Category Archives: Poltiics

Really? The State Fair As Usual, Amid A Fools’ Surge of the Pandemic. Really?

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The red flag of extreme peril is out for the Minnesota State Fair. As all the COVID numbers once again head off in the wrong direction thanks to this latest surge — The Fools’ Surge / The Pandemic of the Unvaccinated — both The Lovely Mrs and Bouncing Baby Boy #1 have declared they will not be rubbing sweaty jowls with the masses at this year’s Great Minnesota Get Together.

Might as well board up The Food Building and The Beer Gardens.

Little by little businesses are coming around to the only effective conclusion. Namely, that they’re open only for clients and staff intelligent and morally responsible enough to have gotten themselves vaccinated. The rest — those clinging to their “personal beliefs” — can stay home, or like CNN, be fired.

Given the month it takes to acquire full efficacy from the three vaccines, we’ve already blown by the window for the Fair and the 1.3 million or whatever who show up to sweat and breathe all over each other. Fair authorities say they are “keeping all options on the table”. But as of this moment they are only seriously considering mandating masks for indoor exhibits and venues … which is ludicrous on the face of it.

Is some hapless employee really going to stand in front of O’Gara’s, The Food Building, the Grandstand or (my personal favorite) the Northern Tool shed and deny entrance to the “mask hesitant”? Give me a break. Mask mandates are unenforceable. Far better just to deny entrance to the grounds to anyone who can’t prove they’ve been vaccinated.

Our Great Cholesterol Get Together is hardly National Priority #1. IMHO getting schools back to normal operation gets top billing. But government leaders — the people we elect to make sometimes (very) unpopular decisions — are reluctant to take a walk out on the legal/political plank and make vaccines mandatory for every school with a link to public funding.

You don’t have to watch a couple hours of Christopher Hitchens/Sam Harris YouTube debates like I did the other night to get into a steaming seethe over all the unintended consequences of America’s anachronistic enshrinement of “religious and personal beliefs”.

With a vast majority of states genuflecting at the notion that what someone prefers to believe is every bit as valid and real as … well, reality … we find ourselves in a moment like this. Locked up and incapable (i.e. unwilling) to say, “No. Sorry. I’m happy for whatever you want to believe. But this disease is not a Sunday school fantasy. It is real. And deadly. And spread by people like you. Meanwhile, the vaccines are safe, widely available, free and effective. If you want to go on believing that the Great Bearded White Man in the Sky and/or His Son, the Beardless White Guy Who Looks Like the Drummer for Foghat, will protect you no matter what. You go right ahead. But until you get with the reality of science you’re not allowed in, and your kids can stay home another year.”

I don’t if anyone famous ever actually said, “Sometimes you’ve just got to take the heat.” But the line has been running through my head as I listen to people from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to U of M officials to White House spokesfolks to State Fair authorities wring their hands over vaccine mandates.

Frey was recently quoted saying he’d prefer not ordering another mask mandate given the impact that kind of thing has on restaurants and small businesses just now getting back on their feet after the first three surges of COVID. That said, he still didn’t want to demand public employees get vaccinated or stay away from work.

Public officials at nearly every level are conceding to this Fools’ Surge rather than biting the bullet and doing the only thing that will truly, once and for all stop the disease and the dying, which is to issue vaccine mandates.

No doubt all of them assume that given the country’s Federalist Society-polluted judiciary, any mandate will be hit with an injunction by some Trumpist-Libertarian judge within seconds of it being issued. Many on the basis of a violation of the basic Constitutional right to “religious or personal beliefs.” It goes without saying that at this point, with 640,000 already dead and more dying not to mention the recovery in danger of relapsing, I personally could not care less about some nitwit’s “religious beliefs.”

Generally speaking, public officials are of course required to care more about Constitutional nuances than me. But again, consider the context. We’re not talking about school prayer, or Critical Race Theory or some storefront preacher’s tax-exempt status. We’re talk the stark reality — reality, not fantasies — of serious illness and death wholly because of the ignorance, obstinancy and selfishness of a minority of the population.

Issue the vaccine mandates. Let it go to the courts. Play hardball with Trumpist judges. Slow walk the legal fight — a la Trump — for the two, three, four months it’d take to force the fools to get the vaccine. Achieve herd immunity. (Before the 30% idiot petri dish stirs up another variant that blows past the vaccines). And apologize for reckless, unconstitutional behavior later.

The Big Upside? The Lamberts afoot at the Fair, streams of grease and beer rolling off their chins.

We’ve Reached That Point. Give the Fools the Culture War They Always Want.

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(Trigger warning for more delicate readers. The following screed may include occasional outbursts of profanity.)

I wish I did, but I don’t own any Berkshire Hathaway stock. And while I tend to take the nostrums and bromides of billionaires with a 50 lb. block of salt, I find I pay more attention when Warren Buffett is quoted. Like recently, when he said, ” … there will be another pandemic. We know that there is a nuclear, chemical, biological and now cyber threat. Each of them has dire possibilities…It doesn’t seem like it’s something that society is fully prepared to deal with”.

His concerns didn’t stop at insufficient financial or technological wherewithall. That exists. What doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity is the matter of getting conservative public officials, “thought leaders” and the general public to take such things as seriously as, well, football play-offs, beach raves and motorcycle rallies.

Buffett, who credits his success as an investor to thousands of hours of reading of a wide spectrum of information, has every reason to be pessimistic about the U.S. and the world coping with a truly ravenous pandemic — a medieval-style disease with faster and more lethal rates of transmission than COVID-19. No one who has done any reading (or something other than Facebook posts) can look at this latest fourth surge of COVID-19 and fail to accept that this all but entirely due to an epidemic of stupidity … in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet.

I’m sure Buffett would agree that this literally death-dealing imbecility, doesn’t stop with COVID. The same bone-numbing ignorance applies to two other existential thrwats, namely, climate change and authoritarian violence against democracy.

Here in Minnesota we’re well into our second month of yellow, LA-in-the-Seventies-style, crud-filled skies, with daily records being set for the worst air quality … ever. You’d be just as healthy sucking down a pack of Camel straights as spending a day breathing in the air from wildfires. Fires stemming from drought that is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change. A crisis thoroughly researched and scientifically validated but yet still one that essentially the same 25-40% of Americans prefer to see as “liberal fear-mongering”, if not a plot by Silicon Valley elites and radical socialists to somehow deprive them of their freedoms.

That same percentage — and I’m confident a Venn diagram of the COVID “hesitant”, climate deniers and Trump worshippers would have near perfect overlap — sees no reason to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, convinced by the echoes of their cult that it was something other than what everyone saw and was recorded for eternity.

So if you’re keeping score at home, that’s (1.) A pandemic that has already killed 640,000 and is revving back up again to re-cripple the economy, (2.) Climate change that is now routinely turning summers into bone-dry, smoky, crop-killing hellscapes, like something out of “Blade Runner: 2049” and (3.) A complete indifference to violent insurrection inspired by failed government leaders.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the connective tissue to all this is reckless, wretched stupidity, inspired and validated by a startling minority of players for their self-interest, be that commercial, ego or both.

COVID is resurging, spawned by the Trump base and the chronically alienated. Climate mayhem will only get worse, thanks to the ignorance and indifference of conservative leaders. (Do NOT read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells if you want to believe otherwise. Stick with whatever Laura Ingraham is selling this week.) And then there’s violent insurrection, (which would aggravate both of those two). Violence egged on by elected Republican officials will happen again and likely repeat itself in worse ways in the absence of investigation and public punishment.

There isn’t just one grand solution to the “unpreparedness”. But permit me to suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point where coddling, and “reaching out” to those who don’t/won’t understand and pretending that global pandemics, global climate disaster and violent (not to mention racist) attempts to overthrow the American government are no more serious threats to our existence than quarrels over tax policy and school prayer.

What’s to be done? In the COVID context: Mandates. French style.

No vaccine? No walking into a bar. No getting on public transportation. No returning to work. Your kids stay home from school. Let the deniers rage. Let Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley fund-raise off their voters’ dumb-as-a-stump petulance. Protestors in France made headlines, but 76% of the population agreed with the government’s vaccine mandate. Only fools want to prolong this idiocy.

Obviously the Biden administration would benefit from some back-up from private industry, which it is getting in a halting way. But we’d be snuffing out this fourth wave a lot faster if mega-coporations like Delta Airlines for example, denied service to the unvaccinated. (Might cut down on some of their “disruptive customers” problems, too.) Likewise, the Minnesota State Fair. No vaccination? No entrance.

Fair-minded Christian coddling of the stupid, the perpetually reckless (i.e. sociopathic) and the “historically suspicious” has become lethal enabling. So … remove their choice to be stupid and selfish. Give them the goddam culture war they always seem to want.

If that’s the same as saying, “Fuck them and the fucking horses of galloping stupidity they rode in on,” well, there you have it. Nothing else is working.

Wanted: Conservative Intellectuals With Even a Half-Ounce of Conscience

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With a fourth COVID surge well under way, with Ozark/red state hospitals filling to the rafters with the denying and the dying, I recalled a sad little scene from up in Duluth last week.

Within the modern, reality-averse conservative bubble, there’s a long-standing, self-proclaimed “think tank” called The Center of the American Experiment”. Former Star Tribune columnist Katherine Kersten is a prominent member of this cadre of, um, deep thinking patriots. Very much like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene’s cynical and hapless “America First” tour, the Center was having a hard time finding any venue in Duluth that would host their “Raise Our Standards” carnival. That being a kind of faux intellectual barnstorming exercise designed to alert low information parents to the dangers of … wait for it … “wokeness” and Critical Race Theory.

Four Duluth businesses denied The Center’s request to rent space, before they settled on a tiny community center out on Park Point. Naturally, instead of acknowledging that the businesses had as much interest in associating with them as they would a band of travelling Holocaust deniers, The Center touted itself as the victim … “victim, I say!” … of freedom and liberty-hating left-wingers.

Eventually the group, led by attorney John Hinderaker, best known for his role in the conservative “Powerline” blog, made it’s case in front of barely 30 people, several of whom it turned out were Duluth area lefties curious to see what a quack show looks like up close.

I’ve followed The Center from a distance for years, once wrote a profile of Ms. Kersten and attended a luncheon they put on way … way … back to refute liberal, Chicken Little concerns about climate change. At every step along the way my perspective on The Center is as a crew of oddly embittered, borderline sociopathic contrarians. A clutch of people intelligent enough to form paragraphs, disciplined enough to check their punctuation, but so intellectually dishonest they refuse to concede that their whole game is simply the business of being against whatever peer-reviewed intelligentsia and liberals are for.

