If It's a Lie Then We Fight on That Lie

Every once in a while, Twitter shows me something.

Someone managed to add a GIF showing that wonderful 32 seconds from "The Wire" where Slim Charles explains to Avon Barksdale, the king, the essential truth about war, for any nation, whether it's a subculture in Baltimore or for the United States of America. 

It's a truth which explains every American war, with the exception of WWII, going back to the Spanish American War of the 1890's.

Of course, it has much wider application in today's Trumpery era. 

And here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOQCuRdWt-A

Okay, Finally, Someone Who Can Beat Him

Yesterday, Mad Dog heard Cory Booker at a backyard New Hampshire event.
He told an affecting story about washing the blood of a gunshot victim off his chest with water hot enough to cause enough pain to his skin to deflect the pain he felt inside. Women sobbed. You could hear a pin drop.

Mad Dog was unmoved:
1. It was simply too much, too much drama, too theatrical.
2. It was all about appealing to white suburban women who are all about empathy, compassion and who are moved by "heart rending."
(Some men are, too, but this is a pitch which is focus grouped.)

Not that he was insincere. He was just not what Mad Dog was looking for.
Mad Dog loves Elizabeth Warren, but she shares that fatal earnestness of the Democrat: bleeding heart liberal, oozing concern for the wretched refuse stuff Booker is trying to sell.

Don't get Mad Dog wrong: He loves Emma Lazarus and the yearning to breathe free stuff, but he is looking for someone who can withstand the acid rain of the Trump crowd, who say all that's for losers.

Today, it was different.

At a house party in an elegant Brentwood manse, Amy Kobuchar arrived and ridiculed Trump from start to finish. She did the one thing Trump cannot stand: She made a fool of him, much to the delight of the crowd. 

The one thing that makes Trump melt is withering ridicule, laugh out loud, ridicule. 

She mentioned that when Trump pulled us out of the climate accord, only Nicaragua and Syria had not signed on. Today both of these countries have signed on--only the US has not. She went through a few stories about floods and fires and asked: Do you really think we don't have climate change? She mentioned a march of scientists who marched with banners that said, "Science matters. But first, peer review."

She said Trump has been riding on the Obama recovery for two years and he has been doing his level best to torpedo the recovery Obama gave us. 

Everyone was  laughing together. It was cathartic.

From climate change, to healthcare to student debt she said just enough, not too much wonky detail, just broad strokes.

Mad Dog could have listened to her all night.

This is just 4 days after Trump regaled his 10,000 storm troopers in Manchester.

After she finished her stump routine, she took questions, written on slips of paper she pulled from a box.
She pulled  out one slip and read it: "How to you defeat a candidate of charisma with policy?"

She laughed. "Well, I think I have plenty of charisma."

She had already proven that.

Weepy Democrats

Something's changed, it's not that I fear but
Maybe it's that I took care of you too many times
And you grew weaker for a kindness
And sometimes kindness from a friend can break a man
--Rickie Lee Jones

Don't feed stray dogs: They'll follow you home.
--Southern proverb

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
--Emma Lazarus

This is racism. Real racism. 

Riding in to work this morning Mad Dog is listening to 3 stories on NPR:
1. An ER doctor talking about treating drug addicts in Boston who sometimes return to his ER 3 times in a single day with overdoses.
2. An activist talking about Trump's new policy to deny entry to immigrant family members if their US citizen relatives who are sponsoring them have been on food stamps or Medicaid--as a way of preventing people entering who will become burdens to the state.
3. A Democratic politician who says Donald Trump is a racist because he says immigrant caravans are filled with MS-13 gang members.

Now Mad Dog is a radical leftist Democrat, he knows this about himself. But something about these stories dived subcutaneously, got into his blood stream and started his blood boiling. 
Mad Dog would like to address the drug problem, the problems of addiction, would like immigration to be fair and orderly and he agrees that there is something suspicious about a man who sees a dark man coming across a border as a rapist gang thug but who smiles and opens arms wide when he sees a blond Norwegian at the gate.

