Think Trump is crazy? Check out Brazil’s current president

You have to hand it to would-be dictator wannabes, especially the right-wing variety: no law is too sturdy to break in the quest of carrying out a personal agenda. It is being reported that Donald Trump is willing break any and all laws to get his “wall” finished by the next election; any underling afraid to go to jail for him need not worry—he will pardon them. Of course, Trump’s isn’t exactly fulfilling his “promise” to his racist supporters; “Build the Wall” is actually more like “Build that barrier of poles with the black heat-absorbing paint with those pointy things on top.” Isn’t quite as “catchy,” is it? Trump and those who are formulating and enforcing his immigration policy claim that they are not doing so out of a racist impulse, but note that they never once confer any humanity in the migrants; they are just “vermin” that must be eradicated—and most of Trump’s supporters share this viewpoint. Does the U.S. already have too many people? It has the same land mass as China and twice that of India, yet both of those countries have more than four times the population of the U.S. The recent immigration raids in Mississippi only prove that the U.S. still has a desperate need for allegedly “low-skill” labor—legal or not (yeah, let’s see if a “high-skill” immigrant from Asia or a caste-conscious Indian can or will do that work). Trump and his supporters’ stupidity and bigotry is even more obvious by the deliberate misinformation campaign concerning what the so-called “diversity” lottery actually is.

Trump isn’t exactly alone in demonizing immigrants. Take, for instance, his counterpart in Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro. He opined that “We do agree with President Trump’s decision or proposal on the wall. The vast majority of potential immigrants do not have good intentions. They do not intend to do the best or do good to the US people,” which echoes Trump’s claims that other countries don’t send their “best,” just dump their “criminals” in this country. Bolsonaro, like Trump, claims he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body, but most Brazilians know this isn’t true, and most of the people know very well that their country has a deeply-rooted race problem—meaning they didn’t care if Bolsonaro is a racist or not when they voted for him. In fact many Brazilian prefer to believe that he is just being “playful” whenever he makes deliberately dehumanizing comments about nonwhites.

But he isn’t being “playful” when he refers to nonwhites in Brazil as “garbage,” and has admitted in an interview that he would refuse to have a nonwhite surgeon operate on him, or be a passenger on a plane if there was a nonwhite pilot flying it (I kind of wonder how many white Americans—let alone Trump—feels the same way). His public comments concerning indigenous peoples living in the Amazon indicate that he just sees them getting in the way of “business,” and he has often declared his contempt for indigenous rights. In a 1998 interview he expressed his unhappiness that the military forces of the descendants of Portuguese settlers had not been as “efficient” in eradicating native peoples as the U.S. Cavalry supposedly was.  

When John Oliver warned us on his HBO show that Brazilians were threatening to elect this lunatic as its president, I’m sure that nearly all of his listeners had no clue of or cared who Bolsonaro was. But it wasn’t like voters in Brazil had no clue who he was; Bolsonaro is very much like Trump in many ways, and none so obvious as the fact that he has a history of saying the most outrageously racist, sexist, homophobic  and ignorant things in general without ever appearing to suffer from it. He was elected for much the same reasons that Trump was—that voters were looking to “shake things up” after its last few presidents were convicted on corruption charges, and were content to play Russian Roulette with the country’s future—and as a result the most recent polling indicates that Brazilians are having “buyers’ remorse,” with his administration’s disapproval numbers worse than Trump’s, and 40 percent alone calling Bolsonaro’s own performance as president “terrible”—and he has only been in office since January. 

Brazilians have tended to vote for center/left candidates for president since the end of the country’s infamous right-wing military dictatorship, and now many are remembering why. Bolsonaro has looked with “nostalgia” upon the “glorious” military regime in Brazil, only criticizing it for not going far enough in the engagement of torture and murder of left-wing opponents.  He even admits to daydreaming about his expectation of a “civil war” and not repeating such “mistakes.” His socially right-wing bent is not merely racist and ragingly homophobic (a subject he has talked about so often because, it appears, he fears his own sons might be infected by the “gay” bug), but his commentary concerning what is or isn’t permissible when dealing with women is positively Trump-like as will. When questioned by a woman, whether a reporter or a political opponent, about past comments concerning the permissibility of rape, he typically responds by claiming that she shouldn’t worry about him raping her because she is too “ugly.” 

