Louisiana Senator Commits Hate Crime During Hate Crime Hearing & Vance Encourages People to Obey Only Laws They Agree With
What I’m Discussing Today:
Kareem’s Daily Quote: A rumination on the most destructive emotion we have: envy.
Donald Trump's Debate Crowd Comment Sparks Confusion: 'They Went Crazy': Trump says the crowd at the debate “went crazy” for him. Except there was no crowd.
Shameless JD Vance Vows to Keep Falsely Calling Haitian Migrants ‘Illegal’: Vance just encouraged Americans to break any laws they disagree with. That’s a leader?
GOP senator insults Arab American advocate at hearing on hate crimes: I have replayed this clip several times because I still find it hard to believe someone this inarticulate and irrational is in the U.S. Senate. Oh, wait…
AOC Embarrasses Teamsters Chief After He Refuses to Endorse Harris: The president of the Teamsters refused to endorse a Democrat for the first time in 20 years. He claims the union is too divided. Looks more like he’s trying to help Trump.
Kareem’s Video Break: Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell show us some elegant tap dancing.
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters”: Turns out that there are a lot of educated people out there who choose to know very little about the candidates. Not how the Founders envisioned an informed citizenry.
Kareem’s Kvetching Korner: Jordan Peterson calls women on the internet “androids.” His reasoning will make you laugh.
What Were They Thinking: ‘Panda Dogs’: Chinese zoo goes viral for luring visitors with painted pups: New feature about amusing, irrational behavior.
JD Souther Sings “You're Only Lonely”: Souther died last week, but his influence on music will last forever.
Kareem’s Daily Quote
The chief barrier to happiness is envy.
Frank Tyger (1929-2011), nationally published editorial cartoonist, columnist and humorist for the Trenton Times.
Envy is the dominant destructive emotion in most people. It’s a tricky emotion in that it can be both healing and lethal. A small dose can motivate a person to excel, but a large dose can lead a person to hop on an endless treadmill of chasing what they can never catch. It’s an addiction that only increasing amounts can satisfy and even then the satisfaction is fleeting and the hunger returns.
While the envy of others is harmful, even more devastating is living one’s life seeking the envy of others. Not only do envy-seekers spend enormous amounts of money on ostentatious homes, clothing, jewelry, and cosmetic surgeries, but so much of their emotional energy is wasted on thinking about how to garner envy and whether or not they’re succeeding. Trump constantly proclaims how rich he is as a way of eliciting envy from those who mistake opulence for intelligence. Worse, he parades his ex-model wives to elicit envy while treating them like prized livestock. The desire to have a spouse or partner others envy is often a detriment to the relationship because the person doesn’t feel valued for who they are, only for their displayed value.
So many pop, rap, and rock songs are about having money and spending it in lavish ways to make themselves “heroes” to the envious fans who also want to be rich. Real Housewives’ main conflicts across the last two decades have boiled down to envy. Either they are envious of others in their group or they are furious when their attempts at eliciting envy fail to bring them happiness.
Envy is inevitable. I’ll watch an NBA game and envy the young legs I no longer have. I’ll read a book and envy the talent of the writer. But I’m also able to shrug those feelings off quickly because they don’t influence me beyond the moment. More importantly, I never strive to have people envy me. I don’t flaunt and I don’t brag (except about my children and grandchildren). I wouldn’t want to be the cause of anyone feeling that what they have or who they are isn’t enough.
Instead, I try to follow my other favorite quote about envy from the 17th-century genius Thomas Browne: “Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.” Well, age has certainly drawn on me.
2024 Election Bites: Lying Liars Edition
Today, I just want to present two examples of wild lies that every person should know are lies, and under ordinary circumstances (in a world where we hold people accountable for lying to the public), these would force every rational person to question both the integrity and cognitive ability of liars. How I long to Make America Rational Again.
Donald Trump's Debate Crowd Comment Sparks Confusion: 'They Went Crazy' (Newsweek)
SUMMARY: Donald Trump has said that when he got fact-checked by moderators during his presidential debate with Kamala Harris, the audience "went crazy." But there was no audience at the debate hosted by ABC.
MY TAKE: This continues Trump’s delusional pattern of claiming his audiences are much larger than they are. But this time, he’s made the odd claim that there was an audience when there wasn’t. Again, he’s either lying or cognitively impaired, either of which should disqualify him from running.
Shameless JD Vance Vows to Keep Falsely Calling Haitian Migrants ‘Illegal’ (The Daily Beast)
SUMMARY: Sen. JD Vance on Wednesday insisted that he will keep calling Haitian immigrants living in his state “illegal aliens,” telling his rally crowd that he does not consider immigrants who legally settled in the United States under programs managed by the Biden Administration—and Vice President Kamala Harris—to be lawful residents.
