Tier One

The two shot method will start putting a real dent in the virus about April 1.

Two shots of the vaccine make people almost 100% immune, while one shot makes a little more  than 80% of the patients immune. But the one shot method will cover twice as many people. Using the two shot method, 100 out of 100 patients will be immune. Using the one shot method, you would reach 200 people. 160 out of 200 people will become immune. 

I'm not a scientist. There must be a lot more to this discussion. First tier personnel are in great danger, and one shot would not be right for them. I'm in second or third tier, and maybe there is an argument to made.  

The Far Left v. Art

The strength of the far left is empathy. They feel burning outrage at the way our country treats the homeless. That's genuine. But recently I read a call from Rep. Barbara  Lee to take money away from underfunded public art to use in relief programs. 

Have we forgotten the WPA? Art is a language--maybe the first language. Absorb it. Public art is there for everyone.

Lacking Balls

When Republicans gain power, they rampage. When Democrats win, they try to work with the macho Republicans. I am reminded of a call I took while volunteering at Democratic HQ in Santa Rosa some eight years back. A drunken woman got me on the phone, and she said, "Your problem is that you don't have any balls."

Maybe she had a point. Voters respect action, not high-minded, upper-middle-class centrism.

Hispanics

I have not warmed up to Gov. Gavin Newsom, but once again he has gotten out in front on a key issue. He's been doing this since, as mayor of San Francisco, he authorized gay marriage (defying the law at the time). 

Newsom has named Alex Padilla,  a Hispanic, to the senate, a first for California. For some time I have been suggesting that the Democrats set a place at the table for Latin Americans. The national party takes them for granted, but Hispanics matter. Ask Arizona.

J. K. Rowling v. The Transgender

 J. K. Rowling has gotten into a major fight with supporters of transgender women. The argument is about whether transgender women are actually women. Rowling's position, I believe, is that transgender women have some but not all the experiences that shape women, so they aren't women. The counter claim is that trans women are women, which is what they believe. 

On a superficial level (often my level) this has been an argument about diction. How do we define the word "women"?  

The categories into which I put people depend on my purpose. Do I want to reject someone or anger her? Or do I want to accept her?

75 Million Votes for Evil

Here's a post-election question the Democrats might consider. Why did 75 million people vote for tRump, a sociopath? There are many reasons, not one, but consider this reason. 

The Dems realized about 30 years ago that they could take the support of white union members and other workers for granted.  Workers and their concerns could be ignored. They had to vote for Democrats. As voters they had no place else to go.

So the workers started voting Republican.

More recently the Democrats realized that they could take the support of progressives for granted.  Today many Democratic leaders believe that progressives can and should be ignored. Progressives have no place else to go, right? 

I see centrist Democrats attacking progressive Democrats on television, apparently set on driving them out of the party. Ancient Biden is staffing his cabinet with centrists. AOC was been denied the post she wanted by Ancient Nancy Pelosi. 

In 2024 union workers and 30 million progressives will be told that they absolutely must support an organization that considers them stupid and has shut them out of deliberations and decisions. They will be told they have no place else to go.

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The MAGA Cap

 In 1969 I learned that if I pasted an American flag decal onto the window of my car, I could drive through American border crossings while smoking a joint. And looking like Mr. Natural. 

I'd read somewhere that America's white-wing lived on symbols. You could adapt and use their symbols to your own advantage. 

The Fascists are currently attacking our form of government, which is an oligarchy colored with a little democracy. Last week trumpublicans knifed and shot a handful of our citizens and trashed a black church or two. The violence has begun. 

I lived in a safe county, but about noon my wife had to go to the support of a woman being threatened by her Lyft driver, because the woman had backed off when he refused to wear a mask.

If you get threatened by a trumpublican, a safe way out is to put on a stolen MAGA cap. The cap will make you invisible. You can slide away before the knifing begins.

Occam's Razor by David Von Drehle

 Opinion by

David Von Drehle

Columnist

Dec. 11, 2020 at 4:11 p.m. PST

If William of Occam, medieval philosopher, were transported by time-travel to the present moment, he might not find everything to be unfamiliar. Much of his career was devoted to one of the epic election disputes of all time, King Louis of Bavaria pitted against Pope John XXII over control of the Holy Roman Empire — a battle that raged across Europe in the 14th century and echoes to this day in one of humanity’s great works of art, Dante’s “Divine Comedy.”

William’s enduring contribution is the logical principle that bears his name, Occam’s razor, which cuts keenly into today’s election controversy. He teaches that the simplest explanation that fits observable facts is probably the nearest to the truth.

In his plain Franciscan tunic, William steps from his time capsule into 2020, razor in hand, and applies himself to the available facts. For more than four years, the political scene has been dominated by a rare genius of publicity, an attention hog whose personality Americans find almost uniquely compelling. Enrapturing supporters and enraging critics, the incumbent president has stoked such passions that many consider his reelection bid to be among the most important elections in U.S. history. Billions of dollars have been raised and spent to maximize voting. More votes are counted than ever before.

 

Two explanations are offered to old William to explain the numbers. One is that the intensity of publicity and depth of passions drove record participation. The other is that the U.S. Postal Service engaged in a widespread conspiracy to steal ballots and sell them to co-conspirators who filled them out using fake identities and delivered them inside food trucks to counting stations. The FBI and Justice Department know all about it, but are covering it up.

Hmm, says William after a brief contemplation. The first explanation seems a good deal simpler — and thus more likely.

Locked Down

The Chaucer Boys Bike Club called off its bike ride today because it is raining and the county is locked down. What that means is that we'd have a hard time finding a place to buy lunch and then have to stand in the rain to eat it. (This would not be happening in New Zealand.)

I wonder if we could ride without stopping to eat. What would Chaucer think?

(The club consists of descendents of Chaucer plus one guy who is kith, not kin.)

The Modern Hero

 The bad Republicans today are the ones pushing for vote cancelation. They hope to throw out the votes of entire states (to keep in place a minority rule that favors the donor class). 

So degenerate has the Republican Party become that now the good Republicans are the ones who actively suppress voting by people of color but refuse to miscount the votes of those who do manage to cast ballots. 

The Porcupine

My Aunt Tot used to say that in American elections you have a choice between the Evil Party and the Useless Party. She voted Uselessly. 

Ross Douhat, a writer no one should respect, recently defined humans as creatures who naturally believe in conspiracy theories. For once he was right. That is who we are.  More than 71 million  Americans just voted to re-elect a Fascist president who is currently attempting to seize the government by coup.

