Month: June 2017

‘Morning Joe’ hosts: White House threatened us with tabloid story

This is beyond absurd unless one lives in an absurd universe like the one in which we are currently living.  It is hard to make sense of what is going on.  No, it is impossible to make sense of what is going because what is going on makes no sense.  It makes no sense but to understand it is necessary for thinking about what to do and, it seems, there is nothing to do about what is that makes sense.

Yes, this is a spin and the spin is spinning out of control at warp speed.  A man is in the position of being the most powerful person in the world and he is without a doubt out of his fucking mind.  He is irrational, unreasonable, sick of mind, ugly in speech and deed and he is the leader of the country in which I live.

I would rather not think about him because to do so is profoundly upsetting.  I have to stare a squirrel in the eyes to ground myself in something I can begin trying to understand, what the squirrel is thinking.  I do get a sense of this when the squirrel stares back while chewing on the seeds that have fallen from my bird feeder.  Really, in the squirrel’s eyes I can read some sensibility, some meaningful purpose in what he (or she) is doing and how what he (or she) is thinking while going about his (or her) business–good place to get some good food and I am taking good advantage of the opportunity.

But that Trump asshole!  What is in his eyes expresses nothing meaningful, nothing that anyone would want to really understand because who he has shown himself to be as a being is a person without good sense, without any kind of purpose that a human being with the least bit of integrity might have in life.  He is president because he wanted to become president because he was Donald Trump and he thought Donald Trump should become president–because he was Donald Trump.  That seems to be as far as he thought it through, that stuff called principles, philosophy, and meaningful goals not a factor in his running for the office, he just wanted to be President Donald Trump.

And somehow, beyond comprehension, he became president, President Donald Trump, without principles to guide his presidency, without a philosophy to guide him in his decision making, without meaningful goals, the presidency becoming with him in office a strange vacuum, important meaninglessness of great consequence, laughable but critically dangerous to all that is good in the nation and for the world.

The alert has been sounded many times now, most often by the dangerous man in high office himself that he is indeed dangerous, that he is and will continue to do what is harmful to others and in big numbers and big ways.  He is ever so big even though he is so little for his pettiness, big only because he holds irrationally to a bloated sense of self, to a caricature that is his own self image; he mistakes nothingness for grandeur that only he himself can see.  Those around him bow to his bloatedness because…  Because they too mistake their ridiculousness for something other than what it is.  And there is a far too large segment of the public that loves the show and thrives on its idiocy and its ugliness.

Unbelievable where we are and what we have come to be.

‘Morning Joe’ hosts: White House threatened us with tabloid story

This is an issue of great importance and it seems to me that actions such as this one are not being considered as they should be by people who care about free elections and the possibility of the United States becoming a well functioning democratic nation.

https://www.propublica.org/article/presidential-commission-demands-massive-amounts-of-state-voter-data?utm_source=pardot&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailynewsletter

Do not say to your children (or anyone else) ‘show respect for the president.’  We have as the leader of our county a man who on ever so many occasions show that he is unworthy of respect, that he is a despicable being who deserves loathing.  I say this not out of hatred or spite but on the evidence that consistently arises to show this man for who he is, his own words reflecting stupidity that is made more profound by the arrogance that accompanies it.  He is arrogant about his stupidity and this reflects on how stupid he really is for to be arrogant about one’s stupidity is to not see how stupid one is, how ridiculous and absurd what one says really is.

Today’s idiotic tweet, compounded by the viciousness of the “thinking” behind it, is but the latest example of the attack dog mentality, of the profound nastiness of he who is the president, the bullying nature of this man without a bit of decency or good sense, furthers our decent into a hell of truly bad people in high places setting new standards for what is and is not acceptable.

From NY Times article https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/29/business/media/trump-mika-brzezinski-facelift.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news:

“Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, also a Republican, wrote on Twitter, “Mr. President, your tweet was beneath the office and represents what is wrong with American politics, not the greatness of America.”

Lindsey Graham is so very right.

The video linked below is for real and it is beyond worrisome considering that it was produced by an organization that owns the minds of millions of gun owners who, considering NRA policies and the rants of its leaders, hold ideas that are so crazy as to make them susceptible to the call to arms that is broadcast in this message.

I have been thinking on the outskirts of my good sense about what would happen if the crazy right decided to act upon their ideology and take the fight to the streets to teach those who lean liberal a lesson about whose country this really is.  I have good reason to believe that the lefties would be terribly out-gunned considering that those to the left are often times against the proliferation of guns and do not collect them as do good numbers of people on the right.

I pushed the thought into a space reserved for ideas too crazy to contemplate but that were real ‘could-be-s’ considering just how ridiculously out of hand things are in this country right now, Breitbart in the White House, Jeff Sessions as AG, Donald Trump in the Whitehouse, and how insane what really is when one thinks about it.

I still would not arm myself because I do believe in civil society even if I live in one where civility is thought to be, by too many of those I live with, weakness, in a society in which crazy people are armed to the teeth and in which I will be defenseless if the followers of those who lead the insane posse of rightwing extremists call for action.

Really, I do not know what it is that I should do anymore.

Watch this clip: http://www.businessinsider.com/national-rifle-association-ad-call-to-violence-2017-6

Forever, as a member of the faculty of the College of Education at the University of Nevada, Reno, I challenged the claims that were consistently made by the local school district that the district was doing well in educating the students who attended its schools.  When reports were published showing that the claims were erroneous, district administrators would find ways to translate the bad to mean good, the common claim being that Washoe County School District (WSCD) did better than the state average and, therefore, even if the results were not very good, they were good because they were better.

