My family, the Hanauers, started in Germany selling feathers and pillows. They got chased out of Germany by Hitler and ended up in Seattle owning another pillow company. Three
generations later, I benefited from that. Then I got as lucky as a person could possibly get in the Internet age by having a buddy in Seattle named Bezos. I look at the average Joe on the street, and I say, “There but for the grace of Jeff go I.” Even the best of us, in the worst of circumstances, are barefoot, standing by a dirt road, selling fruit. We should never forget that, or forget that the United States of America and its middle class made us, rather than the other way around.
Or we could sit back, do nothing, enjoy our yachts. And wait for the pitchforks.
I suspect we're past that point now. We've elected a plutocrat who promised to be sort of what Franklin Roosevelt actually was, "a traitor to his class".
He won't be.
I suspect the rage will amplify.
So, what am I talking about?
I've never had any problems with my health insurance. People complain about their health insurance a lot, however.
I'm noting that here as the public reaction to the assassination of Brian Thompson, CEO of United Healthcare, has been shocking. I've seen people I know and respect actually rejoice at his killing, and that reaction has been extremely widespread. I even saw somebody who is associated sort of with the insurance industry rejoice at the murder. Moreover, one of the most right wing people I know, who voted for Trump twice, made a positive comment about the killing.
Let that sink in. Far right, voted for Trump twice, and expressing some sympathy with the killer.
We find ourselves, at the same time that populists elected a childish billionaire who started nominating his billionaire buddies to government positions, in a situation in which a large section of the American population, including no doubt many of the people who voted the overaged rich child into office, pretty much cheering a terroristic assassination of a health insurance company CEO.
That it was an assassination, there can be no doubt. Expended shell casings were labeled "delay", "defend" and "depose", showing both a familiarity with civil litigation and the book Delay Deny Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.
What's that tell us?
Well it tells us in part that the social fabric in this country is a lot more ripped than we even began to imagine.
And it also tells us people attempting to read the populist weather vein might be reading it wrong. The rage might not be as fully right wing as imagined, as now we have Americans cheering the killing of an industry figure, something that Trump/Musk and his cronies love. That's its populist, however, there can be no doubt.
I can't recall things like this happening in the US, the targeted assassination of industry figures, since the 1920s, when it was a feature of real radicalism. We're entering a very bad space.
It suggest, however, that in spite of what Trump/Musk imagine, the country might actually be ready for some real economic reform as it received in the 1930s. Assassination is not tolerable, but it would appear some aspects of corporate capitalism may not be so much any longer either.
Indeed, the same right wing fellow I mentioned above proposed that all health insurance companies should be forced to be 100% policy holder owned, a highly distributist suggestion.
It is, I'd note, worth noting that plenty of current Trump backers from the far right are noting that the killer, Luigi Mangione, is from a well to do family. He is. This is supposed to tell us that this was a deluded left winger.
Deluded, no doubt. Left winter, maybe. But it's also worth noting that before Trump was the populist darling, Bernie Sanders was. Tulsi Gabbard, one time Democrat and now Trump nominee for security chief, was a Sanders supporter before she supported Trump.
Joseph Goebbels was a Communist before he was a Nazi.
Goebbels in 1916.
Lenin was from a middle class family, whose parents were monarchists. He was a lawyer, hardly a proletarian occupation.
The point of this? Well, just because Mangione was from a well to do family, who no doubt supported none of this, doesn't mean that he became a populist assassin as he was radicalized by the left. He personally may have been. We don't know. He may be just a nut.
But the widespread cheering for him, and it is widespread, shows that Hanauer may very well be very right.
We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before world war two. Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.
Politics, as they say, makes for strange bedfellows.
New Senate Whip John Barrasso with President Elect Donald Trump and President John F. Kennedy with his nephew Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Politics is, we also know, the art of compromise, but to what extent is a politician to blame for compromising with the truth?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been chosen by Donald Trump to be the new head of Health and Human Services.
