Patience, and Rhetoric

I had vowed (in a manner of speaking) to be patient with the Alt-Right.  It is so easy to be annoyed with their lack of substance, their disregard for the health of the very old, the very young, and the very poor; their tolerance for the deceit of Trump and his running dogs, and their opposition to Biden's programme.  That last is a given; the GOP wants the Democrats out of office, and Mitch McConnell has long ago shown how utter disregard for the needs of the electorate is rarely punished by the voters.

Giving in to the annoyance that we (or I, anyway) feel is easier on me, because after a while, thinking of the conservatives as a herd of imbecile lemmings streaming over some cliff overlooking the sea is a comforting image.  But anyone who has been paying attention to reporting by the media on individuals, formerly Alt-Righters, coming in from the cold, reveals that a host of them have found it difficult to turn a blind eye to the untruthful rhetoric emanating from Trump Central.  Therefore it is imperative that these refugees from the GOP are met with reason, rather than knee-jerk viciousness.

I'm using "rhetoric" in a slightly illegal sense.  The word really means the tone of a speech, the choice of words of a speaker (or a writer) that is deliberately intended to create a certain effect in the audience.  The common usage of the word implies that rhetorical language is, to various degrees, deceitful.  It need not be, but when the term rhetoric is used increasingly in recent times, because of the rhetorical excesses of the speech on the right, the difference between rhetoric and lies becomes blurred.

But the word rhetoric is still useful, because it conveys that the people who use it today knowingly use it to create a certain impression, while knowing that it stretches the truth, or, increasingly today, consists of out-and-out lies.

For instance, when the Alt-Right leaders suggest that the COVID vaccines are unsafe, it is rhetoric, because the CDC was slow to actually certify them, and vaccines are guilty of being unsafe until proven innocent.  When they say that the vaccines are an aspect of government control, even mind control, they are engaging in slander, that is, lying.

However, some of these "second-rank" GOP leaders are so feeble-minded that they believe their own rhetoric, their own lies, that is, and lose sight of the actual facts that they have to deal with.  For instance, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is a presidential hopeful, initially cooperated with Trump to minimize the danger of COVID.  Then he, with Trump, chose to cast doubt about the efficacy of the vaccine, just so that Biden would be ineffectual in controlling the spread of infection.  But it so happened that the infection was controlled partially, in such a way that the efficacy of the vaccines, at least temporarily, was established, and the shortfall of the vaccines from total effectivity could be easily seen to be caused by dangerous behavior by people carrying infections.  By easy implication, Ron DeSantis and his cronies could be considered to actually cause the spread of COVID in conservative states.  And now, it is mostly conservative states in which the infection is rampant.  And the very constituents of Ron DeS. and his conservative fellow-governors, are dying, which reveals the utter contempt these people have, the sorry lack of compassion they have, for the weaker ones within their flock--thinking for a moment of these governors as shepherds.  This is not just callous, it is stupid.  Well, they are all ambitious, all eager to join the line of conservatives seeking the White House.  The members of their states may overlook their callousness, and vote for them for president.  But the country as a whole is more likely to remember their ignorance, their callousness, and their stupidity.  In their eagerness to cast shade on Biden, they have thrown their old and feeble, their low-paid hospital workers, the teachers in their schools, under the bus.  It was so preventable.

So we know that the conservative candidates for the presidency in 2024 are going to be callous, and stupid, and ignorant.  Certainly, they are going to be weak in their science background.  They are going to have to be fast talkers.  And they're not going to persuade too many people.  Their chance may come in 2028, after the Democrats have dragged themselves kicking and screaming into moving the country towards a more equitable society, and a less violent climate.  If they don't, conservative rhetoric hardly matters.

Arch

The Roots of Some Failures in Kabul

[When reading what follows, bear in mind that I do not write from first hand knowledge, or even third-hand knowledge.  Read, for instance, https://www.u4.no/publications/corruption-in-afghanistan-and-the-role-of-development-assistance]

I read a very interesting article that arrived in my mailbox, courtesy of one of the newspapers, which I wanted to disseminate to our readers, but I have inadvertently deleted it.  But let's stumble through the main idea anyway.

The article was written by a political correspondent stationed in Afghanistan, who was so stunned by what she was hearing from rural Afghanis, that she quit her job, and moved to rural Afghanistan, to try and help the people there, especially the women.  She was recounting what she discovered when talking to these people.

The main thing is this: an enormous proportion of the money sent to Afghanistan, for the relief of the worst-off members of the population, was essentially stolen.  Of course, we in the US tend to expect this; we throw up our hands, what can we do when the the country is fighting guerilla gangsters?  As the story continues, we learn that the very people the US had installed as the civilian government in Kabul were the worst sort of racketeers.  Much of the food and supplies that were intended for the people, the troops, the hospitals etc, were actually channeled away---sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes in broad daylight---into the distant compounds of the so-called warlords.  A lot of the actual US dollars that were earmarked for the war effort, found their way into the bank accounts of terrorist leaders hunkered down in Pakistan.

As an aside: the groundwork for systematic, built-in corruption in Afghanistan was laid decades ago by the narcotics trade.

In fact, we have now learned that the so-called US ally, Pakistan, is in fact the location of a lot of insurgent hideouts, and many of these fellows came swarming into Afghanistan the second the US began to pull out.  (Recall that Bin Laden was hiding in Pakistan when the Seals got him.)

Let's take a slightly longer view of this problem.
When the US, in the middle of a war, or at any time, wants to support the institutions of a foreign country, it seems to take it as inevitable that the people it deals with are corrupt.  Usually this attitude is justified; the bureaucrats in foreign governments are usually either corrupt, or easily corruptible.  (Trump assumed that the US government was no different, but he was not entirely right about that.)  So the Pentagon budgets (verb)---I suppose---a certain amount of money to spend on corruption.  (This same problem crops up when the US establishes charities to help hardship in foreign lands.  A lot of the money raised in the US for the charities go to, I think, paying out bribes.  I don't know this for certain, and I'd like to be proved wrong.  In any case, a large proportion of the funds go to maintain the American---and even local---administrators and managers of these funds in the style to which they're accustomed.)

To conclude, the conservatives in Congress are often eager to prosecute wars abroad, for various reasons, chiefly to bolster our tendency to put the USA forward as a global policeman.  Even now, the conservatives are furious that the US is in the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan.  (The Democrats are not much better; they have been no less enthusiastic about some of these wars.)  The 'nice' thing about these wars is that they help out the arms industry, which is friendly towards conservative congressmen and senators.  However, as the war winds down, the vast numbers of Afghan citizens whom we had to depend on in Kabul: translators, drivers, orderlies, lawyers, what have you, are petitioning to be taken into the USA as refugees.  (Of course they should; for them to remain would be to get killed at the drop of a hat.)  But the Conservatives see this as just immigration in another guise, and can be expected to resist these initiatives.

Many political wonks are of the opinion that we should have settled on a permanent presence in Kabul (or somewhere in Afghanistan) to keep a lid on "our interests" there, rather than completely cut and run.  This would entail a constant stream of bribes to keep the local Afghanis happy, and would probably end up with a stream of US-origin firearms being trickled out to insurgent groups based in Pakistan, etc.  This would be "foreign aid" of the worst kind.

Arch

A Complete Outsider's View of the War

When it comes to foreign wars, I am a complete outsider.  Of course, I have opinions.  But I know little or nothing of the so-called "calculations" that the generals in the Pentagon make.  At best, these calculations yield probabilities of success.  At worst, they yield highly unreliable, and worse: subjective, estimates of how effectively nation-building will proceed in a theater of war country.  We have been out there, tilling the fields in Korea, in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Iran, in the Philippines, with only partial success in Korea.  We have inched in into Syria, and that's not going to work, either.  (This is partly because at least half the USA wants to do a good job of nation-building; the other half wants to establish business opportunities over there.)

Well, the Taliban have been interested in controlling Afghanistan long before the USA stepped in (in the wake of 911).  In fact, the USA enlisted the help of the Taliban in order to oppose the Soviet ambitions in Afghanistan back in the 60's.  (Either the US wanted to oppose anything the Soviets wanted to do, or the Afghanistanis begged the US to come in and help against the Soviets.)

What are the Taliban, anyway?  I honestly don't know.  All I know about the Taliban is that (1) they're religious extremists—signified by their fury at girls and women being educated; (2) they don't like girls and women being educated, which follows on from (1); (3) they hate the USA (which is no wonder, because we have been fighting them for 20 years, and preventing them from getting any sort of political power.   On the other hand, I don't know much more about the gentlemen who have political office in Kabul—those who are opposed to the Taliban.  All we can guess is that (4) they don't like the Taliban, (5) they do like the US, because after all, we set them up in power.

The Taliban is defeating the Afghan forces, and taking over dozens of government centers around the country.  Pretty soon they're going to roll into Kabul, and the whole country will be in their hands.  Girls and women have to stop going to school, and all the (American-style) cultural progress that has been made in Afghanistan will be rolled back, just like Trump rolled back much of what Obama did to make life better for poor Americans.  The Taliban is the 'Trump' of Afghanistan.  As long as we do cultural advancement in the image of the US in Afghanistan, the Taliban will not rest until they change it back.  Let's face it: nation-building in Afghanistan is not something the USA is equipped to do, no matter what GOP military dreamers think.  We may have led the horse to water, but it isn't drinking.

