Monday, March 18, 2024

March 16, 17, 18

 Sunny today but only slightly above normal temperatures. I didn't do anything outside today and, if the rain the weather people predict will come in tomorrow, I won't do anything outside tomorrow. However, I got some stitching done on the pillow case I have on the hoop. I also cleaned out a notebook and transferred the list of possible books to acquire and read. As I am reading or listening I write down citations or references for later. Sometimes I simply decide that I won't pursue the item. Other things are more interesting. In the process I also tidied up my table caddy so I can easily find things again. It is also a baking day: cornbread to go with the beans and sugar cookies for a late snack. All done now and I am back to reading and cleaning out my e-mail.

First up: Charles Eisenstein's essay on his substack: Machines Will Not Replace Us. I can sympathize with his sentiments. I realized long ago that one of the reasons I like crochet is because it is the only kind of needlework which hasn't made the shift to machine work. There is something about thee pattern of looping threads and pulling thread through the loops that isn't easily mimicked by machines. Also hand stitched pieces have a substance to them that machine made pieces don't have. They are simply flimsy. But I have noticed the same decline in quality of many of the new books coming out. A couple of days ago David Kaiser, who has written a new book on Presidential State of the Union addresses, noted that those addresses we're once designed to propose a program and persuade the audience to support that program. Biden's State of the Union did some of that but it was also constructed around "sound bites" designed for our 24/7 news media which doesn't do depth very well (or at all).

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Happy St. Patrick's Day. Partly cloudy today and a bit below normal temperature--only in the 30s.

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It is cold again and we have flurries with it. There was also a pulse of snow yesterday. I don't expect any of it to stick around.

The "government shutdown watch" has recommenced on the news. I haven't seen much change in the attitudes of either side. We pretty much ignore the news. The "new" news, same as the "old" news. And the "analysis" is the same so why bother.

Caitlin Johnstone posted this depressing piece. It is depressing because it is very accurate.

David Kaiser provides a good overview of the Israel/Palestinian situation with a dollop of history as well. He says something I have thought and our politicians don't want to think: what we think doesn't matter much with the Israeli government. Advice, such as what our government has been giving, is worth its weight in gold. Our government has a problem. It has supported Israel for the last 75 years but now Israel is embarked on a course U.S. policymakers don't agree with. Part of the problem is political because we have a large and vocal population of Palestinian-Americans who still have relatives in Gaza and the West Bank under increasingly difficult (to put it mildly) circumstances. And part of the problem is moral--our politicians expel a lot of hot air on notions of equality, democracy, justice but their actions in both foreign and domestic affairs goes against those high flown sentiments. The U.S. has one lever of influence but our politicians have refused to pull it: the gargantuan amounts of aid we send to Israel. 

Friday, March 15, 2024

March 15

 The weather channel predicts a cool day with clouds in the morning changing to sun in the afternoon. I am still reorganizing the What-not room. That will be a prolonged program. In the mean time I am making progress on the two blankets on the hooks and the four embroidery projects on hoops. I totally sympathize with craft workers who have multiple projects but usually start new ones before all of the WIPs (works in progress) are done. I am trying to bust my stashes by incorporating as much on hand materials into any new project.

I found this post on Medium and was intrigued to see what the author had to say about "saving the planet from your kitchen." As you might guess the topic is "how to reduce food waste." Although we don't have much food waste here, I like seeing what others do. A lot of what the author lists we already do however, I found a few points I disagree with or that we do slightly differently. I have never been good at meal planning beyond two or three days and even then it isn't unusual that a different mean is inserted to the list and the planned meals shifted to a day or two later. Also most of my cooking involves meals that will go multiple days. A couple of days ago we finished off a tuna casserole which lasted three days. Today we are going to finish the taco fixings we had yesterday. Tomorrow we will start on a pot of beans that will go two days with the remaining being frozen in one or two quart jars. The advice to avoid buying flavorings for one dish is good but I would go another step and look at what might substitute for the ingredients I don't have. She suggests that you don't "buy in bulk" and I would suggest that you selectively buy in bulk but limit it to what space you have on hand and how quickly you use the items. We also have (over time) developed a system where when we use the next to last or last item we stock up again. We also resist sales unless we know we are low on something. Having said that most of what is in the article is good advice and my changes wouldn't fit everyone.

