The Curmudgeon Speaks

An interesting opportunity for those of us who blog or keep a journal is the chance to look back. With tomorrow being Jan. 6 and a new, old President soon to be sworn in, I decided to take a look at what I had to say Jan 6 of 2021. I found two Facebook posts from that day.

Four years later and the event still haunts the country with the lie that there was election interference unsubstantiated and the source of that lie and the individual who encouraged the insurrection now elected to be President. The American people deserve better and yet they are also to blame.

I feel guilty when folks send holiday cards and personal letters. I stopped that practice some years ago. A blog post is about all I can offer in return.

Our family has some holiday traditions. We have lasagna and we watch Emmit Otter and the Jug Band Christmas. This movie was originally a Jim Hensen television holiday special from 1977 and just the kind of nostalgia you can latch on to. I thought we were unique in our regard for this holiday program, but one of our daughters saw an Emmit Otter tee-shirt online and we all ended up with Emmit Otter PJs for the holidays.

I have one tradition of my own. The last weekend before Christmas some of the workers at the dump / recycling center dress for the season and I always ask to take a photo with them.

We have a family gathering at our lake cabin. This has been our tradition for several years, but traditions sometimes have to change. Son Todd and family moved from Minneapolis to Salt Lake City, but flew back for the holidays so we were together again. When all of us were living close to each other in the Minneapolis/St Paul area this proximity had to be unusual, but this changed. Both Salt Lake City and MSP are hubs so plane travel is easy. The new jobs are working out well. Porter and Olive have adjusted very well to new schools. The area with many ski areas and mountain terrain offers great opportunities for the outdoor activities they love and Salt Lake City is a great place to visit. 

Both daughters have new ventures. Kim has expanded her OT head trauma treatments by adding one day a week as a private practice. The delays for therapy in the medical professions can be lengthy which is not in the best interest of patients and this new arrangement allows her to explore a more productive approach. Sid and Frankie are multi-sport athletes and Jim is assistant coach for Sid’s basketball team. We often have the opportunity to watch games on weekends. 

Lynn has started a business as the CEO of a medical startup focused on physical therapy opportunities for pediatric cancer patients via an app delivering exercise tasks recommended by therapists. Requirements for security when it comes to children using the Internet for any medical activity make this more complicated than most online ventures and the system recommends exercises but also tracks activity and provides the data the professionals need to evaluate progress. Raising money from venture capitalists is the way it gets done, but the financing approach is foreign to those with our backgrounds. Addie is off to college at Madison and had a good first semester. All are healthy. 

Cindy and I will soon be off to Kauai for a couple of months. We will have several different guests so it should be a great time. We took a trip along the coast of Norway a couple of months ago. The fjords are spectacular and we also spent time with a recent friend in Denmark and a teaching friend of Cindy’s in Oslo. Having the time and good health to travel has resulted in many great memories and photos. 

Marker for Arctic Circle

Best wishes to all. 

I finally decided to delete my Twitter account. I have had Mastodon sites for more than a year and now a Blue Sky account so I have places to go.

I was staying on Twitter mostly because I took a few minutes a day to refute obvious falsehoods that have become so common. It is easy to leave, but I had a concern for those that stay and think they are getting a factual view of the world. For me, Twitter long ago lost the links I found useful in my profession.

My decision beyond the poor quality of the information that now predominates came down to two things. First, Musk’s algorithm which controls what you see when using the “For you” option was sending me little I valued. I certainly wasn’t interested in what Musk had to say and was not following him. His comments appeared anyway.

The latest changes to the terms of service also troubled me. Musk has announced that he will use Twitter content to feed his AI offering. As I understand AI to be a mushing together of the content a service is trained on to offer a perspective on knowledge, the last thing I thought to be useful would be a model trained heavily on Twitter content. The position of Twitter on legal matters requiring that they be arbitrated in Texas courts also signaled a bias I did not want to support.

I can be found on Mastodon (@grabe), Bluesky, etc.

