Gerrymandering's victim: democracy
This post addresses a problem I can't blame directly on you-know-who. It's just a problem of the recent days, and it requires our collective effort to solve it, but we're not doing collective anything because we're so divided.
To put bluntly, gerrymandering has removed the voice from the minority in every state. These days Iowa is all red, Kansas is all red, Illinois is all blue, and New Mexico is all blue. These are states I'm most familiar with but it's happening in every state. As computers make gerrymandering more possible, and more efficient, whoever is the majority in each state's legislature is pressured to make all the districts one color as a national power move for either red or blue. Spider-shape districts appear as people are divided up accordingly, rather than by proximity. So for example Des Moines gets carved up and assimilated into Iowa's red districts and Iowa has all red districts, and the dems of Des Moines lose their voice. All liberals in Iowa lose their voice.
But similarly, all farmers in Illinois, who are usually red, lose their voice as farm country gets carved up and assimilated into blue districts. i live in farm country; it would ordinarily be red. We would have a few red farm-country representatives and then a lot of blue urban representatives and Illinois' delegation would look like Illinois, mostly blue but with a few reds. Now it's all blue. The farmers have lost their voice altogether. So have the red ranchers of New Mexico. It used to be considered at least fair to let New Mexico have at least one red district since it was more than a third red. But no, now its districts are all blue.
How did this happen? Ultra divisive, competetive politics. Dems like to say the Reps started it, and that's true, they did. The dems did it too, they had no choice, that's true. But it's all legal. Of all the illegal stuff T has done, this has at least been legal. When we made the constitution we didn't reckon with computer programs that could divide a state so that its districts would be all one color. But computers can do that and do it well.
Democracy has to adjust to the computer age. First we have to decide whether Iowa and Kansas liberals, or Illinois farmers and New Mexico ranchers, are worthy of representation if they are a minority, even if they are a substantial minority. That's what we've lost - substantial minorities no longer have a voice in Congress. And they won't until we change the law somehow.
But how to change the law? One way would be to change the way a state chooses its US representatives. Iowa has four, in regions now, through gerrymandering divided so that Des Moines liberals no voice. We want the minorities like Illinois farmers and New Mexico ranchers to have a voice, so we do this with every state. You run a statewide election with all candidates, and make the top four winners have the four seats. So
all represent the whole state, not just the carved-up snake-like district that makes no geographical sense, has no geographical cohesion. All would represent all of Iowa. Voters could choose more than one but if the top four made it, the substantial minorities would get one somehow. The nature of politics would change. I'm not sure if there would be more consequences, especially in the bigger states like California or Illinois. In Illinois would the top vote-getters all be Chicagoans? We country folk may all lose our voices altogether if so. More likely, the average voter would simply be unable to distinguish between what, forty or fifty candidates.
So, I'm not sure about my solution here. It's just an idea. If our goal is to
give substantial minorities a voice we can surely collectively come up with
something that will work. We have to do something, though, quick. Democracy is dying and there are some pretty desperate people flailing around, trying to stay afloat, who don't care who drowns in the process.
One lifelong USA fan cheering for Belgium
Let's be clear about this: USA is my team. I was born in the USA and have lived here all my life. Those are my countrymen, my people, our athletes. I should be cheering for them.
When the President steps in to overrule the rules of soccer, everyone loses. He may feel that he knows more than the ref. He may feel that he can help his country by doing this. He's wrong. He's hurting the country. What he's doing means that if we win, we win tainted by cheating, tainted by ignoring the rules, tainted by corruption.
Our team is better than that, and can live by the rules that everyone else plays by. We can either win or lose and be gracious about it and not use political power override the rules that everyone lives by. It dooesn't help us to carry a tainted victory forward in any tournament.
The only way out of it is for Belgium to win, or, for us to lose one way or the other as soon as possible. Carrying tainted victory on oor name is not acceptable.
Here's one lifelong USA fan who says, the season's over.
Labels: world cup
World Cup 2026
So here we are about a week into the World Cup and empty seats in Guadalajara and the Bay Area have already made FIFA and the USA look bad. It's not the lack of fans, I can assure you of that on behalf of USA soccer/futbol fans. We fans are there. The money is not.
In my view it's a very complex and delicate calculation on the part of the ticket-buying public (which does not include me). Many of them buy tickets on the after-market and even that is complex, and goes all the way down to scalpers on the streets near the stadium an hour before. Many people calculate, and plan, to buy tickets on the aftermarket or from the scalpers, but, when prices are too high to begin with, they
stop paying attention on the assumption that at that price, they'll never be able to get tickets
even on the after-market or from scalpers. It's when they stop paying attention that you lose them, because you can lower prices yourself (which makes early buyers angry) but it won't matter because they just aren't watching. So the reality - you can see it for x amount - doesn't always match the perception - which is that you can't get in for a reasonable amount - and empty seats are the result. Everyone looks bad.
Frankly, I was most worried about terrorism, and still am. You start a war with the terrorist world and you'll get a war somehow, and this would be a most obvious venue. But we've been lucky so far.
Then, I blame travel. This is the absolute wrong time to visit the USA, I would tell any of my friends, don't come. Canada, maybe, Mexico, maybe but USA absolutely not. It's not safe and there are fascists pulling foreigners off the. street. But why come to Canada if you can't visit the USA as well? To invest a thousand or so on a trip to the Americas
on top of exorbitant ticket prices just doesn't make sense if you can't stop in on friends or important places at the heart of the matter, better to wait a couple of years until it makes sense to travel. There goes about a third of your ticket revenue.
