On the Money

Sure it's time for a change.  I've been commenting for years that other countries have artists, authors, poets and scholars on their money while we have government officials, symbols of authority.  I've long suggested that Andrew Jackson be the first to go: a miserable racist who deported thousands of people in brutal fashion to miserable concentration camps because he simply didn't want them East of the Mississippi.  Many American Indians have compared him to a certain German leader it's impolitic to name here.

I wish however that there could have been a calm, scholarly but public discussion of  just who most merits becoming the face of the twenty dollar bill, that denomination that dominates the wallets of America.  I know, that's naive. This is America and discussion in America sounds much like the wilds of Montana at night during a full moon.

Harriet Tubman won't be the first female on our currency, that distinction has been had by mythological figures for a long time and of course Sacagawea ( and a baby boy) had a run on a now defunct  dollar coin even though we have no idea what she actually looked like.

So it's mousy, plain and un-heroic looking  Harriet Tubman. we have photographs to prove it.  Of course real heroes hardly ever look the part and for her efforts to save people from slavery at great personal risk, she certainly is as much of one as men like Oskar Schindler and probably greater since she took so many terrible risks with her life.   Good for her. She stood for something, just like George Washington even if she didn't have a white horse to ride on. She not only stood for something truly moral, she broke laws to do it and essentially went to war, which come to think of it was what our founding fathers did even though those were British laws..  I just wish it didn't feel so much like pandering because I know full well every time someone pulls out a twenty in America, there's going to be some comment, some grimace and I'm going to have to distance myself from people even further.  I just don't want to listen to it - idiots demanding that we boycott the twenty. I can see the stickers on all the ATMs.  I just wish it didn't absolutely have to be a woman and a black women, even though  it does, doesn't it?

The Tempest

Wall Street - Main Street: how many times can you use a synecdoche before you become a cynic dochebag?  Or are these mawkish clichés rather more like  metonyms, if the street is used to stand for something much larger than the establishments found there or the men and women working in the neighborhood?  They sell hot dogs on Wall Street too.

When we use those straw men, for that's what they really are, are we distracting from something much bigger, a trend, a phenomenon like the agricultural revolution or the industrial revolution or the deregulation of past years that isn't being noticed as we search for the packaged scapegoats provided by political campaigns?  And we need those scapegoats you know, to focus the public mind the way you ask a kid to look at the birdie and not at the unattractive photographer.

Some of this is so childish as to make us think more of Sesame Street than any other avenue with terrycloth puppets in business suits or is it more a Punch and Judy show: Bernie Sanders hammering on a top hat wearing, hand wringing stereotype?   Is it all there to distract us from the nearly a quarter trillion dollars in fines already paid by "Wall Street" and to prompt us to  clamor for additional punishment which although emotionally satisfying, doesn't pay the bills?

I think we're seeing a bit of a passion play and I have to recall the menacing and grimacing faces common to medieval paintings and street theater, of Jesus being tormented by an angry crowd.  Does "breaking up" large institutions produce salubrious results ?  Are there examples? I'm not hearing any discussion at all.  Is "greed" an apt description for the profit motive or is it a word chosen for emotional complexity?  It conjures up all sorts of historical unpleasantness and far more than the word "ambition" does.

It's cheap politics, but parsimonious America spends little intellectual effort on analyzing major historical movements like the evolution of  economies.  Are we drifting or are we being steered?   Is the captain planning to jump ship as we head toward the rocks, or are we steaming away from the storm?  Is the production of  a large "surplus population" as inevitable as it was in previous revolutionary centuries and now that we don't have colonies to ship them to, will we have a revolution here instead an adjustment?

A tempest in a teapot or a campaign in a piss pot:  it remains to be seen. I'm too old to have expected a contest between reason and  deception, but still it involves holding one's nose when choosing a candidate and it's depressing to be so sure that America the Beautiful would not respond approvingly to anything else.  O brave new world, That has such people in't!

