Killing Jews

Anti-Semitism is growing in places like France and Great Britain. A new factor is that today some voters are Muslims. Politicians seek votes. People take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, as if one side has a monopoly on virtue. Authoritarian (neo-Nazi) politicians have been winning elections in Europe. Jews are under attack from the Left and the Right, even in Asia.

Israel, by continuing to take land from Muslims, feeds anti-Semitism. Palestinian terrorists continue to kill Israelis randomly.

In this country we have Christian Zionists, unshakable supporters of  President tRump. The President has argued that Nazis are, in some cases,  “good people.” Anti-Semites and Christian Zionists both vote for tRump, parts of his base.

The Internet has a role in the United States. It supports a partly hidden network of nutters who encourage one another to murder Jews.

Three Collapses of Western Civilization

About 1177 BCE, Western Civilization collapsed.  We don't talk about it. 

The locals had invented writing, which made it easier to accumulate knowledge. They had invented the wheel, along with bronze. Things were looking up. Then came climate change and many other events, and Egypt, Crete, Greece, the Hittites, the Assyrians and Babylonians collapsed, some worse than others. Literacy was severely reduced.  The governments and cities fragmented. International trade stopped.  People began to move from village to village, country to country, going where the food was. Groups got violent. Immense suffering followed. (Historians call this the Bronze Age collapse.)

Eventually Western Civilization was rebuilt, and it prospered until the second collapse, in 477 AD, roughly, starting the Dark Ages. After prolonged suffering, civilization got built a third time, and here we are, again looking away from global warming. 

We face climate change, a population of 7 billion hungry people and an economic system built on unslakable greed. The good news is that if we implode, the survivors among our descendants may eventually succeed in building Western Civilization a fourth time. (The Chinese have not had this problem, but recently they adopted some western practices and  theories.)

The Candidates

Right now the Democrats have the most interesting field of candidates in their history. 

In contested races for the nomination in the past, the only one remotely like this one was when LBJ faced Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy in primaries.  

Democrats have several progressives (more or less) in Sanders, Warren and Gabbard. They have a governor devoted to fighting global warming. They have a qualified Latino and a qualified black American. They have a qualified woman of color. They have a qualified centrist white woman and a qualified white center-left woman. They have a former Vice President. They have a young man who is smart, gay, religious and highly educated. They have more. 

Democrats have choices, and in the end they’d better have unity and a candidate with natural appeal to young people, women, people of color and independent thinkers. Someone who can fire up people to get out and vote.

Impeachment Confusions

On television Hillary Clinton said yesterday that Congress should “not jump straight to an up-and-down vote on impeachment.” 

Jumping straight to a vote without a careful impeachment committee investigation and deliberation would be idiotic. My guess is that no one in congress is calling for an immediate vote on impeachment. What some may seek is an impeachment committee to look into the matter. 

There are several House committees already doing this without calling themselves impeachment committees. 

tRump violates the law day after day, as if he wants to be impeached. He's forcing the House to act. That might be a strategy (he thinks being impeached is a good campaign issue), but he's not  a strategist. It's probably just his usual temper-tantrum, automatic, out-of-control blustering from behind a wall of bodyguards.

Suicide Bombers

It came as a surprise to much of the world when it turned out that suicide bombers do go directly to heaven. They'd been right all along! We still don't know what to think about the murder of innocents. Of course, it's not as if we ever understood the Spirit in the Sky. He's always been a mystery.

The Forking Democrats

I was an active Democrat for 60 years, off and on, and the party has always been hung up at the same fork in the road. (I am now an independent.)

The party is divided between pragmatists (focused on how to get elected) and idealists (focused on issues).  Both sides are needed. At times they work together. 

You can see how they split on health care issues and on impeaching our depraved President. Pragmatists tend to win elections, so it's no surprise that the Nancy Pelosi types are dominant in congress. They are reluctant to risk their chances at power in 2020 (as they see things).  It is vital to be cautious and surely defeat tRump one step at a time. 

The idealists see impeachment as a moral necessity. And the open rejection of cruelty, avarice and injustice might generate a landslide victory.

