Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Please let this be the last thing I ever write about ISIS

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(From my Facebook page…and it’s not very literary, I know.)

I keep seeing this line of thought on Facebook: “I firmly believe that airstrikes are only going to create more jihadist terrorists.”

That is so inane it’s infuriating. Bombing ISIS targets inside their Caliphate will no more create jihadists than bombing Nazi targets in the Third Reich created more Nazis. Just how stupid do we (and that’s a rhetorical we) think the 99% of the population in the Caliphate living under ISIS terror are? They are being executed by the hundreds by jihadists on a daily basis–shot, beheaded, crucified. So they join up when we start bombing? The US accidentally bombed a couple of Nazi concentration camps during World War 2, and the collateral damage was horrific, hundreds of dead Jewish inmates. Yet oddly enough, surviving Jews didn’t rush to join the SS. Of course, even had they wanted to they wouldn’t have been allowed. Then again, none of the apostates living inside the ISIS Caliphate (and nearly everyone there except ISIS members are considered apostates or potentially apostate, it takes very little to find yourself on the wrong side of a beheading knife) would be allowed to join ISIS anyway, even if they wanted to, because they are apostates. And that exclusion is the justification for executing them on a regular basis, either singly, in batches, or by the village full. It’s this tiny exclusive group (probably numbering less that 50,000 members) of extremely violent fanatics that is the source of the problem, actually. This is how it all began. The attacks on Paris and the like, going after us, the people who go to rock concerts and eat at little chichi cafes, those are new. Why this is so difficult a concept to grasp for some of us I do not understand. Perhaps we watch too much TMZ. Continue reading →

Ben Carson

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Ben Carson is not an idiot. He’s not stupid. He’s not even a fool. He’s wrong, sometimes as wrong as you can be, and he is incredibly unqualified to be President, but he is not an idiot. He can’t be. He was a neurosurgeon, though that barely explains it.  Because Ben Carson was a neurosurgeon like John Coltrane was a saxophone player or Jimi Hendrix a guitar player. Like Wayne Gretzky was a hockey player or Rembrandt a painter.  He was one of those guys who was so brilliant at what he did it does not even seem real. He was what Einstein was to physics or Chomsky to linguistics. He was the Leonardo Da Vinci. In fact in all likelihood he was much better by several degrees of magnitude at what he did than anything you will ever be able to do no matter how hard you try. He was one of the greatest surgeons in the entire history of medicine. A thousand years from now they will speak of Dr. Ben Carson’s surgical feats with awe.

So he’s not stupid. Best not to pretend he is. And he is definitely an egomaniac. But when you are that good you are allowed to be an egomaniac. In fact you are allowed to be anything, anything except president. Because he’d be an awful president. But not even that detracts from his brilliance.

The point of all this being that when we criticize Ben Carson by calling him stupid, all we’re doing is looking stupid ourselves. Let’s not fall into that trap. Like the trap Ben Carson has fallen into thinking that a genius is a genius at everything. They aren’t. A genius can be just as dumb as anyone else at something they’re not good at.

Dr. Ben Carson in the operating room.

Dr. Ben Carson in the operating room.

Nazi memes

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Just found myself debating someone who was insisting that white skinned Jews were not “white”, they were Jewish. The Jews are their own race, he insisted.

This guy was not white, and certainly not a Nazi. He’s not Jewish, obviously. And he’s not a racist. Yet he was parroting Nazi propaganda. Nazi race ideology has been completely reborn on the Internet, and is spreading not only among white supremacists, but among their exact opposites. There are elements on the left that now believe aspects of Nazi race theory without even realizing it. Nazi memes are spreading via the medium of social media. And yet it is OK. No one calls anyone on it. No one points out where those crazy ideas came from. It’s no wonder people say they are sick of the Holocaust. They have already accepted some of the justification for it, though they don’t know it yet.

Leaf blowers

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Brooms. Not much noise. More precise. Less dust. No exhaust. Exercise. Cheaper. How do we get this stuff so utterly bassackwards?

