Some pics from a short trip to Phoenix a few weeks back.

I have always liked maps.  I’m not sure when it began, perhaps just taking car trips in the old days before GPS and trying to get from point A to point B.  I remember I had (still have, actually) a road atlas that I used to “read” nights when I couldn’t sleep.  All the towns with funny names, all the vast spaces.  Places I might go someday.

Google Earth and Google Maps became something I would spend hours with, I suppose the way some people spend time reading or watching movies.  For instance, this week I saw on a map (perhaps on a TV weather report, I’m not sure) a big-ish island off the coast of Baja, Mexico in the Pacific.  I had been to Catalina when I was younger and wondered what this place would be like.  I went to Google Maps and found out I was called Guadalupe Island. Wiki told me lots more.

Some fishermen still lived in camps there seasonally.  Some goats dropped off by whalers in the 1800s stripped the island of pretty much all vegetation.  Even some small forests disappeared.

Guadalupe shares the California chaparral and woodlands ecoregion with the Channel Islands of California in the United States, but the island was at one time practically denuded of all plants higher than a few centimeters by up to 100,000[note 1] feral goats.

Originally brought there in the 19th century by European whalers and sealers for provisions when stopping over, the population eventually eliminated most vegetation; the number of goats declined to a few thousand. The main impact of the goat population was before this collapse, about the turn of the 19th/20th century.

The last of the goats were removed by 2005, so maybe things will come back.  There is also a landing strip on the middle of the island and if you zoom in close, a crashed plane at the end of the runway.  Found a few small encampments along the shore.  If I’m ever in the neighborhood I definitely will stop by.

The 2017 tax overhaul seems to be (predictably?) benefiting large corporations and the top 1%.  Because of this, deficits are heading toward $1 trillion per year, a first for a country at peace and not experiencing a financial crisis.  What comes next?  I suppose further eroding of services as the tax burden continues to lurch downward.

And we’re done!

One of my favorites.  Dave Barry’s yearly recap.

Dave Barry’s Year in Review 2019

Impeachment. Brexit. Greenland. Can we say anything good about this year? Nah.

This blog is itself a protest against the abuses of today’s commercial Social Media.  The article below from Fast Company magazine goes a long way toward explaining what is wrong with companies like Facebook.

The real reason why Facebook and Google won’t change

Facebook, Google, and other masters of the surveillance economy have bred a virulent mutation of capitalism, which explains why they aren’t interested in addressing their many scandals

If you want to know why Facebook won’t “censor” Nazis, terrorists or anyone, it is because these are sources of their profit.  That is all.  From the article:

Facebook and other surveillance capitalists don’t want to harm you, but they gladly extract data from your pain. They don’t care if you’re happy, though they’re determined to fabricate the lucrative predictions that spring from your joy. It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it in ways that they can transmute into profit. Once you understand this, it’s not hard to see that every Facebook action that triggers outrage is simply a predictable consequence of this economic perversion’s basic mechanisms.

I consider the biggest problem in America (and perhaps the world) is the influence of money in politics.  Democracy and Capitalism have always had a difficult and confusing relationship.  While democracy tries to ensure each individual an equal amount of influence in the affairs of state, capitalism does more or less the opposite, concentrating political power in the hands of a few, based on wealth.  The end game here eliminates both capitalism and democracy, with a very small number of people owning and controlling everything.  This has gone by many names in many places over the centuries, but it has been more the rule than the exception in mankind’s history.

America seems to be heading down this path.  As money begins to equal political power, the “one dollar one vote” replaces “one man one vote” and we head back to the territory of Kings, tsars, dictators, Caesars, emperors and all the other types of systems  that feudalare essentially feudalism.  Great if you are king or someone very close to the king, but not so great for the everyone else.

What prevented this up until now, at least in America, was a limit on how much money could be pumped into the political system.  As that has eroded, so has democracy, in the sense that the things people really want to spend their tax dollars on are seldom even discussed.  Below is an article on what might have been the death blow to the sort of democracy Americans enjoyed during my lifetime. From Salon:

The Citizens United ruling broke American democracy at the start of the decade. It never recovered

Had our annual holiday party last night.

I have been a longtime subscriber to the New Yorker magazine.  Originally, I admit, for the cartoons, more recently for the movie reviews.  I have no particular interest in art but over the years I have found myself enjoying Peter Schjeldahl’s art critic column.  I don’t read them all but I always enjoyed the ones I read.  Maybe I should have read them all.  I also enjoy the Personal History articles, where famous and not so famous writers talk about themselves.  Below is Peter Schjeldahl’s article, but under the Personal History section.  I’m not sure why, but my subscription has the title as “77 Sunset Me”, perhaps some obscure reference to the 1960s TV show “77 Sunset Strip”.  The article from the web site is below.

The Art of Dying

I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?

I have seen lots of these odd ads about “surprise medical billing” on TV.   I couldn’t figure out the angle and couldn’t find the source of the ads.  Seems a private equity firm invested in a company that farms our ER docs wants to be able to charge, well, whatever they want.  Basically a huge media effort to allow a financial firm to screw sick Americans.

Yesterday this came out. In an exceedingly rare show of bipartisanship, everyone agreed that this was wrong, and for a brief moment it looked like our elected officials would do  the right thing and protect American consumers from the worst sorts of predators.  Alas, it was not to be.  From Common Dreams:

Top Dem Accused of Putting Private Equity Before Sick and Poor by Killing Effort to End ‘Devastating’ Surprise Medical Bills

One critic said Rep. Richard Neal, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is “actively helping private equity-owned doctor groups rip off and destroy the lives of people at their most vulnerable.”