NBC online says Trump signed an executive order today allowing immigrant families to remain together in detention. Why aren’t I jumping for joy? (You can’t see me, but I’m not.) More on that shortly.

Last night’s special reports including the following wrenching items:

• Border guards lined up shoulder-to-shoulder to prevent asylum seekers from taking the single step onto US soil required in order to claim asylum.
• Families sleeping on bridges outside ports of entry for days, waiting for a chance to be processed.
• Families clustered in not-so-safe safe houses in Reynosa, possibly the most dangerous city in the most violent country in the world, like chickens, with the cartel foxes circling for victims to shake down.
• Adults who have already been deported, sans children, and the desperate efforts of their advocates in the US to find those children. No reunions were reported.
• Three facilities for housing those of “tender age”, mostly babies and toddlers, with a fourth proposed, together with a multiple help-wanted ads for baby-minders.
• A cluster of un-air-conditioned tents in the desert near El Paso erected to house the overflow of older children; the temperature there yesterday was 105 degrees F.
• A recording of small children crying for their parents.
• An interview with a woman who agreed to be fast-tracked for deportation in order to accelerate her reunion with her 7-year-old, later realized she would be going alone, and is now struggling to stay in the US until he is found. Two agents peeled him, screaming, out of her arms, after she was jailed.

It also included the following encouraging things:

• Multiple demonstrations large and small. Lots of people carry signs and chant. Some hold signs silently. Some shout encouragement of the You are not alone! variety as the busloads of children leave for detention centers.
• Four moms in Columbus arrested for criminal trespass as they sat in the waiting room of Sen. Portman for more than three hours, hoping to persuade him to take action.
• Several governors, both Democrat and Republican, refusing to send national guard troops to the border to support enforcement of the zero tolerance policy.
• Multiple lawsuits opposing the policy filed or planned.
• All living First Ladies, including the current one, condemning the policy publicly. Melania may, in fact, deserve a lot of credit for the policy change signed today.
• Multiple bills filed in the US Congress, all seeking to end the policy of separating families, some including wider immigrant-related legislation.

Yesterday we also heard that the Trump Administration was enjoying the hoopla and would hold out in expectation of forcing draconian immigration laws to be passed. This turned out to be untrue. The executive order is far from capitulation, though:

• It reinforces zero tolerance for crossings outside ports of entry, which it will presumably continue to operate as agent-blocked choke points.
• It advocates “detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.” Who decides?
• It reminds us that “Congress’s failure to act and court orders have put the Administration in the position of separating alien families to effectively enforce the law.” False.
• It charges the Secretary of Defense as well as “heads of executive departments and agencies” to provide to the Secretary of Homeland Security “any facilities that are appropriate for such purposes.” Are tents appropriate? Warehouses? Cages?
• It proposes, subject to “availability of appropriations,” to “maintain custody of alien families during the pendency of any criminal improper entry or immigration proceedings involving their members.” Refugee family internment on US soil for years?
• The Secretary of Defense is additionally tasked to “construct such facilities if necessary and consistent with law.” Building internment camps for families!

I say this moment of American Exceptionalism is not quite over.

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Postscript: California’s highly-creative lame-duck governor, Jerry Brown, sent 400 national guard troops to the border specifically tasked not to enforce immigration laws, separate families, or build new border barriers. They are able to combat drug gangs, human traffickers, and drug or gun smugglers. Word is Trump wants the California national guard to go home.

I’m glad a major protest against separating immigrant children from their parents is in the offing, but June 30? That’s twelve days after it was announced. Children are being ripped from parents and caged at the rate of over forty per day.

Innocence is the key concept. Seeking asylum continues to be completely legal under US law, despite the bandying-about of the term illegal immigrants by even fact-based media outlets. The stated purpose of the new policies–reducing throughput at ports of entry and separating children from parents–is to reduce the number of asylum seekers, as reported by CSNBC on June 18.

Maybe we could achieve that result via programs that reduce gang violence in Mexico and Central America? That would require creative strategy, investment, and legislation, and after all, we aren’t involved. Now where did I put my stash?

During the Obama era, adult asylum seekers wore ankle bracelets while their applications were reviewed, which was controversial at the time. Trump makes even America’s punishments Greater.

One idiotic administration mouthpiece chastised parents for bringing children on this dangerous journey. Dangerous journey, dangerous country, how to decide? One woman’s oldest son was killed, then her second was paralyzed. She brought her third here, and lost him to the US custom service. Trifecta!

