Trump on Nukes

President-elect Donald Trump tweeted this statement:

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

America’s nuclear weapons stockpile is aging, and aging nukes must be refurbished from time to time. It’s called stockpile management. One of the top responsibilities of the Department of Energy is maintaining the nuclear stockpile.

So who did Trump pick to head the Department of Energy? None other than Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, who has declared that he wants to dismantle the Department of Energy. Okay everybody, all together now: “WTF?”  Does anyone see a problem here?

It’s called having your cake and eating it, too. It’s classic Trump.

Trump wants to increase spending on the military while also cutting taxes and reducing the national debt. That is a formula that has been proven to not work. But it’s an easy sell to Congress. Every House member wants more Federal government money spent in his district; every senator wants more money spent in his state; every taxpayer loves a tax cut. Meanwhile, the ostriches in Congress have their heads planted firmly in the sand and they’re all chanting, “We see nothing.”

Miner

The song of the day is Paper Moon from the album Tuanaki by folk-rock, family band Miner. The album title, Tuanaki, is the name of a vanished group of inhabited islets, once part of the Cook Islands.

 

The Electoral College

Republicans are still gloating over Trump’s election victory. It’s getting tiresome. And they’re forgetting something. Trump won the election but not the vote. Clinton collected 2.5 million more votes than Trump, yet lost the election.The same thing happened in 2000 thanks to the Electoral College.

Conservatives say the Electoral College is a good thing. They say the Founding Fathers did not want a system in which states with big urban populations would dominate mostly-rural states. However, I suspect this explanation was invented ex post facto as a justification for continuing to have an Electoral College. There were no big cities in America in those long-ago days. Ninety-five percent of America’s population lived on farms. In 1790, the population of New York City was 33,131. Why would the Founding Fathers be concerned about something that might happen someday in their future? They would more likely reason that if a situation arose that voters found objectionable, then we would simply amend the Constitution. And we have amended it. In fact, the US constitution has 27 amendments.

But let’s assume my conservative friends are correct and the justification for the Electoral College is to equalize political power between urban and rural populations. The logic that follows is this: dominance of urban populations over rural populations is bad, but dominance of rural populations over larger urban populations is okay. Excuse me, but I really don’t see the logic there. One could argue whether the Electoral College system is better for the country than the doctrine of “one person, one vote.” All I am saying is the Electoral College system is inherently undemocratic. Your vote should count as much as my vote. It’s that simple.

Today, with computers and instantaneous, long-distance communication, the public will know the outcome of an election within hours of the polls closing. Newscasters will provide us with the number of votes cast for each candidate as well as the number of electoral votes each candidate will win. If every elector always votes according to the election results, then the Electoral College accomplishes nothing. It is nothing more than a rubber stamp on an already-known result. In short, there would be no point in having an Electoral College.

But we have one, so there must be a valid reason for it even in today’s computerized, digitized America. And there is – and it’s the same reason the Founding Fathers created an Electoral College system for electing the president. The one and only justification for having an Electoral College is, and always has been, to void an election. The electors can throw out the results of an election and elect someone else. In short, the Electoral College is a circuit-breaker between an ambitious, ego-driven demagogue elected by a duped and manipulated public, and the office of the president. It’s what the framers of the Constitution, who were a little afraid of a direct vote for president, wanted. The difficult questions – to vote the will of the people or to void the election – must be left to the electors and their consciences.

Of course, the “ambitious, ego-driven demagogue” I cite is purely hypothetical. I really can’t think of any presidential aspirant who has immense ambition coupled with a colossal ego. Nope, can’t think of a single one.

A December Day

Today is a Friday. It is late afternoon.  The temperature is 28°F after being 12° last night. A thick overcast obscures the sun, making for a cold, gray day. The weather forecast calls for ice pellets this evening. Ice pellets begin their existence as snowflakes at high altitude. The snowflakes fall into a layer of warm air where they turn into raindrops. The raindrops fall into very cold air near the ground and turn into ice pellets. A tenth of an inch of ice doesn’t sound like much until you try to walk or drive on it. Then, ice is very treacherous.

One winter I was driving to work, and I knew there was “black ice” on my street, so I drove very slowly as I approached an intersection with a stop sign. In fact, my car was going no faster than a person could walk. About 100 feet from the stop sign, I began tapping my brake pedal. Nothing happened, except every time I tapped the brake pedal, my car seemed to go faster. Seemingly in slow motion, my car leisurely slid past the stop sign and stopped in the middle of the intersection.

Another winter, I was driving my Jeep on a four lane divided highway through a rural part of Virginia. The highway was divided by a raised earthen median. There had been an ice storm and bare trees beside the highway glistened with ice, and some trees had branches broken off by the weight of the ice. There were just two vehicles within sight on the highway: my Jeep and a nondescript white sedan ahead of me in my lane. We were driving at the speed limit: 55 mph. The road was covered with snow, but I was pretty sure that under that snow there lurked a coating of ice on the highway. We came upon a tree limb lying beside the road – not unusual, but this limb was lying partly in the right lane.  The driver of the sedan eased his car into the left lane to go past it, as did I. As the sedan driver tried to return to the right lane, his car began to fishtail. The rear of the car went one way, then the other, in increasingly large deviations. Then the car spun around in front of me and veered off the road toward the hilly median. The car hit the median and flipped into the air and came down on its roof on the edge of the road. Though I had been right behind him, I was able to stop my Jeep before it reached the accident, and I pulled off the road and onto the right shoulder. The driver of the sedan crawled out of his car through the side window and walked over to my Jeep. He appeared unhurt.

I put the window down. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. But then he said, “I think I’ll go into the woods and lie down.” And so he did. I guess he was still some way from “okay.”

Today is also December 16. Is winter here yet? That depends on your definition of winter. For astronomers and scientists, astronomical winter this year begins on December 21. But for weather forecasters, meteorological winter always begins on December 1 – in the northern hemisphere. Down under in the southern hemisphere, the Aussies and Kiwis have their seasons in the wrong months. Their summer is December to February and their winter is June to August. Their autumn is March to May, and their spring is September to November. If you think having all their seasons in the wrong months is weird, know also that they insist on driving on the wrong side of the road. It’s like they live in some bizarre “opposite-world.” Maybe that comes from them being upside down all the time. Anyway, they seem to like it that way.

On Sunday – two days from now – the high temperature is supposed to be 70° with a chance of rain. Sub-freezing one day, balmy two days later: it’s December in Virginia.

Caveman

The song of the day is The State of Mind from the 2016 album Otero War by Brooklyn band Caveman.

Fake News

Whenever I watched pre-election Trump campaign rallies, I always wondered about the people shouting “Lock her up,” referring to Hillary Clinton. Clinton has never been charged with, much less convicted of, any criminal act. So, on what basis would she be locked up? Would there be an arrest warrant issued by a judge, followed by a trial, followed by inevitable appeals? Or would we just grab her off the street and send her to Sing Sing?

But recently, given the publicity about fake news websites, I began to understand the “lock her up” people. There is probably more fake news on the internet (at least about the Clintons) than real news, and much of it consists of imaginary crimes and made-up conspiracies.

How gullible do you have to be to believe this insane nonsense? I’m surprised that someone hasn’t taken an AR-15 to one of Clinton’s concocted crime scenes to investigate it himself. Oh, wait – someone has.

Before the bizarre “pizzagate” story, Clinton was accused of murdering people – lots of people. Then the ante was upped, and she was accused of eating the people she killed. Then the ante was upped again, and it wasn’t “people,” it was children. Then the story morphed into a child sex ring operated by Clinton and her campaign manager in tunnels under a pizza restaurant. Could the story get any weirder? I guess it could, if Clinton is exposed as a space alien or a robot from the future. And I expect somebody to start that story, because clearly people will believe anything. The faculty of common sense and the ability to stay grounded in reality seem unattainable for a large segment of the populace. Facts don’t matter these days. In the online conspiracy world, reality is what you believe it is, and facts be damned.

The truth about Hillary Clinton is that she is a space Nazi from a secret Nazi base hidden on the far side of the Moon. You read it here first.

The Bovine Emission Limitation

Sometimes I encounter a news headline that makes me think, “I’m living in an Alternate Universe!”

For example, California recently passed legislation to regulate cow farts. You see, cow farts contain methane, and methane is a greenhouse gas, and releasing greenhouse gases increases global warming, and global warming is bad. Therefore, by airtight, geometric logic, there can be only one conclusion: cow farts must be stopped.

If you find this news to be bizarre and unlikely, go to your favorite search engine and search for California regulates cow farts. Here is a sampling of headlines:

From the U.K.’s Daily Record: Cow fart crackdown in California creates a stink as rebel farmers let rip.

