Sunday, March 17, 2019

The Color of the Sky On His World


The tweets not by Donald Trump were re-tweeted by him since 2:00 p.m. this afternoon.  The quality of these "sources" should be obvious, but one or two deserve special mention:
And one deserves special commentary:
Hey, as long as nobody in GOP gets challenged in a primary, right?

Just remember, this is the man who sits atop the greatest intelligence gathering services in the world.  And who gets his information from a fanatical group of racists and know-nothings.  And who, based on that alone, clearly should not be allowed to be responsible for anything more complicated than a paper napkin, nor permitted possession of anything sharper than a rubber ball.

And a secret everyone but Trump and his "supporters" seem to know:  the wall is not getting built (nor is it going to be); GM doesn't give a wet snap what Trump wants; and the wheels of justice grind exceeding small and don't even take judicial notice of loony conspiracy tweets.

But his "base" is something we have to respect because elections have consequences; or something.

Adding: a fuller rundown of these "sources":
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One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other


 

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Return to Gone Away


Still too early, but there may be one in my future....

I'm not (yet) a supporter of Beto (I did support him in his Senate campaign), because I'd still rather see him run against Cornyn and take the Senate seat, where I think he'd do more good as one vote among 100, than a non-vote in the White House.

Unless he can pull an LBJ; but I don't expect that.

I'm still more liberal/progressive/radical/what-have-you in my politics than anyone I know.  I'm against prisons, period.  I'm for complete equality and equity by leveling downward (first of all will be last and servant of all, after all), etc., etc., etc.  I mean that stuff.  I believe it.  I think it sound, wise, the best basis for human society, period.  It is the vision that draws the nations to the holy mountain of Isaiah so they won't study war no more (a slap at Solomon the weapons merchant, but don't get me started).

But I'm also tired of all-or-nothing politics.  I don't blame Trump for that; I blame Newt Gingrich.  Or maybe the people so disappointed by Barry Goldwater they decided to burn it all down, and it just took them 50 years to get close enough to doing it.

Will Mitch McConnell quit the Senate in disgust and despair?  I've seen the punditry on that; I put it in the same category as Ivanka/Jared/Melania are actually appalled by Donald, not supportive of him.  Wishful thinking, in other words.  Every time you think he and/or the GOP Senate can't to any lower, they get out the shovels, and show no concern with doing so.  If McConnell is concerned, it's with the fact Trump is more popular than he is in Kentucky.

Dese are de conditions dat prevail.

Personally, I'm more aligned with Warren or Sanders than anybody else.  I'm probably well to the left of both of them.  I also know my positions, or theirs, would never survive contact with governmental reality, and wouldn't move the country leftward by the experience of them in office, but quite the opposite.  LBJ, after all, got Medicare passed.  Now even Medicare for all is considered too radical for much of America.  People conditioned by 5 decades of GOP propaganda want to keep government out of their Medicare; they don't want everyone else to enjoy it.  We aren't told Social Security can be fixed easily by taxing the rich (a small increase, not one designed to drive them all off-shore), we are told it is doomed to fail and start planning to do without it now.  We don't see those two programs as socialism at work; we see socialism as the thing that ruined Venezuela, or that Millenials embrace because they've been so screwed by student debt and not enough white collar jobs (the despair of the Depression redux, in other words; and capitalism unleashed will once again save us).

LBJ gave us PBS, and now we've choked it down so tightly it has to spend as much time fundraising as it does broadcasting, just to have enough money to buy some more shows from the BBC.  LBJ gave us the space program successes that we don't want to pay for anymore.  LBJ gave us highway beautification; we want more billboards.  LBJ gave us improved education standards; now the solution lurking in the wings is to scrap public education in favor of "charter" schools and publicly funded private schools.  LBJ inspired us to educate everyone; now we want to "teach to the test."

Tell me again that this time, a liberal firebrand in the White House will inspire the nation to pursue the angels of our better nature and bring about the Millennium we were promised when Kennedy was leading us all into Camelot.

Will a Democrat be better than a Republican in the White House?  To be sure, so long as we break this cycle of electing a President from one party, a Congress from the other.  Didn't anybody notice the GOP took over Congress when Trump was elected?  That was no accident, and it wasn't the idea everyone voted for.  Everybody and his uncle expected Hillary to win, but didn't want her to have Congress do.  Divided government works, donchaknow?  It works to keep government out of your Medicare and from investing your Social Security in the stock market (as well as not expanding the former or raising taxes on the rich to fund the latter).  America voted for divided government 3 years ago, and then got what they didn't think they'd voted for, because how could a fool like Trump win?  Last November America went for divided government again; a divided Congress that couldn't mess with Trump too much, but also that wouldn't let Trump continue to be the enfant terrible that 70 year old man is.

