Entry 443: Lice, Lice Baby

Some good things, some bad things going on here at the G & G household.  First the good news, which is actually irrelevant news for everybody but me.  (Good thing this is my blog!)  I am now a "yellow belt" in Krav Maga.  I use quotes because you don't actually get a physical belt; it's just a title to signify that you passed the first test and are now a level-two student.



The test is no joke.  I never thought I was in fear of failing (they won't let you test until you can pass), but I still had to do it, and doing it was fucking hard.  It was perhaps the most physically taxing thing I've ever done in my life -- certainly so since high school wrestling.  It started at 1:00 pm and didn't end until about 5:30 pm.  We got fewer than ten minutes worth of break total throughout the entire four and a half hours.  We went the last hour and a half or so without any break at all.  I'm not exaggerating.  It was basically Krav Maga drills nonstop.  You had a chance to catch your breath a bit when you were holding the pad for your partner, but you still had to expend energy absorbing their strikes, especially if your partner was six foot three, 250 pounds, as mine was.

[One of the greatest parodies of all-time]

Before the test the instructors gave us the spiel about “pushing through to the next level” and “you do this because it’s hard, not because it’s easy” and “if you think it's uncomfortable in here, imagine what it would be like on the street.”  I always find this kind of thing super hokey when I’m just standing there listening to it, but when I’m thirsty and exhausted and some big dude has his hands around my neck, I buy in 100%.  As a normal, boring, office-working family man, I don’t have the chance anymore to compete physically in a way I did as a kid.  It’s something I miss and something I find satisfying.  It’s the same reason why people run marathons.  But for me something like Krav Maga is better than running, because with running I can (and do) always slow down.  If you have to defend somebody throwing punches at your head, you can’t slow down.  Well, you can, but you will likely take a fist to the face if you do.  (We’re told to use an “egg shell” hand, not a closed fist, so it’s not going to knock you out if you screw up the defense.  But it still won’t feel good, and sometimes you do get hit hard inadvertently.  In a group drill I caught this one woman with a solid elbow to the head.  Luckily, it was the top of her head, and she’s tough, so she barely flinched.)  A bunch of advanced students and instructors came to watch the end of the test, and they were all cheering for us when we finished, and I gotta say, it felt good.

What didn’t feel good was reading a text from S waiting for me when I finished:

Fantastic.  I was worried about this.  It was going around the boys’ school, and the other night when I checked in on Lil’ S2, he was scratching his head furiously in his sleep.  S confirmed it.  While I was testing, she went through his head with a fine-tooth comb (literally) and found some bugs.  She then called a service called The Lice Doctors, recommended by a friend, and they sent somebody over, who confirmed that everybody had it and began treatment.  Unbeknownst to S at the time The Lice Doctors (not actual doctors) are a “natural” service, so instead of using a “chemical” shampoo they use olive oil.  In theory, I don’t have a problem with this – it seems kinda Gwenyth Paltrow-y to me, but as best I can tell olive oil is a legitimately effective treatment for head lice.  In practice, however, it’s quite awful, as olive oil is ridiculously messy, and it will leave permanent stains on clothing and furniture.  On the plus side, everybody’s head smells like an appetizer at an Italian restaurant.

The idea is that you douse your head in olive oil for eight hours, four days in a row (with a couple of spaced-out follow-ups), and this will suffocate the lice and nits.  The problem with this is that the only eight-hour stretch you can do this is in the middle of night, so we have to put the kids to bed with olive oil in their hair.  (Try getting a hyperactive three-year old into bed with a head full of oil without dripping or brushing up against of something.)  Then in the morning we (I, really, S is at work already) have to get them showered, and wash and dry all the sheets on the bed.  It's hard enough to get them out the door on time without any added tasks.

And it's even more annoying: After talking with a friend skeptical olive oil would actually work, S went out and bought lice-treatment shampoo, and she also applied that to the kids’ hair, so we are now double-bagging treatment, I guess.  I’m not totally sure why we are doing this.  I suggested we stop the olive oil treatment, since it’s such a hassle, but S said she wanted to keep doing it.  When I asked her why, she got upset and said I don’t listen to her and that she had already explained everything.  So, I still don’t know why exactly.  The reason might be that she spent money on the Lice Doctors and doesn’t want to “waste” it.  But it wouldn’t be wasted because the specialist already spent hours picking through everybody’s hair to remove all the lice and nits, and even if she didn’t: sunk cost fallacy.

This is one area in which S and I don’t mesh well.  Often when I question why she did anything the way she did it, she takes it personally and gets upset with me either because I had an accusatory tone (inadvertently, if so) or because I’m not listening to her, even though I am.  I might not be understanding her logic, but I’m listening.  And then she does this thing, where she gets snarky and starts sarcastically overexplaining everything like I’m an alien who has no concept of life on planet Earth.  It’s super irritating.  I think the bottom line is that she just really doesn’t like being questioned or having to explain herself.  I mean, nobody does, but I think she’s especially sensitive to it, and unfortunately explaining yourself is a big part of a marriage -- especially when you are married to somebody as annoyingly pedantic as me.  I’m trying to get better about letting things go.  I'm not perfect, but unless there are major stakes on the line, I try not to push back too sharply – even if it means putting olive oil in your kids’ hair for a few nights.

As for my head, I don’t think I have (or had) lice, but I’m doing the shampoo treatment anyway.  I don’t have an itchy head – or at least I didn’t until S sent the text.  Immediately after that every little tingle on my scalp was freaking me out.  I got my head shaved nearly down to scalp, I’m already nearly bald on top, and most importantly S didn't find anything when she examined my head, so I think I'm good.

You know what I just thought of – the phrase “picking nits” is quite misleading.  It means finding fault for small things, but picking nits is actually very important if you have lice.  It should be a phrase for being thorough and giving the proper attention to detail.  If you don’t pick all those nits, things are just going to get worse.

On that note, until next time…

Entry 442: Purple Rain, Purple Rain

It wasn’t quite a wave -- it was more like a spate of droplets – and it wasn’t totally blue – there was definitely some red mixed in as well.  So, what did Tuesday bring?  Purple rain!  Purple rain!

