12 Weeks?

The joke goes like this: A dashing and well-dressed man walks into a bar, and he approaches a gorgeous woman having a drink.  He makes some conversation, and then says he'd like to ask her a question.  "Yes?," she replies.  He asks her if she would have sex with him for $1M.  She looks him up and down, thinks about their conversation, and about him and his presentation, and says she would.  He then asks her if she would have sex with him for $20.  "What kind of woman do you think I am?" she rhetorically and indignantly asks, with great offense and disgust.  The man responds "We've already determined that.  We're just haggling over the price."

Today, the legislature in NC passed a law limiting abortion to not later than 12 weeks.  In Florida, it's six weeks.  Some jurisdictions permit abortion for women who were raped, or for their health.  But whichever of these exceptions applies, the fact is that the jurisdictions permit abortion.  They might be haggling over the developmental moment in the pregnancy, or the conditions under which the pregnancy occurred, or what the pregnancy might cost the pregnant woman, but they've already determined that they permit abortion.

The facts are that women who want abortions didn't want to be pregnant, and did whatever they thought they should do to prevent pregnancy.  No one is opposed to the idea that women shouldn't become pregnant every time they're fertile.  And 93% of abortions occur within the first trimester (about 14 weeks), and six percent more (up to 99% altogether) by 20 weeks.  So, what's this 12 week game?

There are two reasons that some people are opposed to abortion.  One is that their entirely personal religious beliefs lead them to conclude that "god" does not approve of abortion.  (It's never clear how they know this.  Because they think "god" wants people to "be fruitful and multiply?"  Then aren't they similarly required to have one or two dozen children, or as many as they can crank out?)  And to adopt a limitation like that, and apply it to people who might very well not share those entirely personal religious beliefs, rejects the Constitutional "separation of church and state."  Oddly enough, the people who oppose abortion, on the basis of their entirely personal religious beliefs, also generally claim to be devotees of the Constitution, and its "original" intent.  (We can get clues to what it intends by reading what it says.)  The nice way to point that out is that it's inconsistent.  The not nice way is that it's hypocritical.  And some of the "gods" are big fans of "smiting" evil-doers.  If the religious among us believe in "original sin," then aren't fetuses evil-doers?  Especially if they imposed themselves where no one wanted them, and all parties involved tried to prevent their existence.

The other reason many of these people give is that they consider themselves "pro-life."  Except they're also generally supportive of capital punishment, and of guns in civilian and all police hands.  In the UK, few police officers have guns, and they have to be specially trained in order to have them.  In France, right now(!), one gendarme has been fired because he killed a 17 year old boy who was driving slowly when police told him to stop.  Real countries aren't gun-happy, like we are.  So, again, these Americans are either inconsistent, or they're hypocrites.

The fact, of course, is that if 93% of abortions occur by about 14 weeks, then the sizable majority of those most likely occur by 12 weeks.  So, the legislature of NC has most likely accomplished as near to nothing as possible.  The good thing that can be said for them is that they're not as cruel and sadistic as states like Florida, or states that (for the moment) have banned abortion altogether.

What's additionally interesting here is that the SCOTUS disqualified Roe vs Wade last year, and the blowback, in terms of lost elections for Republicans, has been fierce.  They spat into the wind, and they got the expected result (in that the sizable majority of American citizens want abortion access preserved.)  And they're still at it -- still spitting into the wind.

It Takes a Little More Thinking Through Than That.

So, the SCOTUS has dispensed with college admissions that take into account race.  My e-mailbox is bursting with complaints about this decision.  (And there's one request after another for money, somehow, presumably, if inexplicably, to challenge it.)

Looked at in a certain way, the SCOTUS was right.  It would be a wonderful and large step forward if everything, including college admissions, was "colorblind."  But there are two problems.

First, the people who complain now about advantage given to "minorities" didn't make a peep when those same minorities were placed at very firm disadvantage.  And every advantage was given to the majority.  Even in my lifetime, there were "quotas" for minority admissions, and those quotas were not generous.  So the complainers are being hypocritical in complaining.  We've spent centuries in this country sending a loud and clear message to minorities that their "place" is not in college.  Or at least not a good one.  Which certainly doesn't mean that no minority person ever had great success, including success in getting admitted to college.  Some of them do.  And what minority (especially African-American) people say is that they have to work twice as hard to achieve half as much.  From what I've seen, I don't doubt them for an instant.

But second, and really more important, is that the minorities who are no longer given extra consideration for things like college admission are highly disadvantaged in many (and preceding) ways that would prevent them from being adequately prepared to be competitive (or at least successful) applicants.  And no one is advocating doing anything about those disadvantages.

