“Baseball is like church. Many attend few understand.” – Leo Durocher

Last weekend, we watched grandson Auggie play baseball in a tournament at the Twin Creeks Sports Complex in Sunnyvale. He plays on a team – club? – named the FPs, for Future Prospects (which seems to show a sense of ironic humor that I didn’t have at thirteen). Another team was named Cali and, when I asked Auggie where they were from, he answered, “uh, California”. The kids had had four games over two days and were exhausted. They won their first three games and lost their last – which was the only game we saw, but it was great to see Auggie play.

One thing that I was struck by is that baseball played by 13-year olds is much closer to professional baseball than any other sport I can think of. Watch 13-year olds play basketball or football – either kind – and there is a major difference from the pros, but baseball, not so much. That is not to say that baseball is easy, it takes incredible coordination, more so than football and I do not know enough about baseball to catch the nuances but when a kid hits a deep fly ball, it will probably be caught. Early in the game, while Auggie was playing third base, the batter hit a line drive between third and second. Auggie took a big step, caught the ball, and threw the batter out at first. I think I may have been the only one who was impressed.

Next week the team goes to Aspen for another tournament which we will not see (duh!). In the meanwhile, Charlotte spent a week at a surfing camp in southern Mexico. Then, this week, she goes to a Soccer tournament in San Diago.

When I was a teenager, there were no tournaments like this, we had to stay home and entertain ourselves or, in my case, get a summer job after about sixteen. I talk to some people my age and they tend to glorify the entertain yourself aspect and worry, loudly, that kids are losing some sort of ability to self entertain (it goes along with “they use their smartphones too much”). That is not how I remember it. I remember a summer that was pretty boring and definitely could have used some organized sports to spice it up.

Malm observes that, measuring by capacity, 49 percent of the fossil-fuel-burning energy infrastructure now in operation was installed after 2004. Ezra Klein in an opinion piece entitled It Seems Odd That We Would Just Let the World Burn in the New York Times.

We are not in a drought; drought implies, at the very least, that this lack of water is temporary which this isn’t. This is the new normal isn’t really accurate either because this – whatever you want to call it – isn’t stable. It is getting hotter and the climate is changing, almost imperceptibly, every year. The new normal is a moving target. It seems to me that most people, certainly most people in a position to influence policy, are still treating what is happening as an anomaly. This leads us to cheap and temporary solutions – or, often, no solutions because it will get better- rather than long-range solutions that really deal with the problem. And this isn’t just in California, it is the entire West.

Lake Mead is down 140 feet from normal and is only at 35% of full capacity. Last year, the Colorado River basin got about 80% of normal precipitation but only about 30% of normal got to the lake. The rest was lost to parched ground and evaporation due to the increase in heat. For me, the scariest stat I’ve read so far is that the July snowpack in the Sierras is 0% of normal. The population of California is 39.7 million and the land can’t support that. Maybe we will be able to adapt, to change our infrastructure – like building desalination plants and covering reservoirs to start with – in a way that will allow all of us to live here. But so far, nobody seems to be running for office on that.

The Champlain Towers South collapsed a couple of weeks ago and it pushed everything off the front page. To me, that seemed sort of ghoulish and exploitative. Yes, it was a tragedy and I don’t want to downplay the horror of well over a hundred people dying in one awful night, but it was a specific tragedy. It was on the front page every day and presented as a cliff-hanger however we all knew, early on, that the missing people were not really missing, they were under the rubble and most of them, if not every single one of them, were not alive. But as I started to think about it, I’ve come to realize that that the Champlain Towers is an example of how we – we being almost everybody – treat a slow-moving disaster. In a way, Champlain Towers is a scale model of the way we are dealing with the Global Climate Crisis and, I fear, the end result will be similar.

Champlain Towers had been deteriorating for years with cracks in the concrete structure getting bigger allowing water to penetrate, causing flaking concrete and corrosion. It was something that the owners had been arguing about for years. We are all susceptible to wishful thinking and a large enough number of condo owners did not want to acknowledge the problems. They were worried that, if there really was a problem, or. even worse, problems, their property value would go down. They preferred to let sleeping dogs lie, there is no point in looking for problems. Eventually, as things continued to deteriorate, enough recalcitrant owners agreed on getting an inspection and, in October of 2018, the engineers issued a report which detailed numerous structural problems and pointed out that they were getting even worse and were potentially dangerous. On one level, everybody already knew that and the majority of owners who did not to hire a consultant in the first place were now worried about the cost of repairs.

