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As It Was, So It Is

Tue, 3 Sep 2013, 09:52 PM (-06:00)

He sat on the other side of the bookshelf. He had red hair and shining eyes. He was fit and tall and walked with confidence and certainty as he came and went.

There was a poster on the wall above his desk. It had an F-16 fighter in some kind of banking turn or attack dive or maybe a rocket-like climb with afterburners blazing. I can’t remember exactly as it was a long time ago. But I do recall this: across the top the poster read, Peace Through Superior Firepower.

It was the 80s. On movie screens, in the press, in Washington, D.C., in the jungles of Central America, everywhere there was evidence of the return of America. The Gipper fixed the malaise, didn’t he? And Rambo. And Oliver North. They gave us back our confidence, our resolve, our superior firepower.

And as it was then; so it is today in Syria. Cruise missiles, task groups anchored in the Mediterranean, surgical strikes. Certainly these are tools that we must bring to bear in the interest of peace. You know, like the peace of Iraq, like the peace of Afghanistan. Peace Through Superior Firepower.

Bad Ass

Sat, 31 Aug 2013, 11:07 AM (-06:00)

“There you are,” she said.

I opened my eyes and turned my head. Like a dream, I saw her in the distance, her hair tousled from her eight mile run, her arms swinging confidently by her side as she took long strides toward me. There was a look of exasperation on her face.

“For heaven’s sake,” she said, “I never know where you’re going to be. I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Little did she know (and I did not volunteer this to her) that I was sitting there because I had dropped to the ground in that spot, unwilling to walk further, drenched in sweat, only interested in cooling down and resting while I waited for her Rogue Running group to return.

“I’ve been looking and looking,” she said.

All I could do was look up and wait for her to join me in that shady, breezy spot against that cool limestone wall, which she did in a moment, groaning in relief as she stretched.

“I fell down,” she said.

I looked at her knee that was scraped and her shoulder that was scuffed. Her drink bottle was gravelly, carrying pieces of the running trail that it had picked up when she hit the ground.

“Oh, I’m going to be stiff tomorrow,” she said.

And then she added how she had told her coach about the hole in the sloped trail that had made her fall and about how she had blood running down her leg and how she too was now officially bad ass. She smiled as she said this and as she described how the coach had high-fived her on her new status.

Fair and industrious look out. A new moniker has taken the stage: Bad Ass Trudy.

Hummingbird Afternoon

Sat, 10 Aug 2013, 08:26 PM (-06:00)

Hummingbird

It Depends

Sat, 10 Aug 2013, 03:33 PM (-06:00)

Maybe it’s cause for hope that notable politicians and tech experts are starting to speak out about our government’s surveillance policies. Bruce Schneier is one. A top computer security expert with a knack for communicating, he writes books, he blogs online and recently he has been publicly … shall we say … skeptical of what the Internet has become and what we’re learning about our government.

Recently, he wrote this in a discussion of how government and corporate pronouncements have completely lost our trust:

NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander has claimed that the NSA’s massive surveillance and data mining programs have helped stop more than 50 terrorist plots, 10 inside the U.S. Do you believe him? I think it depends on your definition of “helped.”

The whole thing is worth reading. But this one sentence pushed a hot button that I was trying to describe to the fair and industrious and infinitely patient Trudy.

Whether we believe the good director general or not does not only depend on the definition of helped. It depends on

what surveillance means
what qualifies as a data mining program
what stop means
what terrorist means
what a plot is
what it means to be inside the US

In short, not a single word can be taken at face value. Nothing is what it seems.

People joked for years about Clinton’s it depends on what the meaning of is is, but this kind of triangulation is now the norm.

Schneier is right. Something needs to be done to restore our trust.

On Defining the Problem

Sat, 3 Aug 2013, 10:25 AM (-06:00)

In a recent interview, James Galbraith said this.

[They are] not going to escape the consequences of this. […] it’s a choice that [they] can, and I’m sure, will make. But what is necessary is to state clearly what the choice actually is.

In this particular conversation, he was discussing Germany and the Eurozone and the need for the Germans to define the Eurozone problem and devise and pursue solutions accordingly.

Of course, this notion of defining problems and deriving corresponding solutions is a key element of what we might call rational decision making. It’s about cause and effect. It’s the scientific method. It’s what’s at the core of the age of reason, of the mode of thought bestowed upon us by the enlightenment.

This way of thinking is why we can build skyscrapers and bridges that don’t fall down. It’s why we can send spacecraft to the outer fringes of the solar system. It’s why I can write this from the comfort of my home and you can read it from the comfort of yours.

Yet here is James Galbraith, compelled to lay out this fundamental point as if the decision makers haven’t recognized it.

This, in my opinion, will be the main characteristic of our era when historians of the future look back. It transcends Germany, transcends the Eurozone and transcends the challenges of global capitalism. All our official institutions, the structures that govern our social, economic and political systems, are guided not by the need to identify, define and solve problems but rather by the need to generate money and profits for those at the helm and the private organizations around them.

Of course, the policy conversation is framed in other terms, using a reassuring vocabulary that softens and masks this harsh reality. Nevertheless, when you look at the details of the real machinery that operates behind this thin veneer, when you read the fine print, when you peel back the facade, it’s clear that objective problem solving is nowhere to be found. The only driving forces in our institutions today are power and profit.

This is why James Galbraith had to make the point he did. And it is why his words will fall on deaf ears.

A Dandelion from Free Range Living

Fri, 26 Jul 2013, 08:40 PM (-06:00)

From Free Range Living‘s Project 365, comes this dandelion, at which point the pen and the tablet beside me beckon.

