With people knowing full well who and what he is

Decades ago I heard the aria Lascia ch’io pianga from the opera Rinaldo by George Frederick Handel. I first heard it in the 1994 movie Farinelli. It’s a beautiful tune and I thought I could arrange it for handbells (because that’s what I do). But I did only the basics before changing music programs (the first time was 23 years ago) and the file didn’t transfer. A new music program with a better way to read old files revived my interest and I spent this afternoon pulling it into my program. I had heard the aria sung in its original Italian on the radio and hadn’t paid much attention to the English translation. While working on it today I took a moment to read the English. And it is appropriate for today:

Here let my tears flow! Let hope my soul know, My heart is longing For Liberty. Assuage the sorrow to chains belonging O, grant tomorrow That I may be free.

Yeah, the nasty guy will squat in the Oval Office again. That is difficult to take. The Michigan House flipped to Republican, so no more improvements in LGBTQ rights. I’m glad Democrats did quite a bit while they could. The lame duck session could be busy. Democrat Elissa Slotkin will replace retiring Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, winning a tiny margin while the nasty guy took the state. But the US Senate flipped to Republican with a decent (rather than thin) margin. As of this writing the US House hasn’t been called yet. We may see the nasty guy take office with unchecked power. There are a few other bright spots. Sarah McBride easily won to be the first transgender person in the House, filling Delaware’s single seat. Yes, she is a Democrat. Abortion rights were on the ballot in ten states and passed in seven. Those that approved their proposals are: Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York. Those that did not are South Dakota, Florida, and Nebraska. Florida is important because it got 57% of the vote but needed 60% to be approved. Nebraska is interesting because the ballot had to opposing measures. A majority approved a ban after the 12th week. The proposal to ensure abortion rights got only 49%. To be approved a proposal had to cross 50% and have more votes than the other. And South Dakota simply didn’t pass it. That’s the end of my good news. There is very much the possibility Congress will pass a national abortion ban and the nasty guy will sign it, even though lately he’s been saying he won’t. Even if they don’t manage that, Project 2025 calls for banning mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in medication abortions. Kos of Daily Kos posted just before 6:30 this morning. Articles on Kos usually are topped by an image. For this post the image is solid black.

In 2016, people were dazzled by Donald Trump, and he ran up against a great but unpopular candidate. In 2020, Trump barely lost, but hey, incumbency has its advantages. And here we are, with people knowing full well who and what Trump is, and they still voted for him in big numbers. Vice President Kamala Harris was not a flawed candidate. She was near spotless. And she was objectively more popular than Trump. (Exit polling shows Trump’s favorability at 44/54, with Harris at 48/51.) And we did what we needed to do. And it was still not enough. All the money in the world, all the door-knocking in the world—none of that could overcome the reality that more people were convinced that Trump was the better choice.

So don’t accuse Harris of this or that supposed failing. This is too big for that to matter. Even so, Democrats will hold a postmortem to try to figure out why they lost. We liberals need to rebuild, to create a movement that can weather the worst Republicans can do. And we need to listen both to what people say and what they aren’t telling us. Some racists and misogynists are hopeless. And some are not. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos wrote this morning:

Dear Benjamin Franklin, This letter concerns our republic. We regret to inform you that, despite your most fervent wishes, we were unable to keep it. Sorry. We tried. Best to you and the other Founders, We The People ... JEERS to our profoundly broken country. This election should’ve ended last night in a landslide for the presidential candidate of truth, fact, and decency, even with a bunch of mail-in votes pending. I really don’t know what to say. Holy cow, seeing a massive chunk of our fellow countrymen choose hate and ignorance and outright gaslighting over the alternative is not what I signed up for.

Well a bit more good news: Maia Sandu was reelected president of Moldova, in spite of Russia’s attempt to undermine her and the country’s election. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, included some quotes worth mentioning. From a tweet by Osita Nwanevu:

Many Americans of all races do not believe our norms and institutions work, and a message about protecting them from a force promising to upend them will not be effective.

