To Russia, With Love

Move over, Ukraine, Russia has displaced you.  Last week, Mad Dog had 119 hits from the USA, 42 from Ukraine and 691 from Russia.

Mad Dog is a hit in Russia!

Friends, who are more internet savvy than Mad Dog, have suggested since many of the world's most perfidious hackers live in Russia,  attention from Russia may not be a good thing.  

Others have suggested some of Mad Dog's  past posts regarding Mr. Vladimir Putin might have got him on the screens at whatever replaced the KGB. Again, not the audience Mad Dog would be wise to seek. 

Mad Dog prefers to think he is a big hit in Russia, that Russians are intrigued by American politics in the heartland.

Most of what Mad Dog knows about Russia comes directly from the David Lean film, "Dr. Zhivago," a movie  made by a  Brit, starring an Egyptian in the role of Zhivago, a Brit as Lara and an American as the arch villain. Not a bone fide Russian in the cast, but it has to be authentic because it's got that wonderful musical score which sounds very Russian and it was filmed, as Mad Dog recalls, in Finland, which is almost Russia.

Actually, with the rise of the Donald, Mad Dog believes we all may have much to learn from the Russians about dealing with a leader who commands rapt affection from his countrymen, while saying and doing bizarre, belligerent things while mismanaging his economy. At least Mr. Putin has not had to seek bankruptcy protection for any of his government owned companies, so he may have the edge on Mr. Trump in management skills. 

And then there is Maria Sharapova, that dazzling Russian tennis player, who could arouse interest in the most entrenched Russia o phobe.  She can surely compete with the Donald's current squeeze. Mr. Putin has a girlfriend who showed up at the Winter Olympics held in Russia, and presumably Mr. Putin put her on display to demonstrate he can compete with Mr. Trump and Mr. Obama for arm candy any day.


Mad Dog fondly  remembers his Russian friends from his days in Washington, D.C. Of course, these were ex-patriot Russians, so there is selection bias, but most of them said, at one time or another, Russia is a great country to be from. They really did not seem to miss mother Russia much. Russia apparently did not treat Jews well. Nor women, to hear my friends tell it. Nor people who felt inclined to complain about oligarchs who were cozy with Mr. Putin or Mr. Putin's friends. 

One thing which did not impress the Russians was size.  We talk about the Great Plains, but they sniff.  In Russia, we have 15 time zones. Or winter. We have Minnesota and North Dakota; they have Siberia. No contest.  We also, of course, have Alaska, but as Sarah Palin can attest, that's just a Russian annex, up there.

So, Hello Russia! Whoever you are. 

One thing Mad Dog does not understand: Why the silence?  This right here is a free country. You are allowed to speak up, speak your mind. Love to hear from you.

Bernie, Hillary and Major Barbara

George Bernard Shaw wrote a wonderful play called, "Major Barbara" in 1905 which students used to read in high school and which has suddenly become relevant again.

Barbara Undershaft is a Major in the Salvation Army, inveighing against demon rum and war and all things nasty and money driven and speaking for the good works of man which embody God's will.

She is confronted with her long lost father, whom she has not seen since her parents divorced and discovers he is a very rich capitalist, who owns a company town in which the workers are well paid, provided for with all earthly comforts and spiritual benefits of churches and schools.  The source of all this well being is profit from the Undershaft armaments factories.  Undershaft is a merchant of death, but he has provided a wonderful life for hundreds of workers. 

Barbara rejects his money, his help because the money is tainted money, money drenched in the blood of the victims of the bombs and bullets made by Undershaft's factories.

When Undershaft offers a large contribution to the Salvation Army post where Major Barbara works, she is horrified to think of all that tainted money being accepted by the Salvation Army.  But the man in charge of this post accepts not only Undershaft's generosity but money from a whiskey maker.

"I would accept money from the Devil himself, if I could put it toward advancing God's good works," says the director.

Eventually, Barbara herself accepts this thinking. In a capitalist society, she realizes, there really is no such thing as "clean money."   Sleazeball financial barons contribute large sums to support hospitals;  slave owners got the money they used to found universities from the misery of slaves. Part of the Brown family money came from the slave trade (although part of the family rejected slaving.) Georgetown University sold slaves. Andrew Carnegie, who turned a blind eye to the brutalization of workers in his steel mills gave the money for Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Mellon. And Mellon was a ruthless capitalist.  The capitalist economy of England was founded on exploitation of colonial peoples.  

