Yesterday, a TV news channel showed a video of an adoring crowd cheering on Kamala Harris and shaking their heads affirmatively as she said she would make inflation her priority "on day one." Putting aside that Biden-Harris policies caused the inflation she promises to address in some as yet un-articulated manner, I'll note that the same TV channel has shown videos of enthusiastic crowds at a Trump rally as he promised to reduce the same inflationary spiral. I would like you to put aside the two candidates' promises and focus instead on the adoration and enthusiasm. The videos brought to mind a blog I posted on 5/30/2015 titled "Take Me to Your Leader." I repost it here: 

An alien sees a planet with water, assumes it houses life, and lands in your backyard. Then the alien, approaching you as you drink your morning coffee on the patio, says in your language, “Take me to your leader.”

Taking a sip of the coffee while it is still hot, you, as a native Earthling, say, “I don’t have one. I am my own leader.”

Would you say that? Really? I hope so, but in what context would you proclaim to be self-led? You are, as you must surely realize, a product of inculcations beyond your ability to recognize or count: Influences from crib to current age both subtle and overt. And in this age of social media and mainstream media influencers, now including AI influencers, can you recognize when you are more follower than leader?  

Listen today to the voices of your fellow Earthlings. Many around you proclaim their “individuality.” What do those Earthlings mean when they say they are individuals? What constitutes the individuality they seem to cherish and defend with mental, emotional, and physical tools? Once defined, does that individuality ever succumb to disintegration, to dissolving like sugar in hot coffee? Are there people who are not “individuals”?

What’s that you say? Yes? But you are different, right?

If you recognize the individuality of others “dissolving like sugar in hot coffee” as they adoringly shake their heads at a political rally, can you recognize in yourself that same process that results in your own individuality dissolving in a solution of society?

​No? Not even a little dissolution? Be honest here. When you try to pin down the nature of individuality, you run into some difficulty and maybe into some frustration.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you; rather, I was just posing the question asked by a hypothetical alien. To what degree would you insist, “I am my own leader”? Is such self-leadership possible? if so, do you see it in your thinking and behavior? 

​Strangers, call them Apple and Orange, talk on a train.

Apple: So, where’re you headin’?
Orange: Work. I work at Lawrence Livermore Lab.
Apple: Wow! Aren’t you busy on the cutting edge of nuclear stuff?
Orange: Yes, I guess you could say that.
Apple: So, I’m guessing you are some sort of nuclear physicist, maybe working on fusion or on some gizmo to defend the country against a North Korean nuclear attack on the West Coast.
Orange: Well, no. Actually I’m a lawyer. I work in the IDEA office.
Apple: I-D-E-A? What’s that mean. No, wait! Let me guess. You come up with the ideas for nuclear experiments and new materials.
Orange: Well, no, again. I’m more into overseeing the lab’s compliance with California standards on inclusion, diversity, equity, and accountablity. I work closely with all the HR staff.
Apple: Missed opportunity there! I would have thought that a nuclear physics lab’s employees were exclusively dedicated to practical applications of technology and science for the good of the nation. Lawrence Livermore is a national lab like Argonne, isn’t it? Gets federal funding, right? Hold on, let me look you guys up…Says here on your website your mission is applying “cutting-edge science and technology to achieve breakthroughs in nuclear deterrence, counterterrorism and nonproliferation, defense and intelligence and energy and environmental security.”
Orange: Yes, well, the lab is big and has many employees. You can read on the website that we even have people devoted to understanding “the global climate system, develop technologies to reduce accumulation of greenhouse gases and pursue the domestic production and supply of affordable, clean energy delivered across a secure and sustainable infrastructure.” So, we have a diverse employee makeup. That’s where I come in.
Apple: On climate?
Orange: No, no, no, on diversity, inclusion, equity, and accountability. And my office is good at it. We just received an award. Look, here’s the Press release on the award from the State Bar of California “in recognition of our work in inclusion, diversity, equity, and accountability.” We got the award because Lawrence Livermore’s “IDEA Office fosters a workplace culture that is inclusive, collaborative and supportive of multi-disciplinary teams to solve challenges in national security. The core beliefs of LLNL’s IDEA Office embraces people with all their unique abilities and perspectives so they can succeed in reaching their full potential at the Laboratory.”
Apple: I would think that diversity of ideas would drive the lab’s work. What’s equity have to do with science? So, do you mean to tell me that my tax dollars that could go exclusively to practical applications of science for the defense and betterment on the nation go to a social issue? I’m glad you have a job, but honestly, I can’t see Russia building a lab for nuclear research and having its scientists and engineers concerned about equity and inclusion, or even about diversity, as long as the group comes up with practical applications of their science—for that I can see diverse people with diverse ideas because of their ideas, but not because of their ethnic origin. I wonder whether Russia would have a lawyer in a lab.
Orange: Look, equity is important.
Apple: Meaning what in a lab? I can understand equality of opportunity to pursue ideas and experiments, but outcomes in science aren’t dependent on the scientist’s feelings of self-worth.
Orange: So, what is your line of work?
Apple: I make holes where there were no holes.
Orange: What?
Apple: Okay, in other words, I’m a ditch digger. In my business, we don’t look at equity. The person who makes the biggest or longest holes is recognized as the best and given the most responsibility. That’s what accountability means in ditch digging.
Orange: Is this a joke? Are you joking?
Apple: I work for a gas company laying pipelines. No one can lay a pipe unless I make a hole. Pretty much everyone is dependent on my completing that task. That’s the only measurement of success, making a long hole. No hole, no pipeline. The best backhoe operator is the best. No equity stuff. I’m accountable for making a hole. If I don’t make one, I’m gone. Fired. No questions, no lawyers, no equity involved. Simple: at the end of the day there is a hole or there isn’t a hole.

