Shillelagh

Susan brought me an article by William Rivers Pitt on the blackthorn walking stick he had inherited from his father. I wear a blackthorn stick on my own walks, and it's about an inch thick, mostly black and decorated with thorns. That's fine, but in his essay Pitt made a crucial error. Several times he referred to his stick as a shillelagh. I can't stand that kind of sloppy diction.

A blackthorn walking stick is about a yard in length. A blackthorn shillelagh is about 18 inches long, and it functions as a short club. It  is akin to a billy club or to a carpenter's wooden mallet.  

You'd look damned silly hunched down and using a billy club as a cane.

Biden

Joe Biden first came to attention (for many of us) the first time he ran for President. He was caught plagiarizing and had to withdraw. Then there was the candidate he backed for the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas. And, for some reason, he trashed Anita Hill when she objected to sexual harassment. And so on. Joe supported our brainless attack on Iraq, which flipped around the entire Middle East. Today this leader is the somewhat reluctant choice of the corporate types who command the Democratic Party. People are supposed to vote for Joe, to make him the champion of western civilization. 

I think most progressives want to vote for Joe, given the alternative.

Biden is tied to the fossil fuel industries; and the use of oil, natural gas and coal are, scientists say, killing the plankton that create our oxygen. The planet may have to do without mammals in about 80 years. But vote for Biden.  (It's the economy, stupid.)

This morning Susan and I watched the Tara Reade interview on Amy Goodman's show. We watch Goodman about twice a month. Reade described in detail the sexual assault Biden made on her when she was a young woman on his staff. Women might want consider this interview. Reade will be ignored or trashed by our overlords, but she seems to be telling the truth.  

If Biden has, once again, to withdraw, the Corporate Democrats will replace him with another of his kind, probably Amy Klobishar.  The plankton may continue to die, but at least Klobischar will keep her fingers off the private parts of her staff. 

TV mysteries

Social distancing has given me the time to reconsider the many eight-part mystery series Susan and I watch on TV. 

In these series, the writers start with enough material to last 90 minutes. Then they stretch it out for 480 minutes.

You know the kind of drama I mean. It might be American, British, German, French or Swedish. It opens with two kids kicking a ball, and the ball rolls into a churchyard. The kids run after the ball and stumble onto a corpse, usually a naked young woman weirdly bound to a crucifix or some such. 

Soon the chief detective arrives. Often she is an 80-year-old woman who, for some reason, has not retired. She has divorced her husband, however, but now he's her best friend and cooks special treats for her snacks after dinner.

Another crucifix murder takes place. This time the victim is the first victim's worst enemy. Meanwhile we learn that the detective's secretary rescues dogs in Kenya and one of the dogs has gone missing  When the detective hears this, she begins to weep. She's comforted by the mayor, who (we know) has stolen most of the city's payroll.

A married copper is having an affair with a darling young copper with red hair, and his wife finds out. He's stricken.  He's very dependent on his wife. Their teenage son gets arrested for selling meth on campus. Another crucifix murder takes place. The darling copper turns to a lesbian judge for comfort, but the judge understands that the young woman is on the rebound and gently disengages. A mysterious fire destroys the morgue and the key bodies. The coroner is strangled. By now we're into the fourth hour and braced for some padding.

Elmore Leonard once said that the key to a good plot is to leave out the boring stuff that does not advance the story.

The Invisible Woman

You may have noticed that certain political explanations are deranged. For example, many Democrats, including several Presidential candidates, have argued that they once voted to give President Bush the power to attack Iraq because Bush had promised that he would not attack Iraq. 

I am really taken by an argument made by much earlier Democrats, about 1865, on why congress should give women the right to vote. 

The real problem for the racist, conservative Democrats of 1865 was that congress seemed to be serious about enfranchising black men. The black vote, the conservatives argued, could be more than offset by enfranchising women. There were more women than black men in America.

Conservatives had forgotten that some women are not white.

Black women were invisible.

Most black women were quickly enfranchised by the Civil Rights Act of 1965, only 100 years later. 

