Category Archives: Ahimsa

Too Much Truth can be dangerous!

Truth, a thing that actually happened, or a process that is really taking place, is often excluded from a conversation.  This is done to benefit the side that the truth would be harmful to.   Someone coined a good term for it “an inconvenient truth”. This is a large, explanatory truth that allows us to fully understand something otherwise unknowable.  

Few problems can be solved unless this often troubling truth is set on the table, since without it the clues to the more difficult underlying part of the problem have been made to disappear.  The suppression of this kind of truth is necessary if your intent is to hoodwink people, or to continue an unfair system.   When an important underlying truth, or even a key fact or two, is excluded from a conversation about problems, it’s impossible to arrive at a reasonable solution.  All that remains is the anodyne explanation, a partial story that puts everything in its best light and leaves out anything troubling, upsetting or controversial.

I have a personal tic about the importance of a truthful laying out of facts, of “transparency”.  I grew up in a home where most discussions immediately became adversarial and key points that needed to be addressed were swept off the table.   My poor father’s main technique in conducting these impromptu adversarial proceedings was constantly reframing what we were actually talking about.   This reframing served to remove certain topics from the discussion entirely and to constantly shift the “burden of proof” onto a set of moving cross-accusations.

Whenever you got close to making a point, the conversation would be redirected to your anger, your intractability, whatever unrelated point was necessary to derail your train of thought and make you eventually back off in frustration.  Luckily for me (he said, spreading irony like butter), decades later, as my father was dying he admitted with regret that he’d done my sister and me a grave disservice by turning everything into an unfair zero-sum fight to the death.  I say that with a touch of snideness, though it was a piece of great good fortune, to have my father confirm that for me before he went.

I can see things from another side more now than I could as a young man.  I can easily see now that an upset eight year-old asking his father to tell him about the dozens of family members killed by the Nazis only thirteen years before he was born would be very upsetting to a father.   My father, admittedly, did not respond well, but I can now fully understand the painfully difficult position my question put him in.   His regrettable reaction was to turn the inquiry into a conversation about “mere abstractions” (the people who died) and, more importantly, about why, at eight years of age, with all my so-called maturity, I still couldn’t simply act like a man.   My whimpering, defensive responses only confirmed the sorry image of my unmanliness.   The People rest.

“Nothing to see here!”, following a quick hiding of an inconvenient truth, is so common a refrain today that it’s hard for me to refrain from barking it out regularly.  Shame concealeth itself, only a sucker admits anything!  We live in a competitive culture where any admission of guilt, wrong-doing, shame, is seen as the mark of a loser.  Look at Al Franken [1].  Loser!   The winner, we all know, will always deny everything and make them prove every aspect of the case against him, and if it takes ten years, and a mountain of money for lawyers, so much the better.   The loser will question himself when accused, guiltily slink away, even if he hasn’t really done anything that bad.

I was thinking about this concealing damaging truth business in connection with the National Rifle Association’s wildly successful effort to have the number of Americans who shoot themselves to death daily with a gun (about 55 a day, more than two an hour) excluded from all discussions of gun violence in the United States.   It’s a standard ploy, take a harmful piece of verifiable information, claim it’s irrelevant — for any reason pulled out of your ass–  and bury it as deep as possible.

Here’s a recent personal example, you be the judge if the larger truth changes anything about the story.

An old friend recently refused to do me a relatively simple favor.  When I asked why he told me he didn’t need to explain anything to me, that I was a pushy bastard to ask, that I don’t know how to take no for an answer.  He eventually gave me a flimsy rationale, and later, when things began turning tense, admitted he wasn’t doing me the favor because of his anger and resentment toward me, which finally made sense, although it was not reassuring.

Do the facts really matter?   They don’t really, in terms of our friendship, though they help me see there was probably nothing I could have done to avoid his hidden anger.   Looking at the only solid facts we have, our recent emails and texts, and reading his original offer to do me the favor, before changing his mind later and getting angry when I asked why, it was hard to see this sudden rage as anything I could have seen coming.  Or anything I might have been able to avoid.  It was clear, in hindsight, that he’d been looking for a damned good reason to explode, my pushy query was the fucking last fucking straw!   

Feelings are often this way.  We feel a certain way and then marshal whatever facts we need to support the utter reasonableness of our feelings.   You can’t argue with feelings, they’re as real as our breathing, as the awful prospect of our inevitable deaths.   I can’t help thinking that the things that actually happened, or are currently taking place,  matter and should be part of our consideration, part of any real conversation.   A raw feeling, like rage, should not have the final say in a conversation or friendship (though, sadly, it often does).

This concealing of “harmful facts” is at the root of virtually every vexing and hard to resolve situation we face, as individuals, as a society.   The tobacco industry knew very well that it was pumping up the addictiveness of its deadly product, but nobody needed to know this.  They denied it for years and spent millions defending their denial against a giant class of addicted plaintiffs, before finally agreeing to make a huge payout to a fund for their past, present and future victims.   

The oil industry hired scientists, decades ago, whose studies laid out the harmful effects of burning fossil fuels, the relation of this massive burning to the accumulation of greenhouse gases and the warming of the planet.  They had the answer they didn’t want, so they decided to hire another army of experts to deny the science and create public skepticism and “debate”.   Hard to blame these industries, these “job creators,”  if you truly believe that maximum monetary profit is society’s most important product.

Has our current president monetized the presidency in a way that offends norms, laws, the constitution itself?   Too bad you can’t see his financials, he has an army of lawyers to fight that to the very end and beyond.   In fairness to him, those documents could reveal business connections to wealthy international criminals and even his own criminal money laundering.  The president would be a fool to let these fall into the hands of his enemies, whatever the law might say about it. 

