The SF Giants and Niners

Yesterday we learned that one of the principle owners of the San Francisco Giants, Charles Johnson (85), gave the maximum contribution to the campaign of America's newest racist senator, Hyde-Smith of Mississippi. The brutal Hyde family is back among us.

It's possible that Johnson didn't know Hyde-Smith is an overt racist, but he did know she is a Republican. 

The Niners, on the other hand, fired a useful linebacker, Reuben Foster, because he may have slapped his woman-friend around and definitely found himself arrested again. Foster was immediately hired by another NFL team, the Washington Racist Slur. The Slur believe they can provide the supportive environment needed by long-term domestic abusers. Some now claim that racist slurs and abuse of women are at times joined together, along with homophobia, in football leadership. 

Trump's Nobel Prize

Today Pres. Spanky got to obsessing in public about the probability he will be cheated out of the Nobel Prize. It wasn't clear which Nobel prize he meant. Perhaps the prize in literature for his tweets or in physics for his contributions to global warming. Of maybe he should get a special prize for his expert portrayal of most of the personality disorders known to psychology.

The Guns of Thanksgiving

Our modern version of Thanksgiving is the result of a campaign by a prominent editor in the 1860s named Sarah Josepha Hale, who also wrote "Mary Had A Little Lamb." She was known as "a woman of masculine energy." Then she was forgotten.

The Pilgrims brought thanksgivings events with them from England, where fasting and harvest festivals were intended by the pious to replace dubious pagan holidays like Christmas and Easter.  

From day one the Puritans and then others held occasional secular and religious thanksgiving fasts and feasts to celebrate whatever seemed important to them, often military victories. President Washington suggested that states put together thanksgiving holidays.  Thanksgiving remained a locally scheduled series of holidays, not regularized into one federal holiday until Lincoln did it in 1863. That was not our most thankful year. A great number of young Americans were killing one another. 

From colonial days onward some parts of the South resisted this Yankee holiday.  

Canada and many other countries influenced by Europe have their own versions of Thanksgiving, but it isn't such a big deal. 

In 1941 Congress made the holiday permanent in the United States. 

As far as I know, the fasting, feasting and giving of thanks to Jesus have had little to do with America's original settlers. If your school made you don a onesy and war bonnet and participate in a Thanksgiving pageant, forget about it. You should have been waving a musket and wearing a powdered wig. 

Bread and Circuses

Ancient Rome reached a point where poor people greatly outnumbered the rich, so the nervous authorities began to distribute grain and stage chariot races and entertaining gladiator fights and so on. The poet Juvenal famously called these precautions "bread and circuses." Food prices were regulated and kept low. And it worked. The poor did not get hungry and attack the rich.

America has a related problem today. People are employed, but wages are low.  Getting new glasses or getting your teeth pulled can be unaffordable. The rich outlive the poor, on average, by 14 years. Meanwhile knuckleheads like President Spanky (who inherited hundreds of millions) flourish. The Republican response has been an attempt to punish people for being poor. Republicans want to cut entitlements. That is guaranteed to irritate a majority of people. 

The party that works hard to provide health care, to raise the minimum wage and to keep bread cheap will have an edge.

The Sameness of MSNBC

Many years ago I was elected to serve on a faculty committee that weighed in on personnel disputes. I was sent to examine and report on a case where a tenure candidate, Jane Doe, had gotten a vote of only 65% from her colleagues. I scheduled interviews with Jane Doe and her colleagues. In the end the main accusation against Doe was that she dressed herself exactly like a senior professor, who bitterly resented being copied.

I wrote the complaint up, perhaps expressing reservations about the nature of the charge against Jane Doe, who seemed like a regular professor to me, and she got tenure. 

What brought this back to mind was watching MSNBC this morning. This station has at least three nearly indistinguishable but intelligent blonde hosts with the same hair, same coloring, same age, same big lips, etc., and this morning two of them were on at the same time, interviewing one another while wearing the same clothing.  Wow. 

A Moron in Paradise

Last week we saw President Moron visiting Paradise, California, where a raging forest fire had totally destroyed a town of 26,000 people. This may have been the first time Moron had ventured outside and into a forest; and he was visibly upset. For one thing, the forest floor was filthy, littered with dirt and pine needles. He wanted cleaners sent into the foothills of the Sierras. “This is a management problem,” he insisted. 

He might have been able to call the American Army in to police the forest floor, but he had already sent the army to our southern border to fend off hundreds of families and youngsters seeking asylum.

What matters is that Moron may have opened a needed discussion, which is how do we live with the monstrous fires resulting from global warming? I've seen one fire up close. It's no joke. Fortunately, the answer is straightforward and inevitable. 

We have to build fireproof structures and make them safe by surrounding them with fireproof grounds. The fires will happen. We let the fires flow around us. We watch fires race by. And we stop using oil, coal and natural gas.

Rich!!!

Suppose you own five hundred acres of empty ground in downtown Chicago, but you have to live on social security. Are you a rich woman?

Suppose you are a nation with gigantic holdings in corporations, oil fields and Wall Street, but your bridges are falling down, your people's teeth are falling out and your school textbooks are fifty years out of date. Are you the richest country in the world?

Death for Republicans

The Associated Press summarized what has happened to politics in California, once Nixon and Reagan country and today America’s biggest tax base: demographic change. And California is the future.

In California racism will no longer get a candidate elected. People of color outnumber white people. Independents outnumber Republicans. The Democrats hold a 41 to 9 edge in House seats. One House district with a 7 point Republican registration advantage ousted an incumbent Republican because so many Republican voters found Trump toxic. They elected a protege of Elizabeth Warren.

Hillary Clinton carried Orange County, a legendary Republican stronghold.

So far the Republican Party has learned nothing from its defeats. It's doubling down on a losing hand.

The nation and state need two or more viable parties to give voters at least a shadow of choice. The Republicans in California are on life support. For the moment, the voters  mostly are choosing between the two wings of the Democratic Party, who seem fairly well matched.

If the nation's deluded Republican leaders and voters can re-orient themselves to face reality, their party might avoid joining the Passenger Pigeon.

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Mars?

Jim Jefferies recently explained what might be wrong with the idea of Americans settling people on Mars. Mars, Jefferies points out, is a piece of crap.  We could go there and fix it up, but it would be a lot cheaper to fix up our own planet.