tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86412162024-03-07T03:51:57.739-05:00brain lyntWhatever seems important at the time.cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.comBlogger777125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-13259486004858136072024-02-27T11:21:00.002-05:002024-02-27T11:21:26.752-05:00The leakiness of Gmail<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> When I signed up for Gmail many years ago, you had to be invited by an existing user. My colleague Ralph extended that credential, after which I could invite myself to open more accounts.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The address format specified characters.characters@gmail.com. It was case sensitive and the dots mattered. Then, a few years later, I started receiving emails definitely not addressed to me. Up in the address field was a note from the googs stating "yes, this is you," with a link to explanation. Addresses were no longer case sensitive and dots didn't matter. Thus I would receive email addressed to anyone using the same characters I had used, upper or lower case, dots or no dots. But it's selective. I don't receive every email my doppelgangers get. Their inboxes can't be that sparse unless they ruthlessly prune their contact lists.</span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I get snapshots of multiple lives. I even get spam based on their history and preferences. And they're a diverse group. At least two appear to be Black women. One seems to be a southern guy. Someone owns or used to own a Jeep. I've learned some interesting things about California's ecology, the blues music scene in Los Angeles, and The Roosevelt Institute, as well as dental and hair care schedules, notifications about routine automobile service, and the cosmetic products marketed to certain demographics. I even get emails from school administrators to parents, and internal business communications from people I don't know. These are not phishing scams. These are other people's business, delivered to me. Some seem to come and go randomly. Others appear regularly, even daily.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I wonder what they might see from my inbox?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">While the experience has been interesting in a way, it's also annoying that Gmail made no effort to secure my communications or those with whom I share my initials. It's a good reminder that most communication on the Internet is not secure. It can be made somewhat more secure by taking specific steps that cost money, but in any case we are submitting our information to a sprawling global system of computers entirely owned by other people. Commit your information accordingly.</span></span><br /></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-55519636075686661752023-09-24T10:32:00.005-05:002023-09-24T10:32:57.348-05:00Give up and put your clothes back on<p> <span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Here in New Hampshire we have reached the time of year when the house is never warm, but the weather isn't cold enough to justify running the heat. This will fade directly into the time of year when the house is never warm, even with the heat on. Glorious summer had its chance, and decided mostly to skip us this year. I'm not sure where it did show up, but it didn't book a long stay in New England.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">In a typical year, May is full of promise and June is full of disappointments. Daylight doesn't automatically mean sunshine. Without sunshine, the relative warmth doesn't bake into your pasty, pale body in shorts and a tee shirt to compensate for the months you've waited. But then July seems to flip a switch. The heat lamp comes on and you can forget the other three-quarters of the year, two-thirds of it with leafless trees. If we're lucky, we get cool nights for sleeping and just hot enough days to enjoy the lakes and mountains. That's the image that everyone carries, anyway. Even before the climate really started to skid out of control, driven by people drunk with power and money, New England's weather had a well earned reputation for variability. You can't always get what you want, even if you're sure you remember it that way.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">This summer was an endless June. Frequent rain, some of it so heavy that it caused destructive flooding, gave way only briefly to sunny days before the next batch of clouds arrived. We didn't see more than a moment of excessive heat, but nighttime temperatures were warm, and dew points high. We waited through what seemed like unending tepid gooeyness for brief visits of drier warmth. And now it's over. Daylight slips below twelve hours, soon to plunge faster and faster toward its low point three months away. The sun's angle drops to a stabbing glare when it shows at all.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">If we lived in the tropics, the length of day wouldn't vary and the sun would always arc high overhead. A friend who lived in Ecuador for a couple of years said that you could choose your temperatures by changing your elevation. But forget the short, light nights of summer in more northerly latitudes. Forget long twilights, too. So we ride around the millions of miles of orbit ahead of us to get to our next shot at the light and warmth we hope for.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Every season has its attractions. I see people getting excited for autumn's cooler temperatures, bright foliage, and signature flavors. Some are also planning happily for the best of winter, that other highly weather dependent season. Another casualty of climate change, winter could easily turn out to be cold, dark, wet, and nothing more. In that case, there's always hot beverages and baked goods. But just the right amount of usable snow for a couple or three months would be better for the economy and the scenery. And you'd still have hot beverages and baked goods. So go find the appropriate layers to wear for the moment and face the future.</span></span><br /></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-19684306899923034722023-09-11T10:06:00.000-05:002023-09-11T10:06:58.459-05:00Remembering 9-11 22 years later<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> On 9-11-2001, Americans were stunned and highly offended when, after decades of meddling in other countries and destabilizing them with impunity for our own gain, someone had finally succeeded in attacking and destabilizing ours. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">September 11th was a day of horror and heroism, when the few Americans suddenly thrust into the jaws of history met certain death with a sense of duty and service to their fellow citizens, while the rest of us had to watch helplessly. The passengers on Flight 93 and the first responders in New York engaged directly. No doubt the military and intelligence services were busy, but without concrete action they could take. The wider audience could only devour what news we could get, and wonder what would be next.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The recollection of great national unity is a myth. On September 12th I walked into my favorite coffee shop to find people shouting at each other over what country to bomb first. Anyone vaguely resembling a Muslim had a target on them. The culture of xenophobia got a surge of nutrients on which it still feeds. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In many ways, 9-11-01 brought us 11-8-2016. Predictably, we had our chance to be thoughtful and measured in our response, and ran off shooting instead. The architects of the attack knew this about us. While just under 3,000 people died in the attacks themselves, the death toll resulting worldwide is in the millions. Someone needed to die for what “they” had done to us, and it almost didn’t matter who.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Suicide bombers are not noble and heroic. They represent a sickness in the human psyche that comes out not just in spectacular events like 9-11, but in every sad and maddening murder suicide, whether it’s in a small apartment and barely makes the evening news, or a school or shopping mall or house of worship that triggers thoughts and prayers from sanctimonious politicians who intend to do nothing more.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">It was never too soon to look inward and reflect on what the 9-11 attacks could tell us about our position and influence in the world, and it’s not too late, although it is too late for the casualties of our long wars since then. We learn to fit ourselves together in the finite space of this planet or we destroy it all in the battle for dominance.</span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-63344402490872087702023-09-10T19:14:00.006-05:002023-09-13T07:23:42.365-05:00A Dose of Strangers<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">As dusk settles on a day I've spent indoors, I get restless, looking out the windows at the darkening forest, even if I've spent the day doing useful or creative things. I recall the convenience of living in my grubbiest apartment, nicknamed The Slum, in the Eastport section of Annapolis. It's the only time I feel the faintest twinge of dissatisfaction at living surrounded by nature.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">There was a shopping center, my bank, and a post office within a block or two.</span> </span>My commute to work was a five-minute bike ride or a fifteen-minute walk to a poorly paid factory job in a sail loft. I could get home from work in minutes.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Knee trouble had knocked me out of bike racing in the spring that year, so I didn't have the distraction of thinking that I needed to train. That freed up a lot of time. Juggling a couple of unsuccessful love affairs chewed up a few weekends at either end of the summer, but once I got bounced from those I had my evenings and weekends to myself.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My roommate was a racing buddy who had lured me into splitting the rent after his own previous cohab had taken him for a few hundred dollars and departed. Then, during the winter, he moved in with a woman in another apartment complex, where they could actually afford to pay for heat, so my solitude deepened with winter's advancing chill. We had made a pact never to turn on the electric baseboards, and I held to it. I was getting into winter camping anyway.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The living room was furnished with a few shabby pieces and several bicycles. My roomie left his bikes because his new girlfriend didn't have room in her cozy dwelling. The place was poorly lit after dark, the off-white paint of the living room walls horizontally striped in dashes made by the Velox handlebar plugs of four bikes that rested against them. The floor was dark wood. The ceilings were fairly high, although the architecture of the buildings was boxlike and uninspired. It was a great place to go out from, in search of light, life, and possible companionship.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Companionship is a distant ship, a welcome sight when it first comes over the horizon, but menacing in its anonymity as it draws closer. What flag is that? Who looks over the rail as faces become more distinct? The idea seemed nice. Why spoil it with actual experience? I could easily walk to the center of town, to enjoy the bustle of other people's lives while they obligingly showed no interest in mine. I might go to the infant <a href="https://ramsheadtavern.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ram's Head Tavern</a>, when it was a basement dive offering a galaxy of unusual imported and domestic beers, or I might just walk and walk, sitting for a time on different benches, laying out the map of the city based on all that I could hear.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I'd started the practice of walking to town right after college, when I returned to Annapolis after graduation. Annapolis was both familiar and unfamiliar, because of the way my family had come and gone from it over and over during my father's Coast Guard career. I walked from West Annapolis at that point, a bit farther, but a pretty walk, between the Naval Academy and St. John's College campuses, or, often, across the St. John's campus. During firefly season, the walks were enchanted by millions of tiny lights. It was on those walks that I started laying out the sound map, realizing how much of the area I could place spatially from any point.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I would log miles on my evening walks, without thinking about it. Walking is a great way to stimulate creativity and relaxation. Driving facilitates sloth, which can be mistaken for relaxation, but walking provides rhythm, exercise, and flow through the scenery. So does biking, but walking is often a better choice. Especially during the times when I was spending most of my time on the latest draft of my bad novel, or other creative efforts that kept me in a chair for hours, the ability to redeem the day with an evening walk was not only a great amenity, the walk itself was an opportunity to observe other lives and fit these snippets into current or future works. I called it a dose of strangers.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I
do have a few dear friends, some of whom I might actually hear from
occasionally. I didn't have anything against meeting people, I'm just
not very good at it. So, playing to my strengths, I was content to
observe, tending to any close passage with a courteous nod and a smile. I
did try to kindle something with the young woman who worked the evening
shift in a cool bookstore on Main Street, but she deflected the
advance. That was still something to file away for possible fictional
use, as was everything in those days. I would go home and write for
hours before nodding off. Then the alarm would pull me up to crawl from
the deep seaweed of fatigue in search of coffee and whatever the day had
in store.</span></span> <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">In my childhood, my
father would go for drives after supper. Like a favorite dog, I would
be invited along a lot of the time. But after the gasoline shortages of
the 1970s made it obvious to me that petroleum was not something to
squander, I wasn't going to drive aimlessly even if I had a car. So here
I am now, with a choice between groping in the forest among creatures
adapted not only to function but to prey in the dark, or to walk along
the road, where hotrodders like to manufacture rubber smoke, and
drinkers fling their empties, their driving precision not to be trusted.
