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Politics

Primary Ballot: GAAAAAHHHHHH!

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What can I say? Nothing coherent, that’s for sure: The ballot for the Democratic primary arrived in the mail — I always vote early (but, alas, never “early and often”…). It is, in a word — the only coherent word I can muster — depressing.

Who to vote for, who to vote for, whom to vote for???

Personally, I don’t care much for Hillary Clinton. I don’t trust her, don’t believe a thing she says.

On the other hand, neither do I believe for an instant that Bernie Sanders can win the Presidential election. Say what? A guy who willingly describes himself as a socialist? Not. A. Chance.

Sanders’ message, by and large, is morally and probably factually right. But there’s no way he’s going to win a majority of American voters. Give me a proverbial break! This is not a country whose people vote for the good guys. That hasn’t happened since 1960.

If the Republican candidates weren’t SO toxic, I would vote for Sanders on principle. But given what will happen if a candidate who’s even faintly sane, even vaguely ethical, even sorta-kinda pretends to a person of good will loses to a right-wing lunatic, the main factor for Democratic voters has to be which one can win against a Republican?

And really… I don’t know. Conservatives and even some moderates revile the woman. Those of us who think of ourselves as moderate to kinda liberal suspect her. But I fear that an avowed socialist will bring out droves of conservative or moderate-to-conservative people who would not ordinarily be bothered to vote.

Wouldn’t Hillary have the same effect? I doubt it. Those who dislike her have disliked her for so long she’s part of the wallpaper.

A socialist, though? Definitely the elephant…uhm…the donkey in the room.

The election of an extremist to the White House will herald the end of the American hegemony. Many people think that will be a good thing. I don’t. Having grown up overseas and seen something of the world, I can’t escape the thought that the alternative to American hegemony is something far worse.

Yes. The Greek empire came to an end. The Roman empire came to an end. The Ottoman empire came to an end.  The empire of Genghis Khan came to an end. The Spanish empire came to an end. The British empire came to an end. And of course, the American hegemony will also come to an end.

But I’d just as soon not be here to witness it. Nor do I want to cast a vote that will hurry it along.

Obama Beefs Up Gun Laws… Your Thoughts?

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pistol 800px-SIG_Pro_by_Augustas_DidzgalvisWell, at least someone’s trying to do something, eh? The question is…are unilateral fiats to tighten gun registration and control going to do the job?

I was glad to see the President dedicate another $500 million to mental health care.

It is, alas, a drop in the bucket. Five hundred million bucks is as nothing compared to, say, the government’s $58.7 billion outlay in 2015 for something called “protection,” or the $813.9 billion in defense spending or the $149 billion for education.

And while no, of course I do not believe anyone who has a mental illness is ipso facto a menace to society, the fact is all of the mass shootings that bring our president to tears were committed by people who were suffering insanity. Our mental health care system leaves a lot to be desired…such as mental health care. Any help there is welcome, but $500 million comes under the heading of “too little, too late.”

Should people who are stark raving mad be prohibited from buying a gun? No doubt.

How about a person who, feeling a little sad, has talked with a doctor about it and now has a diagnosis of “depression” permanently  inscribed in the computerized record? That’s a catch-all term applied to anything from passing sadness to profound, pathological, long-term illness endangering the sufferer’s life. Should all of us who wish not to be “regulated” avoid discussing our blues with our doctors, lest we be prohibited from ever buying a sporting firearm or ammunition?

And will this improved rule do the trick? Let’s remember that Adam Lanza, who was seriously ill and had been for quite some time, was supplied with an arsenal by his mother, a woman who seems to have been generally regarded as a normal member of an affluent community.

The people from whom we have the most to fear, in terms of gun violence, are criminals — the type who stick up pawn shops, kidnap the employees, flee into neighborhoods, and hide in little old ladies’ garages. These folks don’t buy guns from dealers; they trade on the streets, within their own gang culture. We already have gun laws that have little effect on the availability of arms on the street. While spectacularly publicized shootings by people who have gone off the rails are alarming, they actually represent a tiny portion of the violent crime in this country. Most of it is perpetrated by people for whom regulatory control is superfluous and irrelevant.

