Frantic over the nom de plume or title that Republicans want to label Kamala Harris, the Democrat sycophantic Press has been repeating the talking point that the VP was never the “Border Czar.” And Harris herself has said that she went to Guatemala to “discover the root causes of immigration.”


So, let’s understand: The President assigned a research paper to the Vice President. Nothing more. Now almost four years later, she has yet to turn in her work. Is the rough draft out there? Did her dog eat her homework? Is she still doing research and documenting her citations? What’s up?


In the time between receiving the assignment and her presumed nomination as Democratic presidential candidate, millions of people have entered the country, including gang members and terrorists. Under her watch—and Biden’s— tens of thousands of Americans have died from smuggled fentanyl, and taxpayers have paid for housing, medicating, and educating illegals.


Four years and still no paper. That’s not an incomplete for the course; it’s an F.


What’s the argument for Harris? Are the sycophants arguing that as the second in command, she has no responsibility for the open border? That, well, she DID go to Guatemala. Give her some slack. What do you expect from a DEI hire?


No Report Is Better than a Harris Report


What could we expect from Harris? Here’s part of her draft copy:


            REPORT ON THE ROOT CAUSES OF MIGRATION


    The reason for his report is to report on the causes of migration from countries where people are leaving to travel to the United States. People are making the dangerous journey from where they lived to a land of promise. It is not an easy trip. There are hazards along the way. But why are they leaving the countries where they lived to come to America? They are seeking to get away from the root causes of migration which I went to Guatemala to discover when I went there. The people, the mothers and fathers and uncles and aunts and cousins and even distant cousins, plus some grandparents and family friends and even acquaintances and strangers who can make the journey, are making the dangerous journey even as I write this. They want to come to America. They want to migrate to escape the root causes of the reasons they want to migrate. And that’s what I discovered when I went to Guatemala.
                    —Kamala Harris
                    Vice President of the United States of America


What She Could Have Written


    People from poor countries are leaving their homes for the United States, where they know they will receive free housing, food, education, and healthcare provided at the expense of taxpaying citizens. They have heard that they will also receive preloaded debit cards, phones, and transportation.
    An extensive review has revealed that the root causes of immigration lie not in the countries of origin, but rather in the country of destination.


                    —Kamala Harris
                    Vice President of the United States of America

I was intrigued by the story of a 42-year-old Belgian tourist whose feet were burned by the hot July surface of the Mojave Desert after he lost or broke his flip-flops. *
​
What intrigued me? His age. He’s lived on this planet for four decades, but seems to have learned little about surviving its risks. Well, maybe that’s wrong. Maybe he knew the risk of walking in sands approaching 180 degrees Fahrenheit, but his hubris convinced him that he was invulnerable. Lesson learned, I suppose, the hard (or hot) way.


Flip-flops on a hike? A hike in the Mojave in July! What part of the name Death Valley escaped his attention? And it wasn’t an accident he was there. He traveled to the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes purposely. Probably had a brochure in his cargo shorts.


No Excuses on the Home Planet


You can find the bathroom in your house at night. You can because you are familiar with your home. Well, you have a larger home with which you are familiar, even if you have never been in every room.That place is the home planet. You know about places you have never visited because of classes in school, background settings in movies, documentaries, and even TV news reports. You have been bombarded with images from all over the planet—heck, even with images of the moon and Mars—for all your life. You’ve seen lions on the Serengeti and yaks in the Himalayas. Suffice the point with this: One would have to have lived in a mental closet in the modern world to have avoided knowledge about most places on Earth. I’m betting that if I asked you to describe the climate and landscape of a place you’ve never visited like Mt. Everest, you could mouth a fairly accurate description. If I asked, “How what would you pack for a summer vacation in Athens?” I don’t think you would say, “The same clothes I would pack for a winter ski vacation in Vail.”


We can excuse the ancients and the people of four or five centuries ago for not knowing much about Earth’s processes and features. Because no one had previously written about a pyroclastic flow and described its reach and dangers, Pompeians alive in 79 AD could be excused for not knowing what a volcano could do. It’s more difficult to ascribe excuses to residents of Naples today. They know Vesuvius erupts, and they have evidence in the ruins of Pompei to indicate what can happen. Similarly, because no one had written about hurricanes and hurricane paths prior to 1622, the captains of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha and seven other Spanish galleons that sank in the same storm could be excused for their ignorance about late summer hurricanes off the Florida Keys.


But a Belgian adult in 2024 has no excuse for suffering burns because he wore flip-flops in Death Valley. Fact is, unless he was living in a room without windows, TV, and books, he might have had to go out of is way to miss readily available information about Earth’s processes and features. Even travel brochures contain descriptions of Earth’s varied regions, many of those colorful pamphlets pointing out local dangers, including weather and geologic phenomena. What excuse does a Belgian adult give after suffering burns from super hot sands?


