Craig Common Sense

“How very wet this water is.”
– L. Frank Baum, The Marvelous Land of Oz

“If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s a duck!”
– Robin Cook

Over the last weeks there has been a series of hearings in Washington, unlike anything we have seen except perhaps the Watergate hearings (for those of you who are old enough to remember those). We listened to the testimony of a lady whose name is Wandrea Moss. She is commonly known as Shaye. Who in the world would have ever thought that the whole nation would be listening to Shaye Moss? I’m sure she didn’t. After all, Shaye is just a humble government worker in Fulton County, Georgia. She is like all of us, trying to make a living, trying to make a better life for those she loves. But for nothing more than just doing her job, an honorable profession I would argue, her life has been upended. She now fears for her life.

What in the world happened? Shaye was an election worker. Somehow for some reason, she was accused of pulling fake mail-in ballots from a suitcase while working on Election Day. (Election officials quickly confirmed that the “suitcases” were actually standard ballot containers and that there was absolutely no fraud.) It is not clear why Shaye and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who was also a temporary election worker were selected for the attack and identified to the public. In the now infamous call in which our own former President Trump called Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, he singled our Shaye and Ruby, calling them “professional vote scammers”, “hustlers”, “known political operatives” who “stuff ballot boxes”. The President’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, falsely claimed that he had video footage showing the women engage in “surreptitious illegal activity” acting like drug dealers “passing out dope.” The reaction by the Trump Faithful was swift and severe. Within a very short time Shaye and Ruby began fielding hate messages and threats on their Facebook pages. The oftentimes racist messages threatened physical violence. Suddenly people were knocking on their doors at all hours of the day including the overnight hours. Ruby immediately quit her job. Shaye took a leave of absence and tried to change her appearance. She quit shopping at her regular grocery store, afraid that an acquaintance might call her by her first name and that she would be identified. She began to move from house to house, never staying in the same structure two nights in a row.

Did Ruby and Shaye “go off the deep end”? Are their fears overblown? Maybe but I don’t think so. Have you ever been threatened by the most powerful man on the earth? You know, the guy who is Commander-in-Chief of the most powerful military in the world, and who oversees the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other agencies I don’t even know who could end your life in minutes if the order came down. This does not even take into account the legions who hang on former President Trump’s every word. But they wouldn’t resort to violence, would they? Oops, I guess having observed the events of January 6, maybe they would. If they would attempt to break into the nation’s Capital and hang the Vice President, I guess they might harm two innocent little ladies in Georgia.

I don’t think I can really understand the terror that these two ladies feel, but former President Trump’s words in his call to Secretary of State Raffensperger dredged up memories of a very unpleasant experience I once had that might be similar on a much smaller scale.

“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.”
“And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”

In other words, I don’t care how you do it, just make it happen. In 1975 while I was working for the government of my hometown, as the assistant city engineer, the City Engineer resigned to take another job. Our city administrator (a man who could very incisively evaluate exceptional talent in my opinion) told me that he would suggest to our City Council that I be made the new City Engineer. This would be my dream job, serving as the chief engineer for the community in which I grew up, close to my family and friends. There was however a problem – state law required that a city engineer must be a state-licensed engineer. Obtaining a state license involves several steps all of which I had completed – except taking the Part 2 oral exam and finally the Part 2 national written exam. I would not be eligible to take the Part 2 exams for six months. Our city administrator figured out a way to get through that, he would contract with a licensed engineer to serve as my supervisor for the six months and once I passed the Part 2 exams, he would advocate for my appointment. My interim supervisor reviewed and approved all of my technical work during this period, but I was also in charge of non-technical work not needing technical review. One of those tasks was to formulate “special assessments” for public works projects. Special assessments in Minnesota are charges made to residents in addition to their normal taxes relating to public works projects felt to provide special benefit to their individual property. My duty was to identify the properties affected and to propose the amount of the special assessment for each property.

As luck would have it, a month or so before taking my exams, one of the special assessment projects included a property owned by a member of our city council. I dutifully prepared the assessment roll and readied it for presentation to the city council at their regular noon meeting. At 10:30 AM the affected property owner/council member, stopped into my office. He questioned my work and told me that I had misinterpreted the city policy and that there was no way his property should be subject to the charge. I carefully reviewed with him how we had applied the policy and how we had calculated the charges. The conversation grew more animated, and he ended it with this directive – “I don’t care how you do it, get my name off that assessment roll – make it happen” and he stormed out.

I sat in my little office, a bit stunned and uncertain what I should do. The city administrator was out of town and there was no one to consult. The meeting was in an hour. My thoughts ran wild.
• Is he right? Did I make an error? I reread the policy, looked at the supporting documents, and recalculated the numbers. Everything checked.
• This is not going to end well for me. I either need to knowingly do something wrong (probably even illegal) or this fellow is going to lead the charge to make sure that I am NOT the next city engineer.
• Maybe he just doesn’t understand. I didn’t explain things to him clearly enough.
• Maybe he is just testing me, verifying that I am honest and will always do my job without fear or favor.
• Maybe I should just go home and send someone else to go the meeting to tell the council that their action on the proposed assessments should be delayed (until I could get a chance to discuss this with the city administrator and have him take care of the problem).
With a lot of trepidation, I went to our noon meeting. With all of the resolve I could muster I looked the councilman in the eye and said – “These are the assessments I recommend”. The council studied the document and after a period of time there was a motion to adopt the list and a second. ALL of the Council voted in favor including my now least favorite who was berating me ninety minutes earlier. As I left the meeting still wondering what he would do to me in the future, it became clear to me. This wasn’t a misunderstanding – this wasn’t a disagreement about the city policy – this wasn’t a test of my honesty. This was about the damn $222 in cost that he was going to incur. Sometimes things are exactly what you think they are.

Brad Raffensperger and Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman and thousands of other dedicated public servants across the country have been going through hell, and still are, simply for doing their jobs. I have been around elections for much of my professional career. I have watched the training and the processes that are mandated by our state law. And without exception I will tell you that these people are as a pure as the driven snow. They are doing their jobs to the best of their ability and their job is incredibly important – I would argue that free and fair elections are the bedrock of our system of government. It’s time as former Attorney General Barr said, we call BS when it is BS.

NONE OF THE SO-CALLED ACCUSATIONS OF ELECTION FRAUD ARE REALLY ABOUT FRAUD – THEY ARE JUST WHAT THEY SEEM TO BE – A BALD FACED ATTEMPT BY THE FORMER PRESIDENT AND HIS INNER CIRCLE TO STAY IN POWER NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES. JUST MAKE IT HAPPEN.

