A late summer roundup.

A view from my porch.
Lynne Cantwell | August 2025

I'm back, having never been away.

I can explain!

In my last post two weeks ago, I said I would be having carpal tunnel release surgery on my right hand on August 8th, then traveling to greater Chicagoland this past weekend for my high school reunion. Neither of those things happened.

I decided to put off the surgery because of the portable swamp coolers. I wrote about them earlier this summer -- you can go here to refresh your memory, if you like -- but the problem relating to the surgery was that I use a two-gallon watering can to fill them, and I realized I wasn't going to be able to lift it with just one hand. And it has been too hot to go without using the swamp coolers. So the surgery has been rescheduled for the end of September, which hopefully will not conflict with our governor's reported plans to call a special legislative session within the next few weeks.

That explains the surgery delay, but what about canceling the trip? That's because of the Bathroom Vanity Project.

The original vanity was the one the builders installed when the place was built in 1987. It was the same design as the kitchen cabinets, except shorter in height. It was also so long that I had to move the litter box every time I wanted to do laundry. Some previous owner had replaced whatever the original countertop was with Talavera tile: countertop, backsplash, and matching sinks. I like Talavera tile, but there are lots (and lots) of designs, and I wasn't wild about this one. Here:

Lynne Cantwell | 2023

The tile was inoffensive (which was part of my problem with it, to be honest) and some of it was dark green, which clashed with the laundry closet door after I painted it turquoise blue.

I spent a lot of time looking at replacement vanities online. The ones in my price range looked like boxes; the ones with a little style to them were over my budget. So last fall, when my friend Kim was in town, we checked out consignment shops and found this: 

Lynne Cantwell | 2024

It had started out life as an entertainment center. I knew I wanted a vessel sink; this was the right height and definitely did not look like a box. So I bought it and had it delivered, and it sat in my storage closet until last month, when I contracted with the cabinet makers down the street to put it in.

Well. The top is not flat, which I knew, and the thing is not square. Plus I had to have more Saltillo tile put in because the people who installed it didn't pull the old vanity to lay it underneath. (It turned out there was nothing under the old vanity but the subfloor.) Then there was the miscommunication about the sink; I'm going down to one sink from two, and I had the plumbers put the new connections in the wrong place, so that had to be fixed.

Anyway, the bottom line is that it's not done yet. The floor tile and vanity are in, the new countertop will be installed tomorrow, the backsplash will go up Tuesday, and then I can have the plumbers come back. Hopefully it'll be all done by the end of this week. Then I get to spend Labor Day weekend painting. 

The joys of homeownership...

***

This post is already pretty long, but I wanted to mention the death this week of James Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family in 1977.

Dobson -- along with Jerry Falwell, founder of Liberty University and creator of the label "the Moral Majority", and Pat Robertson, who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network and what's now Regis University -- were probably the most well-known promoters of evangelical Christianity in the 1970s and '80s. All three of them espoused the sort of "family values" that include opposition to abortion and the claim that LGBTQ+ people are misled and should undergo conversion therapy. (Conversion therapy doesn't work, has been proven detrimental to those who undergo it, and is now banned in 23 states and DC.) But Dobson in particular is vilified by a lot of people whose parents ascribed to his harsh, abusive childrearing techniques. One blogger began his post with this: "JAMES DOBSON, 89, died this week after a long battle with children." He goes on to say that Dobson's philosophy on raising children was in reaction to that of Dr. Benjamin Spock, who said kids do best when disciplined with love and understanding: "Dobson contended that children were born sinful and must be beaten without mercy in order to secure their bond to their parents and the church, and, of course, to save them ... from damnation." 

A charming fellow. But he, Robertson, and Falwell insinuated their hateful brand of Christianity into the highest echelons of government in this country, and for decades, conservative candidates have appreciated their followers' support. Ronald Reagan courted the evangelical vote. So did George W. Bush. And I'm sure you've seen the laying-on-of-hands memes featuring the current occupant of the White House -- a man whose behavior is in no way Christian, but whose supporters claim he was sent by God to save the nation.

Dobson, Robertson, and Falwell are all gone now; Falwell died in 2007, Robertson in 2023. But the poison they introduced into our national discourse has become deeply rooted, and it needs to be uprooted from our government before we can recover from the mess we're in.

***

You could argue that I conceived of The Pipe Woman Chronicles partly as a response to the damage evangelicalism was doing to the nation.

I used to say that I thought Falwell was the Antichrist until Robertson came along. Then I realized that Falwell was the anti-John-the-Baptist.

