Safety and Happiness

In the Declaration of Independence, the founders of our country made two central functions of government clear: to keep us safe and to make our lives better. (Look at the last two words in the quotation below.) 

Donald Trump is not keeping us safe. He is trashing our medical research programs and our alliances with other democracies. 

I feel less happy. He's not making my life better. Tariffs are ripping the world economy apart. And the rent is too damn high. 

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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Berklee

My granddaughter, Daisy, auditioned for the Berklee College of Music in Boston and was accepted and granted some tuition money, which she will need. The college made it clear that they want her.

Berklee, which has ties to Harvard, is one of the great colleges for the study of popular music. Former students include Quincy Jones, Steven Tyler, Gillian Welch, Chaka Khan, Melissa Ethridge, Diana Krall, Johnny Ramone, Natalie Maines and so on. 

Johnny Ramone? "I want to be sedated."

Daisy is a singer with tested perfect pitch, and she knows how to hold a microphone. Her father, Mark Meritt, a guitarist and singer, has guided Daisy's development. She's been performing with local bands in the Bay Area since childhood. 

MAGA and TIME

                            

About 100 years ago, Calvin Goss, my paternal grandfather, signed up with the KKK in Fresno, California. His Klan recruiter got to keep half the ten dollars a membership cost. He’d told Cal that the KKK served free beer at its meetings, the first of many lies used to separate untutored white men from their money.  

Disappointed, Cal quit a year later.

. . . . . . . . . .

Consider Andrew Jackson, who defied the court system. He rounded up American Indians and deported them, in brutal conditions, to Oklahoma. Consider FDR, who sent innocent Japanese-American citizens to concentration camps for years. During the Civil War, Lincoln jailed suspected Democrats, ignoring the Constitution. 

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The USA  has always had a large MAGA group devoted to making America white, male and Christian. 

They lynched Joseph Smith. They murdered Medgar Evers. 

MAGA is built in. It hides like shingles and then returns. We should fight MAGA. We will win significant battles but not see a final victory. 

The Center

I was reading a conservative, anti-Trump columnist. He ended by advising the Democrats  to build their party "from the center out." But where is the center?

Are centrists the voters who can't decide between the Namby-Pamby Party and the Raving Loony Party? What would a centrist leader be like? 

The Long Game

Trump has lost the tariff war. 

Chess players used to say that a bad plan beats no plan.

Trump has no plan. He does have biases. He acts on impulse, surrounded by the kind of yes-men who consider electric cars unmanly  

He does not understand what a tariff is or how it works. He has no idea how much to charge or why. He's floundering, making up numbers based on bullshit.  

Trump, on television, invited the other national  leaders to "kiss my ass."

China plays the long game. 

Problem Solved

In the April 21 The New Yorker, Sarah Stillman analyses about fifty incidents in which prisoners in American county jails died of starvation and related problems.

That's surprising until you think about it. 

Suppose a mentally ill person spits on a police officer. That's illegal. We clap her in a county jail. That's how we handle useless trash. It's traditional. The pilgrims did it. 

Locked up, she might not trust the county bread and water. She abstains for a week or two and dies. 

Problem solved. 

The Manufactioners

The USA is the second largest nation in the world when it comes to manufacturing. China, with three times our population, is first.

El Supremo's tariff war is not about manufacturing. He wants the leaders of other nations to journey to Washington and kiss his giant bum.  He wants to feel good. But he never will. 

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How Class Came to America

In public schools long ago I was miseducated about the first European settlers in America. I learned back then that the settlers were particularly devout Christians seeking religious freedom or that they came to the New World to settle on unused land and make it fruitful. 

In fact, most early settlers were shipped here against their will. They were sent as indentured servants to do the work. Great Britain hoped, in this way, to rid itself of vagabonds, orphans, thieves, prostitutes and the unproductive poor. 

In the New World they could work hard or die. Either way it solved a British problem.

People that Hillary Clinton might have called "deplorables" became indentured servants  without pay for up to nine years. 

For example,  a man convicted of robbery in 1633 had his property sold and given to his victims. He was sentenced to three years as an indentured servant. His daughter (a child, I suspect) was sentenced to 14 years as a servant. It would be the duty of her new American master to see that she was raised properly--that was standard at the time. 

There were, in 1633,  two classes of people even lower than indentured servants: American Indians and "strangers" (enslaved black people). 

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Movement

Saturday I biked to the anti-Trump rally in Santa Rosa. Courthouse Square was jammed with thousands of protestors holding home-made signs. So many people I had difficulty reaching the square. No parking. 

When younger I participated in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. This demonstration felt like that, like a movement that came from people, not from a political party. 

The crowd looked different, made up of a mix of middle-class families, radicals, retirees, etc. All sorts of people have problems with Musk/Trump. 

I must have had friends in the area, but, lost in the crowds, I didn't see anyone. And I'm old now. I left early.

Everyone do something, even a small thing.

Trump Is Not Mistaken

This week President Trump has presented us with charts, calculations and figures representing tariffs as they currently exist. Have he and his team made mistakes in their calculations? 

This is from Wittgenstein (sort of). Suppose you ask Jean-Paul to divide 50 by two. His answer is 125,001.  Has he made a mistake?

No. Jean-Paul has no idea how to calculate. He doesn't know enough to make an error. In the words of the song, he can't get started.

Trump and his team have no idea how tariffs work or how to add them up or calculate impact and so on. 

They just make up numbers to put on charts.