The Lessons of Fort Dix

One wonders whether the FBI investigation that bagged the six Muslims planning a massacre at Fort Dix involved wiretaps? Were the perps' spied on? Were they profiled? Did the FBI infiltrate as many agents into Methodist churches and Reform synagogues as into New Jersey mosques? Were the perps' rights as scrupulously protected as if it was peacetime? I hope not.

What comes after Gen X?

On Jeopardy! College Tournament the final question was "Who was the first president to conduct a televised news conference?" One of the kids, a fairly smart one, thought it was LBJ. I was stunned. How could he have thought that? Then I realized he was born twenty years after Johnson left office. To him Johnson and Eisenhower are equally figures from the Dark Ages. Another moment of feeling senior....

You Heard It Here First

Amid the shouting and brouhaha of the French election campaign, the name that has not been mentioned is that of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher was to Britain what Lee Iacocca was to Chrysler. She was elected to reform a British economy running on welfare, deficits, unemployment, strikes, and inflation, and she did it. Britain had become the Sick Man of Europe. Today the British economy is the envy of Europe.

Sarkozy was elected with essentially the same mandate as Thatcher. The contrast with the defender of welfare and political correctness, the Socialist Segolene Royal, could not have been clearer. Whether he will be as successful as Thatcher will unfold over the next five or ten years.

The problem for Americans is whether France, without its snug status quo economy will be as much fun for tourists. Can a recently remodeled restaurant or hotel ever be as good a tourist experience as the old one, unchanged since 1912, was? Can big box malls be far off?

Little Ones and the Big One

Life is a big defeat. We look both ways before crossing the street, we get vaccinations, we stay out of dark alleys, we dodge the draft, we drive defensively. But in the end we die anyway.

That is why small victories are so important. A few weeks ago my kitchen drain stopped draining. But the clog was porous enough that the water would go down eventually. A few days ago the water stopped going down at all. Standing water, dirty dishes. A fetid slum. Guaranteed Miraculous liquid drain cleaner had no effect whatever. Finally I was home and I had a snake in hand.

Fifteen years ago I spent several weekends straining and swearing, to unscrew a rusted-tight galvanized steel drain plug. Each weekend I upped the torque ante and the risk of breaking the pipe. After it ever so reluctantly came out, I replaced the galvanized rust blob with a black plastic screw-in plug. Today I reaped the benefit of my long ago prudence. Out the plug came with no screaming or gnashing of teeth whatever. To quote the sage, "Calloo callay!"

I snaked out a disgusting blob and ran the water and behold! Nothing. It still backed up. Open the plug a second time and run the snake the opposite direction. More disgusting blobs. Free running drain.

It ain't V-E Day but it made my day. Washed the dishes, washed the sinks. I am a simple man and simple things make me happy.

From Lordsburg

Life is full of major defeats and small victories. My small victories today were several. My defeat was major.

I have learned the routine with getting the decorative and thoroughly inconvenient wheel covers off and bought my own pipe wrench so I could get them off myself. With the wheel covers off one can get at the lug nuts. (The Lansing minor league baseball team is the Lansing Lugnuts by the way, in case you were wondering.) They are an oddball size and the truckstop where I wanted them tightened to the specified torque did not have a socket that would fit. I went to a few places that didn't have large sockets, then to one that had a row of them but I didn't know which to get. But by the trial and error of buying one after another and returning them, I discovered that all day I had been wanting a 30mm socket and had not known it. I bought a pipe wrench in the same place. Later I will find a place with a Filson wrench and dump the pipe wrench in California, but for now.....

I actually succeeded by mutual intimations in bribing the wheel-and-tire guy at the truck stop in Deming to work on my bus (using my exciting new 30mm socket) ahead of the 18-wheelers lined up there. Even a palm already greasy can be greased. $30 and worth every penny. It was one of those small adventures that are precious for being preposterous.

Between Deming and Lordsburg on I-10 is a mountain pass which marks the continental divide. For days now there has been a stiff wind out of the west (presumably Mariah) which for me is a head wind. The Pachyderm has an immense cross section to the wind and clearly was going to get me killed by slowing to a crawl on the way up to the pass. My small victory was having the foresight /intimidation to get to Lordsburg via Silver City, an additional 40 miles but over little-used roads.