What about the figures being bandied about to justify taking guns out of the hands of the American public? Or at least, of the law-abiding portion thereof?

We’re told  500 people die in gun accidents each year, and of those, 30 are children under five years old. You know…500 people is .00015681% of the US population. And 30 children? They comprise .00000941% of the US population, or .00015175% of children under five in this country.

Those are minuscule figures, microscopic compared to the number of people who die in home accidents and car wrecks. As a matter of fact, despite all the devices we have in place now to protect us from ourselves (I couldn’t even get into a bottle of nose spray to treat the current heavy cold!), home accidents are among the top causes of injury and death.

Are we really in a crisis situation? We’re told that “mass shootings” occur almost every day in this country. But define the term: gang-bangers shooting at each other in street fights or at drunken bashes are different from lunatics shooting up movie theaters and schools. We have a large criminal class in this country. It exists because we have serious problems of poverty, inequality, and injustice. However you define it, though, the death rate for “mass shootings” is under 5 percent of all shooting deaths in the US, and the annual rate of gun-related homicide has been dropping steadily over the past twenty years.

Hysterical reportage a crisis does not make.

Will Obama’s improved gun control regulation help stop the ongoing tragedy of suicides? One wonders.

If you’re really determined to off yourself, you’re going to do it, one way or the other. Having a gun at hand is convenient, that is true. It wouldn’t be my first choice — too messy, and too much chance of missing. But it has to be allowed that easy access to a pistol makes it too easy for an impulsive teenager to harm him- or herself in a moment of adolescent distress or real depression. But shouldn’t control of that access be the family’s responsibility? Should we all have our personal choices restricted because some people fail to keep their guns locked up?

Consider the ways your deceased friends  have found to take themselves out of this mortal coil…and why:

• Gunshot to head: had a second stroke, understood what was coming, and decided he didn’t want to die that way
• Tied a cinderblock to his leg and jumped into the deep end of the pool: depression, general craziness, hated his wife
• Drove a car into a concrete abutment: divorce, drunkenness
• Gunshot to head: depression, adolescent angst
• Gunshot to head:  unemployment; incurable long-term debilitating disease
• Overdose: depression

This line of thought carries us straight back to the matter of mental health care, something that is sadly wanting in this country. Some people, such as the elderly guy (my father’s best friend) who shot himself after he experienced a second stroke, have good reason to bring their lives to an end. This is not a mental health issue but one of ordinary humane treatment: people suffering terminal illness or looking at a hideous downhill ride in late old age should have a right to end their lives in peace. The rest? Every one of these people needed effective mental health care, and nary a one of them got it.

The answer to the problem of suicide — and to the problem of people like Adam Lanza going on killing sprees — is to fund  psychiatrists, medical doctors, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and humane mental hospitals, not to infantilize the entire adult population of the United States.

There’s a limit to how much a culture should protect its members from themselves. This aspect of the question has its parallel in other products from which we’re protected. I find myself now having to remove the caps from every bottle of household cleaner, from every OTC health nostrum, from every pool chemical, from every container of plant fertilizer, from every everything, carry them out to the garage, and break them apart with a hammer so that I can use and re-cap ordinary products that I pay for.

Child-proof caps are consumer-proof caps — they make it difficult and sometimes even impossible to use anything that they’re slapped onto, and they’re slapped onto almost every product we use today. You have to wrestle with these things whether you have a kid in the house or not. Should everyone’s life be restricted because a few people haven’t the sense to keep dangerous products out of children’s reach? Really?

Similarly, should all responsible adults’ lives be restricted because some people are irresponsible, some are criminal, and some are desperate? Or because we’re too cheap to provide universal mental health care and functional mental hospitals? Because we’re too cheap to lift the underclass out of poverty? Because we can’t be bothered to educate people in the skills of common sense?

