Although It Should Not Go Unsaid...

The book I abandoned two books ago was James Kirchick's The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.  Kirchick, a journalist, is a wonderful writer, but for some reason, which I can no longer remember, I started to lose confidence in what he was saying.  (He wasn't just reporting.  He was constructing an argument.)  Kirchick has spent time living in and studying Europe, from a journalist's perspective, and I haven't, so I'm generally inclined to assume he knows what he's talking about.  But curiously, as out to sea as I felt with the subject matter, what seemed like a bigger issue, since I wanted as much grounding as I could get, was that Kirchick seemed to approach topics as a liberal, but he was described online (possibly Wikipedia) as a "neo-conservative."  If I'm reading his synthesis of something about which he knows a lot, and I know very little, I have to be able to trust him.  So I wrote to him to say he was described as a "neo-conservative," and to ask him what a "neo-conservative" is (and how it influences his view of things).  He never responded, so since I was increasingly unsure that his reporting was accurate, I stopped reading the book.

The last book I abandoned was Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man.  The book is well-constructed, with lots of references, but it relies too heavily on perspectives and assumptions that are dated and, in my opinion, not valid.  Even from Darwin's point of view, it seemed glaring to me that there were angles and explanations he never considered.  And since I can't discuss this with him (either), I contented myself with a 75 page start, and decided to move on.  And I moved on to the topic immediately at hand.

I have three books written by one or both of the same two people.  The one on top of the pile is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.  As it turns out, this is the most recent of the three books, and the original argument was made in Merchants of DOUBT.  The authors are Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway (The Big Myth and Merchants of DOUBT), and just Naomi Oreskes (Why Trust Science?).  So I started with The Big Myth, which I thought was going to be an impossible pain, because the Introduction is long (as is the book), and the font is too small and faint for me to read easily with my glasses.  But I got through the Introduction, and the rest of the book/font is much more manageable.  It's exceptionally well-written, too.

The reason for the subhead about American business having manipulated public opinion about government and the free market is introduced in the Introduction, and I'm sure it will get a lot more attention in subsequent chapters.

The thesis, to put it as simply as the authors sometimes put it, is that both the public sector and the private sector are necessary, and that if government wasn't necessary (that's the Libertarian view), the private sector would not have created as many problems as it glaringly has.  It has been willing to create horrible pollution, because putting toxic substances in the water and in the air is cheaper and easier than processing or avoiding them.  The Introduction mentions child labor a few times, which works well for industry, but it doesn't work well for children.  It mentions the often poor treatment of employees, when that treatment is left to the discretion, and power, of industry.  It mentions the tobacco industry, the product of which is great for the tobacco industry, but very bad for the public.  None of this is adequately confronted except by government.  "Just say no?"  Nice, Nancy, but it doesn't work that happy way in the real world.

Two examples not included in the Introduction spring to mind.  Maybe they'll be discussed later.  One is seatbelts.  Seatbelts were invented by a Briton in the 19th C, and he used them in his glider.  They were improved (made retractable) and offered for use in cars in this country in the early 1950s (by a neurologist).  But the public weren't keen to use them, and particularly to pay for them (they were a discretionary feature), and the car companies didn't want to raise the price of the cars by including them, either.  So, between the public and the car companies, there was resistance.  It was left to government to step in and tell everyone essentially to grow up, and use the seatbelts.  Without them, the neurologist had messes to clean up, and corpses to bury.  It was the private sector, or the "free market," that invented them, but the public sector that required their use.  I don't know if there are Libertarians who drive themselves and their families around, and refuse to use seatbelts, because the government requires them, but I hope there aren't.  And not because I hope they don't get ticketed.

In my field, doctors are answerable in a variety of ways to the jurisdictions/states.  And you can be sure that when this started to happen, the doctors were very unhappy about it.  They didn't want the states (government) making rules for how they practice.  But the problem was that they hadn't been making, and enforcing, rules for themselves.  They didn't police themselves, and they were offended that anyone else policed them.  But someone had to protect to public/patients.  If the doctors weren't going to do it, then government was.

Another medical-related issue, which I might have discussed before, is the Diagnosis Related Groups (DRG).  This was put in place in the 1980s, and it affected hospital treatment of Medicare beneficiaries.  Medicare was getting killed paying these bills, and they established a different approach.  The doctor had to make an admitting diagnosis, and list any other conditions (comorbidities) the patient had.  Based on this information, Medicare decided in advance how much it would pay for the hospitalization.  If the treatment was effective and efficient, and the patient was improved enough for discharge early (and didn't get readmitted for the same problem too soon), the hospital kept the money.  If they were inefficient, and kept the patient longer, the hospital itself had to pay for the protracted treatment.  I was in practice on Miami Beach at the time, and many doctors, and the four fully functioning hospitals, were up in arms.  Doctors were making a killing off hospitalizing Medicare beneficiaries who didn't need to be in the hospital, and keeping them there as long as they wanted, charging, of course, for a hospital visit every day.  Some doctors retired early, because the gravy train ended.  But the private sector -- the market -- was not functioning properly (it was functioning in its own interest), and the government/public sector/Medicare had to step in to limit the excessive use.  If you're a Medicare beneficiary, and your doctor tells you you need to be in the hospital, are you going to argue?  Who knows best if you need hospital treatment?  Today, there is one hospital on Miami Beach.  And it's a private hospital.  The private sector does what it's supposed to do (still to excess), and the public sector or government has to control misuse.  No one else can do it.

And that's where we are.  The vast majority of countries in the world have a combination of market functioning and government functioning or oversight.  Anyone who thinks government, or the market/private sector, can function monolithically and adaptively is kidding him- or herself.

