The Middle East is Not Listening to Us

 Once again, today, there's a news article about a street demonstration in San Francisco demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.  Several Bay Area cities (including mine) have passed resolutions demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.  I've been thinking, and I have to get this off my chest.

Folks, neither side is listening to us and our "ceasefire resolutions."  Certainly not to the cities of Oakland and Richmond, CA.  The Israelis aren't even listening to US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who said recently, 

"In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat," Austin said, drawing on his experience as a four-star general overseeing the battle against Islamic State militants.

"So I have repeatedly made clear to Israel's leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and strategic imperative."

The real problem in Gaza is that neither side wants to compromise.  Netanyahu has built an entire career on opposing a 2-state solution, which (in my humble opinion) is the only peaceful answer to this.  One of the reasons Hamas is in charge of Gaza is that Netanyahu supported them against the Palestinian Authority, because he knew they would never agree to a 2 state solution, and Mahmoud Abbas might have.  So when Hamas started this (and they did), they knew that Netanyahu would throw everything Israel had at Gaza.  Which is a lot.  I'm going to guess that Hamas also assumed what has happened would happen - millions of people around the world would see Israel bombing civilians in Gaza and killing many times the people the Oct. 7 invasion killed - and would immediately assume that Israel is to blame for the horror.

No, folks.  Hamas started this.  And Hamas' stated goal is to destroy Israel and take all of Palestine back, "from the river to the sea."  Which Netanyahu will do everything he can to prevent.  I don't know if Hamas didn't realize how much Israel would throw at them (I don't believe that), or if they simply didn't care how many Palestinian civilians got killed, because it would all make Israel look worse.  (I wouldn't be surprised.)

I'm in the camp that believes the only long-term solution for Israel and Palestine is a 2 state solution, preferably with Israel not run by Netanyahu and his right-wing gang, and with the Palestinian state not run by Hamas.  Israel has a good chance of getting Netanyahu out of office - he was on trial for corruption, and it just picked up again, after being paused for the war.  And before October 7, a lot of Israelis were demonstrating against him.  

I don't know what anyone could do about Hamas; but a non-Netanyahu Israeli government might be able to negotiate something with the Palestinian Authority.  Except that Mahmoud Abbas was elected to a 4-year term as PA President in 2005, and they haven't had an election since then (not to mention that Abbas is 88 - definitely older than Joe Biden whom many are complaining about!).

And the trouble with Israel "destroying Hamas" is that Hamas is not just an organization (one whose leaders, I might add, don't live in Gaza) but an ideology.  Go back and read Lloyd Austin's comment again, he understands.  Every Palestinian Israel kills have relatives who are potential recruits for Hamas.

I wish I had answers.  Should the U.S. quit giving Israel money?  Are we then saying they shouldn't defend themselves?  Is the only real solution the one that neither side will agree to?

There's No Excuse for This

My last post was about believing absurdities leading to committing atrocities.  Well, we have one, and it's right down the block from my house, at Chabot Elementary School.  

We have no kids, but as neighbors, we're on the school mailing list.  Last night about 11:10PM I got an email from the principal.  They had arranged a playdate last Saturday for all the families and children of color who attend the school; they were trying to "to increase a sense of belonging among all of our students and their families."  It seems to have gone very well, especially in a school and a neighborhood that is mostly white, although the news reports suggest that the kids at the school are about 45% BIPOC. 

The email continued, "A member of our community found the idea of this playdate exclusionary and posted their thoughts and questions on Reddit.  This post has gone viral inviting emails and calls from all sorts of anonymous folks who do not understand what we are trying to do at Chabot and in OUSD."  And finally the principal included this appalling message:

“Hi there you racist pieces of sh**! Just wanted to stop by and let you know that if you keep this sh** up we're going to put you back in chains or in the jungle where you belong. Go ahead and keep pushing for segregation. If you want a race war we'll f***ing give you one and you won't like how it ends. Have a wonderful day :)”

This is a school that serves children from kindergarten to 5th grade.  I was and am appalled.  But I wasn't surprised when I left the house at around 10AM to go to an exercise class and saw the school intersection blocked off with crime tape, at least 2 Oakland Police cars there, a couple of Oakland cops walking around, and a person being interviewed by someone carrying a TV camera.  I walked down to see what was up and was told by an ABC reporter (yes, I'm apparently somewhere on ABC's coverage, although I haven't found myself yet; 2 of my friends have contacted me!) that there had been a bomb threat!  I now know from the news coverage that the bomb threat came via email at 7:30 this morning, fortunately before the normal start of class, and that the police, the FBI, and a bomb dog unit were going through the school to make sure it was clear.

