America the Forlorn

 Many folks in America are becoming outraged, or worse, because of the actions of the various “leaders” in our political system, but especially the republicans. The list of corrupt, or ignorant politicos is long and seems to grow daily. Kevin McCarthy was near the top of the idiot-list, until bigger idiots decided to toss him aside. Gaetz, McConnell, Green, Boebert, Hawley, Jordan, the list goes on and on and grows daily.  Their latest faux pas was tossing McCarthy aside after it took them 15 tries to elevate him to the Speaker position.  Oddly, although they all seem to want to be elevated to high political positions within Congress, they don’t seem to have anything they want to do, in the way of legislative actions that might benefit the American people.

Ever since Trump was tossed aside by the American people, republicans seem to be diving into some canyon of darkness, in which they are either to just die, or to vote on some bill that will help to destroy the lives of ordinary Americans. And every time Biden does something to benefit America, the republicans become catatonic.

And the reporting on all this chaos keeps pointing out the foibles of various pseudoleaders within the party, or the latest corrupt actions by that dude, The Donald of Trumpland.  But I do not see much in the way of reporting on the people of America.  We seem not to want to recognize the role of ordinary Americans in elevating the idiot-malenfants of our country into positions in which they can bring chaos into our lives.

The very fact that, after all he has said and done, there remain Americans who still support Donald Trump and . . . . and, wish to re-elevate him into that position called President of the United States, is to me both amazing and sad. We have begun to talk about the final destruction of that American dream, our Nation.  That we seem headed into a canyon of despair seems obvious. But we need to stop blaming simply our corrupt, inept leaders. That the American people, having heard everything The Donald is and does, still want him as President, tells me more about our people than perhaps I ever wanted to know.  It is now the case that, were I 30, or maybe even 40, I would be searching the globe for some other Nation to which I might migrate. I think I now understand fully why so many people, including my own grandparents, decided that their own countries were inadequate and so they had to leave for another Land  . . . in this case America, the America of the 19^th century.

But that America has now slipped away. It is a Land no longer in existence. America has become some other failed state. I keep thinking we are in some version of 1930s Germany. The Germans surely knew who Hitler was, but they elevated him anyway. Nazi Germany wasn’t created by some gods up in heaven. It was created by the German people, and just as surely, the American people are busily creating this America of TrumpLand, a place where corruption, ineptitude, and immorality flourish. Yes, I know it is not all Americans, but there are enough of them, and enough who vote, that they are elevating the criminal segment of our society into positions whereby they can lead our Nation.  Maybe the good folks of America, and there are still good folks, cannot be bothered to go to the polls and vote—too much trouble. And so those folks are being blessed with criminal leaders.

So, you may blame Donald Trump and his minions all you wish for the increasing mess in which we find ourselves.  But the major blame must be laid right at the feet of the American people who, knowing exactly who Donald is, continue to applaud him and his gang of thieves. If America falters and finally converts into some Land of ne’er-do-wells, it will be the American people who created that disaster.

So, America, unless you wish to destroy America, get off your asses, vote out the idiot-malenfants, and allow decency back into our Land. Only then can you look again at that Lady Liberty in the Harbor of New York and feel blessed to be an American.

Poised at the Edge

 It’s getting hard to write. I no longer know what to say about life in America.

On the one hand, as we are aging in place, Carol and I remain in reasonable health and are constantly surrounded by loving wishes from friends and family.

On the other hand, there exists in full charge, a world of America I know longer recognize as American.  Although I never lived there, I keep thinking of Germany during the 1930s, when ordinary Germans elected Adolph Hitler. Did they understand what they were doing? Were they really that angry?

