Author Archives: oinsketta

Pop loved “shooting pictures”

My grandfather was a mild-mannered man.  He had big, powerful hands he used for years professionally in the delicate art of egg candling. He held an egg in front of a bright light, (a candle at one point, one supposes) and inspected it to see if the yolk had the shadow of a spot in it.  If so, this spot of blood indicated it had been fertilized and wasn’t fit to eat.  I don’t know if this was under Jewish law or American health law, but he sat with cases of eggs, in the basement of his friend Al’s  (who my grandmother once said smelled like a camel), grocery store, or Julie’s appetizing shop, picking them up in his large hands one by one, gently turning them in front of the light and looking through their shells to see if they could be sold.

The year I was born, Pop, at one time a prodigious cigarette smoker (Camels, if memory serves), underwent late stage lung cancer surgery.   They removed one of his lungs.  I was a few months old at the time and remember only what I was later told about it.   We have the snake plant that was delivered to Pop in the hospital as he recuperated from the surgery.  The plant is almost 63 years old and doing well.   Pop had an excellent recovery from the surgery and lived twenty-two years with only one lung in his powerful body.  

One of his doctors recommended that he add bacon to his diet, for health reasons.  There was some kind of bullshit rationale involved, which my grandfather explained to me at one point.   So in addition to his usual kasha, boiled flanken, boiled chicken, soup and several slices of whole wheat, pumpernickel or rye bread Pop ate a few strips of bacon from time to time, at his doctor’s recommendation.

Pop was a well-built, trim man who weighed 168 pounds for his entire adult life.  One year at his physical he weighed in at 169 or 170.   He and the doctor were both surprised.   The doctor asked pop how many slices of bread he ate a day.   My grandfather counted and told the doctor seven.   The doctor said, “eat six”.   Pop did.  At his next physical he was 168 pounds.  

The lived philosophy of that, food merely fuel for the optimum running of your body, still fills me with wonder and admiration.  Pop would eat a Danish from a bakery from time to time with his coffee, but couldn’t care less if he did or he didn’t.  He always handed my sister and me each a candy bar (it was Chunkies for a long time, a chocolate chunk filled with peanuts and raisins, then mainly Nestle’s Crunch Bars with the occasional Mr. Goodbar thrown in) as soon as he saw us.  For himself, he never ate anything just for the taste of it.

Pop was retired for most of the time I knew him. His favorite pastime in those years was watching a good shooting picture on TV.   He’d scan the TV Guide, a small booklet that came out every week and told you what was coming up on each of the seven or eight stations available in the media mega-market of New York City and later Miami Beach. When he spotted a good shooting picture, also known as a Western, he’d tune in and watch the good guys triumph over the bad guys.

“Sit down,” he’d say, if I asked him who was who on the screen, “watch and you’ll know.”  In most of the shooting pictures Pop watched, Hollywood movies of the 1940s, 50s and early 60s, it didn’t take long to figure out who was wearing the white hat and who was the evil, sadistic, murdering bastard who needed killing, the one glaring provocatively from under the black hat.   Simpler times.

Pop loved Bonanza, and Gun smoke, two shows he caught every week, my parents and I loved those shows too, my sister would also watch them.  Outside of those, he’d catch every western on Million Dollar Movie, a show where they played the same black and white movie several times in a given week.  Pop would watch pretty much any movie where good guys and bad guys dressed like cowboys, (or Indians, for that matter), chased each other around in the dust of their horses and shot it out at the end.

Pop’s hammer

This is the “European hammer” that belonged to my grandfather.   I will have more to say about the old fellow and his life in the coming days, but, for the moment, here is the hammer itself:

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You can see how ready it is to get to work, banging in a thin nail or doing some serious peening (whatever the hell that is).   Here is another view of the business end of my grandfather’s ball-peen hammer:

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I never saw my grandfather use this hammer, that I can recall.   The hammer, I must say, reflects his style.  My grandfather had a certain graceful delicacy about him.  He was surprisingly light on his feet.   My sister once witnessed him, at close to eighty, doing a mocking dance move behind his overbearing wife’s back.   It was during a dispute over the fate of some cash my grandfather was planning to deposit in the bank.

“Don’t put that money in the bank! I’m taking Abby out for lunch and then we’re going shopping, I need the money,” my grandmother said, in the tone of one used to being the boss.  

