Still Not Feeling Great

      Tired and achy, migraines and dizzy.  Gee, I'm sure glad I am taking a (partial) week of vacation.   Still no COVID-19 symptoms, so that's a a plus.

A Couple Of Interesting Art Blogs

      Black And White -- About prints and printmaking.

      Art & Artists -- a lot about artists, with very little pretension or posturing.  Just art and info.

Program Abended

      ...As in "ABnormally ENDed."  Firefox kept crashing every time I opened it.  Rebooted, closed all but one tab, and so far, so good.

      I have been a little sick the past two days, probably just a cold, or even my sinuses responding to cold weather (actually, to dry indoor conditions) but it has involved migraines with visual distortion, extreme clumsiness and dizziness, plus some sinus-and-throat ick.  Maybe I gave it to my computer.

Sobering

      A little simulation from Princeton about how things might go if a conventional NATO/Russia conflict went nuclear.

     It looks like an early video game at first glance -- at least, until the casualty counts pop up.

Wednesday Dinner

      The store had some nice boneless pork chops when I did my weekly shopping, so I bought a couple.  Last night, I decided to try something different. 

      Seasoned them with a little of fancy flake salt and truffle salt, pepper, a touch of garlic powder and parsley, and browned them them in butter with a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce.  As the chops were browning, I diced a stalk of celery and a couple of big radishes and added them after the first turning.  Once both sides were nice and brown, I added a can of Campbell's Condensed Mushroom Soup, a can of Amy's Mushroom Bisque, and half a (Campbell's) can of water, stirred and deglazed it, put the lid on and left it to simmer.

      Ten minutes on, I lifted the lid, stirred it (turning a lovely golden brown) and pondered the thickness: not quite what I wanted.

      Tam had bought a bag of tiny, fresh, seasoned microwaveable potatoes* and I started them (seven minutes, then rest for a minute).

      I stirred up a teaspoon of cornstarch in a custard cup half full of cold water and added it to the gravy, bringing up the heat so it boiled a little, then put the lid back on and let it simmer more.

      By the time the potatoes were done, my digital meat thermometer was reporting the pork chops were ready.  The gravy was thickened just enough.  (Cornstarch is a cheat, since it works without having to make a roux.  Just be sparing with it.)

      The end result was tender and moist, and the gravy worked very well with the pork.  Fresh mushrooms would have fit in well, but it had lots of good flavor without them.
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* The microwave is your friend when it comes to baked potatoes; my standard big Idaho gets nuked (three minutes and turn for three more; repeat three and three and it's usually done, or four and four for the largest) and then wrapped in foil and parked at the back of the gas oven above the pilot or on a corner of the grill until the rest of dinner is ready.  You can add seasoning or a dab of butter when you wrap them if you'd like.

Follow-Up

      As a companion piece to reading The Next Civil War (from yesterday's post), Studs Terkel's Hard Times is somewhat reassuring.

      Subtitled An Oral History Of The great Depression, the book is exactly what it says on the label: Terkel went around and interviewed as broad a cross-section as he could find of Americans who lived through it, from an isolationist anti-communist Republican ex-Congressman to Reds, from Fundamentalist Silver Shirts to social workers, farmers, hobos and social reformers.  We are a polyglot lot and we always have been, and most of us figure the deck is at least a little stacked against whatever group we consider ourselves to be in.  It comes with the territory: vanishingly few of our ancestors were at top of the heap wherever they were from, which is why and how they ended up here. 

      Americans in a tight spot are especially likely to try everything.  And argue over it, too.

Yes, Tuesday

      I'm so tired of the intractable mess.  I've been reading one of Tam's suggestions and even after making due allowance for Canadiazation of the author's viewpoint -- it is a whole different country, after all, and the guy grew up there -- it's a depressing read.  One of our greatest strengths, the way in which the United States is a wonderful shambling mess of zany ideas, wild notions and a political system that tries -- tried -- to steer clear of the worst shoals and not screw up too badly, is also a weakness and it may break us yet.

      I hope not.

Happy Birthday, Tamara

      Happy birthday to my friend (and lodger) Tamara Keel!  Here's to many more happy years!