"Beware of Darkness"

This post is about two probably unrelated things that happened at about the same time.

You might remember (or have read) the recent post about our neighbor, who is a friend of mine, whose politics are "Libertarian."  Our neighbor and I have been having some back and forth about this, and I think we have come to a kind of agreement: we are both at least wary of government.  Our Libertarian neighbor takes a short cut, as do all Libertarians, and declares government largely unnecessary, and a problem.  I don't take that shortcut, and I consider government very necessary (in support of my position, I'll point out that so did the Founding Fathers), but susceptible to corruption.  Our biggest problem, and the reason Libertarians have given up on government, is that it's very hard to control the strong tendency of those in government to agree to be corrupt.  I'm unwilling to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but I do recognize that the bathwater needs to be thrown out.

In the meantime, tonight, I watched a documentary I've seen before.  It's the 1971 "Concert for Bangladesh."  It's really quite amazing, and in retrospect, sort of a crowning achievement for George Harrison.

The "Concert for Bangladesh" is a concert.  So it's a bunch of songs performed by some very famous and accomplished musicians.  The musicians performed for free, so the money from the concert(s) (it was repeated, so there were two), and from the sale of records (in the early 1970s) could be used to help the mistreated and starving people of Bangladesh.  It was the first such concert, and "Live Aid" and a number of other similar projects occurred over the years.  This concert might have been George Harrison's idea, and it was stimulated by Ravi Shankar's having told Harrison about this tragedy, and asking him if there was anything he could do to help.  Shankar performed in the concert as well, as did a good number of very famous musicians.  Harrison, Leon Russell, Carl Radle, and Ravi Shankar are now dead, and some of the others might also be.

One song that was sung was "Beware of Darkness."  If you don't know this song, then you're not a big fan of the late Leon Russell (I'm a huge fan), and it was written by Harrison and Russell together, and sung by both of them.  The song contains the line "beware of greedy leaders, who take you where you should not go."

That is certainly a perfect way to summarize my objection to how government (dys)functions, and why Libertarians give up on it entirely.

And I totally understand the overpowering frustration with government.  As I very recently wrote to our neighbor, when the private sector cheats and steals, and enriches itself at the expense of everyone else, it's doing what it's supposed to do in its self-interest.  When government (the public sector), or those who govern and are part of government, cheat and steal, and enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else -- and tell lies so that the public won't realize they've been taken for a ride -- they're doing wrong, and should be held responsible, or at least eliminated from the public sector.  They are the "greedy leaders, who [are not allowed to] take you where you should not go."

I don't expect Libertarians to stop being Libertarians.  They've built up so much understandable mistrust that there's no compelling reason for them to be more trusting.  But I do think that if government could be corrected, maybe at least some Libertarians would reconsider their tendency just to jettison the whole thing.

By the way, Rishi Sunak, who is the Prime Minister of Great Britain, just last week called for new elections.  They will occur about 2-3 weeks after he called for them.  There's no protracted and obscenely expensive process, and people will be elected if the voters already know about them and what they have accomplished.  An approach like that would help greatly to minimize the possibility of "greedy leaders, who take [us] where [we] should not go," and who support a governmental system that leads people like Libertarians to give up, and wish for little or no government.  And the British system doesn't mean that the leanings of the government don't change, or go back and forth.  It's just not founded on fooling the voters, and fundamentally being "greedy leaders, who take you where you should not go."  That's very prominently what happens here.

A Different Approach...To Life and Society. It Might Be Hard to Achieve, But They Don't Call It "Civilization" for Nothing.

Or maybe it's not so hard to achieve.

The Denmark secret: how it became the world’s most trusting country – and why that matters | Denmark | The Guardian

It's certainly worth noting the contradictions among Denmark's eye-opening level of trust, but institutionalized racism, and more recent efforts to confront racism.

But there's an underlying feeling about Denmark and the idea of trust in other people.  Danes simply aren't suspicious of the motives of other people, including strangers.  And their society, and the ways it's constructed, and the ways it functions, don't give them reason to be suspicious.  At one very curious point in the linked article, when there's discussion of all the people who leave their infants in strollers in the street, one woman says that it's imaginable that someone might want to steal a "pram," but unimaginable that anyone would steal a baby, or a pram with a baby in it.  So she doesn't worry.

They do have violent crime, and it's unclear what it means to say the rate of it is 1/9th the rate of violent crime in the Bronx.  Is 1/9th the crime rate of the Bronx very low, or is the crime rate in the Bronx so high that 1/9th that rate is still high?  If the latter, the relaxed and trusting nature of Danes would be hard to explain.

This article puts me in mind of three movies.  One is a Michael Moore "Bowling for Columbine" documentary, which I've discussed before.  It's a documentary, so it's true.  Moore's investigations lead him to conclude that the rate of gun crime -- that's what this documentary is about -- is as high as it is in this country (which is very, very high) because Americans are a terrified people who don't trust each other.  They're afraid of each other.  Moore tests this, after talking to some Canadians just over the border, by "accidentally" opening the unlocked doors to people's homes, because he was told Canadians just aren't so worried, and tend not to lock their doors.  And in fact, on a personal note, I have to admit how not infrequent it is that I find out in the morning that I never locked my front door the night before (and no one came into my house).  So we Americans are terrified of each other, and we have a tendency to assault each other out of unnecessary and misplaced fear.  (Another Moore movie/documentary that comes to mind is "Sicko," which is about health care in real countries as contrasted with the US.  Real countries just feel that health care should be available to everyone, which is related to the Danes' view of social support and that no one should be dramatically more affluent than anyone else.  In fact, one of Moore's passing references in "Sicko" is that universal health care in real countries is supported by the presumably unresisted payment of taxes, which again contributes to, and may be driven by, a sense of trust in, and feeling of responsibility for, other people in those countries.)

