happy new year

                                            HAPPY NEW YEAR
                                           !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mt. Everest ruling and drug smuggling

Urk harbor

It's a relief to think that Olympian Oscar Pistorius will no longer be endangered by an application to climb Mt. Everest. True, he's in the slammer for killing his girlfriend, but there is always a lurking possibility ... that has now, for the moment, been erased.

Solo climbers, blind people and double amputees have been banned from climbing Everest under new rules the Nepalese tourism ministry believes will reduce the number of deaths on the mountain.

Whew! Close call.

And then there's the tale of Urk, a close-knit Dutch community "where television and dancing are spurned by some as the devil’s work." Everyone's tight-lipped about it all, but several fishermen in Urk have been drawn into a drug trial involving the smuggling of 261 kilos of cocaine. No one is willing to talk about it, apparently, but still, this community of 20,000 has not dodged the bullet: A close call turned into a direct hit, it seems.

What's the link between these two stories? I haven't got a clue except that they caught my attention.

"Urk" -- who could pass up a name like that?

compendium of weird in the world of sport

It was less like baseball and more like archery practice. And wherever Stephen Piscotty went he had a bull’s-eye on him.
In a bruising, battering tour around the bases , the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder could not stay out of harm’s way. He was hit three times in one inning, as if being tracked by a GPS....

The list goes on and on....

Christmas races photo

Ballyheigue, Ireland

Riders participate in traditional Christmas beach races

Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters

the rest of the news

News that made me wonder:

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J. (AP) — A New Jersey surgeon’s medical license has been temporarily suspended for allegedly reusing disposable anal catheters on multiple patients.
Attorney General Christopher Porrino says East Brunswick-based colon and rectal surgeon Sanjiv Patankar allegedly washed and reused the one-use catheters that are inserted into patients during medical procedures.
State officials say they have evidence that Patankar ordered only five catheters during time when he performed 82 procedures requiring them.

Why do I have the sense, as I increasingly do with 'news' stories, that the rest of this five-paragraph AP story has gone missing or overlooked or ignored? The doctor stands accused and yet there is no indication the doctor has been contacted and asked. What verifiable "danger" did this pose to patients?

Is it possible that the whole of the pressure he has been subjected to has to do with sales and little to do with hygiene? Has he judged -- not necessarily wrongly -- that there is no danger to reuse of what claims to be a one-use item? And is it possible that the device maker sees a loss in revenue if doctors simply sterilize what remains a perfectly good tool? Is this another example of the "use-by" dating of medications in which business affixes a label which has nothing to do with the effectiveness of the drug in question?

Why is this tool a one-use item? Who determines it and why? What is the downside of reuse ... if any? Is accusation an excuse for not rounding out a story thought good enough to post? How much revenue is generated by "one-use" as compared with "multiple-use?"

This is slovenly journalism and it is increasingly employed: The accusation is good enough. Titillation is sufficient and digging in is expensive. Multiply the holes in this Swiss cheese medical device story, apply it to politics, international affairs or other 'serious' news, and it is easy to see why "fake news" has gained traction. Not every detail of every story is possible, but does that make laziness an excuse? Does anyone ask, for example, why the stories about Iran or Israel are configured as they are?

Iran-bad
Israel-good

Is that news or merely another version of Donald Trump?

somewhere, it's warm

-1 F at 6:30 a.m. Nothing moves. Everything still, but perhaps chuckling at the human discomfiture.

I just called a plumber about the costs of installing a new stove (as yet unpurchased). The receptionist pointed out that their guys were ass-over-appetite in the repair of heating units that were not putting out heat on this cold morning. Murphy rules -- I would pick today of all days to try to get the stove-ball rolling.

President Donald Trump, who cannot pass a single morning without offering an opinion-Tweet about something -- it's always about him, but the coloration of the topic varies -- has suggested that the East and Midwest, which are hit by the cold, could use a dose of Global Warming ... and I'm inclined to agree.

Israel is suffering from a drought (why do I suspect that those most deprived in the search for a solution will be Palestinian?) and Australia is no doubt roasting/basking in summer's clutches ... but it ain't like that around here. Maybe, if like some well-conned 19th century homesteaders, we set up a prayer colloquium as the Israelis are trying to do in search of rain ... maybe warming temperatures would occur.

There is other news, but none of it really grabs my fancy. It's my cold hands that are thinking their little pinkies off.

limerick dictionary

Chris Strolin was teasing English buffs in an online forum years ago when he said the dictionary should be rewritten in the singsong rhyme scheme of limericks. He ended up embracing the absurd bravado of his own wisecrack and decided to try it for real....
The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form (or OEDILF for short) has published more than 97,000 rhyming definitions since Strolin started it in 2004. The retired Air Force radio operator from Belleville, Illinois, says his project is on track to publish its 100,000th limerick in the coming year.
He hopes his grandchildren — or perhaps their kids — will finish the job decades from now....
Perhaps not so easy: Writing a limerick that weaves a joke into an accurate explanation of word’s meaning. Take contributor Bill Middleton’s definition of “adult”:

“As a kid, I was wild and a clown.

As a teen, I would dash about town.

Now adult, I shall go

Very cautious and slow.

Goes to prove: what grows up must calm down.”

cold

It's cold and cold is all the rage, news-wise. 3 degrees at 8 a.m.

