HIV Cured

Close to 20 years ago, my brother-in-law died. He'd insured himself to the hilt to protect his wife and daughter. He was smart and he was brave, and he died from AIDS like a man. Today I read that maybe 5% of HIV patients can be cured. The rest can usually live long and healthy lives. We can thank science for that, unless we are teabaggers and don't believe in biology or Darwin or climate change.

Pope Francis Speaks

Now that the College of Cardinals has elected a new leader, Pope Francis, whose parents were both Italian, we have the first Pope from outside of Europe in many centuries. Among Americans, including my many Catholic relatives, questions have been raised about the Pope's name. We should insist on one thing: he was not named for a talking horse. The talking horse was Mr. Ed. He was only on TV. There is no Pope Ed. Francis was a talking mule, voiced by Chill Wills, in a series of movies in the 1950s.

Dennis Rodman

Top story in THE BOHEMIAN: Hugo Chavez dies just before his turn to meet Dennis Rodman.

The ECONOMIST on Hugo Chavez

I have friends who swear by a magazine called THE ECONOMIST. This British publication has a circulation of about 750,000 proud readers in the USA. I have tried to keep away from economists, myself, after one of them told me to pull my pension funds out of the stock market when the S&P had reached about 3,000. Shortly after that, when the S&P went to 14,000,  I became convinced that economists don't know jack. Today I've found a few economists I listen to, but that's another matter.

This morning our local paper republished a story from THE ECONOMIST on the legacy of Hugo Chavez, and I will attempt to translate two sentences of it from the British for you right here. For example, in discussing Venezuela's booming oil income, ECON wrote: "Chavez used this windfall to buy himself popular support, with social programs and handouts." In  American English that would read "Chavez used the nation's oil money to lower the percentage of his citizens living below the poverty line from 22% to 8%, the third lowest in South America."

I realize that my translation omits something vital from the ECON article, as translations often do. Perhaps I should try again. "Chavez used the nation's oil money to lower the percentage of his citizens living below the poverty line from 22% to 8%, the third lowest in South America, the dirty bastard."  That seems to capture the ECON tone a little better. 

The last sentence of the ECON article reads: "Now that the man has gone, however, Latin America's democrats have an easier task." Here the translation is much simpler. Where the ECONOMIST used the term "democrats," the rest of us would use the term "capitalists." In THE ECONOMIST, confusedly, the two words are employed as synonyms.     

Fears at the Fringe

I am a progressive in a progressive place. I hold that science is our most reliable discourse. I try to be brave. I live in North County. Our most progressive voters reside in West County, where some live lives of fear. 

Many are afraid of food. For starters, they fear wheat, the staff of life. Nationally 1.5% of the country is allergic to gluten, but in West County the perceived  figure is closer to 40%. Some of my friends fear the elected government every bit as much as the Tea Party does. They fear that the President is a Fascist. One town recently banned SmartMeters, so the utility company has stopped all work there. The ban exposes the city to lawsuits. 

Yes, some progressives in West County fear electricity. They remind me of my great-grandmother, Mary Berry, who came over on the boat. She feared telephones. As someone else pointed out, West County has banned  SmartMeters but has yet to ban routers, laptops,  TVs, iPads and Kindles, nor have they taken down the transmitting cell towers. Only a few have turned off the lights. 

Fluoridation, as you might expect, terrifies the fringe. The fact that most of the nation has been drinking fluoridated water for 70 years and nothing bad has happened is overruled by this: if you feed a rat nothing but fluoride and chicken fat, it will not prosper. And to hell with the poor kids who parents don't provide fluoridated toothpaste. Let their teeth rot. The fringe fear flu shots, of course, and all inoculations. The way they see it, if everyone else gets a flu shot, they won't need one.

