Whac-A-Mole

 We went to dinner with friends on a Sunday afternoon at a restaurant beside Albuquerque's Central Avenue.  Sitting in the restaurant's outdoor patio gave us front row seats to the parade of motorcycles and cars with disabled mufflers which goes on day and night through the weekend.  At times the noise drowned out our conversation.

Of course the conversation turned briefly to the passing spectacle.  Our dinner host, who spent most of his life in law enforcement, observed that the police really could not do anything to quiet the noise given the priority to deal with the torrent of violent crime which besets the city.  I had to agree, though I suggested that making a noise check part of the yearly vehicle inspection might lower the volume a little bit.

Another source of day and night cacophony we are all subjected to now is the endless stream of political ads aimed at convincing voters who should next represent them at the local, state and national levels.  The Republican candidates in particular assure us that they will clamp down on crime by hiring more police and locking up more offenders.  Just as assuredly, close to half the voting population will forget that such promises have been made every year since the beginning of Time with no demonstrable effect on crime rates.

I think it is worthwhile to spend some time thinking about who the people are that are racing their noisy machines around the city.  It is a challenge to come up with a convincing profile of the group members, though they seem to constitute a significant portion of the population.  Newscasters occasionally show clips of the police trying to cope with congregations of street racers and bystanders to little effect.  However, I don't recall anyone trying to interview the participants with an eye toward understanding the motivations behind the behavior.  I suppose some academic researchers - perhaps a novelist - have undertaken such a project; I'll try to look for some of that.

Meanwhile, it seems safe to conclude that an adrenaline rush abetted by some substance abuse is fundamental to the perpetuation of the machine-related noise pollution, and that it is greatly facilitated by cell phones and social networks.  Beyond the organizational particulars, I suspect that the noisy drivers and their sympathizers are simultaneously enjoying a defiance of authority and proclaiming solidarity with a like-minded if rather ill defined social group.

I will speculate further that the social group in question includes many individuals left behind by our society's tolerance for an economic order that has concentrated wealth in the hands of a tiny elite at an ever increasing rate over the past half century.  Feelings of powerlessness, desperate gestures of defiance, political movements characterized by grievance, racism and xenophobia, and support for authoritarian regimes are some of the possible outcomes.  Whac-a-mole tactics are not the answer to complex antisocial behaviors.  

The Numbers Tell

 An article at FiveThirtyEight examines the issues around Biden's proposal to cancel $10,000 of student higher education debt ($20,000 for Pell Grant recipients).  Debt cancellation clearly has the potential to alleviate the disparities in wealth and income between the white and non-white populations of the U.S.  As the article points out, however, it would require a cancellation of debt five times greater than what Biden has proposed to have a real impact on the equity problem.

The most shocking revelation in the FiveThirtyEight article was the long-term outlook comparing black and white borrowers:

“Twenty years into repayment, the median black borrowers owe 95 percent of what they borrowed, while the median white person has almost fully repaid their loan,” 

So, tuition loans which saddle  some (mostly black) students with decades of crushing debt can hardly be considered a gateway to prosperity.

One bright spot not dealt with in the FiveThirtyEight article is the opportunities for intervention in the debt problem at the State level.  Amazingly, New Mexico -- usually at the bottom of most measures of well-being -- is at the forefront of higher education debt reduction as noted in a New York Times article:

A new state law approved in a rare show of bipartisanship allocates almost 1 percent of the state’s budget toward covering tuition and fees at public colleges and universities, community colleges and tribal colleges. All state residents from new high school graduates to adults enrolling part-time will be eligible regardless of family income. The program is also open to immigrants regardless of their immigration status.

Even though I came from  family with modest means I was able to leave college with no debt at all, thanks to a WWII death benefit from my father, and my family's determination to hold onto the $10,000 until I needed it.  As the numbers show,  the families of KIA black soldiers seldom enjoyed the option of postponing the use of death benefits far down the line toward higher education.

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Update:

An article in The Intercept by Jon Schwarz provides some historical perspective on the educational debt dilemma kicked off by Ronald Reagan in 1970.

John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the dead body of Jeffrey Miller minutes after the unarmed student was fatally shot by an Ohio National Guardsman. (from Wikipedia)

Thank You for Your Service

I had several social services jobs during the AIDS pandemic.  I was mostly responsible for seeing that people got access to whatever assistance was then available.  In those early years an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence, so what I was offering did not seem to amount to much to me or my clients.  Dr. Fauci's firm leadership in getting the illness recognized and ultimately overcome was of inestimable value.

The prognosis for individuals with Covid 19 was not as severe as that for people afflicted with AIDS, but millions still died.  Dr. Fauci was there again to deal with the development of strategies to deal with the pandemic, and he stuck it out even in the face of confusion and misdirection from the administration he was working under when the pandemic erupted.

There is still much to be done to curb suffering and deaths from Covid, and the same conditions that allowed the lightning spread of that disease ensure that we are going to be faced with similar challenges in the immediate future.  Dr. Fauci will no longer be acting as the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but he has said he will continue to find ways to exercise his expertise.  I will certainly be paying attention to what he has to say, and I hope we can elect political leaders who will do the same.

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8/23/22 (KOB4)

New Mexico COVID-19 update: 18 deaths, 110 hospitalizations, 1,327 cases

Going Dark

Two of my neighbors asked me if my electricity was out. "Yes", I said, "There are some big storms down south and maybe some lines are down." One of those neighbors is vision impaired.  She said her phone was just about out of battery. I looked at mine and saw that it was at 45%; probably enough to get through the day. I remembered that we had a portable lamp that has a phone charging port, so I connected my cellphone to that.  The batteries in the lamp were too low to charge the phone.

