Juneteenth and Father’s Day

Today is June 19th, the day known as ‘Juneteenth’, the anniversary of the day when the news of the emancipation of slaves finally reached Texas in 1865. Although Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, enforcement of it in the secessionist states had to await the arrival of the Union army and Texas was the most remote part of the Confederacy. It was declared a federal holiday last year and tomorrow will be the first time the holiday will be celebrated as a national holiday though it has long been celebrated in the African-American community.

Today is also Father’s Day, one of the many ‘special’ days that the retail industry in the US loves to publicize and that are used to drive shopping. Naturally I ignore it.

My own father died over four decades ago. He was a wonderful man, kind and generous and always willing to do anything for his children. We had a great relationship but it was not manifested in long conversations or gift giving. Father’s Day was not a thing in Sri Lanka but if it were and if my father and I did talk on the phone, the conversation would be pretty much like the one below.

(Baby Blues)

Anti-transgender fears used as wedge to drive anti-LGBTQ+ policies

The LGBTQ+ community had made great strides in recent times in gaining more equality, the chief achievements being the decriminalization of homosexual activities and the legalization of same-sex marriages. The anti-gay groups who warned that greater recognition and acceptance of equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community would lead to a collapse of civilization have seen their fear-mongering being shown to be hollow.

However, now they have seized upon using the transgender community as a vehicle for advancing their hate-filled reactionary agenda.

In Idaho, police recently found 31 members of a white supremacist group packed into the back of a U-Haul truck, apparently on their way to an LGBTQ+ pride event in the town of Coeur d’Alene.

Further west, a crew of Proud Boys interrupted a drag queen event in California, intimidating parents and children and screaming transphobic and homophobic insults. In Texas, a state plagued by anti-trans politics, a group of rightwingers screamed abuse and threatened attendees at an adults-only drag brunch.
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The needless childbirth deaths in US

It is scandalous that the richest country in the world has such a high mortality rate of women giving birth. While politicians and religious people on the right loudly pontificate about how they value life, their words are exposed as hollow when it comes to how little they do to curb the massive number of avoidable deaths that occur when women, especially Black women, give birth and the number who die due to the easy availability of guns.

Samantha Bee discusses how the high rates of childbirth deaths could be easily reduced.

This is one area where having a single payer health care system could make a huge and immediate difference. Spared from the waste and profit motive that plagues the current private health care system, one could easily build small birthing and pre-natal care centers in local communities that provide check ups to pregnant women and doulas and midwives in their neighborhoods that aid in the actual birth. These centers would be much cheaper to run than big hospitals, which is why of course the current system does not do it. There is little profit to be made from providing basic health care to underprivileged groups.

Small steps on gun control but even those are faltering

Following the recent spate of mass shootings, there were very small sign that there might be some movement on enacting gun control measures. Rather than their usual reflexive refusal to even consider that there was a problem that needed to be addressed, the Republican party said that they might be open to taking some measures and some of their senators started negotiations with Democrats on possible legislation.

The framework they came up with was pitifully small in its scope.

The first step in understanding the new legislative framework on gun violence that a bipartisan group of senators agreed to on Sunday is grasping how its Republican participants see it. “This is not about creating new restrictions on law-abiding citizens,” Senator John Cornyn, who led the Republican side, said last week. “It’s about insuring that the system we already have in place works as intended.”

In other words, the Republicans insisted that the current free-for-all essentially be left in place, while accepting some secondary reforms that will not enrage the gun lobby sufficiently to spell doom for their future in the G.O.P. That limited framework means no ban on assault weapons or high-capacity cartridges, which President Biden has repeatedly called for. No direct expansion of background checks to online sales and gun shows, which the senators Joe Manchin and Pat Toomey proposed in 2013. And no equalizing of the age at which young people can buy handguns and semi-automatic rifles. (The age requirement for purchasing handguns from licensed dealers is twenty-one; for rifles, it’s eighteen.)

