Why I'm Pagan.

Warning: This post is not comprehensive. A better title would probably be something like, "Why I gave up on Christianity." 

Anyway, here we go.

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Jemez National Forest, NM
Lynne Cantwell | July 2025

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John Beckett, a Druid priest who I've been following online for several years, is offering a new online class called, "Unpacking Your Religious Baggage So You Can Live a Magical Life". The class is two weeks in -- the second module dropped this Thursday -- so there's still time to get in on it if you're so inclined. (Or take it later. The classes are on-demand.) I wasn't going to sign up -- I didn't grow up in a specific religious tradition, and I think I've done a pretty good job of exorcising from my head whatever Western religious thought I've picked up by osmosis. But then I thought, what the heck -- maybe I'll learn something. 

I have several friends who did grow up in religious traditions but who later turned atheist, and I thought the class might help them, so I've posted a time or two about it on Facebook. On one of those posts, I got into a discussion with a friend who has been following the Rev. Karla, an ordained interfaith minister who has made a name for herself on TikTok. My friend posted a link to one of the Rev. Karla's Substack posts: "The Kindness of Atheists and the Intolerance of Christians". In it, the Rev. Karla says she has been surprised at the number of Christians-turned-atheists who have told her they're following her. Here she is, busy helping people "heal from [their] religious trauma" and "deconstruct[] from the toxic theology of [their] religious heritage" (according to her website), and she's attracting atheists who appreciate what she has to say. (Her biggest target right now appears to be the patriarchy and attacking it from within the structure of the church.) 

So I read the post. One thing she wrote caught my eye: "[I]ntolerance is not inherent to religion, but it is deeply embedded in the systems that insist their truth is the only truth." I told my friend that I agreed with the statement -- but in my opinion, it didn't go far enough. 

The Rev. Karla -- just like nearly everybody else in the Western world, including atheists -- operates from the assumption that monotheism is the only possible religious framework. The only correct religious framework. Either God exists or He doesn't. 

Let's call it the "God/no God dichotomy" for short.

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Growing up outside of organized religion (save a couple of summers of vacation Bible school, courtesy of the well-meaning parents of friends) led me to spend some time in my late teens and twenties investigating various denominations to see where I might fit. In addition to several Christian denominations, I also looked into the Baha'i faith. But eventually I rejected them all and called myself agnostic.

At the time, I had a subscription to a magazine called Free Inquiry, published by the Council for Secular Humanism. They ran a column every month (and may still) that deconstructed some discrepancy or other in the Bible. It was always great fun to read.

But it eventually occurred to me that they were always fighting the same battle. Yes, a lot of Christian theology doesn't pass the sniff test. Yes, you can be a moral and ethical person without being a member of a church. It was all very rational: science good/religion bad (or if not bad, precisely, then misguided). The God/no God dichotomy.

But I knew there was more to the world we live in than science could explain. 

And I have since known a lot of atheists who reject all spirituality. They pay lip service to the idea that science doesn't know everything, but they dismiss ESP, Tarot, and so on as preposterous -- even when they've seen the woo-woo work. They know that trees are alive, but they're only grudgingly admitting that they communicate with one another, and they refuse to believe that trees have consciousness, aka a soul -- without recognizing the irony that for centuries, the same argument has been used by the Christian church against Black, brown, and Asian people; Native Americans; and anybody else who isn't "us".  That argument is what spawned the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, by which the Catholic Church gave the conquistadors and missionaries permission -- nay, the duty -- to capture, enslave, and "civilize" members of nonwhite societies.

I'll go further: Monotheism foments patriarchy. It encourages the control of ideas, especially those that conflict with religious doctrine (much of which was written centuries ago by powerful men). It puts fear into those who are tempted to believe that the paranormal is real: miracles are okay, but any other unexplained phenomena are scary because they could be the devil's work. (I once pissed off a Russian Orthodox guy of my acquaintance by observing that what his church called miracles, Pagans call magic.)

The God/no God dichotomy is the bedrock of Western culture. It's so deeply ingrained that a lot of the time, we don't even realize it's there. Why does the horror genre work? Because the villain is often stereotypically evil. What's the framework by which society defines evil? I'll let you work that out on your own.

Many atheists define their beliefs as no-God. That's fine, as far as it goes, I guess, but it seems to me it's a position in which it's easy to get stuck. You could keep poking holes in the Bible or your prophet of choice -- or you could do the work to define your own belief system, in which the Bible and its prophets are irrelevant.

I am here to tell you that the God/no-God dichotomy is bullshit. Quit fighting Jehovah and move on.

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Anyway, that's why I'm Pagan.

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These moments of bloggy dichotomy have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

The bathroom is done, huzzah!

I had something else in the queue for tonight's post, but I'm putting it off until next week for this BREAKING NEWS: As of this afternoon, the bathroom renovation is done! 

Lynne Cantwell | September 2025

Well, as much as I'm going to do right now.

As a reminder, here's what it looked like when I moved in. This is lifted straight from the listing when I bought the house. It was ... very white.

I forget the realtor's name. Anyway, it's from the MLS listing.

Note the builder-grade mirror and the 72-inch, same-as-the-kitchen-cabinets-but-not-as-high vanity that were installed in 1987. The countertop and sinks, I've learned, weren't very old, but I didn't like the dark green tile, plus I couldn't open the laundry closet without moving Tigs's litter box. Those round knobs on the laundry closet doors were installed throughout the house; I replaced all of them some time ago. The shelves you can see in the mirror on the left were actually part of an over-the-toilet thing that was broken. And the vanity light turned out to be a track lighting fixture that wasn't damp rated (horrors!).

My inspiration for the new color scheme was this photo that I apparently stole from Better Homes and Gardens. 

Stolen from the internet in 2023

It reminded me of a house I used to see from the school bus window when I was a kid. The house stood at the top of a dune, right across from Lake Michigan. It was painted white with black trim, and against a clear blue sky, it was just so pretty. That has stuck with me for 50 years. And when I saw this photo, I thought, "Why mess with perfection?"

Then the llamas got in there, and I needed little hints of yellow to go with the bits of yellow in the backsplash tile, and then I started buying art for the space, and things got complicated. But the blue, white, and turquoise are still there. And the vanity is shorter by a foot, so I don't have to move Tigs's box anymore to do laundry -- yay! 

Lynne Cantwell | September 2025

Our lives have improved by about a thousand percent on that basis alone.

