Category: Current Events

There’s a lot of talk these days about fake news.  And it’s a legitimate truth that there are a number of satirical and flat-out tabloid-style websites and services that provide totally made up news, and much of it gets passed around on Facebook as though it were real.  That’s a problem in itself, but it’s worse when the “legitimate” news sources use them as a scapegoat to draw attention away from their own fakeness.

I know, there I go, sounding like a crazy person again.  Look, the reality of modern life is that journalism is dead.  As Denzel Washington pointed out recently, the media has become more focused on being first than on being right.  I’ll carry that a little farther, though.  They’re focused on being first, and they’re all about sensationalism, and the first outlet to break the stories gets all the attention.  The reason being first and being sensational matter is because it’s a ratings game.  Nobody pays attention anymore unless the news is dramatic, shocking, spectacular.  We watched the World Trade Towers fall live on national television.  We watched the bombing of Baghdad live on television.  Twice.  Everybody has a camera in their pocket now, and a platform to share what they see.  The media is competing with social media.  They’re competing with us.  It’s hard to get our attention because we’re so saturated with sensory input from around the world on a constant basis.  Truth doesn’t sell anymore.  Narratives do.

True journalism is supposed to be objective, just reporting facts and allowing the reader, listener, or viewer, to draw their own conclusions based on the evidence presented.  A really great piece of investigative journalism would gather lots of pertinent facts from various sources, including some which spoke on the condition of anonymity, and would connect the dots without fabricating connective tissue that isn’t there.

But most reporting these days, even from reputable, “legitimate” news sources, isn’t like that.  Most of what passes for journalism these days is written from an emotional point of view, where the reporter leads the audience to subjective conclusions based on an emotional reading of the facts, assuming they bother with any facts at all.

You want an example?  How about the fact that Buzzfeed and CNN just spent the day claiming that Reince Priebus compared Donald Trump to Jesus?  What happened was they took this statement from the RNC:

And decided that Priebus was talking about Donald Trump because…why?  Why would anyone assume that?  Because the Republicans just won the presidency and in a few weeks Trump will be sworn in as Commander-in-Chief?  Nowhere in that message does Priebus mention Trump, or the presidency, or the election, or our nation really at all.  He talks about Jesus, and he talks about worshiping Jesus in 2016 as the Magi did circa 6 BC.  The only reason to read anything else into that is because of your personal feelings, and that has no place in journalism.  That’s nothing but actual, naked fearmongering.

CNN has become no better than Glenn Beck, crying in front of a blackboard with a demented, Kafka-esque flow-chart linking Barack Obama to everything from Satan to tooth decay.

Here’s another example.  The Dakota Access Pipeline.  Though I have usually commented on the major news stories of the last year or two, I didn’t say anything about the Dakota Access Pipeline.  The main reason for that was that it was nearly impossible to gather any facts, and once I did, I was honestly afraid I was going to get ripped into for speaking the truth.

Most of the media coverage of DAPL was emotionally-charged, talking about how the Standing Rock Sioux’s land was being desecrated by the white man and his oil, how the pipeline was crossing the reservation and the protesters were peaceful and the law enforcement and military were being called upon to intimidate, harass, and attack them.

All of this is awful, and got me a little irate, but I took a deep breath and asked myself, “is any of this pipeline reporting objective?”  When the answer was no, I Googled and Googled and eventually found one or two pieces of reporting that cited sources and facts, and remained unemotional about the entire thing, and the conclusion I drew is that the entire thing was fairly complex, that both sides had legitimate concerns, and there was a whole mess of confusion in the middle caused by third parties.

As near as I can tell, the pipeline’s proposed route doesn’t enter the reservation at all, though it does cross the Missouri river at the site of an existing natural gas pipeline crossing.  The Army Corps of Engineers (who are very thorough and never do anything without checking and re-checking carefully) worked with a team of archaeologists and met repeatedly with various tribal leaders in order to choose a path that was clear of sacred and historically significant sites.

Of course, the Natives had concerns about the river crossing, because it was only a few miles from the reservation, and should the pipeline leak at the crossing, it would pollute the river and would be devastating for the reservation.  I’d call that a reasonable concern on their part, without need of embellishment.  However, various environmental activist groups got involved, and that’s where things get tricky.  It seems that the environmentalists escalated the protests, which led to escalation by government and law enforcement.  Construction workers felt so scared and intimidated that they started packing heat, and even then protesters succeeded in running them off the road, even sometimes dragging them from their vehicles.

https://youtu.be/skkxiT5hJ4M

I consider that a strategic move on the part of the environmentalists as it led to greater media coverage by making for more dramatic, sensational news stories.  That’s just good political strategy.  Finally the Army Corps of Engineers backed down, and they did it because the whole thing had become so ugly, dangerous, and, frankly, a circus; so that strategy by the organizers in the environmental groups certainly paid off.

So why didn’t the media report it objectively?  Well, because the narrative created by the activists was sexier.  Opposing the pipeline is in line with fighting climate change; it’s part of a larger narrative that is important to many journalists and by crusading on the pipeline issue, they are crusading for the planet.  If they can package that under a veil of half-truths about Natives getting screwed, it’s even sexier.  Hit ‘em right in the White Guilt.  Works every time.

