Archives

bookmark_borderPost-410: Baseball game

Posted on by Peter

I was again at an MLB baseball game yesterday, June 16.

The Washington Nationals defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates, at Washington. Neither team looked very good and but for a two-run home-run, the game was a toss-up.

They announced attendance as 16,800. Of 42,000 seats, giving a total ticket-sale figure of 40%. This in addition to what must be a few thousand staff, almost all of whom looked bored almost all the time (which I find an awkward part of the experience whenever I have been at baseball games here).

Thoughts follow on observations and some memories, the usual things I tend to drift into writing on these pages.

__________________

Bikeshare to stadium

I went to the game with my dad, who invited me. He has a friend who sells him tickets at discounted rates. He has been a baseball since youth, though seemed much more of a fan in the 2010s than I remember him being in the 1990s.

I persuaded my dad to go to the stadium by bikeshare after parking in North Arlington. In all there were four legs round-trip, and he did three by e-bike (free because I have so many credits) and I did them all by regular bike as usual (free always for members).

From looking at the stations around the stadium, I estimate something at least 150 people attended the game by this method, with probably an equal numbers using private (non-bikeshare) bikes. Armed guards watch over these private bikes during the game in a little cove on the east side of the stadium, which they call a “bike valet.” If my estimate is right, around 300 people of 16,800 attendees went by bike, 1.8%. Since many attendees were children, or elderly, or obese or otherwise disabled, this must mean up to 3% of able-bodied attended by bike.

One effect of the Virus Panic disruptions is the end of the bikeshare system’s “bike corrals,” four stations downtown manned in the mornings by small teams who would keep docks open, in other words, guaranteed parking. I used these. They did not return at all in 2020 and don’t look likely to return in 2021, though maybe by fall they might.

I think the bikeshare system also used to run these “corrals” at certain other places during major events, but I haven’t seen any in a few years. One was during baseball games. A small team would keep docks open — as the station got full, remove some bikes and keep them in a pile, allowing new arrivals to cruise in and park. This was a great system, but is now gone. We got there very early — 3pm — and the main station across from the main entrance was full by about 4:30pm, and most others in the area were also at or near full.

There are no real hills going to the stadium, which sits on the west bank of the Anacostia River not far above where it meets the Potomac, which makes bicycling there theoretically practical. In practice it’s still a little hard, which is a disincentive to people doing it. Make things like that easy or people won’t do it.

The good thing about rolling in early was walking around the empty stadium:

___________________

Reflections on stadium-anchored “gentrification” success, mid-2000s vs. early 2020s

I must say, the baseball stadium has been a success in anchoring the major gentrification of this area, which had sunk to some pathetic depths of crime by the 1970s, fading into the 2000s, something near a half-century lost. Optimists in the mid-2000s predicted the new stadium would turn things around decisively and they were right, or at least sis definitely right if we lean on Correlation and ignore that pesky bug in the ear called Causation.

In some pictures taken from the Nationals stadium, you’ll see large, new-looking apartment buildings near it. These are new-looking because they are new.

The river sits on a site adjacent to the Anacostia River. The very name “Anacostia” conjures up some unpleasant images, even today, to many. The general area was once an anchor of Washington’s years-long claim to being Murder Capital of North America. No Washington baseball team was national champion between 1934 and 2019, but quite a few years had Washington ranked Number One for crime, or at least homicides.

I remember assuming that crime would more likely persist. I was wrong in being skeptical that the plan would work, because the stadium today is surrounded by luxury apartments.

In my partial defense, the general area is still not exactly the kind of safe a good neighborhood in pre-1960s Washington would have been, and there is a modest siege mentality, of the kind that must be felt by residents of those Brazilian luxury apartments walled off from favelas but all the same directly adjacent to them (this is much more visceral in the development in Maryland just outside DC caleld “National Harbor”).

I had some dealings in one of these new apartment buildings in 2014, when I worked for a time for a Korean Phone English company. The agent for the company ran the business out of his home, I assume, and met me in the lobby. (Was that in a legal gray area?) The building was pleasant once scanned in, inside the security zone, but still subject to the unpleasantly high-security feeling. I expect that had faded somewhat by the end of the decade as things marched on.

Of course many other areas also improved. The 2010s were the lowest-crime since the 1950s (and early 1960s). Since the annus terribilis of lockdowns, artificial major recession, riots, and major breakthrough by anti-police rhetoric, a series of reverses starting in spring 2020, crime is back up around its long-term late-1960s-to-mid-2000s running average.

Since the lockdowns began there started to emerge unmistakable signs of major social blight in parts of Washington, things that seemed a thing of the past by 2019. The abandonment of downtown with the Virus Panic led directly to the mayor deciding to cede several downtown blocks to a protestor zone. For now fifteen months the mayor has also refused to allow police to clear homeless camps in public parks, originally citing the Virus (of course!), but now just through intertial inaction, I guess. This is to the bafflement of many. The tent citynear the Watergate Hotel has dozens of tents now, and I have seen some unpleasant scenes in it. But no sign of homeless tent-cities near the stadium yesterday.

If Washington’s sudden decline persists, the anchor of the stadium are will probably not feel its effects on game- or event-days.

_____________________

The rollback of the Virus Panic

The capacity restrictions seem finally gone. I interpret this as another signal that our agenda-setters want to move on from the Virus Panic. Had they been responsible social stewards, they’d have moved to limit social/economic/psychological damage from the start, let people make their own decisions, and for God’s sake not deliberately fan Panic flames (which they did). I noticed clear signs of a sustained campaign to unravel the Panic starting in mid-May 2021. The tone shift seems to predate that. Maybe they were waiting for spring? Of course when flu season ends, flu viruses recede dramatically in our climates.

In the Washington baseball stadium case, the authorities lifted the stadium attendance capacity cap from 33% to 100% less than a week ago. For this game, the market bought 40% of the tickets. (It was a 4:00pm weekday game and I don’t know how many of those ever sell out, especially mid-season for a mediocre team; though the Nationals won the World Series in 2019, they don’t look like the same team now.)

The market figure and the arbitrary capacity restriction end up being similar figures — 33% vs. 40% — which means if the local government still demanded the 33% limit, three thousand who attended yesterday could not have done so, a simple deadweight loss to those people and to ticket and food/beverage revenue and whatever else they tossed their money into.

The other good news, from my perspective (as a pretty hard-line anti-VirusPanic person since late March 2020), is the absence of mask busybodies, those who demand people wear masks or adjust them properly, which became a strange feature of Virus Panic world since masks became mandatory by law by about May 2020.

(Looking back now, Mask-ism was a strange escalation by the Virus Panic regime, right when they should have moved decisively to slay the Panic beast and let people make their own decisions — which they finally did one year later, but for one year masks became a disturbing feature of lived reality, led by the decisions of Western political demagogues riding Virus Panic to popularity or power-grab, my interpretation of events.)

The fingerprints of the old regime are still all over:

With half of June gone, I see continual good news on this front. An event like a major-league baseball game, and what restrictions are imposed or not, and how people behave, these seem pretty significant indicators to me, especially in one of the Big Blue strongholds of what became a bizarre, reality-detached Flu Virus Cult. O understand much of Europe is still mired in this, and Australia is for some reason the worst off of all, being subject to disgraceful terror-panics when even one “positive case” comes out in a region.

There are still individual Panickers, of course. I still see people still riding a bicycle with masks on, something I will just never understand.

I was moving around the stadium for, it must have been fifteen minutes before I saw the first spectator with a mask. Later I saw a few others, some actively wearing and some with it hanging off their face or neck or whatever in some way — all looking ridiculous to me and I would hope looking ridiculous to the eyes of History. It’s hard to estimate, but maybe 5-15% of spectators had masks with them at all, and most of those were not actively wearing them at any given moment, which puts the total actively wearing at any given time well below 5%. Up from 0.00% in 2019 and all previous years.

This little estimate of mine applies to spectators. The staff is another matter. The staff mostly had conspicuous signs of masks — I assume they are still under a private mandate. My non-scientific estimate is least half actively wearing them at any given time, but not too high above that 50% line. Some conveniently took long or indefinite breaks from the mask in the afternoon heat and seemed no longer to be subject to mask-busybodies or supervisors. Their mask rate is much down from peak-Panic periods since the mandates started coming in in spring 2020.

This is all really good news, but as long as anyone has a mask to me means a sign of the social contagion (which I’ve called Virus Panic here) is still in circulation.

______________________

Miscellaneous baseball memories

I do not follow baseball, nor do I follow any sports with any regularity today. I did when I was a kid.

I played baseball up to around age 12, always prompted by my dad, whose own preferences and interests generally steered my activities at those ages partly to my low-level resentment. Not long ago I came across a team picture from 1996 of my our team and my dad kneeling alongside, as coach. I hardly remember him being coach. I think there were two coaches and the other one was absent on picture day.

I liked playing baseball, I think, and am glad I was able to do it and had a period of great interest in the sport (i.e., when I “followed” it), because in the end it’s the mark of one plank of our culture. Baseball has been with us about two centuries, though the lineage of the game may not be what the legends claims (invented by a young man named Doubleday at Cooperstown, New York, about 1840 — later General Doubleday). People who don’t know the game expect American men to know it and be able to explain it.

