HinesSight

Maine mass shooting and Israel war are both result of craziness

This evening the suspect in the killing of 18 people in Lewiston, Maine and the wounding of 13 others was found dead, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot. Robert Card had suffered from mental illness, having been hospitalized for two weeks last summer.

Reportedly he had been hearing voices.

Well, while Card likely had some form of schizophrenia, what he has in common with the rest of us is substantial, for we all hear voices inside our head: our own.

Card's voices may have told him that other people were out to harm him, so he needed to kill as many of those "others" as possible.

And the Hamas terrorists who crossed the border from Gaza into Israel on October 7, killing about 1,400 people, had voices telling them that it was their duty to kill innocent men, women, and children, along with Israeli soldiers, because of the injustices Israel had wrought on Palestinians.

And leaders in Israel had voices telling them after the Hamas attack that it was their duty to kill innocent men, women, and children in Gaza, along with Hamas militants, because of the injustices Hamas had wrought on Israelis.

There's plenty of insanity evident here.

A couple of weeks ago I shared on my Church of the Churchless blog three views about the war between Hamas and Israel that I considered reasonable at the time, and still do.

(1) Hamas engaged in unforgivable terrorism when its fighters attacked Israeli citizens, killing women and children, decapitating infants, slaughtering young people at a music festival, and taking an estimated 150 people hostage. Now Israel is justified in fighting back against Hamas.

(2) Israel has fanned the flames of Islamic resentment in the Middle East by treating Palestinians in the occupied territories badly and showing little to no recent interest in pursuing a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict. The current right-wing administration of Benjamin Netanyahu has made a bad situation in the West Bank even worse through its oppressive policies.

(3) Most of the two million people living in Gaza aren't Hamas fighters. Israel should do everything possible to protect them during its war against Hamas. This entails complying with generally accepted rules of war to the greatest extent possible. 

Protecting the people of Gaza from horrendous Israel bombing attacks, as well as a ground invasion that may come soon, needs to become an Israeli priority. As President Biden said in a speech soon after the war began, a thirst for revenge can't be seen as more important than human decency. The United States learned that lesson after our 9/11.

The news out of Gaza has stopped, because today Israel destroyed the internet and cellular communication there. It is clear, though, that things are very bad and getting worse. Today on MSNBC I heard a report from a Norwegian doctor who worked in Gaza hospitals that there are tens of thousands wounded from Israeli shelling, 70% of them women, children, and the elderly, plus thousands dead.

How can Hamas attacks on innocent Israeli women, children, and the elderly be used as an excuse by Israel to attack innocent Palestinian women, children, and elderly? That's crazy, yet at the moment that's the insanity that seems to be holding sway among Israeli leaders.

Fortunately, voices of reason are urging Israel to reconsider the wisdom of a massive ground invasion of Gaza, and of continuing to deny the people of Gaza food, water, electricity, and fuel. Here's a post on X from Chris Hayes today, an eminently reasonable MSNBC commentator.

Thankfully, the Biden administration is urging Israel to scale back its plan to essentially demolish Gaza in order to destroy the Hamas terrorists. So says a Washington Post story, "U.S. urges Israel against Gaza ground invasion, pushes surgical campaign."

The Biden administration is urging Israel to rethink its plans for a major ground offensive in the Gaza Strip and instead to opt for a more “surgical” operation using aircraft and special operations forces carrying out precise, targeted raids on high-value Hamas targets and infrastructure, according to five U.S. officials familiar with the discussions.

Administration officials have become highly concerned about the potential repercussions of a full ground assault, the officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters, and they increasingly doubt that it would achieve Israel’s stated goal of eliminating Hamas. They also are concerned that it could derail negotiations to release nearly 200 hostages, particularly as diplomats think they have made “significant” advances in recent days to free a number of them, potentially including some Americans, one of the officials said.

The Biden administration also is worried that a ground invasion could result in numerous casualties among Palestinian civilians as well as Israeli soldiers, potentially triggering a dramatic escalation of hostilities in the region, the officials said. U.S. officials think a targeted operation would be more conducive to hostage negotiations, less likely to interrupt humanitarian aid deliveries, less deadly for people on both sides and less likely to provoke a wider war in the region, the officials said.

And the United States also is in favor of humanitarian pauses in the Gaza fighting, according to another Washington Post story, "U.S., in policy shift, urges humanitarian pauses in Gaza." Good news. It's never too late to ditch the insanity of all-out war and find a more balanced approach to protecting both Israel and the people of Gaza, while eliminating Hamas to the greatest extent possible.

After weeks of declining to back growing international calls for “humanitarian pauses” in Israeli airstrikes to allow a steady flow of aid to enter Gaza, permit American and foreign citizens to exit into Egypt and facilitate the release of hostages, the Biden administration is now fully in favor of them and is pressing Israel to agree.

The abrupt policy shift comes as the humanitarian situation inside the enclave has become more dire and much of the world has declined to follow the U.S. lead in withholding public criticism of how Israel is conducting its war against Hamas.

...The administration’s public promotion this week of humanitarian pauses came after what one U.S. official said was “a lot of the groundwork in private communications.”

But it still left the United States behind the curve of international opinion, as the U.N. General Assembly Friday overwhelmingly approved an Arab-sponsored resolution calling for a complete ceasefire. Only 14 of the 193 U.N. member nations voted against the measure, including the United States, Israel and several Pacific island and eastern European states. Most close U.S. allies were in favor or abstained from the vote.

The resolution called on “all parties” to comply with international law in the conflict and specifically demanded rescission by Israel, “the occupying power,” of evacuation orders in Gaza. It did not mention Hamas by name or refer directly to its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

I don't believe in free will. Here's why.

Today the monthly Salon discussion group that my wife and I are part of spent quite a bit of time talking about free will.

This is one of my favorite subjects, for after pondering quite a few books about free will, or the lack thereof, I'm highly confident that free will is an illusion.

I can't recall exactly how our group started conversing about it, but for sure I spurred our conversation by saying that I've started reading Robert M. Sapolsky's terrific book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will.

To give you a feel for his general view of free will, here's an eight-minute interview featuring Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor of biology, of neurology and neurological sciences, and of neurosurgery.

I was worried that my passion for this subject wouldn't be shared by other members of the discussion group. I was wrong. We had a really interesting discussion of free will in which some people agreed with me that we don't possess it, and others presented reasons why they think we do.

Since I'm writing this blog post, not them, I'm going to focus on briefly relating some of my arguments for why free will doesn't exist. These aren't original, obviously. They flow from the books I've read by people arguing that free will is an illusion.

(1) Humans are part of the natural world. We are animals. Animals with powerful brains, to be sure, but animals. If a grizzly bear attacks someone, we don't consider that the bear had the free will to do otherwise. We just say, it was doing what bears do. So what makes us think that we stand apart from the natural world by possessing some sort of free will magic in our brain?

(2) The core argument against free will is simple. Everything about us, and the rest of the world, is determined. That's why Sapolsky's book has that title, Determined. Sure, we make choices. So do bears. And sea slugs. Those choices, those intentions, don't spring out of nowhere. They arise out of the goings-on in our brain, which is amazingly complex, yet still determined by causes and effects that range from a few seconds ago, to the moment of our birth, and even beyond given cultural and genetic influences on us.

(3) Recall something you've done that you regret. That's easy for me. Probably is for you also. We all have regrets. Often, or usually, that regret is made more painful by believing that we could have acted differently. But consider this. If every atom in your brain and outside world were in exactly the same condition as it was when you acted the first time, you'd do exactly what you did again. No doubt about it. Free will assumes that we have a choice to act differently. That can't be true if nothing has changed from when we acted initially.

(4) But as Sapolsky says in the video above, change does happen. All the time. Life and our world as a whole is nothing but change. People change. Animals change. Rocks change. Plants change. Free will, since it doesn't exist, can't change anything. Yet circumstances change. Every thought we have, every feeling we have, every action we take, all that changes us. So there's no fatalism involved in giving up a belief in free will. In fact, not believing in free will opens us to the reality that change can occur for countless reasons. Life is a never-ending series of surprises caused by determinism.

(5) Believing in free will fosters judgmentalism. We see someone in an unfortunate situation and think, "It's their fault." Giving up a belief in free will leads to a realization that, as strange as this may sound, no one is deserving of praise or blame. They're just doing what was determined that they do. So are we. Everybody is. Sure, society is justified in imprisoning dangerous people. But not to punish them. To protect others. And to change the prisoner for the better, if this is possible.

(6) There's no reason to think that people would go wild and crazy if they didn't believe in free will. Animals don't believe in free will, yet a wolf pack, herd of deer, school of fish, or flock of birds do just fine without such a belief. Us human animals have a strong sense of community and social cohesion. We generally want to get along with our fellow humans, notwithstanding our political, religious, and other sorts of divisions. Morality flows from a much deeper source than free will. It is embedded in our being thanks to evolution.

(7) Lastly, here's an excerpt from a post I wrote for my Church of the Churchless blog about Sapolsky's book. I loved this quotation from Determined. 

Finally, any contemporary view of determinism must accommodate a profoundly important point, one that dominates the second half of the book -- despite the world being deterministic, things can change. Brains change, behaviors change. We change. And that doesn't counter this being a deterministic world without free will. In fact, the science of change strengthens this conclusion; this will come in chapter 12.

With those issues in mind, time to see the version of determinism that this book builds on. 

Imagine a university graduation ceremony. Almost always moving, despite the platitudes, the boilerplate, the kitsch. The happiness, the pride. The families whose sacrifices now all seem worth it. The graduates who were the first in their family to finish high school. The ones whose immigrant parents sit there glowing, their saris, dashikis, barongs broadcasting that their pride in the present isn't at the cost of pride in their past.

And then you notice someone. Amid the family clusters post ceremony, the new graduates posing for pictures with Grandma in her wheelchair, the bursts of hugs and laughter, you see the person way in the back, the person who is part of the grounds crew, collecting the garbage from the cans on the perimeter of the event.

Randomly pick any of the graduates. Do some magic so that this garbage collector started life with the graduate's genes. Likewise for getting the womb in which nine months were spent and the lifelong epigenetic consequences of that.

Get the graduate's childhood as well -- one filled with, say, piano lessons and family game nights, instead of, say, threats of going to bed hungry, becoming homeless, or being deported for lack of papers. Let's go all the way so that, in addition to the garbage collector having gotten all that of the graduate's past, the graduate would have gotten the garbage collector's past.

Trade every factor over which they had no control, and you will switch who would be in the graduation robe and who would be hauling garbage cans. This is what I mean by determinism. 

AND WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Because we all know that the graduate and the garbage collector would switch places. And because, nevertheless, we rarely reflect on that sort of fact; we congratulate the graduate on all she's accomplished and move out of the way of the garbage guy without glancing at him.

 

Ron Eachus has died. He served the world well.

Thank you, Rachel Alexander of the Salem Reporter, for writing a marvelous tribute to Ron Eachus: Ron Eachus, "incorruptible" consumer advocate and activist, dies at 76. Here's some excerpts that give a feel for this remarkable man.

Ron Eachus, a steward of civic life in Salem and former utility regulator known for his “bulldog-like tenacity,” died from a heart condition on Saturday, Oct. 14, while hiking in Bhutan.

He was 76.

Eachus worked for over 20 years as an Oregon’s public utility commissioner, earning a reputation as a fierce consumer advocate while helping steer Oregon toward a focus on energy conservation to meet electricity needs. He became an international expert in utility regulation who helped many former Soviet countries transition to privately-owned utilities.

Friends and colleagues described a life filled with public policy and adventure, from his days organizing protests against the Vietnam War as University of Oregon’s student body president to more recent work leading Salem City Club.

“He always did work in the public interest,” said John Savage, the former director of the Oregon Department of Energy, who worked closely with Eachus and ultimately became a good friend. “He had fervent convictions, that was Ron. And he acted on them.”

...After college, Eachus worked briefly for U.S. Rep. Jim Weaver, a Eugene Democrat, but hated being in Washington D.C. He returned to his home state and was elected to the Oregon House, serving from 1985 until 1987. 

Eachus resigned midway through his term after being appointed a state public utility commissioner. He held the job until 2001 and moved to Salem soon after his appointment.

...Eachus wrote a column for the Statesman Journal on politics and also wrote for Salem Weekly.

...About five years ago, he joined Salem City Club, a nonpartisan civic group that presents public programs on issues of concern. He was in the middle of his third term as president.

“Ron was on top of everything, much more than any president I know in recent memory,” said Russ Beaton, who will serve out Eachus’ term as interim president.

...Eachus was an avid whitewater rafter who traveled the Rogue River many times and made trips to Alaska and the Colorado River.

Andie Andeen, a close friend, assumed he got into the sport while living on a rural stretch of the McKenzie River outside of Eugene as a student.

She asked him once for his thoughts on living outside the city, expecting him to say something profound about rural life.

“His comment was simply, ‘It was hard to organize protests,’” she said.

...Eachus had no spouse or children but was surrounded by friends in Salem. Andeen and Savage are organizing a public memorial. 

Eachus loved Bhutan and was interested in Buddhism, spending time with monks on his most recent trip.

“The fact that he died where he did and was able to be part of a ceremony with the monk body is poetic,” Andeen said.

I didn't know Ron well, but encountered him now and then when our activist lives intersected. Mostly we agreed on issues. Even when we didn't, I found Ron to be a likable guy whose passion for making Salem, and the world, better was evident.

The last time I saw Ron was two weeks ago, when he presided over a Salem City Club meeting. He was his usual positive self. It was sad and shocking to learn of his death. Still, given Ron's love of the outdoors and of travel, dying while hiking in Bhutan was a fitting way to go.

Five miles from Salem city limits, our neighborhood is unserved by broadband

Our neighborhood, Spring Lake Estates, is only about five miles from the city limits of Salem, Oregon's capital. So it isn't like we're in Outer Mongolia -- though when it comes to broadband access, we might as well be.

For one of the things I learned by my phone conversation with a guy from the Oregon Broadband Office today, is that our neighborhood is unserved by broadband according to the federal definition: 

An unserved location is defined as a broadband-serviceable location that the Broadband DATA Maps show as (a) having no access to broadband service, or (b) lacking access to Reliable Broadband Service offered with - (i) a speed of not less than 25 Mbps for downloads; and (ii) a speed of not less than 3 Mbps for uploads; and (iii) latency less than or equal to 100 milliseconds (NOFO Section I.C.dd).

We definitely qualify as unserved, since the only non-cellular, non-satellite option our neighborhood has is crappy CenturyLink DSL, which at our house offered dismal speeds of 6-7 Mbps download and 1-2 Mbps upload.

Until Starlink came to our rescue when I was chosen to be a beta tester for this SpaceX satellite internet service. Currently it costs $120 a month for speeds that vary. At the moment I'm getting 104 Mbps download and 18 Mbps upload.

The Oregon Broadband Office guy I spoke with after I emailed that office with questions about their grant program for improving broadband in our state said that he has CenturyLink in Portland, I believe, and pays $30 a month for 200 Mbps download speed.

(He'll go nameless in this blog post, since I didn't take notes on our conversation, so don't want to run the risk of saying something that doesn't completely match what he told me. Which doesn't include the definition of "unserved" because I could check that out with some Googling.)

I was told that satellite internet isn't part of unserved and underserved broadband locations since it's available everywhere, for a steep price. And cellular broadband typically doesn't qualify since often the speed isn't reliably above 25 Mbps download.

It was a pleasant conversation for me because it gave me a chance to vent about our neighborhood's broadband woes. I told the guy that while I'm not religious, our talk sort of felt like my brief experience as a childhood Catholic when I'd go to confession. Except in this case I was complaining more than confessing.

For our neighborhood only had dial-up internet until late 2007, when I managed to bring DSL to our area by writing a pleading letter to the CEO of Qwest, which later became CenturyLink. I talked about that success in I'm the DSL King of the World!

This occurred after a Qwest broadband manager told me that even though our neighborhood was just a few miles from Bunker Hill Road, where DSL existed, Qwest would never bring DSL to our area because it would cost too much.

Then after the manager heard from the Qwest CEO, I got a phone call from him saying that, lo and behold, we'd be getting DSL. Now, I told the Oregon Broadband Office guy, I heard from the Marion County broadband coordinator a few years ago that CenturyLink is saying the same thing about bringing fiber optic broadband service to our area of about 150 homes. It'll never happen. 

The (possible) good news is that thanks to grants from both the Trump and Biden administrations, Oregon will be getting quite a bit of money to bring broadband to unserved locations like ours. I was told that $100 million from the previous administration is arriving soon, with more to come.

I was told that companies which receive contracts to expand broadband access are expected to contribute some of their own money to the project. Which is fair, because they will be the ones getting the monthly subscription fees after broadband comes to an area.

I'm hoping this will happen sooner rather than later for our neighborhood. Starlink works well for us, but it's expensive. I'd love to have fiber optic service rather than satellite internet. What's frustrating is how poorly the free market works when no broadband providers are willing to service an area like ours.

Fast reliable broadband isn't a luxury. It's a necessity. For work, for education, for entertainment, for keeping in touch with the world. 

Fairly soon, I suspect, it will be a necessity for television watching in rural area lacking cable when DirecTV and Dish go under, though they could stagger on for a while longer by merging, since they're losing customers rapidly.

With no satellite television, streaming via broadband will be the only option for many rural residents.

Death came too soon for Chris. So sad.

Today I heard about the death of Chris, a 46 year-old guy I came to first know during my Pacific Martial Arts karate days.

Chris moved to the Portland area, but he'd return once in a while to take part in the Tai Chi classes that are now the focus of Pacific Martial Arts. He was engaging, positive, funny, and a pleasure to be around. 

We were close in the way many men are: by sharing a love of a physical activity. I knew some things about Chris, but mostly I knew him through the martial arts classes we shared.

Cause of death isn't certain. An aortic aneurysm is suspected. 

The only good news is that death came quickly. Everything else is bad news. Chris had children and a wife. He was fit and athletic. 

When my Tai Chi instructor told me the news, my first reaction was to say, You've got to be kidding! But as soon as the words left my mouth, I quickly added, I know you aren't; I just can't believe Chris is dead.

That's the thing about death. It's unbelievable when it happens to someone too young for it to happen to. For people like me, in our mid-70s or older, death is entirely believable.  We don't welcome it. But it isn't a big surprise when it occurs.

I don't want to engage in platitudes. You know, like how death makes us appreciate life.

That's true. However, there's such a huge gap between the shocking finality of the death of someone too young to die and bumper sticker-like cliches, as wordy as I am, I don't want to spend words on trying to find any meaning in Chris' death.

I'm an atheist. Those of us who don't believe in God or the supernatural care as much as religious believers in finding meaning in life. And, yes, death.

But the way I see it, that meaning doesn't exist out there, like the objective universe does. It only exists in here, in our subjective feelings and thoughts.

And right now I fail to see any meaning in Chris' death. I just see sadness, grief, loss. 

A few months ago Chris took part in a three-hour Tai Chi seminar at Pacific Martial Arts with the theme of Swimming Dragon. I remember how lively Chris was, how he lightened up the room with his sense of humor.

Now he's dead. That just seems utterly wrong. I'm deeply philosophical. I understand that my feeling of utterly wrong can't be defended logically. 

It's simply what's in my heart -- a conviction that no matter what power, force, or laws of nature guide human events, it got things wrong with Chris. That makes me sad.

Talking about racism in schools reduces bias

Here in blue Oregon, we're fortunate to have avoided the absurd laws in some red states, such as Florida, that make it very difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to talk about racism. 

Obviously this head-in-the-sand approach doesn't do anything to combat racism. It just prevents open discussion that could reduce racism.

Last year I came across an article in Scientific American that cites psychological research in concluding that it's best for students to engage in honest talk about racism. The article appeared in the November 2022 issue, though apparently it was published online in August.

That issue has been languishing in a pile of magazines containing blog-post-worthy articles, where I just dug it out. Here's the article in its entirety. It makes a lot of sense. I just wish Florida Governor Ron DeSsntis would pay attention to it.

In Schools, Honest Talk About Racism Can Reduce Discrimination
New laws make it harder for teachers to discuss racism and inequality,
but psychological evidence shows  these conversations dispel causes of bias and distress

by Camilla Mutoni Griffiths, Nicky Sullivan on August 19, 2022 in Scientific American

“Where are the Native Americans now?” asked fifth grade students in an Iowa City classroom last year. There are many ways their teacher, Melanie Hester, might have answered. She could have pointed out that today Native Americans live in cities and towns across the U.S. About 20 percent live on reservations, and Hester could have used that to open a discussion of the U.S. government’s forcible movement and isolation of tribes. Hester might have also discussed how European and American settlers brutally killed many Native Americans in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Instead she evaded the question and continued her lesson without offering historical context for her students to understand the present. Teachers across the country are avoiding explicit conversations about race, racism and racial inequality because of a series of recent laws passed in several states.