Know Place and Self to Survive on a Planet of Risks


When my younger son was little, he asked me why I taught earth sciences. On occasion Dr. Christian Conte tells that story to make a point about knowing oneself. This is how he tells the story in his Walking through Anger:


    “My dad was a professor of English literature before he changed directions and switched to teaching earth science. When I was young, I saw fun in storytelling, in mythology, and in the subject of literature; but, admittedly, I did not see the value in studying the ground. As a haughty teenager, I asked my dad why he chose to be an earth scientist. He replied, ‘If you’re only ever going to live on one planet in your life, don’t you think you ought to know about that planet?’ I loved that answer. A few years later, when I was in college, I felt lost and didn’t know what course of study to follow. I thought about my dad’s explanation of why he did what he did. Then the thought occurred to me: I will only ever live with me, so shouldn’t I get to know myself? I decided then and there to study psychology.” (4)**


That Belgian Guy with the Burned Feet


That Belgian guy with the burned feet should get this year’s “Darwin Award.” He illustrates the folly of not knowing self and place.

No, you don’t have to know how Ordovician limestones formed in ancient tropical seas. You should, however, know that limestone regions are subject to sinkhole formation. You don’t have to know how seismic waves travel. You should know where movements along faults are likely to produce building-damaging seismic waves. You don’t have to know why the Mojave lies in its location. You should know that during summers the heat there can injure or kill.


And you should know your own limitations, like not being able to walk barefoot on hot sands. Knowing Self is often tied to knowing Place.




*Joseph Serna. Los Angeles Times Wed, July 24, 2024 at 3:38 PM EDT Online at https://www.yahoo.com/news/death-valley-heat-melts-skin-193806143.html


**2019. Boulder, Colorado. Sounds True (Pub). Walking through Anger: A New Design for Confronting Conflict in an Emotionally Charged World.

As you know intuitively, you are the universe conscious of itself. No evidence exists that the consciousness of other life-forms encompasses thoughts not just about what exists, but also thoughts about thoughts themselves. We are, it seems, the only philosophical species in existence—anywhere, any time—though that consciousness extends our minds to accept the likely probability that in two trillion-plus galaxies, somewhere our equals and superiors do exist. It’s a big universe for just little old us.


With no evidence that such equivalent consciousness lies outside humanity, we can intuit our inherent loneliness. Isolated, we are driven on one hand by the dual realities of subconscious thought and feeling and on the other hand by personal and collective consciousness, to make sense of all existence. In the context of those enveloping realities, we have individually and collectively searched primarily for both personal and interpersonal meaning. And because of our failure to discover unshakeable absolutes, we have both imagined and invented meanings as diverse as there are groups of likeminded humans and, as some might argue, as diverse as there are individuals. Thus, personally and cooperatively, we seek meaning through accumulated information as a protection against the apparent randomness and chaos of a constantly changing universe. In short, we want the world to make sense.


But it doesn’t. And the senselessness we aim to transform into meaning is nowhere more apparent than in social contexts, especially in political ones.


Enter Kamala Harris


Some 200,000 years into human evolution and the search for meaning, humanity finds itself perched on the cusp of a surge of more meaninglessness, a happenstance of the contemporaneity of the most militarily powerful collective of consciousness ever gathered on this little dot in the universe and of a potential leader who seems to struggle with meaning, namely, Kamala Harris.


What is befuddling to me is the support among supposedly conscious beings for this purveyor of nonsensical tautologies * and circular speech. Believing that “the children of the community are [pause for dramatic effect] the children of the community,” and that community banks are banks in the community, Harris has somehow garnered a crowd of followers that believe she is the best person to lead one third of a billion people and the most powerful military ever assembled.


The irony that makes those Harris followers the stuff of befuddlement is that many of them claim some sort of mental superiority over those who do not follow her. Harris-ites have cast their search for meaning into the chaos of senselessness. Somehow they believe that Harris is worthy of representing them on the world stage.


With uncritical minds they accept as profound someone who says,


    “significance of the passage of time, right, the significance of the passage of time. So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires. What we need to do to create these jobs. And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.”


More recently, she responded to the question “Have you been to the border?” by saying, “I haven’t been to Europe either.” Her non sequiturs are as telling as her circular definitions and tautologies. One wonders what her professors thought when she was in college or law school. Could she compose a freshman composition or a law brief?


But Mastery of Rhetoric Alone Does Not a Leader Make


That Harris is not a modern-day Democritus is evident to all but her followers. But rhetorical prowess isn’t necessarily an indicator of intelligent thinking. Actions count. And action is the venue for logical judgment about her potential for leadership. What has she accomplished? She was supposedly in charge of the border, but has done little more apparently than to go to Mexico to say, “Don’t come”—as ineffective as Biden’s “don’t” in speaking about bad actors like Russia and Iran. Millions have illegally entered the country on her watch, and with them criminals and drugs like fentanyl imposing costs on American citizens in treasure and safety.

Nonsense Is Meaningful in the Minds of the Faithful


The struggle to find meaning will continue as long as humans exist. Today’s politics demonstrate this explicitly. Fickle feelings driven by propaganda and party loyalty will prevail over logic and commonsense. After 200 millennia of human evolution that produced consciousness and logic, a woman who spouts word salads has captured the loyalty of millions who either can’t hear or read or who, if attentive, lack commonsense and a fundamental understanding of logical expression and meaningful language.