Actually, it was more like an indigo storm – a heavily blue purple storm – but Prince doesn’t have a song called “Indigo Storm,” and I couldn’t come up with a decent Indigo Girls pun.  The point is, the midterm elections were very-good-not-quite-great for non-Trumpists and disappointing-not-disastrous for Trumpists.  I didn't have a panic attack laying in bed at night, which is a departure from two years ago.  I was definitely sweating it out early in the night though.  I was watching the FiveThirtyEight real-time House odds, and it wasn’t calibrated correctly early in the night, so it was too aggressively changing directions.  When things opened kinda sluggish for the Dems in the Southeast, the dial moved from 90% in their favor to 55% to 30% (!) in about a half-hour.  My first reaction was “oh no… it’s happening again!”  But I wasn’t totally freaking out because I could see the Dems hadn’t suffered a big upset in a House race or anything like that, so I suspected maybe something was up.  Then Nate Silver posted that indeed something was up, and they were changing the settings, and then the odds immediately went up to 55% Dems and trended up the rest of the night from there.  In fact, they probably overcorrected and made it not aggressive enough because it was only at like 70% Dems when the Upshot (the New York Times' forecasting team) had it at more than 95% Dems.  Whatever... it is now at 100%, even though there are still some races pending.

Trump, of course, claimed victory because the Reps gained some seats in the Senate.  But he already had control of the Senate and this election map was incredibly tilted in their favor.  The Dems had to win or hold serve in a bunch of red states, and that's just too tall an order in today's political climate.  (A big take away from the night is that we are hardening even more into a red state/blue state country.  With some exceptions -- Joe Manchin and Jon Tester won Senate seats in states Trump won and Kyrsten Sinema might also.  Bill Nelson probably won't.)  The biggest upset Trump can celebrate is the governor's race in Florida (probably).  The Democrat Andrew Gillum was up pretty big in the polls and lost to a Trump acolyte – possibly because Trump campaigned for him.

The flip side of this, however, is that a ton of winning Dem House candidates campaigned expressly against Trump.  Living in DC I see a lot of Virginia political ads, and Jennifer Wexton was calling her opponent Barbara Comstock “Barbara Trumpstock.”  No points for creativity, but it worked.  And those who didn’t run hard against Trump explicitly, ran against him implicitly, because he dominates the ether.  In a lot of suburban swing districts I think Trump very much worked against the Republican candidates.  He turns people off, and because he makes everything about him, the Dems don’t have to waste their resources attacking him, and so they can focus on other things.  By many accounts, it was healthcare, not rabid anti-Trumpism, that swung things back in the Dems favor.

And this I think delineates the best strategy going forward to the 2020 presidential election.  Don’t run against Trump explicitly.  Run on other issues – healthcare, inequality, etc.  Call him out on his lies and bigotry, hold him accountable for his shady dealings, don't be pushovers, but don’t get bogged down in a morass of Trump hate.  It only serves to entrench people and make the Dems look “just as bad.”  Of the people I know who didn’t vote for Hillary that was their main reason why.  They didn’t really like Trump, but they saw the election as a partisan squabble between two unlikeable people – so what difference did it make?  That’s a very wrong way to see it, in my opinion (and objectively), but that’s how they saw it.  And I think that’s how a lot of people saw it.  If I were advising the Dems for 2020, I would advise them to give voters as little reasonable as possible to think the only message they have is “fuck Trump,” even though that’s what we all wish they could run on.  Again, the reason this could work is because Trump turns enough people off on his own.  "Fuck trump" is already baked into the cake.

This is also why I agree with people who think it would be a mistake for the newly elected Dem majority in the House to go gung-ho, guns-a-blazin' against Trump.  I don’t think they should try to impeach him (for now, at least).  The trick, I think, is to investigate behind the scenes, hold him accountable, but try to expose him without making it look like something the public will just chalk up to a partisan fight.  It’s not easy, and it might not work, but I think it’s the best bet.  I heard a commentator on a podcast say something to the effect of “Liberals need to stop dreaming about the magic bullet that will defeat Trump – impeachment, the Mueller investigation, etc.  The way to defeat Trump is the way to defeat any other politician.  Vote him out.”  I think that’s right.  But also, I could be wrong about all of this.  I’m open to the possibility that nobody really knows anything about political strategy and that the people who are “good” at it are just lucky, because the sample size is so small.  I mean, if you had a million people guess the outcomes of 100 coin tosses, some of them are going to do very well, and if we didn’t know any better we would think these people are good at predicting coin tosses and value their opinions on the matter.  Maybe that’s what’s going on with politics.

Anyway... if you were curious about the biggest upset of the election, meet Democrat Kendra Horn in Oklahoma's 5th district.  FiveThirtyEight only gave her a 7% chance of winning.  I went to her home page and read about her policies.  She's touts fairly standard Democratic positions -- education, health care, gun control (somewhat surprising for Oklahoma) -- and you know who she doesn't mention?  Trump.  And she won.  See, it worked this one time in an election of 250,000 Oklahomans, therefore it will always work on the national level.  That's just good extrapolation.

Until next time...

Entry 441: All Hallows' Eve

Halloween 2018 came and went.  It was fun.  My kids, three and six, are at the right age for it.  In fact, I'd say my oldest is at the beginning of his Halloween prime.  From six to ten, Halloween is an absolutely magical holiday.  Before that you're a bit too young to fully appreciate it, and after that, although you still have a few good years left, you already start to get the sense the end is near, and you start getting self-conscious about dressing up or doing anything that looks like it took "effort."  Some older kids costumes are pretty weak.  Like you'll see somebody wearing a Nationals cap and a batting glove and that's it: Hey, I'm Bryce Harper, give me some candy.  Then at age thirteen or fourteen trick-or-treating isn't cool anymore.

After that it takes some years for Halloween to be fun again.  You have to get to the point where you can go out to Halloween parties with friends and enjoy a night of alcohol-fueled silliness and debauchery.  (Don Savage calls Halloween a "Straight Pride Parade," which is pretty funny and apt.)  And then when you have kids, trick-or-treating is fun again.  But from, like, 14 through 18 Halloween isn't such a great holiday.  The main thing to do at that age is to go out and cause trouble, which usually doesn't end well.  I might have done a bit of that in my day, but I don't remember causing much havoc.  I think once I smashed a jack-o-lantern on the porch of a friend's asshole neighbor, but that's all I can recall (and he totally deserved it).  Usually, I wanted to be trouble adjacent.  I wanted to be in on the action, without being in on the action -- a (mostly) innocent bystander.  What this typically meant in practice is that I would go out with a few friends, walk around the neighborhood looking for people we know and something to do, get bored and tired, and then go back to one of our houses and play video games.