In Iowa, for example, a law prohibits any teaching that suggests the U.S. is “fundamentally or systematically racist or sexist.” The Iowa law also specifies that teachers must ensure that no student feels “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of that individual’s race or sex.” The laws in other states lay out similar logic.

The legal language seems, for the most part, protective of children. But the effect is quite the opposite. As psychologists who study how parents and teachers communicate with kids about race, we can attest to an ever growing body of scientific evidence that suggests these laws are failing the children they purport to help.

First, years of research make it evident that kids notice racial and ethnic disparities from an early age. For example, psychologists have found that white kids as young as age four will consistently pair white families with higher-wealth items (such as nice cars and bigger houses) and Black families with lower-wealth items (for instance, run-down cars and smaller houses).

In other words, very young children are aware of persistent racial disparities in wealth. Around the same age, children begin forming preferences for wealthier kids with more “stuff,” which, given the link between wealth and racial background in the U.S., may result in white children preferring and choosing to play with other white peers over Black peers.

Second, we know that when children notice differences between people or groups, they usually look for an explanation. Here a psychological principle called the inherence bias comes into play. In general, when we see someone behave in a distinctly different way from others, we assume there is something inherently different about that person.

Adults often fall into this trap: if someone cuts you off on the highway, you are likely to assume they are a bad driver rather than assume, for instance, that they are a good driver who happens to be rushing to a hospital in an emergency. In the same way, children are more likely to attribute a wealth difference between communities to the groups’ capabilities or intelligence rather than something external, such as a historical advantage one group has had over another.

Children often go one step further and think that groups are biologically or innately different. These attitudes are what psychologists call essentialist beliefs because they attribute group differences to some deep, underlying and often unknown “essence.”

These tendencies toward inherence and essentialism are especially harmful when we think about children’s efforts to understand racial disparities. Scientists agree that race is not biological. It is not inherent or innate. Instead race is the product of social and cultural ideas that are imposed on groups of people. These ideas become codified in our institutions and in the ways that we interact with one another, thus producing the inequalities we see in the world.

This means that children need external explanations, such as historical injustices and racial discrimination, to understand the differences between groups that they are observing. Without that context, children can mistakenly believe that racial difference is inherent, which leaves them with an inaccurate understanding of the world.

More concerning, these beliefs about the inherent or essential nature of racial difference are actually a foundation of racial bias. In fact, multiple studies have found that when kids have more essentialist beliefs about race, they also hold more stereotypes about other racial groups.

In other words, without explicit discussions about race and the external, rather than internal, causes of racial disparities, children will come to the wrong conclusions and may develop racial biases. In principle, these problems could apply to any child who is not given greater context for racial differences. White children may be especially at risk because they are often the least likely to have conversations about racism with their families.

In fact, one of us (Sullivan) tracked almost 1,000 parents in 2020 and found that white Americans were significantly less likely to talk to their children about race than Black Americans, even after the much publicized murder of George Floyd prompted national protests and dialogue about racism.

When we think about new laws limiting discussion of race in schools, it’s critical to keep in mind how they will impact children of color specifically. The research we’ve discussed suggests that students will be more likely to develop racially biased views in the absence of explicit lessons. As a result, children of color are likely to face more discrimination, not less. This outcome is clearly at odds with the language of the laws, which explicitly state that children should not be made to feel psychological distress because of their race. Yet that is precisely what will happen if children of color face more discrimination.

In contrast, explicit conversations with kids about racial disparities can help reduce some of the negative consequences we have described.

In one study, white elementary school students who received history lessons about racial discrimination faced by Black people had more positive views of Black people and were less likely to hold stereotypes than students who didn’t receive such lessons. And those lessons did not lead either white or Black children to hold more negative views of white Americans, which is a commonly voiced concern among those who oppose teaching about racism. There is also early evidence from a preprint paper (which has not yet been through peer review) that when parents engage in honest, accurate conversations about race with their children, it can decrease kids’ racial biases.

The laws passed in Iowa and elsewhere claim to protect kids from forming racist beliefs, but the research suggests they are more likely to do the opposite. When it comes to children’s understanding of racism and the development of racist beliefs, the biggest danger isn’t teaching or talking to children about these topics—it’s staying quiet.

If you need rural cellular internet, I recommend MobileData2Go

Recently I spent a lot of time checking out providers of rural cellular internet, which basically set you up with a router and plan that accesses the internet via one of the major companies: Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T.

If someone lives in a city, they probably have many internet/broadband choices. People like me who live in a rural area with poor cell service, don't. Out here in rural south Salem, Oregon, my wife and I suffered with 6-7 Mbps CenturyLink DSL over ancient copper phone lines because that was our only option.

Then I was selected to be a beta tester for Starlink satellite internet, and our broadband life changed markedly. We were thrilled to have shows on Netflix not buffer constantly, and be in sharp focus. 

However, it's an open secret that Starlink customer service can be slow. There's no way to talk to anyone in person. It all happens through support tickets. So even though our Starlink equipment has been trouble-free so far, I wanted a viable backup to Starlink in case we had to wait weeks for replacement equipment to arrive if something broke.

That led me to Googling rural cellular internet companies after my daughter visited and I noted that her AT&T iPhone was getting a 5G signal. My hope was that I could find a reasonably priced plan that used AT&T (Verizon and T-Mobile are very slow at our house) so we could still have decent broadband if, or likely when, our Starlink system stopped working.

The clear winner in my search was MobileData2Go. Their unlimited plan was the least expensive; they sell a router so you don't have to keep paying for a rental; they have plans for all three major cellular companies; and I found that their customer service was superb.

The only downside to this otherwise happy story was that after several days of tweaking the AT&T router  that I promptly received from MobileData2Go, the signal we were able to receive was too unreliable and slow to make it worth continuing with the service.

This wasn't the fault of MobileData2Go. It simply was because our house is in a low part of the south Salem hills with no direct line of sight to a cell tower. I was hugely impressed with the competence and diligence of the people at MobileData2Go. I know good customer support when I experience it. 

Having contacted several other rural cellular internet companies, my strong advice to anyone interested in their services is Buyer Beware. One of the worst offenders would go nameless if I didn't share the name: HomeFi. 

HomeFi advertises on Facebook, where I learned about them. Luckily, I Googled "HomeFi reviews" and "HomeFi scam." I recommend you do the same, not only for HomeFi, but for any rural cellular internet company you're considering. Here's one of the HomeFi results from ScamPulse. 

I ended up ordering a Mobile Starlink system intended for RV users, even though I'm only going to use it as a residential Starlink backup. Don't know why I didn't think of this before, since a Mobile Starlink account can be paused during the months someone doesn't need it, which will be almost all of the time for us.

So I'm returning the MobileData2Go router. There was zero problem doing this, as this is a reputable company.

One sign of this is that MobileData2Go accepts PayPal in addition to credit cards, and includes a link to where PayPal lets you cancel a recurring payment in their FAQs. That impressed me, since I'd read numerous complaints about MobileData2Go competitors from people who had great difficulty in cancelling their rural cellular internet plan.

CarMax beat Capitol Subaru's offer on my 2020 Crosstrek

When it came time to sell my 2020 Crosstrek Limited because I was getting a 2024 Crosstrek Limited, the choice was between Capitol Subaru and CarMax. In the past I've sold cars on my own, but I don't enjoy doing this anymore.

My wife and I have bought quite a few cars from the Capitol Auto Group, starting back when they were on Mission Street. Now the four Capitol dealerships -- Chevrolet, Cadillac, Toyota, Subaru -- are adjacent to the Martin Luther King Parkway, which enables the Capitol slogan:

Your way on the parkway

Usually I've agreed with that slogan. But sometimes I haven't, especially when it comes to trading in a car. That's what happened this time. I found CarMax much easier to deal with than Capitol Subaru when it came to getting an offer for my 2020 Crosstrek.

That car was fully loaded with every possible factory option. I ordered the Crosstrek, which was built in Japan. It also had low miles, about 24,000, in part because I did so little driving during the initial Covid period.

Understand: I only have good things to say about the Subaru saleswoman I worked with, Emily Campbell. You won't go wrong if you buy a vehicle from her. My problem is with the trade-in policies established by Capitol management that Campbell had to operate under.

Campbell gave me a test drive in a 2024 Crosstrek after I'd brought my 2020 in for service and got to looking at the 2024 model, which was a redesign with some marked improvements from my 2020. Notably, a larger 2.5 liter engine rather than the underpowered 2.0 liter I had. Also, wireless Apple CarPlay and a bunch of other new features that appealed to me, including upgraded safety equipment.

I was curious to learn what my 2020 was worth. Campbell took some photos after my car had been serviced and said she'd let me know what Capitol would offer for it. But I never got that offer. I'm pretty sure it was because Capitol didn't want to give me an offer before it was time to trade-in my 2020 on a new car.

That happened fairly quickly, since Campbell found a 2024 Crosstrek Limited on its way to the dealership with the color and options that I wanted. I put down a $500 deposit on the 2024 around mid July and the car was scheduled to arrive on September 3. So it wasn't like I was asking for a trade in offer way ahead of time.

At any rate, in early to mid August CarMax gave me an online offer of $25,000 after asking a bunch of questions about my 2020, including the VIN. Around that time I'd gotten an email from Subaru saying they were interested in my 2020 Crosstrek.

I recall that I wasn't asked for the mileage, which I thought was strange. Regardless, I gave Subaru the info on my 2020 and got an offer back: $23,550, which was good for up to 45,000 miles on the car. The offer had an expiration date of August 31.

That led me to text Campbell, saying that I'd gotten an offer from Subaru that was less than what CarMax was offering for my car, and seemingly didn't take into account the low mileage -- though maybe they had that from my service record, all of which has been done at Capitol Subaru.

I figured that after Capitol learned that Subaru had offered me less than CarMax, they'd raise their offer.

I'd been telling Campbell that I wanted to have the trade-in set several days before the 2024 Crosstrek arrived, because from past painful episodes with various dealers I've learned that what should be a pleasant car buying experience can be hurt by an unpleasant car selling/trade-in experience.

Plus, how about that slogan Your way on the parkway. The way I wanted was to get a firm trade-in offer from Capitol Subaru before the 2024 came in, so the car buying and car selling were separated.

That never happened. A week or so before the 2024 was to arrive, I got an updated online offer for my 2020 from CarMax. This time the offer was for $25,600, six hundred dollars more than the previous CarMax offer. 

Since my 2020 had a MSRP of $32,103, I was pleasantly surprised that the value of my Crosstrek had held up so well. I headed off to CarMax (on Lancaster Drive) to have them confirm the offer by looking at my car.

Melanie Zuniga worked with me at CarMax. She was wonderfully efficient, as was the CarMax appraisal process. Within about 40 minutes I was told that no problems were found with my car and the $25,600 was a firm offer good for the next seven days.

Leaving CarMax, I felt that they deserved to buy my 2020 Crosstrek. After all, Capitol Subaru had plenty of chances to give me a fair offer. (The CarMax offer was right in line with the midpoint of the Kelley Blue Book trade-in price for my car, which CarMax showed on their offer sheet and which I'd already confirmed with my own KBB research.)

When I got home, I told Campbell that my wife and I were going to sell my car to CarMax. Campbell then told me that if I sent her the CarMax offer, Capitol would match it. That didn't seem fair to me, since Capitol was just piggy-backing on the CarMax offer, which had taken some time of CarMax staff. 

However, it turned out that the 2024 Crosstrek was delayed in arriving at Capitol Subaru.

By the time it came in, my wife was planning to go to the coast for a few days. We were going to be able to buy the 2024 on the evening before she was due to leave, but since I didn't want to sell the 2020 before I'd seen the 2024 and confirmed that I liked the Sun Blaze Pearl color (I do, a lot), my wife would have had to leave later for the coast than she wanted to if we were going to sell my 2020 before the 7-day CarMax offer expired.

Thus we ended up trading in the 2020 to Capitol Subaru for the $25,600 CarMax had offered. I regret doing this, because the CarMax car selling process was much better than the Capitol Subaru process that I encountered.

CarMax was straightforward, fair, and efficient. With Capitol Subaru, I couldn't get a decent trade-in offer until CarMax gave me one and Capitol matched it. Yes, I was told by Campbell that CarMax is huge and can shift cars around the country, which is true, while Capitol is local.

But somehow local small Capitol was willing to pay just as much for my car as CarMax was -- after CarMax had given me a firm offer. I can't say that my trade-in experience was typical for the Capitol Auto Group.

Still, based on my experience I'd advise getting an offer from CarMax, then selling your vehicle to CarMax even if a local dealer is willing to match the CarMax offer. This just seems to me to be the right thing to do, regardless of how large CarMax is. I like to reward good service, and like I said, I regret not being able to sell my Crosstrek to CarMax, given how well they treated me.

Also, when my wife and I were buying the 2024 Crosstrek, we were presented with a sheet that had the price of the car about $4,000 more than the MSRP that I'd expected. It turned out that Capitol Subaru had loaded up the price with every dealer add-on that I almost always reject, like a windshield treatment and clear coat for the paint. I've never had a dealer add that stuff on their own. In the past the financial guy asks about those options during the purchase paperwork, when I go "no, no, no, no." With the 2020 I did get a Rain-X sort of windshield treatment, which was basically useless. Capitol needs to stop doing this.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that in addition to the trade-in offer I got from a Subaru email message, I also got different trade-in offer estimates by clicking on a "what's your current car worth?" link on the general Subaru web site and by clicking on a similar link on the Capitol Subaru web site. All of those offers were less than the CarMax offer, though the general Subaru offer gave me a range of $23,470 to $26,765 for my 2020 Crosstrek. But I was never asked to get a firm offer by coming to Capitol Subaru. The only way I got a firm offer was by going to CarMax and telling Capitol that my wife and I were planning to sell the car to CarMax.

Oregon State and WSU score legal victory against Pac-12 departers

Usually I like to root for the underdog in sports. It's just more satisfying to watch a team that's expected to lose defy the odds and beat the supposedly more powerful team.

That's one reason I was hoping Oregon State and Washington State would score a legal victory against the eight members of the Pac-12 who have announced that they're leaving the conference for other leagues after a media rights negotiation gone bad left the Pac-12 with less TV money than the departing members wanted.

USC and UCLA had already announced they were heading to the Big 10, which means currently the Pac-12 is really the Pac-2: Oregon State and Washington State.

At least, that's how OSU and WSU see the situation. That's why they went to court to prevent the ten departing members of the Pac-12 from being able to divvy up the financial and other resources of the league, possibly as soon as a league board meeting scheduled for next Wednesday.

Today a judge ruled in favor of OSU and WSU. Here's excerpts from the Oregonian story. 

Washington State and Oregon State scored a major victory in court on Monday when a Whitman County (Wash.) judge agreed to their request for a temporary restraining order preventing the Pac-12′s presidents and chancellors from meeting until the court determines the makeup of the board of directors.

“That makes everybody equal,” Superior Court Judge Gary Libey said in issuing his ruling a few minutes after 12 p.m.

A preliminary injunction hearing to determine which schools have voting rights -- all 12, or only the Beavers and Cougars -- is expected to be scheduled in the next few weeks.

“I am pleased with today’s decision,” Oregon State president Jayathi Murthy said on social media. “As the two remaining Pac-12 members, Oregon State and Washington State must be able to chart a path forward for the Pac-12 -- not the members that have chosen to leave it.”

...The Pac-12 bylaws state that if a school gives notice of withdrawal prior to Aug. 1, 2024, then its “representative to the Pac-12 Board of Directors shall automatically cease to be a member of the Pac-12 Board of Directors and shall cease to have the right to vote on any matter.”

What defines a notice of withdrawal?

The bylaws don’t specify. None of the outgoing schools have delivered written notice, according to a source. But WSU and OSU believe the public statements by executives from the 10 schools — and the “welcome” announcements blasted on social media by their new leagues — constitute notice, thereby rendering their presidents ineligible for the board.

Major strategic and financial issues require super-majority approval (75 percent). If the court determines the 10 outgoing schools retain board-of-directors status, they could do as they please. One option: Vote to dissolve the conference as of next summer, which would result in all assets being split among the 12 schools.

But if the Cougars and Beavers are deemed the sole board members, they would control the assets and potentially use tens of millions of dollars in Pac-12 funds to rebuild the conference and offset the loss of revenue resulting from the collapse.

I sure hope that Oregon State and Washington State can rebuild the Pac-12 by bringing in new members. The most viable option to do this seems to be folding in all or most of the members of the Mountain West Conference into the Pac-12, assuming OSU and WSU succeed in gaining legal control of the league.

Sure, it would be a whole different Pac-12 with the Mountain West Conference members: Air Force, Boise State, Colorado State, Fresno State, Hawaii, Nevada, New Mexico, San Diego State, San Jose State, UNLV, Utah State, and Wyoming.

But the Pac-12 has a lot more visibility and prestige than the Mountain West Conference. Seemingly that would be a selling point if OSU and WSU make a pitch to the MWC to merge the two leagues under the Pac-12 banner. 

After all, the MWC has "west" in its name, which goes well with "Pac" or "Pacific." I sort of understand why Stanford and California are heading to the ACC - Atlantic Coast Conference. It just seems bizarre that two universities located so close to the Pacific Ocean would be part of the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Oregon beats Texas Tech, thanks to a fourth quarter

I'm glad I don't have a heart problem, because even without one, I was feeling palpitations in my chest for most of today's Oregon - Texas Tech football game in hot Lubbock.

It was a familiar feeling, given past occasions when Oregon unexpectedly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

I get excited about being able to watch the Ducks play, since we rely on DirecTV for television watching, and DirecTV still doesn't carry the Pac 12 Networks, which is where the Oregon - Portland State blowout game in favor of the Ducks was last week.

(Of course, now that Oregon is headed to the Big Ten, and the Pac 12 is down to the Pac 2 (Oregon State and Washington State), likely the Pac 12 Networks won't exist after this school year.)

So I got our DVR recording the Oregon - Texas Tech game, which was on Fox, thankfully. I'd noted that Oregon was favored to win by several touchdowns. After all, the Ducks are ranked #13 in the country and Texas Tech lost to Wyoming in its first game.

That made the first three quarters tough to watch. 

I started all optimistic. Then reality set in. Oregon was playing in an uninspired fashion. Lots of penalties. Lots of dropped passes. Offensive play calling that seemed drearily predictable. Not only weren't there any creative trick plays, the standard plays often weren't having much success.

Still, at halftime Oregon was ahead 18-13. I hoped that Oregon would pull away in the second half, but the opposite happened. In the third quarter Oregon didn't score and trailed Texas Tech 18-27. 

Visions of any chance the Ducks had of making the national playoff being flushed down the football toilet danced through my head.

Until the fourth quarter happened. Once again, quarterback Bo Nix came up with clutch plays, as did the  Oregon defense. A couple of interceptions sealed the deal. Final score: 38-30.

Whew! My heart felt way better after Oregon put up 20 points in the final quarter while Texas Tech managed only three.

Hopefully this bodes well for the rest of the Ducks' season. They've got the makings of a great team. I do have to admit, though, that the Texas Tech Masked Rider has a flair that the Ducks' mascot lacks.

Some of our oaks are losing all their leaves in early September. Global warming.

We've lived at our home in rural south Salem, Oregon since 1990. In those 33 years, my wife and I have never seen some of the oak trees on our ten mostly natural acres lose all of their leaves in late August and early September.

Repeat, never.

But this is what the area in front of our well house looked like today. It sure seems to be a result of global warming. We didn't get any rain during June, July, and almost all of August. Maybe May also. And it's been considerably hotter than normal. The oaks must be stressed.

Update: Just saw this post from the National Weather Service on X, the site formerly known as Twitter. Supports my thesis. The years 2021, 2022, and 2023 were three of the top five hottest summers in Salem dating back to 1892, with 2014 and 2015 being the other two. 

Usually the oaks lose their leaves after other deciduous trees, not before. This is how part of our Y-shaped driveway appears. That area of our property near the road gets the most sun. The oaks here are the ones losing their leaves.


Close to our house, where there is more shade, the oaks are still green. So this indicates that it isn't any sort of disease that's causing the falling oak leaves. It's heat stress, almost certainly.

This is just one sign, among many, of a dangerously warming world. All over our country, and in other nations, what used to be highly unusual is becoming commonplace as the Earth becomes steadily hotter.

Everybody has their own global warming freakout sign. For me, the falling oak leaves are my latest sign. Sadly, there will be many more so long as temperatures keep rising.

After getting Starlink's Gen 3 router, I'm liking it

I've had, and enjoyed, Starlink's satellite internet service since January 2021, when I was approved to be a beta tester and got to put the original round dish on our roof. Not for free, sadly, I had to pay for it.