Nothing to see here; move along.

August 5, 2024, is a date that will live in quietude in spite of these headlines:


Iran bombs a US military base, injuring US soldiers, and continues to threaten Israel.

U.S. Sends More Military to Middle East Amid Threats of Retaliation After Israel’s Assassinations.

Sudan’s paramilitary RSF continues deadly attack on El Fasher as U.N. warns famine could spread.

Dispute over Venezuela’s election results deepens as opposition claims It won by 2X the vote count; many Venezuelans say they will leave country—probably for USA, where a couple of hundred thousand have already entered over the past three years.

Pentagon Chief Lloyd Austin revokes plea deal for 9/11 Guantánamo prisoners.

Southern states Brace for Hurricane Debby as it makes landfall in Florida.

Al-Shabab claims Mogadishu beach attack that killed 37.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell 1,033 points, the worst day in nearly two years.

From the White House— i.e., the President and Vice President— we heard………..


Today is August 6, 2024. Are you, as I am, eagerly awaiting a statement or word salad on these and other incidents headlining US and world newspapers?

Now, I Know What You Are Thinking

Now, I know what you are thinking. Why is this guy now focusing on daily news like some podcaster?
Whereas it is true that I have in these couple thousand essays touched on current events and other topics found in the back pages of the Press, I have largely done so in the context of some larger issue, like socialism vs. capitalism, evil vs. morality, common sense vs. common feelings, and science vs. belief. But today struck me as different because a large number of journalists and pundits have not raced to discover the US’s official stand on these matters.

One might guess that the action of Lloyd Austin would have by itself driven reporters to demand statements from the Executive Branch. Austin’s action did center on the 9—11 attacks that killed thousands, with many of their surviving families still suffering from their deaths by the umbrella group whose offshoot Al-Shabab just killed 37 and wounded hundreds on a Mogadishu beach. Al Qaeda still functions. That issue alone should have warranted a statement from the WH, especially in light of a report from the Judiciary Committee that the Biden-Harris Administration has released into the United States at least 99 potential terrorists since January 2021.

The Danger of an Agenda-Driven Press

So, in deference to your desire for more than a “podcast,” I’ll note that the willful restraint by the Press to hold the Biden-Harris Administration’s feet to the fires of transparency and explanation as they were eager to do under the Bush and Trump administrations, has quashed knowledge and allowed the current administration to run free from rational justification. Certainly, it has not received probing followup questions.

​It is the news media that willingly acquiesces to both misinformation and secrecy.

I’m guessing that even before ancient Greeks circulated the tale of mythical Narcissus and before the first artificial reflective surfaces, humans were concerned about their appearance. Maybe that concern is reflected in some as yet undiscovered cave painting. I’m guessing. Why? Our species is obsessed with appearance.


Part of that concern stems in part, I believe, from our gregarious nature and part from our desire for convenience and comfort. The former relates us in society; the latter, self-relates. Think of the difference between—in some quarters there will be the gnashing of teeth over the following analog—having long hair fixed in a scrunchy or pinned up on a hot day versus hair fixed in a beauty salon for a formal evening out.  We do, at times, merge comfort, social norms, and convenience, but in numerous settings, comfort elicits frown-faces of judgement. As one whose hair began its lifelong vacation when I was just 17 but who had hair before then, I can appreciate the dilemma of people with long hair who choose to get relief in summertime but who want to maintain a habitual social image.