Wrinkles:

1. As I mentioned last week, I had the plate-glass mirror cut down to fit in that frame. I had the glass shower doors taken out at the same time. I dunno why, but I hate glass shower doors -- and I like my llama shower curtain a lot better. 
2. There was zero flooring under the old vanity -- just the subfloor -- so I had to have more Saltillo tile installed. Of course it's virtually impossible to match Saltillo, as it's handmade and so on. (The tile guy laughed when he was done and said, "It's Santa Fe. Nothing matches!")
3. I thought at first that I wanted the sink in the left corner so the plumbing would be hidden inside a cabinet. The cabinet installer suggested that it would look dumb there. He was right. Unfortunately, I'd already had the plumbers set up the connection in the corner, so I had to pay for them to come back. To hide the plumbing in the center section, I went on eBay, found a llama shower curtain to match the one I had, and made the little curtain from it.
4. The sink is wood-look sandstone that I ordered from a place in Wisconsin. The countertop guys were a little freaked out by it. They thought at first that it was actual wood. 

It's sandstone, I swear it.
Lynne Cantwell | September 2025

Anyway, I painted the room yesterday (I woke up so sore this morning). I was thinking I'd have to paint the medicine cabinet, but with the fresh coat of paint on the walls, I think it looks okay. The shower tiles, however, now look more dingy than they did to start with. I'd really like to do a tub-to-shower conversion someday, but it won't be this year. I might just get the tiles reglazed for now. We'll see.

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These moments of bloggy home improvement have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Shopping for towels.

 I miss mall department stores. 

gpointstudio | Deposit Photos

But first: Let's talk towels.

As I mentioned last week, I'm in the throes of a partial bathroom remodel. Not only am I swapping out the vanity, but I had the ginormous builder-grade mirror cut down and put in a frame I bought at the same consignment store where I bought the vanity. The frame's finish didn't match the vanity, so I painted it the same color as the laundry closet doors, which is more or less the same color as my favorite bath sheet, which I bought from Amazon so long ago that it's not in my purchase history (I must have ordered it under an old email address). Which is to say that I could use a new bath sheet.

You wouldn't think the assignment would be hard, but you'd be wrong. First, there's the question of color. The paint is Behr Adonis. It's a medium blue that leans toward turquoise; Behr calls it "a clear aqua". Try to match that just by comparing photos on the internet, and you will rapidly descend into madness. I think of aqua in general as being fairly pale, plus a lot of so-called aquas lean way green. Anything called "turquoise" can also be too green. I thought I'd found a decent color match with this towel (even though it was billed as "aqua") -- and it is a decent match, color wise, but the towel feels like you're trying to dry off with cardboard.

Then there's the question of thickness. Some towels are plush, but some plush towels are so plush that they don't fit into all the crevices, if you know what I mean, plus they take forever to dry. Thinner towels dry faster, but some can be too thin. I thought I had this licked when I found a waffle towel at World Market and bought two hand towels to try them out. I like them a lot; they feel thick but dry really fast. But they don't come in bath sheet size. Highly-rated waffle towels are hella expensive, and the definition of "waffle towel" is sometimes baffling at a lower price point. (Sorry, LL Bean, but leaving out the loops in little squares in your terry cloth does not make what you're selling a waffle towel.)

The answer -- as it is with other fabrics and virtually all yarn -- is to see the merchandise in person. You need to touch it to judge the weight, and you need to see the color without shade-shifting electronics in the way. And you -- okay, I -- also need to give up on finding a waffle towel in a non-boring color and at a non-eye-watering price, and just get a regular terry towel in not-blue but maybe in a fun pattern.

Which is how I ended up at Dillard's this afternoon to look at their selection of Pendleton spa towels. ("Spa towel" is apparently the chic name for beach towels these days.)

Of course I headed the wrong way at first and ended up touring every other department before I got to home decor. But it reminded me of how much I used to like browsing in nice department stores. The pandemic shutdown did a number on in-person shopping, and retail has yet to recover; maybe it never will. But there's something soothing about wandering through departments of curated merchandise in an environment where there's carpet underfoot and the lighting is not too bright. Big-box stores have their place, and so do warehouse stores like Costco. But it was so pleasant today to peruse stacks of neatly folded towels and have a nice assistant tell me to just let her know when I was done looking because she'd be happy to ring me up right over there. And she did. No waiting! And no self-checkout!

Anyway. I ended up getting this towel. My eyes only watered a little at the price (I suspect looking at those chichi waffle towels online wore me down). If I'm satisfied with it, I'll probably get another one or two in different patterns for guests.

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I can't let this post go without addressing the rumors that have been swirling online about the state of Trump's health. Before today, he hadn't appeared in public for three days, so of course the social media death watch had begun.

As much fun as it is to speculate on whether his team would pull a Weekend at Bernie's if he did die, I just don't see it happening. For one thing, his vice president is reportedly champing at the bit to take over.

Trump does look terrible, though.

I'll just leave it at that.

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These moments of curated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

A late summer roundup.

A view from my porch.
Lynne Cantwell | August 2025

I'm back, having never been away.

I can explain!

In my last post two weeks ago, I said I would be having carpal tunnel release surgery on my right hand on August 8th, then traveling to greater Chicagoland this past weekend for my high school reunion. Neither of those things happened.

I decided to put off the surgery because of the portable swamp coolers. I wrote about them earlier this summer -- you can go here to refresh your memory, if you like -- but the problem relating to the surgery was that I use a two-gallon watering can to fill them, and I realized I wasn't going to be able to lift it with just one hand. And it has been too hot to go without using the swamp coolers. So the surgery has been rescheduled for the end of September, which hopefully will not conflict with our governor's reported plans to call a special legislative session within the next few weeks.

That explains the surgery delay, but what about canceling the trip? That's because of the Bathroom Vanity Project.

The original vanity was the one the builders installed when the place was built in 1987. It was the same design as the kitchen cabinets, except shorter in height. It was also so long that I had to move the litter box every time I wanted to do laundry. Some previous owner had replaced whatever the original countertop was with Talavera tile: countertop, backsplash, and matching sinks. I like Talavera tile, but there are lots (and lots) of designs, and I wasn't wild about this one. Here:

Lynne Cantwell | 2023

The tile was inoffensive (which was part of my problem with it, to be honest) and some of it was dark green, which clashed with the laundry closet door after I painted it turquoise blue.

I spent a lot of time looking at replacement vanities online. The ones in my price range looked like boxes; the ones with a little style to them were over my budget. So last fall, when my friend Kim was in town, we checked out consignment shops and found this: 

Lynne Cantwell | 2024

It had started out life as an entertainment center. I knew I wanted a vessel sink; this was the right height and definitely did not look like a box. So I bought it and had it delivered, and it sat in my storage closet until last month, when I contracted with the cabinet makers down the street to put it in.

Well. The top is not flat, which I knew, and the thing is not square. Plus I had to have more Saltillo tile put in because the people who installed it didn't pull the old vanity to lay it underneath. (It turned out there was nothing under the old vanity but the subfloor.) Then there was the miscommunication about the sink; I'm going down to one sink from two, and I had the plumbers put the new connections in the wrong place, so that had to be fixed.

