Quit Saying "Terrorist"

I'm getting really tired of this.  A young man who (from the news coverage) came to this country, got a green card, and lived here quietly for several years, recently decided to drive a rental truck through a group of walkers and bicyclists in New York City.  He killed 8 people and injured several more.  From the note in Arabic which he left in his truck, it's pretty clear that he bought the Islamic State line, and was radicalized in the last few months.  So he's a terrorist.  Oooh, cringe in terror.

And yet, the 64 year old white man who set up a sniper post in a Las Vegas hotel and killed 58 people attending a country music festival, and injured over 500 others - he's not a terrorist.  This is pretty obviously because the news media buys the racist line that you are only a terrorist if you have brown skin, were not born in America, and speak Arabic.  If you're white, you can't be a terrorist.  Is that racist?  Yup, it is.

This is baloney.  High grade, all beef, thinly sliced baloney.  Can we please call people who kill other people, for whatever ridiculous reason, what they are?  They are criminals.  It is a crime to kill other humans.  It's been a crime for so long that it's even in the Ten Commandments - Thou shalt not kill.  I might add it is also in the Quran.  Every major religion prohibits killing.

Weather and Climate

The sky is brown today.  The light coming in through the windows is orange.  I'm staying in the house because the smoke particles in the air are bad for my asthma.  Forty or so miles north of here, the Napa Valley is burning.  Twenty or so miles west of the Napa Valley, Santa Rosa is burning, along with a big chunk of Sonoma County.  There are 22 fires in Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, Yuba, Solano, and Nevada counties.  The burned area totals at least 170,000 acres; 21 people are identified dead and 670 reported missing; up to 3,000 homes and businesses have burned; and the fires are still not under control.  Much of the burn area has no electricity, no phone service, and no Internet.

How did this happen?  Even for California's fire season (in other words, October), this is bad.

"Y'all get paid way too much"

This post is actually about 45's proposed tax code changes.  I'll explain the title in a little bit.

I started this morning listening to Michael Krasny and his guests on KQED Forum discussing the "largest tax overhaul in decades."  I listened for several minutes to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute spouting every Republican talking point I've been listening to since the early 1980s about the way tax cuts will free up capital and spur growth and lots of American jobs.

This is bullshit.  Living through the last 4 decades, I've seen the country grow when taxes were up and slump when taxes were down.  Over my lifetime, the most prosperous period in our history was the late 50s and early 60s, when the top individual tax rate was 90%.  Mr. Bruce Bartlett, who worked on the Reagan tax code reform with Jack Kemp in the early 80s, has just written a thorough and detailed explanation, in the Washington Post, of why the Republican "line" is ridiculous, doesn't work, and never has worked.  I recommend the article to the interested.

Based on my own life experience, though, I believe there are other reasons lowering taxes will not lead to investment, new jobs, and growth.  Here's where the title comes in.  I heard that comment, from a senior executive of Bank of America, in the early oughts, shortly after the merger with Nationsbank.  The executive was from Charlotte, part of "new management."  I don't recall his name. 

Free speech??

I've written on this before, and I just updated several posts with the tag Free speech to make them easier to find.  And after Charlottesville, and the mess in Berkeley on Sunday August 27, maybe it's time to restate my views.

If Nazis don't have freedom of speech, I don't have freedom of speech.

Full disclosure:  I don't like Nazis.  I'm a history buff; I've read numerous books on World War II, including twice through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  I have a very clear view of who the Nazis were and what they did to people they considered "inferior" - which included everyone except white men of "Aryan" (which meant German) descent.  They considered women inferior beings suited only to produce more Aryan male babies.  I shouldn't even have to mention what they did to Jews - and yes, the holocaust actually happened.  There may even be a few American World War II vets still alive who remember liberating those concentration camps.

I've seen no evidence that the people who call themselves Nazis today, in 2017, are any better than the ones in Germany in the '30s and '40s.  They claim to want a "whites only" nation.  They show up armed at public rallies and beat up people who disagree with them.  One of them used a car to kill an unarmed woman in Charlottesville, and injured 19 more unarmed people.

We're Losing in Afghanistan

I just heard yet another newscast quoting Donald Trump as complaining, "We're losing in Afghanistan."  This impelled me to draft a post about why we are, of course, losing in Afghanistan.  When I searched my blog, I realized I wrote that post in January 2015, and as I reread it, I see it makes my points pretty well. 

Briefly, a formal army cannot defeat a guerrilla insurgency fighting on its own ground, with any kind of support from the local population, so of course we're losing in Afghanistan.

For the full argument, with historical detail, I refer you to this post:

Losing the Wars

Suicide

I'll start this with an article in the East Bay Times on Saturday, July 8:

Man hangs himself from Lake Merritt bridge in apparent suicide, police say

It's a very short article.  It didn't appear in the San Francisco Chronicle, my usual paper.  This is the significant sentence:  "Witnesses said a woman ran up and down the bridge screaming for someone to stop him before he jumped."