If you Google Chabot Elementary Oakland CA today you'll see all the coverage. By noon when I returned from my exercise class it had all been cleared away - I assume they didn't find a bomb.  But it looks like the principal has decided not to have any classes today; there are no kids on the grounds.  I was relieved to see an Oakland police car turning the corner by the school as I left on an errand this afternoon.

There is no excuse for this crap.  Wikipedia says, "There is broad consensus across the biological and social sciences that race is a social construct, not an accurate representation of human genetic variation." I agree with Wikipedia that the genetic differences between the races are smaller than 1%.  

 The whole "race" business was invented by our European ancestors, centuries ago, to explain why they kept finding people (in the areas they were colonizing) who didn't look like them or act like them.  You may not have European ancestors, but I do.  I'm afraid the whole "race" business was really developed because a portion of the human race wants to have someone they can look down on, someone they can feel superior to - because they are disturbed by the people who (for financial, social, or political reasons) are "superior" to them.  We clearly have some of those people making trouble at Chabot Elementary.  I wish they would grow up and get a life.

If You Believe Absurdities ...

 Apparently Voltaire never quite said exactly the quote that's been attributed to him:  

Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities

But that statement has been around long enough that, when I applied to attend the University of California at Berkeley, around 1962 or 63, it was offered to me as a possible subject for the 500-word essay I was expected to submit with my application.  I don't recall what the other possible subjects were.  I chose that one, and drafted a handwritten page or so (on the application) on why it is right.  (At the time I didn't know it was attributed to Voltaire.)  Cal admitted me for the 1963-64 year.

That was (my God!) sixty years ago.  Voltaire has been dead for roughly 250 years.  But the statement stands.  And as I look around today, I see more atrocities being committed, by people who believe absurdities, than I want to consider.  I'm not going to tell you what I think the atrocities are because I don't want to get into an internet screaming match.  But there are dozens of them, being committed by people in the U.S. and elsewhere.  

This isn't a good sign, people.  I think I remember a time when we could agree on the basic facts of life and the world, but we seem to have lost that.  It worries me.  I wish I could close this post with a witty remark, but all I can come up with is, it worries me.

The A's Are Leaving Oakland

 So - the A's have signed up to buy land for a stadium in Las Vegas.  Many people in Oakland are furious - many of my friends are.  I sympathise with them; but I'm not furious. This is going to annoy them, but I want to speak my mind.

I can't deny that the Coliseum is a mess, although it's easier to get to than the proposed stadium at Howard Terminal would have been.  Coliseum even has a BART station, with a pedestrian walkway to the stadium, and lots of parking.  The proposed stadium near the Port of Oakland is at least half a mile from BART and is not served by any major bus lines.  At one point the A's were suggesting an overhead tram arrangement to get to the stadium, but I haven't heard that in quite a while.  (For those who don't know, Howard Terminal is the name of a part of the Port of Oakland facility that the A's wanted do buy.)

I've been in Jack London Square, and I know the area around the port.  It hasn't got parking.  It isn't set up to manage heavy traffic.  The main traffic street along the waterfront has an active railroad line, for God's sake, which I know carries Amtrak passengers and I'm fairly sure also carries freight to and from the port.  How would that fit in with 35,000 people on game day??  I know that both the Port and the railroad people opposed the site.s

The housing they propose would be nice, we can always use more housing; I don't recall hearing how much of it would be affordable.  But they're also suggesting 270,000 square feet of retail space (along with 1.5 million of "commercial space").  If you don't live in Oakland you may not know how much of the existing retail space has "For Rent" signs, but it's a lot.  Who do they think will rent all that retail space??  

I've never heard an A's person admit to this, but I've been convinced since it was first proposed that they A's want a baseball stadium on a waterfront - because the Giants have one.  That's all this is about.  They thought they could con Oakland into paying for a lot of the infrastructure upgrades this would need.  But they forgot one thing:  Port of Oakland is a working port, a major container ship facility.  There is water traffic (BIG ships!) in and out of there all the time.  The Giants' nice waterside stadium went in long after the Port of San Francisco stopped being a working port, now it's mostly cruise ships, and they're farther north.  Everyone thinks the people who hang out in canoes in McCovey Cove, trying to catch foul balls, are really cute.  You couldn't have that outside a Howard Terminal stadium; not with container ships going back and forth in a relatively narrow estuary.  McCovey Cove backs onto the Bay.

So they're going to Las Vegas to play ball, they say, in a stadium they say will have a retractable roof.  Have fun playing there in the summer, boys.  I thought that about the Raiders, too, but they usually play in the fall and winter.  Still, they start in September.  I used to visit Vegas regularly to see my sister, and summer is not fun.  I've seen 117 in the shade (and no shade!) in September.  Better keep that retractable roof closed, and turn on the A/C.

