Goofy Governing

The repeal last week of Seattle's 30-year-old bike helmet law by the city's board of health exemplifies the sort of goofy governing that infuriates right-wingers.

As reported by The New York Times, Seattle scrapped the law—despite its proven ability to save lives—because police used it as a pretext to hassle Blacks.

“The question before us wasn’t the efficacy of helmets,” a board member said. "The question before us was whether a helmet law that’s enforced by police on balance produces results that outweigh the harm that that law creates."

As the basis of its decision, the board cited a local advocacy group's analysis of court records.

The analysis showed cops disproportionately ticketed Blacks for breaking the bike helmet law.

The analysis neglected to examine whether Seattle's Blacks wore bike helmets less frequently than other citizens, or rode bikes more frequently (both highly likely).

The same board declared racism a public health crisis in 2020.

You might credibly argue the bike helmet law was never fair, or that governments shouldn't "legislate safety" in the first place, and so the board's decision is the right one.

I don't see it that way.

Bike helmet laws have proven to reduce brain injuries and save lives everywhere. Their fair enforcement is a matter of police reform.

But if police harassment outweighs pubic safety, and social justice trumps public health, then it's only logical that all traffic laws be rescinded, and that police forces be defunded accordingly.

We don't need a lot of cops to enforce nonexistent traffic laws. Get rid of them! 

And it's that inevitable logic which sends right-wingers into apoplexy.

As it should.

Laws often have unintended consequences. (The mandate to stop at red lights, for example, often makes me late for my art classes, which really pisses me off.)

That doesn't make them laws we should rescind.

Goofy governing like Seattle's gives liberals a bad name. 

Toxic Masculinity

I have a bad feeling about this.

— Han Solo

"Toxic masculinity."

I overhear this phrase in coffee shops, cafés, and restaurants more than any other single phrase.

I don't know why it's on the top of women's minds right now—at least the minds of the women who frequent coffee shops, cafés, and restaurants—but it definitely is.

I don't know what's happening to women; but—whatever it is—I have a bad feeling about this.

Perhaps you can blame their wrath on Andrew Cuomo, Jeffery Epstein, or Texas's Republicans.

But, whatever the cause, I think men are soon up for a collective asswhuppin' (defined by Urban Dictionary as an "intense physical retribution involving heavy bruising, put upon a person in need of a life-lesson in civility, politeness, and manners"). 

The phrase "toxic masculinity" was coined 36 years ago by farmer and writer Shepherd Bliss. He thought it described the authoritarian streak displayed by his absent, career-military father.

Over the decades since, however, the phrase has come to denote practically all the attitudes and actions of men, who by dint of gender are not only vulgar and sloppy, but aggressive, competitive, homophobic, sexist, and misogynistic.

That's seems awfully harsh; but I'm not most men's target.

Novelist Norman Mailer, fairly macho himself, believed that contemporary American males were toxic because they were without honor.

"Masculinity is not something given to you, something you’re born with, but something you gain," he wrote in 1962. "And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. 

"Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men."

I think Mailer was onto something.

Somewhere on the journey to manhood, American men forgot about honor.

Endemic

There’s no finish line.

— Gov. Gavin Newsom

My hat's off to Gavin Newsom for declaring that Covide-19 is no longer epidemic, but endemic, in California. 

And so he's taking steps to mainstream it, acknowledging that government must combat Covid-19 perpetually, as it perpetually combats smoking, obesity, unsafe products, and water pollution.

And naturally, as with other public hazards, some people will die.

News flash, America: death is endemic everywhere. It always has been. It's inescapable and baked in.

Most of us simply choose to deny that cold fact.

Perhaps mainstreaming Covid-19, which to date has killed nearly 1 million Americans, will depoliticize it and wake sleepwalking citizens to the inexorability of their own deaths.

Our country would be a much happier place.

The existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger defined the human being as finite, a "being-toward-death" (Sein zum Tode).

Where man is concerned, death is baked in, Heidegger claimed. Death is life's "fellow." 

Heidegger also believed that accepting death—your own death—brought you unbounded freedom—and unbounded happiness.

