Epstein fury and some backsliding.

Damn that guy taking up space in the White House anyway. I was all set to write a mea culpa blog post about how working this session screwed up my low-carb eating plan, and then I woke up yesterday morning, as we all did, to the news that Trump's latest gambit to draw headlines away from the Epstein files is to team up with Bibi Netanyahu to bomb Iran -- which country's nuclear capability we supposedly obliterated in June of last year, or so said Trump at the time.

The warmongers in Washington named the attack Operation Epic Fury, but it took no time at all for the memesters to change it to Operation Epstein Fury.

Already some US service members have lost their lives in retaliatory bombing, and Trump has said more are likely to die. Isn't this the same guy who said that if he was re-elected, he wasn't going to start any wars? His supporters believed him. And now, here we are.

I am so tired of this timeline.

***

Anyway, I'm not going to let him derail my plans for this post. My original topic is not good news, either, but I'll put in a little palate cleanser at the end. 

***

So yeah, the last week or two of this year's legislative session was hard. I whined about how hard it was here a couple of weeks back. What I didn't mention in that post was how the stress and anxiety, coupled with freely available, carb-heavy food, pinged my bad eating habits of yesteryear. I'd been amping up the snacking anyway, but this session put me back where I was toward the end of my time in DC.

Well, not completely back to those days. This year, I wasn't leaving work in the middle of the afternoon to head over to some shop to stock up on candy and a bag of chips, then polish off all of it at my desk before quitting time. But it was bad.

This past Monday, I had my regular appointment with my endocrinologist. Before session, my A1c was 6.5; on Monday, it was 8.9. Optimal for diabetics is less than 7.0. So yeah -- not good.

She told me to go back to a strict low-carb diet -- protein and veggies only. She outfitted me with a continuous glucose monitor that doesn't require a prescription and had me download an app that would let her see how I was doing. And then she asked me if I wanted to try Ozempic. I sighed and said okay.

Not my pen. This is a stock photo.
Artmim | Deposit Photos

I sighed because it felt like going backwards. When I left DC, I was not only taking Ozempic, I was also on a drug called Invokana that basically filters out all the extra sugar in your blood and sends it out through your kidneys. Neither one was too pricey when I was on the law firm's Cadillac insurance plan, but once I retired, hoo boy. It was those eye-watering prescription prices that made me try low-carbing in the first place. And low carbing worked -- until it didn't.

But it worked far longer than it might otherwise have. A fairly recent study found that most people regain the weight they lost, as well as losing all the other benefits they gained from being on a GLP-1, within two years of stopping the drug. I didn't lose weight when I was on Ozempic before because I was binge eating. But it took me five years to lose the benefits of taking it.

One thing it did help with, I believe, was quieting the food noise in my head. After I moved out here, I remember telling someone that I didn't have a craving for sweets anymore. Now I think that was because of the Ozempic. If it quiets the food noise again, it would be worth the eye-watering prescription price, at least until I can get back on the low-carb track.

I do like the continuous monitor. It's kind of fun, watching the numbers go up and down. I will likely feel different if I backslide again and the graph starts going the wrong way. But I'm pretty sure my numbers will be much better when I see my doctor next. I'll keep y'all posted.

***

Okay, here's the palate cleanser. We've had really nice weather here, with highs in the upper 60s. Tigs and I spent some time out on the porch this afternoon, and he alerted me when some birds showed up at the feeder. (I hope you guys can watch this -- I'm never sure about Apple's video format.) 

***

These desperate moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

RIP, the profession of journalism.

The worst part of taking a week off from blogging last weekend is that I had a great topic for a post but no oomph to write it. So I'm gonna write it this week, even though it's old news by now. Then I'll put a little bit of new news at the end.

gunaonedesign | Deposit Photos

The day the news broke early this month that the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, had sent his minions to decimate the remaining staff, leaving one of the nation's greatest newspapers a hollowed-out shell, I had a conversation online about it with a good friend. It started me thinking about the history of journalism, and specifically how very short a time it has been a respectable profession. Because it was respectable, for a hundred years or so. Now it's devolving into what it was before the muckrakers helped turn it into the Fourth Estate.