I Can't Understand Why He's Not Behind Bars

I love the conversations I get into when I'm waiting for something - in this case for a shot, at Kaiser's injection clinic Monday.  (What shot?  None of your business.)  The clinic has a set of chairs to wait in, you only stand in line to register; I started talking to the nice woman in the next chair.  After some brief political rumbles about The Former Guy (we agreed about him), she leaned over and whispered that to me.

I have to agree with her - with everything he's done, he should be in jail, or at least under indictment.  But I do understand why he isn't.

First of all, America has never (thank God!) had a president who behaved like that.  Who assumed that the rules, the laws, didn't apply to him.  (The attempts to declare the 2020 election invalid.)  Who assumed everything in his vicinity belonged to him.  (The multiple boxes of paperwork that should never have been moved to Mar-A-Lago.)  He breaks the conventions and the laws with such aplomb that your first response is, "What the hell?"  It's taken a while for all of us to realize just how bad it is.

But he's used to getting away with stuff, and he always has lawyers in his service who are happy to delay and argue and put things off until everyone gives up.  (Given how he tends not to pay people if they don't get the results he wants, I don't know why they work for him, but they do.)  Also, if he ever goes to a trial, there may be people on the jury who approve of him.  So any case against him has to be absolutely solid - iron clad and proven.  Unarguable.  I believe that's why Merrick Garland's Justice Department is taking its cautious time building the case - because they can't lose this case.  I genuinely believe that if He Whom I Will Not Name is elected president again, we can kiss democracy and the rule of law goodbye.  And I think Mr. Garland knows that.

The founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution built a government that assumed all educated men of good will (that's who they thought would be in government) understood the rules of behavior, the checks and balances, that were laid out in it.  They never in their lives imagined a man like this - who is not educated, who has good will only for himself, who doesn't think he has to obey anything or anyone, and particularly who cannot bear to lose.  

I wonder who would now be Attorney General if Merrick Garland had been appointed to the Supreme Court in 2016.

I Spit On You

 The message in the title is directed to certain members of the Supreme Court of the United States.  SCOTUS has thrown out the Roe vs. Wade decision that made abortion legal at the federal level for 50 years.  And now that the federal protection is gone, state after state is moving to eliminate abortion entirely. 

This is going to kill women.  Lots of women, especially poor and black women.  Women who already have 3 or 5 kids and can't afford to feed any more.  

This decision was made by 5 men and a woman.  I am appalled that a woman could do that to her sisters; but I understand she belonged to a patriarchal sect which believed that women should obey men.  Hence the betrayal - she did what the men wanted.

Full disclosure:  I don't have a dog in this fight.  Yes, hedera is a woman, but I'm well past menopause, and I won't ever have to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.  I'm not affected here.  But I feel for the women who can't afford the contraceptives, who can't afford to feed one more kid, who are underage and can't have a child without blowing away the education that would allow them to feed and clothe it.

The current majority on the Supreme Court is working on eliminating the 19th and 20th centuries, and throwing the U.S. back to the 18th century, when only landowning white men could vote, and women were their husbands' chattel property - along with the black slaves who served both of them.  And nobody who wasn't a heterosexual white male had any rights at all.  Am I overstating?  I don't think so.  Clarence Thomas has already suggested eliminating the court decisions that allowed gay sex, gay marriage, and contraception!

With all that in mind, I repeat my initial statement to the 6 judges of SCOTUS who did this:  I spit on you.  You are a disgrace to your office.

I except the three dissenters.  I do not spit on them; I thank them for their courage.

Guns and Originalists

More mass shootings.  More discussions of gun control.  More worries about it, because a judge recently upheld upheld a California law which would ban the sale of semiautomatic rifles to persons under 21 but was overruled by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, on the "originalist" assumption that "the arming of young adults is a tradition dating to the nation's founding."  This produced an absolutely reasonable letter to the editor a few days later in which the writer made the following arguments:

When the Second Amendment was written, most young people lived in rural areas and had to defend themselves against wild animals and roving bands of marauders, as well as having to hunt for food. Those in the more urban coastal cities had to worry about British invaders. Many had to provide their own weapons to serve in the militia.

Thank you, Joseph Chance of Emeryville; you're perfectly right. But you left out some other important differences between guns in the late 18th century and now.  I found all this information in an interesting site called NCPedia, a North Carolina historical site - I've linked it, and will now summarize what it says.  But do go read it.

In the 18th century, European militaries used muskets.  The British, being the ones we were fighting, used a musket they called a Brown Bess; but all muskets were alike.  The NCPedia site links a video showing how to fire a musket.  They were not rifles because the barrel wasn't rifled.  They weighed 10 pounds.  A 75 caliber musket had a barrel 3/4" in diameter and it could shoot anything smaller than that.  They had no sights.  You just pointed and pulled the trigger.  It was meant to fire at a rank of men, standing next to each other, shooting at you.  Also, you can load a musket in about eight seconds.

