Invariant, Unteachable, Incapable

Preview:

In 1944 John R. Pierce wrote "Invariant," a science fiction short story about a man whose mind was incapable of change.

A scientist, one Dr. Homer Green, believed he had created a rejuvenation formula that could make people immortal. He tested it on himself and found that it worked. Wounds healed almost immediately and no disease could touch him.

But as Pierce notes, "There is only one catch. Even his brain tissue is invariant - exactly the way it was before he treated himself! He cannot get any more memories or otherwise adapt to environment, because his mind always repairs itself to the state just before the treatment!!"¹

So Dr. Green lives forever, but always in the same ever-repeating and never-remembered day. Groundhog Day forever.

Life imitates art:

Dr. Jonathan Reiner, after watching a Fox News interview in which the unpresident contradicted himself about mask use at least twice and cited outdated information: "He's unteachable, and I can't understand it. His failure to understand this simple public health measure, his reluctance to accept the advice of all his public health experts, makes me wonder whether he really is qualified . . . the fact that the president of the United States can't get this straight raises serious doubts about his competence now."²

Dr. Mary Trump, the Child-in-Chief's niece, and a clinical psychologist:

"Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information."³

Well--what else might one say? Here are two medical opinions, one from a psychologist who is a member of the Trump family. Both echo countless other observations and anecdotal evidence that the Great Pretender is delusional, incapable of governing, and a pawn of forces that are inimical to the United States.

I say again, he must be removed from office by any means necessary, before he plunges this nation into war, either civil or international.


--- Diogenes, 7/20/2020



¹ Astounding Science Fiction, April, 1944.
² https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/watch/hes-unteachable-doctor-blasts-trumps-latest-mask-remarks/vp-BB16UvCz
³ Trump, Mary L. Too Much and Never Enough, p. 197.

RIP John Lewis

Things could soon get interesting in the Peachtree State. Or maybe not.

Representative John Lewis, one of the lions of the Civil Rights movement, and a genuinely great American, has died.

With his death, Brian Kemp, the Trump suckup who is governor of Georgia, may find his 15 minutes of fame. It will be up to him to decide whether to fill Lewis' House seat.

It's a tricky situation. Kemp is Constitutionally bound to hold a special election for the seat, but the Constitution doesn't specify how soon the election is to be held after the seat becomes vacant. (Article I, §2,4)

Kemp could in theory table the special election and let the clock run out until the November general election. He could plead that it could take months to set up a special election, which among other things would require printing a great many absentee ballots due to COVID-19 restrictions.

Neither Trump nor Kemp was a fan of Lewis. He was Black, popular, and powerful, and to their alligator brains that was three strikes. It could be to the Republican advantage to leave the seat empty for a while.

But does Kemp want to leave the 5th District unrepresented for any significant length of time? It's a Black majority district, and such precincts have historically not been of interest to Southern governors. But . . .

The 5th is not just any district. Located in the north central part of the state, it includes the capital Atlanta and its suburbs, the headquarters of the CDC, the headquarters of several major corporations, and Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, a major airline hub. Its population of some 760,000 are largely educated professional types who are unlikely to sit still and let the governor mute their voice in Congress.

It doesn't apply directly to the subject here, but this striking sentence is in Article V of the Constitution: "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate." So why shouldn't what's good for the Senate not be good for the House? Sounds like a good question for the good folks in the 5th District to ask.

And there's always the old favorite: "No taxation without representation." Well, OK, there's no tax involved here. But no action that could affect the 5th should take place without representation. Keep that in mind, Sycophant Kemp.

RIP, John Lewis. Please assure Dr. King that we're still carrying on the best we can.


--- Diogenes, 7/18/2020


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Take your stinkin' paws off my rights, you damn dirty ape!

The Ape-in-Chief is trying to monkey with the Bill of Rights. We all have to act to stop him. He still has 27 weeks in which he can do tons of damage.

When James Madison wrote that "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press," he meant to ensure that news and information important to the public could reach the populace freely, untrammeled by political spin or falsehoods, and without government censorship.

For Madison, "press" meant newspapers. Today it means print, broadcast, and digital media, but the idea remains the same. We the public have the right to straight-up and factual news and information about facts that concern us, and the government has no right to prevent us from getting it.

