Lift Up Your Hearts!

It's wonderful to spend time with Grace in person and see what a bright, capable, and happy three-year-old she is! And apparently healthy, though the knowledge that appearances can be deceiving is always in the background. Her new medication appears to be proceeding with only minor side effects, though it's still too early to see any noticeable good effects. She takes her pills like a champ: not only has she learned to swallow them, but she does so without any help, not even a drink. (The single Tic Tac given afterwards is still an important part of the routine, however!) She is adjusting well to her cute multi-colored hearing aid.

However, the background concerns are poking into the foreground, after Jon (Jon, not the doctors!) noticed something strange in her last bone marrow aspirate results. The communication between Boston and Dartmouth is STILL horrendous. (Boston is where the bone marrow transplant was done, and where all those records are, despite them officially having handed her care off to Dartmouth.) As a friend who has had plenty of her own experience with childhood medical issues, wrote, "You want to trust that [the doctors are] doing everything, but the reality is that no one will pay attention to the details and care for her health as much as you."

The upshot is that the results showed evidence of something called the JAK3 mutation, which apparently is related to but not the same as the mutation that causes her NF1. Maybe; I'm not clear about that. But it's in the bone marrow and was supposed to have disappeared in the transplant along with everything else about her original marrow. So the urgent question is: Is this an error (they happen) or a sign that her old bone marrow is still lurking in her system? This coming Thursday the doctors will take another aspirate (with all that comes with it, including general anesthesia) to check the results. As Heather said, Please pray that Grace has no trace of her old marrow and for peace.

Below are more details taken from the Daleys' post.

Jon was reading through Grace's test results and saw that the most recent bone marrow report mentioned the JAK3 mutation. He contacted her doctors because we thought that one was gone following the transplant.

Dartmouth doctors can't see her Boston results to compare [insert eye-roll emoji here] so they contacted the head transplant doctor there. She said that seemed odd given the good chimerism results, but she wants another aspirate as soon as possible to make sure. So that is scheduled for June 12. We aren't clear as to why no one noticed that before. We think the Dartmouth doctors thought it was expected, and I guess the Boston doctors didn't see the results? It does make us wonder if we need to be paying more attention - we try to read all of the medical records, but don't always read through everything, and sometimes it gets pretty technical.

Please pray that Grace has no trace of her old marrow and for peace. We know a boy who had a relapse and had to go through the whole transplant process a second time and we really don't want to follow in his footsteps.

I'm letting the Cares Chorus be an earworm in my head.

Thank you, as always, for your love, your concern, and your prayers.

I hear that the CDC is recommending that anyone travelling abroad get vaccinated for measles.  No matter where they're going.

"Never had it, never will." (Are you old enough to remember that 7-Up commercial?)

If my doctor recommended testing as part of my annual blood draw, and Medicare would pay for it, I might consider checking to see if my antibody response is still robust after all this time. After all, it has been a few years since I had the measles.

As it turns out, the CDC is okay with that.  If you dig down just a little from the scary news stories and read what the CDC actually says, they acknowledge that if you've had measles in the past, you're good to go.

This is my dream garden. It's not an achievable dream at this point in my life, and even if I were much younger, there's a lot more to creating a system like this than he discusses. It's not so much a garden as a very small farm (albeit this one is in suburban Long Island), and requires farm-level work. For one thing, you can't decide to go out of town without arranging for someone to care for your plants and animals. It's like being a pet owner, only a lot more intense—you can't pack up your chickens and take them to a kennel, and neighbors who will happily feed your cat might draw the line at milking goats.

If this is ever going to be your dream, it's probably easiest to start dreaming early in life, when you're making decisions about family, employment, and home location.

Nonetheless, there's a lot of inspiration to be gained from Mike G.'s experience, especially in seeing how much he accomplished in under five years of consistently pursuring his goal, taking one step at a time, and learning along the way.

If your day is in need of a laugh, or at least an ironic smile, try some Great Moments in Unintended Consequences. It's lighthearted humor with a serious point. Here are two examples, from which you can get to many more. Warning: they're addictive.

Streisand Effect, Sesame Labeling, Golden Goals

Printed Guns, Scratch and Sniff, Jakarta Traffic

It was a genealogy moment. I was thinking about Memorial Day, and that it would be good to write a post honoring my own ancestors. I couldn't think of anyone! Oh, there were plenty of ancestors who fought in wars, from before our country was founded through World War II, including both sides of the Civil War, but none who died in their service, which is what Memorial Day is all about.

"How odd," I thought. "Was our family just extraordinarily lucky?"