Buried in today’s local Reno paper was the article linked below that showed that on the test the state has chosen to determine student achievement, the State of Nevada is not doing well and that Washoe County Schools are not very much better than the state average.

Watch how the numbers will be spun by our district superintendent and the Chair of the Board of Trustees.  Such spinning is for the sake of administrators who like to brag about the goodness of the jobs they are doing, even when the numbers show they are not doing so well, and the business organizations and real estate folk who need to show that the schools, despite their actual performance, are good schools.  When the spinning starts, citizens, put your foot down and demand the kind of truth that might lead to real reform that might lead to schools that are truly good schools.

http://www.rgj.com/story/news/education/2017/06/28/nevada-continues-see-low-college-readiness-test-scores/436289001/

Article in NYT about the apartment fire in London that considers consequences of deregulation.  I know a lot of people who think we live in an overly regulated society and there are times when I hear from otherwise sensible people their qualms with a particular regulation that affects them, in their minds, unfairly when, in most cases, honest assessment of the regulation would lead to an understanding of the good sense behind the regulation.

Actually, almost all benefit from regulation and, whether they think about it or not, live lives made better for the regulations that give them confidence in boarding airplanes or taking elevators or driving on freeways or drinking water and eating their cookies and carrots.

Annoying as some regulations are, and there probably are some that need to be changed from time to time, it is regulations that allow us to live relatively comfortable lives without having to have someone taste what we are going to eat to determine whether it contains poison or having to take small steps across the floor on the second story to determine whether the structure is sound enough to carry our weight.

To those who do buy the poison that is anti-regulation for the sake of getting rid of regulations, know that to be free of regulation is not to be more free considering the kinds of things that regulations exist to protect us against.  Regulations, most, exist so that without having to think about it, we know we are safe and can go about living our lives without having to worry about whether the building we are walking buy might collapse and fall on our heads or whether the restaurant in which we are eating is serving up spoiled meat.

I just received an invitation to a fete honoring Ronni Karen Moffitt and I had to look up the name because I hadn’t thought about the Letelier assignation for a very long time, my investigations into the history of the United States intrusions into Latin America, almost always for the purpose of making sure that the wealthy in those country could continue to dominate over the piss poor majorities of people who made doing business in that part of the country really good for truly bad American corporations.  Ronni Moffitt and her husband were killed when Letelier, an economist for the Chilean state under Salvador Allende.  He fled his country after Allende, the democratically elected leader of Chile was assigned himself with aid from the American government which, for the sake of American business, preferred the brutal dictator Pinochet over a socialist such as Allende.

The force of America backing the very rich in Chile and the ravaging of Chile by American corporations was repeated over and over again and throughout the world.  The American government supporting the very rich against the welfare of the bulk of the American people, the Northern American people, is how things have been operating for a long period of time.  The history of the Dulles brothers, one of whom has an airport in Texas named after him for his work to make the world safe for exploitation should have been a cautionary tale for those concerned with how we would be allowed to live through the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.

But that part of our history, our post WWII behavior in the countries we labeled “third world,” is a reflection of what we were becoming as a nation and what this nation was forcing the world to become, oligarchical to the point that a very few own most of the wealth in the world and good numbers of people suffer greatly for their poverty and powerlessness.

Few give a damn anymore about Ronni Karen Moffitt and Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar or even care to know that they were murdered on the streets of the capital of our democracy, in Washington D.C. by Chilean agents who were a part of a operation serving the dictator Pinochet called Operation Condor and aided by agents of the United States of America.

As I have said before, what we see now and so many of those I know despise is but a symptom of a reality long ignored.  I haven’t read Naomi Klein’s new book about how we are living now and why, but I am about to with one of her other books, The Shock Doctrine, that deserves a careful reading by all who really give a shit about what we need to do to create a just and honest society.

CBO scored the truly evil republican health bill and lent proof to the fact that it is an evil bill created by people who deserve absolutely no respect because they so disrespect their fellow human beings with their willingness to take more than they need while others suffer greatly for their greed.

Who gives a fuck about 20 million thrown out to sink when they have health care needs. Republican answer, throw them an anchor so they can get to the bottom even faster.

This is intolerable cruelty, a profound lack of the kind of empathy that makes good human beings humane beings.  The republicans are punishing those already punished by their lack of wealth, by conditions of life that would never be allowed in a kind and generous society.

But kind and generous, in the conservative lexicon are synonyms lax, for notions that when adhered to lead to laziness, begging for handouts (entitlements) and ultimately to lives of crime.  Lack of empathy leads the real criminals, those who take much and cannot even find their way to giving even a little back, leads to such things mass incarceration of all but those who commit the most heinous crimes, crimes against humanity masked as a hard generosity that teaches THEM to learn to take care of themselves despite their being little left available after the rich and powerful get most of what there is that is good.

This is called civilization, the people who run it the civilized.  Really, what this society has so sadly been convinced of is that the barbarism reflected in moves such as the creation of this health bill IS a high form of society and that is the bullshit that kills on the street, kills in the neighborhoods, and in the families where the underclass must reside and obediently or else the wrath of the law will be upon them.

It might be that to return to a nation of laws that protect and enrich the lives of the people there will have to be some lawlessness.