Sunday Funnies

      Once upon a time, there was an artist  named Boris Artzybasheff.  Born in 1899 in Russia, he fought against the Bolsheviks and made his way to the United States by 1919.  He did a lot of illustration work and beginning before WW II, frequently did cover art for Time Magazine.

     His work could be strikingly anthropomorphic:

     They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery -- which makes this 1943 MGM cartoon high praise indeed.

     ...But not only does Artzybasheff not get so much as a nod in the credits, I couldn't find any mention of the obvious influence his work had on this animation in any discussion of the subject.

In Which I Am Snarked At By The Credulous

      In response to my most recent posting, a commenter who very rarely gets past the filters chided me:

"'Always suspect a story that fits too well with the reporter or outlet's inclinations (and/or your own)' You should take your own advice."

      The thing is, I do -- and I make a particular effort to check things out and find (and share) links when it is something I have strong feelings about, pro or con.

      I spent nearly all of the Trump administration "doing homework" rather than joining any reflexive pro or anti bandwagon.  I had disliked the man for years; he has always struck me as a remarkable example of a bad boss in the "disruptive manager" style.  I'm not a big fan of "nativism" as historically expressed in the United States and Mr. Trump's updating of it was no improvement, in my judgement.  Once the "Grab them by the [female private parts]" audio came out and was confirmed, there was no way I was ever going to vote for him.  As a result, I made a great effort to fairly judge his actions as President on their own merits, and found myself coming to his defense from time to time in online discussions.

      ...I started to write a long history of how and why I arrived at my present conclusions, but you know what?  It doesn't matter how clear and careful a trail of breadcrumbs I leave, if you have bought into the alt-reality line of a rigged election, a faked pandemic and vaccines that aren't, I'm not going to change your mind.

      But here's reality:

      - The 2020 Federal elections were as fair and honest as any of 'em have been in my lifetime.  Mr. Trump lost and Mr. Biden won, mostly by virtue of not being Mr. Trump rather than his own merits.  Note that the election shrank the Democrat majority in the House and left the Senate at 50/50: that's not a recipe for gaining power over the Federal government and it's a sure sign the Dems didn't have a thumb on the scales.

      - Mr. Trump's "legal team" pushing the notion of a stolen election is a bunch of grifters and/or lunatics.  That narrative trails away into the "Qanon" craziness and bloody-handed authoritarians, and the only thing at the end of it is ruin and bankruptcy.

      - The coronavirus pandemic is real.  Over 860,000 Americans have died of it so far and that figure may break a million by the end of this year.  (I hope not, but it's almost inevitable.)

      - Coronavirus vaccines work and they are safe.  Over 75 percent of the population of the U.S. has received at least one shot.  That's nearly 250 million of your fellow citizens.  They're not dying of the shots. 

      That's the real world, one in which we can be reasonably confident the omicron surge will buy us at least a month or two (or more!) of low infection, hospitalization and death rates once it passes -- and death rates are already low, especially compared to infection rates, and should keep dropping thanks to a number of factors including widespread vaccination and better medical treatments for COVID-19 cases.

      You can go live in cloud-cuckoo land if you like, grooving on paranoid fantasies, inflammatory politics and a growing disconnect from the real world, but it doesn't lead anywhere good.  It's the political version of heroin addiction.

      The stupid, violent and deluded at the political extremes are working very hard to burn this country down.  We have one party mostly trying to pretend it's not happening anywhere on their side and one party buying matches in bulk.  I'm not impressed by either one and I am not going to cheer them on.  YMMV.

      Don't like it?  Go jump out of an Overton window.  "Communists or Fascists" is a false choice, an option of being bludgeoned to death with an oak club or hickory one.  It was a false choice in Germany in 1933 and it's a false choice now.  We have still got a functioning form of democracy* here in the United States, no matter how much of their own excrement Lefty and Righty rioters and talk-show hosts try to smear on it.
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* "Democracy" is a general term, widely used, and we say "direct democracy" if we want to refer to the ancient Greek citizens-vote-on-everything model.  If you want to whine, "But this is a republic," in that politcal-party-name coded way, go breathe it into a paper bag until the urge passes.  "Democracy," a system of government based on the ongoing consent of the governed, in which we choose the nitwits running the gummint by voting instead of them being born to it or getting there atop a heap of severed heads; and we get to replace the nitwits frequently.  It's all fiddlin' details from there and you're either for it or agin' it.  It you're against it, I'm not your friend.