Wherever there has been a repressive Islamist regime in place in a country, if women have acquired rights, it is by their own efforts.  Foreign travel, and the Western experience merely introduces them to how women live in the West; then it is up to Islamic women themselves to push for a measure of liberty.  Afghani women are not going to permanently win any concessions because the US decrees that it should be so.

What are the Taliban going to do to the women?  Kill them all?  That would be horrible, and it is one of the few things that might spur Biden into carpet-bombing the place.  We know how dismal life is for Indian women in (certain parts of) India, but we have not done anything about it—so far.  But there's no saying what these fellows will do.  For 20 years we haven't succeeded in persuading them to think that the American Way is anything they can subscribe to; what are the odds that we can do it another few months?

HOWEVER, there is nothing to say that if other Islamist nations were to attempt to moderate the enthusiasm of the Taliban, it won't be effective.  It is time that these nations stepped up to do something about the situation.  (There is a problem that the wrong denomination of Islam will not succeed at this task; I believe the Afghans are Shia, which means that the only country qualified to address the nation-building of Afghanistan might be Iran.)  Leaving Afghanistan to the tender mercies of the Taliban seems to me to be a waste of a perfectly good country, despite that we couldn't make a deal with them to supply us with cocaine.  (I'm being sarcastic; you addicts can go back to sleep.)

The GOP is inclined to blame Biden for either abandoning Afghanistan, or not doing it the right way.  Never mind that Trump wanted to do it the same way.  But they have been inclined to make silly accusations of the Democrats, and Biden, anyway.

Arch

True Skill versus Hacking

Many of us have realized that the Republican Party has begun to fragment over the last few years.  (So have the Democrats, but the Dems, at least, are more in tune with the conventional workings of government, whereas the Republicans are not.)

Let us first assume that the mechanics of Congress, the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the White House, and the ways they work together to govern the country has worked, and will continue to work in the near future.  Whether it does or doesn't is a discussion for smarter minds than mine.  Then it behooves those who are sent to Washington to learn how to do this to the best of their ability.  However, in many areas of life, we see that the newer waves of people apprenticed to work in any area are simply content to learn certain tricks that work, and simply employ them repeatedly.

Mitch McConnell, for example, has learned to drag things out as long as possible, when a Congressional Democratic majority is in power, to (1) not address any legislation that has been sent up from the House, and (2) not consider any supreme court justices that a Democrat President nominates.

This pattern has been extended as follows.  If any Democrat President tries to do anything in a bipartisan way, the Republicans pretend to try to accommodate him or her.  After months of negotiating have delayed the proceedings, they then stop negotiating and vote against the (successfully weakened) legislation.

The Democrats, however, are usually accomplished lawyers, who usually argue their cases in good faith, and do not try to subvert the dominant paradigm, as the saying goes.  The Republicans know this, therefore they try very hard to break the rules.  Whenever they discover a 'charismatic' leader in their midst (though it's hard to think of Donald Trump in terms of charisma; he's more of a showman, a sort of Liberace who can't play the piano), and who does not stand for the usual procedures of Washington, they make the best of it, and encourage him to wreak havoc in Washington, to the extent of subverting the Justice Department, the Immigration Service, and many other institutions that are not intended to be interfered with by political people.

So, as fewer and fewer strong, knowledgeable and skillful Republicans are elected to national office, and the party is left in the hands of hacks, their strategies will drift ever increasingly towards obstructionism, and such things as voter suppression, and playing with the Supreme Court, and wild litigation.

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Power Politics, and Getting Things Done

Why people consider politics as something dirty is because there are two aspects to it.

The first is to get into City Council, or the State House of Representatives, or Congress, or the Senate, and somehow get some legislation you really want passed; hopefully some law that will make things better for everybody.

The second is to get yourself elected.

Members of both parties are concerned with both aspects of politics; you can't do either without the other; sometimes someone who aspires to public office has to compromise on his or her objectives in order to persuade voters to elect them.  Some people go as far as lying about what they want to do once elected, in order to get votes.  Others are brutally honest about their agenda, and endure not being elected for years and years, hoping that the electorate will finally see that their agenda is the best for the electorate.

Now, looking around us, we can't help noticing that there are two terrible forces that are advancing on us: (1) The relentless advance of climate change.  Just like the GOP has finally recognized that it is insane to urge their people to refuse to get vaccinated, so we must hope that those who insisted that climate change was temporary, and not a result of society's disregard of environmental effects, will see reason.  Many fools who screamed at the science that was trying to persuade people that it was going to get too hot and too wet to continue to live the way we like to live, are belatedly coming round to say: we have to do something.  (2) The fact that it is the poorest among us, African Americans and all sorts of minorities, immigrants, women, single parents, disabled, and uneducated, who suffer most from the excesses of the society we live in; in particular, and increasingly, the ravages of climate.

I have, most of my life, dreamed about going into space.  If society was equitable, if poverty was not something that was going through the roof, if there were no more suffering in the world, not to mention the USA, I would have dearly loved an opportunity to go into space, and so would have many others.  But given the horrible future that awaits us if we keep going in the direction we have been, there's something a little crass about billionaires riding out on their own private spaceships, to satisfy their craving to get into space.

There's no doubt that we have to pull out the big guns now---figuratively speaking.  We don't need to choose between dealing with (1) above, or (2); they have to be dealt with together, and with a steady eye on the long term effects of what we do, and what they do to oppose us.

It's sort of a no-brainer that controlling sales of firearms will reduce gun violence across the USA.  But conservatives of all sorts are stockpiling their own personal armories because they expect that the poor will come looking for them, for all the wonderful things they're hiding in their basements, such as a second freezer, and the computers on which they play computer games.  The vaccination fiasco has shown us that conservatives are not the smartest people in the country.  And their leaders are not even as smart as they are.  In a recent article in the New York Times, a writer exclaims why he's sure that Trump will run for President again in 2024.  Not to make things better for the country.  Not to make money out of his hotels.  Rather, to take revenge on everyone who didn't support his electoral bid the last time!  The country is burning on one side, and flooding on the other; his followers are dying of COVID, his fellow-Trumpers are perjuring themselves and ruining their reputations to remain in his favor, and does he care?  No; his first objective---according to this writer, and the idea makes sense to anyone who has been paying attention to the sorts of things that Trump has done while president---is to take revenge on his political opponents.

It is no time for pettiness.  Every act of pettiness detracts from our resources, our time, our energy, all that it takes to move society, and the law, towards dealing with the climate that is grinding towards an intolerable condition.  Many Democrats, in particular, those considered to be among the so called Left Extreme, but who are quite moderate in actual fact, have tried to portray Clean Energy as something that could Profit the big Energy Companies.  Some of the energy companies have bought into this, and have tried to take over some parts of the clean energy industries, and proceeded to build wind farms, and solar farms, with the usual heavy-handed, environment-destroying, jack-booted style with which they were accustomed to developing their energy assets.  They've plunked down solar panels right in the middle of virgin forests.  Wind farms in residential areas.  What are they trying to do?  Make citizens hate wind and solar, to that they will get the OK to drill for more oil?  This is interesting.  The conservatives are now motivated more by hate than by greed.  This is not the time for Democrats, and progressives and liberals generally, to fall into the same trap.  It is almost impossible to avoid feeling hate, because of the destruction that the conservatives are causing.  But it is a mistake to act on hate.  It is not just that liberals and progressives are superior---which they probably are---but that we have our eye on the ball, and we can't get where we want to go by retaliation.

Arch

Humor, News, and Things Going Very Wrong

Well.

How is everyone?  I don't expect you to answer that, but I thought I'll start out on a less egocentric note than seems natural to me.  (You have to expect that bloggers, by their very nature, tend to be egocentric, because they're usually blogging about what happened to them.) 

My wife and my stepson---or at least, my wife---like to keep the house temperature cool, like 69° or 70° F, which is a little too cold for me.  So I obtained a Hoodie, and wear it until I start perspiring, at which point I take it off.  (I get hot flashes, and sweats, possibly because my Urologist shot me up with Estrogen, while he was fixing my middle, as the limerick says.  Don't ask me for the rest of the limerick.)  Now ... what was I saying?

I have a huge problem with short-term memory, though heretofore a lot less trouble with long term memory.  It's a little like ... What did you say your name was?

Ah, temperature.  Because it is kept so cold around here, I suddenly realized that the most comfortable place in which to sit and blog, for me, is---the bathroom!  It is a tiny space, which has its own baseboard heater, and I can set it exactly at the temperature that I like!  Except, of course, that it would tie up an essential facility ...

I hope you found that funny, because that is the Humor segment of today's post.

