Boreal B[l]og

It’s easy to be depressed, at least for people who share my values, by the election.  I’m back in the political wilderness, a time when people I don’t like are going to be running the country, and running it badly.  It’s easy to get angry at those who underestimated the opponent, voted for him, were too overconfident, did not see the handwriting on the wall, and other errors of commission or omission.  But I’m not going to primarily cast blame here. I am looking instead at the silver linings.

During the campaign, Ms. Clinton received a demand from Black Lives Matter to apologize for slavery and racism. Had she done that, the election would have been over in August. Instead of discussing what they would do about the economy–and they had good ideas– the Democrats were sidetracked by groups whom they help but who do not turn out to vote for them when it matters.  Working class whites—their traditional support— will turn out, but they don’t care a whit about bathroom regulation, and nor do I, quite frankly. Considering a significant number of LGBTQ folks voted for the Other, it might be wise to direct the Party’s outreach efforts elsewhere. That’s a silver lining, I hope.

The Democrats are going to learn a lot if they look at the numbers.  Secretary Clinton will win by more a million votes nationwide, but she needed about a tenth of those votes distributed into Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Learning can start with Wisconsin, which had almost the same number of Republican votes in 2012, whereas the Democrats got two hundred thousand fewer.  Was this due to staying home or switching sides? Maybe the Republican vote would have been a lot less. The Democrats need to be walking through the state and finding answers.

The Democratic Party can now be remade.  Clinton is gone.  It’s time for a younger generation to remake the Party into something relevant for the American people.  I suspect young Democrats will be more inclusive, tolerant of more diversity, hopefully more interested in science and climate change than the politicians today. In any case, they’ve got two years to figure out where the Party is going.  Secretary Clinton was going to be investigated during her entire term, had she been elected, and now that is moot. She probably would have had terrible midterms in 2018 and been voted out in 2020. It was unlikely that the Democrats would have 16 consecutive years of the presidency.  Twelve would have been a stretch.

Go where the votes are.  White voters are still the largest bloc. Listen to them and campaign where they live.  That means campaign in all 50 states, because even if the presidential nominee doesn’t win the state, the nominee can help with local elections. The number of Democrats in local and state offices has tanked in the last 8 years.  Increasing these numbers should be a major priority, especially before the 2020 redistricting. Every Democratic leader needs to know the numbers of Democrats in office throughout the country.  There is now time to fix this problem.

The Republicans now own the government, all three branches.  They own it, and if they start taking away safety nets, the Democrats need to remind people who is doing it. Frankly, the party  of people who actually understand the English language needs to quit losing the battle of words to those who can barely spell.

Addressing climate change won’t occur, but it was DOA under both candidates.  We reached a stage several years ago where people said the climate was changing, but it wasn’t due to man.  Now it is simply that it hasn’t changed at all—the snowball on the Senate floor, the record low that occurs, the warm year that is 0.1 degrees cooler than the prior year.  We are going backward on climate change.  While I deeply regret what is going to happen to the Earth in the next four years, I am optimistic.  I’m optimistic that nature, biology, chemistry, and physics will unleash energy that will perhaps be the Magnitude 10 environmental event that might wake us up.  In the next eight years, there is a high likelihood that fisheries will crash, stronger storms will occur, hotter days, floods, droughts, and to humans, environmental mayhem.  I’m a lot more certain it will be sooner than predicted, since predictions have been shown to be too conservative. To nature, it is just biology, physics, and chemistry following the rules when the ingredients are mixed with the proper temperature and pressure.

The Democrats won’t be responsible for any major terrorist attack, dealing with Russia, Iran, Syria, or North Korea; any one of which could blow any time.  Oh, the Democrats will be blamed, I’m sure, but the buck stops with the Republicans.  Should we go to war, the debt burden will be squarely upon the Republicans, assuming the Democrats don’t let them off the hook this time with off-budget “emergency authorizations.”

The Democrats won’t be responsible for any oil spill into the Missouri River, the Ogallala Aquifer or anywhere else where pipelines were resisted.  Much of the damage will be in red states.  We will help clean up the mess, but we will also be sure to remind people who did this to them.

