Category: Personal/Misc.

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A Tariffic Time Was Had By All — The Art of the Dealt

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

February 3rd 2025

When Donald Trump called me to tell me that if I didn’t give him what he wanted, he was going to slap tariffs on me, I was nonplussed. Weren’t the price of eggs already too high? “Please, Mister Trump,” I begged him. “What do you want, Mister Trump?”

There was a pause. I was sure Donald knew what he wanted when he picked up the phone. But you know, he’s a very important man. Important things to see, important people to do. It gets confusing.

Time to avail myself of an opportunity to fill that void.

“Do whatever you want, but please, please don’t demand I give you Mar-a-Lago. Please. Anything but that!”

“Mar-a-lago, eh?” I heard him give a sly cackle. Clearly, he thought he had be over a barrel. “OK,” he said, “Here’s my offer. I won’t slap tariffs on you if you give me Mar-a-Lago.”

I whimpered convincingly, begging him to spare me. He hung up. I looked at my phone and chuckled.

A few days later, he announced the tariffs on me. He did it on a Friday because nobody watches the news on Friday. I nearly missed it myself.

By Monday morning, the stock market people were talking openly about a market crash. Market people don’t like to talk about crashes, you know. They don’t even like to admit such things exist. Usually if a broker mentions the word ‘crash’ it means he has jumped from the plane, fallen for ten seconds, and just realized he forgot his parachute. Meanwhile, the phrase ‘trade war,’ one hated by nearly all businessmen, was being bandied about. The whole world, it seemed, was mad at Donald.

He gave me a call. “This is your last chance. Agree to giving me Mar-a-Lago and I’ll consider dropping the tariffs.”

“Sorry. Can’t do it.” I hung up.

I turned on the stock-ticker channel and watched the meltdown proceed.

The phone rang. “Give me Mar-a-Lago and I’ll drop the tariffs for two weeks.”

“No good. I’ll tariff you right back.” I reminded myself to call the stock ticker channel and make the same threat. Should put the tech stocks in a tailspin.

I watched the cartoon channel. I didn’t mean to. It’s just a bit hard to tell Looney Tunes from Fox News. Ring!

“As you know, I am a top-flight negotiator, and I’ve given this considerable thought. I want to help you here. I’ll suspend tariffs for thirty days, only by the time a month has rolled around, everyone will have forgotten them. In return, you don’t mention tariffs to anyone. You give me Mar-a-Lago, and I’ll give you $3.5 million just to sweeten the deal and make it look legit for the tax people.”

I spent thirty seconds pretending to think about it. I could almost hear him sweating over the phone. I didn’t want to think what that smelled like.

“Donald, I think we have a deal. You truly are the world’s greatest deal-maker. I tell you this, sir, with tears in my eyes.”

I wondered if any of his flunkies would work up the nerve to tell him he already owned Mar-a-Lago and I had just sold him his own property to defuse a threat he wasn’t prepared to carry out.

The money arrived the next day in the form of a bearer bond. Which was good—I wouldn’t trust a check from that guy.

Pretty good day’s work, really. Think I’ll call him tomorrow and tell him all the people at OANN are secretly woke.

But first, call Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Presidente Claudia Sheinbaum. Tell them that if they want to avoid a trade war, they should tell him their respective countries won’t swap places on the map, and that Mexico might be willing to sell him Alaska while Canada might sell him Texas.

Just my little contribution to world peace, that.

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“Medals for Everyone!” — A guide to understanding Trumpenstein II

“Medals for Everyone!”

A guide to understanding Trumpenstein II

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 17th 2024

If you haven’t seen the 1933 Marx Brothers classic “Duck Soup,” now might be a good time to do so. Raucous and absurd, it’s also a fairly handy guide to what Americans might expect over this coming year.

In the movie, a rich plutocrat (Gloria Teasdale, played by Margaret Dumont) with more money than common sense makes the nation of Freedonia an offer it can’t refuse. $20 million in US dollars (worth nearly $500 million today) but there’s a catch: she gets to appoint the next leader of Freedonia. She has someone in particular in mind: Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho Marx).

Rufus is erratic, egotistical verging on monomaniacal, impetuous and basically a force of chaos. Without the intervention of moronic money, he would never have gotten within a time zone of the levers of power.

Freedonia falls into corrupt paralysis and eventually ends up at war with its neighboring country. Freedonia collapses, and the enemy troops find Rufus and his rich sponsor, toss them in stocks and pelt them with fruit.

This being a Marx brothers movie and not the country you grew up in, it’s all very hilarious.

Thanks in large part to the power of propaganda, a majority of American voters felt liberated to be complete, vicious, selfish shits and elect a hateful nut as President. If you think of the coalition of plutocrats and corporations that promoted this (the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues, and yes, I’m going to keep right on calling them that until they throw me in the camps) as the Teasdale coalition, and Donald J. Trump as Rufus T. Firefly, then suddenly Duck Soup stops looking like an amusing, if dated parody and instead, becomes our future.

I won’t bother discussing the start of our new era. The headlines speak for themselves. Not only is it as bad a start as we can imagine, but it’s a worse start than we could imagine. Andy Borowitz caught the spirit of this new world order with a picture of Matt Gaetz and the caption: “Maybe this is what QAnon meant when they talked about bringing pedophiles to Justice.”

Our only real hope is that the new regime, like that of Rufus T. Firefly’s, will be so corrupt and incompetent that it will simply collapse before it has a chance to utterly destroy the nation. What such a collapse might entail I can’t really imagine. But it has already begun.

We’re already hearing reports of a incandescently angry Trump screaming at aides over leaks, mostly because the leaks tend to be true. We’re seeing flat-out lies already, and repression is rapidly spreading. I know that for some time the earth sciences have been moving data and access to data out of the country, a stream that has become a flood since the 5th of November. I imagine a lot of other disciplines that fall under the tent of “woke” or “bad for business” or which contradicts holy script are all doing the same thing. We’re not going to get out of this without falling into a mini-dark age at the very least.

Fortunately, most of the world’s library is on-line and safely abroad. They can ban all the books they want, but as long as people can log on overseas (magic words: Tor Browser and a virtual private network) access to knowledge and wisdom will remain.

Another reason to believe that the age of Trump might be short-lived: his policies (tariffs, deconstruction of nearly the entire federal government, deporting nearly half of the agricultural labor force) are going to be catastrophic for the economy, and no matter how much his regime tries to hide it, the same plutocrats who made Trump possible (the top ten richest Americans added $68 billion to their wealth in the DAY after Trump as elected) are going to start seeing immense losses.

Social unrest will probably rise to levels unseen since 1933. Trump wants to respond to protest violently, which is the surest path to cause discontent to blaze into full rebellion. Trump and his motley crew are probably too arrogant and too stupid to realize it, but they are creating what will become a social tsunami. It won’t be pretty.

And remember: Trump already has dementia, and is in terrible physical condition. He personally will not last, and knowing his management style, his death will create a bloodbath in every organization he heads, including the United States.

The next few years are not going to be pretty. I haven’t even discussed what America’s abdication from the world stage is going to mean, except that under the very best possible scenarios, America will no longer be the strongest nation in the world. It may not even be in the top ten.

But hang in there. History shows that things like this don’t last long unless folk like you give up. Be prepared to resist.