And yet it reminds me of a time when, at a school I attended in Lake Placid, N.Y., the kids fell out for skiing when it was 20 below zero. Skiing was part of the physical education regimen.

Twenty-below zero and I, like most of my friends, was not bellyaching because of the extreme cold but was pissed that the extreme cold meant the speed at which I could ski was measurably slowed. Without the rime of melted water that waxed the skis, we were all forced to go slower and, hell, that was no fun.

Now, of course, the bone-chilling gets the attention, not the fun. Strange to think of the implied 'heroism' contained in the notion that (wo)man battles the nature of which s/he is inescapably a part.

tallywacker disappears

A four-storey painting of a penis that piqued the curiosity of New Yorkers when it appeared on Christmas Eve was being painted over on Wednesday – by order of the building’s landlord.
The painting, on an apartment building on Broome Street in the Lower East Side, was commissioned by a local street art foundation and made by a Swedish artist, Carolina Falkholt, as a companion to a similarly vast if more abstract vagina, further east on Pike Street. [The Guardian]

PS. With full-frontal honesty, I have to admit I tacked this onto the blog largely to give myself the opportunity to use a word I have always admired: "tallywacker." It just makes me smile.

the new abnormal

Mildly strange to think, linguistically, that the "new normal"
means
by definition
the "new abnormal."

old, cold and skeery

Cold weather at the moment with more, allegedly, in the offing. It's -2 Fahrenheit just now. A trip onto the porch leaves me literally and metaphorically shivering. The cold is so loud.

It reminds me of a line from one of my favorite movies, "Jeremiah Johnson."

"You got skeery in your old age?" was the approximate question.

"Skeery" hits the nail pretty much on the head. See, hear, touch, taste, smell -- at the extremes of what is useful, there seem to be no handholds.

intangible economies

A Guardian editorial to munch on... capitalism without capital...

Intangible capitalism generates what Haskell and Westlake call “inequality of esteem” – a chasm between haves and have-nots that goes beyond affluence and opportunity. It is a disparity in ownership of the political process. Neither side trusts the other with the power to make decisions about the collective future. The two tribes grow suspicious of elections in case the process ends up expressing the will of the “wrong” people. This is a dysfunction in the once flourishing marriage of democracy to capitalism. The two ideas are connected to the extent that the rule of law and civil rights are essential to both, but one does not automatically sustain the other.

If I were capable of absorbing a quarter of this entire editorial, I would give myself a gold star. There ain't no gold stars for this trekker.

shit heaped on shit

The man who allegedly sent a box of horse manure to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in reaction to Donald Trump's recently-passed tax legislation, feels that protest needs a bit of a smile: "Protest really should be funny,” [psychologist Robert] Strong told Reuters. “People’s eyes glaze over when they just see angry people in the streets.”

 

And so:

(Reuters) - A man claiming to be the person who delivered a gift-wrapped package of horse manure at the Los Angeles home of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Monday he did it to protest the federal tax overhaul signed into law last week by President Donald Trump....  

In a photo of the card Strong posted on Twitter, he wrote “Misters Mnuchin & Trump, We’re returning the ‘gift’ of the Christmas tax bill” and signed it “Warmest wishes, The American people."

I agree with Strong's observation about humor and would be happy to sign the card as written.

the price of a good smoke

MOSCOW (AP) — Russian media reports say that gale-force winds have blown a woman off her balcony on the Pacific island of Sakhalin.
The Interfax news agency reported Tuesday that the 65-year-old woman from the town of Shakhtyorsk went out for a smoke on the balcony and was blown off, landing on a snowdrift below. An ambulance couldn’t reach the house so the woman had to be taken to a hospital in the bucket of a construction truck.
Local news website Uglegorskiye Novosti says she fell from the fourth floor, breaking an arm and three ribs, and leaving her with a concussion.
Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East has been hit with a series of snowstorms since Monday with wind gusts in the area of the woman’s fall reaching about 150 kph (93 mph).

pinball makes a comeback

Who knew?!

Are the Olympics next?

Pinball appears to be on a roll.

The old-school arcade game of pinball is resurging in popularity.
Interest has skyrocketed over the last decade or so, with the number of players and competitions growing worldwide, according to the International Flipper Pinball Association. There were 500 players in 50 competitions worldwide in 2006, according to the IFPA. In 2017, there were nearly 4,500 competitions and more than 55,000 players.

In an age of gizmos and gadgets and apps, I suspect that old farts like me find some smug satisfaction in all this. Not least, perhaps, because pinball seems to be a pastime and delight that -- for a change -- doesn't rip anybody off.  It's whimsically serious ... and fun.

universal basic income

Universal basic income is, according to its many and various supporters, an idea whose time has come. The deceptively simple notion of offering every citizen a regular payment without means testing or requiring them to work for it has backers as disparate as Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Hawking, Caroline Lucas and Richard Branson. Ed Miliband chose the concept to launch his ideas podcast Reasons to be Cheerful in the autumn.
But it is in Scotland that four councils face the task of turning basic income from a utopian fantasy to contemporary reality as they build the first pilot schemes in the UK, with the support of a £250,000 grant announced by the Scottish government last month and the explicit support of Nicola Sturgeon.

I wonder: If universal basic income were presented to trickle-down robbers and other one-percenters, would there be a collective case of cardiac arrest and send the likes of Donald Trump to a long-term rehab facility and hence obviate the need for impeachment or euthanasia?