That got me thinking. I’ve said many times in various ways that Republicans invest strongly in the social hierarchy, with themselves and their financial backers near the top. People invested in the hierarchy oppress those below them because they believe the size of the gulf between themselves and those below is how their worth is measured. But that does not mean Democrats are the party that will subvert and eliminate the hierarchy. Yes, they welcome the working class and people of color. But they had chances to subvert, or at least blunt some of the oppression of, the hierarchy and they didn’t take them. They didn’t pass voting reforms (including rules to end gerrymandering). They didn’t tax the rich. They left the Senate filibuster intact. They allowed Republicans to deny approval of federal judges (Biden got a huge and diverse class approved, but many more languished in the Senate). The Department of Justice didn’t go after the nasty guy fast enough. They didn’t challenge monopolies (the meatpacker monopoly affects huge numbers of farmers in rural America). There are many other similar things I can’t think of right now. At our last lunch together my friend and debate partner talked about the young men in the 1980s and 90s who decided college was not for them. How are those men faring now, thirty and forty years later? Did we give them a path to a decent life or were they forgotten and left to low wages? Do they have resentments today, resentments they hope the nasty guy will fill? Back to Dworkin’s roundup. Heath Mayo tweeted:

Whatever happens, one thing is clear: Trumpism is now the GOP permanently. There is no battle for the future of that party. It believes different things now and doesn’t think character matters—and Americans appear to have plenty of appetite for it. It has no incentive to change.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

I wrote yesterday that I thought Harris ran a near flawless campaign. I still think that. And that removes one excuse. If she had run a mess of a campaign that would be one thing. She didn’t. I think she ran about as good a campaign as possible. I’m sure some people will blame her. I don’t think that will be fair. But big picture it doesn’t matter. Trump is the exception. Nobody gets a second chance to run for President. So blame her or not, it doesn’t matter. She won’t be running again. The reality we need to keep in mind is that incumbent parties have been losing in basically every industrial democracy since the pandemic. From one perspective it’s no surprise that the U.S. appears to be following that pattern. But Trump, with his degenerate, autocratic ways was the option.

A tweet from Matt Ortega:

Classic Vidal Gore quote and he was right. “We live here in the United States of Amnesia. No one remembers anything before Monday morning. Everything is a blank. They have no history.”

For a while I wondered if Republicans won by fraud. I was thinking about Ohio in 2004 that tipped the Electoral College to Bush II, who got another four years. See the book What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election by Robert J. Fitrakis, Steven Rosenfeld, Harvey Wasserman published in 2006. I just read the description again and the level of Republican fraud was more involved and more extensive than I knew (and I had heard about the book back when it was published). So did that happen on a much more massive scale this year? Part of me wants to say, nah, the votes for Harris were down even in solidly blue states. Also, Michigan’s elections are overseen by Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. But in Michigan there are a lot of county election panels run run by people who supported the Big Lie in 2020. The next few weeks will be interesting, because this stuff won’t remain hidden (and partly because some people like to brag). I’ve been thinking of this morning’s news and what it means for the country and the world. Say goodbye to the robust economy that Biden guided us into. The nasty guy is promising tariffs which would cause inflation and retaliation. He has also promised mass deportations, depriving the economy of workers. Say goodbye to your neighbors from Central and South America. Being a citizen won’t matter. Say goodbye to health care. He has talked about bringing back the worst of insurance plans before the Affordable Care Act was signed. Say goodbye to safe women’s health. Say goodbye to the social safety net. He has promised to bring Elon Musk and his chainsaw to clear away anything that doesn’t help those at the top of the hierarchy. Say goodbye to efforts to curb global warming. He continues to chant “Drill, baby, drill.” Say goodbye to environmental protections. Corporations want permission to pollute. Say goodbye to consumer protections, what corporations call “regulations” which they declare are evil. Say goodbye to your transgender friends. If they don’t flee they could well be driven to suicide. Say goodbye to the filibuster. Republicans have been wielding it to great effect over the last few decades, blocking many Democratic initiatives to help the country. Yet, enough Democrats let them, declaring the filibuster to be more important than whatever democracy-preserving plan they were trying to pass. Republicans already blocked use of the filibuster for judges and justices. In the upcoming Congress they will have more than 50 but less than 60 votes. This should mean Democrats could use the filibuster against them. And Republicans will make sure that can’t happen. Say goodbye to Ukraine. Say goodbye to Gaza. Say goodbye to NATO. Say goodbye to a government for, by, and of the people. Say goodbye to civility. I wonder if, before four years are over, I’ll be saying goodbye to this blog. I’m not going to get my Christmas wish of never hearing his voice again. But I doubt he’ll live long enough to finish out his term. He’s declining too rapidly. Which means a new vice nasty will take over. And he’ll be worse.

