A False Accusation

I am falsely accusing Pete Hegseth of sexual assault.  That's on the assumption that he will pay me $50,000 for a false accusation, something this good man has done for others in the past. 

When it comes to money, I could use a little extra. 

Doctor Zhivago

The film version of Doctor Zhivago grossed the equivalent of 2 billion dollars worldwide. 

The movie follows two star-crossed lovers, married to other people, tragically caught in a huge revolution that tosses them hither and yon.  

The ending is unusual. The two main characters are long dead. Zhivago's powerful half-brother, Yevgraf, visits a power plant deep in the USSR to determine if a young worker there, Tonya Komarov,  is his niece. She has no idea who he is or who her birth parents had been. He doesn't tell her. But he sees in her the artistic talent that runs through his family. The end.

Why is that so powerful? Here's what I think.

The USSR had been idealistically devoted to creating a new sort of human, adults dedicated to the state and humanity as whole. Not to family. The new kind of citizen was not to be  sidetracked by art, music or love. 

But in the odd, final scenes of the film, the personal survives. Yevgraf cares about his niece. Stalin's attempt to create a new kind of person has failed. 

MLK

America is getting the president it deserves today, but I'm not going to watch. I will be thinking about MLK. I once stood twenty feet from him as he talked with students at UCLA.

The Constitution

In the army I took an oath to defend the Constitution. That's fine. I still defend it, although  it is a strange old thing. 

The Constitution gives us a platform for discussion and governance. 

I'm guessing the Constitution took the form it did for many reasons, and one big reason was that men educated at Harvard feared that white working-class men might outvote them in a democracy and grab their money. 

So the rich wrote a labyrinthine, difficult constitution designed to keep the rich in power.  

Today, though, tech billionaires have allied themselves with working-class white men to pick a king, to destroy the Constitution and to beat down the mildly progressive middle-class. 

This alliance of the rich with white workers to destroy the middle class has happened in other countries.

 It doesn't make sense for billionaires to attack the system that enriched them. Maybe they get addled by the impact of super-wealth. They surround themselves with fawning yes-men. They begin to think they are wise. 

 

 

to insure (if possible) that mobs of inferior thinkers could not come to power. The inferiors--women, people of color and ignorant poor white males--were denied the vote. That way no inferior could threaten rich white males.  

The basic American political platform mixed some democratic representation with some oligarchy or rule by the Harvard-educated elite. Governors could be elected directly by white men, but Presidents would be elected by a conclave of deep thinkers called "the electoral college," which is not a college.

That political system, patched and sometimes improved,  held together until last November when a lot of power was won by the irrational male mob so feared by Benjamin Franklyn. This mob was funded by stupid billionaires. But the mob and the stupid billionaires have incompatible goals. 

Who knows what will come next?

I'm just guessing.

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Priorities

 "When asked where she will spend the most time in her new title, Melania told Fox, 'I will be in the White House. And when I need to be in New York, I will be in New York. When I need to be in Palm Beach, I will be in Palm Beach. My first priority is to be a mom, to be a first lady, to be a wife.'"

How many First Ladies have formulated and announced three first priorities?

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, trembling, announced last week that he was shutting down the fact-checking at Facebook. 

That raised concerns. We are still in the opening discussion of how to deal with internet media, its impact on children, on politics, etc. But attempts to defend the fact-checking at Facebook overlook something important.

The fact-checkers at FaceBook were idiots. The whole system was bent, alien, unworkable and a can of stale nuts. 

From the Pages of American History

When, at the request of President Jefferson, Lewis and Clark led an exploration of the American West, they had to feed themselves along the way. It is a fact that they ate 200 dogs. 

Lewis took with them (and did not eat) a giant Newfoundland dog, named Seaman. The dog excelled at retrieving game and chasing bears.

Only two statues of Seaman have been erected.  

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Barbara Lee

I see that Barbara Lee is running for mayor of Oakland. Good news! She was a thoughtful and dependable member of congress for years. Any city could use a leader like Lee. 

The Stupid

I've become interested in political stupidity. 

Stupidity, as I see it, is an inability to think rationally. In that case, we are born stupid. 

Later some of us learn to think rationally part of the time--if we have rational parents or helpful experiences or a good education, etc. 

Here are a few key points I picked up from my reading.

There are more stupid people than you think.

Stupid people often reject rational thinking as elitist.

The stupid often vote against their self-interest and your self-interest.  

Stupidity is an independent variable. A man can be a brilliant engineer and politically illogical. 

A political party that does not win a good chunk of the stupid vote will lose. 

You win the votes of the stupid by agreeing with their disjointed views. 

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