virtue meets its maker

Two snowball fights and I am not sure I've got the energy to retail them, but here goes....

The first came in perhaps the second grade, maybe 70 years ago. At the public school I attended, there was one "gang" -- a kind of club which, like other clubs, relied in part for its definition to the people it excluded. It was good to belong to the "gang," the in-crowd, and saddening not to.  Glasses and freckles and girls, perhaps, qualified for exclusion.

But one day, bolstered at home by Pete Seeger's Almanac Singers and the willingness to fight the good labor fight on vinyl records, I gathered all those who were outside the gang and challenged the gang to a snowball fight in the school parking lot during recess. There was a great mound of plowed snow and we made our stand on top of that heap. We may have been outgunned by numbers, but we had the virtue of the underdog (in my mind) and we had elevation. These, I imagined, would see us through to a victory that would leave the gang in the shade.

Only of course it didn't. Once the fight started, it was clear that recess could not end soon enough. Virtue and all, we got clobbered. When it was all over, the kids with freckles, glasses, physical challenges and verifiable stupidities remained excluded. The gang was intact.

Some years later, in the 6th or 7th grade at a boarding school of some 50 students, a group of the best arms available (twelve of us perhaps) challenged the rest of the school to a snowball fight. We had built fortifications up near a wonderful drift. We had laid in pre-made snowballs. We felt confident the best arms could flatten the mere rabble.

Well oops again: What seemed like the entire rest of the school (including teachers) turned out to meet our challenge. The best arms were not good enough for the seething numbers. We got clocked. It was a kind of precursor to the Vietnam war at a time when most of us had never heard of Vietnam.

What wondrous visions and hopes I brought to those snowy battles. What should happen surely would happen. Only it didn't, and looking back, what shudders me worst is the recognition that such good lessons should be blithely ignored as time passed and decency and virtue still sang their siren song.

Sometimes I wish I'd turned out smarter, but it's too late now.

where politesse can spell death

ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Women are less likely than men to get CPR from a bystander and more likely to die, a new study suggests, and researchers think reluctance to touch a woman’s chest might be one reason.
Only 39 percent of women suffering cardiac arrest in a public place were given CPR versus 45 percent of men, and men were 23 percent more likely to survive, the study found.

the parched Ogallala aquifer

DENVER (AP) — The draining of a massive aquifer that underlies portions of eight states in the central U.S. is drying up streams, causing fish to disappear and threatening the livelihood of farmers who rely on it for their crops.
Water levels in the Ogallala aquifer have been dropping for decades as irrigators pump water faster than rainfall can recharge it.
An analysis of federal data found the Ogallala aquifer shrank twice as fast over the past six years compared with the previous 60, The Denver Post reports. ...
Also known as the High Plains Aquifer, the Ogallala underlies 175,000 square miles (453,000 square kilometers), including parts of Colorado, Wyoming Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas. That’s one of the primary agricultural regions of the U.S., producing $35 billion in crops annually.

thinking man's existence

Or, as Descartes might have put it, "I want, therefore I am."

move over "opiod crisis"

Among the possibilities of something that's labeled as "bad" is the fact that it can always be "worse."

In the United States, the feeding frenzy that has greeted the "opiod epidemic" has been trumped in Canada by the seizure of 42kg of carfentanil in the basement of a house in a well-manicured Toronto neighborhood. Said one researcher, “Carfentanil is about 100 times more toxic than fentanyl and about 10,000 times more toxic than morphine.”

Lab tests eventually revealed 42kg of the substance to be carfentanil – a drug the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has described as “crazy dangerous” and which authorities in the US have flagged as as potential chemical weapon. The local police force had unwittingly stumbled across what is believed to be the largest volume of the opioid ever seized in North America....

Developed in the 1970s as a tranquilizer for large animals such as elephants and bears, the synthetic opioid has also been studied as a potential chemical weapon by countries including the US, China and Israel. It is thought to have been deployed with disastrous effects when Russian special forces attempted to rescue hundreds of hostages from a Moscow theatre in 2002.

