19 February

Nice bright sun today but we won't get above mid-20s until Sunday. According to the weather channel we won't get any sizable snow for at least the next ten days. My fingers are crossed. Next week temperatures should stay in the thirties with a couple of 40s in the mix. Really hope so.

Watching the scenes from Texas. I am absolutely stunned by the ineptitude of the political class from Governor Abbot trying to blame "the Green New Deal" (which hasn't been implemented) for the failure of the Texas grid to a mayor telling his people that he is tired of "lazy" people who seem to want everything done for them to Sen. Ted Cruz who thought it a good time for a family trip to Cancun because everyone knows senators can't do anything.

However, other thoughts came up as various "systems" failed in succession: water, food, fuel, heat. We are so totally dependent on fragile systems that provide our basic needs. Most of us have no Plan B, C or D. No alternatives if something we depend on becomes undependable. We are so locked into Plan A we can't think beyond it. I noticed how often the various reports stressed the unprecedented nature of the storm in Texas but lost in the accounts except as a throwaway line is that was the fact that experts had been warning of such a situation for years. Unprecedented yes, unthinkable not at all.

February 21

It is early yet here and still dark so I can't see much outside. The weather predictions indicate snow for today though only up to 3 inches. But the temperatures should be going up to the point where some of our mountains of snow piled up all around might melt.

David Kaiser provides an interesting brief history of the primary process for nominating political contestants. I think we are in a bleak season of discontent as far as our political system is concerned. Democracy is a nice idea but then we have to decide who votes when and where. The news media and political pundits have said that a lot of measures have been introduced in multiple states designed to roll back measures like mail-in votes (aka absentee voting), early voting and such that made casting a ballot easier for ethnic/racial minorities, the poor, and the less mobile among us. Most of the measures are proposed in Republican states and are efforts to limit access to the groups that are least likely to vote Republican. They, it seems, would rather limit the numbers of their opposition with access  than broaden their appeal to attract those voters.

February 22

I don't know how far I will get with this today. The last couple I got distracted by other things and didn't get back to finish the post. Today I am a bit under the weather and plan on doing very little besides sleeping. Nice thing about retirement is I can afford to do that.

Most of the coverage of the latest long bout of nasty winter weather has focused on Texas which is understandable because of the geographical and population impact but this NY Times article (which I was able to read in its entirety even though their stories are usually behind a paywall) notes that the problems go well beyond the FUBAR situation in Texas which is monumental on so many levels. We have been reading about infrastructure failures that have come more frequently over the last decade or so. But the problem at bottom is that our "leaders" have kicked a lot of cans down increasingly potholed roads for a very long time. I don't think we can repair that damage easily or cheaply and we may have neither the political will nor the financial wherewithal.

Well, this AP story notes what the news yesterday said: we have passed the 500,000 mark in COVID deaths in this country which is more than any other country including Brazil which is the next leading country for COVID deaths. I remember when Dr. Deborah Birx said that "if we did everything right" we could keep that tally down to 50-100K. I think we proved Churchill's point when he said "Americans do the right thing--after they have tried everything else." We certainly didn't do much right under #45 who only "played" a president before a national audience. Unfortunately, we couldn't ignore the "show" like we did for The Apprentice and its offshoot. "The figure compiled by Johns Hopkins University surpasses the number of people who died in 2019 of chronic lower respiratory diseases, stroke, Alzheimer’s, flu and pneumonia combined."

By the way, the graphic at the top of the AXIOS introduction indicated that it took 4 month for the death toll to go from 100K last May to 200K in September, 3 months to go to 300K in December, 1 month to go to 400K in January and another month to go to today at 500K. That is a scary progression.

Engelhardt this morning is reposting a piece by Chalmers Johnson from the past. It is well worth reading and in doing so I was struck by the following sentence: Where exactly are we, as we continue to garrison much of the globe even as our country finds itself incapable of paying for basic services? That is especially timely as the toll from the latest weather disaster and the debate in the Biden Administration over whether we should go along with the previous (faux)-administration plans to get out of Afghanistan. We should never have gotten into that quagmire but since we did we now have no good options going forward. We are a part of a NATO force and have obligations to allies. And we have a fragile situation in the country which is likely to go bad no matter which way we go. Damned if we do and damned if we don't.

While watching the news from Texas I made the remark that Texas hadn't had a Democrat governor since Ann Richards. That means that the situation in the state has to be laid at the feet of George W. Bush, Rick Perry, and Tony Abbot. That is the point of this Crooks&Liars post.

The several stories about astronomical utility bills for Texas residents triggered a memory from several years ago. We had repeated visits from people who tried to sign us up for an alternative electric supplier promising huge savings. We had difficulty finding out exactly who they represented and the promises were too good to be true as we checked them out and several stories about charges of fraud concerning similar companies in Illinois led us to refuse to change. What happened to utility customers in Texas makes us very glad we did because the promise of "whole sale pricing" was exactly what our visitors were promising.

No need to comment except to say "its about time!"

This bit from Can It Happen Here is interesting. I thought I saw a large number of older rioters on January 6 but didn't think much of it since I also saw a lot of younger people. Evidently the number of older individuals (over 40) made that riot very different from the insurrections in Hong Kong, or Egypt or other such movements even our own Revolution. I wonder if part of that is the fact that we have an older population. The author suggests loss of cultural hegemony.

I have been retired for so long I forgot that unemployment benefits are taxed. The one time in my life when I received those benefits for such a short time, I got so little it didn't trigger a tax payment. Unfortunately, many people who received the expanded benefits over the last year are getting very unpleasant surprises--huge tax bills even thought they are still unemployed. Here is the HuffPost story on that. I actually had to look up the official word on the IRS site.