Author Archives: oinsketta

The Southern Strategy

I love it, in that sick way one loves hideous things, that die-hard Republicans take credit for Abraham Lincoln, our nation’s first Republican president, and blame Democrats for creating the Ku Klux Klan and being the party of racists.   A simple matter of the historical record, they will say with a certain pugnacious smugness.

A glance at any national electoral map since LBJ signed those damnable Civil Rights laws shows the former Confederacy votes solidly red.  The same way whites hated Republicans down in the former Confederacy after the South lost the Civil War, as a voting block they now seem to hate Democrats.  For more than fifty years, the South votes solidly Republican in national elections.

In fairness to southern white voters, look at this map and imagine how intolerable their lives would have been if they’d done nothing about the Fifteenth Amendment and simply let Negroes vote.

southern states slave populations

Some eye-popping majorities would have been created by suddenly enfranchised former slaves and sympathetic poor whites.   All the more urgent that, once federal troops were withdrawn from the former Confederacy, pursuant to the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1876, some measures be put in place to make sure vengeful Negroes were kept in their place.  With “Bayonet Rule” over the states of the former Confederacy ended, local powers enforced the rights of Negroes as they saw fit.  Those rights did not include easy access to the voting booth, obviously.

Fast forward through generations of Black Codes, poll taxes, literacy tests, fucking Dixiecrats blocking anti-lynching legislation, voting with the racially conscious right wingers across the aisle, holding the Democratic party hostage to their states’ rights, anti-Civil Rights views.  Nixon had a great strategy for all those disillusioned southerners who voted faithfully for the Dixiecrats for a hundred years, before LBJ’s stunning betrayal of the Southern way of life.  Law and Order, a militarized War on Drugs, and, most of all, a war on angry fucking Negroes.   It was called The Southern Strategy and it has been in more or less continuous use since.

This Republican administration we have now was endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan. The president’s chief strategist is the former boss of a hugely popular white supremacist on-line ‘news service’ called Breitbart.  Admittedly, racism was not the only appeal the billionaire reality TV star had going for him.   He was a very well-known brand.  His brand, of incalculable worth, stands for winning, and being self-made, and being a bold, even audacious innovator.    His name stood for taking no shit, for dishing it out, whether you like it or not.   His presidential run was the last chance for a dying generation of racist Americans to have one of their own in the White House, though for millions, ethnocentrism may be incidental to his other appeals.  

He may be an overbearing jerk, fond of humiliating people he doesn’t like, but he gets this reassuring tone of voice sometimes, a tone he can apparently assume at will, and our fear-whipped citizens take great solace from that tone.  He may seem, at times, to be insane, still… he can get that reassuring tone, talk softly, almost gently.   It is that ability to modulate his voice, sound very calm, as much as anything, I believe, that accounts for his popularity, among those who love what he says he stands for.   It is that soft side of his braying, bullying persona that sometimes soothes even those of us who despise his type and the inhuman values for which they stand.

The United States of No Short-Term Memory

Sekhnet always comments that I should not write about “current events” since topical writing soon goes out of date.   I take her point but I’ve also got breaking news for my sweetheart — most things soon go out of date.   We are rats running on an accelerating digital treadmill, technology giving us the up-to-the second illusion that we know much more when, actually, because we are always running full tilt, and living increasingly in echo-chambers that confirm our own biases, we know much less. 

How about a quick trip down non-memory lane?  It’s possible that Jeremy Scahill is wrong when he says the American citizen President Obama ordered executed by missile was not charged with any crime.  It’s possible that I am wrong in my memory of what Scahill wrote in Dirty Wars and other places.    It’s possible that this source I am about to quote was wrong:

It’s still unclear precisely which charges Al-Awlaki would have been asked to surrender to face. A State Department spokesman referred questions about that to the Justice Department. A spokesman there said Wednesday the agency “has not commented on whether there were or were not federal charges against him at the time of his death.”   source

I love a good turn of phrase as much as the next guy.  Hard not to admire the DOJ spokesman’s adroit “at the time of his death” which is so much better than “at the time we turned him into chopped meat with a missile launched from a drone”.  Whatever else one might say about Al-Awlaki at “the time of his death”, one true thing is that he was an American citizen.  At minimum one would like to think he was charged with a capital crime before his execution was ordered by the American president.  After all, we are a nation of laws, as the president who ordered Mr. Al-Alwaki’s extrajudicial execution always reminded us.    

My hatred of charismatic President “We Tortured Some Folks” is well-documented.   My largest single reason for it now, outside of the solidly right-wing government his well-talked, adroitly walked two terms left us with, are the precedents he left behind for his angry, unstable successor.   The fucking Department of Justice will not comment on whether Mr. Al-Awlaki was charged with anything “at the time of his death”?   Are you fucking shitting in my mouth?

That was a rhetorical question, of course.  They are allowed to shit in my mouth, and yours, whenever they want.  If I screamed too loudly, and got too much attention for my angry opinions, and was not born very, very rich, I could become a nuisance.  If I became a sufficient nuisance they could make any allegations they like against me.  Having made those allegations, it would be at the discretion of the current president whether or not I deserved to be killed, with or without charges against me, at the time of my death. 

They could, for example, threaten me with the publication of videos of me with prostitutes.  This would end my career as America’s fair-minded, moderate go-to TV imam after 9/11.  I could go back to my family’s country of origin, say, Yemen, and find myself picked up, at America’s request, and detained for a year and a half, mostly in solitary confinement, as America stepped up its global war against Islamic terrorists and those suspected of supporting Islamic terror.  When I got out of solitary, and took to the internet to scream against American injustice and hypocrisy, and its worldwide jihad against Muslims — well, you can see where this is going.   Everywhere you look now, everywhere, you would see me referred to as Al-Qu’aeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s number two man.    

