… Without Cancer. Yeah!!
My One Year Anniversary
Category Archives: Current Affairs
Our Agave Is Blooming
Asparagaceae Agavoideae Agave americana, the full name of our main backyard Agave (also known as a Century Plant).
I have no idea why we have a huge agave in our backyard, except that – I’m guessing – we thought the plant would not grow very big. But it just kept growing until it dominated our yard. I want to say garden here, but as a friend replied when Michele complained about how difficult it is to maintain “her” garden with the quail and rabbits eating all the sprouts, “You don’t have a garden, you have a habitat”.
Whatever the backyard is, the agave dominates it, and we’ve grown to like its sculptural quality. Then, at the end of last year, it started growing a huge, asparagus-like stalk. In the hot spell we had in early March, it seemed to be growing a couple of inches a day. Then, in late May, it started branching out. Last week, it started blooming, and we are thrilled.
It’s The Inequality, Stupid.
We live in a system that’s stealing from us. Graham Platner Tou Tube ad.
AOC is in the house now. So AOC, you don’t even need a name anymore. You can go anywhere in the world, you say AOC and they know who you are. David Axelrod, while introducing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a public interview in front of a packed house at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
They assume my ambition is positional. They assume my ambition is a title or a seat, and my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, Senate and House seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer health care is forever, a living wage is forever. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at that interview.
I heard that someone was flying a plane with a banner that said This is Trump country… It sure don’t look like it today. I don’t think this is Trump country. This is our country. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez just before her speech in Folsom, California.
We Liberals seem to have an all-purpose answer for why so many people voted for Donald Trump. “They’re stupid,” or “They only watch FOX News”, which sort of means the same thing. I don’t buy that generalization. Sure, some people are stupid, and some are not interested in politics or current events – as we used to call it. – enough to be informed, but most people know that most people are being screwed by the few the system is serving.
A large number of people voted for Trump because they were desperate. They hoped Trump might stop the economic screwing they were getting from powerful economic interests. They were so desperate that they had even voted for a black man with a Muslim name, Barrak Husain Obama. Obama was a Washington outsider, and, while the change he brought was real, it was minimal rather than substantial. When Trump ran in 2016, he said he was already rich and didn’t need any more money, so he could bring real change. Of course, that was a lie. The funny thing about money, not funny Ha Ha, but funny unexpected, is the more a person has, the more they want. Very few people get very rich and say, “I don’t need any more money”. Trump said it, but – obviously – Trump didn’t really mean it.
I thought that the voting public was still so desperate that they would be willing to try a woman, even a Latina woman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now I’m not so sure. Now I think that the country is more sexist and, probably, more racist than I thought a couple of months ago, but that is not the main reason I’ve changed my mind. The main reason is that AOC – a handle I’ll use for the rest of this – is a fiscal populist, and the Democratic Party leadership, while socially liberal, is fiscally conservative. Even more importantly, the Liberal Media establishment, like the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Los Angeles Times, and CBS, and NBC, and ad infinitum, are fiscally conservative. They are aligned with what they call the Centrists (as if that were a virtue). Politicians who think we should have a one-payer health system, or a fair Minimum Wage, are called Extremists by the so-called Liberal Media.
Since I started to write this post – way longer ago than I’m ready to admit – several things have happened that are starting to make me change my mind. A new poll by the highly regarded AtlasIntel has AOC leading a crowded, hypothetical 2028 Democratic primary field. In that poll, AOC narrowly edged out former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for the top spot. Twenty-twenty-eight will be a good year to be a Democrat running for president, for what I think are obvious reasons, but getting the Democratic nomination for a woman, a Latina, and most importantly, a fiscal Liberal, will be hard.
I’m convinced, for two reasons, however, that AOC will try. First, when she was sworn into Congress in January 2019, she wore large hoop earrings and bright red lipstick. She said she was inspired by Jusyice Sotamayer and said: “Next time someone tells Bronx girls to take off their hoops, they can just say they’re dressing like a Congresswoman.” It was a badge of honor she was not going to change, but she toned down both her lipstick color and the size of her earrings.