And then I laughed at myself. It's not odd at all. Who is it, mostly, who dies in wars? Young men! Men who go off to war early in life and don't come back, never to have the opportunity to become ancestors.

If we were to honor our ancestors who suffered the loss of a child in service to their country, that would be a very different story.

Here's the follow-up to yesterday's post which featured the hot-button controversy over an image with an embedded swastika. If you watched the video, did you look closely at the contested picture?

BOLO—Be On the Look-Out for AI-generated images, video, and other content. It can be a fun puzzle; it's good practice training your brain to be more observant; and the skill may help protect you from propaganda.

Here's the image with the clandestine swastika, which was part of a comment posted on Matt Walsh's X feed, critical of his contention that many native-born South Africans are white. Now that I know about it, I can't unsee the symbol, and I did say I wasn't going to poke the bear unnecessarily, so I've blurred it out. You can see the original if you click on the picture.

This image freaks me out, and that has nothing to do with swastikas. It's creepy in the same way some of Salvador Dali's paintings are creepy.

Ignore the swastika; look at the girls. Six young girls, all dressed in white, so alike they could be sisters—or sextuplets. Look at their arms, their legs, the physically impossible contortion of their bodies, the arrangement of their dresses in ways no one would sit for an actual photograph (e.g. revealing their undergarments). Definitely creepy, and clearly AI-generated. As if someone had typed into an AI engine, "Create an image of six blonde white girls in which their dresses take the form of a swastika."

This is not a photo from reality. It is an image designed to cause trouble.

Surely someone else noticed this; I'm not going to waste my time wading through what others said. What interests me is that Matt Walsh's video does not indicate that he noticed it or thought it worth mentioning.

I find the use of Artificial Intelligence (Automated Idiocy) in this way disturbing. At root, AI is a tool, like a knife. It matters whether the knife is in the hands of a chef, a surgeon, or a psychopath.

I don't follow Matt Walsh's podcasts, but that's for lack of time, not lack of respect. I find him intelligent and well-spoken, and sometimes quote him here. Not that I always agree with him—he nearly lost me when I found out that he thinks raw milk is disgusting. I was almost one of the 14,000+ people who called him out on that, but decided instead that each of us has a right to be wrong, and let him alone.   

Why have I included him in my Heroes category? Because we need heroes at every level. Maybe Matt Walsh didn't run into a burning building to save a child, but he just took an important stand against the undefined but powerful mob that will use any excuse and any tactic to bring down those who dare disagree with whatever narrative they are currently imposing. I have no problem with calling someone out for saying or doing something that troubles me, but the demand for an apology and public groveling, which is almost always a part of the process, is not only wrong, but a dangerous abuse of power.

I consider it a heroic act to stand up to that kind of pressure. It's not easy. I remember, with shame, the times in my life when I've apologized for things I still believe were not only not wrong, but actively the right thing to do. And yet, shameful though I think my groveling was, I'm not apologizing for apologizing under duress, because the threats were not to me but to my children. The memory, however, makes me all the more inclined to respect people who, as Walsh put it, decline to take part.

In this video, Walsh addresses the firestorm that erupted when he refused to take down an image that someone else posted in a critical response to one of his X posts. Walsh, the mob insists, knowingly and approvingly posted a swastika, because he didn't censor his critic's image.

Now that I know where it is, I find it impossible not to see the swastika in question. But until it was pointed out, I didn't see it at all. I have no problem believing that Walsh didn't either. But once noted, why not take it down? The better question is, why should it be taken down? Even if it had been in plain sight, a normal swastika, while it would have been fine for Walsh to delete an image that someone else had imposed on his X feed, it is wrong for anyone to pressure him to do so. The swastika has been around for millennia and originally meant well-being. This mob would have had us burn our antique Oriental rug because it included these ancient symbols in its design.

Just because someone has reused a historic symbol for other purposes, that doesn't mean it's right to cave in to the misappropriation. Even if I'm the last person in the world to do so, I will still use "gay" to mean "lighthearted," use masculine pronouns as neutral when appropriate, and continue to cringe every time I hear "they" and "them" used as if they were singular. (This means I am cringing frequently while listening to the lastest New International Version of the Bible—not a salubrious situation.) I also insist on singing the old words to familiar hymns rather than the abominations featured in modern hymnals. Take that, "Good Christian Friends, Rejoice!"

This attack on Walsh makes me want to post an image of a swastika loud and clear on my blog, maybe in the company of my nasty-looking image of the COVID-19 virus. However, even if it may sometimes be necessary to fight a bear, it's stupid to poke one unnecessarily, so my more rational side beat down my gut reaction in this case.