Bolsonaro has also decried that military police did not kill more prisoners in the infamous 1992 Carandiru prison massacre, an incident which still excites angry memories among Brazilians. Initially it began after a brawl broke out during a prisoner soccer match, which quickly got out of hand and around 2,000 prisoners became involved, armed with brickbats of various sorts. Only 15 guards were present, which tells of the laxity of security at the prison.  Because of the impossibility of controlling the situation, the prison director contacted the local military police for help; the result was that 111 prisoners were killed, despite the fact that not one police officer was even wounded. An investigation revealed that those who died were most likely simply shot dead on the spot, including those who were found only wounded (only 37 initially wounded survived). Also, some of the wounded were killed when police dogs were unleashed on them. It was also determined that most of those killed were likely in defensive postures. What is more, the prisoners themselves were not even “convicts,” but being detained on various charges. Although a number of police were eventually convicted on murder charges, none of them actually served time; a judge voided all charges since, according to him, they acted in “self-defense.” The evidence, however, showed that they just walked in with guns blazing. One of the results of the massacre was that prison gangs, rather than fighting each other, found a “common purpose” in turning their attentions to the police. 

Crime—especially violent crime—is a serious problem in Brazil, but like many problems it is due not just to social environment and economic disparities, but just plain short-sighted stupidity, which far-right extremists like Bolsonaro have shown a “talent” for. During the period of military dictatorship, politically-left militants were imprisoned with common criminals. The result of this was that criminals with gang tendencies who generally committed their crimes haphazardly learned the value of “organization” and the usefulness of governing gang behavior by “laws” which they applied to themselves to keep members in “line”—in or out of prison. The 1994 crime bill sponsored by the Clinton administration which greatly expanded the prison population and lengthened sentences can be argued to have had the same effect in this country. Bolsonaro has claimed a “preference” for just killing as many criminals as “legally” as possible, but this “solution” is typical of those who helped create the problem in the first place—just as it was the U.S. who created the gang problem in Central America by “deporting” gang members incubated in the U.S. to those countries; it is with terrible irony to note that most of the asylum seekers from Central America are doing so out of fear of a problem whose fault lies entirely at the doorstep of this country.

But the view of  “Captain Chainsaw,” as enunciated by former government minister Rubens Ricupero, as “the most despised and detested leader on earth” is due to his environmental record, particularly in regard to the preservation of the Amazon rainforest. Although the total area of forest destruction typical in a year sounds “small” compared the seeming vastness of the Amazon—about the area of Delaware destroyed out of the total area of about half of the continental U.S.—this all adds-up in time. People might believe that because it rains for most of the year in the Amazon that it “naturally” regenerates, but that is not exactly true. The amount of rain is largely due to the process of evapotranspiration, which provides the sky above a continuous source of precipitation during the long rainy season. But at some point if the current degree of forest destruction continues, not only will the rain “stop,” but in its place will be the release of vast amounts of stored carbon dioxide, which the Amazon is currently the largest absorber of. What this means is that instead of mitigating global warming, it will be one of the worst contributors to the problem, not just initially from the level of burning which has turned day into night in many cities near these uncontrolled fires.

While the current degree of deforestation due to burning is not unprecedented, the reason for it is. Nearly all fires in the Amazon are started by deliberate human design during the relatively brief “dry period,” which farmers, loggers and ranchers take advantage of with a vengeance. Most of this burning and forest clearing is technically illegal in Brazil, but Bolsonaro has made it de facto policy to ignore this burning in the name of “economic growth.” The new governmental attitude of indifference toward burning has had its effect: despite no different weather-related factors as in 2018, since Bolsonaro took office in 2019 the number of fires has already more than doubled. There is no question about “cause and effect” here. Bolsonaro, like Trump, has also shown contempt for science; when his own environmental minister tried to talk sense to him, he was fired, and when presented with photographic evidence from Brazil’s own government satellites of the extent of the fires, Bolsonaro still claimed it was all “lies.”

