Category: Saturday Soother

Saturday Soother – May 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Adams sunrise with orchards in bloom, WA – May 2023 photo by Mitch Schreiber Photography

(Wrongo and Ms. Right give a group hug to family member Bob W. His mother has a grave health crisis. We’re thinking of you Bob.)

There’s a book called “A Terrible Country” written in 2018 by Keith Gessen. It’s about life in Russia a few years before Russia became a pariah in Europe. But the title could easily describe the US in 2023. If you doubt that, maybe you aren’t aware of the video of a NYC subway rider choking a homeless man to death last week. The video lasts for four minutes.

The NYT describes the video:

“The homeless man, Jordan Neely, is seen writhing, trying to get free from the arms and legs of the other subway riders who are pinning him down. As the minutes tick by early Monday afternoon on a northbound F train in Manhattan, Mr. Neely visibly weakens as the arm wrapped around his neck stays tight.”

After he stops moving, the riders hold him down for about another 50 seconds. Neely was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital. Jordan Neely was homeless. He was a Michael Jackson impersonator. Neely’s race (Black) and that of his killer (White) are a depressingly familiar story. What’s different is that his assailant wasn’t a cop and didn’t use a gun.

What’s also familiar is that the assailant has not been charged by the NYPD.

What’s also disturbing is that the subway car held bystanders most of whom remained bystanders, watching a former Marine choke the life out of Neely for (apparently) behaving erratically.

After the fact, we learned that Neely had more than 40 arrests including an open warrant for punching a 67 old woman. No one should portray him as simply a misunderstood soul. But did he deserve to die in that subway car?

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that there’s been news nearly every day about Americans being killed over mundane, mostly non-threatening actions, or for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The NYT’s Roxanne Gay:

“We are at something of an impasse. The list of things that can get you killed in public is expanding every single day. Whether it’s mass shootings or police brutality or random acts of violence, it only takes running into one scared man to have the worst and likely last day of your life. We can’t even agree on right and wrong anymore.”

How did the country get this way? Why is there so much fear and paranoia about the “other”? Why do select elements of our society cultivate this fear by marketing it?

Neely’s killing is partly an outcome of the relentless political rhetoric that has contributed to the public’s false beliefs about actual crime levels in America’s cities. And NYC’s Mayor and NY’s Governor wouldn’t even condemn the killer. Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The Atlantic:

“This process, through which mundane uncomfortable situations are transformed into terrifying ordeals by…incidents of random gun violence…is one means by which a healthy community becomes a violent society. Nobody looks forward to encountering people behaving erratically on the subway…but killing a mentally ill man on a train….represents the loss of a peaceful commons, the absence of compassion, and the overwhelming fear we have come to accept in our culture of violence. This is the country we have become.”

Yep, we’ve become a terrible country. Back to Roxanne Gay:

“There is no patience for simple mistakes or room for addressing how bigotry colors even the most innocuous interactions. There is no regard for due process. People who deem themselves judge, jury and executioner walk among us, and we have no real way of knowing when they will turn on us.”

And on Thursday, four of the Proud Boys, among paranoia’s finest, were convicted of committing vigilante justice against our democracy. Let’s leave the final words to Gay, who says we’ve become:

“…a people without empathy, without any respect for the sanctity of life unless it’s our own…”

Or fetuses.

Time for Wrongo to wash up after digging in this cultural dirt. It’s time for our Saturday Soother where we try to forget about whose drones hit the Kremlin, and try to center ourselves before another demanding week begins,

Here at the Mansion of Wrong, Wrongo and Ms. Right are spending the weekend in NYC seeing two musicals.

But as a public service to the rest of you, grab a seat outdoors on what looks like a beautiful day in the northeast. Now watch and listen to ErzsĂ©bet Pozsgai play the first movement of “Spring” from the “Four Seasons” by Antonio Vivaldi on solo violin, live in Budapest in 2013:

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Saturday Soother – April 29, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Crab Apple tree, Fields of Wrong, CT – May 10, 2013 photo by Wrongo. This year, the trees are in full bloom two weeks earlier. The petals will be long gone by May 10, 2023. Climate change?

The new Democratic governor of Arizona, Katie Hobbs, appears to be on the wrong foot with her take on food safety. The NYT reports that she vetoed a bill that would have allowed Arizona’s informal network of home cooks to sell perishable food legally:

“Though the state promotes itself as a low-tax, low-regulation haven for private enterprise, it does not allow the sale of perishable foods made at home. So for years, a thriving economy of working-class, mostly Latina home cooks has operated underground, selling tacos, tres leches cakes and chile-dusted corn illegally from living rooms and outside laundromats and soccer games.”

Earlier in April, Republicans who control the state legislature came together with Democrats in a moment of bipartisan accord to pass a bill that would let Arizona’s home cooks register with the state to legally sell perishable foods like salsas and tamales.