And are Americans so angry that they will elect somehow the likes of Donald Trump? I mean he is under dozens of criminal indictments and, if we allow the courts to proceed, he will likely be convicted and then sentenced to live in prison for the rest of his natural life. But then we have his republican supporters, who have begun throwing out threats to life and limb to those participating in these various pursuits of justice. Rep Jordan threatening the Georgia prosecutors, and he is but one of many. That January 6^th violence did not spring from nowhere. Republican abound in violence.  And there are apparently no “normal” republicans any longer. And what do I mean by “normal”? Well, I mean people who understand and believe in the rule of law and the American Constitution. They used to be people who were opposed to fascism/Nazism. Remember, Dwight Eisenhower, that dude who was a general during WW II and then served honorably as US President? Yeah, him. Well, turns out, he was a republican. Yep, I know, it’s hard to believe, but it’s true.  I think, for heaven’s sake, as awful as he might have been in my eyes, even Ronald Reagan would not understand this crew of today’s republicans. Imagine Reagan trying to understand Donald Trump. Or, worse yet, imagine a dinner party with Ronald Reagan, at one end of the table, Dwight Eisenhower at the other hand, and in the middle, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley, and a half dozen other GOP Federal wannabees, like DeSantis.  Imagine that. I imagine the two at the table heads baffled, stunned even to listen to the idiot-malenfants at the table.

So, yeah, me, a mere libtard, I’m baffled. I don’t understand what I am witnessing. At this magic age of 88, I am actually contemplating in my head, where I should consider migrating. America seems actually headed towards oblivion, in the Germany-1936 sense. I think we may be at a not-so-early stage of national destruction. And then I think of grandchildren and even great grandchildren. What are we leaving to them? I still remember sitting in our front room during the 1940s, listening to the radio, and even hearing FDR occasionally on that radio telling us about the war.  Things seems grim, but my faith in America stayed strong. We would defeat those Nazi’s, I knew. Today, I am no longer so certain.  I listen still, but now I hear idiots like Jim Jordan threaten people because they are trying to maintain law and order in a country wherein Donald Trump is trying just as hard to move us back to 1930s Germany. And then Marjorie Taylor Green tells us all about Jewish space lasers.

So, David Brooks, where are you when we need you?  Where are all the republican intellectuals, telling their “conservative” followers to oppose GOP fascism? Where are you guys?? We need you.  The hordes of American pseudo-fascists need you to help them recover and return to sanity and to a civilized life. America is waiting, poised at the edge of a nearby cliff.  Do we head over, or will we turn around and return to civilized life? I think it may be in your hands. So do not fail us.

Endings 101

Recently, three of my friends have departed, and by that I mean they have died. But see our language and our imagination prevent us from saying simply “they died”.  Instead, we have invented this massive tale about what happens after we die. I guess, depending on how far away from reality we live in our minds, we believe different things. Many, many folks say, after someone dies, that they are now watching us from up above, that is, the person is now sitting on a cloud somewhere up above us and observing us.  Now that is just too weird, but it remains fairly common.

I have now reached a magic age—88+. In December, I will reach 89 years.  Yes, I climbed aboard this thing we call life on December 17^th, in the year 1934. Until recently, I was just cruising along like everyone else.  Then one day I realized that I had already surpassed in life years everyone of whom I am aware in my immediate family. That is, no one known to me as family has ever made it this many years.  A few came close, i.e., 85 years, but none, to my knowledge hit the upper 80s, or even 90.

And so, I am now looking at “life” a little differently. I understand that I may make it til 90, or, hopefully, even higher in years.  But I also understand that each day is special, a gift if you will.  And when a friend passes on, ceases to exist, I am saddened and sometimes shocked.  Recently, an especially close friend, George Stiles, died—bang out of the blue. We had just been trying to call him because we had not seen him in a while and he often stayed with us a day or two enroute to one of his kids.  And we failed to make contact by phone. So we thought maybe we just had an old telephone number, so I looked him up on the Internet, and what to my wondering eyes did appear but, “An Obituary for George Stiles”.  First, I thought, “no, it’s someone else”. But then I looked at the picture and, Yep, it was our dear friend George.

It was a shock. We could no longer speak with George. And then another reality came into my brain. George no longer exists. That is, his brain has ceased functioning, and so he no longer exists. And we can’t use these terms like, “he is gone”, or “George has departed”, or “oh my George has left us”.  And why can I not think those thoughts? Well, because, the reality of death is that the person who dies actually ceases to exist, because his brain stops functioning.  He is “dead” but he does not know he is dead, because he does not any longer “know” anything.

