February 2025 – Into the Woods

The maintenance of the spine

A 6-inch Chirp wheel. Click here for high-resolution version.

If you watch children playing, you’ll see that they flex their bodies, vigorously, in pretty much every way that a body can be flexed, including their spines. We older folks stop doing that, and so we pay for it.

Last year I had a serious round of back trouble. It was so bad that I could barely stand up straight. I literally had to crawl to the bathroom at night. I crouched and waddled down the stairs in the morning to make coffee. The problem was far worse in the morning and got a good bit better during the day. After a few days I swallowed my pride and denial and went to the doctor.

A CT scan showed no obvious problem. (In fact, the doctor said, my hip joints looked very good.) The doctor could not make a clear diagnosis. It was one of two things. It might have been piriformis syndrome. That was the diagnosis I favored, because I believed I had injured the piriformis muscle with some very foolish lifting the day before the pain started. Or the problem could have been an ordinary lower-back problem, which is so familiar to so many people. Either way, the treatment was pretty much the same — physical therapy, exercise, some pain relief, and wait. The pain gradually subsided, and after a month I was 98 percent back to normal.

Little intermittent twinges persisted, though. And I knew that the doctor was right when he said that the problem would come back unless I did something about it. He recommended regularly doing the exercises that the physical therapist showed me, along with yoga. And, he said, keep walking.

I realized that the exercises the physical therapist showed me, as well as the recommended yoga moves, do pretty much the same thing. They flex the spine in every possible direction, and they strengthen and stretch the muscles around the spine. They do the things that come so naturally to children.

A few days ago I came across an article at Wired magazine, “Work Has Given Me Tech Neck. This Device Is Helping Undo the Damage.” The article was selling something (Chirp wheels). But as I watched some videos on how to use it I saw that the wheels can manipulate the spine much more intensely than yoga can do. It’s pretty difficult to flex the spine backwards. The wheel uses body weight to do that, and it can operate on the entire length of the spine including the shoulders and lower neck. So I bought one.

We older folks aren’t eager to get down on the floor. But we ought to, because it’s good for us. That alone is beneficial, I think, because we have to practice getting up. I can still do it just fine — sit cross-legged, shift forward onto the knees, then stand up, preferably without using the hands. But I avoid it.

When you hear your back making little cracking sounds, that’s a good thing! I think it means that the spine is flexing. I spend too much time at the computer. I tend to get cricks in my shoulders. I hope this will help.

Amazon has Chirp wheels as well as similar wheels from competitors.

The political situation

I haven’t posted lately about the political situation because I don’t think I have had much to add. I would emphasize, though, that as the media show their timidity and corruptibility, the intelligentsia are coming to the rescue. I rely on Substack, particularly Heather Cox Richardson, Lillian Rubin’s the Contrarian, and Paul Krugman, who posts pretty much every morning.

The timidity of the media is alarming. This morning, for example, the New York Times said that Trump “contradicted” Emmanuel Macron in a press conference at the White House. But Macron didn’t just contradict Macron. He corrected Trump’s lies (about Ukraine). He even interrupted Trump to do it, in the middle of a lie.

What’s happening is horrifying. Yet history is going to understand perfectly well what is happening, in spite of Republican and MAGA attempts to flood the zone with lies, and even though plenty of chumps still believe them. It’s the smartest and best people in the world up against a ship of fools who want to own the earth and control us all. I hate waiting for justice. But I continue to believe that we will have it.

An exercise in moral reasoning

Luigi Mangione

After a powerful, inhumane, and heartless health care CEO was shot and killed in New York City (presumably by Luigi Mangione), the pundit class flooded the zone with sanctimonious pieces scolding the masses for making a hero out of Mangione. I tried to work up some sympathy for the CEO. I failed, because I think there are millions of people — powerless people — more deserving of our sympathy. Does that make me a bad person?

First I should mention that Mangione’s lawyers have released a statement from Mangione thanking people for their support. Obviously he has become a hero for a great many people. Mangione’s legal team also have started a web site so that people can follow the case.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought that Jonathan Haidt, with his “moral foundations” theory, held a monopoly on studying how the moral values of liberals differ from the moral values of conservatives. Now I know that Haidt has a competitor. That’s Kurt Gray, at the University of North Carolina. As Gray writes on his web site, “If you want to understand the morals of the ‘other side,’ ask yourself a simple question — what harms do they see?”