"Turning away from a flight from death," he said, "you see a horizon of opportunity." 

Embracing your death—denying your denial of death—"puts you in a state of anticipatory resoluteness with a solicitous regard for others that makes your life seem like an adventure perfused with unshakeable joy."

Who knows but that mainstreaming Covid-19 could make common courtesy and civility—the "solicitous regard for others"—routine again; and make vaccination and mask-wearing badges of honor that announce to the world, "I can't outrun death and don't wish to try. I'm terribly mortal—and happy."

As to those discourteous, miserable many who resist vaccinations and masks I say, so think you can outrun your own death? Good luck with that. 

There's no finish line but one.

Moderates Rise Up

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

― Oscar Wilde

San Francisco voters this week put the kibosh on "Squad politics," according to Axios, when they tossed three lefties off the city's seven-member school board.

It seems the jettisoned board members went too far when they placed priority on renaming 44 public schools in honor of BIPOC over reopening the city's shuttered schools.

That in a nutshell is the problem with immoderate Dems.

Like their right-wing opponents, they never address problems; they only manipulate symbols. 

Moderates, on the other hand, roll up their sleeves and get shit done. (For a vivid history lesson in this, listen to the LBJ Tapes. They're remarkable.)

Moderates also know that America looks like more like Maybury than Roxbury. 

What happens in San Francisco doesn't stay in San Francisco, alas, and as a result left-wingers on the national stage are freaking out.

Their loud-mouthed obsessions with punishing police, tearing down statues, and renaming buildings now threaten their re-elections—and the majority enjoyed by Democrats.

"It's a huge problem," one political strategist told Axios.

Squad politics are left of most voters', who want fixes not to systemic injustices, but to galloping inflation, violent crime, illegal guns, crumbling bridges, diseases like Covid-19, and a rigged tax system.

"The hard-left politics of the so-called 'Squad' are backfiring big-time," Axios says. The Squad has turned the Democrats' brand toxic in the hinterlands.

No surprise, Squad members and their Congressional aides are refusing to comment on the voter uprising this week. No doubt they're working in closed session on a new name for San Francisco.

How about Graybury?

NOTE: Learn more about the voter uprising this week in San Francisco.

Intel Inside

Aristotle, the father of biology, believed purpose distinguished living things from lifeless matter and that purpose drove the evolution of species.

Rather oddly, he also believed that purpose came from "inside" every creature—that purpose was in fact the cause of the creature.

Aristotle's theory pretty much ruled Westerners' ideas about evolution for 2,400 years, when suddenly Darwin exploded onto the scene in 1859, claiming evolution was random and purposeless.

Now, 163 years after the publication of Darwin's On the Origins of the Species, a new study reveals Aristotle was right all along: there is purpose behind mutations, but it comes both from "inside" and "outside" the creature.

The study shows human genes mutate not randomly, but in response to outside pressures.

The University of Haifa researchers responsible for the study have produced evidence showing that the rate of mutation of the genes that protect us against malaria is faster among Africans than among Europeans.

Because malaria grips Africa more so than Europe, the researchers concluded the genes mutated not by accident, but to help Africans survive the disease.

Darwin's insistence that mutations were random looks wrong.

"The results show the mutation is not generated at random, but instead originates preferentially in the gene and in the population where it is of adaptive significance," one researcher told Science X.

"We hypothesize that evolution is influenced by two sources of information: external information that is natural selection, and internal information that is accumulated in the genome through the generations and impacts the origination of mutations."

Since Darwin's book, scientists have assumed that mutations occur by accident and that natural selection—survival of the fittest—favors beneficial accidents, leading to evolutionary adaptations.

But the new findings suggest otherwise.

"The results suggest that complex information accumulated in the genome through the generations impacts mutation, and therefore mutation-specific origination rates can respond in the long-term to specific environmental pressures," the researcher said. 

"Mutations may be generated nonrandomly in evolution after all."

The study opens doors to reimagining evolution and to curing diseases caused by mutations such as cancer. While lending no credence to creationism, it also makes old Aristotle look pretty smart.

The study appears in Genome Research.