Anything I say or do doesn’t give you the right to murder me

My Sunday movie was Tig on Netflix. This is a documentary of the stand-up comedian Tig Notaro, released in 2015. About a decade ago I heard on the news (NPR) that Notaro had done what people were calling an amazing stand-up act, one that was brave and out there. She started by saying, “Hello. Good Evening. I have cancer. How are you?” She was brave for both talking about it and making it funny. I had heard this documentary featured that act, so I wanted to watch. The movie’s story begins a few months before that famous act. Notaro had come to realize stand-up was what she was meant to do. Then in quick succession she had an acute digestive illness, her mother died, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer. And she did that act. The club where she did that act had a rule against video recordings. Some of the audio is included in the movie and all of it was released as a CD (there is a segment of less than four minutes on YouTube). But that’s an act that can be done only once. And it took Notaro several months to figure out what came next. Some of the story is finding her way back to the stage. Some was her trying to have a baby through surrogacy – even producing eggs after breast cancer is risky. And some was falling in love with another woman, one who was sure she wasn’t lesbian. There are a lot of news stories about the killing of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. He was black. The five police officers who beat him are black and they’re now in custody facing murder charges. The police released the bodycam videos that showed the horrific beating (I won’t watch it and won’t link) and also show others, including firemen, who could have stepped in and didn’t. I’ve collected several posts about police being involved in incidents that have ended badly. Some of these posts are about police and black people. Others are about police and mental health, which was not the case in the Nichols beatings. Ari Shapiro of NPR spoke to Phillip Atiba Goff, CEO of the Center for Policing Equity and chair of African American Studies and psychology professor at Yale University. Their conversation was about recommendations to lessen police violence. The top item is to “use police for less.” If a person is having a mental health crisis or contemplating suicide, don’t send a badge and a gun that has had maybe eight hours of mental health emergencies and could make the situation worse. Don’t send a badge and a gun to deal with someone unhoused. Don’t have police stop a person for a low-level nonfatal traffic incident (which is what Nichols was pulled over for). Instead, send a ticket through the mail. Goff said:

Policing is set up to do a set of things. It does that with ruthless efficiency. It is not set up ideally for community safety because, to do that, you need to do investment. And so there are people who would say policing hasn't gotten better, but it hasn't gotten worse because it continues to do those things efficiently. ... There are very few major city police chiefs who should be taken seriously who won't tell you that we have failed to invest in certain communities, and those are the communities that they get called to. And they get blamed for what they do. And no one is, at the same time, blaming the corporations or the white flight or the banking investment in any of that. While it's fair for law enforcement to be held accountable for what they're doing, it is incredibly shortsighted of us to think that fixing law enforcement prevents the death. Because, as much as there is incredible violence from policing and incredible violence within these communities, all of that is within the context of the violence of poverty and deprivation, and those are policy choices usually made by people who never have to see that violence up close.

In a post that has been hiding in my browser tabs (and waiting for me to remember to include it) since January 2022 Marissa Higgins of Daily Kos also discussed how to get out from using police when there is a mental health crisis. One issue is setting up a different phone number (since then the national 988 crisis line was announced) with non-police people to staff it. Along with that is how to fund it. Some federal money may help. Even so, at the time programs were being implemented in Ann Arbor, Denver, San Francisco, and Eugene, Oregon. In a post from June 2022 Irna Landrum of Kos discussed the call to “Defund the police” and how some are saying it is an unwise goal. Dismissing that phrase as a stupid slogan dismisses the thought, research, and advocacy that has gone into the call. Landrum lives in Minneapolis. She discussed the problems in her city’s police force, then wrote:

The Minnesota Department of Health found that no policy change would be sufficient to root out this corruption, and that deep cultural change—the kind that chiefs and politicians have been pledging for years yet failing to deliver—is what it would take to even slightly reform this police department.

Of course, Minneapolis is not the only city with this problem. Add to that the tight connection between law enforcement and white nationalism, which the FBI has been warning about for more than 15 years. Top it off with police not being effective at preventing or solving crime. In spite of the propaganda (including every cop show in the entire history of TV) police solve about 4% of crimes.

Whether you mean "defund the police" by diverting a significant amount of funding from their coffers toward more tried-and-true community interventions, or you mean "defund the police" by eventually starving them of resources so that it is no longer possible for them to exist as our primary public safety agency, defunding the police makes sense. ... Even those of us who advocate defunding police down to nothing recognize that abolishing police is a disaster waiting to happen, if we are not also investing in life-affirming institutions.

John Stoehr, who edits the Editorial Board daily newsletter that discusses politics in plain English, tweeted a thread. It started with columnist Rex Huppke saying wanting to know the motive of the shooter is a diversion. Stoehr says even that misses a bigger point. We have accepted mass death as an outcome of legitimate political disagreement. No one, at least in public, says anyone has a right to kill another person. But we’ve created a false equivalence of “mass death versus rights.”

Mass death is a consequence of legitimate political disagreement as well as a consequence of sadists using legitimate political disagreement to mask their sadism. Truth is, lots of Americans don’t mind mass death as long as it’s visiting “those people.” Even if it’s visiting them and their kin, however, it’s still OK. A few dead Americans are a small price for maintaining the white order. I’ve gone blue in the face talking about how being pro-gun is being pro-white power. My point today, however, is that desensitization – or being “insured to America’s murderous rhythms” – is not necessarily rooted in seeing terrible things happening over and over. Just as likely is that desensitization is rooted in indifference to suffering or the perverse pleasure of seeing the suffering of “those people.”

In a comic from September 2022 Keith Knight of Kos takes on the claim that only some cops are “bad apples.” Some of what is in his comic:

If you bit into an apple & saw it was rotten you wouldn’t put it back with the others. And I’m sure the rest of the apples wouldn’t rally around bad apples & defend like cops do. If there are so few bad apples like cop defenders claim wouldn’t it be easy to weed them out? Real good cops, the kind who report bad policing, are the true unicorns!

Cop shows introduced us to our Miranda Rights, the stuff the cop reads off when one is arrested that begins, “You have the right...” Christopher Weyant of the Boston Globe, shows a black man reading Miranda Rights for Police to a frowning cop standing beside his car, “I have the right to be treated as a human. Anything I say or do doesn’t give you the right to murder me.” Michael D’Antuono tweeted a cartoon of a hoodie standoff. A cop in a Klan hood aims a gun at a young black boy wearing a hoodie who is offering the cop some candy.

Bigotry is bad for business

I finished the book The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis and translated from the original French by Michael Lucey. Don’t worry, Eddy doesn’t come to a tragic demise. Eddy ends because he grows up to become Édouard. Yes, this is a fictional story of the author’s youth. Eddy was born in a small unnamed village close to the coast in the region north of Paris. The first part of the book is about growing up desperately poor. There is a factory in town and most of the men start work there at age 16 because they’re already tired of school. But it is hard work so most turn to drink. And to violence – men are just assumed to be violent. The only options for the women are as clerk or cashier at one of the local shops or motherhood. A girl who wants to be a teacher is strongly discouraged. Eddy’s mother had her first child at 17. She talked about the mistakes in her life, one being getting pregnant so young. But Eddy later realizes what she thinks is a mistake is simply the way life worked in the village. The second part of the book is Eddy dealing with being described as effeminate – which doesn’t work well in such a macho culture. Eddy eventually understands he is attracted to man and not women, though he seems to be initiated into sex at a very young age (also the way the village works). He realizes the only way to survive is to get out, which isn’t easy for one so poor. I’m writing about this book only a few days after the previous one. This one is a bit less than 200 pages and a quick read. I was back at the Detroit Institute of Arts last evening for a dance program. I don’t go to many programs by dance companies. I went to this one because of the music. Eisenhower Dance Detroit did the dancing and musicians from Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings accompanied them. The music that drew me was The Soldier’s Tale, better known by the French title, L’Histoire du Soldat. It is a story of a soldier on leave being tricked by the devil. Early in the 1910s Stravinsky wrote big ballet scores – Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite of Spring – that used big orchestras. But in 1917 because of WWI he had much smaller resources available. So there are only seven musicians for The Soldier’s Tale, though it also has three narrators and a dance company. I went because this music is fascinating for me. The dancers, of course, danced to the music. They also danced to spoken narration with the soldier and the devil acting out the words in a dance-like manner. The DIA’s webpage describing the event describes the soldier as male. The previous performance I had seen (many years ago) also had a male soldier. But last night featured a female soldier (and female devil). The narration was changed accordingly and I’m sure the character of the prince was originally a princess. A brief summary of the plot: Having stuff, even if it makes one rich, can’t replace love. Kerry Eleveld of Daily Kos reported that there is a state government charting a course for national Democrats – and it isn’t California. It’s Michigan, now with Democrats in control of the legislature and governor’s office. Some of the things Democrats are doing: Standing up against conservative talking points. Standing up for women able to control their own bodies. Vowing to protect LGBTQ people. Keeping the economy humming. Adding clean energy jobs. Helping the poor. Taking advantage of all the goodies in the Inflation Reduction Act. Eleveld explained how this is an example for the national party:

No more Clinton triangulation of the '90s on issues like reproductive freedom and the rights of LGBTQ Americans. The path to winning suburban voters has smashed right through the very wedge issues that once favored Republicans, and [Governor] Whitmer undoubtedly benefitted from her high-profile efforts to keep abortion legal in the state. According to exit polls, Whitmer won over 80% of pro-choice voters—a data point that all but made her untouchable. At the same time, forget about being slammed as a “liberal elite” while working to empower unions, boost working families, and help seniors stretch their retirement income. As The Washington Post's Greg Sargent noted, "by fusing an attack on right-wing culture-warring with a focus on economic fairness," Whitmer "could undercut GOP efforts to cast social liberalism as contrary to 'working-class values.'”