“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family: Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one.” — Jane Howard

We made our annual trek to visit cemeteries this weekend. When you are young it is inconceivable why old people do this. While I’m not sure that I would say that I “enjoy” it, as I grow old it is something that I find, I’m struggling to find the word, fulfilling is the best that I can come up with. The tradition of Memorial Day was born out of a desire to honor the dead of the Civil War. It was first observed in 1868 and was widely observed by others for decades until Congress passed the National Holiday Act of 1971 to make it officially a holiday to be observed on the last Monday in May, to honor our military men and women who have given so much to keep our country free. I would never want to detract from that primary purpose. But the day has grown to also be a time for remembering ALL of our loved ones who have gone before, usually our family members. When I walk through the cemetery and see the graves of my grandparents and my uncles and aunts, memories (nearly all GOOD memories) flood into my mind. I haven’t lived in my little farm community for more than fifty years and yet when I go to the cemetery, there is a strong feeling that this is where I belong, this is where I came from, and this is where I should end. Given that apart from one of my brothers, I have no immediate family that lives in the area, this is a bit irrational. But despite the many friends that I have made throughout my life and my departure from this geographical area, as Johnny Cash said, these are my people.

When I retired a few years ago, I felt compelled to take stock of where I had been in my life and to offer some wisdom to those who thought I should have learned something after all of those years. I struggled to sift through all of those experiences to identify what is really important and came up with three things:

1. God – the need to BELIEVE
2. Family – the need to LOVE
3. Hard Work – the need to SERVE

At my retirement gathering I said the following about family. “We are not alone in the world. If we try to be we will be so much less than what we could have been. We can say in our anger and foolishness sometimes that we don’t want or need anyone to love. We all know that is silly. Humans were meant to be with other humans. And families are our first ring of those we must love.”

Remembering this I had such an empty feeling when I came across Gert’s tombstone in our little country cemetery. You see, Gert is not laid to rest among a huge number of Van Steinfahrens as is commonly found with families in our cemetery. Indeed, his is a little stone and it was found far off in the corner of the cemetery all by itself.

Our part of Gert’s story goes like this. Sometime in the early 1900’s Gert came to the doorway of my Grandpa Wilber’s farmhouse. He was tired and hungry and was looking for work, looking for shelter, looking for food. Wilber was a young farmer with a wife and children struggling to make it, out on the Southwestern Minnesota prairies. Why did Gert pick Wilber and Frauke’s door? Maybe he had tried lots of other doors and theirs was the first one that was opened. Maybe he saw “Ebeling” on the mailbox and thought that perhaps these people might speak “Low German” or Dutch which was probably his nationality. There is a lot we don’t know about that first meeting. But this much we do know. Wilber explained to Gert that he had no extra food and although he desperately needed help on the farm, he had no money to pay him. And then he made this offer to Gert instead: “If you will work with me on the farm, you can live with us, you can stay in our home, eat what we eat and live as we do. Additionally, I will buy you one new set of clothing each year.” This apparently was acceptable to Gert, for he moved in with the family and stayed with Wilber and his wife and his children until he died in 1927.

It’s hard for us in the affluence of the 21st century to grasp that an adult male could be that down on his luck to need to randomly knock on a door to look for food and employment. And how many of us in these days would take someone who is obviously down on his luck, whom we know NOTHING about, and take them into our home, and let them stay for twenty years?!?!? What a kind and generous man Wilber was. What a sad state of affairs Gert found himself in. He was apparently far from home with no ties to anyone, bereft of family and loved ones. And now he lies in his grave, with a small stone in the corner of a windswept little country cemetery. It seemed so “SAD” was the best word I could come up with.

But then I remembered something else that I said about families at my farewell event reflecting on how my first wife Pam was taken from us at age thirty-eight and how Janice took us on as a part of a new family, blending her children with mine. “Ours is not exactly a “normal” family. And yours might not be either. But DON’T be without a family. Your family may not even be biologically linked to you or related to you in the traditional way at all. But as we have demonstrated in our little assembly, that really isn’t what it’s about. You may have known each other for decades or months. Do NOT deprive yourself of others to love.” And then I went over to Wilber’s gravesite and realized that his cemetery plot had not been purchased until 1954. When Wilber paid for Gert’s funeral and burial in 1927, he wasn’t thinking about his need for his own burial site, or having Gert next to him, he was just trying to do what he needed to do, what he could afford to do, with a wife and eleven children. It hit me: Gert DID have a family. He was part of Wilber’s family. He is part of MY family.

On this day when we reflect on our loved ones who have gone before, I recite again the words from my farewell event. May you never be deprived of a family to love and to be loved by, however you define that family. Happy Memorial Day!!

“There is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered………..(it) can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” – Benjamin Franklin – From His Final Speech at the Constitutional Convention – September 17, 1787

With the momentous events of the last week, it FEELS like I should say SOMETHING. It feels like we should all say something and DO something. Well, we sent some money to a relief agency but that feels a bit feeble when you look at old guys my age in Ukraine who are packing up their shotguns and heading for the front lines. The Ukrainians are so inspiring right now. The worst is truly bringing out their best. I wonder if OUR politicians would refuse safe passage to escape war and instead ask for more ammunition?!?! What makes Americans so admire the Ukrainians is that they remind us of us!! Or at least they remind us of what we THINK we were and what we are. And it is true that there have been remarkable American patriots at the birth of our country and in the centuries since then who were no less heroic than our modern-day Ukrainians. But history is always a little more complicated than we like to remember it. Things are not always so black and white as we would like to think they were.

As I have reported before American history fascinates me. I have been working my way through a course on the constitutional convention over the last months. I love digging in to the nitty gritty of history because it always reminds me that our heroes (and villains) were nearly always ordinary people, with their own prejudices and passions, their own strengths, and weaknesses, doing extraordinary things.

The constitutional convention was in session from May 14, 1787, to September 17, 1787. The delegates included an impressive list of our heroes of the revolutionary era. James Madison was the unofficial notes taker (although he was not the designated secretary), George Washington presided, and Benjamin Franklin was a delegate from Pennsylvania. The list included Edmund Randolph from Virginia, Roger Sherman from Connecticut, and other founding fathers. The process wasn’t quite as neat as we might remember. Some states did not participate for the entire process, delegates came and went, and Rhode Island never came at all!! The delegates jealously guarded the interests of their own states and schemed and argued for provisions that would serve THEIR state the best. Slavery was a thorny issue for them. There was great discomfort with how to address it and there were certainly conflicts of interest – many if not most of the delegates were slave owners. There were many times when the delegates thought that it all would blow up and that everyone would just go home in frustration. But they all agreed that the country could not continue under the Articles of Confederation. What has the American constitutional convention got to do with the awful invasion of Ukraine? Its Benjamin Franklin and Vladimir Putin.