I wouldn’t mind playing again, especially a lower-stakes version as with plastic bat and hollow plastic ball. My cousins in Connecticut called this “whiffle ball,” but I don’t know how common that name is.

(I played cricket once, in 2012, on an island off the west coast of Korea, with a mish-mash of vacationers including British coworkers, and did amazingly well to their surprise. Baseball skills are transferable, though the rules of the game are different. Cricket vs. baseball strikes me as a good analogy for how languages differ and how language families work.)

_______________________

Baseball games, 1990s vs. 2010s/20s

I attended a few Baltimore Orioles games in the 1990s, the closest team to me at the time before the Nationals came in. I was at one one as late as July 2005, with my aunt N. and cousins B. W. and M. W.; the Orioles were playing Boston, which is B. and M.’s favorite team and, they being through the area at the time, decided to attend and for some reason invite me. (They are from near the Yankees-Red Sox fandom dividing line that runs through central Connecticut and decisively side with the latter.)

One thing I noticed in the 2010s, in the handful of times I attended games in various capacities and situations, and which I was reminded of very much yesterday, is the lower share of people actually interested in the game in any way than what I remember from the 1990s. (Reader beware, I was just a boy in the 1990s and everything impressed me. Even trying to adjust for that, I really think this is true.)

Many of the people attending are just at these games as a social event and spend the entire time chatting or hanging around in the rear area, and any of the game they witness if almost by chance. These are people there as a form of social signaling. This is true of many, perhaps most, of the women attending, and many of the men, too. A little sign of how so much of the world is oriented towards women, especially younger-end women in that consumption decisions are much more driven by women (per anyone with contact with lived-reality, but also spending studies).

It’s hard to untangle exact motivations in individual cases but the social dynamic of “attending = prestige” does seem to exist, like an umbrella under which individuals operate. In any case this is great news for the Nationals as a business, because if the stadium is a ‘prestige’ place to be, sales go up, attendance goes up, sales of merchandise goes up, prices can go up (or stay crazily high, $30+ t-shirts, whatever).

____________________

Airport-style security comes to stadium — Why?

I started this writing on the rapid retreat of masks as symbol of the retreat of the Virus Panic coalition, which is good news. I realize there was something else in yesterday’s experience that seems pretty bad news and which I want to put to paper here. It is: the hugely increased security at the front gate, and seemingly also inside the stadium.

They interrogate everyone entering now, often for several minutes, and subject them to airport-style security with the same level of rigor and tone that the benighted TSA does. The TSA, perhaps the USA’s most hated agency of all since its founding in late 2001. Is it actually a government agency? For practical purposes it seems to be, and after twenty years another government agency was born never to be reigned back in.

Most people have demonstrated their full willingness to go along with whatever, as long as whoever it is eventually waves them through. Last year taught us this willingness includes even month-after-month-after-month of endless, rolling shutdown orders, based even on the thinnest of justifications and apparently no cost-benefit calculations at all, throwing social and economic life into disarray. Compared to 2020, a little increase in stadium security looks minor.

Still, for some reason I was surprised and annoyed by the new security regime. I was in the stadium over four hours without but one or two brief sips of water from a drinking fountain. I would’ve had more but they made me throw out my water bottle at the security gate because it was already open. (What the heck?)

This is all dramatically different than what I remember. As recently as summer 2019, the last time I was at a game (which was with coworkers and worth a full post of its own if I get around to it), I remember sailing through security and taking more time scanning the ticket to get in. This time the ratio was reversed.

I remember airports in the 1990s. I think the baseball stadium security in June 2021 was in some ways at least as strict as airport security was in the 1990s and in some ways stricter. Absolutely no bags are allowed. All open water bottles must be inspected and dumped if opened. There were several other procedures. What is the meaning of this?

I don’t know who gave these silly orders for airport-style security at the baseball stadium gates. I also sense they may never get rolled back now. I’ve heard this called the “ratchet effect.“

bookmark_borderPost-409: Rawhide, and Synchronicity

Posted on by Peter

Synchronicity. The very evening I published the Star Trek Voyager post, I randomly flipped to a channel, early in the 11pm hour. To a number on the channel list I feel certain was random. I wasn’t sure what number I was typing. By this set up you may already have guessed what I found. None other than Star Trek Voyager.

There it was. Very occasionally I’ll do a random flip to see what’s going on. The channel I’d stumbled onto was called “Heroes & Icons.” I’d never heard of this channel before. I had planned to turn off the TV and sleep. Tthere was the face of the character Tuvok, looking perplexed, with ominous music playing and dark lighting. A mystery assailant was attacking crew members and Tuvok was on the case.

People can mock the concept of Synchronicity if they want, but I can attest that I had never watched this channel ever before nor knew of its existence. I can attest I had not seen Voyager on TV in man years. What are the odds the very day I wrote/published about it that I’d encounter it at random? I couldn’t believe it.

Although that very morning I had written that Voyager was still airing, I confess I was saying so to puff up the importance of my subject. I hadn’t seen it, myself, on regular TV and had only heard of its syndication airing (an impressive fact for a show off the air twenty years. I assumed it would be on the Sci-Fi channel, which I think still airs it, too. Maybe others, I don’t know.)

Today, before proceeding with other matters I turned it on again to see what would come up. On came the television show Rawhide. This is an old Western show, originally conceived of in the late 1950s and which clearly draws influence from the old radio dramas which preceded it. In other words, I think the show could have worked on radio almost just as well as on TV.

Rawhide is a good show.

I am not sure I’d ever seen Rawhide before but it’s typical of the Western genre set in the late 19th century. I had heard the theme song, which became a well-known Country-Western music song in its own right.

Okay, now. Whoever reads this may not believe this but the purpose of this place is for me to record any thoughts or experiences, or etc., that I want. I already opened this post with a long tangent on Star Trek Voyager and Synchronicity. If you’re with me, get ready for another.

Yesterday afternoon, I had some business in downtown Washington. It is very hot this week, and from late morning to early evening the temperatures, sun glare, and maybe humidity are all enough to make it physically oppressive during those hours. As I had business to do and under such conditions, and especially as the business I had to attend to went badly and ended up somewhat humiliating — a small psychological blow in addition to the physical as described — my mind drifted to humming a song that seemed suited. You may have guessed from this set up, too, what I am getting at.

Many times yesterday afternoon, the simple tune and lyrics of “Rawhide,” the song, turned over in my mind. Let me say again I was familiar with the song, but had (1) never seen the show, (2) wasn’t sure the song was from the show, (3) wasn’t completely sure there was a show named Rawhide, (4) had never been on the channel aforementioned (Heroes & Icons) before the 11pm hour of the night before, (5) had no idea of the channel’s schedule, (6) had no plan to return to the channel but did by chance this morning.

It was a good show and something compelled me to watch it to the end. I didn’t realize I was watching Rawhide until some of the transitional and mood-setting music in certain scenes, recorded by an orchestra, used variations on the tune to the song.

This is the song:

I don’t think my mind had drifted into the “Rawhide” song in a very long time, and again here within less than a day I see the show for which it was the theme song, as far as I know the first time I’d ever seen the show.

I think I’d been familiar with the song since the mid- or late-2000s, probably first encountering it via a download from one of the Napster-successors of the day, especially one I was on called WinMX. (I assume most of the market for music-sharing on those networks was replaced by Youtube, which is a worrying development, a Youtube monopoly.)

I don’t know what to make of this double-synchronicity. I know well that the usual attitude of skeptics, there must be some explanation you are overlooking. I have had experiences like these before, more often when I was younger, and I have no explanation for them. Mysteries of the universe, including events that do not align chronologically like the two I’ve described, are best not sledgehammered away with ultra-skepticism.

I have never read Carl Jung in a serious way, but like any reasonably educated person I am familiar with many of his ideas. I believe Jung coined the term “synchronicity,” and two major and identifiable ones in a row like this is no small matter. What is the significance of this?

I have tagged this post ‘Religion’ as the closest of the existing categories I have to capture this discussion. But I don’t know how to proceed further with such thinking except to read Jung or his successors, but I don’t really want to.

The episode of Rawhide I saw was Season 3: Episode 6, first aired November 1960. Clint Eastwood is one of the protagonists in Rawhide, playing a cleaner-cut type of the character for which he later became emblematic in a long series of movies.

The plot: The group of cattle drivers encounters a former stagecoach robber who is on a mission to repay all his victims from ten years earlier, and then turn himself in. Because of the looseness of the law in the Old West, this is best done by tracking down victims and secretly dropping off the money and slipping away.

The group helps the reformed robber get to the final town he needs to get to, for it’s in the same direction they’re going. They repay $250 to the town’s bank. But it turns out someone in the town had framed him ten years earlier, had stolen the entire town’s savings of $11,000, and had shot dead the popular bank clerk.

The local sheriff and mayor are mixed up in this plot and kept it a secret for ten years. Agitated locals, led by the sheriff, form a posse and insinuate that may lynch the reformed robber, or at least fast-track his murder trial and hang him that way. Eastwood, a junior hand in the group, starts to figure out the frame-up, devises a plan to expose the plotters, and does.