Apparently, the US strategy is to compete with MS-13 to be the worst choice for a happy life. You think your children will be safer in the US than in Honduras? The Trump Administration will take the challenge!

I heard Dianne Feinstein compare this situation to our interning Japanese-Americans during WWII. Yes shameful, yes wrong, but the families were together.

How about slavery, in which family members of all ages were frequently sold separately? That is, they had about as many rights as batteries do today. Slavery defenders cited the same God-loves-government passage from the Bible that Jeff Sessions did recently. Confusingly, this facile passage doesn’t seem to induce Bible-thumpers to respect much else of what government does.

My favorite is “Indian School.” Starting in the late 1800s, we took native American children from their families, gave them “Christian” names, and sent them to boarding school to learn “American” language and traditions. Some were institutionalized or placed with “American” families. None was returned to their real families. This was outlawed in 2007.

Punch line: They were in America first! By over 10,000 years!

During the same period, America often forced unwed mothers to give up their babies, since they are obviously unfit mothers. This is the only policy that affected white families, though at the time, one example of race would be “Irish.”

In 2018, now, today, 44% of youth in US juvenile incarceration facilities are African-American, even though only 16% of all youth are.

This immigration policy appears to be a continuation of our long tradition of oppression and cruelty. As the Bible says, …there is no new thing under the sun.

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Dr. Seuss caught onto America First v. children long ago. Please checkout the political cartoon embedded in this Snopes report:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dr-seuss-adolf-wolf/

I am not accustomed to feeling helpless, but that’s how I feel. The following I believe to be a factual timeline that is happening now.

• Both US and international law provide means for immigrants to seek asylum. US law restricts that activity to US Ports of Entry.
• As of April 26, 2018, the US government issued a policy change, directing southern ports of entry to turn away asylum seekers on the grounds of insufficient capacity.
• Mexican towns adjacent to ports of entry are filling with asylum seekers under various stages of financial and psychological stress.
• Mexican cartels in those towns now kidnap wealthier asylum seekers and demand ransom for their release.
• Because they are either dangerously low on resources, wealthy but in fear of being kidnapped, or recently ransomed and in fear of being re-kidnapped, asylum seekers are attempting more dangerous between-port border crossings, which are always illegal. Many gratefully turn themselves in on encountering US border patrol agents, requesting asylum.
• Because they are caught entering the US at illegal locations, these asylum seekers are denied asylum applications and detained for prosecution.
• Children of detained asylum seekers are sent to separate detention facilities, alone, regardless of age, including infants. The separation is done in most cases by ruse, for example, We’re going to bathe your child. There is no chance for goodbyes, since neither the child nor the parent realizes they will not see each other again.
• Tens of cases already being pursued by US lawyers on behalf of detained asylum seekers have revealed that there is no tracking system to match the locations of parents and children once separated. Many specific children have been sought in vain for days or weeks.

So here’s what the US can be proud about now: tricking immigrants who are using legitimate means to seek asylum into making illegal crossings so we can detain them, after we further trick them to give up their children, for whom we have no provision or apparent expectation of reuniting with their parent.

Let’s compare this to the Holocaust, just for a moment. I know everyone hates that. After the Holocaust, many people believed that it wasn’t the fault of the simple soldier who followed orders to commit mass murder. How can a soldier disobey?

Later it turned out that many soldiers refused to participate, and they were simply re-assigned. There were plenty who would comply.

Yesterday on the radio I heard the archbishop of Miami opine that the “policy makers” should do some “soul searching” while he absolved the rank and file border patrol agents because they were simply “following orders.”

Is there really not a single border patrol agent who has asked to avoid the assignment of separating children from parents who were tricked into illegal crossings? Or better, someone who quit in protest?

Not one?

Abruptly separating children For Life from their parents in a foreign country after a harrowing journey is pretty close to the Holocaust. Sure, there aren’t as many, so far, and they aren’t actually being killed, just having their lives ruined. Sounds like we’re haggling over the price.

Wow, did we go from City on a Hill to Deepest Pit of Hell quickly. In a handbasket, as it were.

I am no longer satisfied with my husband’s and my plans to retire in California. We should have moved to a country that is not a force of evil in the world.

To paraphrase Eric Garcetti, every patriot over the age of 35 should be running for something.

No one engaged in the activities described above is a patriot. Period.

When I was young and immersed in the mating game, my female friends group referred to a man who “got” women as an Evolved Form. This being multiple decades ago and mostly a cis group, our ideal man was definitely masculine and willing to treat us like princesses, yet occasionally self-effacing and able to back down. He preferred his women smart and capable. He wouldn’t take No for an answer right away–Game Over first round? Where’s the sport in that?–but he would be tempting, not scary-insistent. And the question being answered back then was more likely to be related to going out than hooking up. Libido hasn’t changed, but mores have.