I often wonder how different things would have been if I grew up in the age of cell phones and social media.  I remember looking for people being a central part of my teenage social life.  Like you'd just go to Jack In the Box or the bowling alley or something and hope to see people you know.  And if you made plans with somebody and there was a missed connection, that might be it -- you just didn't see them for the night.  It would be weird to be a kid now and always know where your friends are at all times -- to never have those nights where you just stayed home, because you couldn't get a hold of anybody and didn't know where they were.  Or those nights when you were torn between waiting at home for a friend to call you back or going out and doing something else without them.  You'd tell your parents: If JY calls, tell him to come to the $1 movie theater at 8:00.

An ironic thing, thinking back on those years, is that the mundane memories are actually the ones I cherish the most.  I always wanted to have these "epic" nights like something out of Dazed and Confused, but it never happened (because life isn't a teen movie), but even those rare nights where something "crazy" did happen don't mean that much to me now.  The memories I most value are the ones where it was just me and a few friends doing ordinary things -- playing video games, playing cards, goofing off, doing nothing.  I took those times for granted, and it's something I miss so much now that I'm an adult and a family man and I don't have the time or space in my life to do those things.

Anyway...

Back to this Halloween, my youngest son dressed up like Gekko from PJ Masks and my oldest son went as a ninja.  Our neighborhood really gets poppin' on Halloween, and a lot of it is row houses, packed tightly together, so the kids don't have to go far to get a lot of candy, so they both made out like bandits.  In fact, Lil' S2 just tapped out after about a half-hour.  He said, "My bucket's full," even though it was only three-quarters-full, and stopped going up to houses.  Some of the other kids we were with were tired too, so we headed back, even though Lil' S1 would have stayed out all night if we let him.

As soon as we got home, we clandestinely took half their candy out of their buckets and hid it.  They got way too much.  I don't know what we will do with it.  Probably disperse some it throughout the next year; probably throw some it away; probably eat some it ourselves.  I've lost my taste for a lot of Halloween candy.  I don't like that pure sugar taste anymore.  I still like some of the chocolate bars, but the other stuff -- Smarties, Starburst, Nerds, Pixy Stix, Dum-Dums, Jolly Rancher, etc. -- I don't care for at all.

Here's my Halloween Candy Power Rankings:

5.  Tootsie Rolls (classic): I like the texture more than the taste.  I never want a tootsie roll, but if I'm really jonesing for something sweet, I will eat one.  It's the methadone of Halloween candy.

4.  Mini Kit Kat: Would be higher on my list if the dark chocolate version was more prevalent.  I love the wafery snap when you bite into it, but I'm not huge on the milk chocolate coating (and I downright dislike the white chocolate variety).

3.  Mini Snickers: This used to be number one on my list, but lately I've found they're just a tad too sweet.  I love the salty crunch of the peanut, but they're slightly cloying overall.

2.  Mini Twix: Put it in the refrigerator about a half hour before you want to eat it.  The chocolate is firm, the caramel is chewy, and the cookie is still crisp.  Delicious.  One of my favorites as a kid that still holds up.

1.  Hershey's Nuggets, Dark Chocolate with Almond: Simple, classic, delicious.  Unfortunately, I rarely see these in my kids' buckets.  Most kids prefer milk chocolate and chocolate without nuts, I think.  Dark chocolate is sort of like the IPA of the candy world.  It's for "dignified" adults of "refined" tastes -- for people who care about things like cocoa percentage.  I don't know about all that.  All I know is that when I put dark chocolate on my tongue, it's heavenly.

Until next time...

Oh, also, vote on Tuesday!

Entry 440: Life Update

Just a quick, or semi-quick, maybe, life update for all my fans out there.

Things have been going pretty well for me -- they're mostly normal.  In the lead-up to the midterms, I've been simultaneously trying to remain pissed off and stress-free.  These emotions aren't as contradictory as one might think.  I heard Rebecca Traister, one of my favorite voices of feminism, on a podcast recently promoting her new book Good and Mad, and she talked about the virtues of anger, and how being mad doesn't preclude you from being healthy and sane.  In fact, anger is often the appropriate human emotion for a situation, and actually letting yourself feel it, embracing it even, is better than bottling it up and pretending it doesn't exist, or feeling guilty about feeling it.  The key, I think, is focusing it in the right direction.

Right now I'm focusing my anger by donating to various blue candidates and causes.  I will vote too, which is the most important thing, of course, but I live in DC, so it doesn't matter much on a national level.  (Although DC politics is interesting and important in it's own right.)  Now, if DC could obtain statehood that would be a different story, but I don't see that happening in the immediate future.  It is something, however, that I think Democrats should fight for.  Why not?  We are US citizens.  Why don't we have the same representation as everybody else?  Same for Puerto Rico.

The answer, of course, is that Republicans are in power, and they don't want it, because they are very unpopular among the people who live in these places.  And the key mission of Republicans -- their primary unifying feature -- is staying in power even if it means employing anti-democratic methods.  The Republicans are the party of entrenched power, and they use that entrenched power, mostly to further entrench their power, even if it means denying the will of the people -- and that's exactly what it means right now.  One thing that annoys me a bit is when liberals blame Democrats for being weak and/or not being able to win elections.  There is some truth to it, of course, but the far bigger issue is that Democrats, being the party that represents traditionally marginalized groups (racial minorities, women, LBGT folks, youths, etc.), are constantly fighting an uphill battle against the centuries-long vice grip on power of older white males who currently comprise most of the GOP.  You can see this in the voting results -- Democrats almost always win more total votes than Republicans.  They frequently win the "popular vote" -- often by a significant margin -- and still lose.  Clinton received millions more votes than Trump; Dems in Congress received millions more than their Republican counterparts; and yet Reps control all three branches of government.  It's not fair; it's not democratic (little d).  And it's because Republicans don't believe in fairness or democracy.  They believe in gerrymandering, voter suppression, fearmongering, and straight-up lying.  This isn't some unhinged, leftist rant; this is an accurate assessment of the current political situation that I could back-up with a bevvy of facts and examples.

