Sunday, March 31, 2019

What I have learned from Ramona so far

In the public library's literacy program,  I work with a Latina I will call Ramona, because that is not her name. I'm trying to help her prepare for the citizenship test.

Ramona has lived here more than ten years without learning English. The test will be in English.


Ramona had a sixth grade education in Jalisco. She has a sister who is a computer programmer. The sister attended the University of Mexico, which is free, unlike our public universities. 


Ramona is intelligent but untutored. When I met her, she thought maybe France was a city. She did not know what a colony was, what Britain is, what a civil war was, etc.  When I asked her what is the law of the land, she would say, correctly, "The Constitution." She had memorized that, but she didn't know that the Constitution is a document or how it had been created or for what purpose.  

Ramona's family in Jalisco baked bread and sold it on the street. 


Where Ramona grew up, a burrito is a tortilla wrapped around some sprinkled salt. 


Ramona has two small children, one of whom wants to become a veterinarian. His name is Tom. She is determined that her two sons go to a university, and she and her husband, who runs a small gardening business, are saving money for college


For the last ten years, Ramona has lived about 30 miles from the ocean. She has not been there. She told me that her husband told her that the coast is unpleasantly cold. 


Ramona has said that she works as a cleaner, the first time I had heard that term. 


Ramona is dignified, charming, natural, expressive and very polite.




Saturday, March 30, 2019

Put Democracy First

The most profoundly revolutionary statement made in English, the one that changed the human world, is "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. . . ."

But today's Republican leadership is more interested in staying in power than in serving democracy. They back a racist President who is a malignant narcissist or a racist crook or both. What they care about is political control. But what about the Democrats?

Trump has already committed a dozen offenses in public that warrant impeachment. These offenses may not constitute prosecutable crimes. If they are crimes, no one is going to charge Trump, anyway. He has to be impeached, a political act.


The unheroic Democratic leadership has calculated, perhaps incorrectly, that their election chances will be best served by not making impeachment an issue. Nancy Pelosi seems to be trying to figure out the best way to win, not the right thing to do. For example, single payer health care is the right thing to do, and she knows it. But some Democratic leaders are claiming that a position in between single payer and no health care might be more popular. 


Some whisper, "Let's find a candidate for President who will appeal to old white male voters. That's the ticket." Never mind which candidates are best on the issues. Or "Let's nominate someone who looks like an elongated Robert Kennedy."

If  Democrats like AOC push for the right things, not the most half-assed things, they might win big. Defeating President Spanky is vital, of course. We aren't certain which is the best way to do that. We might as well do the right thing. 

A North American English Accent

Have you ever noticed that in North American English sometimes the letter "t" gets pronounced as a "d"? As in a bottle of water?

There's a rule that governs this (in most cases). Thank god I grew up speaking English and not having to memorize the weird rules. 

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

El Supremo's Next Campaign

Our President, El Supremo, is gearing up for the 2020 campaign. As brainless as a rhino, he understands one thing: how to lower his head, double down and charge.  Brought to a standstill, he will repeatedly punch himself in the face

He plans to run against 1. Latinos, 2.  disabled children and 3. affordable health care. He will add smaller campaigns against education, women, black people, Muslims, movies, gays in San Francisco, clean water, common sense and fresh vegetables. These are not promising Republican issues (except for vegetables). 

He will also run on the economy, which has been good but has not helped most voters in a visible way. 

El Supremo expected to lose last time. This time he's not taking chances.

(also on Facebook) 

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

What Did Bob Barr Do?

Bob Barr covered up the Iran-Contra scandal, mainly by use of Presidential pardons. Covering up is his field of expertise.  

Next question?

Ancient DNA

My brother loaned me a copy of WHO WE ARE AND HOW WE GOT HERE  by David Reich, a scientist in the field of ancient DNA. It's a slow read, but here is some of what I retained.

The new ability to read ancient human DNA is a breakthrough comparable to the discovery of carbon dating. Suddenly many questions have answers.


About 70,000 years ago there were at least four or five human races, which then mixed together, dominated by one race, the modern human, which is what we all are today, with traces in our DNA from the other early human races. The size of these DNA traces is tiny, much smaller than reported by the commercial companies that provide us with personal data. 


Over the last 50,000 years there have been constant migrations and mixings, and that process continues today. Our European ancestors, for example, did not even reach Europe until about 5,000 years ago. The Japanese are 80% from Korea and 20% Ainu. There is a small group of humans in  the Amazon basin whose ancestors settled there before the Indians arrived from Asia 15,000 years ago  This group came from southwest Pacific islands and/or Australia.


People today share many genetic features; the DNA differences are too slight to justify sorting people into races. 


