I Forgot My Gloves

    It was spitting snow today and pretty much December cold.  It was so overcast it looked like dusk at about 3 PM.  It is a few days from the solstice.  I had errands.  Since I kinda resent going out unless the temperature matches my age I don't go out too much.  I'm 68.  I do still like the winter but now more in cozy contemplation than actual physical contact.  I worked outside, in the winter, for a long time.  I had a friend who would say he had so many winters left until retirement. I liked that formulation.  He got his 30 years in.  I like that too.  Good for him.  I used to play in the winter when I could.  Flexi-Flyers, snowmen, toboggans, snow forts.
    I always wear long johns in the winter months.  A little hot flash never hurt anyone but a little chill has killed millions of people.  I wore my work boots, knit cap, a hooded sweatshirt and a nice ski jacket.
    My small errands could have been run in the neighborhood but  I decided to go to the other side of town and make an afternoon of it.  I don't go out much in the winter so I try to force myself when I do.  I even went to an old local bar.  A little beer, a little bullshit.  It was nice.  It was then I realized I'd forgotten my gloves.  Since my hands would be full on the way home that was a problem.  My ensemb was incomplete and my hands would be cold.
    I decided to go next door to the local dollar store  (The modern 5 and 10) and buy a cheap pair of work gloves.  It turned out the cheapest purchase was actually a set of two pair.  Half the price of a better, single pair.  I bought them.  Now I owned 4 pair of work gloves.  I had forgotten my gloves before. I'm retired.  I'll never use them but for a couple bucks my hands would be warm for an hour or so which is all I needed.
    I live in the City and I don't drive; haven't for 13 years.  I make up dumb stories about that but the truth is, I just don't like it anymore.  I don't have to do it so, I don't.  I ride the trolley or the bus.  I do like that.  Some element of anticipation I guess.  Some pleasure in the idea of arrival.
    It's close to Christmas which is always nice in the city or anywhere I suppose.  The stores are decorated.  Even the tavern had the prettiest of porcelain houses and such in little beds of cotton snow.  As I rode the bus across town I realized the best decorations I saw that day were a mother and four children  returning from some shopping.  Cute, good-natured kids. very well behaved.
    As I approached my destination I dug my new gloves out of  one of my bags.  Two pairs stapled together.  I separated them thinking about the storage container where they would join the other two pair  I would never need or use.  A thought struck me and instead of returning the one pair to my bag I left them on the seat.  Maybe someone would need them for a reason no better than my own or even a better reason.  A dollar twenty-five cent pair of flimsy gloves.  There's a conceit, I thought to myself.
    Who was likely to find them and what use could they really be?  They'd probably be found and discarded by a bus company clean up person or turned into the lost and found or just ignored by someone who didn't need them but maybe, just maybe.  They might be a holiday find for a pair of cold hands.  They could be a find by someone who also had forgotten their gloves, another forgetful old man.  Good for him.
    Maybe the clean-up person or the fellow who had no use for them would have my thought and let them lie so they could move into an uncertain future, an informal lost and found where maybe, just maybe.
    One thing is certain.   None of those things would be possible from my storage bin or the back of my closet or anyone else's.  That's true of so many things we can all do so easily.  Maybe, as we get older, Creative Forgetfulness is a blessing we all can share.
 

I Don't Understand

    We constantly hear how divided we are as a nation.  Why?  It seems to have no relation to reality.  The idea of division implies a persistent ambivalence and lack of some sort of majority opinion.  That's just not what's happening.
    If you go back to the 2016 election and look at the real numbers for and against you find a persistent majority opinion.  Certainly, Mrs Clinton polled almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump head to head.  However, if you look at all the votes cast you find that nearly 12 million more people voted against Donald Trump than voted for him.  There is no reason to believe, had the election been head to head, Trump versus Clinton, that Trump would have garnered any additional support and he certainly would have lost in the Electoral College.
    The Trump supporters like to point out the inaccurate pre-election polling.  That's not true.  The polls were accurate to the decimal point.  The pollsters just didn't dig deep enough into the distribution of those votes and they failed to account for the Electoral College. Yeah, we know all that, why bring it up?  Because that supposed inaccuracy is used to spread an almost subliminal distrust of polling in general. That distrust opens the door to some bad conclusions about circumstances in general.
    If you look at the Congressional elections of 2016,  you notice something else that's never discussed.  The party with the successful presidential candidate actually lost seats in both houses of Congress. That never happens. The 2018, House elections were a rout for the republicans.  There doesn't seem to be any reason to think 2020 will be any different no matter what party you support except the republicans seem to have many more vulnerable Senate seats.
    Except for the months coming up to election day, presidential polling is confined to and judged by job approval numbers.  Usually, those numbers are all over the map, driven by current events. Rapid shifts of 20-30 points aren't unusual no matter the President.  Not this time.
    For nearly 3 years Donald Trump's approval numbers have remained persistently dismal.  People just don't like this guy. A continuing, solid majority are, in fact, united in their opinion of this guy.  I've never seen anything like this kind of solidarity.  I've never seen anything like this kind of unity.  If I were an establishment republican I certainly would be more worried every day.  The truth is, it takes a lot of time to establish a non-encumbent presidential candidate and they are rapidly running out of that time.

