Reptilian Paul Ryan Eyes

As I watch the Republican Party writhe in agony, I’m impressed by its ability, despite the turmoil, to remain focused on its core mission. That mission is to cut aid to the needy and shift government funds and tax breaks to the 1%. The party may be dying, but it will, by God, punish the poor (with a cold gleam in its reptilian Paul Ryan eyes) and greatly enrich the trolls who own the oligarchy.

Whitefish From The Head Down

The Whitefish contract to rebuild part of Puerto Rico’s electrical grid has been canceled, probably because it looks as crooked as a shark’s grin. According to the Huffington Post, the contract states that “In no event shall [government bodies] have the right to audit or review the cost and profit elements.” The contract waived “any claim against Contractor related to delayed completion of the work.”

In short, Whitefish could take the money and do just about nothing. 

Whitefish is an unknown company that had two employees at the time the strange contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was awarded. Headquartered in the home town of Interior Secretary Zinke, Whitefish recently provided a summer job for one of his children. 

My father used to say that whitefish stinks from the head down. 

Help the Giants!

After winning three World Series in five years, the SF Giants collapsed last season. The team needed new players at first base, third base and the three outfield positions. 

The Giants rake in the money. Tickets cost a lot, stadium food and beer cost more and TV revenues remain enormous. The owners float on cash. But their solution to finishing in last place--they need to hire new players at five out of nine positions--has been to fire several assistant coaches. This ridiculous but inexpensive plan has been applauded by buttocks-smooching sports writers like Lowell Cohn. 

Cohn retired last year. Please retire him again.

Hindoos (?)

Charles Darwin was religious as a young man, but later on he wrote: “I had gradually come . . . to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world . . . from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos. . . .”

Maybe the Old Testament God, the God of the Torah, suffers from borderline personality disorder. 

You meet America’s religiosity on long driving trips. I recently drove from Victoria to Santa Rosa in two days, and I heard bits from many Preacher-Confidence men; they were working folks for cash on the radio. 

I know religious people who live good lives and do good works. They help others. I’m not sure what they think God may be, maybe a vague all-encompassing-all, but they are good women and men. 

For others the church is a clubhouse, a place where you meet your friends and business contacts.

Personal identity is a major factor in ethnic churches.

Political religiosity works for politicians like Paul Ryan, who no doubt goes to confession and the next day enacts legislation to harm the poor, ignoring his church and the injunction that sooner shall a camel (or rope) pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man enter heaven. Driven by greed and a lust for power, Ryan prefers to prosper in this life and gamble on his place in the next. Maybe Hell is just a metaphor?

Jelly Belly

Chris Hayes pointed out tonight that Donald Trump says over and over that we are the highest taxed developed nation on the planet. The claim is easily checked. We are, in fact, almost the lowest taxed developed nation. But Trump’s notion of truth and facts is as primitive as his bloated body decay.

Trump believes that truth is flexibly determined by a kind of vote. To defend his lie about tax rates, he claims that many very smart people agree with him. That’s a lie, but to the Minority President, If many people agree that Hugh Hefner died a virgin, then it becomes a fact as far as Trump is concerned.

In English we determine the truth of sentences in a variety of ways. If someone claims that Babe Ruth hit 65 home runs in one season, we can look up Ruth’s hitting feats in a baseball book. If someone claims that a pound of feathers is lighter than a pound of lead, we can weigh them and compare the results. If a friend insists that Joe Cocker never sang “Into The Mystic,” we can google the song. And so on.  Voting doesn’t come into it. 

Trump is a dope, of course, so stupid that he somehow got himself out front on the national stage, where his feckless brainlessness would certainly be exposed every single embarrassing day. Until a year or two back, he’d been protected by mounds of his father’s money, bodyguards, Chinese banks, whatever. Now he’s a malignant International fool, a strutting, naked jelly belly. 

Wildfire Forecast

In the worst wildfire in California history, Jesus Fabian Gonzalez, 29, who lives under a bridge, felt cold, he said, so he walked down to creek bed near Sonoma, lit a fire and then slowly walked away. The police arrested him. 

After the hottest summer we know of in California, we had huge winds driving our worst fire. That could have happened, in part, because of global warming, which means the risks from Mother Nature and human error may be growing. 

Wait till next year. 

Trump's a bit odd

The wind is up tonight. If it doesn't get too bad, we will be returning to Santa Rosa tomorrow. To my surprise electricity and natural gas have been hooked up to our apartment a week earlier than predicted, probably thanks to helpers reaching us from kindly cities and states.

Meanwhile I have been in San Francisco watching President Moron babble about this and that. None of what he says connects with the world as we understand it. Chaos, of course, has its own hidden basic structure, and in this case it seems that the moron's brainless focus is to reverse everything President Obama accomplished. That's not a plan. It's odd, though. 

