Some brief political observations

1) Yeah, yeah, Trump declared a national emergency, whatevs.  Sorry if I can't work up much sense of concern.  This asshole generates outrages every week or two, and yes, a few of them have done real harm, like the migrant family-separation policy or the shutdown.  But I doubt this one will rise to that level.  The expected lawsuits have already begun, and we now have some real power (in the House) and a real leader (Pelosi) who's shown she knows how to handle him.  Meanwhile he's yet again causing consternation and division in his own party, having plunged recklessly into this fight with no clear idea how to win, just as he did with the shutdown.  And it's not like any wall is actually going to get built as a result.  Trump isn't Hitler, he's the Gilderoy Lockhart version of Hitler.  He may yet do horrendous damage somewhere down the line, but this emergency thing is just another example of his usual random blundering and will turn out to be ineffectual.

o o o o o

2) It's long been observed that since roughly the Reagan era, conservative tax and labor policies and the implosion of unions have left real wages for most workers stagnant instead of steadily increasing as they always had before.  Productivity grew dramatically and people are working harder than ever, but the gains in national wealth were skimmed off by the owner/investor class which was already at the peak of the economic pyramid, resulting in the massive inequality and concentration of an obscene amount of wealth in the hands of a tiny oligarchy that we see today.

It occurred to me recently that this third-of-a-century of stagnant real wages (while the costs of things like health care skyrocketed) pretty much coincided with my own entire working lifetime.  If the tax and labor policies that prevailed before the 80s had remained in effect, my income history would probably have been very different, as would my present situation.  So yes, I take the machinations of this vampire party and the oligarchy it serves rather personally.  I'm not alone -- as the shutdown showed, many people with jobs at much higher skill levels than mine are living paycheck-to-paycheck, struggling to cope with even a brief interruption of income.  And I can see why the generation now coming of age -- often "in the hole" before they even start due to massive college loan debt -- are unenthused about participating in the working world or consumer culture at all.  They know a rigged game when they see one.  The kind of economy their grandparents worked in is not even a living memory to them.

o o o o o

3) Does mass rejection of science and reason, and the popularity of crackpot ideas like creationism and global-warming denialism, do concrete harm to US society?  That's increasingly happening as the proliferation of nonsense spreads to more and more areas of thinking.  It now includes millions of people firmly and truculently embracing movements which are directly harmful to their own health, such as fat acceptance and the anti-vax mania.  As a result, we are beginning to unilaterally disarm in the face of a catastrophic obesity epidemic and new outbreaks of diseases which vaccines had long kept at bay.  (If you doubt that fatism is now reaching the point of utter strident raging against reality itself, read this.)  Thank goodness we don't have an equally belligerent and delusional "smoking acceptance" movement to complete the trifecta.

The vaccination rate in measles-stricken Clark county, WA is only 78%, and state-wide it's only 85%.  Despite Trump's rants about disease-bearing migrant caravans, impoverished Guatemala has a higher rate of childhood vaccination than Texas does.  Tens of millions of American parents are rejecting or delaying vaccination for their children.  We already lag behind most other developed countries in universal health coverage, infrastructure maintenance, and some areas of applied technology like high-speed rail.  Now, through sheer stupidity, we risk degenerating into the kind of disease-ridden Third World cesspit which much of the actual Third World is leaving behind.

o o o o o

4) What Ilhan Omar did earlier this month -- invoking an old anti-Semitic trope about shady rich international Jews manipulating politics behind the scenes with money -- was at least as bad as posing in blackface, as Northam did.  And it was contemporary, not from 35 years ago, representing her current views rather than some juvenile stupidity which intervening decades of maturity might have washed away.  Pelosi and the rest of the party leadership were right to come down on her like a ton of bricks about it.  This once again draws a clear line between Democrats, who will not and cannot tolerate such bigotry in their ranks, and Republicans, who almost never condemn the constant barrage of bigotry of all kinds from their own, notably from Trump himself.

Omar's apology was unequivocal, and I'm willing to cut her some slack on this, especially since she came to the US in 1995 as a refugee from Somalia and may have been genuinely unaware of some of the history of anti-Semitic propaganda memes in the West.  But if she ever does anything like this again, the leadership must force her to resign.  We are not the Republicans.