January 28

 We had a tiny bit of snow over night--not even worth getting the broom out to sweep it off. Even though the temperature isn't above 20*F today the sidewalks warmed enough, where the sun reached them, to melt the snow. The weather is supposed to be somewhat chancy with a new front moving in by the middle of next week so we did what little shopping we were going to do then to today. We can hibernate for the week.

I found this little piece on Treehugger which asks what future the Winter Olympics has. Spoiler: pretty bleak. Even if the goals of the Paris Accord are reached (a might big IF) most of the areas where the games are normally held will be marginal to very risky at best for snow conditions. Beijing is making its snow putting a strain on already strained water supplies.

I have never been a fan of electric ranges since my high school days when I tried to boil water on a controlled setting burner that I set to too low a temperature. I cooked entire meals at home on a gas stove with no problem when mom was in the hospital having my youngest brother and helped a lot in the kitchen at other times. The teacher's taunting remarks really ticked me off to the point where I refused to cook at all in that class and took a D instead. I also had a few choice remarks about her assuming that everyone worked with a "modern" electric stove at home. Treehugger has another article about the amount of unburned methane gas stoves emit and it isn't inconsequential. I would still rather have a gas stove.

New York Time's David Leonhardt has a chilling article for anyone who is concerned with internet/communications security. 

January 26

 Cold--real COLD, as in single digits--but we have brilliant sunshine along with it. The temperatures should go back up toward "normal" for the rest of the week. That snow, however, will stay around for a while longer.

I found this on Treehugger this morning. Before the pandemic we had gone a long way toward eliminating a lot of plastics. But most of the stores we shop banned our canvas bags on the advice of health officials. Even those stores where the cashiers didn't have to handle the public's bags banned the canvas. At that time the official opinion was that COVID spread by touching surfaces contaminated with the virus. Even after the received wisdom changed to recognize that it actually spread through the air, the stores continued to ban our canvas bags. The plastic bags are never single use for us. We have two cats with two litter boxes that have to be scooped out daily. And lately all of the stores now allow our bags so we are reducing our plastic accumulations. We still have a large number of plastic containers and always get more with our groceries. But we keep those that seal well and use them for our left overs and don't microwave anything we are reheating in the plastic so they are going to last quite a while. I would love it if our supermarkets followed the French rules and eliminated plastic packaging.

January 24

January 24

 It finally looks like winter here. We got between 6 and 8 inches of snow over the last two days with more expected. A blogger who lives a bit south and east of us was complaining late last week that she hasn't had much so far and really wanted enough to provide cover for her slumbering plants so they wouldn't die from the sub freezing temperatures. I agree. I hope several of my plants will come back in the spring but they need the snow cover to protect them.

January 23

 January 23

I haven't posted much so far this year because noting much seems to have changed. The only difference between 2022 and 2021 has been the rising speculation about the midterm elections and what Biden's last three years will be like with the infantile squabbling in our legislature and the hard right turn at the Supreme Court. I think last time I quoted the lyrics to the Merry Minuet and linked to For What Its Worth. Actually, I just looked back at the posts and I used that quote and link on January 1. Right now I feel more like referring you to the lyrics of Blowin' In The Wind. Too many commentators have observed over the last couple of weeks that we seem to be fighting the same battles we thought were already won. Civil rights, voting rights, women's rights--hell let's just cut to the chase--human rights all are in retreat with certain groups being redefined as somehow less than fully human.

And perhaps a good bit more is being redefined--like the U.S. position in the world. I have just started reading Alfred McCoy's To Govern The Globe. He makes an interesting observation: in the last 500 years we have had three "world orders" dominated by three different empires--the Iberian order (Spain), the British, and the American. In each the pinnacle of power for the three came only a couple of decades before their decline. Spain around 1570 massed a great fleet that destroyed a Moorish fleet in the Mediterranean but in 1588 another great Spanish Armada was destroyed trying to invade England, a blow from which Spain never recovered. In the 1890s England's dominance seemed to be cemented with the roll out of the Dreadnaught line a massive battleships triggering an arms race especially with Germany (but also Japan). But the battleships played little role in the course of the World War era (1914-45) and in the post war era Britain's empire fell apart. In 2000 the U.S. seemed similarly positioned at the apex of world power with aircraft carrier fleets positioned on seas world wide.

