Rooms In My Head

    Sometimes I write in this blog just to clear my own mind about stuff going on in my life.  Lately, I've been copying and pasting a lot of stuff just because the author reflects my point of view and puts it a cleverer way than I could.  And then there are the Foxworld posts with their mini observations.  It seems rare anymore that I write just to let my readers know what's going on with me.  This is just such a post.

    I've been working at the hotel now for eight years.  Before this one, I worked at another hotel for four.  Both were on the overnight shift.  For personal reasons, I had committed to stay at my current job until the end of next summer.  By that time, I will have been nocturnal for thirteen years.  As much as I love my job and the place I work, I'm tired. I want to do something else.
    So, for the next eleven months, I'm going to be exploring my options.  There's some things I have to consider: my age and my health insurance being two of them, and what type of job.  I really like working with the public and meeting new people all the time.  I got offered two jobs just from giving the tour of the hotel.  One gentleman suggested that with my knowledge of OKC's architectural history, I should work for him as a water taxi driver in Bricktown.  Another, for the same reason, said I should become a public relations guy for the City of Tulsa.  Both offers just came along at the wrong time.  And now, with Gaby's job being more important than mine, moving to another city is not really an option.
    One of the things I'd like to do is to talk to people who are actually doing the things I'm interested in.  I have friends on Facebook that are just such people, and I'd really like to sit down with them and talk about what they do, and see if they can offer any advice.  (This would also be part of a larger plan to get to know some of my Facebook friends who are only acquaintances in real life.)

    If my world were different, I'd really like to spend my days concentrating on my art.  I used to do just that, but real life interfered, and I just don't know how to restart.  I've let things fall apart so much that I think I'd have to take a few months off just to do the prep work.
    That being said, I have started a new adventure in my artwork.  A friend of mine convinced me that the photos that I take, manipulate on the computer, and then set aside for the purpose of eventually maybe possibly in the future getting around to drawing or painting, are, in fact, works of art in themselves, and that I need to just find a good printer and mat, frame and sell what I've got.
    Framemasters, here in Edmond, has a giclée machine.

 

I'm so pleased and excited about the way these look I could just bust.  But I've got to make a big investment this year in framing and printing.  I intend to have at least a dozen of them to show at the Edmond show next spring.

As many of you know, Gaby and I went through immigration last year, and last summer he got his green card.  That gives him the ability to travel, and our intention is to go see his family in Chihuahua ASAP.  The biggest obstacle has been that he has to have a Mexican passport, and that has to be gotten through the Mexican Embassy.  There is a traveling consulate that one can go to when it comes to town, but they aren't very good at keeping their online schedule up to date.  Fortunately, the agency where Gaby works keep track of this stuff, and finally, a year after he got his green card, he's got an appointment this week to get his passport.  That means we'll be able to start making plans within a few weeks.
     Just one hitch:  Chihuahua is one of the cities noted for violence, killings, kidnappings.  And my sisters-in-law live in Ciudad Juarez, which is even worse.  I want to go, but I have to admit I'm more than a bit nervous.  I'm going to be relying on advice from my in-laws about safety on this trip.  But I really want to go.  There are photos that need to be taken.

We went to see a new doctor last week.  We really like him; he listens, and he really seems to know his stuff.  Also, he's not afraid to talk about money and how we can save some on healthcare.  We've both been given referrals to specialists, a sleep specialist for Gaby, and one that that can take movies of my innards.  I could talk more about the state of our health, but I haven't gotten my lab results back yet (because of my schedule, not because they aren't ready.) 
    Gaby was told he needs to lose 35 pounds.  (He's actually 70 pounds overweight, according to the insurance charts, but, you know, baby steps.)  I need to lose about 30 myself.  That will require a plan, and we haven't sat down to make one yet. But as I sit here typing, I'm feeling the achiness that comes with being too sedentary.

They say a man's mind is like a house with a lot of rooms.  These are the rooms in my mind where the lights are on.  I've got a three day weekend this week.  Maybe I'll get something done in one of these rooms.

The Guns of Foxworld

In Foxworld, some people blame the guns themselves whenever there is a shooting death.
 

In Foxworld, there are people who believe that guns are independent operators.

 

In Foxworld, there are politicians who actually want to ban guns.

The Study of History in Foxworld

In Foxworld, there are obvious historical parallels between

Adolf Hitler, 9-11, and the presidency of Barak Obama.

