What Republicans Do

It used to be a cinch to predict what the Republicans would do. They were the party of Mammon. Their mission was to make the rich even richer. To accomplish that mission, they ran for office on racist dog-whistles, primitive Christianity, the subjugation of women and related issues that appealed to the clucks, sadists and morons who crowd the bottom of our voting pool.

There's a price to be paid for that strategy, and the party has slowly degenerated, electing Presidents who were paranoid, senile, dumb and now criminally insane. 

Like others with his personality disorder, tRump tends to focus on certain targets (Obama, Hillary, McCabe), but even when corporations ask him to stop supporting climate change, tRump presses froward. Why would anyone support global warming?  Unless he wants to take us with him when he dies. 

Biden

From the start I have believed that the Democratic voters will not nominate Joe Biden. He's a weaker candidate than Gore, Kerry or Hillary Clinton.  Like them he is a DNC-backed insider centrist, which doesn't make him a bad person but does make him a loser. 

The Democrats win when they nominate someone a little outside of the DNC center, someone who brings something extra like Barack Obama. They need a candidate who will fire up the reluctant voters who are tired of Washington and Wall Street.

The DNC's main interest in all this is in retaining power at the DNC.  They will back a weak candidate if it means they retain control of the Democratic Party and its budget and jobs. 

I intend to vote for Bernie, but everyone's second choice seems to be Warren. That puts her in an interesting position. She's my second choice, too.

The Trade War

Our troubled President starts a new fight daily. It was  probably inevitable that he would start fights he can't win. I see no way for tRump to win his trade war with China. 

I see talking heads on TV saying that the war hurts the Chinese more than it hurts us. That's probably true, but the Chinese have been in pain for 5,000 years. They can handle pain. 

The Chinese Communists probably have a long term plan in place. This is not because they are Communists, which is doubtful, but because they are Chinese. They understand time. They are led by a careful leader-for-life. Our President has 16 months left in office if he is lucky.  Those may be the odds he can win his trade war, about 16 out of 5,000.

Some Chinese people will suffer during the next year. The Chinese leaders may not be as uncaring as a Republican senator, but they can probably manage to ignore the pain of ordinary Chinese citizens for 16 months. Or four more years, if it comes to that. 

(also on Facebook)

The State of Democracy in the USA

How is democracy doing in the USA?

A few years back, social scientists studied who influences government choices in America. The results were unsurprising. Financial elites and organized interest groups get what they want from the government. When the wishes of the rich or an interest group conflict with what the public wants, the public loses. For example, 93% of the public wants background checks on all gun buyers, a weak. symbolic reaction to mass murders. The House, Senate, President and Supreme Court have ignored this proposal for decades. The gun manufacturers and their organized interest group, the NRA, get their way. 

In 2016  white-wing voters rebelled against being ignored and seized the Republican Party. The unheard Left rebelled in the Democratic Party but lost. In the general election, financial elites backed the candidates of  both parties. tRump ran second and won. 

The G7 or The Severn Largest Economies

According to the media, the G7 summit members enjoy the seven largest economies in the world. There must be a reason why our media say that, but I don't know what it is.

The G7 consists of the USA, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy and Canada. Russia used to be a member. But if you rank the nations of the world by the size of their economies, you get the following list;

USA 
(The European Union, which attends the G7 but for some reason does not count.)
China
Japan
Germany
United Kingdom
India
France
Brazil



Italy has the 8th or 9th largest economy. So does Brazil.

Canada has the world's 10th largest economy.

Russia is 12th.

Mexico is 15th.

(Note: On this list, California would rank 6th.) 

Why are China, India and Brazil left out in favor of Canada, Italy (and little Russia)? 

The Democratic Plan to End Hate Crimes

The Republican leadership supports hate crimes, wink, wink. The Democratic leaders oppose hate crimes, but they have no plan to end them.

Unless advocating for background checks will end hate crimes.  Remember, when President Grant crushed the KKK, he did it with stern background checks. 

No, not really. Grant sent in the army. That was his plan. As Lincoln said of Grant, the man fights.

Trump Voters: Two Facts

A couple of years ago I read a summary of some studies of tRump voters. Two things stuck in my memory.

The median income among tRumpers was $72,000 a year. They weren't poor, but they felt entitled to more. 

