Evidence? What evidence? We don't need no stinking evidence.

 Many years ago, when I was still living in Mid-Nowhere, I was a crony capitalist.  I did not think of myself as such, but it's what I was.  I bought a failing bookstore because I liked books, and I thought that if I tweaked the business model, it could make money.  I didn't even know the term 'business model', but in retrospect, that's what I thought.  Enter the cronyism.  A reasonable bank would not have lent me the money I needed to make my foolish purchase, but I had family connections at the bank.  For a while all went well.  I was the sole proprietor and sole employee, and I worked hard.  Early in the morning, I was cleaning my windows and rearranging the displays.  Late at night I was doing the books and taking out the trash.  Enter more cronyism.  There's a college even in Mid-Nowhere and most of my customers were from that august institution.  One day the head of the History Department asked me if I would like an MA in history.  He had an assistantship open but didn't like any of the applicants.  Would I like to apply?  I said that I had to work.  He said he had a solution.  I could hire his wife.  Her salary would be just a bit less than the assistantship and I would get an MA in the deal.  So, I became an employer.

Having even one employee is a lot more work than doing all the work oneself.  To make matters worse, the professor in charge of my thesis said that she could only find time to work with me if I hired her son.  The wife of the department head was a great employee.  The son of my supervising professor couldn't even take out the garbage.  But for a while the business was growing and I had a few other employees from time to time. Also from time to time a little man named Mr. Green, who reminded me of no one so much as a shorter Sam Lowry from Brazil, would come by with form 27b-6, and I would give him a cup of coffee while we computed the payroll tax I owed the Great State, and I would write him a check until the next time he arrived.

Alas, the Bible page-thin margin dwindled to nothing during the recession that came with the Carter administration.  I ended up selling the bookstore to a wealthy woman who could use the debt as a tax offset, giving the books to libraries, and moved to the Big City to try to find work to support my growing family and pay my bills. The economy seemed to improve dramatically when Mr. Carter retired from the presidency and went into volunteer carpentry.. It was a bit of a rocky transition, from entrepreneur to employee, and I worked two jobs for a while, sending my then-wife to law school and eventually even getting--did I mention that I am a slow learner?--another Masters and most of a Doctorate, myself.

But there was one particularly rocky moment, one Sunday morning at about 2:00 am, when there was a very loud knock on the door accompanied by two policemen yelling POLICE! Silly me.  I never thought about shooting at them.  In fact, I didn't even have a gun.  They handcuffed me and put me in the back of a Chevrolet with a grill dividing the passenger seat from the command station, and with no door handles in the back seat.  I was finger-printed and mug-shotted  for the offense of fleeing across state lines to avoid taxes.   Without Mr. Green, I had forgotten form 27b-6.  I think I was the only sober person in the cell, which was made entirely of stainless steel, but not in a Mies van der Rohe kinda way.  One baloney sandwich later, I was out on bond.  The affair was actually quite easy to settle, especially because it seemed that the reason I had been arrested in the middle of the night instead of having been sent a bill was that someone in the County Clerk's office had a grudge left from high school. 

Fast forward a few years and a few lifetimes, and I found myself at the edge of the country where all my friends drink chai lattes made with almond milk. We were told that science was going to end after the 2016 election, that Richard Feyman would no longer have money for chalk, and that we should take to the street carrying signs saying 'hooray for our side'.  Now, I had taken to the streets with signs when I was even younger and more delusional than when I had thought I  could. afford both to own a bookstore and buy books.  But I 'liked' the Facebook Page from The March for Science.  Shucks.  Those were the days when I still thought that 'most trusted news source' might imply 'a reliable news source'.

The March for Science came and went.  Science did not die nor get defunded, as I just ascertained by a bit of diligent Googling.  That is, I thought The March for Science had come and gone, until last night.   All of a sudden it was back with a call to march in protest of the Kentucky Grand Jury's presentation of the evidence in  Breonna Taylor's death.  I made the error of suggesting that sleeping with a drug dealer might not be the best way to assure a long and happy life.  One would have thought I had killed Santa Claus.

 One of the things I found most amusing about this excerpt of the things I was called for suggesting that the Kentucky Attorney General might be more reliable than the propaganda of BLM is that I have often been critical of Trunp's foreign policy because I think it strengthens Russia.  (Not that he listens to me any more than Mr. Obama listened to me when I suggested that bombing weddings and funerals is not a good way to win the hearts and minds of the people.)  But, the outflow of vitriol made me a bit more curious about 'March for Science', so I looked at their website.  