From Ohio’s Country Journal: Hot air experts: California politicians legislate a cap (or cork?) on cow farts.

The Wall Street Journal talks about California’s Cow Police, while The Moderate Voice calls the cow police The Fart Patrol of California.

Wired asks How Can California Cut Methane Emissions if Cows Keep Cutting the Cheese?

That is an excellent question. Meanwhile, I wonder if I’ll be able to get back to my Universe.

The End of Writing

Earlier today, in the small, insomnia-riddled hours that often hit in the middle of the night, I left myself a note containing an idea for a blog post. (I didn’t write the note; I merely picked up my phone, punched an icon, and spoke the note.)

I quickly forgot what I put into the note. I didn’t recall it until I read the note many hours later. The note said, “Soon the ability to read and write will be archaic.”

It’s a rare school these days that teaches cursive writing. Once upon a time, and not that long ago, all children had to learn cursive. Enter the computer age. Computer keyboards use block lettering. Virtual keyboards on phones and tablets use block lettering. All electronic devices, including computers and phones, display text as block lettering. Cursive was invented so that people could write faster. But no one writes any longer; today’s communication is by email and text message and social media. There is no need for cursive, so it has gone the way of the horse and buggy.

Progress is exponential. The more the world changes, the faster the changes come at us. Whereas yesterday’s communication usually consisted of pages of handwriting, today’s communication is likely to contain photos and even videos. Progress builds on itself. Innovation builds on itself until it becomes synergistic, a blend of humanity and technology. We no longer have to type instructions into a machine – we can simply talk to the machine.

When all we have to do is talk to a machine, why learn to write? The day is approaching when learning to write will be a task without a purpose. And if you cannot write, then you will be ill-equipped to read. But no matter – text to speech is already old hat. Our machines will listen to us and they will talk to us. They’ll be very smart machines. They’ll know us better than we know ourselves. They will learn our innermost secrets and our every desire and whim. They’ll be our confidantes and best friends.

Maybe I’m overstating the imminent death of the written word in order to make a point about the things we may lose by rushing with reckless haste into a technological future. If the day does come in which the majority of people become so comfortable talking and listening to machines that they no longer feel the need for written words, it will be a sad day for humanity. For as Carl Sagan observed, “A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

TV Dinner

I was eating a frozen entrée – what in Olden Days was called a TV dinner – and I couldn’t help wonder, “What ingredient do they put into these dinners to make them all taste the same?”

Because they do. Taste the same, that is. And not in a good way.

Now I’m aware that a steak fajita dinner tastes different from a meatloaf and mashed potatoes dinner. And yet, there’s an aftertaste from each that is disgustingly similar and makes one swear to never eat another TV dinner – excuse me, I meant to say frozen entrée.

Once, many yarns ago when I was a teenager, a neighbor who managed a frozen dinner factory took me to his factory and gave me a tour. At the end of the tour, he and I went to his office and he commanded a worker bee to bring us a plate of fried chicken, which was used in one variety of dinner (I mean, entrée) that the factory produced. The fried chicken was delicious. I didn’t taste a hint of TV-dinner in that fried chicken. But freeze it and then heat it up, and you’ve got a different animal.

Maybe the secret ingredient is sprayed onto the food just before it goes into the box. Whatever it is, all the TV dinner companies use it. Dang it! I mean frozen entrée companies. I’ll never get the hang of living in the 21st century.

Ignorance Is Bliss

I’m still getting emails telling me how great a president Trump will be. I hope they’re right. I don’t agree with much Trump says he will do, but I certainly don’t want to see our president fail. I don’t want inflation to get out of control. I don’t want to see rampant unemployment. I don’t want our food prices to increase by fifty percent. And yet, to be honest, there is something I don’t quite get.

If you were boarding a jet airliner, you wouldn’t want someone who had never flown a plane to be your pilot. If you were preparing for surgery, you wouldn’t want someone who had never gone to medical school and had no experience as a surgeon to operate on you.

If you needed an electrician, you wouldn’t hire someone who had no experience with electricity and wiring. If you needed a plumber, you wouldn’t hire someone who had never seen the inside of a plumbing supply store.

In fact, I can’t think of any field of endeavor in which complete ignorance of the job is considered an advantage. But the American public has decided that doesn’t apply to politics. Apparently, the less you know about that job, the more effective you will be when you get the job.

I don’t believe it. But we will see.

The Hamilton Incident

President-elect Donald Trump is notoriously thin-skinned. This is not a newly discovered personality trait that I am only now revealing. His inability to handle criticism was one of the major knocks against him during the run-up to the election. So the Hamilton Incident comes as no surprise.

Trump’s pick for vice president, Mike Pence, went to a Broadway theater to watch the play Hamilton: An American Musical. As the play ended, the actor who played Aaron Burr, Brandon Victor Dixon, thanked Pence for attending and said, “We hope you will hear us out.”

As Pence was leaving the auditorium, Dixon continued, “We, sir — we — are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents, or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights. We truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.”

The audience broke out in enthusiastic applause and cheers.

This pissed Trump off to no end, and he fired off several tweets stating that the cast of Hamilton had harassed Pence, had been rude to Pence, and owed Pence an apology.

Now, maybe they do, and maybe it’s called free speech. But I don’t think it’s about Pence at all. I think Trump took the incident as a personal criticism. The man that he, Donald Trump, had personally selected to be vice president, and by association Trump himself, had been implored to govern with better behavior than Trump had demonstrated during the long election race.

If being addressed at the end of a Broadway play is the worst thing that befalls Trump or Pence during the Trump presidency, I would call his presidency golden.

But if Trump is truly upset over this very mild and polite exhibition of free speech – upset enough to spend any time at all with public criticism of the incident – upset enough to publicly demand an apology from the “offending” actor – then Trump has, without any doubt, chosen the wrong job.

Boyce Avenue & Sarah Hyland

The song of the day is 2016's Closer by The Chainsmokers ft. Halsey (Ashley Nicolette Frangipane). This cover is performed by Boyce Avenue ft. Sarah Hyland. The original is here.

The First United States

I am not a history buff. In high school, history was my most hated class and one that I seldom made better than a ‘C’ grade. It was dry and boring and seemed at times to consist mainly of memorizing obscure facts about innumerable European wars. The Hundred Years’ War, the Thirteen Year’s War, the War of the Roses – on and on it went. Do you know how many named wars have occurred in European history? Me neither, but it’s a long list. TL;DR.

But there are some interesting facts about United States history that I would bet a lot of people don’t know. For example, before the present day United States came into existence, there was an earlier United States. It had its own constitution that was formally called The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.

The Articles of Confederation were written by a committee appointed by the Second Continental Congress. The colonies adopted the Articles of Confederation and the first United States was born. The Congress of the Confederation was formally called the United States in Congress Assembled. In 1781, John Hanson was elected the first President of the United States in Congress Assembled.

This first United States government didn’t last long. The confederation was too weak and cooperation between the states too limited to be useful, so after eight years a new constitution replaced the Articles of Confederation. Framers of the new constitution advocated a federal government, so they were called Federalists. The new Federal government would have more power than the old confederation, which delegated most power to the states.

After some wheeling-and-dealing to get the states on board – for example, Virginia demanded a Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution before the state would ratify the new Constitution – all thirteen colonies joined the new United States. The first president elected under the new United States Constitution was, as we all know, George Washington. But there are some historians who say the first president should be John Hanson. I guess it all depends on your point of view.

Therapy Dogs

My Roanoke amigo and fellow blogger CyberDave told me that he saw this tidbit of news on the TV: namely, some people were so distraught after seeing the election results that they had to seek out therapy dogs. My reaction was, “What?! Nah, you’re kidding me. That can’t be real.”

Turned out it actually was real, sorta-kinda. I don’t know how many people, if any, were treated by therapy dogs because of the election results, but ABC news aired a story called Therapy Dogs Help Stressed Voters in which they interview a woman who owns therapy dogs, and she said they could be very helpful to a person under stress, such as a distraught voter.

Then CyberDave said he was going to the Roanoke Wiener Stand in downtown Roanoke and order a couple of therapy dogs. I thought that was funny and reminded him that any dog can be a therapy dog. A chili dog, a slaw dog, a whatever dog, they can all put a warm glow into one’s tummy. That warm glow is called indigestion, but that’s another blog post.

CyberDave was as good as his word. In fact, he went to DQ and the Wiener Stand and ordered therapy dogs at both places. Predictably, his request was met with “Huh?” and “Stick to the menu.” Then he came home and blogged about it in considerably more detail than I would have thought possible. If you’re into therapy dogs – I mean wieners – I mean the hot dog kind of wiener, not the Huma Abedin’s husband kind, you can read all about it on CyberDave’s blog here. Be forewarned, though – by the time you reach the end of the post, you may find yourself drooling.

