On this day in 1933, the Blaine Act was passed — named after Senator John J Blaine. It was the law that started the process that ended in the Twenty-First Amendment later that year. And that was a repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, ratified almost 15 years earlier. We are, of course, talking about Prohibition.

Here’s something: Prohibition was basically a liberal idea. People saw a real social problem with alcohol. And remember: the way people drink now is really quite moderate compared to the way they used to drink. And then, as now, alcohol led to all kinds of violence — especially domestic violence. The idea of Prohibition was a well-intentioned liberal idea.

What’s happened over the last century is that liberals have realized the limits of creating a perfect society. Conservatives have not. At the same time, conservatives continue to think that liberals are the ones who want a nanny state. But what are liberals actually asking for? Universal healthcare; a strong safety net; a humble foreign policy. It’s the conservatives who want to treat the poor as though they are school children who need to be proctored. It’s the conservatives who think that without government intervention, women will have abortions at eight months. Basically, it is conservatives who have utopian ideas.

Liberals continue to stands for our Constitution that’s stated intent is to make a “more perfect” union, not a perfect one. Of course, it isn’t all Republicans. We are talking mostly about conservative voters who are one of the most meddlesome groups of people on the planet. The Republican establishment doesn’t care what the people do, as long as they don’t start demanding things like fair pay and equal rights.

Still, it is amazing how quickly Prohibition died. It reminds me of the line about bankruptcy: slowly then suddenly. Of course, we learned only that one lesson from Prohibition: that we shouldn’t outlaw alcohol. We’ve destroyed many millions of lives by prohibiting other substances that people enjoy putting in their bodies.

On this day in 2005, the Kyoto Protocol went into effect. And global warming was solved!

That image there on the left shows buy into the treaty. It was basically Europe. Of the advanced economies, the one really standout there is the United States — land of blind, home of the selfish.

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference was far more successful than the Kyoto Protocol because each country set its own targets. Here’s the interesting thing about all this: those countries that address climate change are going to find themselves rewarded economically. It’s funny to listen to the Republican wonderboy Marco Rubio talking about how he’s the future, when he is more stuck in the past than my 83 year old father.

But it looked like the Supreme Court was set to mess up even this recent agreement in Paris. And then Antonin Scalia went and did the best thing he ever did for the world: he died. You see, the current attack on Obama’s executive actions are in the DC Circuit Court. It has a majority of Democrat appointed judges. That means it will likely find for the administration. (Don’t ever let anyone tell you the courts aren’t political!) And that means that if it goes to the Supreme Court, it will get at most four votes against — a tie. And so the circuit court finding will hold. Thank you so much Justice Scalia!

Who Needs the Kyoto Protocol or the Paris Agreement?!

Of course, we are approximately 20 years too late to be doing the little that we are now doing. We are now just over half way through February here in California. Normal rainfall for this month is almost six inches. We’ve only gotten a tenth of an inch this month. And this was supposed to be the big El Niño year. I’m in a constant state of outrage over this. But what are you going to do? There is the fate of civilization and maybe even the species on the one hand. And then there are the short-term profits of already really rich people on the other. I supposed we don’t have to come down on the side of the rich. It’s just our habit.

So the Kyoto Protocol and all other efforts to do something about global warming be damned.

On this day in 1989, the Soviet Union announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan, ending the Soviet-Afghan War. During the war, of course, the United States was entirely against the Soviet Union. I greatly admire Jimmy Carter, but he was a Cold War relic. His foreign policy toward the Soviet Union was more conservative than the Republicans who came before and after him. But Carter wasn’t alone. Everywhere you looked in the United States people just took it for granted that all that stuff about allowing women to be educated and similar reforms were a Very Bad Idea™.

The war had been going on for just over nine years. So we were almost exactly four years dumber than the Soviet Union. Of course, I’m not really sure what the hell we were doing in Afghanistan. The main thing was just revenge — an extremely imperfect target, but at least better than Iraq. But once we were there, what were we trying to do? I mean: yes, we were trying to liberalize the country. But that doesn’t count, does it? Why should the Americans get credit for that when the Soviets never did?

The Soviet-Afghan War was always presented in the US as an invasion. I understood even then that this was not the way things work. There had been a coup in Afghanistan. The new government under Nur Muhammad Taraki was very much pro-Soviet Union. Like most such governments, it was not very nice and it managed to get a civil war started. Taraki had begged the Soviets to intervene. They refused and only did so after Taraki himself was assassinated by his own people.

