Len Zwelling

“Both Sides Now” is a famous folk song made popular by Judy Collins in the 1960s. The song was written by Joni Mitchell and its original name was “Clouds.” The singer relates the meaning of clouds, love and life and it kick started the career of both women. But cloud has a whole new meaning now.

In the cloud is where my son Andrew lives. He works in the cloud for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the attached is the video he just produced for AWS and its customer Rubicon. I find it fascinating and not just because my son produced it. It shows how the cloud is being employed by Rubicon which services the waste management needs of municipalities (in this case Santa Fe, New Mexico) in making the collection of garbage and recycling operationally efficient, cost effective and carbon footprint neutral. As I understand it, it is the computing power of Amazon Web Services that allows such projects to take flight and part of my son’s job (I think) is to convince more end users and middle level providers to utilize the power of the cloud to provide their customers with better service as well as keep the environment as clean as possible.

It is both sad and undeniable that the United States and its government are hopelessly divided between two groups. Loosely, these two groups correspond to the two major political parties, but it’s not that simple for it’s really more than two groups.

The United States was not designed to be a democracy. It’s a representative government and an unfair one at that because the electors who actually determine who is to be President do not represent the same number of voters. Usually, the electors from the smaller states represent fewer people than the electors from the larger states because each state, regardless of its size, has at least three electors (one for each senator and representative in Congress) and in Wyoming that translates into far fewer citizens per elector than in California. Nonetheless, that’s the system in the Constitution.

Readers of this blog know that there are a couple of recurrent themes that I write about. Guns is certainly one. I’m against them except for policemen, soldiers, and hunters. But there are others and a trial going on in California right now illustrates one of my favorites or really two of my favorites: conflict of interest and fraud among the rich and powerful.

As most of you will remember, Elizabeth Holmes was the much praised, black turtlenecked, deep-voiced, blonde bombshell CEO of Theranos, a company that purported to have developed a machine that would allow multiple clinical tests to be done on a single drop of blood

Greg Weiner is a political scientist at Assumption University who wrote a piece in The New York Times on November 29 that goes a long way to explaining why there is such a mess on Capitol Hill at the moment.

To summarize a long op-ed succinctly, passing legislation is supposed to be hard and take a while. The more transformative the legislation, the harder it should be to pass and the longer it should take to do so. Remember please that it took about 14 months to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2010 and that legislation, watered down as it was, passed without a single Republican vote. This was not the case with the equally transformative Medicare and Medicaid legislation of the mid-1960s where some Republican support was gleaned by a very powerful President and a large Democratic majority in the Congress. Is that the case now? It is not.

It matters little what your personal beliefs are with regard to the legality of abortion. As of this moment, Roe v. Wade rules in the United States and no state can limit a woman’s right to legal and safe abortion services up to the time of fetal viability, usually set at 24 weeks of gestation.

On December 1, the Supreme Court heard a significant challenge to Roe in its having to determine the constitutionality of Mississippi’s law to limit abortion to pregnancies under 15 weeks in duration. If the Court, decides that the Mississippi law is constitutional, it would substantively overturn Roe.

Many Americans believe that we live in a democracy. We do not. If we did, then every vote cast would be equal to every other vote cast and that simply is not the case for a host of reasons.

First, there’s the Electoral College which magnifies the effect of voters in purple states as they really determine the outcome of the presidential election. Voting for Trump in New York and California or for Biden in Nebraska or Alabama was a meaningless activity. For those who did, their votes really didn’t count.

This phenomenon is even more critical in state and district wide races where state legislatures draw the maps of these districts and can gerrymander a current Congressman out of a job every ten years based on the need to redraw the districts after each census and the resultant redistribution of the American population.

In the most recent season of the superb drama The Morning Show on Apple TV, Jennifer Anniston’s character, a morning TV anchor not unlike Katie Couric, risks being cancelled on the internet because she reconnects with her disgraced former partner (Steve Carell) who plays a Matt Lauer like-lout who has sexually abused women and been ostracized for having done so. This cancel culture has to be on the minds of many in the public eye who risk criticism on social media doing what they think they should do or what they need to do for their own edification, sanity, or sense of ethics even as some deserve cancellation for heinous behavior (like Lauer).

I understand this. Cancellation (or what passed for it in the day) has happened to me twice. Both times it was awful.

Half a million Americans have died of opioid overdoses in recent years. “In the 12-month period ending in April, more than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses” according to The New York Times on November 18. That’s the story of Dopesick (on Hulu), a personalization of Beth Macy’s best seller about how the opioid crisis became the huge story it still is. The evil forces that precipitated this massive fraud on the American public is remarkable because there are so many villains.

Ross Douthat is a prominent editorialist for The New York Times. He contracted Lyme Disease and now suffers from the effects of a disorder that some in medicine don’t accept—chronic Lyme Disease. The details of how the disorder is manifested clinically is less important than the fact that many of the symptoms are non-specific and it’s a brutally hard diagnosis to make and even harder to treat. In fact, as I understand it, there is no accepted treatment for this disorder and there are some in the medical establishment who doubt it exists.