American settlers generally used flintlock rifles, although the British had made them illegal.  Rifles had (of course) rifled barrels (which spins the bullet and makes it fly straight), and sights - you could aim them at something and probably hit it.  Or him - that's why the British said they would hang any man caught with a rifle.  The Americans tended to aim at officers, and medics, not just the front rank.

Here's my point:  It takes two to three minutes to load a flintlock.  It was designed for hunting, not fighting.  And it has a lot of moving pieces.  At this point I strongly recommend you go to the site - Firing a musket: 18th-century small arms | NCpedia - and read the section labeled, How a flintlock works, because I couldn't possibly tell it as well as the man who wrote the article.  He does this sort of thing to educate people.

Having absorbed this very brief summary of the guns that were around when the Second Amendment was written, I now urge you to stop a minute and think about modern semi-automatic rifles.  These are not the same as those old rifles, and they don't require anything like the skill and experience it took to shoot a flintlock.  Any idiot can fire a modern semi-automatic, and a lot of idiots do.  Which is why the originalist argument that modern 18 year olds should be able to buy automatic rifles because 18th century 18 year olds had rifles is ridiculous.  Two of the 3 appeals court judges in this ruling were appointed by Donald Trump.  The third was a temporary on assignment from New York, appointed by Bill Clinton.

Because We Say So - Marijuana

Full disclosure:  I don't use marijuana.  I tried it once in college and was not impressed.  I also don't smoke cigarettes; with my tendency toward asthma, I don't like inhaling smoke.  And I no longer drink alcohol.  So I have no stake in this.

But I have always wondered:  why is it, that people can buy and consume booze and cigarettes with no issues, but for decades, if they bought marijuana, they were setting themselves up for arrest and possible prison.  It's not the addictive properties; as far as I know, pot isn't addictive, and alcohol and tobacco are.  Too much alcohol, too much tobacco, will kill you; even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration admits that “No death from overdose of marijuana has been reported.”  I've lost at least 3 relatives to entirely legal tobacco use.

A very interesting post by Becky Little on history.com (Why the US Made Marijuana Illegal) confirms what I remember reading elsewhere.  In the 19th century ("at least since the 1830s"), marijuana was a normal part of the medical pharmacy.  It has real medicinal uses; we've determined recently that it can help with epileptic seizures.  I've seen boxes in museums that were used by 19th century ship's doctors; they have a partition for marijuana.  This was a normal medical tool.  You could buy it in a pharmacy.  And yet, between 1916 and 1931, 29 states outlawed marijuana; and the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 (they couldn't even spell it) banned it nationwide, in the face of objections from the American Medical Association!

Given all our recent discussions of systemic racism, I concluded that it was banned in the '30s because it was a drug largely used by people of color - I was thinking about the Harlem Renaissance in the '20s.  I was right about the systemic racism, but wrong about which people of color.  According to Ms. Little, during and after the Mexican Revolution in 1910, a lot of Mexicans immigrated to the United States.  These Mexicans smoked marijuana to get high, and they terrified the good people of the United States, who didn't understand people who were too poor to drink booze to get high.

This has been fully written up by Eric Schlosser in his book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, but I have to share some of the details because they are hilarious - and sad.  The Texas police apparently believed that marijuana incited violent crimes (it doesn't), including a "lust for blood" (ditto), and that it gave people "superhuman strength" (no, it doesn't do that either).  But people were additionally terrified by a 1936 movie (?!) called Reefer Madness, which warned parents that drug dealers would invite their teenagers to jazz parties and get them hooked on “reefer.”  The Marihuana Tax Act passed the next year, and the feds and the states continued to increase punishments for the substance until the people they were arresting morphed into upper-middle-class white college students, in the late 1960s.

Marijuana is now legal in California, and in a number of other states; and so it should be.  I know people who use cannabidiol for medical conditions, especially cancer treatments.  It's still illegal at the federal level.  

We banned the use of marijuana because we didn't like or understand the people who used it, because they didn't look like us or speak our language, and in spite of the fact that we knew the substance was medically useful.  How stupid was that?  Let's eliminate the Federal ban and go back to the 19th century, but with better technology.

Education in Texas

 One of the people I follow on Facebook is Heather Cox Richardson, a political historian who writes interesting posts about current events.  She wrote one yesterday (10-16-21) on a new Texas law which requires teachers to "present opposing views on controversial subjects." Like racism. And the Holocaust. That's right, Texas teachers may be expected to present "both sides" of the Holocaust. I didn't think the Holocaust had another side, unless you are a Nazi who believes in Aryan superiority - aka white superiority.

