If you are an American, the National Parks are part of your heritage. Explore them, enjoy them, make them part of your permanent memory file. And don’t let anyone tell you this land wasn’t meant for you and me. Continue reading A Postcard From Your National Parks
Amazon has an entry level wage of $18/hour, but to get it you have to put up with computer– yes computer– supervisors, backbreaking labor, and insane conditions. Yet only one warehouse has unionized. Really? Continue reading State of the Union
It’s Passover or as some of my non-Jewish friends call it, Jewish Easter. Instead of celebrating one man rising from the dead, we celebrate an entire people rising from the almost dead. Or as traditionally said of most Jewish holidays “They tried to kill us, we beat them, let’s eat.” Continue reading Jewish Easter
Sometimes it happens that the little guys win. Amazon wanted to put a distribution center on a 2 lane country road and then have 87 delivery vans and 14 semi trucks go in and out on it. The neighbors put Amazon up a river. Continue reading The Final Mile
Would you wait six hours on line for a chance to sample a beer that is only available for two weeks each year? Thousands just did that at the annual release of Pliny The Younger at Russian River Brewing. And you know what? It’s a good thing. Continue reading A Postcard From Russian River Brewing
Toxic masculinity rears it’s head everywhere these days, from the stage of the Oscars to the misinformationcasts of conservative media to the planning rooms of the Kremlin. Continue reading Toxic Levels of Masculinity
California Governor Gavin Newsom has proposed an $11B aid package to our state’s citizens to help combat the effects of $6 a gallon gas. But the government didn’t cause the spike in oil prices. Even Tsar Vlad only partially caused it. Greedy oil companies are the culprits. Your anger should be directed at them. Continue reading California Gets Gassed
Two items from where the worlds of sports and business collide got my attention. One was a new way to support your favorite team. The other showed how economic sanctions might not work as smoothly if the target is China. Continue reading Huddle Up
Cory Booker got up and said he had Ketanji Brown Jackson’s back. He also put into words what his political party stands for. Mike Braun did the same for his party. You can decide who did it better. Continue reading Cory Booker Is A Mensch
To Quote: “Boris Johnson’s buffoonery contrasts with the courageous leadership of President Zelensky. To compare a referendum to women and children fleeing Putin’s bombs is an insult to every Ukrainian. He is no Churchill: he is Basil Fawlty.”
Some thoughts on Boris Johnson, Basil Fawlty, and clowns running governments. Continue reading Fawlty Tory
Don’t wanna be an American idiot!
One nation controlled by the new media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America! Continue reading American Idiots
We’ve just passed the two year mark since the first national shelter in place order was issued. Time is right to play the blame game. All the usual subjects, plus one or two you might not have thought about. Continue reading 731 Odd Days
There are monsters in this world. Currently a whole mess of them are killing innocents in Ukraine upon the orders of their master. You don’t negotiate with monsters. You end them. Continue reading Here Be Monsters
Putin looks fondly back at the days of the Soviet Union and wistfully muses how things were so much better when everyone feared their own government. Ah the good old days Continue reading Back To The Future
Random thoughts on an overcast Friday morning with a special appearance by Dick Nixon to show in historical context that time has been kind to him Continue reading A Little Bit Of This, A Little Bit Of That
While Russian troops advance into Ukraine, the Russian economy looks to be slipping further and further into inflation, recession, and dare I say even depression. The New York Times has a good article that articulates in non-Economics Professor terms just what the West is doing financially to try and curtail the Mad Dog of Moscow.
Last week I advocated for severe economic punishment for Russia’s blatant disregard for Ukraine’s national sovereignty and amazingly (because who thought the Western Allies could ever agree on doing something) that punishment has been meted out.
Somewhat.
I’m hoping that the somewhat is only to give Vlad the Impersonator a taste of what could happen if full measures were in fact instituted. Hoping, but something tells me that somewhere along the line some country somewhere will do the “but we need their natural gas” and begin to fray the alliance. But as for now the sanctions currently in place are definitely worrying to Russia. Russians are lining up at ATM’s trying to get cash out. The Bank of Russia even went so far as to promise that
“The volume of bank notes ready for loading into A.T.M.s is more than sufficient. All customer funds on bank accounts are fully preserved and available for any transactions.”