And a Warren or Sanders in the bully pulpit is going to do what?  And is not going to get a Congress watched over by Mitch McConnell, or worse?

Which, I know, is not much reason to vote for Beto; it's not much reason to vote at all.  President Donald Trump is the reason to vote at all; not voting is what got us into this national, even international, mess.  We have a president who sounds like the President of Venezuela, except the latter blames the U.S. for his failures, and the former blames CNN and the Democrats.  We don't need another conspiratorial lunatic in the White House.

But neither do we need to believe a savior will arise and save us from ourselves.  As somebody pointed out, the last time a Presidential candidate lost a major political race (I think it was for the Senate) and then rose to enter the White House, that candidate was Abraham Lincoln.  So it could turn out well; it could turn out poorly.  Lincoln was not the anti-slavery avatar we might wish today he was.  He simply wasn't, by the standards of his day, that radical.

Maybe radical is a good idea in theory, not that good an idea in practice.  Or maybe I'm just too Niebuhrian for my own good.
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Erin go...GOP?


Really?
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White House Schedule Concerns

So, let's review:  Jeanine Pirro ranted against Ilhan Omar because the Representative is a Muslim. These were comments even FoxNews condemned. Then a man, citing Trump's words and actions, killed 50 people at prayer in a mosque in hopes of starting a race war. Perhaps related to that, perhaps not, FoxNews pulled Pirro's show last night. And so we come to Donald Trump's tweets thus morning.




Just so we know where his priorities are. So white nationalism is not an international problem, SNL colluded with Russia:

(You can read Trump's Twitter feed for the 3 tweets this morning on SNL.), and the President is concerned with the scheduling practices of a cable news network.

BTW, my PBS station is disrupting its schedule again to run fundraising pitches. It takes 2 to 3 weeks before they return to normal, but somehow the republic still stands and it's not a national issue.
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Saturday, March 16, 2019

Why Your Mother Told You...

...not to speak ill of the dead.

I'm old enough to remember when this was a controversial idea on tout le intertoobs. I seldom agreed with John McCain on politics, but this attack is ad hominem, and the man cannot defend himself. It's the ultimate act of cowardice.

And it comes in the context of several retweets from the White House account showing people praising Trump at the veto signing party.
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Friday, March 15, 2019

More on "How You Do It"



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"Your time is sand, your ways are leaves upon the sea"


Compassion is a subversive act.  And is the problem really a problem?

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday he does not see a rise in white nationalism but it may be an issue in New Zealand, where a gunman who is believed to espouse those views killed 49 people at two mosques.

Asked by a reporter if he sees an increase in white nationalism, Trump said: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people.”

Trump also said he had not seen a manifesto in which the suspected gunman denounced immigrants and praised Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.”
The manifesto also reportedly cites the potential loss of absolute gun rights under the 2nd Amendment.  The killer was inspired internationally (figures from Sweden and France have been mentioned in news coverage), but he also wanted to incorporate as many people as he could, in hopes of sparking the "race war" that people like Dylann Roof were looking for, as well.  Is this the point where we point out Hitler was inspired, in part, by a book from America published in 1916:  "The Passing of the Great Race, which spread the doctrine of race purity all over the globe."

Yes, kiddies, we did all this long before electronic communications were widespread or even global.  Now pardon me while I run a bulldozer over Godwin's Law; because this is the start of the conversation, not the ending of it:

Grant’s purportedly scientific argument that the exalted “Nordic” race that had founded America was in peril, and all of modern society’s accomplishments along with it, helped catalyze nativist legislators in Congress to pass comprehensive restrictionist immigration policies in the early 1920s. His book went on to become Adolf Hitler’s “bible,” as the führer wrote to tell him. Grant’s doctrine has since been rejuvenated and rebranded by his ideological descendants as “white genocide” (the term genocide hadn’t yet been coined in Grant’s day). In an introduction to the 2013 edition of another of Grant’s works, the white nationalist Richard Spencer warns that “one possible outcome of the ongoing demographic transformation is a thoroughly miscegenated, and thus homogeneous and ‘assimilated,’ nation, which would have little resemblance to the White America that came before it.” This language is vintage Grant.