Journalists have always been crusaders.  That’s nothing new.  What’s new is that many of them no longer crusade for the truth, they crusade for political causes.  They’re telling you fairytales and horror stories, in service of what they think is the greater good.  I’ve referenced this before, but a lie in service of the greater good is still a lie.

So let’s come back to the “fake news” discussion for a moment.  As Elbert Hubbard once said, “responsibility is the price of freedom.” I brought that concept up when talking about gun control.  If you’re going to be truly free, you have to be responsible for yourself and your actions; and if you’re going to give up responsibility then you also give up freedom.  Responsibility must be taught, by parents to children, or else learned through a series of comprehensive and potentially cataclysmic failures.  If children don’t understand the concept of personal responsibility, they grow up, turn to the government and say, “take care of me.”  And that’s where freedom dies.

What has this got to do with fake news, you ask?  In the words of Jacob Marley:  “Much.”

After all, who gets to decide what is fake news?  See the First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Freedom of the press.  If the press is free, and the price of freedom is responsibility, then the press is responsible for what they print.  Any attempt by the government to regulate it, and the press is no longer free.  The second that happens, it becomes nothing more than government propaganda which is the exact antithesis of what it was created to be.  Which is why it’s so telling that the media finally jumps on the “ fake news” train the moment their candidate loses out.  Meanwhile CNN wants you to believe that Reince Priebus thinks Donald Trump is Jesus Christ.

Ultimately, we have to accept that the first amendment protects all of this garbage, at least to a degree, and that changing the first amendment would be too dangerous to even consider.  So instead, we must ask ourselves, what can we do?

Well, the first thing is we can remember that every single media outlet is a business.  And because they are businesses, what we spend money on is what we support.  And in the online world, sometimes what you click on is what you support.  What you “like” on Facebook is what you support.  What you share, is what you support.  So if you don’t like it, drop it like it’s hot.  Basic economics, right there.

The second thing, which pairs nicely with that, is when you see a news story, fact-check it, sure, but not only that; ask yourself, “is this fact-based journalism, or are my emotions being played?”  And if the answer to that is, “no, and yes,” then regardless of the masthead at the top of the page, or whose face it’s coming out of, what you have is not news.  Journalism may be persuasive, but it ought not be propaganda.  Which is to say that a journalist may gather and report the facts, and then use those to draw certain conclusions, and while there is a subjectivity inherent there, you get to look at all the same facts and decide if you agree with the reporter’s conclusions or not.  Ideally, the reporter is intelligent and objective enough to draw reasonable conclusions, and change their own point of view if necessary as facts are discovered.  The propagandist, on the other hand, twists the facts or outright fabricates information in order to promote a specific viewpoint.

I don’t need a journalist to tell me how I ought to feel about a given thing, and neither, I suspect, do you.  Don’t get me wrong, everybody’s free to have an opinion.  But by that same token, everyone is responsible for forming their own.  Which really only happens if we can get our hands on true and accurate information.  In the digital age, that’s surprisingly damned difficult.  It’s a jungle out there.

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few weeks about the Electoral College, as usually happens after an election, particularly an election like this one, where it was so close that the candidate who won the popular vote did not win the Electoral College vote.  People talk about how that shouldn’t be possible and argue that it’s a bad system, but I don’t agree, and I know plenty of other people, some of whom are smarter than I, who agree with me.

The Electoral College itself is fairly simple.  It’s a process wherein each party selects a number of electors in each state who cast votes on behalf of the people of that state.  The number of electors a state receives is equal to the number of congresspersons that each state has.  Every state has two Senators, so that’s your baseline.  Maine, for instance, with 5 Electoral College votes, has two senators and three representatives.  California of course has two senators and holds a whopping 53 seats in the House, and thus has 55 Electoral College votes.  This is because the number of Representatives a state has is based on population; a more populous state will have more representatives.

So when we cast our votes for president, we’re in a sense voting for which set of electors will get to vote.  And 48 of the 50 states have a winner takes all policy where the EC is concerned.  This is where some people get tripped up, because the winner take all system means that candidates win on a state-by-state basis and not by a strict popular vote count.  Some question how this is a fair system.

To really understand this, I think you have to consider how you think about the United States of America.  We think of ourselves as one big country, and certainly, we are, but what does statehood mean?  What is a state?  Is it just a geographic locality?  Or is it something a little more?  Merriam-Webster offers several definitions.  Only two are applicable to the United States:

Obviously No. 7, but that one is kind of useless, like saying the definition of a can is “a thing in a six-pack.”  I’m going with No. 5, which is a bit more specific.  Of course this is all just definitions, so let’s look at the founding documents of our country.

The Constitution on its own does not define our nation; rather there is a continuity of founding documents that define it, beginning with the Declaration of Independence and moving through the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution.