About News: since I started reading the New York Times, I regret to say, I find it harder to maintain my customary relentlessly optimistic outlook.  Many things get me depressed.  The  arguments over whether the 2020 elections were stolen; the break-in of the Capitol (and the subsequent misbehaviour); the Democrats' slim majority in Congress; frequent news stories of accumulating piles of plastic waste; the problems with schools reopening, and my own doubts about whether I could have functioned in a remote classroom; and the race of Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to send themselves into space.

But almost the worst story of all is the utter dysfunctionality of Haiti, as a nation.  All the news stories that outline the history of the country seem to indict the USA as---if not the principal culprit, at least one of the culprits who have kept Haiti in its state of dysfunctionality.  Only a Haitian can take the reins of any improvement of that country's condition.  One expects that it has to be an educated Haitian, because modern government requires a certain degree of awareness.  But it looks as though all educated Haitians are cynical in the worst way.  There seems to be no way out of the mess.  As far as the international community is concerned, it looks to be a money pit, and throwing good money into it after the bad will not get anyone anywhere.

One of the most frightening facts that have emerged in the last year is that there is a vast number of Americans who do not believe anything except what their favorite truth peddler tells them.  They don't believe that Trump lost the 2020 elections, they don't believe that Trump has cheated on his taxes, they don't believe in Climate Change, they don't believe in the seriousness of COVID, they don't believe in vaccinations.

Put it all together, and what do you get?

I have a feeling that the GOP is going to get elected back into both Congress and the White House sooner or later, and repeal every good action that the Democrats will take in the next year or two, whether good or bad or indifferent.  If they (Good Actions of the Democrats) improve our lives in the long term, these Unbelievers will doubt that it was the Democrats who made it so.  (Compare, for instance, how Obama lowered the unemployment rate, but Trump took the credit.)  Even if some action of Biden's makes lives immediately better for every American, we know who will get the credit: Trump.

It hardly seems worth Biden's while to try very hard.

On top of all this are the twin divides of Racism/Xenophobia, and Classism/Education-phobia.  I can only conclude that Haiti is merely a foreshadowing of what will happen to us.  The difference is that we have a lot more resources, more oil, more learning, none of which will be permitted to make a difference.  Already the youth are heading towards cynicism.

If one of our Axioms is going to be that we cannot combat Global Warming, saddled with the broader political picture that sits like a stationary cold front over our society, what should be our guiding principle?

Some people choose to be optimistic, even if that choice is not supported by the facts.  I suspect that some denominations are going to style themselves Church of Hope in the Face of Despair.  Churches are so good at believing in irrational things!  They call it faith.

Should we continue to recycle, given that we know no US government is going to attack the problem of pollution head on?  The American political system is designed to move incrementally.  We have incrementally painted ourselves into a corner, and now we need quick action, but the system is not designed for it.  We thought we were the poster boys of everyone working together, or at least, everyone who mattered.  But vast stretches of the US is populated by those who did not get the Memo, and don't believe that the Earth is round, to begin with.  As for me and my house, to quote the prophet Joshua, we will continue to act as though our actions make a difference.  Burn less gas, eat less meat, elect more environmentalists, practice less hate, and so on.  It isn't easy, but it gives us something to do.

Meanwhile, the plastics industry is making plastic cheaper and more convenient to use, the gas industry is making gas more readily available.  (Can't they make gas out of plastic?  Apparently not; plastic is very low-energy stuff, into which you need to pump a lot of energy to make anything out of it other than more plastic.)

It's a rainy day over here, but that's clearly better than temperatures in the triple digits, as they have in some places in California.  I don't understand why Californians continue to stay there with the prospect of murderous summers in the foreseeable future.  (According to their laws, the Big Farms have control over their water, so that most citizens can't get the water they need.  But the state government dares not change the laws, because Trump will label them as the destroyers of Californian agriculture.)

Keep up your optimism, or at least, act as if you're an optimist!

Arch

Cut-throat Competition is Not Good For Everybody

Yesterday and today are the days of Homemade Days, an annual festival that takes place in Brandon Park, close to where we live.  On the face of it, it's just a neighborhood festival for our town, but has also the features of an arts festival.  We have other things sort of like it: a First Friday monthly event, and a Saturday morning Farmers' Market.

This year, Homemade Days were poorly attended, but consider that last year, we didn't have Homemade Days at all, due to COVID.  I don't quite know what the psychology of the vendors and the customers is, but I have noticed that there was quite a good attendance at the morning's Farmers' Market, which is a place where folks who grow produce in their small farms or their homes bring them into town, to this space set up in a parking lot, and sell their produce direct to the customers.  Some of us have suspected that some of these vendors don't actually grow this stuff, but get it wholesale from other vendors, and bring them in, so they're effectively shopkeepers, with mobile shops.

These are not the products we would have looked for in the Homemade Days (often spelled Homade Days), but rather the fun things to be found in a fair, e.g. funnel cakes, lemonade, music in the band-shell, ice cream, deep-fried cookies, hot dogs, and . . . handicrafts.  You can buy anything from necklaces, sea-shells, items made of wood, paintings, potted plants, jewellery, and so on.

However, over the years, the quality seems to have declined.  I think the problem is that the vendors are now focused more on trying to identify what sort of things will sell, what sorts of things are easy to make, and not at all on what sort of things they can make really well.  Making things really well takes a lot of work, and understandably, nobody want to spend a lot of time making something well, when people just won't shell out the money for it.  The customers know the value of money, and would rather keep it to spend later on a quarterpounder, rather than some delectable work of sheer handworked beauty.

Handicrafts are not the only things that have become slaves to market research.  The survey kings have taken over everything from TV to movies to politics, to conspiracy theories.  The New York Times, too, wants to know "How are we doing?"  Fair enough; they would like to know whether I think they suck.  "What sorts of articles would you like to read?"  YouTube wants to know "Is the video above a good suggestion for you?"

There's no going back!  Polling, or market research determines what people are going to do.  Even health systems decide on which departments they would invest their money in, based on customer surveys.  (Shall we create a department of Asthma, or a department of Athlete's Foot?  These are the decisions that will make or break them.)  Meanwhile, Geisinger Health Systems play a vicious game.  They look for any location where the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center takes over an existing health facility, and immediately acquire land close to it, and put in a facility of their own, to compete with it.  (I have heard, on the grapevine, that this is sort of an economic war between Aetna on the one hand, and Geisinger Insurance Corp on the other.  I hope it is false.)

The only people who have the luxury of completely ignoring marketing are those, like me, who are retired.  But even we sometimes worry whether the Home Insurance we have is the best according to recent surveys.  And of course, you probably know well---those of you who are also retired---the volume of junk mail that comes to your house.  In addition, because my wife sends money to charities, all sorts of charities hound her continually to send more.  I don't blame the charities themselves; they hire fresh graduates for their direct mail departments, who have earned pestering by mail degrees which are precisely focused on this particular job for accredited non-profits.

Anyway, this is the greatest country in the world, and our junk mail is the best.  Let that thought give you consolation.

Arch

What Barack H. Obama delivered to us

I'm going to talk about all sorts of things, and if I lose track of what I'm saying, my apologies in advance!

Five years before Obama arrived in the Senate, nobody would have thought seriously of the possibility of a Black president.  But it's a lot deeper than just that Obama made it into the White House.

Imagine a little 5th grader, who was seeing the elections on TV.  This kid is about 9 or 10.  But eight years later, when this kid watches elections once again, the kid is now 17 years old, and has his or her own opinions, and Obama has been in the White House for eight years, half the lifetime of this kid.  So when people talk about women and minorities running for national office, if they talk scornfully about it being unimaginable that minorities should run for national office, this kid is thinking: whyever not?  Wasn't Obama president?  And wasn't he one of the more effective ones?

Kids who might have been a little older, would have had similar opinions, especially when they hear Trump boast about what he did for unemployment.  Some of this explains what happened during the mid-term elections.  The point is that race is much less of a factor among people just coming into being eligible to vote than it might have been before Obama.  For older men, whose self-images depended on their being able to boss Black folk and minorities around, race was even more of a factor.

Let's not be too critical.  For people whose jobs had been managing mostly Blacks and minorities, this could have been a huge deal; for instance, prison guards.

 

But that is not the main point I am making, actually, though none of this would have come about if not for Obama's ground-breaking presidency.  If you would like to see the article that sparked my thinking: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-barack-obama.html  (I'm not sure whether the NYT will let you read that for free.)

For decades, the guys who ran for president were: George H.W. Bush; Bill Clinton; George W. Bush.  Then along comes Barack Obama.  When Obama gave a public address, you got the distinct impression that he was measuring his words very carefully.  And he was not doing it in real time, no; it had all been done days, even weeks in advance.  He had estimated---usually accurately---what the reactions of the public would be; in fact, all the possible reactions of everyone with different political leanings, and how important would be their reaction to the health of the Federal Government.  Now, to be sure, advisers to the presidents did this all the time, since the beginning of presidential advisers.  But in Obama's case, you got the impression that a lot more of these planned statements were from Obama himself.