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The Dark Age — Once again, dear friends…

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 6th 2024

First, I want to apologize to my readers. I really blew it on my forecast on how this election was going to turn out. I’m especially sorry to those who took my forecast in good faith—I’m sure it added to the pain you are feeling now, and I deeply regret that.

I’ve been contemplating overnight and this morning over how I—and others, including the Harris campaign—so totally got it wrong.

I don’t have any real answers and indeed, more questions than I began with. How could such a large number of Hispanics support Trump? He’s made it clear that they are one of his target groups; when he says “illegal immigrants” he’s including Hispanics born here, or naturalized. They’re part of the twenty-two million people he wants to mass deport. He isn’t doing it to “save the economy.” He’s doing it because he’s a bigot, pandering to other bigots.

I don’t understand the self-professed Christians who supported him. He is the antithesis of everything they supposedly stand for.

And most of all, I don’t understand the women who voted for Trump. In seven states, freedom of reproductive choice was on the ballot, and many women in those states voted for reproductive freedom and then went ahead and voted for the man who destroyed that right in the first place!

I underestimated the power of the aggrieved anger that the right wing media—mostly run by plutocrats who wanted to use the mob to destroy the safeguards the constitution has to protect that same mob—and there was one thing I did get right; the economy is extremely strong, but it hasn’t really reached the lower middle class and the poor, even as conditions were beginning to improve.

A friend of mine once told me that revolution and revolt was most likely, not when things were at their bleakest, but when things were starting to improve. He told me that some forty years ago, and a close look at major upheavals throughout history confirms this to be true. Not always, but usually.

I have friends in the scientific community, so I was already aware of an on-going effort to save and secure date In The Event Of. Efforts will be redoubled; some of the incoming administration regard such data as either blasphemous or economically inconvenient.

America is heading for a scientific dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

The Ukraine will be on their own now, along with the states surrounding the genocidal Netanyahu. Trump wants to end NATO, which will give his buddy Putin license to invade much of eastern Europe, and he won’t stop there. The NATO nations need to start gearing up for a war footing NOW. There may be a general war in Europe within two years. The middle east will become a sea of flames, and before his mad reign ends, Netanyahu will have slaughtered millions. Other major nations currently not involved, such as Canada, Japan, India and China—may step in.

America is heading for a geopolitical dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Project 2025 is alive and well, with all its draconian plans. I was compiling data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today for a Trump-loving client, and it occurred to me to advise him that when this annual task comes due next year, neither I nor the BLS may be around.

America is heading for a governance dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Putting tariffs on most foreign imports and deliberately destroying over half the agricultural production force isn’t going to lower costs or put food on the table. Destroying nearly all federal jobs is going to create a huge labor surplus. States attempting to fill the huge gaps left will have to double, triple, quadruple taxes.

America is heading for an economic dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Trump will pursue his mad aim to encourage profligate use of fossil fuels, dooming the already inadequate efforts to mitigate climate change. The world has already entered a catastrophic zone: America is now a major part of the problem.

America is heading for an environmental dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

With the Department of Education gone, public schools will fall prey to the same people who have already benefited from spreading misinformation, disinformation, and slowing the spread of scientific and historical knowledge. Thousands of books will be banned “for the children” and eventually, movies and other forms of communication. Literacy will fall, both by design and through sheer incompetence.

America is heading for an educational dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Rights will rapidly contract and then vanish altogether. People will be told that the era between 1865 and 2025 was an aberration in American culture, and that life under our caring despots who safeguard our morals and thoughts is what the Founders really intended.

America is heading for a humanitarian dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

Here in California, and other deep blue states, talk of secession is mounting rapidly. It may, in the end, be the only way we can protect ourselves from the libertarian and fundamentalist quagmire that Trump plans. It would mean dissolution of America, and/or civil war. A peaceful way back may not be possible.

America is heading for a dark age, but there’s no reason to drag the rest of the world into it.

To the rest of the world: help us where you can, but remember our leaders will be inimical, and this sort of madness can be contagious.

We’re on our own.

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Decision Day 2024 — House and Senate up for grabs, along with our future

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 4th 2024

Kamala Harris is going to win. And fairly substantially. She will be our next president and with any luck at all, by next March Donald Trump will be just a bad memory.

But if you can vote, do so. Especially if you are in a state or a Congressional district that is even remotely close. Harris won’t be able to put many of her campaign promises into effect if Republicans control either House. At this point, I think the Dems have a good chance of taking the House back, but I’m not so sure about the Senate. Even with Mitch McConnell shuffling off to well-deserved obscurity, I expect whoever replaces him will be just as obstructionist and possibly a crazy MAGAt.

Some of the smaller polls are producing startling results. Texas might just dump Ted Cruz, and may even break for Harris, despite the best efforts of the fascist government in Texas to skewer and interfere with the vote there. North Carolina may go for Harris: a lot of voters there heard Trump’s claims of no government assistance in the wake of the hurricanes, looked around, and realized that Trump was lying. Many realized that the future will bring more natural disasters, and they need a government that won’t base assistance on how you voted in the last election. Harris is leading in solidly red Iowa by two points.

America needs a government that is competent, clean, and works on behalf of everyone in the country, and not just people waving Trump flags. Unless Democrats take the White House and BOTH the House and the Senate, that’s not going to happen.

Imagine a future where the news of the governance of the nation isn’t dominated by Marjorie Taylor-Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Mike Johnson, Elise Stefanik, Joni Ernst, Rick Scott, or any of the other nutball rabble that infest our governance these days. Yes, many of them will be re-elected or didn’t have to run this time, but if they are in the minority, it will put an end to the endless kangaroo court hearings, and Congress might actually become useful again. Instead of clownish hearings about impeaching Biden or punishing family members of his, we may instead hear about debate over housing assistance for young adults entering the workplace, expanded Medicare, and further efforts to rein in the corporations.

Fascist plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues will continue to poison the well, of course, and they will have the usual clown shows where some attention seeker in the GOP ranks will call for Harris’ impeachment three days after she takes office. That won’t change. But at least a solid win for the Dems will set them back, and reduce the threat they pose to our freedoms.

I expect that MAGA and QAnon will disintegrate after the inauguration. Trump won’t be their figurehead any more; at the very least he will have lost his clout, and in all likelihood he’ll be in prison or a rest home. Yes, America, like everywhere, will always have a significant population of nasty right wing nuts—bigots, greedheads, haters—but without the cult leader, they will crawl back to under the rocks where they belong.

Most importantly, control of court appointments must be taken back. Trump appointed three disgraces to the Supreme Court, and he’s even on record suggesting that his District Attorney (appointed, because there isn’t a prayer the Senate would confirm her) would be his pet corrupt Florida judge, Aileen Cannon. He’s also said he will make the loony Robert F. Kennedy Junior the nation’s ‘health czar’ and put the eerie Reinhard Heydrich clone Steven Miller in charge of immigration. Yesterday, he proposed to put the nation’s missile defense in the hands of noted rocket scientist Herschel Walker! Trump probably would like to have Mafia-type rule, but what he would achieve to control our lives would be an extremely malignant and incompetent idiocracy.

