Why Isn't Greta Thunberg in School Pursuing a Science Degree?

Is it because girls can't think, contribute to the problems of the planet, then can only bitch, moan, whine and complain -- and demand that other people -- other men? -- get educated and work to fix the problems she is such a qualified world expert to bitch about?

That's the message she is (unintentionally??) sending...

This child has long passed her sell-by date as a novelty, and is now proving a horrible young role model for female students.  Learn bunnies, learn. Your female brain is just as capable of greatness as a man's. The tools you will need in life are available now for your use too. Seize them. Don't repeat the same mistakes as generations of females now, just chanting louder and louder and getting angrier and angrier that the men haven't fixed all the problems in the world yet...

What have you to offer?
That's what life asks, of its sons and daughters.
Some parents teach entitlement, and model their lack of responsibility to their own.  These children grow up "secure" but with little ambition of their own, other than status-raising and making money;  the parents have steered the child's fortunes, but she never really learns independence -- how to feed and raise her own family, without paid outside help --  nor understands how dependent she is on others, until left alone for even a brief period and she falls to pieces...

Greta Thunberg has plenty of adult company, mostly women, in this regard.  She can't save herself, so she yells at the rest of us who are leading independent, responsible lives.  And very soon, she will look to shift the costs of her traveling global lifestyle to the rest of us who have tempered our needs and wants to what we can provide for, without asking for handouts.  Independence.

More women should try it.

What They're Asking Where I'm At...

Just read this on the Internet, someone local, running a poll:

Very curious, if the DNC screws Bernie out of a nomination again this election cycle, will ya'll just vote for whoever else they make their candidate regardless of who it is? Be honest

President Trump to Join Women, Families at the March for Life.

His pro-family policies -- for families that are hands-on in raising their children and would like more first-amendment religious choices in directing the public-school curriculum their tax dollars are paying for -- are served well by the types of conservative judges he is appointing to the courts.

Freedom often means hands off.
You pay for yours, and let me choose and pay for mine.

Redistributing tax dollars to supplement elite lifestyles, over helping children and women who are mothers who do not want to pay for the preferences of others, is objected to by many women who vote. President Trump is choosing to march with these women and see that their voices are heard, and their votes are counted.

I'm sure it will somehow be spun as evil toward women, just as the Iraq wars were spun as helpful. *wave your helpful purple fingers, people*

The less tax money to subsidize poor choices of the elites, the more children who will be valued, loved and raised in healthy environments with their own families.

If that is turning back the clock to a better time in America when childrens's lives were more valued, so be it. #ProLifeIsContagious #LivesNotLifestyles #FreedomOfFinancialChoice #NoMoreSubsidizingEliteFamilies

Never Forget.

Shades of Barry Obama:

"They made promises that are not going to be kept," said Selena Thornton, 45, who works in nearby Caswell County in North Carolina. "Discrimination has been around since how long? Since the beginning of time. And just inviting black people to events is not the answer to that."

In other news, Prof. Camic of UW-Law shows how the Wisconsin tax system can be used to bring one's indigent mother into Dane County for social services support.

Camic, former wife of the former noted sociology professor at UW now at Northwestern, came to America to work as a peasant in-house girl for the then-NYT publisher, helping as a nanny for his daughter. Camic the travelled extensively, and wrote memorably at the man's death, of helping him polish kitchenware after dinner, while his own wife and daughter visited elsewhere in the summer home.

Today, Prof. Camic -- the wife who, like her daughter, secured a teaching position at UW-Law herself, writes that it looks like her indigent elderly mother, recently relocated from Berkeley, will qualify for a living accommodation in the Madison suburb of Verona! Rejoice.

Both Prof. Camic's daughters work (Yale and Harvard grads, they are), and their husbands have solid jobs, but with children of their own to raise, and immigrant generational family care not what it once was, this taxpayer assistance for their grandmother likely frees up family finances for both girls to invest in the trips and opportunities that under their mother's tutelage, they have now no doubt become accustomed themselves, as elite Americans...

An American success story, then?
Or something sadly much more 21 Century?

Either way, we wish the Dane County newcomer well. So many others can only wish to come to this state to unlock free public housing -- African-Americans from Cook County, Illinois, say -- nevermind bringing their parents in to qualify for taxpayer care.

It's enough to make you understand how taxpayers subsidize upper-class White Privilege: how an old Communist lady from Poland (where Prof. Camic now owns property herself -- an international property-owner, she is!), and then Berkeley, with wealthy relatives who surely could afford grandma's care if she were indeed looking at homelessness -- her daughter, and her daugher's daughters (one an Episcopalian now!), marry, assimilate into entitledness, reproduce, and push through the paperwork to qualify their elder for public funds in the great State of Wisconsin -- to understand why this country is where we are today, and where we are likely headed.
-----------------

ADDED: Means testing, means testing, means teasting...

If your extended family can afford the trips, the toys, the fancy wines and cheeses, then they should have to sign a form abandoning their elder to public care.

