January 28, 29

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We had more snow yesterday. Not enough to blanket the car but enough to put a bit of a coat on the pavement. The temps have dropped also. Next week might be a repeat of this last week so we are planning to hibernate. We don't have to go anywhere until we run out of milk--probably late next week.

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A couple of days ago Mom had an email which was a petition addressed to our local electric provider to protest the rising electri c costs. At least two of our relatives have signed. A couple of the signers have written that they have experienced bills between $400 and $600 for a couple of the latest months. We have noticed a bit of an increase but not to that extent. However, it would seem that this area isn't alone. The Frugalite describes similar increases. The article has a link to a New England news post reporting that the energy companies predicted last September that a large (very large) increase in electric rates was coming. Evidently, that increase has come.

Charles Hugh Smith has a good post this morning. I have thought for some time that our economic/political/economic theories have become more like religious doctrines. My acerbic comment is that the pundits all think Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with some additional commandments: Thou Shalt Practice Unfettered Capitalism, Thou Shalt Not Deviate From The Foundational Document (i.e., the Constitution as certain true believers think the Founding Fathers intended it to be read.) However, any of the alternative "orthodoxies" are equally dogmatic.

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It is a nice slow Sunday morning--overcast but not frigid and not snowing at the moment. We didn't watch much news yesterday or Friday because of the wall-to-wall coverage of the Memphis clusterf**k. We certainly didn't want to watch replays of the beating murder by rogue cops. And we definitely didn't want to see it at the top of each hour every hour.

I mentioned the local petition concerning the fantastic increases in some electric bills. Today one of the bloggers I read mentioned her landlord increasing her rent by $600/month and her daughter being informed that her rent will go up by $500/month. Last year the state's laws limiting the amount a landlord could raise rents was cancelled opening things up for corporate landlords to put the screws to their tenants. She isn't going to renew and has decided to put most of her things in storage so she can travel a bit. At least she has choices. Others don't.

January 26, 27

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I guess it is official--the COVID pandemic is over and we are now simply living with it. The New York Times "Virus Briefing" is suspending its reporting barring a new surge. Yesterday's article was a retrospective and a "good bye." We still have COVID and we have "long COVID" but there really isn't a flood of new information that the media needs to urgently cover. This fails to note that COVID was the 3rd greatest killer of children between 5 and 14 and the 2nd greatest cause of death of adults 25 to 34 for the last three years.

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Good morning again. It is almost the end of January--damn how the time goes by. We have had snow over the last. couple of days. Normally we wouldn't have gone out at all but on Wednesday Mom suddenly realized that we hadn't paid rent yet. The streets were far slicker than they looked and we had a bit of a fender bender. Thankfully, no other car was involved. Coming to a stop sign we hit a very slick patch. A car was stopped in front of us, another was coming behind us and a third was in the oncoming lane. All Mom could do was go to the right side, jump the curb and hit the stop sign and bump the telephone pole. We weren't going fast and only bent the stop sign a bit. The bumper is cracked and scuffed.

We had to go out again this morning because our check for the rent had a mistake we had to correct. We always spend a bit of time talking to the office manager and other people there and this morning the manager commented that at least we knew how to write a check. She had several young people coming in to rent who had no idea. She had to actually teach them how to do it. I asked if they knew how to write cursive and she said they didn't--they hand printed the information on the check. Almost the first thing I read this morning was this piece on Word Genius detailing the rise and fall of cursive writing. For a time educators saw no reason to teach cursive and focused on keyboarding and computer skills. Some states are now rethinking that and mandating the teaching of handwriting skills. I learned handwriting in grade school and then learned keyboarding in high school where it was called "typing".

January 23

Well--another Monday and another news cycle concerns another mass murder by someone with a gun. The tally is another ten dead and ten wounded in one shooting spree. That makes 33 THIS year which is only 23 days old. I have never favored eliminating guns. I have known too many people who depended up hunting seasons to fill their freezers with affordable meat. I knew a lot of people who took out their guns only to shoot targets (inanimate targets) and clean them. My ex-husband (now two decades dead) was one of the latter group. I enjoyed target shooting for a time and earned a couple of minor trophies for my efforts. GUNS ARE TOOLS. Inanimate tools. Relabeling gun control measures as gun safety measures erases the real problem: we have a people problem. Too many people who take out their anger, frustrations, and general pissed-off-ness by physically attacking other people with what ever weapons they can get. We had (and probably still have) "road rage" incidents but they aren't as dramatic as the shootings unless they result in a massive traffic accident. We had a number of Asian Americans, homeless Americans, LGBTQ+ Americans, and other Americans brutally beaten but again those are viewed isolated incidents and not dramatic enough to command the news cycle. As I said; WE HAVE A PEOPLE PROBLEM but our political discourse is focused on a weapon problem people are using.