Worse, Texas has passed a bill on Critical Race Theory (S.B. 3), which will go into effect in December, laying out exactly what should be taught about what we used to call civics: "the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government; the history, qualities, traditions, and features of civic engagement in the United States; the structure, function, and processes of government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels.” This new law essentially limits the study of these things to certain specific documents and people.

I don't want to quote her entire essay, it's quite long, but if you are on Facebook, look it up. We should all read it.

What blew me away were the items and people who may not be taught: the writings of George Washington! Anything about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings! The history of Native Americans and of "founding mothers and other founding persons!" Frederick Douglass! I could go on. It essentially restricts the history of the U.S. and its government to the brilliant deeds of a few white men, leaving out anything that might make white men look bad. Like systemic racism, and genocide of Native Americans, and the fact that until the 20th century, married women were essentially their husbands' property.

I stewed about this all morning - really. History is important to me. If we don't know how we got here, how do we know where we're going? And facts are important to me - if you don't know all the facts, you make wrong decisions. But as I stewed, something occurred to me.

These legislators have forgotten the Internet. (Based on observation of various elected bodies, many of the people elected barely know how to send email.) Many of the kids whose education they want to warp have access to the Internet, and know how to use Google, especially after the last year and a half of virtual learning. If you know how to ask the questions, the Internet will tell you anything you want to know, whether the State of Texas likes it or not. I encourage myself that at least some Texas kids may start wondering about what was left out, and asking the questions.

Anti-Vaxxers

 I had the impression that the anti-vax movement started with Andrew Wakefield, a British doctor, because of the flap around 1998 when he published a paper in the Lancet which suggested that the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella vaccine (MMR) had not been properly tested and could cause autism.  Usually publication in the Lancet means good research, but it turned out that he'd been paid to find out if there was evidence to support a legal case filed by parents who believed the vaccine had harmed their children.  He invented the evidence  to support his conclusion and his results couldn't be reproduced. By 2010 the British General Medical Council had ruled against Wakefield on several issues and the Lancet withdrew the paper.  Wakefield is no longer allowed to practice medicine in Great Britain.  This is just a summary, if you're interested in the Wakefield incident, read the linked article on him.

I got a lot of this from the History of Anti-Vaccination Movements, a 2018 article on the site History of Vaccines. I recommend the article to the interested.  It reminded me that people have been objecting to vaccines since before vaccines existed as such (the concept was developed by Edward Jenner in 1798).  The reasons aren't very different from what we're seeing now:  people don't trust doctors, or the government.  People don't like being told they have to do something.  People are afraid vaccines will harm them.

A lot of people on social media have been referring to the general acceptance of the polio vaccines in the 1950s, in the United States, as the standard for public acceptance of vaccines against a horrible disease, and comparing it to current rejection of the COVID-19 vaccines.  It was the exception.  There were public objections to the smallpox vaccine, to the Diphtheria, Tetanus, and Pertussis (DTP) Vaccine, and of course to the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) Vaccine.  The only reason there were no objections to a vaccine for the 1918 influenza is because a vaccine was never developed. There were objections in 1918 to wearing masks.

Apparently people in the 1950s were simply more afraid of polio than they were of the vaccine, a reaction we haven't seen in the people refusing the COVID-19 vaccines.  At least until they're in the ICU.

Cops and Guns

There has been a lot of public discussion lately of why police are armed, and why armed police are called to situations which could be - and maybe should be - solved with something other than armed force.  This is especially the case when unarmed people of color end up being shot.  On one NPR discussion the other day, I heard a commentator ask why cops need guns anyway; and I didn't hear anyone respond with the reason that came to my mind.

Full disclosure here:  I am a community policing volunteer, and have been for over a decade.  I'm on the steering committee of a local council that is supposed to be a conduit between Neighborhood Watch groups in our area and the police.  I've worked with a number of cops, who were about as varied as most groups of humans.  As for their attitudes toward people of color, I couldn't tell you.  The neighborhood I live in is about as white and upper income as Oakland, California gets.  But I never heard of any of the cops we worked with shooting anyone; and believe me, in this area when a cop shoots someone, it makes the news.

But why do cops need to be armed?  British cops aren't, among quite a list of others.  I say American cops need to be armed because Americans, as a group, are armed.  In a 2017 survey cited in Wikipedia, there were 120.5 firearms for every 100 citizens in the U.S., the vast majority of them not registered.  And Money magazine says that, during 2020, nearly 40 million guns were bought legally (note the caveat!), and another 4.1 million just in January 2021.  There are literally more guns than people in this country.

This has nothing to do with how cops are trained to handle situations, or their general attitude toward people of color, which is a whole different issue.  But an unarmed policeman in America would be an absolute sitting duck.  He assumes the people he's looking at are  armed because, in fact, they may be.

