Year: 2017

. . . I was 10 or 11, at Camp Wigwam.  Maybe I was 12.  I can’t remember, but I sure remember the rifle range and the ammo and all the NRA safety posters.  Because that’s what the NRA was about way back then — safety and sportsmanship.

Even as late as 1999, the NRA advocated universal background checks at gun shows — “no loopholes anywhere for anyone.”  Fourteen seconds.  Watch.  Same guy who still heads the far darker NRA.

But now look.  Bill Moyers comments on a new 60-second NRA spot that could hardly be more sinister.

Take a look at the ad below and ask whether the National Rifle Association can go any lower. Ponder this flagrant call for violence, this insidious advocacy of hate delivered with a sneer, this threat of civil war, this despicable use of propaganda to arouse rebellion against the rule of law and the ideals of democracy.

On the surface this is a recruitment video for the National Rifle Association. But what you are really about to see is a call for white supremacy and armed insurrection, each word and image deliberately chosen to stir the feral instincts of troubled souls who lash out in anger and fear:

[WATCH]

Disgusting. Dishonorable. Dangerous. But also deliberate. Everything deplored by the NRA in the ad is committed by “they” — a classic manipulation turning anyone who disagrees with your point of view into “The Other” — something alien, evil, foreign.

“They use their media to assassinate real news,” “They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler,” “They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again.”

“And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.”

Well, we all know who “they” are, don’t we? This is the vitriol that has been spewed like garbage since the days of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blasted from lynch mobs and demagogues and fascistic factions of political parties that turn racial and religious minorities into grotesque caricatures, the better to demean and diminish and dominate.

It is the nature of such malevolent human beings to hate those whom they have injured, and the NRA has enabled more injury to more marginalized and vulnerable people than can be imagined. Note how the words “guns” or “firearms” are never mentioned once in the ad and yet we know that the NRA is death on steroids. And behind it are the arms merchants — the gun makers and gun sellers — who profit from selling semiautomatic rifles to deranged people who shoot down politicians playing intramural baseball, or slaughter children in their classrooms in schools named Sandy Hook, or who massacre black folks at Bible study in a Charleston church, or murderously infiltrate a gay nightclub in Orlando.

Watching this expertly produced ad, we thought of how the Nazis produced slick propaganda like this to demonize the Jews, round up gypsies and homosexuals, foment mobs, burn books, crush critics, justify torture and incite support for state violence.

It’s the crack in the Liberty Bell, this ad: the dropped stitch in the American flag, the dregs at the bottom of the cup of freedom. It’s a Trump-sized lie invoked to bolster his base, discredit critics, end dissent. Joseph McCarthy must be smiling in hell at such a powerful incarnation on earth of his wretched, twisted soul.

With this savage ad, every Democrat, every liberal, every person of color, every immigrant or anyone who carries a protest sign or raises a voice in disagreement becomes a target in the diseased mind of some tormented viewer. Heavily armed Americans are encouraged to lock and load and be ready for the ballistic solution to any who oppose the systematic looting of Washington by an authoritarian regime led by a deeply disturbed barracuda of a man who tweets personal insults, throws tantrums and degrades everything he touches.

Look again at the ad. Ask yourself: What kind of fools are they at the NRA to turn America into a killing ground for sport? To be choked with hate is a terrible fate, and it is worst for those on whom it is visited.

Take one more look, and ask: Why do they get away with it?  What is happening to us? How long do we have before the fire this time?

I was a pretty good shot; won some merit badges.  Back then, it was all innocent fun.

IBM is building an artificial brain.

If only Trump hard a healthily functioning one.

Meanwhile, look at some of the ways Baby Boomers may age more successfully than their parents or grandparents did.

. . . I strongly believe that technology will change the face of aging as we have known it since times immemorial,” said Dilip Jeste, director of UC San Diego’s Center for Healthy Aging. “Just as presbyopia is no longer a major problem — thanks to eye glasses — many physical impairments of old age will cease being disabilities with the use of technology. The notion that aging means disability will be laid to rest — and with that, the stigma of being old.” . . .

From the indispensable New York Times:

Counseled by Industry, Not Staff, E.P.A. Chief Is Off to a Blazing Start

WASHINGTON — In the four months since he took office as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, Scott Pruitt has moved to undo, delay or otherwise block more than 30 environmental rules, a regulatory rollback larger in scope than any other over so short a time in the agency’s 47-year history . . .