Fish of the Day

Did you know that the Hawaii state fish is the humuhumunukunukuapua’a? It’s pronounced “who-moo-who-moo-noo-koo-noo-koo-ah-pooah-ah.” I challenge anyone to say it ten times fast. And no, there is no reward if you manage to do it.

Humuhumunukunukuapua’a can attack when annoyed. There is no word on whether they are tasty, but I’ve never seen one on a menu so they probably aren’t.

In Virginia, where I live, the state fish is the brook trout. (Seven other states also claim the brook trout as their state fish.) I’ve read that brookies are tasty. There is even a website called Eat More Brook Trout.

But back to the humuhumunukunukuapua’a. For some reason it amuses me to write the name humuhumunukunukuapua’a.

Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. Ha-ha.
Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. Ha-ha-ha-ha.
Humuhumunukunukuapua’a. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Sorry.

If you can’t pronounce the name, just say humuhumu for short.

Humuhumunukunukuapua’a

I bet native Hawaiians made up a gibberish name when the first Europeans arrived on the islands. I can see it now … a European approaches a small huddle of native Hawaiians who also happen to enjoy playing jokes on naïve Europeans.

European guy: “What do you call that fish?”

Hawaiian guy thinks, winks at the other Hawaiians. “We call it … humuhumunukunukuapua’a.”

European guy: “Uh, thanks. I’d better write that down. Can you spell it?”

Hawaiian guy chokes back a giggle, says “Just like it sounds,” and walks away to grins from the other Hawaiians.

And just like that, the fish had a name.

Autonomous Trucks

I read in the news today that Uber-owned startup Otto has developed a self-driving semi-trailer. According to the news story, the self-driving semi-truck last week completed a 120-mile Budweiser beer delivery across Colorado without a driver behind the wheel. In fact, he was hanging out in the sleeper cabin of his tractor.

This video shows the Otto truck driving itself:

Otto self-driving truck

But Otto isn’t the only game in town. A quick internet search reveals that Mercedes has a self-driving truck. Daimler built the first self-driving truck to be licensed to use the public roads in Nevada. And three Wi-Fi-connected Daimler trucks drove convoy-style on a German highway and demonstrated a 7 percent reduction in fuel used.

Audi is developing an autonomous truck. Google was awarded a patent for a self-driving delivery truck.

When self-driving trucks become common (it will happen), what will truckers do? I mean, besides pushing the Start button.

Pentatonix

The song of the day is Hallelujah by Canadian recording artist Leonard Cohen and originally released on his 1984 album Various Positions. It is reprised here by a cappella group Pentatonix. A performance of the song by Cohen is here. Artists who have covered this song include John Cale, Jeff Buckley, Alexandra Burke, and Bon Jovi.

The Election

There has been so much complaining in the run-up to this election.

Trump complained that polls showing him lagging behind Clinton are rigged.

Trump complained that he is being smeared by false accounts of sexual assault, even though an audio recording exists of him bragging about getting away with sexual assault. His supporters contend that even if he is guilty, the issues are too important to worry about details such as decency, integrity, and morals. Unless we’re talking about Hillary Clinton’s decency, integrity, and morals, in which case those details are extremely important.

Trump complained that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim is paying women to make sexual assault accusations. A spokesman for Slim said, “He doesn't know him. He's never met him in any way. He doesn't know anything about his personal life and, to be honest, he doesn't care about his personal life. We never get involved in politics in Mexico, much less in the United States.”

Trump complained that the election will be rigged. Voting machines will be rigged. Millions of undocumented immigrants will throw the election.

Trump complained that the media is making him look bad by focusing too much on the outlandish things he says. Ironically, it was that media focus that propelled him to the nomination.

If Trump is correct and the election truly is rigged for Clinton, this blogger suggests Trump supporters stay home on Election Day. Because, why bother? The election is rigged. Remember?

The Debate

The second presidential debate between Trump and Clinton aired last night. I didn’t watch it. Presidential debates are for voters who are undecided. I am definitely not undecided. I know who I want to vote for. More accurately, I know who I want to vote against. I don’t have a most liked candidate in this election – I have a least disliked. It’s like choosing between two foods where one food makes you wretch and the other makes you heave; choose your poison and bon appétit. It’s like choosing between an ogre and a troll. Which do you want to encounter? “Neither,” most would say. But if you must choose one or the other, which is your favorite miscreant?

I recently read an article in The Guardian titled: News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier. I believe that is true. I don’t know anyone who is happier because they read the news. And I know for sure that the news media – a conglomeration of news sources competing for the most eyeballs – tend to promote the “flashiest” news rather than the most important news.

Watching more debates will not make you a better informed voter. Watching more debates will make you a more angry voter, a more disgusted voter, a more what-have-we-done-to-deserve-this voter. I’ve seen a lot of elections, but until now, I’ve never seen an election that I wished could have no winners. It’s reminiscent of Henry Kissinger’s alleged quip about the Iran-Iraq war – that it’s a pity they both can’t lose. Or, as my amigo CyberDave has often observed, “We’re either screwed or we’re really screwed.”

So, on election day, go to your polling place and choose your villain. Or perhaps I should say, choose your favorite deplorable. And may God bless America.

The Shires

The song of the day is Brave from the 2015 album Brave by British country music duo The Shires (Ben Earle and Crissie Rhodes).

Ten Things Not Likely To Be Heard At Walmart

Collected from Twitter, here’s a list of things you’re not likely to hear spoken at Walmart. No judgment. I buy from Walmart, too.

Wow look at all the cashiers at all the checkout stands.
— ScorpioMarine™ (@ScorpioMarine)

"Hi, I work here. May I help you?"
— Ecklebob Chiselfritz (@RotNScoundrel)

It's ok, Mom. You're right. I don't need this toy. I'll put it back.
— Fadedessence (@Fadedessence)

I'll be five minutes. I know what I want and I know where it is.
— Ben (@superherofbmx)

That bathroom is just absolutely spotless!
— Charleigh Kristin (@ChrliHarmonSter)

I feel completely safe in this parking lot.
— Jessica Wilder (@JessicaNexus)

Where can I find the Tolstoy section?
— Laurie Crosswell (@lauriecrosswell)

They put the Christmas stuff out way too late.
— Aaron Weinbaum (@aaronsayswhat1)

I don't want this box of ice cream sandwiches, guess I'll respectfully place them back in the freezer section.
— Diealated (@Diealated)

So after I graduated from Harvard Law...
— Chris O'Brien (@bigdweeb)

Instant Karma

This story isn’t about American college football. It’s about instant karma.

I turned on the TV and college football was in progress. Tennessee was playing Georgia. Tennessee was leading by 3 points, but Georgia had the ball at midfield. There were 19 seconds left in the game.

The Georgia center snapped the ball. The quarterback dropped back, then threw a long pass. The Georgia pass receiver caught the ball near the goal line and ran into the end zone for a score. Now Georgia was ahead and Georgia fans were jumping with joy. Tennessee fans were stunned. Many simply stood with their mouths open, hardly believing what they saw happen.

On the field, a celebrating Georgia player took off his helmet. That is a foul; players are not allowed to remove their helmets on the field of play. An official threw a flag. The celebration drew a 15 yard penalty that was enforced on the following play. This meant Georgia had to kick the ball to Tennessee while 15 yards closer to their own goal line than usual.

A Tennessee player caught the ball and returned it to the Georgia 43 yard line. Now there were just 4 seconds left in the game. Tennessee had time to run one play. Everyone on both teams knew what play was probably coming: a “Hail Mary” pass to the end zone. It was possible because of that 15 yard penalty. Without it, the distance to the goal line would have been too far for a “Hail Mary.”

The Tennessee center snapped the ball. The quarterback dropped back and, as expected, threw a long pass to the end zone. Though surrounded by Georgia players, the Tennessee pass receiver jumped high and caught the ball. With no time on the clock, Tennessee was back on top and now it was Georgia fans who were stunned and Tennessee fans who were jumping with joy.

Georgia lost because of a 15 yard penalty on a foul that a Georgia player intentionally committed, probably thinking it won’t matter with just seconds left in the game, so why not?

Now he knows why not: Karma – it always works, even in football.

Jevons’s Number

I had been reading about asymmetrical encryption using public-private key-pairs when I came across a quote that, it struck me, touched upon the essence of key-pairs.