Small differences do exist between this group and that group, which can have medical consequences. It is true that natural selection in different environments creates subgroups with slightly different abilities. Perhaps Jamaica produces exceptionally fast runners. That does not mean that the average Jamaican is a fast runner. Jamaica may also produce exceptionally slow runners, who go unnoticed. But differences between groups will always exist. And then the groups migrate and mix together again in Los Angeles.


Monday, March 25, 2019

The Flood Plain

The Laguna de Santa Rosa is a wonderful flood plain that holds water in wet years. The water soaks into the ground and recharges the aquifer. 

A flood plain is a fairly flat area of land next to a creek that is subject to flooding. The Laguna expands and contracts as rain patterns differ from year to year. Maybe every 20 or 30 years the Laguna swells up huge; I suppose the wet years will come more frequently as global warming worsens. Or less frequently. 

Anyway, I was surprised a few years back when banks loaned a developer money to erect about four blocks of buildings in the flood plain about a hundred yards from the creek.  I don’t know a thing about banking. Maybe there’s a knack to it, and they made a nice profit.  

The business people who rented space in the new buildings were certainly gamblers. The planning commission and city council who issued permits to build in a laguna were, for the most part, attempting to grow the tax base, I think, unless they were sweet-talked. One thing builders sometimes tell elected town officials is, “I know you’re hoping to run for congress in three years, and if you support us today, we’ll be there with backers when you need a political donation.”

A few months back it rained hard, the Laguna rose high and swelled, and the new district flooded. Many were ruined, an outcome few could have predicted, allegedly, although the term "flood plain" has a ring to it that might stir a few thoughts. 

Sunday, March 24, 2019

Sally Hemings

Last week, when Laurence O'Donnell was interpreting the news for us,  he said, looking quite stern, "We all know what Thomas Jefferson did to Sally Hemings." But there is a lot I don't know about Hemings and Jefferson.  

Agency is the degree to which an individual has the ability to make decisions about her life. That Sally Hemings was enslaved may not mean she had no human agency. 


There's no portrait  of  the enslaved girl and little written record about her.  We're told by one or two contemporaries that she was attractive and looked a lot like her half-sister, Jefferson's wife (they had the same father). Sally wasn't much older than Jefferson's daughters and grew up with them in the same mansion and apparently got along with them. In a sense she was their half-aunt and enslaved companion. Perhaps Sally's older half-sister protected her, but Jefferson's wife died young. While dying she asked Jefferson not to remarry (which sounds odd, but in those days it would have been to protect the interests of her children from a new wife and new children). Jefferson, devastated, agreed and kept his word. 

Sally, about 15, and her older brother were eventually sent to France, where Jefferson had been serving as our ambassador. In France, where slavery was outlawed, the Hemingses found they were free if they stayed in France.. Apparently both wanted to rejoin their family in Virginia. They struck deals with Jefferson. The brother, newly trained as a French chef, agreed, in return for his freedom, to train a new chef for Jefferson in Virgina. 

Sally seems to have agreed to return to Monticello if the children she had with Jefferson would be emancipated (and if she had some privileges). Sally could not be free and  also live in Monticello--that would have violated the strange social pretenses of the period. 

How many of these odd households were there? The President, his original daughters, their enslaved half-aunt, Jefferson's enslaved children, who would eventually be set free, other nearly-white Hemingses, etc. 

After Jefferson's death, Sally Hemings moved to town, still technically enslaved to the Jefferson family. I'm guessing that that was her choice, that as Jefferson property, she was protected a little. Her children passed down a brief story. But was Sally someone people did things to or did she take some control of her life despite the odds?

Thursday, March 21, 2019

The Ides of March

I just watched a film released about eight years ago called "The Ides of March." It's film about how the world of practical politics will corrupt you.

As a young man I volunteered to work in a congressional campaign, After the campaign had ended, another volunteer, a 19-year-old girl, came to my apartment very upset. The candidate, a wealthy, handsome, personable man, had been having sex with her and then blew her off. Just like in "The Ides of March."

From that example and twenty others, where I saw friends betray one another and cut deals and manipulate those who were more innocent, I realized that practical politics was by its nature deeply flawed. And these were the good guys. I could join them (I was no better than they were) or I could get out and do something useful. I got out.

Saturday, March 16, 2019

When There Were Races

"Race" is a term from biology. In that context it means a  biological subgroup within a single species. There are no biological races in Homo sapiens, because the species has a similar heredity everywhere with much in common and only minor ways in which the subgroups differ. 

That wasn't always the case. We used to have human races. 

Scientific work with ancient DNA has determined that about 70,000 years ago, there were five human races on the planet. They were unrelated to what we sometimes call races today.

The old human races were modern humans, Neanderthals, Siberian Denisovans, Australo-Denisovans and the so-called hobbits of Indonesia--and possibly some races not yet detected. 

Only the modern humans survived, but our ancestors mingled with the other four races and had viable young. We have traces of the other races in our genome. 