Speaking of number two, wipe the side of your mouth, man, that’s disgusting.

Jeez, I’m sorry, I don’t know how this number two got on the side of my mouth.  

“Must you always be so disgusting?,” asked someone, at the time of my death.

Why Can’t I Concentrate?

OK, granted, the odds of remission of my idiopathic membranous nephropathy, after months of the proposed immunosuppressive treatment, a cocktail of steroids and chemotherapy-type drugs, my nephrologist admitted the other day, are about 50%.  Versus the odds of spontaneous remission, which has not been widely studied, but which seems to be in the 30% range, according to this footnote from a recent hospital study of the disease in Spain. [1]

There is also my root canal, which began more than two months ago.  Under the temporary crown there is more discomfort than I had when I initially went to the dentist. The dentist suspects the wisdom tooth adjacent to the root canal may be the culprit, suggests it might be best if the oral surgeon pulls it before a permanent crown is fitted.

The cat, who has one kidney, had very bad lab results the other day and was retested today.  Although he’s consistently hostile to me, he’s a good cat and I’m very fond of him.  Sekhnet adores him, and he adores her.  So that’s a worry.  

A bot from the fucking New York State of Health Marketplace, where unemployed people like me are obliged to buy their mandated health insurance under Obama’s admittedly imperfect Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, denied me the subsidy the law entitles me to, in January.  Donna Frescatore, the director of NYSOH, has a strict policy that nobody there may disclose her name. They also have no procedure for correcting their many errors, outside of a snail-paced appeals process.  I have so far overpaid, by over $1,000, the insurance premium the law says I should pay, with no end in sight, as I wait for a person with a below average IQ to call and conduct my impartial “telephone appeal” of their clear clerical error.

I have no idea why I’m so distracted lately, but I have unpaid work to get to today, so let me not dilly-dally any longer.

We went to see Amy Goodman, creator of Democracy Now!, speak at a nearby college on Friday night.   I love Amy for her integrity, courage, honest reporting and a strong facial resemblance to my beloved grandmother Yetta.  Amy spoke at The New School, one of these $50,000 a year museum-looking places for the children of a select economic class.  It was an inspiring talk.  Afterwards Sekhnet bought books for Amy to sign and when it was our turn I said “Amy, you’re an American hero,” which Amy accepted with a bland semi-smile.

We are 5% of the world’s population and have 25% of the world’s prison inmates, Amy reminded us.  I did the math in my head.  If we were an average country, we’d have about 5% of the world’s prison population.   At 25%, we have five times that, or 500% more in prison than the average country.   God bless these exceptional United States, our strictness with poor people’s morality and our innovative, corporately-operated, run-for-profit private prison system.

During the March for Science a few weeks ago, which Democracy Now! covered, Amy described a rainy, raw day.  The assembled masses shivered at the rally.   A week later, at the March for Climate Change Awareness (or whatever it was called) it was sweltering, the hottest day in DC on that date.   Amy suggested anyone calling themself a meteorologist should, any time extreme weather is encountered, mention that this is another sign of climate disruption.

They don’t harp on climate disruption in the mass media, she pointed out, because some sponsors would object.  She mentioned the rash, in recent years, of earthquakes in Oklahoma, a region that never had any.  This increased seismic instability is the direct result of hydro-fracking, a controversial and toxic method of extracting natural gas from deep in the earth.   Same deal with the “debate” over fracking, corporate sponsors are not going to stand by while somebody badmouths their lucrative product, which may, arguably, cause an earthquake here and there, in some armpit in Oklahoma where people with land are getting paid a lot of money for fracking rights.

I sat there rhetorically wondering why there is any “debate” about any of this.  Fucking pieces of shit in some board room are making a killing — only reason there’s any “controversy”.  This controversy/confusion is crafted by well-paid public relations geniuses who come up with a counter-factual narrative that is more satisfying to certain salt of the earth people who, not unreasonably, suspect that elites are fucking them.   These well-crafted stories, usually based on freedom and a sinister conspiracy by those who hate our freedom, are more satisfying to low-information types than cold scientific data and the academic and media elitists who spout it.

Inspired as I was listening to Amy speak, and reading her book afterwards, I still feel like hollering.  I lift my head and scream into the silence of cyberspace and wonder what the fucking use is of preaching to a half dozen people who wonder by this site and occasionally hit “like” or “follow” to encourage me to do the same for their silent screams.

Then I hear a sound bite from our diminutive racist Attorney General, wants to return America to the good old days when you could mass incarcerate nig… eh, bad hombres, for smoking weed.  “Good people don’t use marijuana,” said the smug little twerp a while ago, announcing his intention to return to the heyday of Nixon’s racist war on what the former president fondly referred to as “niggers”, “spics”, “kykes” and other enemy freaks who smoke pot and take other dangerous, morally degenerate drugs. 

What the fuck?  Are we really going to live through a remake of this hideous chapter from the toxic waste bin of history?  

“‘Make America Great Again,’ says right there on the hat, asshole.”

Got a lot of haters here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave who think that’s just fucking ducky, sure, fuck the n-words and their unAmerican friends — and keep your damned hands off our meth and prescription opioids.  Only job in town is over at the damned privatized prison—- “lock ’em up!  lock ’em up!”

Meanwhile, people like Amy Goodman are out there being true American heroes, fighting idealistically for what we should all be fighting for– a society that values human lives more than corporate profits, no matter how “free” we can make “free trade” sound.  Of course, there’s no real money in that, is there?  Heh, Catch-22.

