Archives for March 2019

Day 789 Wednesday March 6, 2019

607 Days to the 2020 election and 685 Days to Inauguration Day

Bits and Bobs:

There are just a lot of things hanging around the edge of my plate, I thought I’d try to get as many of them off said plate as I could think of today. I am told in India when you get a round flat piece of bread the first thing you do is to go around the edge picking off the burnt and uncooked parts. That’s kind of what I’ll be doing here.

First off, is the delightful picture from CPAC 2019 of the folks waving flags that say TRUMP on them. They’re lovely flags: red, white and blue, in three big horizontal stripes just like, no exactly like, the flag of Russia. How appropriate! Apparently, the organizers of CPAC figured it out pretty quickly and being the kindly souls that they are threatened everyone by demanding to collect the flags and anyone caught waving one would be kicked out of the convention. Nice. Some people wanted to keep the flags as souvenirs. I guess they had to hide them from “the man.” (Oh boy, haven’t used that term in decades.)

This trick may have been done before. I can’t remember. I hope it resurfaces again. I wonder if the guy who did it is related to those two fellows who showed up at a Trump rally in New Hampshire dressed like Nazi brown shirts but with Trump armbands? They later showed up at a Jeb! rally (not as brown shirts however) and said they hadn’t been paid and where did they get paid? Jeb was flummoxed.

Then there are the investigations! Maxine Waters’ committee is going after Trump’s tax returns. Jerry Nadler has issued 81 requests from Trump people for documents relating to WikiLeaks. (the White House has already refused, setting them up for a subpoena and a fight over executive privilege, which might go to the Supreme Court and then we’ll get to watch the conservative Constitutionalist Federalist Society appointed judges twist themselves in knots. Erik Trump went on a wacky right wing demagogue’s radio show and said that all 81 folks should refuse, get subpoenaed and plead the fifth. Just like Nixon suggested right before he resigned and just like every mobster says his people should do. Nice. Plead guilty and take the fifth!)

Then there’s Elijah Cummings open testimony of Michael Cohen that kicked off so many little things. We watched Jim Jordan make such a fool of himself that he got parodied on SNL where the Democrats in the skit would yield most of their time to Jordan (played by Bill Hader) so he could continue to make an ass of himself. Jordan in the real hearings kept referring to this testimony as the first hearing of the committee and saying wasn’t it a shame that they were wasting their time on this when there was so much important work to do? Blah, Blah, Blah, in his smirky condescending little way. (Hey, does that guy own a jacket and tie? Let’s jump on the “Isn’t it disrespectful?” band wagon, shall we?) At the end of the hearing Cummings reminded everyone that the first hearing of his committee was from a mother who watched her daughter die because she couldn’t afford the insulin the kid needed. I guess Jim missed that meeting. And the next one, which Cummings also referenced. Maybe, Jim can’t count to three?

Then there’s Adam Schiff’s Intelligence committee and most of what they are doing is behind closed doors. But we got a peak or a hint. There is testimony that Michael Cohen gave that got the committee sitting on the edge of their seats. We don’t know what it is, but we know that much. There has also been activity in a courtroom regarding Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks. We also know that Roger Stone and WikiLeaks are involved in another case. Perhaps, they are all related?

Speaking of Roger Stone, he can’t seem to keep his mouth shut or to stop doing things publicly. Somehow the judge has let him stay free, which is amazing. After publishing a picture of the judge with crosshairs next to her face and saying he didn’t know that they were crosshairs of a gun scope (which is amazing seeing as how he has done this many times before, so I’d call that outright lying to a judge, but that’s me.) Roger has now published a picture of himself as if he’s on the cover of a book or on a movie poster with the words “Who Framed Roger Stone?” And he did something else stupid like that too. The judge has warned him that he can’t talk, write or otherwise communicate to the public about his case. He seems to still want to run around like some kid in short pants and kick the authorities in the ankles. Let’s see: how long did he lasts this last time? Two weeks? What do you give him this time? Ten days? I’ll bet ten.

Then there’s Paul Manafort. He’s to be sentenced for his first trial where he was found guilty on a bunch of charges and missed being found guilty on all the charges by one hold out juror. The sentencing guidelines are 19 1/2 to 24 years. The Mueller team has weighed in saying he deserves no leniency for his supposed cooperation and in fact his behavior should be an aggravating circumstance, which means he should get in their opinion the max or worse. And oh yeah, they say he was committing crimes as late as October of 2018! Oh, and btw, he has yet to be sentenced for his other crimes in the other jurisdiction. That comes the following week.