Did former White House Counsel Don McGahn commit perjury, as Trump claimed, when McGahn told Mueller’s investigators, under oath, that Trump called him twice on a Saturday to pressure him to fire Mueller and then asked him write a memo saying they’d never had any conversation about it?   Too bad it will take months, if not years, for the courts to decide on the facially absurd blanket immunity defense the president is asserting as he blocks all subpoenas and document requests of any kind.  Etc…

I heard a great discussion of an issue deeply related to this whole truth vs. half-truth spin business on the July 31, 2019 broadcast of  WNYC’s On the Media.   The show is about an alternative to punitive incarceration and the hopeless cycle of violence caused by our carceral state.   The conversation centered on Restorative Justice, a community-based process of truth and reconciliation where perpetrators acknowledge the harms their actions have caused and seek the forgiveness of their victims.  Bob Garfield’s guest,  Danielle Sered, a pioneer in the Restorative Justice movement and executive director of an organization called Common Justice, makes a strikingly succinct and deep point well worth pondering:  

The four core drivers of violence are shame, isolation, exposure to violence and an inability to meet one’s economic needs.    The four key features of prison are shame, isolation, exposure to violence and an inability to meet one’s economic needs.

These are also, coincidentally, four key features of poverty: shame, isolation, exposure to violence and an inability to meet one’s economic needs.    It is a terrifying and demoralizing constellation of features that all but guarantees a terrible outcome, including a high likelihood of being locked up.   Those four factors form a terrible truth that explains a lot about the failings of our prosecutorial law enforcement culture and our enormous prison population.   We have a bumper crop of hardened, violent criminals that no amount of humiliating punishment seems to be curing them of.  Same goes for drug addicts.

If we were truly intent on creating a safer, better society, we would take this hard truth into consideration.   We need to seriously consider it in any discussion of creating a safer, more just society  that protects all of its citizens and maximizes their chances for a peaceful life largely free of shame and violence.   Like in a discussion of the crisis of opioid addiction and overdose, if we addressed the causes of this desperation instead of criminalizing and punishing the addicts…  If… we… were… truly… intent… (don’t forget, there is a very lucrative private prison system here, and a more profitable than ever private immigration detention center industry here, and a super profitable opioid production and sales industry… don’t forget).   

Or we can leave that awful truth about shame and violence and hopeless poverty out of it entirely.  Here’s an idea.  We could simply, honestly say that people born to the unspeakable shame and violence of poverty are just fucked.  Sad but true.  You know, in a way, they kind of made their choice to be born poor.  Had they been of better stock and born wealthy, they’d have every right to live peacefully and happily in the most exceptionally free and luxurious society the world has ever known.  Too bad those young children of the poor are already weak, dirty, morally compromised, lazy, other-blaming parasites.   

I leave the “race” and ethnicity of these doomed children for you to imagine.  Keep in mind, many millions of them are as white as the president’s family, as his mother’s nine pale, dirty-faced siblings in Scotland [2].  As Martin Luther King said often in the last years of his life, the color of poor people has little to do with it.  Poor children of every color in America are growing up in a country that has no use for them, except as cash cows for the privatized prison barons.   Racism, militarism and poverty are three faces of the same vicious, insatiable monster.   But that will have to be a hard truth for another day.

 

[1]  Former Senator Franken was accused, by a conservative media provocateur (and former nude model), of making her feel sexually abused on a USO tour years earlier.   It was not a super-credible accusation, not supported by a single witness, and it was made public before Franken was given any chance to comment, then was quickly followed by a handful of women who came forward to claim Franken had put his hand creepily low on their waists, or otherwise touched them inappropriately during photo ops.   

Franken responded to these charges by calling for an ethics investigation of himself (during which he’d be able to hear the full accusations, call witnesses and defend himself against the charges).   Hopped up members of Franken’s unthinkingly politically correct party, led by the ambitious Kirsten Gillebrand, formed a kind of lynch mob and angrily, publicly demanded that their colleague immediately resign instead.  Another reason to shake your head about elected Democrats and their high-minded circular firing squads.  Franken resigned, something he regrets every day, something I regret whenever I think of it.   

Read this excellent investigative piece by Jane Mayer and you’ll see what I mean about the poisonous effect of throttling the truth, and a lawful inquiry into the truth.   Do the actual facts of the case matter?   They fucking should.

[2]   Trump’s mother’s ancestry:

Mary Anne MacLeod (Trump) was born in a pebbledashcroft house owned by her father since 1895 in Tong on the Isle of Lewis.[2]Local historians and genealogists have described properties in this community at the time as “indescribably filthy” and characterized by “human wretchedness”.[5][6] The outbreak ofWorld War I weakened its economy and male population.[2]

Raised in a Scottish Gaelic-speaking household, Mary was the youngest of ten children born to Malcolm (1866–1954) and Mary MacLeod (née Smith; 1867–1963).[7] Her father was a crofter,fisherman and compulsory officer at Mary’s school.[2][3][8][9]English was her second language, which she learned at the school she attended until secondary school.[2]

 

As one account has put it, she “started life in America as a dirt-poor servant escaping the even worse poverty of her native land.”[8] Having obtained a U.S. Re-entry Permit—only granted to immigrants intending to stay and gain citizenship[8][9]—she returned to Scotland on the SS Cameronia on September 12, 1934.[13] She was recorded as living in New York by April 1935 in the 1940 U.S. Census.[13]

Though the 1940 census form filed by Mary Anne and her husband Fred Trumpstated that she was a naturalized citizen, she did not actually become one until March 10, 1942.[3][8][9]

FredTrump1950-02.png

 

Check out the mustache on Fred Christ Trump, in 1950, for fuck’s sake, five years after Hitler’s defeat in World War Two..  Talk about yer Nazi bastards….

