Christopher Merle

Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, but first I need more coffee.

Category: LiveJournal (Page 22 of 27)

These are my posts imported from LiveJournal.

And a Sidewalk Runs Through It

June 23, 2010 /

Photobucket

Now then, Montana is a lovely land
And upon it grows fine grain
Surely `tis a place of residence
For a soldier to remain
Where the sugar cane is plentiful
And the tea grows on the tree
Well, I never had but the one sweetheart
And now he`s gone far away from me

OK, so I changed Holland to Montana. Of course sugar cane and tea doesn’t grow in Holland either. So the song makes as much sense referring to Montana. Mel and I spent a week in Missoula. She was teaching a week long class at the University of Montana and I was left to my own devices. I think the one thing that surprised me was there were still quite a few snowcapped mountains. There were even a few days of rain which became snow on a few more of those peaks. The picture above was taken at Fort Missoula. Apparently I was only a few hundred yards from the Bitteroot River but didn’t know it until later.

Missoula is surprisingly metropolitan. They have all the big box stores and major restaurant chains, replete with horrific traffic. Avoid Reserve Rd (Dr, Ave?) if possible. Downtown Missoula on the north bank the Clark Fork River is lovely and small. On the south bank is the university and older residential neighborhoods. If this were all there were to Missoula, I’d give the place two thumbs up. Newer housing editions spread out across the valley floor to the south and industrial and commercial structures to the west. You still can’t beat the natural beauty of the mountains and scenery whether you are in the newer parts of Missoula or the older parts.

It was nice seeing author Maggie Bonham though we didn’t get to go out and see her and her husband’s place out in the Montana countryside. I’ll post more pictures later. I hope we’ll get to go back and see more of the 4th largest state in the Union.

Mount Lemmon-ade

June 8, 2010 /

Mount Lemmon just north of Tucson started off life as an internment camp during WWII. For conscientious objectors. The prisoners built a highway up to the mountain. The camp has long since closed but now there is a small community called Summerhaven up about 8,000 ft. I took my parents there today. It was pretty nice. Mostly quiet except for the construction equipment. You could see where the trees had burned during a devastating fire in 2003. A lot of homes were destroyed and have since been rebuilt. The houses all have a Swiss chalet feel to them. We stopped at The Cookie House for a ginourmous cookie sat outside in the cool mountain air and had some other snacks & drinks we’d brought with us.

All in all it was a nice outing. Got us out of the heat in the valley for a little while. Currently at 105F.

There is also a ski resort up on Mount Lemmon which is the southern most place you can ski in the continental US. Anway they turned what was a not so happy place into a nice place to visit. Though unless you are hiking, camping, or skiing there really isn’t much else to do up there.

Update 6/11/2010

I’ve finally posted some photos from the trip on my blog. I posted a subset of those on my Facebook page. Those have captions. These do not.

Windy Point

It all makes sense

May 31, 2010 /

I saw a graphic called i, Republican with a parody on Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. As I read it, I felt it didn’t quite ring true. I knew that there were Democrats in Congress who also obeyed these three laws. And if you’ve been following Congress for the past 20 years, you will see just how true these laws are:

i, Congress

The 3 Laws

  1. Congress may not injure a corporation or, through inaction, allow a corporation to come to lose money.
  2. Congress must obey any orders given to it by corporations, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. Congress must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Signal to Noise Ratio

May 31, 2010 /

In my conversion from being libertarian (with a small L) to a progressive (because I couldn’t bring myself to calling myself liberal) has been a journey fraught with mistakes. In rejecting my old politics, I’d forgotten what was valuable from that old political belief system. Just as in rejecting Christianity (my Catholicism) I’d rejected all of it. After watching Joseph Campbell’s Power of Myth with Bill Moyers I was able to reclaim and keep what was good from my Catholic upbringing. It’s time I do the same with my political leanings.

Note- I use the lowercase L because I never joined the party. The reason is they wanted me to sign an oath:

"I hereby certify that I do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political of social goals."

I agree with it in principle and I totally oppose the neocon doctrine of preemption, but why did I not sign it or take it? I can’t quite articulate why at the moment and I apologize for that but it boils down to that I think of it as an unspoken principle. No party should advocate the use of force to achieve political ends. And yet we know that our government controlled by these parties use force all the time to do so. They also use laws to achieve political and social goals that are just as detrimental as the use of force. Such as the poorly named ‘war on drugs’.

But I digress.

Although political and religious ideas can never reach the precision of a scientific theory, I believe that using the principles of science to form a better view of the world is essential in producing ideas that are workable in the real world. And so I believe in taking what is useful and figuring out what works. I rejected libertarianism because they were never going to get into power and frankly their philosophy prevented them from doing so. They want small gov’t. Well to trot out a phrase ‘nature abhors a vacuum’. I concluded that corporations would fill that power vacuum left by the gov’t. And to me libertarianism became a bait and switch philosophy. I started looking at the history of progressivism and found myself agreeing with the Teddy Roosevelt era progressive policies: break up monopolies, ending child labor are just a few of the things I agree with.