. . . And he is doing all this largely without the input of the 15,000 career employees at the agency he heads, according to interviews with over 20 current and former E.P.A. senior career staff members. . . .

. . . Instead, Mr. Pruitt has outsourced crucial work to a network of lawyers, lobbyists and other allies, especially Republican state attorneys general, a network he worked with closely as the head of the Republican Attorneys General Association. Since 2013, the group has collected $4.2 million from fossil fuel-related companies . . . businesses that also worked closely with Mr. Pruitt in many of the 14 lawsuits he filed against the E.P.A. . . .

Mr. Pruitt’s supporters, including President Trump, have hailed his moves as an uprooting of the administrative state and a clearing of onerous regulations that have stymied American business. Environmental advocates have watched in horror . . .

Mr. Pruitt, a former Oklahoma attorney general who built a career out of suing the agency he now leads, is moving effectively to dismantle the regulations and international agreements that stood as a cornerstone of President Barack Obama’s legacy. . . .

. . . [even] reversed a ban on the use of a pesticide that the E.P.A.’s own scientists have said is linked to damage of children’s nervous systems . . .

But as the White House Spokesperson explained in a different context last week, the American people knew what they were getting when they elected Trump “overwhelmingly.”

And think of it this way: sure, some children may suffer damage to their nervous systems.  But thanks to Trump and the Republican Congress, those kids and all the rest of us will shortly have great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost.  So it shouldn’t be hard to fix them.

Pearl Harbor devastating.  But we instantly recognized the enemy, came together, regained our balance, and — after a tremendous struggle — came out stronger than ever.

Putin’s sneak attack has proved devastating as well.  But part of its sneakiness is that there’s no newsreel footage.  You just have to trust the unanimous findings of our 17 intelligence agencies.

And because the attack has been poo-pooed by our commander in chief (who knows? it could have been the Chinese — or some 400-pound guy on a bed), we have not come together or regained our balance.  If anything, this attack on our democracy has driven us even further apart.  Thrown us even more off balance.

It’s hard for some to know what’s true when you have the President saying repeatedly that  he won the 2016 election by a wider margin than anyone since Reagan (actually, he did much worse than George H.W. Bush in 1988, much worse than Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and much worse than Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — but why quibble?).

Or when as recently as last week his spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in defending his attack on Mika Brzezinski, told the world that the voters knew what they were getting when they voted for him — and he “won overwhelmingly.”

Think about that.  This is his official spokesperson saying that the man who got millions fewer votes than his opponent — did worse by that measure than any president in our history — “won overwhelmingly.”

So maybe the intelligence community, like the courts and the press (with the exception of the National Enquirer and Fox News) — and your own lying eyes, when you compare Inaugural crowd photos — are not to be trusted.  Maybe it was just some 400-pound guy sitting on his bed.  Maybe ripping hundreds of billions of dollars out of health care to cut taxes on investment income is the way to give “everybody great health care at tiny fraction of today’s cost.”

But you know it’s not true.  And for now, Putin is winning.

Will we recognize the enemy, come together, regain our balance and — after what is likely to be a significant struggle — come out stronger than ever?

(And, while we’re at it, right a system where one party can win 83,468 more votes for a state’s 18 Congressional seats — yet be awarded just 5 of them?)

It’s my July 4th wish.

Remember?

It was little more than six months ago.

Competence, compassion, civility.  A deep knowledge of history.  Respect for democratic norms.  Science.

With “45,” our luck appears to have run out.

As smarter minds than mine have noted, it’s important to remember “it’s not normal.”

. . . The idea, [Amy Siskind] said, came from her post-election reading about how authoritarian governments take hold — often with incremental changes that seem shocking at first but quickly become normalized. Each post begins with: “Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so you’ll remember.” . . .

More than most years, Tuesday would be a great day to re-read our founding documents (“When, in the course of human events, . . .” “We, the people . . .”) . . . and such treasures as “Ask not . . .” and “I have a dream . . .” both of which you surely know . . . his letter from a Birmingham jail (that you surely know of) . . . “We, the people,” reaffirmed in 2013 . . . and what has been called “the second bill of rights.”