Aysha Qamar of Kos reviewed Whitmer’s recent State of the State speech, given live in the state House chamber for the first time in three years. One of her good lines was “Bigotry is bad for business.” The state Republicans sniped that it was way too political (a common refrain when they want to dismiss something) and short on details (of course it is – that would make the speech too long and the details will show up in the budget to be released soon). Remember back last summer when the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision to overturn the right to an abortion and Clarence Thomas included comments that he’d also like to revisit the right to same-sex marriage? Joan McCarter of Kos reported that Idaho, Alabama, and Oklahoma are moving to take up Thomas’ invitation. McCarter also discussed the report from the investigation into who leaked the Dobbs decision before the ruling became final. Summary: the leaker wasn’t found. A lot of people quickly noted one big hole in the investigation. The marshal of the court talked to the justices, but did not ask them to sign sworn affidavits. That is notably different from the employees of the court who were warned they could face disciplinary action if they didn’t cooperate, they had to hand over phone, email, and print records as well as their court-issued laptops, and they had to sign that affidavit. Hunter of Kos explained the whole thing in more detail, adding that the court doesn’t keep certain types of records, such as who printed how many pages. He also noted...

the report largely ignores the theories that the leak resulted from an intentional delivery of the draft opinion from a sitting justice to an invested outside party or from, for example, the draft opinion being brought home to a justice's home office where it would be shared with an arch-conservative gadfly spouse who sells consulting services based on her personal, up-close access to the court.

Back in early December railroad workers threatened a strike over working conditions. The strike, which would have been disastrous to the national economy, was averted by quick action by Congress and Biden, who banned the strike but did nothing about the working conditions. Walter Einenkel of Kos discussed the recently released Union Pacific earnings report. The railroad made another year of record earnings and billions of that money went to stock buybacks. The company could have spent money to alleviate the problems in the working conditions, which don’t give workers sick leave or days off. Instead, the money went to investors.

As a freight rail policy expert for the unions told Freight Waves back in 2021, “They want to run the leanest railroad they could possibly run to produce historic operating revenues to entice investors. The railroads are running themselves so lean that they are only capable of the railroad of today. They are not capable of running railroads when there are economic shocks or changes in shipping patterns.” Hurting labor hurts us all, because it degrades the things we actually depend on most: people and the integrity of their work.

McCarter reported that the far right Freedom Caucus in the House demanded a rule change. Amendments to bills no longer have to go through the Rules Committee. Caucus members only had to get the proposed amendment to the Congressional Record by a certain deadline. Delightfully, Democrats can do that too. There’s a bill before the House to having something to do with the president and the strategic oil reserves. About 100 amendments made the deadline. Each amendment gets five minutes and a vote (for some just a voice vote). And in this case some of the votes will embarrass Republicans. I had written before that bills, such as to raise the debt limit, must go through the Rules Committee, now with a strong maniac presence. McCarter doesn’t say, but I wonder whether this new amendment system will allow a clean limit raising bill to get through the House. Gabe Ortiz of Kos says the far right is attempting to smear everyone with the “groomer” slur. An example (of several) of how ridiculous this has become is that one of those targeted is Elmo, a muppet on Sesame Street. Their evidence is Elmo was on a public health announcement in which he got a COVID vaccine (not sure how this turns straight kids gay, but whatever). One can hope they so overuse the term that everyone, perhaps even their base, decides it is meaningless. Hunter discussed the M&M spokescandies and what Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been saying about them. A couple of the female candies changed from sexy to sensible footwear and Carlson had a fit. Hunter wonders if Carlson wanted to pick up a drunk candy at a bar and take it home for sexual pleasure. Why is he focusing on the sex appeal of candy? Then the sexy footwear was back but two supposedly female candies were seen holding hands. And Carlson had another meltdown. So the M&M company issued a statement saying the spokescandies will take a break for a while. Hunter looked at the sly nature of the text and declared Carlson was being trolled. Besides, the Super Bowl ads have already been created. And Carlson having a snit over whether a candy is lesbian is advertising gold.

The only remorse is the tantrum didn’t lead to the result they wanted

Captain Frogbert of the Daily Kos community discussed an article in this month’s Scientific American that points out that Americans are dying younger than citizens of other industrially advanced countries. I’m not sure what Frogbert discussed next is in the original SA article and what isn’t. Even so, Frogbert does link to sources for his statistics. Frogbert does leave out one statistic (though his image at the top shows it) – since the start of the pandemic life expectancy in America has fallen. That brings us to Frogbert’s thesis: Conservative ideology is causing more Americans to die. There are three primary sources of this death. The first is the conservative response to COVID. The data for this is the falling life expectancy for black people and Native Americans, though also the falling expectancy of white people. For that last one Frogbert points to data from Government Executive:

The study finds that excess deaths during the pandemic were 76% higher among Republicans than Democrats in two states, Ohio and Florida. What’s more, the partisan gap in death rates increased significantly after vaccines were introduced.

Frogbert also noted that more men are dying of COVID than women. The second source of death is the ongoing opiate crisis, again made worse by conservative ideology. Frogbert wrote:

It began with the conservative idea that profits trump common sense and medical science, leading physicians, encouraged by pharmaceutical companies in search of profits, to prescribe opiates like they were Tic Tacs for years and years. It ends with America’s studied inability to manage a social or medical crisis without making it all about “how much better I am than you.” Because conservatives insist on treating drug abuse and addiction as a moral issue rather than a medical issue and a social management issue, and because conservatives can’t imagine helping people when they can blame them for problems not entirely of their own making, America simply can’t handle opiate addiction rationally or effectively. As long as we see addiction treatment and recovery as a failure of morality (I’m better than you), and more as a criminal issue to be managed by imprisonment (I’m still out here and you’re in there, so I’m better than you), we will continue to fail to address the opioid addiction issues that plague America.

I’ve been writing a lot about how all of the problems of us humans are because of or made worse through our rampant need to feel superior to others. I’m pleased to see others have come to the same conclusion. The third source of death is guns. Frogbert quoted such statistics as:

In 2019, 316 people of Asian or Pacific Islander origin died by suicide using a firearm in the United States. In that same year, 20,090 White people died by suicide involving a firearm in the United States.

Data from Statista. Gun advocates claim that a gun was used to deter hundreds of thousands of crimes a year. But data from emergency departments does not show hundreds of thousands of criminals with gunshot wounds. Frogbert linked to a study done at Harvard that says victims use guns in less than 1% of contact crimes. That study also shows other that other excuses to own guns aren’t backed by evidence (not that gun enthusiasts pay any attention to evidence). Wrote Frogbert:

The simple fact is, conservatism’s choice to make fetishistic obsession with guns the symbol of their identity is killing more Americans and killing more American conservatives than it ever did.

The lively discussion in the comments wonders if conservatives are dying at a rate faster than they can be replaced. Alas, the problem of letting them kill themselves and each other is that mass shootings take too many innocent lives. Also, maybe the expected Red Wave in November’s election was because too many conservatives were too dead to vote. Commenter Rosencrantz discussed the definition of conservatism, meaning conserving the hierarchy of power. That originally meant royalty, people who thought serfs having a say was obscene.

So the “founding fathers” of conservatism came up with the theory that the problem wasn’t that a handful of wealthy nobles had all the money, power and land…but that they were the wrong nobles. So they came up with the concept that the proper nobles to rule should be determined by markets rather than birth. Hence capitalism is created as a way to virtue signal support for democracy while still ensuring those with the money, power and land still had all those things anyway.

Last week Laura Clawson of Kos reported that the nasty guy and his legal team were ordered to pay $937,989.39 for filing politically motivated lawsuits against 31 people. One of those people was Hillary Clinton. The strange amount, rather than something like $1 million or $938 thousand, is the sum of all the expenses these 31 people had to pay out to protect themselves from these suits. The judge was clear that the nasty guy, not just his lawyers, has to pay part of that fine. He said the nasty guy has repeatedly used the courts to seek revenge for political adversaries. This fine is in addition to the $1.6 million the Trump Organization was fined for tax fraud. Because of this ruling the nasty guy’s lawsuits against the Pulitzer Prize Board, Twitter, and CNN have been withdrawn. Clawson also reported that the nasty guy has withdrawn two lawsuits against New York Attorney General Letitia James. He filed these suits because James is pursuing a $250 million civil lawsuit against the nasty guy and his adult children for fraudulent business practices. Of course, the circus in the US House continues. The big task now is to determine who sits on which committees. Joan McCarter of Kos reported on some of it, though by the time I got to writing about it the details aren’t so interesting. McCarthy wants to keep Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell off the Intelligence Committee, partly because they would gum up his (or the maniac’s) plans to retaliate against Democrats and partly because they had been so effective investigating the nasty guy and guiding the impeachment trials. Since Intelligence isn’t a standing committee McCarthy can keep Schiff and Swalwell off. But he has to go to the floor for some of his choices and some of his denials – and his majority is so thin. A couple Republicans have said they won’t approve some of McCarthy’s choices, and Rep. Greg Steube is out for a while because he fell off a ladder while cutting tree limbs. As for other things Republicans have been doing... Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Steve Benen of MSNBC writing about the recent obsession over the thought people are coming for their unhealthy gas stoves.

