Hunter Biden

From an enormous distance, it appears that Hunter Biden took a job in Ukraine (the ancestral  home of my father-in-law's family) for which he was paid about $600,000 a year. His qualification for the job was that he had a politically important father. That's ordinary sleazy capitalism and how it works. 

I believe it would be a mistake to nominate Joe Biden. In the past he got elbowed aside by Gore, Kerry and Hillary, all losers,  because he was such a lightweight. Since then he has lost forty pounds. He's now a featherweight. I doubt if the Democrats want to lose badly enough to nominate him. But Joe Biden should not be blamed for what his son did, and what Hunter did was ordinary and legal.

The Gates of Hell

My old friends and I survived Richard Nixon and relished his sweaty downfall. What fun that shaming fall was!  

This time around tRump--the cager of children--has been doing his best, out of spite, to hasten the sixth extinction (the fifth extinction took the dinosaurs). But, I say, when times are hard, enjoy the pleasure you find. Watching a malignant, brainless planet killer flail and whine is the next show scheduled. We will now get a year of watching tRump get dragged screaming through the gates of Hell. Savor it. 

Spanking Greta Thunberg

David Futrelle has compiled on the Internet a list of men advising somebody to spank activist Greta Thunberg, a small 16-year-old girl famous for her opposition to a mass dying-off of humanity. One of the pro-spankers is Breibart's John Nolte.

Old men spanking teenage girls is apparently a sex fantasy for those who conflate sex with violence and pain. I don't get it, but it feels appropriate that the fantasy comes from the radical right.

Eating the Barr

"Sometimes you eat the Barr, " Sam Elliott drawled in THE BIG LEBOWSKY,  "and sometimes the Barr eats you." He was quoting from America's book of frontier wisdom. Before the Europeans arrived in the New World with firearms and horses, bears and humans were evenly competing to be the dominant species. Imagine a man on foot with a bow and arrow facing a grizzly.

Arctic horribilis sometimes stood about 8 feet tall and weighed more than 1,000 pounds. 

Sam Elliott is famous for many reasons, including his acting, his long marriage to Katherine Ross, his mustache and his very deep voice.

I'm really talking about Bill Barr, of course, an officer horribilis of the court system and the President's complicit enforcer, famous for having lied on an industrial scale to cover up for several Republican eras.  

Many people are saying that Barr should be disbarred and then eaten by geese. 

Unfit to Serve

There's an unwritten rule that to serve as President of the United States you must be mentally competent and emotionally sound. Or maybe not, in which case we have a long-range problem.

Richard Nixon was paranoid. Reagan was senile. George W. Bush was a dope who invaded the wrong country. Trump is a malevolent narcissist  Four Republican Presidents in my lifetime have been unfit to serve, which may faithfully reflect the people who vote Republican.

The Democrats are, at last, going to impeach Trump, keeping it simple. Nancy Pelosi will charge him with a few decisions that were illegal or inappropriate. That will miss the point. Trump should be charged with general incompetence, an inability to function as President because of mental and emotional disorders. 

Trump is worse than a crook. He would be grossly inadequate as the head chicken in a chicken coop. That's the truth. We need a new rule.

Mike Thompson on Impeachment

My wife has contacted Rep. Mike Thompson's office four or five times in an effort to find out where he stands on impeaching President Spanklyn T. Borderline. She has gotten a few responses--on unrelated matters. Thompson has apparently remained noncommittal until now, and now it is too late. We no longer care where he stands on this or any other issue. 

It's time for a change.

Downton Arby's

Mark Meritt is working on a script for a TV show called "Downton Arby's." It's about a wealthy British family that loses its money but has just enough left to buy an Arby's franchise on Rosecrans Avenue in Compton.

Gitmo

I once visited Guantanamo Bay as part of the personnel of a light cruiser. In those days it was just another limited navel station, although an odd one in a foreign country. The terrain was desert-like, and there was a chain link fence around the place, if memory serves--I'm thinking back 65 years.

Today Gitmo houses about 40 prisoners who are serving life terms without a trial. Holding them in Gitmo is expensive. Their food has to be brought across a sea. Major surgery means flying in a specialist. 

Maybe the justification for imposing life without a trial is that the men are prisoners of war in the war against terror, a war that by definition cannot end. I'm almost certain that imprisoning 40 people for life won't make a dent in the events to come, in which millions have enrolled in the other side. 

Meanwhile the life-without-trial prison at Gitmo makes us look as primitive as kings in West-Asian folk tales.

Time after Time

In 1814 Alexander von Humboldt wrote: 

“When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters, with an imprudent precipitation, the springs are entirely dried up, or become less abundant. The beds of the rivers remaining dry during a part of the year, are converted into torrents, whenever great rains fall on the heights. The sward and moss disappearing from the brush-wood on the sides of the mountains, the waters falling in rain are no longer impeded in their course: and instead of slowly augmenting the level of the rivers by progressive filtrations, they furrow during heavy showers the sides of the hills, bear down the loose soil, and form those sudden inundations that devastate the country.”

