A Non-Carpenter Looks Closely at Carpentry

My deck boards kept rotting through, so I decided to switch to "no maintenance" composite decking, which comes with a 25 year guarantee. I fix a lot of things at my house, but I suspected that the joists were rotted out and that work is over my head. Luckily, my favorite carpenter, "Matt," had a couple days open. He allowed me to be his carpenter's helper for 12 hours yesterday.

It's amazing to watch a professional carpenter solve challenge after challenge, many of them not obvious to non-carpenters until pointed out. This was notably imperfect existing construction that needed to be torn out. I helped to cut material, make runs to the hardware store, and carry around a lot of material, including 60 lb joists. I was mesmerized by Matt's physical stamina and his thought process as much as his skills in fitting things together into a rock solid new deck and perfect new set of stairs. Even setting up requires unloading and moving probably 700 pounds of equipment off the truck. It also involves significant planning, because getting the job done uses up lots of supplies, including blades and bits. He needs to stock an entire workshop on his truck, including backup tools.

I got back to my routine today, but Matt does this every day. His job requires skills honed over a lifetime and constant physical exertion where mistakes can be expensive and sometimes dangerous. So kudos to those of you who do physically demanding high-skill work. These are people (including carpenters, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics and many others) with a central role in keeping this country running. Maybe it's time to set aside a day in their honor . . .

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An Excellent Two-Fer: Walking and Thinking

Does walking help you think? Absolutely, I would say!  In my experience, walking gets the mental juices flowing.  Problems sometimes get reframed on a walk.  Or a new question pops out at me.  I walk for the exercise, but equally because it turbo-charges the way I think.  Or is it that walking physically calms me down so that I don't get in my own way? Exercise is suggested for people like me who sometimes seem to struggle with ADD. My own routine is 10,000 steps per day, usually divided up into 2 or 3 sessions of walking.  My Fitbit keeps me honest (about both my walking and my sleeping).

Jeremy DeSilva's "On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking" perambulates the topic of walking and thinking. He begins with the story of Charles Darwin, who took many walks along his "D" shaped path. Then he moves on to the science. Here's an excerpt:

A group of Stanford students were asked to list as many creative uses for common objects as they could. A Frisbee, for example, can be used as a dog toy, but it can also be used as a hat, a plate, a bird bath, or a small shovel. The more novel uses a student listed, the higher the creativity score. Half the students sat for an hour before they were given their test. The others walked on a treadmill. The results were staggering. Creativity scores improved by 60 percent after a walk.

Wow! Here's one more: Half of 65 couch-potatoes were put a moderate exercise routine (treadmill walking 3 times per week). The result? "[T]he walkers had significantly improved connectivity in regions of the brain understood to play an important role in our ability to think creatively."

So get out there and take a walk! Perhaps the cheapest form of exercise--and it might get your brain revving.

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Something from Nothing?

What caused the universe? "God" is not an answer for me because this mysterious "God" seems entirely made up and "He" creates many new answerless questions. So "He" is not an explanation.

Back to the question. What caused the universe? Why is there something rather than nothing. I generally conclude "I don't know." But then Roger Penrose comes along . . .

"There was something before the Big Bang and that something is what we will have in our future," he said, according to The Telegraph.

He added, "We have a universe that expands and expands, and all mass decays away, and in this crazy theory of mine, that remote future becomes the Big Bang of another aeon."

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Christopher Rufo Reports: Critical Race Theory Takes Root in Public Grade Schools and High Schools from Coast to Coast

Christopher Rufo has been reporting on Critical Race Theory in our schools for the past year. His eleven headlines (and articles) below demoralize me. These are the teachings of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi in action. I hope that attorneys file lawsuits with regard to every one of these situations for creating hostile race environments. This is also child abuse, but most of the parents either don't know what is being taught to their children or they are afraid to speak up because doing so will cause them to be ostracized or branded “racists.”

Here are Rufo's headlines and synopses. Each of the eleven locations below contains a link to Rufo's full story of the way those schools are teaching CRT. Many of these stories are based upon whistle-blower oral and written disclosures to Rufo:

Seattle [Public Grade School]

Seattle Public Schools tells teachers that the education system is guilty of "spirit murder" against black children and that white teachers must "bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance."

San Diego [Public K - 8]

San Diego Public Schools accuses white teachers of being colonizers on stolen Native American land and tells them "you are racist" and "you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies." They recommend that the teachers undergo "antiracist therapy."

Cupertino, California [Public School, Third Graders]

A Cupertino, California, elementary school forces third-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities, then rank themselves according to their "power and privilege." They separate the eight-year-old children into oppressors and oppressed.

Springfield, Missouri [Public Middle School]

A middle school in Springfield, Missouri, forces teachers to locate themselves on an "oppression matrix," claiming that white heterosexual Protestant males are inherently oppressors and must atone for their "covert white supremacy."

Philadelphia [Public School - Fifth grade]

A Philadelphia elementary school forces fifth-graders to celebrate "Black communism" and simulate a Black Power rally to "free Angela Davis" from prison. At this school, 87 percent of students will fail to achieve basic literacy by graduation.

New York [Public School, Grades 6 - 12]

The principal of the East Side Community School in New York sent an email to white parents telling them that they should "subvert white authority," become "white traitors," and then advocate for full "white abolition."

