2020 garden retrospective – now with more bug pictures!

Gardening and being around my small urban garden definitely brought me some comfort during the long Covid-impacted spring, summer, and fall. A silver lining of being forced to work from home was being able to work outside some. Anyway, below I’ll just tell my story in pictures.

Black Swallowtails are not rare but they are just fun to watch, and their big fat green caterpillars are fun for the young and young at heart. In addition to bicycle tires, they like the fennel and celery in the garden, neither of which I had to plant this year. The fennel is a hardy perennial with a deep taproot that also spreads aggressively by seed. In fact, I had to start pulling fennel aggressively this year except for a couple spots where I decided it was allowed. The celery (which I mistook for flat-leafed parsley at the farmer’s market years ago) seems to be self-seeding and coming back each spring. There was no parsley in evidence in the garden this year.

Black Swallowtail

We saw quite a few monarchs around. This one is on butterfly milkweed, which really started to take over parts of the garden this year. The monarch didn’t cooperate and spread its wings for a nice photo. This should be a host plant, but sadly we did not see any Monarch caterpillars in evidence. I feel good doing my small part in a small urban garden for this endangered species. We made a brief trip to Cape May, New Jersey in October during the fall bird and butterfly migration, and this is just an amazing thing to see – Monarchs just flitting by every few minutes, adding up to millions I would imagine over time!

Some other plants you can see here are purple hyssop (slightly past its prime) and the fennel just starting to bloom. In the background is the neighbor’s ornamental grass, which is interesting but getting completely out of hand. If I didn’t constantly hack at it my garden would be gone in a few years.

Monarch on Butterfly Milkweed

Here’s another (slightly more photogenic) Monarch on a sunchoke flower. The sunchoke, which I planted last year, started to get aggressive this year. I don’t really mind because they are shallow-rooted and easy to pull where I don’t want them. I did notice some squirrels digging them up in the fall and “squirreling them away” in neighbors’ gardens, lol. The sunchokes and hyssop in particular attracted lots of bumblebees which were fun to watch but did not cooperate for photos. Mountain mint was another plant that seemed to attract lots of bumblebees.

Monarch on Sunchoke

We had a bumper crop of milkweed bugs this year. They’re harmless and I think they are super cool, but I can appreciate they might be creepy to people who just don’t like bugs. This is what the butterfly milkweed looks like after it is done flowering and starts to grow seedpods. There was also a lot of common milkweed in the garden which I didn’t plant but leave alone whenever I see it. I notice that friendly neighbors and their gardeners tend to pull theirs, which I will not judge (in case any of you are reading this) but all the more reason for me to do my small part to support native plants and ecosystems.

Milkweed Bugs

Completing the butterfly milkweed life cycle, here the seed pods are bursting open and preparing to scatter their goodness to next year’s garden. The milkweed bugs are still around, but I noticed after about this point they just started to crawl away and scatter. I don’t know exactly where they go. The white flowers you can see here are garlic chives, which are super cool and attract lots of bees and harmless little wasps. They (the garlic chives, not the pollinators) are getting just a bit aggressive though.

Butterfly Milkweed Seed Pods

This giant pumpkin vine just volunteered, probably as a result of throwing last year’s Halloween pumpkin in the compost. Either that or the squirrel’s who shredded other peoples’ Halloween pumpkins (we have learned not to put ours out too early) might have buried the seeds. It didn’t grow any pumpkins though, maybe missing some key nutrient?

Volunteer Pumpkin

The spotted lanternflies invaded Southeast Pennsylvania with a vengeance this year. This is an invasive species from Asia that is almost certainly here for good now. They didn’t do any obvious damage to my trees (including this Asian persimmon) but we will see what the future holds. They don’t bite, unlike the mosquitoes we had in abundance. We mostly worried about one particular species of virus this year, but others like west Nile, Lyme disease, and Zika are still around, and with climate change I will not be surprised if tropical diseases like Dengue are on the way. Can we apply the new vaccine development technologies to work on some of these, please?