But the party can’t shake its reliance on juvenile antics. The focus on Dr. Seuss, Potato Head dolls, and inefficient lightbulbs has given way to pointless rhetoric about gas ovens and executive orders about critical race theory in states in which no schools teach critical race theory. Republicans do this for a variety of reasons, none of which is especially compelling: The party enjoys scoring cheap points, keeping activists they see as fools fully engaged, providing fodder for conservative media, and creating the basis for new fundraising gimmicks.

Congressman Bill Foster of Illinois had something to say about George Santos, whose entire life story was shown to be made up:

As the only recipient of the Wilson Prize for High-Energy Particle Accelerator Physics serving in Congress, it can get lonely. Not anymore! I'm thrilled to be joined on the Science Committee by my Republican colleague Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Fields Medal - the top prize in Mathematics - for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a video from The Daily Show with a hilarious take by people who still support Santos. Clay Bennett of the Chattanooga Times Free Press tweeted a cartoon that says being anti-woke is being asleep at the wheel. Dartagnan of the Kos community wrote about those who attacked the Capitol two years ago and have been facing trials and convictions for their actions. Dartagnan calls them spoiled toddlers. His first point of proof is they had no idea what would come next if their attack had succeeded. Did they intend to go back to their jobs if the nasty guy had been reinstalled? Did they fancy themselves in the menacing role of the nasty guy’s private enforcers, imposing a new social order at gunpoint? That means they were more like deluded minions than warriors. Dartagnan’s other point of proof is the violent rhetoric they used before, during, and after the attack and the meek, stumbling, not quite apologies they are saying before the court. To Dartagnan that means what they did two years ago was throw a tantrum and the only remorse they have is the tantrum didn’t lead to the result they wanted. Marissa Higgins of Kos wrestles with a bit of news from Pope Francis. On the good side Francis has called for the end of laws that ban homosexuality and for his church to be a part of ending those bans. On the bad side Francis still maintains that homosexuality is a sin. And Higgins, a lesbian and former Catholic feels caught in the middle. Yes, it is a help in distinguishing being gay as not a crime, though it is still a sin. Calling for 67 countries to end their bans on homosexuality, especially those that punish the crime with death, is great! Overturning those laws will save lives. Calling on American politicians (perhaps indirectly) to stop their efforts to ban trans people from sports and bathrooms of choice, to ban age-appropriate gender confirming health care, to ban knowledge of LGBTQ people from schools, to ban queer books, is all to the good. We need more voices to remember that sin and crime are not the same thing. But there’s still that thing about the Catholic Church – and many other denominations and religions – saying being LGBTQ is a sin, still denying us the community and comfort religion might bring. Higgins ends with a personal story. She was raised by her very religious grandmother. That grandmother had a brother who was gay and died of AIDS. Every night for the rest of her life that woman prayed that her brother would be accepted into heaven. What Pope Francis said is great and beneficial and a big step forward for the church and not enough.

We still haven’t finished not doing anything

I get a bit annoyed with Netflix because it doesn’t seem to have a way to search for good movies. A search on that site will show movies of the proper category (and likely similar to what I’ve seen before). So I thought to search the whole web for recommendations for LGBTQ movies on Netflix. I found several lists. And from those lists (plus a bit of searching for ratings and trailers) I’ve replenished my list of films to watch. The one I saw on Sunday is Timeout or maybe Time Out (its IMDB page has both). It was described as a Bollywood movie with a gay character. Since I hadn’t sat down to watch a Bollywood movie before (I have been to Indian restaurants with Bollywood movies played on the TVs on the walls with the sound off), I thought to give this one a try. Bollywood is known for its dance numbers. This movie has little dancing, but it does have several songs. So I don’t know if this is true Bollywood style. The story focuses on Guarav, who is 14, and his older brother Mihir, who I guess is a senior. Mihir is on the basketball team (Guarav is on the junior team). Guarav and friends form a band and they’re quite good – good enough to play at school events. In addition to basketball and the band a lot of the story is about teenagers trying to negotiate dating. Then Guarav catches Mihir in bed with another boy. And Guarav has a hard time figuring out what that means for him. Is he also gay? How does that affect his relationship to his brother? A nice bit of this movie is it asks the question how does one explain why one is attracted to another. I enjoyed this one. The language of the movie is listed as Hindi though it seemed half the words were English. Sometimes both languages were used in the same sentence. Fortunately, both languages are given English subtitles. After a bit of thinking about this film I saw that if one changed the language and the skin color it could take place in any suburban American high school. I finished the book The Bowl of Heaven and Shipstar by Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. The story was first published as two novels back in 2012 and 2014. My paperback contains both as one thousand page book. It took me almost four weeks to read it. This book is part of the genre of science fiction where humans encounter some jaw-droppingly huge artifact, obviously constructed, and need to investigate it. Niven had done this before in his Ringworld stories. I had also read John Varley’s Titan trilogy. In this case the artifact is a bowl about the width somewhere between the orbits of Mercury and Venus. The whole thing spins so the sides of the bowl offer gravity for a habitable space a few million times larger than the surface of the earth. The bottom of the bowl is covered with mirrors that focus the star’s light back on a small area of the star creating a jet of plasma. That plasma moves the star forward and the gravity of bowl keeps it following. If the jet (which passes through a hole in the center of the bowl) stopped propelling the star the bowl will fall into it. Humans passing in a colony ship need to investigate, partly because they need provisions, and partly to answer the question the authors set up: Who built it and why? The story is also a way for authors to show the wide variety of life they could dream up. That they did, though after a while each new wonder got a bit tiring. I wanted the story to get on to the point the authors were making, to resolve the conflicts. I think the whole thing would have been a lot better by cutting out about a third of it. The last few pages of the book are a preview of the sequel – what happens when the human ship gets to their original destination. It’s another 400 pages and online reviews are only moderate. I won’t bother. As for that page count... This book, when looking at the front cover, is narrower than other books on my shelf. That makes for a wider spine. If the cover was as wide as other books I figure it would be only 850 pages. Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday, shows the peaks in new cases per day as 1098, 950, 588, and 743. I hope it implies cases have leveled off (rather than the start of an increase). It is good it stays below peaks of 1000 cases a day. The deaths per day look like they aren’t updated as quickly as the cases per day. The last two weeks show deaths in the single digits, and the five weeks before then in the 17-27 range. Just in a couple days there were two mass shootings in California. And already in the 25 days so far in January there have been 30 mass shootings. Your favorite news source will have details at least on the two in California. Instead, I’ll comment on the huge number of political cartoons that have been created in the last few days (or created years before and reposted with no loss of relevancy). Here are some of them: Dan Nott posted a version of the Second Amendment with a lot of crossing out and rewriting:

An unregulated mass of armed citizens being necessary to the perpetuation of the firearms industry the right of the people to buy and conceal the latest in man-slaughtering technology shall not be infringed.

Danied Garcia posted one showing a man firing a gun but the band of bullets feeding it is actually a band of people. https://twitter.com/cartoonmovement/status/1617850712641179651 Jesse Duquette tweeted an image of a balance scale in which guns are heavier than everything else. Along with it is the comment:

The only thing more reliable than the next mass shooting is our gross unwillingness to do anything about it. This country is a blood-drunk snake eating itself and I don’t believe we’ll ever lose our taste for blood.

Mike Smith of the Las Vegas Sun tweeted a cartoon of a couple talking outside the Capitol.

He: When it comes to gun violence we need to consider mental health. She: Yes... The mental health of anyone opposed to gun laws.

Marc Murphy of the Louisville Courier-Journal shows the standard religious praying hands with some red stains and the person praying says, “I pray I get reelected.” Steve Sack posted one of a lawmaker trying to dismiss reporters by saying:

Too Soon! We still haven’t finished not doing anything after the last massacre!

RJ Matson posted a calendar of shootings in January in the USA. It’s accurate through Sunday, January 22 (which means it’s already out of date and doesn’t have the second California shooting). It has a splotch of red with a state abbreviation for each shooting. Sunday the 1st has six splotches, Sunday the 15th has four with up to three splotches on most other days. And this one from November 30th last year is still appropriate. I knew I could use it eventually. It shows an empty semi truck with the words:

Mass shootings in the US are happening so often, Republicans are having supply chain issues with thoughts & prayers.