El Hermano Obama

Forgive my tardiness. Perhaps it is not too late to bring up this important chapter in the shared history of the Americas. Now that our common evolution regarding the Cold War, the epic struggle between our two world views and the disparate economic theories that have held court and battle in the punishing and unforgiving light of economic prosperity, can finally be written, I hope that this news is still fresh in your minds.

Initially, I was very excited and motivated. However, I soon bogged down in my own inadequate skills at translation. I have no excuse as to why I said nothing even after I had found the English language translation only a day or two later. Interested in the letter that the eighty-nine year-old Castro had addressed to our president, of course the first thing that I did was to googol a Spanish language, complete text of the letter. This was easy enough to find and took me to the website of the official news organ of the Cuban government, as some of you will remember, appropriately named Granma. This kept me busy for several days as I tested my skills at Spanish syntax and wording. Although my language skills were not lacking, even with the help of on-line translators, I was unable to arrive at the true meaning of Castro’s words.

Happily, upon returning to the newly discovered website, I noticed that the article was available in five languages. This is what I learned in my attempts to translate it independently from Castro’s words originally written in Spanish: I think that it was easy enough to understand the first sentence. We do not need the empire to give us anything. Where I first ran into trouble was the second sentence. Nuestros esfuerzos serán legales y pacíficos, porque es nuestro compromiso con la paz y la fraternidad de todos los seres humanos que vivimos en este planeta. I understood Castro’s commitment to world peace and accord with the brotherhood of human beings. But I misunderstood the word, esfuerzos, which simply means efforts. When Castro began talking about how the Spaniards, unable to quickly find gold, shamefully destroyed many of the river valleys in a frantic and vain search for the precious metal, I was already in over my head. I did understand the word, bochornosa as shameful or reproachful, and understood that he was talking about the lust for gold that caused the Spaniards to destroy the native habitat. I was unable to come up with a logical syntax for my own translation. What I found out along the way was of some significance.

The expression Hatos Circulares eventually brought me to a history of the colonization of Cuba in the Spanish language. While there were land grants given by the crown to Spanish families, these grants were large and were later subdivided. I learned two new words in Spanish, Repartir and Compartir. Repartir means to distribute or divide. Compartir means to share with another person. The large land grants in Cuba were sub-divided and apportioned to the privileged few. The Hatos Circulares refer to circular divisions of land that were exploited for the discovery of gold. The original meaning of Hato is simply a herd of animals, something that might be constrained or limited to a locality or a corral. Thus, the circular corrals that were divided between the landed Spaniards were stripped of their ecosystems in the vain attempt of Spain to reproduce the obscene wealth that they had procured from the Mexican, Central American and South American lands. The search for gold in Cuba proved fruitless. Eventually the island became a plantation economy populated with slave labor. What is significant about the communication between Castro and Obama is that Fidel Castro accuses Obama of only being concerned about the development of events subsequent to the colonization of the Americas; as if the history of the indigenous people were of no import. This is a valid criticism, although low-hanging fruit. I wonder if Obama privately felt any honor by being so named by Castro as a brother. Of course, this is neither flattery nor a compliment to be publicly acknowledged by our president. Castro has harsh judgment for Obama’s “honeyed” words as to leaving behind the past fifty years of the Cold War and looking forward together to a bright future. Castro mocks Obama. Yet he values him as he never has any president in the past. He takes note of Obama’s natural intelligence. He confesses that he has hoped for wisdom from our president. He has sent a message to every American of intelligence. For me it is entirely refreshing to hear from someone outside of the system of corporate governance. Let me leave you with the two links: The complete text in Spanish and the complete text in English. Please do take the time to read it. This will never happen again in our lifetimes or any other time in the future.

http://www.granma.cu/reflexiones-fidel/2016-03-28/el-hermano-obama-28-03-2016-01-03-16

http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2016-03-28/brother-obama

Thank you Brothers and Sisters.

FJ

When The Alternative Is Far Worse...

