Home Soon

[Yes, it's sarcasm]

After endless screwing around with being sick first in Grande Prairie and now in Edmonton, I am reluctantly throwing in the towel.

I have been taking antibiotics for six days now and am at last able to eat normal food again. At least I hope so. I had real food for breakfast - lox and a bagel - and I am now waiting to see if my innards can handle it. The lox was greasy so I am uneasy about what will happen during the next few hours. It is remarkable how quickly and how much one comes to miss food. Oatmeal and soda crackers are technically food, but only technically.

I was willing to start bicycling again subject to the deconditioning of not having exercised regularly for two weeks. But I was not willing to start subject to both the deconditioning and the considerable debilitation from being sick. My sister Gail pointed out to me that I also faced the risk of a relapse and possibly getting sicker than before. And of being on the road when it happened. Which I hadn't thought of. It gave me pause.

The bicycle trip was becoming more a medical enterprise than a touristic one. This was supposed to be fun and it has stopped being so.

Even if I set out, there is nothing south of here but endless vistas of prairie for hundreds of kilometers south to Calgary and then more of the same into Montana. There is much to be said for prairie vistas but once that has been said, there is no more to say about them. I am too far east of the Rockies and it is too late in the season to do much of anything toward going home.

No, that isn't true. If I were fit and inclined, I could bull my way across Alberta, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and California in a month. The fact is that I am tired, sick, and discouraged. There is no point in pretending that I am forced out. The fact is that I am quitting because I don't want to do this anymore. I have been on the road since June 20, for just over two months now. It is just over.

So I have said the magic words, "the hell with it" and booked a flight home. I feel really crappy about it ending with a whimper but I would have felt a lot worse if it had ended with a bang.

Irene

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Air Swimmers

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A Policy Statement on the Deficit

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq1zpHF0J04

Mission Accomplished

[Nafissatou Diallo]

From today's Wall Street Journal -

Until his arrest, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was viewed as the only politician who could defeat France's President Nicolas Sarkozy in next year's election. Although Mr. Strauss-Kahn has yet to reveal his plans, few French Socialists believe the former chief of the International Monetary Fund can revive his presidential ambitions.

I think I owe Nafissatou Diallo an apology. In a previous blog entry I questioned her competence as a perjurer. But if the Wall Street Journal is correct, then she did exactly what she was sent to do. Success is the measure of a job well done.

Here I am speculating, but one could make the case that her story came unglued at exactly the right time. She was credible enough to convince the hotel management and security people that she was telling the truth. She was credible enough for the police investigators to believe her and the Manhattan prosecutor to file charges, ruining Mr. Strauss-Kahn and assuring the re-election of President Sarkozy.

This is the woman who was able to bring herself to tears in describing a gang-rape in her native Guinea that was later determined never to have happened.

But she was not credible enough to get the case brought to trial. Which prevented her from being investigated and cross-examined and subjected to deposition after deposition, during the course of which she might have revealed who put her up to it.

When one consider the Dreyfus Affair, if the French military establishment had merely disgraced Dreyfus, drummed him out of the army, and sent him to prison for a few years, nothing much else would have happened to him nor to the Army. Nobody would have investigated. They would have gotten away with it.

But instead they sent Dreyfus to Devil's Island for life. Which was dramatic enough that when exculpatory evidence came to light, it was worth Emile Zola's time to write 'J'Accuse' and worth

Georges Clemenceau's time to publish it in his newspaper L'Aurore.

The subsequent investigations and unraveling scandal between 1895 and 1906 permanently damaged the reputation of the French Army and of the class it was part of.

So Diallo had just the right amount of credibility - enough to knock Strauss-Kahn out of the race for the presidency of France - but not enough to convict him and make him a martyr, nor to risk too much investigation into who sent her.

Diallo, so far being an example of the difficulty of getting competent help in New York, is an example of to what high levels the arts of skulduggery, lying, and manipulation have been raised in our time.

What happened in New York was a seizure of the Elysee Palace for the next seven years, a clandestine coup d'etat. And it appears that they got away with it, in plain sight.

South African Liberation

[Nelson Mandela retired in 1998. He is now 93 years old.]

Remember when the end of apartheid in South Africa was going to mean the spread of democracy throughout Africa? Instead South Africa traded what it had, political clout, legitimacy, and mercenary soldiers, for what the Khadaffi regime had, which was, well, money. And oil.

Now that Khadaffi is discredited and all but overthrown, surely the South African government has seen the error of it ways and recognized its hypocrisy? Well, no.

JOHANNESBURG—The spreading rebel control of Libya on Monday appeared to deal a diplomatic setback to South Africa and other African nations that had argued a change in Libyan government should happen at the negotiating table and not on the battlefield.

South Africa, a continental power broker, has sought to bring rebels and Col. Moammar Gadhafi's forces together for talks to end the conflict. That stance hasn't changed.

Even as rebel trucks streamed into the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Monday, South Africa gave no indication it would recognize a rebel-led government. The U.S. and the U.K. are among more than 30 countries that recognize the rebel body, known as the National Transitional Council, as Libya's legitimate government.

Pretoria instead has supported an African Union plan for a transitional government once there is a "durable cease-fire." The transitional government should include elements from both the rebel forces and the current regime—but not Col. Gadhafi—and move toward drafting a new constitution and holding elections, according to the South African Minister of International Affairs, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.