Support for tRump increased the farther the American voter lived from the southern border. 

John. Adams on tRump

I posted this some time back, but it remains timeless. What follows is something John Adams wrote about Alexander Hamilton, but it might also be his view of President tRump. 

"His ambition, his restlessness and all of his grandiose schemes come, I'm convinced, from a superabundance of secretions, which he couldn't find enough whores to absorb."

In Adams' era politics could get rough. 

Painkillers

Wanda Sykes commented last night on why black people are under-represented in the opiod-addiction crisis. It's mostly a white problem.

Statistics show that American doctors are slow to prescribe painkillers for people of color.

Kendi

Ibram Kendi is a cultural historian who won the National Book Award for nonfiction several years ago for Stamped from the Beginning. In this book he challenges deeply held and sometimes well-meant and progressive ideas about racism. He argues convincingly that even the strongest anti-racists have been infected with racism. I, of course, have been infected. Even people of color accept half-hidden racist beliefs that define black people as inferior. 

You may recall that President Obama once made a speech in which he pointed out that many black families have disintegrated--that they are in some ways inferior to the typical white family.  

Do white families set the standard that black families should try to meet? Or is there more than one way to build a good family?

Kendi's research goes back to Cotton Mather and the Founding Fathers, some of whom were very quietly opposed to slavery. Some argued in private  that people of color could be loving and loyal but not smart or creative, and that in compensation for these deficiencies, black people had been made more athletic and sexual. This ancient idea lives on today in the many jokes about male sex organs and "white men can't jump." 

The last ten winners of the men's Olympic high jump contest have been named Sotomayor, Wszola, Brumel, Drouin, Ukhov, Silnov, Holm, Klyugin, Austin and Avdeenko, two of whom are people of color.

Kendi has a new book: How to Be an Antiracist. In it he has written that the only way to fight racism "is to consistently identify and describe it--and then dismantle it."

Her Husband Is Ugly

What can the future nominee of the Democratic Party look forward to in today’s political climate?   

Let’s assume, for sake of argument,  that the Democrats nominate Tulsi Gabbard, because she surfs and Hawaii is their lucky state. Shortly after being nominated, she will hear the following:

Her husband is too ugly.

Her father assassinated JFK. 

She is a rapist and a drug mule.

She arranged the murder of Jeffrey Epstein.

She runs a pedophile ring out of the Taco Bell on Wall Street.

She is a Jew who is financing thousands of people of color to invade the United States and vote for her dozens of times each, wearing a different cap each time. 

She is a low energy, non-citizen Hindu. 

She was born in a shithole country.

The last claim will be tested in 2020.

What Is Real

The nation is divided into two cultural worlds. The world of tRump and his voters is the smaller and less pragmatic world, less attached to reality, inventing imaginary facts. You can order reality to go away, but it's still there even if you don't like it and call it fake news. That's what makes it real.

The Vegetarians

Certain leaders in my family have suddenly become vegetarians or near-vegetarians, which has given me something to think about.

Humans and bears evolved as omnivores. They enjoy meat, and animal protein has been important in the physical development of children. Arguing that it is morally okay for an osprey but not a chimpanzee to eat fish hasn't been entirely convincing. But the situation has changed.

Science has invented plant-based meat and clean meat. The Impossible Burger is plant-based, and it is suddenly available everywhere. Clean meat is genuine cell-based meat grown in a factory. Soon you'll be able to buy factory-grown chicken meat indistinguishable from meat from a dead bird.

Growing crops to feed cattle and all that follows is, I hear, a major contributor to global warming. Science is telling us we face a catastrophe. We have choices to make.

The tRump Voters

Change in a modern culture is inevitable, but you don't have to like it. tRump voters are not comfortable with change.

America began to reshape itself in the sixties. Over the next 50 years relationships between men and women shifted. Relationships between the so-called races started to change. Music changed. Aspects of life as foundational as gender were redefined.  New methods of communication sprang up--the Internet emerged from UCLA. The nation became more pluralistic and multicultural. Marijuana became legal. The political parties realigned and lost touch. 

Many voters managed to accept what was happening and to enjoy parts of it. Others reacted with irrational hatred and sometimes violence toward women, gays, longhairs and people of color.  