My sister then had the miraculous luck to witness a little dance that my grandfather must have done countless times over his long life with Yetta.   As his wife went into the other room, he did a kind of shrug and with fluid grace lifted one leg, bent the other knee and threw his arms to the side in a comically ironic manner.  

“She don’t want to put the money in the bank,” he said quietly, moving his head from side to side as he danced his mocking dance.   “She don’t want to put the money in the bank!”

Decades later I found a great clip somebody put together of Paolo Conte’s [1] wonderful “It’s Wonderful” with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing.   A beautiful job.  Take a moment to enjoy it, and enjoy it you certainly will.   I sent it to my sister with the caption “Pop” and she instantly agreed.

 

[1]  dig  what Conte plays behind the sax solo, (I’ve cued it up for you), great stuff!

My grandfather’s hammer

My grandfather had a ball-peen hammer [1] that I now use to drive small nails into the wall to hang baseball caps and calendars on.   Because I was a child the first time I saw this eccentric looking, thin handled hammer (without the familiar woodpecker comb on the back of the head, used for pulling nails) I thought it was called a European hammer, which made sense to me, since my grandfather was European.    I have no idea how he came to own the machinist’s hammer as, to my knowledge, he never did any type of peening at all (whatever the hell that is).

I love this hammer, because it was owned by Pop.   The smooth handle has the feel of old, well-used wood.  The small metal head is smart looking and ready to bop.   I wield it every time there is a small nail to be driven into anything.   I feel a small rush of excitement as I go to get the natty little hammer.

When I was a boy I went through a time when all I wanted was a baby elephant.   I would not let up on the theme.   One day, over dinner, Pop promised to get me one when I reached a certain age, along with, a few years later, a copy machine.   I never stopped to think that baby elephants grow to become the earth’s largest land mammals.  The baby ones are so cute.   I was a kid.   Still, I didn’t forget, when I reached those ages and had no elephant, no copy machine (at that time a gigantic thing that took up the footprint of a single bed) appeared. My gentle, loving grandfather had lied to placate me.   Et tu, Pop? 

He was trying to soothe me with these obvious lies, I realize, and I didn’t really hold it against him.   Fifty years later we’d all have copy machines on our desks and, truly, it would have sucked to have been the child owner of a baby elephant.  In the best case scenario there would have been that wrenching moment when the growing elephant would have to move away.   I never even thought of the cruelty of taking the little giant away from her mother so I could have the world’s coolest pet.  Elephants are social animals.

… And I am going to be late for my appointment with the nephrologist if I continue tapping here now.  So, if you will please excuse me, I must… be…. awwwwwn my way.

 

 

[1] Wikipedia:  

also known as a machinist’s hammer, is a type of peening hammer used in metalworking.

Stop Lying, Dogg

I hate this tribal, partisan shit, I really do.   The division into angry “tribes” is an old, time-tested practice to keep us divided.  It is the ultimate triumph of those who seek to distract the millions of us who are desperately fucked by our political/economic system.   The real enemy of all of us is not the “other side”, with its infuriating buzzwords, it’s the small elite class of super-wealthy activists, and their army of career true believers.   They buy politicians and privilege-protective laws in our pay-to-play democracy.    

People born into great wealth, folks like hereditary billionaire Betsy DeVos, her brother Erik Prince, Charles and David Koch,  Rebecca Mercer, daughter of Robert Mercer, sponsors of Steve Bannon and Mr. Trump, are prominent examples.   These members of the top 0.01% exert a heroic influence on public affairs in our great experiment in rule by the people.

We hear there are billionaire activists on both sides of the political spectrum, and it’s true.  One side, however, the extreme right, has played the game much more strategically, systematically, ruthlessly and practically than the other.  I’m talking about the group that has created dozens of influential “think tanks” and partisan membership organizations, founded and funded “grassroots movements” like the Tea Party. endowed university chairs, compiled lists of carefully vetted ideologically sound judges, “primaried” non-compliant party members out of office, and so forth.

