After watching and the thinking about the Jan 6 Committee hearing yesterday, I’m more impressed by the process than I was at the beginning. For Republicans, this is like a slow-moving train wreck in which they’re trapped. They’re sure it’s going to hurt; they might even die, and they can’t stop the action. They can only look on in horror. The people who supported Trump’s actions are getting a spotlight placed on them, and it isn’t pretty. And I don’t know what motivated Cassidy Hutchinson, but I’m thankful for it. Someone had to come forward, and she womanned-up.

Weather-wise, July is coming in hot in Louisville. Looks like we’ll have 90+ degrees and humidity in Louisville through at least my first week there. Good weather for tomatoes. And maybe I’ll sweat off a few pounds.

On the lighter side of things, we watched the first two episodes of FX’s The Old Man last night. Very, very good new series starring some great actors. Recommended. And I *love* those dogs.

McSweeney’s tells the sad and funny story of the fearful last bottle of ketchup left at Mar-a-Lago. Hilarious. I’ve always found humor in dark and hopeless realities – this fits. “We lost Daryl that day…”.

I’ve seen too many friends meet what we call “The Wall.” When he gets angry, we get scared. And he gets angry a lot. Sometimes he gets mad about people saying he should be in prison for trying to overthrow the government, sometimes because he can’t drink water from a glass, or sometimes because his hands are too tiny to cut his well-well-done steak. Sometimes he’s not even eating. One time he got back from trying to walk down a ramp and was so mad he ordered food just to throw it against a wall. We lost Darryl that day. Every time his ire matches the color of his makeup, another friend meets The Wall.

I’m the last bottle left. Surrounded by plastic brothers and sisters who no longer are willing to risk their own safety to protect me. I keep telling them there’s this poem: “First they came for the mustard, and I did not speak out — because I was not mustard.” They don’t care. Most of them can’t read. I asked one if it supported the peaceful pouring of condiments, and it said, “I plead the fifth.” I’m alone here.

It’s just a little over a week until my visit to Imaginarium. It should be fun being surrounded by writers, filmmakers and fellow geeks for a couple of days. I’m not doing any creative writing lately – too much paid consulting work – but I’m hoping this visit to the other side gets me going again. And i just noticed that the venue, a Holiday Inn out on the east side of Louisville, is right next to Cask, a most excellent brunch spot. I figure that’s how I’ll begin a day or two at the conference.

Here’s some fun video of the ever-cringeworthy Lauren Boebert lecturing a receptive group on how the church is supposed to lead the government, and how she’s tired of this stupid separation of church and state junk. It’s hard for me to believe that there are people who think this way, but…there they are. You couldn’t make this shit up.

As the US moves ever closer to becoming a theocracy, I’ve been thinking about where I’d like to live. My first choice is The Culture, a post-scarcity galactic society in which the irrational human animal is governed managed kept from doing most stupid things by a benevolent federation of all-powerful AI starships. When I write it like that, it sounds dumb. But Ian M. Banks could make it sound wonderful. I sure miss that guy.

Great news! I received this message today, and our financial future is now assured:

Hello,

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$758.7million Dollars on 28th August 2021. I am granting 3 individuals
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What a lovely person she must be. So generous.

More Louisville news. A two-year-old girl from Crestwood has become the youngest Mensa member ever. That’s very cool…I hope she does great things in life. The story is behind the Courier-Journal’s online paywall, so I can’t link to it.

Just waiting for this next SCOTUS boot to drop. Here’s the tally:

• Remove women’s rights to control their body….check
• Remove several separations of church and state….check
• Remove Federal authority to regulate corporations’ tendency to pollute air and water…check
• Remove states’ ability to control gun culture…check

That’s a pretty good month’s work, SCOTUS. Nicely done. Now please go back to whatever demonic nth-circle-of-hell dimension you’re from and leave us alone for a while.

Yes, the images of young men praying together after a football game are inspiring. It’s good to have them participate in a peaceful, collaborative meditation on life and the game. No argument there.

But the real test of this decision will be if a Muslim coach gathers players to lay down a prayer rug, face east, bow down and pray to Allah. If that is also protected and accepted, then the Court’s latest decision has some logic. I hope someone tests that theory soon…

The coach is in a position of power. He or she can have great impact on the players, and can not-so-subtly pressure the players into following his/her lead along with the rest of the team. That’s kind of the definition of being a coach – you teach and influence. But what about the Muslim kid whose parents don’t want him joining in a Christian prayer? Or the atheist kid? And again, what about a Hebrew coach who wants to lead the team in a piyyut – a prayer chant? Will the WASPy parents respect that coach’s right? Based on my experience in football America, I don’ think so.

