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. 

(also on Facebook)

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.