Category: History

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Trump and COVID — Republicans prove that yes, there is a pandemic.

October 2nd 2020

The news that Trump’s open contempt for science and public safety finally caught up to him is one of the most expected shocks in history. For the past six months or so, I’ve expected to wake up to a headline reading “Trump rushed to Walter Reed with Respiratory Distress.” Or those in utter awe at my prognostication abilities, I also predicted the Dodgers would have a good season, California would have wildfires in the late summer, and bell bottoms would make a comeback. I am like unto a God.

Historians will never figure out why the Trump administration was openly contemptuous about wearing masks, still the single most effective way we have to slow the spread of COVID-19. After all, psychiatrists can’t figure out the motivation now.

Authoritarians are famous for denying the obvious when it’s obvious that things are going to hell and it puts them in a bad light. The story of Nero fiddling while Rome burned is apocryphal, but Roman leaders told many reassuring lies in the centuries of Rome’s decline. Hitler pretended all was well and German victory inevitable as late as April, 1945. Baghdad Bob swore there were no American troops were in Baghdad and what’s more, Homer Simpson was screwing their wives while they fought overseas.

But few governments told such transparent lies with so little hope of a good outcome under circumstances that weren’t yet dire.

It’s a sign of the intellectual rot infecting American society that conspiracy theories already abound. Some Republicans have claimed that liberals put the virus in a solution and painted it on Trump’s microphone and dais before the debate. (The only way it would work in reality would be if they painted it on Putin’s penis.) Another was that the Chinese somehow infected Trump because he was about to reveal that they deliberately released the virus.

Just to show that the idiocy is bipartisan, some liberals are claiming Trump is faking the whole thing as a sympathy ploy and/or an excuse to skip the debate.

Well, the good news (sorta) is that with two dozen or so people who have been exposed to Trump getting sick themselves make the odds that Trump is “faking it” vanishingly small. I doubt we’ll get much in the way of accurate and full information going forward. That isn’t even just a matter of Trump’s veracity: historically Presidents and their staff have lied about their health. Few people knew Harrison was dying until after he died. Teddy Roosevelt hid an injury from an assassination attempt and gave a speech. (Points for a gutsy move, though!). Woodrow Wilson had a major stroke and his WH concealed his incapacitation for almost 18 months. Eisenhower concealed the severity of his heart attack because he believed the thought of a Nixon presidency would panic the country.

But with this administration, I have little hope of any transparency. The Trump crowd lie just because they lie. They don’t even need a reason.

Despite his general health, the odds at this point are in Trump’s favor. The disease kills about 5% of those who catch it. For someone in Trump’s observable condition, that rises to about 15%. And given that he is showing symptoms, it’s likely that he will have knock-on health problems for the rest of his life. It’s reasonable to expect that he will walk out of Walter Reed in due course—a few days, a few weeks, a few months. But he won’t be the same man who went in today.

Just the fact that he got sick is going to utterly destroy the anti-mask, anti-science Republican movement that is the main reason COVID-19 has been and remains out of control in America. People who persuaded themselves that it is all a hoax are going to have to reassess that view. Trump’s open contempt for masks and social distancing have caught up to him. People may continue viewing evolution and climate change as commie plots, but the fact that it has laid their hero low means they will have to be circumspect about this one. Some of the smarter ones will start wearing masks. The dumber ones will isolate into non-mask communities, and evolution will take its course. It won’t cure America of its fevered infection of utter stupidity, but it will put a dent in it.

We’re already in one of the most chaotic periods in American history since the Civil War, and this will make things that much worse. If he’s in the hospital for more than a week, Republicans will say the elections must be postponed. Trump will probably get a sympathy bounce in the polls, but it’s unlikely that will translate to more votes. Everyone will be watching Pence for signs he’s preparing to become America’s 46th president. With Trump ill and the nation in crisis, the grotesque drive to rubber stamp Amy Barrett onto the Court may have to actually suspend. For one thing, Trump’s reckless approach to social distancing has infected a number of Senators, all Republican. (Barrett has been exposed to Trump and his Petri dish of a White House over the past week, but there are reports that she tested positive for Covid last summer and is (presumably) immune.

We can’t control events stemming from this latest crisis except for one: Don’t be stupid. Mask up, keep your distance.

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Amy Coney Barrett — Godstruck, Authoritarian, and part of Scalia’s nonsense doctrine

September 26th 2020

Amy Coney Barrett once said that we should always remember that a “legal career is but a means to an end . . . and that end is building the Kingdom of God.”

This, by itself, should be a disqualifying statement for a Supreme Court nominee. The role of any American judge is to uphold the law as it exists under the United States Constitution. Not the bible. Not some tooth fairy interpretation of the universe.

The Constitution doesn’t mention any kingdoms of god. Indeed, it only mentions religion twice, second in in the well known “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and first in the main body of the Constitution, as the only clause that cannot be amended: “but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”. The joint purpose of both clauses is to prevent government from favoring any religion over any other religion, and to prevent religion from using government for its own empowerment.

Interpreting American law as a device for the establishment of a religious kingdom is an undesirable trait in a municipal night court judge; it’s a horror show in the mind of a Supreme Court justice. Justices interpret the Constitution, which doesn’t mention God, Allah, Thor, Coyote or any other being as being superior to itself.