And Hobbs vetoed it. Naturally, there was a backlash. Why would the new governor alienate Arizona’s large Latino population? Even a few Democrats have criticized her for killing what is widely being called the “tamale bill.” More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“They said her move was a slap in the face of Latino constituents who voted for Ms. Hobbs, and whose support was crucial in a politically fractured state that is about 32% Latino. Critics said her veto would hurt the working-class immigrants that Ms. Hobbs had championed during her campaign.”

We can debate the merits of Arizona’s food safety laws. You might say, “I’ve seen my kitchen, and I’m against it.”

But when we debate the merits, it ought to be in the context of a) the minimal acceptable standard for public safety, and b) what the people want. Arizona’s informal food network is very popular. People aren’t stupid: They know that eating food purchased from the trunk of a car or from a roadside stand carries a risk of a possible night on the toilet, yet no one complains. And if something happens the city or town can always trace it and shut someone down.

BTW: You haven’t lived until you’ve bought tamales from the trunk of a nice lady’s car in a Home Depot parking lot.

The Arizona food safety reform bill appealed to both Parties: Republicans could stand up for fewer regulations, while Dems could show that they understood and supported the working class. This is particularly relevant in Arizona, where working people have a long tradition of making money through selling food informally.

So, what was Hobbs thinking? The selling of home-cooked food is primarily practiced by people of color or immigrants. Banning sale of their cooking could be seen as institutional racism, something we might expect in Arizona, but from a Democratic governor?

Maybe roadside vendors could display a warning sign saying that the Office of Food Inspection isn’t inspecting their garage BBQs, or their kitchens, or their basement bakeries, so you’re on your own. Besides, the Feds allow Big Food to put pink slime in our ground beef.

Enough about Katie Hobbs, someone who we were thrilled to see beat Kari Lake last November.

It’s time to forget about politics and whatever Ron DeSantis was doing in Israel. Focus instead on finding some relaxing time before the week starts all over again. Here on the fields of Wrong, the spring cleanup continues, along with our working to convince a pair of house finches that building a nest under the walkway to our door is – well, wrong. Wrongo expects to prevail as he has in prior years.

But now, it’s time for our Saturday Soother!

Let’s start by brewing up a hot steaming mug of Ethiopia Basha Bekele coffee ($23/12oz.) from Virginia’s Roadmap CoffeeWorks, an award-winning artisan roasting company based in Lexington, VA. It is said to be chocolaty and fruit-toned in the very long and satisfying finish. Who doesn’t like a long finish?

Since there’s rain in Litchfield County today, grab a chair by a large window. Now watch and listen to “Simple Gifts” from Aaron Copland’s  “Appalachian Spring” conducted by Leonard Bernstein. In 1942, Martha Graham commissioned Copland to write a ballet with “an American theme”. It premiered at the Library of Congress on October 30, 1944, with Graham dancing the lead role.

In 1945, Copland was commissioned by conductor Artur RodziƄski to rearrange the ballet as an orchestral suite. “Simple Gifts” was a Shaker Hymn that Copland brought to life. He called the piece “Ballet for Martha”, and Graham gave it the title “Appalachian Spring”, after a line in a poem by Hart Crane:

“Tis’ a Gift to be Simple“….indeed.

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Saturday Soother – April 22, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Rainbow, Blue Ridge Parkway, VA – April 2023 photo by Tim Lewis

American carnage is real, my friend. Just not in the way that Trump stated in his inaugural rant. The American carnage Wrongo speaks of is the gun attacks made on others by angry or fearful lone American gunmen. From Charlie Sykes at The Bulwark:

“Ringing the wrong doorbell, making a wrong turn, getting in the wrong car, and an errant basketball. A wounded teenager, a dead young woman, cheerleaders in critical condition, and a 6-year-old girl and her father shot.”

The Indiana man who shot a 16-year-old boy for knocking on his door is described by his grandson as a conspiracy theorist and avid consumer of right-wing media: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I feel like a lot of people of that generation are caught up in this 24 hour news cycle of fear and paranoia perpetuated by some…news stations. And he was fully into that, sitting and watching Fox News all day, every day blaring in his living room…..that doesn’t necessarily lead people to be racist, but it reinforces and galvanizes racist people. And their beliefs.”

Right wing propaganda is about fear. And some people bathe in it for hours a day. So, while the rest of us enjoy walks in the park or a trip to the market, they’re terrified of every swarthy stranger at the Publix or Home Depot.

Add this level of fear to the implicit permission given gun owners by “stand your ground” laws, and you have the elements of an environment of violence.  Vox provides background:

“Some of these shootings took place in states with so-called “stand your ground” laws, which offer expansive legal protections for people who use deadly force against others out of self-defense….and experts have noted that the laws can bolster a “shoot first, ask later” mentality.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Under such laws — which exist in some form in 38 states — people can use lethal force if they reasonably believe their life is under threat, and they don’t have to take steps to retreat or avoid the confrontation first. That’s a stark change from prior laws….In the past, the “castle doctrine,” which has been adopted by most states, allowed people to use deadly force if a person entered their home.

