Another Tornado

There t'was another F1/F2 tornado in town on the 14th, coming from the northwest and spinning across the Allegheny and Conewango rivers before doing some damage a block north of the house. The warning sirens went off at 8:03 pm and the storm hit about 15 minutes later. I watched from the front porch and through a window to the back of the house and saw dark clouds and rain and wind, but never knew a tornado had been so close until the next day. Actually, straight line 'blowdown' winds that push over dozens of trees are fairly common in these mountains, so that's all I thought the storm was. This particular tornado seems to have formed and dissipated several times based on the damage: it came down a mountain and crossed the Allegheny where it destroyed a lumberyard then climbed over another mountain doing minimal tree damage, then fell back to the valley where we live. Here it took down some trees and power lines and damaged but did not destroy several buildings. Fortunately, no one was hurt. Three years ago an F1 tornado followed a similar route where there is a gap in the mountains that apparently aids in their formation.

Abortion..my spin..a letter to the editor

 

   “Globally from 2010 through 2014, 35 abortions were performed per 1,000 women of reproductive age, down from 40 abortions per 1,000 women. The decrease was driven primarily by reductions in countries with liberal abortion laws, where abortion rates dropped from 46 per 1,000 women to 27. Conversely, developing regions – including 93 percent of the countries with the most restrictive abortion laws – saw only a drop from 39 to 36 abortions per 1,000 women…The data show that, while stricter abortion laws do not lead to fewer abortions, preventing unwanted pregnancies has a significant effect on reducing the number of terminations…In countries where laws permit abortion only to save the life of the mother, the abortion rate is higher at 37 per 1,000 women than the rate of 34 abortions per 1,000 in countries without such restrictions…In 2018 abortions in the United States hit an all time low.”
      Effective contraception is the most effective deterrent to having to confront the difficult decision to abort or not, and the education and social status of women in developed countries better empowers them to control their pregnancies. Ideally, if an unwanted baby is born, and the mother does not offer it for adoption, that mother has both the emotional and financial support to raise the child in a loving, supportive environment. If not, then the moral question of aborting a fetus becomes the question of assuring that a child does not suffer from neglect-or worse. In the United States, there are public safety nets to assist needy mothers, yet far more money is spent on weapons and conflicts financed by American tax dollars. Hopefully, some of the outrage against killing unborn babies is being channeled into stopping American supported violence that kills innocent children around the world. All unnecessary killing should be avoided.
     When discussing the sanctity of life, it is common for people to assume that human life is the most precious. After all, we are human and have an inherent bias towards our own species. From a larger, historical perspective, Nature does not assume that our species has a privileged position over other species; extinction has been a normal part of lifes history. So for as much as we like to believe that we are special, with a little empathy and an inclusive vision, it is easy to value other species as having a similar right to life as a human fetus. But over population and resource depletion by humanity are slowly causing the next mass extinction-perhaps including ourselves-so from that perspective it is hard to argue the moral high ground regarding human fetuses. Again, all unnecessary killing should be avoided.
  In any case, the decision to abort a child is a difficult one for every woman, and to condense the complexities of that decision to a dogmatic religious doctrine oversimplifies their emotional turmoil. Is to choose life a preferable, positive choice? No doubt, but the perspectives leading to that choice demand that compassion for pregnant mothers is included in the discussion.

One Monument

   The book "THE MASTER PLAN" by ex convict Chris Wilson did more to clarify the black experience as related to the justice system than any other source I have ever seen. He is a better man than most of us and I encourage everyone to read it. Along those lines...

Beth and I recently returned from a 3 week journey to the south, where we encountered this racist monument in the town of Madison, Georgia. To be fair it was erected in 1908 and overall we found the people of the south to be very friendly and courteous. They are, however, still fighting the civil war in some places and seem to have missed the larger point that preserving the “sovereignty” of their way of life meant preserving the abominable immorality of slavery. And I would like to remind those black people who still harbor resentment towards whites that the battle of Spotsylvania courthouse alone-among many others- and particularly the sacrifices at the ‘bloody angle’ show that many white men offered their lives to help right the wrongs of their misguided brothers.

Another Good Book, etc

     In addition to my standard comment "it's all crap" regarding the bureaucracies and inefficiencies of modern life, I also say "well, people don't farm anymore, so what are they supposed to do?"
     This book offers a detailed analysis of why modern society has become the way it is and why 37% of people say that what they do is meaningless-hence the title of the book. Bullshit jobs are jobs that if they disappeared, no one would really notice, and include mostly white collar paper pushing administrative type vocations that have proliferated in the last 30 to 50 years. Mr. Obama gave this informative description of them while formulating the Affordable Care Act:
      " Everybody who supports single-payer health care says,