I hope they're all enjoying themselves now, wherever they've ended up. I'm pretty sure it's not heaven.

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These moments of deconstructive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Stay away from rabbit holes; and taking a break.

I want to address, briefly, a thing that's made the rounds on social media over the past couple of days. It was sparked by a Substack post (which I'm not linking to because I don't want to amplify it) quoting a guy who claims to be a former CIA agent and who supposedly participated in an NSA forensic audit of the 2024 election. The purported NSA audit supposedly found that foreign interests manipulated the election results and that Kamala Harris actually won the election.

Here's why I think it's bullshit.

geralt | Pixabay

For starters: The Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency are different federal agencies. The NSA has its own agents. Why wouldn't they use people from their own agency to conduct an audit? Why pick an ex-CIA guy whose security clearances may or may not still be any good?

Second: The feds don't do nationwide audits of election results. Each state runs its own elections and performs its own audits. The graphics you see on TV on election night are pulled from reports provided by election officials in each individual state, and they compile them from results provided by election officials in each individual precinct. Ballots and voting apparatuses aren't even held by a state agency, as far as I'm aware; election officials in each county are responsible for keeping their own stuff under lock and key.

Third: There have been challenges to the 2024 results in several states, and time and again it's been acknowledged that the machines and their software have not been tampered with, and in fact could not have been tampered with. All the challenges were resolved when Biden was still president. Now, this fellow is claiming that some sneaky code disguised as an update to vote-counting software allowed foreign malefactors to mess with the numbers. Really? Really?? Wouldn't the locals have noticed if their numbers changed when they got to the state level? And didn't we go through this with the 2020 results? Except then it was conservatives claiming the votes were tampered with -- and it cost them a lot of money when it was proven in court that they were making it all up.

Fourth: The guy is an author of a book on international human trafficking. His book is available for free. Reportedly it's 900 pages long. I'm not interested in giving him a download, but this poster on Reddit has done it, and here's what he has to say (all syntax issues are the original poster's): 

"This is classic internet conspiracy word salad nonsense. From what I can piece together he believes that the wars in Ukraine, and Gaza are directed by a global mafia that runs Israel, Russia, China, and the United States to name a few of the nations. He ties in human trafficking, slavery, pedophiles, all of it into his global conspiracy. This is the same pedophiles run the world right-wing conspiracies just rebranded by a left leaning audience."

In other words, it's QAnon for lefties. Look up "pizzagate" and see where that has gotten us before.

I could go on (i.e., anybody can get a Substack; anybody can publish a book and upload it for sale; anybody can offer their book for free -- heck, I've done it), but I said at the top that this would be brief. 

What concerns me is the same thing that concerns that Reddit poster: People are taking this and running with it without thinking about whether any of it is plausible.

I know it's tempting to hang onto hope that the disaster we're living through is the result of evil machinations. And social media's algorithms are designed to keep serving us more and more of what we've already consumed; it would be so easy to get sucked down a rabbit hole into a lefty version of QAnon.

But please don't. Step away from the screens, take a breath, drink some water, use the john, and think about how likely any of this is. 

***

I will be scarce here on the blog for the next couple of weeks. This coming Friday, I'm going in for carpal tunnel surgery on my right hand -- something that I probably should have had done 30 years ago. I'll still be wearing a splint on my right hand when next Sunday rolls around, so no blog post from me that day.

Then the following weekend -- assuming all goes well with the surgery and whatnot -- I'll be back in my hometown for my (gulp) 50th high school reunion. 

So let's make a tentative date to meet back here on Sunday, August 24th. I should have lots to tell you about by then.

***

These moments of non-rabbit-holed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, and go drink some water. Seriously.

Was America ever exceptional?

Dazdraperma | Deposit Phots

One of the comments on last week's post got me thinking. "I don't ascribe to notions of American exceptionalism," the anonymous* poster said, and went on to list several things that were wrong with the US in the '60s, including racial discrimination, political assassinations, and the Vietnam War. 

Of course, and those are just the tip of the iceberg. Women were also discriminated against. And in the early years of the 20th century, immigrants who would be considered white by today's standards were thought of as different, lesser races -- including people from Ireland, Italy, and China. Virtually all 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II; many of them, like actor George Takei, were born here.

We have done shitty things to other countries, too. That noted expert Wikipedia says, "The U.S. has engaged in nearly 400 military interventions between 1776 and 2023, with half of these operations occurring since 1950 and over 25% occurring in the post-Cold War period." That doesn't even count covert CIA actions to destabilize governments, in South America and elsewhere, often to make it easier for US corporations to do business there. The Iran-Contra affair is just one example of us mucking around in other countries' self-governance to benefit ourselves.