There have been a great many debates, and even some legal cases, on this subject, but my brand of patriotism says that to fully understand the Constitution you have to consider the full continuity; especially since the Constitution, in opening with a line about forming “a more perfect union,” references the Articles of Confederation.  Reaching back, then, to the Declaration, Jefferson wrote that “these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States.”

Under Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation it was elaborated that, “Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation, expressly delegated to the United States, in congress assembled.”

This is echoed in the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

As you know, your state has its own laws, its own police force, its own governor and legislative body.  Its own court system.  These must all meet the basic guidelines established by Federal Law in the Constitution, but states are also given leeway to make their own laws according to the will of the people who occupy those states.

In effect, the United States is exactly that: a group of free and sovereign states, banded together for economic gain, security, and defense.  The Articles of Confederation gave states more leeway than they currently have, down to each state having its own money, and there being no federal law enforcement at that time, crime was out of control, there were economic problems, and things were generally a mess.  So the Constitution is in effect a revision of the Articles of Confederation, a new system that is more complex, more detailed, and in some ways more restrictive.  But it unifies the states economically and by law.

The states also ratified the constitution, thereby freely entering into the union.  Viewed in this way, the constitution may be seen as a contract between free states that have agreed to abide by a set of rules for their mutual benefit, another through-line that began with the Declaration and continues through each successive document.  That being the case, it makes sense that presidential candidates must win whole states, in order to win the presidency.  To only count the popular vote means that the states themselves don’t matter, and that’s dangerous for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it would favor the will of people in more populous states, like California, over a state like Wyoming.  That’s why the popular vote is kind of irrelevant in a close election.

That’s also why even though California’s population is 66 times greater than Wyoming’s, they only have 11 times the number of Electoral College votes.  What this does is create a balance, by letting the less populated states still have a voice.  And that’s important, because a voter in LA and a voter in Manhattan may have certain things that matter to them, but I’m pretty sure a coal miner in Kentucky couldn’t possibly care less what either of them says.  Consider the states as separate, yet contractually linked and having the same rights, and you understand why the population of the individual state shouldn’t necessarily determine the outcome of a national election.

Consider that each of the original thirteen colonies was founded by a different group of people having come here for different reasons.  If you were a puritan in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a Quaker in Pennsylvania, a Catholic in Maryland or a Virginian who just got shipped over to find economic opportunity…you had different goals, different values.  That informs how each colony developed, and the identity of each of those states, even to this day, is what it is because of that.  Even as we move forward, knowing where we came from and how we got where we are is useful.  You can’t plot a journey if you don’t have a beginning and an end point.  You can’t map progress without these fixed points.  The past matters.  It matters on a national level, but it must also matter on a state level.  The idea that each state should be able to determine, within reason, what its own needs are and how best to meet them, is only natural.  This is particularly valuable in modern America, as we have so many different cultures represented within our borders, whose values and traditions vary, that the voices of individual groups matter as much as the voice of the majority.

This is why we have congressional districts, and why we have representation in congress.  It is also why every state has its own legislature, its own judicial branch, and its own executive branch.  You have a voice within your state, and a voice within the Federal government, and a national election must observe that hierarchy.  You vote as a citizen of your state, which is a member of the union, as opposed to voting as a citizen of the country on the whole, if that makes sense.  The system honors the sovereignty of the states, and in this way the diversity of the American people.

We talk a lot about changing things in this country, about rearranging our government, and hell, nothing could be more quintessentially American.  But it’s useful to understand what things are, and why they exist, before you get too deep into that conversation, else you say little of value.

What do you think?  Feel free to comment below and let me know.  I welcome intelligent discussion here.  Just stay respectful to others who may comment as well.

In early June of 2016, everybody was pissed because a rich kid named Brock the Rapist somehow avoided taking responsibility for his own actions.

A week later a bad guy shot up a nightclub full of innocents in Florida and nobody was willing to just assign blame to the guy responsible.  Look, when a guy rapes a girl behind a dumpster it’s not the girl’s fault, or the dumpster’s, or even the guy’s wang’s fault, it’s the guy’s fault for being a bad person. Period.

When a drunk driver kills somebody, it’s not the car’s fault, or the alcohol’s fault, or the dead guy’s fault, or the road’s fault, it’s the fault of the guy who made the piss-poor decision to drive while drunk.

Part of being a free society means having to accept individual responsibility for our lives, and that includes holding people responsible when they act in reprehensible ways. It really is exactly as simple as that.  So I have found myself frustrated every time there’s another mass shooting and the conversation turns to gun control.  Not because it isn’t a natural talking point of the subject at hand, but because it has the rather pointed effect of taking the focus off of the perpetrator of the crime.

I get that in the case of the Orlando shooting, the obfuscation was because Omar Mateen was a Muslim man and even though he claimed some connection to ISIS, he wasn’t acting at their behest and the media didn’t want to stir up anti-Muslim sentiment or create the impression of an organized terror attack.  It also speaks to a deeper need to connect the dots of all the mass killings we’ve seen in this country in recent years, with an ever-increasing frequency.  The problem is you’re treating symptoms.  It’s clear that there’s a problem when we have this many mass shootings, but I’m more interested in the root of the problem, which isn’t the guns themselves.  Guns are a tool.  A tool of death and destruction, certainly, but still a tool.