One of the news accounts of the "March For Life" featured a protestor promising that the movement's aim is to restore a "life affirming America." I don't know when in our national life this country was "life affirming." Evidently she has never read any accounts of the treatment of indentured servants in the colonial period, or the accounts of treatment of African slaves which was only marginally better than on the Caribbean sugar plantations where the populations of slaves was kept up only by importation, or the Trail of Tears, or of the "orphan trains." If the measure for being "life affirming" is being anti-abortion they are setting a ridiculously low bar. If we had universal maternity/paternity/elder care support, universal health care with complete maternity/newborn care, real support for public public education and kept politics out of education I would think we might be "life affirming."

January 18, 29,20

 We have a doctor's appointment today so we'll see how much reading I get done.

Doomberg has an article criticizing the "research" which concluded that using gas stoves is correlated with increased childhood asthma and other respiratory conditions. I took those claims with a bit of amusement and a large dose of salt to begin with. Another article I read earlier in this kerfuffle noted that poor and ethnic/racial minority children showed the strongest correlation which the author thought was a strong argument for banning gas stoves because it would benefit the children. Well, those groups usually live in areas that experience higher auto emission pollution and, often, industrial pollution. And those groups are also most likely to be malnourished which might also enter into the picture. The Doomberg article claims that the group conducting the research is part of a group actively pushing against the natural gas industry. That is why I try to find out exactly who is doing the research to see what biases they might have. Do they have incentives (financial and otherwise) to come to the conclusions the wanted to justify?

Improve the News put up a good article on China's nearly one million person drop in population that was announced earlier this week. A lot more detail and connections to some history.

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Yesterday was a disjointed kind of day dedicated to some clean up that wasn't done because of the medical appointment and errands on the 18th. We also had to talk to her doctor because the inhaler prescribed was WAY too expensive. The Doctor checked that the medication was covered by Medicare and it was which makes me wonder what the full cost might have been. Doctor wanted us to call the medicare advantage insurance company to have them provide a list of lower cost alternatives. Mom decided to simply do without since the cost is too much for a "slight" COPD. We don't understand why we have to pressure the insurance company to prescribe a medication. They aren't doctors. The American medical industry is totally screwed up.

Just what we need (NOT!!). I originally found it on an Indiana news station and then went to Google for more information. (I didn't link to the original) So illegal drug purveyors are now selling their products with fentanyl but with a veterinary sedative not approved for any human application which, because it isn't a narcotic, makes Narcan useless in overdose cases. As usual with these stories the reporters featured the grieving mother of the young man who died of his overdose but like so many such segments it irritated me. Yeah, he was only 32 with the potential for a long life. Yeah, he had two cute kids he evidently loved. But answer this question: why did he value getting high much more than a future with those kids? His mother certainly didn't know and she knew he had an addiction problem from his teen years.

As long as I can remember histories firmly concluded that the Bubonic Plague was spread by rats. This article, featured on Naked Capitalism, questions that notion. The focus on other possibilities for spread (human to human by touch or by the human body's own population of fleas and possibly lice) is good. Too often human behavior is ignored in these stories. The disease appears and spreads of its own volition and humans are the passive victims. That is rarely the case. One article I read so many years ago I can no longer remember the source claimed that people in the areas of Asia where the plague was endemic for a long time developed ways of handling the rodents who possibly harbored the pathogen which contained the spread while Europeans didn't. Maybe. I also noticed that the article didn't mention a couple of factors I also read years ago. First, the dominant rat population in Europe changed and the new dominant was a better reservoir for the bacterium. Second, Medieval Europeans considered cats demonic creatures and killed large numbers of them which eliminated a major predator of rats. Looking carefully to whatever information is available for the three outbreaks the authors identified might provide some answers.

