April 30

Well--it has already been a frustrating morning and it isn't even 6am yet. I tried to get onto Facebook as usual but all I got was a blank page. Nothing I did brought up anything but that blank page. Mom was able to get on with Firefox so I tried than. I could get my page up but none of the games would play. After more than an hour trying to figure out the problem I decided either it would come back on Safari as it normal or I will ignore Facebook except for checking out the groups I am in. Those are mostly needlework and such and they provide some jaw dropping inspiration. On that note I have a lot of e-mail to get through and may find something to comment on.

I saw this item yesterday but wanted to let it percolate in my mind. I remember reading Countdown to Zero Day and Lights Out (by Ted Koppel) when they came out. Although both had a lot of new information none of it was exactly surprising. I think most of us have become somewhat used to disruptions of services we depend on--see the first paragraph. We have had difficulty several times over the last few years accessing our bank accounts and paying our bills. That governments (including our own) are deeply involved in developing cyberspace weapons wasn't at all surprising. Individuals at my level are left with only one option--figure out what you would do if those vital services failed.

A minor theme in the politics now is our (seemingly interminable) presence in Afghanistan. Neither Former Guy nor President Biden were able to extricate us without a quiet but intense fight among foreign policy factions over when (if) we should get out and under what conditions. A comment last night on one of the news/commentary shows summed it up nicely. Those factions are either warning the politicians that the situation is unstable and we will have to go back in to ensure the Taliban doesn't overthrow the government we support and those who say that the situation will never be stable, we can't make over Afghanistan into our own image and if not now WHEN. I would quibble with the notion that we will have to go back in sometime because nothing says we will have to do anything. I always thought that we should have chosen four targets in Afghanistan to match the four planes that hit us--perhaps a couple in Kabul, the Al Qaida's training camp, and another of some lesser significance. Then told them that since we had to repair what they destroyed they could repair the damage we caused. Instead we tried to hit a gnat with a sledge hammer for 20 damned years. This piece at Tomdispatch.com lays out our exercise in futility very nicely.

An interesting question cropped up in the wake of President Biden's address Wednesday night: Is America a racist country? It is interesting because there is no "right" answer. A country is a collective of individuals living in a specific geographical area and as such a country can't be racist or sexist, or (name your poison.) Individuals can definitely be racist, sexist, or (name your poison.) But you can have a population with a sufficiently large percentage of prejudiced people and who act on that prejudice. Such a large percentage of bad apples ruins the whole barrel. Our barrel has been tainted in all its institutions with the bad apples and somehow we need to clean it out.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has a good article describing why the student loan problem is worse than we might think. She considers only the financial (ill)logic of the programs but the harm goes beyond the financial losses which are, as she says, baked in now. The people saddled with loans they can't repay either because they never finished and so couldn't get the jobs they hoped would allow repayment or they finished and found no jobs that would pay enough to live on and repay the loans.