The Dismal Science

    I was going to start by saying something like: We all know Malthus.  Nah, no you don't. Thomas Robert Malthus.  Oxford educated, English cleric and seminal economist. 1766-1834.  Look it up.  That'll bore hell outta ya.
    His thoughts on political economy, economics and demographics are the reason Economics has been called the dismal science.  He postulated that any advance in technology or productivity would result in an increase in population that would always outstrip productivity and create and reinforce poverty.  Yeah, that's pretty dismal.  Put him together with Thomas Hobbes and ya got a real laugh riot.  Hobbes is the guy that said, for most, life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short.
    His thoughts on productivity and poverty are what most people who have ever heard of Malthus remember about him but what stuck in my mind was something different he said and definitely more pertinent to our current debates.  Malthus said there were things that needed to be done that could never be done for a profit and those things fell into the purview of government.  Now, remember, this guy died more than a decade before Marx and Engles wrote.  He was no socialist.  He was actually an observer of and a contributor to the ideas and ideals of capitalism.  I'd be willing to bet Marx and Engles had read his works.  If you don't know and I'd be willing to bet you don't,  Marx and Engels wrote the "Communist Manifesto". I've read it.  That'll put your ass to sleep.  If you want, I can also tell you a bedtime story about the Hegelian Dialectic.
    The reason I mention this is because for no rational reason I can think of,  Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have decided to proclaim themselves  Democratic Socialists. In reality, they're New Deal Democrats.  That opened the door for republicans to scream, SOCIALISM like they were yelling FIRE in a crowded theater.  Why start a debate with a bunch of ignoramuses?  I dunno.
    So we got the republicans saying, socialist this and socialist that because they hope you're stupid and we have the Democrats trying to say the police and fire departments, the military,   public water and sewer, public health, snow plows and so on are all socialist ideas, apparently, because they're stupid.  Nonsense.
     These are all parts of the Malthusian Equation and both sides had better stop talking like idiots or we're gonna end up with even more Reality TV personalities posing as leaders.  Across the political spectrum, no one is proposing socialism in the United States and our major corporations and the rich, in general, sure aren't proposing capitalism.  You can make the case Dr King was right when he said, we have socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for everyone else.  That's pretty dismal and needs to stop.

Kintsukuroi

    It is the practice of repairing valued if not valuable objects with precious metals. It's also known as Kintsugi. It preserves the functionality and immeasurably enhances the beauty and ultimately the value of the repaired object.  It has become the symbol of philosophies that, if understood, make my banal thoughts inadequate at best.
    Stumbling on this concept made me think of people I've known all my life and people I've known all of their lives. We all have known people who, after some shaking misfortune, have been discarded, sometimes by even themselves, like so much broken crockery.  A tragedy and a failure of faith.  A failure of faith in themselves and others. Failure of belief in a future.
    We've also seen victories if not triumphs of faith in individuals both great and small.  Witnessing the damage done by mere circumstance or even malice can break our own hearts.  Witnessing the precious repair can also repair and advance our own hearts.  In a large way that can become the basis of faith and we see it all around us day after day.
   I'm reminded of the story of a little girl with two apples.  Her mother asked if she could have one.  The little girl bit into one and then, immediately, the other.  In that moment the mother's faith collapsed in herself and in her daughter.  The mother's faith collapsed in all she had tried to do.  Then the little girl held out an apple and said, " Take this one, it's sweeter."  In an instant, the mother's humble bowl was repaired and made more precious than imaginable.