Really?

Image: SIG Pro semi-automatic pistol. Augustas Didžgalvis. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

What’s Your Favorite News Source?

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Other than Revanche’s always amazing round-ups, that is! Last September, as you’ll recall, I canceled delivery of the New York Times‘s print edition, because of the frequent nondelivery. Sometimes I do miss it, but nothing like as much as I expected.

Breakfast-time, the usual moment I have and prefer for reading print anything, occupies so few minutes that there was no way I could get through the entire paper before I had to get to work. Along the same line, my guess that a weekly edition of The Economist and a monthly New York Review of Books would suffice to entertain me over solitary meals proved to be correct. I can only get through a couple of Economist pieces before breakfast is finished. And when I’ve run out of Economist copy, the NYRofB’s more than takes up the slack.

Both periodicals contain plenty of interesting and informative copy.

Is any of it current news? Well. No. But how much current “news,” after all, do you want to fill your brain cells with? How many shootings and hit-and-runs and idiotic politicians’ utterances can one mind absorb?

I find myself searching out more news online now, though. Google News leaves much to be desired — such as, oh, say…news. The problem with Google News is that it’s uncurated: the hive mind dictates what appears on any given “page” of Google News. Apparently no real editors exist, and so no real intellect manifests itself there. The result is gestalt, unreliable, and often downright stupid.

What are your favorite news sites online?

Lately I’ve become enamored of Sci-News.com, a compendium of reasonably well educated science reporting. The site is organized by discipline. For the really good stuff, click on the top menu’s right-most link, “More.” Great stuff!

News flash! Men are more narcissistic than women, study says! No kidding?

“New Study Shows What Makes Latin American Telenovelas So Popular!” 😀 Can you spell “f-u-n”?, dear academic?

The nanotechnology section at Sci-News is eye-catching: Scientists Create Artificial Photosynthesis System!” Holy mackerel…can it hold a (heh) candle to the glowing nanocellulose paper?

Raw Story, while often undisciplined, is usually entertaining and often interesting. I like that it tends to run long-form stories. Although I prefer print for longer stories, as a practical matter I don’t get print any more, so this is as good a source as any…assuming you don’t mind a slightly yellowish tinge.

Far more polished and arguably more sophisticated is Salon. Just now they’re having quite a frenzy over the ludicrousness of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Salon, like The Atlantic, tends to skew a little too demagogically to the left for my taste. And really, the present “lite” version of The Atlantic is just fluffy enough and just ill-thought-through enough to annoy. But still: if one must have demagoguery with one’s news, I suppose left-leaning is better than what the right has to offer these days. {sigh}

BuzzFeed is amusing, but if Raw Story smacks of yellow journalism, Buzzfeed is…what? Unprintable? Is it really impossible to deliver news without benefit of click-baiting?

NPR does a halfway decent job of delivering hard news…although sometimes one wonders. “Man Plays Saxophone During Tumor Removal“? LOL! Talk about click bait!

BBC News is consistently good at reporting and interpreting events. Coverage is broad and, for a newspaper, deep.

The Washington Post, like the New York Times, provides responsibly reported, reasonably objective, and fairly thoughtful reportage. Unfortunately, both organizations limit the number of stories you can read before they start gouging you a fee-per-view, and so I tend to avoid their sites unless something urgently important is happening.

Access to local news poses a much bigger challenge than finding acceptable national and international reporting. In many parts of the country, there are no decent local news organizations. One could argue that’s the fact here in lovely uptown Arizona, where the most up-to-date and often most comprehensive local reporting is, heaven help us, on the Fox TV station. That should tell you something…

One local radio station emits a kind of news digest. But like almost all the other local news media, it reads like it was written by lower-division J-school students without benefit of editors. Often the writing is barely literate, full of cliches, factual errors, and bêtises. That leaves one doubting the veracity of anything that appears.