Last week Joe Biden made an ambiguous statement that interpreted one way, suggested he called Trump supporters at large “trash.” There was a lot of outrage over that, of course, but it’s significant that the outrage didn’t spread much outside of Trump’s most devoted followers. Many people who have known Joe Biden for years don’t believe he meant it that way (the remark, Biden says, was aimed at some of the trash who spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally) and among those who did, there was considerable doubt that the supposed judgment was particularly harsh. It’s hard to give people the benefit of the doubt when they shout that liberals are communists, Democrats are scum, and want to impose their church doctrines on us all, not to mention nutball opinions about vaccines, reading material, women’s right to vote, eugenics, and “race science.” Some of these flat-earth nuts want us to doubt the Moon landings took place.

It’s time to put this idiocy back in its place. People have an absolute right to wrong-headed and illogical opinions, but they don’t have the right to impose them upon the rest of us. And yes, this includes religious-based opinions. Robert Heinlein once wrote “One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.” And a meme popular on social media states, “America is not a Christian nation. It is a nation in which you are free to be a Christian.”

So do vote. Even if you are in a state that is solidly blue or red, your vote could tip the balance in the House and Senate, and ensure that America remains America, and doesn’t become a corrupt and evil kleptocracy.

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Turning Up the Burn — Sudden Widespread Catastrophic Warming

Turning Up the Burn

Sudden Widespread Catastrophic Warming

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

August 4th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Back about twenty years ago, I was asked to write a piece on the effects global warming would have on our specific locale in the northern California mountains.

Well, an honest essay would have taken five seconds to write: “I don’t know.” I suggested this to my editor, who was unamused and gave me the Editor Glower. So, OK. Write something that won’t be too embarrassing.

I hit on a simple model. Suppose a uniform rise in temperature of three degrees Fahrenheit? Uniform. Every day exactly three degrees warmer than what the latest 30 year model showed as averages for each date.

Of course it was absurd on the face of it. “Average temperature” in the mountains is at best a polite suggestion, and in some years, a bad joke. Well, anywhere, really, but especially in the mountains where the weather is particularly variable. Microclimates rule. “If you don’t like the weather, move over five feet.” The almanacs list “first frost” and “last frost” but in any given year that can vary by six weeks in either direction—or more. “Playing to the averages” is how casinos make money and their customers don’t.

So I took the most simple-minded approach possible. I simply transposed the averages from a town at slightly less than 1,000 feet lower elevation than ours, and described the lengths of seasons, growing seasons, and the effects on regional vegetation. I even shifted the climate/weather bands south, giving us the weather patterns for Seattle. Why not? We already share volcanoes and a snotty attitude towards Los Angeles. One thing I got (sorta) right: even with more rain, there would be more drought. My editor, who normally was scientifically literate, didn’t understand that theory at all.

It made for a dramatic piece, even if it had all the scientific validity of phrenology.

But now it’s 2024, and we’ve just had the hottest month in recorded history. Not just here, but world-wide. Locally, it’s been pretty dramatic. At the time I wrote that piece, the hottest day I had recorded at the house was 98. We broke 100 for the first time in 2012, hit it five times last year, and thirteen times (so far) this year, including our hottest day to date—109. Nights are warmer, as well. Mornings it didn’t get below 60 used to be very rare, happening maybe once every other year. This year we’ve had ten nights where it stayed that warm, including a new record—a low of 69. Perhaps in a few years, I (or somebody) will be musing about how lows above 70 used to be unheard-of.

At least now a lot of local residents understand the concept of transpiration and evaporative rates. We’ve just had two very wet water years, running 150% of normal between them for a total of 150” inches over those two years. The first winter we saw vast amounts of snow—sixteen feet where I live. The reservoirs were all full this spring, the conifers lush and green. A lot of people relaxed a bit, reasoning this would be a mild fire season. People who did know better engaged in frantic brush clearance around the local towns. We have eighteen towns in this county, and ten of them have had major wildfire damage over the past ten years, some of them more than once.

And sure enough, by July 22nd, we were officially listed as being in moderate drought. And we’ve been getting red flag warnings and fire weather advisories. The Park Fire exploded out of Chico’s Bidwell Park, and in just six days became the third biggest fire in California history, racing over the grass, brush and chaparral of the Sierra foothills.

Not only has it been insanely hot, but unusually dry—we haven’t had any measurable rain here since April 25th. So we’re in drought. Imagine if one or both winters had been drier than usual.

Remember that sixteen feet of snow I mentioned? It isn’t a record for the town: we got twenty-two feet in the winter of ‘51-52, nearly all of it in February in two titanic storms. But in recent decades we had seen our annual average drop from fourteen feet in the thirties to just eight feet in the 2010s. Partly that was from the creation of Shasta Lake, which warmed our winters (by way of example, 2022-23 was the coldest winter the town had experienced in thirty years. But in the town’s 140 year history, it was only the 77th coldest winter!) and partly because of prolonged and severe droughts.

That sixteen feet was also a result of global warming. While temperatures between storms were persistently cold, temperatures during the storms were a couple of degrees above normal. And if it was usually 28 degrees when snowing and was now 30, that may not sound like much, but the warmer systems can hold a LOT more water—or in this case, snow. We got very heavy wet snow, both in terms of amount and in terms of water equivalent—the snow was wetter and heavier than normal, and did a fair bit of damage.

So we’re seeing some of the more obvious complications of global warming now, and people are noticing. There’s many more to come, and the ones that worry me are the ones we can’t see coming. But it’s safe to say we won’t like it when they do arrive.

As mentioned, the hot July was world wide. That was already the case before the numbers came in from Antarctica.

Across the entire southern polar ice cap, an area roughly the size of the lower 48, temperatures for the month were a staggering 10 degrees Celsius—or 18 degrees Fahrenheit—above normal. Nobody saw that coming.

To the hundreds of people living there, it probably wasn’t noticeable except on the thermometer readings. After all, it’s deepest darkest winter in July, and there isn’t a whole lot of discernible difference between minus fifty eight and minus forty. Fortunately, this weirding heat wave didn’t reach the coasts of the continent, where temperatures are milder and glaciers and sea ice are already melting at a frightening rate.

A heat increase on that scale was utterly inconceivable. On any other continent, such a thing would cause the deaths of millions and perhaps billions of people. Widespread famine, incredible fire storms, and complete destruction of entire ecosystems would ensue.

So now we have to consider this most terrifying of possibilities: sudden widespread catastrophic warming. I would have considered what happened in Antarctica impossible, along with pretty much all climate scientists. But now that it has happened, what if it happened someplace else in the world?

Writing a simple-minded piece on what effects it would have locally would be pretty easy: Just say, “Death Valley, with a bit of Venus mixed in. And we’re all dead.”

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President Kamala Harris — If Joe Biden steps down

NOTE:  I finished this essay just minutes before Joe Biden announced that he was not running for President, but not stepping down as President, or endorsing a successor.  I’m going ahead and publishing this essay anyway, as written, in the hopes it might influence people to urge Biden to make a stronger and more directional decision.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 21st, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Ever since the debate I’ve been going back and forth in my own head about whether Biden should run for a second term. There’s no doubt in my mind that he is in better shape, physically, morally, mentally and psychologically than his opponent, but he has a disadvantage in that his supporters care if the president is fit to run the country or not, whereas Donnie One-Ear’s supporters are content merely to worship their idol.

If Biden were to step down, he would go down as the greatest one-term president in American history. He has served his term with immense competence, overcoming daunting odds to create the greatest legislative legacy since FDR. His policies have brought the country back from the brink of a depression to a roaring economy, and for the first time since Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ madness was inflicted upon the country, workers and the middle class are gaining ground. He has brought manufacturing back, made vast updates and improvements to the national infrastructure, and made inroads in smashing the corrupt system of permanent economic servitude known as ‘student debt.’ His legacy is secure, and no mountain of Republican lies can change that.