Leaf blowers. We all hate them. Alas, from a professional gardener’s perspective, they are so much faster and more efficient than brooms. From the workers’ point of view, they are not bassackwards at all, but just the opposite. Time is money in their highly competitive biz. Only in cities where they’ve been banned do they disappear, and invariably that has cut into the income of the working class gardeners. Not that many people think about their gardeners. But I’ve known several gardeners, and I know even more people whose family income derives, in part, from professional gardening. I just consider leaf blowers a fact of life. Working class solidarity, I suppose. Hard to find something more emblematic of the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the working class than leaf blowers. One third of Occupy Wall Street was in the top twenty per cent of Americans by wealth. If you want to rat them out bring up leaf blowers. They love all Mexicans except the ones blowing leaves around the yard.

leaf blower

Assaulting America’s nicer neighborhoods with their noise, hard work and unsightly pick up trucks.

A mandate is a state of mind

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No one seems to look at is this way, but right now Donald Trump is supported by about 10% of registered voters, and Bernie Sanders about 15% or even 17%.

Or let’s put it this way–right now nine out of ten American voters do not want to vote for Donald Trump, in fact most would not vote for him under any circumstance whatsoever. Among other reasons, they loathe him. It’s hard to win over people who hate you and wish you had never been born.

And eight or so out of every ten American voters feel are not feeling the Bern to various degrees. Some aren’t feeling it a little bit, and perhaps some of those could be swayed. Some aren’t likely to feel it all and would feel safer with a moderate Democrat or even a moderate conservative than a life long socialist. And some feel about Bernie the way almost everyone else feels about Donald Trump.

That’s the math. True believers in both camps will claim not to believe in math. A mandate is a state of mind.

Ahmed Muhamed

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I don’t understand how Bernie Sanders, of all people, can be so tone deaf about this kinda thing. In fact, his one big stumble so far was when he infuriated Black LIves Matter by never going off message even for a tweet or two to comment on the police shootings and beatings of African Americans. I’m not so sure how many Bernie supporters are aware there was even an issue with that, but in the Black community it did him in. That more than any other factor is why so few people of color show up at his rallies.

So when I saw Hillary comment on the racially profiled arrest of fourteen year old Ahmed Muhamed in Texas for designing a clock, I expected a hollow up from Bernie Sanders. But there was nothing. He refused to go off his message even one iota to make a statement about this and give even a hint that he is concerned with issues of police abuse and racial profiling. Of course he’s concerned…but he keeps missing out on opportunities to show it. Today was a perfect opportunity. Apparently Bernie and his whole staff was busy. It would have taken only thirty seconds but been worth a million dollars in television advertising in southern primary states next March. And I simply cannot fathom how neither he nor anyone on his staff had figured that out. And as a result, there are a hundred stories on the web right now that quote in their entirety the tweets from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

What is it that makes Bernie Sanders ignore the value of the symbolism in tweeting in anger about the police abuse of a person of color. I know it’s not a problem in Vermont, but it’s a huge problem elsewhere, and he needs to address it when it come up, even if all that means is a simple little message on Twitter.

His campaign needs to stop ignoring people of color, because those people make up a huge proportion of the Democratic Party. This party has been based on poor people and immigrants for its entire existence, and you can’t bend over backwards appealing to hip white progressives, a goof chunk of them members of the top fifth of Americans in income, and pretend the rest of the party doesn’t exist.

The revolution will not be twitterized either, apparently

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Was just looking at Dr. Cornel West’s twitter page to see how he is pushing along Bernie’s drive for black votes. Turns out Dr. West does not tweet. Well he tweets, but apparently only when he’s in the mood. He’s almost never in the mood. The last time he was in the mood was September 8, when he tweeted briefly about it being John Coltrane’s birthday. Before then he released a whole flurry of tweets on August 24, the day he endorsed Bernie Sanders, in what is basically a long essay broken up into little tweets. And that is all that Dr. Cornel West has done on Twitter to help Bernie Sanders. That’s it. Instead of a torrent of tweets on Bernie’s behalf and attacking Hillary, Dr. West can’t be bothered to do a fucking thing. And this is the man who will turn Bernie’s standing in the African-American community in the South around.

No wonder there were nobody but white people at those rallies in the Carolinas. They were probably the only ones who even knew about them.

You cannot fundamentally reform the nation if your campaign staff can’t even do some basic advance work for a few campaign appearances.