Surprise surprise surprise.  Lots of feel-good buzz words.  Lots of claims that opposition to what they are advocating is a conspiracy.  But despite their nod to 'evidence based' public policies, they are calling for protests--mostly peaceful, I'm sure, because that's the only kind newspeak allows--against a public policy based on evidence.  Odd, perhaps, that there is no explanation of how they conclude what 'The Science' is, or about the scientific method.  Just a wonderful neo-puritanism of the sort so popular amongst folks in what I only semi-humorously call The Third Great Awakening.  I was, I confess, a bit amused when many of my friends who marched 'for science' in 2017 had no real regard for science in their daily lives unless they thought it agreed with their prejudices and fears.  One of them sleeps with crystals to channel more chi.  But I had thought that they were probably had good intentions.  One must always remember where good intentions most often lead.  

I should have just shot the two policemen who came to arrest me.  I could have been a folk hero by now.

Welcome to Brazil.  Please keep your form 27b-6 with you at all times.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

 

I suppose it's useful if one can learn from one's sins, so although I'm repentant, I'm not remorseful.  I committed one of the most common sins of the internet and social media, but I hope not to do it again, and by not doing it again, I hope my posts might be more effective.  But probably not, because of another thing I learned from having sinned:  there is a very selective sort of neo-talmudism that occurs on the internet.

For a long time I have been distressed that many Americans, including many of my friends, have chosen ignorance of history and ignorance of  context, and have claimed the contemporary moral high ground of victimhood  rather than responsibility.  Let Lenin convince me that I'm the victim of the Czar and I will likely soon become the victim of Lenin.  Lenin's propoganda didn't mention collecting my land and sendig me to the gulag.  Propoganda's kinda like that somtimes.

So, when a friend whom I generally consider a very good person posted one lament that capitalism is not supporting families well enough and that the government should step into the gap, and followed it with a nice virtue-signal of himself in a BLM parade, ironically while living in a town where the university was shut down for a bit of re-education when it was alleged that someone on one of the Vikings sports teams had made something someone considered a racial slur on an actually rather obscure site, resulting in demands, thankfully not met, that the name of the sports teams be changed from Vikings, I sinned.  I Googled BLM and families and saw an essay from an organization called The Federalist.com which outlined why the author, Auguste Mayrat, thinks the Black Lives Matters movement is opposed to families. I posted a link to the essay on my Facebook page. It seemed to me an unfortunate irony that someone who thinks families need help would expect to find it in an organization that is dedicated to disrupting families.   Common to both of my friend's posts, I suppose, was a not-unusual disapproval of capitalism.  

(Sorry.  I can't help myself)

Mr. Mayrat's essay wasn't perfect.  A friend said that it was unlike me to have shared it if I had read it.  (Indeed, I had read it.  I miss the pithiness of someone like Bill Buckley, perhaps, but sometimes I take what I find.) Disappointed friend said 'It's flawed in so very many ways and written with a obviously biased agenda. I'm kinda shocked.' Well duh.  Of course it's written with a biased agenda, but unlike many publications (I'm looking at you, Good Gray Lady), it doesn't pretend to be unbiased.  The Federalist is a conservative publication, and doesn't pretend to be otherwise. In a long telephone conversation that followed, my shocked friend went on to decry the nuclear family as a myth, to argue that one does need a village to raise a child, and to pounce on Mr. Mayrat's claim that BLM hates families, based on the actual text of the BLM website. The discussion reminded me of nothing so much as Talmudic arguments, which in this case centered around Mr. Mayrat's use of the word 'logic'.  He said that the logic of the BLM website's statement suggested (I must confess that at the time of the discussion, I was sitting on a park bench and didn't have my Mishna with me, or I would have pounced on the word 'suggests'.) 'that children do better without parents and outside the home.'

Now, I realize that by openly admitting to having any conservative notions at all, and even to commit what is probably larger than a micro-agression by quoting a conservative source is enough to disallow most arguments, so I was actually honoured if a bit amused by my shocked friend's extensive discourse.  I also think that his use of BLM's conception of a village to raise children (and of Mrs. Clinton's use in her book advocating passing our children over the fire of Moloch, which I did not read until after she lost the election, but which made me less unhappy that she had lost) is double speak.  If the Black Lives Matter movement were concerned about families and children, we might find folks with BLM signs patrolling the neighborhoods of Chicago to provide a safe environment for children rather than burning the businesses of black women in Brooklyn or torching mattress factories in Kenosha.  (I found that one hard to understand for a while.  I realize that it might be argued that the sister in Brooklyn had sold out to capitalism, but mattresses?  And then I realized that they're just a symbol of bourgeois luxury.  Real workers, I guess, sleep on a thin mat on the floor.  As I do.)