 

[1]   Spontaneous remission is a well known characteristic of idiopathic membranous nephropathy, but contemporary studies describing predictors of remission and long-term outcomes are lacking. We conducted a retrospective, multicenter cohort study of 328 patients with nephrotic syndrome resulting from idiopathic membranous nephropathy that initially received conservative therapy. Spontaneous remission occurred in 104 (32%) patients: proteinuria progressively declined after diagnosis until remission of disease at 14.7 +/- 11.4 months. Although spontaneous remission was more frequent with lower levels of baseline proteinuria, it also frequently occurred in patients with massive proteinuria: 26% among those with baseline proteinuria 8 to 12 g/24 h and 22% among those with proteinuria>12 g/24 h. Baseline serum creatinine and proteinuria, treatment with angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors or angiotensin receptor antagonists, and a>50% decline of proteinuria from baseline during the first year of follow-up were significant independent predictors for spontaneous remission. Only six patients (5.7%) experienced a relapse of nephrotic syndrome. The incidence of death and ESRD were significantly lower among patients with spontaneous remission. In conclusion, spontaneous remission is common among patients with nephrotic syndrome resulting from membranous nephropathy and carries a favorable long-term outcome with a low incidence of relapse. A decrease in proteinuria>50% from baseline during the first year predicts spontaneous remission.

Hospital 12 de Octubre, Madrid, Spain.   source

Data-driven World

We have the first social media president, a deeply divisive character who communicates directly with his echo-chamber followers and reflects the deep divisions in our data-driven world.   Some pundits claim the president’s victory was decided by his genius in exploiting the newest mass technology.   His team’s brilliant use of data has also been mentioned.

This has happened before with each new technology.   FDR, with his fireside chats, was the genius of the radio, the new and engrossing mass media of his time.   JFK was the first TV president (Nixon, no fag, refused to wear make up; JFK, a metrosexual who let them fix his face for TV, was not shiny, sweaty and shifty-eyed under the lights when they debated).   Obama mobilized support, and early campaign funding, like Howard Dean before him, via the internet.    Trump, already a famous and outspoken brand, worked his thumbs on his phone throughout the campaign, using Twitter like no political candidate before him.

Many of his tweets are, frankly, idiotic.  That is not the point, as we learn.  Politicians throw red meat to their base.  America is a deeply divided nation and that’s how candidates do it.  Obama had crowds chanting “¡Sí se puede!” [1]  and “Yes we can!” — it made them feel united, hopeful and energized.    Trump had crowds chanting and pumping their fists to “Lock her up!” as he repeatedly threatened his often defensive-looking opponent with prison time upon his election. [2]  This, we must confess, is the level of national politics in America, SAD!  

Back in Hitler’s time his party made unprecedented use of social feedback to continually adjust and sell their policies.  Every speech Hitler gave was heard over millions of radios.   Every listener’s reaction was reported up the chain, each apartment building had a captain, every block had someone who reported these reports to a gauleiter higher up the food chain, to Goebbels himself.  

Dr. Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, quickly had feedback on how the public was buying a given load of crap from candidate Hitler and later from the Fuhrer.  Having, and being able to analyze, such data is crucial in selling anything, marketers run ad campaigns based on it.  Political campaigns are about branding and marketing.  The side with the most emotionally effective “messaging” wins. 

 

If Hitler spoke in a hall or a stadium, he knew exactly what to do.  He was said to have had an unerring geiger counter-like gift for taking the pulse of a given crowd and a genius for playing that crowd like yer proverbial violin.   This is an essential talent for any would-be demagogue.  In a mass-market, the candidate, who must speak to millions at once, needs the help of data and numbers crunchers.  We have the technology now to do it in real-time.

He is not well-known, in part because he is a private person, but Robert Mercer, self-made billionaire, is credited by some with saving Trump’s campaign.   Mercer funded Breitbart News and after Trump destroyed Ted Cruz’s campaign, Mercer threw his support behind The Donald.  Through Mercer strategist Steve Bannon came on to the scene, and also the delightful Kellyanne Conway.  Mercer’s daughter Rebekah was appointed to Trump’s transition team right after he won the election.  

Trump is said to love chaos and distraction.  It seems to be true.  He seems to operate best off the cuff, with a shit-storm flying in every direction.   Paying a $25,000,000 settlement, during his presidential campaign, to people defrauded by a business of his that he bragged about would have destroyed any other candidacy.  In his world of constant chaos, nobody really had the focus to exploit it against him as they might have.  The “so-called judge” who ruled against him and forced the settlement, well, his parents were Mexicans, tweeted Trump, with a knowing wink, resting his case.   “Lock her up!  Lock her up!” screamed energized Trump crowds, as their candidate exuded nonchalance.  

While all this was going on some very smart nerds were presumably working obsessively with data.   Robert Mercer is a brilliant mathematician who refined the use of data in investing and invented algorithms that made him a billionaire.   If you have the money to invest in his fund, and you need a lot, his super-sophisticated data-driven investment machine can make you a shitload of money.  The levels of profit are off the charts.

Trump won the Electoral College by a shockingly small number of votes, well under 100,000, spread over five “swing states”.   He won key districts in each of these states, exactly enough of them to win.   A careful analysis of the data prior to election day would have shown his exact path to an Electoral College victory.  How many gerrymandered districts would candidate Trump need to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, the other prizes?  With less than 20,000 votes needed in each of those states, would it have been hard for someone with the know-how to design the algorithm to figure out exactly where to target the campaign?  Particularly if hundreds of thousands in those states were ruled ineligible to vote under new, suddenly constitutional, state voter suppression laws?

When my father cast his computerized vote for Al Gore in Florida in 2000,  on a Diebold voting machine, he was alarmed to see a screen pop up instructing him to press “confirm” to cast his vote for George W. Bush.  A primitive computer user, and smart man, my father managed to find the back arrow, got back to the previous screen, indicated Gore again and, the second time, was able to confirm his vote for the candidate he had selected.  (Or maybe not, who knows?  Diebold, owned by Bush campaign donors, successfully argued that its proprietary software would be compromised if they allowed internal checks of their voting machine tabulations)  “How many voters my age do you suppose would have been able to figure out how not to vote for Bush in that situation?” asked my father, not unreasonably.

