Like Father Like Son, Or Like Mother Like Daughter, Or Like Father Like Daughter, Mother Like Son?

The magpies are still spending parts of their day in our back yard and they aren't exactly welcoming if I want to spend some time on the deck.

John Oliver Challenges Coal Mogul To a Duel, Mogul Accepts

I was going to use a poker metaphor for this, but a reddit discussion suggested the terms I was going to use - call and raise - are problematic.

A fellow Alaskan blogger posted a youtube video the other day of John Oliver calling out a West Virginia coal king Bob Murray on a number of issues.  I thought it was brilliant the way he has mastered a technique of using humor and visuals (in the Jon Steward model) to take complex issues and explain them simply, without losing the complexity.  In this case it involved

• Trump's hypocrisy about promising and claiming new coal jobs
• Murray's hypocrisy over his concern about coal miner safety
• The first amendment 

In the piece, Oliver tells us that HBO got a cease and desist order telling them to not air the segment and that Murray has sued other media, including the New York Times over something they wrote.  It all sounds very Trumpish (It will be interesting how that word will eventually be defined when it enters the Oxford dictionary).

Today we learn that the threatened law suit has been filed in West Virginia  circuit court.

Here's the offending segment.  Judge for yourself.



HBO and Time Warner have deep pockets, but it is troubling when the very rich use libel and defamation law suit threats to shut down media that criticize them.

I've been threatened twice over posts here. One post about the Alaska International Film Festival which has nothing to do with Alaska except the pictures on its website and a post office forwarding service with an Alaska address earned me a threatening letter from their attorney.  The other got me an email that threatened a law suit.

The first was a bit scary as I had to consider the costs of potential lawsuits as a price of blogging.  While I was adamant about not taking down the post, I did have some difficult days calculating what standing by my post might cost me.   I was lucky to have access to a great attorney who ended the threat with one letter, but others who were threatened by them pulled their posts.   These threats are a real danger to free speech.   Gawker was put out of business by a lawsuit.

Murray seems a lot like Trump in that he can't handle any criticism.  John Oliver does come on very strong, but I'm confident - especially since he knew a lawsuit was likely - that he can document all his claims.

Let's see how far this lawsuit gets.  In this case, the defendants have the resources to fight.  In fact, John Oliver says in the segment that he knows such a suit is coming.  My concern is for smaller media, including individual bloggers, who can be much more easily shut down by the threat of a lawsuit.

NOTE:  I've been listening and reading the news lately with an eye to the percent of articles/segments that focus on conflict.  It's clear that conflict is the bread and butter of news.  Even NPR calls their news articles 'stories.'  At last April's Alaska Press Club conference here, NPR reporter Kirk Siegler  talked about how to create a good story and he identified tension as the second factor after a strong character.

But the constant focus on conflict (or tension) leads to a distorted perception of the degree of conflict in human life compared to the cooperation.  News shows will report the car accidents each day, but not the millions of drivers who used their turn indicators, slowed down to let someone in their lane, and did all the other cooperative activities necessary for freeway drivers to negotiate their way to their destinations.  We all hear daily things like "Two people were shot to death today in a robbery."  But how many times have you heard a newscaster say, "6170 people died today of heart attacks." 

Just as stories of murders far outnumber stories of other kinds of deaths, stories of conflict hugely outweigh stories of cooperation.  And in both cases people's perceptions are grossly distorted so they think of terrorists as a far bigger threat than they really are compared to other causes of death, and to think that conflict is far more common than cooperation.  

So when I post a story like this one that does focus on conflict, I ask myself what are the reasons that this story is worth posting.  Here's what I think is important in this story:

• Oliver's skill in presenting the facts of a complex story in a way that retains the complexity yet is compelling to viewers.  He doesn't dumb it down, he raises the level of his viewers.  It's a model to study and emulate, though without the insults.
• The danger to free speech from very wealthy people who don't like to be criticized.  This threat of lawsuits is very real - particularly for smaller scale journalists than those at HBO.  It's a consequence of the great divide between the very rich - for whom $10 million is pocket change - and the rest of us.  

The Cost Of Airshows, What I Know About You, And Unobtrusive Measures

As the title suggests, I'm trying to kill three birds with one post.  But everything is connected and so I'm showing just three of the interconnected issues here.

Let's start with the cost of airshows.