Four days later, at my gym after a water aerobics class, I found myself sharing a hot tub with the woman who ran up and down the bridge screaming.  

For the purpose of this story, I'll call her Ethel, which isn't her name.  She's an older African American woman who works in San Francisco and exercises regularly at the Oakland gym, and one of her exercise habits is a daily walk around Lake Merritt, a course of a little over 3 miles. We chat regularly in the locker room.  After climbing into the tub, she told me flatly that she'd seen a man kill himself on Friday evening.  I asked her to repeat herself a couple of times, partly because the jacuzzi makes a fair amount of noise and partly because I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly.

What Those Words Mean

All languages change over time, of course.  if you don't believe me, take a look at Shakespeare's plays (400 years or so) or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (more like 550 years).  But the English language (and several others) are morphing as we watch, particularly in the political arena.

Take the most obvious:  President Trump's continual use of the phrase fake news.  It should be obvious to anyone who isn't part of his base that when he says fake news, he means, something I don't like.  It doesn't necessarily mean the news isn't true.  It just means he doesn't like it.  Careful observers may immediately start looking around to see what recent development he's trying to distract us away from.

He isn't the first American to do this; he's just the most recent, and the loudest.  In the 1950s, when I was growing up and just learning what "the news" was, people would often use the word Communist to describe someone whose opinions they disagreed with.  It didn't mean the person was an actual member of the Communist Party; it meant they disagreed with the speaker.

This usage isn't, of course, limited to Americans.  My classic example, before Mr. Trump came along, was Bashir al-Assad of Syria.  It's been much too clear since that whole mess started that when he says the words jihadi or terrorist, what he means is someone who doesn't think I should be running Syria.  His definition includes a lot of people in Daesh, who actually are terrorists; but it also includes the ordinary Syrians who turned out, unarmed, six or so years ago, to ask him peacefully to step down.  President al-Sisi of Egypt also appears to use a variant this meaning from time to time - terrorists are people who don't think he should be running Egypt.

Other misconstructions of the word terrorist include Mr. Trump's version, which means Muslims with brown skin, and Saudi Arabia's, which roughly means Iranian, or possibly merely Shiite.  President Erdogan of Turkey also competes in this - his terrorist translates to Kurd, and secondarily to any Muslim who isn't Sunni.  Given that Turkey now houses the largest single population of refugee Syrians (possibly over 2 million by now), many of whom are Alevis (a variant of Shia Islam), this may cause trouble some day, but so far the situation is peaceful. 

This usage seems specific to prominent political figures, so the next time you see a prominent political figure say something like, "Obamacare is a failure", ask yourself what they really mean.  The LA Times just did exactly that.  What the Republicans mean by "Obamacare is a failure" is that they hope you'll believe them and not ask questions about it - which is basically what all these misstatements mean.  Believe me and don't ask questions.  We always need to ask questions.

Republican Legislation

As appalled as I was (and am) by the election of Donald Trump, my real concern these days is the Republican leadership in the House and Senate.  (Ed. note:  I see I've blown it once, but I try to follow Bernice King's suggestion that we refer to the president by his number, because it encourages his narcissism when we publish his name.)

 Paul Ryan routinely excuses every idiocy committed by 45 ("He's new to government...").  And Mitch McConnell, who began last year by ignoring his constitutional duty to advise and consent on presidential nominations, is now personally rewriting the Republican health care bill, in secret with a small cabal of co-conspirators, and plans to ram it through the senate with no public hearings, no review by the Congressional Budget Office, and no time given to senators to read it. If the Republican rank and file in the senate had any balls at all, they would stand up en mass and refuse to vote on a bill they hadn't been allowed to read; but I don't think they've even considered that.

The Republican leaders use 45 as a smoke screen, to keep everyone's attention off what they're up to.  They learned that from him.  The mainstream media routinely complain, correctly, that the President is breaching the Constitution; believe me, the Republican congressional leaders are right next to him, refusing even to work with Democrats or moderate Republicans, revising Congressional rules of procedure to make it easier to pass their legislation without opposition support.

The Congressional leaders will support any insanity 45 proposes, because they expect him to sign off on the bills they want to pass.  And the bills they want to pass, my fellow Americans, will disenfranchise you and me, especially if we are old, poor, minority, female, or any combination of these.  They don't want people like that to vote at all.  They will also raise your taxes and give the money to the rich.  Nobody yet knows what's in the secret health care bill, but we know what was in the House bill - no insurance for 23 million Americans who now have it; Medicaid gutted, with Medicare next on the list. I can't imagine this "secret" bill will be any better.  McConnell doesn't seem to realize - or maybe to care - that his secrecy on the bill is an indictment of it.