Eastwood is the co-hero of this particular story, along with the head of the cattle driving group who agrees to help the reformed robber in the first place, putting himself at some risk.

What to say about Rawhide. Sixty years is not a short time (1960 to 2021), and the era depicted is about 90 years earlier still (ca. 1870), 150 years before our time.

The idea of linear progression is our civic religion. From a very-bad Distant Past, to a somewhat-bad Moderate Past, to a better-but-still-bad Near Past, to a still-bad-but-much-better Present, to a hopefully better Future, the last achieved through constant and unrelenting striving against The Bad People, who are of an identifiable demographic who “cling” to this and that (as someone famously said in 2008). This is what I see as our civic religion, and the dominant American historical-cultural narratives are now all based this premise, a form of worship of Progress. In other words, I have no doubt at all — zero — that any of the priests of our civic religion were to watch and analyze/interpret this episode of Rawhide, or any episode, they would get angry and produce a laundry-list of grievances against it, maybe even try to start a social-media mob to get it canceled for some inane reason. Such is not in the realm of parody but happens pretty regularly now. As such I’m always a little surprised when very-old TV shows or movies still air on TV. Even Star Trek Voyager of the 1995-2001 period, has plenty of episodes which would draw ire.

The funny thing about or civic religion is how there are so many heretics to the religion, people who basically disbelieve the central premise of the civic religion that the past is horrifyingly bad and one gets one’s moral worth through eternal striving against the past and against any supposed remnants of the past, an eternal political-cultural purge apparatus now seems built into our system. The wave of statue-topplings and name-changings goes on. The latest I hear is people are demanding bird names change because the people who named them one or two hundred years ago had some kind of impure political views as judged from the early 2020s. The America I know by now will have some people make noise, complain, about the ever-more-bizarre Jacobinism of our time, but the institutions with power over such things will fold.

Clint Eastwood himself stands out as against this tidal wave. I don’t know what his personal views are. I think he is a longtime Republican. I don’t know if he actively supported the Orange Man at any point, either the wild days of 2015, or through the Orange Man’s presidency. I don’t know what he may have thought during the disputed election drama going on a few months, except that he was too smart to say the wrong thing once things got heated and people started getting arrested by the hundreds.

Clint Eastwood the man is less important, anyway, than Clint Eastwood the artist (actor, director, movie producer), and the latter really stands out as a living tie to the days of a culture basically wholesome and optimistic, as I see it. May he live and continue working for years yet to come.

I’m going to write a little about a recent Eastwood movie I saw next, Richard Jewell (2019) but this post has already sailed well past a good length limit.

bookmark_borderPost-408: Star Trek Voyager

Posted on by Peter

(The idea for this post was in my mind on May 23, 2021 and the actual writing is just filling in the details and the usual, limited tangent-hopping.)

May 23, 2021: The twenty-year anniversary of the original airing of the last episode of Star Trek: Voyager.

I worked for the Census in 2020 as a field agent, and it was really rewarding work but also usually physically exhausting. After finishing some days, I started watching episodes of this show again, not thinking much of it. But the foray began a re-ignition of interest, picked up from about where I left it off at age ten, maybe eleven, in the late 1990s.

I was eight years old when the show first aired in 1995. I remember excitement around it at the time. I had forgotten that it aired on UPN, which I do remember being a fan of in the late 1990s and 2000s. What I also didn’t know is the original episode of Star Trek: Voyager aired the opening night that UPN was on the air, as a new broadcast-tv channel. Voyager was, I learn, by fan UPN’s best-performing show, drawing over millions of established Star Trek fans to its new episodes and reruns. (I don’t know if UPN is still around in some form, but in the long run the attempt at a new broadcast television channel was clearly doomed.) I hear Star Trek: Voyager is still airing somewhere on TV in rerun form, even into the 2020s.

I got my views on such things as what kind of TV show to be interested in via a very limited window of perception. (About the same time, I was a subscriber to the print-magazine Nintendo Power, and the idea of a print magazine shipped to people’s homes to talk about video game stuff seems terrible anachronistic now.)

I feel certain I was influenced in being an early fan of Voyager by my half-brother, ten years my senior, and who was hanging around at the time. I think I remember watching the first episode, but don’t know for sure if it was on the original broadcast or on a rerun. The original episode straddled the line between movie and TV, for they took more month to produce it and it was double-length, two hours of TV time (minus commercials at 1h30m ore a little more). In the 1990s there were still only several channels on TV and cable existed but was not really mainstream. I remember perceiving cable as exotic, maybe decadent, and unnecessarily expensive, which is roughly how cell phones were perceived at the time. (I had access to neither a cell phone nor cable all through school days; I think I got a cell phone first in my last year of high school.)

The premier of a much-anticipated new series was a big deal. When I recently watched the first episode, a scene involving drinking water stands out; I know I had seen it before, but I was just a child. In 1995, and probably 1996 and 1997, I think I was a casual fan, but I don’t know how many episodes I ever really watched. I remember being intrigued when my half-brother wrote and submitted a script in either summer 1995 or summer 1996. Star Trek had an open submission policy. I remember some of the plot of his script, which leaned absurdist but any Star Trek could be characterized as absurdist, except the played it straight and waved away problems with the magic of future-scene (“technobabble”). He never heard back from them on his script, one of hundreds that never made it.

There is a lot to show about this show. I don’t want to go on too long here except to note the anniversary of the show’s ending. Children are sometimes Star Trek for very different reasons than adults. Both appreciate it. It’s been called modern mythology, or American mythology (but the series may be as popular outside America), an update of the legends of pantheons of gods of yester-millennia. It’s also basically utopian, a fantasy presented within a certain set of firm, reality-seeming bounds. People have written a lot about this over the years, back to the 1970s when they first started observing that Star Trek had attracted an unusually devout fan base, and in the early 2020s we are at roughly the fifty-year mark of the social phenomenon.

I have never counted myself a Star Trek fan. I occasionally watched the show in reruns, with The Next Generation (late 1980s to early 1990s) being more the standard-bearer than the Original Series (late 1960s).

A culturally literate American born between the 1950s to 1990s knows Star Trek references well, for they became well-embedded in popular culture by the 1990s and even those who never saw the show soon acquire by osmosis certain ideas or references.

The set of assumptions behind Star Trek is also profoundly set in most popular culture, going back many generations, the religion of Progress, unstoppable progress, which of course would put us zooming across the galaxy by the 2370s (when Voyager is set).

The 2020s is 350 years from the 2370s, the time-setting of Voyager. Reversing chronological course in the other direction, we get the 1670s. (By coincidence, the 1670s is an era I have for several year taken interest in for very different reasons, the subject of a long unpublished post on this blog related to Amerindians in the Potomac area, a project I abandoned but recently revived in Microsoft Word form and which I hope to bring to a form of completion.)

I am really writing this to note the anniversary of the end of Star Trek: Voyager, which probably formed a bigger part of my understanding of the world than I knew at the time, in my formative years. I have enjoyed watching the old shows, and for a while was even reading multi-thousand word reviews someone had written in 2017-18, but eventually grew tired of them because they were repetitive. (No one can write a cumulative hundreds of thousands of words on a television series without getting seriously repetitive.) In the past few weeks I’ve started listening to a podcast by two of the actors, The Delta Flyers. (Late in the series the ship developed a small vessel called the Delta Flyer for small “away missions.”) The two, who played two young-male officers on the show, do a good job with this podcast, and have such good connections with the other actors that they often get them on, too.

I had completely lost interest in Star Trek: Voyager by the time its final episode aired in May 2001, as is usual for people in the age range I was in at the time.

The show is underrated and worth watching again, for all kinds of reasons for insights into baseline of American/Western attitudes towards future, past, and present. In the quarter century since Star Trek: Voyager came on, I don’t know that I thought about it much before about summer 2020 when one day I sought it out again. I appreciate its role in my own life, as minor as it was, I remember being captivated and inspired by it.

bookmark_borderPost-404: Germany’s Super-Election-Year 2021, thoughts and developments

Posted on by Peter

Six German state governments have elections this year. Two others have local elections. That’s a total of eight states of sixteen having some kind of elections. Everyone in Germany has the all-important national Bundestag election in September 2021, eight months from this writing. They’re calling it a Superwahljar (Super-Election-Year). It’s really a Super-Election-HalfYear, because they all occur between mid-March and late-September, good weather months.

Recent news has brought my attention back to something big that happened in Germany in 2020, which I followed closely at the time and wrote about on these pages. It was the sudden breakthrough of the AfD party in forming a state government, in Thuringia. I wrote about the Thuringia shock and crisis (Post-383: High Drama in Erfurt) and then a series of long comments on the political crisis as it happened, and reactions to it, a kind of political journaling mixed with my own recollections and insights. Thuringia was a big deal, and remains a big deal as I look back, now, almost one year later.

But then the Virus Panic of 2020 happened and shifted political support levels significantly. In fact in such a dramatic way, in fact, that one understands why politicians have dragged on the irrational responses. The media succeeded in scaring people, who were then easy pickings for political demagogues.

In any case, this is the biggest year for German electoral politics in a while. Following are comments and observations.