Furthermore, Mad Dog thinks we are doing something wrong in the United States that we have so many mass shootings and so many home shootings compared to other nations, especially English speaking nations.

On the other hand, nothing gets Mad Dog more irritated than hearing the typical Democratic response to all these problems because it sounds so effete, formulaic and wrong headed and the posture is always one of lachrymose --"I'm so sorry for your loss"--and never tough, pragmatic.

The Trump fan will say:
1. That drug addict is a leech on society. He is making his problem our problem. He keeps presenting himself to the ER for care then goes right out and repeats his transgression.
2. That immigrant family is on food stamps and gets free insulin from Mass Health when my insulin costs me $600 and why does the government take better care of these illegals than it does for me, a hard working guy who puts roofs on houses in the hot sun all day?
3. Trump is not racist. Look at his rallies--always a few Black faces in the stands behind him. He says he is doing more for Blacks than Obama by opening up factories and getting them jobs. Would Hitler or George Wallace have shaken hands with Negroes on stage at their rallies? Trump never said he didn't want Black immigrants or brown immigrants. What he doesn't want is criminals and people who will go straight on welfare. Has nothing to do with race. He doesn't like "shithole" countries. His antipathy is not toward Blackness but backwardness. He loves rich Black people.

What Democrat is this loved?

Anti Trumps keep pointing to the Statue of Liberty and the idea of the maternal gathering up of the suffering as the ideal of the United States.
Trump is saying, "NO! Our ship is full!"

Compassion is out, hard edge is in. We take care of our own, not the whole world. Africa, South and Central America, Asia, South Asia are huge buckets and we cannot contain all their misery in our cup.

Do we turn her away?

The fact is, Mad Dog believes, most of his fellow citizens are somewhere in between these two extremes.
1. There should be care for drug addicts, but the addict and his family are not primarily our burden. These folks have to get themselves right. We can help in a limited way but the responsibility of getting you clean is not ours.

2. We want to provide limited welfare--the welfare system was changed during the Clinton years to accommodate people briefly, for a matter of months, but we cannot support every needy family indefinitely. We can tide you over, but not accept the full burden of your family indefinitely. You must learn some skill and work. When Trump says he's open to immigrants with PhD's this is what he's tapping into. Send us your well trained, your high tech stars, but keep your failures.

3. It was for years a liberal trope that 90% of our prison population is Black, which proved, ipso facto, that the justice system is unjust and biased. 
But then someone asked, "What if 90% of the crime is committed by Blacks? 
Suppose the justice system simply incarcerates, color blind?"

The average citizen, reading his newspaper sees the description of the perpetrator and sees "a Black male, in his twenties" often enough it makes an impression. 

4. As for immigration: Yes, we want immigrants, but since the early 20th century our doors have been closed, often to whole classes of people, particularly Asians and Africans but even to southern Europeans. That was done on a straightforward master race/Nordic race racist basis emanating not from the slack jawed, illiterate Southern simpleton, but from the Harvard, Princeton, Yale set of privileged entitled white males.
Trump is simply atavistic; he's nothing new. The whole Emma Lazarus thing was but a flicker.

Desperation

We can work out immigration but we need to decide basic things like are we out to "reunite families" or to import talent or to be sure new immigrants will not be unemployable or diseased? We used to exclude people for TB and trachoma. In recent years we admitted people with HIV and severe heart disease which were sure to cost the public coffers dearly. What do we want to do about allowing the disabled or unemployable to immigrate? 

Is this racist?

What we need is thought, not slogans.
But the left gives us bumper stickers.
Trump gives us rallies.

Studying Trump; Learning from Trump

People who loathe Trump cannot penetrate his armor.
Intelligent, scholarly, otherwise learned and effective people melt before his visage.

Why? They simply lose their cool. They stop examining the disease under the microscope or in the lab and they erupt in a bilious outrage and all hope of effectively striking back at him is lost.

This happens in various (usually contact) sports: If you can just get your opponent to blow his top, he'll self destruct and be unable to hurt you.

So Mad Dog submits this proposition for your, kind reader's, consideration: Let's find what is attractive about Mr. Trump. Why people love him, and then see where that takes us.