When the movie version of All the President's Men was released in the spring of 1976, I was in my freshman year of college. I'd pretty recently (after spending a semester discovering that I did not have what it took to be a professional musician) declared journalism as my major, and the movie sure made it seem like it had been the right decision. Discovering the grain of a big story, pursuing the facts to the truth, bringing down bad actors in the highest of high places -- that was the sort of thing I could see myself doing, or at least the sort of thing I wanted to be associated with. Now, with 50 years of hindsight, it's clear to me that Watergate was pretty much journalism's pinnacle. And it's been coasting downhill ever since. 

My memory of the journalism history course I took that semester is hazy, but I recall that while the press played a role in the Founding Fathers spreading their views throughout the colonies, journalism ethics weren't yet a thing. Benjamin Franklin was a publisher and sorta-kinda reporter, but he wasn't always honest about when he was fictionalizing details; he reported his own famous experiment involving a kite and a key in the third person, as if somebody else had done it. That sort of thing would never fly today (pardon the pun). 

The profession of journalism began to hit its stride in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when muckraking reporters dug into corruption in political and corporate institutions of the time. A couple of famous muckrakers come to mind: Nellie Bly, who had herself committed to an insane asylum in New York City to find out how deplorable the conditions there were; and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed corruption in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The work of these and other reporters, though often melodramatic, caused enough of a stir that laws were passed to relieve some of the worst conditions.

Alongside these crusaders ran an attempt to set an informal code of ethics for journalists. Among the standards was that journalists should be objective. Everybody's got an opinion, but a journalist's should not be readily discernible from his or her work; a reporter should be fair to all sides. Also, a reporter should never make the story about him or her (which is why Ben Franklin would have gotten into trouble if he'd been writing 150 years later).

That all worked fine, more or less, until the moneyed classes realized they could buy up the papers (and the radio stations and TV stations) and exert pressure on the journalists who worked there to bury stories that would hurt business. Journalistic independence has been eroding ever since.

In a column in Slate published on February 5th, Alex Kirshner talked about Bezos' gutting of the Post as almost inevitable. He says the cause of the Post's death is "that one of the richest people in human history staged a controlled burn to turn it into ash. Bezos wanted the Post to die, because a vigorous, well-resourced Washington Post does not suit his vision for the world or his own bottom line." Kirshner makes the point that the paper's net worth is little more than a rounding error in Bezos' vast wealth, and reporting that angers the Trump administration can have a big impact on Bezos' other companies, particularly when we're talking about federal contracts for Amazon and Blue Origin: "Bezos' external economic interests turned him into a virus that ate the Post from the inside."

We can see a similar thing happening at CBS, the former home of famed journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, where the new owner's attempts to placate Trump prompted Anderson Cooper to resign from his 60 Minutes gig just this week.

Journalism has been descending toward infotainment for decades, but real reporting has always coexisted with the fluffy stuff. I assumed it always would. Now I begin to think it won't. 

RIP, the profession of journalism, 1900-2026. It's been a good run. 

***

This weekend, Trump made a cockamamie post on his social media outlet that the US was sending a "hospital boat" to Greenland to provide medical care to Greenlanders. I could not make heads or tails of his rambling until I did a little research. It looks like what set him off was a humanitarian incident in which a sailor aboard a US Navy submarine took ill while the boat was off the coast of Greenland and was airlifted to a hospital in Nuuk for treatment. Greenland reportedly has six hospitals for its population of fewer than 60,000 people and, like the rest of the civilized world, has free, universal healthcare. So the prime minister of Greenland says they don't need our help. Besides, both of our hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, are in drydock for repairs, so neither one of them will be steaming toward Greenland any time soon.

Trump also mentioned the governor of Louisiana, who I guess he promoted to "special envoy" to Greenland back in December to help negotiate whatever Trump thinks he can get out of Greenland's government, which is not going to be ownership of the island. Or a Nobel Peace Prize, either.

The whole thing is a fantasy from Trump's fevered brain. But what pissed me off -- and what every US sailor should also be pissed off about -- is that the commander-in-chief of our military does not know the difference between a ship and a boat. I know the difference because a) I was married to a sailor, and b) I covered the Sixth Fleet when I worked as a reporter in Norfolk, VA. A boat is small enough to fit on a ship. A submarine is a boat; our floating hospitals are ships.

If he's too far gone to understand that, what business does he have running the country?