Social Norms vs Reality


As a bald person, I was intrigued by the story about Puerto Rico’s new law banning discrimination against hair styles. In a land of eternal heat, long hair can be uncomfortable. But how casual or convenient does one style hair? Depends on the circumstance, I suppose.


HR job interviewers most likely conduct sessions with job applicants with appearance  conforming to social norms and their particular company’s ideals in mind. Bank tellers and vice presidents usually don’t sport a “Hippy” disheveled look. I was unaware, however, that hairstyle discrimination was such a matter of concern that 26 US states, and now the Territory of Puerto Rico, had enacted laws against it, all modeled on California’s CROWN Act, which stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.”


Is There a Problem? Only in the Eyes of the Beholder


If hairstyle is problematic feature, what other human features are even more problematic in the eyes of society and media? Skin color, of course, especially in the liberal media where race is an obsession.


Kamala’s skin currently qualifies as “Black” in the eyes of the liberal Press, whereas Ulsha’s skin is “Caucasian-brownish” in their eyes. Yet, both have Indian genes, Harris’s heritage tracing to southeastern India’s Tamil Nadu on her mother’s side and to her father’s maternal grandmother Iris Finegan and his paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown). Usha’s heritage also derives from southeastern India, albeit not from Tamil Nadu, but rather from neighboring Andhra Pradesh. Yeah. You get it. There’s a commonality: Southeastern India. * And there’s a difference: Ireland. But in the eyes of the liberal Press, Kamala is decidedly—as Obama was labeled—“Black” and spoken of with respect, whereas Usha doesn’t get the same respect. For hypocrites, race makes a difference, and race doesn’t make a difference.


The liberal Press can’t see the commonality or the difference. That the liberal media’s pundits only see humans through a political lens tells the tale of an emotional approach to politicians and those associated with them. They are both concerned and unconcerned about race, depending upon, of course, the political association. Thus, the big uproar when Trump recently said, “I didn’t know she was ‘Black’.” Could he have gotten his idea from Kamala’s appearance on a cooking show during which she laid claim to her Indian heritage?*** Did those Irish ancestors taint his understanding? The pundits have gone full throttle on correcting his “faulty” notion.


Heritage and Hairstyle, Yes, Policy, No


So, we’ve been silly about ourselves for thousands of years, noting the slightest variations in appearance and using those variations—from personal fashion to skin color— as bases for evaluation and worth. Ideas, behaviors, and accomplishments take a backseat to superficial characteristics, especially in modern politics framed as they are by 24/7 talking heads with ubiquity.


The things that concern us about individuals and groups are frequently the things that contribute little to ability and accomplishment. The things that concern us are frequently those that have nothing to do with practical matters like guiding a country toward ever-increasing prosperity. Black, white, brown, or burnt siena, long hair, short hair, braided hair, those colors and hairstyles do not guarantee any company or country prosperity.

• Andrea Flores. LA Times. Aug. 1, 2024 4:33 PM PT Online at: https://www.latimes.com/delos/story/2024-08-01/puerto-rico-ban-discrimination-protective-hairstyles-crown-act
• *Vatteluttu, the script of the Tamil, is to my untrained eye very similar to the script of Telegu. My ignorance of both languages prohibits me from speculating with confidence, but I’ll hazard that the ancestors of both women could have understood one another in the same way that Swedes and Danes can understand even without speaking one another’s language. I also hazard that fewer than six degrees separate Kamala and Usha.
• * * YouTube “Kamala Harris & Mindy Kaling Cook Masala Dosa”

While the NFL has emplaced a new kickoff format to make the game less dangerous for men, the Olympic Committee has emplaced a new eligibility format in boxing to make the sport more dangerous for women.


Changing the Rules


Confusing times, these. The European world is now obsessed with American Wokism, essentially erasing commonsense from social interactions, and particularly from sports. Now humans born as biological males can compete in sports with women born as—women. All the strides toward equality in athletic opportunity made by women since America’s Title IX’s enactment have been erased in just a few years. With a biological male boxing a biological female, the trend to reverse those strides has now spread to the Olympics.