Anyway, the bottom line is that it's not done yet. The floor tile and vanity are in, the new countertop will be installed tomorrow, the backsplash will go up Tuesday, and then I can have the plumbers come back. Hopefully it'll be all done by the end of this week. Then I get to spend Labor Day weekend painting. 

The joys of homeownership...

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This post is already pretty long, but I wanted to mention the death this week of James Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family in 1977.

Dobson -- along with Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and creator of the label "the Moral Majority", and Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network and what's now Regis University -- were probably the most well-known promoters of evangelical Christianity in the 1970s and '80s. All three of them espoused the sort of "family values" that include opposition to abortion and the claim that LGBTQ+ people are misled and should undergo conversion therapy. (Conversion therapy doesn't work, has been proven detrimental to those who undergo it, and is now banned in 23 states and DC.) But Dobson in particular is vilified by a lot of people whose parents ascribed to his harsh, abusive childrearing techniques. One blogger began his post with this: "JAMES DOBSON, 89, died this week after a long battle with children." He goes on to say that Dobson's philosophy on raising children was in reaction to that of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who said kids do best when disciplined with love and understanding: "Dobson contended that children were born sinful and must be beaten without mercy in order to secure their bond to their parents and the church, and, of course, to save them ... from damnation." 

A charming fellow. But he, Robertson, and Falwell insinuated their hateful brand of Christianity into the highest echelons of government in this country, and for decades, conservative candidates have appreciated their followers' support. Ronald Reagan courted the evangelical vote. So did George W. Bush. And I'm sure you've seen the laying-on-of-hands memes featuring the current occupant of the White House -- a man whose behavior is in no way Christian, but whose supporters claim he was sent by God to save the nation.

Dobson, Robertson, and Falwell are all gone now; Falwell died in 2007, Robertson in 2023. But the poison they introduced into our national discourse has become deeply rooted, and it needs to be uprooted from our government before we can recover from the mess we're in.

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You could argue that I conceived of The Pipe Woman Chronicles partly as a response to the damage evangelicalism was doing to the nation.

I used to say that I thought Falwell was the Antichrist until Robertson came along. Then I realized that Falwell was the anti-John-the-Baptist.

I hope they're all enjoying themselves now, wherever they've ended up. I'm pretty sure it's not heaven.

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These moments of deconstructive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Stay away from rabbit holes; and taking a break.

I want to address, briefly, a thing that's made the rounds on social media over the past couple of days. It was sparked by a Substack post (which I'm not linking to because I don't want to amplify it) quoting a guy who claims to be a former CIA agent and who supposedly participated in an NSA forensic audit of the 2024 election. The purported NSA audit supposedly found that foreign interests manipulated the election results and that Kamala Harris actually won the election.

Here's why I think it's bullshit.

geralt | Pixabay

For starters: The Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency are different federal agencies. The NSA has its own agents. Why wouldn't they use people from their own agency to conduct an audit? Why pick an ex-CIA guy whose security clearances may or may not still be any good?

Second: The feds don't do nationwide audits of election results. Each state runs its own elections and performs its own audits. The graphics you see on TV on election night are pulled from reports provided by election officials in each individual state, and they compile them from results provided by election officials in each individual precinct. Ballots and voting apparatuses aren't even held by a state agency, as far as I'm aware; election officials in each county are responsible for keeping their own stuff under lock and key.

Third: There have been challenges to the 2024 results in several states, and time and again it's been acknowledged that the machines and their software have not been tampered with, and in fact could not have been tampered with. All the challenges were resolved when Biden was still president. Now, this fellow is claiming that some sneaky code disguised as an update to vote-counting software allowed foreign malefactors to mess with the numbers. Really? Really?? Wouldn't the locals have noticed if their numbers changed when they got to the state level? And didn't we go through this with the 2020 results? Except then it was conservatives claiming the votes were tampered with -- and it cost them a lot of money when it was proven in court that they were making it all up.

Fourth: The guy is an author of a book on international human trafficking. His book is available for free. Reportedly it's 900 pages long. I'm not interested in giving him a download, but this poster on Reddit has done it, and here's what he has to say (all syntax issues are the original poster's): 

"This is classic internet conspiracy word salad nonsense. From what I can piece together he believes that the wars in Ukraine, and Gaza are directed by a global mafia that runs Israel, Russia, China, and the United States to name a few of the nations. He ties in human trafficking, slavery, pedophiles, all of it into his global conspiracy. This is the same pedophiles run the world right-wing conspiracies just rebranded by a left leaning audience."

In other words, it's QAnon for lefties. Look up "pizzagate" and see where that has gotten us before.

I could go on (i.e., anybody can get a Substack; anybody can publish a book and upload it for sale; anybody can offer their book for free -- heck, I've done it), but I said at the top that this would be brief. 

What concerns me is the same thing that concerns that Reddit poster: People are taking this and running with it without thinking about whether any of it is plausible.

I know it's tempting to hang onto hope that the disaster we're living through is the result of evil machinations. And social media's algorithms are designed to keep serving us more and more of what we've already consumed; it would be so easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole into a lefty version of QAnon.

But please don't. Step away from the screens, take a breath, drink some water, use the john, and think about how likely any of this is. 

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I will be scarce here on the blog for the next couple of weeks. This coming Friday, I'm going in for carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand -- something that I probably should have had done 30 years ago. I'll still be wearing a splint on my right hand when next Sunday rolls around, so no blog post from me that day.

Then the following weekend -- assuming all goes well with the surgery and whatnot -- I'll be back in my hometown for my (gulp) 50th high school reunion. 

So let's make a tentative date to meet back here on Sunday, August 24th. I should have lots to tell you about by then.

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These moments of non-rabbit-holed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, and go drink some water. Seriously.

Was America ever exceptional?

Dazdraperma | Deposit Phots

One of the comments on last week's post got me thinking. "I don't ascribe to notions of American exceptionalism," the anonymous* poster said, and went on to list several things that were wrong with the US in the '60s, including racial discrimination, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War. 

Of course, and those are just the tip of the iceberg. Women were also discriminated against. And in the early years of the 20th century, immigrants who would be considered white by today's standards were thought of as different, lesser races -- including people from Ireland, Italy, and China. Virtually all 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II; many of them, like actor George Takei, were born here.

We have done shitty things to other countries, too. That noted expert Wikipedia says, "The U.S. has engaged in nearly 400 military interventions between 1776 and 2023, with half of these operations occurring since 1950 and over 25% occurring in the post-Cold War period." That doesn't even count covert CIA actions to destabilize governments, in South America and elsewhere, often to make it easier for US corporations to do business there. The Iran-Contra affair is just one example of us mucking around in other countries' self-governance to benefit ourselves.