Leaving aside this kind of easily conducted cyber-chicanery, some simple math can be done to analyze Trump’s Electoral College victory.  It is a strictly academic exercise, but the arithmetic is not hard to do.  

Take his margin of victory in each state.  Put it beside the number of disenfranchised likely Democratic voters in each of those states, voters purged from the voter rolls or not allowed to vote under the particular voting laws of the state, or made to wait hours to vote in “inner city” districts while in the suburbs there were no lines at polling places.  A gun license might be suitable voter ID in one state while a college ID might not.  A brief general history of voter suppression laws is here.

The Voting Rights Act, enacted to prevent this kind of shit, no longer needs enforcement in our post-racial society, a right-wing Supreme Court has recently ruled.   We had a mulatto president, for fuck’s sake, argued the five conservatives on the Court.  The law is now that states may best decide how to restrict voting by people they think don’t deserve to vote.

I leave you with this one thought: whether a foreign government with the ability to hack into voting machines in selected districts, changing just enough votes to give an Electoral College victory, or an all-American mathematical savant with the right algorithm– how hard would it be to flip the right 80,000 or so votes in an election one candidate won by a fairly narrow almost 3,000,000 vote margin?  

Meanwhile, as the real and metaphorical shit flies in every direction, suck it up, ladies and gentlemen, America got the president we deserve.  We love celebrities and worship the fabulously rich, the undisputed winners of the class war the rich so vociferously denounce losers for trying to bring up.  We got a fabulously rich celebrity president.  God bless these Untied States.

 

[1]  Many of those chanting in Spanish had reason, during his eight years, to hope they and their loved ones were not among the record number deported by the charismatic president they helped to elect. 

[2] In a delicious irony, Michael Flynn, a man now seeking immunity from prosecutors, famously led the crowd in the “Lock her up!” chant during the 2016 Republican Convention.  

[3]  I loved this google blurb, as I verified the spelling of the ‘poison dwarf’s’ name:

Joseph Goebbels: the ‘Casanova of the Nazis’ – Telegraph

Jan 8, 2011 – A new biography of Joseph Goebbels, the limping Nazi propaganda chief, shows him to be a serial seducer who kept detailed notes of his affairs. … On the streets of Nazi Germany his club foot and feeble, polio-weakened 5’5″ frame earned him the scathing nickname, the “poison dwarf”.

“Myth-busting” 101

The current president’s chief credentials for office are his fantastic personal wealth, his larger-than-life personality and his genius at branding himself a “winner” in spite of an impressive body of evidence to the contrary.   The president’s current chief adviser, his son-in-law, Jared, tasked with ending the opioid epidemic, negotiating peace in the Middle East and revamping the federal government, among other duties, has similar impressive credentials, minus the personality.   Jared, a Harvard graduate, is the son of, perhaps, not the most ethical billionaire.  Charles, his father, donated $2,500,000 to Harvard as an offset against the boy’s undistinguished private school grades and test scores.  The donation to Harvard was made years before Charles was imprisoned for a couple of years in connection with his guilty plea to 18 felony counts in a case prosecuted by then federal prosecutor Chris Christie.  You could look it up. [1]

Chelsea Manning, who Obama had prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act, served a portion of the thirty-five year sentence she received after being acquitted of aiding the enemy, in a long and largely secret trial.   Manning is still reviled by many as a traitor while the soldiers involved in this incident, revealed by Manning, and dubbed “Collateral Murder” by Wikileaks, have never been prosecuted.  

Manning felt the public had a right to know about incidents like “Collateral Murder”, where Reuters reporters and other civilians (including at least one child) were gleefully machine gunned along with their would-be rescuers, also fired on by the U.S. helicopter crew who got orders to “light ’em up”, or, in civilian-speak, riddle their bodies with machine gun fire.   Civil liberties types were horrified by the protracted, aggressive, largely non-public prosecution of Manning under the rarely used Espionage Act, under which motive is irrelevant. [2]

A soldier, who wrote to everyone in the government without response, finally reported the massacre of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by American soldiers at My Lai to reporter Seymour Hersh. [3]  The publicity was the only reason the government’s cover-up failed and anyone was ever tried for that atrocity (only one served jail time, three years, for allegedly ordering the rape and killing of as many as five hundred unarmed civilians).

Soldiers who served in Viet Nam said there were other massacres like the one at My Lai.  We will never know.  Shit happens, particularly during war.  Nothing to see here.  Unless some damned traitorous trouble maker makes it a problem.

Nothing to see here.   Have a very nice day!

[1]  Or let me save you the trouble, c/o Wikipedia:   

In the summer of 2004, Kushner was fined $508,900 by the Federal Election Commission for contributing to political campaigns in the names of his partnerships when he lacked authorization to do so.[12] In 2005, following an investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey,[13] U.S. Attorney Chris Christie negotiated a plea agreement with Kushner, under which he pleaded guilty to 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering.[14] The witness-tampering charge arose from Kushner’s act of retaliation against William Schulder, his sister Esther’s husband, who was cooperating with federal investigators; Kushner hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, arranged to record an encounter between the two, and had the tape sent to his sister.[15][16][17][14]Kushner was sentenced to two years in prison[15] and served 14 months at Federal Prison Camp, Montgomery in Alabama[18][19] before being sent to a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey to complete his sentence.[18][19][20] He was released from prison on August 25, 2006.[21]

As a result of his convictions, Kushner was disbarred from practicing law in New Jersey,[22] New York,[23] and Pennsylvania.[24]

[2]   “When a soldier who shared information with the press and public is punished far more harshly than others who tortured prisoners and killed civilians, something is seriously wrong with our justice system,” said Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. “This is a sad day for Bradley Manning, but it’s also a sad day for all Americans who depend on brave whistleblowers and a free press for a fully informed public debate.”

source

The situation becomes even more grotesque when those who authorize torture, rebrand it as “enhanced interrogation” and design the torture program are fantastically rewarded… and the “high road” president who “looks forward” and not backward and declines to investigate or prosecute anyone for these war crimes… and is well on his way to becoming a self-made billionaire for consistently taking the “right” side on such matters of conscience, well, you get the idea… the torture never stops, as Frank Zappa observed.  

