Political Courage

It takes guts…

I guess you have to admire the courage it took for those 52 Republican Senators to vote for the latest Tax Reform Bill.

In the first place, they had to know it was a con game from the start.  They also had to know that the opposition is on to them, and was going to bring the heat every chance they could from now until 2018, yet they went ahead and did it.  It’s like they have to know Trump is about to bite the big one, and they were running out of time.

It seems to be pretty much out in the open that the Koch brothers and other big donors really do get whatever they want from the Republican Party, damn the consequences.

It’s also pretty obvious, and has been pointed out as recently as this morning, by Danny Westneat in the Seattle Times, that the federal budget deficits they have created with this bill will be the excuse they will use in the future to cut Social programs like Medicare and Social Security.  What they’re trying to tell us is that we’ve gotten a little too fat sucking on the public teat, never mind where the money came from, and that things are going to have to tighten up around here.  It’s all coming together according to plan.

So the Republicans have to know a bunch of them are going to lose their jobs in 2018, unless they can somehow focus the attention of the electorate on something else, off to the side, or talk a bunch of people out of bothering to vote.  Look out, Hillary, we’re really gonna come after you this time, and we’re not kidding!

The problem is, when you get their backs against the wall, and it begins to start to look like it’s all going down the toilet, what will they be willing to try to put off the inevitable?

Pull out the Nazi shock troops that are training together all over the country right now and put them on some targets?  Maye some more mass shootings?

How about a nice hot war somewhere new, like Korea?  Maybe Iran, they don’t have nukes yet, we hope.  It doesn’t take much looking to see how many American and Global companies are making a killing these days on arms and armaments, and the related ammunition and parts supply chains.  Gun shops and tactical supply joints are popping up nearly as fast as breweries these days, and the big guns, the planes and ships, the submarines and rockets, those are coming off the assembly lines in precise order, with backlogs in the years.

The fat cats who run those companies make money no matter who wins or loses the war, or who gives up their child in sacrifice to that money, a process that has been going on since the Gilded Age, and today’s Rupert Murdoch is yesterday’s William Randolph Hearst. So a war could be in the offing

I guess you have to hand it to the Republicans this time, all right.  Their strategy seems to be: “Let’s stab the majority of our constituents in the back while we take their money and give it to our patrons, then cover up the mess by throwing huge piles of bullshit on it and see if we get away with it.  Even if we lose our seats, we’ll still have our pensions, of course.  We’re not touching those…”

You’d think it would take a lot of guts to bet the farm like they’ve done here, that if they could invent some high principle upon which they were willing to stake their political futures to achieve, come up with some new words to replace “taking away from the citizens benefits they have bought and paid for all their lives”, they’d be quick to trumpet that.  You’d think so, if you didn’t suspect they were merely acting on orders from above, which also explains what happened.  Either way you look at it, it boils down to two things:  We’re screwed, and they’re toast.  :-{)}

Letter to Donald Trump

January 11, 2018

Dear President Trump,

Your Team Trump folks sent me an email yesterday, and I have to admit that I’m a bit confused.

First, they asked me if I thought January 20^th, 2017 was a fantastic day, because it was the day We the People elected Donald Trump president (I didn’t, but that’s neither here nor there), and whether I would like to join the president and whichever of his children were most likely to not be in jail for dinner on January 20^th of this year.

Under that they invited me to contribute one dollar to be automatically entered to win, the prize being a chance for dinner with you, Eric and Lara at a place in Florida!

Under that, in large white letters on a red background is a button to click that says: “Contribute $1”

They said you asked that all of your loyal supporters be told about this opportunity, to join the whole family at the most beautiful spot in Florida for an evening we’ll never forget!  Then it asked me to contribute $1 right now to be automatically entered to win an exclusive trip to Florida for Dinner with the President and His Family!