One of the hardest things to realize, I think, is that human beings are not very good about the opportunity or stick-to-itiveness to be lazy. They haven't got the requisite imagination. And into that mix there is the satisfaction that is derived from work ... but not from laziness. The idea that anyone prefers laziness ... well, in serious discussion, I doubt it. How many lottery winners have either committed suicide or fallen onto discombobulated times in the wake of their winnings?

Christmas

On cue, it's snowing.

my upscale daughter, the forklift operator

I love it.
I love it.
I love it.

My daughter, a management maven who recently returned from a weekend seminar run by ex-Navy-SEALs in San Diego -- a seminar that included the option of rising a 4 to do pre-classroom calisthenics; I encouraged her to do them; and she texted me with no further explanation after the event, "I threw up twice!" -- has added a new accomplishment to her, ahem, curriculum vitae: She is now well on her way to receiving her license to operate a forklift.

Does this have any practical application to her upwardly-mobile management job? "None," she told me this morning, "but I knew you'd like it." Her low-key explanation for "why?" was simply, "I like to learn."

Made my fucking day! Is there anything that beats "random acts of kindness" better than "random acts that have no practical application?"

Best Christmas present ever!

spermatozoon extraordinaire

Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's ... a BIG sperm in flight!

OK, so it's not a sperm, but California residents got a charge out of this rocket lift-off on Friday.

Christmas

It doesn't matter if you can't sing -- sing anyway.

collector of intersecting crumbs

It's British, but the potato-chip-eating, can't-stop-reading feel to The Guardian article by its quiz writer (if I've got that right) left this colonial reading and reading and reading....

There are no short cuts to acquiring a quizzer’s general knowledge. Mine came through a lot of reading when I was young – neither structured nor even age-appropriate, but definitely omnivorous. I read children’s encyclopedias, the Guinness Book of Records, Usborne histories and compendiums of facts. Poring over atlases full of now-defunct countries, I savoured names such as Tashkent and Ulan Bator, and began learning that staple of the quiz world: capital cities. Meanwhile, Top Trumps left me able to reel off recherché facts and figures about Olympic athletes, second world war aircraft, footballers of the 70s and diesel locomotives. When I was recovering in hospital after an emergency appendectomy, my parents brought me the Ladybird book on Warwick the King Maker: the ruthless machinations of the Wars of the Roses, they figured, would be the perfect postoperative read.

Up with the nerds!

when all my villains die

I wonder -- are things better or worse when all your villains die? Or perhaps not "die" (the word so often carries with it red-hot snapback reactions) but just sort of evaporate like smoke from a wood fire.

What would happen if Voltaire were up-dated: "If Donald Trump did not exist it would be necessary to invent him."

Or, to use less inflammatory words ... pick your own villain(s).

Would I be serene-r, compassionate-er, more peaceful ... or would I be grinding my teeth in resentment? Of course, on the surface, I would be smooth as melted butter if all my villains disappeared/died/faded, but sub rosa, down where it really counts, would I be pissed off as a wet cat?

cold Christmas coming

A cold, raw day today, with perhaps an inch of snow-frozen-rain on sidewalk and street outside the house. There, delicately etched, is one set of what I take to be the newspaper-deliverer's foot prints. Each step is carefully marked from one house to the next.

But in the midst of all that neatness is a helter-skelter of rabbit tracks ... this way, that way, the other way ... delivering nothing but a reminder that Peter or Priscilla Rabbit had come and gone. How I hope, given the raw cold, that s/he was wearing thermal socks.

Yesterday, in town, after finding a hard-to-find parking slot, I started a long-ish trek towards a store where I might buy Christmas knick-knacks, but the cold was such that I chickened out. It was just too cold and I was just too old and I turned back... and by chance stumbled on an overpriced store quite near to my parking place.

I went in. I perused. I spent. Isn't that the 'Christmas spirit?'

There is something to be said for acceding to your inner wuss.

LGBT tax benefits

There is something quite heartening about all this.

Two Irish men have married in Dublin to avoid paying €50,000 inheritance tax on a house.

Best friends Matt Murphy and Michael O’Sullivan are both heterosexual, but decided to get married when they discovered how much tax would have to be paid on the house Murphy, 83, intended to leave in his will to O’Sullivan, 58, who is his carer.

Same-sex marriage was legalised in Ireland following a referendum in May 2015.

Norwegian reindeer cull at issue

Days before Rudolph and his team set off with Santa’s sleigh on their annual round-the-world dash, a Norwegian reindeer herder has been ordered to put down dozens of their real-life relatives in a controversial cull.
The supreme court in Oslo rejected an appeal by Jovsset Ante Sara, a small reindeer herder from the indigenous Sami community in the Norwegian Arctic, ruling he must comply with an earlier order to cull 41 of his 116-strong herd.
Sara, who had twice successfully challenged the order, argued he would be unable to sustain himself and his family with such a small number of reindeer and that the government’s herd reduction policy was an infringement of indigenous rights.

resembling good news

I'm just not in the mood for bad-news stories this morning. Yes, I skimmed the obligatory grueling famines and newest blood-lettings and tax lies and crooked politicians and cops, but I simply wasn't in the mood. Just for a nanosecond, I wanted something clear. Not that an underwater wedding really filled the counterpoint I was looking for, but at least I can allow myself to presume someone was laughing and happy.