Stand your ground laws take that idea one step further, with some making such allowances no matter where a person is, whether that’s a public place, their vehicle or their office.”

Add pervasive fear and permission to stand your ground to the proliferation of guns in America (aided by the Supreme Court’s expansive reading of the Second Amendment) and the US has come undone. From Umair Haque: (emphasis by Haque)

“Did you know that America isn’t just the most violent nation in the industrialized world — but an off the charts extreme outlier? Iceland is the world’s most peaceful society. Canada is the world’s 12th most peaceful society. America is the
 129th.”

That’s 129 out of 163 countries tracked. Further evidence is in the recent TSA statistics about intercepting guns about to be carried on to planes:

“Officers with the Transportation Security Administration confiscated more than 1,500 guns at airport security checkpoints in the US during the first quarter of the year, more than 93% of which were loaded. The 1,508 firearms equate to an average of 16.8 intercepted each day during the first three months of the year…”

The gun gives its owner the power of life and death. No training needed. The power of God right there in your hand. It’s very attractive to a certain type of person. And we cultivate that type of personality in America.

We have no safety nets, no social bonds, no norms of decency. That means we ask each other to bear the unbearable.

We don’t invest enough in safety nets, insurance, public goods, healthcare, education, and, in most states, gun laws. According to Haque, it’s all justified by politicians saying, “I can bear the unbearable — why can’t they?” But we can’t do that forever. Someone will snap, and the frustration of bearing the unbearable pours out as rage that’s visited on whomever is nearest, or easiest to hurt. That’s American Exceptionalism at work. America’s extreme violence, caused in large part by the twisted ideology that asks Americans to bear unbearable things.

Enough about guns and people snapping. It’s time for our Saturday Soother! Here on the Fields of Wrong, our crabapple trees are in bloom. They’re being visited by both birds and bees, each looking for high calorie snacks. The bees for the flowers, the birds for the buds. Our spring clean-up is lagging, so there’s still much to do.

But first, let’s relax for a few minutes. Grab a comfy chair near a big window and watch and listen to Valentina Lisitsa, a Ukrainian-American pianist, play “Rustle of Spring”, a solo piano piece written by Norwegian composer Christian Sinding in 1896:

If you are interested in amazing piano technique, watch Lisitsa perform Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

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Saturday Soother – April 15, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Wildflowers, Ennis, TX – April 2023 photo by Teresa Gawor

Welcome to the start of taxpayer’s blues weekend. The date for submitting your taxes is April 18 this year, since April 15 falls on a Saturday and Emancipation Day, a holiday observed in Washington, DC, is April 17. Around 88 million Americans still hadn’t filed by April 1, so there’s got to be some burning of the midnight oil this weekend.

Let’s talk about the leak of classified Pentagon documents by Jack Teixeira, a 21 year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard. Teixeira was arrested on Thursday for posting US secret documents in a private Discord chat room he hosted. The classified material was shared with some 20-30 room members, including some of whom were foreigners.

The details are depressing. The group had a taste for racist and anti-Semitic memes. The WaPo reports that they seemed to love guns, military gear and God.

What happens next will be a damage assessment by the US Intelligence Community (IC), along with some of the usual suspects staking out political positions about how inept the IC is by allowing another classified leak.

Sadly, Teixeira has already picked up supporters in the GOP, as this tweet by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) shows:

It’s surprising how open and direct the pro-Putin Right is in linking Russia’s policies to those of the authoritarian white Christian secession movement in America. If you read Wrongo’s column yesterday on what’s dividing America, today’s tweet by Greene is a prime example of the difficulty in finding common cause with the extremist wing of the Republican Party.

Perhaps you didn’t see that Fox’s Tucker Carlson said that Teixeira deserves a medal not prison time. Or that he said that Teixeira is today’s Daniel Ellsberg. Others are saying that the racist meme and the god and guns framing aren’t true and are simply what the liberals at the DOJ and the NYT are spoon feeding to us. If you can stomach it, read some of the comments Right Wingers leave after viewing Tucker’s spew.

If this had happened when GW Bush was president, the GOP would be demanding that Teixeira receive a public execution.

But the GOP has moved on, and now there isn’t a substantial difference between Trump and Teixeira. The crimes are the same, and it seems, so are their motives. But Trump isn’t a 21-year old trying to impress his friends in a private forum. After four years as US president, he knows exactly why his behavior was criminal and dangerous.

And whatever sentence Teixeira receives should also apply to Trump, only with less leniency.

A basic question for the US Intelligence Community is how many more disaffected people are out there who have access to our intelligence? How many have a desire to steal it, either to stick it to the man or to simply hoard a few secrets? How many more IC oddballs are out there living in houses filled with terabytes of digital and paper secrets squirreled away?

That’s enough for today, it’s time for our Saturday Soother, where we block out all distractions and try to figure out how many miles our cars were driven for business in 2022.

Here on the fields of Wrong, it’s been in the high 80’s and it’s suddenly apparent that there’s plenty of yard work that needs doing. Wrongo has started trimming and shaping the bushes that seemed to grow wildly last year, even without much rain. Ms. Right helpfully says just chain saw them off to half their size. It will be brutal, but effective!

