Month: November 2018

Lookin’ good, Skwurlikins …

This squirrel is such a regular visitor to the house that I ought to give him or her a name. Sometimes he gets on the roof. Sometimes he peeks in an upstairs dormer window. And sometimes he tries to break through the screen of an attic vent, in which case I go out to chase him away. On this particular day, he just sat on the deck for a while, looking relaxed and contemplative. It must have been a good year for the squirrels. He looks well fed, with a fine bushy tail. I don’t feed the squirrels or encourage them. They’d soon get out of hand.

The global rot of billionaires

The list of things that make American deplorables so deplorable is very long — racism, vile religion, anti-intellectualism, appalling ignorance, love of propaganda, and tolerance for violence, to name a few. But one of the worst vices — taught by their sorry politics as well as their sorry religion — is the glorification of the rich.

Sometimes I think that the state of the world today is best understood not by looking at the competing interests and activities of states (the U.S., Russia, China, Germany, etc.), but rather by looking at the competing interests and activities of global oligarchs. Our media, out of long habit, focuses its attention on states and their doings, while the doings of oligarchs fly under the radar.

The media do report on the doings of billionaire oligarchs, but in a piecemeal way. The media ignore, or cannot see, the larger pattern of how billionaire oligarchs now have the world by the throat and have tapped the power of the state to amplify the power of their money. (See links below.)

The key to understanding Trump is to understand that the global oligarchy, with which Trump is criminally entangled, intends to loot the United States the same way they have looted (and continue to loot) Russia, China, Africa, Latin America, and many smaller states such as North Korea and the Czech Republic. The test for the United States is whether the rule of law will be able to slow this process of looting, which has been going on since the Reagan administration. There is nothing new in Trump’s politics. It’s just that Trump is more flagrant. His intent is more transparent. He is rather obviously a tool of global oligarchs, for reasons that the Mueller investigation will surely expose. The Republican Party has gone along with Trump because the Republican Party has been working for years (though with disguised intentions) to loot the American commons, to weaken the American democracy, and to hand the country over to the oligarchy. Billionaires have learned an incredible new trick: How to masquerade as populists, which the ugliness of right-wing politics and the stupidity of the deplorables have made possible.

The question is whether democracies can muster the power to rid themselves of these billionaire parasites and their corruption. The solution is easy to describe, but much harder to actually do. The solution is to use the existing power of states to put billionaires in prison when they break the law, and then to tax them into the dirt.

As for the deplorables, I’m afraid they’ll never get it. They’ll probably continue to glorify the rich who are eating them alive, while blaming dark-skinned people, whose poverty and powerlessness they are destined to increasingly share if billionaires continue to get away with looting and murder.

Here are just a few reports on the doings of global billionaires:

Czech Republic: The New York Times: Scandal Around Billionaire Prime Minister Leaves Czechs in Limbo. What Andrej Babis is doing to the Czech Republic is remarkably similar to what Donald Trump is doing to the U.S.

Venezuela: The New York Times: Jets, Horses and Bribes: How a Venezuelan Official Became a Billionaire as His Country Crumbled. This is about how an oligarch family sucked up the assets of the Venezuelan people, Russian style.

China: The Guardian: Guo Wengui, the maverick Chinese billionaire who threatens to crash Xi’s party. This is about competing billionaire oligarchs in China. China is run by billionaire oligarchs.

North Korea: The Sun: Where does billionaire Kim Jong-un get all his money to spend on luxuries such as superyachts, top quality champagne and his favourite Swiss cheese? North Korea is just one country of many that is controlled by damned-fool oligarchs.

Africa: Quartz: There may now be more billionaires in Africa than in Latin America. Competing billionaires are sucking all the wealth out of Africa, while the people of Africa are increasingly impoverished.

Russia: The Irish Times: Oligarchs and ‘unexplained wealth’: London’s rich Russians. Russia, of course, is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It’s a country run by oligarchs, for oligarchs.

Saudi Arabia: The New York Times: Saudi Arabia Arrests 11 Princes, Including Billionaire Alwaleed bin Talal. There is some sort of power struggle going on among the billionaires of Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has shown that, like billionaire oligarchs everywhere, he can get away with murder.

The United States: The American Prospect: The Trump Presidency: Oligarchs, Billionaires, Corporations, and Porn Stars. To quote from the article: “But the hate is not the point of this presidency. It’s a tool for protecting the massive looting of the public commons currently under way, and most importantly, the shady network of Russian oligarchs, U.S. billionaires, Kremlin cronies, hapless lawyers, and privately held corporations that brought Donald J. Trump to power. The U.S. billionaires and privately held corporations are in it for the looting.”

Kirby vacuum cleaners


A Kirby Avalir vacuum cleaner

Sorry again, non-nerds. This is another nerd post. Though we’ll also talk about Kirby’s business practices.

I had not been inside a pawn shop in probably 50 years. Nice people don’t go into pawn shops. But I was waiting for the oil to be changed in my car, with a one-hour wait on my hands. I got in 2.5 miles of walking, checking out the businesses in the neighborhood of the car place. One of those businesses was a pawn shop. When I went in, a nice young man told me that if I saw anything I liked, he’d make me a good deal on it.