Voters run on emotion, not reason, and so does a porcupine. 

Rafer Johnson

Rafer Johnson died yesterday.

I met Rafer Johnson at UCLA just before he became the world's greatist athlete. He was a freshman. He would go on to play basketball for Coach Wooden and to set new world records in the decathalon three times. 

Johnson was one of the men who tackled the armed Sirhan Sirhan after he'd murdered Robert Kennedy. 

My encounter with Johnson mostly consisted of one pingpong game in which we were partners in a doubles match. We won!

A Magic Wand

 In pandemic lockdown, Susan and I have finally taken up watching sci-fi, focusing on the comical Mr. Data in Star Trek. In this series the medical doctor is often a good-looking, middleaged woman with a magic wand. If a crew member breaks a wrist, the doctor waves her wand over the arm, and the bones knit together, and all is well. 

I'm here to report that the wand era of medicine has already begun. Yesterday a surgeon removed a minor flaw from my right ear, and then he waved a wand over the wound. I could hear it making a mild roaring noise, but I felt nothing much. 

Apparently the surgeon used an electric wand to cauterize some bleeding capillaries. Don't ask me how. No blood. Magic.

The Problem of Evil--a Thanksgiving Story

Jim Jefferies, a transgressive comic, got me thinking about the problem of evil. If all-powerful God is good, why does evil exist?

Some religions have many gods or no god, but the ones with which I am most familiar, the desert religions, have one god. 

Followers speculate about what the one Creator is like.  As I see it, the only strong evidence for what the Creator is like is his creation, the universe. 

The Creator, then, made wonders like berry ice cream and the laughter of children. But what about rabbits eaten by hungry coyotes? How do theorists explain a Creator who put together the coronavirus?

The usual answer is that God's ways are unknowable to us, a mystery we should accept. Jeffries explores this concept with a parable even I can grasp. Suppose a Samaritan is walking along a crowded sidewalk and he sees a woman. He hits her on the head, she falls, and then he begins to rape her. A police officer grabs him and shouts, "Are you insane? Why are you doing that?" And the Samaritan responds, "I don't know! It's a mystery!"

 

Defunding the Police?

Crackpots and other Republicans have, of late, accused the Democrats of indulging in cannibalism and of demanding that the police be defunded. Centrist Democrats have denied the cannibalism part, and I believe they are probably right. 

Centrist Democrats agree with Republican crackpots that progressive Democrats campaigned in favor of defunding the police. And that this cost the party votes in swing districts. 

Speaking for myself, I'd like to see racist police departments defunded and replaced by anti-racist departments, so I am guilty as charged, except that I am not a Democrat. I'm independent.

There must be a Democrat somewhere who actually ran on a platform calling for defunding the police, but basically this charge is a fabrication. Progressive Democrats are way too chicken to support the Black Lives Matter slogan. (That's why I'm not a Democrat.)

So why are centrist Democrats lying about their own progressive congress members? Well, the centrists want to retain power. Power is worth billions of dollars. To control that money and retain their ties to Wall Street, the centrists have to club down the progressive wing of their party. 

Here's another theory about why the Dems recently lost seats. What they offer the voters is mighty thin oatmeal, mostly water. If they offer warm, thick stew the next time around, they might attract hungry voters. Or not. Undecided voters seem able to overlook issues like life vs. death. 

Why Polls Fail

 My brother sent me a Washington Post article in which the writer claimed that today most people are no longer willing to be polled. So the polling data comes from a tiny minority of the willing. 

I think it's possible that very few of the willing wear MAGA hats. 

If a pollster does manage to get an old white man to cooperate, that dude is probably not representative. So the true margin of error in polls is increasing, and the support for Spanky Braincrumb has been underestimated.

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Felony

At the moment, Rudy, Lindsay and President Spanky are tampering with an election. That is a felony. 

They should be charged and stand trial. Biden should, of course, start an investigation, but he is unlikely to do much unless Kamala manages to provide the man with a stronger spine. 

Biden will probably let everything slip, setting another awful precident. We are talking big, long term damage. I've always thought Biden isn't big enough to handle the job. But he isn't a traitor. Biden is infinitely preferable to Spanky.  It's a relief to see Joe on the tube. 

By stalling the transition, attempting a coup, Lindsay, Rudy and Spanky are promoting the coronavirus and killing Americans. They should be held accountable. For once in their hugely privileged lives.

Diversity in Cabinet Making

Joe Biden will have to choose carefully if he wants his cabinet to be diverse. He has promised it will represent all of us.

A diverse cabinet that reflects all of America will help make Americans feel invested in the government and presidential decisions. It will give us leadership that looks like America. 

Biden could start by appointing several morons. A moron could serve, for example, as secretary of education. But that's not enough. At least a third of American voters are determinedly stupid, and securing their input and trust is central to diversity at the cabinet level.

Hicks have long been underrepresented in the cabinet. Why not have the Dept. of Defense led by an evangelical, opiate-munching white woman from southern Ohio who dropped out of junior high to work as a lap dancer? 

Biden should consider asking the leader of Big Tobacco to serve as secretary of state, in large part because of his experience in providing smokes to third world nations. This man knows foreigners  He could simultaneously serve as secretary of labor, bringing to bear what he has learned from breaking unions.  

Finally,  Biden might want to include in his truly diverse cabinet a representative QANON rapist who argues that Obama is a Communist and a devout Moslem who died in 1984 and was replaced by a body-double trained by George Soros' nurse practitioner. 

Minority Rule

From the start this country has struggled with the problem of minority rule. The Founders gave us a system that excluded women (a majority), people of color, Amerindians, the enslaved, ex-convicts, the young and poor white males. On paper most of that has been fixed, but clever voter suppression techniques still deny the vote to many. 

In my lifetime Truman and Clinton were elected without winning a majority (but they did finish first). Bush and tRump won by finishing second. That's ridiculous.

In our system, half the time a minority rules and then often passes laws making it harder for a majority to win. The minority clings to power. We should do something about that.

Empathy

 

 I want those who voted for Death Trump to get the food, shelter, medical care and shoes we all need.  But do they care about me? Or does empathy run in one direction, like human empathy for wolverines? 

Trump's Coup

The president of the United States lost his bid for re-election, and he--and the crackpots he's allowed into the White House-- is attempting a coup. A coup here! Spanky has at least the nominal backing of the shameless leader of the senate and the attorney general. He has fired leadership among the military and installed puppets. He stacked the Supreme Court (which still might not support the coup). The White House has a (stupid) plan.

