Category: Personal/Misc.

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The Cultivation of America — Teaching free people to drink Kool-aid

The Cultivation of America

Teaching free people to drink Kool-aid

September 18th, 2020

As this is being written, the horribly sad news broke that the great Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died from complications of pancreatic cancer. An extraordinarily brave and determined woman, she represents the best America will be.

Now is the time to remind Republicans that eight months before the election in 2016, they announced they would not consider a nomination to the court in an election year. If their lust for power causes them to forget that stand, remind them that people have had enough of this criminal and corrupt reign of GOP power, and an attempt to ram some third-rate Nazi onto the court over the next 45 days will result in severe civil strife.

Talking with Trump supporters, one is struck by the things they believe that are patently false. The economy is not great under Trump. In fact, it didn’t grow as fast in the first three years of Trump as it did in the final three years of Obama. And the fourth year has been a catastrophe, one created by the pandemic but made far worse by the Republicans taking advantage of the crisis to steal trillions from the country. Biden isn’t a socialist. I’m a socialist, and I wish to hell he was, but he isn’t. Neither of us are communists. Wearing a mask is no more an infringement on rights than requiring shoes in a restaurant, or having to drive on the left-hand side of the road. Nobody’s coming for their guns, or making them be atheist, or forcing them into same-sex marriage.

The range of belief is from simply uninformed to utterly ridiculous. Obama isn’t a Moslem, and nor is his minister. Antifa isn’t intent on burning Oregon down. Trump isn’t one of the common men. Not unless you pronounce the first “m” like an “n”. He didn’t get rid of the deficit—he quadrupled it. YOUR taxes didn’t go down, but he wants you to give up your Social Security and Medicare to make up for the cost of the taxes lost to billionaires and corporations. Oh, yes, and COVID-19 is a real thing, and actually has killed nearly a quarter million Americans. It wasn’t made up by scientists to make Trump look bad. He did that all on his own.

Nonetheless, it doesn’t dissuade followers. One was quoted in the Guardian as saying, “It’s [the pandemic] a ploy to take away from (Trump’s) success.”

These delusions are not only impervious, but tend to strengthen when opposing points of view appear.

The delusions, constantly reinforced by the right wing disinformation bubble and Trump himself, are red-flag markers of cultic thinking. Roughly 40% of Americans have joined a cult.

While most cults are reasonably harmless, some are predatory and malicious, and all, given enough power, become very dangerous, given that they are predicated on such tenets as separation from the greater society, most often in the form of a paranoid “us versus them” worldview, replete with conspiracy theories, and mistrust of established authority, be it governmental, scientific or educational. Most have some form of bigotry backing the sense of separation. It’s not uncommon to see cultists who fervently believe that a clandestine cabal of “those people” secretly control the world through wealth and hidden power, and simultaneously believe that those very same people are intellectually and morally inferior to themselves. Nearly all powerful sects believe the existing order must be torn down and replaced with, well, something.

That “something” is almost always utopian in theory, and horrific in practice. Cults aren’t emotionally or mentally equipped to deal with dissent, and people who refuse to submit to the utopian demands of the cult are rapidly targeted for punishment, either though ostracization or more severe measure, including imprisonment and death.

In the most dangerous types of cult, the cult of personality, the goal is a utopia run by the leader. The Leader, whether it be Hitler or Jim Jones or Donald Trump, is seen as wise, generous, benevolent, and caring for his followers. Usually none of those characteristics are accurate. Such leaders are authoritarian, narcissistic, and manipulative.

While cults of personality are usually the most dangerous, they are also the most vulnerable. The leaders tend to conflate their ideas with themselves, and the ideas often don’t hold up well in the absence of the leader. The leader doesn’t usually have a good second-in-command, an item seen as a vulnerability, a reminder that the leader won’t be there forever, and a possible threat from within. Number two in cults tend to be ruthless enforcers, devoted to carrying out the leader’s will and never having any particular will of their own.

Remove the leader in a cult of personality, and the cult usually collapses in relatively short order. There are exceptions, of course. Scientology and Mormonism survived the deaths of their founders. And Christianity is sort of an oddball situation, where the leader had already been dead for some 300 years before the cult really got going and they maintain their status by assuring everyone he’ll be back any old time now.

But in nearly all cases, a cult collapses when the central figure is removed. Sometimes the ideas survive, and resurrect themselves in different forms down the road. Hitler may be dead, but after three generations, Nazism is enjoying a bit of a revival. New iterations of the People’s Temple will horrify the world every decade or so. Mao is long gone, but the Chinese government survived by turning its back on everything Mao stood for and prevailing through sheer authoritarian muscle. Stalin died, and communism used authoritarianism to cling to power for nearly 50 years, and I’ve no doubt new communist movements will arise in the future.

Toxic ideas survive, but the leaders do not.

But removing the leader does suppress his followers. If Trump loses the election, he may fight it, but his followers for the most part will have the wind taken out of their sails. The ones that threaten to fight in the event of Biden winning will find themselves on television, fighting American troops, and they won’t have the support to continue. Their families will spend generations pretending they never existed.

Trump won’t accept the election, and in the event he declares he won’t leave the White House, the government must remove him, by force if necessary, and don’t even wait for the Inauguration. Remove Trump and jail him for trial, and let Pence try to hold the government together until January. Jail Barr, too—he’s Trump’s real second in command, a vicious thug who will cheerfully commit atrocities to keep Trump ascendant. He knows without Trump, he has no future.

But Trump is the center of his cult, and without him, there is little for his followers to cling to.

If he fights the election results, take him out. Do it now. It will save the country from a brief but very painful civil war. Remember, the cult is Trump, and Trump is the cult. Defeat Trump, and you defeat the cult.

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Red Masque of Death — Covering mouths that could stand a little covering

July 11th, 2020

Basque bus driver Philippe Monguillot, 59, died in hospital on Friday, six days after being attacked by three men and left for dead. His crime: he asked them to wear masks in order to board his bus, as required by French law. Two of the three men are facing murder charges as a result. Fortunately for them, French prisons aren’t the utter death traps that American prisons are, and French have more lenient laws, so they may see the light of day again, hopefully many years from now.