Um, sure. But something tells me many Russians are getting ready to make a run on the bank which is never a good thing. Would that panic spread to the rest of the world? My college economics professor would have said yes, but the world has changed in the *cough cough* years since I took his class. As the sequel to Wall Street (the movie) said, “money never sleeps”. Besides with a government fiat against doing business with Russian banks in place, a default letter from any Russian bank will be laughed at by any foreign borrower.
Damn that let’s Trump off the hook for a while. No wonder he thought Putin’s Penetration was a smart move.
There’s more to the story, click the link below
Continue reading “Vlad And The Magical Disappearing Currency”
Well here we are, the place we never thought we’d be at but the place we always knew deep down we’d get to. Russia, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, has without reason, provocation, or seemingly sanity, has invaded the sovereign country of Ukraine because…well if I could figure out why I’d be on the Kremlin Desk at the Company and briefing the bigwigs in the White House. In other words, I can’t figure it out and anyone who says they KNOW why he did it is just blowing smoke up that proverbial backside. Some of the reasons expounded by the experts … Continue reading Vlad the Dissembler
Gonna get a little personal on you today.
Last week my older son Brian had a corneal transplant. Without it he would have gone blind, which would be a rather inconvenient condition to have given that his chosen profession is photography. You can see some of his work by clicking here.
He lives with a condition called keratoconus which you are welcome to click the link and find out more about, but basically means his corneas never formed properly. It occurs in around one out of every 2,000 people and is the leading cause of corneal transplant.
This was the third attempt to have the transplant, the first two aborted because of, first, a problem with anesthesia and second a problem with the viability of the cornea to be transplanted. With transplants the phrase “good enough” is never good enough. If it’s the least bit hinky the surgeon says no go.
As well she should.
Fortunately the third time was the charm. As he is a single gentleman his mother (Cruella) and I took care of him for the first few days of his recovery. That consisted mostly of keeping lights in the house low or off, making sure he took his anti-rejection medication and providing as much TLC as he would allow us to give. Once assured he was capable of going it on his own we returned him to his own house where he continues to recover.
From this experience I find myself up on the soapbox preaching the good word of organ donation and why you, yes you, should be taking the easy steps to participate in the process.
To see how, click the link below
Well here we go again with yet another California recall election and the national media contorting themselves into pretzel logic trying to figure out just what the hell is going on with the heart left in the City By The Bay.
Wow, Steely Dan and Tony Bennett in one sentence.
By now you may have heard that San Francisco voted to recall three members of the Board of Education over, well, it’s actually a lot more intricate than the media would have you believe. Sorry national media, but this was NOT liberals versus the ultra left. This wasn’t about San Francisco becoming more conservative. Put away all those now tired catch phrases like “woke” or “cancel culture”. This was a lot more parochial than that.
126,000 people voted in this election out of a population of 824,000 people, 500,000 of whom are registered voters. 374,000 people couldn’t be bothered to even drop their ballot in the mailbox, possibly because San Francisco only has about 53,000 school age kids within the city limits. That’s about 6% of the total population. To put that in perspective, there are 120,000 dogs in San Francisco.
That’s right, dogs outnumber school age kids almost 3-1 in old Baghdad By The Bay.
Ostensibly this election was about three issues: not getting kids back in school during the pandemic, wanting to change school names to honor less allegedly abhorrent role models, and wanting to eliminate the so called merit system for admission to Lowell High School (more about that below).
Pretend this is the SAT and we’ll break the above paragraph into three parts to inspect and dissect. Got your number two pencils at the ready? OK, begin.
Eyes on your own paper young man.
