Consider The Source

     If a book, article or website is being consistently pushed by highly polarized sources, especially if they're the only ones pushing it and even more if it claims to have been banned by any major, content-neutral platform, then you are being sold bullshit.

     Count on it.  It doesn't matter if the sources saying nice things about it are Left, Right or either Plain or Fancy Whackdoodle.  It doesn't matter how much the book (etc.) confirms your own biases or blows 'em wide open.  If it makes extraordinary claims without providing extraordinary proof?  It's bullshit.  If it offers supposedly ground-shattering insight and hasn't made the front page of a major newspaper or been the lead story on network news?  That doesn't confirm there's a conspiracy to suppress it -- it confirms that it's bullshit.

     Shocking, surprising, impressive, moving, horrifying, verifiably-real stuff sells newspapers and gets eyes on screens.  The New York and LA Times would bite the heads off chickens and TV anchors would compete to eat live rats on camera if it produced big ratings and advertiser dollars.  Luckily for us, most people find it repulsive instead.

     Vaccines work.  They don't cause autism or make your heart explode.  5G is just a cellphone/data protocol -- and some of the nodes run at frequencies close to those of airplane radar altimeters.  Human beings -- Americans -- went to the Moon and returned safely.  JFK is dead.  JFK, Jr. is dead.  RFK is dead.  RFK, Jr. is a loon.

     Stop stuffing your mind with crap, no matter how shiny and sugar-coated it is.  Please.

Yep, Canada's Still On Fire

     Canada is burning and I've picked up a chronic cough.  Y'know, a lot of that country was so damp that it didn't burn all that well.  Sure, they had wildfires.  Huge swathes of Canada (and Alaska) are forest and scrub, lightly populated if at all, and sometimes it just burns; that's been happening for as long as there have been forests.

     Don't think of this as the woods at, say, a state park or tucked into a corner of farmland.  Those are manicured in comparison.  It's wild forest.  Nobody's logging it.  No hogs or cattle are eating the low stuff.

     It's drying out up there.  Call it weather.  Call it climate.  Call it a drought.  Whatever it is, we've got to live with it.  These are fires too big to put out; they'll save the settled places, or try to, and let the rest burn.  The expert prediction, from firefighters to climatologists, is that Canada's going to burn all summer.

     If you compare a map of the active fires (see my "Canada is burning" link) with a map of population density, Canada's doing a remarkable job of prevention and control where people and fire risk overlap.  With less than the population of California in a country about the same size as the United States, that's as much as you could hope for.  The majority of Canada's population lives within a couple hundred miles of the U.S. border and that's the part that hasn't caught fire.  At least so far.

     For them, and for the rest of us who are downwind, a reminder that a Corsi-Rosenthal box is a cheap, high-volume indoor air purifier you can make with commonly-available odds and ends.  I'm not going to tell anyone to wear a mask outdoors when the air is gritty, but that same N95 so many people chafed at will stop the worst parts of border-sneaking woodsmoke before it gets to your lungs and you can make up your own mind about it.

The Triumph Of The Ignorami

     The last few days, I haven't posted.  I've just been watching it all auger in.  Appalling ignorance and anti-science became Flavor of the Day on the political Right a long time ago, but the rise of Robert Kennedy, Jr. among Democrats has been as disappointing as it has been predictable: the anti-vax, quack-medicine Left has a long and lurid history, after all.

     At a time when technical and scientific literacy are key skills for human survival, when a solid grounding in real history is the only way to grasp the implications of current world events, nonsense is becoming ever more popular.

     This kind of superstition and preference for comfortable fables that confirm one's preconceptions over awkward truths (and best-fit scientific theories) is how civilizations grind to a halt and begin to decline.  I can't stop it.  I don't know how much of the inevitable damage I can personally avoid.

     It's not an easy thing to blog about.  I'm not sure what's next, but my bet is that it won't be good.  And the partisan finger-pointing will be epic -- and useless.

What Is Happening In Russia

     No, seriously -- what is happening in Russia?  Mr. Putin seems to have gotten himself into a bit of a corner and some of the chaos he's been inflicting on Ukraine started to come home.