Some of those cartoons came from about four dozen that Denise Oliver Velez posted at the top of the comments of a pundit roundup for Daily Kos. I’ve saved a few Ukraine updates. On January 15 Kos of Kos wrote about the Russian attack on apartments in Dnipro, Ukraine. As reported at the time there were 25 dead, 73 injured, 72 apartments destroyed, 230 damaged. Kos declared that in carrying out that attack Russia was really stupid. At a time when Ukraine’s allies were about to meet in Ramstein, Germany (the meeting has since happened) to discuss the next round of military aid and arguing over what to include...

A smart Russia lays low at this time, focusing on their tactical advances around Soledar, near Bakhmut. They make fake noises about “peace process” and string Germany along, pretending to be interested in finding resolution, if only the West didn’t encourage Ukraine to be so unreasonable! Instead, they engaged in a war crime so blatant, so viscerally horrifying, that a recalcitrant German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will have no choice but to agree to “free the Leopards”—the European-standard battle tanks manufactured by Germany’s arms industry.

The meeting would show that Ukraine’s capabilities will only improve and modernize.

Russia is still banking on the West losing its patience and pressuring Ukraine to freeze the current lines. Announcing everything would dash those Russian dreams, and might even spur a reassessment of their war effort.

This apartment bombing has shown the need to end this war as quickly as possible to prevent more war crimes. So deliver as much military gear as possible as quickly as possible. From a post on January 17th, Mark Sumner of Kos updated the stats for the Dnipro apartment attack: 44 dead, 79 injured, 39 rescued from the rubble. Most of the post is about Russia “liberating” the town of Soledar north of Bakhmut. There wasn’t much left of the town by the time Ukraine withdrew. One reason for defending it as much as they did was because Soledar was already destroyed, but keeping Russia bottled up here means another village may be spared destruction. As for why Soledar, which has no strategic value:

Russia didn’t manage to capture Kyiv. So it redefined victory down to taking the eastern and southern areas of Ukraine. Then it failed to hold Kharkiv, so it redefined victory to capturing all of Luhansk and holding the sea coast. Kherson is Russia forever! Then Russia lost Kherson in an absolutely humiliating defeat. Then Russia decided that taking Bakhmut, Bakhmut would be a victory! Only they couldn’t capture Bakhmut. Russia threw everything at Soledar because it needed a “win.” And any win would do. The strategic value of taking this flat space that used to hold a town is negligible, except in terms of the media reports announcing “Russia scores its first victory in months,” backed by the sound of 10,000 cheering tankies. Which does make you think. Not so much about Soledar, but about exactly why Russia felt it needed a win so badly that it was willing to reset the bar of victory so low and raise the level of acceptable loss so high. It’s fair to say that the importance of Soledar isn’t well understood, and the answers won’t be found on a map of Ukraine.

On Thursday the 19th, leading up to that Ramstein meeting, Sumner reported the long list of equipment the US and European countries pledged to send to Ukraine. Sumner wrote, speaking of Putin...

But what’s happening in Europe right now might be the capstone for his despair. In spite of a year of terrorizing and torture, in spite of enough nuclear threats to populate a thousand Tom Clancy novels, in spite of feeding untrained Russian soldiers wholesale into a meat-grinder for a “victory” over an area the size of a Walmart parking lot … Ukraine’s support in the West Just. Will. Not. Go. Away. By now, Russia expected Europe to be fretting about the cost of keeping their homes warm, the U.S. to be launching investigations into Zelenskyy’s laptop, and Ukraine’s army to be running on fumes. Instead, no matter what false claims Wagner may be making, Ukraine is having a stellar week—a week that sends a signal not just to Putin, but to China and to anyone else who thinks anything good can come from invasion.

On Friday the 20th, the start of the Ramstein meeting, Sumner discussed the central debate. Ukraine needs tanks. Up to this point Western countries didn’t want to send any modern tanks – old Soviet era tanks were just fine. Many European countries were willing to send their German made Leopard tanks. But clauses in export licenses say Germany must give permission for the buyer to give or sell the Leopards to any other country. And German Chancellor Olaf Scholz wasn’t giving that permission. There are, of course, a lot of historical reasons why Germany is reluctant to be an active supporter of any war effort. On Sunday the 22nd Kos reported that Germany would not prevent other countries, primarily Poland, from sending their Leopards to Ukraine. This was after Poland began suggesting that they and a few other countries were going to send their Leopards whether or not Germany gave their blessing. Kos also discussed the fight over the little village of Novoselivs’ke, north of Svatove. Unlike Soledar, this little village has a great deal of strategic value to both sides. On Tuesday the 24th Sumner reported that Biden was leaning towards sending the M1A2 Abrams tank to Ukraine. He had originally said no (the Abrams would be much more of a logistical mess for Ukraine than it would be a benefit). But Scholz had said he wouldn’t approve Leopards unless Biden approve Abrams. Since then both countries have confirmed both tanks would be sent (but don’t expect the Abrams to show up for a few months – the people to run and maintain it will need lots of training).

Letting us sit like fish in a barrel with AR-15s aimed at us

I’ve been avoiding writing about George Santos, the newly elected member of Congress from Long Island who lied about every aspect of his personal biography, though that didn’t come out until after the election. Lots of voices are calling for his resignation – lots, except for McCarthy, the one voice that matters. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos explained why. Republicans have a slim majority in the House and Santos is a Republican. She also reported that before the elections several other Republicans knew some of the parts of his story that were false. And they chose to be complicit in the lies. Because all they care about is power. Joan McCarter of Kos wrote:

One element of that secret deal Kevin McCarthy made with the Freedom Caucus for his speakership has emerged, and it is absolutely bonkers. The plan is to allow the debt ceiling to be breached, and then to direct the Treasury Department on how to prioritize debt payments. The GOP has been promising since before last fall’s midterm election that they would make debt ceiling a fight, and would demand those cuts. They followed through with new House rules to reinforce that. What they hadn’t said out loud was that they were willing to do the unthinkable: Force a debt ceiling breach. ... Prioritizing servicing the interest payments over running the government is not a good look for the GOP. “Any plan to pay bondholders but not fund school lunches or the FAA or food safety or XYZ is just target practice for us,” one senior Democratic aide told the Post. But there’s no indication that this crop of House GOP leadership actually gives a damn about the politics of it. They are all in safe seats and the fact that the minority is tiny and dependent on a bunch of vulnerable members doesn’t deter them. A larger problem for the nation is reality: We were here before in 2011 and 2013 and the Treasury Department was very clear in explaining that it doesn’t work that way—you can’t juggle the payments around when you are making literally millions of separate payments every single day. Then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew explained that the computer systems that issue those tens of millions of payments simply can’t be updated and reshuffled on an emergency basis, and that “prioritization is just default by another name.”

My friend and debate partner asked a couple weeks ago why don’t a few of the saner Republicans join with Democrats to pass a bill to raise the debt limit? (At least that’s what I remember him asking.) The big problem is the House Rules Committees, now well stocked with maniacs, controls what comes to the House floor. If they don’t approve it then it doesn’t happen. There is a way around that committee, called the discharge petition, but it requires a great deal of work and a great deal of time. Meaning if they don’t start now it won’t happen before Treasury is out of options in June. In a pundit roundup for Kos, Greg Dworkin quoted a bit of Ezra Klein of the New York Times discussing three reasons why the Republican Party is falling apart. I’ll skip the quote and go straight to Dworkin’s summary of the three reasons:

* Republicans are caught between money and media. * Same party, different voters. * Republicans need an enemy.

McCarter summarized what House Republicans accomplished between their week trying to elect a Speaker, and their long break this week and part of next for Martin Luther King Day. I won’t list all the horrors (which won’t get past the Senate), and jump to McCarter’s conclusion:

The House GOP started the week with a plunging favorability rating, and they sure didn’t do anything in the ensuing days to halt that plummet. What they’ve got planned for their return is no less cruel and no more popular than what we’ve seen so far. So, you go guys?

When Marjorie Taylor Greene got to Congress and we saw how obnoxious she was, Pelosi stripped her of committee assignments. But Pelosi isn’t Speaker anymore and McCarthy needed to make deals to get the Speaker job. During that Greene was his vocal supporter. Clawson reported she was rewarded with some plum assignments. One was the Oversight Committee, the gang that will be falsely targeting Hunter Biden. Greene should fit right in. The other is the Homeland Security Committee. That’s a problem, because Homeland Security was created after the 9/11 attacks. And Greene has a record of denying those attacks actually happened. Greene has gone from the maniac fringe to mainstream Republican. Marissa Higgins of Kos wrote Republicans around the country are starting the year with a slew of anti-trans and anti-queer bills. She listed some of these bills. Most are such things as banning trans kids from sports or banning trans kids from getting gender affirming health care. Then there are the bills banning LGBTQ books from libraries. And the worst version of that (no doubt we’ll see copies introduced in other states) is to define “sexually explicit” to include depictions of gender identity and sexual orientation – and imprison librarians who don’t take them off their shelves. Higgins also reported that DeathSantis has been asking some questions that are definitely invasions of privacy and quite vile. Such as: Asking schools and athletic associations about the menstrual cycle of students assigned female at birth to see who might be pregnant and who is receiving gender affirming care. That info is nobody’s business. Asking who is receiving gender affirming care at college campus clinics, even if just to get mental health support, and threatening government funding if he doesn’t get it. Higgins wrote:

“We can see cuts in funding for universities to treat students with this condition,” House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell said, according to the Associated Press. “And I think an all-out elimination of services is certainly on the table.” Driskell went on to say she’s worried about a possible “brain drain” of folks leaving Florida for out-of-state education in response to this clear invasion of privacy and overreach.

