Uh, Yes, Slavery Was Very Bad

 I have a quick, easy and gawdawful expensive way to call Felon47's bluff.  

We need for a group or individual of means to offer Felon47 a billion dollars for him to submit to being a slave for a month to a Black person to be named later. (me, I would name me)  The conditions and treatment he would be subjected to would be restricted to historically verifiable things that happened to slaves.

However, I am nothing if not reasonable so, he would not have to endure the treatment that every slave got.  A committee consisting of me, my siblings and a few thousand of my closest friends would choose one slave with a verified recorded history and for his billion dollar payout, Felon47 would only have to endure a month of the treatment that one slave endured.

If by some odd chance he did not survive the month and could not collect the payout, the money would become a donation to organizations such as NAACP, sickle cell research, shelters for abused women, etc etc. 

I don't have the number for any billionaires in my contact list but I'm pretty sure the money could be raised.  So what say Bone Spurs Bitch, you mind us putting our money where your mouth is?  One month, one billion dollars and history will remember you for as long as the nation endures.

UPDATE:

In the interest of fairness and to avoid allegations of cherry picking, I and my crew will choose a hundred slaves with a verified recorded history instead of one. Once he agrees to the deal, his offspring will be presented with the one hundred slaves stories and they will have to choose which one Father Felon must endure for the month. If they cannot or will not choose in a week's time, then I will make the choice.

Am I not the epitome of fairness??

Shortest Essay Ever

 Land doesn't vote.  Land has no Constitutional protections.  Land has no representatives.  Human citizens are the one's with rights.  They are the one's whose red or blue self-identities matter.  When looking at an election map, only look at the citizens.

Land doesn't vote and has no Constitutional protections.  Any questions?

Balance The Right Thing

 A fairly standard understanding of human intelligence involves the ability to see relevant patterns in physical things or physical events or the things that lead to or surround those things or events.  I do not have an issue with this understanding.  However, I am leaning towards recognizing it as very incomplete.

In his recent essay Do The Right Thing  - Bill Foster correctly points out that immoral acts frequently lead to undesirable outcomes.  Those outcomes may be immediate but a lot of the time, perhaps the majority of times, the undesirable outcomes are years or decades down the road.  We have been doing this civilization thing long enough that seeing the patterns which predict those outcomes are seen, recognized for what they are, and even publicized.  They are then ignored by the majority of humanity.

That ignoring seems horribly counter-productive.  Why would we do that?

To me, the universe seems to be all about balance.  Forces must equal out or cancel out.  You have to have as much positive as you do negative to have a stable atom.  Chemical reactions are all about reestablishing equilibrium. Balance is key.  

It may not be obvious to most but I am thinking that human pattern recognition has a balancing phenomena too.  Unfortunately, it appears to be significantly less well acknowledged.  We should change that.  I propose that a standard measure of human stupidity should be whether one sees the connections between any two or more things or events.  The inability to see those connections limits our ability to understand our environment.  If we could see those connections and recognize them for what they are, we would have much less to fear from The Law of Unintended Consequences.

Stupid people are the ones that cannot see the connection between the prevalence of disease on other continents and public health here.  They can't see the connection between what gets put in the air and water and chronic health conditions.  They act as though there is no connection between adherence to the rule of law and the desirability as a tourist destination.  They are severely out of balance, they see patterns but not connections.

TBH I'm not sure this helps much.  In my experience ignorance can be addressed through education ("can" being the operative word).  Stupidity though, has no such clear fix.  Perhaps we could focus our efforts more where some level of success is actually possible.  Perhaps if we put more energy into explaining the connections we could turn a few lights on.  Clearly what we are doing now is not working.

The Future Is Not So Bright

 I am not the author of this piece.  Bill Foster (see the link) is however a veteran of the USN having retired after 21 (I think) years of active duty.  I think the piece is important and deserves as wide of an audience as possible.  I am including the full text as well as the link.  Share it if you feel the urge.

In the interest of full disclosure, Bill has published several of my essays to his Substack and in theory, will do more as I write more.  Enjoy.  Discuss.  Share.

Bill Foster's Substack - Read a lot. Don't die.

