Category Archives: Uncategorized

I fear that I failed to follow up on the trial of Officer Yanez in the death of Philando Castile, in which the officer was found not guilty, but he immediately resigned his position, or perhaps was asked to leave. This was just about a year ago.

Today, I see the City of Falcon Heights, the location of Castile’s death, is making a gesture of community spirit. From a City e-mail (I’d give a link if I could find one):

The City Council adopted a resolution on May 16 proclaiming July 6 as Restoration Day and July 7 as Unity Day. The proclamation will become a component of healing, grant respect to Philando Castile’s family, while at the same time serve to improve the quality community engagement within the City by its residents, businesses, and guests.

It set about to shift a day of tragedy and provide a redemptive focus of the two days by which all of us can benefit. The first of the two days, Restoration Day is more about taking personal action and steps to build or restore relationships. This could be in the form of meeting a neighbor, mending a strained friendship or relationship, or even actively pursuing conversation with someone that a person would not naturally interact. Think of how on Earth Day individuals set a side time as a family or neighborhood to actively steward the land.

Here we as a city will be acknowledging the importance of stewarding healthy relationships. The second day has a focus that demonstrates healing has begun, connectedness is taking place, and thus the city as a whole demonstrates a measure of cooperative growth in inclusion and engagement. This could be a day for simple parties on the block, or even citywide gatherings. These two days will be promoted through standard city communication tools that could also provide suggested topics for discussion, and activities.

If you would like to watch the action taken by the Council on the Proclamation, please visit: http://webstreaming.ctv15.org/viewer.php?streamid=3002

It’s good to see it isn’t being brushed under the rug.

It’s not just for animals. From The American Journal of Epidemiology comes a study on coal and oil power plant retirements by Joan A Casey, Deborah Karasek, Elizabeth L Ogburn, Dana E Goin, Kristina Dang, Paula A Braveman, and Rachel Morello-Frosch, and this is from the abstract:

We used California Department of Public Health birth records and Energy Information Administration data from 2001-2011 to evaluate the relationship between 8 coal and oil power plant retirements and nearby preterm births ( < 37 weeks gestational age). We conducted a difference-in-differences analysis using adjusted linear mixed models that included 57,005 births–6.5% of which were preterm–to compare the probability of preterm birth before and after power plant retirement among mothers residing within 0-5 km and 5-10 km of the 8 power plants. We found that power plant retirements were associated with a decrease in the proportion of preterm birth within 5 km (-0.019, 95% CI: -0.031, -0.008) and 5-10 km (-0.015, 95% CI: -0.024, -0.007) controlling for secular trends with mothers living 10-20 km away. For the 0-5 km area, this corresponds to a reduction in preterm birth from 7.0% to 5.1%. Subgroup analyses indicated a potentially larger association among non-Hispanic Black and Asian mothers compared to non-Hispanic White and Hispanic mothers and no differences in educational attainment. Future coal and oil power plant retirements may reduce preterm birth among nearby populations.

An immediate impact on the health of people surrounding these power plants is an important observation, and suggests that those living near these power plants bear a disproportionate share of the burden these power plants inflict on society. Not that, in the past, this was unjustifiable, for one could argue that power brought greater social goods. Today, though, with the development of cleaner power sources, defending oil and coal fired power plants has become inadvisable for those who wish to keep clean intellectual reputations.

In Inside Climate News, Sabrina Shankman comments on further problems:

In a separate article published last week in the American Heart Association’s journal Hypertension, [Noel Mueller, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University] examined what can happen when the pollution source is not eliminated.

In a study that looked at 1,293 mothers and their children in the Boston area, Mueller and his coauthors found that babies who were exposed to higher levels of particulate matter during the third trimester were significantly more likely to have high blood pressure in childhood.

Particulate matter can come from cars and the burning of coal, oil and biomass.

Casey, the author of the California study, said the findings from the two studies are related. “We know that preterm birth isn’t the end of the outcomes for a child that is born early,” she said.

Walter Einenkel of The Daily Kos, from whom I picked up the original pointer to this information, sees studies such as these as indicative of a bigger problem down the road:

The Trump administration’s insistence in attacking all of the clean air policies across our country is not simply craven because of its naked greed, it’s the beginnings of a public health crisis that the Republican Party is not interested in handling on any level. The importance of the study showing these health benefits in California is that Trump’s EPA has targeted the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy as the battleground for so much of its environmental rollbacks.