Rat Season in such numbers even attorneys are fed up

In a Ukraine update from last Friday, almost a week ago, Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed the perilous situation in Bakhmut (and almost a week later Bakhmut still remains in Ukrainian control). Ukraine is also poking at Russia’s defenses at other places along the line. Sumner also reported on the situation in Georgia (the one south of Russia). The Dream Party (aligned with Russia) proposed a bill that employees of Non Governmental Organizations (which is a large part of Georgian society) had to register as foreign agents. There were two days of massive protests and the legislation was withdrawn. Sumner included images of the size of the protest crowds. Russian propaganda is blaming foreign “Anglo-Saxon” agitators. Nope, this protest is all homegrown. A couple things related to that. First, Russians and Russian supporters in Georgia are so worried that the Russian friendly government might fall they are fleeing back to Russia, or otherwise deciding now is a good time for a holiday somewhere else. Second, since Russia has about 97% of its military engaged in Ukraine, there aren’t available soldiers to force an end to the protests in Georgia. If the people do topple the government there could be major shifts across the region. In an update from last Saturday Sumner noted the Russian death count was over 1000 for that day for a total of over 158K Russian dead. They also lost 10 tanks and 20 armored personnel vehicles that day. However, Sumner’s big story of the post is about the wave of Russian citizens ratting each other out.

All over Russia, it’s open season on anyone. All it takes is a quick suggestion that they said something against Putin, the war, or the Russian military. Or a claim that they were caught saying anything favorable about Ukraine. No evidence required. Rat Season has only been boosted by new legislation that has upped penalties and added even more restrictions about what it’s permissible to say. Russians are ratting Russians out in such numbers that even attorneys are fed up over dealing with the cases. Those who have long harbored a grudge are using this as an opportunity to get back at the guy they didn’t think was respectful enough in the local bar, or the neighbor who played his music too loud. And the worse things get in Ukraine, the more “traitors” they’re going to find.

In an update posted Sunday Kos of Kos discussed whether Bakhmut is still a good place to kill off Russian soldiers or has the cost to Ukrainian soldiers become to high? Is it better for Ukraine to pull out of the city to the higher ground to the west? Kos (as does Sumner) reminds us that Zelenskyy and the military leadership know more about the situation than he does. An Associated Press article posted on Kos discusses the efforts and problems of sanctioning Russian oligarchs. There is an effort to sell off the huge yachts that had been seized, with cases coordinated by KleptoCapture. The money would go to Ukraine. The effort can be slow because each case has to go through proper legal and judicial procedures. Another effort is to go after the wealth managers, those who facilitate keeping an oligarch’s wealth hidden from prosecutors. The managers can be indicted on conspiring to violate and evade US sanctions. In a Wednesday update Sumner reported that Bakhmut’s position is still dangerous. And Zelenskyy came for a visit. That is a signal to the world that Ukraine hasn’t given up on the town in spite of the danger. Kos discussed Switzerland’s neutrality, which kept the country out of two world wars. A big way that the Swiss remain neutral is they have a pretty good arms industry. But that arms industry needs exports to survive. Yet, Germany is getting infuriated with its neighbor because the Swiss refuse to permit armaments sold to Germany to be given to Ukraine. That fury means Germany will stop buying Swiss weapons, which threatens the viability of those weapons companies, and thus Swiss neutrality. There’s another aspect of this. Switzerland is not under threat by the NATO countries that surround it. But the Swiss refusal to give defensive weapons to Ukraine helps Russia. That’s another hit to their claims of neutrality.

The Swiss care about one thing: money. Their banking industry, friendly to money launderers everywhere, holds between $50 and $200 billion in Russian assets. The Swiss have sanctioned just $8 billion of that amount. It’s a weird kind of “neutrality” that only benefits the aggressor.

In a pundit roundup Chitown Kev of Kos quoted Maxim Trudolyubov of the independent Russia media outlet Meduza discussing why Putin is incapable of ending the invasion.

