The man behind the tree

or

There are no others

– In which Dorn tries to talk politics.

This post is rated P (for preachy)

recently read an article touting an efficient way to cut carbon emissions from raising and eating beef. It had to do with reducing the overall amount of meat eaten by Americans, but in an innovative way: the report noted that the amounts of beef eaten by individuals varied significantly, and the 20% of the population that ate the most beef actually accounted for half of its consumption.

The article reasoned that by targeting this group for behavior modification (by whatever method you try), you’d effect a reduction in total beef consumption with significantly less effort than if you applied this effort to the entire population.

graph: greenhouse gas emissions aren't evenly distributed among consumers

This seemed like a great idea to me, at first. It just makes sense—why spend any effort trying to convince near-vegetarians to eat less beef? But then I thought more about what made the concept so attractive to me, and I soon realized what it was: I’m pretty sure I’m not in that high-beef-eating bracket, so this approach doesn’t require me to change my own behavior at all. Clearly, the best way to solve the problem is to make someone else change their lifestyle!

Admit it, you thought the same thing too, didn’t you? Why is it that we are never so ready to adopt measures that call for sacrifices for the greater good as when that sacrifice is borne by someone else?

Do we need a new power plant, or landfill, or half-way house? That’s fine, but don’t build it near my back yard—build it way over there, those folks won’t mind it.

Not enough jobs to go around? Let’s just make it so some people can’t get those jobs, so there are are more for us. They’re foreigners anyway, so it matters less if they are jobless.

Fossil fuel burning destroying the planet? Don’t reduce my ability to travel whereever and whenever I want to, but rather provide me with newer and cleaner alternatives to driving or flying. And if producing those alternatives pollutes some other part of the world, or if buying those alternatives is out of reach for some people here, well, we all have to make sacrifices for the greater good, don’t we?

We all see this, and do this, every day, in matters large and small. It’s part of the tendency to distinguish between “us” and “them”, sometimes referred to as “othering“. It’s a quintessentially human reaction, but if one isn’t careful it can also be as insidious a human reaction as rage, envy, hatred, or indifference.

One of my favorite books is The Ruin of Kasch, by Roberto Calasso. My sister Lona gave it to me about 30 years ago, and I still haven’t finished it, or really understood the parts I have read. I love it because it’s so incomprehensible to me. It seems to be about the evolution of culture and society from pre-history to the present, especially the replacement of divine-right rule with various types of “-ocracies” that have taken place over the last three or four hundred years. A central theme of the book, I think (did I mention that I found it incomprehensible?), is the universal human desire to effect good results for ourselves by ritual human sacrifice. The person being sacrificed represents us symbolically, but isn’t us, not really. His or her sacrifice won’t bother us much personally, but we’re hoping the gods will mistake him or her for one of us, and reward our “sacrifice”.

And one doesn’t need to believe in any gods to believe in the wisdom of sacrificing someone else’s time, or resources, or peace of mind for the good of our own. Somewhere during my Second Age—my work life—I learned a jingle that provides a good rule of thumb for how politicians and the public want to handle issues of revenue:

Don’t tax you
Don’t tax me
Tax the man behind the tree

This poem is attributed (with variations) to Russell B. Long, a colorful Democratic politician and United States Senator from Louisiana from 1948 until 1987. One of Russell B. Long’s claims to fame is that he is the son of that famous politician Huey Long, who is thought to be the inspiration for Willie Stark, the central character in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Kings Men. I never read it, but I saw the 1949 Oscar-winning movie starring Broderick Crawford.

What a harrowing movie! In the story, Willie Stark rises from corruption-fighting activist to powerful politician and wildly popular demagogue, along the way becoming just as corrupt himself, and at the same time corrupting his supporters and apologists.

Stark did this by promising his power base that their problems were someone else’s fault, and their solutions rested in making these other people change, or quit the scene.

Robert Penn Warren said at the time that the Willie Stark character was not really based on Huey Long, and it certainly wasn’t based on any politicians in power today. But the lesson of the corrupting influence of political and popular power seems just as true now as it ever was.

We are hot into the presidential campaign season, and many of the leading candidates of both parties find willing audiences for their claims that today’s ills will all be cured by imposing on other people—the poor, the rich, immigrants, the uneducated, the boomers, the millenials, the progressives, the prejudiced, the snowflakes, the deplorables.

I’d ask that as you work through all the claims and promises being slung around this year, take a moment to recognize the part of you that wants to see the sacrifice needed to tackle today’s problems borne by somebody other than you and yours. This recognition won’t let others off the hook, but it will help your conscience make more informed and objective decisions, and differentiate what’s good for all from what just feels good for you.