Thank you, Team Trump.  Contribute 1$

Then, underneath all that, is a forwarded message from you, Mr. Trump.  It says the same thing, basically, with one small change:  before it raises the stakes by saying I get to bring a friend, and that dinner is at Florida’s “Most Exclusive” Club, and we get to pose for a picture (!), you lowered the boom on us.  The price went up to 3$.

You make it all clear when you say, “All it takes is any contribution of 3$ or more before the deadline to be automatically entered for this once-in-a-lifetime chance…”

Under that is a stack of suggested contributions, ranging from $200 down to $35, ending with “Contribute Other Amount”, which could be 3$, I guess.

Then at the bottom you add a few details.  The most exclusive club in Florida is in Palm Beach, apparently, and the deadline is 11:59 PM on January 17, 2018.  That’s cutting it mighty fine if the dinner is on the 20^th.  That only leaves me 3 days to buy a suit and get my hair done.  Are you sending Air Force One or Two to pick me up at Sea-Tac?

But no, I found the link in the email that led to the fine print, and read all of that.

First thing, I see you’re bringing me in on an airline of your choice, putting me up in a hotel of your choice. That’s ok, but I’m surprised you’re going to have me in Coach.  You ever fly Coach across the country?  I doubt it.

Then I see that all meals and ground transportation is up to me while I’m there.  So much for “all expenses paid”.  Then I see that this deal is going to pick 50 winners!  How exclusive is that, I ask?  Then I see that I get to pay the taxes on all this, too!  How much is that photo-op worth to the IRS?

Then I see that the Secret Service has to do a background check on all 50 winners, not to mention their friends, and get it done in 3 days, and I gotta wonder, how much is that going to cost the American Taxpayer?  Are the results of those checks going to be available under the Freedom of Information Act?  I guess not, according to the fine print in the email, I have to send an SASE with return stamp to your campaign hq in Massachusetts after February 15, 2018 to get the answer to that question.  I’m half tempted…

Then we get to the nitty gritty.  If I don’t, for any reason, pass this background check, the whole deal is off.  Beyond that, the 50 winners will be selected from a pool of eligible contributors and selected using criteria supplied by the Sponsor “…to provide for an appropriate range of views, backgrounds, and interests.” 

In other words, your people are going to cherry pick out of the pile 50 people and their guests that have passed the Secret Service background checks and, since the drawing is going to be held on January 18, and the winners notified the same day, and the dinner is in Florida (at Mar-A-Lago?) two days later, I’d say you’ve got your work cut out for you.

In fact, the more I think about it, I’d say the whole “contest” is as phony as Trump University ever was.

I’d have to say you can kiss my ass for 1$, let alone 3.  I’d say you’d  have to be a dumb-as-a box-of-rocks Redneck to fall for this one.  :-{)}

Restaurant Review - Wingstop

January 6, 2017

Now I have always thought highly of Richard Sherman, ever since he came out of Stanford University to the Seahawks.  Because of our son’s experience there, we know how they prepare students to take their places on the world stage and make something happen, and we’ve seen it over and over.

So when we heard that Richard had joined a partnership in a new restaurant based on various types of chicken wings, we put it on the back burner as something to check out.

Well, be that as it may, my fellow intrepid explorer of the depths of White Center, Marty Etquibal, and I were footloose and fancy free today, and decided the time was ripe for a venture into the wilds of Westwood Village, where the one and only WingStop holds forth on a pedestrian corner between Sleep Country and the 24 hour fitness joint (motto:  Come work out here, then pig out on some wings on the way out!).

We’re here to join forces and tell you, don’t.  Much as it pains me to pan anything with Richard Sherman’s name attached, if invisibly or in any other way, I must in all honestly rain a reality blast down on this particular endeavor, and tell my friends, “Don’t go there.”

Philosophically, I realize that you can not critique the entire menu of any given restaurant  without eating there many times, to allow for hidden gems in the menu.  It’s like, when the nurse asks you, “are you allergic to any medications?” all you can say is, “Well, I haven’t taken them all yet, so I can’t rightly say… got any you want me to try?”