I wrote a post in 2012 called Air Shows And The Cost Of Military Fuel.  I gathered what information I could and made some very general calculations.  I wasn't terribly happy with it because there were so many unknowns.  But there wasn't all that much out there and apparently still isn't since that post still regularly gets a fair number of hits from all over the world.

But as I checked StatCounter* this morning, I noticed a hit from Lockheed Corporation.  And then one from Boeing.  And another one last night from the US Senate.

click image to enlarge and focus

What I Know About You

That image above is a Photoshopped grouping of three different records from StatCounter.

StatCounter is one of many tools websites, including blogs, can use to track visitors to their sites.  I moved to StatCounter from Sitemeter after Sitemeter gave me all sorts of problems.  I suspect my regular readers got tired of my complaining and were happy when I switched and they stopped hearing about it.

Everyone who surfs the web should know about the information that is collected from them by each website they visit.  Sitemeter packaged that data about each individual visitor in a whole page that included more that StatCounter individual reports.  But StatCounter packages the info in a way that makes it faster to view and breaks out a lot more information in different reports.

But all these programs simply use the information that your computer collects on visitors and packages it in different formats.

If you click on the image, it will enlarge and focus so you can read it.  I don't get all this information from everyone.  First, I suspect there are a lot of visitors StatCounter doesn't even report.  I say this because Google Analytics says I have a lot more visitors than StatCounter reports, but it doesn't give me such detailed info on each visitor.
Also, some visitors have scrubbed their info - whether their internet provider does that, or they have done it themselves.  Another way is to use a proxy server which hides all the info.

I'd also note that if you use the private browsing feature of your browser, that only hides info about what sites you visit on your own computer.  You still leave tracks at the websites you visit.

I have put this sort of info up now and then because I think most folks really have no idea of how much info they leave around while surfing the web.  And I'm often surprised at how organizations leave their names up so people can see that they have visited.  And part of me doesn't want to post things like this which may alert them and cause them to disguise their identity.  I like knowing that these visitors visit.

I'd also note that all this information - plus more - is how browsers and others make lots of money selling it to advertisers.   These are, unobtrusive measures, because most people leave these tracks without knowing.  The main way people have any clue about any of this comes from the pop-up ads we get after visiting a particular site.  If you delete the cookies, some of them will end.

Unobtrusive Measures

"Unobtrusive measures are measures that don't require the researcher to intrude in the research context. Direct and participant observation require that the researcher be physically present. This can lead the respondents to alter their behavior in order to look good in the eyes of the researcher. A questionnaire is an interruption in the natural stream of behavior. Respondents can get tired of filling out a survey or resentful of the questions asked.
Unobtrusive measurement presumably reduces the biases that result from the intrusion of the researcher or measurement instrument. However, unobtrusive measures reduce the degree the researcher has control over the type of data collected. For some constructs there may simply not be any available unobtrusive measures."

The site goes on to identify three different types of unobtrusive measures.

I mention this because these tracks that people leave on websites are a form of unobtrusive measure.  My use of it is very informal and unorganized.  Every now and then I'll suddenly get a bunch of hits for an old post and it will alert me that something is happening related to something in the post.  Once I got a bunch of hits for a post about the director of the Alaska DMV, mostly from Texas.  So I started checking and found out she'd taken a job as the head of the Texas DMV.  The counter alerted me to that.

Another time a post suddenly got a bunch of hits and it turned out a British newspaper had a puzzle and my post had one of the answers. Here's a 2009 post that chronicles that event and several others where I was alerted to something by the hits on a particular post.

So, for what it is worth, today I got three hits on this post about the cost of fuel for airshows.  Three isn't a lot of hits, but when they are from Boeing, Lockheed, and the US Senate, it suggests that perhaps someone is looking into that issue.

Now, I don't know if the visitor from, say Boeing or the US Senate, was doing this officially or it was just someone privately surfing while at work.  But given the three hits from these three I suspect there's an interesting reason.  Is a budget committee examining the costs of air shows?  Or is it something else buried in the post?  For most google searches I no longer get the actual search terms - that's something they've done to improve user security - so I don't know for sure what they were looking for.  I just know where they landed.

Alaska Budget Crisis - Head Tax

There's so much to write about, but not nearly as much time to do sufficient research to say something  that adds meaningfully to what others have already said.  So I'm going to keep this really focused.

