What Are You Going To Do About It?

Who are these people, what do you know about them,  and why should you know?

George Nader Photo CNN	Erik Prinz Photo Bloomberg
Elliott Broidy Photo CNN	Paul Manafort Photo Guardian
Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan (MBZ) (l) Mohammed bin Salman (MBS)  Photo Al Jazeera

Have you hear about "The Grand Bargain" Trump plans for the Middle East?  Seth Abramson's book comes out September 3 (it's still September 2 in Alaska, but it's the 3rd already in NY).  This Twitter Thread of 20 Tweets will chill you, because it isn't a Netflix series, it's how Trump got elected and the international machinations behind his election - what he got from them and what they want from him.  And are getting.  This won't take too much of your time, though it's probably not something you want to know, because then you'll either feel a.  helpless, b. depressed, or c. required to fight.  I hope you pick c.  How can you fight?

• Send the book to your Congressional Reps.
• Copy key passages and post them on social media.
• Suggest the book to your book club.
• Copy pages and post them on bulletin boards and bus stops.
• Give copies of the book, or of chapters, to your Republican friends and challenge them to refute the facts in the book.
• Apply for Canadian citizenship

Know that if Trump is reelected, the United States as we've known it is over.

I've written about this book recently.  Abramson is offering excerpts from the book this time.  Think of it as a preview  of the book (sorry, I'm of the era that knows what's now called  'trailers" - something that comes after - as 'previews' - something that comes before).  As I understand it, he's picked parts from the overview so you get a sense of details but also of the bigger picture in twenty tweets (280 characters per tweet).


Yes, I know Seth Abramson is doing his best to promote his book.  But I've read his previous book - Proof of Collusion.  It's the best guide I've seen to who is who in the Trump swamp. Think of it as a program guide at the theater or baseball game.   He's pulled together everything available on all the players and what they did.

 I expect this book will be the same with more stories.  This is different from getting dribbles daily that are hard to connect.  Abramson connects everything for you.  As you can see in the Twitter feed below. So I don't mind him pushing his book, and I don't feel any doubts about making people aware of it.  This is what all Americans should know about how our president got elected and what he owes Russia, Saudi Arabia, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and others.  These twenty tweets will get you started down this rabbit hole.

(THREAD) Now that Amazon lets readers preview the first 56 pages of the 600-page book PROOF OF CONSPIRACY—which officially launches in under 3 hours—I thought I'd post some key early excerpts. I hope you'll read on and retweet. The purchase link is below: https://t.co/YBrqfTtZ4Q

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) September 3, 2019

[UPDATE Sept. 4, 2019:  I tried to put the whole thread up, but you have to click on the link at the bottom to find out more details of the men pictured above.]

A Look Back At The Jungle On This Labor Day - We've Come Far, But We're Slipping Back To How Things Were

It's Labor Day.  And as the president foments anti-immigrant anger and violence, and unions are weaker than they've been in over 50 years, it's probably important to remind people why we have unions in the first place.

So here are some excerpts from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle which was first published in 1906.  It follows Jurgis a strong young Lithuanian immigrant as he goes from confident innocent to experienced bitterness.  You can read the whole book online here.   It takes place is the stockyards of Chicago.

This may help people understand why people risked their lives to create and join unions.  And why the Kochs (what do we say now that only one of the brothers is still living?) and Waltons other wealthy business owners have fought them - so they could do as they wished despite the misery it caused their employees, who are simply expendable.  And this story also shows us why factories today still employ millions of undocumented workers - because the workers are desperate and compliant so they won't be deported.  It's also a story of why we can't trust for-profit companies to police themselves - for worker safety, fairness, or food safety either.

The owners of the factory Sinclair depicts are no different from how our president behaves - ruthless and entitled.

What made all this the more painful was that it was so hard on the few
that had really done their best. There was poor old ponas Jokubas, for
instance--he had already given five dollars, and did not every one know
that Jokubas Szedvilas had just mortgaged his delicatessen store for two
hundred dollars to meet several months' overdue rent? And then there was
withered old poni Aniele--who was a widow, and had three children, and
the rheumatism besides, and did washing for the tradespeople on Halsted
Street at prices it would break your heart to hear named. Aniele had
given the entire profit of her chickens for several months. Eight of
them she owned, and she kept them in a little place fenced around on her
backstairs. All day long the children of Aniele were raking in the dump
for food for these chickens; and sometimes, when the competition there
was too fierce, you might see them on Halsted Street walking close to
the gutters, and with their mother following to see that no one robbed
them of their finds. Money could not tell the value of these chickens
to old Mrs. Jukniene--she valued them differently, for she had a feeling
that she was getting something for nothing by means of them--that with
them she was getting the better of a world that was getting the better
of her in so many other ways.

