Mail-in ballot upgrade

The Shapiro administration is improving the way Pennsylvania mail-in ballots are designed.  In the spring primary almost 3% of the 597,000 mail-in ballots had errors or disqualifying problems.  Three percent might not seem like a lot until you realize how many races are decided by less than that.

The changes include better-written instructions, eye-catching graphics, and a change in the color of the “security envelope.”  Now we should push for an increase in the number of drop boxes.  Still, this is a positive development.

A supporter of Israel starts to waver

That would be me.  The hostility between Israel and the Palestinians will never be resolved as long as Netanyahu stays in power, as long as the settlements in the West Bank continue, and as long as the Israeli military supports the settlers.  Every country seems to have religious extremists.  Most countries manage to exert at least some measure of control over them.  Unfortunately the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel are actually being abetted by a Prime Minister who needs their support in the Knesset.

Netanyahu is encountering the same problem the U.S. encountered in Vietnam.  How do you know when you won?  Let’s say in another month the entire infrastructure of Gaza is destroyed.  Is that victory?  And then what?

Of course Hamas can’t be trusted.  There are Palestinians, however, who would live next to Israel in peace if a deal were imposed.  I have heard often that many Palestinians will never accept Israel’s right to exist.  We must also ask whether or not Israel will accept Palestine’s right to exist.

Amory Lovins and "soft energy"

Decades ago Professor Amory Lovins distinguished between a “hard energy path” and a “soft energy path.”  The difference is not so much between renewable and non-renewable energy as it is between how the energy is produced and distributed.  It is true that soft energy technologies often depend on renewables, but renewable energy can be quite hard.

The difference in the two paths lies in the infrastructure, the investment, and the distribution networks.  Soft energy is decentralized energy.  It doesn’t need a distribution grid, nor does it take much initial investment.  It is difficult to disrupt, since there is no centralized source.  Solar panels on our shed roof are a soft energy source; a 1700 acre solar “farm” in Kidder Township, with its huge capital investment and its distribution infrastructure is a hard source.  

The ideal is energy production that is both renewable and “soft.”  That’s what we must push for.

Analyzing Republican Party history

Columbia University Press recently published The Republican Evolution:  From Governing Party to Antigovernment Party, 1860-2020 by Kenneth Janda.  There was a time in my life when I would read a review and pretend to have read the book, but I have grown more honest.  I have only read a review, not the book itself.

Janda examined each of the party’s platforms from 1856 to 2020.  From his analysis he sees the party passing through three eras:  “illustrious nationalism” from 1860 to 1924, a neoliberal era from 1928-1960, and an ethnocentric era beginning in 1964.  The last of the three, according to Janda, has favored white Christians over others and turned away from supporting the federal government.  

Janda now believes that the current Republican party is more akin to a cult.  He would like the party to return to its roots.  I personally don’t see that happening.

Why Women Don't Marry

To paraphrase the old saw about politics:  “It’s the men, stupid.”  A more accurate way to put it might be “It’s the stupid men.”

According to an article in the Saturday Times by Anna Louise Sussman, a journalist who writes about gender, dating, and reproduction, the decline in heterosexual marriages can largely be traced to a dearth of good male partners.  This is the result of a crisis among men (and boys) known as “male drift.”  Men don’t go to college as often as women, drop out of the work force, take more drugs, and fail to look after their health.  We also don’t dress very well and aren’t particularly sensitive to the other people’s needs. 

Sussman notes a high school English teacher assigned a creative writing topic in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex.  The girls gave this careful thought and wrote detailed essays.  Some of the boys simply refused to carry out the assignment or did it resentfully.  Guys have to be tough, unemotional, distant.  Who would want to marry a person like that?

There may be exceptions, of course.

Carnegie v. Musk

While in Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving I visited the Carnegie Museum for Natural History and stood in awe of the dinosaurs that Carnegie paid to have dug up, shipped to Pittsburgh, and assembled by paleontologists.  I visited the Carnegie Art Museum to see the special display of Japanese woodcuts.  I was next door to the Pittsburgh Carnegie library and not too far from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall.  

