HinesSight

Laurel Hines, my wife, supports changes to Oregon's Death With Dignity law

The Oregon legislature is considering a bill, SB 1003, that would make changes to our state's Death With Dignity law -- which allows people who have six months or less left to live to exercise control over the time and manner of their death by taking physician-prescribed medication.

Passed by Oregon voters in 1994, and affirmed in 1997 when it took effect after a legal challenge, the law is a good start, but it needs improving. That's why my wife, Laurel Hines, testified in favor of SB 1003 at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 3.

Laurel told the committee that it makes sense to allow physician assistants and nurse practitioners to deal with patients who want to make use of the Death With Dignity law. In many rural parts of Oregon, PAs and NPs are the primary caregivers, since physicians are lacking in those areas. 

She also approved of a proposed change that reduces the waiting period to use the law from 15 days to 2 days, telling the committee that a 15 day wait after deciding on a peaceful death could be intolerable, and it prolongs the patient's emotional agony. Further, some people lose the ability to self-administer the medication over a 15 day period (that's a requirement under the law).

My wife was quoted in a couple of news stories about the hearing. Here's an excerpt from a story in The Lund Report (an independent publication focused on health care in Oregon), "Senators hear passionate arguments over how terminally ill patients end their lives in Oregon."

How easy should it be for terminally ill people to end their lives? Debate over how Oregon should answer that question is flaring in Salem.

A group of doctors want to cut the waiting period for Oregon’s Death with Dignity law from 15 days to 48 hours and allow not just physicians but nurse practitioners and physician assistants to prescribe medication and oversee the process that allows terminally ill patients to end their lives.

Critics say the changes will remove safeguards voters were promised when they approved Oregon’s physician-assisted dying law in 1994 and affirmed in 1997. Supporters, however, say the law needs an update in response to doctor shortages and for patients who are on the brink of death.

“I believe that these changes that are being proposed are not radical at all, and extremely reasonable,” Laurel Hines, a retired Salem social worker, told lawmakers Monday.

Lawmakers considered those arguments during a hearing of Senate Bill 1003, which would make the most far-reaching revisions to Oregon’s Death with Dignity program in the history of the law.

Hines said that Oregon’s law is modest compared to what’s in place in Canada and other countries. Without reforms to Oregon’s law, she said more people would turn to “do-it-yourself options.”

“I now have traumatic memories of my sister dying the way she did, and being in the condition she was and in pain that morphine didn't control and her loss of autonomy."

The Portland Oregonian also had a story that mentioned Laurel, "Bill to ease medically assisted suicide runs into wall of opposition." 
Download Bill to ease medically assisted suicide runs into wall of opposition

The bill would loosen Oregon’s first-in-the-nation law by reducing the standard waiting period after patients ask for lethal doses of medication from 15 days to two days. Among other provisions, it would eliminate the need for two doctors to sign off on medically assisted suicide and instead allow two physician assistants or nurse practitioners to do so.

No individual lawmakers have signed on as sponsors of Senate Bill 1003, which was filed by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Only two people spoke in favor of the bill Monday. Eight people spoke in opposition, along with 150 Oregonians who submitted written testimony objecting to the bill.

Dr. Paul Kaplan, who said he was speaking for a group of about 30 mostly retired doctors who’ve focused on end-of-life care, told the committee the bill would help reduce inequities in rural Oregon where most residents use physician assistants or nurse practitioners for their medical care.

“There are very large areas of Oregon where there is not a doctor available for hundreds of miles,” Kaplan said. “And so this service is literally not available to patients who live in those areas.”

Laurel Hines, a Salem resident, told the committee that sometimes waiting 15 days is too long. Hines said her sister deteriorated within a few days of going into hospice and would not have been able to self-administer a lethal dose — as required by Oregon law. Though Hines’ sister died in Illinois, where there is no medically assisted suicide law, Hines used her sister’s death as an example of what can happen to terminally ill patients.

“I now have traumatic memories of my sister dying the way she did and being in the condition that she was and pain that morphine didn’t control,” Hines said.

It seems that many or even most of the 150 comments in opposition to the bill likely came from an organized effort by Oregon Right to Life. Laurel read the comments and told me that there was talk about the horror of killing unborn children, though abortion obviously has nothing to do with the Death With Dignity law. Most of those opponents probably hadn't even read SB 1003, so hopefully their comments will be discounted by the committee.

Ukrainian refugee speaks at Salem City Club on day Trump insults Ukraine

The timing was coincidental.

Still, yesterday it was jarring for me to leave for the noon Salem City Club program on "Finding Home in a New Culture and Country" after learning the news about how Trump and Vance had insulted Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, which really was an insult to the entire country, only to find that one of the program speakers was Kseniia Hnatovska, a Ukrainian.

Here's how she was described in a City Club email:

Kseniia and her family fled Ukraine at the onset of the war and undertook a long and challenging journey that brought them to Salem. Kseniia works as Ukrainian Navigator/Case Manager with Salem For Refugees organization now and helps other refugees to settle in and feel safe. Kseniia works hard to build a Ukrainian community in Salem and bring people and resources together.

Hnatovska shared some images of what her city, Kharkiv, was like before and after the unprovoked Russian invasion three years ago. I couldn't help but think of how Trump criticized Zelensky for being so angry at the Russian dictator, Vladimir Putin.

Gosh, Donald, maybe that had something to do with Putin being responsible for the deaths of so many Ukrainian, along with senseless attacks on civilians.

This is Hnatovska, her husband, and daughter in happier times back in Ukraine.


Her city looked beautiful.

Until Russian bombs started to fall. 

Parents would write a child's identifying information on their back in case the child became separated from their family. Or if the child was the sole survivor of a Russian attack.

Eventually Hnatovska and her family made it to Salem, where they were aided by the Salem for Refugees and other local people.

Tania Wilson Moran, the Volunteer Coordinator for Salem for Refugees, also spoke at the City Club program. She explained the rigorous process refugees have to go through before they are cleared for entry to the United States. Sometimes refugees have to wait over ten years to jump through all the hoops.

Irritatingly, Moran said that some Salem-bound refugees were ready to board planes to come to this country. Then the Trump administration cancelled all refugee admissions, an amazingly heartless and cruel thing to do.

The historic average of refugees allowed to come to the United States has been 65,000 to 70,000 per year. In 2023 the number was 60,000. Now the number is sitting at zero.

Moran said that in Salem, over 500 volunteers, 50 community partners, and 35 faith communities have welcomed over 1,000 refugees from 17 different countries who speak 29 different languages. That's wonderful. Hopefully the Trump administration will find a glimmer of compassion in its so-far cold heart and resume the entry of refugees to our country.

In response to a question from the audience about how the current dysfunction in Washington, D.C. has affected her organization, Moran said that Salem for Refugees is in a tough spot, having lost most of the group's federal funding. However, I recall her saying that they've been able to raise $100,000 from other sources.

Another audience member had a right-on comment about Ukraine losing the support of the American government. His hope was that Ukraine keeps the support of the American people. I feel the same way.

Salem Health dumps Regence after each blames the other

When I went in for a teeth cleaning session at my dentist's office this week, I told the front desk person that I had different insurance now, having signed up with Providence MedAdvantage at the end of 2024 because I didn't want to run the risk of my Regence MedAdvantage plan being severely handicapped by Regence and Salem Health failing to renew their contract -- which seemed likely at the time.

I was told that many of their dental patients have done the same thing: dumped Regence. A few days ago the wisdom of that move became clear when Salem Health issued a news release whose title says it all: "Update: Negotiations fail, Salem Health can no longer accept Regence insurance." Excerpt:

For over a year, Salem Health Hospitals and Clinics has worked tirelessly to reach agreement on a fair and equitable contract with Regence BlueCross BlueShield that covers the cost of providing health care in the mid-valley. Despite daily negotiations and numerous accommodations by Salem Health, Regence has been unwilling to offer any meaningful compromise, forcing Salem Health to stop accepting BlueCross BlueShield insurance effective Feb. 24, 2025.

“It is Salem Health’s obligation and privilege to provide high quality of care for our community,” said Cheryl Wolfe, Salem Health president and CEO. “Unfortunately, that means making difficult decisions to ensure we can provide that level of care now and for the next generation. We understand this decision will be difficult for our patients who are BlueCross BlueShield members. We have worked so hard to find an alternative path with Regence and are so deeply frustrated and heartbroken that this is where we are.”

Since the contract between the two parties expired Jan. 1, Salem Health has seen a pattern of Regence denying coverage and passing the full cost of care to their members. This leaves patients with overwhelming medical bills, even as these members continue to pay their premiums to Regence.

Of course, Regence has a different perspective on this corporate pissing match, issuing its own news release, "Salem Health's leadership has walked away from negotiations." Excerpt:

We have been working for months to find a reasonable path to bring Salem Health’s providers and facilities back into our network. But today their leaders said they are not interested in continuing conversations if we won’t give them a 40% increase.

Salem chose to terminate our contract at the start of this year and appears uninterested in serving Regence members.

We’ve been transparent that our aim is to protect our members and customers from unsustainable increases in the cost of care. We hear regularly from people who are frustrated about the very real impact health care affordability has on their lives. Those frustrations extend to our regulators, who have asked us to limit care to 3.4% growth annually.

Salem Health leaders have continued to insist on reimbursement rates that far exceed that amount. We’ve regularly given them increases through the years, and we have offered them an increase in our current conversations as well. However, they continue to demand more, and we cannot do that to our members and customers, knowing any increases in the price of care will cost them more.

We understand that Salem Health’s position is that they are ready to stay out of network for a long time, asserting that they do not need Regence for their continued business and plan to prioritize patients insured by others. They’ve indicated that they can easily replace our members with other patients.

This is a most unfortunate position that prioritizes their profits and not their patients and turns a blind eye to the disruption they have caused in the community. We want to provide access to our members, but we will not ask them to shoulder the burden of lining the provider’s pockets.

I don't know who to believe. My leaning, I guess, is a bit toward Salem Health. After all, Salem Health says that they have contracts with 15 other insurance carriers, though it's unclear how many of those contracts were newly negotiated.

When I turned 65, I signed up with Regence MedAdvantage. So for over ten years I've been mostly satisfied with Regence. In 2024 I paid $72 a month for coverage, in addition to what is deducted for Medicare from my Social Security payment. Now I'm paying Providence MedAdvantage $82 a month for a roughly similar plan.

What disturbs me is the disruption caused to people in the Salem area who have Regence health insurance and either weren't able to switch to a different insurance company, or didn't want to switch, perhaps trusting that Regence and Salem Health would work out a deal. 

The number of people potentially affected is open to debate. Salem Health's news release says more than 30,000:

Salem Health requested continuity of care for all Regence members after January while the two parties negotiated toward a fair contract. Regence largely denied this request. Out of more than 30,000 local BlueCross BlueShield members, Regence has granted continuity of care for less than 400, leaving the others with almost no local access to care and large medical bills. To avoid further crippling medical debt for patients, Salem Health has made the difficult decision to stop accepting BlueCross BlueShield insurance.

Regence's press release says 30,000 is too high.

Salem Health says Regence has 30,000 affected members – not true: this number includes members from other Blue plans across the country as well as thousands of people who were no longer eligible with any Blues plan.

Regardless, it's a sad commentary on our nation's dysfunctional health care system that two giant corporations can hold hostage the physical and mental health needs of many thousands of people in our area.

I'm not expecting that the next four years of the Trump administration will see any improvement in this regard, since at the best our health care system will be fortunate to maintain the crappy status quo: way more expensive than in other comparable countries, while we have poorer health outcomes.

2025 Super Bowl made me into a NFL fan

I can't be absolutely sure about this, but after watching the 2025 Super Bowl, for the first time I feel like I'm turning into a NFL fan -- even though I've watched every previous Super Bowl and never had that inclination. 

It's hard for me to tell what made the difference this time.

Sure, it was an entertaining game, filled with surprises. I expected that the contest between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles would be close. When the score was 24-0 at halftime after Philadelphia held Kansas City scoreless, I realized a blowout was more likely.

Yet all through the game, Kansas City bottled up Philadelphia's star running back, Saquon Barkley, who only got 57 yards total. That didn't matter much, as the final score was 40-22 with Kansas City getting 16 points in the fourth quarter after the game had been effectively decided.

My best guess is that this Super Bowl allowed me to turn the page on my longstanding reluctance to be a big fan of professional sports.

I've always preferred the college game, whether it be football, basketball, or baseball -- aside from my time in high school when I was a huge San Francisco Giants fan back when Willy Mays, Juan Marichal, and Orlando Cepeda were on the team. (Yeah, I'm old.)

College sports just seemed purer to me, athletes playing for the joy of the game rather than for big bucks. Of course, it bothered me that college athletic departments raked in lots of money from those athletes.

So when the NIL (name, image, likeness) policy came into being, which allows college athletes to make money from their personal brand, that seemed like a good thing to me. However, NIL has blurred the line between college and professional sports, making it more difficult for me to view the college game as purer.

Also, this year I watched the NFL division championships along with the Super Bowl. This helped me see something that is obvious, yet wasn't readily apparent to me until now: NFL players are top college players, just some years older.

Meaning, for the first time I could put the "professional" part of the NFL game in the back of my mind and focus instead on how NFL players are the cream of the crop of college football that I've enjoyed so much over the years.

The age spread of NFL players is greater than in the college game, but otherwise watching an NFL game is roughly similar to watching an All-Star college football game. And I could see in today's Super Bowl that the players are just as emotional as college players, ecstatic when things are going well, despondent when they aren't. 

There is, though, one thing I refuse to accept about the NFL: using roman numerals to denote Super Bowls. That seems incredibly outmoded. How many people can tell what year this Super Bowl was? (Answer: 2025)

Just about nobody, even if they somehow know that LIX means 59. Roman numerals made a bit of sense when there was just a few Super Bowls, but now it's time to simply call them by the year they were played.

I loved Emilia Pérez, a highly creative genre-bending film

Last night my wife and I finished watching Emilia Pérez on Netflix. We loved the movie, which won four Golden Globe awards this year and likely will be nominated for many Oscars. 

We tried to imagine what the pitch would have been to movie studios. "Hey guys, we want to make a film about a man who is a vicious Mexican drug lord, but whose dream is to become a transgender woman. It will be largely in Spanish with English subtitles and feature lots of singing and dancing."

Yeah, right, not going to happen seemingly would have been the typical response. Yet Jacques Audiard, writer and director, did succeed in making the movie -- which blends the genres of a musical, drama, and thriller. 

I found the song lyrics deeply moving, especially those in which cartel kingpin Juan "Manitas" Del Monte, played by transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón, expresses his deep desire to be who he truly is, a woman, before he dies. 

Basically Manitas is saying, I want to truly live before I die. Which is how almost everybody feels. Yet often we don't reveal to others, or maybe even to ourselves, what our innermost nature genuinely is. 

Before I watched Emilia Pérez, I was very sympathetic to transgender people who undergo gender-affirming care. After seeing the movie, even more so. Manitas has to go through a huge amount of trouble, making tremendous sacrifices, to become the person he feels himself to be.

This is the power of movie-making. Watching a marvelously-made film about someone transitioning from a man to a woman had much more of an emotional effect on me than all of the news stories I've read about transgender people and gender-affirming care. 

Yes, the director apologized after Mexican outrage over Emilia Pérez, which was made in Spain. And he's come in for criticism from a LGBTQ group. But I think critics of the movie are missing what really counts about it: how we humans can have an intense desire to be true to ourselves that compels us to make great sacrifices to that noble end.

In Providence strike, I'm on the side of nurses and doctors

Last Friday Oregon's largest health care strike in history kicked off as about 5,000 nurses, doctors, and midwives walked off their Providence Hospitals jobs. Dissatisfaction with working conditions was a major reason for the strike, according to the Oregon Nurses Association. 

One of Oregon’s largest healthcare providers, Providence, is a system in crisis that threatens the health and well-being of all Oregonians.  

We are nurses, doctors, physician associates, nurse practitioners, and certified nurse midwives from Providence facilities across Oregon. Some of us have been bargaining with Providence for more than a year and are working without a contract.

Providence has rejected our common-sense proposals to improve patient care and safety by not committing to safe staffing and other critical patient safety issues in our contracts. That’s why we’re going on strike starting January 10.

When healthcare workers are asked to do more with less, patient lives are at stake. Providence has pushed nurses, doctors and other healthcare professionals to work under unsafe staffing conditions.  

Providence hasn’t offered any real plan to increase retention. Providence simply isn’t competitive with other healthcare systems in the areas where they operate. That means fewer workers; longer ER lines; longer surgery waits; and more medical complications, as Oregonians can’t get the care they need quickly. 

We have made the difficult decision to go on strike because Providence executives aren’t listening to us. We need Providence to put patients before profits and do everything they can to make sure healthcare professionals can work to the top of their practice and stay for the long term.  

Today Providence paid for a full page ad in the Sunday Oregonian newspaper. I'm a digital subscriber. Here's screenshots of the ad, which I found annoying and demeaning toward nurses.

Providence Health & Services claims that the Oregon Nurses Association called a strike with the intent of cancelling patient appointments and services. I doubt there's any solid evidence supporting that assertion, and it goes against the ONA statement of concern for patient well-being. 

And Providence also claims the Oregon Nurses Association is fully responsible for disruptions to patient care. Huh?

Negotiations over union contracts obviously involve two parties, the employer and the employees. Sure, often each side blames the other for being unreasonable if a strike occurs after negotiations break down, but usually this is hyperbole. Each side should shoulder some blame for the strike.

Hopefully Providence isn't operating under a fantasy that the public is more sympathetic to a giant health care corporation than to the nurses and doctors who provide care at the eight Providence hospitals around Oregon. 

I deeply doubt this is the case.

When someone needs care at a hospital, it is given by nurses and doctors, not by the management of the entity that owns and runs the hospital. I've appreciated the competency and friendliness of the doctors and nurses who handled my fairly recent hernia and eye operations at Salem Health, along with screening colonoscopies.  Administrators of the health care organization responsible for my care mean nothing to me.

After ten years of being a member of Regence Medicare Advantage, I just switched to a Providence Medicare Advantage plan after Regence and Salem Health failed to agree on a 2025 contract, which meant that I'd have to pay more for out-of-network care from Salem Health as of January 1.

So far (just twelve days), I'm satisfied with Providence Medicare Advantage. Several times I've phoned Providence with questions about my new insurance plan. The people I've talked with have been helpful and pleasant. But again, I'm thankful for the front-line staff at Providence, not management. 

The financial aspect of the offer Providence says it has made to nurses and doctors seems pretty reasonable. But it appears that working conditions and staffing levels may be the bigger concern for the nurses and doctors. I'm on their side, as I strongly suspect a majority of Oregonians are.

Oregon's Rose Bowl loss reminded me of Harris's presidential loss

There I was, all prepared for what I thought was going to be an enjoyable television watching time.

I'd been looking forward to this moment for months. I was highly familiar with the contest that finally was going to be decided. I realized that my favorite wasn't guaranteed to win. But there was every indication that this had a good chance of happening. I figured that the worst that could happen was an evenly matched contest where it would take a while for the winner to become obvious.

Sadly, what I just said applied equally to two disturbing events spaced about two months apart: Kamala Harris's loss to Donald Trump on November 5 in the presidential race, and the University of Oregon football team's loss to Ohio State on January 1 in the Rose Bowl.

Of course, these losses involved very different consequences. Harris's defeat risks the future of our country and indeed the entire world. Oregon's loss just means that a national championship isn't going to happen for the team ranked #1 for many weeks.

Yet both hit me hard emotionally. I wanted my favored contestant to win, really badly. I'd envisioned how good I was going to feel after their hard-fought victory had finally happened. I had settled into my TV watching chair with a lot of optimism.

But it didn't take long for me to realize that the Oregon Ducks weren't quacking away on the football field like they had earlier in the season when they'd defeated Ohio State 32-31 thanks to the Buckeyes quarterback sliding to the turf a split second too late when he had gained enough yardage to put his team in field goal range, and the game ended before a field goal could be attempted.

Either Oregon had taken a big step backward, or Ohio State was a much better team now. Probably both were true.

Regardless, watching Ohio State score 34 unanswered points in the first half, when the Buckeyes were only favored to win by three points or so, was shocking. Oregon sort of came to life at the end of the first half and some parts of the second half, though it seemed to me that the final score of 41-21 made the game seem closer than it really was. 

