The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan. The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning, whilst some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan  [sic] and Archie will always be much loved family members. Statement from Buckingham Palace on Prince Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.

It has been a year, almost to the day, since I had lunch with my friend and former business partner, Barbara. It sounded like a good idea when we made the lunch date but it seemed thoughtless once we got there. The place was empty, the windows and doors were all open but, rather than making it seem safer, it just made it seem foolish and risky. At the time, there was one Covid-19 death in neighboring Santa Clara County – that they reported but we now know there were more – and the chances of running into someone that was contagious was real but unlikely.

Three days ago, only one year later, remarkably, I got my second vaccination shot.

As an aside, the former president just put out a press release in a sort of pseudoTweet style – I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn‘t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers! – that is so perfectly Donald Trump; wallowing in self-pity, and whinny, self-serving, exaggeration to the point of parody but that is still slightly true. Trueish, at least. When the experts told him it would take 18 months to two years to get a vaccine, Trump said “cut corners, ignore the rules and regulations, get rid of the safety protocols, just do it fast”. And the drug companies did exactly that and it worked. Something like this is where the cumbersome government bureaucracy gets in the way and Trump had the nerve, or the disposition, at least, to go around it. Of course, distributing the vaccine is exactly where the cumbersome government bureaucracy helps and Trump, in his disdain, did almost nothing, leaving President Biden to pick up the pieces (and the credit). End aside.

I was going to write about R1 Zoning but I keep thinking about Meghan and Harry’s Interview with Ophra. Michele recorded the interview, we both watched it, and now I’m dreaming about them (I must not be alone because I read that more people watched the interview than watched the Golden Globes and The Emmys combined). Still, I haven’t been particularly interested in The Royals, I haven’t seen any of their weddings or funerals but I have watched The Crown so maybe I do have some prejudices.

Watching The Crown, I’ve become convinced that living in the British Monarchy is a nightmare. Everything is controlled by protocols, protocols that have almost nothing to do with reality. When young Prince Charles wanted to get serious about young Camellia, he couldn’t because she wasn’t a virgin. Based on the royal right and expectation of deflowering, I guess. In reality, the Monarchy is almost powerless – Margret Thatcher had to curtsy every time she saw Queen Elizabeth but the Queen couldn’t stop Thatcher from going to war over the Falklands – but still preoccupied with looking powerful. Prince Charles wears a military uniform with a chestful of medals, not medals for doing anything but medals like the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal and the Order of the Bath (my fave is the Queen’s Coronation Medal, awarded when Charles was four-years-old).

Watching the Megan/now exPrince Harry interview, I was taken by how naïve they both seemed. Megan says that she had no idea what she was getting into and exPrince Harry seemed to have no idea that his life was radically different than that of the norm. I walked away thinking that the Royal Family wasn’t particularly racist – maybe the Firm, the quasi-independent bureaucracy that supports and semi-runs the Royals, is but that’s slightly different- but they were elitist assholes. One story on The Crown, which is pro-Royal by the way, revolves around Diana coming for dinner for the first time. Somehow she gets a schedule – whether it was sent to her, given to her, or pinned to the door, I don’t remember – that says something like Cocktails at 5:30, Dinner at 7:00, dress: Evening Dress. What Diana doesn’t know, when she shows up for cocktails dressed to the nines for dinner, is that she will be the only one dressed up. The real schedule is Cocktails at 5:30 to talk about the day’s riding adventures while still dressed in their mud-splattered riding clothes and dinner later. That’s the Royal family Megan walked into and, like a sensible human being, wanted to get away from. Racism feels like just an excuse.

Tarantino says digital is the death of cinema. Fuck you, man. Chloé could get no backing because she is a Chinese woman. With digital we could make our own movie for a hundred thousand dollars at the level they could be shown as cinema. Joshua James Richards talking about Nomadland director Chloé Zhao in an interview in the New Yorker.

We watched Tina Fey and Amy Poehler host the Golden Globes last Sunday and walked away feeling better about the world. Because it was sort of Covid quarantined and sort of not, the Golden Globes seemed, every time we cut to somebody at home, a little like eavesdropping on some very interesting and entertaining people. Of the five nominees in every category, it seemed there was one expectant winner with her/his entire extended family. I was surprised that I had seen so few of the movies and even more surprised at how many of the nominees I hadn’t even heard of.