We are still being bombarded with the ads for Medicare Advantage even though the open enrollment has expired. Mom decided to check into it and we have already had some glitches. None of the ads tell you exactly what the program will cost and getting a straight answer from the agents you talk to is impossible. She told them she didn't want the drug coverage but the latest letter indicates she is going to get it anyway at an additional cost. And she is going to be charged a penalty for not having such coverage for 55 months. I will definitely will not enroll in Medicare Advantage. Too much we aren't being told. She is going to keep it as it is and see how it goes.

Susie Madrak at Crooks&Liars covers that idiotic proposal for a 30% national sales tax and the abolition of the IRS which Spineless McCarthy promised to bring to the floor to get Buddy Carter's vote for his speakership. My first thought on this was that it was typically Republican in that it would impose a regressive tax to replace an at least modestly progressive tax structure. Second thought, OMG, these guys want to take us back to Medieval day s when we peasants had to spend at least days a week working for the lord with some extra fees thrown in. Think about that--2 of the 6 day work week (Sundays was for Church). That is what 30% translates to. More progressive states at least make exceptions for food and some other necessities. I wonder how they plan to give the wealthy a pass. Notice that the payroll taxes which support Social Security and Medicare would also be eliminated so how do they expect to continue those programs or is this a backdoor way to eliminate them. 

January 17

It certainly doesn't look like winter. We got a bit of snow last week--enough that they had some snow removal people out and we had to remove snow from the car on Friday. But it is totally gone and we have had two days of rain. The temperature was just over 40F very early this morning. That is very unusual. A weather reporter noted over the weekend that our weather is more typical of early November than mid January.

Evidently Europe's mild winter has put a dent in Russia's finances. According to a report on the news this morning the weather is one of many factors easing somewhat Europe's energy crunch as imports of Russian gas and oil have plummeted. I have thought for sometime that countries, as a matter of national security, should source as many of their critical needs (medicine, energy, and food) from within their own boarders as much as possible. Under the spell of "globalization" most western nations (and probably others as well) have shifted that trade and manufacture to foreign countries some of which are not exactly friendly.

Another interesting story said that China's population has dropped by nearly 1 million thanks to the COVID epidemic and the falling birth rate. Someone once said a while ago that China's society was going to get old before it got rich and it appears that is now the case. That drop in population is the first since 1961.

I think we have seen this situation before and I really wish the voters would get tired of it. Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, has sent a letter to Speaker of the House, Kevin "no spine" McCarthy, telling him that the country would bump up against the debt ceiling this coming Thursday and, if it isn't raised, the country risks a default by early June. In between some tactics of "robbing Peter to pay Paul" will mean some of the country's bills won't be paid on time. Ole Spineless has promised his MAGA/QAnon crazies that he won't bring a clean bill to the floor meaning that he will propose drastic budget cuts especially to "mandatory" spending programs (read Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid). He hinted that he might be amenable to capping the defense budget to 2022 levels (I think). William Hartung on Tomdispatch today has some interesting things to say about that bloated budget and the unsatisfactory weapons systems (read F35) that should have been cut long ago. A couple of commentators had some acidic things to say about Spineless's pious expressions of moral concern about the Dems being like kids who need to have their credit cards controlled by responsible adults since the largest increases in the debt which came during the Former Guy's administration. It seems they have only cared about the debt and deficits when Democrats are in the White House. And every time this comes up they want to balance the budget on the backs of those who have the least.

So a Republican Representative from Georgia claims that raising the age when people can apply for Social security makes sense because "people want to work longer." I always wonder who those people are. I took Social Security 13 years ago just before I turned 62 under my deceased ex-husband's account after being unemployed for nearly 2 years and after sending out a hell of a lot applications which netted only one interview during which I was told I was "overqualified." News Flash--a reasonably intelligent high school graduate would have been overqualified. What the interviewer really meant was she thought I was too old. I really do not want a new job and I no longer have the stamina. By the way, the woman I talked to at the Social Security office checked on how delaying my retirement til age 65, or 67, or 70, would affect what my benefits would have been. Answer--not at all. My next younger sibling who is now age 70 and retired at age 66. He couldn't physically delay retiring from a job that left him with spinal and joint damage that had already required surgeries. My much younger sister just retired at 62 with physical problems so she isn't interested in working longer and our youngest sibling a brother age 60 is on disability with serious health disabilities. People already have the alternative to work longer if they are physically and mentally able. We don't need to legally raise the age.