First of all, you will note, his rallies are not conventions of snarling dogs.
People you see behind him are grinning ear to ear. 
The people you cannot see in the audience are laughing uproariously.

Take just a random, recent clip of Trump speaking to a crowd in Texas, where he complains about the criticism coming from the liberal/fake news media: 
"They complain about my saying we are seeing an INVASION coming across the border! Ten thousand coming across! What else do you call it?"

He laughs. 
The crowd laughs with him.

"Well, of COURSE it's an invasion what else would you call it?"

Now he is all reason and incredulity that the obvious truth of this assertion could be questioned.

"And what can we do about it?" he goes on, grinning.

"Shoot 'em!" someone cries out from the audience.

"Well, that's only in the panhandle you can get away with that stuff. Only in the panhandle!" Trump roars.

The crowd roars. 

Now, what has he done here, exactly?
1. He has shown the crowd he knows there is a panhandle.
2. He has suggested he shares an inside joke about the panhandle with them. (Although what exactly that joke is eludes Mad Dog, who is not even sure he wants to know.)
3. He has used a big number to substantiate his claim, 10,000. Where that comes from doesn't matter. He just says it. 
4. He shows the good folks of Texas he is with them on shooting folks first and asking questions later--a good ol' Texas tradition.

Despite his red tie and designer suits, his New York origins, he has shown he is one of them, can laugh with them, can reduce those self righteous, sanctimonious snots who are the Eastern liberal media to sputtering effete puddles of jelly.

And what is the response?  Joe Scarborough explains, tediously, that this is bad. This is racist. This is the President being unpresidential.

Trump knows if you can get the crowd laughing with you, he wins.

What Democrat--other than Bernie, on occassion--can do that?

Justice Thomas Instructs on Eugenics

"The use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical. The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement. That movement developed alongside the American eugenics movement. And significantly, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause.

Margaret Sanger

This case highlights the fact that abortion is an act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation. From the beginning, birth control and abortion were promoted as means of effectuating eugenics. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was particularly open about the fact that birth control could be used for eugenic purposes. These arguments about the eugenic potential for birth control apply with even greater force to abortion, which can be used to target specific children with unwanted characteristics. Even after World War II, future Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher and other abortion advocates endorsed abortion for eugenic reasons and promoted it as a means of controlling the population and improving its quality. As explained below, a growing body of evidence suggests that eugenic goals are already being realized through abortion."

--Thomas in Box v Planned parenthood.

Justice Thomas

Scholars and educators also rushed toward a eugenic future with enthusiasm. Harvard, Columbia, Wisconsin, Northwestern and other universities added eugenics to their curricula. Booker T. Washingt, who harbored the belief that self improvement could be passed along genetically, invited Davenport to speak at the Tuskegee Institute.

--Danile Okrent, "The Guarded Gate"

In  his opinion in Box v Planned Parenthood, Justice Thomas says Planned Parenthood is a vile organization, determined to use abortion to eliminate Black babies as a way of maintaining the racial purity of America. He particularly savages Margaret Sanger, who was addressing the needs for contraception in the early 20th century. He does include Alan Guttmacher, who was still active in the 1950's.

Of course, Thomas is an amateur historian, and is apparently unaware of the tenure of the times in which Sanger and even as late as Guttmacher, functioned. He knows only what he wants to know about the waters in which Sanger swam.

When we think about the recent criticisms of Justice John Stevens, attacks which focus on his willingness to admit he came to his conclusions based on facts, experiences and thinking which occur outside legal cases, one should think immediately of Justice Thomas, who like the "orginalist" Scalia, refers to history extensively, to justify his opinions, and that history is a selective reading of sources, often biased. 

The problem is, history is one long argument and you can never have enough information. Just when you think you know something, another piece of information arises. (Think of Abraham Lincoln, who has been knocked from his pedestal with the case of the 38 Dakota Sioux--he signed the order for their execution, the largest mass execution in American history: Turns out the people of Minnesota presented him with the demand to execute over 300, and the ultimatum that he execute Indians or they would take the law into their own hands and  kill Sioux men, women and children, without the help of the government if he did not sign on.)