How we came to forget this chapter in American history (rather like we forget the true evils of slavery, or genocide of the natives here) is described in the very next paragraph, with its own dollop of that elision of our sins included in the passage itself:

Most Americans, however, quickly forgot who Grant was—but not because the country had grappled with his vision’s dangerous appeal and implications. Reflexive recoil was more like it: When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form, wartime denial set in. Jonathan Peter Spiro, a historian and the author of Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (2009), described the backlash to me this way: “Even though the Germans had been directly influenced by Madison Grant and the American eugenics movement, when we fought Germany, because Germany was racist, racism became unacceptable in America. Our enemy was racist; therefore we adopted antiracism as our creed.” Ever since, a strange kind of historical amnesia has obscured the American lineage of this white-nationalist ideology.

When Nazism reflected back that vision in grotesque form seems to imply the vision was not grotesque already, and only became so because Nazis were monsters, not us.  Nice work, if you can get it; and we get it so very easily, and so very often.  I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free to deny any of our national, historical sins.

The language of Richard Spencer described as "vintage Grant" is, of course, also vintage Trump.  Problems of evil are problems for other people; never for Trump and "his" people.  Problems of evil are always "over there," even if "there" is only the other side of the street; or the tracks; or the opposite river bank.  This is not a uniquely American sin, as another quote from Serwer provides (indeed, this article is almost Nostrodamic in its prescience, given what has happened in the last 24 hours):

Grant was not the first proponent of “race science.” In 1853, across the Atlantic, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, a French count, first identified the “Aryan” race as “great, noble, and fruitful in the works of man on this earth.” Half a century later, as the eugenics movement gathered force in the U.S., “experts” began dividing white people into distinct races. In 1899, William Z. Ripley, an economist, concluded that Europeans consisted of “three races”: the brave, beautiful, blond “Teutons”; the stocky “Alpines”; and the swarthy “Mediterraneans.” Another leading academic contributor to race science in turn-of-the-century America was a statistician named Francis Walker, who argued in The Atlantic that the new immigrants lacked the pioneer spirit of their predecessors; they were made up of “beaten men from beaten races,” whose offspring were crowding out the fine “native” stock of white people. In 1901 the sociologist Edward A. Ross, who similarly described the new immigrants as “masses of fecund but beaten humanity from the hovels of far Lombardy and Galicia,” coined the term race suicide.
Everything old really is new again; ideas really are bulletproof.  As another example (it's hard not to turn this post over to this article), consider this if you think the courts are bad today:

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court was struggling mightily to define whiteness in a consistent fashion, an endeavor complicated by the empirical flimsiness of race science. In one case after another, the high court faced the task of essentially tailoring its definition to exclude those whom white elites considered unworthy of full citizenship. 
Serwer gives an example of that:

In 1923, when an Indian veteran named Bhagat Singh Thind—who had fought for the U.S. in World War I—came before the justices with the claim of being Caucasian in the scientific sense of the term, and therefore entitled to the privileges of whiteness, they threw up their hands. In a unanimous ruling against Thind (who was ultimately made a citizen in 1936), Justice George Sutherland wrote:

"What we now hold is that the words 'free white persons' are words of common speech to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word 'Caucasian' only as that word is popularly understood.

The justices had unwittingly acknowledged a consistent truth about racism, which is that race is whatever those in power say it is. 
We need, finally, to return to Hitler, especially in light of the President's comments today:

It was america that taught us a nation should not open its doors equally to all nations,” Adolf Hitler told The New York Times half a decade later, just one year before his elevation to chancellor in January 1933. Elsewhere he admiringly noted that the U.S. “simply excludes the immigration of certain races. In these respects America already pays obeisance, at least in tentative first steps, to the characteristic völkisch conception of the state.” Hitler and his followers were eager to claim a foreign—American—lineage for the Nazi mission. 
So here we are, back again at the beginning, and in our end is our beginning.  I said this article by Serwer was eerily prescient.  It is so in the way the Hebrew prophets (though under very different inspiration following a wholly different purpose) could seem prescient:  because when you see what is right in front of you, it suddenly appears.  Consider these concluding words from Serwer, and how frightfully true they turned out to be:

When Americans abandon their commitment to pluralism, the world notices, and catastrophe follows. 
The only response now is subversive acts, like compassion; like Lent. 
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Hallmark tries sympathy cards for massacres

also good for weddings and graduations.  But enough about you, let's talk about me now:



(BTW, this is how you do it:
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Compassion is a subversive act


A brave soul from the Department of Homeland Security came forward with a story that has rocked the country this week. They are keeping a dossier on journalists, activists and others, flagging their passports, in some cases, revoking visas, travel privileges in others, deporting as many as they can.

I saw the article and thought one of the blurred photos of the targeted people looked familiar.

It was, because it was my passport photo. With a yellow X that the most powerful government in the world drew across my face.

But none of us would have known if someone in the department, someone with significant access to information, hadn't taken a very serious and personal risk to come forward.

