Who Gave Us Unalienable Rights?

There are, of course, many useful explanations for the Fascism that has overtaken the Republican Party. For me the most unsettling is in what follows below.

I am reading a book by an Israeli historian. The book was loaned to me by a friend. In it the historian quotes someone telling this story. Suppose you go up to a monkey who has a banana. You say to him, "If you give me that banana, I will give you ten bananas after you die and go to monkey heaven." The monkey won't trade, but a human might, and that's because of the cognitive revolution that took place about 70,000 years ago, some historians say. 

In short, Homo sapiens acquired so much language that we could make up unfounded stories and then believe them. Hence, Don Trump, Fascism, unalienable human rights, and so on.

SAPIENS by Yuval Noah Harari

But what about our genetic foundation? Who gave us rights?  Mother Nature? No one? (I will read on.)

The Conservatives

 David Brooks has published an article in The Atlantic that recounts how he read Edmund Burke and became a conservative. He apparently thinks that there was a moment in the history of the Republican Party in which the party was genuinely conservative.

The party of his youth was run by the greedy guts of Wall Street, not by the nasty racist William Buckley. The party bosses were never conservative.  They were intent on huge changes in taxation and establishing monopolies. 

It's not surprising that a Wall Street party slid into Fascism. That is a natural evolution. Obtuse people like Brooks share the blame. 

A Brief History of Racism

This is a brief history of racism. 

About 70,000 years ago, people roamed the earth in small groups armed with sharp sticks, hoping to avoid apex predators. In those days, humans came in five or six genuine races (or more). 

The known races were Homo sapiens (us), Neanderthals (Europe), Homo soloensis (on Java), Homo floresiensis (averaging 3.5 feet in height),  Homo denisova (Siberia) and Homo erectus, who survived in the East for 2 million years, a record we are unlikely to match.  

Homo sapiens produced viable children with some of these races. We carry Neanderthal genes to this day.

Once the other human races were extinct, Homo sapiens, needing a new challenge, divided themselves into many imaginary races, based on whatever.

Belfast

What resonated through the movie BELFAST for me. 

Pogrom (my wife's family immigrated from Tetiev, a Jewish town in Ukraine, later destroyed by Christians).

Smash and grab in the California news. 

My great-grandparents left Kentucky to escape involvement in the Hatfield-McCoy feud. 

My Orange Irish grandfather and Grandma Mary with parents from Westmeath.

Judi Dench may be up for an Oscar.

Danny Boy. The Leaving of Liverpool. The Fields of Athenry.

Andy Bashear's God

Andy Bashear (Dem), the governor of Kentucky, was on TV Monday thanking God that only eight people in a factory had died in a recent tornado. "Our prayers have been answered," he said.

If it strikes you as odd to be grateful that God, answering your prayer, has killed only eight people, you might want to reread that Old Testament or the Torah.

New Nuremberg

Below the surface of the news, there is some talk about the New Nuremberg trials. A bunch of cranks, I guess, will attempt show-trials of people accused of promoting COVID vaccines.  

These trials will not take place in the real Nuremberg, because Germany has much more restrictive COVID regulations than we do. Unless you are a citizen of the EU (or a few other places), you cannot enter Germany and visit Nuremberg without being vaccinated. 

Germany now has a new government, and it has promised even stricter approaches, which may include lockdowns etc. 

The "Nuremberg" show trials will take place in Poland, which now has a nativist government led by a Trumplike Fascist. A few American lefties (anti-vaxers) will talking this up. There really is a place on the circle of politics where the paranoid Left meets the Radical Right. Anti-vax lives in that moldy arc. 

It looks as if some Fascists have misunderstood the real Nuremberg Trials.  

Death Rates

About 88% of the citizens of Healdsburg (over the age of 5) are vaccinated. The science and compliance are set.

Everywhere the COVID death rate for vaccinated people is lower than the death rate for unvaccinated people. 

The central goal of the vaccination is to prevent most but not all deaths. 

Making it necessary for most people to get vaccinated is how the entire world eliminated smallpox and controlled polio in my lifetime. 

The basic problem with a medical issue is one of trust. I'm not a scientist. But, as Bertrand Russell once wrote, if 95% of the experts advise a course of action, your best bet is to follow it. They could all be wrong, but what are the odds? The doctors are probably right. This is a probability question.

Each of us has to decide whom to trust. No one is infallible, but I trust my doctor and modern medicine in general. 

It is true that many anti-vaxers are good people, but I do not trust the Trump machine, which is pushing the current anti-vax movement for political reasons.  

My doctor has made and will make mistakes, but she's my best bet for guidance.

Republican Politics

The movement to repeal Roe sometime in the future was a useful campaign hammer sitting in the Republican toolbox, but now they actually have to use it. The next step is to pound women on the head. Republicans have a dominating collection of crackpots and money-grubbers on the Supreme Court. Their time has finally come.

Until now the effort by White Republicans to further control women has not cost them the majority of votes from White women. Overturning Roe may change that. John Roberts is worried. Republican strategists from the Ivies are concerned. The dreaded moment of actual change has arrived. 

If Roe dies, the Democrats can hang the corpse around the Republican neck like a medallion. And it, as Justice Sotomayor told us, will smell awful.

Race Suicide

I've come across a number of articles recently that ask why Republican men and the Supreme Court care deeply about anti-abortion. Some of the Republicans are White supremacists. 

Group B and Group C, striving to control a country, may try to outbreed one another. Protestants vs. Catholics, perhaps, an old strategy. 

Outbreeding a rival is only one reason to attack a White woman's right to choose, but it is a major reason. 

In America (as some Republicans see it) White women today are not having enough children. Many White couples have one child or none, while people of color have many offspring. In the last ten years, the percentage of American children who are non-Hispanic White has dropped from 53% to 50%, heading downward. The White supremacists call this "race suicide." 

 

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Crackers

The three degenerates who lynched Mr. Arbery were not hillbillies. I have hillbillies in my family tree, and they lived in the hills. They were related to the Hatfields and left Kentucky, heading for California with a herd of horses, because they "didn't want to die in a senseless feud."

Arbery's murderers are crackers. Originally crackers were cowboys in Georgia near the Florida border. They managed their cattle with bullwhips, which made loud cracking sounds when snapped in the air. 

"Cracker" meant a braggart in Shakespeare's England. In America the term came to mean ignorant, non-elite cowboy or something more derogatory. But some Georgians do take pride in the term. The best known cracker, so to speak, is probably Jimmy Carter. (I don't know what he feels about the term.)

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Harvest

 

Thanksgiving Day became a national holiday in 1863, but harvest festivals have been going on, I suppose, since harvests began. Below is a quote from Edward Winslow describing perhaps the first European/American harvest festival. It does not sum up the relationships, sometimes genocidal,  between Amerindians and European settlers, but it did happen.  

“Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together, after we had gathered the fruits of our labors; they four in one day killed as much fowl, as with a little help beside, served the Company almost a week, at which time amongst other Recreations, we exercised our Arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and amongst the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five Deer, which they brought to the Plantation and bestowed on our Governor, and upon the Captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful, as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want, that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."

 

How To Eliminate Racism

 From AlterNet :

When sheriff’s deputies in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, pulled over Octavio Lopez for an expired inspection tag in 2018, they wrote on his traffic ticket that he is white. Lopez, who is from Nicaragua, is Hispanic and speaks only Spanish, said his wife.

In fact, of the 167 tickets issued by deputies to drivers with the last name Lopez over a nearly six-year span, not one of the motorists was labeled as Hispanic, according to records provided by the Jefferson Parish clerk of court. The same was true of the 252 tickets issued to people with the last name of Rodriguez, 234 named Martinez, 223 with the last name Hernandez and 189 with the surname Garcia.

Rittenhouse

 

President Biden was right when he said of the Rittenhouse decision, "Look, I stand by what the jury has concluded. The jury system works, and we have to abide by it." The system worked the way it is supposed to. In this system, if a white boy kills two BLM protesters, a jury's job is to find him innocent. And the president is tasked with agreeing to the free killing of demonstrators by Fascists. Nothing new to see here. 

 

Death by Citizen's Arrest

There is no such thing as a citizen's arrest when the person arrested has not committed a crime. But one of  the oddest defense attorneys in the Arbery trial is claiming that Mr. Arbery committed suicide when two lynchers with shotguns blew him to tatters. "Suicide by citizens' arrest." Perhaps Mr. Arbery had committed no crime in the hope he would be chased and killed? (I'm having trouble developing this argument.)

Today this lawyer welcomed to the visitors' section a rabbi who was a "white woman." The same lawyer had before objected to the presence of black pastors, for unknown reasons noting the genders and races of attendees. 

  

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Johnson

You have probably read that Johnson & Johnson is in the process of dividing itself into two separate companies named Johnson. 

Johnson will consist of the major profit centers of the corporation, the branches that sell drugs at prices about 10 times what they cost in Canada. The other Johnson--someone told me--will continue to administer booster shots every two months (!) and sell white-plastic johnsons.

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Crybaby Killer

Kyle Rittenhouse, the crybaby killer, was driven to the fatal demonstration (from another state) by his mother. I wonder what it was like as they got into the car. 

"Kyle, did you forget your illegally acquired long gun again?"

"No, Ma. It's on the backseat."

"Is it loaded for once? Kyle, don't start the blubbering. You're seventeen, for Christ's sake. Use the Kleenex in the glove compartment. You know, this is exactly why I divorced your father."

"Sorry, Ma."

"You didn't bring your skateboard? Never take a skateboard to a gunfight, Kyle."

"I know that. Really?" 

"When you finish, go straight to your father's. He's expecting you. Don't be late. Text me the final score. And be a gentleman. I didn't raise you to kill any girls."

Black Like Me

I never gave the Kardashians a fair chance. I did watch one of their TV shows for ten minutes. Nothing happened.

I can say this. The Kardashian family originally immigrated to America from the Caucasus. You can't get more Caucasian than that.

The  Caucasus are the mountain range where Prometheus was chained by the Gods to punish him for giving people fire. 

Apparently the Kardashians sometimes wear their hair in cornrows, Fulani braids, etc. They may spray-tan themselves until their skin is the color of good wood stain, and the women have married Black men and now are the mothers of Black children. 

All this has led some entertainers to call attention to what they call  brownface, cultural appropriation and blackfishing. These are interesting words. I hope they have homes in current dictionaries. 

Democracy

The Pew Research center surveyed people in 17 industrialized nations and asked them if the American political system is a good model of democracy. A generous 17% said, yes, it is. 

Of course, there may be room for improvement. I  believe we might score higher as a democracy if in our system the candidate who finishes second doesn't become president. 

 

Black in Sonoma

Sonoma County had, until this week, two division  heads who were Black. They both quit, citing racism as the reason. This county went for Biden by more than 70%, but. . . . 

More than 20% of the citizens here voted for tRump. We are talking about stupid, angry racists. Imagine how they acted when a Black county leader instituted a policy not to their liking. 

The Black leaders also cited daily micro-aggressions. People like me experience micro aggressions about once every 20 years. Imagine that happening every day, much of it really tiresome and clueless. 

Sonoma County is about 25% Hispanic but only 2% Black. A competent leader of color can always get a job someplace more diverse.

de Selby's Wife

At de Selby's 89th birthday celebration, Figgie, his wife of 63 years, told the assembled relatives and friends that she had never read a word her husband had written. No one, not even the press, responded at the time. No one knew what to say. Later several friends speculated that de Selby's wife might be illiterate, so of course she'd read little. One historian suggested that Figgie suffered from erotomania. 

de Selby himself found it difficult to process the new information, which the unkind might see as a dismissal of his life's work as a prominent scholar and exemplar of wisdom. But he soon realized that Figgie had deliberately set him free to write anything he wanted about her. He'd never mentioned her in print. Figgie valued her privacy. Now he could write whatever he pleased, and she would never read it. This was the last great sacrifice of a loving partner, maybe. 

The Passive Boys

Nicole Wallace, an ex-Republican on MSNBC, asks fairly often why the Democrats, faced with the monstrous Trump, aren't as angry as she is. Why don't they coordinate an attack on him? And this is repeated by other ex-Republicans, who learned in their old party how to crush rivals. 

I discovered the answer to Nicole's question some time back. 

About ten years ago, as the least among volunteers, I was answering the phone at a local Democratic HQ, and a drunken woman called in. She wanted to talk to President Obama and tell him he had no balls. When I proved unable to arrange this interchange, she told me that I, too, had no balls.

The secret answer to Nicole Wallace's question is that the Democrats have no balls. There are exceptions, of course, people like Nancy and Bernie. They struggle to get anything done. But they face a wall that is ten feet thick, made up of even thicker lobbyists who guarantee candidates more campaign funds than all the Trumps in Hell. 

Camus Again

Back in the 50s and 60s, young people were reading Albert Camus with great interest and some puzzlement, because most of us had little background in philosophical questions. I'm a little surprised 60 years later suddenly to be seeing references to Camus and to the myth of Sisyphus.  Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill was Camus' central example of how life consisted of work that was pointless and difficult yet good enough.

In brief, Camus was an active participant in the underground resistance to the Nazis in France. He won a Nobel prize for his writings. He said repeatedly that he was not an existentialist. He owed a lot to Nietzsche. He was one of the few leftists in France to denounce Stalin's brutality. 

Now an interest in Camus is back. He started from a belief that everyone (deep inside) sees no evidence that the universe has meaning. Apparently it just exists, as does our small planet. Camus's philosophy is an examination of how people cope with nihilism. 