I have yet to see a Republican health care proposal that can't be summed up as "Just Die, Already."

I've emailed both my Senators to oppose the secret Republican health bill (and thank you, Sen. McCaskill, for your public objection to the whole process!).  But my senators are Democrats; they will vote against the abomination, but they're outnumbered.

My only rays of hope are the Special Investigation into the Russian involvement in the 2016 election, and the committee investigation in the Senate Intelligence Committee.  But even if one or both of those does turn up probative evidence that Trump has broken some law or Constitutional principle that could justify impeachment, impeachment can only happen if Ryan agrees to prosecute the case and McConnell's senate agrees to hear it - and convict him.  They can keep him in office until 2020, if not longer, just by ignoring evidence.

Immigrants

My mother was an immigrant.  Her family came to America in 1921, from Canada.  She was 9 years old.  Her mother was Irish; her father was Scotch-Irish.  I'm a first generation American citizen, born and raised here. We've talked a lot lately about who immigrants are, what they do when they get here, and why they come.  Here's the story of my family. 

They came for economic reasons, and because they had family in California.  My grandfather was a photographer; my great-uncle Tom, his brother, had a chicken farm in the San Jose area.  They lived in San Jose for awhile, then moved to Vallejo around 1930, where my grandfather opened a photography studio.

When they arrived in California they had 4 children:  a 19 year old daughter, a 15 year old son, a 9 year old daughter (my mother), and a 2 year old son.  Here is the course of their lives:

• The 19 year old daughter contracted TB from a carrier in her nursing class, and died in November 1928.
• The 15 year old son attended Stanford University, married a young woman from the Napa Valley, and eventually got a job as a manager in a firm manufacturing aluminum windows.  He had 3 children, and died in 1989.
• The 9 year old daughter eventually attended college briefly, dropped out to work to help support her family after her father died, and very eventually (1944) married a man from Missouri, whom she met at the USO in Vallejo (my father).  She had 2 children and died in 2000.
• The 2 year old son contracted TB in his hip bone, probably from his sister, which left him with one leg shorter than the other. I remember him using an orthopedic shoe built up to near 6 inches.  He attended U.C. Berkeley and other universities, ending up with a Ph.D. in Economics at Michigan State University.  He married a woman from New York, had one child who died at birth, adopted 2 other children, and died in 1995.

My grandfather died in 1936.  My grandmother died in 1962.

Many people who emigrate to the United States today look pretty much like my grandparents, except for their skin color and language.  Things weren't so great in the old country, they hope to make a better life here, the children they bring (or produce here) go on to become Americans, and produce more Americans.

Americans could be rough on immigrants.  We've always had a xenophobic streak, not necessarily aimed only at people of color.  The Irish, and later Italians, were unwelcome because they were Catholic, an early echo of the anti-Muslim prejudice we see.  Now, of course, we also have war refugees, many but not all Muslim, simply running for their lives from countries like Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. My reading suggests that in the early 20th century, Americans often disliked immigrants, because they weren't "like us", but they weren't afraid of them, as we're now being urged to fear Muslims.

Most immigrants just want to make a better life here.  Now there's a very small group of people - a few thousand out of tens of millions - who believe that killing infidels (including Americans) is a service to Allah.  Should we really shut out all the people who just want a better life, because a few of them might be a threat?  Immigrants built America; shall we stop building America because we're afraid?  We're all armed to the teeth these days - couldn't we handle a few jihadis, if they did show up?

As for their threat to American jobs - most immigrants take jobs that Americans wouldn't do, even for better pay.  How much would it take to make you pick vegetables by hand all day, stooped over in a field?  Or pack chicken carcasses on a factory line?  Immigrants don't threaten American jobs; automation threatens American jobs.  But that's another post.

Regulations

The new administration says, among other things, that it is opposed to "new regulations"; that it will remove 2 old regulations for every new one proposed; and that it wants to destroy the government departments which make and enforce the regulations.  This, they claim, will make us "free." 

I beg to differ.  It will make a small number of us free to do things not currently permitted under government regulations.  The rest of us will have to live with the fallout from that.  Specifically, businesses large and small will now be able to do things not currently permitted.

The new administration has already issued permits for a previously blocked practice:  dumping coal ash.  Pickens County, South Carolina is seriously concerned about a proposal to dump coal ash from another state in a landfill in their county, apparently whether they like it or not.  And they don't.  Dumping substances into streams isn't a problem restricted to coal country.  My husband is from Wisconsin and he has told me stories of creeks poisoned when dairies simply dumped their waste whey into streams, rather than pay to dispose of it.  This was decades ago.  And remember the Gold King Mine waste water spill in 2015?  There were regulations against that, but contractors working on the mine didn't follow the regulations properly and destroyed an entire ecosystem.