The most noteworthy element of this story is that it happened in France and not in America, because France has a lower proportion of violent lunatics per capita.

Here, of course, there’s an entire movement dedicated to an imaginary right not to wear masks. Most of them are just stupid people. Some, however, are violent lunatics buoyed by the notion that God or Trump or the Constitution are on their side. Trump is, but Trump is a fool. The Constitution isn’t on their side: courts long ago upheld the rights of businesses and property owners to make certain requirements of their customers—shirts, shoes, and now, masks. If it’s posted, some establishments can require ties, or no hats. God, as usual, had no comment.

I had an encounter with one of those this morning. He was trying to harangue and bully the store clerk, giving the bogus argument that the Americans with Disabilities Act not only exempted him from wearing a mask, but he wasn’t even required to disclose what his physical disability was. The clerk, with whom I’ve been acquainted for some thirty years, looked unimpressed, and if I read the angle of her head correctly, a bit disgusted. She didn’t need any help from me. But I was tiring rapidly of the spiel, and the fact that this large hairy unmasked goon was spraying his nonsense into the air, at the clerk and myself, with who-knows-what in the spittle.

The clerk said that the health inspector had been by the past two days, and they were going to start handing out fines. He said that was her problem, not his.

So I spoke up. “Look, just pay for your stuff and get out.”

He glared at me. I’m kinda big and hairy myself, and he promptly forgot his right not to disclose his condition. “I find it hard to breathe in a mask,” he whined.

“Hey, I don’t like masks either,” I replied. “But I’m wearing one. It’s common sense. We have eight times as many cases in the county as we had a month ago. Things are out of control.”

“So what? It’s just like the flu. And the flu kills 640,000 Americans a year.”

“What? It’s more like 30,000 a year, and right now hospitals are sounding panic alarms over the number of critically ill there are.”

George of the Bungle realized he had blown it with the specious number. Without another word, he grabbed his stuff and took off.

Like I said, the clerk didn’t need my help. But getting pushback like that might make the clown reconsider trying to impose a risk on others, at least a little bit.

Yeah, they can be willfully dangerous. But even the more mild-mannered ones are more dangerous from something they may not even believe they carry. Wear a mask, and stand up to the goons. Don’t threaten, but be firm. We can wear them down.

Years back, I was having a bull session with a cop buddy, and presented him with a novel defense to be used by a driver breaking a basic rule of the road. “I have impaired vision in this eye,” I said, pointing to my left eye. Obviously, when driving, you need to be watching oncoming traffic, and people attempting to pass you.” I pantomimed driving, peering around in various directions as my hands wobbled the imaginary wheel, in case my companion was unfamiliar with the concept of driving a motor vehicle.

“Therefore,” I concluded grandly, “It makes sense that I should be driving on the left-hand side of the road, where my field of vision covers more potential hazards.” I tapped my right eye, the good one, in case my point wasn’t obvious enough.

It took my buddy roughly 0.158 seconds to point out the basic problem. “Zepp, if your vision is that fucked up, you shouldn’t be driving at all.”

Well, nuts. Another beautiful hypothesis killed by ugly facts.

There are reasons people can’t wear masks. Disfiguring facial injuries. COPD, asthma, difficulty swallowing. Those are all legitimate and fairly common. Masks, to these people, are a real and evident health threat.

But the correct answer is roughly the same as my buddy’s. If your breathing is that messed up, you shouldn’t be out at all. Even a mild case of COVID-19 will kill you. Stay in. Get the store to deliver, or have someone get your groceries for you. COVID-19 doesn’t care about your Constitutional rights, and isn’t going to cut you any slack because you have existing health conditions. Quite the opposite.

It’s very simple: wear a mask, and if you can’t wear a mask, don’t go out in public. We don’t want you to die, and we don’t want to risk dying ourselves. Wear a mask! Or stay home!

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Solstice 2019 – Heikki Lunta

Heikki Lunta

Solstice 2019

December 21st, 2019

In places like the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, snow dances fall under the category of “be careful what you ask for.” Like Buffalo or the Sierra or the Rockies, it’s a part of the country that can see major dumpage—snow measured by the meter rather than centimeters. Some years, the last thing in the world you want to do is encourage more of the stuff. Nonetheless, they have something called the “Heikki Lunta snowdance song” in Hancock, MI, a venerable tradition dating back to 1970 in which the locals beseech the snow gods for big snows in order to run the snowmobile races.

We got about 1.15 meters of snow (45”) back at Thanksgiving, so I’m just looking at those Michiganders beseeching their Finnish snowblower gods and I ask, “What in the hell are you THINKING?”

When I was a kid in Ottawa, the last thing anyone except us kids wanted was a big snow on Grey Cup weekend. (Canada has a Thanksgiving Day, but it’s at a more sensible time when crops are actually still being gathered and the whole country hasn’t iced up for the winter. You see, it usually dropped below zero about then and stayed there until late February, so any snow that fell was likely to still be there as stubborn patches of berm ice the following April.)

For adults, it was a nightmare season, shoveling and rock salt and “square tires” (the old style automobile tires used to freeze at night, including the flattened portion in direct contact with the sidewalk, resulting in a bump every revolution of the tires that persisted until the tires became warm enough to be malleable again.) They had snow chains back then, but it was usually easier to just use them to hang yourself than to put them on the wheels. There were engine blankets that prevented engines from freezing on really cold nights, but they carried their own risks. Bad enough that you had to get on your hands and knees on a minus twenty-five degree morning to shoo any cats out before starting the car, but you sometimes found yourself poking a skunk with your house broom—with predictable results. I know, because it happened to my Dad one winter. He smelled like the neighbor’s terrier, aka, “the world’s dumbest dog.” Dad’s just lucky Mom didn’t make him set out side that night in a tub of tomato juice. On the plus side, we didn’t have to smell the blood pudding that was his choice for breakfast for a few weeks after that. The skunk odor was an improvement.