Sure, show us the family celebrations, the inherited wealth and affluence from in-laws too, the company Christmas parties on the arm of the owner... and then tell us that you prefer your fellow liberal taxpayers to care for your parents and grandparents.

Honor Thy Mother and Father.

It's okay to be irreligious, and to model me-first values. Look at what it gets you: international travel at the drop of a hat to visit with childhood friends at the holidays. The world's best in imports, carried in via suitcases meticulously travelling to those foreign places to sample the best of the best. Underinvesting in automobile safety features to protect fellow motorists who share the road (truth be told, sometimes not even maintaining your own automobile up to standard code, figuring that flat tires and lack of fluids are somehow, good for the environment to cheap out)...

I like blogs because daily we share and exchange information, voluntarily.

People don't often understand, within the confines of their own gilded cages, what messages they are sending to others. If you have no moral qualms about tranferring the debts of your family elders -- should they be incurring them late in life due to poor planning, poor health, or abandoned family committments -- or other misfortune -- onto other less involved taxpayers who do not share your family bonds, then perhaps you need to audit a tax law class at your own state university law school.

Nevermind the credentials, if that's your bag, the tax-saving family skills can be taught and trained to be put in practice. Much like the young, underpaid working-mother caregivers who are often employed and commute into places like that to provide daily taxpayer-provided assistance. It's just societal, family cost-shifting. You wonder how many young relationships break up with a young mother providing extensive, often exhausting human care -- for pay-- to another outside her own family like that. Sad.

What might the world be if instead, she could stay home to raise the next generation, instead of seeing somebody else's loved one out?

That's called Family Responsibility -- the opposite of state aid and communism, right? Funny how the upper-middle-class, more than the poor families, are always most benefitted by the cries for more government family help, like subsidized daycare schools (non religious) and college tuition write offs.

"Is There An Impeachment in the House?!?"

Now don't tell me that joke would have worked better weeks ago, when the impeachment WAS in the House, not in the Senate, where it currently rests...

To me, if you overlook the detail, my joke made me laugh, out here in the hinters. Are the Senators allowed to laugh, if they can't talk or otherwise communicate? A smart participant would be looking to give others in the room something to smile at, I would think...

I 'spose nobody can "accidentally" let a dog escape down the aisle, eh?
Too bad. That might work, if the dog was a runner...

A Narrow Appreciation of a Harder, Lawless Ill.

Clarence Page, a veteran columnist at the Chicago Tribune, sums up some of the criticism of scholar Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, while acknowledging her 10-year-old work has led to eye-opening re. racial incarceration rates.

[Ten] years have passed since another breakthrough book shook up the criminal justice debate: legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Since hers was hardly the first study to claim racial bias in our nation’s criminal justice system, she recalls in an essay that she wrote for the book’s 10th anniversary edition, a lot of people told her not to expect much reaction. Instead, the book climbed the New York Times bestseller list, where it remained for nearly 250 weeks.

A decade later, it is easier to look back and see what made this book stand out — and ignite another debate, even as states like Illinois expunge thousands of minor drug convictions. With ample statistics and historical narratives, she gave voice to what many people had long suspected, especially in black communities. The surge in black incarceration that followed decades of wars on drugs had become, whether by accident or design, a “new Jim Crow,” she argued, metaphorically resembling the original version of racial segregation banned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The nation’s criminal justice system uses the war on drugs to enforce forms of racial discrimination, oppression and “social control” that most of us thought had gone away with the hard-won victories of the civil rights era.

For this, she has received some scholarly pushback, even from those who share her concern for racially disproportional incarceration rates. In his book “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform,” John Pfaff, a Fordham University law professor, argues that Alexander makes too much of the statistics for drug offenders, since they make up only a small part of the prison population — and nonviolent drug offenders an even smaller part.

Most prisoners have been convicted of violent crimes, he points out, and most American prisoners are in county and state justice systems, not the federal system.

Indeed, the federal system houses 221,000 inmates, compared with 1.3 million in state prisons and 612,000 in local jails, according to the Prison Policy Initiative in 2019.

Although the proportion of state prisoners whose primary crime was a drug offense rose sharply from 1980 to 1990, when it peaked at 22%, Pfaff writes, that leaves about four-fifths who were found guilty of some other offense. By 2010, it fell to 17%. Bottom line, says the statistics expert: Reducing the incarceration of drug offenders will not do much to reduce prison populations.

Other scholars have made similar claims. Jonathan Rothwell, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, tries nobly to reconcile the differences by comparing the time and length of sentences for different crimes. Drug crimes have been the predominant reason for new admissions into state and federal prisons in recent decades, but those offenders tend to serve shorter sentences than those convicted of violent crimes.

“Rolling back the war on drugs would not totally solve the problem of mass incarceration,” he writes, “but it could help a great deal, by reducing exposure to prison."

That makes sense. So do a number of black community residents who would like to see tougher law enforcement. The get-tough approach is much less popular now. That helps to explain why former Vice President Joe Biden seemed to be caught in a time warp as he tried to defend his support of the get-tough 1994 crime law that Alexander blames for making the mass incarceration problem worse.