If you look back at history, many of the regulations that annoy businesses so much were created because at some point, businesses did things that seriously harmed people, to the point that the government (urged by its voters) told them, "You can't do that any more."  Here are some random examples.  I didn't research these; this is what I can think of offhand.  A lot of these changes came from labor union negotiations, or from citizens joining together to protest a situation.

• The windows in your cars have to shatter into tiny squares with not much edge, so as not to slice you to pieces in a collision.  I'm old enough to remember when car windows broke like any other window, and a piece of the windshield, if you were unlucky, could cut your throat.  
• You can buy a car today with reasonable expectation that it will not only protect you in a crash, but will not emit noxious vapors that pollute the air; all due to government regulations that make cars more expensive to produce.  I remember when none of that was true.  In particular, I remember when the air in Los Angeles was so bad that your eyes began to sting when you drove through the pass on the Grapevine at the edge of the plain containing the city - 1,500 feet above sea level and 88 miles away from downtown L.A.
• You must be paid extra wages if you work longer than 8 hours a day, or on a weekend or holiday.  These rules came about, through union bargaining, because before the rules, you could essentially be forced to work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, at threat of losing your job if you complained.  Research the history of factory work in the late 19th and early 20th century if you think I'm kidding.
• If you're injured working on your job, you can apply for worker's compensation to pay for your treatment, which your employer is required to pay into as a form of insurance.  Before worker's comp, if you were injured on the job, you were probably just fired - which left you broke and unable to work.
• Food you buy at the store can't contain poisonous substances.  The classic recent example of this happened in China in 2008, when milk and infant formula adulterated with melamine (cheaper than protein but looks like protein on analysis) poisoned approximately 300,000 infants, of whom 6 died from kidney damage and 54 were hospitalized.  Yeah, that's the same melamine in some dishes.  The World Health Organization said this was "clearly not an isolated accident, [but] a large-scale intentional activity to deceive consumers for simple, basic, short-term profits."  The FDA, which is at considerable risk of being eliminated, is why you don't worry about this here.

The Republican Party and its business supporters want to eliminate government regulations to make life easier for businesses.  Unregulated businesses have a history of operating in a way that makes them money, at the expense of both their employees and their customers.  They say eliminating regulations will make you "free."  Yeah - and disabled, poisoned, and broke.  What kind of freedom is that?  Not all businesses operate this way; but without government oversight, how do we know which ones they are?  This war on regulations is one of the most dangerous things the current President has suggested, and it isn't getting nearly enough attention.

Paying to be Heard

This just happened to me for the third time in a few weeks, and it annoyed me.  I understand why they do it but I'm still annoyed.

You see something on Facebook, or in an email (I've seen both), which says, Are you concerned about X?  Fill in your favorite issue for X.  So you click on "add your name" and they ask a bunch of questions about this urgent issue - the last one was "tell Republicans: don't defund Planned Parenthood" - and you think, wow, I'm being listened to.

No you aren't, because after you finish the survey, you get to the page that says, "Yes - and I'll give you $5!"  With the possible options of "Yes - and I'll give more!"  I also saw one that said, "No, I don't care about women's health issues."  (Really insulting, Ms. Gillibrand.  I do care.)

So these elected officials ask you for your opinion, but to be heard, you have to pay them $5?  Wait a minute.

Look again and they're all clickbait - they're all from people running for office:  Kamala Harris (before she won), Gavin Newsom (running for governor), and Kirsten Gillibrand (running for something in New York, where I don't even live). They don't actually give a flying damn what you think but they really want that $5.

If you want to be heard on any issue, phone your own representative, and both your senators, and tell them directly what you think.  You can also email them (via their official web sites). They work for you; your taxes pay them; they have to listen.  If you've chosen well, they'll even act for you.

It's true that this is how Bernie, and for that matter Barack Obama, got as far as they did.  But there's a big difference between saying, "I need your help, please donate", and saying, "I want your opinion" and not saying "and please donate" until the last page.  The latter is just deceptive.

Why Tom Price Shouldn't Be Confirmed

I think the best way to begin this is to quote the summary from the Daily Beast article on this issue:

Tom Price and another influential GOP congressman got a discounted deal on stock from an Australian firm seeking FDA approval for its new drug.

First of all, in most countries insider trading is illegal (although how long that will last under a President Trump is an interesting question).  But this isn't really insider trading.  Mr. Price and the other Representative, Chris Collins of New York, were approached by the Aussie company, and offered shares of their company (trading then as a penny stock), at a discounted price.

Does this smell like bribery to you?  It does to me, especially because the stock isn't public - it's traded privately to "sophisticated U.S. investors."

It smells even more like bribery when you consider that  the company, Innate Immuno, has a new multiple sclerosis drug that they want to market in the U.S. because they can charge a lot more for it here.  Messrs. Price and Collins both sit on key committees that regulate health, and Mr. Price is nominated to Secretary of Health and Human Services, which regulates the Food and Drug Administration.  The FDA will - or won't - approve the new drug for American sale.