There's a sermon at the other end of this link,  so I won't offer another one.  Let's just start with the admission that asylum is a legal status, one enshrined in the law of the land. It is not illegal to seek asylum here. It is not illegal aid those seeking asylum.

But under this Administration, it is considered illegal to show compassion. It is illegal to offer kindness to the stranger. It is illegal to be your brother's keeper.

This is Lent, and our government wants to make caring for others a subversive act. Lent us about compassion. Properly practiced, Lent is subversive. Compassion should not be; but for now, it is.

Somebody should write some Lenten meditations about that.
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The Boy Can't Help It


The problem everybody has with Beto:  right now, he's sucking all the oxygen out of the room.


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Thursday, March 14, 2019

A Stunning Display of Incompetence: A Timeline

March 13:

In the end, though, none of that mattered. Vice President Mike Pence’s assurances to Lee and his colleagues that Trump was open to the compromise went up in smoke when the president called in to a Senate lunch meeting Wednesday with a preemptive announcement: He planned to veto Lee’s bill.
March 14:

On Thursday morning, Donald Trump sent out a pointed missive ahead of the Senate’s vote to block his emergency declaration: “A vote for today’s resolution by Republican Senators is a vote for Nancy Pelosi, Crime, and the Open Border Democrats!“

Soon after, White House aides began blasting the tweet to GOP senators by text message to remind them of how the president viewed the impending vote, according to senators and aides who received the messages.

Trump was for the Lee legislation, and then he wasn't, and then he was; sort of.  And he was too busy tweeting to actually, you know, call Senators and get them to vote his way.  And yes, the vote by Congress plays into the hands of those bringing suits to stop this "emergency" (which Homeland Security has yet to take action on), because it gives the courts a reason to refuse this hot potato without refusing to rule on the issues raised by this declaration. And the lesson of all this?


You don't get enough votes in the Senate, either.

So much winning!
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Covering The Horse Race




407-29 = "#Dems In Disarray"

47 Democratic Senators + 12 GOP Senators =

“I think this is a stunning rebuke to the president that reflects this turmoil that’s building, or so it seems, within the Republican Party right now under President Trump,” Axios reporter Alexi McCammond noted.

“This whole national emergency thing is reflective of the same pattern of behavior that we’ve seen from him since day one, where he loves using this sort of unilateral executive authority afforded to him by being the president of the United States,” McCammond explained. “Whether that’s legislating via executive orders … or governing via tweet or the pardon power and the way he dangles that with people and now this national emergency, it is not surprising to me that he’s not backing down.”

"Something's happening here/what it is ain't exactly clear...."

The Narrative is All.
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SO MUCH WINNING!!!!!



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Is it 2020 already?


Let the bitching begin:

“How is it that someone who did raise $80 million but then lost against Ted Cruz, how is it that, all of a sudden, he thinks he’s qualified?” she asked.

Well, let's see:

“Beto has the potential ― alone among the Democratic nominees ― to put Texas into play,” Rice University political scientist Mark Jones said. “If Trump is forced to go on the defense in Texas, that really complicates the rest of his election strategy. There’s almost no way for him to win mathematically if he loses Texas the way things are looking today.” 

The Democrats already have:  California (Harris); New York (Gillibrand); Vermont (Sanders); and Massachusetts (Warren).  Who else is going to bring Texas?

Indeed, the main gripe seems to be that Beto is a man, not a woman.


Which may make some pundits and guardians of the public discourse bristle, but complaining about it is not exactly a winning political strategy.  "Don't be sexist, vote for Harris/Gillibrand/Warren" is not a bumper sticker anybody needs to see.  And frankly, if the Democrats want to split so badly over a non-issue as that, they deserve to lose again in 2020.

Which is not to say I'm committed to Beto come hell or high water; but who else is likely to bring Texas to the Democratic column?  That alone is worthy of serious consideration.  But right now, in a field of 15, everyone has their partisans, and the only way to climb is to stand on somebody's shoulders.  Preferably with cleats on.

Let the games begin.
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Lessons In Tautology

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Try Another One

I've known (of) two people in Texas called "Beto." Both are white guys. Nobody cares.
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Wednesday, March 13, 2019

"Ma! Grandpa got in the cooking sherry again!"



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Today in criminal justice

The simple fact is, we are more comfortable with "white-collar" crime than with non-white collar crime. And we are more comfortable with black and brown people in prison than white people. Does anyone consider Martha Stewart an ex-con, or a convicted felon? (Full disclosure: I like post-prison Martha). Of course, she's a celebrity, too; that always helps.