On a Friday last month, shortly after midnight, in a move that was not covered properly by the media, the House voted on a $9 billion recissions bill, clawing back money already appropriated by congress. This bill marks the end of congress as an institution. It is the straw that breaks the camel’s back in a decades-long process of congress giving up institutional power to the executive branch. Our constitution establishes three coequal branches, with checks and balances between them. However, as the executive as accrued more and more power to itself, the legislative branch has simply rolled over time and time again. There are no longer people in congress who protect the institution itself. Instead of a coequal branch of government, congress has become the prize won after elections. It is no longer a battlefield. Instead, it is the reward for the winning team.

The Founders referred to political parties as factions and thought they had designed a system of government in which the built-in separation of powers would subsume competition. Factions would not arise because the separation of powers would create factions in government. Here is the thing though: Parties are inevitable. Every single time someone says to me (and it is OFTEN), “Man, parties are destroying this country,” I ask them to name a democracy without one. Hell, even China has parties within the communist party. People get together and compromise and that makes parties. You can no more have a democracy without parties than you can have an ocean without water. You can do whatever you want to your government but as soon as you say, “I want a law that makes it illegal to lasso a fish [TN]” and someone says, “I’ll vote for that if you vote to make whale hunting illegal on Sundays [OH],” well, you have a political party. It is inevitable.

And parties are ESSENTIAL Society is made up of different people who want different things so the way you get laws is through compromise. Parties are organizations that compromise and provide information. As a voter, what do you really know about tariffs? Probably more than you did a year ago, but I doubt you can discuss the differences between the GATT and the WTO and how one led to the other, let alone what the proper tariff rate is for rivets. Can you discuss how chickens relate to light trucks via tariffs? Can you discuss how tariff engineering influenced Converse sneakers? Where is the Court of International Trade and what are its powers (as you can probably see, this is a future column)? That is the purpose of representative government. I get irritated at online arguments where someone says, “you don’t know this or that.” Of course I don’t. The modern world is complicated, and it takes years to know most things. We try to elect a representative and a party that we agree with.

Unfortunately, a multitude of trends are working against representative democracy right now, first among them gerrymandering. When a district is gerrymandered to make it safe, it becomes impossible for a centrist to become elected. Candidates in gerrymandered districts don’t have to compromise. Their fear is being primaried by a more extreme candidate. When candidates on both sides of any individual issue fear facing a primary election more than they fear not accomplishing something, compromise becomes impossible. This is a much more serious problem than is commonly acknowledged.

The more extreme candidates that gain office because of gerrymandering are also to blame for congress no longer being a coequal branch of government. Neither party works to protect the legitimacy of congress as an institution. This has been going on for decades. It has been going on since World War II, minus the brief post-Watergate respite. It is congress’s duty to resist power grabs by the executive branch. At key moments in history, bipartisan movements have arisen to maintain congress’s power. For example, after the Vietnam War, congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973. Since its passage, it has been weakened because congress has refused to assert its powers as every consecutive president has violated it. The Constitution clearly grants the power to declare war to congress. The nonsensical argument the executive tends to make is that bombing another country is not declaring war. Congress could easily clarify that if they wished by amending the War Powers Act but there is no interest in doing so because individual members of Congress prefer to take credit if it goes well and assign blame if it does not. No one is willing to stand up for the institution and the reason they are unwilling to do so is because they are mostly in safe districts and there is nothing to be gained by doing so.

The situation is that we have a Congress in which trust is difficult to attain because of partisanship. Partisanship gets increased because of gerrymandering and incumbency advantages. This is why Congress has not passed a budget since 1996. Did you know that? It has been THIRTY FUCKING YEARS since we have had a budget. Instead, Congress passes a set of continuing resolutions every year because the compromises necessary to make an actual budget are seemingly unattainable.

Now, on top of this situation, we have added recissions bills. The recissions process comes from the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. When Congress passes a bill authorizing spending, the executive must spend the funds. If they refuse to do so, that is called impoundment. Impoundment is illegal but the Trump Administration is doing it anyway, and as a result there are several lawsuits working their way through the courts. Under the ICA, the administration can impound funds legally by notifying Congress that they wish to impound the money within 45 days. This is called a recission and this is why they had to wait till midnight to pass the bill as that was the deadline.