In football, there's always next year. Oregon had a great 2024 season with a 13-1 record. It's how much the  "1" hurts that stops me from feeling good right now about how the team did. Plus, Oregon has come close to a national championship before. I'd convinced myself that this was the year the Ducks would break through that "close but not quite" barrier.

Didn't happen. Maybe it will in 2025.

2024 Silvertongue Apple-Peal pokes satirical fun at Silverton

The Silvertongue Apple-Peal not coincidentally has a name similar to Silverton's recently deceased serious newspaper, the Appeal Tribune, which met its end in 2022 when the nearby Salem Statesman Journal stopped publishing it on the command of its corporate master, Gannett. 

Thankfully, the Silvertongue Apple-Peal lives on since 2012, thanks to local gadfly Gus Frederick, who has come out with a new edition on the pleasingly languid schedule of every two years to mark a general or midterm election. 

Our Town described Gus Frederick's effort in a story about the closing of the Appeal Tribune after 142 years. 

Frederick said The Appeal-Tribune had a personal impact on him and his eventual career in multimedia. He said, during high school, he worked on page layout for Davis, and was hired during the summer as a photo lab technician.

“The Appeal was a great initial learning experience,” said Frederick. “And while everything I do nowadays (video, photography, publishing) is digital, the analog background I lived through not only exposed those principles in graphic detail, it also makes me greatly appreciate these new modern whiz-bang tools we have today!”

Frederick felt so inspired by his experience that, in 1987, he and friend Rick Ernst published The Silvertongue Apple-Peal, a spoof newspaper poking fun at local institutions in the style of MAD Magazine and National Lampoon. The paper was published every April 1 using then-state-of-the-art publishing software, but even with a yearly print cycle Frederick said his small staff became burned out and the spoof paper was discontinued after five years.

But The Apple-Peal made a surprise comeback in 2012, this time being published every other year and coinciding with major elections. Frederick admitted his political views “drift towards port,” but neither liberals nor conservatives are spared in this new iteration, with the 2022 issue expected to come out soon.

The 2024 Silvertongue Apple-Peal is another work of creative pseudo-journalistic genius. I love every satirical bit of it, but am particularly struck by the ads, some of which I've shown below -- in part for the practical reason that my MacBook Pro laptop doesn't have a big screen, so I'm limited in the size of the screenshots I can capture and share.

Here's part of the 2024 front page, along with some favorite ads.

GIMME-ITT refers to Gannett, the much-despised owner of the Statesman Journal and many other newspapers in the country that Gannett uses as cash cows, laying off staff to reduce expenses and making as much money as possible from a paper before it is closed for good.

It's cool that the Silvertongue Apple-Peal has ads for related magazines.


Edgy but amusing ad.


Corny financial news plus bathroom humor directed at the Statesman Journal. Perfect!

My wife made the healthiest main dish in the history of Christmas Eve dinners

Part of me says, "You shouldn't be bragging on Christmas Day." Another part says, "Dude, go ahead and brag -- you aren't bragging about yourself, but about your wife, Laurel."

I'm listening to that part.

For while the title of this blog post might seem to be an exaggeration, it accurately reflects the prevailing opinion among me, Laurel, and five friends we invited for a Christmas Eve dinner at our house last night 

Well, in the history of Christmas Eve dinners is an embellishment that I added for dramatic effect. But it's true that all seven of us agreed that few people were having as healthy a main dish as what Laurel served for dinner.

Here's a photo of my leftover plate that I'm having for dinner again today.

It's a vegetarian loaf with organic lentils, kale, brown rice, and carrots, with cranberry sauce as a glaze on top, plus some other minor ingredients. (It was supposed to have a celery stalk also; Laurel forgot to put it on the list when I went grocery shopping on Sunday, so celery wasn't included.)

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Ultimate Vegan Thanksgiving Load with Cranberry Sauce recipe. You have to scroll down a ways to find the recipe on this web page. 

Since I've been a vegetarian for 55 years, with no meat or fish entering my mouth during all that time, I readily admit that my taste buds are so attuned to healthy vegetarian food, there's no way I can compare this veggie loaf with turkey, ham, or any other food that once was walking around -- assuming it was raised outside of a factory farm, since in those places some animals don't have enough room to walk.

All I can say is that it tastes good to me, as it did to everybody who ate it last night. Of course, our Christmas Eve dinner included some other food: mashed potatoes, salad, green beans, chocolate cake, poppy seed cake. Our guests contributed several of the dishes. 

I'm not religious, but it was a Christmas miracle of sorts when I got on the scale this morning for my daily weigh-in and found that not only hadn't I gained any weight, I had lost some, even though I ate quite a bit last night.

That's a side benefit of eating healthy vegetarian food during the holidays, as well as throughout the year. It tends to be lower in calories.

My weight has bounced around a bit during the vegetarian phase of my life, which began when I was about 21. Currently I weigh just a bit more than I did in high school. However, my height is a few inches less (damn aging!) so my BMI, body mass index, must be greater now.

I'm not a strong proselytizer for vegetarianism.

Still, I'm not shy about pointing out that not only is giving up meat good for a person's health, it's good for our planet. Raising animals for food is a major contributor to rising greenhouse gas emissions, which makes being a vegetarian wise both personally and environmentally. 

Looks like Macy's store in downtown Salem is closing soon

I've heard from two people that the Macy's store in downtown Salem is closing after the first of the year. I don't know if that means January 1 or a later date.

But reportedly this news comes from Macy's employees, so it seems to be true -- though I don't believe there has been any official announcement. 

Adding credence to this rumor is a Reddit post from two months ago. 

So, idk if it’s public knowledge yet, but Macys in downtown mall is closing. I’m a former employee and they told us in June/July-ish? They’re declining in service, they’re treating their employees worse and worse. So quick reminder, when you go there, have some gd compassion. Y’all asking and not having any shred of compassion? It’s gonna make things worse. This town had the tendency to not take a three seconds to compose a 10 second sentence that isn’t selfish. Be. Nice.

Also, not closing because they’re not making money, it’s because of the building being so unfortunately under code and corporate doesn’t wanna spend the money.

Toodles!!

Also, a RetailWatchers post from March 2024 had the Salem Macy's on a list of stores probably closing by 2026. (Typos are in the post.)

According to an anonymous but reliable source, these Macy's stores either among the lowest sales per square foot in the company, has had its property has been acquired for redevelopment or has an upcoming expiring lease, therefore in all likelihood will close by 2026.

And a recent December 19, 2024 article in That Oregon Life, "Could Macy's Be Saying Goodbye to Salem Center Mall in 2025?," said:

The retail landscape is shifting rapidly, and once-iconic department stores are finding it increasingly difficult to stay relevant in the digital age. Macy’s, a brand that has long symbolized the quintessential American shopping experience, is facing mounting challenges as it seeks to adapt to changing consumer habits. Rumors circulating online suggest that Salem’s Macy’s location at the Salem Center Mall could be among the stores closing after the 2024 holiday season, potentially by February 2025. While Macy's has not yet confirmed which locations are on the chopping block, the speculation alone highlights the growing uncertainty around the future of physical retail spaces.

The timing of the rumored closure fits with a December 13, 2024 USA Today story:

Macy's is closing more stores than it originally announced earlier this year.

According to the company's third quarter earnings report, the department store chain is expected to close 65 locations by the end of the year, an increase from the 50 locations the company said it would close by the end of the fiscal year in February.

"We now expect to close roughly 65 locations this year," said Macy's CEO Tony Spring in the earnings call. "In line with our typical cadence, closures will occur post holiday."

The retail giant said in February that by 2026, it planned to shut down 150 "unproductive" stores, or roughly 30% of all its locations, while prioritizing investments in 350 "go-forward" stores. Macy's also said at the time the move, dubbed as "A Bold New Chapter," will allow it to focus its resources and prioritize other stores.

If the closure happens, this will be a blow to downtown Salem.

There's a lot of shopping history in that location, which was home to the first branch Meier & Frank store after it opened in 1955 -- following on the success of the original Meier & Frank store in downtown Portland. Eventually all Meier & Frank stores were sold and rebranded.

In 2005, Federated Department Stores, parent company for Macy's, purchased the stores. By September 2006, all their stores were rebranded "Macy's," ending the 149-year history of Meier & Frank Company, the "Store for Service and Accommodation", in the northwest.

Us seniors are getting screwed by the lack of Medicare long-term care

My wife and I are in our mid-70s. We're old, but not super old. Currently we're doing just fine living at our home on ten non-easy-care acres in rural south Salem, Oregon. 

Yet it's becoming increasingly obvious that with increasing age comes a diminished ability to do the things that need doing. That's why we're having more yard work done by hourly workers, use a handyman to do some routine chores we used to do ourself, and have made changes such as putting screens on our gutters and railings along our outside walkway.

Such is absolutely normal. Every old person, or senior citizen if you prefer that term, is going to need help with everyday living at some point in their life. 

That's what makes our nation's crappy approach to long-term care so irritating. I used to work for the State Health Planning and Development Agency back in the 1970s-80s when health planning was a thing. (Maybe it still is, but now it isn't the same sort of thing.)

I recall a lot of talk back then, which made it into the State Health Plan that I helped write, about promoting alternatives to institutional long-term care such as nursing homes. About fifty years later, the  same talk is happening, with very little action. 

What spurred my recent thinking about this was getting an email from someone at Capital Manor here in Salem. We have a deposit at Capital Manor that puts us on a wait list for their Life Care Services. This is an appealing continuity of care approach where you start off with independent living, then are able to make use of Residential Care, Memory Care, and Home Care as needed.

That sounds great. But there's a catch.

As the Capital Manor staff person reminds us every time we hear from her, "The premise of our community, is much like a long term care plan.  The only way to get here is to have the ability to live independently and once a resident, you will have the guarantees of assisted living, nursing and memory care.  This contractual guarantee is made to our residents only and the window of opportunity to make a move here can close quickly."

So in order to receive the services of Capital Manor, you have to be able to live independently. The Capital Manor web site makes this clear, saying on the pages that I linked to above, "Capital Manor does not accept direct admissions into residential care, memory care, or home care."

This indeed is very much like a long-term care insurance plan. Or other health insurance plans before the Affordable Care Act did away with pre-existing conditions not being covered. To be approved to get long-term care through Capital Manor, you can't need long-term care at the moment.

This is exactly like the bad old days of health insurance where, if you needed insurance because you have cancer, the insurance company would exclude coverage of cancer treatment because it was a pre-existing condition.

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was able to eliminate this policy by expanding the insurance coverage pool markedly -- which enabled insurance companies to spread the risk of pre-existing conditions over a large base, the basic point of insurance.

Like most old people, we don't want to sell our house and move to a continuum of care community like Capital Manor. We want to keep on living where we are until circumstances demand a move. But as the email from Capital Manor said, if we wait too long and either my wife or I are no longer able to live independently, then just when we need the services of Capital Manor, we won't qualify to join Capital Manor.

So it's a tough choice: do something we don't want to do -- sell our house and move to a less desirable residence at Capital Manor while we're still able to pass the Capital Manor health assessment -- or wait and see how long we can get by with cobbling together our own ways of "assisted living."

This isn't fair to us seniors.

I'm not blaming Capital Manor for their policy regarding the ability to live independently. If Capital Manor didn't do this, then it would be similar to people not buying health insurance until they had an expensive medical problem. Insurance companies had to exclude pre-existing conditions until the Affordable Care Act required everyone to have health insurance. 

I'm blaming our nation's legislators in Washington D.C. who haven't made long-term care an integral part of Medicare. Every person on Medicare should be able to get the same services offered by Capital Manor as part of their basic benefit package. This would allow old people to live in their homes for as long as possible, getting assistance as needed from caregivers just as Capital Manor offers for its residents.

Again, it's crazy that in order to qualify for what amounts to private long-term care insurance, you can't currently need the services that would be provided by that insurance. I understand that you couldn't get fire insurance for your house if it was in the process of burning down. However, health care isn't fire insurance; it is a necessity that should be guaranteed by the federal government, as it is in most wealthy countries, but not the United States.

It's clear that the next four years of the Trump administration won't bring genuine long-term care benefits to Medicare. We'll be lucky if massive cuts aren't made to Medicare and other entitlement programs. I just hope that when Democrats get back in power, they make this a priority. 

Our 2024 Christmas letter is partly about saber-toothed tigers

Another year, another Christmas Letter. Or as we call it, our Holiday Greetings.

Per usual, I wrote it. The key to doing that this time was an image that popped into my mind of animals going extinct. Which pretty much sums up how I look upon Christmas letters: a dying breed.

Nonetheless, I'm still alive. And I enjoy writing the Holiday Greetings. Plus, because I've written a Christmas letter since 1995, as documented in my regularly updated Collected Christmas Letters post, I didn't feel like breaking that string this year.

Here's the 2024 letter, in PDF and JPEG formats.
Download 2024 Christmas Letter PDF

Here's what's scientifically true about good nutrition

When it comes to what sorts of food are best for us, opinions abound. There's a never-ending avalanche of nutritional advice from many different sources: social media, news sites, television ads, books, and such.

Often this advice isn't based on scientific facts. That's why I was thrilled to see the special issue of New Scientist that arrived in the mail recently. The cover headline: How to Eat Better: The Seven Chewiest Questions About Nutrition and Your Health.

Here's the questions and a brief summary of the answers. (New Scientist is a British publication, so some spellings are different from American English.)

(1) Could when you eat matter as much as what you eat? Not really. But it's advised to "get most  of your calories earlier in the day and avoid eating altogether during your biological night, which for non-owls starts around 8pm." Owls, who wake late and go to bed late, could eat later at night. 

(2) What's the truth about hormone-balancing diets? Hormones vary a lot, so the notion of balancing doesn't make much sense. However, it's still good advice to follow hormone diets touted on social media just because they make good general nutritional sense: "eat more wholegrains, more lean proteins, plant-based fats, fruits, vegetables, high fibre foods."

(3) Is snacking really that bad for you? It depends on the quality of the snack. "If you are a grazer, as long as you're grazing on healthy food and not grazing late at night, current evidence would support that can be part of a healthy, balanced dietary pattern."

(4) What's the real supernutrient we don't get enough of? Fiber (or fibre, in British English). "Few of us appreciate just how far-reaching its health benefits go... high fibre diets lead to lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels." Good sources are vegetables, fruits, wholegrain cereals, nuts, peas and beans.

(5) Do anti-inflammatory diets work? Once again, a diet that reduces chronic inflammation, which is implicated in cardiovascular disease, cancer, arthritis, and dementia, is simply a good diet in general. "A fibre-poor diet will be more pro-inflammatory... diets that seem to offer protection are those already recognised as broadly healthy: low in processed foods, saturated fats, salt and sugars."

(6) Is personalized nutrition worth it? Probably not. "A 2023 report from the UK's Food Standards Agency concluded that the benefits of personalised nutrition 'seem somewhat marginal when compared to what is already understood about a healthy diet.'"

(7) Are fermented foods all they are cracked up to be? "The case is strongest for yogurt...[but] some of the benefits may have nothing to do with fermentation...yogurt is high in calcium, a nutrient helpful for stronger bones." Be cautious about making your own fermented food like yogurt, kombucha, sauerkraut, and kimchi. Inexpert at-home fermentation can foster harmful pathogens like salmonella. 

Oregon Ducks win Big Ten championship! We're #1!

Wow. What a game. And what a season. The University of Oregon football team went 13-0, capping it off with a nail biter of a Big Ten championship game against Penn State that the Ducks won 45-37 tonight.

It was a highly entertaining game. Somehow I remained calm through most of it. Probably that had a lot to do with my memories of the preceding twelve games, some of which -- like Boise State and Ohio State -- were won extremely narrowly.

But somehow Oregon found a way to win. That's the mark of a great team with great coaching. They manufacture their own breaks, though I readily admit that in a game of inches, Penn State came very close to beating the Ducks.

For most of the game the Oregon secondary looked pretty weak. They kept giving up a lot of yardage on pass plays where the Penn State receiver was wide open with no defender in the vicinity. However, when it mattered most, the secondary came through, as an Oregonian story says.

The Ducks were unable to move the ball on offense, giving it back to Penn State with 2:11 left and a conference title hanging in the balance.

Nikko Reed would then write himself into Ducks lore.

The senior corner picked off Allar on a deep ball to cut Penn State’s comeback attempt short, with Oregon fans taking a beat before realizing what had happened. The Ducks offense ran the ball with success — including a key first down run on third down by Gabriel to wrap up the victory.

Now the Ducks get some well-deserved rest before playing in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day against the #8 vs. #9 winner in the 12-team national championship playoff. Naturally Oregon will be the #1 seed, since they've been the top-ranked team for quite a few weeks and just defeated the #3 team.

I've loved not only watching Oregon play this season, but feeling that the style of the team is a wonderful reflection of our state.

Their uniforms are bright and flashy. They combine toughness with speed and finesse. Coach Lanning and his defensive coordinator are expressive and enthusiastic. The team plays cohesively, not panicking when things aren't going well, not becoming overly confident when they've got a large lead.

Win three more games, and the Ducks are national champions. It'd be terrific if that happens. If it doesn't, that won't take away from Oregon's unforgettable season.

It's tough to grow old. Government should be doing more for the elderly.

I don't want to burst any young person's aging bubble, but the plain truth is that the so-called Golden Years are anything but -- if "golden" is viewed as a blissful retired condition filled with travel, golf, and other pleasant activities that supposedly dominate life of the elderly.

Speaking as a 76 year old who has friends in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, I can confidently say that while growing old has its positive side (such as more free time), doctor visits, aches and pains, chronic medical conditions, and an increasing inability to do activities that used to be much enjoyed are irritants for most of those in my age group.

Simply put, it isn't easy growing old. Bit by bit, your body and mind are on an inexorable slide toward the finality of death. In middle age, it's possible to envision staying happy and healthy for the foreseeable future. In old age, what's foreseeable is a steady descent into ill health and the worries that come with being an increasingly unproductive member of society. 

A recent issue of The New Yorker has an article about aging, How "The Golden Girls" Celebrated -- and Distorted -- Old Age. For those too young to have watched The Golden Girls, here's a few paragraphs about the television show.

When “The Golden Girls” débuted, in 1985, one of the lead actors, Rue McClanahan, was in her fifties, and the others—Bea Arthur, Betty White, and Estelle Getty—were in their sixties. Usually, television consigned such women to unflattering supporting roles. Here, they were the stars, with nary a young or male co-star in sight. (A gay live-in cook appeared in the pilot but promptly vanished. Coco, you are not forgotten.) The feminist Betty Friedan praised the show for defying the “universal grayout of older women on network TV.”

It was the right moment. The President, Ronald Reagan, was a septuagenarian who made a show of chopping wood and riding horses. More generally, healthy seniors—the “wellderly”—were on the rise. Popular culture’s usual parade of toothless codgers and crones increasingly seemed obsolete. “The Golden Girls” (1985-92) joined a silver surge of television shows featuring energetic older protagonists, including “Murder, She Wrote” (1984-96), “Matlock” (1986-95), and Susan Harris’s “Empty Nest” (1988-95).

“The Golden Girls” was particularly adored. It ranked among the ten most watched shows for six of its seven seasons. Emmys rained down: three awards for best actress in a comedy, in three consecutive years, for White, McClanahan, and Arthur, and a supporting-actress award for Getty. In ratings and acclaim, “The Golden Girls” blew “Miami Vice” and its speedboats clear out of the water.

Not bad for a show that was almost militantly unglamorous. The Golden Girls had old-lady hair, wore loose clothes, and joked about their faltering bodies. A much loved scene, written by Harris, has the Girls considering the effect of various body positions on the sagging of their faces and breasts. There was a burlesque quality to this but also defiant pride. Here was a senior subculture, with its own fashion, politics, and humor.

I enjoyed The Golden Girls. Of course, in 1985 I was 37 years old, so I looked upon the actresses from the distance of youth, or at least incipient middle age. That was the year my mother died of a stroke at the age of 73, following a life of heavy smoking, alcoholism, liver disease, and breast cancer.

For me her death was a relief, since I knew that my highly intellectual mother wouldn't have wanted to live with a brain/mind limited by a severe stroke. I loved her, but still, in 2011 I needed to speak in a blog post of One Honest Moment.

My mother was an example of a fantasy perpetuated by The Golden Girls.