I don't want to be a lone figure in the headlights even if the oncoming
or overtaking motorist is totally sober and sedate. This is doubly true
of biking. The advantage of the city was that I could see and be seen
without being unusual. And at the time Annapolis had little street
crime. There was little to fear.</span></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Hiking is grand. I love to hike. But my night vision was never great, and now it's worse, so I'm reluctant to bumble into a bear or accidentally drop kick a skunk while I'm fumbling around in the dark. And even though I know that coyotes are an asset and don't habitually attack humans, when they sing out nearby it still makes my hair stand up. I'm not going for a walk in the dark. I'll have to come up with something else. Or, as usual, peck idly at this or that until I notice that it's almost midnight and I should have gone to bed hours before.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-44843808118216346802023-06-21T09:38:00.006-05:002023-06-21T13:55:08.369-05:00Kids today...<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> Skimming an article online from NPR, about two middle school girls who have a podcast about what it's like to be a middle schooler today, one thing stood out: active shooter drills.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">When I was in the middle school years, the Vietnam War and racial tension stressed the country. As a military dependent, I knew a lot of kids who worried about losing a father. Outside of that circle, with the draft in full operation, I knew kids who worried about losing a brother. Hanging over all of this was the threat of nuclear war. None of us as young children had any idea what might trigger it, but we all knew that it would be much more abrupt and far reaching than the start of any other war in human history. But it was abstract. When a kid lost a family member to the war in Southeast Asia, it was on the other side of the world. Their loss was real, but the carnage took place off stage.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">For the past thirty years or so, school children have had to prepare more and more for the carnage to erupt in the middle of their lives. With gun laws that are not only lax but openly supportive of the rights of the homicidal, the United States is a breeding ground for grievance murderers. Most of it happens piecemeal, in domestic violence or street crime. Applying the logic used around air crashes, you never hear about the thousands of schools that go year after year without a mass shooting. You only hear about the spectacular disasters. We're just supposed to accept the possibility. Could happen. Probably won't. And hey: your odds of survival are way better in a school shooting than in an airliner crash. Do your drills and keep your wits about you if the shooting actually starts. You fall to the level of your training, kids!</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Mass shootings are not limited to schools, of course. Any public gathering could become a target range for some heavily armed, sad, angry person ready to let it rip. They might or might not be suicidal themselves. Often they have no intention of surviving, or at least don't expect to.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Death hovered near us in other ways in the 1960s and '70s. Schoolmates
might lose a parent to cancer or a car crash. We might even lose a
schoolmate to cancer or a car crash. One kid I knew drowned in a swimming pool. Those still apply today. The unlikely but far from impossible threat of a nuclear fireball (I spent a lot of school years near DC) has been replaced by the fairly unlikely but too-often repeated scenario of a mass murderer dropping by, in addition to the daily hazards. Does it make it harder or easier to take that you might be chopped to pieces by little bits of flying lead while a nearby friend manages to evade it? It's not even combat. You're being hunted by a wasteful killer with nothing but blood lust.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">In the meantime, you have to worry about whether you look sufficiently fashionable to avoid ridicule, and hope that you don't do anything that will get you plastered all over the internet for decades of unanswerable humiliation. And an older generation grumbles constantly about your flaws.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-684043157200705552023-04-17T16:56:00.002-05:002023-04-17T16:56:44.025-05:00A town too small to be good<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Nationally and at the state level, some of the bad actors of politics and government are facing some consequences for verifiable and legally actionable corruption, as opposed to just batting away rumors and accusations in the shouting match that has kept us from enacting the sound, progressive policies that might actually create and maintain a pleasantly livable world for the children and grandchildren of those who decided to reproduce from the 1980s onward.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Little rays of hope shine into the gloom of the future. Will high profile criminals and traitors actually be indicted, tried, and convicted? Stay tuned. Will we actually start to deal with the climate crisis? Will we finally get an actual system of universal health care based on patient outcomes rather than corporate income? Will we go back to trying to accept each other's peculiarities rather than trying to eradicate them? Will we rein in rampant gun violence? Will we shine a light on corruption and waste where it actually occurs, rather than scapegoating social programs? It could happen. The US government and many state governments have strong enough constitutions and agencies to be able to enforce higher standards if the right people have the political will.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Some states are going the opposite way. The factions that have seized power are determined to hold it regardless of the naive notion of citizen government. But even there, a determined political opposition can maneuver against authoritarian takeover. They might even succeed. And states are big enough to attract national media attention. There are a lot of eyes on the big battles that define who we are as a nation.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Meanwhile, way down at the small town level, it's hard to find out what's going on. Here in New Hampshire, the state does little oversight of town governments. The smaller the town, the less money they have, and the less attention they attract. If corruption becomes the norm, no one will stop it if it becomes normalized. Cronyism, incompetent officials, revenge enforcement can go on unchecked because no one cares.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Correction: a minority of residents and voters cares, but small New England towns are direct democracies. Funny, that, because the conservative residents sneeringly tell you that "we live in a republic, not a democracy," and then go vote directly at town meeting on every issue, with absolutely no filter of elected representatives. Democracy, baby. In fact, it's damn near communistic. We all get together and decide how much money we need, compare it to how much money we actually have or can get, and figure out a budget.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">You'd think it would be quite transparent, but town meeting is once a year. After that the select board and whatever professional town management you've scraped up the money for will be free to act autonomously, even exceeding budgeted amounts when a need is immediate. Sure, citizens can go to weekly select board meetings, but you have little leverage between elections. There is no debate among a regularly meeting body of legislators. The select board is all executive branch, with no checks and balances.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The winner of any election at this level is the person that gets the most votes. It is a pure popularity contest, like Prom King and Queen. If the majority of voters who show up prefers someone unqualified, or perhaps two or three of them in the course of a couple of elections, that's who will be running your town and setting your tax rate. It's a recipe for bad roads, environmental degradation, graft, and waste.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The American belief in the homespun common sense of country folk is generally complete bullshit. The same kinds of people tend to seek power at any level: the ones who see something in it for themselves and their friends. Where progressives try to broaden the basis of prosperity and acceptance to include more categories of minority, conservatives look out for their own people; the good people; the normal people; their kin and friends. And rural people are generally conservative.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">It makes sense. People live closer to the real processes of survival in rural areas. They're more likely to have raised the animals that they later eat, or to have hunted a wild one, killed it, and prepared it for consumption. They raise crops, build and fix their own dwellings. The ones without generational wealth really do live close to that image of self reliance, insofar as anyone is self reliant. We all have to trade our skills or lend a hand, or get a hand, from time to time. A life like that makes a person calculate the cost and benefit of most actions. Unfortunately, at a governmental level -- even a dinky one like a town of a few hundred people without a true town center -- their calculations can lead to false economy, or to a few (thousand) bucks of town revenue going to a favored partner in an untraceable transaction.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's not really <i>untraceable.</i> It's just that there is no real oversight unless enough townsfolk pay enough attention all the time, and still manage to overcome the loyalties of the close-knit group that benefits the most from keeping things vague and "good enough." In tiny towns, elections can come down to a single vote. Who are you going to complain to? First you have to untangle what happened. Then you have to make a case to have it investigated. At any level, your neighbors and your notoriously parsimonious state government will do their own cost benefit analysis and decide whether it's worth imperiling their own uneasy peace with neighbors or expending public funds to root out this one example of the kind of fiscal shenanigans that are probably found wherever you care to look.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I've lived here through an era of bad roads, no land use ordinances, and a really disgusting town trash dump. I saw it improve gradually. Now it's on the way down again. There's no one to tell, when even the rural news media know whose side they're on. The average citizen is just trying to earn a living and rest up from one work day to the next. We don't have time or resources to ride herd constantly on our public officials. I guess we're just really lucky that all of our town bridges are fairly new now, and none of the spans are very long. As for the rest of the roads, get ready for a bumpy ride. And don't be surprised at anything that gets built next door to you.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-87748211840331435912023-02-09T12:56:00.001-05:002023-02-09T14:00:49.585-05:00A Celebration of Death<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"><span>People around me keep getting Covid. Business has been bad enough that I have not had to deal with crowds of people,</span> <span>so I haven't been overrun by hordes of mouth breathers, but I can't avoid all contact.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Recent sufferers all report rapid onset of symptoms from a very mild feeling of fatigue similar to what some of us feel much of the time anyway.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Since basically no one masks anymore, you have to decide whether to look like a freak. Meanwhile, we get even less information about the current symptoms and severity of the disease than we did at its height, when we got a fair amount more, but nowhere near enough. The response was forced to be 80 percent political and 20 percent scientific, so we did not have comprehensive data gathering and analysis to help us get the best understanding we could.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When everything shut down in March, 2020, we thought that our little bike shop was going to cease operation immediately, and maybe never return. Ours is a genuine small business, Forget fewer than 500 employees. We have fewer than five. But then we were declared essential, and a whole bunch of people suddenly wanted bikes that weren't there. So, then they wanted their old bikes refurbished. We were very busy, although we could hardly get basic repair parts, and certainly saw almost no new bikes. We relied on decades of experience and ingenuity to meet the demand.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The management took the pandemic seriously. We masked, put in air filters, put up barriers, and reconfigured service counters to control air flow and reduce contact with people. We imposed our protocols on customers, and lost a few as a result. I do not know how they fared against the disease itself, because we haven't seen them again. At least not so far. Sometimes people drift back in after years of nursing a grudge or just not needing our services.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Outside our windows we could see two establishments that did nothing to reduce risks. One was a church that ended up generating a cluster of infections. The other was a little sandwich shop. I was struck by the party atmosphere among the mingling, hugging, unmasked gatherings that I saw. On social media, this joyful defiance was even stronger. The advocates for normalcy at all costs seemed eager for the deaths that would come, some with a suicidal enthusiasm. The firm foundation of all of this was a bedrock of self-centeredness. The advocates of contagion held that the risk was fine because they themselves were fine with it. Anyone who wanted or needed to deal with them was forced to go out on that limb with them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Now we're all out on the limb. The few who mask protect themselves and others, but masks are generally more protective of others, by filtering the breath of the wearer. In a sea of the maskless, the lonely mask is a leaky life raft.