So we were outraged by the "wrist slap" the first judge have Manafort; but despite an hours long hearing and an implicit rejection of the idea Manafort has lived a "blame," or that he was truly contrite, this sentence is effectively shorter. The judge thought it was fair for the crime and despite the fact she didn't seem to praise Manafort. 10 years, though, is a long sentence; and the fact is, long sentences bother us less when the criminal is not white and the crime is not hard to understand. We're upset when the sentence for the rich white man is lower than anything given to the poor black man, nut our anger is not directed at that injustice. We're not angry that the system of punishment is askew, that poor people are regularly imprisoned on lengthy sentences. We're angry that one celebrity wasn't buried under the jail.  To the overall injustice of the system, we are entirely indifferent.

Aye, there's the rub.

(I should add my educated guess is that this sentence was set with an eye to appeals. Rich people can appeal their sentence; poor people can't. And again, appellate judges are more sympathetic to people who are "their kind." We all are. So ten years for Manafort's crimes may seem very long, but 10 years for stealing quarters is fixing "broken windows."  There's always an excuse.)
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Tuesday, March 12, 2019

Maybe We DO Need the FAA

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It's true! It's true!

Seriously. I don't expect this to last long.
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Who needs the FAA?

Or the NTSB? We have sooper-genius on the job!
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Monday, March 11, 2019

I really didn't think she...

...was on to something, but now I do.

I mean, if Facebook is gonna be this clumsy....
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POTUS is bored, needs a new toy


How quickly that "you're a liar!", "No, you're a liar!" drama faded from the newsreels.

But wait!

 

How quickly Michael Cohen's "perjury" slipped his mind.  And as if I didn't have enough reasons to vote against the man:

 
Of course he's fine with it.  He never goes to work before noon, and only goes outside to play golf.
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My Brother's Keeper


We take children away from parents who starve their children, physically or emotionally abuse their children. Why don't we do it when they expose their children to preventable diseases?

The 6-year-old boy, who was not identified in the report, was playing outdoors at a farm when he cut his forehead. Six days later, the case study detailed, the child started exhibiting tell-tale signs of tetanus ― jaw and muscle spasms, arching of the neck and back and difficulty breathing.

His parents contacted emergency services, and the boy was airlifted to a pediatric medical facility.

“He was alert and requested water but was unable to open his mouth; respiratory distress caused by diaphragmatic and laryngeal spasm necessitated sedation, endotracheal intubation, and mechanical ventilation,” the report noted.

The child, who had never received any immunizations, was given an initial dose of the DTaP vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.

“Fortunately, the emergency department physicians immediately recognized the symptoms of severe tetanus,” Judith Guzman-Cottrill, a pediatrics professor at Oregon Health & Science University who co-authored the report, told The Washington Post in an email. “Physicians have all read about tetanus, and we have seen pictures of people suffering from tetanus. ... It is profound.”

Tetanus is an infection caused by spores of Clostridium tetani bacteria that enter the body through a wound. Toxin from the bacteria causes painful muscle spasms, often in a person’s neck and jaw, hence the common name for tetanus: lockjaw. When the muscles lock, it can be difficult for infected people to open their mouth or swallow.

The boy received inpatient acute care for 57 days, 47 of which he spent in the intensive care unit, the case study said. It took 44 days after he developed the disease before he was able to sip clear liquids and 50 days before he was able to walk on his own.

The case was the first incidence of pediatric tetanus that Oregon witnessed in over 30 years and resulted in $800,000 in inpatient charges. At the end of the ordeal, the report said, the boy’s parents refused further vaccinations before taking him home.

This is child abuse:  plain and simple.  47 days in intensive care, 44 days before he could sip clear liquids, 50 days before he could walk on his own again, and the parents still refuse further vaccinations?  What madness is this?  If these parents were starving their child to drive "Satan" out of him, there'd be no question of societal responsibility.  But because it's a vaccine?  Maybe it's the extreme case we need to prove the point. What if the next case is polio? Is that what it will take? Someone crippled for life to convince us we've gone down the wrong path?
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Or your lyin' ears.....


HE NEVER SAID "TIM APPLE!"  EXCEPT WHEN HE DID!  BECAUSE HE MEANT TO!
This AND Daylight Savings Time, all in one week?  I'm going back to bed....

 

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First Monday of Lent 2019


IS this a fast, to keep
      The larder lean?
            And clean
From fat of veals and sheep?

Is it to quit the dish        5
      Of flesh, yet still
            To fill
The platter high with fish?

Is it to fast an hour,
      Or ragg’d to go?        10
            Or show
A downcast look and sour?

No; ’tis a fast to dole
      Thy sheaf of wheat,
            And meat,        15
Unto the hungry soul.