Now I’ll admit it: I’m a conservative who doesn’t own a gun.  I never want to own a gun, but what’s going on in this country is bigger than gun control. And to boil it down to that issue and act as if there’s a law you can pass that’s going to stop this madness overnight is naive and disingenuous.

If making a thing illegal in this country made it go away nobody would be addicted to cocaine. Somebody wants something bad enough they’ll get it. That’s why crime exists. That’s basically the exact definition of crime.

Now obviously I’m in favor of cocaine remaining illegal, and for the same reason I’m in favor of reasonable restrictions on firearms, but to act like we can pass a law and go out for shawarma and a couple of beers, job done, mission accomplished, is silly.

I’m in favor of reasonable restrictions not because some guns are more dangerous than others, but because some people are more dangerous than others.  Any gun can kill. Any gun in the hands of an unstable or ill-intentioned person is a terrifying prospect.  Omar Mateen once threatened to murder all of his classmates over a hamburger.  That’s just a fact.  He’d been investigated by the FBI.  Somebody like that shouldn’t have been able to buy so much as a Daisy bb gun.  Period.  He was mentally unstable, he was an Islamic fundamentalist, and he was a closeted homosexual.  That’s a cocktail just one good shake away from disaster.  Then somebody shook the cocktail.

But that separates Mateen from the majority of mass-shooters, who typically are not known to have any mental disorders or diagnosed emotional problems.  Nobody’s even sure why most of them do it.  So regulations on firearms wouldn’t likely keep guns out of their hands.

Here’s the thing: you can argue that assault weapons should be banned, but how do you define an “assault weapon”?  Technically, shooting at somebody with any kind of firearm could be fairly labeled “assault.”  Every weapon is a weapon of war.  Men fought with clubs and spears before they learned to forge blades from bronze and steel.  Technology changes over time, weapons become more efficient and more deadly.  So that begs the question, where the Second Amendment is concerned, did the Founders intend that the people should be able to own weapons of war?

I think the answer is absolutely yes.  The Second Amendment reads as follows:

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

So, yes, it says “militia.” It also says, “the right of the people,” not “the right of the militia” or “the right of the army” or “the right of like six guys we chose in a back room.”  Remember that when the Revolutionary war was fought, the majority of actors on both sides were British Subjects. The point was that some of them didn’t want to be any longer.

Who fought the first battles of the revolution, before the Continental Army was formed? Who made up a significant portion of that army even after it was formed? Who fought at Lexington and Concord?

Militiamen. Citizen soldiers. Because until the revolution was fully organized, there was no official army. They had to make one. To fight the army controlled by the government to which they had previously owed their allegiance.

In other words, there is a reasonable case to be made that the militia referred to in the Second Amendment is the citizen soldier, the free man and woman with a conscience, a backbone, and the will to remain free.

To reiterate, I do believe some restrictions on firearms are necessary. But the language we use to describe these weapons and the way in which we choose to regulate them, absolutely matters. The framers knew exactly what they were doing when they chose the language in the Bill of Rights. Let us be equally as careful.  Because the most dangerous thing in the world would be to give up the people’s right to defend themselves from enslavement, abuse, and oppression, by a government that the majority of Americans already believe is corrupt.

You all know the Lord Acton quote: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

We all quote it so often we seem to accept it as true without really considering what it means.  But this is a principle that the founders clearly understood, and they built our system of government with the intent to spread the power around, and temper it always with checks and balances so that nobody could thoroughly abuse their position or the power it afforded them, without consequence.  Our system of government is meant to protect us, by empowering us, by making the government work for us.

Now then, returning to the original point, how do we deal with mass shooters?  Well, first of all, if we accept that they are responsible for their own actions, then we have to ask what is driving them to act.  As I said before, nobody really seems to know, but I see a few options.  One is that they are people who just want notoriety, who want to leave a mark.  Another is that they are unhappy in their lives, unhappy with their situation, with the culture or the world into which they are born.  In either case I can see only one real case for how we work toward preventing these things.  We must become a more principled society, more willing to listen to ideas, to discuss them, more willing to disagree.  To understand that our differences don’t determine our worth.

The thing that would make our country, hell our WORLD a better place today would be if people would talk a little less and listen a little more. It’s true with politics, it’s true with race relations, it’s true with the police, it’s just a simple, universal truth.

One of the greatest gifts you can give anybody is to listen to them. You want to understand women better, listen to them. You want to understand black folks, listen to them. You want to understand conservatives, listen to them. Liberals, listen to them. Poor people, rich people, men, children… just shut your mouth and LISTEN to them.

Shutting your cake hole and opening your ears has two effects. First, it makes you a better friend to the people you love, and second, it makes you wiser. I know this from experience. And the thing is, it wasn’t my choice. I stutter, everybody who knows me knows that. It got easier, as a kid, just to not talk to anybody in school. Just not try because it kept me from getting laughed at and kept me from getting bullied as much, and while I wouldn’t wish THAT on anybody, it also taught me patience… it taught me to listen, it taught me to think, it taught me to analyze.