In fact, there was a lot of belief that Obama was a lot cleverer than working-class Whites could tolerate.  If there was one thing worse than a Black in the White House, it was a clever Black.  (And the only thing worse than a clever Black in the White House, it would be a Puerto-Rican woman.  I just don't get it about Puerto Ricans and Americans; why is Puerto Rico still not a state, and why are Puerto Ricans so reviled?  It just does not compute for me.  And why did Trump toss rolls of paper towels at them?  Was there a sort of dog-whistle insult there?  I strongly believe so.)

Consider the 2020 elections, and the debates leading up to it.  Andrew Yang was a candidate, and there was no doubt that he was quite a clever gentleman, even if his grey cells might not have been up to up arm-wrestling those of Obama.  Let's face it: because of how complex our National problems are: health, economics, culture, environmental, social justice, you could expect only an at least moderately bright and highly-educated person running for president under the Democrat banner.  Under the Republican banner, you could expect either someone glamorous, someone who was a TV personality, someone who has had lots of illegal affairs with teenagers, but someone whose public face would be: 'I'm as Dumb as a Couple of Posts!'  That does not mean that the Republican candidate would not be guided by clever policies.  But they would be policies put together by behind-the-scenes guys that are designed to (1) get the Republicans elected, (2) make it very inconvenient for Blacks and minorities to vote, and if there's any time left over, (3).make it almost impossible to develop Clean Energy.  Then, of course, there is the almost irresistible desire to destroy any delicate peace deals that the Democrats might have put in place.  And ruining any plans to provide more affordable health care for poor Americans.  (One thing the Republicans just can't stand is poor folk who are too healthy, at low cost.)

Finally, I wonder whether the Republicans are thinking at all.  Every inane scandal they get into, every silly conspiracy theory they swallow, every instance of gullibility they exhibit, is one more reason, one more bit of evidence for the entire Republican ticket to be rejected by Millennials.

Arch

Inside the Mind of a Browser

So, most people seldom give a thought to the psychology of a browser.  (Maybe we should call it the Spychology, for obvious reasons.)

My browser is Firefox von Mozilla.  A while ago it asked me to upgrade to its new version, but I was in a contrary mood, and I said, no, nuh-uh.

OMG.  Little did I know how this would upset the thing.  The first thing it did was to tell me that it has trouble doing something or other, and can it reload?  So I said, Not Now.  It did not appear to do anything in response to that, and I proceeded to wait until it open up the half-dozen tabs I had open, but ... i t   w a s   s o   s  l   o    w.

Unfortunately for me, I have had just enough computer background to be able to get into the sad mind of this browser.  You see, it probably doesn't expect users to deny it permission to update.  The updating Team has not reckoned with senior citizens (me) who have suffered under updates that invariably make products work not-good-ly.

What happens, at the level of pseudocode, is as follows.  There is probably a switch that is present, at top level, that sends control to Old Firefox, in the unlikely event that the user has said: Don't Update.  But, even in Old Firefox, they have probably embedded numerous switches, all throughout, that keep checking whether the user has decided to change his or her mind, and update.  So the control flow probably looks like this.

Check whether to update:  CHECKING...

Update? : NO.

Do a couple of steps:  OKAY...

Check whether to update:  CHECKING... 

Update? : NO.

Do one more step:  OKAY...

Check whether to update:  CHECKING...

Update? : NO.

Oh, come on; check again: CHECKING...

Update? : NO.

I can't believe this! : ???

Yes, debugging computer performance can be invigorating, except possibly in this case.

Arch

Dealing with Things We Don't Completely Understand

Back in the dawn of computers, the number of people using computers were very few.  This handful knew all about computers.  Some decades later, they were able to do miraculous things with computers, and around the late 1960's, they even sent a team to the moon, (something that quite a few people do not yet entirely believe).

Of course, by the time inexpensive Personal Computers were available---the mid 1980's---everybody just had to get in on computers, whether they had a clue as to how the things worked or not.  By the time smart phones were freely available, even more people had to get one for themselves, though, as we know, smartphones are in fact computers, which connect with computers in some central locations, to enable us to make phone calls.

People, at this point, have become comfortable using gadgets---technology---which they never understood.  There are many people who do not understand the workings of a vast pile of things: the government, smart phones, GPS, the school system, Colleges and Universities, jury trials, electric chairs, cataract surgery ... you name it.  They don't understand how Congress and the Senate work, and so they gradually become deeply suspicious about the workings of the government.  After all, we get to vote on the people who go to Washington, don't we?  We pick the ones we like, and Boom!  They go to Washington and enact laws which we don't like.  How come?  There is something suspicious going on.

Along comes a fellow, Trump, whom we know well, because he's on TV, firing his Apprentices, just like we want to fire these losers for whom we voted.  So we send him to Washington, and sure 'nuff, he fires more people than almost anyone before him.  We cheer him on, because these fellows whom Trump is firing are sure to be no-goodniks, and he must be firing them for a reason.

Trump also convinces everyone that the bad news everyone reads in the news, and which the TV newspeople tell us, are ALL LIES.  This is easy to believe, because we don't understand how anything works anyway, and now we have a reason for it: it's all lies.

Halfway through his term, Trump began to realize that he himself didn't understand how a lot of government worked, either.  He did understand that lobbyists come bringing gifts, and in return you have to pass laws that the lobbyists like.  Beyond that, all of Trump's legendary intelligence boiled down to a few rules of thumb that he had managed to acquire, and this 'know-how' was basically about real estate, golf courses, hotels and casinos.  There was a book published back in the last century called "Winning Through Intimidation", and it is entirely possible that Trump learned all he knows from this book, and the twisted advice his late father used to throw at him.

Trump was also quick to pick up on the fact that a lot of people were beginning to be uneasy about immigrants and minorities.  Focusing on keeping migrants entirely out, by building an expensive wall along the southern border accomplished two things: the base that elected him (those who watched The Apprentice) loved it, and Trump was quickly able to point the finger at those who opposed the wall (the Democrats and others whom he named Libtards) as The Enemy.

Then the COVID pandemic arrived.  This was entirely unplanned for.  Dealing with it required Trump to have some intelligence and information and experience that he did not even remotely have, and neither did his advisers.  Somehow, the Democrats stumbled into winning the election---it was by no means a sure thing.  At least, the Democrats had experience dealing with epidemics and public health, and having won the election, set about earnestly dealing with the pandemic.

The rank and file of the GOP must be seriously baffled.  A large number of them must now be aware that the central Brains of the party don't understand much of anything that is going on (least of all how to leave teenage girls alone).  Many of the GOP state governors are having trouble dealing with the pandemic, and Trump's lies about voter fraud at the same time.  A tiny bit of voter fraud is inevitable; there are known instances of people interfering with ballots, about half of them Republicans.  (Trump keeps harping on his belief that thousands and thousands of ballots have been altered, or whatever.  In fact, in every instance it seems that it is a dozen or fewer, and they have been caught every time.)

There's no going back to a world where we only use things that we completely understand; we have to use smart phones, we have to use ballot machines; many teachers, now, have to use zoom to teach their classes remotely.  Overactive kids, whom teachers could quiet down in person, now have to be quieted down by their parents.  In addition to not knowing how anything works, parents don't know how their children work, either.  Teachers have had to become experts in dealing with kids, who did not want to settle down and learn lessons without a great deal of magic from their teachers.  I believe that it was not inevitable that kids have become so difficult to manage, but then I'm probably in the minority.  (Some would claim that kids are hard to manage because they are more intelligent!  Sure.  That's why they'll vote for Trump.)

To summarize: it is tough to keep going when the GOP seems to be determined to make politics into chaos so successfully.  A century or so ago, there was an actual strategy among some conservatives to deliberately make politics chaotic, as a way of allowing big business to take over the government; I'm fairly sure that the majority of members of the GOP are not aware of that plan.

Short term, the Democrats will solve some of the most pressing problems that are facing the nation.  People will either cheer, or sneer.  Then the Republicans will come in, and claim that the Democrats ruined everything!  Let's just be prepared.

Arch

Things vs. People; Lies Are Everywhere; How is Biden Doing?

This is a 3-part post, and I worry that the title may not fit on the page.

Biden After 100 Days
I saw a lot of Biden's--distanced--address to Congress.  There was not a lot of surprises, but maybe I missed something.

He did take credit for the improved COVID picture.  What he did differently from Trump was more about the tone he adopted, rather than concrete steps he took, but--let's face it--he did throw a heck of a lot of money at the vaccine problem.  This is what I tried to say so many times (and never succeeded): a predatory real-estate mogul, such as Trump sets himself up to be, does not have the training to handle a national emergency.  Businessmen generally aren't going to do well at anything except business.

He described his plans as having been drawn up with "forgotten" people in mind.  These are the people who feel that they (A) do not have the training for good jobs.  He sold his program as providing good new jobs; he mentioned the word 'jobs' numerous times, so much that Stephen Colbert mocked him for it!

He elaborated on his plan to make the $3000 cash allowance per child, for raising kids, at least through 2025, and possibly permanently.

He said that responsible gun owners weren't upset at restrictions on military-style assault weapons.  ("You think deer are wearing Kevlar vests?")

There was also reference to Republican efforts to make voting more difficult for (B) the elderly, those without a lot of mobility, and those who had to take time off from work in order to vote.