But hope springs eternal. Maybe we will find meaning in the universe under her leadership. As Kamala Harris has said, “It is time to do what we have been doing, and that time is everyday. Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.” Makes sense, doesn’t it? As she has also said, "I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled.”


What Is Settled?


The universe will never make sense as long as there are people like Kamala Harris trying to discern that meaning for sycophants incapable of recognizing nonsense when they hear it.


Merriam Webster:  “needless repetition of an idea, statement, or word”

I suppose that some visitors to this blog are wondering why I have not commented on the Trump assassination attempt.


At this time the details about the protective measures are still sketchy, but those details garnered from various sources hint at failures in planning and communication that contributed to the circumstances allowing the attack. Questions also linger about the relationship between the parents and their would be assassin son. According to AI, they are “certified behavioral health counselors.” How do such specialists not have a hint that a would be assassin is living in the house? And then there are questions about the leadership of the Secret Service, questions about competence and motive. With regard to motive for protective levels, questions arise in the context of the White House’s (Biden’s?) denying secret service protection to candidate RFK, Jr., who has a family history of failed protection and who as a candidate has received death threats. (Protection, I recently heard, has been extended to him since the attempted assassination in Butler and the leak that Iran had plotted to assassinate Trump)


TDS


With so many unanswered questions in mind, I turn instead to the news coverage by MSNBC pundits. Their hatred of all things Trump is blatant. That they have minimized the seriousness of the assassination attempt because of the—as labeled by Fauci—superficial wound and that they have even questioned whether Trump was actually hit by a bullet, indicate a blind hatred.


Curiosity about this hatred led me to Wikipedia, where I found:


    “The origin of the term [Trump Derangement Syndrome] is traced to conservative political columnist and commentator Charles Krauthammer, a psychiatrist, who coined the phrase Bush derangement syndrome in 2003 …That ‘syndrome’ was defined by Krauthammer as ‘the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency—nay—the very existence of George W. Bush'.[10][11][12][13] The first use of the term Trump derangement syndrome may have been by Esther Goldberg in an August 2015 in an op-ed in The American Spectator; she applied the term to ‘Ruling Class Republicans’ who are dismissive or contemptuous of Trump.[14] Krauthammer, in an op-ed harshly criticizing Trump, commented that—in addition to general hysteria about Trump—the ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ was the "inability to distinguish between legitimate policy differences and ... signs of psychic pathology" in his behavior.[13]"


Definition
    "Fareed Zakaria defined the syndrome as ‘hatred of President Trump so intense that it impairs people's judgment.’

Historical Derangement Syndromes
​
Visceral responses to American political leaders are not new phenomena, as the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy and the attempted assassinations of Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Nixon, Ford, Bush, and Obama reveal (HInckley’s motivation in shooting Reagan was different). Did the Press have some role in driving those visceral motives? Maybe, but in the pre-social media eras probably not to the extent that today’s media drives hatred toward political leaders. And the difference in degree, if not in kind, stems from the ironic proliferation of false or distorted information in an age when more information is available to more literate people than in any previous era. However, distorted and false information itself is nothing new. Jefferson wrote that “"nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”

To the mainstream media’s influence over visceral responses we can add today’s numerous anonymous commentators on social media who trumpet anti-Trump feelings. The plethora of “nattering nabobs of negativism,” to use VP Spiro Agnew’s term, floods the Web with hate for what or for whom they dislike, making this an Age of Hate that shows no signs of fading into peaceful oblivion.

Comedian Pundits’ Subtle Influence

The proliferation of anti-Republican comedians has been increasingly met with the rise of anti-Democrat comedians. The reason for mentioning this lies in the pundit-like influence comedians have over their audiences. The large TV audiences of the liberal-leaning late-night comedians has given them a venue largely unmatched by individual standup comedians not backed by networks. Comedy is a subtle way to spread influence. For example, SNL’s Chevy Chase made fun of athletic Gerald Ford’s slight stumble, whereas no late-night comedian has made fun of Biden’s numerous trips and falls, and the same can be said for late-night satirists making fun of VP Quayle’s misspelling of potatoes, but not satirizing VP Harris’s many tautological word salads and nonsensical statements delivered as profundities. ("When we talk about the children of the community, they are the children of the community”)

In the Context of the Last Five Decades of Punditry and Comedy

Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, might have been the product of such broadcast hatred, but that is an idle and unsubstantiated speculation. Assigning blame to a hateful Press and entertainment industry is a risky business in the absence of direct confirmation.  Yet, such hate was indeed the context of the outside world Crooks had known all his life. That he reportedly had registered as a Republican but given $15 to Democrats is hardly evidence that he was influenced to act by hateful punditry. He might have been looking for attention just as Hinckley sought attention from Jodie Foster when he shot Reagan.
So, assigning blame, even to Trump’s many enemies, is nothing more than idle speculation. The reality we know is that a young man seemed to have planned and carried out an attack without help, that authorities had weaknesses in their security plans and execution, and that it was a fortuitous turn of the head that saved Trump’s life.
And thus ends my “no comment” blog.

OK everyone gather around,  take a knee, and listen up; Secretary-General António Guterres of the United Nations is about to speak.