Fortunately Pres. Spanky is feeble and cowardly, but the situation is unique in our history, and it is dangerous.

A recent poll showed that only 3% of the voters believe Spanky won the election. 

We are told to wait it out, to give a nutter and his parasites a chance to cool down and adjust. That is madness. Our system has failed. We're relying on luck to get by.  Fingers crossed. 

Converting Evangelicals

Angelo Fiddelmann has called for a movement to convert evangelicals to Christianity. Fiddelmann is himself a secular Christian, a New Testament man, who takes the teachings of Jesus seriously. 

My own experience with evangelicals is that some are unfamiliar with basic Bible stories. Recently I was chatting with an evangelical, and I mentioned Jonah. He stared at me blankly. Never heard of Jonah. 

If converted, Evangelicals may become familiar with, for example, Mark, where Jesus says, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Note what Mark does not say: "If a neighbor woman crosses the desert holding a small child, you should take away the child and keep it. Now it belongs to you." 

Outcomes

 Alison Soltau summed up the situation best: this is the kind of election result that restores your faith in the humanity of one out of two people. 

My sense is that the smartest elected Republicans in Washington are the ones who can tell which way the wind is blowing. 

A Note from an Expert

I can't tell you how many times women have praised me for my knowledge of political polling. Tuesday night, at about ten-thirty, was one of the best. Joe Biden was down by 15 percentage points. I was surrounded by tears of rage. But the tears were mopped up when I reminded everyone that the pollers had showed Biden eventually winning Michigan and Wisconsin. No worries.

The polls (but not the politicians) had tended to predict that Biden would take home a much larger win than the one he got. Instead it was a squeaker. That harmed the reputation of polling. But the political pros had never called for a huge win and had made that clear. They had, however, predicted a close victory. 

I mean, c'mon. 

The Brown Belt

To date the analysis of the 2020 election by the talking TV heads on CNN  and MSNBC has been pathetic. Here is some real news, much of it from Juan Gonzales. 

President Spanky's support among American voters grew quite a bit after 2016. (The poll takers somehow overlooked this in their calculations.)

Spanky just won the support of a majority of white American women. (My guess is that the law and order scare worked its usual magic. A majority of white women accidentally voted against the right to choose and in favor of the main inciter of violence.)  The gender gap exists only among people of color. Wow.

From 2008 to 2020 the number of white voters decreased from 109 million to 104 million. (The Republican Party is now whiter than a snowbank.)

From 2008 to 2020  the number of Latino voters increased from 10 million to 23 million. (We now have a brown belt in the Southwest and California.) There were also increases among Asian voters, Amerindian voters, etc. 

But mainstream TV isn't talking about any of this.

Hijab

Many years ago, when the dean was annoyed with me, she assigned me to teach a survey course in world religions. That is how I became expert in the hijab controversy. 

A number of countries have criminalized Moslem religious clothing, including veils, masks and the hijab, which covers a woman's hair, neck and sometimes her face. These same counties tend not to criminalize the head coverings, collars and black dresses worn by Christian preachers and nuns. America has not banned the costumes worn by ultra-orthodox Jews. I don't think we care about the outfits worn by Moslem men from oil-rich nations.  

The argument for criminalizing Moslem items is that the loose clothing and facial coverings may disguise terrorists. Yet today all Americans, including stupid people, Protestants and superheroes, are urged to wear masks; the terrorist-protection angle may seem less compelling. 

It occurred to me that terrorists wearing hijabs might be ineffective.   

Also the desert religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have a history of subjugating women and forcing them to wear wigs or bathe or whatever.  So should we ban the hijab? Or ritual baths? Or can we trust Islamic women to make their own scarf choices?

I'm not very religious. I do believe that my ancient religion played a major part in how it became possible to organize safe towns where strangers could safely pass one another on the sidewalks. In the old days, if you were wearing a Zeus hat, you could often trust the strangers wearing Zeus hats not to sneak up on you with a knife. Or something like that.

It might be common sense to let people decide for themselves what to worship and how to signal their status.

Voters Shift

 

This analysis by the Marist Poll gives people a

good look at one state.

BIDEN UP BY 6 POINTS IN NORTH CAROLINA

October 2020

In North Carolina, former Vice President Joe Biden receives the support of 52% to 46% for President Donald Trump among likely voters including those who are undecided yet leaning toward a candidate or who already voted. Among North Carolina registered voters, Biden has 51% to 46% for Trump. Biden (51%) was +7 points over Trump (44%) among North Carolina registered voters in July.

• Biden leads Trump among Blacks who are likely to vote, those who say they are voting by mail or absentee ballot, white voters with a college degree – especially white women with a college degree – voters under the age of 45, women, and voters in the cities and suburbs.

• Trump is ahead among white Evangelical Christians, those who plan to vote in-person on Election Day, whites -- especially white men without a college degree – men, and voters in small towns or rural areas.

• Trump is +14 among whites. He carried this group by 31 points in 2016.

• Independents are +9 points for Biden, a group that supported Trump by 16 points in 2016.

• Voters age 65 and older divide (50% Trump to 49% Biden). Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by 23 points among these voters in 2016.

• 62% of registered voters report having voted.

• Only 2% of likely voters are persuadable, that is, voters who are undecided or who support a candidate but might vote differently.

Pandemic Studies

Is Trumpolini planning to reopen Trump University and offer a two week course in which you become an M.D.?  

Kamala

 

In case you are asked, Kamala is a name that means "lotus" or "pale red" in Sanskrit. Kamala is also the name of a Hindu deity, better known as Lakshmi. Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of prosperity, good luck and beauty.

Sanskrit is one of 445 Indo-European languages that have a common ancestor.  The group includes English, Spanish, Greek, etc.   

Di Prima

I can't say I ever paid much attention to my own generation, known as "the silent generation." It was a great generation in which to be a white man in America, perhaps the best ever. The destructions of World War Two had swept the ground of world competition. America was the last prosperous place on earth. Jobs went begging. 

This was also the time of the Beat Generation, and I saw this morning that mother and poet Diane Di Prima had died. So she hasn't quite been forgotten. In writing about how women get broken, she was the one who asked, "How did we come to be contained/ in rooms?"   

No One

I was listening to Pres. Obama giving a speech to a parking lot filled with honking cars in Florida. He brought up some good advice that had been given to the young Joe Biden by his mother.

"Joe," she had said, "remember that no one is better than you, and you are better than no one."

Startled by what Obama had said, I suddenly understood why Susan and I had recently voted for Joe Biden.  He is better than no one.