William Stanley Jevons was a 19th century English economist and logician. In his book, A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy, published in 1862, he wrote:

"Can the reader say what two numbers multiplied together will produce the number 8616460799? I think it unlikely that anyone but myself will ever know."
-- William Stanley Jevons

“Unlikely”, Mr. Jevons? Do your two numbers happen to be 89681 and 96079? They must be, because they are the only whole numbers (other than the very obvious 1 and 8616460799) that, when multiplied, produce Jevons’s number.

I know because, just for grins, I wrote a small computer program to look for pairs of whole numbers that will produce Jevons’s number as their product. I may be – probably am – the first person to know the two numbers Jevons used. And now you know, too.

Never say never in a world that has fast computers.

Monitor Meaning

I was at my computer when my mind wandered and I began thinking about my monitor – a 23” flat screen with LED backlight. I thought about my previous monitor – a 19” flat screen with florescent tubes for backlight. I thought about the fact those tubes were called CCFLs (for cold-cathode florescent lamps). I thought about the fact that my 19” monitor had developed a problem and I had to set it aside. That’s when I bought my 23” monitor. (Later, I repaired the 19” unit, but that’s another story.) I thought about how my LED monitor was much thinner and ran cooler than my CCFL monitor. I reflected upon its reliability – my newer monitor has worked flawlessly every day while being powered up pretty much continuously for seven years. The images it displays are as precise and colorful now as they were the day I first turned it on.

Those were my thoughts when I heard a sound come from the monitor. It was a short and faint fffftt. At the same moment as the sound, the monitor’s screen brightened considerably. I thought perhaps my web browser had glitched, causing the screen to brighten. I closed and re-opened the browser, but the screen was still too bright. Black text was slightly washed out, appearing grayish.

Next, I thought perhaps the problem was with the operating system. So I restarted my computer. After restart, I opened my browser and checked: it was still too bright. Hmm: my computer is not the problem. I opened my monitor’s menu and checked the settings. The brightness was set to 100%. I cranked the brightness down to 70%. Still too bright. I set it to 60%. Still too bright. Finally, with the brightness at 50% the monitor looked “normal” again.

I knew with certainty I had never set the brightness to 100%. My monitor set itself to 100%. And it did so after seven years of working perfectly, at the very moment I was reflecting upon how reliable it had been. Random coincidence? Synchronicity? Is the Universe making a point? If so, is it that our thoughts influence reality? Maybe. Maybe not. All I know for sure is that it gave me enough material for a blog post.

Internet Logic

If you ask Google “How many calories are in a pastrami sandwich?”, this is Google’s answer:

“Calories In Pastrami Sandwich.
476 calories, 21g fat, 49g carbs, 24g protein, 6g fiber.

Calories In Pastrami Sandwich with Swiss Cheese on Rye.
243 calories, 3g fat, 13g carbs, 19g protein, 1g fiber.”

It appears that adding Swiss cheese to the sandwich will cut its calories in half and reduce fat from 21 to 3 grams and reduce carbs from 49 to 13 grams. Does this mean adding twice as much cheese to the sandwich will send its calorie count to zero? It sounds impossible, but as we all know, if it’s on the internet it has to be true.

# # #

I use a popular email client that is not made by Microsoft. It’s open-source and totally free. The people who maintain the browser’s code constantly say they want its users to send money to them to help them keep it free. They say this with no suggestion of irony.

# # #

In astronomy news:

“PGC 83677 is a lenticular, or lens-shaped, galaxy … located 300 light-years from Earth.”

It’s 300 light-years from Earth? That’s a neat trick, considering our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light-years across. If another galaxy was 300 light-years away, it would be inside our own galaxy. In fact, it would be in our own stellar neighborhood. In reality, PGC 83677 is 300 million light-years away. It’s the difference between saying the Sun is 93 million miles from Earth and saying the Sun is 93 miles from Earth.

I know: “Details, details.”

Trump’s Deplorables

Hillary Clinton said half of Donald Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables.” She said they were "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic."

And just like that, she lost the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic voting bloc. Can she really afford to write off these deplorables? In a close presidential race, it can’t hurt to have a few deplorables on your side.

Someone said Clinton’s description of Trump supporters as "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic" was actually a description of Donald Trump. But is that accurate?

Is Trump racist? At one of his rallies, Trump pointed to a black man and said, "Oh, look at my African-American over here. Look at him." Does that sound racist? He said “my African-American.” How can he be racist if he has his own African-American?

Is Trump sexist? Admittedly he has said some ugly things about women, such as Carly Fiorina couldn’t get votes because of her face, or when he called women “bimbos” and said breastfeeding was “disgusting”. There are too many insults for me to list here. However, if you’re interested, you can find a list of Trump’s insults to women on this page. It’s a long page.

Kirstie Engaged

Pentatonix member Kirstin Maldonado has gotten engaged to her boyfriend Jeremy Michael. This will surely destroy their relationship. They may as well break up now.

Look at what happened to Kaley Cuoco. She was dating Ryan Sweeting, and they seemed so much in love, when they married on Dec. 31, 2013. That marriage lasted 21 months.

I knew a couple who lived together for seven years. Finally, they decided to tie the knot, and they got married. Two weeks later they broke up and went their separate ways. The incident reminded me of an episode of Star Trek called Amok Time. In it, Mr. Spock said, “After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”

Good luck, Kirstie.

Starsailor

The song of the day is Tell Me It's Not Over from the 2009 album All the Plans by English band Starsailor.

Ice Cream

A couple of days ago, I was at the grocery store and I bought a tub of ice cream. I love ice cream, but I rarely buy it. By rarely, I mean maybe once a year. This is because I don’t want to weigh 400 pounds, which I seriously might hit if I allowed myself to eat as much ice cream as I’d like to eat.

When I was a kid, one could buy a pasteboard box of ice cream that held a full gallon of the icy goodness. Four quarts. Eight pints. Sixteen cups. I don’t know when that changed, but it did change. In my neck of the woods, one can no longer buy a gallon of ice cream. Today, it is sold in pasteboard tubs containing three quarts. Six pints. Twelve cups.

I admit that ice cream is a hopeless weakness of mine and I usually avoid it the way an ex-addict avoids heroin, and perhaps that biases my observations. But I contend that the new tubs contain four – not twelve – servings of ice cream. In fact, I further contend that those four servings are “girly” servings which equate to only two “manly” servings of ice cream. Oh sure, the container may say “12 servings” on its side, but that’s just marketing hype. If you’re an ice cream addict, you know full well that you’re lucky if a tub of ice cream lasts two days. In fact, it requires a great deal of willpower to make a tub stretch that long.

I bought the 3 quart tub of Cookies ‘n Cream on Sunday and threw the empty tub into the kitchen trash receptacle on Monday. Sayonara, two-serving tub. I foresee the day (which doubtless is fast approaching) when the largest container of ice cream you can buy is a single-serving tub. Sure, it may say “Family Size” on the tub, but we’ll all know that’s a lie.

The Hyland Anomaly

Sarah Hyland, an actress who plays Haley Dunphy on a sitcom titled Modern Family (a good show, IMHO, with good-to-excellent writing and acting) recently recounted on her Twitter account an experience she had. She awoke around 6:30 and saw daylight outside and assumed she had had a wonderful night’s sleep and now it was 6:30 in the morning. But as time passed it dawned (pun intended) on her that it might not be 6:30AM – might, in fact, be 6:30PM on the previous day. And, as it turned out, that is exactly what it was.

It’s disconcerting. I know because the very same thing happened to me, and it happened on the very same day that it happened to Hyland. I awoke, saw the sunshine, and thought, “It’s a beautiful, sunny morning!” I was also feeling just a bit proud of the fact that I had slept all night without having to resort to popping a sleeping pill or drinking alcohol to help me sleep.

Those thoughts didn’t last long. As soon as I walked into the living room, the wrongness of it hit me. The window blinds were open, and they’re never open when I get up in the morning. The “morning light” seemed odd, and though my still-sleepy brain didn’t know exactly why, the oddness assuredly was caused by the sunlight coming from the west instead of the east.

I walked to my computer (why that and not my phone?) and checked the time. PM! Damn it! All the things I thought I had sailed through overnight, like falling asleep so easily, sleeping through the night uninterrupted, waking up on a sunny morning ready for the new day, were all a fiction. None of them happened. Bummer!

When it comes to sleep, there is another kind of bummer that happens to me far more often. I go to bed at a reasonable time – say, 11PM – and fall asleep quickly. I awaken feeling like I’ve been asleep for hours. It’s dark inside and outside, but I’m wide awake feeling like I’ve slept for hours, so I’m sure it is close to the time I should get up. But then I look at the clock beside my bed and my hopes are dashed: it’s 1 AM. Morning is hours away. There’s nothing to do now but get out of bed, pour a drink, and type a blog post.

