Four years ago, Democrats nominated the one candidate Trump could beat. Will history repeat?
Four years ago, I didn’t think my then-fellow Republicans would be crazy enough to nominate Trump. Then I watched in horror as, like lemmings, they plunged en masse off that cliff.
I’d underestimated Trump fans’ reckless passion, and the resulting momentum. A similar dynamic could propel Sanders. Though while winner-take-all Republican primaries enabled Trump to rack up delegates, Democrats instead mostly use a proportional system. Sanders could “win” most primaries with, like, 30% of the vote, yet lose the nomination. That would enrage his fans, kneecapping the Democratic campaign.
Meantime Trump tries to paint Democrats as dangerous crazy radicals. Sandernistas seem determined to help him. 
They fantasize the moment has arrived for their “social justice” revolution. Revved up for years with demonizing capitalism, they imagine “socialism” is somehow a viable alternative, even romanticizing the word.
Sanders himself has long worn the “socialist” badge as a puckish provocateur. This won’t be indulged by the wider American electorate. It will be a leaden albatross around his neck, in November. He’ll be called a communist. And why not? He honeymooned in that socialist paradise, the USSR.
He and his supporters are actually either confused or disingenuous about what “socialism” means. We’re told that if you like publicly provided roads, schools, libraries, etc., why, that’s socialism! No. It’s simply government performing normal governmental functions. Socialism is government taking over functions that in a free society are the purview of the private sector.
Sanders talks of “democratic socialism,” as if such government monopolization of power is democratic. It isn’t. History proves — as one might expect — such concentration of power is fundamentally antithetical to democracy.
He invokes as models the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland). Another misconception. These nations do have strong social safety nets, but not socialist economies. In fact they’re more free-market capitalist than America. That produces a lot of wealth, which they tax heavily, to fund their social spending.
Class war is central to Bernie’s candidacy. He’s all about the idea that the rich and corporations are screwing everybody else, and taking them down is the way to a fairer, better society. But such class war rhetoric puts off most Americans, for good reason: it’s wrong.
The idea that corporations and the affluent get their profits and wealth at the expense of the rest is a fallacy. Steve Jobs got rich not by ripping people off but by giving them products they valued above their cost. Improving, not worsening, societal welfare. That’s what productive effort does in a free market economy.
Americans who do well are not the cause of others doing less well. What’s happening instead is technology changing the economic landscape ever faster, with many Americans not positioned to benefit. Often because their education is crap. What’s needed is not tearing down businesses and successful people, but equipping more people for success.
Moreover, this country is being torn apart and wrecked by increasingly bitter political polarization. We desperately need some way out of this, restoring common purpose. Not class war politics further enflaming societal divisions. And those divisions make that class war unwinnable for Sandernistas. Even if he somehow got elected (unlikely), his program would unleash a firestorm of conflict.
All this is why Bernie’s candidacy augurs disaster. Nominating him will bring us not to a socialist Jerusalem, 
but more likely destruction of the American idea with four more years of a depraved, deranged, and out-of-control monster.
Facts. Trump’s lawyers try to sound like they’re all about facts. My twenty years as an administrative law judge gave me tons of experience with lawyers twisting facts to push what are really lies. Especially lawyers for the telephone company. But they were paragons of honesty compared to Patsy Baloney and the rest of Trump’s team.
Democrats’ selective “hand-picked” witnesses? Only because Trump himself blocked other witnesses like Bolton, Mulvaney or Pompeo from testifying. But the upstanding patriotic civil servants who did testify — Taylor, Vindman, Hill, and many others, who were privy to what happened — told the truth, and the resulting damning picture is factually indisputable. Even Trump’s flunkey Sondland confirmed it. And how about getting testimony from Lev Parnas, who’s now produced a shocking video of Trump proving he’s a liar (and a creep)?
I actually didn’t think they’d dare insist “he did nothing wrong.” But I underestimated the brass of these liars. Seeking to use U.S. aid to extort a bribe from a foreign leader to pervert a U.S. election by falsely smearing an opponent — breaking the law — and trying to cover it up — and to block Congress from investigating it — all proven facts — are wrong. Bigly.