Bolsonaro has been engaged in an ongoing feud with French president Emmanuel Macron—who has made the environment a personal issue—but in general he has had only one “ally” globally in this foolishness: Trump.  Right-wing contempt for environmental issues isn’t new, of course. While Richard Nixon tried to court liberal support with a progressive environmental agenda, that changed with the Reagan administration. Interior secretary James Watt was literally just waiting for the “end of the world,” while Ann Gorsuch and Rita Lavelle ran the EPA as if it were a corporate cost-cutting department. But while Trump’s attitude toward the environment is equal parts due to his lack of empathy for the party effected (like those “Mexicans” in Puerto Rico) or because of his prior beef with environmental regulators, Bolsonaro just seems to want to be contrary and takes glee at upsetting as many people as he can.

Bolsonaro has in recent days been forced to take a more “conciliatory” attitude toward those demanding action over his inaction in combatting the burning, claiming he will accept assistance from other countries if they stop criticizing him, but more so because Brazilian public opinion has turned sharply against him. That is one thing that can be said about him in his “favor”: instead of calling it “fake news,” he actually takes bad poll numbers seriously, if nothing else.

The awful truth about Amazon “customer service”

Whenever you contact a business’ customer service call center, you  do so in the belief that they are going to “fix” the problem you are calling them about—at least once you get around their menu “options.” I find that one way of getting around this is just shouting into the phone the words “customer service” over the interminable yada this and that. If you have a “technical” issue, like the bank putting a hold on your account because of “suspicious activity” or have computer issues that you are too enfeebled to find out how to fix yourself (I stopped calling computer “tech” support because I usually found I actually knew more than the “tech” guy did), then customer service may be something actually useful. 

But if you have questions about the shipment or delivery of an item you ordered—particularly if the item isn’t ordered, packaged and shipped from a location that also has “in-house” customer service—you might have some “problems” that the level of cooperation between customer service and customer has nothing to do with. Sometimes it takes a while for you to discover this “awful truth.” 

Take, for instance, Amazon. Now, I know that some people may be frustrated by the fact that whenever they contact Amazon customer service, they are usually patched in to a call center in India and encounter people who do not understand American “idioms”—especially ones that denote significant levels of displeasure. You can make an inquiry regarding the current status of a “prime” shipment that has been “shipping now” for 24 hours, and instead of helping put the “now” into the now, they “assist” you by offering to cancel the order and issue a refund, prompting some pulling of the hair about the “misunderstanding” between what the customer asked and what customer service “understood.”

If you wonder why an AMZL “prime” package that is supposed to be delivered on that day, and it still has not moved from the distribution warehouse after 14 hours, you can decide to “chat” with someone who does just one thing: read the same tracking information that you have access to, and if you demand more “help” they have someone from a “logistics” center call you—who says nothing more than what you have already been told by the other person, or what you already read yourself on the order information/tracking page. And if your phone number has been put on an Amazon “block” list, you won’t even have the “satisfaction” of hearing this bullshit in person.

But if you think that speaking to a “native” American will improve the quality of customer service, think again, because that is the person you are forwarded to by the Indian call center, and is also just as “helpless.” Take this wonderful experience that has been repeated ad nauseam. If an AMZL (which is Amazon’s “in-house” local delivery system) package is to be delivered in Seattle, it goes to a distribution center in Renton, where it is sorted and loaded onto a “prime” truck or given to a “freight forwarder”—usually just some guy in his POV. It is important the time that the package actually arrives at the distribution center; 2 AM is the “optimal” time for a package to go “out for delivery” relatively “early”—meaning between 7 and 9 AM. If a package arrives in Renton “early” it not only won’t necessarily leave with the first loads, in fact it is more likely to be buried somewhere beneath the mountain of other packages. If a package arrives too late—which is a frequent occurrence when an order originates from the Kent Fulfillment Center just down the highway—then you can just wait and expect something to happen, or not. Often, not.