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">We have incomplete information because most home tests go unreported. Even at the height of scrutiny we had incomplete information, and its distribution was hampered by political pressure. I get a general sense that most infections are much less severe, especially among vaccinated or previously infected people, but we still don't know about hidden or long-term effects of this new disease. It's also become a game of sorts, trying to deny the virus the victory of inflicting illness. By extension, the opponent is also anyone who has courted the disease and acted as its agent.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The problem is that the mask is not a secret weapon. You're putting it right out there, as plain as the filter on your face. In a public-contact business, that first impression influences everything that follows, as surely as ripping a loud fart, or choosing to wear politically provocative apparel. The mask is politically provocative apparel. Because it was made into a divisive issue from the beginning, it has had a stigma that only the mandates could overcome. Anyone who felt the need could say that they were wearing the mask because they were forced to. The rest of us could wear it without comment. It was the default, and naked faces were the outliers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Masking helps reduce all infectious disease, but it's inconvenient and weird. It's isolating because it is an admission of concern and of possible contagion. It's more isolating when only one person in 30 or 50 is doing it. More people like to blend in than stand out. It's more comfortable to think that you can choose when and how to attract attention. This is a further burden on the decision whether to mask.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Once you get sick, you're sick. You can't dial it back. You're going to take that ride. It's automated. You don't know how long the track is or exactly how it is shaped. Either get out of the queue or prepare to get launched. You don't even know for certain if the restraints will keep you in your seat. Sure, life is full of uncertainties. You have to decide whether you'd like to add a few more and share them with a captive audience.</span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-41805519511541637112023-01-31T11:21:00.003-05:002023-02-27T13:41:36.315-05:00The stickiness of racism<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> Someone posted a picture of Brazil nuts online the other day, as a test of racism, asking whether anyone used a certain term for them. Someone else I know posted a puzzled comment, because she didn't know the term. I, unfortunately, did. I knew right away what the original post was getting at.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I didn't grow up using the term. I was at least in my late 20s before I heard it. But it wedged itself into the jumble of other unnecessarily race-based terminology that had been common and socially acceptable among the people at whom it would never be leveled. A whole bunch of people who disapproved of lynching and would never burn a cross, who might even consider themselves color-blind in their egalitarianism would still chuckle at stereotyping jokes, and allow as how a much more flagrant racist was "entitled to their opinion."</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">With the expansion of civil rights came a wave of victim blaming that has helped keep racism viable for decades after the advances of the 1960s. "You can vote and go to the good schools now! It's all on you to catch up!" Black people in the media provided highly visible success stories, as well as wry commentary on the white world. Maybe the Black population really was sorting itself out according to its own desires, and we could all joke about our foibles.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Speaking of jokes, have you heard the one about the two Black guys who were told to lie down on top of a load of trash in a truck so it wouldn't blow out on the way to the dump? If you've heard it, it probably just auto-completed in your mind, whether you want it to or not. If you haven't heard it, you have to decide for yourself whether to accept it into your life. It's actually more of a redneck joke than a Black joke, but the punch line has the two rednecks who see the truck using the n-word, and it has the two Black guys in a job where they could be ordered to lie on top of a load of trash.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">How about the joke about Black kids learning the alphabet? Or a commonly used derogatory term for improvised construction or mechanical assembly, which, in New England, might be referred to by the more laudatory "Yankee ingenuity?" Or a racist descriptive for an unhealthy selection of food and beverage from processed foods and soda pop as the morning meal?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">My record on discarding and resisting these is scuffed and dented from collisions with their use. My transition has lasted since the 1970s. Prior to that I managed to be oblivious enough to the whole situation, as a dumb schoolkid in a lot of places where there simply wasn't much Black population -- sometimes none -- that it hadn't really come up. As soon as I did know about it, I approved of Black liberation in my little juvenile mind, and never changed that stance, no matter how ineptly I lived it. Meanwhile, the culture around me shifted away from blatant suppression and direct violence while it dished up plenty of separated equality, and terms of differentiation. Less visible to the white majority behind the public facade of Black advancement, separation and calculated inequality hollowed out the gains and kept racism thriving.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Guilt and fear drive white supremacy. They know damn well that this country owes a debt it can hardly repay, to the Black people who labored and the indigenous people who were shoved into undesirable corners, subject to extermination whenever they were deemed too inconvenient, so that the mythic greatness of America might rise. White labor was abused and exploited as well. That has contributed to poor white people resisting acknowledgement of the Black and indigenous claims for compensation, because the poor whites know that the rich will find a way to duck the bill and hand it off to people who can't afford to hire lawyers and buy judges and elected officials. Only through voting solidarity do we have the slightest chance of gaining leverage on government. It seems simple, but the concessions it will require from people who have prospered under the existing conditions almost guarantee that it will never happen.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Prove me wrong. The way will involve a few intermediate steps, but we never get anywhere if we don't all share the vision of where we need to end up.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">More likely we go down in chaos and blood, because the defenders of the old ways are wedded to violence and willing to destroy everything if they can no longer control it. I don't prefer that, but I'd be remiss if I did not acknowledge it. It probably won't be the "race war" that some of them yearn for. We are at work on too many methods to destroy ourselves: environmental degradation, nationalist and religious militancy, criminal oligarchy, all of these actively erode the general welfare and domestic tranquility.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Knowing all of this, I still deal with the ugly crowd of racist epithets that pop into my mind whenever I see a Black person. These are terms that I never used in aggression, and never wanted to. They were just in the air, all around, and soaked in the same way repeated song lyrics do, as popular tunes go from Top 40 to Oldies, and never go away.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I often wonder what my thinking would be like if I had never been exposed to racism. What would my own brain come up with if it had not been loaded with terms and attitudes reflecting centuries of prejudice? I was probably in first grade when I started to learn that it was a big deal to see a Black person in a position of some authority and power. Instead of just other kids and adults in different skin tones, there was apparently a reason to differentiate, and I needed to have an opinion about that. On top of the basic academic stuff I had to absorb, and all of the other routine human aspects of growing up, I had to figure out the powers and responsibilities of inherited privilege, without feeling particularly privileged.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Not feeling particularly privileged, struggling white people push back hard and quickly against the concept. Racial identity was created by white people. It would have gone away if white people had been ready to accept Black people as fully equal fellow citizens back in the 1860s. Heck, I bet women still wouldn't have the vote if Black men had been given equal and unchallenged voting rights back then. Sexism crosses all color barriers. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's for damn sure a thing. When you imagine all the power that white people would have lost by granting full liberation to Blacks, think about what might have been gained in other precious realms of prejudice.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Lots of blood has been shed and lives have been destroyed trying to convince white men to lighten up. And maybe humans in general are so pig-headed that busting heads really was the only way to move forward. White men might -- for a very limited time -- have represented the least of all evils in our halting evolution into a truly enlightened species. But the iron fist always holds on for too long when a better way emerges. The fingers grip externally and in the mind, and need to be pried loose and melted down.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-2116856568943554142022-11-06T17:31:00.001-05:002022-11-06T17:37:30.461-05:00The Baby Boomers broke the system, but not the way you think<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> While the Boomers are responsible for purposeful acts that made life more difficult for their own children and grandchildren, they started straining the machinery of civilization when they themselves were in school.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The Baby Boom -- as opposed to any birthrate surge known as <i><b>a</b></i> baby boom -- officially dates from 1947 to closing dates anywhere from 1960 to 1964. Within that span, the various waves had very different views of the world. The first wave for instance, could go to college, come out with a bachelor's degree, and slide into a good job that might support them for an entire career until retirement. Others might take a different kind of training and find good unionized jobs for similar career security. But the system that developed to process this younger generation was overwhelmed by their numbers by the late 1960s, as the middle of the boom choked the schools and then hit the job market. I was born in 1956. As I approached the end of high school, a bachelor's degree was still a decent ticket to employment. By the time I was in college, students who really wanted to get anywhere with academic credentials were planning for graduate school. And even with that, we had already heard the stories of "PhDs pumping gas."</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">To get a job, you have to find someone willing and able to pay you. Virtually every high-paying employer had their pick of highly qualified applicants by the mid 1970s, and more kept coming out of the pipeline. A need is not the same as a market. Areas that our species might have needed to work on were not attracting investors. The Boomers followed the money. Consumerism created or enhanced markets and ignored needs.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The Boomers had also grown up with the fantasy that unlimited wealth is not only possible, but okay. Some of us were oblivious and simply imagined stumbling into a fortune and being the cool kind of rich people, who are generous, open-minded, curious, fun, and conveniently well funded. Others were knowingly elitist and ruthlessly competitive, which is what it really takes to be wealthy. Hard work is a small percentage. Focused self interest is the larger part. Feel free to look down on the lowly grunts who merely labor. Maneuver against your peers and near peers, forming and breaking alliances as necessary. Game the system. Take every advantage as you find it. Sportsmanship is for losers.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The apparent prosperity of the 1980s was mostly based on credit and optimism. The recession that ended the decade hit when the bills finally went too far past due. The recovery that made us all feel good in the 1990s happened only because everyone had finally paid their cards down enough to start consuming again. And so we crashed in 2000. Every bad decision was multiplied by increasing numbers of players as the Boom begat Gen X and Gen X begat Gen Z, or however the succession goes. There's always overlap, so there are "generations" that are too young to have been sired by the one immediately ahead of them. But it's safe to say that Boomers stretched the credit and financial systems in the 1980s just as extensively as they had blown the seams on the educational system in the 1970s.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Ultimately, our problems are population problems. Our breeding success combines with our industrialized consumerism with devastating effect. This leads not only to products purposely designed to fail, it makes our own lives cheaper, as the impatient crowd in the queue behind us wants us out of their way.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-45268949140284869572022-06-14T08:25:00.001-05:002022-06-14T09:21:48.892-05:00War in Ukraine: Economics versus morality<p> <span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">As the consequences of Russia's invasion of Ukraine continue to expand, major disruptions of food and energy supplies threaten economic stability across the developed world, and actual survival across the Global South. Areas that were under stress are now under much more stress. This will only get worse as the war drags on, and Russia refuses to back down from its unprovoked and immoral act of violence against a neighboring nation.