Chapter 2

Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young. They told him
stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of
Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterward--stories to make
your flesh creep, but Jurgis would only laugh. He had only been there
four months, and he was young, and a giant besides. There was too much
health in him. He could not even imagine how it would feel to be beaten.
“That is well enough for men like you,” he would say, “silpnas, puny
fellows--but my back is broad.”
Jurgis was like a boy, a boy from the country. He was the sort of man
the bosses like to get hold of, the sort they make it a grievance they
cannot get hold of. When he was told to go to a certain place, he would
go there on the run. When he had nothing to do for the moment, he would
stand round fidgeting, dancing, with the overflow of energy that was
in him. If he were working in a line of men, the line always moved
too slowly for him, and you could pick him out by his impatience and
restlessness. That was why he had been picked out on one important
occasion; for Jurgis had stood outside of Brown and Company's “Central
Time Station” not more than half an hour, the second day of his arrival
in Chicago, before he had been beckoned by one of the bosses. Of this he
was very proud, and it made him more disposed than ever to laugh at the
pessimists. In vain would they all tell him that there were men in that
crowd from which he had been chosen who had stood there a month--yes,
many months--and not been chosen yet. “Yes,” he would say, “but what
sort of men? Broken-down tramps and good-for-nothings, fellows who have
spent all their money drinking, and want to get more for it. Do you want
me to believe that with these arms”--and he would clench his fists and
hold them up in the air, so that you might see the rolling muscles--“that
with these arms people will ever let me starve?”
.....
Yet, when they saw the home of the Widow Jukniene they could not but
recoil, even so, in all their journey they had seen nothing so bad as
this. Poni Aniele had a four-room flat in one of that wilderness of
two-story frame tenements that lie “back of the yards.” There were four
such flats in each building, and each of the four was a “boardinghouse”
 for the occupancy of foreigners--Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, or
Bohemians. Some of these places were kept by private persons, some were
cooperative. There would be an average of half a dozen boarders to each
room--sometimes there were thirteen or fourteen to one room, fifty
or sixty to a flat. Each one of the occupants furnished his own
accommodations--that is, a mattress and some bedding. The mattresses
would be spread upon the floor in rows--and there would be nothing else
in the place except a stove. It was by no means unusual for two men
to own the same mattress in common, one working by day and using it by
night, and the other working at night and using it in the daytime. Very
frequently a lodging house keeper would rent the same beds to double
shifts of men.

One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions.
He had had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained
to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting
for their rights. Jurgis asked them what they meant by their rights, a
question in which he was quite sincere, for he had not any idea of any
rights that he had, except the right to hunt for a job, and do as he was
told when he got it. Generally, however, this harmless question would
only make his fellow workingmen lose their tempers and call him a fool.
There was a delegate of the butcher-helpers' union who came to see
Jurgis to enroll him; and when Jurgis found that this meant that he
would have to part with some of his money, he froze up directly, and the
delegate, who was an Irishman and only knew a few words of Lithuanian,
lost his temper and began to threaten him. In the end Jurgis got into a
fine rage, and made it sufficiently plain that it would take more than
one Irishman to scare him into a union. Little by little he gathered
that the main thing the men wanted was to put a stop to the habit of
“speeding-up”; they were trying their best to force a lessening of the
pace, for there were some, they said, who could not keep up with it,
whom it was killing. But Jurgis had no sympathy with such ideas as
this--he could do the work himself, and so could the rest of them, he
declared, if they were good for anything. If they couldn't do it, let
them go somewhere else. Jurgis had not studied the books, and he would
not have known how to pronounce “laissez faire”; but he had been round
the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it,
and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him
holler.

Yet there have been known to be philosophers and plain men who swore
by Malthus in the books, and would, nevertheless, subscribe to a relief
fund in time of a famine. It was the same with Jurgis, who consigned the
unfit to destruction, while going about all day sick at heart because
of his poor old father, who was wandering somewhere in the yards begging
for a chance to earn his bread. Old Antanas had been a worker ever since
he was a child; he had run away from home when he was twelve, because
his father beat him for trying to learn to read. And he was a faithful
man, too; he was a man you might leave alone for a month, if only you
had made him understand what you wanted him to do in the meantime. And
now here he was, worn out in soul and body, and with no more place in
the world than a sick dog. He had his home, as it happened, and some one
who would care for him if he never got a job; but his son could not help
thinking, suppose this had not been the case. Antanas Rudkus had been
into every building in Packingtown by this time, and into nearly every
room; he had stood mornings among the crowd of applicants till the very
policemen had come to know his face and to tell him to go home and give
it up. He had been likewise to all the stores and saloons for a mile
about, begging for some little thing to do; and everywhere they had
ordered him out, sometimes with curses, and not once even stopping to
ask him a question.

Jurgis would find out these things for himself, if he stayed there long
enough; it was the men who had to do all the dirty jobs, and so there
was no deceiving them; and they caught the spirit of the place, and did
like all the rest. Jurgis had come there, and thought he was going to
make himself useful, and rise and become a skilled man; but he would
soon find out his error--for nobody rose in Packingtown by doing good
work. You could lay that down for a rule--if you met a man who was
rising in Packingtown, you met a knave. That man who had been sent to
Jurgis' father by the boss, he would rise; the man who told tales
and spied upon his fellows would rise; but the man who minded his own
business and did his work--why, they would “speed him up” till they had
worn him out, and then they would throw him into the gutter.
One day a man slipped and hurt his leg; and that afternoon, when the
last of the cattle had been disposed of, and the men were leaving,
Jurgis was ordered to remain and do some special work which this injured
man had usually done. It was late, almost dark, and the government
inspectors had all gone, and there were only a dozen or two of men on
the floor. That day they had killed about four thousand cattle, and
these cattle had come in freight trains from far states, and some of
them had got hurt. There were some with broken legs, and some with gored
sides; there were some that had died, from what cause no one could
say; and they were all to be disposed of, here in darkness and silence.
“Downers,” the men called them; and the packing house had a special
elevator upon which they were raised to the killing beds, where the gang
proceeded to handle them, with an air of businesslike nonchalance which
said plainer than any words that it was a matter of everyday routine. It
took a couple of hours to get them out of the way, and in the end Jurgis
saw them go into the chilling rooms with the rest of the meat, being
carefully scattered here and there so that they could not be identified.