Only one thing caught my eye. That was a Kirby Avalir vacuum cleaner, model G10D, that looked like new. The sticker said that it came with a box of tools. The sticker price was $199. After wandering around the store for a while, I told the young man that I had some time to kill while my car was being serviced, and that I was interested in the vacuum cleaner. I asked what kind of deal he’d make me. He went behind the counter and looked up something in a computer. He’d sell it for $140, he said. I went out and walked some more, and I Googled for that model of Kirby. The price he’d offered me was a total steal. I resolved that I’d go back, and, if the box of tools (which was in the back, he said), was complete, then I’d buy the vacuum cleaner. After visiting an ATM machine and withdrawing enough cash, I went back to the pawn shop. Most of the tools in the box appeared to have never been used. There even was a shampoo attachment (which I will never use and probably ought to sell on eBay).

Kirby vacuum cleaners are an American icon, with about 85 years of history. Their build quality is superb, and they’re very high-powered. The mechanical beauty of a Kirby vacuum cleaner is so appealing to men that it seems that most of the YouTube videos on Kirby vacuum cleaners are done by men. Kirby’s marketing, though, has often gotten the company into trouble. They’re sold by “direct sales” only, door to door. Though they’re great vacuum cleaners, they cost twice as much as comparable products, like every product that is sold door to door. Poor people and old people are often targeted by Kirby salesmen, people who can’t afford Kirby’s prices. I would assume that Kirby must also make money through financing, because it seems very unlikely that many customers are in a position to write a $2,000 check for a vacuum cleaner.

And so the value of a Kirby vacuum cleaner drops by about half as soon as the salesman walks out the door. After that, Kirby vacuum cleaners hold their value very well, as you’ll see if you shop for one on eBay.

Driving home with the vacuum cleaner in the front seat and the box of tools in the back, I had a good chuckle at the model name “Avalir.” As a word nerd, I knew that it’s clearly taken from the French avaler, which means to swallow or to inhale. It was a bit of work, Googling in French, to trace the root of the French avaler back to Latin. The Latin root is valles, or valley. The French avaler, it seems, originally meant “to descend,” but later the word acquired the meaning of swallowing. An English cognate is avalanche.

I haven’t used the vacuum cleaner yet because I’m waiting for some new vacuum cleaner bags from Amazon. But Lily (the cat), though she has never heard the thing run, recognized it instantly as a vacuum cleaner. She turned and fled upstairs.

Using the Apple watch in fringe areas

Sorry, non-nerds. This is a nerd post.

Technology companies these days assume that everyone, everywhere, has fast Internet and good cell phone coverage. In rural America, that is not the case. Millions of us have been left behind. In the 10 years that I have lived here in the woods, things have gotten better. But I still have sketchy cellular service (the nearest tower is about 2.75 miles away). For Internet, I now have HughesNet satellite service. It’s fast, but it’s expensive. I get only so many gigabytes a month. And a half-second delay is built into everything you do, just because of the speed of light and the round trip to the satellite (46,000 miles).

A week ago, when I bought an Apple Watch 4, I knew that I was taking a risk and that some of the features might not work well in a fringe area. For example, by default, if the watch’s owner is more than 65 years old (I am), then fall detection is turned on. If the watch’s internal sensors think that you have taken a fall, and if you don’t move and don’t respond to the watch for a minute, then the watch will call emergency services and send texts to your emergency contacts. I wanted that feature not only for fall detection, but also so that I always would have on my wrist a way to call 911.

I am happy to report that, when I did a walkaround today, the watch was able to make calls from anywhere on abbey property — the woods as well as the yard, garden, and orchard. However, to make that happen, I had to order a WIFI range extender and mount it in the abbey’s attic. It took a lot of fussing, experimenting, and reading to figure out why a WIFI range extender was necessary in my situation.

My watch is paired with a new iPhone XR. The phone actually is quite a good cell phone, much better than my now-retired iPhone 5, which was six years old. I’m on the Verizon network. The iPhone XR will make an LTE connection to Verizon if it can. That’s the fastest kind of connection, but LTE also requires better signal strength. If the nearest Verizon tower is too far away to support LTE, then the iPhone will fall back to 3G, or CDMA-EVDO, which is slower but totally useful. If the signal strength is too weak to support 3G, then the iPhone will fall back to CDMA-1x, which is very slow but good enough for phone calls and even slow, slow, data. The iPhone even has another option. If WIFI is available, then the iPhone can make phone calls using WIFI, routed through Verizon’s “VZW-Wifi” system. In short, the iPhone XR has options for how it connects to the nearest tower, it has decent antennas, and it has enough power to be a pretty good cell phone. The iPhone also has the option of routing calls over WIFI.

The Apple watch can function as a cell phone even when its paired iPhone is not nearby. The watch can connect directly to Verizon. But the watch is not a powerful cell phone. The watch has low power and tiny antennas. Even worse, the watch supports only LTE, so it cannot fall back to 3G or 1x when signals are weak. Apple watches love the city. But there is a limit to what they can do in rural areas with fringe cellular coverage. However, if the watch’s paired iPhone is nearby, then the watch will make its calls through the iPhone, using a Bluetooth connection to the iPhone. That provides some options for people like me who are in fringe areas — as long as the iPhone is within Bluetooth or WIFI range of the watch.

