Lift Up Your Hearts!

I'm terrible about organizing and identifying photos and memorabilia. My intentions are good, but follow-through abysmal. I keep working on it, but the rate at which objects join the queue far exceeds the rate at which they are processed. I'm so grateful for (1) location stamps on my pictures—whatever the risks are of letting Google know where I am, the benefits for photo identification are immeasurable. And (2) Google Lens and Image Search. The unidentified photo of me as a little girl standing next to some monument? My father wasn't much better than me at keeping up with the documentation, but Google told me immediately that I was on top of Mt. Greylock in Massachusetts! Still, it's a very long and sometimes tedious job, and I just keep putting one foot in front of the other. My goal is to collate photos, memorabilia, and writings into a compact collection that people (i.e. family members) will enjoy looking at. The state it's all in now, if it falls into the hands of my executors, most of it will get tossed. If it's a hard job for me, it will be impossible for them. And I'm not getting any younger.

No pressure.

First, there's all my immediate family's stuff, which has been accumulating since we got married nearly 50 years ago. A couple of dozen large photo books with the pictures in chronological order (good) but largely unlabelled (terrible). Boxes of memorabilia that will be invaluable for identifying photos and for piecing together stories, even if most will eventually be tossed (before or after scanning). Carousels and boxes of old slides, which was the film medium of choice in our earlier days. Eighty thousand digital photos to sift through, label, and organize. The older photos take longer to process, as they need to be digitized and identification is much more difficult. The early digital photos don't need to be scanned, but they include very little identifying information. The pictures we took after getting our smart phones in 2014 are much easier to process because of included date and location data, but make up for that in sheer volume.

That's imposing enough. But as a firstborn (and thus more likely to be able to make identifications of older people and places), and even more as the resident genealogist (who cares the most about family history), I have become the repository for over 100 years worth of old photos (mostly unidentified) and memorabilia, from both my side of the family and my husband's. It has been accumulating in my closet for decades. And I mean accumulating; boxes and boxes that looked good because they were neatly stacked, but inside, all was chaos. I've been ignoring them because other projects have had higher priority, and—let's be honest—because I've been too intimidated to begin.

Recently, however, I girded my loins and pulled the first box out of the closet. I had decided that if I would just get everything roughly sorted by family and era, it would be easier to tackle the smaller chunks (certainly a relative term) piecemeal. That's the theory, anyway.

I began by going through all the boxes and sorting the contents into very rough piles.

It gets worse. What you see here doesn't begin to reveal why I suddenly felt completely overwhelmed when I ought to have been rejoicing in having made a start.

In addition to a lot of stuff that I know I'm going to discard, I found treasure. In particular, a large stack of notebooks containing further journals kept by my father, of which I had been unaware. I had already scanned and organized the 15 journals that I knew about, and that was quite a project in itself. It was thrilling to find more, from the later years; not so thrilling that they were written in unorganized spiral notebooks—here a little, there a little—sometimes in the kind of pen that bleeds over onto the other side.

Plus I found stacks of Dad's letters to the family and essays (with photos) of the many Elderhostel programs he had enjoyed. Dad was a prolific writer and a good one, and it's amazing to read what he wrote about life during our childhood years. I know better than to think I will be able to read them all as carefully as I would like. But I really want to scan them, and do some minimal image editing to make the faded text more legible, so that they will be available, especially to my younger siblings, whose activities they cover more than my own. My first thought had been to toss the Elderhostel writings, but it turns out they make interesting reading, and I think are worth preserving. Maybe that's the writer in me, reluctant to let go of any good writing, or the dutiful daughter who finds value in her father's thoughts. But at least one person in the family has expressed an interest in reading the stories—if they were in an organized form. And most of his letters are worth preserving, being another source of family history.

At one point I hoped to transcribe the journals and letters—and I have my own hand-written journals in addition to his. Why? For the same reason I like to have e-book versions of books (as well as physical copies of my favorites): The ability to search the text. (How old was my brother when he had the chicken pox?) Plus, in the case of handwritten originals, a transcribed version would be much easier and more pleasant to read. My father's handwriting is even harder to decipher than my own, if only because I generally wrote in manuscript, and he in cursive. However, I gave up the transcription dream for two reasons: (1) I'm not planning to live to 150, and (2) I have hopes that Artificial Intelligence, whatever disasters it might bring, will soon be able to do a much better job than the transcription software currently available. So I content myself with digitizing the pages, and occasionally including keywords in the filenames.