As some of us remember, that bill was supported by a lot of black folks, including the Congressional Black Caucus, although with some reservations as they called for other reforms, too.

But today, years after the totally unexpected crime drop in the mid-1990s, more people of all races are asking questions about the role race plays in our justice system. After all, crack cocaine, primarily a plague in black communities, was treated as a crime problem. Opioid abuse, more closely identified with poor white communities, has been treated as a public health problem.

Racial disparities like that are not easily brushed off as coincidence. Nor should they be. Instead, they help to explain the popularity of Alexander’s book.

-----------------
ADDED: Related...

Not So Black and White: Race and Class Issues.

Yesterday, I read two contrasting articles about criminal bail reform, one by a well respected scholar and one by a woman who lives on Chicago's South Side, who experiences the effects of black male violence and guns daily in her neighborhood.

That doesn't mean shootings occur daily. It means, every day, you think about where you will be and when, and you listen for gunshots with ears cocked, as well as to the chatter of what is going on in the neighborhood around you.

The scholar was writing in a national newspaper on Martin Luther King Day, about the results of her work, and experience. The neighborhood woman had only her stories. She didn't like when men were arrested for shootings, bail set, and the gangs automatically bailed them out -- they were back on the streets before you could say, "Boo!'.

Their victims were more likely still lying on their backs in the county hospital, those who survived their shootings, some the intended targets fully in the game, some innocents in the wrong place at the wrong time -- like a residential front porch resting. Or inside the living room playing games alongside other children.

No-bail-no-jail is not a welcome policy in the neighborhoods where the scholar doesn't live. She shares the skin tone of those affected by black men who kill, but because of proximity: little else.

White people don't run from black neighbors much nowadays. They can't afford to lose their devalued homes, again. They run from bad schools. Poor schools, not because the facilities are not the finest or the faculty budget is limited, but because the local culture refuses to value education.

MIddle-classs people take their children and flee for better schools, in places where voters approve school referenda to maintain the programs their children participate in. Where there is little support in the home for formalized education, the public school as a local institution is devalued, a sports palace, perhaps.

Hence the creep from racial to social-class issues... Residents who don't rely on local schools can stay, a racial mix. And nobody wants to fear their front-windows being shot out, as a mistaken address or sign of initiation.

Until the scholar recognizes and plans to address the very real issue of male gang violence in her racial work, she should not advise policies that will affect the lives of people who must live with the conclusions of her work. Anybody can put it down on paper, afterall.

Realism means putting it down where it can be tested, and sticking around to see the experiment through.

"Our lives are better left to chance. I could have missed the pain, but I'd have had to miss the dance."

Maureen Dowd:

Trump’s ascent does not make it harder for women to ascend — just the opposite. Look at the throng of women who were outraged enough about Trump to march and run and get elected in 2018.

Once a woman electrifies Democrats the way J.F.K., Bill Clinton and Obama did — and the way Trump does his base — she will win.

Annnnnnnnnnd Peggy Noonan crosses the finish line:

We all think our breathless recitations of the latest revelations matter but I don’t know, it keeps feeling like 2016.

Only this time with full employment.

-------------------

Peggy attended a recent Washington DC fete, and captures the mood there:

Meanwhile in full-employment America, Donald Trump is taking out terrorists with drones and announcing trade deals with China and seemingly weathering every storm.

In the China ceremony Tuesday, in the East Room, after a booming “Hail to the Chief,” with a palpable sense of triumph filling the room, with the golden frames of the great portraits shining, Mr. Trump rolled off the names of the CEOs in the audience. There were a lot!

It was in a way a fabulous celebration of the riches produced by capitalism. But it also seemed an almost sinister declaration of the intimate ties between great U.S. corporations and the federal government. 

She concludes with a reference to a classic Godfather scene, but girls and boys today might be more familiar with the Hunger Games banquets and the outrageous dress and hair found there. The procedure. The enunciation. The poor choice of footwear.

Nevermind watches. Footware.
That's the tell.
-------------

Make it a great Saturday everyone, no matter where you are going and how far.  We had a snowstorm here yesterday, never as much as predicted, but fierce to travel in coming down mid-afternoon. And you can't keep people off the roads. It's good to be in a warm dry place, rested, reading here and there of yesterday's results, accompanied to the rhythms of early morning residents chipping ice off their windshields...

Be in touch  today. There's never as much time as we think, even if time were infinite...
 ----------------
 2 Chronicles 7:14

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.

WaPo (Washington Post) Letters to the Editor, Oct. 16, 2019.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren has had her “basket of deplorables” moment. Her response to how she would respond to someone whose faith teaches him that marriage is between one man and one woman was not clever but rude, condescending and dismissive.*

Her answer was especially disappointing considering that there is a very sensible response to that question.

Marriage is primarily a civil function, a legal agreement between two adults conferring certain rights and obligations between the two of them and certain rights and obligations between them as a couple and society.

Any religious ceremony is optional and, in itself, does not make a legal marriage — you still need that license from City Hall.