When he came home that night he was in a very somber mood, having begun
to see at last how those might be right who had laughed at him for his
faith in America.
The men upon the killing beds felt also the effects of the slump which
had turned Marija out; but they felt it in a different way, and a way
which made Jurgis understand at last all their bitterness. The big
packers did not turn their hands off and close down, like the canning
factories; but they began to run for shorter and shorter hours. They had
always required the men to be on the killing beds and ready for work at
seven o'clock, although there was almost never any work to be done till
the buyers out in the yards had gotten to work, and some cattle had come
over the chutes. That would often be ten or eleven o'clock, which was
bad enough, in all conscience; but now, in the slack season, they would
perhaps not have a thing for their men to do till late in the afternoon.
And so they would have to loaf around, in a place where the thermometer
might be twenty degrees below zero! At first one would see them running
about, or skylarking with each other, trying to keep warm; but before
the day was over they would become quite chilled through and exhausted,
and, when the cattle finally came, so near frozen that to move was an
agony. And then suddenly the place would spring into activity, and the
merciless “speeding-up” would begin!

There were weeks at a time when Jurgis went home after such a day as
this with not more than two hours' work to his credit--which meant about
thirty-five cents. There were many days when the total was less than
half an hour, and others when there was none at all. The general average
was six hours a day, which meant for Jurgis about six dollars a week;
and this six hours of work would be done after standing on the killing
bed till one o'clock, or perhaps even three or four o'clock, in the
afternoon. Like as not there would come a rush of cattle at the very
end of the day, which the men would have to dispose of before they went
home, often working by electric light till nine or ten, or even twelve
or one o'clock, and without a single instant for a bite of supper. The
men were at the mercy of the cattle. Perhaps the buyers would be holding
off for better prices--if they could scare the shippers into thinking
that they meant to buy nothing that day, they could get their own terms.
For some reason the cost of fodder for cattle in the yards was much
above the market price--and you were not allowed to bring your own
fodder! Then, too, a number of cars were apt to arrive late in the day,
now that the roads were blocked with snow, and the packers would buy
their cattle that night, to get them cheaper, and then would come into
play their ironclad rule, that all cattle must be killed the same day
they were bought. There was no use kicking about this--there had been
one delegation after another to see the packers about it, only to be
told that it was the rule, and that there was not the slightest chance
of its ever being altered. And so on Christmas Eve Jurgis worked till
nearly one o'clock in the morning, and on Christmas Day he was on the
killing bed at seven o'clock.

All this was bad; and yet it was not the worst. For after all the hard
work a man did, he was paid for only part of it. Jurgis had once been
among those who scoffed at the idea of these huge concerns cheating;
and so now he could appreciate the bitter irony of the fact that it was
precisely their size which enabled them to do it with impunity. One of
the rules on the killing beds was that a man who was one minute late
was docked an hour; and this was economical, for he was made to work the
balance of the hour--he was not allowed to stand round and wait. And on
the other hand if he came ahead of time he got no pay for that--though
often the bosses would start up the gang ten or fifteen minutes before
the whistle. And this same custom they carried over to the end of the
day; they did not pay for any fraction of an hour--for “broken time.” A
man might work full fifty minutes, but if there was no work to fill out
the hour, there was no pay for him. Thus the end of every day was a
sort of lottery--a struggle, all but breaking into open war between
the bosses and the men, the former trying to rush a job through and
the latter trying to stretch it out. Jurgis blamed the bosses for this,
though the truth to be told it was not always their fault; for the
packers kept them frightened for their lives--and when one was in danger
of falling behind the standard, what was easier than to catch up
by making the gang work awhile “for the church”? This was a savage
witticism the men had, which Jurgis had to have explained to him. Old
man Jones was great on missions and such things, and so whenever they
were doing some particularly disreputable job, the men would wink at
each other and say, “Now we're working for the church!”

One of the consequences of all these things was that Jurgis was no
longer perplexed when he heard men talk of fighting for their rights.
He felt like fighting now himself; and when the Irish delegate of the
butcher-helpers' union came to him a second time, he received him in a
far different spirit. A wonderful idea it now seemed to Jurgis, this
of the men--that by combining they might be able to make a stand and
conquer the packers! Jurgis wondered who had first thought of it; and
when he was told that it was a common thing for men to do in America, he
got the first inkling of a meaning in the phrase “a free country.” The
delegate explained to him how it depended upon their being able to get
every man to join and stand by the organization, and so Jurgis signified
that he was willing to do his share. Before another month was by, all
the working members of his family had union cards, and wore their union
buttons conspicuously and with pride. For fully a week they were quite
blissfully happy, thinking that belonging to a union meant an end to all
their troubles.

How are things today?  Here's from a 2006 PBS look at meat packing in the US from the days of The Jungle until today:

"Today, America's meat industry is the nation's largest agricultural sector and sales of meat and poultry exceed $100 billion a year in the U.S. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the animal slaughtering and processing industry employed a total of 506,000 people at the close of 2005. The average earnings of production workers that year was $11.47 an hour, about 30 percent less than the average wage for all manufacturing jobs in the U.S. According to REAP, a union-affiliated group, union membership among meat packing employees has plunged from 80 percent in 1980 to less than 50 percent today.
The face of the average meatpacking plant worker has also changed. Over the past two decades, the number of immigrant laborers in meat packing plants—and in the Midwestern areas in which they are primarily located—has increased dramatically. According to the USDA, the percentage of Hispanic meat-processing workers rose from less than 10 percent in 1980 to nearly 30 percent in 2000."