Evening the “Playing Field”


Is this an irreversible situation in which female boxers will never again capture the Gold? No, because I have a solution that levels the boxing ring.


Biological female boxers should be allowed to hit below the belt. There, problem solved. Or, if that is insufficient to even the chances of winning among females, then the rules should require female boxers to hit only below the belt.

Political campaigning generates suspicions among the cerebral. What’s the motive other than to sell a promise wrapped up in emotion with questions like “Boxers or briefs, Mr. Clinton?” and “What flavor ice cream, Mr. Biden?” Politics has been relegated to entertainment and gossip for the masses, and not reasoned discussion. In the midst of an American political campaign, potential voters often get only grocery store check-out-aisle tabloid reporting. We’ve seen such appeals to emotions in every political convention as candidates surround themselves with musicians and entertainers, serving as warm-up acts on elaborately designed stages ringed by TV cameras. And nowadays, campaigns pre- and post- conventions take on the appearance of traveling road shows.


Speeches as Fiery as Dying Embers


Do Americans—or the masses of any country—need the hype? Aren’t most of them locked into voting on the basis of party loyalty?


“No,” you say. “At the very least, there’s the belief among candidates and their managers that Americans can be convinced, if not by reason, then by emotion, to change their voting preferences.”


You might be right. But what is the method for changing minds? Your opinion seems obviously correct in the context of the political road shows.


Remember Ross Perot? His campaigning centered on graphs and charts. Never an energetic or inspiring speaker, Perot tried to reason his way into the minds of American voters. His aim? The frontal cortex. His campaign, run as the product of a third party in a two-party country, was doomed from the outset though he did garner 19,743,821 votes (18.91% of the popular vote). Obviously, almost twenty million people were listening, but the guy who answered the underwear question won as Perot robbed votes from Bush.


Perot used those visual aids to make a point about national debt, an amount that has now surpassed $35,000,000,000,000. His reasoned arguments did not reach Clinton and Bush voters, possibly because of his method of messaging. Maybe if Ross had played the saxophone on TV and employed some pre-Miley-Cyrus twerking dancers, he could have succeeded in his run for the presidency, and the national debt would not be approaching infinity. Well, not infinity, but at its current rate in ten years interest on that debt will approach $2 trillion per year.


Twerking for Votes


Speaking of twerking, I have to ask whether or not you saw or read about a campaign event for Harris during which Megan Thee Stallion and others “twerked” in front of the audience. * What was the message? Was it about the national debt, about foreign affairs, the border crisis, giving away the amount of money equivalent to the the U.S. Army’s budget to pay off college loans? Was the message a reasoned argument aimed to win not the hearts but the minds of voters? Apparently, not so. From videos of the event, it seems obvious that some in the audience were pleased, maybe even pleased enough to vote for Harris and a future in which the White House, already debased in a topless display on the lawn during Biden’s pandering to special interests, will become the New Hollywood or Broadway given to entertaining the masses. Stay tuned as the politicians continue to twerk for the dopamine vote.


Campaigns evolve as people evolve, but they also seem to devolve as people devolve. Should we fault the campaign managers or the candidates for making entertainment the focus on a world stage? Aren’t they merely reflecting their culture? While we sing and dance our way toward an election, enemies committed to our destruction note our folly. “Those Americans! They are more interested in feelings than in facts, more interested in DEI and Wokeness than in actual threats.”   


What’s next? We can’t get campaigning any more irrelevant to our present and future status or more insulting to our intelligence than inappropriate pandering twerkers. Or can we? Pandering seems to be the rule and not the exception. Go back to listen to Hilary Clinton’s and Al Gore’s exaggerated southern dialects in the presence of black audiences or go online to listen to Kamala Harris recently speak in feigned Georgian Black dialect and colloquialisms.


About the same time that Harris’s twerkers were entertaining folks in Georgia and she was feigning a southern dialect on stage, her husband walked among the Hmong, soliciting votes at a festival centered on the Hmong’s contributions to America during the Vietnam War. Pandering takes many forms, and astute campaign managers know when opportunity arises to reach pocket audiences. And why not? If Clinton’s underwear choice convinced the MTV crowd to vote for him, any pandering, including twerking pandering, is effective pandering.


November will reveal whether or not such tactics persuade Americans to cast ballots more from their amygdalae than from their frontal cortexes.


*See YouTube “Kamala Harris Gets BACKLASH for Megan Thee Stallion TWERKING at Her Presidential Rally in Atlanta” and numerous news accounts.

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.