Franklin was in his advanced years during the convention. There were days when he was literally carried to the meetings and days when he was unable to attend at all. But when the document was ready for signing, he asked for one last chance to address the convention. His concern was for the future of the proposed document. Would it be approved by the congress that existed (under the Articles of Confederation) and would it be approved by the ratifying conventions that would be held in each state? The delegates had pounded away at each other for a whole summer and now at the end of it all they were worried that their work would go for naught. Indeed, three of the delegates refused to sign the document and actively worked against its approval. If you have not read Franklin’s speech which he wrote but was too weak to deliver (it was read by James Wilson, a fellow Pennsylvania delegate), I think you will find it to be one of greatest speeches of the era. There is a lot in it about compromise, respecting the opinions of others and seeing ourselves the way we really are. But the above quote is my favorite part of the speech.

So, what is my point? Well, there are a couple:

– Governments are really only made up of people. And people can be good or bad, or good sometimes and bad other times, wise sometimes and foolish other times. Are the Russian people inherently evil? I can not believe this. They are like us. They want to live in peace and prosperity. They want their kids to grow up in a world that will be better than the one we live in now. And I believe their form of government COULD be a blessing to them and to the world IF a despot did not lead it. Yes, Putin is a liar, a cheat, a thief, a megalomaniac, and a lot of other things which add up to him being a despot. When you look through the sad history of Russia, unfortunately he is not the only one – Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Rasputin, and others to say nothing of the czars that preceded them. What makes this happen? The leaders who are evil of course, but more. It is also the people who immediately surround the despots – their co-conspirators, their fellow thieves. The creation of the oligarchy in Russia needed two parts – the despot (Putin definitely fits the bill) and his enablers. These include the oligarchs, his fellow thieves in their corrupt version of business, and his fellow thieves in the higher levels of government who all take their cuts, stealing from the Russian people in their own ways. This might mean pocketing money meant to be spent on social programs or even pocketing money meant to modernize their military. People are amazed at how the Russian military equipment seems to be old and breaking down despite billions of dollars dedicated to updating it. Transparency International has ranked Russia as one of the world’s most corrupt countries, identifying a particular problem in its defense sector. Thieves!! These people do not challenge the despot because they are afraid of him, but also because they are in league with him.

– Despite some missteps on our part (think about our recently concluded adventure in Afghanistan or the “shock and awe” of Iraq) America has been and still is the shining beacon of liberty for the world. While we have NOT been perfect, we have done so much good over our history. How have we avoided the maladies that have inflicted Russia for decades and even centuries? WE have been blessed with leaders and people who surrounded them that while flawed, still had the best interest of the country and the world in mind. These people are there because we have been blessed with a culture of independence and a free press. We EXPECT and DEMAND accountability from our leaders and the ones that surround them. The spark for doing this in Russia has been so starved for oxygen for so long it is hard for it to burn.

– Well, if as Franklin says any form of government CAN work, does it follow that any form of government can be corrupted? The constitution that those people labored over in the summer of 1787 makes that a little more difficult here, but it still comes down to people. We have been blessed throughout our history with patriots who could fend off corruption. But events of the last few years have shown that despite our form of government, we are NOT immune to despotism. We must always remain vigilant.

“Nothing succeeds like success”
Alexandre Dumas

There are lots of things going on in the world today and many of them are ominous or at least not good. I choose to ignore those and to instead comment on the world of NCAA College Football. Let me preface these remarks by saying I have been a Gopher fan since the days of Sandy Stephens and Judge Dickson. I knew about the Golden Gopher football team before I even realized there was a learning institution that was attached to it. Ahh, those were the Glory Days – SOOOOO long ago. Oh, not that there haven’t been a few fleeting minutes of joy since then. I confess I am not a season ticket holder. But there have been very few seasons where we haven’t attended two to three games in person and watched/listened to the balance of the games. It has been an exercise marked by heartache and frustration. For after those glory years of the early 60’s and one shared title (with two others) in 1967, my Beloved Little Rodents have been shut out of the Big Ten title. And after attending last week’s debacle with Illinois and watching the disappointing loss to Iowa Saturday it is now clear that 2021 won’t be the year to break that string either.

But really what did we expect? There are “haves” and “have-nots” in college football, and we certainly are not one of the “haves.” Ohh when you listen to the Big Ten Network commentators one would think that this is a wide-open competition year-in and year-out. And I am certainly not a statistician but even a sewer engineer can look at who has won or tied for the Big Ten title over the last fifty years. I did that little exercise and found that Ohio State has won or shared the title twenty-five times and Michigan twenty times. Their nearest competitors are Wisconsin (six), Iowa (five) and Michigan State (five). All others combined have ten. So, I think the math is that OSU has as many titles as all other Big Ten teams not named Michigan combined. Michigan and OSU together have almost twice as many titles as all others combined. Its not the Big Ten, it’s the Big Two and the Little Twelve. How can this be? Wouldn’t you think in fifty years our Gophers could muster a team to compete with the Big Two?

To explain this phenomenon, as with all dilemmas, I harkened back to the source of all my wisdom, my days growing up on the farm. One of my fondest memories is when we gathered with my dad and my Uncle Louis to bale hay. Rather than pay the exorbitant fee charged by other farmers who already had a hay baler, my Pop and my uncle pooled their resources and purchased an International Harvester model 50T baler. The 50T had a nasty habit of not correctly tying about every third bale, which in turn lead to unbaled chunks of hay littering the field and streams of profanity from its owners. In fact, if my uncle and my dad are not in heaven (which I know they are) it would be because of that damn 50T baler. But one thing that DID work on the 50T was the flywheel. This was a massive piece of metal that kept rotating and kept the baler running smoothly even if the inadvertent large windrow of hay brought too much material into the baling chamber. The tremendous weight of that huge metal wheel just kept that machine going, on and on regardless of what it ran into. It sustained the ongoing power of the machine.