Continue reading “Post-404: Germany’s Super-Election-Year 2021, thoughts and developments”

bookmark_borderPost-402: “Storming the Capitol” (Jan. 6, 2021)

Posted on by Peter

History-making happens when you don’t expect it.

What to “make” of the occupation of the U.S. federal Capitol grounds, in Washington, in the afternoon and into early evening, Jan. 6, 2021?

My immediate impression. This will be remembered as a major, historic, ‘landmark’ moment in history. A moment ranking with the most historic of my adult lifetime so far.

As a protest, and as protests go, it was a stunning success. The occupation of central government building by unarmed protestors? Wow.

(The Occupation of the U.S. Capitol grounds, Jan. 6, 2021.)

Also a humiliation, if there ever was one, for the U.S. federal government.

The following was written about 48 hours after the event. Thoughts on context for this moment in history, how such as dramatic as this comes to happen, and then some notable scenes from the occupation.

(original: 2000 words) (updated, Jan. 9: now 3300 words.)

Continue reading “Post-402: “Storming the Capitol” (Jan. 6, 2021)”

bookmark_borderPost-401: Seoul mayoral races, 2011 to 2021, reminiscences and thoughts

Posted on by Peter

The sitting Mayor of Seoul committed suicide in July 2020.

Park Won-soon (elected mayor of Seoul, Oct. 2011; reelected, June 2014 and June 2018)’s suicide triggered an early mayoral election, now set for April 7, 2021. The early phase of the campaign is underway.

The leading candidates in the Seoul mayoral special election are:

  • Ahn Chul-Soo (also spelled Ahn Cheol-soo),
  • Park Young-Sun, and
  • Na Kyung-won.

The first of these, Ahn, is a former software developer, PhD, and professor who spent the 2010s bouncing around politics, and who by now qualifies as a “perennial political candidate,” popping up in races all over. I have a surprisingly long tradition on these pages of writing about him, and he appears as an important feature in Post-66, Post-71, Post-340, Post-342. This post will have the biggest treatment of Ahn Chul-soo yet, and I am writing today with a much more mature understanding (althought still lacking) understanding of Korean politics.

A recent political cartoon of Ahn’s late-December 2020 announcement that he was running for Seoul mayor has him as the champion of the “anti-Moon federation,” trying to see which way the winds are blowing:

(Political cartoon of Ahn Chul-soo, late Dec. 2020, KoreaHotNews.)

Ahn’s competitors are both women: Park Young-sun is of the Establishment-Left (Moon’s) party; Na Kyung-won is of the Establishment-Right party.

___________

This post started as a brief mention of the upcoming 2021 election but has since grown into something more meaningful, correspondingly longer, and more personal. I also meant to write about the 2018 election at the time but never got around to it; it’s good I’m finally getting it done now.

Recorded are thoughts, experiences, and other material on the 2011, 2014, 2018 and 2021 Seoul mayoral elections, during all of which I happen to have been in Korea. There is a mix of personal reminiscence and political analysis/commentary through personal reminiscence, especially on 2018, having dug through old photos, I am posting many of them here. (I’ve come to view the recording of personal reminiscence and thoughts as the purpose of my writing on these digital pages, and those who wish to take the time will find as much below.)

(Original, Jan. 4: 1600 words.)
(Updated: Jan. 5 and Jan. 6; expanded significantly to 7700 words with many pictures and one video taken by me at the time.)

_____________

I start with the immediate past (2018), then circle back to the present (2021), jump back to memories of the more-distant past (2011 and 2014), and finish with thoughts on the future (2022, the next presidential election, of which this special Seoul mayoral election is an important stepping stone).

_____________

The Seoul Mayoral Campaign of 2018

I was in Korea at the time, in June 2018. In the peak-campaign period I was mainly in Seoul itself, and did soomething of an on-the-ground investigation, the results of which I had not compiled and published in disciplined written, until now.

Continue reading “Post-401: Seoul mayoral races, 2011 to 2021, reminiscences and thoughts”

bookmark_borderThe Two U.S. political hegemonies of our time

Posted on by Peter

On historical trends of our time. I wrote about the general concept yesterday that eras often do not align with their calendar-numbers, with one example arguably being “the 2000s” ending Sept. 2008 with the financial crisis. (Some also argued “The 1960s” really ends with either the Nixon resignation or the evacuation of Saigon, which by calendrical dating were already in the mid-1970s, and maybe it really began about 1964, so at least that’s still a ten-or-so-year decade.)

I want to put digital pen to paper on a related topic again: The thirty-year cycle we are still (?) in.

In February 2020, I read State Dept. figure William J. Burns’ memoir (his career was from 1980 to 2014 and he rose unusually quickly; my comments on his unexplained rapid rise fill the margins of the book). I began to suspect something that had not quite occurred to me before. It was this: The USA was in a long arc that began thirty years ago, specifically in 1990-91, traceable to two landmark events (Rodney King and the U.S. decision to fight Iraq) which do not have immediate precursors at the time. The rest of this post will be an update on this idea including events of the last ten-and-a-half months. I think “2020” validates the thesis, which I published in these pages about one month before the Corona-Panic began, in a big way.

_____________

The two events, the decision to invade Iraq and Rodney King, occurred from late July 1990 to early March 1991, only seven months’ space of time.

The two events were almost trivial in their time and are often not remembered, in and of themselves.

I myself am too young to remember either of them. In the 1990s during my own process of socialization I became aware of them as minor landmark events of the recent past.

[1.] The decision to intervene against Iraq and crush it as a regional power (apparently made by top U.S. officials in late July 1990, according to Burns who witnessed it) set up a long chain process of very-free-hand Mideast interventionism, in a way that the U.S. would absolutely not meddle or intervene or bomb or invade any place in its own hemisphere (anymore), which itself is strange to think about.

When I was in high school I believed the U.S. might invade Colombia, in response to the rebels trafficking drugs there causing trouble. Nothing like that ever happened at all. But meddling in the Midwest over much more abstruse reasons is the norm, is expected, and one hears muted criticism of it. It is a consensus position.

There became an ingrained cultural attitude that The Evil-Doers (to use what I vaguely recall as a George W. Bush phrasing) are out there, and are mainly in the Midwest, so we have to constantly meddle, and attack, and bomb, and use the map as a giant chessboard, or the Evil-Doers win. It puzzles me how this is uncontroversial.

Intervention predates George W. Bush, continued through Clinton, and began with George H. W. Bush, not that the nominal president at any given time was the decisive factor, because they’ve all done it, steadily so, and as I say, seemingly as if a Foreign Policy Prime Directive, beyond the point of possibility of dispute by good people (an enforced consensus). This was much less a story in 2020 than other years, but it never really went away. A much bigger story in 2020 was the second trend:

[2.] The decision (?) to turn to race-demagoguery with the Rodney King incident (traffic stop and arrest of a man high on cocaine) as some kind of regularized, semi-controlled, moral-hysteria process. This functions to unify the regime and its loyalists against the Bad People out there. This strategy was subtle at first but increasingly embraced by Good People, and largely as a matter of course by those born in the 1980s and beyond, especially the Good People therein. Soon the strategy was by the state itself, the state being run by Good People. It was manifestly certain that this was our reality by the 2010s.

The Los Angeles Riots followed the initial Rodney King incident a year later. The pattern was set, and would reach epidemic proportions in the 2010s, and then in May-June 2020. The latter was not the breakout of mass-psychosis that it may have appeared to be, to many, but follows a specific line back to Rodney King. The pattern was: Take a minor, local story of ambiguous nature etc., etc., inflate into national importance, garnish with lies of commission and omission as needed, and riots are okay in pursuit of The Goal (whatever the goal is — but you wouldn’t want to be on the side of the Bad People, would you?).

Even if there are distant ancestors of this strain of domestic politics (most notably, the mid-late 1960s riots), and even though the cultural energies may have been hanging around in the 1980s, they didn’t manifest until 1990-91, and they have been near-hegemonic in our discourse since then, framing our accepted reality (to use academic-esque language).

Later events were faded carbon-copies of the Rodney King case, and they kept getting trotted out, one after another, dominating domestic-news in bizarre ways, and even Orwellian ways.

This all became depressingly in-your-face by 2020, highly demoralizing given that nothing was done against them. (I should know; I witnessed some of these things at their peak, at close range. I showed up. No one knew, at first, that riots were going to happen, but people locked down for months and recently released were ready for some fun; it was the only way young people could gather, all other options disrupted or closed-off to them by the Panic-Lockdown regime(s). I saw open rioting/vandalism/fires, and looting, in front of me. I saw the police stand-down. The rumors were/are true.)

The younger half or so of the population, socialized after Rodney King, thinks it more-or-less normal that this bizarre game is effectively our Domestic Policy Prime Directive.

Some at the top have profound sympathies for their own reasons, with many of them, if not most, even talking themselves into it with the other moral-frenzy-ists.

Whatever the 2010s were, as a decade, and whatever their true beginning and end should be, they seem to me to follow a longer thread that began in 1990-91. I don’t know how much energy this thirty-year historical-cycle has left in it, the Virus-Lockdown-induced, Elite-approved riots of mid-2020, the seeming Apotheosis, and the sudden statue-toppling, all-placenames-are-to-be-replaced mania (always fight the Bad People, no matter what, and if you run out of them, just find more) notwithstanding.

bookmark_borderThe 2020s, Day 2 or Day 368?

