Look! My Lyft Driver Gave Me a Mask!

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My Lyft driver, a nice Hispanic lady, had a very limited supply of masks and she offered me one.  At first I refused but she wanted me to have it.  I gave her a big tip but that isnt what matters.  What matters is that people help each other in a time of crisis.  

Unlike my friend David in LA who goes out of his way to infect people.

Me at Pharmacy in Montecito

Returning the Gift of Nastiness in the Pandemic

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Its not everyday that you get to return the favor of nastiness to someone who has attacked you in the past and for no good reason.  I am sentimental about my old friends, yes even my old lovers. Friends on Facebook for several years she suddently attacked me for no reason.  So here we go, dear, love you!  Text follows.

Since you went out of my way to be as nasty as you could be to me for no good reason, and when I was just being cordial and pleasant, I wanted to return the favor. I hope that you or someone you love is damaged permanently in this pandemic. With luck it can be someone who dies because you infected them so you can live with the guilt, assuming you are capable of experiencing guilt.  Please dont ever talk to me again.

End of text.  That was fun!

Getting A Message to Richard Edlund, Somehow

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I just want to get a message to Richard Edlund, ASC, somehow.  I know he is on the Board of Governors of the Academy.  Anyway I want to make sure and hope that he is taking care of himself in these challenging times.  And to thank him for all the times he has been very kind to me.  He probably doesnt even notice, he is probably kind to everyone.  But it really has meant a lot to me over the years.

The Whole World is My Garden

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For those who use Voltaire's garden as a way of excusing their failure to stand up for what is right, my response is that my garden is the whole world.  If you fail to stand up for what is right you will not be forgiven by history.

When is a Nazi a Nazi?

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When is a Nazi a Nazi?  Do you have to wait until they kill 6 million innocent people?  Or is it sufficient for them to kill as many of their scapegoat ethnic and other group(s) from "shithole" countries as they can get their hands on?

Was Adolf Hitler a Nazi before the extermination camps?  Of course he was.  For those who say he was not, you are just excusing your moral laziness.  You should not have to wait for all the murders to happen before you should be willing to stand up and oppose them.

You can send me all the holocaust porn you want, and it doesnt change a thing.  Your sophistry does not excuse you from failing to oppose these murders.  You are complicit with their crimes.

Fat and Unhappy

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Letter to my friend Andy about being overweight.

The situation about losing weight seems to be somewhat complicated. It doesnt seem to be so much about the "healthiness" of the food I eat, although that is part of it, but is probably about the amount/calories thereof. I have been cooking at home every meal for about 15 years. I am a lacto vegetarian (which means I eat cheese and butter, but avoid eggs and of course meat of any type). But I have decades of bad food habits, big meals, and medicating anxiety with food. I have a sweet tooth. My metabolism has changed with age (my father warned me of this) and my exercise per day has gone way down. If you subscribe to the calorie theory of weight loss (and I only sortof do), then you realize to your horror that one scone may be the total calories permissible in a day. To that add the interesting evidence of calorie restriction and life extension, and you realize that you (or me, rather) is / are fucked. I have a variety of different cost/quality equations that I use to control my expenditures and I am most excellently knowledgable about reducing cost in this area, but sadly that would reduce fresh fruits and vegetables and increase carbohydrates. Bad. So I increase costs and eat healthy home made soups, stews and salads. Non fat dressing. Olive oil when an oil is used. Try to keep a lid on the amount of cheese, use half the butter a recipe calls for. On the other hand, life is short, and food is a big part of the pleasure I am permitted to get in this disgusting world we live in. With the orange moron as president and my life and career a ruin, who would begrudge me a half a stick of butter to make blueberry ersatz scones once in a while? Is that so much to ask from life?

So I am fat and unhappy and that is not the way its supposed to be.

Add to that the local culture where all the people here look like they just stepped out of a Nike catalog (and possibly did) and the situation is worse. And everyone here eats kale and my feeling is that the only people who are qualified to eat kale are people from the South, probably black, and they use a lot of tasty pig fat when they do so, and cook the shit out of the stuff. I dont go with this healthy kale thing.

So Now We Wait

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So now we wait. Is it the apocalypse or just another example of the dysfunction and stupidity of our government? I have no idea. But presumably if the hammer comes down it comes down in 1-3 weeks. I am guessing we will only know it is bad if we start hearing stories of hospitals filling up. Or not filling up, as the weeks go by. Idiots.