Reading Okrent's illuminating book on immigration,"The Guarded Gate", you find long chapters  devoted to the eugenics movement in America, which formed the basis for an attempt to discern who we should want to allow to live in the United States.

It is astonishing how thoroughly "eugenic" beliefs permeated the "intelligentsia" of the country, and in England, where Bertrand Russell, Charles Darwin's son, and a host of intellectual luminaries signed on.

Underlying the eugenics thing was the idea, based in an agrarian society, that you could improve "stock" by selective breeding, as you do with cattle and horses, and that over time, given the immense wisdom and perspective of the educated, intelligent and right sort of person (Theodore Roosevelt's phrase) you could produce a stronger, more vital, successful and dominant nation.

Willet Hays, of the American Breeders Association, would give men and women an eleven digit number so that they could chose to mate with "those of equal genetic excellence." (Susan Patton, the Princeton grad and mother of Princeton grads echoed this sentiment when she advised Princeton women to marry Princeton men, who were most likely to be "worthy" of them.) There was a Better Babies Bureau which sponsored competitions and Charles Davenport, the Harvard physician and "eugenics scholar" advised the BBB to judge babies by their heredity as much as by what they could see in front of them.

Peter Kropotkin 

There were, of course, detractors, who questioned whether men were wise enough to actually know what "good" genes are, and the idea of genes was still fairly rudimentary. Peter Kropotkin, a wonderful character, a descendant of the Russian czars Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible, who self exiled to London, and who had been brought up in an Moscow home with 75 servants and a country estate with 100 more, attending a meeting of eugenicists rose to ask them, when they proposed sterilizing imbeciles, whom the eugenicists proposed to sterilize: "Those who produced degenerates in slums, or those who produced them in palaces?"

Bad Stock, Inferior Race

And a Methodist pastor from Minnesota, Samuel G. Smith,  noted that "genius was the surprise of history" noting Lincoln, Michelangelo and Luther arose from ordinary, undistinguished families. Nurture and environment mattered to the assessment: "Shakespeare could have done nothing among the Hottentots, or Beethoven among the Alaskans."

Samuel G. Smith

But then he got to the essence of the argument: The world, he said, has "suffered more from the vices of the rich than from those of the poor."

This struck at the heart of the eugenics movement, which flowered from the drawing rooms of the successful, the rich and the prominent. These people believed either tacitly or overtly that criminality, poverty was genetically inherited, and that whatever it was they had inherited, made them successful. ("The rich are different," as Fitzgerald said. "Yes," Hemingway replied, "They have more money.")

The cream rises to the top, and the rest is used and some spoiled milk must simply be discarded.

All this was so pervasive to assail Margaret Sanger for having dabbled in this thinking is like attacking George Washington and his doctors for believing bad vapors caused disease, before the day of microbiology, Semmelweis, Lister and germ theory. And how do we know what people actually thought? Was Shakespeare an anti Semite? No surprise if he were, given the prevalence in Elizabethan England, but the Jew in "The Merchant of Venice" asks, "Am I not a man? If you prick me, do I not bleed?" Not the question you would expect from a thorough going hater. Hate depends on de humanization, and yet Shakespeare gives the Jew that line.

Again, what we know about historical figures, what they believed and even what they did is shroud in the webs of history.

I lived through history--the war in Vietnam, the protests, the Civil Rights era, the moon shot and the reaction among Americans who thought it arrogant to shoot for the moon while our cities burned in race riots--and what I read of that "history" now always leaves me shaking my head--yes, that was true, that happened, but that does not tell the whole story.

So it is with Margaret Sanger and Justice Thomas, who rages against eugenics, which deserves to be railed against, but in his outrage, he neglects the "what else"?

Of course, in the case Box v Planned Parenthood, the whole question of history is misused. What does it matter what the origin story of Planned Parenthood is if it is not that today? Ford Motor company was founded by a man who wrote "The International Jew" and who traveled to Berlin so Hitler could pin a medal on his chest. Name a company which existed in the 1930's and you come up with a Nazi, from Mercedes to Volkswagen to American companies now owned by German conglomerates. 