This is a huge project (and perhaps a just penance for not keeping my own archivist work up-to-date over the years!) but at least I know that my siblings and children, having entrusted the job to me, are of necessity all on board with my throwing away whatever I can't justify keeping. But that's a big responsibility, too, and one I find particularly difficult. Throwing out items that I figure I may someday want l is not my strong suit. What keeps me going is knowing that it all will be lost if I don't get it into a manageable state.

I took on the job because I care about family history—and possibly because I'm the eldest. First-born's burden, I suppose.

One. Step. At. A. Time.

Don't be manipulated. Good advice, but very broad, and hard to follow. This post was inspired by what I have read about "bad actors"—AI bots or paid humans—attempting to sow discontent, anger, and hatred online. The Chinese and the Russians have both been accused of this, with what seems to be pretty convincing evidence, and I fear some of it is also homegrown.

My greatest concern is that Artificial Intelligence is rapidly advancing to the point where we can no longer trust our own eyes and ears, at least where online videos are concerned. It is possible to manipulate images and audio to make it appear that someone is saying something he or she never said. Think what political enemies could do with that! Everything from rigging elections to starting World War III. And you know those crazy spam blackmail threats that claim they recorded you doing "nasty things" in front of your computer? The ones you face with a grim smile and quickly delete because you know you never did whatever it is they claim? Imagine them including a video of you "actually" doing or saying what you did not? What if they show you a candidate for public office in that compromising position? Or your spouse, or your children. What about fake kidnappings? I could go on and on—my imagination is fertile and paranoid.

But that's not where I'm going in this post. AI's not quite there yet, and we have a clear and present danger in the here and now: Angry, profane, and hateful comments posted to articles, videos, and podcasts. Nasty online videos (especially the short form commonly seen on Tik-Tok and Facebook Reels) whose purpose (obvious or subtle) appears to be to stir up negative emotions. And that's just what I see every day; I know there's a lot more out there. It's hard not to have a visceral reaction that does no one any good, least of all ourselves.

And that, I'm afraid, is exactly the purpose of what is being posted. To make us angry; to make us suspicious of each other; to influence our reactions, our actions, our purchases, and our votes.

The best solution I've been able to come up with (and I have no idea how effective it might be, except with me) is this:

• Know your sources. Is this negativity coming from someone you actually know, in person, so that you are aware of the context? Is it from someone you know online only, but have had enough experience with over time to assess his general attitude, reliability, and track record? If not, keep your salt shaker near.
• When in doubt, if the content tempts you to react badly, assume the best: It's a bot or troll whose purpose is to make you angry; or a human tool too desperate for a job to consider its moral implications; or an ordinary human being who has been having a bad day/week/year (doesn't that happen to all of us?). In any case, make an effort not to fall into the trap.
• Avoid sources that usually make you react badly. Unfortunately, I don't think we can afford to avoid seeking information about what is happening in the world. One of the first rules of self-defense is to be aware of your surroundings. But we can be cautious. Even the sources I find most reliable can have nasty trolls in the comment section, so I mostly avoid reading the comments. I'm also trying to wean myself off of the Facebook Reels (mostly ported over from Tik-Tok or Instagram it seems). They can be fun, and funny, and sometimes usefully informative. But they are definitely addictive, and I've noticed that far too many of them are negative, even if humorous, leaving an aftertaste of fear, anger, disgust, and/or suspicion. Not good for the human psyche!
• Consider slowing down? I'm struggling with this one, because of the reality that so much of our information comes in video form these days. Unlike print, in which it is easy to skim for information, to skip over irrelevant sections, and to slow down and reread what is important, and which provides a much better information-to-time-spent ratio, the best one can do with video is to speed it up. I find that almost everything can be gleaned from a video just as well if it's taken in at 1.5x speed, sometimes even 2x. Porter's ears and brain can manage 2x almost all the time. This is a blessing when there is so much worth watching and so little time! However, here's what I'm struggling with: videos watched at high speeds tend to sound over-excited, even angry, when at normal speed they are not. And the human nervous system is designed to react automatically to such stimuli in a way that is probably not good for us if we are not actually in a position to either fight or flee. I don't have a satisfactory answer for this, but I figure it's at least worth being aware of.
• Remember that the people you interact with online are human beings, who work at their jobs, love their families, and want the best for their country, just as you do. Unless they're not, in which case it's even more important not to rise to the bait.