I learned of Gray’s existence after a friend in Washington (who knows that I think Haidt is a schmuck who claims to be objective while implicitly flattering the moral crudeness of conservatives) sent me a link to a YouTube video. In the video, Gray is interviewed by Michael Shermer, who founded Skeptic magazine. I have seen Skeptic magazine from time to time over the years, and I always found it to be smug and snarky. Thus I was not surprised to find, in the video, that Shermer comes across like a used-car salesman. If you watch the video, I’d recommend discounting and skipping over Shermer’s jabbering. Only what Gray says matters.

In the video, Gray mentions the Mangione case. Liberals see a great deal of harm in people dying, or being bankrupted by, the greed of a health-care CEO. But liberals (I can testify to the truth of it) aren’t as alarmed by harm to a CEO who is responsible for those deaths and bankruptcies. What can be said about that kind of ethics?

Most people would agree that, if one of the 40 plots to assassinate Hitler had succeeded, then something like 50 million lives would have been saved, not to mention that Hitler was just plain evil. It is no great leap of moral reasoning to hold that the world would have been much better off if Hitler had died sooner rather than later. I think it reasonably follows that there are plenty of other people whom the world would be better off without.

Whether assassination is justified is a separate, and much more difficult, question. Reasonable people would always hope that there are humane and legal ways of preventing bad people from doing harm. Bad people have lately been very successful in finding new ways of preventing us from using humane and legal ways of stopping them from doing harm. Reasonable people also will disagree on when humane and legal solutions have failed, and when, if ever, the harm someone does in the world is so great that that person should be dispatched. Those who support capital punishment have already taken a stand on this question, which, as I see it, puts them on a slippery slope toward hypocrisy, especially if they demand the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, as many of them will.

It all boils down to what Kurt Gray is arguing: Different people assess harm in very different ways. It’s hard for me, as a liberal, to believe, but many people worry much more about harm to the harmful and powerful than they worry about harm to the harmless and powerless. Luigi Mangione has become a hero because he took the opposite — and, I would argue, the less morally crude — position.

Anyway, my intention here is only to bring up different ways of looking at these things. I am not arguing that Luigi Mangione was right to kill Brian Thompson. Certainly I would not have done that. But I also refuse to be scolded by the morally crude people who today are strutting and gloating over having the upper hand and new power to do harm in the world, with impunity. After all, remember who it was who said this and whom he was talking about: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

The right-wing propaganda campaign against “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion is all about the glorification of moral crudeness, because everything they want to do is morally crude. It’s no wonder that they had a fit over Luigi Mangione. Someone actually struck back, and a great many people found it inspiring.

Consider skipping to around 39:00 for what Kurt Gray says about Jonathan Haidt.

Writers who tried to warn us

The zone is completely flooded with you know what. From liberal sources and liberal friends I am hearing two categories of responses. The first boils down to red alert, Defcon 1, all hands on deck. The second is more restrained, and cautions us against wasting our efforts and our mental health on feints, distractions, and smokescreens. This second group points out that many of the outrages of the past two weeks have quickly fallen flat, and that Trump is not as powerful as he wants us to think he is. As someone wrote on Facebook, “Be careful, folks…. Is the constant freak-out to wear us down? … Keep your powder dry till you see the whites of their eyes.”

We don’t know — can’t know at this point — what they actually will be able to do.

But we do know what they want to do, and we do know what they are trying to do. What they are trying to do is to make a reality out of everything that science fiction and fantasy writers have been warning us about for many years.

I have zero patience for centrist chumps who keep telling us that we must “reach out” to them and “try to understand them.” We do understand them. We have understood them for a very long time. There is a huge body of literature, some of it fiction, some of it history and social science, telling us what they are.

Things that have happened before obviously are not impossible and can happen again. We already had a civil war in this country, and historians such as Heather Cox Richardson have made it quite clear that what is happening now comes from the same roots as what happened then. We already had a war on this planet against fascism. No one today is talking about ovens and genocide, but they are talking about ethnic cleansing with forced displacement, offshore prisons, and what would amount to concentration camps. They are cutting off food and medicine to millions of the planet’s poor. People will die. Even if Trump floats an idea and subsequently has to walk it back, they’re telling us what they want, and they will do as much of it as they can get away with.

What they are trying to do is a petrifying mix of pretty much everything that writers of dystopian fiction have tried for many years to warn us about. I’ll try to list some of them.

The Hunger Games: This is where oligarchy leads. It’s about the ugliness and ridiculousness of those who want to rule us. It’s what happens when there is no democracy, when oligarchs have all the power and the little people have none. It exposes the sadism that we can see quite clearly in MAGA, in Trump, and in Trump operatives like Stephen Miller. Hunger Games actually was very popular with the deplorables, who seem to lack the imagination to apprehend who they themselves are in the story.