The Alabama’s, the Ohio State’s, the Georgia’s of the college football world have huge flywheels. They are sustained every year through massive athletic departments funded by massive donations from supporters and massive ticket and merchandising income. But the biggest flywheel they have is that they win consistently. NCAA football is fundamentally different than the National Football League (NFL). When you finish first in the NFL you get the lowest draft picks. Your incoming players are by design less capable than those available to the team that finished LAST in the league. That last place team gets the FIRST pick of the available players. This is all designed to create parity in the league and for the most part it has worked (well maybe except for the Bears). College football is the opposite. If you finish last in the league none of the elite incoming freshmen want to join your program. The college football have-nots have no flywheel, and it is REALLY hard to get one if you don’t already have one. It is much easier to keep one going once you have it spinning.

This was my hypothesis. Just to check myself out a little bit I visited two websites – one listing information on the 2021 recruiting class for OSU and one listing information on the 2021 recruiting class for our beloved Gophers. Based on what I read in our local and national sports publications the Minnesota class was one of its best in years. How did it stack up against OSU? College sports and all the businesses that revolve around it are an industry. High school football player rating agencies are part of that industry. The three largest of the rating agencies are 247 Sports, Rivals and ESPN. They sometimes differ slightly in how they rate incoming freshmen but not all that much. They use a “star system,” assigning each player a star rating ranging from one to five – five being the best. The 247 Sports rating agency said there were thirty-one five-star recruits in the nation for the 2021 class. OSU was able to secure five of those players. Of the twenty-one players in their incoming class, five were five-star, thirteen were four-star and three were three-star players. Of the eighteen players in the Minnesota class, NONE were five-star, four were four-star and fourteen were three-star players. Do you kinda see how this works? OSU has a LOT bigger flywheel than Minnesota, yet they play in the same league.

Fortunately, football games are not computer model exercises and sometimes those two and three and four-star football players rise and give those five-star laden teams a tussle, but truthfully not very often (see the data on the Big Ten championships). Well, if things are so discouraging why do I shell out big bucks each year to go down to the games? And why do I agonize and curse and rage during each game you watch on TV? Ummm because its’ fun? Actually, it IS fun. We get to go down and see the band and the spirit squad and good old Goldy. We sing the Rouser and Hail Minnesota with gusto usually until the third quarter when we are far behind. And there is the sting of the losses, but that goes away – after a while. And then we wistfully dream of next year – those incoming freshmen really DO look good. Just wait until next year – we are going to win back Floyd of Rosedale, and the Axe, and the Little Brown Jug and we are going to go the Rose Bowl!!!! But it looks like the Pin Stripe Bowl for us again this year.

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Mark Twain

I have been missing in action for a few weeks. Our lives have been devoted to helping Grandma move to a new assisted living location. A part of that involved canceling existing phone, cable television and other accounts and advising social security of her new address. Despite approximately five hours of effort, the social security records change is not done. I have about twenty hours of effort involved in utilizing the time-saving automated services of these companies, nine hours of which was involved in the effort to acquire a telephone service from Frontier. But all of this is another blog.

Today I want to talk about running. Now at my age the term “running” may seem a bit generous when one sees or hears about my efforts. But I do attempt to keep up with my own version of the activity. With all the difficulties we have had this summer and the recent move I am sorry to report that my normal running routines have been interrupted. But I was able to run yesterday, and the run reminded me of all the joy and pain associated with this hobby. It occurred to me that my routine involves the same thought patterns. This writing attempts to capture some of those thoughts.

Running Day Minus Three
• I just ran yesterday. I must be in decent shape.
• I will go ahead and eat the candy bar that Janice bought for herself.

Running Day Minus Two
• I should not have eaten so much yesterday. The extra weight will make it hard for me to run when I resume.

Running Day Minus One
• I really should run today.
• If I don’t keep at this, I will turn into a gelatinous blob of blubber and be an embarrassment to my wife and children when I collapse of terminal obesity.
• I will really give her heck tomorrow.

Running Day Minus Thirty Minutes
• I really could wait until tomorrow. It looks pretty cold (or hot) outside. Did I just see lightening? I’m sure the weather will be better tomorrow.
• And what would I wear? Do I really have the right shirt/pants/socks/hat for today? Maybe I should wait for better equipment.
• There are higher priority items on my do list. Janice must have something that she wants me to do that is more important.
• Well, I told Janice yesterday I was going to run today and if I don’t, I will seem weak and unmotivated. I know, I will at least start. I don’t have to run the whole three miles. I will just start and see how it goes. I can always walk for a ways and turn around if I need to.
• I will walk to begin with, I don’t need to start running until I reach Mead Court.

Running Day
• My two-block walking start is done. Why did I eat so much yesterday?
• This feels like I have never run before in my life.
• Do I always gasp like this when I start?
• My knee is kind of barking.
• Wait a minute, this isn’t so bad. Once my breathing starts to even out, this is better. I think I can go a mile.
• My knee actually is not hurting so bad.
• The trees and pond are gorgeous today. Wow it is a great morning for a run.
• I love this part of my route. I am feeling better all the time. I think I can easily run the mile, what the heck let’s do two.
• I am going a bit faster now and you know, I remember why I love this running thing.
• I am feeling even BETTER now. In fact, I feel like I could run FOREVER!! Well at least for sure I need to do the regular three-mile route.
• I have run this route thousands of times, but I don’t remember this hill being quite this steep. I don’t think I can run forever; I will just finish the three miles.
• Where the heck did this other hill come from? I need to slow down a bit to make sure I finish strong.
• Maybe I need to walk a while. No, only wimps do that. Push through it and get ‘er done.
• I could cut off here and save a half mile. NOOOO, only wimps do that. You can make it.
• Was this REALLY a good idea?
• This was a bad idea.
• Home is in sight. I think I am going to make it.
• I made it. I AM a stud. I’m feeling groovy (although a bit tired). I need to check my time.
• What the hell? I’m calling Apple, this run COULDN’T have taken FORTY MINUTES!! The clock on this new iPhone must be inaccurate.
• I must run more or less.