But if we could dispense with criticism for a moment, I think it would be safe to say that the US had been considered exceptional around the world -- if for no other reason that immigrants have historically flocked to our shores to escape whatever atrocity was going on in their own countries (whether we caused it or not). (Of course, immigration is still happening today -- although less so, given who's running the show right now and how "illegal immigrants" are being treated by those people.)

And then there's the way other nations, especially those in Europe, have counted on the United States to protect them in case of an act of aggression against them by some other nation -- which is what makes Trump's turnabout in American policy toward Ukraine so hard to stomach. Sure, he's being nicer to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky now, but it's hard to trust him when he's changed his mind so many times before. 

We've never been perfect, and I did not mean to imply last week that we ever were. We have a long way to go to reach perfection, if we ever get there; that has always been true. 

But going back to last week's topic: We were the first nation to put a person on the moon, and we're still the only nation to have done it. In that one singular achievement, at least, we have been exceptional. 

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*This blogging platform doesn't make it easy for folks who comment directly on my posts. Usually I can tell who an anonymous poster is; in this instance, it could be one of several folks. No need to out yourself, sir or madam. I'm just explaining to others who might wonder.

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These moments of exceptional (in several senses of the word) blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Back when we owned the moon.

 

benschonewille | Deposit Photos

Today is the 56th anniversary of the day that men landed on the moon. On this date in 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin piloted NASA's lunar lander away from their spaceship, Apollo 11, and touched down on the surface of the moon. (The third guy on the mission, Michael Collins, stayed behind in the command module to keep the motor running, as it were.) Neil was the first one out the door of the lander; his first words as his foot touched the surface got kinda garbled in the transmission back to earth, but what he said was, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Yeah, he did say "mankind", not "humankind". This was 1969 -- women were good enough to do the math to get us into space, but we weren't good enough to be remembered in everyday speech. Yet.

Certain events are imprinted on the national consciousness in terms of where we, personally, were when they happened: President John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963; the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986; the day the Twin Towers collapsed (and the Pentagon was also attacked) on September 11, 2001; the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; and this one. It's become fashionable to bring up these events on their anniversaries and remember what we were doing when we either saw it happen or heard about it. 

NASA says Armstrong's left foot hit the lunar dust at 9:56 p.m. Central Daylight Time, the same time zone I lived in (albeit 1,100 miles away). I watched the historic event at home with my parents. I was eleven years old that summer, plenty old enough to stay up late to watch history in the making. Then I went to bed. (I mean, I was a kid -- celebratory toasts were way off in my future.)

What strikes me today is why people are making kind of a big deal about it this year. It's not like it's a major anniversary. Who celebrates the 56th anniversary of anything? Nobody.

No, I think it's nostalgia at work. It was JFK who set the goal for us, to beat the Russians to the moon, in May 1961. It only took us eight years to get there. Think of that: Americans had set a major goal, focused on it, pulled together, and reached it in only eight years. Our nation was truly ascendent, and not just in space exploration; since at least World War II, we had been a shining beacon to the rest of the world, and now here we were, excelling again. In 1969, it seemed, everybody wanted to be American.

Today, Americans might rather be Finns. All of the top five happiest countries in the world are Nordic countries. Even Mexico is happier than the United States: they're number 10, and we're number 24.

A lot could be said about what's happened to our nation since 1969 that has caused that to happen, and folks of differing political proclivities of course have different opinions. But I think it's clear that almost no Americans want what's happening right now to continue. 

Can we ever be the best country on earth again? I think we can. But we'll never do it while Trump and his Project 2025 minions are in power, so our first task is to get them out.

No, I don't have a plan. But we didn't have a plan for getting to the moon until JFK made it our national goal, either. To get our country out of this mess, I think we're going to have to develop the plan together.

***

I guess I've never shared this on the blog before. In 1989, as part of the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, NASA sent Buzz Aldrin around on a PR tour. I covered his news conference at the NASA Langley Visitor Center in Hampton, VA, for WTAR Radio. During the Q&A part of the event, all of us were serious news people, asking relevant questions and such. But once the mics and cameras were turned off, we turned into fanboys and fangirls. I still have the poster that Aldrin signed for me, and of course I framed it. Sorry for the angle -- the hallway here is too narrow for a full-on photo. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

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These moments of spacey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, and look to the stars!

In praise of smaller airports.

 

ClassyCatStudio | Deposit Photos

You get a quick post tonight because I've been out of town at a convention this weekend (Mystic South). Travel is exhausting, as I'm sure you know, and I need to get to bed soon. But traveling into and out of a smaller airport is a lot less exhausting, as I was reminded this weekend.

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post ranked the 50 best US airports (it's a gift link), and my current local airport -- the Albuquerque International Sunport -- was ranked seventh. Oh heck, to save time, here's their list of the top ten:

1. Portland International Airport
2. Long Beach Airport
3. National Airport*
4. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
5. Seattle Paine Field International Airport
6. Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport
7. Albuquerque International Sunport
8. Indianapolis International Airport
9. Salt Lake City International Airport
10. Detroit Metro Airport

By and large, you will notice, these are not behemoth facilities. Small airports are just less complicated and easier to get around -- and in some cases, parking is cheaper. For instance, I parked in the garage adjacent to the terminal in Albuquerque this weekend; the maximum charge per day is $14, less than half what you'd pay for the same parking proximity at National.

The convention I went to this weekend was in a suburb of Atlanta, so of course I had to fly into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the world. A reported 108 million people traveled through that airport in 2024, and I swear to gods, pretty close to that many were there Friday night. It didn't help that I rode the train out to the rental car area only to find out that I didn't have a reservation, after all (thanks, Travelocity!), and then rode the train back to the main terminal to find the rideshare pickup point, which was an absolute mob scene. Landed in Atlanta at about 10 p.m.; didn't get in the Lyft until 11:40 p.m.; and it was nearly 12:30 a.m. when I got to the convention hotel.  The drive took longer than usual because my Lyft driver went out of her way to avoid traffic downtown due to the Beyonce concert. (Thank the gods that my body was on Mountain Time.) 

Today, we landed in Albuquerque at about 3:45 p.m. I stopped to use the ladies' room (no line!), got to my car, and drove the 45 minutes home. Even with stopping at the grocery store for a couple of things, I was home by about 5:30 p.m. Piece of cake.

Airports are such weird spaces anyway. Smaller ones are just nicer.

***

*The official name is Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. It was plain old National Airport until 1998, when Bob Barr, then a congressman from -- wait for it -- Georgia, went on a campaign to rename a whole bunch of stuff in DC after President Reagan. I believe Reagan has a lot to answer for, so I stick with the airport's old name. 