ANGER schematic

Anger works in a specific way — it’s a powerful emotion that convinces you, beyond any doubt, that you are completely right to feel mad and that the person (or thing) you’re angry at is a complete fucking asshole.  When you’re righteously angry there are no gradations of right and wrong, only black and white, only you being just and the other party being fucking infuriating.

In order to sustain anger, you need to feel that you are right, righteous, justified, that you were deliberately wronged, unfairly abused.   Sometimes this feeling is the clear result of actual things that have happened to you.   These things happen in life, we make each other angry from time to time.  It is best to make peace and try to avoid the same ugliness next time, though that’s not always in the cards.

Sometimes anger results from a creeping feeling, often of being disrespected —  a feeling that finally gives rise to your angry mind putting together an airtight prosecutor’s case against the person you feel has disrespected you.  Once you have made the irrefutable case, you feel justified in sentencing the other party to whatever they deserve.   And carrying out the sentence.

A feeling may have been gnawing at you for a long time, though you couldn’t exactly put your finger on it, but there’s no mistaking the moment you’ve finally  had enough.   Your anger is burning, you’re dangerous, the only thing left to do is to flesh out the reasons you’re angry, make your case for why you’re right and the other person is totally wrong.   Anger has a notoriously low threshold of proof, you’re already mad, any rationale will do, simply grab one.   Then accuse.   Your accusations will lead to infuriating responses.  An argument then begins, in which everything the other party says only convinces you more and more what an unredeemed piece of shit you are dealing with.

Feelings are real, not to be sneezed at, or trifled with.   What we feel is more real to us than anything else, actually.   You can’t argue with a feeling, it is how you truly feel.   You can’t even have a productive talk with someone who has a strong feeling until you acknowledge the feeling.   Most of the time we keep our feelings to ourselves and these repressed feelings are prone to fester and grow more powerful, even monstrous.   Classically, in our macho society, this applies more to men than to women, who are often more adept at talking about their feelings than men are.

It’s the classic bottle up and explode scenario sung about by the late, great Elliott Smith.    Somebody does something that makes you feel like shit, you say nothing, the next insult is added on, you feel a bit shittier, the next thing is added on, you say nothing.   Eventually somebody will do something somewhat like the thing, or begin to, or seem to be about to, and then the anger at the whole long torment explodes.  Way out of proportion to whatever provoked it, usually.

I had a friend from childhood who was visibly nervous in his own skin.   He always thought I was much cooler [1] than him and though he loved me for it, it also bothered him.   Increasingly over the years.  He was trapped in a nightmare marriage, to a woman he physically feared, he felt helpless and fought her constantly, viciously, helplessly.   He was angry and afraid all the time (these often go together).   I was somebody he could provoke, get a rise out of, someone he felt perfectly safe in making angry.   Indeed, angry as he sometimes made me, I never took a swing at him.

I’d grown up in a house where everybody raged at each other all the time.  My parents never learned to control their tempers, their frustrations, their deep sense of being powerless, abused children.   In fact, both were abused by their violent mothers, unprotected by their gentle, timid fathers.   So it was rage all the time.  It sucked, growing up in a fucking madhouse, and it did great damage to my sister and me.   It took me decades to make any progress toward learning to recognize the signs that I was getting close to the edge, how to calm myself, however slightly.  Awareness that you’re getting angry, and experiencing that you can reel yourself back in, is the first step to exiting the cycle of rage.  

One thing I learned, after many years, is to tell people close to me when they were hurting me and exactly how, and what I need them to do differently.  Each time my childhood friend provoked me I would tell him I was getting aggravated, ask him to back off, to realize that he was poking a raw nerve and making me angry.   His response each time was to deny that he was doing anything, then double down and tell me pointedly that I was the one with the fucking anger problem, not him.  

When you find yourself stuck in one of these kind of insane revolving doors, all the good will in the world will be of little use.   It is too late, once you make your feelings clear and are met with more denial and blame.   Making me angry was the only thing that made the poor bastard feel good, feel like he had any power in the world.  He felt safe, you see and, clearly, he felt he needed to do it.  Otherwise, his head would explode.  What is an old friend for if not to feel safe with?

In the end, after our friendship was dead and cold, after many months trying to preserve our friendship, I pressed him for the reasons he was angry at me.   The reasons I couldn’t be friends with him (unless he changed his behavior) had been on the table for months, though he energetically denied the validity of my feelings.   It emerged that all of the reasons he could never be friends with me were related to things his wife told him, things that happened after our friendship was already beyond reviving.

The schematic of anger is always the same.   A feeling that chafes, gets worse, builds to an intolerable pitch.   A case is made, because though angry and mad are synonyms, nobody likes to feel “mad”.   We need a good reason, or a rationale, anyway.  Nobody does anything unless he is convinced he has a good reason.   Sometimes there is one, sometimes there isn’t.  Our feelings will not allow us to behave without a good reason, so sometimes we create one.  

OK?  I fucking created this inescapable straitjacket case specially for you, just to say “fuck you.”   I love you, man, but you’re dead to me, because, I never told you this, you are a complete fucking asshole.