Anyone who has a clue how we ended up living in an America where Donald J. Trump is the President-Elect, understands that there’s been too little listening and too much talking, bullying, and shaming of people who have different experiences, different points of view, and different ideas to bring to a discussion.  That’s how we got there.  That’s how racial tensions get ratcheted up.  It’s why riot cops get sent to hose down peaceful Native protesters.  Because everybody is so goddamn sure that they’re right and everybody else is wrong.  If you don’t live with the pervasive feeling that you might possibly be full of shit, then you cannot truly be said to have an open mind.

Problems of the kind we face in our world today don’t just happen because we didn’t regulate something.  They happen because our society has grown seriously sick.  And if you want to fix it, ladies and gentlemen, the first step is to quit using it to leverage political agendas. Left, right, liberal, conservative, whatever you are, whatever you want to call yourself, put that crap aside and just deal with it as an American, or better yet as a compassionate human being. You say it’s not the time for understanding or compassion?  I call bullshit.  We won’t solve our problems by clinging dogmatically to narrow, pre-programmed perceptions.  We won’t solve them by sharing fake news articles.  You cannot hold others accountable for their actions until you accept responsibility for your own.

Sane people don’t walk into a school and shoot everybody if they feel connected to them.  Sane people don’t shoot people who respect them, or whom they respect.  Since we’ve established that the majority of the mass shooters don’t appear to be clinically crazy, then we must assume that the fault is in the other half of the equation: that mass shootings happen because people do not feel empowered, do not feel heard, do not feel seen.  Noticed.  Cared for.  Respected.  Appreciated.  Loved.  They feel cut off from the people around them.  The human spirit needs nourishing, and you do not get that nourishing through a computer screen.  You do not get it through likes.  You do not get it through working harder.  You do not get it through law.  Congress cannot ratify a nourishing of the spirit.  The president cannot sign an executive order saying that you will henceforth be happy and healthy.

You get that through communion.  You can find it in pretty much any church, temple, mosque, or synagogue.  But you can also find it around a table with your friends and family, and as we stumble forward into another Thanksgiving holiday, we should remember to be thankful for the time spent with one another.  What’s missing in our society these days is pretty much right there at the Thanksgiving table.  Just a little human decency, and some good old-fashioned awkward conversation.

NOTE: I originally posted the following to Facebook on November 10th.  Moving forward I will be creating original content for this blog, but also posting older pieces that I have previous only shared with friends.  

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Okay, I’ve been mostly silent for a few days, owing partly to being under the weather, and owing partly to the fact that I have friends of every race, gender, sexual orientation, and political stripe, I actually respect them all, and I doubted that at least of half of you would be ready to talk sense until the dust settled.

So here I am, ready to speak up to all of you. There are several points I need to make, and I hope to hit them all, and in some kind of order, but I’ll start here. I have an advantage of many of you in that I never liked either candidate, and I have thus been preparing myself for months for the eventuality that one of them was going to be president. Since I was guaranteed not to be thrilled with the outcome, I had to do some soul-searching early on and make peace, preemptively, with whatever the outcome would be.

So here is my thought process. Remember first of all that we elect presidents in this country. Not emperors, not kings, not rulers. Presidents. A president has a lot of power, but his or her power also has limits. Our system was built with check and balances in place, and the reason for that is that the people who designed this system had just gotten out from under the rule of a king whom they felt was taking advantage of them as subjects. They wanted to make sure that the system they set up could not allow any one person to seize that kind of power.

Many of you who are terrified right now were the same people posting memes about how Trump seemed not to know what the limits of a president’s power are. Now, I know, I know that the system has changed some since it’s inception, and I know that it isn’t necessarily free from being exploited, but regardless of who or what Donald J. Trump might turn out to be, I have faith, not in him, but faith that the majority of the American people are not racists, misogynists, or homophobes. I have faith that the American government will not start mandating, or supporting, bigotry and hatred.

And if it did, I have faith that the majority of the American citizenry would not stand for it. Because I know I would not stand for it, and I am a pretty regular, dare I say unremarkable guy.

Consider the fact that you’re so well aware of, that Donald Trump didn’t win the popular vote. Not only that, but I read that only 24% of registered voters even voted for him. Knowing that he still won, and that even Hillary’s popular vote was a narrow margin, that tells you that voter turnout was absolute garbage this year, and that’s because a lot of people just did not like either option, felt that they had nothing for which to vote, and either voted for a third party candidate, or did not vote at all.

Next I would ask you to consider that we legitimately have no idea what Donald Trump stands for. None. He said a lot of offensive things on the campaign trail, and some old tapes surfaced of some other repugnant shit coming out of his mouth, but I have to point out a few things.

First, remember that Trump has historically been a democrat. I know that doesn’t mean he’s a bleeding heart, and I’m pretty certain that he isn’t, but it IS a good indicator that he may not be the racist bastard he has portrayed himself as. Many of you, over the course of his campaign, have pulled out the quote from the 90’s where he said if he would run that he would run as a Republican because it would be easy to dupe the base into voting for him — that’s a paraphrase, but the quote is out there and is easy to find. It’s not hard to see that this may be exactly what he did.