Side streets, covered in white ice (very compacted snow) became favored locales for games of shinny, or pick-up hockey games.

Another more dangerous pastime involved grabbing the rear bumper of a bus leaving a stop and sliding along behind the bus for several blocks until it reached a heavily traveled street and the ice got patchy. It was a major bust if a cop saw you doing it. Not for you—for the cop. There wasn’t a cop alive who could catch a 10 year old boy on ice and snow. Most people put on weight in the winter. Not the police of Ottawa—we saw to it that they got lots of exercise and fresh air. Just doing our part to support our local police, ma’am.

Poor cops couldn’t even just shoot you in the back as you ran away. That would have caused talk. Hell, a lot of them didn’t even pack guns.

Ottawa wasn’t as far north as some places I’ve lived, and the longest night was about as long was either of America’s Portland’s. But it FELT more like the Solstice people think of when they think of polar bears eating Vikings and vice versa. You could go out on a dark, cold porch at 5pm, and watch snow dust sweeping across the white ice streets in taunting little eddies, look at the unforgiving and unwinking stars of a polar night, and feel your cheeks beginning to crinkle from the cold, and you knew, in your heart, that winter had finally arrived, and was going to dominate your life for the next three months or so.

It’s changing, of course. Temperatures of 10 and even 20 above are seen in March and sometimes February, the streets are normally free of ice and snow, which is a shame since many of the buses are now electric, eliminating the face-full of Diesel exhaust that was the price we paid for getting a free bus lift.

Still, that doesn’t mean the old style winters are gone. The polar vortex wobbles around more, and as a result, while most winters are warmer than they used to be, if the vortex settles over eastern Canada, then you could get a winter every bit as vicious as the ones we experienced as kids when our biggest concern was avoiding getting caught between a polar bear and his Viking.

For me, it’s the beginning of the countdown to meteorological spring. Officially, that’s March 1st. The calendar says March 21st, and my wood pile says April 22nd. In any case, it’s a turning point: the days have stopped getting shorter, and the weather will start getting warmer, slowly at first but with increasing confidence as the Earth rolls around the sun to the equinox, which is when Vikings balance eggs on the heads of polar bears. That is why there are no more Vikings.

In Australia, it’s the summer solstice, and a nightmare summer awaits. Fires are blazing along the east cost of the land, and extreme heat and winds turn them into infernos. The entire land mass set heat records on consecutive days this week, going from 40.3 on Tuesday to 40.9 on Wednesday to 41.9 yesterday. That’s the average high temperature, 107.5F, for an area larger than Europe. And the seasonal winds are building as the temperatures continue to climb.

Australia isn’t alone, just six months out of phase with the North American west coast, much of Brazil, Europe and much of Russia as the global warming change dubbed the pyrocene spreads like the fires in Australia.

But the seasons turn, and nothing humans do can change that, and respite will come. Hang in there, and be careful and courageous.

And don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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Milling Time – First Doubt, Then Resolve

July 4th 2019

I was watching a video on YouTube, made by the Truckee Police Department, called Wildfire 2.0 . If you live in an area susceptible to wildfires (which is some 150 million people in North America) then it’s important viewing.

But it gave a name to a phenomenon that I had not only seen many times before, but have experienced personally. There comes a time during a major, rapidly evolving emergency such as a wildfire or a tornado or a volcanic eruption where authorities or neighbors or someone approaches you and tells you you have to get the hell out, now. The danger is immediate, it is real. You can’t save your home and your belongings, just what you have in the car. Any pets you can’t find are on their own. (And boy, is that a soul-ripping decision to make!). You may perhaps be in your car already, and a cop or firefighter comes up to you and tells you the roads are blocked, just get out and run for it.

But your car can go zero-to-sixty in five seconds. You know you can outrun the fire. On foot…? Abandon the car and everything in it? You have to think about that.

Or you know the cat has to be hiding in the bushes out back. Yeah, it’s only a cat, but you’ve had that cat for ten years and the kids love it.

You hesitate. You dither. You’re not ready to commit.

All your neighbors are in the same circumstances, and they’re all doing the same thing.

Evacuation experts and emergency personnel have a name for that: Milling Time. People are in shock. They are numb, confused. Some become angry. Some panic. Some cry. Some just stare blankly. All are normal human reactions to a shocking and sudden emergency.

Fiction writers like to dwell on the deniers, the people who resolutely believe the fire will miss them, the tornado will disperse before it reaches them, the mountain will settle down, or they’ve seen dozens of hurricanes as bad as this one. These literary redshirts make for good drama, but the reality is the deniers don’t die in numbers anything like the loss of life caused by Milling Time. “He who hesitates is lost.”

Emergency evacuation personnel would love to come up with a way of eliminating or lessening Milling Time, but they haven’t had much luck. It’s just a part of human nature, and the best they can do is include it in their plans and train for it, so they don’t themselves experience Milling Time while trying to deal with it in an emergency. Yes, the guys with badges can experience doubt and confusion, too.

As we slog through what might be the most grotesque Fourth of July in the history of the United States, the country at large is experiencing Milling Time. People are facing a surreal situation in which everything they thought they knew about themselves and their country are under sudden threat. The Land of the Free has concentration camps housing thousands of innocent children. Some of those children are dying. Possibly even worse, family members and others who they once liked and respected are growling that those kids got what was coming to them. The president, and guys with badges, joke about the kids in concentration camps.

The government, once the champion of human rights and freedoms, suddenly is at war with both. Scientists are being expelled from the centers of power and sent to the hinterlands, the equivalent of Stalin sending intellectuals to Mongolia. Indeed, the president recently sent an aide who fell out of favor to Mongolia. Apparently he has read up on Stalin, along with Hitler.

There are tanks in the street in Washington, and while the turrets aren’t pointed at anyone, most people have realized that this president wouldn’t hesitate to give the order to aim if annoyed enough. Millions of Americans who used to watch the Washington Fourth of July celebrations are turning their backs this year, sickened by the lurid partisan spectacle promised by the president.