Caitlin Johnstone has a good point on Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's response to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's comments on the Senate floor concerning Israel's conduct of the Gaza war. Israel may think of itself as an "independent" nation and a democracy but if so then perhaps they should refuse any future aid of any kind from the U.S. Then they can do what they damned well please. The U.S. should recognize that once the aid is given it is up to the recipient what is done with it and the only real choice we have is to continue the gravy train recognizing we don't have control or stop the aid. I don't support Israel unconditionally and I don't condemn Hamas unconditionally. Neither side is clean.

The House of Representatives passed their bill requiring Byte Dance to sell TikTok or be banned in the U.S. Now it is awaiting action by the Senate. The proponents of the bill cite safety concerns which at the moment are more hypothetical than real--at least as far as the articles I have read. Most of the opponents were concerned with freedom of speech issues and the potential harm for business. I don't use TikTok so I don't have a dog in the fight but I wondered how much harm and how much benefit might come from banning the app. From this article on CNN about the experience of India after they banned it back in 2020 after a border skirmish with Chinese troops I would guess not as much as either side hopes or fears. The ban didn't affect safety either way. And U.S. tech giants stepped in along with local start ups to provide the same services TikTok provided. However, on the negative, the big tech companies quickly ran over the locals. And TikTok customers quickly found new options.

Stray thought: Last night one of the news/comment shows had a piece taking off on the theme of Victor Orban/Donald Trump/strongmen. The reporter asked Republicans at I forget which event about that and several said they were fine with strongman rule and that this country needed such a change. But I notice the reporter never asked a simple question: Why?

Robert Reich asks a question that occurred to me on the TikTok question: who do you trust (or distrust) most China or American Billionaires. I don't trust either. I wondered who would be buying TikTok if Byte Dance had to sell and noticed that one of the possibles shown on one of the news stories (but not named) was Steve Mnuchin who served ignominiously in Trump's cabinet. He is supposed to be trying to put together a consortium of investors. However, how much would TikTok be worth without the algorithms which Byte Dance owns.

Charles Hugh Smith has an amusing but all too accurate post today on "America the Snackable." I said amusing but in a dark way because everything, not just snack foods, has been reduced to empty bites that don't really provide intellectual or physical nutrition.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

March 15

Stormy last night--thunder and lightning with heavy rain. Now it is simply rain coming in waves. Glad I got some of the clean up on the patio done yesterday--including moving my tub of soil and half-bag of potting mix into the shed. No--I didn't get the shed cleaned out. That is for the next dry day. Welcome to half-past March.

Today I hope to make some progress in the What-not Room. I got into getting it reorganized because I remember some partly completed pieces and the pattern books to go with them. I didn't find them in the usual places. Nor did I find them in a few unusual places. So I figured it was time  and--hey--it is Spring.

Naked Capitalism has another set of "Oh, Shit" climate graphs. Think about the fact that as the temperatures rise the GDP goes down.

I linked to an article by Martin Kulldorf yesterday, I think, in which he claims Harvard fired him because he questioned the "company line" on COVID: vaccines, lockdowns, and masks. This article takes his arguments on so I thought I would give you another side of the argument. I found the article annoying. Name calling is never conducive to discussion and neither are snarky barbs. So far nothing I have read convinces me that the vaccines were not effective though perhaps not at the level the early propaganda information from the drug companies gave us. But NO vaccine is totally effective. It is a numbers game: with the vaccine X cases/hospitalizations/deaths vs. without Y cases/hospitalizations/deaths. If X is less than Y then you do get some benefit. All other mitigation measures are judged the same way. We are still learning about COVID.