"If this government falls, there is no government," she told reporters at a briefing.

She said there were plans "afoot" to form such a broad transitional government in that case.

So we have the heirs of Nelson Mandela supporting a brutal primitive military dictatorship, even after it has been overthrown by the revolt of its own people. Cool, huh?

This is morally consistent with the heirs of the revolution against apartheid sponsoring the overtly racist Durban I and Durban II anti-racism conferences, with their open anti-semitism, both held in Durban, South Africa.

This got so primitive and extreme that one of the main organizers of the conference, Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, was obliged to disavow the conference she had herself organized.

Let it not be said that this is just a failure of the ANC (African National Congress) party which has ruled the country essentially without opposition for more than twenty years now. The tenor of social life in South Africa can be estimated from the repeated lynchings of Zimbabwean immigrant workers by South African mobs.

They Wouldn't Do That. Would They?

From today's Wall Street Journal -

New York prosecutors are likely to seek dismissal of all criminal sexual assault charges against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter said.

The request, to be made Tuesday when Mr. Strauss-Kahn is due in New York State Supreme Court, comes after more than two months in which prosecutors for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. have probed not only Mr. Strauss-Kahn, but also his accuser, Sofitel hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo.

Ultimately, prosecutors have come to believe that in light of what they saw as serious questions about Ms. Diallo's credibility, it would be unlikely they could convince a jury that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, sexually assaulted the 32-year-old Guinean immigrant in his suite at the Sofitel on May 14, the person familiar with the matter said.

So this whole thing has come to nothing. Nothing, that is, except that it stayed in the news long enough to discredit Strauss-Kahn and take him out of contention for election as the next President of France.

No one but a crazy conspiracy theorist would suggest that anyone could have put Diallo up to removing by far the strongest Socialist candidate from contention. I think the greater scandal here is that it shows the difficulty of hiring a decent perjurer these days. If one can't get good help, how is capitalism to thrive?

Surgical Operations in the Middle East

From today's Wall Street Journal:

"In the first hour of the cease-fire, which Palestinian and Israeli media reported was starting Sunday evening, several rockets were fired into southern Israel. An Israeli government spokesman said Israel's responses to rocket fire would be "surgical" and measured. A spokesman for Hamas wasn't available to comment."

One can perhaps assume that the reason the spokesman wasn't available was.... Let's hope so.

Where is George Orwell when we need him?

[Mao-tse-tung]

According to today's Wall Street Journal, in commenting on the visit of Joe Biden to the People's Republic -

[Xinhua, the official organ of the Chinese government] urged Washington to "end its excessive reliance on overseas borrowing, make substantial reforms and cuts to its bloated entitlement programs, reduce budget deficits and restructure its economy."

"Bloated entitlement programs"? This is the Communist Party?

What can one expect from a politburo all of whom were born after the Long March and who were small children during the Cultural Revolution? More than ever we can join Karl Marx in saying, "The workers have no homeland."

Auto-emancipation

In the August 2011 issue of Scientific American appears this squib reprinted from the August 1861 issue of the same magazine.

Civil War at Sea

The schooner S.J. Waring, which had been captured by the privateer Jeff Davis, arrived in this port on July 21st, having been retaken by the black steward, with the assistance of one of the seamen. When the S.J. Waring was taken, her captain and mate were taken off, but the colored steward, two of the seamen and a passenger were left on board. The steward having discovered by a conversation which he heard, that it was the intention of the prize master Captain Amiel to sell him into slavery as soon as the schooner arrived in Charleston, determined to make a desperate attempt to retake the vessel. The steward's name is William Tillman.

The steward was engaging in auto-emancipation. He did not wait for the authorities. He did not have faith in the system. He did not implore anyone's conscience. He did not organize a reform movement. He did not wait for better times. He did not shrug and say, "What're you gonna do?" He did not petition. He did not put it to a vote after free and fair debate.

He freed himself by force, with permission from no one. William Tillman engaged in auto-emancipation.

In 1882 a Russian Jew named Leo Pinsker published the founding document of the Zionist movement, titled "Auto-emancipation" which advocated that the Jews do for themselves what William Tillman had done for himself twenty one years earlier.

William Tillman was a Zionist. The IDF are William Tillmans.

A Common Misunderstanding

When I was a teenager I rebelled against belief in a G_d whom I had been led to believe was a bearded white-haired old man on a throne amid clouds in heaven.

Only when I grew up did I come to understand that what I didn’t believe in was a stupid caricature, a cartoon.

So let us get one thing perfectly clear - G_d is not a bearded, white-haired, old man on a throne on a cloud. G_d is not an Angry Santa Claus. That is an image that has been provided over the centuries for children and those too ignorant to understand anything else.

The fact that you no longer believe the fable you were told about as a child does not mean there is no G_d. It means the bubbe meisse you were told is not true.

Literate people have never believed that. Greek philosophy shows that not even Roman and Greek pagans believed that Zeus and the other gods were literally over-sized human beings as shown in statues.

I would point out that in the Middle Ages the hardest thing to believe about religion was that G_d created the universe out of nothing, and that nothing preceded it.

Modern astronomy has established that the universe came into existence in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. If that is not creation out of nothing, then what would be?

Further, the physics is that the Big Bang is when space-time came into existence. Before time existed there was no ‘before’. So the two major obstacles to belief in creation have been laid to rest by the ten or eleven observational bases for believing the Big Bang theory.