Senator Click Bishop has introduced SB12 which establishes a head tax.  I had some questions about how that would work and contacted my Senator, Berta Gardner.  So I can say something with a bit of authority on this.

We used to have a head tax - I remember it being minimal, like $10 from everyone's first paycheck of the year.  But if 200,000 people got at least one paycheck a year (our population was much lower then) it would still amount to $2 million.   Sen. Bishop's bill would have several levels based on income, so it would be somewhat progressive.

However, it's only for people on a payroll.  So people with other kinds of income - pensions, rental properties, investment income, etc.  would not have to pay.  That seems blatantly unfair and why a graduated income tax is a better option.  Though I'd vote for the simplest-to-calculate income tax possible - like a percent of the federal taxes.  Minimum wage workers shouldn't have to pay if people with much larger, but unearned, incomes don't.

The one benefit of this tax is that it does include non-residents who work in Alaska.

Senator Gardner also wrote it could be part of the compromise package  if the Senate ever agrees to any new revenue.  She also said there haven't been any hearings on the bill.

LA Times Headline Jumps To Conclusions: "Cosby case deadlock reflects our cultural split" (And Side Note On Google Search Problem) [UPDATED]

Does that deadlocked jury really reflect our cultural split?

Maybe, but since we don't know what happened in the jury room  there is so far no basis for that conclusion.  If it said, "Crosby case" (without the deadlock), I wouldn't have reacted like this.   I think it's worth calling out the headline writer and to some extent the reporter on this.  It seems a clear case of using this story as a pretext to discuss what the reporter was thinking about the case.  Not what the facts showed.  Because the only facts we have about the deadlock is that it deadlocked.

[NOTE:  I haven't figured out how to get the link to the article when I read print facsimile version of the LA Times.  So after I finished this post, I went back to get the link.  It gave me a different online version of the article which has a completely different headline.  Had I read this headline, I never would have written this post:

"One night, two stories: In the Bill Cosby saga of sex, race, celebrity and alleged assault, even the jury couldn't agree on the truth"

Online headline writers have more space to use than print headline writers.  But my point about the print headline is still valid.  I'm glad to see the online headline writer was more careful.  And since you'll get the other headline at the link, here's a screenshot of what I saw first:]

Here's the beginning of the article:

"BY STEVEN ZEITCHIK
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — The dozen jurors in the Bill Cosby sexual assault trial spanned a diverse demographic range: white men in their 20s and 30s, middle-aged African Americans, elderly white women.
With that diversity also came deadlock. On its sixth day of deliberations, the jury found itself unable to render a verdict — like so much of this country, unable to find consensus on charged questions of race, age, power and gender."

I'd also note that reporters are not usually the ones who write the headlines, though this sentence seems to give the headline writer the needed prompt:

"The jurors did not speak with reporters, but their inability to reach a verdict, after more than 100 hours of testimony and deliberations in this suburban Philadelphia courtroom, brought home how divided opinions are about Cosby — and about a lot more."

Before we can reach this conclusion, we need to know a few things:

1.   How many jurors vote for guilty and how many for not-guilty?

• If only one or two jurors held out, then their deadlock doesn't represent "our cultural split."  11 -1 or 10-2 are huge majorities.  I was on a jury where one woman refused to find the young woman defendant guilty of drunk driving because, as she told us, it could have been her daughter.  It's easy to imagine a juror who's had sex with a drunk friend identifying himself in the same situation, using the same sort of personal logic to say 'not guilty.'  
• If more jurors held out, and the debate focused on whether the plaintiff consented and/or whether Cosby was the victim of race discrimination, then perhaps the headline would be justified. Or not.   And if the debate was about reasonable doubt  (and the article says the deadlocked jury asked for a definition of that term) then it really might have been just that and not particularly reflective of cultural splits.  I'm assuming, for example, that the number of other accusers, who say they were assaulted the same way and who have not filed law suits, was not allowed into the trial.

There are lots of reasons juries deadlock.  One juror may so irritate another juror that the second just won't go along with whatever the first one decides.  Or a juror feels strongly that government is screwing over people.  We don't even know, in this case, whether the majority was for not-guilty or guilty.

[A Note On Juries.    I did try to find studies on why juries deadlock.  This revealed a problem with google's search algorithm - the first ten pages were almost completely about the Cosby case, nothing generic about deadlocked juries, and nothing about why they deadlock.

