Audie Murphy

Last week I watched an old Audie Murphy western. Audie Murphy had fought in World War Two, and he had been perhaps the most effective infantry soldier in history. He’d won every medal possible, including the Medal of Honor, and he’d killed, on his own, more than 100 German soldiers (as I recall).

Murphy was a small man, and on screen he usually looked worried and bit pinched. He suffered from PTSD. When there was a showdown in a movie and he went for his rifle or pistol, it was nothing like John Wayne going for his gun. Wayne had never faced a weapon in real life, and he walked with a swing of the hips associated with bone spurs.

Dems Sell Us Out Again

Senate Democrats just agreed to expedite votes on 15 of Trump's  malevolent nominees to lifetime federal court seats because the senators wanted to go home and campaign..

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) cut a deal with McConnell on Tuesday to bypass the wait times and let the lunatic legal vampires get through.

It would be generous to call the Minority Leader a hack. He's  pretty much ideal if you want a leader devoid of decent human impulses. The Democratic leaders are currently sick from centrism and deal cutting. Schumer will hurry home to Wall Street. I think he sleeps under a table in the stock market, using heaps of hundred dollar bills as a blanket. 

The Rats of the Senate

I never voted for John McCain. He was a Republican and a hawk and an officer, but he was also a lion of the senate, who almost fearlessly went his own way. He tried to be decent, even in terrible circumstances, under torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.  One of the surprising things he did was work to build peacetime ties with Vietnam once the war ended.

McCain and Teddy Kennedy were the last two lions. What we have left in the senate are rats like Lindsey Graham and (I hope) some cubs that will grown into their paws. Senators are supposed to be the adults in our governance structure. McCain was an adult.

Popeye in Petaluma

Petaluma is boiling over a public art project supported by their art committee but frowned on by some voters. This begs a question about who should decide questions of public art. Start with this. I should not be the decider. 

Democratic procedures are quite useful in selecting political leaders. This method strengthens social stability and guards against outright lunatics (most of the time). Democracies aren't foolproof. Athens committed genocides, and we attacked Iraq for no reason. Keep in mind that Hitler, Bush and Trump were elected (by minority votes).  But in general, representative democracies seem to be an effective system.

We don't take public votes on whether to have cancer surgery. We leave that to experts. We don't vote on whether George Washington was a woman or if the planet is an oblate spheroid. We rely on scientists and historical evidence. And we don't ask the public to vote on public art. If we did, on every pier we'd find an old statue of Popeye.

No Balls at All

In 2016 I was answering a phone in the Santa Rosa Democratic HQ, when a drunken woman called in. She said she had a message for Obama. This was a cry from her heart. I told her that I had no way to reach the President. "Tell him he's got no balls!" she said. I repeated that I had no way to relay her message. "Your problem is . . . you got no balls!" she said. 

I laughed, but I should have taken her analysis seriously. 

Today the Democratic party is waiting for  Bob Mueller's report on President Spanky. If the report is negative, they may try to impeach him, but they don't know enough about Spanky to discuss impeachment yet. 

Voters respond to frankness. 

If the Republicans are the stupid party, the National Democrats are the gutless, rubber legs party. Spanky is the confidence man who invented a fake college to strip money from poor people attempting to educate themselves. He took children from their mothers at the border and caged them and lost track of who they were. He asked the Russians to hack into Hillary Clinton's emails. He tried to destroy NATO. He took a knee before Putin, a neo-fascist dictator. He bragged about sexually abusing women. He praised American Nazis. But the National Democratic party is waiting for a report (and wondering why the good guys aren't trusted and popular).  

The problem is that the good guys are stiffs; they are gutless, insincere and calculating when they should react with feeling. And that is why they today hope to squeak by in elections they might win by 40 points if they had any balls.

Burnt!

In case you  missed the story, Verizon choked off  communications among some people fighting the largest wild fire in California's history. This had an impact on fire fighters' ability to provide emergency services. Verizon's account manager informed them that they needed to upgrade from a $38 a month subscription to a $40 a month data plan. Verizon's action reduced one fire department's internet speeds to 1/1000ths of previous speeds.

