Maybe; Maybe; Maybe

For Several Days I have been hearing agitatedly exercised pundits farting and moaning about a number of things, which turn out to all be the same thing once the only slightly differently camouflaged outer husks have been stripped away. They are: unconnected dots, unshared information, faulty, lacking or non-existent intelligence, dueling data bases, non-communicating data bases and the human race's general and persistent inability to communicate across anything remotely resembling a divide or difference.

I couldn’t help but wonder. “How is it that the Iranian People are in the process of conducting a possibly successful revolution without any of the powerful facilities and functional capabilities that, even though we have them at our disposal, we can’t seem to stop one guy from taping some plastique to his crotch and board an airplane with intent to destroy it? How can they be possibly succeeding without any co-ordinated data bases or massive amounts of money and technology and manpower in support of their aims?”

After a little thought I remembered that they have Twitter. And with Twitter they have the capability to function like a hive of bees or a massive flock of birds,wheeling in inexplicably close order unison as they hurtle through the air. They can keep one another constantly aware of whatever it might be that one another might need to be kept aware of. Like the developing world and its adoption of cell phone technology which has allowed that developing world to leapfrog its richer land line based superiors, the Iranian Opposition has cracked the code: drop all that old bullshit and just communicate. And then act. That viewpoint, added to the facilitating power of a burst mode instant messaging system is a whole new paradigm. And it is a paradigm that looks to the future and embraces only the pragmatic and useful things that have most recently become available in the areas of keeping the most important information constantly available to everyone. They don't need data bases. They ARE the data base. They don’t need some omniscient power to connect the dots for them. They ARE the dots.

Compare that paradigm to the turf war ridden morass of paradigms extant in the United States: “this data base doesn’t talk to that data base” and “this agency doesn’t like that agency” and “we’ve got our best people working on it” and you just may be seeing something of a silhouette of what the future is going to look like. And we may not be in it. Maybe we ought to look at how Twitter facilitates rather than – as does our current mélange of systems - hinders the exchange of vital information. Maybe we need to realize that waiting to learn whatever it will be that the next bomber hides his bomb in (we’ve had shoes and underwear so far) and then making everybody getting on an airplane take that item off is not a winning strategy. It’s not even an acceptable tactic. It is a cretin attempt to look as if we are doing something when everybody is just pretty happy collecting their paychecks.

The Iranian Opposition actually gives a shit. Unlike the people in charge of our anti terror operations who are doing whatever it is that they think they are doing in support of keeping suicide bombers off of airplanes, the members of the Iranian Opposition don’t get a paycheck every two weeks no matter how they perform, no matter what they do. It doesn’t all pay the same for them. And sometimes their payment is their life.

Maybe…

Another Four Letter Word

I wrote this in an email responding to an email I received from a long lost acquaintance - her family is alluded to in Screen Saver - and when I re-read it I thought "this is a better Blog than it is an email". The first paragraph is a response to her question: "So tell me….what do you do when you go to France and what made you start going there in the first place?" Rather than just ignore the question or blow it off with irrelevancies I attempted to really give an answer, starting with the fact that the real answer is in Screen Saver.

But here it is.

What made me go there in the first place and what I do there when I am there are some of the story lines in Screen Saver. Briefly, I went there because some friends were going and Mysti decided to go and I decided to test a life long pillar of personal knowledge: France and the French suck. How wrong. When I'm there I rent apartments in Paris and just blend in with occasional stops for wine, espress or onion soup.

Mysti and I have taken a couple of self directed bike tours, one in Languedoc and one in Entre deux mers. Those put us out on the back roads of rural France where we stayed in tour provided gits and ate local food and drank local wines with local people.

We also took five weeks in Brittany. On that one we picked up our rental car in Rennes and just took off. We didn't have any reservations. We just took a map and found towns that looked interesting and stayed in them when we could get ocean view rooms. We were always able to get ocean front rooms because it was in September and October, so the Season was over. We usually stayed in a town for four or five days and made side trips every day into the adjacent country side to see what we could see. In that manner we found Pont Croix which is a little town several miles inland from the Atlantic which lost its significance eight or nine hundred years ago when the port silted up. But it was a fascinating little place.