Scattered across the United States are hundreds of smaller Carnegie libraries.  He provided the funds to build 1,795 of them in this country and a few hundred more in other countries as well.  I know he was a robber baron.  I know he treated his steel mill workers unfairly.  Nonetheless, he also left an amazing positive legacy.

Contrast that with today’s wealthy tycoons.  Peter Thiel is attempting to build a separate colony for rich people on floating islands.  And how about that Elon Musk?  Our current crop of robber barons just don’t stack up. 

Thoughts on Thanksgiving

I’ll be in Pittsburgh for the next few days looking at dinosaur skeletons and Andy Warhol art work, so I won’t be posting.  I will, however, leave you with a few observations on the Thanksgiving holiday.

Thanksgiving is an emotional time.  People travel thousands of miles to be with people they only see once a year.  And then discover once a year is way too often.  (Johnny Carson)

Cooking tip:  Wrap turkey leftovers in aluminum foil and throw them out. (Nicole Hollander)

Most turkeys taste better the day after Thanksgiving; my mother’s tasted better the day before.  (Rita Rudner)

A new survey found that 80 percent of men claim they help cook Thanksgiving dinner.  Which makes sense when you hear they consider saying ”That smells good” to be helping.  (Jimmy Fallon)

Thanksgiving:  when the Indians said “Well, this has been fun, but we know you have a long voyage back to England.”  (Jay Leno)

It wasn’t easy telling my family that I’m gay.  I made my carefully worded announcement at Thanksgiving.  It was very Norman Rockwell.  I said, “Mom, would you please pass the gravy to a homosexual?”  She passed it to my father.  A terrible scene followed.  (Bob Smith)

Rustin

Check out “Rustin” on Netflix.  It is a film about Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the March On Washington in 1963.  He was not given the credit he deserved at the time because he was gay, but he was the guy most responsible.  You realize how different times were–the March was about Civil Rights, but no women were given a speaking role and gays were strictly off-limits.

I did not attend the March on Washington.  I had purchased my bus ticket and was planning to go down with a group from the Bethlehem NAACP, but my parents were afraid of violence and said I couldn’t go.  I was so angry, but I did what my parents said.

One of the profs on my American Studies team at SJSU told me he attended, but he smoked so much dope that he fell asleep and never heard Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech.  I guess we were both there in spirit. 

Letter to Sen. Mike Lee

Senator Mike Lee

363 Russell Senate Office Building

Washington, D.C. 20510

Dear Sen. Lee:

I am not L.D.S., but I have always believed that Mormons belonged to a religion that had a strong moral code and the courage to act on it.  I was so disappointed when I learned that you have joined the conspiracy theorists like Margery Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and are propagating the lie that FBI agents were involved in the January 6 attempt to overthrow the United States government .

Since you are obviously smarter that that, you must be doing it for crass political reasons.  The sad thing is that as an incumbent, you don’t need to stoop that low to be re-elected.

You need to undertake some serious self-reflection. 

I'll let you know if he replies, but I don't have much hope of that.  He has been a bad senator from the day he took office, but this is a new low.

Solving the Tommy Tuberville problem

Sen. Tuberville of Alabama has been holding up appointments in the military, preventing the Senate from approving them and weakening America’s national defense.

There is nothing in the Constitution that gives a Senator the power to do this.   I checked.  This is a Senate rule.  It was adopted by the Senators.  I have never been a member of a group that didn’t have some method available to change the bylaws.  I don’t understand this.  This isn’t Tuberville’s fault.  There are 99 other Senators.  Can’t MarkWayne just go over and punch him? 

A reaffirming development

About a month ago I wrote to the resident of a house in Towamensing Township about a “F--- Biden” sign in front of this house.  I said, in effect, that I felt the sign was inappropriate and there were better ways to express anger at the President.

