Anemia is a condition in which you lack enough healthy red blood cells to carry adequate oxygen to your body’s tissues. Having anemia can make you feel tired and weak. There are many forms of anemia, each with its own cause. Anemia can be temporary or long-term, and it can range from mild to severe. The Mayo Clinic via Google.

I am in Sequoia Hospital – I know, again -and I feel better than I have in months. It now seems that my problem is that I am seriously anemic. That is both the good news and the bad news. The good part of the news is that we – we being a bevy of doctors – now know what is causing my shortness of breath although the anemia is probably more of a fellow traveler, along with a replacement heart valve that is ending its useful life and lungs that are pretty trashed, the bad part is that nobody knows what is causing the anemia, although there are theories. As the various theories are being tested and explored, I got a blood transfusion, iron injections, and heavy-duty Lasix injections to lower my water level.

One theory was that I had an ulcer but that lost favor after testing, another is that my esophagus is chafing against some other, nearby, body part. My gastroenterologist will perform an endoscopy on Friday to explore that theory. Still another theory is that my deteriorating heart valve is the culprit (both Michele and I are in that camp). Meanwhile, I am sitting/lying all day long with a constant parade of doctors, bored enough to watch My Fair Lady on Netflix.

How strange America has become. Cousin Marion in an email from Gascony, France.

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president. A statement made Senate Majority Leader McConnell in an interview in the National Journal on Oct. 23, 2010

I’ve had a problem breathing since last summer’s fires with their resultant smoke and the attempted cures have only made it worse. At first, I thought it was my heart because, with a heart valve from a cow – well, remanufactured parts of a cow’s heart sac, actually – everything, from a stubbed toe on up, is a heart problem. My heart is doing fine – considering – so the last couple of weeks have been taken up with fretting about my lungs but various Xrays and CT scans indicate that they are not the problem. I’ve now had both my shots – yeah that! – and had a much bigger reaction with the first shot so I keep trying to blame my shortness of breath and chills on them but that theory has not been as comforting as I had hoped. Meanwhile, the earth has continued to rotate and life goes on.

Except that, in way more cases than should be, life didn’t go on, it ended early. In Washington, some deranged guy drove into a couple of Capitol Police Officers, killing one. In Orange County, California, another deranged guy killed four people, another one killed ten people – this time by a guy of Arab descent – in Boulder Colorado – and still another by a white Christian guy lamenting that he liked sex which he somehow used to justify the killing of six Asian women in Georgia (the head cop said “He had a bad day.”). As the plague winds down – because of Trump’s early push to get a vaccine and Biden’s heavy lifting in actually getting the vaccine delivered – our national love of violence winds back up.

While I am worried about my health, in 42 different states, 42 different republican legislatures are hard at work trying to make voting harder for Black People. I’m sure that this – these? – will end up in court and make a lot of lawyers richer, but, so far, all that has happened is that Major League Baseball has canceled its All-Star game in Georgia. As the Earth continued to rotate, a huge container ship got stuck and unstuck in the Suez Canel and a Republican Congressmember gets caught in an underage sex scandal.

I’ve been emailed the quote at the top of the page, by Minority Leader McConnell, more times than I want to count, usually to try to scare me into sending somebody, or some organization, money or more money. Because, almost every time, the email sender claims – or infers – it was made a week after President Obama had been elected when the economy was in freefall, and it wasn’t, getting the message has annoyed me more than the message itself. My tendency has been to just delete the email, there is enough misinformation floating around so that I don’t need any more clogging up my email queue. Still, I keep thinking about it. I do want to be clear that that Speaker McConnell made this statement in 2010, almost two years after Obama took office, and while McConnell was in full campaign mode. I also want to acknowledge that Majority Speaker McConnell added that, if President Obama does a Clintonian backflip, if he’s willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues, it’s not inappropriate for us to do business with him. Now, after another email, I want to acknowledge that, in my haste to hit delete, I kinda missed the point.

A couple of nights ago, when I saw the quote again, for the first time, McConnell’s audacity took my breath away. For the first time, I saw it in a completely different light. By McConnell saying that the most important thing is to make President Obama a one-term president, McConnell was implying, at the very least, that Obama failing was his main goal. Clearly, having the president fail is not a good thing for the country, but, for McConnell, according to McConnell himself, President Obama failing was a goal higher than the country succeeding.