207 365

It does the free range dandelion no justice. It was just a scribble but not bad as a Friday night meditation.

Happy weekend.

That Might Have Been Me

Sun, 21 Jul 2013, 08:53 PM (-06:00)

So we stood there at the overlook gazing into the distance and into Halema‘uma‘u crater, Pele’s home.

The sky was blue. White clouds went by. We could see to the horizon from where we stood. Steam and smoke and volcanic vapors rose into the sky and caught the wind.

Halemaumau

We stood there for a while viewing the land, but we still had a half-hour drive down to Hilo. So soon it was time to go.

“Wait,” I said. “Let’s go across the street and take some more pictures of Mauna Kea.”

“Sure!” Trudy said. Somehow it wasn’t surprising that she was willing to stay just a little bit longer.

There was a four wheel drive vehicle stopped at a locked barrier crossing the road not far from where we had parked. A woman got out, unlocked the gate and drove the vehicle thru, getting out again to lock the gate behind her. She drove away, disappearing around a bend in the road beyond a cluster of trees.

One sign on the gate said Road Closed. Another said Slow moving vehicle. Measurements in progress.

DSC 9634

Trudy looked at me with a pensive look on her face.

“In a different life,” she said, “that might have been me.”

Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea from Kilauea

Sat, 20 Jul 2013, 05:19 PM (-06:00)

Another from that trip more than a year ago. We’re getting very near the end…

It looks like it’s going to be a nice day. Bits of blue sky are showing thru the clouds here and there, so we go up to Kilauea one more time.

We show the gate attendant our receipt from several days ago. “We’re getting our money’s worth out of this. This is our fifth visit.”

She smiles a sincere smile on her face. “Have a good time.”

The clouds begin to thin. The sky is mostly blue. We drive slowly along the narrow asphalt road thru the rainforest, happy that there is no rain.

“Look!” I say, pointing out the window.

Beyond the trees, for the first time we can clearly see the slopes of Mauna Loa. Today there is no mist floating thru the woods. There are no clouds concealing its distant summit. The weather is mostly clear, and there it is, sunlight bathing its lower slopes, great black shadows on its upper slopes.

No, those are no shadows but rather reat black stains of black lava. Lava that some time in the past pushed out of fissures, running down the side of the volcano, cooling before it reached the bottom. We can see where the flow twisted and turned with the contours as it ran downhill. And we can see where it pooled in places, forming lava lakes high on the slopes.

DSC 9638

This mountain is really, really big. All the descriptions say this, but it is hard to appreciate its enormity without being there. Even from this distance, we can’t capture the whole volcano in a single camera image. It fills the horizon from left to right.

And look! There in the distance beyond Mauna Loa. There’s Mauna Kea.

DSC 9628

And holy cow, look! There are the telescopes! We were there standing beside them just the other day (although as you might remember, even though we looked back in this very direction, we didn’t notice Mauna Loa which looms before us now).

Helen Thomas

Sat, 20 Jul 2013, 02:23 PM (-06:00)

Helen Thomas died yesterday. If you were around during her long tenure, you might still hear her voice in the scrum of the White House press room during those things called press conferences that presidents used to have.

She was fearless. And in her later years, she lamented the decline of the fourth estate:

… Did we invade those countries?

At that point McClellan called on another reporter.

Those were the days when I longed for ABC-TV’s great Sam Donaldson to back up my questions as he always did, and I did the same for him and other daring reporters. Then I realized that the old pros, reporters whom I had known in the past, many of them around during World War II and later the Vietnam War, reporters who had some historical perspective on government deception and folly, were not around anymore.

I honestly believe that if reporters had put the spotlight on the flaws in the Bush Administration’s war policies, they could have saved the country the heartache and the losses of American and Iraqi lives.

It is past time for reporters to forget the party line, ask the tough questions and let the chips fall where they may.

She did not live to see the day. Increasingly it’s evident that none of us will, this notion of asking objective, truth-seeking questions being so very twentieth century.

A Magnificent View

Sun, 14 Jul 2013, 09:22 PM (-06:00)

There was a guy leaning against the stone wall of the Jagger Museum. He was in the shadows sharing miscellaneous facts and telling stories about the Halema‘uma‘u eruption. He talked about the weather. He talked about Rim Road being closed. And at some point, he mentioned Mauna Kea.

We mentioned that we had just been there, and he mentioned the magnificent view of Mauna Loa that you get when you’re on Mauna Kea.

When he said that, Trudy and I mentioned that we hadn’t noticed, and you could see from his reaction that he thought something was wrong. He mentioned something about how Mauna Kea is usually above the clouds and not socked in at which point I stopped talking about our ascent, because it had been above the clouds, and it was not socked in, and neither of us saw Mauna Loa. …um to the best of our recollection.

Were we clueless!? How was it that we were up there above the clouds with nothing but clear, blue sky all around us, and we didn’t see Mauna Loa?

I’m sure the guy thought we were blowing smoke. And we were kind of ashamed… and baffled. So when we got home, we took a closer look at our photos to see if the cameras saw what we clearly didn’t.

And so here it is. I submit this as evidence that we really were there, as you can see from the dark slope of Mauna Kea in the foreground, and as evidence that we were indeed above the clouds as you can tell from …well, the clouds. And I submit this as evidence that Mauna Loa was barely visible.

DSC 8366

As you can see, it’s not obvious what that dark thing is in the distance. Is it? I mean, you see what I’m saying, right?

And what a sight it was, now that we look back at it. A magnificent view!