While a lot of people who think he should step down propose that he just announce he isn’t running again (as did Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman) it’s worth noting that in both instances the party left without an incumbent president went on to lose both the White House and Congressional supermajorities.

That’s illustrative in another way: in both cases, the prior president died in office (Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy) and both Johnson and Truman, running on their predecessors’ policies and platforms, were elected with huge majorities against fundamentally weak Republican candidates.

Biden announcing he won’t run again would be a mistake, and we would probably see a floor fight at the convention followed by a sweeping loss. I’ve no doubt that would be the last meaningful election America would ever see. If Trump gets back in office, we are finished.

But if instead, Joe Biden resigns the Presidency, then Kamala Harris becomes President. Not ‘acting president’ or ‘president pro tem’ but THE President. She would be the incumbent (and eligible to run for two full terms in addition to the months remaining in Biden’s first term) and effectively the head of her party. If she decides to run (and it’s nearly impossible to imagine a circumstance where she wouldn’t) the Democratic Party would have little choice, politically or tactically, but to back her and nominate her and a running mate at the convention, three weeks from now.

If she runs on Biden’s platform, and has the full-throated support of Biden, then the Democrats would be united. Even the Democrats mooted to be possible presidential candidates, such as Gavin Newsom or Adam Schiff, would have little recourse but to support her.

The only President to resign office was Richard Nixon, and he did so in disgrace. With Biden, it would be an act of heroism and personal character, putting the interests of the country ahead of his own ambitions. He would be a hero. And if he, along with Obama and the Clintons, is actively campaigning for her, then Biden’s final official act will be one of pure courage and genius.

Which leaves one question: Is Kamala Harris up for the job?

Often the vice presidential nomination is a matter of naked political calculation. The putative goal is a “balanced ticket” wherein the VP candidate is strong in a region where the presidential candidate is weak or appeals to a constituency not keen on the presidential candidate. Harris wasn’t the result of such; she is from California, which was already a given for Biden, and is liberal-centrist, like Biden. The bigots will say she’s a ‘minority hire’ or some other such crap, but honestly—does anybody know a Repucican black person and/or a woman who said, “I was going to vote for Trump, but Harris is a DEI, so I’m switching?” Yes, there are black people and women who support Trump. But you only need to watch them for a few moments to see they aren’t quite right. None of them are going to switch for Harris.

With the possible exceptions of Al Gore and puppet master Dick Cheney, most VPs don’t have memorable terms. John Nance Gardner once remarked of his job as VP that it was “Not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Basically, the VP has three jobs: cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate, certify the electoral college count, and wait for the president to die. In most of the history of the Republic, that made the job an utter sinecure.

What about the rest of her career? Well, stellar. As a district attorney she was tough on crime, but had compassion. She opposed the death penalty in all cases, sometimes in the face of intense political pressure. In 2005 she created an environmental crimes unit, and a hate crimes unit. She vigorously persecuted marijuana traffickers, but very rarely persecuted end users, and didn’t seek prison time on such offenses. On violent crime, she was suburb, achieving an 87-percent conviction rate for homicides and a 90-percent conviction rate for all felony gun violations.

She was elected State DA in 2010 in one of the closest elections in state history (it took three weeks to determine she was the winner, but won reelection in 2014 by nearly 58% of the vote, showing strong public consensus behind the job she was doing.

She went after the mortgage mills that nearly destroyed the economy in 2008, and clawed back over a half billion dollars in false claims from two major Medicare swindler companies. She backed and then utilized the Homeowner Bill of Rights which eliminated egregious abuses by the banks and saved not only thousands of people their homes, but homeowners around the state billions of dollars.

She consistently has fought major corporations and banks for the rights of consumers and employees and the public at large. Her record as state DA is utterly amazing, and leaves me with no doubt that she can stand nose-to-nose with Donald Trump, call him a liar and a crook, explain why he’s a liar and a crook, and send him away crying like a little bitch. She’s far more a man than he’s ever been.

Harris, backed by Biden and the rest of the Democratic party, is what we absolutely must have if Trump and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues who back him are to be defeated.

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The Trump Shooting — Chaos and confusion reign—don’t let it rule you

The Trump Shooting

Chaos and confusion reign—don’t let it rule you

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 14th, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Perhaps the most depressing thing about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump yesterday was that I was utterly unsurprised. I would have been equally unsurprised if the intended target had been Joe Biden, or even Robert F. Kennedy Jr. All three men, and indeed any politician of any notoriety at all, have enemies by the thousands or even millions, and with 600 million guns in the country, a lot of those enemies are heavily armed.

I was surprised that anyone meeting that criteria could get close enough to get some shots off. The Secret Service are very good at their job, and despite the fact that hundred and perhaps thousands of armed people fantasize about shooting one politician or another, the last really close call was Ronald Reagan, 43 years ago. (Gabby Giffords didn’t have SS protection when she was shot.) While there are legitimate questions about how this happened at all (at least one member of Trump’s audience says he spotted the shooter on a neighboring roof and tried to warn SS and police personnel on the scene and was ignored) the fact is there are weapons of war out there that can hit a three inch target from three miles away. In this instance, preliminary reports are that the shooter used an AR-15 (or “AR-type rifle”), which certainly has the range but isn’t particularly accurate.

Some reports are that Trump wasn’t grazed by a bullet, but by a shard of glass from a teleprompter the shooter did hit. That seems plausible. Even at 300 yards, getting nicked by an assault rifle bullet should produce enough hydrostatic shock that Trump would end up with a permanent case of what boxers used to call “Cauliflower Ear.”

It’s a sign of the utter confusion surrounding the event that even now we don’t know how far away the shooter was. In baseball, Statcast can tell the crowd the precise distance and velocity of a home run before the ball even lands. Estimates began at “300 to 400 yards” and now are around 150-200 yards. The latter seems more likely, partially because the bullets did come so close, and partially because it’s a lot easier to spot a man with a gun at 150 yard than it is at 400 yards. Let alone hit him with return fire almost immediately, as apparently happened when the Secret Service returned fire. (And in the moments since I wrote that, the Guardian produced a aerial photo showing where Trump was, where the shooter was, and where the SS snipers were. The shots came from 120 meters away, about 133 yards).

We don’t know much about the shooter. His name was Thomas Matthew Crooks, he lived nearby, he was twenty years old, and registered as a Republican. That last might surprise some folks, but remember that some of Trump’s most vociferous critics and strident foes are Republicans. For all the adoration of his fans, the man is very widely hated.

One anonymous police report is that they found bomb-making equipment but for now we should just assume they found a set of wire cutters in his garage.

Congress is already demanding a full investigation into how this could have happened, and while some of those congressionals are simply grandstanding, it is a very legitimate point. This. Should. Not. Have. Happened. Somebody screwed the pooch.

There are calls for national unity in the wake of the shooting, and no doubt most of them are being made in good faith. But some aren’t. Mike Lee of Utah thinks we should show our support for America by dropping all criminal charges and convictions against Donald Trump. Get a few stitches in your ear, it’s a get-out-of-jail card, amiright?