Well, I’m not happy about this. Not a fan of Sapporo, and I’ve always liked Stone’s IPAs. So much for San Diego being a craft beer leader.

This Onion headline isn’t far from true: “Supreme Court Votes 5-4 To Reclassify Women As Service Animals“.

Very interesting perspective here.

The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.

Today my brother and sister-in-law fly off to a new life two thousand miles away. They quit their jobs, sold their house, sold their cars, packed/shipped their stuff and today fly from San Diego to their new location in Louisville KY. Costs of housing and living are the big reasons – they’re joining the thousands of people each month leaving California. We’ll miss seeing them in Socal, but we’ll see them in KY.

Meanwhile, the Roe v Wade demise is starting to sink in with folks. I hope that people realize that this is just the first step in the conservative/evangelical push to make sure that every person in the US abides by their rules. That’s the whole problem with this – it’s OK to be a white evangelical and have specific, strict beliefs and practices. Good for you; I’m happy for you. Or an Orthodox Jew. Or a Buddhist. But when you decide to impose your belief system on me, it’s not OK. Particularly if your belief system includes taking control of my (your) body, in any circumstance.

Every woman in America, every gay person in America, every non-white person in America, make no mistake – they’re coming for you and your rights. So get out there and vote.

Travel day today, not much time to write. We *do* have a problem to solve once we get home – turns out our well isn’t working, so we have to figure out why and fix it. No water in Socal – that seems about right.

OK, this has a lot of creepy use cases. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to hear my dead friends and relatives talk to me via Alexa.

The Supreme Demonic Court is at it again this morning. They’ve struck down New York’s law requiring licenses for concealed handgun carry. <Sigh.> Archdemon Justice Alito mused about the rights of law-abiding citizens wishing to carry a weapon on the NY subway to protect themselves. Absolutely, I want to carry a gun to protect myself on public transportation (NOT). Welcome back to the 1850s, I suppose.

Alright, call me sexist, but this is just wrong. Natalie Portman wielding Thor’s hammer. So what the heck is Thor using as a weapon? Thor should stay Thor, and Mjolnir is his alone. I didn’t even like it when Captain America picked up the hammer in a previous movie.

This is the trouble with endless movies featuring the same characters…the Hollywood geeks feel the need to muck with the canon. Asshats.

The Hell’s Kitchen visit last night was good. Small-ish restaurant, inside a casino. Service was excellent, food was excellent, not a lot of menu choices, and it was rather expensive. When I look at it overall, it seems designed to maximize profit. I mean sure, all restaurants want to make a profit, but every little touch here was something that enhanced profitability. No bread served. All menu items in a category (starters, salads, main courses) approximately the same (rather high) price. Small portions for the salads and starters. One dessert choice. Wine prices at about 3X retail. And I’m betting young, just-starting-out cooks and chefs who aren’t as expensive as more experienced staff. Chef Gordon Ramsay has designed a money-making machine. All that said, it was a really nice meal.

News came out yesterday that Sen. Ron Johnson of WI tried to hand VP Pence a false slate of electors only minutes before the official vote counting. I find this particularly egregious – pretty much direct treason. He should be in jail, this minute, if it’s true. Hell, based on what I’ve read of Johnson he should be in jail on general principles. These guys are so used to committing crimes in plain sight, they think they can gaslight everyone and just move on. Here’s what Heather Cox Richardson reported yesterday:

Striding quickly past reporters today, Johnson told CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju that he had “no idea” who asked him to share the fake electors with Pence. He said he had “no involvement” in the attempt to provide fake electors to overturn the legitimate outcome of the 2020 election and claimed he didn’t know who handed his office the envelope that was supposed to go to Pence. It was, he said, “some staff intern” who handed another staff member the envelope. When asked if he would try to find out, he said, “No. No, because there’s no conspiracy here. This is a complete non-story, guys. Complete non-story.”

Complete non-story, huh? Not for me, and I hope not for many others. These assholes committed crimes trying to keep their crime boss Trump in power. They need to pay.

In other news, evangelicals have daddy issues. They just want a strong male authority figure to take care of them. Poor snowflakes.