Then there’s Deutsche Bank. The bank that kept lending money to Donald Trump after no one else would. The bank that had been caught laundering money for Russians and got fined $425 million by the State of New York for that crime. But hey, they laundered $10B so big deal. Cost of doing business. It was Anthony Kennedy’s son that was the guy while working at Deutsche Bank who was involved in okaying the money to Trump and the reason Kennedy suddenly decided to retire from the Supreme Court. They’ve been asked to provide records to one of the Congressional committees. I forget which one. 

Then there’s the security clearances of Jared and Ivanka, both purportedly were done over the objections of the intelligence community and personally okayed by The Donald, which Donald says he had nothing to do with. Do you think he’d lie? Well, lemme put that to the test with the Trumpolator -> “Would DT lie about this?” Answer: “Yes. He lies about everything.” Okay. That’s settled.

By the way, one of the concerns, we think that the Intel Community had with Jared was his being in so much debt and therefore his possible willingness to sell out U.S. interests for money. He got some juicy loans for his huge building in New York that he paid way too much for, and now it is reported that he and Ivanka made about $80 million this year. I wonder how? Nice work if you can get it. (I wonder how they got it?) And this with Ivanka shutting down her retail line of crappy jewelry.

Then there’s this little tidbit. Trump is moving the woman heading up the DC Justice Department to the #3 spot in Justice, which covers anti-trust stuff. Why, when this job has been vacant for over a year? You don’t think it is so he can appoint someone to her old job do you? (Trumpolator -> “Is that it?” Answer, “Yes.”)

She’s is overseeing the Stone, Manafort, and Butina cases right now. Maybe, Slick Donnie can get someone a little – ya know – amenable to his way of thinkin’? Ya know what I mean? (Trumpolator? “Yes, I know what you mean.”)

Better get this out there before more do-do hits the fan.

607 Days to the 2020 election and 685 Days to Inauguration Day

PS Big Tree – Little Me

Day 788 Tuesday March 5, 2019

608 Days to the 2020 election and 686 Days to Inauguration Day

I didn’t write a screed yesterday because I was busy writing about an old friend, the Unix operating system.

It is now fifty years old, which for anything in computing is ancient. Why has it survived?

As Fred Brooks wrote in his classic “Mythical Man Month” and I paraphrase some things take time. Or to put it another way “You can’t have nine men jump on a woman and get a baby in a month.”

He also said that the secret to survival is adaptability. 

What made Unix survive?

It was carefully thought out and was designed in answer to specific problems that had been addressed earlier but not solved in a sufficiently satisfying way. There was a core philosophy that is in some ways hard to explain. It was also written and allowed to develop without a lot of external pressures by people who didn’t know or understand what this tightly knit group was trying to accomplish.

But, as Arlo Gutherie said in his classic record Alice’s Restaurant, “This isn’t what I came here to talk to you about.”

Today, let’s look at another question that has been raised and that is the idea of putting the question of :

“Are you a U.S. citizen?”

on the census form, and the analogous statement of:

“Only U.S. citizens should be counted in the Census.”

There is a problem with each statement and I’ll address that here so you know where I’m going ahead of time.

One) If you want to know if people are U.S. citizens there is a better, more accurate way to get that data than asking on a census form, because people who are not citizens are reluctant to say to the government for fear of retribution (ie deportation.)

Two) The Constitution says that for the purpose of representation and taxes all person shall be counted. It does not say anything about being a citizen. Unless, one wants to ignore the Constitution, the second statement’s action would be unconstitutional.

How did we get here? By that I mean why is this being raised as an issue? The answer is that the conservative right wing forces want more power and if they can disenfranchise people who don’t vote for them they gain more power. It’s really that simple. There is no concern about fairness, only aggrandizement of power. 

Where did this effort start? Somewhere in the bowels of scheming by the rich right wing who had Wilbur Ross suggest it. But he couldn’t do it without cover so he asked Jeff Sessions, when Jeff was Attorney General, to send him a letter requesting it. When asked about it Ross lied and said he hadn’t made such a request.

The people at Census are dedicated to counting everyone, as is their duty under the Constitution. When they were ordered by Ross to put the citizenship question on the 2020 Census form they balked. First, it wouldn’t give them an accurate number. Secondly, they could get more accurate data another way and because the Department of Justice said they needed the data for some reason they, the people at Census, offered to meet with the Justice folks and show them how they, the Census Bureau, could give them more accurate data at a much cheaper price than putting it on the Census form. What did Justice do? They were instructed by AG Sessions not to take the meeting.