Kingdoms of God—i.e., theocracies—are without exception repressive and cruel. There is no room for individual rights in such, and one can search scriptures of any religion in vain for mention of freedom of speech, freedom of worship, or selecting one’s own representatives. Indeed, most scriptures have very long lists of ideas and opinions that can mandate being put to death. In so-called “Christian” lands, the Catholic Church has a particularly bad record over the years of mass killings, pogroms, and terrorization of any who didn’t worship as they wanted.

The very first thing Barrett’s “Kingdom of God” would have to deal with would be the non-believers, the ‘blasphemers’ and the ‘perverts’. The results would be bloody and vicious, as bad as what we see in Saudi Arabia or Iraq today.

The second big problem with this nomination is that Barrett, a clerk for Tony Scalia, adopted his amazing nonsense known as “Originalism” in which the SC justices are supposed to divine the original intent of the authors of the Constitution.

Aside from the insanity of trying to divine the inner thoughts and hopes of men through their 18th century verbiage, there’s one significant problem with original intent: it doesn’t exist.

Nearly every line, every clause of the Constitution was vigorously and sometimes vociferously debated. Even the parts of the first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation, that they decided to blend into the new document were argued over. After all, the Articles had failed, which is why, ten years after winning independence, the colonies were still trying to figure out a new government.

The Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers show the amazing diversity of opinions that had to be appeased, assuaged, and mixed into a main document that wound up in a lot of spots being a lot less than clear or even coherent. The whole thing was written by committee, for Pete’s sake! The Bill of Rights was an afterthought, and it, too, was subject to a wide range of input as to its form, or even if it should exist at all. Some feared that government might conclude that rights were limited to those in the Bill of Rights, and so as an after-afterthought, stating “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” Then it occurred to the Founders that this meant people could start assigning themselves rights all willy-nilly, so they had an after-after-afterthought, and added the Tenth amendment, which read, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It took endless debates about Nullification and a Civil War for them to realize that States should not be allowed to override the rights guaranteed to all by the Constitution.

Given what a dog’s breakfast the creation of the Constitution was, it’s a bit of a wonder it’s worked as well as it has, really.

But it’s utter insanity to claim there was some sort of monolithic “original intent” in the Constitution.

Finally, Barrett is a Dominionist. This is the “Gott uber alles” crowd who think their particular religion has supremacy over the Constitution (despite the Supremacy Clause in the Constitution, the one part where the intent of the Founders is easy to discern!).

They want to blend the incoherence of the original intent crowd with the far greater incoherence of the bible literalists to produce a governing body that is morally bankrupt, intellectually absurd, and as capricious as a cow on ice, with belief and governance combining to each thoroughly corrupt the other.

Barrett is a contemptible and calculated sop to the crowd that has America’s worst interests at heart, a corrupt and cynical ploy for the support of people who really don’t like the idea of a free and independent United States.

Are there any Republicans with the patriotism, courage, and intellect to reject this pathetic bible flogger?

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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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Satire is Dead – Trumped like a can of beans

August 18th, 2020

Hours before the opening of the Democratic Convention, Trump tried to grab the headlines that he would be making a very, very important pardon the next day.

A lot of people thought he might pardon Julian Assange, if for no other reason than it would annoy American intelligence agencies. Even Trump couldn’t quite dare pardoning Snowden, who is more of a loose cannon. Now, my own opinion was the pardon couldn’t be all that important, since Hitler blew his brains out 75 years ago and even Trump wouldn’t be able to rehabilitate him. Granted, I was joking, but Trump, like most right wing whacks, will do ANYTHING if he thinks it might annoy a liberal. Honoring Hitler has a proven track record of annoying liberals. And since Trump is reduced to thinking anyone not in Qanon or the Nazi Party is a liberal, that’s a satisfyingly large audience to antagonize.

So today, he pardoned…Susan B. Anthony. Now, there’s nothing wrong with the pardon itself. The 19th century suffragent was convicted under an unfair and unjust law, one that was struck down some 48 years later and 14 years after her death. She’s since been widely honored, becoming the first actual woman to be on a US coin.

But in the middle of a vast campaign to persuade voters that permitting mail-in voting would cause vast amounts of voter fraud and thus would justify disenfranchising millions of Americans, he just pardoned someone for committing the crime of … voter fraud. Yes, that’s right. Anthony was convicted and jailed for voting under false pretences, ie, pretending to be a male. A US male, if you will.

Trump had various loony toons from the anti-abortion movement with him as he signed the pardon. The no-choicers had decided, based on precious little evidence, that Anthony was anti-abortion. While she surely opposed the practice of forcing women to have abortions against their will, there’s no record of her opinion on the right of women to elect to have an abortion. Indeed, while abortion was fairly common place despite being sometimes illegal in some states, it wasn’t a big issue since the country wasn’t overrun with pseudo-religious nutjobs who mistook their own personal squeamishness for a natural law of the universe.

Some wondered if Trump was taking a shot of some sort at Michelle Obama. The former first lady had just decimated Trump in a speech at the DNC, declaring Trump “in over his head” and deadpanning, “It is what it is.” Trump was in an open fury the next morning, banging around on Twitter like a nervous cat in a box with exploding ladyfingers. If he was trying to show up Little Miss “It Is What It Is” he missed badly.

