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One of the historical debates I remember in school was why did so many German Jews stay when they could see what Hitler was doing. Wasn’t the coming Holocaust obvious to them? Of course, anyone living after post-World War II know this but how could someone living at the time know it. No one until World War II could imagine such a horror as happening. Now, however, the world remembers the Holocaust as an example of how things can go terribly wrong with Facism and Nationalism. So much so that it taints every reference to Facism/Nationalism. People could end in concentration camps if this goes on much longer. Unlikely but still has to be seriously considered given our knowledge of history.

I am thinking about this now because friends recently discussed leaving the country because of Donald Trump. I am not talking about Ellen Degeneres or Rosie O’Donnell either. People I know. And my first thoughts were why on Earth would they leave the country. Things just aren’t that bad. But, because Donald Trump is Donald Trump, I have to question myself — what if I am wrong?

The key to getting out is to leave before it gets too bad. It is best to leave while you can still get your money out and other countries are accepting political refugees, before the madness turns from you are a terrible person to you are so terrible that deserves to die. So, because I am Gay and stand very near to people Trump hates, I need to assess the situation. There must be some sweet spot between leaving too soon and leaving too late. Right now I still have a great deal of hope and I am not particularly worried.

I just can’t imagine my neighbors sitting idly by while I get sent to a concentration camp. Even the ones that voted for Trump would raise the alarm and, so far, I think I am right. Every Trump outrage has been met with some resistance and, while under tremendous strain, Democratic institutions are functioning as they should. It doesn’t mean that this won’t change.

Trump is arresting immigrants and shipping them off to foreign country jails without due process. There are people who argue that potential immigrants don’t deserve due process because they aren’t citizens and therefore are denied the Constitutional
Rights Americans have to prevent autocratic rule breaking. The vast majority of Republicans seems to be willing to go along with this in order to stay in power. So we have a bully with a strong authoritarian streak we need to keep our eyes on.

Right now this all seems manageable but I continue to have this nagging feeling of what if I am wrong. The problem with Trump isn’t the man but his voters. I honestly can see what people see in him. All I see is a buffoon, a clown unworthy of his office. I didn’t think he would be elected president and yet he was which means I am missing something really important about his voters.

I clearly don’t understand them, their grievances or their anger. This is what scares me then. Maybe I am so out of touch that I am misunderstanding all the signals which are telling me to leave. Again, I don’t think so but it is a gamble on my part which makes me think I might end up like the German Jews who staid because they thought things would get better. Am I blinding myself to the obvious and keeping my sunny disposition about the future here in America because I can’t see what everyone else is seeing? Does this mean I will end up on a train car to Auschwitz?

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My book club read Ernest Hemingways’ The Sun Also Rises this month. It was a book I loved when I was 20. The vivid descriptions of Paris and Spain, everyone drinking way too much and never seeming to work, it all seemed wonderful. It’s funny how 40 years later I see something that I missed on my first reading.

There is still much to like but I was only a few pages in when Hemingway’s casual bigotry began to grate on me. He uses the N word to describe a drummer in a jazz band. And not in using the N word was important for understanding the character way, but in trying to let you know that the drummer was black way.

Robert Cohn is a Jewish character. Hemingway uses a lot of Jewish stereotypes to convey his personality. Jake Barnes, the hero of his story, complains about the number of words he uses in a telegram in order to save money. Or how Cohn has this superior Jewish attitude. None of the other characters seem to like him. There are various reasons other than being Jewish that create this animus toward Cohn but an important and frequently mentioned problem for his friends was that Cohn was simply being Jewish.

Oh, you have to forgive Hemingway. He was just a man of his time. That is the way everyone talked back then. It doesn’t make him a bad person. No, it doesn’t but it certainly make him a racist. So then, it becomes an important factor in discussing his writing.

This is a big problem I have when examining history and literature before the Civil Rights Era. Modern readers are supposed to forgive racism as unimportant because everyone back then was racist. It is meaningless to the story. This is very much the attitude people take when an old person slips into making racist’s statements. They are old. They grew up before they knew it was wrong.

But, saying the N Word, has always been wrong. If Hemingway had used colored or Negro, I could forgive him because they were acceptable terms to describe Black people in the 1920’s. But the N word wasn’t supposed to be used in polite company even in the 1920’s. That Hemingway used it matters greatly.

He knew he could get away with it. His mostly White readers wouldn’t blink an eye when they saw it and, more importantly, they would form an opinion about that character based on the use of the racial slur. It also gave readers a look into Jake’s friend – Lady Brett who was friendly with the drummer. What kind of self-respecting White woman knows a Black Jazz drummer? It helps Hemingway’s characterization of Lady Brett as a promiscuous woman. Racial slurs, then, are not neutral even in the 1920’s.