Posted on by Peter

I received a long, reflective email from an Australian friend living in Korea, sent to a large group of his contacts. It started:

Welcome to the 3rd decade of the 3rd millennium Anno Domini 2021.

I see that I first wrote about this exactly a year ago.

The idea, here, is the “third decade” of the century starts with Jan. 1, 2021, and not Jan. 1, 2020, because there is no “Year 0.”

In our counting system, “Jan. 1st of AD 1” was the first day of the first year of the era, approximately around the time of Jesus’ birth. Therefore Jan. 1st of AD 2021 would be the first year of the new decade.

I think this is too complicated and decades ought to be measured by the third digit for clarity and simplicity’s sake, and therefore we are now at Day 368 of “the 2020s” (Leap Year 2020 at 366 days, plus Jan. 1st and now Jan. 2nd = 368). Before you know it we will hit the 11% mark of the decade. And for how terrible a decade it’s been so far, one might hope it will get better.

___________

There is another way or counting eras, only possible in retrospect, always subject to possible dispute. The (“Short”) 20th century was really Nov. 1918 to Nov. 1989. A clean seventy-one years, from the end of the Great War in Europe, which unleashed the era of competing ideologies, until the Fall of Communism process, a complicated process but symbolized by the peaceful Fall of the Berlin Wall, Nov. 1989.

In more recent times, “the 2000s” may have ended in Sept. 2008 when the financial crisis suddenly hit, or at least that’s when the panic in the news hit, preceded by the strange oil price spike of mid-year 2020. I remember it.

Economic disruptions affect almost everyone at least a little, and some a lot, often in ways they don’t recognize or appreciate. I was determined to go abroad in 2009 and did. The 2008-09 recession had a long, lingering effect. If my old job were still there, in Sept. 2010, when I showed back up, I would have taken it back. Instead, I did a lot of other things. The 2010s went in unexpected directions for me, but I never had a master-plan anyway, and maybe it was for the better. I did some interesting things in the (calendrical) 2010s.

Now the harder question: When did “The 2010s” begin and end? Or have they not ended yet? We’re too close to say. Check back on this in the 2030s.

_____________

bookmark_borderAnnus Horribilis Twenty-Twenty

Posted on by Peter

I distinctly recall, as I write this, rushing to make an end-of-year post on Dec. 31, 2019. It is now Dec. 31, 2020. Here I am again. The hours of the year are fading fast.

People tend to do review the events of the wider world, or their own lives in a narrow sense, at such times. What can one say about 2020 except this:

This is the “annus horribilis” of the firstquarter of the twenty-first century. With four years left in this quarter-century, I can’t imagine any of the others being worse. Across almost all possible measures, a terrible year.

(Without getting into it, I think the problems are much more of our own making than anything. Certain historical trends are active which have inevitably found at outlet, if not through the surreal craziness through which they manifested in 2020, then some other way sooner than later. But we could have, and should have, done better. I am ashamed of us.)

In some ways I feel it still is Dec. 31, 2019, right now, and there has been a 366-day (leap year) pause. Nothing has advanced. We’ve lost a lot of time.

But it wasn’t all bad. I worked hard for a time I greatly enjoyed and greatly excelled at, being promoted to a leadership position on merits and being consistently one of the best performers. I have been juggling other projects. Life moves on.

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Scenes #7: Trump signs abundant in western Maryland

Posted on by Peter

Taking advantage of unseasonably good weather and clear skies, from October 25 to 28 I was hiking in western Maryland, primarily in Washington County. I did a long tour of Antietam battlefield as part of this, which is entirely within Washington County. Harpers Ferry is also part of the general battle theater, which is where I came up from. (I don’t know how many people do an all-on-foot tour of Antietam, but it can’t be many. The battlefield area is definitely car-oriented.)

Antietam battlefield scene, preserved as it was in 1862

Maybe I’ll have another opportunity, another day, to write about that hike itself. I have done many such hikes and they are always liberating and you always learn a lot, regardless of what you think you know.

The most notable thing in Washington County, Md., was the overwhelming support for Trump. Granted, western Maryland is ‘red’ anyway. But Arlington is ‘blue,’ an there was a distinct lack of signs for Biden around Arlington, which I wrote about in a recent post. This is a strong contrast I was immediately hit by.

It feels like I felt ten Trump signs for every Biden sign in Washington County, which if much higher than the actual likely vote ratio.

One of the few Biden signs I saw actually included a separate sign next to it apologizing for the Biden sign:

Sharpsburg, Maryland, October 2020. The sign on the right says: “Just to be Clear! I support police officers, but not the ones who commit crimes. I support protestors, but not the ones who commit crimes. Yes, it really is that simple.”

This elaborate explanatory note attached to the Biden-Harris yard sign display is something I’ve never otherwise seen. I interpret it as an apology for Biden support in this area, given the strength of Trump support.

The same is true in much of Middle America. Washington County, no doubt has people in it tied economically or otherwise to the Washington DC-centric core, but the basic population stock here is Middle America Whites, the Trump 2015-16 base.

I didn’t bother taking pictures, in part because I was trying to preserve my phone battery and in part because there were just so many houses with Trump signs. Here is one, a very large sign (see the mailbox opposite for scale):

The largely rural landscape here fits with the image of core Trump supporters.

Here someone took it upon themselves to decorate a stop sign at the intersection with the Harpers Ferry Road (which dates back two centuries and featured in the battle at Antietam):

Being here a few days made me think of Iowa, my father’s home state. His home county delivered the biggest margin to Trump in Nov. 2016 than it ever gave to any presidential candidate in history. Trump is the type who tosses around words like “historic,” but in that case it really was, literally ranking number one in the modern political era. There are lots and lots of counties like this, once you step out of core metro areas, which broke much more ‘Red’ than they normally do. Deep-blue areas tended to do the opposite, which led to Hillary’s win in the popular vote.

What to make of clear and strong Trump support in western Maryland and places like it? For one thing, Maryland is a locked-up blue state. Everyone knows who’s getting its electoral votes. The fact that these people in western Maryland are so dedicated to the Trump movement, despite knowing full well they won’t swing the state, speaks to the mystique and power of MAGA many have spoken of.

If Trump wins again in most of the key states, the belt of Obama-to Trump states, Pennsylvania to Minnesota, and thus wins the election, it may be because of strongly motivated core supporters like these. I even spotted evidence of sign wars in Northern Virginia:

(“Vote for Democrats” sign vandalized with a “Trump 2020” bumper sticker, Northern Virginia, late October 2020.)

As I write this, it is just past noon on election day. There are a few more of these types of stories I wanted but I got in mostly what I wanted. There is always more to say. I’ll be in DC in the evening and till late with more stories to tell.

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Street Scenes #6: Blue Lives Matter

Posted on by Peter

In the first two weeks of October, I was doing daily census work in the field in DC (their operation was in considerably much worse shape than ours in Northern Virginia was, by late September; there was a tentative October 5 end date at the time. It was announced we were being transferred us over on I think September 29).

I never had time to stroll around making “Election Week” observations, but on several days I did pass in the general White House area for one reason or another. October 10 was one such day.

Here was the scene in Constitution Avenue, south of the White House (visible in the distance):

Here we see the Blue Lives Matter flag, something I was not familiar with before the June riots and the flurry of activity that felt a lot like a color revolution attempt. (I was up close and personal to much of the worst of it in DC. I even got a black eye out of it.)

I have long admired the area around the White House for being what I thought of as a town square, a place for mutual exchange of ideas. Everyone with their little causes, and almost always a crowd of some kind around. You could also see something new. It helped a lot that the Pennsylvania Avenue north of the White House has long been closed to traffic.

While “Open Schools Now” only partially and ambiguously overlaps with “Trump 2020” as a campaign, “Blue Lives Matter” overlaps something near 100%. I can’t imagine many Blue Lives Matter flag-carriers are voting Biden-Harris.

I see a handful of Blue Lives Matter flags around, but in political-Left-heavy areas of Northern Virginia they are far outnumbered by Black Lives Matter. (In non-Black areas, Black Lives Matter yard signs are almost exclusively seen in wealthy neighborhoods. This must be a puzzling phenomenon to foreigners to observe. I was through many non-Black and non-White areas for the census, especially Hispanic areas, and really never saw Black Lives Matter signs at all.)

This good feeling I had for the area of the White House which I have described to others as feeling like a political town square was disrupted in June by the fact that the riots reached there, and then weeks of occupation of the area proceeded — blessed by the mayor, who cynically ‘renamed’ the street Black Lives Matter Plaza.

The protests and street-partiers in which the rioters moved (the rioter, maybe, moves among the crowd as the fish swims in the sea, to quote Mao) were as far as the park north of the White House, a focal point for them. It proved to be unfortunate for them that this became the focal point, because it is so easy to defend. The rioters did the most damage when the battles were scattered all over, looting here, burning garbage cans there, no way for police to mount a defense.

The riots were shocking enough, an if Trump wins I expect a common ‘take’ will be people in Middle America — who really are the forgotten people in national dialogue, looked down on or ignored — did not like the riots.