In this case, such hope is soon dashed, and the clues that shout themselves as you walk in the door are undeniable.  First, it’s the middle of rush hour, and the place is empty.  There’s exactly one other person inside, and she’s from the Post Office, so she’s probably on break.

The décor is heavy on fast food chic mixed with IKEA frills, with great views out into the empty parking lot and vacant sidewalks.  The menu is brief, very brief, and really only wants to know one thing:  boneless, or boned?  There are lots of sides available, but it really boils down to what kind of sauce you want on your wings?

I ordered the combo in bone with French fries and smoky barbecue sauce, while Marty asked for the same sauce over boneless wings, with potato salad on the side.  We both got a tall paper cup to fill at the fountain, which surprisingly contained no diet sodas, or even water.   I poured a cup of ice and waited for it to melt, and talked into it to speed up the process.

It took a surprising amount of time to prepare two small orders in an empty restaurant, but my ice was not even half melted when we dug in.  That was where reality set in.

The barbecue sauce was unmistakably none other than Sweet Baby Ray’s, off the shelf at Costco, and I would swear to that on a stack of the wimpy brown paper towels they supply for napkins, which is unfortunate, because they dump enough sauce on the poor wings  for you to eat your lunch three times over and still make chili with the leftovers.  The boneless wings turned out to be the most severely over-breaded Chicken Un-Tenders out of those 47 pound bags of thrice frozen remnants with the Foster Farms label in the Costco bulk foods section.    And Oh, Look, over there the huge tubs of Kirkland potato salad look just like the formless wad served to Marty in an overstuffed paper tub, probably less than a week old.  At least the bony chicken wings had real meat on them, all six of them for $10, I must grant that.  The “boneless” wings could have well included some tofu, if not a lot of beak parts, not that you could tell under all that breading.  My fries were good, until I ate one and discovered they were covered in toxic levels of sodium chloride.  At least they were real potatos.

To sum up, the Wing Stop restaurant is a prime candidate for a new reality show, “Costo Gone Wild”, but not one that we can recommend for our friends or any other discerning palates.  If you feel piqued by this, if your hopes were dashed because you were thinking the same thing as me but hadn’t found the place yet, feel free to check for yourself.  I’d suggest soon, though, restaurants that are empty at lunchtime are soon empty all the time.  Marty and I deserve a medal of some sort for exposing ourselves to this experience, so you don’t have to… urp.  :-{)}

Bread and Roses

People forget in this time of conservatism and division how things used to be, say, back in the Thirties, during the Great Depression.  People learned to get together, and to make do, and to get by.

My mother used to tell how, on a trip to town, they would throw a couple of the best spare tires, along with some tubes with the fewest patches on them, and the patch kit, into the back of the truck before leaving the farm.  With war rationing on and rubber in short supply, a couple of flat tires per trip on the old country roads was typical.

Mom would talk about how, with Dad out in the fields early in the morning, there would be a knock on the back door, and there would stand a starving young man who had just jumped out of a boxcar at the crossing, asking for work.  Grandma would invite the young man in and seat him at the kitchen table, then put a glass of fresh milk in front of him, along with a big ham sandwich on homemade bread, surely the best meal the man had seen in a few days.  After he ate, she would send him out behind the shed, where a pile of unsplit firewood lay in wait, so he could recover a shred of his dignity by splitting a few pieces of it before going on his way.  She always packed a bit of lunch for them also.

If you had a farm, you did not go hungry, in those days, and neither did anyone who crossed your stoop.  You darned your socks over and over, and made new dresses out of old, you did what you had to do, and you got by.

This is why I don’t get too concerned about the real fear that America can disintegrate into the same kind of chaos we lived through then, because we have shown that we will pull together in our communities and realize that we can get things done if we get together and work at them.