It’s that last one, from 1944,  that came to mind as I read this note from one of you just now:

John Grund: “Some years ago, a friend and I were walking on a downtown street when a homeless man came walking the other way.  My friend said, ‘Did you know he’s part owner of the Statue of Liberty?’  I was stumped for a moment, then replied, ‘Right, like we all are part owners of the Statue of Liberty.’  Over the years, that example has stuck with me. I work at an investment bank, where ownership of assets — and the privileges of owners — becomes a religion. I keep getting stumped by the example of the homeless man: If he owns an equal share of America, from the highways to the parks to the aircraft carriers to the public buildings, why is he destitute? Why is the owner of a share of America destitute, while the owner of a share of America plus a run-down duplex gets enough to live on?  I hear the recipients of public ‘safety net’ benefits, including subsidized health care benefits, described as ‘moochers,’ ‘the undeserving poor,’ ‘people who don’t understand how capitalism works,’ and worse. Why not describe them as ‘owners’? Does that change how the arguments sound? I think it does — it makes the safety net seem like a small, probably inadequate, way to give them a proper dividend on what they own.  There are a lot of reasons to think that people have a right to health care — religious reasons, moral reasons, ethical reasons, practical reasons. If a person finds none of those reasons compelling enough, perhaps the fact that every American is an owner will be convincing.”

In the meantime, the Republican Party struggles mightily to shift hundreds of billions of dollars away from often-desperately-needed health care to a place they believe it more properly belongs: the brokerage accounts of people earning millions of dollars a year.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Paris is known for climate change.  Its winters, when it drizzles; its summers, when it sizzles; and its Climate Accords that, thanks to in good measure to American leadership, all the nations of the world signed onto except Syria and Nicaragua . . . the latter because they felt it was too weak.  As described here, “Even North Korea signed, along with 194 other nations, and North Korea is completely insane and run by a tiny-brained, quasi-dictator man-baby with an enormous head and puny hands and… oh wait.”

What an embarrassment Trump is.  Doing their best to ignore him, American usiness leaders and governors and mayors representing $6.2 trillion of the American economy have issued their own statement, signing on to the Accords.  And that already long list — at We Are Still In —  is likely to grow.

Speaking of climate nightmares, Bryan Norcross has written My Hurricane Andrew Story: The story behind the preparation, the terror, the resilience, and the renowned TV coverage of the Great Hurricane of 1992, reviewed here. (“Truly riveting.”)  Disaster though it was, had Andrew hit just 10 miles to the north, half a million homes would have been destroyed or damaged, 1.6 million Miamians left homeless.

(And speaking of Paris, those of you following WheelTug may be interested in this short video from last week’s Paris Air Show.  The voice-over has not yet been added, but there’s still much to see.  I especially like the “pyramid of tasks” you’ll find at 1:04, and how WheelTug cuts it down to size.)

In the current New York:

“Just Wait.  Watergate didn’t become Watergate overnight, either.”

The differences of course are many.  For starters, Nixon actually wanted the job, won it by the largest margin in history, and was both qualified and prepared to fill it — a brilliant student of history who’d been, among other things, Vice President for eight years.  His “flaws” were egregious . . . but pale beside Trump’s.

(A friend who used to golf with Trump calls him, “About the worst person I can imagine to be POTUS. A dangerous man with no sense of truth, proportion or ethics. Horrible. Just awful.  Full stop.”  This from a Romney supporter who knocks Clinton and Obama at every opportunity and would save millions in taxes if Trump succeeds at shifting health care to wealth care.)

But how about something hopeful for a change?

My pal Josh Gottheimer, former wunderkind Bill Clinton speechwriter and now a first-term Congressman from New Jersey, has joined with 20 D’s and 20 R’s to form the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus.  In an ideal world, this caucus would have 435 members and change it’s name to . . . “Congress.”  But it’s a start.  Read all about it.

Okay,  Back to the nightmare.

How ridiculous is this 90-day Muslim ban?  It was first imposed without warning, lest the bad guys take advantage of even a few days’ notice to hop Air Iraq and start blowing us up.  Now, they’ve had five months to get in — with no apparent harm — and are we to believe, given the urgency with which Trump views the problem, his Administration has waited all this time before starting its 90-day review?