Sophie B Hawkins

The song of the day is As I Lay Me Down from the 1994 album Whaler by singer-songwriter Sophie B. Hawkins (Sophie Ballantine Hawkins).

Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash

The song of the day is Girl from the North Country from the 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan by singer, songwriter, artist, and writer Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman). Dylan re-recorded the song as a duet with Johnny Cash (J. R. Cash) in February 1969. That recording became the first track on Nashville Skyline, Dylan's ninth studio album. The song was used in the 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

Pixie Lott

The song of the day is Lay Me Down from the 2014 album Pixie Lott by English singer, songwriter, and actress Pixie Lott (Victoria Louise Lott).

We Are The Fallen

The song of the day is Without You from the 2010 album Tear the World Down by American-Irish gothic metal band We Are The Fallen with vocals by Irish singer, songwriter, and actress Carly Smithson.

The Trump Anomaly

For years, right wing and far right news media – and I’m thinking of Fox News, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Drudge Report, Worldnetdaily, and the like – have shouted from the rooftops, “The country is on fire! The country is burning down!” They did this to motivate their viewers and readers to vote for candidates favored by those media. For a while it worked. A substantial number of voters bought into the story that the country is on fire. Right wing and far right candidates were sent to Congress. But now, a tipping point has been reached. Rather than voting for another mainstream candidate, those voters have chosen another path. Those voters believe America’s problems are too dire to be put into the hands of another mainstream politician. Those voters have decided that only radical change can solve America’s problems. And Donald Trump is their radical.

Trump is clearly a loose cannon. But that is precisely why his followers love him. He speaks his mind, even when his mind changes 180 degrees from one day to the next. He’s politically-incorrect-on-steroids, which gives his followers permission to also be politically incorrect – as well as racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic. If America is a house on fire, Trump won’t try to put out the fire; Trump will fan the flames. Trump’s followers are convinced that America’s problems are too complex and too entrenched for ordinary solutions. They believe that the only way forward is to burn the house to the ground and build a new house.

Trump is not the man to honor inconvenient treaties nor tread lightly on the world stage. Being responsible hasn’t worked so let’s be irresponsible. Trump will be a man of action; he will build giant walls, use nuclear weapons on our enemies, and throw millions of people out of the country. He’s going to do all these horribly expensive things and more, while simultaneously giving the wealthiest Americans another tax cut and balancing the budget. He’s going to do things that clearly can’t be done – by an “ordinary” politician. But the Trump faithful are convinced that somehow he’ll pull it off. They know what the rest of us cannot fathom: that Trump must destroy America in order to save America.

There is a Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times.” If Trump is elected, Americans will learn what that means.

Al Stewart

The song of the day is Year of the Cat from the 1976 album Year of the Cat by British singer-songwriter Al Stewart (Alastair Ian Stewart). The cat is the fourth animal symbol in the 12-year cycle of the Vietnamese zodiac, replacing the rabbit in the Chinese zodiac.

Eleni Mandell

The song of the day is He Thinks He's In Love from the 2000 album Thrill by singer-songwriter Eleni Mandell.

Ed Harcourt

The song of the day is This One's For You from the 2004 album Strangers by English singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt (Edward Henry Richard Harcourt-Smith).

Windows 10 Third Try

If you are one of the many who chose NOT to update their Windows computer to Windows 10, let me describe a few things you may have missed, based on my own experience.

On the day that Windows 10 Update was released to the public – July 29, 2015, I updated my Windows 8.1 computer. There were bugs.

Music and videos had no sound. The computer could only produce Windows system sounds, and they went to my secondary monitor (my TV) despite the Sound applet showing that my primary monitor was selected.

Applications not compatible with Windows 10 had been removed. These included Windows calculator, a program seemingly so simple that one wonders how it could be incompatible with anything.

I couldn’t keep Firefox as my default browser; Windows 10 preferred the new Microsoft Edge. I could tell Windows that Firefox was my default browser, but Windows 10 simply ignored my instructions and used Edge.

I could have gone into debugging mode and tried to fix these problems. And maybe I would have fixed them, and maybe I would have made things worse. So I chose to roll-back my system to Windows 8.1. That was easy and quick and my computer issues were gone. I decided to give Microsoft six months to iron the bugs out of Windows 10 and I would try the installation again.

Six months later I did try again. The second update had a very different outcome compared to the first. This time, most of my Desktop icons – shortcuts, files, and folders went missing from the Desktop. My Desktop wallpaper image was also missing. When I checked my Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos, and Downloads folders, they were all empty. I went online to ask the question, “After Windows 10 update where are my documents?” I found many other users with the same problem. A Microsoft MVP explained that to get back the missing files I should go to the old Windows system, (in the folder “Windows.old”) and drill down to those folders (documents, etc.) and copy their contents over to the new Windows folders. But when I tried to do that, I found that all my old Windows folders were empty, too. So where were all my files?

Again, I rolled back to Windows 8.1 and got everything back. So far I was not impressed with Windows 10 but I was impressed with the roll-back feature. It had worked flawlessly, twice.

Time passed and the final day for the free update to Windows 10 arrived – July 29, 2016. Dare I tempt fate and try another update?

Call it scientific curiosity, call it “finishing-the-story”, call it crazy, but I decided to try the update one more time. I didn’t have a good feeling about it, but I had to do it.

I started the update process and it took an hour and 50 minutes to complete. When the computer rebooted for the final time, the Desktop looked promising. All my Desktop icons were there. My Desktop background image was there. During the final boot-up, I had noticed one glitch. I have a Reminder program that I wrote a few years ago, during the days of Vista. I wrote it to run on XP and anything newer. But on Windows 10 it gives an “Access Denied” error. I have another PC – a little notebook/tablet – that came with Windows 10 installed and it runs my Reminder program with no problem, so I knew this problem was with the Windows 10 update and not with my software.

There were other problems, of course. My computer is Bluetooth-capable, and sometimes that is a useful feature. But Windows 10 said my suite of Bluetooth software was incompatible with Windows 10.

Next, I tried to play a video. Media Player opened and began playing the video, but the sound was in Spanish. That isn’t unusual; many videos are bi-lingual. Ordinarily I would go to the System Tray and right click my a/v splitter (I use the Haali splitter) and select English and turn off subtitles. But the icon for the Haali splitter was not in the System Tray. I hunted around for it, but couldn’t find it. So I closed Media Player. The audio kept going. I opened the Task Manager, thinking that somehow Media Player was still running and I could close it from there, but Task Manager showed that Media Player was not running. I scrolled down to the background audio tasks (there were 4 of them) and closed all 4, but the sound kept going. It was as if there was a bit of code that hadn’t been cleaned up when I closed Media Player, and that bit of code was still running, orphaned from the rest of the system. The only way I could kill the audio was to restart my PC.

I was not interested in finding what other potholes the update had prepared for me. I wrote down my Windows 10 product key for the remote chance I needed to re-install Windows 10, and then I initiated a roll-back to Windows 8.1. The roll-back took 15 minutes and worked flawlessly. I had given Windows 10 three chances to show what it could do. Now, I was back in my comfort zone with a computer that just worked. I’ve no doubt there is a Windows 10 desktop computer in my future, but I’ll take my time getting there.

CO2 Solution

I read a story in the Washington Post with this headline:

“The controversial practice of storing carbon underground may be safer than we thought”

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and as such it would be preferable if we didn’t release it into the atmosphere. One way of getting rid of excess carbon dioxide (a.k.a. CO2, or more properly CO₂) is to store it underground.

Of course, many communities draw their municipal water from underground aquifers. If carbon dioxide finds its way into these aquifers, it’s entirely possible that it would convert their ordinary water into fizzy water. Perhaps one day in the near future, people will be able to open a faucet and fill a glass with seltzer.

But I wonder, what will it feel like to shower with seltzer? It might be refreshing, or it might tickle like crazy as the tiny bubbles explode against our skin. And how will our laundry fare after being washed in seltzer? Will it remove stains better than regular water? Believe it or not, this topic has been hotly debated for years. Scientists just don’t know.

And I just thought of this: what will seltzer water do to our plumbing? The carbonation makes the water slightly acidic. Will it corrode our pipes, Flint-style? When we’re using the porcelain facility, will the tiny bubbles make our derrières damp?

Clearly this area of research needs a lot more study, and if any government agencies are willing to fund me, I will volunteer to study the effects of using seltzer water in our homes. I should be able to do the study and hold the cost to no more than … let’s see, what does a fortnight in St. Lucia cost? I’ll have to get back to you on this. Meanwhile, just keep me in mind. Thanks so much.