And yes, I am talking to you, gentle reader, not just to those hard-headed guys behind the tree who can’t see how wrong they are and how right we are! The country and the world have enough problems to go around, that’s sure, and different problems effect each of us more or less severely. But to tackle them, our country and our world are going to have to get more united than we have been. I don’t think that can happen as long as every faction is working hard so to believe some other faction to blame.

This random poster popped up on my screen the other day (well, probably not really random, the Zuck knows all my (and your) thoughts). To me, it says in under a dozen words what I’ve been fumbling for this whole post:

Gimme an amen!

Thanks for your patience,
Dorn
2/28/2020

Java quest

– In which Dorn talks about his Jones for a good cup of Joe.

mysterious package arrived in the mail today—a box about the size and shape of, say, a squat 1-quart milk carton. It contained a package of delicious “Two Volcanoes” coffee. There was no note, but we skillfully sluethed out that my Aunt and Uncle must have sent it. This was primarily from two clues:

(1) The coffee was from Guatemala (the Two Volcanoes of the brand name are Tacana and Tajumulco in San Marcos), which is a known favorite stomping ground of this globe-skipping pair, and

(2) the box was mailed from Kentucky, and almost the only people that we know live in Kentucky are (a) this family, (b) Mitch McConnell, and (c) Amy McGrath. (I almost never talk politics in these posts, but let me just say that if I was voting between those two people for who should represent my state in the Senate, I would vote for the one who wasn’t in the employ of the Kremlin.)

THANK YOU!! Kathleen says drinking it was like a little trip to Guatemala! I found the smell and taste of the coffee triggered a lot of memories (as the best smells and tastes do) of all the coffee I’ve enjoyed over the years, which is quite a large amount. Coffee has been a staple of my diet as far back as I can clearly remember.

I didn’t like coffee’s bitterness as a child (no surprise there), except when we were camping. The coffee we made on camping trips was brewed so crudely (even for the pre-Keurig 1950’s) that it must have been intentional, as part of the “roughing it” experience. No high-falutin’ percolator for us, just a pot into which was thrown some ground coffee and water, to be boiled on the camp stove, firepit, or (if we were in Yellowstone) the nearest handy fumarole.

I can’t remember now whether camp etiquette demanded that the grounds be spit over the right shoulder into the underbrush, or just chewed and swallowed, but I loved it. I remember trying to drink coffee at home in between camping trips and being amazed at how foul it tasted. Must have been because I tried to make it using an electric stovetop and a real coffeepot, I guess.

Speaking of java, a really great book is Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, written in 2004 by Simon Winchester, about the catastrophic volcanic explosion of 1883. He’s a great storyteller, and he spins a yarn that mixes coffee and spices, history, politics, natural science, heroism, villainy and adventure with a genuine apocalypse-scale (for many in that hemisphere) disaster. I heartily recommend it.

But back to my story. As I matured, so did my taste for coffee. My lifelong relationship with the beverage was really cemented when I started working. Having to get up so early every single day (no kidding, they really make you do that when you work for a living!) made a morning cuppa practically a necessity. I worked for the US Navy, the best coffee drinkers in the world, so no matter where I was during the day there was always a coffeemaker or a pot on the hotplate with as much hot, tarry coffee sludge as I could stomach just for the taking. Times were good!

I developed a habit of milk in my coffee, not for reasons of taste, but because I had a vain (I was young then, and allowed!) desire not to stain my teeth brown. I’ve kept that habit to this day, and while my teeth are no longer pearly white, I’m sure they aren’t stained as bad as all those tons of coffee I imbibed over the last 40 years could have made them, if I hadn’t taken this simple precaution.

I’m not sure it is more accurate to say of those days that I liked coffee, or just that I needed a steady infusion of it throughout the day. The flavor of it was usually agreeable enough (I like it scalding hot and bitter, like my women), but I knew that what I was drinking wasn’t exactly the best.

We got to travel a good bit because of my job at that time, and I couldn’t help noticing that sometimes restaurant coffee was much much better than my usual home- or work-made fare. A few places still stand out in my memory: Disneyland, Kona in Hawaii, many restaurants in European cities, and literally everywhere, down to the meanest gas station, in New Zealand.

Somewhere along the way I developed another coffee-brewing habit, this time not to protect my teeth, but my blood vessels. Studies show that coffee contains a great number of biochemical compounds (yum!), including some lipids that might actually increase your cholesterol. But the good news was that many of these compounds will stick to the paper in your coffee filter, if you use a paper coffee filter. So I always do, even when french-pressing coffee: I cut out a little circle of filter paper and put it right in the french press between the coffee and the screen.