McCoy makes another point: the power of each of the three empires marched in lockstep with their economic power. As their economic power declined so did their military power. David Kaiser has a post this morning which reinforces some worrisome developments concerning U.S. economic power by examining the recent history of Boeing. This is his key conclusion at the very beginning of the post 

Two years ago, in a post about the superb HBO miniseries about the Chernobyl disaster, I speculated that our institutions, for different reasons, might be as rotten as those in the USSR in its later stages.  Checking that post just now, I see that I referred to a new story (in January 2020) about one of the key mistakes that led to the Boeing disaster.  Now, reading a much more thorough account, I'm inclined to believe that we have further disasters ahead.

 The post isn't that long so I will leave the rest for you to read.

John Michael Greer also has an interesting post this last week. We always talk about "the future" not acknowledging that we actually have "futures." And we should prepare for alternatives and be flexible. A number of pundits have noticed that we judge the future, especially the near future, as a linear progression from the near past. Over the last forty years I have come up against the inconvenient fact that something is (or has) broken and the immediate past is no longer a guide for decisions about what is to come. Once upon a time the received wisdom told us that getting more and newer credentials (high school diploma to bachelor's degree to master's degree to PhD for example) and to go into "good" debt (a.k.a., student loans) to do so was a winning strategy. That hasn't been true for most (not all) of us for the last 30 years.

 January 7

Another cold morning but it looks like it will start out sunny. The forecast I looked at earlier predicts we won't get out of the teens.

From the stories on tv (when they aren't covering the memorial yesterday of the insurrection--which I didn't watch) a major story asks how we begin to "live with" coronavirus. This piece from the New York Times which I found yesterday covers part of the conundrum. For all the experts on the morning no one really has any good suggestions. "Vaccines forever" isn't really a tenable option. Israel is pushing a fourth shot for their "vulnerable" populations but how reasonable is that strategy? We have put so many eggs into the vaccination basket and it looks like it is all getting scrambled.

Euronews reports a new variant of COVID has been identified in Southern France. It hasn't yet been designated a variant "of concern" but they are watching it. The first case might be a man who returned to France from Cameroon. This illustrates the primary weakness in the "Vaccinate us out of the pandemic" strategy: large parts of the world have negligible vaccination rates.

 January 6

It is sunny today but very cold. The temperature on the thermometer on the fence read 8*F. It has just risen above 10. We won't get out of the teens today. Yesterday we had bouts of windblown snow much of which came off the Lake. We didn't get much accumulation for which I am grateful because I haven't cleared a path on the patio. I finally put up the winter wreath about five weeks later than usual.

Tom Engelhardt has a good post on his tomdispatch site. His comments about what we, individually and collectively, remember is right on point. I can see some of the process playing out as large parts of our population want to minimize the pandemic and erase the insurrection. Like Engelhardt I wonder what future generations will remember. I keep thinking of the phrase that became a mantra in the later installments of Battlestar Galactica: this has happened before and will happen again.

John Feffer at Foreign Policy in Focus has an interesting piece today. He writes about the way civil war came to what used to be Yugoslavia. Between the late 1980 the populace went from believing the slogan "brotherhood and unity" to shooting each other in 1991. He could have chosen a couple of times in American history for similar sudden times when the "us" became "us vs. them" . It took only a bit more than a decade from the end of the French and Indian War (after which most American colonials felt pride being part of the British empire and subjects of the king) to full blown rebellion. And it was only a decade between the Compromise of 1850 (the last measure designed to defuse the simmering tempers over slavery) to civil war. In one of the post apocalyptic novels I like to read sometimes a major character tells the small group gathering around him that they need to decide what they are going to do and where they will go and "whether there is a 'we' to do it. I don't know if there is an us in the U.S. any more.