Melano

The song of the day is On Fire by Norwegian DJ/Producer Melano (Farid Zangani). Said the musician, “With On Fire I wanted to create a drum and bass track with a really strong upbeat vibe. The vocals and the melody gave the track a summer-vibe that I was looking for.”

Let the Hijinks Begin

The RNC has just begun (and if you don’t know what the RNC is, well, welcome to America and send my regards to Antarctica). There will be days of demonizing Hillary Clinton, with Republican acolytes listening to their high priests with rapt attention, perhaps repeating their mantra, “Hillary is evil, Hillary is evil,” as speaker after speaker repeats the refrain at the lectern. (Yes, it’s called a lectern, not a podium – a podium is the small platform a speaker of short stature may stand on. Please, journalists, get it right!) Republican speakers will say silly things like, “Hillary is only running for President because she wants power.”

Well, of course she does. Anyone who runs for President of the United States wants power. Imagine a candidate saying, “I really don’t want to be President, but I owe it to my country to at least try to be the leader of the free world.” Does anyone think Donald Trump’s campaign isn’t running on ego?

The annoying thing about an acolyte, Republican or Democrat, is that no matter what facts you collect, no matter what evidence you compile, that shows – indeed, proves – their candidate is the wrong person for the job, acolytes will only worship their candidate more fervently. If it could be proven that Donald Trump is actually Satan with a comb-over, Republican acolytes would love him even more. They would be saying things like, “If anyone can get the job done, it’s Satan.” And, “Sure he’s got that whole Head-Demon-in-Hell thing going on, but nobody’s perfect.”

And, of course, the Democrat acolytes who love Hillary … wait a minute, do any Democrats really love Hillary Clinton? I’ve heard people say, “If the choice is between Hillary and Satan, I’ll have to vote for Satan, because Hillary would be worse.”

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that both candidates are the least popular in the history of the poll, with Trump viewed slightly more unfavorably than Clinton. Not surprisingly, the question I hear asked most often is, “How did we end up here?”

This week has the Donald Show. Next week will have the Hillary Show. Come November we will have the We’re So Screwed Show. Put a clothespin on your nose and vote. As my friend and fellow blogger CyberDave is wont to say, “Either we’re screwed, or we’re really screwed.” Your choice.

DNCE

The song of the day is 2015's Cake By The Ocean by pop rock band DNCE (Joe Jonas, Jack Lawless, Cole Whittle, and JinJoo Lee). The song is their debut single and peaked at 9 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Ruth B

The song of the day is 2015's Lost Boy, a piano ballad by Canadian singer-songwriter Ruth B (Ruth Berhe). Lost Boy is her debut single and is included on her debut EP, The Intro. The song was inspired by the play Peter Pan.

Lukas Graham

The song of the day is 7 Years from the 2015 album Lukas Graham (a.k.a. Blue Album) by Danish pop-soul band Lukas Graham with vocals by the band’s namesake, Danish singer-songwriter and actor Lukas Graham Forchhammer.

Sia

The song of the day is Cheap Thrills from the 2016 album This Is Acting by Australian singer-songwriter Sia (Sia Kate Isobelle Furler).  The female dancer is 13-year-old Maddie Ziegler, who also appeared in Sia’s music videos for Chandelier, Elastic Heart, and Big Girls Cry. A lyric video for Cheap Thrills can be found here.

Calvin Harris & Rihanna

The song of the day is This Is What You Came For by Scottish DJ, producer, singer, songwriter Calvin Harris (Adam Richard Wiles) with vocals by Barbadian singer-songwriter Rihanna.

Selena Gomez

The song of the day is Kill Em With Kindness from the 2015 album Revival by American actress and singer Selena Gomez (Selena Marie Gomez).

Guns and Statistics

One of my pro-gun friends sent me a link to a YouTube video about gun murders, voiced by Bill Whittle. The video was pro-gun and filled with snarky remarks about gun control and its proponents, such as: our country’s obsession with guns is “dangerous and frankly embarrassing when facing our European film critic friends.”

I’m not sure if he meant all Europeans are film critics, or all film critics are Europeans. At first I took it to mean that all gun control proponents are liberals and all liberals are film critics; ergo, all gun control proponents are film critics. But I may be over-thinking this. Perhaps he means only that film critics are liberals because to be a film critic you must be able to think. And also, you must be able to write grammatically correct sentences. Liberals can do that.

He also refers to “our moral betters on the left.” Though this sentence is intended to be snarky, it’s probably accurate. (I can be snarky, too.) He refers to the “left-wing weenie case for banning guns” – something that literally no one of any political stature has suggested. In fact, banning the sale and ownership of guns would be unconstitutional. Banning guns is a prevalent right-wing paranoia that is promoted, I suspect, to boost gun sales. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn the NRA is behind it.

Whittle makes his case against gun control by first pointing out that, according to Wikipedia, the US has the highest per capita gun ownership of any country. Then, he makes the claim that the US is not #1 in gun murders; the US is, he says, #111 in gun murders. The reason for our relatively low ranking could be because there is a long list of violent 3rd world countries ruled by drug cartels and warlords with private armies.

But even though I trusted Whittle to be straight with his viewers, I remember what Ronald Reagan said: trust but verify. So I went to Wikipedia and found their list of countries with firearm related deaths per 100,000 population per year. By default, countries in the table are sorted alphabetically by name, but clicking on a column header (such as Homicides) sorts the table by ascending values (one click) or descending values (two clicks) found in that column.

According to this Wikipedia article, the US is in 18th place for gun murders. A string of Central and South American countries (plus Swaziland, Philippines, and South Africa) is above us, with Honduras in the #1 position. If we sort on total gun deaths (including accidents and suicides) the US is in 11th place.

Whittle points out that Detroit, Michigan, with strict gun control laws, has a gun murder rate of 54.6 per hundred thousand compared to 10.54 for the entire US. He then points out that Plano, Texas, where apparently everyone is armed to the teeth with pistols, shotguns, and assault weapons as well as knives and pointy rocks (backup, one assumes), has a gun murder rate of only 0.4 per hundred thousand. He does this to make his point that gun control increases gun murders, whereas arming the populace like they’re going into combat reduces gun murders.

According to Whittle, Detroit’s gun control laws must be the problem, not the fact that Detroit’s per capita income ($14,717) is one third that of Plano ($40,920); not that Detroit’s inner city has collapsed as Detroit’s auto industry has dwindled; not that the inner city has few job opportunities and has neighborhoods where drug dealers and gang-bangers roam. Whittle must be very astute to figure out that gun control laws are the problem, because frankly, I would have naively bet all those other things were the problem.

Whittle ends with this mind-blowing conclusion, “maybe it’s not the guns … maybe it’s the people holding the guns.” No kidding, Whittle.

Of course it’s the people holding the guns! That’s why it’s a bad idea to sell guns to violent felons, dangerous lunatics, and people with restraining orders against them. That’s the whole reason for background checks.

Gun control proponents primarily want two things. The first is universal background checks at the point of transfer for every person buying any type of firearm. Currently only eight states and the District of Columbia require such checks. Two more states require such checks for handguns. The second thing gun control proponents want is a ban on the sale of weapons designed primarily to kill a large number of people quickly.

I’m a gun owner and I support the Second Amendment, as long as we sell reasonable firearms to responsible people. Society has to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere should be personal and family protection, hunting, and recreational and competition target shooting. No citizen needs weapons of war for any legitimate purpose.

Ambien

I’ve written previously about the sleep-inducing drug Ambien (also called Zolpidem) in a post called Losing My Mind. In that post I recounted how someone changed all my clocks from Daylight to Standard time one night while I was sleeping. The problem: I was the only person in my house, so who set the clocks back an hour? Apparently, I did, while I was asleep. I had taken Ambien that night.

The list of Ambien side effects is a long one. There have been reports of people taking Ambien and then sleep-walking, sleep-driving, and sleep-eating bizarre things like buttered cigarettes and whole eggs including the shell. People have driven cars into people, injuring or killing them, with no memory of it after taking Ambien. People have taken Ambien and gone to bed and gone to sleep, only to awaken in the morning to find themselves in jail with no memory of what they did.

But I forgot about that clock episode when I recently complained of poor sleep to my doctor and she prescribed Ambien. I took the Ambien for three and a half weeks before I decided to stop. I stopped for two reasons. First reason: I was beginning to feel bad during the day. At first I didn’t connect that with Ambien, but after two or three days I concluded it was daytime Ambien withdrawal. Second reason: I saw that things were happening in my house that I couldn’t remember doing. It was as if I was living with another person – a person I never saw but who left behind telltale signs of his presence. I could only conclude the obvious: the other person was my sleeping self, who was apparently getting out of bed during the night and doing who-knows-what.