    Then I saw this example of persistence meeting resistance.  Someone planted a tree. Fifty or so years later, someone cut down that tree.  Then ten or so years later, someone cut down the volunteer offshoots from the stump.  Somehow the two photographic images became related in my mind.  The sap and sinew of all life.  Regrowth, renewal and restoration.  I'll be by in the spring just to see that long story continue to work itself out.  Repair can be an instant, a season or a lifetime.

Well, Maybe

    I often think about and sometimes write about things we should do and obviously won't do.

    For example:  https://stillpittsburgh.blogspot.com/2017/02/walk-like-athenian.html.  Boy, I was kinda proud of that.  It's the idea called sortition.  It turns out lots of people have written about that and done a much better job than I did.  It confirms my suspicion I have never actually had an original idea. Oh well.

    People want to abolish the Electoral College.  It's understandable.  The idea was to avoid the  "tyranny of the majority".  That's a real thing and certainly can be a real problem.  The Founding Fathers were right to consider the concept.  I don't think they ever considered their creation made an opportunity for a "tyranny of the minority",  like we're seeing now.  I know they never thought that minority would be composed of every poorly informed lout, led by a poorly informed lout.  I don't think it ever occurred to the  Founding Fathers someone might,  rather than try to elevate the poorly informed, forge them into a voting block.  Didn't see that coming.

    In the last 20  years we've seen that "tyranny of the minority" produce disastrous results.  Jesus! Nearly a million innocent people are dead.  Al Gore never would have invaded the wrong country or mis-waged a war in the right country, the only goal of which turned out to be consolidation of the international trade in heroin.  The whole thing is irrational and was easily avoidable.

    By the same token, Hillary Clinton never would have reinstated Bush's laughable tax cuts for the wealthy.  Nor would she have immersed the Pentagon in a hot tub full of borrowed money.  That's a financial disaster we're going to wear like an albatross for generations.  There's a lot of things being done  Mrs Clinton wouldn't have done because she knows better.  She doesn't seem to listen to AM radio much.  I suspect she reads. 

    The Electoral College has been called racist in conception.  That's outright bullshit.  The idea is tangentially related to the idea of slaves being 3/5ths of a person but just not the same thing.   Both concepts addressed the reality at the time.  The concept of crying 'racist'  just proves a little racism goes a long way.  People don't like racism much. You don't have to endorse or tolerate much to earn a life-long label.  That's as it should be.  Even racists don't like being called racist because they know racism is wrong.

    However, the Electoral College is not what we don't like much.  We don't like the asymmetrical outcomes. Since 2000, the Green Party has thrown the elections to the republicans a couple notable times.  If you look at their party principles, that's an unintended consequence.  We'd like to avoid that and we're searching for ways to not do that.  

    We have a dyed in the wool, two-party system but third party candidates have a habit of emerging in and twisting the results of presidential elections.  You could say Teddy Roosevelt made Woodrow Wilson President.  Wallace made Nixon President and certainly, Ross Perot made Clinton President. Following that reasoning, Nader made GW President and Jill Stein made Trump president.  That's a little simplistic but it does make the point.  We don't like the Electoral College much but what we really don't like is the effects of these 'stalking horses'.
    My idea to deal with that is to just hold run-off elections.  It's not new or unusual. Over 30 countries do it worldwide.   When Trump seemed to have won, about 60% of the population said,  " I'll be damned."  Had a run-off been held a week, month or year later, excluding the 3rd party candidates,  Mrs Clinton would have won in a walk-over.  Hell, Donald Duck would have won in a walk-over.  We're not going to do that.  It would involve amending the Constitution and that's just not going to happen.
    Maine has what seems to be a better idea. They have voted in  'Ranked Choice".  You simply vote for your first and second choice.  If no one reaches a simple majority the least popular are eliminated and the second choices are counted until someone does reach a majority.
    My first thought about that was, 'That's a good idea'.  My second thought was, 'Boy are they gonna get sued.'   It seems to be holding up in court.
    So, is it something we should do but won't do or is it a good idea that will gain traction over time.
    We'll see.  It is better than my idea.
    Until we reach a long term solution we have to avoid the effects of these   'stalking horse' candidates.  That starts with acknowledging that, at least for now, we are most certainly a two-party system.