The bill cancelled $9 billion in funding for USAID, public broadcasting, various UN health agencies, the UN human rights council and refugee assistance. Now, what I have written so far is bad enough, but it is important to look at this in context. This administration has impounded many separate sets of funds for many months. It is important to look at how illegal this is. Congress appropriates money and the executive spends it. That’s it. If the administration refuses to spend the money, they are usurping the power of congress, which is a major violation of the constitution. Congress was not notified within 45 days about the funds in the recissions bill but only after many months. All of this is part of a pattern of the administration using a variety of illegal means to not expend appropriated funds for activities it doesn’t approve of.

This recissions bill is the largest ever passed, the first since 1999 and only the second since 1974. It fundamentally rearranges Congress. This is because budget negotiations are based on compromise. Let us say that one party wants increased defense spending and the other party wants increased spending for health care. They trade so they each get what they want. But now, the party that wants to increase defense spending can agree to the health care spending and then just pass a recissions bill to impound the health care money. You can make whatever compromise you want to get 60 votes, then pass a recissions bill and take it back with only a fifty-one-vote majority. This is literally the last straw, and I imagine that this is going to break the appropriations process and that we are headed for a major fiscal process as it is impossible to come to a compromise when the other side has a tool like this and has shown the willingness to use it in an abusive manner.

The only question now is how the Democrats will respond. We are headed for a couple different debt ceiling and budget showdowns, and the Republicans are not going to give. They will threaten a US default, which could have unimaginable costs, a 2008 style crash. However, if they are willing to compromise, how can they be trusted with recissions on the table? The Republicans are going to be terrorists threatening to shoot the hostages and, unfortunately, I don’t see any way out of the situation except to let them do so and hope the public recognizes who is actually at fault, just like they recognize who is at fault in most of Trump’s …. Um …. Shit …. We’re screwed.

WILL YOU BE MY NEIGHBOR?

 

Serious question: What would a neighbor of yours have to do to justify the authorities killing you?  Think about it.  What if your neighbor was Ted Bundy, a prolific serial killer.  Would his living next door to you justify your demise at the hands of authorities?  What if Bundy was doing his serial killing next door to you?  Assuming you did not know it was going on, should you be killed for his actions?

What if your neighbor was Adolph Hitler?  What if after he had ordered or otherwise caused the murder of millions of other humans, he moved in next door to you?  If you were killed in the effort to capture or eliminate him, would you consider that just?

Personally, I have not been able to come up with a situation wherein my demise at the hands of those attempting to hold a neighbor responsible for actions taken without my assistance or knowledge could be considered "just".  To be honest, I don't feel like any level of injury to me would be justifiable in an effort to punish someone else for something they did.  However, you need not feel limited by my position.  If you can think of a suitable answer to the question, feel free to share it with me and the world.

Brett Hankison was a police detective in Louisville, KY.  He was very involved in the no-knock raid that resulted in the wrongful death of an innocent civilian, Breonna Taylor.  While by all accounts Hankison did not fire the round that killed her as she slept, he did fire rounds that went into or through her apartment.  Oddly enough, he is so far, the only officer to be charged and convicted of any crime associated with the poorly planned and executed raid.

The DOJ submitted a sentencing memorandum that recommended essentially no repercussions for the irresponsible detective.  Nothing about Taylor's death or the rather obvious violation of her civil rights appears to be of concern to the DOJ though Hankison's well-being - his PTSD and related conditions was a focus.

I have taught several folks to shoot.  I tend to tell those I am instructing that "There is no such thing as an accident. If you point the firearm at me, I will assume you intend to shoot me and I will do my best to get you first.  I'll explain it to your parents later."  Traditional instruction is that you do not shoot if you don't know where the bullet is going if it misses the target or goes through the target.  If you cannot say with authority where the projectile will go, it is reckless and negligent to pull the trigger.

I can only see two options, either Hankison and the other LEOs on the scene knew where their bullets were going or they didn't.  Those two options translate to either they were reckless and negligent OR, for whatever reason they wanted innocent civilians to be harmed.  You are welcome to argue the existence of other options but I am a reasonably experienced shooter so, you're looking at an uphill climb.