One vignette that tells it all, the corruption and disregard for American values. The president promised the biggest fireworks show ever, and he may get it. When he slapped his tariffs on China, he had a curious exemption: fireworks. China’s biggest fireworks manufacturer showed its gratitude for this display of favoritism by donating $755,000 worth of fireworks to the trumpaganza.

A furious judge discovered yesterday that this president wants to defy the Supreme Court and explicit language in the Constitution in order to further his low and thuggish bigotry against non-white Americans and residents and tried to unilaterally rescind a direct ruling by the SC on the census.

The VP, himself a bible-pounding monster, did a strange pirouette, supposedly leaving for a symposium in New Hampshire, then coming back for an emergency. Or maybe he didn’t go, there was no emergency, and the administration will tell us what happened in a few weeks. This opaque and corrupt government has turned us all into a nation of Kremlin Watchers, desperately scanning for clues as to the intent of these dangerous autocrats.

Concentration camps. Deep corruption. An outlaw president.

Milling Time does resolve, one of three ways. Either the danger engulfs us and we are lost, or we panic.

Or we realize, “Oh, fuck, that’s not going to miss me!” or see the numb fear on the faces of the people around us, and something clicks in our heads.

And the doubt and confusion vanishes, replaced by steely resolve.

We will live to fight another day. We will come back and vanquish the threat. We will prevail.

Americans have been in Milling Time, threatened by the shocking rise of fascism and neo-Nazism in the country they love and thought they knew.

But there’s no longer any doubt the danger is real. It won’t miss us. We talk to others, facing the same threats. Even the deniers are starting to admit it isn’t just a fabrication by fake news.

Now, Americans have three choices: they can succumb, they can panic.

Or they can fight for their country.

It’s time for resolve.

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Baseball – The season begins, and I have a few suggestions for the future

March 28th 2019

The Dodgers clouted eight home runs in their opening game, setting a major league record (the poor Diamondbacks set an MLB record for most homers allowed in an opening game, and a franchise record for most homers allowed in a 9 inning game). As a Dodger fan, I was delighted, but as a baseball fan, it pointed out some troubling aspects. The game took 2:48 to play, and by today’s standards, that’s considered a fast game. The average is about 2:55. Three hours is common, and four hours happen about 10% of the time. That’s far too long to watch or listen to a game. Baseball needs to work on picking up the pace. Yes, the typical NFL game is over three and a half hours long and packs perhaps 20 minutes of actual action in that time, but that’s why I don’t follow football. It’s a slow, boring time waster. Baseball is actually faster and more exciting.

But look at real football. Ninety minutes, plus injury time, so a typical game is about 95 minutes, plus 15 minutes for the half time break. You sit down in the stadium at 1pm, and you’re on your way back out by ten to three. And it’s nearly all action.

But baseball couldn’t be changed that much without altering the game out of recognition. I’ll settle for formats that allow games to be played in 2 hours and 15 minutes.

To that end, I propose the following changes: limit breaks between half innings to a minute and thirty seconds. That’s plenty of time for the fielders to take their positions. If a guy can’t get from the home dugout to first base in ninety seconds, he’s too sick to be playing. That would shave 23 and a half minutes off each game right there. Right there a typical game is 2:31:30. The long breaks are for the benefit of the advertisers, not the fans, and with everything from the announcer’s booth to the entire stadium plastered with some sponsor’s name, and even game moments branded by butt creams (for relievers) to security firms (for stolen bases) the advertisers can give a little something back to the fans.

Twelve second time clock on pitches, if bases are empty. Pitcher can only shake off the catcher twice per pitch. From the moment the manager takes the baseball from a pitcher, the reliever only has 1:30 to throw his first pitch, unless brought in for injury and thus not warmed up.

No more than five relievers per team per game. So what happens if you’re in the 15th inning and your fifth reliever is in his third inning and his tank is empty? Simple. There are no more 15th innings.

A game that is tied after nine can go a maximum of 11 innings. If at that point, it’s tied, then it’s a draw. Use a point system like football or hockey, and give teams two points for a win, and one apiece for a tie. Why 11 innings? Stats show that 10% of games make it to the 10 inning, a bit over 5% to the 11th, and only 3% to the 12th. It wouldn’t affect the game that much. Obviously, the playoffs would permit unlimited innings to settle a game.

Those reforms would speed up the games. What about the season?

Spring training starts in mid February, and the final out of the World Series is late October. That’s a long haul, particularly given the amount of travel involved. Even the strongest players are suffering physical and emotional exhaustion by the end of it all. (Incidentally, stats show that teams that play five hour marathons often have reduced performance for up to a month afterward.)

Further, early spring games are afflicted by horrific weather, resulting in many rainouts and make-up games later in the season when neither team is fresh.

So we need to reduce the length of the season and/or wear and tear on the players, and here my suggestions will have a significant impact on the game, but not in a way that baseball hasn’t used before.

First, add two expansion teams (in the example I came up with, I suggested Montréal, Vancouver or Portland but there are other configurations) to have 32 teams. The teams would be divided up into four divisions of eight teams, regardless of present league. Cities with two teams would each have both in the same division. With one exception (Arizona) each team would be one time zone or less from every other team in its division. (Even that could be solved—drop the expansion to Vancouver or Portland, move AZ to the west, and give the South one of several cities fully capable of supporting an MLB franchise—San Antonio, Charlotte, Oklahoma City). There would be no interdivisional play—all the natural rivalries are already grouped together. Each team would play each other team 22 times during the season, for a total of 154 games. The present season is 162 games, but for the previous 90 years of its existence, MLB had a 154 game season. Spring training could be shortened to three weeks and begin around March 15th. Trust me, the mid February start doesn’t make spring come any faster. The regular season could begin around April 10th, and end the first week of October. Playoffs would be two tier—EAST champion against CENTRAL, SOUTH against WEST. The present system of ten teams in the playoffs is ridiculous: yes, a team that lost 80 games could end up the champs, but you’ve reduced that long, long season to a few lucky breaks in a seven game series. Three tier playoffs are for the advertisers, not the fans. The last world series game should be about October 20th, no later.