I did find one book The Jury Under Fire: Myth, Controversy, and Reform  by Brian H. Bornstein and Edie Greene.  Google got me to page 73 which discussed how jury size (12 or 6 jurors) affected deliberations and how the unanimous vote rule (as opposed to using a majority vote) affected decisions.  It also mentioned that only two states - Oregon and Louisiana have majority rule, but they require at 10 jurors in some kinds of cases and 11 in murder cases.  It also cited some numbers:  2% of federal trials and 4-5% of state trials result in hung juries.  There were also some caveats because most studies of juries are done on mock juries not real ones.]

[A Further Note on Google and Hung Juries.  Before posting this, I decided to try a different browser.  I used Bing.  And bingo (sorry), I got better results than with google.  Here are the reasons for hung juries from one study

This covers only 46 cases and presumably none with the kind of celebrity buzz as the Cosby trial.  I'd say 'cultural split' might fit in 'dysfunctional process'  or 'unknown.'

A study by the National Center for State Courts found:

"In examining the data, researchers found one or more of the following traits consistent in a hung jury compared to one that reaches a verdict:
• weak evidence
• problematic deliberations
• jurors’ perception of unfairness"

"Cultural split' might fit into the last two categories.  We just don't know what happened.

My point?  Even with reputable media, we need to be ever watchful that the facts support the conclusions.   Here I think the story reflects what the reporter thinks about the case, not about the hung jury.  When the article was posted we didn't know any more about the jury than it was deadlocked.  (I couch it that way, because I don't know if any of the jurors have said anything publicly as I write this.   Using Google and  Bing I can't find anything about a juror talking to anyone about the details of the split or the issues that caused the split.)

[UPDATE August 24, 2019:  A Los Angeles Times article discusses a current Supreme Court case about the constitutionality of Louisiana's majority rule..  It says Louisiana's voters changed the rule to unanimous in 2018, but the case is an earlier one.  Oregon is now the only non-unanimous jury verdict state and

"Michael Kron, special counsel to Oregon’s attorney general, said that if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Ramos, it would be reversing its 1972 ruling that the Constitution does not bar states from allowing nonunanimous verdicts."

Others argue that Oregon might have dozens, not hundreds of cases and that the original Oregon constitutional amendment to have non-unanimous verdicts 

"The decision by Oregon voters in 1934 to allow split-jury verdicts was fueled by white supremacy and anti-immigrant sentiment. One newspaper said immigrants from southern and Eastern Europe had made the requirement for unanimous verdicts 'unwieldy and unsatisfactory.'”]

"Every time Trump has broken a window, GOP leaders have obediently swept up the glass."

Some articles I found worth reading.


1.  From the LA Times:

"Every time Trump has broken a window, GOP leaders have obediently swept up the glass, if sometimes after some initial grumbling. Their deference could explain why Trump might imagine Republicans would ultimately defend him even if he fired special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, as he’s reportedly considered this week."

As I've said before, this is like watching a car racing toward the cliff in slow motion.  Slowly Republicans in Congress - at least in the Senate - are going to figure out that the short term benefits of having a so-called Republican in the White House do not outweigh the long term harm of having Trump in the White House.

2.  From the New York Times, a long article about Kris Kobach, a smart guy whose moral reasoning seems particularly warped.   His mission is to pass the most restrictive voter registration laws possible to keep non-whites from voting.  He did that as Kansas Secretary of State and now he's the "vice chairman of a new Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to be led by Vice President Mike Pence."  This guy uses up a lot of the ACLU's resources.

Raspail's The Camp of the Saints is also mentioned in the article.  Fits in well with the Bannon crowd.

"At the A.C.L.U. hearing, Kobach argued that his restrictive measures were justified by the high stakes. 'We are preventing noncitizens from voting in elections,' he said. “And when a few noncitizens vote, those can swing a close election.'”

And when a lot of citizens are prevented from voting, those can swing less close elections.

When I read about people like this my mind screams, "WHY????"   Why does his brain work this way?  Is there something about his brain chemistry that's different from most people?  Was he picked on as a kid?  Maybe that difference caused him to be picked on.  There are lots and lots of other possible explanations.  Figuring out these things - rather than just dismissing him as evil or whatever else - is what will move us along as a species.