And, although I knew that, suddenly, with George, that reality set into my brain. Yeah, when I die, I will no longer know anything, including that I am dead. I will simply go dark, but I will not even know that everything just went dark.  No, but what will that be like? Well, nothing. Yeah, when life ceases, we do not know that life has just ceased. And that isn’t like anything that we have known throughout our long lives.

So, now, daily, I am aware of life and life things differently. When I look at a lantana flower or an hibiscus flower and then observe some critter on that flower, I watch it carefully. That life form is special because I am observing it. And it isn’t that I am now depressed thinking about life terminating. Oh I know it will and I have at least a dim understanding about cessation, but one can only dimly understand this end of life thing. Mainly, because there is nothing to understand. You are aware one second and the next you are not aware. And that is it. There is nothing else to understand.  Now we could, I assume argue about whether my conclusion is accurate, but such arguments are pointless, because we can never shed any light through evidence on the subject. So, you are free to believe the cloud thing, and I am free to believe the ending thing.  Why anyone argues about such things is quite beyond my comprehension, unless one belief gives someone control over another by that belief. Oh and that would be called religion, huh? OK, believe on folks. It’s all up to you. Whatever turns you on.

Life Goes On

 Ahhh, the weather just shifted to humane. Suddenly, it’s ok to open the windows, instead of sitting inside in fear that the heavy rain will flood the basement.  It has not done so in quite a while, But worry I will. Maybe it’s my age. I am getting on there—approaching 89 in December.

But more than the weather, was recent news of two friends and colleagues who just passed on, both a bit younger than me.  And both passed peacefully, but suddenly.  George Stiles was a colleague who became a friend, then practically a member of our family. I met George during the 1970s in the course of my work.  Then he was more than helpful to our daughter’s quest to gain entry into the world of UNC-Chapel Hill. And then George became a friend of long-standing. We saw him with some frequency as he rotated from his family home in Yarmouth, Maine to Philadelphia and South Carolina where his kids lived. George became part of our family.

And then, without warning, he died, peacefully we are told. But it is a shock nonetheless.

And then, my old boss and colleague Joe Wholey died. I was in a bit of a mess career-wise in the early 1970s, having left a secure job at Peat, Marwick, Livingston for a small firm that then collapsed. Through Joe, I managed to get a secure position at The Urban Institute, where I worked in the field of evaluation of health care programs. After five years, Joe left to join the Carter Administration, running an evaluation office in the Department of Health Education and Welfare. Joe asked me to join him, which I did. But then, Ronald Reagan took the presidency and we all had to cope with his administration. I managed for five years, but then grew fearful that I might become brain-dead working under Reagan. So, I left, as did Joe Wholey before me.

And now Joe has left this world.

And I remain behind to continue thinking about these truly good humans.

But it all brings to mind aging, and watching people drop all around me. Not just people with whom I am friends, but people of whom I am aware. We watch a lot of British TV, and especially one program that brings us to laughter even now. It is a show called “Are You Being Served?” It was on From 1972 to 1985.  I discovered recently that all of the acting cast had now died and they varied in age during that show.  So, now we find ourselves watching and loving a TV comedy series in which none of the acting cast remains alive.  I know, I know, it’s a TV show. Time passes, people age and then they die. And meanwhile I sit here, aging in place.

But then, look, our President is 81. And that idiot-malenfant Donald Trump is in his 70s, and poised to die. So, everyone is “aging in place.” But hey, they’re running our country. Well, technically, Joe Biden is running our country while Donald Trump is trying desperately to destroy our country. Two sides of the same coin I guess.

Well, I guess I will just have to suck it up and keep on truck’n. It ain’t my time yet, even if it is Mitch’s.

Meanwhile, my wonderful wife of 68 years tolerates me and loves and feeds me daily. And my kids, grandkids and Great grandkids continue to embrace life and to being me joy.  So, there you have it. Keep out of trouble and get on with this thing called LIFE.