This incapacity is rooted in the political system Putin himself has created, part of which is the disorganized, unwieldy, and uncontrollably violent military that doesn’t stop at crimes against civilians. No leader can conduct a war marked by atrocities like those that shocked the world when the Russian army retreated from the Kyiv region, without forfeiting his chances of shaping the conditions for peace. As a leader, Putin cannot extricate himself from this war without facing the gravest accusations and possibly even threats to his life. As a result, his only way out of warfare is to crush the adversary, if he can. But given how big an ‘if’ this is, his best option is to perpetuate the war, since any conditional peace would probably mean Putin’s removal from power, followed by severe repercussions.

Another AP story posted to Kos is about Machaela Cavanaugh of the Nebraska legislature. A bill to allow gender affirming therapy for those 18 years and younger has been proposed. Cavanaugh is fighting it with all she has – which is quite a bit. She has been personally filibustering that bill and is now three weeks into the effort. That has ground the legislature to a crawl. And this is a legislature that is in session only 90 days.

Both Cavanaugh and the conservative Omaha lawmaker who introduced the trans bill, state Sen. Kathleen Kauth, said they're seeking to protect children. Cavanaugh cited a 2021 survey by the Trevor Project, a nonprofit focused on suicide prevention efforts among LGBTQ youth, that found that 58% of transgender and nonbinary youth in Nebraska seriously considered suicide in the previous year, and more than 1 in 5 reported that they had attempted it. “This is a bill that attacks trans children,” Cavanaugh said. “It is legislating hate. It is legislating meanness. The children of Nebraska deserve to have somebody stand up and fight for them.” Kauth said she's trying to protect children from undertaking gender-affirming treatments that they might later regret as adults. She has characterized treatments such as hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery as medically unproven and potentially dangerous in the long term — although the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychiatric Association all support gender-affirming care for youths. Cavanaugh and other lawmakers who support her filibuster effort “don't want to acknowledge the support I have for this bill," Kauth said. “We should be allowed to debate this," she said. “What this is doing is taking the ball and going home.”

Kauth’s reasons are all bunk. When the AMA, AAP, and APA support gender affirming care they mean the hormone therapy the Kauth claims is unproven. Such therapy is very much proven. As for the gender reassignment surgery, that isn’t done on those under 18. Surveys have shown adults rarely regret the treatments. There is more harm in preventing treatment for those who need it than harm in those who regret it. The chamber’s leadership praises Cavanaugh’s use of the filibuster, but apparently is making no effort to withdraw the offending bill in order to get everything else done.

It's not just Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or ballet

I finished the book Bewilderment, a novel by Richard Powers. This is the third novel by Powers I’ve read and enjoyed all three very much. The narrator is Theo, an astrobiologist trying to model how we might detect life on exoplanets, those outside our solar system. The other main character is his nine year old son Robin. One doctor says Robin is on the autistic spectrum, another says Robin is ADHD, and his school wants him medicated because of violent outbursts. Theo thinks it wrong to medicate a child so young. Robin’s mother Alyssa died two years before the story opens, though there are flashbacks so we can see who she was. Though marketed as general literature, this is science fiction. That comes through in a treatment of biofeedback offered to Robin that is beyond what can be done now and has side effects that unnerve Theo. The treatment allows Robin, always fascinated with nature, to become essentially Greta Thunberg’s more artistic little brother. Robin can’t fathom why humans are so destructive to nature. At times when Theo needs to calm Robin they take a mental journey to an exoplanet to explore what life might be like there. The description of one of them prompted me to think it was symbolic of the relationship between Theo and Robin, but the symbolism of other planets escaped me. This is the second novel in a row – the other being The End of Eddy – in which dialogue isn’t enclosed in quotes, instead it is italicized. Eddy used it for all characters. This one does it for Robin’s and Alyssa’s words while Theo’s words are put in quotes. In this case it might be appropriate, leading one to wonder whether Robin actually spoke out loud or Theo is imagining what his son is saying. This use of language is not one I would want to see catch on, though it is better than a few novels (the ones I can think of are Australian) where there is no separation of spoken text. There’s just things like this: It’s a cloudy day, he said. Robin is quite the intriguing character, frequently bewildering his dad. The language Powers uses is gentle and evocative. I recommend this one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data updated Tuesday. We seem to be in a plateau, thankfully a low one. The peaks in the number of new cases per day for the last few weeks are 984, 844, 778, and 764. The number of deaths per day remains at a low level. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Daily Kos, quoted Alan Elrod of Arc Digital discussing the word “groomer,” among others, by the anti-LGBTQ crowd:

What I want to note is the way this idea invites a view of being trans as an illness and, by emphasizing it as a social contagion that can rapidly overwhelm a young person, one that is highly communicable. As to the supposed spreaders of this illness? Well, Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik was unequivocal in her condemnation of LGBTQ advocates, calling them “groomers” and concluding “I think they’re evil.”

Walter Einenkel of Kos reported that a bill to ban children and youth from drag shows has been introduced in the Nebraska legislature. It is backed by Sen. Dave Murman, who said, “I think the vast majority of Nebraskans would agree that sexualized dancing and enhanced genitals is not appropriate for children to view.” I agree with Einenkel – “enhanced genitals?” Where is this guy’s brain? Einenkel note this bill may prevent youth from seeing the show “Hairspray” and perhaps a few of Shakespeare’s plays (and in Shakespeare’s time that would be all of his plays because women were banned from acting and men played the female roles). Sen. Megan Hunt added an amendment to the bill, showing two people can play this game. The opening text, likely mimicking the original, says,

The Legislature finds that there is a well documented history of indoctrination and sexual abuse perpetrated by religious leaders and clergy people upon children. Abusers within churches and other religious institutions often use events like church or youth-group-sponsored camps and retreats to earn children's trust and gain unsupervised access to such children in order to commit such abuse.

So kids should be banned from church camps and also from rituals where ceremonial alcohol is present. For my non Christian friends – in the Sunday service, the Mass, in the Catholic Church and in some Protestant denominations the high point is the Eucharist or Communion, which includes a sip of wine. Other Protestant denominations have replaced the wine with grape juice. So, yeah, Hunt’s amendment would ban youth and children from Mass. Einenkel discussed a study released by the Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center about 173 mass attacks that occurred between 2016 and 2020. Some of what the study showed: No community is immune from being a target. Guns were the cause of injury and death in three-quarters of the attacks. Less than a quarter of those gun attacks involved a gun acquired illegally. One-quarter of the attackers held a belief (that was important to the attack? Einenkel isn’t clear) that is conspiratorial, topic specific, or hate-focused. More findings:

96% of the attackers studied were male, 3% were female, and 2% were transgender. 57% of attackers were white. 34% of attackers were Black. 11% of attackers were Hispanic. 4% of attackers were Asian. 1% of attackers were American Indian. 72% of attackers experienced some kind of financial stressor sometime prior to the attack. Just under 20% of attackers had an “unstable housing” situation at the time of the attack. Bystanders intervened in about 10% of the attacks. When that happened, the attacker was killed by the intervening bystander only 2% of the time. (Think the mythic “good guy with a gun.”) While there was a large age range, the average age of an attacker was 34 years old. 41% of attackers had a history of “engaging in at least one incident of domestic violence.” And nearly a fifth of attackers exhibited “misogynistic behaviors.”

In a pundit roundup by Chitown Kev of Kos commenter Hugh Jim Bissell wrote:

We need a new metric: a number that describes how many are killed by gunfire in a given election district as a function of how much money the gun industry gives to public office holders and seekers in that district. Such a metric would help us know how much value each representative gives the lives of their constituents. If you take the amount of NRA funding received by each elected representative and divide it by the number of dead kids in their respective jurisdictions during their time in office, you’ll get exactly how much they earned for each killing.

That second paragraph is in an image and has a different font. I don’t know if it is original to Bissell or he pulled it from somewhere else. Leah McElrath tweeted a thread about US police traveling to Israel for training. Sometimes the Israeli trainers come to them. The Anti-Defamation League and American taxpayers fund these trips. This kind of training happened before the deaths of George Floyd, Freddie Gray, and Tyre Nichols. Police are also getting surplus military equipment. This is important because:

Our tax dollars are being spent to send US police officials to Israel to be trained to respond to Americans as though we are all terrorists within our own country.

McElrath got significant pushback for her thread.