Over the years I had tried different store brands, different coffeemakers, and different brewing tips, but I could never get my home-brewed coffee to rise about its stalwart average home-made flavor. Until one fateful day!

I was picking up coffee and other groceries at the Safeway, and they were having a manager’s sale on a Starbucks seasonal blend. I didn’t usually drink Starbucks—it was too precious for my Navy-honed tastes—but the price was right so I got it. I can’t remember the exact name, but it had “Antigua Guatemala” in the title.

I was floored by it! It was unlike any coffee I had ever made in my life, at work or at home! The only thing close was one of those mythical coffees I had gotten at restaurants around the world during magical pseudo-work-trip vacations. I had made it in our cheap old Walmart coffeemaker in the same way I always did, but the ambrosia that dripped out was other-wordly! And it wasn’t just a fluke: every pot of this stuff I brewed was as good as the one before!

This was a life changer for me. I suddenly realized that I could make coffee with complex, aromatic flavors I had never dreamed of. I went back to the Safeway and bought every bag of that coffee that was there, and continued to buy it every time they restocked. (Recall, this was a seasonal coffee, so I needed to stock up for the long cold months when it wasn’t available.) During the rest of the year when this coffee wasn’t offered, I would watch my supply slowly dwindle, and wonder if it would last until the Starbucks Guatemala coffee season started again (it never did, so then I subsisted on ordinary coffee, or as I came to think of it, “Soylent Brown”).

I also wondered each year whether changing tastes or market pressures would result in my coffee not showing up on the grocery store shelves at all next season? I was lucky for a couple of years, and then the inevitable happened. The coffee was gone from Safeway, from Starbucks, from the internet, everywhere.

This was the start of my quest to recover that transcendant flavor of really good coffee made at home. I started researching coffee, and searching out internet coffee stores to try different kinds. I got myself a coffee grinder, and started ordering whole-bean samplers.

At first, I limited all my attempts to Guatemalan coffees, reasoning that while there may be many stellar types of coffee in the world, the one that rocked my particular senses was grown there. But I had little luck—the Guatemala coffees I tried, while tasty, were just not magic. So I broadened my search, and found several types that I swear by to this day, including a single-origin Kenya AA, and a Tanzania peaberry.

A peaberry and a normal flat coffee bean (source)

(Coffee beans normally grow in matched pairs, which is why they are round on one side and flat on the other. But a small fraction—maybe 10%—of the beans grow without a twin. These so-called “peaberries” are smaller and rounder than the rest of the beans, and can be picked out from among the rest and sold at a premium, if you can find someone willing to pay that premium. The theory is that the size and shape allow more even roasting and therefore better flavor. I don’t believe it, but I like the Tanzanian coffee and the place I buy it only sells the peaberry version of it.)

So mostly I would buy my Kenya AA and my Tanzania peaberry, and every so often I would experiment with some new type, or try again with a Guatemalan bean just in case. I finally realized that I had been brewing the Guatemalan coffee wrong—it was much milder than those African coffees, so I needed to brew it a lot stronger. Once I started doing that, I finally was able to recreate the experience of that fabulous Starbucks coffee I had lucked onto many many years before.

And that’s where I stand today, with a stable of several favorite really good coffees, and a reliable source to get more, and the hope that that inevitable day when my nerves, or my stomach, or my heart, will force me to cut back on coffee is as far away in the future as possible.

Thanks,
Dorn
2/20/2020

Tribute to Insects

This morning I caught a news story about a study on insect die off. The study counted the numbers of insects that splat on car windshields, which the study shows have declined dramatically. This is not to be sneezed at since the implication points to an imminent collapse in the natural world that sustains humans and all life on Earth. Another study shows plummeting numbers of aquatic insects in streams. And the global warming news keeps getting worse and worse! Entities that are in power don’t seem to want to do anything. I just finished Robert Heinlein’s short story “The Year of the Jackpot”, which is online at the link. While not exactly comforting, it is a great 1952 short story of an actuary, who makes a hobby of tracking zany news stories, and correlates these stories in a way that points to an inevitable worldwide catastrophic climax. How prescient!

My tribute to insects, “Butterflies and Ironweed”, is below.

‘Sup, Dawg?

– In which Dorn expounds on the Archie health diet.

rchie will turn 14 next month. It’s a wonderful achievement for him, and a blessing for us, especially considering all his health issues over the years that vets have told us would shorten his life. He’s got some kind of heart anomaly, liver problems, bile duct “sludge”, heat intolerance, and poor defenses against water-borne infections (bad luck for a pup who loved to swim in the Bay!).