I liked flying out of National, too. The best part was that when we lived in Potomac Yard, it was only a five-minute drive from our apartment.

***

Oh, the convention? It was interesting and fun. The workshops gave me a lot to think about. Might write about it all in a future post.

***

These moments of traveling blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Safe travels, everyone!

Whose flag? Our flag.

As you probably know, Friday was Independence Day here in the US. I haven't been feeling much in the mood to celebrate our country lately, so I wasn't interested in finding a local fireworks display -- and anyway Santa Fe has been in a drought for pretty much forever, it seems like, and so setting off fireworks just seemed like a bad idea. (It didn't stop some of the neighbors, but then some people just want to blow stuff up and damn the consequences.)

But when the Santa Fe Opera sent an email saying they were offering tickets to this weekend's performances at 40 percent off, I snapped up a ticket to The Marriage of Figaro without thinking twice.

I like going to the opera, and we have a terrific -- dare I say world-renowned -- company here in town. World-class performances ten minutes from my house? Yes, please! Plus unlike most other live performance venues, the Santa Fe Opera has built into the auditorium seat backs a screen that shows what amounts to closed captioning. It's for translating the lyrics into English and Spanish, but it's pretty fabulous for hard-of-hearing folks, too.

Anyway, just before the performance started, the orchestra struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner". At the first strains of the song, the audience got to its feet, as did I -- years of public schooling trained me well -- and we began singing along.

Then I heard some guy in the aisle behind me say "something something Republicans". I don't remember his exact words, but what he meant was it was the sort of song you'd expect a bunch of well-to-do Republicans to trot out on the Fourth of July. Maybe he was trying to impress his date with world-weary snark, I dunno. But if I hadn't been concentrating on staying on key, I would have turned around and let him have it.

Our national anthem is for all Americans. I'm not about to cede it to the Republican party -- or our flag, either, which is what the anthem is all about. 

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the song is perfect for our times.

suti | Deposit Photos

"The Star-Spangled Banner" was written by Francis Scott Key, a lawyer who lived in Georgetown, which at that time was still a sort of suburb of Washington, DC. If you want the whole story, you can read about it on Wikipedia -- but suffice it to say that during the War of 1812, Key and a couple of American companions ended up stuck on a ship in British custody as the Brits were about to bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore's harbor. The attack began at dawn on September 13, 1814, and continued for 25 hours.

Key and his companions realized they wouldn't know the outcome until dawn on the 14th: if the American flag still flew above the fort, it would be clear that it was still in US hands. And it did, and it was. Key was moved by the British defeat to write a poem that was published as "The Defence of Fort M'Henry".

It wasn't much later that the poem was set to the tune of "The Anacreontic Song", also known as "Anacreon in Heaven", that was written for a gentleman's club in London by John Stafford Smith. It didn't become our national anthem until 1931 (beating out "America the Beautiful", which is a heck of a lot easier to sing).

***

"The Star-Spangled Banner" has lately been criticized for racist language in a verse that's hardly ever sung (fun fact: the song has four verses), and there have been calls for a different song to be chosen as our national anthem. Earlier this year, after Trump enacted his on-again, off-again tariffs, Canadians booed the song when it was played at sporting events involving the U.S. and Canada. And of course, there are the everlasting complaints about how hard it is to sing.

But think about its genesis. Key wrote it during wartime, in the thick of battle. He didn't know whether the battle would be won. Moreover, he didn't know whether the country would survive.

It's somewhat analogous to where we are today, except we're not fighting the British -- we're fighting the oligarchy and Project 2025. The ending to the final verse is so hopeful that it could be a rallying cry for today:

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave 

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

 ***

"The Star-Spangled Banner" isn't perfect by any means -- but neither is the United States. And I'm not interested in relinquishing our anthem and our flag to those who don't believe in America's ideals -- freedom, equality, fairness, and the rest -- to desecrate.

That would be obeying in advance.

***

These moments of patriotic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

All hail the semicolon; and a few words about Mamdami.

I tell you what: Nothing brings out the pedants like a post about punctuation. (And I'm counting on you lot to follow through!)

3D-Agentur | Deposit Photos

Washington Post columnist Mark Lasswell knows this, apparently. His column published in the paper today is titled, "This punctuation mark is semi-dead. People have opinions." (You can read it for free here; you're welcome.)

Lasswell's bio on WaPo's website says only that he has a BA from the University of Missouri. His LinkedIn indicates that he was an op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal before being forced out in 2017 due to intra-department conflicts during Trump 1.0. That seems like an odd thing to leave out of one's biography on your current employer's website, but maybe he's flying under the radar due to Jeff Bezos's ownership of the Post.

Anyway, back to the poor, benighted semicolon, which Lasswell says was introduced by a Venetian printer in 1494. But according to a study released by Babbel, its usage has dropped by half over the past 50 years in British English books; things are not much better on this side of the pond, according to a Swedish study of semicolon usage in US publications from 1920 through 2019. 

One wonders why it was left to a Swedish academic to study semicolon usage in the United States, but answering that question is beyond the scope of this post (translation: I ain't spending my Sunday afternoon reading a 27-page linguistics paper. If that's your jam, have at it).

Lasswell doesn't proffer any reasons for the declining usage; instead, he wisely (perhaps) leaves it to the peanut gallery to speculate. The usual suspects are suggested, including the dumbing down of edumacation (rest assured that the Oxford comma also gets dragged into the discussion). 

I didn't comment (well, I did, but not about what I'm about to say here), but the discussion did put me in mind of something I learned in a Great Courses course from linguist John McWhorter: As languages become the lingua franca of more people, particularly as people with different native languages come together more often, certain things about them become simplified. For example, irregular verb forms become more regular. And I would suggest that punctuation becomes simpler, too. The semicolon has only a few uses in prose: to connect two closely related independent clauses (i.e., if the text on each side of the semicolon could stand as a sentence on its own); and separating items in a list, if one or more of the items is complex so as to require a comma. (Mama Google's A.I. adds a third usage -- before a conjunctive adverb like "moreover" -- but to my mind, that's the first rule with an extra word thrown in to underscore the relationship between the first and second clauses.) 

So the semicolon is fairly specialized, and people who don't write regularly (I'm not counting social media posts as "writing regularly") probably forget what it's used for. I've seen a whole lot of comma splices that should have been a semicolon. 

I like semicolons; I appreciate their usefulness; and I do get annoyed with comma splices. But at work, we tend toward extreme avoidance. I've seen complex lists in legislation that use nothing but commas. But then we tend to use commas more sparingly than I'd like, too, which is a whole 'nother rant.