KEY LARGO, Fla. (AP) -- After a four-year courtship, a British Army sergeant and a former diving instructor have married underwater in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

The couple used an underwater tablet Thursday to exchange wedding vows beside Molasses Reef off Key Largo.

In 2013, Thomas Mould, of Leicester, England, traveled on an Army adventure training dive trip to the Amoray Dive Resort in the Keys, where Sandra Hyde worked as an instructor.

The couple connected. Hyde traveled to Leicester a few times, and he visited her in the states.

They decided to marry and planned a summer wedding in an old English church but then decided an underwater wedding in the Keys would not only be more appropriate, but more cost-effective.

The couple is honeymooning in the Keys, before returning to live in England.

Russia seals warm-water deal

MOSCOW (AP) -- The Russian parliament has voted to extend Russia's lease of a naval base in Syria for 49 years following the announcement of a partial pullout of Russian troops from that country.

I may be wrong, but my sense of Russia's interest in Syria is not the oil-and-tactics approach preferred by the U.S. What the Russians want is a warm-water port for their military fleet.

Et voilà!

Trump tax bill passes

No one seems ashamed that the passage of Donald Trump's tax legislation, which was not publicly debated, will save the president of the United States between $11 million and $15 million. And he's not alone as a beneficiary: Others in Trump's retinue also are to receive the trinkets of victory.

Donald Trump and six members of his inner circle will be big winners of the Republicans’ vast tax overhaul, with the president personally benefiting from a tax cut of up to $15m a year, research shows.

The US president chalked up his first big legislative win on Wednesday with the $1.5tn bill, the most sweeping revamp of the tax code in three decades, slashing taxes for corporations and the wealthy and dealing the heaviest blow yet to Obamacare.

Middle-class and poor wage earners receive tax breaks -- the promise Trump made -- for a limited number of years, but the cuts to the wealthy are fixed in perpetuity. Finally, the bullshit of "trickle-down" economics has been enshrined in law.

Democrats are vowing to hang the Trump hand-out around Republican necks ("the Republicans have their very own Obamacare" read one approximate quote), but it is hard not to imagine 1. voters' forgetting their latest screwing and 2. the Democrats blowing a golden opportunity.

"Crass" hardly begins to describe the depths to which the United States has been consigned. Suddenly, "overhaul" becomes "keelhauled."

"Away From Her" movie

Last night I found myself watching a 2006 movie called "Away From Her," a decorous and delving Canadian movie about the wife of a loving couple as she descends into Alzheimers. It's not the kind of movie I generally feel an affinity for and yet this one kept me glued to my seat as it prodded and poked the perimeters of what must be a wracking-wracking-wracking reality.

Had the movie been American, I suspect it would have qualified as a 'touching chick flick' or something similar ... maybe a shove-your-nose-in-the-ain't-it-awful-shit expose. But this was a quiet movie and touching despite an environment of financial comfort. The silences were put to credible use -- not starchy and often contrived American versions of silence. Imagine what it must be like to feel a long-term love slipping and drifting away like cigarette smoke in a pool hall. Perhaps the fact that the movie was directed by a woman helped. I don't know.

I watched and didn't stop watching ... which, in another time, I might well have done. The movie was touching and for some reason -- age, I suppose -- I was willing to be touched. It was to weep for in a realm beyond the wetness of tears.

No one survives.

And it's OK.

political Christmas creche

Passed along in email:

small kindnesses

Sometimes it's the little kindnesses that add up.

This morning, heading for an early morning medical appointment about 10 minutes from my house, the car crapped out. It was the third time in as many months. I was about halfway to my destination, but was stuck on a thoroughfare. I got out and stuck my thumb out since I had no cell phone. A heating contractor stopped, picked me up and dropped me off at the door to the medical building where my wife worked, some 300 yards away. Then, apparently, he or someone who saw me hitchhiking, called the cops, who showed up in the person of a bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed young man who tracked me to the building.

A small kindness from several quarters.

Which had been duplicated in other ways when the car had crapped out before -- passers-by ready and willing to lend me their cell phones to call AAA and some sympathy into the bargain. Yes, I know -- get the car fixed ... which I have tried to do, apparently without complete success.

The sense of being marooned on the highway and elsewhere is a sinking feeling. I don't walk distances any more and am, like Scarlet O'Hara, left "relying on the kindness of strangers." Which they have been kind enough to give.

Small matters, perhaps, but little-bit-by-little-bit, I am touched by the kindnesses extended. The occasional sense that the world is full of a crusty indifference has been leavened by the knowledge that some people just need an opportunity to extend a helping hand instead of adopting a thousand-yard stare of indifference.

Pretty nice, I think. Despite all the sappy encomiums, pretty nice.

'blameless' Israelis strike again

I guess the Israeli security services have adopted a new motto: "Never saw a Palestinian protester we couldn't shoot dead." Around the world, other police services seem capable of capturing-without-killing all sorts of perpetrators, some of them with guns. But hey, Palestinians are different, I guess. Those armed with knives cannot be subdued without shooting. And those without ... well, they're Palestinians.

GENEVA (AP) -- The U.N. human rights office says an internal Israeli military probe that cleared troops of any wrongdoing in the death of a paraplegic Palestinian protester was "insufficient."

U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein called Tuesday for an independent and impartial investigation.