Having put that nasty little negress in her place (and I’m pleased to see my spell checker didn’t like that word), Trump went after Jacinda Ardern, another strong women who has humiliated Trump in the past (they are legion, you know). Having just finished eulogizing his brother for having the grace and courage not to be jealous of Donald’s superiority and brilliance, he attacked Ardern and New Zealand for having an outbreak of Covid-19. “The places they were using to hold up now they’re having a big surge … they were holding up names of countries and now they’re saying ‘whoops! Do you see what’s happening in New Zealand? They beat it, they beat it, it was like front-page news because they wanted to show me something.”

The “Big Surge” was nine new cases in one day. Under Trump’s leadership, the United States has more than nine new cases each and every second of every day. The second wave is arriving—there has been a surge of new cases throughout Europe (where the disease actually originated) and Asia. New Zealand had been doing extraordinarily well fighting the plague (the best, as opposed to Trump’s America, which has been the worst) but this is a pernicious disease.

Perhaps if Trump is really lucky, a child will die in New Zealand. Then he can use that to justify the ten thousand or so children in the US who are likely to die from his push to have the schools reopen.

Finally, just in case anyone is feeling a need to ironically mock the American leader, Trump yesterday teamed up with that con artist Mike Lindell, who shills pillows on the television to hawk the latest miracle cure for Covid-19: Oleander. The compound, called oleandrin, is toxic, and has no known efficacy against Covid-19. One expert wrote, “Oleandrin? Yeah that would definitely end up killing people,” tweeted David Juurlink, MD, PhD, of Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto. Trump is pressing for the FDA to give it a handwave approval, desperate for a miracle cure before the election and willing to kill millions if need be to secure such.

I hereby urge Trump and everyone who supports him to take oleandrin and let us know how it works out. After all, it won’t kill all of them, and they should be prepared to risk their all for Donald.

And we can bury the unlucky ones in the same graveyard where we just buried satire.

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Tin Soljas — Mercenaries against America

July 26th 2020

For some time, rumors had been swirling around that the costumed clowns would-be Dictator Trump was sending into American cities, beginning with Portland were in fact, mercenaries, scummy for-hire bravos, cast-offs and retirees from the military, or just gun-nut yahoos looking to bag a few people they disapprove of. Medium has a major story this week detailing the presence of gunsels from Triple Canopy and Academi, two disguised dependent corporations of the infamous Blackwater. The article states, in part that the so-called Federal Protective Service “..In fact, FPS spends more than $1 billion a year on these contract security guards who are authorized to conduct crowd control at federal properties, such as those in Portland.”

That’s a lot of money to be spending on hired pork meant only to terrorize peaceful demonstrators. In fact, according to Medium, “There are some 13,000 security guards nationwide employed by FPS via contracts with private security firms, a figure that can be expanded through existing and future contracts.”

These are not federal troops. They are not part of any legitimate policing agency. They aren’t even special agents such as exist in the Secret Service or DHS. They are mercenaries. They are for-hire thugs, glorified security guards with weapons of war. They aren’t in American cities to keep the peace: they are there to shatter it. They want riots, confusion and chaos because that is what Donald Trump needs as an excuse to cling to power.

Americans are better than Donald Trump and his rent-a-pigs, and they have been proving it in Portland, with a March of Moms, a line of real American veterans (as opposed to the “Let’s pretend we’re still soljas” in Blackwater) and in a truly magnificent stand, a naked woman performing yoga poses in front of the mercenaries. (They retreated in considerable confusion!). One guy showed up with a hockey stick to (successfully) bat tear gas grenades back at the portapigs. One heroic vet, Christopher David, 53, joined the protest because he was disturbed by reports of federal officers in unmarked cars arresting people without explanation. They beat the hell out of him with batons, breaking his right arm, and tear gassed him at point-blank range. Showing balls of steel, he strode away from the puzzled and defeated assailants.

While I’m deeply contemptuous of these thugs and the morally diseased people who deploy them, I don’t underestimate the danger they pose. Take Iraq, for example.

There were many different reasons why the American invasion and occupation of Iraq failed, but it was Blackwater that made such a complete calamity for America inevitable, even if the Americans had done everything else right.

First there was the 2004 Fallujah ambush. Four Blackwater mercenaries were ambushed, killed, set afire, dragged through the streets of Fallujah and hanged from the struts of a bridge spanning the Euphrates River. The four individuals weren’t believed to be doing anything more sinister than making a food delivery, but they were seen by the locals as symbols of greater problems. America got off to the wrong foot in that city, riding tanks and humvees into town with huge American flags flying, in direct defiance of orders not to fly flags lest they be seen, not as liberators, but invaders. It was a grotesquely stupid display of ooh-rah patriotism.

Americans, both soldiers and mercenaries, did door-to-door searches, and it’s believed that the mercenaries hit on the bright idea of bringing bomb-and-drug sniffing dogs into the households of the residents. Iraq, like many Islamic nations, has a deep taboo against allowing dogs in the home. Scattered reports of viciousness, molestation and even rape of women, and contempt for Allah circulated. The ambush of the mercenaries resulted in great joy in Iraq and a tepid response in America, where people were unenthusiastic about the use of mercenaries. It’s true that America couldn’t have won independence from England without the presence of mercenaries, but those were German mercenaries, hired by the Crown, and hated by the colonists. Mercenaries don’t have a good odor in America, and nor should they.

In the wake of the hanging of the four mercenaries, a popular uprising drove the Americans out, temporarily. But Blackwater influence in Iraq wasn’t done.