It’s the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. We happen to be in a beautiful place for this year’s longest day, in the mountains above Gardnerville NV. K’s sister and husband have a palatial home tucked away in the shadow of Job’s Peak, and the views from here are stunning. Here’s a picture from the main room.

The big event for today is dinner at Hell’s Kitchen Lake Tahoe. Should be interesting.

Meanwhile, so much for separation of church and state. The conservative SCOTUS lives up to expectations – Supreme Court says Maine cannot exclude religious schools from tuition assistance programs. We’re on a collision course with a theocracy, and I don’t think folks will like it once it’s here. Take a look at Pakistan or Iran for that future.

Made the mistake of looking at the stock market indexes today – ouch! Stocks are down about 18% in the last six months. That’s ugly news for us old retired folks.

What really worries me is that it’ll take at least a year to reverse some of the underlying causes of inflation and the market’s lack of optimism – oil supplies, the Ukraine war, the supply chain shitshow, airline capacity versus demand, the ongoing litigation of Trump and 2020, etc. This stuff doesn’t change fast, unlike prices at the pump.

And I am *really* worried about the 2024 elections. With Biden’s term not going so well, Trump and his followers are energized. Another four years of slouching toward right-wing authoritarianism won’t be good for anyone, economically or (especially) socially.

This is a long read, but it’s worth it. Anyone who says racism is dead in America should read this. School boards weaponized, a respected educator pretty much driven out of a GA county, truckloads of ignorance and hate revealed. Words like “equity”, “justice”, and “race” have become trigger words that inflame the mob. And the mob uses the label and lie of Critical Race Theory to work (white) people into a frenzy, when CRT simply isn’t a thing in K-12 education. It’s all a right-wing lie leading to a sad story.

The afternoon after the sleepless night hasn’t gotten any better. But I’m trying.

One thing I did during the night was finish a seriously creepy book, But the Stars, by Peter Cawdron. This is one of Cawdron’s many books in his “First Contact” series, where he imagines humanity meeting aliens for the first time, in every way imaginable. Well, at least in 20+ ways – there are a lot of books in this series. The guy is an excellent author and his output is…intimidating. Dude is a writer.

In But the Stars humanity meets its first alien intelligence a long way from Earth, on an interstellar voyage with nine crewmates. The book’s beginning is frustrating – it’s a bunch of repetitive short scenes with small changes. But there’s method to the madness.

<SPOILER ALERT> Turns out these aliens are capable of mind control, and they hijack the consciousness of the crew. The crew doesn’t even know they’ve been boarded and held captive. Each crew member’s consciousness is started then ended, over and over in various scenarios, as the aliens experiment to try and understand humanity.

It’s a twist on the Matrix, where you’re not sure if you’re in reality or a simulation. You can’t trust anything you see or remember – you’re not even sure if you’re you or a simulation of you. But in this case the bad guys aren’t machines and you’re in deep space with no one coming to help. Cawdron does a great job showing how little details give the crew hints that something’s wrong, and eventually – after decades – they begin to understand that their minds have been hijacked and they’re captives of…something. Like I said, creepy.

The mind control /telepathy thing is a good twist, but it’s a classic deus ex machina – a made-up device or concept that enables an otherwise unlikely story. In this case the device is revealed partway through the book, not at the end. But I classify it as such because the likelihood of us being able to communicate with an alien intelligence are pretty slim. Even now we’re pretty sure that dolphins, elephants, and whales are intelligent. They have a consciousness and they communicate with each other. But we can’t understand them at all, and they’re terrestrial Brothers right here on Earth. So what chance do we have to understand some ammonia-breathing, supercooled arachnid from Gliese 710?

Something about But the Stars hit me in a way that The Matrix didn’t. Perhaps it was the loneliness, the distance from Earth as the crew was captured. Really, truly alone. Or perhaps it was that they had to suffer not knowing what or who was real, over and over. In The Matrix you were either in or out, and when humans occupying reality went back in, they knew that they were in a virtual world. Cool, but not terrifying.

Both of these stories remind me that even as I sit here looking out over the vineyards, I can’t know if this world we occupy is real or is a very, very good simulation. None of us can. And it doesn’t really matter; I can be agnostic about it. Don’t care. If this is the Level 0 universe, the reality at the bottom of everything, well, that’s nice. And if this is the 10th-level simulation of a simulation, so what? It’s still our reality. I would find it fascinating if someone ripped a hole in our reality to reveal something else beyond, but I’m not holding my breath. That’s pretty much Lovecraft’s whole thing. And in that case, I prefer Cthulu stick to its dimension and I’ll stick to mine.