[UPDATE 2:30pm:  KS offers a link to an Atlantic article on current labor conditions.   ]

The US Department of Compassion Announced A Growing Shortage Of Thoughts And Prayers

That was my reaction to the Odessa shooting.  The rest of this is me thinking out loud while my nieta* is off with her mom for a bit.

But I've also been thinking about what we're going to need globally as climate change forces people out of their traditional homes through floods, droughts, disease bearing mosquitos and other critters expanding their range.  Normal crops in areas will fail as conditions change.  Refugees will be on the move for more hospital climates.  Well, for food and water and relief.

That's already happening in places.  Alaska native villages are being forced to move from their coastal locations because heavy waves are eroding the shoreline.  The waves are there because normally sea ice prevents the formation of waves most of the year.  No longer.

The Syrian civil war was caused in part by a years long drought that led farmers to move to the cities.  That led to many refugees trying to get to safe countries.  That's a taste of the future.

Even those who profess to not believe climate change is real talk about mitigation rather than prevention.  They think that we should take steps to adapt.  Yes, of course.  Where we can.  Are you listening South Pacific nations?  Are you listening  South Florida?  I guess people in Manhattan can make the third floor of buildings the new entrances and work with Venetians on gondolas.

Of course, there will need to be technical fixes.  People are creating floating cities in the South Pacific for nations that will be underwater soon.

But one thing I haven't heard people talk about is lessons in civilization and community.  There are organizations working with indigenous peoples around the world to help sustain their languages and cultures.  Others working with poor farmers and others.  But their stories don't generate clicks for new media they way violence and fear-mongering do.  But we do hear after many disasters that communities pull together and help each other.  After fires, floods, mass shootings, there are outpourings of volunteers and of money to help the victims.  But what happens when everyone is the victim?

Tapping Into People's Natural Goodness

We need to learn how to tap into that love we see in times of crisis. The love parents have for their children.  The camaraderie we're told soldiers feel during war.  What is that and how do we grow it? We need to study it and find out how it works, who does it, and how to nurture those kinds of reactions in the hearts and minds of everyone.  What is the difference between those who come after disasters to loot and those who come to help?

Disaster movies are a very popular genre, but how many teach people community survival behaviors?  (That's a sincere question, because those aren't my top choice of entertainment.)

We have a Department of Defense (which should more truthfully be called the Department of War as it once was.)  And we also need a Department of Compassion, or, if you prefer, a Department of Peace.  Humans are capable of both good and bad.  Under the right conditions - child rearing, schooling, national values, and role models - more people will be peaceful, caring, and happy.  Under the wrong conditions, more divided and violent.

This week research was announced that attempted to find a homosexual gene.  It's more complicated than that.  Genetic disposition for sexuality, they say, is all over the genome, and environment plays a role as well.  I suspect the same is true for sainthood as well as sociopathy.

The Netflix series Mindhunter, which added new episodes recently, follows two FBI agents, helped by a university professor, who decide that interviewing imprisoned serial killers to find out why they do what they do.  That start out doing this secretly and are chastised when they're found out.  But they already have enough insights for catching other serial killers that the Bureau lets them continue.  In a basement office.  The most persuasive argument is something like "who knows why serial killers do what they do better than serial killers?"

We should be doing the same thing with mass shooters (and I'm sure there are people who are already doing this.)(I looked.  Didn't find much, but here's a 2018 article about a project tthat was going to start interviewing mass shooters.)  (And here's Dr. Jillian Peterson, the head of that study doing a Ted Talk May 2019.)

And I suspect they will find out the same thing that the Mindhunters learned (this is based on a true story):  that they all had serious self image problems due to absent and/or abusive parents.

This trail leads to lots of different areas - rights of parents, education of parents, birth control, abortion, foster care issues . .  just as starters.  The Department of Compassion - as I write this I realize we need both the Departments of Compassion and Peace - one more on the individual scale and one on the national scale.  But they overlap, because ultimately, 'nations' don't make war, the individual people in control of the military make war.

That sentence took an abrupt turn and never got finished.  The Department of Compassion would work on all these micro and macro environmental factors that impact how kids learn to feel good about themselves and how they learn to work with and for others instead of against them.

That's enough for today.  Remember that every human you encounter is, surprise, a human, with a whole history trailing them.  And a mind, and feelings, and a sense of self.  Imagine what that person doesn't know about you, and there's just as much you don't know about them.  Try to connect to all those people in a way that makes them feel better for having interacted with you.  Just a genuine smile as you pass someone on the street.  And I guarantee you'll discover the people around you have rich and interesting lives that will make you feel better too.  99.9% of the people you pass are NOT people you need to fear.  (I just made up that number.  I don't know if it's true.  I suspect it's definitely not if you are a person of color or a woman.  But even the people who might do someone harm, probably won't do harm most of the time or to most of the people they encounter.)


Glossary
*nieta is Spanish for granddaughter

Why Everyone Should Turn Off Online Movies Until They Finish Reading Proof Of Conspiracy - Plus A Brief Twitter Explanation

OK, it's hard to read Proof of Conspiracy because it doesn't come out until Tuesday September 3.  So you have the weekend to binge view.

I've already posted about Seth Abramson's previous book, Proof of Collusion which was like the background guide for the Mueller Report.