Obama is praised by some for belatedly granting “clemency” to the soldier he prosecuted under the draconian World War One law that did not allow that whistelblower to defend herself in a virtually secret trial.  God bless my man the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

[3]  The coverup continued until Ron Ridenhour, a soldier in the 11th Brigade who had heard reports of the massacre but had not participated, began a campaign to bring the events to light. After writing letters to President Richard Nixon, the Pentagon, State Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff and several congressmen, with no response, Ridenhour finally gave an interview to the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story in November 1969.

source

A Good Life, two

A big element of a good life is gaining the ability to heal.  To heal yourself, to help heal others.   Of all the blessed work in the world, is there any more blessed than being a healer?   Is there a greater service one can perform, in a life of service, than helping others bear the burdens of this world?  

I’m tempted to have the skeleton chime in here, but he has already said goodbye, reminded me that he is dead.  

“I am,” says the skeleton of my father.  

Death, we are sometimes reminded, is not the end– as long as we live to consider those who have left the stage.   We grow, gain perspective, can see the dead differently than we did when they were alive.  We can recover things that were taken from us by people who were brutal, and died.  It takes work, work paid for with invisible coins.  

My father, too busy being a bread winner, was never released from the pain his mother inflicted on him after the brutal, unhappy woman died.   He was not released from the chilling knowledge that all of his aunts and uncles, except Aren, had been in the path of a slaughtering hoard, left dead in mass graves that were never found, somewhere near the hamlet in the marsh that was wiped from the map.  

I’m aware it probably sounds self-righteous of me to ruminate on what makes a good life.  To prescribe the steps toward true righteousness and shit like that.  I speak only for myself, using the example of my father’s life, and self-evident logic: peace is better than pain.  Maybe one can never speak for others, but as for me, I’ve been on a conscious journey to find myself at peace, after decades of senseless war.

A Good Life

“What is a good life?” is a question few people ever seriously take the time to answer.  My father never had a chance to ask it, one step ahead of countless demons every step of his life.   He spoke, every so often, about his demons, and how they drove him, without ever naming one.   He was unable to answer the question of a good life for himself, or leave me much of a clue, except by the example of his suffering.  It is a shame, although I have come to understand the reasons he was unable to ask the question.   I ask it now for both of us: what is a good life?  

One element, certainly, is being true to yourself.   Finding this true self, and serving it faithfully, is the object of long study.  Honestly addressing the feelings which must guide the inquiry is essential.   Some consider such “study” frivolous, the luxurious navel gazing of idle philosophers.  For me, addressing the question is vital to a good life.  

How is one true to oneself?    

I always think of Hillel’s famous answer first.  It is an answer I’ve tried to live by almost from the time I first heard it, when I was a boy.   Hillel was the legendary Jewish sage who lived around the time of Jesus.   Illiterate and poor until he was forty, he was uniquely qualified, among scholars, to relate to the mass of humanity.   He was renowned for his patience and kindness, and his practicality.  

A Roman, according to legend, asked Hillel to teach him the Torah while the Roman stood on one foot.  Hillel’s famously strict colleague, Shammai, had already angrily told this Roman, in answer to the same question, to fuck off.   Hillel thought for a moment and said “what is hateful to you, do not do to another person.   That is the essence of the Torah, the rest is commentary, go study it.” 

I, like the Roman in the story, admired the concise genius of this answer.  Don’t be a sadistic hypocrite.   “Love your enemy,” as Jesus was supposed to have said, seems as ridiculous to me as the miracle myth of Jesus’s mother being a virgin impregnated by God.  What is hateful to you — few things could be more clear and direct.

I know, as do you, exactly what is hateful to us.  If you hate it, don’t do it to other people.   That is a large part of being true to yourself.   You would like to live in a world where this was a universal principle, so, as the Nike ad says: just do it.  

Loving your enemies is fine for saints, but for the rest of us, not doing what we hate being done to us is probably the best we can do.  If everyone did it, how much sweeter life would be for everyone.  How can that not be part of the answer to “what is a good life?”

Do not tolerate abuse, from others, from yourself.  When you see it practiced by others, and you have the power to intervene to stop it, stop abuse.   When you realize you’re being unfair to yourself, let up.  If someone else did that to you, you’d find it hateful, so don’t do it to yourself.

Now that’s easy for a man living on other people’s coins to say, you will say, abuse is, in many situations, in most situations, perhaps, the law of the land.  It is simply another word for robust human competition, call it “abuse” if you like.  But abuse is hateful, and much different from the good sportsmanship we applaud in fair competition.  We know it when we feel abused, and, you will agree, if abuse is the law of the land, it’s a law everyone living under it would like to change. 

What is a good life?  To me, a boy who grew up in a home where rage was expressed regularly, it’s a life with as little anger and conflict as possible.   The serenity prayer is one thing, but learning to avoid conflict is indispensable.  

You can often avoid conflict in the short term by a compromise that leaves you unsatisfied, feeling you’ve got the sucker’s end of the deal.  You will avoid the immediate fight but it is not a workable long-term strategy.  Sooner or later, the unfairness of it will overboil.  