But before starting the yard work, let’s take a few minutes to center ourselves and try to prepare for the week to come.

Start by finding a seat near an open window. Now, watch and listen to the Vienna Philharmonic play Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann: Barcarolle” live and outdoors in Vienna in 2020. Here the orchestra is conducted by Valery Gergiev. Barcarolle comes from the Italian “barca” or boat. It is a traditional folk song sung by Venetian gondoliers, or a piece of music composed in that style:

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Saturday Soother – March 25, 2023

The Daily Escape:

The Neon Museum at night, Las Vegas, NV – March 2023 photo by Linda Hoggard Henderson

The US confirmed Thursday that it had struck an Iranian-backed group in northeastern Syria after it launched a drone attack against a US base in Syria, killing one US contractor and injuring another along with five US troops. On Friday, the Iran proxy forces launched seven rockets at a US base in northeast Syria on Friday in retaliation.

Wait. We’re still in Syria? Yep, the US still maintains about 900 troops in Syria after Trump ordered the withdrawal of roughly 2,000 in 2018. Video footage indicates that the strike was in Deir Ez-Zor, a Syrian province that borders Iraq and contains significant oil fields.

We entered Syria uninvited in 2015. Our invasion was based on two ideas, one commendable and the other disastrously stupid from the start.

We were misguided in our effort to identify, train and equip the local “good jihadis” to take on the Syrian government. These so-called good jihadis understood we were gullible dupes from day one. It turned out that all we accomplished was to supply better weapons to ISIS.

The commendable effort was our direct support of the Rojava Kurds in their existential battle against the ISIS jihadis. We had experience fighting with them against ISIS in Iraq. We weren’t invited by Syria to help the Rojava Kurds, but it was a fight against a mutual enemy. And at the time, Syria exercised no control in the region.

The main fighting was by the People’s Protection Units (YPG) of the Rojava Kurds. We entered the conflict by conducting airstrikes aimed at Kobani and embedding two Special Forces teams with the YPG, who later captured Kobani.

Our tiny presence with the YPG metastasized into creation of the Syrian Defense Force (SDF). Now, it’s clear that we have stayed too long. We should have been preparing the YPG and SDF for integration into the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). We failed to do that, and we remain there because we promised both groups we’d stand by them, stoking their false hopes of independence from Syria.

We don’t belong there anymore than the Russian Army belongs in Ukraine. Like Ukraine, Syria is a sovereign state and can choose whomever it wants to align with, and who it doesn’t.

How can we demand that Russia exit Ukraine’s sovereign territory while we remain in Syria, uninvited?

We should leave. With all that’s going on elsewhere, taking Syria off the table should be a no-brainer for Biden. We should coordinate our leaving with Syria and the Russians, so as not to be seen as disappearing into the night.

On the way out the door, we need to make it clear to the Rojava Kurds and the SDF that we’re going to leave, and that now they must negotiate an accommodation with the Syrian government.

That’s enough geopolitics for this week. It’s time for our Saturday Soother. Wrongo and Ms. Right are just back from Napa Valley and our granddaughter’s wedding. And Spring has sprung here on the fields of Wrong. It’s already clear that Wrongo is behind on his annual spring cleanup. The woods are taking on the vague red color of new buds, and our Bradford Pear also has buds. Yesterday, we put out our Bluebird nesting boxes.

Let’s relax for a few minutes and center ourselves before next week brings us another political atrocity, like the firing of a Florida school principal after three parents complained about an art teacher showing a picture of Michelangelo’s 16th century sculpture of David. Time to get fig leaves put on all the statues in Florida.

Let it go. Now, sit in your favorite chair and watch and listen to Alana Youssefian and the Voices of Music perform “Spring” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on original instruments used in Vivaldi’s time. This features Youssefian playing a baroque violin. They bring life to this Vivaldi old favorite that you’ve heard many times, making it something fun, and joyful. It’s definitely worth your time:

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Saturday Soother – March 11, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend NP, TX – March 2023 photo by Rick A. Ludwig. Cliff on left is in Mexico, the one on the right is in US. The Rio Grande is in the middle.

Signs that we’re starting to think about the 2024 election are everywhere. Wrongo wants to connect a few dots regarding Biden’s recent efforts to move the Democratic Party more to the middle on crime and immigration while staying left on financing the country’s social and military needs.

Biden proposed a budget to reduce the deficit, protect Medicare and Social Security, and raise taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. From the NYT:

“In a speech in Philadelphia on Thursday, Mr. Biden said that his budget was designed to ‘lift the burden on hard working Americans’ and drew sharp contrasts with the proposals that Republicans have offered, which the president argued would threaten the nation’s social safety net programs and benefit the rich.”