Rational Nation USA
Purveyor of Truth

Let’s take a break from our national pastime – trying to stop Donald Trump – for a moment of clarity. Wanting Trump out of the Republican presidential race is not the same thing as proclaiming Ted Cruz an acceptable alternative. He manifestly is not. If a Trump presidency would be a disaster, a Cruz administration would be apocalyptic.

The above excerpt from today's Boston Globe is spot on. While Trump (Drumpf), as odious as he is for a majority of Americans, Cruz is equally as odious and indeed far more dangerous to American civil liberties. The GOP field, with the exception of perhaps Kasich who doesn't stand a chance, is one of, if not the worst in modern GOP history. In fact, and it pains me to say this, the GOP is currently the best argument for voting democratic this year.

With his archaic views, ill-informed grasp of civil rights, and noxious ambition, Cruz shouldn’t be allowed any closer to the Oval Office than a White House tour. This is a man whose crowning achievement has been the 2013 government shutdown, which he engineered to force President Obama and the Democrat-led Senate to gut the Affordable Care Act. Of course, Obamacare remained intact, and what most people remember about their government being held hostage is Cruz reading “Green Eggs and Ham” during a 21-hour speech.

It was, as Josh Holmes, a former aide to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell told The Washington Post, “like a toddler’s version of legislating.”

And as every toddler knows, if you act up long enough, you’ll get your way. In the case of Cruz, then a freshmen senator and a Tea Party darling, it was about juicing his national profile in preparation for the presidential run he is now inflicting on us. No wonder his fellow Republicans, blamed for the shutdown, are loath to support a man willing to torch his party and country in order to further his own career.

Continue Reading  BELOW THE FOLD

      

'Inky' the Octopus Escapes

In case any of you have been wondering about my absence from the blogosphere, here is the reason: Non-stop minute by minute minutia on Cyanide Network News; the fetid aroma of ass wipe politicians wafting through the air; and hive insects lapping up the stench. Yup, the dreaded Zombie Apocalypse is upon us -- swarming with rotten animated flesh -- with no definitive or merciful End in sight.

Everyone needs a mental health break and a breath of fresh air.  So I decided to take a nautical vacation -- as naughty as possible -- until the effluvium subsides.

You May Be a Hypocrite

"We can't legislate morality" said Indian River County, Florida's Superintendent of Schools yesterday at a school board workshop.   The suggestion had arisen last month after some students at the Freshman Learning Center in Vero Beach printed a racist flier that included the Confederate flag.
The board found no interest in banning the symbol even though the district is under a federal desegregation order calling for a more equitable school system for minority students.

Legislating morality in the schools often appears prominent however when it comes to student behavior of all sorts, but this is Florida.  This is The South.  There are a million excuses and of course the idea that a symbol means different things to different people.  To me a battle flag of a group that flew it during an armed attack on the United States of America represents treason.  Your view may be different, but if your view is that it is a benign symbol of  Southern civilization, you may be a hypocrite.

Don't get me wrong, I will stand up for free speech without hesitation, but ask your school board whether they would look the other way at ISIS recruiting posters, at Marxist and Soviet symbols or nearly anything offensive to most forms of Christianity and you'll wait a long time to hear ."We can't legislate morality."  Show up at school with a "Jesus Sucks" T Shirt and watch them legislate morality.

One board member questioned the idea of the flag as a hate symbol at all and wondered how people are being taught it's hateful, another asked whether the display of that symbol was even detrimental to the learning environment as though learning was the goal and not learning the truth.  The truth is that it was the flag of  insurrection, of armed aggression against the US government and the battle  flag of a country built on slavery and human misery.

Is there a difference between a picture in a history book and a racist screed being passed out in school?  Is there a difference between a swastika in a movie about WW II and hanging one in your window or wearing an armband to school?  Is the solution, as one board member suggested, to "have a conversation?"  

Well go ahead, have a conversation, get your story and your excuses straight and present a unified front, but sooner or later people are going to refuse to shake your hand, to vote for you, to be seen with you in public.  You're on the wrong side of honesty and decency and education, for that matter -- and the name Vero may mean "True" but you still may be a hypocrite.