When the Evolved Form man ogled you, it was subtle. Ogling women is not really a choice for men, evolved or not; it is hard-wired. Cf. The Male Brain, written by a woman. Unbelievable men get any work done at all, much less run the world.

In retrospect, an Evolved Form is someone whose behavior is based on observation and informed by empathy.

Imagine a doctor who recommends the fish-heavy Mediterranean diet to a patient. Fishing is already unsustainable, and farmed fish turn out to damage the environment as much as overfishing. There is no way humans can extract enough fish for everyone on the planet to enjoy that healthful diet.

Should the MD consider only the patient when making a recommendation? A doctor who takes the entire planet into consideration would be a Super-Evolved Form. Also unemployed.

Whether due to the environmental movement, moving to California, the stark choices of the America First era, or some other factors, my own perceptions have evolved recently. The world seems like an intricate puzzle, with every flock of sanderlings or grove of Eucalyptus a key piece. The pieces are being scattered by humans, who are simply too numerous to fit in with the natural world. Who knew hunting all those blue whales in the 20th century would affect climate change, or that wolves were maintaining water quality in Yellowstone?

I want someone to take the decisions away from me. People are clearing the rain forest to sell us palm oil. Why is it even in the store? I didn’t know!

If we tried to consider the whole planet for every decision, we’d all be neurotic, guilt-ridden, or defiant. I don’t think most people are doing that though. There must be some other reason we’re all neurotic, guilt-ridden, or defiant. Maybe the struggle of evolving, or of refusing to.

While the conjunction of the full moon and Jupiter recedes, celestial bodies are on my mind. Or maybe it’s just the sci-fi series I have been reading. As my husband’s planet spirals gently into a stable retirement orbit, my own comet leaves the aphelion of Mostly Home and accelerates toward the perihelion of Work with Benefits.

I am anxious to embrace this new challenge. It is not at all like diving into the Sun. There is far more uncertainty involved.

We now have record low unemployment in the US. Trump 2020! I swear I heard this week that one state is hiring prisoners pre-release, though I can’t re-create the tidbit. I should be able to find a job easily, you think?

You’d be wrong. I’m having to work at it, so to speak. It’s not much fun, so sometimes I analyze the situation instead. Turns out, I have a few issues:

• I need a job with medical insurance. I need that more than I need a salary. Trump 2020 not!
• I’d rather not work in the retail sector. That is by far the largest US employment sector, comprising 12% of the workforce with a median salary of $10 per hour. Not all of them get insurance.
• I live in a tourist destination, so lots of the jobs are seasonal, and lots of people want to live and work here. In April, unemployment in Santa Cruz County was 5.4%, while it was to 3.8% in California and 3.7% in the US.
• I don’t want to commute to San Jose.
• I’m oldish. Ok, I’m old. I’m applying for government jobs because they are less likely to have age discrimination.
• I’m well-educated. I had a twenty-year high tech career and moved on, a while ago. Now I would like a leave-it-at-the-office job. I want one that requires alertness and flexibility certainly, though I don’t care about title, prestige, or high wages, and I really am willing to do repetitive work.

Although it’s only a guess, I think this last one may be the crux. Employers may well think, why is this person seeking this sort of work? Why did she give up–or maybe lose?– the other sort? Those questions can be addressed in a manner I believe would be quite satisfactory, but only face-to-face. I’m not getting much in the way of interviews.

Shout out to the USPS, who would like to hire me! All I have to do is to work six- to seven-day weeks for an indefinite period that might be less than a year, and give up volunteer work, regularly-scheduled activities that start before 8 pm, weekends, vacation, and holidays. I would be walking ten miles a day, so I would be in shape, though probably in no shape to do much after work.

I may do that. For now, I’m still on a mission, exploring the final frontier.

I still receive and read paper magazines, and maybe I will defend that on some future blog. I don’t always have time to read them, and certainly don’t want them lying about, so I stack them in a magazine rack and periodically (pun?) go through it. Yesterday I found three unread issues of Scientific American.

How did I get so far behind? I love science! I considered skipping one, but decided to at least skim them all. Being slightly OCD, I started with the oldest one, which contained a gem.

For decades, a small number of scientists have postulated, and striven to prove, that nerve propagation is primarily via sound waves rather than electricity. This research has been gaining momentum this century, due to a growing number of researchers who are interested in it and significant improvement in our ability to measure tiny amounts of movement.