Churches have every right to decide who may marry under their auspices; they do not have the right to decide who may marry in a civil ceremony.

The irony is that long before same-sex marriage was legalized, there were plenty of religious leaders happy to preside over same-sex unions. These marriages had no legal standing but had all the spiritual standing of any other religious ceremony. It may not be too late for Ms. Warren to reconsider her thoughts on this matter.

Dan O'Day, Alexandria

------------------------------------

* "When asked how she would respond to a man who thought marriage should be between one man and one woman, Ms. Warren’s answer, as it pertains to marriage, was interesting. She said she would tell the male questioner to marry a woman, if he could find one."

The Problem with Pollsters...

If we're going to try and do identity-politics horse-race coverage, and the boys crunch the numbers, then we make sure first they are asking the right questions...

Poll numbers allegedly show black voters support Joe Biden...

But WHICH black voters?  The older establishment Dems, who have seen their fortunes rise within the party, and are the loyal registered voters that the polls usually count (and perhaps oversample?)

Or the NEW black young voters coming up?
I don't think there is strong support for Joe Biden from the up-and-coming black people, especially those young ones NOT on the academic-to-corporation career pipeline that so many smart educated middle-class black youth find themselves today trapped in thanks to affirmative-action numbers that need to be met, and the financial incentives and rewards used to induce. ("They'll take your soul if you let them... Don't you let them! You just call out my Name, and you know where-ever you are, I'll come running, yes I will, to see you again..." ~JT/ Songwriter: Carol King.)

I don't think blacks fared all that well under President Obama, except of course for those chosen for the special programs, the academic-to-corporation paths, and the connected.

If you want to get more black voters on the rolls, give them someone to vote for.  And take note too, Kamala Harris was not their pick.  She appealed to the California liberals who thought her platform should be taking President Trump off Twitter, needling tech companies, desegregating schools via busing (!) (?)...

She is black in skintone, but culturally, doesn't seem to share the same values.

I know most of the current pollster stars are young Jewish men allegedly good with crunching numbers, but like with pundit David Brooks, I think they are out-of-touch with the American populace.

David today appears to be denying that America's Middle Class is rapidly vanishing as we open our doors to the wealth of the world -- which doesn't get so much coverage as the poverty-stricken trickling in from the south -- and price birthright citizenship at whatever rate it they charge a pregnant wealthy Asian woman to board a plane to America to deliver her baby, and another American not sharing our cultural values or history is born.

I'm not anti-Semitic, but I wish we had more worldly thinkers in the American political establishment now, and less of these parochial fellows who think they know the value of everything because they can run the numbers.
------------------------

 *Hat tip to Rodenberry: The Trouble with Tribbles...

Is There Any Place in the New Democratic Party for Non-Elite, Working White Men?

In today's NYT:

“We can’t relive 2016,” said Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, referring to the split between pro-Sanders liberals and other Democrats who wanted the party to unite behind his onetime rival, Hillary Clinton. “Misinformation miscreants will have a field day with this.”

Ill will between Sanders and Warren supporters is now exploding on social media, with angry memes, conspiracy theories and harassing commentary mostly aimed at Ms. Warren. Negative attacks and doubts about party unity are exactly what Democratic leaders do not want to happen in 2020, for fear of handing ammunition to Mr. Trump, as the heated contest between the Vermont senator and Mrs. Clinton did four years ago.

Many Warren advisers and allies think the Sanders camp has long tolerated public attacks on her from his surrogates, and believe he is not reining in divisive and in some cases sexist attacks against her among Sanders supporters on Twitter.

Continue reading the main story

And the Sanders camp is even more frustrated over what they see as an orchestrated, dayslong campaign by Ms. Warren to revive her bid by suggesting Mr. Sanders is a misogynist.

Sanders advisers believe Ms. Warren has hurt herself with the accusations but also put them in a no-win situation, in which they are unable to fully strike back for fear of appearing insensitive but risk incurring damage of their own without rebutting her claims.

Ms. Warren’s decisions at Tuesday’s debate to openly challenge Mr. Sanders’s denial of that remark, and then to confront him after the debate and refuse to shake his hand before the cameras, have also led Sanders supporters to believe that she is acting underhandedly.

 If Mr. Sanders emerges as the nominee, he may find it difficult to energize the female Democrats who were already uneasy with him because of the 2016 race.

And should Ms. Warren become the party’s standard-bearer, she could find it hard to win back the most fervent Sanders backers, who hardly needed any further evidence to claim that the nominating process is stacked against him.

Doh!

I was born on a Saturday.
Many miles on me; more to go?

In the 1887 version of the Monday's Child poem published in Harper's Weekly magazine, it is actually Thursday's child “who works hard for a living”, with Saturday's child having “far to go”.

Mal too.

(I guess at least I can stop working so hard.
hahaha)

Month at a Glance...

Does anybody want to make a bet on the outcome of the impeachment trial?

I think President Trump will be exonerated, and the Senators who sit in the jury will find that he committed no high crimes or misdemeanors that cause him to be removed from office. I suspect the American voters sitting in judgment might well return the same verdict for the president in November.

