SmokeSound

Science magazine has an article that tries to understand what lies behind national differences.  It is not  economic, political,or religious differences.   The real difference, the study suggests, has to do with whether the nation, in its history, has had to deal with threats:  threats to its territory, a persistent threat of disease, a population threat, and the like.  Nations that live with threats have to be disciplined, coordinated, learn obedience, and take collective action.   Other nations have an easier time.  Food might be abundant, the land rich, perhaps well-away from major enemies, rich in resources, and with room for expansion.  There is no enduring history of living under threat.   Gareth Cook says the study call the first type of nation, "tight", and the latter, "loose".  Pakistan and India and China and Korea are "tight".  Greece and Australia and Brazil are "loose".   On a scale, Brazil scored 3.5...

First, as a nation, we raise some money.  You know:  taxes. Income taxes.  Sales taxes.  Taxes on shoes and new cars. All those people we elected to Congress figured that out. Then, we spend some money.  You know, roads and Medicare. Maybe a nice little war in the Middle East.  Congress said  it would rather not pay cash for that, but it was a nice war. Whoops!  We spent more than we had, and we have a law that says if you want to borrow the difference, you have to raise the Debt Limit, which is how far you were in debt the last time you figured out how we were doing. "No!", Congress says, "We aren't in favor of being in debt. We think it is crazy to raise the Debt Limit.  People should not spend more than they have.  The nation has to learn austerity!" The debt limit isn't the cause of anything.  It is just the calculation that we have already decided to raise a trillion dollars, and that we have already ...

In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of religions--which is to say, for a lot of us--to be religious is to look at the world as people understood it about 3,000 years ago.   It was a three-storied universe:  God and all his angelic cohorts up in the sky, Satan and all his demonic deviltry down under the earth, and all of us caught here in the middle, exhorted by God, tempted by the Devil, with our eternal destiny dependent on what we do. Our son, Daniel, used to be afraid to walk on the grass in front of the neighboring Lutheran Church, keeping himself centered in the sidewalk, because he had learned, over there across the street, that the Devil lived under the ground.   Every time Denard Span, center-fielder for the Minnesota Twins, gets a hit, he looks up at the sky and and thanks Somebody Who is a Twins Fan.  Not out.  Not inside.  Up there where God is.  He still lives in a three-storied universe.   Aside from religions, most people...

Ages and eons ago, I used to dread my Grandfather's suggestion that I go pump water for the cows and horses.  The pump stood on a waist-high cover over a shallow well not far from a peat bog, so a simple hand pump did the job. No, a simple grandson did the job.  The water ran down a short wooden chute to a long watering trough, carved from a big log.  On a hot day, a ring of cows and horses can drink faster than a boy can pump water, and the rule was that you never quit until the animals were satisfied and the trough was full. At our log house, near Decorah, the water supply is a buried, concrete water cistern up on the hillside, filled with water hauled from the Fire Station in town, which runs down to the log house.  Gravity does all the pumping.  That's the easy part. I used to hire a milk truck driver to bring water to the cistern, but now all the milk trucks are the size of oil tankers, so I have to haul the water myself, perhaps once a year.  It...

The amount of deliberate misrepresentation by politicians is an insult to intelligence! For example, Barack Obama recently said that Israel and the Palestinians had to come to terms with each other, and admit the right of both to exist as states.  To do that, he said, they should begin with the 1967 borders, and make mutually agreeable land swaps to modify that boundary. The Israeli Prime Minister howled.  "The 1967 border is indefensible; unacceptable!"  In our own country, politicians are lamenting that Obama is a fool; that the 1967 line cannot be the border between the two populations. O.K.  Obama did not say that.  He said that the two groups should begin with the 1967 border, and make mutually agreeable land swaps to that line.   Mutually agreeable land swaps.     Israel will demand this.  The Palestinians will demand that.  Israel will offer this.  The Palestinians will offer that.  If they do that, both will be...

I love names!  As you may have noticed, my own last name means, "SmokeSound", as in Puget Sound, or Bristol Bay.   I looked up, "Romney".  It is a girl or a boys name from Scotland, and it means, "Winding River".  I am not sure that explains anything about Mitt, except perhaps for his stance on his own health care program in Massachusetts. I looked up, "Pawlenty", too.  Nobody knows what "Pawlenty" means.  I am not sure that explains anything about Tim, except perhaps for his stance on just about everything.   Since "Pawlenty" does not mean anything, I looked up "Polenta":  boiled cornmeal.   Just to be fair, I looked up, "Royksund", again.  There are two "Royksunds" in the United States, and I am both of them.  The State with the most people named "Royksund" is Minnesota.  One of me.  The most popular first name for people named "Royksund" in the United States is ...