Sleep deprivation again. It’s an awful feeling – fatigue, can’t concentrate, blurry eyes, a weird heaviness or pressure in the head. Coffee doesn’t help. Hangovers are more fun. Whoever invents a brainwave-altering device that allows you to get to sleep without drugs and stay there will be a billionaire. I mean, how hard could this be? We can measure brainwaves, we can see them change during sleep cycles. So where’s my sleep-inducing device?

I asked Google and there’s a lot of information about brainwave training, but most of it looks sketchy, like something you’d see on an infomercial. Sometime when I feel better I’ll read through it and decide if there’s anything promising there. Right now I think I’ll take a nap.

Every one of these guys should be packed up and sent to 3rd world countries to serve in the Peace Corp for a couple of years. Every single one. And then forced to pass some basic educational and emotional tests before they regain US citizenship. They need to be shown that the world doesn’t revolve around them; that people of every race and color matter; and that they’ve pissed away their privileged first world life so far. “Patriot Front”, seriously? More like Spoiled Idiots R Us.

Here’s a bit of fun from McSweeney’s – Proverbs for Introverts. My favorite: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single nap.”

Jumping right into politics, I think the January 6th Committee is about to ruin a strong start. Their opening salvo, hearing #1, was great. It used Trump’s own people to make the case that he knew exactly what he was doing when he pushed The Big Lie. But after that great start, I think the hearing’s producers are making a big mistake. They think people will sit through seven multi-hour sessions to hear/see all the material, and they’re wrong. We have a short attention span, and these hearings aren’t exactly on a par with Breaking Bad as entertainment.

They forgot the golden rule about a three act play. There’s a reason an effective story doesn’t have seven parts in its dramatic arc – people lose interest. And this story is no different. So I fear that the hearings, while useful in bringing forward key insights about Trump’s attempted coup, will be ineffective in changing the polarized opinions of anyone. There might even be a smoking gun in act four or five, but by then the audience will have moved on. Hell, I love politics and think understanding what really happened is important, but I’m not gonna sit through 14-21 hours of testimony to hear the occasional “holy shit” moment. Wasted opportunity. Typical Democrat strategy – hit people over the head with facts relentlessly and expect to win their hearts. Facts matter, but effective stories are what reach people and change their minds about things.

On travel, COVID has really broken the airlines’ systems. What I’m seeing this summer is that all the airlines have cut their schedules, cut their available flights, and priced the remaining seats sky-high. They tried to use old, pre-COVID schedules, but now that labor, pilots and parts are unavailable, they’re constraining supply at a time when demand is at an all-time high (people *really* want to get out and travel again). Result…high prices. That’s bad news for a person who spends time at two homes 2000 miles apart. And who has a plan to do a lot of travel the next six months. So it goes.

The Dow has dropped 10% in just six days – yikes! It’s hard to stand pat and think long term about your investments after a week like this. And crypto is crashing…gee, imagine that. The music has stopped and lots of crypto players without a chair.

My satisfaction with KLM continues to rise. I went back to their website, finished my flight booking easily and with no surprises (e.g., no extra charges to select a seat). United and BA should take a lesson.

We had a spate of wildfires in Socal yesterday. A small one close to us and a couple of larger fires within 100 miles. It’s that time of year (actually, it’s always that time of year lately), and the current mega-drought has consequences. No moisture, lots of heat, and off we go. I’ve done everything I know to do to prepare our property except cut some big trees close to the house, but cutting those down would mean a fast trip to divorce court. So fingers crossed.

Here’s what a fire close to your home can look like – photo taken during the 2003 fires in my old Scripps Ranch neighborhood. Flames 100+ feet high racing up a hill toward our street at this point. It’s not something you’ll ever forget.

Given that BLTN began as a travel weblog, I have to write about today’s experience.