Astoundingly, this investment isn't actually illegal for a Congresscritter (thank you, Jim Hightower).  Richard Painter, George W. Bush's ethics lawyer, notes that "“There is an appearance problem… to have members of Congress buying and selling stocks that are affected by the work of the committees they sit on."  The rules are "a lot stricter" in the Executive Branch, and Mr. Price has already agreed to divest all his stocks.  Which is nice for him, as his stake in Innate Immuno will probably yield him between half a million and a million dollars, on a basic stake between $50,000 and $100,000.

I've been working in the financial industry, and watching the market, for most of my adult working life.  As far as I'm concerned, the mere fact that we can discuss this issue means that Mr. Price is ethically disqualified to serve in Congress, much less to head Health and Human Services. You can make your own decision.  If you agree with me, call your senators.

Oh, and now we know why the Republicans' first act when they convened "in private" was to try to eliminate the Office of Congressional Ethics.

Who Do You Work For?

I heard an interview today, on NPR's Here and Now, with Congressman Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla).

Mr. Mullin wanted to discuss repealing Obamacare immediately, but before that, Ms. Chakrabarti asked him about the Republican closed door meeting on Monday (Jan. 2), where the Republican leadership tried to eliminate the bipartisan Office of Congressional Ethics by making it report to the House Ethics Committee (run, of course, by the majority party, currently the GOP).

Oh, said Mr. Mullin, that wasn't a secret meeting, it was our "regular conference rules meeting" to work out our rules to control the House, and we wanted to get rid of the Congressional Ethics Committee because it's a waste of time and money.  He did say "we all should be held to a higher standard."

This sounds noble until you realize that Mr. Mullin is one of six Congressmen currently under investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics, his sin being taking time from Congressional business to make commercials for his family plumbing business, from which he also gets private income.  Challenged on this, he said it was terrible that a plumber who's owned his own business since he was 20 couldn't at the same time serve as a "citizen legislator."

Mr. Mullin doesn't seem to understand that the position of Congressman is a full time job.  Congressmen take the following oath of office:

I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

I don't see anything there about using his Congressional credentials to recommend his plumbing business.

If Mr. Citizen Legislator were to hire a plumber for his business, who spent part of his time running a side business selling real estate, I suspect that plumber would be out of the plumbing business within a couple of hours of his boss finding out.  And frankly, that's how I feel about Mr. Mullin.  Unfortunately, since I'm not in his district, all I can do is disapprove.  But his idea of "public service" seems to be a little fuzzy.

Now what?

I have nothing to say about The Election.  In fact, I have huge amounts to say, but most of it has been said already, by many other people.  I have nothing new to say.  But I'm afraid, and there is so little I can do.  I'm doing what I can - writing to Senators to object to his cabinet picks.  But I feel very small and helpless.

I'm most offended by Mr. Trump because he doesn't understand, and he doesn't care that he doesn't understand.  He just wants to shoot off his mouth and be cheered.  He's about to become the head of the most powerful country in the world - the commander in chief of the world's largest military, yet - and he can't be bothered to listen to the daily briefings because they're boring.  He said so; I'm not making a judgment.

More than Mr. Trump, I'm afraid of the Republican Congress.  With a rubber stamp in the White House, the hard right Republicans want to repeal Obamacare, privatize Social Security, gut Medicare and Medicaid, and God knows what they'll do to public housing.  I receive Social Security; I receive Medicare.  I'm really unhappy with all these projects, and I can't affect anything because I don't vote for those Congresscritters.  And if you think this Congress will approve a huge infrastructure project to bring back the good jobs Trump promised his supporters, you are delusional.  You're fooling yourself.  I'm beginning to think we really do need Congressional term limits, but it's impossible, because Congress would have to vote for them.

It's going to be a bleak 4 years.  The only option open to those of us who don't like the situation is to complain, complain, complain - organize, call, write, march. Silence is consent.

Have You Stopped Beating Your Wife?

Now that Thanksgiving is over:  I wrote this at the end of September and then put it aside.  I just read it again today, and I still think it's worth saying.  I did decide it was unsuitable to post it on Thanksgiving Day.

KALW's Your Call, once again, had a segment that got me thinking.  Today's program was a review of a new dance program, Grace and Delia are Gone, performed over this weekend at Fort Mason in S.F.  (Ed. note:  Sorry, this broadcast was aired on September 29, 2016, so you can't catch the dance program tomorrow.  Click the link to listen to the broadcast.)

I'm sure it's a great program, but what startled me was the earnest conviction - from the choreographer, from at least one caller, and in some sense from Rose Aguilar herself - that violence against women is a new, modern problem, aggravated by men who've spent 5 tours in Iraq/Afghanistan, and all the guns we now have around.