But it only burst into public view last year after officials across North America began to warn that it was being cut with heroin and other illicit drugs, leaving a rash of overdoses and deaths in its wake.

a little stupidity

Are interesting people more interested?
Not necessarily.
Are interested people more interesting?
Not necessarily.

I guess you take what you git and another wannabe fortune cookie goes down the drain. Another stupid question for which there are only stupid answers. An imponderable.

Still, I'm kind of interested.

I never said I wasn't stupid.

Veterans Day

Remembering combat veterans.

Let me be clear from the get-go: I have absolutely no personal experience of the raging sorrow and enveloping fear and screaming slice-and-dicing reality of combat and the wounds sustained by those who have lived and outlived it. I have no experience: Imagination is mere arrogance, however it grovels and praises and thanks.

Zip. Zero. Nada. Nothing ... that is the extent of my bona fides. I can rightly be accused of being as oozing liberal wimp. I might wish I knew more and combat vets might wish I knew more, but the fact is, I don't know more, however much I may blubber and fume. Yeah, I was a pencil-pushing spy for three years, but I never was in overt combat.

But that doesn't mean I can't allow myself a rasher of wrath.

Today is Veterans Day -- a time to remember those who were lost to combat and war and other widespread insanity and self-congratulation.

There are no doubt many ways to remember those who fell in the old men's wars that sent young men to die and be horribly scarred. I am thinking of only two of those ways: 1. Service and 2. Servitude.

The bunting is on display here in the U.S. and in other countries around the world. At first, this date marked the ending of World War I -- the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh month. Peace, so to speak, broke out. These days, with so many subsequent combat missions in the past, World War I is just one among the many markers set by old men who seldom if ever put themselves in the line of fire, however much their fingerprints are on the trigger.

Service -- yes, we honor the sacrifice, and sorrow for the loss and wish we could weep the tears young men were constrained to weep. God, I am so sorry. It must be said that young men are not without their enthusiasms for the kinship wars welded. Like those waving the flag along the parade route, they too would like to come away with something (like peace) that made some sense. But when they recall what cannot be escaped in the dead of night, "service" is not a bulwark that holds up well.

Service -- blessings be upon it.

But that service has another name that fits as well -- servitude. The old men who concoct and conjure wars have always sent others to do the dirty work they convince themselves is warranted. The law of the land is the law of the battlefield. Let the kids do it ... they're enthusiastic enough and stupid enough to be led by their elders ...whose children seldom serve. It is in the old men that the levers of power and policy reside and it is they who exercise their "good judgment" and waste the children instead of insisting they grow up straight and sound and peaceful. True, peace is a more daunting mission because it means so much more than 'the absence of war.' But if the old men cannot exercise their good judgment in the name of nourishment and peace, will someone tell me why it is not they, rather then the kids, who should be cut down.

Servitude -- in the service of money and lip-service glory: Do we want our kids to grow up to be a mewling merchant willing to sell off patrimony for the blood of sons and daughters? Yes, the old men can hold the young in thrall and some of those young people will join up enthusiastically ... but let's check the finger-prints on the triggers of this world and deal with the evidence as it deserves.

Servitude has been tried. It even works. But its capacity to nourish decency and principle ... well, bring on the feudal past... and never imagine that service and servitude are the same thing.

change ... again...oops

Strange to think -- not criticize or improve necessarily, just think -- how much of this life is devoted to finding some aspect or touchstone that does not change at the same time that the slick and slippery 'philosopher' within seeks and growls and yearns for something unchanging.

Love, joy, understanding, enlightenment ... the words and longings roll off the mental tongue ... you know, the 'good' stuff and the cloying TED talks that seek to enshrine and assure some unchanging certainty.

Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it too! What a piss-cutter.