Too High in the Mountains

Joseph Salazar

El Supremo Rambles

President tRump talking about the virus and his relationship with the 50 states: “It’s a two-way street,” he said. “They have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, ‘Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.’ "

from The Rolling Stone

Hold Your Breath

Phytoplankton, a tiny algae in the ocean, produces about two-thirds of  the world's oxygen, according to Sergei Petrovskii of the University of Leicester.  (This is science and above my pay grade.) 

As the oceans warm, phytoplankton dies. By 2100, a point at which my granddaughter might still be around, the production of oxygen by phytoplankton may cease. "This would likely result in the mass mortality of animals and humans." 

In my lifetime, more than 40% of the phytoplankton on Earth has vanished. We are, right now, deciding what to do about it. Should we ignore the problem and support the fossil fuel industries or should we continue breathing oxygen?

What are the odds?

Maybe our grandchildren can learn to breathe faster. 

Karl Marx had his failings, but he understood how unrestrained  capitalism works. He wrote that a capitalist will sell you the rope you need to hang him with. Right now the fossil fuel magnates are selling products that will choke their own descendants. 

We are currently in the midst of an awful medical crisis.  We must band together to fight off a virus. Global warming is a thousand times more dangerous than a virus, and our next President is unlikely to face down the fossil fuel guys.   

We'll get four years of doing nothing effective. Followed by eight years of nothing and then a lot more nothing, to paraphrase the Ramones.

Santa

Santa Claus works very hard. He doesn't always bring what you want, but I respect him. I like him. We stay in touch. Santa is a friend of mine. 

Santa delivers thousands and thousands of presents. And I've had conversations with him about this. He's a gentleman. I wish he brought the presents I asked for. You know that. He makes us wait to find out what we're getting--he could be more transparent--but Santa runs a very complex pole, a complicated workshop. 

The elves are making the presents right now, without him even telling them what he needs. Instructing elves is not our role. The elves are doing an incredible job. You understand--you're adults--we took over a badly broken Christmas system, and we improved it enormously. You all know that. We've done an amazing job with the ugly, failing system Obama left us.

Gribenes

Santa Rosa suddenly has a Jewish Deli. It has opened in the midst of the TrumpVirus, so we can't go there for a meal, but I do have their menu. 

I'm not a Jew, but Jews will know what this means. Grossman's serves (or will serve within 18 months) warm pistachios, knishes, kreplach, smoked whitefish salad and gribenes.

Grossman's is located on Railroad Square. The entire state of California is now locked down, but the law allows this noshery to provide a very limited menu of take-out. The place opens at 9 AM. 

Antiques Roadshow

This is not about the Presidential race.

Now that I have an 18 month sentence of confinement to my room, I've begun a long-needed comparison of two TV programs: the American version of "Antiques Roadshow" vs. the British version of "Antiques Roadshow."

In the American version, a slick dealer will interview a housewife from Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She will have brought in an etching she grabbed from a trash pile when a local hotel was knocked down to make way for a trailer park. The owner of the trailer park had told her she could keep it. The etching turns out to be a missing, one-of-a-kind art work by Rembrandt worth $120,000. 

In the British version, four sisters and a cousin bring in a damaged brick given to their great-grandfather by the Duke of Earl. It's the last-known remnant of a royal cottage lost in the great Soho fire of 1542. It's worth about 90 pounds but has enormous sentimental value. 

My conclusion is that ordinary Brits have little to bring to these events. All the good stuff is either owned by the Queen or can be found in one of the ten thousand museums in England and Wales. The participants are reduced to bringing in whatever they have left, perhaps a branch once gnawed on by Sir Walter Raleigh's chamber pot cleaner.

Open Your Golden Gate?

In San Francisco we have a daughter, a son-in-law, a grandchild and many friends and relations. They are now locked down, confined to their homes except for trips to get groceries, to buy medications and to do good deeds. Many businesses are going to fail. Our daughter and son-in-law are working from home, which is not easy. 

We have a second daughter at work in two or three Seattle hospitals. 