***

Okay, briefly, Mamdami (since I can't bring myself to comment on Trump's Big Bullshit Bill without swearing): People all over the country are losing their minds over Zohran Mamdami's win in last week's New York Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdami, who says he's a democratic socialist, is predictably making conservatives' heads explode -- but he's also discomfiting Democratic Party stalwarts like Bill Clinton who backed former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo (never mind that Cuomo quit as governor after an investigation found credible evidence that he sexually harassed eleven women). Cuomo outspent Mamdami, $87 per vote to $19 per vote; still, Mamdami won.

There are so many angles to cover with a story like this, Islamophobia (Mamdami is Muslim) being only one. But the thing that most interests me is the Democrats' reactions. They're correct when they say that you can't extrapolate election results in liberal New York City to the rest of the country. But the sotto voce backlash to Zamdami's win is reminding me a whole lot of what the party did to Bernie Sanders in 2016: they decided it was Hillary's turn to be president, and they just were not going to acknowledge Bernie's popularity, period, end of story. Why? Because the Democratic National Committee's business model is to collect as much money as possible to elect as many candidates as possible so they can hold onto as much power as possible. That's their whole reason for being. 

But Bernie proposed helping people, not corporate donors. He talked about income inequality and the oligarchy, and the DNC's big donors are part of the oligarchy. Bernie funded his campaign with small-dollar donations that the DNC couldn't control (and Bernie, bless him, refused to hand over his donor list to the DNC when he dropped out of the race).

Mamdami won by doing the same thing. No wonder the DNC is scared; he's attacking their business model.

***

Seven semicolons and the use of "discomfiting" in a single blog post. I ought to get a prize or something.

***

But seriously, who thought it was a good idea to back an accused sexual harasser for political office? I mean, Andrew Cuomo is no Trump...

***

These moments of bloggy punctuality have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

War in Iran, and keeping cool in the Southwest.

I was all set to do a 100 percent nonpolitical, totally educational post this week about how I'm not gonna die because of the lack of air conditioning in my condo. And then yesterday, Trump went and dropped a bunch of BOMBS on Iran. (His quirky capitalization, not mine.)

In some respects, we all should have seen this coming. The guy's been itching to play with our arsenal since his first term, when he asked whether nuking a hurricane would work. (Spoiler: No. And also, WTF?)

He also probably thinks he's brilliant for misdirecting his critics with his never-gonna-happen "two weeks" excuse and then striking almost right away. 

Here's what I know: No matter what anybody in the Trump regime claims, it is way too early to know how badly, or even whether, Iran's nuclear capability was damaged. Third-party inspectors would need to be granted access to the bombing sites to evaluate the damage, and good luck getting the Iranians to agree to that now. (I'm feeling echoes of Bush the Younger's bombing runs on Iraqi targets that were supposed to be chemical weapons sites; one may have been a baby-milk factory, but it definitely wasn't a munitions plant.)

Here's what else I know: The Iranians will retaliate. We don't know how yet, but they will. 

As a commenter on some article I read somewhere observed, the United States is now Japan in 1941. And we all know how that turned out for Japan.

***

Anyway. I refuse to let Trump derail my original plan. So here's an explainer about my A/C-free condo.

***

I have always had a hard time equalizing the indoor temperature in this place. I'm not in an end unit, so I only have windows on the north and south sides. The south side has four ginormous solar windows that don't open - I have often referred to them as the fabulous wall o' windows -- and a door to the deck. There's also a mysterious circular thing that looks like a fan cover in a side wall at the top of the solar windows. On the north side of the house, there are three smaller casement windows, two in the bedroom and one in the office/craft room. This window placement is the classic arrangement for passive solar design. The idea is to capture the heat from the sun in the building's materials (including the brick floor in my living/dining room) on the south side of the house and let it keep the house warm all night long. That works great in the winter. And it did work pretty well in the summer, here at 7,000 feet and almost 40 years ago, until climate change started giving us warmer summers. Today, for me, the living/dining room has been ten degrees warmer than the back of the house in every season.

Of course, you can regulate the sun's intensity by putting a shade on any window. And my solar windows did have shades on them -- dark brown shadecloth-type fabric that you had to pull up from the bottom, even though (as I've explained to several window-shade sellers) the sun, which you're trying to block, comes in at the top. (There's also an exterior roller shade, also in a dark brown shadecloth-type fabric, that I leave down all summer.) The living/dining room temperature can easily exceed 85 degrees on a summer day without any intervention.

Here's my first line of defense: an evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

The bottom part is a water tank. There's a submersible pump inside that pumps water to the top of the unit and sends it trickling down over a honeycomb-cardboard pad that's maybe two inches thick in the back of the unit. The water saturates the pad; the fan in the front pulls hot air through the wet pad and sends it out into the room, where the water in it evaporates, cooling the room. It's a stupid simple technology that has been around at least since the time of the pharaohs. It's also cheap compared to air conditioning. The tank holds about four gallons of water, which lasts for about four hours. A ten-minute shower uses about 20 gallons of water, or about five refills of this device. As for electrical usage, it's just like running a fan.

Note, though, that a swamp cooler only works in dry climates. If you tried running one of these in the humid mid-Atlantic, it wouldn't work -- the air there is already saturated with moisture. You'd just make yourself more miserable.

Okay, but what about a mini-split? I had a guy come out to the house a couple of months ago to advise me about that, and he suggested that I get the exhaust fan at the top of the solar windows (for so the mysterious circular thing has turned out to be) hooked up again. So I did that, and it's helping a lot. The exhaust fan not only pulls out the hot air that gets trapped at the top of those windows, but it also pulls the cooler air through from the back of the house. For the first time since I moved in, the bedroom temperature is within a degree or two of the living/dining room temperature.

I've made one more adjustment: I got rid of the dark brown interior shades and had fancy light-colored honeycomb shades installed in their place. It turns out that those dark shades were actually soaking up heat and holding it in the room; lighter-colored shades reflect heat. That should have been obvious to me, but it wasn't. It also should have been obvious to whichever previous owner had them installed -- but my money is on it being the same genius who had the exhaust fan unhooked.

Anyhow, as I write this on Sunday at 2:30 pm, it's 82 degrees outside with 15 percent humidity. I've got the shades drawn and the exhaust fan and the swamp cooler running. Just for fun, I put a thermometer in front of the swamp cooler. They're about 30 inches apart.

Lynne Cantwell 2025

TL;DR: I'll be fine.

***

The swamp cooler covers about 500 square feet. My condo is about 1,000 square feet, so I have two -- one in the living/dining room and one in the bedroom. You can hook them up to a garden hose, eliminating the need to refill the tank manually, but you're advised to only do that outside -- if you overfill the unit, the water will leak out the back and all over your floor (ask me know I know).