Corporations, and Planned Parenthood, dear justice, are not people.

Meritocracy: The Demon Seed of Eugenics

"The immigrant is a brutal destroyer. He spoils every bit of nature in his own country, then comes to new fields in our country to destroy them."
--Charles Barker Bradford

"Filthy, lousy, and diseased, scum of the earth, the off scourings of European nations."
--Hudson Maxim

Reading Daniel Okrent, the value of book length treatment of an important topic comes full force.

"The Guarded Gate" is primarily about American attitudes toward immigration, but Okrent cannot explain the who, how, what and why without examining the mindset of those who drove, and who attempted to drive, thinking about immigrants.

Of course, in the 18th century, America was not rich, and it was separated from Europe and Asia by oceans, so there was no great wave of immigration to consider, but as American wealth grew, that force, analogous to osmosis, began to draw inexorably increasing numbers of immigrants to the continent. So it has always been with wealth: wealthier locations exist (cities vs rural, rich countries vs poor) and people living in poorer areas begin to migrate toward wealth.

By the end, of the 19th century, America became a magnet for the destitute, the starving, the abused of Europe and Asia. The potato famine in Ireland, poverty in southern Italy, pogroms throughout the Pale in eastern Europe drove Irish, Italians, Jews in large numbers (hundreds of thousands) to the United States. They were the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Immigration is always a matter of numbers and rates. 

If only 10% of all Chinese (which would be 150 million) and 10% of all folks living in India (another 150 million) decided to immigrate to America tomorrow, that would be a number virtually equal to the current US population. Add to that the roughly 40 million Central Americans and you see the problem. Even a lifeboat has room for only so many. 

But in 1890, America was not "filled up." In fact, the captains of industry wanted more immigration because that meant cheap labor, while labor unions opposed it, because they thought they were protecting members' wages. It was the millionaire class, the factory owners, who voted down Henry Cabot Lodge's "literacy" test which was meant to screen out imbeciles and low grade intellects from admission to the US shores. Actually, the literacy test was meant to screen out not just individuals but entire groups, i.e. Italians, Jews who were often not able to read English.

Lodge and his Boston gentry were disturbed by what he saw as the dregs and rejects Europe was dumping on the US. 
"The degenerate spawn of Asiatic hordes...They were coming to America to cut throats, throw dynamite, conduct labor riots and assassination."

But, as his opponents noted, it was unlikely European royalty would want to move from their positions of wealth and privilege; it was the losers who would look for another game. 

Okrent explores the attitudes of the reigning powers in America around the beginning of the 20th century and the cast of characters includes people we thought we knew: Theodore Roosevelt, whose image is on Mount Rushmore, who spoke of the threat of "racial suicide" if the white race did not reproduce up to the fecundity of other races arriving in America and the USA was overwhelmed by non white immigrants of low intelligence and drive; Eleanor Roosevelt, who later advocated for Blacks, but who remarked she could not face another "Jew party" where those uncouth undesirables were present; Oliver Wendell Holmes, Civil War warrior, Supreme Court justice who famously said, "three generations of imbeciles are enough" when he voted for sterilization of a woman who was said be mentally retarded (but who probably was not.)

Davenport

Meanwhile, a Harvard PhD came up with a theory of "eugenics" which proclaimed that a gene existed for each of separate qualities: courage, artistic ability, discernment, the ability to cooperate with others, social graces, tact, humor, mechanical ability, moral stamina and sexual morality. He was Charles Davenport, the founder of the Cold Spring institute which developed a survey of the population for these and hundreds of other traits, the Eugenics Records Office, in hopes of guiding gifted and talent people to mate with each other and, ultimately, to exclude people with inferior genes from the country, by either deportation or denial of entry.

The implications of Davenport's bogus "biology" all rest on the idea that complex traits, like "intelligence" or "morality" were inherited like the color of pea flowers, controlled by single, discrete genes.