This morning tRump seems to be edging up a little. There is a week to go. Let's encourage kith and kin to vote. Let's try to keep the planet habitable. 

Anyone

Last year many people vowed to support anyone but Trump, and now it looks as if Joe Anyone may become President. I have already voted for him. The nation is in trouble. If Anyone can lead us to a better place, he will try.

Anyone is not just anyone. He's been around a long time. Former Republicans and Wall Street centrists in the Democratic party were the first to support Anyone, but how he will govern is anyone's guess. I don't know what Anyone will do next. Not much, probably. Maybe. He might have the opportunity to do something good and make a real name for himself.

Can Trumpolini Lie?

The last century's most interesting philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, looked at what constituted a mistake. If memory serves, Wittgenstein used the example of someone who took a test in addition and got every answer wrong. Had the man been making mistakes? No.  The man didn't know how to add. To make a mistake in addition, you have to know how to add. 

Don Trumpolini presents us with a related problem.  "Lying" is a word that goes back to the 1300s. It has several meanings today, but the oldest one is that lying is the opposite of telling the truth. 

Trumpolini quite literally does not know what the English word "truth" means. Observers have commented on this. Trumpolini believes that anything he says is, at that moment, true.  He can comfortably contradict himself in the same paragraph. Of course, "anything the President says" is not a definition of "truth"  in the English language. But not being able to correctly identify the truth makes it impossible for Trumpolini to lie. To lie you must understand the concept of truth. 

His inability to tell the truth or lie is, I suppose, a symptom of a much deeper mental disorder. A language is kept in order by other people who tell us if we have used a word incorrectly. But for Trumpolini other people hardly exist except as weak projections of himself. 

 

Mass Murder

As near as I can tell, 220,000 people have died from coronavirus in the United States in recent months.  

Meanwhile in Taiwan seven people have died. Of course, Taiwan has a smaller population. Everyone knows that. The USA has about 15 times the population of Taiwan. 

To be fair, then, we should multiply the Taiwan figure by 15, which gives us 105 deaths there compared to 220,000 deaths here. That is mass murder. Nevertheless the American  President will get at least 45% of the votes in November, many of them coming from people who believe that Joe Biden is a cannibal.

The Chicago Seven

 In 1968 I was married and in graduate school. And I became a foot soldier in demonstrations against the Vietnam War, teargassed in Buffalo and the District of Columbia. I'd had teargas training in the army. Not a problem.

Tonight Susan and I watched "The Trial of the Chicago Seven" on Netflix. It has about ten great actors in it, sharp dialog and a good look at how things don't change without cost. The movie is quite entertaining even if you were alive at the time and know how it all turns out.

The Very Nicest Explanation of Trumpolini

 The man lacks common sense. 

The Importance of Paper

Let's say that a thousand years ago you wanted to buy a small notebook and keep a journal. If you lived in Europe, the first step would be to round up about 35 sheep and have their skins processed into parchment. And so on. Only the top 1% could afford a blank notebook.

In China, at the same time, your grandmother could buy a blank notebook at the corner store. The Chinese had invented cheap paper. They had also invented the brush (used to write with) and someone (perhaps a man named Pi Sheng) had invented moveable type made of porcelain. 

Several centuries later, word of paper and moveable type reached Europe, where Gutenberg used a relatively simple alphabet to produce a best seller in the Bible. Soon cheap books were everywhere. There was an information explosion. Science developed, and Europe was made great.

Terrorist Militias

About a hundred back, my grandfather joined the California KKK for one year because they promised free beer at their meetings. That never happened, and, indignant, he quit a year later.

That 1920s version of the KKK was, I think, largely a pyramid scheme. It cost ten dollar to join, and if you brought in a new member, you got to keep five of the dollars. Recruiters did a lot of lying. 

The original KKK and related terrorist gangs were murderous thugs, of course. President Grant used the army to crush them. But white supremicists  have popped up again and again, today calling themselves "militias," as if private armies were legal. To be blunt, they are armed American terrorists.  They should be prosecuted.

Republicans and some others try to compare the terrorist militias to Antifa, which is nonsense. Antifa is not an organization. It is a name for antifascists who wear black pants.

Family

According to my father, Butch and Helen Thomason moved to the desert near Death Valley in the 1930s to try their hand at gold mining. Around 1940 they built a small cabin and outbuilding. They had electricity provided by a windmill and a generator. They took drinking water from a nearby spring. 

In 1955 the Thomasons sold their ranch to Jim and Arlene Barker, who had moved to the desert from Oklahoma. To accommodate family gatherings, the Barkers enlarged the cabin and constructed more outbuildings. 

Today what remains of the ranch belongs to the National Park Service. A fire in May, 2009, destroyed most of the cabin, leaving only the cement and rock parts standing. The famous bathroom vanity under which Charles Manson attempted to hide from law enforcement is gone.

Inyo County sheriff deputies and National Park Service rangers captured the Manson family on the Barker ranch in October, 1969.  One of the deputies (later elected sheriff of Kern County) was my uncle by marriage, Merrill Helm Curtis (1908-1992). 

The deputies arrested Manson thinking he might be responsible for  some vandalism in the Death Valley National Monument.  Later the authorities realized he was a homicidal maniac. Once locked in the county jail, Manson climbed up through a 12-inch vent, entered a crawl space and attempted to break a hole in the wall with a piece of re-bar, Curtis told my father, Lee Goss. 

Merrill Curtis was my Aunt Ardith’s first husband. She went through a lot of men fast. I think we once counted eleven marriages. At Christmas my parents would bring along a general present to give to Ardith’s husband, not knowing who would show up. 

The men in the family liked to box and fight in the street, and my father, growing up,  greatly admired Merrill Curtis’s skills. Merrill was a little older and willing to spar with him. My father was an athlete and a tremendous puncher (he was offered football scholarships to USC and Oregon State). He said he couldn’t lay a hand on Curtis. Too clever. 

My grandfather once said that where he came from, everyone was tough. 

Two out of Three Reasons

I do not want to vote for Joe Biden, but he is not the worst person in the world, and his opponent is. 

I  am faced with an incumbent who will do anything to avoid reality. tRumpolini cannot cope with the fact that he is an ugly, stupid loser who has survived by inheriting money. He'd rather--like Hitler--burn down the house and take everyone with him. 

tRump is an existential threat to our species. 

I will vote for Joe Biden for two out of three reasons. 