This year, the Golden Globes honored both Jane Fonda and Norman Lear and we were all reminded of how much they both contributed to Hollywood and to the making of our modern Liberal world. However, listening to people laughing at an old Archie Bunker bit from the 70s is disquieting; it is humorous but the humor comes at the expense of Archie who is presented as, and we all know is, a racist clod. To me, that is somewhat of a problem. There are lots of racist clods in the United States and humiliating them does not make them go away – like we thought it would – it just builds resentment which boils over into doing something stupid, like electing a conman like Donald Trump.

This year, it seemed much more women-centric than any year I can remember. The winner for best movie, Nomadland is a movie by a woman director, Chloé Zhao, who probably would not have won ten years ago. It was one of the few movies we had seen and, based on very little information, I’m glad that it won. To quote Peter Keough of The Boston Globe, who was writing about another one of Zhao’s movies but is just as true about this one, [The film] achieves what cinema is capable of at its best: It reproduces a world with such acuteness, fidelity, and empathy that it transcends the mundane and touches on the universal.

Nomadland starts with the town of Empire, Nevada shutting down which immediately caught my attention. Michele and I know Empire, it is a company town near Gerlach, Nevada which is sort of the home base if someone is exploring Northwest Nevada (I suggest breakfast at Bruno’s Country Club Café, the Country Club part is misleading). When United States Gypsum Corporation shut down Empire, it gutted the area and, in the movie’s background, the general failure of American capitalism is always present. I thought it was a superb movie, thoughtful and, in the end, very affirming.

However…..Nomadland is not my favorite movie from last year, Palm Springs is. Palm Springs is just a fun movie at a time when not much else is fun, but the humiliatathon, Borat, Subsequent Moviefilm won instead. The Crown, which we have seen, won and Schitt’s Creek, which we tried and gave up on, won several awards. I guess we’ll try again. Finally, Jason Sudeikis won for Ted Lasso which we enjoyed.

One movie we decided to give a try after it won for best actress is I Care A Lot but it left us both cold so, as far as I am concerned, winning isn’t a guarantee we are going to like a particular movie. Especially this year.

Lastly, what I most like about both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards is how they reflect our changing society. If one is a racist or a sexist, it must be much harder to watch these programs. As a side note, the woman who made Nomadland, Chloé Zhao – who, BTW, is listed as Chinese but went to high school in LA and lives in Ojai, California – who couldn’t get more than an hundred thousand dollars to make Nomadland, is now the director of a two hundred million dollar Marvel movie with Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie. Now THAT wouldn’t have happen ten years ago.

“I think unfortunately the President was getting bad advice from people who had articulated that the Vice President would have some extraordinary powers that had never been used before .. during certification by Congress” of electoral results, Marc Short tells @PamelaBrownCNN A Tweet by Manu Raju @mkraju Chief Congressional Correspondent, @CNN. Roaming the Capitol halls, covering the Hill and politics. Die-hard Chicago sports fan. Wisconsin Badger for life.

The Tsar just has bad advisers you see A Tweet by Tom Nichols commenting on the RajuTweet @RadioFreeTom Professor, author of “Our Own Worst Enemy.” Curmudgeon. Cat guy. Democracy enthusiast. Board of Contributors, @USAToday, Contributing Writer, @TheAtlantic. commenting on the above Tweet

A million years ago I worked for Enron and I tried to explain the business model to my dad and when I was done he said “that sounds like check-kiting” and I rolled my eyes because DADS and I figured I hadn’t explained it correctly but it turns out I nailed it. A Tweet by Deborah Scaramastra PhD @discoveredpathI ensure orgs hit critical objectives by developing strong leaders, building high performing teams, and augmenting staff when needed.