The Big Bang also implies that everything in the universe has a common origin, has a common cause, a common destiny, and everything that happens or can happen is the expression of the same common process.

Even Deism, the theory that G_d created the universe and then abandoned it, does not survive the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang does NOT posit that something happened at a moment a long time ago and then nothing happened since. What it does say is that universal expansion started then and continues now, not a moving outward into space, but an expansion of space itself. Which is to say that the act of creation, the expansion, is continuous and is going on now, this very instant, and will go on forever, to the best of our knowledge.

None of this should be confused with pantheism. All possible universes throughout eternity are, according to Spinoza, the Face of G_d - a surface or manifestation.

To deny the unity of the universe one would have to engage in the same denial of Big Bang observations as the fundamentalists use to deny the existence of dinosaurs. Nothing but closing one’s mind to evidence will support the atheist’s unexamined 19th Century mechanistic assumptions.

One can easily extend this argument to the results of Feynman’s two slit experiment in the 1940’s. He found that the quantum mechanical wave function collapses in the presence of an observer. Since the wave -particle duality is a demonstrated fact, there must be a physical significance to there being an observer. Human beings are recent, quantum particles are ancient. Yet their properties depend on an observer.

What kind of conclusion can an atheist draw from this? The usual shrug of the shoulders is merely denial - that again puts them in the company of hard-shell fundamentalists whose beliefs are not open to reason or observation.

The widespread atheism among Jews is not a proof that G_d is dead, it is a proof that the level of Jewish education is pathetic.

Michelle Bachmann

Michelle Bachmann in a radio interview--

But what people recognize is that there’s a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward. And especially with this very bad debt ceiling bill, what we have done is given a favor to President Obama and the first thing he’ll whack is five hundred billion out of the military defense at a time when we’re fighting three wars. People recognize that.

The Soviet Union?

If everyone supports a two state solution, why isn't it happening?

If everyone supports a two state solution, why isn't it happening?

Nabil Sha'ath, the PA foreign minister, explains that the PA supports a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people, but will never agree to a Jewish state for the Jewish people.

Could that just possibly be the obstacle to peace, and not the settlements?

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A Link to Some Pictures from this Bicycle Trip

https://picasaweb.google.com/101620971752378953137/2011BikeTripYukonBC

To go to the next picture, click on the pale blue arrow at the right or press the right arrow on the keyboard.

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Too Big To See?

[PG&E power generating plant at Moss Landing, near Monterey]

A lodge in the north is a combination gas station, cafe, store, and motel. The lodges along the Alaska Highway are too remote to have power lines running to them. There is instead a small building near the main buildings where the generator runs constantly. These small generator buildings are sometimes better sound-insulated, but usually worse.

I have been fussy about turning off lights I am not using because one knows that the generator is outside converting fossil fuel, usually diesel oil, to electricity. This seems like an incredibly wasteful way to get electricity, burning an ancient and irreplaceable resource to get temporary pleasures like watching television, leaving lights on, heating a whole building instead of wearing warm clothes inside it, and so on. It seems unsustainable.

But, I reasoned, it is part of the rigors and remoteness of the north. Everything is expensive here because everything has to be trucked a long way, that is, there is a higher overhead. It makes sense that electricity would also be produced in a fairly primitive, expensive, high-overhead way, by burning fossil fuel, because one is far from the grid.

But then it occurred to me that that is how the grid itself works. Our power plants all burn an ancient and irreplaceable resource to provide temporary pleasure like televisions, curling irons, and heating houses instead of wearing warm clothes inside them.

But we do it on such a vast scale that it seems like an abstraction. An Alaska Highway lodge brings it down to a scale where we can see how primitive and wasteful it is to burn fossil fuel to generate electricity.

We have to find a better way.

Do It Yourself

[Great on burgers too]

"The study, by the Mayo Clinic, found that seven known risk factors contribute to up to half of Alzheimer's cases worldwide. For Americans, the single biggest risk factor is physical inactivity, which the study linked to 21 percent of U.S. Alzheimer's cases.

Depression accounts for another 15 percent, and smoking for 11 percent. Globally, lack of education is the greatest risk factor, with a link to 19 percent of cases; scientists say minds that are not active and engaged in learning are more susceptible to the disease.

The findings contradict the widespread belief that Alzheimer's is a predetermined genetic fate."

Which means that Alzheimer's is caused by couches and spreads from the toukes to the brain.

Life and Death

It is fortunate that Jews don't believe in reincarnation. If we did, then being born would come shortly after having died in a previous life. Which would mean that a birthday would also be a yahrzeit which would just be tacky. I like it the way we have it. You get one shot at it, you do the best you can with it, then fertik.

I am always bemused by my and everyone else's fear of death and desire for medical care and long life, followed by days consciously wasted. I do it. You do it. Everybody does it.

If we are so afraid of death, why do we piss away our lives? I don't know what life is supposed to be about nor what exactly constitutes not pissing away days.

But I know very clearly what does constitute pissing away a day. And I still do it all the time. I have done it repeatedly on this trip. I do it constantly at home. Promising myself to live a more active life is much like promising myself to go on a diet - long on promising, short on delivery.