Coming from an old Boston family of impeccable credentials, Abolitionists, Harvard and Stanford pedigrees, Davenport gained entry to the American royalty of the day, particularly the heirs to the Harriman railroad fortunes, but also Rockefeller (oil) and Carnegie (steel).
Davenport differed from most of his fellow travelers in the eugenics movement in that he believed there were some intelligent people among even the most "backward" groups--even Italians might contribute the occasional good genome. But most of his friends saw no exceptions among the undesirables and would have banned all immigration apart from Scandinavia and the British Isles. 

Mary Harriman

Once Okrent describes the almost unimaginable wealth of these people, you can almost understand how and why they came to believe they were, like Arthur drawing the sword from the stone, cosmically (and genetically) destined to greatness, and by extension, why the ragged, huddled masses were not.

And once you peruse the lists of traits the Eugenics Records Office used to fill up index cards with scores for confidence, drive, courage, musical ability, mechanical ability, vocabulary, confidence, optimism,  you can fast forward to the SAT exams, and the Harvard admission office which assigned a "personal score" to applicants, particularly tough for Asian applicants, for traits like "courage" and "likability."

Mary Patton

And you get Susan Patton, the Princeton alumna, who implored Princeton women to marry only Princeton men, to ensure the best genes mix and Princeton grads not squander their superior traits on lesser human beings, who will only dilute the talent pool of the nation.

"Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you."
--Susan Patton, on marrying and propagating with Princeton men

The whole idea of "meritocracy" in America might be separated from race--although ideas about merit so often travels with ideas of racial superiority it is often hard to do--but, at bedrock, it rests on the notion you can define the worth of a person, assign a scoring system, and then cull out the inferior, as if you were selecting for superior vs inferior potatoes, and you can improve the "stock" of the nation.

Whew.

SCOTUS & The Black Magic of Objectivity

A particularly irritating and insipid article by some professor at Pepperdine Law School appeared in the Sunday Times. Mad Dog is still trying to simmer down.

Professor Barry McDonald faults Justice Stevens for allowing his personal experience to interfere with "the objective and consistent application of established rules of law."

This is the old "we don't make up the law; we just call balls and strikes," argument, which is the fundamentally pernicious canard which continues to strangle efforts to bring to SCOTUS the critical changes it so richly requires.

The framers of the constitution never specified Supreme Court justices had to be lawyers, or for that matter, how many justices the Supreme Court should have.

The idea that the justices should be rigorous adherents of law, of stare decisis (precedent) is a more recent development. (And one which Justice Thomas most flagrantly denies.)

In fact, the most important cases reaching the justices have no true basis in law; they reach the Court precisely because law is unclear.

Does a man who is not a human being, but property (Dred Scot) have standing to sue in court?  That gets decided not by law but by the experience and bias of the justice. The Constitution does not define a human being.

Can a school system which is separate but equal be faulted? Only if you conclude separate but equal is an oxymoron, that separate is never equal by virtue of the discrimination which defines the system.

If a student protests, off school property, as a publicity stunt from a morally questionable enterprise (The Olympics, Inc.) is paraded in front of his school, can the principal rush across the street, tear down his banner and suspend him from school? Where in the Constitution is the answer to this question? Free Speech? No, free speech is on the student's side; but  the justices found an  imperative for students to be kept under adult control in the Constitution. Where is that passage?

And if a local jurisdiction outlaws handguns (Heller v DC) and the 2nd amendment is a single sentence, containing the only explanation in the Constitution for why a particular right is granted:  "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," how do you reach the conclusion, by following the law, by simply calling balls and strikes, that grants a right to personal, individual ownership of a hand gun? Talk about "consistent application of established law: Justice Scalia did intellectual contortions to find a reason to reject generations of established law on that one. He was a gun enthusiast.

The travesty wrought by this persistent fantasy that black robed justices are somehow wiser and more qualified to render "objective and consistent" rulings would be risible, if it weren't so damaging, keeping us mired in the dreary reality of a reactionary court for the next 30 years.

Why the NYT did not allow for online responses to this nonsense is beyond me, unless of course you suspected what the reaction would be.