The list of those preserved disadvantages is long.  Minorities of various kinds are paid less than majority populations.  So the parents of imagined future college students are not as well positioned to provide adequately enough for their families, including their children.  Minority pregnant women have less chance to be mothers, because they are not treated as well (Why do so many Black women die in pregnancy? One reason: Doctors don't take them seriously (msn.com).  Minorities are herded into municipalities and sectors which are not supported as well as are sometimes nearby areas that are majority inhabited.  I've written before about two cases that have been in the news about African-Americans whose houses (for sale) were dramatically undervalued until they have Causasian friends pose as the homeowners/sellers.  So, had they not relied on their Caucasian friends, they would have walked away from their old homes with far less money to buy a new one, which would have been nicer, and in a better neighborhood.  Minorities are charged more for loans, like mortgages, making it again harder to support families.  Projects that include taking property by eminent domain are commonly targeted at minority inhabited areas, so life and living are not only less supported, but also less stable.  The same is true of establishment of landfills, toxic dumping, and other activities that make life more difficult, and less healthy.

The result of this kind of activity, which is sometimes subtle and hard to detect Jim Crow pressure, makes life as students more challenging and less successful.  So, even if we tried to treat all college applicants equally when they apply, they're already unequal for the 17 years before they apply.  And the inequality is not an advantage to them.

So, I think in spirit, it would be great if we could make the same general assumptions about all college applicants.  But we can't.  And a ruling like today's SCOTUS denial simply applies yet a further disadvantage to people who are already at a disadvantage.  In fact, they're at lots of them.  They don't even have the advantage of telling themselves, as we always claim we in this country tell ourselves, that any opportunity is available to anyone.  It isn't.

Nothing to Be Proud Of.

Apparently, June is "Pride Month" in this country.  It's a month when people who are either homosexual or "non-binary" express their "pride" regarding their sexual preference or sexual identity.

It's a longer conversation, but to make that longer story short, I do not believe in transsexuality or the transsexual movement.  I don't bother to express an opinion about it regarding adults, because they're adults, and they can do as they wish, whether or not it is rational.  But I do object to the imaginary concept of transsexualism being acted out on minors.  As I said, we're not going to have that conversation right now, unless you comment about it, and what to discuss it.

But I have no issue at all with homosexuality.  It is a completely "normal" variant of human sexuality, it is not a reflection of any other problem, like psychopathology, and anyone who tells themselves that homosexual people groom or prey on other people are simply wrong.  Do homosexual people ever commit sexual-related crimes?  Yes, they do.  But not nearly as much as do heterosexual people.

The issue, though, is "Pride Month."  Homosexual people have been badly treated in this country, for no other reason than their sexual preference, and whoever treated them badly, or continues to treat them badly, has serious issues of his or her own, and ought to knock it off.  (And probably get help.)  Caring if someone is homosexual is as ridiculous as caring what gender they are, what race they are, what religion they follow, or any other completely irrelevant issue.

But why, apart from relief, or feeling less ashamed, do homosexual people want a "Pride Month," or to celebrate it?  I myself am heterosexual.  I don't need a month set aside to celebrate that fact, or parade in the streets.  Of course I realize I have never been disadvantaged for being heterosexual, but still, the cure for being disadvantaged is no longer being disadvantaged.  It's not the establishment of a commemorative month.  Or a parade.  ("Black History Month" most certainly hasn't stopped black people from being mistreated.)

But like everything else in this country, "Pride Month" is now a business.  It has been monetized.  The emblem is rainbows, and places that want to profit from "Pride Month" want to sell things with rainbows.  It's not uncommon that what they want to sell is clothes.  Those clothes, to allow as many middlemen as possible, are sold in stores.  Or the rainbow is emblazoned on something.

So, places like Target, and consumer goods like Bud Light, get in on the ($) deal.  Their aim is to be inclusive, but more than that, to sell stuff.  What they also wind up doing is attracting the ire of people who, for whatever reasons, object to "Pride Month."  With enough pressure and pushback from these objectors, Target and Bud Light withdraw their offerings.

"Pride Month" offends some heterosexuals, and the withdrawal of the celebratory gestures offends some homosexuals.  Target, and Bud Light, stand to lose business either way.

And this is all over nothing.  There is nothing wrong with homosexuality, "Pride Month" is unnecessary, and objecting to it, and boycotting sales and vendors, is petty and ridiculous.  But the objections have caused problems for Target, Bud Light, and possibly other vendors.

What a dumb mess.

"The Inane Bullshit That is Corporate Media?"