Aristotle says that the way to live a good life is to acquire virtuous habits through practice. By practicing virtuous habits, they eventually become second nature, habitual, done without effort. He may be right. Nothing else seems to work.


My sister Gail replies:
If you have no regrets, then it is not pissing away a day. If you regret not doing something else then maybe it is a day pissed away. The Jewish ethic is that you should first do no harm, if you do, then make amends, if you have a talent it is a sin to not nurture it, if you have much, it is good to share with those who have little. You do not have to do these things every day but enough to not have regrets. A life well lived includes sometimes just lying on the couch and reading something interesting.

The wisdom of 73 years and still learning.

If It's Not Funny, Why Am I Laughing?

[66 years ago today]

The Yiddish word "shlemazel" or "shlemazzle" means a person who is chronically a victim. The teaching mnemonic is, "the schlemiel spills the soup on the schlemazel."

At Arches National Park in Utah in 2007 I was especially cautious around Balancing Rock because, though it had stood for perhaps thousands of years, if it chose to fall today, and fall on me, not only would I be dead, I would also be ridiculous. I would be a cosmic shlemazel.

It turns out this kind of luck has actually happened to people. In Japanese, the word hibakusha means 'explosion survivor'. Niju hibakusha means 'double explosion survivor'.

On August 6, 1945 - 66 years ago today - Tsumoto Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip. An American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city that day, and Yamaguchi, like many tens of thousands of others, was injured in the immense explosion. So he cut short his trip and went home to Nagasaki.

According to Japanese statistics there were a total of 165 niju hibakusha to whom the same thing happened. I don't know if Mr. Yamaguchi was a believing Buddhist or not, but if he was, he must have been a real schmuck in a past life to have such mazel. Or maybe not. He died last year at the age of 93.

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Why S&P Downgraded the US Government's Credit Rating

S&P's statement:

"More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges."

One's credit rating is based both on one's assets AND whether one is able to manage money reliably. Congress has just demonstrated that they as an institution are unable to do that.

The consequence of poor money management is lower credit rating and the consequence of that is higher risk to lenders and correspondingly higher interest rates. Which means that this folly in Congress redounds to the benefit of creditors of the United States, those who own treasury bonds, bills, and notes. They will collect, and we will pay, higher interest rates indefinitely as treasury auction after treasury auction is shadowed by the lowered credit rating.

A large fraction of the federal government's debt is owned by the Chinese and Japanese governments and by corporations in those countries. So the debacle in Congress and its result will result in still larger transfers of wealth from the United States to our creditors Back East than before.

Higher interest payments on the debt because of the lowered credit rating are an unfunded new obligation of the government. They will add to future deficits and thus increase future debt and the interest on it.

One would like to say, as most who write about this likely will, that everyone in Washington is to blame. That there is plenty of blame to go around. That Congress is to blame. Or Obama. That both parties are equally culpable.

But the facts are otherwise. Any recollection of what happened is that almost everyone offered to compromise. The Democrats offered to compromise. The Republican leadership offered to compromise. President Obama tried to arrange a compromise. The one group, and it turned out to be a decisive one, that repeatedly refused to compromise was the Tea Party faction of the Republican party.

Congress has been negotiating budget compromises since 1790, and it has always more or less worked. Clearly what changed, the new thing in Washington, was the election of a cohort of right-wing radicals to Congress in the 2010 elections.

When asked how it happened, it would be easy to shake one's head and mutter something about "gun-toting morons in the fly-over states", or "The country is turning right right now. But it will swing back."

The fact is that people in the middle of the country were no brighter ten or twenty years ago, and no less enamored of their guns then. And the notion of a pendulum swinging back and forth requires one to believe that things happen for no reason, that there is no such thing as cause-and-effect.

But there are reasons why things happen. I strongly suspect that the decision in Citizens United v. FEC in January 2010 and the rise of the Tea Party are not coincidental. In Citizens United the Supreme Court held that money is speech and that corporations have the same First Amendment rights to free speech as human beings. They made the saying, "Money talks" into a maxim of constitutional law.

Since then corporations have been legally able to contribute unlimitedly to political campaigns. And they have. Since Citizens United, large sums have been put into political campaigns that could not legally have been contributed before. Judging by the results in the 2010 elections, that new money has been going primarily to right-wing candidates and causes.

That created the Tea Party and the Tea Party created the budget impasse in Congress, and that is on its way to create higher interest on the national debt, larger deficits on account of the higher interest, increased debt overall, and increased transfers of trillions of dollars from the United States to China and Japan.

The moral here is that the situation we see today will not soon go away. The obvious riposte of the voters to the Tea Party for their intransigence in 2011 is to turn them out in 2012. It won't happen. The Supreme Court is right. Money does talk. And it will talk at least as loudly in 2012 as it did in 2010.

The right-wing intransigents in Congress are not going away. Their numbers and influence will not be diminished in the foreseeable future. If anything they may grow in power.

What do we get in return for these harms to the nation? We get free speech for corporations.

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Good Times

It was a major piece of work getting away from Muncho Lake today. The road followed Muncho Creek from its mouth at the lake to its headwaters at a mountain pass. It was up and up, and up, continuously for fourteen miles.

Even after making it to the pass and then down into the Toad River canyon my legs were unreliable for climbing.

The prize was that Toad River canyon is spectacular, with vista after vista. The weather was perfect. At one point I found myself spontaneously shouting, "Life is good!" And the echo off the canyon walls assured me I was right.

