Peripheral neuropathy – result of radiation therapy?

Cataract surgery – 20/20 vision (but still need reading eyeglass)

The reason is that several months ago I noticed that the bottom of my toes and the balls of my feet felt like I was wearing something thick that was absorbing the normal feeling of walking around. When I touched the areas that felt that way, I could feel my fingernail, so I didn't think it could be called 'numbness'. When I looked up the topic on line it appeared that I was possibly experiencing 'neuropathy' – but as it didn't seem to be getting worse, I didn't rush to my doctor. After two months, with no change, I did go to my internist, who confirmed that what I was experiencing suggested 'neuropathy' – the problem is, the change in the nerves for which neuropathy is general name has many causes. The single most commonly known cause is diabetes, which accounts for about 30% of the people with some form of neuropathy. After that, the internist listed a whole bunch of other potential causes, which online in medical sites are bunched into groups of causes. The problem, however, is that somewhere between 30% and 40% of all instances have no known cause, which is what 'idiopathic' means – and when the nerve change happens in the feet or the hands, it's referred to as 'idiopathic peripheral' neuropathy.

The other aspect of this that can be confusing is that there is a range of potential symptoms – not just numbness, but tingling, prickling, sharp pain, burning pain, pain during activities that shouldn't involve pain, or even just extreme sensitivity. It was all these symptoms listed online that led me initially to question if I actually had that sort of problem – and decided to wait before seeking medical review.

So after an initial examination by my internist, along with just about all the possible blood tests that might reveal one of the many causes, I scheduled an examination by a recommended neurologist – who's not available until just before Thanksgiving. So I won't know much more for some time.

What I do know, however, is that some form of neuropathy is common – according to Cleveland Clinic, it's 25 to 30% of all Americans at some point. As a number of medical sites report, it is with aged adults that neuropathy of some sort becomes relatively common – and I am aging. It was Kate's dad, Robert Flanagan, who had serious neuropathy – which is why Kate was familiar with the name as well as some of the bad potential consequences if it progresses significantly in the body.

Now, I suppose I could spend a lot of time anguishing about what this might mean for me. That seems pointless at this point, especially since what I am experiencing now really has not changed my life. It's just a minor sensation that I am sometimes aware of – and as long as that is all that it is, I just feel like there are far more things about my physical future that I should be thinking about.

As I've aged I've had to deal with some of typical problems, of which prostate cancer has been the most significant so far. After surgery, followed by radiation, it's unlikely that prostate cancer will be my cause of death, unlike my father.

What has surprised me is my cataract surgery. I simply thought that would mean that the slight fuzziness in sunlight that the cataracts were starting to cause would simply be ended. What I did not realize was that my perception of color and sunlight would suddenly be very more intense – a reminder of what my vision was like when I was young and my eye doctor told me I needed to wear sunglasses because I was very sensitive to sunlight.

What I did not realize was that the cataract surgery actually also eliminated my astigmatism – which meant at age 74 I was returned to the 20/20 vision of my youth, before I started wearing glasses for most of my life. The only difference, of course, is that as one with aged eyes, I do still need reading glasses. So that was the surprise – one age-related medical treatment that actually made me feel younger – and now I am learning what it is like to live without having to have glasses on my face throughout the day. Of course, I read and use the computer so much that I do spend a lot of time with the reading glasses on – but reading glasses I can buy online or from a local store for $30 or less.

So, this is my first such post – as of 22/04/22 9:01 PM

For almost ten successive blocks, I found one to three pennies on each block. I picked them all up, although many of them were not as shiny as the first two. As I walked, I remembered seeing a young man going through a pile of coins in his hand and just dropping the pennies. Initially I had wondered if someone deliberately created a path of pennies, but the memory convinced me this was just the result of yet another person who treated pennies as trash.

After a bit of online research, I learned that a lot of folks think pennies should be abandoned – and that some just treat them as trash. Others assert that could be considered a violation of US code. It is true that pennies now cost more to create (1.7￠) than they are worth.

Finally I found a good summary of the arguments about pennies: Should We Get Rid of the Penny? – 8 Reasons to Keep It vs Eliminate It. I discovered that, like many Americans, I just like pennies because they honor Lincoln, our most revered president.

I also liked the story about the student, Stephen Coyle, who used pennies for protest: 11,000 pennies for your thoughts? One student’s unique protest against fines

#100daystooffload Day 22.

The author and former Oxford professor, John Gray, uses the behavior of cats as a lens through which to evaluate major schools of philosophy. Cats, of course, do not have or need a philosophy, which – one could argue – is a philosophy in itself.