Found this Nature article by way of Naked Capitalism. It asks why so many young people are getting cancer. Good question. No firm answers.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

March 12, 11

 Sunny this morning. Chilly but not cold. All I will need for the moment is my sweater. We have an errand later and, since it is so late, we will have our late meal out.

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Still dark outside--damn time change. Our high yesterday reached about 65. It is supposed to hit 70+ today. Time to do a bit more outside.

The author of this post on The Honest Sorcerer takes off from the post on Ecosophia John Michael Greer wrote a couple of weeks ago. (I linked to it a couple of days ago after mulling it over for about a week.) As I read it I remembered articles over the last couple of decades, which quickly disappeared without much attention, describing the aging of farmers and ranchers in this country. The average in that occupation group has gone from high 50s to mid 60s in that time. I followed a link in the post linked above to this article which contains and discusses a map of the world with the median ages of populations noted. And then, with a question tickling my mind, I found this article listing the average age of workers in various occupation groups. We are already experiencing disruptions from declining populations.

It looks like several countries are going through a serious "negotiation" over national identities. We have seen Putin turn to Russia's past to create a Russian identity that is opposed to the West and its "decadence." Modi in India is pushing "Hindu" nationalism and a new citizenship law. Here in the U.S. we have a struggle between those who support an "inclusive" society and those who are pushing "Christian Nationalism" (a.k.a., white supremacy. (I put these terms in quotes because they seem elastic depending on who is speaking or writing.) China, according to this article, is also having its troubles defining the soul of China. Like so many in this country they are trying to do so by erasing the not so valorous, not so heroic parts of their past as presented in modern literature. I wonder when they will try to do what some of our zealots are doing and move from restricting what people can read to editing their history. Maybe they already have but our information sources haven't covered it.

Stray thought: listening to Israeli politicians, especially Netanyahu, insisting on continuing the operations in Gaza until they destroy (obliterate??) Hamas and "win" the contest I remember a scene in a sci-fi novel where a warlord tries to educate a subordinate in the notion that you can lose the war by winning a battle and retreating isn't the same as losing. Will Israel have its own Pyrrhic "victory?"

This story about a former Harvard professor of medicine who took a contrary position on COVID, COVID vaccinations, and COVID lockdowns illustrates the problem with censorship, whether official on any level or informal) is a bad idea. It is also why I follow several blogs which try to present critical information that goes against the official position on our controversial topics. I might or might not agree but at least the information is there for me. That is why I also disagree with the current efforts to prohibit TikTok unless its Chinese parent company divests and sells it.

Bill Astore posted an interesting bit on his Bracing Views substack. He expresses thoughts I have had since not long after 9/11. We have had a long period where our government uses the military to enforce solutions international problems. They swaggered around the globe like some kind of modern cowboys. We needed (and need) leaders who can think on a different bandwidth. I also believed we needed to get beyond the Cold War but were still dominated by Cold Warriors. But that doesn't describe either Biden or Trump. Astore is right: they aren't the politicians  to formulate a new path for the country.

Monday, March 11, 2024

March 11

 Sunny and warmer today. It looks, according to the Weather Channel, like we will have a week of 50s and 60s. Good. I can get some more of the patio cleaned up and begin rearranging the containers. We had to return the old modem to the Xfinity store and Mom has an appointment tomorrow so I guess I won't get to it til Wednesday at the earliest.

Stray thought: Lindsey Graham (Sen.-Mar-a-lago) suggested that any aid given to Ukraine should be in the form of loans citing the $34Trillion national debt we have. WTF--how does he expect to repay loans any time in the foreseeable future? Especially since the price tag for rebuilding the country when the war ends is almost as much as our national debt last time I heard. And no one really knows where the resources for that will come.

