Dirty Pool

     Recently, an ad agency working for a gun-control advocacy group tricked former NRA President David Keene and firearms-rights author/researcher John R. Lott into giving a graduation speech to 3,044 empty chairs, a number chosen to represent students killed by firearms who would have been graduating -- a stunt being reported in glowing terms in the advertising community.

     While I am very much in favor of people having their own opinions and beliefs, and being free to promote them (as long as they do not advocate harming others) even when I strongly disagree with their position, this is shoddy behavior.  Disagreement is normal, acceptable; deciding those with whom you disagree are fair game for dirty tricks is not.  Cheering on such behavior is reprehensible.

     This con job is right down there with the selective editing and trick questions used by "Project Veritas" to push their agenda.  It's not honest, nor is it effective debate.  It's not right, no matter who is doing it or how noble they believe their cause to be.

     The ends do not justify the means.  Period.*
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* This is very much of a piece with my strong belief that persons who have been arrested, even for heinous crimes, ought not be treated any more harshly than any other prisoner while awaiting trial.  Dealing fairly and squarely with people is a measure of your morality, not of your opinion of theirs.    

More Nope

      In an America in which people have politicized the germ theory of disease and push muddled misunderstandings of how vaccines work, some mornings it's not possible to find a topic to write about that won't result in heaping mounds of behind-the-scenes acrimony.

      At this point, we're in the "is the monster dead or playing possum?" stage of the pandemic, and some of the incautious characters are going to get savaged if the thing's merely lying low.

      The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has got a sub-variant of its own, and it could be especially ugly.  Or not -- but we're only going to know when the music builds to crescendo and a scaly tentacle unexpectedly lashes out at the prom queen, the High School football center and the skinny math geek, all shaking a failing flashlight. Will they survive?  I don't know -- I wasn't willing to roll those dice and frankly, I think this movie stinks.  We're nevertheless stuck in it until the credits roll, sometime in 2022 unless the unvaccinated manage to breed a really nasty variation on the virus that we can't keep a lid on.

      It's raining soup and bowls are free.  You can be in the movie or come join the audience.  It's your choice.  We're all going to have to see it play out either way, but one of them's a lot higher risk than the other.

A General Principle

      My general objection to the antics of the media is not that they are hard on politicians, but that they don't give all of them -- and their subject-matter-experts! -- the same level of scrutiny.

      The notion came to the forefront of my thoughts over the weekend, watching some pundit or wonk being interviewed on CNN about former U. S. Attorney General William Barr's recently-reported statement on the 2020 elections.  (The original piece now seems to have been buried.)  Her comments came down to "Weaksauce" and "Why wait until now?"

      Her "weaksauce" opinion is subjective; persons holding (or who have held) high office generally avoid terms like "bullshit" when speaking for the record.  When they do not, my experience is that watering down the strength of their opinion is the precise opposite of their intent.

      Her other notion, though, is simply wrong.  It took me about ten seconds to type in search terms and come up with an AP story from December of this year: Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud.  Barr didn't hold back (nor was he the only one); he didn't wait.  Accusing him of having done so is ignorant if not disingenuous.

      I'm all for people having their own opinions -- but those opinions are not of any value if the person expressing them hasn't done their homework first.  The public record is not a secret and requires no reading between the lines; we know what Mr. Barr first said about claims of fraud in the 2020 Presidential election and when he said it.*
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* Some commenters will use this as a chance to say, "See why we don't trust the media?"  But in fact, I used the media to check the media.  Commentators and SME's speak off-the-cuff and often with partisan intent (conscious or not).  In general, I trust the media to not screw up general accounts of widely-reported events and interviews with public figures: I keep the broad outlines in mind and double-check anything that seems askew or too-neatly confirms my own opinions, and I try to work back to things that were observed by multiple reporters and other people.

Vacationing By Television

      They are places I shall probably never visit -- but thanks to television and a charming hostess, I can see them on television: Penelope Keith's Hidden Villages is a series of programs originally shown on the UK's Channel 4.  Several of the streaming services offer it.

      Each episode takes you to several villages -- not cities or towns! -- in a particular area, with general views and visits to sites and person of interest.  Produced with the eye's-view naturalism the Brits do so well, they are a refreshing change from the stress and rush all around us .

      Tamara returned today from a month-long house-sitting assignment.  The present messy state of air travel had left her jangled and annoyed.  Over dinner, Ms. Keith showed us Cumbria, with particular attention paid to the the Lake District, unhurried and pleasant.  It was time well spent.

Bad Idea

      It probably serves me right.

      The eye surgeon's office was upfront about it: they were going to dilate my eyes.  And they can provide transportation, at remarkably low prices.

      "No thanks," said I, "Your office is only two or three miles from the North Campus and I have two sets of sunglasses.  I'll drive myself."

      And so I did.  The afternoon was thickly overcast, which was a help.  Wide-brimmed hat, dark clip-ons on my new glasses and the big, dark, side-shield over-glasses they supplied after surgery.  A little dicey getting to the car, but once inside...  Well, not great but certainly workable.

      Wide-dilated eyes have a very shallow focus: only a narrow range of distances will be clear at any given time.  (It's the exact opposite of a pinhole camera.)  The eye drops tend to freeze the muscles that change your focus, too.  The way to deal with this is to keep your eyes moving, so you build up a clearer idea of the details.  Heavy stop-and-go traffic is actually a help: your main attention is on the car in front of you.  That's exactly what I was driving in; I made it back to the North Campus just fine.

      The inside of the building there is painted and floored in light, neutral colors and very well lit.  Really, extremely well-lit.  Post-dilation, it looked to be well past that and right up to OMG ARE WE DOING SURGERY ON THE SURFACE OF THE SUN?