The most common way of coping is to invent a meaning for life. Perhaps you commit to Leninism or Zeus or to composing operas--that is the leap of faith. Camus regarded the leap as self-deception, as philosophical suicide. His solution was not to deny meaninglessness but to try to live the fullest life possible, to maximize your experiences, which proved hard on some of the people he loved. What is the fullest life? Is that goal a self-deception? 

The Silent Generation

In the October 18th New Yorker, Louis Menand kneecapped authors who write books on imaginary differences between named generations. For the most part generational differences do exist but in small, privileged pockets unrepresentative of the generation as a whole. 

I was interested in my generation. According to Menand, the term "Silent Generation" was coined in Time magazine in 1951, where it referred to people born between 1923 and 1933. But eventually the term "migrated" to those born between 1928 and 1945, which includes me and Susan, my wife. 

Menand notes that the Silent Generation includes such wallflowers as Gloria Steinem, Muhammad Ali, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, MLK, jr., Billie Jean King, Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Ken Kesey, Huey Newton, Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol, and on and on. 

 

How the Parties Respond

My wife will tell you I make the same prediction each year. If the world catches fire, the Republicans will throw gasoline on it, and the Democrats will authorize 25% of what is needed to put the fire out. If it takes 6.5 trillion, they will authorize 1.3 trillion. But I can hope that they will go to 30% or 35%. 

Remembering Colin Powell

Colin Powell left us with much to read, documents historians will be consulting a long time. He wrote the official report that covered up the My Lai massacre. That earned him a quick promotion. His ability to work with others shot him to the top in Washington, where he eventually became Secretary of State. 

“I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male,” Powell once wrote. “If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen (West Germany), Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong.”

(I'm probably just repeating things you've already heard on news outlets like CNN and MSNBC.) 

Bad Judgment

 

Do some occupations attract people with poor judgment?

About 50% of the Chicago police are refusing to be vaccinated against covid. Meanwhile about 95% of medical doctors in America have had two shots.

 

The American Moderate

In American politics a moderate is a candidate or official who takes money from a corporation in exchange for allowing a lobbyist to write the laws regulating and taxing the corporate entity. 

A moderate is often free to vote his conscience on issues not directly related to corporate wealth like abortion, gay rights and child abuse. He may be for or against these issues. This freedom elevates the moderate above the currant Republican politician  who represents the irrational right and death.

Liberals, progressives and genuine conservatives tend to vote for moderates, as I do, because the viable alternative is fascism. 

 

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Captain Streeter

I tend to think of my family as unnoticed, but what about Captain Streeter? My great-grandfather, Sylvester Streeter Strickland, someone I actually met as a small child and remember, was a descendent of Captain George Wellington Streeter, a name familiar to Chicago historians. 

As I understand it, in 1886, Captain Streeter's boat got stuck on a sandbar in Lake Michigan, so he declared the boat an independent territory and tried, through forgery and chicanery, to lay claim to 186 acres of waterfront property in Chicago. When the rich owners of the acreage refused to pay him off, Streeter turned to selling parts of the property to uninformed buyers. This somehow led my working-class grandmother to claim in court that she owned downtown Chicago. To this day an upscale part of Chicago is called Streeterville. 

Back to Normal

For me normal was when California had 12 million residents; if you wanted to camp in Yosemite, you grabbed your backpack and went.

Over the last 20 years we lost the global warming battle. We didn't try to win it. What's needed now is to mitigate the damage, and we're not ready for that, either. What the future holds is major changes. We will not be going back to normal. But as a medical doctor wrote in my newspaper today, there is a cure for stupidity: it's death. 

de Selby

 My son-in-law recently told us that when de Selby goes on Facebook, his usual comment is, "Why don't you mind your own business?"

Colors on TV

American TV news has a narrow range, mostly confined to the horse race between the Democrats and the Stupid Party. All politics, all day. But I noticed another major flaw, which has to do with skin color. If a news reader is bone white and he wears white cloth, he will look like a sensory deprivation experiment. C'mon, now. Get some color on. 

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Gerrymander--what is it good for?

When my wife and I were young, we had two friends who became members of the California assembly. Once there they created two congressional districts for themselves. Both remained valuable members of congress for the rest of their working lives. They were Democrats. 

That sort of thing can no longer happen in California.  Now independent commissions shape the districts, following state rules. 

In 26 states today the Republicans control the gerrymandering process, and the Democrats control it in about half that number. In roughly ten states an independent commission does the work.  

Some of the states are so small that they have only one member of the house (and, ridiculously, two senators). In states like that, no federal gerrymander is possible. 

Many of the Republican states (Mississippi, Alabama?) are already gerrymandered to the cockles of their bowels. It will be hard to make them worse.

Oregon is gaining seats that will likely go to Democrats. In New York the Democrats will be in control of gerrymandering for the first time in decades, and the Republicans may lose four or five rotten seats as a result. I expect the states where control has shifted to see the big changes. 

I have no idea how all this adds up. 

Gitmo Again

According to de Selby, he saw on national TV a chainlink pen set up in Gitmo that was built to contain Haitians. De Selby did not know if anyone was actually housed there or what plans Uncle Joe Biden has for these people of color.

This makes me a little uneasy. I'm of Irish descent, and while I was working on Long Island for 30 years, I became aware that many young Irish people slipped into the Hamptons each summer to work in the resort areas. I'm wondering if Biden has built a pen for the Irish or pens for the other groups who come to America without proper papers. 

There must be many ethnicities. Has Biden constructed special pens to contain the Finns, the Icelanders, the Aussies, etc? 

A Small Sacrifice to Make

 We sent our young children out of the house and back to crowded schools in the face of a booming pandemic when we knew that vaccinations would be ready for them in two more months. 

Who would do that? (We would.)

You hear a lot of talk about how godawful it is when children miss a few months or a year of elementary school. But what is more terrible is when children die--and some are already dying of covid.

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Gen. Milley

George Washington and the Founders committed treason against their nation, Great Britain. Treason is as American as strawberry shortcake.

As you know, Gen. Milley, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  twice contacted the  Chinese military during President Trump's lunatic meltdown. Milley told the Chinese he would warn them of any attack attempted by Trump. Deep political thinkers are pointing out that these contacts amounted to treason. According to Andrew Bacevich, the calls violated "the bedrock principle of civilian control of the military."

But what constitutes bedrock? "The universe exists" is a bedrock statement. Everything we say depends on it, especially the nouns. Civilian control of the military isn't bedrock. It's a preference. 

Did Milley commit treason? Did he do the right thing? What if the answer to both questions is yes? What if you had to decide between starting a war with China (perhaps a nuclear war) and deference to an elected nutter?

The Problem of Evil

Let's say that's you go to a science fiction movie about teenagers, and in the movie the teenagers' beloved grandmothers begin to die. They just explode at random intervals. There is no apparent motive behind the deaths. They just happen. The deaths are inevitable and pointless. The teenagers have no option but to adjust to inexplicable horror. In the film this is part of how they grow to adulthood.  