Hypocrisy of US Media on Soviet-Afghan War

I talked about this on my birthday post: not getting the full context of things from my father. This is a more general problem in issues like this. The case that the Soviets were asked by the country to intervene are actually stronger than the case that they simply invaded. But both are rather too simplistic. But what is clear is that when we did the same thing in Vietnam, our media didn’t present it as some kind of unprovoked attack on the country. Just as with the Soviet-Afghan War, we came in to help prop up an unpopular government.

Hypocrisy is a natural human trait. But when your nation’s fourth estate accepts the government’s hypocrisy as God’s own word, that country is not long the land of liberty. Because liberty based upon lies is the same as slavery.

On this day in 1881, the first issue of La Citoyenne was published. It was a bi-monthly feminist newspaper published by Hubertine Auclert. It ran for ten years until Auclert couldn’t afford to publish it anymore. The struggle for women’s rights has been a long one in France. The first signs of it appeared during the French Revolution. But Rousseau so dominated the thinking of that time that no one took it seriously.

Let me make a quick diversion. Conservatives so often say things to me like, “Of Course it was wrong to X, but that’s all solved now and there is no need to do Y.” This annoys me. I’m kinda sorta okay with conservatives being awful. But I’m not okay with them claiming ownership of things in the past that they would have been totally against! Every conservative I ever talk to thinks it’s obvious that women should be able to manage their own finances and stand for election or vote. They just don’t see any of the problems today. They see the demands today as unreasonable. Just like the conservatives of 1881 found these now “obvious” rights unreasonable.

Hubertine Auclert

Hubertine Auclert was a major figure in French struggle for women’s equality. And part of that was moving to Algeria in 1888. What is it about Algeria and feminism? I wrote about Isabelle Eberhardt before. But it seems to come down to what Hubertine Auclert noticed when she was there: that the way the French authorities treated the Algerians was the same way that they treated women back in France.

Of course, it wasn’t just that. It was also the case that the French government colluded with Arab males to suppress the education of women, and generally push a conservative approach to Islam. It’s interesting how common this kind of thing is and how those who supported regressive beliefs are just shocked when it ends up harming themselves.

Of course, Hubertine Auclert did not live to see French women get the right to vote. She would have had to live into her late 90s for that. Women didn’t get the right to vote in France until 1944. And this is especially embarrassing, it was under the Provisional Government of the French Republic. You know: the temporary one they set up after the Allies pushed the Germans out?! Pathetic. But Auclert did live long enough to see married women get the rights to their own paychecks. So there’s that.

After La Citoyenne, it was quickly replaced by Le Journal des femmes. And then in 1897, La Fronde was started — the first French feminist daily, written and edited entirely by women.

On this day in 1894, the anarchist Émile Henry threw a bomb into the Café Terminus, killing one and injuring 20 more. At his trial, he was asked why he killed so many innocent people. He apparently replied, “There are no innocent bourgeois.” I think that’s a fascinating answer.

I don’t believe in violence. It is one of those things that almost always seems like a good idea before, and a bad idea after. It really doesn’t matter what it is. People always grab onto World War II. But the reasons we have for justifying it were not the reasons we got into it. But I’ll grant that there are times when violence does some good. But it is so rare that it isn’t much worth thinking about.

But Émile Henry’s retort speaks to me. I don’t say that as an outsider but very much as an insider. Mostly, I don’t see myself as directly complicit in the evils of the world. But there is no doubt that the quality of my life is improved by the system of oppression. It isn’t something I wallow in, because it’s bad enough to benefit from it, but it’s worse for the world to be polluted by my polite guilt.

If I had real strength in my beliefs, I could go off to some remote place and become a subsistence farmer. But I freak out when a spider crawls on my desk. I’m not the kind of man who is capable of making bold gestures. Of course, we could say the same thing of Émile Henry. He was born into an upper class (albeit a radical) household. It’s a curious way to deal with your own privilege: by killing others in your class. It strikes me as a selfish act. If he were alive today, Émile Henry would probably be a libertarian and claim to be freeing the poor by cutting the taxes on the rich.

Happy National Foundation Day everyone! Don’t know what it is? Neither did I. Supposedly, on this day in 660 BCE, Emperor Jimmu founded Japan. You might question this given that he was supposed to have lived from 711 BCE to 585 BCE, which would have made him 126 years old when he died, which is over three years older than the oldest person who ever lived (that we can verify). It’s also about two years older than what seems to be the theoretical maximum age of humans due to cell regeneration. Just the same, no one seems to actually believe that Emperor Jimmu lived to be that old.

