The scent of fresh Lenin

The way the class issues in America are coming up - food stamps, one percent, 47 percent, etc.  - sooner or later, seems to me, will coalesce not with the old Marxism we knew, but with what really may be an inescapable fact.  We and the Chinese and the other smart econo/socio/politico engineers are putting together societies with a huge, increasing gap in income and wealth.  It may be forever.  It may be inescapable. We all get the idea that free unregulated markets are a good way to balance supply and demand.   But are they a good way to balance wealth?  All the evidence says no.

Sooner of later we have to face the fact that there will be many more people than jobs, jobs that are worth a damn with incomes that are enough to raise and educate children and put away enough to create an annuity that will enable old people to live well.  Walk around in America.  Ask the working guys you know in their fifties and sixties if they are really going to accumulate enough money to do anything but work until they drop. And that's the middle class.  The poor folks will just look for handouts.

That's a really big failure, and I think it's coming everywhere, over the next few decades.  The way these things have been addressed in the past have always been through the Four Horsemen.  Are they the only ways out?

Seems bleak, I know, and I'm a basically pretty cheerful dude, but I really can't solve this one.  If this is how America looks, what about the rest of the world?  Asia's markets seem to be based on the US Federal Reserve System.  What?  Don't they have their own central banks?  Is it all here, all dependent on Harvard and Chicago grads?

 Trouble, my friends, trouble.  Right here in River City.

Terrorism, the label

The baby-gassing leader of Syria refer to his opponents as "terrorists" and it makes me wonder - is there a definition?  

Evidently there are hundreds.  And there is a big political issue baked in - can a state be a terrorist?  Can a state be the sponsor?  The answer is hell yes, with plenty of examples, like Lockerbie.  Or is a terrorist someone who is domestic, and only violates the law of the state?  Timothy McVeigh - was he a terrorist or just a criminal?

I'd say he's a terrorist, for two reasons.  The first has to do with the true origin of the term - it seems to come from the Terror, La Terreur, in the French Revolution, when the idea was to use terror to win at revolution and to rule.   Said Robespierre:

"We must smother the internal and external enemies of the Republic or perish with it; now in this situation, the first maxim of your policy ought to be to lead the people by reason and the people's enemies by terror.

"If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs."

McVeigh thought this, that his action was somehow civic.  So did Bin Laden.  So, I suppose, do the Syrian revolutionaries.

But to me the second and equally necessary test is whether there is the deliberate slaughter of innocents. 9/11 yes, Oklahoma City yes, and now, Damascus - yes.   So it's Bashar Al-Assad, who's the terrorist. If the shoe fits, Mr. Baby-Gasser, wear it.

Swimming to Nantucket

Spalding Gray died nine years ago but for me he's still around, still showing that life is humorous enough but maybe not humorous enough to survive.  When we were at the beach a few weeks ago I looked across to Martha's Vineyard, and knew that Nantucket lay beyond, over the horizon, but there.  It's a distance you can put in your head and wonder -  if that were the test, would you pass or fail.  Probably no sharks. But a long swim.

Spalding jumped off the Staten Island Ferry.  Was he going to see if he could make it, swimming back to Manhattan?  I guess not, but still  I'd like to think so.  Otherwise it's just too linear.

Back to summer

Every year I do a post of some kind about the summer heat in St. Louis.  But this year we haven't had it; you'd think we were Michigan.

Is that why we had practically no Japanese Beetles this year?  (Or was it the nasty chemical I sprinkled at the base of the most JB-savory plants?)

Now, late August, we seem to be back to days with that oven-like heat blast when you walk outside.  But with this very  decent summer, we seem to still have cool mornings and even the occasional dew.  This much hot summer, this late, before September walks in .  Good with that.

Isabel

I guess there is something pathetic about saying your dog is your best friend, but I do think that, as to Isabel now and as to Valerie before and pretty much back to my first dog.  Whose name I can't say because he's the answer to about 50 security questions.

But not really a friend, right?  Because a dog's a dog.  We don't know really what they are thinking, whether they are self-conscious, whether what looks like devotion is really a sense of making sure the relationship is strong with the guy who puts kibble in the bowl.

I have pretty much lost all attitudes based on what people are thinking, because I don't know what they are thinking.  I never did; I only thought I did.  Now, I basically try to base my convictions on what people do.  And why not the same with dogs.  I don't know what they think.  I know what they do.

Isabel hangs around me, most of the time.  When there are children or other dogs, she will hang with them, but come back to me when she's called.  She runs after varmints.  She sleeps.  She drags herself across the grass, looks up, rolls over.    She wakes me up in the morning by standing on my chest and licking my nose, once.  When we are out in new territory she sits and looks around, like a sentinel and a guard.

This is not doctorate thesis material.  It's just peaceful and doggy, and also it is doing things - not thinking things - that to me constitute friendship.  So yeah.  She is a friend, a great one.

Clambake

The idea was to do a clambake in a Weber kettle.  I looked, and of course there was a pretty good guide on the Internet.  Is there anything left with no guide on the Internet?

In fact there was a big complicated version that made you wonder why you wouldn't go a beach with a shovel and do the real thing.  But the simpler version... as elegant as beer can chicken.  Stuff a burlap bag with seaweed, lobsters, clams, spuds, corn, and onions, wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil so it's like a big ass pillow, and put it on the grill for an hour with a lot of charcoal.

Came out great, looked like we'd done it on the beach in Maine.  But not entirely lucky.  I did a trial the day before, and it kind of sucked, and I made adjustments.

• Not too riverine.  Rinse the bejeesus out of the seaweed.
• Hot.  You don't have to worry about too much heat.  That's a lot of moisture.  It will be hard to dry this stuff out.
• One lemon, not sliced, in the sack.
• Corn in the stalks but with the silk removed.

So the good part wasn't just that we could do a clambake without turning it it into a WPA project.  It went beyond the letter of the Internet.   A hundred bucks of lobsters came out looking right.

Dexamethasone

You'd think that when you go into the hospital and they think you've had a stroke, they'd give you more than an aspirin.  Or later, a couple of Tylenol.  Hey guys, I've got a big headache!  I need to develop my complaining techniques.

Finally a doctor in the field showed up and she said "you've only had that? Sure, we've got something better."

Indeed it was.  Called dexamethasone.  It didn't work right away, and I had to develop another nmemonic (my brother, whose name is like "dex", snorting meth in a school zone), but it turns out to be remarkable stuff.  While I was at the hospital, by injection, and since by pill.  A declining amount over a week.

No more headache.  After a few days, no scary word loss.  (OK, c'mon.  I'm 63!  I'm still going to forget where I left the keys once in a while.)  In fact I feel really good.  I think just as clear-speaking, if not more, and a lot of thinking about life and liberty.  And it clears up my nasty psoriasis.  I'm looking fine.

It's a steroid!  Finally I get to be like a pro athlete.

So........... how about I stay with this stuff for the next, oh, 15 years or so?

When you read about it in places like Wikipedia it sounds strongish but not brutish.   But when you ask the doc about the idea of longer prescriptions they look at you like you are nuts. Lots of bad physical things and it could make you crazy.  Bad idea.  Bad results.  OK OK.

I don't want to destroy my body.  But the other thing - the mind?  Is this some kind of Awakenings? Once I stop taking this stuff, will I go to dumber and dumber?

We may find out soon enough, because today is the last day of the prescription and there ain't no refill. But they say no.

And I don't think so.  I think the drug is great and I'm sure it brought things around.  But I think that as to the mental consequences - I really have been re-examining life, and facing choices - I think it's about having had a second chance to seriously greet the Reaper once again and say nope, still not now, still not yet.