Recently Starlink emailed me with an offer to purchase their new Gen 3 router that works both with the first generation round dish and the second generation square dish. This time I had to pay $200 for the privilege of being a beta tester.

I decided to get the router because the original router was still in use. It's worked fine, but I figured that the Gen 3 router had to be an improvement. This is part of what the Starlink email said about the router.

The new Gen 3 router introduces WiFi 6 and tri-band radios to Starlink. With improved range, performance, and device support, the Starlink Gen 3 router will extend your WiFi network throughout your home to provide a more consistent and reliable connection with faster speeds.

 

The Gen 3 router can replace your current router, and multiple Gen 3 routers can be meshed together to extend the range of your WiFi network.   

I'd agree with those claims by and large. The Gen 3 router has a minimalist design and fits nicely on the table where the vertically oriented original router looked like it could tip over at any moment.

Installation was easy. Or at least it would have been, if I hadn't inexplicably put the ends of the ethernet cable in the wrong places, even after reading the instructions several times. You can read all about that misadventure in my blog post, "My guide to happiness: act stupid, then undo your stupidity." 

The Gen 3 router seems to start up with a connection considerably faster than the original router. That's a plus, since at times the old one would take forever, more or less, after being plugged in.

I did experience much slower speeds at first with the Gen 3 router. However, after a few days the speeds returned to their normal range of 30-125 Mbps or so depending on the time of day and how the Starlink gods are feeling.

At one point the speed dropped to the dreadful DSL range that my wife and I were stuck with for many years out here in rural south Salem, Oregon, 6-7 Mbps.

I was about to submit a support ticket to Starlink, but after I read the tips to fix a slow connection I decided that I was capable of unplugging and plugging in the router again, which led to a marked speed increase right away.

At the moment, 9:50 pm on a weekday, I'm getting 58 Mbps download and 16 Mbps upload, which is fairly typical. 

The wi-fi signal in the most distant part of our house from the router seems less strong but also faster than the original router. In the early morning I've gotten speeds of over 100 Mbps in that area, which never happened with the first generation router. 

So I'm pleased with the Gen 3 router so far. 

I declare a winner in the Decaf Instant Coffee contest

For many years I was a coffee addict. More accurately, I craved the caffeine in coffee. I'm still in recovery. Probably always will be.

But even though my withdrawal several years ago was difficult, I've managed to give up the hard stuff and get by with a little help from my decaffeinated friends.

I'll share their photos below. One of them has become my best Decaf Instant Coffee friend. Here it is.

Republica makes an organic decaf instant coffee from Arabica beans that to me tastes like brewed coffee. I just use a level teaspoon in 16 ounces of hot water. It's made by a woman-owned company in Australia  that checks all of my environmental/fair trade boxes. Republica uses a water-process for decaffeination rather than chemicals. I get it from Amazon.

I had to seek out alternatives to regular coffee after developing a bladder problem in 2017. Because caffeine is a bladder irritant, I discovered that my body was happier without caffeinated coffee. 

Plus, I found that after a difficult coffee transition period -- full caffeine to half caffeine to no caffeine -- I felt like I had even more energy without the ups and downs of regular coffee. And my sleep was considerably improved.

For a while, though, it seemed that even the minimal caffeine in decaf coffee was causing me problems. That led me to explore alternatives to coffee. 

I started with Roma. It's a roasted grain beverage. I liked it. But naturally it didn't have a coffee taste or smell, though the longer I stayed away from coffee, the more I forgot what I was missing.

Cafix appealed to me more, though it is very similar to Roma. It just seemed to have a bit more of a coffee vibe to it.

I gave Dandy Blend a try. It has a mixture of grains and dandelion root. While it had the most coffee-like flavor, dandelion root turned out to be a bladder stimulant. I didn't need that, so decided to stop using Dandy Blend.

Eventually I decided to ditch the coffee alternatives and try the real thing in decaf. A friend told me about Kava, which had the apparent benefit of reduced acid. However, the chemical used to accomplish the decaffeinating didn't get along well with my digestive system. 

So I went back to Republica, which I'd tried early on in my alternatives-to-caffeine seeking but set aside for a reason that I no longer remember. I still had a jar in the cupboard. As noted above, it's agreeing with me.

Hopefully I've found my forever Decaf Instant Coffee friend. Read the user reviews on Amazon and you may be tempted to give Republica a try yourself, if you're into decaf coffee.

My guide to happiness: act stupid, then undo your stupidity

Everybody wants to be happy. And everybody has their own ways of accomplishing this.

Recently the New York Times had an interview with a Buddhist monk, Matthieu Ricard. When I saw that the story was called The 'World's Happiest Man' Shares His Three Rules for Life, I got excited.  

Yay! Finally I'd know how to be happy all the time. Sweet. But when I read what Ricard said the three rules were, I felt my Perpetual Happiness Balloon popping. 

You know, once I was on the India Today Conclave. They said, “Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.”

Ugh. No secret. Not just three points. Takes a whole life. Bummer.

Then I realized that while I'm far away from being the world's happiest man (I'm not even the happiest sentient being in our house, being eclipsed by my wife and dog, and likely also by the mice who live in our crawl space), I do have a secret to happiness that works for me.

Since a New York Times reporter isn't going to be beating down my door to learn what it is, I figured that I'd share it in this blog post.

Well, I already have in the title above. I ran out of space or I would have made it: Act stupid, then undo the stupidity and feel the bliss of relief.

There's no end of examples that I could offer for how I've applied this (no longer a) secret to aid in my happiness. Here's a good recent one.

Though I live just six miles from the city limits of Oregon's capital, Salem, our neighborhood's primary "broadband" provider, CenturyLink, offers a pitiful 7 Mbps via DSL that travels through ancient copper phone lines. 

When Elon Musk's Starlink satellite internet service came online several years ago, I was thrilled to have my application to be a beta tester of Starlink approved. That got us a decent broadband speed.

A few weeks ago Starlink sent me an email saying that because I was an early beta customer, I was entitled to send them $200 for a third-generation router that offered better features than our first-generation router.

OK, I fell for the pitch. I'm always up for a chance to improve our broadband life, especially since in the not-so-good old days of sloooooow DSL, streaming shows on Netflix often had us watching the buffering spinning ball as much as Bridgerton.

The new router arrived a few days ago. After I opened the box, I downloaded a PDF file that had the simple instructions for installing it. 

I read the instructions several times. I laid out the power supply cord and the ethernet cable. Connecting the power supply was a no-brainer. But the ethernet cable had two dissimilar connectors: one long and one short.

The place on the router where one end of the ethernet cable was to be inserted was strangely deep. So deep, I got out a flashlight and looked into the depths of it. My mind thought, "That must be where the long ethernet connector goes." 

I then studied the installation instructions again. Closely. Intimately. The instructions showed where the long connector of the ethernet cable was to go and where the short connector of the ethernet cable was to go. 

Supremely confident that I knew what to do, I inserted the long connector into the deep recess of the router and the short connector into the normal looking hole in the power supply.

Then I expectantly waited for the flashing white light on the router to turn solid, showing that a connection with the Starlink satellites had occurred. After watching the flashing light for a while, I got concerned and reviewed the instructions again.

Which elicited a loud F*CK from me. You can easily fill in the blank.

Somehow I'd gotten the two ends of the ethernet cable in the wrong places. Yes, even though I'd read the instructions several times, paying special attention to the images of the long and short connectors of the ethernet cable.

Worse, the short connector was stuck in the power supply. The little clip used to release an ethernet cable was nowhere to be seen. Or felt. I fiddled with it for a while, but didn't want to break the connector in the power supply.

Panic started to set in. If I couldn't undo what I'd just did, our broadband speed would plummet to near zero, since we have dismal cell service out here in the not-very-wilds of six miles from the Salem city limits.

However, with the aid of a very small screwdriver, I was able to push on the clip and release the short connector of the ethernet cable. Which then fit easily into the router, just as the instructions had said. And the long connector fit easily into the power supply, just as the instructions had said.

All I can figure is that when my brain thought early on that the long connector must go into the deep recess of the router, that erroneous thought won out in an unconscious battle between it and what the instructions said.

The relief I felt when the flashing light on the router turned solid almost immediately after, duh, I'd done what the instructions said, created a jolt of happiness in me which lasted for a long time. 

It's worn off now. But the good news is that it won't be long before I do something stupid again, which, when I undo my stupidity, will make me happy. 

Obligatory warning for those who want to follow in my happiness footsteps: sometimes I do something stupid that can't be undone, which obviously doesn't make me happy.

Watch this video of Lahaina fire destruction. Then do what you can to help.

My wife and I have vacationed on Maui many times. We love the island. The town of Lahaina has a special place in our hearts.

Front Street in Lahaina was a delightful place to visit. We'd go there most evenings during our stay to shop, people-watch, see the art in the many galleries, eat. The atmosphere was like nowhere else we'd ever been.

Now much of Lahaina has been destroyed by the wind-stoked wildfires that have killed 53 people on Maui.

This screenshot from the video below shows the destruction. The three minute video was really painful for me to watch. It is raw footage, with no audio, but the pictures are more powerful than any words.

Here's the YouTube video.

Please consider donating to one of the relief organizations mentioned in this Travel + Leisure story about the Maui wildfires.

Here's a photo of Lahaina's Front Street from the visit we made to Maui in 2017, the last time we were there, which was part of an Adobe Spark slideshow I made about our vacation. Again, its unbelievably sad that this marvelous place has been mostly reduced to ashes.

US women's soccer shootout loss shows power of smallness

Understandably, most of us believe that in order to accomplish something great, you need to do great things. Meaning, large important things.

There's a certain logic to this, but it doesn't fit with reality. 

In the real world -- as contrasted with the ideal world constructed in human minds -- important outcomes often hinge on insignificant details.

For example, and as a progressive it's painful for me to think about this, if Hillary Clinton hadn't decided to set up a private email server as Secretary of State instead of relying on her government account, there's good reason to consider that she'd have been elected president in 2016 rather than Donald Trump. 

There's a saying, "for want of a nail the kingdom was lost."

Something of great importance may depend on an apparently trivial detail. The saying comes from a longer proverb about a battle during which the loss of a nail in a horseshoe leads to the loss of a horse, which leads to the loss of the rider, which leads to the loss of the battle, which in turn leads to the loss of a whole kingdom.

This relates to chaos theory, a subject I find fascinating.

Basically it involves the sensitivity of large scale systems to minute changes in initial conditions that then multiply over time. Frequently this is referred to as the butterfly effect: a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, which creates a tiny atmospheric instability that eventually becomes a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.

Today the United States women's soccer team lost to Sweden in a penalty shootout after the teams ended up scoreless after regular play and two extra time periods. A shootout is used to decide a winner.

One by one, players from each team alternate at trying to score from the penalty spot in front of the goal. It's tough for the goalkeeper to stop a shot at such short range, so there's a battle of wits between the player taking the shot and the goalkeeper trying to guess which way to lunge to try to stop the shot.

You can see the United States-Sweden penalty shootout in this 7:39 long YouTube video.

After a strong start by the US and Sweden, there were misses-by-a-mile by players from both teams. But what really struck my eye was the shot by a US player that bounced off a crossbar and the even more amazing failure of the US goalkeeper to prevent a goal that she seemed to have stopped, but which technology revealed just barely crossed the goal line.

Here's a screenshot from the video:

The ball crossed the goal line by the narrowest of margins before the US goalkeeper swatted it away on a second try after it rebounded following her first attempt to block it.

And that decided the match. Which ended the US women's team competition in the World Cup at the earliest stage ever and dashed their chance to win three World Cup championships in a row.

Such is life. Large outcomes often are determined by very small influences. Sure, the US team would have won if several players hadn't kicked the ball well over the net in the shootout. Those were big mistakes.

But I suspect that the image which will haunt the US team is the one above. How the soccer ball ended up in precisely the right location to give Sweden the victory after taking an unlucky (for the US) or lucky (for Sweden) bounce off of the goalkeeper's hands.

Oregon leaving Pac-12 for Big Ten is a disaster for Oregon State

Today the University of Oregon and University of Washington announced that they were leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten conference, which now will have 18 teams. 

With the departure of Oregon, Washington, USC, UCLA, Colorado, and apparently also Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah to either the Big Ten or Big 12 conferences, this leaves Oregon State, Washington State, California, and Stanford in a pitiful Pac-4 conference after the upcoming academic year.

The Oregon State athletic director isn't happy.

While UO leaders celebrated its move, Oregon State athletic director Scott Barnes decried it.

“The great history and tradition of this conference has been severely damaged,” Barnes said. “The best interest of the student-athlete hasn’t been served. Traveling to the Eastern seaboard multiple times a year is not in the best interest of student-athletes. I’m furious because it puts this university in harm’s way and our student-athletes in harm’s way. There’s some damage done that we’re going to have to mitigate.”

This is a shocking end to the Pac-12. It happened really rapidly.

Just a few days ago ace sports columnist John Canzano, who used to work for the Oregonian and now has a substack publication that I subscribe to, wrote about how the Pac-12 powers-that-be were expected to approve a media deal with Apple TV.

Except, they didn't, because the deal wasn't going to provide some of the schools with as much money as they wanted. So that led to the Big Ten inviting Oregon and Washington to jump the Pac-12 ship, which the university presidents bought off on today.

Without consulting their fans. Without consulting their students. Without consulting their athletes. So far as I know. This is the power of money in sports these days. It is all-powerful, tradition be damned.

There's lots of good commentary on what happened today. Canzano has written a couple of excellent pieces, here and here, which may or may not be available to those who don't subscribe to him.

Bill Oram of the Oregonian has written a great piece, "Oregon Ducks survived this round of realignment roulette. But what did it really cost them?"

Couldn't agree more with what Oram says:

Expect rain on Nov. 24.

The football gods will need to pour one out over Autzen Stadium when the Oregon State Beavers and Oregon Ducks play for the final time as conference rivals.

Let it pour.

To hide our tears and wash away our sins.

Greed, that evil temptress. She gets us every time.

Oregon is on its way to the Big Ten, pulled from boiling seas to the safety of a cornfield.

The Ducks survived this round of realignment roulette.

But in order to do so they had to sacrifice their rivals and kill their conference. A soulless, boardroom form of Squid Game. Play or get played.

The Pac-12 is dead. Oregon State is reeling.

But Oregon is safe and the university’s only responsibility was to itself.

It was spectacularly inept conference leadership that left the Ducks with little choice, and no choice for the other universities that jumped to safety.

Someday there will be excitement from this corner on what a new life in the Big Ten means for the University of Oregon and its teams. Football games at Camp Randall, the Big House and the Horseshoe. Hoops in Assembly Hall and Tom Izzo in Eugene.

Never could have imagined it.

But at the moment that is inadequate salve for what has been lost.

A once-proud conference, cocksure about its survival just days ago, has been scattered near and far, like dandelion fluff caught in the wind, done in by the influence of television dollars and executives who have moved universities around like pieces on a game board.

Risk? More like Reward.

The Pac-12 sold itself off for parts.

When it was founded with the stroke of a pen in a downtown Portland hotel 108 years ago, it was called the Pacific Coast Conference and then the Athletic Association of Western Universities. Later it morphed from the Pac-8 to the Pac-10 to the Pac-12.

Now?

Pac-It-In.

It’s time to go home.

Commissioner George Kliavkoff is but one of many to be blamed, but the conference died at his feet. His legacy in this job is complete.

Kliavkoff was the one who could not negotiate a palatable media deal or control the conference’s narrative. Who could not reel schools back in as they started to riggle away.

He seemed oblivious to the threats around him and was immune to backstabbing.

He got burned by the so-called alliance with Big Ten and ACC, blindsided by USC and UCLA’s escape acts and bamboozled by Colorado.

And he still seemed confident that he could hold the Conference of Champions together with a firm handshake and a twinkle in his eye.

What good is a mistake if you can’t learn from it?

Oregon and Washington were pushed to the Big Ten.

If there were a conference worth staying for, they would have remained in the Pac-12. The clearer path to the College Football Playoff would have been too enticing to pass up for schools that now enter a prestige conference as freshmen.

But as potential emergency hatches go, this was a great one. The Ducks were fearful of getting left behind when the L.A. schools left a year ago, and Kliavkoff’s failures ended up opening doors for the Ducks that would have likely remained closed.

If all that matters is the result, then the Ducks are doing cartwheels.

But it’s not that simple. This is a bitter pill for many and not just Beaver fans. Oregon now joins a host of schools around the country that have abandoned many of the ideals of intercollegiate athletics for security and financial bounty.

The move will be seen through the lens of football, and indeed, that is what drives decisions and makes network executives salivate. But beyond big-stage Saturdays when Oregon plays at Michigan, or Ohio State comes to Autzen, athletes in all of Oregon’s 20 Division I sports will travel as far as Rutgers and the University of Maryland for conference matchups.

Hasn’t the beach volleyball team suffered enough?

It’s a move that shatters much of our established identity as Oregonians.

Rob Mullens, the Oregon AD, said Friday that he hopes the Ducks can still schedule Oregon State in all sports. And he should be applauded for wanting to continue the rivalry.

He also knows he would have been defenestrated if he said anything else.

So good job on the Day 1 PR. Let’s see what happens.

Even if Oregon and Oregon State continue their home and home football rivalry, the highlight of the state’s sports calendar, it won’t be the same. There won’t be the same stakes. Once Oregon reaps the benefits of Big Ten recruiting and funding, its hard to imagine it can ever be a fair fight.

No, it will never be the same.

It was only the dreamers and fools who ever believed it could be.

Let it pour.

My southern California daughter found downtown Salem cool

Last week my granddaughter, Evelyn, and daughter, Celeste, spent three days with us, having come up from their home in Laguna Niguel in Orange County so Evelyn could go on a tour of the University of Oregon. She'll be a junior at Mater Dei High School next year and is considering the U of O for college.

Here's Evelyn, Celeste, and me on the Minto-Island bridge at Riverfront Park, photo courtesy of my wife, Laurel.

Celeste lived in Salem from 1977 to 1990, when she graduated from South Salem High and headed off to the University of Arizona -- fulfilling her nefarious goal of having me pay out-of-state tuition for four years after she was born and raised in Oregon (albeit at a much lower rate than college costs these days). 

We stopped by the house on Hillview Drive that my first wife and I bought when I started working for the State Health Planning and Development Agency. It looked much the same. Celeste wanted to show Evelyn the steep hill she walked up after the school day was finished at Salem Heights Elementary School.

One afternoon we headed to downtown Salem. Celeste had spent a lot of time there during her high school years, calling herself a "mall rat." Naturally she'd seen downtown on previous visits to Salem, but it had been a few years since she'd been there.

I was curious how someone from southern California, who travels a lot both in this country and internationally in the course of her work as the Sales Manager for Silhouette, a designer eyewear company, would look upon downtown Salem.

Well, Celeste was impressed. (Patrick, her husband, couldn't make the trip, having just started a new job as manager of a Baccarat store; if you're looking for a $800 caviar bowl, look no further.)

We started off with lunch at the downtown Venti's. I had one of the best grilled cheese sandwiches in my life. All four of us enjoyed our meal. Then we walked across the street to the Reed Opera House. Celeste remembered it well from her high school days.

Evelyn and Celeste loved the Dark Wash Vintage Co. In the photos above Celeste is wearing a Saturday Night Live t-shirt she found there. The Awkward Peach Boutique also was a hit with them. 

Heading down Liberty, we stopped at Sewell Sweets for dessert. At the end of the block, The Freckled Bee drew us in. Since all four of us are progressives, we liked the sentiments in the store windows. Like:

It was great to see downtown Salem through the eyes of my daughter and granddaughter. I tend to take downtown for granted, since I'm there so often attending my thrice-weekly Tai Chi classes at Pacific Martial Arts on Court Street.

Celeste and Evelyn helped me better understand what downtown has to offer, partly because they drew me into shops that I haven't gone into on my own.

Oleg Foksha clued me in to what it's like to be a Salem builder

As I said in a post a few days ago about the 2023 Tour of Homes for the Salem area, I had an enjoyable conversation with Oleg Foksha when my wife and I visited a beautiful Foksha Homes house in southeast Salem.

Before too much time passes, I wanted to share what I remember from that conversation. Foksha is the president of the Home Builders Association of Marion & Polk Counties and an experienced builder himself obviously.

My wife and I started talking with Foksha when we asked some questions about the Tour of Homes house, and mentioned how we appreciated the large trees on the property. I then said that it irked me when builders in Salem cut down most, or all, of the existing trees in the course of developing a property.

That led Foksha to explain to me the hurdles builders face these days. I can't remember everything he said, but here's a few highlights.

His main point was that it's tough for a builder devoted to quality to make a decent profit. Foksha decried large national or regional firms who build "cookie cutter" houses in the Salem area. He said that Foksha Homes is small and family-owned.

