Smart Train

Our local paper prints many letters from people who are angry because the Smart Train, which runs parallel to 101, isn't profitable. They don't understand that trains need subsidies. 101 isn't profitable, either.

Afraid to Die?

When my mother was dying, I asked if she was afraid. "No," she said. There was a bit of scorn in her voice. She was about 73, and with luck she might have had another ten or fifteen years. 

The question is fundamental. I've been more lucky. I'm old now, and a family member recently asked me the same question. 

When I was young I absolutely did not want to die or even think about it. Now--and I am healthy and active--I live in a country that many of the people I care about have departed. Packing it in looks like a natural event, good enough for anyone. No worries.

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Seizing the Children of the Poor

tRump was not the first tyrant to take children from their mothers and cage them. In the Old Testament Job speaks of men who "seize in pledge the child of the poor." This renders the parents instantly helpless. 

But the American President is unlikely to have read a book. We know he's unfamiliar with the Bible. A Satanic angel, familiar with Job, might have proposed this plan to the old flab, perhaps Stephen Miller.

Old White Man

In the polling so far, the Democrats (especially people of color) seem set on nominating an old white man. That bias, I suspect, emerges in part from the fact that tRump is an old white man. Old white men win!

That's how limited our thinking is. And I support Bernie.

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tRump's End

From the Book of Job

"Though his summit go up to the sky,
and his head reach up to the clouds,
He will disappear like his dung for all time;
Those who've seen him will say, "Where is he?"

trans: Edward Greenstein

(from Facebook)

Fear

Andrew Goofimann (name changed to protect  those with borderline personality disorder) is a rustic who has published more than a thousand letters-to-the-editor to a weekly newspaper that prints nything. His letters are fact-free deliveries of word salad. 

"Gavin Newsom is the worst liberal in the country. The whole state is run by Democrats and look at the filthy rotten things that have happened here and the stupid rules in the stupid regulations and the stupid asinine democrat liberal anti-American Communist ideas we have in California. Yeah! Beyond description filthy dirty rotten people. God bless Donald Trump" etc. That is Goofimann at his mildest. 

My guess is that Goofimann doesn't have electricity in the shed I picture as his home. He has lots of daylight hours, a bottle of Thunderbird, no friends or family and, like Trump, nothing to do.  He seems driven by a terrible fear of  reality. Like the President, he is a victim, in his own eyes a brave soldier but actually a whiny loser who keeps losing. 

Like Donaldo Trump, Goofimann hopes his words will change  things in California, which has a larger economy than Russia. Yet he insists California is mired in ruin.

Trump also hopes that his words can create a new reality--one in which he's okay. If you inherit 400 million dollars, that might seem kind of possible until you encounter people you can't buy.

(from Facebook)

RasPutin

Voter suppression is as American as the Lindy Hop. The Founders set up our first vote in a way that allowed less than a third of the adults in the nation to participate. They even barred some working-class white men. 

Since then we’ve seen the franchise expanded to include women and people of color, and we’ve seen countermeasures like Jim Crow. The goal of the countermeasures has usually been to keep who gets to vote down to a relatively small, white number.

Our Republican Supreme Court gutted the voting rights act. Today we see a lot of purging of minority Americans from voter lists and the closing of polling places located near minorities. The Republicans aim to win another election. Voter suppression, racism, authoritarianism and sexism are their best issues, along with help from RasPutin. That’s  how you win by coming in second with a small but dedicated base.

Free College

My son-in-law explained this. Mayor Pete has mocked Elizabeth Warren's plan to provide free college for all Americans. Mayor Pete asks, Why should the tax payer offer free education to the children of the rich? They can afford to pay. 

Mayor Pete has warned us. If we don't charge the rich for college, they will soon be demanding free high school.

( Also on Facebook) 

Feeling Sad about Impeachment

I chaired three Democratic clubs in my life, but today I am an independent voter. One reason is that the elected leaders of the party lie a lot. Yesterday they told us how sad they were that President Flabbimann had to be impeached. One by one they appeared on TV with long horse faces. Nancy Pelosi gravely claimed to be saddest of all. 

This weepy faux-Christian sorrow is obviously unreal. Impeaching a son-of-a-bitch who stripped children from their parents at the border and then caged the children and let them suffer from neglect is a rare moment for joy. I felt like dancing in the street.