Shorter season, faster games, less travel time. It will make baseball better.

EAST

Baltimore Orioles

Boston Red Sox

New York Yankees

New York Mets

Philadelphia Phillies

Pittsburgh Pirates

Washington Nationals

Toronto Blue Jays

CENTRAL

Chicago Cubs

Chicago White Sox

Cincinnati Reds

Cleveland Indians

Detroit Tigers

Minnesota Twins

Milwaukee Brewers

Montreal team

SOUTH

Arizona Diamondbacks

Atlanta Braves

Houston Astros

Kansas City Royals

Miami Marlins

Saint Louis Cardinals

Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Texas Rangers

WEST

Colorado Rockies

Los Angeles Angels

Los Angeles Dodgers

Oakland As

San Diego Padres

San Francisco Giants

Seattle Mariners

Vancouver or Portland team
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End Game – It’s us or him

December 21st 2018

Even by the vicious, arbitrary, capricious and sometimes insane standards of the Trump administration, the past 48 hours were beyond belief.

First, there was the Michael Flynn sentencing. Judge Emmett Sullivan was expected to give the seditious and disgraced General a slap on the wrist as a result of supposedly very valuable evidence provided to the special council’s office in relation to Trump and Russia. But Flynn, whose common sense is the equal of his sense of loyalty to his country, ran his mouth to the press, whining that the FBI fooled him into thinking it was OK to lie to them because he thought the 11 separate interviews they hauled him in for were just friendly chats. Koffee Klatches. They talked about the latest Vogue magazine, you know. Just more proof the FBI was evil. Sullivan’s patience snapped, and he let Flynn know just how big a pile of human shit he really is, delayed sentencing, and let it be known if he spread any more right wing bullshit, he would be treated as a near-traitor.

That happened just a day after California Congresswoman Jackie Spier penned an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle titled, “Did Putin Buy Donald Trump?” She didn’t actually use either the word “traitor” or “kompromat,” but the concepts were definitely intrinsic to her narrative.

So now even the mainstream press is starting to use the word “treason” in relation to Trump. It’s about time.

Trump made Spier’s case for her by suddenly and unilaterally announcing that all troops would be pulled out of Syria, a sudden action that betrayed the Kurds (again) and no doubt delighted Putin. Make no mistake: I’ve argued for pulling troops out of Syria right along, but I don’t for an instant believe that Trump went about it the way he did because he gave a shit about the troops, let alone the Syrians who are dying by the thousands. He did it because Putin wanted him to. And time is running out for him to do stuff like that.

This in turn caused Jim Mattis to quit in disgust. No flowery language about it being an honor and privilege to serve Trump; just a letter that boiled down to, “I can’t help you, get yourself a defense secretary who will do your bidding.” I used to joke about how it came to be that the only adult in the Trump administration, the sane thoughtful one, was known as “Mad Dog” but that Mad Dog might be one of the very few to leave that benighted administration with his reputation as an adult and an American still intact.

It is scary to contemplate Trump’s foreign policy now that his only remaining advisor is John Bolton.

Then Trump blew up the Continuing Resolution. This was a kick-the-can-down-the-road measure to keep the government running while the ludicrous impasse over the Wall continued. Nothing too unusual there: it’s been pretty much what passes for Republican governance since 1993. They love America but hate the United States, and don’t want to pay for anything other than a big military and an economy that consists mostly in the form of raping the workers. So they’ve been running government by extortion, whittling down any stake Americans might have in their own country.

Trump, apparently upset that such intellectual luminaries as Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh no longer loved him, changed his mind after most of Congress had left for their indeterminable vacations, so the government will have a partial shutdown at least until January 10th. It will cost billions, and Trump should reflect on the fact that the Secret Service agents following him won’t be getting paychecks for Christmas.

Even the most stupid mob boss knows you gotta pay your muscle. But then, Trump is extraordinarily stupid.

The stock market is showing signs of a possible crash, having lost 4,000 points this past month. Investors are no longer confident we will survive Trump. That’s not a very comfortable thought.

Then there is the Whitaker thing. The swindler-turned-top-cop had a Department of Justice board of unknown parties say he was not required to recuse himself in the Mueller investigation, then they put out another statement an hour later saying he was supposed to recuse himself, and then an hour after that Whitaker said he was going to disregard the advice to recuse himself.

Kremlin watchers thought as of yesterday that Rosenstein was still overseeing the investigation, since Whitaker didn’t want to go to jail for obstruction, but was acting on the QT since if he did recuse himself, he would get the Jeff Sessions treatment. Now nobody knows that the hell is going on. In some ways, that’s the most terrifying development of all, since it smells like Trump is preparing to purge Mueller’s ass.

Finally, there was the Trump Foundation. A judge shut it down, effectively labeling it a criminal enterprise. I had to shake my head at the wonder of it all. Remember all those Republicans who prattled on endlessly about the Clinton Foundation because it took money (legally) from foreign concerns. For all the huffing, they couldn’t find any quid pro quo, unless you count the ridiculous conspiracy theory about the Canadian government selling uranium to Russia. (Would Trump hesitate to give Russia uranium if Putin asked him for it?). Are they apoplectic in rage over the open criminality of the Trump Foundation?

Hmm. Apparently not. Like cheating on wives or banging porn stars or blowing up the deficit or bombing kids in other countries, or screwing kids domestically, it’s only bad if Democrats are accused of it.

The people who worked directly for Trump aren’t the only ones who trashed their reputations; any Republican who whined endlessly about the Clinton/Obama “scandals” and is silent now can expect decades to pass before anyone wants to hear their thoughts on much of anything again.

Meanwhile, the country is now in deep crisis, and when Congress returns, it may have to put aside the budget and the wall and all that, and drive Trump from office.

It’s him or us.