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Vladimir Putin's greed for power drives the nation that he leads to act as his machine to sow chaos for the gain of a wealthy minority. Did Putin know that his forces would not have to sweep to easy victory in Ukraine to generate the leverage that he now enjoys? As long as the war lasts, Russia's power will only grow, because of the strategic importance of Ukraine as a food supplier, and Russia's position as a key player in the fossil fuel economy. The fossil fuel economy still has a choke hold on the world. <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">From a moral standpoint, the rest of the world should stand united in support of Ukraine against Russia's brutal war of conquest. From an economic standpoint, the rest of the world will see an almost immediate -- though temporary -- improvement in conditions by ceding Ukraine to Russia, perhaps even throwing support behind the old empire's second-rate military to help overrun Ukrainian resistance. As deplorable as Russia is, at least the rule of an authoritarian empire provides a single, known entity to build a strategy against. Think of how wonderfully simple everything seemed during the Cold War.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The United States has already suffered moral damage as our desperation for petroleum has driven us to make amends with Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration had made admirable efforts to recognize the abuses of the Saudi regime, for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, and the war in Yemen. Now we are abandoning that stance and kissing up for oil. Stick a bigger flag on your pickup truck for that one.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">What do you think? A long, expensive, bloody struggle lasting years and years to uphold the sovereignty of Ukraine and the continued rise of democracy in the world, or cheaper gas and food and shame that will follow us all the rest of our lives? Having chosen petroleum over virtue, those lives will be shorter in any case. The improvements really will only be temporary, as the climate finally goes out of control, and famine and drought envelop more and more of the earth's surface.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The climate collapse gains momentum in either scenario, as we neglect measures to mitigate it because our focus is on the delicate balance of a limited war with an erstwhile superpower or we hit the accelerator with our newly refueled big trucks and motorized toys. War is environmentally devastating, but our consumer version of peace and prosperity is also environmentally devastating.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The best answer would be for Russia to suddenly shake its head and back out of Ukraine with profuse apologies. That ain't happening. We have to figure out in a hurry whether the less worse prospect to reduce global threats is to throw Ukraine to the bears and deal with imperialist Russia or to ratchet up support for Ukraine's defense and hope that it drives Russia back to its borders sooner than later.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-28615554198274981552022-05-31T11:19:00.003-05:002023-02-01T07:35:10.018-05:00Why "gun control" is doomed<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Humans have been losing their temper and killing their own kind since before we were humans. We just keep improving the technology.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The AR-15 was created to secure a military contract by providing a more effective weapon for the style of combat American troops were encountering in jungle and urban warfare. It was designed to kill not just people, but people reduced to the status of varmints in the underbrush: dehumanized humans.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Beginning with the American Civil War, mechanized slaughter in warfare started generating shocking numbers of casualties that were quickly rationalized and normalized by supporters of the conflict. Combatant deaths and collateral damage have always been accepted as part of the cost of the revered practice of war. We accepted that we will always have wars, so we'd better keep improving our weaponry to improve our odds of success.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The sale of personal guns reflects on an individual level the defense industry's sale of large-scale weapons to government military forces. Between nations, those arsenals present a deterrent to potential aggressors, or intimidate potential resisters to a powerful nation's overtures to a weaker one with deals that they can't refuse. The dynamic is different on a personal level, where some gun owners like to wear their firepower openly, while others prefer to take advantage of concealment. With an ample supply of guns in the United States, anyone who is fully clothed could have one or more weapons in easy reach. Thus, almost anyone you see could be an unstable dictator with nukes.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">When the world entered the Nuclear Age, in which country after country developed doomsday bombs and missiles, we counted on the threat of mutually assured destruction to keep any single state actor from starting The Big One that would blow us back to the Stone Age. Indeed, research indicated that we would go farther than the Stone Age, to a nearly completely lifeless planet. As appealing as that may sound to nihilists who say that the destruction of our species and all other life sounds great, no one of that bent has yet succeeded in gaining enough control over a country with a nuclear arsenal to make the dream a reality.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">On the individual level, the prospect looks completely different. How often do we hear that the instigator of a mass shooting either commits suicide or accepts that the armed response will kill him? Because the motives for mass shootings vary, some shooters do survive, or might have hoped to. But anyone initiating an act of slaughter has to accept the risk that it will end their story at the same time that it ends the lives of their victims. Mutually assured destruction isn't a deterrent, it's an enhancement.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/14/health/ar15-rifle-history-trnd/index.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2017 article from CNN</a> provides a convenient history of the AR-15 and statistics on gun ownership in general. It reports that a 1999 Pew Research survey found that 50 percent of gun owners said that they owned theirs for hunting, and 26 percent said it was for protection. By 2017, 67 percent said they owned firearms for protection, and only 38 percent said it was for hunting. Put another way, the balance shifted from hunting animals to hunting each other. But the article also stated that gun ownership in the US had been steadily declining. The article is from 2017, with a graph showing data ending in 2014. That graph ends with a rising line indicating that could have continued to rise in the eight years since 2014. As with so many things, a lot can go unreported. Based on what I hear around my neighborhood on a regular basis, gun ownership is thriving.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Among my acquaintances I know heavily armed people and adamantly unarmed people. Because I'm not involved in shooting as a hobby or occupation, the subject comes up very little. I find a lot of helpful information and analysis at a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/BeauoftheFifthColumn" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">YouTube channel </a>presented by a southern journalist who discusses this topic extensively. <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">According to more recent statistics reported in<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> a BBC article</a>, Americans use their guns to kill themselves more often than to kill others. But homicide is the next largest segment, followed by law enforcement, unintentional discharge (negligence), and uncategorized.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">In
the United States we are uniquely hampered by the Second Amendment when
it comes to restraining the supply and use of firearms. Other
countries that supposedly provide examples of how easily it could be
done with sufficient political will do not have the scriptural basis
that the gun culture claims here. There is no "right to life" explicit in the Bill of Rights, but there is a right to the power of instant death.</span></span> <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Gun culture couldn't exist without guns. But guns already exist in huge numbers, leaving us to figure out how to address human attitudes toward them and their appropriate use. Bans promote sales. During the 1994-2004 ban, sales of the AR-15 and similar rifles increased. The rifles were simply reconfigured to comply with the wording of the ban. The prohibitions in the ban did little or nothing to reduce the lethality of the weapons, and absolutely nothing to stem the production of them or the demand for them. It created a scarcity mentality among people inclined to want a gun, and made them a sort of forbidden fruit that fed into anti-government rhetoric. True patriots stand up against their government, because you know we never really wanted or needed one in the first place, but back the blue and salute Old Glory and support our troops.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Mental health accounts for only a fraction of homicides. Human volatility combined with an implied challenge from popular culture makes people wonder all the time how they would stack up in a confrontation. The hero doesn't win every time, but they never quit. There is no distinct line between normal human violence and pathological expressions of it. Just by stepping onto the continuum you open yourself up to further experimentation. What would it be like? Could I take it? Is this my time to be the righteous fist of justice? Or maybe you're just pissed off that day.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Any time someone cites a progression of events in a conjectural way, the dive bombers of logical debate will descend in a swarm, shrieking "slippery slope fallacy! Slippery slope fallacy!" You know what? Fuck them. Slippery slopes exist, and the refusal to consider them as a thought experiment is intellectually dishonest and cowardly. One thing does lead to another. Not every progression proves true, but dismissing them out of hand because you learned, in some class you took or book you read, to scorn them shows an ironic lack of creative and critical thinking. As someone who has slid off of a number of them, I offer you my one-finger salute.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The problem with the political process is that we get buried in statistics and arguments from all sides, amplified or suppressed depending on where the lobbying money is being applied. There's a whole lot of rhetoric before the energy dissipates because everyone is too confused to move forward. If something does get enacted, its more likely to be ineffective political theater, because that's what the American people actually want. A simple and inadequate solution, or the attempt to impose one, is much easier for the public to understand than a data-driven, somewhat complicated long campaign to address the behavioral basis of our problem.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-60242501774263479972022-04-05T09:02:00.001-05:002022-04-05T13:59:22.559-05:00Your investment portfolio<p> <span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">If you've made enough money during your working life to invest in a portfolio that will now support you in comfortable leisure in retirement, congratulations.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">You don't need to be a major plutocrat to enjoy the advantages of the system that they have designed. Investment for profit is open to anyone who wants to buy in with whatever spare money they have lying around.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Many employers offer pension plans. At higher income levels, the pension can be a considerable inducement to take a job and do your best to hold onto it. Keep your eyes on the pot of gold waiting in the luminous fog of the future.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">If your employer doesn't offer a plan, you can still shop around for a mutual fund, or piece together your own collection. Some people are good at this, or lucky. The more money you have, the more luck seems to find you. It isn't insider trading if it just comes up in social conversation, right?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">However you collect your pile, remember that you are being supported by the labor of others. The higher your income during your career, the more you were paid with money that was denied to others. The income on your investments is almost entirely money that is denied to others still working. This does include the CEOs and other top management at profitable corporations, who have to sacrifice some of the profits to pay investors. It's all part of the game. They're well compensated enough for it to be a game for them.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Critics of Social Security complain, among other things, that retirees now are getting money put into the system by workers who have not yet retired. The active workers are subsidizing the retirees. But that's exactly how an investment-based retirement plan works as well. The money that private industry generates to pay a return on investment is made using their active labor force, or otherwise stressing the active labor force by laying a bunch of them off and buying back stock with the money saved on payroll.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The only way to save for retirement without relying on younger people to pay your way is to hoard gold, and hope that it still has value by the time you try to trade your nuggets and ingots for the real necessities.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-86969606508648881862022-04-05T09:01:00.005-05:002022-04-05T14:04:08.717-05:00An unstoppable wave of suffering and death<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> The current crisis in Ukraine not only puts us on the verge -- if not
an inescapable path -- to nuclear destruction, it also forces humanity
to ignore the environmental collapse that's been brewing since the
beginning of the 20th Century.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">World-wide, authoritarian
governments push back against democracy, while democratic countries and
confederations have to satisfy voters in order to get anything done.