He said "facts" gathered by his staffers strongly suggest that excessive force was used against 29-year-old Ibrahim Abu Thraya, who used a wheelchair.

Palestinian health officials say Abu Thraya was shot in the head while demonstrating Friday in Gaza amid unrest following President Donald Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital.

Israel's military said no live fire was aimed at Abu Thraya and it was impossible to determine the cause of death.

Rights office spokesman Rupert Colville said the "very quick internal army investigation" was insufficient.

the Buddhist pendulum swings

Today, returning from the mini-mart, I saw my neighbor Tina, who I had been thinking about since she told me a while back that her daughter, Isabella, was studying to become a minister in Texas ... a generalized course as I understood it. I wanted to send along a short thing I wrote ten or more years ago about Buddhism. "Not bad" was my reaction as I reread it this morning ... but it was as if someone else had written it. I dislike tooting my own horn, but don't mind a bit tooting someone else's. So here is what someone else wrote today:
**************

 

Tina -- I wrote the summary below some years ago for a young Christian woman who came to my small meditation hall in the backyard as a means of gaining what she called "tolerance." It's short and fits nicely in the waste basket but I thought Isabella might enjoy it as she pursues her ministerial studies.

Best wishes,

adam

PS. I never did learn if she became more tolerant. :)

                                                           BUDDHISM

The truth of Buddhism does not come from a book. It does not come from a temple. It does not come from someone else. It is not written on a piece of paper. The truth of Buddhism comes from the individual effort to investigate, verify and actualize a clear understanding of this life.

Shakyamuni Buddha, the man most often referred to as the founder of Buddhism, was born on the border of India and Nepal in about 565 BC. He attained what is sometimes called enlightenment at 35 and preached until his death at 80. Many schools of Buddhism sprang from his teachings … in India, Tibet, China, Korea and Japan among others. Uncertain estimates put Buddhist numbers at about 350 million worldwide.

All Buddhist schools agree on at least two things:

1. THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS: These are observations about the world around us.

The Four Noble Truths are:

***1. There is suffering (dukkha – the uncertainties, dissatisfactions and doubts that life can dish up); 2. There is a cause of suffering; 3. There is an end to suffering; 4. There is a way to end suffering.

2. THE EIGHTFOLD PATH: These are the tools suggested as most useful when seeking out a truly peaceful life in a changing world.

The Eightfold Path is:

*** 1. Right View 2. Right Intention 3. Right Speech 4. Right Action 5. Right Livelihood 6. Right Effort 7. Right Mindfulness 8. Right Concentration.

The word "right" is sometimes translated as "complete." A “complete” effort is thorough-going and whole-hearted. Nothing is held back. Buddhism is not a threat-based persuasion: You won’t go to heaven (right) if you practice it and you won’t go to hell (wrong) if you don’t. But honesty is required -- complete honesty. 

The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path carry with them the verifiable observation that everything in life changes. There is nothing that does not change. Joy turns to sorrow, love turns to anger, birth turns to death, and the family car always gets a flat. All Buddhist schools agree on such things, but how they approach them may vary.

But as the Dalai Lama put it once, "Everyone wants to be happy." And that is probably as good a summary of Buddhism as any.

 

Christmas tax cookies

Trickle-down Republicans are going to get their way: The tax plan they have (largely in secret) cobbled together in Congress will pass; there will be more wealth for the wealthy; and in the end the jobless and impoverished will see their taxes rise. Republicans -- against a vast majority of savvy economists -- are employing the "trickle down" model ... if the rich get richer, the lives of the average working stiff will improve.

Supporters of the 'overhaul' are devotees of the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels' philosophy -- if you tell a lie long enough and fervently enough, eventually people will believe it. I don't know if even Goebbels could have conceived the victory the Republicans are about to win. Tax relief for the wealthy will be permanent. Tax relief for the working classes will run out sometime in the next decade and they will end up paying higher taxes. Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, calls the whole thing a "Christmas present" for all Americans.

There are some doubters:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The tax overhaul of 2017 amounts to a high-stakes gamble by Republicans in Congress: That slashing taxes for corporations and wealthy individuals will accelerate growth and assure greater prosperity for Americans for years to come.

The risks are considerable.

A wide range of economists and nonpartisan analysts have warned that the bill will likely escalate federal debt, intensify pressure to cut spending on social programs and further widen America's troubling income inequality.

The bad stuff -- the tax increases and the ramped-up assault on programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- all take place after the 2018 mid-term elections, a time when do-nothing and accomplish-nothing Republicans face a potential challenge to their majorities in Congress. They need some good news to leaven that threat.

America has yet to benefit under a Republican administration.

OK, I know ... so what else is new?

UFO investigator moves on

If you had a choice between reading still more about the Republican tax heist wending its way through Congress and a little known-office at the Pentagon that seems to have investigated (when money allowed) unidentified flying objects, which would you choose?

All I can say is that at least the UFO story has a ring of authenticity about it.

The New York Times was apparently first to report on the issue.

White House word ban

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

early-ish Christian art ... photos

A photo array from The Guardian: As one of the first countries to adopt Christianity, Ethiopia has a legacy of churches and monasteries, built on hilltops or hewn out of cliff faces, as well as vibrant traditions of worship. These are celebrated in a lavish book, Ethiopia: The Living Churches of an Ancient Kingdom 

I find myself liking religious art that is not yet slick and perfected, a devotion that is somehow feet-on-the-ground. The picture above, for example, seems to me to be imbued with people who know how to smile in the midst of what I assume is a devoted heart. Only later would people sand and smooth the images, find 'great' artists, and the direct and simple smiles be put aside. The picture reminds me of the shepherd's prayer once admired by The Bal Shem Tov ... something along the lines of "Dear God, though I keep the sheep of others for money, for you I would keep them for free because I love you."