On this the last weekend before the election, there have been impressive showing of Blue Lives Matter and Trump supporters all over, in marches and car caravans. It’s for this reason I think Trump has at least a 50-50 chance, not the <10% chance the pollsters and pundits give him.

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Street Scenes #5: Open Schools Now

Posted on by Peter

Political yard signs are not limited to actual yards in front of houses or windows, and the US has a long tradition now of people putting them up in public places, especially in median strips on roads or other comparable places.

One you’d never have guessed you’d see is this one:

This particular median strip got more crowded with political signs as time went by. If you’d shown this to someone in 2019, they’d never guess what the sign was supposed to mean.

“Open Schools Now” is a defacto political slogan, overlapping with national politics but not identical, though the two positions have grown closer over time as people rearrange themselves into familiar political boxes.

Schools in Arlington remain fully closed, as the Panic crowd demanded and, in retrospect, easily got. In August, there was a sign campaign demanding no opening at all until there were “fourteen days with no new cases,” which I’, sorry but is an insane position. It’s a respiratory/flu virus, people. What are you thinking? And elected leaders caved in.

(Schools never should have closed at all, not in March and not to the present. It was never an evidence-based or data-based position. It was purely a panic-based, emotion-based decision. The negative effects of this decision far, far outweigh any potential positives. This is my position, reached through analysis of the data. But if I’ve learned nothing else from other people in my time, it’s that most people don’t think like that — which is why it’s a good think public policy people generally do, to avoid constant disruptive panics.)

The Coronavirus Panic overlapped this year with regular political currents, but at least at first it didn’t fit previous division lines, so you saw people all over the place in their positions. The media drumbeat terrified people, putting the cart miles ahead of the horse because they never bothered to wait for evidence to come in.

Meanwhile, the “Open Schools Now” people are like figures out of the Twilight Zone, the kind of episode where the protagonist is the same and everyone else one day is different (“they were all like that,” Seinfeld said). Very few, early on in this virus panic, would have wanted schools closed for a full one and a half school years, as may now be the case.

So this “Open Schools Now” campaign seems hopeless, with the people in it, mainstream just months ago, are now cornered into looking like malcontents or perennial candidates for office, like the Clement sign behind the Open Schools Now sign. Clement is a perennial candidate and critic of the local one-party state of total Democratic Party machine control. She won’t win because most Arlington voters are transients (don’t know much about the local area, nor care) who vote straight Democrat.

Arlington is the kind of place where schools were shut down and have not reopened as of election week. It’s impossible to trust the media on Corona and all topics related to it, given their responsibility for frankly creating the Panic and leading the digital lynch mobs that demanded shutdowns. I don’t know if Open Schools Now is a position from which a candidate could win, if an election were a pure national referendum on it.

In April I started to sense that the November 2020 general election might be a partial referendum on Shutdowns/Lockdowns, and that prediction has turned out quite right. In simple form:

Pro-Shutdowns/Lockdowns, Vote Biden. Anti-Shutdowns/Lockdowns, Vote Trump.

It’s not that simple, but both candidates have made moves suggesting they are comfortable carrying that banner. The all-important question is which direction that pushes Pennsylvania and the rest of the key states that swung to Trump in 2016. Demanding schools stay shut indefinitely feels to me like it’s more like a Blue Bubble position, but it’s hard to say. It’s really not political, of course, but more personality based.

I must say, in any case, that I pity students and am glad I am not one just now.

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Street Scenes #4: Honk for ‘Black Lives Matter’

Posted on by Peter


At this same intersection at the corner that would be visible if you peeked behind the poll from the previous post (“No Photo ID Required to Vote”), there are often two wheelchair-bound men, one Black and one White, silently glaring at passersby. They have been staging daily hour long “Honk for Black Lives Matter” protests since the riots in June.

Usually they have one to three hangers-on with them. Here they are on October 30:

This protest elicits lots of disorganized honks and therefore causes considerable noise, making it seem like perpetual, angry traffic jam is in place.

Why are people honking this much? I know Arlington and I know the answer: It’s a signal of how much Arlington types want to signal their support for the trendy movement (support rates shot way up during the riots and the aftermath), and therefore signaling their social status, their social prestige, that they are one of the good people. Though yard signs are plenty sign enough of that. Yard sign ratio is such a very much low-hanging-fruit observation that I decide to spend a few hours quantifying it with personal data collection which I published yesterday.

But there are plenty of people not on board with the Black Lives Matter agenda. It is also not hard to see this for what it is, a political campaign in no small part directed against Trump and as a rallying call for anti-Trump forces and to some extent a grab-bag of left-wing ideas. I’d go so far as to say Black Lives Matter isn’t even primarily about Black people, at least not in this manifestation, the dynamic of the two wheelchair-bound guys and the mainly White honkers and sundry passersby.

Some passersby distinctly express their disapproval. One of the times I passed by, I witnessed a pair on bicycles shout “Trump 2020!” several times at the protestors, which about sums it up. Supposedly there was, for some days, a solitary counter-protestor who silently carried a US flag and stared at the Honk for Black Lives Matter grouplet, which again sums up the point of what the dividing line is, I think.

But there is also a non-political argument against this kind of protest in this kind of area, a largely residential area. It causes a constant assault on the auditory senses.

I did a few census addresses in the area. There was one resident in the area complained bitterly of the constant noise, saying he couldn’t sleep, saying he didn’t understand why they were doing that. I could barely conduct the interview for all the steady honking. He was a Spanish speaker. Anyone living, working, or just passing through the area is subject to this noise for an hour a day.

Will it end if Biden is elected? Will it continue if Trump is re-elected?

The newspaper profiled the pair, and the man was a professor of history at Howard University and adopted the other man, paralyzed from birth, from Lesotho.

bookmark_borderNeighborhood political yard-sign survey suggests Biden is in trouble (Election 2020 – Street Scenes #3)

Posted on by Peter

(This was written October 30-31; the survey was mid-October; observations on which I decided to do to full survey were made in August and September.)

After census work ended in mid-October, I conducted my own census, a political yard sign census, around a certain neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. It is heavily white, heavily educated and credentialed and with new in-mover necessarily having to be pretty high income as since the early 2000s it has had ballooning land prices. It is quite strongly Democratic for a white neighborhood.

I walked past 478 occupied homes (houses, mainly; some townhouses) and noted what kind or yard signs they had, if any, whether there were Halloween decorations, an whether there was a US flag. This was a personal research project ahead of the election, to see if I might spot anything that might signal the election result, either before or after:

Political Signs:

  • Biden signs alone,
  • Biden signs with other political signs,
  • Other political signs without Biden signs, or
  • No political signs of any kind.

Halloween decorations:

  • Pumpkins alone,
  • Pumpkins and other Halloween paraphernalia, or
  • No Halloween decorations.

Flags:

  • US flag flying
  • Other flag/banner flying
  • No flag of any kind

13.1% of occupied homes had a Biden sign, of which 7.5% had a Biden sign alone (no other accompanying political sign) and 5.6% having a Biden sign along with at least one other political sign, including “Black Lives Matter” and a particularly common long list of doctrinal statements. (Earlier versions had existed before but in June this year after the protests, riots, and looting, some of which I witnessed personally, the signs began to be replaced with a version that led with “We believe… Black Lives Matter,” followed by the other doctrinal statements of belief below it.)

Another 6.1% of occupied homes had some kin of political or quasi-political sign but no Biden sign, 0.8% pro-Trump or proxy pro-Trump, and 5.3% anti-Trump or other.

Of these, only 0.8% appeared to be pro-Trump either directly (0.4%) or by proxy (0.4%). In the latter I include a house with a “Blue Line” flag, the flag being flown to support police.

The other 5.3% had left-wing signs such as the doctrinal confession aforementioned and various other common ones such as the “Hate Has No Home Here” sign. Another common one was “You are Welcome Here,” which explains to mean the resident is pro-immigration and implies they also support those illegally resident in the USA.

Often, the homes in this 5.3% set that had left-wing slogans but passed on the Biden signs had a more radical and angry and even obscene tenor: “Tuck Frump.” One had “Profits are a Crime Against Humanity.” About three homes had “A Woman’s Place is in the Resistance” featuring a picture of a Star Wars character (I think a reference to a 2010s-era Star Wars movie which put women as the protagonists). Lots said Dump Trump and had various kinds of anti-Trump slogans. There were other miscellaneous signs that those who followed the various political news cycles would recognize to also be connected to the Orange Man, such as “Save the Post Office.”

Rearranging the categories a little:

  • Homes advertising support for left-wing causes d’jour (with or without a Biden sign alongside) were at 10.9%.
  • Those advertising support for Biden without any co-endorsement of any left-wing cause d’jour were at 7.5%.
  • Those advertising possible Trump support were at only 0.8%.
  • (People without any political signs were at 80.8%.)

Using these groups as proxies for Left, Center, and Right, respectively, we have a ratio in the large sample of 14:9:1, or 23:1 on the expected Biden-Trump vote in this area. The problem is, this is far higher a ratio than the actual result is going to be; 23 to 1 is a blowout on par with one-party stats that have rubber-stamp elections. Sure enough it can hold in isolated geographic zones, but not in this one: The precinct’s result in November 2016 was strongly tilted Left, but nowhere near 23:1. The Left-to-Right voting ratio in 2026 was 26:10 (Hillary+Stein vs. Trump+Johnson+McMullin). The Hillary:Trump margin alone was 37:10.