“The Golden Girls” conjures a fantasy of old age that is not only largely free of children but also largely free of doctors. Chappel notes how often the show expresses animosity toward medical institutions and, instead, solves problems with friendship. An episode about a friend languishing in a state-funded nursing home ends when the Golden Girls finance her move to an upscale facility and then resolve to “take care of each other” to the end. “The show was a celebration of self-care as an alternative to physicians’ care,” Chappel writes.

Self-care works for seniors who are basically healthy. But they aren’t always, not in real life. Estelle Getty started suffering from Lewy body dementia during the show and struggled to memorize scripts. When she flubbed lines, White would turn to the studio audience, point to Getty, and make a “she’s been drinking” gesture. When Getty requested cue cards, McClanahan remembered the cast being “appalled” by the unprofessionalism. Getty’s character, Sophia, was in her eighties yet essentially impervious. Getty herself died at eighty-four, after a long slide into incoherence.

While the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) used to be a potent political force, I don't recall much attention being paid to the elderly in the recent election. Neither Trump nor Harris talked much about my age group, aside from the usual assurances that as president they wouldn't cut Social Security or Medicare.

Yet at the moment congressional Republicans, along with Elon Musk, who has been charged with Trump to head up a Department of Government Efficiency that has entitlement programs in its cost-cutting sights, are indeed making noises about cutting Social Security and Medicare.

But this would be a horrible thing to do, given how many seniors are heavily dependent on these programs. Actually, Medicare needs to be expanded to cover long term care and in-home care, along with dental and vision benefits that go beyond the paltry coverage in MedicareAdvantage programs, which I believe is still better than what traditional Medicare offers.

The New Yorker article makes a great point.

Tom Cruise in his sixties is the face (the otherworldly, well-moisturized face) of an aging society in denial. The effects are spelled out in institutions. Chappel observes that, although the United States boasts “a relatively developed and successful” system for healthy older people, its support for those requiring long-term assistance is “catastrophically underdeveloped.”

Families that don’t qualify for Medicaid pay small fortunes, not infrequently draining their savings, to get professional care. Nursing homes, meanwhile, are understaffed and poorly regulated. Their inadequacies became clear with covid-19. Fourteen states saw more than ten per cent of their nursing-home population die of the virus in the year 2020 alone.

One might expect politicians to do something. They are, after all, quite old themselves. The average age in the Senate is now sixty-seven. Recent Presidents have been older. The baby boom refers to those born within an eighteen-year span, yet there was a twenty-eight-year run of boomer Presidents, broken only by Joe Biden, a pre-boomer. (We will now return to boomers.)

But age has not compelled action, and federal long-term care remains essentially what it was in the sixties, even as the elderly population has ballooned. Politicians seem as afflicted with age denialism as everyone else.

Broadband is coming to Oregon's unserved areas, but slowly

A few days ago I decided to see whether there was anything new being reported by the Oregon Broadband Office, a state agency charged with overseeing projects to bring decently fast broadband to people in this state who lack it.

That includes my neighborhood in rural south Salem. Though we're only six miles or so from the Salem city limits, Oregon's capital, the only wired/fixed broadband (as contrasted with cellular broadband) available out here is crappy CenturyLink DSL that comes over ancient copper phone lines at the sluggish speed of 6-7 Mbps down and 1-2 Mbps up.

This is a far cry from the minimal broadband standard of 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. And until I was able to bring DSL to our area in 2008 by writing a plaintive letter to the CEO of Qwest, the predecessor to CenturyLink, we had to use a glitchy satellite service, WildBlue, while neighbors of ours had to make do with dial-up.

Currently my wife and I enjoy Space X's Starlink broadband, which we've had since January 2021, when I became a Starlink beta tester. Since, Starlink has become much faster and more reliable as many more satellites are launched into low orbit. That's great, but I'd much rather have fiber optic broadband -- which is considerably better than Starlink's $120/month service. (Starlink speeds vary quite a bit; at the moment I'm getting 123 Mbps down and 17 Mbps up.)

I noticed a November 12, 2024 press release on the Oregon Broadband Office web site about $133 million being awarded to broadband projects in Oregon. Marion County, where I live, was to get $8,356,701 for 1,007 locations. That got me excited, until I checked out a map of the projects and saw that Ziply Fiber would be installing fiber optic on the east side of I-5 near us, while our neighborhood is a few miles west of I-5.

So close, yet so far. That spurred me to send a message to the Oregon Broadband Office:

I contacted your office before, wondering when our woefully broadband underserved area of several hundred homes out here in rural south Salem would benefit from the federal programs to expand broadband access.

From what I can tell after just looking at your site, Ziply Fiber has a contract nearby, on the east side of I-5, while we’re several miles from that area on the west side of I-5. So it looks like even though most of our neighbors suffer with 6-7 Mbps DSL from CenturyLink, the only option widely available other than Starlink, which we have and pay $120 a month for, there’s no plan for our neighborhood to get faster and cheaper broadband.

Please let me know if my gloomy assessment of the situation is correct. As I told one of your staff before, I’ve looked into every conceivable broadband option, including cellular broadband, and have come up with exactly zero options to DSL other than satellite internet, which I have.

I’ve noted that Starlink wasn’t eligible for federal grants to improve broadband access because the service was too expensive and too slow. So it’s frustrating that aside from crappy DSL, the only option I and many other neighbors have is Starlink and HughesNet, two satellite services that don’t qualify under federal rules as viable broadband. 

How long are we supposed to wait for “real” broadband? I’m 76, so I'm suspecting I’ll be dead before that happens in our neighborhood, though I’d enjoy getting some positive news from your office.

I got a quick reply from a staffer who I'd talked with before, Brian McGuirk. We set up a time to talk by phone last Tuesday. Once again, McGuirk was helpful, friendly, and informative. He told me that the $133 million was from the 2021 ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act).

So it's taken more than three years for that money to be allocated to broadband projects in Oregon. Given how the federal bureaucracy works, I suppose this is reasonable. McGuirk said that a much larger pot of broadband money is coming from the 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act, which contains $65 billion nationally for broadband. 

I found a June 14, 2024 story from our local newspaper, the Statesman Journal, "Oregon's 'Internet for All' application approved." 

Nearly a year after announcing Oregon would receive $688 million for the improvement and expansion of affordable, high-speed internet, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said Thursday that the state can now request access to funding to begin administering the program.

A pre-pandemic study estimated 1.7 million Oregonians live in rural areas without access to high-speed broadband.

Nick Batz, director of the Oregon Broadband Office, said while the state generally has good connectivity, establishing access in those under or unserved areas is challenging.

The story said that the program is expected to be implemented over the next four years and completed by 2028. Well, I'll be 80 then. So maybe I'll live to see fiber optic at our house. Until then, I'm thankful for Starlink, which has made our broadband life much happier after we were able to ditch archaic DSL.

McGuirk told me about an area in rural Washingon County that is in the same DSL situation as our neighborhood is. After a bit of Googling, I came up with a 2020 story, "Is fiber coming to rural western Washington County? Perhaps, says Ziply." But that area still doesn't have fiber.

The rural portions of Washington County have always struggled to gain access to high speed internet, with some regions solely relying on satellite or microwave options, while others are on copper lines now owned by Ziply Fiber, which acquired the former network of the struggling Frontier Communications operation in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana on May 1 of this year.

...The Frontier network for rural residents in far western Washington County has been a constant source of frustration for years, with technical issues plaguing the aging network and often poor customer service being a hallmark of their legacy. With the acquisition of the network by Ziply, a new company, is there a future in western Washington County where internet connectivity comes in the way of fiber instead of copper? Perhaps, says the company. 

I'm enjoying Bluesky after my disillusionment with Elon Musk's X

A few days ago I took the social media plunge into the pleasant waters of Bluesky, having become increasingly disillusioned with X (formerly known as Twitter). 

After Elon Musk bought Twitter and almost instantly renamed it X, because that's his favorite letter, I found this irritating, but not enough to make me leave X. The positives seemed to outweigh the negatives.

I use Twitter, X, and now Bluesky for the enjoyment I get from following quality observers of our local, state, and national political scenery. They're up to date on what's going on. I learn a lot from the links they share, along with their own commentary on current events.

After I wake up, I like to see what those I follow are viewing as the day's most important news. Because my list of follows is strongly biased toward Democrats and progressives, they resonate with my own similar political leaning. 

Though I've never met any of them, they come to seem like friends of a sort. Each has their own unique style and area of expertise. 

Though for months I've been hearing talk on X about people leaving for other similar platforms like Threads and Bluesky, after signing up for Threads and then ignoring it, I'd decided that I'd stick with X for the time being.

Then came Elon Musk's full-bore support for Trump. Since I have followed Musk on Twitter and then X because I admire what he's done with Tesla and SpaceX (I'm a longtime Starlink customer), I was aware of how different his recent posts on X were from the Elon Musk posts before he became a big Trump supporter. 

Those new posts were full of lies. Then came his efforts to get Trump elected. Now Trump has given Musk the job of figuring out ways to make the federal government more efficient through a Department of Government Efficiency -- DOGE, which not coincidentally is the name of a crypto currency, Dogecoin, that Musk is heavily invested in.

The conflicts of interest Musk has are breathtaking. SpaceX and Tesla benefit mightily from government programs, yet there's no indication that Musk is going to take steps to make sure that his DOGE recommendations on where to cut government spending aren't in line with what enriches Musk.

So along with many other users of X, I've decided to wean myself off of Musk's social media plaything in favor of Bluesky, a haven for people who are fed up with the MAGA craziness X has become. The ads on X are equally annoying, as Musk has taken away the ability to block specific ads. So far, Bluesky doesn't have ads. 

I kept my X username when I signed up for Bluesky: OregonBrian. Many of the people and organizations I follow on X aren't on Bluesky, but quite a few are. Currently I follow 59 Bluesky users. I had 701 followers on X; now I have 9 on Bluesky. I've invited my followers to join me on Bluesky, but obviously most haven't done this.

But since I'm much more interested in reading the posts of other people and organizations than sharing my own posts, which usually are just links to a blog post that I write each night, I'm fine with being almost follower'less on Bluesky.

It feels great to be out of the clutches of Elon Musk's X, though I'm still on X for a while longer. Blue Sky has the look and feel of X without the annoyances. Give it a try. Bluesky has over 20 million users now, a big jump from before the election. It isn't difficult to find people and organizations to follow on virtually any topic.

Constant worrying about Trump is a threat to your health

Like many millions of Americans, ever since Trump was elected president on November 5, a mere twelve days ago that seems like much longer, I've been consumed with anxiety about what this means for the United States and the world.

In short, nothing good. Or at least, very little that is good.

Naturally I'm speaking from my perspective as a Democrat who heartily supported Kamala Harris. I realize that Trump supporters feel differently. But I'm speaking to those who, like me, see Trump as a threat to democracy, the environment, equal rights, justice, the economy, Ukraine, and so much else. 

We have to resist Trump whenever and wherever possible. That's a given. However, we can't constantly worry about what Trump will do in the next four years. That way isn't good for our mental and physical health. 

And it's important that we remain strong -- to fight the good fight against Trump's malevolent authoritarianism.

Maybe you've heard of the book, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. It's about stress. Humans and other animals are hard-wired by evolution to react strongly when faced with imminent danger, like a lion stalking a herd of zebras.

When the lion attacks, the zebras run like crazy. Hormones in their brain and body are instantly released to aid them in escaping from the threat to their life. But after the attack is over, the zebras return to grazing. 

That's how the sympathetic nervous system was intended to work. In his book, Mind Magic, neuroscientist and neurosurgeon James Doty says about the autonomic nervous system:

This part of the nervous system developed early in our evolution as a species and has two divisions. The first to evolve was the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), whose job it is to ensure our physical survival and the survival of our genes, and whose primary activity is to engage the fight, flight, or freeze response. 

...Because it evolved to act in life-or-death situations, it moves along very short neurons and therefore has the power to completely commandeer our physical and emotional resources in a split second, filling our body with stress hormones like cortisol and tensing our muscles for action.

Later, the human nervous system evolved further with the addition of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), also known as the rest-and-digest response, whose job is to return the body to a peaceful resting state, a process known as homeostasis. 

The switch to rest-and-digest is accompanied by a wide variety of physiological changes to promote balance and harmony: our muscles relax, our heart rate and blood pressure decrease, and we produce more saliva for digestion.

Nature didn't intend that we be in a constant state of anxious arousal. Our brain and body are basically unchanged from prehistoric times when early humans, like zebras, were faced with dire life-or-death threats that required a rapid fight, flight, or freeze response, soon followed by a rest-and-digest response (assuming the threat didn't end in death).

We live in a very different world now. Few of us have direct threats to our life. Instead, our modern world is filled with situations that provoke feelings of anxiety in us, such as the election of a president, Donald Trump, who is viewed by many as posing a serious threat to values they hold dear.

Instead of going back to grazing on what sustains us, as zebras do after a threat appears and disappears, often we remain in a stressful state -- because what we fear isn't a near-at-hand danger that can be dealt with, but a distant danger outside of our control.

James Doty goes on to say:

The problem is that while evolution takes millions of years to adapt to environmental change, humans have profoundly changed our environment in only a few thousand years. In fact, we lived as hunter-gatherers in groups of fifty to a hundred until only six to eight thousand years ago.

Unfortunately, today's fast-paced and anxiety-provoking world is riddled with the sorts of uncertainties and frustrations that trigger the fight, flight, or freeze response and keep it chronically activated by unreal, imagined, or insignificant threats. 

Essentially, we are responding to a passive-aggressive comment in a colleague's email through the same system that was designed to process a saber-toothed tiger attack. As we will see, the chronic activation of the fight, flight, or freeze response and its release of inflammatory proteins has damaging effects on the body, including an increase in heart disease and a weakened immune system.

I don't see Trump as an imagined or insignificant threat. He's a clear and present danger to not only the United States, but the world as a whole. Like I said, when there's an opportunity to resist him, we need to do what demands to be done. 

But we can't remain on guard against Trump all the time. He can't be a constant inhabitant of our mind. We can't react to every crazy thing he does as if it was a saber-toothed tiger attack. We need to keep informed about what he and his administration are up to, while engaging in activities that relax and rejuvenate us as much as possible.

Everybody who opposes Trump will have to find their own ways of doing this. I've meditated every day since 1969, when I started learning yoga while in college. Currently I enjoy brief guided meditations rather than the hour or two of meditation that I used to practice.

On my iPhone I switch back and forth between Sam Harris' Waking Up app and the Calm app. Today I went back to listening to the Daily Calm, which I find more relaxing than the daily guided meditation offered by Waking Up. 

Trump is going to do what he's going to do. Yes, that's a tautology. But it reminds me that by and large, it's going to be up to leading Democrats in Congress and various states to stand in Trump's way when he poses a danger. 

I can support those efforts. Yet I can't let my mental and physical health be threatened by constant worries about what Trump has done, is doing, and will do. I've got to graze on the pleasant grass in my life, not be incessantly looking around for threats from a president who isn't anywhere near me, physically.

Trader Joe's has brought back the Turkey-Less Stuffed Roast for 2024!

Thank you, Trader Joe's!!!

Those three exclamation marks don't begin to describe the joy I felt when I learned that the Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast has returned for 2024 holiday eating, after being discontinued in 2023. 

In November 2023 I sadly wrote, "Bummer! Trader Joe's Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast discontinued for 2023." That post started out with:

Oh, Trader Joe's, I'm so disappointed that you have put a piece of metaphorical coal in my vegetarian stocking this 2023 holiday season by discontinuing your marvelous vegan Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast -- which is the favorite meatless alternative of its kind for my wife and me.

I bought several extra last year and put them in our freezer. Here's a photo of one of the last survivors of the Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast purge before I took it out of the box and put it in an oven for Thanksgiving dinner. Now we're down to zero. Sob...

Yesterday I looked for the roast in the frozen food section of our Salem, Oregon store. Not seeing it, I mentioned to my checkout person that I was disappointed that the Turkey-less Stuffed Roast wasn't available again this year.

To my surprise, and pleasure, she said, "We have it. Want me to show you where it is?" "Absolutely," I told her. Somehow I'd walked right by it.

Not only did I buy one, I bought three. One for our meatless Thanksgiving, one for our meatless Christmas Eve, and one to have in the freezer whenever my wife and I want to eat it at some other time.

The check-out person said she wasn't sure if the ingredients had changed. They haven't. I included the photo below in my 2023 blog post. I just compared those ingredients and nutrition facts with the 2024 version of the roast. They're exactly the same. Trader Joe's was wise not to mess with a good product.

I ended my 2023 post this way. It's great that Trader Joe's realized that the Turkey-less Roast was much beloved, so a replacement wasn't called for. All that needed to be done was bring back the roast. 

But all is not lost. In a November 8, 2023 story, VegNews reported on the much-beloved Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast being discontinued by Trader Joe's. There's hope.

VegNews reached out to Trader Joe’s and the company has confirmed that the product is discontinued and they will not have a meat-free roast offering this year. 

The cult-favorite holiday product will not return to shelves this holiday season because “it wasn’t meeting expectations,” according to one Reddit user. Some commenters suggested the reason might be because the recipe changed at some point and it was never as good as the original. 

However, store managers have told customers that a replacement could come to stores in 2024. 

“The notes in the internal system do say we are sourcing a replacement for 2024, it just didn’t come together this year,” another Reddit user confirmed. 

LOVERS OF THE ROAST, TAKE ACTION! Head to the Trader Joe's Product Feedback page. Tell them that you adore the Breaded Turkey-less Stuffed Roast more than life itself. Or if you prefer life to the roast -- my personal view, since if I'm not alive, I can't enjoy the roast -- tell Trader Joe's that you hope so much for a return of the roast, or a new and improved version, in 2024.

My wife's shoulder replacement surgery is helping me be a better person

When it comes to being a caring, compassionate person, I'd say that I'm about average.

I know people who are much more caring and compassionate than I am, and I also know people who are considerably less caring and compassionate. So I've got room to grow in this regard.

However, at the age of 76, I pretty much figured that I was set in my ways and wouldn't be improving my caring and compassionate quotient any time soon.

That was before my wife, Laurel, had shoulder replacement surgery. More accurately, reverse shoulder replacement surgery.

The difference between a reverse prosthesis and a standard shoulder replacement is that in a reverse prosthesis, the ball is placed on the socket side of the joint. This is opposite of where it is located in nature, or “reverse” of what you would expect. The socket is then placed on the arm side where it is supported by a metal stem in the arm bone (the humerus).

About ten years ago, I think it was, Laurel had surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff in her right shoulder. When it got torn again, my wife had to decide whether to go through another surgery, this time a total replacement of the shoulder. 

She wasn't wild about the prospect of needing to wear a sling for around a month and go through the physical therapy needed for her to make best use of a new shoulder. But this was the wisest thing to do, so last Tuesday she had the surgery on an outpatient basis from her Salem Health doctor. 

It went well. Now we're in the post-surgery recovery mode, which has been difficult for Laurel. The first 48 hours she was icing her shoulder via a machine for 40 minutes on and 20 minutes off. That meant sitting and sleeping in a recliner chair.

She was given several prescriptions to deal with pain and inflammation, along with other medications to dealt with the side effects of the prescriptions. In short, not fun, to put it mildly. 

As with her first surgery, I'm Laurel's caregiver. She needs quite a bit of care. Basically I'm her right arm whenever she needs to do something that requires two arms. Which is a lot of stuff. Until someone has lost the use of an arm, you don't realize how difficult it is to do previously simple things.

Here's how I put my caregiving in a post on my Church of the Churchless blog, where I write more philosophically than on this blog and my Salem Political Snark blog.

Until you can't use an arm for much, it's difficult to know all the things you won't be able to do anymore. We're rediscovering those things, since Laurel had rotator cuff surgery on the same arm about ten years ago that also required her to use a sling for a month. Of course, we were a decade younger then, so everything is a bit tougher now that we're in our mid-70s rather than mid-60s.

I've been having to do a lot more around the house than I usually do.

For example, Laurel used to walk our dog in the morning and I did it most afternoons. Now I handle both walks. We shared cooking duties before her surgery. Now I have to help Laurel with her meals, unless it's a simple one that doesn't require two hands. For the first 48 hours my wife was constantly using a machine with a timer to ice her shoulder, 40 minutes on, 20 minutes off. My job was to rotate three sets of 12 frozen water bottles into the machine every eight hours, making sure a thoroughly frozen set always was available.

