The 10th Justice

The video of the high school kids from Covington, Kentucky, the native American drummers and the Black Hebrew Isrealites all milling about and semi-confronting each other is a great example America. The articles in the news drew all kinds of conclusions about the meaning of the video. My opinion is that in these types of confrontations the only information exchanged are charged sound-bites, slurs and retorts. The world views of the three groups represented are so different that only conflict can come from confrontation. No one can explain to a teenager what the history of the Native Americans or the African Americans has been just as neither of those groups knows what the world view of a high schooler from the south has been. To depict this video as meaning anything but confusion based on disharmonious world views is to make way too much of it. Each of these groups are part of America and the diversity that makes America great. As I've said in a previous blog, so far in the history...

There is an old Buddhist kōan in which a student asks his teacher 'what is the moon' and the teacher simply points to the moon and says, 'do not mistake my finger for the moon'. Analog and digital are similar. Here's how this helps us understand how we ended up with Donald Trump as president. Two technologies, television and the Internet, helped elect Trump. Not with ads and not with fundraising or social media manipulation by the Russian, though these helped. The real influence on the American public has been years of watching television. When television first began the shows were written to emulate modern American life and to entertain. People loved television and still do. They watched more and more. The shows got more and more entertaining with more exaggerated plots, language and situations. Do you ever feel, after you have just seen a really engaging movie, that you find yourself talking like the characters, or feeling similar to how the character felt? It m...

Even Fox News may be rethinking what's good for America! Tucker Carlson, a Fox News pundit and Hillary Clinton basher, recently wrote that perhaps the conservative wing of policy makers should start considering what is good for the American family when they make changes to our economic infrastructure of wages, taxes and support and stop only considering what is good for the bottom line of American corporations. This change was apparently provoked by Mitt Romney's call for maintaining the status quo economically. Carlson apparently doesn't like the fact that Romney receives $22 million dollars a year from his investments and only pays 14% tax. Who does? Ocasio-Cortez would like to see him paying 70% taxes on this income, like when Eisenhower, another Republican, was president. Carlson says his reason for moving away from a true libertarian stance on the free market capitalism is that if the right doesn't make that move they will, eventually, get a form of European styl...

In my blog from December titled Donald's Chronicles Numero 1, I suggested that he might declare a state of emergency and use the military to build a wall between the US and Mexico. Today he said just that. Bruce Ackerman, in today's New York Times, says that he thinks that the idea of declaring an emergency and using the military to build the wall is illegal. However, his final paragraph sums up the situation best: What this all adds up to is a potential crisis much graver than whatever immigration emergencies the president has in mind: A legally ignorant president forcing our troops to choose between his commands and the rule of law in a petty political struggle over a domestic political question. Trump needs military support in order to act against the wishes of the Congress. Having military support puts him, and us, one step closer to a fascist regime in which the military is used to enforce the will of our elected president. Repairing our democratic institutions is o...

The recent book How Democracies Die by Levitsky and Ziblatt tells a story about how human nature often works against our best interests. Even when there are no barriers to racial heterogeneity people tend to congregate with other people similar to themselves. For instance, new immigrants often choose a place to live where there are other immigrants. They do this for financial reasons and also because they like neighbors who speak the same language, eat the same style of food, share the same cultural myths and ideas. It is just easier to be around people who are like you in terms of heritage and sometimes color. We are all to some extent tribal. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt no democracy has been formed and persists that is multicultural. To quote the book: As our colleague Danielle Allen writes: The simple fact of the matter is that the world has never built a multiethnic democracy in which no particular ethnic group is in the majority and where political equality, social e...

Donald’s Chronicles Numero 1 It's 3am and I'm awake wondering if the president is awake also. I wonder if he is thinking what I’m thinking. Now that he has no Chief of Staff and no Secretary of Defense, no Attorney General, and since he is Commander in Chief, if he orders the military to do something, will they do it? This is a huge question for America the Democracy. No fascist regime can function without a strong right arm and Trump is no Hellboy. “What is it that makes a man, a man?” This question was asked by Hellboy’s “father” played by John Hurt in the first move. The answer is that ‘it is the decisions that he makes.’ Hellboy, and his strong right arm, decided to not use force to rule the universe because the lives of so many normal people would be ruined, so much pain and suffering would be caused, so much joy of freedom lost. But just as Trump is no Obama, he is no Hellboy either. If cartoon characters are used for comparison, only Scrooge McDuck fits the...

“Feel the market, don’t just go by meaningless numbers,” said the donald yesterday after the Fed raised the interest rate by a quarter point. I wonder if he said something similar when he demanded gold plated faucets in the Taj Mahal casino after being told by his accountants that the level of debt he was incurring for the project was unsustainable and would go bankrupt. Maybe he said, "Forget the meaningless numbers and don't worry about the debt. I love debt. If we go bankrupt the only ones who will suffer will be the subcontractors and they can't afford to sue me." The Federal Reserve is being managed by people you do understand numbers and their implications. They operate on facts and not feelings. But having facts requires reading and studying the situation. It requires focus and a background body of knowledge. We don't pick children to manage the Fed because they don't have enough education to do the job correctly. It is difficult to understand how a c...