What distinguishes this story about a small cabal of wealthy, powerful manipulators from conspiracy theories like the old conspiracy about all-powerful international Jewry is that it can be easily shown to be true.   Journalist Jane Mayer laid it out very clearly in a well-researched book called Dark Money, historian Nancy MacLean built on Mayer’s work by tracing the “philosophical” roots of this hidden ideology of raw power in Democracy in Chains.   The truthfulness of these two accounts is proved because neither author was ever sued (although Mayer was threatened by aggressive Koch brother lawyers and investigators while she was writing her book).

Although they have generally worked in the shadows (their actual ideas appealing only to their own tiny cohort), it’s not very hard to follow the Koch network’s money and influence.   They fund, among other things, Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute [1] and my favorite (also Charles Koch’s) the Institute for Humane Studies.  They also fund the influential Federalist Society, a society of right wing fellow traveling lawyers and judges started by the Kochs during lifetime member Boof Kavanaugh’s first year at Yale Law School.

There are valid political arguments to be had, important debates that should be vigorous and nuances that need to be laid out, difficult solutions found.  Climate catastrophe is upon us, that fact is beyond dispute.  We need to discuss ways to avoid the worst of it — yet the well-funded “Climate Change Skeptic” movement (fossil fuel industry millions, including Koch money)  that denies fossil fuel’s role in the crisis, makes actual discussion of solutions virtually impossible.  The despair of tens of millions of Americans, and our suicide epidemic, needs to be dealt with, the answer is not more privatized prisons (unless you own that stock).  

Yet we are usually confronted with other black and white issues, and must reflexively take sides.  Is abortion murder?  I don’t really know, it’s something that could be discussed, if guns weren’t pointed at doctors and family planning groups.   Is allowing a pregnant rape victim to die from her pregnancy because abortion is banned murder?   I think it probably is.  There are rarely simple answers to these kinds of questions, questions that immediately divide us.  

These emotional triggers keep us from having any intelligent talks about anything.  By design, these super-charged religious/humanist issues are kept eternally before us.   Which is exactly what grinning fossils like Charles Koch want. Betsey DeVos smiles too, pretty as a Barbie doll, and equally bright, as she defends the Bible over every other book ever written.   God’s word, after all, y’all.

All that said, and at the risk of sounding partisan, Mr. Trump, you’ve got to stop lying, Dogg.  I know you can’t help it, but still, you have to try.

The other day he was complaining about Germany not paying its fair share to NATO, insisting they double their contribution.  In a videotaped Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg Tuesday he said (and you can watch him say it here):

President Donald Trump: “Germany, honestly, is not paying their fair share. I have great respect for Angela, and I have great respect for the country. My father is German—right?—was German and born in a—a very wonderful place in Germany.”

Democracy Now! reported this, and then the facts as printed on Fred Christ Trump’s actual Kenyan birth certificate:

Fred Trump was in fact born in the Bronx, in New York City. It was not the first time Trump made the claim. He made the comments as he once again demanded Germany and other NATO countries increase their military spending from 2 to 4 percent of GDP.

So, while I hate to be disrespectful to a man as powerful as POTUS– goddamn it, man, can you just shut the fuck up with the fucking compulsive lying?

This just in (an old headline from the Onion)

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[1]   The venerable American Enterprise Institute, to take one example, styles itself nonpartisan, as their blurb on google reads.  From their website:

We are committed to making the intellectual, moral, and practical case for expanding freedom, increasing individual opportunity, and strengthening the free enterprise system in America and around the world. Our work explores ideas that further these goals, and AEI scholars take part in this pursuit with academic freedom. AEI operates independently of any political party and has no institutional positions. Our scholars’ conclusions are fueled by rigorous, data-driven research and broad-ranging evidence.

source

Others would beg to differ:

Founded in 1938, The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, known simply as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is a Washington, D.C. based conservative think tank that researches government, politics, economics, and social welfare. The current President of AEI is Arthur C. Brooks.

According to their about page: “The American Enterprise Institute is a public policy think tank dedicated to defending human dignity, expanding human potential, and building a freer and safer world. The work of our scholars and staff advances ideas rooted in our belief in democracy, free enterprise, American strength and global leadership, solidarity with those at the periphery of our society, and a pluralistic, entrepreneurial culture.” 