Confirmation Bias: Teachable Moment

      The relative positions of media outlets on the Ad Fontes bias/accuracy chart are the center point of a "scattergram" of ratings for a wide sampling of items for each one; if you go to the interactive version and look up the various rated providers, you can see it and find links to the stories themselves.

      NPR's will probably take a hit in the next update and it's an instructive incident: Nina Totenberg reported that Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor had begun working remotely -- and that the reason was that Justice Gorsuch's had refused to wear a mask, while all the other Justices were doing so.

      This story clicked right into Ms. Totenberg's confirmation bias, and right into her story about tension among the justices.  The juicy item of conflict between a supposedly defiantly unmasked Mr. Justice Gorsuch and an aggrieved Ms. Justice Sotomayor was raw meat for a lot of the media and a predictable feeding frenzy ensued and escalated, nicely unpacked here.

      The United States Supreme Court was not amused, and issued a joint statement:
"Reporting that Justice Sotomayor asked Justice Gorsuch to wear a mask surprised us. It is false. While we may sometimes disagree about the law, we are warm colleagues and friends."

      While there's no requirement that Supreme Court Justices love one one another, agree, or even like their fellow Justices (and historically, there's been a lot of loathing), the present Court appears to value an atmosphere in which they can argue like hell and still get along.

      There's a recent drawing by a court artist making the rounds, and it showed up on Twitter in response to the joint statement -- it's the header at SCOTUSblog right now, nine chairs all in a row, six masked Justices, an empty chair, Justice Gorsuch unmasked and one more Justice in a mask.  Striking, but it tells us nothing about it got that way.

      As a follow-up, Chief Justice Roberts issued a statement of his own, "I did not request Justice Gorsuch or any other Justice to wear a mask on the bench."

      I kept checking NPR's website to see what they had to say about the situation.  Eventually, yesterday evening, they did a news story about the news story, with rather a lot of of hedging from Ms. Totenberg.

      NPR is well aware of how bad a gaffe this is, and has got out the sackcloth and ashes, or at least the Unabridged:
      "In the absence of a clarification, NPR risks losing credibility with audience members who see the plainly worded statement from Roberts and are forced to go back to NPR's story and reconcile the nuances of the verb 'asked' when in fact, it's not a nuanced word."

      The takeaway?

      1. Always suspect a story that fits too well with the reporter or outlet's inclinations (and/or your own).  Hey, it could be right, but that stuff is red meat, no matter which direction they're leaning.  Look for independent confirmation -- of which this story never had any.

      2. Reality is nuanced.  Twitter -- where this thing really mushroomed -- and headlines are not.  Story ledes and hooks (that part that grabs your attention away from the hockey scores or WW III reports) are not.  This can get out of hand rapidly. 

      3. Time is your friend.  My initial reaction (to Tam) was, "I thought the Justices got along better than that.  Didn't Scalia take Sotomayor hunting, way back when?"  And later, after learning Sotomayor is diabetic, "It's really going to stink if is Gorsuch is that big a shitheel."  Well, he's probably not.  And they probably do get along well enough.   And while there may have been a minor kerfluffle over masks, the Justices settled it among themselves and presumably nobody's seething, or at least not enough to go gripe about it in the Press.  Tempest, meet teapot; teapot, meet Totenberg.  Oops.

      4. I could not find links to the official Supreme Court statements, not even at SCOTUSblog.  Forbes linked to tweets, and that's as close as anyone came.  WTH, Press?  C'mon, show your work when you can.

Of Masks And Risks And Omicron

      The recent piece on navigating the present-day landscape of everyone else's coronavirus strategy didn't get many responses, and those weren't publishable for reasons of excessive pugnacity or the repeating of misinformation.

      One stood out, a fellow who chided me, "Well young lady I guess that the semi-annual HEPA mask fittings I did as a condition of employment was a profitable scam if paper or cloth masks filter out virus-sized particles."

      One supposes "Young lady..." is meant as flattery, but it reads as dismissive; at any rate, I'm within a couple of years of full retirement age, which is a bit past 65 for my cohort.  I've been working at my trade for forty-eight years now.  There's more silver than gold in my hair these days.