 

 

[1]  whatever the hell that means.   I suppose in his case it was watching someone comfortable in social situations, by the looks of it, not a victimized, anxious, self-conscious person like he felt himself to be.

Losing the Propaganda War

Back in the day, in ancient Egypt, when a new dynasty came into power they’d send goons into the tombs of the rulers of the past.   These goons would scrape the images of the dead off the tomb walls, making sure to remove the faces wherever they were depicted.   It was a way of messing them up good in the after-life — try living forever in glory with no face.   It was a way of effacing their image, and memory, from history.    The same technique has been used a million times since.  Who are you going to believe — me or this asshole who literally has no fucking face?

It’s now common to call this process something like controlling the narrative.  In propaganda terms, you take a complex issue and reduce it to a phrase that will make people angry.  “Moscow Mitch” pops to mind, a great recent example of this technique (and, by the way, Moscow Mitch is fuming about this vicious, if not completely unfair, nickname).   Mitch McConnell, the long serving lady-killer from Kentucky, has used his position as leader of the Senate to block votes on all legislation, and every appointment, he doesn’t like.  He simply refuses to allow a debate or vote, that’s how you guarantee your enemies lose every time.   Losers.

Included on this list, most recently, is his ungentlemanly, anti-democratic refusal to bring two House bills about election security to a vote on the floor of the Senate.   These bills are to ensure that our electronic elections are protected from the massive foreign manipulation we can expect in 2020, in light of what the Mueller Report documented as “sweeping and systematic” Russian interference in 2016. [1]   Also in light of a recent government report that showed attempts to hack voting machines in all 50 states in 2016.  Moscow Mitch sees no problem with any of this, as long as his party, whose presidential candidate was openly favored by Moscow in 2016, and happily invited their help, stays in power.

So, instead of needing to say all that simply say:  Moscow Mitch.  The phrase stands in perfectly for a candidate apparently more loyal to Putin’s right to a favorable say in the election than any Democrat’s right to cast a secure ballot.   Hopefully the cool new nickname will help cost the obdurate, unprincipled, partisan obstructionist his job in the next election.

Screen Shot 2019-08-01 at 3.41.19 PM.png

This sort of thing is common in politics, of course.   “Lock her up!” was used to great effect by a demagogue and his cronies in a recent election.  It was simply a way of channelling hatred for Hillary Clinton and all she stood for.   “Build the Wall!” was as feel good a chant as “Block that Kick!” at a football game.   Makes people feel part of something virile and powerful, to fullthroatedly yell in unison like that, standing and rhythmically pumping their fists.  Winners.  

Odd to say, the same simplifying principle is routinely employed by most of us in our personal lives.  From time to time we judge something another person did as crossing a line, beyond the pale (whatever that cliche actually means — [2]) and based on that transgression we write the final unflattering chapter of our history with that person.   Everything was fine until this person I was friends with for thirty years refused to take “I said ‘no’ and I don’t have to say why” as a final answer, the infuriatingly overbearing fuck!

Bringing people to one side or the other in these wars is largely a public relations battle, fought on the miniature battlefield of interpersonal relations.   It is routinely fought in families — who is to blame for what, who is the black sheep, who brought honor or dishonor to our family name, who is on whose side against whom.   It is fought everywhere people are angry about anything, which is to say, everywhere.  I give you the following highly hypothetical illustration which resembles nothing in anyone’s personal life, I assure you.

[illustration REDACTED]

A focus on the truth of what actually happened is often seen as misguided in our Moscow Mitch world, or, to be more accurate: irrelevant.   A simple, easy to embrace belief is better, in the all-important public relations/marketing/branding arena, than a well-researched, compellingly written thousand pages nobody will ever read, particularly if you burn the fucking book and the godless witch who wrote it. 

Mueller [3] was a godless witch, by the way, just ask Moscow Mitch.

 

[1]    “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” Mueller wrote in the 448-page document, which lays out new details about a Kremlin-backed plot that compromised Democrats’ computer networks and targeted state and local election offices.

source     note that this article is from April 19, 2019!   

[2]  Screen Shot 2019-08-01 at 3.47.27 PM.png

[3] Bobby Three Sticks

Tucking Melz in (Two)

An illustration of the inherent feebleness of even a well-reputed memory (such as my own).  

I noticed that yesterday somebody had clicked on an old post called “Tucking Melz In” and I told Sekhnet the story.   Later I read the piece and was amazed to find a significantly different anecdote, bearing little resemblance to what I’d just told Sekhnet, which was, minus the first paragraph (which she already knew) which was:

Five and a half years ago an old friend, Melz, succumbed to a rare and deadly form of soft tissue cancer.   When I say succumbed, I mean he died.   The funeral was conducted by his long-time bosom buddy, trained as a rabbi and with a great talent for humanistic public speaking.   He conducted a beautiful funeral.   It’s hard to say how he held himself together the way he did.

Afterwards, at the golf course-like cemetery (no head stones) as we gave our shovels to others who were taking turns burying Melz, according to our tradition, Alan and his wife Terri came up to me.  Alan said (referring to the wonderful funeral oration we’d just witnessed) “you realize, if we die before Sokoll, we’re fucked.  Who’s going to do our funeral?  Think about it!”

I did.  As I was thinking, Sokoll walked by and we told him our concern.  The good rebbe told us not to worry.  “I’ll bury all of you fuckers,” he said, without breaking stride.   Oddly reassuring words.    

After a moment Terri said “let’s go tuck Melz in,” and we walked over and took over the shoveling for a while.