Let me start with some steps back.  It was last year that I started seeing on my commonest homepage (msn.com) repeated reports that Aldi was either going out of business, or closing all of its US stores.  And according to the reports, this was going to happen by the end of 2022.  Well, no, there's absolutely no evidence of weakness, and that's where I shop.  As best I can tell, I have a lot of company.

Similarly, when Russia began its assault on the Ukraine, there were various stories about Putin, and how he was either demented, otherwise ill, or something, and there were coup plots in the works against him, and one report said he had three months to live.  Also last year.  Um, no.

If we go way, way back, we can remember how the W administration lied and scammed the public, and Congress(!), into believing Iraq had WMD (and had anything remotely to do with 9/11), and the media didn't adequately fact check this.  Much more recently, George Santos got himself elected to the US House of Representatives by telling lie after lie, also not fact checked by the media.

Right now, there's repeated polling of someone regarding which Republican candidate has their confidence for the presidential election a year and a half from now.  Donnie Trump is sinking faster and faster in every way, except in these polls, where he reportedly maintains an overpowering advantage over the second most supported candidate (Ronnie DeSantis), and the others are straggling.  Trump, by the way, was very low in the pack in 2015 or 2016, too, but he became the nominee.  So, either a lot of people changed their minds, or the polling was wrong.  Or the reports were wrong.

I've sort of given up trying to find reliable news anywhere.  Except NPR.  Or I had given up.  And then came The Lever.  And The Intercept.  These are online sources, and I consider them very highly reliable.  I will admit that they both seem, in what they report and how they report it, to be left wing, but I do not see this as evidence of bias.  First of all, both of them, and particularly The Lever, are essentially very hard on Joe Biden, and, to a lesser extent, Pete Buttigieg, and second, I think a left slant is correct.  It represents both reality and what the public wants.  If a right slant was correct, the right wouldn't be working so hard, bending and breaking so many rules, gerrymandering in the most tortured ways, spending so much money, and corrupting the system to impose on the public what the public doesn't want.  People would just see the fundamental truth of the right's positions, and give them lots of support.  You don't need me to remind you that Reagan's "voodoo" "Reaganomics" was nonsense, that W sort of squeaked out a victory with a minority of the popular vote, and only because his Florida governor brother and a sympathetic Supreme Court stopped the vote-counting before W lost, and that Trump lost the popular vote both times he ran.  Americans simply don't want to buy what the right is selling.

The Lever (they're funded by the public -- their listeners -- and I donate to them) has a written column every day or most days, and it has interviews and "podcasts" once or twice a week.  Today is one of those "podcast" days.  In the introduction to the "podcast" (I don't actually know what the term "podcast" means, or why they call interviews "podcasts"), the founder of The Lever, David Sirota, is getting ready to interview someone named Boots Riley, and he used the term that is the title of this post.

"Corporate media" did not, in my memory of it, always produce "inane bullshit."  But it does now.  No one would ever have said that about Walter Cronkite, or Peter Jennings, or any of many of them.  Frankly, apart from sources like The Lever and The Intercept, I wouldn't know where to go for news that's reliably true, unless I just assumed that all left-seeming wing sources are more than likely reliably true.  But if it was that pure and simple, Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon wouldn't get kicked off of MSNBC.

So, I don't know what to tell you.  If you're content with your partisan "news," I guess you'll stick with it.  (Is Rush Limbaugh even still alive?  I think Alex Jones has been booted.  Roger Ailes was kicked out, then died, and little Tuckie-boy Carlson was also booted.  What a trouble it is when you tell so many lies that you cost your employer hundreds of millions of dollars.)  On the other side, I think people are still more or less content with Rachel Maddow, although I find her style very annoying, and I can picture the rest of the left wing crowd, although I don't watch them.  I couldn't name them.

I Hope You (Fathers) Have a Happy Fathers' Day

I have theories about parenting.  A lot of people do.  But I have to actualize my theories.  There are two groups of people to whom my theories about parenting are important.  Those are my offspring and my patients.  If you're not my offspring, and you're not my patient, then you don't have to care what I think about parenting.

Both my offspring and my patients have heard my theories about parenting many times.  And here's my theory:  It is the job of children, from as soon as they're old enough to start doing their job, to become capable and independent, including independent of their parents.  It is the job of parents to permit, and even encourage, capacity and independence, including independence from parents, in their offspring .

Parents provide support and encouragement, and they set an example.  Parents who are doing their jobs as parents do not dominate or control, or leave their children with the impression that the children know nothing, and can't do anything, and only their parents are reliable.

This means that parents encourage their children to think through situations, consider various angles, and make their own decisions.  Parents permit, and even encourage, if reluctantly and with apprehension, their children to do things the parents wouldn't do.  They tolerate mistakes their children make, knowing, or even just assuming, that children will learn from their mistakes, just as the parents learned from theirs.  Parents watch children make mistakes the parents already made, and wouldn't make again, because children making, and learning from, their own mistakes is worth vastly more than relying on parents to tell them what to do.