Burn, baby, burn, say the money grubbers. 

Sacrificing for America

Franklin Pierce, "Handsome Frank," the 14th President of the United States, won no praise for the one term he served in the White House, but he’s a model for those who suffer for the nation.

In President Polk’s war against Mexico, the goal of which was to annex California, Pierce fought as well as he could in his role as a general who led troops into battle. 

At the Battle of Contreras, his horse was startled, jamming Pierce's testicles against a hard saddle, then the horse fell, pinning Pierce’s knee and crushing it. The troops watched all this and accused the general of having fainted from cowardice. The next day he re-injured the knee, and he ended up not leading his men in a charge but hobbling far behind them as they went to the fighting.

In the next Battle, at Churubusco, General Pierce ordered himself tied into his saddle; once the shooting started he passed out from pain and rode about in random directions, unconscious. During the famous Battle of Mexico City, where young Grant and Lee performed feats, Pierce spent most of it in the sick tent, laid low by acute diarrhea.

Pierce returned home to a hero’s welcome and was eventually elected President, an ideal candidate at the time because he opposed both slavery and abolition. After one feckless term, he was sent home. Historians rank him among our worst Presidents, and he likely led the saddest Presidential life, outliving his wife and all their children. 

Ignorance

We have not given enough credit to how hard Trump voters work to be true to their overlord. It's true that we all have traits that defend ignorance, traits like bias confirmation. But we also live in an age of information. The profoundly ignorant get bombarded all day long by the real world, by science, by facts that contradict their beliefs. Clinging to their faith in President Spanky must take wads of energy as they watch him boast of groping women, snatching babies from their mothers' arms, kneeling before little Putin, paying off porn stars and hiring a doddering Rudy to blabber about an alternate reality. Supporting Bonespurs is emotionally and mentally exhausting. Show some respect. 

How To Turn Off The News

One of my friends limits his TV news-watching to 45 minutes a day. Anything after that is repetition, and it makes his nose ache. 

The problem is that the all-news stations have 24 hours to fill with blabber. The news hosts repeat their blabber over and over, often interviewing one another or running clips from preceding programs.  Rachel Maddow often starts her show with a 15-minute anecdote about the fall of Sumer. Amy Goodman can always find a genocide--if there is no current genocide (unlikely), she will describe one from the last century.   

News hosts have tough jobs, hour after hour of empty time to fill with superficial comments. Imagine doing that five days a week. It takes skills: the ability to repeat genuine astonishment and outrage, the knack of seeming fairness, physical strength in the buttocks needed to sit all day long. These are talking heads behind desks, and in most cases we never see them standing. For all we know, they have short, bowed legs. 

I control my time by ending my watching the moment the host says something truly ignorant, maybe a quote from a rap singer. Or it might be something to wake up his slumbering panel, something along the lines of "Now the President has told us that he is highly intelligent. Shouldn't we, in fairness, consider that he may be telling the truth?"

Molesters

You may be asking why a parent would send her or his children to an American Catholic school or church, unless you agree that some kids need a good molesting. Given the molestation news that we've watched year after year after year, it should be obvious to everyone that child molesters have flocked into the American Catholic clergy--and into other churches--and into medical jobs involving young athletes. There must have been a rush of molesters into ICE and customs when Trump started separating small children from their parents at the border and caging them. 

As a nation we provide good jobs for molesters, There seems to be no let-up in sight. We are shocked by scandals for a few minutes, then let things slide. 

Daisy Sings!

When Daisy, our granddaughter, was about eight, she got up at a small party and sang "Here Comes The Sun" note perfect. It was a little amazing for those present. In short order (supported by her musical father and mother and music teachers) it became clear that Daisy had perfect pitch and related superpowers. When I bragged about Daisy to a friend who sang professionally, she said, "Every grandfather thinks his granddaughter can sing, but this kid can sing."