Another movie is a dramatization of a true story, and it's "Take the Lead."  It's the story of Pierre Dulaine (Peter Gordon Heney), who is played by Antonio Banderas, and says he grew up in Spain (Pierre Dulaine/Heney was actually born in Palestine to an Irish father and Palestinian mother in 1944, but his family fled in 1948 -- hmm -- and lived in a few places in Europe before moving to Amman, Jordan, then fleeing again to England in 1956 due to the Suez Crisis -- hmm.  Dulaine (it's not explained in Wikipedia why he gave himself a French name) later moved to NYC, where (you have to watch the movie to find out how this happened) he started giving free ballroom dance lessons to misbehaving inner city high school students, as well as running his own more conventional and upper crust studio.  But the point is that at one point in the movie, Dulaine is explaining to the school's PTA, which wanted to cancel this program, how teaching ghetto teenagers to dance ballroom, which includes touching each other in civilized ways, and trusting each other to lead and to follow, would instill in them confidence and respect for themselves and for people of the other gender.  It's a somewhat different take on the idea of developing trust, as the Danes have.

Finally, there's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," which is set in Sweden.  One of the protagonists loses a court case involving what amounts to a white collar crime (he was set up, and he wasn't really guilty), and his sentence is three months in a relatively comfortable room with a door he can open.  He's a convict, but the system trusts him.  And the sentence doesn't even start until six months after the conviction.

So there's a lot to be said for the idea of trusting other people, including people you don't know, and for not assuming they're a threat to you.  Of course, if you constantly give them reasons to be afraid, and then arm them, you probably make them more threatening and harder to trust.  But depending on what stories you tell them, you might give them the impression that you, too, are more threatening and harder to trust.

I've Said It Before, And I'll Say It Again: Donnie Trump is Not the Problem.

Think back to various primaries.  Think about 2016, with Donnie, "little Marco" Rubio, "lyin' Ted" Cruz, and the rest of them.  Think about this year, with about 8-10 Republicans, and Donnie couldn't even be bothered to show up for debates.  

Donnie doesn't nominate himself.  He gets the support of a lot of people.  It's true that he never won the support of the majority of the voters (despite his protestations to the contrary), but tens of millions of people voted for him.

Have you ever watched even a few minutes of his rallies on TV or youtube?  He's a caricature.  He is, as Biden pointed out, twice, in a presidential debate in 2020, a "clown."  He acts and talks like an idiot (and his mental state is deteriorating before our eyes), his primary method of communicating is lying, conspicuously, he adopts patently ridiculous conspiracy theories, and I interpret these rallies as mutual masturbation: Donnie blathers about various kinds of nonsense until the crowd shows interest, at which point he just repeats what the crowd wants to hear.  And the crowd, if you've ever listened to any of them talk, are completely out in orbit, and would normally be ashamed of themselves and their gross limitations, except Donnie tells them they're not wrong, as the rest of the world has told them, but that they're right.  They shouldn't be ashamed; they should be proud.  Donnie gets his audience off (gives them what they want), and they get him off.

H.L,Mencken said "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."  If Mencken thought the inner soul of Americans is that they're downright morons, Trump's prominence has made it impossible to argue with him.  Well, a minority, true, but not a small minority.

If we come back to 2015 and 2016, we saw that Donnie Trump gave every indication of being a fool, a liar, dishonest, and empty.  He did not earn the support of the majority of the voters, but because of the distortion created by the Electoral College, he won the election.  By 2020, once he proved beyond any doubt that was even worse than he seemed, he got more votes than he did the first time.

The problem is not Trump.  It's the voters, who are stupid and superficial enough to vote for someone like that.  And it doesn't stop there.  Mitch McConnell refused to allow Obama to nominate a Supreme Court Justice when Scalia died, and he claimed his reason was that Joe Biden had offered some similar policy about a divergence between the president's party and the Senate's majority party years before (as if McConnell generally adopts whatever Biden proposes).  McConnell also claimed it would not be fair representation to have a president nominate a SCOTUS hopeful within the last year of the president's term.  So he allowed Trump to nominate Gorsuch, on the flimsiest of theories, in which McConnell himself doesn't even believe, and to nominate Barratt three weeks before Trump's term ended, also inconsistent with McConnell's alleged beliefs.  And McConnell's Senate showed no concern about Kavanaugh's blatant lying, very unstable temper, and overt bias during the hearings.

And it's not even just the voters and the Republican Senate.  Trump can insult his Republican competitors any way he wants, including ad hominem attacks on them and their families, and they fall in line, and suck their thumbs, as soon as he wins, even when they had previously declared him unfit and highly defective, which he certainly is.  The most recent competitor suddenly to see Trump in an entirely different light is Nikki Haley, who had been trying to give the impression she was moderate, and took a very dim view of Trump, until she couldn't uphold the facade any more.

Whenever there are elections, and primaries, there are 1%ers, and others who don't crack single digits of support.  Donnie Trump had all the makings of a loser like that, except he got way too much, and way too inexplicable, support from too many places.  He's done tremendous damage, and his supporters don't seem to care.  Among other things, he told his throng that he believes Putin over US intelligence, and now, Lindsay Graham, who had previously spoken very negatively of Donnie, says he trusts Israel over US intelligence.  It's a very pervasive dumbing down.  And Donnie, even with a minority of the vote, was once elected president despite no relevant experience, persistent and pervasive failure in business, no evidence of morality, total self-focus, lack of family respect or stability, a bumbling and idiotic style of communicating, and inveterate lying.  If you want to know how someone like that gets any support at all from American voters, you can ask Mencken. 