Spotted Lanternfly on my Persimmon Tree

We had lots of stuff in pots. From left to right here, Thai “holy” basil, Asian long beans, Thai “sweet” basil, sunflowers (“Autumn beauty”, which lived up to their name and I recommend, Thai jasmine. Lots of bell peppers also volunteered this year, but no hot peppers – in past years lots Thai red peppers have been in evidence.

Pots

Maypop was my “try again” species this year. With the last few winters being so mild, I am hoping to see it again this spring. The new species I decided to add this year was a low, evergreen groundcover called bearberry. I didn’t take good pictures of it, and anyway it is not photogenic at this point, but I have high hopes for its future.

Maypop

And finally, the dwarf Asian persimmon turned a nice shade of orange to wrap up the year. It is 3 or 4 years old, and flowered but did not set any fruit this year. My other tree is a dwarf Asian pear. It had some kind of leaf spot and looked a bit sickly much of the year, but it did set a fair amount of fruit, of which the score was humans 2, squirrels the rest. They were good, and that is an all time high score for the humans!

Dwarf Asian Persimmon Fall Foliage

War on the Rocks Holiday Reading List

I have to be honest with myself – my reading pace has dropped way off during my intensive child-rearing (not to mention full time working) years. I just am not going to be reading long non-fiction books, and I will be chipping away at fiction very slowly, mostly as audiobooks. So that out of the way, there are some interesting books here that I will very likely not be able to read.

  • Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. At first I thought what, is this about military strategy or business strategy or what? Turns out it cuts across many fields and that is why it sounds interesting to me.
  • The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare. I probably won’t read this. In fact, I don’t even want high-tech warfare to arrive, but it will so we might at least want to know it when we see it.
  • George Orwell. I would rather read George Orwell than books about George Orwell, but this reminds that George Orwell wrote a variety of books other than Animal Farm and 1984 (or are you supposed to write out the letters?) I read and enjoyed Burmese Days a few years ago, for example. I would like to reread 1984 though. I don’t usually reread books, but this is a classic I read when I was just too young to appreciate it. The interesting thing to me is that it depicts future governments as mastering propaganda through technology, when in fact technology is causing governments to lose control of communications with their own people.
  • Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan – I am always up for some near-future techno-dystopia!
  • Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. Recently I have been trying to stop worrying about the line between science fiction and fantasy and learn to enjoy the latter more. But now we have something called “science fantasy” that straddles the line. I guess we have always had it and now it just has a new (to me) name. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all that.
  • The Red Trilogy by Linda Nagata. Military science fiction. Not always my favorite genre but I am always on the lookout for something even close to the classics like Starship Troopers, Ender’s Game, and The Forever War. Of course, in all of those war is a means to explore a variety of social and psychological topics.

Bernie Sanders makes the case to (UK?) voters

A guy named Bernie Sanders has an article in The Guardian. Who is Bernie Sanders, asks the UK audience. According to the article, “Bernie Sanders is a US senator. He represents the state of Vermont”. According to this Bernie Sanders,

If the Democratic party wants to avoid losing millions of votes in the future it must stand tall and deliver for the working families of our country who, today, are facing more economic desperation than at any time since the Great Depression. Democrats must show, in word and deed, how fraudulent the Republican party is when it claims to be the party of working families.

And, in order to do that, Democrats must have the courage to take on the powerful special interests who have been at war with the working class of this country for decades. I’m talking about Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance industry, the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, the private prison industrial complex and many profitable corporations who continue to exploit their employees.

If the Democratic party cannot demonstrate that it will stand up to these powerful institutions and aggressively fight for the working families of this country – Black, White, Latino, Asian American and Native American – we will pave the way for another rightwing authoritarian to be elected in 2024. And that president could be even worse than Trump.

The Guardian

It’s ironic that as the excitement of the election begins to fade, and the feeling sets in that we have dodged the bullet of a second Trump term, we now feel comfortable with beginning to feel disappointed with the Biden administration before it even takes power!