The aforementioned climate change bash was naked in its reaction to Al Gore … Al friggin’ Gore! … telling us carbon dioxide was bad for our health. What an alarmist! What a woke nanny stater!

Since then and up to now, The Center and Powerline have kept up a contrarian, reactionary drum beat against … well, let’s see … electric cars, COVID lockdowns, tax advantages for wind and solar power, police reform, anything Joe Biden says, equitable taxation of large businesses and especially “wokeness”, seemingly the greatest liberal sin of all.

In the grand scheme of things The Center of the American Experiment barely registers on the Richter scale of conservative cynicism. I bring it up only to offer an example of the kind of people who come to mind anytime someone asks, “Do these people actually believe this stuff, or is it all just another grift?”

With COVID surging among the unvaccinated, largely due to the self-interested cynicism of similar conservative “intellectuals” — people like Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, a handful of bow-tied opinion writers, several hundred talk radio hosts, YouTubers and podcasters — their influence is proving fatal, again. This is not to forget Republican presidential “contenders” like Florida’s Ron DeSantis — lately hawking anti-Fauci t-shirts, as his state leads the fourth wave — and South Dakota’s Kristi Noem, the beauty queen-turned-politician most responsible for, at a time last fall, one of COVID’s worst death-rates-per-capita … in the world.

The Vaccine-Hesitant Coach Who Died as Ron DeSantis Hawked 'Don't Fauci My Florida' Merch

Whether it be DeSantis, FoxNews hosts, Facebook influencers or the poor little Center of the American Experiment, it is impossible to watch this crowd of allegedly educated adults shovel out misinformation to the chronically aggrieved and not see the ratings, revenue, underwriting and political viability motivating them. Put most simply, it’s all about them getting theirs.

Trump Swears He Didn't Ask to Be on Mount Rushmore by Asking to Be on Mount Rushmore | Vanity Fair

You hear people say all the time that what this country needs are two — not just one — reality-embracing, fact-based political parties. And this is true. But watching the explosive sewer-flow of cynicism coming from modern conservatism’s so-called best and brightest I’d add that we also need two — not just one — ideological hierarchy that respects ethics, science and logic.

When LA Fitness Chooses Far-Right Propaganda Over Customer Service

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Any private business obviously has a free speech right to play Fox News on their television(s). But the majority of Americans who voted against Donald Trump, and/or just want better news coverage, also have the right to speak out against those Fox News propaganda pushers.

I know it’s a heavy lift to try to change the world one business TV set at a time. But not trying is too depressing a life for me to live. So yeah, I’m afraid I’m that “that guy.” Not “the PC police.” Not a “cancel culture cop.” Just a guy who isn’t going to remain silent when being force-fed right-wing proselytizing at bars, restaurants, waiting rooms, and health clubs.

After all, Fox News is propaganda, not the “fair and balanced news” it claims to be. As several studies cited by the Washington Post found, Fox is not only unfair and unbalanced, it’s been demonstrably dangerous during the pandemic era:

In April, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign published a peer-reviewed study examining how Americans’ media diets affected their beliefs about the coronavirus.

Administering a nationally representative phone survey with 1,008 respondents, they found that people who got most of their information from mainstream print and broadcast outlets tended to have an accurate assessment of the severity of the pandemic and their risks of infection. But those who relied on conservative sources, such as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, were more likely to believe in conspiracy theories or unfounded rumors, such as the belief that taking vitamin C could prevent infection, that the Chinese government had created the virus, and that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention exaggerated the pandemic’s threat “to

These findings held even after controlling for viewers’ political affiliation, education, gender and age.

That doesn’t seem to be the kind of information a health club would want to be promoting during the most deadly pandemic in a century.

My Adorable Little Crusade

So when I returned to my health club after the pandemic died down, I was disappointed to see that MSNBC had been dropped from the channel selections on TVs attached to treadmills, ellipticals and step machines, while Fox News remained. I wasn’t too upset, though, because I assumed it was a small oversight that would be easily remedied.

So I politely asked the local manager to add MSNBC as a progressive option for the mouth-breathing masses.  I asked them to either include both Fox and MSNBC in their channel selections, as they did pre-pandemic, or have neither MSNBC nor Fox News. 

I was simply requesting balance. I thought that was darn reasonable, especially since this club is located in a county that gave Biden 71 percent of its vote, compared to just 25 percent for the Fox News poster child. So, I frankly expected them to quickly agree to such a minor and reasonable request.

Surprisingly, the LA Fitness/Esporta manager has refused, and his rationale is absurd.  He claimed the CNN option they were offering in the channel selection was the leftist equivalent to Fox News. 

Earnest wonk that I am, I shared this non-partisan media bias analysis finding that CNN was left-center (“Skews Left” as they put it), and therefore not ideologically comparable to either “Hyper-Partisan Left” MSNBC or “Hyper-Partisan Right” Fox News.

Beyond his CNN argument, the manager also asserted that the availability of WCCO-TV (CBS affiliate) and KSTP-TV (ABC affiliate) stations satisfied their obligation to balance off “Hyper-Partisan” Fox News, so MSNBC wasn’t needed.  He seemed to conclude that any TV news that wasn’t Fox News was progressive, and therefore those local affiliates should somehow count as being a progressive counter-balance to Fox News. 

This claim is also absurd. I pointed out that 1) the vast majority o of the local affiliate stations’ programming was entertainment, such as The Bachelor, NCIS, and NFL football, not news; 2) the local stations’ news was almost entirely focused on weather, sports, crime, pop culture, and local events, and therefore wasn’t comparable to the kind of hard core national news featured on Fox News and MSNBC; and 3) the brief 30-minutes per day of hard national news on those network stations was at best left-center like CNN, and therefore not close to comparable to “Hyper-Partisan Left” MSNBC.

By the way, while I am a commie, I don’t adore MSNBC. It brings some guests, views, and analysis that other stations don’t, so I do tune in. But the cutsieness, pettiness, and long-windedness of Joy Reid, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell are difficult for me to take.

But if Fox News’s far-right commentary is going to be pushed out to club members there should be something comparable with leftist commentary for the rest of us in this deep blue county. I just wanted a mix of stations that is “fair and balanced.”

After dazzling Manager-guy with this logic and data, I reiterated my simple, fair suggestion: Either include both Fox News and MSNBC, or offer neither. 

But after waiting a few weeks, the manager has, of this writing, refused to add MSNBC. So, Fox News remains the only “hyper-partisan” channel choice for this health club in a deep blue county.

My conclusion is that one of two things is at play with LA Fitness’s refusal to add MSNBC as one option for members.  Either they have far-right wing leadership committed to evangelizing dangerous right wing drivel to their captive audience, or they just don’t give a shit about customer feedback and service. 

Whatever their motivations, their decision is shameful. And I do not suffer in silence.

Should We Just Let the COVID-Deniers Perish?

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My wife, aka the Lovely Mrs, does not like it when I respond, “Thin the herd,” to news of the latest completely avoidable misery some idiot has inflicted on him/herself. It’s “unkind”. “We should be better than that.”

As always, she is right of course. We should all have fathomless compassion and empathy for our fellow humans. I think the nuns used to say that. But really, what are we supposed to say, much less do, when you read stories titled, “99% Of People Killed By Covid Last Month Were Unvaccinated, Analysis Finds.”

After the criminal incompetence the Trump administration, which has to be praying there’s never a 9/11-style commission to analyze how it is The United friggin’ States suffered the most deaths of any “sh*thole country” in the world, we’ve enjoyed a stunning turn around. Free … free … vaccines are available to everyone in thousands of locations nationwide. Plus, they’re demonstrating startling effectiveness against the original virus and every variant that has come along since. It’s as close to total protection as science may have ever gotten.

So what we’re now left with are … wait for it … (very) low information, mostly Red State, mostly political partisans who believe only what right wing media carnival barkers tell them. Once again, and I ask you if you’ve heard this before, the rest of us are handicapped in a return to “normalcy” (what that is exactly is a whole other topic) by, excuse me dear, utter fools. By people endangering themselves and continuing to overburden hospital staffs with a disease they could have avoided with a painless … free … shot at their local WalMart.

I have to credit the “Thin the herd” line to Jesse Ventura. Told the story of yet another drunken idiot who drowned trying to skip his snowmobile over open water, the Guv remarked, “Well, that’s nature’s way of thinning the herd.” In more Darwinian terms, idiots being idiots, they needlessly engage in life-threatening activities more often than their intelligent brethren. Consequently they die out faster, ending their opportunities to pass on their judgment-challenged DNA to a new generation of drunken snowmobile open-water skippers … or COVID deniers.

I believe the great, monolithic American insurance industry could do something about this. The cost of the average COVID hospitalization is somewhere in the range of $34,000 to $46,000. At this point in the pandemic, after an aggressive and effective government program to distribute … free … vaccine to every nook, cranny and West Virginny holler of the country, insurance companies should announce that, like suicide, they’re not going to pay death benefits … or hospitalization costs. There’s simply no excuse for anyone anywhere to continue to expose themselves to COVID. Those who do … well, they’re on their own. Might be time to pawn the rifles and pickup, kids.

Is this unkind? Well, I suppose it is. But some people engage irrational, foolish, life-threatening activities all the time, and I’m not talking about free-soloing El Capitan. There are the idiot-macho bikers, who weave in between cars on a freeway without a helmet. Or book a weekend at a “Redneck Rave” and end up getting impaled not far from the big mud-bathin’ hole. Or roar out to negligibly-vaccinated, far western Colorado for the big “Country Jam”, to get it on with 50,000 or so of their “it’s no worse than flu” compadres. Or hell, start planning for their return to Sturgis … if they’re finally off their ventilators.

These people are a lost cause. They’ve made All American free choice decisions to endanger themselves and others and lay off the cost of saving their low-information lives on professionals who need a year off, not another six months of 24-7 work saving fools from their own stupidity.

So, talking Darwin again here, I ask you, should these COVID-deniers perish as a consequence of their own Constitutionally-protected decisions, is the human gene pool better or worse off?

Talk amongst yourselves.

The Age of Barstool Republicans

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There’s a trending piece on Politico titled, “How Republicans Became the ‘Barstool’ Party”. In part a profile of podcaster Dave Portnoy and his “Barstool Sports” empire-ette, the author, Derek Robertson, writes, ” … the Barstool Republican now largely defines the Republican coalition because of his willingness to dispense with his party’s conventional policy wisdom on anything — the social safety net, drug laws, abortion access — as long as it means one thing: he doesn’t have to vote for some snooty Democrat, and, by proxy, the caste of lousy deans that props up the left’s politically-correct cultural regime.”