No one has made that movie, but someone did make  "Spontaneous." In "Spontaneous," it's the teenagers who begin to combust for no reason. Some explode in the classroom. The others have to live with that. No choice. They live with the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? In the film this is part of how young people  grow to adulthood. 

Booster Shots

MSNBC this morning says there is evidence that covid booster shots increase protection against serious illness by ten fold. My wife and I drove to our local drugstore a month ago and got boosters. But for some reason the Press Democrat, our local California newspaper, pretends that none of this is happening. The newspaper maintains that boosters may be available at some future date. 

Why not report the truth?

Our doctor thought we should get the boosters, but no one at the drugstore checked. A clerk did ask us if our immune systems were compromised. We said yes, and that was that. 

Barbara Lee

Some leaders of America's splintering left are now attempting to drum out Barbara Lee, on the grounds that she has been insufficiently pro-Palestinian.  

The Israel-Palestine issue is, as I see it, toxic. The supporters of both sides demand 100% black-and-white conformity to their party lines. They have nothing to negotiate. Everything this issue touches turns into death. 

This brings to mind something that happened about 65 years ago. Albert Camus, active in the French resistance in World War Two,  wrote that no cause, no matter how good, can justify the killing of civilians. He condemned Joseph Stalin, and much of the French Left banned him. The French Left didn't turn against Stalin until ten years later. Some to this day condemn Camus as a traitor to the cause of social justice.

Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, another icon of the left, takes Camus' position: no cause justifies targeting noncombatants. 

Consider this. The Israelis target civilians. The Palestinians target civilians. We deliberately targeted civilians in World War Two. 

Tar and Feathers

For 30 years, scientists have been telling us that using fossil fuels will bring on climate change and  huge swaths of physical and social destruction. The destruction is here now; we can see it. What should we do about the politicians who lied to us about global warming for 30 years?

Tar and feathers are out. We get tar from fossil fuel, and some would prefer to keep the feathers on live chickens. But what should we do with all those lying political money-grubbers?  They've done enormous damage. Will we shrug and move on? 

Rolling Disasters

It is now obvious to anyone with his or her own brainstem that climate change is on top of us and that climate change is an unending set of rolling disasters. 

California State Senator Mike McGuire and others are attempting to block the shipping by rail of vast bins of coal through Northern California. The coal would then be sold to China, who would burn it and make our life on this planet worse. 

Stopping coal is exactly what is needed. We must stop producing and selling fossil fuels. Few politicians are willing to take this problem on, because there is money to made by the Amerindians on whose reservation the coal will be dug, money to be made by the railroads, money to be made selling coal to China, etc. Money, money, money. For money many humans will sell bullets to their own firing squad. 

Remember McGuire. He and some others are trying to deal realistically with the awkward reality of global warming.

Cultural Genocide as Nation Building

Portugal, Spain, France and Great Britain entered the New World (with its developed civilizations) intent on cultural genocide. They systematically destroyed the indigenous nations they encountered, determined to rebuild them into European systems, something like America more recently attempted to do in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Cultural genocide was and is the lasting core of European and American foreign policy.

People tend to be deeply attached to the culture that shaped them. Some are willing to die in defense of themselves and their culture. We have been losing wars. 

President Biden recently announced that we were getting out of the nation-building business at the core of our foreign policy. Cultural systems best change at their pace, not at our pace.

I hope that works out. But we have a giant two-party foreign policy caste, one that tames mere presidents. Lasting change in our policies may be hard to come by. 

Moderna

As a low ranking employee in several large organizations, I noticed many decades ago that the leaders at the top often have no clue about what is actually going on.  And today I read in my newspaper that top federal health officials have warned the White House that the plan to offer booster shots would at first have to be limited to people who got Pfizer vaccinations.

Like a constant line of people at my drugstore, I got a Moderna booster a week or two back. I hope it isn't too late to return it.

Spontaneous

"Spontaneous" is a film made just before the pandemic--the movie is known to others, but I just blundered onto it. On EPIX. I recorded the movie and watched it because the critics score was 97 and the audience rating was 67. Those are strange numbers.

I found it compelling, and my wife hated it and ignored it as best she could. Fair warning.

The first half of the film is a very dark rom-com about a class of high school seniors who begin to spontaneously explode, throwing buckets of blood around the classroom. 

The second half is humorless but compelling in its way, a symbolic exploration of the texture of life once you realize how uncertain life is. And no one can change that. Do you remember high school? Not everyone made it out alive. 

Texas

 Texas has become toxic for women. They should  leave. 

A Kafka-like new law in Texas encourages private citizens to punish nearly anyone who encounters a woman seeking an abortion. That puts everyone in danger. It's no longer safe to drive through Texas. 

My assumption is that most Texans can't leave the state immediately. Women and their friends have businesses and homes to sell, new jobs to find in the 49 more welcoming states and Puerto Rico, kith and kin to consider, etc.  For many, leaving Texas will take a lot of planning. Now is time to start the process. 

The Right Time To Leave Afghanistan

 I've seen complaints from the establishment caste that Biden pulled our troops out of Afghanistan too early, that we are an immature nation that lacks patience, etc. 

This was the wrong time to leave Afghanistan.  We should have left 20 years ago.

Two Heads Are Better

The Niners today have two starting quarterbacks (one of whom is already injured.)   

In the first NFL game I attended. both teams had two starting quarterbacks. The Washington Racial Slurs were led by Sammy Baugh, holder of most passing records at the time and also the team punter, and Eddie LeBaron, a short running quarterback who made jump passes briefly popular. The L.A. Rams were led by Bob Waterfield, married to Jane Russell and winner of a league title, and Norm Van Brocklin, who would later win a league title with another team.

These teams played two quarterbacks. The Rams, as I recall, used Waterfield in the first and third quarters and Van Brocklin in the second and fourth quarters. The offense was notable. Both quarterbacks ended up voted into the Hall of Fame.

So far the Niners seem to be playing their two starters by running them in and out according the situation. The results may be awesome.    

The Importance of Being a Man

Susan, my wife since 1965, had a biopsy done on her face recently. Probably nothing much. But she has to wear a bandage on her cheekbone. Accompanyiong her places has earned me dirty looks from several young women. One of them came up to us and asked her, "Are you all right?"

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Recall

 Nearly everyone in Sonoma County who sees this has already decided to vote against the recall of Gov. Newsom and the County District Attorney. If Newsom loses, he will be replaced by a malignant tRumper. If the D.A. loses, the office will be empty--no one is running to replace her. 

I don't care for either of them, but here I am supporting them. 

I suppose history is rich in powerful, murderous sociopaths like Nero or the current governors of Florida and Texas. I wish that what we are going through was unusual, but I've lived through a time that contained the Holocaust, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, many massacres, and now elected officials promoting the deaths of hundreds of thousands of voters. And the warming of the planet. 