What I've discovered from all this extra taking care of Laurel is that the more I'm focused on her needs, the less it bothers me when something goes wrong in my life. This both surprised and pleased me. The first time it happened, it felt like I'd taken a pill that reduced the sensation of the problem I was having by about half. 

Meaning, what used to irritate me considerably now irritated me only a little. It was as if constantly putting Laurel's needs before my own, even for just a couple of days, considerably lowered the feeling of Me I normally carry around. Having less Me rattle around in my mind, and more She (my wife), left less for an irritation to latch onto. 

Also, after six days of caregiving, I've been pleased that aside from a single instance where I got a bit testy with Laurel and had to apologize to her for that, I've been able to be caring and compassionate toward my wife to a greater degree than I anticipated. 

I hadn't realized that putting a loved one's needs before my own, which I readily admit should be my habitual way of acting, but hasn't been, can become a habit. It's sort of like I hadn't exercised my caring and compassionate mental muscle before, or at least not to the extent I'm doing it now (the exception being my wife's previous shoulder surgery).

So all in all, I'm feeling good both about Laurel's prospect for getting back almost complete use of her right shoulder, and my capability for learning how to be a more consistently caring and compassionate person. Of course, only time will tell how both things go.

Oregon football pulls out an exciting win over Ohio State

My heart still hasn't recovered from the closing minutes of Oregon's thrilling 32-31 victory over Ohio State in a battle of #3 versus #2. After tonight, Oregon should be the second ranked team in the country, maybe even close to the top spot, a major accomplishment given the mediocre play from Oregon in its first two games.

Sports writer John Canzano captured my feeling exactly in his "The Bald Faced Truth" substack post (I'm a subscriber) as the talented Ohio State quarterback took the field in the last few minutes of the game, needing only a field goal to pull out a win.

EUGENE — It sure was something on Saturday night to see Oregon fans storm the field and Chip Kelly storm the press box elevator at the end of regulation.

Final: Oregon 32, Ohio State 31.

The biggest win of the Dan Lanning era.

No question mark there. None needed. Because Lanning’s Ducks took possession of the Big Ten Conference penthouse with a gritty, gutsy, never-say-die victory at Autzen Stadium. It wasn’t perfect. Nor easy. But the win came just the same, and it was accompanied by some national respect for the UO program.

Kelly, Ohio State’s mercenary play-caller, was down by a point when his offense got the ball. He had 107 seconds, three timeouts, and a trusted kicker. I don’t blame you if you shook your head, turned off the TV, and headed to bed. Or maybe just covered your eyes with the sofa pillows.

Kelly vs. the Ducks defense with the game on the line?

I was totally prepared for Kelly and Ohio State to come out on top. It just looked like one of those agonizingly close losses in important games was going to bite the Ducks in the butt again. But poor clock management by Ohio State in the closing seconds saved Oregon.

Inexplicably, the Ohio State quarterback kept the ball and ran up the middle when there was just six seconds left in the game. Canzano wrote:

I’d wondered all week if it would come down to the grandmaster chess player against his old school. We’d seen Kelly win a pile of games during his tenure in Eugene. He and Buckeyes’ head coach Ryan Day presented a formidable challenge for Lanning and his youthful staff, particularly defensive coordinator Tosh Lupoi.

Lupoi is an elite recruiter who happens to also be Oregon’s defensive playcaller. Kelly loathes recruiting but can work the back of a napkin at a coaching clinic with the best around. That contrast and the sky-high stakes provided terrific theater on Saturday.

It wasn’t lost on me that Oregon’s Jabbar Muhammad, a transfer cornerback from Washington, deflected a critical pass on the second-to-last play of the game. Or that when Ohio State quarterback Will Howard decided to tuck the ball and run with the final seconds ticking away, he was being chased by players Lupoi recruited, developed, and put on the field.

Howard ran, slid, and then looked up at the clock.

Timeout?

Too late — “0:00.”

This was Oregon's big entrance into the Big Ten. I've got to admit that the scary reputation of Ohio State, which had beaten every opponent easily up to now, made me hope that at least Oregon would keep the final score close so if they lost, they wouldn't sink far in the rankings.

But the Ducks pulled it out -- even with a botched extra point, a failed two-point conversion to make up for the missed extra point, a missed field goal, and a deeply irritating ejection from the game of Oregon receiver Traeshon Holden when he spit in the face of an Ohio State defender after making a catch near the goal line, which led to a 15 yard unsportsmanlike conduct penalty that took away the chance for a touchdown when the Ducks had to settle for a field goal. 

That four point difference between a touchdown and field goal was very much on my mind as Ohio State started its final possession just one point behind, since an Ohio State field goal would win it for them. I have no doubt that one of the happiest people in Autzen Stadium after the Ducks' victory was Holden, since if they had lost, his spit in the face would have gone down in Oregon football history as one of the stupidest moves ever by a Duck in an important game.

It still was really stupid. But at least it didn't cost Oregon the game. If Oregon can beat one of the top teams in the country after making preventable errors, the rest of the season looks really promising for the Ducks. 

Regence and Salem Health are in an annoying contract dispute

Recently I got a not-so-cheery letter from Cheryl Nester Wolfe, President and CEO of Salem Health Hospitals and Clinics.

She informed me, along with many thousands of other people in Salem who get their health insurance through Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon that Salem Health's contract with Regence expires on December 31, 2024 and "despite repeated attempts to negotiate a new contract for 2025, Regence refuses to agree to fair market terms."

Wolfe put most of another sentence in boldface to draw attention to it.

This means that as a patient, you will likely be responsible for a greater portion of the costs of your care at all Salem Health Hospitals and Clinics locations after December 31, 2024.

Yesterday the Salem Reporter had an informative story about this dispute, "Salem Health seeks 35% increase from Regence in insurance coverage dispute." Here's how the story begins:

Thousands in Salem may not be able to get in-network care at Salem Health next year due to a contract dispute between the hospital system and insurance company Regence BlueCross BlueShield.

Both sides say the disagreement, centered around how much the insurance company pays Salem Health to care for patients, may be insurmountable. 

Salem Health is seeking a 35% increase in the amount it bills Regence when members go to the emergency room or have surgery at Salem’s only hospital.

Hospital leaders said that’s necessary to keep up with inflation, while Regence said it would drastically raise premiums for members.

If a deal isn’t settled, Regence patients would pay more out-of-pocket for appointments, surgeries and care at Salem Health’s hospitals and clinics.

Federal law protects patients from paying out-of-network prices for emergency care, including airlifts.

This is really annoying. I'm on Medicare, so have the Regence MedAdvantage plan. The monthly cost is reasonable, $72 a month. I've been happy with the plan, which I've had for ten years, ever since I became eligible for Medicare.

I got a MedAdvantage plan in part because just before I turned 65, I semi-jokingly asked my Salem Health family physician if she was going to kick me out after I had Medicare, since I knew that medical providers complain about Medicare's reimbursement rates. She said that her clinic loses money on regular Medicare visits but they break even, or maybe a bit better, with MedAdvantage. 

Today I phoned Regence, being more than a little concerned about the statement in the Salem Reporter story that the disagreement between Regence and Salem Health may be insurmountable. The open enrollment period for MedAdvantage plans ends December 7, so I wanted to start looking into other options if Regence and Salem Health can't agree on a 2025 contract.

The woman I talked with at Regence was pleasant and seemingly knowledgeable. She told me that contract disputes happen all the time between insurance companies and providers, but usually they aren't as public as this one. She said that if Regence doesn't have a Salem Health contract by November 18, I think it was, they'd have to send out a letter to their Salem customers stating this.

I told her that since my deadline is December 7 to sign up for a different MedAdvantage plan, that's cutting it kind of close. She then told me that between January 1 and March 31 Medicare allows one switch of MedAdvantage plans, which often occurs because someone chooses a new plan during the fall open enrollment period, then finds they don't like that plan.

This applies even if no change has been made to a MedAdvantage plan. Meaning, I could dump Regence and enroll in a different plan between January and March. However, she added that the change doesn't take effect until the first of the next month after a change is made, which means I could have no MedAdvantage plan at all for a while if I switched from Regence early next year.

I don't want to run that risk, given the ever-present possibility of a serious accident or illness popping up. So I'm strongly leaning toward switching to a different MedAdvantage plan prior to December 7. My wife has Providence MedAdvantage through her PERS retirement health plan. She likes Providence, though no insurance plan is perfect.

Understand: I don't trust either Regence or Salem Health.

I told the woman at Regence who I talked with today that this reminds me of the disputes that regularly surface with DirecTV, which we have to use because we live in a rural area lacking cable. When, say, ESPN goes off the air due to a lack of a contract, DirecTV says it is because ESPN is being greedy, and I should complain to ESPN. Of course, ESPN says it is because DirecTV is being greedy, and I should complain to DirecTV.

My attitude is that I don't care who's at fault, I just want ESPN back so I can watch sports. Likewise, I don't care who's at fault between Regence and Salem Health, I just want health care.

It's crazy that even after joining Medicare, I still have to deal with corporate contract disputes. Our country's health care system is screwed up. Even if we had Medicare For All, so long as the profit motive dominates, patients are going to suffer from giant corporations arguing about how much money each of them is going to make. 

My 76th birthday has me thinking about sending death letters before I die

For a while I've been pondering the notion of sending death letters to friends, family, and other people important to me -- not letters to be delivered after I die, but while I'm very much alive, not even sick. 

This idea has gained strength as I approach my 76th birthday. That sounds damn old to me. Which, it is.

My sister died at 71. My mother died at 73. My father, almost entirely absent from my life, died at 73 (best I can estimate; I'm not sure about the exact age).

So while I'm pretty healthy at the moment, having taken better care of myself than those relatives, I still sort of feel like I've living on borrowed time. After all, usually we have no way of knowing when we'll take our last breath.

Accidents happen. Unexpected heart attacks happen. Murders happen. The only way death is known in advance is if we commit suicide or if we have a fatal disease whose course is predictable.

My sister and mother died without me being able to speak with them. My father, the same, though we were so distant, I might not have wanted to talk with him before his death. 

I regret not being able to tell my sister and mother how much I loved them and would miss them. Hopefully they knew this, but we weren't a super-intimate family. I never told them things that I now wish I had, such as regrets about how I could have been a better brother or son, and my appreciation for all they did for me which, in retrospect, I took for granted more than I should have.

That's my motivation for writing individualized death letters to people I care about and sending them out while I'm alive and well, aside from some chronic health problems that are annoying rather than life-threatening. 

The letters would be a reflection of my deep feelings for these people. They'd allow me to say things more honestly and directly than I'm able to do in my usual communications with them. I'd imagine that I was on my death bed, even though I wouldn't be. What would I want to say to each of them if I knew that I only had fifteen minutes of living left?

For sure it wouldn't be aimless chit-chat. It would be heartfelt, real, emotional.

That's the spirit I'll try to put myself in when I write the death letters. Of course, if I end up living quite a bit longer, I might want to write a second death letter to some people. (The Social Security Administration says a 76 year old man lives another ten years, on average.)

I wouldn't expect a response to the death letters.

In fact, I see this as a downside of sending them while I'll alive, because I don't want people to think that I'm looking for them to say nice things about me after I've said nice things about them. However, to be honest, it wouldn't bother me if that happened. I just have no expectation of it happening, as I want my words to reflect how I feel about the person, not how I want them to feel about how I feel.

Anyway, this is something I'm planning to pursue over the coming months.

If I ever have a sudden massive heart attack or find a big semi-truck about to hit my little Subaru head on, I don't want my last thought to be, Damn, I never told _____ how much I care about them.  I'd rather have it simply be, Fuck! I'm about to die!

Verizon outage today was irritating for several reasons

It was a stressful morning in the life of my wife and I, two retired people who usually enjoy a relaxed morning of breakfast, browsing of online news sources, and watching our dog nap after her first meal of the day.

But today we had an electrician coming over to install two ceiling fans, and my wife, Laurel, came into my bedroom as I was just getting up, saying "My phone isn't working; I need to use yours to tell the electrician that if he's delayed, to text or call you, since he won't be able to reach me."

Looking at Laurel's iPhone 14 Max, the same model as mine, I saw the dreaded "SOS" in the upper right corner where a cellular connection is supposed to be. That's Apple's signal that our Verizon service had disappeared, but if we needed emergency help it can be reached via other cellular providers.

The strange thing was, my iPhone was still able to make phone calls and send/receive texts. However, the cellular range extender wasn't working that I'd talked Verizon into giving us after I pointed out to them that we'd bought two new iPhones from Verizon but couldn't reliably phone anybody from our house, the reception was so poor out here in rural south Salem. 

Laurel was told by several people that she called this morning, "You're breaking up." When she went closer to a window, the connection improved, just like our not-so-good old times before we got the range extender. Not surprisingly, since my iPhone was working and Laurel's wasn't, we figured that the problem was with her phone -- though I couldn't figure out why the range extender wasn't doing its thing.

Because we've both become addicted to our smart phones, like the vast majority of Americans, Laurel was worried about driving around later in the day with no functioning phone, just in case she had car trouble or needed her phone for some other reason. 

So, overly optimistic beings that we are, even though part of me knew this wasn't going to be easy given my past experience with contacting Verizon, I called Verizon on my phone. I'm pretty sure I heard a message that said something like, "We're experiencing higher than usual call volume due to outages in parts of the country."

OK, I thought, that must refer to the recent hurricane that decimated several states in the southeast, notably including western North Carolina, where a couple Laurel has kept in touch with since their college days moved a few years ago, so that state has been on our mind. What Verizon failed to mention, and damn well should have, was that a massive outage of their cellular service unrelated to the hurricane had occurred in many places across the country.

Later I saw that this was exactly what an author of a ZDNet story, "Is Verizon down for you? Massive outage puts phones in SOS mode across the US," thought.

If you're seeing SOS mode on your phone today, you're not alone. Verizon, the largest wireless carrier in America, is experiencing a massive outage that's affecting users across the US.

Around 10 a.m. ET, users reported that they could not call, text, or use cellular data. Many added that their phones were in SOS mode.

Phones enter SOS mode when not connected to their carrier network, either because they are in an area with poor coverage or because of a technical problem. Given that most of today's reports are from major cities, this issue seems to be the latter. 

When I used Verizon's "Check Network Status" tool, it showed that everything seemed to be functioning normally. My first thought was that this might be related to damage from Hurricane Helen, which ravaged parts of Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. However, many people affected today by the Verizon problem aren't in the storm's path.

For most of the morning we were thinking that Laurel's nonfunctioning iPhone was caused by some glitch with her phone.

We tried restarting it, several times. We never were able to talk to anyone at Verizon, but Laurel talked with somebody at Apple, a company that actually has real live technical support people who speak with customers having a problem. We puzzled over the fact that settings on her iPhone was showing no Esim card, the electronic version of a physical sim card. I Googled "problem with Verizon cellular range extender," since that wasn't working.

Eventually I put "Verizon outage" into the Google News search box. That brought up lots of stories about a widespread Verizon outage reported by hundreds of thousands of people, which meant many more must have been affected, given that most people aren't going to report a problem on a web site that tracks outages.

It sure would have been nice if Verizon had prominently displayed a message to those of us looking for technical support either by phoning Verizon or going to the Verizon web site that, most likely, our problem was due to a widespread Verizon outage. That would have saved my wife and me hours of time we could have spent more productively than trying to figure out what was wrong with Laurel's iPhone.

In short, nothing, since by the time I drove into town around 2 pm and called Laurel's phone from my car, her phone was back to normal. 

Tonight I searched for any stories that described the cause of Verizon's outage. Couldn't find any. So far, Verizon apparently isn't revealing why so many Americans had to spend much of Monday with no Verizon cell service. For us, it was an annoyance. For a business, it was lost sales. 

Why would Verizon be hit with such a massive outage all across the country? Was it a hacking attack by some malicious foreign power like Iran or Russia? Was it an error caused by Verizon itself? Not only us Verizon customers deserve to know, but all Americans do, given how reliant we are on our smartphones these days. 

Some life lessons from a Tai Chi seminar

I've been practicing Tai Chi for nineteen years, having embraced this internal martial art after twelve years of karate, an external martial art. 

In a 2021 post, "Internal martial arts have a lot to teach us," I quoted from a book by Ron Sieh:

Typically the martial arts are characterized by how they arrive at power: the external, by muscular effort; the internal, relaxed and effortlessly.

All "karates" are considered external, and most of the Chinese arts, plus Judo, Capoeira, and Kali, are lumped into the external category.

T'ai Chi Ch'uan, Hsing I Ch'uan, and Pa Kua are the Chinese internal arts and of course, Aikido is a Japanese art. There is a flow in the internal arts that is missing from the external ones.

In the external there is a quality of fighting, of pushing against the way things are, to change what is happening to better fit our "plan."

In the internal tradition a more inclusive approach is cultivated, a quality of non-interference, of using your opponents' strengths to your advantage without the struggle to change them.

Glenn, Dustin, Marisa, Eric, and Brian (me) at Pacific Martial Arts Tai Chi seminar

Yesterday Warren Allen, my Tai Chi instructor, offered a three hour seminar for five students who are especially interested in the martial side of Tai Chi, as contrasted with the energetic/exercise side. Warren is well suited to teach both aspects of Tai Chi, having much experience with both internal and external martial arts.

One of the things I like about Tai Chi is its close connection with Taoism. I like the description of Tai Chi as "Taoism in motion." Meaning, Tai Chi embodies the principles of Taoism, including notions like effortless effort and yin/yang transitions as the foundation of movement.

Here's some of the life lessons that were conveyed at the seminar, partly through words and partly through partner exercises.

(1) Doing something with your whole self works best. Obviously we don't always need to use every mental or physical capability at our disposal. Getting a spoon out of a drawer to eat cereal in the morning just requires a simple intention and minor movements of my arm and fingers. But often our core needs to be involved: both our bodily core and our psychological core.

By themselves, my arms are much less strong than my arms connected to my core. Tai Chi encourages whole-body movement, combined with whole-mind movement. That's an ideal, of course, one which I fail to live up to many times each day. However, most people would agree with Tai Chi that when we really need to do something right, putting our whole self into the activity works better than half-hearted action.

(2) Trying too hard makes an action less easy. Throughout life most of us have been told to try harder if we want to succeed. Teachers and coaches praise us for putting in maximum effort. While there can be some value in this, Tai Chi demonstrates that trying too hard interferes with our innate capacity to accomplish what needs doing. Excessive effort leads to tension. Tension makes it more difficult for both our physical muscles and mental abilities to do their job.

This is evident when a relief pitcher enters a must-win baseball game in a tough situation, like the bases loaded with nobody out with the score tied. Frequently I'll hear an announcer critique a relief pitcher with a control problem: "He's trying to aim the ball rather than trust his technique." Yoda said, "Do or do not. There is no try." Good advice. 

(3) Rushing is a sign to relax and slow down. We don't spar in a hardstyle martial arts sense in our Tai Chi classes. We do throw punches in a controlled manner, partly to get practice in handling a real world attack and partly to learn how we react to a physical threat. 

At the seminar I noticed that when someone punched at my head fairly slowly, I responded more softly and smoothly than when the punch came more rapidly. This is understandable, though undesirable. For actually I had plenty of time to respond, including by stepping back and to the side while guiding the punch past my head. 

Often we react to unwelcome events in our life with more speed and tension than is necessary. Slowing down and relaxing will lead to a better outcome. Navy SEALs have a mantra: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Easy to say, more difficult to do.

(4) View conflict more as a dance than a battle. It's easy to see battles everywhere we look in life. I do this frequently.

Someone is scrolling away on their smartphone while sitting at a weight machine at our athletic club that's the last exercise I have left to do in my workout. That ticks me off. Someone is driving slowly on the two lane road with few passing lanes that I have to take on my way into town for an appointment that I'm late for. That irks me.

Actually, though, these people aren't out to drive me crazy. I'm doing that to myself. They're simply doing what feels right for them to do. So I'd be better off viewing these sorts of encounters as just a dance between me and someone else, not a battle. Soon we'll be dancing in another fashion with other partners. Maybe we will step on each other's toes, maybe we won't.

Either way, viewing conflict more as a dance than a battle makes a lot of sense. Especially when I'm the only one feeling a conflict, as is the case with the two examples I just offered.

2024 Salem Art Fair is much improved from 2023

The Salem Art Fair and Festival is on an upward trajectory, according to my decidedly personal opinion.

