Category Archives: Posterity

Minority rule is all but here

“Republicans are laying the groundwork to refuse to certify a 2024 Democratic presidential victory . . .”

– Opinion by Perry Bacon Jr., Washington Post 5/20/2021

I have a bet with my wife about the Senate filibuster. My bet is that the Biden Administration cannot or will not modify the filibuster enough to allow passage of the pending voting rights acts. Without these acts to stop them, Republicans have all but finished laying the groundwork to overturn the next presidential election. The radical right has been brilliantly working on the statehouses for several decades. This work has been done quietly and effectively. Conversely, the anti-democratic radicals have loudly and egregiously warped the U.S. Supreme Court in their favor. They flagrantly did this right in the Democrat’s face even though they represented a minority of the population. The Republican statehouses have learned they can refuse to certify presidential elections that run in favor of Democrats. When they refuse to certify, the election, as dictated by the Constitution, is thrown to the U.S. House where the election decision is made by one state one vote. Republican states represent a minority of the population but they are the majority of the states and so the democratically decided election will be overturned in favor of a Republican.

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It could be so much better

Jonathan P. Thompson

Jonathan P. Thompson is a son of the Four Corners. He is a journalist and writer, recently penning the book River of Lost Souls (non-fiction Torrey House 2018) and Behind the Slickrock Curtain (fiction Lost Souls Press Sept. 2020). I am co-founder of Torrey House Press and while I previously followed him as an extra savvy writer of the West, I got to know him personally when he published with us. In August of this year he and Torrey House are bringing out his next book, SAGEBRUSH EMPIRE: How a Remote Utah County Became the Battlefront of American Public Lands. I have had a look at a first draft and am thrilled that more of his writing and perspective will soon hit the stores.

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Dark Sky

My father passed away last week at age 88. This essay I finished early last year is largely about him.

Dark Sky

I

On a clear, moonless night, 7,000 feet high on the Colorado Plateau, I stand in my backyard in Torrey, Utah looking at the heavens. When I shift my gaze to the ground, I realize I can see my shadow.  I move my arm about to see if a shadow is really what I am seeing. The shadow moves. The night seems inky dark. There is no artificial light anywhere.  I laugh under my breath. How could there be a shadow? The only light is coming from the summer Milky Way arcing overhead.

I don’t believe there are many people who have seen their shadow by starlight and that is a shame. In most of the country and much of the world people live in places where the skyglow caused by errant urban light makes it impossible to see the Milky Way. When I was born there were slightly fewer than 3 billion people on the planet. Now there are almost 8 billion and it shows in the sky. Satellite photos of the earth at night taken over the past decades show the expansion of light creeping like a fungus growing in a petri dish. As Joni Mitchell sang in my youth,  Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. That dark sky over my head in Torrey is becoming a lost resource. Another vanishing piece of wildness.

My father has been an avid amateur astronomer and astro-photographer since the early 1980’s. The technology of telescopes was improving fast in those days, prices were starting to come down, and Dad was an early adapter of the new technologies. In 1986 when Halley’s comet was making its once every 75 year rounds past Earth, Dad invited a buddy and me to join him in the dark skies of southern Utah to take a look through his telescope. We went to Canyonlands, south of Moab. Standing outside his motorhome the night was thick with dark, the Milky Way swept overhead, and Halley’s hung in the middle of the south sky with its tail pointing up and away to the northwest. The view through the telescope did not disappoint and my buddy and I laughed as we tried and failed to keep the comet in the telescope’s crosshairs. I could see the attraction to Dad’s hobby but I was busy with a budding family and career and did not see the telescope again until 20 years later. By then Dad had reconverted in a fundamental way to religion and there was a growing distance between us. “I still have that old telescope, the orange tube C8,” he told me. “You can take it if you want to.” That was all the instruction I got, but I took him up on the offer.

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Come out punching!

McConnell is not the top of the senate, Kamala Harris will be. As vice president she will be the Senate president. And as president she can break McConnell’s gridlock by recognizing any senator to bring any House-passed bill to the floor. She can do that without altering any Senate rule. No procedural vote is required. The Biden administration’s success depends on it. If Harris exercises this power, Republicans will never win again. If she does not, Biden will be one term.

To be successful, the Biden administration must come out punching.

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Frame like a Republican

I’m sitting here in my suburban living room on Melony Drive in Salt Lake City thinking I could do a better job communicating effectively than my Democratic representatives in Washington. The Democratic leadership is terrible at framing. Framing is the ability to phrase something in a nutshell that has immediate and emphatic meaning to the body politic. We just don’t seem to be able frame although the opportunities are myriad.

Ask yourself, for instance, how many times you have heard the phrase, “Imagine the Republican response if Obama did this . . .” Well, why don’t we level the same vehement response? Our lack of ability to effectively respond is why the Never Trumpers and the Lincoln Project are necessary. These groups are made up of ex-Republican operatives that know how to play hardball. They know how to frame. Democrats sputter in outrage at an effective Republican frame, with no response other that to repeat the frame by denying it. Democrats play puffball. Gently, with hand-wringing and apology (Democrats are decent people, after all).

