January 18

New snow again with lake effect probable. The temps won't exceed 32 til the middle of next week. I hope some of the ice under the snow will melt then. We didn't get the slush shoveled before the real cold set in. Every year such tasks get harder to do and easier to forget to do.

Bill Astore takes on the notion of an American turn toward isolationism. He  makes a good point that unraveling the net work of bases and the political/economic ties the U.S. has spanning the globe is a complicated project no one is honestly addressing--not addressing at all really. Reassessing our military footprint, our relationships world wide, and where our resources is not the same as retreating into isolationism. Conditions change and such periodic reconsiderations are necessary.

Another Republican thinks we should put kids to work. She has drawn up a bill that will allow children to leave school after graduating 8th grade. My grandfather graduated 8th grade in the 1890s which would have qualified him to teach. He preferred to work as a farmer. My father dropped out before graduating high school to enlist in the Navy during WWII. He worked as a truck driver. My mother dropped out though she had all the credits she needed to graduate (they refused to give her the diploma) to get married. Nearly 20 years later she took a GED test so she could go to Purdue and earn a nursing degree. My siblings and I have various histories. But by the time we came along my mother strove mightily to keep us in school to graduate. Statistics show that life time incomes increase as one completes high school and increases more with a college diploma. That would seem to be a good thing for the person, for the family and for our society. Evidently others don't think so. Stray thought: my mother and I have often listened to stories where some supposedly educated people spouted incorrect "facts" on some subject and wondered what the schools are teaching now. I often worked retail and found much younger colleagues who couldn't do basic math or make accurate change without the register telling them what the change should be. I have seen stories of young people who couldn't read or write cursive. Recently, I read a semi-biographical part of a blog written by a person who recounted how the parameters of his submissions have changed from articles of 4000 words to  nowadays a limit of under 1000 because the publishers think people won't read longer ones. I could accept letting kids leave school after graduating 8th grade if we had a rigorous system which provided kids with skills to go back to school later and learn other skills/degrees. I don't see that. All I see is politicians who think dumping kids on the labor market so that employers have a resource that will let them pressure adult wages downward.

Stray thought: there has been a lot of space given to the polls which say people, generally, are pessimistic about the economy. I have mentioned some of them along with my own skepticism about statistics that are cherry picked and massaged. Over the last few I have seen another poll which reveals the importance of what question is asked. The pollsters asked their respondents the usual question about what they think of the economy and got the usual pessimistic responses. But then they followed up with the same respondents and asked how they felt about their own economic situation and found most people were both satisfied and optimistic. Interesting. I can relate to that because we are in that position--skeptical about the over all direction of the economy writ large and satisfied with our own economic situation.

Stray thought: the article title proclaimed that Trump was "denied" access to evidence that doesn't exist. That seems a bit moronic. No one can deny access to what doesn't exist. I didn't read the article.

Charles Hugh Smith has a post about trust in American Society. Spoiler: there isn't much any more.