I knew this, or I thought I knew this but it never hit me like this before. I always thought – believed may be a better word – that the Republicans voted fiscally conservatively because they thought it was better for their wealthy donors. But that’s not true, the opposite is true. The Republicans spent like drunken sailors when both Bush the Younger and Donald Trump were President. Republicans vote against things like a minimum wage because it is a Democratic idea and they know it is good for the country, if they really thought it was bad for the country, paradoxily, they would have voted for it to hurt the Democrats.

Even though that was way back in 2010, when Barrak Obama was President, and this is 2021 with Joe Biden as President, nothing has changed on the Republican side. Despite the country’s financial health being even more precarious because of Covid-19, the Republicans still don’t want the country to succeed under a Democratic Administration. If President Biden, and the Democrats not succeeding hurts the country, the Republicans seem to be willing to have the country pay that price. It’s not that the Republicans are against helping the country per see – I think – they are just against helping the country if it helps Joe Biden. When the pandemic hit the country, in March of 2020 Donald Trump was President, and Republicans voted, en masse, for the March 2020 Trump Stimulus Bill of Two trillion dollars. At that time, there were 1,382 deaths, nationwide, it was obvious that the economy was close to tanking, and the Republicans – along with all the Democrats – passed a huge relief bill by voice vote because they knew it was a political plus for President Trump who said, at the time, “I signed the single biggest economic relief package in American history. This will deliver urgently needed relief to our nation’s families, workers and businesses, and that’s what this is all about.”

 It turns out that “urgently needed relief to our nation’s families, workers and businesses” is not what “this is all about,” this time around. This time around, not one Republican voted for a slightly smaller bill even though the need is still there. Not one. Not one Republican said – or even thought, I guess – “I voted for a relief bill in the Spring because it was needed to counteract the economy tanking and the need is still there so I’ll vote for another one.” Every Republican said, in effect, “I won’t vote for this bill because it will help ‘families, workers and businesses’ and that will help the Democrats.”

That was an attitude that I didn’t want to acknowledge and just thinking about it makes me sad.

The whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for Harry and Meghan. The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning, whilst some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately. Harry, Meghan  [sic] and Archie will always be much loved family members. Statement from Buckingham Palace on Prince Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah Winfrey.

It has been a year, almost to the day, since I had lunch with my friend and former business partner, Barbara. It sounded like a good idea when we made the lunch date but it seemed thoughtless once we got there. The place was empty, the windows and doors were all open but, rather than making it seem safer, it just made it seem foolish and risky. At the time, there was one Covid-19 death in neighboring Santa Clara County – that they reported but we now know there were more – and the chances of running into someone that was contagious was real but unlikely.

Three days ago, only one year later, remarkably, I got my second vaccination shot.

As an aside, the former president just put out a press release in a sort of pseudoTweet style – I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn‘t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers! – that is so perfectly Donald Trump; wallowing in self-pity, and whinny, self-serving, exaggeration to the point of parody but that is still slightly true. Trueish, at least. When the experts told him it would take 18 months to two years to get a vaccine, Trump said “cut corners, ignore the rules and regulations, get rid of the safety protocols, just do it fast”. And the drug companies did exactly that and it worked. Something like this is where the cumbersome government bureaucracy gets in the way and Trump had the nerve, or the disposition, at least, to go around it. Of course, distributing the vaccine is exactly where the cumbersome government bureaucracy helps and Trump, in his disdain, did almost nothing, leaving President Biden to pick up the pieces (and the credit). End aside.

I was going to write about R1 Zoning but I keep thinking about Meghan and Harry’s Interview with Ophra. Michele recorded the interview, we both watched it, and now I’m dreaming about them (I must not be alone because I read that more people watched the interview than watched the Golden Globes and The Emmys combined). Still, I haven’t been particularly interested in The Royals, I haven’t seen any of their weddings or funerals but I have watched The Crown so maybe I do have some prejudices.