That’s enough about Republicans for now. While on the topic LGBTQ people here’s a story of something good happening. The United Methodist Church in Michigan presented a program at the denomination’s North Central Jurisdiction meeting in November. This jurisdiction includes the upper Midwest – roughly Michigan to the Dakotas. The program told stories of the impact of homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism on individuals. The impact was because of the official denomination policies barring LGBTQ people from becoming pastors and barring same-sex weddings from taking place in denomination churches. Rev. Angie Cox told of being rejected by her family because she and her partner are lesbian. Later a non-denominational church refused to baptize her. She found a reconciling United Methodist congregation and was welcomed. She began to study to be a pastor but each year as fellow students were commissioned by the church her candidacy was not recommended. Kiri Ann Ryan Bereznai isn’t a man and isn’t a woman either. But they insist is a person loved by God. They told the story of having a job within a United Methodist Church and afraid to be authentic. They got tired of hiding. Thankfully, the church leadership was understanding and they kept the job. They now wants to be a model for young queer people, to say there is a place for all of us. Thirty years ago Rev. Mary Ann Moman led a commitment ceremony for Michael and Allen. The church is the closest to Boystown, Chicago, the gay neighborhood, and has always been progressive. This was before an explicit denominational ban on such ceremonies. Even so, she got a deluge of letters saying she had desecrated the altar of her church. Thirty years later we’re still talking about it. After each speaker the audience was asked to think about and discuss such questions as: Are there examples of your congregation participating in or countering homophobia? Is your church addressing the problem of LGBTQ youth being four times more likely to attempt suicide? What could the church learn from transgender people? The Bible tells us to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God, so how does that inform your LGBTQ allyship? What are examples of how the privileges of heterosexism affected your life? Yes, the stories spoke of pain, of being harmed by the church. But this is something good that happened – the church leadership agreed to let the stories be heard and asked the audience to ponder how to make sure all people really are welcomed. X Gonzáles (formerly Emma) is a survivor of the shooting in Parkland, Florida that happened almost five years ago. They wrote an essay for New York Magazine, which is online at The Cut. The essay is about juggling time as an activist for March for Our Lives and student and how draining that was physically, emotionally, and mentally. They had to absorb the stories of other survivors and parents of victims while grieving their own loss then see protests at events where protesters were armed with the same weapons that had cut down fellow students. They went off to college and had to pull away from activism for a while. It was at college they realized they are nonbinary. They are living with parents after college, which means still living in Parkland and all its reminders. Last summer they offered to speak at another gun protest.

I directed my speech at members of Congress. I spoke to the fact that in my time as an activist trying to protect this country from itself, the only thing standing in the way of a life without headlines about mass shootings or the news that a loved one was taken by a gun had been Congress. Those who are currently in office are the only people who can make this change, and it is the sole purpose of their job to pass the laws that the people want them to. I let myself insult, scream, and curse at Congress in this speech for the simple reason that it is unfathomable to me that there would be people in this world who ran for office with the intention of making the world a better place, are presented with the facts about gun violence, and choose to ignore them in favor of making money from gun manufacturers. We are dying. And the people whose job it is to stop it work on Capitol Hill and sit around all day doing nothing, letting us sit like fish in a barrel with AR-15s aimed at us from every direction.

Keep them poor and they won't have time or strength for politics

A week ago I wrote about an article posted by Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community. In that one he wrote that we are in the final stages of Reaganism – the course set in motion when Reagan significantly cut the taxes on the rich, coupled with the Supreme Court of the time loosening donations to political campaigns. Hartmann posted again, this time asking whether the rich are weakening our democracy just to amass more money, or is there a deeper issue. When an article begins that way the logical guess is to say, yes there is something deeper. However, I think there is something even deeper that Hartmann missed. Back in the 1950s conservatives began to write about America having too much democracy. Yeah, that’s telling. Conservatives – mostly the rich – were becoming alarmed at the growing size of the middle class. The previous article said that the middle class had reached two-thirds of the population. The fear was that the middle class was growing faster than the rich class and when people reached the middle class they would have enough leisure time and financial cushion to be politically active. Hartmann reviewed some of the influences of conservative thinking. One was the book The Conservative Mind by Russel Kirk. His first chapter discussed Edmund Burke of close to the turn of the 19th century. Burke’s book (not named) discussed Britain’s restrictions on democracy – who could vote and run for office, and the British maximum wage. No, that’s not a typo. Limit how much a person is paid, keep them on the edge of poverty, and they wouldn’t have time or strength to get involved in politics. The middle class certainly did have time to get involved in politics. In the 1960s there was women’s liberation, campus protests against the Vietnam War, black people demanding Civil and Voting Rights, and the labor movement flexing its muscles and calling frequent strikes.

The Republican/Conservative “solution” to the “national crisis” these movements represented was put into place with the election of 1980: the project of the Reagan Revolution was to dial back democracy while taking the middle class down a peg, and thus end the protests and social instability.

Hartmann then listed many things Reagan did to attack the middle class. I’ve already mentioned the tax cuts on the rich. Reagan also raised taxes 11 times on the middle class, plus adding taxes on Social Security income, unemployment benefits, and tips. He disallowed deductions for credit card, car loan, and student debt interest. He declared war on unions. His VP brought in his son George W. to build bridges with fanatical evangelical Christianity because they also opposed women’s rights and Civil Rights. And he attacked the idea that government should provide some amount of care for its citizens. Among his successes is an entire generation of students so saddled with debt they aren’t willing to jeopardize their future by “acting up” on campus. About the depth Hartmann missed. He said the goal of conservatives was to end “social instability.” So what does that mean? Hartmann didn’t clarify. So I’ll give it a try. Conservatives are highly invested in the social hierarchy with, of course, themselves at the top. “Social instability” is anything that might disrupt their position at the top or, even worse (for them), do away with the need for a social hierarchy. Hartmann says there is a way out from under conservative control: mobilize. He quoted a phrase both Sanders and Obama were fond of saying: “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” The comments to Hartmann’s post were indeed lively. One I thought was worth repeating is by Al B Tross, who wrote:

Capitalism knows no morality. Capitalism, an economic system, or society, where the only motivator is greed, and the only measure is money. We have become a transactional, not a civil, society.

I’ve written little about the United Methodist Church in the last couple years. Back in 2020, just before the pandemic hit the US I attended a gathering of progressives getting ready for the 2020 General Conference, the denomination’s legislative body. The major piece before that Conference was a carefully negotiated proposal for an amicable split – conservatives would get help forming their own denomination that would allow them to keep LGBTQ people out of leadership roles and the progressives who stayed would then have the majority to fully welcome LGBTQ people. Of course, that GC 2020 was postponed a year, then canceled. The next GC won’t happen until 2024. In the meantime the conservative denomination was formed, called the Global Methodist Church, and congregations began to disaffiliate from the UMC, many to join the GMC. All that was done without the financial help the big 2020 proposal would have supplied. So much happened the progressive parties who had negotiated it pulled out. And I haven’t paid much attention to it all. I occasionally look at articles Rev. Jeremy Smith writes for his blog Hacking Christianity, though it has been months since I’ve looked. A post from earlier this year is about Methodism 2.0. To describe it he uses the metaphor of the spider and the starfish. A spider has a head that makes all the decisions. Kill the head and you kill the spider. A starfish has a nervous system spread through the body. Chop off a limb and it will regrow. That comes from the book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. Change comes from the bottom up, not top down. Smith applies that to United Methodism. At the 2012 GC (which I attended as an observer and which did not go well – see blog entries from the end of May that year) the big push for an LGBTQ inclusive church was defeated, yet Bishop Talbert started a movement when he called for Biblical Obedience over the denomination’s rule book prohibiting LGBTQ pastors. His ideas spread in spite of the leadership. But as for the denomination...

In short, traditionalists required a super-majority to finally excise progressives from United Methodism, which they didn’t have. And progressives needed a majority to excise the sin of antigay polity from United Methodism, which they didn’t have. So, stalemate.