And I tell parents, and "children" (most of whom are adults), that if they have no other way to think about this, they should realize that if everyone gets his and her wish, the offspring will outlive their parents.  If offspring are not capable and independent by then (when they're in their 40s, 50s, 60s, or maybe even 70s), they're in very deep trouble when their parents die.

The conspicuous, and legendary, times when children declare their independence are times like "the terrible twos," when two year olds rebel, refuse, and say no, and adolescence.  (This most definitely includes hearing from one's children that they hate their parents, who are the worst parents in the world, and certainly worse than their friends' parents.)  But children spend their childhoods (if we're good parents) establishing themselves and their autonomy, and figuring out what works best for them.    It's certainly not necessary to want, or hope, that children go in directions that are different from the directions their parents took, but inclinations and decisions like these should be welcomed and supported by the parents.  Sometimes, children's/offsprings' decisions to follow in the footsteps of one or another parent, in the same profession, and the same office/practice/firm, can appear adaptive and successful, but can camouflage a failure to be independent.  This can work, if it gives the adult offspring at least a fiscal basis for independence, but there's an unfulfilled component about it.

My offspring are very capable, and very independent, including independent of me.  So, I'm quite satisfied, and I pat myself on the back for having raised them the way I think they should be raised.  They don't need me, and they shouldn't.  (One will be 43 in two months, and the other is 40 1/2.  And the younger one is married and has two children of her own.)

I have said to my offspring, I say to my patients, and I will say to you, the day one's parents die should be a sad day.  It should not be a tragedy.  If it is, the parents failed.

So, I hope you succeeded, and if you did, and you're a father, Happy Father's Day.

Well, Doesn't the Beat Just Go On. (Rhetorical. Not a Question.)

It was years ago that then Commissioner Bob Anderson took Chuck Ross and me on some "field trips" in the Village.  One was to the not yet redone Public Works yard.  On that yard, in addition to lots of debris, was a garbage truck that no longer worked.  We had two others, one of which worked intermittently, and the other of which "worked" all the time.  They were old, they needed repairs we couldn't afford, and the one that "worked" all the time also constantly leaked stinking garbage fluid all over the streets.  That's when we ran our own solid waste collection and removal program, that "worked" well for some people (especially the Village residents who tipped and gave presents to the Village's sanitation PW employees), and not as well for other people.  Our first professional manager, Frank Spence, who started with us in 2006, had neither the devotion (he was worried about his elderly mother, and he spent more time with her than he did at work with us, and he already planned to move to the Pacific northwest to be near his ex-wife and children after his mother died) nor the patience or bandwidth to deal with the solid waste issue.

But our second manager, Ana Garcia, did, and she got to work.  We were overstaffed, including with people whose job descriptions were hard to identify, and she began paring.  Or chopping.  Ana did Village finances and the functioning of the sanitation part of PW some big favors.  The employees who were made redundant no doubt didn't appreciate it, but Village functioning, and taxpayers, did.

Our third manager, Heidi Shafran/Siegel, took the deep breath, and lifted us out of a situation that was marginal, at the very, very best.  She encouraged us to outsource the whole function, which the Commission did in 2014.  We had a non-Commissioner committee of Village residents to review possible contractors, and the Commission visited with the front-runner (WastePro), and we pulled the trigger.  WastePro offered all of our PW sanitation workers full time jobs, as we insisted they do, for more money than we were paying them, and not one of them agreed to work for WastePro.  We ended our program, so the majority of them were no longer working for us, and I have no idea what they decided to do instead.  But that wasn't our problem.  We gave them the best opportunity we could, and better than they had here, and they weren't interested.  OK, none of our business.  We sold our trucks, and replaced our program with a much more efficient one, that had trucks on our roads fewer days of the week than we did, and it cost homeowners/taxpayers less than our in-house program.  Were there people who complained?  Are there ever not?  Certainly the people who had gotten special treatment in exchange for tips and gifts complained.  But that wasn't our problem, either.

Our contract with WastePro eventually expired, and we went month-to-month at gradually and modestly increasing rates with them, because the Commission changed, and it was the nuclear explosion known as Tracy Truppman, and we no longer had competent management (Tracy fired whoever was competent, and whom she herself hadn't chosen), so we sort of limped.  But we were still getting our normal service from WastePro.  But then, we got another new Commission, we could finally make an attempt at rational functioning, and we could turn our attention to solid waste collection and removal, and WastePro, about which some Village residents were still complaining (whining?).