The media too will win, attracting eyeballs in the short term, and keeping their silos full of political entertainment fodder to feed the masses through the winter, the long hot summer that looms, and then into the autumn harvest, ripe or lean may it be this year, with our national vote gatherings set for early November...
------------

We ordered calendars once in an office at work. Rather, it was the kind of high-budget place that had a secretary pass you an order form and ask your choice of scheduling needs, and they ordered and delivered for you. All choices and colors, leather, big and small...

Daily planners, pocket planners, wall calendars, desk calendars, weekly appointment books, whatever you wanted. "Month at a Glance" was my choice. Those daily bland white boxes on the 12 tear sheets tend to fill themselves in.

(Houseplants, not pets or children: I can't deal with too micro a perspective those little daily planners bring. My eyeballs need to roam ahead in accordance with the brain, processing and planning en route.  Who knows what natural conditions you'll be working with, and where. Best to keep those "plans" in the head too, adjusted accordingly. That's just me, and I'm in the minority, I know. Not too many Month at a Glance planners are ordered or sold, they tell me, the ones you carry with you daily, not the communal hanging wall one... )

God bless, stay warm, and make it a great Thursday. Pray for the fruits of the women laboring today? ("Thursday's Child Has Far to Go...")

*Libya.

Gail Collins in the NYT:

{A} lot of people of both sexes really don’t believe the country will elect any woman president.

How you look at this depends a lot on why you think Hillary Clinton lost. Yes, she did get 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump. But we can’t spend the day bewailing the existence of the Electoral College.

Continue reading the main story

Back to the question. Why do you think she  lost?

“Sexism.”

“Failure to campaign in Wisconsin...” *

That deplorable comment of hers?
Which Elizabeth Warren sadly repeated, revealing her inner self to some?

 ----------------------------

I was originally going to title this post, "Right on, Gail!" and cut the excerpt after, "But we can’t spend the day bewailing the existence of the Electoral College."

Here's more of where Collins went with that:

“She won! She won! She won! She ——”

Sorry about that sharp elbow, but I told you we weren’t going there. Next you’re going to be moaning about Al Gore.

“Al Gore won!”

That’s it. Unless you have a special interest in the election of Benjamin Harrison.

“Grover Cleveland was robbed!”

You understand we need to move on here, right? Personally, I’ve always suspected that Clinton lost — to the degree that she lost — not so much because of her gender as because people just wanted a change. She’d been a starring player in two eight-year administrations. It was pretty clear what we were going to get in another Clinton presidency, and it wasn’t going to be anything dramatically new.

(This is what happens when you get a little bit bored with life and decide you want to juice things up. You spend $50,000 on a new sports car and then drive it into a restaurant takeout window. Or far worse, you elect Donald Trump.)

 This is good stuff.  Funny.

But I wish it had been written, say, three to six months after the Nov. 2016 election.  After the Women's March at inauguration time, this just went on and on and on, and it's a bit late to finally call women on their pre-conceived notions -- that are often just plain wrong -- that sexism caused HRC to lose the election, while still "winning" under the popular vote rubrics...

(Aside -- this is where pre-Title IX women show they have not been in the game very long:  for all her alleged leadership, Nancy Pelosi is voluntarily playing a losing game, knows the final score almost to the number I suspect, and is making but a symbolic show -- much like HRC's "popular" vote -- on her way to losing the impeachment, big time.  You have to be able to think like that in competition, because the world does not award any points for moral victories other than that which strengthens and sustains the fighters themselves. Who probably just hope you have a better overall game plan the next time you send them into a losing fight...)

In short, I wish people had read this Gail Collins column back in Feb. 2017, so the Democratic voters might have adjusted the game plan -- not re-run the same plays -- and realized how much their complaints about the longstanding Constitutional Electoral College results came across as whiny losers.  (Dude, do you even understand how HARD it is to CHANGE the U.S. Constitution?  All those alleged scholar pundits who acted as though they had such a novel idea... that coastal states of high-populace should be "fairly" granted dominance in the Senate, as well as the House, do not understand what actual work it would have taken to implement their ideas, easily stroked onto paper but making them no more reality without the actual workers to get the job done...

Sadly, the Democratic Party is still being encouraged to play identity politics.  So they do.






**
The First Woman President of the United States will not be elected based on fairness, because it is time to shatter a ceiling, or because she overcame more hurdles than her male counterparts.  She will be elected because people want her -- the person -- to be their president.

Period.

Only when you can look past gender/sexuality/race/ethnicity/religion/etc. etc. etc. and see the INDIVIDUAL within can you really evaluate a person for their plans, how their proposed policies might -- or might not -- play out in person.

That's what we should be looking for in a president, and what we do, and will continue to do.  Sometimes, you gamble and you lose.  Thinking an individual is bigger than their identity label, but you have to be honest when they consistently -- over an 8-year period -- prove you wrong.

Until the Democrats admit that, well they might get another identity-politics candidate elected in a divided nation, but I don't foresee unity and an end to national division.  Much the opposite actually:  more splintering...