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The Good Old Days

[click on photo to enlarge]

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Passing on the Savings

[click on cartoon to enlarge]

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What's In It For Me?

So suppose the Republicans actually follow through on the premise that they would rather the country collapse than suffer rich people to pay taxes? What will happen?

Everyone agrees at least that interest rates will rise and the dollar will fall. But interest rates are like energy prices. They are built into every other price somehow. If they rise, it seems like prices should rise generally. But interest is a transfer of wealth from borrower to lender. If rates rise, that should increase the amounts transferred.

My impression, is that the relationship between borrowers and lenders is that in general lenders have more money than borrowers. If it were any other way, the borrowers wouldn't need to borrow and the lenders wouldn't have anything to lend. So one can say that in general interest is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

And the Republicans' obduracy in Congress, if it leads to higher interest rates, is almost certain to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Isn't that a surprise to find the Republicans pursuing such a policy? Who would have thought it?

As the dollar falls, as surely it must with trillions of recently created dollars floating around, the price of imported goods must rise. Which is further inflation.

How does the government, usually through the Federal Reserve Board, fight inflation? By raising interest rates. That should not be too hard, considering that interest rates - to banks at least - are now less than zero. I.e. zero less the inflation rate.

But the reason the rates are zero - to banks - is to keep money flowing by banks borrowing for free so they can lend at low interest rates so borrowers can invest and buy and sell. That is, to keep the economy from stopping. Less politely, to keep it from collapsing. Which it nearly did in 2008 and 2009.

So the economy faces the risk of inflation if nothing is done, if interest rates are kept low. And as we have seen in earlier decades, particularly the 1970's, that once started, an inflationary spiral can be hard to stop, very hard.

Conversely, if interest rates are raised, either by the Federal Reserve raising them, or by the Republican sabotage of the national economy, we could fall back into a deflationary spiral. As the example of Japan in the 1990's has shown, once a deflationary spiral starts, almost nothing can stop it. And the attempts to slow it down leave the government with staggering amounts of debt afterward.

Assuming I were a Republican and thus so selfish that I were willing to destroy my country and impoverish its people rather than pay even a token amount of taxes on my income and assets, which disaster would I prefer to inflict on my country?

A deflationary spiral would mean that prices would go down so the cost of living would be less. Or would it? It would mean that costs incurred by corporations selling goods would go down. Prices would only go down if they lowered prices in response, if they passed on the savings to their customers. That is, if the market were really competitive rather than oligopolistic. In short, do falling producer price really mean falling consumer prices?

Oddly enough, even during the recent sharp retreat in consumer demand, there were almost no price reductions. Instead, there were special offers, things were 'On Sale', there was this gimmick and that, all of which were ways to disguise price reductions. This was so they would not have to admit to either the price reductions nor the inevitable price increases when consumer demand returned.

For goods in which the demand is less elastic, i.e. in which the consumer has fewer choices and little opportunity to simply not buy the product, e.g. medical care, pharmaceuticals, utility bills, food staples, and the like, the corporations have simply pocketed the difference and passed on none of the savings from falling costs.

So does supply-and-demand economics, the marketplace setting prices, really work in real life? In a word, NO.

Though I am no economist, my guess is that the Adam Smith model of the free market only works if every buyer and and every seller has identical economic power. Since that happens exactly never, the free market model is a theoretical construct that never actually happens. The ideology of the Republican Party and of free-market conservatives generally, is based squarely on this fantasy.

In short, if there were a serious deflation, my pension and the rents from my house would be seriously diminished. My stocks would go down. My mortgage would remain the same. The cost of living, though disguised, would not fall significantly. I would be screwed.

Conversely, if there were a serious inflation, my pension would rise about the same amount, the rents from my house would rise about the same amount, my stocks would rise about the same amount, and prices would rise about the same amount. Travel would probably not become much more expensive because though the dollar would be worth less, there would be more of them.

BUT my mortgage payment, which is a fixed rate mortgage, would NOT go up. Paying this is by far the largest expenditure I have. More than half of every dollar I get goes to paying it. If the inflation were severe enough, the mortgage might become just another bill like the utility bill - noticeable, but not crushing.

So it is in my interest for the party bickering to go on forever, for the deficits to grow ever-larger, for interest rates to rise ever-higher to keep the Chinese lending us money for the ever-larger debt.

Fortunately for my soul, I am not quite that selfish. I plan to live in the United States for the rest of my life and I would prefer that it not be a social and economic wreck, neither in my time nor after.

So what I would like to see would be for Anders Breivik to escape from prison in Norway, and come to the US and kill everybody in Congress. And then for the next Congress to raise taxes, reduce expenditures, and eventually balance the budget.

p.s. Hi, FBI. Just kidding about killing everybody in Congress. It's a metaphor for the 2012 elections. Get it? Really. Just kidding.

Hey, wait. I am in Canada - I can say anything I want. Go get 'em Anders!

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More to me than to you

Victory of the Borg

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for fullframe]

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Numbers Matter

[click four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

With all due respect for the victims of both, 93 defenseless people have been murdered by a lone madman in Norway in the past few days. 1,600 defenseless people have been murdered by the regime in Syria in the past few days. Compare the coverage and world reaction to each.