Furthermore, it isn’t harmless because everyone is doing it. If everyone is doing it then it calls into question the entire White population who either use the word or dismiss it as inconsequential. Why is everybody using it? So, if you are talking about The Sun Also Rises, it is a relevant point of discussion.

This also points to a bigger problem with how we address racism when discussing our past. A lot of people want to say racism is irrelevant to present day America because nobody would do this today. I would argue differently but let’s give them this point.

We aren’t talking about 2025. We are talking about a book written a hundred years ago when a man like Hemingway could safely use racial slurs and still be considered one of the great American writers of the 20th century. Why is that and what does this say about America during this time?

You can’t explain what was going on back then by ignoring racism. The past was far from perfect. Not everything can be tied in to nice little bow. One of those lessons might be that racism was pervasive in 1920’s America and how did this racism affect literature written during this time. But it isn’t meaningless.

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So the wizards in Silicon Valley are spending $50,000 to screen their fetuses for intelligence. They only want the best apparently and are willing to pay top dollar before going through the whole trouble of pregnancy and childbirth.

This shows a startling narrow view of intelligence — it all can be found in the genes and nothing else, say education or environment or, even, dare I say, loving parents. Who knows but I am certain that a DNA test is only part of the story.

And the data may cause more questions than answers. What if you never get a fetus that has an IQ that you want? Say you want a baby with at least a 130 IQ and you keep getting fetuses stuck in the 120 range. Do you bite the bullet and work with you 120 kid or keep trying? What if your 160 IQ fetus also has an incurable disease that will cut the baby’s life short? Possibly before they can express their genius. Or your 160 IQ fetus has genetic predisposition for alcoholism or drug addiction? Or what if your 160 IQ fetus is on the spectrum. Yes they are a genius but they an incredibly difficult time being around other people? What takes priority – the potential genius or the kid who can’t socialize with his kindergarten class.

Babies are a crap shot. You get what you get and you do the best with what you got. Spending $50,000 to comb through DNA data to find the best baby seems like an incredible waste of money to receive dubious data. Really if you can afford to throw away $50,000 on developing a perfect baby, you can afford $50,000 for better schools for everyone.

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One of the things I like about Slate, an on line magazine, is its advice columnists. They have a variety of subjects like finance, misbehaving children, people being assholes and sex questions. I enjoy reading and seeing whether I agree with columnist about the problem being discussed. Every so once in awhile there will be a non problem that I think why would anyone even bother writing about this extremely lame “problem.”

A reader addressed one of these non-problems to Slate’s sexual advice columnists recently and I have to admit being baffled by the reader’s concern and the columnist’s advice. The reader’s boyfriend, while asleep, vigorously touches his dick to the point of semi-erection. He never takes it to climax, he doesn’t make any demands on her, he remains asleep during the whole time and doesn’t seem to be negatively affected by the time he sleeps in this semi-aroused state. So what exactly is the problem here?

The woman is concerned that this might be a form of sexsomnia — a condition, I have to admit, I never even heard of until reading Slate’s sex column. For those of you, like me, who are new to sexsomnia, I have provided a link but I will try to summarize as best I can. A person with this condition acts out sexually during sleep – this could include attempting to have sex with a partner sharing the bed. The person who suffers from this condition is actually asleep and not faking it in order to get sex. They are genuinely asleep.

The advice columnist thought it could be a form of sexsomnia and suggested the woman have her boyfriend take a sleep study done to ascertain if this is indeed true. All I can say is WTF. Really. A sleep study to find out if he touches himself to semi-erection while sleeping? Why would anyone consent to a sleep study when he is bothering no one? The woman isn’t being harassed for sex and he isn’t complaining about the lack of sleep. How would anyone’s life benefit from a sleep study here? Yes you do have sexsomnia but it is so mild we don’t suggest you do anything about it? Or no, you don’t have sexsomnia, you dick is just getting hard because you touched it for a few seconds. It’s all perfectly normal so don’t worry about.

I would suggest the woman just go back to sleep when she finds her boyfriend in this state and to stop worrying about nothing.

On the other hand, it does keep my mind off of Donald Trump for a few minutes. So, there is that.

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I try not to read too much news as I find it depressing and unhelpful. I am sorry but there is only so much time I am willing to give to Donald Trump’s shenanigans. There has to be more life than complaining about him so I was struck by a friend’s post in Facebook about Trump. I missed it and it was indeed shocking. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, prostrated himself before Donald Trump in order to ensure that his company is exempt from Trump’s tariffs.