What to do about it?  Donate, vote, speak up, get involved, don't give up, don't get discouraged -- what else can you do?  Overwhelm them with democracy at every level.  Be angry.  But also stay sane and live your best life.  Don't let the bastards get you down.  That's my advice.

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On the topic of staying sane, my Krav Maga classes have become and important part of my life maintenance.  There's something so satisfying about exhausting yourself physically, and doing it in a group is way better than doing it alone.  I fear my gym is struggling financially, though.  They recently raised rates -- it's not cheap: $50/week -- and I've noticed a down-tick in class attendance.  That's expected -- it's basic microeconomics -- but I don't know if they're making up for it with the higher rates.  I got a text from them the other day that said, "Hey!  This is E from Krav Maga :)  Just checkin' in!  How's training been going??" and I'm not sure why they would send that unless it's some sort of virtually glad-handing.  I also didn't really know how to respond.  Is this a pro forma group thing they sent out to everybody?  Is E actually expecting me to continue a personal dialogue?  If I ignore it, and then I see her at the gym, will it be awkward?  Will she say something about it?  I wrote back, "Pretty good, I think.  Thanks!"  And then she wrote, "Awesome!  We love having you here!"  So, it obviously is a membership outreach thing.  Also, perhaps she's trying to trawl for people who might be considering leaving.  I think reliable cash flow is an issue, which is why they went to a weekly payment system instead of their old monthly system.  Anyway, you probably don't care about any of this, so I will move on.

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S and I had a date night on Friday, and we saw First Man at this cool, trendy boutique theater in this cool, trendy part of town.  It's good to have the occasionally reminder as to why it's nice to live in the city.  The movie itself was decent -- not fantastic, but worth watching.  The main problem with this movie is that it couldn't match the magnitude of the actual event.  The moon landing might be the coolest thing humankind has ever done.  This The Onion article captures it perfectly.  Also, the film is a biopic of Neil Armstrong, and Armstrong was a very quiet, calculating man.  Those are fine qualities for leading a stressful space mission, but they don't necessarily translate into great cinema.  The entire time I was in the theater, I just felt like I'd rather be watching real footage or reading about the actually moon missions rather than watching Ryan Gosling look pensive on the big screen.  (Nothing against Gosling, who is good in the movie.)  Also, as S pointed out, there was too much screen time from inside a capsule with the camera shaking repeatedly.

One thing I appreciate about it is that it was very accurate -- at least with respect to the verifiable things.  Obviously, not every conversation Armstrong had with his wife is captured verbatim, but the facts about the mission are, as best I can tell, spot on.  (And people who knew Armstrong said in interviews that the film depicts him very accurately.)  Every time I thought something was exaggerated for dramatic effect, I looked it up afterwards and found out it wasn't.  It didn't need to be, because the moon landing was a precarious and dramatic mission from the get-go.  There was no guarantee that they were actually going to touchdown on the moon successfully.  I think Buzz Aldrin said he gave it 50/50 odds before the mission.  Having to abort and return to Earth without landing was a definite possibility.  Although, if that happened, they probably would have just gone back a few months later and then a few months later if that didn't work, until they got it right, and we would have all forgotten the failed attempts, once they actually landed.  So, maybe the stakes weren't that high as far as aborting is concerned.  But also there was the very real chance of them exploding or getting stranded in space.  The odds of one of those things happening were much higher than I think people realize.

One weird thing about moon exploration is how little we've done of it.  The Apollo missions represent the entirety of physical human contact with the moon, and those ended in 1972.  We haven't been in over 45 years, and only 12 people have walked on the moon total.  I think we need to go back as a warm-up and then go to Mars.  I know it's expensive, but, it's worth it, in my opinion.  Doing crazy, mind-boggling shit is a worthy human endeavor.  I do concede however, that there is a big drawback to space exploration: There's nothing interesting close to us.  Why aren't there Martians and moon creatures?  If our universe was made by a divine creator, he or she actually did a very ho-hum job.

On that note, until next time...

Oh, one last thing, a crossword puzzle acquaintance of mine has won on Jeopardy! the past three nights (and he did something on the show, which I don't get but ascertain is funny).  He's the fourth person I know from crossword puzzles who has been a champion on the show -- that's nuts.  Watch tonight if you're a fan of trivia.  He's the reigning champion with the Afro.

Entry 439: On Several Topics

So, as I figured along, Bart O'Kavanaugh was seated on the Supreme Court.  I never thought his status was in much jeopardy.  I knew Flake and at least one of Collins or Murkowski would vote "yes," and then that would be that.  I wouldn't read much into Murkowski voting "no" and Manchin voting "yes."  Those were strictly political plays after the outcome was already decided.  Murkowski, a Republican, wants to emphasize her bona fides as an independent (she won via write-in, after all), and Manchin, a Democrat, can't get on the wrong side of too many conservatives, since he's up for reelection in West Virginia, one of the Trumpiest states of them all.  I'm fine with Manchin's vote, if it helps his reelection.  I'd rather have a Democrat in that seat to cast a possible deciding vote on something that actually matters in the future, than have Manchin make a symbolically gesture against O'Kavanaugh.  As for the composition of the court itself, it's now 5-4 conservative, with two men credibly accused of sexual harassment.  That sucks -- there's no other way to put it.  Be mad, donate, vote.

***

I recently found out two old friends of mine found themselves on the wrong side of the law.  The first is an environmental activist who helped turn off an oil pipeline in Minnesota.  In a surprising move, the court dismissed a criminal case against him and his partners.  Ultimately, I think this is a good thing -- nobody wants their friend to face prison time (he has a wife and three kids) -- but it's bittersweet because it stops a line of communication with the public about climate change.  The defense team had a slate of expert witnesses to testify about our heating planet, and it sounds like the defendants also planned to take the stand to give their own testimony and motivations.  This would have garnered at least a little bit of media attention, and now that opportunity is gone.

This is another big reason a conservative court is going to be damaging to the country (and humans writ large).  They are going to side with business interests in cases of environmental regulation.  Republicans are literally the only major political party in the world that doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change, and, at the moment, they are the party with the most say in what we do about it.  So, what we do about it is nothing.  Actually, it's worse than nothing, we make it worse.