Funded by / Ownership

The American Enterprise Institute is a think tank funded through donations from individuals, corporations and foundations. According to Sourcewatch,they are funded by many corporations connected to the fossil fuel industry.

source

Lest we forget

In this age of 24/7 distraction things fly by so quickly that we barely have time to consider one before the next wet turd comes whizzing by.   Our current POTUS, who won election with a historic, never before seen landslide of almost 100,000 votes, is the master of this ADHD-inducing tactic, launching a constant stream of odiferous torpedoes that leave everyone too dizzy to analyze any single torpedo.

Lest we forget, prior to the 2016 midterms the failing NY Times published a huge, highly detailed story about the corrupt practices Fred Christ Trump, the president’s ethically challenged father, used to avoid paying taxes as he made his children multimillionaires.  The lede of that October 2, 2018 (the day Jared Kushner’s friend, fellow prince MBS, was having a journalist murdered and dismembered) story was:

The president has long sold himself as a self-made billionaire, but a Times investigation found that he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.

It went on, for many pages, like this:

President Trump participated in dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud, that greatly increased the fortune he received from his parents, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

Mr. Trump won the presidency proclaiming himself a self-made billionaire, and he has long insisted that his father, the legendary New York City builder Fred C. Trump, provided almost no financial help.

But The Times’s investigation, based on a vast trove of confidential tax returns and financial records, reveals that Mr. Trump received the equivalent today of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire, starting when he was a toddler and continuing to this day.

Much of this money came to Mr. Trump because he helped his parents dodge taxes. He and his siblings set up a sham corporation to disguise millions of dollars in gifts from their parents, records and interviews show. Records indicate that Mr. Trump helped his father take improper tax deductions worth millions more. He also helped formulate a strategy to undervalue his parents’ real estate holdings by hundreds of millions of dollars on tax returns, sharply reducing the tax bill when those properties were transferred to him and his siblings.

These maneuvers met with little resistance from the Internal Revenue Service, The Times found. The president’s parents, Fred and Mary Trump, transferred well over $1 billion in wealth to their children, which could have produced a tax bill of at least $550 million under the 55 percent tax rate then imposed on gifts and inheritances.

The Trumps paid a total of $52.2 million, or about 5 percent, tax records show.

A lesser man would have been put on the defensive by the exhaustively researched and very damning expose.    Trump had his lawyer [1]  threaten the Times.  The Grey Lady quoted the essence of his threats in the article:

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If Trump’s direct participation in this long pattern of fraud, tax evasion and other crimes is debatable (at least when he was an eight year-old millionaire), he was certainly the primary beneficiary of his father’s generosity and criminality.   What is not in debate is that Mr. Harder never sued the Times.  I love the way the Times casually dropped his threat in the middle of its expose, without comment, hilarious. 

It is worth not forgetting that Trump is the lifelong beneficiary of fraud and tax evasion, among the self-made financial genius’s other endearing traits.  Still, defamation is defamation and the truth of the matters alleged, a separate question.  The facts of the recent blockbuster lawsuit Trump v. The Lyin’ NY Times speak for themselves.  As every American school child knows, Mr. Trump won over fifty billion dollars from the now shuttered NY Times for its defamatory article.

Another detail that should not be lost, in the clouds of gas that pour out of POTUS’s twitter feed many times a day, is that current A.G. William Barr [2] auditioned for his job as Trump’s loyal consigliere by writing Trump an unsolicited NINETEEN PAGE LEGAL MEMO, putting his lawyerly skills on display in the service of explaining to the embattled president that he would protect him no matter what.  

Trump’s first attorney general, who had lied about conversations with the Russians and then properly recused himself from supervising Robert Mueller’s investigation, had long been mocked and humiliated by the president as disloyal, stupid and no Roy Cohn (that last is actually a compliment).  Every American school child could see that the loyal Sessions was skittering on very thin ice.  Up stepped the esteemed Mr. Barr, promising to do what the weak Jeff Sessions could not do, protect the president from Barr’s close friend Robert Mueller no matter what. 

So far Barr is doing exactly that.  Stonewalling.   Nothing to see here.   The careful, thorough, incorruptible Robert Mueller punted, as they say.   According to the non-summary of the report by his new boss, William Barr, Mueller presented evidence that POTUS obstructed justice, along with arguments that he did not actually obstruct justice.   Therefore, you dig, it’s a wash, tie-breaker going to Mueller’s boss, Barr.  Nothing to see here, says Barr, cagey as a man who endorsed preemptive pardons for untruthful, law-flouting superiors in the past [3].  