    

   

Let's Talk About It

    There's an old joke about racism.  How does every racist joke start?  Then the person who intends to tell the joke gets up and looks around to make sure there are no people who might be offended, meaning minorities. That, of course, doesn't take into account an awful lot of white folks are offended by racism and racist jokes. It does take into account the teller knows what he's about to say is offensive to his neighbors and even his friends. It's a joke. Sometimes we're not bad people,  just thoughtless. Some people are just bad.  Rotted to the core for whatever reason.
    Earl Butz was a Secretary of Agriculture.  In 1976, he told an incredibly offensive racist joke while aboard a commercial flight with other officials.  He was surprised to find out some in his audience were offended.  After all, he'd taken a long look around before he told the joke.  It took overcoming 246 years of slavery and another hundred years of Jim Crow to make it no real surprise Butz was immediately fired and fired by a Republican President in the final month of a campaign.
    Let's talk about that overcoming and human progress.  To be sure, there were heroic and extremely articulate figures among the oppressed races. So many come to mind. But Dr King always stays in mind.  He admonished us that not only should we be judged on the content of our character but we most certainly always are so judged in the end.       
    It's that content of character that's made all the difference.  It's what makes the idiot with his racist joke look around.  I'm sure it's what made Butz, in his tightly laced brogans, look around.
    Content of character.  None of the slow, incremental progress made in race relations over the long years would have been possible without informing and strengthening good character on all sides. It is well we study and are informed by the minority members of our society.  It is good to hold dear and honor their contributions to the common good.  However, we can't ignore the fact that none of the progress could have been made without people of good character on all sides.
    Now, as white people, we are confronted by people in positions of leadership who don't bother to look around before they say or do something offensive.  These people seem delighted they can display and employ elements of their lesser character.  As Earl Butz illustrates,  people of lesser character have always been with us, limited only by social convention; that pressure that makes them look around before doing or saying something even they know is offensive.  We can't allow that kind of backsliding; that kind of coarsening of our society and our future as neighbors and friends. We have to always respond.  It's our duty to ourselves, our future and our past.

Terms of Endearment

    That movie is coming on again, in just a few minutes.  I really like that movie.  I saw it, in the theater, when it came out.  I always sit down-front in theaters.  Not sure why.  I can see and hear fine.  I just do.
    I remember being embarrassed to get up to leave when that movie was over because I was bawling like a baby. So was my date and the 75 or so other people in the theater.  Buncha tough guys.
    I don't think, after 36 years, I'm givin much away.  You sit there for 2 hours or so and are thoroughly entertained.  It's funny, emotionally affecting, all that stuff but you do begin to wonder where they're going with this.  Then they show you exactly what they had in mind.
    Then, of course, the stand-ins for the cast of the "Road Warrior" leave in tears.  I don't plan to watch it again.
    Two years after my initial viewing,  I noticed "Terms of Endearment" was being shown on HBO.  I was living with a wonderful girl and my best friend was there.  The movie is just as good on a TV as it is in a theater.
    It was being shown about 3 in the afternoon.  We sat down to watch what I had assured them was a movie not to be missed.  They trusted my judgment and I think I even made popcorn. We settled in.        After about an hour and 3/4s,  I said, " Oh, I forgot, I have to meet a guy about a job. I've seen this before and it'll be on again."  I left.
     I went over to a local bar,  where I knew anything would be on the TV other than the end of that movie.  I had a beer and a little bullshit and looked at my watch and went home.
    " You son of a bitch!  You left on purpose.!"
    Yes, I did.

    My love to you, Aurora.
 
 