I discovered the truth about how low one’s expectations should be when they deal with Amazon customer service recently when I simply became fed-up with the uselessness of their “chat” option, and what the “alternative” was. After 14 hours of a package sitting in Renton and still not out for delivery, I went online to try the “chat” service to get things moving along, since there was a finite time where eventual delivery was possible. I should have known it was pointless, but I had to vent my frustration to someone. As usual, I began the “chat” by explaining the problem, and then someone with an Indian name eventually responded. After the “apologies” I was prompted to supply my phone number to be “connected” with “logistics,” and the customer service person went off-line, figuring they had served the “purpose” expected of them.  Except that I never receive the call. I stay on the chat line and repeat this over and over again; when I tell the next people that I was not connected to logistics, and never am, and ask them why they don’t find out what the issue instead of making the customer “fix” the problem, I am told their hands are tied, and they abandon you, if I choose not accept that as the final “word,” I can stay on and allow the next customer service person in line to not handle the problem. 

One day I decided that the complete pointlessness of the “chat” option required a different action, meaning calling them directly. I was prompted to provide my phone number, whereas I discovered why I never seemed to get connected to logistics via the chat option: Amazon had blocked my phone number from receiving calls. I had only been in contact with “logistics” a few times, and apparently it had been determined that I was someone who they didn’t want to talk to anymore, because I just wouldn’t accept incompetence as a “solution.” I was then prompted to call a general service number, and someone actually answered the phone. This person at least betrayed some surprise that there had been no updated tracking on a package that was supposed to be delivered on that day for over 14 hours and well after the first deliveries went out. When I asked him about the various methods he could deploy to at least “expedite” the process, this is what he told me:

1. Amazon customer service is not equipped to investigate irregularities in the shipping and delivery process; they can not personally contact the facilities or warehouses an order originated at or was sorted for delivery, not even via email addresses, let through alone phone contact numbers. They only have ability to replace or refund orders determined to be lost or damaged. 

2. When the initial customer service person agrees to send you to the “next level,” they are essentially just “passing the buck” to someone who will merely tell you what you already had been told—which is exactly what you read on the tracking information on the order page.  What you could read yourself is all they know too. The Amazon “logistics” call center that is this “next level” for shipping and delivery inquiries in regard to AMZL shipments (USPS, UPS and Fedex have their own customer service), also has no direct access to the points of shipment or the delivery processing warehouses, so they too can do nothing to find out why a package is late, or if it is “lost.” They too can only respond to an issue by either authorizing a replacement or issue a refund after the fact—when all you want is to get the damn order on the “guaranteed” delivery date.

What this all means of course is that it is completely pointless to contact Amazon customer service about any concerns you have about an order except cancel it before it gets into the shipping process; after that, it is out of yours and customer service's hands, and only when an order is determined to be “lost” can anything anything “useful” be done--and sometimes even more damage can be done if someone from an Indian call center “misinterprets” your inquiry. Still, something “positive” did of course arise from this last particular contact: that I need not further waste my time wasting time talking to Amazon customer service. What a load off my shoulders; now I can just simmer and stew knowing there is absolutely nothing I or anyone can do about it.

Amazon does have one other “option” for non-delivery problems, which is the modify “delivery instructions” module, which surely must be read by someone at the delivery warehouse, and I have found this to be a “useful” avenue in which to vent frustration, and a few times it may even have worked. Or not.

The question in the Epstein case: At what age must one be to know one's own mind?

For most of human history, if a person reached the age of 30 that was considered to be an “advanced” age; only some of the nobility and other privileged classes who lived in more comfortable conditions could expect to live longer. Because of low life expectancy and high infant mortality, an adolescent was no longer considered as such once he or she hit puberty; they were considered de facto “adults” at that time. Only those from the upper classes could afford to “wait” a few years longer. This only really changed upon the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the dramatic medical breakthroughs in combatting various diseases, which allowed longer life expectancies for even the working poor.  