Be aware, be alert, do what is right in your own actions and reactions, and hope for the best. It's healthier for us all.

I've started a new category, which I've called "Heroes." Here's the first post. It's not the most important, but it's the first—so I guess it is the most important until I post the next one. Not all heroes carry swords; not all die pulling children from burning buildings. Some just do what they know they have to do, and take the consequences.

This is the story of Andrew Klavan (14 minutes). He's one of the multitude of entertainment culture characters that I've never heard of; from the long list of his books and screenplays, I know that's my fault and not his. Two things stand out to me as he recounts his experiences in Hollywood: (1) His calm but firm refusal to compromise his ethical beliefs despite the threat of great financial loss, and (2) Whatever wise decisions (unnamed) that he made in advance of his time of trial that buttressed his resolve not to give in, through confidence that he and his family could weather the economic storm.

You know how you do a search on your computer or your phone, and the next thing you know an advertisement related to that search shows up on Facebook? Or worse, it seems as if even talking about a product brings up such an ad? I have a new twist on that problem, and I say the situation has gotten out of hand.

This morning I wrote a new blog post, which I have saved for another day. It contains the following line:

We absolutely drink tap water when we can, but we also keep bottles of water in the closet in case a hurricane (or anything else) threatens our water supply.

In point of fact, no hurricane has yet cut our water supply, though we take that threat seriously, in the same way we take the possibility of fire seriously and have smoke alarms installed. But the worst that has happened with our water was to have had it cut off for an hour or two for maintenance, which has only happened a couple of times, and for which we were always warned ahead of time.

After a lovely morning with a friend at our local botanical gardens, followed by a delicious lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, we came home to no water. When our local government wanted to tell us where we could pick up sandbags if needed (we've been getting a LOT of rain), we got phone calls to all three phones, text messages to two phones, and e-mails to two separate accounts. I think we even got alert messages on our phones. But for this, nothing.

In a reminder of why it can be good to hang on to my Facebook account, that's where we found the information that much of the neighborhood was also without water, that the city had no idea when it would be back on, and that we'd probably be faced with a boil water directive when it was.

Shortly after 3:00, the water was back on. We never heard anything about a need to boil our water, but we did hear (again, via Facebook) that the workers were taking steps to make sure the lines were clear and that wouldn't be necessary. So all's well that ends well.

But I'll admit it was a shock, and a bit of a wake-up call. I'm quite certain that in the 40 years we have been here, this is the first time we have had our water supply halted without warning. The fact that I had just written about its reliability just added a little freakiness to the surprise.

As the Boy Scouts always told us, Be prepared.

In the mad scramble to establish whether or not immigrant families are eating people's pets and wild ducks and geese in parks, the obvious answer is being ignored: Of course they are! What world are you living in if you think they can't be?

After the United States retreated ignobly from Southeast Asia, we were flooded with refugees from that part of the world. "Flooded" is a relative word; the numbers I can find vary, but it appears that it was around 125,000 people before we closed our doors except for the purpose of reuniting families. Which, of course, is a trickle compared with the multiple millions of people coming in now, from all over the world.

There were naturally plenty of difficulties settling so many Southeast Asian refugees and integrating them into our communities, but there were some significant differences between then and now that made that process generally successful. 

• Sheer numbers, obviously.
• Comparatively speaking, their entrance into this country was well-regulated.
• As refugees were brought here, they were sponsored by families, churches, and other groups that took responsibility for helping individual refugee families find places to stay, gain employment, learn or improve their English, navigate paperwork, and get their children enrolled in schools. In addition to that, the sponsors provided much-needed friendly relationships, often long-lasting, in an alien and frightening environment.
• Their presence in our country was clearly legal, greatly reducing the refugees' vulnerability to enslavement by gangs, pimps, unscrupulous employers, and crooked cops, lawyers, and judges.
• Again, the numbers. Small numbers of immigrants, relative to the population, can be assimilated and integrated into the host society without causing massive disruption. There is a difference between a summer storm and a category 5 hurricane.