And now he’s developing the standard old-man issues: he can’t see or hear as good as he used to, he’s going bald (especially the end of his tail), and one eye is starting to droop. He is getting less able to handle cold as well as heat, and much more interested in short walks as opposed to long walks, and short games of fetch-the-ball as opposed to long ones. And he’s developing a little of an old man’s crotchety-ness, though he started out so sweet that he’s still better natured than his canine neighbors (or, truth be told, his human housemates sometimes).

I attribute Archie’s vigorous Third Age to his dinner regimen. His supper every night consists of the same three things:

(1) Some ridiculously expensive veterinary “Hepatic” diet especially designed for dogs who can’t keep their liver bloodwork values down where they should be;

(2) A big bowl of green beans, preferably french-cut, cooked to softness; and

(3) Just a little bit of everything else in the world that comes through our house, considered edible or not. Except chocolate or raisins, ‘cause they’re poison.

I can’t think right now of anything Archie isn’t willing to eat. He used to turn up his wet nose at celery, but in the last couple of years he’s acquired a taste for it, and now it’s his second-favorite snack (tied for second place with almost every other food in the world).

His first favorite snack is broccoli, which he loves boiled, steamed, grilled, nuked, puréed, deep-fried (I’m sure, tho’ we’ve never tried) or raw. His favorite beverage is water used to boil broccoli. I’m pretty sure I could tempt Archie away from a steak that has fallen on the floor with the promise of a broccoli floret. One time we needed to train him to go up and down some stairs, and the only effective incentive we could find was to give him a bit of the broc every time he took another step.

Albert R. Broccoli with a James Bond poster of Moonraker — Albert R. Broccoli

Archie is also quite partial to other broccoli-like vegetables, which is not surprising since they are all really the same species of plant, Brassica oleracea, that has been bred into different shapes and sizes over the centuries. These veggies are all “cultivars” of the same plant as broccoli: cauliflower, kale, collard greens, regular cabbage, Savoy cabbage (but not Napa cabbage), brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and broccolini (but not Broccoli Rabe, which is the same plant as Napa cabbage).

Once we had a friend over for supper who was allergic to “nightshade vegetables”. I had to look up what vegetables were in the nightshade family (the Solanacaea family, taxonomically speaking), and found to my dismay it included almost every plant we had envisioned as part of the supper menu: all kinds of potatoes (but not sweet potatoes), tomatoes, eggplants, and all kinds of peppers (but not black pepper).

Fortunately, we had a few representatives from the Brassica clan in the fridge and were able to redesign the dinner. But who knew that so many of the wide variety of veggies we eat come from so few families? You biologists probably knew that, but I didn’t.

I’m sure Archie doesn’t know or care how closely related tomatoes are to potatoes, or kohlrabi is to kale, as long as he gets a sample of each and every one of them now and then. His enthusiasm for everything he can sink his teeth into, from stinky old crab parts on the beach to the scientific rice-based “hepatic” brown nuggets that make up most of his meal, keep him happy and young, I think. I hope I’m in as good a shape when I’m his equivalent age.

What is his equivalent age, exactly? Following the folk wisdom states that one year in a dog’s life ages him as much as people age in seven years, Archie will be like 98 in March. But according to the American Kennel Club, that old rule of thumb is wrong. Different breeds and different dogs age differently, but they a better effective age for old dogs can be given by the formula:

agedog-years = 14 + (agepeople-years * 5)

By the above new-and-improved formula, this March Archie will be the equivalent of 84 years old. The article goes on, though, to provide an even more better formula (and by better, I mean more sciencey and complicated), developed at the University of California San Diego:

agedog-years = 31 + (Loge[agepeople-years] * 16)

UC San Diego developed this formula by studying the “epigenetic clocks”, the systematic altering of DNA by addition of methyl groups, that occurs in the aging process of both humans and dogs. By this formula, next month Archie will be only the equivalent of 73 years old! I like this formula best by far, and from now on I’ll only use this one, to keep Archie young and sprightly!

Thanks,
Dorn
2/6/2020

Goldilocks

I think I blogged about my 15 portraits in 15 weeks challenge a few weeks ago here. As I come upon the last week of the challenge, I’m a little tired of doing portraits but I’m quite grateful to the project for helping me solve the retiree’s dilemma of too much free time. For the last week of the challenge, tired of doing mostly fairly standard portraits, I decided to paint my youngest granddaughter as Goldilocks. For the record, she is exactly the type who could sneak into someone’s house, wreak all kinds of havoc, then fall asleep looking like a little angel. Side note: when I went on the spirit journey with some grandkids, that I previously blogged about here, it turned out that my spirit animal was a bear, so I had been wanting to paint one of them too!

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