But if we could dispense with criticism for a moment, I think it would be safe to say that the US had been considered exceptional around the world -- if for no other reason that immigrants have historically flocked to our shores to escape whatever atrocity was going on in their own countries (whether we caused it or not). (Of course, immigration is still happening today -- although less so, given who's running the show right now and how "illegal immigrants" are being treated by those people.)

And then there's the way other nations, especially those in Europe, have counted on the United States to protect them in case of an act of aggression against them by some other nation -- which is what makes Trump's turnabout in American policy toward Ukraine so hard to stomach. Sure, he's being nicer to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky now, but it's hard to trust him when he's changed his mind so many times before. 

We've never been perfect, and I did not mean to imply last week that we ever were. We have a long way to go to reach perfection, if we ever get there; that has always been true. 

But going back to last week's topic: We were the first nation to put a person on the moon, and we're still the only nation to have done it. In that one singular achievement, at least, we have been exceptional. 

***

*This blogging platform doesn't make it easy for folks who comment directly on my posts. Usually I can tell who an anonymous poster is; in this instance, it could be one of several folks. No need to out yourself, sir or madam. I'm just explaining to others who might wonder.

***

These moments of exceptional (in several senses of the word) blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Back when we owned the moon.

 

benschonewille | Deposit Photos

Today is the 56th anniversary of the day that men landed on the moon. On this date in 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin piloted NASA's lunar lander away from their spaceship, Apollo 11, and touched down on the surface of the moon. (The third guy on the mission, Michael Collins, stayed behind in the command module to keep the motor running, as it were.) Neil was the first one out the door of the lander; his first words as his foot touched the surface got kinda garbled in the transmission back to earth, but what he said was, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Yeah, he did say "mankind", not "humankind". This was 1969 -- women were good enough to do the math to get us into space, but we weren't good enough to be remembered in everyday speech. Yet.

Certain events are imprinted on the national consciousness in terms of where we, personally, were when they happened: President John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963; the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986; the day the Twin Towers collapsed (and the Pentagon was also attacked) on September 11, 2001; the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; and this one. It's become fashionable to bring up these events on their anniversaries and remember what we were doing when we either saw it happen or heard about it. 

NASA says Armstrong's left foot hit the lunar dust at 9:56 p.m. Central Daylight Time, the same time zone I lived in (albeit 1,100 miles away). I watched the historic event at home with my parents. I was eleven years old that summer, plenty old enough to stay up late to watch history in the making. Then I went to bed. (I mean, I was a kid -- celebratory toasts were way off in my future.)

What strikes me today is why people are making kind of a big deal about it this year. It's not like it's a major anniversary. Who celebrates the 56th anniversary of anything? Nobody.

No, I think it's nostalgia at work. It was JFK who set the goal for us, to beat the Russians to the moon, in May 1961. It only took us eight years to get there. Think of that: Americans had set a major goal, focused on it, pulled together, and reached it in only eight years. Our nation was truly ascendent, and not just in space exploration; since at least World War II, we had been a shining beacon to the rest of the world, and now here we were, excelling again. In 1969, it seemed, everybody wanted to be American.

Today, Americans might rather be Finns. All of the top five happiest countries in the world are Nordic countries. Even Mexico is happier than the United States: they're number 10, and we're number 24.

A lot could be said about what's happened to our nation since 1969 that has caused that to happen, and folks of differing political proclivities of course have different opinions. But I think it's clear that almost no Americans want what's happening right now to continue. 

Can we ever be the best country on earth again? I think we can. But we'll never do it while Trump and his Project 2025 minions are in power, so our first task is to get them out.

No, I don't have a plan. But we didn't have a plan for getting to the moon until JFK made it our national goal, either. To get our country out of this mess, I think we're going to have to develop the plan together.

***

I guess I've never shared this on the blog before. In 1989, as part of the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, NASA sent Buzz Aldrin around on a PR tour. I covered his news conference at the NASA Langley Visitor Center in Hampton, VA, for WTAR Radio. During the Q&A part of the event, all of us were serious news people, asking relevant questions and such. But once the mics and cameras were turned off, we turned into fanboys and fangirls. I still have the poster that Aldrin signed for me, and of course I framed it. Sorry for the angle -- the hallway here is too narrow for a full-on photo. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

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These moments of spacey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, and look to the stars!