Late this fall we’re traveling to Norway, chasing the Northern Lights aboard the Queen Mary 2. I’ve been stressing about nailing down the US-Europe tickets, given the crazy economy and fuel prices. Today I got that done after 4-5 hours (!!) of hard work and frustration. Lessons learned:

• COVID has broken air travel as we used to know it. Nothing is certain. Assume nothing.
• Travel agents or flight consolidators aren’t trustworthy. You think you have a good deal and suddenly the deal changes, within minutes. A pox on Momondo and Crystal Travel.
• A lot of the flight comparators/consolidators options are silly, 2-3 stop options that take you 30 hours to travel an otherwise 11 hour nonstop. I realize that some folks are willing to trade time for money (and I am, up to a point), but many of the options advertised are just stupid. I’m not spending 30 hours to get across the Atlantic on a plane.
• Even dealing directly with airlines on their websites, things get flaky. Prices change, seats disappear, new charges are revealed as you get closer to paying for the flight. United’s website went completely wonky on me as I tried different scenarios. And British Air’s website was well behaved but wanted to charge me a shitload of money to select seats in business class, after telling me what the business class fare would be. Not nice.
• There are no refunds. You can get a flight credit if you change your mind (I did), but no refunds. And if you book a flight through a third party agent, the agent has to be involved in getting your refund. I’ve got a couple of thousand dollars locked up in that little unadvertised mess.
• Unlike Southwest in the US, buying a Europe trip as two one-way transactions/journeys is complicated. Dangerous. What costs you $1000 one direction might be 2-3X the other direction.
• Traveling to and from London is about the priciest option available to get to Europe. I ended up taking us in and out of Amsterdam, a city I love to visit. And better fares.

I’ve landed on KLM as our carrier of choice for this trip. Easy to use website, great fares, a solid reputation, and the best thing ever – a feature to lock in seats and a fare for 36 hours while you do your homework. It cost me $36 to lock things in with KLM and I couldn’t be happier. Every airline should do this.

The Turing test becomes an issue for a Google employee. Poor guy lost his job over the claims. And the fact that this guy is a priest who seems to want to protect the AI’s soul (my word, not the article’s), is an extra layer of juicy complication.

You can see where this is going – at some point soon a chatbot will be convincing enough that anyone will believe they are speaking with a sentient being, sooooo…what do we then label the software? It’s possible that a chatbot could be good enough to be 100% convincing of a thought process behind the scenes and know absolutely nothing beyond how to converse. For that matter, maybe we’re simply mobile language processing machines? If you can teach the chatbot math, does that qualify it as sentient? Machines can already learn.

I think the test needs to be more about autonomy, about free will. A baby is born with a will – it wants things, even though it doesn’t understand them. Because it wants, it takes action. So if a chatbot suddenly initiates action, if it seems to want to reach a goal, then we should talk about sentience. And if an AI decides it needs a priest…yikes! Head for the exits, because a religious machine intelligence would be the worst possible outcome for humanity. The Crusades 2.0. There’s definitely a novel in that idea.

Very sad news from Louisville today. A mass shooting happened at the foot of the Big Four Bridge, shortly after a gun control rally downtown. All those involved were juveniles, which begs the questions: Where were their parents? Where did they get the guns?

We walk and bike across that bridge, so I’m sad and concerned to hear that it’s a gathering place for kids with guns.

Did a little checking today, and it turns out that since I started this blog in 2019, I’ve written 170,000 words and 700 posts. That’s a couple of average-sized novels, one little essay at a time. Who knew?

But I think today’s theme will be water, not word count. Here in Socal the biggest issue isn’t the cost of gasoline, or wildfires, gun control, or immigration – it’s water. More precisely, the lack of water.

The first five months of 2022 have been the driest ever recorded in Socal, and that’s on top of a gradually increasing drought of the last ten years. Once every few years we get a decent amount of rainfall, but looking at long term trends the average is headed down. For example, this year it has rained nine inches (measured July 2021 to present, and almost all that rain was in 2021), versus a long term average of 14 inches. Three of the last five years we’ve been significantly below that long-term average, and the same for the previous five years. Right now the lakes and reservoirs are drying up, there’s no mountain snowpack to melt, the Colorado River is drying up, and in the Central Valley, the land itself is dropping feet per year after the area’s ancient aquifer has been pumped dry by farmers. Entire forests are dying or burning due to lack of water. The situation is grim.

The only slightly good news is that Socal has a unique solution for water problems that is within our grasp once people get desperate enough. Desalinization. What’s unique about Socal (at least in America) is that we have an ocean on one side of the densely-populated coastal region, and vast deserts 30 or 40 miles east. That geography is perfect for an environmentally friendly solar-desal solution.