If Trump’s phone call with Ukraine President Zelensky was “perfect,” why did everyone around him freak out and swiftly move to cover it up? The facts show the call was just a small piece of a long sordid scheme, with Giuliani doing the dirty work, aimed solely to achieve a phony smear of Biden. We now know how much effort went into this. How many levers were pulled, people deployed, others overridden, machinations undertaken. If only Trump were so assiduous dealing with our actual problems.
Other societies have fallen. God did not decree America immune.
India is heralded as the world’s largest democracy. Proving that democracy is not just a luxury for rich nations. Some claim messy democracy is bad for economic development — citing China’s high growth rates under authoritarianism. Yet is dictatorship really good for prosperity in the long term? After all, the richest countries are the most democratic. But anyhow, man does not live on bread alone, economics is not everything, and people value democratic rights for their own sake.
Some nevertheless wanted India to be a Hindu state. One was Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. Hindu supremacists like Godse hated Gandhi for promoting accommodation with the nation’s Muslims. They’ve instead advocated “Hindutva,” an ideology of “India for Hindus.”
But Modi seems focused less on the economy than on Hindutva — and on his own power. He’s increasingly authoritarian, and intolerant of criticism or opposition, using every possible means to suppress it. The RSS acts as a parallel government. That’s Modi’s power base. He openly rejects the founding concept of a secular state.
Over a million Muslims are being thusly made stateless, with nowhere else to go; India is building detention camps.
Godse, the Hindu fanatic assassin of Gandhi, is now being rehabilitated as a hero. While Trump has staged a Texas rally with Modi lionizing him as a great pal.
Now it’s official: the Government Accountability Office (chief federal watchdog agency) has determined that Trump’s Ukraine aid shakedown broke the law.
Elections and impeachments are separate in the Constitution. And that’s particularly pertinent in this case, where it’s the election itself Trump tried to corrupt. His attempt failed only because the whistle was blown.
But this shows how deranged Republican hatred for Obama was. Now they talk as though Democrats’ opposition to Trump is somehow similarly deranged. As though it’s just blind partisan tribal hatred, unmoored from any rational reasons. But there are perfectly rational reasons. Democrats hate Trump because he is hateful. The worst human being, biggest liar, most corrupt selfish person ever to hold the office. But never mind his character. It’s his actions. Coddling dictators while shredding our alliances. Separating children from parents. Not summoning the better angels of our nature, but stirring a toxic brew of people’s worst impulses. The list goes on and on. Republicans blind themselves to it all; Democrats cannot.
Yet not for any of this is he being impeached. Nor even his clear attempts to obstruct justice as proven in the Mueller report. It’s for his incontrovertible, indefensible Ukraine crime.
The wooden sign reads “2 Children for Sale,” in 1931 rural Pennsylvania. This propels the novel, Sold on a Monday.
The tale was inspired by an actual newspaper story, from 1948 Ohio, centered on a photo of a mother and four children with a sign offering their sale. Author McMorris’s afterword notes that that sign was suspiciously well lettered. Yet those kids did get sold. Moving the story to the Depression era enhances verisimilitude. However, the book doesn’t really convey a Depression ambience; doesn’t actually show us the deprivation. 
Go read instead Evans and Agee’s 
As for the book’s writing, I had a hard time putting my finger on what irked me. It wasn’t bad writing. Even fitting, perhaps, for a ’30s flavor. Indeed, it felt like the text for a movie of the time, not a noirish one, but more like Miracle on 34th Street, exuding a kind of forthright innocence.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve been spoiled by more searing modern literary realism. For all the iniquity it actually depicts, this novel seemed like a throwback to a more innocent time.
One such rebel was Macrianus. This was in the “East” (Asia Minor and the Levant); for about a year, 260-261 AD. He didn’t actually take the purple himself, but had his two young sons crowned instead — named Quietus and Macrianus Junior. With coins issued for them. Fairly rare, but not prohibitively so.
So I went there, the guy had a loft, and it turned out he was Robert Bashlow — yes, the one responsible for the well-known 1961 “Bashlow restrikes” of the Confederate cent. He was quite a character and had tons of intriguing stuff, which I would sort through, during lunch breaks. In one batch of junk I found a rather low grade Roman coin on which I could read the name “Quietus.” This was before I was really much into ancient coins, but I did recognize this as rare, and bought it. (Bashlow tragically died not long after in a Spanish hotel fire.)