3.  Mapping Police Violence

I'm not sure what you'll get since the link goes to the main page, which I assume changes.  But the website tracks blacks and whites killed by police.  The statistics are shocking and surprising.  It's all about graphics and data.  A number of different displays.  And there's a link to download their database.

There are lots of possible explanations for these seeming disparities, but the data aren't as easy to get. Is it simply more racist cops in some places?  Better police training in some places?  Different policing styles, like beat cops?  Age of the population or other factors that matter?  Stability of the population?  Lots to think about here.

Magpie Playground And Body Guards [Updated]

Parents are pretty aggressive about protecting their young, and birds are no exception.  There's a magpie nest not far from our house and now that the young can fly a bit, they've found our trees to be a great playground.  Here are two young ones.  There are several more.

The easiest way to distinguish them from the adults is there short tails.   They're starting to make quite a racket which is what got me to look out the window.    And today when I went out to get the mail, the noise got exploded as I opened the glass outer door.  

An adult got between me and one of the young ones screeching.  

Another flew down at me from the other side.  (I'm not as foolhardy as it may look.   I had the storm door for protection.)

It sat on the railing a couple of feet from me and glared.  

Meanwhile the other one found some food on the roof.  (An old mountain ash berry?) and fed it to the young one in the tree.   It's practically placing it in the young's stomach!

From a little further back, here's another shot.

And when I tried to venture out, the two adults let me know I shouldn't.  

They are such beautiful birds.  In the sun the black shines blue and green.  But no one would ever call them song birds.  More like screech birds.  Unlike the larger, all black ravens, who have a whole repertoire of amazing sounds.


[UPDATE  3:20pm:  The young ones are now in the backyard.  I can see four at the same time.   The parents are giving them space to explore, but when I opened the back door, I could hear them screeching somewhere in the background.    One on the deck.








Another in a flower bed.

And two more up in a tree.

It's Summer, A Beautiful Day, So Biked The Bird To Gird Trail And Left My Computer Behind

When they rerouted the Seward Highway many years ago from the perilous two-lane, no shoulder road that went well above the water below to a four lane road at the water's edge, the old road was revisioned into a bike trail.  And it's a wonderful six mile ride from Bird Point to the Girdwood turnoff.

The first two or so miles from Bird Point go up with great views of Turnagain Arm.  Though a number of the view points - including telescope-viewers - have cottonwood and other trees blocking the views now.  But not at this point.



















Here's the rock wall on the other side of the trail.  There are lots of waterfalls along the way and I counted 18 piles of bear scat on the trail.  Later at the National Forest visitor center near the end of the trail, the lady said that yesterday one of the workers encountered a black bear.  Someone coming the other way had to zap it with bear spray before it left the trail.

Here's the trail on the way down near the Girdwood end.

And back down to road level, there's duck playground.  She wasn't happy that I stopped and hustled her brood off while I got the camera out of the backpack.    It should be a little sharper if you click on it.

Here's a July view from 2011 when the flowers were all blooming and a September view from last year.  Same trail different moods.

A Look At Time Honored Advice For Keeping Focused On What's Important - Eye On The Ball, Follow The Money, etc.

Let's see, we've got a burning London tower, Comey and Sessions hearings, an attack on Republicans playing baseball, a new health care bill, Trump tweets . . .  And then everyone has state issues to follow - in Alaska our legislature is in a special session called by the governor because there's a stalemate between the Democratically controlled House and the Republicanly controlled Senate.  There's so much stuff flying at us, how can anyone keep track?

That's what this post is about.  I'm going to look at words of advice on how to intelligently track what's going on in a few different areas:

• Sports - Keep Your Eye On The Ball
• Magic - Misdirection
• Politics -" Follow The Money" and "Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"

Do any of these help us figure out what we should do?   Let's go through each one first, then try to tease out any similarities.  

Keep your eye on the ball.   -  For players, this seems to be good advice.  From Inside Science:

"For the first time, scientists have documented the eye movement of athletes running at full speed to catch fly balls. The results are the most convincing yet to support past notions that constant eye contact is essential to a successful catch."

But for the audience, taking your eye off the ball may give you a better understanding of what's happening.

There's a well known psychological test where subjects are asked to count the number of times the white team passes the basketball.  If you've never seen this video, you should watch it now.  Really.  It's short.  Go ahead.  I'll get back to this later.