The Stupid Party

We live in a world with hundreds of nations and maybe a thousand political parties. I haven't looked closely, but as far as I can tell, only one party on the planet denies global warming, the Stupid Party. It's one of a kind. Even Boris Johnson, with the brains of a dry mop, believes in global warming. 

How stupid is the Stupid Party?  

Imagine walking into a gun store and telling the proprietor, "I'd like to buy a Winchester saddle gun like the one used by John Wayne. I have a coupon that gives me 10% off. And I'll need a box of ammo, because I intend to kill you and your family." If the guy sells you the carbine and ammo, he probably votes Stupid. Also he is a capitalist.

Kavanaughs

A private school for rich kids looked down on the road where I grew up. Public school kids didn't interact with the private school kids often, but I encountered some at a high school dance I went to with an attractive girl who eventually ended up doing TV news in a big city. At that age I knew nothing about girls, and she had no reason to be interested in me (and she wasn't).

One of the private school guys began to pester my date. Like Supreme Court Justice Boofer Kavanaugh,  Charlton Dude was a drunk, socially lame even with his buddies and a semi-deranged, unattractive butthead with nothing going for him except money. My date did not like him and said so. She asked him to leave her alone.

He wouldn't go away, so I told him to get lost. He challenged me to go outside. I had never been in a real fist fight, but some reason I found this challenge agreeable.

We walked out onto the night lawn, followed by his friends and mine. At the time I knew nothing about fighting except what my father, a machinist, had told me, which was always get in the first punch (often decisive) and hit your opponent in the nose as hard as you could.

My ancestry had any number of street fighters in it.

I set myself, and Charlton yelled some curses and took a run at me. Even I could see that this strategy might betray him. Maybe he thought he was in a football game.  He basically ran his face into my fist. I hit him in the face as hard as I  could, getting both cheeks into it. He landed on his back with a broken nose.  Fight over.

As Mike Tyson said, every fighter has a plan until he gets hit in the mouth.

Charlton was a guy much like Brett Kavanaugh, who to this day makes his own friends cringe. 

Is Joe Biden Racist?

Is Joe Biden racist?  

Hell, yes. 

He's not lynch-mob racist, of course. But this week, at the candidates debate, he told the world that Black children grow up suffering from a shortage of words, and he urged Black parents to make up for this with a record player (using those platters to smarten up inarticulate homes). 

The talking heads on TV seem to be ignoring this. My guess is that it went unnoticed for some reason. Three guesses why it got overlooked. 

I believe that I am racist, because I grew up in a place where racism is as common as oxygen. It's in the air we breathe. But we have the option of struggling with our own racism and trying to keep up with current, shifting insights into the problem. Biden has not done enough of that to serve as the President of a diverse nation.

This week Biden will give a speech on racism (likely written by someone more up-to-date). Perhaps he will apologize to Anita Hill. He may point out that one of his friends is Black. He may change his negative view on reparations. Biden will still be Uncle Fudd, who recently discovered that some children of color can be as bright as white children, and he wants to tell the world about it.

Cheap Labor

Santa Rosa's shameless daily newspaper, The Corporate Democrat, had two long pieces this morning attacking the idea that the adult workers who deliver newspapers deserve health care and pensions. The state is legislating decent treatment for "independent" employees, and that doesn't fit the newspaper's business model, built around savings from cheap labor. (O, capitalism.)

The paper is threatening to end rural delivery, restrict city delivery and cut back on reporters. I read this already dwindling paper, mostly for the crossword,  but I guess I can do what young people do. They get their news off the 'net. I can buy puzzles at the book store. 

Tia Maria

If you happen to be driving south on Wilson/Cleveland near Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, keep going across Third and keep on going. The street will turn into Sebastopol Road in Roseland in about three blocks.  And where it does that (it turns right), you will see small house on your left that has become Tia Maria, a bakery. 

That's at 44 Sebastopol Road, the east end of the road

There's no cooking in the house. The food and drink are supplied by someone else, maybe by the French bakery in Healdsburg. I'm not sure. But the food is good and cheap. Mexican pastries, sandwiches, Jamaica, you name it. I ate a breakfast sandwich and then bought a large wedge of carrot cake for $3.50. There are tables and chairs.

Three Times in a Row

Analysts on TV have been telling us how unlikely it is for one political party to win the Presidency three terms in a row. We've all heard that. It hasn't happened since Reagan and Bush. But how seriously should we take what the media tells us? I decided to look the facts up.

There have been other three-term runs, of course. Washington and Adams come to mind. Also Jackson and Van Buren. Harding, Coolidge and Hoover made three, along with McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft. Madison and Monroe covered four terms. Five terms in a row were put up by Grant, Hayes, Garfield and Arthur. Also by FDR and Truman.