  'Look at all the money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork'. That represents one million, two million, three million jobs filled by people who are working at Blue Cross, Blue Shield or Kaiser or other places. What are we doing with them? Where are we employing them?"
        Which, as author Graeber ( a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics)  states, is precisely why the present inefficient system was/is maintained...Because to some decision makers it is "better to maintain those millions of basically useless office jobs than to cast about trying to find something else for the paper pushers to do."    (...like I said...nobody farms anymore..)
       Personally, I have always thought the farmers and plumbers and child care givers and all the genuine Workers in a society should be the highest paid, because what they do has the highest value. If all of the 'illegal' immigrants were deported, society would quickly notice the lack of food, housing, clean hotel rooms.etc etc.. In "Anti-Clock" I wrote that the true worth of manual labor is revealed when it's time to move a refrigerator up a flight of stairs. No lawyer or doctor or banker or writer will be of much help then, or when the electricity goes out. .This book helps explain how priorities have gotten so skewed.
          At any rate...one example of a job that is Not bullshit is a dentist, because one can directly see the productivity. I had a broken, infected tooth pulled last week, the first in my life. My reasoning at age 63 is that saving some of them with root canals and crowns no longer makes economic sense.
  

Buzzard Swamp

  Walked a few miles at Buzzard Swamp today, a preserve about 30 miles from here, which I visit 6 or 7 times a year. I enjoy the open land there and it is a good spot to see wildlife and fish for large mouth bass. Today I saw bald eagles nesting ( that spruce tree in the closeup is the same one that is in the panoramic picture, so I had to zoom in without a tripod...) The beaver pond borders the dirt access road and fortunately did not flood the road. The Allegheny forest that surrounds this open land and is mostly mountainous, which makes the flat, watery refuge all the more rare and valuable. Beavers and bald eagles are relatively common in western PA,   although neither one is a daily sighting unless one knows where to look. Eagles frequent the rivers that flow right though town, but beavers dam the smaller creeks in the valleys further away. Trappers keep the latter population down but not so much that I do not see the animals regularly.
   As in much of the country, winter came fast around here with cold and snow jumping a month ahead of normal...perhaps that is

the new normal.

Reading,Writing and Critical Thought

            Have been reading a book by Maryanne Wolf, professor at Tufts University, titled   “Reader, Come Home- The Reading Brain in a Digital World” in which she analyzes the effects of new technology on the brain. Her fellow professors of literature and social science have noticed two trends at the college level:

            “The first is that students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly adverse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis. The second is that student writing is deteriorating”

              Cursive writing is no longer taught in some states and only partially in others, which means that many people will not be able to read the American Declaration of Independence or Constitution as they were originally written. My thirty five years of cursive journals might be incomprehensible to my own granddaughter and other descendants. Maybe translation software will make cursive legible to future generations, just as Latin and other lost languages remain viable, but even when they can be read, intricate works of literature might be incomprehensible to future generations if the lack of attention span and critical analysis continues.           

            As a person who has spent many years walking and thinking in solitude, it is not difficult for me to discern the lack of critical analyisis in otherwise intelligent people. The proliferation of biased news sources and the manipulation of video and print to promote propaganda has made the immersion in self fulfilling ‘group think’ easier than ever. It is impossible to articulate the complexity of a subject in a ‘tweet’, but that seems to be the extent of some peoples critical thinking. If they limit their sources of information to others who think like them, they will never find the truth.

             Fortunately, there are always independent thinkers who challenge the culture. If the digital age lowers peoples ability to think deeply, then I suppose we cannot invent Artificial Intelligence soon enough for it to pick up the slack. I cautiously trust that humanity will adapt as needed to compensate.

  

Misc Babble...

                           This is an 84 year old patient's daily medications schedule. The person suffers from Dyspnea, diabetes, COPD, obesity, sleep apnea, coronary heart disease and was a smoker until 25 years ago. The paper medical records for this person measure 6 inches thick. This is just one of the 40-50% of people most responsible for the high cost of health care. You draw your own conclusions; mine have been articulated in earlier posts.
                            My thoughts on Mr. Trump 2 years on are as follows:
     A master at manipulation and self promotion who will do what it takes to accomplish his agenda regardless of moral or ethical considerations. For that reason he relates well to similar leaders in the world; they understand one another on a visceral level.  There are Trump supporters who believe the entire government is corrupt and that Mr. Trump at least is stirring the pot. His detractors believe he is destroying all civility for decades to come. Unfortunately, support for one side or the other has 'trumped' the search for Truth as an ethical scientist would describe it-with verifiable facts and repeatable experiments. As one recent example, Mr. Trumps rhetoric has stated that "If you want your Stocks to go down, I strongly suggest voting Democrat." In truth, Binky Chadha, chief strategist at Deutsche Bank, noted that the three-month period running from a month ahead to two months after the (midterm) election has produced a median 8% gain, (regardless of party affiliation of the winners and losers) And that includes only one decline, a 4% drop in 1978, over that period in the last 21 midterm elections.") Personally, I think Trumps most lasting legacy will be the supreme court nominees; they alone will survive several election cycles. The tax changes, EPA decisions and other policy commitments may or may not survive depending on the choices of voters in the future.
                         Overall, what happens in the back rooms affects the planet as much as what we argue about publicly; there is a big wheel rolling secretly that nothing is going to change.  Do I believe democracy will survive the present commotion? Yes. But the planet and humanity are bigger than democracy and human nature is very messy thing.