Roads and Bridges, or Daycare and Education?
The Republicans seem firm in their preference for things such as roads and bridges and schools and airports, over people, and services, e.g. childcare, schools, education, elder care, etc.  They feel, I suppose, that that sort of investment will be directed more towards the sort of people that Democrats have tended to support: Blacks, Hispanics, women and minorities, etc, rather than the traditional Republican base of business owners.

Here's what I think.  There is already a certain amount of money for roads and bridges; it just needs to be deployed.  If roads and bridges take more money than Biden has budgeted, there is no chance at all that more money cannot be voted for it, because, as I said before, the Republicans love roads and bridges, because perhaps they use them more heavily than Democrats do!  But the Republicans will balk at 'wasting' money on free education from PreSchool to Community College, as Biden wants to do.  But in the 21^st century, most ordinary jobs require more than a high-school education, supervised poorly by rich land-owners in each school district.  In bygone days, the school boards could keep kids simply learning whatever they needed to work in the small businesses that these landowners owned.  These days, though, to work even in a Best Buy, the salespeople need to know the inside story on a lot of technology, for which just a high-school education is not enough.

Furthermore, a lot of women are forced to stay at home looking after aged parents, or tiny infants, keeping some very promising workers out of the labor force.  The picture of labor that Trump and his cronies have is more suited to the early days of the 20^th century.  Today, it is a different time.  The Chinese educate their workers.  If we want back our jobs, we would need to educate our workers too.

Lies are Everywhere
There are a lot of theories as to why the Republicans believe, and / or spread such huge lies.  Why the GOP leaders spread these lies is because it works; their rank and file believe them.  There are complex theories about wish-fulfillment and solidarity and so on, but once they started the lies, they quickly discovered that it was a strategy that worked with the particular demographic that they wanted to attract and control.

The problem with using disinformation as a tool is that it only useful for deceiving voters.  It can be used for winning an election, for instance.  ("So much winning.")  Once the election is won, though, it is almost impossible to put a Republican (whose mind comes ready-packed with the lies you yourself have spread) to work on a real problem.  Part of the difficulty Trump had with his administration is all the fairy tales that these jokers believed, which made them useless as workers.  Steve Miller, the immigration guy, and Betsy de Vos, the education lady, both hauled around a great weight of misinformation, which prevented them from doing anything worthwhile.

How is Biden Doing?
Some historians were asked to assess Biden, on his 100^th day in office.  Now, historians, as you could guess, are all about looking for patterns.  You could look up a lot of these fanciful comparisons yourself; you can't avoid them.

But one of these fellows (Meacham?) said something interesting.

He said that, when Jimmy Carter was elected, he proposed all sorts of legislation that was new.  He began environmental reforms.  He began recycling initiatives.  He presided over the asbestos mitigation efforts, and so on.  But of course, the Iranian Revolution, and the Oil Crisis brought him down.  And the Oil Companies hated his guts.

Ronald Reagan found it easy to defeat him, and with supreme confidence, began to dismantle the welfare programs that the Democrats had put in place, lower taxes (temporarily; in fact, Reagan quietly increased taxes in the end), and generally turn public opinion against welfare programs in general.

Fast-forward 40 years, to Donald Trump.  People would be surprised to compare Donald Trump to Jimmy Carter, but Trump did for the GOP what Carter did for the Dems, moved the policies way to the right.  But like the Iran Crisis, Trump has the COVID crisis, and he loses the election.

Biden did not find it easy to defeat him, and Trump fought him tooth and nail, but not with political arguments, but merely lies.  With supreme confidence, Biden takes up the task of dismantling the American First in The World, and Business First in America structure, Biden says: let's work together; let's earn the right to claim to be the best.

Some Suggestions about Attitude Adjustment

I did not have the courage to put on the post title exactly what I wanted to write about, which is: the attitude of 'Liberals' towards 'Conservatives', or more specifically, the attitudes of Democrats towards Republicans.  Remember that within 50 years or so, not only will we all be pushing up the daisies, the characters of the two parties may be totally transformed, so this post should be deleted by me very soon.

Many of us despise the Republicans, and with some justification.  (In the Bible, we read that Jonah despised the people of Niniveh in much the same way, but evidently God advised him to be moderate.  We atheists do not believe that God does this kind of thing; if there had been such a person as Jonah, he must have taken time to reconsider, but written, in his autobiography, that God spoke to him.  The voices of their consciences were, to these people, the voice of God.)

Despising Republicans--or conservatives, generally--is a losing strategy.  Those people are what they are for numerous, numerous quite different reasons; in this era, in particular, they are a highly diverse and philosophically fragmented lot.

The Republican leadership, I concede, are an opportunistic and amoral bunch.  At the best of times, politicians are obsessed with being re-elected.  These days, the Republican leadership lives in fear that Donald Trump may turn against them, leading to lost elections.  We see these people playing all sorts of verbal games, on Fox TV, and on other conservative media, trying to walk back their criticism of Donald Trump.  It is rather pathetic, but not all of them are wealthy enough to be able to handle being out of a job, so the poorer ones act like MAGA monkeys, while those who have been in politics long enough to have saved up for a rainy day are able to act the statesman, and be firm about disapproving of Trump.  Liz Cheyney strikes me as one of the latter, and so does Mitch McConnell.  (McConnell has to be careful, because Trump and his family must be watching him closely; if he influences too many senators and congressmen and women away from Trump, there could be a vicious backlash.  There was one, in fact; Trump called McConnel all sorts of names.)

The rank-and-file Republicans, as I have written about before, are Republicans for various reasons: religion, abortion, guns, racism, taxes, fossil fuels, hatred of Hillary Clinton, fear of Socialism, feeble-mindedness, etc, etc.  But not all of them may be concerned with all of these issues.  (In the same way, not all Democrats are concerned with government help in emergencies, fighting COVID, marriage equality, minority rights, gender equality, poverty, the environment and pollution, native rights, and so on.)  Moderate Republicans are--effectively-- being abused by their leaders, to go along with silly principles like saying that the election was stolen, or that the vaccines are unsafe, etc, etc.

Once we stop shooting from the hip when we see a Republican, we can begin to adjust our own mental stances, because we need Republicans in government.  Left to itself, there is the danger that the Democratic Party will take on so many social programs with so much enthusiasm that we could be up to our necks in taxes.  How much foreign aid is too much?  Is it possible to open up the Mexican border too much?  Is the volume of immigration proportional to how much support the poor get from Federal social programs?  Republicans keep a close eye on these issues, whereas Democrats are eager to create enormous safety-nets for everyone.  Arguably these safety-nets are good things, but if they imply very heavy taxation, in a year or two Democrats will lose heavily at the polls.

The New York Times opinion columns seem to think that Biden might be among the best Democrat presidents since Roosevelt.  It has been hardly four months since Biden took office, but so far things are going well.  News of these blood-clots is worrying, but the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines do not have any side-effects that are cause for anxiety.  Many states have opened up the vaccine for everybody, and we can only hope that soon everyone will try to get one.  So far, 40% of the US population has gotten at least one shot, and that includes 75% of seniors, who are, as we know, most likely to get a bad case of COVID.  Once they were protected, those who caught the virus are less likely to be badly sick, and less likely to die.  So COVID deaths are on a seriously downward trend.

Unfortunately, a larger proportion of more affluent (rich) people have gotten shots, and a larger proportion of Republicans are refusing to get shots, and Blacks are said to be understandably less comfortable about getting shots, because historically they have been used as test populations for medical trials.

Watching the antics of the most ludicrous members of the Republicans in government can easily lead us to be more convinced of our stance of despising the whole party.  I do not watch the details of the Matt Gaetz affair, nor do I pay attention to what Marjorie Greene says, nor the various strange people who consider that their forced entrance into the chambers of Congress gives them a media platform for personal aggrandizement.  But many things are moving in the right direction.

Here is a chart provided by NPR, accurate as of April 15th.

My home state, Pennsylvania, is indicated as having unchecked community spread.  Not a good thing.  A.S. American Samoa has less than 1 person per 100,000 getting infected.

Arch

What's Happening in Politics?

First off, in Minnesota they had brought the policeman who was responsible for George Floyd's death to trial.  I don't know how that is going, but I will leave that to Minnesota to deal with.  There's no point getting upset over something that is still going on.

In Georgia, the state house, heavily Republican, has succeeded in passing laws that make it much more inconvenient for blacks to vote.  There are picture ID requirements; they've cut down the number of days within which a mail-in ballot can be requested; they've reduced the hours in which polling places will remain open; they've made it a felony for an organized political group to interfere with voters waiting in line, including providing food or water.  That last matter has been exaggerated by Democrats, but it is possible that rabid Republicans watching the line of voters might stretch the conditions of the new law, and attempt to have the entire polling place discarded, claiming illegal voting, or whatever.  We have to realize that we have honestly been spoiled by the convenience of doing anything; from pre-partially-cooked food in the supermarkets to drive through drug stores.  Nothing in the new Georgia laws actually prevent anybody from voting.  It just means that it will take a lot more effort to vote.  Which means that if those who are not willing to put in the effort, among Democrats, just do not vote, then the election could go to the Republicans.  But poor Republicans must realize that Democrats are fighting for what could help the Republicans, too.  If all the Republicans were rich, and all the Democrats were poor, then there isn't much to agree upon.  But that is not the case.