Migration

    I was reading about how the first humans developed in Africa and proceeded to travel to  Asia Minor, Asia, Europe.  Eventually populating the most remote of the Pacific islands and even the Arctic Circle.  I think Antartica was missed only because it isn't on the way to somewhere.
    I read about the travels of the Vidic Aryans and the rampages of the Golden Horde.  The Huns becoming Hungarians and some Romans becoming Romanians. Caesars becoming Tzars.  I thought about some Chinese becoming Japanese and Korean,  becoming the various tribes of the Asian South East. I wondered, along with everyone else, how the Abos got to Australia in a past so removed and dim no one remembers. The same is true of the Polynesians.  They don't know how they got there.  They found it so pleasant they didn't bother to remember?  Maybe.  Maybe when we (academics with a mania for such questions) asked, we dismissed the answers or garbled the intent. That happens often enough.
    That got me to thinking of Thor Hyerdahl and the Kon Tiki and the almost bizarre connection of Jacquline Beer and "77 Sunset Strip".  A pulled thread that begins in the Great Rift Valley and ends with  Edd (Kookie) Byrnes?  The spread and interconnectivity of people, ideas and concepts.  That brings up Salman Rushdie and "The Satanic Verses"  as a thorough examination of that cultural phenomenon and idea.
    Tribal migration as a continuous condition of the human experience. Endless comingling.  It's interesting that in the case of the Americas, the north was primarily resettled by the restless, northern European tribes and the south by the tribes of the Iberian peninsula. Settlement determined by the Atlantic Trade Winds  The fascinating introduction of dominant language and ethnic groups and pushing aside the discovered, established societies of an earlier wave of migration.
    I could go on and on. Believe me, if I had more whiskey, I would.  Rushdie pushed it to over 500 pages just examining a few aspects, mainly culture and religion but there is always that one underlying concept:  Migration. We can talk about the migration of concepts, ideas and values but ultimately people are the carriers of these conditions. We find that the underlying feature is endless movement. It's fundamental and as a result, migration is a fundamental human right.  As such, attempts to oppose that right are useless and doomed to ultimate failure. We've seen that failure over the last four years.

If you liked that try this: https://bit.ly/JimRetzerBook     

Leadership

    Some time ago I wrote an essay about some of the origins of self-government.  That should probably be read as a preamble to these thoughts  https://stillpittsburgh.blogspot.com/2017/02/walk-like-athenian.
    There are a lot of terms for the system we have but it is not a pure democracy.  I prefer 'Representative Democracy'.  No matter: Here's what we try to do.  The issues our government faces on a day to day basis are complex.  No one with work or professional responsibilities could be expected to keep up with all of those issues in any kind of detail.  Looks like a job for the hired help to me.  The idea is to select outstanding members of our communities to go to the seat of government and inform themselves in our stead in order to make proper decisions for us, in our name.  In other words,  the guy is supposed to know more than you.  I have to think in the most egregious examples these guys actually do know more than the constituents they've chosen to appeal to and instead of trying to lead they've decided to drive these constituents. Our political process is designed to weed out the stupid, not turn them into a voting block.  That borders on evil.
    Trying to appeal to and motivate the lowest common denominator is not leadership, it's demagoguery and in the end, it never works. It always ends in dislocation, suffering of the innocent and great expense.  We will never adopt the system of the Athenians, more's the pity but we should work to make this system better.  That's up to us.
    Well, that's not very optimistic, is it?  Placing responsibility on our collective, narrow shoulders?  There is good news.  We no longer hear, " Johnny can't read."  You may not have to be able to spell but you do have to be able to read to text nonsense on the endless stream of social media.
    The truth is, change and progress are slow, incremental and very often, occur seemingly by accident.  Here's our accident.  Johnny can read and he carries in his hand the ready portal to all the world's information.  It's up to Johnny to divine wisdom from that mountain of information and he has a better chance than history has ever presented.  I sure ain't gonna bet against him.
    To tell the truth  I think we're witnessing something spiritual, affirming and amazing.  If you look at the emergence of people like David Hogg, Emma Gonzalez, Malala Yousafzia, Greta Thunberg, on and on thru the kids being given multiple scholarships at very young ages and the new crop of "mean girls" in Congress,  we're looking at the worldwide emergence of Tathagathas.  To quote Flounder in "Animal House", "This is gonna be great!"  In my opinion, it's an awakening and expansion of the human spirit and we have a front-row seat.
    People always talk about going back in time and having a chance to relive their lives, change one thing or another.  I never think that.  There's no reason to believe, if I had it to do over again, I'd be any smarter.  I would like to be born today though, so I could witness the next 60 years.  Oh Boy!  This is gonna be Great!