MY TAKE: Haitian immigrants have come to this country to be safe—like so many immigrants before them—only to be placed in a situation where they receive death threats because of politicians who want to lead the country. What’s especially awful is the fact that Vance is the senator representing these people.
Vance declares legal immigrants to be illegal because he doesn’t like the government programs that helped them. If we follow Vance’s “logic,” then no one is required to follow any laws that were passed by a government with party leadership other than their own. Vance’s wife’s family immigrated from India in the 1980s. If we don’t like the programs that allowed them to come here, can we declare them illegal? That’s what Vance is saying—a form of anarchy in which we get to break any laws we don’t like. How is it that anyone shows up to listen to anything this man says?
GOP senator insults Arab American advocate at hearing on hate crimes (The Washington Post)
SUMMARY: A Senate Republican badgered an Arab American activist Tuesday during a congressional hearing about hate crimes with questions about whether she supported terrorist organizations, finally telling her that she should “hide your head in a bag.”
Sen. John Neely Kennedy of Louisiana questioned Arab American Institute Executive Director Maya Berry during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, asking her whether she supported Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran as she repeatedly told him no. Berry tried to explain how assuming that an Arab American would support a foreign terrorist organization or state was an example of the kind of thinking that leads to hate crimes but was repeatedly cut off by Kennedy.
“I didn’t expect a direct racist attack,” Berry told The Washington Post on Wednesday.
MY TAKE: I’m not sure why Louisiana selected someone so lacking in self-awareness or basic intelligence as their U.S. Senator. One revealing exchange demonstrating Kennedy’s attention span follows him asking Berry if she supported Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia based in Lebanon that the United States has classified as a terrorist organization. Her answer is clear; his response is confusing:
“I don’t support violence, whether it’s Hezbollah, Hamas or any other entity that invokes it, so, no sir,” Berry said.
“You can’t bring yourself to say no, can you?” Kennedy replied with a smile. “You just can’t bring yourself to do it.”
Uh, she clearly just said no, but Kennedy had an agenda and her answer didn’t follow his script so he ignored her and returned to his badgering.
The title of the hearing was “A Threat to Justice Everywhere: Stemming the Tide of Hate Crimes in America.” Yet, Kennedy proved why the hearing was necessary by assuming that Berry, because she headed the Arab American Institute, supported terrorism. He offered no evidence, just accusations based on heritage, which is the definition of a hate crime. This made Kennedy part of the statistics of hate crime:
Hate crimes against Arabs and Jews have spiked in the United States. Berry, who co-chairs the Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights hate crimes task force, told lawmakers that while hate crimes ticked up 7 percent between 2022 and last year, those against Arabs and Jews spiked by 73 percent and 58 percent, respectively.
Kennedy then asked Berry again if she supported Hamas, which she again denied, to which he said, “‘You can’t bring yourself to say don’t support UNRWA, you don’t support Hamas, you don’t support Hezbollah and you don’t support Iran,’ Kennedy said, incorrectly. ‘You should hide your head in a bag.’” Don’t terrorists put a bag over the heads of people they kidnap? Isn’t Kennedy assuming the role of a terrorist in this exchange?
Berry responded that it was “regrettable that I, as I sit here, have experienced the very issue that we're attempting to deal with today.” Like most perpetrators of hate crimes, Kennedy is clueless about what really happened. Really, Louisiana, this is the best you can do?
FYI: Looks like Louisiana can’t do any better. Days after their U.S. Senator made a fool of himself in a hearing, one of their U.S. House Representatives released a racist post. Republican Rep. Clay Higgins:
Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters…but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their *ss out of our country before January 20th.
The Haitians that Higgins is threatening are actually the victims of lies perpetuated by Trump and Vance. So, Higgins wants to drive the victims of death threats and bomb threats out of the country because his candidate put their lives in danger. Yes, he removed the offending post after a huge backlash, but the damage is done. More importantly, he outed himself as a vile racist with no concept of what America stands for—and not enough intelligence to know when to keep his LOLs to himself.
As for Louisiana, who they elect to Congress is one of the reasons, according to U.S. News & World Report, they rank 50th among the states.
AOC Embarrasses Teamsters Chief After He Refuses to Endorse Harris (The New Republic)
SUMMARY: Teamsters President Sean O’Brien isn’t happy that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized the union for refusing to endorse Kamala Harris for president. On Thursday, in response to her comments, he made the spurious claim that the Teamsters in AOC’s district overwhelmingly support Donald Trump.
Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash, O’Brien said, “[Ocasio-Cortez] should maybe get into her district, where it voted far-right Republican, and maybe find out what the problem is.”
Bash asked the union president what he meant, to which O’Brien responded, “In our polling, New York, her district, voted overwhelmingly Republican to support former President Trump, so she may want to focus on her job instead of mine.”
While that sound bite was highlighted by the Trump campaign on X (formerly Twitter), O’Brien’s statement was quickly disproven by the fact that Teamsters Local 202 in New York’s 14th District in the Bronx endorsed Ocasio-Cortez Thursday, which the congresswoman was happy to post on X herself.
MY TAKE: The reason this is big news is that the Teamsters have endorsed Democratic presidential candidates since 1996. This is the first time they refused to back any candidate. Added to that, all the other major unions have endorsed Harris. So, what happened?
O’Brien claims, “Unfortunately, neither major candidate was able to make serious commitments to our union to ensure the interests of working people are always put before Big Business.” This makes no sense. Clearly, one party has done more for labor than the other.
The fact that O’Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention indicates his personal preference, but he knows if he endorsed Trump, there would be serious backlash from his members. There already is: “Teamsters local chapters across the country, with several in key battleground states subsequently endorsing the Harris-Walz ticket. After the Teamsters president spoke at the Republican National Convention in July, rank-and-file members spoke from the Democratic National Convention stage to voice their support for Harris. The union’s National Black Caucus also voted unanimously to endorse the vice president.”
James P. Hoffa, who led the International Brotherhood of Teamsters for 23 years, criticized O’Brien’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race as a “critical error,” adding that Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was the “correct choice for labor and working families.”
How does not endorsing a candidate help their union members—or America?
Kareem’s Video Break
This tap dance duet, which becomes a dance-off, is from Broadway Melody of 1940. The movie is before my time—84 years ago—but it showcases how great artistry is timeless. The joy and lightness they bring to their movements help me move through my day a little more joyful and a little lighter.
AMONG AMERICA’S “LOW-INFORMATION VOTERS” (The New Yorker)
SUMMARY: …In April, NBC News released the results of a poll that looked at how a thousand respondents consumed political news, and how they planned to vote. At the time, Biden was the overwhelming favorite among people who read newspapers, watched network news, and followed online news sites. Trump, meanwhile, led among those who frequently got their information from social media, cable news, and YouTube. The poll also showed that Trump most dominated among a subset of people described as “low-information voters.” Definitions of this group vary among experts, some of whom begin by pointing to the ubiquity of ignorance…
Joshua Kalla, a professor of political science at Yale, notes that being low-information is not necessarily a problem. A better question is whether voters know about the specific things that matter to them. “You may think, incorrectly, that the 2020 election was stolen—but, if you know which party will cut your taxes and that’s all you care about, then does it matter?” Kalla asked. “The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.
…By 2016, [Richard Fording, a professor of political science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa] told me, low-information voters appeared to be moving to the right. (His analysis specifically examined white low-information voters, whom he defined as those unable to correctly answer two of the three following questions: how long is a U.S. senator’s term, which party currently controls the House, and which party controls the Senate.) “Trump’s whole playbook was to attract these people,” Fording stated. Low-information voters, he found, are more likely to embrace stereotypes of other groups, and less likely to fact-check claims made by politicians. “Trump was kind of the perfect candidate for them,” he said. After the “Access Hollywood” tape leaked, and voters largely stuck with Trump, Fording dug deeper into the low-information category. He came across a metric in psychology called the “need for cognition” scale. “A question that really caught my attention on the scale is an agree or disagree: ‘Thinking is not my idea of fun,’ ” Fording recalled. He and a colleague ran a study to see whether agreement with the statement correlated with support for Trump. It did.
…Americans have been believing bad information since long before birtherism, or the idea that the 2020 election was stolen. How many people, Schleicher asked me, believe conspiracy theories about the assassination of J.F.K.? “More than you’d think,” he said. But, he cautioned, “this does not mean people are stupid.” He brought up Joseph Schumpeter, the famous Austrian economist and political scientist from the nineteen-thirties, who found that many people demonstrate a high degree of intelligence in their day-to-day business affairs, but suddenly sound like fools when they talk about politics. Schumpeter wondered why. “The answer is they have incentives to know something about their business,” Schleicher said. “And their incentive to know specifics about politics is extremely weak.”
The stakes, in any case, are high. “Lower-information voters may only account for a one- or two-point difference in this election, in the end,” Schleicher said. “But that could be decisive.”