So, in the future I will be much more careful about posting anything in which I haven't counted every jot and tittle.  But I would also encourage my friends who find the BLM website enticing consider that it is written by folks who claim to be Marxists, and then to consider the role Marxists give to propaganda. 

And, finding myself as a sheep in the midst of wolves, I shall strive to be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

And, in this age of miracles and wonders, the Talmud is available online.  But I'll let you Google it for yourself.

Going beyond the Self-Evident

The screen shot above is part of one of billions of interactions that occurred today on the internet.  It's not a bit deal, but it has given me food for reflection all day, and I want to share some of those reflections.  

There are three clauses in that interaction, and I want to discuss each of them, but I will save the first one, about the democrats, for last.

I have known Dan Krotz for about twenty years, since he owned a bookstore from which I bought and then sold and then often re-bought many years.  He's a minor but rather brilliant author, and someone for whom I have much respect.  Indeed, the cover photo on his Facebook  page is one I took of a book he wrote  that I bought and have recommended to many. And Dan said that Trump is simply and openly a pig.  That doesn't seem too remarkable, does it?  And yet, in the history of the world, it's been a rare thing that someone can call the leader of one of the world's most powerful nation a pig with no fear of retribution.  When Trump was elected, I remember being told by many friends that all our rights would be taken away, even that I perhaps should get a burner phone.  But in fact the times I have personally been under scrutiny and censorship by the government was under democratic regimes.  Dan said that without even getting any dislikes on Facebook.  (It's a good thing he didn't call a fat black female actress a pig, because then he would have been put in social media jail or banned for life. (At least he would were he a conservative comedian.) 

Thinking about that remark, I am struck by how much Dan's remark about Trump resembles some of the things Trump says on Twitter about people he dislikes.  Yet, somehow, I still respect Dan.

Now, of course, there are things about Dan's statement that are self-evident.  I mean, I have yet to forgive Trump for destroying the facade of Bonwit-Teller.  He's often crass, calling people things like 'pig'. And yes, there is, I'm aware, corruption in the Trump administration.  But, alas, I'm afraid that is not unusual.  Mr. Obama is somehow now a poster child for good presidenst, but I rented an apartment from the Chicago Democratic Party back in the 1960's when the Johnson administration was tapping my phone , and when somehow my building escaped enforcement of the Chicago building code.  I doubt things have changed much since. (And, if I may borrow a phrase from the democrats' nominee for likely the true leader of the nation, 'are you aware that there's a perception' that people around some politicians are likely to commit suicide?)

So, yes. Trump is a pig. His faults are pretty self-evident.  But, the alternative, about which Dan sadly agrees, the democrats and their program to dismantle western civilization, is carefully covered in banal feel-good phrases like hope and light and love.  If putting up with Trump's self-evident piggishness for another four years will delay the arrival of the full-on Animal Farm, I'm willing to risk it.

Yup.  Trump's a self-evident pig, and he hasn't been given an Nobel Peace Prize.  But I would suggest that it is not enough to just rely on the self-evident appearances of any situation, it is not enough to be seduced by slick intentions, but look for results.  I'm fond of fewer wars.

 

Why I Have Decided to Vote for the Fucking Moron

 

Like  many others,  I was shocked on 8 November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.  I would not have been pleased had Hilary Clinton won the election.  I thought her a dangerous hawk whose primary qualification was overweening ambition.  But the polls . . .  I had voted for neither of them.  It had seemed that Gary Johnson was the only adult in the room.  He may not have known where Aleppo was, but he didn't need to know because he wasn't going to bomb it.  He may have forgotten the name of Mexican President Vicente Fox, but then so had I and I had worked in Mexico when Fox was first elected, and it seemed very unlikely that Johnson would waste millions of dollars building a wall along the Mexican border. I had no illusions that Johnson would win the election, but it seemed a good thing to at least mark my position, kinda like pissing on a fire hydrant. I live in western Washington, and I'm surrounded by Pavlovian progressives who haven't thought critically since they had to write a compare-and-contrast essay in eighth grade English class.