 

There Is A Solution

    Every day hundreds of thousands of decent police officers report for work.  Every day their lives, reputations and characters are challenged by a few bad actors.  They are as embarrassed by this as every citizen who pays their wages.  The mistake they make that embarrasses their safety is failing to police their colleagues.  They are intimidated by personal association and shared experience.  Perhaps even shared fear.  That has to stop.
    Here is the solution.  Every damage award should come from police retirement funds, reducing payouts of retirement benefits in the future and in the present.  That means every time officers let bad apples bring liabilities to their communities their retirement and those already receiving benefits should see those benefits reduced until the penalty is paid.  The police would immediately begin policing themselves.
   If you have concerns about that explain that to a nine-year-old tackled to the ground and cuffed or a fifteen-year-old having his head smashed into the pavement or maybe you want to explain it to someone shot 21 times for having a cell phone, maybe a fourteen-year-old shot in the back on Christmas morning.
    Maybe you want to explain it to the children of an officer shot out of hand because someone is frightened and radicalized by the misbehavior of other, unchecked officers.
    This is the real world. Malefactors should be checked.  Blue, black or purple let's make it actually matter in that real world.

The Deep End

    I'm watching my friends in the Democratic Party wadding in for the 2020 Presidential race and they are all wrong.  It's the wrong way to go about it and it doesn't address the most serious issue we face.  They need to wade into the deep end. The key is national security and foreign affairs.  That sounds odd for a Democrat. Our concerns are almost always domestic but we and the other western democracies are under serious attack and we have to respond.  In case you have missed it, historically, when we're faced with a legitimate threat, liberal democrats respond quite well albeit a little overwhelmingly violent.  You can debate whether the Japanese should have been A-bombed all you want but the fact is we did build the thing and we did use it.  Now we have about 12 thousand of them just waiting to go anywhere in the world we choose.  That's violence.
    Our republican friends have never won a real war and don't seem to have the first clue how to wage one.  Don't bother telling me about the American Civil War or the Spanish American War. Try to stay in the last 100 years.
    The current administration is unconcerned with the ongoing extensive attack on our society and is unwilling to do the simplest things to oppose it.  Any serious candidate for President should hammer that fact home at every opportunity.  It certainly should be emphasized the current people refuse to oppose attacks on our society.  It should be pointed out that is evidence of disloyalty and driven home relentlessly. Supporters of the current administration should unfailingly be belittled as disloyal by choice or by ignorance but belittled nonetheless.
    We are under attack by the Russians.  We know they are ramping up another disinformation campaign to confuse and confound our national debate and elections. We know this administration is disinterested in responding in any realistic way. Those facts are matters of public record.  More importantly, we know that the Trump people jumped at every chance they were offered to coordinate with and cooperate with those foreign attacks.  There is no doubt about that.  It is firmly on the public record.  The juvenile attempts to explain away these myriad contacts have only confirmed they did happen and seem to continue to happen. The willing acceptance of foreign cash into our political system should be portrayed as the crime it is.
    This might sound wrong or contradictory on it's face but the second prong of the Democratic Party's approach to 2020 should be to totally ignore Trump.  The eventual candidate should never acknowledge Trump's existence while his or her's surrogates should hammer his disloyalty and ineptitude.  The hallmark of that effort should be a refusal to debate on the grounds the republicans have failed to advance a legitimate candidate.  It was Clinton's response to Trump as though he wasn't inept and totally unfit that gave him legitimacy. We can all see that was a mistake.
    Any question about Trump should be met by the candidate with an articulation of some policy addressing the future.  It should always be left to surrogates to hammer Trump for disloyalty, first and ineptitude second. Always those two themes.
    It's simple: Hammer disloyalty and ineptitude and never acknowledge anything that would lend legitimacy to a Trump candidacy.  Those things have the virtue of being true and important.