While the Other says there will be a rebuilding of infrastructure, something we need to do, Mr. Ryan, should he still be Speaker, will be wanting to save money.  Such conflict should be interesting, and I am looking forward to see if it is infrastructure jobs, which I think an excellent idea, or protecting the national deficit, which while laudable, is second to infrastructure. Should Mr. Ryan prevail, many infrastructure jobs will not occur, and this will not be the salvation of the “jobs, jobs, jobs” group, who should instead be hearing “fewer children, fewer children, fewer children.”

We’ve had a Democrat womanizer in the White House.  He got impeached.  The Other may behave himself in the White House.  That remains to be seen. Suffice it to say that I think there will be far more scandals in his administration.  There will be more men in it, more white men, and that is a good recipe for scandals.  Newt Gingrich is Exhibit B.

I am worried about public land being transferred to the states.  On the other hand, I have been able to spend many happy hours in such land.  If there is a transfer, those who had been pushing for such will likely be denied access by those who have the money to buy it and to cut off access.  I’m selfish. I enjoyed it greatly.  I can read and teach math.

I expect the media to complain vigorously when they are denied access.  The media needs to stop treating the Other as a celebrity and hit him hard every time there is a scandal or a mistake.  In other words, they need to treat him like a Democrat.  There should be no more free passes for the winner.  This is not The Apprentice.  Or maybe it is, with the nation’s fate in the hands of a rookie, who is greener than the Chicago River on March 17.  We need better writers, not better looking celebrities who pass for them. Reporters now asking the Other what he really believes are a bit late.

I look forward to Trickle Down economics being given its full chance.  While I am not in the top 1%, I benefit from tax cuts, although I keep voting against my economic self-interest. When we are plunged into a recession, which we will,  Trickle Down will finally die its appropriate death, at least for this generation.  I doubt it will disappear forever.

I keep hearing “Fight them,” coupled with requests to donate money.  Someone else’s turn. Silver lining.

Senator Jeff Merkley, junior senator from Oregon, has made over 300 town hall visits in each of the 36 counties in the state. He calls it his most important responsibility as a senator. Every year, he visits each county in the state. Oregon has some large counties: Harney, in the southeastern part of the state, has an area of 10,226 miles.  Were it a state, it would rank 42nd in size. It has only seven thousand people, so their votes don’t make a whit of difference when Merkley stands for election.  Or do they?

Merkley goes to each county, because he sees himself as a senator for the whole state, not just the population centers along the I-5 corridor. He learned from his predecessors, and town meetings give him a sense of the pulse of the state, what people are thinking.

It is interesting is where Merkley holds his town meetings.  In Lane County, home to Eugene and Springfield, he holds the meeting in the Odd Fellows Hall in nearby Coburg, a small town, not in Eugene.  He is making a statement, at least to me, that small town Oregon matters to him.  His town halls are in places most don’t know: Scappoose, Mt. Angel, Baker City, Gladstone.  Merkley won handily in 2014, and I suspect should he run in 2020, he will win handily again.  Yes, he’s a liberal and the only Senator who backed Bernie Sanders, but I would bet he has the respect, if not the votes, of many Oregonians east of the Cascades, where most of the state lies, but few of the people live.

I have often wondered why a presidential nominee has never visited Alaska.  Yes, Alaska votes Republican, but the message sent by a Democratic nominee for president would be huge.  Yes, she would get no electoral votes, but she would get a lot more by going: respect from Alaskans, shock at being visited, and probably an earful, too.  People everywhere like being respected, be they an inner city African-American or a farmer in Nebraska.  America is comprised of huge population centers and hundreds of thousands of square miles with few people, and the way people think in both is very, very different. I think Secretary Clinton made a mistake when she cast her campaign on the big cities in the swing states.  A lot of support was potentially available in places if had she gone and said, “I’m here to see where you live, what your local issues are, and to show you that I put on my pants one leg at a time, just as you do.”

