The Witness Chronicles 1/8/23: Howdy!
What the hell is this? (Warning: liberal content ahead)
If you’re seeing this, you are probably a subscriber to my newsletter, The Grasshopper. I write it, I take responsibility for the subjects and content, and no one else does. For a writer, that’s a pretty unusual combination.
But that is changing, fast.
So at The Grasshopper, I write about writing, the writing lifestyle, my take on various kinds of writing, tips, war stories, etc. Very meta of me, right? And I’m not talking about that dreadful corporation.
So, what the hell is this? The other online writing I do is on Medium, a subscription platform for writers and readers. You pay fifty bucks a year and you can read as much as you want and publish as much as you want. Some of that fifty goes into a pool of money that is paid out to writers based on the total amount of time readers spend reading your stuff.
Yes, you actually make money if you get read. You won’t get rich but you can make decent money. I wrote there for two years before I cracked $500/month, but I do quite a bit better these days. I have a decent following, around 5100 as this is written. It’s kind of my retirement job and I love it. The secret to making it work for me was finding my niche.
Mine is politics, climate, and global events, which covers a lot of territory. But my writing is observation and opinion, not journalism. Because a lot of my articles are timely and have a limited shelf life, I write and publish everyday. Very unlike The Grasshopper, where you can go back and read older stuff and still find value.
Evergreen, not unlike myself.
But my readers here on Substack often cannot read what I write on Medium because they are not members. So how do you know what kind of writer I am? Can this guy walk the walk?
I started The Witness Chronicles to showcase a few articles each week that either were popular on Medium or that I think should have been. You can read them here without the paywall (which is totally kosher with Medium’s TOS).
So enjoy, or not. And comments are open. Trolls will be crushed into tiny digital fragments and flushed down the toilet along with…don’t waste water!
Martin
In this issue: Note, still working on making the title links below jump you to the article (anchor links). For now you have to scroll. Work in progress!
Russians Blame Troops for Getting Themselves Killed
Ron DeSantis Doubles Down on the Wack
The Coming Year of Storms, Not Just Weather
Russians Blame Troops for Getting Themselves Killed
This tells us everything we need to know about Russian leadership
You’ve got hundreds of involuntary conscripts who have been grabbed out of their homes, during the holidays, and press ganged into the military. You barely train them, they have to equip themselves, out of their own pockets, and then you send them into a hot war in the bitter cold of winter.
They do not have the proper clothing, food, or shelter. The enemy is brutal and relentless, fighting with passion and determination to protect their homeland. And well armed and highly trained.
It is so cold that these ragged Russian soldiers, who never asked for that title, are freezing and need shelter. So, an unqualified officer barracks them in a school on the front lines, which happens to have an arms dump in the basement, though I doubt these troops know that.
What happens to these boys, far from home, hungry, cold, and scared out of their wits? They phone home.
Meanwhile the Ukranians, informed by locals, are targeting that school as a weapons dump, a completely legitimate military target. Do they know it is full of soldiers? Do they care? Russian soldiers like these have continually been committing atrocities against civilians since the beginning of the war.
Why would the Ukrainians care if they killed a bunch of the enemy? In war, that is their job, brutal as it is. So they target the school building with state of the art HIMARS missiles, provided by the US and fire off four or five.
There is almost no defense against these weapons. 1950 is trying to fight 2023. The school and everything in it is obliterated, killing hundreds.
It’s war, and that is all you can say, unless you are Russian leadership. They have to find someone to blame.
They meet with Putin and each leader has a theory about what happened and how many are dead. But mostly they are trying to find who they can blame.
Not themselves of course. Not Supreme Leader Putin, who Is infallible. So, the commanders on the ground who located soldiers on top of an ammo dump at the front lines? The local spies who turned them into the enemy? The broken Russian military reduced to rags by its own leaders?
No, the obvious culprits are those poor souls who phoned home and whose cell signals are obviously (according to the leaders) what the Ukrainians targeted.
It was the soldiers fault. Of course. They brought this death upon themselves. By the way, the destruction is so complete they cannot even recover DNA to identify the dead, or to even know how many there are.
For leadership, that is convenient. No bodies to send home to mothers.
Though the estimates range from 60 to 500, the leaders agree it must be the lower number and that is what they tell the public. 63 dead, a nice round number.
This is an ugly scenario, one of the ugliest to come out of an unbearably horrible war started with no discernible strategic justification. It tells us everything we need to know about this Russian Regime. Someone must be to blame.
It is obvious, it was the fault of the dead. They phoned home.
Published 1/4/2023
Ron DeSantis Doubles Down on the Wack
He hates woke cancel culture, but embraces right wing wack culture
A Florida judge denies an abortion for a 17 year old girl because her GPA is low and he decides she is not smart enough to make her own choice.
The judge is forced to resign from the outroar. Gov Ron DeSantis promotes the Trump-appointed Judge to a higher position.
Ron DeSantis is on video numerous times embracing and promoting vaccines, now he wants them investigated for something or other, not sure what.
DeSantis censors any discussion of sexual preference or gender identity in grade schools.
He also censors an obscure study of the history of slavery in American history that is not actually taught in any schools.
He confesses to hating cancel culture and the ‘woke’ people who supposedly practice it. But don’t the choices he made above, and many others, really represent cancel culture? He wants to cancel choice, sex education, the history of slavery in a state where he is governor, and in general is veering to the extreme right on topics like vaccination where until recently he was a proponent and cheerleader for their adoption.
