Category: Uncategorized

The Democratic Party leadership, both in the Democratic National Committee and in Congress, is full of bad ideas these days, and they’re risking disaster because of it.

After the November election fiasco, you’d think a party that is left controlling the governments of just 13 of the 50 states, compared to 32 for Republicans, and that has just lost every lever of power in Washington — the White House, the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court — would be rethinking its whole approach to reaching American voters and trying to figure out where it went wrong over the last several decades.

Instead we’re hearing a whole lot of the same old bad ideas, and some new ones that are even worse than bad.

Take Nancy Pelosi, the dinosaur representative from San Francisco who once was the House speaker, back when Democrats controlled that lower chamber of Congress (bad idea one was rewarding her with the continued role of minority leader of the House!). Pelosi, who at this point should have no credibility as a strategist, argues that Democrats should “just wait” until Trump voters realize that they have been misled by their candidate, on the assumption that they will then flock to the Democratic Party in 2018.

Just wait? Doesn’t Pelosi get it yet? America’s working class — black, hispanic and white — has been “waiting” years in vain for the Democratic Party to come back to its roots and start helping them, instead of helping the toney entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and the toney hedge-fund managers on Wall Street to get richer? Wait for what? Voters both independent and Democratic abandoned the Democratic Party in droves in November because they finally woke up and realized it had abandoned them, and that “just waiting” for them to come back to a party that betrayed them is not going to work at all.

As I’ve written, plenty of those “deplorables” who voted for Trump in states that used to be reliably Democratic first voted in the Democratic primary for Bernie Sanders, either as Democratic Party registrants or as independents. They only turned to Trump when the choice was Trump or Clinton, whom they recognized as corporatist Democratic party hack. Many have told pollsters and interviewers that they voted for Trump and the Republicans not because they liked them, but to “shake things up” because the Democrats have been ignoring their plight.

With apps for smart phones and tablets being the rage worldwide it is not surprising that someone would devise an app based on Black History themes.

But a Black History-themed app for the near ubiquitous smart phones and tablets originating from Britain –- really!

Isn’t Britain the land best known to Americans as the home of “The Queen,” fish-&-chips and fans with a near religious-reverence for soccer?

The history of blacks in Britain is a subject little known either among citizens of that nation or around the world. Few Brits even know that Black History in their nation dates from the occupation of that island by the Roman Empire two thousand years ago.

And what about the fact that this game app focuses on Black History in the United States not history primarily centered in England, Scotland, Wales and North Ireland, the four countries that comprise the United Kingdom commonly known as Britain.

Nubian Jak 3D app
 

But Britain is the birthplace of the recently released Nubian Jak 3D Black History U.S. 2017 Edition app.

True story about a one-legged duck, a parable
 

I was walking down the bike path
between Poultney and Castleton on a hot summer day.
It used to be a railroad track,
passing through fields, forest and bog.
 
There behind an old derelict farm,
right up against the raised path,
was an old beaver pond.
And in the middle of the pond
 
There was a small island
that used to be the beaver lodge.
And on the island
stood a white, one-legged duck.
 
I stopped and looked at the duck, which held my gaze,
it was so beautiful!
I wished it a good day.
 
I stopped again on the way back to my car.
It hadn’t moved perceptibly.
 

This whole winter has been anomalously warm in southeastern Pennsylvania where I live. My oil guy, Hans, is complaining that the demand for home heating oil is so low this winter that it’s killing his business, causing him to lay off workers that he had already trained.

Like everything about climate change, and this is about climate change, as numerous scientific studies like this one are demonstrating, there are short-term benefits to some of what’s happening, of course. Han’s problems aside, on my end, my heating bill this winter is the lowest it’s been in the 20 years we’ve lived here, even factoring in the relatively low cost of oil. It is, for example, even lower than it was last year when the price of oil was lower than today. And who’s going to complain about this week, when our temperatures, for a five-day stretch, have been in the mid 60 degrees to the low 70s? T-shirt weather! And no sign of a night-time frost looking out as far as 10 days from now.

I went outside yesterday, when the thermometer hit 68 in the afternoon, and pulled the pile of clear plastic that some six weeks ago I had tossed over a patch of swiss chard in my little fenced-in raised-bed vegetable garden during a stretch of colder weather when we had some nights drop into the teens, and the chard, which I had been able to nurse through this mild winter up until that colder period by just covering it lightly with one sheet of plastic at night, and exposing it during the daytime, was a lush green, with leaves rising about four inches above the ground. At this point, I don’t think I’ll have to cover the plants at night anymore as they can handle a mild frost, so at least one crop left from my last year’s garden will be up and running this year as of February.

Over-wintered swiss chard plants in the author’s garden, ready to start growing again in late February
 

On my way out of the house, my eyes were drawn to a few spots of bright blue on the ground, and looking down at a patch of overgrown weeds in a garden island in our sidewalk, I saw several blooming birds eye speedwell plants — an early flower I would still not expect to see around this region for another month.