In addition to other small victories this morning, this eveing I succeeded in broiling steak over a portable Coleman grill I got in Las Cruces. I have been looking forward to this for a while now. Restaurant steak is usually too salty for me so I have learned to avoid it. And there is a sense of accomplishment in cooking one's own dinner.

The last of the small victories was delightful. I arrived in Lordsburg at dusk and was looking for a place to look at a telephone book and came upon Holiday Inn. In looking for a place to park I discovered a large graveled area next to a wide field with a few heavy trucks parked in it. I parked there too. The people at the desk were ungracious because I was not going to stay at their motel and because I am quite dirty from crawling around and under the Pachyderm all day. In returning to the Pachyderm in the broad graveled area, I discovered that I can get Holiday Inn's wi-fi signal just fine. Smile.

The defeat was that in spite of the new alternator, the Pachyderm's electrical system still occasionally shuts down under heavy load and sometimes under not-so-heavy load. It did it once between Deming and Silver City and again between Silver City and Lordsburg. (I love Western place names.) The first time it started again almost immediately. The second time I sat in the road for fifteen minutes before it would start. Even the emergency flasher was disabled. I will take it to yet another mechanic in the morning

But in spite of this frustration, during the whole day I was active and busy, I exerted myself, and enjoyed most of what I did.. I accumulated almost 12,000 steps on my walkmeter. That is a successful day, whether the Pachyderm works consistently or not.

The SOB's at Freightliner El Paso accomplished almost nothing in spite of charging a great deal and wasting eight days of my time. I got almost to Deming, New Mexico and had a sidewall blowout on a front tire. That took two full days of screwing around to get a front tire replaced. And to get the other tire replaced as well because of cracks in its sidewalls. I had the air filter replaced. It was clogged and changing it significantly improved the performance of the engine. But it still spontaneously shuts down under heavy load, i.e. highway speeds. I had assumed that fixing the air filter and thus the air pressure problem would also fix the shutting down problem since I assumed that the engine was being throttled off by too little air.

Now I have no idea at all what the problem is. I drove back to the mechanics shop in Deming that changed the air filter (it is a huge cylinder and hard to get to). They said that they didn't do such work and that I had to go to an RV service department to get it fixed and the nearest ones were in Las Cruces. So I backtracked fifty miles to Las Cruces. And learned the exact opposite. The RV service department I spoke to said they did NOT do that kind of work. So my trip to Las Cruces was pointless. But since I am here I am going to talk to yet another mechanic tomorrow. So it goes on and on. I cannot see a way get out of this without solving it.

While it is discouraging and dispiriting, it is still true that I have gotten three of the problems fixed: the tailpipe, the air filter, and the tires. If I can get the engine shutting down problem fixed, I think I can go home.

The News from Pakistan

New York Times, 20 March 2007

"At least 46 people died in the fighting between militants and tribesmen on Monday and Tuesday, the military official said without elaborating.

The two officials, speaking in Islamabad, said the clash was between pro-government tribesmen and foreign militants. However, a local intelligence official said the fighting was part of a feud among rival militant groups."

Is it still about Israel, or can we give that up now?
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The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

Maybe it isn't. The one customer review of this thing says that it is just a reprint of a not very good book published in 1930. The original covered only French gargoyles and was not well laid out, poorly researched, and badly written. I have sent for it and a few others with the word 'gargoyles' in the title. I may yet become an itinerant
photographe living in a gypsy van. I will know in a few days. It might even provide a place to start and plagiarize from using better modern technology. It might be that the main significance of this thing is that somebody at Dover Press recently thought that a book of photographs of gargoyles was worth publishing.

A day late and a euro short

The project I have been planning to spend about a year of my life doing, has been done. I have been obsessing on the right lens, the right camper-van, and the right season for photographing Europe's gargoyles for a coffee table book. Out of an abundance of caution I checked on Amazon this morning. I was and am aghast that the book, vaguely in mind for more than fifteen years (since Carcassonne with Patty, whenever that was), has been done. And only last August. The Gargoyle Book: 572 Examples from Gothic Architecture (Paperback). I am undone. I literally don't know what to do with myself.

from Arches National Park, Utah

The subject here is sandstone, all the marvels, antiquities, colors, and layers of it, the things ancient seas have built and wind and water have carved of it Arches National Park is not misnamed. Among its other wonders and glories, great sandstone arches abound.