[Another note: I have since been reminded that the quote in question was a hoax, possibly perpetrated by one of the many fake news sites that plague Facebook.]

First of all, he took multiple stances on multiple issues, so you already know that most of what he said is outright false. What you don’t know is which part, if any of it, is true. Secondly, when you look at how Trump won, he went after the rural areas, the more traditional middle America, because he knew Clinton and her campaign would skip over those voters while focusing on black people, Latinos, the LGBTQ crowd, and the more urban centers where people tend to be more liberal.

Trump seems to have figured out the key to what the Republican party has been struggling with for the last decade. He figured out how to win an election against the Democrats, and he did it in a counter-intuitive way: he steered into the skid.

Look, this won’t be easy for some of you to hear, but you know how divisive the political climate has been for the last decade? Looking at it objectively, it’s easy to see why the Democrats have been winning for so long. It started actually a decade and a half ago, with George W. Bush’s administration invading Iraq. They misrepresented the facts when they asked for Congress’s permission to go to war, and they did it because their strategy in the war on terror was to try to establish a stronghold of democracy in the middle-east. They thought if they could stabilize the region and create prosperity, it would end terrorism, since it is poverty and desperation under a totalitarian regime, that breed terrorism in the first place.

But a lie in service of something good, is still a lie, as was the point of Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises.” The Bush administration did harm to our nation’s reputation, they gambled on being able to find something in Iraq that would justify their lie and it didn’t work out, and now everyone knows. Worse, we have to deal with ISIS, which is a direct result of that lie. It also damaged the Republican Party.

The war was polarizing enough, but the lie, and the results of that lie, have long-since obscured the basic lessons of September 11th, 2001, and drove the wedge between the two parties even deeper. To wit, Conservatives have long feared that Democrats are too weak on National Defense, and Liberals have long held — and here in the case of the Iraq invasion, could rightfully argue — that Republicans are willing to cross too many lines in the name of National Defense.

So there’s the wedge deepening. People called GWB “Satan” and all sorts of other things, which, as a Christian I think does a serious injustice to the threat level of Satan, but the point is taken and the vitriol, mostly earned. Meanwhile the Democratic Party has had a much sexier kind of message, as they talk about human rights, compassion, and inclusion. These are good things. But what it has meant is that while both parties have been vilifying one another, the Democratic Party has consistently been able to come out on top, with a louder and more vocal section of the populace taking their side and denouncing conservative values — which aren’t all bad.

The thing Republicans have struggled with is figuring out how to win an election in that environment. As a conservative I know that most Republicans actually DO care about human rights. They just have a different philosophy on what that means. Essentially, as republicans have been known to cross moral lines in the name of national security, democrats have crossed moral lines in the name of human rights. And that may sound like a self-contradictory statement, but the fact that I now live in a country where I can’t afford health insurance, but can be fined by the government for not buying any, says otherwise. It’s a different kind of violation, and much easier to overlook than wrongfully invading a foreign country, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also wrong.

Still, because it’s easier to overlook — because it’s a more seemingly innocuous wrong in the service of something good — people still defend it. It’s a sexier message. So Republicans lose again and again; first it was that Bush was the devil and that everything from hangnails to inclement weather was somehow his fault, then it was John McCain was a racist, or Mitt Romney was a Fascist (as if Mitt Romney was ever anything other than a vanilla-scented Yankee Candle). And I know, Republicans did it too — birthers, cries of communist at every leftist politician (for the record, Barack Obama was born in the USA, but Democrats DO like a little Karl Marx in their economic strategies). Democrats have always been able to steer into the skid. Look at Bernie, who describes himself a socialist. He does that because he knows it can’t be an insult if he proudly wears the t-shirt and the secret decoder ring.

Meanwhile, the media and the entertainment industry have always leaned left, so the liberal message reaches ears more readily and slides down like a good craft beer when preached by great songwriters and the beautiful people in Hollywood. But that’s nothing new . What IS relatively new is social media, and the way that changes the national conversation. It creates a liberal echo chamber where, yes, there are conservative voices, but they are often lost in the sea of memes from websites like “Occupy Democrats” and the “Dank Meme Stash” of the week. Speaking as a conservative, I can tell you I am constantly choosing my words carefully out of a desire not to offend any of my friends, and I frankly believe that is something that most liberals have never worried about in the current climate.

In the last decade, Republicans have consistently lost and Democrats have consistently won — with conservatives being shamed and told they were racists and bigots. While I think it’s fair to say that there’s a measure of truth in it, I would also say that speaking as a straight male conservative who respects women, whose best friend since childhood is a black man, who has crushed on more than one Hispanic lady (and a couple of black ones too), and who respects the rights of his gay friends, I know that not all conservatives are bigots. Not by a mile. It’s just that the ones who ARE bigots don’t worry about offending anybody, so you hear their voices first, and you get mad at them because they’re being awful, and you have civil conversations with guys like me and tell me you wish all conservatives were like me, while missing the fact that most of them ARE.