(compare with the original, written a day or two after the funeral)

 

The Poison is Always the Same

There are certain people, tormented by painful needs they have no insight into, who lash out at others as a way of trying to feel better about their own gnawing sense of inadequacy.  This terrible sense of worthlessness was instilled in them when they were children by equally damaged people.   It is possible to largely recover from this kind of mistreatment, but it takes a lot of work.  The only time many damaged souls feel equal to a world they believe is otherwise crushing them is when they are fighting to dominate others.   Injecting poison into others is as close as they come to mastering situations they feel are beyond their control, confrontations they feel at a fatal disadvantage in.

The poison is always the same.   The need to deliver the toxic bite always comes from the righteous feeling of being a victim.   Only defending themselves, you dig, from stronger, more vicious predators.  They have no choice, you understand, because they believe they’re always under attack, and at an unfair disadvantage, and are only doing what is right, what anyone in their position would do.

This toxic cycle is sadly common in human affairs.   The toxic type has only one response to everything: injecting more poison.   We’ve become familiar recently with the term “doubling down” in our partisan politics.   It is a gambling term with wide application in human affairs — it means, according to the first google hit,  “to strengthen one’s commitment to a particular strategy or course of action, typically one that is potentially risky.”   If you seem to be wrong, if anyone questions you, double down — come at them twice as hard.  A strong, angry denial is a much better plan of attack than allowing the possibility that you might have made a mistake, done something wrong, share some blame for the ugly situation you find yourself in.

People with very low self-esteem often feel called upon to fight, to never relent or admit the possibility of even partial fault, to never see another person’s point of view, to constantly double down on the poison.  We can intellectually understand the factors that may have made them this way, a scalding feeling of inferiority, self-hatred, being unloved, but that understanding is little protection against the pain of their bite.   The poison is always the same.

My best advice, whenever possible, avoid this type like you’d shun a whiff of anthrax or the AIDS virus smeared on an open cut.   The poison is always the same. There is really no antidote other than expelling the noxious shit.   It takes time and work to get it all out of your system, I can tell you from experience.   Given the choice, once you recognize this type at work, move away as expeditiously as possible.   These poor motherfuckers simply cannot help themselves.

If one of them, God forbid, becomes the most powerful person in the world, be resolute and strong in removing them from power.

Three comments from a reader

I rarely get comments on this sparsely read blahg.  Yesterday I got two.  I had an email for each, asking if I approved the comment for “publication”.  The comments were from the same person.  I read the first, and then the second.   The second email had this red warning banner at the top:

Screen shot 2019-06-02 at 3.13.02 PM.png

I see now that I have a third comment from Boxerpaws.   So I’ll answer them all here, to err on the side of safety.  I hope you read these replies, my friend, and thank you for your comments.

The comment on  this post

the IRS would have busted Pres Trump if they had found any wrongdoing. What Fred Trump did or didn’t do is irrelevant.

The IRS has a special unit that deals with the tax returns of very wealthy citizens.   Over the years they collected a tiny amount of money from Fred for his under-reporting income, undervaluing assets and other tax mistakes or violations.  Young Donald and his siblings were lifetime beneficiaries of Fred’s tax avoidance schemes and certainly knew, as adults, that he was fraudulently funneling money to them using fake corporations they were officers of, and his other tax dodges.   Did you read the massive NY Times investigative piece?  The Failing NYT was never sued by the president’s many lawyers, in spite of the threat printed in the article itself. 

President Trump will not produce any financial documents … because?   There is every appearance that the president is lying about the longest tax audit in American history.  His appeal of a judge’s decision in the Deutsche Bank case is another example of him being “the most transparent president in history”.  He has been known, on occasion, to lie.  This is something you have to admit, I think.

Also Fred, in old age, had lawyers summon Donald and the other siblings to make sure now President Trump’s plan to become sole executor of Fred’s wealth never happened.   Don’t forget how many times Fred had thrown in tens of millions ($400,000,000 in today’s dollars) to insulate his reckless (or audacious, if you prefer) son from multiple business disasters.

Your comments on this post

“Barr did what Mueller asked, but he waited a few weeks before releasing anything from Mueller.”  Barr had no requirement to release it at all. He released it both for public consumption and Congress.

OK.  But as the sentences that follow the quote point out, during those weeks Barr waited, with Mueller’s fully redacted executive summary and a letter from Mueller disputing Barr’s conclusion of “no collusion, no obstruction, exoneration” in his hands as of March 27, Americans were deliberately misled by Barr.   The narrative that Americans absorbed in the course of almost a month of redacting, in the absence of the details of numerous incidents of obstruction of justice that were laid out in the report (and in the executive summary) was false.  

Have you read the Mueller summary outlining the ten or more examples of obstruction ?  It’s a ten minute read, all Americans should read it.

Mueller told Barr in the presence of witnesses that the DOJ ruling that a sitting Pres cannot be indicted had no bearing on his decision. So which time did Mueller lie? The first time to Barr et al or the 2nd time at his ‘presser’. 2. there is no LAW stating that a sitting Pres can’t be indicted. It amounts to a DOJ guideline. Nothing more,nothing less. IF a sitting Pres couldn’t be indicted for a crime he could rob a bank/murder his wife and get away with it as long as he was in office. Use your head.

Let’s assume that Barr was telling the truth, and witnesses can verify that Mueller lied to him over and over at a meeting when he said under no circumstances could he have indicted President Trump using the evidence compiled in his report.   How does that change anything dozens of witnesses said, under penalty of perjury, in Mueller’s report?   Also note that Trump and Barr are the only two people we know of ever to accuse Republican Eagle Scout Mueller of dishonesty. 

