I’ve had a case of blogger’s block lately, at least in part because I’ve been trying to avoid posting about politics since the Republican menagerie was sworn into the U.S. Senate. But a story today about Marjorie Taylor Greene was such low hanging fruit, I couldn’t resist posting about it. Headline:
Marjorie Taylor Greene ‘Attacked’
by Woman While at Restaurant
Green was quoted in Newsweek as saying, that a woman and her son started shouting at her like “demons” while she was working with her staff on Monday evening, saying that the two of them were “completely out of control.” In referring to her tormentors, she went on to say, They are self-righteous, insane and completely out of control. People used to respect others even if they had different views. But not anymore. Our country is gone. This from the shrew who recently heckled the president of the United State during his State of the Union address. I wonder if MTG could possibly see the Irony of her statement. I doubt if she even knows the meaning of the word. She will say anything to get in the news because news coverage means attention and attention means contributions from the MAGA right. The phrase Taste of your own Medicine comes to mind.
Perhaps it is time for Democrats to take the gloves off and treat these people the way they treat others. Yeah, I know. We don’t gain anything by stooping to their level. Well, except for some satisfaction.
Election Day should be a showplace for America democracy, the end of long political campaigns during which each candidate makes their best pitch to the voters then retires to campaign headquarters to await the results of the vote count. Winners thank their constituents and promise to represent all citizens. Losers hold out as long as they can then thank their supporters and grudgingly concede. Some promises are kept, some forgotten … and we find out if our choices were good ones, always knowing that in two years, we get to choose again. Democracy goes on. That’s how it should be. How it used to be when being a democracy was more important than partisan politics. 
This morning I found an article on the Washington Post that claims 5.1 million Americans have security clearances, which amounts to 1.5% of the population. It occurs to me that is why so many people seem to think that a former president taking huge amounts of classified material to his home is OK. They’ve never seen what ordinary Americans who work with security clearances have to do every day to work with sensitive information. I have worked for 60 years on defense systems, mostly sensor systems that keep track of the vessels and vehicles of countries that might mean us harm. I have held clearances at most of the levels mentioned in the affidavit justifying the search of Mira Lago … Confidential, Secret, Top Secret and special access. At each step, I was trained in the rules for handling classified documents at that level. I had a safe in my office where I kept any classified documents in my possession. 
My wife, Muri, and I could hardly be called philanthropists, but we do our best to support charities. We have been most fortunate in our lives and it only seems right. Muri mostly takes care of the medical research organizations like the American Cancer Society and the American Diabetes Association. We usually support research in areas that have affected us, our family and friends. Monthly, she donates to one or two of our causes, using a rotation formula only she knows. I donate monthly to several causes and donate, mostly online, to causes as the urge strikes me. In addition to medical causes, I donate to animal causes like the ASPCA and Humane society and to environmental causes like the Sierra Club. And political contributions. I never made political donations until 2020, when Trump was threatening to get four more years. I donated to anti-Trump organizations like The Lincoln Project, to the Democratic Party and to critical democratic candidates, quite generously for a mostly non-political guy. 
Looking back a bit on the eve of my 78th birthday …
One of the books I read a page from (almost) every morning is 
Yesterday, I posted about how much I enjoy listening to live music on YouTube and how well their algorithms seem to find similar music and similar artists that I enjoy. I concluded by saying that, at least when it comes to music, YouTube is MyTube. On topics other than music, however, the YouTube algorithms seem to miss their mark as to what I’d like to see. 
Picture this, if you will. Everyone’s electronic devices … phones, computers, tablets … are connected to a massive computer that monitors everything they do and uses that information to control what they believe, think and do. Or. Imagine that your devices and everything you do on them is displayed to a team of managers whose job it is to keep you online as long as possible and to drive you to look at certain advertisers’ information. Sounds like a 1990s science fiction film, but it’s not. These are two of the images the film, The Social Dilemma, uses to illustrate the ways that social media like Facebook and Instagram are damaging our society through manipulating what we look at based upon our actions online. The film offers three areas of concern: mental health because studies show a decline in mental health and life satisfaction greater use of social media; decline of democracy because of disinformation campaigns on social media; and rising extremism because the majority of people in extremist groups were steered there by social media. 
Is anyone else tired of reading about Covid-19 and its variants? How about reading different and conflicting accounts of how dangerous the new and improved (from the virus’ point of view) omicron variant will turn out to be? After all, in South Africa, the onslaught seems to have petered out but reliable sources tell me that won’t necessarily be the case here. So, here I am again, trying to decide whether I should attend activities in our over 55 community or be one of the small percentage of (mostly) seniors wearing masks in the market. With two vaccinations and a booster for both my wife and I, life seemed to be returning to a semblance of normalcy and, sure, I’m glad to hear that this provides some protection against omicron … but how much some is enough? Sometimes, I wish I was brain-dead enough to follow the Q-Anons down the conspiracy theory rat hole and dismiss the entire thing as a hoax. But seventy-seven years have left my brain still functioning, at least enough to dismiss idiotic theories. 
Older Eyes 