In September 2007, Blackwater gunsels, apparently without provocation, opened fire on a crowd of civilians in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, killing 17 and injuring 20. Even though America promptly pulled the mercenaries out of the region, it solidified the opposition in Iraq that eventually lead to the Americans being driven out in disgrace.

Why use mercenaries in the first place? American politicians knew the public wouldn’t count them as part of the deployment, and wouldn’t care as much about casualties amongst private contractors. And the Republicans suffered, then as now, from the mad delusion that things such as military operations should be privatized, even if they cost more (some mercenaries in janitorial positions made more than the officers they cleaned for) and were less easy to control. Eric Prince, owner of Blackwater/Academi/Triple Canopy is, along with his vile sister Betsy DeVos, well-positioned in Republican circles. And both are tight with Trump and his mafioso clan.

Mercenaries aren’t soldiers, or even police. Many have little or no training, and discipline is notoriously shoddy. They have little or no training in keeping the peace, but are very adept at disrupting it. They are pure poison to the discipline and morale of both real soldiers and police. And they are a reckless, direct and immediate danger to the people they are putatively there to contain.

There aren’t there to protect the cities of America. They are there to drive them into chaos, so Trump can end the United States once and for all.

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The World Hates America — With Damned Good Reason

July 2nd 2020

When the news broke that the US government had snapped up the entire world stock of available remdesivir, the only drug shown to be effective in treating COVID-19, there was immediate outrage. While it’s not a cure of any sort, it shortened the course of hospitalizations for this disease by some 20%, and improved the survival rate by a similar amount. Make no mistake: this is no panacea. COVID-19 is still an extremely dangerous and deadly disease, and remdesivir or no, the long-term effects remain unknown.

The government snapped up some half a million doses, enough to treat about 50-100,000 people hospitalized with COVID-19. It represents some three months of the world’s supply.

It was a vicious and sociopathic move by the US, and unfortunately, is seen as being typical of how Americans operate. In fairness, most Americans were appalled, and that number will grow once it becomes clear Trump didn’t buy it to save their miserable lives, unless they were billionaires or Nazis.

Gilead, the company complicit in this deeply immoral deal, came under immediate scrutiny by the EU and other developed nations. Gilead signed an agreement with the EU to boost production so demand could be met in the next month or so, when warehoused supplies ran out. The unspoken threat was they had better, or the EU would simply suspend their copyright on the drug and make the recipe available for all other pharmaceuticals. The US would oppose that, of course, being the beacon of light to all corporations all over the world, but frankly, the opinion of the US doesn’t carry much weight these days.

Part of the outrage stems from the fact that the US needs more remdesivir than anyone else, simply from reasons that were self inflicted. Where most of the developed world have brought the plague down to manageable levels, the ones governed by insane fascist bastards—Brazil, Russia, India and America—have totally lost control of their infestations. In America, cases which had run over 30,000 new cases a day in late April, were brought down to under 20,000. But between intense pressure from corporate overlords to reopen and “save the economy,” cruel contempt for the safety of workers, prisoners, native populations and the aged, and a truly crack-brained notion that wearing a mask infringed on personal rights, the US completely blew it on efforts to control the disease. New daily cases are above 50,000 now (over 57,000 today) and are expected to reach 100,000 a day over the next few weeks.

The US was already seen with a mixture of horror and pity. The antics of the Trump regime were bad enough; this self-immolation made the US pariah and object lesson. Now the the pity and horror are admixed with rage. If the Americans are too fucking stupid to control their plague, the thinking goes, what right have they to deny responsible nations this drug which might save lives? The US has reached the same communal level as that of a drunk stealing communal wine from the local church.

So now America is seen with horror, pity, and rage.

It’s not as bad as it sounds. Oh, not America’s reputation—it’s thoroughly trashed and will remain that way for decades to come. But Trump’s effort to screw the world isn’t as lethal as it might sound. EU countries, Canada and other places had already stocked up on enough remdesivir to get them through most of July, and they did it without fucking anyone else over. If Gilead follows through on the promise to boost production, little or no harm will be done. And as noted, America is an object lesson: unless you want to see tens or hundreds of your fellow citizens die, don’t follow their example. Tough out the economic lock down, take care of your people, and reopen wisely. Don’t be that guy.

The Republicans have made it clear they won’t extend unemployment benefits or do anything for the millions of people still out of work. To them, open stores are more important than dead Americans. Work, or die. Or both. Report to your work camps for the greater glory of the fuhrer!

The Trump administration is involved in Stalinesque efforts to hide the damage. Just as Hitler secreted his death camps in eastern Europe outside of German borders, Republicans are working hard to hide the extent and damage of the plague, flooding media and social media with false stories about Democrats inflating death numbers, and “wanting America to fail.” The mindset of the GOP, like those of the Nazi party eighty years earlier, is to blame “enemies from within and without” for their failings.

Even now, millions of Americans run around shouting they have a right to go maskless. Police officers in a coffee shop in Oregon today harassed and berated store clerks for asking them to observe the “Masks required” sign on the front door. By the standards of American cops, these were better behaved them some—they didn’t shoot the clerks, or even arrest them. I wonder if those cops think they have a right to go in a day-care center and shit on the playfloor. It’s pretty much the same thing.

Trump is cutting testing so there will be less cases reported. Is it possible to be more stupid?