This contrasts with Biden’s right-leaning position on the recent DC crime bill. Since DC is controlled by the Congress, it’s legislation can be vetoed by the US Senate. Also from the NYT:

“The Senate…voted overwhelmingly to block a new District of Columbia criminal code that reduces mandatory minimum sentences for some violent offenses, with Democrats bowing to Republican pressure to take a hard line on crime in a move that underscored the rising political potency of the issue ahead of the 2024 elections.”

By an 81-to-14 vote, with 31 Democrats voting with the Republicans, the Senate passed the Republican-written measure to undo the District’s law. It now goes to Biden, who after initially opposing it abruptly changed course and said he would sign it.

So, Biden’s tacking left on spending but to the center-right on crime. He’s making a series of calculated moves to position his Party to compete successfully in 2024. Still, it’s disappointing that Biden and 31 Democrats joined with the Right to deny DC residents the right to govern their own city.

But this shouldn’t be surprising. Last year, Biden and the Democrats turned their backs on labor during their contract battle with the railroads.

Here’s Nick Catoggio in the Dispatch: (Brackets by Wrongo)

“[Biden has]…begun to tiptoe toward the center lately on another major Democratic liability, immigration…..Centrist analysts…have warned Biden and his Party that their political viability depends on escaping the…“cultural bubble” in which an unsecured border is treated as a civic good.”

And last week Biden changed his immigration policy. He’s requiring asylum seekers to seek refuge in nations they pass through rather than waiting to do so in the US.

These new policies bring Biden closer to public opinion. Among Democrats, a plurality want to see the number of asylum applicants increased rather than reduced. Among the overall public, it’s the opposite. Biden is tilting toward the latter.

Biden wants to be seen as strong on crime. Democrats walk a fine line of being against crime but not wanting to wholly support the police. Doing that would risk looking anti-Black in cities that are so important to their political success. Dems support compassionate justice and not retributive justice, so they get tied up in knots when violent crime increases, which is rising in America. The problem of course is that the descriptor “violent” isn’t consistently applied.

Biden’s idea is to try to win more votes from people who are not fanatic MAGA types. That means picking off White suburban voters, Asian voters and Hispanic and Black voters, all of whom are concerned about crime.

Tom Sullivan points out that while the moderate-to-conservative White population is in slow decline, their votes remain significant, and that Democrats shouldn’t ignore them over the next two years:

“Sadly, Democrats often do. Campaigning in concentrated urban areas that tend to vote your way is simply easier and more cost-effective. What it means for largely rural states like North Carolina is that while it remains possible to elect a Democrat like Roy Cooper as governor, Democrats’ urban focus bequeaths him a Republican-dominated legislature…”

Sullivan says the Democrats need to start acting like the big-tent party that they used to be.

And that’s what Biden is attempting to do.

Time to say “enough” to war-gaming the 2024 election. It’s time for our Saturday Soother. The daffodils have sprung through the snow, a sure sign of spring. We turn back the clocks tomorrow night, another win for those who hate dark days.

So, it’s time to take a few minutes to center yourself. Start by sitting in a comfy chair and watch and listen to Lili Boulanger’s “D’un matin de Printemps” (On a spring morning). She wrote this piece in 1917 when she was 23. Boulanger battled bronchial pneumonia throughout her short life, dying a year later at age 24. Here, it is played by the Seattle Symphony conducted by Cristian Măcelaru.

Listen and think about her writing this during the darkest days of her life:

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Saturday Soother – March 4, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Superstition Mountain area, AZ – March 2, 2023 photo by Teresa Arbisi

What does freedom mean to you? Lexington, a columnist who writes about America in the Economist, says that American politicians on the right and left are groping for a new definition of what it means:

“Democrats and Republicans are competing over which party is the true defender of freedom in American life, but the claims of both have become muddy. What the debate really illuminates is how far the parties have drifted from decades of consensus about liberty in American economic and social life, without yet articulating where they are headed, if they know.”

Lexington says that as evidence of the Republicans’ commitment to freedom, they are for gun rights. The Democrats usually point to abortion rights or voting rights. But the crux of today’s battles are about how history should be taught, what pronouns people should use, and whether governments should coax investment managers to include corporate behaviors in their analysis of investments.

We see that there’s a new willingness on the part of Republicans to inject the state into what freedom means.

Lexington says that Harvard’s Michael Sandel, in his 1996 book “Democracy’s Discontent”, traced in the wake of the New Deal how Americans made peace with centralized governmental power by embracing a concept of liberty that maximized the individual citizens’ freedom to pursue their own ends, with an economy that encouraged consumption. The implicit agreement was that:

“The government would deliver economic growth and Americans would debate how to distribute it, but politicians would stay out of questions about individuals’ values or notions of the good life. In one sign of this shift the Supreme Court in 1943 blocked local governments from compelling schoolchildren to salute the flag.”

This idea of government staying out of the way of individual freedom used to be a core assumption of American politics, but not so much today. Two examples: Florida’s governor DeSantis has trouble squaring his agenda that includes enhancing the state’s control over local schools and substituting its judgment for that of corporations over how to serve their customers.