It is to fast from strife,
      From old debate
            And hate;
To circumcise thy life.        20

To show a heart grief-rent;
      To starve thy sin,
            Not bin;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.

"Lent," by Robert Herrick


"Let us fast in such a way that we lavish our lunches upon the poor, so that we may not store up in our purses what we intended to eat, but rather in the stomachs of the poor."--Caesarius of Arles, Sixth century


I post these things out to try to remind myself it is Lent; and of some of the importance of Lent.  Lent is really the great season of the church, and long season,  the season of repentance and reflection on sin, the season of confession and atonement.  I'm surprised it wasn't taken up at some point by the Protestants, especially those sects that wanted to be more Calvinist than the Calvinists, who wanted to repent like the Baptisers at every revival.  Then again, Lent is an institutional method, and Protestants have long emphasized personal piety as a way to reject organizational spirituality.

So it goes; and so it is.  I find Lent useful as a method of self-examination, as long as the examination is honest and fruitful, not light and passing or degrading and demeaning.  We are not called to regret our every sin, but neither are we called to treat them as peccadilloes.  What is humility without awareness of failure?  But what is the emphasis on failure, except idolatry?  Somewhere between starving and feasting we find God, and we always find God in the hardest place possible:  in other people.  A "sheaf of wheat, and meat, unto the hungry soul," is not a spiritual directive, but a physical one.  We are not called to love our neighbor; we are called to express our love for our neighbor.

I really need to work on my ability to fast; but maybe if I can't physically fast, I can at least fast from those habits of the heart that keep my bowels from being filled with mercy and compassion; and really, until that sentence, it's easy to forget the following wasn't written yesterday, instead of 300 years ago:

You will perhaps say that, by this means, I encourage people to be beggars.  But the same thoughtless objection may be made against all kinds of charities, for they may encourage people to depend upon them.  The same may be said against forgiving our enemies, for it may encourage people to do us hurt.  The same may be said even against the goodness of God, that, by pouring blessing on the evil and on the good, on the just and on the unjust, evil and unjust people are encouraged in their wicked ways.  The same may be said against clothing the naked, or giving medicines to the sick, for that may encourage people to neglect themselves and be careless of their health.  But when the love of God dwellers in you, then it has enlarged your heart, and filled you with bowels of mercy and compassion, you will make no more such objections as these.

--William Law (18th century)
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Sunday, March 10, 2019

The Big Story...


...was Ilhan Omar and who's anti-Semitic now, and of court, #DemsInDisarray.

The longest running show on television may not be aware of this story, but Chinese intelligence has known about it for quite some time; probably from the beginning.  But look! Democrats only got 407 votes on their resolution, and Chuck Todd got to interview Liz Cheney, one of 23 people who voted against it (and if Todd mentioned that, I blinked and missed it).
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"Straw police" is the new straw man

Waiters have been asking me this question for decades. Well, the good ones have. I don't use straws because: I just don't. I'm always happy not to have something on the table that goes automatically from useful to trash despite the fact it wasn't used.

If that's socialism, then I've been a socialist longer than I thought.
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No, I hate DST AND stupid condescension



No, Mark Joseph Stern, I do know what I'm railing against when I complain about Daylight Saving Time.  I'm not confused; I'm tired of the uselessness of the idea.

I lived in the Chicago area for a year.  It felt like it was just south of the Arctic circle, because on the hottest day in August the public pool was too cold to do more than shiver in.  I was used to Texas summers, not Chicago summers(swimming pools actually get warm in August, but still cooler than the air temperature), and the winters were worse.  Daylight started stealing from the sky by 3:30; it was dark by 5 p.m.  The sun barely made a dent in the darkness during the week in the morning, when my then young daughter had to go to school where they stood outside waiting for school to start unless the temperature was about 5 below (if memory serves; it may have had to go lower than that). Maybe the sun was up by then, but it was barely up. Who would wish to see it come up later? Teachers, janitors, principals, parents, even students? Apparently Mr. Stern doesn't know any such people.  Apparently Mr. Stern also thinks everyone in America lives in Chicago, or further north, and would love to have DST in the winter as well as the summer.  He thinks what we all dislike is the sun retreating from the sky before the workday has ended.  I think about getting up at 5 by the sun, even though the clock says it's 6 a.m.  I think, further, of going to bed at 10:00, when the sun is still withdrawing light from the sky.  That's how it is south of the Mason-Dixon, in the summer on DST.  Florida may want that year round, but I don't.  One more reason not to live in Florida.