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Happy Yaldā Night! – Solstice 2018

December 20th, 2018

Well, I hoped he would be in prison by now, too. But the walls are closing in, and at this point, it’s a matter of “when,” and for how long, and how many others will be in adjacent cells. He’s going down.

See? You feel hopeful already, don’t you? Well, this is the Solstice Essay, and that’s the whole point of the thing.

So let’s talk about trippy Solstice stuff.

They celebrate the winter Solstice in Iran. I was a bit surprised, because the whole place is south of 40 north, going all the way down to 21 north. While winters in the mountains of Iran can be fierce, and sometimes downright Canadian, most of the country has a fairly wide range of climate, but with fairly mild winters—no worse than, say, Tennessee. If anything, the place is known for its heat, with temperatures often well above 120 in the height of summer.

And it’s sort of equatorish. It doesn’t do midnight suns, and the long winter nights might go 14 hours instead of 20. Nobody is going to mistake it for Sweden.

The government is religious bordering on nuts, and the people are secular, bordering on sane. It suggests that celebrations, even of natural events, might have the sort of tension built in that the Christmas defenders at Faux News can only dream about. But apparently their winter Solstice is free of such. Oh—don’t let the religious police get wind of your wine and beer stash. That wouldn’t be cool.

On the night of the winter solstice, they have the Shab-e-Yaldā (“Yaldā Night”) or sometimes, Shab-e-Chelleh, “Night of Forty”. Shades of Ali-Baba! It isn’t celebrated in Ali-Baba’s home turf, Saudi Arabia, but it is big in Iran, most Kurdish regions, and most of the old Soviet breakaway -Stans.

“Chelleh” means 40, or fortieth. It’s a number that pops up pretty often in writings of the Biblical era, including, of course, the Bible. It’s generally taken to mean, “Nobody’s quite sure how long or big it was, but it was a fair old bit.” They have winter (and summer) divvied up into forty day periods, in a complicated system that suggest that their calendar scheduling was Lent to them by the Catholics. Rather than try to describe it, and thus reaffirming I have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll just quote from Wikipedia: “There are all together three 40-day periods, one in summer, and two in winter. The two winter periods are known as the ‘great Chelleh’ period (Day to Bahman,[rs 2] 40 full days), followed/overlapped by the ‘small Chelleh’ period (Bahman to Bahman,[rs 2] 20 days + 20 nights = 40 nights and days). Shab-e Chelleh is the night opening the ‘big Chelleh’ period, that is the night between the last day of autumn and the first day of winter.”

Got it? Good. Now explain it to me.

I’m enchanted with the notion of big and little 40s. I can’t help but wonder if there is a medium 40, which is maybe 38-42.

Yaldā is even more fun. It seems that back in the fifth century, a sect of early Nestorian Christians fled to Iran, escaping religious persecution. Their word for ‘birth’ was, as you might have guessed, ‘yaldā.’ Iran then, as now, had the philosophy of dhimma, that they must be protective of minority religions and customs within their own land. They gave the Nestorians sanctuary and freedom. Didn’t help.

The Nestorians did what religionists absolutely love to do, and tore themselves apart over minutiae of doctrinal differences, but before imploding, decided that since the Annunciation was in spring, that meant the birth of Jesus was in early winter, and made Yaldā the regional word that equates to “Christmas.”

There is another word, “yelda” which, while spelled differently in English, is the same in Aramaic. Yelda means “dark night” or “long night.”

Yelda may have migrated from northern Europe, where it is pronounced “yule.”

Hmm. Start of winter, associated with birth and long dark nights, and yule. Oh, and the Christians swiped it. OK, it’s Solstice, all right.

A Viking probably would easily recognize the tone of Yaldā. People gather against the darkness and the forces of evil (“Ahriman”) and tell tales and jokes and recite poetry, and eat the best of the summer crop, mostly fruits. The foods eaten on that particular night have special properties; eating watermelon won’t do anything in particular on Yaldā night, but will protect you from heat exhaustion later on in the summer. Magic watermelons, at least on Solstice night. Some fruits and vegetables protect against insect bites, and garlic prevents rheumatism. In a lot of areas, contraband stashes of wine and beer are consumed, and lights are arrayed in the living areas.

It’s the evening of the 19th as I write this, and I’m in the southern part of California. It’s nearly full dark, but I can still see palms silhouetted against the sky. I was moping a bit, missing the snow and cold that to me is the hallmark of the winter Solstice. But this year, there is no snow where I live—the forth time in the past five years that’s happened—and while it’s cold up there, it’s satisfyingly nippy down here. So I’m not missing Solstice. Not really. It isn’t just winter, as the Iranians show.

I’ll have something nice for Solstice dinner and call family and friends.

And a rocket launch from nearby Vandenberg was scrubbed, and they have rescheduled for the night of…Solstice. Nothing like a bright light in the longest night to celebrate!

Reading that Solstice is celebrated, with its true meaning, in the dry and dusty lands of Persia, cheered me right up. How can you not like people who gather against the long darkness, and tell jokes and sing and enjoy food and drink and dream of a brighter future?

It’s what I hope we’re are all doing on Solstice night.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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Madness Awaits – The savagery of the GOP laid bare

Madness Awaits

The savagery of the GOP laid bare

October 21st, 2018

As the midterms near, the sheer madness of America’s descent has become nakedly clear. A journalist, an American resident, is tortured and murdered in a Saudi Arabian embassy, and the President of the United States spins excuses on behalf of the Saudi Crown Efrit who doubtlessly ordered the murder.

The next day, Pissmop praises a Congressman who body-slammed a reporter for the crime of asking a question. Later, he claimed he was just joking, but the howling, maddened mob who cheered him and made death gestures at reporters in attendance were not joking.

Meanwhile, the propagandistic pseudo-reporters of the far right are transfixed by the existential threat of a group of men, women, and children who are slowly making their way out of the horrors of their homelands in central America, intent on walking the length of Mexico, some 1,800 miles, to petition for amnesty at the American border. Declaring them criminals—which they aren’t—Pissmop told his mindless screamers that something must be done right away, and only the GOP can save them from the ravening horde limping its way north.