"Veepstakes"

Republican has WORST interview of her career over simple question (youtube.com)

Sen. Marco Rubio won't commit to accepting 2024 election results (nbcnews.com)

What has come to be known as the "Veepstakes" is the contending among some Republicans to be named as Donnie Trump's running mate, presumably.  The choice is either that Trump will very clearly be the Republican nominee, and will need to name a running mate, or that whoever is named as the VP candidate will quickly be elevated if Trump goes to jail.  So, on the surface, it appears various Republicans are trying to impress their daddy, so they can be chosen to sit on his lap.  But there's a curiosity here.

When Donnie ran before, both times, he chose little Mikey Pence to be his best boy.  Donnie and little Mikey won the first time, but they didn't win the second time.  And the question is why Donnie doesn't choose little Mikey again.  There appears to be a reason.

Donnie blames little Mikey for not independently giving him the victory the second time, which Donnie thinks little Mikey had the power to do.  Little Mikey doesn't think he had that power, because he thinks the law required him to declare victory for whoever got the most Electoral College votes.  If there was any question about the vote count, which there was, the matter could have been taken to the courts, which it was.  Sixty or sixty-one times.  Donnie's wish not to have to accept the vote count failed each time.

So, if the question is why Donnie didn't choose little Mikey again, the reason is that little Mikey refused to break the law.  (As hard as it is to think of as an adult a man who calls his wife "mother," it does appear that little Mikey is more mature than is Donnie.  Or if it's not maturity, per se, at least it's respect for the law.)

If we think again about the "Veepstakes," we can now more carefully ask what it is Donnie wants in a Veep candidate.  And what the Veep candidates are willing to deliver.  Whether it's Elise Stefanik, "little Marco" Rubio, or anyone else, it's increasingly clear that what Donnie wants is someone who, unlike little Mikey Pence, is willing to break the law for Donnie.  The links to Stefanik's interview (on Fox!) and about Rubio indicate that at the very least, they're willing to arbitrarily and inexplicably change their minds, and worse than that, to lie.  Those are good indicators for Donnie.  Someone whose "morals" are that flexible is much more likely to call them as Donnie wants them called.

That seems to be what the "Veepstakes" are about.  How sycophantic, and detached from reality, the truth, and the law, are you?  If you have no foundation at all, except blind and unquestioning fealty to Donnie, you're Donnie's boy or girl.  Sure, you have to make a fool of yourself to show how far you're willing to go, but Donnie views that as an asset, not as a liability.  I mean really, how could Donnie complain about someone who makes a fool of him- or herself?

I Disagree With Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

I listened to most of "This American Life" on public radio today, and the whole show was taken up with 9/11 and the people held at Guantanamo.  To make a long story short, most of the people originally held there were frankly not suspected of anything (certainly not charged with anything), and the five remaining inmates are suspects.  They have all been subjected to torture (they're suspects, not convicts), there are legal-like activities going on, but not one of these suspects has been tried.  After these many years, it looks increasingly like none of them will be tried.  They're in solitary confinement, deprived of all Constitutional guarantees, and never even charged.  They're just living out what's left of their lives in indefinite sentences.  And this happens because the Constitution and the rights it guarantees (to you, me, and the rest of us) is set aside, and some parallel, if perverted, form of military law is allowed to take its place.

Even victims' families want justice, including the possibility of plea deals, or anything that could end this endless perversion in a way that befits what this country was supposed to be.  So Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ("KSM"), who is considered a central suspect, and talking about this gross perversion of the "justice" for which this country is supposed to be famous, said he thinks this disturbed process will turn Americans against their own country, and the Constitutional democracy which supposedly characterizes it.  As if we ourselves would adopt the contempt for this country that the 9/11 perpetrators had.  KSM thinks of this as a baton the 9/11 perpetrators have handed to the rest of us.  (It should be noted that one of the unanswered questions in this "This American Life" piece was why the 9/11 perpetrators committed 9/11.  No one knows, and no one is making any effort to find out.)

But turning Americans against the United States was already under way, even before innocent, or even suspected, Arabs were tortured and endlessly incarcerated in Guantanamo.  (We of course take a very public and very dim view of other countries that do what we're doing.  Inventing wars, torture, endless punishment for no confirmed crime...)

We were unabashedly horrible to the Native Americans, whose land, system of management, and lives we took.  Because they were here.  We treated Africans at least as badly.  But we tried, at least in part, to do better.  We've continued to make our mistakes (let our antisocial leanings get manifested), with one not so good president or another, or one disruptive Congress or another.  But we sort of try to recover.  Ideally that should include an open admission of error, but we tend not to do that.

Although we made some breathtakingly boneheaded choices when it came to supporting anyone, no matter how terrible they were, to lead other countries, as long as they said they weren't Communists.

It's hard to tell when things began to deteriorate in a more unretractable way.  LBJ, for whatever social and "Great Society" good he did, prosecuted a Vietnam war he never made a real effort to "win."  Or end.  And he was a very manipulative, if not obnoxious, person.  But the American avalanche wasn't obvious at that point.  It became somewhat clearer with Nixon, who was on the verge of being impeached, because he didn't care about the Constitution.  Although as far as I can tell, he had seemingly significant, if not severe, personal problems, including a dangerous level of paranoia.  But the country, under the reassurance of a Congress that was still functional, pulled together, made it clear to Nixon that his behavior was criminal, and he resigned, because he had the sense and perspective, at least, to know he would be impeached.  By members of both major parties, who cared more about propriety than they did about party.