Do we assume, if Mueller lied to Barr about that policy decision, and even falsely claimed that a certain regulation required him to abide by the OLC guideline about indicting a sitting president, that he’s lying about everything in his report, including all of the sworn testimony of many witnesses?  

If so, doesn’t the same assumption apply to President Trump, who sometimes lies?

The standard for impeachment is not the same as for a criminal trial — they do not have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the president committed crimes.   To remove an impeached public official from office they only have to show, to the satisfaction of the American people and 65 Senators, how he abused his power to undermine our constitutional system.

As candidate Trump himself observed, he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.  This seems to be the case, if you ignore all the findings in the Mueller Report and focus only on whether Mueller lied to Barr about one key point during a closed door meeting.  

Let us turn to President Trump’s strong refutation of the Mueller report. Here is the president’s strong case that Mueller is a vicious enemy of his, with a giant “conflict of interest”.  

How am I not using my head?

Thanks again for these comments.

 

A few thoughts on thinking

The most satisfying and memorable kind of conversation is like a great catch.  The thought you throw to the other person is held for a moment and tossed back, with an interesting additional idea, and it comes directly into your hand, for a moment of consideration, before you toss it back.  There is a rhythm to this kind of chat, and no rush to talk.

What you just said reminds me of something eerily similar that happened to me years ago.  I mention it.  You raise your eyebrows, nod, yes, it’s very similar, but there is one big difference.  You elaborate.  I hadn’t thought about that, but, sure, that’s a very big difference, all the difference in the world, really.  

You can learn something important when a distinction is illuminated like that.  This kind of conversation is a way of thinking back and forth, of collaboratively considering things and shedding light on some of the mysteries of this mysterious life.    

Most talks between us are not so much this way, they are quick, many unrelated things come and go, threads pop up and disappear, shorthand is substituted for consideration, we move on, time is fleeting, we gossip, we vent, we don’t linger to converse in the more thoughtful mode every day.

We can all remember specific conversations that were on a deeper level, that moved us, changed us even.   I recall one, during a bike ride with an old friend, when she told me something obvious and profound that I’d never thought of.  She put it succinctly, in a phrase, and it changed the way I saw things.  I had one, and only one, wonderfully deep, personal conversation with my otherwise fussy, distracted Aunt Barbara.  In the living room of my parents house, after everyone else had gone to sleep, the moments with her I value the most.

The desire for this kind of conversation is a big reason people love to read.   We have a dialogue, of a sort, with another mind, a mind who was driven to set things on paper, after combing them into the readable form we have in front of us.   I am reading a book like that now, a novel.   Full of what Zora Neale Hurston called “that oldest human longing”, the desire to reveal ourselves to another, to speak our deepest personal truths and be seen and heard as we really are.   Speaking is great, writing is a more refined version of speech.

This dialogue with the author is a big reason we read.  I knew nothing about Shoshana Zuboff except that she recently gave a few very interesting interviews about her mind-blowing book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.   I didn’t pick up the book because I wanted a dialogue with her specifically, the subject she wrote about was compelling to me.  It turns out she is not only a very perceptive and extremely well-read woman, she’s fucking brilliant, creative and extremely engaging.  

She reminded me of Hannah Arendt in the way her book was loaded with thought-provoking insights seemingly peripheral to her central idea. Of course, no insight is peripheral to anything, in the hands of a creative thinker and skilled writer.

Take this seemingly random peripheral insight from her book.   We in the West have long valued the idea of our own autonomy.   The principle that we alone, as individual moral actors, have the final say in what we think and do.   This idea, Shoshana Zuboff points out, is under great pressure now, in an age when systematically modifying our behavior, our choices, how we think and interact, is increasingly monetized by people who become billionaires by tracking our every impulse, particularly things like the desire to be accepted by others,  and directing these impulses toward personally targeted commerce.  

The ideal consumer is one who is not autonomous, driven by deeply held beliefs and a strong internal need to feel independent, but heteronomous.

Heteronomous?   What the fuck?

Shoshana Zuboff provides this great term as the opposite of autonomous.   Heteronomy is the external force, based on an overarching concept, that drives mass conformity.   This indispensable word is apparently a coinage of Immanuel Kant’s [1].  

Note: the digital technology that allows us to instantly search for and pull up information, opinion and historical (and ahistorical) details is a sharp double-edged sword, of course.  We are all very smart, in our information age, and capable, if we wish, of effortlessly fact-checking and quoting very accurately, when we have instant access to the world’s collected information.  We are not nearly as impressive when we have no cell reception and only memory and wit to rely on.   In this age anyone can tap in a quick search and come up with:

Heteronomy refers to action that is influenced by a force outside the individual, in other words the state or condition of being ruled, governed, or under the sway of another, as in a military occupation.

Immanuel Kant, drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau,[1] considered such an action nonmoral.[2][3]

It is the counter/opposite of autonomy.

Philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis contrasted heteronomy with autonomy by noting that while all societies create their own institutions (laws, traditions and behaviors), autonomous societies are those in which their members are aware of this fact, and explicitly self-institute (αυτο-νομούνται). In contrast, the members of heteronomous societies (hetero = others) attribute their imaginaries to some extra-social authority (e.g., God, the state, ancestors, historical necessity, etc.).[4]

source

 

The actions of a heteronomous person are driven not by an internal imperative to act based on a personal, individualized belief system, but by an external force.  The masters of the force that moves masses can make themselves all-powerful and wealthy beyond the dreams of the most wanton slaveholder who ever enjoyed the involuntary company of an endless parade of beautiful servant girls.