    “Today, one third of the world’s people, mainly in least developed countries and small island developing states, are still not covered by early warning systems... This is unacceptable, particularly with climate impacts sure to get even worse. Early warnings and action save lives. To that end, today I announce the United Nations will spearhead new action to ensure every person on Earth is protected by early warning systems within five years…Climate, weather and water-related extremes have led to 15 times more deadly hazards for people in Africa, South Asia, South and Central America, and small island states. Vulnerable, least-developed countries that have not contributed significantly to the climate crisis are bearing the brunt. Over the last 50 years, nearly 70 per cent of all deaths from climate-related disasters have occurred in the 46 poorest countries…Early warning systems have helped decrease the number of deaths and have reduced losses and damages resulting from hazardous weather, water or climate events.”


Oh-Oh! I sense a world tax. This is gonna cost me, right? 


Not much, about $0.00137 per day. 50 cents a year. That’s not so bad. You won’t even notice the personal cost.


But what if, just what if, the UN, once it establishes the funding, then decides to “do more”? To tax more? Once a bureaucracy gets its hands on funding, It can’t stop asking for more, and then it becomes perpetual, as an early warning system is sure to become—all those administrators and their burgeoning support staffs.


That’s down the road. Anyway, don’t you have a heart? Don’t you care about poor kids living in Khartoum who might not get an early warning of a heat wave or drought? Where’s your humanity?


Sure, I empathize, but can’t hose kids take a dip in either the Blue Nile or the White Nile on the edge of town in walking distance? I know that both kids and adults in my area used the Monongahela, Youghiogheny, Allegheny, Cheat, and Ohio rivers for cooling off during a couple of centuries of hot summer weather. The practice has diminished along the bigger rivers in these days of cheap backyard pools, but a mountain stream like the Youghiogheny still draws summer crowds.


Climate Event?


Go back a sec. What’s a “climate event”? You mean something like the Lesser Dryas, the Medieval Warm Period, or the Little Ice Age? What’s an early warning system going to do when the event occurs over a century or two or even over a half millennium? Can you envision Marco Polo returning to Europe to proclaim a coming “ice age”? “Everybody, gather round; take a knee. I’ve just returned from the Far East to tell you what I learned from a soothsayer I met in Cathay. There’s going to be persistent cold weather and a devastating plague in the coming century. Be warned.”


Climate or Weather event? I can understand an early warning for weather events. Get the word out that a hurricane is coming. Definitely makes sense; definitely will save lives. Contrast that with a warning system for climate change. Who’s going to act on one? Such changes aren’t on average abrupt as Earth slides slowly into them like a person entering either cold lake or a hot bath.


Climate Justice


You’re just not for climate justice.


Say what? Cli…


Climate justice. It’s the latest term bandied about in the hallowed halls of academia. The University of California Center for Climate Justice has this statement on its website:


    “Climate Justice recognizes the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low-income communities and communities of color around the world, the people and places least responsible for the problem.” *


Note the assumption that climate change is anthropogenic. These well-meaning intellectuals say that climate justice rests on “six pillars,” which they list as:

1. Just transition
2. Social, racial, and environmental justice
3. Indigenous climate action
4. Community resilience and adaptation
5. Natural climate solutions
6. Climate education and engagement

The second “pillar” sounds like one of those equity-DEI things, and the sixth, in the context of climate politicization, sounds suspiciously like indoctrination. I’m a bit suspicious of any use of the word justice nowadays.


How about the fifth pillar? It’s defined as “natural climate solutions take a systems approach and include regenerative farming, agroforestry, permaculture, urban gardens, and forest restoration.” Urban gardens like the ancient wonder “Hanging Gardens of Babylon” will turn our cities green, add hydroponics to traditional farming, and reclaim paved arable lands with growing pots on the sides of skyscrapers and apartment complexes. Restoring forests? Tough to do in the Amazon, where slash-and-burn practices have eliminated the restorative nature of rainforests that housed most of the nutrients in living plants and not in the soils now laid bare. But the thought is a relatively reasonable “solution” for those concerned about carbon dioxide. I say “relatively” for a because the carbon sequestered in new growth will eventually be released once again with inevitable new death. And the effect of forests on sequestration will have little to do to help locals like indigenous Amazonians with ’climate justice” if the problem is worldwide carbon emissions.


Noble intentions can still pave the road to Hell for some. Here’s the clue: “This approach, which unites people around equity, has the power to make real and lasting system-wide change. Yep, there it is EQUITY writ large. Equal outcomes spell unequal treatment based on imposed distribution of wealth, jobs, treatment, and freedoms. Climate justice isn’t the panacea and won’t produce the utopia hoped for by climate justice warriors. Someone “at the top,” someone like the UN Secretary-General or his designees, will make the decisions on what such justice entails. And in nations some elected official steeped in climate alarmism will decide for the citizenry.


Like the pittance of fifty cents per person, the control over humanity will grow just as the world tax will grow. And as climate warriors decrease the carbon that makes the world green, they’ll increase the greenbacks in their pockets.


*https://centerclimatejustice.universityofcalifornia.edu/what-is-climate-justice/#natural-climate-solutions   

The population of America, always growing because of legal and illegal immigration (more than 10 million illegals under Biden), is about to decrease.