The high point of that trip, I always thought, occurred on an evening in early October. We had gotten a room in a lodging place in the vestiges of Merlin's forest and had, naturally, retired to the bar. After several wines and a convivial and animated discussion with a number of our fellow drinkers, one of the men turned to me and said, "so what the fuck is the deal with this Bush?" That was in 2005.

I bought the guy a drink.

The proprietor herded a bunch of us out of the place at about 1:30 am, all singing, as best we could, Milord. I'd rather be in France than any where I know of. But at least now I know that the word "know" is a four letter word and, therefore extremely dangerous. A lot of damage has been done under that banner.

Gross Domestic Product

One morning on my way to Spokane I looked across the median strip of Interstate 90 at the apparently endless mass of automobiles that were parked there. I have seen that scene for years in myriad places from Seattle to Atlanta, from Portland to New Jersy.

But on that particular morning I had a revelation which was preceded by a question. “How much do these traffic jams contribute to GDP?” I asked myself. There was no answer to that question, but there was a revelation:if we were to eliminate such daily burning of gasoline there would be a significant dimunition of our GDP.

And that would not be good.

Invisibility

I first noticed it when I was about 45 years old or so. At the time I hadn’t even begun to think of myself as old. I was so busy being, as I saw it , young, that it hadn’t occurred to me that I had at some point, already passed, become old. At least I think it was “old” that caused the invisibility. When I had been, previously, at some point in time, “young” I had been consistently visible.

But on that day when I must have been forty five or so I was in line waiting to approach the young person of undetermined gender who would be responsible for transmitting my request for a Big Mac to whomever or whatever it was that disgorged such culinary masterpieces to people such as I who requested them.

As my turn came I became aware that the young person was looking through me to the other young person of undetermined gender who was in the line immediately behind me. “May I help you?” the undetermined gendered server person who couldn't see me said. “Big Mac, large fries and a small chocolate shake” I said. I was assuming that I was imagining my state of invisibility.

As if from a tandem tape recording, I heard the person behind me order a cheese burger and a coke. Its voice perfectly overlaid mine.

And, momentarily, a cheeseburger and a coke appeared.

I thought of yelling, but I chose instead to remove myself from the venue.

From that point on I lived in a nether world from which I could not be seen by members of that cadre of persons of undetermined gender who lurked at the counters of every source of service that had been invented to date by the highly lauded service economy of the United States of America. As time went on, invisibility became the lesser of two problems. I gradually became aware that I didn’t speak the language that was apparently evolving from the mass of those individuals of undetermined gender. So whether I could be seen really didn't matter any more.

But what the hell.

Staying Power Chapter Two: Drawstrings Again

Very near the end of my time as an employed person I had a job that required me to go most days to downtown Seattle to a large multi-story office building. I resisted going there as much as possible, preferring to work in my home office. My boss was in Denver so I was as close to him if I needed anything from him in my home office as I was in downtown Seattle: I had broadband internet and several phone lines and a full complement of computer equipment, including the one provided by my employer. But it was not considered good form to indulge in extended periods of absence from the office, even though when there, I was substantially less productive than I was in my home office. There wasn’t a water cooler around which everyone gathered, but “everyone” was, nonetheless, quite creative in indulging in work-like activities that could waste vast quantities of time. I spent as little time at that office tower as possible, but I spent substantial time there nevertheless.

One of the benefits that flowed from being downtown, having nothing to do with the needs of the business for which I worked, was the variety and quality of places that could be chosen for lunch. One of those places I had discovered, and it seemed odd that it was in a department store, but it was, was the restaurant at Nordstrom. I ate there often.

One day when I was eating at Nordstrom I thought of my long rag-bagged flannel pajamas.

“I wonder” I thought to myself, “if they still sell those things?” After lunch I went to the men’s department and asked. They did in fact still sell those things. But it was February when I had asked the question and they were all sold out for that pajama sales cycle. They got the pajamas in September or October and sold them until the last pair had been purchased. And that last pair was usually purchased long before Christmas. I learned from this post lunch query that I wasn’t the only person in Seattle who prized those pajamas. They were exceptionally popular.
So I made a mental note to check in when September had arrived.
And I did. And the pajamas were in. And I bought five pair. And all was once again right with the world. Or at least all was right with that part of the world that I was part of during my sleeping hours.

