Technology-Enabled Savagery

In The New Yorker  John Cassidy wrote about America:


"Despite a rising tide of gun violence and political extremism, it has repeatedly failed to adapt its institutions and its laws—particularly those relating to guns and the online spread of hate speech—to an age of technology-enabled savagery." Cassidy's point is that our country is malfunctioning.

I'll add this. We are now down to one political party, and  it is out of power.

Saps We Admire

There's a category of saps we admire. This, of course, is a topic that will annoy people. It certainly annoyed my wife. Or some might want to add to my short list.

The classic example, I suppose, is Paul Henreid in CASABLANCA. Ingrid Bergman flies off to the safety of London with this noodnik at the end of the film when she could have had Humphrey Bogart. She does this to bolster a dude important to the Czech resistance. What? you may ask. Does the overthrow of Hitler really depend on a Czech's girlfriend?  Or George Patton?  

Don't misunderstand. Bergman's inexplicable and terrible decision is what makes the film shockingly great.  Without it, what would be left would be good but ordinary.

We've all seen people do that kind of thing. "My god," we think, "that decision ruins three lives or more lives if there are children, and I've made a few bad choices myself."

Another example of a noodnik is Mr. Rogers. I saw film of him on the news today, brought back on TV by the massacre of Jews in his Pittsburgh neighborhood. He assured me that we live in a wonderful world. 



 Czech Resistance leader,

The Globalists

Trump and Kevin McCarthy have stepped forward as classic anti-Semites, denouncing billionaires George Soros, Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg. Soros has been accused of funding the group of Central Americans slowly walking toward our southern border to seek asylum. The right to ask for asylum is settled law. Soros has funded none of this.  But he is a rich Jew who supports liberal causes. Trump's base of Klansmen and Nazis and deranged potential killers get the anti-Semitic message. Unstable men will continue to act on it. Soros is a marked man.

No doubt Trump and McCarthy and other Republicans will be quick to say that some of their best friends--and even some children--are Jews. How can a dear friend of Bibi Netanyahu be an anti-Semite?

Two days after a bomb was sent to Soros' house, the National Republican Party ran an ad denouncing Soros. The Republican anti-Semitic campaign continues this morning. It will not stop.

Who your friends or relatives are doesn't define you. If you encourage anti-Semitism, if you pass laws banning Muslims, if you ignore the lethal targeting of Barack Obama, you are a bigot. If you denounce "globalists" we (and Nazis) understand that you mean Jews. This is not complicated.

The Jewish Vote

(I wrote this the day before the Pittsburgh massacre, the worst mass murder of Jews in USA history.)

My wife is a Jew, and who the Jews are matters to our family. I can hear Trump's cruel voice mincing on TV as I sit here. He's supported by the KKK and the American Nazis. We understand that our bloated President and Bibi work hand in hand. So where do America Jews stand on all this ?

About 71% voted for Hillary. Current polls show that in 2018, 74% of the Jews plan to support the Democrats.  They may be only 2% of our population, but their impact on elections matters.

Verdict First!

President Spank-My-Bottom has called for the death penalty for the Pittsburgh shooter. This is perfect ALICE IN WONDERLAND.  

Verdict first, trial second!

Death in Pittsburgh

Yesterday we saw the quick arrest of a Trump supporter who sent more than a dozen bombs to political leaders, the largest American assassination attempt since the murder of Abraham Lincoln.  Copycats were expected. This morning we saw an anti-Semite murdering people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh; and the police gathered there to engage the terrorist. Three officers have been shot, many Jews dead, shooter in custody.

Conspiracies of hate are not new, but our current President, a mentally ill slob, has emboldened the KKK and American Nazis and the violent Right. What stands between us and them is the police. Many of us have a somewhat adversarial view of the police, and people of color fear law enforcement with good reason. But how quickly we turn to the cops when the need arises. Patrol officers run into gunfire because that's part of their job.

The Herd and William Morris

Near Monterey, in the old days, the cattle would gather into a herd on November 11th of each year to discuss how they'd like to be eaten. Some would argue for all-beef franks while others spoke for ground chuck or prime rib and so forth.  Then one year a longhorn named William Morris made his way to the stage and announced he had a shocking new idea. "I would like not be eaten," he said.

Morris was mooed off the stage. The boss bulls voted to eliminate the right of longhorns to speak at meetings. The bulls talked about the need for animals to be practical if they hoped to enjoy the feed lots, something Morris admitted he had not considered.  The debate restarted and sensible bovines soon compromised and reached a consensus: barbecue.

(also on Facebook)

Please Lie to Me

Someone has noticed that President Spanky's voters do understand that he lies seven times a day. Of course, they do. And they love it. 

Spanky's lying endears him to them.

I'm guessing that the Trump voter has a belief system built on denying reality. In this post-factual galaxy, white men have the right to grope women of every race, white people are smarter and more moral than people of color, old people are more worthy than young people, cruelty is kindness, feminism is toxic, your status is determined by a new car, Latinos are lazy and an imaginary wall will block inferior and criminal people from arriving in the States on boats and planes. 

Maintaining this weird belief system requires constant lying to yourself. A President who lies with authority, the most powerful white man in the world, who lies seven times a day, dominating the media, is a buttress that keeps the ceiling from falling on nutters. So nutters love him ten times as much as they did Reagan or Nixon, who settled for half measures. 

Gender and Sec

President Dribble-Cup Spanky, in his daily effort to harm voters and to stir up the most base among his base, is threatening to make it government policy that the words "sex" and "gender" mean the same thing (and it isn't "gender"). His political method is to make it federal policy that transgender people don't really exist and to pretend that the sexual and gender categories that actually exist are really fictions. 

My guess is that most Americans don't have a firm grip of the two key words and already tend to blur them together. I see the words misused daily. 

Sex is a name for the differences between the male or female of a species, distinguishing them by the reproductive organs and the behavior dependent on these famous organs. Note the word "behavior." The definition is beginning to blur.

When a word is vague or blurry, it can be a mistake to attempt to sharpen its definition. Vague words have their uses. 

Gender is a person's internal sense of all this. Gender identities are, in reality, many: but in Spanky's truncated world view, that of a five-year-old dimwit, there are only two genders, female and male or spanker and spankee. 

How all this will end no one knows. Languages apparently have minds of their own and develop out of my control. I resent that. So does the French Academy, which pretends to be in control of French.