Raven-Symone said, "My confession for this election is if any Republican gets nominated, I'm going to move to Canada with my entire family. I already have my ticket.”


Miley Cyrus said, ”My heart is broken into a 100000 pieces…I am moving if [Donald Trump] is my president! I don't say things I don't mean!”


Amy Schumer declared, “My act will change because I will need to learn to speak Spanish because I will move to Spain or somewhere. It’s beyond my comprehension if Trump won. It’s just too crazy.”


Cher pledged to leave the planet all together. She tweeted, "IF HE WERE TO BE ELECTED, IM MOVING TO JUPITER.”


Lena Dunham made her statement on the matter: "I know a lot of people have been threatening to do this, but I really will. I know a lovely place in Vancouver.”


Am I wrong in saying that threats to leave the country if Trump is elected spring mostly from the entertainment community, a markedly liberal group centered in Hollywood and New York?


One wonders why those Leftist celebrities who say they will leave the country if Trump is elected didn’t leave during the four years when he actually was President. What kept them here? One wonders also why people on the Right don’t make declarations to leave if a Democrat takes the Oval Office. Could the difference lie in the fundamental nature of the two political parties? Could that difference lie in simple vs complex thinking?


Thinking


I suppose each of us is guilty of Convenient Reductionism (Reductionism of Convenience?) whenever our core beliefs and feelings are threatened. When I see empty threats, such as those made by famous Lefties threatening to leave the country in which they made their inordinate wealth, I ask whether or not those celebrities have reasoned their positions or simply followed the culture of the moment and place driven by the propaganda du jour. Am I also wrong in noting that the “threats” threaten no one?Do the one third billion Americans who stay in the country notice the absence? ”So-n-so left the country, you say? Hmnn, I hadn’t noticed. On my way to pick up the kids now, so I don’t have time to discuss this; see me when my life’s activity level registers zero.”


To borrow from St. Thomas Aquinas, I would argue that such threats to leave America do not derive from a “naturally rational necessity” that, for example, prompted Albert Einstein and other Jews to leave Hitler’s Germany. Then and there a real threat—not merely a perceived threat promulgated through political scare tactics—made living in Germany truly dangerous.


Enter--Or Rather, Exit--Jamie Pomeroy


Jamie Pomeroy and her husband, ex-pats who moved to New Zealand, are once again leaving a country. The couple left the U.S. when New Zealand’s then liberal government supported all the stereotypical Left-wing causes and ideals: Power to lockdown an entire population, quashing individual freedom with mandates, climate change initiatives costing inordinate expenditures on non-quantifiable speculation, extreme gun control because of pathological mass shooters, promotion of rights for vociferous special groups and DEI hires for government agencies, and prohibitions on mining that shut down resources, killing wealth generation in favor of Greenies’ extreme demands.*


But as anyone familiar with the pendulum of politics knows, political parties rise and fall with generational shifts and naturally rational necessities, such as the need to respond to international and domestic crises and the fickle will of a people easily dissatisfied. New Zealand’s pendulum swung just as England’s and France’s swung in recent elections. ** And now Jamie Pomeroy is looking to relocate, maybe to Canada, she says. Good luck with your Trudeautopia, Jamie.


It’s reductionist to think any place has a permanence of political views. The closest any place comes to semi-permanence is in dictatorships and oligarchies like China, Cuba, North Korea, and Russia. The pendulum will eventually swing in those lands, just as it swung at the ends of dynasties in ancient Egypt, in medieval China and Europe, and in modern times in the now defunct Soviet Union. The political pendulum is only briefly still. Pushed alternatively to the Right and Left, the pendulum preserves its momentum, and those in power are eventually powerless to stop the swinging.


It’s simplification driven by propaganda and ideology that drives some to emigrate and others to make empty promises to emigrate if the government swings in a different direction. In the USA, propagandists have convinced some that Trump will destroy democracy and dissolve rights. But was it not the Democrat Party that created and pushed the Russian Collusion hoax in an effort to unseat a duly elected President and thus bypass the election results and foil the democratic process? Why did the Lefties not threaten to leave the country during a hoax that was a direct attack on democracy and individual rights? Answer: Reductionism of Convenience. It was all right to destroy democracy and


Naturally Rational Necessity


The pluralism and complex nature of a free capitalist and constitutional society ensures that the pendulum will swing. If any naturally rational necessity prevails, it should derive from that ineluctable swinging and not from simplistic fear driven by ideology and propaganda.   


*https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-boston-globe/20240703/281646785341581


**https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/new-zealand-once-a-utopia-for-trump-weary-exiles-turns-to-the-right/ar-BB1pgdfy

Objectivity is dead. Everything is whatever we say it is. Rachel Levine is “Woman of the Year,” and Lia Thomas is the best “Woman Swimmer.” And most importantly, Joe Biden shows no indication of failing mental faculties. As TV host and sycophant Joe Scarborough said prior to the debate, Biden is “beyond cogent. In fact, he’s better than he’s ever been.”


And now we have a statement of questionable objectivity by Biden to ponder, “By the way, I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman, to serve with a black president.” I thought the Hair Sniffer in Chief was a man, a white male, biologically equipped to inappropriately take showers with his daughter (her words, not mine). But now from his own mouth Joe Biden has declared himself to be a black woman. Objectivity is dead.