Our problem in the U.S. today is not cops with guns.  Our problem is too many guns, generally.

Patriots??

 We will all remember January 6, 2021.  That was the day a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building, pushing past the Capitol Police, breaking windows to get into the building.  If you were living under a rock and missed this, you can find details in any major newspaper or online; I followed it on CNN and in the New York Times.  You might prefer the Washington Post, which provides the coverage free.

Donald Trump sat in the West Wing and watch the television coverage as his supporters mobbed and ransacked the Capitol Building, forcing the evacuation of Congress.  I watched the coverage and was amazed that I saw so few firearms among the mob, although one woman was shot and killed.  I gather from CNN that as the situation got worse, his staff begged him to go on television and try to calm the mob, and he refused.

These people think they are patriots; I think they are a mob.  I know Donald Trump is no patriot; his only interest is his own interest, the state of the country means nothing to him, as we can tell by the way he ignores the pandemic death toll.  Unfortunately, Donald Trump is one of the greatest con men since P. T. Barnum, and he has somehow managed to convince these people that everything he says is gospel, and if he says the election was rigged, it must be so.  So the "patriots" mobbed the Capitol building and accomplished - absolutely nothing.

I suspect today's rally was intended to whip up the crowd to where they would do something, anything, to stop the certification of the electoral college vote, in hopes of delaying Biden's inauguration.  It failed.  Congressional leaders have already said they will continue the process tonight.  

It is not patriotism to refuse to accept the outcome of an honest election, just because a liar says it wasn't.  It is not patriotism, when an election has taken place and been certified by every state, to try to overturn the results because you don't like them.  I've voted in a number of elections where I didn't like the results.  I don't care what their t-shirts say, nobody who took part in that mob was a patriot, and I hope any who did actual damage (like, breaking windows) will be arrested and charged.

I have two worries about this.  First, Trump is in office for 2 more weeks, what in God's name will he try now?  Second, all these people will still be around after Joe Biden is inaugurated.

Election Results

I admit I was very relieved when the press called the 2020 election for Joe Biden on Saturday.  I felt relieved and happy all day, although unlike some people I didn't go out and dance in the street.  This was a major change from the 2016 election, in which I was happy all election day until the votes started piling up for Trump in the evening.  After it was clear he had won, I spent about three days in a sort of stunned coma, before I recovered enough to resume normal life. I had a really bad feeling about that presidency, and it gives me no satisfaction at all to realize I was right.

Now, 2 days after the election was called, my elation has subsided.  They're still counting votes, but it's clear that Biden is winning both the electoral college and the popular vote, by solid margins.  But Trump is still there, and he's refusing to concede, claiming election officials are concealing massive voter fraud and Democrats are conspiring to "steal" the election from him.  Unless someone can eliminate his Twitter feed, we'll never be rid of him.

I'm also disappointed in the Democrats.  I can't quite identify what they did wrong, but they were convinced they were going to sweep both houses, and I think it went to their heads.  As it is, the Republicans are on the edge of retaining a Senate majority and the  Democrats have lost seats in the house, and we're facing another 4 years of Mitch McConnell refusing to do anything the President or the Democrats - or the people of the United States - want him to do.

And now we have to admit...

One week ago, a man named George Floyd died at the hands of four policemen in Minneapolis.  On camera. 

On the same day, May 25, 2020, in Central Park, New York City, Christian Cooper, a birder, asked a woman with an unleashed dog to leash her dog.  This was in an area clearly marked "dogs must be leashed."  The woman refused to comply and became abusive, so Mr. Cooper began recording the incident, during which the woman called the police and told them she was being "threatened" by an African-American man - who had done nothing worse than ask her to obey the park rules.

Christian Cooper and George Floyd were both African-American.  The policemen, and the woman with the dog, were white.  That's the point. 

These two incidents, on top of a series of other incidents in various states where black people were killed by police, have set off a firestorm of largely peaceful protests, unfortunately sometimes accompanied by violence and looting, in major cities all over the country.  For the last 6 nights.  My county (Alameda) in California was put under curfew last night because of disturbances all over the county, including such largely white towns as Walnut Creek and Pleasant Hill.  In my entire life I've never been aware of so many large public protests, in so many different places all over the country, all at once.

I attended public school, and a public university, in the United States (California, specifically).  Apart from being told about slavery in the South and about the civil war generally, I don't recall any emphasis on the fact that the U.S. is a racist society.  I came out of my schooling believing the legends of a free, democratic society, where everyone had a chance to succeed.  This despite the fact that I got into a major fight with my father when I was in high school, because I signed an Open Housing petition circulated by the local Methodist minister.  My father was from southern Missouri, but had never really talked about his attitude toward African-Americans.  But we had the Open Housing petition because Napa, CA in the 1950s was "redlined."  Black people couldn't buy there.  I'll never know, because Dad is gone; but I've recently wondered if that was why we moved from Vallejo (very racially mixed) to Napa in 1950, when I was 4. 