Some tRump voters were merely people who always voted Republican. But others were the terrified and inflexible, those who could not stomach new rules or new people. They wanted to get rid of all that, to make America great again; that meant sending the Obamas back to Africa and Hillary to prison  It meant deporting Latino families that had been in New Mexico, Texas and California for ten generations. To these voters, the old white wing, it was a question of cultural survival. A few have become home-grown terrorists. But the changes continue, and the swings will be growing wider. 

The changes coming in the next 50 years are likely to be stunning. Global warming and technology are going to scramble human ways of life worldwide. I can't imagine the forces impacting the life of my granddaughter. 

Buttocks

Today I watched one of the unknown fellows running for the Democratic nomination. His name is Steve Buttocks, I think, and he's the governor of one of those western states with a small population made up largely of United States Senators. The first thing he said--and he delivered this line with courage--was "I'm not from the coasts!"

That's sad because New York, Massachusetts, Florida, California, Oregon and Washington are where the votes are. I guess it goes without saying that Buttocks is behind.

The Other Party

My wife is out of town, so last night I killed time by watching an old Jack Ryan thriller. I think it was titled "Clear and Present Danger."  In it our hero (Harrison Ford) discovers that the President and his security advisor have committed treason to gain a domestic political advantage. (The characters were probably based on Nixon and Kissinger, who committed treason with the Vietnamese to gain a domestic political advantage.) The movie ends with a triumphant Jack Ryan testifying before a senate oversight committee.

Jack Ryan never met Moscow Mitch.

tRump has committed ten times the crimes of Nixon. And you will note that Kissinger went unpunished and that a Republican hack gave Nixon a full pardon. 

Today's senate would not allow Jack Ryan to testify. The Supreme Court would happily reinterpret laws to legitimize any treasonous act the President committed  Nancy Pelosi would continue to shrink from action, seeking an imaginary centrist advantage for her semi-Democratic members of congress. 

One party has rotted into a hollow crumbling shell; the other party is Republican. The question is: Will young people be able to rebuild our bent institutions?

The Lady from 29 Palms

I was ten when the Greatest Generation dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That was 74 years ago today. What with radiation sickness and so on, more than 300,000 Japanese men, women and children lost their lives. 

My memory of the event is that Californians were astonished by the A-bomb, at first classifying it as a modern wonder like penicillin and dried milk. The Andrews sisters had a hit song on the radio about "a dynamite dreamboat, a load of atom bombs, the lady from 29 Palms." 

Later a controversy developed about whether the use of the bomb had been necessary. I'll skip that part, because I consider it beside the point. The point is that bombers deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime. 

As  best I can tell, deliberating bombing civilians in order to kill some families and frighten the others into demanding a surrender was a tactic first used by the British in the 1920s in Iraq. Brits under Churchill's command bombed Kurds riding horses. Led by Churchill and Bomber Harris, the Brits returned to this official civilian bombing policy in World War II, followed by the retaliating Nazis and later by the Americans. It was a lot safer for 
Americans  to bomb Berlin at night without aiming. 

Gen. James Doolittle, in charge of our air war in Europe, was relieved of  his command and sent home when he refused to bomb random strangers. After that our nation committed a long series of war crimes, including the fire bombings of Dresden and Tokyo (that one burned to death over a hundred thousand civilians).

Lesson One: War crimes should be admitted, but we (and Japan, for that matter) can't do it. 

That all men are created equal

I encounter people who seem astonished that America's founders held that all white men are created equal. What about women, people of color, the enslaved, transsexuals? And so on. The way I see it, making all white men equal was a first step. The ancients had to start someplace.

Which brings me to George Washington and the high school named for him in San Francisco, the high school closest to my granddaughter. In this school there stands a series of panels, public art. The mural was created long ago by a Marxist friend of Diego Rivera, and in one panel he showed black people condemned to work for no wages; and in another, a dead Amerindian. That is, he managed to insert a critique into an official government project. The school board is now going to paint over all this on the ground that it makes the students uncomfortable (as it should make all of us).

They are not going to remove the statue of George Washington or change the name of the school. The school board is content with erasing slavery and genocide. 

Washington owned about $10,000,000 worth of slaves (in our money). He freed them in his will. So all along Washington and Jefferson and Adams and Franklin (an abolitionist) knew better--that tells us something about human failings, a lesson far out of the reach of one more dull school board.