Prove us wrong Joe! I think Bernie has it right. The Democratic party’s message is overly focused on putting everything in race and gender terms, and not focused enough on an economic message that appeals to the working people of this country, which is the vast majority of people. Getting the basic benefits in place that people in other functioning modern societies take for granted – child care, education, health care, infrastructure in good repair – would disproportionately help people who need the most help, without the race and gender-based messages that are a turnoff to many voters and are ultimately ineffective at bringing about change.

“Fighting the special interests” means campaign finance reform. It probably means legislation or even a constitutional amendment clarifying that the right to free speech applies to humans and not dollars.

I have friends and family that voted for Trump. None of these people is openly racist, although only the hypocritical or naive among us think we are completely free of bias. Most of them honestly believe that Trump lowered their taxes and that Biden will raise them. Some are small business owners who honestly believe Trump, or any Republican at all, is pro-business and that Democrats are hostile to business. Some believe 1990s-era free trade agreements took away their jobs, the issue that I still believe edged out Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The solutions are pretty clear. The U.S. probably needs to take in more taxes and reinvest the money in smart ways that benefit working people, and that set the stage for long-term sustainable growth and innovation. This means the social programs I mentioned earlier, plus investments in infrastructure, capital goods, skills and training, research and development. These are also pro-business policies!

But how can you get people to support paying taxes when they have been subjected to decades of extreme anti-tax propaganda? This is really tough. That propaganda was created by decades of the rich and powerful buying off politicians to implant their extremist ideology in all our heads. I think Bernie is right that attacking those forces of propaganda is absolutely necessary. This is politically very tough and a very long game, and it is fighting the anti-tax message which is so simple to understand and so brutally effective.

Another idea, also politically very, very difficult, is to make taxes psychologically easier to pay. A value added tax would do this. This is how the rest of the developed world does it. It is the equivalent of a saved credit card in your iTunes app being so much psychologically less painful than writing a check each month to pay the electric bill. You just don’t “feel” that payment as much, and you see and enjoy the benefits that you getting in return every day. When I worked in Singapore, I submitted a tax return not unlike the one I submit here. But then someone reviewed that tax return and sent me a clear bill for the exact amount I had to pay. I was then able to set up an auto-pay from my bank account in twelve equal installments. Anything that gets tax payments into the background of people’s minds, kind of like the stored credit card on your Netflix account, might help.

People need to see and understand the value of the goods and services they are getting from the government in exchange for their taxes. We get enormous value from the government but we tend to take it for granted. Part of the propaganda has been for working people to believe that the taxes they pay provide benefits to other people, people not like them in one way or another, or people far away. I don’t have all the answers here, we could look at how companies create a sense of value for services. Advertising, branding, and marketing are part of the answer, whether we find that unsavory or not. Monthly statements, or the digital equivalent, might help.

There is also the flip side of helping people understand how much they pay for war and weapons, payments that do not bring any direct, measurable benefits to the people paying them. Federal tax revenue also gets sucked out of population centers where most economic value is created and redistributed to rural areas where it is not (out of proportion to the populations served, I am not suggesting rural people deserve nothing.) The brilliant, successful propaganda then convinces those rural voters that the exact opposite is true, that they are subsidizing the lazy people in the cities who do not create value! So we have to fight this too, and it brings us back to campaign finance reform, constitutional reform, and maybe democratic (small-d) reforms that get us closer to one-person, one-vote and lower the barriers to entry of candidates outside the two large parties. All politically very, very difficult! So who in the next generation will take up the Bernie Sanders mantle and make this case to the UK voter?!?

NYT best books of 2020

I plan to boycott giving the New York Times any money from now until the end of time because of the weapons of mass destruction debacle. Unless I get a letter or phone call of apology from Judith Miller herself.

So I had a look at the NYT best books on 2020 on this website. I don’t see anything I am likely to read here. I think Obama’s memoir is an important work of history. I don’t need to read it because I listened to his interview with Terry Gross the other day.

Shakespeare in a Divided America and War: How Conflict Shaped Us sound marginally interesting. I may add them to my list of more-books-than-I-can-read-before-I-die.

The problem with arguing that war is just part of the human condition is that weapons keep getting more dangerous. Eventually we will get to weapons so dangerous that a decision to use them is a decision civilization can never recover from. That decision might be completely irrational, but there may come a day when it only takes one irrational decision to bring civilization or even life on Earth crashing down around us.