After going to the fair every year since I moved to Salem in 1977, enjoying the shady setting under the large oaks in Bush Park, in 2022 the fair had to move to a big grassy field with little shade because the oaks were being damaged due to soil compaction.

The title of my July 15, 2022 blog post expressed how I felt about the change: "Salem Art Fair better for trees in new location, but not as pleasant now." It was uncomfortably hot out in the sun, and the layout of the artist booths was much more confusing than the old layout: semi-circles branching off a central paved path.

The fair improved in 2023, as I noted in another blog post. I believe the booth layout was close to how it was this year, with most booths in a large circle surrounding the big grassy area. But the temperature was in the mid to high 80s on Friday, the day my wife and I went in 2023.

This year the Salem Art Fair dates changed to mid-September, the 13th, 14th, and 15th. Great decision. Having the temperature in the low 70s in the afternoon caused us to enjoy the fair a lot more than in the hotter previous years. Moving the main stage and food court from the north to the south end of the grassy field also was a plus.

Made it easier to hear music and get something to eat or drink after entering the fair. I took photos of some other improvements.

There were more booths under trees, which was pleasant -- especially for people with limited mobility. When we were looking at booths in the big grassy area, I overheard a woman using a walker say to her friend, "It's difficult for me to get around on this grass; I'm tired." The paved path under the trees is way more walker and wheelchair friendly. 

Again, I realize that the fair had to be moved from under the white oaks. But just being near some trees somehow makes booths seem more, well, artsy. 

The beer and wine area is more centrally located now. And it isn't "walled off" from the rest of the art fair, as it used to be.

I guess there's no way to make the big grassy field look like anything other than what it is, but at least it wasn't a hot big grassy field in September. Still, I can picture street performers doing their thing in this area, entertaining fairgoers with juggling, mime, hoop tricks, and such, much as a few musicians were singing and playing elsewhere with a collection plate for donations.

A copper booth looked warm and bright.

This booth looked cool.

My child-raising days are long past, as are my daughter's. But maybe I'll live long enough to be able to buy a cute children's sweater if or when my granddaughter has a child.

It was nice to see "This is Kalapuyan Land" signs scattered around the fair, reminding us of the Native Americans who were here first. 

This year I actually bought some art at the Salem Art Fair. Usually I'm just a browser. But the Mercurial Art booth attracted me. I browsed at first, then after my wife and I got some cold drinks, I went back and bought one of the fused glass creations. At the moment I have it next to a reading light in my office, since the tree leaves show up best when lighted.

If I understood him correctly, Leonard Tinnell, the artist, told me that the rock holding the fused glass via a slot cut into the rock was deposited by the great Missoula Floods that occurred at the end of the last Ice Age. That's how the Columbia Gorge in Oregon and Washington was fashioned, with the floodwaters reaching the Willamette Valley, where Salem is. 

Here's a description of the fused glass art from the Mercurial Art web site. 

Crushed glass (also known as frit) and glass powders are used to paint the imagery of a grove of trees in the changing seasons. Starting at room temperature, the glass is heated in a kiln to a process temperature of 1500 degrees, then cooled through several annealing zones back to room temperature. Multiple firings result in more complex geometric designs using cut sheet glass, or by slumping the glass into a mold to achieve the curve of a plate or bowl.  

Watching Oregon - Boise State football game on Peacock was miserable

Last night wasn't pleasant for me, football-watching-wise, for a couple of reasons. 

One, the Oregon football team played a crappy game against Boise State, an opponent they were favored to beat by 19 points, but ended up winning 37-34 on a last second field goal. This follows their crappy initial game against Idaho, a team they were expected to beat by around 50 points, but won by only 24-14.

Two, the Oregon - Boise State game was on Peacock, NBC's streaming service. We subscribe to Peacock for entertainment, so I had no problem accessing the game at 7 pm via our Apple TV device. That was my favorite part of the game: the few minutes at the start before the first series of commercials. 

Now, I readily admit that because I almost always record a football game on our DirecTV DVR, then start watching it about an hour after the game started, I'm used to fast-forwarding through commercials and halftime. Sometimes I also use the 30-second skip-ahead feature to only watch the actual action, since that's about how long it typically takes a college team to go from play to play.

So I have a low tolerance for unwanted interruptions during a football game, especially commercials. I expected that Peacock wouldn't let me skip commercials, and that indeed was the case. Such was bad enough; worse was how many damn commercials there were, especially in the first half. There seemed to be way more than in a usual game on regular TV: ESPN, Fox, and such. 

I recall that in the first quarter there were several "three and outs" when both Oregon and Boise State were having trouble moving the ball. The way that went on Peacock was: Oregon has three plays, punts the ball on fourth down, lengthy commercial break, Boise State has three plays, punts the ball on fourth down, lengthy commercial break.

Ridiculous! 

I'm used to commercial breaks at the end of each quarter, with a few during each quarter, plus maybe during time outs. Also after scores. But when the ball simply changes hands... that made watching a game on Peacock frustrating, though it seemed to me that there were fewer commercials in the second half.

Also, while this may be a quirk of Apple TV, it was irritating to pause the Oregon - Boise State game on Peacock, shift our television over to HDMI 1 where I was recording the Oregon State - San Diego State game that started at 7:30 pm on CBS-SN, watch that game for a while, then find that the Apple TV device had shut off after that period of inactivity, which meant that Peacock showed me the current stream of the Oregon - Boise State game when I went back to it, not where I'd left off watching.

While I was able to rewind and advance the game on Peacock, I avoided doing this since I figured that then I'd have to sit through the commercials again. So I missed part of the game because I was trying to cram both the Oregon and Oregon State games into a few hours of evening football watching.

I guess that's a third irritation: how the demise of the Pac-12, leaving Oregon State and Washington State the only members of a Pac-2, resulted in the Oregon - Boise State game starting at 7 pm and the Oregon State - San Diego State game starting at 7:30 pm. This screwy almost-same-time scheduling never happened, so far as I can recall, back when both Oregon and Oregon State were in the Pac-12 conference.

Next Saturday Oregon plays Oregon State on FOX. It could be a close game, notwithstanding Oregon's #9 national ranking in the AP poll, given how bad Oregon has been playing compared to pre-season expectations. But regardless of who wins -- for sure it will be a team from my state -- I'll be happy both with the outcome and that the game wasn't on Peacock. The production quality of the game also was below par: shaky camera work, inexplicable black screen popping up from time to time.

Another school shooting shows there's only one reason: too many damn guns!

Today four people were killed and nine wounded at a high school in Georgia by a 14-year old student there. 

According to Wikipedia, as of August 31, so far in 2024 in the United States a total of 527 people have been killed and 1,755 people have been wounded in 432 mass shootings. (Defined as at least four people killed or wounded in an incident.)

So this school shooting wasn't anything special, sadly. School shootings just get more attention from the media.

I watched some of the coverage as I exercised this afternoon, then listened to MSNBC and CNN discussions of the mass shooting while driving home.

It didn't take long for me to become disgusted with the all-too-familiar ritual of this country's usual reaction to mass shootings. Vigils, prayers, praise for the police reaction, vilifying the "evil" shooter, calls for better mental health care, blah, blah, blah. 

I can't stand this crap anymore. None of these endlessly repeated actions addresses the real cause of mass shootings: the massive amount of guns floating around in our country. 

This is so damn obvious, it's journalistic malpractice to talk about anything else. 

The United States doesn't have a higher proportion of people with mental health problems than other high-income countries. What distinguishes us is our insane gun culture, the wrong-headed belief that guns keep us safer. 

They don't. As shown in the chart below, which has data for 2017 and 2019, the United States has by far the most guns per 100 people among these countries, and also has by far the highest gun murder rate per 100,000 people.

More guns, more gun deaths. That's the five-word explanation for why our country has so many shootings. There's no other reason. 

So whenever I hear some talking head on a news program blather on about the need for better mental health care, or for arming teachers, or for any other action aimed at reducing mass shootings other than making it more difficult to own a gun, I feel like screaming at the television or radio, shut the fuck up, you idiot!

In the coming days and weeks law enforcement types will study the Georgia shooter's background, his motive for doing what he did, whether his parents knew he had access to the AR-15 style rifle used in the shooting, his behavior on the day of the attack, and such.

None of that, precisely zero, zilch, nada, will move the United States closer to reducing the crazily high number of gun deaths and injuries in this country. Fewer guns -- that's the only real solution.

And that, unfortunately, is almost impossible to achieve until we get a Supreme Court that understands that the second amendment to our constitution allows for strong regulations governing gun ownership.

Good news: DirecTV has Big Ten Network. Bad news: How Oregon played.

Today started off on a high note for me, college football-wise. I was thrilled when, in the morning, I set my DirecTV VCR to record the 3:30 pm Oregon State vs. Idaho State game on The CW (channel 32) and the 4:30 pm Oregon vs. Idaho game on the Big Ten Network (channel 601). 

While that may not sound like a big deal to football fans who don't use DirecTV -- we live in rural south Salem, Oregon, where there's no cable options -- those of us who suffered through many years of not getting the Pac-12 Networks due to a never-ending corporate pissing match between them and DirecTV rejoiced when the Pac-12 became the Pac-2.

Not because we were happy about the demise of the Pac-12. I was really sad when every member except Oregon State and Washington State headed off to other conferences: the Big Ten, Big 12, ACC. But the plus side for me was being able to see every Oregon and Oregon State football game in the 2024 season.

Unfortunately, there's now a corporate pissing match between the Big Ten Network, which is owned by Fox, and Comcast/Xfinity. Today I commiserated with a friend who is an avid Ducks fan and has Comcast at his Salem apartment, sending him this text. 

It warmed my heart just now to be able to record the OSU game on The CW and the Oregon game on the Big Ten Network after so many years of having to deal with DirecTV not having the Pac-12 Networks. I’ve been reading that the Ducks game is blacked out on Comcast due to a dispute between them and the Big Ten Network. I’m curious if that’s true for you.

It was. He responded with:

Well the table has turned (I fear), and your home is able to get Ducks and Beavers football, and it sounds like I will be unable to get at least the Ducks games. Again a dispute on how the profits are split. But I haven’t heard from Comcast one way or another. What a bizarre twist for the local Duck fans. If they are blacked out they just might riot.

It's unclear how long the Comcast blackout will last. An Oregonian story about this issue says:

The question now is whether the impasse will last days, weeks or months.

“I don’t know about months but certainly weeks,” an industry source said Saturday.

The blackout imposed by Fox, which owns the Big Ten Network, came in response to Comcast refusing to move the Big Ten Network to a basic subscription tier along the West Coast once the four schools joined the conference.

I thought both The CW and Big Ten Network did a fine job with their broadcasts of the Oregon State and Oregon games. I'd never watched The CW before (CW stands for the two founding organizations, CBS  Corporation and Warner Brothers). The announcers and camerawork seemed comparable to ESPN and Fox.

My big disappointment today was how Oregon played. They were favored by about 50 points over Idaho but ended up winning by just ten points, 24-14. I don't think Ohio State is quaking with fear about playing Oregon on October 12 given how Oregon looked today.

Either Oregon isn't deserving of its #3 national ranking at the moment, or Idaho is a much better team than expected. Perhaps both are true.

In the fourth quarter Oregon just had a 17-14 lead with a 3rd and seven near the Idaho goal line. An Idaho lineman went offside, leaving Oregon with a 4th and two. Oregon then scored, a game changer since it was looking like Oregon might have to kick a field goal, making the game 20-14 with Idaho having about 5 1/2 minutes to score a touchdown and win the game.

That's pathetic for a team with a quarterback vying for a Heisman trophy that has set its sights on a national championship. Hopefully Oregon will get its act together before it plays Oregon State on September 14. Oregon State won comfortably 38-15. Oregon won uncomfortably.

Bill Oram of the Oregonian started off his column with:

Oh boy, it is certainly tempting to lay into the Oregon Ducks today. To say they bought into their own hype. Label them paper tigers. Call for everyone to lay off the talk of a playoff.

They were supposed to manhandle the team from the panhandle. Instead, it was nearly a Vandal scandal.

The Ducks were spectacularly close to ending up on the wrong side of one of the biggest upsets in college football’s storied history.

Michigan almost got off the hook for its 2007 loss to Appalachian State.

In 16 games against FCS opponents since 2002 — all wins, of course — the Ducks’ average margin of victory had been more than 46 points.

On Saturday, they were favored by 49.5.

Their actual scoring advantage? Three points with barely eight minutes to go in the fourth quarter, before they managed to eke out a 24-14 victory.

“The score is what the score was,” Dan Lanning tersely told reporters after the game

And what was that?

Unimaginable? Unacceptable? Unforgivable?!

Maybe all three. It doesn’t have to be an upset to be upsetting.

In 2024 we see very few bees and yellow jackets in rural south Salem, Oregon

We've lived at our house on ten acres in rural south Salem, about six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital, for thirty-four years. This has been an unusual year for us as regards the bee and yellow jacket population.

We've seen very few of each on our property. Almost none.

Typically we have several natural bee hives. We have flowering plants in our yard that were chosen to appeal to bees. In 2024, though, the bees never showed up.

Same with yellow jackets. In past summers, when we'd eat breakfast on our deck some yellow jackets would appear almost instantly, especially when my cereal topped with raspberries and strawberries was on the table. This year, a few times a single yellow jacket buzzed around. That was it.

And by August we'd see yellow jackets going in and out of underground burrows, which we'd spray if one was close to where we walked. This year, no sign of that. 

Bumblebees have been fairly common. We've seen more of them in our yard than bees. That's never happened before, I'm pretty sure. 

Some neighbors who have a large yard with many flowering plants have noticed a similar marked drop-off in bees. Their theory is that it could be related to aerial spraying with a helicopter of Christmas tree farms north of our neighborhood.

I suppose that's possible. But it seems sort of unlikely to me, given how far away the tree farms are, at least a mile or so. 

It's a mystery. I haven't seen any news about western Oregon experiencing a big die-off in the bee population. Some Googling didn't reveal anything special about 2024 when it comes to natural bee hives in the Willamette Valley.

So I figured I'd cast this blog post into the waters of the Internet and see if it gets any responses from people more knowledgeable than my wife and I are about how bees and yellow jackets are faring in our area this year. 

Leave a comment if you have an explanation for why we've seen so few of them in 2024. Maybe this is just a hyper-local thing, a decline in numbers that is part of some natural cycle. It concerns us, though, that this could be a sign of something harming bees. (Yellow jackets, we're not as concerned about.)

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Joe Biden's speech at the DNC was met with love, and also relief

President Biden deserved the warm welcome he received at the Democratic National Convention tonight. The cries and signs of "I love Joe" were heartfelt. 

However, as I watched his speech here in Oregon, where it was over well after midnight East Coast time and 9:30 or so our time, which seemed like a crazily late time to showcase what amounted to Biden's farewell to the nation as Kamala Harris is poised to enter the stretch run of her presidential campaign, I keep thinking that a big part of why Democrats love Joe is that Biden had the good sense to withdraw from his reelection effort, which created a strong sense of relief.

If he hadn't done this, I was prepared to watch his speech at the convention as the Democratic candidate, rather than as the guy who made Harris' campaign possible, with undisguised enmity. For until the pressure on Biden to withdraw became too strong for him to ignore, reporting indicated that right up to the end, Biden believed that he could beat Trump. 

That wasn't a complete fantasy, but it was damn close to being delusional. The evidence for this is how quickly Harris erased Trump's lead both nationally and in the battleground states, since her candidacy unleashed a wave of enthusiasm that was always there, but was being stifled by Biden's evident inability to run a strong campaign against Trump -- in large part because of his age, but also because he isn't a scintillating speaker.

Those weaknesses were on display tonight, though despite the lateness of the hour, Biden's voice sounded strong, probably because he mostly was reading from a teleprompter. He'll give more speeches before his presidency is over. I'm looking forward to never hearing him say "No joke" or "I'm not kidding" again. I never can understand why Biden feels the need to say these things, since it's obvious from what he's talking about that it isn't a matter of joking or kidding.

By contrast, so far I haven't found anything Kamala Harris or Tim Walz do when they're speaking that irritates me. 

Anyway, I think it was great that Biden got his moment in the sun on the first day of the Democratic National Convention. He rolled through his greatest hits, taking justified pride in his many accomplishments as president. It's hard not to like the guy, though Trump and most Republicans are able to do this, no problem. 

I'm just happy that he was speaking on Monday, rather than on Thursday, when the presidential nominee speaks. I found his speech kind of boring, but that's to be expected of Biden. He beat Trump in 2020 because the nation yearned for someone unexcitingly normal after four years of Trump's over-the-top craziness.

Now, though, I look forward to backing Harris-Walz, who bring out just the right amount of excitement among voters open to their populist progressive message. 

LGBTQ people may not be born that way, but they're formed that way

The Sunday New York Times had a great idea in the opinion section of the August 4, 2024 issue: have some of their columnists debunk a bit of conventional wisdom in their circles. Here's how it was described.

Our world is more connected than ever. But it's never been easier to find yourself shepherded into a comfortable herd made up of close friends or political allies, your social set or professional peers. And those herds are the perfect environment for groupthink to thrive, to allow dubious beliefs or weak arguments to masquerade as unquestionable truisms.

We asked nine of our Opinion columnists to debunk an idea -- big or small -- that has become conventional wisdom in their circles. We wanted to read about the arguments that start debates at dinner parties or make their friends roll their eyes. These are Times Opinion's unpopular opinions.

David Brooks wrote "Many People Fear A.I. They Shouldn't." Zeynep Tufekci wrote "Politicians Say We're More Divided than Ever. It Could Be Worse." Bret Stephens wrote "Conservatives Think The Market Always Gets It Right. It Doesn't." Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote "Don't Hate on the D.M.V. It's Actually Great." Michelle Goldberg wrote "Mothers Are Told Natural Childbirth Is Best. It Isn't." Pamela Paul wrote "The Saying Goes: Dogs are Man's Best Friend. But Cats Are Better." Lydia Polgreen wrote "We're Taught to Hate Hypocrisy. We Shouldn't." David French wrote "Some Think What You Preach Matters More Than What You Do. It Doesn't." 

And Charles M. Blow wrote "People Say Queer People Are Born That Way. It's More Complicated." That's a gift link from my online subscription; my wife subscribes to the Sunday paper edition, which is how I learned about the debunking columns. I've copied in Blow's piece below for easier reading within this post.

Blow makes a lot of sense, though he takes on a subject that in liberal circles is controversial: that sexual orientation isn't purely genetic but arises from a bunch of factors, including genetics. But this seems to be true. Here's a couple of excepts from a 2008 story in Science, "Gay Is Not All in the Genes."

Why are some people gay? Most researchers who study sexual orientation think that both genetic and environmental factors play a role, but the relative contributions of each remain unclear. A new study of Swedish twins reinforces earlier findings that environmental influences--including the environment in the womb--may play a greater role than genes.

...The results, published online this month in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, confirm earlier findings that identical twins are more concordant for same-sex behaviors than fraternal twins are but only modestly so: In men, genetic effects appeared to explain 34% to 39% of the differences between the two twin groups, whereas in women, genetics accounted for only about 18% to 19% of the difference--a finding consistent with other research showing that sexual orientation in women is not as rigidly determined as it is in men.

If I was asked to debunk a bit of conventional wisdom in my circle, a top choice of mine would be "Most people believe we have free will. But we don't." This is one of my favorite subjects on my Church of the Churchless blog. I've written many posts about free will, or rather the lack thereof. 

So I resonated with Blow's statements, though I don't totally agree with them: 

“Born this way” may, unfortunately, have been an oversimplification. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that people are “formed this way.”

...Now the argument has to be more sophisticated: We may choose how we identify and how we express — or suppress — our attractions, but our attractions themselves are not a choice.

We must insist that people’s right to exist, and our responsibility to affirm and protect them, doesn’t hinge on the mechanisms by which they came to exist. The “end” exists, regardless of the “means.”

The way I see it, everything that we do, and all that we are, is determined by causes and conditions extending all the way back to the big bang.

This scientific understanding, which Robert Sapolsky ably argued for in his recent book, Determined, makes it impossible to blame people for being whoever they are now, for they had no choice in the matter -- notwithstanding Blow's attempt to make our attractions not a choice, but how we express or suppress our attractions a choice.

Regardless, I like what Blow said in his column.