I think of myself as a connoisseur of barstool conversations. It’s an acquired taste to be sure. But from the Florida Keys to Forks, Washington and various rural outposts in between there’s something to be gleaned from what (mostly) men and women talk about over cheap beer in familiar hang-outs.

As presently populated, the Republican party is, as we all know, chockful of serious crazy. From sanctimonious evangelicals who have no problem cheering on a flagrantly unethical, thrice-married, porn-star-banging philanderer, to shameless racists and anti-Semites toting rifles and torches through American streets in the name of protecting northern European purity … as God intended it.

But, IMHO, the conceit of “Barstool Republican” injects something just as if not more useful than mere delusional religiosity and racism into attempts at understanding conservative politics, circa 2021.

On this side of the yawning chasm the realization settled in quite some time ago that the average Trumper doesn’t give two Lite damns about tax policy, or NATO or whether their obese, Depends-wearing, spray-tanned leader is really just a middle-man money launderer for Russian gangsters as long as he helps them “own the libs.”

The phenotype, “Barstool Republican” builds a handy definitional corral around pretty much every imaginable conservative sub-group. (The term “phenotype” refers to the observable physical properties of an organism​; these include the organism’s appearance, development, and behavior.)

Portnoy’s appeal is a natural, direct line outgrowth of morning drive radio, as heard in virtually every large city in the USA. Think Tom Barnard here in the Twin Cities, or Howard Stern nationally. The ingredients of the appeal — to 18-54 year-old blue collar males primarily — are porn-y vulgarity, regular assertions of hard-won street wisdom and persistent criticism and attacks on the “over-protected”, which as practiced in morning drive usually means racial minorities and women too uptight to shake their booty for a cold beer.

I’m sorry I don’t have any numbers, but this is a crowd I see a lot of “out there” in Sarah Palin’s “Real America”, and one I dare anyone to tell me is smaller than mega-church zealots.

These folks, nursing their $3 tap brew at Middlegate Station in central Nevada or the No Name Pub on Big Pine Key, claim to “hate all politicians”, never suggest any interest in religion, share endless stories of the “assholes and idiots” who commanded them if they were in the military and belly ache constantly about the boss they have today … if they’re currently employed. Then you get to the wildly suspect information they trade about liberal “giveaways”, regulations and “la la land bullshit” about cleaning up the planet.

But as bad as all that is, nothing gets them singing the same chorus as when talk turns to “limp dick” liberals, their “bitch/bull dyke” women, and all the “asinine” rules “those morons” are trying to “shove down our throats.” Much as they hate politics, anyone who takes a slap at that crowd gets their vote … if they’re not busy hunting on election day.

There’s a reason “nihilism” is routinely bandied about when this type of value-free Republican is mentioned. But the thing is they do have values, just not much in the way of standing up for basic rights for … well, you know, the whole liberal litany of the oppressed. And that’s because they see themselves as the oppressed. Primarily by anyone in authority over them.

They are the hard-working/hard-playing straight guys who just want to be left alone to make whatever jokes they want about women, gays, Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Asians and whoever else is getting “special treatment” and who make them feel uncomfortable any time they’re around.

As I say, my suspicion is that Barstool Republicans, whether knocking them back in Oklahoma or out the 494 Strip, represent a far larger bloc of reliable Republican voter than the classic science-and-fact averse evangelical, the focus of so much liberal angst.

They are a crowd some Democrat somewhere, somehow, has to pull over to the light.

Unfortunately, lacking any pastor-like figures other than crude, in-it-for-the-money shock jocks, the Barstool kids might be even less reachable than the moony-eyed parishioners staring up from the pews at your local Abundant Life Dollars-for-Jesus palace.

Sick of politicians? Take ’em to “court”

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Guest post by Noel Holston

If it please the court of public opinion, I’d like to advocate on behalf of The Advocates, a TV series whose time has come. Again.

For those too young to remember and for those who never caught an installment, The Advocates was a co-production of Boston’s WGBH and Los Angeles’ KCET that aired weekly on public TV from 1969 through 1974. It was revived as a bi-weekly for most of 1978 and ’79.

 Image by Venita Oberholster from Pixabay

The Advocates was vastly more entertaining and enlightening than the so-called “debates” among Presidential contenders on television then or now. Questions were harder to evade. The show was promoted as “PBS Fight of the Week.” The fisticuffs were all verbal, but the show could pack a wallop. More than one intellectual hotshot left the arena with his or her ego badly bruised.

The format, created by Harvard Law professor Roger Fisher, ingeniously recast debate as mock trial, with “attorneys” for the opposing sides of a question presenting expert witnesses to help make his or her case. At its best, it was as much fun to watch as a courtroom sequence on Boston Legal — or a WWE cage match.

You can see vintage installments via Open Vault: https://openvault.wgbh.org/collections/advocates/full-program-video

The series attracted top-tier participants. For instance, when the Equal Rights Amendment was on the show’s docket, the lead counsel in favor of passage was Eleanor Smeal, then president of the National Organization of Women, while the opposition arguments were framed by Phyllis Schlafly, the formidable head of Stop ERA. Political heavyweights such as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert Humphrey popped up as guest witnesses during the run of the show.
The Advocates never won an Emmy, perhaps because there was no category it quite fit. It did win a George Foster Peabody Award after its first season on what was then still the National Educational Television Network, the forerunner of PBS.

The Peabody board’s citation lauded its “bold, invigorating debates of crucial issues” grounded in the producers’ belief “that in a courtroom atmosphere such controversial problems as abortion, smog versus the auto, the use of marijuana, or the danger of offshore drilling could be dramatized and reasonably, if hotly, discussed.”

Most of the hot-button issues the Peabody judges mentioned have, if anything, gained a few degrees Fahrenheit with the passing years. The format would work today on issues ranging from the credibility of climate-change science to the smartest way to deal with Iran or Russia. The Advocates could “try” the realities and misconceptions of Covid vaccinations, election fraud, Black Lives Matter, immigration, even the overall success or failure of the current President’s administration.

What’s more, the potential for public participation in The Advocates is much greater now than it was when it last aired some 40 years ago. We’re well into the age of instant communication, live coverage of high-profile trials and non-stop punditry. If the viewers can cast votes by phone for their favorites on American Idol, why not use a similar phone-in system get an indication of how citizens view various issues and controversies before and after they’ve watched courtroom-style testimony and cross-examination?

Who knows? Maybe the revenues from the phone calls could be applied to election costs or federal deficit reduction.

So, in summation, somebody in the public television system or, if they’re too strapped for funds, somebody at a cable news network should revive The Advocates. It was born in the late 1960s, a time of great polarization and upheaval in America. Watch video of the January 6 assault on the U.S. House of Representatives and tell me a revival is not overdue.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He’s a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

UFOs are Finally Having Their Moment, and That’s Interesting

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A New York Times preview of the much-noted Pentagon report on UFOs suggests pretty much what I expected. The military, which has been tracking strange objects in the sky for nearly 70 years will officially say they have no evidence anything about these incidents is the result of space aliens space. But … and this is significant … America’s military, for which we spent $714 billion in 2020, will also say they have no idea what — or who — has been regularly invading American airspace, over water, land and heavily populated areas for going on a century … at least.

I certainly have no explanation for the most confounding UFO incidents. (My old pal, Marty Keller, a long-time UFO-ologist is finishing a book based on his years studying the phenomenon. I’ll hype it when it is published.) But I find the conversation about UFOs and life beyond this planet pretty damn interesting. As speculative dialogue goes, theories about whether, how and why intelligent life from deep space may have visited Earth is a lot … a lot … more interesting and intellectually satisfying than arguing against the average Trumper idiocy of Jewish space lasers igniting forest fires or Italy rigging satellites to switch votes and steal the election from a corrupt reality TV character with incontinence issues.

The legendary sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, who I had the pleasure to interview once, said many memorable things about existence in this universe.

Asked about the likelihood we are alone in 14 billion years of evolution, Clarke said, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

He also said, in the context of trying to “explain” Stanley Kubrick and his movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

That said, here are some random thoughts I return to any time the conversation of life beyond Earth comes up.

1: I have a hard time believing in the little green or grey men theory. Or more specifically, the idea that biological entities would cross the vast distances of space. In humans’ perpetual and long-term quest for “immortality”, there are — right now today — serious, if nascent, attempts to transfer/upload human intelligence into some form of “indestructible” artificial intelligence, generally described as “computer-based.” Credible scientists believe a semblance of such “singularity” will be achieved within the next generation. Whether that transfer is still “human” can be argued. But the emergence of an AI “life-form” capable of analyzing data and making self-sustaining decisions strikes me as all but certain by the end of the century.

Point being, a truly advanced civilization, possibly millions of years further along the evolutionary scale than we are, would achieve any exploratory goal it wanted across space by dispersing highly-miniaturized, if not invisible (to the human eye), undetectable AI sensors. Large, clumsy, radar-detectable metallic saucers piloted by weird humanoids — who occasionally crash and die — seems absurd, given just the technologies within our grasp.

2: So if they are visitors from advanced civilizations, why are UFOs detectable? The answer here could be, “Because they want us to see them.” Someone recently made the analogy of a drone flying over a pack of monkeys to describe a super-race’s concern about humans noticing their presence. This fits with the thinking that to a species a couple hundred years further along than us, much less millions of years, we are nothing more than a biological curiosity, a primitive first step in becoming something serious in an inter-planetary context. (Insert another Trump rally reference here.) They allow us to detect them simply to gauge our developing response to them.

3: Continuing with the monkeys-excited-by-drone analogy, I’ve long thought an advanced space-faring civilization would have about as much trouble controlling our minds, and our response to their presence, as we have hypnotizing chickens. Think of it as a Jedi mind-trick. “Nothing to see here silly, ill-formed bi-peds. Resume your business.”

My favorite large-scale example of this was the reaction to the famous 1997 Phoenix lights incident, in which thousands of people witnessed extremely strange aerial phenomenon directly over the city … of four million people. The uproar was so great that then Gov. Fife Symington held a news conference to debunk everything, to the point of dressing up one of his aides as an alien … just for the laughs, you understand. Never mind no one up on the official dais had any explanation for the object(s) seen passing/hovering with impunity over a large American city. I mean, WTF, what are we paying you guys for?