There is a place in the United States, almost half-a-mile underground, in a salt mine, where radioactive waste leftover from the production of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs was to be held separate from all contact with humanity for 10,000 years, equivalent to the entire history of civilization. This separation of civilization from the byproduct of its folly had lasted one-tenth of one percent of that immense time when on Valentine’s Day, three years ago, an explosion sent the deadly contamination back to the world of humans.

It shouldn’t have been a surprise because there were already two other failed geological repositories for nuclear waste, both in Germany and designed for civilian not military waste, that have also leaked within a short time of operation. But despite the signs of potential failure the United States in an leap of technological faith spent billions to hollow out a salt cavern in south eastern New Mexico, near the small town of Carlsbad, not far from the Texas border called the Waste Isolation pilot Plant or WIPP.

That faith wasn’t justified as events unfolded.

Supposedly safe for storage for 10,000 years, WIPP's nuke waste repository failed catastrophically in just three years
 

What happened on August 14, 2014 was that at least one of 683 barrels, about three feet tall and a little under two feet in diameter each and filled with plutonium contaminated waste burst into flames contaminating 8000 feet of tunnels and 22 workers who were either on the surface or arrived at the scene soon afterward.

The still unfinished clean up has cost taxpayers $2 billion since then.

Twice in recent weeks President Donald Trump reinforced his image of ignorance on African-Americans with astounding statements. Those statements amplified concerns about this president who rose to the Oval Office through a campaign tarred by brazen bigotry from his surrogates, his supporters and himself.

During a recent press conference, where Trump’s deportment was assessed as bizarre by conservatives and liberals, the self-proclaimed “least racist person…ever” evidenced ignorance about the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) –- that 46-year-old Capitol Hill contingent concerned with issues important to African-Americans.

During that press conference Trump bizarrely asked an African-American journalist to arrange a meeting for him with the CBC. Also, Trump falsely stated that a CBC member had rejected his repeated requests to meet with him.

Days before that press conference flub, President Trump made a faux pas regarding legendary 19th Century black activist Frederick Douglass during a White House meeting with a dozen-plus handpicked blacks held on the first day of African-American History Month.

During remarks at that February 1st “listening session,” Trump referenced Douglass as if the fabled abolitionist/orator/statesman was still alive. Trump somehow missed the fact that Douglass died 122-years ago, in February 1895.

Sketch of Frederick Douglass at Blockson Afro-American Collection in Philadelphia. LBWPhoto
 

Douglass died in DC at his home that is now a National Historic Site located a few miles from the White House. Trump’s faux pas on Frederick Douglass ignited widespread ridicule, from social media postings to mainstream news media accounts.

* NOTE: The term bullshit is used here in the sense established by Harvard philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt in his little gem of a book titled On Bullshit, which opens with: “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”
 

We’re living in a very weird and convoluted moment in the annals of truth and bullshit. For some reason Americans saddled themselves with a rich and obnoxious reality TV star significantly unmoored from reality. A George W. Bush aide famously told a reporter: We’re an empire now and we make our own reality. Maybe it’s an axiom of our age: The wealthy and powerful have the right to make their own reality. As for the poor and the powerless, the same condition of being unmoored from reality is generally linked with what we call “mental illness,” which leads to marginalization, institutionalization or incarceration.

The same corrupt double standard works in the realm of violence. I‘ve been writing for decades about the killing our government has officially undertaken in places like Vietnam and Iraq and in smaller venues. I’ve always liked the bumper sticker that says: Kill One Person It’s Murder; Kill 100,000 It’s Foreign Policy. In my thinking, it isn’t a joke; it’s more like the Rules Of Engagement.

For me, the exemplary culprit in this equation is Henry Kissinger and the cold-blooded slaughter of millions of Vietnamese in a war that really makes no sense at all. (I challenge anyone to tell me what the Vietnamese ever did to us other than work as our ally against the Japanese in World War Two.) The most truthful narrative is that the Vietnamese were betrayed and attacked by the United States, one, to support French re-colonization after WWII, and, two, because US leaders felt compelled to dominate the wrecked post-WWII world. To recognize Vietnamese nationalism and the Vietnamese urge for freedom was too complicated for our fearful and reductive Cold War mindset. Rich and powerful, we ended up killing millions of Vietnamese in an ultimately failed effort to impose our reality — although in the end the Vietnamese developed excellent capitalistic instincts.

President Trump and Bill O'Reilly before the Super Bowl talking about killers in the US government
 

In a very weird turn of events, our new president seems to agree with the idea that killing is very American and that there are killers in our government. President Trump revealed this in an interview with his old pal Bill O’Reilly. The interview was appropriately run just before the Super Bowl, our culture’s pre-eminent gladiatorial extravaganza, an annual event of such masculine escapist power that it defines Bread & Circus for our media-addled, couch-potato age. Here’s O’Reilly and Trump:

Bright liberal, you are called
 

You are called
to attend a wedding
at the bend in the river
where glacial melt
flows out of the mountain’s shadow
and quickens
before it leaps into space
transmuting
into valley water.
 