The Fire

I suppose everyone knows that Sonoma County is being ravaged by a group of fires that started Sunday night with a 70 MPH wind. This is the worst fire in the county's history. It had never occurred to me that you could have a wildfire in a settled city, but something like that is happening. Whole city neighborhoods we bike through are gone. To date the apartment complex where Susan and I live has been spared, but nearly everyone has left and the wind is rising. I threw some paintings and pillows and clothes in my van. We are lucky--we have places we can go. 

How Democrats Can Win

According to “The Intercept,” the Democratic Party has shifted its focus from private health care options (which have worked in places like Switzerland) to public health care programs. Bernie Sanders introduced a Medicare-for-all bill, and many bills by other senators take a related approach. These include public option bills, a Medicare buy-in bill for those 55 and above, a universal Medicare buy-in, and Tim Kane’s Medicare Part E, with the E standing for everyone. Democrats are also working in some states to let people buy into Medicaid.

Make it happen. Make the Democrats useful for ordinary people. 

Rex Tillerson On Mental Abilities

Rex Tillerson On Mental Abilities:

We’ve all come across morons and elected them (George W. Bush) President of the United States. For example, where I, Rex Tillerson, went to high school in Huntsville, the boys vice principal was a failed gym coach. If you happened to be walking behind him in the hall, you’d spit on his back silently for luck. We’re talking about a man who hung his suit coat up wet, a fool with an IQ of about 84.

And he wasn’t the dumbest SOB I met while young. I won a scholarship to play in the orchestra at the University of Texas at Austin, so I had a kettle drum instructor, maybe the worst musician you could meet. He was an estimated 12% more stupid than the boys vice principal.

After college I got hired by the central production division of Exxon USA, headed up by a tabula rasa from Duke who was twice as dumb as the drum instructor. She ended up sending me to negotiate with some fellow from the United Arab Emirates who couldn’t button his own dress. One estimate of the Emerates intelligence put him at 8% less than the Duke graduate or the same as Donald Trump.

If you followed along, figures don’t lie. We started with a vice principal with an IQ of 84, then a drummer with 12 % less, followed by a Duke grad with 50% less, and an oil tyrant with 8% less than that. That factual history gives Trump a IQ of 34— he’s a fucking moron. It’s not my fault.

Our Leader

There is convincing evidence that the Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, called the President "a fucking moron." This has surfaced several problems. What sort of cooperation exists in the President's cabinet and so forth? But no one on the tube seems to be commenting on the key problem: the President of the United States is a moron. 

The Road Apples of American Thought, Chapter 22: Sonic Attacks

The state department under Rex Tillerson is expelling 16 Cuban diplomats in retaliation for supposed attacks on American personnel in Cuba, although few believe the Cubans are behind the attacks. The Cubans have nothing to gain and much to lose by such attacks, and Cuban authorities have been cooperating with the FBI.

Are these attacks real? One main theory is that someone has assaulted Americans from a distance with sonic waves, something scientists say is not physically possible. In this administration, science is part of a liberal conspiracy called fact-based reality, and it doesn’t count.

Is some other kind of attack going on?  I have no idea, but we seem sure that the Cubans are not attacking. Their crime is a failure to defend our diplomats against an attack we can’t define. Also Republican hacks in Washington hope to reject Cuba. (Many Republican business leaders see Cuba as an interesting market.)

Presidents Meet

According to Seth Meyers, when Trump visited Puerto Rico the other day, he asked to meet with their president. 

Pure Evil

Today Minority President Trump referred to the act of the loony terrorist who killed around 60  people in Las Vegas last night as “pure evil.”  On the same day the Republican lawmakers let the CHIP act expire (after 20 years). Nine million children lost their health care coverage. No more check ups, immunizations, prescriptions, dental care, eyeglasses, X-rays, etc. It’s hard to weigh these events against one another, but which was purer evil? 

Both were calculated. One meant sudden death for a few; the other, many illnesses and slow deaths for many. The motives behind one are unknown. The motives behind the other (saving poor children from an unhealthy reliance on government aid, saving money to give tax cuts to billionaires) are well understood.

Shots Fired

America is averaging one mass shooting a day now (a mass shooting is one in which at least three people are killed). This morning we woke to the worst of them, at least 50 killed in Las Vegas last night by one nut armed with automatic weapons. The local police officers, according to witnesses, behaved heroically, as did other first responders, something to keep in mind.

There is no other western nation in which these massacres happen on a daily basis. 

Nevada’s attempts at gun control are lax to nonexistent. The reason behind weak gun control is not to protect the right to hunt quail, as you probably know. Many Americans insist on the right to overthrow the government with small arms fire, even if that means arming lunatic native terrorists.

Once again we are left to sorrow.