That Berning Sensation

I think Bernie Sanders has a lot to be embarrassed about, despite another primary won, but I'm not sure that revealing his apparent lack of  knowledge about just how he would retrieve all that pie from the stratosphere  worries me.  Just how a president makes state college tuition free I don't know nor does he, and when pressed by Bloomberg TV as to just who on "wall Street" should or would be punished for what crimes, he had no answer and  when interviewed by the New York Daily News about how, among other things, he would break up big banks, he sounded very much like a schoolboy explaining why he hadn't done his homework.  It's being called a disaster, but is it?

Donald Trump joked that he could shoot someone and not lose a supporter.  Whether or not it's strictly true, we Americans support candidates without much reliance on objective and dispassionate arguments.  We like slogans, platitudes and promises and the feeling that some buffoon loves and respects us uncritically and will attack our bogeymen and scapegoats in dramatic fashion. I don't think Sanders'  lack of  knowledge about economics, banking and finance hurts him one bit, sad to say, nor his equal unfamiliarity with foreign policy and current world events.  Perhaps his supporters don't want to be informed about those subjects lest they lose the confidence that innocence (and anger) bring.  If your concerns are mostly about tuition and loans why ask the man about a nuclear North Korea or Iran shipping weapons to Yemen and the rise of Neo-Fascism in Europe?  Why care if he answers "I don't know?"

When he rails about the "bailouts" the dogs prick up their ears, because it sounds like somebody got something for free, the scenario that enrages both camps, but  as I see it, the return on that "bailout" has netted a gain - a profit for the nation of nearly 70 billion dollars.  No, that's not a big piece of such a huge pie, but then, remember that an economic collapse as big as the Great Depression was avoided and countless jobs and industries were kept in the United States. A once endangered General Motors is selling cars in China as fast as they can make them.  What else do we sell there?  Mr. Sanders has no interest in telling us that Obama's policies may have saved the country and in that he mirrors the  disloyal opposition on the Right.  What does that say about him?  

I will of course vote for him - or nearly anyone if his opponent is one of the GOP circus clowns, but without thinking of Mrs. Clinton as being the best of all possible candidates, I worry about a 75 year old dog having to learn a whole world of new tricks in a world and a country being torn apart by wild and ignorant armies, day and night, here and abroad.

The Sashimi Solution

 We've all heard the joke about the statistician who drowned in a lake with an average depth of 4 inches and we've all heard the Mark Twain quote that he attributed to Benjamin Disraeli: there are three kinds of lies:  lies, damned lies and statistics.  Is there any way other than appeals to faith used more to bolster weak arguments than a graph, a chart, a string of numbers?  It's so common we don't notice and worse, we don't check facts.

I read an article the other day which began with the observation that Japan has a higher life expectancy than the United States.  That's probably true, but the article went straight from there to a rhapsody about the Japanese diet and that theme, that Meme so adored by Americans: our food is poisonous and full of  "artificial" ingredients which are killing us.

Being a skeptic by nature and particularly as concerns any article about health and nutrition or food chemistry I took the trouble to look at the WHO statistics by country and yes, it's true about Japan, but when you note that number 2 is Spain, followed by Andorra, Singapore, and Switzerland -- Australia, Italy, San Marino and Monaco all with essentially identical numbers, I had to ask myself just what similarity in diet there is between these and the 39 countries between Japan and the United States.  Not much, I fear, so perhaps the unmentioned assumption: that the primary factor in national longevity expectations is diet, must be questioned.  Something the article does not do but rather taps into our national hypochondria. Is it wrong to observe that all those countries have far greater access to health care?  Are suicide rates taken into account? Accidents, homicides, numbers of people incarcerated, infant mortality, quality of health care and emergency services, elder care?  How many people ask?

People who use statistics to sell things often leave large gaps in their arguments which are filled with unsupported assumptions, as does this one.  Is a fish based diet good for you?  Quite possibly if you don't have allergies to sea food, but you can't get to that conclusion with this argument, which in fact starts with that  assumption. Do genetics play a part in longevity?  From what I read they do and the US is far, for more genetically diverse than Japan or Andorra and in fact so is the American diet.  So should I seek salvation in Sushi or is there more to it than that?


