Boreal B[l]og

Now, I am beginning to understand, thanks to budget director Mick Mulvaney.  When asked by Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan why money for water protection in the Great Lakes was zeroed out in the budget, he said we had to look at this through the eyes of a taxpayer in Arkansas: “Should I really take some of his tax dollars to do something in Michigan?”

Stabenow commented, “that’s called having a country, with all due respect.”  She went on to say that 20% of the world’s fresh water bordered 8 states. I wonder how many Americans can name all the Great Lakes.  I wonder if Mulvaney could even name the states; he’s from the South.

I would have gone right back at Mulvaney asking why I, here in Oregon, should give a damn about a trailer park in Arkansas that gets leveled by a tornado, something that happens virtually every year.  Or some chicken farmer, when I’m vegetarian.  Why should I care if some cattle rancher’s herd dies in a winter blizzard?  That doesn’t affect me.  Why should I pay to truck sand into some North Carolina beach, so it will get eroded away the next storm?  Or to fight grass fires in Texas, build levees in Louisiana, where the ground is sinking and the Atchafalaya River needs to flow naturally again, which means taking over from the Mississippi.  Why should I care about floods in South Carolina?  That’s Mulvaney’s home.  Let him pay for it.  I’m not going there again.  If there is an EF-5 in Oklahoma, why should I care?  It’s a red state, most of the people there wish somebody like me would drop dead, and they certainly wouldn’t want my money.  Why then?

Because we are the UNITED States, not the UNTIED States.  We fix things in the country that matter.  We help people who need help.  We protect the environment for the next generation, and if I, a guy who neither desired nor wanted nor had children, thinks that helping those who lives have yet to begin is important, why can’t the president’s budget address this fact?

How local to we go, Mr. Mulvaney?  Do we go so local that we only pay for medical bills that affect us?  That our taxes shouldn’t go to medical research because I may see no benefit, to building trauma centers I may never use, to research that tries to cure other childhood cancers, like we cured acute lymphoblastic leukemia (it wasn’t prayer that did that, you know) even though I will never in my life have a child who could have it?  Mr. Mulvaney, it should be noted, failed to pay payroll taxes incurred by a nanny for his triplets from 2000-2004, arguing she was a babysitter.

Why should I pay for somebody who has head trauma and wasn’t wearing a helmet?  Or somebody with a gunshot wound when I think the NRA ought to pay for it? They use firearms, I don’t.

Are we becoming a nation of crowd source funders, passing the digital hat, without a clue what a country is about?  Is this the rugged individualism approach that sounds good when you hear Sheriff Richard Mack, of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, the same Mr. Mack who hated Mr. Obama and his ACA?  Sheriff Mack, to remind some and to educate others, had a heart attack and his wife became ill as well.  They went to GoFundMe to try to get their medical bills paid for, since they didn’t have insurance. Crowd sourcing isn’t the answer, because medical bills are far more than most realize, and Sheriff Mack, your bill and many others with similar conditions can’t be anticipated, so that’s why we have a thing called insurance.  Now insurance isn’t all that great when it restricts what you can use it for, so it was changed.  Personally, I would have the government cover all medical care to a certain extent, but I am open to honest, fair debate as to what that extent should be.

For example, I think medical care for heart conditions, cancer, aneurysms, blown out knees, fractured clavicles, broken necks, concussions, childbirth, strep throats, ought to be available so that people—even right wing, red state folks who hate me and everything I stand for—get it when they fall ill, rather than dying and as Charles Dickens would have said, “decreased the surplus population.”  I think a 30 year-old, uninsured, in a coma, should be given medical treatment to try to save his life, not “let him die,” which is what the audience yelled at a Ron Paul rally in 2011. Paul himself said, “let people assume responsibility for themselves.”  Really?  People in a coma can assume responsibility?  Old people can shop for the best value medical care?  Should those who were too stupid not to wear a helmet be left at the side of the road to die?  Granted, I didn’t like coming in at 2 a.m. to care for them, but these people needed medical care, unless or until there was a time when in the my judgment where care would no longer help. I wasn’t, of course, trained as an OBG like Paul, just a neurologist, and I was a few years behind him in medical school, so I didn’t hear the part about having the churches take care of these people.  That’s been tried in this country, and it doesn’t work, although if some of the megachurches put their dollars towards actual hands on care, we could probably make a moderate dent in the scope of the problem.