It turned out that the repairs were going to cost a lot of money, something like $175,000 per condo, and nobody has that kind of money kicking around. Additionally, they found some city engineer who said that the building was safe, so starting the repairs dragged on with nothing happening.

Until it did.

Vermont and South Dakota are actually very similar Both have slightly older, white, rural populations Have comparable median incomes Both have Republican governors And these days, they look super similar on infections Here they are over past 2 months

Vermont has vaccinated (1+ shot) nearly 75% of its population SD? 50% Vermont has a high degree of immunity through vaccinations So how does SD have high population immunity? Prior infections Here’s how pandemic has played out in both states

and you can see it in the suffering of the people of the two states Deaths per capita from COVID in VT vs SD Nearly 6 times as many folks in SD died from COVID as VT 40/100K in VT versus 230/100K in South Dakota

So both states have landed at high population immunity Good But SD got there by having close to 50% of folks infected And suffering high death rates during the fall and winter months So yes vaccines or infections work for population immunity One is much better End

A couple of days ago, our cat, Precious Mae, bit me. I had been sitting on the bed, putting on my socks, and she bit me. Well, actually, I had just finished putting on my socks and was reaching for my watch when she bit me. Both Michele and I agreed that it was my fault. Let me explain.

Precious Mae loves smelling and – for lack of a better word – cuddling shoes. Michele has a tendency to leave her shoes scattered around the house wherever she happened to take them off. Precious Mae can be walking through a room on her way somewhere else, see the shoes, and go over to spend fifteen minutes smelling and cuddling them.

In this case, Precious Mae was on the bed, cuddling my watch -which I’ve probably worn for at least 300 days during the last year, giving the leather band a smell, I guess, that entices Precious Mae even if I can’t smell it – when I reached for the watch. She instantly bit me, striking like a mongoose. I was shocked. My first reaction was that it was my fault and I said something like, “Oh, I shouldn’t have done that.”. For some reason. the ridiculousness of the whole thing, besides making me laugh, somehow reminded me of people making excuses for their Jaguar breaking down.

Today, Jags are pretty reliable – nowhere near as reliable as a Japanese car or Korean car, but slightly better than a BMW, about the same as a Mercedes – but that wasn’t always the case. They were often very fast and usually gorgeous, but, up to about ten, fifteen years ago, they were notoriously unreliable. Because of their reputation, Jags didn’t ever sell very well which gave them an aura of exclusivity and that, along with the promise of speed and their good looks, meant that there were always some people willing to overlook the reliability problem. I have known three of them – a 4.2 liter E-Type, an XJ12 sedan with a magnificent 5.2 liter V-12, and a 3.8 liter IX Saloon – and all of them were astoundingly unreliable. The buyers were from different eras of my life and didn’t know each other but had one thing in common, when something broke, which almost always happened, they had a sort of excuses that basically amounted to, “It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have driven it”. People willing to defend their cars – or cats, or dogs – at the expense of themselves, I find very appealing, in a quirky sort of way (being one of them, I guess, so, duh).

But I’ve always wondered why. And why do I defend Precious Mae in the same way? I’ve come around to the opinion that it is just good ol’ cognitive dissonance reduction.

Psychologists, like doctors, like to use very precise words, and the longer each word the better because it makes it more precise. As an aside, enginers are the same and Formula One is all about engineering, so, tires don’t wear (out), tires degrade and the distance left before they have to be changed is judged by the rate of degradation. But Formula One is run by racers so everybody just calls it deg as in “I’ve got a lot of deg on the right rear.” End aside. I’m not sure that there is an equivalent for cognitive dissonance reduction so I’ll use the full term.

The theory behind cognitive dissonance reduction is that we can’t hold two opposing beliefs in our mind at the same so we change something to make the opposing beliefs line up. Sometimes, we change the facts or the weight of one of the facts, an unfortunately typical and especially debilitating example is, My spouse is s great human being who has had a hard life but he beats me…so I must be wrong. it must be my fault. One of my favorites is I love watching the animals in our backyard, each one is an individual, living a life, wanting to prosper, wanting to live, but animals are so delicious…it is Ok to eat pasture-raised animals because they have had a good life (except for that one very bad last day).

It is shocking how powerful – powerful mostly because it is not conscience – cognitive dissonance reduction is. We think we are so logical but most of the time we are operating on deeply buried beliefs that we’ve changed the real world to match.