Why Are Folks Who Exaggerated False Threats AWOL Now?

Part of growing up is learning to distinguish real from superficial threats.

Our nation has faced serious threats, including the Depression and World War II. I was born the year after WWII ended. During my childhood, there were reasonable and unreasonable arguments about the significance of the USSR as a threat, and about how we should conduct ourselves. As school kids we regularly went out into the hallway and sat against the wall covering our heads, and I can recall envisioning a Russian plane headed our way, and trying to will it to turn around.

All my life and before, security-obsessed conservatives have gotten terribly exercised over things I didn’t see as threats. (To be fair, my parents’ generation had experienced the Crash, the Depression, and Pearl Harbor, and knew of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and knew the USSR had such weapons.)

There were radicals (often immigrants) around after World War I, and we violently persecuted them, in the Palmer Raids and otherwise, though some were merely labor organizers; there were genuine national leaders seeking genuine independence for their people (as Washington and Jefferson had done), such as Ho Chi Minh, Mohammad Mossaddegh, Salvador Allende, Jacobo Arbenz, Joao Goulart, and Fidel Castro whom our fear of the USSR led us to classify (mistakenly) as enemies and attack or assassinate. We cleverly pushed the survivors into the arms of the USSR, and earned the angry resentment of their peoples.

There were U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry whom we forced into camps, to live there for years then return home to find their houses, land, and businesses taken over by others. There were actors and writers such as Charles Chaplin, Paul Robeson, and the Blacklisted Hollywood talents, whom we persecuted, jailed, or exiled for freedom of thought. There were skinny young Negro boys “sitting-in” at southern lunch-counters in the late 1950’s.

I didn’t see any of these as existential threats, and rather admired some of them; and still do. History has shown that they were not threats. Their persecutors mumbled “national security” and argued they acted not from prejudice or intolerance, but to protect U.S. citizens. I wondered.

More recently, we’ve seen conservatives exaggerate the problem posed by illegal immigrants and seekers of refuge. Seen a president – whose (light-skinned) wife and her family got into the U.S. through abuse of legal loopholes – rail against (not so light-skinned) immigrants as “all thieves and rapists.” I’ve known plenty of sweet, devout, hard-working non-citizens, without papers, who do not appear threats to anyone, though some are inspirational.

But now we have a real enemy, more implacable than Joe Stalin, that can change itself to adjust to our defenses and has no compunction about killing even the finest of us.

Why are so many who rail so loudly against questionable threats AWOL now? There are very clear difference-makers that are as effective against this enemy as tanks and machine-guns against Nips and Nazis: vaccination, minimizing large gatherings, and wearing masks when in groups, particularly indoors and particularly if unvaccinated.

Folks who’d advocate capital punishment for those who aided and abetted “the Communists” are actually trying to prevent companies, schools, and cities from rules keeping employees, students, and citizens safe from this enemy. The Hell with safety of country, community, and family!

History won’t look kindly on these Quislings; but saving lives now is what really matters.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 25 July, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[Interestingly, there’s currently some movement by national Republican leaders to support the vaccination effort. As Republican states such as Florida where COVID-19 isn’t taken so seriously, and the vaccination rate remains low, recent outbreaks are finally waking up some folks. I hope the change is real, if belated, and not posturing for 2022 electoral purposes; but above all I hope it helps up states’ vaccination rates in.]

[It sure does seem that folks' perceive threats more easily and feel more motivated to fight them when there are human beings to hate or jail or otherwise mistreat to "defend ourselves."  However, there are other factors at play here.  As time passes, are we as a people markedly less concerned about community and county than we once were?  Less self-disciplined?  I believe we are far more inclined to question authority; but that skepticism is a good thing.  Folks who think about such things should take even health professionals' urgings with a grain of salt, and do some independent research.  Here, science supports the view that masks and vaccination are good for self and state.

Of course, "disinformation" hinders that research.  Folks are out there, for ideological reasons or profit motives, pontificating persuasively about bullshit.  Russian trolls may even be adding to the noise.]

 

Notice re Emails about Blog Posts

                                       NOTICE

hi!

first, thanks for taking an interest in this blog.  thanks for signing up to get email notice when i post on it.  i really appreciate that.

recently i keep getting notices about some program that has been doing that, which program will be discontinued, and that there's a way i can ensure you still get email notice of posts anyway; but, so far, i'm way too stupid to figure out how to accomplish that.