      Okay, shades drawn, lights off, I can cope.  I've been using one of my own laptops (a MacBook Air, a useful little machine and a good match to my older Windows Surface Pro) for e-mail and other simple tasks.   With the brightness down to the very lowest setting that doesn't turn the backlight off, the screen was comfortable to look at.  I got to work and made good progress on a current project.

      As time passed, things in the darkened building were getting clearer.  And the computer screen was starting to give me a headache--

      I didn't ask what they'd used in the eye-dilating drops.  Atropine -- one of the gotcha chemicals in Belladonna or Deadly Nightshade -- is still a common ingredient.  It's safe in this application.  Like any drug, full effect is reached some time after administration and then it tapers off.  And this stuff isn't quick: it reached peak two or three hours after they used it on me.

      It was still tapering off when I left for home.  Hat, clip-ons, sunglasses over them, at least it was still overcast.  But the clouds didn't go all the way to the horizon and the setting sun was starting to peek under them from time to time.  Well, my car's got sun visors.... 

      I set out for home.  It turned out the evening sunlight wasn't too hard to take.  Not great, but workable.  The headlights of oncoming cars, on the other hand--

      Each light source made a big, fuzzy, four-armed star.  I am both nearsighted and astigmatic; the astigmatism became markedly worse in early adulthood and the first indication was that light sources at night started turning into fuzzy, bright balls, sometime with star rays.  New glasses fixed it.  Now the effect of the dilation was making my astigmatism different!  Not enough to obscure things, but it was unexpected.

      Next time, I'm taking the afternoon off -- and I'm not doing my own driving.

Eye Exam

      Today, I have a short appointment with the eye surgeon to find out how my recovery from cataract surgery is going, and if I'm ready for an exam to determine my new prescription. 

      The glasses I got shortly after surgery are a stop-gap; vision usually changes as your eyes heal.  It's obvious I'll be needing bifocals again, which I had expected.

Did He Miss One?

     (Note: if you're still of the opinion that the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election was determined by voter fraud, cheating or tampering with the totals, this blog post and linked article isn't for you.  It barely intersects your worldview and I'm about as interested in debating you as I am in debating a Methodist and an old-school Unitarian about the Trinity.)

      A few days ago, I linked to an interesting opinion piece that suggested the U. S. political culture is divided not into two halves, but four quarters.  The writer, George Packer, did a good job of supporting his contention, too.

     Of course, for every pundit claiming the sky is yellow, there's another one saying it's violet.  Or that Mr. Packer has overlooked an entire demographic--

      And there they are: Eric Levitz has discovered working-class Democrats.  Yes, they do exist, and while I think the group contains far more "swing" voters (many of whom probably voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 due to a combination of feeling he was on their side and because he wasn't Ms. Clinton*) than he appears to, they're certainly the forgotten voters, just as much as their Republican counterparts -- and possibly more fickle.

      It's fun to slap red and blue paint on every issue and every voter, but that's nowhere near the whole story.  Elections, especially Presidential elections, are often decided by fairly narrow margins.  The people way out at the extremes show up in the headlines, but it's the fat center of the distribution curve where the vote is won or lost.  Candidates, parties and pundits would do well not to ignore them.
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* The power of negative voting is often overlooked, but the effect of, "Oh, hell no, anybody but that person," votes is significant.  While it's very satisfying to have a candidate who infuriates the other side, the problem is that they also can infuriate voters who might otherwise have been on your side.

It's Typewriter Day!

      Or one of them, anyway.  The Europeans have their own, on 30 April, for their guy who invented one.  The nice thing about holidays is they they're very rarely either-or.

      Ours -- and the world's -- celebrates the day Christopher Latham Sholes and his partners were first granted a U. S. patent, 23 June 1868. 

Early Results Are In

      A few responses to my self-test on the subject of hypocrisy have arrived.  So far, they indicate that respondents believe it is perfectly okay to say one thing and do another yourself -- it's only damning when someone else does so, especially if they are someone of whom you disapprove.  (I'm not immune to this myself.)

      How interesting.

Nope

      There were a couple of items I was thinking of blogging about, but you know what?  One is simply contentious and the other, well, the other will fuel the worst kind of tinfoil-hat speculation instead of the careful consideration it deserves.*

      Some days, I just don't much feel like poking at scary things with a stick.  Especially if I don't have anything constructive to add to the discussion.  People are already way crazier than I ever expected.  Why add to it?
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* Here's a hint for the latter: Sir Arthur C. Clarke covered the general topic in two of his Tales From The White Hart stories, "Big Game Hunt" and "Patent Pending."  There's a fellow at Columbia University making good progress on it right now.  It's a very deep rabbit hole and tinfoil is not going to help.

Everybody Under The Microscope!

      This article about our current politics is uncomfortable reading.  The writer doesn't come at it from the same angle I do -- and he's upfront about that -- but nobody's corner of the present political divides is spared and none of them come off as shining examples of the way forward.

      His analysis of the big picture looks pretty close to me.  It's certainly worth your time to read it all the way through.  Even if you decide he's off-base, it's a good look into another person's perceptions of where we are and how we got there.

Two Questions

      If you are one of those people who believes hypocrisy to be an especially damming sin, I have two questions for you.

      Please read and answer each one to yourself before proceeding to the next.  Be honest.

   First Question:
      Do you believe it is important to respect and obey the laws of our States and nation?


   Second Question:
      Do you always drive at or below the posted speed limit?


     Man, some mornings I just hate having to look in the mirror....