If Pelosi and the others aren't happy, then they are as sick as Flabbimann. Fortunately for all of us, they actually are delighted. Elected Democrats have a new spring in their steps. They aren't idiots. But they are lying, and we can't trust liars.

When they tell us how sad impeachment has made them, they are faking, which is a fairly standard strategy and the reason politicians are generally thought of with contempt by anyone who can admit what she is feeling. 

The Winner in 2020

Experts say that in 2020 each major party will support its own candidate for President at the same level, about 85%.

The Democratic party is larger.

The Republican party has better turn-out.

The Democratic party turn-out will decide the election. If the Dems nominate someone who enthuses their base, they will win. If the Dems register many new young voters, they will win.

The Democratic base is women and people of color (many working class), well educated people and young voters. It's a guess as to which candidate will interest them, but I doubt if it will be the 1990s Joe Biden or someone whose first name is Mayor.

New Landia

This week President Flabbimann generously made my wife the citizen of a new nation he invented with an executive order. He gave the nation no name, so I will (temporarily) call it New Landia. 

Flabbimann, an anti-Semite who thinks Jews make the best accountants, issued an order redefining American Jews as a nationality, whether their families came from Poland, China, Ethiopia or Ukraine (in my wife's case). My wife now has dual citizenship in New Landia and the United States. 

Those who follow politics know that American Jews support Democrats over Republicans by about a 2-1 margin. Yet it is a Republican who has issued an order that will punish colleges that allow criticism of Isreal or support for Palestinians. 

This is mostly a dispute about what can be said on campus about the policies of the government of Israel. The Leader of the Free World has attempted to confine that discussion under Title VI, which strips funds from colleges that allow verbal or physical attacks based on race, color and nationality. 

Everyone knows that American Jews are not a race or color, so the President concluded that they must be a nation. Israel seems to be the first nation on the President's university no-blame list, but we can probably expect national additions like Turkey and North Korea.

Meanwhile anti-Semites murdered Jews shopping in a store in Jersey City.

(The size of the type above changed itself and remains out of my control) 

Loser

We've had crooked Presidents before. What makes tRump different is the level of his skills. The man is crooked, delusional and incompetent--the attributes of a loser who is in and out of prison all his adult life, because he's too mentally disabled to get away with much. 

tRump is that bum, but he inherited 400 million dollars. What a difference that makes! Leader of the Free World! 

FEMA

In a bankruptcy proceeding, PGE has agreed to pay 13.5 billion dollars to people who took losses in California fires that PGE started. 

FEMA has announced that, for the first time in history, it wants to be reimbursed. It wants to be repaid for the money it spent in California to help during the fire season. tRump wants about a quarter of PGEs 13.5 billion, which would otherwise go to fire victims who likely didn't vote for him. 

Most California fires have been declared acts of God. Will FEMA seek reimbursement from California churches? Have these churches neglected to harden their lines to the Deity?

Bloomberg

Michael Bloomberg, the most corporate of Democrats, sitting on 50 billion, is attempting to frighten the party into nominating him. His claim is that the other candidates are too weak or impractical or too far left to win.  He correctly reads the current Democratic leadership as craven on progressive issues.

Bloomberg, given how young people and people of color view him,  is unlikely to win the nomination, but he might pile up enough delegate votes to become a factor in a brokered convention (along with the centrist superdelegates). That might be his goal. 

Baked-in Racism

The Corporate Democrat, our newspaper in Santa Rosa, ran an op-ed article with the headline "Working Class Doesn't Want Grand Plans."  What followed was an argument that we badly need the working class to become the backbone of the Democratic party again (plus the usual centrist attacks on planners Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders).  "The alienation of working stiffs elected Donald Trump" etc. 

What marks the corporate centrists (aside from their use of terms like "working stiffs," which they probably learned in some Yale graduate course on the songs of the Lincoln Battalion) is their use of  "working class" to mean "white working class." There already exists a large cohort of committed working class Democrats--but with these columnists and papers they don't count. They aren't white enough. (The racism is baked in.)

The Peak Population

In 1969 we worried that the world's population would continue to grow until the planet became uninhabitable. Since then the world population has more than doubled.