Like many others, I was horrified on 8 November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.  He shared Clinton's ambition, but seemed even less likely to choose good advisors.  He seem to obey neither the laws of grammar, nor of the United States.  I confess I have broke both from time to time, but truthfully I more often consider grammar.  Of course what should have been obvious to anyone who has listened to people talk for more than five minutes or has read any novel written since 1900, communication does not obey the laws of grammar, either.  And when I had talked to supporters of the most enthusiastically supported democratic candidate, Bernie Sanders, it quickly became apparent that law, especially constitutional law, has very little respect from anyone in the current political climate change.  Nevertheless, I posted a long string of memes describing the president a a fucking moron, posts which garnered likes on Facebook.

Like many others, I expected some great catastrophe to follow after 8 November 2016 when  Donald Trump was elected president of the United States.  My progressive friends told me so.  CNN told me so.  And they both told me that Fox News was in cahoots with the devil.  I had been rather appalled by what a pansy Anderson Cooper had been in his reactions to the Trump during the debate he failed to moderate.  (Yes, I know one isn't supposed to use terms denigrating someone's sexuality, but I'm a pansy, too, so I get a pass, like a rap singer using the Nword.)  I had been impressed by how the only moderator during the debates who did reel in Trump was Chris Wallace, whom I had been told worked for the devil himself.  So when the Fucking Moron attacked false news, I thought of that in terms of an attack on freedom of the press, despite that never has the press reported anything about me accurately, and despite that I in general recognize that the true centers of power are now more the big media/tech companies and not Washington.

Like many others, I found that following 8 November 2016 Donald Trump did one outrageous thing after another, and not only did he fail to appoint particularly brightest and best staffers, he fired them as quickly as  he had done on the Apprentice.   It seemed like the presidency as a reality TV show. It was interesting to me that the things my liberal/progressive friends condemned mostly loudly about his policies were things that Mr. Obomber had been doing all along. It seemed to me that the best way to keep from even considering putting kids in cages would be to keep the out to begin with.  But they had hope with Mr. Obomber, and they had horror with Mr. Trump.  Mr. Obomber had been Nice looking, while the fucking moron didn't need to be caricatured. He always looked like a cartoon.

And, can you imagine what Jackie K-O would think about the way he redecorated the White House?  At least he had the honesty to brag about having sex with that woman, so long as she was nice looking.  

Following the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2017, I like many other people was reminded that we in live a post-moder of alternative facts.  I learned that some massacre somewhere in Kentucky  had occurred in an alternative universe and  that covefe is a thing. I was introduced to government by Tweet, which if one considers it, is really much more appropriate for the contemporary political climate change than fire side chats.  Unlike my progressive friends, I was pretty much pleased by a lot of the early actions of the administration, although they seemed to have been the program of Paul Ryan, who I noticed abandoned the swamp after two years, putting a bit of distance between himself and the new American Greatness.

Following the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2017, the world didn't end.  No new nations were bombed.   Bombing and targeted attacks were not ended, but hay, America is great right.  I mean, one of Clinton's claims to glory as the assassination of Mumammar Khaddafi, an act which has made life miserable for an awful lot of Libyans.

Following the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2017 the wold didn't end.  Things pretty much chugged along as they would have anyway.  People continued to invent things.  Wages went up.  Prices went up, but mostly slower than wages.  Because I am what a friend of mine calls a 'god-damned one worlder', I have been very saddened that the United States has disengaged from China, and indeed from much of the world.  It never seemed to me, for instance, that the Fucking Moron understood that NATO was established for the benefit of the United States.  On the other hand, I must realize that the world in which NATO now exists is quite different from  what existed in 1949.  I don't think that the presidency has much power for good, and a lot of power for bad,  but still I was disappointed that the Fucking Moron's pastiche of tweeted ideas that might better have been saved to examine in the cold light of dawn, often  been to strengthen Russia and China.  I don't think he has been alone in working up the electorate by triggering their-our--fears,  The Democratic National Convention has been a Fear Week.  And no one seems more anxious to race bait sooner than Nancy Pelosi, a woman whom I confess I find a bit difficult to take seriously because she reminds me so much of an aunt who lived much of her life in California and who tended to spike heels and pant suits and a shrill voice.  The only thing Pelosi lacks is my aunt's Chiwawa named Oogie.