Still, the biggest reason I think AOC will run for President is that she is campaigning outside of her district and, even, outside New York, although AOC is not calling it campaigning. Last year, AOC and Bernie Sanders went on the “Fighting Oligarchy” National Tour, during which they campaigned in 21 states (Los Angeles, Folsom, and Bakersfield in California; Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Bethlehem in Pennsylvania; Iowa City and Davenport in Iowa). This year, she has campaigned for Sam Forstag in Montana, Chriss Rab in Pennsylvania, and Analilia Mejia in New Jersey.
Nobody ever wins the first time they run for office. Nobody’s ever supposed to win their first bid for office. Nobody’s ever supposed to win without taking lobbyists’ money. No one’s ever supposed to defeat an incumbent. No one’s ever supposed to run a grassroots campaign without running any ads on television. We did all of those things. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
I’m At A Loss For Words
I haven’t blogged in weeks, not because nothing has happened – it has, both to the world and me – but because I seem to be in a loop. Everything in my life and everything I want to blog about seems to be on repeat. We went to the Carizzo Plain some time ago, hoping to see a superbloom. It turns out that we were a little late, but it was still nice. But I’ve written about the Carizzo Plain’s Superbloom several times, and doing it again just seems superfluous.
One new thing: we went to the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek over Easter. Now, thinking back on it, I’m surprised I haven’t gone before. I have certainly heard of it for years. I was working as a Construction Manager only a few blocks away in the late 1960s, but it was still a farm in those days. Now it is primarily a cactus and suculent garden, beautifully laid out.
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again, President Donald Trump said, referring to what would happen to Iran if his demands were not met.
How deranged do you have to be to be upset with the Pope for preaching about peace and love in the spirit of Jesus Christ? Representative Ilhan Omar (who is a Muslim in case you didn’t know).
To change the subject to something which is actually sort of new, the Wall Street Journal – which I don’t read, but saw in Which Car – Reports from April 15, 2026, indicate that senior defense officials have held preliminary meetings with top executives from Ford, General Motors, GE Aerospace, and Oshkosh Corp. The goal of these talks is to determine how quickly the domestic auto industry could pivot to a “wartime footing” if needed.
We seem to be running out of munitions, especially anti-drone munitions, in our so-called war with Iran, and that doesn’t surprise me. I was stationed on a Hawk anti-aircraft site in the mid 1960s, and we had 18 missiles ready, or near ready, to fire with another 18 missiles in the onsite maintenance-storage facility. There were 16 HAWK batteries in Korea and China, alone had an estimated 3,000 planes, so it never seemed like we were very serious about protecting “Freedom’s Frontier”. It still doesn’t.
Jim Compton
Don’t mope, take action.
Accept mistakes, lessons learned.
Every day, something good.
Help others, humor.
A project. A random note from Jim Compton to himself.
Jim Compton, my sister Paula’s husband, died earlier this year after a long bout with Parkinson’s disease. Without him, the world is a dimmer, less fun, and less interesting place.
Jim was born Dinsdale Michael James Compton in London in 1930, but he was known by almost everyone as Jim Compton. When The War started, Jim, along with almost all of the other school-aged kids, was sent to the country to get them out of range of the German bombers. Jim was smart, exceptionally smart, and that led to his being accepted into a boarding school, established in the 1400s, that educated children from working-class or poor families. From there, he was accepted into Oxford, where he earned a PhD in Chemistry, and then went on to a postdoctoral position in Canada. His research spanned physical chemistry, solid-state physics, and medical technology.
According to Paula, “Jim always said that he would rather do a bit of everything than become a distinguished specialist in a single field.” Although he rarely spoke to his family about his scientific accomplishments, his professional footprint was significant; he filed at least 7 patents and published more than 30 papers, ranging from “Neutron capture cross-section measurements for U-238 between 0.4 and 1.4 MeV” – whatever that means – (published in The Journal of Chemical Physics with W. G. Schneider and T. C. Waddington) to developing methods to use radioactive isotopes to visualize and measure how air and blood flow through the lungs, providing a critical diagnostic tool for identifying lung diseases and blockages (I think I was on the other end of that paper when I was tested at Sequoia Hospital for asthma; thank you, Jim).
More importantly than his academic accomplishments, in my opinion, Jim had a contagious love of life that was hard not to catch when he was around. He lived in the moment. He was curious about everything, kind, and funny. Jim Compton was a remarkably nonjudgmental man. I’ll miss him, we’ll all miss him.