But within a span of three years the traditionalists, the spiders, lost their power. First, they won a draconian policy at the special 2019 GC, which led to considerable blowback. Second, by forming the GMC they lost credibility with the Judicial Council, the denomination’s court, which turned against them. Third, all of the traditionalist bishops have been replaced with the most progressive and diverse class. And fourth, with 2000 congregations having disaffiliated, traditionalist no longer have a majority in many state conferences. And now all five American jurisdictions – including the most conservative South East – have passed a statement supporting LGBTQ inclusion. Meteor Blades of Kos wrote the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court ruling that permitted a ban on bump stocks. These are devices that essentially turn a semi-automatic rifle into an automatic rifle. Yes, the case will go to the Supremes, where they will eventually rule in favor of death. My interest isn’t so much in the details of the case, and Blades provides plenty. Instead, I’ll look at Blades’ quote of Elie Mystal, written for The Nation:

But the legal wrangling about the technical function of how these things are designed to kill us highlights a larger problem: the legal futility of one-off weapon bans. It’s a bitter pill for people to swallow, because bans focused on specific weapons are practically effective and feel politically achievable. But legally, their impact is fleeting. They don’t offer permanent solutions to our problems. Gun bans are a temporary therapeutic, not a long-term cure to our disease of gun violence. That’s because the gun industry will always produce a newer, better bump stock. It will always make different, more deadly weapons. It will always refine the speed and killing power of firearms. And the plodding regulatory process simply will not, and likely cannot, keep up with whatever gunmakers do to murder people next. ... Our gun laws are a deadly joke. They will continue to be jokes as long as we try to solve this problem one weapon at a time. It’s folly to try to regulate which particular overcompensation machine aggrieved men are allowed to smuggle into their trousers. Instead, we should regulate the category of people allowed to purchase any weapon, of any kind, at all.

NPR posted a story about the history of abortion rights last June before Roe v Wade was overturned. I missed it then. They aired it again this morning. In it host A Martínez talked to Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah hosts of the NPR history podcast Throughline. Before 1860 there were no laws in America banning abortion. Horatio Storer didn’t think abortion was good, so he started his campaign by writing a letter pretending to be the president of the American Medical Association. In it he condemned abortion on moral grounds. At this point in the story I’m already thinking this has something to do with one group of people believing they are more superior than another. All abortion laws in the 20th century revolve around that. And I was right, though the reason was not just the oppression of women. Storer’s reasoning was fairly straightforward. The birth rate for Protestant white women had been declining over the 19th century. His fear was there wouldn’t be enough Protestant white babies to stay ahead of the babies by the incoming migrants, the Catholics, the newly freed black people, and the Chinese. So Protestant white women had better take one for the team and stay home and have babies. Along with criminalizing abortion Storer saw a chance to knock out the doctor’s competition – midwives, who he slandered as unclean. That required women to get their care from male doctors.

Non-violence is a sword that heals

My Sunday movie was the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. It is a true story of Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) hired to teach computers in East Los Angeles in 1980. But the school couldn’t afford to buy computers, so he ends up teaching math in a place where his students have Spanish surnames. We follow one class of students through to graduation in 1982. He has to convince them an education matters. If all you can do is add and subtract you’ll spend your life pumping gas. Some of the boys in the class swagger like gang members and don’t want to be seen as smart. He has to convince fellow teachers that students will rise to expectations and these students are worth teaching. He has to convince parents that their children can have a better life. And he has to battle the Education Testing Service who accuse his students of cheating. I think a few of the actors playing the students went on to decent movie careers, though the only name I recognize now is Lou Diamond Phillips. Looking up the movie on IMDB didn’t help in identifying actors because it shows how the actors look now (or perhaps in the last 10 years), not how they looked when the movie was made. The IMDB trivia page noted Olmos shadowed the real Jaime Escalante for many days and Olmos wrote dialogue based on what Escalante actually said. So it is good Escalante said the movie was 90% truth and 10% drama. I enjoyed this one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. While there are stories in the national news about the possibility of being infected by COVID, flu, and RSV all at the same time, Michigan is doing well on the COVID front – at least in the reported COVID cases. The peaks in the new cases per day over the last few weeks are 1233, 1002, 852, and 555 – heading in the right direction. The number of deaths per day remain at their ongoing low level. The Martin Luther King holiday happened since the last time I posted. So here are a few things that were discussed about the day. Charles Jay of the Daily Kos community called us to continue King’s dream of economic justice. A few quotes from King:

“God never intended for one group of people to live in superfluous inordinate wealth, while others live in abject poverty.” “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.” “And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America?’ And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.”

Jay then discussed how it was that the rich acquired more than a trillion dollars during the pandemic. Paul Fell, as part of his Daily Felltoon, tweeted a cartoon about economic equality:

Did you see how much the university is paying its new coaches?! Meanwhile, our professors make a fraction of that for turning out doctors, teachers, engineer, and Nobel Prize winners. Big Deal! Not a one of ’em can throw a 70-yard touchdown pass and win the Superbowl!!

Aysha Qamar of Kos wrote about King’s influence around the world. Nelson Mandela of South Africa was highly influenced by King as he worked to end Apartheid. In Northern Ireland Catholics used King’s teachings to challenge the discrimination they experienced from the Protestants. King’s vision was a part of the social movements in Eastern Europe in the 1980s that finally swept aside Soviet rule. And in India the Dalits, the “untouchables” in India’s caste system, used King’s non-violent teachings to challenge that system. David Fitzsimmons of the Arizona Daily Star tweeted one of King’s central messages:

If you succumb to the temptation of using violence in your struggle unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness and your chief legacy will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos.

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a King quote:

When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love. Where evil men would seek to perpetuate an unjust status quo, good men must seek to bring a real order of justice. Non-violence is a powerful and just weapon which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

YoursINegritude stole an image we can use when conservatives quote MLK. Remember Clippy, the paperclip help character from a long ago version of Windows? The image is of Clippy asking:

Hi! It looks like you’ve quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. out of context instead of engaging with the complex reality of white supremacy in America. Would like some help with that?

This one isn’t directly about MLK, though appropriate for his life’s work. A few weeks ago during the children’s time at my church the presenter talked about the book The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss. She didn’t just talk about it, she had the kids act it out. The story is about one group of sneetches who have a star on their bellies who look down on another group of sneetches who don’t have stars. So those without get stars and the first group takes them off and proclaim the better sneetches don’t have stars. And round and round they go. The kids would go into a tent where the presenter’s husband would attach or take off the stars. At the conclusion the kids, at least the older ones, got the point. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about a teacher of the Olentangy Local School District in Ohio reading that book to students. The reading was being recorded for the NPR Planet Money podcast. Yeah, I didn’t think that book was about economics. But apparently the book, with all that activity to add and remove stars, is about open markets. Or something. This is one of several books discussing economics for kids on that podcast. After they got into the book a ways, a third grader made a connection, “Like, white people disrespected Black people, but then, they might stand up in the book.” A moment later, Amanda Beeman, the district’s assistant communication’s director, stopped the reading. That halt and the children’s confusion are are now a part of the podcast. Ohio does not have a law preventing teachers from discussing race. Well, not yet. Republicans have introduced such a bill. Even without such a law the political climate has teachers and school officials already censoring what goes on in a classroom. And even if the book says nothing about white people and black people students can’t be allowed to figure out the topic is racism. A book published in 1961 during the Civil Rights era is now too risky for a classroom. I recently wrote about the protests in Lützerath, Germany trying to stop an open pit coal mine from eating the town. The protesters didn’t reoccupy the village. But... Leah McElrath quoted FaggotsForFuture, who wrote, “It was a political victory: we showed the greens that anyone who tries to screw the #climate movement will get hurt politically. We are not to be messed with!” McElrath also wrote the police inflicting violence against the climate activist seemed to be having fun. Laura Clawson of Kos wrote about a feature of the Inflation Reduction Act signed last year. There will be a variety of rebates and tax credits to help households shift away from fossil fuels. States need to enact laws to get the money to their residents, so the money may be available by the end of this year. So start thinking about it now! Money will be available for such things as: weatherization materials such as insulation and window upgrades; heat pumps to replace the furnace, air conditioner, and water heater; and solar panels. Hunter of Kos discussed the latest silliness from conservatives. Another major scientific study shows that gas stoves are not a good idea. The emissions of that flame in the house can lead to asthma in children. That prompted many conservatives to proclaim that Biden was coming after their stove and that the only way he’ll get it is to pry it out of their cold dead hands (extra points if you remember the last thing they insisted their cold hands would grasp). Hunter noted two things related to this tempest. First, there is regulation:

If all washing machines came with optional robot-arm attachments that would spontaneously rip the livers out of a small percentage of passing toddlers, we'd regulate those washers pretty darn quick. Robotic vacuums cannot be shipped with optional spinning knife attachments just because it would look cool. You can no longer put cocaine in your old-timey bottled cough syrup even if it does really perk your patients up, because reasons. There are some things we're good at regulating, and some things we're not. The "not" parts tend to coincide with very particular lobbying efforts.

See the fights over tobacco, lead in gasoline, and now fossil fuels in general. The second thing is that the loudest conservatives…

are catering to a crowd that very much believes mundane aspects of our modern American life are causing nationwide illness and death. That's their thing. It's their whole personality, in fact. They just believe the dangers are always coming from the opposite direction of whatever our nation's top experts are currently warning about.

