March 6

 How convoluted our business ties have become. When we try to punish Russia for its horrible behavior we often end up hurting ourselves or our allies as this article shows. I have been tracking the gas prices locally. Yesterday all but one station had gas for $3.90/gal and that one had raised their price to $4.00. Today all gas stations (the ones that are listing their prices--some aren't) are selling their gas for $4.00. The news yesterday mentioned that another Senator had introduced his own bill for a ban on Russian oil and the reporters featured interviewees who commented on the pain of higher prices but considered it worth given the circumstances in Europe. One of the featured analysts made the mistake of minimizing in a rather condescending way the effect of the price increases on "average" Americans (if there is such a category) which was received with a good bit of sarcasm here.

David Kaiser has a post which touches on several points that have been rattling around in my head since crisis began. I had been thinking this morning about the fact that no conventional, large scale war has been fought in Europe since the end of WWII. Wars since have been confined to third-world countries and were often insurgencies or civil wars that were proxies for our "great" power rivalries.  Kaiser doesn't draw many conclusions about that. I am thinking about the levels of suicide and/or drug addiction among our "volunteer" soldiers and the repeated scandals concerning the substandard medical treatment many received for their wounds.

Kaiser does remark on the loss of respect for governmental authority in both the former Soviet Union and in western democracies. He is a bit vague about the causes of the loss of respect in either country except for the blame he casts on our educational system. I could point to the high cost of wars of choice that yielded far few if any benefits ordinary Americans could see. I can't speak to the Russian situation but I seem to remember a "joke" that passed around during the time their government was expending a lot of blood and treasure in Afghanistan: they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Makes me wonder just what their economy was doing then. About that time (the 1980s) the income of middle class Americans stagnated and the only things that kept most families enjoying a middle class lifestyle were women entering the work force and easy credit (student loans, home equity lines of credit, etc.).

I will leave you to read the last couple of paragraphs for yourself. Some of the conclusions indicate that whatever "normal" will come after the dust finally settles won't be the old normal.

About 30 years ago I read Dmitry Orlov's work regularly--before it went behind a subscription wall--and I was reminded of one piece where he explained why he thought that Americans would do worse in case of an economic/social collapse than the Russians did during their 1991 collapse. Russia had a large number of people who survived WWII or who grew up during the hard times in the post war period and remembered what they did and applied those memories to the new crisis. Americans had fewer people who remembered the hardships of the Great Depression and WWII. Most of us have no memories or experiences to draw on to help us through such times. I was thinking of that during the discussions of the effects of the sanctions on the Russians and on us and I wondered it Putin was betting that his people would weather the privations better than our people would. I wonder how that bet will play out.

March 4

 First thing I saw this morning was a post whose author said that gas prices had gone up 0.50/gal overnight. I thought I would check our prices locally and saw the prices here range from 3.80 to 3.90/gal. That is 0.30-0.40 higher than we paid two days ago.

Then I found this. What I have read so far today Ukraine and Russia dodged a bullet--the reactor is intact and no radiation has leaked. However, the reactor supplied power to about a quarter of the country and the Russians can now cut that off. I don't chalk up the result (the fact that the reactor was taken intact and relatively undamaged) to precision given how many of their missiles have hit civilian targets though they claim they are not deliberately targeting civilians.

I love the first two posters leading off this Treehuggers post. The first is the WWII original and the second a modern remake. I have read that Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski have introduced a bill to ban imports of Russian oil. I don't know where it will go but I agree even though it might make our budget a good bit tighter. I always am deeply suspicious of depending on something someone else can hold over me. I remember the problems women in my bootcamp company had when we suffered a company punishment couldn't smoke because the "smoking lamp" was off. I remember in "A" school when the woman in charge of the women in the class threatened to take us to her "barber" if we didn't follow regulations on our hair styles. I immediately cut mine off in a pixie cut even shorter than hers. It make no sense to me that, as a society, we don't produce what we absolutely need within our own borders. As a tit for tat the Russians have prohibited the export of rocket engines our space program uses.

I just had another thought--officially banning Russian oil might not mean that much because quite a few major western oil companies are divesting of their investments in Russian oil.