It’s worth noting that Symington, who resigned from office later that year after being indicted on bank fraud and extortion, later conceded the incident was likely extra-terrestial.

4: I’m open to believing — or enjoying the conversation — that rather than making the long, long, speed-of-light leap across space, or zipping through a worm hole, or molting over via a connection with a “multi-verse”, intelligent alien species have been here on Earth for a very, very long time. The “Goldilocks” positioning of Earth from its star may have narrowed this planet as a prime target for interstellar explorers millions/billions of years ago and they “seeded” it with AI sensors/life-forms to track our progress (or lack thereof).

This idea is the basis of Arthur Clarke’s novel, “The Sentinel”, from which “2001” evolved. And again, you can entertain the idea that such a civilization would have no problem — none — disguising its presence from our pitiful technologies. I can’t recall the title, but there was a cheesy sci-fi film years ago that had aliens hiding in plain sight, as essentially, nanobots no larger than grains of sand, but with all the presumed powers of an advanced race.

So no, I have no idea what is on those Navy radars, or what went on over Phoenix, but it is significant that the Pentagon is now saying it doesn’t know either.

(BTW: The photo for this blog was taken in Roswell, New Mexico. And if you’re reading this on Facebook, my profile picture — with the little man on my shoulder — was shot on the plains outside Corona, NM, where the 1947 UFO “crash” supposedly took place.)

Woke Coke

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Guest post by Noel Holston

Coca-Cola is as much a part of my Southern upbringing as Elvis, SEC football, pecan pie, possum grapes, and grits.

When I was growing up, it was synonymous with soda pop itself. We talked going to get a Coke even when what we actually pulled out of the cooler was a root beer or an Orange Crush.

But if you’ve watched any sponsored TV lately, especially around evening news time, you know that Coca-Cola is a terrible company, its signature product warranting a skull-and-crossbones label.  

Or so says Consumers’ Research, an outfit that you should not confuse with Consumer Reports, although they probably don’t mind if you do. It’s a right-wing advocacy group that’s been buying TV spots all over the country, including in Georgia, Coca-Cola’s home state, to run some of the nastiest attack ads I’ve ever seen. The targets also include Nike and American Airlines.

The anti-Coke spot accuses the company of attempting to distract people from its “dismal” business failures, kissing up to repressive regimes and selling to teenagers “despite the obesity crisis.”

The words “Stop poisoning our children” appear on screen at the end.

The funny thing about the appearance of these spots is that Coca-Cola has been around since 1886. While pretty much everybody now knows that drinking sugary beverages – not just Coke but Pepsi, Yoo-hoo, 7 Up, even homemade sweet tea – can lead to cavities and diabetes, it only recently started to infuriate the watchdogs at Consumers’ Research.

That’s because what actually annoys them isn’t overweight teenagers or the wellbeing of foreign workers but, rather, that Coke is, in their view, woke.

They’re out to get for Coca-Cola because the brand’s CEO, James Quincey, supposedly lied about Georgia’s new voting laws. Quincey denounced the new measures as restrictive and regressive.  Never mind that his assessment is shared by both of Georgia’s new U.S. Senators, most election experts and millions of Georgia voters. To Consumers’ Research and Trumpist megaphones like Fox News and Breitbart, it’s a “falsehood” that must be challenged just like that lie that Joe Biden won the Presidency fair and square.

Consumers’ Research is thus spending a bundle to smear one of the most philanthropically generous companies in the world, an iconic Georgia business that donates money to everything from the American Red Cross to the Peabody Awards to youth baseball teams.

It’s a dirty, deceitful campaign that demonstrates just how shameless the Trumpist Right remains.  Nothing is sacred to these guys but their god Don.

If Gerber or Marie Callender were to speak out against state laws that in application make it more difficult for poor Americans and minorities to vote, we’d probably be seeing spots attacking motherhood and apple pie.

I’m not blind. Coca-Cola is a huge international corporation, no more without sin than Royal Dutch Shell or Monsanto. I know its signature product isn’t particularly good for my teeth or my blood sugar. Still, I drink a bottle or can once in a while, partly because we have a history, partly because I still like the taste of it. And I plan to drink them more often until Consumers’ Research stops running those spots and lying about disingenuous laws drafted to address nonexistent voter fraud.

I’d also like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

That used to mean I was idealistic, kindhearted, even Christian. Now I guess it just means I’ve drunk the Woke-a-Cola.

Note: Noel Holston is a freelance writer who lives in Athens, Georgia. He’s a contributing essayist to Medium.com, TVWorthWatching.com, and other websites. He previously wrote about television and radio at Newsday (200-2005) and, as a crosstown counterpart to the Pioneer Press’s Brian Lambert, at the Star Tribune  (1986-2000).  He’s the author of “Life After Deaf: My Misadventures in Hearing Loss and Recovery,” by Skyhorse.

Big(ger) Pay-Outs to Police Victims is the Only Viable Reform

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I am of course shocked that Congress blew the deadline to produce a Police Reform bill by the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. And despite brave words about “making progress” I suspect whatever is finally produced will fall well short of the basic changes needed to control routine abuses of police authority.

That said, Ben Crump, the attorney representing Floyd’s family and a half dozen other victims of panicked/racist cops, is clear-eyed about the best and most immediate solution. Says Crump, “My goal is to make it financially unsustainable for them to keep killing Black people, unjustifiably, as we continue to fight for these policy reforms to prevent the next George Floyd.”

If the $47 million that Minneapolis alone has paid out to victims of its thin blue line of protectors and servers isn’t enough to force the city and police administration to put a shock collar around the neck of its worst-trained and regularly violent employees, nothing Congress comes up with will have any great impact.

The great Randy Newman once sang, “It’s Money That Matters” and this being the USA, he was spot on. The twist within that idea of course is connecting these enormous ever-larger pay-outs to the bottom line of residents far more terrified of ransacked auto parts stores than black folks being murdered — in front of children — over a $20 bill.

Back to legislation: the fixes that would do the most to put the spook in your average gun-waving, f-bomb dropping former telemarketer/security guard-turned-cop remain boldly obvious.

1: End qualified immunity. Republicans and a few nervous Democrats are leery of this because they imagine a ceaseless tidal wave of law-suits against individal cops for anything a citizen doesn’t like about an interaction with police. Moreover, the fear of getting sued personally would put a serious chill on cop recruitment. (There are only so many well-heeled former telemarketers and mall cops pining for the ego boost from being handed a badge and a gun.) But this is another example of cops having little to fear if they actually obey both the law … and the spirit of the law. Namely, turn on the body cam, keep your cool and treat whoever you’re dealing with basic respect, regardless if they’re a nice suburban lady in her pajamas or a big, scary black guy who maybe might have passed a fake $20. Camera on? Case dismissed. No body cam footage? Waving a loaded gun and cursing in someone’s face? You’re on your own, dude.

2: Pre-textual traffic stops. Frankly, I’d think even cops would be happy red-lining this widely-accepted policy, which as practiced around the country is a tortured abuse of the Supreme Court’s Whren v United States decision from 1996. As it is commonly perverted, “broken tail lights”, and the most minor of traffic violations (failure to signal, two miles over the speed limit) are sufficient basis for a cop to ignore any semblance of probable cause, hit the lights and get down to what they’re really up to, namely “stopping and frisking” for something that looks good on the squad room wall and gins up some easy revenue for their municipality. Deep red states have made thousands of such stops under the guise of “interdicting smugglers” from “drug states”. (I.e. more liberal places that conservative politicians want to show they won’t tolerate.) These stops — flagrantly bogus to any reasonable adult — mean a couple thousand dollars worth of court costs for someone caught with CBD oil or a couple gummies in their medicine bag. It’s one thing if the stopped and frisked are white folks. But as we’ve seen over and over … and over and over again … a whole different animal when the gung-ho cop gets in the grill of anyone whose grandparents didn’t come from northern Europe. Crude, over-aggressive police work mixed with naked pretense for the stop itself not only seriously undermines the credibility of police authority but has a habit of going very bad way, way too often.

But all this is pretty well lost in the usual partisan gamesmanship. No Republican is going to make a big show of supporting anything that might be construed as getting “soft on crime” (i.e. crimes committed on streets by black folks). Hell, unless I missed it, there wasn’t a Republican face to be seen up on the stage for Minnesota’s kick-off to these days of remembrance for George Floyd.

Maybe it’ll take another $40-$50 million out of Republican cities’ insurance funds to get their attention.

But I doubt even that’ll be enough.

Moments in the Life of a Census Enumerator

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My shoulder is a little out of joint for patting myself on the back so much. Thanks to yours truly (and a couple others) Minnesota counted up 89 more people in last year’s census than New York, which means we can keep all eight of our hard-working congress people, including even Tom Emmer, Jim Hagedorn, Pete Stauber and Michelle Fishbach, for whatever it is they actually do.

As enumeraor DACV 908*** (redacted for security), I spent a couple months late last summer knocking on doors and wandering long, maze-like hallways in sprawling apartment complexes trying to get people to either cooperate in either a basic function of democracy or … submit to yet another Big Brother socialist scheme to deprive us of our freedoms, depending on whether or not they listen to Laura Ingraham.

Truth be told, I signed up for the job because I thought it’d be interesting. You know, face to face with “real America”, albeit during a pandemic. There’d have to be some stories in that. Plus, it paid well enough to incentivize me to break away from my usual 3 p.m. happy hours.

A few quick incidents.

***

Tucked away in otherwise middle-class Hopkins, not far off Excelsior Boulevard, is a pretty down-on-its-heels neighborhood little more than three blocks long. The door and steps of one of my assigned houses was already littered with a half dozen Notice of Visit (NOV) slips left by previous enumerators. After ringing and banging, I left another and walked back out to the driveway to check on the next address … simultaneous with a beaten up SUV pulled up in front of the garage.

It was a hot day and after a 30 second stand off — the car idling, the driver obscured by heavily tinted windows and me broiling in the heat waiting for someone to step out — I took another step over and made a “roll it down” motion with my finger. Pause. Then the window began to drop.

And as it does out pours a cloud of dense cannabis smoke that would put Cheech and Chong to shame. What little I inhaled was probably three times stronger than anything I smoked in college. As the cloud wafted away I asked the driver, a mid-thirty-ish black guy, “You live here?”

“No.”

“Ok, do you know who does?”

“No.”

Right. But I’m thinking. You got nothing. But you just pulled into this driveway in frontr of this garage door because … why, exactly?

“How about the people next door?” (It was a duplex.)

“No.” And with that he buzzed up the window, backed up and drove away.