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Close, But No Cigar

[James Dean, 1956]

In his Dead Pool selections for 2010 Harvey had Amy Winehouse as number 8 on his list of croakers. Today she bit the big one at the age of 27, which would have given Harvey a monumental 73 points. But it was not to be. Not on either of our lists for 2011.

But there is always next year. Question for next year's list - does Charlie Sheen, age 46, own a motorcycle?

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How Bad Is Oslo?

[click the four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

The destruction appears to be so general that it is hard to understand what happened. But from the video the building fronts appear to be bashed in rather than out, so the blast was on the street rather than inside. The incinerated cars suggest that it was a coordinated series of car bombs.

The fact that there was a shooting attack at a government party youth camp at the same time makes it almost impossibly unlikely that the motive was not terrorism.

There are lots of crazy people in the world and there is as yet no evidence that this was a jihad attack. But an awful lot of the crazy people whose craziness takes the form of bombing public places are jihadi Muslims. Norway is more than 10% Muslim and it is a very real likelihood that the attack was perpetrated by jihadis.

According to the New York Times,

Earlier this month, Norwegian prosecutors filed a terrorism charge against Mullah Krekar, the Iraqi-born founder of the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, who is accused of making death threats against the head of Norway’s Conservative Party, Erna Solberg. Mr. Krekar co-founded Ansar al-Islam in 2001, but said a year later that he no longer led the group, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and United Nations.

If the attack does turn out to have been done by jihadis, the irony will be palpable. Norway has been foremost among Western countries in its anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian policies.

I remember being on a bicycle trip in Norway in 2001 during a diplomatic crisis there. From CNN in my motel room I followed it for several days.

A Palestinian who had murdered two Israelis applied for asylum in Norway on the ground that he would be subject to persecution if he were turned away. His asylum petition was granted. Israel and the United States protested. The Norwegian government deflected, saying it was an immigration service administrative decision and they could not change it. Whereupon the newly inaugurated Bush administration sent the US Navy to conduct war games off the Norwegian coast.

The message, I am pretty sure, was not that the United States was going to invade Norway, but rather that the US was serious about it and that it was not a routine diplomatic note. I think the further implication was that if the decision were not changed, that Norway would be informally suspended from membership in NATO.

Which would have meant, among other things, that if Russia had wanted to establish an equally informal sphere of influence over Norway's all-but-empty northernmost territory of Finnmark (Norwegian Lappland) and the arctic island of Svlabard, the Norwegians would have been on their own to do anything about it.

The government got the message, the person who granted the asylum petition was transferred to other duties, and the Palestinian murderer was extradited.

The lesson of Oslo in 2011 is the same as was learned at such vast cost at Munich in 1938 -- appeasement doesn't work.

One could well say there is another lesson as well. Oslo is where the Oslo Accords were negotiated and signed in 1993. These were the "Land for Peace" deal between Israel and the PLO. Israel conceded the land - much of Judea and Samaria and all of Gaza were handed over to the newly-constituted Palestinian Authority. Jericho, Ramallah, Qalqilyah, Gaza, and many other cities got Palestinian governments. And got nothing in return. There was and is no peace and no diminution in Palestinian hostility. Nor a diminution in their teaching hostility and delegitimization to their children.

So the earlier lesson of Oslo is that negotiating with people who are negotiating in bad faith is worse than not negotiating.

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Today and Tomorrow

Yesterday I crossed the continental divide between the waters of the Swift River that flow north and west, eventually into the Yukon River and the Pacific, and those of the Rancheria River that flow north, eventually into the MacKenzie and the Arctic Ocean. It should have been a minor tourist factoid but it wasn't. It was exhilarating. It made the wind fresher and the sky brighter to be up on a mountain pass dividing two parts of the world. It was also reassuring that I had gotten to the top and that it was all downhill from there.

Today has been a rest day at the Rancheria Lodge. It puts the "run" in rundown, the "shab" in shabby, and the "funk" in funky. It has reputedly been here since 1942 when the highway was built. And looks like it.

Tomorrow will be a longish day and then Thursday I should be at Watson Lake. I am little by little coming to have more stamina and leg strength. My heart rate recovers to lower levels more quickly. So the road therapy if one may call it that, is beginning to work.

Plus it is a good trip. It is nice now and again to take a season away from the madding crowd, to put behind the daily dailiness of daily life and get away, to be among white spruce and poplar, the road and the true blue sky.

Tomorrow I am going to get back on my bicycle and begin once more to ease on down, ease on down, ease on down the road.

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"One of the..."?? There're more?

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[click 4 outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

Flotilla Fun

Why Evan Longoria is in the big leagues and you aren't....

[click four outward-pointing arrows for full-screen]

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Reflections on the Revolution

[Louis XVI making his final appearance on the French stage, with Robespierre in a supporting role]

Along the way I have been sometimes listening to books-on-CD. One of them was volume one of a two volume biography of John Adams. Adams had been, along with Franklin, part of the commission to Paris to get French aid for the Revolution.

At a time when Washington's army was being driven from the field by the redcoats for lack of gunpowder, Louis XVI sent 60 tons. It saved the Continental Army, and the Revolution, from certain destruction. This is never mentioned in conventional histories of the Revolution.

Adams pleaded for, and got, French naval support to keep the British armies separated and unable to be re-supplied. This too was instrumental in the war. It was why the British army attempted to march overland from Canada to New York rather than going by ship. In the course of which they were defeated at Ticonderoga. Not in our textbooks.