But, four years is a long time, and following the inauguration of Donald Trump on 20 January 2017, I have been collecting a bit of random data.  The loyal opposition--is irony still allowed in 2020?--has carefully cultivated the Trump derangement syndrome.   Time and again when I have asked my progressive friends, who are about the only sort there are here in western Washington, so I may have a skewed viewpoint, why they support some activity, from such things as the Green New Deal to the looting being perpetrated in honor of George Floyd, their answers have nothing to do with my question but quickly become 'I don't like Donald Trump'.  As he said himself, maybe it's his personality. I, however, find most of the ideas of the loyal opposition arebboatahto6bopposed to the ideas that have made America great in the first place:  classic  English liberalism, free trade, and capitalism.   I doubt the fucking moron understands classic English liberalism, but he hasn't overtly attacked  it.   He has done nothing much to help free trade, alas.  But he doesn't attack--always; I mean, his tweets do seem to be random--the capitalists like Tim Cook who stand up to him on free trade.

But, of course, the Virus.

The Big Black Swan.

It is far too early to pretend to know all the results of the covid pandemic, but I will say that it's foolish to blame it on China, as the Fucking Moron does, or to blame it one the Fucking Moron, as the democrats do.  One needs to avoid derangement syndromes of every sort, I suspect.

So, here's the deal:  Much to my surprise, and largely because of his incompetence and tendency to chase every squirrel, the United States hasn't been doing badly for the past four years if one looks at reality rather than the news.  The United States has not been the worst nation in its response to the virus, as we were repeatedly told by the DNC. nor has it been the best nation, as the Fucking Moron claims.  What makes the United States' situation difficult is of course that it is a union of states, something which Trump has mostly noticed and honored during the pandemic, despite the many calls for one-size-fits-all measures from Pelosi & Company.  As Rahm Emanuel, home boy of Mr. Obomber said, no good crisis should be wasted.

Unfortunately, although the democrats seem firmly in the depths of Trump derangement syndrome, powdered Biden mixed in with one's organic vegan smoothie is not a cure for the virus.  I have seen nothing from the loyal opposition to suggest that their 'belief' in science will actually change the facts for the many scientists all around the world who are working for a cure and/or preventative already.

Unfortunately, I have seen no signs that the democrats would recognize the achievements of Regan and Nixon in bringing Russia and China into the sphere of American influence and build on it.  Rather it seems that the democrats would embrace the notion that Trump and Sanders have in common, the notion that 1953 or thereabouts was some sort of golden age that can be brought back by presidential fiat.  Meanwhile, the policies that the democrats do seem to embrace would be catastrophic to the classic liberal freedom of the individual, of free trade, and of capitalism.  

Like many others, I was shocked on 8 November 2016 when Donald Trump was elected president.  But I was wrong to think that the United States was so fragile that it could not survive the presidency of a guy who is only slightly, if much more bigly loudly, incompetent than the norm.  The New York Times still prints all the news it pretends is fit to print, even when it's often fake.  Rachel Maddow still says things about the head of state that would lose her her head in many Muslim countries. The people who are being censored are those more conservative than the leaders of Twitter or Google or Facebook.  

Now, four years later, Donald Trump is up for re-election.  He remains a sort of Cardi B personality, loud and outrageous.  And his opponent, Joe Biden, is--what?-- a sort of retired crooner performing in a casino. Mr. Biden, whom I can't help but think of as a return of Mr. Potatohead, a person with no real personality or ideas of his own, on whom a sardonic smile can be hung by the instructions on the teleprompter, might seem to be a return to a calmer presidency.  But he comes with a lot of baggage.  Many people do not expect him to survive one term, making Kamala Harris very likely the real president. And the others who would almost certainly be members of a Biden presidency are not people I trust to protect my freedoms or the United States Constitution.

Now, four years later Donald Trump is up for re-election, and it has been four years of continuous attack on him by the democratic congress, nearly all of which has been proven baseless.  Again and again the willingness to accept the truthiness of the 'evidence' of the Mueller investigation and the dossier of allegations has proven to be wishful thinking of a bunch of folks who are sure they know better than the electorate. I find myself as surprised by how Trump has really governed as has John Yoo, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, who wrote a fascinating book entitled Defender in Chief:  Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power.  In it he writes, 'If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity.  I had not voted for him in the 2016 primary or general elections.  His many personal and professional flaws repelled me.' But Yoo brilliantly explains the struggles between Trump and the democrats in terms of the checks and balances and expectations of the federal constitution, not claiming that Trump even realized what he was doing, but that the founders of the constitution created a system in which the struggles of individual persons for their own power would be channeled for the common good.