The Handmaid’s Tale: This is where Christian Nationalism and Project 2025 want to take us. And let’s remember that it’s not just women who pay the price. In this story, African-Americans are forcibly relocated, and it’s implied that there was a total genocide against Native Americans. There are always scapegoats. The rest of us are just natural resources to exploit.

Fahrenheit 451: This is about the importance of ignorance. It’s about censorship and what happens to those who resist the lies that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about not forgetting the things that we once learned at great cost.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: This is about the tools that totalitarian regimes use to install and preserve themselves — surveillance, the suppression of dissent, and, as in Fahrenheit 415, the lie-enforcing systems that totalitarianism always requires. It’s about what happens to us when they flood the zone.

Star Wars: This is about the close connections between autocracy and empire. It’s about how rebellion is inevitable. It’s also about the difficulty of rebellion, when autocracy and empire are entrenched and vastly rich. It’s about the corruptibility of formerly democratic governing bodies. It’s about our need for heroes, for hope, for bravery, for perseverance. It’s about how oligarchs and empires hate diversity, equity, and inclusion; and it’s about how rebellions depend on it.

The Children of Men, The Road, Lucifer’s Hammer: In a dystopia, survival is Priority 1. Oligarchy and totalitarianism have an inherent tendency to lead to uncontrolled pandemic, environmental disaster, famine, and violence. They don’t care about us. To resist, first you must survive.

Wool: This is about mass deception, its consequences, and the difficult process of slowly figuring things out.

The Lord of the Rings: This is about the power of evil, the ugliness of evil, the strange sameness of evils wherever they appear, and the importance of alliances in resisting evils. It’s about how having kings and armies in the resistance is a great help, but also about how the little people can, and must, stand up for themselves.

The Lord of the Flies: This is about how people who are not fully developed human beings — that is, the deplorables — can so easily regress into primitive and inhuman behavior, if someone or something winds them up in a certain way. It’s about the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s about how power and authority can lead people who are cognitively and morally stunted not just to illiberal ideology but all the way to cruelty and violence.

Fugue in Ursa Major: Here I must apologize for promoting not my own self-published books, but rather my ideas. The number of sales of my novels is next to nothing compared with the above. But I believe that, ten years ago in 2014, I correctly called a great deal of the chaos of today. It’s that it’s the billionaires who finance the engines that overpower the arc of justice. It’s that, ultimately, the billionaires and oligarchs want all the power. Being that rich is deeply corrupting and corrosive, and wealth at that level provides the ability to buy the power to do what they want to do. They finance the so-called think tanks that develop the propaganda, they own the machinery that retails the propaganda, they corrupt our elections and our governing bodies with money, and they have led us to a situation in which the richest man on the planet actually has his hands on the infrastructure of our government. Just months ago, that would have seemed too crazy even for fiction. But here we are. My novel also is about the importance of knowledge and the intelligentsia. JD Vance was entirely right when he said that (from his dark perspective) the universities are the enemy. If corruption and autocracy depend on lies, then the enemy of corruption and autocracy is knowledge and truth. A Frodo may lack the knowledge of a Gandalf, but a Frodo can know enough to do what needs to be done, as long as he can distinguish between who is lying to him and who is not.

We know what we’re up against. We know who they are. We know what they want. We know what they’ll use against us. We know what we have to do to try to stop them. I never guessed that they would get this far this time around. I thought the institutions would hold. I thought we’d learned our lessons about these people. We all got the memo. But 77,284,118 of us were too foolish to read it.

Flatbreads

Whole-wheat flatbread; spinach, apple, and onion salad with Roquefort-garlic dressing; walnuts. Click here for high-resolution version.

Flatbreads are just as much a comfort food as any other hot bread. Plus they are quick and even healthy with the right flour. Whole-wheat flatbread works great, since whole-wheat breads rise poorly, and flatbreads don’t have to rise.

As for making the flatbreads puff up, I’m not the best at that. But whether they puff or not, they’re just as good.

I am no expert on flatbreads, though I make them fairly often. I’d recommend watching a YouTube video of a South Asian cook making flatbread. The trick is in having the dough moist enough, rolling to just the right thickness, having the pan just hot enough, and flipping at just the right time. My flatbreads puff only about a third of the time, but I’ve stopped worrying about it, even as I try to get better at it.

I use only flour and water in flatbreads. I don’t even add salt. For some reason that I can’t explain, unsalted flatbread has its own somehow special flavor that contrasts with whatever salty food you’re having with it.