In the Kojiki, oldest extant history of Japan dating back to the early 8th century, it says that Emperor Jimmu was a real guy. That’s a long time between event and history, however: roughly 1,400 years. Plus, the Kojiki is where we get the 126 year lifespan. And in the Nihon Shoki (written a decade after the Kojiki), it tells us his reign was from 660 BCE to 585 BCE. That’s a reign of 75 years! And one that started when he was 51?! Kind of old to be conquering countries. So clearly, by that time, much myth had been introduced into the story. And it strikes me as fanciful. But any reason for holiday is good by me!

Huangdi (the Yellow Emperor) is said to have started the Chinese civilization back about 2700 BCE. And he just so happen to reign for a century. Of course, there is no doubt that he is mythical. He only started being referred to as a historical figure some 2,500 years after his supposed rule. He appears to have been a god that was later historicized.

Emperor Jimmu: Real Myth?

But Emperor Jimmu could have been a real guy, just papered over with myth. But you have to follow the list of emperors roughly a thousand years before you start to see anything that looks normal: short rules, reasonable life lengths. The supposed 11th emperor at the beginning of the first century, Suinin, supposedly ruled for 41 years and died at the age of 138. Not that it makes sense to try to make sense of it, but that would mean he became emperor at the age of 97.

Regardless, myth is important. But there is a down side to this kind of thing. It gives the impression that Japan was started by someone. And that isn’t true. Even people who fetishize George Washington understand that he didn’t found the United States — that it is the result of an entire social movement, centuries in the making. At least, I hope they do.

On this day exactly 52 years ago, radio personality Glenn Beck was born. That just happens to be the exact day that I was born. In most ways, I am not pleased about this. As I have discussed before, his attempt to co-opt the legacy of Thomas Paine was vile. He thinks he’s a libertarian! Of course, he’s done the same thing with Martin Luther King Jr. He thinks he’s not a bigot! Like a lot of modern conservatives, Beck thinks that he is the real radical. In a sense, he’s right. But the radicals of the past who he looks up to were working to help the weak. Beck is a radical in the name of helping the powerful.

I am impressed with Beck in that he is a searcher. Unfortunately, some time ago, he discovered The Truth™. And so all his searching goes into the service of discovering what he thinks is the truth. And it has sent him down the rabbit hole that is the world of conspiracy theories. The basis of everything for Beck is Cleon Skousen’s The 5,000 Year Leap.

But you have to give the man credit for combining his own bizarre collection of beliefs with a messianic sense. While my father’s girlfriend laid dying, she was glued to Beck’s television show. She had to be there every day — the same way as people in cults. She felt that Beck was transmitting secret truths to her. She died before seeing his downfall. But he’s still hugely successful on the internet. There are a lot of people like my dad’s girlfriend. They never tire of the oracle. I, of course, see him more like this:

A Quick Libertarian History of Frank

As for me, well my life went something like the following. I was raised by a very conservative father and what I would call a swing voting mother. In the fifth grade, I began to see that many of the things that my father had told me weren’t exactly true. It was kind of like conservative radio before there was such a thing. So there was always a kernel of truth, but I didn’t have the context. This created in me a desire to find, as best as possible, the full truth.

This caused me to bounce around a bit ideologically over the years. The problem with ideology is that it tends to create the kind of shortcuts to truth that got me screwed up with my father when I was a kid. That’s because you have this theory about the way the world works and then you simply filter the facts in the pursuit of proving the theory right. Of course, everyone has an ideology. But when it is something ossified like free market fundamentalism or Stalinism, you aren’t as nimble intellectually.

When I was first in college, I thought of myself as more or less a liberal. I worked for the nuclear freeze movement and for Michael Dukakis’ campaign. And then I met my first wife who turned me onto libertarianism. And if that sounds like she was offering me heroin, good. Because libertarianism is a kind of opioid. It’s highly addictive in its facile simplicity and completeness. And as long as you only talk to other libertarians, you will never get over your addiction because you will never want to.

I did, however, talk to a lot of non-libertarians. This was partly the result of my not liking most libertarians. I found them to be mostly conservatives who were unhappy with the purity of the Republican Party. Indeed, that’s how the Libertarian Party got started. And by the end of graduate school, my libertarianism was starting to crack. For one thing, it was so theoretical and went so much against my natural inclinations that it was hard to maintain. As I’ve discussed before, while being a libertarian at that time, I hated it and felt trapped by it.

But then I found an actual physical addiction that was much less dangerous: drugs. But unfortunately, they extended the run of my libertarian habit because I wanted my drugs to be legal. And in varying states of clarity I stayed at that point. But even there, cracks continued to appear. It became clear to me that any libertarian politician was far more interested in cutting my taxes than allowing me my drugs. And even on an economic level, that was a terrible deal for me.