By the way, Paul’s 2008 campaign manager died at 49 from pneumonia, leaving behind a $400,000 medical bill, because while he could raise money for Paul, he couldn’t afford a few hundred a month for COBRA coverage.  Paul managed to extol the man’s skills and tried to raise money for his medical bills.  Is this the America he envisioned?

Are we united or untied?  Will my America be money for defense, tax cuts for the rich, where the money will not trickle down, but we will continue to hear that it is true? Will my America be where the president’s family uses the office to generate money and virtually nobody will try to stop it?  Where Mr. Putin’s approaches to journalism and money are copied here?  Is it here where we make a budget based on unrealistic growth expectations?  What happens when a Cat 5 hurricane levels Miami, storm surge again wipes out New Orleans, or a cluster of EF-4 tornadoes takes out Birmingham?  Are those people expected to take care of themselves?  What happens if the San Andreas or Cascadia Fault slips, and Los Angeles, San Francisco, Eugene, Salem, Portland or Seattle is leveled?  Or we have an oil spill from a pipeline that a lot of us didn’t want, and the Ogallala Aquifer or Lake Superior are polluted beyond repair?  You’ve heard, I assume, Mr. Mulvaney, of the Enbridge 5 pipeline under the Straits of Mackinac.  What happens if this 65 year-old pipeline, whose supports have failed, leaks? Who fixes Lake Superior?

This is what I finally understand.  I know now where we are going: we are to become a nation of take care of yourself, because nobody else will.  That’s the case in many places in the world today.  I’ve seen those places and those people, in Manila, La Paz, Caracas, Lima, Djakarta, New Delhi, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Lusaka, Nairobi, Cairo, and Tripoli.  Of course, we have them here, too. And we will have a lot more.  You see, the AHCA will remove insurance from 64,000 in Oregon Congressman Greg Walden’s district, and he helped craft the bill.

You know what?  He will be re-elected in 2018.

Social and other media have been abuzz the past few weeks about impeachment of the president, a display of both magical thinking and forgetfulness of with whom we are dealing.  In the same vein, the “resistance” is taking credit for things that perhaps are not worth crediting.  In short, while I support all steps that fight the current administration and run down the clock, I want to inject a harsh dose of reality into our lives, too.

I wouldn’t bet against the current president.  He survived insulting of McCain, the Pope and Ted Cruz’s wife, dissing a Gold Star family, giving away Graham’s phone number, and took apart not only the entire Republican field, but the Democrats as well.  He was shrewd enough to bring several of his rivals into his cabinet. He has gotten away with all of it, and other than a few brave judges slowing down some executive orders, is quietly moving to dismantle health care, give a big tax break to the wealthy, remove food stamps, Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare, and all environmental restrictions.  Maybe this can be stopped, but I am not betting on it right now.

The rules have changed.  While the media is finally stepping forward with investigations into his ties and his campaign’s ties to Russia, already there are those who may find a way to weaken the investigation.  I’ve heard countless times of the dysfunction in the White House and how this can’t continue.  And yet it continues.  He can fire the current special counsel should he choose, like Nixon, more than 40 years ago, and there would be a huge outcry…but nothing to show for it, were I betting.

