December 30

 Last Monday of 2024 and two days from the end of another year I am glad to see recede into the past. However, having read a lot of history I have come to realize that the past is never really past. Its tendrils weave into the events we experience in every present we live through. Listening to the news recounting the long life of Former President Jimmy Carter I am reminded of that.

Bill Astore on his substack blog today echoes that notion (that the past is in the present). There is also a Biblical idea that a "prophet is without honor in his own country" and in his own time. Dwight Eisenhower's reputation as President under went a serious reappraisal about 25 years after he left the White House. Early evaluations cast him as a somewhat slow witted (or senile) old man who didn't do much. Later historians thought he was greatly underestimated and was in fact a canny player on the world stage and set up the conditions for an American economic explosion. Carter was dismissed in much the same way.

Stray thought: Some years ago I read Vera Britain's memoir A TESTAMENT OF YOUTH which covered her life in pre-WWI England through her service in as a nurse during the war and her efforts to build a life after. Before the war she was studying English at Oxford and after she decided to go back to Study. The head of the women's college wasn't very enthusiastic because Britain had been considered barely qualified for the English program and not at all for History. When Britain said she wanted to study History to find out why the nations of Europe went to war in 1914 she was told that the program didn't cover recent events defined as anything within the last 50 years. They thought that a space of time was necessary to provide perspective. That might not be a bad notion.

Stray thought: during a couple of the cheating scandals that engulfed a couple of the military academies and the part of the service that mans the nuclear missile sites I was surprised--not by the scandals themselves but by the commentary on them. The commentators were shocked the behavior of people they somehow thought were more "honorable" than the population from which they came.

December 26, 27, 28

 Boxing Day today in Canada and the UK. Hope your Christmas (or first day of Hanukah) was pleasant. Ours was quiet here at home. We had turkey, mashed sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce and Brussels sprouts for supper. I wove several squares on my zoom loom and picked apart several I had connected and thought better of what I had done. I have an idea I want to try after New Year's Day to connect those squares but I am not going to start that until then. We watched a whole star of our DVDs because nothing interested us on cable. Today I wove several more squares, got the kitchen cleaned up, made oatmeal for breakfast and got a cake in the oven. We will have pork chops with mashed potatoes for supper because I have the chops thawed and don't want to risk them going bad. I won't have to do more than heat up meals for the next week. We'll live on left-overs.

Reading list:

1) Bill Astore at Bracing Views casts considerable doubt on the notion of "trusting" the government. However, his article suggests that we shouldn't trust other aspects of our social/political system. He reminds us of how old Biden looked during the 2020 campaign with his physical stumbles, mental hiccups, and other signs of decline. Astore argues that, because of COVID, we simply didn't see enough of him to have notice the signs. Well, I did notice but I also saw the same signs with Trump and in a choice between the two I chose Biden. I don't trust most of what the government puts out or promises. I spend a good bit of time trying to figure out how to lessen my reliance on the government but some of what they do is so necessary and so embedded in our society that it is a challenge.

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Our iron grey skies finally decided to dump some rain on us. We expect another couple of days before the temperatures fall to more normal levels. Right now we have high 40s or low 50s. I saw something sprouting in the containers. I have no idea what it is but it won't last long with colder temps coming

I am in a "low power" mode and simply puttering around puttering around. As I mentioned, the embroidered pillow case was the last completion for this year. That makes two pairs of pillow cases, a table topper, two embroidered/cross-stitched table scarves, an eight piece set of placemats and napkins, four crocheted lap blankets. Not bad. I am already lining up the needlework for next year. I just started a new doily which will be a bit of a challenge along with the two to-be-embroidered/cross-stitched table clothes, a lap blanket in process, and a whole bunch of woven squares to put together for something undecided yet. I will also bring out a quilt that is started but has been in limbo for about two years. Time to make progress on that.

Well, it is finally official--the bald eagle is the official bird of the U.S. We both were surprise because we thought it had been since the founding of this country. Evidently not. The BBC has a nice article here.

28*******************************************************************************

Quiet Saturday watching our own re-runs. We watched one of the local Chicago channels for news but switched to our DVDs. Most of the rest is news/commentary/speculation so limiting my exposure to it seems to be the way to mental health. There seems to be two camps: the hysterical Democrats and the sycophant Republicans. A few seem to be taking a wait-and-see attitude. I am in the middle camp. I have never had a good opinion of Trump. I never watched THE APPRENTICE because I never liked the "reality" type of TV show. (I never watched AMERICA'S GOT TALENT, SURVIVOR, THE VOICE etc., either.) For some time I have thought that some aspects of the Federal government (and perhaps State governments as well) needed a thorough reform but not a thorough demolition. We'll have to see what the Trump and his acolytes actually do.

I favor the old admonition:

    Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change

    The strength to change the things I can change

    And the wisdom to know the difference.

That is the trick--to tell which is which is which.