If you question the activities of Israel, its government, or its security forces, you will be attacked as “antisemitic” or as engaging in “blood libel.” First time I’ve been called a “Nazi” though. FTR, I question the actions of *every* state, government, and security force.

The trolling got so bad she had to lock down her Twitter account for awhile, permitting no one outside of trusted friends to see it. I was one of those who tried to see her tweets during that time and was denied. Sweden and Finland have applied to join NATO. Turkey, already a NATO member, has been holding up Sweden’s approval over what Turkey says are anti-Islamic incidents. Recently there was a new incident of someone burning a copy of the Quran, upsetting Turkey again. Anders Åslund, who has written a book about Russia, tweeted a quote from a TV news report.

"Swedish journalist Chang Frick, affiliated with Russian propagandist channel RT, paid for Danish far-right activist Rasmus Paludan to publicly burn the Quran near the Turkish embassy in Sweden." To block Sweden from NATO...

Also, Alexander Stubb, former Prime Minister of Finland and now a professor at the School for Transnational Governance and a member of an organization promoting conflict resolution, tweeted:

This should come as no surprise. Russia seems to be behind the burning of the Quran in Sweden. This is what hybrid warfare of a rogue state looks like. In today's world everything can be weaponised.

Andrew Michta, dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the Marshall Center, tweeted a thread:

A word of advice for all those "realists" among Western elites who oppose support for #Ukraine: Finally, once and for all bury the Yalta mindset. Understand the Russia is no more entitled to a sphere of influence than a gangster is entitled to keep the spoils of a robbery. Time to set aside our double standard whereby when it comes to #Russia, we don't enforce the rules, but instead hope for a good tsar (Gorbachev, Yeltsin) with whom we can (to quote Lady Thatcher) "do business." We should also set aside the nonsense about Russian high culture. Russian culture must be seen in its totality -- it's not just Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy or ballet; it's first and foremost the Gulag, prisons, firing squads, rape and torture. It's the culture of violence and theft as a mode of governance. It's an empire awash in blood.

In a Ukraine update Mark Sumner of Kos included a video that appears to be put out by the Wagner Group, the mercenary group beating against Bakhmut for the last six months or so but not yet taking it (though they might now be close). The video appears to be recruiting Americans to join Russia’s fight, claiming only Russia is fighting against evil. Sumner wrote:

The video may or may not be an actual production of the Wagner Group. To quote pro-Russian bloggers when they’re pretending that Ukraine hasn’t just liberated Kyiv, Kharkiv, or Kherson … time will tell. But whoever put together this “true patriot” video did an admirable job of touching Americans right in the Q-center. From the footage of Jan. 6 “patriots” to the final scenes that crib part of the atomic blast from Terminator 2, it’s a love letter to anyone who ever thought it would be great to scream “Wolverines!” only while working for the Russians. Will this video actually send some Americans looking for the nearest Wagner recruiting station? Unknown. But it’s tempting to wish them success in this venture. Sending Americans to Ukraine who believe in Wagner’s idea of “the patriot” might be the best thing for both nations.

Jon Hawkes tweeted an image of a Full Width Mine Plough – a big device with a tarantula vibe that can plow up mines from fields and wherever else they might be. If I’m decoding the abbreviations right Germany facilitated getting a large quantity of them from a manufacturer in England into Ukraine by the end of the year. How the thing keeps from getting blown up from each mine it encounters is not explained. I’ve collected several cartoons and tweets that all have to do with racism. There is a famous 1964 painting by Norman Rockwell of a black girl being escorted by federal officers to a school in New Orleans to force integration. Two recent cartoons play on that painting. Mike Luckovich tweeted an image of a white girl being escorted by men with “GOP” armbands. She says, “But I don’t wanna be protected from black history.” Andy Marlette tweeted an image of a black girl carrying a Black History book. But instead of being escorted, she is stopped by a man with a “DeSantis” button. Ruben Bolling of Kos showed the covers of several popular children’s books reworked to meet the standards of DeathSantis. The titles include “Harry the White Dog and His Black Friend Who’s Never Experienced Any Racism” and “The Free Market Tree” by Shel Silverstein. Luckovich again, with a child walking through a detector that starts beeping. The cop say, “Halt, is that a book in your backpack?” Incognito Finito tweeted with a photo to prove it:

I bought a bag of M&M's and they don't have M's anymore. They all have W's... for woke.

