“Can’t” is the worst of four-letter words

My “Sunday” movie was on Friday because a movie I wanted to see was on broadcast TV (besides, the Oscars are on Sunday). The movie was The Conductor, a documentary about orchestra conductor Marin Alsop. It was shown on PBS as part of their Great Performances series. Alsop is a worthy subject of a documentary because she is the first woman to lead a major American orchestra (and did I get it right that she’s still the only one?). She is also quite good, worthy of her post. She is the daughter of professional musicians. She studied piano (and hated it). Her parents sent her to camp – violin camp, and she was hooked. At age 9 she attended an orchestra concert and was entranced by the conductor, who was Leonard Bernstein. She said that’s what I want to do. But she was frequently told girls can’t do that. She attended Julliard for violin. With fellow students she formed a small ensemble named String Fever to play swing music. Since they were all from the classical music world it took a while to figure out what “swing” meant and to apply it to their playing. Once they did they got gigs (including on TV) and played together for 20 years. She still wanted to conduct. Various schools turned her down. So she created her own orchestra with the help of a well-off businessman and his friends. Bernstein and Tanglewood finally accepted her as a student. She applied for the job of Music Director at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. There was a great deal of resistance to her getting the job with the usual misogynistic blather. She wondered how she could lead a group that opposed her. She got it and accepted it. She has also been the Music Director for the Sao Paulo orchestra and for an orchestra in Vienna – the birthplace of classical music! (Though not the Vienna Philharmonic, one of the last orchestras to admit female musicians). She is also a teacher of minority and female conductors (sometimes over the internet) and sponsors music programs for inner city Baltimore kids. She thinks “can’t” is the worst of four-letter words. And she has a wife. I enjoyed it because I enjoy classical music. If you do too this one is on one of the streaming services. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. Of course, numbers have been adjusted since previous downloads. The weekly peaks in the number of new cases per day for the last four weeks, coming off the omicron spike, are 1012, 777, 778, and 832. Perhaps this is a plateau instead of the start of another rise, though it is too soon to tell. News reports are saying the omicron BA2 variant is becoming more common in America, though nationwide the case count is currently dropping. For the last two weeks the deaths per day has been below 20. There are days when I hope the news out of Ukraine is light so I can write about all the other things accumulating in my browser tabs. But today doesn’t look like one of them. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported that Russia says it is focusing its efforts in “liberating” the Dombas region of Ukraine. Sumner says we should read this as Moscow recognizing it can’t take Kyiv and can’t install its desired puppet government. A couple days ago I wrote that the Ukrainian flag had been raised over the Kherson city hall. That is false. The city is still under Russian control. I did see a photo of a yellow and blue banner hanging from a wall, but I don’t know where that wall is – evidently not in Kherson. A few hours later Sumner wrote of a presentation given by the Russian Ministry of Defense that Russia never really wanted to capture Kyiv and Kharkiv in the first place. Never mind they lost 15,000 troops and 1,800 armored vehicles in the attempt. The only reason for those fronts was to draw attention away from the real action in the east and south. They say that as the outskirts of Kyiv were shelled again. One can tell the truth of those statements because they also said the avoided damage to civilian infrastructure and civilian casualties (though Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Irpin, Bucha, and especially Mariupol would like a word). Those statements also claim the Ukrainian military has been destroyed – as in they’ve taken out “300 out of 117 radars.” Somebody has a math problem. Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote that Mariupol shows Putin’s claim that the invasion was necessary to protect Ukraine’s Russian speaking population is a lie. The city has been one of the most pro-Russian cities in Ukraine. A survey had shown that residents were more likely to favor economic ties to Russia and oppose ties to Europe and NATO. 80% of Mariupol voters supported pro-Russian candidates. That does not mean the city wants to be independent from Ukraine. Or a part of Russia. So Russia reducing Mariupol to rubble may be one of Putin’s biggest blunders. That rubble will greatly change how the residents feel about closer ties to Russia – though there won’t be any polls taken for a while. Another thread from Kamil Galeev explains there is a big difference between Russian speaking and being Russian. Political allegiances don’t align with languages and ethnicities. Galeev included a map of the ethnic peoples in Ukraine. The country is quite diverse. Galeev turned to France as an example. The country used to have a variety of languages. Then the monarchy began to push the language of the capital onto the rest of the country. That homogeneity, that monoculture, we now see in France is not “natural” – it is the result of ruthless social engineering, sometimes known as ethnic cleansing. What is natural is diversity. This thread includes a long discussion of which ideas (mostly religious ideas) came from Russia and which came from Ukraine. Yep, a lot of them came from Ukraine. One of the things Galeev mentioned is that since 2014 a goal of Russia in Donbas has been to keep up a level of chaos. That allows Russians to appear to maintain order and be the heroes of the populace. Kos of Kos included a tweet from Pierre Morcos that says French President Macron has announced that France, working with Greece and Turkey, is planning an evacuation of Mariupol. They won’t ask Putin for permission. They’ll tell him about it. Also, Greece and Turkey working together? They’re usually like cats and dogs. But Russia’s invasion is bringing them together. Kos warns this operation will be difficult. Kos also discussed the effect the war is having elsewhere in the world. Yes, NATO is working to make sure the war doesn’t spread – into Europe (though enlistments in the Polish army are way up). Japan is considering this might be the time to reassert control over islands they say Russia is occupying. There is Nagorno-Karabakh, a territory of Azerbaijan being held by Armenia. The current situation had been enforced by Russia. The US and China wield soft power, such as economic inducements. But Russia had only hard power – fear of its military might. And that fear is fading. Russia is leaving a vacuum that a dozen countries would like to fill. Joan McCarter of Kos, working with a story from the Washington Post and CBS, that back after the 2020 election there was a series of text messages between Ginni Thomas and Mark Meadows, then the nasty guy’s chief of staff. Thomas offered suggestions and encouragement on how to keep the nasty guy in office. These text messages are a big problem because Ginni is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Yeah, the wife of a Supreme Court justice was working to overturn an election and destroy democracy. There have been calls for Clarence to resign (lovely dream, not going to happen) or be impeached. At least he should recuse himself when Capitol attack cases come before the court. Ginni does a lot of work in the white supremacy world and so far when cases related to her work come before the court Clarence hasn’t recused himself (and there is no body overseeing the court nor ethics rules that demand he does). Brian Tyler Cohen, who does political commentary, tweeted:

“We don't want any activist judges,” say Republicans, as one of their justices' wives conspired with the White House Chief of Staff to overturn a presidential election and that justice refuses to recuse himself from any cases on it.

Jared Yates Sexton tweeted:

The Ginni Thomas story is bigger than Clarence Thomas or his position on the Supreme Court. It reveals what a lot of us have been trying to tell people. The antidemocratic authoritarianism wasn’t just Trump or a passing flirtation. The GOP and the Right Wing are riddled with it. Yes, Clarence Thomas should resign. But we also have to recognize that Trump wasn’t the sickness but a symptom. The Right is fully dedicated to overthrowing democracy and securing power and profit. It’s top to bottom and part of the entire project. The attempt to steal the election, and ongoing efforts to disenfranchise and steal power, are being executed by incredibly powerful and wealthy Right Wing actors behind the scenes. Trump was the figurehead, but the problem is extensive and continuing.

When I was in college decades ago I did a small research paper on nuclear fusion as an energy source. This has always been portrayed as producing commercially available electricity 20 years from now – as in 20 years from now when I was in college and still 20 years from now in 2022. Meteor Blades of Kos, in his Earth Matters column, included a 15 minute video by Just Have a Think explaining nuclear fusion and the current state of research. Fusion is what powers the sun and is a very green way to generate energy. Yes, we can make fusion happen on earth – for a second or so at a time. The devices that do fusion cost tens of billions of dollars. Currently the total amount of energy required to make fusion happen and get that energy to the electrical grid is about ten times the energy we can get out of a fusion reaction. So this video says maybe our children will enjoy the benefits of fusion. But right now it is much better to spend those billions on the renewable energy sources we already know work. The urgency of our need to switch away from fossil fuels is too great. I just realized we are using fusion energy – through solar panels.