I've always been a student of history, and the more I've learned about American history in the years since I left university, the clearer it is that the basic assumption of our social arrangements is that people of color are inferior to white people.  Even, occasionally, when they are well educated and well-to-do.  And this is still so.

I think we all have to admit now that the society we live in is racist, and values or devalues its members based on the color of their skin.  It saddens me; I thought we were better than that.  I was wrong.  I don't think I'll detail here all the reasons this is so; as an aging white woman, I have no direct experience of them, and there are memes all over social media which include them in excruciating detail.  They start with inferior education and go on to low paying job opportunities, lack of access to health care, and housing options in food deserts, but the real issue is the treatment of people of color by the police.

I don't know what we do to fix this.  But it's becoming clear that we have to do something, probably starting with major changes in policing attitudes and approaches.

It's also becoming clear that white people are realizing we must do something.  The policeman who knelt on George Floyd's neck has been fired, and arrested for 3rd degree murder (whatever that is).  The woman in the park has lost her job (she was fired when the story went viral) and the dog (the rescue operation where she got it took it back). 

There were times when nothing would have happened to either white person; in fact the policeman had a record of 18 complaints, none of which had ever led even to a reprimand.

Ironically, I think we owe the last week of demonstrations to social media.  If those incidents hadn't been recorded, and shared widely on social media, it's possible that nothing would have happened, again. But they were, and there were consequences.  We've complained a lot about social media the last few years.  But in this case it may be the driving force pushing us to look at our racisim - and fix it.  So we don't have to look at any more terrible videos.

Pandemic

I haven't been posting much; Christmas and its aftermath was very chaotic.  And now what we all thought was a sad epidemic in China is a global pandemic, and it's right here in my town, where everyone agrees with China that the best way to cope with it is for everyone to stay home and not mix with other people.

Part of the problem, of course, is that our brilliant government decided it didn't need a team of pandemic experts on standby (Trump fired them in 2018).  And when a real pandemic came along, they decided we should build our own test kits instead of using the ones from the WHO, like most other countries.  And because Trump has also been gutting the funding for the Centers for Disease Control, the first test kits they sent out were unusable because they were missing a part.  China's epidemic is tailing off, South Korea is testing hundreds of thousands of people, and the U.S. can't get off the ground.  California has almost 40 million people, and we have about 8,000 available test kits, some of which don't have all the necessary parts.  Who's the 3rd world country now? 

I may go crazy.  I don't usually put personal information in these posts, but I'll admit that I'm over 70 and I have asthma.  Treated and controlled asthma, but asthma.  So here I am, a prime target for the virus; and there's nothing I can do but wash my hands.  Which I do.  But I'm a very social person; I need to interact with people.  And the "stay home and shut up" advice is steadily shutting down all my options.  My chorus rehearsals - cancelled through the end of the month.  The concerts we had tickets for - cancelled.  If I'm stuck in the house, my solution is to read - I just learned that the city is closing all its libraries "until further notice."

The uncertainty of all this is not helping.  I'm a problem solver by nature; the pandemic is a problem I can't do one single thing about.  And nobody knows how long it will last.

Nothing left to lose

I don't know how many people are following the protests in Lebanon.  God knows there's a lot going on all over.  But I listen to NPR, which has covered this, and I read the Economist.  The people of Lebanon have been in the streets protesting for the last 9 days, ignoring all the Lebanese government's attempts to calm them.  I just heard Marco Werman of The world interviewing a Lebanese activist on the protests.  She said things that resonated with me (paraphrasing):

The government has been "making the rich richer, and the poor poorer" for years, and nothing ever changes, and the same faces keep doing the same things.  She said that "we have nothing left to lose" by demonstrating, despite the fact that Hezbollah, at least, is now beating demonstrators.  Yes, Hezbollah is Iran's Shiite militia in Lebanon, put there to make trouble for Israel; but it's part of the Lebanese government, and its people are attacking the ones protesting the government.

"Nothing left to lose" made me think of a historical incident in 1789 in which "the people" felt they had nothing left to lose.  We call it the French Revolution, and it led to the death of a king and queen, and of a lot of other wealthy and prominent people, by an aroused public that felt it had nothing left to lose.  France is now a republic, but by the late 1790s the revolution had led to the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte and eventually a war that covered Europe.

I don't know if the leaders of Lebanon read European history or not.  They may think they can get away with this, and continue as they have been.  But if their population really feels it has nothing left to lose, they may be as wrong as the French aristocracy was.

PG&E Power Outages

Based on what I've read and heard about PG&E over the last couple of years, I have to rant.