The group includes old people and children, and are on foot, so they probably aren’t moving much faster than Pissmop can waddle around his golf course. Let’s see: 1,800 miles divided by waddle equals lots of time to figure out humane and sensible answers. But Pissmop doesn’t want that.

Pissmop claims that Democrats want open borders and this huge menace will invade America the day after the election unless Republicans keep Congress.

The Republicans have abandoned even the efforts to make their lies credible. Today’s local paper had a column labeling the return of insurers being able to deny insurance to people with pre-existing conditions a liberal lie, but the fact it that is exactly what is happening. Up to 40% of the population is at risk of far higher premiums or losing their coverage altogether.

Republican thieves in Congress, avid to steal the trillions allocated for Social Security and Medicare for their rich masters, have announced they plan to impose deep cuts to ‘pay for’ the huge deficits that they themselves have created. Social Security and Medicare aren’t even a part of those deficit and will make no differences to the deficits. But they will steal the pensions and health care from people who have spent their lives paying for it.

Back in 2002 I wrote an essay about a movie, The Man Who Cried with Christina Ricci and Johnny Depp. The movie concerned itself with the rapid descent into utter madness the citroyens of Paris experienced in the wake of the German invasion in 1940. You never see the German invaders. You just hear them marching. Cronch, cronch, cronch. (And I remember wondering what it must have been like for German citizens between 1932 and the final consolidation of Nazi power by mid 1934. Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner tells that tale).

Things in America were bad in 2002, as the country went through a big surge of hypernationalism and paranoia in the wake of the 9/11 attacks (brought to you largely by citizens of Saudi Arabia, the same nation Pissmop is being an murder accessory after the fact for), and the article address the snarling viciousness that consumed the country in the wake of the attacks.

While it never really did recover from that, America at least had a reason then. People were frightened and lashing out, and it was pretty easy to see why.

America doesn’t really have that excuse now. White citizens are not in danger of being subsumed by ‘dusky races’. Christians are not being persecuted or even inconvenienced. LGBT folks aren’t trying to force anyone to their lifestyle: they just want you to let them live their lives in peace.

Other minorities don’t want ‘special rights’; they just want the same rights you enjoy. People who recognize that aren’t employing ‘identity politics’; they just aren’t going to throw the rights of their fellow humans under the bus in order to try to appease swaggering bigots.

Yes, the economy is teetering and likely to crash between now and the next general election, but that’s the inevitable result of unrestrained capitalism. Give them enough rope. Entire economies vanish into oligarchic black holes. Republicans swear they are the solution to that, but the fact is they are the cause.

What’s more, it’s what they want. That’s why the deliberate sabotaging of the national treasury, pensions, health care, and the systematic destabilizing of American institutions from voting to the courts. Economies in vast turmoil mean societies in crisis, and that in turn means a cringing, frightened and dependent populace.

The cause of the crises are mostly imaginary, but the crises that arise are quite real, destructive, and useful to Pissmop and his cohorts who stand to benefit from the destruction and debilitation of your personal reality.

Republicans invent crises to try and panic you and make you their dependents, but the reality is that they are the crisis, and it’s one that can still be solved.

Next month, make the Republican party and its would-be dictator an unhappy footnote in history.

Or follow the path of Germany in the 1930s.

Cronch. Cronch. Cronch.

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Trump Junior’s War Sour grapes following a sour victory

Donald Trump Junior, vacuous moron, big game killer, child prodigy swindler and defender of the privileged class, rage-tweeted in the wake of the Kavanaugh vote, “Trump supporters – The fight isn’t over. You better believe that Democrats are going to do everything in their power to impeach Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court if they take control of Congress in November…This is war. Time to fight. Vote on Nov 6 to protect the Supreme Court!”

Just imagine how aggrieved and full of empty threats Donny the Lesser would have been had he lost this battle.

He’s right, of course. We won’t forget. Kavanaugh is a perjurer and a liar. He lied repeatedly to the Senate, committing the same crime for which he believed Bill Clinton should be destroyed. He was selected by the criminal Trump precisely because he believes now that no president should be subject to the kinds of legal persecution he inflicted on Bill Clinton. Even a president who is demonstrably a swindler and a tax cheat. One who assaults, rather than diddling consenting adults. One who is staging a coup against his own country. Even one who might be a traitor.

Kavanaugh’s demeanor made it clear that he is nothing more than what Charles Pierce memorably described as “a partisan ratfucker.” He would have been more at home as Rush Limbaugh’s color commentator than as a Supreme Court nominee.

He’s credibly accused of rape and sexual assault. The example he set, and the fact that he and his scumbag president got away with it by smearing and mocking victims, significantly increases the chances that his own daughters will suffer similar fates at the hands of entitled frat boys in the future. If they complain, perhaps Kavanaugh can asked Trump to mock them, so he needn’t suffer political embarrassment.

We will impeach Kavanaugh, and we will drive him from the Court and back under his rock where he belongs.

Then we will come for the moral and ethical abdicates, the criminals and fascists, and the traitors of the GOP. We will drive them from office.

People like Trump and Kavanaugh don’t see themselves as traitors. They don’t see themselves as liars and cheats. They believe they deserve to take what is theirs. Any woman. Any money. Any country. All of us. We aren’t citizenry to them; we are chattel.

Susan Collins only needed a sham FBI investigation to don a g-string and pasties and do a little shimmy for Trump and Kavanaugh. She knows a woman’s place. As long as she’s rich, what value is dignity? Her only remaining role is to demonstrate that when you sell out your own, you can never reclaim the mantle of being their champion.

The Eleven swine on the Senate Judiciary Committee who made such a joke of the Senate and the Supreme Court in their lust for power will never win another election. We will drive them out.

You know what kind of life you can expect if these fascists prevail. Ask the thousands of customers, investors and contractors that Trump has swindled. Ask the women he has raped and mocked.