The EU has banned Americans from visiting. A poll in Canada showed reactions to American visitors ranging from strong aversion (Quebec, where only 24% favored allowing Americans to visit) to projectile vomiting revulsion (BC, where only 6% wanted to allow Americans in). Granted, BC has had a problem with sick Americans sneaking in, and did long before COVID-19 turned up.

The US may or may not come to terms with this disease. But they’ve already lost all their friends, aside from the President’s manipulative buddy in the Kremlin.

Wear a mask. Stay safe. Don’t be one of THOSE Americans.

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Transitioning — The World is Changing—Fast

June 14th 2020

In front of Parliament in London, they encased the statue of Winston Churchill in plywood and put barricades around it to protect it from defacement and possible destruction at the hands of demonstrators. Just a few weeks ago, such a situation would have been unthinkable, let alone that it could have arisen from the murder of a black man by police in Minneapolis, four thousand miles away and three weeks before.

But in a social convulsion analogous to the Arab Spring, the mass demonstrations sparked by the murder of George Floyd have spread beyond America and throughout the west.

The Churchill statue is under threat much the same way the Confederate statues are under threat in America. There are quite a few distinctions that can be made, of course: Churchill didn’t fight for the enemy, and the statue wasn’t put up to try to keep alive a racist legacy. Now, if a statue of Klaus Barbie

had been erected in Coventry as a not-too-subtle reminder to the Jewish population to know their places, then it might make a lot more sense that people might want to pull it down.

Churchill had a lot of baggage, to be sure. He was a bigot, contemptuous of the peoples the English subjugated, and had a track record of enormous incompetence. But he was also one of the main reasons the United Kingdom still exists today. When England needed a heroic leader, he rose to the occasion. So unlike the Confederate statues that dot the US, there are actually legitimate reasons to honor Churchill with such.

Unfortunately, movements like this tend to overreach, and hopefully common sense will prevail in London. Teach Churchill’s flaws, but honor the man for his greatness.

In the United States, the groundswell of discontent is still taking shape. A lot of what we’re seeing is hopeful. African-Americans deserve far better treatment than they’ve been getting, and have a right to walk the streets and drive their cars without fear, just like the rest of us. The role of police in society needs to be rethought from the ground up. In the 60s and 70s, when society was obsessed with crime and social unrest, the concept arose of cowboy cops who didn’t play by the rules and didn’t mind breaking a lot of eggs to make an omelet. It became fashionable to have out-of-control cops protected by a ‘thin blue line’ mentality that took care of their own, no matter how corrupt and self-defeating it might be. Few noticed or cared that there were no omelets, just plenty of broken eggs, and the police were seen, more and more, as vicious bullies and swaggering cowards. Community relations, in far too many places, was seen as being for weenies.

Additionally there was the racial component. Cops in far too many places were there to uphold white privilege. And subjugate black people. Police batons were called ‘night-sticks’ even though they were most often used in broad daylight, and had worse names. The war on drugs, itself a tactic of racial oppression, made things even worse. So did increasingly draconian laws, such as ‘three-strikes’ which overwhelmingly targeted African-American populations.

It wasn’t enough to attack minorities, though; police were useful for attacking other vulnerable parts of the population, those seen as unprofitable by capitalist leaders. So more and more, police were sent to deal with homelessness, mental illness, poverty, and any other social problem that presented itself. They weren’t just the bully boys of capitalism; they became its janitors, as well.

Black Lives Matter and the rest of the movement hope to address that, and that can only be an improvement.

But there are two other elements of American society that also scream for reform, and without them, the chances of success are much slimmer.

First, there is the problem of capitalist domination of society. No fascist society is free, and a fascist society is one in which the people serve the economy, rather than the other way around. Capitalism requires a large pool of economic outcasts in order to threaten the workers and consumers. Its morality is not the morality of human beings, and bullying and subjugation are essential to maintaining control. Putting jails and the justice system on a “make it pay” basis ensured a vicious abattoir of oppression and viciousness in lieu of justice.

The GOP, now a Nazi Cult, insists that Americans must be prepared to die in the hundreds of thousands in order to protect billionaires from becoming millionaires, as witness Trump’s determination to pretend the coronavirus has gone, and America can resume business as normal. His Nuremberg rally, the Repulsa in Tulsa, planned now for the day after Juneteenth, will require that attendees not wear masks or practice safe distancing, but also sign a waiver relieving the Trump campaign of liability if they become sick from this plague that [cough] doesn’t exist.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but America must reduce the role of the upholstered parasites who use racism and unfairness as means of control.

The other major item is guns. That the President is a cowardly racist who thinks it’s fine for disgusting white neo-Nazis to carry weapons of war, but hides in a bunker behind 12 foot high fences at the thought of black people chanting, clearly demonstrates the racist and vicious nature of “gun rights.” Far too many of the wrong people have weapons meant to terrify and harass the rest of society—including cops. Cops are constantly being afraid because so many howling nuts have so many weapons, and that in turn makes them more trigger happy. I’m not saying that to excuse the behavior of pigs who think that killing blacks as a warning to the rest is legitimate police work—this is a problem in addition to that, one that affects good cops as well as bad. We saw the white trash Nazi movement in action in Michigan; America needs to rethink a philosophy that allows such cretins to have .50 cal machine guns.

It’s scary, and nobody knows where it’s going to go, but one thing is certain: America needs this social tsunami. It wasn’t survivable in its present form.