The first night after I quit Ambien was miserable. Not only did I not sleep at all, I was very restless and kept getting up, watching TV, going back to bed, lying there a while, getting up, and so on, all night long. The next day I felt really bad withdrawal symptoms. I was anxious and shaky. I could hardly believe that three and a half weeks on Ambien would cause such distress.

The strange thing is that many years ago when I was having sleep problems, I took Ambien for a month or two with no ill effects. It put me to sleep, I slept all night, and I awoke refreshed. When I ran out of Ambien I didn’t renew the prescription – I just didn’t take any more Ambien and I had no withdrawal symptoms. Many people take Ambien without any problems, just as I once did. But for those unlucky enough to have problems, the problems can be major – life-changing, even. And not in a good way.

Anybody But

My friends on the right send me a constant stream of emails demonizing Hillary Clinton. Some say they would vote for Satan before they would vote for Hillary. That’s a bold statement. It makes me think: Really? Satan?

According to Christian belief, Satan wants to take our souls to Hell and let us burn there forever. I ask you, can Hillary do worse than that? I file this constant drubbing of Hillary in the Anybody But Hillary folder, which is a subfolder of the Anybody But folder.

Who else is in the Anybody But folder? Cable news channel CNN ran this headline recently: RNC delegates launch 'Anybody but Trump' drive. CNN isn’t alone in reporting these Republican anti-Trump movements. There is a lot of chatter on the internet that can be put into the Anybody But Trump folder.

So some voters say they would vote for Satan before Hillary, and some say they would vote for Satan before Trump. This makes me think that Satan isn’t getting the respect he warrants. Not worship, not devotion, not allegiance, but respect. Anything that can torture us until the end of time warrants our respect, lest we underestimate its power.

Voters are free to dislike a candidate for any number of reasons. However, to compare a presidential candidate with ultimate evil goes beyond the pale. 

You know who really belongs in the Anybody But folder? Satan. Literally, anybody would be far preferable.

The Chainsmokers ft Daya

The song of the day is 2016's Don't Let Me Down by American DJ duo The Chainsmokers (Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall) featuring vocals by American singer-songwriter Daya (Grace Martine Tandon).

Liberal Values

My friends on the right call me a liberal. I used to think I was fairly middle-of-the-road when it comes to political ideology. But now I think they’re right. As the two main political parties in America have moved farther apart in their opinions of our most pressing problems and what the appropriate solutions should be, I find myself increasingly in the liberal camp.

I’m liberal because I support liberal values. I refer to values like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, racial equality, and gender equality, among others. In fact, the values declared in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights are liberal values. Conservatives will probably claim that the rights declared in the Bill of Rights are conservative values, too. But let’s examine the historical record.

America’s “Founding Fathers” were the liberals of their day, and very progressive liberals at that. The values they put into the Constitution were revolutionary (pun intended). The conservatives of that day were called Royalists. Conservatives don’t like change, unless the change is “backward” to an earlier time, and the Royalists wanted no part of creating a new country. They liked things as they were and wanted to remain British subjects. In the end, liberal revolutionaries won the day and America was born.

America’s Civil War was a war between liberal progressives and militant conservatives as much as it was anything else. Liberal progressives wanted to abolish slavery, while militant conservatives were ready to fight to the death to defend the institution of slavery and maintain the status quo. In the end, liberals won the day, slavery was abolished, and the United States remained united.

Liberals didn’t push for segregation and Jim Crow laws in the South after the Civil War. That was done by conservatives who wanted the people they had subjugated during slavery to remain subjugated after slavery had been abolished. Southern conservatives desperately wanted nothing to change in the South. Although blacks were no longer slaves, many black sharecroppers remained in economic bondage to white landowners.

The battles to bring women the vote, to bring women and all races and ethnicities equal rights in job opportunities, education, and pay were battles brought by liberals in an attempt to bring America closer to the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence—that not just white men, but all people, are created equal, and all should have the same opportunities for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Liberals believe all people must be treated fairly and equally by government and ultimately by all of society, with the same rights and the same opportunities for education, jobs, and pay.

Today, the battle for LGBT rights is another liberal battle. As is often the case, the battle is about allowing a minority to have rights that conservatives don’t want to grant them. And just as conservatives lost the battle to remain British, and lost the battle to spread slavery, and lost the battle to deny women the vote, and lost the battle to deny civil rights to minorities, they are destined to lose the battle to deny the LGBT community the rights that others take for granted. The arc of progress is toward more equality, not less; toward more fairness, not less.

By making these observations, I do not intend to imply that liberals are always on the side of the angels, while conservatives are always wrong and somehow bad. In some instances, such as racial segregation, I think it is obvious that conservatives were on the wrong side of history. And I think liberals have sometimes been overly zealous in their pursuit of a more just society, to the point that one could make the observation, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Stated more directly, acts that were undertaken with the best intentions sometimes had unforeseen negative consequences.

There are many factors that make one a liberal or a conservative. For example, if you believe in science, then you probably believe man-made global warming is real, and that, in turn, will likely lead you to conclude that global warming is the biggest threat we face today. If you don’t believe in science (or you only believe the science you want to believe), then you may believe that man-made global warming is a hoax being perpetrated on the world by some nefarious conspiracy or foreign power, so you will likely conclude that something else—perhaps terrorism—is our greatest threat today. If you believe a wealthy country should provide a safety net for its poorest citizens, then you probably support some forms of welfare. If you believe that self-reliance is an important virtue, then you will likely be opposed to government programs that, in the worst case, perpetuate dependence on government assistance to the ultimate detriment of the individual.

As a liberal, I believe the political realities of 21st century America cannot always be aligned with the values of 18th century America. We live in a very different nation, and a very different world, than did our mostly agrarian, 18th century ancestors. Society evolves in order to meet evolving challenges. People today don’t want to just survive. People today want, and indeed need, a fair opportunity to achieve happiness, fulfilment, and a sense of security and well-being. They are demanding the opportunity to obtain those things. Ultimately, and however crooked the path, our society will evolve toward those solutions, liberal or conservative, that work best at meeting those needs. To that end, sooner or later everyone must take a stand; everyone must decide which solutions are likely to work best—not which solutions will best fit into an ideology learned by watching television and reading works of fiction.

Netsky

The song of the day is Your Way by Belgium musician and producer Netsky (Boris Daenen).

Lab Work

I have an appointment with one of my doctors in five weeks. So, his office assistant calls me to tell me I need to go to the hospital to get some lab work done. I ask her, “When should I go? Should I go a week before my appointment with the doctor? That would be in four weeks.” She says that will be okay. I ask her how to find the lab; she says go to Patient Registration.

A couple of days go by and the lab orders arrive in the mail. One of the orders says the test is scheduled for 6-7-16. Hmm, that’s not four weeks away, that’s just a few days away. Okay, 6-7-16 it is. I wonder, though, when is the lab open and can I make an appointment? I check the hospital’s website. It says the lab is open 24 hours a day. There’s a phone number listed for the lab, so I call them and ask when they are open. They tell me they’re open from 7 AM to 5 PM. Maybe they could mention that to the website designer. I ask how to get to the lab. They tell me to go to Patient Registration.

Now it’s Monday afternoon and my lab appointment is tomorrow. At 3 PM my phone rings and there’s a female voice. Someone from the lab is calling me to remind me of my appointment “tomorrow at 10AM.” I tell her, “I know my appointment is tomorrow, but no one told me it was at 10AM.” She says someone at my doctor’s office should have told me. I ask her how to get to the lab. She says go through the hospital’s front entrance, take an elevator to the second floor, turn right, and the lab is on the right. That’s pretty easy.

So as information trickles down from the medical establishment to me, the patient, my appointment time has gone from “anytime this month” to “this Tuesday” to “10 AM this Tuesday”, and my appointment location has gone from the hospital’s “front desk” to the actual lab location. None of this really surprises me. There is no evil intent to withhold information from me. Rather, a lot of people don’t know what they are supposed to know. It happens everywhere, I know, but it seems to happen a lot in the medical profession. Hospitals lose paperwork. Appointments are rescheduled and no one informs the patient. On and on it goes. One day the entire medical establishment will be replaced by robots. Maybe robots can get it right. And if not, well, they can’t do a lot worse.

Popeye Moment

I’ve just about reached my Popeye moment with phone scammers. (That’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more!) I get so many scammers calling me, so many robo-calls, that I’m at the point of just turning the ringer off on my VoIP phone, and leaving the mobile phone turned off unless I’m out and about.