A local business journal produces some OK reportage, but its scope is limited. The local alternative weekly is a haven for yellow journalism, when it’s reporting news at all — mostly it covers restaurants and entertainment. The only halfway decent source of reporting on the rascals at City Hall (or at the Legislature) is solidly barricaded behind a paywall. And it’s very expensive, reinforcing the impression that only the elite can afford to be educated about government these days. Of course, what really costs the dollars is real reporting…but the impression remains.

Where are you getting your news these days?

What Do Surveys Survey?

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The beloved Charles M. Blow is holding forth on the Walter Scott case, which one would expect that he should. I’m not going to say whether I agree or disagree with today’s column (those of  you who’ve been watching closely can imagine). But I would like to discuss a source that he (graphically supported by the NY Times) uses to help make his finely honed point: a Gallup poll asking Americans about their views of police force.

Every time someone trots out statistics from one of these polls, I find myself asking What do these questions really mean? And more to the point, what did the respondents really mean when they answered “yes,” “no,” “maybe”?

Let’s consider the responses to the questions Mr. Blow’s graphic designer presents.

“How much confidence do you have in the police”? Those responding ‘a great deal/quite a lot’:

Whites: 59%
Blacks: 37%

How much confidence do you  have in the police? I’ll tell you what my answer is: “It depends.”

It depends on the call to which one asks the officer(s) to respond. It depends on the officer’s training. It depends on the officer’s years of experience and on the quality of that experience. It depends on the officer’s overall IQ: smart, normal, or dumb as a post?

I feel a lot of confidence in most officers’ ability to cope with a traffic accident. I feel a lot of confidence in their ability to respond to my call to 911 reporting that some creep is trying to get in a bedroom window.  I feel a lot of confidence in their ability to respond to a cell phone call saying I’m at Tatum and Shea, headed for the Paradise Valley Police Station, and someone scary is following me.

I do not feel a lot of confidence in most officers’ ability to deal safely with domestic violence in progress, although I suspect they would do better than I could. Especially if they were bigger than me.

I do not feel a lot of confidence in any man’s or woman’s ability to respond when someone threatens his or her life; no more than I feel a  lot of confidence in my own ability to respond to a direct threat on my own life (other than to know that if I had a pistol in hand I would not hesitate to shoot).

I do not feel a lot of confidence that a police officer would deal kindly with Gerardo or Luz if someone called to say they saw one or the other of them entering my property when I wasn’t home — even if I’d left the key for Luz or the back gate unlocked for Gerardo.

I do feel a lot of confidence in any officer’s inclination to sacrifice his or her own safety to help someone whose life appears to be in danger.

“How would you rate the honest and ethical standards of police officers.” Those responding “very high/high”:

Whites: 59%
Blacks: 45%

How would you rate the honesty and ethical standards of police officers? Me, I think 59% “high” or even 45% “high” is pretty damn good. I would rate the honesty and ethical standards of most human beings as “mediocre” to “low.” Police officers seem to be human beings, and so…well…

Is the American justice system biased against black people?” Those responding “no”:

Whites: 69%
Blacks: 26%

And you? Do you think the American justice system is biased against black people? Yes, no, maybe? As for moi, my response is WRONG QUESTION!

In my not very humble opinion, the American justice system is biased against poor people: the more money you have, the more justice you can afford. Thanks to a legacy of slavery and discrimination, a larger proportion of black folks than of white folks live in poverty, or in something close to it.

Is the American justice system biased against poor people? Damn right. To the extent that a lot of black people are poor, well, sure: the system is biased against them. If you asked me, out of the blue, “biased against black people?” I might or might not answer “yes.” Or “no.” Depending on my mood and on what you asked in the previous questions.

So you see…I hate these surveys. You see why?

Current Events and the State of One’s Sanity

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I think my brain has turned itself upside down. Have you read the news over the past couple of days? The current Current Events are enough to make you crazy.