In any case, the book is short and entertaining. What is most entertaining are the stories about cats:

• Mèo, in Jack Laurence's memoir of Michel de Montaigne
• Saha, in Sindonie-Gabrielle Colette's 1933 novel, The Cat
• Ming, in Patricia Highsmith's story, 'Ming's Biggest Prey'
• Lily, in Junichiro Tanizaki's novel, A Cat, a Man and Two Women
• Gattino, in Mary Gaitskill's essay, 'Lost Cat'
• Muri, in Russian religious philosopher Nicolos Berdyaev's autobiography

I was very pleased to see Gray's reference to one of the books that deeply moved me when I was young: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. (Cats don't need to read that book, but I sure did!)

I think the best summary of the book is the first rule of the section titled “Ten feline hints on how to live well”:

1. Never try to persuade human beings to be reasonable.

Trying to persuade human beings to be rational is like trying to teach cats to be vegans. Human beings use reason to bolster whatever they want to believe, seldom to find out if what they believe is true.

So true!

#100daystooffload Day 22.

In September 2020, ... French newspaper Le Monde identified Hughes as one of four “anti-conformists of anti-racism” along with Glenn Loury, Thomas Chatterton Williams and John McWhorter.

Since I was familiar with three of the four “anti-conformists of anti-racism”, I was pleased to learn that the fourth, Williams, had published a book in 2019, a memoir about the struggle with his own identity as a black man.

After reading the book, I visited the Book Mark Reviews to see how William's book was rated by various literary critics. The website assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream critics; Williams' book received a “Mixed” rating based on 11 reviews: 2 “Rave”, 3 “Positive”, 3 “Mixed”, and 3 “Pan” reviews. When I read the “Pan” reviews, it was clear that several critics are simply 'antiracist ideologues' who simply reject what Williams has to say:

“Woke” anti-racism proceeds from the premise that race is real—if not biological, then socially constructed and therefore equally if not more significant still—putting it in sync with toxic presumptions of white supremacism that would also like to insist on the fundamentality of racial difference. Working toward opposing conclusions, racists and many anti-racists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed and determinative, and almost supernatural in scope. This way of thinking about human difference is seductive for many reasons but it has failed us. (p.128)

To be clear, the bulk of the book consists of Williams recounting how his experience of life in the United States and then Europe led to an evolution of his understanding about what 'racial identity' actually is, such as:

Very often a class transition, without any further complicating factors needed, can feel just like a racial one. (p.32)

Or again:

People will always look different from each other in ways we can't control. What we can control is what we allow ourselves to make of those differences. (p.26)

I hadn't actually seen a photograph of Williams until after finishing the book. It was remarkable how the many photos one sees in the Google search results illustrate much about that which he had written.

If one did not want to read the book, one could simply watch for a few minutes the video Unlearning Race in 2020? Thomas Chatterton Williams. Of course, after watching Thomas Chatteron Williams in conversation, one might decide to read his book!

#100daystooffload Day 21.

When he started to talk to me again on the state of the election fraud, I gently cut him off by simply saying I would believe the fraud accusation when it was proved in court. In the meantime, I told him that I monitor news coverage across the political spectrum with the aid of Ground News. He was intrigued that Ground News identified 'blind spots' of both the left- and right-leaning media, i.e., stories only covered on one side of the political spectrum.

JL accepted my skepticism about the 'research' that he felt proved the voter fraud conspiracy. He also admitted that whether the fraud was proved true or false by history, it would still represent a major harm for our political environment. Naturally I agreed with that assessment.

Then, during the DC insurrection three days later, I found myself thinking about my Trumpist friend again. What would he be thinking as he watched the same events? I'm fairly sure it would be along lines such as follows:

• The protesters did go overboard; they should not have broken into the Capitol.
• They unwittingly made Trump look bad; too many of them misunderstood what Trump actually wanted them to do.
• Their anger about the stolen election is justified, but Trump was not seeking the violent coup that the fake media had been reporting.

For me, my friend's unwavering belief in the vast voter fraud conspiracy is simply another form of what my favorite black intellectual, John McWhorter, observed about extreme leftist ideology in his article Antiracism, Our Flawed New Religion.

Trumpism has become my Trumpist friend's religion.

#100daystooffload Day 20.