Today scientists say that the worldwide birthrate of children per mother has fallen from 5 children each to 2.5 children each since 1960. The drop is attributed to education. Scientists say that sometime around 2100, our population should peak at about 11 million and level out. The predicted world birthrate for 2100 is 1.9 children per mother.

Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi, a product of the old Burton machine in San Francisco (and holder of what was once Phil Burton's congressional seat), has said a lot in her overly long political career. 

I'll remember Pelosi mostly for her comment that the President "is not worth impeaching." She said this after the children President Flabbimann had caged on the border had begun to die of neglect, after the President's greedy success in enriching himself at government expense had become obvious, after Flabbimann's allegiance to Putin's Russian kleptocracy had moved the entire Republican party into subservience to a foreign autocrat.

Pelosi's main concern, disguised in a variety of television commentaries, was to retain her own power in the House. Then events and a rebelling Democratic party forced her to begin impeachment proceedings against the loony criminal bent on destroying western civilization. For this very late start, much praise will be heaped on Peolosi this weekend by the corporate liberals of  MSNBC. She is--like Hillary--their notion of a hero.

The Never Trumpers

The Republican party did not suddenly degenerate in 2015. 

In the 1950s Republicans called Dean Acheson--a devoted Cold Warrior--a pinko. Harry Truman was accused of being soft on Communism. Relentless polarization increased. JFK beat Nixon by running to his right on foreign policy. 

Now consider our current never-trumpers Bill Kristol and Steve Schmidt, who have quit the Republican party and denounced the President.

Why can't a host ask them about their own contributions to the mess we are in? Kristal and Schmidt are the pros who talked John McCain into nominating Sarah Palin--a then unknown, radical-right moron--for Vice President. 

At the time they were intent on encouraging the loony wing that was finally coming to power in the Republican party. Kristal and Schmidt, George W. Bush, Paul Ryan and other corporate types set the stage for someone like Flabbimann. He is the culmination of a 60-year program. The never-trumpers try not to  think about it, but they share the blame.

Jimtown

The Jimtown store is closing in December. They made the best chocolate pudding I've tasted. Jimtown has been a welcome stop for bicycle riders pedaling in isolated wine country. 

The place has always been strange--I was never certain how to order food there. But the food was good. And the store sat next to the gateway to Pine Flat. 

wolf and man

In the middle 1960s I brought home a small wolf pup to raise, which surprised my young wife. 

Wolves are not very dangerous. In the recorded history of the United States, there is no documented case of wild wolves killing a human. You can't say that for, say, deer.

Our pup had a fine coat of blacks, silvers and red-brown parts. We took him to a zoo to make sure what he was, a legitimate southern wolf, although I don't suppose there was such a thing in those days as a wolf with no dog genes in him. Wolves and dogs interbreed and produce young.

My wolf clearly believed that other dogs and other wolves were the same thing. 

The pup adopted me as his family leader, I think. He would groom me by licking the top of my head until my hair was sopping with wolf saliva. 

 I accepted him for what he was, a wolf, and did not attempt to change him. That might have been the key to our relationship. I'm grateful for our time together.

The wolf was the first animal people domesticated and the only large predator. Maybe the wolf came first because it was the easiest (I did it myself). Wolves and people lived in similar family structures. There's speculation that ancient wolves and ancient people may have camped near one another and teamed up informally on hunts. They both liked to eat horses. A few wolves hanging around campfires may have tamed themselves in exchange for food. 

If you're afraid of bears (and you should be) there's nothing like adding some wolves to your camp perimeter defense. The only time I saw my wolf enraged was the one time he came across a bear, whom he instantly hated with all his heart.  

The Automatic Voter

Most American voters are automatic. That is, they always vote Republican. Or they always vote Democratic. They don't have to think about it. I suspect that the results of automatic voting are as positive or negative, on the whole, as the results of careful voting by independents who take the time to read and think for themselves. 

Automatic support for a party is a time-saving shortcut. 

Our two major political parties have different roles, of course. The Republican party of today exists to transfer money from poor people to the 1%. It uses racism and sexism to accomplish that. The Democratic voters of today are a composite of outsiders.  The leadership is there to provide jobs for itself and maybe attempt to improve the lot of the middle class a bit if it's no trouble. So I vote--as an independent--for Democrats.