A second stray thought: I have a nasty, suspicious mind listening to the news stories about our plans to build some kind of pier to get relief supplies from ships to Gaza. I could just see Netanyahu deciding to bomb that pier on the excuse that the supplies are going to Hamas.

James Howard Kunstler writes some thoughts I have had about how our high tech world depends on fragile and aging power systems. John Michael Greer and Gail Tverberg have also written on this theme in their various blogs and talks about catabolic economic collapse. About twenty years ago I read news stories about Alaska's government basically pruning most of higher education--actually completely up rooting it--except for the University of Alaska itself which was also pruned. The state was facing a serious budget problem as some of the oil revenues dried up. The University system in Ohio also suffered a similar cut back for the same reasons at about the same time. Yesterday I read that Duke is planning to close its Herbarium, a world renowned collection of plants and printed materials, because the cost ($25Million) to rehouse the collections in a suitable modern building was too much. (My own snarky question is how much their sports facilities cost and which would be more valuable to Duke's supposed purpose of education.) All of those stories center on the flow of money which seems to be slowing. Several months ago I described my shock at the condition of a city nearby which I remember from 50 years ago. It has lost population and, with population, tax revenues. The result was a scene that could be the set of a post-apocalyptic movie. Street lights were replaced by stop signs. The streets badly needed repair and the sidewalks were broken. The flow of money has slowed to a trickle. Under those conditions governments, companies, and individuals choose between expenses cutting those which are as good but not as critical as others.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

March 10

Sunny today. So things might have a chance to dry out and warm up. Just finished putting together a tuna casserole which can sit on the counter for an hour before I put it in the oven. That should take care of today's and tomorrow's dinners; perhaps even Tuesday's. I know people who hate left overs. My late sister-in-law was that way. I plan on having multiple meals from one cooking session and any leftovers will be frozen to be incorporated in some future meal. Considering it is only Mom and me here that seems the most efficient.

As I read this report from Climate & Capitalism I stripped out the terms "capitalism," "Marxist," and "revolutionary." I didn't need the ideological or political overtones. Take a look at the list of novel (at least to Americans) diseases outbreaks. Take a look at the list of once familiar diseases we once thought extinct or at least under control. There are several features that have little to do with political/economic philosophy. First, the world population became more than 50% urban only a couple of decades ago. Crowding, especially in countries with inadequate or aging sanitary infrastructure. Two, in a global economy any place in the world is only a plane ride or two away from any place else. And more people are traveling. Three, a significant number of people in countries around the world have become skeptical of institutions that we once relied on to keep us healthy: medicine, science, public health, governments at all levels. Fourth, advertising has produced a befuddling amount of information, misinformation, mistaken information, and downright false information. During my lifetime I have seen nutrition ads that touted various artificial sweeteners over regular sugar. Many of those sweeteners are not at all as good for you as the ads claimed. Remember the ads touting pork as "the other white meat" after various studies seemed to condemn red meat. Or how eggs suddenly became a boogyman after studies panning cholesterol? Or the drives against sugar, fat, and almost anything that accounted for flavor in foods because of we had to cut calories? We always joked that we saw ads touting certain foods after the ads condemning those foods drove sales down. 

I have let this post John Michael Greer posted on his Ecosophia site ferment for a few days. I grew up in the same time Greer mentions--when the pundits were hyperventilating over "The Population Bomb", which I read when it first came out. I remember when the Chinese government mandated one-child families and their concern over the pampered "Little Emperors/Empresses" and political/economic thinkers thought they might have a good idea. Things have changed radically in the last twenty or so years.  It has been a long while since demographers noted that the U.S. had the only growing population in the industrialized world--because of immigration. Germany and other countries welcomed the first wave of climate refugees from Africa but now as they face the problems of absorbing large numbers of people who don't know the local language and customs their attitudes have changed. I read a couple of histories which mentioned in passing the problem sudden population losses caused--taxes declined because fewer people meant lower revenues, infrastructure declined because fewer people couldn't maintain it, food shortages because fewer farmers were growing food. In some cases the entire area was abandoned.