This brings me to issue of when does a person start to know their own mind. Do you remember when you were 14 years old—when most “kids” are freshmen in high school? Even at the age of 13? When I was in 8^th grade at a Catholic grade school, as “older” students my classmates didn’t view themselves as “kids” anymore. They thought, acted and behaved as their parents did, or were allowed to. All knew the value of money, and a few had part-time summer jobs when they did not receive “allowances” from their parents (I never did). My adolescence and teenage years were for the most part a miserable affair, mainly because my introverted nature (and constant fear of punishment on the slightest whim) was “interpreted” and acted upon as if it was evidence of delinquency—an “easy” inference because of my “ethnic” appearance even within my own family. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t have the capacity for independent thought, or was incapable of finding ways to mitigate my circumstances. If my mother thought I was taking advantage of a brief period of “kindness” when I asked for a cookie, I would bake my own batch—until the family came back home unexpectedly one day, and as before I was forced to spend evenings in the barn until I was called in for bedtime. 

Anyways, if you try “explaining” to a 13 or 14 year old in this social media world that they don’t know their own mind, they will probably tell you to mind your own business. It is only the flick of a switch later when an “innocent child” is old enough to carry a gun into a war zone—and not necessarily a “war” in another country. “Kids” have even been charged as adults when they kill with guns in the commission of a crime. Most people are inclined to say that they are too young to know the difference between right and wrong, but if children reach their teenage years without knowing the difference, who is to blame for that? They should know by then, because if they don’t, that means that there will be serious problems with continuance of civilization as we know it.

I have to tell you that while many issues—race, the environment, gun control, and political malfeasance—were as alive 50 years ago as they are today if not even more so, certain other elements of social discourse have changed dramatically since I was young, especially in regard to the “special victims” movement. I purchased all six seasons of Time-Life’s release of Laugh-In, a popular show which ran on television from1967 to 1972, and I have to admit that contrary to what more jaded viewers today may think, it was astonishingly more “adult” than what people see on network television today not just in its political and social commentary, but in its frequent use of sexual “innuendo,” which back in a more open-minded time was considered fair game for mirth. However, the so-called “sexual revolution,” it seems to me, only lasted as long as Laugh-In was on the air, before the feminist “revolution” set in and “sex” became something of a crime, depending upon one’s interpretations and what their motivations are as much as the actual facts—particularly when people with fame, power and especially money are involved.

But we live in a nation of laws, and when it comes to questions of maturity or self-awareness there is no distinction when those under the age of 18 are involved. This is not always evenly applied; boys as young as 12 or 13 who have had sexual relationships with adult women are generally considered more “lucky” than “victims,” even though adult women are obviously taking advantage of their natural “curiosity.” Some of these women are allowed to believe that they did not do anything “wrong.” Mary Kay Letourneau is only one of many recent examples, and in another famous case, actress Gloria Grahame (best known as the “bad girl” of film noir) didn’t seem to have suffered overmuch after she had sex with her 13-year-old stepson Anthony Ray (who did go on record to confirm what had been only a “rumor”), and a few years after the end of her marriage to his father, director Nicolas Ray, married him—since they were no longer technically “related.”  

But when teenage girls or even “young women” are involved, another switch is turned on. The New York Times has printed a story concerning the judge in the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal case allowing his accusers to tell their stories in open court. Those who were legally underage were indeed victims not just because that is what the law says they are, but their lack of awareness of the realities of the world did not allow them to take a “holistic” view of how society deems the situation they found themselves in—which is what we must say in order to deny them the ability to say that they knew exactly what they were doing, even as just teenagers.

Am I being slightly “cynical” here?  Why not? Are the accusers completely “blameless” in their own victimhood? The Times notes that Epstein and some of his “employees” procured teenage girls and young women for money—meaning they were paid to “perform” either with him or with his “guests.” Furthermore

He then engaged in sex acts with the girls during naked massage sessions, prosecutors said, paying them hundreds of dollars in cash each time. Mr. Epstein also encouraged some of his victims to recruit additional girls who were then abused, allowing him to maintain ‘a steady supply of new victims to exploit,’ the indictment had charged.