This isn’t the way government is supposed to work. Trump’s whole theory behind the tariffs is that he wants to bring back jobs to American workers. Yet, Cook, a large company with a large contingent of Chinese labor, bends the knee, buys a present for Trump and is now free from the high tariffs on Chinese manufacturing. Cook supposedly agreed to house more manufacturing in USA but the details don’t sound very promising. It sounds like a lot of paperwork on how Trump’s Team defines foreign made for Apple while allowing Apple to continuing making its phones in China.

So what did American Labor get out of this deal? Vague promises. All Cook had to do was throw a little gold Trump’s way and then, in public, kiss Trump’s abundant ass which I am pretty sure was the most unpleasant part of the whole deal for Cook. I am sure he would have preferred a much quieter deal without the cameras and the transfer of the gold present.

But that isn’t the way Trump operates. He doesn’t think tit for tat is wrong, he doesn’t think accepting gifts from anyone may be suspect, and he likes people to bow before him. I am not naive enough to think this doesn’t happen. It probably does. What is troubling is that Trump fails to see the problem with his behavior and that Cook consented to such a naked display of corruption.

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What is happening in Gaza is horrible and, with no possible solution that both sides will agree to, it will continue to be horrible.

The idea that defunding Israel will somehow stop it is absurd. Donald Trump is an idiot and no competition for the evil genius of Benjamin Netanyahu. So you are more than welcome to dream on with that but be prepared to be disappointed.

The only device left in Hamas’ arsenal is pictures of dying children which tells you everything. When all else fails, dying children will do the trick. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. There are dying children everywhere, why this particular subset of dying children should get more attention than the other dying children in the world is debatable. Why are the dying children in South Sudan any less worthy of our attention than the dying children in Gaza?

Dying children always occur during war. It is a terrible awful fact. Children died when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. So when pro-Palestinians try to guilt the West into supporting their side because of all the dying children. I find it difficult to take their complaints seriously when Hamas has the blood of children on their hands.

But Israel is eliminating the Palestinians in Gaza. Probably but how has October 7 made this situation better. Indeed, it has made the Palestinians situation in Gaza a good deal worse and Hamas, instead of surrendering which would save their civilian population, continue this losing strategy in the hopes that the world changes their mind and turn on Israel.

The problem for the Palestinians is what is the world willing to do about it. Israel has an overwhelming military force, advanced technology and atomic weapons. Gaza has dying children, bombed out building and Hamas. What can change this dynamic? More attacks like October 7? Pictures of dying children? Good luck with that.

It’s not as if Israel’s stance is above reproach. It most certainly is. Israel has definitely pursued policies that have robbed Palestinians of their land. On the other hand, the leadership of the Palestinians have pursued a strategy that is even more alienating to the West than Israel’s. What advantage have they gained since October 7? They probably will lose control over Gaza. Since 1948, all that the Palestinian leadership has been able to achieve is less and less territory and lots and lots of dead children.

So, by all means, continue to show pictures of dead children as the Israelis take over Gaza. All those martyrs were worth another crushing defeat.

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One of the enduring mysteries of American Tax laws is why do the Rich need so much help.

Let me start with tax laws because this is where the Rich do their best to milk the rest of us. A tax bill is money owed the government for services provided. Now you may not like to pay taxes (who does?) but the political institutions that guide our communal living has determined this is the money a person owes. Citizens have an opportunity to change these laws by electing people of a similar mind in the frequent elections held in this country.

It is the price for living here in the USA — the greatest country on the face of the earth, right? But the Rich are constantly complaining that they need more money in order to juice the economy and if you give them more money it will actually help everyone else because the Rich will be spending money on their businesses. So since the election of Reagan in 1980, taxes have been routinely cut and tax breaks have been instituted to such a degree that many rich people and companies presently pay absolutely no income taxes.

How is this working for everyone else? Have the rich fulfilled their promise to make the rest of us rich with their selfless spending. Surely the Americans must have the richest poor people on the face of the earth. They must be swimming in luxury — great health care, cheap housing, good public education.

But this isn’t the story. Why hasn’t all this largess to the Rich had any effect? Hmm. Let me think about this. Perhaps they haven’t been juicing the American economy. How could this be? They claim to love this country so much, why hasn’t all this love and money translated into a more stable economic situation for everyone else. What could be wrong?

The Rich do have an answer. They just need even more tax cuts. They just haven’t been given enough money to juice the economy. This means everyone else will have to suck it up when cutting government funded programs for the poor and the middle class. The American taxpayer simply can’t afford to help everyone and it is vital that the Rich get even more money then, and only then, will the rich have enough money to spend the rest of us into prosperity.