Sure, many would have laughed.  Her handlers wanted her in the swing states, where the electoral votes were that mattered, in the cities, where Democrats live. But people read the newspaper and log online.  If they had seen that she were touring red states, for heaven’s sake, they might have been thrown off balance by such strange strategy.  They might have thought, “wow, she is seeing where the people live.”

Suppose she had left the DNC convention and with Tim Kaine, her VP Nominee, gotten aboard a  train and gone to York, Scranton, Harrisburg, and a stopover at the 9/11 memorial, finishing at Erie.  She would then have entered Ohio and done a tour south of Cleveland, maybe as far south as Mansfield, and then north up into Michigan, telling people in Detroit she’d be back, but she would continue to Ann Arbor, Flint and to the Upper Peninsula, where no nominee ever goes.  From Escanaba, she could have gone west into Rhinelander, Wisconsin and spent time touring the central part of the state, places that do have Democrats but also have Republicans who would have been surprised.  They would have seen a presidential nominee in their small town who spoke differently, saying hi, I’m here to see what your state looks like and what kind of people live here.  Can you tell me? Some would have laughed, some would have turned away or flipped her off, and I bet she would have gotten a ration, but come away with a good idea of the pulse of the country.  She could have entered Minnesota near Hinckley and gone through the small towns across the state, up to Red Lake, to the reservation, before traveling to Moorhead and Fargo, on the Red River of the North. She could have crossed North Dakota, perhaps making a statement at the standoff, before visiting the oil fields near Dickinson.  She also could have paid homage to Theodore Roosevelt by visiting the National Park named for him.

Bison, Theodore Roosevelt NP, October, 2006

Continuing west, she would have seen Glendive, Montana, and ridden along the Yellowstone River to Billings, then west through the Big Sky Country, by Big Timber, Bozeman, Great Falls, Missoula.  In eastern Montana, she would have been near coal country, where much as I and others don’t like coal, one train of 100 cars is required daily for one of the eastern power plants for a single day’s use.  It gives one perspective to know that the power they take for granted comes from stuff that they think should be kept in the ground.  If she had visited a coal mine, trust me, a lot of folks would have taken notice. The miners might have made fun of her, but I think they would have given her grudging respect.

Entering Idaho, she would have seen Craters of the Moon, Snake River Country, places that burn in the summer, have frightful winters, and where Americans live.  Past Spokane, Washington, past Moses Lake, and she’d visit Yakima, maybe, Snoqualmie Pass and finally end in Seattle.  Because Washington is a blue state, few nominees go there.

But our nominee would then fly to Alaska, visiting Juneau, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, before flying to Hawaii for a day on either Oahu or the Big Island.

It’s a tough trip, but once flying back to San Francisco, she would go east, over Donner Pass, to Reno, Washoe County, and then along the northern tier of Nevada, past Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, and Elko, east to Salt Lake City.  She had no chance in Utah, but visiting the Mormon Tabernacle as a tourist, if allowed, would have shown respect.  She would then leave and go through Vernal and Grand Junction, by Rifle and Glenwood Springs, all the way to Denver. From there, she might miss Nebraska and the Platte for Kansas, then swinging south into Oklahoma and Texas, ending in Dallas.  She would have traveled through a dozen states she wouldn’t win, but the press corps would have loved it.  They would all see America as too many people in politics don’t see it, an America that belongs to the Republicans.  Not really, of course.  It belongs to all of us.

West Texas, from Guadalupe Peak, from Guadalupe Mountains, NP, 2005.

At any point, the nominee could leave for a few days for a rally or for fundraising, but the goal would be to finish, meaning Nebraska and South Dakota, Oregon, Arizona and New Mexico, the Deep South and the “Red Crescent” of Kentucky and West Virginia.  Yes, even those states.  She would learn a lot from seeing them.  Americans are a diverse people, and much of the diversity in thought comes from the land in which they happen to live and work.

Big Bend National Park. This is moist air striking 3000′ cliffs and being forced upward, condensing before me.  It is the best example of lifting air’s producing rain (orographic lift) I have ever seen. June, 2007.