DeSantis signed a law tightening restrictions on what materials teachers can use, prevented cruise-ship companies from requiring passengers to be vaccinated and sought new government control over Disney because he disapproved of its exercise of speech.

This week, a Florida state senator introduced a bill that would make bloggers who write about DeSantis, and other members of the Florida executive cabinet or legislature register with the state or face fines.

Whatever you make of these policies, what’s happening in Florida is miles away from any definition of freedom.

Second, Lexington points to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas. In her rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union speech, she said she was a defender of free speech, while boasting she had banned the “derogatory term LatinX in our government”. Wrongo never uses the term either, but did Huckabee Sanders understand the contradiction between her actions and what freedom of speech means?

The Republicans are saying words about freedom that no longer square with the concept, while groping for definitions that they can’t articulate without losing much of America. Take for example, this quote from DeSantis’s new book, “The Courage to Be Free”:

“At the end of the day, the re-mooring of the constitutional ship of state will provide the needed foundation for the reinvigoration of a society rooted in freedom, justice, and the rule of law.”

What exactly does THAT mean?

This is a great time to introduce you to Anat Shenker-Osorio. She’s the founder of ASO Communications, and an expert on political messaging. Shenker-Osorio says we need to be thinking about freedom as freedoms, plural. And to see it as a concept that the Left needs to reclaim from the Right, who use it as a tribal signifier.

She says the Left focuses too much on what they are against. Thus, what the Left stands for gets lost in the noise. She thinks that freedom must be a contested value between the Parties.

If you think about it, the Right have fought against every major effort to extend freedom to more people. Isn’t it funny how deeply anti-communist Florida along with the deeply anti-communist Republican Party keep doing things to constrain freedom? Aren’t these the hallmarks of state socialist regimes?

On to the weekend and our Saturday Soother. It’s our time to forget about ideas that make our heads hurt; like what freedom means. Let’s try to center ourselves after another week of terrible news. Here on the Fields of Wrong, the first robins have arrived. They’re searching among the patches of snow for those early bugs that will soon be everywhere. We’re also getting our latest late winter snowfall, so good luck finding bugs for the next day or so.

Let’s start off by grabbing a chair by a south-facing window. Now watch and listen to Yo Yo Ma perform “Song of the Birds“. It’s a traditional Catalan tune and was a favorite of Pablo Casals, but the composer is unknown. Ma plays this piece often.

Casals often played it to protest war and oppression, particularly after he fled Franco’s Spain. He played it in 1961 at the White House for John F. Kennedy. Here Ma performs it live at KCRW in Los Angeles:

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Saturday Soother – February 17, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Where desert meets mountains, near CA/NV border –  February 2023 photo by Austin James Jackson

Liz Hoffman at Semafor has a short analysis of the value of credit card loyalty programs to airlines. Many of us have them and we use them to purchase our everyday goods in order to earn air miles or points that we later use to get a seat upgrade, or to fly for free.

Everyone knows about this “perk” from the airlines, but few of us know just how profitable these programs are to the carriers. It turns out that they are the most lucrative assets on airlines’ balance sheets. The uncertain profitability of the airline business makes them very important since the airlines often lose money.

The airlines used to be secretive about just how profitable their frequent-flier programs were. But, when they were in deep financial trouble during the pandemic, several US carriers pledged their loyalty programs as collateral for new loans when other financing failed.

That required the airlines to open the books on their loyalty programs. And now we’ve learned that their credit card businesses are more valuable to shareholders than their basic business of flying planes. From Hoffman:

“It turns out that United’s rewards card program with JPMorgan Chase is valued today at $22 billion. But United’s market capitalization is $16 billion, meaning investors are assigning negative value to the part of its business that flies airplanes. The same goes for American and Delta.”

From a market valuation perspective, the basic businesses of the big three US airlines are under water. Hoffman provides an eye-opening chart showing that the airlines’ huge investment in aircraft and ground operations doesn’t produce a dime of market value for their shareholders:

As you can see, none of the big three US carriers get any incremental market value from flying planes. So should they either sell off all of that hardware, or spin off their credit card businesses?

They can’t. They need the flights to create demand for the points/miles. The secret sauce behind the success of their loyalty programs is that the actual value of an air mile isn’t clear. Customers think they’re getting a $3,000 upgrade to first class for a few thousand points, while the airlines know that the upgraded seat is unlikely to sell at all, and if it does, it won’t be for anything like that amount.

Foreign carriers have less reliance on their rewards programs. Many operate with government subsidies, so their flights are more profitable. And they serve consumers who are less comfortable with plastic. So their market valuation is less dependent on loyalty programs:

We have to assume that the board members of the airlines have always known about the value of their loyalty programs. But now everyone is seeing the potential value, and the airlines might be thinking that they can wring even more value from them.

What’s distressing about this is that the airlines needed bailouts only two years ago during Covid. The US airlines received $54 billion in federal aid to pay workers during the Covid pandemic. That agreement prohibited them from share buybacks.