As with my previously possessed single pair, time wended its way forward: the shortest day merged with the longest; the chestnuts waxed, waned and disappeared; the mountain ashes scented the early spring air and then disappeared until that magic autumn day when they leapt forth from their anonymous green raiment with massive flashes of orange. And those chestnuts, and those Mountain Ashes joined all the rest of those things that I had gradually begun to notice were marking the passage of time , and marking the swiftly accelerating passage, of my life. One day the drawstrings of the pair of pajamas that I was wearing on that day began to disintegrate. Then so did the next and the next and the next as their hosts were put into service. And then all five were bound up in the death spiral of breaks and knots and lumpy congested attempts at still utilizing them for their intended function; and all were rapidly descending into unusability.

But this time the disintegration was confined solely to the drawstrings. The reason that I had bought five pair of pajamas had been to give four of them an extended break from wear and tear in each wearing cycle. That concept had proved to be a valid one with the pajamas themselves. They showed absolutely no sign of wear. But as the drawstrings began their descent into disintegration I was, I began to believe, apparently going to be confronted with the need to dispose of five perfectly good pairs of pajamas once the imminent lapsing of their drawstrings into un-usability had been completed.

But then I had an idea. I took a pair of the failing drawstring bottoms with me to my cleaners. I also took some suits and shirts and sweaters to cover the real purpose of the visit.

After the always pleasant acknowledgement of how much I enjoyed the Chinese pop music that was always being played, and after the interesting if incomprehensible discussion of why the statue of Ho Ti was facing the opposite direction from the last time I had been there I pulled the pajama pants from the pile of cleaning and laundry and showed the lady the problem and posed the question, could she make new drawstring. She had done some minor zipper work for me previously and had performed major and successful surgery on a rip that had occurred in my Facanable jacket resulting from my stumbling into a sharp door handle on rue de Grenelle, so I had a lot of faith in her abilities. The Facanable repair had involved some pretty tricky opening and re-sewing of the lining of the jacket’s sleeve, so I was pretty sure she could figure out how to get into the enclosed trace that housed the drawstrings and detach them from their moorings, build their replacements and repeat the whole process in reverse. If only she would.

She looked at me. I looked at her. Neither of us said anything. She took the pajamas away to a place out of my sight. Time passed. And then she re- appeared. “Fifteen dollars” she said. “Do it” I said.

A week later I picked up my cleaning and before leaving, I inspected what she had done. I had brought the other four pajama bottoms with me in the event that it looked as if the lady had been able to solve the problem.

Inspection revealed that she had solved the problem. The pajamas possessed perfectly installed, perfectly functioning new drawstrings. Where their predecessors had been slender quarter inch strands of flannel rolled and sewn closed I now had inch wide pieces of double layered and double sewn cotton material whose probable primary function prior to being redeployed as draw strings had been to be used as backing for material needing reinforcement and stiffening. But they fit in their traces and they were fastened firmly to the interior of those traces and they worked. The pajamas could be cinched up smoothly and the strings could be tied and there was no resistance or sluggishness in their opening or closing; they worked. They were a marvel of over-engineering, but they worked.

So I flung the other four pair on the counter and said “these too.”

Now I have a new and philosophically interesting situation: those drawstrings are, I believe, as close to indestructible as it is possible for humanity to produce from cloth. They will far outlive the garments for whom they serve. The pajamas are still showing the wisdom of my decision to have five pair, thus allowing mostly off duty time. They are still not showing any evidence of disintegration. But the Chestnuts are flashing by with increasing temporal velocity and it is inevitable that the soft, warm flannel will at some point shout “uncle” and begin to descend into the rents and frays and fuzzes of their single predecessor. But those drawstrings seem to be destined for immortality. They will surely outlive me. They will almost as surely outlive this century, even allowing for its current extreme youth. They may even nearly outlive the planet. I can easily imagine them among the final physical things that finally burst into flame as the earth is incinerated, or leap into nothingness as the earth slips with dramatic silence like some spherical version of the Titanic into its predestined rendezvous with its previously assigned black hole, or are called to final judgment in the event that such an unlikely thing actually occurs.