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Can America Defeat Trump? — We’re at war. Pick a side.

Can America Defeat Trump?

We’re at war. Pick a side.

June 4th 2020

A lot of us have been saying for some time that when it comes to Trump, it’s going to boil down to either Trump prevailing or America. Trump does clumsy, weird huggings of the flag, and occasionally waves a bible around (in his latest photo-op stunt where he gassed peaceful protesters, he was holding it upside down and backwards) and that’s enough to convince the utter fucking morons that he’s a patriot and devout, but he has never shown any interest in the Constitution, the rights of the People, and openly expresses hatred for various target groups. As he accumulates power, that collection of groups will grow to include not only the ones his bigoted supporters already hate, but pretty much anyone who doesn’t support him.

He’s already had a falling out with Faux News for the crime of failing to jump to their collective feet and shout “Jawohl!” at all of his pronouncements. Now he’s getting harsh criticism for his recent actions from the military, former members of his cabinet, members of the GOP, and even the servile and amoral leaders of the evangelical right. Even some elements of the neo-Nazi right are getting restive; I saw an amazing political cartoon the other day in which Trump had a knee on the neck of Lady Liberty while a black-clad figure labeled “AntiFa” held her legs. I’ve always joked that when members of the far right started blaming the left for Trump, that would mean he’s finished. Well, here we are.

His actions over the past fortnight have been nothing short of grotesque. The PR stunt at St. John’s Episcopal (yes, backwards and upside down) may become a defining Moment of his political career, much the way holding up a toddler to protect himself from bullets became the Moment of Greg Stillson’s political career in Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone.”

Not that there weren’t others. The empty threats that he bleated from the bunker under the White House where he cravenly crouched; turning off the White House lights (last done in 1940), building the eight foot fence around the White House (a joke making the rounds is that Mexico might just be willing to pay for THIS wall), and the comparison of Trump crouching afraid, underground and in the dark, to Winston Churchill. (Churchill famously would go out during Blitz attacks so that he might personally observe the atrocities committed against England by Hitler). His craven posturing even invited negative comparisons to Richard Nixon, who, some 50 years earlier, was also in a White House surrounded by protests. Nixon went out late in the evening to talk to some random protesters face-to-face to try and get a dialogue of some sort going.

The stunt of putting anonymous clowns in full soldier kit—dozens of them—in response to minor vandalism perpetrated the night before at the Lincoln Memorial was both ludicrous and sinister. Who were those clowns? Were they soldiers? Cops? Secret Service? Blackwater? Were they even American? Fortunately for all, they were content to just stand there and look stupid, since the protesters weren’t targeting the memorial and the spray paint was probably just done by one asshole looking to stir the pot.

The stunt of flying a helicopter between buildings to use the backwash from the blades to disperse the crowd was dangerous beyond belief. Any helicopter pilot pulling such a stunt other than under direct orders from the President would have had his license to fly permanently revoked. I’m guessing we’ll never learn the name of the war criminal who flew that chopper at the behest of Trump.

Oh, did I say war criminal? Yes. The chopper was marked with the red cross, making that a violation of the Geneva convention. Medical insignia means “non-combatant” both for their protection, and when a cowardly little Nazi sits in the White House, for the protection of unarmed American civilians.

The act of gassing a group of peaceful demonstrators in order to stage a painfully awkward PR stunt meant to drum up support from the religious right was also a war crime.

Tom Cotton, a sitting Senator from Arkansas, wrote an editorial for the New York Times, one which the Times utterly disgraced itself by running, in which he called for siccing the airborne infantry on the protesters. Yet another war crime, and Cotton should be expelled from the Senate and tried for advocating mass slaughter of Americans. As for the Times, just remember that in critical moments, this is a paper that will lie to you in service to the GOP. Now they are willing to suspend the Posse Comitatus Act, Habeas Corpus, and presumably the first, third and fourth amendments just because Cotton wanted the world to know that there might be people opposed to fascism in the crowd.

Some of Trump’s desperation and panic is warranted. Not only have his actions caused schisms in his previously unshakable base, but the Pentagon has made it as clear as the law allows that it is not prepared to fire on unarmed American civilians.

Keith Ellison, the District Attorney for the state of Minnesota where the Floyd murder took place, announced charges against the four police involved in Floyd’s death; Murder-2 against Chauvin, and accomplices and accessories to murder against the other three.

I thought that might defuse the situation a fair bit. Ellison is well-trusted, and this provided a serious promise of the justice the protesters wanted.

But the protests are no longer against the Floyd murder, or the police murders of hundreds of others of African Americans in recent years. Now the crowd has realized that their true enemy, black or white, Christian or non, Democrat or non, is the treasonous wannabee dictator in the White House.

Last night police arrested over 10,000 people nationwide. Since masks and social distancing aren’t available in jail, it’s safe to assume that as many as a thousand of those people may become sick, and three hundred or so may die. All for protesting oppression and treason by the government against the people.

I’m guessing the protests won’t die down, only now, it isn’t just injustice: it’s Americans fighting for their country against an opportunistic and amoral traitor in the White House.

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Taking the Knee — Will the murder of George Floyd shatter America’s emotional paralysis?

May 30th 2020

As I write this, we’re moving into the fifth night of civil unrest and full-on riots in the wake of the video of four Minneapolis police systematically murdering an African American man for – supposedly – spending a ten or a twenty dollar bill that might have been counterfeit. There’s pretty much zero evidence of any criminal intent, and even if Floyd was an evil mastermind producing millions of bogus notes in his basement, that usually doesn’t carry a death sentence.