But even beyond the examples of individuals or companies which have done nasty things, all parts of the economy benefit from the spoils of war, or empire or commercial exploitation.  The baker buys his flour transported by trains built by cooley labor and he sells it to people who work in the factory which builds bombs which kill innocents abroad who the factory workers never see. 

The capitalist economy of 21st century America is no less interconnected.  

The same man who contributes to Planned Parenthood may give generously to the Catholic Church or to the Mormon Church.  The Koch brothers have part of Lincoln Center named in honor of the money they have given, and that money comes from oil and also supports a reactionary agenda which includes union busting. 

The affluence of many Southern cities depends on "defense contractors" i.e., the production of weapons of mass destruction which wind up being dropped on Palestinians or other oppressed people. 

In past decades, sweat shops in China, Taiwan, El Salvador paid their workers starvation wages so "stuff" could be sold cheaply in the United States. 

You can poison a gallon of clean water with a few drops of arsenic or lead. And you cannot get an engine running without greasing the gears with dirty grease and oil.

Maybe Hillary needs to re read "Major Barbara" as she struggles to answer questions about those speeches to Goldman Saks. "I'd take money from the Devil to get the laws the Middle Class needs."

Trumped! Our Very Own Berlusconi

If Donald Trump never does another good thing for his country, at least he managed to thwart one of the most malicious sleaze balls in his quest for the presidency. Listening to Mr. Cruz's concession speech tonight was the ultimate reminder of the great service the Donald has done his country by ending the ordeal of having to listen to the stomach turning Mr. Cruz any longer.

Running against Trump will be a challenge for Hillary Clinton. Like most lawyers, like anyone who has been in government, Hillary thinks in terms of policies, and programs,  but Trump does none of this.  Do you apply the principle of punishing an accomplice to murder by prosecuting a woman who has an abortion? Yeah, sure, why not?  No, wait.  Hell, I don't care.  Who thinks about stuff like that anyway?  Hey, we're gonna make America great again: that's what I'm talking about!  

How do you debate a ten year old who will stand on the stage and make faces and thumb his nose at you and called you names?  

Mr. Trump joins that pantheon of rich men who seek public office by sheer audacity and exuberance and succeed, for a time. He will have to step up his game to compete with  Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian premier,  who was fond of appointing former lovers to government offices. He appointed Marla Carfagna, a former bedmate,  as his Minister of the Ministry of Equal Opportunity--taking the name of that ministry quite literally--if this woman was willing to go to bed with me, why should she not have equal opportunity to serve in public office?

Who would not want equal opportunity with her?

Perhaps Hillary's best option would be to send Bernie to the debates with the Donald. She could say, "When the Republicans nominate an adult, I'll debate. Until then I'll send my Vice Principal to deal with the Infant Terrible." 

The Donald should be studying the game films of Mr. Berlusconi in action.  This is  how an infantile billionaire can frame the discussion among world leaders when considering important questions like what to do with the Syrian refugees flooding into Europe or how to handle the Greek default. 

Who needs adults ,when we can have such fun?

We all have to admit, it will be interesting to see what the composition of America really is. Will the Donald appeal to only the 32% who voted for him in the early primaries or will more and more Americans catch the fun train?   Are we more like Germany or Italy?  Germany, after all, elected a decent, if frumpy lady whose instincts have been magnanimous and conciliatory, while Italy preferred Mr.  Berlusconi, who was way more fun, who threw parties with a ready supply of young women (teenagers, actually)  to bed for all his rich friends, while running a tabloid news and real estate empire. 

Now this is the way to govern

I may have to start watching reality TV.  How about "Survivor?" 

Nicole Minetti

Both billionaires seem to have a taste for a certain look of woman. In the case of Nicole Minetti, who procured the teenagers for Mr. Berlusconi's "parties" the look was lean and angular. At least, one might say, he had a certain standard he maintained.  Mr. Trump, apparently, has similar tastes.  And he's an internationalist. He likes Miss Universe contestants. And as was true of Mr. Berlusconi, the women seem to find something to like in the Donald. Might be the hair. Might be the money.  Something works for these guys.

I may have some young ladies for you

Stay tuned.

I Dig  Donald

The Game is Rigged: The Deadly Delusion of Meritocracy

Thomas Frank has made a career analyzing how liberals lost the  struggle for the soul of bottom 80% of the American electorate, which is to say the lower and middle classes, such as we actually still have a "middle class."

His big idea is encapsulated in the remark he cites from Lawrence Summers, an effete snob who never quite recovered from his rejection as an undergraduate from Harvard and who made a career of bullying his way into sinecure positions like President of Harvard and chief economist of the World Bank, who said, "One of the reasons that inequality has probably gone up in our society is that people are being treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated." 