No reason for anyone to read all the sickening details laid out in Mueller’s report, according to Barr, the main thing is that Mueller found no evidence of direct collusion with Russia (no criminal conspiracy)  and took no position on indicting the sitting president for obstruction of justice.  Another main thing: he did not subpoena the compulsively lying chief executive to testify under oath.  As anyone who has ever heard the president speak understands, that would have been a perjury trap!

It is worth pausing from time to time to look at things like this with some care.  The devil, as always, is fucking his way through the mischievous details.

 

[1]  from that NY Times article:

The president declined repeated requests over several weeks to comment for this article. But a lawyer for Mr. Trump, Charles J. Harder, provided a written statement on Monday, one day after The Times sent a detailed description of its findings. “The New York Times’s allegations of fraud and tax evasion are 100 percent false, and highly defamatory,” Mr. Harder said. “There was no fraud or tax evasion by anyone. The facts upon which The Times bases its false allegations are extremely inaccurate.”

[2] Communist mouthpiece Business Insider published a recent capsule bio of Mr. Barr.  You can read it here.   A  couple of teasers:  

Additionally, Barr supported one of Trump’s most criticized moves as president — the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Barr wrote an op-ed in 2017 stating Trump “made the right call.” Trump has faced accusations of obstruction of justice over Comey’s ousting.

In a separate op-ed, Barr expressed approval of Trump’s firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she refused to enforce the president’s travel ban that targeted predominantly Muslim countries.

Barr has also been critical of Mueller’s team of prosecutors, questioning their political leanings. “I would have liked to see him have more balance on this group,” Barr said on the subject last year.

[3]  When President George H.W. Bush lost his reelection bid, Iran-Contra principal Cap Weinberger was about to finally stand trial for his long ago misdeeds, including obstruction of justice.  Although Reagan’s Secretary of Defense was innocent until proven guilty, pretrial discovery would have allowed prosecutors to see his detailed meeting notes.   These notes contained references to Bush being present at meetings he denied knowledge of.   The elder Bush would have been put on the spot had Weinberger gone to trial.  

Barr took care of the problem for the man who appointed him Attorney General by recommending and endorsing six pardons days before the end of Bush’s tenure in the Oval Office.  Weinberger was pardoned.  There was no Weinberger trial, no revelation of Bush senior’s repeated lies about what he did or didn’t know about the secret sale of arms to Iran and using the proceeds to illegally fund right wing Central American death squads. Nothing to see here!

Wikipedia summarizes the nothing burger thusly:

Iran–Contra affair[edit]

The Iran–Contra affair concerned the selling of US missiles to Iran. The funds received from Iran were then channeled to guerilla rebels known as Contras, who were fighting the socialist government of Nicaragua.[22]Such funding had been specifically denied by the US Congress.

Though he claimed to have been opposed to the sale on principle, actually Weinberger participated in the transfer of United States Hawk and TOW missiles to Iran at that time.

This resulted in a large scandal with several investigations which resulted in fourteen Reagan administration officials being indicted, including Caspar Weinberger who resigned before trial.[23][24][25]

Following his resignation as Secretary of Defense, legal proceedings against him were continued byIndependent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh. A federal grand jury then indicted Weinberger on two counts of perjury and one count of Obstruction of Justice on June 16, 1992.[26] He was defended by defense attorneyCarl Rauh.

Prosecutors brought an additional indictment just four days before the 1992 presidential election. This was controversial because it cited a Weinberger diary entry contradicting a claim made by President George H. W. Bush. Republicans claimed that this action contributed to President Bush’s later defeat. On December 11, 1992, Judge Thomas F. Hogan threw out this indictment because it violated the five-year statute of limitations and improperly broadened the original charges.[27]

Before Weinberger could be tried on the original charges, he received a pardon on December 24, 1992, from then President Bush, who had been Reagan’s Vice President during the scandal.[24][28]

I add:  Barr had been in office less than a month when he helped Mr. Bush out of a terribly embarrassing situation.   Imagine the damage to Mr. Bush’s image had it been revealed that the former head spook had been lying for years about his involvement in the secret, illegal dealings? 