Jim Houston, RIP, Damn It

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Jim Houston died unexpectedly last Thursday at the age of 61.  Cause of death is still a little uncertain but it is probably from complications from a stroke.  He was young, had years more left to him, but he was not taking care of his health and that is a proximate cause.

I will elaborate this post with pictures and so forth as I get them.

At some point there will be a memorial service out here, but in the time being, he will be buried in Pennsylvania.

Jim and I talked perhaps once / week and I am really annoyed. 

Scenario for the Failure of Recent Democratic Coalition

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So this is my argument for why the most recent democratic coalition will fragment after the next election.

Lets run through a few scenarios. In all scenarios, assume that there is some percentage of democrats who we might call Sanders/Warren supporters and that Biden is nominated, as he certainly will be. I also assume that the most important factor holding the Democratic coalition together for this next election is fear of a Trump 2nd term. In the first scenario, Trump defeats Biden through a combination of obvious vote repression and russian interference or possibly just obvious judicial interference as we saw in 2000 and really in all elections since then by the failure of the judiciary to correct obvious abuses. The usual finger pointing results, with the so called mainstream democrats blaming the sanders/warren faction for the loss. But the sanders/warren faction will say you guys really didnt give us anything with Biden, just like you didnt with Clinton, and your only hold on us is that you claim we have to stick together to win elections. Well, screw that. And the Democratis party becomes essentially two parties that never talk to each other (through a process I could not begin to predict). It goes without saying that the conversion of this country into a right wing dictatorship will be completed trivially in the second Trump administration, but that is a different topic, and besides, its pretty close already. In scenario two, Biden wins and utterly fails to address the progressive agenda except through obviously insincere and insufficient acts, utterly failing in all regards, including even to reverse trump exec orders. He does do a few things, like maybe something at least superficially to help his major blocks such as unions and the african american vote, but very little to help the sanders/warren crowd. To be fair, since Biden is just a stooge of the right wing neoliberal faction just like Obama, it would be wrong for him to do anything else. But he is certainly better than Trump. But in that scenario the sanders/warren crowd will also say "what the fuck is this", and walk. Again, two democratic parties, unable to unite beyond certain very specific elections, the Democrats refuse to reform (the DNC has been incredibly bad in the last two years) and thats the end of that. The Republicans romp through the next 2-4 presidential elections because their minority, a solid 35-45 percent, always unite behind whatever traitor or idiot they nominate, and they win. This may or may not apply to the individual states, each of which has its own situation.

Now maybe Biden will pull the party together, unlike Clinton who failed utterly at that, because after all at this point even a pretense of democracy will be gone and people may unite because the situation is so dire, but by then it will be too late anyway, probably.

So that is why I think the most recent incarnation of the democratic coalition will pretty much cease to exist after the next election.

As always, I tend to be too optimistic, but whatever.

The Long Term Effects of COVID-19 (part 1)

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There are many issues regarding COVID-19 and whether it will affect America in the long run. There is a clear answer from American history because there are some very interesting case studies we can review including the Civil War, the Pandemic of 1918, the Depression, World War II and Vietnam. I am going to focus here on the Depression but the others would each have their own story to tell. The Depression is particularly noteworthy because it was a prolonged disaster, it affected everybody, and I have some personal stake in the matter.

The short answer is this: the effects of the Depression were profound for those who lived through it, but tended to go away over time as new people entered the world who had not directly experienced it. Until today, its most notable expression are some fascinating art and infrastructure projects that have remained behind to baffle, uplift and mystify us.

My father told me stories about his time during the depression.  It was very hard to relate to, and ultimately I found them colorful but not necessarily applicable to my experience.  In that, I was wrong, because when I realized that I had, unwittingly, taken chances with my own economic survival because I thought I was, somehow, exempt, I blamed myself even more.  Why?  Because I had been warned and I had not listened.

Ultimately, everything about the Depression was ignored by our various right wing governments as unions were attacked and financial institutions and procedures deregulated.  The common people may have an excuse for this, but our elites never.

And yet, now and then one sees something like the Hoover Dam, or these fabulous remanants of the WPA and one has to wonder, how is it that our corrupt and crass government(s) went out of their way to sponsor such interesting art and architecture?