I received a reply about two weeks ago from that resident.  The letter thanked for me for including my name and address and complimented me for being civil.  It turns out the sign was put there by a friend, and the resident had removed it.  He noted that my letter was so much better than stealing the sign, calling the cops, or worse.

I have not met this man, but I did reply to him to thank him.  What an unexpected and respectful exchange of views.   

Rigging elections

Republican state legislators gerrymandered congressional and state legislative districts in the red states.  They suppressed the vote with demands for voter ID and dropped thousands of people from the rolls.  They closed polling places in areas with lots of Democrats.  They removed drop boxes.  They passed rules that you couldn’t bring someone else’s ballot to a drop box, not even that of your spouse.  

Republicans discouraged mail-in balloting.  They challenged voters.  They put thugs outside of polling places to intimidate voters.  They put a guy in charge of the United States Postal Service to screw up the mail before the election.  They said corporations had the same rights as people and could give unlimited funds.  They weakened and even eliminated campaign finance limits.  They attempted to intimidate the press.  

Three years after Trump lost, over half of the Republicans in the United States think that election was rigged.  It was, but they lost anyway.

The really funny hammer attack

People were shocked and disgusted at the idea that not only did Hamas terrorists stab and shoot Israeli unarmed civilians at close range, but on film they were shown laughing and joking about it.

Tonight I saw a clip on the news of Trump giving a speech to a MAGA crowd.  He was joking and laughing about the hammer attack on Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-husband.  The crowd was laughing and cheering. 

Truth in advertising?

Isn’t it strange that these terrible groups give themselves names that really don’t fit what they stand for.  Oath Keepers, Moms for Liberty, Family Research Council, True the Vote, Truth Social, Stop the Steal, Freedom Caucus, Federalist Society, Pro-Life.  At least the Proud Boys call themselves boys, though I’m not sure what they are proud of. 

The Endangered Species Act turns fifty

President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973.  The act mandated steps to protect and restore plants and animals identified as “threatened” or “endangered.”  Since then over 1000 fish, mammals, insects, birds, flowers, and other species have been listed.  

The good news is that more than 50 of these species have rebounded.  The bald eagle is one of them.  In 1963, one year after the publication of Silent Spring, 47 nesting pairs of bald eagles were counted in the lower 48 states.  In 2007 the bald eagle was “delisted.”  You can see them in almost every state.  Earlier this year one flew over our house.

Other species that have rebounded are Kirtland’s warbler, Sander’s blue butterfly, the Topeka shinier, the American alligator, and my favorite, the peregrine falcon.  

Thank you President Nixon and all the members of Congress who voted for the act.

Information for this post is from the magazine Nature Conservancy, Winter 2023. 

A warning from Leo Tolstoy

In War and Peace Tolstoy wrote about the attitude of the people in Moscow as Napoleon’s army advanced towards the city:

At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul:  one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.  In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second....

Tolstoy obviously didn’t know about global warming, but he certainly knew about the tendency to disregard what is painful.

Hunting ring-necked pheasants

Yesterday we had a ring-necked pheasant behind our house.  Last evening it was in our driveway, but when I came too close it ran into nearby shrubs.  Ring-necks no longer reproduce in the wild in our area.  They are not native to the U.S., but many states have stocked them.  The Pennsylvania Game Commission purchases them from growers and releases them in the fall for hunters to shoot.

It cannot be very satisfying to shoot tame birds.  Many of them, evidently familiar with vehicles, walk along the road.  I am hoping the one I saw yesterday hangs around.  It can winter with our chickens.  Ringnecks are beautiful birds, and the idea of blasting them with shotguns seems the antithesis of a sport.

A male bastion

The Carbon County Commissioners’ meeting room has a framed row of portraits of former Commissioners.  No female commissioners appear in the entire lineup.  The three recently-elected commissioners are also male.  

Perhaps we should not be surprised.  In 1915 a referendum on women’s suffrage failed in Carbon County by a vote of 3034 against and 2685 for.  Amazingly, every county in the “northern tier” favored women’s suffrage, as did most of the western part of the state.  The Pennsylvania Dutch counties–Lancaster, Berks, Lehigh, Lebanon, York, Northampton–all were opposed to the right of women to vote.