Some are misguided. Speaker Mike Johnson compared this to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. That event didn’t do much in the way of unification: a third of the land (the Confederacy) erupted in wild jubilation, and Lincoln’s shooting is celebrated in some quarters even today.

There’s a lot of bad actors and opportunists out there spreading misinformation and disinformation. Beware any report that seems suspicious, or is simply too good to be true. It’s very unlikely, for instance, that Crooks was a transgendered DEI hire who was secretly banging AOC and hated Jesus. He don’t even know if his motives were political.

So stay calm, call out the professional liars and opportunists, and remember that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one.

And reflect on the fact that it’s hard to maintain stability in a land with six hundred million guns. We’ve got to do something about that.

 

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The Hottest Day in History — After a cool, tranquil start

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 6th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

There really isn’t anything to suggest today is unusual. It’s 6:30, full light, and it’s 53 with a very slight breeze from the north. Perfect dog-walking weather, or so the dog, ancient but always eager, thinks. There’s a faint scorched smell in the air this July 6th, but it’s not residue from fireworks. They’re banned here, and residents, mindful of the fire situation, were happy to comply.

The faint odor is left over from the day before, until today the hottest day the town has ever recorded. For a few minutes yesterday, late in a bronze afternoon, it ticked 106.1, unheard-of in this mountain town.

It’s cool, it’s fresh, humidity is low. Thunderstorms are not in the offing, and there’s a mercy. Five miles away, the still-large snowfields of Shasta glisten in the morning sun. They look pristine, but weeks of heat have turned them into cornsnow, and the streams and rivers are all very cold white water.

It’s supposed to be 107 today, and experience suggests the forecast is a bit conservative. But the cool nights are a pleasant surprise; forecasts had us getting nights in the mid 60s, hideously hot for us. Nearly everyone in town depends on “mountain air conditioning”–using exhaust fans to suck the warm air out of the homes and replace them with fresh, cool night air. So after a silent mountain night, the house is fresh and cool.

There is birdsong, but this late in the year it’s subdued. A few whipoorwills and cheeseburger birds stake claims already taken, and in the distance a logging truck grunts its way up the hill.

There shouldn’t be a sense of gathering force, but I know better. In a couple of hours the morning sun will feel uncomfortably harsh. Insects will be silent, birds waiting under leafy canopies.

The heat is coming.

I think about the state of the world. Things there, too, have been unnaturally hot, a symptom of an underlying change. In the United States, the fever has been tumultuous. The Supreme Court has utterly abdicated its role as guardian of the constitution and ruled that yes, the president (or at least one particular president) is above the law. There is a historical precedent, even if the order is a bit different.

Then, as now, it won’t end well.

Biden seemed vague and confused during the debate as Trump mindlessly shouted the same prefabricated lies he has been shouting all along. It was painful to watch, but this, too, had a historical precedent, a warning from the past.

There was once a man who ran for high office. He was a criminal and even though he professed great love and patriotism, he led a violent effort to depose the government. He was hoarse, a hateful shouter who knew that you only needed to keep your lies simple and repeat them, over and over. He “uncovered” groups who were different, and could be scapegoated, and he could lie viciously about them. He worked up a social frenzy and convinced followers that they need only punish these groups and remove them from society and everything would then be fine.

After his conviction, he ran for office again. He was an absurd figure, short, dumpy, and not particularly bright. But he convinced his followers he was like unto a god, and there were hundreds of images of him, tall, muscular, chiseled, a stern, steely-eyed leader whose very presence challenged the sun itself. He, and only he, could restore lost greatness and respect to his land, and he could solve all problems. Sane people saw him as a bad joke, but his followers worshiped him. If he told them white was black, then by gawd white was black, although some moderates would argue it was a dark gray.

He didn’t win his election, getting only 32% of the vote, a plurality. But he came close enough that he could steal the rest, and all that lay in his path was one old man, a colossal figure in recent history, still a hero to many, but old, so very old.

The man bullied him mercilessly as his followers swarmed through the streets, beating political opponents and savaging members of the groups the man has scapegoated. The old hero gave in, and gave the man the role of leader.

Here’s where the order was changed. The man took power first, and then had the laws changed so that any “official act” he committed was legal. Once that took place, it was over. No more elections, and freedoms vanished in a growing morass of horror and lawlessness.

The Enabling Acts gave Hitler all the power he wanted and more, and yet they were nothing more than a change in the law that said any of his official acts were protected and he could not be punished for them.

The old hero he wore into submission was Paul von Hindenberg, a truly old man who died just a couple of years later. He wasn’t alone: before Hitler was done, some 45 million other people died.

The order has changed this time. The Supreme Court has passed its version of the Enabling Acts already, but Trump has yet to come close enough to seize power. Between him and that is an old man. Not as old as von Hindenberg was in 1932, and not nearly as feeble. But Trump and his brown shirts are working feverishly to cast him in that role, hoping, as always, that they can manufacture truth from lies.

Even the politicians and journalists who are shouting for Biden to drop his opposition to the new Leader haven’t paused to wonder why they aren’t shouting for Trump to step down. After all, the man is a criminal, a liar, a thief, a moral and ethical wastrel, and his only redeeming qualities are his incompetence and his short life expectancy. How does an evening of confusion in the face of shouted lies stack up against that?

We know what Trump and his followers want. Like Hitler, they make no secret of it, appealing to the same vile, vicious cretins that lie in the underbelly of any society. They betray in the name of patriotism, defile in the name of their god, and want simple answers to questions that don’t have answers.

But unlike the weather, this is reversible. Trump and his Nazis can be stopped.

It’s starting to warm up out there. The air is cool, but the sun is not fooled. It will put us to the test this day.

The morning chores are done, the garden is watered, pets are seen to, careful provisions for shade and water made. The house is cool, and even if we lose electricity, we should be comfortable and safe.

I know my history. I know what to expect, how to prepare.

How about you?

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The Debate — Biden’s night off obscures Trump’s maliciousness

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

June 28th 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.com

It’s one thing to say that Biden performed extremely poorly during the debate, and he did, looking and sounding like an 82 year old man pushed beyond his limits. Democrats are asking hard questions about the viability of the Biden campaign, and there are suggestions he stand down, either as a candidate (leading to an open convention) or even as President, in which case Kamala Harris would be president, and in all likelihood, the candidate for office this year. I’m not going to even try to guess how this is going to unfold.

But the most important element of the debate was that Trump, as always, is a sociopathic, remorseless, malign, criminal liar. The Biden campaign listed 50 lies Trump told in just the 40 minutes in which he could speak. Yes, more than a lie a minute, and at that, he repeated many of them. But the campaign didn’t say what made them lies. So let me give it a go:

  1. “We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We have never done so well, and everybody was amazed by it.”

Mark that a partial lie. Trump had the greatest economy TO 2019, in terms of sheer size. But if you draw a straight line from the start of Trump’s term to today, leveling out the pandemic, then the economy has actually outperformed Trump’s, more than making up for the pandemic dislocations.

  1. “The only jobs he created are for illegal immigrants and bounce-back jobs, they’re bounced back from the COVID.”

Eight million jobs were lost in the early stages of the pandemic. But since taking office, Biden has seen a job increase of over 16 million jobs, which is eight million jobs net in just over three years. That’s the biggest increase in American history. The “illegal immigrants” crack is just more Trump hate mongering.

  1. “[10% universal tariff proposal is] not going to drive [prices] higher.”