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Leaving Afghanistan

When I was very young, Hitler set out to conquer the world and failed. The world is large; there weren't enough Germans to go around. 

The size calculation wasn't difficult to make, but I bet Hitler had been a bad math student when he was attending school with young Ludwig Wittgenstein. In any case, the same mistake has also been made by Tojo, Stalin and George W. Bush, none of whom could count accurately.  

The United States is never going to rule the world, serve as the world's police force or protect the women in a hundred medieval nations. In fact, according to George Will last week, we should not even adopt an equal rights amendment to protect American women.

As we abandon Afghanistan, my suggestion, despite Will, is that we work on equality for women in North America, where we live and can make a difference. 

California

 

The new census shows that White people now make up 35% of the residents in California, while Latinos make up 39.4%. Maybe someone should notify the Republican Party.

Cuomosexualism

 Cuomosexualism is the practice of riding the subway at rush hour in order to press yourself against other bodies.

The Refusers

People who today refuse vaccination have not suddenly become foolish. They were foolish in high school.  

In general the best among us are mediocre at weighing relative risks. Some people are worse than mediocre. 

Yesterday  the Republican governor of one state announced that everyone in his state who died recently of the coronavirus was unvaccinated. Nobody has died from the vaccination. So what are the odds that vaccination is worse than the disease?

TV  showed a small resort town in a state where there are no mask restrictions or distancing rules. People from more competent states are flocking this small town for vacations, where many will get infected and some will die. When interviewed they said that vaccination is a private matter (it's a public health issue). They said they were reclaiming their freedom from the government (but they obediently strap on seatbelts). 

Their true reason, in many cases, is that they are afraid of the vaccination. They don't trust the government, which has lied to them most of their lives.  And they don't trust science. They don't know how to weigh the odds. They've made another bad decision. 

Marcos

In an effort to escape for a few hours the media coverage of  Cuomosexualism, I turned to reading ON THE  PLAIN OF SNAKES by Paul Theroux, an account of Theroux's recent trip through Mexico. 

When I was young, we drove into Mexico without a thought. We did everything without a thought. I'd think twice now.

The border and many resort areas are controlled today  by warring cartels. You don't go out at night. Many ordinary people consider the police more dangerous than the cartels. Parts of Mexico have failed to provide safety, medical care, education and social welfare. Which brings me to the Zapatistas, a group Theroux encountered. 

About 40 years ago a socialist rebellion began among the Mayas in Chiapas, led, after a fashion, by a former philosophy professor in a mask. At the time he called himself Subcomandante  Marcos. He took the title of subcomandante to make it clear that he was subordinate. He and a small group of followers set out to find what the Indians in the countryside actually wanted. This is probably what set him apart from the missionaries, the  Chomskys, the UN missions, the Gueveras of the civilized world, who came to enlighten, not to listen. 

If you want to help, first find out what the people want. 

Mexico, I guess, had other fish to fry and did not really care all that much when the Indians in Chiapas set up a state within the state, one that has lasted since the 1980s. The army came and killed some people and left and so on. 

Marcos, still masked and hidden and free after all this time, wrote:  "Behind our face masks is the face of all women excluded. Of all the indigenous people forgotten. Of all the homosexuals persecuted. Of young people belittled. Of all migrants beaten. Of all people imprisoned for their thoughts or words. Of all workers humiliated. Of all who died in oblivion. Of all the simple and ordinary men and women who don't count, who are not seen, who are not named, who have no tomorrows." In 2002  he wrote of the Basque separatists that "neither this noble cause, nor any other, can justify the sacrifice of human lives. Not only does it (killing civilians) not lead to any political gain, even if it did, the human cost is unpayable. We condemn  military acts that hurt civilians. And we condemn them equally, whether they come from ETA or from the Spanish state, from Al Qaeda or George W. Bush, from the Israelis or Palestinians, or anyone who . . . makes victims of children, women, old people and men who have had nothing to do with the matter."

Herd Immunity?

Nothing I say below is new but my grasp of what doctors have been saying improved recently. 

Herd immunity may occur when 70% or more of the community is immune to a disease. Sonoma right now has 70% of its population vaccinated, along with another 8% that has taken the first shot. But the infection rate has risen fast in recent weeks.

I suspect that the problem is that the vaccines do not make people immune. The vaccines will save your life if you get infected, but they don't immunize you from catching covid or transmitting it. 

I'm not annoyed by all this. The scientists are at work. They learn more as they go along. 

Vigilantes

"There is no precedent for what happened."--a newscaster

What happened is that on January 6, 2021, several thousand vigilantes stormed the American capitol and fought with the police. 

In 1864 vigilantes in Montana lynched Sheriff Henry Plummer. For a hundred years after the Civil War, white vigilantes tortured, mutilated, burned and lynched black people at will. 

Vigilantes are groups of men formed to attack genuine or imaginary threats to their privileges. A recent example was an organization of armed volunteers that operated on the border with Mexico, where they illegally captured people crossing into the United States. ( The Border Control cooperated with them.) 

In Michigan last year vigilantes took control of the state capitol and planned to capture, try and execute the governor of the state. 

Vigilante groups sometimes form in places where the criminal justice system is seen as weak or corrupt. Vigilantes believe strongly that they are preventing or punishing crimes, and sometimes they are. But often the vigilantes are committing crimes ranging from assault to murder.

A good film on the topic is "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1942). A powerful short story is Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," set in 1732. 

Ross Douthat

I seldom read Ross Douthat's political musings because he's foolish, but this week an editor gave his column a headline that interested me: "How Conservatives Can Reshape Education."

After examining the possibilities, Douthat concluded that the only chance conservatives have to reshape education is to get involved in it. If conservatives become the teachers and administrators and college professors and so on, they might have an impact on what gets taught.

The problem with Douthat's plan is the it would require conservatives to understand students and care about them and work for mediocre wages. They would become liberals.

Also reality has a liberal bias. 

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The Chicans

("Chicans" is pronounced "CHEEK-uns.")

In California people living in the blazingly hot Central Valley often have a favorite summer town on the coast to vacation in.  Chicans often head to Fort Bragg, which is far off the main roads and not considered a destination by anyone else. Chicans come from Chico, of course, a city of 100,000 and home to a state university. Research shows that about 9% of Chicans are living in sin, and Jackson Pollock grew up there. 

I suppose there must be naysayers who view Fort Bragg as unsophisticated, but you have to admire a town  named for an incompetent jackass loathed by both armies in the Civil War. To be fair, the town was named by fellow who detested Bragg and the town and believe they deserved one another. It was an early version of naming sewage treatment plants for Donny Trump. 

The naming occurred before Gen. Bragg lost his Civil War battles and destroyed his own army, anticipating the fate of Gen. Lee, but Fort Bragg has had the guts to retain both its name and the vacant, strip-mall drabness that lure Chicans to the Pacific. (The nearest neighboring town is Mendocino, a ritzy spot, quite New Englandy, where the wells have gone dry in the current drought. If you go there, take water.)