COVID-19 is, or should be, a subject of interest to everyone who draws breath. Until Tuesday the best place to find detailed information about it was CDC.gov. That was the date (Bastille Day, ironically) when the Department of Health and Human Services, at the behest of the Gorilla-in-Chief, ordered information from the nation's hospitals to be sent to HHS (and some to the White House!) instead of CDC. The next day that information disappeared from the CDC website.

The initial announcement about this displacement of data said tellingly that the data would be in a database inaccessible to the public.

Did that last bit get your attention? The Executive Branch of the government was planning to sequester information about public health, keeping it from the very public who need to have it.

Then, surprise! Two days later the information is back at CDC.gov. There's a lot of speculation about what happened to it in the interim, ranging from the data being bugged so the administration can tweak it at will to HHS personnel realizing they couldn't deal with the data inflow, let alone analyze it.

Of course the data never actually went away. One portal to it was closed, but it's still out there on lots of news, public health, and university websites.  

So no harm, no foul, right? Wrong! The fact that the data never went away is irrelevant.

We've not returned to the status quo ante. We've seen an open attempt on the part of the administration to withhold important public health information from the American people. My personal feeling is that they failed because they're so tightly enclosed in the Trump bubble they didn't realize just how accessible the data is.

They will try again, and they will keep trying to deny crucial information to the American people. This administration is capable of acts we can't even imagine.

As election day comes closer and the unpresident becomes ever more desperate, he will become more dangerous. As I've said before, the people have to move to stop him. Our most direct route to accomplishing this is by keeping heavy pressure on our members of Congress to act in some meaningful way to contain DJTrump.

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.¹


--- Diogenes, 7/17/2020  


¹ Wendell Phillips, American abolitionist, 1852.


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Excuses, excuses

Reasons not to wear a mask during the COVID-19 pandemic:

1. Trump says I don't have to.                  Trump lies. If he says you don't, it means you do.
2. It's uncomfortable.                                Tell me that when you're intubated so you can breathe.
3. My breath smells bad.                          Get a breath mint.
4. My emphysema makes it hard to breathe.     You're high risk. Go home.
5. The governor says I don't have to.       The governor is an idiot.
6. I can't drink with it on.                         Use a straw.
7. I don't like the way I look.                    Tell me that when you're lying in your casket.
8. None of my friends do.                          You know what your mother would say, don't you?
9. No one can make me.                           They can if you're in one of the states requiring it.*
10. My asthma makes it feel stuffy.            See answer #4.
11. I feel claustrophobic.                            Inhale deeply before putting it on; exhale slowly.
12. I'm healthy.                                            Look up the definition of "asymptomatic."
13. I can't smoke with it on.                       You can't smoke inside anyway, numbnuts.
14. I can't tie it behind my head.                 Get one that goes around your ears.
15. It hurts behind my ears.                         Give it time; you'll get calluses.
16. The pandemic is a hoax.                        Shall I call you an ambulance now?
17. I social distance; don't need one.           Get the hell away from me!
18. Sean Hannity says I don't need one.      See answer #5.
19. I cough and sneeze a lot from allergies.  All the better to be wearing one.
20. It's against my religion.                          I hope you're praying a lot.    

 ---Diogenes, 7/16/2020

* California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

Life Matters, Part 3

We were once called the melting pot of nations for the millions of immigrants from myriad nations who came to the United States during the 19th century in search of a better life. Polish, Germans, Chinese, Italians, Dutch, Swedes, Russians, Jews, and a variety of Eastern Europeans landed in New York. After 1849 hundreds of thousands of Chinese came through San Francisco in search of gold and to work on the western railroads.

All were discriminated against and persecuted until they found niches in American society. All but one race ultimately assimilated. The Chinese were considered too alien. Their culture, dress, physical appearance, cuisine, religion, language, and several other factors worked against them. They were denied immigration for 61 years by a string of measures beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Members of one foreign ethnic group, however, had been here long before all others. The institution of slavery had been established in 1619 with the arrival of 20 African captives in Jamestown, Virginia. Of all the peoples who came to these shores, only Africans came involuntarily, only Africans were forced into slavery, and only Africans were bought and sold as chattel in marketplaces.

Black lives matter and Black deaths matter. Not because they are inherently more important than those of other races, but because they have been disregarded for so long. For more than two centuries millions of African men and women lived, worked, and died in appalling conditions, first in the American colonies and then in the American states. Few of their names are known.