***

Another weed moment was in one of the huge apartment complexes I mentioned. A labyrinth of dimly-lit hallways, infused and cross-infused with every kind of ethnic cooking you can imagine. (IMHO Indian smells best.)

As I walk a hallway as long as one of those Vegas hotels, I hear two male voices shouting and yelping. A fight?

“Dude! Hit it, dude!” “No! No! Back out! Back out!” “Shoot it! Shoot it!” “Aw! You fucked it, man! You had it and you fucked it!”

Not a fight, but two young guys playing video games … and, as luck would have it, in the next apartment on my list.

Knock. Knock.

“Dude, someone at the door! Someone knockin’.”

A longer than expected wait, before the door cracks open just wide enough for a skinny teenage face — and another cloud of reefer — to squeeze through.

“Yo.”

“Hey, how you doing? I’m with the census. You live here?”

An expression like this might be a trick question, and a glance over his shoulder back into the room.

“No.”

“Is the person who lives here here now.”

Another furtive look over his shoulder.

“No. Bro’s sleepin’.”

The guy who “had it” but “fucked it” a second ago is now asleep? Whatever.

“Ok,” I say, as I write out an NOV with numbers to call in the info, “give this to him when he wakes up,”

“Cool.” And the door bangs shut.

***

Another complex. Another hallway. Another knock on another door.

A smiling, 60-ish black gal answers. “Why hello, darlin’. Can I help you.”

“Yes, you can thank you, mam. I’m with the census and … .”

“OH! I been meaning to fill that out. But I work nights. Why don’t you come in a minute and we’ll get this done, what do you say?”

I say, “Ok,” as I walk into a spotless, tidy living room … dominated by an enormous 85″ TV suspended off the wall by the window and angled down to a dining room table where the lady has her controllers. Her some-kind-of-dragons-and sorcerors game is on pause.

“Have a seat there on the couch,” she says. And I make myself comfortable in front of a coffee table where a Bible, with a red ribbon place holder, is open to passage that I should have remembered, but as a practicing heathen, I didn’t, other than to notice that she has a plaque over on her kitchen wall referring to the same scripture. (“John” something or other.)

The basic census interview takes maybe 10 minutes, tops. Less if it’s just one person. But as I begin, she hits the controller and resumes her game. She answers the questions half distracted by combat with the fire-breathing reptile. The dragon has a deep, weird snarl. But she’s on its tail, showing no fear as the she goes deeper into its lair.

“Ok, mam. That’s all I need. Thank you so much. We appreciate your cooperation.”

“No problem at all, darlin’. You need anything more I guess you know where I live. Be good now. God bless.”

***

My list wasn’t all minorities. And the two worst were white folks in my own beloved Edina.

In a swank condo complex a millenial woman in corporate power suit attire stands in the hallway berating me — as I’m trying to interview an 80 year-old lady with poor hearing — for having “no permission or authority to be on this property” and accusing me of “lying” when I say I just followed another resident in, who held the door for me.

She goes on so long and so loud I finally have to drop the cool, turn to her and say, “Lady, what is your problem exactly? I’m with the census. See the badge? The census. I’m not exactly Ted Bundy here.”

***

In the same vein was an upscale rambler, also in Edina. The clues, walking up, were the open garage door, with a seven or eight year-old Mercedes covered in dust. A dozen or more newspapers still in their plastic wrappers were strewn all over the walk and up a short wheelchair ramp.

The 70-something white male who answers the door is shirtless and wearing cargo shorts. He’s unkempt and his eyes have an unhealthy, milky glaze to them.

“You’re with the what?”

“The census. Just a few questions. It’ll take maybe 10 minutes.”

“Questions? Like what?”

“Well, like for starters, can I get your name?”

“My name?” he says, indignation rising. “Why would I tell you that? What is this? You’re going to get off my property, right now.”

Census training says to leave and mark folks like that down as uncooperative … or worse.

But this guy isn’t letting up, even as I walk to the next house, where a neighbor is out in his drivedway oiling his bicycle. From now 100 feet away the old guy is still bellowing.

“It’s getting to be like Nazi Germany! Like hell I’m telling you anything! You come back here again and I’m calling the cops!”

The neighbor oiling the bike takes this in and turns to me with a look that says, “Welcome to my life.”

Two Statues for George Floyd Square

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I am not a sculptor, nor do I play one on YouTube. But I have a recommendation for a statue — actually two of them — at George Floyd Square.

Along with all the imagery and signage about George himself, what that corner needs are statues of Darnella Frazier holding up her cellphone and the little girl next to her in her “Love” t-shirt. Why them? Because those two images encapsulate for me the brute motivation for the murder and how we evolve out of this violent, racist “enforcement” syndrome.

Let me explain: Reasonable minds may disagree, but the turning point of the incident, the precise, in-the-moment influence that turned just another episode of over-aggressive policing into murder was the crowd admonishing and taunting Chauvin to stop what he was doing. As Frazier’s video shows, his response was to, in effect, double down the pressure on a dying man.

Regarded as an alpha male by his rookie cohorts and by himself, (I’m guessing), Chauvin’s reaction in that moment was raw king (or at least prince) of the jungle. “I am The Man here.” “I am in charge.” “I do as I please.” “No one challenges my supremacy.” And so, rather than lift off Floyd’s neck as the crowd was pleading, he sustained force for long minutes … after Floyd was already dead.

“Anyone else want a piece of this?”

Throughout his trial, Chauvin’s defense attempted to create a picture of a tense, threatening situation — for Chauvin. It was yet another run at the classic, invariable and inevitable defense for every violent/freaked-out cop. “He/she feared for his life.”

Except that there there was no physically intimidating, much less threatening mob. There was Darnella and the little girl standing there in her “Love” t-shirt. Those two — and an older guy cussing him out — were what Chauvin the alpha dog was afraid of? No jury in the world, (with the exception maybe of some in Alabama or South Dakota), was going to believe that, and Chauvin’s didn’t.

The little girl in the “Love” shirt then represents unthreatening, life-affirming innocence affronted by the spectacle of hypocrisy — an authorized authority figure abusing his authority — committing a public murder. (When Judge Cahill assess the “aggravating circumstances” in Chauvin’s guilt, the fact that he — a cop, slowly, methodically and remorselessly murdered a man in plain view of children, should qualify Chauvin for another five to ten years.)

But superseding all other influences in Chauvin’s conviction is young Darnella’s camera.

You and I both know the situation this morning would be a lot different if Chauvin’s slow-mo murder hadn’t been recorded from start to finish. A statue of Darnella then represents the first and most powerful solution to reflexive cop racism and violence. Namely, an alert citizen with a camera and a potential audience of millions.

Not being particularly optimistic about political solutions to cop criminality, I expect little to nothing of significance from the usual clash of metropolitan liberals and their terrified, conservative, race-baiting rural colleagues.

But the public at large can’t help but have taken away from the conviction of an otherwise ordinary brute cop the searing power of video. The number of cameras (including cop body cams) recording the Floyd encounter was startling. And that level of “coverage” as they say in Hollywood is only going to increase as millions more citizen on-lookers hit “record” whenever they see cops (six of them in this case, in rabid response to that possibly counterfeit $20) go all pack-wolves on anyone, particularly another Black person.

It’s as though sinister, all-present, all-seeing Big Brother has molted into a sea of shocked and horrified teenagers and grade schoolers, all equipped with the ability to provide damning testimony against The Man.

If cities aren’t chastened by the $47 million Minneapolis has paid out in the Mohammed Noor and Derek Chauvin crimes, cops themselves have to be chilled by the sight of the brass and suits above them reacting to indefensible video evidence and cutting loose one of their own a veteran alpha. How they behave off public streets, or on lonesome stretches of road, is another matter. But even the average, fresh out of cop school rookie has to be smart enough to understand that each new Floyd v. Three Cars and Six Cops incident on a city thoroughfare is going to draw video coverage like the last quarter of the Super Bowl.

So yeah, two statues. Darnella and her camera: Alert citizen witnesses and their power of “testimony”. Alongside pint-sized “Love”: emblematic of the sick myth of mortal fear (of citizens!) among armed authority, plus a reminder of the scarring effect of police thuggery on innocents.

I’ll throw in $100 to Kickstart whatever real sculptor wants to take a run at that.

The Fine for Driving While Black with Expired Tabs? Death … by Yet Another Panicked Cop.

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Every time I hear about another shooting like the one that killed Daunte Wright in Brooklyn Center Sunday afternoon I remember that Philando Castile was stopped by cops at least 46 times … before one of them panicked and killed him.

46 times! How is that even possible? Says the old white guy living in Edina. (I ask my fellow white guys and gals: how many times before you’d be mortgaging the house to drop a gigaton of legal hell on the city that was pulling that kind of crap?)

All the details may not yet be fully known about what went on with 20 year-old Mr. Wright. But as of this moment the story has it that a group of Brooklyn Center cops initated the incident with Wright because of … expired tabs. (My wife will confirm that every time I see a car pulled over by a city cop I say, ” Expired tabs.” And I say that because trawling for expired tabs is such a cliched, easy-revenue cop game.)

Whether, like Philando Castile, the cops involved in the Wright case first noted a black kid driving and then decided to check his tabs, will come out at some point in Minnesota’s next, long cycle of investigation, law suits and court proceedings. All likely leading again to another astonishing pay-out to the now deceased Mr. Wright’s family from a city’s self-insurance fund.

Pundits are mulling whether a conviction in the Derek Chauvin case will have any substantive impact in the way America’s cops go about their business. (At this point I always like to point out that three cars and six cops showed up — and were immediately cursing and waving guns — in The Case of the Possibly Counterfeit $20.)

Having seen enough of how this stuff goes down, I doubt anything significant will change. But one facet of America’s police violence epidemic worth re-thinking is the necessity of using city cops to churn up money for the city’s general fund. Would Castile still be alive if he wasn’t a regular target of otherwise bored cops under implicit (or maybe explicit) orders to “crack down” on expired tabs and other ticky tack offenses? (Being careful of course not to get too aggressive with drivers who look like they might know their way around City Hall.)

A few years ago The New Yorker published a story titled, “The Link Between Money and Aggressive Policing.” (One of my favorite car sites, Jalopnik, revisited the story today.)