Now, four years later, Donald Trump is up for re-election, and I find myself in position I could not have imagined four years ago.  I would have been unhappy with a Clinton but I expected her administration would have been pretty much a return of the normal blundering incompetency we have come to expect from the presidency.  I hope, in case Biden is elected, that I am wrong, but I expect a Biden administration would to be a targeted attack on the principles of western civilization that underlie the founding of the United States and that  have made it a destination for thousands, whether they were 'huddled masses' or others who 'were yearning to breathe free.'  

Now, four years later, Donald Trump is up for re-election.  I would certainly prefer a calmer candidate, some less ego-centric, someone whose voice I enjoyed hearing, someone who is handsome and doesn't have an absurd hair-cut--the list could go on.  But the United States has survived four years of Trump, and I expect that it will survive another four years, that we will recover from the blows of the virus,  and that we will flourish.  There has been nothing in the actions of the loyal opposition to make me think they would encourage recovery or flourishing.  

Because I live in Western Washington, my vote mostly doesn't matter.  One of my friends will likely call my opposition to Biden/Harris/Pelosi/the Squad/Sanders & Co. mental masturbation.  But I consider it marking my position.  I have  enjoyed the privilege of living in a society that is heir of English Liberalism. I will do what little I can do to share that privilege. To do otherwise I would consider cowardice.  A small cowardice, of course, but at my age, one does what one can, even if those acts are small. 

Perhaps pointless pondering on a summer''s day.

I certainly don''t expect to come up with anything so swell as a theory of gravity.  Besides, I'm sitting under a fir tree, not an apple tree.  Still, pondering during a time of plague remains popular, and it's pretty near free.

Many science fiction writers and entrepreneurs  and I expect the world to be organized rather differently in the future from what we know now.  Some, like William Gibson expect a dystopia.  Some, Mark Zuckerberg among them, expect the connected world to be better for everyone.  I, who look at the world as evolving from smaller to ever-more-inclusive units of identity, expect that there is no pre-determined outcome.  Barringthe complete collapse of human societies, which seems more likely during the Covid pandemic than it has for a while, the trend will almost certainly be towards larger units that we rely on for our identities and to provide us services.  In the struggles between Google and the European Union, I expect Google to prevail over the long run.

But in the longer run, I must admit that we are only seeing the beginning of really large  pan-national organizations.  Trying to think of antecedents, the British East India Company comes to mind. If I weren't so lazy I would study it more closely.  It's popular these days to denounce imperialism and look at the East India Company as some sort of evil empire at its worse.  But, empires are old news.  I think that the East India Company's role in exposing the British to the thought of the world beyond Europe.  Think, for instance, of Max Muller's Sacred Books of the East project, which introduced me to ideas beyond those of the narrow protestant town in which I was raised. The experience of the empire set the stage for the development of classical liberalism, which was concerned with the rights of all mankind, not the just rights of Englishmen. Those ideas with the more material goods then spread to a world in which they were revolutionary.  I suspect that the trade of the East India Company was necessary for the sort of world view that lay behind Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, and it would be such ideas on which reformers from Gandhi to King relied.  

Today's multi-nationals, however, dwarf the East India Company in scope and influence.  Perhaps none of them are overtly imperialistic as Facebook, but they all are focused on growing both in size and function.  Apple long ago quit being Apple Computers and became just Apple, moving into more and more areas of service, most recently health and banking  Samsung don't seem to be in the same league as the giants, but it has its own military division.  Microsoft and Alphabet (Google) are both led by men who can only be seen as heirs of the British Empire.  We might  think of Amazon as a store--I can if I want with my voice tell the cute little red cube sitting on the corner of my desk to send me anything the card tied to my Amazon account will allow, but Amazon make most of their money storing data.  Indeed, I am typing this

ponder on a computer that I bought from BestBuy through Google Shopping.  Despite all of these competitors for  influence of my life, I can usually ignore two of the biggest players, Alibaba and Ten Cent, while Walmart, which remains the company with the largest gross revenues, to which I contributed only yesterday, is quickly escaping its brick and mortar fortresses to become a big player in William Gibson's cyberspace.