But what about the four-in-five majority who put up no political yard signs in 2020? The 2016 voting rate was 26:10:18 Left:Right:Nonvoter. So not quite a majority voted Hillary. This is hardly the kind of total dominance you’d expect from a casual walk through the area with an eye on yard signs, or the data as presented in this post, with its 230:10 Left:Right political yard sign ratio.

That is the first lesson I take from this. In certain areas, a tipping point is reached an a status quo asserts itself, and people in the minority begin to self-censor. This is the Arlington I have known. It is run by smug, self-satisfied, and self-righteous people who cannot fathom any opposition, and never see any. Truer bubble people you seldom find.

I’ve often wondered when the tipping point was in Arlington. In decade terms, I think it was the 1980s. There was still a conservative element in the 1970s, although by fading fast as new arrivals kept coming in, from near and far. Starting in the 1980s, the apparent public consensus was established and conservatives began to disappear from public discourse; I expect you could find similar versions of this finding of a laughably lopsided sign ratio back to the 1990s at least. Having been a relatively regular observer of Arlington starting at that time, that aligns with my memory. There was still some degree of conservative strength but it was only seen in the privacy of polling booths and with very occasional civic questions of the moment, but starting the 1980s they had an unbeatable voting coalition given the type of person coming into Arlington, and they had a coming one-party state. The one-party state is all I’ve ever known of Arlington, 1990s to present.

They are crowing with victory and have, of late, been on a tear of name-changing, statue-toppling, and memorial defacing. The image you get is one of a wine-and-cheese Taliban. (Their latest target is Lee Highway; they put up a website for people to vote on new names for Lee Highway, something no one asked for. Almost all the many options were ridiculous. They are again trying to push “Loving.” They refused to offer a None of the Above option in their poll or a Keep the Name option or a face-saving “Symbolically rename it for another Lee” and not the great general, the most famous man to ever come out of Arlington.)

In any case, back to the neighborhood political sign survey I conducted. I decided to survey flags flown in front of the same houses once I perceived a possible lopsided sign ratio way beyond the voting ratio. My idea was that US flags might be a proxy for Trump support or Right voting (in 2016, they also could’ve voted for Trump, Johnson, or McMullin to be counted as a Right voter).

8.8% of occupied homes had US flags flying or otherwise displayed at time of visit, of which 1% had a Biden sign and 7.8% had no Biden sign.

  • Homes advertising support for left-wing causes d’jour (with or without a Biden sign alongside) were at 10.9%.
  • Those advertising support for Biden without any co-endorsement of any left-wing cause d’jour were at 7.5%.
  • Those advertising possible Trump support were at only 0.8%.
  • Those flying US flags without a Biden sign or a left-wing activist sign were ca. 7.2%.

Ratio of the first two categories (18.4%) against the second two (8%) puts us at a 23:10 Left:Right ratio, which is near the actual voting ratio in 2016, which was 26:10 Left:Right.

So finding two is that US flags are a proxy for conservative voting, also not the shock of the century but interesting how well the numbers line up. Maybe a coincidence.

Homes with a Biden sign would occasionally also have a US flag. I would interpret these people to be older people, mid-twentieth-century liberals, of which Arlington has had plenty for a long time.

Homes with left-oriented or activist signs but without a Biden sign almost never had a US flag. I would interpret these people to represent the new Democratic Party, the one that has rejected its once important populist streak and reoriented to being a party with close ties to academia and the well-credentialed broad elite, which again is certainly well represented in Arlington and in the neighborhood I surveyed.

I didn’t write down perfect notes in all cases on this, but I don’t think more than one of the houses in this grouping (activist signs without Biden signs) had a US flag, and I am sure many would, if asked, say they don’t want to fly the flag because it offends them because reasons. (I am thinking of the Profits are Evil sign-poster.)

Finding Three is that support for Biden is unenthusiastic. This was the most interesting of all and the reason I wanted to do this survey, especially coming off three+ months of hard census work doing things a lot like this. This finding is also why I am typing away at this on November 1, 48 hours before the election results start to come in.

You often hear anecdotal reports about Trump signs versus Biden signs, but how to test these rigorously? I don’t have access to comparisons over time and space, but I do have access to a possibly ‘control’ dataset: Halloween decorations.

Halloween is definitely now part of the USA’s civic religion, with many people taking it as seriously as religious people took religious holidays in days of yore. And a Martian anthropologist would definitely think Halloween something to do with the state religion. For this reason I’d say those who put up Halloween decorations are civically minded and civically engaged, with the caveat that of course it’s a ‘holiday’ primarily for children. Celebrating Halloween is effectively an expression of defacto civic patriotism. Some of these decorations people do are very involved, almost embarrassing amounts of time, money, imagination, effort, and energy go into some of these.

I noted how many houses had pumpkins alone (17.8%), how many had Halloween paraphernalia or decorations besides pumpkins (16.1%) and how many had neither (66.1%) as of the time I collected this data on Oct. 13-15.

19.2% of homes had any kind of political sign up; 33.9% had Halloween decorations up. There were noticeably more homes with Halloween decorations of some kind, even 2.5 weeks before Halloween, than had any kind of political sign.

This, along with the finding of so many anti-Trump signs or other activist signs in comparison to actual pro-Biden signs, leads me to believe people are unenthusiastic about Biden. This doesn’t matter in Virginia, which will certainly be in the D column Tuesday night; Virginia is now a “solid blue” state, entirely because of Northern Virginia and migration into is from elsewhere, domestic and international. The process I described of how Arlington flipped from being once competitive to becoming a dreary one-party state with party bosses controlling who wins each time was ongoing elsewhere as well, driven by essentially the same things it was in Arlington but following by twenty or thirty years. Virginia voted Obama in 2008 and 2012, then, even as so much of Middle America broke for Trump, doubled down on Hillary.

The election is looking very close and could still go either way, and no one knows what to believe. I think this survey of political yard signs gives the insight that Biden support is weaker than it may seem, and the odds must be more like 50-50 than the 90-10 they are talking about.

Yes, there is a large core that just hates Trump with a passion, and this is also reflected in the distribution of political signs. There were more anti-Trump signs than pro-Biden signs in the neighborhood. But beyond this angry and agitated core, will marginals in the middle go for Biden? Given the softness of his support even in such a strongly Democratic-voting area as the precinct of Arlington I surveyed, I can only expect the key states will see lackluster support for him, too. But maybe he doesn’t seen it, and maybe anti-Trump feeling alone, and the anti-Trump drumbeat we hear on the news, could be enough to win. It could.

It turned out Trump’s real odds of victory in 2016 were around 50-50, and he won because he came up heads in more Midwest states than not (all within about a point). The same could happen in 2020.

I remember November 8th, 2016. I was in Washington and saw a lot, many things to remember. Glimpses of what was to come in the mass outbreak of politicized violence and politicized(?)-looting in mid-2020.

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Street Scenes #2: “No Voter ID Required”

Posted on by Peter

Another small street scene from election season:

“A photo ID is not required to vote.”

These were taped up around Arlington in October. I spotted this one on October 30. I met a census guy I worked with over the past few months and now that the census is over he let loose more on what he really felt. He confidently predicted a Trump win. I said it’s 50-50. (As it really was 50-50 in 2016, too.)

He mentioned Virginia has recently abolished the requirement that you have an ID to vote. We had talked about the library (which has cocooned in on itself and effectively declared itself irrelevant by continuing to be closed down tight since mid-March) and he said you need an ID to borrow a library book (whenever they feel like opening again), but not to vote.

Maybe there are good arguments for getting rid of the long-established voter ID law, but whatever those may me, it seems pretty cynical to me to advertise “no ID required!” at the very top of your election pitch!

____________

bookmark_borderElection Week 2020 Street Scenes #1: Boarding Up

Posted on by Peter

Wednesday, October 28, early morning. Downtown businesses boarding up already.

I am returning from Brunswick, Maryland, after a few days in western Maryland and one day walking the length and breadth of Antietam battlefield.

I arrive at DC Union Station. Not much going on. For a central train station anchoring a population of a few million, DC Union Station is somewhat pathetic and never very busy, but less so than usual. On my trip out, teams of armed police were accosting people demanding to see their tickets. What was the meaning of this? Lockdown enforcement, maybe. I’d never seen it before. In any case, the mood is somewhat gloomy. The commuter train I’d rode in on was naturally rather empty, and they’d just announced further service cuts. Amtrak itself formerly ran one train a day each direction through Harpers Ferry en route to Pittsburgh and Chicago but now seems to be down to two per week. This is pretty depressing

I exit the station, still on the early side of the 6am hour. It’s still dark.

This is a building I am well familiar with. The building itself bespeaks glory and prestige of great architecture and the civilization that dares to design such. We don’t get designs like that anymore. The station dates to the 1910s, I think, and was used heavily by Washington politicians in its early years. It is even a long walk from the Capitol building. (I don’t think many politicians do this anymore, though Joe Biden has long had the habit. Delaware is one of the few places from which it’s at all feasible to even do.)