Historically, maybe not historically, maybe just in our collective imagination, maybe just in the Fairy Tales we are told as children, the King is kind and gentle and he wants only what is best for the country but he is out of touch. The taxes, war, bad roads, you name it, are the fault of the Prime Minister who is cunning and uncaring. I don’t think this is just an artifact of the feudal system, I saw it in the Army with generals and lower leaders, I’ve seen it in companies. I don’t know why we want the king to be good or why we hold these beliefs, it is some unknown algorithm buried deep in our ancestral past, but it is pretty universal. But, the opposite is usually true; it is usually the King who wants more and it is up to the Prime Minister to screw it out of the people.

It seems to me that corporations – and now Limited Liability Companies – are like the prime minister in feudal times. They are the fall guy for the rich owners. We read about bad things that corporations are doing as if they were independent operators, but they aren’t they are agents of their owners, well, owner/CEOs. We read about something bad that Exxon did, not something bad that Darren Woods, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Exxon, did. But Exxon did it because Woods, and probably the rest of the Board, wanted Exxon to do it.

There are exceptions – Zuckerberg comes to mind – but, when we get pissed at the massive amount of profit that Johnson & Johnson makes, $17.3 billion even while they are being sued because of asbestos in their baby powder, we don’t get pissed at the CEO, Alex Gorsky, who made $19,590,777 last year telling Johnson & Johnson to do the things that piss us off. Like the old feudal kings, our new royalty manages to protect themselves.

A couple of days ago, Michele and I were walking and we passed a woman with an extremely happy Dachshund, Michele turned to me and said “I love Dachshunds, they are always so happy.” It got us talking about different breed dogs and their personalities, for lack of a better word, and how much they differ in shape, size, and how that has affected their personalities. Domestic dogs are really a variable species, especially compared to cats or humans, or cows or horses for that matter, and all this variation has come pretty quickly. Something like 15,000 years ago our dogs were still wolves, Canis lupus, that’s somewhere between 5,000 to 7,500 generations. That does not seem like many generations to go from a wolf to a Dachshund (and an Old English Sheepdog in the other direction).

Humans, however, have changed very little in the last 7,500 generations. Yeah, we now come in different colors and hair textures but, compared to the Dachshund versus the Old English Sheepdog, we are pretty much the same. And so are our personalities. Even though we overfocus on different skin tones or nose shapes, we are not really a very malleable species.

I want to start with a story that happened when I lived in Oakland in the mid to late 1960s. My very-exwife and I lived in an old house on Lester Avenue that had been split into two apartments. The main level of the house was split in half so both entries and both main floors were at street level. The house/flats had been pretty rundown but the landlord had remodeled our half so, when we moved in, we lived in half the main floor that had been repainted and refurbished and a newly finished basement bedroom and bathroom that was under our half of the first floor and the other half’s kitchen.

The rent was cheap – $90 a month, as I recall – and it was a convenient place to live, close to Lake Merritt and close to freeway access, but it was not in an area that was considered nice at the time nor was it considered particularly safe. Anyway, after we moved in, the landlord started remodeling the other flat. Usually, he locked it each night, but, towards the end, while he was painting the second unit, he left the windows open for the paint to dry. As we were getting ready to go to bed, we heard somebody walking around upstairs. It was probably in the other unit but it was hard to tell and right above our head. We panicked and my now very-ex-wife immediately called the police.

This was in the summer of 1968, and Martin Luther King had been murdered – but Robert Kennedy hadn’t; yet – there had been riots fueled by Black rage in almost every American City but not in Oakland. What particularly surprised me was that there were riots in San Francisco which seemed much more Black friendly than Oakland which was run like a police state. I wondered why.

Back at Lester, when my very-ex-wife called the police and told them we had a burglar, the cop on the line asked “Is he in the house?” Uhh, no sir. “Then he is not a burglar lady, he is a prowler.” It was not a conversation we expected what with the prowler walking around above our heads but it is good to know the proper nomenclature. Inside the house is a burglar, outside is a prowler.

