As if 2020 couldn’t get more scary, there’s a line of very strong storms heading for Chicago–

A severe thunderstorm watch has been issued for parts of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin until 7 PM CDT pic.twitter.com/QadSIJ2uM1

— NWS Severe Tstorm (@NWSSevereTstorm) August 10, 2020

Here’s the timing from NWS Chicago–

Expected severe storm arrival times! #ilwx #inwx pic.twitter.com/WN0UN8CbLm

— NWS Chicago (@NWSChicago) August 10, 2020

These are wind gusts 100 mph. trees down in Iowa, and multiple power outages. Take precautions as you would for a tornado. Don’t forget your phone, kids, pets, and your weather radio.

Be safe!

The book appeared in my mailbox last week. Didn’t take Sherlock to know that it was a book. The package had the name of an Ebay reseller, Discover Books, on the two-piece brown mailers sealing the contents tightly within. 

“Your book came,” I said to my husband. 

“I didn’t order a book,” he responded. 

Can’t blame the dog, she’s been dead for 10 years. Since sheltering in place during Covid-19 and with the limitations our library system has struggled with to keep the public safe, we’d both been buying secondhand books from resellers on Ebay.

Puzzled, I took the kitchen scissors from their Marie Kondo-organized drawer. Sniping one side of the mailer to release the book within. I didn’t recognize the title of this one. 

Or did I?

I remember that on my adult daughter’s excited suggestion, so I ordered a secondhand copy of the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, copyright 1999. 

I always listen to my offsprings’ suggestions. 

What a story the cover of the well-used paperback told. A yellow yellowing sticker identified it as having been from the Santa Barbara Public Library, another SKU with an identifying number and a red dot on the spine. Originally priced at $13.00, I’d paid $3.49 plus tax. Slow, but free USPS shipping was included.

Another book for my pile of TBRs, or ‘to be read’ books that I always keep on hand. It’s an old habit that I developed while living abroad where English libraries weren’t available and the only English books were super-expensive IF they were available. 

In 1972 Peru with no access to English books, I read whatever was at hand. The thin aerogram-like paper of international versions of Newsweek or Time magazines. The Spanish toothpaste tube in the bathroom. In the missionary’s home, where we house sat their dog, I was thrilled to find an old English encyclopedia to read. I made it up to B or C as I remember. 

1979 Paraguay I joined my first English book club where the one and only purpose of the group was to pool and share books. The friend’s husband who lent volume 1 and 2 of The Annotated Sherlock Holmes by William S. Baring-Gould, rekindled my passion for the series as I read by kerosine lamp during the frequent power outages. 

In 1983 Curacao the one-and only- English subscription book club was fully subscribed by women who would live on the island forever-so no room for me. At their monthly meetings members took turns choosing the books they’d take home for the month. Making friends with one member, she offered to share her monthly stash of reading material. Sworn to secrecy, I never told anyone about my secret access.

And it did beat the local boekhandel (bookstore) with their random selection of imported books. Popping into when I’d time, I’d scour the shelves for any sale book that would only cost double what it was priced at in Europe or North America. 

In days before Kindle and portable e-books, English books were pricey treasured tomes. 

In 1986 Ecuador, we moved into a company house with my two books. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer and a microwave recipe book that came with my first microwave. I read both, cover-to-cover, practicing the lessons of how to cook with a microwave just because. By the time our container of household goods came, I couldn’t wait to find my limited stash of books. 

By the time we moved to Mexico City in 1995 I’d learned my lesson so brought some–but not enough–books in our household goods. Over the first year of our six years there, I made friends with a woman who went to a couple of subscription book clubs. Once again my friend passed books to me, after she’d read them, but before they were due back at her book club. 

A new source of English reads appeared at some international meeting, when a woman appeared with boxes of used paperback books for sale. At 10 pesos a book, or just under one US dollar, she used the money to help lower income Mexicans who couldn’t afford to neuter their pet dogs and/or cats. When she was to move back to America, she asked if I wanted to continue the de facto charity.

I did. Just thinking about all of those books made my skin tingle. 