December 23

 Well the snow is still hanging on and we have a gray and cloudy day. There may be more precipitation but we aren't going out so we aren't concerned. I have already turned off the TV--the insanity of what goes on or, rather, the insanity of the news coverage irritated me so I turned off the news rather than throw something at the screen. Instead we are playing a Charlie Chan marathon. We have a nice collection of our own reruns. But I am still reading what has arrived in my e-mail. That I can ignore or scan or read carefully as I choose. It isn't nearly as irritating.

Here is some of what I am reading:

1) Alfred McCoy who wrote a recent book on the transitions from one world order to another over the last couple of thousand years ( TO GOVERN THE GLOBE) posted a piece on Tomdispatch: "The World's Four Legacy Empires Going Down."

December 22

 Good morning. Only three more days til Christmas. The weather forecast predicts above "normal" temperatures which should get rid of the snow we have now. We are supposed to have a couple of days of rain but nothing more. I put that word in quotes because the weather over the last couple of decades has been anything but normal. We aren't planning anything special.

I finished another embroidery piece--the second of a pair of pillow cases. I completed the other a month or so ago. That will probably be the last completion for the year. Next year will be devoted to finishing some projects that are a bit too far along to finish quickly. The whole purpose of doing hand work is to slow down. I wouldn't have said that a couple of decades ago when I was still in the rat race they call life in this country--doing everything as fast as possible and getting on with the next thing or trying to juggle four and five things at the same time.

Well, the clowns in congress finally got a continuing resolution to keep the government in operation for another quarter. The new shitshow same as the old shitshow. And the same as all the other quarterly or semiannual shitshows for I forget how long. It is getting a bit boring and very irritating. It isn't even a full budget. They (past and present members of the House especially) haven't been able to get an agreement on a real budget for the last four administrations--if not longer. This time we had the added spectacle of Elon Musk's self-serving interference which had a lot of commentators (inside and outside government) wondering who is the real President-in-waiting. Trump came in with his own two-cents only after Musk created his twitter storm and raised his ruckus.

Bill Astore has an acerbic post this morning on the mess in the Middle East. He takes exception to the New York Times editorial opining on finding a "nuanced" position on the "Hamas-Israel" war because he can't really see such a position. Frankly, I can't either. The response to the October 8th Hamas attack on Israel has been to destroy the Palestinians under the guise of destroying Hamas. In the back of my mind was something I had read about the aims of the ultra-conservative Jewish groups aims to create a Greater Israel that approximates the territories of the Jewish kingdom under Solomon and other kings. It totally incorporates the West Bank, Gaza, parts of Lebanon, Jordon, and Syria. As Astore points out the actions Israel has undertaken amounts to a one state "solution" which leaves the Palestinians without any state at all.

Another aspect of the shitshow in Washington is that to keep up our government's support for Israel they keep increasing the aid to Israel and cut things like support for research and treatment of childhood cancer. Death in one hand and death in the other and death all around.  

December 17

Sunny today and unseasonably warm. I am taking things easy. I am still tired and stiff from yesterday. I had to take the car in for new tires and a replacement for a burned out headlight but, as the saying goes, one damned thing after another kept me waiting there for five hours. And I am not complaining about the service--that was great. The mechanics found that the headlight assembly was shot because the insulation on the wires had disintegrated and the wiring corroded. They had to order the parts which took time. Then they found a similar problem with the wheel assembly and was dangerous enough that it really had to be fixed immediately. More parts had to be ordered and more time. So I wound up spending five hours there because I had no alternate transportation. If we had realized so much had to be done to simply get the original things fixed (new tires and headlights) I might have been able to arrange something so I could leave the car and pick it up next day. I took my NOOK reader with me so I could read a book but sitting there that long left me so stiff that I could hardly write the check. We did spend much more than anticipated but it wasn't anything we couldn't cover and the repairs probably mean the car will last past when neither one of us are driving any longer.

Bill Astore linked to a George Carlin skit from 2005 which is well worth a listen, or read since Astore included a transcription. Sounds an awful lot like what I have been hearing from the coterie around the Once and Future President. 

December 15

 Cloudy, foggy, and a bit warm for mid December. We had rain overnight and may be getting a light mist in addition to the fog. We have a nice soccer day today with three back-to-back games. I changed out the Fall door wreath for a Winter wreath. I had intended to make some changes but I will wait until I take the wreath down for Spring.

Bill Astore has a good post on the American health wealth care system. Another blogger has called it the "sick care" system. Both get to the same point: the system is designed to make sure the medical insurance industry, corporate medical service industry, drug industry, and medical devices industry stay wealthy and get wealthier. They do that by 1) denying service whenever possible, 2) charging as much in fees (like co-pays) and creating service limitations (lifetime limits) and 3) pushing drugs or treatments which don't rally cure diseases and keeps patients on the hook for their lives (weight loss drugs which work but which you can't stop if you want to maintain the weight loss). 