Of course it will. The exporters in other countries aren’t running charities; they cover their increased costs by raising prices. A typical kindergartener could figure that one out.

  1. “[Tariff proposal is] just going to just force [other countries] to pay us a lot of money.”

See number 3. There is no “just” about it. Also, the best estimate for tariff revenues is about $400 billion, and that’s assuming countries don’t redirect trade to less protectionist countries.

  1. “I gave you the largest tax cut in history.”

He gave the top 1% the largest tax cut in history. It did nothing for working people, let alone the poor, and added 40% to the national debt.

  1. “I was getting out of Afghanistan, but we’re getting out with dignity, with strength, with power.”

Initially, he wanted to get out of Afghanistan two weeks after he made the snap decision. A horrified Pentagon persuaded him to make the pull out date March of 2021. He then released 15,000 Taliban prisoners, and ordered the Pentagon to slow-walk the pullout process, deliberately leaving Biden with an unsolvable mess in his first six weeks in office. Trump is probably just sorry that more American “losers and suckers” weren’t killed by the mess he deliberately made.

  1. “The tax cuts spurred the greatest economy that we’ve ever seen.”

In a word, no. “Trickle down” has never spurred the economy, and it didn’t this time.

 

  1. “Now, when we cut the taxes…we took in more revenue with much less tax.”

In 2017, revenues were $3.32T. In 2020, they were $3.42T. That’s far less than inflation, or national economic growth—in other words, a loss.

  1. “We had largely fixed [COVID].”

…He said, while trying to blame Biden for all the deaths after he left office. He did fast-track the vaccine program, the one thing he got right. But he bollixed everything else pertaining to the pandemic.

  1. “Throughout the entire world, we’re no longer respected as a country. They don’t respect our leadership. They don’t respect the United States anymore. We’re like a third world nation.”

Biden’s leadership ratings world wide, according to Pew, are slightly underwater, 41-46. But Trump’s were a catastrophic 28-69 underwater. Nearly everyone hated and mistrusted Trump, and with good reason.

  1. “He allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails, and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.”

Another hate-mongering lie. There is no evidence to support this. But Hitler would be proud.

  1. “He’s destroying Medicare because all of these people are coming in.”

Medicare is doing just fine despite Republican efforts to destroy it. And while undocumented immigrants can get emergency medical care in some circumstances, for the most part they aren’t covered. Even though they contribute nearly $2T/year to the national economy.

  1. “The Supreme Court just approved the abortion pill.”

No, they just deferred action on it. It’s a catastrophe politically for the Republicans, since the vast majority of American aren’t women-hating religious freaks.

  1. “Every legal scholar throughout the world, the most respected, wanted [abortion] brought back to the states.”

Quite aside from being patently false, you would have to wonder why these foreign scholars would even give a fuck in the first place. It’s not like they have to live here.

  1. “They’re radical because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth. After birth, if you look at the former governor of Virginia, he was willing to do this. He said, we’ll put the baby aside, I will determine what we do with the baby, meaning will kill the baby.”

An absolute and utter lie, told by and believed by women-hating psychotics. The alleged quote is an utter fabrication.

  1. “Under Roe v. Wade, you have late term abortion. You can do whatever you want depending on the state. You can do whatever you want.”

The text of Roe v. Wade is online and easily available. It divides pregnancy into three “trimesters” and has increasing amounts of restrictions for each trimester. Abortion was never available after the sixth month “on demand.” It’s a zealot lie, and of course, it’s a Trump lie.

  1. “He decided to open up our border, open up our country to people that are from prisons, people that are from mental institutions, insane asylum, terrorists.”

AKA “the Republican base.” Another Trump hate mongering lie. You have to be a pretty vile human being to believe it.

  1. “He didn’t need legislation because I didn’t have legislation. I said close the border.”

A lie on the face of it. Immigration dropped, but that was the pandemic, and not Trump’s non-existent policy.

  1. “[Migrants are] living in luxury hotels in New York City and other places.”

Some were put briefly in hotels when the human-trafficking scum in Florida and Georgia foisted immigrants, some legal, on them.

  1. “He doesn’t care about our veterans. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t like the military at all, and he doesn’t care about our veterans.”

The VA budget in 2017 was $177.54 billion. This year, it’s $369.3 billion. Any questions?

  1. “I had the highest approval rating for veterans taking care of the VA. He has the worst. He’s gotten rid of all the things that I approved.”

According to Business Insider, “Younger veterans prefer Biden, with 51% of veterans ages 35-54 backing Biden over Trump. Among veterans under the age of 35, 46% said they preferred Biden while 42% supported Trump.”

  1. “First of all, that was a made-up quote, ‘suckers and losers.’ They made it up.”

No, they didn’t. His own JCOS reported he said it.

  1. “Our veterans and our soldiers can’t stand this guy. They can’t stand him. They think he’s the worst Commander in Chief, if that’s what you call him, that we’ve ever had.”

I think it’s very unlikely Trump has spoken to any soldiers since leaving office. He didn’t have any respect for them while he was in office, after all.

  1. “He did nothing to stop [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine]. In fact, I think he encouraged Russia from going in.”What was he supposed to do? Nuke Moscow? More Trump drivel, wholly invented.
  2. “Iran was broke with me. I wouldn’t let anybody do business with them. They ran out of money. They were broke.”

He also destroyed the nuclear agreement we had with Iran and stood by meekly while Iran bombed American facilities in Iraq, injuring dozens of American troops. He even held up issuing purple heart medals because he didn’t want the public to know the damage his policies caused to US troops.

  1. “You had no terror at all during my administration.”

You mean besides January 6th? Well, see answer 25, immediately above. It’s still terror if your own little Nazi shitbags commit it.

  1. “Nancy Pelosi, if you just watched the news from two days ago, on tape to her daughter, who’s a documentary filmmaker they say, but she’s saying, ‘Oh, no, it’s my responsibility. I was responsible for this’ because I offered them 10,000 soldiers or National Guard. And she turned them down.”

Demonstrably false from the documentary itself, which shows Pelosi frantically asking the White House and other available authorities for National Guard protection while Trump watched TV and chortled.