The weird thing about this, of course, is that Republican need an environment that's suitable for future generations just as much as Democrats do.  But one feature of all Republicans, perhaps the defining feature, is that you believe what the party wants you to believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.  Also, there's the fact that conservatives have so demonized liberals that they would rather destroy human life as we know it than take their side on a position.  One modicum of solace I do take is that when climate change gets so bad everybody is forced to reckon with it -- and I do think that day will happen -- we are going to know exactly who was at fault.  This isn't a case of "[shrug emoji], we didn't know any better."  We know better.  We've known better for a long time.  It's just a sliver of people with outsize power, who are in willful denial and/or don't care.  We will be able to call them out by name: The Koch Brothers, Donald Trump, James Imhoff, Scott Pruitt, and every current Republican in Congress right now, without a single exception.  They might all be gone when shit really goes down, but let's not forget them.  They will be the ones most responsible for whatever future we are currently damning ourselves to.

***
My other friend is currently in prison.  I went to high school with this kid, we were pretty good friends, not BFFs, but we'd hang out quite a bit.  He was a bit-part member of my little crew.  We played lacrosse together on the school team.  We'd shoot pool, play pick-up basketball in his backyard, sneak beers together, stuff like that.  We even went camping together once.  I remember he filled up a Doritos bag with water and threw it over a bathroom stall while my other friend was taking a dump, and we all thought it was the funniest thing ever.  He also was scared of every sound in the night and every animal.  We saw a raccoon, and he just about shit himself.  He literally wanted me to hold his hand to walk 100 yards to the bathroom in the dark.  We were 17-years-old, I think.  (I told him no.)

Anyway, he went to college at UW with some other friends of mine, but everybody lost touch with him after his freshman year.  A while down the road, after graduation, another one of my friends caught up with him, and he was suddenly a millionaire businessman.  He dropped out of college to work for software company (it was the late '90s, when the dotcom bubble was at its largest, and people were getting hired with little experience), and then he started his own company shortly thereafter, and it blew up.  He had a mansion on Lake Washington and a bunch of sports cars and boats and stuff.

Admittedly, I was a bit surprised when I heard this, as he wasn't any sort of computer whiz or business genius or anything like that.  But he was a reasonably smart guy and a hard worker, so, whatever, he hit the jackpot, good on him... or not.  A few years ago he pled guilty in a $100 million piracy case.  He was part of a scheme to sell ill-gotten and pirated authorization codes of Mircosoft software.  This absolutely floored me when I first heard about it.  I couldn't stop thinking about it, and even now it seems surreal.  Unfortunately, I don't know anything other than what I can find online, so I don't know the details or his motivation or even what his sentence is.  I don't know if his business was crooked from the get-go or if he got into it later.  I suspect the latter.  My guess -- based on nothing but high school memories and gut feel -- is that he started his business at the right time and made a bunch of money, but then the bubble burst.  Things went south, and he wasn't ready for it.  He had an expensive lifestyle he felt compelled to maintain, even if it meant doing illegal things.  Another factor might be shame.  He's Korean-American, and growing-up his dad was a stereotypical, hard-ass, super-demanding Asian parent.  Maybe his business was failing, and he couldn't deal with the shame of it.  I don't know.  Other than an odd "what's up" on Facebook, I haven't talked to the guy in 20 years.  I do know he has at least one kid, though, so it's a sad situation, even if he did bring it on himself.

 ***
S took the kids to her in-laws in South Carolina for a few weeks, so I'm by myself for a few days.  I'm going to fly there on Saturday to join them, and then we will all drive back next week.  The kids go to a year-round school, so they get a couple of random breaks throughout the year and this is one of them.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't enjoying it.  It's just nice that simple things are actually simple again.  I wake up in the morning and just go to work.  I make one breakfast instead of three.  I don't have to fight with anybody to get them to use the bathroom or to put their clothes on.  That's how I've been taking advantage of it -- doing normal things normally.  I also took back-to-back classes at my gym on both Monday and yesterday.  Getting crazy with the exercise.  It feels good, but I'm super sore now.  (I'm not 25 anymore; hell, I'm not even 35 anymore.)  I love taking classes there, though.  It's so much better than exercising alone.  I'm so much more motivated to actually go to the gym and to push myself once I'm there.  I see the same faces every time I go, so I feel like part of a team, and there's a weird accountability, like if I don't go that guy with the braids and that girl with the cut-off sleeves are going to look down on me.  Even though I know in reality the guy with the braids and that girl with the cut-off sleeves don't actually think about me, in my head they are judging me for every class I miss, and it's strangely motivating.  Also, I'm still doing Krav Maga in addition to the fitness classes, so I'm learning self-defense and getting in shape.  The only downside is it's pricey: $50 per week.  But so far it's worth it, and I rarely spend money on myself, anyway. 

***
Speaking of sport, I don't think my children -- or at least my oldest child -- is going to take much of an interested in organized sports.  He's still young, but early returns aren't promising.  He goes to soccer on Saturday, and he's kinda into it for the first 20 minutes or so, and then he gets bored and goofs off.  This week the usual "coaches" were gone, so I stepped in with a couple of other parents, and during the scrimmage, I was occupied on another field, but I glanced over and saw him lying down on top of the goal -- like he climbed up the back of the net and just sprawled across the top, while the game was in progress.  Eventually, another parent chased him off, but he still didn't want to go in the game.  He just sat on the sidelines the entire time.

In his defense, it goes way too long.  It starts at 10:30 am, and they are supposed to practice for an hour, and then play a 36 minute game.  With breaks it ends up being over two hours.  It's ridiculous.  They're six!  It's a struggle to get them to stay focused for five minutes, let alone over an hour and a half.  I don't understand what the organizers are thinking.  It should be 20 minutes of practice, a 10-minute break, and then a 30-minute game.  Door-to-door it should be, like, an hour and half out of your day.  That's how I would do it if I was in charge of everything, and if I was in charge of everything the world would be a much better place.

And on that humble note... until next time. 

