Gratitude for What Matters - You

With a smile on my face and a song in my heart

I go through phases in my musical musings, with whatever’s at the top of my imagined chart tending to become a soundtrack playing on loop in the background. This can last for weeks until a hiccup in my experiences draws me toward another genre, artist, or band.

This week, it’s a title and phrase borrowed from indy band The Last Dinner Party, part of a chorus too explicit for the airwaves. The specific term Nothing Matters isn’t a nihilist creed, it’s an expression of devotion and angst amid a love song, with the kind of lyrics concert goers are prone to sing along.

I’m writing about this to share a teeny part of the silo I live in. Everything I hear, see, experience gets dumped and eventually sorted by whatever it is between my ears. My existence would be a lonely one were it not for the soundtracks in my head.

The five days-a-week essays I’ve written over the past dozen years at the San Diego Free Press, my standalone blog, and Substack are expositions and analyses about the games of power and politics in assorted venues. Each of them was enabled by soundtracks from all over the genre continuum. I know that readers can’t hear this music, but what I’m saying now is that all my writing comes from a song in my heart.

The keyboard is my voice, as I lost my vocal chords to cancer in 2012. When I have tasks or meetings in the world outside my silo, it’s likely I’ll bring a typed up sheet to guide interactions.

Multiple recurrences of malignancy means lots of doctor visits, and a typed up sheet goes with me explaining my health observations and requests. They are a way to put thoughts into the context for which they are intended.

The aftermath of the pandemic means nearly all my interactions with humans are transactional, the exception being my wife Lisa. I’m really lousy with writing on a white board. In those moments I leave out words, lose the ability to spell, and do a poor job of conveying context. I think I’ve said something and haven’t, or are three paragraphs behind in the conversation.

• We write because words are the most powerful tool of citizens in a regime that seeks to erase their existence. We write to make it known that we are here. We write to make a personal accounting of who we are in the face of a power that wants to erase us.

--Lyz in Do Our Stories Matter?

My keyboard speaks for me. The “h” key is worn out, I have an unconventional way of typing, one that horrifies real typists when they see me at the keyboard. Still, I must write. Early and often, as Norman Mailer told me in another lifetime.

I can take a break, tamping down the various thoughts begging to be expressed. I look thoughtful, maybe even dazed, as those synaptic electrical outbursts are whisked away.

Nothing matters is because no.thing.matters. “Things” don’t have souls. (Unless you’re a devotee of eastern religions) Souls come from within and are something so intangible that they only exist in our beliefs, unlike emotions, which ordinarily get expressed.

I see you. You, sentient being, matter. That’s my premise. I give thanks for all the good in us and want you to come away from this essay knowing this.

• Gratitude is a powerful force, but its true strength lies in its ability to inspire us to be better—for ourselves, one another, and the country we love. –Olivia Troye at We Lived It.

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Since those awful moments in the wake of you-know-who winning an election, much legacy media has seen a precipitous decline in reader/viewership.

I’m happy to say the opposite has been true in a lot of good places, including this one. Thank you to all the new subscribers and those passing through. And it’s not just me.

Find me on BlueSky @dougbob506.bsky.social. Much good news and nicer people there.

Fare Warning: I’ll be off for Thanksgiving on Thursday and Friday, but back to M-F as of Monday, Dec. 2. ALSO, I’m going to Japan and Taiwan during the final two weeks of the year.

The Incredible Shrinking GOP Majority by Jay Kuo at The Status Quo

• With Gaetz’s resignation and the loss of two House seats until they can be filled by special election, the balance of power will be 217 to 215 for many weeks. Assuming full attendance, that would mean any single GOP member could sink any bill assuming the Democrats unite behind House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

• That’s a lot of power to give the congressional bomb throwers on the right. And it will make passing much of Trump’s agenda really difficult if not impossible, including extension of the Trump tax cuts for the wealthy; gutting the ACA, Social Security and Medicare; and authorizing billions of dollars to build mass detention centers for undocumented migrants.

• This underscores how every single vote counts, and how the hard work of volunteers out in CA-45 and CA-13, who doggedly pursued voters to come cure their ballots, could pay huge dividends. If they remain disciplined, House Democrats could use the GOP’s own narrow margin against it to block the very worst of the far right’s wrecking ball agenda.

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Their DNA survives in diverse populations across the world – but who were the Denisovans? By Laura Ongaro at The Conversation

• While much about the Denisovans’ lifestyle, appearance and culture remains unknown, the discovery of the Tibetan jawbone showed that these people lived in diverse environments, and that they must have been very adaptable. Sure enough, we now know that Denisovan ancestry in modern humans has contributed to adaptive traits, particularly in challenging environments.

• A notable example is the EPAS1 gene. Inherited from Denisovans, it helps regulate the body’s response to low oxygen levels, giving Tibetans a physiological advantage in the high altitudes of the Tibetan plateau.

• Other human adaptations possibly derived from Denisovan interbreeding relate to being able to tolerate cold weather, and being able to metabolise lipids, which include fats and oils. These may have been beneficial for populations in northern regions, such as the Arctic. For example, Inuit populations carry Denisovan genes that help to regulate body fat and maintain warmth.

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‘What many of us feel’: why ‘enshittification’ is Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year by Tory Shepard at The Guardian

• With those affixes, the impression is conveyed of the platform owners tampering with their own product until the bad stuff, like guano on a rock, eclipses the original form.

• Doctorow wrote that this decay was a three-stage process.

• “First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves,” he wrote.