I mention this because I heard recently that the Forters don't like the way newly shod Chicans stroll along on their sidewalks wearing MAGA hats. I've been told this by an insider. These encounters may illustrate one of America's lasting internal wars, that between the coast and the interior. It's like the larger war between the city and the countryside.

Change the World

Several times in my life I have been asked if David Brooks is an intellectual, which is like asking if Dr.  Jekyll is a physician. He is, but I'd look elsewhere for medical care. I'd look for someone not smirking,

A few days back Brooks told us that it is our duty to fight another 20 years in Afghanistan for people who won't defend themselves. Not having marched in an army himself, Brooks is oddly willing to send my friend's grandson or my granddaughter off to die in the East. 

If you are opposed to tRump, Brooks expects you also to battle the authoritarians in other nations--that would be about 100 other nations, I guess.  Let's get started, David. I will serve in the military again if you will join me and finally put on a uniform. 

Age

 Old age is no place for a coward.  El Supremo can run for president again, but he can't hide. 

Vegetables

 So my wife accused me of not liking vegetables. I told her that that wasn't true--I am devoted to potatoes, wheat and Thai stick. 

The Story

We tell ourselves stories ithat make it possible to live together.

Zoe Heller in The New Yorker (July 12, 2021) had some interesting things to say about the Trump story. She got me thinking. 

Maybe the greatest influences on how people perceive themselves and the world are the narratives they learned growing up. They learned to accept on faith explanatory tales that defy evidence and logic. They might believe in a God who lives on top of a mountain or in an intellectual who drew maps that will certainly lead to a just society. 

Humans learn to discount facts that call stories into question. They might tell you, for example, that enslaved people enjoyed their servitude. 

We all believe, Subcommander Bob says, in narratives that exist without proof.  From the moment we are born, we are taught to believe in powerful but unproved and improbable tales. We are told to love our country and that it loves us, which is absurd. 

 It may be that these narratives are what make it possible for huge numbers of people to unite. 

Stories become internalized. To contradict my basic narratives is to attack my core self. 

Consider the strength of Trump's narrative. What a tale! Bad people stole the election from good people. You can spot bad people--they're a different color! That is Trump's narrative. His voters, who have been trained from birth to believe almost anything, believe that Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of babies. Democrats are pedophiles! And the cultists understand that Trump and his people are always right, because Trumpers have inside information. Hillary drinks blood! The anti-Trump people are, in the eyes of Trumpers, either evil or ignorant. Nothing they say matters. They are pathetic fools. And the pandemic is a hoax. 

America Without Racism

Suppose the Republican Party woke to racism and dropped it completely, retaining everything else in their current approach to politics. They stress their authoritarianism. Then they nominate a person  of color, a tiger mom, for president. By what margin will she win? 

War--What Is It Good for?

As a former private solder in the American army, I supported Joe Biden's failed attempt to convince President Obama not to surge more troops into Afghanistan. Now Biden has pulled our military out of Afghanistan, bringing them home. I doubt if Biden is the answer to global warming, and I voted for him reluctantly, but ending a war is not a small thing.

No one has hired and trained Americans to act as the world's police force. We are not entitled to enter other countries. Our leaders don't know how to remake other cultures.  

Our political leaders don't understand non-European cultures. But we should be able to grasp this much. People everywhere want to work out their futures for themselves. 

Taxes

If you want to cheat on your taxes, you should do what I did: not run for president.  

Recoil

We will be holding a recall election on September 14, the newspaper says. Recalls are one of those progressive innovations that whitewing bad guys have learned to use for bad causes. 

Governor Newsom will be voted on this time. If he loses, he will be replaced by a Trump/Fascist of some sort. I've never liked Newsom, but he consistently gets out front on progressive causes, and he doesn't fly a Confederate battle flag or wrestle bears. I will vote for Newsom.

Also our county district attorney, Jill Ravitch, who is retiring anyway, is up for a recall vote. I have no use for Ravitch, who helped cover up the Andy Lopez homicide. But the developer who financed this recall with about $800,000, might have been motivated by the fact that Ravitch had prosecuted his company after elderly residents had been abandoned in two of his care homes during the 2017 Tubbs fire. The developer is reportedly sending out 28 mailings attacking Ravitch. 

The Ravitch recall illustrates the extent to which this nation is basically an oligarchy run by and for the rich. But we aren't entirely an oligarchy, and I will find myself--to my regret--voting for Ravitch. 

The Manx Missile

Six years ago, the Manx Missile, Mark Cavendish, was thought by many to be the greatest sprinter in bicycle racing history. He had dominated fast finishes in the Tour de France for years, winning on thirty different days. He never came close to winning the race overall--it's a three-week race that includes climbs through the Alps--but on relatively flat days, he was the quickest. 

About five years ago, he seemed to be slowing.  He was badly injured in crashes (the fate of most pro bike racers), and he came down with Epstein-Barr for the second time. He was finished and won nothing for five years. Some years he wasn't fit enough to participate, until yesterday. 

This year Cavendish did not train specifically for the Tour. No point in it. But the Bahrain team lost its formidable sprinter at the last minute and made Cavendish a starter on its Tour team. No one had expected that. And then the team leader and world champion Julian Alaphilippe led an effort to help Cav--as they call him--into a striking place at the end of a very long day of riding. With cunning and 39 mph burst of speed, the old guy won for the 31st time and burst into tears. 

 

How Much Do Black Lives Matter?

 So the judge gave Derek Chauvin 22.5 years, which means he will likely serve 15. That is a long time. But it's about 3/5ths of what Chauvin deserved, for some reason. 

Childhood Memories

Experts say that early childhood memories (memories before the age of three) are rare. A kind of fog blocks most events until a child reaches about six. We apparently need the structure of language to organize most memories. 

Keep in mind that memories are inaccurate, and they become increasingly inaccurate. Each time you remember something, you change it a little. When you remember something, you also reinforce it (inaccurately) in a general way. 

I have memories I'd rather forget. I suppose that if I resist remembering bad events, the memories may fade over time. 

The Bishops

 

As you probably know, American Catholic Bishops are now considering the denial of Communion to President Biden, because he supports the right of women to terminate their pregnancies, a decision antique dogma tells us belongs to men.  The genuine issue here may be that of credibility. How credible are the Bishops? The Pope disagrees with them. Are they deaf to Rome? 

About 49% of voting Catholics supported Biden for president, and Biden seems to me to be sincerely religious. 

My mother's side of my family was Catholic, and I am familiar with my grandmother's response to church authority. "What the priest doesn't know won't hurt him." In fairness to the church, she was excommunicated for about 40 years, then saved again.

The Infusion

A family member needed an iron infusion, and she had to go to the cancer center to get it, although she does not have cancer. I waited for her in the lobby for two hours, and I observed human interactions. The most interesting was a middle-aged man talking to one of the aides. I could not hear much of what the man was saying. The aide spoke in a loud but nice voice.