What does this have to do with eating cats? Everything. Even with the relatively small, orderly, and successful assimilation of the "boat people" of Southeast Asia, people are human. They have problems. They lose their jobs, drop out of school, fall victim to unscrupulous predators, are tempted by illegal activities, or can't handle their money well. Especially as time goes on and the social safety net is not so focused and robust. And don't forget that while many of the Southeast Asian refugees were middle class workers who spoke English, many were also "country bumpkins" with no knowledge of Western culture. They weren't stupid people, but they were smart in their own culture; being dropped into an American city made them as vulnerable as I would be if I suddenly found myself in the jungles of Laos.

So some of them were hungry, and they did what hungry people do: they used the skills they had to find food. They fished in the rivers, not knowing and not caring that the rivers were polluted. The hungry belly does not concern itself with mercury levels. They discovered that squirrels abound in city parks, and squirrels make good eating—or so I'm told. Here, we rely on our local hawks to keep the squirrel population under control; back then, refugee families took care of that. I am not making this up.

If you flood an unprepared—and maybe unsuspecting—city with a large population of migrants who do not fit into the culture, who may not even speak the language, and who have no responsible sponsors to welcome them, some of them are going to be hungry. And they are going to do what they have to do to get food.

They're going to help themselves to ducks found conveniently living on city ponds. If they're hungry enough, they're going to eat cats without a second thought for whose pets they might be. Maybe they come from a culture that is too poor to imagine keeping pets and treating them like family members.

Of course they're going to eat pets, and whatever else they can find.

You heard that right. I'm here today to praise the Democratic Party. They may have betrayed my 56 years of loyalty; they may have cut their members off from the democratic process by keeping opponents of President Biden off the primary ballots, or as in the case of Florida, cancelling the primaries altogether so we couldn't even write in an alternative; they may be leading our country to the brink of disaster and beyond—but one thing they have done really well:

As soon as I switched my party affiliation, they stopped harassing me.

True, I would have appreciated a little "we're sorry to see you go" and "what led you to leave us?" rather than feeling as if they were delighted to have me off their membership rolls. It reminds me of my quarrel with Penzey's Spices, which clearly and openly stated that if our political and social views did not align with theirs, they did not care about having our business. Or the church that kicked us out, changed the locks, and cut off communication. It was not a smart response in any of these cases, and certainly not kind—bear in mind that all three of these organizations brag about their supposed compassion—but if they don't want my votes/membership/business, that's their problem.

But I am grateful for this current snub. I did appreciate getting information from all sides in the mail, which I find helpful for making voting decisions. But I resent the intrusive phone calls and text messages, which are now exclusively from the Republicans. When I was a Democrat, they came from both parties. I wish I could say that the volume has been cut in half now, but alas that does not appear to be the case.

It's not going to change how I vote, but I can't deny that this restores in me a tiny bit of gratitude to my former party.

I made nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice) for dinner tonight. (It was yummy.) The oil I used was coconut oil, and the experience was not without mess and a few muttered grumbles: Why does coconut oil come in jars instead of bottles?

Before transferring the oil to one of the bottles I use when I make oil infusions, I took a picture of my coconut oil, because it finally occurred to me that coconut oil comes in jars because this is not what it looks like for most of you:

I guess I'll worry about getting the oil out of my tall, thin bottle when winter comes.

I grew up a conservationist. That's the kind of thing that happens when you live in the shadow of New York's Adirondack Mountains, and your father is a Boy Scout leader who loves camping and hiking, and frequently takes you mountain climbing with his buddies from work. "Forever Wild" gets in your blood.

From before I can remember, I knew how to respect the mountains, the waters, the flora, and the fauna. Dad wouldn't have it any other way.  We subscribed to The Conservationist magazine, and treated the land and animals everywhere else properly as well. It's not surprising, then, that in my teenaged years I was drawn to what became known as the Environmentalist Movement.

That infatuation did not last, as the movement quickly moved beyond saving wild areas and animal habits, cleaning up air and water, and promoting responsible human encounters with nature.  It became political, and extreme; it chose large-scale activism over human scale efforts; and it lost me.