Here's an overview of what you'll get in Proof of Conspiracy from the author via a 15 Tweet thread:   [*For those who don't know a Tweet from a Thread, skip down to the bottom of this post]

Seth Abramson
@SethAbramson
·
Aug 30
1/ Two things are simultaneously true:
(1) PROOF OF CONSPIRACY will shock you and profoundly alter your understanding of what the Trump presidency means for the whole world.
(2) PROOF OF CONSPIRACY is fully sourced: 3,250 endnotes and 4,330 citations are being published online.
2/ In fact, for the first time, I'm going to direct people to the website for the 378 pages (not a typo) of endnotes and citations for PROOF OF CONSPIRACY that are available for free online. All stem from the endnotes in the print book, which is 592 pages: https://static.macmillan.com/static/macmillan/proofofconspiracy/endnotes.pdf

3/ The Trump collusion narrative that lay outside the scope of the Mueller Report is larger by a factor of 5—at least—than what even those who've read the full Report have seen. Mueller focused on 1 crime and 1 country; PROOF OF CONSPIRACY looks at *many* crimes and 10 countries.
4/ Every day, America is rediscovering the narrowness of the Mueller Report. Not merely because the Report says at its beginning that Trumpworld witnesses withheld, hid, and destroyed evidence—making a proper, conclusive investigation impossible—but because the probe ended early.

5/ I'm not criticizing Mueller. I believe there were pressures/anxieties in play in his investigation we will one day discover. But the investigation ended with *all* counterintelligence information—a far greater stock of information than what was in the Report—being farmed out.

6/ The Mueller probe ended with key subpoenas unfulfilled, key witnesses unquestioned, key issues unlitigated, key cooperation deals wantonly broken, key lines of inquiry that lay outside the narrow scope of the investigation wholly—seemingly carelessly—unexplored. That's a fact.
7/ The problem we have is that not only did media do nothing to consider, explore, or reveal to news-watchers the *vast* narrative that lay outside the scope of the Mueller Report, it didn't even educate viewers on the *Mueller Report*.
Not Volume 1, at least. *That* it ignored.
8/ Tell most people that the Mueller Report reveals that Trump's top Russia adviser for the entirety of the 2016 campaign was a Soviet-born man who currently works for the Kremlin in Moscow and who Putin has described as a "friend," and they'll say, "No it doesn't."
But it does.

9/ Tell most people that the Mueller Report reveals that weeks before the 2016 election a Kremlin ally wrote Trump's lawyer to confirm the existence of blackmail videos of Trump, thereby issuing an implicit threat from the Kremlin, and they'll say, "No it doesn't."
But it does.

10/ Tell most people that the Mueller Report proves that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin—and that an indictment undergirded by that collusion couldn't be brought only because Trump convinced Manafort to lie to the feds—and they'll say, "No it doesn't."
But it does.


11/ Media has so ill-prepared us to understand the foundation upon which PROOF OF CONSPIRACY was written that the book must, at points, remind readers of these facts—with citations to the Report and elsewhere—in order to unfold its even-more-terrifying (and fully sourced) story.
10/ Tell most people that the Mueller Report proves that the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin—and that an indictment undergirded by that collusion couldn't be brought only because Trump convinced Manafort to lie to the feds—and they'll say, "No it doesn't."
But it does.

11/ Media has so ill-prepared us to understand the foundation upon which PROOF OF CONSPIRACY was written that the book must, at points, remind readers of these facts—with citations to the Report and elsewhere—in order to unfold its even-more-terrifying (and fully sourced) story.

12/ What we've gotten, instead, is 1,000+ Trump propagandists like John Solomon or anyone at Fox News or Chuck Ross who are lying—bald-facedly lying—every day about what Volume 1 does and does not say, likely because they *haven't read it* and they assume no one else has, either.

13/ If you want to know how carefully documented PROOF OF CONSPIRACY is, consider that whereas most in media ignored Vol. 1 of the Mueller Report—and some lied about having read it and what's in it—I publicly live-tweeted my first reading of it in a thread spanning 500 tweets.

14/ What we're getting:
@ChrisCuomo
—a smart, dedicated journalist—arguing with profoundly dishonest Trump cultist
@KayleighMcEnany
.
What we deserve: Deep dives on the Saudi- and Emirati-funded Israeli disinformation campaign that the Trumps knew about and that helped Trump win.

15/ Upshot: I'm a ride-or-die Mueller-Report-Volume-1 nerd who owes nothing to corporate bosses or advertisers and will offer long-form analysis of a national emergency whether some scoff or not. I worked harder on PROOF OF CONSPIRACY than anything I've worked on in my life. /end

I'm thinking of sending this Tweet to my US Senators.  Dan Sullivan has said his staff has been reading the Mueller Report, but he hasn't.  Murkowski says it's slow, but she's plowing through it.    It should be high a priority.

And so should Proof of Conspiracy.  Maybe this author written set of Cliff Notes might help Sullivan.



*Tweets And Threads

Twitter is a kind of social media where members can post mini-blog posts of up to 280 characters. It used to be 140 characters but eventually they doubled it.

https://www.lifewire.com/twitter-slang-and-key-terms-explained-2655399is a post on Twitter.  They look like this:

EARTH TO DAN SULLIVAN @SenDanSullivan
Critically ill Immigrant kids are being cut-off from medical treatment by the Trump Administration! @POTUS
Do you care?@lisamurkowski @DrAlGrossAK @adn @JuneauEmpire @FDNMPolitics

— Elstun (@ElstunL) September 1, 2019

People can add photos and videos.  And people can comment as well.  But you're limited, as I said, to 280 characters.  People can have a Twitter name (here, it's Elstun) and a @elstonL is how you find him.  The @SenDanSullivan in this post will let Sullivan know he's been mentioned in a Tweet.  There's lots more.  Here's a page which explains key Twitter terms.  I mention all this because I know many people never look at Twitter, even though they hear about the President tweeting every day.