March 2

 Welcome to March and the start of meteorological spring. We have three more weeks til the Vernal Equinox and astronomical spring. I only put that in because I always mix up the two. This is the time when the emotional part of me really, really wants to get out and garden while the rational part yells "not yet, you fool!" At the moment the rational side is winning.

We did most of our grocery shopping yesterday and filled the car. The gas was $3.54/gal--twenty cents higher than a week ago. I expected the rise because oil prices have been creeping higher since before the before the Ukrainian situation blew up. The prices aren't yet disturbingly painful only because we don't drive much--maybe once a week for groceries. If they go to that point we have our strategies in place to deal with it. Last year we our shopping trips to once every two or three weeks and can do that again if we must.

I noticed in the news blurbs that the oil/gas companies are trying to use Russia's war of choice against Ukraine as an excuse to drill more and to persuade the government to relieve them of some environmental restrictions. I don't think they really need such action from the government since the oil prices are now over $100/barrel. It would serve us better if the government advocated and subsidized renewables for home electricity and conservation measures. 

And oil isn't the only price going up (hence the increase in gas prices) food has also been going up. It amuses me that so many people haven't connected the dots between the droughts, heat waves, and floods afflicting so much of the world's agricultural land and the high prices.  We saw the drought, heat, and floods in the Northwest and into Canada and said "watch the beef prices." But guess what?--chickens and hogs don't do well in those conditions either. Neither does corn or wheat. And Ukraine is considered Europe's bread basket. Together with Russia it produces about 25% of the world's wheat.

February 22

 It is still too early to see anything much outside though the bright, slightly-past-full moon indicates a sunny day--unless clouds come in. The forecast promises three days in the 40s so the snow that has already fallen should be diminished.

The news is still dominated by only a handful of stories--and most feel very remote from life at my level (retired and on fixed income). Queen Elizabeth has a mild case (so far) of covid even though she has had all vaccination shots recommended. Because of her age they are watching very carefully. Prince Charles also has another breakthrough infection even though he has also been fully vaccinated and has even had his own previous breakthrough infection.

The Ukrainian situation is still, as it has been for most of this year so far, the major story. Most of the coverage is highly repetitive and very skimpy on real information. This morning they say that President Macron of France has conducted an extensive round of negotiations by phone with Putin and Biden perhaps arranging a summit between the two leaders though the White House said nothing is firm on such a meeting. They say one "conversation" between Putin and Macron lasted more than two hours. Listening to the story I thought of a scene in Isaac Asimov's sci-fi classic Foundation. The leaders of the Foundation received an emissary from the Galactic Empire and after extensive talks were convinced that the Empire had their backs in their increasingly threatening relations with a breakaway province. One person had the foresight to record most of those conversations and study them with sophisticated linguistic analysis. He found that the emissary spent a good deal of time spewing a lot of verbiage and didn't really say anything at all. No guarantees, no promises, no action to curb the rebellious province. I suspect that the conversations between Putin and Macron are very similar.

The stampede to remove covid restrictions now includes many Democratic controlled states with spokespeople for the national health agencies cautioning those moves may be premature. I thought in the first summer that covid was likely to become and endemic "flu" that we have to find a way to "live with." Our state hasn't had any restrictions for months but we haven't changed our behavior--we still avoid crowds and carry masks in case we come into an unexpected crowd and the medical offices we have to visit regularly still require them. We just picked up the three free N95 masks at our local big-box store (the local Walgreens didn't have any and the clerk said they wouldn't be getting any.) We are keeping the masks I sewed early in the pandemic because they are all double or triple layered and are a good back up. We have not picked up the free tests. Just for the hell of it I looked up some mortality stats on some other causes of death: flu--12000-52000 per year from 2010 to 2019/gun shot deaths-45,222 in 2020 alone/heart disease-about 700k deaths per year/covid to date--900k. If covid become an endemic flu I expect the yearly death toll would be between 50 and 100k deaths each year. We will see yearly exhortations to get vaccinated to both flu and covid (along with other vaccinations against other diseases like shingles.) Over the 2010-2019 years about 48% of the U.S. population over age 5 received vaccines for flu. That percentage rose to about 51% in 2020.  Just like with flu people who get covid will go to work if they aren't feeling too bad, will stay home if they are not feeling well at all, and go the the hospital if they are really sick. After all we still have no real system of effective sick leave and losing a day or two of wages can be catastrophic for ordinary Americans--a situation I remember all too well in my own life.