     At present, it appears the mess has stopped short of Moscow, which means it's not going to be very sweeping, at least not yet; but anyone who tells you they know what will happen next is taking through their hat.

     Interesting times.

Pick A Card, Any Card...

     ...Every card's got a social or political issue on it, every card has two sides and no matter which side you turn up, there's more heat than light, more opinion than fact, more reaction than evidence.

     One example: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, angling for the Republican Presidential nomination, went to San Francisco and made a campaign ad in the mean streets of the Tenderloin, commenting on "...[S]o much riffraff just running around...," open drug use, people defecating in the streets and so on, the kind of "urban decay" narrative the worst parts of that city so readily support.  And it is bad.  People and politicians get into shouting matches over causes and solutions, but the situation itself is undeniable.

     The thing is, San Francisco is not uniquely pestilential.  In response to Governor DeSantis, commenters on social media posted photographs of homeless encampments in and near major Florida cities, no less tatterdemalion and desperate than anything in the City by the Bay.  Any U. S. city has examples of a modern-day "hobo jungle;" policies and attitudes can change how evident they are, and climate plays a huge part (cities with mild winters and summers are going to have a larger homeless population ), but it's there.  The unhoused and inadequately housed are a part of the American scene, some by choice and others by necessity, and the underlying causes are poorly understood and poorly addressed, when they are addressed at all.

     Pointing at 'em in horror won't fix it.  Sweeping them to the outskirts or abandoned neighborhoods only moves the problem and may make it easier to ignore.  Neither laxity nor severity towards the homeless changes their numbers.

     So, yeah, pick a card.  Why not?  It's all nearly everyone is willing to do.  But don't come whining to me when your choice results in only cosmetic change at best.  As long as "dealing with it" consists of pointing at the other political party and blaming them, the used needles, hobo dung, appalling litter, improvised shelter, beggars and inert bodies on sidewalks and in vacant lots will continue.

Quick Dinner

     I didn't feel much like cooking last night but I wanted to make something nice.  Tam took a bad spill on the sidewalk the day before yesterday and comfort food was in order.

     Started with a pound of sweet Italian sausage, a 17.6-ounce jar of fancy pasta sauce, toasted fregula pasta, a large box of golden oyster mushrooms and a few Greek olives similar to Castelvetranos.  Plus an egg (or more, if you like 'em) and an 8-ounce can of plain tomato sauce.

     The most recent addition to my cooking supplies was a glass-lidded deep-walled 12" "everyday" skillet with PFOA-free non-stick, replacing both a shallow frying pan and a large non-stick saucepan with a clear lid.  It is great for this kind of thing.

     I browned and drained the sausage (with some extra "Italian" seasoning on it as it cooked)  and cleaned and added the mushrooms.  Once they were underway, I added the sauce, took a look at it and added an 8-ounce can of plain tomato sauce (and a little more seasoning).

     Meanwhile, I had a little over a half-cup of fregula in a 2-cup glass measure, with water over it to bring the combined level up to a little over a cup.  I salted it and was zapping it in the microwave 30 seconds or a minute at a time as I was cooking, letting it rest in between.  The water level declines and the pasta swells as it cooks, and while it needs to come to a boil, watch carefully on the one-minute runs -- it'll foam up and boil over.  This is just pre-cooking; the pasta will finish in the sauce.  (You can cook it directly in the sauce but it takes a bit longer.)

     With the sauce, meat and mushrooms stirred up, I let it simmer uncovered while I sliced four of the big, green olives and added them.  The pasta followed.  Reserve any excess pasta water and use it if the sauce seems too thick.  "Thickness" is subjective, but it's hard to go very far wrong.

     The sauce was bubbling, so I pushed a little hollow into it, broke the egg into that, and stirred the yolk with a toothpick -- I prefer 'em broken and solid.  YMMV, so adjust to taste.  I sprinkled some parsley over it all, put the lid on, reduced the heat and let it simmer for fifteen minutes, checking every five.

     It turned out pretty good, just what I was after!

