You go, Willie

A must-see,. Yesterday in Texas Beto O'Rourke who is running to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz had a rally in Austin. Crowd was estimated at more than 50,000, which would make it the largest candidate rally since Barack Obama's in Portland in 2008. Some people say it was because of a famous singer on the stage. Here is the song he introduced at the rally.

Some reflections on Kavanaugh

    During Dr.  Christine Blasey Ford's testimony:

Watching the hearing this morning a warning keeps flashing in my mind. (Incidentally it's something I recall from about 15 years before this assault took place.) As the news pundits analyze and propose logical commentary to the testimony, the warning is this. In a college political science class I wrote a paper analyzing a particular political campaign. I carefully constructed an analysis that came to a logical reasoning for the result. The teaching assistant (I assume) who graded my paper wrote: "There is no logic in politics C+" And to my mind, the illogical conclusion to what I am watching today is the fear that this sexual predator will end up on the Supreme Court despite what is said in this hearing.

This prosecutor, fronting for a bunch of chickenshit Republican senators, keeps probing for minute details as if she were preparing what would be called a" preponderance of evidence" that would lead to a final argument for a verdict based on "reasonable doubt" over a witness's testimony.

Best reason given for employing the woman prosecutor was the leadership did not want the American people watch 11 white men in their 80s questioning one credible woman.

Reasons I almost never watch Fox news: I just heard Chris Wallace, whose daughters recently told him about having experiences similar to Dr. Ford's, call Kavanaugh a man of towering intellect.

When Kavanaugh began testifying after about 15 minutes I had to turn it off. I couldn't stand his spittle-lipped anger or his quivering chin as he supposedly fought tears during the rant proclaiming his innocence. One thing he showed all too clearly is how vicious his anger can be and one can only imagine what it is like when fueled by alcohol. I finally turned it off long before he was done.

The more I read and saw from Brett Kavanaugh, the more it seemed he is a self-entitled, spoiled, privileged kid/adult who has never suffered a hardship or even been told "no" in his life. When finally faced with it, he threw a tantrum and complained his life is ruined. The father of a Parkland student who was killed in that attack sets him straight with this tweet. 

Justice Kavanaugh your life and family are not ruined. Try having a child murdered by a weapon that you refer to as "common use." You will get through this and hug both of your children tonight.

— Fred Guttenberg (@fred_guttenberg) September 27, 2018

Jaime Guttenberg's obituary

Whether Kavenaugh sits on the Supreme Court or not his life will go on with privilege few of us have enjoyed.

In time I began to wonder if that sort of demeanor was acceptable for a Supreme Court justice. And that led to seeing a great failure of this particular hearing day. While the world focused on the sexual assault charge, left in the dust were all the other reasons why he is a bad choice for the court: including (as many as I can recall): his stated opposition to several women's health issues, not the least of which is Roe v. Wade; his standing that a president cannot be charged with a crime; the fact that he may sit in judgment of a president charged with a crime and who appointed him to the bench; all the background information and documentation that was never revealed; along with others. Any one of those should be enough to disqualify this guy, but they have disappeared in the dust of the assault charge.

Not that any of it matters. Republicans have said all along his confirmation is a foregone conclusion. I hope I'm wrong but at this point I think he will be confirmed, one more issue to be confronted if the Democrats can take over Congress in the upcoming election. He can be impeached.

Obviously: There is no logic in politics C+.

It's not really a laughing matter

The performance of the #fakepresident today in front of the United Nations raises so many thoughts and reactions. Here are a couple:

 Could anybody ever imagine a U.S. president claiming to have accomplished more than any president in history? Is it any wonder the audience laughed at him? And think of the embarrassment of our own president being laughed at by world leaders and, sadly, deservedly so. Unfortunately for those of us living in this country it is no laughing matter as the #crookinchief and his minions continue to dismantle the republic.

Less noticed and less mentioned was his call for a worldwide movement toward almost isolationist nationalism, each country for itself without regard for the whole. His base probably cheered, my own father would have, at that thought. Like it or not we are also citizens of the world and solutions to many problems will come only with worldwide cooperation. Climate change is a huge example.

The issue reminds me of a poem my friend Patricia Monaghan wrote almost 30 years ago. Living in Chicago at the time she wrote about the Exxon Valdez oil spill as someone who has experienced Prince William Sound but even in her current residence realized the spill affected her along with accepting her own and everyone else's responsibility for it. She ended the poem with the line that went something like “you are nowhere where you are not part of the world.” And that was the line that came to mind today at the thought of a president calling for isolationist nationalism shortly after being laughed at by world leaders in the audience.

It will take years to recover from the damage and it is going to take a cosmic realization that we are all part of the world and like it or not we cannot isolate ourselves from the rest of it.

Find Patricia Monaghan's full poem at the end of this post

In dreams

This is the second time my security camera has caught this spider spinning her web across the eaves in front of the lens. In sleep I dream of waking to a house encased in a cocoon of cobweb, my windows glowing with what translucent light can filter through, while a huge shadow crosses one after another probing for a weak spot where she can pry an opening to allow her entry so she can perform her nefarious deed whatever that might be.

It turns out one of my crazy ideas has some basis in science

   

Over the years I've been known to come up with some harebrained theories for various aspects of life. Among them was this:
     As we grow old we face what has been called and laughed at as memory loss. Every time we can't recall something from memory there is an instant of panic when we wonder, "Is this it? The beginning of the long decline?"
    Well it hit me one time that it's not memory loss at all. Over an extended lifetime we gather large amounts of information that we store somewhere in our brains. When it comes time to remember something it takes longer and longer to sort through that growing body of knowledge to find the specific item we're looking for.  In short, it's not a memory problem, it's a data management problem. Oh and the short-term memory problem? Well that's all the new stuff that's like still on the desk and hasn't been filed yet so it doesn't show up in a regular search. It's the stuff you will get to sooner or later.
     That's the short version of the theory. The full thought process is in the second link below.
     It sounds outrageous, right? I mean, I proposed it more for the humor of it and as a response to some younger person's idea of a joke than for any real belief such an idea could have merit.
     Well, guess what. It turns out there's some scientific basis for that being the exact problem. Some folks at the University of California Berkley (where else?) have studied the phenomenon and concluded that there is some scientific basis for the data management theory and it does in fact take those of us who have lived long enough to gather all the information we do, to have some difficulty sorting through the recollections of great aunt Tillie's second husband and how to frame a wall for an 8-foot picture window to figure out where we left our keys.
    Advice? Don't panic, relax, sooner or later your mind will find what you were looking for, maybe later today, maybe tomorrow, maybe next month, but it's there and it will show up sooner or later.
     Meanwhile if you stop, look around a little or retrace your steps you will figure out why you came into the kitchen.
     And, oh boy, am I going to remember this vindication. One of my outrageous theories actually has some solid foundation even if I came to it without the slightest background in any facts. Now, do you want to hear my numerous theories on how to troll for silver salmon?

Here's the Berkley report
The original data management post

Unexpected visitors

This is just to move that picture of the #fakepresident down the page a way. It's a short video taken by my security camera a week or so ago.




And then there were these too:" … when you go chasing rabbits …and you know you're going to fall

Tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call. And call Alice, when she was just small"