That’s because they had continuously bought back shares in the years prior to the bailout. The four biggest US carriers — Delta, United, American, and Southwest — spent about $40 billion buying back their companies’ stock between 2015 and 2020. That effort to improve their market valuation failed spectacularly, since their loyalty programs are now worth more than the companies themselves.

America added a 1% tax on buybacks excise tax for buybacks this year, passed as a part of the Inflation Reduction Act. This will help reduce the deficit and might dampen American corporations’ appetite for stock buybacks. The largest US airlines are making money again, and labor unions don’t want them to spend it on more stock buybacks. In a public petition, some of the largest airline labor unions — representing more than 170,000 pilots, flight attendants, customer service agents — are urging carriers to stabilize operations and invest in workers before spending on buying back more of their stock. We’ll see if that ever happens.

Enough high finance, it’s time for our Saturday Soother. Here on the Fields of Wrong, we’ve had a few warm days that led to the beginning of our spring cleanup. To settle into your soother, grab a mug of coffee and a seat by the window. Start by forgetting about Nikki Haley’s campaign or what to do now that football is over.

Now listen and watch RenĂ©e Fleming sing “Nacht und TrĂ€ume” (Night and Dreams) written in 1825 by Franz Schubert conducted by Claudio Abbado with The Lucerne Festival Orchestra in 2005:

 

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Saturday Soother – February 4, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Grist Mill, Brewster, Cape Cod, MA – February 2023 photo by Nick Haveran

Ah, Florida. Wrongo and Ms. Right will be making our annual visit to the land of DeSantis in late March to see family. Florida has always been a destination for older Americans who are tired of the -2°F with the windchill making it feel like -25°F that we had last night in Northwestern Connecticut.

Martin Edic in his Medium column has it right:

“Picture a…retirement community with rules set by a Homeowner’s Association or HOA. An idyllic place to see out one’s final years, undisturbed by the reality of the outside world.

And then a man is elected leader of your HOA and he becomes consumed by writing rules and dictating how you should live your life….Welcome to the State of Florida under Ron DeSantis.”

Historically, Florida’s population skewed older. But its demographics have changed, driven in part by a large Latino population that is traditionally politically conservative. The older voters and the Latino block have become fertile ground for wedge cultural issues like those put forth by its governor Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis has a vision for Florida: His vision says that slavery really never happened in the Deep South, but if it did, it wasn’t as bad as people in the North say.

But since that’s controversial, DeSantis has ordered the Florida educational system to eliminate curriculum that differs from his worldview: No black history. No recognition that gay and gender fluid people exist.

His vision is to lesson plan by state government. If DeSantis says slavery was not a legitimate issue in Florida history, then it wasn’t. If kids have questions about their sexuality or gender preference, make it illegal for them to learn about it. Also make it illegal to help them.

So it’s no surprise that as we enter Black History Month, DeSantis announced a proposal to all but remove both the teaching about that history and the descendants of those who survived it from Florida’s public schools and universities:

“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Tuesday that he intends to ban state universities from spending money on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives….It really serves as an ideological filter, a political filter…”

In a press release about the legislation, his office called diversity, equity and inclusion programs “discriminatory” and vowed to prohibit universities from funding them. From CNN:

“The proposal is a top priority for DeSantis’ higher education agenda this year, which also includes giving politically appointed presidents and university boards of trustees more power over hiring and firing at universities and urging schools to focus their missions on Florida’s future workforce needs.”

DeSantis has seen his standing among conservatives soar nationwide following his public stances on hot-button cultural and education issues.

He announced his higher education agenda in Bradenton, a 15-minute drive from New College of Florida, a public liberal arts college where DeSantis has installed a new board with a mandate to remake the school into his conservative vision for higher education.

On top of all that, DeSantis wants to radically change the curriculum of Florida’s public education system:

“The core curriculum must be grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization,….We don’t want students to go…at taxpayer expense, and graduate with a degree in Zombie studies.”

Say goodbye to Black history, gender study, and any queer history courses in the state. And there’s also DeSantis’ criticism of the College Board’s new curriculum for its AP course in African American Studies.

DeSantis announced in January that he would ban it, because state education officials said it wasn’t historically accurate and violated state law that regulates precisely how race-related issues are taught in public schools.

That sent the College Board into edit mode, stripping much of the subject matter that had angered DeSantis and other conservatives:

“The College Board purged the names of many Black writers and scholars associated with critical race theory, the queer experience and Black feminism. It ushered out some politically fraught topics, like Black Lives Matter, from the formal curriculum. And it added something new: “Black conservatism” is now offered as an idea for a research project.”

The College Board’s revisions address most of the DeSantis’s objections. Why? Because the College Board makes most of its revenue from AP courses. From Popular Information:

“In 2019, the College Board made over $1.1 billion dollars in revenue, according to documents filed with the IRS. Almost half of this revenue came from “AP and Instruction,” and 40% came from “assessments” like SAT exams. In 2020, revenue shrunk to $800 million dollars. “AP and Instruction” now constituted the majority of revenue…”

For the College Board, right-wing criticism of the AP African American Studies course presents a financial threat. Assessments are dying: Compared to 2019, when 55% of colleges required test scores, only 4 % of schools had a testing requirement this past fall. So it needs more students than ever to enroll in its AP courses.