MY TAKE: The key statement above is “many people demonstrate a high degree of intelligence in their day-to-day business affairs, but suddenly sound like fools when they talk about politics.” This is why when you talk politics with some educated but highly specialized people like doctors, lawyers, scientists, and business owners, they clearly don’t know what they are talking about. The tools used to become successful in their careers are abandoned because they wrongfully assume that they don’t need to apply those skills of information gathering and logical analysis. They have proven themselves smart in their careers and arrogantly believe that their opinions about everything are as valuable as their opinions in their professions. It’s even worse when they then choose to spread their ignorance by getting actively involved in politics, like Trump and Elon Musk. They want to be kings, they want to be admired, and they want to be worshipped.
The other problem is that low-information voters are often single-issue voters, meaning they only care about one issue such as abortion or immigration. The main problem with that is that they often don’t really know much about that issue, just that it makes them feel moral to take their position. Also, government is about a lot more than a singular issue. For example, by supporting a candidate just because they support restricting abortion, the voter misses issues about the economy, education, immigration, censorship, women’s rights, institutional racism, and so much more. That’s like dressing your child for school in clean underwear—but nothing else.
Kareem’s Kvetching Korner
This is where I can indulge my pettiness about minor things that bug me but aren’t worth getting outraged about.
Someone sent me an Instagram post by cyzorgg, a charming photographer and content creator, in which he playfully but logically shreds Jordan Peterson’s strange, misogynistic post (above). I was so disturbed by Peterson’s irrational thinking and the fact that he has almost 9 million Instagram followers and 5 million X followers, that it had to be shared. His premise is that women who use the internet to promote sexual content (as in OnlyFans) aren’t women, they’re androids (he means cyborgs, but let’s let that slide). He seems oblivious to the fact that he’s using social media to denounce these women, which makes him an “android.” He’s trying hard to go all Scarlet Letter on women. This is a modern take on, “Cover yourself up and act like a lady.”
This would all be very amusing if he didn’t influence millions of young men with his pseudo-intellectual nonsense to be as misogynistic as he is.
What Were They Thinking?
Another new section that I will present when the occasion arises, that features baffling things that people do that defy reason.
‘Panda Dogs’: Chinese zoo goes viral for luring visitors with painted pups (CNN)
A zoo in China has admitted its star attraction, two so-called pandas, are just painted dogs.
The fluffy Chow Chow dogs painted to resemble the country’s beloved national animal were seen in a video shot by a visitor to the zoo in southern Guangdong province.
…In May, a zoo in eastern Jiangsu province sparked outrage after visitors discovered it painted two dogs black and white to resemble pandas. Following widespread criticism, the zoo admitted the ruse.
MY TAKE: This deception isn’t limited to just one zoo. How did the zoo officials who came up with this scheme not realize that they would eventually be caught? Visitors have been demanding their money back for false advertising. One zoo official tried to backtrack by saying the animals were actually a rare breed of “panda dog,” a breed that doesn’t exist and doesn’t explain why they are dyed. Let the head-shaking begin.
Kareem’s Jukebox Playlist
JD Souther: “You're Only Lonely” (1979)
J.D. Souther died last week and I wanted to pay tribute to him with his most famous recording. Souther was much more influential on other artists in the seventies than his solo career indicated. He helped write several of the Eagles’ hits, including “New Kid in Town” and “Heartache Tonight.” He worked with James Taylor, Bob Seger, Roy Orbison, Christopher Cross, and Bonnie Raitt. He was romantically involved with Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, and Stevie Nicks.
His songs tended to be a fusion of rock and country. “You’re Only Lonely” isn’t a breakthrough song with deep, meaningful lyrics like the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” but it’s a sweet love song made convincing by Souther’s gentle, soaring voice. Nothing wrong with a sweet love song on occasion.
This morning you brought me a lot of information, Kareem, some of which I had completely missed. The fake “doctor” for instance who seems completely unhinged. I’m glad you included the link to sanity as an antidote. I’m very impressed by your wide-ranging interests and ability to shine far beyond your legendary athletic ability. Peace and Love.
Re Envy - I once watched the Dalai Llama interviewed on Australian TV. He was asked what was the secret to happiness. His answer was that it was the to stop wanting things. There were two ways to achieve this - firstly to get everything you want, which is impossible as you will then want more, or secondly, to teach yourself to stop wanting things.
I always took this message to mean stop envying others and be happy with what you have and have achieved. I have tried to live my life by this creed ever since and I can attest I am far happier than I have ever been. Since that interview, I have married, had a child, built a career in a profession I love and now can generally say I want for nothing. Who can ask for more than that?