So, what if I’m out mowing the yard, the mower turns over on a steep bank, I’m thrown off and land hard, and I don’t respond when the Apple watch asks if I’m OK. As long as the iPhone is in my pocket, the Apple watch will connect to the iPhone, and the iPhone will make the call and send the texts. Depending on where I am on abbey property, the iPhone might make its emergency call using LTE, 3G, or WIFI. By walking around the entire property, including into the woods and up the ridge, I determined that the iPhone always has an option for making the call. LTE works up on the ridge, for example. But down by the stream, and in most of the yard, the iPhone chooses WIFI.

About the watch: I love it! I actually like wearing a watch. The Apple watch will always be accurate to a fraction of a second, because it gets the time from network time servers. I was somewhat skeptical about whether the fitness features of the watch (and of the iPhone XR) would be useful, but they are, not least because the watch gently encourages you to keep moving. I also learned that my old-fashioned rural lifestyle is more active than I realized. Even on a sedentary day, I cover two miles and 25 flights of stairs. Four miles a day is easy to achieve. Because the watch helps you calculate the number of calories you’ve burned each day, it provides decently accurate advice on how much you can eat without gaining weight. It’s also nice to know that my resting heart rate is in a very healthy range. The new Apple Watch 4 has new features that obviously are aimed at older people. The geniuses at Apple are geniuses at separating us from our money, even our retirement income.


To test the watch’s ability to make phone calls anywhere on abbey property, I used the number that anyone can call to hear BBC’s audio — (605) 781-9836.

1953 lunch counter deliciousness


Egg and bacon sandwich. Photo with iPhone XR.

I have written here before about the Red Rooster, a drug store lunch counter in Walnut Cove, North Carolina, which not only is thriving but is beating the fast food competition. The Red Rooster happens to be only about 200 steps from the county headquarters of the Democratic Party, so it has been part of my compensation as a political operative to have breakfast or lunch there for the past few weeks. If the food is in any way different from the diner food of 1953, I can’t detect it.

The breakfast menu includes egg sandwiches for $2. Dress the sandwich however you wish, says the menu. This morning I added — sinfully — bacon, along with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise.

In 1953, lunch counters in the American South would have been segregated. Today the Red Rooster is anything but. Walnut Cove has an African-American mayor, and two members of the town board are African-Americans.

Apple Pay? Yes, you should …

When I first heard about Apple Pay a few years ago, I assumed that it was nothing more than a play by Apple to insert itself into the lucrative credit card transaction business and extract a cut. To some degree, that’s true. But, as far as I can tell, Apple gets only a meager 0.15 percent cut of each transaction. That’s not much, so Apple has other motives. I believe those other motives are the usefulness of their devices such as iPhones, and security. The bank pays the 0.15 percent, and you get the benefit of the convenience and the added security. Apple Pay doesn’t cost you anything. To use Apple Pay, your credit card stays in your pocket. Instead, you hold your phone close to the credit card reader. To the merchant, it’s as good as swiping your card. To you, it’s free. Plus your credit card information can’t be stolen. And you get a receipt stored inside your phone.

On my recent trip to Scotland, I noticed many people paying with their phones — far more than I had observed in the United States. Europe, it seems, is ahead of the U.S. in this area. Consequently, Europe also has a lower rate of credit card fraud than the U.S.

How Apple Pay works is fairly technical, and we need not get into that here. The important factor is that the merchant never sees your credit card or your credit card number. Instead, the merchant sees only a “token,” presented wirelessly from a chip in your phone, which is good for that transaction only. Thus your credit card information cannot be stolen when you use Apple Pay. (There are similar services for people who use Android phones.)

That’s another thing I noticed in Scotland. Whether I was in a restaurant, a hotel, a grocery store, a book store, or a train station, my credit card never left my hand. Instead, you were always presented with a card reader into which the customer inserts the card. In the U.S., we are moving in that direction. But it’s still common for credit cards to vanish from the table at restaurants while the charges are run somewhere else. When credit card information is stolen, that’s often how it happens. Someone “skims” your credit card data while it’s out of your sight. Last month, for the third time in ten years, my credit card information was stolen or compromised. I’ve vowed to never let a credit card out of my sight, or out of my hand, again. My bank has always detected the problem very quickly when my credit card was compromised. And I have never been stuck with a charge that I didn’t make. But it’s a huge aggravation to come to terms with the bank on the illegitimate charges and to wait for one to two weeks for a new card to be issued.

I would have adopted Apple Pay sooner. But it was only a few days ago that I retired my six-year-old iPhone 5, which did not support Apple Pay, and upgraded to an iPhone XR. The Internet is a dangerous place. These days we (or our banks) can be robbed by someone who is thousands of miles away in a corrupt country such as Russia. We need not only to protect ourselves, but also to take advantage of improved technologies that make crime harder for criminals.