  1. “The unselect committee, which is basically two horrible Republicans that are all gone now, out of office, and Democrats, all Democrats, they destroyed and deleted all the information they found because they found out we were right. We were right. And they deleted and destroyed all of the information.”Republicans deleted and destroyed the information they could get their hands on. But the public records were all preserved, and it’s believed that some Democrats stashed the rest for historical purposes.
  2. “Telling the Ukrainian people that we’re going to want a billion dollars or you change the prosecutor, otherwise you’re not getting a billion dollars. If I ever said that, that’s quid pro quo.” He did say that, during that ‘perfect phone call’ and was impeached for it, by the highest margin in history. Only the 2/3rds majority law in the Senate saved his ass.
  3. “I didn’t have sex with a porn star.” Granted, she didn’t consider it much in the way of sex, but yeah, you banged Stormy Daniels and then falsified business records to cover it up. That’s why you’re a felon.
  4. “He basically went after his political opponent because he thought it was going to damage me.” No need. Trump does plenty of damage to himself. That’s why he’s lost so many court cases in so many ways, including 34 felonies.
  5. “He made up the Charlottesville story.” The Charlottesville event we all saw on our televisions?
  6. “He caused the inflation and it’s killing Black families and Hispanic families.” Inflation was a bounce-back from the pandemic, fueled by corporate greed. At that, it was lower than in any other developed nation on Earth. Biden didn’t cause it.
  7. “They can’t buy groceries anymore, they can’t, you look at the cost of food where it’s doubled and tripled and quadrupled. They can’t live, they’re not living anymore.” Groceries across the board went up 25-30%. Painful, yes, but again, not Biden’s fault.
  8. “[European countries] don’t want anything that we have.” Trump clearly thinks America produces nothing but worthless shit. Looking at Trump, I could see where some people might see it that way. But they don’t. America is still the world’s top exporter.
  9. “Almost every police group in the nation from every state is supporting Donald J. Trump. Almost every police group.” So far, most haven’t. Nor are they likely to support a felon who fostered a violent rebellion that got cops disabled and even killed.
  10. “And what he’s done to the black population is horrible, including the fact that for ten years he called them super-predators.” Biden did that, and supported Slappy for the Supreme Court, and other bad mistakes. But tell me, Donald: did he ever buy ads in the New York Times demanding that five kids be executed, even after they were exonerated of the crime they had been accused of?
  11. “And yet during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever.”Trump deliberately slow walked enforcement of nearly all environmental regulations. Granted, his numbers were the best from the viewpoint of major corporate polluters.
  12. “The Paris accord was going to cost us $1 trillion and China nothing and Russia, nothing, and India nothing. It was a rip off of the United States and I ended it because I didn’t want to waste that money because they treated us horribly…. Nobody else was paying into it and it was, it was a disaster.” The one trillion is made up, and China got a grace period to implement required changes. Russia wasn’t involved.
  13. “I’m the one that got the insulin down for the seniors. I took care of the seniors.” He reduced it, one time, to $200. Virtually no help at all to anyone. Biden got an ongoing monthly cap of $35, saving thousands of lives.
  14. On migrants: “They’re taking over our schools our hospitals, and they’re going to be taking over our schools or hospitals, and they’re going to be taking over Social Security.” More hate mongering from fascist filth. He is vicious trash, appealing to vicious trash.
  15. “But Social Security – he’s destroying it because millions of people are pouring into our country and they are putting them onto Social Security. They’re putting them onto Medicare, Medicaid. They’re putting them in our hospitals.”

Republicans have been predicting doom for Social Security “any time now” since 1935. But undocumented aliens aren’t eligible for Social Security. But then, you knew that, didn’t you.

  1. “He wants open borders. He wants our country to either be destroyed, or he wants to pick up those people as voters.”

Hatemongering. Insert the word “Jews” for “immigrants” and you’ll see where he gets it from.

  1. “He wants the Trump tax cuts to expire.”

OK, that one is actually true. He does. America isn’t here to serve the superrich.

  1. “He wants to raise your taxes by four times. He wants to raise everybody’s taxes by four times.”

If he means quadrupling taxes, that’s sort of true for the billionaire class. He wants to raise their tax rate from 6% to 25%. By comparison, the average middle-class family pays about 16%.

  1. “We now have the largest [trade] deficit in the history of our country under this guy. We have the largest deficit with China.”

In terms of unadjusted dollars, yes, but in terms of percentage of GDP, not even close. Not even in the top 15 years.

  1. “He gets paid by China. He’s a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China. So I think he’s afraid to deal with them.”Trump needs a psych eval, I’m afraid. BTW, which candidate has hundreds of millions in business dealings with China again?
  2. “We had two cases, we paid $6 billion for five people.”Does anybody know what the hell he’s talking about?
  3. “They talk about a relatively small number of people that went to the Capitol, and in many cases were ushered in by the police.” There are a couple of instances of capital cops just letting the insurgents in, and I believe they are now gone. But we’ve all seen the images. Trump is lying, again.
  4. “I would have much rather accepted these [election results in 2020], but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous.”And yet in 61 cases alleging fraud, courts tossed 60 of them, one third being decided by Trump appointed judges. And Faux news lost $757 billion in damages from repeated and promoting Trump’s lies.

So there are actually 47 demonstrable lies there, two that were somewhat true, and one too incoherent to tell.

No, Biden didn’t do well. And Democrats are going to have to waste no time sorting that out. But Trump was, and is, a malicious, vicious, remorseless and relentless liar, and if he gets back in, he will destroy America and take most of us with it.

If the Dems have to replace Biden, they will do so. But Trump is far worse, and the Republicans lack any character or courage. We’re stuck with him as a candidate, and there’s no circumstance where he’s better than Biden.

 

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10 (again), Naturally — Revisited 23 years later

Twenty three years ago, in the wake of the Combine shootings, we were dealing with the nonsense of hanging the Ten Commandments in classrooms.  It was a stupid and destructive idea then, and it is now.  I wrote a piece mocking the idea (the Columbine shooters see the poster, realize that killing people is wrong, and go away) and then, on reflection, wrote WHY the Ten Commandments are wildly inappropriate for an American classroom.  Here’s what I wrote, nearly a quarter century ago:

10 (again), Naturally
© Bryan Zepp Jamieson 2/12/00

Back in the aftermath of the Columbine shootings, various right wing politicians and/or religious whacks were jumping up and down saying that if only the 10 Commandments were posted things like the shooting wouldn’t happen. The idea was absurd and idiotic, and I wrote a Usenet post (the previous article in this section) ridiculing it. I thought that after a few weeks, it would die a well-deserved death.

The religious right, however, thrives on absurd and idiotic Crusades, and a depressing number of politicians are perfectly willing to throw away the rights of Americans in order to pander to these noisy and overbearing cretins. Now we have various states seriously considering putting the 10 Commandments up in the schools, arguing that it will promote morality and good behavior. Presumably this would be the same sort of morality and good behavior that has been the hallmark of Christianity over 2,000 wars, when they alternated between murdering, torturing and discriminating against non-Christians and the other option, which was that of murdering, torturing and discriminating against the wrong type of Christians.

In the latest Crusade, the arguments are that the 10 Commandments apply to everyone, that they govern nothing more than everyday decent behavior, and that it won’t make anyone except evil doers uncomfortable, All three claims are false, and it’s easy to show why.

For starters, let’s do what right-wingers hate more than anything, and go right to the source. Well, one of the sources, anyway. The bible I have on hand is The New English Bible, the one used by Anglicans. Groups that consider that to be evil, profane and blasphemous are invited to put up their own editions up on
their own sites and explain why their versions won’t work, either.

1. You shall have no other god to set against me. (In other versions, this appears as “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”). So right away, kids who happen to be Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan, Hindu or atheist (about 2.5 million children) are being told by school authorities that their  ome religious beliefs are wrong, wrong, wrong, and eeevil. Great way to start the school week, you gotta admit. For those fundamentalists out there wearing the blank looks, try turning it around. Imagine if your local school put up a big sign that read, “Want to be normal and decent, kid? Then stop believing all that cosmic sky muffin rubbish your church keeps stuffing down your throat!” I bet that would cause a bit of a stir at the next church meeting.