Some decades later, we visited Ephesus, and there were the usual guys hawking fake coins to tourists. I waved them away, but one got the idea I knew coins, and insisted he could show me good stuff. He led me into the recesses of his shop, and produced a little group carefully wrapped in tissue paper. Most of these were fake too, or else too poor to be worth anything. But one was a Macrianus! Genuine and in decent condition. He quoted 100 Euros. I said no and walked away, but he followed and continued to dicker. Finally, on the steps of the tourist bus about to depart, I bought it for 50. I’m not sure if he really knew it was rare. I made some money selling it.
Recently they had a special sale of a large collection focused on coins of the Valerian-Gallienus period — which included Macrianus and Quietus. One lot was a pair of their Egyptian tetradrachms; the Macrianus fairly nice except for some nasty looking green crust spots on the reverse that I thought I could ameliorate. 
The Quietus unfortunately was pretty rough. Well, I got the lot for what I felt was a very good price of $140 (plus 18% buyer fee). So I unleashed my restorative skills on the two coins, and was able to make the Quietus, if not superb, at least minimally passable for my snobby collection. It does have a good sharp obverse inscription and portrait detail.
lower coin; and the same (at left) after my cleaning. I enjoyed adding this to my collection.
The article reports “an audible gasp,” an “incredulous-looking councilwoman,” another saying she was “offended” (adding “at least try to be politically correct”), another observer saying she was “stunned,” an African-American man who “walked out of the room in apparent disgust,” and the local NAACP head saying he was caught off-guard and the issue will be taken up at the group’s next meeting.
And using “Negro” was not new, but repurposed an old word, which originated as the Spanish for “black,” and had actually referred to slaves. The N-word was a more degrading version. Some southerners would later snarkily pronounce “Negro” as “Nigra,” to be just this side of politeness while conveying what was really meant.
Yet still the words in the two phrases are actually identical in meaning, and both arise from the same linguistic roots, using the same word as a signifier of ethnic difference. If “people of color” is now acceptable, “colored people” should be too. Maintaining a sharp distinction seems absurdist hair-splitting.
This syndrome was on full display in the Schenectady council episode. A few people quoted did acknowledge that the “offender” was guilty merely of a slip of the tongue, and nothing ought be made of it. That’s just common sense and reasonableness. After all, the fellow was applauding nonwhites. But common sense and reasonableness go out the window in such cases. There are now always people eager to mount high horses, getting out their pitchforks and torches.
A final irony: the article, again, quoted the local NAACP head. Perhaps in that future meeting he talked of, they can also discuss their own organization’s name: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 
I eat meat; not a lot, but am troubled by the ethics. Michael Pollan too, discussing this in depth in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Like me, he’d like to be able to justify meat eating. While recognizing that bias.*
Descartes saw animals as just machines without feelings. We know better. Pollan quotes Jeremy Bentham in 1789, that the question isn’t animals’ mental abilities, but can they suffer? (Note, we’re really talking about higher animals; seafood creatures don’t have much inner life to fret over.) However, Pollan notes, pain and suffering are different things. Humans suffer from pain in great part due to the mental constructs we form around it, which animals generally cannot do. (Having no conception of death or really, even, the future.)
As Peter Singer (the leading animal rights thinker) argues, most of us subscribe to an ethic of human equality. But that’s a moral, not a factual, idea. We recognize humans vary greatly in, say, intelligence, yet hold everyone’s lives and interests nonetheless entitled to equal consideration. Hence you may not exploit another for your own ends. Why then are humans entitled to thusly exploit animals — those that are sentient, feeling, and certainly possessed of lives with interests?
The domesticated animals we eat actually represent a mutualism or symbiosis between their species and ours — rooted in an opportunistic aboriginal deal with us, enabling them to survive and prosper better than if on their own. And their populations are now vast, while those in the wild have shriveled. So the deal is advantageous even while individual animals do die. Which of course is true of all individuals in any case. “As a rule,” Pollan says, “animals in the wild don’t get good deaths surrounded by their loved ones.”
When pigs fly.
** Unwilling to eschew his inner carnivore, Pollan decides he’s honor-bound to, at least once, eat something he’s personally killed. His successful wild pig hunt is detailed at length, with much nuanced meditation on what it all means. Initial atavistic elation mixes with later disgust and shame. But here too Pollan arrives at no definitive conclusion.