This story is a good argument for being cautious about adopting electric vehicles. No matter how the fire originally started (and the investigation has to wait for the fire to go out which won't be soon because the lithium ion batteries in all those luxury cars is now fueling the fire.

February 17

 The weather continues to be strange. A lot of the snow we had a week ago is gone--melted in the 51F of yesterday and washed away with the rain. It is snowing now. We won't complain because the worst of the storm (sleet and freezing rain topped off with inches of snow) passed us by. We still might get as much as 6 inches before tomorrow morning. I checked as many of the garden as I could reach. Several areas are still blocked by snow. The rosemary and Chamomile look very likely to comeback. The mums might also since the main stalks are supple and not brittle like dead ones would be. Beyond that--who knows?

Tom Engelhardt has a personal reminiscence on his Tomdispatch site today that rings several bells with me. At the same age he was when he sneaked into the adult section of his local library hoping the librarians wouldn't chase him away, I was doing much the same. I had already read through the children's section of my branch of our city library but my mother sent me in with a note allowing me to check our any book I the library--from any section. The city built a new, and larger branch closer to my house and I quickly read through it as well. The librarians already knew me and didn't bother me. I read through everything--fiction, science fiction/fantasy, history, biography, and science, whatever I got my hands on. By the time I was in high school I had also gone through the better part of the main city library (all three floors) and was taking a couple of train rides to Chicago where the last stop was just below the Chicago main library. Since my grandmother lived in the city we got me a borrowers card with her address and believe me I made sure every book got back on time and in good condition. Grandma would have blistered my ass if I hadn't done so and Mom would have done the same at home. 

I didn't read Maus when it came out but I did much later working on a never-finished dissertation on comic books or, to use the later phrase, graphic novels. The libraries I frequented in my much younger days wouldn't have had any of "those" on their shelves just as they didn't have series books (Nancy Drew, The Shadow, Doc Savage, The Hardy Boys, etc.) Those books I bought out of my allowance or Mom got them for me. The librarians frowned on those just as the "experts" of the previous century disapproved of the "dime" novels. Those books weren't "real" literature.

 The book banning craze is simply more evidence of the psychotic breakdown of our society or at least a significant minority (I hope) of it. Along with the attempts of legislatures to ban certain subjects from classroom discussion because it might make the poor little students uncomfortable. Of course they aren't worried about the psyches of all students--just white students. 

February 14

Well, we are at half past February. A month and a half into this year and it seems like we are in the same place now that we were on January 1: legislators that can't talk to each other reflecting an electorate the factions of which can't talk to each other, a population so deeply divided on almost every issue that an agreement is impossible (even if the tribes would talk among themselves--which they won't), an economy which some tout as booming while benefits the top tier most while the bottom tiers barely get by. That just barely scratches the surface.

Ah, well--since there isn't a damned thing I can do about the clowns prancing in the national circus I try not to get too irritated. Instead I can be pleased that I am almost finished with my second crocheted lap blanket of the year. I also have made good progress on a crocheted shrug and the embroidered table topper. That is something I can control. I need to get back to hand piecing a small quilted project that I think will be a cover for my sewing machine. And I really do need to get some machine piecing done  but I don't yet know what pattern I want to do. I just know I have that itch growing.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

 We have somewhere above 8 inches of snow that fell yesterday. The streets are somewhat passable--if you can get your car uncovered and the snow piled up around it cleared. We aren't going anywhere so we can do it slowly which is a good thing at our ages. Mom was saying that she would gladly pay some neighborhood lad $20 to do the job but we haven't seen any kids out and about lately.

This post from William Hartung on Tomdispatch doesn't tell me anything new. I have read similar articles for several years now. But I wondered as I read it if there are any people like Joe Manchin complaining about the Pentagon budget and the 3-5% yearly increases the National Defense Strategy Commission proposes. Why do they only complain about the inflationary impact of "social" spending? I guess the "poors" are the only ones who can get lazy and misuse government largess. The military won't do the equivalent of going hunting on the funds from the child tax credit. I am all for fiscal responsibility but I think it should start with our governmental "scared cows."