Most of us are angry about something.  There are countless reasons for it in a world run largely by the most unprincipled.   Most often anger comes from the feeling that we are being forced to eat shit.   It is natural to feel angry when you have a mouthful of something disgusting.  My father, no matter how materially successful he became, no matter how comfortably middle class his life grew, always had a mouthful of something disgusting.   This left him snarling at those he had the power to snarl at without consequences.  

A life of snarling is not, of course, without consequences. My father was unable to forgive anything.  He could not forgive others for doing hateful things, he could not forgive himself.  He died deeply regretting this attitude he admitted was seared into his soul by the time he was two. He died lamenting his lack of insight and the courage to try to change himself, for his own sake and for the sake of those he loved.  

Forgiveness is hard sometimes, but there is no substitute for it in a good life.   When someone apologizes sincerely, forgiveness is usually not hard.  Apologizing sincerely, and without conditions, is the right thing to do as soon as you know you’ve hurt someone.  But a sincere apology is sadly rare.  

Are we obliged to forgive people who tell us it is our own problem that we are easily wounded pussies?   Fuck that. No reason to get the last word, though.  Those types, once they prove themselves incapable of not being that way, are best left in the wake of your boat.  Seriously.  Fuck them.  Your life and serenity is enriched by each such sullen, defensive vampire you lose.

The loved ones we cherish are the ones we can be our true selves around.  No acting is required, no false politeness demanded.   We treat them well because they treat us well and our small kindnesses invite reciprocation.  It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle.  It’s a fairly simple arrangement, and a precious one, because it is not easy to find these kindred souls in the world.  

Love, now that I think of it, is at the center of a good life.

Doing what you love, although a luxury many people can not afford in our competitive, materialistic society, is a beautiful thing.  I have a friend who does work she truly loves, and she is a better person for it.   There are frustrations in her working life, but the work itself helps people, sometimes even saves a life, and is something she does well and loves to do.  Talk about a blessing.

If you are fortunate to have things you love to do, do them whenever you can.  It is a blessing to make yourself happy.  

Counting your blessings is also a blessing, but I have to say, in all honesty, fuck that.  

Right, dad?

Why Racism?

The Civil War was fought because the wealthy in the southern part of the United States wanted the right to have their African slaves working anywhere they damned well wanted them to.  There was a raging debate, as native Americans were slaughtered, or otherwise removed from lands that were to be settled by “white” Americans, about the expansion of slavery into these new territories.   America by then had a strictly race-based slavery, the only slaves working were from Africa.  

Americans who hated slavery, as most of us today do, were determined to stop its expansion.   Americans who profited handsomely from slave labor stood on their Constitutional right to own and sell as many damned slaves as they could afford to and do pretty much anything they damned well pleased with them.  The Bible was called into play by supporters of slavery to justify God’s supposed approval of this arrangement.   Abolitionists also cited the Bible as condemning the Peculiar Institution, which just goes to show you.

So why did hundreds of thousands of brave, warlike working class Rebels, men who could not afford to own slaves, charge into Union fire defending an institution that did not benefit them in any way?   How is it that the Civil War itself has come to stand for “states’ rights”, Americans’ right to disagree and the overreach of vindictive northerners (the damned meddlesome federal government) in punishing the south after its surrender?   Why is there any debate over the flag of the former Confederacy, the states who took up arms against the country they seceded from , flying over southern government buildings?   (Shoot, it’s not like the stars and bars is a damned swastika, just the colors of an army that rose up to defend a damned way of life, a genteel and good one too…) 

We have to recognize that a lot of this, like racism itself, defies strict rational analysis.   These are emotional issues that do not call the higher functions of the analytical mind into play.   Why did millions of angry, hurting Americans recently vote for a callous billionaire who spoke as though he was their friend and champion, as if his only interests were not more money and more power?  Same deal.  Our question today is not why people vote and act against their own best interests, it’s why racism?

Howard Zinn, in his groundbreaking A People’s History of the United States, described the situation in early colonial America.  Many poor people arrived as indentured servants.   In return for their passage, poor “whites” contracted to work as unpaid servants for a certain number of years, after which indenture they would be freed.   They worked side by side with African slaves and sometimes enslaved Native Americans.   But there was a problem.  

They made common cause with their fellow slaves, resisted brutal treatment together, ran off together, married.   Those who benefitted from slave labor were in genuine danger from this united front.  There could have been no United States of America as we know it if these unpaid laborers were not divided and set against each other.  It was not profitable for the wealthy to have to pay workers for labor-intensive monoculture cultivation.   The solidarity of the enslaved presented a real dilemma for the new barons of the vast, fertile American wilderness.

The colony of Virginia, very early, in the 1680s, I believe, addressed this vexing problem for the wealthy.  A law was written guaranteeing certain rights to White Indentured Servants.   They could not be stripped naked for whipping, for example, though black slaves certainly could.  The white slaves were given certain other rights including the right to receive way more than the mythical 40 acres and a mule when they were liberated from their indenture.  In addition to land (100 acres, I think) and animals, they got a good supply of food, some money and a gun with plenty of powder and bullets.   Thus, by this ingenious device, Virginia made white slaves far superior to Negroes who were most often destined to remain slaves from birth to death.

This is one calculated, cultivated reason for American racism. It is based on the tribal human need to feel superior to the “other”, a phenomenon seen throughout history in most places.   It is often exploited by the privileged few who control populations by keeping those with common interests as divided as possible.  This need to feel superior becomes an unbearable ache during times of crisis, famine, fear, uncertainty and is often expressed violently.  It can be stoked pretty easily.

After the Civil War there was almost a century of terrorist lynching, tolerated by the states, while Southern legislators blocked federal laws to stop it.  The Turks massacred more than a million Armenians, when the supposed circumstances arose, around the time of World War One.  The Japanese tortured, raped and beheaded “racially inferior” Chinese during their infamous Rape of Nanking in the years prior to full-blown World War Two.   The Germans systematically murdered millions of “others” including several million Jews.  