Staying Power Chapter One : The Drawstrings

A number of years ago my wife gave me a pair of flannel pajamas from Nordstrom. At that time in my life I slept in my underwear. I had decided somewhere along the line that sleeping in one’s underwear was some sort of statement of resistance to something that should be resisted. But the point in time at which I received that gift of Nordstrom flannel pajamas was also that point in my life when various chemicals in my body had apparently begun to atrophy causing the cold that often accompanies the sleeping hours to begin to invade the curtilage of my soul, to say nothing of my body. So pajamas seemed a suitable solution to the cold. So I started wearing them. And then I couldn’t stop. They were so warm. They were so soft. Except for the inevitably necessary bouts with the washing machine, those pajamas were never away from me when I slept. And time passed. And time, as it so passed, was not kind to my pajamas.

The first to begin to go were the draw strings. They just began to fray. They just began to break when drawn. They just seemed to be pointing to the doom of those garments which had become so indispensible to my warmth and comfort when sleeping or preparing to sleep. I tied those drawstrings back together again and again and I figured out ways to keep the irregular girth of those knot-bulked draw strings from hindering the performance of their draw string function. But they continued to deteriorate and I continued with my knotting counter measures. I was determined to continue using those pajamas.

But then the pajamas themselves began to develop rents and holes and massive fissions in the fiber.

And then one day I had to face the fact that they had turned to rags. And as rags they were consigned to the rag bag. Sad is not an adequate word. But sad is the only word at my disposal to describe the pall of gloom that descended upon my life, at least the pre/during/and-immediately post sleeping portion of my life that was affected by that ragbag consignment. Luckily for my happiness this story has a sequel.

Folk Song

In my various discussions in Screen Saver of my development of musical ability and ultimately of starting and developing a singing group – The RF Trio – I mention various songs. Those various songs, the ones mentioned and the myriad not mentioned, were the result of either writing efforts or never-ending listening to and searching for material. To that end, a long time ago I bought a Burl Ives album. It had about 25 tracks. Here is one of them.

I recorded this in the living room of Doug, one of my fraternity brothers. Doug was the guy from Screen Saver who fixed my 1955 Plymouth at the Winter Carnival the night that Barb had taken – justifiably – leave of my life, and Tom and I had gone off to see what sort of adventures it might be possible to have in Bend Oregon in the winter of 1964. The song was recorded in 1973.

The video was shot in the Paris Aquarium in 2007.

SOS

SOS

In Screen Saver I mention that on a fuel stop at Clark Air Force Base in Manila on the trip to Vietnam I went into a cafeteria type of place where there were vast steam tables with a lumpy, viscous substance that was apparently being offered to the troops as food. I subsequently – after some time in Saigon – learned that the substance, which was also on offer in the Officers' Clubs where I ate most of my meals, was called SOS. I guess that stood for shit on a shingle. Even later in my tour, one of my fellow officers started waxing poetic one day about how good the stuff was. He waxed so poetic that I had to try it, no matter how awful it looked. I soon found myself also waxing poetic about it. It was really good. I have never seen a recipe for it, but I have been able to duplicate it with a fair degree of accuracy.

Ingredients

8 ounces of ground beef

2 or 3 garlic cloves

Olive oil (just a little)

1/8^th cup of flour

Whipping cream

Lea and Perrins

English muffin

Cooking

Use a garlic press to get some garlic in a cast iron fry pan. Put in a little olive oil. Put in the ground beef and blend the oil and the beef and the garlic into a kind of uniform paste. Turn the gas up to high (if you are cooking electric, let the element get red before you put the pan on it). Cover and let cook for a few minutes – 3 to 5 minutes. Remove the lid and there should be a mass of beef and garlic that is partially cooked and is kind of like a beef patty with garlic laced into it. Break it up some, but leave it in lots of chunks. Don't break it down to the size of the grind of the beef. SOS is supposed to be lumpy. Turn the heat down to medium. Turn the chunks a few times until they are done and put the flour in and mix it up with the meat with a wooden spoon. That should yield a bunch of beef and garlic chunks coated with flour. Brown those a bit. Then add some whipping cream. At this point you are turning the mix into a sort of country cream gravy. It will thicken and need some water to thin it down a bit. When it looks like sausage gravy put the mix on your previously toasted English muffin halves and eat.

