December 28

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The warm up the weather forecasts predicted is a bit slower than they thought. I finally got the trash tote open thanks to a kitchen knife that passed its kitchen days long ago. It worked like a charm in cutting through the ice sealing the lid closed. I want the trash to go out tomorrow because I put the turkey bones I boiled down yesterday in the trash and wanted to get the whole mess out for pick up tomorrow. Couldn't do that until I got the damned tote open.

I am not surprised the Supreme Court decided to continue Title 42 and hear the  arguments of the Republican state's attorneys in a couple of months. The five justices who voted to continue this abomination of a stealth immigration procedure masquerading as a public health policy. Ever since the Constitution was passed there has been a tug between the states and the Federal government over where one set of powers end and the other begins. Evidently Justice Gorsuch expressed the part of the problem. Politicians have failed to address the mess that is immigration policy and applying a measure that was used to address a pandemic to an entirely different problem makes no sense. I don't expect any "come to Jesus moment" among the people in the legislature any time soon.

I have often observed that the people of this country have a few choices: to become one country in fact as well as in rhetoric which would mean the states would be totally subordinate to the Federal government and reduced to mere provinces, or to become finally a confederation of sovereign states with a much reduced (if any) Federal presence, or we can come to a new balance between the states and the Federal power. I don't know which way this will go. Note: we were a confederation once under our first constitution, the Articles of Confederation. That arrangement had a lot of problems which is why the convention was called to "reform" the articles--that resulted in the ditching of the Articles and the establishing of the Constitution. Our history courses below the college level glides over the period from 1783 when the War ended and 1789 when the Constitution was approved.

The other crisis in moving people is the cluster**k in the airports. Some questions stand out from the reporting. Why did Southwest cancel two-thirds of their flights while the others cancelled only about 2% of their flights? All of Southwest's excuses for their performance should have affected all the others equally after all the storm didn't dump on their gates only. The other problem is our "just in time" mentality. Southwestern claimed they had the necessary assets and people in place to handle the Christmas rush and were simply overwhelmed by the weather. But that doesn't really make sense because that forecasters were giving warnings days in advance. I remember nearly a bit more than 30years whenI traveled from Denver to Tampa in an early January. The airlines knew a blizzard was coming. Their planes were stuck on the west coast because of the weather and my plane was among them. The ticket agents changed all the passengers on my flight to other planes and arranged connections. I was changed from a direct flight to one going to Dallas for a connecting flight to Tampa. I only experienced two glitches. First, my checked baggage was lost for a while but I carried on a change of clothes and everything I absolutely had to have. Second, on the way home the airline had me listed as a no show on my first flight which complicated my return ticket. But I told them about the re-routing and they put me on my original direct flight home. But in the intervening years the timelines have become tighter, the capacity is so tight that open seats are scarce or non-existent, and the entire system is brittle because the redundancy has been squeezed out. But redundancy was what allowed the airlines to be flexible in a similar situation years ago.

I found this article which did surprise me because I hadn't heard about the chickenpox cases in the United States. I'm 73 and I remember having measles, mumps, and chickenpox but my parents didn't have the option of vaccinating me because those vaccines hadn't come out yet. I was already six years old when the first polio vaccines were issued. I often think that success is the worst enemy of many things. Labor unions successfully agitated for a living wage for a 40 hour work week, overtime pay, health insurance and but as union membership waned so did the number of workers who had those "benefits." Social Security has reduced poverty in the elderly and in the surviving children of covered workers. For three or four decades now we have heard more complaints from economists and political pundits for its successes. Childhood diseases which almost a right of passage once and killed a proportion of the children who contracted it. We have become used to the benefits of each, considered them our due and we many now doubt the value of each.