1.  Joe Biden is not trying to kill me. (This may have prejudiced my lengthy deliberations.)

2.  In my lifetime we have elected as leaders a paranoid, a senile film actor skilled at playing the hero's amiable best friend, a lecher, a dope and a raving looney.  Joe Biden will sweeten that list.

3. My wife just predicted that Biden is going to let tRump go free and not prosecute him, and when Biden does that she is going to kill herself, she is so angry.  That is not a reason to vote for Joe. 

tRump Loses

Susan and I have settled in, back from being evacuated from the Glass fire. We're waiting for our ballots to arrive. For the last year I've been saying that tRump has no chance. He's been killing Americans. He's a threat to my life. He has, as Homer Simpson might put it, gone mad with power and syphilis. (Well, it isn't syphilis, only coronavirus.)

Covid-19 Donny, a super-spreader, is also the worst wheezing butthead ever seen on television. It's true that he solidified the butthead vote, and nothing will destroy that allegiance, but buttheads are not a majority. And some are turning on their idol. 

Presidents' wives are usually more popular than their husbands, but now the networks have a phone tape of Melania saying, "Fuck Christmas." Nothing is working for Covid-19 Donny. 

Karma

We got evacuated, drove two cars south to the City, and we have finally returned to Smokeland. No harm done. Motels are boring. Like everyone we are watching the President's progress in the hospital. I will seize this moment to remind myself that a belief in karma is based on faith (like the belief that Mary was a virgin). Buddha did not believe in karma.

Minority Rule

People can differ on whether America is governed by an oligarchy or a representative democracy or something in between, but from the start we have had a problem with minority rule.  

The Founders expected leadership roles to be limited to college-educated white males with financial assets. Women, people of color, poor males, the enslaved and Amerindians could not vote. A minority ruled.

What makes a representative democracy or even an oligarchy function is a shared belief that majority rules. Yet in my lifetime four American presidents have been taken power without winning a majority of the votes: Truman, Clinton, Dimwitted Bush and tRump. The last two actually ran second. 

What today's majority of voters wants (universal health care, no forced birth, an end to racism) has been attacked by Wall Street Republicans, allied with religious reactionaries, Fascists, white supremacists and morons. That's a shrinking vote. It's not a majority. But they win by hook or mostly by crook. Today that minority rules a teetering, top-heavy nation that may be about to tumble down.  Or change and become more sturdy.

Some Patronizing Advice

One of our oldest and whitest Democratic figures had something to say a day or two back. He was addressing (on national TV) black protesters who were outraged about the homicide of a young, unarmed black woman who had gone down in a gale of police bullets. He advised the protesters not to do anything "inappropriate."

I can't speak for people of color, of course, but I'm going to guess that many people of color are not looking for advice on what is appropriate from a 1980s empty suit. The Democrat should already know that, but he doesn't. White men giving patronizing advice to black people went out about 60 years ago. 

But what if he wasn't talking to black people? Maybe he was talking to people like himself who need reassurance that nothing much is going to change here.

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Death and Ideology

 Anyone voting for tRump in November is voting to risk lives. The President has already killed more than 200,000 citizens with more to come. But his followers are emotionally attached to a range of ideologies and are willing to bet the lives of their children. They are sending their own children to gather in schools during a pandemic, when isolation is the best defense. 

The president, a sociopath like his father, wants American children back in school, because he thinks that ignoring the plague will help his election chances and the stock market. He is a stupid man. Ignoring the plague has been a losing strategy.

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Ruth Passes

 My guess is that only three or four supreme court justices will be totally balmy. The outcome might go like this. The court will allow the red states to enforce laws suppressing women, people of color, gays, etc. But the blue states will not pass such laws. The divide will grow more stark. People will begin to move to states that suit them. The divide will grow more stark again.

Trump's Character

One evening, when I was in graduate school,  my wife and I smoked an adequate amount of Thai-stick in a small, metal pipe, and I immediately began to write a story based on a character I invented named Donald Trump. This character was terribly bloated in appearance and lacked courage or any of the virtues, which began to trouble him and made him suspect the worst. Trump demanded to know what plans I had made for him. 

In those days I was young and brutally honest, and I told Trump I planned to have him beaten in an alley behind a food pantry by a squadron of police, who would then stand on his back and choke him out until he expired in agony.

"That seems unfair," he said. "Here I am newly born and utterly friendless, entirely by your design, and you've already condemned me to nothing but pain, terror and misery the rest of my short life." He began to sob and sigh pathetically and beg me on two knees to give him at least a few positive moments before his time ran out. 

I finally agreed and added a chapter in which he became President of the United States. You know the rest. 

Iran!

 There may be a flood of pacts between the Arab states and Israel. I am guessing the Arab states have decided that nuclear Israel can provide help in holding back Iran. (The tRumps and kushners can pretend to deserve credit.)

Real

To some extent reality--for everybody--is a conspiracy against us and how we might prefer things to be. As we grow up, we learn to accommodate ourselves to what exists. But someone born super-rich may not have to deal with all of the usual encounters with reality. Even with a toxic personality he can rent a string of gorgeous, gold-digging wives. He can buy a medical doctor, develop imaginary bone spurs and avoid military service. 

President  Spanky can say on tape, "I played down the virus on purpose. I didn't want to start a panic." And the next day he can say, "I didn't play down the virus. I played it up." And anyone who objects to this obvious lying has "drunk the Kool-Ade." 

To Spanky and his supporters, reality is a conspiracy against them, led by "the deep state." Lying is a defense against reality. The more Spanky lies, the better certain people like him. He's their superhero whose special power is lying.  

Spanky lies about race, women, medicine and science. He's undaunted by facts. He tries to project an alternate reality, one that shifts instantly to meet his mood. This, Fitzgerald might have said, makes Spanky careless about what happens to others. Others are tertiary. In Spanky's novel, he is the only developed character. 

Tested to Obliven

Yesterday I watched a tRump enabler on TV explaining that the reason our death rate from the plague is 25% of the world's total is that we do the most testing. I'm not sure what this dope meant, maybe that tRump has been testing people to death? I would not accuse the (p)resident of that myself. He might try it, of course, but Fox News would have to think of it first.  

The Santana Wind

The Santa Ana or Santana wind of Southern California is a foehn, a wind that occurs on the downward slope of a mountain range. As far as I can tell, the Santa Ana wind originates far to the east and has  nothing to do with the city of Santa Ana. 

My generation in Los Angeles grew up calling the wind "Santana," although the other name is apparently older. 