2020 words of the year

The Oxford English Dictionary has released its “word of the year” for 2020, which consists of many words. This is the first “best of” article I have come come across this year, so this is officially my “first of the best of the best of” post. Note, not all things in my “best of” series are good, I just like to stick with the name.

This is really a whole “year in review” post with some vocabulary words thrown in. Here are some of them:

  • bushfires
  • Covid-19. Interesting – “coronavirus” was the term in March and April, then “Covid-19” became more popular from May on. Not surprisingly, “pandemic” was also popular.
  • WFH (I was thinking “work for hire”, but no, that doesn’t make any sense. This is “work from home”. Come on, the acronym takes the same amount of time to say as the words, and nobody is paying for paper or ink any more. We don’t need this acronym!) Also “remote” and “remotely”, “mute” and “unmute”. They don’t mention “virtual” but that is popular where I am.
  • lockdown and shelter-in-place. Not mentioned in the article is “stay at home”, which turned out to be the official legal term where I lived. It makes sense, because “shelter in place” conjures up visions of incoming missiles, and lockdown implies people can’t go outside, which was never actually the case. We also had “curfews” but these were used in reference to civil unrest.
  • circuit-breaker (didn’t see this term much in the U.S., but I saw it in Singapore government communications about their lockdown, forwarded by the U.S. embassy there. 10 years ago right now, I had recently arrived in Singapore for what would turn out to be a 3-year stint living and working there. After 7 years back in the U.S., I still get the dispatches from the embassy and have never taken the time to figure out how to turn them off. Anyway, I think this is a good way to communicate the purpose of Covid-19 related restrictions – they cause significant short-term inconvenience, like a blackout, but they prevent long-term catastrophe, like your house burning down.)
  • support bubbles (haven’t heard this one actually, but I think I can guess)
  • keyworkers (must be what we are calling “essential workers” here in the U.S. I assume locksmiths are included). “Frontliners” and “front line workers” have also been used.
  • social distancing, face masks, PPE (PPE also annoys me, but at least the acronym rolls off the tongue easier than the full name. In my opinion though, using industry-specific jargon never makes anyone sound smarter, especially jargon you just learned and act like you have always known.) Also mask up, anti-mask, anti-masker and mask-shaming. For the record, I wear a mask to protect myself and others, and even just to make others feel more comfortable even in low-risk situations. I still feel annoyed by the masks though, because they should be the last layer in a many-layered defense provided by our government. Because our government has failed in every other layer of defense, mask shaming and “personal responsibility” are all they have left. Fuck you guys. Do your jobs next time.
  • Superspreader
  • Reopening
  • furlough
  • Black Lives Matter, BLM (Bureau of Livestock and Mines?), George Floyd, cancel culture. I might add “police brutality” and “police reform”. I also found myself trying to distinguish between a “protest”, a “riot”, “civil unrest”, and “looting”. This year might be the first time I heard the term “civil unrest” referring to the present day where I actually live, rather than referring to the 1960s. I’m also going to add “of color”. It seems everyone now has to be classified as either white or “of color”. I’m not sure this captures the diversity of people we have in our country.
  • moonshot (Covid-19 vaccine development will probably go down in history as an example of how you can throw an enormous amount of money at a scientific problem and get rapid progress – alongside nuclear weapons and going to the moon. But this seems like easily the most positive and humanitarian of the three.)
  • unprecedented – gets used in the title and throughout the article, but they never actually call it the word of the year
  • mail-in
  • conspiracy theory, QAnon
  • “Isn’t now exactly the moment when we should be using Brexit more than ever?” (My answer as an American: NO!!! I’m sick of hearing about it. But maybe if you are in the UK it is relevant even if you are sick of it. My personal opinion is Europe is a nice continent and anyone should consider themselves fortunate to be part of it.)
  • Workcation and staycation are apparently popular somewhere, but I haven’t heard these much.
  • Impeachment, acquittal (already forgot about this)
  • “anthropause” – I have never heard this, but apparently it refers to a temporary dip in carbon emissions and air pollution during the pandemic. They say media coverage of climate change actually decreased for the year.

energy directed weapons

An energy directed weapon is basically a microwave beam directed at people. They have been developed for both military and riot control purpose. The U.S. says it has them but has never used them. The Daily Mail (a UK semi-respectable paper, known to sensationalize but not outright fabricate) says China may have used one against Indian troops.

military robot dogs

The Air Force now has robot dogs patrolling at least one base in Florida. Fun pictures here.