SO: emails may cease, and you won't get notice of blog posts; but if thereafter you sign up again, that should start the emails again -- i think.

anyway, thanks!  apologies!  and appreciation for your interest in the blog posts.

Let's Just Do the Right Thing

Suppose when you’re eight days old Pa is up early, milking, and spots an incredibly bright explosion several dozen miles away. He’s startled and amazed. Never seen anything like it. Later, the radio reports that the Government says ammunition blew up in some accident.

The Government has good reasons – named Tojo and Adolph, and Joe Stalin) – to lie. Eventually you learn, with a mixture of awe and pride, that the explosion was the first Atomic Bomb going off in your desert. That’s after we drop one on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki. Your uncles get to come home, instead of invading Japan.

No one stresses that the half-life of Plutonium is 24,000 years. Government officials know the radioactive fallout lands all around where you live. They don’t say much. Out where you live, you drink milk and beef from cows that radiation fell on. Your chickens eat grass radiation fell on, and you eat them and their eggs, and the lettuce, beans, and tomatoes Ma plants in the dirt it fell on; and you wash meals down with water from cisterns and acequias it fell on. Sitting at the picnic table it fell on. Saying your prayers at night on the dirt floor it blew onto through the window.

Pa dies of cancer. Ma’s cancer attacks so much of her body the doctors can’t say where it started. Your older sister has her womanly parts taken out when she’s 28. You and half your siblings have thyroid problems. Your high school friends’ families are the same. When you go away to college, you realize other families don’t have near so much cancer and thyroid disease.

Before the test, the Government had no idea what the blast would do. One scientist thought it might blow up the world. Government workers prepared press releases apologizing for the death toll, in case there was one, even in your “lightly populated” county.

The USSR gets the bomb, too. The U.S. continues testing powerful, poisonous bombs, though now with more knowledge. In 1990, the Government starts a program to compensate folks harmed by living near the Nevada Test Site.

They don’t compensate New Mexicans. Do they think folks need a passport to visit New Mexico? Do they figure Indians and Mexicans don’t matter? But you’re a patriotic American, you tear up when they play the anthem, on the Day of the Dead you honor your brother who didn’t come back from ‘Nam. Are government officials so angry at the Japanese saying the Bomb shouldn’t have been dropped that they can’t face up to the harm the bomb did on U.S. soil?

Currently there’s another attempt to amend the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act to help the folks hurt by the first Atomic Bomb. U.S. Senator Ben Ray Lujan and others seek to add New Mexico downwinders and uranium miners to those RECA could help with their medical problems. New Mexican leaders speak up for it. Your Congresswoman doesn’t, at first, but you feel sure she will. These are her people. And maybe whoever decides these things will listen this time. Particularly if enough folks everywhere speak up, and tell their senators and representatives they support amending RECA.

Because it ain’t about what the Japanese did or didn’t deserve, after Pearl Harbor. It’s about patriotic U.S. citizens unwittingly drafted into extensive suffering to help us win the war. They deserve medical help. Call your legislators!

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 11 July, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[I’ve been to Hiroshima ("Hiroshima Peace Museum" 4 August 2012) and to the Trinity site ("A Visit to the Trinity Site" (23 April 2016)). I’ve been
aware of the downwinders, but learned more on Wednesday, 14 July, when four downwinders visited with us on our weekly radio show (archived here). I was moved. How could one not be?

This column kind of wrote itself, an instinctive effort to tell the story simply, directly, and clearly. No bells, whistles, rhetoric. None needed. This is a story that tells itself, a situation that demands redress, an obvious gaping wound on our national character.

After I drafting the column, I sent it to a friend who is a downwinder. She wrote me on Saturday that on Wednesday’s show, “I didn't even relay the Peralta story which I wanted to relay on the program.  . . . Our cousins from Capitan; family of 9; Dad is in corral with horse; 5:00 a.m. he witnesses the explosion; walks into the house to see family huddled in the corner fearful that the world is ending; he's covered with fallout; the horse's hair turns white and dies; Dad gets cancer on hands, in eyes; he dies; over time entire family dies of cancer; only living family cancer survivor lives in LC.”

For more information, contact the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium at www.trinitydowninders.com]

 

 

[Not stressed in the column, but also important, is that the proposed amendments (which I think have not been formally introduced yet this year) would also help uranium miners, including many Navajo. A reader (not Navajo), after reading the column this morning, wrote me that it “reminded me of the 1950s in Colorado.  Word came by our alpine jungle system that miners and their families were having an “epidemic” of cancer in the southwestern part of the state.