See COVID vaccines and the latest generation of broadband infrastructure. So, yeah, the tempest over gas stoves will continue to be a thing. Hunter also discussed the latest blather from Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. Lee, surely working for ways to gut the federal budget, asked:

Please (1) name any federal regulatory agency whose elimination would negatively impact your life, and then (2) specify whether that agency’s necessary functions couldn’t be performed at least as well at the state or local level, or by a non-governmental body.

Lee then suggested that states would step up and handle food safety and while there would be variations from state to state this won’t be a problem. Hunter then asked Kos readers for their lists of necessary federal departments and agencies. The discussion was lively. Mother Mags: Food safety, work safety, etc. would get watered down in red states. hijean: see the meat industry during COVID. tmseattle: Texas electricity isolated themselves from the national grid to avoid following national regs. That was a disaster a couple Februarys ago. RO37:

Do I like having a single national currency instead of needing a book of exchange rates on hundreds of private and state run currencies (DoT) Do i like drugs that I know work when I take them, and food that won't poison me? (FDA) Do I like breathing clean(er) air? That my asthma prone family hasn’t triggered for my children? (EPA) Do i like that the DOJ can crack down on the most racist police departments? Do I like reading novel, watching TV shows, and listening to music (Dept of Commerce—patent office) Do I like that China or Russia can't just march to my door and there's acoordinated national defense? Dept of Defense

Katwoman added:

Do I like having an independent organization investigating mass casualty accidents and recommending changes regardless of profit impact? (NTSB) Do I like knowing the resources entire country will help my state in the event of a natural disaster? (FEMA) Do I like preserving our natural landscape for the animals who live in it? (NPS and BLM) Do I like having one exceptionally trained organization in charge of search and rescue on and around my country’s ports? (USCG).

And several noted that corporation want one set of regulations, not fifty. See the complaints that California has much more stringent car exhaust regs than the rest of the country. So, yeah, they want the federal government and it various agencies to regulate and not the states.

The all new M1A2 Abrams recreational utility vehicle!

Back before Christmas and shortly after Ukrainian President Zelenskyy visited the US Congress Cathy Young wrote an article for Bulwark about Putin’s Useful Idiots. A good chunk of the article is various people on the right criticizing the visit. They include nasty junior, Josh Hammer and Batya Ungar-Sargon of Newsweek, Matt Walsh of Daily Wire, Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and let’s just say many more. There is a strong consensus that Ukraine is fighting for freedom against authoritarianism and for a free world and its values. There’s also a sense that if Ukraine succumbs all of the countries on Russia’s border may be next.

The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine—a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops—doesn’t have a simple answer. Partly, it’s simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we’re against it, and the more offensively the better. (And if the pre-Trump Republican establishment is also for it, then we’re even more against it.) Partly, it’s the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/“Deep State” project, all the more suspect because it’s related to Trump’s first impeachment. Partly, it’s the “national conservative” distaste for liberalism—not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia’s crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine’s desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe. Whatever the reason, the anti-Ukraine animus on the right is quite real and widespread.

A reminder that the goal of “limited government” means a government that is not able to help anyone (but the rich), meaning if you don’t have it the government isn’t going to give you resources to get it. In a sense proponents of limited government are saying, “I have mine, too bad you don’t have yours. And, oh goody! There is no one able to prevent me from exploiting and oppressing you.” From the way that American insurrectionists have been protected, in spite of the law, they don’t believe that bit about “equality before the law.” Mark Sumner of Daily Kos wrote about the town of Soledar in Ukraine. Russia claims to have “liberated” it. Ukraine says no, they haven’t. Soledar is a bit north of Bakhmut, which Russia has been repeatedly trying to take for months and has lost thousands of lives in the attempt. Perhaps if Soledar is taken Russia would then be able to take Bakhmut. At the moment the fog of war is too murky to actually tell who controls the town. Likely both control a part. Of interest to Sumner is the propaganda value of claiming the town.

Because it’s been so long since Russia had anything that even looked like a marginal victory, pro-Russian sources are trying to turn Soledar into “proof” of every claim out of the Kremlin. Soledar has already been turned into a banner they can wave to show that everything is going according to plan. Those feints at Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson? Bah. Only now is Russia seriously beginning to fight. There’s a good reason for this propaganda flood: If Russia captures Soledar, it would be their first significant advance since July. If. There’s no doubt that Ukraine is also attempting to paint the situation favorably. However, their motivations for exaggerating the ability of Ukrainian forces to withstand a large assault are certainly mixed. Would the loss of Soledar and increasing threat to Bakhmut make it more likely or less likely that modern main battle tanks roll into Ukraine in the next few weeks? Good question.

The invasion is almost 11 months old and only now Russia is seriously beginning to fight? Heh. Why wait so long? In an update at the top of this post Sumner included a video from the Twitter account Defense of Ukraine. The video acknowledges that some countries are reluctant to send tanks to Ukraine. Others are arguing about the definition of “tank.” So they offer a solution: The all new M1A2 Abrams recreational utility vehicle! It then plays like a commercial for an SUV with comparisons to galloping horses. The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago is hosting the exhibit Children of War through February 12. Shortly after the war began art teacher Nataliia Pavliuk and daughter Yustyna started an art therapy program for the refugee children who settled in Lviv. They held classes in orphanages, hospitals, community centers, art galleries, and wherever they encountered refugee children. This therapy helps them deal with the hell they endured. Some of the art will break a heart, other images show the love and hope they hold on to. The best way to see the art is to click on the “for sale” button. Sales will benefit the therapy program, but it looks like it has all been sold. Frances Nguyen of Kos Prism wrote about a small effort of community reparations. Back in 1963 the City Council of Berkeley, California passed an anti-segregation law. The opposition was so fierce it was repealed by referendum just a few months later. Of course, at the time redlining was already well established. That’s the practice of refusing to lend money for mortgages in black neighborhoods. That meant black people could not accumulate wealth. To reverse a bit of that the Arlington Community Church, United Church of Christ of Kensington, a predominantly white church just north of Berkeley, established the Black Wealth Builders Fund. It offers zero-interest loans to help black residents to make a down payment on a home. The church considered what to do following the 2020 murder of George Floyd. They created an anti-racist discussion group and what they heard about the most was housing. So that’s what they worked on. While they have used the term reparations to recover from past injustices, the word doesn’t appear in the title of their project because what they offer is a tiny bit of money in what would be needed to restore the denied wealth of black people. Also, they do not call it charity. The money does need to be paid back – when the home is refinanced or sold. Leah McElrath tweeted a quote from The Wounded Healer:

The longer I work in psychiatry, the more & more I'm reminded that poverty is one of the most harmful factors (if not the most harmful factor) affecting peoples' mental health.

McElrath added:

Can attest professionally and personally. Also: life events like divorce, job loss, and disability can all lead to becoming unhoused, which then can exacerbate mental illness. We mistakenly think mental illness leads to becoming unhoused, but it’s a dual direction relationship.

Randall Woodfin, mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, tweeted:

Announcing "Home for All" We are launching project Home for All, to provide dignified and safe housing units and wraparound services to residents in need. Each unit is lockable, heated and cooled, and furnished with a desk and bed. We've heard from y'all, our neighbors experiencing homelessness, & local service providers about the need for temporary housing for those experiencing homelessness paired with wraparound services that identify needs, addresses them, & helps transition them into permanent housing. ... Everyone deserves to have safe shelter. This project, which we will be presenting to the City Council next week, is a big step forward in the fight for a more equitable and just society that protects all of our people.

Woodfin included photos of these shelters. They don’t appear to be any bigger than that desk and bed and don’t look all that sturdy. But as temporary shelter it sure beats a tent or a spot under a bridge. And since it comes with helpful services one shouldn’t need to live in them for very long. More communities need to provide such shelters and services rather than forcing homeless people out of encampments.

Legislative victories can’t answer the party’s underlying discontent

Continuing with the first week of the US House under the control of Speaker McCarthy. Joan McCarter of Daily Kos discussed one of his giveaways so he could get the job. He promised a vote for the Fair Tax Act, which as usual for Republicans, has nothing to do with what its title says. This bad bill has been floating around Republicans for 20 years. It has the following provisions: * Abolish the IRS * Eliminate income, payroll, estate, and gift taxes. * Institute a national sales tax of 23% that gets funneled into the general budget and a few trust funds for pensions, health insurance, and disability insurance. Not a surprise that the taxes eliminated benefit the rich and a high sales tax hurts the poor. Yeah, the poor are supposed to get a monthly tax rebate, but with no IRS there is no one to tell who. Eliminate those taxes also means eliminating charity donations. Lots of nonprofits that help the poor will close. And that sales tax is to disappear by 2030. Yeah, that means the federal government has income from tariffs, but little else.

And it’s getting a floor vote. Because of Kevin McCarthy’s desperate need to be called speaker. Because the GOP of 2023 has no clue how any of this works. The bill, if it passes in the House, will get laughed out of the Senate and has no hope of passing. Which makes it a poison pill for the not-maniacs in the House GOP. One of the other reasons it’s never advanced to the floor is that leadership never wanted to force their members to have to vote on something so ridiculous, a vote that could either alienate the core Tea Party base on the one hand or their corporate funders on the other. Business does not like this idea. So thanks Kevin for yet another gift to Democrats in 2024.