January 16

 I didn't even start a post over the weekend. Instead I used three apples we didn't use a while ago in a batch of fried cabbage with apples to make applesauce. It turned out really good. I also put a few more rows on another piece of experimental crochet work and Mark Leibowitz's book Thank You For Your Servitude which was a totally depressing account the people around and withinThe Former Guy's campaigns and administration. Otherwise, I avoided the news for the most part. They keep rehashing the same things, offering little new information and a lot of warmed over speculation.

Robert Reich is getting a close up look at the atmospheric "rivers" inundating California. He lives there. He asks why the mainstream media rarely mentions climate change at all. He notes that, even in the stories about the current weather disasters in this country and in the world at large, few reporters link the weird weather with climate change and fewer ever add the descriptor "human caused" to the term. He asks why. Well, if we acknowledge that the climate is changing and then admit that our activities might be pushing the changes along, intensifying them, we would then have to ask what actions we might take to mitigate the changes and the effects on us and on the world generally. Refusing to admit any of that allows masses of us to refuse to do anything or change anything.

January 13

 Well, the news this morning is reporting that one or two contractors editing the files of the FAA's ATAM system may be responsible for the system crash which caused nationwide delays and cancellations. I wondered if something like that might have been the cause but, of course, all I, or anyone outside the agency, could do was speculate. I wonder what happened with the Canadian system which also went down at the same time. The systems are supposed to be completely separate. Some other thoughts: First, it is amazing how dependent we are on systems that are showing considerable fragility. Second, I am amazed and yet not surprised that such a crucial system is running on 30 year old programing and equipment. The government hasn't allocated the funds for expensive updates and the airlines don't want to spend the money either. Third, it seems that very few people (or agencies) plan alternatives in case things fall apart. 

William Astore has a good article this morning. He asks a good question: with a military budget of over $800billion can't we pay our lower ranking service people enough to meet their basic needs? 

January 12

 Almost half past January and we haven't seen any significant snow since Christmas week. We also haven't seen any really cold temperatures. It just doesn't feel like winter.

Robert Reich has a suggestion about how to solve the "labor problem." Basically he says people should be paid more. I would add a caveat that the workers who need and deserve more are those at the lower end of the pay scale. Those are the people who have to work two or three jobs to earn enough to pay rent in almost all housing markets. Or they need two or three people contributing to the rent. Every now and then we check out the local rents and even rent in areas a distance from us. When we moved in here the rent took half and a bit more of our combined income. The basic rent here has doubled in the last 25 years we have been here for new renters. Ours hasn't been raised that drastically because we are established tenants. But the rent exceeds the 30% of our combined income that is the recommended limit. Neither of us could afford to live here by ourselves. Why should people work in a system that doesn't even pay them a living wage? Key item in Reich's article is this:

So what should be done about the difficulty employers are having finding workers?Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.

Jerome Powell and the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need without raising wages.

 

But this is cruel. Slowing the economy will cause millions of people to lose their jobs — disproportionately low-wage workers, women, and people of color. 

This reminds me of the arguments of slave holders who insisted they were as humane as possible because the (n word) would not work without the fear of the lash. Or the arguments against direct food aid during the Great Depression that poor people wouldn't work without the pain of hunger.

We have been told forever that "smart" (i.e., programable) thermostats save energy and money. The pundits insisted that if everyone converted (i.e., shelled out a significant portion of their grocery money for a new gadget) "we" could save so much energy, prevent so much pollution, and consumers would save so much money we wouldn't know what to do with it all. This article throws cold water all over the argument. A couple of interesting points. First, the Department of Energy, like the FDA, relies on the manufacturers' own data to make their recommendations and that data might not be all that trust worthy. After all the profits of the manufacturer (like the drug company) depend on good recommendations. Second, what works well in the lab doesn't always work all that well when scaled up to a mass market. Third, what works well when people who develop these gadgets use them might not work nearly as well when ordinary consumers use them.