This is something of a corollary to the remark he made which cost him his job as Harvard President, when he observed that women haven't established much of a presence in math and science because they aren't as talented as men in math in science. He was alluding to test scores which have suggested as much, but it was politically incorrect to say it.  

What he was really saying is that the successful deserve to be successful and the losers are what they are, losers.

This is  the idea that we have ways of measuring "talent" and worthiness and we should reward those on whom God has bestowed superior genes and brains and we should not feel too sorry for those less competitive, less worthy, less" talented," less intelligent individuals who comprised the lower 90% and who could never "qualify" to get into Harvard.

Which brings to mind the man Thomas Frank quoted in his book, "What's the Matter with Kansas," a guy who complains that his son, who could rewire his house, rebuild the tractor's motor, read the defense from the line of scrimmage before burning it for a forty yard touch down pass,  hunt and shoot a wild boar, kayak a class four rapid and sink a basket from 35 feet would never get into Harvard, because his college board scores are not high enough.

What the man from Kansas was saying is you have your ideas of what constitutes "talent," Mr. Summers, and I have mine. And in my world, your kid, with his perfect scores and perfect grades and his resume filled with made-for-college-application extra curricula activities,  is an empty suit, whose greatest virtue is knowing how to kiss up to adults.

That "talented" student, destined to garner the glittering prizes, is the Lt. Dick, of the Band of Brothers, a Yale graduate, who was never seen when the lead started flying, a dreadful failure as a leader of men, who is ultimately removed from command of Easy Company, only to wind up on the staff of the General who commands the whole regiment, the classic case of a fortunate feckless son,  kicked upstairs. 

Frank assails the "well graduated" cohort of smug collegians who have been told they are the select, the elect and they will rule the world and they graduate to join Mackenzie Consulting and, sure enough, they find themselves writing reports telling men twice their age how to manufacture widgets more profitably, having mastered the problem of profitable widget making in a blitzkrieg of studying the factory and it's place in the economy.

Of course,  those who have a more enlightened perspective  will tell you they got high board scores because their parents could afford to send them to Kaplan courses and tutors which ramped up their scores.

On the other hand, when one actually lives and works among the hoi polloi, one discovers they are not all brilliant, hard working people who were simply born into poor families. Many do come from families  with six brothers and four sisters and parents who worked two jobs and had no time to read to kids at night. College for them was never an option. But  whatever their talents and intelligence, many of these folks struggle putting pen to paper to simply fill out a questionnaire.  

It's not that people who dropped out of high school were unintelligent, but their lives took arches predictable from their circumstances and the marketplace has no patience and no intention of  bringing them up to speed.

But the rage that fuels the crowds at Donald Trump rallies is a rage at a dimly perceived injustice, buried in early childhood experience and reinforced throughout adolescence that meritocracy is a fraud, the system is rigged and the wrong people rewarded.

Plastic Bag Pollution: No Excuses

Garbage the size of Texas: Click on Image

You can question global warming, if you want to be perverse and you can believe President Obama was born in Kenya and raised on Mars, but it is hard to deny the persistent pestilence of plastic bags and bottles in the oceans of the planet, or, if you don't want to believe photos of the ocean, which, it must be admitted might have been photo shopped in the same studio where they faked all those moon landings, but you can simply walk around New York City and even Hampton, and see plastic bags in the trees, and on the beaches.


It is true, plastic bags and detritus on Hampton beaches are relatively minimal scourges compared to beaches in places like Barbados and other places where currents concentrate the garbage.

But, the thing is, with  minimal effort even someone as unorganized as I can manage to keep a few cloth bags in my car to be used at Market Basket and Hannafords and Walgreens and Home Depot. I can do it.  How much effort does it take to take a small step to save the planet and some struggling fish and sea turtles?

Jacques Cousteau saw it first

The article in this week's New Yorker about Jennie Romer, the New York City lawyer who is trying to get a law passed to impose a 5 cent charge for plastic bags at all New York City stores is a reminder we, each of us, can do more to save the planet. 

Jennie Romer, Esq

It turns out plastic bags are simply not recyclable, in the real world. They are not put through machines except in a very few places, like San Francisco. They break down into deadly blobs and float around the ocean. Or they wash up on beaches. Their fellow travelers are plastic bottles, which are even more obnoxious, if less numerous. 