Today Daisy, 12,  landed her first paid gig. She wasn't looking for work, and I don't know how it happened. I'm guessing that some friends had a hand in it. But she is a treat, and I'm kind of stunned. 

Daisy Meritt will be performing three songs as part of an evening of poetry and art at the Greenhouse Studios in Mill Valley on Thursday, September 6, 2018. The program begins at 7pm. The art will be displayed by members of the Greenhouse Studios. Poets include Kathleen McClung, Cathryn Shea. Kate Peper, Kelly Alsup, and Sarah HaBa.

I will attend in secret to support antifa. Look for the dude wearing black clothes, a bicycle helmet and a mask.

Place: 229 Flamingo Road, Mill Valley 

The Oil Off Coast

I have never voted for anyone who agreed with me 100%. I  remember a writer who claimed that even if he elected himself, he would soon find himself in disagreement with himself and calling himself a sell-out. Once you are in office and have to make decisions and compromises and strategic retreats and trades, everything changes.

Right now the Trump party is set on leasing the entire California coastline to oil companies determined to drill and make global warming worse. Leading the attempt to block this crime against the environment is State Senator Mike McGuire, who has authored a bill now under consideration. McGuire is our local representative. 

In effect we hire representatives to focus on details and provide the right kind of governance, to most of which we pay little attention. Some dudes drink all day and don’t do the work. I’m satisfied that McGuire does the work intelligently and conscientiously, although I don’t always agree with his positions or my own positions. I intend to vote for him in November. 

Forced Creativity

Without reaching a conclusion, I wondered for a long time how creativity functions in a democratic society. It might be that I became interested in the topic when I read, as a 14-year-old, a novel written by a woman who remained a narcissistic adolescent her entire life, Ayn Rand. 

I recently found some insights into this matter in writings about the  recent Supreme Court case in which two gay men sued a creative Colorado baker who refused to design and make them a special wedding cake. The decision itself is of no interest. The Court avoided all meaningful issues and slipped away. But the discussion in the aftermath was interesting. Can the government, in the name of equal rights, force someone to do something creative, in this case, to design and bake a cake?

The answer seems to be yes and no. In a business open to the public, every customer must be treated the same. That's the price of a business license. If your business is designing special cakes, you must treat all customers the same. There is no exemption for bakers who are especially creative or bigoted. This applies to a nail solon, a barbershop, a bakery or a cafe (many businesses have a creative element). If someone enters your bakery and requests you make a cake with a gay flag on top, you have to do it (unless you don't create special cakes).

But novelists, sculptors, composers, etc., seldom operate businesses open to the general public. Instead they sign contracts with individual entities. They don't have public business licenses, and they can do as they please. You can't force John Barth to write a novel that supports your religion. 

That's how it works in one country.







    

What's 'Wrong with Emily's List?

As of today, Emily's List has not endorsed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for Congress. I know nothing about the inner workings of Emily's List, but I'm going to guess that the reason is obvious. Ocasio-Cortez is not part of the centrist Clinton-Cuomo wing of the NY Democratic establishment. Emily's List is.

Control of the party is worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. That's why the fight for control (which takes place in the primaries) is more important to party leaders than actually winning an election. Ocasio-Cortez represents new blood, and the old blood is determined to hang on to power. 

Containing President Spankbottom is what matters to independents like me, and the two wings of the Democratic Party--the centrists and the left--must learn to live together. Neither wing can defeat Spanky alone.
  

The Job Solution

For years I have been wondering how the world's 7 billion people will cope with the lack of jobs. It turns out that the answer is built into our system, and all of us know it.

In BULLSHIT JOBS by David Graeber, the author estimates that about 40% of the jobs in America are pointless nothings without social value. An obvious example is deans in a university. Their job is to invent useless committees to absorb faculty time. There are entire industries that contribute nothing (telemarketing, spamming).  

To some extent, this is reassuring. What we have done for centuries, as we industrialized and robotized work, is invent make-work non-tasks to keep people employed filing papers and so on. They get pay checks. Socialism by another name. We don’t have to fear that a robot will take our jobs, because we will end up in supervising people who supervise computers generating reports on robot oil maintenance.  