It won't please those who believe in the "born that way" hypothesis, nor will it please those who believe in the "sexuality is a choice" hypothesis. The truth doesn't always lie in the middle, but in this case I think it does. My only quibble with his column is that I don't believe we ever make choices of our own unfettered free will, no matter what those choices are.

When Lady Gaga released “Born This Way,” the 2011 song on an album of the same name, it was an instant hit and an instant L.G.B.T.Q. anthem. The song debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Top 100, and Elton John called it “the new gay anthem.”

It was the dictum of a generation, three words operating with bumper sticker efficiency, conveying that queerness was natural and immutable, and that it was not a result of abuse, grooming or impairment. Queer people were not broken, and therefore in no need of fixing. Queerness was neither a choice nor a curse. It was not a “lifestyle” but a state of being.

The idea that sexuality was innate, captured in the phrase, was a rhetorical work horse that began to lead the conversation around L.G.B.T.Q. issues. Although the idea of homosexual bio-essentialism has a history that long predates this modern iteration, “born this way” this time was a phrase that matched the moment and captured the zeitgeist. As with most things in politics, it was about timing.

Later that year, during remarks delivered at the Human Rights Campaign annual dinner, President Barack Obama joked to the gay rights group that “I also took a trip out to California last week, where I held some productive, bilateral talks with your leader: Lady Gaga.”

Obama was referring to meeting Gaga at a fundraiser at which she raised the issue of bullying after one of her fans, 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, endured homophobic bullying before dying by suicide.

Before the fundraiser, Obama had repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the military, allowing queer service members to serve openly, and soon after the fundraiser, Obama would become the first president to declare his support for same-sex marriage.

In the years after the song was released, the percentage of Americans saying in polling that “being gay or lesbian is something a person is born with” began to consistently outweigh those who responded that being queer was “due to factors such as upbringing and environment.”

“Born this way,” as a slogan, was a tremendous cultural and political success. The problem is that it isn’t supported by science. The emerging scientific consensus is that sexual orientation isn’t purely genetic. A person’s genetic makeup and exposure to prenatal hormones may provide a propensity to queerness, but they aren’t determinative. Other factors most likely also play a role.

“Born this way” may, unfortunately, have been an oversimplification. It’s probably closer to the truth to say that people are “formed this way.” As the complity of human sexuality has become clearer, scientists and writers have attempted to add necessary nuance to the subject. But the slogan remains entrenched in the culture.

Just last year, Rolling Stone crowned “Born This Way” the most inspirational L.G.B.T.Q. song of all time, calling it a “battle cry” that “is as relevant as ever.”

But the time may have come to retire the phrase. It is not only unsupportable by science but also does not capture the full reality of queer experience and is unjust to some members of the queer community itself.

As Lisa Diamond, a professor of developmental psychology, health psychology and gender studies at the University of Utah, explained in her 2018 TED talk, the argument is “unjust because it implies that L.G.B.T. individuals who fit a certain cultural stereotype, the ones who have been exclusively gay for as long as they can possibly remember, are somehow more deserving of acceptance and equality than someone who came out at age 60 or whose attractions have been more fluid or who is bisexual rather than exclusively gay.”

I fully understand how frightening relinquishing this phrase may be.

“Born this way,” as both a scientific concept and a political ideology, was easy to understand, accept and digest. A more nuanced explanation of attraction, one with a bit of mystery, opens the door to ambiguity and uncertainty that the opponents of gay rights will no doubt seek to exploit.

Relinquishing such a powerful tool might feel like giving up too much. But incoming Stony Brook University professor Joanna Wuest, author of “Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement,” believes that retiring the idea may potentially not be much of a loss at all, because the science is so strong that things like conversion therapy “are extremely detrimental to mental health and even the lives of queer people.”

As she explained to me, “we don’t need a strong biological theory of identity to understand that when you punch someone, they say it hurts.”

Now the argument has to be more sophisticated: We may choose how we identify and how we express — or suppress — our attractions, but our attractions themselves are not a choice.

We must insist that people’s right to exist, and our responsibility to affirm and protect them, doesn’t hinge on the mechanisms by which they came to exist. The “end” exists, regardless of the “means.”

I watched The Handmaid's Tale to learn what reelecting Trump would be like

It was a tough job, but I had to do it -- watching every second of every episode of the five seasons of The Handmaid's Tale, a show that I wasn't interested in when it aired from April 2017 to November 2022, but which grabbed my attention this year for a couple of reasons.

One was that I'd seen Elisabeth Moss in The Veil and was captivated by her acting. She's the lead character in The Handmaid's Tale.

Another was that I wanted to see what lessons The Handmaid's Tale had for our current political situation, where Donald Trump is seeking a return to the White House and the three Supreme Court justices he appointed overturned abortion rights guaranteed by Roe v. Wade in June 2022 via the Dobbs decision. 

In case you're not familiar with the basic plot of The Handmaid's Tale, which is based on a book by Margaret Atwood, Wikipedia summarizes it.

In a world where fertility rates have collapsed as a result of sexually transmitted diseases and environmental pollution, the totalitarian, theonomic government of Gilead has established its rule in the former United States in the aftermath of a civil war. Society is organized by power-hungry leaders along with a new, militarized, hierarchical régime of religious fanaticism and newly created social classes, in which women are brutally subjugated. By law, women in Gilead are forced to work in very limited roles, including some as natal slaves, and they are not allowed to own property, have careers, handle money, or read.

Sure sounds like the sort of thing rabid Trump supporters would dream about, albeit not to the degree religious authoritarians were able to pull off in The Handmaid's Tale. 

Power-hungry leaders? Check. Militarized regime? Check. Religious fanaticism? Check. Subjugation of women? Check. 

The Handmaid's Tale has many flashbacks where we get to see how the United States as we know it now became a nation, renamed Gilead, with totalitarian rule by men consumed with a lust for power and keeping women in the subservient place their interpretation of the Bible demands. 

At first it seems impossible that this could happen. But bit by bit, rights are extinguished until democracy and the Constitution are just memories. Today many Americans think that could never happen here. 

They need to think again. 

Project 2025 was embraced by Donald Trump until publicity about this scary agenda for a second Trump presidency became so strong, his campaign had to pretend to disavow it. There's a lot to dislike in the 900 page document. A BBC story describes some of what it would do, including these scary plans that relate to The Handmaid's Tale.

Project 2025 proposes that the entire federal bureaucracy, including independent agencies such as the Department of Justice, be placed under direct presidential control - a controversial idea known as "unitary executive theory".

In practice, that would streamline decision-making, allowing the president to directly implement policies in a number of areas.

The proposals also call for eliminating job protections for thousands of government employees, who could then be replaced by political appointees.

The document labels the FBI a "bloated, arrogant, increasingly lawless organization". It calls for drastic overhauls of this and several other federal agencies, as well as the complete elimination of the Department of Education.

...Project 2025 does not call outright for a nationwide abortion ban.

However, it proposes withdrawing the abortion pill mifepristone from the market, and using existing but little-enforced laws to stop the drug being sent through the post.

The document suggests that the department of Health and Human Services should "maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family".

Since I watched some of The Handmaid's Tale every day until I finished the series, there were times when I thought about giving up on it. Not because it wasn't captivating. Because it was so dark and disturbing. 

The big lesson that I took away from my viewing was this: to prevent The Handmaid's Tale from being even a partial reality in our country, it's absolutely essential that Kamala Harris be elected president this November. Donald Trump has told us that he plans to be an authoritarian theocratic ruler if he wins. 

We need to believe him.

"We" being everybody in the United States who supports freedom, democracy, and the rule of law, but especially women, because they have the most to lose from a second Trump presidency, just as they had the most to lose in The Handmaid's Tale.

Relax, today's big stock market decline is no big deal

If you're like me, someone with money invested in the United States stock market, today wasn't fun. All the major market indices dropped considerably, following a couple of declining days last week. 

The S&P 500 was down 3.0%, the Dow 2.6%, the NASDAQ 3.4%.

I don't believe one-sentence descriptions why the stock market rises or falls are worth much, including today's "the market is worried about a possible recession." This doesn't begin to capture the complexities of why markets around the world had a tough time today.

For example, lots of investors had borrowed money in Japan, because that country has had very low interest rates. Then they'd invest that money in other countries with higher interest rates. However, after the Bank of Japan raised the interest rate, this screwed up that scheme, leading the investors to "unwind" their positions.

And don't believe the claims from Republicans that the stock market decline was all Kamala Harris' and Joe Biden's fault. A couple of posts on X undermined that ridiculous theory.

Indeed, currently overnight trading of futures points to a rise in the S&P 500 of 0.9%, about a third of what was lost today. 

Many people aren't totally invested in the stock market. My wife and I, being in our mid-70s, only have about half of our investments in equities. Most of the rest is in bonds and a money market fund. Our investments dropped 1.4% today, about half of the 3.0% drop in the S&P 500. So diversification goes a long way toward being able to relax after a large decline in the stock market.

But regardless of the makeup of someone's investments, the best advice I've come across today is encapsulated in the title of a New York Times story: "When the Stock Market Drops, Stay Calm and Do Nothing." That's a gift link from my subscription, so you should be able to read the story. Here's some excerpts.

Think of what’s happening in the stock market as a kind of fire drill. As we all know from childhood, one of the primary rules is not to panic. And in this case, panicking would mean selling stocks when the market is falling.

...Selling is smart if you know that the stock market is about to fall by a lot and stay down for a long time. Most people don’t know, however, and those who got it right in 2022 or 2020 or 2008 or 2000 or 1987 may not know the difference between the skill they think they have and the luck that probably helped them back then.

Many of the people who traded furiously on Monday are professional investors of various sorts — or the robots they programmed to automatically sell when this or that indicator flashes yellow or red. But here’s a dirty little secret about, say, hedge funds: All of their trading in reaction to world events doesn’t lead most of them to do better than sticking money in an index fund that tracks the stock market. Mutual fund managers don’t do much better.

If you need money soon that you have invested — say, for a down payment or college tuition — this is probably a scary moment, and selling might make sense. But if you are frightened, remember the feeling. Going forward, perhaps any money you might need quickly should not be in the stock market at all.

...Still, rational thinking often eludes us in moments like this, and fear is nothing to be ashamed of. Here are a few things that may make you feel a little better.

First, consider the early days of the pandemic, when stocks fell by more than a quarter in the space of a month or so. Who would have thought that within a year, market gains off the bottom of the market would wipe out those losses and then some? But that’s what happened.

Now, consider other future facts that remain elusive: We don’t know who will be the next president of the United States, or what kind of hurricane season it will be. Try, if at all possible, to revel in the wonders of an unpredictable world and consider the possibility that good news can happen and the markets can react accordingly, even if we can’t predict most of it.

Second, look at the performance of your investment portfolio over the last year or three or 10. Chances are, you’ve made a lot of money if you’ve invested regularly and then left things alone. Nice going! Try to think about those enormous gains and not any smaller paper losses from today’s drop.

...Finally, and as ever, you are not the stock market. If you have, say, one-third of your savings in cash, bonds or real estate, your overall paper losses in your investment portfolio are less than whatever Monday’s stock market losses end up being. Cash, after all, did not melt down.

Moreover, you are the sum of many large parts, including home equity and future salary, not to mention the immeasurably high returns that come from friends and family and playing outside and taking in art.

Go fly a kite or wander among beautiful buildings and check in with the market again tomorrow.

Oh, no! Just learned that yuppies were baby boomers. I'm crushed.

Since I was born in 1948, naturally I've always considered myself to be part of the baby boomer generation.

And since I went to college at San Jose State University from 1966-71, the height of the Flower Child movement in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as elsewhere, and I embraced marijuana, psychedelics, long hair, and other trappings of that movement, naturally I've always considered myself to be a hippie who just happens to look now like the old man that I am.

What I've never considered myself to be is either a yuppie or the generation that spawned the hugely annoying Young Urban Professional who worshipped money and conspicuous consumption. That was so not me or my hippie generation. We danced to the different drummer of liberal causes, caring for the planet, equality for all. 

Imagine my shock, then, when I read "What Happened to the Yuppie" by Louis Menand in the July 27, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. (Title in online edition is "When Yuppies Ruled.") This is a book review of Tom McGrath's Triumph of the Yuppie: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.

In the first part of the article I came across some facts that undermined my confidence that I was part of a generation of hippies.

The demographic that the term was intended to pick out—professionals under forty living in cities—was fairly small in 1984, something like 1.2 million people. But there were not a lot of bona-fide hippies in the nineteen-sixties, either.

In 1967, only one per cent of college students said that they had tried LSD, and in 1969 Newsweek estimated that there were ten thousand people living in communes—probably a lowball estimate, but, whatever the number, it was not huge, and communes tend to have a short life span.

Hippies and yuppies signified not as political constituencies but as social types. A social type stands for something that people think is important to identify either with or against. As with the Swiftie. There are people who really want to be Swifties, and there are people who can’t believe that there are people who really want to be Swifties.

But, no matter how little you care about Swifties, you have to have an opinion. Even professing indifference is an opinion. And your view on Swifties says something about you. You’re the kind of person who says whatever it was you just said about Swifties—or yuppies or hippies. It all hangs together.

Okay, that left most of my hippie self-image intact. Sure, most people in my generation didn't identify as hippies, but at least we were highly sympathetic toward the elevated values of hippies -- which were ever so different from the crass materialism of the yuppies.

However, reading onward in the article, I learned something highly disturbing: the yuppies that I looked down upon were baby boomers, my generation. And they didn't change from being hippies to yuppies; they had yuppie-dom in them all along. Yikes! I felt self-image ground crumbling beneath my feet.

McGrath is insistent, even a little overinsistent, on making sense of the yuppies as baby boomers. The idea is that, having been dissidents and countercultural idealists in the nineteen-sixties, the boomers flipped in the nineteen-eighties to embrace capitalism and materialism.

McGrath presents this less as a sellout than as a colorful new chapter in the history of postwar America as the pig passes through the python.

But, once you do the math, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The baby boom began in July, 1946, and ended in December, 1964—representing approximately seventy-six million people. Almost none of those people were actively involved in the political, social, or cultural changes of the nineteen-sixties. They were much too young.

It’s the difference between listening to the Beatles and being the Beatles. Most of the baby boomers had nothing to do with the civil-rights movement or the launch of the women’s-liberation movement, and only a few who were born before 1950 had much to do with the antiwar movement.

When the first U.S. combat troops were deployed to Vietnam, in 1965, the oldest baby boomers were nineteen, and still in college. The youngest were not yet one, and teething.

On the other hand, the yuppies, if we define them as people between twenty-five and thirty-nine in 1984, were indeed baby boomers. The yuppie, not the hippie, is the baby boom’s contribution to postwar American social history.

Sigh... This is probably true. I hadn't thought much before about the leaders of the 60's social change movements being considerably older than us baby boomers, even those like me who were at the leading edge of the baby boom generation.

I always thought that we were revolutionary hippies. But the article argues that we're better thought of as traditionalist yuppies. Best I can come up with is that my generation is a mixture of each. I'm good at wishful thinking. 

I loved the Olympics opening ceremony, including drag queen part

When I first heard that the Paris Olympics opening ceremony was going to be held on the Seine River, with boats carrying the parade of nations, I thought that this could be a big mistake by the organizers. Why not respect tradition and have the ceremony in a stadium, like it always has been?

Well, my thought was the mistake, not the decision to have the opening ceremony on the Seine. I recorded the lengthy ceremony. My wife and I are only partway through it, but we've loved what we've seen so far, and I know that we'll love the rest of it also.

France did itself proud. The opening ceremony was wonderfully bold, creative, innovative, breathtaking. I'll remember this one much more than all the other ceremonies I've watched, and mostly forgotten, over the years.

The boats passing by the cameras, filled with cheering, flag-waving, dancing athletes from around the world, was much more interesting than the usual march into a stadium. Being on a boat freed the athletes to express themselves more exuberantly. 

And the boats themselves were well worth watching. Each was unique. Some were large. Some were small. I expect that boat tours of the Seine are going to experience a big increase in ridership after the Olympics. 

The performance part of the opening ceremony held my attention to a greater degree than past ceremonies have. Being outdoors, with the "set" the banks of the Seine and other locations in Paris, gave the performances a vibrance that surpassed the performance part of previous ceremonies. 

As an open-minded liberal, the outrage of religious conservatives about the so-called Last Supper performance featuring drag queens made the opening ceremony even more appealing for me.

A NBC News story about the uproar showed how ridiculous religious fundamentalists can be. Aside from being bigoted, they lack both a sense of humor and appreciation of artistry.

PARIS — The extravagant opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics has caused fury among the populist and religious right in the United States and elsewhere, with critics especially unhappy about an apparent depiction of the Last Supper featuring drag performers.

A fashion show at the ceremony included a scene that resembled a modern re-creation of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting, French actor and singer Philippe Katerine appeared as the Greek god Dionysus, painted blue and wearing little more than a bunch of flowers covering his modesty.

While some fans loved this unabashed display of French camp and kitsch, others — particularly those who espouse conservative or Christian beliefs — were not happy with it.

“In this scene from the Olympic opening ceremony, the famous painting of The Last Supper is recreated, but Jesus is replaced with an obese woman, while queer and trans figures (including a child!) depict her apostles,” Jenna Ellis, former 2020 campaign attorney to Donald Trump, told her 1 million followers on X.

She described the ceremony as containing “overt pagan and satanic symbolism.”

The Last Supper refers to the final meal that Jesus Christ shared with his 12 apostles before he was crucified. It’s also a popular subject in Christian art, most famously depicted by da Vinci, who painted a scene that captured the apostles’ reaction to Jesus’ announcement of his betrayal.

Thomas Jolly, the artistic director of the opening ceremony, defended the production when asked at a news conference Saturday about some of the backlash. Jolly said he was unaware of the criticism and wanted to display “inclusion.”

“When we want to include everyone and not exclude anyone, questions are raised,” he said at an International Olympic Committee media briefing.

“Our subject was not to be subversive. We never wanted to be subversive. We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together,” he continued. “We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that. In France, we have freedom of creation, artistic freedom. We are lucky in France to live in a free country. I didn’t have any specific messages that I wanted to deliver. In France, we are republic, we have the right to love whom we want, we have the right not to be worshippers, we have a lot of rights in France, and this is what I wanted to convey.”

Right on, Mr. Jolly.

I'm sorry that you have to deal with the wounded feelings of our religious conservatives here in the United States -- who have no problem taking away the right of women to choose their own health care, and the right of LGBTQ people to express themselves as they wish, but get offended when the Olympics opening ceremony doesn't comply with their weird twisted sense of morality.

Just ignore them. And be grateful that you live in France, where you're an ocean away from the extreme religious nationalism of fundamentalist Christians in the United States, who are our homegrown American Taliban.

Bound Salem Weekly issues now can be seen at Willamette Heritage Center

Salem Weekly, our city's much-beloved (and for some conservatives, much-hated) alternative newspaper that published from April 2003 to October 2018 still lives on in a certain sense -- thanks to Jim Scheppke, a retired librarian who led an effort to have almost all of the Salem Weekly issues professionally bound, then donated to the Willamette Heritage Center, where they can be reviewed by the public.

Yesterday afternoon some people with ties to Salem Weekly and the binding project met at the Willamette Heritage Center to admire the volumes. We chatted about how much Salem Weekly meant to us, expressing thanks to Scheppke and A.P. Walther, the Salem Weekly publisher, for preserving the issues with the help of some donations from Mark Wigg and me.

Jim Scheppke and A.P. Walther

We had to wear archival gloves while thumbing through the Salem Weekly issues. They can be viewed by anyone. All you have to do is contact Kylie Pine, Curator of the Willamette Heritage Center: 503-585-7012, [email protected]

Kylie Pine (standing)

Helen Caswell, who died fairly recently after a bout with cancer, got much praise at yesterday's gathering. Helen wrote so many stories for Salem Weekly, she used at least four pseudonyms. She and Walther were the beating heart of Salem Weekly. Their hard work and dedication will aways be remembered by everybody who knows how much the paper contributed to Salem.

I wrote a Strange Up Salem column for Salem Weekly from May 2013 to May 2015. They're available in a Hinessight blog post, "Here's all of my Strange Up Salem columns." Naturally I perused the issue where a column first appeared, which merited a cover image.

Brian Hines

Until yesterday I didn't know who had drawn the hand holding a pen, which has a sort of nicely creepy Edgar Allen Poe feel to it. Walther told me that Sarah Torres drew the image, which wasn't used for its initial purpose, then was retrieved by Walther for the cover, which he designed. 