All right, I know it was just another Biden gaffe, but the Gaffe Master still never fails to surprise me. Could he just avoid speaking off the cuff to save his followers the need for cleanups? It’s bad enough when he reads instructions for prepared text on the teleprompter, as he did when he said “pause.”


Everyone Misspeaks, but


If I look back on my own verbal slips and falls, I see that in every instance I was trying to speak rapidly or was engaged in a complex thought. Or, alternatively, I muffed a word in the midst of making a point in a discussion with someone adamant in supporting an opposing view; basically, I allowed adrenaline to control my speech. I spoke from the limbic system rather than from the frontal cortex. Of course, I’m also guilty of an occasional parapraxis, but the subconscious mind has or is a mind of its own. As in the speech of most people the verbal slips are noticeable by their rarity and are often followed by a correction. With Biden, they are noticeable by their frequency and go uncorrected.


Scarborough’s political blindness (deafness) aside, the rest of the world has noticed or heard. Still, why The Times of India cares about Biden’s gaffes puzzles me, but it ran an article under the headline “Biden made 148 gaffes in public comments.”* The paper reports that the gaffes occurred between January 1 and April 24 this year with Biden also tripping over his words 118 times in speeches and comments during the same period. His numerous gaffes and speech errors have also inspired a book by KeWe Workshop Publishing (Author) entitled LET'S GET READY TO MUMBLLLLE!!!: Joe Biden Gaffes & Bidenisms. Activity Book for Adults. 50 hilarious pages of Biden’s best blunders, gaffes, and mishaps. **


I’m not sure what to call Joe Biden’s many gaffes and word fails. Is it mental ankyloglossia? Speech errors start in the brain obviously, and they manifest themselves in many forms. Joe seems to have mastered all of them. It’s as though he lacks the ability to monitor some pre-articulatory representation of the target word or phrase before he says it. Somewhere between brain and tongue there’s a detour or very long traffic jam, if not a “Road Closed” sign. When he recovers, it’s typically with “Look” or “Here’s the deal” though neither of those ensures a return to intelligibility as exemplified by his statement in the debate that “We beat Medicare.”


According to Kevin Trewartha and Natalie A Phillips, there are at least eight types of speech error that can interrupt articulation: 1) Omission, 2) Addition, 3) Sequential substitution, 4) Non-sequential substitution, 5) Non-substitution, 6) Non-identification, 7) Fluency, 8) Combinations of errors, and 8) Error correction. *** When he said, “America can be defined by one word, Iwuzindfutmhmafut,” he was probably mouthing a Non-sequential substitution (#4), but he’s probably committed each type of speech errors.


I won’t bore you by listing many examples, but I realize you now crave examples of the eight error types. To satisfy that craving, see the article by Trewartha and Phillips. As for Biden’s speech errors, they have been preserved online and in print.



*TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Apr 30, 2024, 21:56 IST Read more at:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/109735507.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst


**June 28, 2021


***Trewartha KM, Phillips NA. Detecting self-produced speech errors before and after articulation: an ERP investigation. Front Hum Neurosci. 2013 Nov 11;7:763. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00763. PMID: 24273506; PMCID: PMC3822290. Online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3822290/

















  

Members of the General Assembly,


Here I stand before you, standing today, as a representative of a free world that is free because America has always supported freedom, and it will always do so to keep free people free.. Because freedom means that everyone who is free is free to live a free life.


But today that freedom of the past is threatened by those who would pour gasoline which is a fossil fuel on the fires of war. And this is why climate change is a threat. Heat waves and drought have affected millions where it has been hotter than it was, and still some would throw gasoline—and not just gasoline but gas and coal— on the fires of war.


And that is why America has rejoined the Paris Accord—to protect the lives of women and their right to choose in a world without heat waves [she laughs for no apparent reason] and without floods and droughts and weather of any kind except the weather of peace and mild temperatures. America is ready to commit trillions of dollars to this effort because to save the world from climate change is to save it from war.


And that is why I stand before you today and will continue to stand before you, as America has stood with you, and will stand with you well into the future as time progresses. As I have said repeatedly many times before today [she points in one direction and then in the opposite direction as though using a timeline], “What can be, unburdened by what has been.”


So as we look to a future that has yet to come and as we leave a past behind, we will strive for what can be unburdened by what has been. [She laughs]


Thank you.

A Democrat has coffee with an Independent.