January 10, 11

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Well, the dental appointment went well. No cavities so all I needed was a cleaning. We decided to do our grocery shopping since we were out anyway. I skimmed my Facebook feed and saw one the posters had an entry concerning egg prices that shocked me. He showed a picture of a shelf in his local grocery where the eggs were priced between $7.75 and $9.50 per dozen. I checked the prices at our supermarket and they ranged from $4.50 for the store brand and $7+ for a commercial brand. We get our eggs from the little local dairy which gets them from local farmers. I don't remember what we paid but we aren't planning to change our buying habits right now. Found this first thing this morning on CBS to explain the situation.

I am still somewhat shocked to see how many shelves are either empty or sparsely stocked. Over the last three years we have developed a habit of buying 2 of any item we use regularly--our stock items. If there is a good sale and we have the space to store it we will buy more. That doesn't alway mean that we will have what we need when we need it. This week we found the store sold out of the brand of yogurt we use and the smaller carrots (they had the humongous variety which we really can't use easily.) We decided to go to a different store that is a bit further away where we found the carrots and got the last two cartons of yogurt. That is also a habit we have developed--finding multiple sources for what we need.

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California has received between 4 and 6 times the normal rainfall with the latest rounds of "atmospheric rivers". CNN has this article and I know they write that the rainfall is 400% to 600% normal. That translates to what I said above. Another round is supposed to come in by tonight. However, all that water hasn't done much to relieve the drought. Look at this comparison between the Drought Monitor maps for December 27 and January 3. This cycle of storms might turn out to be the first $1+billion storm. We had 15 last year. A reporter on a news feature yesterday was shown waist deep in a flood street recounting his story.

January 9

 Another Monday. I don't know what I will get done today though I do know I have an early dental appointment. It is a cleaning but I just don't like dental work of any kind. But I really hope to leave this life with my remaining teeth so I put up with it.

I've loved watching Katie Porter scorching the various financial critters in committee hearings though I would almost bet she won't get the same kind of committee assignments in this new Congress. Crooks&Liars had this piece which gave us a laugh this morning. During that mess of an election for Speaker of the House she caught up with her reading with The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck.

The Chris Hedges Report also posted a good summation of our current politics. "Our political class doesn't govern. It entertains." I, for one, am not entertained and any amusement is very darkly tinged.

December 7

 Well, Old Spineless finally got his wish to be Speaker of the House. It only took 15 votes and his giving away most of the power of the Speaker. The next two years should be continued theater and chaos from what used to be the Republican Party. The Former Guy's sycophants are pretty much in charge.

I wasn't paying much attention to the latest unemployment data on the news this morning. They said it was at a very low 3.5%. Really?? I confirmed that with a quick Google search. However, I also did a quick check of Shadowstats. They confirmed he headline number but the U6 number, which includes the "short term discouraged" and "marginally attached workers" excluded from the official number is about 3% higher and, if they measure the unemployment as it was in 1994 and before, the unemployment is at almost 25%. The only way we have low unemployment is by excluding large parts of the labor force.

I found this by way of NakedCapitalism which is interesting given the layoffs announced by Amazon and some tech companies. The stealth layoffs mean the company doesn't have to announce job cuts. Makes me wonder how much of this kind of thing is going on and how much it affects the unemployment numbers.

Found this one from the Asia Times also by way of NakedCapitalism. Almost none of the info presented in the article has appeared in the mainstream news.

Gizmodo continues the sad saga of the cryptocurrency meltdown.

Since I am no great fan of The Former Guy I loved this story from the Oilprice.com. Though I don't believe there is any more chance of the anything coming of the arrest warrant against him (any more than expect to see Putin in the dock at The Hague for war crimes) it did bring a smile to my face.

January 6

 Well, the D.C. soap opera continues. The House will be back in session at noon today after failing for the 11th time yesterday to elect a speaker. I wonder what more the dissidents can extract since Spineless McCarthy has given up almost every bit of power the Speaker has. Who ever gets the Speaker's gavel will be crippled.The next two years are going to be VERY interesting. It might even be very painful depending on what, if anything, actually comes out of the House and whether it gets through the Senate and passed the President.

Today is the second anniversary of the insurrectionary assault on the Capital which we watched in disbelief as it happened on TV. And then in the following days were aghast as right wing pundits and politicians gaslighted us with the notion that nothing really happened, that it was simply a peaceful demonstration hijacked by "Antifa", that the rioters were really generally orderly tourists (in a government building closed to visitors), or any other idiotic  dismissal that might get us to disbelieve our "lying" eyes. Those (choose your own epithet) empty heads are still at it. And many of the people on the Republican side of the House of the Representatives egged those rioters on.