Desalinization requires vast amounts of electricity – you need to force millions of gallons of water through filters it doesn’t want to go through, and that requires electric pumps. Lots and lots of big pumps. And of course it requires an ocean. The electricity required for a desal plant on the Socal coast can be paired with a photovoltaic solar farm in the desert. The same hot dry conditions that created the problem can be used to solve the problem.

Each desal-solar farm pair would cost around four billion dollars (a very rough estimate), and to supply the water for 30 million thirsty people we’d need 60-70 systems. And a lot of coastal real estate. This solution isn’t cheap, but it’s so very achievable that it gives me hope that eventually we’ll decide to do it. At some point it will be the only choice left other than depopulation of the region.

There’s a lot to worry about in our country, but now the shit’s gotten real. OMG, no sriracha!

Today’s economic outlook is a little tough to accept, given my semi-retired status and plan for modest but steady growth in holdings. In previous downturns (like 2008) I didn’t worry much because I knew there was plenty of time to recover equity and portfolio value. This time…the recovery runway is 14 years shorter. In only a few years (age 70) I’ll be forced to make specific withdrawals from equity accounts, whether we need the money or not, further reducing the time left to grow/recover equity value. I know, it’s a first world problem.

In retrospect this isn’t surprising. We’ve been through horrendous primary and secondary economic shocks, disrupting labor markets, capital markets, supply chains, national GDPs, etc. First Trump, then COVID, and now the Russia-Ukraine war. It’s amazing things are as normal as they are. But I won’t be surprised to see a deep Bear market in stocks and a long-ish run of high prices (inflation). Just when I was ready to enjoy my retirement…

Someone (maybe me) should start a new series – Politics as Grift, in which we highlight how so many folks have turned political fund raising into a lucrative personal business. Today’s focus is on True the Vote, a “nonprofit” organization that raised millions from people who believe there is/was significant voter fraud in recent elections. The organization has presented no results, no proof, nada. But it *has* managed to vector most of those same millions to companies owned by the two TtV founders, Catherine Englebrecht and Gregg Phillips. It’s a fairly straightforward grift, right out in the open – collect money from suckers via a nonprofit that you control, spend that money on “services” from for-profit companies that you also control, muddle up your life and business expenses within those companies and get most of your expenses paid by the company, then collect the rest as salary or loans. Rinse and repeat. Makes me want to start a political action committee and then start an online services company or two.

I’m looking forward to watching the Jan 6 committee hearings live on TV. But not everyone is.

Figures. The people who need to hear the truth most won’t get a chance.

Thinking about those hearings gives me a chance to shake my head at how crazy the last 2-3 years have been. Starting in late 2019…

• My brothers and I intervened and removed my Dad from his home and his painkiller addiction. A very traumatic few months.
• Then pandemic began. Two years of lockdown, confusion, fear, death, mask and vaccine drama. I can only compare it to a World War, though the pandemic divided the country rather than uniting it.
• During the pandemic I had my first and only (knock on wood) major surgery, a knee replacement.
• And during the pandemic I made two cross-country drives to see the kids and grandsons, drives I never would have taken otherwise. The first one in particular was strange – we knew really nothing about COVID then except that people were dying. I drove through a vast, silent countryside.
• In late 2020 we saw the four pestilent years of Trump end with the election of President Biden by over 8 million votes.
• We didn’t see, but now are hearing about, a furious behind-the-scenes attempt at a coup by Trump and his minions in the run-up to Jan 6 2021.
• Then on that January 6th we saw a Trump-driven mob overrun the Capital and try to stop the legal transition of power – an insurrection. It was surreal.
• Now we’re going on two and a half years of working apart, working only via video conference, after which work practices will never be quite the same.
• And after all that, we now have to deal with Russia threatening the world again and the US in the thrall of gun culture and unacceptable gun violence. And expensive gasoline.

That’s quite a list. I wonder if all that trauma is part of the cause of the rapid increase in mass shootings. The whole world went through some of what we did (the pandemic and the messy departure of Trump, not my personal stuff), but the US is the only place in the world with more guns than people. Traumatized people act out, go crazy, and grab the nearest gun. It’s a theory.

Whether the theory’s correct or not, I’m ready for a few years with a lot less drama.

I didn’t publish anything this morning because I decided to attend an 8am Board meeting in person for a change. It’s been over two years (!?!?) since I was last at the 211 San Diego HQ for a meeting, so this was a big change. The traffic between home and there at 7am wasn’t as bad as I feared, and being there in person again was great. Most of the Board was still remote/online, but given that I’m OK with air travel risks, it makes sense for me to begin to take certain meetings in person. We had 3-4 of us in the facility – it’s a start.