From NPR:

"Don't watch the ball. That's it. Don't watch the ball. Wait, the ball is large and orange and demands to be watched. It's a magnetic orb through which all action flows and all camera angles are oriented. True enough, but to understand and appreciate the sport, look away. If you begin to look at what the other players are doing without the ball, the sport presents itself to you differently.
You see how a player came to be open or how a defender came to thwart an offensive play - grabbing a jersey is the answer more often than you'd think. On the San Antonio Spurs, watch Pau Gasol as he muscles into position under the basket. On the Cleveland Cavaliers, when Kyrie Irving has the ball, watch LeBron. When LeBron has the ball, watch Kyrie or Kevin Love. You think to yourself, he's standing sentinel ready to fire up a three-pointer, but then he plunges towards the hoop for a rebound or to set himself up in the post."

There's also a book on the NFL called Take Your Eye Off The Ball 2.0.  I was guessing it has similar kind of advice about football, but I couldn't find anything online that actually says that.

But it's clear that if you keep your eye on the ball, you miss a lot of other things, like a team sets up plays and does its defense.  Just as in the video, where concentrating on the ball and the white team causes most folks to not even see the gorilla.

And in sports, where there is usually only one ball in play at a time, it's much easier than in politics where the myriad of issues I listed at the beginning suggests there are many metaphorical balls in play at once.



Magic - Misdirection

From an article on the psychology of magic:

Physical misdirection is a well-known tool for the magician: he points at an object, a big gesture distracts, spectators fixate on a suddenly appearing dove. All are designed to distract from another movement that is vital for the trick.

The article goes on to make the point I was intending to make here, that we can get psychologically misdirected too.

"Psychological misdirection is much more subtle – a good example is the false solution. This is where the magician leads spectators to believe they’ve worked out how the trick is done. Once this ‘solution’ is suggested people are much less likely to notice the clues that crop up as to how it’s really done. Instead people look for confirmation that their own theory is correct. When the magician finally shows this ‘solution’ is no such thing, spectators are left even more bemused. The false solution is, therefore, not just a happy coincidence, it is used as a distraction from the real solution."

In fact, many have suggested that Trump's tweets are a form of misdirection, and politicians have always used distraction to slip through things when people were looking elsewhere.  So the real question is where should our eyes (and ears) be focused?

Let's go to a couple suggestions from the Watergate era.



"Follow The Money" 

For me, this quote goes back to Watergate and Deep Throat (the informant reporters Bernstein and Woodward  used to confirm they were going in the right direction).  He kept telling them to 'follow the money.'  I suspect that's a lot like 'keep your eye on the ball.'   This Wikipedia entry suggests that it probably was the screenwriter's (for the film about Bernstein and Woodward, All the President's Men) shortcut of less pithy advice.

I think this is probably good advice now as well.  There are lots of flows of money to watch.  Who funds which candidates is always a good way to figure out why politicians vote the way they vote.  But the Citizens United decision makes it harder to do - which is more confirmation that following the money is important.  And there are a number of websites that help us do that, such as followthemoney.org and open secrets.org.

But it's getting apparent that following Trump's money - the money he borrowed from Russian linked people to keep building after his bankruptcy and money that corporations and governments are steering toward his businesses how people are trying to document possible violations of the emoluments clause of the Constitution.  The Russian money, as one hypothesis goes,  to help determine how badly they can hurt him financially if he doesn't do their bidding. The other money, well so they can influence him as well.  We learned just the other day that there's been a huge increase in the percent of investments by shell companies in Trump real estate.

So it seems like the money is an important factor to attend to.



"Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"

Conservative commentator William Safire explained it this way in 1988:

 '''Watch what we do, not what we say,' Attorney General John Mitchell advised reporters at the start of the Nixon Administration.
Coming from the law-and-order campaign manager with the visage of a bloodhound, that epigram was interpreted as the epitome of political deceptiveness.
But his intent was to reassure blacks that, foot-dragging poses aside, the Nixon Justice Department would accomplish desegregation. John Mitchell knew that the appearance of a tilt toward white Southerners would ease the way for acceptance of steady civil rights progress for blacks, and sure enough, what he did in this area was much better than what he said."

I think this is pretty clear - what we say means little.  What we actually do is important.  Except for the code words we use to alert our base that we're talking to them.