So I continued the charity collecting donations of hardback and paperback books, VHS videos in those late 1990s, pre-DVD days, keeping the books at home for expats perusal. When we moved back to America, I turned out the lights on the charity, donating the remainders to another charitable reseller of secondhand English books. 

So with this new-to-me book before me, despite the foxing of the pages I began to gobble up the pages like samples at Costco. 

Thanks Jen. It’s yet another fascinating book. 

In 2016 I Called Illinois Speaker of the House Michael Madigan an Enemy of the State; Guess What? Madigan is Still an Enemy of the State!

The latest revelation regarding the shenanigans involving ComEd (an Exelon Company) is merely the tip of the iceberg.

There is sure to be much, much more in Michael J. Madigan’s closet and by extension the many Illinois Lawmakers (and I use that term very loosely) who take there marching orders from the Speaker of the House. They have been called many things but I still choose to call them “MADIGOONS.” Why? Because they resemble the hoods and goons that used to run Chicago during the Al Capone era; They have all profited by the under-the-table deals while constituents and consumers have paid a dear price.

Have any of you even bothered to take a look at your Illinois Utility Bills? And I mean all of them! Landline Telephones, Cellular Phones, Electricity er COMED, Nicor or Peoples Gas. Of course let’s not forget about Sales Taxes, Tollway Fees, Illinois Secretary of State Fees, Water Bills and how about the two biggies – Property Taxes and School District Taxes.

There is enough listed above to choke a cow.

Yet the voters of Illinois have chosen to re-elect their Democratic Madigoons who in turn have kept Michael J. Madigan Illinois Speaker of the House for 30+ years.

And why not? With so many people on the roles of multiple Public Pensions and a current crop of nepotism from long retired political families – well why not keep him The BOSS! With so much money going into their pockets why give it up? Now some people my say that this current crop also pay taxes well I beg to differ. They get preferential treatment at the expense of unwitting and devoted Democratic Voters.

Hey it has four years since I last posted a blog for various reasons – but I am back and I am coming out swinging!

Multiple counties in the Chicago area have been put under a tornado warning — with residents being instructed to seek shelter.

Andrew Pritchard shared the below video on Twitter of what the storm looked like in Morris, Illinois.

Estimating 70 MPH gusts on Hwy 47 just north of Morris, IL at 3:25 PM CT #ilwx @NWSChicago pic.twitter.com/A5KY1jmjZK

— Andrew Pritchard (@skydrama) August 10, 2020

Most of us have heard of redlining, sort of understand how sharecropping operated, and know that “separate but equal” schools weren’t ruled illegal until Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Yet while we understand that those are examples of systemic racism, we still may largely think of racism as an attitude displayed by individuals.

Until the recent Black Lives Matter protests, I hadn’t delved into the specifics of system racism. Taking to heart BLM’s admonition to white people to educate ourselves, I’ve been reading exposés like Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “What Is Owed” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” From them I learned a lot about how structures and institutions, including government, deliberately kept African Americans subservient. Following are just a few of the revelations that opened my eyes to the extent of systemic racism.

Do you know where the term “40 acres and a mule” originated? In January 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman ordered that hundreds of thousands of acres of Confederate land be given to former slaves in 40-acre tracts. But pro-Southern President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, rescinded the order. Newly freed Blacks had no resources to build on and thus fell into the sharecropping system, farming plots for exploitative landowners. States passed laws that made it a crime if Blacks did not sign labor contracts with white landowners or changed employers without permission. During the same time period, whites were benefiting from the federal Homestead Act, which gave away 246 million acres of land in 160-acre tracts to more than 1.5 million white homesteaders.

While realtors and bigoted homeowners furthered residential segregation, it was the US government that first drew the red lines on maps around Black neighborhoods supposedly undesirable for home loans. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (1933) and the Federal Housing Administration (1934) also required that any federally insured mortgage be covered by a restrictive covenant forbidding a sale to anyone but whites. From 1934 to 1962, whites secured 98 percent of federally backed mortgages.

“Lay those redlining maps over any city in America with a significant Black population,” Hannah-Jones wrote, and you will see that the government-sanctioned segregation patterns remain stubbornly intact.”