I’m coming to the end of my term on the 211 SD Board as of December 2022, and I’m pretty sad about that. The end of a personal era. Serving 211 and the community the last ten years has been a real honor, something that I’m proud of doing. I get to collaborate with a wonderful, talented group of people, and grow/sustain an organization that does so much good for the people of San Diego – the people who need help most. I’m now thinking about ways to serve within or adjacent to 211 SD other than being a Board member.

“Awwww shit. Dammit.”

When those are the first words out of your mouth before getting out of bed, it’s gonna be a bad day. I woke up this morning feeling much more fatigued than when I went to bed. Woke up at 130am and never really got back to sleep. Internet surfed, read a book, tossed and turned, and played possum but couldn’t fall back into a normal sleep. And now I feel like death warmed over.

The brain doesn’t want to work, even after a couple of strong cups of coffee. I hate mornings like this. And I did everything right yesterday – I ate healthy, I exercised hard, twice (!). No alcohol and went to bed at a reasonable hour. This is what I get for living healthy – punished the following day. What’s a person to do?

Guns again (I told you; not letting this go). I had an indirect discussion with one of my brothers about guns, a discussion that told me I need to make my position clear. I’m not against gun ownership, and I don’t think people who own them are bad people (well, many of them aren’t). What I am against is an idiotic lack of controls on gun ownership and firepower. There’s simply no use for an AR-15 except to kill lots of people quickly, so it has no place in a civilized nation. They should be banned and illegal to own. It’s a war weapon, period.

If you want to own a gun, any gun, you should go through the same kind of hoops as someone who wants to pilot an airplane – training, certification, registration, and some kind of annual testing. No untrained or untested 18 year-old should fly a plane, and no untrained 18 year-old should be able to own and use a gun.

And there are degrees of this. A commercial jet requires much, much more experience and training than a starter Cessna. Likewise, the right for concealed carry of a handgun should require much, much more experience and training than your first shotgun used for hunting ducks (and that first shotgun should still require a minimum of training). And again, outside the military there’s simply no need for high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic weapons. Those are for killing lots of people fast, so why would we allow normal citizens to have them?

That’s my position on guns. Background checks. Lots of training. Annual certification and mental health checks. Registration. Strict limits on firepower. Assurances that the person owning and carrying the gun is of sound mind and sound body. Is a card-carrying adult who understands the responsibility.

These measures won’t remove all chance of gun deaths in the US, but it would return us to a saner culture and dramatically decrease the opportunity for troubled individuals to kill lots of people quickly. Gun fetishism, gun culture at its worst, is what has gotten us to this terrible place. We had ten mass shootings in the US over the weekend – ten! It’s as if we’re an alcoholic drinking ourselves to death – we simply can’t stop.

It really does make me want to move to the south of France. Our culture in the US is very diseased, and gun violence is one of the big symptoms.

Congress. <he spits with derision> I can hardly imagine an institution with more dysfunction and dishonesty. Here’s another example of Congress not doing their job and leaving millions of schoolkids with uncertainty about getting lunch at school. $700B for Defense, no problem. But a billion or less to make sure that kids don’t go hungry, not so fast. And according to the article, we have KY’s own Mitch McConnell to thank.

After thinking about that situation we need a joke. Scientists say the universe is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. They forgot to mention morons.

UKY sports should be great to watch this fall and winter. The UK hoops team has, as always, a lot of promise and a potential to go all the way. And on the gridiron, UK’s quarterback Will Levis is being discussed for the Heisman and as a solid round 1 NFL draft pick. I can’t wait. We’re in the trough right now between seasons, so golf and soccer will have to do.

The ever-entertaining Samantha Bee has a great take on the abortion debate. At least in the US, she says “…it’s scared white men projecting their fragility onto their god…”.

A little bit of trivia I heard from the guitarist down at the winery yesterday. What is the origin of the name ZZ Top? The guitarist said that the mischievous trio created their band’s name based on Zig-Zag rolling papers from the Top brand. But Wikipedia thinks differently:

The original line-up was formed in Houston and consisted of Gibbons, bassist/organist Lanier Greig,^[5] and drummer Dan Mitchell.^[5] The name of the band was Gibbons’ idea. The band had a small apartment covered with concert posters and he noticed that many performers’ names used initials. Gibbons particularly noticed B.B. King and Z. Z. Hill and thought of combining the two into “ZZ King”, but considered it too similar to the original name. He then figured that “king is going at the top” which brought him to “ZZ Top”.^[6]

I like the guitarist’s story better.