In the first place, I must confess that I have thought the flap over white cops shooting black men has been strenuously overblown. Puh-leeeze! If you decide to knock over a convenience store and rough up a clerk and challenge a cop who comes after you, you can’t be surprised when you get shot, no matter what your racial persuasion. And you might want to think about the potential risks before you let your kid go outside and wave a convincingly realistic-looking toy gun around a public park. But what happened in South Carolina yesterday raises some real questions about that line of thinking.

In case you haven’t pulled your head out from under the pillow this morning: a police officer stopped a driver because one of the driver’s tail lights was out. An altercation ensued in which the officer tased the driver, who turned and ran off. The officer fired eight shots, at least one of which hit the man in the back and killed him. The officer happened to be white; the driver happened to be black.

The officer claims he felt his life was threatened. Exactly how a man who’s fleeing you at a dead run, with his back turned to you and with no gun in his hand, could be much of a threat…that remains unexplained. Was the man a threat to public safety? Well…a healthy and vigorous adult male human being can wreak a fair amount of mayhem without benefit of any kind of armament. But lacking a gun and lacking any reason to beat up on anyone: one wonders.

So…we killed this guy because he ran away (his brother claims he probably was afraid of going to jail for failing to pay child support) after we stopped him over a tail light???

We stopped him over a dead tail light? Really? Seriously?

Let me ask you, my white brethren and sistern, how often has a police officer passed his time arresting you because one (count it, 1) of your tail lights was not working? As you know, I drive a junker. Just the other day when I took the Dog Chariot in for some maintenance work, WonderMechanic’s guys changed a tail light that they noticed was out. I knew the plastic cover was cracked — has been for quite some time (as in months and months) — but was trying to pretend I didn’t know the light was out. I pass quite a few of Arizona’s Finest as I make my way over the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Nary a one of them has even turned a hair at the blank tail light, much less tried to shoot me over it.

Maybe the rattletrap cars of elderly white women are less of a threat to public safety than the rattletrap cars of middle-aged black men?

Funny makes a sharp left turn.

Let  us pour another cup of coffee and turn the page. Along about page 18, we come upon this blood-roiling headline:

Utility Cut Off Stolen Meter Before Death of Family of 8

Dayum! That evil utility company!

The story of the man who poisoned himself and his seven kids by running an electric generator indoors has been framed in this way repeatedly: about 95 percent of the reports I’ve read imply that the cruel utility company cut off the family’s power and left them to die in the cold cold Maryland springtime.

As it develops, however, the victim had never even requested electric power service to the rental home. They moved in there last November — five months ago — and never ran up a dime’s worth of (legal) electric bills. Not, we learn, because the generator powered the home’s heater through the winter, but because Dad was an accomplished thief. He had stolen an electric meter, hooked it up on the QT, and was ripping off power from the utility company. Evidently he couldn’t afford power bills because he was trying to support seven children on minimum wage.

One of the conservative themes that I find especially revolting in the 21st-century national conversation is the idea that if you’re poor, it’s all your fault: poor people are, in this train of thought, lazy no-good bums who refuse to get off their duffs, and they deserve to live in poverty.

But… It’s very hard to push away the unkind question: what would possess you to have seven children if all you can earn is minimum wage? Minimum wage in this country isn’t enough to support one person, much less eight people. What part of birth control do you not understand? Does your zipper fall down on its own?

One of the deceased father’s friends asked “How can a man survive off of basically minimum wage with seven kids, and you can’t help him with a utility bill?”

It is not in any way self-evident that a utility company should donate support for the vast brood spawned by a man who can’t keep a grip on his procreative urges. Avoiding pregnancy is just not that hard.

No, it’s not the kids’ fault that they were born. It’s the fault — and the responsibility — of only two people: their parents.

Funny veers to the right.

Craziness to the left of us. Craziness to the right of us. We live in a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

So it goes…

Time to Move Along?