He is, frankly, a nutter on health topics, who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near such a post.
John Barrasso is, by training, an orthopedic surgeon.
I've long suspected, well I'm pretty much certain, that Dr. Barrasso doesn't actually believe even half of what he's saying..He's doing it to 1) keep his Senatorial seat; and 2) advance himself in the Senate, even though at his age he could easily retire and be done with it.
Without getting too deep into it, I also believe that once you start compromising on fundamental things, you keep doing it, including with the truth. You don't start off deep into it, but you end up there.
Dr. Barrasso was known, at one time, as "Wyoming's Doctor" and had spots on local television with health minutes, and hosted the Labor Day Marathon. He continued to do this after he became Senator, a spot he was appointed to by the legislature to fill a vacancy before he was elected.
I've met him, as a physician, but can't claim to know him. I've been with him on commercial aircraft numerous times. I've always left him alone, as I figure that while traveling, people don't like to be bothered. I don't. Not everyone was like that, however, and I'd see people who recognized him treat him sort of like fans treated Elvis Presley.
Dr. Barrasso is originally from Pennsylvania. With a solid Italian American parentage, and an early Catholic education, I'd guess, but don't know, that he was a Catholic up until some point. He list himself as a Presbyterian now, and has been divorced, and later remarried. He's in his early 70s. Early on, his positions were clearly moderate Republican, but starting at least as early as 2016 they began to rapidly head towards Trumpism. He had a right wing challenger in the GOP primary last go around, and while I think the chances of him every losing were small, he went hardcore to the right.
Now he's the whip. Trump is going to expect him to whip up support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, holds some of the nuttiest ideas on healthcare, and particularly vaccines, imaginable. He shouldn't be anywhere near the Department of Health and Human Services.
Will Barrasso choke those down and support them.
Again, people don't get to supporting anything overnight. Some do rapidly, some over decades.
RFK, Jr. has no business in this office.
Kennedys
Before moving on, hasn't the country had enough of the Kennedys?
I certainly have.
The over tattooed and expropriation.
Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, is taking a lot of flak. Some of it is for things he's said or believes
Some of it for his tattoos, which are interpreted to mean things which they might not.
One of those tattoos is of a Jerusalem Cross.
The Jerusalem cross consists of a large cross potent surrounded by four smaller Greek crosses representing the spread of the gospel to the four corners of the earth. It was used as the emblem and coat of arms of the Kingdom of Jerusalem after 1099.
Hegeth is a member of a church which is part of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches. Therefore, he's appropriating a Catholic symbol, while he's not a Catholic. Indeed, he's not even close, as he's on his third spouse, something no adherent Catholic would have done.
He also has a tattoo on a bicep that states Deus vult, "God wills", a phrase that dates back to the First Crusade, but which has been appropriated by many groups over the years. And it doesn't stop there.
“Israel, Christianity and my faith are things I care deeply about,” he's stated.
Perhaps he should learn more about the faith espoused by the symbols that he's had inked on himself. Indeed, quite frankly, the men who cried Deus vult in the 11th Century and those who fought to defend the Kingdom of Jerusalem would have regarded him as a heretic.
Anyhow, one thing that I've worried about since the rise of Christian Nationalist is that Catholics are the ones who are going to take a beating in the end, even though its really a Protestant movement. I can already see it starting to happen. Former Senator Adam Kinzinger, who comments heavily on Blue Sky and Twitter, had a post noting that "the Crusades weren't Christian". Oh yes they were, the thing they weren't is the edited version that English Protestants came up with to attempt to tar and feather the Church. Others have been running around claiming that the Jerusalem Cross, which Catholics use a lot, is a Nazi symbol, which it isn't, or a camouflaged swastika, which it isn't.
The United States remains a Protestant nation, including in the way it reacts to symbols and in its misunderstanding of history.
