Columns
SMITHEREENS: Reflections on Bits & Pieces
Wake Me When It's Over
I've been having some odd encounters with sleepwalking lately. A by-product of aging, apparently. Most recently, I started dreaming that I had overheard someone outside the house trying to sneak inside, I responded by creeping to the door and making sure it was securely bolted.
That's when I woke up and found myself at the foot of the bed, trying to bolt down the controls on the bedroom TV.
And then there was the dream where I found myself beneath a towering metal derrick. A long cable on a pulley at the top of the tower suddenly snapped. The friction of the metal scrapping over the pulley began generating sparks. I realized that, if I didn't get out of the way, the heavy cable would fall straight on me. At the last minute, I rolled quickly to the left, avoiding certain doom.
And that's when I woke up to find myself on the floor next to the bed, clutching a broken alarm clock in my hand.
And, most dramatically, there was the night I dreamed I was in a James Bond flick, edging my way through a darkened factory when, suddenly, an assassin jumped out from behind a wall and prepared to strike. In a flash, I morphed from James Bond into Bruce Lee and executed a perfect, spinning, karate kick that sent the attacker sprawling.
And that's when I woke up to the sound of furniture crashing. Somehow, I had managed to kick over a wooden ladder propped against a nearby bunk bed. But this time, at least, I managed to stay beneath the covers.
I think I'm getting better at this but I'll understand if you have reservations about having me as an overnight guest.
I've been wondering how long it would take before someone I actually knew was swept up in the wreath-of-fire that's been encircling the Bay Area these past weeks. The answer came in an email on August 22, 2020.
"My home office is in Sonoma County, California, and our area is threatened by a very dangerous wildfire. If you are reading this, I have been forced to evacuate and I will be offline for at least a few days. . . . I shall return."
The message came from the managing editor of Reader Supported News whose name just happens to be . . . Marc Ash.
Has Google Maps Gone to the Devil?
Recently, while researching an article, I needed to identify a location in California. So I went to Google Maps, typed in the name of the nearest address, and clicked. The result looked like site had been hijacked by Beelzebub himself. It read:
Headfi, Ave Dermentum, Onsectetur Adipiscing Tortor Sagittis, CA 880986.
If that's supposed to be Latin, this is the best translation I've been able to find: Hail, Dermentum, onsectet importantly tormentor arrows.
Google provided one added bit of spooky advice: "Just north of Gravesboro & South of Avocado Lake Park."
We Can Dispense with Pence
On August 26, Vice President Mike Pence offered his convention speech from the historic site of Fort Henry. “The hard truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Pence warned. “Under President Trump, we will always stand with those who stand on the Thin Blue Line.” As opposed to, one was left to surmise, those leftist rioters and people of color on the other side of The Line.
On August 27, The Washington Post printed a critical summary titled "All the Glaring Contradictions in Mike Pence's Speech" but apparently failed to fact-check Pence's reference to "Dave Patrick Underwood, an officer in the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service who was shot and killed during the riots in Oakland, California.”
Pence directed his comments to Underwood's widow (prominently seated in the audience) and then proclaimed: "America will never forget or fail to honor officer Dave Patrick Underwood."
But Pence outright lied when he implied that Underwood was killed by "leftist protestors." The truth was just the opposite. The man accused of killing Underwood turned out to be an active duty US Air Force sergeant named Steve Carillo, a fellow with links to the far-right extremist "Boogaloo Boys," a pro-Trump, white supremacist movement that has called for a "race war" in the US.
Only a few media outlets managed to call Pence out on this lie. Kudos to the New York Times, Buzzfeed News, Vox, Democracy Now! and local TV station, ABC7 News.
One especially chilling moment came when Pence appeared to "join the dark side." Quoting Trump, Pence declared: "Where Joe Biden sees America's darkness, we see America's greatness." Make America Great—And Dark—Again!
Kenosha Killer Joins Trump in Photo-op
The law-and-order 17-year-old charged with shooting and killing two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, turns out to be a huge Trump fan. Kyle Howard Rittenhouse’s social media posts depict him posing with his personal arsenal amid pro-police “Blue Lives Matter” posters. He proudly posted his video footage from the Trump rally he attended in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 30. Photos and news footage of the event shows Rittenhouse in the front row, mere feet from Trump. Rittenhouse posted the video of his "Trump moment" on TikTok, but don't bother looking for it: it's been removed.
EBMUD Comes Clean
The July-August edition of EBMUD's Customer Pipeline contained a wonderful list of all the trails available for physically-distanced hiking on the utility district's well-forested 57,000 acres. It also contained a presentation on "The Science of Water" that praised EBMUD for its well-deserved reputation as a trusted purveyor of clean tap water that performs "more than 20,000 lab tests each year" to assure water purity. The article concluded with the observation: "It's what's not in the water that makes it so wonderful."Sorry to be a killjoy, but there are two items in our water that EBMUD's Pipeline didn't mention.
The water is fluoridated so it contains 0.7 parts per million of fluoride and is treated with chloramine, which is "safe for all pets"—unless your pet happens to be a goldfish.