From the New Yorker we get this: “Alexes Harris is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington and the author of ‘A Pound of Flesh’. Published in June, the book analyzes the rise of monetary sanctions in the criminal-justice system. Harris argues that jurisdictions have increasingly relied on levying fines for minor infractions—broken tail-lights, vagrancy, traffic violations—as a way to generate municipal revenue. For instance, a Department of Justice investigation revealed that, in 2013, police in Ferguson, Missouri, issued arrest warrants for nine thousand people, almost all for municipal-code violations such as failing to pay a fine or missing court appearances. Doing so allowed the city to collect $2.4 million in fines and fees, the second highest source of income for the city, behind taxes.”

The political indictment here is on politicians too terrified to raise adequate revenue for city operations through normal taxes, preferring instead to turn their police forces into tax collectors by another name. “Fees”, you know. Never, “taxes.” (Trademark: Tim Pawlenty.)

The racial indictment is that most cops are smart enough not to pull over a late model Mercedes for a dead LED. Far better to nail the guy in the beat up Oldsmobile. He’s not likely to come after you with a lawyer who plays golf with the city manager. Unfortunately, as we see, over and over and over again, a lot of that latter crowd are either poor, minority or both.

And that’s where poorly vetted, poorly trained aggression comes in.

The incident with Daunte Wright is classic in its tragic familiarity. Three cops. Three cops … approach his car with hyper-cautious, stalking movement. Their fear is palpable. One at the driver’s door, one at the passenger’s door and one tailing along behind just for … for … well, in case any of them suddenly finds themselves in a position where they … fear for their life.

The scene is aggressive and intimidating as hell. And sure enough pretty soon the scared kid is wrestling free of the hand cuffs and trying to drive away … before being shot — and killed — by a panicked, shrieking cop who doesn’t have enough training to know the difference between a Taser and a revolver.

The point being … traffic stops … of minorities for petty, revenue-producing “infractions.” It’s bullshit and dangerous. And now lethal, again. Considering the way nervous, aggressive cops react in these situations — resulting in millions of dollars of legal costs and pay-outs — “revenue stops” need to be seriously re-thought, if not curtailed entirely.

City desperately needs the cash from expired tabs and broken tail lights? Trawl the parking lot at Walmart and leave tickets on windshields. Walmart won’t let you do that? Trawl city streets for parked cars.

Someone got outstanding warrants? Get a de-escalation expert and go knock on his door.

Among everything else that is completely screwed up about the way the U.S. enforces law and order, getting the average street cop out of the infraction–for-profit business would do something to reduce the number of Philando Castiles and Daunte Wrights haunting our collective memory.

It’s Up to American Business, i.e. “The Marketplace”, to Put the Final Nail in the Pandemic

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Damn how I wish I were more shameless than I am. Maybe I could take an on-line course. If I do, my goal would be to outdo these two recent spit-takes from RepublicanWorld.

First, there was this one from the wattled Sith Lord, Mitch McConnell. “My warning, if you will, to corporate America is to stay out of politics. It’s not what you’re designed for. And don’t be intimidated by the left into taking up causes that put you right in the middle of America’s greatest political debates.”

When asked to define the activities that executives should avoid, he responded, “I’m not talking about political contributions.”

That’s … well, pretty damn rich … from a guy who has personally pulled in something like $4.5 million from corporations and corporate tycoons staying in politics … in just the last five years. A guy who was a key figure in pushing through Citizens United and someone who has coordinated over $400 million in mostly dark money contributions from corporations to various Republican PACS.

But for some reason I like this next one even better. Try to follow this.

Republicans are gathering soon for their annual spring retreat in — where else? but Florida. The state where the Republican governor is making a big, everything-and-the-hog-trough stink about the woke-hippie-commie-cancel culture-socialist- Hollywood elite-job-killing idea of “vaccine passports”. You know, a card or app for proving you’ve been vaccinated and therefore less of a risk to everyone else.

Talk about outrageous Big Brother BS! Where do these freedom-hating libruls get this stuff?

So … it was amusing in the usual gob-smacking way to read a release the Republican National Committee sent out to attendees of the upcoming spring break, or whatever. .

“Proof of a negative COVID-19 test result is required in order to receive your credentials for the weekend. If you or members in your party fail to fulfill this requirement, you will be denied entry to the 2021 RNC Spring Retreat.”

If you tried to compile a digital book of all the utterly without-shame things Republicans have said over the last 20 years you’d quickly deplete the world’s known supply of terabytes.

But the combination of “vaccine passports” and corporations and a comment Dr. Fauci said the other day convinces me that actual companies, gigantic, large and small are going to have to fill a leadership role to put an end to this pandemic that Republicans refuse to accept. Fauci conceded it simply wasn’t possible for the government to require vaccination (i.e. proof of vaccination) as criteria for returning to work, attending sports and entertainment events, filling bars and restaurants. The political blowback was too predictable.

Proof of vaccination as a requirement for returning to the office, flying on a plane or attending a concert or a football game was something that was going to have to come from businesses … of all types and sizes.

And I’m thinking it actually might.

At the current rate of vaccination, the country should hit the 70% threshold for “herd immunity” by the Fourth of July. At that point airlines, concert and sports venues, and even bars and restaurants would be on not just safe financial ground to restrict access to the fully vaccinated, but such a requirement would likely spur on attendance by responsible (i.e. vaccinated) people who might otherwise still be reluctant to wade into a plane/office/concert hall/mosh pit packed with resistant idiots.

I ask you, what would your reaction be to bars, restaurants or businesses putting up signs saying “Proof of COVID Vaccination Required for Entrance”? I know my wife, The Lovely Mrs, would be far more likely to walk through those doors.

That 70% threshold is of course imperiled by the 49% of Republican men who, getting their science information from Sean Hannity, Alex Jones and the ghost of Rush Limbaugh, are saying they will “never” get a COVID shot. That all-too familiar stone age thinking poses the possibility of extending all the tedious COVID protocols long past the point where they would otherwise be necessary.

This then is where “the marketplace” comes in. If these gibberish-infused gentlemen (and their wives, albeit in smaller numbers) find themselves denied access to airlines, hotels, bars, restaurants, sports events, Ted Nugent concerts or even the office they used to work in, their attitude is likely to change, and very quickly.

So fine, corporate America, do as Mitch says and stay out of politics. Instead, just do what’s best for your bottom line.

Florida Man Seeks Teenage Female for Fun Adventures with Frequently Indicted Tax Collector/Embezzler/Trump Minion

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The competition is intense and the choice is always subjective, but everyone has their favorite Florida Man story. But this thing with super-Trumper Matt Gaetz and his tax collecting home boy is so spectacularly and so ludicrously Floridian it will soon eclipse a couple of my all-time favorites.

Until Gaetz I was fond of the tale told by a Florida Highway Patrolman who pulled over a Cadillac exceeding 100 mph on Alligator Alley, i.e. I-75 from Naples to Ft. Lauderdale. According to his report, upon stopping the vehicle he noted that the driver was both “intoxicated … and naked” and that the three women passengers were likewise, “intoxicated … and naked.” Florida: the Wisconsin of the South.

Perhaps better is the tale of the extremely Trumpy couple in a Tampa-area Medicare-related business. The dude was the company’s super salesman and the Mrs. was the receptionist for the small office. She was the cheery face of the company. Family values and other assertions of all-American patriotism and rectitude were standard parts of their conversations, along with lamenting the hell-on-earth sewer being propagated by liberals, socialists and pretty much anyone who didn’t genuflect to the godliness and glory of Donald Trump.

So it came as a bit of surprise to learn that the couple’s side-hustle was running a Mom and Pop porn site, featuring the Mrs. as the main attraction Pop as the cameraman/director and a half dozen of their buddies as the eager and willing props.

Hey! Free country! Drain the Swamp!

But come on, the steadily accumulating details about Gaetz and his buddy the Florida tax collector (a can’t-make-it-up filigree) are so sleazy, so shameless and so … so … Florida in all its humid corruption it would take your breath away if you weren’t laughing so hard. And the fact that no character in Congress had coiled himself tighter around Donald Trump’s cankles than Gaetz — to the point he was “dating” Trump’s daughter makes it more delicious than a sweaty trucker’s cap filled with deep-fried gator bites. (Apparently that relationship has cooled. Gaetz recently proposed to his latest girl friend while relaxing at Mar-A-Lago. The girl friend just happens to be the sister of the guy who invented the Oculus virtual reality head set, is worth $700 million and has been an unapolgetic Islamaphobe and alt-right Trumpist on social media.)

Here’s more on Greenberg. And still more.

If you haven’t paid full attention to this farce, not only is Gaetz under investigation for having sex with under-age girls, but his buddy, the tax collector, is now looking at … wait for it … 33 separate federal charges, including sex trafficking as well, mail fraud and embezzlement from his tax collecting job. (The latter may be part of every Florida government official’s job description, I’ll have to check that.)

Everything about Gaetz screams “rich, entitled asshole”, which explains why so many of his Republican colleagues seem happy to let him flail and rant to Fox News about “extortion” … while simultaneously rolling Tucker Carlson into his sewer and defaming a prominent Florida attorney (I say “prominent” not necessarily “respectable”) in the same berserko interview. .

But since I’m always interested in “Where do you get these guys?” I Googled around a bit for Gaetz’ old man, Don Gaetz, politely described in news stories about his um, troubled, off-spring as “a wealthy Florida businessman and prominent state politician.” And that is true, as far as it goes.

The good and wholesome part about the old guy, is that he was born in North Dakota and educated in the great evangelical tradition at Concordia College right over there in Moorhead, Minnesota.

Then he moved to Florida.

It was down there on the Redneck Riviera that he made his fortune in … wait for it again … the for-profit hospice business. A unique health service niche for which his company was eventually indicted for Medicare fraud — over-charging the government, charging for people with no need for hospice care, etc.. i.e. the usual Florida business model . The case was quietly settled out of court in the way that most well-capitalized fraud cases involving prominent politicians usually are.

Oh, and did I mention that old man Gaetz cashed out by selling his pricey, government-supported hospice business for close to a half-billion bucks to an Ohio firm best known as the parent company of … Roto-Rooter?

At death’s door? We’ll handle that and get that nasty grease glob out of your pipes!

Florida. For-profit hospice Medicare scams. Sex trafficking teenage girls. Embezzlement. Mail fraud. Defamation. Face-planted puckering into Donald Trump’s gold-leafed rump.

Even Carl Hiaasen hasn’t rolled all this into one character.

Why Not Introduce Chauvin’s $460,000 Tax Scam into Evidence?

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Given the sheer cyber-tonnage of commentary on Day #1 of the Derek Chauvin trial, I think it’s safe to say, Minnesota has never had as big a moment in the international spotlight as this one.

