DoctorD's Observations

Today is my wife's birthday

I guess it isn't proper to tell the exact year, which probably I did already.  But, while old enough to be considered "old," she is in spectacular health.  And she hasn't packed on the pounds, as so many people (including me) do as they age.

My son and I took her to dinner tonight, and offered her cards.  I had a couple of gifts, and flowers.  But, still, I am feeling that she isn't getting as good treatment as she deserves.  One of her (adult) children is angry at her, for no good reason; they haven't been on speaking terms for a couple of months.

It is a shame and a waste.  Good people merit more affection and respect.  In the department of being a wife, mother, and grandmother, my wife is surely among the very best.  And, if she hadn't come along and become a part of my life when she did, it is hard for me to think I would have survived.

Rain, rain, go away

It was storming last night and this morning, when my wife went out to an early mass.  She came back quite shaken, and concerned about the well-being of "all those babies," which is to say especially her grandchildren.  She raised five children herself; it was by no means an easy responsibility; and even at her age (her 71st birthday is this weekend) she has not abandoned concern for the well-being of children.

I mostly think about myself and about her.  She thinks about the babies.  She is one of the best possible mothers and grandmothers.

She called the nearest to check on him.  He, it turned out, thought that the big rain was "funny."

Dauphin Island

Dauphin Island, Alabama, a barrier island near Mobile, has been in the news quite a bit because it is one of the first places where oil from the BP/Halliburton offshore drilling platform explosion has been coming ashore.  Local businesses have already suffered quite a bit, which isn't surprising. 

What impresses me at the moment is that we have been there.

We came down from Mobile, the place where Mardi Gras actually started, and then drove along the thin island to the west end.  Next we went out to Fort Gaines, felt the wind and watched the waves.  But we couldn't take the ferry boat from the east end to Fort Morgan and Gulf Shores, I think the water wasn't deep enough or something like that, so we returned by the same route that we came, going on to Pensacola, where we had a fine hamburger at the Blue Dot.

So we have been there.  And, actually, there isn't almost anywhere in the U.S. where we haven't been on one or another of our many cross-country road trips.

When Obama goes someplace to talk about the loss of jobs or other economic events, quite regularly, we have been there.  When there is some kind of terrible storm (a hurricane, a tornado) usually it is at some place we have traveled through.  Or, when there is a major flood.  (Including, right now, the start of a flood of oil).

The multiple tornados described in tonight's news were near Oklahoma City.  We've been there.  We got engaged there, at the Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma State Fair.

So, anyhow, I have a pretty good idea of what the entire nation looks like, from up fairly close, not on an interstate but on a two-lane.  

Roads we have traveled for great distances include: the National Road, the Lincoln Highway, US 6, US 12, US 14, US 2, the Oregon Trail, old US 66, US 41, Alligator Alley, the Dixie Highway, the Mormon Trail, the route of Lewis and Clark.  U.S. 30, U.S. 20.  That isn't all, but it is some of them.  US 1 (down to Key West) and A1A.  Of course most of the especially scenic routes like Skyline Drive, the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Going to the Sun road.  Plus some of the interstates when we had to, I-65 among them, but we have tried to avoid that.

Eastbound 12 in South Dakota

For enormous numbers of people, viewing the matter practically and having little time, the U.S. is a country to fly over or hurry through.  But not for me.  This is a country to see and treasure, to try to comprehend, to try to understand its history and its beauty, the way people live right now.  

 So see America First.  This land is your land, this land is my land!

Lots of it is likely to be gone before too long.  Quite a lot is already.

Are we are too smart for our own good?

We know how to drill deep into the ocean, but we don't know how to fix the wells when something goes wrong.

We know how to utilize nuclear materials in weapons and power plants, but we don't know what to do with the waste.

Actually, we know how to make all kinds of stuff--plastic bottles, computers, etc.--and don't know what to do with the waste.

We know how to utilize coal, oil, and other fossil fuels, but we don't know what to do when burning so much of them changes the atmosphere.

We know how to develop broadcast and computer networks, but we don't know how to keep them from spreading misinformation, lies, and extremist propaganda.

We know how to make huge, fast airplanes--but we don't know how to keep passengers from hijacking them or attempting to blow them up.

We know how to make very advanced medical equipment and perform extremely complex surgeries, but we don't know how to assure even basic medical care to everyone, or to keep costs from spiraling out of control.

We know how to put a man on the moon--but we don't know how to assure that every man or woman who wants a job has one.

We are smart.  But either we aren't smart enough--or else we are too smart for our own good.

Kagan

I assume that the Republican spin machine is racing to invent all kinds of reasons to oppose Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court, a woman who is the former dean of the Harvard Law School.

None, of course, have to have any truth whatever.  A short phrase taken out of context is good enough.

I assume that the goal is simply to make mincemeat out of her, or indeed any other nominee, not because of actually opposing any stand she has ever taken, but simply to block an appointment made by this president.  About 100 others are being held up, too, way more than at this time during the Bush Administration.

It is the same tactic as opposing every legislative or policy initiative that comes out of the White House--not out of real, honest objections, but simply to block, hopefully embarrass, the president, to make him seem ineffectual.  Republicans famously have opposed policy initiatives that they favored before they won presidential support.  

It is hard for me to understand why high-quality people would go through the political gauntlet like that.  But I guess we should be glad that some are willing to.

We shall see.  Perhaps I am too cynical.  That would be nice.

Mother's day

Mother's day for us had very good parts and a painful one.  Seems like that is how most holidays have become.