Running Day Plus One – Rinse and Repeat

I saw a film today, oh boy
The English army had just won the war
A crowd of people turned away
But I just had to look
Having read the book
John Lennon From the Lennon McCartney Song “A Day in the Life”

Hubris – excessive or exaggerated pride or self-confidence – synonyms: arrogance, conceit, conceitedness, haughtiness, pride, vanity, self-importance, self-conceit, pomposity, superciliousness, feeling of superiority

I was going to entitle this pearl of wisdom “hubris”, but Janice told me that this is not a word that a lot of people use. So, then I had to struggle for a title and came up with this. Let me explain. There are woefully few things that the political left and right can agree on these days. But they seem to have hit on something over the last couple of weeks – the Afghan war withdrawal and especially the situation at the airport. Oh sure, they may put a different slant on what has happened and who exactly is to blame. The Republicans gleefully make fun of the President, call him senile and incompetent and call for his resignation and or impeachment. The Democrats point to the fact that President Biden was handed this fuzzy lollipop and there was nothing that he could do with it but to complete the withdrawal. And after all they say, this is all the fault of former Secretary of State Pompeo and former President Trump who negotiated a bad deal. But despite the spins that the various groups put on it there is a consensus that our withdrawal from Afghanistan has been a debacle, a blow to our esteem and to our standing in the world and just in general a totally unacceptable MESS. The pundits say we are the most powerful country in the world. We SHOULD be able to do this or anything else that we set our minds too. WHO SCREWED THIS UP? Well truthfully it really IS a mess. But I am not sure who is to blame. Did Trump and Pompeo negotiate a ticking time bomb with the Taliban that they gleefully handed over to President Biden? How could our vaunted intelligence services misunderstand the situation so grossly that they so badly failed to predict how all of this was going to go down? Did President Biden get bad information or did he IGNORE good information. Is he being weak or wise?

You can add this dilemma to the list of many that I am just not fully certain about. We have spent twenty years in Afghanistan, spent by some estimates over a TRILLION dollars and most tragically have spent the lives of nearly 2,500 of our best young people, about 65,000 to 70,000 thousand Afghani soldiers, over 50,000 Taliban fighters and nearly 50,000 innocent Afghani citizens. The war started under Republican President George W. Bush, was extended, expanded, and contracted by Democratic President Obama, was extended by Republican President Trump and is now in the hands of another Democratic President, Joe Biden. I think there is plenty of blame to go around. But I want to talk about something other than who is to blame.

In the conservative and liberal media, the talking heads, the retired generals and other “intelligence experts” rage and rail about the sorry state of affairs. It strikes me as an indictment of how we see ourselves (I would argue of how we delude ourselves) versus how others see us. If you ask most Americans who won World War II, they will say America did of course. I shudder to try to interpret what was in the mind of Lennon and McCartney when they wrote the words listed above. (They were probably stoned.) But it is safe to say that most Brits think that THEY won the war. Oh, they would agree that the Yanks came to help, as usual late to the party, but that THEY paid the price. (Most scholars think that the US and the UK lost a similar number of military personnel, but the Brits lost nearly 70,000 civilians.) The French, Canadians, Aussies, Norwegians and several other groups would have their own take on things. My point is that we think that we have always been and always should be ALL POWERFUL. We think we can do anything we want in the world because we have the largest economy (for now), the most wealth and the most military power on earth. And by jiminy, if we DON’T get our way, it is because somebody (usually our political opponent) has screwed everything up. I think that is a key to why Americans are so conflicted about the Vietnam war. It is hard to argue that we WON that war. Some would say we didn’t lose the war, but I think that is equivocating. And this setback in Afghanistan will be just as difficult to weave into our “we-are-the-champions” (to paraphrase Freddy Mercury) mentality.

And of course, we Americans think that we KNOW what is best for every situation. Thus, we have coined the term “nation building”. Is that what we were doing in Vietnam and is that what we have been doing in Afghanistan? Let’s try to be balanced, our work in Afghanistan is NOT all to no avail. We built schools, hospitals and greatly improved the infrastructure of the country. It is said that Kabul was an overgrown village with dirt roads in the 1990’s when the Taliban took over and now it is a bustling modern city of over 4,000,000. But along with what we have built, how much physical and societal infrastructure did we destroy? And perhaps more to the point, what made us think that we KNEW what government was best for this scattered, mostly rural, tribal, fundamentally Islamic country that has steadfastly resisted other attempts at organization over the centuries? Perhaps there is no central government there because they don’t WANT one!!

I have said before and I will say it again. I love America. I think it is without doubt the best country in the world. I would never want to live anywhere else. But is it possible that in reality even with all our power and wealth that we CAN’T do exactly what we want in every situation? And if we can’t is this such a sign of failure? What about the rest of the world? Do they have anything to say about how things are done on this planet? Is it possible that we DON’T have the solution for every problem that arises in the world? Is it possible that we can’t right every thing that we perceive to be wrong in the world? I am not an “America First” advocate because I think that radical nationalism has far too many negative aspects to it. As the most powerful nation in the world, I believe we DO have responsibilities. But would it make some sense to work on SOME other problems instead of engaging in the military misadventures we seem to be prone to entering? What could a trillion dollars have done to address poverty, pollution, and global climate change? And by the way I am not saying that we would address those issues only within our borders. Maybe we should try to become the world leader in something in addition to military might.

Some will call me Un-American for even uttering these words – perhaps we should eat some humble pie and own up to the fact that we DID NOT accomplish our ill-defined goals in Afghanistan and that we are making the best of a bad situation that was of our own making and that we will learn from this misadventure. And once and for all admit that we CAN’T be all things to all people. We don’t have all knowledge and wisdom and we need to stop beating ourselves up for these truths.

“A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.”

Mark Twain

NO, not THAT Ted – Ted Turner. Let me explain. So much has been spoken and written about the giant divides in our country today – rural vs urban, blue vs red, liberal vs conservative, evangelical vs non-evangelical, now even vaccinated vs non-vaccinated. In a thoughtful article published earlier this year, Jonathan Zimmerman from the University of Pennsylvania discusses this schism. He examines the issue from the perspective of the George Floyd murder and subsequent unrest that rocked the country thereafter. He specifically called out Fox News and MSNBC as both being sources that gave out skewed and incomplete coverage of the event, presenting partial and incomplete facts in such a manner as to validate the worldview that they favor. His point was that we can never have meaningful discussions of our problems while we are constantly being fed partial truths and occasionally bald-faced lies to scare the heck out of us.

Why would they do this? Why do they want us scared? Don’t the people who control these enterprises love our country and want the best for it? Call me naïve but I think for the most part they do. (Well, maybe not the Murdocks). But they are commercial enterprises. They have a mission to present the news, but they also are on a mission to make money for their owners and/or shareholders. I think it is all Ted Turner’s fault. Turner was the founder of Cable News Network (CNN) the world’s first 24/7 news network in 1980.

In the “good old days”, Walter Cronkite presented the news for CBS at 5:30 each day for thirty minutes. Ohh, he might extend his stay if there were some sort of national crisis or historically significant event like the assassination of JFK or the Apollo space missions. This was also true of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley over at NBC and Peter Jennings, Howard K. Smith and others for ABC. In those good old days IF you lived in a metropolitan area or were really lucky (and the weather was good), you could choose from any of the three. In our rural area we first had CBS, KELO television Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and if the weather was just right, ABC from KTIV television in Sioux City, Iowa. Pop could occasionally twist our rabbit ears around and pull in the John Deere Bandwagon show from KEYC in Mankato on a Saturday night, but all of that is another story.