Everybody does it, and particularly those bodies that have elected themselves to speak for causes, from product safety to immigration to gun control.  Facts are easy to fudge, to select from, to edit and redact.  It's easy to confuse "linked to' and "caused by."  Is the fact that there is a link between marijuana and crime the result of marijuana being illegal in teh first place?   The argument for it being a "gateway drug" depends on not looking at the "link' between alcohol, cigarettes and in fact almost anything we all do and drug usage.

Complex causes and simple or single causes. Who likes to confuse them fallaciously more than activists who aren't often quite as rational or honest as you might expect. As I said, there are more ways to increase life span than to eat Sashimi and sea weed.  Want to cut the US gun related "murder" rate?  Stop lumping suicides in with murder.  According to the New York Times 60% of what we call murders are suicides.  Would the corrected number still be too great? sure, but making things seem worse than they are is the practice of every political organization on Earth. Is Trump lying about swarms of Mexicans crossing the Southern border?  Sure, there are more going the other direction?  Is there an Autism epidemic?  Real statistics seem to refute it, anti-vaccine people counter with anecdotes and anger.  It's endless, it's pervasive, even ubiquitous. It's lies, Damned lies and statistics.

Packing for Peace

We all know that the best way to keep the peace in a place full of angry men is to allow them to openly display weapons. There doesn't seem to be any doubt of that axiom discernable in the communications of the Party and so I have to wonder why, when candidates like Drumpf pretend to be worried about violence at his speeches, he doesn't propose the obvious to his followers and his retinue. Pack heat and keep the peace.

A petition posted to Change.org is asking for open carry of guns to be permitted at the Republican National Convention in July. I'm all for it and not just because it's time the Wild West Republicans put their safety where their mouths are.  It's because I see science as the ultimate arbiter of truth. It's time for a test.

RECOGNIZE OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO OPEN CARRY FIREARMS AT THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION AT THE QUICKEN LOANS ARENA IN JULY 2016

The fact that the choice of venue, the Quicken Loans Arena,  does not allow guns or any other weapons concealed or otherwise, makes me suspect that as usual for Republican rationalizations: It's different when we do it. It's OK to carry guns in Kindergarten, but not where any Republicans might be at risk.  Ohio, of course is an open carry state - something that may shock the more passionate gun control advocates, but Ohio is hardly alone.  It's just that few people openly carry guns unless they're on a hunting trip, and we don't have enough examples of how all those good guys with guns make things smoother and more mellow.   And so it falls to the NRA and its ally, the GOP to show us what a great idea it would be if everyone were decked out like Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassady because the total lack of violence would prove that they've been right all along and the wimpy gun grabbers were, well, just wimpy.

So go for it Patriots!  Time to show us all and pack the halls with guns aplenty.  Make it look like Pancho Villa was holding a rally -- wait, that's a bad image - too many Mexicans. Make it look like Pickett's Charge.  I dare ya!

It's Only Natural

I don't feel safe in this world no more,
I don't want to die in a nuclear war.
I want to sail away to a distant shore and make like an apeman.

-The Kinks-

The allure of nature, the yearning to get back to some other time and place when things were natural.
It's part of our American revulsion for technology and science and the way they interfere with our animal emotionalism and recreational anger.

 In man's evolution he's created the city 
And the motor traffic rumble. 
But give me half a chance and I'd be taking off my clothes 
And living in the jungle. 
Cause the only time that I feel at ease 
Is swinging up and down in the coconut trees.

in some other time and place when things were natural.  It's a thing of our time and yet it seems almost a feature of the way we are built and the way we think. We want to go back and we always have.