My wife and I moved to New York to work and then back west to retire in Northern California. I read in the local newspaper that Santa Rosa sometimes got a "Santa Ana wind." That made no sense to me--we were 500 miles from Santa Ana. I paid no attention until the Tubbs fire--driven by a foehn--three years ago killed about 50 people in Sonoma County. That's when I first became aware of the term "fire season."

California has always had massive fires, I suppose, during the part of the year when vegetation is most dry. With global warming, that period has become dryer and longer.  Back in 1957 a Santa Ana in Southern California blew from November 21 to December 4. Wind gusts reached 100 mph. Fires raged out of control. People died. It was a lot like the Tubbs fire. The difference today is that many more people have built homes near or in the woods. And we are experiencing wind-driven wild fires in towns.

About all this, Joan Didion long ago wrote, "The wind shows us how close to the edge we are."

s

A föhn or foehn (UK: /fɜːn/,^[2][3] US: /feɪn/) is a type of dry, warm, down-slope wind that occurs in the lee (downwind side) of a mountain range.

Föhn can be initiated when deep low-pressure systems move into Europe, drawing moist Mediterranean air over the Alps.

It is a rain shadow wind that results from the subsequent adiabatic warming of air that has dropped most of its moisture on windward slopes (see orographic lift). As a consequence of the different adiabatic lapse rates of moist and dry air, the air on the leeward slopes becomes warmer than equivalent elevations on the windward slopes. Föhn winds can raise temperatures by as much as 14 °C (25 °F)^[4]in just a matter of hours. Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria have a warmer climate due to the Föhn, as moist winds off the Mediterranean Sea blow over the Alps.

tRump's Enablers

 Today we learned that the President's flunkies have been altering the CDC reports on the pandemic so that the science won't contradict the President's ludicrous ramblings. 

The President is playing with people's lives, feeding them misinformation and letting them die. He's a sociopath like his father, and he does not care.

When Stalin's enablers did that kind of thing, we disapproved. It's a problem inherent to dictatorships. The enablers must pretend that the dictator's absurd claims are realities. But reality persists when you wish it would stop, and dictatorships often (but not always) end in catastrophes. 

In the White House we have a troll surrounded by volunteers as evil as the nutter who attracted them. In the next election, evil will be supported enthusiastically by more than 40% of the voters. It's discouraging.

42%

Michelle Goldberg pointed out that when Herbert Hoover ran for re-election, he got 42% of the vote.  Hoover was a humanitarian and a total failure who had no grasp of how to deal with a Depression. It's not right to compare him to a murderous cretin like Donald tRump, but we can expect tRump to get at least 42% of the vote in November. Maybe more. That is the minimum.

I wonder what this says about human nature. It is the case that 42% of the voters are of below average intelligence, but they won't all vote for tRump.  Some will vote for other candidates. 

Jim Wood

Some years back our medical doctor opened a boutique practice for the rich, dropping my wife and me from her practice. Fortunately we caught on with our former doctor's nurse practitioner, whom we had long preferred anyway. 

Recently Assembly Member Jim Wood, a retired dentist, got a bill passed that will grant more freedom to nurse practitioners to work on their own. It's now on the governor's desk, and I hope he signs it. We need more people providing service in the medical profession, and my experience with a nurse practitioner has been excellent. She gives more time and thought to her patients than many overworked doctors can allow. 

Like most voters I don't really keep track of what my elected representatives are doing day-to-day in the state capitol. This work by Jim Wood  should be recognized, in my opinion, and commended.

Good and Evil

My grandparents believed that morality was based on organized religion. Later on religion began to fall out of favor in Clovis, California, which meant that morality was--some people believed--baseless, merely a temporary social contract. Joan Didion's response can stand for the dilemma all this caused. In the 1960s she surveyed the Haight and began to feel that the center no longer held, quoting Yeats.

Didion wrote, "You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing --beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code--what is 'right' and what is 'wrong' . . . ."

From Didion's standpoint, what we have instead of religious morality  is an agreement about how behave. She refused to call that morality, and she had a point. 

In short, some intellectuals believed in the 60s that morality had been created by God or that it had no compelling basis at all. But what if there are more than those two possibilities? 

What deters the hungry lioness from eating her own litter? Not the Ten Commandments. Not a social contract. 

How To Survive Election Night

Susan and I used to survive election nights by going to the movies. We'd watch Jeff Bridges for several hours, then drive home, turn on the TV and discover in a minute which candidate for President had run second and thereby won. 

In a plague year, our quick approach is not available. Movie theaters here are closed.  But I came across a passage in a Joan Didion essay that suggested another approach. In November we will watch early election returns at home after pulling brown paper bags over our heads. 

Many people say they will be doing this in November. There will be two likely outcomes.

1. The scientific object, of course, is to retain carbon dioxide in our lungs by rebreathing our own breath inside paper sacks. If we were to lose CO2 by shouting and hyperventilating into the open air, the tissues in our bodies might malfunction. 

2. Sadly, this approach brings with it distance and perspective. For example, I prefer to think of myself as an important vaquero-poet with a tame wolf as my sidekick. It's hard to maintain that image with my head in a bag.

Biden on Climate Change

"I am not banning fracking," Joe Biden said on August 31, 2020. So the joke is on us. Or on our grandchildren.

A Dance of Death

 Last night about 1500 fools gathered, sat together unmasked and shouted in each other's naked faces on the White House lawn. They met there to celebrate the crumbling ego of El Supremo, the head case in charge of the United States, and to deny the truth of the coronavirus, which they believe to be a hoax.

The plague is killing about 1,000 Americans a day.

Most Americans comprehend the danger. I hope most can see the weird defiance of reality in the actions of our ponderously loony President and his contagious cult, engaged in a robotic dance of death.

American Institutions

 A question raised over the last four years is will American institutions stand up in the face of a Fascist Presidency?

Our institutions have not done as well as we might like. In this pandemic, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has made a series of decisions designed to placate El Supremo, even though the decisions will be killing American voters.

Today, for example, the CDC changed its recommendations on virus testing and social isolation for people who have been in contact with someone contagious. The CDC now recommends less testing and more socializing. So far they have given no medical reasons for the changes. Now more Americans will die; but tRump, who wants to end testing because the pandemic makes him look like himself, will smile on CDC leadership.

The problem with institutions is that they may be led by sociopaths who made their way to power in cold blood.  

Democracy

 "American democracy itself is at stake," said an MSNBC professional centrist. Centrist-talking is a good living, pro or con. You may have noticed that the purpose of Fox News is to attack centrist Democrats, and the purpose of MSNBC is to defend centrist Democrats. 