I am going to write Ellen Tauscher, my congresswoman, to ask, nay demand, that something be done about the names perpetuated by the Park Service. I demand that Double Arch be renamed Petrarch and Beatrice Arch, Turret Arch must become Plutarch. In honor of Utah's own Brigham Young, Landscape Arch must become Heresiarch. West Window and East Window must become Patriarch and Matriarch. My demands go on and on, but those are the non-negotiable ones.

I hiked up to Heresiarch today, the extraordinary long narrow one on the cover of flyers about the park. Part of it fell down in 1991 which made it still longer and narrower. There were people under it at the time but they ran away upon the initial rockfall and no one was hurt. There is even a picture of the rock falling. The Park Service has now gone the Forest Service one better by closing off the area underneath for fear of Hazardous Arch Failure.


When I was at Balancing Rock it occurred to me that though the thing has been where it is for tens of thousands of years, it must eventually fall. One would have to be a schlemazzel on a cosmic scale to have Balancing Rock fall on him. But we all have to go sometime. I think it would be good to go in a way so innately preposterous that there would be an inkling of laughter at the last. But later. Much later.

Reading about and seeing geology, deep time, and uniformitarianism is always relieving. I consider the layers in the sandstone as I walk over them. Each tenth of an inch thick layer is a year's cycle of seasons and there are miles and miles of them as I walk, and more miles and miles of them that eroded away long ago. Life seems less serious and compelling then.

News from the Middle East

Would like to hear the bad news first and more bad news second, or the other way around?

That the agreement between Hamas and the Fatah arranged at Mecca brokered by Saudi Arabia ended the fighting between them is well known. Less well known are the terms. One of them is that Fatah agreed to PA schoolbooks teaching that the destruction of Israel is a religious duty, not just a nationalist obligation. A nationalist obligation can be negotiated about, however insincerely. A religious struggle (Ribat) cannot. http://www.spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=1908 has quotes.

The other not so good news is that an American Jewish group, Brit Tzedek vShalom, has already come to the defense of the new textbooks. They wrote a letter to Senator Clinton who had publicly criticized the new textbooks, asking her to reconsider, claiming the new textbooks "encourage a peaceful resolution of the conflict" and "endorse democracy".

For the Record

America's "newspaper of record" as it calls itself, has long been considered to be the New York Times. It isn't. The Washington Post recently ran an investigative series on the treatment of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital which resulted in the dismissal of the Secretary of the Army and the commander of the hospital followed by the dismissal of his appointed successor. This is the highest and best tradition of journalism, both as reporting and as uncovering. The Washington Post, not the New York Times, a generation ago did the investigative series that led to the undoing of the Nixon Administration.

The New York Times has stumbled from internal scandal to internal scandal and its reporting has been locked into an ideological rigidity of that kind often characterized as "mediocre". The New York Times seems to have little to recommend it beside the identification with New York. Reading an account of events in the New York Times leaves me wondering what actually happened. Reading one in the Washington Post leaves me thinking that that is probably what happened.

Stuck Inside of Joplin with the .....

I have the dubious situation of being stuck in Joplin for a few days. Driving through eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, my back became more and more painful. Long since familiar with the signs, I looked for a decent motel in which to hole up. There are none in the dwindling and run-down small agricultural towns of the southeastern corner of Kansas, hence Joplin, the local metropolis. It is all for the best because there was a thunderstorm last night and it is raining today, so I would not have been enthusiastic about driving anyway. Also I am ensconced in a very nice Hilton hotel so I am not unhappy. I can barely walk but I am going to try walking outside this afternoon to see if that helps. And aspirin -- I am going to try aspirin.

It is also an opportunity to explore a whole new dimension in my no-longer-young life -- reading glasses. I am still exploring how many diopters of correction is best. I am toying with 2.00, 2.25, and 2.50. They are cheap and readily available so it is easy to experiment. Having tried them in New Orleans and finding them remarkably clarifying, I am rediscovering the printed page. As always I brought along tons of books, none of which I have heretofore so much as touched. Now I am touching them. Another reason not to be uncontrollably distraught about my sojourn in Missouri.