      I have also been trained on and then worked in a "Moon suit" and full-face Air-Purifying Respirator, or APR, basically a gas mask.  The training comes with lectures on what it does and does not stop, how it works and a lengthy segment on how to control and limit exposure that included this short film. I don't know how a short training course -- we got 24 hours, total -- stacks up against getting a filter mask fit check a few times a year, but it's at least comparable.

      And it means neither of us is an expert at everyday biohazard control -- just like most people.

      With that caveat, I'll dig right in to the central canard, that my cheap little paper and synthetic-fiber KN95 mask is supposed to keep the virus from getting to me, all by itself.

      It's not.  In that direction, it's a pointy stick in a gunfight: better than nothing.  But it's also just one part of the process, a process that explains why I can look at one or two unmasked folks at the grocery store and not freak right out. 

      Limiting the spread -- even with the chicken pox or cooties contagiousness of omicron -- is accomplished by a bunch of small steps, none of them perfect.  "The best is the enemy of good enough:" many people see that some measure -- vaccines, handwashing, refraining from French-kissing strangers, whatever -- is not a total barrier to infection, and therefore ignore it.  In that case, why wear a seat belt in your car or an airplane?

      I'm going to use my typical trip to the corner grocer's.  Your mileage may vary.

      Start with that mask: it's not a great barrier against tiny, dry, aerosolized viruses.  It is a better barrier to the larger moist, virus-bearing components of my exhaled breath; even a cloth mask does at least a little of that.  And what it doesn't stop, it tends to slow down.  It's better than nothing.

      Next step: I choose uncrowded times to grocery-shop.  I don't push up close to other people.  So presumably, there's less viral load in the air and I've got a bit of distance from the source, or a barrier between us.  It's not great (I guess I could have groceries parachuted to the middle of the back yard if I really wanted to keep my distance) but it's better than nothing.

      Next step: I limit my time in the store, planning what I will buy ahead of time and following a set, efficient route.  A week's worth of groceries takes about twenty minutes -- a bit long, but better than  wandering around for an hour.

      Next step: I don't socialize or chatter.  A "Hello," to the butchers I know, a pleasantry with the cashier through the barrier (those slabs of Lexan aren't great, but they're better than nothing).  I don't stop and catch up on neighborhood gossip in the middle of the aisle when I see a friend. (Yes, some people still do.  I'm not in charge of them; I wasn't even when they were aisle-blocking before the pandemic.)

      Final steps: I sanitized the touching surfaces of the cart when I picked it up.  Once the groceries are stowed, I return the cart* and then sanitize my hands before taking the mask off, folding it by the straps and stowing it in a zip-lock bag.  None of these are sure-fire virus-stoppers, either -- but they're better than nothing.  I've had two vaccine shots and a booster, too: also not a guarantee I won't fall ill, though they should substantially improve my odds of not ending up in the hospital or worse if it happens. (If, indeed, it hasn't already.)  Once I get home, I'll wash my hands before and after putting the groceries away.  Through it all, I will refrain from touching my face. 

      Am I saying all of this is a totally effective way to not get COVID-19 (or the flu or a cold)?  No.  In fact, hell, no.  But it helps.  It's more helpful in not spreading it if I happen to have it and don't know.  It's not a hundred percent for that, either -- but it's better than nothing.

      Am I saying you should be doing all or even some of these things?  Sorry; I'm not the boss of you.  Make up your own mind.  Roll your own dice.  I'll be over there, at least six feet away, not yelling at you.

      Controlling communicable illness is a matter of statistics and mass populations.  One way is by drastically restricting people's movements and interactions the way Red China has -- but it takes a totalitarian government to pull that off and it becomes less and less effective with more contagious versions.  If not combined with massive vaccination, all it does it put the problem off for later, because this virus is not going away.   That's not how we do things in Western Civilization.  Sure, there's a degree of chivvying going on here in the U.S., at roughly a seat-belt law and smoking-ban level, and with about the same degree of compliance or a bit more, and that's what we've got.  It's better than nothing.

      It's a lot better than spreading rumors that keep people from making the effort. 
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* Because I'm not a sociopath or a savage.  YMMV.