Under any circumstances, the videos of Floyd’s murder would have been horrifying, but what made this stand out was how calm and collected the four cops were as a man lay dying under their knees. They were chatting, who knows about what? The Stanley Cup round robin? The weather? Lamenting about how the Civil War made killing slaves illegal? It was a cold, calculating murder, of the sort you associate with the Nazis, or Bond villains.

I was scared that America was becoming inured to the willful murder of African-Americans. In recent times, there have been Trayvon Martin, who was shot in 2012 by a murderous cop wannabee, George Zimmerman. Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, and neo-Nazi bigots crowed that he had it coming because he shoved a shopkeeper a half-hour earlier. Brown’s murder sparked the “Black Lives Matter” movement, much ridiculed by Donald Trump and other right wing trash. Dontre Hamilton was killed for being schizophrenic in public. Aside from being noisy, he wasn’t breaking any law, but a cop, Christopher Manney, decided to pat him down, and when Hamilton pulled away, Manney shot him.

Eric Garner was famously murdered by New York’s finest for the crime of selling cigarettes on a street corner. He uttered the phrase, hideously echoed this week, “I can’t breathe.” There are still apologists for racist murders who say if he could speak, he could breathe, and that he probably actually died from an ingrown toe nail, or some other hidden medical condition aggravated by having oxygen to the brain cut off for ten minutes. The same fools were saying the same thing six years later.

John Crawford, 22, was gunned down for picking up a toy .22 rifle in a WalMart and walking with it to the checkout stands in order to purchase it.

Ezell Ford, unarmed, was shot in the back by two police officers. He was accused of no crime, and the investigation was put on “administrative hold.”

Dante Parker was tased to death by San Bernardino cops. Tanisha Anderson, 37, died after cops smashed her head repeatedly against the pavement. Apparently they considered that a viable treatment for schizophrenia. Akai Gurley, 28, was shot for no reason at all by a cop. “Accidental discharge” they called it. Gurley wound up accidentally dead as a result.

Tamir Rice, age 12, was just a kid playing with a toy gun. In Cleveland, that, and black skin, is enough to get you killed. The poor panicked cops mistook him for an adult with an AR-15. The one who actually killed Tamir got fired, but don’t worry—he’s a cop somewhere else now, protecting white society from kids with toy guns.

Jerame Reid, 36, was shot and killed by police on suspicion of being black while a passenger in New Jersey.

That just brings us up to 2015. There have been a dozen or more incidents each year since of African-Americans dying at the hands of police where there were images proving that the cops were, at best, reckless, and at worst, murdering swine. Multiply that by dozens, perhaps hundreds of incidents where it was the word of our noble police against that of some black street thug who “reached for his waistband.”

According to the Guardian, in the first five months of 2015, “In total, 478 of those people were shot and killed, while 31 died after being shocked by a Taser, 16 died after being struck by police vehicles, and 19 – including 25-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore – have died after altercations in police custody.” We were on course for, and eventually met a total of 1,100 dying in police custody or confrontations with police. Over half of those killed were black. Twenty percent were white. It’s only gotten worse since then, led by a fascist regime that values vicious police suppression. Further, there’s no federal law requiring police departments to report fatal encounters to any central agency (the Guardian did its own, private survey), so the number of people killed by police may be double what we know about, or even worse.

Most encounters aren’t caught on camera. Personal webcams some police have to wear have a way of failing at critical moments, so until the rise of smartphones, it was always the word of sorrowful-looking officers against that of some dead guy.

But phones have changed all that. As Will Smith the actor acidly remarked, “Racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed.” And dozens of times a year, the viciousness and sadism of our alleged public defenders is put on full display.

Such spasms of rage are nothing new in America, of course. Slave revolts were so common, and so feared, that the Founders put the second amendment in, giving cover to slaveowners to hunt down and/or kill rebellious slaves. Slavery led to the civil war. Tulsa, Oklahoma saw its black community nearly exterminated by a mass lynching some 120 years ago. Lynchings were common, and praised by civic leaders from 1870 to 1960. The race riots of the 60s were sparked by a minor incident in Watts, where police stopped a youth, determined he had an outstanding warrant, and arrested him. They didn’t kill him or even rough him up. But onlookers were tired of constantly being detained on suspicion of being black. Then Martin Luther King Junior and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and the rage broke wide open.

The only thing surprising about this week’s events is that it took so long to happen. We’ve had three years of a president who has devoted his whole vicious, wastrel life to cheating and defaming African-Americans, a weak, cowardly racist even by the shit standards of the white supremacist.

He demonstrated his hate and fear on the third night, tweeting that that protesters could have been attacked with “vicious dogs and ominous weapons” wielded by the US Secret Service. He also attacked the Washington DC, mayor for supposedly not providing police to protect the White House. Poor defenseless widdle American president. I posted that perhaps the best answer was to put one of those vicious dogs in the Oval Office and put Trump out on the White House lawn to snarl at passers-by. Certainly it would be a win-win for the nation.

“They let the ‘protesters’ scream and rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard – didn’t know what hit them,” Trump said. Nothing more pathetic than a blustering, cowardly, racist bully.