DST for me is summer days that don't end on time, but reach almost to midnight.  It's the closest to Moscow's "white night" as I ever want to get and of course it's hot, rather than cold.  That heat persists long after the sun sets, so making the clocks tell me it's time to sleep so I can get up the next morning, when the heat of the day has only begun to dissipate, when the light of the day has only begun to turn to darkness, is a more real problem than Mr. Stern's thought that everyone sleeps as late in winter as he does, and wants the light to last until he gets home from work.  You want the state you live in in the Northeast or upper Midwest to do that?  Fine; but count my state out.

I hate daylight saving time, and I know why, and I know what I'm talking about.  It isn't a convenience in the summer in the American south, it's a burden.  Days are long enough down here in summer.  By August, day is distinguishable from night only by the presence of non-artificial light; the heat has built up so much over so many days it won't go away until October, or maybe November.  About the time we "fall back," in fact; and it's nice to get up as the sun is rising, and go home as it is going down.  It's nice, in other words, to be back on "God's time."  Besides, I lose an hour of sleep today that I won't get back until November.  I'll feel that for 8 months.

There are a lot of people, apparently unknown to Mr. Stern, who work by the sun; and those who don't work farms or ranches, who get up by clocks and toil in the daylight, know the difference between rising in the dark and going home in the heat of the day.  No, Mr. Stern, we know what we are talking about.  What you don't know, is what we are talking about.

These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.
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10 years later, and going off DST, I'm still wondering


If space and time are connected, why don't clocks make me look smaller?
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Friday, March 08, 2019

Godwin's Ironclad Law



Since I keep talking about this, I'll drop this into the conversation.  It's from an opinion column at Haaretz (though it's behind a paywall, so I'm using the quote from Raw Story's reprint of a Salon column):

What, after all, has Omar said? That pro-Israel activists demand “allegiance to a foreign country”; that U.S. politicians support Israel because of money they receive from the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC, and that “Israel hypnotized the world.” What is incorrect in these statements? Why is describing reality considered anti-Semitic?
Because, as Eliot said, humankind cannot bear very much reality?  You notice if you leave certain facts out of what Ilhan Omar said, it's rather easy to make it offensive, and also to use the 407-23 vote yesterday to continue the narrative "Dems in disarray."

I have to challenge my source, if only to clarify my point.  Paul Rosenberg quotes that language, and then explains the problem in America is "sensitivity to language."  That fits the Breathed cartoon I used before; but it's not the issue.  "Sensitivity to language" is a smokescreen, just as "political correctness" was for so long a time.  It's a canard, a sword and shield, to ward off real discussion of the issues in favor of a discussion that keeps us away from addressing the issues.  Rosenberg, without irony, opens his argument quoting Jeremy Ben-Ami:

If you’re going to have a serious discussion about hate and intolerance in this country, let’s start at the top. Let’s start by having a House discussion about the president’s intolerance and his racism. Let’s have a discussion about the xenophobia and the racism that’s coming from the other side of the aisle. And let’s stop using the discussion of anti-Semitism as a way of avoiding a real discussion about policy towards Israel and Palestine, and the issues that are actually on the table about occupation and the treatment of Palestinians. (emphasis added)

Is that going to happen now?  Not soon.  NPR described this clash on Capitol Hill as a generational one; the younger generation of Representatives v. the older generation of the House leadership.  Well, the times they are a-changin', again. It's about time, too.  And I'm not interested in the variant "both-siderism" of arguments about Trump's xenophobia or the racism of birtherism.  This isn't about tu quoque, it's about shutting down the discussion, about not letting the issues be aired and considered

Thought Criminal, in another context on the same mushrooming controversy (inside the Beltway it mushrooms, anyway; how many of us are actually affected by it?), notes this:

 It plays into some of the worst sterotyping of Jews holding themselves to be "chosen" as if that choice was an assignment of superiority, it also diminishes the protection that holding it as part of the universal crime of genocide gives by enhancing its meaning to those who are not Jewish. 

That sense of being superior is one attributed to Judaism by Gentiles, not one inherent to being the children of Abraham or Isaiah's vision of the holy mountain to which the nations will want to come.  If anything the law and the prophets are a burden on Jews, a duty; not a mark of special favor and superior position among the nations.  There is a point when anything that can be said to insult Jews, especially if AIPAC doesn't approve of it (or the JDL, in the issue TC brings up) is itself a form of anti-semitism, because it establishes Jews and Israel as untouchable and beyond reproach or critique.  And perhaps that is why Gideon Levy wrote about Omar's comments:

“Maybe, for the first time in history, someone will dare tell the truth to the American people, absorbing scathing accusations of anti-Semitism, without bowing her head.”

It is, after all, and ironically enough, an issue of free speech; except this is not a case of bad speech which needs to be drowned out by better speech; this is a case of speech that should be heard first, and adjudged later, after due deliberation.  We can't listen, if we refuse to hear.