Man: blab blab blab for three minutes.

Aide: Yes, of course, but I can't schedule an appointment until after you go back to the hospital's record department and have them send over your wife's medical records.

Man: blab blab blab for three minutes.

Aide: We will schedule a second opinion as soon as you drive to the hospital and have them send over your wife's medical records.

Man: blab blab blab for three minutes.

Aide: We will schedule a second opinion. It's not a problem. We are happy to do it. But you will have to ask the hospital to send over your wife's medical records. You'll need your wife's signature.

This went on for about 25 minutes.The aide remained friendly and courteous, repeating the same message. Finally the man left, promising to do exactly what the aide had asked. Twenty minutes later, the man returned  and went through the same dialogue again. The aide never showed impatience. 

Building Memories

According to experts, our memories often consist of events to which we paid close attention (so they got processed by our hippocampi). When something awful happens, we pay attention, of course. We acquire an unpleasant memory. 

I suspect that I tend to let good experiences slide away. I can have pleasant memories if I pay attention when nice things are happening. 

The Successful Amendment`

The second amendment has been our most successful change to the Constitution. The Founders’ goal was to ensure that there would be people familiar with weapons in every hamlet. That way it would be easy to pull together a militia in a few hours. At the time it was thought we needed to be ready to defend ourselves against the British (see the War of 1812) and populist mobs (see Shay’s Rebellion). 

Today 72 million Americans own firearms. In theory we can call up a militia of 72 million fighters, many of them genuine shit-on-the-floor patriots. 

We are currently protected from invasion by two vast oceans, regular military forces and nuclear weapons. We spend 715 billion each year maintaining our regular military.  That’s too much under the circumstances. We could scale it down. Imagine an invader being met on the beaches by 72 million irrational men and women with their faces painted blue.  

Race Norming

Race norming as a formal process began about 40 years ago. I don't know much about it, but I suspect that it started from a good motive, an attempt to level the playing field for people of color. Race norming attempted to do that by adjusting scores on standardized tests for different racial groups. In other words, the score of a black person would be compared only to the scores of black people in general, not to the scores of Caucasians or Asians.  

Probably the assumption was that in a land of unequal opportunity, black people would tend to score lower than white folks, who had gone to better-funded schools. 

Biologists today do not find enough differences among peoples to justify dividing living humans into subspecies or races. 

The National Football League has put aside money to aid former employees who have suffered concussions and a loss of cognitive functions. To receive that money, the former players must be tested. Standards have been set. A Black player must show a lower level of cognitive ability than a White player to get help, because--wait for it--Black players are supposedly dumber to start with. That's one type of race norming in 2021.

How Fundamental Is the Filibuster?

Most Americans have no idea how fundamental the non-speaking filibuster is to our governance system. To discover how central the non-speaking filibuster is, all you need do is look up the many legislative bodies in our fifty states. You'll find many assemblies, senates, city councils and county boards. Add up how many have the non-speaking filibuster. To this number add all the other governments in the world that allow them non-speaking filibuster. The total will yield a number quantifying how vital the non-speaking filibuster is in maintaining a democracy. 

Shuttered

 ''Donald Trump’s blog site, designed to give the disgraced former U.S. president an online outlet after he was banned from Twitter, Facebook and other services, has been permanently shuttered about a month after it debuted.''

No, it was shut down. Blog sites don't have shutters.

Lagerkvist

John Mihoff and I read Par Lagerkvist back in the late fifties. Recently Jack retold one of the stories that Lagerkvist had written. 

Lagerkvist won the Nobel Prize in 1951. He was a novelist, a moralist and a great stylist. When he was young and most pessimistic, he wrote, "Anguish is everything." 

What follows is my faulty memory of Jack's faulty summary of the story. 

Bill (not the name used in the story) was a religious man who did his best to live a good life. When he died, he went to heaven, where he found the terrain mostly flat and featureless except for a road. He walked down the road until he came upon a small group of people sitting in folding chairs, chatting and drinking cool water. 

One of the chairs was empty, so Bill took a seat and joined in the conversation, but after a while he grew restless. "Heaven is not what I expected," he said. "For one thing, where's God?"  Oh, just down the road, he was told.

Bill walked another mile or two until he came to an old bearded fellow sawing logs, making firewood. "Are you God?" Bill asked.

"Yes."

"Well, Heaven is not what I expected. It's dull."

"I did the best I knew at the time," God said and retuned to sawing wood.

______

Jack observed that many of us come to view our parents as people who did the best they knew at the time. We hope our children will feel that way about it.

The Walking

Scientists tell us that, generally speaking, walking upright has had no lasting advantage among mammals (other than humans). It's too slow. Imagine strolling along and suddenly you had to outrun a lion.

Having two free hands has advantages in gathering food and holding a spear, but what made it work in the beginning was a social network. To survive in the wilderness, you needed a family, a tribe. With 20 spears you could hunt lions. To survive and prosper, you needed to be--like wolves--part of a cooperating family. Without cooperation, walking on two feet would have made you easy prey. We survived by cooperating. 

The Corporate Democrat

My daily newspaper, a centrist corporation, today printed a letter against the welfare state that included the following. "No doubt word will be spread throughout Guatemala, El Salvador, and other decrepit Latin American countries and nearby states about the new California Dream: come to California for free lodging, free food and free medical care."

Letters printed by newspapers should, in my opinion, be factually accurate and not moronic. Does the editor think racists deserve a fair share of the ink? Or does the editor publish occasional bits of racist sarcasm because it is an effective way to attract attention and sell papers? What motivates the editor? 

Stillbirth

The Fresno Bee reported that Chelsea Becker is now out of jail--after 16 months. Becker had used meth while pregnant. When the child was stillborn, Becker was arrested for murder, and her bail was set at $5 million.

This happened inn Kings County, just to the north of Kern County, in the number-two-hole part of California.

It may be important to note that there is no scientific evidence that meth usage can cause a stillbirth. Also that the politics of this section of California's big valley has been blighted for some time. The county did vote for Hubert Humphrey 63 years ago, so who knows what might happen there next. 

Death Penalty

Oregon has more or less decriminalized the possession of otherwise illegal drugs like heroin and oxycontin. People in possession can still be fined $100, a citation that will be dropped if they agree to a health assessment. That looks like common sense. It takes some profit out of organized crime, and Oregon can hire fewer deputies and fewer prison guards. 

A law like that might have saved Andrew Brown's life last week in North Carolina. A posse of officers showed up to arrest him. Someone had fingered Brown, an unarmed black man, as a drug dealer. Frightened he tried to flee in his car, forcing a white officer to jump out of the way, which is a death penalty offense in North Carolina. After Brown got clear of the police and was motoring into the distance, they shot him in the back of the head. And that was justified, the local white prosecutor said. 