Returning to this long dormant thread on civil asset forfeiture, or as I described it,

… forfeiture is nothing more than judging a suspect to be guilty without trial …

WaPo has a disheartening statistic for me:

In 2017, federal authorities seized more than $2 billion in assets from people, a net loss similar in size to annual losses from residential burglaries in the United States.

Their accompanying chart is even more depressing – $2 billion is a local minima.

There’s not a lot more to add on this thread, outside of the ridiculous numbers involved. The numbers either indicate we’re in the midst of a massive crime wave, despite FBI statistics to the contrary, or those elements of government with access to civil asset forfeiture are abusing it.

One more note from the article, which covers an incident in which a man by the name of Kazazi lost $58,000 to U. S. Customs:

The first thing the Kazazis noticed was that the dollar amount listed was $770 less than the amount that Kazazi said he took with him. The family said that the cash was all in $100 bills, making it impossible for it to add up to $57,330.

[Wesley Hottot, the Kazazi family’s attorney,] said that these types of “errors” are common in forfeiture cases and that it is “always in the same direction” — government receipts coming up a few hundred or a few thousand dollars short of what defendants say they had.

Does the few criminals this helps to convict outweigh the government corruption it encourages? Better yet, these additions to the federal and state treasuries, small as they may seem, are a means to reduce taxes. In an era in which taxation is such a keyword, is it really wise to use such a morally dubious and unprincipled approach to the problem of raising funds for public purposes?

Shouldn’t we simply raise the proper taxes and be honest about paying for that which benefits us?

I do believe I’ll be writing my Senators and Representative.

As I read this morning about how NAFTA re-negotiations may be crashing over a Mike Pence-delivered ultimatum of a five year sunset provision on the agreement, I started mumbling about how this entire Administration is continually pulling shit out of its ass. I have no idea why this ultimatum was presented, and nor does WaPo. This being a few days ago, maybe the Administration just as quickly dropped it when Trudeau refused it.

President Trump wanders about the stage of the Presidency, making vague pronouncements and judgments which, in hind-sight, turn out to be so much bullshit. Ever think about comparing that to President Obama? If President Obama had wanted to renegotiate NAFTA, I think anyone who paid attention would realize that Obama would have been giving speeches which laid out, section & clause, his objections to the treaty and why, and how he’d prefer to fix them in such a way to benefit both the United States and Mexico and Canada. After all, this was public business and deserved a workmanlike approach to the matter.

His specificity was a reassurance.

In comparison, Trump is a bombast, a braggart, a grasping fool. One of the verbal flags of his personality is his dependence on absolutes in his verbs – worst treaty ever I believe he used in describing the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal). He never deals in specifics, it’s all in vague absolutes, and therefore he’s difficult to evaluate on specific matters – until one steps back and asks whether he’s believable.

No doubt, in his career as a real-estate developer he could be relatively successful using this style because the various groups he dealt with didn’t intercommunicate as a rule – a rule broken during legal proceedings, wherein rumor has it Trump’s inclination towards lies tends to catch up with him.

But in the national spotlight, everyone talks to everyone else. Fact-checking occurs and is broadcast. I tend to see supporters of Trump as the self-deluded, those desperate to return to a time colored rose by their regretful peering into the past. The facts are out there, staring us in the face, but we have to be willing to open our eyes and see them for what they are.

To borrow one of Andrew Sullivan’s favorite quotes:

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”
– George Orwell

Aggrandizement:

an increase in power or importance:
He gives a lot of money to charity, but personal aggrandizement/self-aggrandizement is his motive. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “John Brennan: I will speak out until integrity returns to the White House,” former CIA Director John Brennan, WaPo:

The esteem with which I held the presidency was dealt a serious blow when Donald Trump took office. Almost immediately, I began to see a startling aberration from the remarkable, though human, presidents I had served. Mr. Trump’s lifelong preoccupation with aggrandizing himself seemed to intensify in office, and he quickly leveraged his 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. address and his Twitter handle to burnish his brand and misrepresent reality.

I was lucky enough to take some pictures of a beautiful butterfly while in Stockholm, WI.

I also put the last two pictures up on iNaturalist, just in case it’s some species someone’s never seen. I know virtually nothing about butterflies.

No doubt this will enrage some of our neighbors:

Yep, that’s momma squirrel with her tykes.

