History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books – books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, ‘What is history, but a fable agreed upon? The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

I used to think Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday, and maybe it still is, but Fall is not my favorite season and this year seems especially fallish. Fall; the days get shorter and the nights get colder. Life gets slightly harder. Now, Thanksgiving, itself, is increasingly taking on the role of reminding us that we took this land away from its original owners. There were people here before the Europeans arrived we did take the land and made the original owners live on shit land and, as a nation, we are slowly starting to own up to what we did. What we are going to really do about what we did is a different story.

A good place to start is to admit that there is more than one history of the United States. There are different stories from different viewpoints and they are all valid. Replacing the White Western European fable as the Agreed Upon Fable with another fable that everybody has to agree to is just going to take us down the rathole of victimhood. Replacing one set of bad guys with a new set of bad guys is not going to bring justice or resolution. It will just bring a new set of angers and resentments.

So this year, in a growing, changing world, Michele and I wish everybody a Happy and Thoughtful Thanksgiving.

“This country needs a therapist. White men [are] losing their power to brown women and it’s freaking them out.” Michele Stern

Last week, for the first time in eleven years, the House of Representatives voted to censure a member. This is a big deal, it turns out, and it has only happened eight times in the last hundred years. It got me wondering what the other centureés did. When I look at pictures of an old white man dressed in a suit with a starched collar, I default to smart, thoughtful, guy; I am reminded of both my grandfathers. But reading through several of the old cases has changed my mind. Not surprisingly, the House of Representatives has a long history of nasty rubes and Republican Paul Representative Gosar seems to be one of them.

That’s not completely surprising since Cozar represents a big chunk of Arizona’s boondocks, his district has been drawn to leave out both Phonix and Flagstaff to make it even more boondocky. In an act of petty meanness Gozar posted an anime video depicting himself killing Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. I have not seen the video – and, believe me, I tried – but nobody, including Gosar himself, denies that it depicts him killing AOC so I am going to go with that. The whole thing is so bizarre, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it. I can’t imagine a situation in which doing something like that would be acceptable, well, maybe two close friends with a history of teasing each other, but when else? In this case, they are not friends, and AOC has a history of being threatened by various right-wing haters. Serious enough threats that the Secret Service, FBI, and Capitol Police were brought in, more than once.

Gosar, in his defense, said that it was a joke, he meant no harm, and that AOC doesn’t have a sense of humor. I guess he thought it was a joke, but it was either a thoughtless, nasty, joke and Gosar should be kicked out of Congress because he is too stupid to make even basic decisions or it was meant to harm AOC. Either way, if this happened in the private sector, I’m sure Gosar would be fired.

What I find most disturbing about Gozar’s so-called joke is not the anime – it’s not surprising that there is a jerk in Congress – but that all but two Republican Representatives voted against censure. All but two Republican members of Congress think it is pretty much OK to make and post a video of yourself killing another member of Congress. The two Republican women who spoke sort of ignored the whole death threat joke thingy and complained about the process and the speed at which punishment had been served. Speaker McCarthy rambled on for close to three hours saying nothing particularly germane. And Representative Ocasio-Cortez gave another great speech cutting to the core of the problem. Give it a listen.

I know a lot of people who regret getting the vaccine. Don’t know anyone who regrets not getting it. A Tweet by Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

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That’s it, the Tweet and the picture – together – are the joke. If you get it, you are smarter or better educated or just funnier than me, because I sure didn’t get it. I’m not sure that I even knew it was intended as a joke. But it was and it is.

Probably the place to start was with the Jews being hounded out of Europe by the Nazis. Obviously, not all the Jewish people were able to leave Europe, or even wanted to, with over six million Jewish people murdered solely for the crime of being Jewish. But a large number of Jewish people did get out and, ironically, many of them contributed to the Allies eventually beating the Nazis. One of them was a Hungarian Jewish mathematician named Abraham Wald. Wald managed to get to the US and ended us taking a job at Columbia as head of the Statistics Department. Like many immigrants, the job was below what his pay grade would have been back home, but it was a job. When the United States entered the war, Wald ended up in a wartime organization known as The Statistical Research Group and it was there that he made a major contribution to the Allied war effort.

The Statistical Research Group worked on problems like how to streamline the supply chain for material going to the Battlefield or the trajectory of bullets fired by a moving airplane and, according to the mathematician and author, Jordan Ellenberg, was a group where Milton Friedman, the future Nobelist in economics, was often the fourth-smartest person in the room. In mid-1943, or so, the military brought the airplane picture above to Abraham Wald with a question in armoring airplanes.

Armour is weight and weight is the enemy of a successful fighter plane: too much armor and the plane is too slow, and too little armor results in a plane being too vulnerable to enemy fire. The military told Wald that “The red dots are bullet holes; this is where our planes are being shot.” And they asked him, “What is the minimum amount of armor needed to protect these areas?” Wald gave them an answer they did not expect. He said, “Put the armor where there are no bullet holes.”

The planes that got hit where there are no bullet holes, didn’t come back. Statistically, this is known as survival bias. I only know one person, that I’m aware of, that refuses to take the vaccine and he hasn’t died or even gotten sick and offers this as proof that people shouldn’t be taking the vaccine. I’m sure he will feel this way as long as he remains Covid-free. Survival Bias.

 

It has been about two weeks since I last wrote here and it is raising my level of angst. It’s not like nothing has happened during that time, or that I haven’t thought about it, but, for some reason, unknown to me, I could never string together an interesting series of comments.

Mort Saul died last month and I wanted to say something, but what? I was a big fan of Saul’s but I haven’t seen or even heard of him for years so Saul’s dying, in Mill Valley at 94, was a shook mostly because I didn’t even know he was still alive. At first glance, dying at 94 seems like a pretty good run, but Saul actually died, as a comedian, when he became obsessed with the President Jack Kennedy Assassination and was canceled. Still, he was the most famous and successful comedian in the country for a while and he revolutionized stand-up. Before Saul, comedians told jokes, Saul riffed on the news, ad-libbing – well, seemingly ad-libbing – making comments on the day’s news from the folded newspaper he carried.

Today, Dave Chappell seems the most like Saul and, like Saul, people are campaigning to cancel Chappell over one, or, maybe, several. of his riffs. In Chappell’s case, it is his remarks in his last Stand up gig for Netflix, The Closer, on transgender people that got him in trouble. I’ve watched The Closer twice and, while Chapell makes several jokes at the expense of trans-people, to my ear, he is never is degrading. Just funny. I think, as importantly, both Saul and Chappell own up to what they have said, they know their jokes should be funny and, if that humor offends somebody, they don’t try to brush it off as “I was only joking.”

That is not the case with, say, the new “Go Brandon” meme that is making the rounds with some Conservative politicians and pundits in Washington. “Go Brandon” somehow became code for “Fuck Biden” but when challenged, the pundits brushed it off as “Just a joke.” But no joke is just a joke, every joke has a target, every joke is commenting on something, even a joke as unfunny as “Go Brandon”, and to brush it off is just a sign of cowardice.

Lastly, here are some pictures I took a couple of weeks ago. While we were at Michele’s family cabin in Olympic Valley, we drove down to Lone pine on Highway 395 and then back up into the mountains on the Cottonwood Pass Road to a little over 10,000 feet, to see what the Sierras looked like with their new dusting of snow.

I’m just passing this on without any comment. Give it a watch.