TheTerrible Disappointments of Donald Trump

The most unexpected revelation about the Jan 6 insurrection may be the discovery that the  ex-president genuinely wanted to take part in storming the capitol. When thwarted by his secret service driver, the then-president of the United States of America grabbed the man by the throat and tried to choke him.

Donald had planned to sit in Nancy Pelosi's chair and put his feet on her desk. He'd hoped to march through the senate waving a Confederate battle flag.  He'd wanted to be the warlock wearing a helmet with horns. And he'd planned to take a dump on the floor and smear the wall with feces.  But it was not to be. 

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Enslaved

On January 1, 1808, a law pushed through by Thomas Jefferson took effect, banning the importation of enslaved people. 

From 1808 to the start of the Civil War, the number of enslaved people rose from about 750,000 to 4,000,000.   Some smuggling took place, mainly via Florida and Texas, who, for a while, had not yet joined the nation they would degrade. But most of the additional enslaved people were (in a sense) manufactured through a forced birth program using enslaved women of color. 

In those days an enslaved human being was worth the equivalent of several tens of thousands of dollars. If a whitefella who owned women forced them to give birth, he could get rich.

Today's supreme Court majority, composed of four women haters and a hand-maiden, has handed Texas and Florida the right to return to the forced birth policies of slavery. 

This time around there I see no financial advantage for owners, except to increase the number of workers competing for each job. But the court decision does give states the right to clamp down on women, control them, push them down the social ladder. The oppressors of women must be elated. 

Women (and many sons, brothers, husbands and fathers) will rebel. Some major city leaders have already announced a refusal to enforce the new slave laws. The fight has just begun.  

 

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The Agenda

You can't have a meaningful superior caste (white, male and supreme) without the contrast of an inferior caste.  Of late that contrast became dimmed somewhat by increasing the rights of women, gays and people of color. The job of our rogue Supreme Court is to turn that around. They intend to push women, gays and people of color back down what they were allowed in 1880. 

The struggle against Fascism seems to be eternal. It lurks deep in the human mind, a basic part.  We won't eliminate Fascism. We should never stop fighting it.

The Militia

One of the problems that come with installing crackpots on the Supreme Court is that some may be poor readers.  Justice Thomas, for one, has probably attempted  to read the Second Amendment and failed. 

Thomas is an originalist, which means he tries (inadequately) to find the original meanings of the Bill of Rights. He now claims that the Second Amendment tells us that individuals have the right to carry concealed handguns into grocery stores for self-protection, although self-protection is not mentioned in the Amendment. It's not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution. Thomas made up this fiction.

According to Thomas and Kavanaugh, the fellow who was arrested in front of Justice Kavanaugh's home had every right to stand on the sidewalk there armed with a concealed .44 (needing no permit). 

As always I'd like to help out Kavanaugh and Thomas, so I'll remind them that the original point of the Second Amendment was to make it easy for southern states to form well-regulated militias and put down slave revolts. That makes the ruling by Thomas and Kavanaugh right, of course, if the National Guard is made up of gents marching proudly with concealed handguns.

Originalism

When James Madison was cobbling together the Bill of Rights, he opposed including the Second Amendment. But Southern white leaders insisted on including it. They wanted to insure the right to form local militias (to put down slave revolts). 

There is nothing in the amendment about owning guns for self defense or owning guns to overthrow the government. The amendment is about militias.

Originalists on the Supreme Court ought to be deciding gun issues with one thing in mind. Does the issue help or hurt the quick formation of militias (like the national guard)? That was the original intent.

I served in the army and not a militia, but my brother served in the California national guard. We were issued rifles, of course, but for some reason we were not allowed to bear our rifles off the base and into restaurants, bars or movie theaters. Because that would have been insane. 

The root problem with originalism is that our Constitution was written by a collection of unbathed, long-dead, white male racists. The claim that American women and people of color are bound to the end of time by a document written by 50 stinking bigots is, in my opinion, unreasonable. 

The Language Game

 

THE LANGUAGE GAME  by Christiansen and Chater is an attempt to explain how our species became so talkative. Here is part of a review by Rebecca Chaffey:

. . .  language, according to Christiansen and Chaten, is not so much an invention as an improvisation, a “community-wide game of charades, where each new game builds on those that have gone before.” It is constantly re-contrived generation after generation. Children acquire words and phrases not by assimilating rules or by vocalizing according to patterns they were somehow born to express but by jumping into the game and extemporizing freely.

“We talk without knowing the rules of our language just as we play tennis without knowing the laws of physics, or sing without knowing music theory. In this very real sense, we speak, and do so skillfully and effectively, without knowing our language at all.”

The Worst Court Ever

Our current Supreme Court has six members on it committed to repealing or misreading any law that gives women or people of color the rights reserved for the white male caste. Our court was carefully assembled to block legal attempts to weaken racism or sexism. But is it our worst court ever?

I looked at the constitution, in which the Supreme Court is called "the supreme Court." The word "supreme" is not capitalized.  I don't know why, but I'm for it.

What our founders--slave owners--expected of the court, I do not know, except that it should defend slavery.  I can see how the court turned out. It's the most authoritarian branch of government, consisting of nine unelected attorneys with jobs for life. Throughout our history (with some exceptions) the court has found inventive reasons to help suppress women, Amerindians, black people, brown people and poor people. 

When liberals get bills passed and signed by presidents, the court's job is to gut those bills. 

I grew up under the Warren Court, an exception, as I have finally realized. Our current court is like our courts before and after the Civil War.  A bigoted Supreme Court is normal.

Exactly Who Attacked on January 6?

Urged on by the Republican Party, domestic terrorists attacked the House and Senate on January 6. Many were arrested and are beginning to stand trial. Social scientists started asking who these stupid bastards were. 

I was surprised by the outcomes of the studies that have been conducted.

1. Were the rioters white and male?  Yes. No surprise there.

2. Were many insurrectionists from rural areas? No. The rioters came from big cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. 

3. Did they belong to militias? Maybe 10% were militia members.

4. Were they poor? No. Many were professionals or business owners. Only 7% were unemployed.

5. Did they come from red states?  For the most part they came from blue states. 

6. Were they impetuous young men? Most were early middle-aged, in their late thirties or forties. 

7. What motivated these fools? The rioters turned out to be white males living in liberal cities where women and people of color had begun to win the rights and respect formerly available only to white men. In short, the mob was motivated by the Great Replacement Theory. 

There are those who believe that every advancement by women or people of color is subtracted from the white male position of superiority. In  a sense that is true. In order to create a superior caste, you first have to invent an inferior caste. (See our original Constitution.) If later on the inferior castes get elevated, well . . . . 

Yeats

The Attorney General has decided not to prosecute Mark Meadows for his rejection of a subpoena by the House to testify. 

Not a surprise. The Publicans are killers. Some Democrats have fight in them, but on the whole the party is listless.  As Yeats wrote:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. 

Long Beach

 As I started the sixth grade, my family sold their home in Compton and moved to the Victoria Apartments in Long Beach. It was closer to where my father worked as a machinist at the Union Oil refinery in Wilmington. Gasoline was rationed—in World War II—and he had to get to work. 

The apartment house sat on the beach. We all ran around in bathing suits. My mother acquired a local nickname. She was known as “the body.”  Her best friend there, Delma, a blonde young woman from Oklahoma, was known as "the face."

Three or four sex workers lived in the shabby apartment house. For them time passed slowly in the afternoons, so they asked my mother to teach them how to knit. As my brother and I (and Delma's son Raymond) ran through the lobby, we’d pass the women and our mother sitting on couches and knitting away, talking about whatever.