Slate has an interesting account of the longest deadlock over a Speaker in 1856.

We got rid of our non-stick cookware because the fourth set in about 12 or 14 years started pealing. We took a step "backwards" and replaced them with stainless and cast iron. Those don't peal and, without much special handling, they are nearly as non-stick as the "modern" cookware. This little piece from Doomberg, which isn't the full article because the rest is behind a pay wall, actually shows exactly what is the primary fault of "capitalism." At least modern Capitalism which is more of a religion masquerading as an economic theory. When profit is the ONLY measure of value companies will sacrifice the health, safety, and welfare of people to continue making profits. That happened with lead in gasoline, with air and water pollution resulting from production, with ozone depleting refrigerants, with DDT, and any number of other things I could cite. And sometimes the companies making the products are aligned with the customers who want/need their products.

Janueary 5

 The Republican soap opera continues today. Yesterday's installment continued the stalemate with Spineless McCarthy losing his 4th, 5th, and 6th votes and the party barely able to squeak through and get a final adjournment til noon today. The story today is that Spineless has offered to lower the threshold for a vote to vacate the chair (in other words a vote to fire him) to ONE Republican member. Someone asked yesterday when the threshold had been reduced to FIVE how many speakers might we see over the next two years. Another commentator said that when you try to sell your soul you need to make sure there is a buyer. Evidently, Spineless has no reliable buyer. I would go a bit further and note that, when you sell your soul, you inevitably sell cheap. It looks, to me, like Spineless has should his for nothing. He has promised everything and gotten promises for nothing.

Robert Reich has a piece this morning on what would be a sane strategy but I don't think it has a chance in hell. Neither side is in the mood to consider it.

An interesting question came up on Morning Joe just now. Compromise has become a dirty word implying that whoever compromises has betrayed his principles. The question was how to move the conversation away from that either/or dichotomy. I think the answer Sherrod Brown provides is a side step that doesn't really answer the question: find common ground. When principles are involved sometimes there is no common ground.

The 7th vote in the House trying to elect a Speaker. Results:Jeffries--212; MCCarthy--201; Donalds--19; Other (Trump)--1; Present--1. No Speaker elected. The 8th round of voting is just beginning.

The 8th round of voting  has ended with no change except a new name entered during the voting. No election.

They are going into round 9 but I am closing this for the day.

January 4

 Nice and sunny today after a cloudy and wet four days. The soap opera of electing a Speaker of the House. Three votes yesterday and McCarthy still waiting. Will Rogers once said "I don't belong to an organized party. I'm a Democrat." Well, that might be edited nowadays from Democrat to Republican. One of the commentators on the news this morning noted that this is the culmination of a decades old process of "neutering" the legislative leadership.

This CNN article is another cautionary tale about the airlines and luggage. And the airline involved providing lousy customer service until the media becomes involved isn't Southwest. If, and that is a big IF, I will ever fly again, not likely since I haven't flown in 50 years, I would take carry on only. If I had too much to do that I would ship the excess ground to my home.

Michael Campi at Medium has an interesting post. I have suspected for some time that we are long past the time when we (as a world society) can do anything to either stop outright or even roll back the damage we have done and are still doing to the environment/climate. He says

There are an ever growing number of fluffy people trying to see if they can capture some market share by writing, seemingly endless, articles on how we can “save the planet” or how we can “make a difference” or how we can “make better choices” and the simple truth is…

…we can’t.

The sooner that sinks in the better. There is nothing we can do.

We have several problems. First, there really isn't a "we" to do the job. Too many who want a standard of living like what the richest nations boast and have an argument that the West grew rich on the backs of the rest of the world. And we have industries and those who have interests in them whose status and wealth depend on a continuation of "business as usual." Second, even those who are loudly proclaiming that "we" need to change aren't showing much willingness to sacrifice their comforts to make that change. The "we" they are talking about is everyone else. Third, even if, by some miracle, people managed to go to zero carbon emissions it will be several decades before the levels of CO2 in the  declines. But we also have to deal with other greenhouse gasses that the warming temperatures are releasing. Also, the Amazon rain forest, which was a carbon sponge, is now releasing more CO2 than it absorbs. Our entire lifestyle depends on heroic consumption, wasteful production using dwindling resources, and releasing greater amounts of CO2. Changing a culture is like changing the course of a supertanker--it doesn't happen all at once.