Most Americans know the name of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, but do they know that of his elder brother, Edwin Thomas Booth? The latter is the subject of the biographical Prince of Players (1955), and tells the story, no doubt somewhat fictionalized, of one of the finest Shakespearean actors of his era, starting with his youth, when his father was also a noted Shakespearean actor, dissolute, drunken, and perhaps a bit mad. One night, when his father could not fulfill his contract with a theater, Edwin goes on and succeeds magnificently.

From there on in, he works the little venues, even labor camps, building a reputation, moving on to bigger and bigger venues until his is a name that comes to mind whenever anyone mentions a Shakespearean production. But lurking in the background are two curses. The first is the same as his father’s, a predilection to angst and drink, the deep black hole in everyone’s lives. This is stayed when he meets the love of his life, Mary Devlin, who gives him purpose.

The second? The Mason-Dixon line, the line dividing the slave-holding South from the abolitionist North. His brother, John, is forever the second fiddle to Edwin, and while John is popular in the South, Edwin is popular in the South, and then in the North, and finally England. This grinds away at John as the Civil War commences, slowly embittering him.

Mary, sadly, contracts tuberculosis, the slow fatality of which leads Edwin back to the edge of drunken madness. Sometimes unable to go on the stage, his manager is frantic and writes to Mary, whose attempt to come to her husband’s aid ends badly. Upon her eventual death, Edwin is bereft. And then?

Of course. The assassination of the President, part theater itself, and the subsequent death of John. So is the family of Booth cursed.

In the consequent crescendo, the name ‘Booth’ becomes a curse, and when Edwin returns to the stage, he’s met with riot and rage. But when the rest of the company retreats, under fire from the traditional rotten vegetable cannonade, from their staging of Hamlet, Edwin sits in a chair on the stage, silently suffering the slings and arrows of an unjust fate, until, won over by his steely resolve, they gradually transform from the enraged beast to the adoring audience.

Sorry about the purple prose.

Having been released in 1955, Prince of Players has a different, flatter pacing than do today’s crop of movies, but don’t let that throw you. It’s a peek into the life of a family once at the center of the American experience, for the theater is as much a place of learning as it is of entertainment, and the Booths were, in that sense, supreme, if inadvertent, teachers. The great hole of madness around which they revolved not only threatened them, but the nation, changing it in ways never to be corrected.

It’s worth a look.

And, finally, there’s the House On The Rock pictures which fit in no category or I don’t recognize.

That’s it, folks!

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com is enthusiastic about a new brand of organic underwear being put out by Marc Skid:

Why organic? Cotton is one of the most polluting crops in the world, accounting for nearly a quarter of agricultural insecticide use. Opting for organic supports much cleaner, safer production, both for the Earth and the farmers who raise it. From the Marc Skid website:

“Organic cotton is grown free of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants. It’s also free of GMOs – contaminants so dangerous Peru bans them – and is always hand picked to minimize environmental impact and maximize quality.”

There’s a lot of good things here, but one element I don’t see considered here – and perhaps it’s covered elsewhere – is the question of scalability. Later on, Katherine notes the folks at Marc Skid want to influence the big boys:

[Company founder Dan Barry] believes that small companies play a crucial role in influencing bigger companies to rethink their production models. When the small ones are successful, the big ones see it’s feasible, and that’s when the real change can occur. He hopes that Marc Skid can be a model for the industry.

OK, assume they’re successful at convincing the big boys to shift over to organic cotton. What then? Remember the ongoing palm oil debacle? What are the unforeseen consequences of attempting to do the right thing in this case? Like most folks, I’m not sure the environmentalists are correctly considering the consequences of the success of a tactic, no matter how well-intentioned, in a world over-crowded with consumers.

And that’s what I mean by scalability. Success may result in Peru becoming one big cotton plantation – and dozens of little Aral Seas. For those readers not up on the Aral Sea, it has been drained and despoiled because of Soviet addiction to the “white gold” – cotton.

I don’t know if this would happen. I just worry when the question is not addressed by the advocates of a solution.

The New York Times reports on the passage of a “right to try” law, which is a law which permits terminal patients to bypass the FDA mandated testing process and try unapproved drugs for their conditions directly from the suppliers:

A program known as compassionate use, or expanded access, has been in place since the 1970s. It allows patients with a serious disease or condition to obtain experimental medicines; the Food and Drug Administration says it authorizes 99 percent of the requests for expanded access that it receives.