Okay, so I’ve established that this would be unconstitutional and that it has nothing to do with getting the data, but is really being used to undercount the people who are not citizens so that the states that have those people (most notably California) won’t be given as much representation or funding. This will in turn reward states with fewer immigrants. In other words Wyoming and the welfare red states. They will get even more money while screwing the states with lots of people needing help.

There’s a deeper issue here and I don’t think it’s been discussed anywhere that I know of. It centers around the reasoning for why we as a nation went to war for our independence. To quote Patrick Henry, “No taxation without representation.” This is the nub of the argument. 

Britain had elected representatives. The country underwent a population shift. People moved to the coal producing areas, like Manchester. However, the representation didn’t change. Those areas with expanded populations did not get anymore representation than when they were sparsely populated. Parliament dismissed the disparity with the excuse of “Oh Manchester is like such and such place, we  can let the chaps in such and such make decisions for Manchester.” 

When the colonies in America were formed this was the thinking there as well. So the colonies got no representation in Parliament. As the Boston Tea Party emphasized, this didn’t go over well.

So to put the argument in historical terms “no taxation without representation.” To put it in Constitutional terms “All the people get counted.” To put it in current political terms – this is a callous attempt to deprive people who pay taxes (working immigrants) of representation and aid, and to intimidate them and maybe use this data to kick them out of the country.

Next?

PS Temple of the Inscriptions, Palenque, Mexico

 

Day 786 Sunday March 3, 2019

610 Days to the 2020 election and 688 Days to Inauguration Day

The Fear of Ocasio-Cortez.

Why were the people at CPAC making fun of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Why is there so much uproar about The Green New Deal? What is it about a twenty nine year old woman and former bartender from New York that so unnerves the … the … what should we call them? The Right? The Republicans? The Conservatives? The Trump supporters? The racists? The deplorables? Whatever you want to call them they clearly have something that they think they should fear in this woman. What is it and why?

If you study the nature of prejudice, and we are all having to do that to some degree in the age of Trump, you find that prejudice is based on fear. Fear is based on either not knowing or knowing all to well.  Therefore fear is based on an anticipation. Overcoming fear takes effort. It takes understanding, practice, and preparation. 

Are you afraid to surf of forty foot wave? I would guess most people would be, but those that do it practice and study. They condition their bodies. They think about what they need to do the task they have envisioned. They try smaller waves. they become proficient at the skills they anticipate needing for the task. When the time comes they do and have done everything they can think of to be prepared, to know what is coming.

Prejudice has many characteristics that people have pointed out. First, there is the mental game you have to play. Somehow what ever it is that you don’t like you have to develop a set of reasons for not liking it. Maybe, these have already been created for you by your environment and all you have to do is adopt them. There’s the trying to label and lessen whatever it is. There is the putting yourself in a superior position, and the lessening of the other. The other thing about prejudice is the ability to grant exceptions when faced with what one considers an outlier. “I hate all foo, except so and so because they are okay” (or not like the rest of them). In the case of race in this country most people of African American decent were of lower class and people of a higher socio-economic group didn’t like lower class people. It was easier to say in one’s mind that a black person was lower class and dismiss them than it was to make the effort to find out. As black people have moved up socio-economically this notion is being challenged more and more. 

There is little that one can do to overcome prejudice, unless that person is willing to work at it. However, the one thing that has been proven, verified and proven, to work is to put people who are prejudiced against one another in jobs of equal status. It’s hard to harbor prejudice if you are in a fire fight and the person whom you thought you didn’t care for is covering your ass with suppressive gunfire. Or you’re working side by side doing the same job. 

There is also a tendency to want to be among people who look like you. Therefore over time groups will tend to segregate. When they do they tend to label and fear the other group because they don’t look like them. This leaves room for all sorts of interpretations, most or all of them not good.

Therefore as individuals in a society if we do not want to be ruled by fear and prejudice we must constantly strive to overcome our self imposed restrictions, fears, and prejudices. Associating with those we fear is one way of doing that, hopefully, in an equal status situation (because it has been shown to work.)

Segregating and talking amongst yourselves reinforces and heightens ones predisposed thoughts. This is dangerous. The unfortunate thing about our instant communications and many channels for information is that it allows us to seek out our own and stay within the narrow confines of our own thinking. Travel, as Mark Twain pointed out, is a great way to overcome prejudice. People who are deeply prejudice, rarely travel far.