You folks all need to read more history - a problem I've noticed before.  For those horrified by multiple tours in Afghanistan, read the history of World Wars I and II, when soldiers spent months or years on the battlefield, or on a ship at sea, alternating between brief periods of extreme danger and weeks or months of total boredom.  You probably never heard this personally from your grandfather because the WWII vets didn't discuss what they went through.  Some of them beat up their wives; some of them killed themselves (I went to school with a young man whose WWII vet father killed himself); most of them just went on with life.  And never talked about the war.

Violence against women has gone on for centuries.  Medieval women weren't educated, and they couldn't choose whom they married.  Aristocratic women were married off to further the family's political connections.  Married women were chattel property to their husbands, and the husbands were allowed to do whatever they pleased to their property.  Moralists might object, but beating the crap out of your wife was NOT illegal through most of European and American history.  The Victorians take a lot of flack for their views on morality, but they did start the idea that maybe wife-beating was a bad idea.

The primary difference between history and now is that over the last 40 years or so, American society has concluded that it's a bad idea for one spouse to beat up on the other (and don't think it only happens to women, or for that matter only to straight people).  We actually have laws against it, and support groups for victims - this is a tremendous improvement. It hasn't stopped the practice, but don't assume this is the worst of times.  And if the situation in the U.S. disturbs you, Google "wife beating" and take a look at the headlines on current practices in Islamic countries.

There's something in the human race that makes certain members of it make themselves feel better by beating up on people, or creatures, they consider their "inferiors" - wives, pets, children.  (Also, people of other races or religions; but we're talking about family violence here).  People who do this are usually but not exclusively male.  Until and unless this changes, we're unlikely to get rid of spousal abuse entirely.

Footnote:  in the 2 months since I wrote this, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, to take office in January.  In a country as in an organization, the tone comes from the top.  Given Trump's rhetoric on the campaign trail, and the fact that he's on his third wife, I can't judge right now whether his presence in the White House (assuming he stays in the White House) will enable spousal abuse or not.  He's enabled a lot of gratuitous violence, but I haven't heard much about Trump-caused domestic violence, so maybe not.

Homelessness

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, as I do, it's hard to ignore the homeless population, whether they are rolled up in an old sleeping bag in the doorway of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium or pitching a collection of tents under a freeway overpass in West Oakland. There they are, and what are we going to do?  I started this post after reading and hearing a full week of coverage of press and radio coverage of the situation, assembled by 70 local Bay Area news organizations and organized by the San Francisco Chronicle.

I've written before about the housing issues caused by gentrification in this area (Gentrification) - rich people are bidding up the price of housing (both bought and rented) to the point that families who have lived here for generations have to move out of town.  This does, of course, affect the size of the homeless population, especially for renters:  a rise in your rent can mean you either have to move to Antioch (a 90 minute commute each way) or move into your car.  Or the nearest tent city.  Loss of a job can do the same thing.

The homeless population appears to range from people who are merely unfortunate (laid off because a business closes, say), to people who are ill in some way (anything from addiction to hepatitis to raging schizophrenia to Alzheimer's), to people who are actual criminals and prefer the anonymity of the street.  But the collective popular response to the homeless seems to be, "Ewww, them," mainly because homelessness makes it very hard for you to wash, or relieve yourself indoors.  

Many people feel that the homeless population is "not us."  We couldn't be like that.  This is self-deception; we could be them.  There was a time in my life when I could have been them.  When I was not quite 30, I decided that my 5 year old marriage wasn't working; I went alone to visit my parents and suddenly realized I couldn't go back.  At this point, luck kicked in and saved me - my parents took me in, fed me and put me up until I could find another job, which took several months.  

Here's the situation I was in:  my now ex was a spendthrift, so my bank account, which had held $500 when we married, was now down to $300 (a lot more money than you think, this was 1975).  I'd been working in a family business, so I didn't qualify for unemployment (and what a kick in the pants that was).  And because it was 1975, the credit cards were all in his name - married women at that time were just becoming able to get cards in their own names!  (The Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed in 1974.)  

My parents were 68 and 63, and healthy, with solid pensions, living in a house they had owned outright since 1952; but if any of that had been different, I could have found myself on the street, and I knew it.  In fact, I've always known it, and I wrote my feelings up in 2008, shortly after I retired (The Bag Lady).

We are the homeless, and they are us; they're just unluckier than we are. There but for the grace of God go I.  And what do we do about that?  Some people talk about the U.S. as a "Christian nation," but as long as we leave the less fortunate sleeping on street corners, we aren't following any Christian precepts that I ever learned.  There is really only one good solution - as I said in Gentrification, we need to build more and more and more housing, mostly in tall buildings to make use of limited land. We need to build enough housing to drive down the price.  I explained this in some detail in Gentrification, so go read it there, and then think about what your beautiful views and tidy low-rise neighborhoods are doing to the people who are sleeping under the bridges.