The new national law — like similar laws in more than three dozen states — allows patients and doctors to ask drug companies directly for access to the experimental drugs, rather than wait for approval by the agency.

Yet these laws “do not ensure that manufacturers will provide the drug or that insurance companies will cover the cost,” according to a policy report from Rice University. Obtaining the medicines from manufacturers can be more cumbersome than going through the Food and Drug Administration’s existing program, the report found.

President Trump’s prediction:

“We will be saving — I don’t even want to say thousands, because I think it’s going to be much more, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands. We’re going to be saving tremendous numbers of lives.”

The commentary of the blind anti-government ideologue. And the same article supplies a quote from an advocate:

“It’s impossible to tell how many people will be helped by the federal right-to-try law,” said Christina Sandefur, the executive vice president of the Goldwater Institute, the conservative group that spearheaded the effort.

But “if it saves one person, it’s worth it,” she said, adding, “For the patients who are turned away from clinical trials and who are unable to navigate the complex expanded access process, right to try will give them a last chance — and the right to hope.”

Which is naive thinking. Perhaps one life is saved, while another 99 die prematurely, even with their already terminal conditions, and in agony. Would she still stick with her statement? The problem is: she won’t know about the 99.

We’re potentially in a big ol’ social experiment here, and it’s important that we be prepared. Toward this end, we should be collecting data – who and how many people are applying for these unproven drugs? What are the outcomes? How does the fact that this is a transitional process affect the outcome, and how can we compare that to a scenario in which the FDA is little more than a rubber stamp?

In other words, if we’re going to walk down this path, let’s get as much information on how it works out as compared to historical FDA process of having to meet safety and efficacy targets before it can be administered to the general patient population. If I’m a sober citizen of this country, I don’t need to have a few effing anecdotes about how it helped your brother Jose survive his cancer – I don’t even know if Jose exists, I don’t know if had an unpredictable remission, a mis-diagnosis, or if he’s just a figment of someone’s malignant imagination.

No fucking anecdotes. Got it?

Good research studies are the order of the day, no matter how much that might turn the stomachs of the advocates. It’s the only way to find out if the old FDA way of doing things is good, or if letting the desperate plead for drugs of unknown quality is the better way to go.

If you set store by honoring those who fell in defense of the nation with something tangible, submariners can be a difficult lot, much like the whalers of old. However, Eternal Reefs may be what you’re looking for:

The “On Eternal Patrol Memorial Reef” will be the first-ever undersea memorial to honor the United States submarines and their crews that made the ultimate sacrifice and never returned from duty. Imagine 66 reef balls, one for each US-manned submarine lost since 1900 and a single reef ball honoring those lost in non-sinking incidents, forming a patriotic reef off the coast of Sarasota, Florida. It will forever pay tribute to those “On Eternal Patrol” and replenish the precious marine environment in which they served.

It’s crossed my mind more than once that humanity really should clean up after itself, even to the extent of raising wrecks and salvaging the hulks. Of course, this couldn’t possibly be done with current technologies, and some wrecks are actually beneficial, on balance, at their final locations.

Memorializing the lost submariners in this way sure seems appropriate. If you’re so inclined, they’ll accept donations.

Interregnum:

1. an interval of time between the close of a sovereign’s reign and the accession of his or her normal or legitimate successor.
2. any period during which a state has no ruler or only a temporary executive.
3. any period of freedom from the usual authority. [Dictionary.com]

Heard on Dr. Who last night. We’re hopping around seasons these days, since I neglected Dr. Who in my childhood.

Looming through the gloom of House On The Rock was certain bits of machinery, some of which we never did really make out.

Deborah MacKenzie in NewScientist (19 May 2018, paywall) meditates briefly on the damage done to democracy by President Trump’s decision to abrogate the JCPOA (Iran Nuclear Deal) and then reports on the technology under development which would permit the detection of cheating by any nation that is being monitored:

Load monitors being developed at Oak Ridge would let the IAEA measure how fast uranium enters and leaves the enrichment process, says [Robert Goldston at Princeton University]. Tools being developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, automatically measure the mass in cylinders of material entering and leaving the plant. Together, these could keep tabs on all the uranium passing through enrichment. Cameras with pattern recognition focused on pipework and detectors watching for unusual neutrons, gamma rays or chemical release could also reveal illicit changes to the enrichment process.