Despite all the transgressions the current president has made, his approval rating stubbornly remains in the mid to high 30s, back to 40% when we had our $90 million raid on Syria.  Oh, I read that the firing of Comey had a 29% approval rating, but the disapproval rating is today barely over 50%.  The president would get at least 40% of the vote were the election held today, and until or unless I see polling numbers in the 20s, I will not be impressed much has significantly changed.  It doesn’t matter that Mr. Obama ran a scandal-free administration, stymied every step of the way, had unproven conspiracy theories abound, and would have been impeached in a New York minute had he secret conversations with the Russians.  This president has the backing of the Republican Party, who sees more what they can get from him than what is right or wrong in the country. I heard before the election all the Republicans who weren’t going to vote for him. And they all did anyway.  I’m not sure what—if anything—will take this man down.  I suspect if something does, it may be a minor sleeper that takes everybody by surprise.

Currently, I am trying to unsubscribe from the voluminous number of emails I get from so many different groups.  Today was the Democratic Governor’s Association.  I fought the battle 10 years ago, back when Napolitano and Sebelius were still red state governors, until Mr. Obama’s ill-timed use of them in his cabinet.   If the Democrats were too stupid to realize what they needed to do, it isn’t up to me to be their money tree.  I’m retired.  It’s time for somebody else to step forward. I’m tired of losing, of candidates not wanting the national organization to come to their district, because national is out of touch, running candidates with high disapproval ratings who worry more about raising money than going to the heartland in all 50 states and just discussing matters like health care, defense, taxes, and trade.  I’ve had it with voters who demand perfection in race, gender, sexual orientation, medical plans, fighting terrorism, or they will stay home.  These same voters are getting creamed by this administration, and frankly a tax cut would be economically beneficial to me.  If they are too stupid to realize that only the Democrat can beat the president, not a Libertarian or a Green, and that down ballot measures like Congress and School Boards matter, then they deserve what they get.

Resist, yes.  But don’t think for a moment that the resistance killed the AHCA.  It didn’t kill it the first time, the Freedom Caucus did.  And whether the town halls will make a difference at the voting booth, I’m not optimistic right now.  People have short memories.  People are stupid, when they think “Obamacare” was different from the ACA.  I’d predict that if the AHCA became law today, the House wouldn’t change much in 2018. Nobody is protesting the lack of enforcement of the ACA, which is causing more insurers to pull out, the Blues now from the KC area.  Enforcement of the law is a presidential duty.  At least it was for a Democratic president.

Worse, it may be too late.  An estimated 300,000 in Wisconsin alone were disenfranchised because of harsh rules to vote.  It is more difficult to vote now, the districts were gerrymandered, the voting rights act was gutted, and now we are going to have a commission to look into voter fraud, most of the single digit cases of fraud being by Republicans.  In 2020, the census will be politicized, and minorities will be undercounted, underrepresented, and districts drawn by Republicans, because most of the states are run by Republicans now.  The Democrats in power were too busy doing—well, I don’t know what—while the Republicans took 1000 offices nationwide.

It’s not up to me.  If it were, I’d have mandatory national service, military out of South Asia, single payer health care, and a tax plan I’ve discussed here many times.

People would do well to cool it a little bit.  Nobody is going to impeach the president in a Republican run Congress.  Even if that happened, conviction would require two-thirds of the Senate, and other than an occasional feel good bill, there aren’t two thirds the votes for even free enemas in this country.  Maybe the guy will resign.  Or just quit.  Or die or get Alzheimer’s, assuming he doesn’t have that right now.  Then we get Pence, whom I would bet money that very few people in this country realized what those implications might be, because the media was so focused back then on the presidency.  Pence may be investigated too, but to count on that is counting a second generation chicken.

The media is helping uncover a lot of bad stuff now, true.  I’m glad that they are doing their job.  I can be forgiven for not being a fan of theirs when they gave untold amounts of free advertising to this president, who is a candidate still, with packed rallies and a lot of strong support, people who will vote.