The Significance of Kushner

Just think how bad things would be now in the Middle East if it weren't for Jared Kushner's peace plan.

What War Is Good For

When I was about ten, the Israelis and Palestinians went to war against one another.  I am now an old man, and the war continues. 

From what I can tell, killing human beings on the other side keeps all the current leaders in power. That's one thing war is good for. 

Wayne Lapierre

 It somehow became a practice around the NRA to gift the executive vice president and boss, bloody Wayne Lapierre, with silk suits and rides in yachts. Wayne is apparently a modest fellow--he could have made himself NRA president, after all, or maybe sergeant at arms. Instead he seemed contented with perks. 

He now finds himself in court accused of weekends in a cramped little 100 foot yacht, when important people have yachts three times that long. On television Wayne looks embarrassed at having his cheapness made so public.

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Is Race A Social Construct?

Like others of my sort, I have been going around for decades telling people that race is a social construct. Recently Jack told me that what I claimed was true but trivial. 

Jack went on to remind me that all words are social constructs (see the private language argument). So when you say that race is a social construct, you can't be wrong.  "Walnut" is also a social construct, originally meaning "foreign nut."

"Race" is a term from biology, where it was used in my youth as a taxonomic category related to "subspecies." But biologists no longer divide people into races. The human species doesn't have enough genetic variation to merit that kind of division. And that settles the matter. We are all one thing, so to speak. There are no clear-cut, genetic boundaries in a species with a thousand shades of skin color.  

I  would guess that DNA studies played a role in all this. Penguins have more genetic variation than we do.

Free Beer

 Some locales are now offering slackers a free beer if they get vaccinated. That may help with tRump supporters. And it reminded me of my grandfather, who joined the KKK in Taft because the recruiter told him they served free beer. 

A hundred years ago the California KKK was mostly a pyramid scheme. It cost ten bucks to join. If you talked someone else into joining, you got to keep half of his ten dollars. That was good money. 

There was, of course, no free beer. After having his photo taken wearing a white sheet, my grandfather quit, bitter and unforgiving.

The Kill Rate

If you look at the rates of deadly police shootings per 100,000 people, you will find that the rate in California is four times that of New York. California's kill rate is higher than that of Georgia or Texas or Florida or New Jersey. But before you start to brag, there are some small states with even higher rates. 

Pear Salad

 My wife took us to lunch today at a brand new Mediterranean restaurant, where I ordered a pear salad, which came with pita bread, and a root beer. When the food arrived the salad had no pear in it. Also no pita and no root beer. Otherwise the meal went well if you like Greek food. I do not. 

Is Racism Innate?

I would like to believe that racism has to be learned. There's a song that says so.  But what if a tendency toward racism is innate?  

Darwin realized that species change through natural selection in a challenging world. Back when humans had real races, Homo sapiens encountered the Neanderthals in Western Asia and Europe. Neanderthals were human but different. It may be that when a Homo sapiens had to chose between one race or another, she favored the one who looked like her. This bias would have had survival value for her kind. Over time the relatively few Neanderthals disappeared, although many people today carry a few of their genes.

Some cognitive scientists believe that we are genetically programmed to prefer people who look like us or who share our ways--the blonde graduates of Duke may favor their own kind. In general people do not like difference. Small children may suddenly fear--for no apparent reason--adults who look different from their parents. 

But cognitive scientists argue that we aren't doomed to be racist. We can learn anti-racism in the same way that we learn to control our tempers. 

Vaccination Schedule

 To get an appointment for vaccination in Sonoma County, go to this website.

https://form.jotform.com/211016242241134

Culture War

The history of  North America illustrates how one culture (European) overpowered the cultures of the Amerindians of Canada, the United States and Mexico. But some tribes retained enough of their culture to keep it alive. In Ireland relearning the old Goedelic language became part of public education, and today about a third of the inhabitants claim some proficiency in Irish. In the 20th century the Jews revived Hebrew, turning it into a written and spoken language used in daily life. 

The drive to save their culture is what fuels the frantic tRumpians today. Their commitment to maintaining that culture outweighs religion, science, financial reality, patriotism and common sense.

I’m not sure how to describe the tRump culture. White supremacy is a major part of it, along with mashed potatoes and ham. But these people will fight minor changes to the bitter end. They believe that the survival of their selves—almost—depends on defeating everyone different. 

Lord Bakersfield of Kern

I had an uncle I never met, Merrill Helm Curtis,  who actually captured Charles Manson, somewhat by accident, and later was elected sheriff of Inyo County. I know the area a little, and I have heard that the minority leader in the House of Representatives is a goofball from the the next  county. Call him Lord Bakersfield of Kern. 

Right now Lord Bakersfield and the Democrats in the House are trying to set up a committee to investigate the riot of January 6. Negotiations are somewhat snagged by Bakersfield's loony insistence that the January 6th committee also investigate Black Lives Matter, Antifa and maybe the plot to replace us. The Democrats will not agree to the weird assertion that BLM  and Antifa are somehow related to the fascistic tRump nutters who smashed into the capitol, injured more than 100 police officers and emptied their capacious bowels on the floor.

Say His Name

Derek Chauvin learned today that George Floyd's life mattered. Chauvin may now understand that girls carry smart phones with cameras. We all can see that Minnesota elected Keith Ellison, a man of color, as attorney general. It seems that Ellison can put together a team of diverse, competent prosecutors. 

Derek Chauvin. Say his name.

The conviction of Chauvin is one step on a marathon run.

147

I'm writing this on April 17 in America; so far this year we have had 147 mass shootings. That's more than one a day.

I own several guns, but maybe we should do something before a stranger randomly shoots me. 

The Right Thing

Evil leaders occasionally do the right thing. Hitler got protection of animals laws passed in Germany and campaigned against smoking. Donald Trump, as far as I can tell, did nothing positive, but I may have missed something. 

I won't compare Joe Biden to Trump or Hitler. Joe Biden is recognizably human. I don't like his history with women or his centrism, but eleven years ago, he began telling people we should get out of Afghanistan. We were, in his view, finished there. We would not succeed in changing the culture. It was time to pack up and fly home. 

No one in power agreed. Eleven years went by. Americans kept dying in Afghanistan, and our forces kept killing local people. Same old thing. Now Biden is president and he's bringing the Americans back. We've lost another war. Some of the generals don't like it, but Biden is doing the right thing. 

Kill Fee

Is there any force in America stronger than racism? 

Greed trumps racism. 

You can see greed at work right now in the major corporations who have come out in opposition to the New Jim Crow. Some corporations cannot afford to alienate educated young adults, many of whom are anti-racist and unsympathetic to homophobia and transphobia.

Suppose we pass a federal law that says if you kill anyone at all, no matter how good or bad your reason, you have to pay a $50,000 kill fee. A police officer could still pull her handgun and shoot someone sitting in a car, and she still might claim it was an accident and get away with it, but she would have to pay the fee. Wouldn't she think twice?