Largely denied access to home ownership, the means by which whites secured middle-class status, Blacks became the target of predatory sellers who bought homes and resold them “on contract” at inflated prices. Buyers acquired no equity until the entire contract was paid off; one missed payment meant forfeiting the property and all money paid.

When Black soldiers returned from World War II, many of them were locked out of the home loan benefit of the G.I. Bill because they were disqualified by their local Veterans Administration office or banks.

Public housing reinforced segregation; more than 98 percent of the public housing units built in Chicago in the 1950s and 1960s were in Black neighborhoods.

Housing is the main driver of the Black-white wealth gap. In today’s Chicago, only 22 percent of housing units in which Blacks reside are occupied by the owner. The Black homeownership rate is almost the same as in 1968. Because of disinvestment in their communities, the fortunate few who own their homes have not built up equity comparable to those in white neighborhoods.

Living in middle-class or wealthier communities, whites could send their children to decent public schools. Most communities in the South, where the majority of Blacks lived, did not have a single public high school for Black students as late as the 1930s.

Black students were denied entrance to Southern colleges, but many universities in the rest of the country were also complicit in limiting Black admission by using quotas.

An admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, I was surprised to learn that Blacks were denied some of the New Deal’s benefits. To get Southern buy-in, the Roosevelt administration excluded farmworkers and domestics, many of whom were Black, from Social Security and unemployment insurance. Sixty-five percent of Blacks nationally and 70 to 80 percent in the South were ineligible for Social Security when it became law in 1935. Black people worked in service jobs because racist practices closed better-paying and union jobs to them.

Considering such officially sanctioned discrimination as the above, the huge wealth gap between Blacks and whites ought not be surprising. Yet I was still blown away by Hannah-Jones’s statement that “the Black family with children holds just one cent of wealth for every dollar that the average white family with children holds.” She cited a Yale University study showing that most whites are as ignorant as I was about the degree of economic inequality.

If you’d asked me just a few months ago what racism is, I would have answered something along the lines of believing someone is inferior because of skin color. Now any definition I’d come up with would include the word “policies.”

*****

ANTI-TRUMP COMMENTS: 125TH IN AN ONGOING SERIES

“Everyone cannot believe what they’re seeing in the US, and they cannot believe the words coming out of leadership.”
—Dr. David Ho, director of the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Columbia University, about the reactions of his worldwide colleagues to the US response to COVID

I don’t know about you, but I’m doing everything I can to avoid contracting COVID-19. Rather than cower in fear, however, I’m living my life as fully possible, thanks to practices that have helped generations avoid scourges. As a public service, I summarize these for you.

1. Spit three times over your left shoulder. Plenty of you are spitting, but you’re doing it wrong. Maybe you don’t know your left from your right, but Russian folklore specifies that the devil hangs out to your left. According to the Russian news agency TASS, July’s COVID-19 cases were 50% lower than June’s figures in Russia.

Photo by Leanne Star

2. Knock on wood. You’ve heard this so often that you may have tuned it out, but now’s the time to get this right. It has to be real wood, folks. Not laminate, not MDF, not Styrofoam beams, as convincing as they may look. But even a slab of Sequoia won’t get you far if you don’t knock properly. According to the History channel website, “Turkish people often pull on one earlobe and knock on wood twice to ward off a jinx.” BBC News reports that Turkey’s population of 83 million has suffered a relatively low number of COVID-19 cases. A virologist told the BBC that “Turkey fits the category of several countries that responded fairly quickly with testing, tracing, isolation and movement restrictions,” but the virologist failed to note the elongated earlobes on one side of Turkish heads.

3. Never make a toast with water in your glass. The ancient Greeks came up with this important medical insight, and you’d be wise to heed it. Stick to beer, wine, even fruit juice. And don’t toast with those beverages inside a packed bar.

4. Don’t walk under a ladder. C’mon, people. What are you thinking?

5. Try to avoid spilling salt, you klutz. But in the event that some sodium chloride escapes your grasp, you can correct your mistake by intentionally throwing a sprinkle of salt over your left shoulder — remember, that’s where the devil is hanging out. Clean up all the salt.