Look at what came out of the Thirties and Forties, as we survived war, starvation, and political upheaval, and formed Unions, fought the rich guys for a piece of the action, won that battle, and built the Working Class into the Middle Class.  Over the years, we got too complacent and secure in our positions, then we started feeling threatened by newcomers, forgetting that we were all newcomers once, too.  This led to the tendency to arm up, build fortresses, and man the ramparts against all comers, real or imagined.  This led inevitably to the conservatism that demands walls, and borders, and snoops into the neighbors back yards looking for enemies.  It’s no wonder the middle class is fading back into the workers again, always looking up at a carrot that is pulling away.

The tendency of Capitalism to always search for the lowest operating cost was best summarized by Karl Marx, when he said something like, “the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life." The class struggle is based on the tug-o-war across that line.

But nowadays the product of labor is more often an idea, in the form of a program, or a service generated on and by the Internet.  Furthermore, the increase of robotics in manufacturing and customer service applications has become a geometrical progression, to the point where an article in today’s Seattle Times http://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/automation-could-replace-one-out-of-three-us-jobs-within-about-15-years-report-says/  says that 38% of American jobs can disappear due to automation in 15 years.  Now is not the time to consider a career in driving truck, for example.

But maybe now is a good time to start the conversation going on the concept of a guaranteed minimum income for all people.  Imagine, if you will, the potential savings to the companies, which translates into earnings per share, as robots take over.  In trucking, for example, you could program the robots to always stay in the right lane, leave plenty of room in front of them for cars to merge in and out (or even in a separate lane just for them, when we get going on the idea), and drive all day and all night, stopping only for fuel or recharging their batteries.  All the money those robots would make as they drove down the public highway could either go into the pockets of the owners of the companies who bought the robots, or it could be shared evenly with all the displaced truck drivers, so they could go do what they want to do.  Each owner-operator could buy just one truck, send it out to work for him or her, and sit back and manage the operation from the home computer.  Trucking companies as we know them will disappear.

I see no reason beyond technology that we could not ultimately, as a human race, decide to use technology and robotics to make life easier for literally everyone on the planet, starting with the poorest and hungriest and working our way up to the wealthiest, who by that time will be getting hard up for household help and personal servants, so we will let them belly up to the public trough with the rest of us.  If you look closely at anyone who thinks this is a bad idea, you might see a big ol’ hog with his trotters already in the trough up to his hocks, just trying to avoid competition.

Imagine a world where the robots have freed the people to restore the planet to the original pristine condition in which we found it, and build the means to explore outer space, and pull our material needs from the asteroids that are the crumbled remains of a different planet, or the gaseous upper atmosphere of Jupiter, where the countries are so peaceful, because nobody is starving anymore or feeling like they have to steal or kill to get ahead, so you can go anywhere and visit in peace.  Imagine what we could accomplish if we decided collectively to make that world our goal, and work for it determinedly.  Some already have.

But, you say, what about the rich elites who already suck up the vast majority of the income in this world for themselves?  Don’t you think they might have an opinion about such a goal?  And that will lead us right back to the old tug-of-war, and the final question that everyone must answer at some point:  Which side of that line are you on?  :-{)}

Oh, Beautiful

From an article in the Seattle Times, published by the New York Times on October 23, 2017
The song lyrics were added by me.  The concept was introduced by Paul Simon.

Oh, beautiful for spacious skies,

Two unnamed Senior Officials said today that the CIA is expanding its covert operations in Afghanistan,

For amber waves of grain,

sending small teams of highly experienced officers and contractors alongside Afghan forces

For purple mountain majesties

to hunt and kill Taliban militants across the country.

Above the fruited plain!

Who are these contractors, and how much are they being paid?  Is this the new career path for Army and Marine veterans?  Serve one or two tours in country, then retire, then come back as a member of a kill team?  Do they also hire mercenaries from other countries, like Russia?

America! America!