Foggy morning, Mammoth Cave, Kentucky, April, 2013

I think every nominee should visit every one of the fifty states.  I have. I’ve spent more than 100 nights in 13 of them. I’ve walked across two of them and part of two more. I have seen the diversity of America the land, camped in many states, seen nearly all of its national parks.  As a result, I understand the diversity of the people better than I otherwise would.  For me, it matters little in the grand scheme of things.  For a presidential nominee, it matters immensely.  The Democrats would do well to read these words before 2020.

Salmon, Brooks Falls, Katmai, Alaska, 2016.

“Because no little girl who gets groped on a bus or in a grocery store or on a subway or in a classroom should ever have to wonder if she did something wrong.”  Columnist Dan Savage, explaining “The Trump Talk,” the term coined by a woman who wrote in, defining the depressing conversation that every parent needs to give their daughters about predatory, entitled men.

Two years ago, I joined a half million people (then) who liked My Stealthy Freedom, a Facebook page that showed Iranian women taking off the scarf in public, as many of them called the mandatory head cover, an offense often leading to arrest.  As I saw more pictures of these women, heard stories of their abuse by husbands, brothers, fathers, and strangers, including acid thrown into their face, I also read support from husbands, brothers, fathers, and strangers.  It took me far longer than it should have to realize that not only were Iranian women being abused, so were Iranian men.  The page now has more than a million members.

The excuse given for covering women’s hair was that it excited men, who could not control themselves around women.  Yep, and that I guess was the reason that 7 year-olds are covered in school.  If a man can be excited by a 7 year-old girl, he’s a pedophile, a predator. The woman writing into Dan Savage had her 9 year-old daughter inappropriately touched by a man while in a grocery checkout line.

The vast majority of Iranian men are not pedophiles, I posted.  Publicly walking without a scarf in an 87 second video did not destroy the country, I wrote.  A few trolls tried to bait me with problems in the US, but I stayed quiet and let my fellow commenters handle them.  So long as women were being required to cover themselves, I realized men were insulted, too.  If the men didn’t see that, it was time they did, I wrote.  Real men control their “urges,” don’t assault women, resist as much as they dare the laws that require women to be covered, and treat their wives as equal partners.  There were many posts of Iranian men who did resist. Some even wore the scarf themselves.  There are many brave, smart and creative men and women in the country.  I’ve helped correct the English in several M.S. and  Ph.D. theses; I was even last author in a meteorological article about Tabriz.

I didn’t realize that my words about insulting men would come back during this presidential campaign, where I have been quiet, only writing about boorishness. Because I’m an old white guy, FB once targeted me with Republican ads.  I put a quick stop to that nonsense.

When Mr. Trump was caught on tape with his vulgarities, where the verb “to grope” was probably learned by many children for the first time, I was disgusted.  But frankly, I thought it would blow over, like every other epithet, crude remark, lie, and insult he has used during his campaign.  If he could get away with insulting John McCain, six bankruptcies, writing off a $900 million loss in one year, saying Muslims shouldn’t be allowed into the country, a Mexican-American judge born in the country was biased, what could he possibly do worse?  Mr. Trump was given a free pass on women.  He was allowed to call them ugly, “how would you like to wake up next to that?” and insulted Ted Cruz’s wife, a professional in her own right, not that it matters. Even using the toilet and menstruation were not off limits to Mr. Trump; no outrageous comment stuck.

So, I could have been forgiven for thinking that “grope” and “pussy” would last a day or two and then disappear.  I mean, I had seen Mr. Trump getting softball coverage as a celebrity and not as a presidential candidate.  I had wondered when the media was going to be as hard on him as on Secretary Clinton.  When the shoe dropped, the final straw in the haybarn of insults turned out to be the verb and the noun alluded to above. I didn’t think what he said was much worse than what he had already said, but as a man, I missed something that women don’t miss.  It’s one thing to leer, to rate women on a 1 to 10 scale, to make fun of their bodies, even if the insulter is overweight, has dyed hair, and constantly glowers.  No, what really changed this campaign was the action, the groping, sexual assault.  That’s courage, by the way, to come forth as a woman who was sexually assaulted, and after which likely initially blamed herself for what she wore, said, or did.