The then Commission, with or without the participation of whichever incompetent "interim" manager we had then, decided to switch to a different contractor.  They chose Great Waste, which is our contractor now.

Great Waste (both "great" and "waste" turn out to be interesting words here) quoted us a fee far higher than we were paying WastePro.  But "the times [and the economy], they were a-changing," and WastePro, which also bid to continue to serve us, also quoted us a much higher fee than we had been paying them.  I was not part of the Commission then, and I don't know whether with a nudge and a wink, we could have kept on with the month-to-month cheaper arrangement.  But we didn't, and we switched to Great Waste, and that's where we are now.

Well, you know, nothing is ever perfect, and some people will always have something to complain about, so we had our in-house issues, WastePro had its issues, and Great Waste has its issues (apart from the cost).  The one about which I had been hearing, and experiencing, is that for some unimaginable reason, the guys who work the Great Waste trucks roll garbage cans up to a few houses away from where they belong, and they leave them there.  So, some people wonder why there's a garbage can in front of their house, and it's not theirs, and other people wonder what happened to their garbage can.  Once you realize this is happening, you learn to check with your neighbors to find out who's missing a garbage can (the one that's now in front of your house, but it's not yours), or who has yours.

And then -- and this is sort of the main reason for this post, frankly! -- there's yesterday.  Yesterday was Tuesday, I live east of 9th Avenue, so Tuesday is my yard waste pick-up day.  Monday afternoon, I put out a pile of thin branches and palm fronds, and two containers of leaves.  My immediate nextdoor neighbor and I use the same small patch of swale for our yard waste.  I don't think he had any yesterday.  So, there was a pile, and two containers.  The Great Waste guys came by, emptied the two containers into the truck, and didn't touch the pile of thin branches.  Nor a similar-looking pile across the street.  This is a problem, because there is no reason to think those piles won't sit there for a week, and get added to next week, and no one wants a pile of yard waste on the swale/street for a week. So, I sent an e-mail to our Commissioners, asking them to get this resolved.  (It's also worth noting that yesterday was the last day of work here for Mario Diaz, who in my opinion, was a terrible manager, and who, as a parting shot to the Village, unilaterally gave Great Waste permission to increase our solid waste collection and removal fee by 20%.  Mario either didn't see any reason to leave a decision like that up to the Commission -- Great Waste is under contract, and we had no obligation just to let them increase the fee -- or hiring Mario, and giving him the resume boost that allowed him to make very much more money being CNMB's manager, was one of those good deeds that didn't go unpunished.)

Anyway, as I said, I reached out to the Commission to ask for help.  I got the help, very promptly, from Mac Kennedy.  He forwarded my e-mail to Great Waste, and they said they'd be back today to pick up what they left behind yesterday.  I never heard word 1 from any others of the Commissioners.

Mac argues with me when I say he's the only one who cares, and he's the only one who does the work of being a Commissioner.  He offers excuses for the others.  And I openly admit that I am so massively disappointed in and disgusted by our recent Commissions that I have stopped attending meetings.  But apart from Mac's protestations, I have no evidence that I'm wrong.

Mac's term ends in November of 2024.  I very much hope he runs again.  Art Gonzalez's term ends at the same time.  He's already said, at the outset, that his only ambition is one term.  I hope he doesn't change his mind.  Veronica Olivera's term is two years, and ends at the same time as Mac's and Art's.  I hope she doesn't run again.  If we can hold on to Mac, and get two more Commissioners who care about any of this, and are prepared to do the work, maybe we can become more fully functional.  I hope so.

The Attack of...Social Media

I'm listening to the radio while I work out, and the host for this morning's show is Ayesha Rascoe.  She had as a guest another NPR contributor named Ayesha Harris.  Ayesha Rascoe called this "The Attack of the Ayeshas."

The topic was "social media," and the problems it causes.  It's easy to think of "social media" as facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, and maybe some others.  The Ayeshas fleetingly noted that the whole internet is a kind of social media.  Frankly, it occurred to me that a public blog like this one is, or can be, an example of a kind of social media.

One of the noteworthy, and toxic, features of social media mentioned by the Ayeshas was anonymity.  (If you hear sirens blaring, so do I.)  I have been part of online communities in which many participants use aliases.  One of those communities was a doctors' site called SERMO.  I did a post about anonymity (the use of aliases) on SERMO, and there were hundreds of comments.  One I will never forget came from an unidentified doctor who said that if s/he had to reveal her or his name, s/he wouldn't comment.  S/he would say things under cover of an alias that s/he wouldn't say if s/he had to identify her- or himself.  And that's a big part of the problem.  I would never in a million years make a public comment under cover of an alias.  If I have something to say, you're entitled to know who's saying it.  If I can't bear to let you know, then I should keep my mouth shut.