Louis le bien-ame, did more. He sent a field army commanded by le comte de Rochambeau to join Washington and the Continental Army. In the final and decisive battle of the war, at Yorktown, there were 8,000 soldiers of the Continental Army under Washington and 7,000 French regulars under Rochambeau, and 2,500 militia. Opposing them were 8,000 British soldiers under Cornwallis.

Cornwallis' army was unable to escape or get reinforcements because a French squadron commanded by Admiral de Grasse had defeated a smaller British fleet under Graves and blockaded the coast.

Cornwallis, outnumbered and trapped, surrendered to both Washington and Rochambeau. Very much not in our textbooks and complete news to me, who consider myself historically well-informed.

One can well imagine that the legend of Lafayette has been magnified in proportion as the fact of Rochambeau has been deliberately forgotten. Young Lafayette brought himself and a handful of adventurers to America. He served as an officer of American soldiers and led the expedition that was defeated in Canada. That was a grand gesture.

The comte de Rochambeau had 40 years of military experience when he arrived. In addition to giving Washington excellent advice, he brought an army, at least as well trained and equipped as the Americans and certainly better-paid, and a fleet at his back. That was considerably more than a gesture.

It is deliberate forgetting and misrepresentation for us to remember Lafayette and not Rochambeau. That we remember and teach our children about Lafayette and not Rochambeau is to make an empty pretense of gratitude to France for our independence. It is a falsification of our history. French aid was not a gesture.

Seen thus, the American Revolution and republic were as much a product of French intervention as of American resistance. Which puts a very different cast on the origins of the Republic and thus of its nature. Seeing our republic as merely an artifact of the clash of foreign empires makes it considerably less edifying than the more familiar narrative.

One can wonder about the wisdom of a hereditary absolute monarch aiding a republican revolution. The popularization of republican ideas and ideals in France by the American Revolution did not in a specific sense cause the French Revolution. Louis himself did that - by his unwillingness or inability to impose and collect taxes on the wealthy.

But once the Estates-General met, it was the ideas and ideals popularized by the American Revolution that made it a runaway horse that could not be stopped or even restrained. In a very real sense it was Louis' aid to American revolutionaries in 1775 that put his neck in the guillotine of French revolutionaries eighteen years later.

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The Hard Truth About Bicycle Touring

The hard truth is that the limit of one's initial capacity to ride long distances is not just one's stamina but also one's ability to endure the seat. The organ most challenged is not the lungs or heart nor even the legs, but the butt.

Thus far I have reached Nishkina (spelling?) on the Glenn Highway, a day short of Glenallen. Thus far I have begun to acquire the initial stages of stamina and thus am able to ride longer and further each day. And the Glenn Highway is now carrying me north from the Chugach Mountain Range which has turned south following the coast, giving me flatter country to ride through. At least that's the theory.

Another "Progressive" Against Zionism

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for full screen]

David Duke, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Kux Klan, speaking in support of the Muslim cause against Israel. Can't get much more progressive than that....

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Trip Journal - Layoff Day

[a two-stage bottle rocket, suitable for attacking targets in Asia]

How to make a bottle rocket: http://www.lnhs.org/hayhurst/rockets/

After one easy, and one moderate day of bicycling, I have taken a day off to rest. I was even more out of shape than I thought. Last night I had muscle spasms in my left leg which was no fun at all. One always gets them with insufficient stretching, but it is unusual to get them this soon in the trip.

I was making a pleasure out of a necessity this morning by watching early rounds play at Wimbledon on the motel room television, and found that I kept dozing off. I missed whole sets. Dozing in the morning after a full night's sleep is a sign that I was more tired than I thought. Last night I even dozed off while sitting on the pot.

Plus, as usual, I have badly overloaded the bike at the outset. Why can't I learn the basic lesson to bring only what one will need and not what one might need? Every bicycle trip for as long as I can remember begins with an overloaded bicycle and sending a box of seemed-necessary-at-the-time stuff home.

The bicycle as it stands when loaded is painfully heavy. I am going to go through my luggage and send home as much as possible. Even cherished right values will have to be foregone. I brought a notably large and heavy digital SLR camera and a second lens for it in addition to a small pocket camera. The theory was that a long bike tour alone would be the perfect time to really learn photography. That is a laudable, correct thing to do. But not necessary. It would be good to teach myself Spanish on this trip too, but I am not going to carry a Spanish textbook. The DSLR and the extra lens for it go home.

I am carrying too much food as well. The whole point of going on the easier Alaska Highway instead of the all-but-unpopulated Cassiar Highway of 2008 is to be within a day or two of services, to carry credit cards instead of luggage. I do not need two weeks supply of granola with me. That is just crazy.

I do not need a spare bicycle chain. I have never broken a chain in all my years of bicycling. It goes home. I do not need five extra notebooks to write in. I do not need any. I can write as well on this computer as in a notebook, even if it isn't as sexy. I will transcribe the work I did in Le Taha'a and send home even the partially-filled one. I can save whatever I have written to Google documents. It will be a lot safer on their servers in Cupertino than on my bicycle.

I don't need the nifty nylon briefcase-style computer carrying case. It is for carrying the computer on airplanes, in cars and such. I am not even using it. It goes home.