Tim Polenta's pride is never having raised taxes while he was Governor of Minnesota, although he left the State budget five or six billion dollars in debt.  Then there was all that borrowing from the education budget, and a curious necessity for property taxes to rise to make up for what the State refused to pay, and "fees" began to sprout like virtuous weeds.   Tiny Tim wants to save our nation, too.  Today he said he will announce that tomorrow.   Ah, he is a tease, that Tim! The Republican field of candidates for the Presidency is a loony bin--tea bags, no-government-is-the-best-government, hamburger hucksters, Jesus-is-my-advisor types, and half-governors.  Only Mitt Rummy and Tim Polanta (so far) even seem  serious.  Tim knows that.  He admitted that Mitt will have a lot more money than he.  Mitt, he said, is a Mercedes.  Tim says he is a Buick. Actually, Mitt has inherited American Motors money, and Tim is more of a Miata ...

I believe I have invented something like superconductivity at room temperature.   For decades, scientists have known that some materials, cooled to something near absolute zero (0   ° K, or -273  °C ) provide no resistance to a current.  It has to do with the pairing of electrons, or turnips or something, at that temperature.  If left undisturbed, a current at extremely low temperature will go on just about forever.  There is no resistance.  Our home here i the Twin Cities has a lawn that completely encircles the house.  It is a corner lot, which means that, on two sides, our yard abuts neighbors; upwind neighbors.  Not just upwind:  up dandelion-wind! They are principled neighbors.  One refuses to use chemicals unless they taste good, or the doctor prescribes them, and the other refuses to spray anything that can be mowed down, regularly, every month, usually.   Because we have planted wildflowers, I have to be car...

Let us be serious, for a moment, about the end of the world. Someday all life on earth will end, of course, because if for no other reason, the sun will collapse and become a red giant, and earth will fry like forgotten bacon.  That will be four or five billion years from now.  I will be about 4,500,000,079 years old by then.  I won't care, or understand. The people who do care--now--the people who genuinely believe, and hope, and fear that the world might end last Saturday, or next year, or whenever, are people who hurt.  They despair, they want a better world than they have, they believe that, somehow, everything might be put right.  They are the believers. Maybe god will create a new heaven and a new earth.  Surely the evildoers will suffer, finally!  There must be justice, finally!  There has to be justice.  If there is a god, at all, there must be justice!   There will be a new heaven and a new earth! But there isn't. ...

There is a rumor that the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church is a problem, so the church spent a couple of million dollars to look into the matter.  It took four years for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to conclude that the problem is this:  a lot of those priests were alive during the 1960s.   That did it!  Pot, sex, permissiveness, loud music, booze, long hair.  The obvious outcome:  buggering little boys. (Want to take a barf break?) It has nothing to do, the study concluded, with enforced celibacy.  And nothing to do with a massive cover-up.  It is, apparently, just an accident of history.   Baloney!  The church has required celibacy of its priests.  The obvious result is that young men (in this lamentable case) who might otherwise desire ordinary sexual relations have to suppress it.  Other young men, who are not interested in heterosexual relations, anyway, are drawn to a fraternity of m...

An analogy:  "This is like that." It might be that we learn mostly by analogy:   "This is like that, but different." Creative thinking may be by analogy:   "If we change what we did over there, we could. . . ." But analogies trap us, too.   This is not always like that. A commentator in one of today's newspapers described some of the newly elected members of the Minnesota House of Representatives as young zealots running around with their hair on fire.  All over the country, there are new politicians chanting slogans about things they have not thought about very much.  One of their favorite mantras is that a government budget is just like a household budget:  "You can't spend what you don't have!"  So don't spend! Most households don't print their own currency, of course, although a few try.  It lands you in jail.  But putting aside other similarities and differences, we do  spend what we do not have. I live in ...

I got a call from John. He has been wondering about the Rapture. Said he went to coffee this morning and no one he usually met was there. Not Dale.  Not Joel.  Not me or Mari. He wondered where I was. I said I was at home.   "Oh, glory!", he said. Thought I might have been taken up to redemption, or damned to hell. Said he was wearing his Concordia College sweatshirt so that if he was taken up to his curious reward,  they would put him into the right line.

Here it is:  May 21.  The end of the world. Here I am:  all alone.  Where in hell is everybody else? There, I guess.  Most of them deserved it. Never thought I was that good, frankly, but I'm not going to pretend to be Job. Nobody likes a complainer.  Not even God. I wonder whether the newspaper carrier was left behind, too, or whether he will bring the paper.