Reading List for August 21, 2015

5 Reasons The GOP Is In Worse Shape Now Than It Was In 2012 in which the GOP forgets why they lost the last election.
Trump thinks that being born in the U.S. shouldn’t make you a citizen. Changing that would be very hard.  in which the Constitutional problems with Trump's immigration plan are examined.
Carly Fiorina did a 4-minute riff on climate change. Everything she said was wrong. in which Ms Fiorina is praised by the right wing press for passing along bad information.
Carter, Reagan, and Machiavelli in which Paul Krugman comments on Rex Nutting's article about Jimmy Carter.

Donald Trump Is A PSA Against Conservative Politics

5 Reasons Donald Trump Is A Public Service Announcement Against Conservative Politics

...Here are five revelations about the GOP we should be grateful that he’s crystalizing for America to see.
1. It’s easy to act like a conservative on TV.
Want to be a conservative? Deny climate change. Promise to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something that almost exactly resembles Obamacare. Say terrible things about Obama and Hillary. Deny the reality that the economy, health care and the deficit are all in far better shape than they were in 2008.
But most importantly, pick a scapegoat—a non-white scapegoat—to scare white America into believing you understand its fears.
2. The GOP’s decades of strategic racism make an actual racist look like a truth teller.
Ronald Reagan began his 1980 campaign with a states’ rights speech attacking “welfare queens” in Nesoba county, which was famous for its white supremacism and the deaths of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. The Reagan Revolution was so effective at turning the middle class against the government policies that girded the creation of the middle class that Democrats even adopted the rhetoric of “strategic racism.”
Using vaguely racial appeals is less about race than it is about power. Conservatives are on the verge of seeing decades of the Southern Strategy pay off with a chance to appoint four Supreme Court Justices who will shape America for the next half-century. They need a real ideologue to win. Trump just wants power and status. He isn’t appealing to conservatives, he’s appealing to the voters conservatives have been tricking into voting against their own interests for decades.
House Republicans have voted for mass deportations several times in the last few years. Every Republican candidate starts his or her immigration reform rap with, “Secure the border first,” knowing that after decades of scaring them about invaders, Republican voters will never feel secure enough to back any real reform.
When Trump skips all that and calls immigrants “rapists” and imagines a conspiracy where Mexico is sending its criminals into our country — because if there’s one thing Mexico knows how to do, it’s controlling criminals — he seems like the only honest clown in the circus.
3. Campaign finance is a complete joke.
Trump is a living argument for campaign finance reform. First, he’s a shining example of the sort of guy who is able to buy an election — arrogant, oblivious and comically absorbed in his own agenda.
But more important, as a large donor, he literally makes a mockery of the logic behind the Citizens United decision.
Conservatives on the Supreme Court justified unlimited corporate donations to campaign groups by arguing that doing so would “not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Trump essentially says, “I give these fools money and they do what I say.” And none of the Republican candidates standing onstage with him dare to disagree.
4. America is not a business.Conservatives argue that rich people create jobs and America should be run like a business.
Trump inherited huge wealth from his dad and games the system to make himself much, much richer. The fact that the .01 percent are sucking up nearly all the gains of our economy is the greatest threat to our nation’s future. And when Trump stands there, we realize that what makes that possible isn’t his genius or the genius of the free market, it’s a political decision to aid the rich at all costs over the needs of the other 99.9 percent.
Recent Democratic presidents have kicked their Republican competitors’ butts on job creation because their policies treat workers as profit creators. When America is run for the sake of business, we get the crash of 2008 and Donald Trump — who was born on home plate and thinks he hit a home run — mocking those who leg out an infield hit as “losers.”
5. The “best Republican field in decades” is incredibly uninspiring.The GOP continually vaunts its huge field of candidates as the best in a generation. If that were true, why is Trump soaking them up like so much au jus?
Republicans may be inspired by governors whose specialty is creating wealth inequality and denying women health care — including one who shares DNA with the living personification of the failure of conservative policies. They may love first-term senators whose primary accomplishment is grandstanding. And they may be thrilled by candidates who have never won an election but are strategically aligned to attack President Obama and Hillary Clinton with a shield against charges of racism or sexism. But their party is truly swooning over a guy who learned how to be a conservative by watching Fox & Friends.