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Speaking of the impact of your statements.....



If your attack on the "fossil fuel industry" is about ANWAR and opening public lands to drilling, you have my sympathies.  But if your attack is simply on the "fossil fuel industry," my first question is going to be:  how did you get to that rally?

I mean, I'm all for the Green New Deal, at least in concept (do we have it in concrete, yet?), but fossil fuels basically undergird modern industrial society.  Shouting "FUCK YOU!" at oil companies is, well, just stupid.  Exxon doesn't have my best interests at heart, but Exxon isn't forcing us all to buy their fossil fuels.
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Thursday, March 07, 2019

I'M OFFENDED BY YOUR OFFENSE!


I actually went to school with Berkeley Breathed (I was in graduate school, he was an undergrad, we never met.  It was a school of 50,000 people, I've lived in smaller towns).  I thought of that comic (above; and found it!  Praise be to Google and the intertoobs!) when I read this:


Yeah, that's pretty much where we are.  And part of what's happening is actually this:

Roosevelt wanted to expand the Court, at one point, to 15 justices.  His critics denounced the plan as "court packing."  Now journalists use the term as a noun.  The number of justices started at 6, in 1789.  It went up to 7 in 1803, then 9 in 1837, then 10 in 1863.  I have yet to find any reference to any of these increases as "court packing."  It went down to 7, and Andrew Jackson was blocked from adding 3 Justices to the court with the move; which puts the recent actions of Mitch McConnell in a slightly different light.  But the point is, the number is set by Congress, not Art. III; and it has fluctuated in almost 220 years, without causing the death of the republic or the end of comity as we have known it.

I especially like the fact Congress slapped President Jackson so hard.  Kinda makes "court packing" sound reasonable by comparison.  There are a lot of sound arguments to be made for expanding the Court, especially as the Court has become more political and politicized in my lifetime.  It would probably save the Court, which after all has only its reputation to rest on, finally (something Roberts, who seems to be the new Kennedy, seems to understand).  It might also lighten the load on the other justices.  But we can't even discuss the topic if we have to get around journalists describing it with a pejorative.  In fact, we can't decide very many important things if everybody is going to use, or insist everyone else is using, offensive terms.
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Godwin's Law Backs The Truck Up


When Ilhan Omar says this:

“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” Omar said as part of a discussion about past anti-Semitism allegations lobbed at her.

I understand her comments to be directed at AIPAC and its influence over Congress.  When Nancy Pelosi says this:

“I don’t think that the congresswoman is perhaps appreciative of the full weight of how it was heard by other people, although I don’t believe it was intended in any anti-Semitic way,” Pelosi told reporters at a press conference.

I understand her to be saying:  "Don't fuck with Israel, which in this case means AIPAC."

When Omar said it was "all about the Benjamins" I understood her to mean AIPAC's lobbying money, because the general perception about any lobbyist is that they influence legislators through money, directly or indirectly.  When she questions pushing for allegiance to a foreign country, I take that as rejecting the idea that criticism of the behavior of Israel (not any particular government in power, but their continued insistence that Palestinians are refugees, people without a country), is a critique that cannot be countenanced.

If that is an anti-semitic posture, then Godwin's Law has a new application.

(and the worst thing about these discussions where nobody's right and yet somebody's wrong, is that you get statements like this:

“I see everything as an opportunity,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Thursday. “This is an opportunity once again to declare as strongly as possible opposition to anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim statements, anti-white supremacist attitudes.”

She actually said "anti-Islamaphobic statements."  I heard this sound bite on NPR just now.  I think she carried the parallelism of the "anti-" prefix a bit too far, there; without intending to say what she actually said.  If you can't discuss the content of these terms, you can't discuss the problem with the ideas they represent.)

Adding:  I know I'm just making it awkward now, but:



What criticism of Israel (or more accurately, AIPAC; must we conflate the two?  Or does that shield AIPAC from criticism?), then, can not be described as "anti-Semitic", or a trope?  I'm asking in all seriousness, because this "controversy" seems to really be all about that, not about racial animus.

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Wednesday, March 06, 2019

The Definition of Space (and life)


Something so safely anodyne about a "detention space," isn't there? So much nicer than "cages."

And 3 deaths of children this year?  1 per month, on average?  And this is not a public outrage because brown people, or something?  Or is it because Sec. Nielsen said "cages"?  Because that seems to be the outrage du jour among the commentariat; that chain link doesn't create a cage, rather than children have died in our custody. Cages are on the government, but deaths in custody are on all of us.

And that should outrage us.
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