I was told that Foksha Homes needs to price a house at about $700,000, I think it was, in order to make a profit of $65,000. Out of that he has to pay his employees and the owners of Foksha Homes a decent wage.

There are so many rules and regulations that have to be complied with by a builder, Foksha said. He noted that in older parts of town with fairly large lots and back yards, there's now an ability to build several story apartments or condos -- which can irk the people living in a neighborhood who thought its character would remain the same after they bought a house there.

Anyway, I came away from our conversation with a better appreciation of what it is like to be a builder in Salem. Because the Home Builders Association leans decidedly conservative in its political stance, and I'm a progressive, I've tended to look at builders through that lens.

But being able to hear Foksha describe his life as a builder opened my eyes to the difficulties he and his fellow builders face. And that's a good thing, given how many divisions there already are in our country between people who judge each other without really understanding what it's like to be the other person.

Photos of the million dollar houses in 2023 Tour of Homes

Last Saturday my wife, Laurel, and I toured the most expensive houses in the 2023 Salem-area Tour of Homes. Naturally we figured they'd be the most interesting, since money talks when it comes to home design.

Our first stop was the $1,586,016 (nice precise cost) house on two acres near Jefferson offered by Bergby Construction. It's a 3,947 sq. ft. one-level.

The living room had a clean modern look.

As did the kitchen.

Out back a very large water feature was partially filled. Laurel believes this area is groundwater limited, which made us wonder how neighbors on other small acreages were going to like having this home's well used to fill the pond and keep it full during dry months.

We'd love to have a covered outdoor seating area like this, but our 1973 house was built way before such was fashionable. 

The walk-in shower actually was a walk-through shower.

Past the walk-through shower were not one but two large walk-in closets. We were envious, since our closets are only suitable for being walked into by very small animals.

In the utility room there was a washer, dryer, and something else. It seemed to be some sort of device for dewrinkling clothes, maybe? Never seen anything like it before.

A great feature of the house was a separate living area the size of many stand-alone houses. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms.

In this area a walk-through shower leads to a toilet.

Then we visited a $1,650,000 house with 2,513 sq. ft. on Coates Crest Way offered by Foksha Homes. We liked this home more than the Jefferson house, largely because of the more attractive setting.

This countertop in the living room was striking. Really unusual. It looked like it was shining with light.

Which it was, being backlit with LED lights.

I also liked the look of this unusual bowl.


A retaining wall looked much better with blocks that appeared more rock-like.

Here's a wide view of the back-lit counter and dining area.

You can either watch TV or flickering flames. Or both.

An outdoor seating area has a nice view.

A walk-in closet was attractively designed.

The master bedroom has large windows well placed to reveal the beautiful surroundings.

I talked with Oleg Foksha, the builder, for quite a while. I'll share what I remember of our conversation in another blog post. Foksha shared what it is like to be building houses in Salem these days, given all of the land use rules he has to comply with. I enjoyed our conversation.

Salem Art Fair 2023 improved from last year, but still lacking old fair energy

Friday my wife, Laurel, and I went to the Salem Art Fair in Bush Park. Last year I wrote about the drawbacks of the new location mostly away from the large shady oak trees, which was necessary because of damage being caused to the trees.

On the positive side, some of the problems I noted in "Salem Art Fair better for trees in new location, but not as pleasant now" have been addressed, at least partially. But I also still agree with a follow-up post I wrote, "Salem Art Fair should move to Riverfront Park." 

Here's some photos I took at this year's Art Fair. I'll use my comments on them to talk about what's been improved from last year, and what's stayed the same.

As we entered Bush Park after paying at a gate, once again I was struck by the lack of intimacy that marked the Art Fair under the sheltering oak trees. Being met by a very large open area exposed to the sun (temperature was in the mid-to-high 80's on Friday) didn't fill me with enthusiasm for the event.

The children's area to the south of the large open area looked more appealing, with the backdrop of large trees. We skipped that area, heading to the first artist booths at that end of the fair. For a while I felt enthused about being at the fair, enjoying the booths and lingering at some.

It was nice to see a woman with a good voice playing her guitar at a shady location. The Art Fair needs more of this: solo entertainers sprinkled throughout the fair. We dawdled here for a bit, since shade is rare at the new Art Fair location. I'm quite heat tolerant. My wife, less so. But as we walked around in the hot afternoon sun, our desire to dawdle dwindled.

I'd drunk 16 ounces of water just before going to the fair. But I was drawn to head toward the main food/drink area at the north end of the fair after viewing just a small number of booths, because the sun and heat was getting to me. And like I said, I tolerate heat better than Laurel does.

The new main stage at the back left of this photo didn't attract nearly as many people as the old main stage did. The reason, pretty clearly, is that the area near the old stage was largely shaded and the new area is in the direct sun. Some people were sitting under awnings listening to a performer, but there wasn't room for very many.

After we speed-walked our way through the artist booths because of the sun and heat, finding the new layout easier to navigate (last year's layout made it difficult to determine whether some booths had been missed), Laurel sat down in the shade while I explored the part of the fair nearest to where the old fair used to be located. This additional children's area was pleasant, being under trees.

I felt a pang of regret for the loss of the old location when I saw a barrier fence along what used to be the main corridor of the Art Fair, filled with visitors and brimming with energy. Now it was mostly empty. (Note the angry owl warning sign on the right; that brings back memories.)

There were a few booths along the main paved trail. I figured that maybe these didn't need a vehicle to transport the art so they could be near the oak trees. Regardless, I enjoyed this taste of the old fair location.

And there were some food/drink trucks along the path. Again, this made me feel good because it reminded me of the old art fair vibe.

I found Laurel near a stage where dancers were performing. In the shade, of course. 

Leaving the Art Far, this woman asked us if we wanted to sign the petition requesting a referendum on the employee payroll tax recently passed by the Salem City Council without a vote of the people. I had to tell her that we live outside of the city limits so couldn't sign the petition. I definitely support the referendum, though, I said.

Stoic guide to happiness: want the things you already have

If you want to be happy -- and who doesn't? -- there are a huge number of ways people have advised how to accomplish this throughout the thousands of years of recorded history. 

Whatever works for you, go for it. That's my attitude. I simply want to suggest an approach that resonates with me, the Stoic practice of negative visualization. 

Or as William B. Irvine says in the transcript of a talk that I've shared below, want the things you already have, love the life you happen to be living.

Yeah, I realize this sounds kind of obvious.

But as Irvine points out in his talk, that isn't how most of us look upon happiness, since much of the time we expect that if something new and better comes into our life, then we'll be happier. 

This morning I saw the Negative Visualization talk featured on my iPhone's Waking Up app, where I listen to guided meditations and interesting talks about spirituality, neuroscience, and such. I'd already heard the talk when I listened to Irvine's 23-session long series on "The Stoic Path."

This time, though, his remarks about how we go wrong in seeking happiness appealed more strongly to me. So much so, I spent about an hour this afternoon making a transcript of the 11 1/2 minute talk. 

Irvine is a clear thinker and good writer/speaker. Enjoy. 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Negative Visualization

A transcript of a talk by William B. Irvine
From “The Stoic Path” on the Waking Up app

What is it that you want in life? One common answer is that people want to be happy. But this raises a follow-up question. What’s your strategy for becoming happy?

A common answer is that you become happy by getting the things in life that you want. And this might include a new car, a bigger house, a perfect partner.

Although this recipe for attaining happiness is quite popular, it is defective, and that’s because it ignores the psychological phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation. 

So here’s the situation. You want something. You work to get it. You finally do get it. For a while, you’re happy. But then, the problem is, you get used to the thing you have and you’re no longer happy.

You don’t live happier ever after the way you thought you would. 

You end up with pretty much the same position you were at before you went to all that trouble. And you find yourself wanting new new things, from the belief that if you only had them, you really would be happy forever after.

At this point a comment is in order. If you’re currently unhappy, this is proof that never in your life have you succeeded in doing something that would let you live happily forever after. 

And yet the dream persists. It’s high time that you considered the possibility that maybe, just maybe, your strategy for pursuing happiness is flawed.

It turns out that the get happy by getting what you want strategy provides you with a recipe not for having a good life, but for having a life filled with dissatisfaction. 

By adopting this strategy, you unwittingly place yourself on a hedonic treadmill on which happiness is like a mirage in the desert. A thirsty person might walk for a mile to get the water that he sees with his own eyes off in the distance in the desert, only to have it vanish as he arrives at his destination.

He ends up as thirsty as he was before. Actually he might be even more thirsty as a result of taking a long and pointless walk under the desert sun. What foolishness. 

The get happy by getting what you want strategy is based on what I call the gap theory of happiness. You’re unhappy because you’re aware of a gap between what you have and what you want. 

Under these circumstances, the strategy for attaining happiness is obvious. You just get what you want. And that closes the gap, eliminating the source of your unhappiness. Easy as can be.

Because this strategy is so obvious, it’s been employed throughout history and around the globe. There’s a good chance you’re among those who use it. I know I have used it in my life. Since becoming a Stoic I use it much less than I formerly did, but it still lures me.

The problem is that we humans are dynamos of desire. If you’re normal, you have a profound capacity for wanting things, but getting what you want doesn’t stop the dynamo. At best it slows it down for a few days.

But then powers up again to come up with new things for you to want. It would be bad enough if the get happy by getting what you want strategy were simply ineffective, but it can better be described as being counterproductive. 

The more you use it, the less satisfied likely you will be. Dissatisfaction, I should add, is incompatible with happiness. 

The ancient Stoics came up with a way to get off the hedonic treadmill. The trick, they said, is to want the things you already have, to love the life you happen to be living. 

To better understand this trick, let’s turn our attention back to the gap theory of happiness. The Stoics agreed that the presence of a gap between what you have and what you want will make you unhappy. Their insight was to realize there’s a second way to close the gap.

You can also close it by wanting what you already have. Let me restate that. Instead of working to get the thing you don’t have, spend your efforts learning to want the things you already do have. 

The Stoics would argue that the person who embraces the life that he happens to be living, even though the life is quite basic, is vastly better off than the millionaire who, despite living in a mansion, is convinced that he would be lastingly happy if only he replaced his Ferrari with a newer model.

Or perhaps replaced his wife of several decades with some young model. This millionaire, by the way, will likely be envied by many people. They will imagine that if only they were living his life, they would at last be happy. All their problems would disappear, and no new problems would arise to replace them.

These people are as deluded as the millionaire is. The primary difference between them and the millionaire is that the millionaire is on a more expensive and extravagant version of the hedonic treadmill than they are. 

OK, you say, point taken. But how can you learn to want what you already have? The trick, the Stoics said, is to develop your ability to accept, appreciate, and even savor the life you already find yourself living. 

One way to accomplish this is by employing the psychological technique known as negative visualization. The technique in question is simple to learn, easy to use, and surprisingly effective. Let’s give it a try. 

I want you to think about your life, about your relationships, and about your circumstances. Pick one thing that plays an important role in your life. It might be your spouse or partner. It might be your job. It might be your children. 

Now take a few seconds to imagine that thing disappearing from your life. 

You can imagine that your spouse has just filed for divorce. You can imagine getting an email telling you that you’ve been laid off from your job. Or, and this one’s kind of sad, you can imagine getting a phone call from the police informing you that your child has been involved in an accident.

Now that you’ve chosen your topic for the negative visualization, go ahead and visualize. Think about the consequences that the disappearance would have for you and the life you’re living. 

Form a mental image of what it would be like. And mentally fill in some of the details of the story. Let that image sink in for a few seconds. OK, visualization is over. Return to life as usual. 

These are, I realize gloomy thoughts. But realize that in proposing that you negatively visualize, I’m not asking you to dwell on thoughts like these. That would be a recipe for a miserable existence. 

What I’m instead doing is asking you to entertain these thoughts for a few seconds. Paradoxically, having flickering negative thoughts, rather than making you sad, will contribute to your happiness. It accomplishes this by shaking your perspective on your circumstances. 

Instead of taking those circumstances, including your spouse, your job, or your child for granted, you will realize how lucky you are to have them. 

Suppose that in your negative visualization you imagined that your child had been in an accident. When you subsequently encounter your child, you might notice that you’re behaving differently towards her than otherwise would have been the case.

Instead of merely acknowledging her existence, you might find yourself savoring her presence. In your life, you might find yourself wanting to do things with her that would be impossible if she ceased being part of your life. 

You might find yourself wanting to read to her, or to play a game with her, instead of watching football. As a result of engaging in negative visualization, those activities, those simple activities, might be the high point of your day.

Negative visualization is effective even if your situation in life is quite difficult. This is because almost always, it’s the case that your situation could be worse than it is, even much worse than it is.

Keeping this in mind can help you not only cope with your circumstances, but keep an upbeat attitude as you do. 

Suppose you find yourself living in a crude cabin. Don’t spend your time there worrying about what it would be like to live in a mansion. That’s going to make you miserable. Think instead about what it would be like to live in a tent. Or to live without any shelter at all.

Doing this will help you appreciate the cabin. 

The sense of appreciation brought on by negative visualization wears off, though. Meaning that negative visualization is like a prescription for ointment that says “apply as needed.” 

Fortunately it’s easy to negatively visualize. It can be done almost anywhere. 

In your kitchen, in your workplace, even in a battlefield trench. It can also be done while you’re being wheeled off to surgery. One of the things you can imagine is that your doctor, instead of saying he needed to operate on you, told you that your condition was inoperable. 

Also, negative visualization takes very little energy, just a few seconds of your time. As a practicing Stoic, I might negatively visualize half a dozen times a day.

In the late afternoon it’s not unusual for my wife to hear my voice call out to her from my office that’s in a distant part of the house. And what I’ll say is, “Thanks for existing.”

On hearing this, she knows from experience that I’ve just completed a negative visualization. She also knows that she herself was the subject of that visualization. 

Penis enhancement story in New Yorker was disturbing reading

I love The New Yorker because the magazine exposes me to great writing about important issues (I skip the fiction, preferring the non-fiction articles). But sometimes what I read is so disturbing, yet so eloquently described, I'm torn between finishing an article or putting it aside.

That was my dilemma with Ava Koffman's piece in the July 3, 2023 issue, The Perils and Promises of Penis-Enlargement Surgery: One doctor's Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured.

I'll share a PDF file of the story in case that link doesn't work for non-subscribers.
Download The Perils and Promises of Penis-Enlargement Surgery | The New Yorker

I ended up reading the entire article, which was fascinating and terrifying in equal measure. Until the article came along I knew nothing about this sort of surgery. The first paragraph drew me in, making me want to learn more about why men entrust such a vital and sensitive organ to a surgeon's knife.

They wanted it because they’d just gone through a bad breakup and needed an edge in the volatile dating market; because porn had warped their sense of scale; because they’d been in a car accident, or were looking to fix a curve, or were hoping for a little “software upgrade”; because they were not having a midlife crisis; because they were, “and it was cheaper than a Bugatti Veyron”; because, after five kids, their wife couldn’t feel them anymore; because they’d been molested as a child and still remembered the laughter of the adults in the room; because they couldn’t forget a passing comment their spouse made in 1975; because, despite the objections of their couples therapist, they believed it would bring them closer to their “sex-obsessed” husband (who then had an affair that precipitated their divorce); because they’d stopped changing in locker rooms, stopped peeing in urinals, stopped having sex; because who wouldn’t want it?

Well, nine New Yorker pages later my question became, who would want it?

For while there are plenty of men who are satisfied with their penis-enhancement surgery, there's also plenty who are trapped in a doom loop of seeking help to undo the surgery, which typically isn't easy to accomplish. For the procedure is much more complicated than breast-enhancement surgery.

James Elist is a urologist who is the centerpiece of the article. He developed a silicone implant "shaped like a hot-dog bun which could be implanted just under the skin of the penis to increase its girth and flaccid length."

With the blockbuster launch of Viagra, in 1998, Elist feared that demand for surgical cures for erectile dysfunction would fall, and decided it was time to diversify. Over the years, many of his patients had asked if he could make them bigger while he was down there. Walking around the 90210 Zip Code, where the median breast size seemed to balloon by the day, Elist realized that his next move was staring him in the face.

As he toyed with an early prototype for the Penuma, other doctors were dismissive. The penis—a tentacle that shrinks and swells with an exquisite sensitivity—was nothing like the breast; it wouldn’t be possible, they told him, to put something static under its elastic skin.

Because the F.D.A. requires the pharmaceutical industry to conduct clinical studies of new drugs, it is often assumed that the same is required of medical-device manufacturers. However, a loophole known as the 510(k) process allows companies to implant untested products in patients as long as they can demonstrate that the devices are “substantially equivalent” to those already on the market.

In September, 2004, not long after Elist convinced the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office of the novelty of his invention, he informed the F.D.A. that his “silicone block” was comparable to calf and butt implants. A month later, when the agency cleared the device for the “cosmetic correction of soft-tissue deformities,” the word “penis” did not appear in its indications for use.

The article describes how many of Elist's patients were not at all happy with the penis implant they got, to put it mildly. Here's a sample of the gory details.

For dozens of Penuma patients who spoke to me, the shock of the new was the prelude to graver troubles. Some, like Mick, lost sensation. Others said they experienced stabbing pains in the shower or during sex. Seroma, or excess fluid, was not uncommon. When a defense-and-intelligence contractor’s girlfriend, a registered nurse, aspirated his seroma with a sterile needle, a cup of amber fluid oozed out. The one time they tried to have sex, she told me, the corners of his implant felt like “someone sticking a butter knife inside you.”

Some implants got infected or detached. Others buckled at the corners. Occasionally these protrusions broke through the skin, forming holes that would fester. The hole of the health-spa vice-president was so tiny that he originally mistook its fermented odor for an S.T.D. An engineer with gallows humor played me a video of the snorting crunch his penis made when air moved through a hole. He had two holes, and the skin between them eventually eroded so that a corner of the implant emerged, pearlescent.

Later, doctors unaffiliated with the Penuma would compare such penises to “a torpedo,” “a penguin,” “a pig in a blanket,” “a beer can with a mushroom sticking out on the top,” and “the tipped-down nose of the Concorde.” But the imperturbable assistants at Elist’s clinic, besieged by photographs documenting these phenomena, told patients that they were “healing as expected” and “continuing to heal well!” It was only after months had passed and the men insisted they weren’t healing well at all that Elist would sometimes suggest that an “upgrade” to a bigger size would resolve their problems.

A sad part of Kofman's article was these passages.

What surgeons continually emphasized—the implanters with pride, the explanters with dismay—was that most of the men they were seeing had been of at least average size before going under the knife. (The photographic evidence men sent to me over text and e-mail supported this contention.) “Most don’t have anything physically wrong with them at all, so what they don’t need is vultures preying on them, which is almost always a disaster,” Muir, the London urologist, said.

Along with other urologists and psychiatrists, at King’s College and the University of Turin, Muir conducted a literature review called “Surgical and Nonsurgical Interventions in Normal Men Complaining of Small Penis Size.”

The research showed that men dissatisfied with their penises respond well to educational counselling about the average size, which is 3.6 inches long when flaccid, and 5.2 inches erect. (The average girth is 3.5 inches flaccid, and 4.6 inches erect.) For men who have an excessive and distorted preoccupation with the appearance of their genitals—a form of body dysmorphic disorder—Muir said that cognitive-behavioral therapy and medications may also be necessary.

Which would be a heck of a lot wiser thing to do than get a penis implant.

I'm enjoying Threads as a Twitter killer

I don't post a lot on Twitter, just links to my blog posts, basically, but I follow many people on Twitter and have liked it as a great way to stay informed about subjects I'm interested in: politics, Ukraine war, Oregon news, local weather, and such.

However, after Elon Musk bought Twitter it's become annoying. Musk keeps making arbitrary changes to what once was a successful product. So along with a great many other Twitter users, I've been hoping that a viable alternative to Twitter would come along. In short, a Twitter killer.

Now it has: Threads. 

Instagram’s much-hyped new Twitter-killer app, Threads, is here. And it looks a lot like Twitter. Which is exactly the point.

Many social media users are ready — desperate even — for a solid Twitter replacement, as the app has been going through a particularly rough phase in what many see as its gradual product degeneration under Elon Musk’s leadership. Last weekend, the company started limiting the number of tweets people can read, a questionable business decision that was widely unpopular with users. While there are some alternatives out there, like Mastodon and Bluesky, none have grown to surpass Twitter’s popularity with a critical mass of politically and culturally influential figures.

So Meta-owned Instagram decided to strike while the iron is hot. The Threads app was initially expected to launch later this month, only to be moved up to this Thursday, and now, to today. The app will start to go live for users in 100 countries, although reportedly not in the European Union (more on that later).

Today I got around to setting up Threads after I downloaded the app for my iPhone yesterday. That was easy. I already had a (rarely used) Instagram account, so Threads automatically used the same user name, salembrian.

