My economic plan has always been to grow our economy from the bottom up and the middle out. Today we learned that unemployment is at a 50-year low after the two strongest years of job growth ever. We’re creating jobs. We’re lowering costs. Our plan is working. President Biden@POTUS·6hUnited States government official

I’m feeling strangely optimistic about this new year. I am not entirely sure why. A lot of it is political, I think. We got through the last round of national elections with our Democracy mostly intact. Now, with McCarthy finally elected as the Speaker of the House, we have a functioning Congress, the 118^th. Although, my guess is that the 118^th will not go down as an especially effective Congress.

I am optimistic for Democracy because Russia is losing their evil war in Ukraine. This still seems sort of impossible; for as long as I can remember – from crawling under my desk in the third grade, practicing for the inevitable Soviet attack, to the Army rotating fresh troops to Poland right now – Russia or its surrogate, the Soviet Union, has dominated our national imagination as close to invincible. But Ukraine is proving that Russia is far from invincible. By all accounts – except Russian TV – Russia is running out of men and material while Ukraine is getting stronger. I can’t imagine what Russia losing will look like, but I am sure that they will lose.

I am delighted that The Squad – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib – have all returned with several additional members. However, I don’t think their presentence will result in any Progressive legislation in the 118^th. What is progressive, I guess, is that the military will start eliminating Confederate statues and names from its facilities. So, for example, Fort Hood will become Fort Cavazos (General Richard Cavazos was the first Hispanic four-star general). I have no idea why any Army bases were named after generals from an enemy army, but they were, and now they won’t be. That’s good.

Partially, I’m feeling optimistic because I’m feeling better. Not great, but better. Three weeks ago, I was gasping for air, but now I’m getting ready to return to the Pulmonary Rehab treadmill. And, partially, it’s the nourishing rain we’ve been getting even though it has brought flooding.

We didn’t watch most of the Qatar World Cup games mostly because it came at the wrong time of year and we’re creatures of habit, but also because it was in Qatar. I’ve made peace with the FIA staging Formula One races in autocracies – I was going to say fascist states, but that has a slightly wrong flavor, let’s say repressive, non-democratic countries – because motor racing is slightly sleazy anyway. But beautiful Soccer – or Football, if you prefer – is so pure. Intellectually I know that FICA is one of the world’s most corrupt organizations, but having the World Cup in Qatar is just rubbing our faces in that corruption.

I did watch the last couple of games, however, and fell in love with Leo Messi. That led to watching several highlight videos on YouTube. And then several more (which are really just the same highlights in a different order). Watching Messi got me thinking about the extraordinary athletes I’ve had the good fortune of seeing. Athletes like Jerry Rice and Mia Hamm, and, of course, Lewis Hamilton. Then Michele and I, on the recommendation of the New Yorker and Linda Melton watched The Rescue by Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. The Rescue is about a couple of regular guys acting in an extraordinary way, and it would take a lot of work for anyone to feel pessimistic after watching it.

The Rescue made my day and is a great way to start the New Year.

War is killing people and blowing things up. Dominic Nicholls on the Podcast Ukraine Today

When I was in the Army in 1963, stationed in Korea on a HAWK Surface to Air Missile (SAM) site, our Battery had two launcher sections with nine missiles in each section for a total of eighteen missiles theoretically ready to fire. We had an additional eighteen missiles in the missile maintenance building for a total of thirty six missiles. Considering that the Chinese Air Force had more than 3.000 planes and that every HAWK launch didn’t result in a kill – far from it – that never seemed like enough ammunition. It was among the many things I grumbled about when I was in Korea.

To me it seemed like our whole HAWK system, our whole presence in Korea, was a sham. Only having thirty six missiles, was part of it. On a daily basis, we wore what the Army called fatigues, although they were olive-drab, they were emblazoned with a white rectangular over our hearts on which our last names were printed in in large block letters. We seemed like perfect targets. Additionally, under our olive-drab fatigues, we all wore regulation bright white T-shirts showing a spiffy bright white triangle at the regulation open collar.