In Hannaford's today, I saw the ubiquitous plastic bags at every cash register, as they are at every other store, from Walgreens to the Dollar Store.  It seems counter intuitive that by simply adding a 5 cent charge for the bag could possibly undo all this plastic bag infrastructure, but, apparently, it's worked in San Francisco. But the other thing is San Francisco has invested in the hardware to actually destroy the plastic bags. Hard to imagine New Hampshire being willing to spend money on this. 

In Italy, I saw women walking home from the markets carrying food in net bags--no automobiles, no plastic bags, in Italy.  

We always brag about how superior we are here in the United States of America. Why can't we do what the Italians do, every day, to be less destructive of our planet?

Sea Otters

Having written this screed, I began to notice just how ubiquitous plastic is, starting with my refrigerator. Everything from milk, to yogurt, to water is contained by plastic throw aways. Clothes from the laundry is wrapped in plastic. Every tool in the hardware store comes wrapped in plastic, as do all electric devices from ear phones to I pods.  Even if we eliminated plastic bags, we would be awash in plastic. Of course, the bags are particularly nasty because they are so light, they blow in the wind into trees and lakes and oceans, but it strikes me, we ought to really be talking about doing what San Francisco has done--invested in the big machines which really do melt this stuff down into some less toxic form.  Solutions likely will prove more complicated, but expense should not be a problem--the people who made glass bottles once had to pay for the collection of these items. No reason the people who make plastic things should not bear the cost of disposing of them.

The So Called War on Drugs

It must be frustrating to be Kurt Schmoke.  The man was born and raised in Baltimore, led his high school football teams to state championships and got sucked up by Yale, from which he graduated to a Rhodes scholarship, then to Harvard Law and then Mayor of Baltimore.  All that glitzy resume stuff and  still nobody listens to him.

Today, the New York Times editors have run an editorial suggesting that maybe we ought to do something different in the war on drugs. 

Mr. Schmoke must have read this and said, "You think?"

It took "The Wire" to actually lay out in detail why the current approach to criminalization of drug sales is worse than useless. In that fictional paragon, the implications of Mayor Schmoke's idea of legalization are spelled out, as a rogue police major, Howard Colvin, walls off a part of the city where drug sales and use is legal. The impact on the rest of the city is immediate and dramatic, as neighborhoods ravaged by violence surrounding the trade emerge as if from a bombing siege.  

Howard Colvin

 But the reality in the zone, called "Hamsterdam" by the druggies, is unpleasant.  Deaths from overdoses ensue, and the sidewalks and streets are filled with drugged out, staggering addicts. What has been happening under ground, out of sight, is now visible to genteel eyes. The rodents have emerged into the sunlight.

Of course, it's the politicians and police who run for cover.  Doing the right thing is unbearable. As T.S. Eliot remarked:  "Humankind cannot bear too much reality."

Humankind could not bear watching "The Wire." Can you imagine what humankind would do when confronted with the reality of drug legalization?  

People whose disease caused them to hide underground would now emerge for upright citizens to gaze upon. 

Heroin dispensed at the corner drug store along with clean needles.  Cocaine, too. There will, presumably, always be some drugs which are just too combustible to be made available, but take those two out of the mix and stop jailing people for marijuana and the economy and the culture of the inner city would change radically. 

There will still be crime, but at least we would have wrested a public health problem from the underground and lanced one abscess.

Kurt Schmoke

Freedom to Wander

Ken Ilgunas

Staying on point is something I've never been good at.  One of the great efforts I learned I had to make when writing anything is to stay on the topic and not to digress or wander off into interesting but unrelated topics.

Which is why Ken Ilgunas's lovely article in today's New York Times struck such a chord with me.  At first glance, I thought it was an article about the Keystone XL pipeline.  It carried a picture of the pipeline from its origin in Alberta to the terminus in Port Arthur, Texas, but it turned out to be not so much about the pipeline, or a description of the lands and vistas it would cross as it is an article about the adventure and rewards of actually trying to walk the entire length of the thing, which took Ilgunas 136 days.   The whole journey brought him face to face with the strictures in America which thwart those who love to go a wandering.

The real subject of the article, if it can be said to have a single subject, is the idea that in the United States you cannot just wander, by foot along much of the continent because so much of our land is owned as private property.  When Woody Guthrie sang, "This Land is Your Land. This Land is My Land," he could not have been speaking of America, because this land is apt to belong to someone else.

The only public land in America is, most often, the roads. 