Watch the tears stream down Kavanaugh’s flabby cheeks as the toy he was promised is held at arm’s reach. How can we take away that which he deserves?

Once he has it, he will give us exactly what he thinks he deserves. His won’t be the sullen rage of the post-turtle Thomas who never was able to convince himself he was anything more than a GOP token, the result of a cynical belief that the great Thurgood Marshall could be adequately replaced by a House Negro.

No, Kavanaugh’s will be an open rage, an aristocrat frightened by an aroused citizenry. Rush and Tucker and Donald will assure him, over and over, that he is the victim, and his persecutors must pay. He is damaged goods, and will inflict damaged decisions.

Kavanaugh is on the Court, and all it cost was the legitimacy of the Court and the Senate. A small price to pay when you think the country shouldn’t have that sort of nonsense when there is money to be stolen and women to be raped.

Yes, Donald the Lesser, you will get the war you so desire. If you are very lucky, you and your wastrel family will merely end up in jail for many years, and the country will emerge intact. That is the deepest wish of all who oppose you and your brotherhood of gangsters.

But don’t count on that desire for a peaceful solution. You’re merely fighting for an imagined right to shoot large animals. The rest of us are fighting for the right to a decent life, something you hold in contempt.

You will not win this war you want.

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An Early Night: Why I Hate Daylight Savings Time

By on Saturday, March 3, 2018

Creative Commons

Looking at the Trump administration this past week, I feel like I’m in a runaway locomotive that is heading at full tilt toward the side of a mountain in which someone has forgotten to carve a tunnel. If you aren’t frightened right now, you should be. This is even scarier than Nixon’s final week was.

So let’s talk about Daylight Savings Time. But don’t worry: there’s method in this madness.

Daylight Savings Time, or what we as kids called “Summer Time” has become deeply unpopular, and a majority of Americans would like to just get rid of it altogether. There’s even scientific evidence that the self-inflicted twice-a-year jet lag leads to a loss of productivity, and an increase in heart attacks and strokes, especially in the spring when the clocks are moved forward. It’s just one more irritation in a world filled with irritations big and small, and of course the government, having made it an annoying waste of time (literally), will do nothing to alleviate it.

When I was a kid, Daylight Savings Time was great. It came at a time of year, late April, when the last of the dust and gravel from the winter had vanished from the streets, the tulips were topped by fat buds with hints of the colors to come, the days were warm(ish), and suddenly, magically, you had time for three more innings of baseball after dinner. It marked the end of Unlocking and the beginning of true summer. It was a glorious event. It was Summer Time, and it was special.

The first week of October marked the beginning of Locking. The leaves were beginning to turn, the evenings were crisp, the mornings chill. It was time to put away the toys of summer. Thanksgiving and the Grey Cup were only weeks away (this was Canada, after all) and the NHL would be starting soon. Locking had begun, with the promise of the winter to come, and it was right that the evenings would darken, softened by the extra hour of sunlight on school mornings.

The time shift, which began was a need by plutocrats to squeeze more work out of us, meshed with the seasons and our moods. It was almost organic, and gladdened our souls. People set their clocks ahead and smiled at the warm days to come. In fall, it heralded another welcome transition. People moved their clocks back and settled in to get cozy.

In the 1970s there was the APEC crisis, and Congress decided to extend daylight savings time in the vain hope it would save energy. It didn’t, and eventually the crisis passed, making the point moot, but Congress wasn’t about to admit they were wrong and set it back to where it was.

Another, smaller energy crisis struck in the Oughts, and the Congress, now mostly twisted and broken minions of twisted and broken plutocrats, could think of nothing better to do to deal with it than extend DST again, this time from the second weekend in March to the first weekend in November.

I remember early March. It was just barely light when I awoke, and when washing my hands in the kitchen, I would look at our neighbor’s north-sloping roof, hoping to see gaps in the snow cover where the eaves would appear. At least the giant icicles of February had fallen. The trip to school was a slog, wet cold winds, rain or snow, or both. It was the rotten part of late winter, where the white ice had melted from the streets, old man Campbell had shut down his rink because the ice was too rotten for skating, and the berms were crunchy foul nightmares of black gravel and automotive soot and dead things caught by the plows. “Summer Time” began, not only before the snow had melted, but before it even stopped snowing. The pussy willows, the bravest harbingers, hadn’t even budded yet. Worst of all, one’s mornings were slammed back to the latest sunrises of the year, the hopeless dark of a mid-winter morning. School began at first light, a phenomenon of which everyone was already heartily sick, having gone through it in early January.

The end of DST is an even more meaningless. Evenings are already dark and cold, the leaves have all fallen, and as the cold and dark encroach, we are tormented by the false gaiety and emotional blackmail of the Mass of the Christ Commercial. Suddenly, it’s dark before dinner, and the faint gray light of November mornings are no consolation. Saying goodbye to summer is like grieving for your great-grandfather who died twenty years before you were born.

The time change has changed from an accentuation of the seasons to just another bloody pain-in-the-ass regulation foisted on us by a corrupt and uncaring government.

Is it any wonder people have learned to hate Day Light Savings Time?

There’s been a spate of articles lately about how people are depressed an alienated, crushed between the millstones of runaway capitalism and a corrupt and twisted government.

And now we see the end game of the fascistic notion that society should serve the economy, rather than the other way around. A man whose only qualification for office was that he was a good thief is disintegrating before our eyes and threatening to take us with him. The inevitable political implosion is here, and the economy is threatening to follow suit. The media each day reflect how, like the time change, the foundations of society have completely lost relevance to our human needs.

Of course we are depressed and frightened. Any sane person would be.

I think we’ll muddle though, and I’m sincere when I write that. But that’s my own optimism, and that’s all it is. The only thing backing it up is “Well, we’ ain’t dead yet.”

It’s a mean time in our lives, the bleakness of dead leaves in the gutters and a swirl of snowflakes mocking the dying lawns. And now, suddenly, it’s dark, far too early.

Set your clocks, and hope for the best.

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