Crybaby

I have known women who lived their entire lives, and everything went wrong, but they absolutely refused, by god, to think of themselves as victims. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is a crybaby. He's a victim. Yesterday he claimed that white people are the victims of racism. You see, Crybaby Trump is not manly. He's a crybaby and calls himself a victim, although he was born crying, perhaps because he had a diamond-encrusted spoon jammed into his crybaby mouth. He's been a crybaby since birth. And I have a real need to call him a crybaby. We should call a him a crybaby, because it is true, and we should repeat crybaby as often as possible in one paragraph. What a crybaby.

Hitler, California

I have kith and kin who live in or have houses in Hitler, a small town on the California coast about ten miles north of Fort Bragg. The personnel in Hitler refuse to change the town's name. Their argument is that the town was named Hitler before the Holocaust, back when Hitler was considered a patriot and a man who had served his country bravely in World War One. The name was good at the time, and today it's a town tradition to take pride in. 

Fort Bragg makes a related argument, that while Braxton Bragg eventually betrayed the USA in order to defend slavery, the town was named Bragg before that misstep, at a time when Bragg was considered a patriot and a man who had served his country bravely in the war to annex half of Mexico. 

The town of Hitler, of course, is imaginary. 

Who Are The Uyghurs

A minor owner of the Golden State Warriors basketball team recently said, "Nobody cares about the Uyghurs" ("Weegers"). 

The Uyghurs are a Moslem minority group in China who are being jailed and brutally stripped of their religion and culture by the nation's leaders.

Yuval Harari, historian, has pointed out that cultural extermination goes back many years. Consider the ancient genocide at Jericho, where the walls came tumbling down. 

I resist change. The Irish teach their children the old Celtic language. Amerindian tribes in Canada attempt to revive ancient practices. The Ainu in Japan are doing the same. Ultra Orthodox Jews are attempting to replace the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered by Hitler. 

But the overall trend is toward cultural unification. In fact, Harari points out, in some ways  we may be down to one human culture in the world already. 

If you were an alien observer in outer space, and if you checked on the Earth every 20,000 years, what you would find is fewer human cultures each time. No one will be speaking the Ainu language 20,000 years from now.

That doesn't justify what is happening to the Uyghurs. The beliefs of living people, their invented instincts, are deeply part of them as individuals. Beating the culture out of people is criminal. Cultural extermination will happen over time; it's better if it happens slowly and almost unnoticed. 

People do care about the Uyghurs. 

In the end we will be assimilated.    

The Size of Horses

You may not have given much thought to the size of the steed King Arthur sat on during the Middle Ages, but my brother has researched the matter. 

By definition a horse must be at least 57 inches tall or 14 hands and one finger. You are measuring, of course, the height of its withers. (I don't know who makes up the rules.)

You can estimate the height your colt will reach when the colt is six months old. The length of the colt's lower leg from hoof to knee is 93% of the size the lower leg will be when mature. The next step is too complicated to explain here, but if you set out to buy a horse to ride, pick one that weighs at least seven times what you do.  

A study of human skeletons indicates that men actually lost height in the Middle Ages, maybe two and a half fingers on average. But knights, while contemptibly short, were famously prodigious eaters. Most would have needed horses weighing close to 3,000 pounds. And a study of skeletal remains tells us they rode what we now call ponies. 

By some estimates, instead of weighing a seventh of their steeds, knights may have weighed about a quarter of the ponies they staggered in on. Keep in mind that the ideal knight was supposed to be broad-shouldered and narrow waisted, an effect mostly achieved with corsets and heavy metal armor, which cost many knights their lives, as they rode into battle unable to dismount or raise their arms above their waists. 

Don't Look Down

The recent satirical movie about how capitalism brings the world to an end, "Don't Look Up," has come under criticism from CNN for looking down. "In its efforts to champion its cause, the film only alienates those who most need to be moved by its message." Or, as another wit put it, "You feel invited to conspire in a protracted liberal-elitist sneer at the dumb masses." (Some reviewers probably missed the capitalism part.) 

What may be misleading about these centrist critiques is the assumption that the movie was made as propaganda, as an attempt to convert MAGA types, who cannot be converted. 

I believe that the movie was intended to entertain people like me and to make money. Susan and I coughed up five or six bucks and don't regret it.  

Parklets

"Parklets should include an open guardrail to define the space. Railings should be no higher than 3 feet and be capable of withstanding at least 200 feet of horizontal force."--from one city's rules for parklets.

One of the changes brought to Santa Rosa by the pandemic has been the rise of parklets, where parking space in front of a cafe gets converted into an outdoor dining room. In a pandemic it's safer to eat outdoors and not as noisy. You can talk during lunch. 

In some cities, parklets have turned into traffic-free greenways. Studies show that the parklets bring more walking and biking. 

I'm hoping many of our parklets will become permanent. Good parklets can cost up to $50,000 to build. We don't have much bad weather here. We can do parklets year 'round. 

Don't Look Up

The Democrats who insisted on nominating easy-going Joe Biden (instead of a fighter like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders) are now mad at Biden because he's not a fighter. That's amazing.

The Democrats are fighting among themselves, as usual, while the evil bastards who run the Trump party smirk on their way to visit bank vaults filled with cash.

Don't look up. 

Saving the American Democracy

"In November the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a watchdog group, added the U.S. to its list of backsliding democracies."  -- Elizabeth Kolbert.

A study of social mobility ranked America as 27th in the world. 

"All men are created equal" is a fiction. Obviously each person is different. No Creator has given us unalienable rights. Jesus did not give us the right to bear arms. But invented claims seem to be needed to unify us and give us the ability to work together. 

Over the next few years we will be faced with a choice. We can support Fascism or--most likely--a slightly modified status quo, which is a mixture of caste system with some democracy. That's an easy call. But what makes antifascism an easy call?

The best I can come up with is that we are, like many mammals, hard-wired for empathy, which connects us to family. "All people are created equal," although not true, gives empathy a more useful reach. We can cooperate. 

American Fictions

The Myth of Meritocracy 

The Ivy League and a few other elites run this country (for the most part) and do so on merit. That is, if you are potentially elite, you get admitted to Yale, Princeton, Harvard or maybe Stanford. Once there you meet the best professors, who prepare the brightest young people for leadership positions in the political, economic and judicial worlds. In the Ivies, young Democrats room with young Republicans. And in a meritocracy, these people deserve success because they are better than we are. 

The USA is ranked the 27th country in the world in social mobility, just below South Korea and Lithuania. Once we were ranked first, but never mind.

  

Betty White

When I was about 15 suddenly everyone in L.A. County had a TV set for the first time, and Betty White was on it five hours a day. She was local and live. She had a niche to herself, the sparkling, very young woman (surrounded by grave men of middle age). Quite an oddity at the time. No one like her. No women newscasters or on talk shows, for example. This was the era in which a woman could not get a credit card without a man to vouch for her. 

Betty White was an instant favorite.