I'm no more immune to nostalgia than you are, but having been a nostalgic person since childhood I've learned much about how life was without the romanticized view that  commerce and politics use to make us spend and vote and sing about. Yes, indeed we have lost a great deal of both beautiful and ugly things over time, but we have gained far more than we're aware of.  Your favorite Tiki Hut restaurant on the beach becomes a soulless chain restaurant serving fish from New Zealand, that peaceful country road triples in width, sprouts ten thousand traffic lights and strip malls. The little seaside fishing community sprouts "shoppes" for people from New Jersey.  I hate it more than you do and yes it does feel like all those artisanal and natural, organic and authentic things are something devoutly to be wished for, but Capitalism has the ability to mass produce romantic ideas and sell them to us as the real thing We can't tell the difference any more.  Even Starbucks seems real to some of us.

How many TV "reality" shows are there about surviving without technology, living "off the grid" and how many "lifestyles" do we buy into that include the pretense of living like a "caveman" and eating a "paleo" diet as though all our ancestors lived in caves or ate the same things.  I fear that most of it is only theater and most of the science adhering to it isn't much different than Dr. Bonkers' elixir.  But we can't get away from it.  The modern world is scary, complex and lacking in some ineffable quality we think we want.

We want things that are "Natural" and we are afraid of anything that smacks of  the lab coat whether the distinction is real or not.  We'll spend more for something "artisanal" a word that's hard to define and you never used to see and we love the word so much you'll spend more for the product of a 'bread artisan' than of a baker although there's no difference.  We just know that preservatives are poison even when they're not.  We just know that  Ammonium Nitrate is "artificial" unless you extract it from manure and that "organic" food is healthier and tastes better even though all evidence is to the contrary. We're afraid and looking for the soothing lap of  mother nature to comfort us and commerce is happy to dress up in a mommy costume and charge us a fee.

I once had a heated argument about milk with some quite intelligent friend who assured me it was bad because only humans drank milk as an adult which shows it's not natural.  Now of course that definition of natural as something which our species is not involved in is contrived.  We are, as all things are, part of nature, but as we're the only species that brushes our teeth, removes the offal from our prey, boils water and millions of other things, it doesn't follow that all such things are harmful. Yet the urge is to deny all the science that proves milk does not make you phlegmatic, because science isn't natural and fear is.

But it's an old argument, used frequently by religious bigots.  Homosexuality isn't "natural"  there are crimes against nature that must be punished.  Ben Franklin was vilified because lightning rods are an unnatural interference with nature, just as Dr. Frankenstein was punished (in the movie version) for learning and doing things man was never meant to know or do.  Yes, it's an old story and older than the Bible which tells us that knowledge is sinful to acquire.

Man made is bad, technology is bad and frightening, and so science is not trustworthy or wholesome.


In man's evolution he's created the city
And the motor traffic rumble. 
But give me half a chance and I'd be taking off my clothes
And living in the jungle. Cause the only time that I feel at ease
Is swinging up and down in the coconut trees.

But the naive and the fearful and the nostalgic are the prey of bad people and bad science and the sellers of "lifestyles."  Billions are made by telling you to fear radios and anything not found lying on the ground because it's not natural. An anti-oxidant is bad if it's used as a preservative. Nothing artificial is good even if identical to the "natural" version.  Pesticides are bad unless you get them from a plant or mineral even though they may be quite deadly.  We're convinced because we hear this on the Internet or from some TV pitch man or read some charlatan's book.  We have to worry about hormones from chicken and phlegm from milk and about the antibiotics in the pig food getting into our bloodstreams, even if we can't assimilate DNA and all those "toxins' are destroyed by cooking if they exist at all.. We have to worry about grain brain and wheat belly and the equally non-existent danger of gluten or bananas or any of the "seven foods you should never eat." We don't care how much evidence refutes it.

We don't care that Autism isn't expanding and that vaccination doesn't cause it.  We don't care that all our food sources are things that don't exist in the wild and that we are the only animal on earth that cannot survive without technology and that our dominance is entirely due to technology -- like cooking your food or brushing your teeth or wearing clothes or reading a book or making music -- like human inability to tell reason from emotion -- it's not natural.