In each case these genocides were fueled by racist beliefs. The people being killed were not fellow human beings, they were inferior races that needed to be destroyed, usually because of the grave danger they supposedly represented.

In order to commit unspeakable acts against other humans, it is generally necessary to hate those humans. How do good, decent, law-abiding, God-fearing Americans torture people?  By believing they are torturing inhuman terrorists who will stop at nothing to inflict unthinkable atrocities on innocent Americans.  That an individual recipient of torture may turn out to be an innocent, sixty year-old pediatrician does not mean the rest of them aren’t the worst of the worst.

You can flip through pages of recent propaganda posters to get a nice glimpse of racism made graphic.  Ever see the American depictions of “Japs” during World War Two?   Vicious, squinting, buck-toothed rats.   Look at Nazi cartoons of Jews, same kind of deal.   Cartoons of American Blacks, similarly vicious.   It is necessary to ridicule and hate before you can commit atrocities against a group of people.  

Not everyone is cut out to massacre with machetes, as one African tribal group, the Hutus, did to 800,000 Tutsis in a frenzy of killing in Rwanda in 1994.   The Nazis had a challenge figuring out how to kill so many Jews.  The men in the killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, who shot Jews into mass graves, became drunks, went mad.  A few idealistic sadists excelled, but the sheer number of Jews to be killed was overwhelming.  Eventually a program was developed that mechanized the killing process, lessening the toll on those tasked with the mass murder of the villainized, subhuman groups.

If those who exploit others for their own profit do not divide their potential opposition and make them hate each other, their lucrative enterprise is often in danger.   Martin Luther King, Jr. was a greatly admired Man of the Year, and won the Nobel Peace Prize, when he was peacefully fighting to integrate lunch counters, buses, urging his followers to endure great hardship and exert moral force to end segregation.   Once he began speaking of the infamous triad of racism, militarism and poverty, and uniting the poor of all races, he became an enemy of America who had to be killed.  Listen to his “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” speech, delivered at Riverside Church in New York, a year to the day before his murder:

The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal…

… It seemed that there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, and new beginnings. Then came the build-up in Vietnam. And I watched the program broken as if it was some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money, like some demonic, destructive suction tube. And you may not know it, my friends, but it is estimated that we spend $500,000 to kill each enemy soldier, while we spend only fifty-three dollars for each person classified as poor, and much of that fifty-three dollars goes for salaries to people that are not poor. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor, and attack it as such.

(source)

Men who speak such truths are often killed– if heeded they could cost those who profit from war billions of dollars.   Murdering such troublemakers has always been  part of the history of guns in America.   Gun violence was always integral to the rule of racists in America. “The Equalizer” was a Colt 45 revolver that made the man holding it the equal, physically, if not morally, of four or five stronger men who did not have guns.  An Equalizer tucked in the belt of a white overseer meant that, no matter how brutal he may have been to the slaves he worked, he was equal to a bunch of the strongest of them who hated him.  Unlike its predecessors, guns that had to be reloaded after one shot, leaving the shooter vulnerable, the Equalizer had a revolving chamber and was able to fire and kill six times.  Suck on that, muscle man.  

Why racism?  It benefits those who, like our current president, stoke it and use it to send messages that divide and conquer.   Mexicans are no more likely to rape than anyone else.  The very idea is ridiculous.  And yet…

We call racism by many names, deny it most of the time. We obscure our infamously racist history here– we  had race-based chattel slavery here for more than two hundred years, annihilated most of the native people who lived on what is now the USA (savages, we remember them as), excluded the Chinese, once they had died building transcontinental railroads, tolerated more than a century of terrorism against former slaves, discriminated against Italians, Irish, Eastern Europeans and other “ethnic” types, and so forth.    

“Race” is largely an arbitrary construct, and a very mutable one.  At one time here in the United States (and still, among some) Italians, Irish and Jews were considered “niggers”.   As a Jew, I take my solidarity with my fellow niggers quite seriously, as my father before me did.

In our greatest moments as a nation, these arbitrary differences have been put aside and masses of our people have moved forward together to face some grave challenge or to enjoy the fruits of liberty.  In our worst moments, these cultural differences are exploited by ruthless demagogues, pointing to the evil “other” and inspiring violence as they quietly do their dirty deeds. 

Fuck racism, you know what I’m saying?  But in order to fuck it, you first have to talk about it.

All you really need to know about Jared’s little brother Josh

Thirty-one year-old Josh, among his many business investments, is the founder and chairman of Oscar, a large health insurance company that sells insurance on the Obamacare marketplace.  His older brother Jared, 34, is the president’s de facto prime minister.

The New York Times lays out the pertinent facts.  The family survived the Holocaust, the grandparents came to the U.S. in 1949.   They built apartments in New Jersey, starting a real estate empire that was soon worth a billion dollars.  Jared and Josh’s father, Charles, spent two years in prison after his conviction for (then) illegal campaign donations, witness tampering and tax evasion.   Josh started a non-profit at Harvard to make it easier for Harvard grads to borrow and raise money.    Now I hand it over to the Grey Lady:

By the spring of 2012, Mr. Kushner had scored his first investment hit. He had become friends with a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Kevin Systrom, who had started Instagram. Mr. Systrom said he had met Mr. Kushner long before he was thinking about raising large sums of money for the app, and the two had stayed in touch.

That year, Mr. Systrom let Mr. Kushner invest in Instagram alongside the prestigious venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, illustrating how much personal connections matter. The funding pegged Instagram’s valuation at $500 million. Three days later, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion and Mr. Kushner instantly doubled his money.

(emphasis mine, you’ve got to love the Grey Skank!)

