YOU STILL HAVE TIME TO READ….

Anything for a Vote, a 2007 book by Joseph Cummins.  Serendipity led me to it today, when a friend happened to stop by — who happened to have visited the Library of Congress’s Book Store in Washington recently — and lent me the book with the $9.99 price tag.

Subtitle:  Dirty Tricks. Cheap Shots, and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Campaigns. Don’t say I didn’t tell you…

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FOR JUST A MOMENT

Let’s stop the world and reflect:   Are we not being slurped back down evolution’s ladder?   WHEN DARWINIAN FITNESS BACKFIRES: Re-reading Consilience by the late Edward O. Wilson, we are reminded of  that real bugabear  Kin Selection, which genetically predisposes man-womankind to favor “their own kind.”  Fallout from this innate favoritism feeds with surprising strength into racism.  I can empathize with the statement “No one is born a racist,” but I have to question.

I look around me and see black, tan, yellow and pink separations and preferences.  Class warfare?  Nationalism?  It has morphed into ideational container groups: races to the top; “My God is better than your God”; “My way or the highway.”  Us versus Them.  Altruism is tied to the concept in a roundabout way.  Genocide threatened over  sexual identities?  “Us normals versus them?”  Kinship selection currently, in Israel?  In Ukraine? 

It’s true I have trouble empathizing with a rich bloke who would spend $450,000 on a pocketbook while others starve.  If I were a fellow billionaire and Republican would I feel the same? 

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UNSURE IF I MENTIONED THIS…

Why do MAGA politicians want to cut Ukraine off?   The answer is, unfortunately, obvious. Whatever Republican hard-liners may say, they want Putin to win. They view the Putin regime’s cruelty and repression as admirable features that America should emulate. They support a wannabe dictator at home and are sympathetic to actual dictators abroad.

Paul Krugman Opinion Piece N.Y. Times

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IF YOU’VE COME THIS FAR WITH ME, THEN…

I’ll give you a byte (for educational purposes) from the book this blog opened with:  “Then Republicans made the mistake of repeating an apocryphal story about Roosevelt and his Scotch terrier Fala.  According to the tale,  Roosevelt was visiting the Aleutian Islands  and accidentally left Fala behind; he later sent a U.S. destroyer t pick up the animal.  The Republicans tried to use the anecdote to illustrate the President’s extravagance, but Roosevelt diffused the charges with gentle sarcasm in a national address:  “I don’t resent attacks and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them….He has not been the same dog since.”