Category Archives: Americana

Blowing up mailboxes

Americana, Around home

Mail boxes-00286

When I was a kid, a teenager, we blew up a guy’s mailbox several times. I don’t remember the reason, if there was a reason, but it couldn’t have been much of one. But were just beginning to realize our powerlessness as teenagers, on allowances, in a world of rules not of our making.

A couple of years ago now, we were turning right onto 4th Street in San Francisco and a homeless man cut across the street in front of us. He walked as slow as possible, just dawdling across the street while, eventually, four lanes of traffic were stopped, all of us watching him through angry eyes.

The New Yorker has an article about the White House Pressroom in the Trump era. Part of the article is about an infuriating a troll named Lucian Wintrich who is now an accredited reporter complete with a “make America Great Again” hat. According to the article, Wintrich blogs and posts posts like “BuzzFeed Admits Liberal ‘Fake News’ No Longer Works — Points To Gateway Pundits as  News Of Future” after BuzzFeed ran a story  accusing the GateWay Pundit, among other right-wing blogs, of using “alternate facts. Wintrich seems to be smart and he is surely smartass but he seems to be more interested in mocking the news rather than reporting it.

I think the three antidotes above have, as their common denominator, a theme of powerless men trying to exercise the only power they can muster.

Intelligence is not a virtue, it ia a measure of something else

Americana

DSC00064

What an idiot. My first thought when hearing Trump’s scheme to add 10% to the military’s already bloated budget (last year’s military band budgets totaled $437 million dollars, for example, as compared to 148 million for the entire National Endowment for the Arts).

My second thought was How ironic, calling Trump is stupid is exactly what I’ve been ragging all my friends on for the last six months. Trump is not an idiot, he is smart, very smart. He is also an asshole and I think that is the problem. We Coastal Elites tend to think of reasonable behavior as a sign of high intelligence, and boorish behavior is a sign of low intelligence. It isn’t.

I’ve spent most of my life in the development business and successful bosses, guys who’ve gotten rich, who act boorishly are very common. A good case can be made that being insensitive to the wants and needs of others is a prerequisite for success in the development business (and unmannered and crude are merely tag alongs). 

 

 

 

I can’t help myself, I love Lyndon Johnson

Americana, Politics

smothers_brothers

Fifty years ago, the Smothers Brothers were the gutsiest show on television. By today’s standards, they were very mild but they were critical enough of President Lyndon Johnson that Johnson called William Paley, the head of CBS, to complain, leading to this story I heard on NPR.

“On their final show, Dick read a letter he and Tom had gotten from former President Johnson. These days, President Donald Trump responds to Saturday Night Live skits with angry tweets. Back then, former President Johnson, reflecting on his treatment by the Smothers Brothers, responded by writing: ‘It is part of the price of leadership of this great and free nation to be the target of clever satirists. You have given the gift of laughter to our people. May we never grow so somber or self-important that we fail to appreciate the humor in our lives.’”

 

Time to Volunteer

Americana, Politics

Bernie2

Donald J Trump is president of the United States of America. Even if you don’t like it, even if you are horrified, it is still true. What is also true, is that marches like The Woman’s March don’t change that and they won’t change Trump either. Bitching whether it is facebook, Twitter, a blog, or standing on a street corner,  doesn’t do anything but, temporarily, make the bitcher feel better.

I worked on the Obama campaign and went to a couple of Bernie Rallies plus I’ve complained a lot so I figured I had done all that was necessary but I was wrong. I am just beginning to understand what the Tea Party figured out years ago, that getting people in power, whose values match mine, is the only way to get the political result I want. Get involved. The easiest and fastest way to get people we want into power is in the swing districts of the House of Representatives. That is where this Trump insanity started and, if Progressives want to take back the house and end the insanity, we have to get involved. Here is a good place to start. 

Volunteer

Believing Is Seeing

Americana, Evolution

Eyeball

A couple of parts in my right eye have come loose. It is a little uncomfortable but my vision is still the same so my main problem is my concern that it will get worse. Still, even though I can see as well as before, it is turning out to be a remarkable experience (not really remarkable, I guess, but remarkable to me). When the damage first happened, I saw floaties in my field of vision, pretty big floaties, that I guessed were just debris from the loosening. But now I usually don’t see the floaties, they are still there but my brain has wired around them filling in the blank spaces with information from the other eye, I think, sort of like Content-Aware Fill in Photoshop.

Except that my brain only wired around most of them, not all. While I am standing in the kitchen doing dishes, for example, and a floaty drifts down to the corner of my eye, I will be distracted by seeing the cat just at the edge of my vision field. When I turn my head and look, she is not there. In other words, when the floaty is floating around where there shouldn’t be anything, my brain sort of fills in the blank spot but when the floaty is somewhere where there might be something, my brain uses the information from the eye and makes it something reasonable, like a cat crouching down next to the dishwasher.

We don’t see with our eyes, we see with our brain. The eyes just provide the necessary raw information required for the for the brain to turn it into an image. However, the required information doesn’t have to be very much information. We are incessantly trying to connect the dots, trying to make patterns out of the constant flow of information coming from our eyes. At a very basic level, our brain is overriding our lying eyes.

I suspect that when we know the answer, really know the answer, it is even easier for our brains to override those lying eyes.