Witch hunt update

President Bill Clinton was investigated, by Independent Counsel Ken Starr, for possible involvement in a financial scam called “Whitewater”.   Starr wound up grilling Clinton about blow jobs the president received in the Oval Office.  Clinton lied about these blow jobs, under oath, and perjury charges were brought against him.   When Starr was done investigating Clinton box after box of files were turned over to Congress for their consideration, this was done two days after his investigation concluded.   The pile of boxes being carried into Congress was shown on TV screens everywhere.

In the next few days every twelve year-old in America (indeed, any kid anywhere in the worldwide world with an internet connection) could read the entire report on line, including damning pornographic details about how Clinton inserted an unlit cigar into his favorite intern’s vagina, then put it in his own mouth, savoring it as his intern brought him to climax with her own mouth.   I recall reading that and saying to myself “damn…”.   I’m told there were also physical descriptions of the president’s slightly below average-sized penis.

I heard recently that the bulk of the evidence in the Watergate break-in that brought Nixon down was also made public shortly after Nixon resigned.   (Two days later:  I heard this from an unreliable source, it was withheld from the public for almost forty years, though many of the facts were leaked sooner)  At least in the case of the details of Clinton’s perjury report, the full report was quickly released to Congress and detailed extensively in the press.   Unlike the Mueller report, an ultra-sensitive, partisan, politically charged document whose release is, we are told, totally at the discretion of the new sitting Attorney General, a man chosen because of his dedication to protecting the people he works for.  

In the final days of the George H. W. Bush administration, brand new Attorney General William Barr endorsed the pre-trail pardon for defendant Caspar Weinberger.   Former Secretary of Defense Weinberger’s testimony at trial, it was expected, would have fully implicated former CIA director/Vice President (later president) Bush in the execution and cover-up of the illegal arming of Central American death squads, the clusterfuck known as the Iran-Contra scandal or Contragate.   Barr was instrumental in making the last of the Contragate scandal go away, after Bush was denied a second term by the voters.  He was involved in the pardons for several remaining conspirators, including Elliott Abrams, convicted of lying to Congress about his role in recruiting and funding right wing death squads in Nicaragua and surrounding countries.  

Fair is fair.   The pardons, as George H.W. Bush was leaving office, were perfectly legal.  Clinton committed perjury, lying under oath — plainly illegal.  Plus, Starr was working under the post-Watergate Independent Counsel statute which gave such investigators more latitude and autonomy than they currently have.   There was nothing political about it, as Boof Kavanaugh, one of Starr’s most enthusiastic assistants, will be quick to angrily point out, a lying president must be held to account.   Same goes for Nixon, who, it turns out, was a crook.  

Bear in mind that Robert Mueller was working under the Code of Federal Regulations, the Independent Counsel statute having expired in 1999.   Totally different name, different law, different rules, totally different.   Mueller’s report is being kept under wraps by the man he reports to, William Barr, a guy who auditioned for the job by writing to the president to tell him that, no matter what, no matter what the Supreme Court may have said when Clinton tried to shield himself from the Paula Jones lawsuit, nobody can lay a glove on a sitting president.  He also wrote several op-eds that publicly kissed Trump’s ass.

It remains to be seen how  much of the Mueller report Barr will see fit to release, or be forced to release by Congress.   This is shaping up into a fascinating, if vile, pissing contest.  Barr already released the “highlights” in a four page summary he now says was not intended to be a summary, though it trumpeted the pertinent findings — no finding of collusion with Russia by the Trump campaign (no criminal conspiracy), arguably no criminal attempt by Trump or his administration to obstruct the fucking partisan witch hunt.  This partisan witch hunt, according to the president’s supporters, was orchestrated by disloyal Communist-inspired freedom hating traitors like “little Adam Schitt,” even though the investigation was headed by a lifelong Republican.  Additionally, the report reportedly lays out quite a bit of evidence of obstruction of justice as well as a good deal of Russian interference in the 2016 election.  