All this flooded back to me when I read "Can American Conservation Survive ‘Green’ Energy?" It reminded me that someone said—it may have been Robert F. Kennedy Jr., for whom conservation is a critical issue, but I'm not certain—"The Democratic Party has focused its concern for the environment on one thing and one thing only:  climate change.  It is now the Republicans who are thinking about habitat destruction, species extinction, the destruction of the land, and our nation's food supply." I'm paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist of it.

Thanks to our unique history of conservation and a culture of preservation, Americans have, for many decades, taken for granted their access to natural beauty.

Organizations ... founded by concerned citizens serve to champion habitat restoration and protection. Indeed, such was the very foundation of the modern environmental movement spawning nonprofits that advocate for policy, educate, install oyster beds, guard sea turtles, clean woodlands, “save the whales,” remind drone operators about the negative impacts of unmanned vehicles on wildlife, and, of course, constrain or prevent drilling and mining projects to preserve species and habitats.

But now the environmental movement is at odds with itself. The movement’s full-throated embrace of so-called “green energy,” successfully amplified by unprecedented government mandates and subsidies, is leading to habitat-invading and beauty-destroying energy projects at scales that not only rankle onlookers but also those environmentalists still committed to stewardship and conservation—and would shock the founders of the preservation movement.

In California, a 2,300-acre solar project requires destroying thousands of 150–200 year-old Joshua Trees, also the habitat of endangered desert tortoises. Locals object. Officials approve.

Disputes in Maine about where to put massive wind turbine projects pit environmental groups against conservationists intent on protecting wilderness and wildlife. Paradoxically, the state has the nation’s strictest mining laws, precluding any possibility of directly sourcing even a portion of the raw materials necessary to construct the turbines and solar panels slated for deployment to Maine’s electrical grid. [emphasis mine]

Meantime in Vermont a solar panel project that would cover 227 football fields of pristine landscape is being vigorously opposed.

‘Green’ energy policies come at the expense of far greater land and water use. [They] also ignore increased foreign resource dependence and environmental impacts overseas. The production of useful energy, which drives economic productivity, is always about tradeoffs. Americans are unlikely to tolerate increasingly obvious ‘green’ tradeoffs. [emphasis mine]

In addition to affordable cars, air conditioners, and smart phones, virtually all Americans want clean air and abundant, biodiverse seas and wide-open spaces our 19th-century forebearers helped to realize.  You can bet future generations will too. It’s in our nature. And our energy policies and choices should reflect that.

I think we all need some good news this morning, completely free of political angst.

Dark Chocolate May Be Good for the Eyes, Study Says

As with most Epoch Times articles, this may require an e-mail address to see, even though it's free. So I'll quote a few relevant sections.

Researchers from Italy found that eating just a few squares of dark chocolate—around three from a standard bar—could improve how well the blood vessels in your eyes work. These vessels are essential for maintaining clear and healthy vision.

It found that consuming dark chocolate significantly widened the blood vessels in the retina when exposed to flickering light. This widening improves blood flow, allowing the retina to receive more oxygen and nutrients, which helps it function properly.

[Lead author Giuseppe] Querques, who is also a professor of Ophthalmology at the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan, said that this suggests that dark chocolate might help prevent eye diseases and could have broader health benefits, as the effects seen in the eye’s blood vessels might reflect how cocoa affects the rest of the body.

According to Queques, dark chocolate helps increase the production of nitric oxide, which makes blood vessels in the eyes widen more. The plant compounds in dark chocolate boost the amount of nitric oxide in the body, leading to greater dilation of retinal vessels.

Note that nitric oxide has many other heath benefits, and you can get it from sunshine as well as from chocolate. Also, beets. Two out of three....

Querques added that if further studies confirm that regular dark chocolate consumption plays a favorable role in preventing or managing retinal diseases, “daily cocoa intake could be used as a therapy or prevention not only of retinal but also of systemic diseases.”

I note with special pleasure that this is the first article I have read that speaks of the benefits of eating dark chocolate without feeling obligated to add, "But we all know chocolate also contains bad things like fat and sugar, so we don't recommend eating it."