All this can be made tamper-proof using technologies the IAEA has already developed for monitoring plants that store or reprocess spent nuclear fuel, ranging from paint or welds that reveal when monitoring equipment has been opened, to backup electrical power that cannot be unplugged. Data would be sent securely to the IAEA. Anything unusual could trigger an “unannounced access” inspection.

Although the technology isn’t quite ready yet, the 2031 JCPOA deadline would give the IAEA time to put a stringent monitoring regime based on these devices in place, says Goldston. But if the deal collapses, Iran will at best go back to the infrequent monitoring that allowed it to work on a bomb before – and will have little incentive to trust international promises again.

Along with the damage done to our reputation by President Trump’s moronic decision, he has also lost an opportunity. These technologies would greatly increase our chances of detecting cheating, yes? With them in place, if Iran did cheat, we could have caught them at it, broadcast it to the world, and thereby damage their government system’s reputation.

Another opportunity thrown to the winds by an idiot who flapped his mouth and thereby wrecks his nation, and his staff, who are far too immature and self-important to be aware of how this could have worked out.

HuffPo reports on a state-level politician’s analysis of the school shooting phenomenon:

Does anyone know what kind of porn Rep. Diane Black (R-Tenn.) is watching?

Whatever it is, the 67-year-old Black, who is running for governor of Tennessee, said it’s a “big part” of what is driving the spike in school shootings.

During a meeting last week with local pastors, Black raised the issue of gun violence in schools and why it keeps happening.

“Pornography,” she said.

“It’s available on the shelf when you walk in the grocery store. Yeah, you have to reach up to get it, but there’s pornography there,” she continued. “All of this is available without parental guidance. I think that is a big part of the root cause.”

No reasons given. So does this mean the streets are full, I mean absolutely packed, with potential school shooters? If she’s saying that, then she’d better ask what will happen when that porn is removed from the Internet and 95% of young unmarried men (I’m less certain of the percentage of unmarried women watch porn) become frustrated and enraged.

More shootings?

Just for fun, I pulled up the FBI stats on violent crime in the United States.

Via Wikipedia

Hey, look. Violent crime starts to go down as the Web becomes popular – and we all know that porn is one of the biggest components of Web traffic, and always has been.

Now, this is all very specious reasoning on my part as well as her’s. Correlations are often just coincidences, and I’d have to see more data before I’d believe my own assertions about porn and crime.

But still, perhaps the good Representative should sit down and think about that for a bit. At least, with guns we know they’re a favored weapon of the whacked out. Not to mention people like me, the terminally clumsy.

Excuse me, we’re looking for someone willing to explore the story a little deeper.

Aardman Productions has done better work in the past, and I fear the entire problem will be laid at the scriptwriters’ feet in the case of Early Man (2018). If you want the executive summary, my Arts Editor laid it out most directly: I don’t care for any of these characters.

Let’s take another Aardman creation as a comparison, the venerable Chicken Run (2000). Their plots are basically the same – a group of creatures face doom unless they can cleverly find a way out of their dilemma. For the chickens in Chicken Run, they are prisoners on a chicken farm, a farm that executes non-producers and, in the course of the story, is about to be converted into a chicken pie production facility, leaving our heroes to be the filling.

Similarly, the primitive cave-men protagonists of Early Man face the loss of their Garden of Eden-like valley at the hands of a group of Bronze-Age aggressors, who want their valley for their mining operation. They have invented avariciousness and a hierarchical society, unlike the more socialistic and equable cave-men, and the cave-dwellers teeter on the edge of extinction.

Both stories have the leader intent on saving their group, but here is where the stories begin to diverge in terms of efficacy. Ginger, the heroine of Chicken Run, is fiercely loyal and intent on saving her band of chickens, even when those seem to be running around as if their heads had been chopped off. The storytellers illustrate her drive to succeed, her willingness to leap any obstacle, to literally jump up and dust herself off after every set-back, no matter how many times she is imprisoned in ‘solitary.’

Her counterpart in Early Man is Dug, a young member of the band who dreams big – he wants to move up from hunting rabbits to taking down a mammoth. But, well, that’s just about it. He’s not the leader of the group, and his best friend is a fairly smart hog. We’re given little reason to admire or even bond with the little guy, outside of the fact that he’s, well, little.