So much for the Republican’s vision of “limited government.” DeSantis’ objective is seemingly to provide White Floridians with a version of the past that they can be comfortable with, regardless of whether it’s true.

On to our frigid weekend here in the Northeast: It’s time for our Saturday Soother. Try to forget about the Chinese spy balloon slowly traversing the US, or why Nikki Haley thinks she has a path to the presidency.

Instead, put on a turtleneck and grab a seat by a window. Now, listen to Gustav Holst’s “The Planets – IV. Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” which can mean gayness (sorry DeSantis) played in Royal Albert Hall in London at the 2015 Proms by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Susanna MĂ€lkki:

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Saturday Soother – January 28, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Outside Mayfield, Utah – January 2023 photo by Robert Stevens

Wrongo read a review of two books on US agriculture in the New York Review of Books. The books are “Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It” by Tom Philpott, and “The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm” by Sarah Vogel.

The review is written by Ian Frazier. This gives you an idea of his writing:

“We are eating a big hole in the middle of the Midwest and sucking up California’s ancient aquifers until the land collapses like an empty juice box. The awe that new arrivals from other countries feel when they see the bounty in a US supermarket is an illusion—more like what one might experience when stepping from a cold night into a nice, warm house where they’re burning the furniture. In short, we are plundering the natural sources of our food production and can’t go on this way.”

All of this is Big Agriculture’s doing. Corporate farming controls most of our agriculture, but it’s facing the challenge that American consumers can eat only about 1,500 pounds of food per person per year and the US population is only growing at about a half percent/year. But the investors behind Big Ag want more profit than supplying food to a slowly growing US population. So their strategy is to get Americans to eat more, and to find new foreign markets.

Philpott concentrates on just two of the US’s top food-producing regions: California’s Central Valley and the Iowa-centered Corn Belt.

The CA Central Valley constitutes about half of California’s cropland. Smaller farms concentrate on fruits while the large corporate farms mostly concentrate on nuts. Nuts are a highly profitable crop with low labor costs, but they need enormous amounts of water: To grow a single almond requires about a gallon of water.

Frazier says that almond groves cover about a fifth of the San Joaquin Valley and consume four times as much water as the city of Los Angeles:

“…I eat plenty of nuts myself, including almonds. Looking in the pantry, I see I possess the almond-growing equivalent of a few dozen bathtubfuls of California water.”

Philpott points out that TIAA, a leading provider of financial services owns a 40% stake in Treehouse California Almonds. The Farmland Index, which tracks the performance of agricultural investments, has outperformed the Standard & Poor’s index 11.8% to 9.6% in recent decades.

One problem with California’s Ag dominance is that it takes an increasing share of an increasingly scarce water supply. When irrigation water from snow and rain is scarce, as it has been for decades, farmers pump more of California’s groundwater. Nobody can say when the groundwater will run out because nobody knows how much CA has.

Turning to the Midwest, Frazier points out that the Corn Belt is one and a half times the size of California’s farming acreage. The Corn Belt uses so much fertilizer that it delivers a huge amount of polluted agricultural runoff via the Mississippi down to the Gulf of Mexico. Off of Louisiana, there’s a marine dead zone the size of New Jersey.

Huge companies dominate Midwest farming, from fertilizer and seed manufacturers to large and expensive farm machinery equipment. There is concentration in the companies that buy, process and ship the grain: Three companies: Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), and Ingredion control 87% of the US corn market. Four companies: ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Ag Processing handle 85% of the soybeans.

It is cheaper to raise pork in the US than it is in China because our feed is cheaper. Smithfield is the world’s largest pork producer and is Chinese-owned. AND, the 23 million hogs in Iowa along with Iowa’s other livestock produce as much excrement every year as do 168 million humans.

This data are called “fecal equivalent”. Iowa produces the same amount as the world’s eleven largest cities. Shouldn’t that be on Iowa’s license plate?

But the headline is that mid-sized and small farms are dying. Frazier says that midsize farms are too small to compete with the corporate farms in volume and price. OTOH, they are too big to be supported by the farmers’ outside income. In her book, Sara Vogel says the midsize farm is in danger of going extinct:

“In today’s economy [they] wouldn’t have a prayer.”

Frazier closes by wondering who in agriculture will work to save our environment. He concludes that Big Ag won’t try. A disturbing, but important article.

Time to take a break from politics and economics. It’s also time to ignore that inflation is down and an asteroid narrowly missed the earth. Instead, let’s relax with our Saturday Soother. Readers who are into football will spend their Sunday watching the NFL’s division championship games. That will probably include Wrongo. To kick off our weekend, listen to Alexandra Whittingham and Stephanie Jones perform “Helping Hands” by Sergio Assad. Assad is a Brazilian guitarist. We have featured Whittingham here before, but Jones is new to us:

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