In all of this, there was one gleaming, memorable moment that happened after the night protesters burned Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct, the pig pen that housed the four cops that murdered George Floyd. The nearby Gandhi Mahal Restaurant was severely damaged by fire. The owner, Ruhel Islam, told a friend, “Let my building burn,” he said. “Justice needs to be served.” The next day, he stood by that statement, saying, “We can rebuild a building, but we cannot rebuild a human. The community is still here, and we can work together to rebuild.” Mind you, Mr. Islam is almost certainly a Muslim. He’s as much a target of Trump’s fear and hate as any African-American. Nonetheless, he believes in us, whether we deserve it or not.

In the 18th century, a slaveowner, anguished by guilt and aware of the incredible damage slavery and bigotry would do to the country he helped create, wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.” Thomas Jefferson, no Christian, knew the price to be paid because humans value justice. He would be totally unsurprised by the events of this week.

He might have even felt that justice was being served.

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“God-Given” — The only right you’ll get there is the right to die

“God-Given”

The only right you’ll get there is the right to die

May 11th, 2020

 

We had a mass gathering of morons about 75 miles down I-5 over the weekend, a rodeo in a town called Cottonwood. Over 2,000 attended an event whose only rationale was that it was semi-traditional.

“This event’s been going on for 50 years, it’s a tradition for probably most of us, the rest of them that are here have been tired of being cooped up for months,” rodeo-goer Don Johnson told KRCR News.

“We have constitutional rights, we have inalienable rights given to us by God,” he added.

Well, first there’s the matter of the fact that 2,000 yahoos got together to yell at cowboys mistreating animals. Yes, Northern California has been lightly hit by the pandemic (my county, which is adjacent to Shasta County where Cottonwood is located, has had five cases, none fatal, with the last one on April 10th). Yes, California has moved to Stage 2 of the lock down, and our county has petitioned to be moved to Stage 3. So it’s reasonable for people to drop their guard a bit. But you can be sure none of the yahoos were staying six feet apart, and wearing a mask to fight something a millionth your size just ain’t manly, yuh know?

There was a show on HBO called Avenue 5, about a luxury cruise liner in space which gets knocked off course, and instead of a projected eight weeks, it’s three and a half years from Earth. Written two years before anyone ever heard the phrase “Covid-19” the passengers chafe against the involuntary and seemingly endless isolation, and in the penultimate episode many passengers become convinced that the whole “marooned in space” thing is a hoax, and a number “die of stupidity” in the Captain’s (Hugh Laurie’s) words, by “exposing the hoax” of being in space by stepping out the airlock. You couldn’t watch that without thinking of the whole “ReOpen” movement.

With the exception of certain high-ranking members of the administration, I don’t wish this disease on anybody, and I sincerely hope that all the attendees at the rodeo are in good health two weeks from now. Given the generally light contagion in this region, there’s a chance that wish will pan out. If if just ONE attendee is feeling fine right now has the disease, the stage for an outbreak is set. But I’m sure you’ve been following the course of the pandemic as closely as I have, and know all this.

One line that Johnson uttered was particularly grating. “… [W]e have inalienable rights given to us by God.”

The first thing that crossed my mind was medieval Europe, when contagions swept through (including, most famously, the Black Plague), and people would gather in churches and cathedrals seeking shelter and salvation from the curse. It was a habit that killed additional tens of thousands of people, perhaps more. And while people did not know how the disease spread from one person to another, they couldn’t help but notice that more people who were at those gatherings died. It’s pretty hard to miss something like that, especially if you’re in a small town and it’s easy to see who is dying, and the rate at which they are dying.

But they couldn’t talk about it. It was sacrilege, you see, and at various times and in various places, suggesting that a gathering in the sight of God for salvation wasn’t working out, was in fact making things worse, could get you burned at the stake, or hung, drawn and quartered, or any number of other medieval amusements designed to protect the gods from doubters.

The other reason it irritated is that none of the rights American enjoy were “God-given.” The phrase does appear in the Declaration of Independence, America’s “Dear John” letter to King George III. It was inserted, over author Thomas Jefferson’s objections, as a rhetorical flourish intended to give the document some gravitas in the eyes of the King by citing the one thing in England deemed more powerful than the King himself. Didn’t work, but hey, nice try, guys! Kings are kinda notorious for having only cosmetic reverence for God, and George III was no exception.

The rights that god-struck types like to describe as being Ordained from Above were actually torn from the long history of feudal oppression in Europe by the people themselves. It’s for a reason that the opening words of the Constitution, “We the People…” set the tone for the entire document. Not only did gods and churches have no role in the government of the people being proposed, but the Constitution specified that neither church nor state should interfere in the working of the other, and that no religious qualification should be permitted for any office or position of public trust in America. Nor was that a mere flourish: by its language, “…but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” it’s the one thing in the entire document that cannot be amended.

So when people talk about ‘God-given rights’ not only are they talking about a different set of rights assigned to God by a half-hearted and ineffectual flourish, but the rights they are talking about (incorrectly, in the case of the rodeo) are very explicitly created by People for People. No gods need apply.

I’ve said at several occasions that I social distance, not because the government said so, but as a matter of common sense. Not only am I protecting myself, but I’m lowering the odds of my wandering around with no symptoms but crawling with disease, and thus am protecting you and yours.

I don’t have the government violating my rights because god likes rodeos, and I see no need to take advice from a god that, following the logic of magical thinking, caused the plague in the first place.

 

 

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