So, you may wonder, if you have stuck with my meandering this far, what am I pondering, exactly.  Well, I am wondering how these empires will survive the death of their founders, and I think I have found some clues/answers already.  The most valuable company in the world currently, Saudi Aramco, has the most complicated history of all, having been multi-national and complicated from the beginning.  Walmart has not only survived the death of Sam Walton, but has gotten over the 'what would Sam have done?' problem, akin to the 'what would Steve think of this?' question that still hovers over Tim Cook.  Apple seems to have had its War of Spanish Succession while Jobs was exiled on Corsica, if I may mix a metaphor.  The next similar battle seems always to hover around Zuckerberg  at Facebook.  Google has had both a Regency and an abdication, and seems to plow on smoothly, making an ever-wider world for right-think.

But I also suspect that these companies, which seem huge, are more like what we nowadays call the 'petty German Principalities' that began to gather power when the printing press and the Reformation rocked--disrupted--Europe and overthrew the hegemony of the Papacy.  

Damn, it's a fascinating time to be alive.  I suspect that now we see through a glass darkly.  I only know in part.  Then will I know as I am known to Facebook?

National Politics as Breakfast Cereal

I had thought that I would use a photograph of new improved Cocoa Puffs to head this post, but I found Lucky Trumps, which is even better.

For years, I didn't vote in the presidential elections.  The candidates were usually twiddle-dee and twiddle-dum, and I didn't want to recognize their legitimacy by choosing one.  The last time I supported a major candidate was 1964, having been told by all of my liberal teachers that Goldwater would start a war.  Then Mr. Kennedy brought us to the brink with Cuba. Each president seemed like a bowl of breakfast cereal, each claiming to be new and improved, what Jordan Peterson called, if I remember correctly, normal incompetency.  I would prefer a president who took seriously the job as described in the constitution rather than trying to convince us that his Great New Plan will solve all the problems of the universe, including failed marriages and crabgrass.  It was always obvious that none of their Great New Plans would do anything except cost a lot of money and usually make a lot of problems worse.  I can't help but be amused and saddened that although the democrats under Lyndon Johnson told us that they would solve all the problems of race and poverty with a series of very expensive programs that included a Head Start program to feed kids, snatched from their families, with hearty breakfasts of Cocoa Puffs, the democrats are now telling us that they need to spend more money doing more of the same.

I considered voting for McCain in 2008, but he had a full bozo zonkers VP running mate.  There's nothing more vacuous than hope.  Mr. Obomber was a wonderful poser, publicly pondering wisely what options he might have before dropping the bombs that less hopeful presidents would have fired off immediately.  I don't think any other  Nobel Peace Prize Laureate has bombed so many people.

Then came the 2016 circus, with candidates from both parties who were far below the level of ordinary incompetence to which I had become accustomed.  I voted for Gary Johnson.

Now, 'liberal friends', please don't stop reading because of what I am going to say next.  I have been pleasantly surprised that the Trump presidency has been less of a disaster than I had feared.  Don't worry.  I still think that he's a fucking moron, but some of his [administration's] policies have been pretty good.  (Some of them were probably the work of Paul Ryan, who had the good sense to get out of Dodge before the big showdown at noon.). He remains an egomaniacal nitwit, but most of his 'policies' are bluster and show.  Yes, the nation is very divided, but the divisions within the nation are encouraged by both sides who don't seem to want to allow for any real diversity but to impose an intellectual unity that I find scary as hell.  

The worst part of the Trump regime, IMHO, is that he has destroyed much of US influence in any world wider than his Twitter followers.  He never understood that NATO was a cornerstone of a real 'America First' policy, nor that our economic engagement with China, which made China dependent on the US to continue to fuel their manufacturing growth producing the physical models of US ideas, was a strong ring in the nose of the Chinese water buffalo.  I suspect that had Trump not insisted on making China the enemy, Hong Kong might not have become more fodder for the buffalo.

And now we're in the midst of the vacuous promises wars of Great New Plans again, and Joe Biden seems as demented as Trump ever has.  One might wish--hell, I do wish--that if Biden were elected, he would try to make the US the strong force in the world again, not because I think the United States is some perfect place--I'm no utopian--but because the Pax American has for all of its bumbling, still kept wars at a lower-than-usual level and, most importantly, it has been central to the sort of global economic growth that has been ending poverty for more people than at any other time in history.

But, enter the Diabolus ex Machina:  the virus.

Trump is stumbling and blustering, belaboring decisions much longer than Obama ever did, but without the posture of careful thought.  If Biden has any intentions of trying to return the United States to position of trust-worthiness and influence beyond Coney Island and Disney Land, he ain't talking about it as he tells us that he will make us well and rich again, even if the inflation from  the Great New Plan would mean that probably my first purchase with my next hand-out will be a wheelbarrow.