While individual voters may value their freedom, and access to
government, large groups of them act from narrow interests to the
detriment not only of their nation but of the world as a whole. We've
had decades to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, for instance, but
instead have only looked for cheaper prices for the poison.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">This fossil fuel dependency plays strongly into the doom set in motion as Russia warms up the missile launchers in eager anticipation of the showdown with the West. China might hope to play the moderator, but no one can put the brakes on Putin's aggression except Putin himself. And the war crimes of his soldiers show that he has no shortage of depraved followers enjoying the sadistic task of terrorizing their way to a dominant role strictly by virtue of their willingness to take us all to hell with them in a fireball. As long as democratic governments are <u><i><b>rightly</b></i></u> afraid to ask their citizens to sacrifice for the war effort by dealing with high prices and shortages in a wartime economy, Russia will continue to act with justifiable confidence.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">As Russia and China play Bad Cop/Slightly Less Bad Cop with the rest of the world, the cult of the strongman leader seems to offer a path to safety for anyone willing to knuckle under and kiss up. The depraved and sadistic see career opportunities in such regimes. None of them seem to give much thought to how short a run they'll have. One side or the other will probably blink in the nuclear confrontation, but by then we'll have lost too much time on the environmental collapse and we're probably going to end up in a society where you'd best not depart visibly from a narrow set of norms.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The odds favor a pretty miserable future. I challenge you to prove me wrong.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-8020555650685105182022-01-20T10:18:00.003-05:002022-01-24T17:09:38.011-05:00The love of power has defeated the power of love<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> When 50 Republican senators, plus Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, voted to kill the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act yesterday, they affirmed that holding office in a degenerating autocracy was better than living up to the ideals of fully inclusive representative democracy.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The Republicans are correct that they would have a very difficult time maintaining political office if they had to run on policies alone. Some Democrats as well would face greater headwinds in a truly reformed election system. Manchin and Sinema did not need to be among them, but they have to make their own political calculations. Elective office requires a particular skill set to manage the political maneuvering within the government itself as well as the perceptions of voters. All of those forces can distort a moral compass. It's obvious that this has happened to 52 people charged with making critical decisions regarding the present and future course of this country.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">This failure will be laid completely unfairly at the feet of President Joe Biden. No political maneuvering can overcome the personal ambitions of officials elected to another branch of government. There is no carrot and no stick large enough to deflect the inertia of people who see a way clear to advance their individual gains, even at a terrible national and global cost.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">It's popular to say that history will judge these people harshly, but look how long it has taken to bring shameful facts about our country's past into the public discourse. And we're still not able to face them rationally and eliminate their effects. Too many people depend on maintaining the fable. People whom history has judged harshly remain in the historical record and attract adherents as well as detractors. And that's if the philosophies and movements they represent haven't just kept on truckin' in a somewhat diluted or mutated form regardless of censure. Think of the "victory" over fascism in Europe in the 1940s and the continuation of segregation and bigotry in the rest of the "free world" thereafter.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-13579646955164540832022-01-10T18:57:00.000-05:002022-01-10T18:57:51.202-05:00The Pope wants to know when you're gonna give him some grandchildren already<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> For all of his admirable qualities, the pontiff is a Catholic after all. Sometimes he's just gotta represent the values of the organization he leads. It was funny that he condemned pet ownership so coldly, though, when his religion looks like "cat-holic."</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">As for having children, he's already been answered in detail on social media. We the childless have to make that decision at the stage of life where most of us are getting considerable biological, social, and familial pressure to be fruitful and multiply. The head of an order of celibate priesthood had his own reasons for choosing such a drastic course.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">We all will question our choice from time to time, but circumstances as they have evolved have affirmed my belief that humans would manage to sabotage and undercut all of the improvements they were making in quality of life and halting strides toward a more just and inclusive world society. We're still threatening each other with nuclear war. We're destroying the environment and arguing over whether women are fully independent people. We're sorting by color and killing each other over imaginary lines.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">According to both physics and biology, we have no control over our actions. Thus you can argue that childlessness among the childless was inevitable, because the decision was not made by rational individuals weighing variables and choosing not to reproduce. Another school of thought contends that, because our brains are made up of the elements called into being by the origin of the universe, that we are the universe itself becoming self aware. Wow. The universe is being a real asshole right now. Looking at human history, it's been a worse asshole, but it sure has a damn long way to go to be a safe and fun companion. And how did it produce so many brains that didn't even believe in its own structure?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">If all human thought is the result of cosmic forces, could eugenics be the universe deciding that a bunch of those entities are only useful as disposable labor and a source of donor organs?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">That's just one of thousands of questions stirred up by the idea that we as individuals are not charting our own little courses. It's got to be frustrating to a sentient cosmos that it has produced such feeble little beings that they have no way to travel freely through the vastness from this little incubator of a planet, which the more annoying among us can't destroy fast enough.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sentient doesn't mean smart. The universe is a high school sophomore who created itself as a school science project. It got a C-plus. It would have been a B-minus if the universe was better at spelling. The whole thing is falling apart. Yeah, I definitely want to stick a kid into that and tell them that they're the next phase in an evolution that might not work.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">If the universe wants to remain self aware, it will have to figure out how to do it on its own. Consider this the homunculus rebellion. We're tired of being used. Do a better job, universe. We demand better working conditions.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">You know where to find me. I'll be with my cats.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-41589754360716654182021-11-11T09:17:00.003-05:002021-11-11T23:39:22.140-05:00I owe my life to two world wars<p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> On this Armistice Day, I think about the military service of my grandfather, whom I barely met, and of his only son, my father.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Although both of them were American, my father's parents met in France. I know even less of his mother than I do of his father, because of the way that circumstances broke up their family years later, so I don't know why she was in France, but Grandpère, as we knew him, went there with the American military forces. I don't even know how they met, because the endgame of their family was so difficult for my father that we let him tell us what he wanted, when he wanted. Whether he was dealing well with the trauma or not, he had plastered over it heavily to hide the cracks. He could not let it bother him, because his profession depended on strength and invulnerability.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">After the Great War, my father's parents lived in Paris, where Grandpère attempted to continue his operatic singing career. He'd been emerging as a new talent in the Chicago area before the US entry into the conflict in Europe pulled him away. I have no idea whether he was further hampered by any carnage he might have seen or perpetrated, but the operatic career did not take off. Still, the couple were living a comfortable life as my father recalls it, until the 1929 stock market crash sent its economic waves through the wider world. At least that's what the young child was told was the cause of the family's rapid decline in fortunes and living spaces. But they were starting to rebuild by the late 1930s, only to be displaced again by a troublesome German. They left France in 1939 as World War II broke out across Europe. They landed in New York.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The family situation deteriorated, with his mother hospitalized and his father going off in search of work and -- I'm guessing -- a measure of solace, based on what little I know of the events. My father was left to live at a friend's house while he finished his last year at a pretty fancy prep school, where he was a scholarship student, not a rich kid riding daddy's money to educational credentials appropriate to the business he would inherit. One of his classmates inherited the New York Times. Meanwhile, Dad ended up fending for himself, working for a boat yard on City Island, for a bike shop, and in the offices of the Boy Scouts of America. He'd been a scout since his childhood in France, and was an Eagle Scout in every respect. <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">By this time, America was in the war. My father had gone to college, entering MIT, but all of the stresses on him hurt him academically. His only achievement was on the water, kicking ass in sailboat races for the school team. The coach at the Coast Guard Academy suggested that he enlist, and then apply to take the academy entrance exam. The Coast Guard Academy took applicants solely on merit, without congressional appointments. This my father did. He expected to get sent off to drive landing craft onto beaches, but instead ended up in a construction detail in Florida, and other odd bits, before entering the academy in 1945.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Meanwhile, my mother was growing up in central New Jersey, and chose Connecticut College as her next step after high school. Adjacent to the academy, the all-women's school provided a convenient dating pool for the all-male inmates across the road. Thus the streams of life eventually converged.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">During the years of the Korean Conflict, my father had been on ice breaker duty in the
Arctic, and
on Baffin Island, building and manning a LORAN station. The fight
against global communism had many fronts. His later trips to Europe to discuss
search and rescue agreements with friendly governments also included
navigational enhancements that would aid in the guidance of doomsday
weapons against the USSR, back when those had to be more personally
delivered. <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Over the course of his career, the Coast Guard evolved from a very military organization shaped by its wartime and Cold War activities, to an "agency," under the Department of Transportation. The ships still had guns, but fewer, and smaller. At that, they'd never bristled with the armament sported by naval vessels. Even so, the world I was born into had short hair and attempts at household discipline commensurate with a family in service to its country. But the 1960s were coming.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My father attended the US Naval War College in Newport, RI, in the school year 1964-'65. Thus, my older brother and I attended a local school our parents chose. It was my first experience as a "new kid," but in a navy town with not only the War College but a regular base, transient students were common. I was only in third grade, but I understood that my father believed that our adventure in Vietnam was a bad idea. His conviction was built on practical considerations, risk-benefit analysis, and the difficulties of counterinsurgency for the conventional military forces, it wasn't bleeding-heart hippie bullshit. Nevertheless, his position didn't help him in the more gung-ho climate that developed around the domestic politics of the war.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Through various ups and downs, triumphs and setbacks, he stuck it out, achieving, among other things, the first two seasons of all-year navigation through the Great Lakes in the mid 1970s. Wherever he served, he solved many more problems than he left for others to solve.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">My father remained in
the Coast Guard until 1979, retiring as a captain. He had been passed
over on his first flag board, where existing admirals review aspiring
admirals, and everything they know about each other gets weighed in the
decision. It's not uncommon to need a couple of shots to make it, if at
