With all things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be right.
---William of Occam
Soon Donald Trump will be on trial in many different jurisdictions for many different crimes. The explanations for this phenomenon are:
1. A gigantic conspiracy run by Democrats, district attorneys, judges (some Republican judges appointed by Trump), a conspiracy combining federal and state courts, has set out to persecute an innocent Donald Trump.
2. Trump is a crook.
(also on FB)
Donald "Borderline" Trump has promised to continue his campaign for president from prison if he ends up behind bars.
I'm not sure he means it. He may go into one of his rare but real silent periods if he feels humiliated. But a campaign from prison? That that will make him a legend 200 years from now, while the Clintons will be forgotten.
The governor of Florida wants the children of that state to learn that the enslaved, in some cases, benefited from slavery. He cited black smithery. An enslaved black man might be taught how to be a blacksmith. That would make him more valuable, and he might get better shoes and socks from his owner. Or he might be freed in a civil war (750,000 dead) and have a trade that would support him.
One potential problem with that argument is the trade-off. Suppose you approach a free man, a grounds maintenance worker, and offer to send him to college where he can learn engineering, bettering himself.
In return all he'd have to do is agree to be a slave and agree that his children could be sold to cotton growers in Mississippi.
What follows is from a compelling story reported last Tuesday in The Press Democrat by Edward Booth.
A woman I will call Karen Lawnmower (not her name) rose at a public meeting in Napa to protest the staging of a jazz festival. According to Booth, she was concerned that people attending the festival might threaten the neighborhood's security. She characterized jazz enthusiasts "as the type of people" that "we would not like to invite to our homes," as opposed to better choices, "golf enthusiasts."
"We're going to have people jumping over our fences into our pools.We're going go have people walking all over our yards we work so hard to keep up."
Enola Gay Lawnmower, Karen Lawnmower's sister, later explained that the comments had had nothing to do with racism. "What it has to do with is . . . rap. It's going to be hip hop. It's going to be controversial language."
Enola added, in awkward English, "The acts that are booked are very sexually explicit; they waggle their tails all the time. I mean, it's pretty much vulgar to me."
Napa is not famous for its support of diversity. Even so there's something surprising in the candid way these sisters of privilege express themselves in public.
According to a 2005 study by the National Institute of Health, 3.7 % of our population is sociopathic and 6.2% is narcissistic. So if you go to a baseball game, and 50,000 people attend, nearly 5,000 of them will probably be jerks.
We all learn about jerks the same way, through encountering them in schools or at work. The learning process is quite painful, but we get so we can identify jerks and avoid them and, with luck, do them some harm.
I have avoided buying Kozlowski Farms pies, because a woman of that name is frequently published in The Corporate Democrat, our local newspaper. Ms. K writes brutal Republican prose. (To be fair, she may have no connection to the bakery.)
This week a good friend served me a piece of Kozlowski pie, not a bad pie, except that I encountered a bite that was too chewy and fished a rubber band out of my mouth.
"Asteroid City" is a Wes Anderson movie about everything that offers no insights into anything.
Fifty years ago the film would have been called self-reflexive. Today it is called meta-something. That means it talks about itself. So people began leaving at halftime.
Scarlett Johansson and Jason Schwartzman are pretty good, but they aren't on screen enough to hide the dim mess at the heart of the endeavor.
A movie about everything is a movie about nothing.
Along the campaign trail, Pence frequently meets rural folk who ask him if Trump is still the real president. No one asks if Pence is still the real vice president. Or why he calls his wife "Mother."
According to science we live in a major cooling period, part of an ice age that began about 70 million years ago. Several major factors brought on the ice age, scientists now say. Among them was a decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide, about a 30% drop. Data suggests that the CO2 was trapped in the deep ocean.
From what I have read (I am not a scientist) we know how to remove carbon dioxide from the air and sink it in the deep ocean. This happens naturally in the ice age cycles. We have the money and technology--some say--to cool the planet in a few decades. If true, why aren't we talking about it?