How do our troops feel about these mercenaries?  What do the Afghan soldiers think about it?  How does their pay compare?

God shed his grace on thee,

Since 2001, at least 18 CIA personnel have died in Afghanistan.  In recent months, 1,662 civilians have died, with 3,581 wounded, as a result of increased violence in Afghanistan.

And crown thy good with brotherhood

The CIA’s expanded role will augment missions carried out by military units, meaning more of the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan will be hidden from public view.

From sea to shining sea.

The CIA declined to comment on its expanded role in Afghanistan… :-{)}

Open Borders

This latest in a series of reports on documents issued by the Government Accountability Office is about Border Patrol agent assignments in the Southwest, and it’s an eye-opener.  The link is: http://www.gao.gov/assets/690/688200.pdf?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery

I read this stuff so you don’t have to, and most of it is forgotten immediately, but this one is interesting:  As of May 2017, nationwide, Border Patrol had about 1,900 fewer agents than authorized, which officials cited as a key challenge for optimal agent deployment. In recent years, attrition has exceeded hiring (an average of 904 agents compared to 523 agents) according to officials.

It goes on to note that some 42% of individuals apprehended while trying to cross the border were caught within a mile of the border itself in 2016, while in 2012 that figure was 24%.  It also notes that part of the reason for that is the kids who are sent across the border and told to surrender immediately, but it’s pretty obvious that the main reason is the lack of agents.  If you’re running the border, your chances go way up if you make it the first mile.  Anybody want to ask if the people who make money running the border pay attention to these reports?

So what the hell is going on in the ranks of the Border Patrol that damn near double the number of agents they were able to hire quit over the same period of time?  Is this why the idea of a wall is sounding good to some folks?  Is it just the Southwest division, or is this happening all over?

Personally, I think people ought to be able to go anywhere they damn well please any time they want, and that borders are a particularly vicious invention designed to keep the people of the world at each others’ throats, and not those of the ones who really run things, and make all the profit.  But I realize that the concept of Open Borders is a futility until we solve the problem of why some people are so desperate to get the hell away from where they were born at any cost.

That problem has proven to be a thorny one, indeed.  Ah, but when we do solve it, when the entire world is open to our visitation and exploration, when all the people who live there are happy and comfortable and glad to see us, just like we are glad to see them when they come to our town, wouldn’t that be wonderful indeed?  What’s it going to take to make that happen? :-{)}

Travels with Dog

I hope you’ll forgive me if I depart from my usual light-hearted silliness to tell you about our recent trip to Ventura, California, to attend a dog show with our dog, Nash, or, as I refer to him around the kennel, Fuzzbutt.  He’s a Bouvier des Flandres, a herding dog, and the show was the National Specialty for the breed.

We drove down in our pickup, with Nash ensconced in the back of the extended cab and the various crates, cart and gear in the back in two big tubs, all secured with straps and cargo nets.  We got to go over the famous Grapevine for the first time, as we drove I-5 all the way down, where we were reminded once again how much of the food we eat comes from giant operations up and down the central California valleys.  Our destination was a fancy hotel right on the beach, within walking distance from the Ventura County Fairgrounds to the north.  Our room was on the 4^th floor, overlooking a plaza between the hotel and the public parking garage on the south side with the famous Ventura Pier just beyond that.

We spent a lot of time going back and forth from the hotel to the fairgrounds every day to attend and participate in the competitions, where Nash finished his Rally Novice certification and got his title to add to his Grand Champion status, though he got skunked in the conformation events, not too surprising given that the top 100 Bouviers in the country were all there.

But the thing that got to me, both on the way down and back and while we were there, was the obvious reality that, everywhere in our country these days, our society is coming apart, and an increasingly large number of people are falling off the ladder to success with nowhere else to go but in public places, where they fester and take root and cause problems.