My point is that while I am certain there was a certain amount of competition from the networks, news occupied only thirty minutes of the network’s broadcast day. And I am also certain that while they had paying sponsors, news revenue was NOT the networks’ major source of income. Many if not most of the people in those days relied on the print media more than broadcast news as well. There we had TWO whole choices, the Associated Press (AP) and the United Press International (UPI). Some in those days felt that CBS had a more liberal bias than NBC but for the most part news was not perceived as being biased or even slanted by any of the networks. Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Edward R. Murrow and their colleagues were admired by most and some would say even revered. What a contrast to some of the self-serving hucksters that pollute our airwaves now and what a contrast those days were to the food-fight that is today’s broadcast media scene.

What happened? Like I said Ted Turner wrecked it all. In the late 1970’s cable television became available. Ted needed to fill up twenty-four hours of programming with SOMETHING and he had to compete with fifty or sixty other channels on the cable list. So, whatever his producers decided to air needed to be compelling. Because face it, a lot of times the news is kind of, boring. I mean who really cares about what was said at some arcane House subcommittee? So, the news had to be SOMETHING that really caused us to divert from the Beverly Hillbillies reruns on the other cable channels. It needed to not only be news, but it needed to be sensational to hold our interest twenty-four seven. So gradually everything became more sensationalized even if it wasn’t sensational. Every storm was the WORST with HUGE amounts of damage (even if we saw the same overturned mobile home twenty-five times every hour). And every demonstration had the potential to change the world. If any violence occurred, we were again showed the same thirty second clip over and over and over again. All of this was designed to capture a market share, to impress advertisers all to MAKE MONEY. And my goodness CNN certainly did that. He made so much money that Ted could afford to marry Jane Fonda!!

And there is a funny thing that happens in America. If we observe someone making money doing something, it invariably occurs to us that we could make money doing something similar if we can differentiate ourselves enough to claim a share of the market. Thus, Fox News, MSNBC, OAN etc. etc. came along all trying to carve out their own market share and their own viewer base. They apparently found that telling people what they want to hear is a good way to do that. And now telling the whole truth takes a back seat to making sure that they don’t offend their listeners. Did the proliferation of these news outlets create the tribalism that now infects our society or were they a reflection of the malaise that infected us for other reasons? Clearly there are a lot of aspects to our culture that have brought us to where we are today, but I think its mostly Ted’s fault.

“A great man is always willing to be little.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“God sends no one away empty except those who are full of themselves.”
– Dwight L. Moody

I get as alarmed about racial tensions and the violent demonstrations that often go with them as anyone. But one thing that I usually note with a rueful smile is the cast of characters who immediately rush in whenever we find ourselves in one of these difficult situations. The Reverend Al Sharpton is almost invariably there. Maybe Reverend Sharpton adds a calming influence in times of trouble and is a comfort to those who are embroiled in the troubles. He may be motivated to really do the right thing and to try to help. The cynical side of me thinks that maybe he just craves being the center of attention.

Sort of along these lines, I have read several accounts of social events at Mar-a-Lago in Florida where a special uninvited guest appeared and took the opportunity to address the attendees – former president Trump. I am sure the dumbfounded guests were taken aback, and really, what would you do if the former president showed up? Refuse to let him speak? I am not a Trump fan but geez, he IS the former president!! You MUST let the President speak, must you not? Perhaps Mr. Trump is just a social butterfly with a million friends who just enjoys celebrating with people. But that cynicism in me keeps rearing its ugly head again and tells me that may he TOO craves being the center of attention. OH shoot, after seeing his hourly tweets for four years I KNOW he loves being the center of attention.

What a contrasting experience we had last week. We had a tragedy in our extended family. Jan and I attended an INCREDIBLY sad funeral for a great young man stuck down literally in the prime of his life, leaving his wife and three children. Amid the grief that was freely flowing before, during and after the funeral I noted our Governor Walz in attendance. He was so unobtrusive that I had to look several times to make certain that it was him. It then occurred to me that our loved one was a student of his while he was a teacher in Mankato and played football for him while in high school. There was no fanfare with his arrival or departure, no press conference, no security detail (at least that I was able to detect) and no statements to the press. He simply came, grieved with the rest of us and left.

I am making no comments on how Governor Walz has served us through a couple of pretty difficult years. I am just noting how unusual it is for a public figure to not be in self-promotion mode twenty-four-seven-three sixty-five. Indeed, it seems that this is the road to success in so many avenues of life. Oh, how I long for servant leaders, leaders who do not seek for themselves but literally just want to do the work, to provide what their constituents need – whether the constituents are fans, customers, or citizens. I think that is one of the most admirable traits exhibited by George Washington, our greatest servant leader. He really did NOT seek acclaim. He commanded our armed forces in the Revolutionary War only out a sense of duty. And when the war was done and there were those who would have made him king, he wanted no part of any such thing. He resigned his commission and retreated back to Virginia until he was called again and reluctantly agreed to serve as President. He was truly my-kind-of-guy!!

“Notwithstanding the boasted virtue of America, it is more probable that we shall exhibit the last melancholy proof, that mankind are not competent to their own Government without the means of coercion in the Sovereign.”
George Washington – In a Letter to John Jay

I have previously confessed that I enrolled in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) from Yale a couple of years ago. The subject matter was the American Revolution. That was a lot of work, but I so enjoyed that experience that I found another course entitled “America’s Founding Fathers” taught by Dr. Allen C. Guelzo from Gettysburg College. Guelzo’s accomplishments are impressive, contributing to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, US News and World Report, the National Review, and other notable publications in addition to writing several acclaimed historical books. The approach that Guelzo uses in the course is to talk about this period through the eyes of several “founding fathers”. In the introduction he talks about his criteria for inclusion in this exclusive list of people from that period in our history. His list includes lots of people you will readily remember like Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson but also some that are not as familiar like Thomas Mifflin and William Findley.

One would think that our first president would make the list. But he did not. Oh, George Washington is on his list but not our first President. George Washington was our first president under our present constitution. Our first “President” under the Articles of Confederation was a guy by the name of John Hanson. He took over right after the Revolutionary War. He served in the Congress from Maryland and he was apparently so popular that he was unanimously elected by his colleagues. Actually, there were six “Presidents” before Washington, most of whom you probably haven’t heard of. A notable exception to that statement was that John Hancock served a one-year term.

