Recall

 Nearly everyone in Sonoma County who sees this has already decided to vote against the recall of Gov. Newsom and the County District Attorney. If Newsom loses, he will be replaced by a malignant tRumper. If the D.A. loses, the office will be empty--no one is running to replace her. 

I don't care for either of them, but here I am supporting them. 

I suppose history is rich in powerful, murderous sociopaths like Nero or the current governors of Florida and Texas. I wish that what we are going through was unusual, but I've lived through a time that contained the Holocaust, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, many massacres, and now elected officials promoting the deaths of hundreds of thousands of voters. And the warming of the planet. 

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Leaving Afghanistan

When I was very young, Hitler set out to conquer the world and failed. The world is large; there weren't enough Germans to go around. 

The size calculation wasn't difficult to make, but I bet Hitler had been a bad math student when he was attending school with young Ludwig Wittgenstein. In any case, the same mistake has also been made by Tojo, Stalin and George W. Bush, none of whom could count accurately.  

The United States is never going to rule the world, serve as the world's police force or protect the women in a hundred medieval nations. In fact, according to George Will last week, we should not even adopt an equal rights amendment to protect American women.

As we abandon Afghanistan, my suggestion, despite Will, is that we work on equality for women in North America, where we live and can make a difference. 

California

 

The new census shows that White people now make up 35% of the residents in California, while Latinos make up 39.4%. Maybe someone should notify the Republican Party.

Cuomosexualism

 Cuomosexualism is the practice of riding the subway at rush hour in order to press yourself against other bodies.

The Refusers

People who today refuse vaccination have not suddenly become foolish. They were foolish in high school.  

In general the best among us are mediocre at weighing relative risks. Some people are worse than mediocre. 

Yesterday  the Republican governor of one state announced that everyone in his state who died recently of the coronavirus was unvaccinated. Nobody has died from the vaccination. So what are the odds that vaccination is worse than the disease?

TV  showed a small resort town in a state where there are no mask restrictions or distancing rules. People from more competent states are flocking this small town for vacations, where many will get infected and some will die. When interviewed they said that vaccination is a private matter (it's a public health issue). They said they were reclaiming their freedom from the government (but they obediently strap on seatbelts). 

Their true reason, in many cases, is that they are afraid of the vaccination. They don't trust the government, which has lied to them most of their lives.  And they don't trust science. They don't know how to weigh the odds. They've made another bad decision. 

Marcos

In an effort to escape for a few hours the media coverage of  Cuomosexualism, I turned to reading ON THE  PLAIN OF SNAKES by Paul Theroux, an account of Theroux's recent trip through Mexico. 

When I was young, we drove into Mexico without a thought. We did everything without a thought. I'd think twice now.

The border and many resort areas are controlled today  by warring cartels. You don't go out at night. Many ordinary people consider the police more dangerous than the cartels. Parts of Mexico have failed to provide safety, medical care, education and social welfare. Which brings me to the Zapatistas, a group Theroux encountered. 

About 40 years ago a socialist rebellion began among the Mayas in Chiapas, led, after a fashion, by a former philosophy professor in a mask. At the time he called himself Subcomandante  Marcos. He took the title of subcomandante to make it clear that he was subordinate. He and a small group of followers set out to find what the Indians in the countryside actually wanted. This is probably what set him apart from the missionaries, the  Chomskys, the UN missions, the Gueveras of the civilized world, who came to enlighten, not to listen. 

If you want to help, first find out what the people want. 

Mexico, I guess, had other fish to fry and did not really care all that much when the Indians in Chiapas set up a state within the state, one that has lasted since the 1980s. The army came and killed some people and left and so on. 

Marcos, still masked and hidden and free after all this time, wrote:  "Behind our face masks is the face of all women excluded. Of all the indigenous people forgotten. Of all the homosexuals persecuted. Of young people belittled. Of all migrants beaten. Of all people imprisoned for their thoughts or words. Of all workers humiliated. Of all who died in oblivion. Of all the simple and ordinary men and women who don't count, who are not seen, who are not named, who have no tomorrows." In 2002  he wrote of the Basque separatists that "neither this noble cause, nor any other, can justify the sacrifice of human lives. Not only does it (killing civilians) not lead to any political gain, even if it did, the human cost is unpayable. We condemn  military acts that hurt civilians. And we condemn them equally, whether they come from ETA or from the Spanish state, from Al Qaeda or George W. Bush, from the Israelis or Palestinians, or anyone who . . . makes victims of children, women, old people and men who have had nothing to do with the matter."

Herd Immunity?

Nothing I say below is new but my grasp of what doctors have been saying improved recently. 

Herd immunity may occur when 70% or more of the community is immune to a disease. Sonoma right now has 70% of its population vaccinated, along with another 8% that has taken the first shot. But the infection rate has risen fast in recent weeks.

I suspect that the problem is that the vaccines do not make people immune. The vaccines will save your life if you get infected, but they don't immunize you from catching covid or transmitting it. 

I'm not annoyed by all this. The scientists are at work. They learn more as they go along. 

Vigilantes

"There is no precedent for what happened."--a newscaster

What happened is that on January 6, 2021, several thousand vigilantes stormed the American capitol and fought with the police. 

In 1864 vigilantes in Montana lynched Sheriff Henry Plummer. For a hundred years after the Civil War, white vigilantes tortured, mutilated, burned and lynched black people at will. 

Vigilantes are groups of men formed to attack genuine or imaginary threats to their privileges. A recent example was an organization of armed volunteers that operated on the border with Mexico, where they illegally captured people crossing into the United States. ( The Border Control cooperated with them.) 

In Michigan last year vigilantes took control of the state capitol and planned to capture, try and execute the governor of the state. 

Vigilante groups sometimes form in places where the criminal justice system is seen as weak or corrupt. Vigilantes believe strongly that they are preventing or punishing crimes, and sometimes they are. But often the vigilantes are committing crimes ranging from assault to murder.

A good film on the topic is "The Ox-Bow Incident" (1942). A powerful short story is Nathaniel Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux," set in 1732. 

Ross Douthat

I seldom read Ross Douthat's political musings because he's foolish, but this week an editor gave his column a headline that interested me: "How Conservatives Can Reshape Education."

After examining the possibilities, Douthat concluded that the only chance conservatives have to reshape education is to get involved in it. If conservatives become the teachers and administrators and college professors and so on, they might have an impact on what gets taught.

The problem with Douthat's plan is the it would require conservatives to understand students and care about them and work for mediocre wages. They would become liberals.

Also reality has a liberal bias. 

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