And knew that probably 40% of the men in this country think today she was still in some way to blame.

The “locker room banter” comment significance was missed by me, too, mostly because I haven’t been in a locker room for years.  Athletes came forth en masse, insulted that Mr.Trump would suggest that every man in a locker room would say these things.

And so finally, it came full circle.  Whether it be in the United States or Iran, when women are insulted or physically violated, because a man thinks he can do that, he insults all men who don’t think this way.  When one says it is locker room banter, he insults the men who don’t partake in such banter, who, when given every chance to talk about a woman’s looks, body, whatever, DON’T.

So, I am angry.  I don’t talk to my male friends about women’s looks, bodies, whatever.  That doesn’t mean I give a free pass to all women, because they are women.  I quietly refused a request on a long car trip home last summer to give a ride to a woman who made me feel very uncomfortable. I won’t hike with another for the same reason.  That isn’t sexist.  I’m making a rational decision  based upon actions.

But, I’m with…..Michelle Obama.  She is a national treasure.  Her twenty minute speech, which will be known as the “Enough is Enough” speech, reminded me that attacks on women are attacks on men.  That belittling women belittles men.  That treating women as sex objects is saying that men can’t control their sex drive.  That allowing firearms in the hands of angry men in bad relationships is the major cause of the 3 women a day here who are killed by a man with whom they have or had a relationship.

I’m with Michelle Obama when she says, so truthfully, that we can’t deal with the plight of women in this world if we belittle them here in America.  Our women aren’t forced to wear the scarf, but they are too often treated as sex objects, take less money for equal work, are graded like beef or homework, kowtow to lecherous bosses, and have their looks matter more than their brain.

When Mr. Trump talks about groping, “getting away with anything,” “and finally, “in ten years I’ll be dating you,” to a ten year-old, when he was then 46, he was inculcating dating and pleasing a man as her worth.  By lowering the bar to 10, he is not far away from the Prophet, who in his fifties married young Aisha, consummating it when she reached puberty.  It is ironic that Mr. Trump, who proposed that Muslims not be allowed into this country, was once picking out 10 year-olds for his future.  He was damned close to mimicking The Prophet.

The only suggestion I would make to Dan Savage is that “The Trump Talk” be given to all children, not just girls.

I got an email from a former colleague, a physician trained in geriactics who once practiced in the office next door to mine.  We were good friends, and I often went to his office for a few minutes each day in order to pet his Portuguese Water Dogs, which he often brought to work.  It was a good way to relax.  If he sent me a patient, I would talk to him person to person about what I found.  But this was a quarter century ago.

He is older than I and retired, not long after I went into administration, and took up farming in another state, where he was successful.  We were part of his Christmas card list and heard each year about the family and the dogs.  He had several health issues, but he was tough and got through each one.

About a decade ago, although I can’t be sure these days, because the years go by so fast, his Christmas cards developed a significant religious tone and he mentioned his involvement with several well known evangelists.  I just wished him well, although the change didn’t resonate with me.

Then, about five years ago, not at Christmas, he sent out a e-mail to his address book complaining about the New World Order, how the UN would be stationing troops here, guns would be confiscated, and we would lose our freedoms.  I don’t know much about this stuff, but to be honest, I thought it might be better than the Project for the New American Century, which did exist and was behind the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  I wondered if my friend, or really ex-friend now, might be becoming demented.  That’s tough to diagnose, so I said nothing and heard nothing more.  I now wish most people well, even my so-called detractors, so long as they don’t interfere with my attempts to quietly lead my life. I must be mellowing.

Today, out of the blue, after at least a 3 year hiatus, I heard from him.

He isn’t demented, which was the good news.  The first “How are you?” was, unfortunately, followed by a video clip of Hillary Clinton’s supposed Parkinsonian symptoms that he wanted me to view, along with several other attachments, all on YouTube.