I have read a lot about Washington. So much has been written. But it is concluded by all that Washington was in many ways a modest man and certainly not a “power-grabber” as many in that time were, and I guess as many are today. In fact, in 1783 Washington appeared before Congress and President Hanson and personally submitted his resignation as the leader of American armed forces. He was so universally revered that he probably could have just appointed himself king and Americans would have been happy. But his intent was to quietly return to his beloved Virginia and live out his life in peace and happiness there. So, what happened to reengage him and what in the world would motivate the Father of our Country to issue the pessimistic pronouncement cited above?

Well, it seems after the euphoria of the British surrender at Yorktown and the establishment of the Articles of Confederation, things were going a little sideways. Washington was not the only one who was alarmed. When Benjamin Franklin came home from a stint representing the country to the French monarchy, he was shocked at what had been taking place with the state assemblies and particularly the assembly of his own state, Pennsylvania. The Articles left nearly all meaningful power with the states and they were exercising it in ways that no one would have foreseen. More on that later, but Franklin was also dismayed at American newspapers (a couple of which he had created). He said they were “affronting, calumniating, and defaming one another”. I didn’t know exactly what that second thing was, but I was sure it wasn’t good. I had to look it up. It means that they were making false and derogatory comments about each other. Franklin was particularly alarmed that Pennsylvania had basically pitched his old buddy Robert Morris out of the Assembly, almost accusing him of not being a patriot. This was pretty ironic since Morris had personally provided over one million pounds of his own money to the tottering government. Morris had also been invaluable in his assistance to Franklin in getting foreign loans for our fledgling country. Morris was regarded by most as being our first government finance expert and had many common-sense ideas for how American commerce and banking should be handled. Those ideas were summarily rejected.

How bad was it?

• With our independence from Great Britain and their economic restraints, Americans went on a binge of consumption and speculation.
• With a lack of hard currency Americans found themselves unable to repay the loans that they had racked up with English banks. These defaults in turn brought down no less than five of Great Britain’s largest banks. It didn’t take too long for the remaining ones to turn off the credit to the “colonists”.
• American merchants were in turn unable to buy any goods to sell and closed their doors.
• With the collapse of credit, land values fell, and mortgages went into default.
• With no ability to tax, the national government was unable to pay off its sizable war debt, which in turn soured other European government from extending further credit.
• The assemblymen from no less than seven states knew the way out of the problem – they would just print up some money and pass a law that it was “legal tender” and had to be honored for the repayment of debt – in their state. They also enacted laws that prevented lenders and sellers from collecting debts in any other way. This of course led to wild inflation and the complete collapse of capital borrowing.
• The Brits, understandably upset that the colonists were defaulting on their debts, threatened to NOT honor the peace treaty of 1783 and they specifically began to take steps to retake the forts in the West.
• American soldiers who had not been paid were so angry that a Pennsylvania regiment marched to Philadelphia and surrounded the statehouse where Congress was meeting and threatened the congressmen for their pay. (Congress quickly adjourned and wisely determined to next meet – in Princeton, New Jersey a perhaps safer environment.)
• But what worried Franklin and Washington most was described in a Boston newspaper. America now had developed a “private, selfish, and basely avaricious spirit …. in the room of public virtue”.

Well, we all know that cooler heads prevailed, a new constitution was adopted giving the federal government more power, Washington reluctantly agreed to become our “second-first-president” and we began to work our way out of the predicament. But Washington’s words seem hauntingly prescient to me in 2021-America. I wonder sometimes if we really CAN govern ourselves. In America we say that the PEOPLE are sovereign. But that is not the “Sovereign” that Washington was thinking about. He was thinking about a singular strongman, in his case King George. In other words, he questioned whether we, acting on our own, have the common sense and the common decency to take care of each other and to work for the common good. What do these words mean in today’s America? That is the real issue in our country today. It is a bit presumptuous for anyone to say they really know what acting in the common good is. But I think I know a few things that are NOT in the common good:

• Attacking the seat of our federal representative government – Congress – while our duly elected representatives are carrying out a duty prescribed for them in our Constitution;
• Using social media, to propagate the most outlandish and unsubstantiated rumors, misleading and inciting people to act against their own interest and the interests of others;
• Unendingly refusing to accept an election result that by all unbiased sources was determined to be the most fairly conducted in our history;
• Calumniating each other through biased and slanted usage of all the forms of media under the guise of “reporting the news” – think FOX News, the Huffington Post, CNBC, OAN etc.;
• Establishing economic systems, through taxation and other provisions, that provide for unheard of disparities between the haves and the have-nots;
• EXPECTING and DEMANDING that government be the answer to all problems of every individual, even when those problems are self-inflicted;
• Denying citizens of REAL equal protection under the law because of their race;
• Justifying police racial profiling and cultures of violence towards minorities in our police departments;
• Using wrongs by others (including our police) to justify lawlessness and destruction of public and private property;
• Making it more difficult for poor and minority group Americans to exercise their constitutionally guaranteed right to vote;
• Taking the greatest threat to public health that we have experienced in one hundred years and making it a matter of political debate.

There are others but the big question is why do we do these things? Can we really govern ourselves? We are certainly not realistically threatened by any foreign power. The threat is US. My nephew, a young man with wisdom beyond his years, forwarded a summary of a presentation that he recently heard detailing how much division and animosity there is in our country today. It was presented by Doug Sosnik, a senior policy advisor for the multi-national Brunswick company. I can’t recite all the information in this thought-provoking piece but if you get a chance, I recommend that you review it. I can forward a link if any of you are interested. He makes the point that our country is nearing a real inflection point. Things are dramatically changing and are going to be changing more over the coming years, and maybe not for the better. I was particularly struck by the main point of his summary of politics in the country.

The unifying force in American politics today is the opposition to the other political party. Democrats are out to trample and demonize former President Trump and his followers and Republicans aspire to “own the Libs”. Public policy takes a back seat to these more visceral goals – party positions can actually be reversed depending on what the other party favors. And internally among party activists, the competition is for which candidate will more aggressively, even outrageously, pursue this goal. Incumbent Republicans are more likely to lose a primary from the right – and incumbent Democrats are more likely to lose a primary from the left – than to be defeated in a general election in most districts. Compromise is not a dirty word; it isn’t a word at all.