Emancipation brought an end to enforced slavery, but the plight of Black people, particularly in the South, was little improved. They continued to be harassed, beaten, taunted, persecuted, murdered, raped and lynched well into the 20th century. Systemic victimization, frequently by police, continues today, due in no small part to the rabble-rousing rants of the Racist-in-Chief, DJTrump.

We must learn that if we are to have a truly just and equal society we have to acknowledge the pain, torment and misery our ancestors visited on generations of ancestors of our Black sisters and brothers.

Black lives do matter, We have to speak it.


--- Diogenes, 7/15/2020

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Life Matters, Part 2

The Grand Dragon and High Wizard of the Kaka Klan, a.k.a. Racebaiter-in-Chief DJTrump, says we shouldn't think that all whites are racists.

No, we shouldn't. Not any more than we should think all Blacks are criminals and all Mexicans are rapists and murderers, which he not only believes, but on which he built a political campaign.

As I said in my "True Confessions" post yesterday, I am the product of a racist culture, which I have struggled all my life to cast off, yet I still have to ask myself if I am a racist.

Certainly not in any overt way. Individuals of many ethnicities have passed through my life as teachers, friends, colleagues, students, and lovers. As far as I have been concerned, they are just human beings, period.

At the same time, I occasionally have a twinge of something ugly when I meet certain Black men on the street. I can't consciously say what it is. It's almost as if I perceive an aura of threat. Like Jimmy Carter, who admitted to committing adultery in his heart, I feel I'm committing some kind of hate crime in my subconscious.

These passing encounters are always anonymous. I have no doubt that if I were introduced to the same men socially I wouldn't feel a thing. I can only think what I experience is some nasty thing bubbling up from my early years.

I have been victimized by Blacks, roughed up by white cops, and spat upon by Asians. I hold no grudges about those incidents, and I certainly have developed no racial hatred. I sometimes wonder if it's a generational thing. Perhaps people in Generation X or Z are truly color blind. I certainly hope so.

Our so-called leaders, however, are largely Baby Boomers. I hate sharing a generation with them. It is they who fire up the racists, who have hate in their hearts and who pulled out every dirty trick in the book to scuttle the Obama presidency because they couldn't stand the fact that America had elected a Black president.

It's because of their hatred that we all must understand why Black lives matter.

Tomorrow.


--- Diogenes, Bastille Day, 2020

Life Matters, Part 1

All lives matter. African-Americans have lives. Therefore black lives matter.

Nice little syllogism, that, proving the facts of a major national issue in eleven words.

Logically speaking it's a sound argument with a valid conclusion. I never thought it would lead me to a long silence, let alone a crisis of conscience.

Recently the editor of Vox Populi called me out for a post I had submitted on this subject. It was, she declared, superficial and inadequate to the importance of the question.

She was right.

I am a white man of the Baby Boomer generation. I was raised in a middle-class racist family in an all-white, very small mostly racist town in a largely racist Midwestern state. By racist I mean that people of other races, ethnicities and nationalities were habitually spoken of disparagingly. A variety of epithets were used, depending on the background of the subject. I don't think anyone wished harm to any of those they spoke of--it was just the language one used.

My thoughts and speech echoed those of my family until I was about 13 and had a personal view of segregation during a visit to the South. My most persistent memory of that trip is of the "Colored only" and "White only" signs. They were everywhere: On drinking fountains, public restrooms, theater entrances, swimming pools--I clearly remember an arcade in an amusement park where side-by-side pinball machines were racially labeled.

It troubled my naive teenaged brain. I decided to experiment and started using "Colored" facilities whenever I could. Nothing happened. But I learned there could have been serious repercussions had I been "colored" and used "white" facilities. I could only ask why skin color made such a difference--and I'm still asking.

It's easy to say "Black lives matter." We can shout the slogan, wave it on a sign, wear it on a T-shirt, put it on our Facebook page, and feel virtuous. But do we mean it? Do we feel it? Or are we just being politically correct?

We need to remember that throughout much of American history black lives didn't matter. Or didn't matter much. After long debate in the Continental Congress on how to determine the number of persons in each state for the purposes of representation and taxation, it was decided that each Negro, i.e. slave, would count as 3/5 of a person.