Surely someday, somewhere, a refugee who’s navigated the extreme vetting process Obama already had in place will do something awful.  But after 160 days’ review, not just 90, what have they concluded?  Is the extreme vetting that’s already in place enough to protect us from refugees, as this piece argues? (“In the 14 years since September 11, 2001, the United States has resettled 784,000 refugees from around the world, according to data from the Migration Policy Institute, a D.C. think tank. And within that population, three have been arrested for activities related to terrorism. None was close to executing an attack inside the U.S.  Two of the three were caught trying to leave the country to join terrorist groups overseas.”)

THE POLITICAL CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Just 26% of Republicans believe that Russia interfered in the Presidential election.  That compares with 78% of Democrats, 53% of independents — and 100% of America’s 17 intelligence agencies.

Think what that says about Putin’s and Trump’s ability to manipulate American public opinion.

According to the lengthy Washington Post story that so many have been talking about:

In political terms, Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy.

Yet our commander-in-chief, like the honey badger, he don’t care.

After all, the Kremlin isn’t run by commies anymore.  It’s run by a multi-billionaire kleptocrat.  A lying, journalist-murdering, opponent-murdering former KGB agent — what’s not to like there? — who has our commander-in-chief wrapped around his finger.

(You disagree?  Then tell me this:  If Angela Merkel or Kim Jung-Un had asked Trump to invite their top ministers into the Oval Office, would he have said yes?  And allowed only the German or North Korean press in with them?  And seemed so truly relaxed and happy to have them there?)

Our commander-in-chief is focused on more important matters than Russia’s sustained attack on our democracy.

This week, he and his party are focused on shifting hundreds of billions of dollars from ordinary people’s health care back to the millionaires and billionaires who control the Republican Party.

On that score, I have friends who buy the notion that the Republicans are being no more heavy-handed in rushing through Trumpcare than Obama was with his bill.

There are two things to note about this.

First, it’s spectacularly untrue.  If you doubt that, Claire McCaskill nails it in under three minutes.  (And here is Seth Myers taking a more flippant, circuitous route.)

Second, Obama’s motivation is passing the Affordable Care Act was to help tens of millions of Americans get better health care; relieve all Americans of the worry they might one day develop a pre-exisiting condition or run into a lifetime cap; and launch reforms to make care more efficient and bend the health care inflation curve down — much of all this paid for by adding 3.8% to the tax millionaires pay on investment income — an extra $3.8 million on every $100 million they realize.  Whereas Trump’s and the Republicans’ motivation in rushing through Trumpcare is to repeal that tax.  See the difference?

You can argue the top 1% are over-taxed (though the rate on investment income when Ronald Reagan left office was higher) — oppressed at the hands of the bottom 80% of Americans mostly struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck.  Good for you.

But I’m with those who opposed the “mean” House health care bill — only 17% favored it. (It was Trump himself who called the House bill mean, after celebrating its passage.)  And who will oppose the Senate version, in much the same ballpark of wrong-headed cruelty.

Doug S: “After having read about the abomination that is Mitch McConnell’s healthcare bill, I — as a resident of a high-tax state — say enough of tax welfare for the other states: what about legislation that mandates that no state shall receive more from Uncle Sam than it pays to Uncle Sam?  Oh, but that would benefit the blue states to the detriment of the red states? Hmm, gosh, that is a shame. I’d also advocate for Congressional health care be set equal to the least generous healthcare plan available by any state (or the average of the worst three).  Since the Republican Congress is clearly waging war on the 99%, it is time they live with the consequences they seek to impose on the rest of us.  Fuming in New Jersey.”

Call your senators and ask them to oppose Trumpcare.

Instead, they should improve Obamacare:

1. Allow negotiation of prescription drug prices.  It’s nuts that under current law, the Federal government must accept whatever price the drug companies set.  Trump is supposed to be a good negotiator.  Start negotiating!
2. Add 2% to the tax on income above $1 million in order to lower deductibles and co-pays for those struggling to get by.
3. Stop sabotaging it — discouraging people from signing up and insurers from making it work.

Doing so would go a long way toward making the Affordable Care Act a success and the country more healthy.