What scientist now agree on: Nerve conduction has both a mechanical–sound waves cause physical distortion–and an electrical component, and nerve cell membranes are piezoelectric, meaning they respond to both pressure and charge. What scientists don’t agree on: Which effect is primary.

If the physical changes are primary, a lot of unanswered questions in medicine are suddenly explained, for example, the similar response of the body to chemically quite disparate anesthetics. A lot of answered questions, or at least decades-old explanations of how things supposedly work, will need revisiting.

Many more scientists are currently on Team Electric, mostly I think because it is hard to accept that so much of what you were taught was wrong. I don’t have a career invested in this, so I am free to be overjoyed by it, and I’m not kidding. I am exhilarated. I love it when science overturns, or at least seriously questions, settled thought, especially when the new idea makes a lot of sense.

Why did science favor the electrical theory originally? Fifty years ago, it was easier to measure small electrical changes than small physical ones, so someone did, and got a Nobel prize for it. Since the theory seems to work a lot of the time, most people did not question it.

Human nature.

What if I had discarded the magazine? I feel so lucky!

I turned on the radio in the middle of a show featuring a young-sounding spider expert who was encouraging people to love spiders. When you find a spider in your home, just leave it alone, he opined. Why? the host pressed. Spiders are fun to watch, are useful creatures, and most of them are harmless.

I hope this gentleman is loved by a spider-fancier, or at least someone very spider-tolerant. I do not think most people would find these reasons persuasive, other than Southerners.

In the South we keep spiders in the house, or at least my clan did. It was bad luck to kill a spider, indoors or out. Unlike our scientific friend, we knew why: spiders eat bugs. Or for those of you who think spiders are bugs, I should say, spiders eat insects. In the South, we have insects aplenty, indoors and out. A friendly spider hidden in a corner is much preferable to a passel of flies or mosquitoes, not to mention the daily-in-summer wasp incursion.

One spider eats about 2000 insects per year. The mass of insects eaten by all spiders each year is greater than the mass of Earth’s human population. If that doesn’t impress you, try to estimate how many insects your mass represents. Thereafter, try not to imagine yourself as a seething mass of insects, a la the Oogie Boogie man.

Here on California’s Central Coast we have spiders too, and by lifelong habit I can rarely bring myself to kill one, so I often escort them outdoors. There hardly any insects here. I have no idea how the outdoor spiders survive–are they just doing a great job? I have seen zero mosquitoes since we moved here twenty months ago, and maybe ten flies. We do have bees, but they stick close to the flowers.

I don’t remember any indoor spider birth events from my childhood, though I may have repressed the memory. Spider guy said that spider egg sacs hold “hundreds or thousands” of tiny babies, who disperse as rapidly as possible when the sacs burst, since mom is usually a cannibal.

That’s one approach to getting your kids to move out.

I’m reading a 2012 book which predicts the end of books is nigh. Seems like the author was wrong.

Publishers Weekly claims “print + audio” book sales rose every year from 2012 to 2016, even while the audio book portion fell. From 2015 to 2016, board book sales were up 7.43 %, adult nonfiction 6.85 %, and hardcover 5.43 %.  Audio books dropped 13.49 % and mass market books fell 7.71 %. The overall gain is 3.29 %. Not huge. But not ending.

Maybe it’s the last-gasp of a dying technology, but that’s not how it feels in the book store. Both Bookshop Santa Cruz and Brookline Booksmith, the independent booksellers near our left and right coast domiciles respectively, are open seven days a week, stay open later than most of the surrounding restaurants, and seem constantly jammed.

The 2012 book also describes how eBooks differ from real books, with weblike links and pop-ups. Not so for the Kindle, excepting Fire, which is more of a tablet than an eBook. Reading eBook Kindles is a lot like reading a book, including no  circadian-rhythm-disrupting backlight.

I’ve always wondered why all and sundry don’t peruse classics, which I’ve esteemed since girlhood. Recently I got an inkling from a magazine article, which asserted many folks don’t have the leisure, interest, or wit to read any book. Egad. So many books have guided me clock-oblivious through climes unknown, with personages simpatico or alien, and many of those books were considered classics. Set in distant eras, with curious turns of phrase, they truly demand immersion to deliver the full transcendent experience.

Howbeit, I did not savor Tristram Shandy or The Red and the Black, I struggled with the technical whaling pages of Moby Dick, and I despair of ever finishing Ulysses. Aesthete or philistine?

If I had never spent an hour absorbed in a book, I would be a different person. I am happy I live during the Age of Print.