So put yourself in Ms Taylor's apartment.  She was never the focus of the raid.  No one accused her of illegal behavior.  The officers were allegedly targeting an ex-boyfriend of hers but not someone who currently or recently resided at the address.  So should I rephrase the question?  What would an estranged ex of yours have to do to justify your demise at the hands of authorities?  If you can't think of a reason, then you need to be more upset about the DOJ recommendation.

I have exes.  I have no reason to believe that I should be killed for stuff they might be doing.  I have no reason to believe any of them should be killed for stuff I might be doing.  Breonna Taylor and her loved ones deserve justice.  

Over the years I have known several individuals in law enforcement.  Military, FBI, U.S. Marshalls, TBI, Highway Patrol as well as several local officers/deputies.  I have no idea who I would go to to get a defense of Hankison et al's actions especially if I were able to ask them prior to them knowing about the event.  Perhaps some of them would choose to stand with their LEO brethren once they knew the actual details but none of them would have tried to claim that was the right way to handle things as a hypothetical EVEN if all of the pertinent facts were included in the hypothetical.  They know better.

If I were king of the forest, the author(s) of the memorandum would be charged with a crime.  The DOJ should be the lead in getting justice for Breonna and her loved ones.  They should definitely not be the lead in evading justice for those that murdered her and negligently endangered others.

A pretty standard trope in Hollywood when they want to shock or offend is to have a character describe what are the acceptable levels of civilian casualties.  “Collateral damage” is military verbiage but essentially is the same thing.  It should never be used outside of the military (and ideally, never in the military either!).  There are no acceptable levels of degradation of my health and physical ability due to something someone else did.  What about you?  What would I, as your neighbor, have to do to make you amenable to your demise or serious injury as a byproduct of my (attempted) apprehension?

If being collateral damage doesn’t work for you, then you need to halt that shit before it gets to you.  Louisville, KY would have been a good place to stop it.

VAMPIRES AMONG US

 

There be vampires among us.  

Now, I know what you're thinking. Vampires are the stuff of fiction.  They exist solely in adolescent fantasy movies and the fevered imaginations of those with no other way to explain the incredible cruelty or apathy with which some humans have treated their fellow humans.  But bear with me.

One of the constant themes common to stories of vampirism across various genre is the inability of mirrors, or other reflective surface, to display their images.  They have no reflections.  They cannot see themselves.

None of the various vampire stories with which I am familiar ever discuss the potential ramifications of a human lifespan - or several - spent with no direct knowledge of just exactly what one looks like.  Given the current popularity of "selfies" and the long known desire for one's "15 minutes of fame", this seems a very odd omission.  How would it affect your psyche, your personality, to never see what the world sees when they look at you?  How would it affect your confidence? 

How might the mass of humanity react if they were suddenly unable to see themselves?  If you fancy yourself a writer, you might well be imagining how you would write such characters.  If you are otherwise given to mental meanderings you might be currently wondering how you would act, how you might be different if you spent a significant amount of time completely unable to see yourself.

It turns out, we don't have to imagine at all. Writer or fantacist, we can dam the creative flow and simply observe that which is.  It aint pretty.

If you want to know what happens when you can't see your reflection, simply look at the vampires of the modern day GOP.  They cannot see the reflections of themselves or their migratory ancestors in the modern day refugees.  They cannot see reflections of GOP policies in the conditions that convince people with very little to leave even that little bit behind to embark on a trip fraught with danger for them and their families.  They can't see themselves in the light returning from those that have lost all of their savings due to an unavoidable medical issue.  Drug overdoses are not reflective in the least for them.  LEO abuses only happen to "others" and are certainly no reflection on them.  Nothing that happens to anyone causes any hint of self-recognition when the images reach their eyes.

Whenever you are asking yourself how a given individual or group can treat any other individual or group so callously or horrendously, it is because they cannot see themselves in that person or group.  Being a vampire apparently makes you completely insensitive to the travails others.  I would posit that it is the lack of reflection that causes this. 

If you look at a shiny-faced Dreamer and see yourself, then common sense immigration reform becomes important to you. If you can see yourself in the eyes of a child with cancer or when you see a suddenly homeless stay-at-home parent, your priorities change. 