The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse. The dim light of one in the morning, the moonlight from the open sky framed through the great window, touched here and there on the brass and the copper and the steel of the faintly trembling beast. Light flickered on bits of ruby glass and on sensitive capillary hairs in the nylon-brushed nostrils of the creature that quivered gently, gently, gently, its eight legs spidered under it on rubberpadded paws…

At night when things got dull, which was every night, the men slid down the brass poles, and set the ticking combinations of the olfactory system of the Hound and let loose rats in the firehouse area-way, and sometimes chickens, and sometimes cats that would have to be drowned anyway, and there would be betting to see which the Hound would seize first. The animals were turned loose. Three seconds later the game was done, the rat, cat, or chicken caught half across the areaway, gripped in gentling paws while a four-inch hollow steel needle plunged down from the proboscis of the Hound to inject massive jolts of morphine or procaine. The pawn was then tossed in the incinerator. A new game began…

It was half across the lawn, coming from the shadows, moving with such drifting ease that it was like a single solid cloud of black-grey smoke blown at him in silence. It made a single last leap into the air, coming down at Montag from a good three feet over his head, its spidered legs reaching, the procaine needle snapping out its single angry tooth. Montag caught it with a bloom of fire, a single wondrous blossom that curled in petals of yellow and blue and orange about the metal dog, clad it in a new covering as it slammed into Montag and threw him ten feet back against the bole of a tree, taking the flame-gun with him. He felt it scrabble and seize his leg and stab the needle in for a moment before the fire snapped the Hound up in the air, burst its metal bones at the joints, and blew out its interior in the single flushing of red colour like a skyrocket fastened to the street. Montag lay watching the dead-alive thing fiddle the air and die. Even now it seemed to want to get back at him and finish the injection which was now working through the flesh of his leg.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (I am not guaranteeing this download is legal. If you ever see a book lying around and you are not sure if the copyright intellectual property rights of The Man have been followed, BURN IT!!!)

Jack Goldstone

Here’s a long interview with Jack Goldstone in Salon, who wrote the 1991 book Revolution and Rebellion in the Modern World. His basic idea was that when “selfish elites” starve the government of resources, things get hard for ordinary people (from the poor to the upper middle class, I would say), and that is when revolutions can happen. He says when a society mostly consists of older, less educated people in a stagnant income situation (like former Soviet socialist republics), revolutions are more likely to be peaceful and focus on reform. When a society has more young, educated people in an economic freefall, that is when violent revolutions are more likely to happen. His vision of a stable society is one where elites agree to share the wealth somewhat to promote stability, then they educate and develop cohorts of future elite leaders. Too many educated people chasing too few elite roles is dangerously unstable, in his view. A thought that occurs to me (not in the artcle) is you can see a basis for the emphasis on STEM – educated people in a narrow way that allows them to earn a living and contribute to the larger economy, without the likelihood of them becoming politically active.

The solutions he offers are non-partisan problem solving in Congress, blue ribbon panels, and “citizen assemblies”. It’s a long article and my thoughts above barely scratch the surface.

By the way, here is what a “citizens’ assembly” is according to Wikipedia:

A citizens’ assembly (also known as citizens’ jury or citizens’ panel or people’s jury or policy jury) is a body formed from citizens or generally people to deliberate on an issue or issues of local or national or international importance. The membership of a citizens’ assembly is randomly selected, as in other forms of sortition. It is a mechanism of participatory action research (PAR) that draws on the symbolism, and some of the practices, of a legal trial by jury. The purpose is to employ a cross-section of the public to study the options available to the state on certain questions and to propose answers to these questions through rational and reasoned discussion and the use of various methods of inquiry such as directly questioning experts. In many cases, the state will require these proposals to be accepted by the general public through a referendum before becoming law.