The picture above makes me wonder as ever why the Bible has no statement that reads, "And Jesus laughed." Grown-ups (like Hindus, for example) laugh. I realize there is a cottage industry that has grown up around the role of laughter in Christianity, but it strikes me as so much bilge water. No-laughter-no-balls whispers in the corners of my mind.

Anyway ... I liked the Ethiopian photos. There is something honest .....

dividends of wealth

At the same time that U.S. congress members huddle in an attempt to fashion a tax bill that offers greater rewards to the wealthy indefinitely and pulls the rug out from under the less-well-to-do over ten years (and the bill feels like a win for Donald Trump and his ilk), "The World Inequality Report" helps to sharpen the grotesqueness of it all:

The richest 0.1% of the world’s population have increased their combined wealth by as much as the poorest 50% – or 3.8 billion people – since 1980, according to a report detailing the widening gap between the very rich and poor.
The World Inequality Report, published on Thursday by French economist Thomas Piketty, warned that inequality had ballooned to “extreme levels” in some countries and said the problem would only get worse unless governments took coordinated action to increase taxes and prevent tax avoidance....
The report warns that unless there is globally coordinated political action, the wealth gap will continue to grow. “The global top 1% income share could increase from nearly 20% today to more than 24% by 2050,” the report said. “In which case the global bottom 50% share could fall from 10% to less than 9%.”
However, the economists said increasing inequality was “not inevitable” if countries acted to bring in progressive income tax....
The authors said taxation alone was not enough to tackle the problem as the wealthy were best placed to avoid and evade tax, as shown by the recent Paradise Papers investigation. The report said a tenth of the world’s wealth was held in tax havens. [The Guardian]

What will it take to bitch-slap this ultra-wealthy segment of societies? I don't mean that as a mewling liberal rant. I mean it as a matter of practicality. The people who make the stuff that make rich people rich will only take so much and, in a line I repeatedly fall back on, "If you do not share your wealth with us, we will share our poverty with you."

I honestly cannot see the rich and savvy buttering their own bread with some common sense. They have the capacity, but the lack the sand. I honestly don't see an outcome that is spelled other than "b-l-o-o-d" ... the blood of your children. Yes, the peasants will be even harder hit, but in the end, your sons and daughters will be forfeit. Literally.

men, women and the 'best' novelists

Novelist John Boyne, a guy I've never heard of, makes a pretty good case:

I think women are better novelists than men.
There, I’ve said it. While it’s obviously an enormous generalisation, it’s no more ludicrous than some half-wit proudly claiming never to read books by women.

It's cheeky, of course, but that's what newspaper essays are paid to be. And there's enough truth in Boyne's observations to make them worth a reprise.

Of course a little caution is warranted: I'm not sure how many people actually read any more.

beavers to the rescue

Where homo sapiens finds itself outflanked by nature, well, let the wild animals take a crack at things.

A valley in the Forest of Dean will echo to the sound of herbivorous munching next spring when a family of beavers are released into a fenced enclosure to stop a village from flooding, in the first ever such scheme funded by the government....
Chris McFarling, a cabinet member of Forest of Dean district council, said: “Beavers are the most natural water engineers we could ask for. They’re inexpensive, environmentally friendly and contribute to sustainable water and flood management.
“They slow the release of storm water with their semi-porous dams, decreasing the flooding potential downstream. Water quality is improved as a result of their activities. They also allow water to flow during drought conditions. Financially they are so much more cost-effective than traditional flood defence works so it makes sense to use this great value-for-money opportunity.”

And here you thought beavers were just as "pest."

 

nothing is extra

Trump sends U.S. scientists to France

It's as if (had we missed it on the first go-round) Donald Trump is inviting us all to "Make America Dumb Again."

PARIS (AP) — It is a dream come true for U.S.-based climate scientists — the offer of all-expenses-paid life in France to advance their research in Europe instead of in the United States under climate skeptic President Donald Trump, two of the winners say.
American scientist Camille Parmesan and British scientist Benjamin Sanderson are among the 18 initial winners, including 13 based in the U.S., of French President Emmanuel Macron’s “Make Our Planet Great Again” climate grants.
Macron congratulated the winners during a brief ceremony in Paris on Monday evening, ahead of a climate summit that gathers more than 50 world leaders in the French capital Tuesday.

Russia & U.S., brothers in arms

It's not just the Americans who employ mercenaries  (example article) to do the fighting in the Mideast that for one reason or another is kept 'off the books' so to speak. Russia and the United States appear to be on the same mercenary page for largely the same reasons:

When [Russian President Vladimir] Putin went to a Russian air base in Syria on Monday and told Russian troops that “you are coming back home with victory,” he did not mention the private contractors. Russian troops are expected to remain in Syria for years while the contractors are likely to stay to guard lucrative oil and gas fields under a contract between the Syrian government and another Russian company allegedly linked to a businessman known as “Putin’s chef” for his close ties to the Kremlin.
Proxy fighters like Slyshkin have played a key role in Syria. In addition to augmenting troops officially sent by Moscow, their secret deployment has helped keep the official Russian death toll low as Putin seeks re-election next year.