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Lately, I’ve been thinking it’s time to move — and by that, I mean move a long way away. The news of where this country is headed has become that alarming.

The Arizona legislature is infested with crazies whose politics and thinking are so extreme, so far to the right (if “right” is the word to use: “wrong” is where they’re coming from) that these people can only be described as the new Taliban. Right now we have a nut case who proposes, apparently with a straight face, a bill requiring everyone in the state to attend church.

This red-blooded American scheme came up while our legislators were discussing a bill to allow everyone to carry concealed weapons into public buildings. They’ve already passed a measure requiring that the names of police officers involved in off-duty shootings be kept secret.

These are the kind of ignorant loons that get elected when money buys lawmakers. Lest you wonder whose pocket they’re in, here’s a clue: they’re changing the liquor laws to make it easier to bring booze sales right into your neighborhood — at Circle K’s behest.

Arizona’s legislators propose to ban cities from passing local ordinances barring paper bags. They have resisted allowing the state’s driver’s licenses to meet national guidelines for identification that will let you travel on airplanes — in the near future, Arizonans who want to fly will have to buy a U.S. passport! They signed a bill to make it difficult or impossible for home-buyers to sue a developer for shoddy construction (a standard amenity of new homes in this state). They’ve approved a bill making it illegal to sell health insurance policies that cover abortion.

Really, Arizona has always been the Wild West when it comes to politics. But it’s gone completely off the rails now. It really isn’t a place where educated people who have a brain would want to live.

I consider where I would go:

New Mexico is beautiful but the politicians there are just about as crazy, and you can’t afford to live in Santa Fe — which is the only town in NM where I’d want to live.

California is too expensive. Ditto Oregon. Ditto Washington State.

I dislike snow and don’t want to live someplace where the roads ice up in the winter. That lets out the entire upper Midwest. Florida is relatively affordable but too humid. Southern states in general are infested with the same kinds of crazies as have taken over Arizona’s “leadership.”

Nor is it evident that people of good will and common sense remain in office anywhere. In Ohio, they laugh at a woman recounting her experience of rape as she opposed a bill banning abortion at six weeks into a pregnancy. And, by the way, that bill passed. Ohio used to house people who were reasonably sane.

My associate editor and her soon-to-be husband are talking about decamping to Ecuador. That’s one of several Latin American countries that are said to be friendly to Americans and livable. Another friend  has talked about moving to Mexico.

Honestly: we’re talking about a reverse exodus: Mexicans and Guatemalans want to escape to the US; Americans want to escape to Latin America.

There’s the south of France. But I doubt if I can afford the cost of moving across the Atlantic Ocean. One can drive into Mexico, where the cost of housing and furniture is quite low. Plus I think all of Europe is way too vulnerable to attacks by Islamic crazies. The war in the Middle East is going to move into Europe sooner or later, and I don’t wanna be there when that happens. IMHO, it actually is happening right now, in slow motion.

Proceeds on the sale of my house would buy this in Guanajuato...
Proceeds on the sale of my house would buy this little gem in Guanajuato…

It’s not as unsafe in Mexico as we’re told, as long as you’re not living where the drug cartels are warring with each other. And there are some lovely places to live in Mexico. The Mexican people, by and large, are also lovely: polite and kindly, even when compressed in huge, dense urbs like Mexico City. Try to find a New Yorker or a Londoner who’s friendly to strangers! Most Mexicans are friendly and polite as a matter of course.

Throw in another 25 grand and you get this. Do NOT miss the realtor's pitch for this thing!! http://bit.ly/1Dam8hC
Throw in another 25 grand and you get this. Do NOT miss the realtor’s pitch for this thing!! http://bit.ly/1Dam8hC

But even if you have to dodge the occasional bullet and bribe the occasional local official: is that really any different from what’s happening here now? At least the weather’s decent and you can afford to live on the interest from your savings.