Going Postal
A surprising number of US mail carriers have gone from hauling envelopes to households to becoming household names. Among those who later became famous was a twenty-some postmaster from New Salem, Illinois, named Abraham Lincoln. If Abe knew someone couldn’t make the hike to the post office, he'd carry the letter to them personally, even if that meant slogging off into a rainstorm. The National Geographic recently published a list of hard-charging postal workers who went on to greater fame. A longer USPS roster includes the following stamp-worthy pioneers: abolitionist John Brown, animator Walt Disney, writers William Faulkner and Richard Wright, actors Rock Hudson and Steve Carell, balladeers Brittany Howard and John Prine, politicians Adlai Stevenson and Harry S. Truman, and gold-medal-winning Olympic swimmer Shirley Babashoff. (So far, only 12 of the 27 notables listed have been commemorated on US postage stamps.)
GOP or DEM: When Does Wall Street Do Well?
Are Republicans or Democrats better for the stock market? A recent exercise in economic history (from 1926-2019 and covering 23 presidential elections) suggests that Wall Street's successes are generally non-partisan. According to the number-crunchers, the leaders who presided over the S&P 500's best growth years were: Cal Coolidge (30.57%), Gerald Ford (18.44%) and Bill Clinton (17.20%).
The 46 years of Republican rule saw a 9.12% rate of return for the S&P 500 Index. During the 48 years of Democratic dominance, the S&P index galloped along at 14.94% per year. The study also reports that the stock market performs best when a president's party does not control Congress.
Given the current deadlock in DC, it's hard to understand how a divided government can spur economic growth. What the study seems to be telling well-heeled investors is: Vote for Biden but spend your money to keep the GOP in control of the Senate.
But, if you are a standard, poor person who's not heavily invested in Standard & Poor's, feel free to Ditch Mitch.
EHS Is a Sensitive Issue
Immediately after filing my previous column, I felt a bit uneasy about having described electromagnetic sickness as a "disorder." Sure enough, I heard from several readers who are electrosensitive. Their feedback follows.
• "Thank you for recognizing that 'disorder' is a term that makes many of us cringe. Just referring to it as 'electrosensitivity' is most common, but different people have different preferences for self-identification. The official term is electro-hypersensitivity (EHS), but many of us who suffer from it don't much like that either."
• "As someone who is also chemically sensitive (officially Multiple Chemical Sensitivity or MCS), I've never liked how the concept of 'sensitive' points to the problem being inside me, rather than the toxic agent that sickens me. Many of us in the MCS community refer to ourselves as chemically injured (I sometimes add, and 'sensitized' to connect it to the concept people understand more)."
• "I personally prefer to refer to myself electromagnetically injured, or as disabled by electromagnetic injuries."
"I’ve also heard/read 'microwave radiation sickness' which I like because it’s self-explanatory and educational. EHS or 'EMF sensitivity' are the terms I’ve heard the most often. The general public still doesn’t know what EMF stands for [but] clearly understands microwave radiation sickness which also sounds more serious than a mere 'sensitivity.'"
• "Another term some people like to use instead of EHS is 'microwave sickness,' which is what the military called it before the age of cell phones (back when they did their thousand studies in the 60s and 70s, primarily on the biological effects of radars).
"I like that term because it makes it clear that we are sick because we've been injured by microwaves, rather than that we are hypersensitive."
• "EMF sensitive, EHS, Electrically sensitive (ES) are the terms I use when explaining what I am dealing with. Power poles can have a lot of dirty electricity, which really triggers my electrical sensitivities."
• "If you want to hear an excellent brief explanation of dirty electricity (aka Electromagnetic Interference [EMI]), Magda Havas talks about it in the following video (20:50 to 22:20). Magda (a researcher in Canada at the University of Trent) also refers to the condition as 'rapid-aging syndrome'…."
End the Electoral College: Graduate to Real Democracy
The New York Times recently asked "How Has the Electoral College Survived for This Long?" Part of the answer, the Times suggested, was that resistance to eliminating the Electoral College is firmly "connected to the idea of white supremacy." Harvard professor Alexander Keyssar makes the parallel point that perpetuating this undemocratic artifact is simply another way of exploiting Black Americans.
The Constitution’s three-fifths compromise allowed racist Southern states to use the numbers of their disenfranchised and enslaved populations to boost the South's electoral power. This power was used to install pro-slavery presidents who denied Black people the right to vote.
While every Senate Democrat has agreed on the need to abolish the Electoral College, all 53 Republican senators are opposed.
Mitch McConnell has spent decades denouncing the idea of returning to the popular vote, as spelled out by the Founding Fathers. Ted Cruz has dismissed the prospect of direct elections as “devastating.” Rand Paul agrees that the Electoral College is “less than democratic,” but he still supports it.
On November 15, 2016, Representative Barbara Boxer introduced a proposal to abolish the Electoral College and reinstate the direct popular election of the President and Vice President—by voters in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. A National Popular Vote bill has been enacted into law in 16 states with 196 electoral votes (CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, HI, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NM, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA). At this point, the bill is just 74 votes short of having enough state support to go into effect. For more information, click on National Popular Vote.