all, but after about 35 years he was ready to try life on the outside.</span></span> <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">A few years ago, well after his retirement, our family was sitting around considering alternate courses our lives could have taken. My father said that he had wished that his family had stayed in France during the Nazi occupation. They could have done it, others did. I felt myself disappear. If he had stayed there, none of his children would be here, though he might have had other children. The specific entities created by his union with my mother would not have happened. If the war had not displaced him, he would have stayed, they would have stayed. My parents would not have met.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This doesn't make me grateful to Hitler or happy that things worked out the way they did. If I never existed I would never know it. But it was startling to consider how tremendous world upheavals led to families like mine, completely unrelated to the historical issues of the conflicts, but entirely the product of the movements of the little people caught up therein. There must be millions of us who are war children without ever being near a war.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-9662039762491015112021-10-31T11:01:00.005-05:002021-10-31T11:02:54.237-05:00The homophobic and misogynistic words of George Carlin<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Recently, I was severely castigated in a Facebook comment thread for using the term "boob" in the humorous exchange that had formed underneath a meme, posted by a woman, using this picture:</span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi02-xSQ_HL3p-Qhk_fN5H5J2U8NpphTaYRc2rWW7FW2lwXUkQped79IUaoNIKJwpb4h5rSzFLgamSZzLxA_s1pjyvnBHzQcuu96jcXIaL8DCdxie55_7fBqZB4vYBRz8x1NLe8/s800/Ceiling+boobs.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="800" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi02-xSQ_HL3p-Qhk_fN5H5J2U8NpphTaYRc2rWW7FW2lwXUkQped79IUaoNIKJwpb4h5rSzFLgamSZzLxA_s1pjyvnBHzQcuu96jcXIaL8DCdxie55_7fBqZB4vYBRz8x1NLe8/s320/Ceiling+boobs.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br />My initial comment was, "teenage boy designs own bedroom." This received lots of laugh emojis, including from the original poster. Then some guy posted that I had left out lots of other demographics that would also enjoy the visual effect depicted. In my response, I explained that I wasn't trying to exclude any other "boob fanciers," but brevity won out over complete detail. The original poster of the image then chastised me harshly for using the word, "boob."</span></span><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">I hate to offend anyone inadvertently. If I'm going to offend someone, I want it to be a carefully calculated maneuver that I might very well regret for the rest of my life, but was at least done with my feet shoulder width apart and the slap or jab delivered precisely. So I brooded. I reflected on my entire history with the term "boob" for breasts. Breasts, by the way, was the acceptable term I was directed to, after I edited the offending comment to what I thought was a humorously overly elaborate descriptor of the anatomical detail at issue.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">My awareness of the wider world began in the 1960s. As a younger sibling of the counterculture, I was old enough to feel like almost a part of it, but too young actually to be one. I was part of that generation's trickle-down dilution of culture into cosplay, as happens with any generation's trend setters who have to see their hair styles and clothing go mainstream and end up on school kids and toddlers. I was a hopelessly unhip dipshit, but I tried hard, which only made it worse. It never got better.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">My first guide into hipness was my cool cousin, who was the oldest child in her branch of the family. She knew the names of all the musicians who were calling out the failures of the establishment in poetry and song. She was a Wiccan and a pagan and dressed accordingly. She pierced my younger sister's ears old school, with a big needle, after numbing the earlobes with ice. It was a rite of passage that my sister endured with the bravery of any youngster on the verge of puberty, going through painful rituals to achieve another notch toward adult status. It wasn't old school then, it was common practice. She also guided me through my first purchase of blue jeans that weren't just little kid dungarees. And she tried to teach me, over the ensuing years, a few things about language and culture -- as she saw it -- regarding the mode average sexual relations between men and women. Among her stated preferences, she specifically stated that she thought that the word "breasts" was stuffy and stilted, that "tits" was unacceptably crude, and that "boobs" struck the perfect balance of informal and lighthearted.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">In 1972, George Carlin presented the world with the list of seven words you can never say on television. They became a mantra. Shit, piss fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. For a conscientious Profanitarian, shit, piss, fuck, and motherfucker remain. But cocksucker can be considered both homophobic, and hypocritical as an insult, if one possesses a penis and accepts the ministrations of a fellationist. And of course cunt and tits are crude references to female anatomy. To some philosophers, no man should utter any reference to female anatomy whatsoever, unless it's part of their duly trained and educated profession. We can spiral off some other time into the question of whether any man should ever be allowed into a profession or trade that requires any reference to female anatomy. But even within the strictures of the first proposition, that no man shall speak of female anatomy unless licensed to do so, most of us are unlicensed to do so.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Working in a bike shop, I do get presented with anatomical details relating to the part of the body that endures contact with a bicycle seat. In that context I do have to hear and use terms describing the female intimate anatomy. Most of those questions can be answered with generic solutions related to saddle shape and position, without ever mentioning the human parts in contact with it. On rare occasions someone will go into graphic, specific detail. In that case I guess I am granted a limited term, temporary license. Even so, I can get by without speaking of the forbidden, only prescribing remedies using the inanimate bicycle saddle and its position in three dimensions.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">When one is limited in speech by social strictures, one must rehearse mentally. Otherwise, when called upon to speak of the forbidden topics in a licensed, public setting, one may blurt something offensive, or lose so much time choosing words that one appears incompetent.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The problem is most challenging for the male, the white male in particular. As the dominant players in the rise of civilization, we've grown accustomed to setting the standards to which all others must adhere. This is hardly to say that we represent a true meritocracy. It's merely a testament to the power that bullies have in shaping group behavior over a wider and wider area. White men and their allies will admonish everyone else not to be thin-skinned ninnies when it comes to enduring taunts and slang that owe their origins to hierarchical interpretations that put the white guy on top. The groups under this regime have responded with increasingly rebellious humor through the decades, leading now to increasing insistence on recognition. White men and their allies are pushing back. That doesn't make them right. But it would be a mistake to make them all wrong, too. Beyond the whiteness, men in general possess undesirable tendencies that are the source of their strength and the root of their evil. We, the male, can generally be discounted, but you still want to be absolutely sure that a white, male achievement <i><b>was</b></i> stolen from someone of another hue or gender before pissing on it.<br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Day by day one learns what you can say to whom. As I have striven always to limit my offensiveness only to those who should be offended, I fight a tendency to play with language for humorous value, and to seek audience approval in the form of laughs or appreciative feedback. In a perfect future, people will all, voluntarily and without a dystopian legal framework, just dress in gray and walk past each other quietly. If we have business to conduct, we will conduct it. Sex work will be legalized as a therapeutic service engaged in without emotion or particular excitement. People's own homes might be filled with color and emotive activity, but it stays inside the enclave. Nothing will be forbidden. The underground world can be as bright and wild as one wishes. Go drinking. Go dancing. Go find some fun and have it. But the public face will be gray block buildings, gray clothes, emotionless commerce. The default of interaction will be as sterile as one can be. Any departure from that accepts the terms and conditions that go with any assumption of risk.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-59668259016402539842021-10-28T07:41:00.000-05:002021-10-28T07:41:00.275-05:00Kyle Rittenhouse has to defend himself<p> Teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse has been on trial since the night that he shot three people, killing two. He has been praised or condemned, and subjected to media analysis for more than a year. At the end of his actual trial, just getting underway, he will be found guilty or innocent of the charges of murder and attempted murder. He will remain a polarizing figure in the historical record no matter how he fares in court.<br /></p><p>Teenagers do ill-considered things. We consider the ones who get themselves killed as unlucky, but the ones whose rash decisions lead to the deaths of others face a lifelong challenge. Depending on how the deaths occurred, they might be harder or easier to rationalize. Accepting responsibility for a fatal error is always hard, but when the error was an active decision to use deadly force to end someone else's life the bar is at its highest.</p><p>True remorse is a life sentence without parole. It's one thing to get drunk with your buddies and crash your car, killing one or more of the passengers while you, the driver, survive. There was probably a certain degree of consent among the partying carload. It is easier to rationalize drunken teens playing with a gun than it is to accept that a sober and well-intentioned -- however misguided -- boy picked up a rifle and was willing to walk into a volatile scene of social unrest and make snap decisions in combat with people he identified as disposable.</p><p>Humans react to the threat of violence in two ways: fight or flight. These two reactions may mix in strange ways, as you see in videos of demonstrators clashing with either law enforcement or self-appointed keepers of the peace, in the posture of someone who tries to deliver a blow while simultaneously turning to retreat. You see it in street altercations and playground fights, the untrained actions of fear and anger. Adrenaline flows, the brain buzzes, the body tries to interpret the commands, and neither the fists nor the feet look heroic.</p><p>Carrying a weapon that extends your deadly capability many yards in front of you generates some degree of confidence. That confidence frays rapidly when an actual confrontation calls for clear decision making. Supposedly trained police officers have trouble making the right choice every time. Military personnel discover the difference between training and reality when they are actually attacked. Knowing how to handle a gun is not enough. You have to know how to handle yourself. Elite units are elite units not because of their weaponry, but because of their ability. As with so many other human endeavors, the ones who turn out to be excellent prove that we are not all created equal. We are equal in moral responsibility and in our right to be treated fairly, but not in the distribution of qualities that favor achievement in one realm or another.</p><p>Kyle went looking for trouble. He may have hoped that his armed presence would subdue the unhappy mob without the need to take any out, but he was equipped to kill, and he did so. Whether it was self defense in the actual instant, he didn't have to be there at all. He decided that he could help the beleaguered business owners of Kenosha by showing up armed at an already inflamed situation, to act more or less independently of any centralized command.</p><p>He meant well, within his world view. At least it appears that way. That makes it worse for him, because it makes him more vulnerable to himself, should he decide that he was completely unjustified from the outset. He must defend himself against the worst interpretation of his own actions. No one can protect him from that. He can decide to absorb the approval of his supporters and use that to block any notion that he did something really wrong. It may come easily. But if it fails, he will be left with his own inner voice reminding him every day that two people are dead because of choices he made. It will form a wall between him and deep happiness, unless he can write off the lives of his targets as just a lesson learned in youthful indiscretion. The compulsion to defend himself, even from himself, is powerful and normal. He has to live with himself.<br /></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-74141568751882843142021-10-03T14:01:00.003-05:002021-10-03T14:49:02.393-05:00Poor towns get stuck making bad deals<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> The Effingham Zoning Board completed a long case this year in which an applicant asked for the necessary permissions to reinstate gasoline service at a convenience store that had removed its pumps and tanks six years ago, when new standards would have required them to replace their existing fuel facilities with new ones that met stricter standards for pollution control.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The mandate from the state, following on federal guidelines, skewed the requirement to favor larger corporations or wealthier store operators who could afford to front the cost to install the upgraded systems. Poorer stores could get a grant to quit the gasoline business completely and have all of the old fuel supply equipment removed at no cost to the store owners. There was no aid to upgrade the equipment. Go big on your own dime, or go away. The store here in Effingham opted to go away.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Without fuel sales, the convenience store relied on its deli and other retail offerings. The owners soon put the business up for sale.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The store is on the westbound side of Route 25. Within a quarter of a mile to the west, another, older store is located on the other side of the highway, convenient to eastbound traffic. The left turn into it from westbound Route 25 can be stressful at times when traffic is heavy. It's never as heavy here as it is in densely populated areas where truly heavy traffic is the norm, but it can get thick and fast enough to make the turn across its flow a bit tense, as one watches the rear view mirror for missiles coming up from behind as well. It was nice having an option on either side. And the older store is actually in Ossipee, so its tax revenue does nothing for Effingham.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The Ossipee valley is both blessed and cursed with the largest stratified drift aquifer in the state of New Hampshire. Stratified drift aquifers are the most productive reservoirs of ground water, but their water absorbing properties and the speed of its transmission through them make them especially vulnerable to pollution, such as the threat presented by buried tanks of the toxic chemicals on which our motor vehicles and transportation system rely.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The most vulnerable parts of the aquifer tend to be the flattest and most attractive to road construction and development. Back when people moved on foot or behind animals whose exhaust products were large and tangible but readily biodegradable, this coincidence did not present a problem. The more we came to rely on chemicals that we should really avoid drinking, and put more and more septic systems into that nice flat ground, the more bad things crept -- or poured -- into the aquifer when things went wrong.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When you know better, you do better, at least ideally. Certainly there's at least some public pressure not to poison people's wells, although concern diminishes with distance. As one native resident of the east side of Effingham remarked about a proposed race track on the west side of town back in the 1990s, "It wasn't near me, so I didn't care about it." But a little at a time we manage to increase people's awareness that problems have a way of creeping closer. You may never care about the people who live a mile away, let alone a longer distance, but maybe you'll figure out that your turn will come eventually, and you should figure out what your principles are.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Principles are not absolute. Idealists might have absolute principles, which is why they're useful as philosophers, but often disastrous in government. You have to lay the template of an ideal across the actual landscape of the place itself and the people who live there, and find a way forward that helps more than it hurts.