A Thread is a series of Tweets all connected.  This is a way to say more than you can with just 280 characters.

I chose not to 'embed' Seth's Twitter Thread (then it would have looked like it does on Twitter) so I could edit out things that you really don't need, including all the comments.  But if you want, here's the same link as in the beginning which will take you to Seth's Twitter Thread on Twitter.  And no, you don't have to be a member of Twitter to read Tweets there.

"I thought that they, like myself, simply wanted to 'save the lives of unborn babies.' I have come to the conclusion that I was a dupe."

I was going to have a couple of short links to interesting sites, but it's hard.  I know brief is good, but life is complicated and brief means simplifying the complications.  I do strive for clear, but not simple.  So I'm just going to do this one link on abortion.


How I Lost Faith In The Pro-Life Movement  - This post is several years old, and the basics are well known to anyone who has any awareness of the facts of abortion.  Basically:

• Promoting contraceptives decreases abortion more than anything else.
• Banning abortion doesn't decrease number of abortions, but increases deaths of mothers getting illegal and unsafe abortions.
• Much of the anti-abortion movement is men trying to control women

There's also an interesting discussion about when life begins and how the body sloughs off many fertilized cells naturally - more in women not taking birth control than in those using birth control pills.  Here's a sample of what it sounds like:

"I have to be honest, this blog post totally shocked me. I wondered about the numbers Sarah used, so I went looking for verification. As I did this I opted to use the pro-life movement’s own numbers on the rate of fertilized eggs that fail to implant for women on the pill. Remember, once again, that scientific studies have found again and again that the pill does not result in fertilized eggs failing to implant. However, I felt that if I used the pro-life movement’s own numbers I could not be accused of simply using studies with a liberal bias. And so I explored the numbers."

There's lots of numbers to back all this up, numbers most people don't have when discussing abortion.  And numbers I need to check up on (the link right above goes to another of her own posts that goes into more detailed numbers.  The author of all this this is listed as Libby Anne on the website Patheos which describes itself as:

"Patheos.com is the premier online destination to engage in the global dialogue about religion and spirituality, and to explore and experience the world's beliefs. Patheos is the website of choice for the millions of people looking for credible and balanced information about religion. Patheos brings together faith communities, academics, and the broader public into a single environment, and is the place where many people turn on a regular basis for insight, inspiration, and stimulating discussion."

Libby Anne's brief bio is:

"Libby Anne grew up in a large evangelical homeschool family highly involved in the Christian Right. College turned her world upside down, and she is today an atheist, a feminist, and a progressive. She blogs about leaving religion, her experience with the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements, the detrimental effects of the "purity culture," the contradictions of conservative politics, and the importance of feminism."

For now, I'm going to trust Patheos to have checked up on Libby Anne's background.  But I'll also email them and find out how they vet authors.  I'll let you know when or if I hear back.


Meanwhile, when the anti-abortion group pickets in front of Planned Parenthood, nearby, I'm going to give them all copies.  But I realize that for some people out their picketing, being anti-abortion is their self identity.  If they aren't anti-abortion, who will they become?  It's hard changing.

2000 Pound Pumpkin And Other Alaska State Fair Shots

That's the champion pumpkin grower just after his pumpkin was weighed.  That's 907 kilos!  A lot bigger than last year, due, he things, to our warm summer.

From Time:  (The quotes are from different pages in the slide show)

"State and county fairs have been organized in the United States since 1841, when the first such gathering was organized in Syracuse, New York. Food — both its production and enjoyment — has been their centerpiece from the very beginning."

"Credit for the idea of the state fair is often given to Elkanah Watson, a wealthy New England farmer and businessman who showcased his sheep in the public square of Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1807."

You can learn about the history of  the Alaska State Fair at their website.  I can't cut and paste from there so you'll have to just go there yourself.  But it began in Anchorage, it says, in 1926, and moved to Palmer in 1936.

I hadn't been to a fair for quite a while.  And I was amazed at how much it had grown.  If I recall right, last time I went the maps identified all the food booths.  This time there was a color fold out guide and map, just for Tuesday August 27!  But having a 6 year old in the house was a strong incentive to go.

I have to admit that the highlight, for me, was seeing about 100 or so Sandhill Cranes in the field on the road you turn off the highway to get to the fair.  (No pics because it was tricky parking there and my camera was in the back of the car.)

But here are some pics of the fair itself.  Starting with things up in the air.

There were animals  and crops and flowers:

And lots of prizes

A goat milking contest.

And more exotic animals:

And lots and lots and lots of food. And people seemed to be spending lots of money.  We all had a great time

This Old Dog Learning New Tricks

When I started blogging people didn't have smart phones, or at least not very smart phones.  I had my Canon Spotmatic which I quickly realized I could use to make videos or audio recordings as well as photos.  And I learned how to get them up on YouTube, well I also used .  So in 2007 when I was first blogging news stories - the political corruption trials in Anchorage - I could type up a post, add photos, and even videos before I left the federal building.  I was just doing what came naturally to me at the time.  I didn't realize this was the new journalism.

But as time went by, Google took over Blogger (here, where my blog is) and YouTube, and smartphones added cameras and videos and internet and I fell behind.  Yes, I could still do it the old fashioned way I'd cobbled together, but journalists with a smart phone could do it all from that one device.

