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." 

 

w