Each story also has its outside element that brings salvation. Rocky Rhodes of Chicken Run is an American rooster, driven to escape the circus in which he performs by being shot out of a cannon, and when he does escape by being blown into the chicken farm, he’s willing to do nearly anything to gain the freedom of the world, including lying, cheating his suppliers – and abandoning the chicken flock that has befriended and saved him. In short, he’s fully fleshed out, a character with a drive and goals of his own, and half the fun of Chicken Run is watching as the needs of the flock, and the idea of justice, of doing the right thing, slowly bends that primeval drive into something useful and communal, rather than self-centered and narcissistic.

Rocky’s counterpart in Early Man is the Bronze Age villager woman Goona, who brings her special skills to the aid of the cavemen. But is she driven? Well, sort of. She wants fame, but she’s not really all that driven. She hasn’t the charisma and attitude of Rocky Rhodes. She’s more or less just a wrench where the plot needed a wrench, not the living, breathing creature that brings a sense of Where is this going? to the story.

And, of course, there’s the doom staring each group in the face. In Chicken Run, this is brought starkly home through an execution scene as a non-producing chicken is beheaded and eaten. In Early Man, though, there’s a far more diffuse threat of being enslaved and made to work in the mines that produce the material for the bronze coins. But little work is done to bring home just how dreadful this might be. There are no mine scenes, there are no cavemen dead from working the mines, there’s nothing visceral to make the skin crawl. It’s more or less a statement from the bad guys.

There are quite a few other parallels, from the big plot mechanisms, to the little bits of cleverness to get over obstacles, to the substantial silliness that all Aardman movies feature, and of course the stop-action and animation is virtually flawless and sometimes admiration-worthy. But in the end, the story fails in Early Man because there’s no willingness to drive the plot points home into the granite of our souls. We have no real attachment to Dug or any of the other cavemen. We don’t have any inkling how bad being a miner might be – heck, maybe they’ll turn into dwarves and re-emerge in Lord Of The Rings, wouldn’t that be fun, eh?

I could see an audience member saying that, and that’s the problem with this movie. That’s actually a plausible plot turn in Early Man. And that’s just not a good sign.

Margaret Sullivan of WaPo remarks on the latest trend on how to rate news sources:

Entrepreneur Elon Musk thinks journalism needs fixing, and he’s got just the answer.

Enraged last week by negative media coverage of Tesla, his car company, the tech billionaire proposed a rating system in which the public would vote on the credibility of individual journalists and news sites.

As with all things Musk, the sketchy idea brought rave reviews from his obsessive fans, even though his explanations (by tweetstorm) of how journalism works show that he’s way out of his depth.

“Problem is journos are under constant pressure to get max clicks & earn advertising dollars or get fired. Tricky situation, as Tesla doesn’t advertise, but fossil fuel companies & gas/diesel car companies are among world’s biggest advertisers.”

It doesn’t work that way. Journalists are not under pressure to earn ad dollars through their news stories and in fact go out of their way not to write favorably — or at all — about their company’s advertisers.

The obvious problem with Musk’s idea is that voting is easily contaminated by entities with agendas that have little to do with honest evaluation of these media entities. Either he’s not thought it through, or he’s being quite dishonest because, as Margaret notes, he’s angry at the news coverage.

The hidden problem with Musk’s idea is that we’re asking people with no skin in the game to play. What is their motivation to act honestly?

None.

The best way to evaluate the worthiness of a news source is finding subscribers who are willing to put up some cold, hard cash to not only buy the news, but to also invest their time, one our most precious commodities in today’s busy world, to read that news.

The act of subscribing to a paper is a contract and a conversation between the subscribers and the people who are trained to be journalists concerning the news events of the day. By paying that buck directly to the news media, you’ve gained the right to criticize their methods, or compliment them, to give them tips, and to learn what’s happening in your community and world-wide. It’s a contract about delivering news, about honesty – going both ways.

All those free sources that you and I sup at, have you thought about them? Why should they pay attention to you? To honesty? Their funding comes from advertising. Not that the subscription services don’t also benefit from advertising, but because subscribers demand a certain level of honest journalism, the influence of the advertisers is mitigated – and, if they do have undue influence, that can be detected and corrected by subscribers complaining, and walking away if necessary.

So think about those free news sources we all read, HuffPo and Vox and USA Today and Fox News and CNN. Are they really as substantial as the struggling hometown newspaper that Margaret writes about, perhaps in a death spiral even as we speak? Or are they more like McDonald’s and Burger King, all sodium and greasy french fries which seems so tasty … and will ultimately kill you?