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Bernie Sanders speaking to the whitest bunch I have ever seen

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I’m an unrepentant lifelong Democrat and I know what the breakdown of the Democratic party is, especially in the South. And this is the first time I have ever seen a Democratic candidate with a following that looks like a cross between the Republican convention, a Kenny G concert and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. In a nation approaching 50% people of color, Bernie Sander’s supporters are the whitest bunch I have ever seen outside the Republican Party, AND THAT IS A MAJOR PROBLEM.

The Bernie Sanders movement needs to dump this white only crap and reach out, and this corny half Beatlemania/half messianic thing is not cutting it. If you want to win the nomination and the election, get real. Just as Democrats are praying for Trump to be the Republican nominee, the Republicans are praying for Bernie, and for the same reason. Both candidacies are quite delusional about their supposed mandates. Both, incidentally draw the same percentage of support from their respective parties. And neither base seems especially good at math. Continue reading →

The polls and Donald Trump, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mixed Up Republicans

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I keep hearing that Donald Trump is sweeping America. A lot of Democrats are freaking out. There’s no reason to. You just need to remember that while Trump is leading the Republican candidates with–by far–the most support, that support is still just a minority of Republican voters. Let’s look at some numbers:

There are about 170 million registered voters in the United States. About 55 million of them are registered as Republicans, 72 million as Democrats and 42 million as independents. The latter don’t count right now, because they are not included in the polling during the primaries. Well, they do count in those theoretical match ups (Trump v Hillary, Carson v Sanders, Stassen v McCarthy) but those are so hypothetical, and there is so much time before November of 2016, that they are pretty meaningless. The only polls that have any significance now–and even that is pretty weak–are polls showing the percentage of party member who say they will vote for a certain candidate. And there are two types of those. There are the polls of registered voters by party nationwide, and polls of registered voters by state. The national polls give a general idea of how a candidate is doing, the state polls give an idea of how a state’s primary or caucus vote would break down were the primary election or caucus held today. Caucuses, though, are so obscure and complex and unrepresentative that accurate polling of their results is almost worthless. You can poll Iowa and get an idea of which candidate people prefer, but that does not mean that is how the caucus results will turn out. Any of the polls you see on Iowa may or may not have any relation to the outcome on caucus night. Iowa caucuses are notoriously surprising. (Personally, I think Bernie Sanders will win. No clue on the Republican side.) Polls in New Hampshire and South Carolina will be more accurate, but still, you have to see a series of polls to see if they compare. If they trend one way or the other, you’ll get an idea of how the primary results might well turn out. Continue reading →

Dr. Cornel West and Bernie Sanders

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It is just a sign of how clueless Bernie Sanders supporters are that they think Cornel West will bring Bernie the black vote. This is the man who just this past June on CNN called Obama the first N-wordized president. And repeated it. And went into a very long explanation of just what he meant.

It did not go over well with the voters whom Cornel West is supposed to bring to Bernie Sanders. Nor will it go over well when Bernie Sanders is asked about it. Or when Dr. West, called on to explain, repeats his comment. Dr. West is an impressive man, and not a man to back down, certainly not when pressed by a bunch of annoying reporters. It will be a great moment for Cornel West, the kind of battle he thrives on, the kind of battle that made his reputation, but it will not be good for the Bernie Sanders campaign. This is a presidential primary campaign, and unless Bernie Sanders can get several million black voters in the south to switch allegiance, his campaign will effectively end come Super Tuesday. This is not the time to agitate, agitate, agitate. This is the time to sweet talk, sweet talk, sweet talk. Dr. West’s job is to make people really like Bernie Sanders. But that is not quite the way Dr. West rolls. He’s not a feel good kinda guy. He’s an agitator from the days when the only way for a black man to make it in America was to agitate. But it’s a changed America now, and Barack Obama, more than anyone else, certainly more than Dr. Cornel West, is what changed it. Barack Obama, young enough to be his son (or Bernie Sanders’ son, for that matter) is a feel good guy. Which offends Dr. West. In fact, just about anything about Barack Obama offends Dr. West. “I just don’t respect the brother at all” he has said. Continue reading →