Dem: Okay, yes, the President was a little off on the night of the debate.
Ind: Off! You couldn’t get a light no matter how many times you flipped the switch or checked the circuit breaker. He was as off as those unbuilt charging stations that we taxpayers spent billions to build and as yet have to be built.
Dem: But he had a cold…
Ind: When is the last time a cold made you incoherent and gave you a frozen brain? I can see future labeling on the cold medicine package for Democrats: “Restores coherence caused by common cold and prevents brain freeze.”
Dem: But he was also tired from traveling the world. You know, England, Italy, return trips.
Ind: You mean the trips that ended a fortnight before the debate? Are you saying his jet lag lasted two weeks? Doesn’t he have a bed on Air Force 1? I understand he works only between ten and four, but a trip across the Atlantic provides plenty of time for a nap. Heck! I’ve closed my eyes while sitting upright  on a flight from Pittsburgh to Florida. Arrived refreshed. I’ve done the same on cross country flights.
Dem: He was worn out for the preparation that 16 advisors put him through after he awoke at 11 a.m. at Camp David. He kept that busy schedule up for a week.
Ind: With naps.
Dem: He’ll do better next time.
Ind: I’m sure his adrenaline will be up even if they don’t ply him with uppers. What amuses me is the initial response by his media sycophants. Jaws dropped. Where were they when he said, “America is defined by one word: “asufutimaehaehfutbw”? * Where were they when he walked aimlessly off stage? Where were they when he walked away from rather than toward questions shouted by the press that wasn’t in the pocket of the DNC. Where were they when he said, “I shouldn’t say this or I’ll get in trouble”? Or looked down at the podium unable to pull thoughts together, or mumbled, or said, “You know the deal…”?
Dem: I’ve heard other people slip up occasionally. Everyone does it. It’s better than being a liar…
Ind: Whoa, you mean like “When I came into office, inflation was 9%”? “We have the safest border”? “No terrorists have crossed the border”? “I’ve created 15 million new jobs”? Honestly, listening to you and your media surrogates talk is like listening to La Folie—not the one by the Stranglers (though that might be relevant) but the one by Vivaldi: A simple musical phrase played repeatedly with changes only in volume and pace. It’s a musical piece without complicated development, kind of a predecessor to Ravel’s Bolero, Crescendo being the main device, the different instruments being the media’s Left-leaning spokespeople, shouting louder the same refrain: “He’s as sharp as a tack.”
Hmnn. Maybe the song by The Stranglers has some relevance here, especially the last lines: “Yes, it's madness; yes, it’s madness; yes, it’s madness; yes, it’s madness.”




*Read more at: https://www.deccanherald.com/world/biden-describes-america-in-single-word-asufutimaehaehfutbw-1121067.html

Today’s politics stand at the ends of branches on an ancient tree whose roots run deeper than Plato's Republic, written 2,400 years ago. It’s a safe bet that the philosopher did not write in a political vacuum since this mentor suffered a politically driven suicide. Politics undoubtedly predates even the ancient Greeks. It’s also a safe bet that much of what was true about politics, political parties, and politicians in pre-Socratic and Socratic times is true today. The characteristics of politics have been passed along to our own times like a genome carrying both functional and non-functional (“junk”) DNA. *


The Descendant


Speaking of the Greeks makes me wonder whether or not the genome of politics emerged like Athena, fully formed from the get-go, and not formed slowly through the expanse of human civilization. I speculate thus in light of the tribulations of Socrates who was condemned in a sham trial over trivial matters—really because he did not fall in lockstep with the culture of the dominant political party (supported by the Athenian “deep state”).


With regard to the genetic inheritance of politics and its tie to modern politics, I see a connection to the tribulations of Donald Trump, the victim of obvious political persecution through a hoax called Russia-gate, unfounded accusations of colluding with Ukraine because he wanted the truth about Biden’s quid-pro-quo demands in favor of his son, and similarly unfounded accusations about putting kids in cages (based on a photo from the Obama-Biden era), and finally on “trumped up charges” by New York’s AG and New York City’s DA. Is Trump the modern Socrates? Giving Socrates a death sentence on political grounds was definitely more extreme than convicting Trump over…I’m still puzzled…Was the conviction a mirror image of trying Socrates’ over his free thinking? Was it based on a perceived political threat to Democrat and Deep State control? Was it petty retribution for the offense of winning an election?


Trump will probably not be put to death in spite of the rabid hatred for him in the minds of Democrats (the so-called Trump derangement syndrome). However, as has been revealed, in the raid on his home, the heavily armed agents did have permission to kill.  Kill whom? Trump? Secret Service agents? His wife? His son? The maid or gardener? Whoa! Maybe today’s politics aren’t much different from the politics that killed Socrates! What’s that you say? Killing reputations, political careers, and livelihoods is the modern analog of condemning Socrates to death. If you say so.


Functional Political DNA 


In every living organism DNA transfers the past to the present, “ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny” as biologists like to say in relating individuals to phylum history. Individuals are different, yes, but they are all related through genetic transfers. We might conclude that political parties and politics of the past have evolved little since Plato’s time. Why is this so?


In part, because it’s a male thing. Patriarchy has kept the political genome much the same. There’s actually some truth in the stereotype of backroom meetings of cigar-smoking men choosing candidates. Matriarchy would enhance the speed of political evolution. Again, why?


Slower evolutionary change occurs in males than in females.. The genome inertia in American political parties maintains the phenotypes and mimics the differences in evolutionary change that derives from the genetic geography of males and females. Marauding males like the Vikings who captured women in the British isles and carried them off to Iceland—where many in today’s population carry Irish genes—plus the widespread practice of women like biblical Ruth going “whither thou shalt go” in following husbands and leaving their ancestral villages ensured the rapid alteration of the matriarchal DNA. Thus, my hypothesis that if women dominated politics, parties might evolve faster.  Patriarchal parties slowly fade as weakened telomeres fail with aging male politicians who refuse to retire lest they lose their power.