***

These moments of bloggy sadness and disgust have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Of course the "hospital boat" thing is a distraction from the Epstein files. Here's hoping the fallout from that investigation brings the whole facade tumbling down sooner rather than later.

Taking a week off.

I fully intended to blog every Sunday during this session. And I have -- so far. But then this weekend happened. I was originally scheduled to work eleven hours over two days, seven hours yesterday and four today. But it turned into 14 hours over the two days, 7.5 yesterday and 6.5 today, following a Friday on which our department handled 51 rush documents.

Or so I was told. I maintained the total was closer to 857 rushes.

Anyway, in short, this final weekend of session has kicked my ass. 

This graphic is from a YouTube video that started making the rounds in 2003. The dialogue naturally came up this week at work.

You can watch the whole cartoon here. 

It turns out that the guy who made that video in 2003 made a sequel in 2018. There's an article about it here where you can watch the new(ish) video. Sadly, it's still relevant. Maybe even more so now.

Anyway, yes, I am le tired, and I will have a nap -- after noon on Thursday. But next weekend, I'll be back here, doing my regular thing. See y'all then.

***

These moments of less-than-animated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there!

To sleep (an extra 15 minutes at least).

I know most of y'all are watching the big sportsball thing tonight. Since I don't care about either team (if I followed football at all, I'd root for the Broncos) or the commercials, I'm going to do a little personal whining tonight.

We are a titch over halfway through this year's legislative session here in New Mexico (it's a 30-day session and ends on the 19th at noon). This year I've drawn the short straw and have been working the 7:30 am-4:30 pm shift during the week (the hours are a little different on the weekends). This is when my alarm has been going off: 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

All I can say is: Ugh (yawn).

***

I have been a night owl for as long as I can remember. All those novels I churned out? Most of the time, I was writing them into the wee hours. (My mother said when I was a tiny child, I would wake up with the birds, but I think she was lying.) 

Of course, as a productive member of society (aka a cog in the machine of commerce), I have worked all kinds of crazy shifts, necessitating a sleep schedule all over the clock. For example, the most desirable shift in radio is morning drive time, which means you have to be on the air, sounding coherent, at 6:00 am. And that means you have to be there earlier than that to call the cop shops for any news overnight and write your first newscast. For my first job in radio, I was still living with my parents, driving 35 miles each way to the radio station. I started working there in January. In northern Indiana. Sometimes I followed the snowplows down US 35, and sometimes they followed me.

The weirdest shift I ever had was probably when I wrote for the morning show for the Fox TV affiliate in DC; I had to be in at midnight and left work around 8:00 am or 9:00 am (which was No Fun with Small Children -- try finding a babysitter to come and sleep at your house, just in case the place starts burning down or something).

My favorite shift was always 10:00 am to 6:00 pm. I could sleep in 'til 8 or 8:30, get in a full workday, and have a life after I got off work.

Then I made the move to the legal world. The big law firm had a pretty sweet policy for staff: You could name your own start time (within a certain window), as long as the lawyers you supported were cool with it. The big-picture reason was to help with DC's legendary traffic congestion, but it was helpful for staff, too. When the girls were in school, I started earlier; when they went away to college, I switched to 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. When we lived in Potomac Yard, I could sleep 'til 7:00 am, have breakfast at home, and still get to work on time.

Then I retired, and my schedule was my own... until I started working for the legislature.

During the interim, we work 8:00 am to 5:00 pm; the 6:15 am alarm for that is bad enough when my body clock is telling me to stay up past midnight. But for this session, I'm working the dreaded 7:30 am shift.

For weeks, maybe months, I've been dozing off in the afternoons and falling asleep in front of the TV in the evenings. I thought maybe it was sleep apnea or something worse. Then one evening recently, I crashed. Just could not keep my eyes open any longer. Went to bed at 8-ish and slept almost ten hours. The next day I wasn't sleepy at all.

I wasn't sick. I was sleep-deprived.

Well, fuck.

So now I'm making a concerted effort to get in bed before 10, so that when the 5:45 am alarm goes off, it's not too painful to get up right away. And I guess when session is over, I'll have to give up my post-midnight lifestyle. Damn it.

Someday I will be retired again. I am looking forward to it.

***

These moments of early-to-bed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Less than two weeks to go...