Am I the only person who doesn’t see something “amiss” here? Certainly had he lived to stand trial, Epstein’s attorneys would have pounced on what I am gleaning here, successfully or not. Did these teenage girls and “young women” actually see themselves as “victims” at the time, or in fact did they allow themselves to be “persuaded” to do it for the money? They were being paid hundreds of dollars for each “performance,” probably more money than they ever saw in their life at the time, and that just maybe it was not all that hard to “persuade” a friend by letting her in on the cash cow they found, regardless of what was asked of them to do. Were these “persuaders” not themselves complicit in what is being charged as sex-trafficking? They couldn’t have been completely uncomprehending of what they were doing and why—especially since they were not “forced” to do it.

Insofar as the Epstein case is concerned, the “MeToo” movement and its ilk has allowed at least a few women to re-interpret what they did and call themselves “victims.” In this case the law says they are victims, at least those who were legally underage; but in general did they actually see themselves as such at time? Or is this hypocritical after-the-fact remorse that they were on the wrong side of the current gender politics debate? It can’t be any more hypocritical than all those women who have accused Donald Trump but have never filed criminal or civil actions against him; if they were not such hypocrites, Trump’s name would be in the waste bin of history where it belongs, instead of wreaking havoc on the whole country.

The Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the carnage wrought by the Second Amendment, and it is our duty to "amend" that mistake

Donald Trump is so obsessed with his own self-aggrandizement that he believes that it is those fanatics who attend his campaign rallies who are the ones who write the history books. There is a reason why they are the “forgotten” people who are only taken seriously insofar as how much damage they cause to civil discourse. The white Arkansas woman who held four black high school football players—who were selling discount cards door-to-door to raise funds for the school athletic department—at gunpoint, and the racist white man who drove his black pick-up truck right into the bicycle lane inches from where I was standing waiting for a bus, honking his horn at the “Mexican” (a clearly deliberate act because he shortly thereafter drifted into the left turn lane), are  typical of the kind of people who are the real formulators of “policy” in the Trump administration.  These are the people best ignored and left forgotten, but Trump won’t let us, because those are the only people he listens to.

And so it was no “surprise” that Trump backed off his suggestion of stronger background checks for gun purchases after just one call from one of those far-right fanatics, the NRA’s chief propagandist and nut-job, Wayne LaPierre. It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of Americans want some kind of gun control legislation after another weekly massacre; inflaming the paranoia of gun fanatics is enough to ditch anything resembling common sense. Gun control is not a “new” thing; it was discussed during the height of the crime sprees during the 1930s when the likes of Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde and other criminals out-gunned law enforcement. It was an issue during the 60s; on The Smothers Brothers show, Pat Paulsen did one of his “public service” editorials in which he “advocated” for gun rights, deadpanning that “If you are old enough to get arrested, you are old enough to own a gun,” before he accidentally “shot” one of the television crew. Laugh-In's inaugural "Fickle Finger of Fate" award was given to the U.S. Congress, for "ignoring the wishes of 200 million Americans" and refusing to pass gun control legislation.

There are those who decry anti-gun sentiment as a “phenomenon” that didn’t appear until the 20^th century. Perhaps the reason for this, as already suggested, is that the firepower of privately-owned weapons increased dramatically both in efficacy and lethality. Why don’t gun fanatics ever stop to think that if the “founding fathers” had a crystal ball and could see all the  carnage that the Second Amendment has allowed, and that none of it is has anything to do with preserving democratic principles or battling “tyranny,” that they would have had at the very least second thoughts about the vague wording of the amendment that has allowed fanatics to define it by the widest possible “interpretation”? 

Maybe what we need is an amendment “amending” the Second Amendment. It is not “unprecedented,” after all; the Prohibition amendment—which was the cause of so much violence among bootleggers and gangsters—was eventually repealed. The Second Amendment was passed at a time when guns were slow to load, inaccurate and still used to hunt game for sustenance. No “founding father” was alive to witness the carnage of the Civil War, nor could they have imagined one gunman killing 50 or more people in a matter of minutes. If they could see what we see today, who could doubt that they would have changed the amendment to reflect a reality that they could not have possibly imagined? Since they could not foresee it, it is our duty to amend their mistake.