So, getting kids back into school during the pandemic. Parents were mad that the school board decided unvaccinated youngsters were at risk to not only themselves but to all the adults they could be giving their potential cooties to in a classroom and thus exacerbating the pandemic. Parents were saying their kids were falling behind because distance learning was not as good as in person instruction. They have a point as it’s pretty much a given that kids learn better in an actual classroom and not in front of a laptop with mom or dad trying to conduct business in the next room and the dog growling and the doorbell ringing to announce the Door Dash guy is here. But then again everyone was in the same boat so to speak. It wasn’t one group or another that was singled out to have to do distance learning, ALL students had to do it. If little Billy, excuse me, little Saffron fell behind in his/her studies maybe there were other factors to take into consideration.
Like a worldwide once in a lifetime (hopefully) pandemic.
Issue number two was the so called infatuation with changing names of schools to not honor those who had been retroactively declared persons of bad faith because of some stain in their permanent record. Yes, the stains were in the mold of holding other humans in bondage or having besmirched the reputation of minority groups over a hundred years ago.
Sigh.
Look, despite what Fox News would have you think, in San Francisco there is no Pol Pot High playing Joseph Stalin High for the city football championship. We’re talking about names like Washington and Lincoln and other 18th and 19th century historical figures. Were they important figures in American history? Yes of course. Were some of their views abhorrent to modern sensibilities? Yes of course. Here’s a history lesson we should all learn: no one is perfect, especially when you compare the way they lived their lives in their own time to the way we aspire to live ours in our own time. Be careful when you set anyone up as a model of perfection. That statue will always be mounted on a very shaky pedestal. MLK was an adulterer. Gandhi slept naked with his grandniece “in order to test his celibacy”. Mother Teresa encouraged her followers to secretly baptize dying patients Catholic without their permission. Dig far enough back in anyone’s closet and you’ll find some skeleton rattling around in there.
But the renaming issue was also an issue of bad optics and politics. It was perceived as the school board prioritizing the renaming of schools over getting kids back into schools. What they should have done is table that entire discussion until after the pandemic was over. Oh, actually they did that to a large extent. Except certain conservative media outlets (ahem, again Fox News) kept insisting they hadn’t and that it was the only issue these liberal crazies were interested in.
Continue on to the next page by clicking the link below
By the time you are reading this, the wife (Cruella) and I will be winging our way homeward, off the Azamara Quest and returning to reality. It’s been a much needed break from that sometimes cruel state. Aboard ship one can, if one so chooses, be totally cut off from the outside world. Internet service is spotty and slow, to say the least. In addition it is, frankly, expensive, so much so that Cruella and I opted to just have one account we shared. Sharing of course means having to let each other know when one or the other of … Continue reading I’m Kicking You Off
One of the best things about travel is you get a different perspective on what’s going on in the world.
You also get a different perspective on how the rest of the world sees Americans.
Keep in mind I’m on board a luxury cruise ship. This isn’t your seven day six night Carnival “fun ship” where it’s cheap to get on but expensive once on board. This is the kind of cruise for an older, wealthier clientele so of course it tends to skew conservative.
And then there is the flaming liberal, me, unafraid to voice an opinion and prepared by six years of vicious mudslinging to battle to the death on every issue.
Except I’m not. I am having insightful conversations with people of all political stripes that end more often with toasts to each others health than knives in each other’s backs.
Example: A self described “very right wing” British gentleman I met and had drinks with, (something becoming an oddity in itself in the US) was heard by me to utter “well at least you got rid of Trump” when the subject of politics came up.
That brought me up, as they say in the UK. “You didn’t like him?” I inquired. That lead to, gasp, a civilized discussion of politics and especially what it means to be conservative. He didn’t even fully approve of Boris Johnson but of course the British system means that while you may support and vote for the Conservative candidate in your constituency, sometimes one must have to gulp twice, smile through gritted teeth, and accept the leader of the party when he takes the office of Prime Minister.
Stiff upper lip and all that, don’t you know.