Because of the lawsuits after PG&E equipment started a number of catastrophic wildfires over the last few years, the company has gone into bankruptcy.  They've now decided that, to protect their shareholders, and the executives' bonuses, the appropriate response is to turn off the power over large areas of the state, whenever the National Weather Service issues a red flag warning for dry conditions with gusty offshore winds.  We have one coming over the next couple of days.  Because their web site couldn't handle the traffic for the people from 29 counties who all want to know now whether they will lose power, I can't even check their web site to find out if we're affected.

As far as I can tell, this is because they were too incompetent, or too cheap, or both, to create and maintain an electrical power system that would not fail and cause fires.  (Those of us who remember the San Bruno gas explosion in 2010, which destroyed a neighborhood and killed 8 people, feel that they can't manage their gas distribution system either.) 

So they're putting the onus on us, their customers.  I cannot express how angry this makes me.  We have an announced outage coming over the next couple of days, and because their web site couldn't handle the traffic for people from 29 counties who all want to know now whether they will lose power tomorrow, I can't even check their web site to find out if we're affected.

And most of us have no choice - PG&E is a monopoly in most of northern California.

I'm still waiting for one of these outages to kill someone who relies on electrically powered medical equipment, like the ventilator my sister uses (she's in Nevada, thank God).

Disgraceful

It is Memorial Day 2019.  The President of the United States is in Japan, being feted by the prime minister and the new Emperor.  He is NOT here, honoring the veterans who have died for this country over the years - including the veterans who fought Japan for this country!  (No, I don't have any particular animus toward Japan.)

I have relatives (all dead now) who fought in World War II, and other veterans still living.  Let me call out and honor my cousin Johnny Maguire (U.S. Navy, WW II), my cousin Orville Hicks, Jr. (U.S. Navy, WW II), my cousin Michael Maguire (Vietnam). 

I'll also honor my living veteran relatives:  my brother-in-law James David Allen (U.S. Air Force; Vietnam).  My cousin Richard T. Ivy was in the military, in Korea. 

Let me also honor my father, Lestle W. Ivy, who was too old for the second war (born 1907) but moved to Vallejo in 1940 and spent the next 31 years working for the U.S. Navy at Mare Island Naval Shipyard. 

I learned after I began this post that 45 is actually participating in a Memorial Day ceremony on the U.S.S. Wasp, with U.S. service members.  So I guess I can't yell at him very hard.  I still think he should have stayed home for this occasion.

The Great Negotiator

Donald Trump ran for U.S. President, among other things, as "the great negotiator."  His book, The Art of the Deal, was highly touted in evidence.  (He didn't write that book, and the ghost writer has had some pointed things to say about him.) 

He's now been in office for 2 years and some change, so we've had a chance to see him at it.  I was going to discuss his many failings as a negotiator, starting with the fact that he has only a limited understanding of how his opponents think; but I realized it would take a full volume, not just a blog post.  But for a blatant example of his ineptness, I refer you to an article in the April 25 Economist called America Wants to Challenge Rogue Petrostates.  As I read it, I found myself shaking my head. 

The incident which blew me away in its stupidity was related to the Iran oil ban.  He announced in May 2018, when he withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement, that America would impose sanctions on Iran's oil industry, starting in November.  To support this, he dickered with OPEC to increase oil production, to help restrain oil prices.  Saudi Arabia did this, increasing production by 600,000 barrels a day from June to November.  This was quite generous of the Saudis, since they require an oil price of something like $80-$85 per barrel to balance the national budget.

Just before the sanctions were to take effect, he announced sanction waivers for 8 countries, including China and India (the biggest investors in Iran oil) - and he didn't warn the Saudis, who reduced production in December, along with the rest of OPEC, when oil prices fell to $51 a barrel.  And he considers MBS a good friend.

The rest of the Economist article, which I highly recommend, goes into detail on several other aspects of Trump's attempts to manipulate the oil market to support his policy positions, apparently with less idea of how the oil market works than I have.  Or for that matter, with less idea of how the international financial market works than I have. 

I didn't vote for him; I wouldn't vote for him for second assistant dog-catcher.  But we're stuck with him, at least until 2020 (I hope, no longer), and every so often I have to rant about him.  Thank you for reading.

Another jewel from Art Hoppe

In December 2013,  I posted a link to a column by the late lamented Art Hoppe, reproduced on the San Francisco Chronicle's SFGate web site.  I have another one for you, assuming you can get past the paywall for sfchronicle.com, which is where the Chronicle Classic series is posted online. 

Today's column is called The Mightiest Nation, originally published on July 15, 1987.  Read it and weep - I hope you can get to it.  It sounds merely mildly sarcastic until you get to the last paragraph, which raised the hair on the back of my neck.