But an awful lot of folks only see a false reflection.  They see themselves in Donald Trump but they have no rich father to start them out with several hundred million dollars.  They see themselves in the lottery winners even though they have a better chance of being struck by lightening which is particularly ironic since they do NOT see themselves in those that have suffered greatly in natural disaster.

In vampire lore, they have no tolerance for sunlight.  That level of illumination is a primary threat to their immortality.  This seems to hold up.  When we illuminate the behavior of our current day vampires, significantly fewer folks vote or otherwise support them.  Still, as with so many other circumstances, it is situational awareness that does the most to keep you safe.  Knowing about current vampires will give you greater opportunity to construct a bulwark against them. 

That is why I am telling you now, THERE BE VAMPIRES AMONG US!  As in a majority of the stories I have seen, you either are one or you need protection from them.  Our protection protocols are written into the Constitution.   Will you use them?

WE ARE US

 

Among the incredibly obvious things that apparently elude a significant percentage of humans is the fact that "we" are nested entities.

We are constituent parts of the universe, the supercluster, the local cluster, the galaxy, the solar system, the planet, the animal kingdom, mammals, humans, nations, regions, states, cities/counties, neighborhoods. We are a small portion of all of those things. All of those things certainly have other parts as well but, we would be included in any complete inventory of those entities.

The physical, social and cultural constructs of humanity are also constituent parts of all of those nested entities. While much of human misery throughout history is rooted in concepts of otherness, we are all parts of the same systems. Think about how your brain and heart and liver and lungs look nothing alike but are all part of you - such integral parts that severe injury to any of those parts can cause you to cease to exist. Not all of our parts are crucial in the same way. Some can be injured or removed without killing us but all our parts have a purpose, and we work better with them in place and functioning properly.

Some of those constructs of humans are not generalized. They function to affect humans of a specific type or location. Humans of other types in other locations might choose an alternate but corresponding function. Examples of such can be found in the various governmental and economic philosophies.

Earlier today I saw there had been established a GoFundMe for the victims of the flooding tragedy in TX. Rather obviously, GoFundMe is a social/economic construct of humans. What might not be as obvious is GoFundMe is in large part, a socialist construct. It is a collective response to a localized tragedy.

There are a lot of socialist elements in the government of the USA. We don't like to admit that because those who benefit from our fear of "the other" have conditioned us over scores of years to think of any "ism" other than capitalism as lesser. To avoid having to actually acknowledge the socialist elements they avoid using that term in the name or descriptions. It is disingenuous and hypocritical, but it is also effective. We embrace socialism to avoid financially inconveniencing those with nearly unlimited funds - but we avoid calling it what it is so as to avoid causing them even the slightest discomfort.

FEMA, under responsible and more ethical administrations, is an entity to enable and effect a collective response to localized disasters. It is socialist in spirit and effect but not in name. Medicare and Medicaid also meet that criteria. Though Medicaid in particular might be known by any of several names, what it does and how it does it is not dependent on the name. Social Security might be the most obvious socialist element in our government because the name hints at it but it is far from the only one.

I don't dislike GoFundMe. I don't even mistrust their intentions. In no way am I attempting to dissuade anyone from using that platform or similar platforms to assist our fellow citizens. However, I do find it ludicrous that in the richest nation in the world, and according to the specifics of the metrics, possibly the richest nation in history, we feel the need to rely on a voluntary platform to address real need. The folks in TX should not have to depend on the willingness of their fellow citizens to part with what little disposable funds they have. The same is true of those affected by other disasters.

Attending to citizens after a disaster is a right and proper function of government. There is nothing at all wrong with ancillary organizations helping be they neighborhoods, churches, professional orgs, online entities or even other nations. Sometimes we have an emotional need to help. We need to believe that we have done something to assist victims of tragedy over and above what the government organizations are tasked with. I have no issue with anyone doing actual good. I have a huge issue with government shirking their responsibilities and leaving it to ad hoc socialism to clean up the mess. Individually few of us have the resources and skills to replace government organizations. Responding ad hoc to each tragedy will ensure that some things, some people, fall through the cracks. We need to be ready to respond with a collective and capable response even if it absolutely reeks of socialism.

We are us, even when you don't like to think of us that way.