CHAVEZ and BUSH

The death of Hugo Chavez yesterday saddens me. He was a colorful dude, and we won't see  his like again. To me (no expert) he seemed the sort of political leader who excelled at getting elected but lacked the wisdom to lead effectively. Clearly his heart was with the poor of the world. When he first took office, I supported him, drawn by his courage and charisma. When he changed the Venezuelan constitution so he could be elected in perpetuity, I dropped my meaningless support. He'd made a foolish decision, and he went on to make others. But unlike a worse corrupter of the democratic process, George W. Bush, Chavez never killed people by the thousands. He did not rejigger laws to profit the rich at the expense of everyone else.

The Darwin Award

Each year some Darwin Awards are given out to damned fools who can no longer reproduce, thereby improving our genetic stock.
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Below is a story from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, an entry in the Darwin Awards contest.

    [Arkansas Democrat Gazette]:"Two local men were injured when their pickup truck left the road and struck a tree near Cotton Patch on State Highway 38 early one Monday. Thurston Poole, 33, of Des Arc, and Billy Ray Wallis, 38, of Little Rock, were returning to Des Arc after a frog-gigging trip. On an overcast Sunday night, Poole's pickup truck headlights malfunctioned. The two men concluded that the headlight fuse on the older-model truck had burned out. A replacement fuse was not available, but Wallis noticed that the 22 caliber bullet from his pistol fit perfectly into the fuse box next to the steering-wheel column. Upon inserting the bullet the headlights again began to operate properly, and the two men proceeded eastbound toward the White River Bridge. After traveling approximately 20 miles, and just before crossing the river, the bullet apparently overheated, discharged, and struck Poole in the testicles. The vehicle swerved sharply right, exiting the pavement and striking a tree. Poole suffered only minor cuts and abrasions from the accident, but will require extensive surgery to repair the damage to his testicles, which will never operate as intended. Wallis sustained a broken clavicle and was treated and released. "Thank God we weren't on that bridge when Thurston shot his balls off, or we might both be dead," stated Wallis.

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In an unrelated matter, you should know that not all Catholic women secretly use contraception, a lesbian told me.

Cultural Theft

My favorite news commentators on TV are Melissa Harris Perry, Laurence O'Donnell, and Bill Moyers. I respect great intelligence. But this morning Perry, a young black woman, did a segment that left me somewhat bemused. In her final minutes on air, she talked about the Harlem Shake, not a new form of popular dance but one that has caught new attention in recent weeks. She had two basic problems with this. The name "Harlem Shake" was being applied to all sorts of hopping around that did not deserve it (which I found interesting),  and the groups doing this were guilty of cultural theft. They were stealing culture from the black people of Harlem. Melissa Harris Perry takes this seriously., Although she has a white mother, she identifies herself as a black woman.

What made the last complaint--about cultural theft--odd is that Melissa Harris Perry delivered it in an Indo-European language. She is a full professor at Tulane, a strikingly successful inheritor of non-African cultures going back to the Middle East, Greece, Rome and Great Britain. I am not, of course, accusing her of cultural theft. By definition you can't steal what is free for the taking. We learn from one another. The contributions made to American culture by black people are endless in number, and so are the contributions made by other groups, including the Scotch-Irish, who gave us Princeton, where Perry worked for a while, and songs like "I'll Fly Away." Also they gave us the surname "Harris."






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On Not Making Water on Charles Krauthammer

I am writing today in protest against the movement sweeping the Internet for people to travel to the grave of Charles Krauthammer at some future date, after his passing, where they will make water on his grave. 

Why do I protest? Krauthammer may be as bitter as dirt in your mouth, but he's a clear thinker and a terrific asset to corporate America.  Yes, I know yesterday Krauthammer wrote that the sequester is a trifling matter and predicts that "nothing bad" will happen. Meanwhile, in the same issue of my newspaper, I read that our county's school districts will lose more than $4 million in funds that would have gone for free lunches, reading instruction and language work. But what's wrong with skipping breakfast and lunch for a few years? The children are young. They'll hardly notice, and don't we have too many overweight people already? 

During the sequester "nothing bad" will happen to Charles Krauthammer. That is what matters. He'll be eating the strawberries and heavy cream his contributions to our national dialogue deserve. Let's not even think about his urine-soaked future.