In California today, we see something similar to that ancient mingling. People of color and people of European ancestry (who are of the same ancient race but differ in skin tones) intermarry and raise children together.  Some things don't change.

Friday, March 15, 2019

Death and Gavin Newsom

I’ve opposed the death penalty for three reasons. I don’t trust the state to administer it fairly. The death penalty is barbaric and shames us. And if we want humans to believe that taking human life is taboo, the state should set an example by not killing its own citizens.
I have no sympathy for the murderers on death row. We all have to die sometime. 

When I was young, the death penalty was a major issue. A few states abolished it. Many did not. As an issue it faded away.

Recently the Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, announced that he would not enforce the death penalty. Whatever you think of Newsom, he’s uncommonly willing to take an unpopular position.

Back in the 1950s I attended a class in French novels in translation, which introduced me to Albert Camus. Camus opposed the death penalty and brutality in general, which created a rift with other French leftists at the time who supported Joe Stalin. Camus knew right from wrong. Sometimes he did the right thing. Same for Newsom. 

Monday, March 11, 2019

Seven Reasons to Support Joe Biden for President

Seven Reasons to Support Joe Biden for President

1. Uncle Joe knows corporations. He made a career in the Senate out of representing Delaware, a small state in which half the corporations in America have their headquarters for some reason. 

2. Joe is the greatest. In the 1970s, Joe successfully pushed through legislation against busing that denied equal education to minority children trapped in underfunded school districts. Sen. Edward Brooke called Joe's bill “the greatest symbolic defeat for civil rights since 1964.”

3. Joe is tough on black crime, And he knows how to compromise. In 1984, Uncle Joe Biden and Strom Thurmond slushed through a bill that abolished parole for federal prisoners. The same pair of senators next passed a bill that set a mandated 5-year term for anyone convicted of possessing a tiny piece of crack, creating the famous disparity in sentencing between “white drugs” and “black drugs.”

4. Joe is not afraid of the ladies. In 1974 Uncle Joe revealed that Roe v. Wade “went too far” and “I don’t think a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.” Later he fathered “the Biden Amendment,” which banned the use of foreign aid for abortion research. 

5. Joe builds character. Representing, as he did, a banker-run state, Uncle Joe has served by passing a long series of laws denying students the protection of bankruptcy laws. Joe is the reason students today cannot escape their huge debts and must accept lifelong poverty like responsible adults.

6. Joe can admit a mistake. When it came time to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act (an act that fended off big recessions), Joe Biden was right there, helping free the banks of Delaware to gamble with great success, until 2008 when something went wrong (with my pension, incidentally). Joe has said he regrets this vote!  God bless him!

7. Joe is a job creator. According the New York Times, the Biden Cancer Initiative spent 75% of its money on salaries and other forms of compensation. Its president took home little more than a half million dollars one year. 


At the moment, Democratic voters are looking for major changes, and Joe Biden leads in the polls. At first glance, Joe’s record of compromise may strike people as squalid, but he'd be better than Trump, right? 

Steel yourself.      

Reading the Polls

If you watch political panels talking on TV, you see a lot of contradictions. Sunday morning I saw a panel say that polls showed that two-thirds of the Democrats favor centrist candidates and only one-third favor leftists. Then the same people said that polls showed between 80% and 90% of Democrats support the issues the leftist candidates are running on. And then they showed a poll from Iowa in which Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, representing the two sides, were virtually tied, and the runners-up were mostly from the left. All of which adds up to nothing.

Sunday, March 10, 2019

Neanderthal Genes

I watch history professors on television, and last week I joined friends at a talk by Prof. Chris O'Sullivan. 

American history professors sometimes calm us, because they've studied the lives of the many venal or incompetent Presidents we've had in the past. Historians bring perspective to the age of President Spanklyn Trumpington Borderline.

America survived Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon. But many have forgotten Nixon, who, with Henry Kissinger,  prolonged the war in Vietnam for four years, killing hundreds of thousands of people for no purpose at all other than to ensure Nixon's re-election. As O'Sullivan put it, Nixon did not plan to run for re-election as "the man who lost Vietnam." But once he had won re-election, peace was no problem. 

We've already forgotten the second Bush, who started a moron's war against the wrong country and destroyed most of the Near East. And as for Andrew Johnson, who the hell was he?

As for the Near East, science now says that most of our dwindling Neanderthal genes come from encounters there, not in Italy after all. I might still resent an old pamphlet by Professor Wisdom I once read, in which Wisdom claimed that the Irish were Neanderthals, except that it turns out that Neanderthal genes might be a good thing to have after all. 

Friday, March 8, 2019

A Family of Individuals

Apparently the nation finds it difficult to track the family and friends of Individual-1. This descriptive list of several major Washington players was compiled for the Secret Service.