I think the cop knocked on the door before we even got off of the phone. I went upstairs – with a hairbrush in case it was a burglar and not a prowler – and the cop was waiting outside, weapon drawn. In the middle of the street was another patrol car with another cop standing behind the car with a shotgun pointing at us, me, really. I told him that we heard somebody walking around in the other half of the house and he knocked on the door yelling “police” and stepped to the side. I just stood there, in front of the door, until the cop told me to stand to the side, away from the door. Pointing at the door, he said, “That’s where he is going to shoot.” Up until then, it had never occurred to me that one result, when I knocked on a door, would be somebody shooting at me. But he – they – didn’t shoot and we went inside, found an open window, locked it, and went our separate ways, the police officer back to driving around in the dark and me, two new lessons learned, back to sleep.

As to why the riots happened where they happened, I’ve thought about it a lot and it is complicated, each city has its own particulars. Still, I think that there is a general lesson here, only a hypothesis, really. To greatly oversimplify, nasty dictatorships are stable, think the Soviet Union under Stalin or Saudi Araba under the Saudis, and democracies are stable, think Denmark or Canada, but a pretend democracy is not stable. To us white people, San Francisco talked the good talk – they had something like Safty and Respect on the side of their cars – but, to Black people, they were not what they pretended to be, they were every bit as bad as the Oakland cops. All that good talk was in service of covering up the miserable way Black people were/are really treated in San Francisco in 1968/now. The disconnect is that Black people have been told they live in a democracy with all the liberty and opportunity that implies, but the reality is that they live in an oligarchy in which they are treated as second class citizens. The problem is not reality but the difference between expectations and reality.

Biden’s current mission is to make the world focus on his $1.9 trillion plan for a coronavirus comeback. New York Times Opinion column by Gail Collins.

Watching President Joseph Biden’s Town Hall, I started to tear up. I don’t remember the question or his particular answer, but Biden just seems like such a decent guy (although a decent guy with what seems like abnormally white teeth). I’ve never seen a Trump Town Hall but I’ve seen several of his rallies – on TV, not in person – and he is a stellar entertainer, bullshiting and bantering with a smile, interacting, playing. almost dancing, with the crowd; Biden is an old-fashioned politician and doesn’t do any of those things, but he does radiate a sincerity and compassion along with a technocrat’s grasp of detail that is very effective. For me, he is most effective when he starts to ramble on about a subject that he has obviously thought about and least effective when he sinks into what seems like an over-rehearsed answer.

One thing that really impressed me about Biden is that he can see the other guy’s point of view. When asked about China aggressively terrorizing the  Uyghurs, annexing Hong Kong – which may be the wrong word, maybe suppressing is better – and threatening Taiwan, he said: “…if you know anything about Chinese history, it has always been the time when China has been victimized by the outer world is when they haven’t been unified at home. So the central… Vastly overstated. The central principle of Xi Jinping is that there must be a united tightly-controlled China.” He then went on to say “Well, there will be repercussions for China…China is trying very hard to become the world leader and…as long as they’re engaged in activity that is contrary to basic human rights, it’s going to be hard for them to do that. But it’s much more complicated. I shouldn’t try to talk China policy in 10 minutes on television.”

What most pleased me, however, is that President Biden seems to be a committed member of The Friends of MMT. To refresh your memory, MMT or Modern Monetary Theory, or Modern Money Theory says that a large National Debt is not a problem if it is not inflationary. They point out that Japan has been running a huge National Debt for years without inflation. They also point out that with all the increase in the money supply during the Obama Administration, conventical economics says that we should have rampant inflation by now, but we haven’t. We haven’t even had any inflation with the additional Debt brought on by Trump’s massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Actually, because we haven’t any inflation and a little inflation is considered good, to induce inflation, the Federal Reserve has even dropped the interest rate to a hyper-low 1/4 of a percent. (to quote myself from a post on MMT from about a year ago). In the Town Hall, President Biden said “This is the first time in my career, and as you can tell I’m over 30. The first time in my career that there is a consensus among economists left, right, and center and including the IMF and in Europe that the overwhelming consensus is, in order to grow the economy a year, two, three, and four down the line, we can’t spend too much. Now is the time we should be spending, now is the time to go big.”

With the economy on the skids because of Covid-19 and Global Climate Change roaring towards us, we are going to need to spend money, lots of money, to survive and it is nice to know that President Joseph Biden knows that.

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