It sure sounds like he is embracing the right wing version of woke, let’s call it wack. As in wack a mole where the moles are ideas, creativity, personal empowerment, truth, and a bunch of important things that apparently are not important to him any more.
If they ever were.
A prominent Republican strategist said, off the record, that his worst nightmare would be being stuck on a boat alone with Ron D. Apparently, he has the personality of a really boring and humorless stick.
That humorless thing is going to hurt him, because politics at the level he aspires to is about a cult of personality, especially among Republicans. I may think Trump was never more than a gifted grifter, but I willingly admit he was a master of that cult strategy. It might be the only thing he is any good at.
But personality matters. So, what about the other guy who almost certainly will be running, the current President, Joe Biden, a low key guy?Â
The American public knows Joe pretty well, given his 35+ year political career, but one thing apparent in his first two years is that you cannot underestimate that low key personality.
We are seeing some steel under that quiet manner as he deals with his own party and a generally hostile Republican Congress, where he has signed a multitude of important legislation, more than seen from any Republican government in modern times.
So, early on, we see signs of how the next election may play out. On the right the strategy is say no and play the blame game. On the left it is to be quieter but they will play hardball to get things done in a hostile environment, particularly in the upcoming House, which has already been plunged into chaos by internal infighting amongst Republicans.
If it weren’t so important it would all be very entertaining.
Except men like DeSantis are not entertaining, they are dour, humorless, and flat. Just what the American public wants, right?Â
I don’t think so. Trump is an entertainer, a buffoon who speaks his mind endlessly, spouting out the same stuff over and over, repeating adjectives and capitalizing words to make them into shouts. And a portion of his people love every bit of it.
The rest of us are getting tired of it and have moved on. Polls will tell us that the right has moved on to DeSantis, but I don’t know. It sounds like he may have come out of the gate early and is missing something it’s too late to acquire, a personality.
Published 12/31/2022
The Coming Year of Storms, Not Just Weather
Is 2023 the year the US finally takes climate seriously?
Weather is the most visible effect of climate change for most humans, and often the most devastating. The global climate is a closed system, a hermetically sealed fishbowl we all live in, rich or poor. There is no escaping it. Elon Musk’s fantasies of moving to Mars are just that, delusional fantasies created to pitch his space program.
We’re not leaving this place anytime soon. And why would we want to? It has been a paradise for our entire existence, one we unfortunately exploited to make fast profits while revolutionizing transportation. In less than 200 hundred years, a skyrocketing population and demands for cheap energy combined to change the essential formula that kept that paradise in stasis. It got warmer, fast.
It is a temptation to look back at 2022 and see it as The Year of Storms, and statistics show it was, one of them. The Washington Post did a year end report based on the estimated US storm damage in dollars. If you like data, it’s a good read. There were 15 billion dollar+ events in the past year. The forty year average is 7.7 such events annually.
But that is just a threshold. For example, In September Hurricane Ian hit Florida and caused an estimated $100 billion in damages there and up the Atlantic coast. So one billion+ event could actually represent 100x that baseline. The Post article breaks out many other stats for the year on fires, flooding, windstorms, drought…the list goes on and on.
And one scientist says there is no reason to expect that the next year will be any better. And 2022 is not even the worst stormiest year in the past five years.
Don’t get too comfortable because you got through the year without losing a home or a loved one. This is not a virus, you don’t get immunity from exposure. It is a severe change in the entire ecosystem, that sealed aquarium of climates across the globe.
Our ability to predict these events is improving steadily as our technology and weather models get more sophisticated. But our ability to realistically respond to this new reality is limited. Rebuilding under these circumstances is not the answer, but it is the answer people want to hear.
The reality is we don’t want to deal with reality and that is no accident. Millions of dollars and unimaginable efforts have been made to produce a public that has given up on any meaningful change. We’ve been conned, and suckers don’t like to admit it.
So, we don’t change.
Many coastal areas in Florida are still uninhabitable after Ian. The dreams of living in California’s forests or the Arizona desert are becoming unrealistic. And on and on.
And that is the crux of the problem. There is not going to be a break from these storms, ever again. Not in our lifetimes nor in the lifetimes of our great grandchildren, something I wish climate deniers and those promoting fossil fuels would consider. This is their legacy. It is our legacy as a species.
Humans are used to working our way through catastrophes using innovation and hard work, but we let this thing get way too far out in front of us, while very slowly starting to adapt. If anything is going to help it will be innovation, driven by financial incentives, rather than actions by governments.
We can’t even legislate control over misinformation in social media. Why should we think we can deal with something far more widespread and destructive? So, what do we do?
We can make it easy for businesses to scale up solar and wind. We stop allowing oil industry people into town meetings all over the country promoting negative mythology about those same sustainable energy sources. We can use and upgrade public transportation and relearn how to live with one or no cars. There are a thousand tiny actions that can contribute, but they have to become what society wants.
These are not great sacrifices but we don’t want to make them. Environmentalism used to be about pollution. Now it is about the destruction of a global system that knows no borders and could care less about how much money you have.
2023 will be a Year of the Storms. It could very well be much worse than the bad year we just went through. The data is clearly showing that path. But every year to come will be a Year of the Storms. Is there a point where we learn, or do we just keep keeping on?
The answer is obvious and depressing.
Published 1/3/2023
That’s it, issue #1. I hope you enjoyed it and I’d love to hear what you think. M