Entry 438: The Less Than Compelling Testimony of Bart O'Kavanaugh

I didn't listen to yesterday's testimony by Dr. Ford and Judge Kavanaugh live, but one of the few advantages of today's perpetual stream of news is that it's very easy to stay up-to-date on things without following them exactly as they happen.  I've listened to the highlights of it, listened to analysis on the radio and podcast about it, and read around ten articles on it.

My conclusion: Dr. Ford is telling the truth.  She was assaulted by Kavanaugh when they were both teenagers.  He doesn't remember it because he was very drunk when it happened and also, possibly, because, at the time, he perceive his actions as memorable -- they didn't amount to anything more than fooling around or "boys being boys" -- certainly in his mind they did not constitute sexual assault.  I think he thinks he's telling the truth in his adamant denials.

Where Kavanaugh's defense utterly falls apart, however, is around the parameter.  He is either lying or psychotically in denial about his drinking habits, the company he kept, and his attitudes toward sex and women as a teenager and a young adult.  He also mounted a contradictory defense by claiming that: a) Dr. Ford is credible; b) this is all a leftist conspiracy to smear his name.  If a) is true, then investigations and hearings are warranted, and there is no basis for b).  Basically, what Kavanaugh is saying is -- I think allegations of sexual assault should be taken seriously, unless they are against me.

I also think it is very telling that he evaded all questions concerning an FBI investigation.  If he wants so badly for his name to be cleared, then ask for an investigation to clear it!  It's obvious that he doesn't want one, and it's obvious why.  It's not because the FBI will find proof of the assault or even of the party at which it allegedly happened.  It was over 35 years ago; all physical evidence is likely to have been erased by time; and it's very likely nobody but Ford remembers it.  (Why would they?)  The reason Kavanaugh doesn't want an FBI investigation is because he's painted himself into a corner by significantly playing down his past boorishness.  An honest investigation will not definitively expose him as an assaulter, but it will definitively expose him as being less that truthful, and it will destroy this pristine image -- all-American good guy, hard worker, occasionally beer drinker, sure, but all in good fun -- he's tried to cultivate of himself as a young man.

But anybody who lived through high school can see through his dishonesty immediately.  He's is not being truthful about his yearbook.  His references to the "Renate Alumni" do not have to do with an innocent kiss.  They are clearly a reference to a girl he and his group of friends used to brag/joke about doing sexual things with.  This is the type of thing dumb-ass high school boys (i.e., high school boys) would write code messages about in a yearbook -- not some little smooch.  And Kavanaugh's insistence that "boof" means fart and "devil's triangle" is a drinking game are even more absurd.  These are (or at least were) well-known terms for anal sex and two-guy-one-girl sex, respectively.  Again, this is the type of thing high school boys joke about.  No high school boy would use a term meaning anal sex in a wink-wink message in a yearbook earnestly thinking it was about flatulence.  That's one of the least believable things I've ever heard.  It's so unbelievable that even the Republicans I know who support Kavanaugh would admit that it's not true.

Then we get to his drinking.  I think the term "blackout drunk," which came up several times in the hearing, is a problematic one.  I think of blackout drunk as having no memory of the night before.  I've been drunk many times in my life and only once was I blackout drunk, by this definition.  "Memory-impaired" is a better term.  I've been memory-impaired -- not remembered little parts of a night or they were so hazy I effectively don't remember them -- many times.  Again, there is absolutely no way Kavanaugh has never been memory-impaired from drinking, given what we've heard from people who used to party with him.  An investigation would make this clear immediately.  His old buddy Mark Judge -- who literally wrote a book called Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk (in which Kavanaugh is obviously referenced under the quasi-pseudonym "Bart O'Kavanaugh") -- would make this clear immediately.  And also that's why we didn't hear from Judge yesterday, despite the fact that he was allegedly in the room when Kavanaugh assaulted Ford.

There was another path for Kavanaugh -- a more honest one in which he owns up to the gross references in his yearbook and his prior hard-drinking and classifies them as something many teenagers/early twentysomethings do (which is true!) and they don't give an accurate picture of him as a fully formed adult.  But he didn't take it.  He took the Trump track, which is to become indignant and deny everything, and claim "The Left" is out to destroy you, even when the facts suggest otherwise.  (Curiously, The Left took down Al Franken and let Neil Gorsuch be.  It's almost as if they only go after people who have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct.)  And it will probably work.  The only people Kavanaugh needs to convince to be seated as a Supreme Court justice are Republicans, and the Republicans are currently a party in large part comprised of aggrieved white men, and they want on the court somebody like them, who will unabashedly fight for them.  Kavanaugh showed yesterday he fits this description to a tee.

I predict he will be voted in early next week along party lines.  The only possible Republican holdouts -- Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski -- will come around.  They sometimes claim to stand up for women's rights, but I predict partisanship will overcome any such sentiment in the end.  It will be a sad day for the Supreme Court, a sad for women, especially victims of sexual assault, and a sad day for our country in general.  But don't despair.  Vote.

Until next time...

Entry 437: The Worst Defense of Brett Kavanaugh Imaginable

This article by Dennis Prager has been making the rounds on some podcasts I listen to, by which I mean people have been using it to underscore the absurdity of some of Brett Kavanaugh's defenders.  I wasn't going to read it, because I've read and heard stuff by Prager before (he used to come on The Adam Carolla Show from time to time), and it's almost always truly awful -- a trifecta of bad ideas, poorly argued, underscored by hubris -- but I finally caved, and unsurprisingly it really is as bad as advertised.  I decided to do that thing where I copy the article in full and then ridicule it, because some things need to be ridiculed, and this article is one of them.  After the dashes everything in plain print is Prager's article and my comments are in bold.

-----------------------------------------

The Charges against Judge Kavanaugh Should Be Ignored

It is almost impossible to overstate the damage done to America’s moral compass by taking the charges leveled against Judge Brett Kavanaugh seriously.

It undermines foundational moral principles of any decent society.

Taking charges of sexual assault seriously undermines foundational moral principles of any decent society?  I would say committing acts of sexual misconduct does more to undermine such principles, but so far at least we are very much on brand for a conservative like Prager -- being an accuser is often considered worse than doing the misdeeds one is accused of.