Within Our Gates

I had an amazing experience last night.  I attended a showing, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, of Within Our Gates, a 1920 silent film directed by Oscar Micheaux.  I don't normally go to any movies these days, although I've always had a soft spot for the great silents.  I went to this one because the film was accompanied by members of the Oakland Symphony and the Oakland Symphony Chorus, directed by Maestro Michael Morgan.  I've sung with the Symphony Chorus since 2000, although I don't sing in the Chamber Chorus that performed last night; I knew all the singers and some of the musicians.

If you've never seen a silent film accompanied by an orchestra, with or without chorus, you may not realize that the performers are seated with their backs to the screen.  In fact, a chorus member told me they weren't allowed to see the film.  Only the conductor can see the screen, and Maestro Morgan had to coordinate the action in the movie with the composer's score.  I might add that it was black as the inside of your hat in that theater, except for light from the screen; and silent movies don't generate the light that modern movies do.  As far as I know, the singers had memorized the score; I didn't see many music lights except for the orchestra.  The score they performed was a world premiere, composed by Adolphus Hailstork of Rochester, New York, who attended the performance.

Within Our Gates is the oldest surviving film made by an African-American director.  You can see a plot summary on the Wikipedia article I linked.  The film was released only 5 years after Birth of a Nation. Wikipedia suggests that "critics have considered Micheaux's project as a response to Griffith."

 I never thought I would see a movie, with an all-Negro cast (to use the period term), describing the lives of African Americans in 1920.  The main character, Sylvia Landry, seems "middle class."  She can read and write, she has nice clothes, she can afford to travel.  She lives in a nice house, she visits people and they visit her.  But in a flashback, we learn that she grew up on a plantation, where her illiterate father worked for the owner, and was lynched after someone else shot the owner and he was blamed for it.  Yes, there is a lynching scene, and an attempted rape. 

It's one thing to know, from reading, that people lived and thought a certain way, and that certain things happened.  Seeing it in a movie is a whole different experience.  It was jarring to see these things: 

• A Southern woman tells a northern philanthropist, who was considering supporting a school to educate black children, that there was no point in educating Negroes, they were just good for "porters and field hands," and "they just want to go up to Heaven."  
• A Negro preacher tells his congregation they will go to Heaven because they are poor and uneducated, while all the white people will go to Hell because they are rich and educated.  
• The plantation owner complains to his servant that Sylvia (the daughter of his fieldworker) is educated and can work out what her father's debts really are, instead of what the owner wants them to be.  
• And then, of course, there is the lynching.  No, they didn't show the actual hanging.

And on top of all this, it was a good movie.  The acting was as good as silents ever got, and better than some I've seen.  For instance, I've seen Metropolis, a great classic, but frankly the acting is awful; this was much better, more like you were watching real people.  The characters were presented fairly, there were good and bad Negroes, and good and bad white people.  It was another world, that I never expected to see.  I will remember it.

The GOP's Trump Problem

I've been watching the 2016 Presidential campaign with fascination.  I admit that I, like many people, didn't think Donald Trump could make it this far - hey, we're all wrong every so often.  After the April 26 primaries, it looks like Trump is a done deal for the Republican nomination.  Full disclosure:  as a Democrat and a Hillary supporter, I'm delighted.

But the inner circle of the Republican Party is horrified.  Ted Cruz and John Kasich, neither of which has the chance of a snowball in hell to get the nomination, are scheming together to divide up the remaining primaries.  They hope, between them, to get enough delegates assigned, not so one of them could become the nominee, but to force Trump into a brokered convention, where they hope he will fail on a first vote and throw the convention open to nominate someone else.  And as far as I can tell, the Republican National Committee is backing them.

Who else could it be?  They ran seventeen people for this nomination, and after the bulk of the primaries they are down to three, two of which are dangling by their fingernails while Trump strides confidently toward the full delegate count.  After some backroom shuffling, Paul Ryan (one of his better moves) stood up and said he would not run under any circumstances.  Ted Cruz obviously thinks he should be the candidate, but he has almost no support in the Republican Party.  And yet the RNC still hopes to Stop Trump.

I am staggered by the blindness of this approach.  The RNC has repeatedly implied that a Trump presidency would destroy the Republican Party.  Do they really not realize what it would look like to the rest of the country, if Trump were to win the popular vote but not the delegate count, and then be replaced as the candidate by someone else at the convention??  Seriously - that would be the end of the Republican Party, convicted by its own actions of setting their own personal priorities above the wishes of their constituents.  Many of us already think they do this.  If somebody other than Trump runs for President on the Republican ticket this year, there will be no further question about it.

Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant

Another mass shooting, and this one is being called "terrorism," even though (like the attack in France a couple of weeks ago) it was done by a U.S. citizen and his wife.  This year we've had more "mass shootings" (381) than we've had days (339 as I write this).

Like a lot of people, I'm getting really tired of Congress' total lack of action on gun control, even the simplest and most obvious action of required background checks for gun purchase.  They even refuse to lift the ban on research on the public health effects of gun usage.  They even refuse to ban people on the no-fly list from buying guns!  What??

So I got curious about who's paying them for this, and went to maplight.com.  I found the following really depressing numbers.  Maplight lists 2 categories of funding under Interest Groups:

Gun Control (Anti-Guns) and Gun Rights (Pro-Guns).

The total amount donated to "gun control" members of Congress between the dates shown below was $9,750.  Not even five figures!  Here's the breakdown of the top amounts donated.  These numbers affected votes on 40 different bills during the 114th Congress.

Top Senate Recipients Funded

Recipient	Amount
Edward J. Markey	$2,500
Joe Manchin, III	$2,000
Kirsten E. Gillibrand	$1,000
Jeff Merkley	$500
Tim Kaine	$250

Contributions shown for the last six years of available data, Apr 1, 2009 - Mar 31, 2015, including contributions to presidential campaigns.

Top House Recipients Funded

Recipient	Amount
Ann M. Kuster	$1,500
Elizabeth H. Esty	$1,000

Contributions shown for the last two years of available data, Apr 1, 2013 - Mar 31, 2015, including contributions to presidential campaigns.  

The list above represents all the members of Congress who got any pro-gun funding in the periods shown.

The total amount donated to "gun rights" members of Congress between the dates shown below was $2,754,455.  The breakdown on who got what is too big to display here.  Here is link to the full list:  

All congress members receiving gun rights funding over the last 2 years

Take a look at the list.  Find your representatives.  I'm happy to say that neither of my senators is on the list, nor is my member of Congress.  Numbers for the Senate show the last 6 years; numbers for the House, the last 2.  I urge you to go to Maplight, look up your representatives, and see who is funding them.  And let them know that you did this.  As long as we allow these numbers to stay quietly in the shadows, the current situation will continue.

 

 

Unobtanium

I heard an absolutely fascinating interview the other day (Nov. 24) on Terri Gross' Fresh Air.  She was talking to a New York Times reporter, C. J. Chivers, about his recent article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled The Doomsday Scam.

The subject of this article, and about the first half of the interview, is a substance I'd never heard of:  red mercury.  What?  I'm not kidding when I say that my first mental response to the discussion of red mercury was, "What's its atomic weight?"  Red mercury has been discussed, publicly and privately, since the Cold War - the Soviets were reputed to have it.  Mr. Chivers was unable to find anyone who had ever seen it.  I recommend you to take the time and read The Doomsday Scam - it's absolutely fascinating and Mr. Chivers writes very well.

The theory of red mercury is that it can be used to build very small nuclear weapons.  The following description (excerpted from the article) was written, I'm sorry to say, by an American nuclear physicist who should have known better:

In one edition of his autobiography, he claimed red mercury was manufactured by ‘‘mixing special nuclear materials in very small amounts into the ordinary compound and then inserting the mixture into a nuclear reactor or bombarding it with a particle-accelerator beam.’’ The result, he said, ‘‘is a remarkable nonexploding high explosive’’ that, when detonated, becomes ‘‘extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen and producing a pure-fusion mini neutron bomb.’’ Here was a proliferation threat of an order never before seen.

The author of this bilgewater is named in the article, so that's your incentive to read it.

But my second response was:  I've heard this legend before.  Not red mercury itself, but the legend of the rare and difficult to find substance that can confer unheard-of powers on the owner.  It was called the Philosopher's Stone, and it was the goal of every alchemist the ancient world, and the Middle Ages, ever produced.  Here is the invaluable Wikipedia on alchemy:

Alchemy is a philosophical and protoscientific tradition practiced throughout Egypt and Eurasia which aimed to purify, mature, and perfect certain objects.^{[1] [2][n 1]} Common aims were chrysopoeia, the transmutation of "base metals" (e.g., lead) into "noble" ones (particularly gold); the creation of an elixir of immortality; the creation of panaceas able to cure any disease; and the development of an alkahest, a universal solvent.^[3]

 Red mercury sounds like a form of Philosopher's Stone to me, although sadly one which is only used to destroy.  We tend to look down our noses at our ancestors, as ignorant and uneducated.  At least their rare and powerful Philosopher's Stone was used to cure and create.  Red mercury is apparently only intended to destroy.  How fortunate we all are that it doesn't exist.

But what is it in the human race that makes us believe in the Philosopher's Stone, or red mercury, or snake oil, or any other substance, just because someone we don't know tells us it exists and we only have to find it.