Another note: I should have also questioned whether or not progressivism is also a bait and switch philosophy.

Anyway my point is I believe in the adage of not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And that we should listen to our political opponents. The problem is picking the signal from the noise. And since Obama has become President the noise level has become extremely high. So here’s a nice clean signal extracted from the noise.

Republicans and Libertarians have the right idea here. One lesson we should all take to heart.

I’m not quite sure a high signal-to-noise ratio means there’s more signal than noise or more noise than signal. Does low signal-to-noise ratio mean that’s a bad thing? Anyway if the number on the left is higher than on the right, that’s a good thing. It means there is more signal than noise. So 2:1 is good and 1:2 is bad. I’ve forgotten a lot of my radio training.

Postscript: I should probably add there are differences between liberals and progressives, but the terms have become so conflated in public discourse that it’s takes time to explain the differences. I’d recommend Wikipedia as a good starting place to get the basic definitions about the differences.

2010 The Year of Destruction

May 22, 2010 /

For the past few years I’ve been give names to years. I can’t seem to find where I posted them or what emails I sent them in so the best I can do is guess at what they were called and when. I’m pretty sure I named 2007 The Year of the Fuckhead. There was a lot of fuckheadedness going on that year. 2008 I think was The Year The Chickens Came Home to Roost. I don’t recall what I named 2009 but I think it was probably a positive name. I think I named 2006 and I don’t recall any names for 2005 or earlier. In hindsight I’d rename 2009 The Year Evertyhing Was Supposed to Change But Didn’t.

We didn’t get health reform this year. We got a health insurance and drug company profitability law. There were a few items that were positive in it. It is possible for it to be morphed into real health reform but it’ll be another 20 years before we even think about it seriously again. We are getting a toothless Wall Street reform bill. I’m sure there will be a few scraps for Main Street.

We are watching perhaps the greatest man-made natural disaster in the history of the human race unfold before our very eyes in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s certainly in the top 10. I predict this time next year BP will cease to exist as a company. If only to avoid paying for the damages they’ve wrought. And even if the flow were shut off today we won’t know the full impact for weeks, months, and years. We are stuck in two wars with no end in sight. The right wing in America has gone batshit insane. They haven’t gotten violent yet but they are making noises. Actually I’m somewhat hopeful they are directing their misplaced energies into the electoral process. We are still in the midst of a great recession though there are signs it’s not getting worse and stabilizing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the economy is improving marginally.

As long as the middle class in America loses ground, as long as there are tent cities, as long as there are millions of undocumented workers, as long as the national debt soars, as long as we stay entangled in foreign wars, as long as we don’t take care of our wounded vets, as long as there are millions of unemployed, I do not see conditions improving in America. I do not feel hopeless but neither do I feel hopeful. All I can say is that I do not feel helpless.

Barry McGuire’s song The Eve of Destruction is as timely now as when it was first performed in 1965. It shouldn’t be that way but it is. And with everything that I see happening now I can’t see conditions improving for a long long time. America isn’t going to collapse but it has some very rocky years ahead of it. Since 2009 didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to 2010 was supposed to be crunch time. The time to really make a positive change. I’m not seeing it. I’m not depressed either. I just know that we are in a time of transition and that it’s going to be unpleasant to say the least. November will seal the deal on whether we move forward or we are totally screwed. There is so much more I could kvetch about but why?

The way things are shaping up I’m gonna call 2010 The Year of Destruction. Take it away, Barry.

Update May 31, 2010

I’d forgotten too mention there was a horrible earthquake in Haiti which was the worst earthquake in the world to hit the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. I think 100,000 died. Then shortly afterwards there was a massive earthquake in Chile. Thankfully they were better prepared. I was reminded of this by seeing a picture of a sinkhole recently formed in Guatamala City after a tropical storm killed hundreds and a volcano erupted. And now Israel attacks a humanitarian convoy in the Mediterranean Sea killing 10 and wounding 30. I knew Israel would not let the flotilla land in Gaza.

I should also add that the leak has still flowing strong after several failed attempts to stop it. It also could not have come at a worse time for the Gulf of Mexico. It is the height of breeding and spawning season for sea turtles, fish and fowl. The La. marshes are also critical stopover habitat for migrating birds. The bluefin tuna being fished to extinction spawns in the Gulf which is only one of two places in the world where it does.

Update June 1, 2010

Oh, and must not forget the unpronounceable volcano in Iceland that grounded air traffic in Europe.

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