The best thing you can do for "minority" and numerically underrepresented candidates is to be critical and honest in your evaluation of the individual.  No less.

 (= "Libya".)
-----------------------------

Charles Blow in the NYT argues the opposite strategy, spinning the importance of a character groupthink over an individual's ideas:

Democrats face a real dilemma: The current crop of their party’s presidential candidates are awash in plans and proposals, which in theory is a good thing, but this election will not be decided on that basis.

Donald Trump has transformed the electorate into two camps, sycophants and dissidents, both passionate, both aimed like missiles at November, both with an intent desire to destroy the competition.

This election won’t turn on the definition of “Medicare for all” or its funding mechanisms. It won’t turn on who offers free college and to whom. This election will turn on whether an individual voter sees Trump as a heroic savior or a destructive agent.

This election is about fundamental questions of American ideals: Should foreign countries be invited or welcomed to meddle in our elections? Should a president be allowed to openly obstruct justice without consequence? Should we separate immigrant children from their parents and lock them in cages? Should we have a president who has bragged about assaulting women, paid off women who claim to have been sexually involved with him and been accused by multiple women of being sexually inappropriate with them? Should America have a racist in the White House?

Continue reading the main story

It is issues like these, I believe, that will most animate voters in the election.

No thanks.
I decline to think in those facile terms.
Like this column, "It Gets Worse"...

Trump has laid out his vision for America: It is the racial Hunger Games. It is a dystopian future in which maximum pressure is applied to minority immigrants and trading partners, all to insulate the white working class. Trump is the white nationalist candidate selling the racial romance of reverting America to a time when white workers were virtually guaranteed success and prosperity, often at the expense and exclusion of others.

Blow would have made a good lawyer caricature, shifting the issues to the strawmen he is best prepared to fight, based on his own individual background, which he has generously shared with readers, to learn from, one supposes (or to make a good living, one understands.).  Doesn't make him a wise, or realistic, political strategist though. He writes ugly too.

Americans in the 21st century need to be voting on merit, not emotions. And evaluating individuals for their own worth, not bypassing some of our best to atone for the nation's past sins and omissions...























-----------------[
I'm just glad Charles is not in charge! (... of our days and our lives... of our wrongs and our rights...)

He's not even a Preacher's Kid! (PK). 

2020 is just a 2016 Reboot...

with Elizabeth Warren starring in the First Woman Candidate role, and Bernie Sanders once again playing himself...

I suspect, despite what all the HRC women pundits say, that the result will be much the same.  America doesn't much take to a liberal woman telling them what they can do for her to remake the country to help her struggling people, especially when they've a bit of money in their pocket and the economy is good.

Let Bernie win already. If he loses in the general, the Party flirted with the far-left, and came away wanting. The country can send a message if the Democratic party can't.

But spinning your wheels in a ditch for three plus years, complaining? And then making exactly the same errors in the next election? Watching your former party leaders preach global warming, praise Chicago, then settle for the rest of his life on ... Martha's Vineyard, in an exclusive someday-soon-to-be-underwater oceanside property?

Truth be told, the election the country needs a redo on -- after the disastrous costly and deadly Bush W. years -- is the election of 2008.  Until the party grapples with the identity-politics scheme that arose when the charismatic talking and junior senator jumped the line, I suspect it will be identity politics all the way down...

Will the women voters stay home, enough of them, if Bernie's Bros stick with him in Iowa and he starts putting up some primary wins to make him the nominee?  Will enough of the black vote turn out if there's nobody (non-white) to excite them? Do identity politics matter more than who can get the job done?

If it ain't broke, why fix it?
(So those entitled, who can't really drive, can run it into a ditch again? No thanks. I'm keeping my keys...)
--------------------


AMENDED:  And stylistically, I hate to have to tag this on here, but ... you don't get points if you get there quickly without showing your work these days so... let me fully spell it out for your slower synapses.
 When I write,
"Do identity politics matter more than who can get the job done?", the "job" is not that of getting elected.  The job is of governing, working to implement solid, well-crafted and well-thought-out policies that can THEN be "sold" to the other party's legislators and leaders, and to the American people.

Sneaking stuff through in the middle of the night, privately castigating the intelligence of your countrymen, not reading bills before you pass them, having the Supreme Court twist itself into a multi-flavored pretzel to ensure your unConstitutional mandate legislation -- is it a penalty, or is it a tax? --  passes muster... that's what happens when someone "wins" who wasn't prepared to work the position -- the "job" he, or she, was elected to. It's not a "black" thing... but,

That was the problem of Barry Obama, in a collegiate hornbook nutshell.  Looks good on paper, and in person too (if you like that slight, mixed look), but looks and branding have little to do really with governing a country or ultimately getting the job done for the people that you promised.

Don't look now,
Those cars appear still to be in the ditch, wheels spinning, all these years later...