Meanwhile he was puzzled at how America could have fallen for, his words, “a carnival showman with no clear political agenda other than to stay in power”. I mentioned that not once but twice Trump didn’t win the election, but rather he won the Electoral College, another concept my friend from the UK was totally stumped by. I wanted to go into a history of that most peculiar institution, but more drinks arrived just then saving my breath and I’m pretty certain his sanity. We toasted each other, fist pumped, and moved on to other subjects.
Another example: A Canadian couple from British Columbia and I had a chat that swerved into the politics of Canada-US relations. Now these folks were more liberal than my UK friend, voted for Trudeau, and were totally aghast at what happened during the Trump years and in particular the way Trump had treated Trudeau. “He acted like our Prime Minister was a political novice who didn’t understand the complexities of foreign relations when in fact the opposite was true”. I pointed out that that was Trump’s modus operandi, to cleave his faults onto the other guy while proclaiming himself the “expert”.
“Well that’s certainly not the way to deal with others” they proclaimed, insinuating that type of behavior was more playground than political. Our conversation ended with smiles and fist bumps.
I am currently aboard the cruise ship Azamara Quest and it is the safest place in the world. It is the safest place in the world because of the 220 passengers and 400 crew members aboard the ship, every one of them (us) has to be fully vaccinated against COVID and be able to show proof of status. You want to call my little California state issued vaccine card a vaccine passport go ahead because it fits neatly inside my federal government issued actual passport. It is the safest place in the world because all 220 passengers and 400 crew … Continue reading A Postcard From the Safest Place In The World
The wife (Cruella) and I are travelling for the next two weeks. Actually we’ll be on a cruise ship. More about that next time. This time I’d like to say a good word for the newest Americans working the crappiest jobs who frankly saved our bacon over the last 24 hours. Our flight from San Francisco to Atlanta was delayed two and a half hours because of the winter weather on the East Coast. Just quickly, really Delta? Are you not aware that in late January, early February it can get really snowy on the East coast? And if so … Continue reading Let’s Hear It For The Immigrants
Last Friday the wife (Cruella) and I wanted to go out to dinner. We have a favorite Chinese restaurant we frequent and the desire for their Barbeque Pork Chow Fun combined with our desire to get out of the house neatly.
We have been to this restaurant numerous times, in point of fact we discovered it during the pandemic, both to dine in and to get take out (or take away if you are reading this in the UK). Never a hassle, good food, and most importantly a chance to get out of the house and eat at a different table and gaze at something other than, well, each other.
As has become custom during the pandemic I went to their website to make sure of their operating hours and if they were continuing to offer dine in service. Nothing had changed, so off we went.
Much to our surprise their doorway was blocked and a small sign taped to the glass window announced that since the previous Tuesday they had gone to “Take Out and Door Dash Only”.
While we probably should have gone in search of other eating arraignments, our appetites were craving that Chow Fun, so we scrapped our plans to dine in and ordered to go. While waiting for our order to be completed I counted four people coming to pick up orders they had placed online or via the phone and a stunning seven Door Dashers. That’s eleven total orders in the span of ten minutes.
The other thing I noticed is that the prices had gone up. The chow fun, an order of garlic shrimp, and an order of potstickers came to $36, about 30% higher than we would have been charged prior to the pandemic. Now there is inflation to factor in, plus trying to make back some of what was lost when the restaurant was closed early in the pandemic, but 30% higher? That’s when it hit me. Actually it was the woman from Door Dash who hit me because she was staring down at her phone and not looking where she was going.
I’m being asked to subsidize all of their Door Dash sales. And so are my fellow diners.
You can dash on to more by clicking the link
.A warning before we start. This is going to be a sports essay. If you are not into sports, hang on till the end, I promise I’ll bring this around to current affairs.
You may have heard the gnashing of teeth and grinding of axes over the non-induction of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens to the baseball Hall of Fame. This was their tenth year of eligibility and I don’t have the time or desire to explain the ins and outs of HOF voting but suffice it to say the two most dominant players of their era were told by the voters “so sad, too bad, you juice you lose”.
The Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) are the folks who vote for or against induction into the Hall. Enough of them have taken the stand that anyone who used performance enhancing drugs is a cheater and should thus be banned from induction. So far major names from the steroid era, Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire, A-Rod, et al have failed to win election and either have or will soon fall from the ballot without induction.
Except for the guys they really liked and who, in the voters minds, might have used PEDs, might not, we’re not sure so we’re gonna just take a pass and pass them into the Hall or in other words, give them a hall pass. Like the one player who did get elected this year, David Ortiz. He was only tangentially mentioned in the Mitchell Report, MLB’s investigation into PED use that was released in 2007.
There are two things I think that are important to remember about the Steroid Era ™. The first is that it indeed was an era. It lasted from the late 1980’s or thereabouts until 2003 or thereabouts. In 1991 Major League Baseball banned the use of any PEDs, but they had no testing for it until 2003. Think about that for a moment. For twelve years players could use PEDs pretty much without fear of retribution because without testing there was no way to prove players were using. It was during that period that the record for most home runs in a season was broken twice and the Mark McGwire vs. Sammy Sosa “Long Gone Summer” took place.
While I think it’s absurd to think every major leaguer was using, I don’t think it’s absurd to think most major leaguers were using. In fact I think there were so many who were using that the level playing field moralists are always arguing steroids upended was actually level. If enough players were using then they were all back on even ground. Should they have been using? It’s easy now to say they shouldn’t have, but back in an age when there was no mechanism to see who was and who wasn’t, the pressure to use must have been acute. I’m not talking about pressure from teammates alone. I think the pressure to use came in subtle forms from managers, coaches, and even owners.
“Gee, we’re really looking for a shortstop who can give us 25-30 dingers a year and you’re only popping 10-15. What do you think you can do to get those numbers up? If you can’t, we’re gonna have to look elsewhere and we don’t want to do that since we’re gonna offer you a new multi-year, multi-million dollar contract”.
Money talks, the “pure” ballplayer walks on four pitches to first, down the foul line, and out the bullpen gate.
Bottom of the ninth, two outs, bases loaded, click below for more
Yesterday El Grande Hefe de First Draft wrote about the early political obituaries for Arizona Senator Krysten Sinema. Today I come here, in the words of Shakespeare, not to praise her but to bury her.
In an American Oak wine barrel filled with Sonoma Chardonnay.
Sinema of course has gained fame and notoriety for basically telling all the folks who helped her get elected, both the political classes of the Democratic Party and the good citizens of Arizona who voted for her, that her idea of being a maverick is to do everything she can to prevent the implementation of laws designed to give people the certainty that elections will be held in fair and honorable means. She wants to muck up every chance her party has to turn the hatred of Trump into a solid watershed moment to beat down incipient fascism and create an America where all truly are created equal. She wants to in effect take a parliamentary procedure not mentioned in the Constitution, something not even codified till near 50 years after the Constitution was written, and make it a permanent fixture of congressional debate going forward.
In other words she just loves her some filibuster.
You shouldn’t be surprised. If you have followed her career in politics at all she is the winner of the “Most Likely To Say One Thing But Do Another” award. I mean this is the woman who ran as a moderate Democrat wanting to help the poor of her state then showed up on the floor of the Senate dressed like a teenager heading out to the mall to squash the $15 per hour minimum wage. Not that I have any statistics to back it up but I have a feeling many of the people who voted for her could have really used an upgrade in their minimum wages to help with things like, oh I don’t know, food, shelter, clothing. Especially in the middle of a global pandemic. But hey, she made all Gen Xers yearn for the good old days of Debbie Gibson.
Now I know it’s hard to believe, but we here in Sonoma have a tie to the peripatetic Ms. Sinema. One that is, to say the least, a bit strange. You see, back in the summer of 2020, the Senator from Arizona spent two weeks here in Sonoma as a paid intern at the Three Sticks Winery just a few blocks from my house. How I never ran into her I don’t know. It’s a small town and word of strangers with big names gets around quick.