It is so sad that Donald Trump is still claiming that the election was stolen from him.  Well, many moderate Republicans agree that Trump is lying, and has been lying for years.  But Republicans seem to be OK with Lying for Political Reasons.  They consider it a special kind of election rhetoric.  Many Republicans, within Congress and the Senate, as well as outside government, are furious at how Trump has hijacked the party, but Trump is raising lots of money from small (Republican) donors, and the Republicans can't ignore that.  Until Trump does or says something that spoils things badly for the GOP leadership, they have to bite their tongue and let Trump keep raising the cash.  A problem is that Trump puts the money in a fund controlled by him, rather than the main Republican fund.  Hmm.

Liz Cheney, a Congresswoman who opposed Trump's mad ideas about the stolen election, has spoken against Trump.  But she's one of the few thoughtful members of the GOP, a woman of principle.  John Boehner, the former speaker of the House, has also come out against Trump.  Mitch McConnell opposed Trump right after the election, but came around afterwards, though he went through with counting the Electoral College votes, which Trump did not want them to do.  Recently, Trump thoroughly insulted Mitch, calling him an idiot.  It's hard to tell how it will go; the Republicans are so desperate to have enough power in Washington to block what Biden is trying to do, so that they may close ranks, though they hate each other.  The Republican Party is now shown to be a collection of thoroughly disreputable people.

Beto O'Rourke has been trying to encourage his fellow-Texans to come to the Democrat party.  While the storms were shutting down the Texas grid, and Ted Cruz was making up his mind whether to vacation in Cancun or stay and help his constituents, Beto O'Rourke was driving up from El Paso with water and supplies to help those who were stuck without drinking water.

Governor Abbott of Texas was telling Texans that it was the Democrats who caused their electric grid to fail.  Texas is the center of the Oil Industry, and they hate anything that might be a hindrance to fossil fuels.

In Michigan, they're running out of vaccine doses.  Why is this?  I get so frustrated, worrying that the shortage is deliberate.  Meanwhile, Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan is reluctant to call for a shutdown, because she has called for so many of them (shutdowns) that Michiganders are losing patience with the poor woman.

Of course you've heard that Tiger Woods was speeding when he had his accident.  And more women have come out against Governor Andrew Cuomo, saying he had been obnoxious, and used suggestive language with them.  So Democrats are not immune from the tendency to sexually harass women.  Many families have a family culture that allows a certain amount of bad behavior by men against women.  It has been on the wane for decades, but I have no doubt that men fight against the pressure that modern society exerts to reduce this behavior.

We can't be perfect.  But we need to be a lot better than we are.

Arch

Uma's Podcast!

Well, guess what.

My daughter, who lives in Tucson, AZ, has decided to have a Podcast.  The easiest way to do this is to set it up in our Archie's Archives Blog, and provide links to the mp3 files which contain her blog.

Uma's genius is telling stories.  So she's going to tell her stories over the phone, and the first few podcasts will be joint exercises with me, after which she will probably get into her groove, and run with it.

I have no idea what the topic is going to be, so I'll have to fill that in later!

Arch

Usually, every year at the Spring Equinox, I write a blog post about J. S. Bach.

At the time of Bach's youth, the protestant parts of Germany, reluctant to adopt any new idea coming out of the Vatican, had refused to adopt the Gregorian Calendar for years. (The English refused, too.) Therefore, while we know the date--according to the Julian Calendar--of the Baptism of J. S. Bach, the date of his birth according to our present-day Calendar is not known. I celebrate Bach's birthday on March 21 each year. In the year he was born (as far as I can tell) that day (according to that--inaccurate by modern standards--calendar, fell much later in the spring, or early summer. Nevertheless, this is the date--March 21--when I celebrate Bach's birthday. You will observe that there is no big fuss about Bach's birthday on the Internet; this is because there is no agreement as to when it is.

The music of Bach initially sounds like generic church music to anyone whose musical environment is mainstream pop/rock. But over time, each new piece of Bach's music you hear, more often than not, is a new treasure! The "sameness" of Bach evolves into astonishing variety.

Bach would be 336 years old yesterday, give or take a few weeks. Here's to Bach!

The few paragraphs above are what I wrote in my Facebook post for today.  I'm going to write a more expansive overview of Bach's music on our companion blog, Archie's Archives. 

Arch

Lollipop, the Superstitious Cat

Actually, her name is Lola, because—you guessed it—whatever she wants, she gets.  She is a snow-white little long-haired American Short-hair, which means she’s just a regular white cat, with a blotch of grey on her forehead between her ears.  But she has a very very thick coat, which she usually keeps quite clean, in the typical manner of cats.  Which means that she licks off all the grime in her fur, and swallows it, ew.  It doesn’t seem to do her any harm.  (A lot of her fur comes off with the grime, which she skillfully converts into hairballs, and regurgitates.)

She was, in fact, a rescue, all the way from Danville.  My wife just wanted a white cat, and looked up white cats on Google, located one in Danville, and the result was Lollipop.  She had just been spayed (the cat, of course), and was looking just a little mistrustful, and resentful, and misanthropic, and resisted getting tossed in the cat-carrier, but we brought her to Lycoming County, where we live, and turned her loose in our home.

For a while, she hid under the furniture, but eventually she made peace with us, and ate the food, and went out the back door, and absorbed the neighborhood into her territory, as cats will do.  We already had a cat, Bigfoot, beloved of Lycoming math students.  But Lols did not let anything like seniority get in her way.  Within a few weeks, we observed Lols fearlessly approaching Bigfoot, and insist on performing some sort of grooming operation on him, which he did not care for.  There was a brief argument, but in the end, it was Bigfoot who retreated under the furniture in defeat, not Lols.

But here’s the fun part!  One day, Lols (that’s Lola, or Lollipop; I hope I’m not confusing anybody with this free proliferation of given names.  I used to teach back in the days when it was not quite a felony to rename someone with a name different from the original label the student was given by its mother, or whoever.  Today, of course, it is not PC) was standing at the back door, indicating that she wanted egress.  Then, as I wended my unhurried way to the door, she quickly turned to the scratching post, which stood just near the door, and reached up to give herself a really good stretch, and quickly turned back to the door, signalling that the exit visa was still desired.

So I let her out, with a cheery taunt, closed the door, and returned to whatever I was doing.

The next time she was inside the house, and wanted to go out, again she remembered at the last second that a stretch would be nice, reached up the scratching post to stretch, and was at the door in time to be let out.

About the third time, she was waiting to be let out, and I made it almost all the way to the door, and then she looked at me, and did a token show of stretching at the scratching post!  It was just as if she was miming “See?  I'm doing the scratching thing!!”

What is going through the crazy mixed-up brain of this cat?  It seemed very much as if she had begun to think that just standing at the door was not sufficient to indicate to me that she wanted out.  She had learned superstition somehow.

At night, I’m comfortable in my recliner right near the back door, and Lols marches up, gets up on the coffee-table, then on the arm of the sofa, then on the end table, onto the arm of my recliner, and then puts a tentative paw on my stomach.  Then another paw.  Then she walks up to my chest, and peers into my eyes.

At this time, if she rubs noses with me, I know she wants to be petted, and that starts a quite fun series of activities, which involves her purring at me with an almost inaudible purr.  It’s almost like a white purr, standing in front of a snowbank.  But most times, she does not rub noses; she just walks across, and sits on the former piano-stool that is on the other side of my chair.

“OK, what are you wanting?  Show me.”  That phrase OK, ... show me causes her to leap to the ground, and lead me to either (A) the empty water bowl, or even the full water bowl, into which the dogs have slobbered, making it unusable by Her Highness; or (B) the empty bowl of kibbles, or the full bowl of kibbles which has been out too long; or (C) the door.  Any of these things are a problem, which apparently only I can solve.  If it is the door, the scratching post is apparently optional at this time, unlike earlier in the day.  (I guess she’s High Church in the mornings, and becomes a Methodist in the evenings.)

It used to be that Lols would not permit me to pick her up; she would kick and scratch like fury, until I put her down.  But the years have mellowed her; she still kicks like crazy, but only for a few seconds, and with her claws in.  If she figures I’m merely transporting her to a place that she approves of, she quiets down, while keeping a wary eye on where we’re going.

Our stairs are enclosed.  At any time, if Lola sees the door to the stairs open and unattended, she would zip upstairs like lightning, and hide.  She loves to hide upstairs, until we’ve stopped looking for her, and then make herself comfortable on one of the beds and promptly go to sleep.  Daytime is sleeping time.  (Or time to go outside, if Arch happens to be around.)  Daybreak and Sunset is time for bullying Bigfoot!  She leaps on him from in hiding, very much like Clouseau’s Chinese butler (Kato).