It’s really all we have, isn’t it?

The Beginning of The End

 I titled a journal of 2020 blog postings, “The Beginning of the End, or The End of the Beginning”.  But the more I read about the two subjects, the more convinced I become that we are truly at the Beginning of the End. The End of What you might ask? Well, the Beginning of the End of the World, I might reply.

Every day now, I read about some new Climate Change fact. A scientist is predicting that the Southwest US might hit 150 degrees in the near future. And another doctor was speaking of treating someone who fell on a sidewalk, and the sidewalk temperature was so hot that he was actually Burned, and required burn treatment. And that made me even wonder about doing something simple, like taking your dog for a walk, and the dog’s feet becoming burned or the dog simply ran away from the walkway because it was simply too hot.

And then the waterways around the Florida coastline rose above 100 degrees. So, what does that do to the sea life?

And all of the predictions suggest that these seemingly drastic daily temperatures were actually cooler than we may ever see again during this season.  From the New York Times:

“Last month, the planet experienced its hottest June since records began in 1850. July 6 was its hottest day. And the odds are rising that 2023 will end up displacing 2016 as the hottest year. At the moment, the eight warmest years on the books are the past eight.

“The extreme weather which has affected many millions of people in July is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” Petteri Taalas, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, said in a statement. “The need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is more urgent than ever before.”

The world has entered what forecasters warn could be a multiyear period of exceptional warmth, one in which the warming effects of humankind’s continuing emissions of heat-trapping gases are compounded by El Niño, the recurring climate pattern typically associated with hotter conditions in many regions.”

So, Climate Change is here. The Climate HAS CHANGED. It is no longer arguable.

But then what do I read? Well, the Republican Party is not so sure. Yep, that’s right. In the middle of a catastrophic global climate crisis, the republicans seem to be imagining that Biden’s Impeachment would easily Trump Climate Change. Yeah, why would we wish to actually do anything to defer the worst effects of climate change? Well, for one thing, then we would have to acknowledge we were wrong and Climate Change is real. And republicans no longer do that—acknowledge errors.  No, but my next guess is that, for their next move, they will acknowledge Climate Change, but blame it all on Biden and the Dems.  Yeah, if only Joe had been paying attention when the scientists told him that industrial carbon emissions were a major cause of Climate Change.  But instead, Joe was going full time on Trump, and inventing stories about him, and so was way too busy to devote any energy to Climate Change.  So, it’s all Joe Biden’s fault.

And I sit here watching this growing crisis as I continue aging out of existence. Yeah, at 88, I watch all this with even more sense of terror than were I only thinking of my own age-related demise.  Lots of stuff goes on in your head when you suddenly enter your late 80s, 88 in my case.  Seems as though every time I open a news article, it begins telling me about someone I know who has just passed into the Netherland.  Sometimes it’s even broader. Carol and I watch routinely reruns of a British show called “Are You Being Served?” It ran many years ago and the series was on the air between 1972 and 1985. Turns out everyone on the show has now passed away. And at least some on the show were “young” (now to be fair, they were “young” sometime in the 1972-1985 period). Still, we continue to watch this program, where everyone has now passed on. Hmmm, that’s weird.

So this Death thing seems all around us.  When I was young, people periodically passed on. But then after a period of sadness, that was over and we went back to normal life.  Now, we seem surrounded. And added to that perception, this Climate thing has begun weighing in. It’s now a new element. And storms are more ominous, because they bring more destruction, real or imagined with them.  A whole new era seems upon us, and that new era is not promising, for our entire globe.

So, republican stupidity is just one added element in this new doomsland era we seem to have entered.  To be fair, given my mindset about the Climate Doomsday, republicans seem almost irrelevant. Like they really have passed on and are merely one more poisonous element in our threatened globe.

I wish I could break out of this messy thinking process. But instead, daily, it grows worse. Mainly because I’m old and will likely soon die anyway. But also, even if I escape for a while, it merely gives me more time to watch the gradual disintegration of our entire planet. And republicans are simply bit players in their own doomsday play, a charade of life’s evil playmakers. So play on all you idiot republicans. You are playing to an audience of idiot-malenfants, who will soon disappear from the planet anyway. 