Let that sink in for a moment. A United States Senator, making a salary of $170K a year, decided to take two weeks off and go learn how to scrub out wine barrels. Not only that, but she got paid $1117.40 per week for the privilege. A quick bit of math shows that means she was paid $28 per hour, nearly twice the minimum wage she voted against. She did it in the middle of a pandemic, five months before the rollout of the initial COVID vaccine, and in the middle of a presidential and congressional election that just might have been the most consequential in the history of the country. I’m sure some of her constituents would have liked her to have been working on programs to save their jobs or even their lives. I’m sure the Democratic Party would have liked her to have gone out stumping for congressional candidates to shore up their House majority or to swing into some swing states to help Joe Biden.
Instead with all that going on she decided to take a couple of weeks off to leave the humidity of Washington and the “but it’s a dry heat” of Arizona to come up to the warm during the day, cold at night temps of Sonoma to learn the ins and outs of winemaking. It shouldn’t be surprising though. Sinema had been called out before the pandemic for missing critical senate votes so she could compete in Ironman Triathlons in such nearby locales as New Zealand. At least the winery was in the US.
But she wore her Ironman garb even better than Tony Stark and that’s all that really matters in the end.
More on this rather strange story by clicking the link
In two weeks the Winter Olympic Games ™ will begin in China.
I won’t be watching.
I will be boycotting these games. My physical attendance was never going to happen, so my boycott will be of the television kind. And I strongly urge you to join with me on this boycott journey.
First of all let’s face it, nobody really cares about winter sports unless they or a family member are playing them. Strapping boards on your feet and sliding down a mountain trying to be one tenth of a second faster than the other guy is not compelling sports viewing. Really, it is like auto racing, we’re just waiting for the crash. Don’t get me started on ice skating, a “sport” tailored to be a cesspool of corruption. Ice hockey? I have the NHL for that, if I really need it. Luge, bobsled, cross country skiing? Fine things to do, but a bore to watch. Now curling, that’s something I could get into, but until they let the curlers (don’t call them athletes) play it in their natural habitats, ie, with a beer can in their hands, I’ll pass.
But all that’s just my distaste for winter sports. That’s not the real reason I’ll be boycotting.
Did I mention these games are taking place in China? You remember China. The land that censorship loves so much it bought a timeshare there. The land of suppression and repression. Where surveilling leads to jailing. Where human rights are thrown into the back seat of a police car never to be heard from again. Yeah, that China.
China, or to be more correct the city of Beijing, was selected to host these Olympics through some pretty dubious means. Back in 2014 when the selection election was held, Oslo Norway was the leading candidate. That made perfect sense since, well, Oslo is well known for it’s winters, i.e., they have plenty of naturally occurring snow and ice. But at the last minute the International Olympic Committee (IOC) threw in demands such as:
“Diva-like demands for luxury treatment” for the IOC members themselves, such as special lanes on all roads only to be used by IOC members and cocktail reception at the Royal Palace with drinks paid for by the royal family. IOC also “demanded control over all advertising space throughout Oslo” to be used exclusively by IOC’s sponsors, something that is not possible in Norway because Norway is a liberal democracy where the government doesn’t own or control “all advertising space throughout Oslo” much of which is privately owned and has no authority to give a foreign private organization exclusive use of an entire city and private property within it.
Now the IOC is pretty well known for being a little footloose and fancy free when it comes to demanding things from potential host cities, but that was ridiculous. It actually sounds to me like the IOC made these requirements with the idea of gaming the election so that ONLY Beijing would be able to win. As it stands the only competitor for these games after Oslo pulled out was Almaty Kazakhstan, another Asian country with dubious credentials when it comes to human rights (but notably better than the Chinese).
So Beijing becomes the first city to ever host both a summer and a winter Olympics and they will have done both in the span of 14 years, far quicker than any other two time host city ever has. Then again, while once upon a time cities fought tooth and nail to get an Olympics now they mostly have an ambivalence about them, especially the winter games. Let’s face it, as a ski destination you only have a few months to make money and if those months have to be given over to preparing for and then hosting an event you don’t make money on, well thanks but no thanks.