I used to think that it was only a matter of time before democracy and self-governance would be the system for all countries. But look around – Hong Kong, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, India, Brazil, Syria – we are going in the opposite direction towards authoritarian rule, coercion of a Sovereign. America is the world’s last beacon of hope for a system that provides for self-governance and liberty and justice for all – sovereignty of the people. But we are NOT too big to fail. In fact, I could see Franklin’s and Washington’s fears realized if we do not change the trajectory that we are on. I pray that modern day Washingtons and Franklins will step forward. But more than that, I pray that we will ALL eliminate the “private, selfish and basely avaricious spirit in the room of public virtue”. And that we will ALL eschew the politics of division, excess and hate. We did it in 1789, I pray that we can do it again.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived, and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

— John Kennedy, 1917-1963, American President [1961-1963]

The eighties and nineties were kind of a blur to me. My life was consumed with raising kids and working. There was not a lot of time devoted to television. That may explain why I now find myself terribly amused by some of the shows that I didn’t watch then. My latest favorite is “Third Rock from the Sun”. The pretext for this series involves four aliens from outer space who are on a mission to learn about earth and its inhabitants. The main character, Dick Solomon, is played by John Lithgow, an amazing actor. I think the show is hilarious and sometimes insightful. Today’s rerun episode theme was truth. Dick and his cohorts are incapable of lying. They struggle to understand why humans create so many problems for themselves by not telling the truth and by not being able to discern fact from falsehood.

My thoughts immediately drifted to the high level of untruths that permeate our discussions these days. Or at least much of what is being bantered about seems like untruths to ME at least. There is now talk about “alternative facts”. Isn’t this an oxymoron? If something is a fact, the opposite of that is NOT a fact, umm isn’t it? This is such a target-rich environment, which lie to focus on? Well of course there is the “Big Lie” about the election results. That has created so much discord and destruction. And then there is the whole QAnon fiasco. But I think I will skip these for now in favor of the lies being told this week about the Texas power outage.

Do you ever get a little tired about hearing about Texas? Don’t mess with Texas!! Austin is the fastest growing, successful high-tech community in America. Everyone is leaving California and moving to Texas. Texas is bigger and better than X number of other states combined. The Dallas Cowboys – America’s Team! Texas is so big you can’t drive across it in one day. Blah, blah, blah, blah! Two years ago, I was walking through the MINNESOTA state fair and saw this exhibit extolling all of the virtues of Texas. Give me a break!! Now let me begin with sympathy to all who have experienced loss in the tragedy of the winter storm. I would never wish this disaster on anyone, especially fellow Americans. But I must confess to some guilty schadenfreude for the public officials there – Texas is not so bulletproof either. I know it is always wrong to gloat when others have problems, but it was so hard for me to resist:

• Last fall Texas Senator Ted Cruz hooted when California governor Gavin Newsome had to ask its residents to turn down their air conditioners because of the energy issues created by wildfires. In an August 19, 2020 Tweet he said “California is now unable to perform even basic functions of civilization, like having reliable electricity. Biden/Harris/AOC want to make CA’s failed energy policy the standard nationwide. Hope you don’t like air conditioning!”
• Texas OPTED OUT of regional energy planning/sharing consortia, instead relying on their OWN planning. (Don’t mess with Texas.) There were a few exceptions on the fringes of the state who had participated in joint energy grid planning and these areas went through the recent weather event relatively unscathed. There are three grids in the Lower 48 states: The Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection — and Texas. The Texas grid is called ERCOT, and it is run by an agency of the same name — the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. ERCOT commissioners are now taking flak from Texas politicians who are pointing the fingers at others and fleeing this debacle with reckless abandon!! Why did Texas want to go it alone? Because then they were not under the jurisdiction of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Don’t mess with Texas!
• FERC visited Texas on at least three occasions in the last thirty years after similar weather problems (in an advisory role) and recommended more weatherization of the state’s energy facilities. These recommendations were summarily ignored, because, because umm I guess Texas knows best. And amazingly former Governor Perry said last week that the disaster was worth it, to keep FERC out of the lives of Texans. “Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” I’m not so sure that those Texans who have lost loved ones or even the ones getting $8,000 monthly electric bills would really say that.
• Texas Representative Kyle Biedermann has prepared a bill that would begin the process of secession for Texas. Texas GOP Chairman Allen West has publicly endorsed this legislation to allow for a referendum. They even have a cute name for it – Texit.

So, in the face of all this mismanagement by MANY in the state, the present Governor of Texas knows where the blame lies – it is the failing WIND ENERGY facilities in the state. According to Newsweek, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has blamed the disaster on green energy and criticized the proposed Green New Deal. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said, claiming that wind and solar energy make up “collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid.” “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure we’ll be able to heat our homes in the wintertime and cool our homes in the summertime.” I don’t think anyone is saying that we will never need natural gas again.

And then there is this: The aforementioned Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which oversees most of the state’s electrical grid, has placed the blame for the outages on Texas’ reliance on natural gas. Dan Woodfin, a senior director at ERCOT, told The Texas Tribune that more than half of their winter generating capacity is offline and that much of this is powered by natural gas. “It appears that a lot of the generation that has gone offline today has been primarily due to issues on the natural gas system,” Woodfin said. It is estimated that 80 percent of the Texas electricity grid’s capacity may be generated by natural gas, coal, and nuclear power. Just 7 percent of its winter capacity was due to come from wind. Or as Michael Webber, an energy resources professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Texas Tribune: “Texas is a gas state. Gas is failing in the most spectacular fashion right now.” Let’s call a spade a spade – this debacle lies clearly at the feet of those officials who allowed energy generators in Texas to sidestep widely recommended winterization work, commonplace in areas all over the US, in the interest of HIGHER UTILITY PROFITS.

Despite the secessionist leanings by some in the state, when Governor Abbott requested assistance from Washington, President Biden responded that the US Government will do all that it can to alleviate this exceedingly difficult situation – and I might add, AS IT SHOULD. The US government is funded by taxpayers from ALL the fifty states, including those who are not considering secession. FEMA will spring into action bringing generators and other things to help, just as they did for Houston and other devasted areas of Texas in 2017 in Hurricane Harvey and in many other flood events. But again, the chippy side of me remembers that Houston is well known for its lax to non-existent land use controls. Amazingly even today, the nation’s fourth largest city has no zoning ordinance, instead relying on a convoluted system involving some general overall development standards and the legal ability of the city to enforce private deed restrictions. This lack of urban planning has created difficulties when it comes to efficiently providing public services most notably drainage and flood control. So, don’t tell Houston how to run their city, and don’t tell Texas how to run their power grid – Don’t mess with Texas you Yankee jerks. Just send on down the money when we get into trouble. Oops, I slipped again.