All this serves, I'd note, to bury a deeper item that should be of actual concern, which is the American Evangelical view towards Israel. This is not universal, by any means, but there's a branch of American Evangelicalism which sees itself as having a direct role in bringing about the Second Coming through its interaction with Israel. According to somebody who knew him and commented on it recently (therefore at least making it somewhat suspect) former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has been nominated by Trump to be Ambassador to Israel, and who is a Baptist minister, has those views.
Really, people with the apparent views of Huckabee and Kinzinger really have no business in the offices they've been nominated to serve in.
Hairless wonders.
This is sort of an odd aside, but the huge increase in male tattoos, including chest tattoos, has caused me to wonder, has there been a reduction in male chest hair in recent years?
Chest hair is a secondary male characteristic which is caused by a variety of genetic factors. One of those is a high testosterone level, and for that reason, hairy chests have gone, at any one time, from being regarded as "brutish" to sexy. Because of the conditions of the Second World War, Americans were acclimated for a time to seeing men shirtless, which was unusual, and for a good several decades after the war, hairy chested men, or just flat out hairy men in general, were in vogue. Indeed I can recall seeing some 1960s vintage war movie with Fabian in it which was ridiculously hairy.
This is clearly really out now, but it still raises the question, what's going on. Personally, I couldn't have a giant chest tattoo like Hegseth for the same reason that Tom Selleck couldn't. I doubt that I really could have a tattoo anywhere safe for the the generally non visible part of my arms either.
It's interesting to note that there has been a substantial reduction in detected testosterone levels in the US since the 1980s.**
Maybe RFK, Jr. can look into that.
Creeps
It's a real irony that the man so many Christian Evangelicals saw as the Christian candidate has such a horrible personal tract record at least in the sexual ethics category, but perhaps that fact should cause us to be less than surprised that he nominated Matt Gaetz to be Attorney General of the United States.
There seem to be no doubt that Gaetz dabbled down in this category to a 17 year old. Yes, he wasn't prosecuted, but he may have had a credible defense based on scienter. According to at least one report, once he learned she was 17, he abstained from her favors until she was 18.
The thing here, however, is that this conduct is completely immoral. Not only is it sex outside of marriage, which Christianity, but Gaetz is a creep who is fishing in the bottom of the well. Frankly, this deserves further investigation as most 17 year olds or 18 year olds would have had no interest in Gaetz, so something should be done to figure out why they did and what's behind that.
This guy has no significant legal experience and shouldn't be anywhere near the AG's office.
Scenes from the American dumpster fire.
Strange bedfellows indeed.
At this point, however, if Matt Gaetz invited Mike Johnson over to the Playboy Grotto, if it still existed, I'd expect him to go.
Something about this photo just shows how trashy American culture has become.
Trashy.
I think there is sort of a faction in the Republican Party that has a strange kind of... sort of homoerotic fascination for Putin.
Boris Johnson recently stated this.
The fascination for Putin (who has a hairless chest, I'd note) is pretty weird.
Trad Rant
The recent election seems to have bubbled some stuff up from the bottom of the cultural dutch oven, and not just stuff like the weird things noted in the two above entries. Some of this is interesting to ponder, including pondering whether its a serious trend or something else.
One of them is the emergence of secular (and religious) trad women, holding a romantic, it seems, view of the not so distant path.
Here's an example. Interesting trad rant starting at 21:00.
I don't want to go to far in criticizing this, really, as it has a real appeal, as does a lot of sort of agrarian conservatism and Chesteronian distributism I see creeping into the culture, sort of sideways. These people are sincere, and there's a real appeal to it. Shoot, I'd live an agrarian life if people around me would allow it, or so I tell myself.
Others tell themselves that too, and also mock themselves, as for example, here:
Student Alan Canfora waves a black flag before the Ohio National Guard shortly before they opened fire at Kent State, May 15, 1970.
and never as part of that did I ever imagine being used in the US to round up immigrants.
I have the strong feeling that if Trump attempts this, there's going to be a lot of men leaving the military, and a drop off of enlistment of epic proportions.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