I will make a couple of observations. First, the insurance industry AS A WHOLE has problems. With the number of weather related/environmental disasters property insurers are also having profitability problems which they deal with in the same way the health sector does: denying claims, paying claimants as little as they can if they can't deny payments all together, refusing to renew coverage (which may lead mortgage holders to call the loans), or jacking up the premiums into the financial stratosphere. And so much insurance is required: auto insurance by law, homeowner's insurance by mortgage holders, property insurance for business by lenders and law, etc. But insurance is becoming an unsustainable financial burden and major time tax for the insured. Second, That some parts of the social media ecosystem seem to consider Mangione something of a hero is hardly surprising. We can't really say how widespread the phenomenon is because social media is a very opaque system. You can't tell legitimate sentiment form rabble rousers or even how many posts are discrete individual and how many are repeaters of some kind. But the outlaw hero is an old theme going back at least as far as Robin Hood who robbed the rich to support the poor. The unpopularity of the railroad robber barons whose business screwed small farmers while giving wealthy industrialists sweetheart deals gave rise to Jesse James and similar bandits. And, long before Willie Sutton said he robbed banks because "that's where the money is" predatory practices by bankers made some bank robbers outlaw heroes. It is an old tradition in western culture.

I would have laughed at this CROOKS & LIARS article if it didn't say something so truly angering about the avarice of the medical industry. If you can make more money doing "surgery" then defining as much as possible as "surgery" is way to pad your bank account.

The ANCIENT MARINER complained about "water, water every where and ne'er a drop to drink. According to this Guardian article the island of Sicily there is too little water anywhere. The mariner was surrounded by sea water (not good to drink) while Sicily is in the midst of an unprecedented drought. The reservoir featured in the article saw the water level drop from 30m cubic feet to 290,000. When the government ordered the local towns to send water to towns in neighboring provinces the local people said "NO" and turned up to guard the distribution center.

December 12, 13, 14

Good Morning. We had snow flurries yesterday though little, if any, stuck. We had to take the car in because we got a "check tire pressure" warning light. We don't have the tire pump any more--another thing we don't do ourselves. While there we asked the service people to check all the tires for wear. The last time they were checked was about five or six years ago. As I told Mom, if we followed the milage recommendations for maintenance we would never have any maintenance done. We just don't drive much any more. Well, we an appointment next week to have all four tires changed. We will also have a burned out head light replaced.

I finished a large crochet doily yesterday. It will be the last crochet project for this year. Not a bad tally for this year: four doilies and four lap/baby blankets. I changed things a bit putting all the needlework in progress in the 5-drawer dresser we rescued from a neighbor's trash and put the crochet blankets which had been in the dresser in the ottoman where the needlework had been. In the process I found several pieces that were half finished. I should get the almost completed pillow case done before year's end. I finished the mate to it a couple or three months ago.

Another episode in the on going saga of American "crapification" comes from Robert Reich. 

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It looks like in and out sun today. I am a bit sluggish today. Didn't sleep well last night and decided to read a bit rather than toss and turn. I finally got to sleep somewhere between 12:30 and 1am. At least I finished reading THE VOYAGE HOME by Pat Barker. It continues her story of the Trojan War told from the perspective of the Trojan women which started with THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS and continued with THE WOMEN OF TROY. Historical novels are chancy for me--I either like them or hate them. These I like.

Stray thought: evidently Trump has walked back a couple of campaign promises in a couple of interviews recently. He told his interviewers that lowering grocery prices and negotiating an end to the Ukraine-Russia war were "complicated" and would not be done on his first day. I wonder who gave him a dose of reality.

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Well, here we are--half past December. It started out sunny and cold but the clouds have moved in. I spent the morning starting another scrap lap/crib afghan. It will probably be finished sometime in the new year. Like a lot of fiber crafters I keep several projects going at the same time using several different techniques. The new scrap project is in Tunisian treble and Tunisian single stitches. I learned the basics of the stitch when I was 14 or 15 and a very nice lady working the sewing/notions counter in an old Ben Franklin 5 & 10. Most of that chain are gone now.

Stray thought: evidently one of the people vetting possible employees of for the Department of Health and Human Services if RFK, Jr., is confirmed is a lawyer who is noted for doing the legal work for anti-vax groups and has filed a petition to make the FDA rescind its approval of the POLIO vaccine. He claims that the process was flawed because there were no null groups in the trials. The idiot was born long after the vaccine was approved and long after the last big polio outbreak in the U.S. in the early 1950s. I doubt he knows any person who has had polio--unless he knows Mitch McConnell. I am 75 and in my life time I have known only one person who had contracted polio. The girl was in my 8th grade class and had just emigrated from one of the Eastern European countries which tried to throw off Soviet control and been suppressed by the Red Army. Usually she was in a wheel chair and her clothing was a couple of sizes larger than she would normally wear so it covered her body brace. She also had heavy leg braces and used crutches to stand. The 1952-55 outbreak infected a bit less than 60K and killed a bit more than 3000 with many of the survivors paralyzed. The vaccines (Salk and Sabin versions) were introduced in 1956 and incidents of polio have almost disappeared in this country. I call that effective.

Second stray thought: RFK, Jr., and his ilk seem to have an absolutist definition of "effective" which ignores the fact that no medical technique or medication is absolutely 100% effective. It is always a matter of percentages: what percent of people exposed to a disease get it if they have no vaccine vs. what percent of vaccinated people get the disease if exposed and what percentage of vaccinated people have side effects of what severity.