Ford called an end to this, by pardoning Nixon.  There were many people then, and possibly many people now, who agree that the country should not have been dragged through the mud of a Nixon impeachment.  But there's an increasingly nagging sense that this was a dangerous concession that allowed people not to expect a proper course of action when wrong is done.  Especially when wrong is done by people in power.

Ford's term was otherwise uneventful, if empty and aimless, and Carter was, as best I can tell, the best human being ever to inhabit the White House.  But he was a good and nice guy, and apart from negotiating peace between Egypt and Israel, he doesn't seem to have inspired many people.

And then came Reagan.  For me, this is where things started to fall apart.  Reagan was dishonest and manipulative (money does not "trickle down;" it trickles up, and when you let that happen, and lower taxes, you're going to get a deficit, as we later learned, after Reagan and his sleight of hand were gone), but he was an actor and had ways to charm people.  But he had a slogan: "government is the problem."  I wonder what it would be like if he could have been transported back in time, so he could tell the Revolutionaries, who fought and died to create this country and its generally revered Constitution, and who were in part represented by Benjamin Franklin, who said the Founding Fathers were "giving [us] a republic, if[we] could keep it," that the republic they established was the problem.  They gave us a Constitutional republic, which we spent almost 200 more years improving and perfecting, and Reagan declared that republic to be the problem.  In fact, the whole Republican Party seems to have adopted that view.  Ah, to be a fly on the wall, when they explain to the Founders how completely wrong they got it.

The Clinton years were relatively quiet, with Clinton's trademark cheerleading, and his personal/marital mess, but he replaced the large deficit with which Reagan left us with a surplus.

I still say Reagan was the start of the avalanche, but if anyone thinks he wasn't, then Cheney/W most certainly were.  (Please watch Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11.")  As I said no one really knows what 9/11 was about (if you think you do, then call "This American Life," and tell them; they very much want to know), but it created an opportunity that fell into the laps of Cheney and W.  They totally invented a war against a country that was in way involved, got loads of Iraqis and Americans killed, created nice contracts for Cheney's former company, paralyzed Congress so that few members were willing to point out that the Emperor wasn't wearing any clothes, and got Cheney and W re-elected.  And Cheney and W hit upon a scheme that had never occurred to any other country in the history of civilization: start a war, and lower taxes.  There was nothing rational going on in this country any more.  And of course, the table was set when W got himself elected in the first place by cheating, with the help of his cousin, his brother, and a sympathetic Supreme Court.  Cheating has of course now become the byword of a certain faction, who either cheat to win, or if they don't win, they accuse, with zero evidence, the other side of cheating.

And then came Obama, whose term was feel-good for some (he got elected twice, so I guess a lot of people felt good), but he didn't do what he should have done.  He didn't do a proper job of creating universal health care, or a few other things, because -- and he admits this -- he was trying to be conciliatory to people who were never going to like him no matter what he did.  And although everyone complained about the Cheney/W deficit, which was attributed to Obama from the first day he got into office, he did not raise taxes, as he should have done.  So, whoever wanted to feel good about Obama felt good for as long as they could, while the invented war continued, the deficit grew, and too many Americans still didn't have adequate access to "health care."

Hillary Clinton would probably not have been a great president, but she mishandled her campaign, and thanks to the distortion created by the Electoral College, Trump won, as W had in his first election.  There's a quote from H.L.Mencken that goes "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents more and more closely the inner soul of the people.  On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts' desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."  I would have said that "great and glorious day," which lasted eight years, was the Cheney/W years.  Nope.  It is without any question Trump.  Although most voters didn't want him in 2016, an even higher proportion didn't want him in 2020.  But bizarrely, and unspeakably, he got more votes in 2020, when he had spent four years making unmistakably clear that he was an inveterate liar, a moron, and interested only in himself, than he got in 2016, when he only gave us abundant reason to suspect it.

Biden has been a bit of a mess, doing some things right (mostly reversing some of Trump's policies) and way too many things wrong.  His biggest asset is that he's not Trump.  Helluva resume.

So, as I said, I think KSM was giving 9/11 too much credit for turning Americans against America.  We had already abandoned our spirit and our mission, and we've given ourselves many more, and more glaring, reasons to take an increasingly dim view of ourselves.  Reagan and Republicans are very direct about it: "[American] government is the problem."  (I really do wish I could hear them explain that to Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and many others.  I know people who won't eat beef or pork, but they'll eat fish and fowl.  I say the same thing to them: I want to be there when they explain to the fish and the chickens why cows and pigs are meat, and they -- the fish and chickens -- aren't.  I want to know how convincing that sounds.)

Oh, Just Like SERMO.

As you know very well, I spend a lot of my time going to cultural events.  I went to one two days ago, four days ago, and five days ago.  The weekend before that, I went to one Saturday, Friday, and Thursday.  The Thursday one was "The Moth."  If you listen to public radio, you know all about "The Moth."  It's story telling.  You can sign up to tell a story about the topic identified in advance, there's a time limit, the story has to be true, and it has to be "your story" (about you).  The topic resonated, and I told a story.  I didn't win, but I made some nice friends.  One -- the woman who did win -- was a writer who had told "Moth" stories several times before, this was her first time winning, and she gave me some tips.