You can tell them by their walk.  A homeless, hopeless person takes life one step at a time, there’s no hurry, because there’s nowhere to go, and any place is just as good as any other.  Perhaps it was so jarring because, on the beach in Southern California, at least, the weather is so good that the poor folks are unlikely to freeze to death.  I could look out upon the scene from the safety of my lanai, and watch the well-fed, well-dressed guests enter and exit the side door from the hotel, where their magic plastic card electronically opened all doors for them as they strolled to and from the restaurants on the plaza or their valet-parked cars, past the beggars and the buskers and the young couples lost in the glamour of living on the beach, or out of shopping carts stolen from the local grocery.

I looked out one night, across to the top floor of the parking garage, and witnessed a single individual man, complete with microphone in hand, but lacking any amplification equipment, go through a long, complex rap performance for an audience of none, complete with stage gestures, leaps, and dives into an imaginary mosh pit, which only came to an end when the local drug dealer showed up on the rooftop and handed him something that eased his pain, if only for the night.

Down on the concrete boardwalk that stretches along the beach from the Pier to the Fairgrounds there was a bearded young man in filthy clothing, with his bedroll held loosely over his shoulder, engaged in a furious conversation, with the gestures and facial expressions of one who is ready to explode, with the air around him.  People instinctively gave him a wide berth as they walked by with their expensive dogs, on leashes, in their designer jeans and sunglasses.

I rose early in the morning on one day and watched the police arrest a man who had apparently committed the sin of spending the night on a bench on the boardwalk, where they handcuffed him on the ground as they spread his entire life’s possessions on the bench from which they evicted him before they transported him to whatever lockup awaited.  I noticed that the county employed several full-time security people who patrolled on bicycles with radios on their belts in case they needed the police in a hurry.

And the road past the front of the hotel was often thick with Escalades, and Teslas, and in town the restaurant we favored featured 101 taps with different micro-brews flowing from each on command, while in the morning on a walk through the downtown core I saw people sleeping in doorways of shops that had yet to open.

This is the face of income inequity in this country, and it’s clear that it spreads across the nation, like a blanket of misery that overlays everything, where there are getting to be so many people in dire straits that we don’t have any places left for them to hide.  I have read the words of Steinbeck and others who told stories about the last time we went through this, but back in the ‘30s we were all in the same boat, and nowadays it seems like most of us are doing fine, and then there’s all those people on the beach.

We hear politicians carrying on about immigrants taking our jobs, yet all the people lined up in the cabbage fields behind the tractor-pulled harvesters looked like immigrants to me.  We saw multiple double trailer rigs filled with Roma tomatoes and limes on the highways, and the almond trees were being shaken down for their bounty, which was scooped up with special sweepers that rolled up and down each row.  Somehow, none of that bounty winds up in local food banks, which mostly feed poor people a steady diet of carbohydrates and sugar, leftover pastries from the grocery stores that are past their pull dates but so well preserved they will rot teeth for months afterwards.

There are a few miles of beach to the north of Ventura where you can rent a spot to park your motor home for a nominal fee, and it’s pretty clear that many, if not most of them, have been there unmoved for quite some time.  It’s only the clean ones that belong to tourists.  The others are home for someone, just like the ones you see in downtown Seattle, and anywhere else you want to look.  And when they break down, and get impounded, another family hits the street.

I wish I had a glib, plausible answer for all this, but I don’t.  Maybe, like China has apparently done, part of the solution lies in a guaranteed annual income for all citizens.  Maybe, like in Canada and most other advanced countries, a single-payer health care system for everyone, including mental health care for all the bearded young men with their worldly possessions in a bag on their shoulder who can’t find their way home, would fix some of the problems.

Maybe if we realized, as a nation, that as long as the poorest residents of the favelas of Rio or the slums of New Delhi, not to mention those who live among us already, do not enjoy a minimum of safety and security, then none of us will ultimately be truly safe and secure.  We really are all in this life together, and the sooner we act on that reality the better off we will be.  :-{)}