I thought this content from NBC News was interesting. It is a summary of Trump’s personally stated agenda. Not the 2025 proposal, but you will see it is very close. Print it out and save it. I cannot believe rational people supported many of these claims, but that is not the point. My thought is most of these claims will not happen and were Trump’s claims to energize his base – mostly big talk that is not practical or should be unconstitutional. However, now without those willing to tell Trump no, I guess we will see. Glad we live in Minnesota and are not dependent on a government safety net. I have big concerns as do many in other parts of the world who look to the U.S. for leadership that we have been willing to abandon the moral and democratic values that supported democracies elsewhere. A sense of self-centeredness seems to now prevail.

In our retirement, we have been able to spend considerable time traveling. I maintain a separate travel blog and if interested you are invited to explore this site. We are presently on a small ship exploring the fjords of Norway.

I have listened to many episodes from Kara Swisher’s On podcasts. She mostly focuses on the world of technology. However, she does venture into other areas including politics. A recent episode featured political pundit Rachael Maddow and reviewed her documentary “From Russia with Lev”. The documentary tells the story of Ukranian conman Lev Parnass and his collaboration with the Trump administration to get Ukrainian officials to find dirt or at least announce an investigation of Hunter Biden. This effort resulted in the first Trump impeachment. I have watched the documentary and heartily recommend it. Parnass spend time in prison for his involvement, but was not called as part of the impeachment hearings. The documentary remedies that purposeful oversight.

The Swisher episode is an interview with Parnass and not the documentary, but the backstory is both funny and enlightening. Funny may seem an unlikely description of such a serious and damaging situation, but Parnass is a character and the naivete of his involvement is amusing. Lest you think there is little substance or new information in this documentary I can assure anyone willing to invest the time they will be rewarded. Parnass had a colleague who for unknown reasons (perhaps self protection) recorded many of the meetings and events. The video of meetings with the politicians and the related documents in the possession of Parnass and associates makes clear the criminal acts that were ignored by the decision reached in impeachment process.

It is apple season in Minnesota and time for a trip to the University of Minnesota Apple House. There are plenty of places to purchase apples and this one is not cheap. You also don’t pick your own unless you are a kid because it is a popular destination for school field trips. For those you familiar with apple opportunities in other states, the U of MN is home to the Honeycrisp and many of the popular apples on the market in recent years. I just saw that the “father” of the Honeycrisp retired. Good on you apple man!

You can find plenty of interesting things at the Apple House. They sell pumpkins and gourds of every shape and size. The largest goes for $75. Who buys a $75 pumpkin? I would guess businesses who create arrangements to honor the season. A food truck also had apple donuts. I am a big believer of celebrating the season with an apple donut or two. Some go for pumpkin spice lattes. I would take apple donuts every time.

Then there are the apples. These Honeycrisps were not cheap, but you can’t get this jumbo size at the grocery store.

The claim Haitian workers are stealing and eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats in Ohio has troubled me. In the big scheme of national politics, how can such an issue become a focal point? The story itself seems traceable to a woman who could not find her cat and speculated on Facebook that Haitian neighbors may have taken it. She later found the cat in her basement. Ok, just a naive woman who has accepted racist stereotypes coming to the wrong conclusion and feeling a need to share her biases online. How did the claim get beyond the attention of whomever her followers might be?

Somehow, a candidate for the Presidency is told of this story and decides to repeat the story during a debate broadcast to the entire country. The moderator of the debate is also aware of the story and attempts to correct the ex-President explaining that the story was not true. The Governor, the mayor, and the police chief, Republicans among them, deny the claims are true. However, the damage was done among the true believers. Trump’s VP also from Ohio picks up the theme and continues to promote the story. Soon, new observations are reporting ducks or geese have also been stolen. Community members begin to appear claiming the many problems caused by the Haitians.

So, it appears it was a false alarm turned into a national incident. What if it were true? What if instead, the Voodoo Catholics of New Orleans had sacrificed a chicken as part of a religious ceremony? What if individuals following ancient biblical accounts sacrificed an animal? Would there be national outrage targeting an ethnic group? Maybe it was the claim that animals had been stolen from neighbors instead of being purchased or raised. Maybe it was the thought someone would eat a cat. I know – that is weird. Dogs are eaten in places, but cats? A cat makes the story more appalling. 