(Other People: not the Obamas. Reports say the former presidential family have relinquished their national driving privileges and freedoms in the hinters, content to be chauffeured and flown everywhere their schedule in America now dictates. Que success, or is it Quelle?)
----------------

* "that's what happens when someone "wins" who wasn't prepared to work the position -- the "job" he, or she, was elected to."  You wanna play that game?, voters responded in 2016, we'll play that game. Identity politics is not all it is cracked up to be, afterall. When will the lesson be learned?

So While You're Here, Enjoy the View...

and Keep on Doing What You Do!
Hold On Tight; We'll Muddle Through...
One Day at a Time!

 (So Walk With Me!
Somewhere There's Music Playin'...)

War is Stupid...

Culture Club from 1984... sing along today? War is Stupid.

People are Stupid.

Love Means Nothing...
in Some Strange Quarters.

Back then, the idea of "George" in drag leading our country into pointless wars was but a silly song.* For all his bluster, Reagan knew when to pull out, as in the Beirut Marines barracks attack. Sadly, Lebanon again is being used as a proxy warzone. Nobody is safe, because there are no real wars, or declared warzones this way.

*(We had no idea then of the true dangers of the everlasting War Years, the Second Coming of Boy George, the rough beast his hour come at last, slouching toward Washington DC to be installed...)

ADDED: Everlasting LOVE, not war. Silly.

Where life's river flows, no one really knows
'til someone's there to show the way to lasting love.
Like the sun that shines, endlessly it shine,
You always will be mine. It's everlasting love.
When other loves are gone, ours will still be strong,
We have our very own everlasting love.
Real love will last forever.

Not Good, but it Brought the Truth

Zelensky calls for admission of guilt, justice after Iran admits to mistakenly shooting down Ukrainian plane

“This morning was not good, but it brought the truth,” the Ukrainian president said.

A time for e'ery purpose, under heaven...

Ecclesiastes 3 King James Version (KJV)

 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;

 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

 What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?

 I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.

 He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

 I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life.

 And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.

 I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.

 That which hath been is now; and that which is to be hath already been; and God requireth that which is past.

 And moreover I saw under the sun the place of judgment, that wickedness was there; and the place of righteousness, that iniquity was there.

 I said in mine heart, God shall judge the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time there for every purpose and for every work.

 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.

 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.

 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

 Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?

 Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?
--------------------------
Saturday's Child works hard for a living...
Make it a great weekend, friends!
"Rejoice, rejoice!
We have no choice."

Bernie! ?

Bernie.

ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) - Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has overtaken his rivals in Iowa, while Amy Klobuchar is in fifth place, according to a statewide poll released Friday.

The CNN/Des Moines Register Poll shows Sanders at 20 percent, with three other candidates within 5 percentage points. Elizabeth Warren is second at 17 percent, Pete Buttigieg is third at 16 percent, and Joe Biden is fourth with 15 percent.

Did they not realize how much the impeachment / Ukranian corruption news daily out of Washington would affect Joe's chances, or are the Democrats really ready to Change their party too (not the Obama milquetoast brand of change, tweaks here and there around the corners...)

Family Lands Big Old Sturgeon..

... but you just have to click the link, and watch the video, to see what he caught it on.
(hint: his little sister's pink kiddie pole...)

Frozen Laundry, Stevan Dohanos, March 8, 1952

Look at the graphic by Alexander Glandien that accompanies this article...

Will We Ever Figure Out How to Talk to Boys About Sex?

Teenagers and young men still don’t have the right vocabulary. Can we help them get there?

By Peggy Orenstein

Ms. Orenstein is the author of “Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent and Navigating the New Masculinity.”

Are young black men really having difficulties asking to be pegged by white women in bikinis on the bed, who appears to be suggesting (agreeing to?) vegetables and fisting instead of her white finger? (As if the tongue and hotdog emojis upthread just weren't shocking enough.)

I mean, you had the choice of whatever race-colored emojis you wanted to suggest who is penetrating whom... and the young black man's last thought appears to be asking for it.  I wonder if they will try to use this article in the public schools as a conversation-starter in the New York Times schools project that is always being promoted?  Sad.

(ie:

current events
Lesson of the Day: ‘Dogs Can’t Help Falling in Love’
In this lesson, students will learn about a new theory to explain the specialness of man’s best friend, and create a meme to capture the remarkable relationship between humans and dogs.)

Whether We Like It or Not!

Whether the weather be fine, or whether the weather be not... 
Whether the weather be cold, or whether the weather be hot...
We'll weather the weather, whatever the weather,  
whether we like it or not!

Make it a great Friday, finishing up the first workweek of the New Year! 

May there always be work for your hands to do. 

May your purse always hold a coin or two. 

May the sun always shine on your windowpane. 

May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain.

Do We Not Sail on a Ship of Fools?

"Life is so precious and so cruel..."  ~Erasure

Full Moon. Cold Night...

Stay Warm. Sleep Tight...

The Only Winning Move is Not to Play.

Falken: Did you ever play tic-tac-toe?
Jennifer: Yeah, of course.
Falken: But you don't anymore.
Jennifer: No.
Falken: Why?
Jennifer: Because it's a boring game. It's always a tie.
Falken: Exactly. There's no way to win. The game itself is pointless! But back at the war room, they believe you can win a nuclear war. That there can be "acceptable losses."