Getting back to the internet as social media, it is very common that a patient I treat will ask me, or tell me, about something they looked up (they think it's an important discovery, and they've armed themselves with information and facts) online.  I am very clear with them about this.  I tell them I will beg them, on my knees, if necessary, not to look things up online.  They don't know who said it, what that person's real credentials and expertise are, why the person said it, and certainly not if it's true.  If my patients want psychiatric advice, they should ask me.  That's what I'm here for.  That's what they pay me for.  And if they feel they can't trust me and what I tell them, they should find someone who seems to them more trustworthy.  Of course, if they think that all of my training and experience can be duplicated by looking something up online, then they have another problem besides the one for which they consulted me.

In the medical world, there are people called drug detail people.  They're young, employees of the drug companies, and their job is to meet doctors, and tell the doctors why they should prescribe such-and-such new drug.  I call these people drug cuties or drug hunks, depending on their gender.  I don't know what, if any, credentials or training they have, but they're not hired at random.  They're hired for the appeal the drug company thinks they'll have.  They have a rap they give, which includes various kinds of thin information (including allegations like "this drug is approved for X, but I've been hearing from many of your colleagues that they're finding it also shows effectiveness for Y, which would of course be an 'off label' use"), reprints of articles, and the offer of samples.  Generally speaking, I refuse to talk to them.  But I do remember an interaction with one guy about 20 years ago, and he showed me a reprint of an article.  I recognized the lead author's name, because he was a very well known psychiatrist, but the journal that published this paper was what we call a "throw-away" journal.  I asked about that.  This psychiatrist could get published anywhere.  Why was his paper in a two-bit journal?  The drug detail guy said he didn't know, but he'd get back to me.  Not in about 20 years, so far.  I later became aware that drug companies pay well known doctors a fee to allow the drug company to list the doctor's well known name as the lead author on a paper with which the doctor had no involvement.  Later than that, a former editor of the highly esteemed New England Journal of Medicine revealed that drug companies pay journals to publish papers (which might otherwise not have met the editorial standards of the journal).

I'm just giving you medical examples, but the "social media" problem is vastly more pervasive and insidious than that.  And there's less and less anyone can trust.  "Anonymous?"  Don't make me piss my pants.

If you have something to say, feel free to say it.  And grow up, and take responsibility for what you say.  I do.  If you don't have the nerve to be associated with and responsible for what's in your mind, then keep your mouth shut.  No one gives a shit about you and your drivelings.

A Rock and a Hard Place

The first time Dan Samaria ran for Commission, he didn't win.  He worked very hard on his second campaign, and he did well.  He got elected to a four year term.  As best I understood, Dan also availed himself of the advice, counsel, and mentoring of people like the Rosses and the Andersons.  Frankly, Dan was surprisingly steady, unflinching (while under constant attack from Truppman and her posse), and he seemed to keep his eye on the ball.  I was impressed by him.

But then, something happened (it might have been Roxy Ross' agreement to fulfill a term that had been abandoned by someone), and maybe Dan didn't feel he was free to confer with the Rosses (he was free to confer with Chuck, but not with Roxy, once she became a Commission colleague), and he also stopped relying on the Andersons.  His performance on the Commission deteriorated badly, and he just became resistant to what the rest of the Commission, especially Mac Kennedy, wanted.  There were rumors about whose (very bad) advice Dan was then taking, but the result was that he was no longer a credit to the Commission or to the Village.

Judi Hamelburg was never going to be a creditable Commissioner, and she wasn't.  All Judi ever did, and all she does, is complain and cite herself, and how the Village mistreated her decades ago, about any issue (that had nothing to do with her).

So, when Dan and Judi ran for re-election, I didn't favor or vote for either of them.  The remaining choices were not good, because they were people who had lived in the Village a short time and/or never been involved in Village functioning in any way.  There was nothing promising about them, with the pathetically only redeeming feature being that they weren't Dan or Judi.  There were actually four candidates who weren't Dan or Judi, and if it was possible to consider one of them even less promising than the other three, that was the task.  So, I held my nose, and voted for the three who won.

The Commission is now Mac Kennedy, Art Gonzalez, Jonathan Groth, Veronica Amsler, and Veronica Olivera.  Mac does all the work, Art has never shown any interest or activity, and the other three are essentially dead weight.