Anyway, the story I told was about my experience with a doctor's website called SERMO, the people who involve themselves in it (by writing posts or commenting on other people's posts), and specifically, a woman (as it turned out) I met on SERMO.  (I've met a few people on SERMO.  Some are local.  One became a patient.  Now, his wife is.)  Most people use aliases, so you can't tell anything about them (gender, where -- in the world -- they live, or anything).  You just read what they write, even if it's a comment to someone else's post, and at least you get an idea if their comments are intelligent.  (If you suppose doctors' comments are all intelligent, you're badly kidding yourself.)

Once it became clear that most SERMO members used aliases, and wrote stupid comments, I wrote a post about why SERMO members -- medical doctors -- would hide behind aliases.  And that post got more comments than any other post I ever wrote.  One doctor made the most important comment of all: s/he said that if s/he had to use her or his real name, s/he wouldn't leave a comment.  This commenter wouldn't go public if anyone could know who s/he really was.  S/he was hiding behind an alias in order to say things s/he wouldn't publicly say if s/he could be identified.  I replied to this comment, and I said that if this doctor would be too embarrassed or ashamed to make a comment if s/he could be identified, then s/he shouldn't make the comment at all.

Well, if you're wondering if I ever, even once, got a proposed blog comment from "Anonymous," now that we're in the new regime where I get to monitor all comments in advance, and won't publish one from someone who is unacceptably anonymous, no, I did not.  If "Anonymous" can't be anonymous, then s/he doesn't want to run her or his mouth.  It's just like SERMO.  It's the same stupid garbage cracks, made only on condition that the child who makes them doesn't have to take responsibility.

I take responsibility.  You know who I am.  You probably know me.  You might well know precisely where I live.  You can agree with me, disagree with me, think I'm an idiot, or whatever you want.  That's the risk I take, the risk I'm willing to take, and the risk I owe you, if I want to express my opinion about something.  If I'm not willing to take that risk, then I have to keep my opinions to myself.  And when "Anonymous" found out the risk-free party was over, s/he realized that she or he had to keep her or his opinions to her- or himself.   Works for me.

Now, to be entirely fair to "Anonymous," one of my BP friends told me yesterday he actually sort of misses the idiotic circus of "Anonymous'" dumb cracks.  He wanted to know if I had, in fact, any idea who "Anonymous" is.  No, I don't.  Nor do I care, now that I, this blog, and you, are relieved of the nonsense, weirdly entertaining as it may have been for the occasional BPer.

It Would Be An Easier Argument If It Was Just About the General Public.

Some/several months ago, I published a post about the "Second Amendment."  The post was simple and straightforward, and I showed that 1) the "Second Amendment" has nothing to do with guns in civilian hands (it's about the security of the states and the federal government, as effected by militias), and 2) that the "Second Amendment" was indirectly and informally repealed a long time ago, when we made illegal for civilian possession almost all the "Arms" that would be necessary for a civilian to be an effective member of a militia.  (I'm setting aside that in the modern United States, we do not tolerate militias -- so the whole concept has become spurious -- and we have defeated every one that has arisen).  As I said, that argument, was simple and straightforward.  If I was "tech savvy" enough, I would offer this paper again as a link, but since I'm not tech savvy, I don't know how to do that.  What I did before was copy and paste a 17 page paper I wrote some years ago, and I'm not going to do that to you again.  The bottom line is that in modern American life, and according to modern American laws, there is no more "Second Amendment," and civilians should really stop inventing the idea that there is one, and that it allows them to "keep and bear Arms."

But there's another class of Americans who carry guns openly in public, and it turns out there are very big problems with this practice, too.  I'm talking here about the police.

You won't watch many videos of police responding to calls before you quickly realize they're VERY hopped up on their own anxiety, presumed or imagined need to control situations, and tendency to address many situations by trying to overpower whoever else is involved in the situation.  I'm afraid the saying "shoot first, and ask questions later" was way too often never truer than it is with the police.

And to be bizarrely "fair" to the police, they don't only shoot people.  They didn't shoot Errol Garner or George Floyd.  Frankly, they didn't have to.  Both were handcuffed, despite having done little wrong, and in both cases, police officers simply choked them to death by kneeling on their necks, while the victims pleaded that they couldn't breathe.  It appears that the police tune out complaints like that.

But they do shoot way more than their share of innocent people.  They shot and killed Philando Castile, who was trying to de-escalate an obviously escalating police officer.  They shot that woman who was sleeping in her bed.  And they shot Roger Fortson, a young African American armed forces veteran who was doing nothing wrong.  Do Not Let Media Ignore the Tragic Police Killing of U.S. Airman Roger Fortson (substack.com)

Sometimes, the police get so hopped up that they go to wrong addresses.  The case of Philando Castile's murder was tragically not unique, in the sense that the cop who killed him claimed as a defense that he had not had enough "training."  Not enough training for what?  Not to murder innocent civilians?  Not to murder African Americans?  Not to murder people with a tail light out, and who are trying to reassure you and cooperate in every possible way?  And these cops, who don't have enough training to know how to manage in a respectful and adaptive way whatever situation they think they're in, and to make sure they have the right address, and not to murder civilians, carry guns?

I remember when I was young, and it was always said that British police -- "bobbies" -- didn't carry guns.  I think they do now, because I read some of the same tragic stories of their killing innocent people.

But it would be a wonderful and very civilized (what a word, huh?) thing if no one carried a gun.  We could leave the phenomenon of being gun-toting in the most specialized hands, with properly trained and supervised people who are called upon in the most unique circumstances.