You get a notification and look into your cellphone screen to read a come on that a third party has sent to you.  Your smartphone, of course, has a camera with a sharp lens and you have, by clicking “accept” when downloading the app, already given permission for the app and any associated third parties to have access to that camera.   As you look at the come on, the camera captures your reactions.   A few revealing micro-expressions are taken and filtered through algorithms that tell the third party exactly what you are receptive to receiving as a follow-up.  Disgusted by the ad?   We are too!    We’ll send you the antidote!

In our surveillance age, privacy is sacrificed to “security” and convenience.   The genius of the world’s smartest man, Jeff Bezos, was implementing a system to exploit his keen understanding that by monetizing the laziness and poor impulse control of the average American consumer he could become the richest individual in human history.  

Shop, in the privacy of your home, in your underwear, for the specific things that will make you elegant, popular, the envy of your friends and enemies alike.  Pay an annual fee and become a preferred customer, you can receive this great stuff almost instantly.   They’re working on a way to have robots and drones get this stuff to you in virtual real time.   What a world!

As we enjoy the convenience of this cyber world we give up certain crucial things.   Human interaction has been changed by the always-on social media machine that converts the world into a data-driven high school popularity contest. The need for face-to-face play, improvisation just for fun, one of the great joys of human life, has been largely replaced by virtual human contact. Virtual human contact that allows third parties to monetize and profit from our need to connect.

Just as the female calf on the industrial diary farm never experiences the play that all young mammals have always enjoyed as they master a host of social skills, including the flirting that will lead to reproduction (these industrially raised young cows don’t need to learn anything, they’ll be artificially inseminated and give more milk than any naturally raised cow) [2] today’s teenagers are growing up in a less playful, far more precarious, world few of us could have imagined.   Except perhaps on our worst day in junior high school.

A world where everyone has a camera on them at all times, for better or worse.  Where, on a dare, or being flirtatious, at an age when people are searching for the acceptance of their peers, racy nude photos are taken, exchanged, live forever on servers in virtual clouds.   At the worst possible time in the life of a fifteen year-old girl a formerly trusted best friend reveals a vicious side, posts that photo of you with the dick against your dumbly grinning face.   Of all the things that goad adolescent suicide, a good public humiliation is high up there.  Another person’s shame can now be uploaded, instantly, on to the internet everybody carries in their pocket.  This is a new, devastating weapon everyone is aware of.

Shoshana Zuboff discusses the wariness that must be imparted to children in this world of eternal invasive, largely commercial, surveillance.  Be paranoid, they are collecting every private insight that can be gleaned, in order to “serve you more efficiently”.  They are modifying your behavior in real time, and the reach of their prying apps, in continually more refined ways.  You are a sucker if you trust anyone.  Do not make eye contact, hit “like” and LOL.

I saw an ad for what seems to be a wonderful project.  A search engine that spends its profits planting trees, they’ve already planted millions of trees in formerly denuded, lifeless landscapes. We can read all the devilish details of what amoral motherfuckers Google’s executives are. They also built the greatest internet mousetrap in history, you have to give them credit.  The proof of Google’s value, as they say, is in the pudding, they are richer than fuck, among the most successful companies in history.   That’s really all you need to know.  Hate success?  You hate freedom!  (talk about heteronomous logic)

The alternative search engine I saw the ad for, Ecosia, has a series of wonderful ads.  They plant trees to restore destroyed rain forests, reclaim arid new deserts, provide habitat to preserve some of the thousand of species that are becoming extinct every day.   You can download their free app.   Sounds like a total win-win.  Fuck google.  Let me support a company that is doing something proactive to save our planet from the rapacious extractionists who are, to put it crudely, raping our biosphere to death.  

Then I think:  this is exactly what they want, isn’t it?  Talk about building the ultimate mousetrap.

Download the free app, along with every other idealist in the radius of Ecosia’s advertising,  and they are on your computer, on your phone, in your home, in your head.   They now have your name, and your every preference, on a worldwide list of everybody who fancies herself an idealist, everyone who wants a better world.  Who do they have to wipe out first, if they are to finally have everything just before the earth breathes its last?   Me and you, baby, the people who are determined to fight the grim, determined, heteronomous armies of death.  

Another bracing thing Shoshana Zuboff details is how this justified paranoia has decreased human to human trust among Americans.   We also have less and less trust for institutions, norms, the fairness of justice.  We are right to be paranoid, as we are screwed left and right, in the name of abstract principles that serve only the monetizers at the top of the societal food chain.   Distrust has become a kind of default setting as we learn more and more about the details of how we are being systematically fucked and lied to about the nature of this nonconsensual arrangement.

One final thought about thinking.  We tend to think in words (feelings come in many tastes, smells, sounds, colors, etc.)  and so a word like anodyne, or heteronomy, is essential in forming certain thoughts.  Without the word neatly expressing and encompassing the larger concept, we’d have nothing to chew on, at least not in a way we can express.  Something to masticate.

 

 

[1] Kant, a world-changing philosopher, is reputed never to have traveled more that a short distance from where he was born.  Forty miles is the distance I recall hearing from a chatty professor in a philosophy class at City College around 40 years ago.   I did a search for what that distance actually was, using the newfangled internet.  That he never travelled more than 16 km. (9.9 miles) from his birthplace is apparently a crock:  

A common myth is that Kant never traveled more than 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) from Königsberg his whole life.[45] In fact, between 1750 and 1754 he worked as a tutor (Hauslehrer) in Judtschen[46] (now Veselovka, Russia, approximately 20 km) and in Groß-Arnsdorf[47] (now Jarnołtowo near Morąg (German: Mohrungen), Poland, approximately 145 km).   source

Ninety miles, bitches.  Don’t believe the hype.

