Every year

Every year I think–

This could be my breakthrough year.

This one is the one.

I’ll get to work;

Find discipline

To think, to write,

To finish something good.

Take pride in what I’ve done.

I think that every year.

It’s kind of a New Year’s poem, but I actually wrote it on Mar. 31, 2000.

Israel

In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith explained that racially homogeneous societies were no more peaceful than racially diverse societies.  She looked at Northern Ireland, “an area where people who look absolutely identical to each other, eat the same food, pray to the same God, read the same holy book, wear the same clothes, and celebrate the same holidays have yet spent four hundred years at war over a relatively minor doctrinal difference they later allowed to morph into an all-encompassing argument of land, government, and national identity.”

So we have Israel, a land where groups of people fight over the words of 800 to 2000 year-old tribal prophets, either Jewish or Muslim, who actually believed that some god spoke to them directly and laid down some rules for them to follow.  An atheist like me can only look at the dispute over the “holy city” of Jerusalem and be awestruck that groups could even concern themselves over who gets to rule it.  I mean, it’s not like we are talking about Paris, or even Los Angeles.

Let me point out something.  Since its inception, Israel has been a democratic Jewish state.  If there is no two-state solution and the fanatics keep building settlements in Palestinian territory, Israel will be either a Jewish state or a democratic state.  It cannot remain both.  Secretary of State Kerry gets this.  Prime Minister Netanyahu either doesn’t get it, or doesn’t care, or is putting his short term interests above the long term interests of his country.

Extreme Prey

I’m a big fan of “police procedurals.”  Those are crime novels in which dogged police work solves the mystery, as opposed to the kind of cerebral activity you find in Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie.

John Sandford is one of my favorite authors.  His novels feature Lucas Davenport, a Minnesota cop who works for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, or BCA.  Davenport is intelligent with flashes of brilliant insight.

The most recent book in the series is Extreme Prey, copyrighted in 2016.  I haven’t finished it yet, but a political fanatic is plotting the assassination of a female candidate for the presidency.  Davenport is privy to a number of emails sent by the fanatic, and he gives them to Elle, a nun who is also a childhood friend and a psychologist, for her analysis.

Elle tells Davenport he should take the threat very seriously, since the woman appears consumed by hatred.  Then Elle says something that I had not thought about before.  She notes that in the 60s and 70s the country was torn apart by the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-war Movement, and the Feminist Movement, but all of those protests and all of that activity was driven by optimism.  The people creating the ruckus were all hopeful.

Elle then says to Davenport that the current anger and protest comes from a completely different place.  It is driven not by hope, but by hatred. 

Rubbermaid

The Rubbermaid company began operations in the 1920s in Wooster, Ohio, a town of 24,000.  The company employed about 1600 people in the early 90s; it was the largest employer in Wooster.  In 1995 the company lost a contract with Walmart, which it had supplied with dozens of household items.  Walmart pushes its suppliers to charge the cheapest price possible.

Rubbermaid had already opened plants in Mexico, Korea, and Poland, but its products were still too expensive for Walmart, so it cut its workforce by 9% and closed nine of its facilities.  

In 1999 Rubbermaid was bought by Newell Corporation, a company noted for cost-cutting.  Newell shifted more manufacturing to Mexico and moved the corporate staff to Atlanta.  Employment in Wooster was cut to under 1000.

On December 10, 2003, Newell announced that the Wooster plant would be shuttered in a few months  

Wooster had other factories, but some of them moved production outside the U.S. as well.  The unemployment rate for Wayne County, home of Wooster, stood at 11.1% in 2010.

The U.S. in June 1979 had 19,553,000 jobs in manufacturing.  That was the peak.  By 2011 manufacturing jobs had dropped to 11.6 million.

I don’t know this for sure, but I will bet that many former Rubbermaid workers voted for Trump and shop at Walmart.  I will also bet that the Rubbermaid factory won’t be coming back to Wooster.

Information about Rubbermaid came from Donald L. Barlett and James B Steele, The Betrayal of the American Dream.

Large mammals

Here’s a quiz.  What large North American mammal regularly kills humans in the eastern part of the U.S.?

What other large mammal could lessen those deaths?

If you answered the first one “deer,” you are correct.  If you answered the second one “cougars,” you are also correct.

Earlier this year the on-line journal Conservation Letters published an analysis of returning eastern cougars to their historic range.  The authors determined the cougars could prevent 155 human deaths, 21,400 human injuries, and save 2.3 billion in accident costs in a 30-year-period.  Perhaps I wouldn’t have run into that deer on 209 if we had some cougars in the area. 

Bring ‘em back!

(The article can be found in <onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/conl.12280/full?....>)

Why Republican legislators love voter suppression

Because it works.  

In 2014 a Federal court said that over 300,000 registered voters in Wisconsin lacked the IDs that the Republican legislature required of voters.

Trump won Wisconsin by 27,000 votes.

Christmas Cheer

We had a number of firsts in this past election.  In Washington, Pramila Jayapal, was elected, the first Indian-American woman in the House of Representatives.

In Florida, Stephanie Murphy defeated Republican incumbent John Mica to become the first Vietnamese-American woman in the House.

Kamala Harris won in California to become the first Indian/black U.S. Senator.

In Nevada, Catherine Cortez Masto was the first Latina elected to the Senate.  Incidentally, all of the above were Dems.

Four states (Arizona, Washington, Colorado, and Maine) raised their minimum wage.

Finally, medical use of marijuana was approved by voters in Arkansas, Florida, and North Dakota.  Recreational pot was approved in Massachusetts, Maine, Nevada, and what was that fourth one?  Oh yeah, California.