But having the IOC game the system for them is the least of my problems with China hosting these games. Let’s talk about what they are requiring of those attending the games, both participants and partisans.
There was an election in Florida (why do these stories always come out of Florida?) last week. The winner, a Democrat named Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, won that election with 79% of the votes cast.
Back in the day, they used to call that a landslide victory.
It’s not surprising though. The district, Florida’s 20th, has a 5-1 Democrat to Repugnicant voter registration. Joe Biden won the district in 2020 with 77% of the vote, so Ms. McCormick actually outdid him. The Repugnicant candidate was perceived as a Boston carpetbagger. Third party candidates picked up enough of the vote so that he actually got less than 20% of the vote which means he couldn’t even get some of the registered Republicans to vote for him. In the past his status as a perceived carpetbagger would have been the attributing factor in his shellacking, but not in 2022 America.
Well you know where this is headed. The Repugnicant refuses to concede the election.
Now they called the race, I did not win, so they say, but that does not mean that they lost either, it does not mean that we lost
Forgetting for a moment his inability to speak the English language clearly, this has become the Repugnicant playbook with all elections. Never concede, send in lawyers, try to get the vote overturned. Use, I would say abuse, the system in any way you can. In a fractured political environment where most elections are decided by narrow margins, you just might get the right judge or the right secretary of state or the right governor to hand your candidate a victory the voters didn’t award to them.
Under those conditions the noted dumb play callers the Dallas Cowboys could petition Roger Goodell to just hand them the Lombardi Trophy as Super Bowl Champions every year.
What I really want to talk about is the importance of conceding; formally, graciously, and with a sense of tradition and humility that is entirely necessary for the idea of the peaceful transition of power to become a reality.
John McCain once said
I didn’t like the outcome of the 2008 election. But I had a duty to concede. A concession isn’t just an act of graciousness. It is an act of respect for the will of the American people, an act that is every American leader’s first responsibility.
Respect. Wow, there is a word you don’t hear in connection to politics much these days. Respect the process. Respect the institutions. Respect the history. Hell, respect your opponent and what he or she had to do in order to come out on top. Take your lumps, leave with your head held high, and make sure your election district, your state, or your country can come together to work on the great problems we face in this world.
One political party seems to do that pretty well. The other, not so much. The problem is we can’t even agree on which party is which in that scenario. Well I’ll tell you which one is in the wrong, it’s the Repugnicants. It’s always the Repugnicants. It’s always them because the only way they can win elections is to rig the game ahead of time. They gerrymander districts. They impose ridiculous voting restrictions (I want to be the first guy to go to jail for giving someone a bottle of water while they stand in line to vote in Georgia). In counties they control they make it easy for white voters to cast their ballots by having plenty of voting precincts in the areas where whites live and hardly any in areas where blacks live. In states where early voting is allowed (most of them) they have restricted when or how those early ballots can be dropped off.
Don’t concede, keep reading by clicking the link
So a couple of weeks ago the wife (Cruella) went to the doctor for her annual “well woman checkup”. If you are a woman you know what that means. If you are a man, ask a woman, and it would be best to ask a woman who understands your tolerance for the realities of the female anatomy, to explain it to you.
Cruella checked out just fine as she knew she would. She went out and had lunch with her friends, then tootled on home and thought nothing more of it. The next week an envelope arrived from Palo Alto Medical Foundation, the medical corporation that her doctor works for. In it was a bill for the “well woman checkup” to the tune of $493. Well that’s a surprise since our Blue Cross insurance should have covered the entire amount charged for the check up.
Here’s an important thing to know about my wife. Years ago she had a thought to get into a new line of work and decided medical billing would be an interesting application of her skills. Thus she took courses and bought text books on how to “code” as they say in the biz. Code refers to the various permutations of numbers and letters that are used to define the procedure a patient comes in for (in this case a well woman checkup) and the diagnosis the doctor comes up with (she’s fine, come back in a year). Those codes are the basis on which the doctor or the corporation he works for charge your insurance company and you. Suffice it to say that even though she never actually entered that field, the information never left her head. And the textbooks became fixtures in our bookcase.