There are a half-dozen primary lines of thought based on what this will all mean when it comes to, you know, actually doing something to rein in police violence. But to date none of those lines have included the facet of the case that keeps flaring up in my mind.

It goes like this: Alerted that a guy … may … have tried to pass a bogus $20 bill, three cars and six cops (four MPD and two Park Police) roll up in response. Within seconds of confronting the “perp”, one of the cops, a rookie, a high school drop-out with seven convictions on his own criminal record and fresh off recent employment as a bartender and telemarketer among nearly a dozen other, shall we say, “low expertise” jobs, is dropping raging f-bombs and waving a gun in the man’s face.

But leading this pack of public servants protecting the city from bad $20 bills is the alpha dog who at that moment is engaged with his wife in a $460,000 fraud against the IRS, a.k.a. other citizen-taxpayers of the US of A.

And that guy, sunglasses stylishly perched on his head, grinds his knee into the then suspected $20-passer … until he kills him.

The deceased, George Floyd, had fentanyl in his system. And that has been accepted as valid evidence. It’s suggestive of a reckless life-style. But I haven’t been able to find where Officer Alpha Dog, Mr. Chauvin’s, hefty tax fraud, a crime in straight monetary terms 23,000 times larger than Mr. Floyd’s has been allowed in as a statement of Chauvin’s character.

I’ve belabored this point before, but if this trial leads to any improvement in the quality of police work, a basic, fundamental issue is attracting, vetting and training … a better quality human to be cops.

Forget Chauvin for a second. Are guys like Thomas Lane, the ex-bartender/telemarketer waving a gun and cosplaying a Joe Pesci sidekick from “Goodfellas”, or Mohammed Noor, feaked out, trigger-on-the-finger assassin of a nice lady in her pajamas, or Jeronimo Yanez, panicked, finger-on-the-trigger killer of a guy out riding with his girlfriend and daughter really the best we can come up with?

Is police work — with loaded guns — really no more consequential than bartending, hawking extended car warranties, or patrolling warehouses after dark? If you can handle one of those you can be a cop?

If so … well cities are going to have to get used to paying out $20 million, $27 million on a fairly regular basis. Put another way, characters like Noor, Chauvin, Lane and on and on … and on and on … are without question the most expensive employees on any city’s payroll.

If higher salaries and better benefits are needed to attract better quality people, which is to say people with qualifications for something other than telemarketing, bartending and mall cop(pery) to become licensed and armed law enforcers, how much would $47 million cover?

As I say, this is just me and it doesn’t even seem to be a facet of the case thus far.

But I’m having a hard time ignoring it.

Mass Murder and Illegals: Another Week Just Like Every Other Week

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The only remarkable thing about two of the USA’s most long-running and unresolvable “crises” colliding in the same moment is that it is no surprise at all. Incidents of yet another psycho buying an assault rifle one day and killing a dozen people the next and the chaos of migrants piling up at the southern border are as routine features of American life as traffic jams and beer commercials.

In large part this explains why I at least no longer have any outrage to give. I hope you’re different, but I can’t work up the energy any longer to fume and rant to … who? … demanding “they” do something. Based on how the system works today, I know and I suspect you know, nothing of any lasting significance will be done with either crisis.

This isn’t to say the Biden Administration will not make a good faith effort and try. But both guns and migration require resolutions to issues beyond what elected American officials are capable of dealing with.

On the matter of guns, we all know the basic statistics. There are more guns in circulation than there are people in the United States. Citizens of the U.S. own 47% of the world’s privately-owned firearms. Our death-by-gun-violence is double the next worst country, which lately is … Yemen. The highest percentage of household gun ownership is in rural areas and small towns, and in the Midwest and South. The lowest is in large metropolitan areas of the East and West coasts. Whites own more than twice as many guns as non-whites. Older white men, Republicans and self-described conservatives are most likely to own a gun. And the majority say they own a gun, not for “sport” and hunting as we so often hear, but for “protection.”

To help you with the math on that one, based on the 2010 census, 6.7 million Americans owned something in the range of 140 million guns. And that was 10 years ago. Before the pandemic set off another wild buying spree among the same crowd … for reasons of … protection … against?

And — always my favorite statistic — 3% of these self-protecting gun aficionados own, wait for it … half … of the guns in circulation.

Killing the filibuster might … might … allow a bill on universal background checks to pass. That might at least stop flat-out lunatic time bombs like the guys in Atlanta and Boulder from walking out of a gun shop any morning they wanted and start shooting up massage parlors and grocery stores that afternoon. Even Joe Manchin of hard-protectin’ West Virginny is on record saying he supports gun control to that minimum extent. But at the first whisper that background checks are coming, gun sales will spike again. All the aging white guys in rural America convinced that (usually dark-skinned) killers are lining up to bust through their bedroom windows, will add another half dozen “ARs” to their arsenal.

My personal solution to gun “enthusiasts” has long been … ridicule. I’m not a licensed psychologist, nor do I play one on TV, but in my humble experience over lo these many years kicking around rural ‘Murica and wrangling with gun “lovers” on social media, 99% of self-describing “gun rights” advocates come with the distinctive odor of sexual insecurity and inadequacy.

Self defense and the need to “protect my family” doesn’t quite explain why gun ownership, much less multiple gun ownership, is for many if not most of older, white, male, rural, conservative Americans the #1 issue in any political discussion. And why their reaction to any … any … attempt to regulate gun and ammo sales is like they’ve learned Hillary Clinton is coming with a chain saw for their junk.

Me, I’d launch a PSA campaign. (I defer to Mr. Loveland on how best to coordinate this.) Thousands of TV ads, with actual psychologists, celebrities and indisputable statistics laying out the roots of the tortured fantasies of dominance and heroism these “enthusiasts” are forcing us all to labor under. Create an entertaining zeitgeist that turns buffoonish Oath Keeper/Proud Boy machismo into a cultural punch line. It’s often said such people are arming up for a culture war. Well, give it to them, in a way that bullets don’t matter.

In other words, treat fools as the fools they are.

Immigration, often the #2 “crisis” for the same crowd and a regular excuse for adding to their arsenals, requires a response both to climate change and the epic corruption of Banana Republics. The current wave has roots in not one but two hurricanes in a month destroying homes and crops last fall, a crisis that compounded the usual drug-driven gang violence of places like Honduras and Guatemala.

Since I doubt Libertarians like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are ever going to re-think America’s “war on drugs”, the only viable solution to convincing all these people to stay at home is to pour ungodly amounts of U.S. money into rebuilding homes, infrastructure and farmlands … without losing most of it into the pockets of tin pot dictators and the drug gangs — most armed with cheap American guns — that often keep them in office.

Keeping assault rifles out of the hands of psychos exdecising their precious Second Amendment rights may be the easier of the two.

For Vaccine Holdouts, A Different Kind of Messaging Is Needed By Late Summer

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Currently, COVID-19 vaccine demand exceeds supply, so the challenges public health officials face are mainly logistical in nature.  They’re doing an admirable job with those tasks, with the rate of vaccination doubling since Biden’s inauguration.

But the nature of their challenge is about to quickly change.  But before long, vaccine supply will start to exceed demand.  Then the public health leaders’ challenges will be more about persuasion than logistics. 

Here’s hoping public health officials are prepared for that very different kind of challenge.  Very soon, they must make a swift and dramatic pivot.

The people who are getting vaccinated now are obviously the “low-hanging fruit.”  They’re motivated. They’re much more likely to try to cut in line than avoid the line.  Little to no persuasion was necessary for them. 

But persuading the “high-hanging fruit,” those skeptical about the vaccines, will be necessary to get to the 70% to 90% vaccination rate that experts tell us will give society the holy grail, “herd immunity.”  That won’t be easy.

Up until now, public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci have only needed to communicate public health facts.  For most of us, that worked.

But by now, the fence-sitters have repeatedly heard the Fauci facts and they have stayed on the fence.  At this stage, it’s illogical to think that a new surge of epidemiological fact-sharing is going to suddenly convince holdouts to buck up and get their Fauci Ouchy.

Public health officials should look to what has been successful in other public health campaigns.  I’m talking about bite-sized, unvarnished, and visually-driven ads. These are TV, radio, online, social media, and outdoor ads that make appeals to emotions, including fear.  In terms of messaging, vaccination holdouts need shaking, not hugging.  They need a scare, not a seminar.

After all, smoking rates didn’t decrease dramatically because of inspirational Surgeon General fact sheets. They finally decreased as smokers and their loved ones saw raw emotional ads that portrayed the living hell associated with tobacco-related illnesses.  

Similarly, our parents didn’t all start wearing seat belts after pouring over safety studies or having a spontaneous fit of conscience.  Instead, many finally started to buckle up because they couldn’t stop daydreaming about difficult-to-watch ads like this.

Finally, the incidence of drunk driving didn’t decrease because we all were moved by well-crafted CDC spreadsheets.  Many of us changed our ways because of searing images of victims’ and perpetrators’ lives being destroyed in the blink of an eye.

These campaigns offered brutal testimonials and images that cut through the information clutter of modern life and stuck in our memories in a way the epidemiological sermons couldn’t. 

And they worked.  They changed individual behaviors, and, just as importantly, they fueled passage of laws and policies that further changed behaviors.

In my career, I’ve sat through many focus groups reviewing these kinds of ads. I can assure you, almost everyone hates seeing these ads, because they make us feel horrible. Focus group participants will inevitably tell you that such ads are completely ineffective for them.

Yet whenever and wherever these kinds of ads run, behaviors change.   

Facing the worst pandemic in a century, we can’t treat this final crucial stage of pandemic management like a popularity contest.  We have to do what works, not what is popular.

By late summer and early fall, we will need public health messaging campaigns that show vaccine fence-sitters what it feels like to slowly suffocate to death from COVID.  They need to feel what it would be like to live with chronic COVID long-hauler conditions.  They need to feel what it would be like to inadvertently infect and kill someone. 

We need to see ads that make us feel these things in our guts, because adding another data point in our brains isn’t going to be sufficient.

These are the kinds of jarring emotional images that will push at least some vaccination fence-sitters out of the comfort zone that is preventing them acting.  These are the kinds of portrayals that will show them that the downsides of vaccinations – scheduling hassles, needles, sore arms, short-term aches and fevers – pale in comparison to the downsides of failing to vaccinate.

Surprisingly, the use of jarring imagery is still a matter of debate in public health circles. To their credit, public health decision makers tend to be nurturers and fact-driven.  Therefore, many still make the mistake of assuming that everyone is like them, and therefore can be persuaded by messages that inspire, reassure, and educate.  They’re right about many people, but not all people. 