I am remaining hopeful that something will end the darkness that has ensnared this country, but I do not underestimate the resiliency of this president, the desire of his party to keep him in office, and the damage he can do.  If one wants to have a feel good moment, that’s fine.  From time to time, we need one.  But it is important to be realistic, look at appropriate sources of news, fact check information, and stay realistic, focused on results, and keep reminding people why elections matter.

The following three commentators won today:  “I want my money going to fight North Korea, not to pay for somebody else’s knee.”

Joe Walsh’s tweet: “Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care.” Well, Mr. Walsh, I don’t want to pay for yours, either, but I recognize that any of us can be that somebody else, and a malignant cell, blood clot, virus, drunk driver, nut with a gun, bad choice in deciding to fix a roof, can make any of us easily a million dollar consumer of health care.

A hiking friend of mine won, the guy who couldn’t see why his taxes should go to pay for somebody else’s health care.  I liked him a lot until I heard that.  He carries too much weight.  Yes, I may end up using more medical resources than he, but insurance actuaries would rather insure me than him.

America’s greatness in no small part comes from our willingness as a nation to contribute to the collective good.  That means we pay taxes for a lot of things that never benefit us. I learned young that most of the land, parks, and other places in the West were paid for by people in the East who never saw them.  A trillion dollars in 20 years—yes, a trillion, and that would be a one followed by 12 zeros, with a “net” after it—went from my once home New York State to the federal government over the past 20 years.  Most of the red states in the Deep South got a net infusion of money from the government that so many of them despise.  This is either hypocrisy or ignorance.  Knowing the South, and I have walked across Tennessee, yes—walked, I suspect it is both.  The highest percentages of people with pre-existing conditions are in southern red states.  They have high percentages of teen pregnancy and gun violence, too.

I shouldn’t have to pay for the levees in New Orleans, when they are doomed to fail because of ocean rise, subsidence, and the Atchafalaya River. I would not have rebuilt the city after Katrina.  I no longer wish to pay for sand to be trucked in to East Coast beaches, and rebuilding in the same places after another hurricane, ocean rise, storms, bad building, and because nature reshapes beaches.  I am tired of paying for defense that goes on offense and causes worse problems than we started.  I didn’t think the Iraq war was right and my judgment was correct.  And yes, I don’t like paying for health care for people who smoke, use drugs, drink too much, don’t wear helmets when they should, eat too much meat, and are obese.

You know what?  I get a lot back from this country, even though I gave a lot to this country in time and taxes, and until now, I haven’t been keeping score. Now I am.  Conservative commentators who don’t want to pay for people’s health care have no problem driving on roads and crossing bridges in their state that I helped pay for.  Or laud the firing of cruise missiles that I also helped pay for.  Or send their children to good universities that I helped fund.  I have no kids, but I gladly pay to support education, because an educated population is a lot better than an uneducated one, as we have learned in spades these past 18 months.  The Republicans put together a crappy bill, rammed it through the House without hearings or CBO knowledge, not because the country was in dire straits because of health care issues (mostly their fault, since if they had worked to make the ACA better, it would have not been a problem), but because they wanted some legislative victory to go home to.  I hope they enjoy their town halls.

I’d wish the lot of them to be thrown out of office next year, but that won’t happen, because people have short memories, those who don’t get health care will be told it was Obama’s fault, and while the Democrats are great at asking for money, they aren’t so great when it comes to running good campaigns.  When I have given, all I heard was another email:  Give. They mean well, but let’s face it, we have this guy in office for at least four years, and the other night the news media started discussing his “first term,” so it’s likely to be eight.  The Democrats will blow it again in 2020, I’m sure.  True, the president might become incapacitated, but Pence is after him, and he believes that going to church would cure pre-existing conditions.  How he would deal with pregnancy, a pre-existing condition, and abortion, isn’t clear. Paul Ryan is after Pence.  I’m not going to be politically active for another 8 years, not after dealing with Nixon for 6, Reagan for 8 and Bush 43 for another 8.

