(I) Don't Know Jack

    Remember this little tidbit from ages ago -- you are reading this because of photons.  Wait, what??  If you were drifting in space and could actually see the clashing of atoms shattering apart in our sun's center, you would witness the creation of photons which take hundreds of thousands of years to break free from our sun before they can then shoot out in every direction (at the speed of light, no less) reaching our eyes as sunlight some eight minutes later (it will take those same photons four hours before they'll reach Neptune).  But this isn't about that...okay, it's a tiny bit about that but mainly it's about me admitting (again) that I'm not an expert in anything despite my spewing out of such random factoids; truth is, I'm not even a jack of all trades.  One of my friends politely described me as "intellectually curious" which is a label I'll gladly accept since I am eager to learn (isn't everyone?), even if I don't understand or retain much of it.  Our earth, our universe, our bodies, are all so wondrous that how can anyone not be curious? (more about that in the next post)...but in the meantime, here are a few recent tidbits from my ongoing list of scattered photons (yes, more random factoids).

     After returning fresh from our vacation and picking up our revised estate plan (one which we had done by a rather large legal firm complete with high-rise offices and a gaggle of attorneys that did nothing but specialize in such matters) we felt a little better about our post-life wishes now being "official".  But then came this from Kiplinger's editor-at-large, Janet Bodnar: The number of adults younger than 35 who have a will increased by nearly 70% over the past year, reports Caring.com in its 2021 Wills and Estate Planning Study.  The study cites COVID-19 as a major factor in this burst of estate-planning interest, which wasn’t limited to young adults.  “Last April and May, the traffic on our website went through the roof,” says Betsy Simmons Hannibal, senior legal editor at Nolo, the publisher of do-it-yourself legal products.  “Estate planning is one thing you can do in anticipation of a serious issue.”  I must admit that way back when I was 35, preparing a will (much less an estate plan)* was not even on my radar; first of all, I didn't have many assets at that age (unless you wanted to count my 1969 used racing-striped Javelin) so planning for when I'd be gone seemed way premature...so what changed?  

    Okay, here's another, a story from The Economist on the number of illegal immigrants flowing into Britain (their U.S. version on the story was titled: "Get back to where you once belonged"): According to the BBC, more have already crossed the English Channel this year than in all of 2019 or 2020.  A new one-day record was set on July 19th, when 430 turned up.  By some yardsticks, this is trivial.  Britain received 32,411 applications for asylum in the year to March.  That is a third of the peak in the early 2000s and low by global standards.  Britain ranked fifth among European countries for asylum claims in 2020, and 17th adjusting for population.  Many poorer countries receive far more refugees...attempts to immiserate asylum-seekers by detaining them, cutting their tiny stipends or restricting their ability to work have no effect.  Good thing the U.S. is "the land of the free,"  or is it asked an article in The Atlantic: Over the past century, the United States has deported more immigrants than it has allowed in.  Since 1882, it has deported more than 57 million people.  Who knew?  But one does has to wonder how a country handles so many incoming people?  If a small island such as Britain received over 32,000 applications in one month --and as the article noted, "many poorer countries receive far more refugees"-- when does the influx stop?  Maybe more importantly the question to ask is what is causing so many people to give up everything --their homes, their possessions, their security-- for a tiny chance at entering another country where they don't speak the language or know the customs or tolerate the food?  And if you're the country taking them in, how do you feed and shelter and "welcome" 32,000 this month, 32,000 next month, 32,000 the month after that, and on and on?  Most of the arriving people are simply fleeing violent wars or rebels or cartels so how do these otherwise "poor" countries get their weapons...**  And why does it seem that this pattern continues throughout our history?

 

    Well at least we were taught in school that our country's fight for freedom started with a small group of dissidents throwing a bunch of tea off of a ship docked in Boston.  Well, it turns out that a new book mentions that similar protests had been easily quelled, so what changed asked a review in the New York Review of Books.  Picture this quote: ...we of this town have such a high relish for Liberty, that we all, with one heart, stand ready, sword in hand, with the Italians in the Roman Republick, to defend and maintain our rights against all attempts to enslave us, and joyn our brethren, opposing force to force, if drove to the last extremity, which God forbid.  That came from a small group of farmers in Maine, angered at the newly passed Coercive Acts that were being placed upon distant Boston (in some sense, the show of increased military force as punishment by Britain apparently proved to be the last straw for something that was a long time brewing***).  Said the article: People living in distant colonies sent food to the unemployed workers of Boston.  The details of what was actually happening in the city did not matter.  Political solidarity was an act of imagination.  Britain’s show of toughness encouraged ordinary people from New Hampshire to Georgia to reach out to other Americans who before this moment had been total strangers.  They began to talk of themselves as if they were no longer British, or at least not as British as they had been before Gage and his (British) army arrived in Boston.  