The impressive achievements from the tobacco control, seatbelt, and drunk driving campaigns, among many others, tell the tale.  For the group of Americans who still aren’t sure about whether they want a miraculous life-saving vaccine, facts and inspirational messages alone just aren’t going to cut it.  For people who are still holding out in late summer, it’s time to get real.

And What if Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene Ran NASA?

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I’m having a hard time recalling the last time the two biggest news stories of a single day offered a starker contrast than last Thursday. February 18 being the day NASA landed its latest rover on Mars … and the day Ted Cruz, senator from freezing, powerless and waterless Texas decided to pack up the wife and kiddies and hit the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun.

Prior to Thursday I had geeked out and watched a dozen or more YouTube videos about the Mars 2020 mission. These included backstories of some of the scientists who had devoted a dozen years and more of their lives to pulling off the highwire endeavour of dropping the Perseverance rover with all its exotic tech on exactly the chosen spot after a six-and-a-half-month 130-million mile crossing through space. So yeah, I had tears in my eyes as the signal came in that the machine had landed safely and the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory leapt out of their chairs in exultation.

It was an astonishing accomplishment, even if we’ve come to expect it of NASA.

But then came Cruz. With nearly all of his 29 million constituents suffering and some dying from a predictable, man-aggravated cold weather catastrophe, Cruz seeing no role for himself in either serving or protecting Texans, packed up and left for Mexico. While we may not have expected exactly that stupid a move from Harvard-educated Cruz, somehow it came as less of a surprise than it might.

The two events offer a vivid example of a key and, if you ask me, perilous division widening across the United States.

How so?

Well, on the one hand you have a deeply-coordinated long-term effort by an team of scientists; (ethnically and racially diverse it’s pertinent to note), people of discipline with a near religious devotion to empirical fact. The career they’ve chosen and the work they do fail utterly if they miss, omit or ignore facts.

Meanwhile, you have a burgeoning species of professional politicians, embodied by Cruz, but including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Texas’ Republican-controlled legislature, (an almost all-white male crew) and fellow travelers like Josh Hawley of Missouri, Matt Gaetz of Florida, Jim Jordan of Ohio and of course Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — to name only a few — whose success, such as it is, is heavily if not entirely dependent on ignoring facts, rejecting basic laws of science and only pretending to function as “public servants.”

I couldn’t help but imagine how the two events — the Mars landing and the Texas grid failure — would have played out had the cast of characters reversed roles. If Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene ran NASA and NASA’s science nerds were in charge of Texas’ deregulated power grid … with all it’s voluntary guidelines for maintaining function in cold weather?

On the former, forget blowing up on the launch pad. The Cruz, Hawley, Greene, etc. act — a standard now of Republican political theory — is so solely reactive to juvenile tribal pressures, Mars 2020 would have been red-lined the minute someone tipped them that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is in California … a “blue state run by a socialist Democrat governor!”

Bye bye red planet.

But in Texas, who among us thinks for a minute that Team NASA, looking at the 2011 breakdown of the grid and the years of demands to weatherize the damn system, would have said, “Sheeeeit, all those mittens and scarfs for all those pipes and valves would really cut into shareholder value. Let’s not and say we did. Or blame AOC. Whatever.”

Several people have noted that modern Republicans have perfected a species of electable politician out of DNA based on simply being against everything “the libs” are for. Look no closer than South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem for a Midwest example of blowing off — i.e. doing nothing in the face of the factual science of the COVID pandemic, resulting in one of the highest death rates in the world — and being widely touted as having demonstrated the cut of a presidential jib because of it.

As the folks at NASA control rooms might say, “WTF?”

Cruz and Hawley are no different. They just don’t look as good in skirts, and to date anyway aren’t under attack for running up fat Sarah Palin-style tabs at taxpayer/chump expense flying around on state planes to MAGA rallies.

But (my gal) Marjorie! An unapolgetic carpetbagger from an upscale Atlanta suburb migrates over to rural GooberLand for the easier voter pickins and wins in a slam dunk because she made no real policy promises other than bringing QAnon math, delusion and grievance to DC. Oh, and more guns.

(The death of Rush Limbaugh — the stem root of all hat-no cattle conservative patriotism and theatrical fact rejection — simultaneous with Cruz’ antics was almost too rich for words.)

Watching the split-screen of the Mars rover and Ted Cruz, my alleged mind drifted back to a theme Israeli historian/author Yuval Noah Harari keeps making in his books, essays and lectures. Namely that “cognitive evolution” is increasing right now. Not necessarily among all, but clearly among a small but significant sub-section of the human population.

Not a hundred or a thousand years from now, but likely within the next decade Harari believes we will see the first of what will in effect be a “super species” of humans. People with access to the best information, plus the means to collate and apply it to practices and technology, will dramatically increase both their life-spans and their years of vigorous good health.

That dramatic leap in human evolution will not be based in performative ignorance, laissez-faire math and “owning some libs.”

A lot of facts will be involved.

I can imagine a scenario where when such a day comes, even after all he’s said and done to distort logic and reason, Ted Cruz will once again gather up the wife and kiddies, call in a police escort and push ahead to the front of the line.

Until then though he’ll have to be content — along with Josh Hawley and Marjorie Greene — with having a veto vote over NASA’s budget.

Excuse Me, What Exactly Do You Find “Offensive and Absurd”?

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Classic quotes of the Trump era never stop coming. There was Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts”. Donny’s, “My administration has done more for the Black community than any President since Abraham Lincoln” and (my gal) Marjorie Taylor Greene complaining how, “I was allowed to believe things that weren’t true … .” Truly immortal verbiage, each of them. But to those we now add Lindsey Graham reacting to the (Second) impeachment managers’ meticulous tick tock of the January 6 Trump mob riot by saying, “most Republicans found the presentation … offensive and absurd.”

The issue is not the chaos and violence of the attack mind you … but the presentation of the evidence of it. That’s what a Republican, 26-year veteran of Congress finds “offensive and absurd.”

Really, where do you go with something like that?

Prior to the start of this latest trial my attitude was, “Fine. Knock yourselves out. But we all know how this ends.” Impeachment deux was going to be another noble exercise in futility. There was — and is — no way 17 Republicans will ever vote to convict a life long con man turned reality TV star who is the most potent force in their party.

But after four days I’m here to say that the Democrats have significantly exceeded my expectations. While another acquittal is not in doubt, they have presented for the historical record a vivid, indelible, moment-by-moment, easily-accessible and indisputable chronicle of the highest crimes imaginable short of pulling out a gun and shooting an opposition candidate dead on live TV.

And the Republicans are no in a corner where they will go on record and vote to excuse it.

As W. might say, “Mission Accomplished.”

America’s beard-stroking class is full of punditry of … where do we go now? … when one of the only two viable political parties the country has has become so mired in fears of Trump, of Trump’s fevered and semi-literate base and the consequences of riling either of them to an intramural insurrection that they’ve acquiesced to a fantasy world. A world where for all intents and purposes Trump really did win “in a sacred landslide”, where “patriots” beat and kill cops, where stark visual/audio evidence is “offensive and absurd”, (or “crap” as Graham described it to Sean Hannity a few nights ago.)

Because I’ve come to believe the only plausible route out of this dungeon of grievance-stoked insanity is through a refortification of the so-called center-right, aka traditional country club Republicans, I’ve spent a lot of time lately listening to right-of-center podcasts like Charlie Sykes’ “The Bulwark.” (A former right-wing Wisconsin talk radio host turned mortified/horrified never-Trumper, Sykes has a polished, reassuring manner. He’s been good company as I’ve devoted a mid-winter cold spell to renovating the basement library/bedroom.)

Like other old school conservatives, Sykes and his guests are struggling to see a future for a party where a shameless nincompoop like Marjorie Taylor Greene exerts more influence on likely voters than Liz Cheney, the daughter of the goddam Voldemort of American Republicanism, Dick Cheney, for chrissakes. Facts are tough to ignore. And the fact is that Greene and the roughly 150 other GOP congesspeople like her are far … far… more reprentative of the zeistgeist of modern conservatism (or whatever you want to call it) than either Liz or Dick Cheney, or any Bush or any side show act like Mitt Romney.

Sykes and other former Republican bloviators and strategists correctly see a party overrun with post-policy grifters. People like Greene who clearly don’t have the faintest idea or interest in any form of legislation — save maybe gun rights and another round of tax cuts for their donors — but who have hit on an infallible grift. Namely, raging about any and every kind of hysterical nonsense that trends on social media … and encouraging people to write them a check to “fight for it.” (Greene is reported to have raised more than $1.5 million in the past couple months.)

A few old school Republicans gathered (on Zoom) a couple dsys ago to discuss the idea of creating … wait for it … a new party, and abandoning the “Republican” brand to the Greenes and Matt Gaetz’ and Louie Gohmerts and Oath Keepers of the world. But their central issue would also be money.

While fat corporate/tycoon dough would possibly follow a new party led by Ben Sasse, to pick a name, the Marjorie Greenes (like the Michelle Bachmanns before her) float on a sea of a handful of whack-a-doodle millionaires (Bachmann had Tim and Bevery LaHaye of the “Left Behind” novels fortune), but mainly they tap a fathomless sea of $25 and $100 checks from, well, from the likes of Hillary Clinton’s ‘”deplorables.” That sea will not be writing checks to Ben Sasse.

Historian Jon Meacham, one the more valuable of regular cable pundits, made an interesting point the other day when he said that while it’s true contemporary Republican senators fear Trump and his raging Borg-like base, what they fear is much is the full schism they’d create if they vote to convict Trump. Such a vote would very likely be the impetus for … Trump to create a new party. A Trump party based on nothing but Trump is a fear that is a stark, plain-to-be-seen possibility given the man’s cult-like appeal to seething mobs.

Almost any percentage of Republican voters who followed Trump away from the established party — and poll after poll shows an inviolable 32% who express a near religious attachment to him — translates to certain doom for any Republican caught in a three-way race with a Democrat and a Trumper.

Moreover, it then becomes a good question whether once reliably Republican corporate/tycoon cash continues to follow any Republican — old school or Trumper — into a campaign neither has a chance of winning. Far better, if you’re running the Home Depot political action account, to re-aim that money at “gettable” Democrats who’ll do big money bidding for the right price.

It’s a perilous predicament Reoublicans find themselves in. And if it weren’t for the fact they’ve built their careers on race-baiting, science-denying, economically-divisive “crap” that is truly “offensive and aburd” I might feel sorry for them.