I am as guilty as the next fellow and yet this morning I wonder how much I might have accomplished with all that endeared groveling to the unchanging if I had simply gotten with the program: Everything changes; relief is not the point. Just think -- "I coulda had a V-8."

I recall the very moment in college when, as someone newly-entranced by "philosophy," I ran into some philosopher who advocated for "change." I was in heaven: Here at last was THE Rosetta stone of answers in my unspoken search for The Answer to Everything. Everything I looked at or experienced was always in flux. Everything changed. How delightfully true was that???!!!!

But then -- oops! -- I was tumbled ass over appetite by the realization that if everything changed, that meant my then-relationship with my latest girlfriend was bound -- as I dearly did not want it to be -- to change as well. Well that would never do! I spent long hours trying to write in an exception for my girlfriend. I wanted the delight (change) AND I wanted my girlfriend (unchanging).

Oh well ... another in a long line of ooops-es in the hopper. But did I learn my lesson?

Forgetbaboutit!

Literally, forgetaboutit.

toast my tootsies

A brisk and bristling breeze has overtaken the day.

It makes old sods like me wish that someone would impose global warming ... NOW.

Alternatively, I suppose we could have summer ... which I seem to have missed.

without which...?

Start the day with a little laughter:


And perhaps a little music:

time warp/brain fart

Now, at 8:52, I have finally gotten things sorted out.

When I went into the other room six or eight minutes ago to rouse my wife and find out if she were going to work, I told her it was 8:30.

"You're right," she said groggily. "It is 8:30 ....................at night."

I have been operating as if morning were in full swing when in fact it is not.

Oh well, what's 12 hours between friends?

It's another excuse to sleep, I suppose.

the changing face of politics

Color, gender, ethnicity ... Tuesday's elections contained some historic wins.

Wilmot Collins

Perhaps newly-elected Helena, Mont., mayor Wilmot Collins, a one-time Nigerian immigrant, hit the nail on the head when he said,

The country is still not what Mr. Trump wants it to be. ... The citizens of this state and this city where I have lived for the past 23 years have spoken and they are saying we want the best candidate. They’re not looking at color, at background and creed.

Or newly-elected councilwoman Janet Diaz of Lancaster, Pa., who said at the outset of her race, "We need a government that looks like the people it serves ... that looks like its constituents."

Anyway, we can hope, I suppose.
 

Ban Ki-moon prods U.S.

And a tip of the hat to former U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who on Tuesday delivered what I assume will be a wildly disregarded speech in which he urged the United States to get off its ass and adopt universal health care.

The former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon called on Americans to pass universal health coverage at a speech in New York City on Tuesday, marking a dramatic intervention of world leaders into the US healthcare debate.
Ban called on the US to stop “powerful interests” from prioritizing “profit over care” as part of a global delegation pushing the US to adopt a publicly financed health system similar to those in other wealthy countries.
The US spends more on healthcare than any nation in the world, yet 28 million Americans still lack care....
Of the 25 richest countries in the world, the United States is the only one without universal health coverage.

Far be it from the Democrats, who are licking their chops over what they may imagine will be mid-term election victories, to take up this effort without equivocation.

Look, Jane -- those are the Democrats.
Those are the Democrats running for office.
Those are the Democrats who already show many signs of shooting themselves in the foot.
Those are the Democrats...
See the Democrats run from the issues as even their Republican brethren have before them.

 

burglar's remorse?

A little girl's puppy has been reunited with her family, seemingly returned by the same thieves who stole her.

Sasha, an eight-week-old Labrador, was taken during a burglary in Melbourne on Monday morning - along with a laptop, an iPad, and some jewellery.
The family told Australian news outlets they were "devastated" at the loss of four-year-old Maia's "best friend".
But on Thursday, Sasha was discovered in the garden, apparently dropped there by the remorseful thieves.

fossil fuels bet against renewables

All the gushing enthusiasms in the world cannot yet overcome the balance-sheet realities of fossil fuels when compared to their slim-trim renewable-energy counterparts:

Even as governments and environmentalists forecast a peak in oil demand within a generation - and China and India say they may eventually ban gasoline and diesel vehicles - leaders of the world’s biggest oil firms are not buying the argument that their traditional business faces any imminent threat.