I’m almost in the David Brooks camp about how the president is really a 3-4 on the worry meter, not the 11 so many of us peg him at.  But Brooks isn’t looking at the big picture: climate change, which neither he nor I will live to see wreak its full havoc, the educational system, and the results of our misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and probably Syria and North Korea before this is all over.  Oh, we are marching, and the Democrats are running better than expected for open Congressional seats, but they are still losing.  The Democrats are really good at losing, and almost getting there isn’t a victory or even a message.  It is another loss.  “Wars aren’t won by evacuations,” as Churchill said after Dunkirk.  Ask the average American high school senior who Churchill was and why Dunkirk mattered, and you’d get a dumb stare.  Half the country can’t find the Ukraine within 1500 miles on a map of the world.  A significant number can’t find north, which these days might be useful in the US.

I am wondering at what point the American public is going to look at how the Republicans rammed through a bill that is going to make health care unaffordable, therefore inaccessible, for millions, clobber hospitals, who have to care for sick people who can’t pay, all in the name of a tax break to the wealthy.  There was no hurry to do this, other than to make the president look good, a president all of their other candidates last year tried to stop.  Now, they are embracing him, which means they own everything that happens to the country.  Everything. The Republicans complain of government overreach, yet they reach right into a woman’s life all the time, telling her what she cannot do.  They say people should be free to choose their doctor and health care, when the average person doesn’t have a clue how their body is put together and doesn’t have the money to pay for just one ED visit. I’m a physician, and when I moved to another city, I had no way to know who was a good doctor. The data are so bad that 19 years after I left practice, I was still given a 5-star rating online.  We’re not talking about Consumer Reports for Toyotas or Leafs, but medical care.  People need care, care that doesn’t bankrupt them.  I could ask that the care be better, but that’s next.

What’s unfortunate is that many of those who voted for this Congress and this president are going to be very hurt by what has happened, and they are not even aware of it.  Nor will most change their vote the next election.  But if 1% of them switched, which is the percentage Nicholas Kristof found, there might be hope.

1% to fight the 1%.

I started using my first cellphone in 1990, but even as late as 1999, I still used a pager.  When I tried to replace it, I was told nobody used them any more.  I did, and I liked it.  A pager was easy, I knew what number to call, and usually it was something important.  The cell phone finally supplanted my pager, and I no longer know where every pay phone is (or have a pocket full of dimes—er… quarters), not that there are any of them around, but many of my incoming calls are either spam or wrong numbers.  Every technology has untoward, unforeseen side effects.

I have never tweeted.  I do have an account, but I’ve never seen a need to follow somebody on Twitter, since I have my own life to live, not follow somebody else’s.  I haven’t missed much, although I did stun a few people when I admitted I didn’t know anything about the Kardashians. I’d rather know how to backpack, read the sky, start a fire when it’s pouring rain, how to canoe trip, or how to do basic math than worry about somebody famous.  I can’t write well and quickly.  I need time to think; technology does not play to my strengths in this regard, but rather to my weaknesses.

On a recent hike, a few of us saw a flower we couldn’t identify. Somebody asked me if I had an app to identify it. Being a dinosaur, I don’t have such, any more than I have an app to look at the night sky or the types of clouds overhead.  I usually ask someone or look it up when I get home.  Dinosaurs do those sorts of things. I need to get better at flowers; I know my way around the night sky just fine.

Nonetheless, I looked at flower identification apps, found one that seemed useful, bought it, after having to change my password for the app store, because I couldn’t remember it, since I don’t buy apps very often, and took a picture of an Oregon Grape as a test.  I figured the app would match it to a known picture, just like on my computer, where I kept seeing unwanted pictures of people in the background of my photographs whom I couldn’t get rid of until I got lucky with a few buttons (which showed me where the strange face came from–it was a high jumper at the Olympic trials in 2012).  If we can match faces, I reasoned, certainly we can certainly match flowers.