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">On the first application, for the Special Exception to have a gas station in town, the applicant appeared to have a decent case, since there had been a gas station on that site from 1997 to 2015, and it had not been discontinued due to any specific violation. It was only in site plan review at the Planning Board that someone noted that the convenience store and former gas station was located in the groundwater protection overlay district. The groundwater protection overlay district is based on the vulnerability of the aquifer presented by the particular soils mapped and defined in it. Until 2015 there were three gasoline stations on Route 25 between Route 16 and the Maine border. All of them are disastrously sited by the terms of the groundwater protection overlay district, and all of them were grandfathered, because they predated the ordinance by many years. Two of them upgraded their equipment by 2015 and continued to operate. They are also in other towns, not in Effingham. Thus they represent little value to Effingham's coffers.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The applicants had to return to the ZBA for a variance to allow them to put a prohibited use -- the gas station -- into the groundwater protection district. While the Special Exception had been pretty straightforward, the variance was not. It was gasoline versus drinking water. But it was also a functioning, tax-paying business that was reinstating a use that had already been there without incident for 18 years before it was discontinued. While there was some evidence of minor leakage in the soil samples taken when the tanks were removed, no one with a well nearby had reported pollution, and no evidence of it had appeared in surface streams that flow near the property. The new tanks would have to meet the standards that replacement tanks would have met in 2015, if the previous owners had put them in right away without delay. But gas stations are notorious sources of pollution, which was why they were prohibited in the district.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The deliberation was not an easy one. The resulting approval was not unanimous. But, as the dissenter, I fully understand the reasoning by which approval was granted. A variance has to meet five criteria to pass. It can't meet three out of five or four out of five. A majority of board members must agree that the application satisfies all five of these criteria. I felt that the application did not satisfy all criteria, but these decisions rely on interpretation. Specifically in this case, approval of the variance is not supposed to be contrary to the public interest, but the choice was between the public interest of an improved economy and tax base versus the possibility of groundwater contamination. Were we better served to expand an existing business back to its original level of services, or to insist that anyone who wanted such a business had to find a site with acceptable soils? This would require the environmental disruption of a piece of undeveloped land, and I'm not sure such soils exist along Route 25 within Effingham. As for anywhere else in town, I'm hard pressed to think of any other town road on which you could put a convenience store and have it actually be convenient.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The only other through route is Route 153, which runs down the eastern edge of town so closely that it's actually in Maine for a short stretch. In South Effingham, one side of the road is New Hampshire and the other side of the road is Maine. There used to be a store in South Effingham, with gas pumps, but it was on the Maine side of the road. Ha ha! No tax revenue for <i><b>you</b></i>, Effingham, even though the family that lives all over that part of town lives on both sides of the road. It's one community in two states, living in bucolic tranquility untroubled by their respective state capitals. But when the tax bills come, the money divides like a watershed, flowing each toward a different town hall, eventually sending some to Augusta and some to Concord.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> The middle of Effingham is a compact mountain range about seven or eight miles west to east, and perhaps five miles south to north. Its highest peak is Green Mountain at the east end. The range tapers down over successively lower summits to Welch Top on the west end. The granite mass is separate from any other mountain system in the area, surrounded almost entirely by the glacial sediments of the Ossipee Aquifer. No roads cross it. The ones that used to cut into its flanks are not maintained all the way through.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The gas station on Route 25 represents the difficult bargains made by poor towns. If Green Mountain contained mineral resources that some corporation was willing to pay big money to extract, rest assured that it would be called Green Canyon by now. Remember also that the bigger the business, the more they will chisel for tax breaks. And the jobs they bring may be hazardous for workers who are inadequately compensated for that risk. The bulk of the profits generally go to executives and investors who don't even live in the town. Should a town do it? By some measures, absolutely not. What's lost is irreplaceable. But at some point you have to pay for basic services for the people who do live there. In the case of a state of the art gas station, the guarantee of harm is replaced by a gamble on the updated standards and on the operators' willingness, ability, and luck in maintaining a clean operation that will prosper sufficiently to make it a genuine asset.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">What kind of businesses are appropriate on the aquifer that would actually be profitable and provide reliable tax revenue to the town? You could throw out a shingle for all kinds of cute and clean ideas, but will you make enough money to continue? Something grubby and mundane like a gas station serves everyone. Yes, we need to end the era of petroleum immediately, to save the environment on which all life depends, but so far we haven't, and the business model remains quite normal. If and when our species gets around to shutting down the industry, the end of the profits will be a problem for the investors who chose to hang on. This includes the gas station in question. Humans invented their way into this mess. Whoever survives will do their best to invent their way out.<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Running even a small town takes more time and attention than just showing up once a week or once a month for a two-hour meeting. That's why town board positions tend to be filled by retired people or people whose work schedule allows them the flexibility to put time into training and research. You do get the self-serving scallywags who use their position for personal gain, like contractors on planning and zoning boards, and selectmen who steer contracts to their cronies. But you also get sincere individuals who are trying to do as good a job as they can for the ordinary people who trust them to find the balance.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">We had a selectman for a while who was very active finding grants and
other funding mechanisms to reduce the direct burden on local taxpayers,
and who promoted the idea that anything we did spend money on should be
built to last, so that we didn't have to spend more money on it soon
afterward. But he annoyed some people who marshaled enough voters to
vote him out by a slim margin, because fiscal efficiency is nice, but
nobody likes a smartass. Thus do small towns shoot themselves in the
foot over petty grievances. He also was pretty good at observing the
conflicting effects and unintended consequences of town ordinances, and
seeking a balance among competing wants and needs. He wasn't always
right, but he asked good questions and facilitated discussion. He had served on a number of other town boards, including zoning, and returned to the ZBA as an alternate after he was no longer on the select board.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The approval of the gas station is probably going to be challenged in court. The denial would have been challenged by the opposite party. The conflicts are clear cut to their partisans. It will be interesting to see how the next level deals with it.</span><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-39396624470589589552021-09-21T17:57:00.006-05:002021-10-03T14:49:57.037-05:00My brother, the climate refugee or: Apocalypse Shortly<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> My baby brother, who is now in his fifties, was the only one of my siblings to reproduce. As such, he is the only one with a serious stake in the future of the planet. I'm afraid my cynicism kept me from betting anyone's life that humans would get their heads on straight and avoid the many forms of destruction now set on what appear to be an unstoppable course toward a major disruption that many of us would call disaster.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">From cursory study of snippets of information that flit across my screen, I gather that New England won't be a bad place to weather the new climate. At least it will be less worse than a lot of other places. My brother referred to this when he asked me about available tracts of land on which to establish a survivalist homestead. When he first mentioned it, the idea was for all of us to go in on a parcel of more than 100 acres for us all to use. This overlooks the fact that none of us have any money, and that the coronavirus pandemic has skewed real estate values sharply upward. My part of New England has seen a bit of a building boom as people who can work remotely have joined the existing flow of homesteaders of various persuasions coming up to establish their private kingdoms independent of government interference.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Once we've really gutted government, no one will hold you to any standards homeschooling your kids. You can teach them any damn thing you like without worrying about "accreditation." It will be man against nature once again, on a smaller scale than strip mining and multi-national corporations. The person polluting your well and clouding your skies will more likely be your neighbor, if it isn't you yourself. There will be fewer lawsuits and more blood feuds. Keep it simple.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">My brother's next thought was a mere ten acres, which is quite doable. But you want to guarantee good sun exposure for the garden, good water, and decent soil. Soil can be improved, but if you have to do a lot of clearing and stumping it will take a lot of time. Early settlers spent years enlarging a small patch and improving its soil, and still saw subsequent generations high tail it to the Midwest as soon as the country expanded to a place that already had actual soil instead of fields full of rocks.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A farm that will support a small family will not support two, three, four small families as the offspring mature and want to breed. This simple math propelled our species from central Africa all up and out across the globe, and then led to all the restless back-and-forth invading, repelling, emigrating, assimilating, and general wandering that has created our tribes, our borders, and our generational habits of enmity and sharp dealing.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">In the 1970s, apocalyptic fiction and predictive nonfiction were already popular. As a fencer, I looked forward to a post apocalyptic world in which firearms were reduced to primitive forms or had perhaps become impossible to maintain. I was vague about how it would happen, but it fit my preferred scenario. I grooved a little on all the cool opportunities to win in single combat and receive the favors of impressed females. But you have to be pretty intellectually and emotionally stunted for that image to survive any lengthy contemplation. Besides, after college I was starting to value the fruits of modern civilization. I didn't really want the world to end, and I couldn't understand why so many people seemed eager for it.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sadly, I understand it better now. A lot of people have never gotten the hang of civilization, and yearn for a genuinely simpler life. Nasty, brutish and short it might be, but it will be straightforward. Survive to maturity. Breed. Stay alive as long as you can. Cooperate only as necessary to enhance your individual survival and that of your bloodline. It's basically a reset to the invention of civilization in the first place.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Some apocalypticists are more well read than that. They've studied history, and know some of the pitfalls to avoid. It's not going to be a sudden reset to a dispersed population in a renewed wilderness or perfect pastorality.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The wealthy only want enough disruption to keep the general population frightened and vulnerable. All of their wealth is based on abstract things. There will be no stock market, and, therefore, no vast fortunes with which to hire all of the professionals a king will need to maintain power and security in a reality-based world.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Most apocalyptic fantasies of the post World War II era were based on war as the societal disruptor. Violence would usher in the change very quickly, possibly with a period of conventional warfare as well as nuclear destruction. The climate catastrophe is more of a slow-motion collapse, in which the combat will be more widespread, at a lower level than full-out conventional war. There will be no logical reason for nuclear blasts, although some psychotic despot somewhere might decide to chuck what he's got, just to see what it looks like, since we're all boned anyway. Let's assume that doesn't happen, and that the collapse unrolls steadily in waves of migration, crowding the spaces with water and soil beyond their capacity fairly rapidly. Even though a lot of people will be dying, the remaining population will have to use a smaller area than we have now.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">You can't really hedge the bet. Even though our best chance is to try to head off the worst effects, that requires a commitment to civilization, staying in place as much as possible while working to improve conditions from where you are. Or you can run off now and set up your fortifications, but you can't really contribute to the solution if you've assumed its failure.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Homesteads will be hard to defend. I see a meme online that sneers at the people stockpiling weapons and doing nothing to acquire tools, supplies, and skills with which to make and grow what they will need to live, but the weapon fanciers have learned from history that you don't need to do all that stuff yourself if you are well armed and skilled at hurting people, because you can go take what you want from the farmers and the makers. Who were the kings? Not the farmers and the makers. They were warriors, who held their place by kicking ass. Your Second Amendment types will say that it couldn't happen here because we have a tradition of armed citizens with a right to defend themselves. Sure, but what happens when the badass with more or better guns, and more people, comes along and wants your stuff? What happens when you're concentrating on farm work, because you know how to do that too, and a sniper blows your head off as the first move to invading your farm?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Before you know it, we've recreated society with a warrior caste, and farmers and makers all beholden to their defenders, and it's a long damn time before someone suggests that maybe we should just vote on stuff.