We are living in a new time, when our phones tell us the latest news, what is right, what is legal, what is proper, what is decent.    My phone says Trump is a dangerous, unprincipled lunatic of limited intelligence and unlimited hubris.   It also says that he publicly attempted to obstruct the Mueller “witch hunt” dozens, perhaps hundreds, of times.   Among other things, he hounded his original Attorney General, who properly recused himself from the Russia probe (after lying about his discussions with Russian officials), out of office, used a loophole in the law to replace him with an angry partisan weight lifter who did not need to be confirmed by the Senate, and later a corpulent corporatist who, as we noted, shamelessly auditioned for the job by writing the vain, eternally battling president that nobody would touch him if he was A.G.   Good as his word so far, they haven’t laid a glove on the lying fuck yet.

Like millions of Americans, I’ll be checking my phone to see how this stonewalling works out for POTUS and his shifty, temporary, friends and family.    Make America Great Again!

Empathy is the first casualty of stress

Flipping through some channels yesterday I heard an observation from a scientist Sanjay Gupta was interviewing about the crisis facing humanity these days. Constant stress, the guy pointed out, robs us of our ability to empathize.

One of the first casualties of being constantly stressed out is the loss of humane feeling for the suffering of our fellow human beings. It makes intuitive sense, if your ass is literally on fire your brother’s heartburn, no matter how severe, will not register. Perspective 101.

I thought back to my old friends’ marriage from hell. They are in a constant war, locked in a mutual inchoate rage almost impossible to comprehend. Each one is a basically kind person, has a good sense of humor, is very smart, and so on. Together they are highly toxic, as they have long been to each other.

In recent years my friend could not seem to resist provoking me every time we met. When he provoked me, and my temper began to rise, I told him his line of conversation was irritating me, asked him to back off, talk about something else. His response was always to double down, tell me it was my problem, that I have a problem with anger. I do. Anger is a problem. I don’t seek it, want it or need it. But there it is, waiting, in any situation where we are treated badly, unfairly.

Why couldn’t he stop provoking me? On one level he probably wants someone to kick his ass, make the screaming in his head stop, if only for a minute. That’s my best guess. This seems to be the case in the endless neurotic cycle of violent fights with his wife.

What I realize now is that the stress he is constantly flailing against in his painful marriage is a huge factor in his inability to stop when he is provoking his oldest friend. Compared to the hell he lives in every moment of every day, what problem could a lucky fellow like me possibly have? How dare I pretend that he’s provoking me?!!

All I’ve got is “addition by subtraction.” You need to stay away from people who are incapable of empathy, you really do.

Our current president’s lack of empathy is perhaps the most destructive thing about him. Everything is a transaction he is attempting to win, so that he feels like a “winner”. He has no friends, only people who are useful to him, until they are not. He constantly provokes and attacks, ratcheting up the anger and stress, disabling anyone from discussing anything empathetically, intelligently, with nuance.

If I could speak to his followers I’d tell them that I completely understand how screwed they feel, how desperate they are for fundamental change, more fairness, being able to meaningfully participate in our democracy, how right they are to feel this way. Fellow citizens, we have been fucked for a long time here in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We’ve been fed many kinds of poison, very lucrative for the sellers, very bad for us.

If I could convince them that we are in the same leaky boat, I’d ask them, quietly, how many of the alternative fact president’s promises for their lives has he actually kept.

They may point to an army of lifetime federal judges who will ban abortion and favor corporations over humans. They may mention the huge huge tax breaks he gave to the wealthiest Americans, or his no-nonsense get tough policy on children fleeing horrible conditions south of our border. He took us out of the Paris Climate Accord, the Iran Deal, increased the military budget, just as he promised he would. There are many campaign promises he made that he has kept, like nullifying virtually everything his Kenyan Muslim predecessor did by Executive Order.

One important question: how do any of these things actually benefit you or the people you love?

Do you have health care that is cheaper and better than Obamacare? He promised us that. Do you have a great job in a coal mine? Do you feel optimistic that the people of the earth, working together, can solve the most pressing problems we face or are you still constantly angry at how cruelly you’ve been fucked?

If it’s anger, and you’re looking for someone to blame, I’m your man, the eternal Jew, friend of the enslaved, who created this mess. It’s good to have someone to blame for your rage. A glance at any history book will illuminate the fine uses of this principle for you.

Addition by subtraction, it’s really the best I’ve come up with for mercilessly self-absorbed people in my life. Better to have a couple of comfortable friends you don’t have to keep your guard up with than many friends you have to dance a careful dance with to avoid serious problems. My take, anyway.