The real turning point for me was George W Bush and the Iraq War. Obviously, as a libertarian, I was fanatically anti-war. Truthfully, as a libertarian, I was far more of a radical than I am now. But I remember that I was working at home during the six months leading up to the Iraq War and I listened to a lot of NPR. And despite what conservatives claim, NPR is about as milquetoast and center of the road as you can get in media. Yet even still, it was clear as day that we were going to war and the Bush administration was just laying out the propaganda in support of it.

I felt I needed to be involved in the fight against that kind of thing. A vote for a libertarian is a vote for a conservative. And there was another part of it: on the drug front, it was the liberals who were actually doing things to help users’ lives. They were the ones supporting syringe exchanges; the conservatives largely continue to this day to claim that syringe exchanges promote drug use. But there was a final thing, which is that I was always on the far left of libertarianism anyway.

Once the dam breaks, things rearrange themselves in a more natural way. Maybe my thinking now is too natural — too comfortable. But I probably will die this way. I only have a few working principles. Mostly, I believe we are all interdependent. Our capitalist system distorts reality, benefiting some and harming others far out of proportion to individual worth. And as a result, yes, we who benefit from the system can pay more in taxes. It’s either that, or we get a whole new system. And I ask my rich friends: which would you rather it be?

And with that menacing thought, I wish myself and Glenn Beck (who I feel sorry for) a happy birthday.

Update (9 February 2016 9:28 pm)

I really don’t appreciate this!

I know Google knows all. But I find it kind of creepy.

On this day in 1968, three African American student protesters were killed by police at the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina. In addition, 28 others were injured — most of them shot in the back while they were fleeing.

It was part of a protest of racial segregation at the local All Star Bowling Lane. After it happened, Governor Robert McNair said it was one of the “saddest days” in South Carolina history and blamed the deaths on Black Power agitators. As is usually the case, the local authorities did nothing to the police. So the feds stepped in and prosecuted. But all of the police officers were found not guilty. They used a defense that will sound oddly familiar: they felt threatened. I am now calling this the “I Was Vewy Vewy Afwaid” defense.

Again I ask, since police work is thought to be so dangerous, you would think that we would hire brave men to do the job. But instead, we hire cowards who are, in far too many cases, simple psychopaths.

There was one conviction that came out of the Orangeburg Massacre: in 1970, the state of South Carolina found civil rights leader Cleveland Sellers guilty of rioting. He spent seven month in jail for it. So justice was done! Three students killed, many others shot in the back, and the state sends a man to jail for supposedly rioting two days earlier. Go team!

People who think that racism isn’t a defining feature of our society are crazy. And what we saw back then is exactly what we continue to see today. But we elected a black president, so racism is over! Or so the conservatives say. Of course, those same conservatives said racism was over before Obama. And they said it during Jim Crow. Just ask William Buckley: he told the world of 1960 that Jim Crow wasn’t about racism but just African Americans hadn’t reached the grand civilized heights of the whites who were lynching them.

But I guess things like the Orangeburg Massacre are the price we have to pay for making sure that no police officer is ever afraid. Such delicate flowers they are!

This was an important day for women’s suffrage in 1918, UK women over the age of 30 got the right to vote. Even then, certain property requirements applied. It took until the end of that same year for women to be given the right to serve in parliament. But it took a whole decade for women to get voting parity with men. The Representation of the People Act 1928 allowed everyone over the age of 21 to vote. It’s nice to look back and be happy that women finally got the right to vote. But how frustrating it must have been for women of that time, even if the original Representation of the People Act 1918 was a huge victory.

This has some resonance in the Democratic primary for president. But not as much as I think people might believe. The truth is that you need the Clintons and the Sanderses. But they are not examples of these poles, because both of them are of the marginal change varieties. What we need are more radicals who say, “Change now! We’ve already waited far too long!” In other words, we need people who terrify the establishment. We need Thomas Paine and Malcolm X. The fact that Sanders terrifies the establishment is an indication of just how far our society has gone off the rails.

I can wait. I don’t like conflict and I hate violence. But my life is good. I don’t have to worry that I’ll be killed by a police officer just because I don’t do exactly what I’m told to. I don’t have to worry about much of anything at all. Given my inclinations and idiosyncracies, if I weren’t a straight white male, I’d probably be doing 25 to life in some prison somewhere.

So I respect those who are impatient. And we all should. They are critical to our development, whether it is in the fight for women’s suffrage, racial equality, or economic fairness.