Our manager, who has always been useless to the Village, is leaving.  Next week.  So, we have to find a new manager.  Advertisements about the imminently open position were posted in early May.  There are various places to post ads like this, and people who want this kind of job have very active antennae to find these openings.  We've typically had more applicants, but this time, we got only 10.  Yesterday, Mac sent out an e-blast about progress thus far.  "At the Tuesday, June 6, Commission meeting, the Commission held its first discussion about candidates for the manager after the June 2 application deadline.  Several Commissioners had not been able to meet/talk to all candidates in which (sic) they were interested based on resumes and other application materials."  Mac goes on from there, but the rest of the blah, blah, blah is not important to this discussion.

I was very pointed with Mac about this, and I asked him if he interviewed, spoke with, or otherwise contacted the 10 applicants, or those who he thought were most promising.  Yes, he did.  Mac communicated about the fact that he completed the assigned task, and the others did not, and in his response to me, about the conversation the Commission had at its meeting, and how his suggestions were received, he used terms like "I was shot down," "I was not happy about that," "I never understand such a casual attitude when it's time to get something done, particularly something of such import," and his "prepared[ness] to discuss all the candidates and take next steps, which is what I thought was the intent of the agenda item."  (I told Mac it seemed unimaginable to me that I would not write a blog post about this, and he did not ask me not to, or not to quote him.)

I suggested to Mac that the rest of the Commission were mutinying against him.  He's capable, knowledgeable, and determined, and they're not.  Mac was either gentlemanly or resistant, and he disagreed with me.  He said he did not think they were mutinying against him.

Have you ever heard of the "Peter Principle?"  If you haven't, it's a management theory that says that in a hierarchy, people are promoted for their good work, and they're promoted to the point that they reach their level of incompetence.  Four of our Commissioners are exemplars of the "Peter Principle," or Mac's wrong, and they really are mutinying against him, because they're embarrassed and jealous.  Either way, the Commission is not doing the Village any good.  It has no vision, no concept of the Village's strengths and weaknesses, no "institutional knowledge," and no way to forge an adaptive path.  It can't, or won't, even follow Mac's lead.

We could have gotten Dan Samaria and/or Judi Hamelburg back, but we got the three people who beat them, plus Art Gonzalez.  If you want to know which is the rock, and which is the hard place, I don't know.

"Don't Worry, Be Happy." Or "What, Me Worry?"

"Don't Worry, Be Happy" is a song made famous by Bobby McFerrin.  The lyrics are sort of vapid, as you can guess from the title, but the song is very catchy.

There must be BPers around who are familiar with "What, Me Worry?"  It was the slogan of Alfred E Newman, who was an idiotic-looking cartoon mascot on "Mad" magazine.  And the slogan is as intentionally idiotic as is Alfred E Newman's cartoon existence.  I very much doubt "Mad" magazine exists any more.

There are several current movements that support ideas like "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and "What, Me Worry?"  These movements center on dumbing Americans down, and discouraging them from stressing over slavery (and its current and ongoing echos), and certainly from having to think about much more complicated and subtle concepts like "Critical Race Theory" (this is upper level law school stuff, and not intended for college students, high schoolers, or earlier students), or gender-related issues, or sex at all.

I get loads of e-mails every day, from various sources and about various things.  Knowing me as you do, you can (correctly) guess that they're all liberal-leaning.  One I got yesterday comes from some organization called "Civic Shout" (I don't know anything about them, except I get their e-mails, and they're all liberal-leaning), and this one was complaining about the Ohio legislature's plan to prohibit college professors from teaching about climate change.  You really have to think about that.  College professors would be prohibited from teaching about anything, including something that is objectively true, and a huge and increasing problem?  "Don't Worry, Be Happy."  "What, Me Worry?"

In our state, it's the governor making fun of people who wear masks in an epidemic of an infectious disease, rules not to say "gay," and to adjust textbooks, and ban library books, to eliminate references and topics to which Ron DeSantis and his stooges don't want students and others exposed.  "Don't Worry, Be Happy."  "What, Me Worry?"

There are sort of two, or maybe three, or perhaps four, problems with this approach.  One is that topics like these are true.  Why should people not know what's true?  Related to that is that if we in this increasingly weird and backward-hurtling country could succeed in dumbing down the public, they would be...dumb.  In whose interest is that?  What, because ignorance, or denial, is blissful?  I don't think it is.  Watch Jordan Klepper interview the MAGA crowd.  You don't think those people know what fools they make of themselves?  Third, there's a saying, or variations of it, reportedly, or possibly, coined by George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," or "those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it."  (Although a 2013 article I read from Culture and Religion has the subscript "history shows that both those who do not learn history and those who do learn history are doomed to repeat it."  I don't think that's a reason not to learn history, or not to learn anything.  If you know where this is going, at least you have a fighting chance.)