Russia and the United States, allies in war. It seems that leadership in both countries does not want to be blamed for sending troops to die -- the pesky electorate is touchy about seeing its sons and daughters killed, especially in an election year that Putin faces and American policy makers can envisage all too clearly. The American military is short-handed and 'contractors' help to fill in the gap where policy makers lack the integrity to declare a shooting war. Those congress men and women sure as hell don't want their kids shanghaied by the blood-and-bullets crowd.

Objectives seems to vary mildly (the U.S. wants bases and oil; Russia wants access to a warm-water entrance and exit to the world) but whatever the longings, mercenaries seem to fill the bill. No need to record the depressing dead-and-wounded statistics in the national military column. It's just... uhhh... "contractors" dontcha know.

Oh well, I am late to this particular party: Here is an article that's a couple of years old and probably much better thought out.

Kansas offers U.S. a tax template

To hear The Guardian tell it, the Republican/Democrat tax plan wending its way through Congress (it currently seems to have the momentum for passage) bears an uncanny resemblance to a blueprint already implemented in Kansas. The thinly-veiled trickle-down economics that have failed analytical examination far and wide didn't work in Kansas and won't work in the broader U.S. Nevertheless, Congress seems kindly disposed towards this Kansas model.

Short and sweet: FUBAR ... fucked up beyond all recognition.

Is Donald Trump about to turn America into Kansas? It’s a question some worried people who live in the state are asking as the Republican party pushes through the biggest tax overhaul in a generation – an overhaul that, they claim, bears an uncanny resemblance to a tax plan that left their midwestern home in disarray.
After a failed economic experiment meant to boost economic growth blew a hole in the Kansas budget as big as a prairie sky (a $350m deficit in the current fiscal year and nearly $600m in the next) state jobs and services have been slashed....
The crisis follows the 2012 passage of a tax plan by Kansas governor Sam Brownback that he dubbed “the march to zero”.
Individual state income tax rates dropped from 6.4% to 4.9% – with the intention of getting rid of them altogether eventually. Taxes were eliminated on so-called pass through entities – businesses where taxes are collected at the rate of the business owner and not at the corporate rate. The plan would provide a “shot of adrenaline” to the Kansas economy, Brownback claimed.... “There never was a shot of adrenaline. If anything, that shot put the state on life support,” she said. “It’s the same thing that Trump is saying: there’s going to be tremendous job growth. Well, that didn’t happen either. It’s going to take an entire generation to undo this damage.”

Yes, the electorate has a short memory and yes, politicians know where their re-election bucks are likely to come from, so the bill will probably pass. But that doesn't mean it can't be seen for what it is -- an obscene flop for the nation.

same-sex divorce

As if getting married to someone of the same sex weren't difficult enough, consider the difficulties of getting a divorce in the great Down Under:

New same-sex marriage legislation came into effect on the weekend, prompting a rush of couples heading to registry offices around the country to file their intention to marry.

But in Perth, lawyers were lodging documents of a different kind, on behalf of a woman set to become the first in Australia to file for a same-sex divorce.
She married her long-term partner in 2015 at a consulate in Perth under the laws of a European country where same-sex marriage was already legal.

editing turkeys and gods

On occasion, it seems strange to be made aware that whatever my current concerns might be, however serious or solemn or just plain silly, someone, somewhere else is busy on another of life's tangents and their efforts impact my tapestry without notification.

So, for example, at a time when I might be basting a turkey, the Roman Catholic pope is disturbed by the translation of The Lord's Prayer, one of the best known of Christian petitions.

Pope Francis has signalled his approval of moves already under way in the Catholic church to change the line in the English version of the Lord’s Prayer, from “Lead us not into temptation” to “Don’t let me fall into temptation”. Noting that it was a bad translation, Pope Francis said: “It’s Satan who leads us into temptation”, adding, as though studying a health-and-safety leaflet, “that’s his department.”

OK, language is like folk music -- always being retuned and reworded and messed with according to who is appreciating or using it. But when one of my bedrock memorizations (who the hell knows where I learned the Lord's Prayer, but in my Christian society, I know it) gets tweaked, something within rebels.

It was the same when the United States added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 -- another time (the McCarthy hearings) of alleged heightened morality.

In 1954, at President Dwight D. Eisenhower's urging, the Congress legislated that “under God” be added, making the pledge read: I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

It was weird, adding "under God." Wasn't "one nation, indivisible" enough of a prayer/hope/aspiration/goal? Even as a teenager filled to the brim with his discovery of yet another adult persuasion that was hypocritical, I didn't object so much to "God" as I did to the ways in which the addition messed with the lilt and rhythm of what I had learned as a child.

And it's somewhat the same with the pope's pointing out that Satan is the bad guy, not God, when he revises the Lord's Prayer. It's a song I know, but I know it my way, even if I seldom if ever make use of it.

But nowadays, I'm tickled at my own insistence. Here I am basting a hypothetical turkey and the pope is messing with one of my small foundational rocks in ways that show off how distant we are from what we consider the important things in life.

I wonder if I could get Satan to baste my turkey, assuming I ever make one ... create a kind of unifying gesture to the universe around me.