"Some time later we heard it was the uranium mines where the problem was.  Fortunately at the time we had unions and the companies agreed to providing protective clothing and shower rooms.

“A few years later the mines started closing because of “unreasonable cost increases” making it necessary to open mines in Latin America.  All without the protection and at poverty wages.

"Folks up in the uranium country are still dealing with the fallout and the folks that profited from their misery left their fortunes to the current bastards that run the mining industry internationally.” ]

Is 118 degrees in the Arctic a Red Alert? Hell no, I live nowhere near the Arctic.

The recent juxtaposition of three events created a unique snapshot of a critical moment in our miserable failure to save our grandkids from suffering and death, and numerous species from extinction caused by global warming.

The Pacific Northwest, the Arctic Circle, and other spots experienced unique high temperatures; the next U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment, according to leaked portions, will contain new and more urgent warnings that we are just about out of time; and top Exxon lobbyists, fooled into thinking they were being interviewed for cushier jobs, bragged openly about lying to the public about climate.

Most folks know about the heat wave – and are experiencing early global warming effects in their own lives. Portland, Oregon had never seen a temperature higher than 107 F. Now the record is 116. More than 95 people have died. When Seattle experienced record-breaking temperatures reaching 108, road concrete crumbled and I-5 buckled. The Arctic Circle region, having recorded its first 100-degree day last year, hit 118. The Arctic!

No one can say with certainty that any particular weather event was caused by global warming; but the new IPCC Assessment is clear: global warming is here, posing unprecedented threats, and we will soon reach a point where life-changing deterioration is inevitable. Furthermore, these events compound each other. Sea ice reflects solar rays back into the sky, where they do no harm; and we’re losing sea ice with unanticipated rapidity. Earth will retain more and more warmth from those rays. That accelerates melting of the permafrost in Canada and Siberia, which in turn releases greater amounts of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, compounding the warming and accelerate loss of sea ice – which is already melting faster than predicted.

The report also claims that by taking fast action we can still avoid the worst economic and ecological impacts. I’m wondering what action could do that, and strongly doubting we’ll take it.

Exhibit A for my doubts could be the sting on Exxon lobbyists, who bragged (on video) that (a) Exxon “supports” a carbon tax because Exxon knows there’s no possibility one will ever be enacted; (b) they talk to Joe Manchin every day; and (c) they’ve lied for years about the science. One lobbyist also took credit for sowing doubt on the science behind climate change and for watering down legislation. He added, “ But there's nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders." he said.

This also is no surprise; but it blows away a fig leaf covering Exxon’s misconduct. Any thoughtful person who’s been reading about “scientific doubt” should recheck his or her sources. Exxon has given huge amounts to advocacy groups (e.g., the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, the Heartland Institute, and the Heritage Foundation) that deny climate science and promote use of fossil fuels. Fossil fuel folks also fund politicians.

These events could hardly show more clearly that life as we know it is in imminent danger and that many of our leaders are disinclined to act. Neither “business as usual” nor politics as usual is acceptable. The danger involves us all (especially our descendants), not just any single party or region. Sounds to me as if we the people need to rise up and take some form of strong unified (but non-violent) action. I just wish I knew what the hell that’d be! 

                                         - 30 - 

 

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 11 July, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website (sub nom 118 in the Arctic Is Snapshot of Impending Doom) on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.] 

[As we watch the world change, we live our lives as normal.  Like a dog who lost a leg so many years ago that three legs seems normal, we accept that the world is different in this way, then that, never quite finding cause for any great alarm.   Seawater threatens Miami's fresh-water supply, and possibly the solidity of tall buildings' footing; Lake Mead is disastrously low, like our own Elephant Butte; soon coastal communities will move inland; New Mexico ranchers who sent their cows to Oklahoma years ago move somewhere to live; as threats become realities and grim predictions turn out to have been optimistic, we will adjust, like an elderly patient suffering one indignity and tube and pain and inconvenience after another, to stay alive.  Are we all those fools in any horror film, who cannot accept the weird reality of their situation and stroll casually into danger?

Well, it's hard; because I read and write all this, but the morning sun on the garden is energizing, the dog prances about in joyous anticipation of her walk, Djokovic falls to the grass in blissful exhaustion after prevailing again at Wimbledon, we spend evening laughing with our friends, and many of us are expected at work as usual on Monday afternoon.  How can we be destroying out world? ]

             

Abusing the Law Abuses All of Us

Reading about the Trump family’s disregard for law and their consistent bullying of adversaries by outspending them on lawyers took me back to an evening in Marshall, Texas.