FIFA looks bad, USA looks bad, but hey it's the World Cup, only comes around once in a while.
Labels: world cup
Roundup's day in court
When I was growing up in the sixties, the cigarette companies kept ending up in court, because there were thousands of lawsuits claiming correctly that cigarettes caused cancer. The companies had the best lawyers money could buy, and they had plenty of money, so the inevitable was put off for years. The evidence was clear. Cigarettes were killing children. Eventually they had to pay up; even the best lawyers couldn't avoid it.
Today Bayer is going through the same thing, more or less. There are 65,000 lawsuits claiming that Roundup causes cancer. It does. It causes other things too. Bayer has the best lawyers money can buy, claiming basically that if the feds are on your side it doesn't matter what kills who. And the Supreme Court has proven to be in Trump's pocket, whether it is because they are extorted, paid off, blackmailed, or just plain mean is irrelevant, but I don't expect much from the Supreme Court in terms of justice for dying people. I don't know which way this will go but I do want to make a few points.
Once one of my sons asked me if there was
anything good about the Trump presidency that I could think of, and I came up blank. But now I can think of one thing: The identifying and naming of the MAHA movement. There
are people like myself who care about the health of our children and our future. The fact is that a small number of my friends from the back-to-nature movement actually were supporters of Kennedy and thus went over to Trump when it appeared he would do something about the nation's health. Whether Kennedy actually had a clue or whether Trump would be independent of the millions that funded his election was another question. But the MAHA movement now is making noise at the Supreme Court hearing and that's good. If you care about the nation's health, now's the time to say so.
Second, there's a kind of inevitability about it. The science is clear. It's killing people. It doesn't matter if Trump and the Supreme Court are all in favor of killing. Eventually it will catch up with them.
Third, it's an especially huge problem here in the Midwest (I am in Illinois) where they are literally pouring Roundup on every square foot of land outside of our small towns. No one farmer is going to go out there and do it the hard way
when every single one of his neighbors is poisoning their acreage. In other words, these farmers
need a government to tell them what's murder and what's crop yield maximization, or they'll do what their friends do. They are waiting for someone to tell them to do the right thing.
Finally, Roundup is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many pesticides. There's autism and nerve damage all over the horizon. There's a dead zone down by New Orleans where if there are any fish at all, they all have three eyes and are
still trying to find a river that's not choked up with pesticides. Fertilizers also have their hazards but not quite as bad. It's a very unhealthy river, as are all of them in these parts, and I wouldn't drill a well or touch the drinking water any more.
So yes I'm MAHA. I may be alarmist but I've been away from the Midwest and now I'm back, and I know what I see. It's the single biggest issue we face. In a world where half of us don't have kids and don't care, I say, if you work with kids, or have them, or have your eyes open, you
should care.
bone spur's war
I think it's the soldier's worst nightmare when the government doesn't tell them the reason they're going out there dying. The people at the top just don't bother to give the people, or the soldiers, their best justification, or if they do, it's really not clear or doesn't settle well. So I thought I'd go over the different possibilities.
1. I think some White House person admitted this, it was really Israel's war and we weren't able to say no, so we got sucked into helping and going after Iran with Israel. Now we can guess Israel's motivation, which has to do with the nukes and missiles pointed toward Israel, and there's no question Iran has been threatening Israel with them for a long time. But it is also at very low capability at the moment. We're kicking them when they're down. I'm not really sure this is a good reason for our people to be dying.
2. We're sick of their reactionary, religious-zealot leadership. On this one I'd like to point out that they did what our leader wants to - set up a cultural revolution that was reactionary. They succeeded. Their women cover up. Everyone has to profess the same religion.
3. It's the Crusades. We're us and they are them. Case dismissed. More later.
The greatest betrayal
I sometimes see myself in Robert Kennedy: an idealist trying to make the world healthier, sometimes getting his facts wrong. I'll admit to some of those failures and be glad I was not put in charge of the nation's health.
One can predict a few aspects of this situation. The leader is ultimately beholden to those who have spent millions to put him there; bottom line, he doesn't care about the nation's health. He'd sell out his grandmother if it got him out of a few felonies. So in the end he's going to go with the Roundup people who spent millions if not billions to keep a status quo.
These days there is Roundup, or something like it, being spread on cornfields and soybean fields throughout Illinois and the midwest. The lawsuits are piling up as people notice that it causes cancer and makes our wells unusable. It makes a dead zone out of the entire Mississippi and for miles after it unloads into the Gulf of Upyours. It kills our children. It is the single number one factor making the midwest a difficult place to raise children.
Kennedy should know better. As a lawyer he actually represented people with cancer against the Roundup firms and won. Now here's where I'm not totally ready to document my facts. But I do believe he knew better. I also believe he had no choice. He sold out the American people because of who he worked for.
Here's what I want to say. From the point of view of the individual farmer, it's hard to fight against Roundup. If all your neighbors are using it the soil is full of it whether you use it or not. Your wells are still poisoned. Your kids are still suffering with the consequences. People still have to live with cancer for generations to come. This is a situation where we need government to just outlaw it or at least severely curtail it, and do it for everyone's benefit. People aren't going to themselves curtail their own needs when their output directly influences whether they can make it as a farm. If it comes down from the top that this stuff is not only good but necessary they will go with that judgment just like we go with the judgments of the Supreme Court. If I had myself a little organic farm out in West Nowhere I could refuse to use it and be holier-than-everyone but what's the point? It's the nation's children that are at risk here. It's
all the wells in the midwest.
Kennedy, if you had any
cajones you would stand up for the American people.