I get multiple calls per day. Sometimes a recorded message starts playing. Sometimes a man with a foreign accent says he’s calling me from “tech support”. Sometimes, a recorded message claims that the the call is coming from “internal revenue services”. Services, plural! I’m sure the real Internal Revenue Service knows its own name. They say they’re going to file a lawsuit against me if I don’t call them back and pay them money. (By the way, the real IRS will never initiate contact with a phone call, nor will they ask for money in a phone call.)

Years ago I listed both my VoIP number and my mobile number with the National Do Not Call Registry but scammers don’t care. Phone scammers also don’t use their real phone numbers. They spoof a random phone number or use a number that belongs to a legitimate business.

Now that I think about it, I have another phone number – it’s a Google Voice number – that never receives calls from scammers. Not one scam phone call, not a single robo-call has come into that Google Voice number in all the years I’ve had the number. One more thing, and it’s an odd coincidence: Unlike the other two numbers, I have never submitted my Google Voice number to the National Do Not Call Registry. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

May Ends

It has been raining for days. And before that, it was raining for more days. On May 29, the local weather station announced that May, 2016, is the wettest May on record for central Virginia.

Today is Tuesday and it’s not raining, it’s just hot and humid, but the forecast calls for thunderstorms for tomorrow and every day until next Monday, so this afternoon I mowed the yard. The grass was a little wet, but I knew if I waited another six days to mow, I would have to hack my way through backyard jungle to get to my garage where my mower lives.

There was a time when I tried to try to keep my yard well manicured: grass cut short, sidewalk and curb edged, bushes trimmed. This year I reached my Popeye moment. To keep the city happy, I will mow 98% of my grass; the remaining hard-to-reach 2% can go crazy: grow tall, create seed heads, do anything it wants. The bushes in front of my house which, in the past I have always tried to keep neat and trim, are now shaggy, green monsters. When I look at them, my predominant feeling is not “they need trimming” but rather “they need to be cut down.”

Patches of my front lawn are dying off, leaving islands of green grass. This is the first year this has happened to my lawn, and it made me wonder, what’s up with my lawn? Why are there so many places where not just grass but weeds, too, cannot grow? Then one morning I happened to open my front window blinds in time to see my across-the-street neighbor letting her dog out of her house. My city has a leash-law, which means dogs must be kept in a fenced yard or on a leash. Nevertheless, people snub their noses at this law all the time. So the woman across the street lets her dog out, and the dog comes across the street to my yard, and it pees, and it trots back across the street and into her house. This must be a morning ritual for the dog. Lovely. No wonder my yard looks like it’s been bombed with grass-killer. I shake my head: people.

The woman who lives in the house beside my across-the-street neighbor owns cats. (Assuming it’s possible to own cats. My theory is you can’t own cats, you can only feed them.) Her cats are always in my yard. They poop in my yard, they pee in my yard. There is no leash law for cats. The city says “cats catch mice ergo, cats good.” I’ve seen her cats catch birds in my yard; I’ve seen her cats kill and eat squirrels in my yard. My front and back yards are decimated by voles – their tunnels are everywhere, and the tunnel entrances are big enough for a full-grown rattlesnake to slither through. I ask, where are the neighbor’s cats when you need them? They poop, they pee, they kill birds in my yard, but the voles destroying my yard get a free pass?! I shake my head: cats.

When half my lawn is gone, the two neighbors across the street, the one with the dog and the one with the cats, will probably complain to the city that I’m not keeping my yard up. They’ll want the city to make me do more to make my lawn pretty. People: they’ll piss on you and then get mad at you for smelling like pee.

Panic

Imagine this:

You’re walking beside a highway filled with fast-moving traffic when suddenly an oncoming automobile blows out a front tire and veers off the highway directly at you. You have a second or two to save yourself. There are a couple of ways you might conceivably respond.

Here is one way: you calmly observe the situation and think, “Okay, if that car continues on its current trajectory it is going to impact me and terminate my life. Logic tells me to jump out of its path. So I’ll do that.”

You might do that if you’re that cyborg guy in the movie Alien. But if you’re a human being, that is not what you will do. You will instantly jump, with adrenaline-fueled muscles, out of the path of the car. As the car whizzes past you, so close that it grazes your clothes, you will suddenly feel weak, your heart will be pounding, your hands will be shaking, and your legs will feel so weak you fear you will collapse. Those symptoms are the after-effects of the sudden rush of adrenaline through your body.

The near-death event produced in you what is customarily called a state of panic. Panic is your body’s way of going into emergency overdrive to save itself from an immediate, life-threatening situation. When panic strikes, your brain shuts down and your body simply reacts. You don’t think of what you’re going to do, you just do it. Our bodies evolved that response because when split-seconds count, your body doesn’t have time to wait for your brain to think things through and decide on the best course of action. The body has to react now. And because they’re not thinking, some panicked people do the wrong thing, they do the very thing they should not do, and it costs them their lives.

Maybe you’ve never experienced panic. If so, you’ve been blessed. Maybe you’ve experienced panic only a few times in your life. If so, you’re lucky.

For some unlucky people, panic strikes them hundreds or even thousands of times in their lives. It strikes them when they’re in their car, when they’re sitting in a restaurant, when they’re standing in the checkout line at the grocery store. It can strike them simply because they contemplate being in a situation where panic could strike.

I was one of those people. For me, attacks of panic started on a visit to New York City when I was about 22 years old. I vividly remember my first panic attack and I’ll remember it until I die. Having panic strike you over and over “out of the blue” is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. To say it is life-changing is an understatement. If you can’t get it under control, it closes so many doors to you. Some people become afraid to leave their home – they become house-bound.

Over the years, I tried many kinds of therapy and many medications. Nothing stopped the panic, but tranquilizers numbed me enough that I could endure the panic without fleeing the situation. But who wants to take tranquilizers every time they want to drive their car or buy a few items at the grocery store? The panic attacks were so hellish that for most of my life I simply said “No” to invitations, to social engagements, to going to all kinds of places and doing all kinds of activities. The things other people enjoyed and looked forward to doing were things I dreaded and only managed to endure.

If it sounds bad, wait – it gets worse. People who have panic attacks are ashamed of their panic. They don’t want to admit they have these attacks and try to appear as normal as possible to other people. They’ll put on a smile and act calm when their heart is pounding and they’re barely able to keep themselves composed. What they really want to do is jump up and run out of the room, or bail out of the car in the middle of a highway, or bridge, or at a red light. They want to abandon the restaurant meal they just ordered – throw some money on the table and leave. They desperately want to be anywhere else than where they are, and it takes all the willpower they can muster to remain where they are and appear normal.

Over the years, I added beta-blockers to the medications I could take for panic. If I had to go to the dentist, I would take some beta-blockers along with tranquilizers. If my job required me to speak in public, I’d take beta-blockers along with tranquilizers. They were not a cure, but they “got me through” what I had to do.

In recent years, I’ve taken a drug called an SSRI. The drug changes my brain chemistry and blocks panic attacks from occurring. It’s been a miracle drug for me, but it has negative side-effects that are also life-altering and which many people find unacceptable.

So am I cured? Yes and no. When I go into a situation that would formerly elicit a panic attack, I still get anxious. Sometimes I can even feel the very beginning of a panic attack, but then it stalls. It doesn’t progress to a full panic attack. That is certainly an improvement.

The downside is that decades of panic attacks, decades of developing avoidance behaviors, decades of automatically computing in my head the best strategy to avoid a situation likely to lead to panic – and having to do that multiple times per day, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, for the better part of a lifetime – leaves behind something like psychological scar tissue. Bend a sapling and keep it bent; it will still grow into a tree. But the tree will grow bent, and once grown, there’s no way to make it straight. It is what it is.

Since I’m turning philosophical, l will add that for a long time, I’ve felt that this is how my life was intended to be. Every strategy I tried, with the hope of making my life different, failed, as if destined to fail, as if there were no other way it could have turned out. Like a train on tracks, I seemed unable to steer my life by one degree right or left.

I’m not saying I understand why my life was what it was, and is what it is … but only that I feel it couldn’t have been otherwise.

And I feel like the people in my life, close friends present and past, are and were destined to be in my life. Every friend who was in my life for a time, and who is in my life no more, seems, on reflection, to have been exactly the right person to have in my life at that exact time in my life. I feel they were all there for a reason. And maybe, I was in their lives for a reason.

Shakespeare wrote,

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts …

At the risk of being a little theatrical and a tad off-topic, I understand the sense Shakespeare was trying to convey. When I was very young, I felt strongly that I had existed somewhere before my birth. At times I felt I could almost remember that place. So I had my entrance, and I played my part, and one day I’ll have my exit. Maybe then everything will make sense.

“Now we see through a glass, darkly.” So true, Paul, so true.