I think what Donald Trump did, is he found a strategy. He knew that running as a Republican was going to get him accused of being a lot of terrible things, and I think what defines Donald Trump’s victory, is that he decided to take it on the chin. He wasn’t afraid to be the bad guy. Hell, in a lot of ways he IS a bad guy. After the Billy Bush tape came out, when the first woman accused Trump of groping her and his response was, “have you seen her? I don’t think so. I don’t think so,” I knew right then that he had won. Because if that didn’t stop him, nothing would. No shame, you know? Like Bernie’s socialist decoder ring, Donald Trump put on the pimp coat and kept on campaigning. I think he assumed that being vilified would create sympathy for him among conservatives. I think to some degree it did.

But that’s the thing. Given the inconsistencies in what he has said (to the degree that he has said ANYTHING substantive on the issues) it is impossible to discern just what, if any of it, was true. We know he’s a pig, he likes a certain type of women, he likes them within a certain age range, and he said nasty things on tape with Billy Bush. The thing is, none of that makes him a rapist. Doesn’t make him NOT a rapist, but it doesn’t make him one, either. What he said to Billy Bush wasn’t a confession, it was a hypothetical, and while it is, and ought to be, troubling, it doesn’t prove anything other than that he is a pig. Which was already common knowledge. But he’ll hardly be the first pig in the white house, will he, William Jefferson Clinton?

Now, on to a few other things… yep, Trump has described hypothetically committing war crimes as president, he has talked about building a border wall, and he has talked about mass deportations. Among other things. And these are all things that I think we can, by and large, agree that we don’t want. I don’t know if he actually wants to do them or not, but he won’t be able to. Because we are a nation of laws, and nobody, not even the president, is above the law. Isn’t that right, Richard Milhous Nixon?

That brings me back to my original point. We didn’t elect an emperor. We didn’t elect a king. And after all the stuff he’s said, you know we will all be watching Donald Trump very closely. It’s actually quite unlikely that he’ll be able to do anything like the stuff that he has described.

Look, back when President Obama was campaigning for his own presidency, much of what he promised centered on bringing all the troops home and closing Guantanamo Bay. Back when he made those promises I kept telling people, “he’ll never be able to do those things.” It’s easy to speak in hypotheticals, but presidential decisions aren’t made in a vacuum, and when the Candidate becomes the President, he or she goes in there and has the meetings and sees behind the curtain, and all the machinery is revealed, and the reason why things exist becomes apparent. Moreover, what your actual options are for changing them also become apparent. President Obama has made a point of being seen to try closing Gitmo, being seen to at least change the nature of the conflict in the middle east, but he was never going to be able to just wave a magic wand and make those things happen. He is a smart man and I believe he knew that long before he ever set foot in the Oval Office. But this is politics, and this is how it works.

Likewise, President-Elect Donald Trump will not be able to do most of the things he talked about on the campaign trail, whether he means to or not. And for that reason, dear friends, I am asking you to take a deep breath. Remain vigilant, but be calm.

Yes I’m a conservative, but I believe in harmony, and I am socially rather liberal — my conservatism is mostly in the region of economics. This is why I do not identify myself as a Republican. Some of my favorite presidents have been Republicans. Some of them haven’t. I believe that each side holds part of the answers, and I’m really more of a Libertarian at heart. If you love your country, then weep not, for it needs you. Regardless of your race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation — your country needs you. And it doesn’t need you melting down, but standing strong.

So regardless of which side you’re on, stop with the hate, stop with the fear, and for God’s sake stop setting shit on fire.

Well, after all the noise, I’ve decided to weigh in on Harambe the Gorilla, and then I’ll not mention it or like/comment on any posts about it again.

It’s easy, at first, to be aghast that a zoo killed one of their animals because a child got into the enclosure.  Like a lot of people I was perplexed, at first, and not sure how outraged I should or shouldn’t be.  I mean you figure a zoo has one job, and that’s to care for the animals in the name of preservation and education.  But the facts are out there, including commentary by experts who know far more than the rest of us ever will on the subject, and when you bother to read the details, the picture changes a bit.  When Jungle Jack Hannah says he agrees “one-thousand percent” with the Cincinnati Zoo’s decision, I feel like that really ought to be the end of the discussion.

However, for the sake of education and clarity, let’s delve into some facts.  Harambe was a magnificent creature, a 450lb silverback of the species gorilla gorilla gorilla, or, commonly, a western lowland gorilla.  Silverbacks are alpha males, the leader of their troop, and they have the strength of approximately ten men.

You read that correctly: the strength of ten men.  Being the target of a pissed-off gorilla is literally like getting your ass kicked by the Incredible Hulk.  You don’t come back from that.  And though gorillas are considered the least intelligent of the great apes, they are still smart enough to learn some sign language, play games, and use computers in limited capacities.  They’re like three year old kids with superheroic strength.  If that doesn’t sound dangerous to you, you need to think a little bit harder about what kids are really like.