 [2]  Thank you, Yuval Noah Harari, for the description of this animal right to play and socialize, unsentimentally sacrificed without a second thought by the industry that brings Americans their dairy and meat.

Fiction Writing Workshop

Fortunately for Hal, who’d had a novel published to good reviews when he was fresh out of college, he came of age in an era when such things could be parlayed into a comfortable life.  Hal was a tenured professor of fiction writing by the age of thirty-two and never had to worry about making a living after that.   

When Hal’s father died, Hal got drunk.   He got the news from his sister, who’d been at the hospital when their angry, hopeless father breathed his last.  The old man was pissed off that Hal couldn’t make it back to the hospital to say goodbye one last time.   Hal had been at the hospital all day, went home to make dinner for his daughter, and his father was bitter about that last bit too, according to his sister, who had no reason to lie.

Hal told his sister he’d see her the next morning and went into the kitchen where he kept the Scotch.   He drank a good deal of that fine single malt, which the label said had been aged in a sherry cask.   The warm feeling came over him.   He sat quietly at the kitchen table, in a comfortable chair that could tilt any way he leaned.  

When Hal’s daughter came in, her father was already drunk, that familiar blank look on his face.  He changed his facial expression slightly as she came into view, but the effect wasn’t exactly a smile.  She already knew that grandpa was finally gone.   She’d had the text from her aunt.   She went into her room, locked the door, and a few moments later, tweeted that she was going to kill herself.

“This is your autobiography, Al,” his friend Tova told him, walking in through the back door, gesturing toward the bottle, the daughter’s locked door.  “As you have been telling your students for decades, even back when you were still writing, ‘all good writing is autobiography’.”

“Yeah, yeah.   I was full of shit,” said Hal.  “All bad writing is also autobiography.  A meaningless cliche, like all the other ones in the vast imaginary forests of bullshit.  Vanity.  What the fuck was I thinking?”

“You made a good living,” Tova said.  

“Yes, there was that,” Hal said.  

Tova had a notification from her phone.  She read the screen.  “You’d better call David, your daughter is going to kill herself.”

David was still seven hours away, driving through the foggy night from upstate.  Even in good conditions, it was a long and tedious drive. David was the only person who could talk to Debbie in a way that made any sense to her.

Hal found himself thinking of the family roots. His father had been the last of thirteen children, from some benighted hamlet in Poland nobody had ever bothered to put on a map.  Just as well, everybody there was dead, murdered one chilly afternoon in 1943, by people smelling of vodka.   Hal’s father was in the United States twenty years by then, the only one.  Nobody had a crystal ball, or the money to consult one, otherwise they all would have tried to come to America before that madman marshaled an army of murderous zombies.  

“Look, Hal,” Tova said, as she had many times, “I’m sorry you came from such a poor, shit family and got no rachmunis from anybody when they were all slaughtered, may they rest in peace.  I, and I don’t need to remind you, I have the papers to prove my right to be fucked up, both of my parents got checks from the German government until the day they died, as you know.  They were certified Holocaust survivors, I am a certified, official child of Holocaust survivors.  You, on the other hand, are a melodramatic self-pitying drunkard masochistically fond of brooding on history that happened while you were in boot camp.”

“I could have been Charles Kushner,” Hal had taken to saying recently, “son of two Holocaust survivors who got out of Europe in time, their assholes crammed with enough diamonds to build a small real estate empire in New Jersey.”  

Charles Kushner, the billionaire son of Holocaust survivors, begat Jared Kushner, who was so righteously outraged when his father was imprisoned briefly for simply hiring a prostitute and a filmmaker to make a video blackmailing his uncle, a man who was about to turn rat.  

The blackmail video was necessary to shame Charles’s sister, who Charles believed wore the pants in her home (and, also, appeared to be susceptible to the threat of public shame).  If she said the word, the fucking rat would not take the stand against her brother. Otherwise, her husband was scheduled to rat him out at the federal fraud trial that was about to start.  Charles had been given no choice, as he explained to Jared in the weeks before he was convicted, sentenced and disbarred.  The brother-in-law was the only witness who could really hurt him, and they seemed to be on the same page going forward, but the prosecutor flipped him.  

“Fucking rat,” said Charles, when he gave the money to the scumbag who set up the whole ill-fated prostitute and surveillance thing.

“Who knew my fucking sister was also a fucking rat?” Charles later asked a pigeon sitting on the window ledge of his cell at the federal prison.  “They never revealed if she’d worn a wire that day or not, the treacherous bastards…”   The bird nodded.

“Why is Debbie going to kill herself this time?” Hal asked Tova.    

“The tweet is vague on that,” Tova said.  

“I haven’t been much of an improvement on my old man,” said Hal.  “I have no clue how to help that kid.”  

“I’m going to make coffee,” said Tova.  

“To ruin a perfectly good buzz,” Hal said, pouring the last of the single malt into his glass.  

“Buzz-kill is what they called me in college,” said Tova.  

“You went to a top school full of smart bastards, didn’t you?”  

“Not like the place you teach, professor,” said Tova.  

“No, not like the place I teach,” said Hal, drinking up.  

“No matter, David will be here soon.”

“Let’s hope he can stay awake on the highway this time,” said Hal, tilting back in his chair.   There seemed to be no end to nights like this one, he thought.

 

(to be continued, or not)