We also need to consider that black deaths matter. How many of us remember that the first person to die in the struggle for American independence was an escaped slave named Crispus Attucks, who was given a hero's burial in Boston? How many slaves lie in unmarked graves throughout the South? How many were innocent victims of lynching? How many were never mourned?

I for one cannot come close to imagining how alienated African-Americans must feel from American history. It has been common knowledge for a very long time that many, if not most, of our Founders were slave owners. We even know some intimate details of slave/master interaction thanks to Thomas Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemmings.

The journals of the Continental Congress are full of matter-of-fact debates about how to treat "negroes" (the world is usually not capitalized)--not as people, but as property. Samuel Chase of Maryland, a signer of the Declaration and member of Congress for 20 years, put it plainly: "The negroes are wealth,"¹ i.e. chattel.

How do we reconcile the fact that some of the greatest men in the early history of our country contributed to its most infamous institution? Were they hypocrites, or pragmatists, or did it enter their thoughts at all?

Does the greater good offset the injustice?


--- Diogenes, July 13, 2020



¹ A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: Journals of the Continental Congress, July 30, 1776: http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?hlaw:2:./temp/~ammem_Jvz3::





 

 

The China Connection

A farmer in China's province of Inner Mongolia was recently diagnosed with Bubonic Plague.

That's shocking to us, but hardly surprising. China has been exporting plagues for millennia.

Of the more than 20 pandemics in recorded history, and even a few prehistoric plagues discovered by science, the great majority have originated in China. The path of contagion into Europe typically followed trade along the Great Silk Road.

Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes Plague, is endemic to China. Three major outbreaks, in 541, 1432, and 1855, killed millions. The second, a.k.a. the Black Death, may have killed as much as one half the population of Europe. The 1855 outbreak, which killed at least 12 million people, was finally only declared inactive in 1981, but remnants still pop up from time to time.

Since the 1890s new kinds of zoonotic diseases have come out of China. The newcomers have been associated with swine, birds, and now bats. They generally tend to be types of influenza passed from animals to humans. Because they originate in other species we have no natural immunity to them. Because they mutate often, a vaccine developed one day may not work the next. And because they spread quickly and easily, treatment programs tend to lag a few steps behind the contagion.

So, Diogenes, why this textbook-dry commentary on disease?

Because, dear reader, even though plagues have indeed killed an untold number of people, the "primitive" cultures that dealt with them, having no medicine, no idea of germ theory, and little idea of hygiene, were many times able to slow and even stop the spread of disease. How?

Isolation. The doctors of ancient and medieval times, having no means to cure their patients, watched them closely. They discovered that people who congregated in groups tended to become infected, while non-social individuals did not. They advised families and heads of villages to watch for symptoms and as quickly as possible when a symptom appeared, to close the afflicted person away from others. It took years for the information to get out and for it to spread, but it proved an effective technique.

This is a lesson we have only just relearned; we call it social distancing. There is no indication that medieval doctors suggested wearing masks, but people in the presence of illness frequently covered their mouths and noses against the stench, which may have had some prophylactic effect.

We know about germs, and anyone who has had an 8th-grade health class knows how diseases can be spread. The unpresident clearly missed that lesson.

The Dolt-in-Chief wants schools to open in the fall. He and his Republican minions want to pretend there is no contagion. In the midst of a pandemic that has infected 3 million Americans, he gathers or hires groups of people to sit in close proximity, without masks, to listen to him speak drivel and blather. He continues to deny the reality of this plague.

Someone should sneeze on him.


--- Diogenes, 7/8/2020 

Putting The Hate On Trump (Repost)

(Diogenes is temporarily involved in other pursuits. In his absence we will be reposting some of his more popular pieces.) ---RB

 

I hate Donald Trump because he makes me want to do violence.

I have held to a nonviolent philosophy for my entire adult life. I have never aimed a weapon at anything more threatening than a field target; I was last drawn into a fistfight when I was 17; I have no wish to harm anyone.

And I want to punch Trump's lights out.