But I need to shed a little more light on Safire's take on this.  Using examples like this isn't so easy.  Well, I could just slip it in, but the record is not as clearcut as it seems.  Should I go into all that?  I feel that I have to, even if it makes the post a little harder to get through.  But you can skip down to the conclusions if you like.   A CNN article quotes Nixon top aide, John Ehrlichman, as saying,

"'You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,' Ehrlichman said. 'We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.' 

Ehrlichman's comment is the first time the war on drugs has been plainly characterized as a political assault designed to help Nixon win, and keep, the White House."

The article goes on to say that none of Ehrlichman's five children believe the quote because

"'We never saw or heard anything from our dad, John Ehrlichman, that was derogatory about any person of color,'" wrote Peter Ehrlichman, Tom Ehrlichman, Jan Ehrlichman, Michael Ehrlichman and Jody E. Pineda in a statement provided to CNN."

If you've seen the 2017 movie Get Out you've seen lots of examples of how even liberal whites who ostensibly support blacks in any number of ways, can still be unconsciously racist.  And the point Ehrlichman was making was that they were targeting political opponents who just happened to be black, just as North Carolina argued in their gerrymandering cases.   I'm sure that Ehrlichman's kids would also say that he wasn't racist against whites either, but most hippies were white.

The book White Rage (last chapter I believe) documents how blacks were targeted in the war on drugs as both a way to keep them from voting and to fill the private prisons of campaign supporters.  (I thought I posted about the last chapter, but apparently I only got to Chapter 4 which does talk about how the Nixon and Reagan administrations declared racism over with desegregation and the Voting Rights Act.)



Conclusions 

This may seem like a long way to get to the obvious, but I think it's important to always check our assumptions.  And in this particular political period, to find ways to focus on what's really important.

1.  Keeping your eye on the ball, as an observer, can cause you to miss the bigger picture - how the defense and offense are structured, where the strengths and weaknesses lie, etc.  And you could miss the gorilla in the middle of the room.  We need to keep track of the big picture and not get too bogged down in all the details.

That said, if there is a ball in politics, it's probably the money.  Watch the whole game, but pay attention to the money!

2.  Misdirection  - Just because the magician looks up, doesn't mean you should too.  It's a feint to distract you from what she's doing with her hands.  Trump's tweets are often misdirection, distracting us from the important things.  But they also do tell us something about Trump's need for constant attention and total focus on himself, his bad sleeping habits, his lack of self control.  An interesting historical tidbit that came up the Safire article cited above, was a mention of Nixon attorney general John Mitchell's wife,

"Martha's propensity to make wild phone calls during sleepless nights"

Sound familiar?  Maybe there's a new entry for the DSM here.  Or maybe it's already in there, but one would think someone would have pointed it out by now.

3.  Follow the Money -  as I started to say in #1, Money is the 'ball' of politics.  So this is always important, just don't forget to keep it all in context.

4.  "Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"  If Safire's example of this is accurate, it's appropriate here.  "What we say" is aimed at our base and shouldn't be believed, except by them.  I think that's sort of true about Trump, except that he's got enough advisors who were spokesmen for his base's key issues, that he's at least taking some actions to do things he said he'd do.  Like building a wall, banning Muslims, killing Obamacare, pulling out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.  He's just turned around and dissed the House health care reform and the courts have, so far, blocked his immigration actions.  But there's a lot of damage he can do.

Without forgetting what he said, it is good to watch what he's actually doing.  I suspect he's more focused on the Trump empire than on the needs of the United States.  And Safire's benign conclusion that the Nixon administration actually helped blacks is more what they said and not what they did.  The War on Drugs was, as I cited above, a war on blacks and hippies (really anti-war folks.)  And it is only now that people are recognizing that our prison population has skyrocketed to the benefit of private prison contractors and to the detriment of everyone else.

I don't think the Trump administration is competent enough to be that deviously successful.  First of all, they aren't disguising their racism, sexism, and anti-Muslimism.  The Trump policies are front on attacks.

So I think we should both listen and watch.


Finally, I'd say, limit your Twitter and Facebook and NPR or whatever news sources you use to a reasonable amount of time each day.  Get out into nature, keep up with your exercise, and spend good time with your family and friends.  That way you can keep some balance in life and not go crazy like our president.

Take A Break From Fires, Shooters, Hearings - A Couple Potter Marsh Pics