It finally looks like Winter.

 January 4

 The snow we got over the weekend is still here--mostly. Most surfaces were too warm for the initial accumulation to stay as snow so it melted and then froze into a layer of ice on top of which the rest piled up. Finally tally--about four inches. The roads were well cleared by yesterday when we had to go out and get lab work done for Mom's doctor's appointment next week.

I have seen numerous stories about the "labor shortage" with pundits trying to explain the phenomenon with everything from "lazy" workers who socked away the overly generous government COVID payment and unemployment to low pay and stingy benefits in the hardest hit industries. Yesterday I saw one that pointed to something no one else has acknowledged: deaths. Our economy has lost more than 800k people and a large fraction of those occurred among the primary working age population. That number doesn't include the deaths to which COVID contributed without being the direct cause because the hospitals were overrun with COVID cases. I looked up the population data because I remember an article which claimed that our population had actually shrunk a bit because of the pandemic. Not quite true though according to this piece from the Census Bureau our population grew at the slowest pace ever adding only about 1million which was the lower than the mark posted by 1937 in the depths of the Great Depression. COVID + reduced immigration = low population growth.

Another weather story: I-95 became a snow bound parking lot for up to 24 hours. As I watched the story I was reminded of the storm in 2012 (I think) when Chicago's Lake Shore Drive became a similar snow bound parking lot. This was the Chicago situation on steroids. The latest storm dropped up to 12 inches of snow on the Northern Virginia/D.C. area. Even Biden returning from Delaware was delayed both in just getting out of the plane and then in the motorcade which took more than an hour to go the short distance from Andrews to the White House. Weird weather continues.

Happy New Year--I hope

 1 January 2022

We were all so happy to see the end of 2020 but I wondered months ago if we wouldn't be as happy to see 2021 in our rear view mirrors. I am although I don't think this year will be anything to celebrate. I have ignored most of the "year in review" stories. Every now and then one has something interesting--rarely. Sometimes the prognostication stories grab my attention. This one was the first thing I found this morning. The author listed several things I hope don't materialize this year but can easily see happening and the long quote from someone who lived through turmoil in Sri Lanka. His description resembles our own experiences over the last two years--our own lives continued in a very normal path while things elsewhere seemed to go off the rails. Every now and then the trends came close--several relatives had COVID in its milder forms and a couple of more distant relatives died, most of the on-line venders had prominent warnings that they couldn't guarantee the 1-3 day deliveries that had been normal, more store shelves sparse or empty (but nothing we absolutely needed), costs going up but nothing we need becoming unaffordable. I expect more of the same. But my seed catalogs have finally arrived--a month to six weeks later than normal. And I can start planning my spring plantings--also a month to six weeks late.

For the last couple of years, the news cycle often pushes me to remember this:

They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in Spain.
There's hurricanes in Florida and Texas needs rain.

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls.
The French hate the Germans. The Germans hate the Poles.

Italians hate Yugoslavs. South Africans hate the Dutch.
And I don't like anybody very much!

And we know for certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off and we will all be blown away.

They're rioting in Africa. There's strife in Iran.
What nature doesn't do to us will be done by our fellow man.

The Kingston Trio--1959

I took out the verse about a "mushroom" cloud but otherwise this is the song as it appeared in 1959 when I was 10 years old. If I had any poetic bone in my body (I don't) I would insert something about COVID, economic and "supply chain" woes, and our political discontent. Or sometimes I think of the Buffalo Springfield song For What It's Worth. You can take a look for yourself. The times may have changed but the problems seem up to date.

On to something else. The weird weather continues. Ours hasn't been as disastrous or destructive as in other places but it still has been strange. A warm fall drifted into a warm winter. Our first accumulating snow came only about a week ago and didn't last long. Most surfaces were too warm for it to stick. It is snowing now and the forecasters have predicted several inches over night and throughout tomorrow. How long will it last? Who know? Maybe I will finally take down the fall door wreath and put up my winter wreath.