Incidentally, the Republican anti-choice candidate for the Supreme Court also won Carbon this week.

Rashida Tlaib censured

Rep. Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in the House of Representatives (at least I think she is the only one) was censured by the House for “promoting false narratives.”  She not only called for a cease fire, but used the phrase “from the river to the sea.”  That phrase is seen as a call for the destruction of Israel.  Rep. Tlaib denied that was her intent.

The vote to censure Rep. Tlaib was 234-188.  That included all but seven Republicans–four voted against the resolution; three voted present.  The pro-censure group also included 22 Democrats with 188 Democrats voting no.  (One voted present.)  No Pennsylvania Democratic representative voted to censure Rep. Tlaib.  That includes my representative Susan Wild.

To me this is a matter of free speech and democracy.  I think the call for the destruction of Israel by many Palestinians continues to set back the cause of peace.  I don’t think Rep. Tlaib meant that.  By the way, I do agree with Rep. Tlaib that the cries of Palestinian children don’t sound all that different from the cries of Israeli children.

Clean Sweep in the state judicial races

Pennsylvania elects its appellate court justices.  Yesterday the Democratic candidate for the state Supreme Court won to give that court a five to two Democratic majority.  The victor, Dan McCaffery, was endorsed by Planned Parenthood, which might give you a clue where he stands.

Jill Beck and Timika Lane were elected to the Superior Court and Matt Wolf to the Commonwealth Court.  (PA has three appellate courts.)  I love state-wide elections like the ones for the state courts or the Ohio referendum on abortion or the Kentucky governor’s race.  The Republicans can’t gerrymander them. 

Dems win big (except in my county)

I’m beginning to think the Supreme Court did a favor to Democrats when it overturned Roe v. Wade.  Ohio voters put the right to reproductive choice in the Constitution, the Democratic Governor won in Kentucky, in Virginia both houses of the state legislature are now controlled by Democrats, and in Pennsylvania Daniel McCaffery beat an anti-abortion Republican candidate for a Supreme Court seat.

In Carbon County I believe the Republicans now control every county “row office” (I’ll explain that whole concept in a later post) and hold a majority in the County Commissioners.  The good news about that is when the county government goes to hell, we will definitely know who to blame.  

The election in Carbon County tomorrow

Carbon County currently has about 20,500 Republicans and 13,500 Democrats.  Any political scientist can tell you the main factor in how people vote is not their age, religion, race, educational level, or income.  It is their party identification.  You sometimes hear voters say, “I vote for the candidate, not the party.”  Don’t believe it.  

But you say, how about Independents?  If you question Independents in depth, you will find that almost all of them identify with one party more than the other.  Very few people are truly independent.

Democrats in Carbon did a lot of things right this year.  Facebook ads, thousands of postcards and letters, yard signs, electronic billboards, door hangers, newspaper ads, door-to-door candidate visits, television ads–this was a full court press.  Did it work?  I’ll let you know tomorrow night, provided the results are in.

Here is what we are up against.  Carbon’s sheriff is a popular guy.  No scandals.  No major issues.  Unfortunately for him, he was a Democrat.  So he changed his registration to Republican.  He figured, probably correctly, that if the D appeared next to his name, he would lose.  

West Bank violence increasing

There are approximately 130 illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank.  Settlers clash with Palestinians, and since Oct. 7 more than 130 Palestinians have been killed, some by Israeli soldiers; some by settlers.  Israeli soldiers conduct raids, young Palestinians fight back, and the death toll keeps rising.

Almost all of this violence is occurring because of these illegal settlements. Unfortunately Netanyahu needs the rightist settler-backed party to stay in power.  Many of the extreme Orthodox settlers think they have some kind of Biblical right to the West Bank, even if it means driving every Palestinian out of the territory.  

I am so tired of all the people who justify their evil actions on the basis of fictional scriptures and fictional gods.