Professor Bigfoot tweeted in response to Stewardship asking, “Why is the white man so deathly afraid of the black man and our culture?”

A desperate fear of being “ruled over” by their lessers. This cartoon is from the 1870s near the end of Reconstruction, a time when Black men were being elected to Congress. The pathological need to dominate and control stems from fear.

The cartoon shows a white man with a smoking gun with a small black child at his feet, “Ef I hadn’t-er killed you, you would have growed up to rule me.” Someone fearful of being ruled over by their lessers is someone highly invested in the social hierarchy and glad there is someone below him. I think the fear comes from the need to dominate, not the other way around. Their fear is of losing their position in the hierarchy to someone they feel should be below them.

The longer you believe in the con, the harder it is to admit you’ve been scammed

I said yesterday I was relieved the forecast for my area predicted a high of 95F and my thermometer barely cracked 80F. That didn’t happen today. The prediction for today was 92F and my thermometer registered 90F. Last week I reported on a story by Mark Sumner of Daily Kos that said the COVID death rate for white Americans had risen higher than the death rate for black Americans, reversing a trend from early in the pandemic. Wrote Sumner about what he wrote:

However, that article was wrong. So was the source article. Both fell prey to a statistical phenomenon known as Simpson’s Paradox, in which “an association between two variables in a population emerges, disappears, or reverses when the population is divided into subpopulations.” I was wrong, both in my interpretation of the data, and in the commentary I drew from this conclusion. And in both cases, I forgot one of the most serious dictums of any form of journalism: Beware the story that is too friendly to your own beliefs. ... This article was incorrect on its core assumptions. You have a right to expect better. Apologies.

This willingness to admit errors and to explain why they are errors is a big reason why I trust Daily Kos as a primary news source. Yes, I quoted and linked to Sumner’s previous article. So I’m posting this correction. Here’s another example of why I trust Kos. It is again by Sumner and he discussed a new cancer drug and why he is skepical. He didn’t simply praise it and go on to another story. A week ago the New England Journal of Medicine published the results of how well that drug treated a specific form of cancer. There was “100% response” – in all of the patients their tumors were completely eradicated. That’s great! News outlets touted this is a cure for cancer. Sumner explained why that designation is premature: The study had only 12 patients. All that can be determined from a study that small is that a larger study is worthwhile. It was tried on patients with one particular form of cancer. The study is too small to understand side effects and how serious they may be. One side effect might be autoimmune diseases. If it works – if indeed it can be shown effective on a lot more patients, on other types of cancers, and without side effects worse than radiation and chemo – then it can be proclaimed as the new cancer wonder drug. We’d even praise it if it worked only for this one type of cancer. But we don’t know that yet. Joan McCarter of Kos reported Sen. Bernie Sanders held a debate with Sen. Lindsay Graham a couple days ago. Sanders said America spends twice as much on health care than other major countries. The reason is insurance companies are ripping off the system. McCarter wrote:

That’s socialism, said Graham. “And it’s not going to fix America. We are not a socialist nation. There is a better way, I promise you this.”

So if government provides a service that’s socialism and therefore bad. If there is a corporate layer that rips off the government and the citizens then it’s cool. As for Graham’s better way: Gut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. And, if Republicans retake the Senate, Graham, as head of the Senate Budget Committee, would be in a very good position to make that happen. This is part of a fight among Senate Republicans. The issue at the center of the fight isn’t the cuts, as devastating as they would be to millions of Americans. It’s that several senators insist on talking about the cuts before the midterm elections. I had written that five Republican candidates for governor on Michigan were removed from the primary ballot because they hired a company to gather signatures and too many of those signatures were fraudulent. Rebekah Sager of Kos reported there is a campaign in Nebraska to gather signatures to put a proposal on the November ballot to require voters to have an ID. Yeah, that’s a law adopted in many other states that suppresses black voters. So, yeah, a Republican effort. This campaign in Nebraska hired the same company that turned in fraudulent signatures in Michigan. Well, we don’t know if they’re fraudulent yet. But there have been so many complaints about the people gathering signatures (and being paid to do it) that law enforcement has started to investigate and the state Attorney General has heard about it. The primary complaint is they can’t explain what the proposal is about or they are lying about it. Sager wrote about Sen. Carol Blood, a Democratic nominee for governor.