When Russia invaded the Ukraine, I was naturally on the side of the underdog. I was thrilled when our choir sang John Rutter's A Ukrainian Prayer, and was happy to see the Ukrainian flags displayed in many places on our cruise through France later that summer. (I was even happier when one of our tours walked right into the middle of a demonstration in support of the Canadian truckers' Freedom Convoy.)

But from the beginning I have never understood the hatred of Russia, and one of my first blog posts about the situation was Pray for Russia. We had been looking forward to a trip to St. Petersburg, especially after a friend told me how impressed she was with the friendliness of the Russian people and their gratitude (still!) for American help during World War II. Now it's abundantly clear that we won't live long enough for American-Russian relations to be sufficiently repaired to make such a visit possible.

Very early in the war, I spoke with a Swiss man who could not understand why the United States was involved, and supporting Ukraine so enthusiastically, as there wasn't that much difference between the two governments, and they were both horribly corrupt. I'm finally beginning to understand his point of view, and also that the United States was far from innocent in the Ukrainian corruption.

The Vietnam War was a big part of my young life, though none of our family members actually fought in that terrible (and probably worse than useless) war. Our involvement in the Ukraine is beginning to have an all-too-familiar smell and feel. This 30-minute interview with human rights lawyer Bob Amsterdam gives a peek into one of the dirty sides of the conflict.

Yes, I do have at least two bagpipe players among my readers!

I haven't seen The Crown, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying Charles Cornell's analysis of what the composer did with the bagpipe sound for that movie.

This morning I posted Jordan Peterson's take on the disastrous fall from grace of America's once-trusted institutions:  government, academia, the media, and medicine.  By the time evening came around I had also found Jeremy Tucker's point of view, with similar conclusions. It's an Epoch Times article, so I'll quote a few paragraphs for you.

Several new polls have appeared that confirm what you suspected. Trust in medical authority and pharmaceutical giants, along with their core product, have hit new lows.

People were willing to go along [with the government's COVID policies], simply because most people presumed that there had to be something true about the fears or else leaders would not be saying and doing such things. Surely, too, if this fear was being exaggerated, certainly the medical profession would have been the first to blow the whistle. Instead, we saw media, medicine, government, and pharma all marching in lockstep as the economy was crushed and civil liberties were wrecked.

It seems strange and bitterly ironic that following the largest and most expensive public health intervention in human history that trust would have sunk so far and so dramatically and is unlikely to recover for a generation. That is a problem that needs addressing. It certainly cannot be swept under the carpet, and the dissidents certainly should no longer be treated as problems to silence.

The people who expressed grave doubts about lockdowns and vaccine mandates should be given a hearing and spotlight. They were correct when the entire establishment was wrong. We might as well admit it. That is the beginning of the restoration of trust.

I don't always understand Jordan Peterson, nor do I always agree him, but he is always interesting and makes me think. Here he manages to ponder the causes of anti-Trump extremism, the fears of Trump voters, the fundamental natural resource of Western civilization, and the terrifying erosion of trust he has observed over the last five years, all in three minutes.

Every person, every sermon, every book has something of value to offer to those who will listen with a discerning heart and mind. I am fond of repeating my own aphorism: The wise man recognizes truth even in the words of his enemies. How much more so in the rest of the world?

At the same time, we find ourselves attaching too much value to the words of people we admire. We have much to learn from those with whom we already agree on important issues, but at least with our "enemies" we know to be cautious. It is so human to want to find a path and stick with it, to find the "one right way" to approach a situation and shut our eyes to alternatives and to information that might contradict what we think we know. With complex issues, such as childrearing, health care, charitable giving, education, foreign policy, economics, even personal organization, rigidly following the advice of others often leads to disaster.

I'm not saying that there's no such thing as a "right path," nor that truth is subjective, as so many people want to insist—but that people, even the wisest, best-educated, and most experienced people, are still fallible human beings and make really lousy gods.

Our own knowledge, experience, and thoughts don't necessarily show us the right way, either, and for the same reason. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." Nonetheless, those are the tools we're given and we need to make the most of them.

Listen to others, seek many counsellors, be happy to learn from them—but never stop thinking for yourself. Make the effort to compare what others say with what you know from living your own life. After all, the day is coming, and now is, when those others might actually be "human bots" paid to spread falsehoods and stir up trouble, or AI (Artificial Intelligence or Automated Idiocy, take your pick) doing the same.