 America the beautiful– if you’re born in the right circumstances and have the vision, and genius, to play your cards right.  The Times quotes Josh as saying “being satisfied is not a good thing”.   I like to think the whole family will live perpetually by that self-fulfilling credo.

source

Redraft of letter to Whom it May Go Fuck Yourself

It all feels too big today, as the rain pisses down. Concentration may be hard to come by.

The police department sealed what was until the other day Liz’s apartment.  I passed the green sticker on the door, took a blurry photo of it.   Her cats, brothers Sid and Gus, were taken to another apartment where they will get fed every day and have their litter boxes kept clean, until they can hopefully be adopted.  

Time marches on, rushes on, like the cold rain that is pelting down outside right now.   I am going to attempt to finish the letter to the progressive, publicity-hungry Attorney General of New York, per the imagined suggestion of my dead father.

Dear Mr. Attorney General,

I am writing to alert you to a massive consumer protection failure in New York State, regarding routine denials of purchased health care by health insurance companies.  I urge your office to investigate this unchecked, widespread fraud and propose legislation to correct it.  

There is no New York State agency meaningfully overseeing the practices of private corporations providing health care insurance in the state of New York, as I will detail below.   Even apparent outright fraud by a health insurance company cannot be redressed, except through an appeal to the insurance company itself.  This letter lays out the state’s current non-functional regulatory apparatus, such as it is.  I urge you to propose legislation to remedy this intolerable situation.

In January I drafted a long letter to you about this lack of regulation by New York State.  The health care emergency described in that letter (and here), with consumers at the mercy of an industry rich in temptations to deny services to increase profits, is even more acute under an administration intent on dismantling all regulatory schemes.  My own medical issues prevented finalizing that letter.

Since writing that draft I learned that your office proposes legislation and advocates for it.   I am writing to convince you to propose a bill creating state oversight, on behalf of consumers, of the medical industries that do business in New York State.  Widespread, colorable fraud is routinely committed against mandated ACA consumers/patients and no state agency oversees it.    

While there are hotline numbers for aggrieved health care consumers, none of these provide any help.   Alleged fraud against consumers by corporations is not something the New York State Department of Financial Services (“DFS”) is set up to investigate.   The oversight functions of the Departments of Health and Insurance, you may recall, were merged into the DFS for all insurance-related  purposes when New York State adopted the ACA.  There is no state agency, outside of DFS, that has jurisdiction over such frauds.

New York State needs an agency to oversee routine denials of approved medical services by insurance companies and to act as an Ombudsman for the many difficulties endemic to a complicated public/private health insurance scheme.   

I also urge you to call for creation of an ombudsman’s office for the New York State of Health Marketplace (“NYSOH”).   I can tell you from an unfortunate wealth of experience that the NYSOH is the most intractable bureaucracy I have ever dealt with (this includes New York City’s overwhelmed Adult Protective Services and the NYC Housing Authority). The current waiting time to have an “appeal” to correct a simple clerical error by NYSOH is, at minimum,  four months.  NYSOH’s policy is not to divulge the identity of its director, Donna Frescatore, and I no longer wonder at that policy, with the thousands of complaints they are currently attempting to handle.

Under the ACA, in New York State, a patient is expected to resolve all issues with the corporation he pays premiums to for health insurance.  I will lay out the cul du sac of non-help a NYS citizen experiences in the State of New York.   It is a seemingly robust system, with numbers for consumer help hotlines.  An hour’s investigation reveals that it is not even a fig leaf of a regulatory system.   Presumably the only action a New Yorker can take for denial of service, after calling all of these numbers,  is an Article 78, assuming one could find the legal grounds to not have it dismissed.

The health insurance company may deny services for any number of plausibly innocent-sounding reasons.  Claims are denied for: errant CPT code, two numbers transposed on the NPI, wrong NPI, incorrect service code specified, something related to customer MOOP.   (The PPACA is a treasure trove of acronyms).

What follows is a map of the regulatory cul du sac and some examples of this widespread silent profit-driven campaign against the most vulnerable of New York State’s health care recipients.   It is my hope that your office will propose legislation to make corporations accountable for the worst of these practices.

blah blah blah…

for some reason I can’t focus much on this hideous, but important, task today.  

Maybe it’s the image of a group of grinning elected white male imbeciles in suits, in a White House garden photo op yesterday, celebrating their impressive two vote “victory” in the House, passing a secret bill to abolish Obamacare.

The bill was never debated, its text wasn’t circulated before the vote, its economic impact was not scored by the CBO, but it satisfied the most implacably right wing members of the House.   An actual 1930 lynch mob could not have looked more delighted, posing under a swinging corpse.   The president laughed, asked playfully “can you believe it?” about him being the president.  Then he set off, three hours late, to meet the prime minister of Australia and tell him that Australia’s health care system (public) is much better than America’s.

USA!   USA!!!!

As for moving America back toward the 45,000 annual preventable deaths due to lack of affordable health care, I guess this president hasn’t had time to staff the CDC and pull down its website, as he’s already had his people do with Civil Rights and science-based Environmental information on government sites.  Visit The Center for Disease Control’s site while you can.

You can read for yourself Harvard Medical School’s dire accounting of uninsured Americans’ greatly increased chance of death here.   Thousands more will die, if the Republicans in the Senate can only change the rules so their 52% can pass the long-awaited law to wipe Obama’s signature legislation off the books.  On the other hand, and to be fair, the incredibly rich will get richer.   

We live in a country that accepts the preventable deaths of tens of thousands of its citizens a year as part of the price of freedom– the freedom of talented health insurance CEO-investor types, like Jared Kushner’s equally well-born younger brother, Joshua, who has much of his $1,500,000,000 investment fund invested in health-insurer Oscar, to reap unlimited financial rewards for their selfless service.  

USA!   USA!!!

I’ll hope to finish my letter to the A.G. in a few days.  I have to put on my rain clothes and pedal my bike through the dirty rivulets of lower Manhattan.