Proud to be a tea-bagger (video)

I'm amused to see first the hypocrisy, having been condemned as an irretrievable leftie for using the tea-bagger term. Obviously, it has been used a lot and is embraced by many adherents of the teaparty movement.

But secondly, that at the end of the video, they are seeming going after Saul Alinksky!  What's up with that?  Alinksy is long dead.  And besides, the tea-bagging movement follows many of his precepts.  They ought to embrace, not criticize, him.

Here is one interpretation of part of Alinsky's advice, taken from a very critical right-wing essay on the web:

Teaching hatred for the normal majority is the key to power for radicals. But Alinsky taught that you can't easily hate millions of people. To do that effectively you need a one-person scapegoat to focus all your hatred on. "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." 

Isn't that exactly what the teabagging Republicans do?  They try to focus hatred on a one-person scapegoat, Barack Obama, who had nothing at all to do with any of the problems that trouble them.  And to a lesser extent also on Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House.  What has she ever done wrong?  Seems like a perfectly nice lady to me, and a fine leader of a difficult institution.

Today's hyper-crash

At one point today, the stock market (the Dow) was down nearly 1,000 points.  Some very major league companies were suddenly valued at zero.  A couple of others were valued at more than the entire U.S. economy (I believe that's right).

This happened in a matter of a few minutes:

DOW-JONES-INDEX-large300

In economic theory, decisions are "rational."  In economic theory, stocks are traded at a price that is somewhere very near their "actual value," at an appropriate price.

That is a lot of hooey, and it is so to anyone who pays even the slightest attention.  The only stock I actually watch is Apple's, and it is clear that its variations don't have much connection to how well the company has been doing, or what its prospects seem to be.  Other factors are more influential.  It is as if measuring the amount of rain in India could tell us how many traffic accidents there will be at a given street-corner in Australia.  Everything is interconnected, but in weird and senseless ways.

And, we the regular people (Americans and other) are crazy that we entrust our financial and economic fate to these Wall Street miscreants, who are massively overpaid for their disservice; that they are the ones who essentially determine whether or not we have a job, if we can keep our house, if we can pay health care costs, if we can retire.

They are nuts, but we are nuts to let them run amok.  We are nuts to believe anything, anything at all, said by their advocates and supporters, who are (as it happens) mostly Republicans.  We should join together burn our copies of the Wall Street Journal, and we should close the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, where this kind of "rational" BS was created and taught, spreading wildly like a killer virus, infecting the minds of people who ought, really ought, to know better, if only they opened their eyes.

So, exactly why did this happen?  No one knows for sure.  Actually--as the last big financial crash shows, the one from which we are all still suffering, the one the lead to the defeat of the incumbent Republicans and that has been a heavy noose around the neck of the incoming Democrat--no one knows much of anything about how the market actually operates.  But the theory at the moment is that perhaps someone simply pushed the wrong button, triggering a huge "sell" order, and then in micro-seconds, computers took over and dumped everything, taking the entire global economy into a black hole for a half-hour or so.

Perhaps it was a typo.

There is a book with the title, I believe, The Quants, which is about the mathematization and automatization of finance and economics.  Probably I have it on a shelf here somewhere.  I will have to hunt for it.

Meanwhile, be aware that playing the odds on Wall Street is a lot worse bet than at Las Vegas.  And consider that, if this is the way they handle money, New York hasn't got long to be regarded as the financial capital of the world.

Maybe the Chinese could do a better job.  They seem to be doing better at everything lately.  Except making movies like Avatar, designing computers like Apple, or singing songs like Willie Nelson.

Basics

1)  There are too many of us.

2)  We are using too much energy and other natural resources.

3)  Often, we don't get along with each other very well.

NOTE:  This is a work in progress.  Subject to revision and addition.

A government of laws

I keep thinking about this point, I guess because it seems to me so fundamental, and also because so often the so-called "Republicans" don't want to abide by the law.  They don't honor it.  That comes up today I guess because many of their leaders object to having an American citizen accused of attempting a crime in this country be "read his Miranda rights," which have been specified by the U.S. Supreme Court as assured by the Constitution.  You've seen it on TV:  a suspect is told that things that say can be used against them in a court of law, that they are entitled to a lawyer, etc.  We Americans put a lot of stock in not convicting the innocent, which of course has not be a universal value throughout global history.  In China even today, criminal defendants have essentially no rights.

But this isn't the only case.  Right-wingers recognize that abortion has been held to be a legal procedure, but regard the murder of doctors that provide that service to be perfectly justified.  They know that It is illegal to bomb a federal building (as in Oklahoma City, or as foreign terrorists have attempted to do) but they (or at least some of them celebrate the murders.  In the case of the recent health care reform statute, their goal was to disrupt the proceedings, and now their goal is to get the new law overturned.  They are all for illegal methods of torture; the list could be a long one. 

So, I would argue, that the first characteristic of an American is that they believe in equality, that "all men are created equal."  But what does that mean?  That the have the same ability to play basketball?  No.

It means that all men and women are equal in the eyes and mind of God, but to put it in secular terms, everyone is equal before the law.  We have a government of laws, not of men.  Even the highest rulers are subject to the law.

In a typical Republican misunderstanding, Richard Nixon (a criminal who was driven from office) claimed that "when the president does it it means that it is not illegal."  This is of course the very definition of tyranny.  

This idea was dusted off and employed again during the George W. Bush Administration, perhaps especially by Vice President Dick Cheney and of course the various lackeys in the Bush Justice Department.  

That has been a fairly common view throughout history; I am sure Nero must have said that same thing.  But it isn't the American way, it isn't the American tradition.  People who think or argue that, and especially those who behave that way, are "unAmerican."

Where is the HUAC when we need it?