The minister is a
full-fledged shaman
whose eyes reflect the mountains
that protect his soul
from the likes of you.
 
Bright liberal,
you are called!
You obediently followed the river all the way
through the hills
and gorges,
against the current,
to this place of gathering.
 
You deserve a rest!
 
You are weary.
All your ideas are weary.
 

Your dreams
are a flock of birds
chattering in the sycamores
with all the flight gone from their wings
as if it were the end of the day,
but in truth it is still early!
 
Rest.
 
The bride’s dress,
river-washed,
is flapping in the breeze
against white peaks.
 
You, one seven-billionth
of the human race,
you, bright liberal,
are called
to witness this union.
 

There’s a delicious irony in the downfall of Michael Flynn, President Trump’s National Security Advisor, who resigned his post just 24 days after his appointment.

A retired three-star Lt. General, Flynn had previously been director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the Obama administration. In that role since 2012, he was a key player in the leadership of the sprawling $50-billion US intelligence apparatus that has increasingly been spying not just on Americans but on US allies and, to the extent possible, on the entire world. Flynn, as DIA director, was the top guy in charge of the so-called “Five Eyes” group of intelligence agencies– all English-speaking nations including the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada — which has coordinated spying on citizens of those nations as well as on the citizens and leaders of such supposed NATO allies as Germany, France, Italy, Spain etc.

Knowing all this, it’s simply astounding to learn that Flynn himself was using apparently unencrypted email, phones and texting to communicate with, of all people, the Russian Ambassador to the US, Sergei Kislyak, discussing such issues as potentially lifting sanctions imposed on Russia by the sitting president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn was brought down by the intel monster he helped to create
 

His political implosion is doubly ironic because Flynn was one of those during the election campaign who was loudly condemning Trump’s presidential opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for her use of a private server for her official State Department business, and for her general lax security standards (he actually led a “Lock her up!” chant at one Trump rally!). However, it turns out Flynn himself was not using secure communications in his own conversations with the Russian ambassador — communications that are now widely circulating in embarrassingly complete transcript form courtesy of US spy agencies like the National Security Agency.

Talk about someone being hoist with his own petard!

You’d think that seeing the kind of trouble the NSA’s “collect it all” motto can wreak even for the powerful and seemingly invincible, Washington’s elite might rethink what the NSA is doing?

But nah, I wouldn’t count on that happening. There’s more likely to be a lot of schadenfreude among those, both Democrats and traditional Cold War Republicans, who want to see Trump and his band of bozos go down, but hubristic to a fault, they’re not going to go so far as to think, “Hey, this could as easily happen to me!”

Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams, the top prosecutor with a tarnished reputation for turning a blind-eye to following ethics rules, has clearly seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall.

Williams, a few days ago, announced that he would not seek reelection to a third term. That surprise announcement evidenced belated recognition by Williams that his quest for reelection would be an uphill struggle if not an impossible mission thanks to fallout from his many ethical failings and questionable practices, as well as ongoing criminal investigations into his finances by the FBI and IRS.

That DA career-ending announcement by Williams came weeks after Philadelphia’s Ethics Board slapped this once promising and popular politician with a $62,000 fine for his failure to file mandatory financial disclosure forms for five years. His fine – the largest ever levied by Philadelphia’s Ethics Board – faulted Williams for not reporting over $160,000 in gifts that included fancy vacations and expensive jewelry, including from attorneys with clients prosecuted by Williams’ office.

Williams claimed, improbably, that he merely forgot to file the mandatory disclosure forms from 2010 to 2015.

But that claim fails the laugh test because Williams once served as Philadelphia’s Inspector General, the post tasked with ethics rule enforcement. During his announcement about withdrawing from reelection, Williams apologized for the embarrassment and shame he brought on the District Attorneys Office.

Williams’ re-election prospects were already in doubt due to erosions of support among his core constituency in the black community and his calculated ultimately unsuccessful effort to cultivate support from Philadelphia’s police union. That labor organization, the Fraternal Order of Police, has a history of reflexively backing police brutality and misconduct that primarily impacts blacks in the so-called City of Brotherly Love.

In recent weeks the FOP launched attacks on Williams arising in part from his decisions not to prosecute civilians who had questionable confrontations with police officers. Those FOP attacks included an anti-Williams billboard on the major interstate highway that runs through the center of Philadelphia.
 

DA Williams with Philly FOP prez in better times.
 

Meanwhile, Philadelphia’s NAACP branch recently blasted Williams for failing to prosecute three white men involved in a fatal building collapse while gaining the convictions of two poor black men connected with that incident. A civil trial jury in that building collapse recently found that the men Williams refused to prosecute were most responsible for that fatal incident. That jury verdict produced a settlement providing nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in damages to victims of that collapse.