Susan and I are self-locked down, because we are deep into the targeted group of those very old and somewhat compromised. It has dawned on us that we might not make it through the pandemic, in part because President Oxenbutt is irrational and incompetent, along with his voters. Not all of our friends and relatives will make it through. A year from now the world will be changed. 

To fight the pandemic, people are doing extraordinary things. To fight global warming (whose consequences will be far worse and more lasting) we are not willing to do anything that matters. Our major national parties are committed to the fossil fuel industries.  Follow the money. 

Our national motto for global warming: "Bring it on!"

Isolation

Last night my niece and her husband had some of us ancient family members over for an excellent dinner and conversation. We met their new puppy. They offered to go shopping and deliver food for us.  It is beginning to sink into me how isolated many of us over 70 or 80 should be in the coming months. We have to hole up and try to outlast the tRumpvirus. 

Of course, when you elect yet another obviously impaired person to serve as the leader of western civilization, you likely expect bumps in the road. Perhaps the oddest feature of the tRumpvirus is that it targets tRump voters the hardest while sparing children of color. I do not believe in karma or that Mary was a virgin, but. . . . 

Meanwhile the nation's hard decisions (what must be shut down in our economy and social lives) are being made by people like the baseball commissioner. We get little of use from the White Shack.

Toxic Pique

According to Bret Stephens, who keyboards for the NY Times, Biden might lose to tRump for a number of reasons, the first being "Sanders supporters who, out of  pique, will sit out the election."

Biden said a few days ago that he will veto single payer health care if congress passes it. Biden supports the fossil fuel industry, which is so damaging the climate that drought and inferior leadership might unravel civilization. But Stephens argued that pique is the central problem.

Stephens does have a strategy to persuade the Sanders voters to support Biden. The basic trick is to insult the Left. You win over pique-filled people by calling attention to how petty their motives are, the stupid bastards.

That is just elementary centrist psychology.

What people fixated on Sanders don't understand is that his movement is not about him. It's not a cult about an aged white man, a blunt Jew from Vermont and Brooklyn. The movement is about the issues Sanders has raised, which have shifted the Democratic Party to the left. (If you want votes from the movement, consider the issues the movement has raised.)

The Chaucer Boys

On Sunday the Chaucer Boys, a bicycle club, made its yearly ride from Upper Lake to Lucerne, a twenty-mile round trip. To join this club, you once had to be a descendent of Chaucer. That's how the club started. Today the requirement is that you have be a descendent of someone. 

As usual we paused for a minute at the site of the Bloody Island Massacre. (You can look it up on the 'net.)

In 1850 a band of American cavalry and avid local volunteers trapped some Pomos on a small island and murdered sixty of them, counting women and children. But it's the Pomos who still live here. Nearby we bought bottled drinks at a gas station store run by Pomos. The clerks seemed to me to be reserved but less reserved than Navajos. 

Farther south we came upon an osprey nest with a big youngster in it. He was calling for his mother. When she appeared in the sky, he took off and joined her. My guess is that the two set out to hunt for fish. Fish are, as you know, a great treat for the descendents of dinosaurs, and fish were here before the Pomos.

The Issue

We know that countless mysterious cultures have come and gone in Central America, Ireland and so on, leaving behind questions and mounds and standing rocks. Over time, things go wrong. 

In the late Bronze Age, western civilization (the original superpowers were the  Egyptians, the Hittites and the Mycenaeans) collapsed for the first time. We don’t know why—maybe climate change, other natural factors and man-made factors. Slowly the Greeks and  Romans built a new western civilization, which collapsed about 1,700 years later. The second collapse had many possible causes, including climate change and inferior leadership. Since then western civilization has been rebuilt a third time, and about 1,500 years have passed.

Our species has shown twice that we are capable of obliterating  major civilizations, destroying nations and trade routes, ending literacy, fragmenting into local tribes. Today global warming and poor leadership have set in motion large numbers of ordinary people who trespass in order to survive. In some countries informal volunteer militias are already hunting down border crossers. Asylum seekers will drown in the Mediterranean this evening.