I was impressed. What I liked about Coleman Hughes was his nuanced criticism of ideology, whether on the right or the left – and I was pleased to hear the same nuanced thinking from Mikhaila's father, Jordan. So, after listening to their conversation, I decided to return to Blinkist to see if summaries of Jordan's books were available. They are – and Jordan's two books, Maps of Meaning and 12 Rules for Life, include audios of the Blinkist summaries, which meant I was able to listen to the Maps of Meaning summary while on my daily three-mile walk along the Upper West Side section of Riverside Park.

What that summary evoked from me was memories of what I learned a few decades ago from the two-month Ecumenical Institute Academy on the west side of Chicago – a ghetto, in the language of the seventies. During that time I learned how twentieth century theologians like Bultmann, Tillich and Bonhoeffer made it possible to understand the narratives of Christian gospels without rejecting the modern secular/scientific understanding of the world we live in.

What Jordan's Maps of Meaning apparently does is offer an even more general understanding of religious and social mythologies – how they function and why we should not reject 'mythology' as equivalent to 'unreality' – that the 'reality' that mythologies deal with has to do with social cohesion and, ideally, individual fulfillment.

After reading the Blinkist summary, I checked Wikipedia which summarizes the key reviews of books. Peterson's Maps of Meaning got several very positive initial reviews but more recently several rather negative reviews. The latter seemed to be to be from those who adhere to the current extreme leftist ideology. That was confirmed by seeing that Peterson is now considered to be one of the key figures in the so-called “intellectual dark web”, which includes others analysts I value so much, like John McWhorter, Coleman Hughes, Glenn Loury, Bret Weinstein and Steven Pinker, among many others.

Interestingly, one reviewer said Maps of Meaning could not be summarized, which suggests that I should probably add it to the overly long list of books that I need to read before I die. In the interim, I will follow up by reading and listening to the Blinkist summary of Peterson's second book, 12 Rules for Life. I will also watch at least some of the 380 YouTube videos currently included in the Jordan B Peterson YouTube channel.

#100daystooffload Day 19.

The most recent controversy is Trump and Giuliani's contention that Trump won the election by a landslide which was then stolen by huge conspiracy. I have several friends and relatives who buy into that assertion. The issue for me whether and how to respond when that topic comes up for discussion.

One approach is simply to ask some basic questions about accepting Trump's fraud assertions – at the least, you can find out if they ever look outside the Trump bubble for other information and analysis. Here are some of fraud-related questions to which you might get interesting replies from a Trump believer:

• Why would such a huge conspiracy only elect Biden but allow Republicans to retain control of the senate and even reduce the Democratic majority in the house?

• Since long before the election Trump was saying it would be rigged, why did the Department of Homeland Security investigations before the election result in calling the election “the most secure in American history”? Does that mean Trump's own appointee was part of the conspiracy?

• Since the election results are consistent with virtually all the polls preceding the election, does that mean the many polling companies were also part of the conspiracy?

• State GOP lawmakers in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have all said they would not intervene in the selection of electors, who ultimately cast the votes that secure a candidate’s victory. Are they also participating in the conspiracy?

• Since Trump asserted that he was the victim of election fraud even in the 2016 election that he won, why didn't he have that fraud investigated by the FBI and the Homeland Department of Security? Couldn't such an investigation have prevented the 2020 fraud?

• Finally, if one wants to get into great detail about typical voting issues are now being cited as conspiracy proof, the Wikipedia page Lawsuits related to the 2020 United States presidential election addresses most all of the conspiracy 'evidence' that has already dismissed in courts around the country. Maybe all the state courts are part of the conspiracy too?

The point of these questions is not to try to change your friend's mind. It is to engage in a civilized conversation in which you learn more about the nature and depth of your friend's belief in Trump.

Trump allegiance — for a significant number of folks — functions as a religion, similar to the way that critical race theory serves as a “theology” for many leftist activists, especially in academia. A prior post, Gusher of white privilege, is an example of how I encountered that in one of my own relatives.

Many anti-Trump folks would find Carl Hoffman's Liar's Circus very helpful. The title is likely offensive to Trump supporters — but for me, it delineated the difference between Trump and his supporters. Several of the folks that attended multiple Trump rallies with the author became good friends to him. It didn't matter to them that he was not a supporter himself. By the end, the author had learned that Trump's rallies were not really just political events. Instead, Trump's rallies actually function as modern versions of America's 19th century evangelical rallies. (The Wikipedia page on “Second Great Awakening” provides a good overview.)

All this might help anti-Trump folks get a better grasp of how to deal with pro-Trump folks. Sadly though, I live in a liberal bubble where most people simply refuse to have any relationship with conservatives, especially pro-Trump supporters.