Extra-democratic Means

If you are born to great privilege you will often find your own interests different than, say, the smelly bum on the subway.   In some cases that malodorous layabout can walk into a voting booth (provided he has an address and is registered) and cast his vote for a candidate who may hate your freedom.   You can bet the vote such a person casts will go against the liberty interests you cherish — the liberty to be left alone by the government, except in case of fire, crime, sewage, roads, airports, etc.

In the same way America learned that a judicial process (or even a criminal charge) is not always necessary or desirable before executing a fiercely dissenting American citizen, wealthy Libertarians learned that electoral politics is not the best way to accomplish their goal of keeping all of their money.    Extrajudicial killings by the American government, once super controversial, are now routine.   Extra-democratic means, while taboo in theory, have always been used to protect the privileges of our most privileged persons and their eternal avatars.  Extra-democratic means (for passing unpopular laws) are now the preferred method of the ruling oligarchs here and abroad.  

In the case of America’s wealthiest, we call them philanthropists and job creators, not oligarchs. Sure they wield disproportionate political power, exert massive, decisive influence on the policies that affect us all (particularly the most vulnerable among us), but that doesn’t make them oligarchs.  We reserve the epithet “oligarch” for Russian and Chinese billionaires, or the occasional Ukrainian or Uzbek, who acquired their wealth through suspicious and probably illegal deals with their corrupt, anti-democratic governments.

Which brings us to President Fuckface.  Born booted and spurred, entitled to ride the rest of us like the beasts of burden we are, he has never known a desire he needed to resist.   His fortune is largely the result of decades of his wealthy father’s fraud, tax cheating and abusing government generosity, as documented by the NY Times, who published the detailed account in the face of toothless threats from Trump’s lawyer.   He is the personification of the kind of wanton privilege that has long championed extra-democratic rule by the truly deserving elite.  His cabinet, same powerfully smelling ilk.  His mandate: fuck you, wasshole.    

Mr. Trump always lawyers up, as any good scofflaw with the money does.   He hired for the Justice Department the people most supportive of his right to do whatever he likes.  He vigorously attacked and resisted the DOJ investigation into his ass-kissing of Vladimir Putin, publicly denied his many public attempts to obstruct the investigation and was shielded from the “perjury trap” the cunning yet uncontrolled man would have walked into had he taken an oath not to lie to the Mueller team.  It is universally recognized that he has absolutely no control over his lying. His candid remark to a television interviewer that he tries to tell the truth whenever he can instantly went the way of his dozens of often imbecilic daily tweets.

The famous vanity of the vainglorious self-promoter allows calculating people to openly audition for government positions.  Boof Kavanaugh had written a law review article laying out why what any dodgy president might fear need not be feared.   Somebody described the article to Trump and the president was very interested in a Supreme Court justice who believes the president is essentially a king.  Kavanaugh was his man, went to the top of the list of 25 carefully vetted right-wing zealots selected by the Koch-funded Federalist Society.  William Barr sent Trump an unsolicited letter opining that Trump’s excrement has a delectable odor.  Barr became Trump’s obvious choice for head of the Justice Department, to succeed  a loyal but disappointing supporter too racist to be appointed to the federal bench.   Imagine how racist that is!

The thing to remember is that although these liberty loving, government hating privileged few have a vastly louder voice than you or me in our democracy, easy access to their elected officials, direct ways to influence legislation, etc., that we still have elections and the results, though they might sometimes be in question, are binding.   Trump won the slaveholder’s Electoral College by less than 80,000 votes while losing the popular vote “bigly” (he has the best words).  There was no revolution or even any outbreak of violence when the raging asshole was sworn in, in spite of the horror felt by perhaps 200 million Americans who didn’t vote for him.  

Elections still matter to us, whatever extra-electoral shenanigans are always going on behind closed doors in the halls of power.   We need to continue organizing, being smart, protesting this administration’s worst excesses, and raising important issues (like slowing catastrophic climate change and protecting safety regulations).  We have to keep the pressure on the lawless, lying, compulsively doubling down, prone-to-bankruptcy demagogue.

Most importantly, we need to vote out the world’s most conceited exhibitionist wanker in 2020.  In the meantime, there’s a strong, multi-pronged case for impeaching him, too.