After four years of Trump, the worst, most indecent person alive, Republicans are zealously throwing democracy under the bus rather than accepting his clear loss of the election. I could come up with a more vivid metaphor, like the Rs are throwing democracy in the ditch, pissing on it, then kicking dirt on the remains, but this is a family website.

Pavlov’s dogs?

Take three obvious examples.

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America is Back

6abc Philadelphia

America is back. It was not the landslide victory for democracy that polls misled us once again to expect. (Just shoot me if I ever again read a poll.) But we have a decent, experienced, sane President-elect Biden, and thrillingly, we finally have a very exciting and gifted woman and a minority in Vice President-elect Harris. After having a sociopath as president for these four excruciating years, just returning to normal will be such a tremendous relief and improvement.

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The GOP – Liars and Deniers

Utah is turning blue.

Most Republicans, particularly in Utah, have locked themselves inseparably to Trump. I can remember as far back as the 90’s that as a businessman I was disgusted by Trump. He made business people look bad by calling himself one. I have long been a fan of political scientist Fareed Zakaria and completely agreed with him that Trump’s sole qualification for president was that he was a bullshit artist. Now, after suffering as a patriot and American with that conman mobster as president, I believe Trump is the most despicable, immoral person, public or otherwise, that I know of. And Utah Republicans can’t get enough of him. It is costing them.

Contagious thief without a mask. He lies that the Supreme Court rushed appointment is not about politics.

In the Salt Lake Tribune today there is a long article about how many Republicans, particularly in Utah County, refuse to be tested for COVID-19 or to wear a mask. Mike Lee, who inexplicably has finagled his way to the eminent job of U.S. Senator, tested positive to COVID-19 just over a week ago and now is at the rushed hearing to pack the Supreme Court, in person, without a mask. Lee is from Utah County. I don’t know how or why not wearing a mask is allowed by the Republican Senate, particularly for an infected person, but I expect negative consequences for their gross neglect – for Republicans.

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What is the next move?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died. It is a fantastic loss to the country. The timing of her loss, of course, could be catastrophic. Evil is often fortunate.

There is no bottom for Republican senators. They will use Republican State AG’s to contest the election, appoint a radical right justice, and decide at the now corrupt Supreme Court to appoint Trump no matter what the legitimate vote count. A power hungry, racist minority will rule and democracy will be dead in the U.S.

How can we counter such a cynical ploy? Will marching in the street be enough?

We are serfs

This year-to-date stock index performance chart exemplifies a key aspect to the illness in our country. IXIC is the NASDAQ which is primarily influenced by the household name big tech stocks. SPY is the S&P 500. IJR is a small-cap index. Year-to-date the NASDAQ is up 17 percent, the S&P 500 is flat, and small stocks are down 17%. That is a crazy gap.

The big tech stocks in the NASDAQ, like Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft are the mega corporations that are wrecking Main Street and its mom and pop retail, that are decimating newspapers and journalism, that are publishing the Russian bots and creating the echo chambers of hate and divide that brings the U.S. to the brink of civil war. It is their massive, mountainous, tectonic market capitalizations that give to the large techs corrupt Citizens United power with assets greater than most countries and our nation’s steering wheel to the oligarchs that own most of their stock.

In my investment management career (ending with the previous century) we talked about performance gaps in basis points. A hundred basis points is one percent. A performance gap of say 80 basis points was notable. No one ever talked about six month gaps of 3,700 basis points. Such a thing never happened. (Today is a good day for small-cap stocks. It was more like 4,000 basis points yesterday.)

If this gap doesn’t close we are all serfs. Ill informed serfs. Chained to our phones, mind numb, and poor. Serfs to un-democratic corporations. Mere zombie consumers to be played.

I post this as a reminder to myself to back off of social media, to buy local, to read print and support my local newspapers. To support Torrey House Press and the power of story to change culture. And vote Democratic like our soul depends on it.

Let Trump shoot himself in the foot?

In general I think of my blog as a place to talk about conservation and dark skies and to showcase my astrophotography. But I want to keep jotting down a few notes for posterity on my thoughts about the pandemic.

A burial in New Jersey last week. Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Trump and the GOP are pushing re-opening. The case and death curves are now flat to slightly down. With reopening they are not likely to go much lower. A vaccine is a year or more away. There is negligible immunity built up. The disease is out there now more than ever. We are run my a mafia crime family and there have been no preparations for a national plan to test, trace and contain. Yesterday I predicted 250,000 deaths by Election Day on Facebook. I am probably low. That would be at 1,000 deaths per day for the next 180 days added to the current 70,000 dead. We are still seeing nearly twice that daily death rate. Continue reading