     Something similar happened more recently said Smithsonian with: ...an organization invested in resisting government oppression and police brutality. Whether that was perceived as political or socialist or Marxist or nationalist or all of those things, it created self-determination and community-based solutions under the auspice of “power to the people.”  That group also handed out free food to people out of work and ended up with a grassroots following...and all of it happened right in my backyard, sort of.  I was much younger then (but not that young, but still not thinking of making a will) and while all of this took place just "across the Bay," I was largely ignorant of this growing movement; I didn't understand how or why there was this discontent; in fact I still don't understand such things.  This "movement" of the time (now celebrating it's 50th anniversary) was spilling out into the streets in front of me as quickly as the 25,000 gallons of oil that recently dotted the beaches of southern California.  Disastrous one might say about such a spill, although as Reuters reported, more than 50 such oil spills occurred in Venezuela this year alone (have you heard of any of them?); and a ship trapped in war-torn waters is slowly breaking apart, "ready to sink, catch fire, or explode" said The New Yorker, only this ship contains 40 times the amount of oil that hit southern California (in other words, about 4x what the Exxon Valdez spilled).  How could this all be happening? 

    One more.  The weather does seem to be shifting and making itself known, at least in my part of the country which is in an extended drought.  So one natural solution would appear to be to tap aquifers deep underground, often big aquifers such as the Ogallala which holds "approximately a quadrillion gallons of water, a volume that could fill Lake Erie more than eight times," said Discover.  Digging a well, whether it's for water or for oil, cost about $125 per foot so going down several hundred feet can be expensive, especially for the average farmer in Kansas...or Arizona.  For the mega-farms and mega-dairies this is not an issue since once the aquifer is tapped, the water is free (no metering or monitors as in urban areas).  As High Country News reported (on the arrival of such a mega-dairy coming into Arizona: For 25 years, Glenn Schmidt farmed cotton and alfalfa on 166 acres, a mile south of Coronado Dairy.  Four years ago, he and his wife, Linda, sold the land to the dairy colossus for $1.2 million.  "They were drilling deep wells right beside me," Schmidt, who is 65, said.  "At my age, I didn't see how I could spend $2 million and try to compete.  I had a well that was 600 feet.  The rest of them were 400- to 500 feet wells.  Theirs are 1,200."  And while the aquifers can seem limitless, those deep wells are reportedly pumping "1,800 gallons a minute," said one farmer.  The local Star Tribune paper wrote that the mega-dairy's cows "drink enough water to drain an Olympic-sized pool in just over two days, and produce enough manure to fill one every three days."  The aquifers in that area of Arizona have reportedly dropped 2-3 feet annually as hay and alfalfa crops are grown to feed the cattle...and then there's the drought.

    In many ways, I will justify some of the presenting of such random material by directing you back my "profile" page, that as a reader I hope that you will agree or disagree, question or accept, continue or stop...I hope that I can in some ways simply follow in the steps of Canadian poet and professor Anne Carson who was interviewed in a piece in The New York Times: I’m really trying to make people’s minds move, you know, which is not something they’re naturally inclined to do…We have a kind of inertia, sitting and listening.  But it’s really important to get somehow into the mind and make it move somewhere it has never moved before.  That happens partly because the material is mysterious or unknown but mostly because of the way you push the material around from word to word in a sentence.  And it’s that that I’m more interested in doing, generally, than mystifying by having unexpected content or bizarre forms. It’s more like: Given whatever material we’re going to talk about, and we all know what it is, how can we move within it in a way we’ve never moved before, mentally?  That seems like the most exciting thing to do with your head.  I think it’s a weakness to fall back into merely mystifying the audience, which anybody can do.  That said, even as I remain a non-expert in any field, I hope I can "move" your mind even a fraction of an inch, even if it's only by throwing out a bunch of random factoids...the rest, as they say, is entirely up to you.

*My earlier post talks a bit more about estate plans, but basically having only a will automatically sends your estate into probate court (in my state, that knocks about $10,000 off of your holdings) whereas a trust or estate plan avoids this.

**Sadly, the U.S. leads the world in exporting weapons, a role it has held for quite some time.  But what I found somewhat concerning was this from the blog post of the London Review of Books: The decision to expand the UK’s nuclear weapons stockpile by 40 per cent was slipped onto page 76 of the government’s Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy in March.  The only reason to announce a major strategic decision in such a quiet way is to avoid attention, which is exactly what happened.  The UK is now committed to maintaining a larger stock of nuclear warheads than China (according to US estimates) and there has been too little scrutiny of the policy.  And in case you skipped over that part, here it is again: The UK is now committed to maintaining a larger stock of nuclear warheads than China.  What the heck??

***This viewpoint came from a trio of books on the Revolutionary War by historian and Pulitzer Prize winner, Alan Taylor.  A review of those books appeared in The New Republic and painted a less-than flattering view of the atrocities that came with that war, women and children included.  This unflattering picture is now emerging in Britain's revamped history as well, said an article in The New Yorker.