Those who claim that the charges against Judge Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford are important and worth investigating and that they ultimately, if believed, invalidate his candidacy for the U.S. Supreme Court are stating that:

Before he gets to his points, notice he's already packaging two separate issues together: 1) Whether or not the charges against Kavanaugh are worthy of investigation; 2) Whether or not they are invalidating if believed.  It's a perfectly consistent position to say they should be investigated, and then ultimately decide they are not invalidating.  In fact, the very purpose of an investigation would be to determine this.

a) What a middle-age adult did in high school is all we need to need to know to evaluate an individual’s character — even when his entire adult life has been impeccable.

Literally nobody is saying this.

b) No matter how good and moral a life one has led for ten, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years, it is nullified by a sin committed as teenager.

See above.

No decent — or rational — society has ever believed such nihilistic nonsense.

Yes, and neither does anybody else except Prager's straw man.  My last post expressly addresses the quandary of handling accusations against adults from their teenage years, and if you want to hear somebody more professional and more prominent than me talk about it, listen to Slate's episodes of Political Gabfest on Kavanaugh.  Emily Bazelon, certainly no fan of Kavanaugh's jurisprudence, states explicitly how uncomfortable she is with holding adults accountable for things they did as children.

This is another example of the moral chaos sown by secularism and the Left. In any society rooted in Judeo-Christian values, it is understood that people should be morally assessed based on how they behave over the course of their lifetime — early behavior being the least important period in making such an assessment.

If you want to get into a debate about Judeo-Christian values versus secularism when it comes to sex, I'm all for it.  Because I can't think of anything that has a worse track record on anything else in the history of humankind than religion does on sex.

These religious values taught us that all of us are sinners and, therefore, with the exception of those who have engaged in true evil, we need to be very careful in making moral evaluations of human beings.  

"True evil" is such a catch-all cop-out (what is it? and who gets to decide?), but okay I agree with the larger point about being careful in making moral evaluations.

And, of course, we were taught to extend forgiveness when people demonstrate through their actions that they have changed. As a well-known ancient Jewish adage put it: “Where the penitent stands, the most righteous cannot stand.” In other words, the highest moral achievement is moral improvement.

This is subtly one of the weakest arguments Prager proffers (and that's saying something), because, although I'm not religious, I know that key pieces of many religions, including Judaism and Christianity, are atonement and repentance.  Kavanaugh has neither atoned nor repented for his "sins."  On the contrary, he's categorical denied them, in effect saying his accuser is either lying or mistaken (as if it's impossible that the guy who used to drink to excess and has already shown his "flexibility" when it comes to truth and who doesn't want an investigation by a neutral party could be the mistaken/dishonest one).

As I mentioned in my previous post, if Kavanaugh had responded differently to the charges -- if he had said that he doesn't remember everything he did as a drunk, dumb kid, and that he was sorry if he caused any pain, then things would be very different, but he didn't say that.  He makes no acknowledgement of any mistakes on his part at all.  Until he does (which he won't), getting into all this "where the penitent stand" stuff seems moot to me.

Perhaps the most important principle violated by taking this 36-year-old high school-era charge seriously is the principle of the moral bank account.

Every one of us has a moral bank account. Our good deeds are deposits, and our bad deeds are withdrawals. We therefore assess a person the same way we assess our bank account. If our good actions outweigh our bad actions, we are morally in the black; if our bad actions greatly outweigh our good actions, we are morally in the red.

This is not how society works.  This is not how morality works.  We don't allow people to commit crimes and behave immorally because they have enough credit in their moral bank accounts to make up for it.  (It's like a riff on that Simpsons clip: I'd like to remind the court how many good things I've done in my life.  I should be able to run over as many kids as I want!) This is such a simplistic way to view morality, and more problematically, it's a total useless and impractical one, because there is nobody qualified to evaluate our moral currency and run our accounts.  There are no moral bankers.  How much does a grope cost?  How much does a lewd comment cost?  How much credit do you get for not harassing somebody?  And what do you get for doing something good for one person that's simultaneously bad for somebody else?

But this is how Prager thinks.  I've heard him talk about why he's religious, and one of his reasons is that without God there is no "objective" moral truth.  He's very bothered by the relativism of human morality.  And, by the way, so am I!  It's scary and weird to think that there is nothing out there to keep us in line -- that there is no ultimate justice -- that we are all we have.  But my answer isn't to make a bunch of shit up and pretend as if there is.  And even if Prager is right about a real God holding an objective moral truth, it does absolutely nothing for us now as flawed humans trying to adjudicate the actions of other flawed humans.  But I'm digressing...

By all accounts — literally all — Brett Kavanaugh’s moral bank account is way in the black. He has led a life of decency, integrity, commitment to family, and commitment to community that few Americans can match. On these grounds alone, the charges against him as a teenager should be ignored.

Ignored?  No.  Ultimately dismissed?  Maybe.  We need to know, as best we can, exactly what happened, and we need to know if he's being truthful about it.  Again, that's the whole point of an investigation and hearings and further inquiry.

Also, it's worth noting, being a Supreme Court judge is not only a morality competition.  If Kavanaugh is knowingly lying about the charges against him that would disqualify him from the court in my view, even if he's such an upstanding citizen, he's still morally in the black by Prager's reckoning.

So why is this charge taken seriously?

Because charges of sexual assault should be taken seriously, even if the accused are teenagers.  At 17, you are not legally an adult, but you're not a little kid either.  You're in between, which makes cases like this very sticky.  And I'm not the first one to point out that when it comes to a poor black teenager accused of committing a crime, conservatives rarely have issue with him being treated and tried as an adult, and yet when it's a privileged white kid, suddenly it's a different standard.  (And sometimes they aren't even kids -- George W. Bush tried to slough off bad things he was doing in his mid-30s as youthful indiscretions, and don't even get me started on Don Jr.) 

One reason is, as I recently wrote, the greatest fear in America is fear of the Left — the fear of what the Left will do to you if you cross it. Not fear of God. Not fear of doing wrong. Fear of the Left. Offend the Left and you will lose your reputation and, quite often, your job or your business.

One reason conservatives hate "victimhood culture" so much is because they want nothing more than to be the victims themselves.  They love pointing out how persecuted they are.   The big bad Left coming to get you!  I mean, sure, the Right (to use the counterpart of Prager's term) holds all three branches of the federal government and the majority of state governments and governorships, but it's actually the Left who holds all the real power.  They should be feared.  I mean, just look at all the great men they've destroyed: All Harvey Weinstein has is the millions of dollars he made while sexually assaulting his underlings, same with Matt Lauer.  Louis CK had to leave the comedy scene for almost a whole year, and look at how mean everybody is to Donald Trump -- he almost didn't get to be president!