How did it come to this? Some of this might be attributed to confirmation bias. People demonstrate confirmation bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. I suppose we all fall prey, but we all do not have the audience of a contender for the Presidency. Republicans primed with complaints about border insecurity seek and believe claims about those from other countries in the U.S. It does not matter that the Haitians are documented and not illegal and were invited to address worker shortages. A similar issue is involved in attempts to highlight every serious crime committed by undocumented individuals despite the data clearly showing that the general crime rate among such individuals is lower than that of U.S. citizens. Several biases are exhibited here. Aside from confirmation bias, there is anecdotal reasoning which is using individual cases to argue a point while ignoring the more typical or average case. 

All of these human limitations aside, it is more troubling to consider the behavior of a Presidential candidate. Perhaps this is a sign of impulsivity which is a dangerous characteristic in an individual who must make important and consequential decisions. Perhaps this is an indication of egocentrism which permits an individual to ignore the advice of better informed individuals. Trump has demonstrated such characteristics repeatedly, but I am afraid it is something even worse. I think it is a tendency to ignore facts in search of dirt that may sway supporters. Lies, misinformation, propaganda or whatever you want to call it, these false claims are damaging to individuals who have been falsely accused and the related hatred spread is not a trivial matter. 

“Political speak” drives me crazy. I am interested in specific policy issues and what candidates have to say about these issues seems relevant and important. Too often the stand taken is vague and sometimes outright weird. A reporter at a meeting of the Economic Club of New York asked Trump a straightforward question about the cost of childcare and the response makes a good example. The President began by stating the obvious – people need child care and child care is expensive. This, of course, was basically restating the policy question and not an answer. The policy response as far as I can tell was that other countries were going to be “taxed” amounting to trillions of dollars on goods imported by Americans and this was much more than the cost of child care. That was it.

I compare many of Trump’s position statements to something I covered when I taught Introduction to Psychology – the Rorschach Test. This projective assessment technique involved asking subjects what they saw in an ambiguous figure. In other words, the figure was not a depiction of anything and personal biases and prejudices projected on this figure would be helpful to the psychologist trying to understand the individual subjected to the request. In other words, the babble produced in response to the direct question communicated very little but it allowed viewers to read in their own interpretations.

My guess is that what Trump called taxes are what most of us would call tariffs. As I understand a tariff, a fee is added on top of the price of the producer of an imported good to make the price the item is sold at higher. Consumers in the country importing the item would have to pay more possibly making the item less attractive in comparison to locally produced goods. The government gets the tariff. Who pays the tax in this case is an interesting question. If I pay $20 for an item I could have purchased for $15 without the tariff, I might conclude that I have paid $5 to the government. Of course, the goal is to get citizens to buy local, but that might mean what they purchase will cost more.

What is the connection between the tariff tax and childcare? Again, one must speculate. I assume that some of the money collected by the government might then be allocated in some unspecified way to cover childcare costs. I would suggest that Harris’s child tax credit would have been a much more specific and direct response and would not have involved increasing the cost of goods purchased from other countries and then finding some way for the government to allocate this tax to the parents who need the help.

It is so challenging to work your way through the vagueness of political positions. Are candidates vague to avoid having to be specific and offer something specific for voters to consider? I understand that Republicans are against big government. I understand that this is about unnecessary regulations and unnecessary programs. However, the specific regulations that are to be rescinded and the specific programs that are to be abandoned are seldom mentioned. I assume that the military is a defensible expense. What about childcare? Trump did not really say if the government should intervene to cover some of the cost. Should childcare providers be regulated? Should training be necessary and should the number of children each provider can take be specified? If a provider could have a group of say 25-30 3-year olds much like a kindergarten teacher involved with 5-year olds, the cost to parents would be much lower. The specifics matter.

Finding something to write about while spending your days in a car requires some creativity. Here is an observation related to our time driving through Iowa. Perhaps it is only of interest to old tech people. I can remember a time when we traveled by car and had to find ways to connect our devices to the Internet. How else to check email and post a photo or two? McDonalds was always an option. I remember driving through Iowa and seeing rest area signs announcing that this rest station offered wifi. Either Iowa has not changed its signs in the last 25 or so years or Internet access is still a selling point. I am writing this on the Interstate using our car as a hot spot. Times do change.

We will be traveling for the next couple of weeks. If you are interested in out travel blog, you find it at this online location.