But, most of all, our HAWK system did not work as advertised – when I say advertised, I mean advertised up the Chain of Command to the President – even with constant maintenance. I now read – in Wikipedia – that the quality of tube-based electronics, gave the radars in the early Hawk systems a mean time between failures of only 43 hours. We were about forty miles behind the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which is the defacto line separating North and South Korea and the presumed spot where the North Koreans would start their attack, and our resupply and repair depot, in Seoul, was between us and the theoretical enemy. In total, it seemed like were in a phony war as a way of making money for the military-industrial complex. In the end, it seemed like we were just playing pretend war.

This war, between Russia and Ukraine is different, when the Russians attacked Ukraine, they were definitely not playing at war. This war is the dreadful real thing. On a daily basis, an hourly basis, really, both the Russians and Ukrainians are now trying to kill as many people as possible. This takes ammunition, lots of it, way more than we had in Korea, and the problem both the Russians and the Ukrainians have is that they are running out of ammunition. What I mean by ammunition is more than just bullets- I don’t know how they are doing with actual assault rifle bullets, 7.62 x 39mm for older Russian made gear and the more powerful 7.62 x 51mm NATO supplied gear – I mean anything that is shot down range; 155mm howitzer shells, rockets, even loitering munitions like Iranian Shahed drones.

I was reminded of all this when I saw this headline US Army Awards Raytheon $1.2B for Ukraine NASAMS in my Google News feed. It turns out that the United States is worried that we are running too low on the ammunition that we have squirreled away for future wars and, rather than draw down from our reserves, we are ordering, as part of the US’s Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, six National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems that will take twenty four months to build and deliver. This is, in effect, a very much modernized and updated HAWK system that the Pentagon thinks Ukraine will still need two years from now.

The inference from that headline is that the United States has relearned the Modern wars take an incredible amount of equipment and ammunition lesson. The days of having only thirty-six HAWK missiles ready to go are long gone.

As an aside, I read in the same Wikipedia article that the vacuum tube based electronics {of HAWK has been replaced}with modern solid-state circuits, the mean time between failures has increased a hundred fold, and, according to Janes, the original system’s single shot kill probability was 0.56; Hawk improved this to 0.85. End aside.

For me, last year was sort of a surprise year. I thought the pandemic would end and, somehow, the world would return to what I think of as usual, but, thinking about it, I’ve felt that the world would return to normal for a long time, and it never has. The great Ulysses S Grant said, “War is progressive because all the instruments and elements of war are progressive.” I want to add, Everything is progressive, built on the past, but new.

Today is not a new start; it is the continuation of the long line of what went before. 2022 didn’t start fresh, and 2023 won’t either. The Russo-Ukrainian War will continue, Covid19 will continue, last year will continue, hell, Tom Brady will probably continue to play football (maybe forever). But everything will also be different.

I was listening to a New Yorker podcast yesterday, and they were talking about their most memorable cultural experiences from last year, none of which I had even heard of. One writer recommended Horse by Geraldine Brooks, which, among other things, is about the long tail of racial prejudice still with us. Another is East West Street: On the Origins of “Genocide” and “Crimes Against Humanity” by Philippe Sands, which traces the radicle world philosophy used in the Nuremberg trials to two Jewish thinkers from Eastern Europe. The third and last one was the movie The Rescue, about the 2018 rescue of a young Thai soccer team trapped in a cave. The film is by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin of Free Solo fame.

For me, the two most memorable cultural experiences were The Patient starring Steve Carrel and created by Joel Fields &; Joe Weisberg. It is a ten-episode mini-series, each about thirtyish minutes long, for a total of about five hours. I highly recommend it. Still, my most memorable experience is listening to Ukraine: The Latest every weekday morning. It is by several writers in the British newspaper The Telegraph, and I listen to it on Spotify.

As an sort of an aside, I had no idea that The Telegraph is a conservative newspaper and I wouldn’t have known except that I read a review that pointed that out. Not knowing has been great because I have ended up judging what they are reporting on their constant rather than some preconceived idea of their slant. End aside.