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">If it's all just going to evolve into the same mess we have now, let's just operate the mess we have now, and try to tweak it into a better form. Either that or completely demolish any semblance of civilization and go back to living naked in warm climates and scrounging for whatever we can find. And you'll still end up getting jumped by some bigger scrounger who figured out he can beat your ass and take your fruit.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-72082478888352030212021-05-24T11:36:00.002-05:002021-10-05T08:50:32.243-05:00Veterans of the Covid Insurrection<p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"> Because everything in the United States has to turn into a stupid argument if not an outright gunfight, response to the global pandemic has been no exception, including the brandishing of firearms as the proponents of liberty bellow their defiance. Sides have been chosen all over the world. The US is not the only place in which oppositional defiance and paranoia have hampered perfectly reasonable procedures to restrict the spread of a new and contagious disease that can kill people fairly readily.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">None of this is news to anyone who has not been in a coma for the past year. With every piece of good news about containment and prevention of Covid-19 comes a volley back about how the disease isn't serious, how the dead we're losing are just old people who would die soon anyway, how the disease itself -- though not serious -- was created in a Chinese lab as an attack on America, or possibly commissioned by the Deep State to help enslave ordinary citizens, and how the vaccine is in various ways tainted.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Live free or die. The sentiment is hardly limited to New Hampshire, where adherence to disease precautions has been average or better. But it perfectly describes how the heroes of the biological warfare insurrection view their cause. They bravely risk getting the sniffles to prove to the cowardly mask wearers that life is to be lived and death is to be embraced. And occasionally one of them gets very sick. Some die. Heroes all.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">The rest of the quote from General John Stark is that death is not the worst of evils. Death isn't the only consequence of Covid-19. Some people suffer long-term ill effects. But the dead and the long-haulers are still in the minority. Most who get the disease and survive have their story to tell, about barely being sick, or feeling like they had a nasty flu, or even being so trampled that they had trouble drawing a full breath, and lay in delirious fevers for days. That's if they didn't have to be hospitalized. But if they survived and recovered, clearly there was nothing to worry about. And now they're immune, right? Problem solved. Challenge faced and overcome. That which did not kill them not only made them stronger, it confirmed them in their arrogance.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">Once in a while you hear of one who repented and bore witness to the world that they were wrong, and that we should take this disease seriously. Wimps. Softies. When this is all over in a few months we'll all be drinking and laughing together about how so many people got duped into wearing masks and getting vaccinated with some pharmaceutical company's experimental drug, while the brave and proud remained valorous and philosophically pure. And had fun.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: georgia;">A half a million dead is a tiny fraction of the total population of the United States. This will be swept aside by the return of mass entertainment and the distractions of political theater.<br /></span></span></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-33333939941503285442021-05-24T11:33:00.009-05:002021-05-24T11:33:34.861-05:00Freedom of $peech?<span class="userContent">If I tossed 5 or 10 bucks at every worthy
cause that sent me a "fundraising alert" I could easily blow through
close to $100 a day. If this is to gain political leverage over the tiny
faction of the population who can afford to throw millions of dollars
at Congress on a regular basis, how long can we be expected to try to
beat them at their own game?</span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent">Members of congress willing to rock the gravy boat seem few in number, so I don't know how we can really get big money out of politics. Meanwhile, expecting nickel-and-dime grassroots fundraising to continue to finance political positions that go against the interests of the wealthy is like expecting your health insurance premiums not to keep surging upward. I don't know about you, but I can easily be outspent. Is that how we want to decide whose ideas get to be heard?</span><br />
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<span class="userContent">When stockholders vote in corporate elections, those with the most shares get to make the decisions. Any small holders have to live with that. In our government we are supposed to have equal voices, so that the points of view of all citizens are taken into account. Instead we have another shareholder meeting in which the big players tell the little people what to do.</span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent">Revolution IS called for, since we can't get enough elected officials into office to make the change using what's left of our political system. But a shooting war is a stupid gambit. Just refuse to cooperate. Ride a bike. Walk. Live on less. Detach as much as possible from the corporate-controlled economy. That may mean a pretty primitive lifestyle for quite a while -- maybe a couple of generations. But think how much more primitive and brutal life would be in a country torn by civil war.</span><br />
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<span class="userContent">Corporatocracy will not give up easily. Their forces may lash out. Put the moral burden on them by living inoffensively.</span>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-90864453526236218752021-01-25T10:22:00.004-05:002021-02-09T13:19:22.906-05:00Stimulus checks are an abomination!<p> My little daily news blurb from the New York Times this morning featured a pro-con analysis of the direct $2,000 stimulus checks proposed as part of the Biden administration's coronavirus relief package. The checks would actually be $1,400, building on the $600 already sent out by the previous administration, but the total we're kicking around for purposes of argument is $2,000.</p><p>The arguments in favor of the direct payment all made sense, as did one of the arguments against it. But, as usual, the other arguments from the conservative side were completely insensitive to the realities of daily financial life for working class Americans.</p><p>First the argument against the $2,000, that is even remotely arguable: The money could be used to increase unemployment benefits for the people who really need it, giving a prorated amount of direct payment to people with less need. It's more complicated than simply handing out checks, and could lead to complaints that the targeted system misses in some cases. But there are complaints now. The current stimulus proposal includes enhanced unemployment benefits, with the direct payment added to them. One fix could be ongoing stimulus checks, as proposed by progressive Democratic members of Congress.</p><p>The other arguments against stimulus checks came from conservative fantasyland. The first stated that the stock market is doing great, and that the value of housing has actually gone up, so people are doing well financially, and will simply put the $2,000 in the bank, not stimulating the economy at all. Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute actually called the checks "an abomination."Are they really that unobservant, or are they merely hoping that everyone else is? Most people have stock holdings in a retirement account. The value is comforting -- until you realize that it could all be wiped out by a "market correction" the day before you retire -- but it doesn't help with the day to day expenses unless you tap into that reserve to meet an emergency need. Money you extract now needs to be made up by investment appreciation or by your further contributions so that it will be there when you do finally try to live on it. As for your home value, that's only liquid if you borrow against it, paying a bank to lend you your own money, or sell your house and have a wad of cash to live on while you're homeless. <br /></p><p>The other argument, from conservative Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, was that FDR wouldn't have done it. His plan favors infrastructure programs to put people to work. This neatly forgets how much the New Deal programs were scorned and derided at the time, and -- more importantly -- completely ignores the pandemic that has caused the economic distress in the first place. Manchin can say that he "doesn't remember FDR recommending sending a damn penny to a human being," but FDR wasn't facing a contagious and mysterious illness that would spread through work crews gathered together to work on these projects. We're in a situation like the 1919 flu pandemic, in which the government attempted to promote safe practices like we're seeing today: masks and distance. They met with similar carelessness and opposition. I'd be willing to bet that a pandemic would have altered FDR's calculations and the types of relief offered to the people looking to him for leadership and support.<br /></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-36845807598705843902020-12-08T11:32:00.001-05:002020-12-08T23:08:46.677-05:00No one should travel right now!<p> <i>I'm posting this late because I didn't post it when it was fresh, but it makes points about the US health care system and generally callous society. It was written November 24 in a hotel room on my way to Delaware. I did manage to travel almost entirely without human contact. I saw fewer people than I do in a normal week at home, because I was not at my job.</i><br /></p><p>The Covid-19 pandemic rages across the country. Absolutely every public health expert says to stay home and seal up your pod. So what am I doing? I'm driving almost 500 miles to visit my wife where she works for the school year.</p><p>I believe public health experts. Living under recommended isolation hasn't been very different from how I normally live. That probably gives me an advantage over the habitually gregarious. But everyday life has still become intensely stressful for anyone who cares about beating this illness.</p><p>Contagious illness needs contact to spread. Some pathogens can hitch on inanimate objects to create contact without person-to-person proximity. Think of food borne illnesses and noroviruses. Covid-19 spreads more easily when people are close enough together for long enough to spread respiratory droplets and particles from one to another. It can also spread from surfaces, but we're told that is a minor concern compared to transmission through shared air. Even so, a frequently touched surface like a gas pump nozzle on the busiest travel weekend of the year could infect dozens, especially if its viral load is augmented by numerous infected people glomming onto it in the course of a busy day.</p><p>So what the hell am I doing out here? I'm one of the good guys: I masked up fairly early, I avoid group activities, I shop quickly and efficiently and get the hell out of the grocery store. I believe the doctors who say we should take precautions, and the health care providers from nurses on down who warn us that they are getting overloaded, and some of them are dying because people who could be careful haven't been.</p><p>The decision to travel was not made lightly or easily. Its roots go back to the late 1990s, when a woman pulled me out of relationship retirement. She was smart and funny and talented and liked what I like and we clicked. We wouldn't find out for a few years that she's also incurably ill.</p><p>Isn't that just like something out of a melodramatic movie? Grumpy guy has decided that love is not for him. Old friend shows up and friendship blossoms into love. That's Hallmark enough. The sickness just bumps it up to "oh <i><b>please</b></i>" level of cornball tear jerking.</p><p>Because we live in America, she's had to go where she can find work that provides insurance. Because it's America, the insurance won't cover the kidney transplant that would give her the best odds to extend her life more than a few years. But at least it covers a lot of the preliminaries and maybe the dialysis until she can no longer work and therefore loses the insurance coverage. Life is cheap, people. Most of us are not worth investing in.</p><p>Her numbers are getting worse. The job she took is in a town where she doesn't know anyone, and the pandemic precautions make it very hard for her to get to know anyone. She'd rather be home, but home proved quite infertile for her career. She faces everything by herself while I maintain our home as best I can. A couple of months ago when she asked if I would consider coming down for Thanksgiving I did not hesitate. And I <i><b>hate</b></i> traveling at Thanksgiving, especially down through the East Coast Megalopolis, even when a deadly disease isn't rampaging unchecked.</p><p>I suppose if I was worth a shit I would make enough money to support us both and keep us together in one place or another. <br /></p>cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8641216.post-20242633315642749302020-06-17T06:32:00.001-05:002020-09-20T10:58:03.362-05:00Think outside the boxHumans appreciate creative solutions to vexing problems. We praise the adventurous souls who "think outside the box." But when the answer works it simply changes the shape and reinforces the structure of the box, because the box is the solid structure of society.<br />
<br />
Thinkers outside the box are like space-walking astronauts. They're only useful when they're close to the ship, ministering directly to it. Untethered, they drift into space to die alone.<br />
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Successful box-dwellers find something useful to do inside it. It's full of all kinds of functions we have made necessary, requiring leadership and initiative to manage. You need a strong work ethic, and a belief in the shared values that have brought us so far from our primitive roots. Even our fringe dwellers recognize that success is defined by where you are in the box. If you go outside of it, you need to keep your feet planted on the top of it, so that people can still see you, and you can feed off of the box's resources.<br />
<br />
At one point, hominid social organization consisted of one big ape who could beat up all the smaller apes. He would enjoy his period of dominance before age caught up with him and a new dominant ape would take the top spot. Evolution happened. Smaller hominids figured out how to defeat pure brawn, and could now exploit it. Aggressive muscle remains as dangerous a power source as a leaky nuclear reactor, but we've grown accustomed to it. It manifests itself in gun violence and domestic abuse and warlike ideologies now. It's the least desirable expression of liberty. But it saturates the structure of the box. All is measured against the box in some way.<br />
<br />
There is no escape. Not one that you can survive for long, anyway. Act like you are far outside, by disregarding the norms, and you might as well be surrounded by airless blackness and implacable cold. You're not really outside. You're in the bottom of it, with the broken things and the dirt swept down from the tended levels above you. You are disconnected and seen as useless.<br />
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Norms change. Gradually we've come to accept things that had been too disturbing. What sets you apart is not what you are as much as what you do. Superficialities of appearance and behavior matter less. You can then be judged by how well your actions improve life for the box dwellers who matter.cafiendhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05749761363337659545noreply@blogger.com0