As a middle-age, upper-middle class white man, I know exactly what Prager is talking about.  I mean, yeah, sure, we've controlled the entire country since it's inception over 200 years ago, and we don't have to worry about things like, say, a police officer mistaking us for a burglar in our own home and killing us.  But if we grope just one woman or defend somebody who does, we will absolutely get destroyed on Twitter. 

Oh, by the way, Christine Blasey Ford is receiving death threats and is too scared to live at home right now.  She's probably just afraid the Left is going to take her reputation.

Another reason is pure, amoral, demagogic politics. No honest American of any political persuasion believes that if a woman were to charge a Democrat-appointed judge such as Merrick Garland with doing to her 36 years ago in high school what Brett Kavanaugh is charged with having done 36 years ago in high school, the Democratic party and the media would be demanding that the confirmation vote be delayed or that the candidate withdraw.

This is flat-out wrong.  Did Prager not follow the Al Franken story?  The Left, with dwindling few exceptions, doesn't like sexual assault because it's wrong, and it sucks for women.  The end.  It doesn't matter who carries it out.

One of the Right's staple moves is to project their own failings onto the other side.  Their party is now run by a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by nearly two dozen women (and who admitted it on tape), and they supported an alleged child molester for Congress.  They have no honest defense for this, so they either shamelessly deny it (despite the evidence), or they do what Prager is doing and play the "both sides" game.  But there is no both sides in this one.  It's not equal.  The Right supports sexual assaulters (perhaps begrudgingly, but they support them nonetheless); the Left doesn't.  Period. 

A third reason is feminism’s weakening of the American female (and male, but that is another story). A generation ago, a drunk teenager at a party groping a teenage girl over her clothing while trying to remove as much of her clothing as possible would not have been defended or countenanced. But it would not have been deemed as inducing post-traumatic stress disorder either.

Hey, if anybody knows about the weakening of the American female, it's a 75-year-old man, right?  I mean, I could either trust his views on the subject or those of every woman I've ever talked to.

As for the rest of the paragraph, Prager is right: A generation ago we did not treat sexual assault allegations with the gravity they deserved.  Is this supposed to be in support of his thesis?

This weakening of the female is perfectly illustrated by the statement released by Susanna Jones, head of Holton-Arms School, the private preparatory school for girls in Bethesda, Md., that the accuser attended. “As a school that empowers women to use their voices, we are proud of this alumna for using hers,” Jones said.

“Empowers women”? Please.

Speaking out against sexual assaulters knowing full well an avalanche of shit from people like Dennis Prager is coming your way is indeed empowering.

Nearly every woman past puberty has experienced a man trying to grope her. (This is, needless to say, wrong.) My mother was groped by a physician. She told my father about it. My father told the physician that if he were to do it again, he would break his hands. And it remained a family folk tale. If you had told my mother she was a “survivor,” she would have wondered what you were talking about. The term was reserved for people who survived Nazi concentration camps and Japanese prisoner-of-war camps and for cancer survivors, not women groped by a man.

That's what his father did?  That's the appropriate solution?  Why didn't he report this man?  Did he still have a job?  Did his mom still see him?  How many other women was he assaulting?  Couldn't his dad have prevented a lot of groping (which, needless to say, is wrong) by saying something more public?

Also, his point about the term "survivor" is totally irrelevant.  It's what I call terminology trolling (which is some terminology I just made up on the spot -- what do you think?).

When my wife was a waitress in her mid teens, the manager of her restaurant grabbed her breasts and squeezed them on numerous occasions. She told him to buzz off, figured out how to avoid being in places where they were alone, and continued going about her job. That’s empowerment.

This -- and I say this without exaggeration -- is the most embarrassing paragraph of an opinion essay I've ever read.  If my name was attached to something this terrible, I would destroy my computer and then I would destroy my wife's computer and then I would go door to door, city to city, country to country, in an attempt to destroy the entire Internet one computer at a time.  I wouldn't succeed, but I would try (and even if I did somehow manage to do it, I have enough credit in my moral bank account that nobody could hold it against me).

Think about what Prager is saying: The way to handle sexual assaulters in the workplace is to tell them to "buzz off" (which I'm sure hurt this man's feelings immensely) and then do... nothing.  You shouldn't report them.  You shouldn't call them out.  You shouldn't hold them accountable in any way.  In fact, it's on you to change your work life so that you don't get harassed anymore.  Avoiding your boss so that he doesn't sexually assault you: That's not empowerment.  That's acquiescence.

And it's an acquiescence that too many women have had to do for too many years.  And it needs to end.

This betrays the mindset of people like Dennis Prager: They just don't think sexual assault is that bad.  That's the bottom line.  They might not like it.  They probably don't treat women that way themselves and wish other men wouldn't as well.  But ultimately it's just not something that we as a society should make that big a deal of.  Boys will be boys, and girls just need to deal with it.  It's nothing deeper than that.

In sum, I am not interested in whether Mrs. Ford, an anti-Trump activist, is telling the truth. Because even if true, what happened to her was clearly wrong, but it tells us nothing about Brett Kavanaugh since the age of 17. But for the record, I don’t believe her story. Aside from too many missing details — most women remember virtually everything about the circumstances of a sexual assault no matter how long ago — few men do what she charges Kavanaugh with having done only one time. And no other woman has ever charged him with any sexual misconduct.

Maybe Mrs. Ford is an anti-Trump activist because she's anti-sexual assault.  That would make a lot of sense, actually.  As for the rest of his account, well, it's also true that women rarely manifest fake accusations, and when they do, they are rarely as lacking in lurid detail as Mrs. Ford's.  So, there's that.

Do not be surprised if a future Republican candidate for office or judicial nominee — no matter how exemplary a life he has led — is accused of sexual misconduct . . . from when he was in elementary school.

Hahahaha... It's funny to think of an elementary school kid committing sexual misconduct, isn't it?  But, seriously, I won't be surprised if a future Repulican is accused of sexual misconduct, and I also won't be surprised when other Republicans support him nevertheless.