Let me pull in another thread to this story.  The warm, dry weather has meant we have wasps joining us for dinner out on the deck.  No one's been stung, and we get a bit of exercise waving our hands to move them away, but it's a bit annoying.  I've got some jars out on the deck with the lids off and a bit of salmon inside.  A wasp inevitably gets curious and flies in and I cover the jar with the lid.  This clashes with my Buddhist tendencies, but I remember the explanation they gave me in Thailand for leaving out poisoned meat for feral dogs to eat.  If the dog chooses to eat the food, then they didn't kill the dog.  The dog did itself in.

So I was trying to take wasp pictures at dinner tonight and I accidentally had it on 'live' instead of just 'photo.'  That means you get a second or two of motion as part of the photo.  So I looked up how to turn that into a GIF.  I figured out then how to send it to someone on WhatsApp and then how to get it up here.  But I'm not sure it worked.  It's not working on my draft nor in preview.  It might work when I post it.  Or not.  We'll see.

Do I need this?  It's more compelling than just a still picture of a wasp, but it's not really necessary.  But there may be something where the motion does matter.  I promise not to use these as visual snark.  Just in case it doesn't work, here are a couple of pictures from a stop at Potter Marsh this afternoon.

This has been sitting as a draft for a couple of days.  I'm going to put it up, not sure if the GIF will work.  Took nieta to Apple store for a kids photo class yesterday and Chris there showed me an app to make gifs.  But I'm having trouble getting it from my phone to my computer as a gif.  Maybe later.  [UPDATED a few minutes after posting:  Well, you can see the 'live photo' but it's as a movie, not a GIF.  More work to do.]

Blog maintenance takes up a certain amount of time and is generally not visible to most readers.  Most technical things are pretty static now.  Every now and then I try something new - like I have a post with a gif I made on my iPhone ready to be posted, except I'm not sure it it's working right and it appears I'll have to actually post it to find out.  I also had a lot of issues trying to post from my new iPad while in Argentina this summer.  It didn't get along with Blogger at all.  I thought about post for others with similar problems - tricks I learned to make it better, but my basic advice is don't even try if you can help it.  It's a pain.

Then there are updates to old posts.  I can't do this all the time and I really hope that people look at the dates of posts they read online and realize something six years old might be out of date.  But some things seem worth updating.  Here are a couple of recent updates.


Juries  - The LATimes had an article today about a US supreme court case challenging Louisiana's former majority rule for juries.  (The voters overturned that in favor of unanimous decisions in 2018, but the case was 2016.)  I updated a 2017 post on whether hung juries reflect the US cultural divide, which mentioned that Louisiana and Oregon both had majority rule juries.  So I've updated that post.

Hong Kong - I also added a link to an article by a Chinese Human Rights worker to my recent post on Hong Kong.    I also got messages from one former Hong Kong student and one former Beijing student saying my post on Hong Kong was generally accurate, but they didn't want me to quote them.

And then there is following up on comments by readers.  Often there really isn't anything for me to add.  Do the commenters want me to acknowledge their comments?  Or do they look at my follow up comments as my trying to have the last word on something?  If I don't have more to add, I just leave it, especially if I'm particularly busy.

But some comments are particularly welcome because they add information I didn't know about.
For example, a comment by Dennis on my post the other day about whether the airport couldn't get the runway finished faster, gave details about how the grooves in runways have to be 3mm wide and spaced about 25mm apart.  But then he was vague about how long it would take - "a long time."  My comment asked for specifics of 'a long time.'  

And I realize now, as I'm writing this, that I probably should have put a link in that post to one I did last year about the widening and repairing the north-south runway.  So I'll do that now.

Reposting: "The scum of creation has been dumped on us,"

I was looking through old posts trying to find one where I suggested a statue and campaign support for the first 10 Republican Senators to pledge to fight Trump.  I'm still looking for that one, but I also found this very relevant post from July 2016.

I hope you don't think I'm being lazy here.  I know that very few people have the time to read even 50% of what I post and this seems particularly relevant today.

It's my thoughts on reading The Big Burn by Timothy Egan, with more relevance today than when I first posted it.  (Well, it was relevant then and had enough people paid attention it might be less relevant today.)  Let's see what's in it:
√  an account of huge forest fires in Montana in the early 1900's
√  a president attacking government employees' valiant attempts to preserve the environment
√ outrageous treatment of and discrimination against immigrants

Here's the old post:

From Timothy Egan's, The Big Burn:

"What passed for law and constitutional protections in Morenci, [company owned mining town in Arizona, 1910] were thugs hired by Phelps Dodge.  They maintained a three tier wage system:  one for trouble-free whites, one for Mexicans, one for Italians.  Such attitudes are typical in a decade when nine million immigrants came to the United States, and one-third of the population was either foreign-born or a child of someone born abroad.  The Italian surge in particular angered those who felt the nation was no longer recognizable, had lost its sense of identity.  And they hated all these strange languages spoken in shops, schools, and churches.  The Immigration Restriction League, founded by Boston blue bloods with family ties to the old Tories of England, campaigned to keep "undesirable classes" from entering the country.  They meant Italians, Greeks, Jews, and people from eastern Europe. 