I feel I have encountered more mystics in California than I did in Massachusetts, yet perhaps I am mistaken. Certainly East Coast Morris dancers celebrate many pagan holidays, though with an emphasis on merrymaking and licentious behavior rather than metaphysics.

Shortly after joining our first West Coast Morris group, we were surprised to find a practice canceled because so many members were attending a conference of pagan religions, which, given the drought, included a significant rain-making event. This conference blacks out a weekend on folk dance calendars across the peninsula every year.

In a salon a woman shared her experience with a medium. This medium asked, Who is John? John turned out to be the name of the client’s deceased father and living brother. The message was, John doesn’t blame you, which had some meaning to the client. The medium added that the client’s mother, unnamed, wanted to let the client know she was with the father. This was intriguing, because they had divorced against the mother’s will long before his death. The client concluded this is a genuine medium, not one of the fake ones.

We have a pretty good friend who makes her living de-ghosting properties to facilitate real estate sales. She got started in this when she performed the procedure on a relative’s hard-to-sell house, which was sold shortly thereafter. This service is performed over the phone, and costs hundreds of dollars.

Names and some details have been changed, in case a source would be uncomfortable with these revelations. I have no indication that that is the case.

This post is observational, neither a critique nor an opinion. It seems to me that these mystical practices lie on a continuum that includes all religions, current and past, though that may be because I just reread Of Human Bondage, one of my favorite books. The difference on this coast is that the “outlier” manifestations are more commonplace and accepted, and therefore more often successfully commercialized.

The Atlantic article The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy is having well over fifteen minutes of fame. Yesterday I read the article, listened to author Matthew Stewart on On Point, and read the rebuttal on slate.com. My interest was piqued because Mr. Stewart resides in Brookline, Massachusetts, the town in which we raised our sons,  which is purportedly a fountainhead of families belonging to this lucky group.

The basic idea is shown clearly in a graph, duplicated below. From the Great Depression to the present, the top 0.1 percent of the population increased its wealth by 12 %, while the lower 90 percent lost 12 %. The 9.9 percent in-between maintained its share at about 55 %.

This graph would be more accurate with population-proportional lines. The black line should be ten times as wide as the top line, while the bottom line should be one-tenth as wide.

This middle group, the New American Aristocrats, or NAAs, is characterized by good family, good health, good schools, good neighborhoods, and good jobs, Five Good Things that lead to lifelong financial comfort for them and their progeny, even though they don’t own private jets. The the NAAs and the 0.1 percent, who have private jets and occasionally buy elections, increasingly monopolize opportunities nationwide, including rapidly-appreciating housing, colleges that fuel advancement rather than debt, and professional jobs with either benefits or salaries hyperbolically higher than the skills required or results produced. Both groups enjoy as much freedom from the ravages of crime/discrimination, addiction, and non-communicable diseases as the Deity will allow. They are for the most part completely unfamiliar with not-a-living-wage jobs, lack of reliable transportation, insufficient savings to cover even the smallest emergency, and broken homes.*

The opposite is true of the lower 90 percent, who often express their discontent with their reduced prospects at the polls.

The adult NAAs are largely Baby Boomers, and this article makes them Angry. Like me, many Boomers were raised in lower income households, had to work as children, maintained good high school grades in order to earn college scholarships, then plied full time jobs for decades. Most of us feel we earned our laurels.

The author doesn’t dispute this. Instead he asks us, which he characterizes as a cohort of progressive, intelligent truth-seekers, his own beloved cohort, to do two things.

First, he wants us to acknowledge the inequality that the numbers document. One representative young woman called into On Point: When she graduated from high school she wanted to become a welder, but her parents convinced her to attend college, and she was proud to be the first in her family to earn a college degree. She also acquired $75,000 in debt. Now in her fourth year of work, she has been sending $400/month in loan payments, and she has yet to even start paying down the principle. It’s a trap, she said, just managing to keep her voice steady as she described her bleak future.

This struck my heart. I remember making a decision to refinance our home rather than burden our sons with excessive loans when our college savings came up short. While we did work to purchase our home, and to save for college, perhaps we were able to do so because both of us benefitted from the Five Good Things growing up, as well as the higher mobility available under a more equitable income distribution.

The second thing Stewart asks of NAAs is that we think about how the problem could be solved. No blame, no shame, just real equality of opportunity for everyone in the future. Whether or not you agree with his premise, and slate.com makes some salient counterpoints, less inequality and more mobility is better for everyone, and for democracy.

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* The single parent rate among NAAs is less than 10 %.