Because, here's the problem:  eating the all-new breakfast cereal will not really make us strong and healthy.  Cocoa Puffs are full of hot air, with a lot of sugar to make them go down easy.  The United States needs, even if we don't deserve, considering our recent actions, a full English breakfast.  We need Locke and Hobbes, if we are to avoid collapsing into chaos.  And the world needs all the help it can get from the United States, not in foreign aid, but in global engagement.

Full disclosure:  I don't expect the United States to survive very long.  We have entered, as many science fiction writers have suggested, a post-national age.  I think the history of how humans have organized themselves suggests the same thing.  We have evolved larger and larger units of organizations, of 'usness', as we have come into contact with more and more people beyond our little families.  But the understanding of a larger unity than our tribe, whether it's a family or an ethnicity or a race or a religion or a choice of breakfast cereal or smart phone brand, has, as McLuhan warned us it would, been eroded by a growing neo-tribalism.  The present pandemic may result not only in a lot of deaths but in a lot of retreats into intellectual as well as physical isolations.

So:  am I foolish to hope that we might get over the delusion that all we need to have strong bodies [and minds] eight ways is to eat the right breakfast cereal, to hope that we might even lift, bro, and do the hard work to try to understand the maelstrom of the 21st. century?

Alas.  I probably am.  But, I am old, and there's no fool like an old fool, especially one who remembers when he wanted his mother to buy him Frosted Flakes for breakfast rather than oat meal, because Frosted Flakes had 'free' prizes in every box.

Declaring Independence from Air Strip One.

It's a miracle.  Not so big a miracle, as the occupier  of the White House says will happen with the disappearance of the corona virus, but it's still a miracle.  I found something really helpful in a discussion of Facebook.  I had posted the following photograph with a caption from George Orwell's 1984 A Novel.

'Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted,  every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.  And the process is continuing day by day, minute by minute.  History has been stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.'

A few people gave the post a thumbs-up.  One person said that the only thing Orwell had wrong was the size of the screen.  But more people said that I was having a 'OK boomer moment', and that I was over-reacting, that books hadn't actually been burned yet.  Since most of the woke folks don't read a lot of books, it was the erasing people with whom they disagreed that concerned me.  Having been accused a few days earlier of being an old head, which is apparently someone who thinks that there are complexities to issues that are known by woke people to be simple, I realized that the idea that I might learn from listening to different positions on an issue was no longer fashionable.  But then I was told that the destruction of statues of people who have been dead for 150 years is important to generate a discussion that it's important for us to have. No discussions without  destructions, eh?

My own feeling is that monuments to people who held values 150 years ago today can be very helpful, if we would have our discussions in the context of human history. Since Shakespeare has been deconstructed as a white male chauvinist, we need them to remind us, among other things, of what fools we mortals be, to remind us that people who consider themselves marvelously moral can  make mistakes.  I suspect that nearly all of the folks who are on the side of tearing down the monuments now would have been subscribers to their erection 150 years ago.  I remember a discussion at a United Methodist Church in marvelously woke Bellingham, Washington, about how evil the United Methodist Church is in Georgia, where the Methodists weren't fully behind gay marriage.  It took no great courage or critical thinking to support gay marriage in liberal Washington.  In each case the Church was just adopting protective coloration which helps them to 'grow', since it is having trouble paying its retirement expenses.

But it seems I was making a simple situation complex. If we don't tear down the statues of the folks who lost the civil war, NYU students will start opening slave markets in Union Square.  We need, I am told, to be rehashing the arguments of the 1850's and clearly state the virtues of being on the side of the winners.

In that discussion the small miracle of enlightenment by social media occurred.  I remembered again how right McLuhan had been to  say that as  we  move into the future:  'we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of the most recent past.  We look a the present through a rear-view mirror.  We march backwards into the future'. We no only are fixated on what we see in the rear-view mirror, we are rioting about it.

So, although I still think the demand for the destruction of past monuments is really, really short-sighted and foolish, and even though I tend to be snarky by nature, I am going to try to change the way I interact with people who are fighting about what they see in the rear view mirror.  I am going to continue to suggest that Rightthink is almost always Party jargon that destroys freedom.  I am going to try to be as truthful as possible about what I really think, even if it means deconstructing NewSpeak.   I am  going to try to encourage folks to think of ways  we can make the future better based on probable results rather than on warm fuzzy intentions.   I am going to try to encourage people to look at ways we can understand our future rather than just argue about the past. 

What could go wrong?