The fact is that Americans can't handle access to guns.  Watch Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine."  Read about Kristi Noem (she adopted a dog that was said to have had behavior problems or aggression, then killed it because it had behavior problems and aggression; and the voters of South Dakota elected this thing Governor?).  It's just not a good idea, and it doesn't work out well.  You know what's the commonest outcome of gun ownership in this country?  Nothing.   The gun stays stowed away, and no one touches it.  So why have it?  So a kid can find it?  Or it can get stolen, and wind up on the street in some crime?  Gun are, by the way, the commonest cause of death in minors and in suicides.  For which of those kinds of deaths do we want to advocate?

I live here with you in BP.  I'm going to make a request of you.  If you have a gun, please turn it in to the BP police, and ask them to destroy it for you.  It's better for you, better for your family, better for me, and better for everyone.

If This Is What You've Been Trying For, "Anonymous," Congratulations.

I have finally changed the "Comments" setting on this blog.  All proposed comments come to me first.  I can approve publication of them, or not.

Any comment signed "Anonymous" will not be published, unless I get a separate e-mail from the author of it, letting me know who the author is, and giving me a very good reason that that person should be left unnamed.  I doubt anything will persuade me, but I'm leaving that door open.

Proposed comments will be entered on the blog, by the prospective author, as if they were to be published on the blog.  But blogspot has my e-mail address, and will route it to me for approval first.

I would say you really do need help, "Anonymous," but I doubt you're helpable*.  I think the best possibility is that you're no longer the problem of readers of this blog.  You're your own problem, and the problem of anyone burdened with the possibility of being your family.

*Do you know the joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a lightbulb?  Only one, but the lightbulb has to want to change.  You are very clearly not looking to change.

Good News. And Bad News.

I have heard (not from the child who calls him- or herself "Anonymous," but from an actual source) that Luis Cabrera is on a time-out or something.  It was not clear to me if he is on a suspension or has been fired.  I didn't ask.

I like Luis personally.  He's a friendly guy.  He's also somewhat shifty, and I have a clear sense that he's controlling and manipulative.  And worse than that, for as many years as he's been the police Chief, he has refused to deploy our officers to provide constant patrolling on 6th Avenue.  This failure has cost a number of people quite a bit, including some people their lives.  So, Luis is out, at least for a while?  Good.  Luis had a career with the County or the City of Miami, has a nice pension, and was using us to juice his lifestyle.  I am not concerned about Luis, certainly not any more than he is concerned about the people who live, walk, and drive in BP.  Maybe someone else will do what Luis couldn't be bothered to do.  It's good news for us that someone else is in that position, and better news for us if they actually do the right job.

I was out walking this morning, and when I got to Griffing and 115th, one of our unmarked SUV-type cruisers had stopped someone.  I got to the car to make sure the driver was OK, and not injured.  Yes, she was OK, and no, she was not injured.  If you want to know what race she was, "I'll wait," as the late Gilbert Gottfried used to say, or "Take all the time you need with that," as Brian Tyler Cohen now says.  I don't know what she did.  Maybe something, or maybe nothing.  But she didn't seem afraid or angry, and since she said she was OK, I kept walking.  I waved at the officer, too, but the glass being tinted as dark as it was (you know, illegal, as you and I are not allowed to have our car glass tinted), I couldn't tell if he or she saw me or waved back.

And when I crossed 6th Avenue, it was clearly still not being patrolled.

So, the good news is that Luis, who assigns officers, and doesn't assign them to do the main job we need them to do, is not in place.  The bad news is that neither did the manager tell Luis, or his replacement, to do this essential job, nor did Luis' replacement think of it him- or herself.

We can't win for losing.

I Still Don't Understand "Libertarians."

Yesterday, I was walking in the neighborhood, and I encountered one of our neighbors whom I know.  I have a friendly relationship with him, and I like him, and he and his wife have been here for some time and are friendly with other BP residents I know and like.  I don't know him well, but enough that he and I recognize each other, greet each other, and enjoy talking together, for the short intervals that present themselves.

The last time I saw him, he happened to mention that his sociopolitical leanings and identification are "Libertarian."  I tried to keep it in mind to stop by his house one day, to ask more about this, but I got busy.  I never got around to it until we encountered each other yesterday.  I told him I wanted to ask him at some point about Libertarians (by which I intended to mean he and I should meet up some time -- over coffee, wine, dinner, or whatever --- but we wound up having a substantial piece of our conversation right there.  I ran out of time to finish my walk, because I had appointments, and he continued on with his.  But we talked about a number of things, and he took my e-mail address to send me some things he thought I might be interested to consider.  He's opposed to the government, and especially to agencies whose initials are three letters, as he put it.  He dislikes the FDA more than most or all.  We got to talking about COVID, which he believes is not real, and he asked me what I thought of ivermectin as a treatment (for a condition he doesn't think is real anyway?).  I'm not in favor, but he mentioned studies that have been done.  We talked about other drug studies, and I told him that meta-analyses have special value.  He said he would send me an e-mail about a meta-analysis of ivermectin. 

I really do like this guy.  I appreciate him, and I respect his opinions.  As he and I said, that doesn't mean we have to agree with each other.  So he did, in fact, send me several e-mails that came from youtube.  They were about various things.

So, back to libertarians.  As I said, I don't really understand their theory.  I told that to my friend, and he explained it as he himself understood it.  I know libertarians are generally opposed to the government, and that they caucus with Republicans.  This is a curiosity, because Republicans, who say they, too, are opposed to the government, are really in favor of very big government.  They like a government that can tell you if you have to have children, whom you can marry, who can vote, who can't live in this country (now that they live here), and they invent the idea that Americans are free to own guns.  They want a government big enough to invent that idea.  They want a government that likes to execute Americans, often under extremely questionable circumstances.  My friend and I were standing in the street, pausing our neighborhood walks, which were in different directions, so we didn't get a chance to talk about these areas.