The really interesting part of all this is the image itself—which I reserve for a subsequent post. I'll try enabling comments, just in case someone else notices the issue with the picture before I write about it. Please be respectful and refrain from using the comment section for arguments.

What you do matters. Answer the note. Respond to the email. Return the call.

I have no idea why these words from my friend Eric Schultz showed up recently in my feed reader, as their context is from 2020—but they're as important today as they were then. They're from his Occasional CEO article, "Answer the Note: Lessons from Ben & Jerry's and Warren Buffett," in which he demonstrates the power of simple acts to change lives. I would be remiss in not adding that Eric lives his own advice.

The simplest act of kindness can be transformational. And, if you are especially lucky, you will never even know the good you have done.

I hope you don't have to be on Facebook to see this very short clip of the challenge Jordan Peterson gave to ChatGPT.

I said, "Write me an essay that's a 13th rule for Beyond Order [one of Peterson's books], written in a style that combines the King James Bible with the Tao Te Ching." That's pretty difficult to pull off.... It wrote it in about three seconds, it's four pages long, and it isn't obvious to me ... that I would be able to tell that I didn't write it.

As the man said, "Hang onto your hats."

Florida has become the second state (after Utah) to ban the addition of fluoride to community water systems, for which I am very grateful. I prefer to have governmental decisions made at the lowest practical level, but I prefer even more not to have to choose between buying bottled water and drinking tap water with greater-than-natural levels of fluoride. I already get plenty, perhaps too much, from other sources, from toothpaste to topical fluoride to my frequent cups of tea. There may be dental benefits to consuming fluoride, but ingesting it ought to be a personal choice, not something forced upon all customers of the community water supply.

I let my opinion be known at the city level, with no success, despite the good examples of neighboring cities. So I was thrilled to learn yesterday that our legislature had passed, and Governor DeSantis signed, a bill eliminating added fluoride in our water systems.

There may have been a time when adding fluoride to the water supply was important, but with the substance so readily available in other ways, there's no excuse for forcing it on the general population.

Thanks, Florida!

Note that I'm not preaching to anyone but myself here—and maybe my runner husband who is still a few years short of 75.

The following is from an e-mail written by my father (emphsis mine). I don't think I'll ever be a runner, but I love walking; it's just hard to give it the time it deserves. The idea of self-care is popular these days, and most times I think I don't need any encouragement to think about myself more! But I'm trying to convince myself that paying attention to my health is actually a favor I'm doing to those around me on whom the burden of care would fall!

When I was at the Elderhostel program in the Smoky Mountains, one of the men—who was 75 years old—was telling me how he ran regularly. He wasn't particularly strenuous about it, but he ran for several miles either daily or every other day. When I said that my doctor would like for me to walk five miles a day, but I never found time, he asked "Is your health more important than the other things you have to do?"

Then he said that when he started running, his arthritis went away. When he stopped for a while it came back, and when he started again, it went away again.

Is it possible for that kind of activity to "cure" arthritis? My own feelings are that it might be quite possible. I have had a problem in my right foot for several years. When I start to walk on it, the foot is significantly painful, but the longer I walk, the less it bothers me. And in the Smokies, where I walked five miles a day for six days, the pain was gone and has only recently returned.

Still, the weather does not encourage five mile walks.

By "the weather," Dad was referring to ice-covered sidewalks and below-freezing temperatures. That's not my problem here in Florida, although summer days with temperatures in the mid-90's do make it tempting to avoid any kind of physical exertion.

I've been reading through our Constitution recently, a practice I recommend, along with reading the entire Bible on an annual basis. You never know what's going to jump out at you.

Here's a stark reminder of the dangers of getting our information from headlines, sound bites, click-bait, and quotations taken out of context.

There you have it.  Be a good citizen and vote accordingly.

Here's how to know when television has been too much a part of your life:

You read the headline, "1,000 Troops Who Identify as Transgender Being Discharged," and your first reaction is,

"Where was Donald Trump when Max Klinger needed him?"

Here are some more valuable thoughts from Hillsdale College's Imprimis magazine: New Thinking Needed on National Defense. There's no pay wall.

Please remember that I never agree with all of an author's ideas. That should be obvious but apparently isn't. When a problem is worth thinking about, it is inevitable that bad ideas will emerge. But we'll never get to the good ideas (or even recognize the bad ones) without casting a wide net. My goal is to stimulate thinking by presenting information I find interesting and/or helpful.

A smattering of semi-random quotes. Emphasis mine.

This raises the question of how we can spend so much on our national security but still have a military that seems so woefully underprepared for a major conflict.