Buffalo [Public Grade Schools]

Buffalo Public Schools teaches students that "all white people" perpetuate systemic racism and forces kindergarteners to watch a video of dead black children warning them about "racist police and state-sanctioned violence" who might kill them at any time.

Arizona [ Department of Education Report regarding Babies]

The Arizona Department of Education created an "equity" toolkit claiming that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old and that white children become full racists—"strongly biased in favor of whiteness"—by age five.

California [Department of Education - Primary and Secondary School Students]

The California Department of Education passed an "ethnic studies" curriculum that calls for the "decolonization" of American society and has students chant to the Aztec god of human sacrifice. The solution, according to one author, is "countergenocide."

North Carolina [Public grade schools and high schools]

North Carolina’s largest school district launches a campaign against "whiteness in educational spaces"—and encourages teachers to subvert families and push the ideology of "antiracism" directly onto students without parental consent.

Santa Clara, California [Public grade schools and high schools]

Santa Clara County Office of Education denounces the United States as a "parasitic system" based on the "invasion" of "white male settlers" and encourages teachers to "cash in on kids' inherent empathy" in order to recruit them into political activism.

When you are finished absorbing the highly divisive course materials used by these schools, also consider the numerous violations of the NEA teacher code of conduct.

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Glenn Greenwald Puts Spotlight on CNN’s Natasha Bertrand to Illustrate the DNC – Spy State Alliance

It wasn't that long ago that Democrats were suspicious (if not hostile) to the CIA and America's other spy agencies. There was good reason for that, given the long history of propaganda, lies and manipulation by the CIA, FBI and NSA. Perhaps the peak of this DNC anti-spy state feeling occurred during Edward Snowden's revelations.

But then something happened. The Spy State became useful to the DNC, driven by their mutual hostility to Donald Trump. This was brought on by Trump himself by his ridicule of the spies. This makes for terrible political strategy, as highlighted in this short interview from 2017, Rachel Maddow interviewing Chuck Schumer: "When you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you." The CIA and NSA have immense resources for getting back at you by fueling campaigns of disinformation:

We know remarkably little about the nature of the nation’s intelligence spending, other than its supposed total, released in a report every year. By now, it’s more than $80 billion.
During the good old days of 2013, some Democrats took seriously the revelations disclosed by Edward Snowden, even though they were hesitant to applaud his efforts publicly.  This headline tells you what the DNC thinks about Snowden's heroic actions: "Almost No Democrats Are Calling On Trump To Pardon Edward Snowden: Many progressive lawmakers have pushed reforms based on Snowden’s leaks, which makes their silence about a potential pardon that much more curious." This is a complex multi-variate issue, of course, but I suspect that Snowden has been abandoned to twist in the wind because he is not useful to the DNC and because Snowden is not a friend of the DNC's newish friend, the U.S. spy state.

This brings us to Glenn Greenwald's most recent article about the bubbly friendship involving the spy state, the DNC and the DND-allied "news" media. Corruption doesn't happen in the abstract. Rather, it is furthered by the conduct of real-life human beings, often by people who willingly betray the principles that should be guiding them in exchange for money and career advancement.  CNN's Natasha Bertrand is one for those people.  Greenwald's article is titled: "CNN's New "Reporter," Natasha Bertrand, is a Deranged Conspiracy Theorist and Scandal-Plagued CIA Propagandist: In the U.S. corporate media, the surest way to advance is to loyally spread lies and deceit from the U.S. security state. Bertrand is just the latest example."

Glenn Greenwald continues to be a lightning rod for abuse from many political directions.  These ad hominem attacks stem from his reporting because he has a problem: he follows facts where they lead, regardless of who this pisses off. His resulting and undeservedly untarnished reputation makes many people (including many of my FB "Friends") viscerally hostile to Greenwald and hesitant to read or believe what he has written. Here is the solution to that (unwarranted) hostility: Greenwald's article contains numerous links allowing you to read the underlying evidence and weep. Here is an excerpt, but I urge you to read the full article, to follow Glenn Greenwald at his Substack account and, further, to financially support his courageous journalism.

Natasha Bertrand has spent the last five years working as a spokesperson for the alliance composed of the CIA and the Democratic Party, spreading every unvetted and unproven conspiracy theory about Russiagate that they fed her. The more loyally she performed that propagandistic function, the more rapidly she was promoted and rewarded. Now she arrives at her latest destination: CNN, not only Russiagate Central along with MSNBC but also the home to countless ex-operatives of the security state agencies on whose behalf Bertrand speaks.

Once again we see the two key truths of modern corporate journalism in the U.S. First, we have the Jeffrey Goldberg Principle: you can never go wrong, but only right, by disseminating lies and propaganda from the CIA. Second, the organs that spread the most disinformation and crave disinformation agents as their employees are the very same ones who demand censorship of the internet in the name of stopping disinformation.

I've long said that if you want to understand how to thrive in this part of the media world, you should study the career advancement of Jeffrey Goldberg, propelled by one reckless act after the next. But now the sequel to the Goldberg Rise is the thriving career of this new CNN reporter whose value as a CIA propagandist Goldberg, notably, was the first to spot and reward.

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