How much of the oil companies' assessments is based on wishful thinking and how much is based on reality is not entirely clear, but the fossil-fuel business seems primed to linger a bit -- or more than a bit -- longer.

Polish solution: Make (out) like a bunny

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — The Polish government is urging citizens to go forth and multiply like rabbits.
The health ministry of Poland, which has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, has put out a short video praising rabbits for producing many offspring.

PS: Can't embed the video referred to ... which is in Polish ... but whose sparkling message is pretty clear.

the power of 'the bird'

Ahhhh, enlightened management!

Passed along in email as well as floating around the news wires is the tale of/column about a woman who flipped off (gave the middle finger to) the presidential motorcade, told her bosses about it, and was promptly fired.

On Halloween, after Briskman gave her bosses at Akima, a government contracting firm, a heads-up that she was the unidentified cyclist in the photo, they took her into a room and fired her, she said, escorting her out of the building with a box of her things.

“I wasn’t even at work when I did that,” Briskman said. “But they told me I violated the code-of-conduct policy.”

Aren't there ANY grown-ups out there?

homosexuality? dominance? snuggle?

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Recent photos taken in a Kenyan wildlife area show a rare sight: a male lion mounting another male lion in what resemblesa sexual act but is possibly a way of showing dominance....Paul Goldstein, the photographer who captured the images in Kenya’s Maasai Mara reserve in August, said many other species are known to engage in such behavior and that, for example, he had seen giraffes doing it.
“It was just a dramatic thing to see,” Goldstein said of the male lions. He said he was astonished by a Kenyan media report in which Ezekiel Mutua, a Kenyan official, said the lion behavior was “not normal” and made remarks critical of homosexuality.

Clinton, Brazile and a dash of sexism?

I don't/can't generally keep up with political confetti, but there was something about the Nov 5 story of former Democratic National Convention head Donna Brazile and her book (due out tomorrow) that caught my eye although it was not the focus of the brush fire Brazile has apparently stirred up:

Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile writes in a new book that she seriously contemplated setting in motion a process to replace Hillary Clinton as the party’s 2016 presidential nominee with then-Vice President Biden in the aftermath of Clinton’s fainting spell, in part because Clinton’s campaign was “anemic” and had taken on “the odor of failure.”

In an explosive new memoir, Brazile details widespread dysfunction and dissension throughout the Democratic Party, including secret deliberations over using her powers as interim DNC chair to initiate the process of removing Clinton and running mate Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.) from the ticket after Clinton’s Sept. 11, 2016, collapse in New York City.
Brazile writes that she considered a dozen combinations to replace the nominees and settled on Biden and Sen. Cory Booker (N.J.), the duo she felt most certain would win over enough working-class voters to defeat Republican Donald Trump. But then, she writes, “I thought of Hillary, and all the women in the country who were so proud of and excited about her. I could not do this to them.”
Brazile paints a scathing portrait of Clinton as a well-intentioned, historic candidate whose campaign was badly mismanaged, took minority constituencies for granted and made blunders with “stiff” and “stupid” messages. The campaign was so lacking in passion for the candidate, she writes, that its New York headquarters felt like a sterile hospital ward where “someone had died.” [Washington Post, Nov. 4, 2017; emphasis added throughout]

Dawdling into the past doesn't appeal to me much. 2016 has come and gone. And so perhaps it is just a personal leaning that wishes Brazile had taken the counsel of her "anemic" assessment. And further, that reporters had picked up on the comment that she "could not [replace Hillary Clinton]" at the expense of all those excited and proud American women supporters. What did that mean? Was Brazile falling prey to the notion that women voters deserved to be thrown a sexist bone because of the bad historical treatment they had received? Did she imagine women voters were really that superficial? How would her statements be greeted if the word "men" were substituted for "women?"