[PGM=“precision guided munitions”] A key lesson of the Ukraine War is that when we deploy certain types of PGMs, such as anti-tank missiles or man-portable air-defense systems like Stinger missiles, it takes years to manufacture new ones. We have also learned that the tooling needed to produce various types of PGMs no longer exists—indeed, in some cases entire factories have been dismantled. This means that if we want more PGMs, we will have to start from scratch.

One of the key vulnerabilities of our defense and high-tech infrastructure is that the technology on which it relies is routinely stolen by foreign countries, especially China.... Despite various efforts to hinder or put a stop to this, cyber theft has become a huge business and is tremendously damaging to America’s national security. Until very recently, we have done virtually nothing about this cyber espionage. The thieves are almost never punished. All we do is complain while our enemies bleed us dry.

An important thing we learned very early on in the Ukraine War was that the incredibly expensive tanks we gave to the Ukrainians were defenseless against very inexpensive FPV drones. [In Yemen,] when the Iranian-backed Houthis started firing drones at ships in the Red Sea, what was the U.S. response? For each $30,000 Iranian drone we shot down, we employed two $2 million missiles.

Recently, by the way, forces on the ground in Ukraine have found that relatively inexpensive shotgun technology is proving more effective against drones than previously tried methods.

We need new thinking...about national defense. A guiding principle of that new thinking must be that the defense budget is not inexhaustible.

Why are people so upset that some government workers are losing their jobs? Why are we not rather rejoicing that vast areas of waste and downright corruption and fraud are being exposed? For as long as I can remember—and that's well more than half a century—governmental inefficiency and waste has been a standard joke. But it's not funny. It is unethical, and has led directly to our country's unimaginable debt, and the financial disaster we are bequeathing our children and grandchildren.

Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency are heroes in my book. Why is it that the same people who just months ago wanted to force us all to switch to electric cars are now so upset by the thought of layoffs that they think it's reasonable and useful to destroy Teslas?

It really stinks to lose your job. We've been there, more than once. But government employees have been living in a fantasy world of job security. Private companies, from small family businesses to massive corporations, frequently face situations where they must let employees go: sometimes when the workers have done something unethical, sometimes when they are not doing their jobs well, and often because cold, hard, economic facts force the business to downsize.

Where was all this weeping, wailing, and wrongdoing when American manufacturing went overseas? When our IT jobs went overseas? When millions of workers were imported to keep agricultural wages artificially low? When slave labor became acceptable because otherwise the plantation system would fall apart? (We once fought an especially grievous war over that one.) All these caused millions of American families to become unemployed or to settle for low-paying jobs without the benefits we once had. Did Americans then rise up in protest, or did we just sit back and enjoy the benefits of cheap goods?

It stinks to lose your job, but as far as I can tell, the government employees facing that threat have been offered generous severance packages, much nicer than what most people get when they find themselves out of a job. Why should governmental workers be protected from what ordinary Americans face daily?

Sadly, too many federal judges are showing that they are living in the same fantasy world, by ruling that the government cannot fire its own employees, reorganize its divisions, or effect layoffs of its own workers. What business could possibly stay afloat under such conditions? What part of the Constitution guarantees that a government employee, once hired, has a right to keep his job forever? I can only hope that higher courts have better sense—and that the errant judges are overruled before the damage done becomes irrevocable.

And what's wrong for an employee to be asked to give an accounting for the work he is doing? I admit I don't like the idea of cutting out remote work, which was a positive step forward for job satisfaction and family life. But remote work—or any work for that matter—can only succeed if the tasks actually get done, and I don't see why it's a bad thing to require some accounting of the work that justifies one's paycheck.

I don't remember where I heard the following, but it neatly expresses the problem.

I know a guy in the IT sector who says that a man slept at his desk regularly through the day, but they could not touch him, unless he really botched up. That is someone who is stealing from this company. He is stealing his wages for work not performed. 

That struck me in particular, because of a situation from my own experience. I also knew an IT guy who regularly fell asleep at his desk—or on the floor of his office. He was also one of the most treasured employees because he got the work done, and then some, without counting the hours. He was brilliant, and did his work in a manner that worked best for him. The company had no objection to his unusual schedule because they appreciated what he brought to the table.

I would like to see a system that facilitates such flexibility. Requiring a brief summary of the week's accomplishments can allow such people to shine.

Doubting that most of America's workforce is as obviously effective as my friend was, I believe we could all benefit from such an exercise. The psychological advantage of focusing on "what did I accomplish?" instead of "did I put in my hours?" could be great.