My Pig Illustration

When I was in Brittany in 2005 I was in a great little town called Point Croix. At the market there was a farmer's truck with a pig logo on it. I took a picture of the logo and recently, using Adobe Illustrator, made an illustration of it. So here it is.

If you came here from the future, you might want to go back to "The Joys of Illustrator, Part One".

Pink Dunes

See, they really are pink. I guess it is because there is a lot of sandstone in the area – all those big rocks with holes in them and all – and red becomes pink when it gets ground down to sand sized particles. Or so it would seem.

COIN War

COIN – counter insurgency – is not an acronym that has just been recently invented by some sprightly young Washington pundit. We used that same acronym back in the last century. We used that acronym mostly in relationship to the Vietnam Debacle. It was not named the Vietnam Debacle at the time we were using the acronym though. The name Vietnam Debacle came into being after we had declared victory after eight or ten years of thrashing around diplomatically and militarily and had gotten out. I was never sure what year that exit had occurred because by the time it had occurred I had spent my pre-requisite year in the "war effort" (we called it the "war effort" then) and had, after another subsequent year spent in a sub basement of some building at Offutt AFB in Omaha gotten out of the Air Force. Once out of the Air Force I had stopped paying any attention to what was going on with the war effort. It was my version of post non-combat stress disorder. But apparently it (getting out) had occurred because not long after the time it must have occurred the guys that we had been fighting while we were thrashing around had come into South Vietnam and had set up a government. My disorder never allowed me to know, or care, when that had occurred but it must have occurred because I am told that there is a country called Vietnam. I guess we like to trade with them. I guess we need their rice. I never knew.

But back to COIN.

What I learned when I was in training at Lowery Air Force Base in Denver being trained to be an Intelligence Officer was that there were very few – really only one – examples of successful COIN operations on the part of Western Powers. The one example that our teachers – one of whom was an RAF Flight Lieutenant (there was an "F" in there somewhere, but I know not where) – could reference was Malaysia. The British had conducted a successful COIN operation in Malaysia. And it had only taken thirty years. In fact the key take away from the example of Malaysia was that if a country signs up for a COIN operation, that country had better be ready for a long slog, of thirty years or more.

But all of that is just background information.

I heard today that the republicans are all saying that we can't afford a trillion dollar health care reform bill. I keep hearing, but it is probably all lies, that that trillion dollars is paid for in a variety of cost offsetting ways. Anyway, the republicans are, on the other hand, pretty enthusiastic about war in any form and the one in Afghanistan in particular. That may be because both the Afghan Debacle (is it too soon for that name?) and the Iraq Debacle have been conducted off budget. Apparently that allows the trillion or so that those two Debacles have cost to date to flow straight through to the aggregate national debt without stopping off as a part of any annual deficit. Adding to the deficit would have been pretty annoying to the American people, so our leaders of all stripes and colors just let it flow through to the debt. Since that debt is something about which we rarely speak – probably due to its enormity – the whole war financing method is pretty good politics.

The republican's enthusiasm for the Afghan Debacle, should, I would hope, but I may be assuming where I should be verifying – those guys are pretty slippery – include the fact that they accept the hundred billion a year price tag. Again, even if they accept it they are really off the hook because, unlike health care which needs to be accounted and paid for, the twin Debacles are just paid for out of some magic purse full of foo foo dust.

So what I am about to say is already, even before I say it, trumped. But I have to say it anyway.

If I take thirty years and multiply it by a hundred billion - not counting the post war costs of veterans' medical benefits (we learned from the Walter Reed Debacle – there is a mounting number of Debacles here – that we really don't intend to offer much in the way of veteran's benefits anyway), inflation and related nuisances - I get three trillion dollars. And that is three trillion that, although it is off budget it does go to the aggregate national debt. Last time I looked that aggregate national debt was about eleven trillion. Good thing that interest rates are so low.

I guess three trillion not budgeted and not paid for compared to one trillion which is to be budgeted and paid for is a much better deal.

Of course the crowd to whom that appears to be a good deal mostly believes that the earth is six thousand years old.

 

The War Surtax

Everybody has been assuming since Sunday that tonight – Tuesday 1 December - the president is going to announce a significant increase in troops to be sent to Afghanistan. See my November post "Re-Run" for how I feel about that assumption which is apparently about to become fact. But life moves on.