Of course, Brazile's second-hand account may be fobbed off on her need to have a back-up plan if Clinton's illness were more than the pneumonia that was subsequently used to describe her fainting fit.

Full-frontal concession: I held my nose and voted for Clinton. She struck me as one of the good ol' boys in girl's clothes, but I didn't think Sanders could win and I wanted to vote against Trump. Clinton, I guessed, would prosecute America's longest war in much the same way her mentor predecessors might and doing something about student debt or income disparity or health care was more a talking point than a reality check for her. But she was an awful flat tire as a campaigner and candidate.

So I hate to think Brazile gave in to a rah-rah version of the women's vote. I would rather think her motives were tactical ... but obviously I am not sure. Clinton was anemic and sterile and Joe Biden struck me then and now as a better mouse trap.

But it's over... except as the Democrats do what they can to shoot themselves in the other scaredy-cat foot in 2018.

living off -- way off -- the grid

Ambling and shambling among the pipe dreams, perhaps there is this from The Guardian:

Wild at heart: how one woman and her husband live out in the woods

For seven years, Miriam Lancewood and her husband Peter have lived a nomadic life – she is the hunter and he is the cook. Now they’re walking across Europe to Turkey, with a tent and little else.

know a little, ignoring a lot

A story keeps rattling around in my brain this morning -- of a time when I worked at a logging camp in Oregon when I was 19. There were several dangers associated with the work. These included carelessness with the dynamite used to uproot stumps and the driving of Caterpillar bulldozers that dragged newly-cut logs to the trucks that would cart them away. Since the terrain was steep, bulldozers occasionally tipped over and killed the driver... misjudging the angle of a hill and how much traction might be available was no small matter.

One day, I was talking to one of the Cat drivers and asked him how the dangers of tip-over were avoided. He said that newcomers were not the problem: They were aware of how much they didn't know and tried hard to learn ... they were careful, not careless. Old timers were similarly careful because they had been around long enough to realize that however much they knew, there were still things to learn and be careful about. The ones who got killed were the guys in the middle -- the ones who had learned a little and were convinced they had no more to learn. They were cocky and lazy and every now and then, they paid with their lives. I guess that story holds true for a lot of situations in life -- imagining everything's settled when in fact the learning never ends.

I'm really not entirely sure who is more dangerous -- the ones who know or the ones who don't. Either way, I'd prefer not to be rolled over by a Caterpillar.

reviewing ... everything

Caen, France

A migrant near the port of Ouistreham.

Photograph: Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images

I'm not entirely sure what gets me about this photo. It's OK, but no orchestral wonder. But somehow it puts m in mind of the sense -- or is it some simplistic wish -- that things might somehow freeze-frame and all things would take a moment to reflect on ... well ... everything. What's important, what's not quite so important. The ducks lined up once again, no so much with an eye to improvement but more like reconsidering and dusting shelves long since arranged... renaming miracles, if necessary ... just reconsidering stuff from the get-go.

Water ... imagine that...

my [non-existant] dog

Of all the prayers I know -- and I suspect I know quite a few, assuming I could muster the energy to search them out -- the one I like best for its good nature and practicality is this:

May I become the person my dog thinks I am.

Forty or fifty years of huffing and puffing around spiritual life and, well, that's it.

Now all I need to do is get a dog.

Charles Monroe ... again and never enough...

First, today, it was some writing and then I got wrapped up in rereading Charles Monroe's interview with the Federal Writers' Project in 1939 and was lulled-and-rocked-rocked-and-lulled from beginning to end. At the end of it all, I felt as if I were ready to burst out of a chrysalis and become, perforce, a beautiful butterfly.

A lullaby of small-town life and industrial-strength spirit ... if you have the time.

menstrual art in Swedish subway station

Graphic artist Liv Strömquist’s series of enlarged felt-pen sketches have been on display at Slussen station for the past five weeks. The Night Garden shows cartoon birds, cats, trees, naked men – and women with unshaven legs and visible menstrual blood.