We were there because a fellow I’ll call “Jack” had grown up there, and chose Marshall as the court for suing our clients, a small start-up north of San Francisco. He alleged that our friends’ invention belonged to his big Texas-based company, because after he bought their first start-up, they worked briefly for him.

The claim was horse manure; but, as Jack stated, “I have more money and more lawyers than [our client’s CEO].” He also had home-court advantage.

I actually liked our clients. They’d invented something that would allow rural areas and poorer countries to do telephonic stuff (then cutting-edge) that mostly only big cities did. They were ready to “go public” – selling shares of stock. Investors would likely flock to buy, and they’d all get rich. Jack wanted what they’d built, and knew a company can’t go public with a lawsuit hanging over its head, even a groundless one.

Two weeks into trial, we were kicking butt. We knew it, Jack’s high-priced lawyers knew it, and the jurors appeared to know. The decency of our people was coming through, and Jack’s lawyers’ efforts to embarrass our witnesses on cross-examination bounced off the witnesses like rubber-tipped arrows off Superman. Jack’s lawyers initiated settlement discussions.

If this were a movie, we’d have finished the trial and won a favorable jury verdict. But Jack’s lawyers demanded (lawfully extorting) significant dollars to go away. They knew trial results are always uncertain, and that if we won they could delay the Initial Public Offering for years just by continued appeals.

One memory I love is of us sitting on the front porch of a rooming house, talking, with everyone having his or her say. Not just the CEO (already a multi-millionaire) and the two inventors, but each lawyer, company employee, and paralegal articulated our thoughts and feelings. One inventor remarked that he wanted to fight on, and could afford to roll the dice, but that the secretaries in their little company would all become millionaires from the stock sale, and he couldn’t risk their life-changing payday by acting macho.

We negotiated a settlement, minimizing the payment (though what Jack’s company got would have set you or me up for life, handsomely), and our client’s IPO was indeed lucrative. (Having a little stock myself, I saved half and sold the rest to buy the nearly-new pickup truck we still drive.)

We battled Jack several more times, for that client and another. (His company filed a patent-infringement lawsuit over one product the company had publicly shown and marketed more than the allowable one year before they applied for the patent, making the patent invalid.)

Jack exhibited that Trumpian attitude that courts were for bullying. Litigation was a profit center: sue smaller companies, even on questionable grounds, hoping they’d pay an unwarranted settlement to avoid a lawsuit they couldn’t afford.

The duration and extent of the Trump Organization’s tax fraud demands prosecution. Misusing our judicial system and falsifying tax records hurts us all.

(The client’s CEO was a friend, and a respected philanthropist in northern California. After writing this column, I learned that he died just days ago, at 90, while visiting his caretaker’s family in Puerto Vallerta. He was one of the good guys.)

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 4 July, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and will presently be available on demand on KRWG’s site.]

[The prosecution of the Trump Organization deserves another column, and I may at least devote a blog post to it. (I argued on my “Speak Up, Las Cruces!” radio show, and in a Sunday columna and KRWG Radio Commentary, that the decision to indict Mr. Trump should be made as if he were any CEO who’d allegedly committed the same crimes for similar amounts of money. Now, reading news articles (e.g., this AP story this AP story, and , and applying my trial experience to what I know, I agree that (a) that this seems a clearly intentional (and surprisingly well-documented) crime, (b) the amounts of money is substantial, and (c) the prosecution should prevail at trial.]

[It was startling to learn that Don Green had died the same week I wrote the column. The trial I discussed occurred a quarter century ago, and I had not seen him since 2008; but he was someone I both liked and respected, as did many in northern California. He’d been born poor, or working-class, in the U.K., and (unlike Mr. Trump) he was well-known for his substantial giving to charitable and artistic causes. The Sonoma State University concert hall is the “Don and Maureen Green Music Center, (his wife died last year), and a paragraph from the Press-Democrat news story on his death suggests that the family’s philanthropic activities didn’t stop with that generation: “While Green was in Mexico, he was texting and sending videos every day, Birdsall said. Meanwhile, she was visiting Kenya to check up on a veterinarian clinic that her winery, Black Kite Cellars, was supporting in an effort to help the area’s elephants..”, He was also known as “The Father of Telecom Valley,” proving that one can be a true job creator without getting arrogant about it. Don, with several other successful entrepreneurs I’ve known well, is one reason that although I’m politically pretty left, I can’t join many of my allies in condemning all rich folks or business people.]