We're Falling Short

    When I went to college one of the first survey courses I took was Philosophy 101.  In that course, they discussed the actual definition of the word, 'rhetoric" and how rhetoric is employed to advance public discourse and problem-solving.  It's an area of thought that goes back, at least, to the ancient Greeks.  I realized then and I still believe, not understanding rhetoric and linguistic forensics was a major hole in my education.  We should learn these things right along with learning our ABCs.  This knowledge is critical for any citizen of any country and is essential to rational thought.
    There is a good reason why public schools don't teach recent history.  Public events are vociferously debated for decades after the fact, as they should be.  It's almost impossible to relate recent historical events without advancing one side or the other in that debate. That's what family discussion and Sunday School are for.
    However, teaching the nuts and bolts of discourse isn't partisan.  It's becoming more and more obvious it's essential.  We are confronted with people who speak in an endless stream of fallacies. Some do so to deliberately mislead.  Others do so because they actually think in an endless stream of fallacy.  For some, it's a failure of morality.  For others, it's a failure of education.
    It's hard to sell bullshit as a bouquet of roses to someone who has been educated to know what bullshit smells like. These things should be part of all, elementary education. The thing to remember is; they are an important part of any law school education.  If someone trained as an attorney mouths a fallacy you know he's being deliberately dishonest.  Most politicians are attorneys.
    There are several listings of these illogical tactics, some less obscure than others. I think they should be published every day, in a box, on every editorial page.  Doing so would reduce a lot of opinion columns to farce.
    By far the most common is 'setting up a strawman'.  That's where you mischaracterize what's been said or done and then criticize your own mischaracterization.  The second most common is probably 'poisoning the well'. Familiarly illustrated by, " When did you stop beating your wife."  I don't think that needs more explanation.
    I judge politicians by how often they employ fallacies for the simple reason it means they are either poor thinkers or dishonest.  I do remember the only time I saw Jimmy Carter employ a rhetorical fallacy. He couldn't do it without smiling because he knew what he was doing.  LOL. To my mind that excused it.  The educated people who employ fallacies consciously to deceive will never be excused.
    The point is: Educate yourself.  If you know these things the fallacies clang a warning like a broken bell.

Why Don't You Know?

    I'm retired and in my late sixties.  I've always been interested in politics and now I have the luxury of time to read and jot down some of what I'm thinking.  Yeah, yeah, I got a lot of free time. It's kinda nice. Everybody got that?
    I have a long memory for things I witnessed in real-time. I often find myself wondering why someone doesn't know a particular thing or see a past event with the shading it had at the time. I find myself thinking,  'Don't you remember.'   Of course, they don't remember.  They either hadn't been born or were children when the things that shaped today actually happened.  The kids are held to task for a kind of 'age snobbery' but really, geezers like me are just as bad.
    Let's take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She's been dismissed as a youngster. She's 29.  She actually has a mainstream education in economics and isn't proposing anything radical.  It's the way things were done for decades and it was obviously more successful and responsible than what we've been doing since the '80s.  In addition; the way business and investment income is managed will continue to mean most people at the very top will still be paying an effective tax rate of about 15%.  It does mean some people who haven't been taxed at all are in for a new experience.  I think they'll survive.
      She hasn't started this argument but I will: Pretty much every economic proposal advanced by Reagan has been an unmitigated disaster.  There are reliable metrics to apply to these things and the only real conclusion, looking back, is, Muy Malo or the more technical, Bad Ju-Ju.
    She seems to have decided it's pointless to argue with the leftover, Reaganite dinosaurs.  Make the proposal and let others carry the freight.  It's not a bad approach and it has the useful feature of actually addressing reality.  It does make me wonder about the whole Democratic Socialist thingy.  Why start that argument with a bunch of people you already know to be a collection of ignoramuses?  I honestly think it's a bit of snobbery from the east coast, intellectual establishment. They think it gives them a sort of continental cache. Bullshit, they're New Deal Democrats. Just say so. You're old enough.
    The debate about taxation acknowledges the Trump tax cuts have the shelf life of a gnat.  It's just an effort to get ahead of and contribute to the question of what's next.
    What's next?  I was reading about the Rosenbergs the other day.  No matter what you think of that case from the dim past, you can't help but conclude they were actually murdered by a wave of mass hysteria motivated by public officials; elected officials.  When you consider the near future, that's scary.  It does have a serious chance of being what's next.
     Most people would expect this old liberal to go off on a screed about the excesses of Trumpism. Nah, Trumpism is as dead as Casey's nuts.  It's the inevitable reaction to Trumpism we have to look out for.  These  Trump people can't find work in their fields.  They're facing truncated careers. In the private sector, they are being fired in droves.  Businesses aren't being necessarily boycotted but they are being shunned.  Kids are being thrown out of universities. Other kids, like these guys from Covington, will never see the inside of a decent college.  They can save the postage.  The problem with naked appeals to the half-formed emotions of the crowd is, the crowd's attention wanders.
    The American Right loves their boycotts and their blacklists and their condemnations.  They never notice these things become badges of honor over a very brief time.  The American Left controls the culture and thus, eventually, the economy and they are far more thorough and damaging in condemnation and marginalization. There is no real rehabilitation. The American left can be relentless and deadly.
    That may be a good thing.  It may be a bad thing.  It might be totally understandable.  It is a dangerous thing in its pervasive power and certainly bears consideration and watching.