 It is hard not to sympathize with one tweeting critic who wrote: “It is not enough to get [your period] once a month,” tweeted another. “Now you will be reminded every time you jump on the subway.”

AI's failures ... kind of

If I were to take my pick, I guess I'd guess that the single most shuddering aspect of Artificial Intelligence is its cold-bloodedness -- the inability to accede to the frailties of its current 'master,' i.e. (wo)man. AI doesn't make mistakes and has no sympathy for a world that does.

So perhaps AI would be less upsetting if failure were built into its constitution. Failure, I might argue over a lot of beer, is (wo)man's greatest accomplishment. Creators like to claim a closeness to their creations, dontcha know.

But it would be tricky:

If failure were programmed into AI, that would be a success ... which is not a failure.

On the other hand, failure to program failure in would be a failure ... which is not what AI is programmed for.

Oh fuck it! The dog ate my homework!

another side of the Balfour diktat

Another point of view, this [Palestinian] one largely ignored by those clothing themselves in righteousness and tactical advantage:

Today we mark the centenary of the calamitous Balfour declaration. In 1917, with a few paragraphs and a stroke of his pen, the British foreign minister, Lord Balfour, unleashed historic forces that changed the fate of an entire people and a whole region. He committed a grave sin: promising the homeland of one people to another.

In the interest of candor, I have to admit a soft spot in my heart for the author of the article, Hanan Ashrawi, a woman and politician who seems capable over time of straightforwardness.

ignorance as the spice of life

The first notable seasonal white rimes the local rooftops this morning. It melds strangely with the fog that slips in and out of the street. The tree of the hanging squirrels across the way is losing its leaves on its furthest tips. No sounds of Canada geese fill the air. It's chilly.

Last night, I had a sweet potato, among other things, for dinner. Or was it a yam? I don't know. What's the difference between a sweet potato and a yam? I don't know. I could look it up, but choose not to.

Ignorance, after all, is the spice of life.

Guardian series on AI

The emerging field of artificial intelligence (AI) risks provoking a public backlash as it increasingly falls into private hands, threatens people’s jobs, and operates without effective oversight or regulatory control, leading experts in the technology warn.
At the start of a new Guardian series on AI, experts in the field highlight the huge potential for the technology. ...
“We are clearly in brand new territory. AI allows us to leverage our intellectual power, so we try to do more ambitious things,” he said. “And that means we can have more wide-ranging disasters.”

One commentator in the above-linked story suggests that it is imperative that the benefits of AI should somehow be made "fair."

Does anyone else feel that "f-bomb" should no longer refer with tut-tut dismay to the word "fuck," but instead be reserved for the duck-and-cover moniker "fair?" The use of the word "fair" reminds me of the word "free" and its associated caveat: "If someone tells you something is 'for free,' grab your wallet."

collateral (marital) damage

MULTAN, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani police arrested a newly married woman on murder charges after she allegedly poisoned her husband’s milk and it inadvertently killed 17 other people in a remote village, a senior police officer said Wednesday....
Tajak said the woman obtained a poisonous substance from her boyfriend, Shahid Lashari, last week and mixed it in milk for her husband, who refused to drink it. But the woman’s mother-in-law later used the tainted milk to make a traditional yogurt-based drink and served it to 27 members of her extended family, who fell unconscious and were hospitalized.
Seventeen people died and 10 were being treated in a hospital, he said.

Somehow this reminds me of the U.S., which once said Syria's leader, Bashar al-Assad, had to go before any peace initiatives could gain traction. Assad subsequently used nerve gas on those (remember the rows of children's bodies?) who opposed his regime and bombed the shit out of others and now, miraculously, the U.S. is working with Assad against ... uhhh ... you know, the wicked, nasty, and largely unexamined "terrorists" of Islamic State. And here I thought Donald Trump was confusing.