Let’s try a little thought experiment. What if, instead of giving money to the rich, we gave it to poor and the middle class. They will buy groceries, cars, air conditioners, and a whole array of products that, you got it, will juice the economy. In fact, because there are more just plain folk than there are rich people, it might just juice the economy better and faster than giving money to the rich. I don’t know but I would like to give it a try. Giving to the rich hasn’t exactly worked as promised.

But the budget. We haven’t collected enough in taxes to pay for all this help. Right. Because we are giving the Rich so much back in tax reduction, we are going into debt and unable to afford actions that might help everyone else. Get out your handkerchiefs. Why is it that the only time the Republicans care about the budget deficit is when it involves expanding programs that help the poor. They don’t give a damn about the budget deficits when they are cutting taxes for the Rich which has exactly the same effect — budget deficits.

The whole premise of helping the rich in order to help the poor is so demented. It is a topsy turvy Alice through the looking glass view of living. Our most economically secure citizens — the people with the most money, the best healthcare, luxury vacations, personal airplanes and such — always need our help while we can’t help our least economically secure citizens who don’t have money, or healthcare, or even a safe place to lay their head at night. Helping the poor is always seen as bad while helping the rich is necessary. How does this make sense?

That this story keeps being told, with a straight face no less, is depressing. Years of low taxation and cuts in social services have shown, it to be patently false. But hey ho, I’ve got mine.

Until I don’t.

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When it comes to music, what catches my attention are the lyrics. One of my favorite songs, based on mostly on the lyrics, is “A Pain That I am Used to” by Depeche Mode. I prefer the Jacques Lu Cont remix to the Depeche Mode’s own version. The Lu Cont version has a bit more energy and the opening bit is much more listenable than Depeche Mode’s original version which I found grating.

But what really attracted me to the song was the line: “Give me a pain that I am used to.” This short sentence, more than any other, better expresses what modern life is all about for me. Everything we are grabbing for ultimately brings pain. All we are doing is exchanging one pain for another one so if pain is the result — just give me one that I am used to and be done with it.

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I don’t know why Russiagate is such a big deal. It may be a little shady but it falls within the acceptable shadiness of American politics. I know Republicans want to arrest Barrack Obama and the Democrats are calling Tulsi Gabbard a liar. Gabbard is talking about Russia’s ability to hack voting machines while Democrats are talking about campaign money going to Trump or, at least, anti-Democratic PACS. Republicans will investigate and prosecute and will be disappointed.

The idea that the Russians were using cash to influence the 2016 election seemed like a weak argument to begin with. I agree that the Russians aren’t supposed to spend money on American politics but if they did and their candidate wins, I’m not sure where the problem is. The American people voted and, sadly, found the Russian propaganda more convincing. That is on the Democrats. They choose a terrible candidate and ran a shitty campaign.

Then again the Democrats accusing Trump of being a Russian mole is hardly refuted here. If the Russians contributed cash to anti-Democratic organizations, they were clearly hoping for a Trump victory. The Democrats have every right to tell the story and make the charge of Trump being a Russian asset. They may be wrong but when has hyperbole been absent in a political campaign. For example, Trump called Zoran Mamdani a Communist. Mamdani, by any reasonable assessment, is a Socialist but calling him a Communist makes hims sound so much more horrible. Trump knows it and that is why he used the word Communist.

It would be easier to consider Gabbard’s accusations against the Obama Administration’s use of government agencies against his political opponents if Donald Trump was a model of probity but he most certainly isn’t. Trump gleefully threatens anyone who opposes him with government investigation. Why is it OK for Trump to investigate and Obama can’t? Isn’t this just regular campaign malfeasance?

It is just more screaming about nothing that matters to the average man and woman on the street. It won’t convince Trump supporters to abandon him and it won’t elect Democrats to office. It is political noise. Distractions from the tariffs and Medicaid and anything that has an actual effect on people’s lives. This meaningless noise will absorb media attention until it doesn’t.

Oh yes, then there is the Epstein files. I pretty sure that the Democrats will be disappointed with any release of the Epstein files. If the Biden White House had evidence that Trump was having sex with underage girls, I am fairly certain they would have released it during the 2024 campaign. They may have evidence that he had been to Epstein’s island and that he was friends with Epstein but I doubt there is any smoking gun because if they had that evidence why in God’s name didn’t they release in the 2024 campaign? I mean not releasing it would be some serious campaign malpractice.

And don’t say it is because Democrats would never do that shit because I don’t believe you.