November 2020 in Review

Only one month to go in this tumultuous year. In current events, the U.S. election was obviously a major historical event, and Covid-19 continued to spiral horribly. But my loyal readers (all 3-10 of you worldwide…) don’t need me to cover current events.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: It seems likely the Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump U.S. foreign wars may just grind on endlessly under Biden. Prove us wrong, Joe! (I give Trump a few points for trying to bring troops home over the objections of the military-industrial complex. But in terms of war and peace, this is completely negated and then some by slippage on nuclear proliferation and weapons on his watch.)

Most hopeful story: The massive investment in Covid-19 vaccine development may have major spillover effects to cures for other diseases. This could even be the big acceleration in biotechnology that seems to have been on the horizon for awhile. These technologies also have potential negative and frivolous applications, of course.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: States representing 196 electoral votes have agreed to support the National Popular Vote Compact, in which they would always award their state’s electoral votes to the national popular vote winner. Colorado has now voted to do this twice. Unfortunately, the movement has a tough road to get to 270 votes, because of a few big states that would be giving up a lot of power if they agreed to it.

why we’re numb to mass death

I’ve always found close up pictures of Hiroshima victims to be some of the most affecting images I’ve ever seen, and yet knowing that 100,000* people were vaporized in a fraction of a second has less emotional effect. We also get numb to hearing about steady numbers of deaths that add up to a lot over time, like car accidents. I’m not a monster – this is a bug in human psychology. This article in Axios gives other examples of the phenomenon, from the Holocaust to the Rwanda genocide to the U.S. coronavirus meltdown. The article links to an academic paper by Paul Slovic at the University of Oregon, who studies this “psychic numbing” effect.

A defining element of catastrophes is the magnitude of their harmful consequences. To help society prevent or mitigate damage from catastrophes, immense effort and technological sophistication are often employed to assess and communicate the size and scope of potential or actual losses. This effort assumes that people can understand the resulting numbers and act on them appropriately. However, recent behavioral research casts doubt on this fundamental assumption. Many people do not understand large numbers. Indeed, large numbers have been found to lack meaning and to be underweighted in decisions unless they convey affect (feeling). As a result, there is a paradox that rational models of decision making fail to represent. On the one hand, we respond strongly to aid a single individual in need. On the other hand, we often fail to prevent mass tragedies – such as genocide – or take appropriate measures to reduce potential losses from natural disasters. We believe this occurs, in part, because as numbers get larger and larger, we become insensitive; numbers fail to trigger the emotion or feeling necessary to motivate action. We shall address this problem of insensitivity to mass tragedy by identifying certain circumstances in which it compromises the rationality of our actions and by pointing briefly to strategies that might lessen or overcome this problem.

The More Who Die, the Less We Care: Psychic Numbing and Genocide

I’ve often thought about a class that would teach the history of a war or tragedy by the numbers, by focusing on the number of deaths, who the people were, where they occurred and when they occurred. I think that would be educational (if depressing). But to put it in perspective you might need some visuals. One idea would be a stadium with people vanishing from seats. (This would work for, say, up to 100,000 deaths.) For even larger numbers, maybe you could start with a point in the center of the town where the class is being held or where students live, and then expand the dot outward as though all the people who live inside it were to vanish. You could even make this an app based on census data, and let the user pick the center of the bubble. Then finally, you probably should tie some of the deaths to individual stories, or interviews with survivors, friends and family. For me personally though, the numbers are important to put the emotional stories in context, and I am wary of news stories that don’t have numbers. Morbid stuff!

* Okay, I admit the “100,000 people in a fraction of a second” is just a number I picked somewhat for shock value. According to Wikipedia, 70,000-80,000 people were either vaporized instantly or burned to death shortly after the blast. Then a bunch more died of radiation poisoning of course. Does this make it any better? No, when it’s my turn please just vaporize me.