Also I wonder why the pope did not go further and explain the invisible demarcation line between God and Satan. Wouldn't that seem logical and kindly to those being asking to partake at the Christian dinner table? Without a little spice, wouldn't God be bored stupid?

tax bill speculations

A tax bill is being hammered out between House and Senate conferees in Washington. Bit by bit, despite differences and objections, the bill seems destined for presidential signature.

Yet in the midst of all the discussions I see little or nothing about the fact that once the bill is enshrined in law, once the crowing and boo-hooing has ended, the whole kabuki will snap back on entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and how much they might be trimmed in order to pay for the tax cuts envisioned.

I see the tax bill as a Trojan Horse which, worse than expected, those in need will be forced to pay for. Millions of people will be adversely affected and it's not the ones who make the millions.

school without students open for business

A New Zealand school that has no students has promised to remain open.

Who knew?

There's something quirky and sad and wonderful about it.

sense of irate dis-ease

As the flames approached the elite San Luis Rey Downs training facility for thoroughbreds, many of the more than 450 horses were cut loose to prevent them from being trapped in their stables if barns caught fire, said Mac McBride of the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club.
Herds of horses galloped past flaming palm trees in their chaotic escape of a normally idyllic place. Not all survived.
Horse trainer Scott Hansen said he knows that some of his 30 horses at the facility died.
“I don’t know how many are living and how many are dead,” he said. “I guess I’ll have to figure that out in the morning.”

Sometimes I really do wish my logical serenities could convince my visceral outrages. But I fail and must concede it, as this morning when reading the story of the blast furnace wildfires savaging California and the pedigree horses cut loose against the encroaching flames. Like lightning, my mind pounced and yowled and wanted to blame-blame-blame. Dumb animals taken cavalierly into the care of well-coiffed owners are left to fend for themselves ... responsibility set aside because, hey, what the hell, you can't fight Mother Nature. Somehow, I am sick of it and angry. Furious as a California ember.

Everything seems to be a mess and getting messier and the horses, which, left to their own devices, would naturally have fled, are constrained by a tony set who 'love' their animals but fail to demonstrate a substantive and responsible love.

Fire, like food and air and water, is serious. It burns the well-heeled and the impoverished alike. Isn't it enough to cope with what cannot be escaped and stop manufacturing situations that are awarded a focal concern? Hurricanes strike in the Gulf of Mexico ... the devastation is terrific. Police shootings of unarmed black men waxes. Some blacks plan to skip the opening of an African-American museum in Mississippi after the nation's highest office-holder says he will attend the opening. Donald Trump declares Jerusalem the capital of Israel. Artworks by some of Guantanamo Bay's 41 prisoners, some held without trial for over 10 years by the 'democratic' United States, are under threat of confiscation and/or destruction because of a display at New York's John Jay College. Minnesota Sen Al Franken becomes a recent casualty in the endless line of flabby, aging men in power stepping down in the wake of sexually-inappropriate activity years ago. The sex tsunami has political operatives on edge ... but neither Republicans nor Democrats have any functional plan for addressing it outside figuring that they'd best stick with the donors who will pay for them to be re-elected. Donald Trump promised to "drain the [Washington] swamp." He, as a man who has never conceived a policy or appointee he couldn't back away from, is refilling it.

As hoped by the pre-election Trump constituency, their knight in shining armor is shaking the trees. Their anger and frustration is being addressed (though not with the jobs or Mexico wall or dismantling and replacement of health care as promised during his campaign) ... and in the process has managed to encourage the rest of us to shut away a capacity for decency and caring and more-or-less truthfulness ... and concern with the country as a whole. I am sick of feeling on edge and held in thrall, via a largely compliant press, to an idiot and coward and bully. I'm sick of it and simultaneously sick of my own sissy righteousness that can do little better than point and whine and sneer.

When was the last time some action addressed the things that cannot be escaped and stopped creating stuff that then needs to be escaped? I am sorry that people are hurt ... in California, in Puerto Rico, in wherever. I am sorry that horses had to die. But within it all, I am sick of feeling sorry and on edge.

And somehow, the horses of California rose up in my throat this morning. Perhaps those horses could be put to good use, Donald ...

What a frustrated little twerp I am.

Senator Al Franken to quit

[Minnesota Democrat] Senator Al Franken announced his resignation on Thursday, becoming the highest-ranking US politician yet to step down in the wake of widening allegations of sexual misconduct against powerful men in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the media and politics.
Speaking on the Senate floor, Franken, who said he would quit in the coming weeks, said: “All women deserve to be heard and their experiences taken seriously.”...
In the last several weeks, Franken, 66, has been accused by more than half a dozen women of groping or trying to forcibly kiss them. The senator has apologized for his behavior and asked the Senate ethics committee to investigate him.....
“I, of all people, am aware that there is some irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assault sits in the Oval Office and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party,” he said.

Of late, they've been toppling like nine pins, the powerful and glitzy. The most and least credible of accusations are given credibility ... and the paunchy men exit stage left ... I wonder if the women are really requited after so many (often) decades. God knows these guys could probably use a good horse-whipping.

But I don't understand the unwillingness/inability/cowardice to apply the widely-applied yardstick to Donald Trump. He eludes the lash ... why? Never mind that I dislike the guy, if you're going to have a sexual feeding frenzy, isn't everything bait? At the moment, Donald Trump leaves the mafia's John Gotti, "The Teflon Don," in the shade.