Here's a closeup of the cover. My first column was called "I Know What You Want." It started with:

At the risk of sounding like a phone sex line... I know what you want. You’re hungry for it. You’re hot for it. You’ve gotten tantalizing glimpses of what you lust for, but it’s been frustratingly out of reach.

What I’m talking about is a stranger Salem. Meaning, a city with sights, sounds, people, places, and other delights that make us go ooh, ah, and give me more rather than ho-hum, so lame.

On November 23, 2018 I wrote a blog post, "Salem Weekly closes down. Sad day for our town." For sure. The Statesman Journal is a poor excuse for a hometown paper: few local stories, no letters to the editor, no opinion section. 

Wikipedia's Salem Weekly page describes how the publication got started, which originally was called Salem Monthly.

The Salem Monthly traces its origins to a coffee house in downtown Salem, Oregon known as the Coffee House Cafe. Dating back to the mid-1990s, the Coffee House Cafe served as a popular meeting place and hangout for Salem's youth culture. In its later years of operation, the cafe began publishing a newsletter to engage customers in Salem's community and cultural affairs. Inspired by the reaction to the cafe's newsletter, cafe owner A.P. Walther decided to start up a publishing operation for an alternative newspaper in Salem, Oregon.

I wish Biden could have heard what my Democratic group said about him

This afternoon the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of gathered in a member's living room. Right away, a topic of conversation sprang up, because it was at the top of everyone's mind.

Should President Biden withdraw from the presidential race? We spent about an hour talking about this. The discussion was vigorous. Everybody had something to say about the question. And in the end there was a clear consensus.

All eleven of us felt that Biden should withdraw. 

Everybody in the group is a Democrat, though naturally we disagree about many political subjects. The familiar saying about getting Democrats to agree about something is like herding cats -- absolutely true. But when it came to Biden getting out of the presidential race, we were all in agreement. 

Joe has to go. 

This image expressed our feeling. We all deeply appreciate what Biden has accomplished since he became president, as well as what he's done in his lengthy career in politics as vice-president and senator.

However, it was clear to us that while there are risks involved in Biden withdrawing and another Democrat taking his place, at least then we'd have a better chance of defeating Trump. With Biden at the top of the ticket, our group is convinced that Trump has a much easier path to victory.

 Biden has been wrongly claiming that it is only Democratic "elites" that want him to withdraw. Not true. He would have realized that if he'd been able to see our discussion today. We're all ordinary Democrats who are super-concerned about Trump getting another four years to wreak havoc on our democracy. 

We talked quite a bit about Trump's appeal. There was general agreement that human nature favors strong leaders. After all, that's how leadership works in most of the animal kingdom, and we humans obviously are animals -- just animals with highly evolved brains.

For all of Trump's failings, and they are way too many to enumerate, he does project an aura of strength and confidence. Biden doesn't. I noted to the  group that some political observers feel it isn't fair that Biden only has a 38% approval rating, given all that he has accomplished during his time as president.

But voters aren't machines that calculate the various accomplishments of Biden and Trump, then spit out an answer as to who is most worthy to be president. Voters base their like or dislike of a candidate on all kinds of factors, many of them emotional, irrational, and personal. 

And that's where Biden falls short.

We spoke about how much excitement and enthusiasm there would be among Democrats if someone other than Biden, someone younger and more energetic, replaced him. The malaise among Democrats would vanish in an instant, aside from the comparatively few Biden die-hards who would be sad to see him go.

The rest of us, who are a clear majority of the Democratic electorate, would be thrilled. We talked about how even if the replacement candidate lost to Trump this November, at least we'd feel good that the Democratic Party did its best to defeat Trump, rather than sticking with Biden, a highly unpopular candidate.

We didn't agree on who should replace Biden, should he decide to withdraw. I argued that Kamala Harris was the most obvious candidate. Some agreed, while others felt that Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg would be a better choice. One person liked Secretary of State Blinken. 

Regardless, the prospect of anyone other than Biden facing off against Trump filled us with optimism, while the prospect of Biden hanging on and refusing to withdraw was depressing. 

Along that line, I shared a metaphor I'd heard Chris Hayes discuss with a guest on his MSNBC show. I said that it was about a pitcher "losing his stuff" after doing well for a number of innings. Then he starts giving up hits and walks.

The manager goes out to the mound and talks things over with the pitcher. Then he motions to the bullpen to bring in a relief pitcher. The starting pitcher doesn't get to decide if he stays in the game. Most pitchers believe they're just going through a rough spot, and can get the next batters out.

This is akin to Biden saying in a recent interview, after being asked who he relies on to tell him whether he should stay in the race, "Me." I found that disturbing. Biden isn't qualified to assess his chance of beating Trump, just as a starting pitcher isn't qualified to decide whether he stays in the game.

Two-thirds of Democrats want Biden to withdraw. Everyone in our group felt that way. A majority of Democrats should be the "manager" who decides whether Biden stays in the race, not Biden -- though obviously he has to be the one to say, "I'm withdrawing." 

May that happen soon, for the good of our democracy, which hinges on defeating Trump.

If you don't like the record-breaking Oregon heat wave, don't vote for Trump

It's been a rough four days here in the Willamette Valley, as well as in much of the rest of Oregon. Record high temperatures have been set on multiple days in many locations, sometimes breaking previous records by not just a little, but a lot. 

Today it was 104 degrees in Salem, where I live, according to my car's thermometer. Tomorrow is expected to be just as hot, with temperatures in the high 80s and low 90s for the following six days.

This isn't normal. The average high for today in Salem is 82, so we were 22 degrees above average. Global warming plays a significant role in the heat waves that have been hitting Oregon much more frequently recently, according to the state climatologist, Larry O'Neill. 

I saw O'Neill make these remarks on the KGW 11 pm news a few days ago. They were extremely disturbing then, and even more so now, after I've been dealing with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees for the past three days.

I've boldfaced the scariest part of what O'Neill said. 

PORTLAND, Ore. —

If you think the weather in Oregon over the next week is going to be too hot, Larry O'Neill has some bad news for you.

"Right now, this is probably among the coolest climates we'll be in at the rate we're going," he said.

O'Neill is the state climatologist for Oregon, and he said climate change is amplifying heat waves in the state and across the globe.

"Heat waves are a natural part of our climate system, but when they do occur, now they're occurring in a warmer baseline," he said. "Any heat wave that we get, you can kind of think about it as being about 3 degrees Fahrenheit more intense than it would have been had we not been changing the climate."

Climate change has made extreme heat hotter, longer and more frequent.

There's no hard and fast definition of a heat wave, but regardless of what's used as a measuring stick, warm temperatures have been increasing in Oregon.

"The number of days over 90 degrees or the number of days over 100 degrees, whichever way you parse it, these days are happening much more frequently, especially over the last 10 years," O'Neill said.

According to records from the National Weather Service, between 1938 and 2014, Portland saw an average of 12 days per year with temperatures over 90 degrees.

Between 2014 and 2023, that number nearly doubled to an average of 23 days per year.

Over the past 86 years, Portland has recorded 105 days with temperatures over 100 degrees, but 16 of those days have come in just the last four years.

Portland’s current stretch of extreme heat is expected to be notable not just for its temperatures, but for its duration, with forecasts calling for five days of heat at or above 100 degrees. 

Wow. As hot as it has been the past few days, O'Neill says that soon we'll look back at this time in Oregon's climate history as one of the coolest in recent memory, because global warming is going to increase for quite a while no matter what we human do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Obviously we'll be better off if those emissions are markedly lowered. That's why it's so important that President Biden's climate change initiatives be continued and, hopefully, increased. 

But Donald Trump has vowed to reverse the progress our country has made in combatting global warming. Trump wants to undo those policies and make things worse by increasing the consumption of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas.

That would be amazingly wrong-headed. It would be a disaster economically, since renewable energy is an increasingly important part of our economy. And it would be a disaster environmentally, since we're already not doing enough to reduce carbon emissions, so moving backward under a Trump administration would be horrendous for both our planet and humanity.

There are plenty of reasons not to vote for Trump this November. His commitment to increase global warming, rather than combat it, is definitely a major reason. 

I've stopped using Grubhub and DoorDash after two restaurants asked me to

Live and learn. Until recently I'd never used restaurant ordering apps on my iPhone.

Old-fashioned guy that I was, I'd phone a restaurant and call in my order. But then I decided to join the 21st century, so I installed Grubhub and DoorDash. 

Not knowing any better, I figured that restaurants liked these apps. Or at least, they were okay with them as alternative ways of getting orders from customers other than their own web sites.

So for the past few months I've been using Grubhub and DoorDash to order from three restaurants in south Salem that I'd gotten into the habit of picking up food from on Friday afternoons, rotating my orders between them. 

No more. Because staff at two of the restaurants have told me they'd much prefer that I order from their own web site rather than an app.

This past Friday I learned from a restaurant employee that Grubhub jacks up the price of the dish that I'd ordered to $18 from the $15, I think it is, that the restaurant charges. And that's for a pick-up order, not a delivery order.

Curious about why the apps are disliked by restaurants, I Googled "why restaurants don't like grubhub doordash." Wow. A lot of horror stories popped up.

A Reddit post said:

Many restaurants hate the apps because the apps often list the restaurants without their consent, with inflated prices, overwork their staff and subject them to pushy, impatient drivers, and cause customer complaints about inflated prices on the platforms that aren't even the restaurants' doing. When you order directly from a lot of restaurant's websites, you get their actual price and their driver. Not saying it's always this way, but poke around on this sub and you will see what I'm talking about. This note is not from a restaurant that uses the Big 3 to fulfill their direct orders.

A CNN story said:

Restaurant operators complain that third-party delivery providers like Seamless, DoorDash and Uber Eats are prohibitively expensive. These platforms offer a way for customers to order from local restaurants, process restaurant payments and provide contract drivers to pick meals up from restaurants and deliver them to customers. For these services, they often charge restaurants around 30% per order. But profit margins in the restaurant industry are often razor-thin, so these fees can wipe out the restaurant’s profits or put them in the red. And if they choose to outsource delivery to these platforms, restaurants also hand off valuable customer data and control over how delivery orders show up at their customers doors.

But I wasn't using the apps for food delivery, just for ordering, since I'd pick up the food myself. Even so, the two Salem restaurants who asked me to stop using the apps said that they are hurt by Grubhub and DoorDash. 

 

I benefitted from my sessions at Salem's Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic

Today I had my eighth weekly treatment from Karen Kaufman at her Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic here in Salem (Oregon). This was my first serious dive into the acupuncture waters, having previously only waded in the shallow pool of single sessions with a couple of acupuncturists.

Karen Kaufman, Ph.D., L.Ac

I'm convinced that Kaufman helped relieve the sciatica pain in my right leg considerably.

Naturally I can't be sure of this, since I'm not a random controlled experiment, just one person who was drawn to try acupuncture after physical therapy didn't do much to relieve the pain, over the counter medications did next to nothing, and I had to wait quite a while to get an epidural steroid injection in my back.

I had two acupuncture treatments prior to getting the epidural injection from Salem Pain and Spine Specialists on May 13. By the time of the injection, the pain in my leg was considerably reduced. I ascribe that to acupuncture, since this was the only thing I'd done differently prior to the injection.

After the injection, I continued to get acupuncture from Kaufman every week, figuring that I didn't really care about what, exactly, was making the pain lessen, so long as I was feeling better. For several months I hadn't been able to go to my Tai Chi classes, the pain was so bad. After I started the acupuncture treatments, I was able to return to Tai Chi.

At my first session, Kaufman told me that her previous three patients all had sciatica. Not surprising, since nerve pain seemingly would be one of the problems acupuncture is best suited for. I'd found a review of the literature on this that suggested acupuncture benefits people with sciatica.

I liked that Kaufman was pure acupuncture with me. No mention of herbs or other aspects of Chinese medicine. Early on I told her that I was fairly well acquainted with the notions of meridians, qi, and such, as this gets discussed in my Tai Chi classes, which I've been taking for 18 years. But I'm agnostic as to whether these things truly are scientifically valid.

Kaufman has an interesting background, according to her web site. 

Karen is excited to be returning to Innerhealth where she worked a decade ago with founder, Angela Pfaffenberger.

An Oregon native, Karen grew up in Astoria and is a graduate of U of O.  After earning a doctorate in psychology at Claremont and teaching at a university, she decided to enhance her interest in Chinese Medicine by attending the International Institute of Chinese Medicine in Santa Fe, NM.  After earning a master’s degree in Chinese Medicine, she received funding to do acupuncture research and has taught in the acupuncture doctoral program at ACTCM in San Francisco.  She has been seeing patients in private practice for 13 years.

Karen uses a gentle approach, employing every skill she has acquired along the way, often with a dose of good humor.  She effortlessly combines her east/west training and is particularly attuned to psychological aspects of pain and illness.  She considers treating stress her major area of expertise, both in terms of addressing the everyday hassles that can grind a person down and result in pain, and in treating the fallout from major life stressors and trauma that can, of course, negatively affect health.

Today we agreed that it made sense for me to take a break from acupuncture for a while and see how my leg feels without it. My insurance, Regence MedAdvantage, covers 12 acupuncture treatments a year, if I remember the number correctly. So I have four sessions left in 2024 if I want to return for an acupuncture tune-up.

I find that cold remedies can be worse than the cold

I don't get sick very often. So at first I couldn't believe that I had a cold, irrationally thinking that even though I don't have allergies, my nasal congestion was due to that, rather than a cold. 

But a week ago, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. Not being able to breathe through my nose was annoying, as was breathing via my mouth. Propping my head up on a couple of pillows didn't help. Neither did spraying saline solution in my nostrils, my usual approach to mild everyday congestion. 

So the next day I headed off to Walgreens to get some Sudafed. The real stuff with pseudoephedrine, which Oregon used to require a prescription to get since it can be used to cook up meth. Now you can get it from a pharmacist by showing ID so repeated purchases can be tracked.

I decided to get the 12 hour variety, figuring (wrongly, it turned out) that I'd take one pill at 11 am, when I bought the Walgreens generic version of Sudafed, and another pill at 11 pm, which would keep my nasal passages decongested all night.

Good plan. But based on wrong facts. 

The first pill I took at 11 am did indeed start working soon. But when I got home, my wife reminded me that pseudoephedrine is a stimulant. I'd noticed that the box said "non-drowsy," but I figured this meant it wouldn't put you to sleep, not that it'd keep you awake.

Which, it did, even after more than 12 hours had passed since I took the first dose of generic Sudafed. However, once I got to sleep, I had a pretty good night, since I'd gotten some Kroger Daytime/Nighttime  Sinus Relief after realizing that the pseudoephedrine wasn't going to work for me given how sensitive I was to its stimulating effect.

I'd also gotten some Allegra, because I wanted an antihistamine after finding that the generic Sudafed worked so well after I took it at 11 am, now I had a runny nose. That, of course, wasn't surprising, since I'd just taken a decongestant. But it became annoying to constantly be using a facial tissue to wipe my nose.

I thought (again wrongly, it turned out) that I'd found a cold remedy sweet spot with Allegra and the Kroger Sinus Relief, which is generic Mucinex Sinus-Max Day and Night. However, the Allegra soon made my nose feel too dry, so I just relied on the Nightime generic Mucinex, which had an antihistamine for runny nose along with a decongestant and other stuff.

After a few days, though, I began to worry about the warning on both the generic Sudafed (which I'd stopped taking) and the generic Mucinex (which I was taking both day and night) to ask a doctor before taking if you "have difficulty in urination due to enlargement of the prostate gland." Along with a bunch of other conditions I didn't have, like high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and such. 

I'd ignored that warning, because a urologist had told me that I didn't have a prostate problem, I had a bladder problem -- the reason I need to use a urinary catheter to pee most of the time. However, after taking the generic Mucinex for about three days, while it was keeping my nose decongested, I began to find that it was more difficult to insert a catheter into the bladder.

Some Googling revealed that this can happen when taking Mucinex, Sudafed, and similar products. I'd also noticed that for the nighttime generic Mucinex, the label said to ask a doctor before use if you have glaucoma, which I do.

So my simple desire not to have my nose congested had turned into a rather complex medical puzzle because of the side effects, either actual or potential, of what I was taking. That made me realize the wisdom of something I'd read in my Googling: try to only deal with the actual cold symptom(s) you're experiencing, which may mean not using multi-symptom products like Mucinex.

A few days ago I decided to use some saline solution in my nostrils before I went to bed, propped up my head and shoulders, and slept fine without any cold remedy. Live and learn. From now on I'm only going to use the smallest amount of a decongestant or antihistamine, instead of taking this stuff all through the day, like I'd been doing. 

But at least I'm prepared for the next time I have a cold. Assuming I can remember where I stored these boxes.

Photos of our yard and property, to remind me why we don't want to move

We bought our rural south Salem house, which was built in 1973, from a couple in their mid-60s who said they were selling because the house on five acres was too much for them to maintain anymore.

Well, 35 years later, Laurel and I now are in our mid-70s, taking care of the same house (extensively updated by us) and an additional five acres, for a total of ten, since we were able to buy an undeveloped neighboring lot quite a few years ago.

Someday, probably, we'll have to move. In case I ever wonder why it took us so long, I like to write periodic blog posts with photos of our yard and property, given that our surroundings are the main reason we love where we're been living since 1990.

Here's a tour of a walk I took this afternoon.

Outside our front door, we recently had the stone steps leading to our detached garage/carport improved to be more stable. More rock also was added on either side of the steps. 

We've also had the rock wall along a pathway to our yard improved. (In case you can't tell, we like rocks!)

This path is another recent addition. There used to be some grass here, but it didn't grow well, being directly under several large fir trees. So Norberto Flores' crew, who do great work maintaining and improving our property, installed a path with very fine gravel.

I like how the new path makes a big bend, kind of like a meandering river, to join with the end of the existing path.

The tracks in the grass were made by the John Deere lawn tractor I use to mow various fields and paths on our property. It used to take me much longer with a walk-behind field mower. Now I can do everything in just two hours. Power steering and four-wheel steering, and a heavy duty chassis, make the sometimes challenging mowing pretty darn easy.


This replacement Japanese Maple, which we planted after its much larger predecessor was crushed under a large oak limb in the Great Ice Storm of 2021, is growing nicely.

Our water feature adds some flowing liveliness and pleasing sound to the yard.

Leaving the yard, a path takes me to one of the fields I mowed today.

Below that is another mowed field.

Next to it, one more mowed field. I find mowing relaxing. It takes constant attention, to avoid large branches and to maneuver around the many trees, fallen logs, rocks, and such, but I'm so familiar with all of those things, mowing becomes a sort of mindful meditation for me.

A bench sits next to the path down to the spring-fed creek, which flows for most of the year. 

Laurel has added stepping stones and gravel to an often-slippery slope.

We've had two nicely designed bridges made to replace my decidedly amateurish bridges. This is the first bridge over one tributary of the creek.

This is the second bridge, over another tributary of the creek, nicely nestled between two trees, one of them a snag.

The barely visible creek is lined with lush vegetation.

More steps made by Laurel lead from the creek to the community trail, on an easement, that we use to get to our community lake, Spring Lake.

The easement trail goes up, then down to Spring Lake.

Daisies next to the lake.

Spring Lake is about nine acres. No motorized boats allowed. A blue kayak is on the left.

After walking around the lake, I return home. I like how our house is nestled under large oak and fir trees. We could be happy somewhere else, I'm sure, but we'll never find a place as close to nature as where we are now.

Oregon State and Oregon both in NCAA baseball super regionals. Exciting!

It's a tradition for me.

Since for many years I've been unable to watch the Pac-12 Networks due to their never-ending and hugely irritating pissing match with DirecTV, the only time I get to see the Oregon State baseball team play is if they either make it to the Pac-12 tournament championship game (didn't happen in 2024) or are selected to play in the NCAA tournament (which did happen in 2024).

So I was able to get to know the OSU baseball team this past weekend when they hosted the Corvallis regional. Three wins in four days -- Sunday's game got rained out in the fourth inning, I believe it was, so they finished up the deciding game against UC Irvine on Monday -- put them in a Super Regional against Kentucky in Lexington that starts next Saturday.