When the Presidential race began, there were five or six candidates who understood climate change and the possible consequences (Insley, Warren, Sanders, Steyer, others). 

In November it seems likely that our choice will be between a candidate of the fossil fuel industry versus a candidate supported by the fossil fuel industry. We are about to cede another four years to fossil fuels and climate change, because we think that getting rid of (or keeping) Don the tRump is the issue. 

Joe Biden

Joe Biden is likely to strike out awkwardly in debate and not get elected. But for now he seems to be winning a nomination. I ask myself if I can vote for him.

I can vote for Biden if two things happen.

1. Anita Hill endorses him.

2. We face an overwhelming issue, global warming, which has the potential to kill hundreds of millions of people--and it is our fault. The only chance we have to mitigate this horror is to get off of fossil fuels. But the fossil fuel industry owns many of our major politicians, and they own Biden from the tips of his polished shoes to the top of his hair implants. To get my vote he will have to renounce that lifelong allegiance.

Note: You may have seen the clip of Biden on stage confusing his wife and his sister. But that's not exactly what happened. (Biden won South Carolina but did not marry there.) The truth is that Biden is old, like me, and easily distracted. His mind wanders. He's not nuts. He just forgot who was standing where because he'd drifted into a reverie about lemon popsicles or whatever. You must expect that to happen fifty times a day in the Oval Office. (Mental impairment has become traditional: see Nixon, paranoid; Ford, stupid; Reagan, senile;Young Bush, dimwit, tRump, personality disorder.)

Bernie Sanders

On Saturday I realized the Democratic Party was likely to nominate Joe Biden for President. I wondered if that meant that the attacks on Bernie Sanders would begin to ease. The Dems can't win without support from most of his voters.

The arguments against Sanders have differed. Some have argued that he could not defeat tRump (we will never know). My son-in-law said the Dems are not afraid Sanders will lose the Presidency; they're afraid he might win. The fossil fuel industry, the pharmaceuticals, MSNBC, etc., consider him no-good, I suppose. The usual political money men.  That's American politics. 

What troubles me are the arguments I hear from real folks I know who tell me they dislike Sanders because he doesn't smile enough or he sometimes shouts or he has a Brooklyn accent or he waves his arms or he gets angry or he's short and his white hair flies about.  It's almost as if a stereotype lurks nearby in the shadows of memory. I can't place the word picture, but it seems familiar, perhaps something from high school days in 1950 when the father of a friend of mine told me that "the Jews ruined Beverly Hills." 

Archimedes and Me

Quite a few years ago, I had an argument with my mother (who was supported in this and other arguments by my young wife, of all people). My mother asserted that taking showers used less water than taking a bath. Horrified I argued that how much shower water was used would depend on how long you stood in the downpour. 

That position led to my suffering inexplicable family derision for the next 41 years, but today I had a moment worthy of Archimedes, whose principle is fundamental to fluid mechanics.  I decided to time how long it took to fill the bath. That would tell me how long I could stand in the shower while using exactly one tubful of water. 

The answer was less than five minutes.

Humor

Recently I accidentally saw Grifter on my TV set. He was attempting to address the coronavirus pandemic. 

Pres. Flabbiman Grifter had been goose-stepping across a lawn toward a helicopter, and, as is his practice,  he paused in the short grass and let out a string of unrelated words for the network cameras. 

I can't reproduce the words. It's hard to recall a string of meaningless syllables. But the gravity of the situation and the inability of the leader of the Free World to respond to a crisis except with barking madness (which he clearly considered top leadership) suddenly made me laugh out loud. I couldn't help it.  I suppose this was a special kind of laughter, but it was genuine.  Grifter was so ludicrously inappropriate--the key to the best comedy-- that it touched off something inside me. Spontaneous mirth bubbled out. 

I was baffled and ashamed.

I guess the moral is what fools we are. Pres. Grifter leads the Free World! Somehow this moronic, bloviating pervert has come to embody our mass folly as a species.