But there's a curious and unexpected fourth adverse consequence of adopting the "Don't Worry, Be Happy," or "What, Me Worry?" approach to life.  I'm assuming here that people who adopt this approach sort of know they're kidding themselves.  Monday through Friday, I receive a post from an online publication called "Now I Know."  It's curious and usually interesting things most people don't know.  (But now, they do.)  The founder of this site and author of the posts is a guy named Dan Lewis.  Wednesday's main post was about Bazooka chewing gum, a 1957 contest to predict scores of two baseball games that year on July 11, and indirectly about baseball cards (Bazooka was/is owned by the Topps baseball card company), and one card in particular.  But what was interesting was the "Bonus Fact."  It reads "Baseball cards can help predict the future, maybe.  In 2010, researchers at Wayne [State?] University reviewed 230 baseball cards from the 1952 season, aiming to categorize the smiles on the players' faces.  As Time [magazine] reported, 'players who had more authentic[-looking] smiles -- conveying a deeper level of contentment -- were more likely to live longer than those who were only partially smiling, or not grinning at all.'  And the lifespan differences were huge -- genuinely[-looking] smiling players lived, on average, seven years longer than those who weren't smiling whatsoever." 

It turns out that if you're not being genuine, and you're faking it, and lulling yourself into a "Don't Worry, Be Happy" or "What, Me Worry?" mantra, and you sort of know it, you're not only kidding yourself, but you're killing yourself.

PS: Dan Lewis' posts are NowIKnow.com.  You can subscribe for free.  If you like them, you can contribute.  But you don't have to.  Check them out for a couple of weeks, and see what you think.  I've been following them faithfully for probably over 10 years.  You get a new story almost every Monday through Wednesday, a re-run from the archives on Thursday, and a new discussion about something, recaps of the week, and some weekend "long reads" on Friday.  The "long reads," of which there are usually three, are estimated to be less than 20 minutes each most of the time.

Would It Help to Look at It the Other Way Around?

Everyone is more than aware, and some possibly sick to death, of the commotion regarding Clarence Thomas.  You don't have to read much to find out that the same issue affects John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch.  And more so that a version of it affects, or can affect, all Supreme Court Justices, not to mention any other judges.

The problem is absence of impartiality, from whatever cause, and the presence of bias.  Everyone sees things in certain ways, and has personal preferences, but judges and Justices are expected to set that aside when they have to oversee hearings.  Ideally, they wouldn't have much, or any, basis for conflict of interest, but if they do, they're supposed to be aware of it, and consciously block it from affecting their judgments, and even their behavior on whatever bench they occupy.

Anyone who has trouble understanding what's the problem with Clarence Thomas, for example, and his wife being treated to a luxury lifestyle, by someone who advocates for certain outcomes on the SCOTUS, and Thomas invariably and without question voting for those outcomes, would have much less trouble understanding the problem if George Soros, to take a caricaturish example Reps/cons like to imagine, provided a luxury lifestyle for the late Ruth Ginsburg and her husband, and submitted amicus briefs and other examples of preferred outcomes to the Court, and Ginsburg, without having to ask any questions of litigants, always opined as Soros advocated.

So, here's a situation in Broward County in which the judge had her own leanings (which is fine, as long as she keeps her personal opinions to herself), and she could not run a hearing in a fair way.  That is the one and only job of judges and Justices.  Commission: Florida judge should be reprimanded for conduct during Parkland school shooting trial (msn.com)

In this case, there is a movement to have this judge reprimanded, but she's already figured out into what corner she painted herself, and she's resigning, at age 46, in three weeks.  She couldn't do her job, and either she figured that out, or she's just trying to avoid the consequences.  Frankly, my guess is that if Thomas has any brains, he knows the same thing about himself, but he feels confident he can get away with it, and besides, he likes the tit.  Harlan Crow has done much more for the Thomases than Thomas' SCOTUS salary could do for them.  No, the American public, and the US Constitution, are not Thomas' constituents.  Harlan Crow is.

Nikolas Cruz is a convicted and sentenced criminal, and I haven't read anything that would lead me to think he doesn't deserve to be.  But he also deserved a fair trial, with an impartial judge, and he didn't get one.  (I have also not read anything to suggest his lawyer is planning to ask for a conclusion that there was a mistrial, although I think s/he should.  I can't imagine the outcome would be different, which may be the reason no one is talking about a mistrial, but Cruz was entitled to fair treatment from the judge, and he didn't get it.)  Litigants before judges who are either burdened by conflict of interest, have their minds made up in advance, or just want to promote their own ideology also don't get a fair trial.  If these judges want to advocate for their own opinions, they should run for legislative office, and see if they can get the voters, and legislative colleagues (if they win) to agree with them.  Otherwise, imposing an agenda is not their job.