Beat Kentucky twice, and the Beaver baseball team will be one of eight teams in the College World Series. They've been ranked in the top ten for much of the season, though they dropped to a #16 seed in the NCAA tournament owing to some lost games at the end of the season. 

Oregon State sure looked good in the three games I watched. Kentucky should be nervous, notwithstanding the #2 seed that Kentucky earned because of a stellar season in the always-tough SEC. One thing that impressed the announcers who called the games for ESPN was how OSU hitters are a tough out all the way through the lineup.

In fact, the announcers gave an award to the 7-8-9 players in the hitting rotation for producing so many hits and runs during the regional matchup. And of course OSU has Travis Bazzana, one of the top players in the country who had a great season in the final year of Pac-12 sports as we know them, meaning, before Oregon State and Washington State become the only Pac-12 members, for a while.

Given that fact, it'd be poetic justice if OSU were to win the 2024 NCAA Baseball Championship.

No matter what the future of Oregon State baseball may be (I'm hoping for continued success), the team already has given OSU fans a lot to cheer for, which helps take away some of the pain of seeing OSU and WSU deserted by the ten members of the Pac-12 who left the league for a variety of reasons, none of which made sense to me.

That includes Oregon, whose baseball team also had a great season and will be playing in a Super Regional against Texas A&M, the #3 seed. I don't know much about the Ducks' team, never having seen them play, but I'll be rooting for them this weekend. Pretty amazing that the only Pac-12 teams who made it to a Super Regional are Oregon State and Oregon.

Take that, Arizona, who won both the regular season title and Pac-12 baseball tournament, yet was defeated in their regional.

Five recent streaming shows that I liked a lot

These days, on broadcast television I mainly watch news and political programs. For entertainment, it's almost entirely streaming shows that appeal to me. Here's five recent offerings that I liked a lot, or at least enough close enough to a lot that I was eager to watch all of the episodes in the series.

They're ranked in the order of my liking, with (1) being my favorite.

(1) The Veil - Hulu
Amazingly, this was my first real introduction to Elisabeth Moss, who does a terrific job playing an intelligence agent tasked with finding out whether an Islamic woman in a refugee camp on the Turkish/Syria border, if I recall the countries correctly, is a relatively innocent member of a terrorist organization, or the mastermind of a plot that could kill many thousands of people.

The relationship between the women is fascinating. Each is adept at showing themselves to be someone who may or may not be who they really are. I was so taken by Moss, I finally have gotten around to watching The Handmaid's Tale, a series that I passed on because it seemed too disturbing. Yes, it is, but Moss is so good in it, I'm enjoying the first season, which I've almost finished. 

(2) Hacks (season 3) - Max/HBO
My wife and I have enjoyed the first two seasons of Hacks. Season 3 is just as good, maybe even better. Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder have great chemistry together. It's a pleasure to have a series about an aging female comedian and her bisexual young writer be both so funny and so touching.

Good comedy really goes a long way toward making life seem more bearable, because it lightens and brightens my spirits. It turned out that a couple of days before I was scheduled for a colonoscopy I watched an episode where Smart joins a group of elderly men who have an annual party where they drink and have a good time, then all go together to get a colonoscopy. Not exactly realistic, but the jokes made me feel better about my own procedure.

(3) Franklin - Apple TV+
An entertaining and informative look at Benjamin Franklin's efforts to entice France to enter the Revolutionary War on America's side. Michael Douglas is totally believable as Franklin. Even though we know how history turned out -- we won the war and gained our independence -- this series shows how things could have gone quite differently.

The dialogue is crisp and well-written. Franklin's wit and personality come though loud and clear. We did some Googling of the historical accuracy, and it appears that this series is mostly based on fact, though naturally there's some fiction mixed in.

(4) Sugar -- Apple TV+
Colin Farrell plays John Sugar, a Los Angeles area private detective who drives around in a classic convertible, loves old movies, and has secrets that eventually are revealed in what for me was an unsatisfying conclusion. But I still enjoyed the intrigue as Sugar tries to find a missing woman who is a member of a famous acting and movie-making family. Lots of twists and turns, as there should be in this sort of show.

(5) The Sympathizer -- Max/HBO
This tale of a double agent who was a communist sympathizer in the South Vietnam army, serving as an intelligence agent who rooted out North Vietnamese spies, appealed to my love of spy thrillers. And it was interesting as a reminder of the Vietnam War that was so instrumental in my baby boomer generation's formative years (I escaped being drafted by a high enough number in the "birthday" lottery).

But the episodes had too many ups and downs for me to love this series. I finished it, but more because I was curious to see how it was going to end than because I adored watching the series. Robert Downey Jr. plays several roles, none of whom looked like Robert Downey Jr. to me, so kudos to the costume and makeup people. The Sympathizer is worth watching for the Asian stereotyping back in this country during the 1970s, which thankfully has improved a lot. 

Be sure to take Plenvu rather than Gavilyte for your colonoscopy prep

I've had four or five colonoscopies, can't remember exactly.

Started when I was fifty, then, because unlucky me always has benign polyps, I'm scheduled for another colonoscopy 4-5 years later, while my more fortunate wife gets away with a 10 year repeat (she can even have the test for colon cancer that doesn't require a colonoscopy).

Tomorrow I'm having another one. So today was the preparation day: no solid food, with the colon cleansing prep starting at 4 pm, with a repeat at 11 pm, a couple of hours from now. 

I'm looking forward to the colonoscopy itself tomorrow morning, since that's the easiest part. I'm a fan of propofol that I've been getting for anesthesia.

When I wake up (or regain my memory, I'm not sure which) my first reaction always is disappointment, since the propofol puts me in such a peaceful, blissful state of consciousness -- which argues for me not remembering the procedure, rather than being unconscious.

Drinking the prep stuff, not a fan. But there's better and worse colon cleansing approaches. At first I was prescribed Gavilyte by Salem Gastro, even though the Colonoscopy Preparation Instructions I was given referred to Plenvu.

I learned about the switch only after my pharmacy said that the prep was ready to be picked up. I noticed that the container was really large, but didn't think much about this until I got home and realized that I'd gotten Gavilyte, on the right in the photo below.

When I phoned Salem Gastro to find out what happened, they said that Regence MedAdvantage, my insurance company, wouldn't pay for Plenvu, which uses the much smaller bottle on the left for two split doses. 

I told them that I'd pay out of pocket for Plenvu, since Gavilyte requires drinking 4 liters, or 135 ounces, of water mixed with the prep solution, while Plenvu requires only 32 ounces of water mixed with the prep solution, 16 ounces in two split doses. You're also supposed to drink another 16 ounces of additional clear liquids of your choice after each dose.

Fortunately, my pharmacist told me that Plenvu had a discounted price for people like me whose insurance company won't cover the cost of it. So I ended up paying $50, I think it was, for the Plenvu. The cost was worth it, since I would have add to drink over four times more prep solution with Gavilyte. 

Keep this in mind if you're scheduled for a colonoscopy. The colon cleansing process isn't pleasant, given that you have to stay near a toilet after taking any prep solution. But drinking 32 ounces of the stuff is way better than drinking 135 ounces of it.

Lastly, my even more important advice is to not put off getting a colonoscopy if your doctor says it's time for one. As unfun a colonoscopy is, it's hugely preferable to dealing with colon cancer. 

The Psilocybin Center is open in Salem for psychedelic transformation

Thanks to a story in the Statesman Journal, I learned that Salem's first psilocybin service center has opened on State Street. It's aptly named The Psilocybin Center. 

Husband and wife Sammy Kahuk and Dina Odeh have opened Salem’s first psilocybin service center, and a second location is being licensed.

The Psilocybin Center at 2585 State St. offers personalized “psychedelic mushrooms” sessions to anyone over the age of 21 for behavioral or physical health conditions or for spiritual or recreational purposes.

It took me a while to find the web site for The Psilocybin Center, but once I did, I was impressed. 

So much so, this afternoon I made an appointment to talk with Sammy Kahuk next Tuesday via an online video chat that takes fifteen minutes. I'm assuming he'll ask me some questions, and I can ask some of my own. 

Like, how much the sessions cost, information that I didn't notice on their web site. My leaning is to go with the middle Moderate-High Dose option below. Microdosing seems too little for me; a Hero Dose session seems a bit too much for me at the moment.

I say "at the moment," because like many people my age (I'm 75, a baby boomer), I had quite a few psychedelic experiences during some of my college years -- 1967-68 -- with LSD, mescaline, and, yes, psilocybin. 

Some of those, most of them, really, were in the "Hero Dose" range, especially when I took LSD. Walls would melt and shimmer with color. Reality was transformed into a magical mystery tour, to not coin a phrase. 

But I'm kind of wary of jumping into a really intense psychedelic experience right off the bat, since doing this at my age could be considerably different from doing it at 19 and 20.

My primary motivation now is what Michael Pollan in his book How to Change Your Mind refers to as shaking up the snow globe. My mind has fallen into some senior citizen habits that I'd like aid in revising, which psychedelics are great at. In college, everything was fresh and new, so my psychedelic experiences just added fuel to that already flexible fire.

The Google reviews for the center are all highly positive. Here's a sampling.

 

Elon Musk has become an annoying genius

There's no doubt that Elon Musk is a brilliant guy, arguably a genius, who deserves a lot of credit for his accomplishments with Tesla, Space X, and other business pursuits.

I've been a happy Starlink customer (a Space X offering) since it's early beta days, and it's enabled us to trade our crappy 7 Mbps copper phone line DSL for a snappy 250 Mbps satellite broadband here in rural south Salem, Oregon.

But Elon Musk has gone from being fascinating to annoying.

Not to everybody, because a big cause of my annoyance with Musk is what he's done with Twitter after buying the company and renaming it X. Though X is still a social media platform that I use and enjoy numerous times a day, under Musk it has become much more of a haven for right-wing crazies. 

Fortunately, X still allows users to only see posts from people and organizations that they follow. That walls my X account off from extremists and conspiracy theorists. But I follow Elon Musk, so I'm "treated" to his frequent posts about politics, which are decidedly in accord with the wacko wing of the Republican Party.

This is a dumb move given that liberals and Democrats have been much more likely to buy Teslas that conservatives and Republicans. Now, surveys have found that this group is turned off by Musk's right-wing antics, which hurts Tesla sales.

Another thing that's going to hurt Tesla is Musk's temper tantrum that led to him firing the entire staff of the department in charge of the vaunted Supercharger network, which has been a key reason to buy a Tesla rather than a different electric vehicle. 

Today I came across a Reuters story that describes how the firing happened. Here's excerpts from "The inside story of Elon Musk's mass firing of Tesla Supercharger staff." 

The day before Elon Musk fired virtually all of Tesla’s electric-vehicle charging division last month, they had high hopes as charging chief Rebecca Tinucci went to meet with Musk about the network’s future, four former charging-network staffers told Reuters.

 

After Tinucci had cut between 15% and 20% of staffers two weeks earlier, part of much wider layoffs, they believed Musk would affirm plans for a massive charging-network expansion.

 

The meeting could not have gone worse. Musk, the employees said, was not pleased with Tinucci’s presentation and wanted more layoffs. When she balked, saying deeper cuts would undermine charging-business fundamentals, he responded by firing her and her entire 500-member team.

 

The departures have upended a network widely viewed as a signature Tesla achievement and a key driver of its EV sales. Tesla Superchargers account for more than 60% of U.S. high-speed charging ports, federal statistics show, and the company has been the biggest winner so far of $5 billion in federal funding for new chargers.

 

The charging-team layoffs mark the latest drama in a tumultuous year for Tesla as Musk has shut down or delayed several core efforts meant to drive the rapid EV sales growth that investors have expected. Instead, Musk now says Tesla will shift its main focus to self-driving cars, a fiercely competitive and riskier business that could take years to develop.

 

The company posted its first decline in auto sales since 2020 in the first quarter amid fierce competition from Chinese electric-vehicle makers and sagging worldwide EV demand. Reuters reported in April that Tesla had scrapped plans for a long-awaited affordable car known as the Model 2. That has thrown into doubt Tesla’s plans for new factories in Mexico and India, where Musk had been expected to travel last month to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, before canceling at the last minute. And a host of executives have departed amid deep companywide layoffs.

I'm disappointed about Tesla's decision not to offer a lower cost, and smaller, electric car.

My last three cars have been subcompacts: a Mini Cooper S, a VW GTI, and a Subaru Crosstrek. I much prefer that size car over larger sizes. A Tesla "hot hatch" priced around $25,000 to $35,000 would be very popular both in the United States and elsewhere. 

But Elon Musk appears to have scrapped the Model 2, choosing to instead build updated versions of the Model 3 and Y, both of which have been around for quite a while and look similar. His intention to focus on self-driving cars/taxis strikes me as a mistake, though maybe it will pay off in the end.

After all, like I said, Musk is both annoying and a genius. I just wish he manifested more of the latter quality and less of the former. 

After five months, I finally get medical treatment for my severe sciatica

If you've ever had severe sciatica pain, you'll find this blog post a heck of a lot more interesting than if you haven't. Usually that nerve pain is produced by problems with the spine, either degenerative or following an injury. 

I wrote about my current bout with sciatica back on March 23 in "If you're wondering about my absence, the answer is sciatica." An excerpt:

It can be an extremely annoying pain. My worse moments have been in the middle in the night when I need to use the bathroom, or when I get up after sleeping. A few times I was almost unable to move from my bed. When I tried, the pain was so intense I'd cry out uncontrollably, and needed help from my wife to just put my pants and shoes on.

Now I can do that on my own, though I use a single crutch to hobble into the bathroom, the pain is so bad. When I'm asked to rate the pain on a scale from 1-10, I say that at its worst, it's a 10. 

Given the occasional high intensity of that pain, which otherwise is just really annoying (though I'm doing better now, perhaps thanks to acupuncture), I've been highly motivated to get the health care system moving as quickly as possible toward treatment for the sciatica. 

However, aside from physical therapy, which I got after only a 5-week wait, and acupuncture, which I got on my own with less than a week's wait, it took me a bit over five months from when I first contacted my primary care doctor about the increased discomfort from the sciatica that I've been dealing with since 2020, until today, when I got two epidural steroid injections. 

In pain time, it felt a lot more than five months. But in health care system time, this is all too typical. Maybe even better than typical, since I have a Medicare MedAdvantage plan that is fairly generous and pretty responsive to referral requests.

Still, there are annoying hoops to jump through all along the way. For example, my wife has had three epidural injections that have helped her sciatica pain a lot. For me to get one, my primary care provider said that I needed a Lumbar Spine MRI. And in order to get the MRI, I needed six weeks of physical therapy, a Lumbar Spine X-ray, and something else that I've forgotten.

After that, of course, it took more time to be seen by several specialists. Some of them were clearly understaffed and overworked. In one case, I was shocked when I was told that it would take a week and a half to two weeks to schedule an appointment. Not to be seen at an appointment, just to schedule an appointment. That was a first for me. 

And our health care system isn't under the stress of Covid as it used to be. When I first got severe sciatica in 2020, I could understand why it wasn't possible to schedule a lumbar spine MRI, given that so many resources were going to care for Covid patients.

Now, though, the health care system seems to be under "normal" continual stress. My aging baby boomer generation must be partly to blame, given our increased medical needs. But my wife and I are both finding that now it takes much longer to get doctor appointments. Something is stressing the health care system, and i'm not sure what it is.

Here's my chronology.

December 8, 2023. I ask via MyChart for a referral from my primary care provider to Salem Health Rehabilitation Center, saying:

Dr. Gyuricska, sorry to hear that you're leaving Salem Health soon. I'll miss you. Wish you the best for your new course in life. I'm messaging you because I'd like a repeat referral to Salem Health Rehab Center for my right leg problem. The sciatica continues. What concerns me now is a different sensation in the right leg, some transitory unsteadiness/weakness after sleeping or sitting in a soft chair. Sort of weirdly, the sciatica pain is a bit less. The new problem might go away soon, but with the holidays upon us I figured that a physical therapy referral now would mean I could be seen after the first of the year. If I wait until January, naturally the wait to see a physical therapist, hopefully the same one I saw before, would be even longer.

December 11, 2023. Referred to Salem Health Rehabilitation Center for physical therapy.

January 5, 2024. Medicare wellness exam. Got advice to use BioFreeze to reduce stronger sciatica pain, which, sadly, isn't "going away soon" as I'd hoped on December 8.

January 15, 2024. Had first physical therapy session.

February 23, 2024. Primary care appointment about sciatica. Referred for Lumbar Spine X-ray which I got on same day.

March 9, 2024. Had Lumbar Spine MRI. Numerous problems found, including spinal stenosis. 

March 12, 2024. Referred to Salem Health Spine Center by primary care provider.

March 13, 2024. Had last of six physical therapy sessions.

March 14, 2024. Notified by Salem Health Spine Center to make appointment with Capital Neurosurgery Specialists neurosurgeon.

March 14, 2024. Referred to Salem Pain and Spine Specialists by primary care provider. 

March 18, 2024. Had scoliosis X-ray at request of neurosurgeon. 

March 26, 2024. Had appointment with neurosurgeon. Epidural steroid injections at two spine locations were recommended as first therapeutic step, which also would have diagnostic value.

April 8, 2024. At my request, referred by primary care provider to Portland doctor who performs MILD (Minimally Invasive Lumbar Decompression) for consultation about this possibility.

April 10, 2024. Had appointment with Physician Assistant at Salem Pain and Spine Specialists. It was agreed that I should get epidural steroid injections.

April 16, 2024. Had appointment with Portland doctor's Physician Assistant. 

April 29, 2024. Had first acupuncture treatment, which I chose to do.

May 9, 2024. Had second acupuncture treatment.

May 13, 2024. Had two epidural steroid injections at Salem Pain and Spine Specialists.

July 1, 2024. Follow-up appointment scheduled with neurosurgeon. 

Stormy Daniels, porn star, is more moral than Donald Trump, ex-president

We live in strange times.

Sure, all times are strange in their own way, but 2024 in the United States is shaping up to be among the strangest years, politically speaking, in my more than a half century of following political issues closely.

No cameras are allowed in the courtroom, so we have to rely on sketch artists

Yesterday and today the news was full of how Stormy Daniels, porn star/adult film actress, testified for the prosecution at the criminal trial of Donald Trump, ex-president. That in itself is damn strange. 

For it's the first time an ex-president has had to defend himself in court against criminal accusations. In this case, that he falsified business records in furtherance of a deception that a $130,000 "hush money" payment to Daniels was for legal expenses rather than a contribution to Trump's presidential campaign -- since if news about his affair with Daniels had come out just before the 2016 election, this could have tanked his chances given the uproar over the Access Hollywood tape where he bragged about "grabbing women by the pussy."

The reason for the payment was that in 2006 60 year-old Trump had sex with 27-year-old Daniels. It creeped Daniels out, but she climbed into bed with Trump anyway, in part (or in whole) she says because of the power imbalance between a rich guy with a bodyguard standing outside the hotel suite and a female porn star.

This was four months after Trump's wife, Melania, gave birth to their son, Barron. By contrast, apparently Daniels was in between marriages in 2006, given what this Daily Beast article says:

Daniels has been married four times. Her first marriage was in 2003 to Pat Myne, a fellow adult-film star, just as her career in the industry was taking off. The couple divorced after two years, and Daniels quickly remarried to Mike Moz, an art director, in 2007.

So that's one reason I consider Stormy Daniels to be more moral than Donald Trump. (In truth, I consider almost everyone to be more moral than Trump.)

Another reason is that despite the best effort of one of Trump's attorneys to undermine Daniels' testimony via cross-examination, her story of their sexual encounter held up well. Sure, there were some minor differences between the way Daniels described this over the years, but 2006 was 18 years ago. It makes sense that her memory would fade some with time.

But not to such a degree that Daniels would confuse not having sex with Trump, with having sex with Trump. This is the sort of thing that would be hard to forget. Yet Trump has denied they had sex. Not in court, though, because that would open him up to a perjury indictment.

Daniels had to go into considerable detail about the hotel suite where she met Trump and other descriptions of that evening because his defense team is strongly implying, though not explicitly saying, that the sexual encounter never happened.

This is another reason why Daniels is more moral than Trump.

By no means is she a perfect person (who is?). However, she comes across as someone who is doing her best to speak the truth, while every day Trump speaks to reporters with lies cascading from his mouth. Something he is practiced at, since he lied incessantly during the four years of his presidency, just as he is doing at every campaign event in his hopefully quixotic attempt to be re-elected in November.