Finally, I want to leave with a joke that President Volodymyr Zelenskyy  told David Letterman in a subway station ninety feet underground in Kyiv. Zelenskyy said “Want to hear a Jewish joke?” and I guess it is a Jewish joke although I’m not sure why.

“Two Jewish guys from Odesa meet up, one asks the other: ‘So what’s the situation? What are people saying?”
“And he goes, ‘What are people saying? They are saying it’s a war.”
“What kind of war?”
“Russia is fighting NATO.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, yes! Russia is fighting NATO.”
“So how’s it going?”
“Well, 70,000 Russian soldiers are dead. The missile stockpile has almost been depleted. A lot of equipment is damaged, blown up.”
“And what about NATO?”
“What about NATO? NATO hasn’t even arrived yet.”

During an asthma attack, the airways become swollen and inflamed. The muscles around the airways contract and the airways produce extra mucus, causing the breathing (bronchial) tubes to narrow. MAYO CLINAC Website

Prednisone is a glucocorticoid medication mostly used to suppress the immune system and decrease inflammation. Wikipedia. 

Corticosteroids, often known as steroids, are an anti-inflammatory medicine. NHS inform.

I got up the Wednesday morning before Christmas, and I could hardly breathe, gasping for air like a beached fish, feeling like I was drowning. It was scary, and it only got a little better as the day went on. On Thursday, the cycle repeated itself. For a week. I didn’t think I would die, but I was miserable, gasping for air all through Christmas. Not feeling good enough – but not feely bad enough either, a sweet spot, I guess, with constant high-grade misery – to Google the problem.

I think I sort of reverted to an eight year old wanting Mommy to fix it. Curling up and sleeping most of the day, waiting. And she did, sort of. Tuesday, my pulmonologist was back from Christmas Holiday and, among other things, she prescribed a blast – well, 4 teeny, tiny pills, but it felt like a blast when I woke up this morning – of Prednisone. So, while I don’t feel great, I feel much better and I didn’t feel great a month ago when I started Pulmonary Rehab. I guess it is most accurate to say I feel comparatively great.

I feel more New Yeary than Christmasy. Still, I grew up with the Holiday this time of year as Christmas, with Merry Christmas! as the universal greeting. Whether you are a Pagan celebrating Solstice, Jewish celebrating Hanukkah, a Buddhist celebrating a late Bodhi Day, or somebody like me just celebrating the secular holiday, I hope you have a very Merry Christmas.

I

Britannica Dictionary definition of ART. 1. [noncount] : something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.

Bencher: An individual who takes photographs of graffiti. The term originated in New York when the graffiti writers and non-graffiti writers would sit on benches at train stations waiting for the trains to go by to take pictures and admire graffiti. Glossary of graffiti from Wikipedia.

Putting aside the question of What is Art and who gets to define it? for a while, something has been happening to blank city walls almost everywhere. I don’t mean graffiti-like Summer in the Granary, below, which is from a different tradition; I mean much more traditional painting, possibly commissioned and probably with an actual permit. I saw my first exterior wall painting – for lack of a better descriptor – in 1976, in Palo Alto, of all places. There were several – eventually, nine – approximately life-size figures painted on walls around town. Two I remember were an alien in a flying saucer crashed into a bank wall and two burglars escaping down the side of a building. This was before Silicon Valley was Silicon Valley and the figures seemed cute and wholesome.

Except for that, I don’t really remember any street art until I was driving by some wall paintings on 6th Street in San Francisco. They had already been defaced but I was instantly attracted – for lack of a better word – to it. Now I see wall art everywhere. Well, maybe not everywhere but almost everywhere, all over Paris, even Elko Nevada. Salt Lake City is full of Street Art and proud of it. Especially in the Granary District where we were staying, all we had to do is walk out the front door and wander the long way through the neighborhood on our way to getting coffee.

We ended our wall painting walk trying to guess the various luminaries at the SLC Pepper wall painting (with life-size figures). This remake by Jan Haworth, who collaborated on the original Beatles’ Sgt Pepper cover, features a lot more women and people of color. It was paid for by Zions Bank for us to enjoy.