“Do not let them take away your power,” Obama said to voters. “Don’t let them take away your democracy.”

If the USA were a democracy, we'd have universal health care by now.  

Extinction

Greed is part of us, and one outcome of our economic system is that it can become greed-gone-wild. For example, the Democratic National Committee recently dropped the ending of fossil fuel subsidies from the agreed-on party platform. That is a step toward extinction for humans.

Scientists have stated that our use of fossil fuels is already leading to losses of oxygen--followed by our own extinction in about 80 years. 

Science and life on earth don't seem to matter to the DNC or to the fossil fuel industry. They don't intend to make us extinct, but they are blinded by greed.

What matters to the DNC is that some voters work for oil, coal and natural gas corporations. The DNC doesn't intend to lose those votes. Also the fossil fuel tycoons donate towering bribes of cash to political campaigns. 

For tRump and the DNC, raking in cash and votes is more important that maintaining enough oxygen to keep our grandchildren and the super-rich's grandchildren alive. This is primitive stuff. The big cats eat everything now, and their kittens can starve.

Biden and Harris are pledged to cut subsidies to Big Oil, so the DNC is attempting to reassure the super-rich that Biden and Harris don't mean it. We will find out who means what next year. 

I yield back my time.

Testing Vaccines

 Our vaccine testing program has run into a hitch. The people being tested need to be representative. That means about a third of them should be people of color. But so far only about 10% of those tested are black, Hispanic, etc. Medical authorities can't locate the rest. Here is a hint.

More than 60% of all American prisoners are people of color. If we freed some of them, maybe we'd get the balance we need for testing vaccines. 

Fifteen Cents

AMC is planning to open some of its movie theaters now and charge only fifteen cents for a ticket. There is no cheaper way to get the coronavirus.

Meanwhile I am wearing a mask because I want to save my life. Also I am trying to save the lives of tRump morons. 

Kamala Harris

 Is Kamala Harris the future of the Democratic Party?  She has a new role, one where she represents decent people of every color. She's unusually sharp and a talented speaker. The role is huge, overshadowing the empty suits around her. Can she do it?

Harris will face massive problems, including global warming v. the fossil fuel industries, which has the potential to end human life on this planet in the next  80 years.

To succeed Harris will have to grow and change and be firmer than those who came before. There is more at stake than breaking the sex and color barrier. 

The Eating of Hats

Some time back when I told my wife that Biden would pick Kamala Harris as his VP, my wife said that if he did, she would eat her hat.

Violence and Civil Rights

From what I have read recently, white people left something out of our history of how black people won civil rights in the 1960s. 

MLK and John Lewis and the people with them were braver than I can understand; they were peaceful and effective to a point. But in the South protest marches were sometimes made by people of color carrying concealed weapons, ready to defend their community. No one beat them or stopped them. The KKK stood aside.

How do a suppressed people get the attention of rich community bosses? Bosses like the status quo. That works fine for them, until unknown citizens set fire to their warehouses at night and boycott their stores (cancel culture) in daylight. Then it's finally time for a change. 

If people are treated badly enough, they will respond with destruction and boycott, something to remember the next time it happens.

Sturgis

 Many years ago Susan and I decided to visit Deadwood, where Wild Bill Hickok had been murdered. I intended to buy a Wild Bill T-shirt. 

We drove into the rustic western town in a suitable Ford 3/4 ton pickup and found no souvenir shirts and no bathrooms. The three of us looked around. In those days we had a pet wolf, and he rode on the bench seat between us. 

It turned out that the entire town had a plumbing problem, and everyone had to hold it for a day or two while something got fixed.

Soon we were leaving town, heading for the nearest place that had toilets, a hamlet called Sturgis. I think the drive took about an hour, and we stopped at the first service station we came to and ran inside. The station was like something from the Twilight Zone. Half  the main room was dedicated to the sale of leather jackets. This gas station had stocked hundreds of black jackets. It was eerie. We did our business fast, tried to look friendly and left as quickly as we could. 

Diversity Among Black People

Yesterday Joe Biden told the TV cameras that black people don't have the diversity of Hispanics. It was never his intention, I am sure, to insult black people or to toot a racist dog-whistle. It's just that he can't talk sensibly off the cuff. He's aged out. He needs a script to read.

Some black people, as you know, are Hispanic.

The problem is that Biden's cognitive gears are jamming, and he is about to be elected President during a pandemic and a huge economic downturn. Or Biden might even lose the election because his cognitive deficits during debates turn off voters. 

What the Harvard lads currently dominating the Democratic Party ought to do is get Biden to withdraw and free his delegates. Then nominate a trustworthy DNC employee who is young and competent--perhaps a woman of color. But that won't happen this time around. Maybe in four years.

Death by Voter Suppression

When the translucent eel known as Jerrod Kushner, son of a felon, brainlessly surmised that the coronavirus would have a more deadly impact on blue states than red states, he decided not to help anyone.  That's what has been reported. Let hundreds of thousands die, just another method of voter suppression.   

 tRump decided not to try to help during the pandemic. He abandoned the Republicans of California to their fate.

There are 4,700,000 Republicans registered in California, the most of any state. Florida is second. In California, Republicans are the third largest group of voters (behind the Democrats and the independents). In the end, California is blue.

The President and his mob don't mind who dies, really.  But they prefer the dying be concentrated in states don't support tRump. I look at it this way: I don't vote Republican, and Kushner and tRump are trying, indirectly, to kill me before November. 

John Lewis

Which one of these sentences did John Lewis write?

1. Stand up for what you truly believe.

2.  Vote for the lesser of two evils.

3.  Support the candidate you think others will like. 

4. A penny saved is a penny earned.  

Doubt Hats

In a column for the NY Times, Ross Douthat wrote that the abortion rate among African Americans is five times that among whites. He raised the possibility that Planned Parenthood, one of many abortion providers, is guilty of structural racism. It is reducing the number of black voters, diminishing what Douthat sees as black voting power. 

When abortion was illegal, I knew a young woman whose life became badly marred by an illegal abortion that permanently damaged her health. 

There is something disturbing about the fact that black woman are more apt to abort than white women, but I would argue that the structural racism is in the situations that black women and men can find themselves in. Raising a child in poverty is difficult. Many people of color don't get solid educational or employment opportunities. Changing that will be hard. Shutting down Planned Parenthood is easy but not the answer. Denying choice would revive unsafe abortions. 

Vacation!

