You want it bailed out? You do it.

I’ve already adjusted my clocks for the start of Daylight Savings Time that begins tonight. Yes, I’ve recently seen a few things saying we really shouldn’t do that to ourselves. I like DST for a simple reason. In Detroit in July daylight savings sunrise is at 6:00 and sunset is at 9:20. We’re near the western edge of the eastern time zone. I much prefer the sun up at those times than have standard time sunrise at 5:00 and sunset at 8:20. The way our society is structured, including my standard evening activities, I would have a hard time adjusting to an earlier bedtime and earlier morning. Yeah, I’m aware that I don’t have to get up for a job on Monday morning and take a week to adjust to the new time. I’m aware that there tend to be more vehicle accidents and more heart attacks during this coming week. So I’ve thought of a way to lessen the problems of transition (and I’m fully aware how impractical this is). Instead of changing the clocks one hour on one day change them by two minutes a day over thirty days. For many people the clock they use most is their phone and phone companies can make that change happen automatically. Yeah, I didn’t think anyone would agree. Almost a year ago I wrote about the book Gay Like Me, A Father Writes to His Son by Ritchie Jackson. The book celebrates a son coming out to his gay father. That son is Jackson Foo Wong, also son of actor BD Wong. When I finally heard the full name of the other father I realized I had heard about the prequel to Jackson’s book, Following Foo: The Electronic Adventures of the Chestnut Man by Wong. And now I’ve read that one too. By prequel I mean 18 years earlier when Jackson Wong was born. BD and Ritchie wanted to start a family and chose surrogacy. As the story opens Shauna is carrying their twins, but goes into labor about ten weeks early. One of the boys, named Boaz, doesn’t make it. The other, named Jackson, spends three months in intensive care. BD sent out email updates, first to immediate family and close friends. Soon others asked to join and by the end the list has several hundred names. Those updates, in all their detail, became this book. Also included are responses from readers, plus some explanatory material. The story is fascinating as the baby faces one difficulty after another. It also shows a great deal of love from the fathers, from the rest of the family, and from the friend network. It is also at times hilarious, especially the chapter supposedly written by the baby. The kid explains his care from his point of view, using a lot of slang. He says that at times he does what he does to remind the adults who the real boss is. I recommend this one. I had originally thought it might be the book I leave in my car and read when I have to sit in wait somewhere. But it was too good for that. I finished it off in about a week. Last Friday Silicon Valley Bank failed and was taken over by the Feds. It is the largest bank failure since the start of the Great Recession. There are various news sources that will go into detail on this bank being for the venture capital investors of Silicon Valley, on why it failed, and how that has left some tech companies unable to meet payroll because only so much of their money is insured. I’ll instead go into what put Kos of Daily Kos into a rage. And that is rather simple to explain. Various financial voices are already calling for SVB to be bailed out by the Feds. At the same time other financial voices filed suit against the Biden administration to stop the moratorium on student loan payments, one part of a larger effort to deny Biden’s plan to forgive student debt. Yup, these money people are saying bailing out a bank is good, bailing out students is bad. Kos told Wall Street: You want this bank bailed out to protect all the companies dependent on it? Great! You fork over the billions to do it. You definitely have the billions. One reason you have those billions is because you pay taxes at a much lower rate than most Americans. Asking the Feds to bail out the bank means the money is coming from the taxes average Americans are paying and you’re not. From scanning recent Ukraine updates it looks like Bakhmut is still in Ukrainian hands. This is the town in the east that Russia and the Wagner mercenary group have been trying to take for perhaps eight months. The town is pretty much leveled and close to surrounded, but Ukraine fights on because any town farther west would get the same treatment. Early this week Charles Jay of the Kos community wrote that conscripted Russian service members from Irkutsk in Siberia appealed to Putin last month. Their story made headlines. They complained they were being sent to battle without training and with the Russian style of fighting that was a death sentence. The Moscow Times, operating outside Russia, said their prediction was accurate – by March 1 close to all of them were dead. Those that live are injured and many of those have been told they’ll return to battle soon. Yeah, a tyrant doesn’t listen to his serfs. The more loudly they complain the more likely they’ll be put in the way of certain harm.