“We have real fraud taking place in the streets in order to prevent fraud that is not happening in Nebraska. … It is a weird dichotomy,” Blood said.

If you were the victim of a con would you tell anyone about it? If you were well snookered and ripped off, would your pride let you admit it? What if it wasn’t a monetary con but a political one? What if the con was so complete you invested your identity into what the con artist told you? What if admitting you were conned meant expulsion from your tribe? Dartagnan of the Kos community explores those ideas. That’s why many followers of the nasty guy can’t admit their faith in him was misplaced or wrong:

That is a personal indictment of their own intelligence and self-worth, as well as an indictment of the people in whom they most commonly put their faith (usually friends and family); for that reason, their errors can never be acknowledged. The fact that those who presume to challenge their self-worth are their political opponents makes such an acknowledgment doubly impossible under any circumstances. ... Trump uses every opportunity to tell his supporters that such assertions [that the election was stolen] are the product of a “left-wing mob,” which stokes the same visceral fight-or-flight response in which Fox News regularly traffics. But the real kicker is the cloying implication that his supporters have special knowledge, that they’re smart, danger! And every assertion to the contrary by Democrats is simply perceived as an attack on their intelligence. “Of course the election was stolen, my tribe and a hundred social media sites confirm this,” they insist. And it makes no difference how much evidence is produced to the contrary.

This brings to mind something I had heard several years ago. A con man will frequently convince the mark that they as a team are conning someone else. Such as what Putin did to the nasty guy. Because the con man warns his marks what the official legal or Democratic response will be and defines what those responses are supposed to mean, when they happen the mark feels vindicated – my side was right. Dartagnan discussed why many “religious” people embrace the Big Lie:

An attack on Trump is viewed as an implicit attack on their faith, for which they’ve invested (some of them literally) practically everything they own. Their entire self-worth is predicated on the implicit assumption that they, and they alone, are “right.” In fact, that’s the comforting attraction of many religions: the need to be proven right. And as a corollary, anything espoused by “godless” Democrats—no matter how objectively rational—must be wrong.

Maria Konnikova has written books about how scams work. In a 2019 interview with NPR she said:

One of the things you realize when, you know, you study con artists is that we're conning ourselves all the time about who we are, about our stories. And con artists just pick up on that. They figure out how we're conning ourselves. That's one of the reasons why we're so susceptible.

Elizabeth Winkler, writing for Quartz in 2016 noted:

The longer you believe in the con, the harder it is to admit you’ve been scammed.

In a post of two weeks ago Marissa Higgins of Kos reported that Adam Tritt, an Advanced Placement English teacher at a high school in Brevard, Florida, is running a “banned book drive” to buy copies of books banned or challenged in Florida so students can read them over the summer. At the time of the post Tritt had raised $5,000. Moms for Liberty, a local chapter of a conservative group working to get books banned, is furious. They took to Facebook to claim Tritt was a sex offender, a “groomer,” and a provider of pornographic books. Those moms, in their fury, included a link to the fundraiser. Perhaps that put the link in front of more eyes and made donating a bit easier?

Nebraska won't be soon

The Nebraska ruling to permit same-sex marriage has been stayed by the 8th Circuit. No marriages next week. That case has been combined with the ones from South Dakota, Missouri, and Arkansas. It will be heard after the Supremes hear the Michigan case and before the Supremes issue their ruling.



Th Mormon Church has backed a non-discrimination bill in Utah! Even better, this version has no religious exemptions for individuals or businesses. It is good enough that the Human Rights Campaign will support it.



The nasty anti-homosexuality law in Uganda was overturned on a technicality about a year ago. Members of Parliament are working to bring it back. But this time pro-gay groups in Uganda are rallying their opposition. They're doing it by talking about rights in general, not just gay rights.

Nebraska!

A federal district judge has struck down the same-sex marriage ban in Nebraska. The state has a week to ask the 8th Circuit for a stay and an appeal. The state intends to file that appeal.

Only North Dakota and Georgia haven't had any level of federal ruling on their same-sex marriage bans.