Moving on, therefore, I am curious about something.

I heard just a few moments ago on NPR's "Morning Edition" that the number of troops to be sent is thought to be going to be about thirty thousand. It is also thought that the cost will be about thirty billion a year. Apparently all those Goldman Sachs' bonuses have cut into the Federal budget so much that even thirty billion seems like a lot of money. Various among our elected representatives even have been heard in public utterances occurring during breaks from their meetings with their various lobbyist sponsors that they are not at all sure that we can pay for thirty thousand additional troops in Afghanistan.

So they are suggesting that we probably will need to impose a one percent income tax surtax to pay for the endeavor. The last time we had one of those was to help pay for the iteratively incremental inflow of troops into Vietnam. And that worked out well.

One of the advantages, those lawmakers are pointing out, to such a surtax is that it would make all of us feel more of a sense of ownership of the action in Afghanistan. We need to pay for all the war we are getting they assert.

In a previous post, "Potpourri", I discuss the current persistent use of the debating error "begging the question" in most current discussion of various important issues. The assertion, above, that we need to pay for what we are getting is yet another example of this phenomenon. It is elliptical – the proof being offered that is in itself unproved – is not stated ("you all want to fight a war in Afghanistan") but it is there nonetheless. And it "proves" that we need to pay.

So where do we have any evidence that we all want to fight a war in Afghanistan? Where does it say that we all want to go through the motions again of thrashing around for some currently un-determined number of years and then declare victory, get out and watch whoever it was that we thought we were fighting take over after we leave?

One percent of my annual income tax bill is not a life threatening amount of money, but I have no interest paying it for fighting a war in Afghanistan. So can I send my surtax to Goldman Sachs?

RF Trio Redux

One of the multiple story threads in Screen Saver is the genesis of the RF Trio. Joe and Dave and I really wanted to make a living as entertainers and we gave it as good a go as college kids were able in the early 1960s. But circumstances – Vietnam being the biggest – mitigated against that happening. As time and our lives wandered forward we would upon occasion get together and try to sing again. It was usually pretty sad. Luckily we had lots of beer and good humor to cover the fact that the songs just weren't there anymore. One in awhile, though, there would be the exception, or nearly so. This is one of them.

The video sequence is from images captured on the trip to Paris – originally it had been for three, but it had become for two by the time we went – that Betsy and I went on in 2006. That was the trip in which I realized that the tree on Avenue Rapp, the street which was the home of the residents of the quilt, was a giant fig. The images in the video are from le Musee d'Orsay and l'Orangerie.

Lady Bugs in December

I liked this one so much that I'm re-posting it in the new month.

A couple of years ago my wife and I stopped at an attraction on the way back to Seattle from a bile trip in the Santa Fe and Taos region. The attraction was called the Pink Dunes National Monument. The place was amazing. Everywhere one looked there were pink dunes. That was probably why they called it the Pink Dunes National Monument. There were some hiking paths indicated and we set out on one of them. Almost immediately the pink dunes were full of interesting and beautiful plants, most of which I had never seen before. In the process of photographing one of the ones that I had seen before – yucca – I noticed that it was alive with lady bugs. Closer examination showed why. The yucca was also alive with aphids. There were a great many more aphids than there were lady bugs and that was good for the lady bugs because aphids are sort of like cattle to lady bugs. I've never been clear about what it is that lady bugs do to or with aphids, but it has something to do with food. The lady bugs either eat or milk, or both, the lady bugs. I could visualize the lady bug eating an aphid, but I had a lot of trouble picturing the lady bug milking an aphid. I didn't even know where the aphids' udder and related equipment might be located. I wasn't even sure whether they had such equipment. And that was, in substantial part, why I had such a problem with visualizing the milking process, if indeed such a process actually existed. In any event I saw neither eating nor milking while I was observing the creatures, but I got some good pictures and when I got back to Seattle and took a look at the pictures I had taken, I discovered that, due to the fairly dense pixel depth of my pictures, I could zoom in on them with Photo Shop and extract fairly intimate pictures of the lady bugs farming their aphids. Here is one of them.

More Lady Bugs

Due to absolutely no interest and demand from nobody I am add ig some more lady bug pictures.