I Am Not Well Informed

 I do not know how much covid vaccine our federal government has ordered or has on hand. Also I do not know how the Feds are dividing it up and sending vaccines to the states. There are two reasons for this. One is that tRump was murderously incompetent. The other is that we have no national health system, thanks to Wall Street Democrats. And a consequence we can only improvise delivery. 

I do not know how much vaccine California has on hand or plans on getting. I don't know how the state hopes to distribute the vaccines.

On the county level, I do not know how much vaccine we have or how it will be distributed. My doctor knows nothing. Kaiser has some vaccine and a plan to use it, but no one else seems able to answer a question. 

The pandemic is now a year old. tRump had no plan, of course. But also our governor and our county health people seem stunned and unable to speak cogently. If we had a system, a  single payer national health service, we might know where we stand, but we have endless diversity in health plans, and the result is that little in this state is going right.

Qatar

I became a soccer fan when my daughters started playing it. I would like to look forward to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022. The country is building huge stadiums. The American women will do well. The men have a young team and a better coach. But today I learned that an estimated 4,000 workers will die during the construction.

Low status workers in Qatar mostly come from poor countries. Once in Qatar, these workers are socially dead. They are bound--men and women--to obey their employers. In effect,  they are enslaved, sometimes for life. 

Style

 About a month ago I hit the curb on my bike and went flying. I had been distracted by a homeless couple who were shouting in each other's faces about the right time to get up and leave their tent,

I cracked a knuckle on one hand and scraped the skin off most of my right knee, but, worse, I torn my new black jeans. (Black doesn't show chain grease.) 

The problem is that the jeans cost money, so I ought to keep wearing them. The rip in the knee, tho, makes the jeans look stylish. Not good. I have to ask myself, What would Bernie Sanders do in my place? 

Why Mitch Runs

Mitch's life work has been to master all forms of cheating in a certain political structure. For the last 30 years that has made him one of our Republican masters. It's what old-style Republicans were best at. As a minority party, they learned old ways and new ways to suppress the votes of young people and people of color. They learned how best to lie to voters. McConnell learned how to turn the senate rules sideways and fool the Democrats (and the democrats) and so on. He invested his life in a careful study of trickery. He grew rich. 

Along comes tRump, who takes over the Republican party and plays by no rules, no logic, no arguments, just nutty blabber out of a mindless creature with needs. In the tRump party, Mitch and his honed skills become largely ignored. Mitch does get to help shape the new judicial appointments (and the next president will get to shape his own). But of what use are Mitch's great skills in twisting the rules just a little?  For tRump there are no rules. Mitch can only survive and wait for the president to implode and disappear. And then his hard-earned bag of tricks will matter once again.

 

Unity

This month we did not escape a bullet, but Donald tRrump did.

President Biden is calling for unity. A nation is an artificial construct held together by fictions. The necessary fictions may be religious or claims that we are democracy or whatever. Nevertheless,  Lady Gaga's singing of the national anthem warmed me. The President is an Irish-American Catholic. The Vice President is Black and Asian, and her husband is a Jew.  And my first real girlfriend could not get a credit card without a man to cosign for her.

Head Lobbyist

The new chair of the Democratic Party, selected by Joe Biden, will be a lobbyist for Boeing, Wells Fargo and related corporate predators. This might help explain why the second largest group of voters in California consists of people not affiliated with any  party.

The Army of El Supremo

 I've seen non-military people on TV worry that our first Fascist president has a private army of 74 million people. I think maybe he commands 10,000 murderous rubes, and his army has no artillery.

The Death of Laura Beach

 Laura Beach died yesterday. She and Bob Boardman, her husband, were a key couple in the revival of the Healdsburg Peace Project. They brought me in. They didn't know me--they knew my brother and gave me the stamp of approval. Laura and Susan, my wife, became close friends and stayed close to the end. 

Laura can't be replaced in our lives. We shared too many dinners and books and movies on television. Too many car rides to peace demonstrations, And Laura was absolutely unique in how she saw things. She was capable of a sharp analysis that took you by surprise. And no one was kinder or had more empathy.

