Dr. Christine Blasey Ford opened the door with her heroic testimony on Friday and then these two women forced Senator Flake to listen. This is telling truth to power.
Category Archives: Current Affairs
The FBI has raided Trump’s attorney, or, officially, the office and home of Michael Cohen
I want to start with The FBI is out to get Trump (and back pedal from there). Trump slandered the FBI throughout his campaign and – and there is no better way to say this – fucked over the FBI ever since he has been President. The fact that he has actually done this ignores one of life’s cardinal axioms, You can’t fight City Hall and it makes me wonder Why would he do this? I can come up with a theory on the slandering during the election part; he may have thought that it gave him street cred as an outsider – especially compared to Hillary Clinton, who he kept saying, was left off easy by the FBI because she was an insider – it gave the message that his campaign was not just against the Democrats but against the unfair and unresponsive insider government itself, and it was a pre-excuse for why he lost, if he did lose, which, a lot of evidence seems to show, Trump expected. But, once Trump was elected President, Why did he go out of his way to alienate the FBI?. I don’t know but I’ve got a half-baked theory.
Going all the back to 1973, Trump has acted as if he were above the law and reacted to problems by suing and then, often, settling. In that first year, 1973, he was sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination and he sued back for 100 million dollars. They settled and he, essentially, agreed to follow the law. As an aside, he didn’t follow the law and he was sued again for breaking the settlement agreement. End aside. Since then, Trump has defended about 1,450 lawsuits and usually settled for less than he would have had to pay if he had honored the agreement (he has also sued about 1,900 times). I think that this has left him with the belief that laws are malleable and law enforcement pretty weak.
Trump has been referred to as a businessman and, while he has been in business, he is not an organizational chart kind of businessman with the kind of checks and balances that implies. He is more of a mafia-type businessman in which he is the absolute monarch at the center of an organization. It was easy for Trump to confused loyalty to him with virtue so that anybody who is not loyal to him is, de facto, not virtuous and shouldn’t be in the organization. He has never had a Board of Directors to moderate his impulses, and, one thing for sure, he is impulsive. That those impulses have largely worked out in the past has emboldened him. The FBI with its loyalty to its own rules and procedures is never going to be loyal enough to Trump for Trump; that aggravates him and he lashes out. Why not? He is now more powerful than ever.
People join the FBI for all kinds of different reasons, to help make society safer, to bring criminals to justice, for some, it is a safe government job and for some, it is a way and place to feel powerful, to feel dominant. I once heard an interview with an L.A. gang member, in talking about the anti-gang unit, he said: “They are the biggest, most powerful, gang; they always win.” Well, the biggest, most powerful except for the FBI.
The FBI embodies the same desires as its agents, it wants to make America safer, jail criminals, and it wants to be dominant, it wants to be the most effective law enforcement agency in the world. This is not an organization that takes criticism well, especially fake criticism. Trump has picked a fight with the biggest gang in the country and it is already not going well for him. To show how serious this is, the FBI has even broken through the client/attorney privilege. That must not have been easy, they had to prove to a judge that they were looking for something, not just fishing for anything, but looking for a specific something that they had a good reason to think they would find in Michael Cohen’s office. In the process, they must now have all his hard drives, and our hard drives know even more about us than Facebook.
Guns, guns, guns
“The adults have failed us.” A student on a Facebook clip I can no longer find.
I’m thrilled and actually surprised, that, at long last, somebody is protesting the NRA and their program of guns and more guns for all no matter how many people get killed. I’m surprised and actually thrilled that it is the children that had to finally do it. That unknown student is right, our generation, my generation, have failed those who are following us in almost every way; Global Warming, Environmental Degradation, Income Inequality, Unsafe Schools – let alone good schools – Deteriorating Infrastructure, Perpetual war, to name a few ways.
Maybe it is always the young people who bring change but high school age children seem younger than usual to me. On the other hand, they are the ones who have to live in this brave new world. Hooray for them!
First Supermoon of the month
For reasons unknown to me, I have not been able to upload any pictures since the Supermoon. Last month, we watched the Moonrise from Twin Peaks but we went to Corona Heights, lower and north of Twin Peaks. Because we were lower, I thought the moon would come up slightly later but, because it was the evening of New Year’s Day the San Francisco skyline was not as lite up. The crowd, however, was local.
A March for Science
The March for Science was kind of our rational for going to LA, that, and seeing Michele’s Irish cousins. The March was fun and interesting and I always feel very moral when I’m doing something more than complaining about the world we are in.
However, to a non-scientist the march seemed pretty disorganized we – Michele, really, I was just along for the ride – couldn’t find the actual time of the March. She did find the program, however, which was that everybody would meet at Pershing Square for some warm-up speeches, march about seven blocks to City Hall, listen to more speeches, and wander back to Pershing Square for music and even more speeches. When we got to Pershing Square, it was almost empty and we were told the party had decamped for City Hall, so we started walking over to City Hall only to find ourselves swimming upstream against all the marchers who were returning to Pershing Square.
Just before we got to City Hall, we ran into a little group of protesters? counter-protestors? who were segregated from the marchers and surrounded by police.
When we got to City Hall, the speakers were still speaking and the marchers were milling about but the layout was such that we couldn’t see the speakers or hear them very well. After about a half hour, we joined the part of the crowd that was wandering back to Pershing Square which took us right by the Bradbury Building.
As an aside, if you know the Bradbury Building, the chances are it is from Blade Runner, if you lived in LA in the early 60s and were interested in architecture, the chances are you know it from the very acrimonious fight between the entrenched powers of friendly Developers and City Planners that were bringing their version of the future to LA and the emerging preservationist movement that wanted to save at least the highlights from the past. The Bradbury Building was old – built-in 1893 – and, more importantly, very inefficient and the site would have made a great site for a new highrise building, something along the lines of Lever House, perhaps, but the building is also an architectural and engineering tour de force. The Bradbury Building was high-tech for its time and, somehow, resisted being torn down. That’s not to say it prospered; for years, the building lingered, slowly deteriorating, not protected as a Historical Monument but, somehow, escaping the wrecking ball. Finally, almost one hundred years after it was built, the Bradbury Building was bought by a sympathetic owner, Sydney Irmas, and under the direction of Brenda Levin, was restored to its former glory.
End aside. Meanwhile, back at the March, Michele and I switched from trying to find the center of action to taking portraits of marchers with their signs.