I then changed my Instagram and Threads user photos to match what I'd been using on Twitter. That's a help to people who followed me on Twitter and wanted to make sure that the Brian Hines on Threads (there's already several of us) is the same guy as the Brian Hines who tweeted as oregonbrian.

Probably I should have figured out a way to make my Threads user name oregonbrian also, but since I won't be posting very much on Threads, it seemed that changing to salembrian had some pluses to it -- such as a feeling of starting fresh on this alternative to Twitter, which I hope turns out to be a Twitter killer.

The look and feel of Threads is close to that of Twitter. Here's a screenshot of my feed.

Threads starts you out with a feed filled with posts, so you aren't met with a blank screen. I started searching for key people and organizations that I follow on Twitter and was pleased to find that many already have a Threads account.

Apparently as time goes on, and a Threads user follows more fellow Threads users, their feed will evolve to be less filled with random posts and more filled with posts from those being followed. That's been my experience so far, which basically means just today.

Threads really does feel like it could be a Twitter killer. This Threads post caught my eye.

Hey, all that is fine with me. I want Threads to grow rapidly and push Twitter into the background as soon as possible. I'm not saying that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg are any sort of social media saints. They're not. 

But at least they favor making their social media offerings fairly safe for users who don't want to be subjected to endless disinformation, hate speech, and other crap that Elon Musk appears to be fine with on Twitter.

So I'm looking forward to seeing what Threads becomes. At the moment, it's looking good.

Our horrible Verizon tech support nightmare

OK, I guess "horrible" and "nightmare" are redundant in the title of this blog post. But after what my wife has gone through the past few days with Verizon, I wanted to include as many nasty adjectives as possible in the title.

Now, maybe this tale of woe will have a happy ending. No matter. Verizon has acted so incompetently after my wife called them about her iPhone losing its cellular service, there's no way we'll go back to thinking of Verizon the way we did before this debacle.

Last Saturday, two days ago, Laurel, my wife, tried to make a call from our home on her iPhone 14 Pro Max that was purchased from Verizon last January. It didn't go through. We have crappy cell service at our house in rural south Salem, Oregon.

However, I'd gotten Verizon to send us a signal booster after we both got new iPhone 14's and it was clear that we still were getting the same one or two bars as we did when we had ancient iPhone 8's. So that was good of Verizon, since the signal booster used our Starlink wi-fi to boost the signal to four strong bars.

Which my iPhone 14 still was getting while Laurel's had no bars at all, just the "SOS" notice that appears when there's no cell service but an emergency call still can be made. Not sure how. Maybe via satellite, since the iPhone 14 has that capability.

I Googled "no cellular connection on iPhone 14" and did some of the recommended things. Turn the phone off and on. Turn airplane mode on and off. Can't remember all that I did, just that when nothing worked, I said to Laurel, "You need to call Verizon."

On our land line, of course, since she had no cell service.

That led to Laurel being on the phone for almost three hours with Verizon tech support staff. First with an agent, then a supervisor, then another tech support person. She ended up being told that the problem had to be with the iPhone, since they couldn't figure out how to get the e-sim (electronic sim) in the iPhone 14 activated again.

So Laurel phoned Apple. We had AppleCare for the almost new iPhone 14. And the tech support person at Apple was pleasingly competent. He did his best to get the cellular connection working, but failed. His view was that the problem almost certainly wasn't with the iPhone, which turned out to be correct.

However, he agreed to send Laurel a new iPhone 14, with the proviso that she pay for the phone with a credit card. Then when Apple got her old iPhone 14 back within ten days, that payment would be reversed. 

Today the new iPhone 14 arrived from Apple. We had some problems transferring data and apps from the old phone to the new one, so Laurel had to call Apple tech support and get some help with that. They recommended backing up to iCloud, then restoring from iCloud, which ended up working fine.

But Apple tech support said Laurel would have to phone Verizon again to have the e-sim activated. 

That's what kicked off the second installment of her Verizon nightmare, for she was on the phone with Verizon tech support staff for four freaking hours, 1:30 to 5:30 pm today. The first tech support person dropped her call, then failed to call her back after she waited for twenty minutes. 

Laurel then called Verizon again and had to go through the horrible process of trying to get a live person to talk to. Verizon has no direct tech support phone number even though she had a ticket number. She ended up talking with four different Verizon staff. 

The last guy was the nicest, but he couldn't figure out the cause of the problem either. He ended up by saying that he'd entered a "Force SIM Status" request, whatever that means. Laurel was told that could take up to five days, so she headed into town and bought a cheap prepaid phone to use until Verizon figures out why she can't use her iPhone for calls and text messages.

Like I said, it's been a nightmare -- about seven hours on the phone over two days with Verizon tech support. Apple tech support was good. Verizon tech support was awful. Hopefully the problem will be resolved in a few days, or we'll be looking for a new cellular service.

Streaming movies and series I've enjoyed recently

Watching entertaining television is as important to my mental health as is my evening dose of relaxing marijuana in a hot bath, both of which I enjoy every day. 

Though we have ten zillion channels (more or less) on our DirecTV subscription, I rarely watch any of them other than for sports and news. Streaming services via our AppleTV device is how my wife and I entertain ourselves, sometimes together, sometimes on separate televisions.

Here's some of what I've enjoyed recently.

Rye Lane on Hulu was highly enjoyable. My wife and I watched this movie together, since we're both fans of romantic comedies. I loved the film's overall vibe. Great dialogue, engaging characters, lots of humor, happy ending (guess that's the case with all romantic comedies). And even though the movie is set in south London, I could understand most of what was said without subtitles. A feel-good film. If you want proof that opposites attract, while also repelling temporarily, Rye Lane provides the evidence.

Extraction 2 on Netflix was a movie that I watched on my own, since I have a much greater attraction to lengthy violent fight scenes and stuff being blown up that my wife does. I wisely preceded my viewing of this film by watching Extraction, since it just made sense to see the sequel after the original. Rest assured that the basic plot is much the same in both movies. Virtually unstoppable guy skilled in hand-to-hand combat and firearms of all types is paid to extract an innocent victim from a nasty situation. Non-spoiler alert: Chris Hemsworth survived Extraction to make Extraction 2, and it sure looks like Extraction 3 is in the works also.

Beef on Netflix appealed to me a lot. Well, aside from the ending of the final episode. That was a letdown, though it didn't take away from the enjoyable drama of watching two Asian-Americans go after each other in marvelously creative and increasingly dire ways after a road rage incident between them escalates into an intense feud. They have to deal with Asian-American stereotypes, such as the high achieving mother who is always in control and never loses her temper. Not happening in Beef, for sure.

Rabbit Hole on Paramount+ provided me a Kiefer Sutherland fix after enjoying him so much in 24, where he played a character vaguely similar to who he is in Rabbit Hole, though also quite different. I enjoyed the twists and turns in this thriller, where you're never quite sure what is real and what isn't, the problem faced by Sutherland and his co-stars also. My main gripe with the series was that it often seemed like it was filmed with a dark filter over the camera. I guess the difficult-to-discern scenes were intended to reflect the shadowy nature of the plot machinations, but I got tired of not being able to tell what was going on. 

Ted Lasso on AppleTV+ deserves a big shoutout since my wife and I watched the final episode of the last season with a bittersweet feeling. Bitter, because a show we liked so much was ending. Sweet, because Ted Lasso gave us so many enjoyable moments over the years. It took us a while to begin watching the series, since we couldn't believe that an American heading to England to coach a soccer team even though he knew next to nothing about soccer could be entertaining. Wow, we were so wrong. The positivity and endearing corniness of Ted Lasso, a truly unforgettable TV character, hooked us on the show instantly. You'll be missed, Ted. (We really did feel like we were losing a friend as the final credits appeared on the screen.)

Photos of Chintimini Wildlife Center in Corvallis releasing Great Horned Owl

Last Friday my wife, Laurel, and I attended a Wings and Wine event at Cubanisimo Vineyards in West Salem.

The main focus of the "wings" part was the release of a Great Horned Owl that had finished its rehabilitation and was ready to be returned to the wild by the folks at the Chintimini Wildlife Center in Corvallis.

Join us for a memorable and unique opportunity to witness the remarkable journey of a rehabilitated Great Horned Owl as it takes flight and returns to the wild! This patient arrived at our center from West Salem, orphaned, hungry, and in need of help. We were unable to reunite this nestling owlet with its parents, so the journey of raising them to be wild began! Want to learn how we accomplished this patient’s successful rehabilitation story? On Friday, June 23rd at Cubanisimo Vineyards, 1754 Best Rd NW, Salem, OR 97304, you and your family can witness his return and learn how from 5:30 – 8:30 PM. 

Before I share photos of the release of the owl, here's some photos I took prior to the release when Chintimini staff showed off a couple of falcons and answered questions about the birds and their care.

I can't remember the name of this little falcon, so let's just call it Little Falcon. However, when it opened up its wings, it looked a lot more falcon'y.

The other falcon brought to the event was a peregrine falcon. It was much larger than Little Falcon. Wikipedia says that peregrines can achieve speeds over 200 mph when they dive, making them the fastest animal on earth. Its talons were scary looking. I asked if it needed to have them clipped. The answer was yes, since while a falcon is being rehabilitated, it isn't landing on rocks and such that keep talons shorter in the wild.

After drinking wine and admiring the falcons, it was time for the release of the Great Horned Owl. Since the orphaned owlet had come from West Salem, we were told that it was appropriate to release it in West Salem.

The owl had been put in a large cage as it grew up, which enabled it to fly around and practice hunting skills. Nonetheless, a Chintimini staff member said that it was impossible to predict what would happen when its cage was opened, as sometimes a bird will just sit there rather than fly off.

Us viewers of the owl release were given one task to do: stay silent. No talking before the release. No cheering after the release. The Great Horned Owl didn't need any distractions. Here we all are waiting expectantly.

The carrying case had to be unsealed, which entailed some cutting of zip ties, or whatever was holding the case shut.

The staff didn't need to worry about the owl remaining in its cage. It flew off like a rocket as soon as the door of the container was opened. You'll have to imagine a Great Horned Owl in rapid flight, as my iPhone 14 and my reflexes were utterly incapable of capturing the moment.

Since there were so many avid bird watchers at the event, that explained the impressive cameras I saw some people carrying. Perhaps an expert photographer caught the owl in flight.

Here's where the Great Horned Owl headed off to so quickly, one of the tall fir trees adjacent to the vineyard. Interestingly, as soon as the owl landed in the trees, a blackbird flew from the vineyard to the owl's location. I recall that staff said blackbirds are territorial. But since the owl is much larger than a blackbird, it wasn't going to feel threatened.

Videos and photos of 2023 Salem World Beat festival

The World Beat festival is always one of my favorite events in Salem. This year it didn't disappoint. I went this afternoon, Saturday. There's another day to the festival, so go on Sunday if you can.

It's a marvelous celebration of diversity.

I love how the booths -- and the people attending to them -- run the gamut of the world. Asia Pacific, European, Africa and Middle East, Americas. There's food, crafts, clothing, and performances representing each of these festival areas.

The Main Stage Amphitheater is where the biggest performances are. I happened by when an Aztec Dance group, Ameyalmatzatl Citlatonal, was just entering the stage. Here's a video I made of the colorful smoke-filled ceremony that preceded their true dancing.

I also took some photos with my iPhone 14 which turned out pretty well, given that I wasn't super close to the stage.

I also enjoyed watching the Miz La Fontaine Bollywood dancers. I love the music, energy, and style of Bollywood. This routine that I made a video of has a bit of disco feel mixed in at one point. I can't embed it in this post for some reason, maybe because the music was copyrighted. You can watch it on You Tube.

This booth caught my eye. Some kids were enjoying it also.


lt seemed like there were more people at the World Beat festival this year. But I recall that last year it was hotter, while today it was very pleasant, around 80.

I rarely eat crepes, but near the end of my World Beat visit I couldn't resist trying the Red Berry from this Eugene-based food truck. What I learned is that when a just-made crepe is handed to you all folded up in a cardboard cone, it's damn hot. Also, that eating a rolled up crepe can be messier than consuming one on a plate. Fortunately, the red berry stains on my lime-green t-shirt came out after some scrubbing when I got home .


l enjoy walking through this red structure that contrasts so nicely with the green trees. Reminds me of how my t-shirt looked after eating the crepe, now that I think about it.

Titanic submersible tragedy shows need for regulation

Today we learned that the five men who were on the Titan, a submersible craft that was on its way to the wreck of the Titanic, are dead after the Titan imploded under the tremendous pressures in the ocean depths.

The good news is that the five men must have been killed instantly. I and countless others had been having waking nightmares about their slow death from lack of oxygen as they sat on the ocean floor 12,500 feet from the surface.

Now it appears that the submersible imploded at the same time its mother ship lost contact with the Titan, about an hour and forty-five minutes into its two and half hour descent to the Titanic. So there must have been some kind of structural failure that led to the Titan breaking into pieces and creating a large debris field near the wreckage of the Titanic. 

The United States Navy is reporting that secret Navy sensors detected the implosion at about the time communication with the Titan was lost. 

The U.S. Navy, using data from a secret network of underwater sensors designed to track hostile submarines, detected “an anomaly consistent with an implosion or explosion” in the vicinity of the Titan submersible at the time communications with the vessel were lost on Sunday, two senior Navy officials said on Thursday.

But with no other indications of a catastrophe, one of the officials said, the search was continued.

The data from the sensors was combined with information from airborne Navy P-8 surveillance planes and sonar buoys on the surface to triangulate the approximate location of the Titan, one of the officials said. The analysis of undersea acoustic data and information about the location of the noise were then passed on to the Coast Guard official in charge of the search, Rear Adm. John Mauger.

We shouldn't view this catastrophe as akin to climbers being killed on Mt. Everest or people dying in the course of undertaking some other dangerous activity. That way of looking at it ignores the important differences with the submersible disaster. 

For one thing, it's a big stretch for OceanGate, the company that owned and operated the Titan, to call those on the submersible "mission specialists." Though several had extensive experience with deep sea dives, including the CEO and co-founder of OceanGate, Stockton Rush, who was the pilot of the submersible, two were simply tourists who paid $250,000 each to take the trip.

It pains me to see their photo. The father and son must have viewed this as the biggest adventure of their lifetime. Instead it turned out to be the last thing they'd ever do in life: die almost instantly as the Titan burst apart.

Shahzada and Suleman Dawood surely recognized that the descent to the Titanic was risky. But probably they weren't aware that OceanGate and Stockton Rush had constructed the Titan without going through usual procedures for testing and certifying a submersible of this sort.

A CNN story describes the unnecessary risk-taking with the lives of paying passengers.

The focus on the vessel has renewed criticisms of OceanGate’s approach to safety from employees and other industry leaders. The 23,000-pound deep-sea vessel was made of an experimental combination of carbon fiber and titanium and relied on decidedly low-tech parts, such as a video game controller.

...The implosion of the Titan and deaths of those on board has put its operator’s safety procedures under the microscope.

Rush, the CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, told a Mexican travel blogger in 2021 he wanted to be known as an innovator who broke the rules.

“I think it was (US Army) Gen. (Douglas) MacArthur who said, ‘You’re remembered for the rules you break,’” Rush told Alan Estrada, who documented his trip to the Titanic, including an aborted attempt in July 2021 before a successful visit in 2022.

“And you know,” Rush added, “I’ve broken some rules to make this.”

At least two former OceanGate employees years ago expressed safety concerns about the vessel’s hull, including the thickness of the material used and testing procedures, CNN has learned.

OceanGate Expeditions strayed from industry norms by declining a voluntary, rigorous safety review of the vessel, according to an industry leader. If the company had pursued a certification review “some of this may have been avoided,” Will Kohnen of the Marine Technology Society told CNN on Wednesday.

The company also faced a series of mechanical problems and inclement weather conditions that forced the cancellation or delays of trips in recent years, according to court records. The scuttled excursions led to a pair of lawsuits in which some high-paying customers sought to recoup the cost of trips they said they didn’t take. The complaints alleged that the company overstated its ability to reach the Titanic wreckage.

OceanGate did not respond to the claims in court and could not be reached for comment.

Some expeditions were delayed after OceanGate was forced to rebuild the Titan’s hull because it showed “cyclic fatigue” and wouldn’t be able to travel deep enough to reach the Titanic’s wreckage, according to a 2020 article by GeekWire, which interviewed the company’s CEO.

Several reporters who boarded the Titan noted some of these issues.

For one, Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown” host Josh Gates and his team decided after a 2021 test dive of the Titan against filming a segment on the vessel as it “became clear to us at that time that there was a lot that needed to be worked out with the sub,” he said.

A lot of the systems worked but a lot of them really didn’t. We had issues with thrusters and issues with computer control and things like that. Ultimately, it was a challenging dive,” Gates told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday.

“We were inside Titan for two or three hours, and there were a lot of things that weren’t really ready for prime time, it seemed,” he said.

If Stockton Rush, the OceanGate CEO who was so proud of breaking rules when it came to deep sea exploration, had been the only person to die in the submersible that almost certainly imploded because of design/construction rule-breaking, we could say that he died as he lived -- taking risks.

But Rush's rule-breaking caused four other people to die with him also. And that should tarnish Rush's legacy big time. If a climber on Mt. Everest falls to their death after attempting an unnecessarily risky climbing move, fine, they died doing what they loved. But if that risky move causes four other people roped to them to die also, then the climber deserves a huge amount of criticism.

Hopefully this tragedy will lead to greater regulation of submersibles, especially those being used to take paying customers to ocean depths. Those who say that government regulation isn't necessary are dead wrong. 

In this case, five deaths wrong.

Just as I thought, the 1970s were wet in Oregon and recent years dry

Having reached the age when I'm inclined to talk about the "good old days" as if they were truly good (usually they weren't), I'm understandably cautious about claiming that Oregon was much wetter when I moved here in 1971.

That's sort of like us old folks blabbing on about walking to school in the snow while those dang young'uns nowadays get driven in heated vehicles. OK, I grew up in a part of California where it never snowed, so that's a bad example for me.

But I do have distinct memories of much more intense rain here in western Oregon during the 1970s and 1980s compared to now. Storm after storm would roll in from the Pacific, causing it to rain for weeks on end sometimes.

That happens rarely now. Not at all in recent years. At least, that's how I recall things. So to check my memory, I fired up Google and asked "has Oregon weather changed since the 1970s." Here's what I found out.

Regarding precipitation, the section on drought in the Sixth Oregon Climate Assessment report of January 2023 contained this interesting chart.

It shows how precipitation in Oregon compares to the 1901-2000 average for every water year from 1895 to 2021. (I'm pretty sure the water year is from October to September.)

A green bar means precipitation in that year was above the long term average. A brown bar means precipitation in that year was below the long term average. The 1920s and 1930s were decidedly dry. This coincides with the dust bowl in the midwest, a horrendous drought.

The 1970s were quite wet in Oregon. Seven of the ten years were above the long term average. The 1980s had six years above average, and the 1990s six years above average, with 1996 being the wettest year ever. I remember 1996 well, as the very heavy winter rain caused two very large oak trees on our rural property to topple over.

By contrast, the 2000s were very dry in Oregon, with only one year out of ten having above average precipitation. The 2010s saw six wetter than average years. But so far in the 2020s, both 2020 and 2021 were drier than average, with 2021 being the fourth driest year since 1970, over 50 years ago.

The report says, "In 17 of the last 23 water years, Oregon’s precipitation was below average." So yeah, Oregon has been getting drier.

Regarding temperature, not surprisingly the Stacker web site shows Oregon as warming 1.8 degrees since 1970. However of the 48 states that have state-level temperature data (Hawaii and Alaska don't), Oregon ranked 46th in temperature change.

Meaning, every other state in the lower 48 other than Washington and Idah0 has experienced a greater increase in temperature than Oregon. So that's a benefit of living in the Pacific Northwest. We're getting hotter, but not so much comparatively. Salem, though, apparently has been experiencing more of an increase in temperature than Portland or Eugene.

A queer girl talks about being mistreated in Keizer

Thanks to the Salem-Keizer Proletariat substack writer, who on June 8 published "Keizer marks Pride Month with powerful call to do better," I learned about a moving example of speaking truth to power by McNary student Nevaeh Music -- who addressed the Keizer City Council at the invitation of Mayor Kathy Clark.

Below is an excerpt from this post.

Music is Clark’s youth appointee to the city’s Community Diversity Engagement Committee - the only youth position in Keizer city government with committee voting power.

Clark indicated Music was invited to speak to the Council about Pride Month. But it was clear Music intended to use her time to instead tell an uncomfortable truth about Keizer, and a stern reminder to do better. 

Here’s what Music said: (linked here and transcribed below)

You can read what Music said on the Salem-Keizer Proletariat post. The link above will take you to a YouTube video of the city council meeting that begins with Music's remarks. I've embedded the video below.