“Events, dear boy, events.” That was British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan’s famous reply, when asked what could shake up the status quo.
France’s President Macron was elected in 2017 with 66% of the vote (unimaginable in America), then his favorability polling plummeted to only 23%. Never mind whether that made sense — at least the French were attuned to events, and changing opinions in response thereto. In almost any country, a leader conducting himself as abominably as Trump, caught in so many lies, etc., would see his support plunge close to zero.
And, says Brooks, different segments of American society “now see reality through nonoverlapping lenses. They make meaning in radically different ways. Psychosocial categories have hardened.”
He adds that the 1896 election is also a good predictor of today’s politics — 22 of 23 states voting for Democrat Bryan in 1896 are Republican now.
which included assertions that Adam Schiff had been outed as a pedophile; that Biden was not a candidate when Trump spoke with Zelensky; that child migrants were caged only during the Obama administration; they weren’t separated from parents, as proven by DNA tests! And so on and so forth. All right-wing fake news. Including saying mainstream media spouts fake news.
Our reality perception was honed by evolution to promote survival. That makes us very good at seeing reality insofar as that aids coping with all life’s hazards. You won’t mistake a red light for green. But that doesn’t apply to the realm of public affairs; that’s a freebie, where reality perception isn’t life-or-death, giving us the luxury of a different criterion: what makes us feel good.
Nevertheless, in normal circumstances, we don’t really see it as an option to believe something that’s false just to feel good. However — if it does somehow seem to be an option — if one can rationalize believing it — then heck, let’s go for it!
Far preferable to live in an alternate universe where what you’re supporting is all good (and opponents are all bad). Where DNA tests prove no children were taken from parents.
Michael Pollan is a food thinker and writer. Not a restaurant reviewer; he looks at the big picture of what we eat in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. (Carnivores eat meat; herbivores eat plants; omnivores eat both.)
“The more you concentrate on how it tastes, the less like anything it tastes. I said before that McDonald’s serves a kind of comfort food, but after a few bites I’m more inclined to think they’re selling something more schematic than that — something more like a signifier of comfort food. So you eat . . . hoping somehow to catch up to the original idea of a cheeseburger, or French fry, as it retreats over the horizon. And so it goes, bite after bite, until you feel not satisfied exactly, but simply, regrettably full.”
That first third of the book is all corn. In fact, if “you are what you eat,” we are all corn (well, mostly). Don’t think you eat much corn? Think again. As Pollan explains, a high proportion of our food is derived from corn; even our meat, the animals being mostly corn-fed. Pollan argues that, rather than humans domesticating corn, corn domesticated us. Viewed biologically, that species exploits us to spread itself and increase its population.
But, even with that government guarantee, Pollan shows, most farmers can barely eke a living, after costs. The bulk of the profit from corn actually being swallowed by the big middleman corporations like ADM and Cargill.
But, in Pollan’s telling, it’s been fairly successful in overcoming that obstacle. This contributes, of course, to an obesity epidemic.
Pollan extensively discusses “organic” food. Largely a victim of its own success. “Organic” is a brilliant marketing ploy, it sounds so good. And farming that conforms to the original purist vision of what “organic” should mean may be environmentally cuddlier than conventional farming (though there are tradeoffs, one being greater acreage required). However, in practice, stuff in stores labeled “organic” is not produced all that differently. A key reason is that once “organic” took off and became big business, producers had to use many of the same large-scale industrial practices of conventional farming. Small operators can’t compete. Another is that the USDA rules for “organic” labeling were lobbied hard by producers to give them more leeway. Pollan cites, for example, a rule saying cows must have “access to pasture.” Sounds nice, but if you think about it, what does it really mean? If anything? Here, and in much of the rulebook, there aren’t real rules.*
Pollan muses that salad might seem our most natural kind of eating. But it gives him cognitive dissonance when considering the complex industrial processes that actually put it on our plates. An organic salad mix takes 57 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food. If grown conventionally, it would be just 4% more. Bottom line: by and large, “organic” is a pretty meaningless label. (Wifey take note.)
One example: a slaughtering facility must have a restroom reserved for the government inspector alone. 
The Rational Optimist 