The compromise right now seems to go like this. Our Representatives will conduct a dozen investigations and public hearings into the crime scene once known as the White House. In effect these will be impeachment hearings but not be called impeachment hearings. By the time these hearings have finished, we will be near the elections of 2020.  Time will run out. 

That is, in my view, not good enough. The world deserves a quicker accounting for the crimes and general stupidity of our malevolent leaders. And what will the pragmatists do once in power? Obama let the murderous Bush money grubbers slide. Will they get to slide again? Or will they finally end up where they belong, buried in prison cells? 

The Crown of Thorns

Like nearly everyone I was shocked when half of Notre Dame burned. I was grateful for the fire fighters who saved what they could. What may have not received sufficient notice is that the original crown of thorns worn by Jesus on the cross was saved by a priest, Jean-Marc Fornier. He ran into the fire and carried out the sacred relic.

Why should this matter? For one thing, the crown, perhaps because of its associations, has great monetary value. (It has been sold more than once in the last 1600 years.)  More important, the thorns in the crown pierced the skin of the Lamb, creating bloody scalp wounds. Dried blood on the thorns,  examined by scientists, can provide us with a DNA analysis of Jesus and genetic information about His Parents.

Bernie Takes a Lead

It's too early to matter, but Sen. Bernie Sanders has taken a lead in the contest for the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination. He's ahead in the polls and in money raising. On Sunday he went on Fox News and did well there. His message of economic populism, unchanged for 50 years, drew applause from the Fox audience. 

Among Democrats there are two main views of all this. (1) Sanders' socialism will turn off the centrist Democrats and independents and re-elect tRump. (2) Sanders' economic populism will fire up the Democratic and independent base and attract some tRump populist voters, swamping tRump.

I'm seeing some "never Bernie" stuff, coming from where? Russia?

No one knows if Bernie will get the nomination or what will happen if he does. The one way to find out is to nominate him and renominate the New Deal. That may or may not happen. If the Democratic establishment blocks Sanders in a way that his supporters consider unfair, tRump is likely to win again. If there are many "never Bernie" types, tRump might win again. 

Voters tend to back an outsider against the Democratic National Committee. The average voter doesn't care for DNC. That was part of Obama's appeal when he ran against Hillary. But Obama didn't remain an outsider long. 

The Gulag in California

Donald Trump, who fancies himself the new Stalin, threatened this week to concentrate undocumented Latinos and ship them to a gulag in Siberia. But Siberia is not available, so he threatened to send them to California. His goal is to punish California sanctuary cities and the undocumented brown folks by putting them together.

Trump hasn't noticed that undocumented people like the weather in California, which once was part of Latin America.

It hasn't occurred to the white-wing commentators on TV that California welcomes undocumented workers with big smiles. To be brutally honest, the undocumented are cheap labor. Capitalists love them. Donald Trump recruits and hires them. But he's too stupid to learn from his own behavior. 

The undocumented make the state safer (their crime rate is below that of citizens). They grow our food and cook it in our cafes. They increase the population of California, which means we get even more liberal members of congress.

So I say to the new Joe Stalin, bring it on, jelly brain. 

Mentor

I worked at a college designed to teach students one at a time, meeting individual needs (Empire State College, SUNY). There were earlier models of this kind of thing, but we put together a different package--we invented something new. It worked.

I retired 20 years ago.

A year back I volunteered at my library to help a Latina prepare for her citizenship test. The problem was that the student did not speak much English and guessed that Great Britain was a city. She'd grown up in Mexico, where she had dropped out of junior high. Now she was married,  lived in California, had children and worked as a cleaner. All she had going for her was intelligence, natural charm and gumption. Against her she had Trump, his millions of bigots and a test in foreign language. For her the stakes were huge. 

The student memorized the 100 test questions in English on the citizenship test and the answers. If you asked her how many original colonies there had been, she would say, "Thirteen." If you asked her what a colony was, she'd smile. No idea. She knew that the Constitution was the law of the land, but she did not know what a Constitution looked like. To her it was a word.