It turns out that we got this bill because instead of the visit being coded as a well woman checkup, it was coded as a well woman checkup WITH a diagnosis that something was wrong. Z01.411 versus Z01.419. I am not making these code numbers up. Getting on the phone she called the doctor’s office and was told, no we in the office coded it properly, you’ll need to call the corporate billing department to see if they changed anything.
Ah yes, welcome to the third circle of hell. When you go to the doctor at Palo Alto Med, which by the way is actually owned by a larger corporation called Sutter Health, the doctor’s office is responsible to code the reason for and result of the visit. That information is sent on to the actual Sutter Health billing department, ostensibly to double check it was billed properly, before it is sent on to your health insurance company so they can pay the bill. In order to make sure the code is correct, or perhaps to justify their code, the doctor also sends on their notes from the visit.
Oh you thought your medical records were private. How quaint.
So now Millie in billing gets to read all the doctor’s notes on your visit and can decide, nope, we gotta change this code or add in another code here because in the notes there is a mention of maybe possibly kinda sorta if I squint real hard there might be a potential problem. Thus Z01.411 becomes Z01.419. Then she ships it all off to Blue Cross happy in the knowledge she has served her corporate masters well. She kicks back, puts her feet up on the desk, takes a long sip from her martini glass and pulls out a Kool Menthol to celebrate her achievement. That’s assuming she redid the coding in an honest attempt to be as correct as possible.
Thing is, Sutter Health is actually kinda known for not being the most reputable when it comes to doing honest coding. To the tune of a $90 million dollar fine by the federal government.
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In the last two years COVID has inspired lots of people to embrace nostalgia for the past. TV shows from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s are the “go-to” viewing for millions. Safe, warm, inviting, and you know how it all turns out anyway (Rachel doesn’t get on the plane). People are rereading or reading for the first time books from out of their past, even the ones you had to slog through in English Lit 101 and couldn’t understand why anyone ever thought this was any good (looking at you Jane Austen). Baking bread became a talisman for happier times when you came home from school to the tantalizing smell of something Mom just pulled out of the oven, a pleasant certainty in a time of complete uncertainty.
Even in politics there seems to be a desire to return to what we grew up with. A time when the President of the United States didn’t call Nazis “good people”. A time when Supreme Court nominees were distinguished legal scholars or experienced jurists who got a full and fair hearing in front of the Senate. A time when street protests were the province of the left and editorial handwringing was the province of the right. A time when the violent overthrow of the government of the United States was the stuff of political suspense novels. In other words, a time when you knew who the good guys were (us) and who the bad guys were (them).
So thanks Vladimir Putin for bringing back a remnant of an earlier time: Russia versus America in The Great Game. Just when you were thinking there would never again be a solidly black and white issue where we as a country stood together against the Evil Empire, Vlad decided it was time to sprinkle his troops along the border between his country and Ukraine and threaten to invade. All that’s missing is Brezhnev’s bushy brows, Nixon’s nattering nabobs, and Kissinger’s krafty kreepiness. Geo-politics is always better with alliteration.
Yes, Russia has it’s troops poised to invade Ukraine like so many plastic armies on a Risk game board. Meanwhile Russian and American diplomats hold talks in that citadel of diplomacy and spy craft called Geneva to try and hold off any sort of military confrontation. You can almost feel the strings being pulled by the various players and emissaries. In the meantime George Smiley is sending his people back into the cold. The main difference this time is that the ideological aspects of the Cold War are gone. This isn’t the Communists versus the Democracies, it actually harkens back to an even earlier version, the Fascists versus the Democracies.
And I hate to say it, but it’s a bit frightening to harken back to that earlier era of confrontation, mostly because we know very well how it played out and how it played out was not all that well. The similarities make it even more frightening.
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