For years, I practiced medicine in Washington, D.C. and my practice had a high proportion of Europeans and I always asked them what they found different about living in America and, almost to a man or woman they replied, "You Americans, you DRIVE everywhere. Go to the 7-11 down the block, half a kilometer away: You drive!"

The other thing they noticed is how fat Americans are.  

One thing I noticed was how thin Americans returning from extended stays in Europe had become. One twenty something returned to Washington after 3 years posted to a news outlet in Italy,  and I hardly recognized him. He had lost 30 pounds. In Italy! How had he done this?  "Well," he said. "I wasn't trying to lose weight. It just happened. For one thing, you eat only fresh food, but mostly I just walked a lot."

In Sweden and Scotland and many other European countries, you can walk across private land and that right is guaranteed by "freedom to roam" laws.  You do not have to stay on roads, as you do in the USA.  Of course, as Ilgunas notes, if we tried to pass such laws here, allowing people to roam across your lawn or fields, we'd run up against the Fifth Amendment, which forbids government taking of private property.  While "eminent domain" has been invoked for the building of highways or other such use, we are pretty skittish about allowing the government to trespass or to allow the public to trespass on private property.

Except, when we are not.

We are not so skittish, it turns out, in some places in America, namely New Hampshire, if that trespass involves a person carrying a gun.  

One day I was entering the Urban Forest in Portsmouth, and as I did a stream of rather panicky looking parents and children and dogs came at me along the path from the woods, making a bee line for the parking lot behind me.  Behind them I could hear thunderclaps and I thought, "Oh, a local squall." But no, one of the mothers told me, "Somebody's shooting out there."

I proceeded onward along and was joined by  an off duty policeman, who was there with his dog, and we followed the sound of the gunshots to the water's edge. The Urban Forest runs down to salt marshes which run under Route 1 and out to the sea.  About thirty yards off shore two men with shot guns were shooting toward the sky at some birds.

"They may be within their rights," the off duty cop said, but he still phoned the police department to come out and investigate. 

It turned out the hunters were hunting legally, within the city limits, within spitting distance of Route 1 and within the Urban Forest. 

I wrote the Mayor of Portsmouth, who replied with a copy of the applicable law enclosed in the envelop.  It turned out two separate legal protections covered these hunters.  The first was in the will which bequeathed the land for the Urban Forest to Portsmouth, guaranteeing that hunting would be allowed there. 

The second was a law, which was more interesting.  In the State of New Hampshire it turns out:
1. It is legal to shoot your gun while hunting beyond 300 feet (the length of a football field) of an occupied building, within 15 feet of a road and within 1,000 feet of a school. (Think about that next time your kid goes out for dodge ball at recess.)
2. It is illegal to walk across private property UNLESS you are carrying a gun, hunting, unless the owner has clearly posted "No Hunting" signs. So, the acre of woods behind my house is open to anyone with a gun, unless I nail the signs to trees.  Furthermore, it is legal to shoot at a deer across any road in New Hampshire with 9 exceptions, and those exceptions spell out Route 95, Route 101, Rte 93,  and a bunch of other multi lane highways which it is hard to imagine anyone in his right mind would try to shoot across.

Such is the respect for hunting in New Hampshire. Hunting trumps private property rights. This is still, in parts, a rural state, or was once. Only 1.3 million people live here and most are concentrated along the Western border with Massachusetts, in Manchester or along the 18 mile Seacoast.  Most of the territory is still farmland or forest or mountain or lake. Loons live here, which says something.

When I was in high school, I read Thoreau.  He spent a week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers and it sounded idyllic.  But I now cross the Merrimack 12 times a week commuting to work across the bridges which traverse it as it meanders past Methuen and Haverhill, Massachusetts. Long ago, the shoe factories polluted the Merrimack thoroughly, and although efforts to clean it up are longstanding, the muddy bottom still stores chemicals from that legacy.

Today, I'll go out on my bicycle along the road from Hampton through Kingston to Exeter, New Hampshire.  Those are public roads and automobiles roar past me, some trucks pull trailers carrying mowers and tractors behind, and those are the vehicles I fear most because they veer and swerve behind the trucks towing them.  It would be nice to be able to walk through the woods and fields along the road, but this is America, not Europe.  Of course, this is New Hampshire, so if I carried a AK-15 assault rifle, I'd be perfectly within my rights to walk across that privately owned land.

During the Fall hunting season, one of the best times to walk through town and state parks, I have to wrap my yellow lab in an orange vest and I wear an orange hat, because you can hear the deep throated rumble of gun fire from unseen places off in the woods.  We live free up here, and, occasionally, owing to hunting accidents, we do die.