David: Is this real or is it a game?
Joshua: What's the difference?


Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play"

Oh Canada...

BREAKING NEWS
Ukraine foreign minister says 82 Iranians (were) on board crashed plane
By REUTERS JANUARY 8, 2020 10:59

Ukraine's Foreign Minister Vadym Prystaiko said on Wednesday there were 82 Iranians and 63 Canadians on board the Ukrainian airliner that crashed in Iran.

Detailing the casualties on Twitter, he also said there were 11 Ukrainians on board including nine crew, 10 from Sweden, four passengers from Afghanistan, three from Germany, and three from Britain.

That's an awful lot of dead civilians because some lil fellas get excited when grown men solve their diplomatic and business disputes with military hardware and a killer mindset. Couldn't they take up sports to alleviate the masculine tickle?

"Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran..."

Don't Let the Ghost of John McCain win!
Remember him? Mouldering in his grave?

Dead Hands from the past -- and Bret Stephens' NYT -- should not be writing piss-poor American foreign policy today!

"Just Like Ringing a Bell..."

or, "You Like That...!?!"

In the latest news between warring countries, Ukrainian Airline Boeing 737-800 "went down" at a Tehran airport reportedly killing all 176 passengers and crew aboard.

No word yet from military strategist Bret Stephens or the NYT on how this makes America -- and Israel -- safer tomorrow...

USA!  USA!  USA!

"Pray for Peace, people everywhere...
Do you see what I see?
Do you hear what I hear?
Do you know what I know?
A child, a child, sleeping in the night,
He will bring us goodness and light.
He will bring us goodness and light."

Watching CNN, I howl in frustration when a reporter states that in July 1988 the United States Navy warship Vincennes “accidentally” shot down Iran Air 655, a civilian passenger plane, and that nine months later, General Suleimani arranged the pipe-bombing in Washington of a vehicle driven by the wife of the Vincennes’s commander, Capt. William C. Rogers III. (She survived the blast.)

 

Continue reading the main story

The CNN reporter implies that this demonstrates how volatile and dangerous General Suleimani was. But the F.B.I. was unable to establish that the bombing of the Rogers vehicle was an act of Iranian terrorism; the case remains open. And the attack on Iran Air 655 by the Vincennes wasn’t, in any meaningful sense, accidental — and it killed 290 people, 66 of them children.

In 1988 I traveled to Iran for the funerals of those 290 civilians. Their bodies had been fished from the water of the Persian Gulf and brought home for burial. My editor called me as I left for Tehran, asking me to consider the possibility that Iran shot down the plane itself, since she thought it odd that the recovered bodies were unclothed. “Did they put naked corpses in that plane before they shot it down?” she asked.

She could be forgiven for not knowing the relevant physics: Clothing would be torn from the passenger’s bodies as the exploding plane plummeted from the sky into the sea. It was harder to forgive her cultural unawareness: A state as obsessed with modesty as Iran was — to the extent of covering every hair on a woman’s head and every male kneecap — would never consider undressing bodies before blowing them up.

Continue reading the main story

Ignorance surrounded — and still surrounds — that tragedy. In the immediate aftermath of the downing of Iran Air 655, the United States military’s prevarications came thick and fast: The plane wasn’t in the civilian air corridor. (It was.) It didn’t have its transponder turned on. (It did.) It was descending toward the Vincennes. (It wasn’t.)

The truth gradually came out in the course of the Navy’s own inquiries and in later investigative reports that revealed a pattern of reckless aggression by the Vincennes captain, beginning a month earlier. David Carlson, the commanding officer of the frigate Sides, which was also deployed then in the gulf, called the downing of the Iranian airliner “the horrifying climax” of that aggressiveness. Just before firing at the plane, Captain Rogers had provoked Iranian gunboats and then followed them into Iran’s territorial waters.

Yet the United States later decorated Captain Rogers “for exceptionally meritorious conduct” as commander of the Vincennes during that time. The citation made no mention of the downing of Iran Air 655. How would Americans feel if Iran pinned a medal on a man who killed 290 American civilians?

~ Geraldine Brooks, retired journalist.

God Bless all of the families -- American, Israeli and otherwise -- who are mourning their own sons and daughters tonight.  May we never forget, or be misled into forgetting, our shared humanity with other human beings in this world, in order to artificially advance the monetary and security interests of ... "our own".  What a loss.

(If we respect life, it will show in our own American society.  If we teach our children that killing others makes us stronger, we will see more Sandy Hooks and Stoneman Douglases in the future here at home.  Children learn what they are taught, through example.  Does might make right, or do our smartest minds "win" in life? Mr. Stephens and those who advocate war, violence and foreign assassinations for solving problems, have yet to link domestic gun violence at home with heroic gun violence abroad... but it's all connected in the great Circle of Life, when some begin to conclude, in this variation or that, that Life is Cheap.)

Merry Christmas, and Happy Epiphany!

"... to our Eastern Orthodox friends..."