Watching The Crown, I’ve become convinced that living in the British Monarchy is a nightmare. Everything is controlled by protocols, protocols that have almost nothing to do with reality. When young Prince Charles wanted to get serious about young Camellia, he couldn’t because she wasn’t a virgin. Based on the royal right and expectation of deflowering, I guess. In reality, the Monarchy is almost powerless – Margret Thatcher had to curtsy every time she saw Queen Elizabeth but the Queen couldn’t stop Thatcher from going to war over the Falklands – but still preoccupied with looking powerful. Prince Charles wears a military uniform with a chestful of medals, not medals for doing anything but medals like the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Medal and the Order of the Bath (my fave is the Queen’s Coronation Medal, awarded when Charles was four-years-old).

Watching the Megan/now exPrince Harry interview, I was taken by how naïve they both seemed. Megan says that she had no idea what she was getting into and exPrince Harry seemed to have no idea that his life was radically different than that of the norm. I walked away thinking that the Royal Family wasn’t particularly racist – maybe the Firm, the quasi-independent bureaucracy that supports and semi-runs the Royals, is but that’s slightly different- but they were elitist assholes. One story on The Crown, which is pro-Royal by the way, revolves around Diana coming for dinner for the first time. Somehow she gets a schedule – whether it was sent to her, given to her, or pinned to the door, I don’t remember – that says something like Cocktails at 5:30, Dinner at 7:00, dress: Evening Dress. What Diana doesn’t know, when she shows up for cocktails dressed to the nines for dinner, is that she will be the only one dressed up. The real schedule is Cocktails at 5:30 to talk about the day’s riding adventures while still dressed in their mud-splattered riding clothes and dinner later. That’s the Royal family Megan walked into and, like a sensible human being, wanted to get away from. Racism feels like just an excuse.

Tarantino says digital is the death of cinema. Fuck you, man. Chloé could get no backing because she is a Chinese woman. With digital we could make our own movie for a hundred thousand dollars at the level they could be shown as cinema. Joshua James Richards talking about Nomadland director Chloé Zhao in an interview in the New Yorker.

We watched Tina Fey and Amy Poehler host the Golden Globes last Sunday and walked away feeling better about the world. Because it was sort of Covid quarantined and sort of not, the Golden Globes seemed, every time we cut to somebody at home, a little like eavesdropping on some very interesting and entertaining people. Of the five nominees in every category, it seemed there was one expectant winner with her/his entire extended family. I was surprised that I had seen so few of the movies and even more surprised at how many of the nominees I hadn’t even heard of.

This year, the Golden Globes honored both Jane Fonda and Norman Lear and we were all reminded of how much they both contributed to Hollywood and to the making of our modern Liberal world. However, listening to people laughing at an old Archie Bunker bit from the 70s is disquieting; it is humorous but the humor comes at the expense of Archie who is presented as, and we all know is, a racist clod. To me, that is somewhat of a problem. There are lots of racist clods in the United States and humiliating them does not make them go away – like we thought it would – it just builds resentment which boils over into doing something stupid, like electing a conman like Donald Trump.

This year, it seemed much more women-centric than any year I can remember. The winner for best movie, Nomadland is a movie by a woman director, Chloé Zhao, who probably would not have won ten years ago. It was one of the few movies we had seen and, based on very little information, I’m glad that it won. To quote Peter Keough of The Boston Globe, who was writing about another one of Zhao’s movies but is just as true about this one, [The film] achieves what cinema is capable of at its best: It reproduces a world with such acuteness, fidelity, and empathy that it transcends the mundane and touches on the universal.

Nomadland starts with the town of Empire, Nevada shutting down which immediately caught my attention. Michele and I know Empire, it is a company town near Gerlach, Nevada which is sort of the home base if someone is exploring Northwest Nevada (I suggest breakfast at Bruno’s Country Club Café, the Country Club part is misleading). When United States Gypsum Corporation shut down Empire, it gutted the area and, in the movie’s background, the general failure of American capitalism is always present. I thought it was a superb movie, thoughtful and, in the end, very affirming.

However…..Nomadland is not my favorite movie from last year, Palm Springs is. Palm Springs is just a fun movie at a time when not much else is fun, but the humiliatathon, Borat, Subsequent Moviefilm won instead. The Crown, which we have seen, won and Schitt’s Creek, which we tried and gave up on, won several awards. I guess we’ll try again. Finally, Jason Sudeikis won for Ted Lasso which we enjoyed.