Her latest trick is when Fred, my stepson, decides to do a jigsaw puzzle.  She has to get on the puzzle, and push the pieces around, quite gently, and it looks as if she wants to help.  Fred starts making a sound like the siren of an ambulance, and we’re expected to come and apprehend the furball and distract her for a while.  Occasionally, she’s allowed to get on the table, as long as she doesn’t touch the pieces.  (Fred and his mother are plumb crazy about jigsaw puzzles.)

More about Lols later; I’m sure most families with pets has a Lola they could tell their own stories about!

Arch

Cooking!

Hi there!

I suppose no one who has my level of cooking experience (namely moderate) has a right to break into the Blogging About Cooking racket.  I should check with my Board of Directors before I continue ... OK, game on!  Haha!

This post was inspired by an article in the New York Times, about how to make a scrambled egg just the way you want it.  Warning: the author assumes some moderate degree of knowledge of physics and chemistry, but you can get away with just reading between the lines.  HOWEVER, I’m going to write generally about cooking and me, and only put in maybe a couple of sentences about scrambled eggs; you can get the low-down by going to the link.  By the way, a lot of what I say comes by way of the NYT*; I don’t pretend to scour the Web for information that I then distill into these blog posts.  I’m seventy years old, and this is the age where you want other people to do their own work, and my work, too.

By the way, for any recipe, read the whole thing through before you start, making a note of equipment you need to have ready.  In the recipe for chicken stir-fry below, you’ll need to cook some rice to go with it.  I could have put that warning at the top of the recipe, but I forgot.

Cooking
Anyone can learn to cook, and can start off cooking well right away.  The magic ingredient is—patience.  That’s it.  If you’ve tried to cook an egg by turning on the burner to high ... you know where I’m coming from!  Especially if you like food, it makes perfect sense to learn to fix it the way you like it.  And, if you’re getting to the point where being careful about what you eat seems like a good idea, it makes even more sense.  If you have kids, and you want to be careful about what they eat, and you do not want your spouse to do all the work, and if you want this spouse to stick with you for a long time, being a decent cook is unavoidable.

Anybody can be a ‘recipe cook’.  These people look up recipes for a dish they want to make, make the recipe any old how, serve it and eat it, and promptly forget how it went.  This mode can only get you so far.  But some cooks will pay attention.  If they make, say, several Stir-Fries (on different days, of course) out of several recipes, they observe how the ingredients respond to the several different recipes as they’re going along, and create a sort of database in their heads about how the ingredients behave!  These cooks are on their way to becoming gourmets.  Soon they can make their own recipes.  Another way to do it is to, for example, get 20 samples of the same cut of beef, and do 20 different things to it, and carefully record the results.  In principle this is a good way to get started being an expert on that specific cut of beef, but of course the Planet can’t afford for you to play with food.  Instead, just cook from recipes, (making sure to select recipes that have been endorsed by people you have some confidence in,) and keep trying to understand why the recipe has the steps that it has, and the order in which it wants you to do them.  (A good recipe-writer will often explain the logic behind their approach.  Often it is a modification of another recipe, to get a very specific desired improvement.)

Stir-Frying.  This technique can yield a nutritious meal in a very short time.  Unfortunately, it demands very quick reflexes.  Every professional chef needs to master it, but obviously not everyone has lightning reflexes.  So good recipes have the process divided into stages, which allows the cook to catch his or her breath between stages.  For instance, for a Chicken and veggie stir-fry,
(1) cut the chicken up into small pieces.
(2) Put the pieces in a bowl, with a sort of sauce.  You can use a ready-made bottled stir-fry sauce, or just put in some salt, some pepper, some oil, a little soy sauce or teriyaki or even ketchup or tomato juice, perhaps a tiny bit of vinegar or lemon juice, a little Sherry, perhaps, and set it aside.  (Breathe.)
(3) Cut up the veggies: carrots, celery, green onions, Bok Choy, cabbage, sweet peppers; put them in a bowl with sauce, e.g. soy sauce, or bottled sauce; pick your poison.  Sriracha!  It’s your funeral!  (Breathe.)
(4) Slice an onion.  Mince some garlic.  (Stop breathing.)
(5) Heat your Wok, or any old fry-pan (the deeper the better, to avoid spilling) to medium-high heat —or just medium, your first few times — and fry the onions and garlic quickly.  (No need to deeply brown them.)  Carefully drain them**, and put them in a large bowl.
(6) Wait just a few seconds for the oil to warm up again.  (Quick breath.)  Briskly fry the chicken.  Cook it completely; it won’t really get cooked again.  Carefully drain it**, and throw it in with the onions.  (Avoid moving too much oil into the onion / chicken bowl.)
(7) Wait just a few seconds for the oil to warm up again.  Fry the veggies next.  (Be prepared for the sauce to spatter when it hits the oil; can’t be helped.  Stir-fry implies a certain amount of mess on your cooking range.)  Fish them all out, and put them into a large serving bowl you have kept ready for the purpose.  Ideally, briefly fry each type of vegetable by itself.  Once you’re comfortable with this procedure, you could use a different sauce for each vegetable, if you like.  Of course, they end up in the same container, but different from the chicken container.
(8) Wait a little for the oil and the Frying Pan to heat back up, and put all the ingredients back into the pan; stir to mix them.  Fry briefly.  Turn the burner OFF.  Move the frying pan off the burner.  Transfer the food with a large spoon into your serving dish; I have had very little luck trying to pour things from a frying pan into a serving bowl.

Have some rice ready, to serve with the stir-fry.  Nothing else really works...

If you were paying attention, you would have noticed a lot of things you could do slightly differently; or which I could have described better.  I can't do any better with all this COVID flying around.

The reason for cooking each component separately and storing, is because each ingredient could, in principle, take a different amount of time.  The chicken takes a fair amount of time to cook thoroughly.  The veggies don’t; they do not need too much cooking; after doing this a few times, you’ll get a feel for just how little you can cook the veggies.

I'm exhausted!  More next time.

Arch

*NYT -- New York Times

**Lift them out, leaving the oil behind.

Bugs in the Prophesy Machines

Dear Friends:

I normally write these blog posts in a stream-of-consciousness way; sometimes that comes out making a lot of sense to my readers, other times it does not. Today’s topic—one I have touched upon before—is too important to take risks with. I’m writing this in a word-processor, after which I will import it into our blog.

Christianity has come to us today, having struggled through a lot of obstacles. There were many gifted people—almost all of them men—who either recorded what Jesus said and did in his lifetime, or recorded what people remembered from what had happened many decades before. Certain things that have come down to us convince me, personally, though I am not a history specialist, that they were reliable. I was convinced, and still am, that Jesus was a real person (or, as historians express it, an historical figure) and I also believe more than slightly many of the stories in the gospels. I do not really believe the miracles; in fact I don’t believe them at all. The most important thing I do not believe is that Jesus claimed to be divine.

Millions of people do not believe as much as I do. If conclusive proof were shown me that Jesus could not have existed, I would not be greatly shocked, though I would be greatly disappointed. Like many other teachers and leaders, many of them in the East, Jesus taught that might was not right; an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Moses’s morality) must be given up; and, most importantly, that the Jewish people must bring all people into the knowledge of Jesus’s teachings.  Unfortunately, what we have now is that some of the established denominations, and free churches, are trying to spread a religion that is very much removed from the teachings of Jesus. 

Of course, it was a long time after Jesus’s death that any account of his life and teachings were written down. We don’t know exactly how long after, and by whom, it was written down. It was almost certain that none of them were eyewitness accounts. They could be second-hand accounts; they could even be stories passed down four, five, or even six times.

There were around a hundred competing books, among which the early Christian leaders had to choose, to make up the New Testament. The winners are the books in the present New Testament. But there are many who believe that some of the best books, books that captured most accurately the spirit of the teachings of Jesus, were left out. (There are some sensationalized modern accounts of these books, and their contents, and the process of selecting the New Testament books. There are also, probably, more scholarly inventories of the books, those that were selected, and those that were rejected.)

Then, modern evangelists, both those from established churches, and more independent preachers who spring up everywhere, re-interpret the teachings of Jesus in a manner that they imagine makes sense to modern-day North Americans. In addition, they bend the meanings of the words of Jesus, as in the conventional gospels, in order to allow themselves to live lives that are very high on the hog; with private jet planes, and mansions, lifestyles that seem far removed from that of Jesus. Of course, we don’t know for certain that Jesus would have lived a simple life; all we have to go on are the four gospels we have. Perhaps the books omitted from the New Testament would say that Jesus longed to have his own limousine, but as far as we know, to live simply was a choice for Jesus, and he seemed not to have been forced into it.

For decades, the Church was content to provide guidance to its members—reminding them of the moral codes that Jesus described so carefully, in his parables. It (the Church) also provided comfort to its members, setting out comfortable rituals for births, marriages and deaths. Then these independent religious leaders came along, and they set out to enrich themselves, by exciting their audiences, in person, and on radio and television, and by holding out vague promises that, if they give their money to the leader, they would earn miraculous piles of money, from the generosity of god, and the holy spirit, and what have you. 