Now that I’m a private citizen, I feel even freer than usual to say what I think:

1. To my donor who wrote that he was “dispirited,” I suggested “disappointed” is the better way to feel.  It was disappointing not to win — was it ever! — but (read on), that disappointment should fuel our resolve, not slow us down.                                                                                                                                                                                      .
2. Everyone did his or her best, and should be lauded for that.  But it was ridiculous to spend $25 million Democratic dollars on this.  Understandable — everybody wanted an outlet to help — and within days of Ossoff’s announcement, I sent $1,500 myself.  But once it was apparent he was raising vastly more than could be spent effectively in a single CD, I stopped.  There were better, more leveraged ways to help fuel a sea change for 2018 — funding Tom Perez’s new DNC, prime (very possibly first) among them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        .
3. To my knowledge, the DNC wasted not a dime of our contributions adding to Jon’s $25 million.  Instead, they sent 12 staffers to work on the ground in his district: a sensible, cost-effective way to help.                                                                                                                                                                                                                         .
4. Nor did the DNC choose the candidate.  Jon is terrific and my God he worked hard at this.  We should be grateful to him and everyone who helped him.  But as Joe Scarborough noted the morning after, a young guy without a family and without decades of local roots was not the best way to win the seat Newt Gingrich and Tom Price long held by huge margins.  I don’t blame the DCCC either.  It is they who work to recruit and encourage the best possible Congressional candidates; but this was a snap election with no time to prepare.  No one could have known in advance Trump would pluck Price out of the House to join his Cabinet.

So my bottom lines are:  hats off to everyone for trying, but going forward we need to be

• as STRATEGIC as possible (just $15 million of those $25 million would have allowed the DNC to quadruple the $7,500/month it sends to strengthen each of the 50 state parties, allowing each to approach the kind of operation Nevada ran last cycle — where we won the Senate seat, 3 of the 4 House seats, and flipped both chambers of the state legislature blue);                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               .
• PUMPED, not discouraged — we can ABSOLUTELY win back the House in 2018 (and the Senate and state chambers) even if we don’t prevail in deep red districts.  And by the way?  With more time to encourage the most competitive candidates to run . . . and, especially, with more time for the voters to realize, 16 months from now, no they did NOT get “great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost” — and all the rest – we might even win THIS Georgia seat, too.

So help if you can.*

And in any event: “Don’t agonize — ORGANIZE.”

*Don’t be put off by the huge amounts on that page — there’s a box for “other,” and it’s the millions of “other,” human-size contributions that are what we are really about.  It’s just that this is “my” page, so I’ll see what you do, to say thanks.

In the Brave New World department — if we can summon the wisdom not to destroy each other first — look at this (thanks, Paul!).

It doesn’t seem to be from the Onion.  And if one of you does show me that it’s nuts and not really going to happen by 2020, do you know what?  Something else like it will!  If not by 2020, then 2030 — which is virtually the same exact instant in geological time.

To wit:

. . .a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.

All the data contained in our computer files, historic archives, movies, photo collections and the exploding volume of digital information collected by businesses worldwide is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020. This represents enough data to fill more than six stacks of computer tablets stretching to the moon. The world is producing data faster than the capacity to store it.

Now celebrating its centenary year, Technicolor’s laboratories are at the cutting edge of the science of filmmaking, leading a worldwide revolution in immersive entertainment. The company’s latest amazing innovation is the encoding of movies into artificial, “non-biological” DNA. DNA is almost unimaginably small — up to 90,000 molecules can fit into the width of one human hair — so even a large movie library is totally invisible to the human eye. All you can see is the water in a small test tube. . . .

. . . DNA has some great advantages. It is much smaller than traditional media. Researchers found that they can reach a density of 215 petabytes per gram of DNA. Also, DNA lasts for a prolonged length of time — over 100,000 years — which is magnitudes more than traditional media. As an example, one petabyte is roughly 16,000 times the data that your 64GB iPhone can store. DNA can store 215 petabytes in just 0.035 ounces.

Another advantage of DNA is that it will never become obsolete. If you have cassette tapes of music, or vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, they will not be able to be played unless you have a compatible playback device. These devices are available now, but what about in future decades or even centuries? DNA has been around for billions of years, and humanity is unlikely to lose its ability to read these molecules. . . .

What a time to be alive, on the cusp of all-but-unimaginable well-being for virtually everyone, if we can figure out how to live together.

Or extinction, if we can’t; or if the machines decide to fuel themselves by consuming our carbon.

Register.  Vote.  It matters who lead us through the next make-or-break couple of decades.  “Believing in” science should probably be one prerequisite.