It's clear from Music's remarks that homophobia isn't just a vestige of our country's bigoted past, but is alive and well in Keizer. And not only there, but just about everywhere. Dislike of the LGBTQ community just isn't as obvious in Oregon as it used to be.

That's progress. Yet Nevaeh Music reminds us of how much more remains to be done. By all of us.

I wrote about this yesterday on my Church of the Churchless blog in a post I called The beauty of "We don't not care" rather than "We don't care."  Here's an excerpt, along with the video I shared.

Sometimes a television program can get a moral point across in a few minutes of entertainment that is more clear and convincing than a lengthy ethical treatise.

That happened to me last night when my wife and I were watching an episode of season 3 of Ted Lasso on AppleTV+.

Before I share a clip of that scene, a bit of background. 

Colin, one of the soccer (football, to most of the world) players on the professional team Lasso is coaching, inadvertently revealed that he was gay, homosexual, to the team captain, Isaac, when Isaac saw some photos on Colin's phone.

Isaac then gave Colin the cold shoulder, ignoring him and even acting nasty toward him during the first half of their soccer match. I thought Isaac was being homophobic. Not true. We later learn that Isaac was upset that Colin hadn't told him he was gay.

At halftime, after the team had played poorly, a fan yelled that they were all a bunch of faggots -- a derogatory term for a male homosexual. That set Isaac off. He charged into the seats, accosting the fan, which led to him getting a red card and being ejected from the game.

During the team's halftime meeting, Lasso asked why Isaac acted that way. Someone said that maybe it was because Isaac was gay. But Colin then revealed to the team for the first time that he was gay.

The reaction from team members: "We don't care." That spurred Ted Lasso to relate one of his folksy stories in order to convey a message to his team.

What struck me about this little speech was how while "We don't care" was supposed to express support for Colin, that actually was a weak gesture for their gay teammate. 

Sure, we don't care that you're gay is much better than we dislike that you're gay, but it's way worse than we care about you and will support you. Which is why Lasso put it as "We don't not care." Because they actually do care about Colin.

The meaning I took away from this is that we shouldn't sit on the sidelines when someone or something we care about is being attacked or threatened or denigrated or ignored.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has screwed up Hollywood

I'm no superhero fan when it comes to movies. I can't understand their appeal, though I readily admit that I've only seen the first Wonder Woman movie, the first Iron Man movie, and the first Black Panther movie.

When someone in my Tai Chi class asks me if I've seen the newest Guardian of the Galaxy movie, what goes through my mind is, Good god, no; if I was confined to solitary confinement and had a choice between seeing Guardian of the Galaxy or staring blankly into space, I'd choose the blank stare.

But instead I just say, "I'm not into superhero movies. Is this one any good?" That stimulates an excited description with names of characters like Thor I've vaguely heard mentioned, but couldn't care less about. 

After all, I'm 74, not seven. I grew up watching Superman on a black and white television. I enjoyed his exploits. Until I became old enough to appreciate different sorts of TV shows and movies. So it baffles me how so many adults these days are obsessed with comic book characters.

A story in the June 12 issue of The New Yorker both explained the appeal of one set of superhero movies, the Marvel variety, and the deleterious effect these movies have had on other kinds of movie-making. Here's some excerpts from Michael Schulman's How the Marvel Cinematic Universe Swallowed Hollywood.

Whether you have spent the past decade and a half avoiding Marvel movies like scabies or are in so deep that you can expound on the Sokovia Accords, it is impossible to escape the films’ intergalactic reach.

Collectively, the M.C.U. [Marvel Cinematic Universe] movies—the thirty-second, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” opened in May—have grossed more than twenty-nine billion dollars, making the franchise the most successful in entertainment history. The deluge of content extends to TV series and specials, with an international fan base that scours every teaser and corporate shakeup for clues about what’s coming next.

As in the comics, the M.C.U.’s chief innovation is a shared fictional canvas, where Spider-Man can call on Doctor Strange, and Iron Man can battle Thor’s wily brother. Hollywood has always had sequels, but the M.C.U. is a web of interconnecting plots: new characters are introduced, either in their own movies or as side players in someone else’s, then collide in climactic Avengers films.

In the seventies, “Jaws” and “Star Wars” gave Hollywood a new model for making money: the endlessly promoted summer blockbuster. The M.C.U. multiplied the formula, so that each blockbuster begets another. David Crow, a senior editor for the Web site Den of Geek, calls it a “roadmap for a product that never ends.”

Twenty years ago, few people would have bet that a struggling comic-book company would turn a bunch of second-string superheroes into movie icons—much less swallow the film industry whole.

Yet the Marvel phenomenon has yanked Hollywood into a franchise-drunk new era, in which intellectual property, more than star power or directorial vision, drives what gets made, with studios scrambling to cobble together their own fictional universes. The shift has come at a perilous time for moviegoing.

Audiences, especially since the pandemic, are seeing fewer films in the theatre and streaming more from home, forcing studios to lean on I.P.-driven tentpoles like “The Super Mario Bros. Movie.” Kevin Goetz, the founder of Screen Engine, which studies audience behavior, pointed to Marvel’s sense of “elevated fun” to explain why it gets people to the theatre: “They’re carnival rides, and they’re hefty carnival rides.”

Marvel’s success, he added, has “sucked the air out of” more human-scaled entertainments. Whole species of movies—adult dramas, rom-coms—have become endangered, since audiences are happy to wait and stream “Tár” or “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” or to get their grownup kicks from such series as “Succession” or “The White Lotus.”

Yet even prestige television has become overrun with Marvel, “Star Wars,” and “The Lord of the Rings” series, which use the small screen to map out new corners of their trademarked galaxies. Hollywood writers, who are currently striking over the constricted economics of streaming, also complain of the constricted imaginations of TV executives: instead of searching for the next “Mad Men,” they’re hunting for Batman spinoffs.

Marvel’s fanciful house style has rubbed off even on Oscar winners. This year’s Best Picture, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” had a Marvel-ish meld of walloping action, goofy humor, and multiverse mythology; it could have easily functioned as the origin story for a new Avenger. Marvel, meanwhile, has colonized nearly every other genre.

“WandaVision” was a pastiche of classic sitcoms; “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” was a feminist legal comedy. Detractors see the brand’s something-for-everyone approach as nefarious. An executive at a rival studio, who called the M.C.U. “the Death of All Cinema,” told me that the dominance of Marvel movies “has served to accelerate the squeezing out of the mid-range movie.” His studio’s comedies had been struggling at the box office, and he groused, “If people want a comedy, they’re going to go see ‘Thor’ or ‘Ant-Man’ as their comedy now.”

This is sad for movie lovers like me who aren't into comic books adapted for the big screen. The only good news I could find in The New Yorker story came near the end of it.

All this followed Iger’s comments, at an investor conference, that Disney would reduce its content, including endless Marvel retreads. “Sequels typically work well for us, but do you need a third or a fourth, for instance?” he said. With all the oversaturation, palace intrigue, and brand deterioration, the M.C.U. juggernaut finally appeared to be showing cracks.

The release, last month, of “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”—which grossed twenty-eight million dollars less on its opening weekend than the previous installment—did little to dispel the feeling that Marvel fatigue is real, and that Feige is spread too thin for the avalanche of content.

“The one downside to Marvel is that it all bottlenecks at Kevin,” the former executive said. “I think everyone’s agreeing that this is not the optimal amount of stuff.” Scientists predict that our own universe will begin to contract in the next hundred million years; the Marvel Cinematic Universe, having reached its outer limits, may be subject to a similar law of nature.

Hoping for some Oregon State magic in NCAA baseball playoffs

Once again, I've become an Oregon State baseball fan now that the NCAA playoffs have begun. I would have started my fandom earlier, but DirecTV still doesn't carry the Pac12 Networks, so I've got no way to watch most the games in the regular season.

Well, I've also become an Oregon baseball fan, since they too are in the playoffs.

And at the moment, faring better than Oregon State -- which lost to LSU today, so that means Oregon State has to beat Sam Houston tonight (score is 3-1 in OSU's favor at the moment), then beat LSU twice tomorrow to make it to the super regionals.

Oregon just has to beat Xavier to be in the super regionals. With the score 10-1 in the 7th inning, things are looking good for Oregon.

But I'm not counting Oregon State out. Back in 2018 OSU lost the first game in the College World Series, which put it in the loser's bracket. But as I wrote about in "Watching the Oregon State baseball team is better than watching a thriller," they won four games in a row to make it into the World Series final.

This year, Oregon State won its first game in the regional series, so all OSU has to do, as noted above, is win three games in a row over about 24 hours to get into a super regional matchup. Tough to accomplish, but not impossible.

I quickly discovered that most of the playoff games featuring Oregon State and Oregon are only being shown on ESPN+. Because I'm not a huge sports fan, most of the sports I want to watch is shown on channels I get on DirecTV, aside from the Pac12 Networks.

Because I wanted to follow Oregon State and Oregon in the baseball playoffs, I finally paid attention to ESPN+, which I always thought was another free channel in the ESPN lineup. Nope. It costs, even if you already have a subscription to ESPN.

I didn't feel like forking over $99 a year just for ESPN+. Then I remembered that we have Disney+ and Hulu subscriptions. Disney owns ESPN and offers a package deal for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+.

After a bit of difficulty figuring out how to sign up for that package, I was able to log into my Hulu account and change it to the Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ package. I kept our ad-free subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu. ESPN+ only comes with ads.

It turned out that after our annual subscription to Disney+ was factored in, I'll be paying $9 a month for the package. That's less than what it cost just for ad-free Hulu, so I'm getting ESPN+ for free. Or actually less than free.

Even so, as soon as I started watching the first Oregon State playoff game, Sam Houston scored two runs in the top of the first inning, briefly making me wonder if Oregon State was going to get blown out. Pleasingly, the opposite happened, with Oregon State scoring the next 18 runs, winning 18-2.

Tonight Oregon State is still leading 3-1 in the bottom of the 7th. Hopefully their lead will hold up, as I'd like to see them beat LSU at least once tomorrow. Twice would be amazing.

I'll miss Succession. But not what the Roy family stood for.

The past five years and four seasons of Succession, a highly entertaining and addictive HBO series, captivated me and my wife. 

There's never been a TV show that captured so brilliantly the devious machinations of a powerful family, the Roys, as the children of billionaire mogul Logan Roy vie to succeed him as the leader of his company. 

Without exception the acting was superb. The writing, exquisite. The plot twists, tantalizing. The humor, darkly funny. 

I was sad when the closing credits appeared on last Sunday's final episode of the concluding season. While the Roy family couldn't be said to be likable -- in fact, none of the primary characters were -- I deeply liked their unlikability. 

Well, let me take that last sentence back a bit, because some memories of touching moments in Succession just occurred to me.

The Roy family often would speak of loving each other, and sometimes that seemed to be true.

But only briefly. Then they would go back to playing their vicious rich people games. Lacking nothing material, having more money than they could ever spend, their concerns centered around who their father favored as his successor and how they were faring in various financial power struggles.

In last Sunday's New York Times, there was a story by James Poniewozik that captured what was most politically disturbing about Succession. I'd had vague feelings about what was said in the story, which was titled in the print edition, "In 'Succession,' Troubles of Rich Are Ours Too." But Poniewozik crystallized for me what was most wrong about the Roy family.

As is the case with most of our nation's real-world billionaires, the selfish desires of the super-super-rich aren't just something to be viewed from afar by us ordinary citizens as tasty soap-opera morsels. No, those desires have consequences for everybody, given how powerful the Elon Musk's and Rupert Murdoch's of our culture have become.

Here's excerpts from the New York Times story.

On Nov. 21, 1980, more than 83 million people — over three-quarters of the entire American TV viewership — watched “Who Done It?,” the episode of “Dallas” that revealed who shot the love-to-hate-him oil magnate J.R. Ewing. The mystery, which CBS milked for eight solid months, was a consuming obsession, a Texas-sized example of the power of 20th-century TV to focus the world on one thing.

On Sunday, HBO’s “Succession” will answer the question (or not) of who inherits the media empire of the late tyrant Logan Roy in front of a viewership of — well, a lot less than 83 million. (The show’s final season premiere had 2.3 million same-day viewers; delayed viewing on streaming brings the total average audience to over 8 million.)

Airing its finale to a much more dispersed audience is a fitting end to the saga of a family that got rich off the modern media market, whose final episodes are set against the backdrop of a country that is coming apart.

But numbers aside, “Succession” is in many ways the premium-cable, late-capitalist heir to “Dallas,” a prime-time saga that uses delicious dialogue and sibling rivalries to explore the particular nature of wealth in its time. It’s “Dallas” after 40-plus years of wealth concentration and media fragmentation.

The “Who Shot J.R.?” sensation was, in retrospect, the high-water mark of mass media’s reach. In 1980, three networks still controlled the entire TV audience, which they would soon have to share with cable. It was also a cultural turning point; prime time was becoming fascinated with the rich just as the Reagan Revolution was beginning.

“Succession” is very different from “Dallas” in the details. There are no twangy accents, assassination attempts, cliffhangers or season-long dreams. Its plot turns are simply, devastatingly inevitable: The show sets up conditions, gives its characters motivations and lets them act in their interests. (“Yellowstone” is a closer heir to “Dallas” in both cowboy hats and murder plots.)

And if the “Succession” audience is smaller, the money is, pointedly, bigger. Rewatched in 2023, the idea of luxury in “Dallas” looks quaint, almost dowdy. The aesthetic is Texan country club; the Ewing homestead, the size of a decent suburban McMansion, is a toolshed next to the Manhattan aeries, Hamptons manors and Italian villas that the Roys flitter among.

Some of this is a matter of modern premium-cable budgets vs. the grind of old-school network-TV production, of course. But it also reflects the changed, distorting nature of modern riches. In 1980, American wealth inequality was still near its postwar lows. Since then, the wealth of the top .01 percent has grown at a rate roughly five times as much as that of the population overall. Today, the very rich are very, very, very richer.

The holdings of Waystar Royco — Hollywood studios, cruise lines, newspapers, amusement parks, a king-making right-wing news channel — make Ewing Oil look like a franchise gas station. We know only vaguely how Logan Roy built his empire, but it was enabled partly by the media-consolidation and antitrust deregulation, beginning in the “Dallas”/Reagan era, that allowed his real-life analogues like Rupert Murdoch to make their own piles.

...“Succession” has long hinted at the Roys’ willingness to play footsie with dark political forces for ratings and influence. Waystar’s right-wing news network, ATN, leaves a popular commentator on the air despite his Nazi sympathies. The family backs a far-right presidential candidate, Jeryd Mencken, who voices openness to the ideas of Hitler and Franco. (Mencken fittingly shares a surname with the American writer who said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”)

Late in the final season, the close presidential election is disrupted by a fire, apparently started by Mencken supporters, that incinerates thousands of ballots for his opponent in liberal Milwaukee. In exchange for Mencken’s regulatory cooperation in a struggle over control of the company, ATN declares the handsome fascist the winner, legitimizing his claim to power amid a legal challenge. The result leads to riots. But it’s great for ratings.

As for American democracy — well, good luck! Part of the fantasy of past rich-family sagas was that none of the drama affected you, even by implication. When Ewings did each other dirty in the oil business, you were never asked to imagine yourself, somewhere offscreen, seeing your gas prices go up.

“Succession,” on the other hand, argues that the problems of today’s hyper-rich inevitably become ours because they have so much influence and so little sense of responsibility. (Its main exception is the Pierce family, the owners of a rival media empire, whose blue-blood noblesse oblige comes across as patronizing and ineffectual.) We are swamped in the wake of their yachts and chopped up by the propeller blades, even if the billionaires, sitting on the top deck, scarcely feel a bump.

And while the damaged characters are fascinating, even pitiable, there’s no one among the Roys or their enablers worth rooting for. As with “Game of Thrones,” if you think the important thing is who finally ends up in the big chair, you’re missing the point.

A little Memorial Day tale of grocery coupon kindness

Memorial Day is about recognizing the ultimate sacrifice for our country: losing one's life. That deserves a lot of praise. But so do lesser sacrifices ordinary Americans perform every day to make things better for their fellow citizens.

That's who I want to honor today.

Not just those who have died fighting for the United States, but everybody who engages in actions large or small for the greater good. What happened to me while grocery shopping last week got me thinking about this.

I was in a checkout line at the south Salem Fred Meyer. The clerk had scanned my purchases and was ready to charge my credit card. But she paused, picked up a coupon, and read it closely. I was perplexed, since I hadn't given her any coupons.

"Someone couldn't use this," the clerk told me. "They asked that I use the coupon for someone who could. You know, a pay it forward thing." So I got $1 off a container of Baby Spring Mix organic salad greens. 

That spurred me to look in my wallet for a Fred Meyer grocery coupon that I'd been carrying around for a while because I never buy enough groceries to use the $7 off a purchase of $70 or more. I handed the coupon to the clerk.

"This is a good deal," I said. "Seven dollars off. Use the coupon when someone qualifies for it." The clerk asked if I was sure I wanted to give it away. Absolutely, I told her, mentioning that I never buy $70 worth of groceries.

As I headed off to my car after checking out, I realized that I felt hugely better about giving the $7 off coupon away, than I did about getting $1 subtracted from the cost of the salad greens. The adage it's better to give than to receive popped into my brain.

(The Bible says "more blessed" rather than "better." However, since I'm not religious, I prefer better.)

It's wonderful that evolution has led us humans to feel good about doing good. That's because our species is intensely social. In the early history of Homo sapiens, as today, we thrived by cooperating with each other to accomplish things beyond the capacity of any individual or small group.

Giving is one way we continue to form the bonds that tie us together, notwithstanding all the political and other pressures that drive us apart. When I thought about someone smiling at being able to get $7 off due to the coupon I gave the clerk, I was filled with the warm glow that comes from giving.

Almost everybody feels that way when they act in a way that makes life better for someone else.

In fact, probably I shouldn't have added that "Almost." Even the most selfish Wall Street trader, whose goal is making bucketloads of money for themselves and their firm, likely feels good that they're playing their part in the game of capitalism that keeps our country's powerful financial machinery humming.

So here's to all of the people who give to the greater good. Who are, again, everybody. Trash collectors. Medical personnel. Teachers. Plumbers. Store clerks. Students. Nursing home residents. Everywhere we look, there's fellow citizens giving of themselves.

Last night, on the 11 pm KGW news, there was a story about how electrical linemen are trained, who work with experienced crews from the very begging of their training. One of the trainees said that he loves it when lights go on in a house because of what his team did.

That's giving. That's sacrifice. Not nearly as dramatic as Patrick Henry's famous ""I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country," yet praiseworthy all the same.

 

My memory of Tina Turner

I saw Tina Turner perform with her jerk husband Ike at either Winterland or Fillmore in San Francisco during my college days in 1968 or 1969. (Hey, like they say, if you can clearly remember the 60's, you weren't really there.)

I was high on something, naturally. Being close to the stage, absorbing her amazing energy -- that was an experience I'll never forget. So sorry that she died. Here's a song of hers that sends chills up my spine.

Check out slides of the exciting re-development of Truitt Brothers cannery

There's some really encouraging stuff happening in Salem's urban core. Hey, at some point we may not need to feel like the boring-by-comparison waypoint between Portland and Eugene.

That was the upbeat message I got at today's Salem City Club program about the development of downtown and riverfront properties.

The speakers were Jordan Truitt, who used to be plant manager of the Truitt Brothers cannery just north of downtown, Jim Vu, board president of the Salem Main Street Association, and Shelly Ehenger, Urban Development Program Manager for the City of Salem.

In this post I'm just going to share the Truitt presentation. I'll discuss what Vu and Ehenger had to say in another post.

Truitt showed slides of the current plan to refashion the cannery into a vibrant mixed use development. I took photos of the slides. He started off talking about an invisible barrier between downtown and north downtown, which the cannery project will help erase.

The slide below shows the big picture of the cannery property.

The cannery property has a long history. It was first used as a cannery in 1917. The Truitt family took it over in 1973.

This was a touching slide of a multigenerational family connected to the cannery.

Canning used to be a really big deal in Salem.

Until it wasn't. Truitt said that pears from Hood River ended up costing twice as much as a can of pears from China.


After this bit of history, Truitt shifted to talking about plans for the property.

There would be true riverfront dining on a structure extending over the water.

Plenty of housing, along with retail shops.

A soccer stadium is being considered. I don't think this is the best use of the riverfront property. But I'm not a big soccer fan.

In a Zen-like comment, Truitt said "the train is the train." Adding "it will always be there."

Here's how people can help make the project become a reality.

It won't be easy. Truitt said this would be a $170 million development, with all the complexities that come with such a large project. 

I'm told, "Hey, you got a bit in my face there, man"

I'm a pretty mild-mannered guy. Yes, I get irritated at people. But almost always I either keep my irritation to myself, or express it in as respectful a manner as possible.