I had to fill in information about the plant, which bothered me, because I thought the flower would be matched with a database. Come on, if American Airlines can send me an ad offering “up to 30% off” sharing miles, two days after I viewed the their offer (20% for under 25,000 miles and nothing off on the fee), we ought be able to match an picture to a plant.  I was informed that I would get an answer within 24 hours from a botanist, to whom I could pay $0.99.   In other words, the identification is not by matching, and I have to pay for it.  Bluntly speaking, another fee, explained as “Many experienced botanists make effort….It is a process requiring their time and knowledge.”

OK, I understand the idea that I’m getting a service that has worth.  I won’t use the app.  I’ll teach myself from now on.  Having answered more than 5300 math problems for free on algebra.com, until now quietly and with no fanfare, I wonder why I am such a chump Dino when I could easily charge a dollar or more for each problem solved, three dollars for showing work, which takes maybe a minute longer, and ask for renumeration for my “efforts” using PayPal. More than one student has wanted me to help them. I won’t charge for two reasons: first, I am a chump. I believe I should to give back to the community by helping people, and second, I quit using PayPal ever since they took a deposit on an outdoor trip I paid, said they could only dole it out $500 a month, so that I had to come up with more money to pay for the trip by check, and meantime I could, if I wished, donate my money held by them to a charity of their choosing.  I don’t know how many of my buttons PayPal pushed with that maneuver, but it was plenty.

I was not the only Dino at Rowe Sanctuary when the new young paid staff had an online sign up sheet for volunteer jobs.  We had signed up online for years, and it worked fine until this year, when they used a free web site and stopped using the jobs Board listing three consecutive days of who was doing what job.  I made the jobs Board back in 2008, and it had been, until this year, a quick and easy way to see what jobs needed done and what one’s responsibilities were on a particular day.  The free web site is slow, because it’s free and oh, we’d also like you to look at the ads.  I don’t like slow loading web sites, because I don’t know if it is the website or the computer has locked up.  Once the site loads, then I have to scroll through every job listed for one day.  It’s slow and inefficient, unless one is young, I guess.  I also didn’t like the volunteer orientation with PowerPoint slides that I can read in 3 seconds then have to listen to somebody else read them over a minute or two.  That drives me crazy.  PowerPoint has been shown to do bad things: Tufte’s article about the Columbia space disaster and the concerns raised by PowerPoint presentations beforehand makes compelling reading.  General McChrystal once said that if he could understand a single PowerPoint slide about Afghanistan (amazing to see), he could win the war. I loved Tufte’s comment: “Why are our presentations operating at 2% of the data richness of routine tables found in the sports section? ” Indeed.  In seconds, I understand the NHL or NBA playoff picture, and I follow them only peripherally.

I’m a Dino, because I recently heard that email is passé.  Well, not to me it isn’t.  I like to read what I have written, make changes so it sounds better, and put in little things like “Dear xxxx,” and “Sincerely yours”.  To me, platforms like Skype, Messenger, and WhatsApp, which I have used a lot, while useful, can be huge time wasters.  Skype is horrible for email.  Get somebody on one of them who is lamming—chatting with somebody else online or in person simultaneously, for example—and if there is a gap in the chat, one doesn’t know whether to stay online wasting time or do something else, like read a paper book, feeling rude to leave.  Dinosaurs have different values.

I realize I am falling further behind the technology curve. I still have a decent idea of what technology is good and not good for.  I no longer need Bartlett’s book of quotations, I can find lyrics to any song I wish and even listen to one, and I can write faster than I could on a typewriter.  Calculators are great for the math I can’t possibly do myself, although I still have ability—no longer taught any more—to determine whether or not an answer makes sense just by looking at it. I’m great at that.

I guess I’ve become the curmudgeon that as a kid I made fun of.  Sorry, gramps, or not.  Maybe like me you had no children.  But you were right.  The world is going to hell.