The right thinks it finally has Donald Trump on the run, and soon he’ll go the way of Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann.
But Trump has been a household name longer than the Clintons, is richer than the Romney and Bush families combined, and is crazier than Cain. He has nothing to lose and no TV show to go back to (which is a great reminder that the GOP frontrunner began his campaign by being fired by several corporations because they couldn’t stand by the racist rhetoric GOP voters loved).
What’s more likely is that Trump is on to performing his next public service, which is proving that saying horrible things about women doesn’t hurt you with conservative voters very much — if at all.

The Military Weapons of Foxworld

 

In Foxworld, President Obama is trusting Iran with nuclear weapons

and is also responsible for a 23 year old Department of Defense directive.

From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious

From Trump on Down, the Republicans Can’t Be Serious

Paul Krugman, August 7, 2015

This was, according to many commentators, going to be the election cycle Republicans got to show off their “deep bench.” The race for the nomination would include experienced governors like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, fresh thinkers like Rand Paul, and attractive new players like Marco Rubio. Instead, however, Donald Trump leads the field by a wide margin. What happened?

The answer, according to many of those who didn’t see it coming, is gullibility: People can’t tell the difference between someone who sounds as if he knows what he’s talking about and someone who is actually serious about the issues. And for sure there’s a lot of gullibility out there. But if you ask me, the pundits have been at least as gullible as the public, and still are.

 

For while it’s true that Mr. Trump is, fundamentally, an absurd figure, so are his rivals. If you pay attention to what any one of them is actually saying, as opposed to how he says it, you discover incoherence and extremism every bit as bad as anything Mr. Trump has to offer. And that’s not an accident: Talking nonsense is what you have to do to get anywhere in today’s Republican Party.

For example, Mr. Trump’s economic views, a sort of mishmash of standard conservative talking points and protectionism, are definitely confused. But is that any worse than Jeb Bush’s deep voodoo, his claim that he could double the underlying growth rate of the American economy? And Mr. Bush’s credibility isn’t helped by his evidence for that claim: the relatively rapid growth Florida experienced during the immense housing bubble that coincided with his time as governor.

Mr. Trump, famously, is a “birther” — someone who has questioned whether President Obama was born in the United States. But is that any worse than Scott Walker’s declaration that he isn’t sure whether the president is a Christian?

Mr. Trump’s declared intention to deport all illegal immigrants is definitely extreme, and would require deep violations of civil liberties. But are there any defenders of civil liberties in the modern G.O.P.? Notice how eagerly Rand Paul, self-described libertarian, has joined in the witch hunt against Planned Parenthood.

And while Mr. Trump is definitely appealing to know-nothingism, Marco Rubio, climate change denier, has made “I’m not a scientist” his signature line. (Memo to Mr. Rubio: Presidents don’t have to be experts on everything, but they do need to listen to experts, and decide which ones to believe.)

The point is that while media puff pieces have portrayed Mr. Trump’s rivals as serious men — Jeb the moderate, Rand the original thinker, Marco the face of a new generation — their supposed seriousness is all surface. Judge them by positions as opposed to image, and what you have is a lineup of cranks. And as I said, this is no accident.

 

It has long been obvious that the conventions of political reporting and political commentary make it almost impossible to say the obvious — namely, that one of our two major parties has gone off the deep end. Or as the political analysts Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein put it in their book “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” the G.O.P. has become an “insurgent outlier … unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science.” It’s a party that has no room for rational positions on many major issues.

 

Or to put it another way, modern Republican politicians can’t be serious — not if they want to win primaries and have any future within the party. Crank economics, crank science, crank foreign policy are all necessary parts of a candidate’s resume.

Until now, however, leading Republicans have generally tried to preserve a facade of respectability, helping the news media to maintain the pretense that it was dealing with a normal political party. What distinguishes Mr. Trump is not so much his positions as it is his lack of interest in maintaining appearances. And it turns out that the party’s base, which demands extremist positions, also prefers those positions delivered straight. Why is anyone surprised?

Remember how Mr. Trump was supposed to implode after his attack on John McCain? Mr. McCain epitomizes the strategy of sounding moderate while taking extreme positions, and is much loved by the press corps, which puts him on TV all the time. But Republican voters, it turns out, couldn’t care less about him.

Can Mr. Trump actually win the nomination? I have no idea. But even if he is eventually pushed aside, pay no attention to all the analyses you will read declaring a return to normal politics. That’s not going to happen; normal politics left the G.O.P. a long time ago. At most, we’ll see a return to normal hypocrisy, the kind that cloaks radical policies and contempt for evidence in conventional-sounding rhetoric. And that won’t be an improvement.