That's why what happened at my athletic club today surprised me.

I was almost finished using the weight machines in what used to be called the Circuit Training room. It was termed that because the basic idea of it is that you go from machine to machine, getting a full body workout.

But some club members who focus on the free weights and different machines in an adjoining room will use a "circuit" machine for a long time, doing a series of varying weights and rest periods in between.

That will irk me if I'm feeling rushed. Which I usually am, because I try to leave just enough time to do my workout before my afternoon Tai Chi class downtown. 

Today I was down to my last couple of weight machines when I saw two young guys begin to use one of the machines that I hadn't gotten to yet. OK, no big deal, I thought. One of them would use the machine, then go into the free weight room to do something else while the other guy would use the machine.

This repeated several times. Again, no big deal. I figured that I could come back and finish the circuit after doing some Tai Chi on my own in an upstairs workout room.

But then, yay!, it looked like both of the guys had finished using the machine that was my last stop in the circuit room.

One of them was standing next to the machine with his back to me, using his phone. I waited for a bit to see if he was going to get back to using the weight machine. Didn't look like it, so I walked up and said, "You done?"

He said, "Yes." I reached around him and adjusted the weight to what I was going to use. Then he said, "Let me wipe it off first." Meaning, use disinfectant on a cloth to clean any sweaty parts.

Sometimes people go overboard on the wiping, and I was anxious to finish my workout so I wouldn't be late for my Tai Chi class. So I told the guy, "No big deal. I'm not fussy." I've said this before to club members who want to clean a machine before I use it.

My unspoken message is that I'm fine with a bit of sweat, and besides, I'm going to wipe off the machine after I use it. But the guy took what I said in a different way.

After some wiping, he walked away into the free weight room, saying over his shoulder, "Hey, you got a bit in my face there, man." That surprised me. Even shocked me a bit.

I was just trying to save him some cleaning time. I had zero ill will toward him, since while he and his friend were taking turns using the machine, I recalled the time that I showed a friend of mine how the circuit machines functioned, which entailed me using a machine then him using the same machine.

So I wasn't even irritated, as sometimes I am, that he and his friend had spent so much time on the machine.

What struck me about this encounter, as minor as it was, is how so many people these days, me certainly included, are quick to take offense at small things. Like someone driving too slow, or too fast. Or having a lengthy discussion with a checkout clerk about the price of an item they think is on sale while fellow shoppers wait in line in back of them.

(I didn't pick these examples out of thin air; they're some of my habitual gripes.)

I wasn't blameless, of course. I could have simply said, "Thanks," when the guy said he was going to clean the machine. However, he could have done the old-fashioned respect your elders thing, since I clearly was old enough to be his father, and maybe even his grandfather.

I admit, though, that I sort of liked that he treated me like another young guy that he was irked with. That "man" on the end of his "Hey, you got a bit in my face there, man" comment made me feel kind of good.

How my trabeculectomy is doing 7 1/2 weeks after surgery

This is a follow-up to my initial blog post about the trabeculectomy eye surgery I had on March 6, reported on in "My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun."

As a Johns Hopkins article about trabeculectomy says, this surgery is aimed at controlled eye pressure in people like me with glaucoma, when eye drops or laser surgery either aren't doing a good enough job at lowering eye pressure -- the only viable way of keeping glaucoma from doing more damage to the eye -- or someone can't use those other methods.

In my case, Dr. Young, a Portland glaucoma specialist, felt that I needed this surgery because I'd lost so much peripheral vision in my very nearsighted right eye, while my left eye is only very minimally affected by glaucoma. 

My eye pressure was in the low to mid 20's when I was first diagnosed with glaucoma. Prescription eye drops had lowered the pressure to 10-12 in both eyes,  but Dr. Young wanted to get the pressure in my right eye down to 6-7.

When I asked him why laser surgery wasn't an option for my right eye, Dr. Young told me that given the seriousness of my vision loss, and how slowly glaucoma usually progresses, he didn't want to wait a couple of years to learn how well laser surgery was working -- perhaps because I'm 74, and want to preserve as much vision as possible for the rest of my life.

So I had the surgery. Which then involved five follow-up appointments.

Those weren't convenient for me to get to, since Dr. Young practices in Tualatin, Oregon and I live a ways south of Salem, about a 50 minute drive from Tualatin. But mostly I didn't encounter the dreaded Portland-area freeway traffic, so the Trabeculectomy God must have been smiling upon me.

Dr. Young kept telling me that my eye looked fine, but when he pressed on the trabeculectomy site the pressure in my right eye would drop to zero, or one time 2, which isn't a good thing. In fact, it's a bad thing. 

This meant that while I could stop using an eye shield, and phase down on the post-surgery eye drops I was prescribed, Dr. Young wanted me to keep on not lifting heavy weight. At first the limit was ten pounds. Then twenty pounds. Than thirty pounds. Three weeks ago I was given the OK to lift sixty pounds.

That enabled me to use the weight machines at our athletic club, albeit some of them at a considerably lower weight than I was using before the surgery (120 pounds on four of the eleven machines).

Today, though, I got my trabeculectomy graduation notice, three weeks after my previous visit with Dr. Young where he'd said that my eye wasn't forming scar tissue very quickly. My right eye pressure was six, an excellent pressure and right on what Dr. Young had hoped for.

(Further, Young has told me that there's reason to consider that a low eye pressure following trabeculectomy is a "higher quality" pressure, since it doesn't vary much, whereas lowering pressure via periodic drops in the eye has more ups and downs during the day.)

And, yay!, Dr. Young said I could do away with any weight-lifting restriction -- though I told him that I'd gradually ramp up the weight on the machines where I was using 120 pounds. 

Time will tell whether the trabeculectomy is as successful in preserving the vision in my right eye as it seems to be doing at present.

My next appointment with Dr. Young is in four weeks. I have to wear glasses for the foreseeable future, after quite a few decades of contact lens wearing. I want to ask him when I can wear contacts again. This might relate to when I need cataract surgery, which so far I've avoided.

My bad handwriting makes for interesting grocery checkout discussions

Since I'm 74, I suppose I'd have an excuse for my bad handwriting if I chose to make one up. Like, my hands are shaky due to a neurological condition.

But actually my handwriting has been minimally legible to others for most of my life. Me, I can generally read what I write pretty well, though not always.

On the plus side, my affliction makes for some interesting conversations in the grocery store checkout lane. Here's what the clerk at LifeSource Natural Foods here in Salem, Oregon and I talked about today.

Clerk: The number you wrote on this container can't be right.
Me: (peering to see what was on the label I put on the container) Those are 9's at the end.
Clerk: No, I'm talking about the first number; 599 is bulk dish soap, and that isn't what this is.
Me: Yeah, it's bulk almond butter, 399. But hey, I got two of three numbers written legibly. 
Clerk: Thanks for remembering the number.
Me: Thank you for bringing me back to a memory of first grade. I'm going to go home and practice writing 3's until I can stop them looking like 5's. 
Clerk: Oh, you don't have to do that.
Me: I know, but I want to. Though in my defense, there was quite a crowd around the nut butter area just now, and I was a bit stressed wanting to write the number on the label I'd put on the container as quickly as possible.

Which was kind of true, though it doesn't explain the many other times I've been asked to decipher an item number I'd written on a label. Occasionally I'm even asked if the number is English, or, say, Sanskrit.

Here's a video of me doing Water Boxing (Liu He Ba Fa)

After practicing karate, a hard style martial art, for about 12 years, in 2004 I shifted to learning Tai Chi, a soft style martial art -- albeit one with useful martial applications. 

I've been fortunate to have an instructor here in Salem, Oregon who had a lot of experience in several karate styles before also embracing Tai Chi, which is all that Warren Allen teaches now. So he understands the martial side of Tai Chi.

Warren began learning Tai Chi from a Chinese man who used to live in Hong Kong, where he learned the Water Boxing form, Liu He Ba Fa and taught it to Warren.

Warren has passed on his knowledge of Water Boxing to some of his Tai Chi students interested in this challenging, but engaging, blend of Tai Chi and several other more martial styles, Hsing Yi and Ba Gua.

I've still got a lot to learn about Water Boxing, but decided to make a video of me doing the form yesterday, when April rains stopped for a while and the temperature was pleasant.

Mental health gets talked about at Salem City Club

It's usually good to talk through your mental health problems rather than keeping them bottled up inside of you. Today the Salem City Club did just that, albeit from a policy perspective, in a program called Oregon's Many Mental Health Crises.

The not-so-cheery news is that Oregon ranks 49th out of the 50 states in the prevalence of mental illness and access to care. So for sure, we've got a mental health crisis. 

State Representative Rob Nosse started things off by talking about how the legislature is trying to fix things.

He's chair of the House Joint Committee on Behavioral Health. Until now somehow I didn't understand what "behavioral health" meant. It's mental health plus substance abuse, since you can engage in the behavior of substance abuse without having a mental health problem.

Nosse said that due to the largesse of the federal government, Oregon got $1.3 billion for mental health in the last two years. He said that probably Oregon now ranks as the 46th or 47th worst state for mental health problems and access.

Up from 49, perhaps, but still decidedly pitiful -- especially since we're a blue state with supposedly progressive policies, not one of those backward conservative southern states.

Nosse explained the three levels of mental health care the legislature is trying to improve. The first level is community mental health programs where people are treated on an outpatient basis, often by nonprofits.

The second level is secure residential facilities for those whose care needs are in-between being in the community and in the state hospital. The hope, he said, is that fixing problems with the first two levels will relieve pressure on the third level, the state hospital here in Salem.

Measure 110, which decriminalized drugs like heroin and meth, was needed, Nosse said, since treating drug use as a criminal problem obviously hasn't worked. But he would have preferred to see Measure 110 money for treatment programs ramp up in a first year, with decriminalization happening in the second year, instead of both things occurring at once, as actually happened.

Now that the federal money that was plentiful in 2021 and 2022 has dried up, the legislature is focusing on implementing the programs already started rather than initiating new mental health programs. Nosse said that he's a tax and spend liberal who believes that Oregon needs more investment in mental health.

The next speaker was Ann-Marie Bandfield, a Marion County Health and Human Services Program Manager for many behavioral and mental health areas. She said Marion County has a 24/7 walk-in crisis center. Here's an excerpt from the center's web page.

At least one Qualified Mental Health Professional (QMHP) is on duty at all times to provide face-to-face assessments and crisis counseling. We also provide telephone triage, support, and referral. This service is provided on a first come-first served basis. Most of this work is done at the crisis center itself, but a large number of assessments also occur at the emergency room of Salem Hospital.

The last speaker was Heather Jefferis, Executive Director for the Council for Behavioral Health which helps support behavioral health workers in Oregon. She said it was great that health insurance now has to pay for mental health care. 

However, Medicare rates haven't increased in 18 years. And Jefferis said that Oregon is far below the number of substance abuse and inpatient supportive housing beds that are needed.

In the Q&A part of the program, someone asked the speakers if a universal single payer health care system would help with Oregon's mental health crisis. Each of them said that it would, though Rep. Nosse was skeptical that such a plan is politically feasible in our state. 

I got to ask a question.

I said that when I was diagnosed with a major depressive episode -- meaning I was super depressed, which is much worse than merely being deeply sad -- I contacted every psychiatrist in Salem. None were taking new patients. Some didn't even have a waiting list. I was told that I'd have to wait months to see someone. And I had Medicare Advantage insurance.

But I noted that people in my situation weren't talked about by the speakers today.

I said that people with insurance still have big problems getting mental health care due to a shortage of providers. (Eventually I learned that my Salem Health primary care physician's office had a psychiatric nurse practitioner on the staff, who saw me fairly quickly, prescribed an antidepressant, and saw me every week or two for several months until my depression had lifted.)

Rep. Nosse said my comments were right on, and that the legislature wasn't focused on the plight of insured people like me.

When the program was over I spoke with several people. The program chair told me that in getting background info for his introductory remarks, he learned that half the counties in the United States don't have a psychiatrist. And most psychiatrists don't take Medicare patients because Medicare pays so little for mental health care.

I also spoke with a psychiatric nurse practitioner who said that any doctor can prescribe antidepressants. True. But my wife, a retired psychotherapist, tells me that primary care doctors aren't as knowledgeable about managing psychiatric drugs, which is why she urged me to try to find a psychiatrist when I was depressed.

Bill Maher wrong about transgender athletes and Trump indictment

Bill Maher is a comedian. I like his jokes. It doesn't bother me when some of his one-liners mess with facts in order to get a laugh. That's what comedians often do: exaggerate in order to make a humorous point.

What irritates me about Maher is when his playing loose with facts continues from his opening joke-filled monologue to the mostly serious discussion Maher has with his two panelists.

Last Friday's show (April 14) featured Maher engaging in extended rants about transgender people and Trump's indictment. I didn't like what he said on both subjects.

Maher claimed that transgender women (who transitioned from being a man) were harming the rights of "real" women. I've never heard that from any of the women I know. The main argument presented for this assertion was transgender women competing in women's sports.

OK, this happens. Not often, but sometimes. Maher and the panelists, Katie Porter and Piers Morgan, spent quite a bit of time talking about a transgender woman winning a NCAA championship in swimming.

That was Lia Thomas. 

University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I title after finishing first in the women’s 500-yard freestyle event Thursday evening.

Thomas pulled away in the final 150 yards to win in 4:33.24.

Thomas, who previously swam for the men’s team at Penn, has come to personify the ongoing debate on trans women’s participation in sports and the balance between inclusion and fair play.

This is a worthwhile debate to have. There do need to be rules governing transgender women who want to compete in sports where they may have a competitive advantage. However, Porter made sense when she said this should be left up to the organizations that govern women's sports.

And Morgan was wrong when he said, as I recall, that Thomas won the 500-yard freestyle by 50 seconds over the next fastest woman. Actually it was 1.75 seconds, not exactly a blowout. Plus, Wikipedia says:

In March 2022, she became the first openly transgender athlete to win an NCAA Division I national championship in any sport after winning the women's 500-yard freestyle event. Thomas lost muscle mass and strength through testosterone suppression and hormone replacement therapy. Her time for the 500 freestyle is over 15 seconds slower than her personal bests before medically transitioning. Thomas's winning time of 4:33.24 was 9.18 seconds short of Katie Ledecky's NCAA record of 4:24.06. In other races, Thomas has been beaten by multiple cisgender women as well as by Iszac Henig, a transgender man not on hormones.

Further, the NCAA has instituted a transgender policy that addresses the problem of assuring fair competition between transgender and cisgender women.

At its January 19, 2022 meeting, the NCAA Board of Governors updated the transgender student-athlete participation policy governing college sports. 

The new policy aligns transgender student-athlete participation with the Olympic Movement. The resulting sport-by-sport approach preserves opportunity for transgender student-athletes while balancing fairness, inclusion and safety for all who compete.

So it isn't true that transgender women are trampling on the rights of other women. Maher should educate himself about this before contributing to the transgender hysteria that, as Porter correctly noted, is endangering transgender people, who are subject to physical attacks at a rate much higher than their proportion in the general population.

Regarding Trump's indictment, this is a simpler Maher falsehood to address. First, he wrongly claimed that Democrats were after Trump because he had sex with Stormy Daniels, the adult film actress. That's untrue.

Hardly anyone cares who Trump has sex with, possibly excepting Melania, his wife. And Trump wasn't indicted by Democrats. He was indicted by a Manhattan grand jury that heard extensive testimony about false business records filed by Trump in an attempt to cover up the payment of hush money to Daniels a few weeks before the 2016 presidential election.

Maher blathered on at length about how Democrats were making the same mistake with Trump as Republicans did with Bill Clinton following his affair with Monica Lewinsky. But again, the charge against Trump isn't that he had sex with a woman other than his wife.

He's been indicted because he paid Daniels $130,000 to keep quiet about their affair just before the election where his misogyny was a central focus, and instead of reporting this as a campaign contribution, Trump falsely termed it legal fees.

Bill Maher is a smart guy. So is his staff. So I can't believe that Maher didn't know the facts about Trump's indictment. He knew. Maher just chose to say stuff on his show that was false, in order to take a cheap shot at Democrats.

Just like he took a cheap shot at transgender people.

I try ChatGPT. Asking about myself, I'm impressed.

It took me a while, but after hearing a lot about the marvels of ChatGPT, the online chatbot offered by OpenAI, a company whose goal is A.G.I. -- artificial general intelligence that can do anything a human can do -- I got around to trying out ChatGPT just now.


(All you need to do this is a free account with OpenAI.)

Because I have a significant online presence, and my ego is also significant, my first question for ChatGPT was about myself. I was impressed with the result, which took about five seconds to pop up.

Well, after reading that, I want to be ChatGPT's best friend. Its description of me was a bit over-the-top, but in my decidedly personal opinion, not hugely so.

ChatGPT did provide a profile of me that was kind of one-dimensional, since I'm also proud of my land use and political activism -- though I did ask Chat GPT about Brian Hines the blogger and author, and my Church of the Churchless blog has the largest Internet presence of my three blogs.

ChatGPT rapidly put together a description of me that was well written and accurate. My only minor quibble was that 2004 is 19 years prior to 2023 and ChatGPT said my churchless blog has been operating for "over a decade." But 19 years is over a decade, obviously.

I then tried to learn about Laurel Hines, my wife. But ChatGPT balked, telling me that it couldn't, or wouldn't, provide information on private individuals. I've urged Laurel to sign up with OpenAI herself to see if she has better luck learning about Laurel Hines. It could be that I have enough of a public presence to get a pass on the private person restriction.

Lastly, I recalled that ChatGPT is pretty good at poetry. So my curiosity, and ego, led me to ask it to write a poem about Brian Hines the blogger and author. Here's the result in two screenshots.

OK, this poem is more over-the-top than the prose description of me was. But I love it! Now I not only want ChatGPT to be my best friend, I want it to whisper sweet nothings into my ear about how much ChatGPT adores me. 

After I die, I definitely want ChatGPT to speak at the celebration of life held for me. Unless between now and then, ChatGPT turns sour on me, in which case it can go fuck itself, assuming a chatbot is capable of that.

On a more serious note -- not that I wasn't serious about what I just said -- it was both impressive and a bit creepy to see how well ChatGPT did with my two queries, each of which took only a few seconds.

We're only in the early days of artificial intelligence. There's reason for concern about it, but that's a topic for another blog post. For now, I'm content to bask in the warm glow of what ChatGPT said about me.

Caste is a marvelous book about our racial divisions

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I hadn't heard of Isabel Wilkerson's book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, until I read a fairly recent TIME cover story by Wilkerson that provided an overview of Caste.

Somehow I'd missed the publication of the book in 2020. Making up for lost time, I immediately ordered a copy from Amazon. It took me a while to finish Caste.

For even though Wilkerson is a terrific writer with a smooth style that makes reading her a pleasure, her subject matter isn't cheery. So I'd read a short chapter on most days, rather than rushing through her book.

What blew me away in her TIME essay was the brilliant notion that caste, not prejudice, is a better way to understand the 400 year history of discrimination against African Americans in this country. 

Wilkerson makes her case for caste by not only describing how this means of maintaining power by a dominant class has been used in the United States, but also how caste has enforced hierarchies in India (no big surprise) and Nazi Germany.

This book opened my eyes to how caste explains a lot about social power dynamics that go beyond racial discrimination. For example, in a concluding chapter she speaks about a subject dear to my aging heart, how old people are treated in our country.

The challenge for our era is not merely the social construct of black and white but seeing through the many layers of a caste system that has more power than we as humans should permit it to have. Even the most privileged of humans in the Western world will join a tragically disfavored caste if they live long enough.

They will belong to the last caste of the human cycle, that of old age, people who are among the most demeaned of all citizens in the Western world, where youth is worshipped to forestall thoughts of death. A caste system spares no one. 

I'm not capable of doing justice to the book by attempting to summarize it. Others have done that hugely better than I could. Reading Caste, of course, is the #1 way to understand what Wilkerson has to say.

Here's a couple of lesser ways I found by some Googling: a NPR story, 'Caste' Argues Its Most Violent Manifestation is in Treatment of Black Americans, and a 6-minute PBS NewsHour episode on You Tube.

The book contains a lot that is disturbing. But we Americans need to be disturbed by how our homegrown caste system has caused so much pain and suffering and lost opportunity. One of Wilkerson's favorite metaphors, which I've heard her use on several interviews, is of an old house.

Old houses have many problems. She speaks from experience, being the owner of one. The roof may leak. The basement may have standing water. The electrical system may be outmoded. The porch may be rotting.

If a building inspector takes a look at the house and lists what's wrong with it, this doesn't mean that the current owner was responsible for the problems. But the problems are still problems. They don't go away just because someone says "I didn't cause them."