Mark Sumner of Kos reported the House are considering the idea of expunging either or both of the nasty guy’s impeachments. Perhaps they can fit it in between investigating Hunter Biden’s laptop and pretending to build a wall. Protecting the nasty guy’s ego is, gosh, naturally the top priority of the country. But can they really do that?

There is no mechanism in the Constitution that allows an impeachment to be expunged. Yes, say Republicans, but there’s also nothing in the Constitution that says an impeachment can’t be expunged. So there. This is true, precisely because the authors of the document likely recognized the boneheaded uselessness of any such expungement. Any impeachment is, by necessity, an expression of the will of the sitting House of Representatives in the current Congress. A new Congress can certainly issue a statement disagreeing with the opinion of a past House, but that new statement in no way invalidates the opinion of the House that issued the impeachment in the first place. ... The fact that Republicans are even talking about this makes it likely that they’re going to try it. In fact, Republicans put even more pointless bills before the House twice already that would have expunged both impeachments, even though they knew those bills would go nowhere. Because this isn’t about justice. It’s about show.

McCarter wrote that the House maniacs will hold the debt ceiling hostage. She then discussed ways to get around it: Moderate Republicans can join with Democratss to use a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill – but it is a process that can take months (so better get started already). Another is to invoke the 14th Amendment, section 4 that says, “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law … shall not be questioned” – which means declaring the law that defines the debt limit to be unconstitutional. An idea has been floated that is legal to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin and use it to repurchase debt (I’ll let economists explain it). Congress has passed laws to spend money and issue debt to have that money to spend, to tell how much tax is to be collected to pay the debt, and also to put a limit on that debt. That puts the president in a bind, to spend what Congress has ordered, to tax only as much as Congress has ordered, yet borrow no more than Congress has permitted. The president must follow the least unconstitutional path, which is ignore the debt limit. If the House insists on being dysfunctional the White House needs to be able to take care of the problem without them. McCarter reported that today Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the national debt will reach its statutory limit next Thursday, January 19th. She will then begin “extraordinary measures” that will keep the government going until summer. Yellen, the White House, and various economists are now beating the drum on how disastrous defaulting on the debt would be to the economy. Will Biden, Democrats, and reasonable Republicans in the House plan now for catastrophe? Or will they let the maniacs take the nation up to the brink and perhaps cross it? I had mentioned that House Republicans have already declared they won’t be able to meet the budget deadline of the end of September. Georgia Logothetis, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Ed Kilgore writing for New York Magazine:

One compromise basically promised that the House would never pass an omnibus appropriations bill again, holding votes on 12 separate appropriations bills instead. The problem here is that Congress has routinely relied on omnibus bills in recent years not just to “hide” controversial spending items but because it has proved impossible to get separate bills through Congress by the end of each fiscal year. ... It’s a recipe for fiscal gridlock, government shutdowns, and, at best, a system in which the government chugs along on the power of “continuing resolutions” — stopgap spending bills that keep spending levels the same — which is likely what the MAGA conservatives want. So, ironically, instead of the deep and thoughtful review of federal spending the rebels claim to want, this promise will probably produce at least two years of keeping the federal government on automatic pilot when it comes to spending priorities.

David Horsey of the Seattle Times tweeted a cartoon showing a dog with McCarthy’s face whose leash is being held by Matt Gaetz, walking with Lauren Boebert. Gaetz says, “Heel, Mister Speaker!” Steve Breen of the San Diego Union-Tribune tweeted a cartoon of elephants tangled in a power cord as they are trying to plug in a speaker. Adam Zyglis of the Buffalo News tweeted a cartoon of an elephant very much afraid of a mouse labeled “Freedom Caucus.” Greg Dworkin, in another pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Peter Beinart of the New York Times:

The problem isn’t that Republicans don’t win legislative victories. It’s that legislative victories can’t answer the party’s underlying discontent, which is less about government policy than about American culture. Democrats worry about voting rights, gun control, climate change and abortion — enormous challenges, but ones that congressional leaders can at least try to address. What Republicans fear, above all, is social and demographic changes that leave white Christian men feeling disempowered, a complex set of forces that Republicans often lump together as “wokeness.” ... That’s not the kind of problem a Republican speaker can fix.

Gabe Ortiz of Kos used a swear word when describing the ongoing game that Sen. John Cornyn is playing. Ortiz calls him the Troll Senator. Cornyn gets that name because he calls, as he did this week, for “safe, orderly, humane and legal” immigration reform, then is instrumental in derailing reform packages when they are proposed. One of those came in December. It was supported by both parties – measures to restrict who can come across the border for Republicans and permanent protections for DACAs for Democrats. But now that the House is controlled by Republicans it is safe for Cornyn to again call for immigration reforms he knows won’t happen. Of course, Cornyn had help. However, he seems to be the leader in this way of doing business. And, as I mentioned before, it shows Republicans don’t want to solve the immigration issues. They want to campaign on blaming Democrats for them not being solved. Meteor Blades of Kos discussed a report from the Rhodium Group that shows greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.3% in 2022. Yeah, a lot of things aiming to reduce emissions have gone right. But...

In other words, they concluded, the world needs to be on a trajectory to carbon neutrality by 2030, and at carbon neutrality by 2050. As the IPCC reported several months ago in its 2022 Emissions Gap report and in its 2021-2022 Sixth Assessment Report on the climate, with less than a decade left to get on that trajectory, we’re nowhere near where we need to be in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The reason? Like nearly every nation on the planet, U.S. pledges under the Paris Agreement don’t cut emissions deeply enough quickly enough to reach the trajectory scientists say we need to be on. And, oh, by the way, barely a handful of nations are fulfilling even those inadequate pledges. Despite the pleas of activists and national vows at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 to come to the COP27 talks in Dubai with stepped-up pledges, none of the major emitters did so.

We have to let go of the idea that we can tweak things around the edge and that will be enough. Blades listed a half-dozen recent articles out of a great many highlighting that more needs to be done. Blades asked:

Why wouldn’t this deluge of news put the spurs to everyone with the clout to have an impact? Instead of so few?

He concluded:

This is why we need more candidates who put climate near the top of their priority lists even though most of the general public does not. It’s just seven years until 2030. Seven years to get on the necessary trajectory, say scientists. What’s that old expression? Do or die?

When I lived in Germany more than thirty years ago when I took the autobahn from Cologne to Aachen I would pass near an open pit coal mine. Later I saw photos of a gigantic machine that scooped away at the dirt to get to the coal underneath. Luisa Neubauer tweeted about a second open pit coal mine, this one near the highway between Aachen and Düsseldorf. In her thread she has photos of these big machines. She wrote:

The Green party in the German government has made a deal with RWE, the largest coal company of Germany (and single largest polluter of Europe), to quit coal by 2030. The price: RWE will destruct #Lützerath. Sounds good, yet it turns out to be a dirty deal. ... If RWE gets access to the coal under Lützerath (and burns it), there is barely any chance for Germany to stay in line with its CO2-budget that was agreed to with the Paris Agreement. At the same time, this very coal is not needed for our energy supply. That's what studies say.

On Wednesday police came from across Germany to force the eviction of Lützerath. Climate activists are also there trying to stop the eviction and keep the coal in the ground. Five hundred climate scientists are petitioning the government.

Also today, 200 public figures from Germany, actors, singers and writers and many more have demanded the eviction to be stopped. Christian churches from around the region have spoke out too. And @GretaThunberg has announced to come to join a massive protest there on Saturday. Not all things around the climate crisis are black and white, but this is. If we want to see a world with less crisis, we need the fossil fuel destruction to be stopped. And we need governments to hold fossil fuel companies accountable, to put people over fossil fuel profits. All of this tells so much: The single winner of all of this is RWE, they are expected to make several billions € additional profits through the intensification of coal burning, they receive 2,8 Bn € compensation for an earlier coal exit, plus additional subsidies. Germany, the 4th country most responsible for the climate crisis, is not just failing the climate movement, by violating its 1,5°- promises. It's failing everyone else too. The emissions from Lützerath will not stay in Lützerath. They'll increase climate effects everywhere. If we want to have the slightest chance to get off the road towards climate collapse, the rules for the energy transition must be informed by the science and the Paris Agreement, not by fossil fuel companies. So we keep fighting.

Leah McElrath tweeted several videos of what was happening in the town on Wednesday. Joanie Lemercier, a climate activist, also posted videos of the protest, which appears to have been going on for a couple weeks. She also has a video of one of the big machines in action. Feeling helpless? Join them. I did a search about this situation. Reuters reported this morning that the protest has been going on, not for two weeks, but for two years. And DW reported that most of the protesters have been cleared from the village. It also said most of the residents had abandoned the place and it was now occupied by protesters. Shabnam Nasimi tweeted:

The Taliban have reportedly ordered male doctors NOT to treat female patients. So, if women are BANNED from university & can’t study to become doctors, and now can’t be treated by male doctors, then what are they supposed to do? Die from sickness?