So what is it about AOC that inspires such vitriol? I would suggest that it is her age, her beauty, her ideas, and her brashness in expressing her ideas so well. What can one do in such a case? You can insult her. make fun of her and her ideas, you can label her and thus try to lessen who she is, and you can invent stuff about her. All these things have been done. What you don’t want to do is talk to her, to listen to her, because if you do you might find some common ground and then you’d work together to solve the problem. Of course the way to avoid this, besides not talking to her, is to not admit to the problem she is trying to solve. So one can say climate change is not real, or not as bad as people say it is, or that it is the natural cycle of the Earth and therefore nothing to worry about. What about the divide between rich and poor? You can say that trickle down economics will take care of it. That there has always been a divide. That solutions such as strengthening unions is socialism. 

Oh yes, and socialism – that’s bad. Look at Russia or any of the countries that were behind the iron curtain. They tried socialism and it didn’t work. It’s bad. Yeah, right. This ignores what she and Bernie and many others are saying. Things are out fo whack and if we don’t take steps to fix the situation eventually the pot will boil over. Okay that’s a metaphor and seeing as how metaphors have been so misused I’ll spell it out, as AOC and Bernie, and Elizabeth and many others have done. All the money and power in this country has gotten collected in a very small group of people. It need to be distributed more. How do you want to go about that? We can tax the wealthy. We can stop allowing a minority group to tilt the playing field to their advantage or we can ignore the problem. Ignoring the problem has consequences, and no one knows exactly what will happen but eventually it is concluded that people won’t take “it” any more and they will raise havoc. A quiet revolution is in my estimation preferable to having people dragged out of their castles and killed as happened in the French Revolution. I know, it can’t happen here. Until it does.

What was really interesting in the Michael Cohen open testimony was how AOC in her three and a half minutes did more than anyone else in that room to advance what Congress should, according to the Constitution, be doing. AOC asked questions that helped Congress with its function of oversight. The thing that the Republicans on that committee fear the most is the truth and she exposed that. She exposed that the president is possibly guilty of bank fraud, insurance fraud, charity fraud, and tax fraud among other things. The other thing she exposed was that Donald Trump is a RAGING SOCIALIST!!! 

This, more than anything else, should really scare those rich people supporting Trump. She pointed out that their is a golf course near her district that was developed by the government for one hundred and twenty five million dollars of government money – tax dollars! – that went to make that land a golf course, from which Donald Trump receives all the revenue. Isn’t that a sweetheart deal? Wouldn’t you like a deal like that? Of course not! That’s socialism! Wait what? You would take $125M from the government? But you said … Oh. It’s okay when you are the one benefiting? But not for some person struggling to make their rent? I mean can you imagine what $125,000,000.00 could do in AOC’s district? It could be put into improving the schools, the infrastructure, helping people with addictions, the poor, but instead it went to helping a entitled fuck to get richer. That’s not socialism – that’s capitalism! Oh wait, it is socialism? Yeah, you are taking money from one group (most or all of us) and giving it to another group (the super wealthy). Yeah. that socialism. Wait. Let’s change the label, okay? Let’s call it Robin Hoodism or Pulling yourself up by the bootstrapism or anything else, but not socialism.

So first let’s not listen to what AOC has to say. Let’s put our fingers in our ears. Let’s babble stuff that we make up about her. She’s a socialist. She’s a witch. She’s coming not only after our guns, but our cows and our pickup trucks. 

Let me ask you this:

Are you for everyone paying their fair share”

Do you think we should leave the planet to our children and our grand children?

Do you think everyone should get a fair shot in life?

Do you think we can do more to help ourselves improve our lives?

If you said “yes” to any of these questions you are backing the fundamental ideas that Ms Ocasio-Cortez is suggesting.

There’s another kind of prejudice going on here too. Age discrimination. She’s young. She’s not putting up with the older folks bull. She’s saying we have to take action now. Oh to be young. You have to understand…Things take time…What do you mean bullshit? 

To quote Shelley Berman, “We don’t have time for coffee, tea, or milk! The wing is a solid sheet of flame!”

In other words, she’s saying if we want to save the planet we need to act now. Oh yeah, and there are these people called scientists who agree with her.

If we want to live healthy lives we can act now.

If we want to live better lives we need to act now.

Oh you want to wait? No, what you want is to keep the con going? Your time is coming to an end.

Time is almost up.

610 Days to the 2020 election and 688 Days to Inauguration Day

PS Zodiac painting on the dome of the caladarium, Qasar Amra, Jordan