I have a box of stationery and no envelopes. After I write a few letters today, it goes home. I have a two fountain pens and two ballpoints. I even have an extra plastic bottle of ink. Half of all that will go home. I have two pairs of bicycle shorts. One, though brand-new, are useless because they constantly hang on my legs and make it all but impossible to swing my leg up to mount the seat. The other, though badly worn and still too small, will stay. If the seam in the butt gives way as I fear it may, I can sew it up by hand.

I have four quart bottles of rubbing alcohol for spraying black flies and mosquitoes. This is post-trauma over-compensation. They made me so miserable back in 2008 that I have over-prepared for them. Two bottles will surely get me to Tok and more bottles if need be. Two can stay here. So far there have not been many bugs, but I am still near towns with their mosquito abatement districts. Further out, there may be more. Or it may yet be too early in the season for them.

Conversely, I do not have enough water with me. I ran out of water well before reaching Palmer and was quite thirsty when I got here. As soon as I got to the hotel-cafe-liquor store here and got a room, I bought and downed three small orange juices and one large Budweiser. Enjoyable as that ending was, it would have been better to have had sufficient water with me. Maybe I can empty and wash out the rubbing alcohol bottles and fill them with water.

For future reference for my fans: When traveling light, a two liter soda-pop bottle from a food market or convenience store makes an excellent canteen. It is cheap, light, readily available, well-made, good-sized, has a well-designed and reliable screw-on plastic cap. It is designed to withstand interior pressure from carbonation, so it will not readily leak from the cap nor will the container crack or puncture. One can pour out or drink the soda-pop sold with it as one prefers. What it lacks in class it makes up in utility.

Only two paragraphs after speculating that it is too early in the season for flying pests, a mosquito has found its way through the window screen and onto my arm to bite me. Whereupon I returned the kindness by squishing her into a digusting small black mass of bug guts.

Conversely to everything I ought to get rid of, I really do need to get sunscreen and insect repellent before leaving Palmer.

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Early Travel Note

[Not the moose I saw]

In view of my advanced age and corpulence I am starting off slow and, in the Rappaport tradition, tapering off. I have gotten as far as Palmer, on the Glenn Highway 42 miles from Anchorage.

The good news is that I saw a moose. She was beautiful but shy. She watched me warily from some bushes in a vast marsh alongside the highway. Moose like marshes because they prefer eating marsh plants. It was also clear that the marsh protects them from predators. No wolf, bear, wolverine, or man can make much headway in a marsh. Unless the man is penis-deficient and needs to shoot things to compensate.....

The bad news is that tomorrow will contain some scary-sounding sections of road.

Good News, Bad News

[Many years to come]

I got the results of two days of cardiology testing yesterday. The good news is that the results of all the tests were normal. Which means I am likely to live a good many years to come. And also that I have no reason not to set out for Alaska and the lands of the northwest of the world.

The bad news is that I plan to continue being as much of a pain in the ass to as many people as I can.

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Mobile Blogging

I am setting out on a bicycle trip next week. With any luck I will be gone all summer. I will try to keep in touch from the road.


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Sounds Like Horseshit But It Would Be Funny If It Were True

[Shagetz unt a maidel?]

Sent to me by an Orthodox (Sephardic) rabbi in Israel:

It could happen!

It is interesting to note the following in the family tree of Kate Middleton, wife of Prince William:

Kate's mother is Carol Middleton, daughter of Ronald Goldsmith and Dorothy Harrison (both Jews)

The parents of Dorothy Harrison are Robert Harrison and Elizabeth Temple (both Jews), the latter a descendant of the Myers family (traditional English Jews in the 19th century)

Bottom line: Princess Kate is a Jew on her matrilineal side, and as a consequence, the future king of England will be a Jew according to Jewish Law and tradition.

Jules and Jim

I just saw 'Jules and Jim' last night on Netflix. It was directed by Francois Truffaut in 1962 and is considered a classic of the French New Wave. I didn't get it.

What was so wonderful about Catherine that either of them would have been so devoted to her and willing to obey her every whim? And willing to put up with her childishness and self-centeredness? Why would Gilberte be such a hapless doormat for Jim?

So many men had died in the War that there were far more women than men in both France and Germany in the 1920's. Given the gender imbalance why would Jules, Jim, and Albert and all the others have been following Catherine around like dogs following a bitch in heat? She was far from the only woman available. There would have been plenty of women interested in them and they would soon have been distracted from Catherine and her verbal abuse and craziness.

French women are often shown in film as arbitrary, childishly unto insanely self-absorbed and willful and whimsical. They are shown as under the impression that being pretty and sexy entitles them to indulge every momentary whim, regardless of the consequences to themselves or others, even unto Catherine's pointless murder-suicide of herself and Jim.

Real Frenchwomen are not like that at all. Real Frenchwomen strike me as practical and reasonable. French housewives are considered the very model of thriftiness and prudence. I wonder if the film image of Frenchwomen as snotty willful children is not a result of the continuing impact of 'Jules and Jim' on subsequent French cinema.

The contrast of the ease, simplicity, and happiness of pre-War France with the tortured complexity of post-War seems exaggerated unto silly. Whether it is to be regarded as realistic or as a mere representation of the director's feelings, it is stupid either way. Life is not a cartoon.

However much it is a beloved classic of the French New Wave, 'Jules and Jim' doesn't work and I don't recommend it.

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