They were, some of them, so convinced of god’s approval of them, (or that god’s approval was not necessary for their hoaxes) that they began to prophesy, and speak in tongues. The woman who said the prayer at Donald Trump’s inauguration, later, just before the 2020 elections, prayed that god would smite Trump’s enemies with a rod of iron. She repeated the phrase “smash them”, or something similar, close to a dozen times, and the audience shouted Amen. 

What will happen?
Many of these prophets predicted that Trump would win the 2020 election easily. The GOP election experts, and Trump’s other advisors, told him that the election was in the bag, provided Democrats stayed home, fearing COVID infection, and as many states as possible were pressured to disallow mail-in ballots, and as many polling places as possible in which African-Americans and minorities would vote were closed down, polling times were narrowed—no longer from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., but for much shorter times, and ballots that were mailed were not counted after Election Day. But these decisions rested with the states, not the Federal Government, and the states chose to allow many of these arrangements that Trump wanted to get rid of.

After all the counting, including ballots that the Trump campaign did not want counted, was done, the election was close, but not anywhere a landslide as Trump and his friends expected. In fact, Biden and the Democrats had anticipated a landslide, and they did not get one either. 

So what about the so-called prophets who predicted a landslide for Trump?

They have the unenviable task of explaining to their faithful that something went wrong. Without stooping to mock them, we cannot help but observe the result of their hubris, and watch whether they cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes, like the prophets of old, or whether they double down, and predict some dire consequence on the Democrats, for making The Lord look foolish. In fact, the Lord presumably knows better than to interfere with the self-government of humankind; rather it is these false prophets who have humiliated themselves. 

Why do people need to have these self-appointed charismatic leaders feed them lies? Why can’t people believe simple, cold logic? Why must they experience this fevered propaganda every Sunday? Why do they reject science, while soaking in all this magic? For me, and for many like me, magic was merely entertainment. But now, superstition really rules the lives of these people. Why? 

One reason
I can think of a single possible reason for this desperate clinging to miraculous and mystical causes for events and phenomena. It is that scientific causes are complicated. 

For instance, very simple people can be taught that getting too close to someone who is infected with the Corona Virus may infect them, too. Then we were informed that glass and metal surfaces could be covered with virus, and the virus could be alive for many hours, even days, so that we needed to wash our hands carefully. This was not so hard to understand, so people began to wash their hands frequently, or use those alcohol-based hand-cleansers. 

Shortly afterwards, we were told that, in close quarters, moisture droplets containing the virus could be breathed out by infected persons and be floating in the air, and could be easily inhaled by uninfected people. In fact, we were told, this is the main mode of transmission; the glass surfaces were a smaller risk. 

You can easily imagine that those who had a limited scientific background would get exasperated at the complications of these explanations. What next, they must have thought, would the virus come down the chimney like Santa Claus? To them, these complex descriptions of the infection mechanism sounds fanciful and far-fetched. But that God listens to his favored religious “leaders”, and chooses to cure the sick if he is satisfied by the piety of whoever is praying does not sound far fetched at all. If you jump in water, you will get wet, is fine. If you stay unmasked in a closed room with infected people for several hours, you will get infected: that seems very hard to believe. It requires belief in a number of scientific facts. If one can only believe in two scientific facts at a time, a dozen scientific facts, all operating at once, is probably hard to take. 

Far-fetched theories
Unfortunately, people who are in the habit of accepting mystical effects from their religion, are probably also conditioned to accept complicated theories of contagion, and mind-control. As far back as the last century, there were those who suspected that the fluoride that was added to water to help prevent tooth decay, was a plot to make children more obedient. I myself have seen no evidence for that, but water being so basic a necessity, many localities chose to discontinue addition of fluoride rather than have their residents die of thirst. 

There are some who disbelieve that the Moon Landing took place. Because the TV series with spaceships, etc, looked so convincing to them, it was an easy step for them to suspect that the moon landing was completely staged. Then, there are those who suspect that all sorts of childhood inoculations cause autism. Unfortunately, little is known of the causes of autism—and for several diseases, including fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, myasthenia gravis, and so on—that it is impossible to dispel this belief. Some others suspect that there are tiny microchips in the vaccine fluid, which broadcast various pieces of private information of the infant to the Federal Government, and that is a reason they give for refusing to have their children inoculated. 

This last belief can be countered. Certainly, chips can be created that are very small. I don’t know whether they can be made small enough to be injected, but suppose we accept that as possible. The problem is: where can this information be stored? Many of us are familiar with the problems with running out of space on our phones. How much worse would it be to have to store minutely detailed information about every inoculated infant? And worse: how hard will it be to look for the information of a specific individual? Or search through the enormous data set for the particular kid whose record has such-and-such a feature? The information (if it exists!) is probably stored randomly; it would be far too much trouble to structure it. Searching unstructured information is a huge task; it is like looking for a word in a dictionary that is not in alphabetical order. Now, all these problems with surveillance of infants could be solved by the Federal Government—provided they devoted all their time to this problem, and nothing else. They could not keep an eye on foreign computer attackers, or antifa, or Jewish lasers, or anything else. 

Christianity
Though I do not believe in the Christian miracles and mysticism, and the saints, and the Virgin Mary, or anything like that, my moral thinking is very Christian in almost every way. It therefore is particularly painful that these charismatic preachers, with their jets, and their mansions, and their talking in tongues, have hijacked a system of belief with such an admirable moral code, and perverted it for their selfish purposes. For myself, and for those in my family, we do not need the endorsement of an established “Church” organization; we don’t need an external moral compass. We certainly don’t need external moral compasses with magnetic fields that are so wonky, as those of these preachers. Honestly, the planet cannot support a lifestyle for very many that has such a large carbon footprint. 

Unfortunately, the followers of these independent “preachers” have bought into the concept of Rewards in Heaven. I never felt that I needed a reward for doing what seemed reasonable to me. Lots of modern, born-again folks look longingly for those rewards, and taint the label of Christianity in the process.

So far I have not written about racism. I’m not going to, today; Jesus addressed the whole issue in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and I don’t need to add superfluous commentary to that. 

Though these false prophets have hijacked the copyright of the Christian label, there is nothing to prevent us from following the Christian code of conduct privately, no matter how incensed, or even merely indignant we are at the abuse of the teachings of Jesus, as we have come to know it, even if it is via pathways that have been “modified” by the early church. The picture that traditional teachings have painted for us shows a Jesus that is very believable. Not believable enough for a historian, or a historiographer, what ever that is, but a personality amazingly coherent, despite the potential distortions of the signal. It is as though some radio source at the fringe of the Milky Way was beaming a tune to us, and despite all the distortion of all the crazy pulsars on the path of the signal, we can still hear and enjoy the tune. It is not that it is a miracle; it is that the personality of Jesus was so simple, admirable, and convincing, that even the oral tradition of the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, remains remarkably coherent. I think it is time to embark on a program of passive resistance, in our own homes, among our own friends, against this commercialized version of what we called Christianity.

The Inauguration of 2021

My fears for this Inauguration were not realized---except for one, which cannot be verified yet---and Joe Biden takes the oath of office without much fanfare.  There certainly were lots of believers who wanted a noisier celebration, but I, for one don't have the heart for such a thing, given that almost half the population is disheartened by the outcome of the election.

Having invested so much emotion on the outcome of this election was not a healthy thing.  Emotional politics are not good politics.  And there are inevitably winners and losers in any test, such as an election; the more the test is loaded with emotion, the more devastating the loss is for the losers.

Obviously we can't make everything completely emotionless, from now on.  There will be some emotion involved when people receive their vaccinations; there will be emotions when we hear about people who refuse the vaccination, and refuse to have their kids vaccinated.  There will be emotion when people who have been trying to live off their meager savings heave a heartfelt sigh of relief when a check comes in the mail.

There are those who do not have insurance that will pay for the vaccinations.  That state of affairs must not continue, though many conservatives are determined that it is better for everybody for some people to not have health insurance.  Everyone who fights for health insurance for all will be swept into a bucket labeled "Socialist Radicals," and will be vilified by the media streams whose claim to righteousness is the insistence that "socialism" is un-American, and the steady labeling of anyone who has a program for the alleviation of the pain of poverty as "socialist," even those members of congress who have watched their constituents suffer and die due to the pandemic, and the lack of medical resources, and their economic status.

My one fear, which will be either dissipated or come true, is that even the small inauguration celebration will be a spreader event.  Mask-wearing was almost total, at the Capitol Steps, but bear in mind that a prolonged gathering of even masked people could result in infection.

The loveliest surprise, for me, was the poet, Amanda Gorman!  I was mesmerized by the grace of the gestures with which she accompanied her reading.  This is beginning to be a common characteristic of black women orators; and a welcome and eloquent one.  Ms. Gorman's command of the language of the hands was exemplary, and lent her reading a glow that elevated the inaugural exercises to a new height.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.  Mao Tse Tung's fanciful utterance can be put to a good use, if we ignore its pedigree.  (No doubt if certain types of patriots were to discover this blog, I will be pillaried for the perceived error.)  Let all good things comfort us, and let us have the fortitude to endure the few bad things that will surely dog us a little longer!

Arch