Individual -2  Code Name: Vapid Under-Nada Blondie. Low hung fruit. Clear favorite of Individual-1 despite cheeks smoothed by claymation.

Individual-3  Code Name: Gold Digger Dullard III,  formerly  the Impaler or Spanker-in-Charge. No education. Speaks five languages, none well. 

Individual-4  Code Name: No Shoulders Pencil-Neck Crook-In-Law. Dislikes Chris Christie and other forms of width.

Individual-5  Code Name: Lindsay Armband Whiteface of  My-ladyfear. His positions revolve like a wind vane on Denali.

Individual-213  Code Name:  Boiled Skull Grinning Mayor or, simply, Bozo. Constitutes proof of life after death.

LOYAL


We have a long history of accusing certain ethnic and racial groups of being disloyal to the nation and loyal instead to a foreign country or institution. 

I remember when an Irish-American Catholic could not be elected President. No way.  Catholics were considered potentially disloyal--they allegedly took orders from the Pope. (My grandmother had a more tolerant American Catholic view of the Pope. She used to say that what a priest don't know, won't hurt him, especially about contraception.) 


The election of JFK, a Catholic, was an astounding event (now forgotten). President Obama,  accused by scum of not being a citizen, provided an even bigger change in 2008. 

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

The Small Dark Man

I'm a member of the Chaucer Boys, a bicycle club for descendents of Geoffrey Chaucer, who once wrote that time and tide wait for no man. All of that sentence is true.

It was raining on Sunday, so some club members decided to walk rather than bike. We headed out in light rain toward Haku, a restaurant where people eat with wooden sticks. We walked about two blocks, passing a mission where homeless people get free meals.There we were joined by a small dark man. He walked along with us for a while.

Apparently the small man got up that morning and developed a plan for Sunday. His plan was to find three old strangers on foot in light rain and join them.

The four of us (now) walked the five blocks to Haku and entered the restaurant side by side. A tall Asian led four of us to a table. The small dark man immediately sat down with us, but my brother told him no. The small man got back up. My brother, also a descendent of Chaucer, is the sort of traveler who sleeps on the floors of peasant huts; perhaps he had seen problems like this develop before. 

I remained standing, thinking I should attempt to talk to the man. I asked him what he wanted, but he didn't respond to English or Spanish. He made a few sounds I didn't understand. Then he abruptly left, and I took my seat and ordered a bento box. When we left the restaurant we looked around for him, prepared to give him a few dollars, but he was nowhere in sight. 

It was like a short story by Herman Melville but pointless.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Deconstruction

I seldom use the term "deconstruction," because it reminds me of its place of origin, a moated castle of impulse-driven epistemological terrorism. But the term rhymes with Reconstruction, the historical era most like what we are now experiencing.

Andrew Johnson remains a contender for America's worst President. He was Trumpish. He tried to stop Reconstruction, which was what we call our attempt to rebuild the nation after the Civil War. Johnson tried to deconstruct. Congress attempted to integrate the newly-free people of color as full voting citizens. President Johnson said no. 

With Trump we have another half-man attempting to turn back the clock on our already shaky race relations, health programs, social support efforts, peace treaties, climate problems, justice system, gender issues, etc.  Trump wants, in his mindless way, to deconstruct anything positive his little fingers can probe.  

We impeached Andrew Johnson and elected Grant (who crushed the original KKK), and we can do the same to Pres. Spanklyn T. Borderline and the degenerate family he rode in on. It's time for a change.

Saturday, March 2, 2019

Trump's Gulags

You're familiar with the HHS program that takes charge of the children Trump has separated from their parents at the border. 

When I first heard of the Trump gulags, my reaction was that a large, confined group of unprotected children would attract a cluster of pedophiles as guards. I had no facts to base this guess on, just common sense    

Today I heard a report that HSS personnel and others have averaged more than 1,000 sexual attacks on the confiscated children per year, starting in  2014. That's before Trump was elected.

How Much Can You Tolerate?

I see two key political questions now,  one for each party.

For Republicans the question is: "How much criminal behavior can you tolerate?" To date the answer is that professional Republicans can absorb with a grin any Trump crime, Constitutional violation or betrayal of Republican principles. That flabbiness cost them control of the House of Representatives. At the moment they seem willing to lose the Senate and the next Presidential election, rather than irritate their shrinking racist base. But is there a limit to what they will put up with? 

The extinction of the Republican party--already beginning in California--is one natural limit. But is there a limit short of extinction, where the party leadership stops eating clay and survives?

For Democrats the question is: "Can the Corporate Democrats, who run the party, accept independents and the New Deal types like AOC and Bernie Sanders and unite the 70% of voters who demand health care, climate control, equal rights and a safety net?" 

What I see at the moment is Wall Street Democrats gearing up for war with independents and the progressive half of their own party. So far they do not intend to share the political power that has made them rich. But that may change.

(also on Facebook)