Look, for example, at the ends of Biden’s chromosomes for the inevitable telomere shortening that comes with age—exemplified in his debate performance and numerous public appearances framed by muttering, stumbling, and incoherence.

Functional Genes

Within any national history, political DNA carries the essence of major views with regard to governance and civil order. Much of today’s Democratic Party recapitulates the Wilsonian gene pool that evolved in a time of unrest and anarchy between the pre-Wilson 1880s and the end of Wilson’s era. Those decades of turmoil were punctuated by Chicago’s Haymarket Square riot led by August Spies, editor of the Anarchist daily Die Arbeiter-Zeitung, and by 1919 race riots in Chicago and D.C. A sign of similar times lies in recent riots and takeovers, such as 2020’s Seattle’s CHOP and incidents of harm, looting, and destruction led by the oxymoronically named Antifa in other cities and culminating in 2024’s takeovers on Ivy League campuses by antisemitic Leftists for whom Democrats seemed to be apologists. The characteristic Democratic response appears to be encapsulated in Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin’s calling CHOP a “block party,” in Congressman Jerry Nadler’s saying to a street reporter that turmoil in Seattle and Portland was a myth, and in the Biden Administration’s denying the chaos at the border.   


Functional DNA carries political principles and passes general characteristics along to ensuing generations of party members. The heritable essence defines the major characteristics of a political species. The operating, or functional DNA, more importantly, prevents interbreeding, thus keeping the parties separate (identifiable) even as they mutate. In contemporary America, that essential DNA allows us to distinguish Right from Left easily. However, subtle variations are more difficult to distinguish: Neo-conservative, Neo-liberal, small-government idealist from large-government idealist, and capitalist from socialist—all recognizable in general terms, but fuzzy in specifics. Analog? We know dogs in general though we might have difficulty distinguishing between a Cumberland Spaniel and a Cocker Spaniel or between a savanna elephant (L. a. africana) and the forest elephant (L. a. cyclotis).


Functional political DNA carries the gross features, the stereotypes, while absorbing  subtle mutations, such as Bernie Sanders’s “Democratic Socialism” or, on the other side of the species divide, “Rhino Republicanism.” Functional DNA carries political principles and passes general characteristics along to ensuing generations.

Yet, each party is a hybrid suffused with new genetic material. According to Pew Research Center, “The share of voters who are Hispanic has roughly tripled since the mid-1990s; the share who are Asian has increased sixfold over the same period. Today, 44% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters are Hispanic, Black, Asian, another race or multiracial, compared with 20% of Republicans and Republican leaners.” **


My late father would not identify with today’s leftist Democratic Party but he would still vote exclusively for Democrats. He might admit that today’s Democrats differ from members of his Roosevelt Democratic Party, but he would still see a heritage and unity in his own political species and a similar unity in the Republican Party. With regard to the latter he might say, “Those Republicans look out only for business people and the rich.”


Non-functional DNA


Junk DNA, in contrast, carries along remnants of once important issues that no longer figure meaningfully or figure less meaningfully in the politics of the present. The issue of Vietnam’s turning communist does not sit in the platforms of the Democratic Party once run by Kennedy and then Johnson.The Nixon-Kennedy debate over defending isolated Quemoy and Matsu has now morphed into a larger issue regarding Chinese hegemony in the western Pacific centered on artificial, not natural, islands and on the freedom of Taiwan. I would hazard a guess that few people today would know about those islands of contention in 1958-60. The old issue is now junk. Yet, they it remains in the genome that now centers on the question of defending a free Taiwan, S. Korea, the Philippines, and Japan. And with regard to the southern border there was at one time the free flow of seasonal crop-harvesting Mexican migrants who worked the fields and then returned to their homes in Mexico that has now morphed into open borders and giveaways to illegal aliens, with socialist Democrats spending tax dollars to support the invasion.


Like every organism, humans carry a vast array of junk DNA. And so do political parties. The origin of much of the junk is lost to phylogenetic history, but we can assume it served some past purpose.


It’s All about the Chromosomes, Really


In an era obsessed with X and Y chromosomes in a 21st-century Democratic Party fearful of making comments about men competing on women’s teams and biological males sharing locker rooms, shower rooms, and restrooms with women, the old chromosomes show fatigue. Democrats, worried about being cancelled, have turned to an “inclusiveness” that operates by excluding, censoring, and threatening those who refuse to promulgate DEI, the magical solution to perception of inequality. It is in this and similar matters that the DNA of the party of Jackson has gone the way of shortened telomeres that Joe Biden seems to exemplify.


A party that cannot renew itself because of incestuous homology is a party destined for extinction even before some extinction level event like the Biden presidency occurs.



*My point of departure for this blog was an article I read on a fern . Ferns have been around for a long time, going back deep into the Paleozoic. The particular fern covered by the article has the largest genome.  T. oblanceolata, with its enormous genome, made me wonder about the "genome" of political parties. And thus an analogy was born! See https://www.sciencenews.org/article/largest-genome-tiny-fern

**Online at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/04/09/changing-partisan-coalitions-in-a-politically-divided-nation/