I read a post by a former zookeeper the other day who said that in zoos, they classify the animals based on how dangerous they are, and gorillas are in the top tier right along with tigers and lions.  If you aren’t sure how dangerous tigers are, I have two words for you: Roy Horn.  If you aren’t sure who Roy Horn is, I have one more word for you: Google.  It’s important, too, to remember the 2009 incident between poor Charla Nash and Travis the chimp.

Travis was a star of TV and commercials, and was, by 2009, a 200lb chimp living in a home with his owner, Sandra Herold, who having lost her husband and her only son, had treated Travis like her baby.  Travis was very smart and was a popular figure around the town where he and Sandra Herold lived.  But he was on Xanax for a medical condition he had, and that may have contributed to what he did to his and Sandra’s friend, Charla, tearing off her face, ears, and hands, and rendering her blind.  Charla was one of the first Americans to receive a face transplant surgery.  Chimps are nastier than gorillas, but it bears considering anyway, because if a little ol’ chimp can do that to a grown woman, you don’t really want to imagine what a big-ass gorilla could do to a toddler.

Zookeepers rarely have any actual contact with unsedated gorillas, instead remaining on the other side of barred partitions.  They also have protocols in place for what to do if a visitor gets into an enclosure, and in these instances the life of the person takes priority over the life of the animal if they are forced to choose.  By the time the decision was made to put Harambe down, zookeepers had already called the other gorillas out of the exhibit and into the holding area, but Harambe stayed in the exhibit with the kid.

What’s not clear is what Harambe’s intentions were.  If he’d meant that kid any harm, the kid could well have been dead already…even Jane Goodall says she thinks Harambe may have been acting protectively.  What IS clear is that the frantic reaction of the crowd to Harambe’s antics, was riling him up.  And if you’ve watched the video, he was dragging that kid around like a little girl does with a doll.  They had to make a decision, they had to do it quickly in order to ensure the safety of the child, and they chose not to gamble with the child’s life.  Unfortunately that meant shooting a stunning specimen of a critically endangered species.

Now, with that said, the parent(s)… I do believe bear some responsibility.  I hesitate to get into this too strongly because I am not a parent myself, and I feel as though critiquing someone’s parenting when I have no experience of my own in that arena, is as silly as critiquing an expert’s opinions on gorillas when I know nothing more than what I learned when I wrote a research paper on them twenty-three years ago.  With that said, I’ll lay out my position.

Even without any parenting experience, I know two things for sure:  First, that parenting is HARD, and second, that children don’t come with instruction manuals.  Knowing this, I have to believe that every parent screws something up at some point, and screwing up therefore cannot be the decider in what makes a good parent or a bad one.  Kids, after all, have no compunctions about doing what you tell them not to do.  So I’m not calling the woman a bad mother when I say she screwed up, but when your four year old child climbs into the gorilla enclosure at the zoo and you don’t notice until he’s being ragdolled by a humongous silverback, a parenting fail can fairly be said to have occurred.

I won’t lay the whole thing at her feet.  How many people were in the zoo that day?  It’s the Cincinnati Zoo on Memorial Day weekend, so I’m going to go out on a limb and say it was a hell of a lot of people.  So how do a crowd of adults, and presumably teenagers, and even other kids, not notice the munchkin climbing through the railing and snatch him back?  I realize it’s unpopular to grab somebody else’s kid, but it’s worse to let them fall twelve feet into a pit with a 450lb gorilla.  You gotta look out for people.  I’ll let the mom go off on me and call the cops for grabbing her kid off the railing before I’ll let him fall in there.  I mean which is the greater evil?

Witnesses also report having heard the kid say several times that he wanted to go in and play with the gorillas.  His mother told him he couldn’t, but then he did it anyway.  If you’re standing around overhearing this whole exchange, how do you not decide to be on the lookout for trouble?  If we’re blaming anybody we can spread it around like manure and not be out of line, but I think it’s pointless at this juncture, because blaming, signing petitions, and internet shaming won’t put an extra ounce of sense in the child’s head or bring the dead gorilla back to life.  Instead, you’ve got to make the most of the reality we’re in.

So what I see here is a lesson in responsibility for the kid.  I hope his parents use this to remind him that his actions have consequences, and in this case it nearly it cost him his lfie, and DID cost the gorilla his life, and while the child should not have to go around feeling like crap his whole life because of one stupid choice, he should definitely be given to understand that his actions had consequences and that the next time his mother tells him he can’t do something, she might have a damn good reason for saying so.

The zoo, the parents, the other patrons, the kid, the rest of the gorillas at the zoo… everybody gets to take a bite of this crap sandwich, there’s no need to force-feed them any extra.

In the meantime, I’m entirely certain that the Cincinnati Zoo will be reviewing the design of their facilities and looking to make some changes to prevent more of this happening.

Further, I move that “shooting the gorilla” should now be a colloquialism (as with such fine examples as “jumping the shark,” “nuking the fridge,” or “closing the Washington Monument”), meaning to destroy something of value, preemptively, rather than taking a chance on good faith.

As an example: “I really like that girl but I think she might have been looking around, so I decided to just shoot the gorilla and end the relationship.”