One movie we decided to give a try after it won for best actress is I Care A Lot but it left us both cold so, as far as I am concerned, winning isn’t a guarantee we are going to like a particular movie. Especially this year.

Lastly, what I most like about both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards is how they reflect our changing society. If one is a racist or a sexist, it must be much harder to watch these programs. As a side note, the woman who made Nomadland, Chloé Zhao – who, BTW, is listed as Chinese but went to high school in LA and lives in Ojai, California – who couldn’t get more than an hundred thousand dollars to make Nomadland, is now the director of a two hundred million dollar Marvel movie with Salma Hayek and Angelina Jolie. Now THAT wouldn’t have happen ten years ago.

“I think unfortunately the President was getting bad advice from people who had articulated that the Vice President would have some extraordinary powers that had never been used before .. during certification by Congress” of electoral results, Marc Short tells @PamelaBrownCNN A Tweet by Manu Raju @mkraju Chief Congressional Correspondent, @CNN. Roaming the Capitol halls, covering the Hill and politics. Die-hard Chicago sports fan. Wisconsin Badger for life.

The Tsar just has bad advisers you see A Tweet by Tom Nichols commenting on the RajuTweet @RadioFreeTom Professor, author of “Our Own Worst Enemy.” Curmudgeon. Cat guy. Democracy enthusiast. Board of Contributors, @USAToday, Contributing Writer, @TheAtlantic. commenting on the above Tweet

A million years ago I worked for Enron and I tried to explain the business model to my dad and when I was done he said “that sounds like check-kiting” and I rolled my eyes because DADS and I figured I hadn’t explained it correctly but it turns out I nailed it. A Tweet by Deborah Scaramastra PhD @discoveredpathI ensure orgs hit critical objectives by developing strong leaders, building high performing teams, and augmenting staff when needed.

Historically, maybe not historically, maybe just in our collective imagination, maybe just in the Fairy Tales we are told as children, the King is kind and gentle and he wants only what is best for the country but he is out of touch. The taxes, war, bad roads, you name it, are the fault of the Prime Minister who is cunning and uncaring. I don’t think this is just an artifact of the feudal system, I saw it in the Army with generals and lower leaders, I’ve seen it in companies. I don’t know why we want the king to be good or why we hold these beliefs, it is some unknown algorithm buried deep in our ancestral past, but it is pretty universal. But, the opposite is usually true; it is usually the King who wants more and it is up to the Prime Minister to screw it out of the people.

It seems to me that corporations – and now Limited Liability Companies – are like the prime minister in feudal times. They are the fall guy for the rich owners. We read about bad things that corporations are doing as if they were independent operators, but they aren’t they are agents of their owners, well, owner/CEOs. We read about something bad that Exxon did, not something bad that Darren Woods, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Exxon, did. But Exxon did it because Woods, and probably the rest of the Board, wanted Exxon to do it.

There are exceptions – Zuckerberg comes to mind – but, when we get pissed at the massive amount of profit that Johnson & Johnson makes, $17.3 billion even while they are being sued because of asbestos in their baby powder, we don’t get pissed at the CEO, Alex Gorsky, who made $19,590,777 last year telling Johnson & Johnson to do the things that piss us off. Like the old feudal kings, our new royalty manages to protect themselves.

A couple of days ago, Michele and I were walking and we passed a woman with an extremely happy Dachshund, Michele turned to me and said “I love Dachshunds, they are always so happy.” It got us talking about different breed dogs and their personalities, for lack of a better word, and how much they differ in shape, size, and how that has affected their personalities. Domestic dogs are really a variable species, especially compared to cats or humans, or cows or horses for that matter, and all this variation has come pretty quickly. Something like 15,000 years ago our dogs were still wolves, Canis lupus, that’s somewhere between 5,000 to 7,500 generations. That does not seem like many generations to go from a wolf to a Dachshund (and an Old English Sheepdog in the other direction).

Humans, however, have changed very little in the last 7,500 generations. Yeah, we now come in different colors and hair textures but, compared to the Dachshund versus the Old English Sheepdog, we are pretty much the same. And so are our personalities. Even though we overfocus on different skin tones or nose shapes, we are not really a very malleable species.