---

 [Ma1]

Traveling is Good

Ahhh, the 4^th, the 4^th. Thinking back, on July 4^th, 1955, we had been married for two days, and we were now aboard a flight on an airline now extinct. I thought it was World Airways, but I can no longer find a reference to such a name. At any rate, it was a prop passenger plane that flew us from LaGuardia Airport in New York to San Francisco in 14 hours. I think it stopped 6 times. We left New York around Midnight, arriving in San Francisco in midafternoon. Say 1-2 PM California time.  Ah, those were the days.  There were of course no jet planes in that era. So most flights were longish.  This flight was Carol and my first time aboard an airline. Oh I had traveled from coast to coast several times.  For my first, I took a Greyhound bus that took me 4 days. But I traveled several times thereafter. But we students devised a slightly different method of traveling from coast to coast. We would find someone who wanted a car driven across the country. Sometimes it was another student who wanted some help driving and we would drive with two people in the front seats and one snoozing on the back seat. Once, we drove the whole way (3000 odd miles) in 79 hours.

So that plane trip was a bit of a stunner. Imagine being aboard a vehicle that left the ground and moved in the open air.  Wow, what a concept.  But just when you imagine that a 14 hour flight was really long, I have to remember our flight from LA to Sydney in 2001, which was just over 15 hours, not counting the six hours it took to get to LA from the East Coast.

Oh, traveling has been such fun.  And I need to remember my childhood, where, until I was 18, I had never traveled more than about ten miles from my home base in New York City.  We didn’t even own a car, nor did so many of our New York City counterparts.  Who needed a car when you never went anywhere beyond a couple of miles away from home base, and buses and subways were so readily available? Our standard Sunday afternoon travels were a subway from Second Avenue Manhattan to Jerome Avenue, the Bronx.  Cars?? I think not.

But that flight with the two of us from LaGuardia to San Francisco began our life pattern of serious traveling by car, plane or train.  I am always a bit surprised at how we turned into world travelers, given our stunted early travel days, where neither of us had ever traveled more than maybe ten miles from our home base.

At the end of our first year of marriage, we were faced with the chore of moving to the LA region, since my first job out of Stanford was as a flight test engineer with the Firestone Guided Missile Division in downtown LA. We moved to Garden Grove, a little place 26 miles away from my work in LA.  And during that first year, we didn’t move about much, as we explored the smoggy world of the LA region. Oddly, we lived there six months before we discovered that, when the smog cleared a bit, you could actually see mountains.  I think that might be when we decided that perhaps the LA region was not really where we would choose to work and play for our new married lives.  And so we moved back up to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I began working with Lockheed on the Polaris missile.

Now there, we had some family. My mom lived there and my sis and her family.  So, we only traveled a bit in California, mainly to places like Lake Tahoe. But then, after six years at Lockheed, I joined a consulting firm doing planning work for the Air Force to help plan and control the development of the Minuteman Missile. In that job I traveled extensively, while my wife and kids enjoyed life in downtown San Francisco. So, I got to see much of the country, while my family stayed home. But then my boss called to ask me whether I would be interested in moving to a new gig in New Delhi, India. We had just received a contract to send four consultants to India, to work with the Planning Commission on planning new large public sector projects. I asked my wife and she said, “sure, why not?”

And so our serious traveling began in earnest. Through that opening, we traveled to India, but it was as though the world of global travel was now open. We visited over 30 countries. After we returned four years later, we traveled more about America.

And so what, right? Well, one of the things we have learned with all this traveling, is that folks are different everywhere you go, but also, they are the same. Human beings react in similar ways. Whether you are white or black, or any of the other colors we humans don, we remain humans. Depending on how we are raised and with whom we interact, we may react to stimuli differently. I guess that’s how racists arrive at that dreadful status. But not everyone is a racist as it turns out.  We all need certain stimuli, we all need to eat and we all need to consume water. We also, all need love and friendship. It all depends on what we focus on and when that determines how we look to other folks.  But key here is that the people who live in China, or Bolivia, or Thailand or Wyoming all have similar needs. Arguably, they could all be great friends, if they would only let that happen.