In less than two weeks we head for Napa and Reno. There will be the usual visits to stellar wineries, with a special member’s event at Quintessa. And in Reno (Gardnerville, more precisely) we’re driving over the mountains to visit Hell’s Kitchen Lake Tahoe for a meal. We’ll see if Gordon Ramsay’s reality lives up to his TV-driven reputation.

Finally, NPR discusses how employees aren’t heading back to the office full time without a fight. And they shouldn’t. With $5-6/gallon gasoline and a long commute, it makes no sense for someone like me to spend $35 and two hours driving just to sit in an office and do exactly the same thing I do in my home office. The pandemic opened everyone’s eyes to the fact that office work can be just as productive (actually, more productive) if you’re virtual, online. Factory work, not so much.

Sorry, but more guns. I mentioned that I wasn’t letting go of this issue anytime soon. Anyone who thinks the Republicans are coming to the negotiating table to discuss gun control is kidding themselves. This is what happens when a Republican congresscritter says he’s open to more gun regulation. Rejection. Exorcism. This is a hard line that can’t be crossed in the Republican Gun party.

McSweeney’s has a great summary of the Republican position on protecting children in the classroom.

Here’s a great, long list of books on the craft of writing. I own a few of them, and should take their advice more often.

A longtime friend introduced me to Semantle, and it’s driving me nuts (thanks, G). I’ve only completed the puzzle twice in a week. I find the hints not very helpful, even misleading, and it feels completely random when I guess a word that is semantically close to the answer. I know there’s an algorithm driving this, but for the life of me I can’t reverse engineer it to get better at the game.

I think I have to visit this. The Integraton.

Joan Walsh published a gloom and doom political essay today that I unfortunately agree with. I don’t see any way to mend the fences between Red and Blue America. And I must say, I’m getting quite fed up with the minority of Americans telling the majority how things are going to be. The solutions are simple and obvious – terms limits for Congress and the Supreme Court and abolish the Electoral College. These two actions would move us into a more sane world where the majority of votes on an issue or a candidate would prevail. But getting those two things done in the current system is damn near impossible.

McSweeney’s has a good take on gun culture and “thoughts and prayers“. Here’s a quote directly from God:

At a certain point you need to have an honest conversation with yourself and ask whether you are praying to the God of love (me), or whether you’re praying and listening to a false God that cheers aggression, that encourages the blind worship of a document that was never meant to be worshipped and in fact was designed to be changed, that encourages responsibility for other people and immoral deflection for you, that rules through paranoia and fear, that views finding and killing innocent animals a good reason for why instruments of war should be readily available, that encourages arrogance and pride instead of compassion and listening, and that gives you power so that you can enrich yourselves instead of making the lives of others better.

Your prayers are pointless, your thoughts petty. The problem of too many guns won’t be solved by more guns. Part of the mourning process must involve direct political action, otherwise, the dead are not properly mourned for.

‘Nuff said.

In better news, how about a trip to the Bahamas in August? I’m seriously thinking about it – four UK basketball games at a world class island resort…sounds like heaven. This one might shove its way onto the bucket list Top 10.

Found this online and it tells the story nicely.

I’m gonna keep beating this drum for a while because I don’t want us all to just throw up our hands again and say “oh my, another mass shooting, but what can we do?”. What we can do is stay focused on the problem and the solution(s). Gun fetish and gun culture won’t go away until we make it go away, and that will take a long, sustained effort. Buckle up.

In other much less depressing news, Jacob Toppin is coming back to UK for another season! With another year of growth and experience, Toppin could be one of the best forwards in the country. He’s bold, freakishly athletic, and fun to watch. This is great news for Big Blue Nation. Welcome home, JT!

Here’s a cautionary tale for those who expect genetic editing via CRISPR to lead to a better, healthier future. While trying to edit the hamster genome to make them more passive (uh, why?), scientists got the exact opposite result. They created aggressive, angry hamsters, much to their surprise. So while we have a handle on the craft of genetic editing, we have no real understanding of the complex systems we’re modifying – i.e. a living being. It’s like Neanderthals learned to use a soldering iron and tried to modify a modern computer or TV. Most of the time they’re gonna break it.