Bad

I grew up in a time when we argued that people are naturally good. If something went wrong with your environment, you might end up doing bad things. You might become the rare person who cheated, stole or killed. But you could be reformed if people took the time to be helpful.

Even then we knew about the Holocaust and all the hard workers it took to murder millions of people. We had theories about what had shaped workers committed to mass murder. They were different from us--they were foreigners who had been misshaped by too-strict forms of toilet training. 

In my life it may be the case that there has not been a single day on which a genocide was not taking place somewhere on this planet.

I have to admit that 60,000,000  tRump voters have modified my view of human nature. tRump voters enjoy caging brown children and grabbing women by the private parts. They love a man who can shock brown people and the educated. Watching a billionaire harm minorities, women and children makes tRump voters feel better. 

We can describe people like tRump and his voters. tRump is a malevolent narcissist. But after a century of studying the brain and the mind, we still don't know how tRumps get made. We have primitive, competing theories that do not satisfy. We have found no cure for narcissism.

Science has a way to go. In the meantime I'm with John Oliver, who said on Sunday, "Ted Cruz can suck my balls."

The Socialist!

For some time I've been calling Bernie Sanders a social democrat, much like the New Dealers. Bernie has called himself a democratic socialist. 

One way to differentiate between a social democrat and a socialist is whether the candidate wants to nationalize the coal industry. If he does, he's a socialist.  

Sanders wants to nationalizes all of the fossil fuel industries (not a bad idea). That would be a major step toward lessening global warming and ending government by Big Oil. 

Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist. 

America as Cowards

We start the weekend learning that the leaders at the national weather service have repudiated their own scientists and agreed with tRump's deranged lies about Alabama being threatened by Hurricane Dorian. Also that several branches of government--the Attorney General, the military, the Vice President--have been patronizing tRump's properties at government expense, enriching the balmy President in joints that formerly ached with monetary losses. tRump is sucking the government dry.

Nancy Pelosi cravenly continues not seeing enough evil in tRump to open impeachment hearings, although the President's deranged malfeasance is obvious to every person in the world with his or her own brain. The Democrats have failed us. The Republicans are abolishing their own primaries in an effort to block a minor challenge to the President's re-election.

The Constitution hangs in tatters.  Moscow Mitch and Leningrad Lindsey have seated enough creepy judges to get away with more than even tRump can steal . 

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I'm going on a family bicycle ride. And my granddaughter's singing of "Alone" has had  5,000 views on the 'net.

Cheap Labor

Our local daily newspaper, the Corporate Democrat, ran a beefy editorial today attacking Assembly Bill 5, which will turn many "independent contractors" into people with company jobs and benefits. The editorial writers are particularly upset because no exemption will be granted for adult newspaper carriers. "Most carriers have second jobs," they point out, as if that should count in the favor of the corporation.  

What we have now (for many) is a gig economy where the worker gets no benefits and a non-living wage and works three jobs to survive. That's socially unhealthy.  Assembly Bill 5 is an attempt to change things. 

Our daily paper is a corporation insisting we supply it with cheap labor. 

(What a country we have!)

Schrodinger's Impeachment Committee

"Schrödinger’s Impeachment Committee," someone said on the TV. 

Early in the development of Quantum physics, Irwin Schrodinger, a Nobel prize winning physicist, came up with a thought experiment to demonstrate that Quantum superposition would not work with large objects like cats. Tiny particles can be several things at once, but this does not apply to mammals. 

Schrodinger’s thought experiment involved closing a cat in a black box with some harmful items. If the rules for particles applied, the cat would soon be dead and also alive at same time, which is absurd and obviously not true. (Yet we still come across people who think large objects work like particles.)

Schrodinger’s Impeachment Committee is chaired by Rep. Nadler who claims it is  an impeachment committee, while Speaker Pelosi claims that it is not. It is and is not at the same time. But as Schrodinger might point out, the committee consists of many large items. They do not follow the laws of particle physics.They either form an impeachment committee or they do not. 

Surface Facts

One of the handicaps I had as an English  professor was my secret belief that much of the literary theory and criticism of my time consisted of paranoid inventions of patterns that did not exist.   No poem said what it seemed to say. Poems had to be unpacked to make clear the hidden conspiracies. 

This approach came from several sources at the end of World War II, some of them European Fascists. They had a compelling reason to argue in 1950 that facts should be deconstructed. In a world without solid facts, your former membership in the Nazi party would not matter. 

Such views eventually degenerated into Republicans mocking a "fact-based" view of things, promoting "alternative facts,"  attacking the "deep state" and labelling the truth as "fake news."   

Death as Leader

The people, discouraged, voted for Death, and he became their leader.  Everyone faced Death, and Death was pitiless, but Roger Federer started a pointless argument. While Federer held Death's attention, several young friends slipped across the borderline into another country where Death would not find them for more than 65 years.