Naturally, we have some outside shots at House On The Rocks, and they had some nice forests and whimsy, but nothing like the insides.

My Arts Editor wants these lions for our front steps.

My Arts Editor really liked the ironwork on this gate.

Jordan favored the use of natural elements.

Even if they call it an orange azalea.

The pundits are upset today over a speech given by President Trump over the weekend to the U.S. Naval Academy’s graduation and commissioning ceremony. Why? The usual: perceived lies. From The Week:

He also patted himself on the back for giving troops pay raises “for the first time in over 10 years,” even though the military receives pay raises every year. “I fought for you,” said Trump of the raises. “That was the hardest one to get. But you never had a chance of losing. I represented you well. I represented you well.”

So what’s going on? FederalPay.org has some information. First, their leader:

President officially authorized a 1.4% pay raise for 2018. View 2018 GS Pay Scale and localities now!

So how about previous years? Well, according to the same site, from 2004 on to 2017, there have always been raises. It’s never been less that 1% (2014) and never more than 4.6% (2004). Furthermore, Steve Benen states without source that raises have occurred in every year of the Bush and Clinton Administrations as well.

FederalPay.org states this:

At the end of every year the federal government determines if, and by how much, the basic pay tables will increase. The increase is calculated based on the annual increase in the Employment Cost Index (ECI). Our current estimate of the upcoming 2019 military pay raise is 2.6% (see below for details).

If I were to bend over backward, it’s possible that Trump’s 1.4% pay raise is on top of the ECI adjustment mentioned above, but that requires an extremely generous reading of the quote – and is probably untrue.

It’s more interesting to wonder why President Trump is trying to gather up praise for an action that is not generous and nearly automatic. The easy read is that he simply lives for praise.

However, I think there’s more than that going on. By ingratiating himself to the military and its more fervid supporters and, more importantly, implying the Democratic Administration of President Obama did nothing for the pay of the military, he seeks to widen the divide currently savaging our society. Let’s face it: if you are not an independent (like myself), slanted information which fits our preconceptions can be easily accepted without verification – especially if you’re a working stiff with little time for verification, or are not particularly interested in politics, a position I’ve taken for many years. In cases such as this one, this then leads embitterment and a refusal to use the news media associated with the political opposition. Soon, the audience becomes isolated and distrustful of fellow Americans who may, in fact, share their values and interests – but, because of statements and claims such as President Trump’s, they have been mislead into becoming ever more hardened into a position they might not otherwise accept, if they had full facts.

The lesson here? Don’t trust a politician implicitly, whether their name is Trump, Obama, or your local. A little fact-checking, especially when a statement seems divisive, is always a wise move.

Along with everything else, HOTR has a resident population of animals straight out of the imagination.

In this WaPo article concerning the Vietnam War and the role journalism played in it, Joel Achenbach writes a paragraph of painful content:

Cronkite’s great persuasive power emerged from his long history of not attempting to be persuasive at all. That allowed him to fly to Vietnam like an intercontinental ballistic missile of objectivity. But the past half century has seen a steady erosion in the trust Americans place in institutions such as the news media. Partisan journalists, wielding verbal flamethrowers, view their “objective” counterparts as retailers of false balance. The media culture no longer requires or wants someone with the authority to say, as Cronkite did every night at the close of his broadcast, “And that’s the way it is . . .”

A partisan, at its heart, is someone with a viewpoint of what is desired, not what is. A partisan denies or wishes to reshape reality. And that makes the statement partisan journalist, at best, a misnomer; at worst, it’s an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, a phrase embraced by those who should deserve no trust at all. They can be pundits, opinion column writers, honorable to greater or lesser degrees, but journalists should be dedicated to gathering and disseminating factual material.

A couple of weeks ago my correspondent continued our discussion of drawing voting districts:

I guess I don’t have much trouble with just imposing districts of approximate geographical travel time on people. If they’re highly partisan, too damn bad. Maybe it’s time they learned the fine arts of cooperation and compromise? Seriously, partisanship is ruining our country.

And perhaps that’s the best sentiment for an imperfect world. I simply wonder how much a representative in a party-bound state can actually represent members of the other party in her district, particularly in an era of corrosive team politics. It all leads me to wonder if approaches not based on geography would be more appropriate.