A new chapter

No, it's not another installment of Star Wars.  But today is the end of one chapter in my life and the beginning of another.  After commuting across the border for almost 18 years, I will be making calls from my home office starting next week and the prospect is both liberating and terrifying.  Either way it will be exciting and I am looking forward to new challenges.

Dysfunction Squared

Pretty soon, Jared will hold the position of Sec Def, State, Interior and any other vacant cabinet position and Ivanka will be chief of staff and baby sitter to the commander of Chaos.  Not because they are temperamentally suited for the jobs.  It's just that no one else wants them.   A stint in the tRump administration is now seen as the ultimate career killer.  Not to mention the money you'll be spending on lawyers for the forseeable  future.  Besides, that is the way The Donald has always done business.  The tRump organization was a small, family business with relatives in almost all the top jobs.  The US government is rapidly devolving into the president's eponymous business; all tRump, all the time.  What could possibly go wrong!

yuletide joy

Despite or perhaps because of the pressure of rehearsing and supporting 3 different holiday music performances, the Divine Mrs. M and I agree our holiday spirits are on the ebb.  The religious side of the holiday is covered, but the secular side is wanting.   Perhaps as we look forward to our 44th Christmas together, the pressure of the commercial nature of the holiday has dulled some of the enjoyment.  Also, the existential threat to world peace and democracy which resides in the current White House occupant has caused a deficit in holiday enthusiasm.   It's hard to enjoy when the drumbeat of current events leads to the conclusion our species is getting ready to destroy itself.  But maybe tomorrow will be different.  Family and friends coming together to celebrate tradition with a new generation should be just the thing to buoy our otherwise flagging spirits.  So, have yourself a Merry little Christmas and hopefully a joyous New Year.  I'm certainly going to try!

Non stop chaos

Now that the last "adult in the room", DOD secretary James Mattis has tendered his resignation, the media is in speculation mode about the meaning of it all.   Even the putative liberals on MSNBC with the possible exception of Chris Hayes were in a tizzy about the pullout of 2000 troops from Syria and the reduction in force in Afghanistan which are the factors generally acknowledged to have precipitated Mattis' resignation.  It seems to me the US military rarely if ever agrees to pull out of a situation once it has expended any effort, no matter how ineffectual in the area.  As one senator put it, we all knew our deployment would not have any significant effect on Russian and Iranian plans for Assad's country.   The only negative is the probable slaughter of pro US Kurdish forces by Turkey.  As far as Afghanistan, we have been loosing that war for the last 10 years.  As every great power in the world has found out, the country is a quagmire for whoever is trying to pacify the locals going back to Alexander the Great.  So, withdrawal from both of these areas is not problematic from a utilitarian perspective.   Of course, the deeper problem is The Donald's increasingly unhinged behavior as the walls continue to close in on him.  In an effort to bolster the support of his equally crazy base, he is also demanding $5 billion for his "steel slats" on the southern border.  This will not end well, and the first casualties are the hundreds of thousands of federal employees who are being furloughed as today ends.   I doubt many of them will be singing joyful Christmas carols today.

Dreaming on

Looks like the only White Christmas the Divine Mrs. M is likely to experience this year will be when she hauls out and views that old Bing Crosby/ Danny Kaye chestnut!   We are expecting freezing rain tonight and temperatures near 50 tomorrow, followed by several mostly clear days including Christmas day.   It's quite a contrast to the snowy conditions after Thanksgiving.  The weather reports are even talking about flash floods as we get rainfall on frozen ground.  These weird conditions of course are more evidence of climate change.

Savoring the irony

Schadenfreude is addictive and as the Mueller investigation and many other examinations of the tRump administration's misdeeds continue, the opportunity  for more increases.  The latest jolt was provided by a federal judge who reminded Michael Flynn he is more than fortunate to be among the first cooperators with Mueller.  This after the conservative media noise machine opined the judge would exonerate Flynn and instead rip the government for harassment.  Emmitt Sullivan told Flynn the severity of his crimes as explained in his copy of  the Mueller team's unredacted sentencing recommendation was so great he invited Flynn to keep cooperating if he wanted to avoid jail time.  It will be interesting to see how right wing pundits walk back their confident predictions now!

To Be or not to Be

While checking the media for new outrages committed by or for the tRump administration I ran across a column in the NYT asking if the extinction of humanity might not be a good thing.  The writer, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University seemed to come down on the side that thinks the loss of out species would probably be an unalloyed benefit to the planet and the other beings who inhabit it.  The author feels that the suffering we are causing animals through the destruction of habitat and the suffering we cause them by factory farming is enough cause (maybe, he says) to merit our own demise.  On the other hand, we are unarguably the apex of evolution on the planet and as such, the producers of Shakespeare, Sophocles, Da Vinci and the pantheon of creative genius our species has wrought ensures we should endure.   While not endorsing extinction, the professor suggests the further procreation of succeeding generations should be seriously re-evaluated by his fellow humans in light of our capacity to cause the suffering of fellow conscious animals and destruction of the planet's ecology.  It is a sobering read, but I doubt many of my fellows would pause for very long in the race to see how fast we can destroy the cradle of our civilization.