You can get bigger portable swamp coolers, and even whole-house units. The bigger portable units only cover more square footage, though -- they run through the water tank in about the same amount of time. And a whole-house swamp cooler might be harder to manage in a condo building. But if this setup starts to fail, I'll look into alternatives again.

***

I splurged on the shades and got the motorized kind. The old shades were a mess -- the original pulley mechanism at the top had broken off and been replaced with an eyebolt drilled through the top edge. To raise and lower the shades, you used a jury-rigged pole with a bolt assembly sticking at a right angle through the end.

As I watched the installation crew testing the motors on the new blinds, I pointed out the pole to them. One asked if I would like for them to throw it away with my old blinds. 

"Yes, please," I said. 

Tigs is somewhat gobsmacked by the new blinds.
Lynne Cantwell 2025

***

These moments of comfortable blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay cool!

No Kings Day was a success. Now what?

The visuals from yesterday, juxtaposed against one another, were striking: sparse crowds lining Constitution Avenue NW in the muggy heat of Washington, DC, to watch a parade honoring the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army and also Trump's 79th birthday; and millions of Americans turning out in thousands of cities around the country to protest the policies of Trump's regime. 

The point could not possibly have been lost on him that way more people wanted to rally against him than to party with him. In nearly all the photos I've seen of him from the event, he looks dour. In one video, it looks like he may have dozed a bit. (I can almost forgive him for nodding off. Not only is he old and possibly not in the best of health, but it was 81 degrees in DC, with 80 percent humidity, when the parade kicked off. The best word to describe that sort of weather is vile. I have lived through those summers; I moved to Santa Fe to avoid experiencing any more of them.) 

I'm waiting to see how his press office spins this morose event tomorrow. Maybe somebody will break out a Sharpie.

In contrast, it was pretty much all sweetness and light around the rest of the country -- even in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where rally organizers canceled their event after a man posing as a police officer shot and killed a state representative and her husband and wounded another state representative and his wife. Despite the cancellation, 80,000 people showed up.

This protest was too big for the traditional media to ignore. Few outlets went with the "tens of thousands" dodge this time; some even admitted to six million people attending. The Alt National Park Service account on Facebook gave the final attendance figure as 12.1 million people -- and as I've said here before, the National Park Service knows how to count a crowd of people because they have been in charge of it for decades, even though they don't do it for public release anymore. At the same time, the media have a habit of lowballing such figures so as not to be accused of lying. 

In 2019, Harvard political science researcher Erica Chenowith published a study she had done that showed nonviolent protest is better than violent protest at effecting change, and that if 3.5 percent of the population actively participates in such protests, change is virtually assured. From the BBC article I linked to a second ago: "'There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,' says Chenoweth – a phenomenon she has called the '3.5% rule'."

Mama Google tells me that the population of the United States (2024 estimate) is 340.1 million. Three-and-a-half percent of that is 11.9 million. If Alt National Park Service is right, and I think they are, then we've hit the tipping point. 

Which brings me to my favorite sign of the day from yesterday's events. 

Stolen from Facebook. If you know the photographer, let me know.

None of this means we can rest on our laurels. Trump and his minions aren't going to give up that easily. So what's next? 

More protests, I would imagine. This cannot be a one-and-done. The more despised this regime appears to be, the more it will encourage folks on the fringes to defect. It may also influence those in office to act more boldly against Trump -- and I'm not just talking about the Democrats. Trump will die at some point (we all will, as Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst has helpfully pointed out), and Republican office holders would be idiots to believe they can ride his coattails forever. No one else in the party even remotely has his star power.

I'm not expecting immediate change -- not from the bunch currently in Washington. But as they say, things happen slowly, and then all at once.

***

Happy Father's Day to everybody who is, was, has, or had a father, perfect or im-, and including those with offspring who are or were persons of the nonhuman persuasion.

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These moments of calculating blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there, y'all.

Another day, another scary headline.

I rushed out the door this morning to my volunteer gig at El Rancho de las Golondrinas and almost missed the scary headlines coming out of Los Angeles: ICE personnel conducting raids around the city to round up "illegal immigrants", ordinary Americans mobilizing on the spot to peacefully push back against ICE, ICE throwing flash-bang grenades at reporters who clearly identified themselves as members of the media, and on and on. My reaction mirrored that of a lot of us, I think: 

ibrandify | Deposit Photos

Now Trump has ordered the mobilization of two thousand National Guard troops to "restore order", even though LA Mayor Karen Bass hasn't asked for help, and even though California Governor Gavin Newsom has asked Trump to stand down. As we learned a few summers ago, when Trump ordered peaceful protestors chased out of Lafayette Park in DC so he could walk a block to hold up a Bible for a photo op in front of a church, he's just itching for any excuse to call out the military on US soil.

It's not martial law yet, according to legal experts I follow on social media, but it feels damn close. 

The Brennan Center said in 2020 that the president doesn't have the authority to declare martial law, and even if he did, Congress would have to agree. But that's not as encouraging as it might otherwise be, considering Republicans have control of both houses of Congress right now and Trump has proven himself willing to do whatever the hell he wants, legal or not.

This is a developing story, as they say, and to be honest, I don't know what else to say about it right now. My reporter instincts are to just try to keep up with the facts as they unfold and leave any analysis for later.

One thing did occur to me, though: This action in LA is giving Trump and his minions footage of "American carnage" that actually happened here in the US and not in some other country.

Not to mention that we've all forgotten about the Trump-Musk breakup.

Stay tuned, as they say. And as Dan Rather has been known to say: Courage. 

***

Why the emoji illustration? Because I didn't want give the impression that the reaction was limited to only certain people, whether immigrants or Black people or whatever. I hope we're all shocked, and scared, by what's going on in LA.

***

These moments of disquieting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Courage.

Neoliberalism, or: I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

Here's another post that doesn't have anything to do with writing/publishing -- but it's not exactly political, either. It's based on an email* I got this week about a post Robert Reich published on his Substack that's called "The Tragic History of Neoliberalism". In it, he's refuting comments made by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who now claims to be a moderate, even though he has, in fact, been a conservative forever.

Reich, whose decades-long career in the federal government includes a stint as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, starts his rebuttal with this chart, which I have unapologetically lifted from his Substack. (He lifted it from the Economic Policy Institute, so I don't feel bad about stealing it. The chart might be easier to read at the EPI link, plus it's interactive there.) 

What it shows is that along about, oh, the late 1970s, the gap between worker productivity and worker compensation began to widen, to the point where, since 1979, worker-bee productivity has increased 86 percent, while worker-bee pay has increased just 27%.