Plumbing is under attack!   You know what I mean.  Like pipe fittings:  male and female threads.   That--over there--is an elbow, with female threads on one end, and male threads at the other.  The male threads are out there on the droopy end.  The female threads are the part the male threads fit into.  (You have to cut me some slack, here:  I am trying to be delicate.) Anyway, that is how plumbing works.  The male part fits inside the female part.  It is how God first imagined plumbing should be.  It was probably The Good Lord's  plan all along, but when Adam, in the Garden of Eden, complained that he was lonesome, God threaded Adam and made a female thing sort of like . . . well, you know the story! Theologians call things like this, "natural law".  It is just natural that a male pipe should fit inside a female fitting.  Of course, as you know, it is possible to have two pieces of plumbing that are thread...

I spent a couple of days at our cabin in Iowa, trying to tidy it up for The Rapture.  I kept thinking of the bumper sticker I once had, but cannot find, now that I need it:   "Jesus is coming!  Look busy!" Stan, in Tucson, reports that the panic of the last days has nearly overwhelmed the Great Southwest, too.  He reports:  " Roccos' Pizza here in Tucson has a sign up that says: We are open post rapture and Jesus eats free."   Joel, at the Coffee Shop, can't concentrate on his contracting work.  The six o'clock Saturday deadline runs contrary to everything he knows about construction practices.   I awoke this morning at 4:00 A.M., and still awake at 5:00, decided to start back for the Twin Cities immediately.  I left a note for the kids, telling how I had decided to enter eternity in Minnesota, instead.   I have a sixteen foot trailer, loaded with lawn mowers, and other tools, and it was raining somewhat, and what with the im...

Darn that John McCain!  He says that torture doesn't work.  McCain says that if you torture someone, he or she will tell you just about anything to make you stop.   You may have noticed that John McCain has trouble lifting his arms.  It might have something to do with the five-and-a-half-years he spent in a prison camp in Vietnam.  They worked John over pretty well, but he doesn't understand torture. Rick Santorum knows all about what he likes to call, "enhanced interrogation".  You know, torture.  Waterboarding.  Hanging by the arms.  All that enhanced, sophisticated interrogation stuff.   Senator Santorum wants to become our next President, but he has kindly taken the time, first, to set Senator McCain right:   "He (McCain) doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works."   Harold Camping says the world is going to end this coming Saturday.  Maybe he is on to something.  

Harold says the world is going to end this coming Saturday:  May 21, 2011.   How does Harold know?  He has been reading the Bible for about a hundred years.  Actually, Harold is not quite 90, but he has worn out half a dozen Bibles getting this right.  Six P.M., he says. Somewhere.  There will be an earthquake. Somewhere.   I forgot to cancel my subscription to the New York Times.  They will probably hound me for the money.  I suppose I could designate that they give the papers to the schools, but that is rather a waste.  I don't think kids read the New York Times, except for maybe the Science Section when they show pictures of people like Harold riding dinosaurs in front of the Ark.   Harold and I are pretty much the same age:  he is a little older.  That is to say, I have been wondering who saddled up that first dinosaur.  When I was young and green, Sally used to scare the heck (I guess under these circumstan...

Nine years ago, we packed our lives together and drove from Tucson to St. Paul, where Mari's new job was waiting.  We happened upon a house in South Minneapolis, across the Mississippi.   We found the coffee shop almost immediately.  We have been there ever since.  We moved from that first house here in the Cities, but we start almost every day at that coffee shop.   For thirty years, at a college in Iowa, we stopped for coffee before going to the office.  Not finding Mari at her office one morning, I heard from Per in Norway that she had gone back to the coffee shop.  It was not an internet cafe.  It is in internet world. Ours is a coffee shop world.  I asked Dale and John and Tom where to vote, and we began to talk, and walk around the lake, and belong.   The names change a little, gradually, naturally.  We are coffee shop people, not because we agree to meet at the coffee shop.  The coffee shop brings us together...

I guess Barack Obama is still President, or actually our President, since it appears he was born in Hawaii of a mother and a father.  Donald Trump says he wasn't, but Donald has gone away to comb his hair.  He did so want to become President, or if not that, at least own his own public relations agency!   Mike Huckabee says he would rather keep his day job and pay for his new house in Florida:  The Huckabee Towers.  Haley Barbour decided not to go down the tubes.   Who do the Republican have?  Michele Bachmann.  She was born in Iowa, so she might do as well there as she has done in Anoka, Minnesota.  Ron Paul.  Rick Santorum.  Tim Pawlenty has been doing his best to appear as muscular as Arnold Schwarzenegger (who was not born in Hawaii), but Arnold just announced he flexed his muscle once too often, and has a . . . that he diddled a former . . . that Maria Shriver is leaving him for. . . .   Anyway, Tiny Tim does not pr...