6. Wash your hands frequently. Outside your home, wear a mask and practice social distancing.

Note: The first five practices will not protect you unless you practice Step #6.

I’ve long said that we are decades from electing a female President, and this whole VP debacle just confirms it. I groaned aloud when I heard Biden announce he would pick a female Vice President. I’m all for women in powerful roles, but it was clear from the start that Biden’s intention was completely off. If Biden/DNC had really wanted to elevate competent women, Biden wouldn’t have announced he was picking a female VP. He would have just picked the best candidate, who happened to be female. Instead, by announcing the female intention, he set up a grueling, protracted public vetting process, in which all the names will have been flippantly floated, flogged, and ultimately, forsaken. Rebecca Traister explains that the pre-announcement served only to virtue-signal, pad the egos of potential male candidates (we couldn’t choose you because we gotta tend this female thing, see), and set up the selection process and all candidates for failure. Moreover, the pre-announcement is also exactly the kind of thing the right rails against when thinking about affirmative action. It sets up the inevitable line of merit questioning for Biden’s final pick: is Biden choosing this woman because she is the best candidate or is she just the best candidate of a limited pool?

Perhaps the most grating part of all of this: the DNC had to know that this would happen, because frankly all women intuitively knew this would happen. And the campaign went for it anyway, and I hypothesize that it’s because Biden simply had nothing else going for him. He needed something, so the DNC offered up a trail of women as sacrifice to keep the public engaged with his campaign. He has otherwise done literally nothing else through the pandemic, except put his foot in his mouth several times.

Never have the VP stakes been so significant because the lead on the ticket—the Presidential candidate himself—is so weak. The VP pick will define the ticket, perhaps for the first time, and the DNC doesn’t appear to recognize this. By admitting they seek submissive women who don’t want to be President (explained in the article) and basically devaluing the role, the DNC seems blind to the utter lack of appeal of Biden. They are just so, so set on re-establishing the establishment with the pliant and agreeable Biden at the top, whom I suspect the DNC believes it will completely control. That’s also why it’s key to have a non-problematic woman in the VP slot. So they will throw various women through this hellish vetting gauntlet to find her, and then expect this pick to be complacent and quiet once in the role. It feels like a trap, frankly.

Willie Brown published an op-ed a few days ago advising Kamala Harris to not accept the VP candidacy if offered. He suggests that after Election Day, no one cares about the Vice President, and I agree. HBO’s brilliant satire, VEEP captures this perfectly. Instead Harris would have far more power as Attorney General, and at this stage I am inclined to agree. (Let’s not get into her prosecutorial record here. Also notably, Brown and Harris once dated.) If the DNC is set on the female VP being strictly a token or a pawn to play for the female vote, Brown is totally right.

Before coronavirus struck, I was pretty convinced that Trump would be re-elected because the DNC had done absolutely nothing differently since 2016. And now that covid has handicapped the country and Trump’s chances, it’s even more disconcerting to see that the DNC is still doing nothing differently. So it’s likely that the DNC recognizes Biden’s weak speaking profile, but they could have had him just read some things. Is that really asking too much? Read a few short scripted speeches and have some light Q&A with coronavirus experts, doctors, nurses, survivors, random people struggling with WFH/unemployment/child care/healthcare. A weekly zoom chat with real and truly random Americans would have been a way to engage.

Wasn’t he supposed to start a podcast and his team was like, we don’t know how to do the technology at his house and then just quit? That sort of tells us everything—the DNC can’t be bothered to prop up Biden now because: 1) they probably worry he will bungle the opportunity anyway, 2) they think his positioning is fine as is, and so 3) they prefer to sit back to watch Trump implode. It’s a heartless strategy and indicative of how the DNC operatives will run the Biden presidency once in office. I see no intent to really connect with voters and better understand the amplified trials of living with coronavirus; I see only the notable inaction, i.e. the path of least resistance for Biden and the DNC. They are simply set on the safest plan to get back in office (never mind the female VP candidates tossed aside and thrown under the bus in the meantime) and reset the balance of power.

Anyway, I’m still voting for Biden, and I hope you do, too. I’ve just never been more un-enthused.