Likewise, those who want us to ignore the problems of caste and racial discrimination in this country -- I'm thinking Ron DeSantis and many other Republicans -- are like a homeowner who turns a blind eye to what's wrong with their house. We don't need to blame ourselves for the past. However, we have to take responsibility for fixing what's wrong with the United States that flows from our history.

Wilkerson ends up on a positive note. Here's how her book ends.

In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish girl determined to save the planet, the physics-defying aerobatics of an African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute -- all of these should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.

In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born, would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival, and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe.

We would join forces with indigenous people around the world raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is set back from the progression of our species.

A world without caste would set everyone free.

Ozempic shows that obesity often is a medical problem

I wish Bill Maher was a reader of this blog, because this post was stimulated by him. For Maher, who I argue has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths, has an outdated view of people who are obese.

Here's how I put it in the above-linked post from last January.

Lastly, I can't disagree with Maher's often-stated point that obesity is a big problem in our country. He's correct that obesity is a risk factor if someone gets Covid. But it's a bit simplistic for Maher to say that all it takes for someone to lose weight is will power. 

Meaning, just eat less and you'll lose weight. I've read about numerous scientific studies that show how some people have a natural, probably genetic, propensity to obesity. Sometimes a person's metabolism is out of whack, which makes it really tough for them to lose weight. Medication and surgery may be called for in some cases of obesity.

The March 27, 2023 issue of The New Yorker has an article that indicates that I'm right and Maher is wrong about obesity. In the print edition it was called The Ozempic Era: Will new medications change how we think about being fat and being thin?

The subtitle of the online version is even more direct about what Maher gets wrong about obesity: A popular, growing class of drugs for obesity and diabetes could, in an ideal world, help us see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices.

If that link doesn't work for you, here's a PDF file of the article.
Download Will Ozempic Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin? | The New Yorker

Some excerpts from the article by Jia Tolentino, along with the illustration that accompanied it:

The ideal female body of the past decade, born through the godless alliance of Instagram and the Kardashian family, was as juicy and uncanny as a silicone-injected peach. Young women all over the Internet copied the shape—a sculpted waist, an enormous ass, hips that spread generously underneath a high-cut bikini—and also the face atop it, a contoured hybrid of recognizably human mannequin and sexy feline. This prototype was as technologically mediated as the era that produced it; women attained the look by injecting artificial substances, removing natural ones, and altering photographic evidence.

Dana Omari, a registered dietitian and an Instagram influencer in Houston, has accumulated a quarter of a million followers by documenting the blepharoplasties, breast implants, and Brazilian butt lifts of the rich and famous. Recently, she noticed that the human weathervanes of the social-media beauty standard were spinning in a new direction.

The Kardashians were shrinking. Having previously appropriated styles created by Black women, they were now leaning into a skinnier, whiter ideal. Kim dropped twenty-one pounds before the Met Gala, where she wore a dress made famous by Marilyn Monroe; Khloé, who has spoken in the past about struggling with her weight, posted fortieth-birthday photos in which she looked as slim and blond as a Barbie. All over Instagram, the wealthy and the professionally attractive were showing newly prominent clavicles and rib cages.

Last spring, Omari shared with her followers the open secret behind such striking thinness: the Kardashians and others, she insisted, were likely taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication Ozempic. “This is the ‘diabetic shot’ for weight loss everyone’s been talking about,” she wrote. “Really good sources have told me that Kim and Khloé allegedly started on their Ozempic journey last year.” Omari was about to start taking a version of the medication herself.

Ozempic, which is manufactured by Novo Nordisk, is part of an expanding class of drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists, which have dramatically altered the treatment of diabetes and obesity. Ozempic is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes—a condition that accounts for ninety per cent of all diabetes cases—and has been available since 2017. Its name is now shorthand for the entire category of weight-loss injections.

In 2021, Novo Nordisk received approval for Wegovy, which has the same active ingredient as Ozempic but comes with a higher maximum dose, as an anti-obesity drug. On a year-end earnings call in 2022, Novo Nordisk cited worldwide market growth of fifty per cent, with almost forty thousand new Wegovy prescriptions being written every week.

...A healthy body can generally signal to the brain when it has had enough food. But that signalling system can be faulty, or get injured. “One of the most important things about obesity, and something most people don’t understand, is that, in the process of gaining weight, the neural circuitry of the brain that regulates weight is damaged,” Dr. Louis Aronne, the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center, at Weill Cornell Medicine, told me. (Aronne, like many other prominent practitioners of obesity medicine, has consulted on trials conducted by Novo Nordisk.)

“The hypothalamus shows signs of inflammation and injury,” he went on. The prevailing theory, he explained, is that “too many calories coming in too quickly damages nerves that respond to the hormones that control body weight.” One of these hormones is leptin, which is produced in body fat, and which signals to the brain that it’s time to stop eating. But, if you gain fat, the oversupply of leptin can cause your body to be desensitized to it, making your brain erroneously believe that you are starving.

“Your body tries to rebalance the system by slowing down the metabolism and increasing appetite,” Aronne said. After a person has gained enough weight to enter this cycle of metabolic misdirection, it becomes nearly impossible to lose that weight and keep it off long-term simply through diet and exercise. (About five per cent of people manage to do it.)

A well-known study followed contestants on “The Biggest Loser,” the weight-loss-competition show, and found that the contestants’ metabolisms slowed so drastically after their weight loss that nearly all of them regained what they’d lost. One contestant, who’d dropped an astonishing two hundred and thirty-nine pounds, soon regained a hundred, and then began gaining weight whenever he ate more than eight hundred calories less than the average amount recommended for a man his size.

...Omari, the Instagram-famous dietitian, is now off her compounded semaglutide, which she’d taken to shed some pandemic pounds. She was optimistic that she’d be able to maintain her weight, as she’d generally been able to do before. But, as I kept reminding Ozempic-curious friends, these medications were designed for chronic conditions, obesity and diabetes.

For people who are dealing with those conditions, Ozempic appears to create a path toward a healthy relationship to food. For those who aren’t, it might function more like an injectable eating disorder. As the side effects make clear, it’s not a casual thing to drastically alter your body’s metabolic process, and there is no large-scale data about the safety of these drugs when taken by people who are mainly interested in treating another chronic condition, the desire to be thin.

...Kaplan, a plastic surgeon, is better known on TikTok as @RealDrBae—in his videos, he wears navy scrubs monogrammed “dr bae” and talks to the camera as though it’s his partner in an absorbing conversation at an airport bar. He believes that more people—a lot more people—are going to start taking GLP-1 drugs soon.

He didn’t have in mind thin people who want to be thinner, he added; he was thinking about fat people who had been struggling with discomfort, with inconvenience, with social pressure all their lives, who might have lately felt encouraged to try to accept their heavier weight. He predicted that the Ozempic era would put an end to all that. “They’re no longer going to accept that they should just be happy with the body they have,” he said.

We get a Generac whole house generator after the ice storm trauma

The memory is still sharp in my mind of the Great Salem Ice Storm of 2021.

Twelve days without electricity. Lots of tree damage. Many trips into town to get more gasoline to keep our Honda generator functioning. Having to keep our wood stove going to keep the house warm.

In short, not fun. So when some friends in our rural south Salem neighborhood told my wife and I that they were getting a Generac whole house generator, our ears perked up.

Turns on automatically when the power goes out. Capable of running a heat pump, hot water heater, well pump, and everything else in a house. Or at least, almost everything. 

Sure sounded good to us.

During the ice storm we had to take showers at our athletic club, since we didn't have a way to hook our hot water heater to the Honda generator. And while our wood stove worked fine, it kept the upper part of our house too warm, and left the lower part too cold. So being able to operate our heat pump was really appealing.

It took quite a while to arrange all the details of getting a Generac whole house generator through Northside Electric here in Salem, but yesterday the final work was completed. It wasn't cheap: $13,250, not including the cost of propane tanks.

However, I told Jeff Buyserie, the Northside Electric guy who handled some tricky final electrical panel work and educated us about the Generac yesterday afternoon, that my magical thinking leads me to believe that now that we've gotten the whole house generator, our electricity will never go off again.

Jeff's apt response: "So get some life insurance and you'll never die."

Here's the 24kW generator. We located it near our firewood stacks. The Generac has to be on almost level ground. Northside supplied the concrete pad the generator sits on.

The Generac can't be right next to a structure. We have it close to where the PGE power enters our house, and the circuit breaker boxes in our utility room. 

Eighteen inch deep trenches had to be dug for the propane and electrical lines feeding the Generac. We haven't had the trenches filled yet. The county inspection has been completed, so the trenches will be filled soon.

The Generac can be fueled by either natural gas or propane. Since our neighborhood doesn't have natural gas, propane was our only option. Given our hilly property, and where we wanted to locate the Generac, a 500 gallon propane tank was too large to be moved close to the generator. So Pratum Co-op installed four 120 gallon tanks, which together equal 480 gallons.

They're hooked together, so function as a single tank. Propane tanks can only be filled 80% full, so that gives us a maximum of about 384 gallons. Jeff from Northside Electric told us that likely the Generac would use around 2 gallons an hour on average. So that would equal 192 hours of run time if the propane tanks were full.

Which is eight days of constant generator operation. Four days if the propane tanks were half full. That's longer than most electrical outages last. And naturally the tanks can be refilled, so long as the roads are passable for a Pratum Co-op truck.

A lot of electrical panel work had to be done by Northside. We now have a Generac circuit breaker box that sits to the left of our old transfer box for our 7,000 watt Honda generator. So we could still use the Honda generator, though I hope we'll never have to. 

The main complication we encountered was getting the 3.5 ton heat pump for the 2,000 square foot main part of our house to work with the Generac. (We also have a smaller 2 ton heat pump for a 1,200 square foot "apartment" area; that part of the house isn't hooked up to the Generac.)

It turned out that the thermostat for the 3.5 ton heat pump was on a circuit that ran the furnace: air handler and heat strips for emergency heat, or when it is too cold for the heat pump to run efficiently. Jeff had to do some rewiring so the thermostat was on the Generac panel, but the heat strips weren't.

He said that the 3.5 ton heat pump heat strips probably took around 15,000 watts. So since we have a 24,000 watt generator, the heat strips plus the heat pump plus the extra wattage needed when the heat pump starts up likely would have sucked up the entire output of the Generac. 

So while we still have the heat strips available when PGE power is available, we'll have to make do with just the heat pump when the Generac is operating. If it's too cold for the heat pump to work without the heat strips (below freezing, basically), we'll have to use our wood stove.

I was grocery shopping when Jeff did the testing of how the Generac handled our house's electrical needs. When I got home, he and my wife told me that the Generac did fine with everything on: well pump, heat pump, hot water heater, lights, cooktop, etc., even the oven. It did strain the generator when the heat pump kicked on. Hopefully that won't be the case when we have a lesser load on the Generac.

I feel good about our Generac purchase.

The generator is set up to turn itself on every two weeks at noon for five minutes to keep the Generac "exercised." Northside Electric will do doing the maintenance on the generator, since I have no interest in doing this, in part because the Generac is much larger and more complicated than our Honda generator.

But we'll have to wait and see how the Generac does in a power outage. Well, unless my magical thinking is correct and we'll never have an outage now that we've spent so much money preparing for one.

LifeSource dumps my favorite veggie burger. I'm crushed.

It was the cheese that first set off the alarm bells in my brain. Up until then, my usual Tuesday afternoon grocery shopping at LifeSource Natural Foods had gone as it usually does. 

Uneventfully.

I had no clue that my vegetarian life would be upended before I reached the dairy aisle, my habitual final stop before heading to a checkout register.

Glancing at my list to see what my wife and I needed there, out of the corner of my eye I noticed that something had changed in the alternatives-to-meat section.

Cheese had taken over several feet of that section, oozing over from the already large cheese department to the right of it.

My sometimes still sharp senior citizen mind jumped to a logical conclusion: The cheese must have displaced some items in the eggs/alternatives-to-meat area.

Jumpy, but not yet panicked, I scanned the shelves for what I usually buy in that section.

Tofurky Treehouse Tempe? Yes, still there. Tofurky Plant-Based Chick'n Barbecue? Yes, still there. Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger? Oh, crap! It's missing!

I peered at the labels under some empty areas of the alternatives-to-meat section. None said "Hodo Tofu  Veggie Burger."

My life didn't exactly feel like it was slipping away. Just markedly diminished.

For the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger is by far the best vegetarian burger I've ever eaten. And since I've been a vegetarian for over 50 years, I've eaten a heck of a lot of them.

I make a Hodo burger for lunch almost every day.

I love the taste. I love the simple ingredients: organic tofu, carrots, cabbage, onions, soybean oil, salt, dried shiitake mushrooms, garlic powder, white pepper. I love the nutrition facts: 200 calories, 9 grams of fat (just 0.5 grams saturated), 9 grams of dietary fiber, 19 grams of protein.

The Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger kicks the butt of every other vegetarian burger LifeSource carries, in my admittedly personal opinion.

If the Hodo burger was in a boxing match against, say, the LightLife burger that's still on the LifeSource shelf, the referee would stop the contest after the first round, declaring a knock-out. It not only tastes great, and has great nutrition, it looks great after being fried in a pan.

I don't put anything on the Hodo burger, just some salt. Ketchup disguises the taste of the burger, which is so good, I don't want anything coming between me and my beloved Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger.

That's why I stopped by the Customer Service desk at LifeSource and asked why it was discontinued. I didn't get an answer to "why," but was told that someone else also had asked about the Hodo burger, being disappointed that it wasn't available now.

When I got home, I sent a message to LifeSource via their web site. I expressed my dismay at their dumping such a fine upstanding veggie burger, while allowing lesser quality veggie burgers to remain.

It's been about a week. I haven't gotten a reply from LifeSource. 

I told LifeSource that Natural Grocers still carries the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger, along with three other Hodo products such as the Chinese 5-Spice Tofu Nuggets that I like a lot. LifeSource how has no Hodo products.

Last Sunday I stopped by Natural Grocers, where I rarely shop, and stocked up on the Hodo burger. I also bought some other things that I usually get at LifeSource, as long as I was in the Natural Grocers store. 

I'll ask LifeSource again why they discontinued the Hodo veggie burger. I've bought so many of them over the years, it seems like I should learn this. Maybe the Hodo burger, being tofu-based, fell prey to what I consider an irrational fear of tofu by many people these days. 

Regardless, they'll have to pry the Hodo Tofu Veggie Burger out of my cold dead hands (leaving aside the question of who "they" is).

I just hope that Natural Grocers doesn't discontinue the burger -- which I doubt, since now they're the only place it can be bought in Salem.

Why I enjoy Tai Chi as a martial art

Tai Chi is viewed by most people as merely a gentle form of exercise. Which, it certainly is. But there's another side to Tai Chi -- the martial art aspect. 

I'm familiar with Tai Chi as a martial art because I'm fortunate to have an instructor here in Salem, Oregon who is highly adept at self-defense applications of Tai Chi moves.

Warren Allen came to Tai Chi after a lot of experience in hard style martial arts. So he is able to recognize how Tai Chi can be a soft style martial art like aikido, as contrasted with hard style martial arts like karate.

The Japanese Martial Arts Center has a good definition of hard and soft styles, which basically coincide with external and internal martial arts.

Hard Martial Arts

Hard martial arts are usually synonymous with external martial arts because both focus on physical power. When practicing a hard art, you meet an attack with a forceful opposing attack. Hard arts rely on overpowering the opponent, not just with strength, but also with timing, distance, and angles. That’s true whether you’re engaging in offense, defense, or a combination of both. When you’re sparring in karate and hit your opponent harder than they just hit you, that’s an example of a hard art.

Soft Martial Arts

Soft martial arts are often based on the concept of blending with an opponent’s attack. When you’re attacked, you don’t meet the attack with a block. Instead, you move with it to escape or to improve your position. To win against your attacker, you subdue them before they can attack again. To do this at a high level requires relaxation and a calm perception, qualities that are emphasized in internal martial arts.

I also started my martial arts training in a hard style, Shotokan Karate. After nine years of Shotokan, I started to train in a more eclectic form of karate with Allen at his Pacific Martial Arts studio.

So I have about 12 years of experience with karate, and about 19 years of experience with Tai Chi, which I started learning in 2004 with Allen and have pursued ever since.

Today I took part in a three-hour seminar taught by Allen. Along with four other students, we explored Tai Chi as a soft martial art. All of us had a lot of Tai Chi training.

And all of us found the seminar challenging at times. That's because it is much easier to meet force with force than to respond to force with the above-mentioned blending with an opponent's attack that's the hallmark of soft martial arts.

This is one reason why soft martial arts like Tai Chi are termed "internal." Obviously there is an internal side to karate, just as there's an external side to Tai Chi. It's just a matter of degree. 

If someone attacks us, either physically or verbally, the natural initial reaction of most people, me certainly included, is to respond in kind. Thus karate training is more in line with our usual inclination: if a punch is thrown at our head, we deal with it via an equal or greater physical response.

But with Tai Chi as a martial art, the goal is to blend with the force of an attack to defuse and deflect it as smoothly and effortlessly as possible. 

I find this highly fascinating, intriguing, and, for sure, difficult. I've gotten fairly good at it, though I have to constantly keep in check my usual inclination to match force with force -- again, whether or not the attack is physical or verbal.

And life itself "attacks" all of us regularly, since problems with our health, work, home, relationships, and other areas need to be dealt with. We can't ignore these problems, but sometimes we react to them with more anxious force than is necessary, rather than handling them as gracefully as possible, seeing them not as a malevolent invading army but as troublesome guests deserving of gentle correction.

For me this is why I enjoy Tai Chi so much. It's essentially Taoism in motion, and I've loved Taoist teachings long before I started to learn Tai Chi. 

I have various translations of the Tao Te Ching. The 1972 translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English that I've had since my college days still is my favorite, maybe because it is so familiar to me. Here's a couple of passages that relate to Tai Chi as a martial art.

Yield and overcome;
Bend and be straight;
Empty and be full;
Wear out and be new;
Have little and gain;
Have much and be confused.

The softest thing in the universe
Overcomes the hardest thing in the universe.
That without substance can enter where there is no room.
Hence I know the value of non-action.
Teaching without words and work without doing
Are understood by very few.

Well, I've been trying to understand the Tao Te Ching for most of my life. I'm not sure if I'm any closer to that understanding than I was more than fifty years ago.

But I sure enjoy the searching for Taoist truth. And that's a big reason why I enjoy Tai Chi so much, both in its non-martial and martial forms.

Oscars 2023 was great, but I disagree about Best Picture

I always enjoy watching the Oscars show, and this year was no exception.

I liked having a host back on stage. The tag-team approach I recall from last year didn't work as well as Jimmy Kimmel providing a continuous presence -- for the whole 3 1/2 hours or so of the 3-hour show. One thing I've learned is to always add an hour to our DVR recording time, which came in handy this year.

The way I see it, watching the Oscars is a lot like watching sports. If you have a favorite team, you're going to root for them to win, even as you recognize that they may not be the absolute best team in the league. 

I'd only seen three of the films nominated for Best Picture: Top Gun Maverick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. I loved the first two films. I didn't like Everything Everywhere All at Once.

So I was pleased when All Quiet on the Western Front and Top Gun Maverick won a bunch of lesser awards.

It wasn't a surprise when Everything Everywhere All at Once walked off with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, and a couple of other awards. But I felt that this film was overrated and the Academy went overboard on giving it so many awards. 

That said, I enjoyed the acceptance speeches of the Everything Everywhere All at Once winners. Jamie Lee Curtis gave appealing remarks when she won Best Supporting Actress. I just don't think that this film is going to be remembered as a marvelous bit of movie-making. 

It was quirky, creative, and trendy, given how the multiverse has captured people's attention, even though obviously there's no evidence it actually exists. A few years from now, I suspect Everything Everywhere All at Once will be viewed as a production that doesn't age well.

On the plus side, I was thrilled when Navalny got Best Documentary. The acceptance speech for Navalny was the only time Putin's horrendous invasion of Ukraine and his authoritarian rule of Russia was mentioned at the Oscars. 

And having watched and hugely enjoyed RRR, an Indian film, I was rooting for it to win Best Original Song, which it did for the catchy “Naatu Naatu.” The dancing that accompanied the song was as infectious as it was in RRR itself.

Jimmy Kimmel had some good jokes. Naturally I can't remember most of them. One that sticks in my mind came near the end of the show when he observed that whoever edited the voluminous footage of the January 6 insurrection at the nation's capitol into a "film" that made the riot look like a tourist visit deserved an Oscar.

(It was Tucker Carlson of Fox News who fashioned that lie, of course.)

Lastly, my wife and I kept feeling sorry for whoever had to sit behind the woman wearing a large floppy white hat, or head covering. It seemed to us that this was a selfish thing to do, especially since no other people in the Oscars audience had anything comparable on their heads from what we could see.