Pandemics are learning experiences. For example, I have learned how to extend a pandemic in America so it lasts a year or more. All you have to do is close everything down, then open it, close it, open it, close it, etc. Repeat until you get a new idea. You can supercharge this process by letting each state do its own thing. 

Also, experts at the CDC have taught me how deeply children suffer when schools close. How could anyone have forgotten that? 

We can all recall how we used to suffer when summer came and the auditorium doors closed. Especially that dreaded last day sitting at your desk in early June, surrounded by weeping students suddenly barred from chemistry class, except for the few shiftless scholars (like me) allowed to repeat chemistry in summer school.

Army Service

A friend loaned me the dairy of one of his ancestors, Sergeant Budworth of the Union Army, who fought at Vicksburg, perhaps the central battle of the Civil War.  Much later Budworth wrote: "Came off guard this morning. I drew a canteen and blouse and pair of socks. The blouse is 2 small."

Of course, it was too small. Why did he get a blouse? Was he a woman? 

He wrote: "Orders this morning to be ready for inspection at 9 A.M. We were inspected by a lieut. Colonel of a negro regt. He got through about noon. We then get orders to turn over all the old shelter tents. They had to be condemned. We tore down our tent then they were not condemned. We had to put them up again."

That's the same army I served in. 

Japan

This morning Japan announced that they have lost a total of 1,000 lives to the coronavirus pandemic. The population of the USA is about five times that of Japan, so if we had been losing people at the same rate as Japan, we would have had about 5,000 deaths by now. Instead we have lost 141,000 lives (with no end in sight).

I'm not sure why we are so different, but one possible reason is that many of our citizens refuse to take the precautions urged on us by scientists. The Japanese are more medically compliant. Another possible reason is our system produced a President who is sociopathic and a political party too morally bankrupt to resist the President's indifference to the suffering and death of others. 

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Atonement

Frank Bruni brought up a topic that has interested me for some time: atonement by the Never Trumpers. I enjoy seeing the best of the GOP hitmen slapping the makeup off of tRump's flabby jowls, but I haven't forgotten how tRump got to the top.

I remember when Republicans called Adlai Stevenson a pinko. And Ike got named a "fellow traveler" of Stalinism. Joe McCarthy frightened my parents, and his boy, Roy Cohn, went on to mentor our current President. William Buckley minced in to put a high Yale shine on the turds of racism. 

That may be too ancient a history, but the current Lincoln Project guys attacking tRump are the same guys who found and promoted the bucket-headed Sarah Palin. She was the primer  that set off the tRump explosion. 

If the Never Trumpers are atoning for their roles in a long slide down a ramp into Hell, okay. But say so out loud. 

Diversity

Two of the functions of the University of California system have been to give young people from working-class families like mine a chance to attend a good school. And to provide students with the experience of diversity. 

My roommates at UCLA included a former pilot in the Japanese air force during World War Two (Makoto Kawasugi) and the black tailback on UCLA's undefeated football team (Sam "First Down" Brown).  

Berkeley is currently rated among the top ten universities in the nation, and UCLA is ranked second to Berkeley among all American public universities.  (Back in the Dark Ages I graduated from UCLA when tuition was free and student fees came to less than $40 a semester.)

I read in the newspaper yesterday morning that this spring the UC system admitted almost 120,000 new students, plus about 28,000 transfers from community colleges like Santa Rosa J. C.  36% of the new students will be Hispanics, 35% will be Asians, 21% will be white and 5% will be black (black people make up 6% of the population of the California). 

Many Hispanics are white, black or Asian, of course.

I learned that in California about 43% of the residents speak a language other than English in their homes. 

tRump and the White Whale

The backstory of MOBY DICK is that Captain Ahab had once attacked a great white whale, which had then snapped off one of Arab's legs and gone on about its business. Ahab spends the rest of his life searching for the white whale to kill it. 

Meanwhile the white whale swims along. It can't care less about Ahab. When Ahab finally finds the whale and attacks it, the huge, natural being kills him and nearly everyone in the vicinity and then swims on, unchanged.

Critics have argued about what the whale represents. Maybe the whale represents Mother Nature (indifferent to our fate) or it represents God, equally indifferent. 

Just keep out of the way.

The coronavirus is, to a small, partial degree,  tRump's white whale. The virus may be tiny but it is indifferent to the powerful President and his crew and unmoved by incoherent bullshit. Lies about a virus have no impact on it. The President's strength--misrepresenting reality--is irrelevant.  As with global warming, white-wingers pretending the whale doesn't matter will not change the outcome. 

Just keep out of the way.

tRump's Empathy

Remember back when tRump snatched small, brown children away from their parents at the border? And he put the children in cages? And then forgot to keep track of them so that a thousand children could not be returned? And we said--unfairly--that the President of the United States was a racist? 

Now we see our President insisting that "we open our schools" so that white children can gather for five hours a day in groups and catch the coronavirus. 

tRump isn't a racist. He hates all children. But don't make the mistake of saying tRump lacks empathy--he's grieving in front of cameras right now over damage to statues of Bobby Lee.

Sheriffs vs. Science

I noticed some time ago that cities of Sonoma County do not elect their chiefs of police. They are hired. A chief has power. He or she can arrest the mayor. The chief runs a small armed force, often with military discipline. But if that power goes to the chief's head, the city council can fire her. 

I think it's safer if the ultimate power belongs to a large elected group rather than to one armed authoritarian. 

Nevertheless, the sheriff of Sonoma County is elected,  not hired, making him partly independent from the board of supervisors. There are consequences. 

In the newspaper I read that our current sheriff handled the start of the pandemic by announcing he would not enforce some of the edicts issued by the scientists in our county health department. He said that he found the scientists unconvincing. The board of supervisors and most intelligent people reacted negatively to the sheriff's nonsense, and after a few days he buckled, but as an elected official in his own right, he didn't have to.

Around California a number of elected white-winged sheriffs have decided they will enforce only the science edicts they personally like. Now the coronavirus is surging. 

Sheriffs could be appointed, hired and fired. Or maybe Sonoma County should contract the work out to more accountable city police departments.

tRump University

Pres. Donald tRump has taught me something. He's given me a little taste of what it's like for a person living in Puerto Rico after a hurricane. What it's like to be confined at the border. Or go broke borrowing money to attend tRump's fake university. 

What I mean is:

Trump's out-of-control pandemic has many privileged people like me confined to our homes, in danger of dying on a ventilator--or maybe their lives ruined. We can't hug our children, eat out or go to the movies. With months or years of our sentence left, there's not a damned thing we can do about it except serve the time and hope to survive.