Too Weird For Comment

     Any more, I often look at the latest news and and think, "Okay, that's so askew and oddball that anything I can say about it would fade to invisibility in comparison."

     This livin' in the future is strange.

You Don't Get The Soapbox

     I'm not going to quote from the angrier comments I received for my post about Juneteenth and I'm most certainly not going to publish them as comments.

     Suffice it to say that some people are irked -- irked! -- that we set aside a day to mark when this country stopped letting any of the people in it fall under the legal definition of livestock.  Those commenters are annoyed that the descendants of those citizens might be especially happy and show it, that the Federal government (and the governments of many states) might recognize it.

     Well, to hell with that.  The U. S. was among the last modern countries to outlaw slavery.*  We did so at considerable cost in lives and money and it's a victory worth celebrating.  If you don't like it, stay home and mope -- it is, after all, a free country.  Now.
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* Almost.  The 13th Amendment slips in this when abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude: "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted...." 

Juneteenth

     For some nitwits, this is a controversial holiday.

     You (may) get a day off work.  There are cookouts and parades, fireworks and celebrations -- and you're complaining?

     Try this on for size:  In 1776, representatives of what would become the United States of America signed their names to a document that proclaimed "All men are created equal..."  Eleven years later, they wrote up and signed another one that would become the foundational law of the new country.  To keep the new country from flying apart, the U. S. Constitution compromised: some men were going to be more equal than others.  75 years later, that compromise resulted in a calamitous civil war and once it was over (and well over, the 15th wasn't ratified until 1870), at least on the paper of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, all citizens were equal before the law.

     Depending on where you lived, who your ancestors were and just how much effort you made to exercise your rights, those rights were still not protected by anything much stronger than the paper they were written on. It was nearly a hundred more years before that pot boiled over.

     The promise of the Declaration of Independence is still not perfectly fulfilled.  Perhaps it will never be; perhaps it's an ideal, a dream.  Maybe the best we can ever hope for is to keep working towards it -- and that's a worthy goal.

     When a day is set aside to mark one of the biggest milestones on that road, the official end of slavery in these United States, it takes a pretty small heart to resent it.

The Big Question

      Sure, they're called "rolled oats," but you've got to wonder just what, exactly, they've been rolling in.  I mean, really...?

Fireflies

     I was cleaning up around the grill after supper.  A nice sale at the grocer's meant we'd had steaks, a rare treat these days.

     It was getting dark and I thought I saw a yellow flash.  I stopped, watched, and there it was!  There was just enough light to spot the tiny creature between flashes, helicoptering hopefully over a weedy spot.  A wider look at the back yard found a couple more, too.

     There's lots to worry about these days, but in my back yard, there are small, harmless insects who light up because they're lonely.  And that's kind of wonderful.  I hope they all find a perfect match, and next year we have even more of them. 

Pretty Abnormal, Considering

     U. S. House of Representatives districts: Every time there's a new court decision or the makeup of the relevant court changes, both of the big political parties take turns complaining about the unfairness of it all or proclaiming that now's their chance.

     The House often sits close to the tipping point -- a seat here and another one there can change which party holds the majority.  You can't blame the parties when they scramble for that narrow advantage.  It's how they're built.

     But what are we doing with House districts?  Do the ones where you live have much correspondence to communities, neighborhoods, people who shop in the same place, or are they some stretched and stitched-together chimera that groups likely [Party] voters together, no matter what other differences they might have?  What was the original point of the House of Representatives, anyway?

     The Senate is clearly and obviously where the individual States debate as States.  But the House was supposed to be representing you and me, granularly enough that we could write our Congressthing about local issues and they'd have some clue what we were nattering on about and feel some obligation to address it, however inadequately.  I'm not sure that's what we've got.  I doubt there's any magic rule to drawing up districts that would make them sensible and fair, but the present methods show a remarkable tendency to take the uncertainty out of election results at the expense of any other consideration, no matter which party has the greatest effect on the details.

     Maybe it's time to take another look at that, if we could take a break from playing culture war and running what's left of civil society over a cliff.