Human beings are scatter-brained;  that is to say, do not think alike.   We are all over the place. At the same time, we need each other.   We need each other for procreation,  for protection, to gather food,  to build our shelters, keep the wolves away, and to trade skill for skill. We don't drop our children to the ground,  and cannot drive down the road without rules.   If you are drunk, you cannot drive.   You need a license to practice medicine, to drive a car, perform marriages, to fish, or open a restaurant and sell food to people. We hate having to conform, but we don't want to die alone. We are a compromise. Libertarians are the lone wolves. They, like Marlene Dietrich, "vant to be alone". They begrudge and minimize requirements. Their question is how little they have to conform. They run in the pack only to breed, or if it is necessary to run down food.   Else, they prowl the forest alone. Others ...

Day before yesterday, a Minnesota Twins baseball game, in their lovely new outdoor stadium without a retractable roof,  was delayed for a bit when baseball-sized hail fell, confusing batters and umps and outfielders, and bashing spectators down to seat level.  (I may have exaggerated the size of the hail by an inch.) A tornado came through town, intent, apparently, in searching for a mobile home park, and not spotting it. For several days, I have hand-cultivated the "streambed" where I once had perennial wildflowers, which grew to be larger than the arbor vitae next door.  I have been trying to ready the bed for annual wildflowers.  I worked in fits and starts, having a fit every time it started to rain. Today I planted half-pound of seeds, which I very carefully measured out so that it did not cover the whole seed bed. Today I ordered another half-pound of annual wildflower seeds.  The supplier says half a pound of wildflower seeds will cover 3,000 acre...

Would you give up raccoon hunting, just to tell people the world was going to end on May 21, 2011?   I didn't think so.  Adam Larsen, from Kansas, has put his mouth where his raccoon used to be. He has temporarily given up coon hunting to spread the gospel of . . . well, what is it, anyway? Of how the world is going to end in about ten days, and how good the coon hunting is goin' to be on the other side, where . . . oh, maybe one-in-twenty of us are going to go, whilst the rest of us go straightaway to hell.   That, you understand, is the good news.   Adam Larsen has been listenin' to Harold Camping, who has been researching this catastrophe for almost a hundred years.  Harold got the date wrong onst before, but he freely and friendly admits that he hadn't read part of the Bible carefully enough, which he has done now.   It is May 21, 2011!  Mark it on your calendar!  For nine of ten of us, it will be hell to pay less than two weeks fr...

"I feel like were havin' to suffer for somebody else." She lives on a farm in Missouri, across the Mississippi River fro Cairo, Illinois.  (You learn, In Cairo, to pronounce it as "Kay-ro".  I do not know why. Cairo, Illinois, about as far south as one can go in Illinois, is almost a peninsula where the Mississippi and Ohio river come together.  It is where giants come.  It is a poor town of about fewer than 3,000 people, where once there had been 15,000, mostly Black.  The farmers in Missouri, whose land and homes are being flooded, deliberately, by the Corp of Engineers, are not  mostly Black. The Corp of Engineers had to choose whether to let Cairo flood, or whether to let the farms, built on flood lands, flood.  They let the river go onto the farmland, where about 100 farm homes would be destroyed, together with this year's crops. We ought to be smart enough, by now, to know that Cairo is a stupid place to build a town, and that it is equal...

LOAVES AND FISHES He came home from the sea with boxes of fish in the trunk of the green Plymouth , as comfortable with the smell of cod and halibut as we were not, fish fine-chosen for gift and home. Neighbors came like cats upwind to ask how the trip had gone, and to carry newspaper-wrapped fish home again. She baked top-heavy bread in old ovens, flooding home with the gold smell of eastern Washington wheat, crust-buttered and throbbing invitation to coffee.   They all came to the oilcloth-covered table like pilgrims; uncles, old men left over from another generation, and friends out on a drive. There is someone here with a few loaves and some fishes, they all said, and they came for the picnic at Gus and Jennie's place.   Some stayed at the table for the last trip home, and for bread and cod.   We grew up on the bench side of the multitude that was family, on loaves and fishes.   We all ate what we wanted, twelve baskets full, ...