That is why I was so pleased when I encountered the BraverAngels.org. Braver Angels has the goal of bridging the widening gap in America – promoting civil debates and conversations between the right and the left, Republicans and Democrats, and most relevant now, pro- and anti-Trump folks.

Viewing Trump support as the functional equivalent of a religion is not meant as a disparaging characterization. Instead, it allows one to think about how to engage in civil conversations. For example, I would not try to refute a Christian friend's belief that there will be a Second Coming, something that I don't believe at all. I would, however, be at least somewhat interested in hearing what that friend says about what that meant for his life, for all our lives, for the world we live in, etc. That can lead to an interesting conversation without attacking or disparaging that Christian for his very fundamentalist belief.

So, if there is to be a bridge, it will be like the folks listed in The Red/Blue Pairs of Braver Angels.

#100daystooffload Day 18.

I had been ponderng how to respond to my friend's text about Sidney Powell's Thursday press briefing, in which she asserts a huge fraud that led to Trump's defeat. What amazed me is that he feels he's done research that supports the fraud conspiracy theory. What I already knew was that if you looked at multiple credible sources on both the right and the left, you'd see that accusation was just not supported.

However, I will acknowledge that it is a tragedy. Obviously, if it was true, it would be extremely disturbing. And if it is not true, which is pretty obvious based on current evidence (mostly the lack of it), then the fact that so many Americans still believe it means Trump has succeeded in getting the revenge he was seeking due to his impeachment – and the Biden administration may then have as little credibility as the current Trump administration. What a lot of folks – especially on the left – continue to miss is the fact that Trump managed to engage a sector of the country that many politicians have misunderstood, especially recent Democrats.

For example, many of my liberal friends refused to read J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Why? Simply because Vance was a Trump supporter. If they had bothered to read it, they would have had at least some understanding of how different life is for some folks in many parts of the country.

Did I ever support Trump? No, because long before he actually ran for President many of us living in New York were already very tired of his behavior. His best skill is as an advocate for himself – his most successful role was as the executive in The Apprentice, which was far more successful than virtually all of his real businesses. Those businesses had declared bankruptcy six times between 1991 and 2009 due to their inability to meet required payments and to re-negotiate debt with banks. Trump would be far wealthier today if he had just put the 400 million his dad gave him into the stock market. Of course, Trump still denies that his dad gave him any money, despite the fact that it was long well proven by multiple independent sources.

Do I oppose Trump's policies? No, not all. Yes, we needed to get tougher with China – but not by breaking away from all our allies rather than pushing them to join us in dealing with Chinese trade aggression. Yes, we needed immigration reform, which Trump could well have accomplished instead of stupid things like saying it was all just about a wall and taking children away from parents, many of whom will never be able to rejoin their family. Yes, we needed business tax reform, but not by simply increasing our deficit by $1.9 trillion over the next decade.

Trump could have been far more successful if he had just not felt he had to lie about so many things simply because he can't tolerate anything that he feels is a personal attack.

So I do think Mary L. Trump's book about her uncle, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” convincingly lays out why Trump was unable to rise up and become a truly effective president, doing more than just increasing the ongoing hatred and division in US politics.

Election day was over a week ago, but misleading video clips claiming to be evidence of 'voter fraud' are still circulating through social media. Link: “Voter Fraud” video

The bipartisan National Council of State Legislatures:

• Absentee and Mail Voting Policies in Effect for the 2020 Election

• Voting Outside the Polling Place: Absentee, All-Mail and other Voting at Home Options

From credible conservative media:

• National Review: The Insanity Oath

• Commentator Karl Rove: Now Watch 'Karl Rove States There Is No Evidence of Voter Fraud'

• Tucker Carlson: Trump attorney Sidney Powell refused invite to share evidence of software flipping votes

• Trump lawyer Sidney Powell claims Venezuelan whistleblower warned Smartmatic can change votes without detection

• Trump camp fundraises off Giuliani press conference

Mainstream media (mildly left-leaning, but credible fact-checking):

• Analysis | Here’s how seriously you should take the Trump legal team’s conspiracy theories

• Trump’s Legal Team Sets a Precedent for Lowering the Bar

• Giuliani in Public: ‘It’s a Fraud.’ Giuliani in Court: ‘This Is Not a Fraud Case.’

• Trump Campaign Lawyers Step Up but Are Swiftly Knocked Down.

• How Sidney Powell inaccurately cited Venezuela’s elections as evidence of U.S. fraud.

#100daystooffload Day 17.