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When sports is more than about sports

Despite its massive population that is second only to China, India has achieved very modest success in international athletics. This documentary from Al Jazeera looks at a program that seeks to identify promising young athletes in remote tribal areas and then groom them for success at the national and international levels. The documentary focuses on two of them Ravikaran and Nayana. Usain Bolt has been the inspiration for them.

But it is more than about athletics. The success of young people brings about larger changes in their communities. Ravikaran is from a small community known as Siddis who are believed to be descended from slaves from Africa brought to India by the Portuguese, something I had not known about before. They suffer from the same racial and color prejudice that the US is familiar with.

Nayana is from a different community that is also underprivileged. Her success (she was selected to attend an elite coaching program in the US) has opened the eyes of her traditional-minded community and made them realize that girls should have equal access to education and athletics.

The gripping congressional hearings on the events of January 6th

I generally follow US political news fairly closely so you would think that the public hearings on the riot on January 6th would not contain much that is new to me. But I have been impressed at how well put together the hearings have been, with the committee combining live testimony with previous closed-door testimony to lay out a clear and coherent picture of what happened and why. What it laid out was a damning indictment of what a lying, lawless, person Donald Trump is.

What the hearings reveal is that what happened on January 6th was the culmination of a plan hatched by Trump and a few of his close political advisors, based on a hare-brained theory concocted by a lawyer named John Eastman, that Mike Pence had the power to unilaterally overturn the results, a theory that all the legal and other sane people working in the White House and justice department thought was utterly crazy and possibly criminal. They told Eastman and Trump so but they went ahead anyway, which shows criminal intent.
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Satire at the NRA convention

The NRA had its convention right after the school massacre n Uvalde, Texas. At the event, a prankster named Jason Selvig took the opportunity to make a short speech that was ostensibly praising NRA head Wayne LaPierre but was actually a slap at their absurd responses to the massive gun violence in this country. The satire was subtle enough that he was allowed to speak uninterrupted for two minutes and was even applauded by some in the audience but the internet knows satire when it sees it and it has gained wide circulation, with 10 million views on Twitter alone.


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Unexpected recent trend in Covid deaths

David Leonhardt writes about an unexpected recent trend. When it comes to almost any issue in America, the data for people of color, especially Blacks and Hispanics, are worse than for whites. And in the early days of Covid, that dreary pattern emerged once again.

During Covid’s early months in the U.S., the per capita death rate for Black Americans was almost twice as high as the white rate and more than twice as high as the Asian rate. The Latino death rate was in between, substantially lower than the Black rate but still above average.

Minority and marginalized communities tend to have less access to health care and thus the initial trend was regrettable but not unexpected. But recently, there has been a surprising reversal.
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The problem of tech monopolies

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed how four companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon) are each monopolies in one area and how that works against innovations and makes us unable to escape their clutches, and they use their power to suppress any new company that might hope to compete with them.

He argues that we need to invoke anti-trust legislation to break them up. Those companies warn us, as they always do, that they provide good products and services and forcibly breaking them up would harm consumers. Oliver reminds us that AT&T made that same argument when they were a telephone monopoly but that breaking it up resulted in a flood of innovations that we cannot imagine being without now. He makes the point that consumers may have been happy with AT&T because they had no idea what was out there in terms of possible innovations until the monopoly was broken up.

Congressional hearings demolish Trump’s Big Lie

I have been following the congressional hearings on the the events of January 6th, 2021 when hordes of Trump supporters attacked the Capitol building, breaking in and defacing it and stealing property, in their futile effort at stopping Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. They were responding to Trump’s call to action, duped into believing his pathetic and obvious lie that the election had been stolen from him and that he had been re-elected.

One feature that is emerging is that the people who were employed by the White House in any kind of professional capacity, such as his attorney General Bill Barr, lawyers or employees of various governmental agencies and even his campaign manager, kept telling Trump that there was no evidence of massive fraud.
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