The glory and romanesque architecture of the train station itself contrasts wit the street scenes. I am told Union Station was, in my father’s heydey here in the area in the 1970s-1990s, effectively one part of the giant quasi-ghetto. Dangerous. Don’t hang around here. Don’t walk around here at night. This has not really been my experience here.

I think I first remember it in the late 2000s and at that time while it still seemed dangerous at night, it was a long way from the Bad Old Days. By the 2010s, when I had pretty regular experience at the station, it improved considerably. The new order in Washington is metaphorizable as a battle line in which one side pushes the other side out. The one side is sometimes reduced to being ‘White, young, wealthy’ and the other ‘Black, not wealthy.’ My natural inclination is to favor my own people, you’d think, but I hardly see the Bubble People that make up the ranks of the one side to have much in common with me. In any case, crime is way down but one cannot spend time in Washington east of Rock Creek Park almost anywhere without seeing signs of the past, echoes of the ghetto. The park in front of Union Station provided such an echo: A black man was ranting, possibly at someone or possibly at nothing, and threatening violence.

I get on a bikeshare bike to head towards Virginia. My legs are plenty tired from lots of walking over a few days, but bicycling is fine. It uses different muscles. I take a slow and meandering route. No hint yet of predawn glimmer in the sky when I begin but towards the end of the trip there is. I am going east, navigating by instinct. I know my may around on a bicycle on these streets, and from September 29 to October 12 I was in DC daily for census work, seeing places I’d never seen.

Still not much traffic as you’d normally expect downtown. (How long will the shutdowns/disruptions last? How much of the continuation of the disruptions is people preferring a perceived soft-vacation of staying home and never having to go into the office, and bosses morally disarmed?)

A few people here and there. A few signs here and there, but DC is a true one-party state with a foreordained result in any presidential head-to-head which makes putting up Biden signs a little ridiculous.

In November 2016, for every 25 voters resident in DC, 23 voted Hillary, 1 vote Trump, and 1 voted for someone else. These are communist-bloc rubber-stamp-election-type results, of course. I am sure the obvious one-party lock nature of DC, that even the dimmest and least perceptive potential voters are aware of, effectively discourages Republican-leaning voters from voting at all. And a lot of the daytime population of DC consists of commuters, so the average person you encounter in greater downtown is much more likely than those odds to be a conservative or even a Trump supporter, but they don’t say it. They exist on shibboleths. I had two S*IS professors who I was sure were pro-Trump but only by reading between the lines.

Not many people, not many signs, not much light, and I had the heightened perception of someone at the end of a long trip on the lookout for things to see.

Most conspicuous are work crews, some of them clearly in the process of erecting plywood boards, turning nice glass office-front and storefront windows into fortresses. The goal: Make easy vandalism or looting difficult, discourage casual looters.

I saw the same thing in June, even in Arlington after the worst of the looting. (General looting never crossed the Potomac, but one CVS was hit on Columbia Pike.) I was down here most of the key rioting/looting days, and after so many stores were hit and looted, generally with police doing nothing, businesses prudently began boarding up.

I was familiar with the process from June. They’re clearly expecting fairly explicit political violence associated with an election, Third World style. They might have Black Lives Matter signs (a process that reminds me a lot of the 1970s-era observation by the Czech essayist, later president, on the psychology of the greengrocer putting up Workers of the World Unite sign in his shop window), but talk is cheap. Money talks, and looting and vandalism or potentially arson are clearly a worry.

This may not be not pure political terrorism or extortion, the implied threat of violence if one side doesn’t win, but it’s in the ballpark.

As to the scenes of open looting and anarchy I saw in late May and June, I won’t soon forget them. I was very much up close. A clothing store near my old office was hit by a gang of about 30 Black teenagers as I walked by. Some of them had baseball bats. I stupidly made a point to watch them a few moments and one of their watchers, a black teenage girl warned me not to “snitch.” The scenes those nights are worth much more ink. The scenes of chaos coexisted with scenes of eerie normality, as if mass looting, graffiti everywhere, and the occasional fire set by hotheads within a roving mob were all part of the normal cityscape. This is straight out of dystopian fiction.

I came to interpret these late May and June riots, the embers of which have simmered for months, as Lockdown Riots. When authorities began pulling the ‘Lockdown’ trigger in March, I predicted violence would eventually come of i all, but didn’t know exactly how. I remember by the week of March 16 seeing visions of violence and destruction associated with the lockdowns, and it is no surprise the riots began the exact week states began reopening. People were bored and frustrated, with their usual social networks disrupted for the entire spring. Schools were closed, of course, as the Panic demanded. Few seem to have noticed this correlation, but it looks obvious in retrospect.

I was downtown on the overnight of November 8-9, 2016 (the hours after polls closed), and saw many unforgettable scenes there as well, some of which clealry foreshadow the Lockown-induced, politicized riots and looting of mid-2020. Luxury shops in Georgetown were also hit that night, with police as usual flatfooted, even those around doing nothing. (What is the purpose of the police if they won’t enforce order? I wonder. They seem to have orders to never stop looters. I saw this again ion May 31 and June 1, 2020.) What will the overnight November 3-4 be like?

Later on the news I saw reports of this

bookmark_borderPost-390: Anti-Shinchonji

Posted on by Peter

By late February 2020, the name Shinchonji was surfacing in the media, both in the Korean media (where it would very occasionally make an appearance anyway) and for the first time ever in the world media. The reason was the Virus Panic (so-called COVID19 disease; caused by a “coronavirus”) was tied to a returning Shinchonji missionary in China who ignored self-quarantine orders; most of the Korean cases seem tied to this incident. I am not surprised that it was them because of what kind of group it is.

Shinchonji [신천지] is a religious cult which I had many experiences with, directly and indirectly, in the 2010s, some of which I caught onto at the time and others I reconstructed later as certain, likely, or possible cases. Because generally you don’t know what’s going on. They don’t tell who they are. They use deception. As a result, I can say I have hated Shinchonji for years. I can equally say that few have ever actually taken me seriously when I talk about this, because it seems too bizarre; I wouldn’t take someone who talked about it as I do either, had I not seen it. I will record a few things here.

Continue reading “Post-390: Anti-Shinchonji”

bookmark_borderPost-389: “Virus Panic” of 2020 and China’s Soft Power

Posted on by Peter

I was in China for part of December 2019, but only Beijing. About the time I left (which was Dec. 29, I think), the headlines began coming out that someone in Wuhan, China, was suspected of carrying a “new virus.” I had previously been in China at the very start of the decade, May 2010, and now was back in the last month of the decade, Dec. 2019. I had many observations of how I imagined China had changed.

This “virus” story, from my perspective, writing in early March, has been bad for China’s soft power.

The writing I was doing, in emails and chatting-app messages to many at the time, were all about how I perceived a South-Korean-ization of China economically and a North-Korean-ization of China politically. The South-Korean-ization of certain consumer goods and television shows were, I think, probably consciously copied. On the other hand, anything political was much more reminiscent of North Korea. The political sections of bookstores were laughable; they might as well have been selling nothing but repackaged and new editions of the Little Red Book.

That was my perceived reality. I admit it was probably colored by the fact that in 2010 I was in the south and in May, and in 2019 I was in Beijing in December; Beijing is never a friendly place, they say. In any case, the restrictions I perceived, such as on the Internet, I felt were tougher in 2019 than 2010.

What I meant was China’s soft power deficit still had a long way to go in 2019.

bookmark_borderPost-388: Virus Panics; the COVID19 panic vs. the June 2015 MERS panic in S.Korea, as I remember it

Posted on by Peter

The COVID19 virus is all over the news. Though it began in the Chinese interior in Dec. 2019, South Korea is again in the news for an outbreak, as if on cue re-earning its sometime-nickname of the Land of Extremes. S.Korea has racked up more confirmed COVID19 virus infections (called in Korea “Corona19,” 코로나19), by a considerable margin, than anywhere outside the epicenter around Wuhan.

I have a few things I’d like to say related in some way to this latest big virus panic and/or to Korea’s place in it, in descending order of how long ago:

(1) My observations on what’s going on around me now with regard to the virus panic;
(2) China’s soft-power problem; COVID19 as a potential serious a blow to China’s image/prestige;
(3) S.Korea and the negative influence of the Shinchonji group [신천지] (my experiences with this group, which is definitely a cult by popular understanding of the term, date to 2014; second-hand as early as 2012; the experiences were through no fault of my own, as they use front groups and all manner of deceptions to get in contact with people, effectively like an intelligence agency);
(4) My memory of the MERS virus panic of June 2015 that hit South Korea.

I’ll do these in succession in separate posts, starting with the last and most distant, the MERS virus panic of 2015 (2015년6월의 메르스 바이러스-감염병 위기).

I remember “MERS” well. What’s strange to me is how few others seem to, or their memory of it as something minor. I doubt it made the news much at all in the US.

Here we go with this MERS memory post.

The MERS crisis as I remember it:

Continue reading “Post-388: Virus Panics; the COVID19 panic vs. the June 2015 MERS panic in S.Korea, as I remember it”