So try folks. Try love before hate. It works better for all of us.

Organized Fakery

 The world in which we live is chockerblock filled with Fake News. Surely, Fox, The Faux News Network leads the parade, although they are not alone, as the right wing in America (what used to be known as the Republican Party) is filling up our Land with Fake News outlets, for example One America News, an extreme right wing news outlet founded by Robert Herring of Herring Network, Inc. And the list goes on and on.

But, to be fair, if you aren’t extreme right wing and still want news that is unbiased, you need not listen to/watch Fox and the other dregs like OAN.  You can listen to your news on PBS, or even MSNBC or the other main network news outlets. They may lean one way or another depending on which host they are using at the moment, but still they are not bouncing off the walls of right wing lies, like Fox. I still have difficulty understanding why any thinking person listens to/watches Fox News.  Regardless of whether you voted for Trump or Biden, would you not prefer gaining facts through your news outlets, rather than flat-out lies? Rupert Murdoch has so corrupted our landscape that he really should be forever banished from our Land, and from the Lands of any Nation that wishes to lead a relatively normal National viewpoint.   I mean, Oz, how can you stand that cretin? And he pretends to Australian Nationhood. How did you allow that to happen?

But we go on, day by day. And we listen to Donald Trump and his Fascist political Party, promoted by the likes of Fox News.  And we laugh when Stephen Colbert uses some element of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to make believe that Donald Trump is even more outrageously stupid (but funny) than we might have imagined.  But his AI fakeries are promoted simply as laugh pieces, known to be only partly true (he really did say that he could go out on 5^th Avenue, shoot someone and his poll numbers would rise).

But in conversations with a number of people, who are more steeped in the world of AI than me (because they use it to create AI pieces for TV) I am beginning to wonder, in dismay, just when it will be when we (I) can no longer tell when some news piece produced using AI is real or a fake. And when we can no longer tell, what will we do then?

Just imagine a Donald Trump (or a Marjorie Taylor Greene) who has a fully competent AI system at their disposal.  And they then begin producing fake news elements and finding ways to slip them into all the various news outlets.  Now if such things came into real news outlets like PBS, or CBS, or MSNBC, would we be able to tell whether what we were watching was real or fake?  Now, to be fair, if the source were known to be Donald, or MTG, then we would likely dismiss it. But supposing the source was unknown? And the item showed a Democratic President, Kamala Harris for instance, saying or doing something awful or simply compromising to our future? What then?

I am told that this kind of dystopian future is now within our grasp. It is not off 50-100 years in the future, but more like 5 years. And are we ready for such a future? Hmmm, No. See, in olden days, before our government was made by the right wing to seem completely unreliable, we might have actually asked our government to help, maybe to weigh in on such Fake News events and declare them Fake.  But now, with Fox News and others of that ilk working daily to destroy our government’s credibility, what will we do?

This possibility has me truly baffled, mainly because then, we mighty simply not know any longer whether something we were watching was real or a fake. So maybe, we will need to produce some substitute for video news. But, right now, I cannot imagine what that might be.  Everything is LIVE? Seems extreme, but might be necessary.  Could we trust anyone any longer? If not, how do we operate a Nation-State? See, sometimes it seems as though the right wing does not want to operate a Nation State, but I think that is not the case. I think they only wish to operate a Nation-State if it is their own Nation-State, i.e., one operated by Donald Trump, or others of his ilk. But the rest of us would obviously not trust such a State. So, what then? Two states??? A Red State of TrumpLand and a Blue state of ordinary, mostly honest people. To be preceded by a Civil War? Well, we hope not, but that is the direction in which we are being dragged by our right wing citizenry. So, let us hope for a saner, more civilized solution. Voting?? Well, will voting somehow avoid/correct the AI nightmare future scenarios?  Who knows? Not even the Shadow knows.