I was visiting Laura and Bob when Bob was fading, and he said to her, "Laura, am I dying?" and she said, "The doctors have done everything for you they can."  Bob looked satisfied. What could be done, had been done. All was well. 

Democracy

We need to be aware that some of our political leaders do not believe in democracy. I don't mean the cheaters. Most of them are simply greedy and corrupt, but some leaders genuinely believe that we should be governed by a religious elite, parallel to how Iran is led. They are as nuts as tRump but in a different way.  They believe our government should be doing the Lord's work. That belief excuses anything done to bring it about.

We got a taste of that in Bill Barr, but Sen. Hawley is worse.  He personally saluted the murderous hicks rioting at the capitol. Hawley sees them as followers of Jesus and the righteous enemies of tolerance and democracy. They will go to heaven. We will not. Hawley is a medieval religious fanatic.

Race Riots in History

A woman said that the mob that rioted on Wednesday was made up of people who had made a choice between white supremacy and democracy. To them, white supremacy was more important. 

A historian said that what we saw Wednescay was a race riot. With five dead, it paled in comparison with earlier race riots where hundreds had died. 

Goldie Loo and the Three Beers

As a child I read a primitive British fairy tale. In it certain badly behaved androids drink beer, walk through the forest and break into the capitol while most people are away. These androids, urged on by a moron seated on a toilet of gold,  eat the people's porridge, sit in the people's chairs and sleep in the people's beds. When the people return, the androids kill five of them, jump out the broken windows and run away, feeling victorious.

Bee Gees

HBO  has a new documentary out on the Bee Gees that is getting four stars. It's biographical: how they grew up in Oz, why their sound was so different, why they harken back to the Mills Brothers. And it aches. Try it. How can you mend a broken heart?

Death and Sedition

The news is saying that the woman who died in the trump riot was a member of QAnon and that she was shot by law enforcement. I regret  that. I hope the nation will protect the deluded from their folly when possible. At the same time, I believe the insurrectionists got off easy (so far). White privilege, Fascist sympathies and incompetence played roles.

Next time will probably be different. This time the government and law-enforcement leaders failed--perhaps deliberately--to prepare. They finally, too late, sent for the National Guard but armed them with batons. Next time the Guard will be armed with deadly weapons and fear and impatience. Putting down an armed insurrection will mean loss of life. 

The obvious solution is to indict and try everyone who broke the law. 

MOB

Yesterday president trump asked a stupid mob to advance on the capitol and said he would be with them. But his bonespurs flared up. He had to run away. That left 40,000 armed, brainless hicks loose, and they immediately advanced on congress, planning to take a knee in protest. In the end that seemed too disrespectful, so instead they broke windows, stormed offices and sat in Nancy Pelosi's chair. The capitol police reacted with commendable mildness, no planning and no coordination with other forces. They killed no white people. The president declined to call in the National Guard (the VP finally called them). The president went on TV and told the insurrectionists that he loved them. Wall Street reacted badly, seeing no profit in property damage. The 1% ordered a stop. The riot gradually failed--like all of trump's dim efforts other than those that fail immediately--and the trump era is probably over. 

To Review donald 'Trump

To review, Donald Trump is a degenerate moron. He cannot be appeased. At some point in childhood he learned to amuse his father (the son of a pimp) by defying reality. Inherited money made it possible for Trump to create his own reality as an adult.  Problems with reality were papered over with bluster, running away, bodyguards and a ton of cash. We are fortunate he never murdered anyone, unless you count 400,000 people lost to the virus he ignored.

In a somewhat parallel way, the Republican Party, which began its life by supporting working people, was taken over by big businesses. They patched together a voting coalition of religious maniacs, racists, self-hating women and murderous hicks, but the core purpose of the party remained financial: shifting money from the poor and middle class to the super rich. 

Stealing for the super rich is not a winning platform, so the Republican leadership has had to lie constantly. These money creatures pretended to care about the fetus. They called Adlai Stevenson a pinko. And so on. Each election cycle, the Republican candidates became more extreme in order to win primaries, finally moving toward the tea party and now towards QAnon. Today they would call Stevenson a blood-drinking Satanic pedophile--and the current raging, out-of-control president has their support in his attempt to disenfranchaise the young people, the people of color and the women who voted him down.