I have dreams of throttling him, my hands around his neck, beating his head against the wall while he sings The Beatles' song "I'm A Loser." I want to rip that orange obscenity from his head and shred it with my teeth. I want to throw him into a pool full of crocodiles. I want to wash his lying, profane mouth out with lye soap. I want to tie him to a chair, tape his eyes open, and force him to watch a video loop of President Obama scolding, "Donny, you've been a bad boy." I want the Statue of Liberty to spank him, and the ghosts of Lincoln and Jefferson to haunt him forever. I want a personification of the COVID-19 virus to chase him naked through the streets of Manhattan. I want him to know himself for the fraud and freak show he is, no more worthy to sit in the Oval Office than slime mold. I want him reincarnated to a place where he is the only white person and the rulers are violent, misanthropic women. I want him to know the bone-chilling, knee-collapsing, bladder-emptying fear of authority felt by the oppressed, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized. I want a hundred afarit to drag him into the earth. I want him to know exactly what Putin, Xi Jinping, and Erdoğan actually say about him. I want him tarred and feathered and ridden out of DC on a rail.  I want to tattoo 666 on his ass. I want him to know his biography is full of blank pages. I want him afflicted with boils and unscratchable itches. I want the unspeakable beasts of Chthulu to find him. I want the Holy Bible to burn his blaspheming hands. I want his libelous tongue to cleave to the roof of his mouth. I want him placed among the traitors in the mouth of Satan in the deepest pit of Hell. I want him mute. I want his image expunged from every public place and his portrait never placed in the Gallery of Presidents. I want him forgotten. I want his legacy to be shame. I want him to know just how much he is hated. I want him to be bullied and intimidated. I want him ostracized. I want him humiliated. I want him to cry.

During the Thug-in-Chief's first campaign I sometimes asked rhetorically, "Will someone take this bastard out and shoot him?" I was advised by cooler heads to tone it down, and I did. No more. There are not enough denunciatory, damning, condemnatory, insulting, judgmental, censorious, reproaching, disparaging, derogatory words in all the English language sufficiently to describe him, nor any punishment he does not deserve.

He has defiled, flouted, soiled, profaned, fouled, besmirched, sullied and dishonored the office of President, the laws of this country, the Constitution, the legacy of the Framers, and the idea of democracy itself.

He is a cancer and a plague on freedom and on our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

He must be stopped, deposed, and extirpated.


--- Diogenes, 7/6/2020

One Angry Man

Here we are in the silly season, when political campaigns begin ramping up and candidates strive to present their best sides and demonstrate their good qualities.

Alas for unpresident Donald Trump, who has neither a good side nor any good qualities. He lacks jollity, folkishness, charm, and he sure as hell lacks presidentialness.

All evidence suggests he has only one emotion: anger. He seems incapable of responding to anything positively. He can bring anger out of an audience like a camp meeting preacher can bring out the spirit.

The problem is, you can't build on anger. Anger builds on itself with no mitigation, manifests as hate, and will ultimately always end in violence, the last resort of the incompetent.¹

We should be concerned about where that anger goes. It obviously gets poured out on those around him--the press, his staff, even COVID-19, which he hates because he can't control it. He carries so much anger that he radiates it.

Some of that anger must surely be turned inward, and that is Freud's definition of depression. If Trump is angry with himself and has become depressed he is far more dangerous than your everyday angry man.

On July 3 and 4 he delivered similar speeches at gatherings meant to observe Independence Day. They were, of course, campaign speeches and were of such hyperbolic demagoguery as to stagger the mind.²

Both presentations were belligerent in nature, effectively declaring war on his newest shadow enemy, the "Fascist Left." In both speeches he reached astounding new heights of hypocrisy, reflecting his acts and policies back on this ghost entity, shamelessly blaming the left for his own bad deeds, and attributing the effects of his policies, his racism, and his xenophobia to this phantom fifth column.

The Hypocrite-in-Chief has finally found a speechwriter who can make him sound almost knowledgeable about American history. He merged bellicose harangues with attempts to show his understanding of American history and diversity, peppering both addresses with names of African Americans and women, gracing a few with his only adjective, "great." 

Military power was a major focus of both speeches, as he read off lists of America's increasing military arsenal. All that was missing was a parade of weapons, à la Soviet May Day parades.

Lacking the intellectual capacity to channel his anger into something non-destructive, a depressed Trump is likely to strike out at virtually no provocation, and he has lots of weapons to play with.

We should be very concerned indeed.


--- Diogenes, July 5, 2020


¹ Attributed to Isaac Asimov.
² July 3 transcript: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-transcript-at-mount-rushmore-4th-of-july-event
   July 4 transcript: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-salute-to-america-speech-transcript