But my friend did say that libertarians do not think the government should make the rules it does.  I asked him if that would mean, for example, that people should not have to honor setbacks when they build on their properties.  This, according to my friend, would be an exception.  Oh, so it's a matter of degree.  I wonder who Libertarians think should decide which issues are exceptions.  The same, apparently, is true of speed limits, traffic lights, and STOP signs.  Yes, of course someone -- the government -- has to make those assessments and rules.

But not necessarily many more.  According to my friend, the government should not control health and safety aspects regarding private businesses.  For example, according to my friend, suppose he wants to open a restaurant.  The public can choose if they like the meals he serves.  And if they don't, they don't have to come back.  But I asked what if it's not that they don't like the taste of the food, or if they get a stomach ache -- an example my friend gave of a reason not to choose to come back.  What if his restaurant is unsanitary enough that patrons die?  It will be little comfort to the survivors and family of diners who died just not to eat there any more.  (We were getting into the dreaded FDA territory.)

I also explained that the public -- consumers -- cannot evaluate the "health care" system, because they are not trained to know enough about it.  I agreed that the system we use, which includes the FDA and CDC, is imperfect, but it's better than no system, or pretending to educate yourself by watching TV advertising, or looking things up online, and if we took out the private money that corrupts politics, we'd have a good system.

It was a few hours later that I received some e-mailed videos.  I watched about three or four of them, which was almost all of them.  One was an Australian woman who had been a conventional medical doctor for about 20 years, until she traded in her medical career for a youtube channel, and was explaining that polio is not caused by a virus, but by DDT, and the whole polio virus scam was the product of the Rockefellers.  She showed graphed timelines.  She said everything the Rockefellers, and the American health care industry, said was wrong.  It was all lies.  But she seemed to be confusing viruses with bacteria, and dismissed the idea of a virus as the cause of polio because you can't see viruses.  (True.  They're extremely small, and require an electron microscope to be seen.  So, since they're hard to see, and are not bacteria, which are also too small to be seen without a microscope, then they can't cause illness?)  It turns out that this woman, and featured people in the other videos, were all conspiracy theorists.  As is always the case, they counter commonly accepted beliefs with something else.  You either believe them -- about polio really being caused by DDT, or HIV not really being the cause of AIDS (that was another video) -- or you don't.  The guy who won a Nobel Prize for possibly/reportedly discovering polymerase chain reaction, and who believed in astrology and the paranormal, but who didn't believe HIV caused AIDS, and who used his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to complain that his girlfriend broke up with him, was another video.  And then, there was a British guy, who talked like he might have been a medical doctor, and who presented the promised meta-analysis about ivermectin.  Actually, he sort of presented three or four of them.  The one on which he spent the most time had a lot of flaws in it, and he wasn't sure how valid it was.  Another was dismissed as "rubbish."  Two others, from the NIH and WHO (right, two organizations, one from the US government, that have three letter initials) took a very dim view.

So, the question still is what fuels the Libertarian movement.  Mistrust of government, for sure.  And frankly, I don't disagree, in large part.  As I told our neighbor, the problem with government is that electeds get bought off with lobbying and campaign contributions, and their constituents are the donors, not the public.  But once you dismiss the government, what do you have left?  People who run for office campaign (not in BP any more, but generally).  You can know about them.  They find themselves in debates with other people, and you can judge who comes across better, and makes more sense.  But for the tiny sample of Libertarians I know (one), that gets displaced by people who are either unknown, or they're one or another form of crackpot.  And of course, the endless world of conspiracy theories.

I think I lost an acquaintance/friend yesterday in an unrelated discussion.  He is enraged at Hamas, because of a video he sent me talking about Hamas' shocking sexual and physical abuse, and mutilation and murder, of Israeli women starting on October 7, and it's perfectly fine with him if all Palestinians are annihilated.  The video was very disturbing, although not for the reason you might think.  The video was centered on a woman who was the moderator, and she was interviewing a number of Israelis, some of whom were women who themselves had been abused on or after October 7, and some of whom were a version of first responders.  The degree of composure was beyond creepy.  And at one point, one of the first responder-type men showed the moderator photographs taken on his phone, of Israeli women mutilated and murdered in various ways.  (He took photographs?)  The moderator, still largely disturbingly composed, said "oh, my 'god'" a couple of times.  But the photographs were never shown on camera to people watching this documentary.  The guy who reportedly took the photographs saw them.  The moderator saw them.  Why not show them to the people you want to inform, influence, recruit?  When I told my apparently former acquaintance/friend that the documentary looked staged, he became enraged, and said he never again wanted to talk to me about this.  He dismissed me as "delusional."  (Interestingly, toward the end of the video -- it's possible my erstwhile friend missed this -- they said that 1) over 100 hostages held by Hamas were released at the end of November, during a ceasefire, and 2) that according to the women who told their stories in this documentary, the women who were not released were more mistreated than the ones who were released.  My erstwhile friend asked me what I would do.  I said that if I could get back over 100 hostages by having a ceasefire, and if I should worry even more about the hostages I didn't get back, and if my real goal wasn't simply to annihilate all Palestinians, and if I didn't want to sacrifice any more hostages, I would have extended the ceasefire, or immediately begun another one, or have one now.  He didn't respond.)

It's not a lot different, it seems, about things like Libertarianism, or the MAGA cult.  You attach yourself to something fringy and fragile, and disqualify everything else.