I’ve heard these allegations before.  I didn’t notice anything obvious about her at the Convention, but I didn’t look carefully.  Bill looked like he lost a lot of weight, maybe too much.  I do know Mr. Trump is 70 and has been overweight for years.  That is a significant concern to me.  My board certification is from the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, so I can say with some confidence Mr. Trump meets the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, and the press has often given him a free pass on that and virtually everything he has said, the free advertising likely to elect him president, in what is becoming the highest stakes reality TV ever, given the country’s infatuation with media celebrities.  Ms. Clinton has been a public servant for 35 years, long enough to make mistakes, long before the millenials, who are “cool to her,” were born.  Trump’s failed business ventures, failure to release his tax returns, his boorishness, racism, xenophobia, bullying, and litigation don’t appear to bother much of the electorate, including his ridiculing those with disabilities (a reporter), injuries (Harry Reid), nervousness (the woman in Flint), or his suggesting violence (that the Secret Service not guard Ms. Clinton).

I do not like it when my detractors want me to read a series of articles or look at videos with the idea that I must be changed to their way of thinking, because for years, I read their articles, the ad hominem attacks, the statistics that were clearly in error, the bias, the grammatical mistakes, the inflammatory language, and I was not convinced.

I will not reply. Silence is best.  He will not know whether I received it or what I think. I will not look at the video.  I have no way of knowing how it was edited, whether the purported “freezing” is like “Hitler’s jig” when France fell.  I have no way of knowing if her silent speech was in a focus group and dubbed in to another speech.  And if I say she doesn’t have clinical Parkinson’s, a view which her facial expression on a post today would support, somebody will come back and say I haven’t practiced in years, which is true.  Anything short of agreeing with him will likely lead to an argument I want no part of.

I’ve seen thousands with Parkinson’s, was involved in a clinical trial of bromocriptine; many patients functioned well mentally and physically.  One can outwork me at Rowe Sanctuary in Nebraska every spring and at age 70 taught me the definition of an acre (it’s 10 chains squared, and a chain is 22 yards.)

Bet Mr. Trump doesn’t know that.  Mr. Cruz said we had billions and billions and billions of acres owned by the federal government.  The country outside of Alaska has 1.9 billion acres total, and non-public land in Texas alone has about 161 million of it. A great majority of the land east of the Mississippi is not public.  Candidates for public office ought to be required to say what a billion or a trillion is operationally, before they can run for office. I bet many wouldn’t be able.

As for presidents with disabilities, FDR ran the country for 12 years, during the Depression and  WWII, in a wheelchair. John Kennedy had Addison’s Disease. Johnson had severe enough heart disease to require a defibrillator nearby.  Carter almost collapsed on a run in Catoctin.  Ford tripped coming down Air Force One and became the butt of many jokes. Reagan was shot and had Alzheimer’s for a significant part of his last term.  The first Bush vomited on the Japanese prime minister and fainted at a state function. His son was an alcoholic.

The sudden claim of Parkinson’s for Hillary Clinton is odd, since the supposed symptoms quoted are usually seen late, and she has been in the public eye for years.

I was disappointed, but not surprised, when after a venous thrombosis in her skull four years ago gave her diplopia (double vision), it was treated by the Congressional Republicans as a minor headache, a skimpy excuse keeping her from testifying before Congress on one of their many Benghazi investigations.  She is subject to a double standard.  When Ms. Clinton had a rather common illness—I’ve had pneumonia and hallucinated, but I returned to practice medicine three days later—it was blown out of proportion. When it comes to Parkinson’s, I’m sure there are some neurologists who without an exam, but with bias, repetition, and intimidation, will claim that she does. And so what? Parkinson’s has treatments.  Narcissism?

Both presidential candidates are at an age where bad things happen to people.  I am at that age, too. Being old means that the vice presidential choice matters.  One thing scares me more than Mr. Trump, and that is having him incapacitated.  Trump at least isn’t a social conservative. Governor Pence would send us back to the 19th century in our treatment of women.

I don’t need “re-education.”  I can teach math, statistics, neuroanatomy, guide people on hikes, show them the night sky, and teach them what happened when the most civilized society in the world became fascist.