"The scum of creation has been dumped on us,"  said the native politician Thomas Watson.  "The most dangerous and corrupting hordes of the Old World have invaded us."  It was not just pelicans [auto-correct changed my version of politicians to pelicans] who attacked Mediterranean immigrants as a threat to the American way of life.  Francis A. Walker, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, called Italian and Greek immigrants "beaten men from beaten towns, representing the worst failures in the struggles for existence."  Another educated expert cautioned Americans against "absorbing the equitable blood from Southern Europe." (pp. 131-2)

I'd note that Fredrick Trump, Donald's grandfather arrived in New York on October 19, 1885  (a year before the Statue of Liberty was unveiled) from Germany at age 16.  Twenty-six years prior to the mining and timber rush described in the book in the summer of 1910 (see below), Trump

"moved to the mining town of Monte Cristo, Washington in Snohomish County.[7] Monte Cristo was expected to produce a fortune of gold and silver because evidence of mineral deposits were discovered in 1889. This led to many prospectors moving to the area in hopes of becoming rich, with the financial investment of billionaire John D. Rockefeller in the entire Everett area creating an exaggerated expectation of the area's potential."

He returned to Germany in 1901, found a wife, and returned with her to the US in 1902.  The Trumps, coming from northern Europe, while part of this huge surge of immigrants, came from a more privileged group of immigrants, they weren't Italians or Greeks or Jews.  Though by 1917 the US was at war with their country of origin.

Mike Pence's grandfather didn't get to the US from Ireland until much later - April 11, 1923.

From what I can tell, Hillary Clinton's paternal grandfather immigrated from England and her paternal grandmother was born in the US to Welsh immigrant parents.

I would also note, that when people claim that their ancestors were legal immigrants, as the passage above suggests, the laws were much, much easier back then for European immigrants.  

Actually, immigration is but a small part of the book.  The main focus is the boom towns of Idaho and Montana as the railroads opened access to the forests just after Teddy Roosevelt, with the guidance of Gifford Pinchot, created millions of acres of national forests and parks in the West.  But they had to fight Eastern corporations that were ravaging the new public land with their rapacious taking of minerals and timber.  This included a huge scandal over Alaska coal.  Roosevelt's second term was up and he chose not to run again.  (He'd come in to office from the vice presidency when president McKinley was shot and had only served seven years.)  While he was off on safari in Africa,  Taft, who had promised Roosevelt to protect the forests and the new concept of conservation, had instead appointed pro-development  Richard Ballinger as secretary of the interior.

"The interior secretary, whose duty was to oversee an empire of public land on behalf of the American people, had once backed a syndicate as it tried to take control of coal in a part of Alaska that was later added to the Chugach National Forest. .  ."  

"Beyond the Alaska coal deal, Ballinger was now showing his true colors - as a traitor to the progressives, Pinchot believed.  "You chaps who are in favor of this conservation program are all wrong,"  Ballinger said in a speech.  "You are hindering the development of the West.  In my opinion, the proper course is to divide it up among the big corporations and let the people who know how to make money out of it get the benefits of the circulation of money."  (pp. 94-5)

That's all backdrop to the story of a band of well-trained and highly motivated new rangers  whose job was to oversee huge tracts of land newly designated as national forests and parks. ("Supervisor Koch . . . felt protective about his five million or so acres . . .")  Land that was being exploited by mining and timber companies and hordes of folks taking the new railroad into the tiny boom towns hoping to get rich.

As the title of the book suggests, the book is about fires, as the rangers struggle on meagre salaries to protect the towns and even more, the newly created national forests from the ravages of fire in the bone dry summer of 1910.  There was no rain, but lots of  thunder and lightening, which started thousands of fires that summer.

I'm not through with the book yet, but I thought the sections on immigration give some historical perspective to today's political debates.  And overall, the book shows that the fights between the corporations looking to exploit natural resources and the government fighting to preserve some of the natural space of the continent, wasn't much different then, though time allows us more facts about what was happening back then.

In a book Pinchot wrote at the time - The Fight for Conservation - 

"He predicted that America might one day, within this century, be a nation of two or three hundred million people.  And what would his generation leave them?  Their duty was to the future.  To ensure that people in 2010 would have a country of clean water, healthy forests, and open land would require battle with certain groups, namely 'the alliance between business and politics.'  It was, he said, 'the snake that we must kill.'"(p. 158)

Given that today corporations once again have great influence over Congress - enough to prevent or pervert what they most oppose - and the importance of money in politics is major issue, I'd say his view of things was pretty prescient. 

The Fact That Trump Is Still In Office Reveals A Huge Flaw In Our System

Andrew Sullivan is a gay conservative.  Some things I agree with, others not.  But I think this assessment of the president is accurate and makes those who still support the president (other than those ready to drink the Kool-Aide on command) deeply problematic.*  Particularly those in the US Senate.

From Andrew Sullivan at NYMagazine:

"President Donald Trump is absurd. His presidency is absurd. His party is absurd. We have known this ever since that absurd journey down an escalator, and the surrealism has only intensified since. Perhaps it takes a sane foreigner, not subject to years of almost hourly Trump abuse, to point out the obvious. We have no Executive branch in any meaningful or serious sense. We have a joke that’s wearing thinner by the day. There is no institution or company in America, small or large, that would allow Donald Trump to run or represent it for more than a few days — because most sane institutions see immediately that a rape-y racist with no knowledge base or capacity to learn is an embarrassment, and a huge liability. If appointed the head of, say, a local library on January 20, 2017, Trump would have been fired by January 21."

Think about the history books twenty years from now.  I hope they list those who had the power to get rid of him, but have kept this president in office this long.  Germany - the US helped you out after WW II, which could be considered a self-inflicted catastrophe, just as Trump is our self-inflicted catastrophe.  Remember us when we're picking up the pieces.


*I'm using this term because I realize there are different reasons different Senators have for not opposing the president.  So I won't brand all of them as despicable or cowardly or __________ (fill in the blank.)