I got dressed and took the dog for a walk. I noticed then that the traffic light two blocks up the street was working  -- a good sign that the power outage was local.  Just to be on the safe side I drove to the nearby grocery store to get the six new batteries that the lantern/charger would need.

I was pleased to find that the lights were on in the store, but the batteries were behind the service counter where a sign said that the service counter was temporarily closed.  No problem; I walked through the swinging gate and took three packs of C batteries off the shelf.  I was immediately confronted by two store staff informing me that the area was out of bounds for customers.  "Yes, I know", I said, and walked to the auto-teller to check out.  I scanned the batteries' bar code -- $25 for six C batteries! 

While I waited for the phone to charge I wondered about how power outages affect people with disabilities or the homeless.  Then, I got to thinking about the thousands of people in New Mexico who faced catastrophic displacement just a couple months ago because of wildfires, and who are now experiencing massive flooding in the burn scar areas due to summer monsoon rains of unusual intensity. It is all a good reminder about how dependent all of us are on massive, complicated and vulnerable infrastructures, and how unready we are for what is coming.

Good Times

 No one in my immediate family had any talent for making music. I recall a record player in a big blond cabinet, a Motorola I think, and a small collection of 78 rpm records.  So there was some music in hearing distance from that as well from the radio and tv. There was some mandatory musical exposure in school, but can I only really remember enjoying a few elementary school folk songs. One of my worst memories from my junior high school days was being required to stand up in front of the class and sing something. I would have gladly traded that experience for a bout of corporal punishment.

Over the years my musical indifference and illiteracy was punctured occasionally by largely accidental encounters with musical expression which I found pleasing. I eventually developed a liking for classical guitar and even took a few guitar lessons. That went nowhere due to a lack of any sense of rhythm. Later, I found some affinity with some of the great jazz vocalists, mostly from '30s and '40s, and I also liked most chamber music I came across.

Luckily, music seems to have a genetic component which makes musical enjoyment accessible to even someone like me with a tin ear, and there were even a few instances in which musical performances became associated with life changing events. One such experience was the result of my immersion in the developing world of personal computers in the early 1990s.

We were living in southern New Mexico by then and I worked in a series of jobs in several social services agencies.  While working for a newly established guardianship group I developed a Foxpro/dBase program for recording visit notes along with billing information.  I got some free surplus computers from White Sands which I set up for our Las Cruces office and trained the staff in their use, and I also did some consulting and training with other social service agencies around the state.

The database application I developed relied on the text-based MS-DOS operating system, but it had easily maneuvered menus which made it quick to learn and easy to use.  I tried MicroSoft's early Windows system which was trying to compete with Apple's graphical user interface, but it just seemed awkward and ugly and did not tempt me at all to move my database programing in that direction.

What took me in a completely new direction in social services computer applications was the appearance of Windows 95.  I was working at that point in staff training in a agency providing services for mentally disabled adults. We used personal computers extensively in preparing training materials and I was often called on to do hardware and software trouble shooting.  I think most of the agency's computers were still stuck in Windows 3.1 at the time.

Windows 95 and its graphical user interface was a huge improvement over Windows 3, not only in speed and ease of use, but also in its networking capabilities which meshed nicely with the availability of a whole new world of information through the World Wide Web.  What really got my attention on the Windows 95 installation disk, though,  was a short music video which featured Edie Brickell singing Good Times.

There was no novelty in music videos in general by 1995; they were inescapable on tv. Somehow, though, being able to summon up a fully animated musical performance on a computer screen seemed revolutionary.  I recall inserting the Win 95 disk in a computer in our little three person office and seeing my coworkers' eyes light up as they watched Good Times. It was a short step from there to installing network adapters and wiring our computers together for file sharing and telephone line access to the World Wide Web.

* * *

There is a nicely produced YouTube emulation of playing the Good Times video on the Win 95 screen.

  I still like Edie Brikell's performance a lot.

Old Town Color

 I spent Friday morning in Old Town with my friend, Bob.  We were both shooting black and white in our old plate cameras.  It didn't take me long to get through the eight frames available on a roll of 120 film, so while waiting for Bob to finish his shoot, I walked around the Plaza Vieja and made some pictures with my cell phone camera.

New Mexico Skies

 Spectacular monsoon clouds envelop Albuquerque today.  It makes me think I should get up to Chaco Canyon to give them the proper foreground.

Giving the Military Establishment Some Credit

A recent article in The New Yorker provides chilling details about Trump's ignorant brutality, the  threat he posed to national integrity, and how the country's military leaders saw the threat building on the eve of January 6th.  Trump ignored the advise of his top military advisors at nearly every opportunity, and he kept replacing them in an effort to get unquestioning support for a wide range of strategic and political issues including the constitutionally prohibited use of the military within the borders of the U.S. 

Trump's relationship with the military may have been the most egregiously fraught in our history, but it was not the first time that a President of the United States ignored the strategic expertise and ethical concerns of the top brass.

In 1945 Harry Truman went ahead with dropping two atomic bombs on Japan in spite of the contrary opinions of many of the historically recognized military leaders of those times.  Here is a sampling of those opinions as reported in Wikipedia:

...Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his memoir The White House Years:

In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.^[109]

Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur,^[110][111] Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet), Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr.(Commander of the US Third Fleet), and even the man in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, then-Major General Curtis LeMay:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.

— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, ^[102]

The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950, ^[112]

The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

— Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945, ^[113]

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it. 

— Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr., 1946,...

Water

 The summer monsoon has put water back in the Rio Grande all the way from Albuquerque to Mesilla. 

Also see:

Monsoon flows temporarily prop up New Mexico waters

from NM Political Report