I canceled my NYT subscription quite some time ago, so I haven't actually read the David Brooks column that sparked Reich's post. So I'm going by what Reich has to say about it, which is that what Brooks wrote is an apologetic for neoliberalism. Brooks claims that while wages stagnated in the 1970s and '80s, they began to increase in the early 1990s and, along with productivity, have continued to increase. Brooks says that's the result of neoliberal economic policies, and we should go back to them.

Reich rightfully points out that while wages have trended upward a little bit, the rise in productivity has far outstripped it, and that's due to an imbalance of power caused by those neoliberal economic policies that has basically stolen money from the pockets of the worker bees and put it in the pockets of the fabulously well-to-do.

He doesn't actually use the terms "worker bee" and "fabulously well-to-do", but that's the gist of it.

As I read Reich's post, the refrain of a song kept playing in my head. The song is called "My Back Pages", and I've made that refrain the title of this post. My earworm was the 1967 version by the Byrds: 

I never knew the name of the song until I looked it up this week. I also didn't know that it was written by Bob Dylan, although it made perfect sense when I found that out. Dylan was 23 when he wrote "My Back Pages"; it was his declaration that he was stepping away from writing protest songs because he'd begun to realize that right and wrong, good and evil, weren't as clearly defined as he'd thought they were. He was maturing away from his youthful certainty.

I was interested to see Robert Reich out-and-out say he was questioning neoliberalism, because he was part of the administration that instituted it. Bill Clinton was a Democrat elected in 1992 after 12 years of Republican rule -- first Ronald Reagan, then George H.W. Bush. Clinton ran as an antidote to the GOP's pro-business, anti-worker-bee policies. (In 1981, Reagan fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers, leading to the near-collapse of the union movement in America and facilitating that widening gap between wages and productivity in the chart up top.) 

Clinton ran on bringing the New Deal back, to make life easier for American workers. But then -- ah, then -- he continued and expanded the policies begun under Reagan and Bush the Elder that favored free-market capitalism, deregulation, and a reduction in government spending (as long as military spending wasn't cut), and called it neoliberalism.

I enthusiastically voted for Clinton twice. I thought neoliberalism made sense. I believed in capitalism and thought Clinton's success in balancing the federal budget was terrific. I didn't even mind when he instituted "workfare" to force folks on welfare to get a job, thereby cutting -- all together now -- waste, fraud, and abuse.

What I didn't understand was what those policies were doing to my own earnings. I started out in the working world in 1979 -- right about the time when the wage gap really began to widen. 

I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.

***

Reich closes out his post by saying, "Neoliberalism should not and cannot be rehabilitated." Going down that road, he says, will just bring us more of the same: suppressed wages, more profit going to the rich, even less help for those who need it, and more and more Trumps.

He's pushing for a progressive populist movement. I'm leery of labeling anything populism, given that far-right populists, aka MAGA, helped to elect Trump. But I agree that we cannot keep going down the road we're on and hope to continue to call ourselves a first-world nation.

***

"Fabulously well-to-do" is from Breakfast of Champions, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut that was published in 1973: 

Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.

Vonnegut, like George Carlin, saw it all coming. I miss them both.

 ***

*Is it just me, or are we all getting inundated with daily long-form emails we feel obliged to read since social media has been throttling organic reach?

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Ironically, I need to lengthen this already lengthy post by updating you on this: My former employer, WilmerHale, won a court case against Trump this past week. To summarize the backstory, Trump has been mad at WilmerHale ever since Bob Mueller, who was a partner at the firm, was appointed as a special counsel to investigate accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. So in March, Trump issued an executive order that was clearly designed to put WilmerHale out of business. It wasn't the only big law firm that Trump targeted in this way, and the management at some firms agreed to settle by providing free legal work to the administration in exchange for having the executive orders against them lifted. But WilmerHale (and two others) chose to fight.

This past week, that strategy paid off. D.C. District Judge Richard Leon blocked Trump's executive order. In a blistering opinion containing 27 exclamation points, Judge Leon agreed with the firm. In part, he said: "I have concluded that this order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!"

No word so far on whether Trump will appeal. I suspect he won't; the sturm und drang is what he was after. So this ought to be the end of it.

Kudos to the judge. And congrats to WilmerHale on being on the right side of history once again.

***

These moments of bloggy reverse aging have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Is A.I. the future of journalism? I hope not.

I'm a day late this week, but today is a holiday here in the US, so it's a Monday that feels like a Sunday. So I'm calling it good. 

How many fingers am I holding up?
lipsky | Deposit Photos

This past week, the Chicago Sun-Times copped to running a bogus feature article recommending books to read this summer. The article was written by a freelancer for King Features, a company that regularly distributes material like features and comic strips to newspapers. It has been in business since 1915. 

The article was included in a supplement called "Heat Index" -- a 50-ish-page filler "magazine" meant to fatten a paper's page count while causing no extra work for the news staff. Wherein lies the problem with this particular article: the freelancer kind of ran out of time to do it properly, so he had A.I. generate it. And then he didn't fact check it. His editor at King Features didn't fact check it, either. Neither did anybody at the Sun-Times (nor presumably did anybody at any other papers that ran it, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, according to The Atlantic, which interviewed the freelancer in question). But while the authors cited in the piece were real, the books that are supposedly coming out this summer by them are not.

The articles I've seen about this mess mostly focus on the fact that staff attrition at newspapers around the country have left the business ripe for this kind of thing. Of course that's true. But there's another danger underlying this obvious conclusion, and it relates to the credibility of the news media as a whole.

Once upon a time, people in the news business prided themselves on being purveyors of Truth, their work consisting of factual reporting, as unbiased as it's possible for a human endeavor to be. It's bad enough that conservative media have made a career out of making stuff up and calling it "news the lamestream media doesn't want you to see!!!1!!1!!!" And it's worse that even liberals are berating papers like the New York Times and The Washington Post for publishing editorials that don't reflect reality as they see it. But now newspapers are letting A.I.-generated dreck past their gatekeepers.

It reminds me of back in the '80s when infotainment became a buzzword in broadcasting. Infotainment programming blurred the line between news and entertainment, to the point where TV news has become more about entertainment than informing its viewers. Owing to the tyranny of the clock, broadcast news has always been less substantive -- by which I mean less detailed -- than a newspaper article. But with papers now beginning to lean on A.I. to generate content, whether because of staff shortages or time crunches or cheapskates in the front office, it's going to be harder to trust what we read in the paper as true.

Journalism already faces a credibility problem. Using A.I.-generated crap without having a human vet it is just going to make it worse. 

I hope newspaper owners wake up and realize that relying on chatbot-generated nonsense is not going to improve their bottom lines, and that they're supposed to be providing a service to the community, not just padding the pockets of their owners.

It may be a vain hope. It may be too late to save the news industry. But I hope not.

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These moments of bloggy news criticism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Fact check everything!