2. You shall not make a carved image for yourself, nor in the likeness of anything in the heavens above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth. (“Thou shalt make no graven image”) Most people have never thought this one through, but in order to be consistent, the schools will have to shut down art and photography classes. People in art and photography are making “graven images.” Most people think this simply means you shouldn’t make any idols, but that’s not what it says. It says, “in the likeness of anything.” The school will have to get rid of books with pictures in them, and in the case of many schools, the mascot. It’s hard to see how this will augment scholastic achievement, let alone morality, but hey! It’s the holy word, and all that. Better tell the more religious kids who are wearing crosses to get rid of them. “Graven images,” don’t you know? (Part 2b). You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous god. I punish the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me. But I keep faith with thousands, with those who love me and keep my commandments. Girls, tear down those Leonardo Di Caprio posters. Guy, that Michael Jordan poster is outta here. Not only do they mean you hate God, but your great great grandchilden will be punished for it.

3. You shall not make wrong use of the name of the Lord your God; the Lord will not leave unpunished the man who misuses his name. (“Thou shalt not take the name in vain” and other variants.) Indisputably,10 (again), Naturally this one has enriched our language. Phrases like “good grief” “blimey” “jumpin’ Jehosephat” and “zounds” all come from people making end-runs around this assurance that misusing the name will get you busted for an eternity. Of course, high schoolers will be particularly impressed with this admonition to curb their tongues, and will be extremely inventive in their compliance We might get a whole new host of interesting, albeit obscure phrases, which are bound to be more poetic than the succinct, but prosaic “you suck, dood!” Well, OK. Maybe we can keep that one, just because it encourages kids to develop their language skills. But how do you pronounce a song title like “G-d damn the Pusher Man,” anyway?

4. Remember to keep the sabbath day holy. There is, later on in the bible, a big long list of things that violate the Sabbath, such as heating your house, but in the interest of concision (after all, these were going on stone tablets, which that old fart Moses had to port down a mountain afterward) this  commandment settles for saying that it applies to you, your son or daughter, your slave or slave girl, and your cattle or the aliens within your gates. Disregarding for the moment the indecision over what the sabbath actually is
(generally it gets placed anywhere between sundown on Friday-which can get confusing at certain times of the year in northern Canada, Alaska, Russia or the Scandianian countries-and 12:01 am on Monday), eventually some smart ass kid is going to note that the NFL teams pay those players to punt one another on Sundays, and therefore are working on the sabbath, and they’ll have to ban weekend football. Whereupon American civilization will really collapse, except in Texas, where it already collapsed. We used to have what were called “blue laws” which forbade business of various kinds on the sabbath. We got rid of them because they were stupid and unfair. But now we want to teach the kids that we were wrong to get rid of them.

5. Honor your father and your mother, that you may live long in the land which the Lord your God is giving you (in forty years, give or take). That one, right there, should eliminate about half the conversations going on in any given high school in any given day. (Be honest-you used to whine about your parents when you were in high school, too. Admit it!) Of course, school authorities telling valley-girl wannabees that they should honor their mothers and fathers might just answer that age-old question: Just how far can teenagers roll those eyes, anyway? You’ll just have to trust me on this: no matter how many threats are made, and promises of a shortened life notwithstanding, this one just isn’t going to impress the kids very much.

6. You shall not commit murder. Whew! Well, this one seems safe enough, doesn’t it? “Don’t kill anyone”
In some cultures, that might seem like a rather low expectation to inflict on the kids, but this is Charlton
Heston’s NRA America. Of course, the definition of “murder” is subjective; in a well-known example,
Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses consider any taking of human life to be murder. Abortion opens the issue
of what a human life is. And in most bibles, it says, “thou shalt not kill” which some take to include
“justified” homicides such as occur in war, or American prisons. But for now, the 10c crowd are perfectly
willing to have the message of the day be, “Show you’re good Christians, kids. Don’t kill anyone today,
OK?”
7. You shall not commit adultery. Since few high-school students are married, this is expected to have little effect on dating patterns. As for the broader definition that adultery means “screwing around with anyone other than your wife,” kids for years have gotten around that by very narrowly defining sex. “Third base” also known as “The Stinky Pinkie” isn’t sex, and therefore not adultery. The only people who didn’t understand the distinctions Clinton made in regards to Lewinsky were the ones who didn’t get any in high school.

8. You shall not steal. This one is pretty hard to take any issue with. Clear, concise, unambiguous, and in mesh with nearly all religious and ethical philosophies. In fact, there’s only one real problem. America isn’t a religious and ethical philosophy. It’s a capitalist system. This commandment does not properly prepare our children to go out and thrive in our business community, does it?

9. You shall not give false evidence against your neighbor. This should eliminate the other half of the conversations in high school. My, but those kids are so quiet! Of course, kids whose parents are inveterate Clinton-haters and who consider him responsible for murders in Arkansas and Vince Foster and so on are going to be in a bit of a jam: How do they get their parents to listen to them about this one without violating commandment #5? This, at least, should get Rush Limbaugh knocked off the air. The 10 Commandments make the First Amendment moot, any way.

10, You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, his slave, his slave-girl, his ox, his ass, or anything that belongs to him. (Notice the air of authenticity gained from the British spellings, just like the ones they used in Sinai back then!) Madison Avenue and retailers discovered, to their delight, that no segment is more avidly or vapidly acquisitive than high school kids, or are as willing to spend more than they can afford on such. Thanks in large measure to the determined efforts of clothing and sports equipment manufacturers and their advertising flacks, high school culture is a roiling mass of envy, greed and acquisitiveness, steeped in oneupmanship and class distinctions. Given the amounts of money involved, it’s no wonder Wall Street Republicans are starting to back away more from the religious crowd. It’s a long-held American custom to drop piety like a hot potato when it becomes bad for business. Kids will also be unenthused when they discover that wanting new Nikes violates this commandment.
Another argument the Religious Right likes to use for plastering the 10 Commandments up before the numb faces of our poor kids is that American law depends from the commandments. This is purest codswallop. (“Codswallop” is another neat evasion of commandment #4). Let’s look over the 10, somewhat more briefly, and see what corollaries appear in American law.
1 though 4 are right out, dealing as they do with behavior toward a specific deity. American law doesn’t recognize any specific deity.
5- The sabbath. Courts have noted that schools and businesses have the right to close on any day they choose, but that others don’t have the right to make that choice for them. Which is why the NFL plays on Sunday, and why TV stations and supermarkets can stay open these days.
6- Honoring the old folks. A great idea, but not one easily enforced. The law can stop you from cheating, beating, or otherwise abusing your parents, but it can’t make you honor them. Given what utter turds some parents can be, there’s situations where maybe it doesn’t even qualify as a good idea.
7-Murder. American law recognizes the Biblical stance against murder. Of course, every other religion and philosophy in the world believes that murder is wrong, so this is hardly unique to Christianity, is it?
8-Stealing. Same as #7.
9-False witness. It’s illegal to give false testimony against another person in court, and libel/slander laws cover willful and malicious false representations of people. But technically, saying “All lawyers are thieves” is false witness, since there ARE honest lawyers who don’t steal. But it is something covered by the First Amendment, and to tell the truth, I would sooner live in a culture where casual but harmless calumnies are tolerated than one where you can be punished for running your mouth.
10-Coveting. Can you imagine a law in America demanding that people stop wanting more than they have? Can you, for even an instant? I can’t. Such a commandment isn’t just unenforceable, it’s flat out Unamerican.
So: out of 10 commandments, we have two that are specifically implemented into American law, and one that has partial secular parallels. Out of 10 inviolate rules, only 2 1⁄2 actually translate into law. So much for the 10 Commandments being the foundation of American law. If the 10 Commandments were a pack of ladyfingers, you would want your money back.

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