January 3

 We had rain last night. That plus a restless cat meant I had a fitful night so I am a bit sleep deprived. I will probably doze off and on today. The temperatures are a bit above usual.

The news is covering the battle for house speaker which may turn out to be quite a soap opera. I say "may" because as Yogi Berra (I think it was) said: it is difficult to make predictions especially about the future. As things Spineless Kevin "has" a 222 seat majority (the number of Repthuglicans in the House. That means that he can't lose more than 4 votes to meet the 218 threshold to gain elections to the Speaker's seat. At this moment 5 members have indicated they won't vote for Spineless no matter what. Another 9 or 10 want more concessions to buy their vote. It will be fascinating to watch whether Spineless wins the vote or not. He has already agreed to allow as few as five members to call for a vote to remove him. Wasn't he watching when the Democrats in the Senate had to deal with a similarly narrow margin and found their plans side tracked by one.

Robert Reich has a good assessment of the current condition of the Republican Party. It is no longer recognizably conservative.

Responsiblestatecraft has a good article on the "zombification" of national security. The author says in different words what I have said before. We use our military to handle foreign affairs problems that aren't really nails and we think we have to handle everything all by ourselves. And where we question throwing money at any other department we love to do just that for the Pentagon.

January 2

 Good Day-After-New-Year's Day Though for some ( some govt. workers, the stock market, and such are closed) the holiday continues.

Robert Reich made an observation he refers to today and notes that he got some push back. He wrote that when the U.S. had an expanding middle class, strong unions, and a good education system we were protected from fascism. He didn't specify what arguments were made against his conclusion promising to go into it later today. I can think of one line of critique. This is a case of "that was then; this is now." Conditions have changed. Since around 1985 labor unions declined, the percentage of national income going to labor began to decline, middle class status was maintained by borrowing, and investment in education stagnated while the political intrusion into what is taught and how increased. But all of his rose-tinted view of the past was built on an expanding economy and the economy isn't expanding as reliably (if it isn't actually contracting.) And I would also contend that all of the measures we use to gauge the health of the economy are skewed to show growth and any contradictory stats have been dismissed.

Naked Capitalism has a good, sobering post on the hype around that "successful" fusion experiment a couple of weeks ago. I don't know how many out there are old enough to remember the hype over nuclear power generation. It was supposed to provide electricity "too cheap to meter." It never did. And it never really made a profit without the government subsidies it got. And we still haven't solved the problem of the waste. Note in the article that the notion that the experiment yielded more energy than was put into it only if you carefully select what you count as the energy input. And any possible scaling up to provide reliable energy to large numbers of people is decades away (if ever). Another "subsidy dumpster" (credit the term to John Michael Greer).

January 1

 Happy New Year

Well, someone was happy the year has turned. Neighbors woke us with their fireworks and fire crackers. I wondered if they had acquired a small cannon.

I saw this first off this morning and my first thought was the old saying: the more things change the more they stay the same. I am a boomer and I heard the same criticism of my generation. I am sure my mother heard that about hers and grandnieces and grandnephews (children of Millennials). 

I wonder how many remember (or for those younger than 30 ever learned of) the "Ozone Hole" debate. I found this on BBC which recounts the history of the international efforts to ban HFC refrigerants and describes the results. A few thoughts come to mind. First, clearly concerted international action is possible but it has to be focused and provide help for poor countries to enable their cooperation. Second, enough people must feed that the situation affects or will likely affect them in the short to medium term. Cancer and other such conditions have a tendency to focus people's minds. Third, people can support changes most easily if they don't really have to change. In this case, substitute refrigerants were available so no one had to scramble to find a substitute for the refrigerator or the freezer or the air conditioner. Changing our driving habits is far more difficult when cars are central to our way of life and our self-image. Fourth, it has taken a long time to get the agreements in place, to phase out the original technology (HFC refrigerants), and to see any results from the policy. And the ozone hole won't be fully repaired for a few more decades. We are not patient people. Climate change is a far more complex problem.