I did not know how to teach her English, and we didn't have time. I decided to talk with her about colonies and such--using a Spanish-English dictionary provided by Sally, my sister-in-law, who helped us. I thought it would help memory if the student understood some of the basic vocabulary of American history. And I could encourage her to try to speak English, to just plunge ahead and get used to it. She'd have to talk to the citizenship person who examined her. She would be asked questions, maybe asked to take some dictation, etc. (This all seemed almost impossible.)

Friday morning her husband drove her into the city to take the test.

Later she sent me an email. "Hi Goss, I'm approval, my test the citizenship, thank you for your help every friday 😋"

What Is Palestine?

History's first mention of Palestine is found in Herodotus, who called it "Syria Palaestina." He placed it roughly where Israel is today. It was, in his era, a minor province of Syria, apparently peopled by Phoenicians, Philistines, Arabs, Egyptians and a scattering of others, among whom were Jews.  

The name "Palestine"  has been around, then, for at least 2,500 years. The area, constantly shifting in size, administration and ethnic composition, was populated by Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Christians, pagans and eventually by Muslims. Major cultures that built the civilization in the region include the Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Hellenistic Greeks, the Persians, the Romans, the Byzantines and the Arabs, Jews, Turks and British. 

The area was first peopled by a mix of Neanderthals and modern humans traveling north from Africa. Scientists are unable to point to a contemporary tribe (like the Hopi in the American Southwest) and say, "They are descendents of  the original settlers."

Omar

Ilhan Omar, AOC and several other progressive women of color in congress now face a tsunami of threats from Republican haters. Omar is in physical danger, so what are the Democratic leaders doing about it? 

What we hear from Pelosi, Obama and the like is that these new women of color should step back. They need to adopt a more modest, centrist position, which will help the party win elections (really?). In fact, AOC and Omar had best shut up. Don't jostle the fancy people.  

The Women

At this much-too-early stage of the race for the Democratic nomination, how are women doing? Are the media covering them? What do the polls show? 

The polls show three white men in the lead. The only woman contending so far is Kamala Harris. These rankings will change. But consider the power of built-in patriarchy and racism. The Democrats are fueled by women and people of color, but three white men fly more or less automatically to the top. And who are they? Who is this Beto dude?

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Overhugging

I watch a news program that comes from Germany in English. It's called "The Day." The hosts are ordinary looking people, and they cover what is happening in England and Angola and the United States. And then I might watch MSNBC, which  today spent an hour discussing how unsatisfactorily Joe Biden responded to being charged with overhugging women. I support the women. I don't support Joe Biden (nor does Obama, as far as I can tell), but I fear for Biden's life if he has ever kissed a baby in public. 

Forced Birth

"Abolitionists had dramatized the injustice of enslaved {Black} women forced to bear the children of White Southerners." --Peter H. Wood in NEAR ANDERSONVILLE.

There must be many customs and belief systems that contribute to the creation of an anti-abortionist. Among them are patriarchy and antique religions. There was also an economic reality that helped make forced-birth American. A white man who impregnated an enslaved woman and forced her to bear the child would end up with an extra slave he could sell for big money. 

Geneticists say today that the average American Black person is around 20% White. 

Forced birth is as American as fatback and grits. It's customary.

Hunting and Gathering

My cousin took my brother and me to an interesting talk by a Miwok archeologist. He was also a professor from San Diego and a member of the Graton Rancheria. This talk got me thinking.

I have read that when a culture reliant on farming meets a culture reliant on hunting and gathering, the farming culture dominates. That's what happens, and sometimes, as with the Amerindians of the United States, this clash can approach genocide. A good part of the American tragedy was caused by diseases the Europeans brought with them to the American coasts. But some of it was the result of policy.  Gen. Sherman deliberately exterminated the bison, for example, in order to pen in or destroy the hunting cultures of the plains. The Sioux happened to live right where he wanted to build our original intercontinental railroad. 

I have good friends who believe that we should listen to the Amerindians of the past and of today and adopt their hunter-gatherer belief system,  a balanced way of reacting to our environment. But the Miwoks of today aren't gatherers. They buy frozen food in supermarkets. 

It comes to this. Should we adopt a belief system that loses every time? How would PETA react to hunting-gathering? Can we adopt the values of hunting-gathering without the hunting and gathering? 

The answer might be yes.