Saturday, March 9, 2024

March 8, 9

Rainy this morning but we have to go shopping. The canned cat food won't last the weekend and, believe me, the cats MUST be fed. Otherwise they WILL make their displeasure known.

Update: we are back home and the cats are pleased. We had heavy rain; heavy enough I let Mom off at the supermarket door, parked, and then went through the rain. And then let her tend the groceries while I went for the car. I will say that the grass is coming in very green with the rains we have had.

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We had a heavy rain overnight but has stopped now. The sun broke through a bit ago but we now have more clouds. It looks like we will have a partly cloudy/sunny day. The temperature was quite cold this morning.

We have three soccer games today. We enjoy some of the sports because they aren't politics and they limit the commercials to focus on the game. We anticipate a good day tomorrow with three rugby games.

Yesterday the post mortem on the State of the Union dominated the news. The coverage ran pretty much along the commentators and media outlets political alignments. Those who were more Democrat (or anti-Trump)aligned thought it went well for Biden. Those who are right wing Republican or MAGA aligned damned with faint praise saying Biden managed to clear the very low bar they laid out for him. I am amazed at how abysmally stupid some of the Republicans are and how easily Biden baited them and embarrassed them. (I am talking from the clips the news played.) I don't give much weight to what is said in these speeches. They might present goals I agree with but they depend on 1) the mix of personalities occupying the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives and 2) what happens between now and then socially, economically, and in world events.

The House finally got off their butts and passed one of the two groups of fiscal packages they had to pass. They finally got enough cuts in programs they don't like to do that. The Senate showed they can move when they have to and passed it themselves Friday. Now we have to go through this again for the second package that has to pass by the 22nd of this month. Let's see if they can get their heads out of their butts long enough to do that.

In another act of the Republican Comedy Hour, George Santos has announced he will enter the primary race for the 1st Congressional district in New York. He can do that since he was only expelled from Congress not impeached and convicted. He is still under indictment for criminal charges but, hey, so is his mentor Donald Trump.

And here is a heart-warming story. A 102-year-old woman asked her community to celebrate her birthday by donating 102 food items to the local food bank/community. They came through with 400 items.Bill Astore has a position on our "aid" to Israel I can agree with: stop giving. Of course our arms manufacturers would object because they are the main beneficiary of the aid we send. If I didn't already have more books on my reading than I can keep track of I would look up that memoir Astore refers to in his piece. I had second thoughts--I will pick up that book. It would give a different perspective on the Israel situation. By the way, Astore also has a good take on both the SOTU and (the even worse) Republican rebuttal. As to the truth or untruth or whatever contained in either, check my third paragraph above. And truth is often like beauty--in the eye of the beholder.

And for our bi-annual OH, SHIT moment--I was just reminded that we will have to adjust our clocks forward. I hate those times because the furry clocks (a.k.a., cats) can't be reset and our own biological clocks are out of sync for at least a couple of weeks. I really wish our asshole legislators would simply pick either daylight (not)saving or standard and leave it.

Have I mentioned before that I really, really hate getting new equipment--as in phones, computers, internet gateways. I just spent an annoying (to put it mildly) getting our new Xfinity gateway installed and working. Then we found that Mom could get on line without any problem but I couldn't. We originally had a "family" plan that allowed both of us to log in. We tried every way we could think of to get me on also but no luck. Finally, I bit the bullet and signed up for my own paid separate access. This might be part of the move in the industry to eliminate any kind of sharing (of passwords or accounts). Luckily we aren't so cash strapped as we were when we first got the account nearly 25 years ago. Thinking about it (and getting my temper back) it might also be good from a security point of view. OH, well, we adapt--some of us more easily than others.

All of this sounds so familiar