Which religious training did Obama get?

It is now accepted that Fox's report that Barack Obama attended a madrassah in Jakarta in the 1960's was false. But only if you want it to be.

A video clip of the school shows it to be a secular public school with boys and girls playing together, men and women teachers in Western clothing, and the men teachers beardless.

BUT

In the same video clip the headmaster of the school says that the Muslim children were given religious training in Islam, the Christian children were given religious training in Christianity, and so on.

Which religious training did Obama get? His step-father, though non-practicing, was nominally a Muslim. Obama's middle name is Hussein. When he registered for the Catholic school his religion was listed as "Muslim". Asked why Obama was listed as a Muslim by the new school, the Obama campaign's spokesman Charles Gibbs replied, "I don't know."

Unlike Charles Gibbs, I do know. In a Muslim country like Indonesia proselytizing Muslims to other religions such as Catholicism is illegal. Which would make it imperative that children entering the Catholic school be registered as Muslims if they had had Muslim religious training, so they could be exempted from being taught the catechism. Which also clarifies the throwing-sand-in-your-eyes attempt to confuse the issue with which school Obama attended first.

When I was seven and eight I attended a Jewish Sunday school. That has something to do with what I believe and feel to this day, who I am. What a person learns at that age has a profound influence on his attitudes throughout his life.

At the very least the scandal here is that Obama is getting a free ride from the press, partly because the initial story was over-stated and partly because it came from Fox, and partly of course because Obama is the Great White Hope of the liberals. The initial story that Obama had attended a radical Muslim madrassa having proven false, the press instantly dropped it. But had the story been that Obama had attended Muslim religious school training for two years as a child and that his mother kept a koran in their home, they would have found that the story was true.

Does it matter that Obama was trained as a, let us assume, moderate Muslim? Considering that the koran explicitly teaches the Muslim duty of jihad and to kill Jews and subjugate Christians, I would say yes.

Mardi Gras

I had a good time. I was told there were far fewer people than pK (pre-Katrina) but that may already be the formation of a whole body of Good Old Days lies. Even if it were true, it was a good thing - there were lots of people. Next time I will have a different costume. This time I came as a Clueless Tourist but that was too ironic for most people, many of whom didn't realize it was a costume. My favorite costume was a woman who was dressed as a transvestite. No joke - she handed out wooden nickels with a printed legend describing herself as the doyenne of fake impersonators. Or it was a double imposture. I have no idea.

Katrina Aftermath

The Katrina damage in rural parishes along the coast was impressive. Every outbuilding, commercial building, and church was a broken wreck. In many places there were only bare foundation slabs. There were broken trees everywhere though one could see that the worst of it had been cleared. Equally impressive was the government's success in providing a seemingly endless supply of shiny new bright-colored manufactured homes, each on a three-or-more feet elevated flood platform or stilts. I saw very few wrecked houses, which means that the wreckage of the old ones had been cleared before the new ones were brought in.

The results in the city were more mixed. A large majority of the buildings have been, or are being, rehabilitated. On many only the fronts have been repainted - the sides still show the mud left by the receding waters. The high water mark is usually plainly visible. Around the French Quarter it was usually about or just above the level of the second floor. In other parts of the city there is lots of abandoned property, particularly in poorer quarters. The look of it was that it was slumlord income property which was already marginal before the storm and not worth the investment of restoring. That probably has something to do with the profile of the people still displaced.

Leesville

Leesville, Louisiana is in the Sabine River country bordering Texas. It is mixed patches of trees, open swards, lakes and rivers. Towns are few, small, and rundown. One can see how, if one were from here, one could come to love this country. If not, one would come here to sit in an aluminum boat, pretend to fish, drink beer, and listen to the quiet.

More Brokeback Mountain

Another Kick at Carter

You can take the boy out of the country, but you can't always take the Klan out of the boy.

Carter Explains the Problem

Carter's handwritten note on Carter Presidential Center letterhead stationery reads:

"1/26/07
To Rabbi Marvin Hier:

I don't believe that Simon Wiesenthal would have resorted to falsehood and slander to raise funds.

Sincerely,
Jimmy Carter"

I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief now that we know that the problem is not that Jimmy is a cracker antisemite but that Rabbi Hier is only in it for the money.