I had already noticed that deciding whether colleges deserve accreditation is infinitely expandable in terms of work. It alone can provide jobs for every adult in the United States. First, you insist that every citizen must get a Ph.D. That will require immense college staffing. Second, you set each college to evaluating another.  I'm oversimplifying, but that's how the centuries-old system maintains full employment and leaves time free for Facebook at work.

Graeber argues that instead of continuing this old form of socialism, we just give everyone enough money to live on and free people to decide on their own how to spend their time and enjoy their lives. But a system like that would lack certain things we badly need (we apparently need to punish the poor, segregate people of color, underpay women, etc.).

Not a Dog Whistle

In the annals of American racism, one of the oldest myths is that African-American men are stupid. I suspect it came originally from White men seeking a kind of middle ground on slavery. Thomas Jefferson, for one, argued that Black men obviously loved their children and experienced the same emotions that White men did but that people of color were unintelligent. He didn’t believe slavery was justified, and he hoped time would solve the problem, which he did not address.

Jefferson lived among obviously intelligent enslaved Black people, and he had some of them educated. I don’t know how that fit with his other observations, but probably he attributed the intelligence to racial mixing (the enslaved in his house were often of mixed ancestry, and a few were his progeny).

So now we have President Spankbottom calling Black people stupid, the most recent examples being his attack on Don Lemon and Lebron James. That’s pure racism that runs back to 1776. As someone said, it isn’t a dog whistle to racists—it’s a foghorn.

What Is Truth?

President Spanky is despised for his cruelty, racism, misogyny, etc., but a major reason is that he isn’t truthful. He’s a liar, unlike any liar ever seen before on our national stage. He’s not Washington or Honest Abe. This begs a basic question: “What is truth?”

Some might believe that the truth is what a majority of people decide is the truth, but we don’t evaluate truthfulness by voting. That’s not how it works. 

Some think that the truth is an absolute that exists whether people recognize it or not, which is like believing in unicorns. 

“Truth“ is a word people made up. Trees and cats have no sense of truth. It’s a human word.

Like most words, “truth” has many different uses in English (a language people made up), and those uses are its different meanings.

Someone tells the truth, as far as we are concerned, when something she says meets certain common standards. If she says she saw a full moon in the night sky, we believe her if she has a photograph or credible witnesses or we can see it ourselves or if scientists present evidence or whatever. If she has witnesses and it turns out that they were on LSD, we may decide that the evidence is inadequate. She may be deluded or lying. But there is no mystery, and Trump is a liar.

What Trump is doing now is insisting that evidence of his lying, which we experience as reality, is fake. Reality is fake. See: Orwell. 

Hops and THC

According to the morning paper, Lagunitas is now selling Hi-Fi Hops, a hop-flavored drink that comes in two types, one with THC.  Is this how we make America great again?  Why would I buy a drink flavored with hops, a German female plant infamous for its German bitterness? 

Hildegard of Bingen started the hops movement to enrage Germany, making beer even more sour, and how did that turn out? And consider this: hops and potatoes like the same soil. Every time hops get planted, we have less space for potatoes.  

Faith and Reason

I watched part of a debate today in which the topic was “Is Faith Compatible with Reason?” It was, as you might expect, a waste of time. The topic might have been, “What do we mean when we say two things are compatible?” Obviously some people are both religious and reasonable. On the other hand, faith and reason are opposites. But minds are vast and contain opposites. 

What is crucial may be that natural selection has made all of us prone to delusions. That means (probably) that delusions help us survive. There are beneficial delusions. It is a fact that people of faith tend to be happier than atheists. But once you know that, can you somehow acquire genuine faith? I doubt it.

Obviously not all delusions are equally beneficial. Yesterday we were treated on television to insights into the Q-anon community, which consists of nutters who argue that Democrats are child molesters. So the vital question is how do we combat the delusions that produce a President Spankbottom? We can identify obviously harmful delusions and combat them with reason and tar and feathers.