Even though this post is over 7 years old, I still get nice comments from readers from all over the country. I was planning on going back to the Adirondacks this week after a conference in Saratoga, but didn’t make it this year. Things got too busy at work. I miss the Adirondacks, and here’s to share some of its adventure!
Month: July 2017
McCain After Being Released as a POW
It’s Tuesday Afternoon – Let’s Fly in a Biplane!
One thing you can say about Trisha – she knows how to have fun. This afternoon, she treated me to a ride in a biplane over San Diego. What better thing is there to do for no particular reason at all?
Here is the plane. As in all photos in this post, you can click on it to enlarge. Everyone who lives in San Diego has seen this blue and red biplane in the sky at one time or another. The plane was built in 1927. It is thirty years older than I am, and by far the oldest plane I have ever been in. Think of it. The Wright Brothers first flew in 1903. This plane was built just 24 years after that!
We’re gonna fly!
Here we are over the ocean, looking back to the Torrey Pines glider port. The cliff was swarming with paragliders. We stayed offshore so we didn’t get too close to any of them. If you zoom in and carefully look by the red arrows, you see a couple of them.
Below at the blue arrow is the infamous San Diego Blacks Beach. Do you see any of the nude sunbathers? I looked, but they were too far away.
We turned around and headed for La Jolla. Here is a quick video looking over the hood.
Speaking of La Jolla, here is a good look down at the famous La Jolla cove. You can see all the people on the beach.
And here is a view of the little cove (upper right) where there is a lot of controversy because it’s been taken over by seals. Some want to ban the seals, because they pollute the beach. Others say it’s their beach. Leave them alone.
Looking back, you can see our pilot. How in the world he can see anything back there is beyond me! He pretty much flies the plane looking sideways and down. At one time he pointed out a school of dolphins in the water near the beach and pointed the wing down at them was we circled over the spot checking them out.
Heading back inland now, here is a great view of Mission Bay.
Here is one of the San Diego canyons, with downtown in the back on the left.
Snoopy was also busy taking pictures. All that was missing was her scarf flying behind her in the wind.
Finally, our approach back to the runway. The plan just dive bombed down for the approach. The landing took what seemed just a few seconds.
And that was a superb way to spend a Tuesday afternoon. It’s called an “Adventure.”
Lesson to the Boor by Reebok
In case you were wondering when it IS appropriate to say, "You're in such good shape…beautiful,"… THIS: pic.twitter.com/Z1cnnRD8Ut
— Reebok (@Reebok) July 14, 2017
Organized Crime, Institutionalized Crime and Mike Pence
Russia, under Putin, is practically a nation run by an organized crime ring, inside and out. Putin’s regime has been accused of eliminating any opposition by arresting the opponents on made-up charges, and there are many accusations of killings of opponents of all types. Read Bill Browder’s book Red Notice for a harrowing story about Putin’s regime. In it, you will learn how the Magnitsky Act came about, the very legislation in the U.S. that was enacted to counteract Russian human rights violations. The Magnitsky Act is also related to the Russian orphan adoption program that recently made headlines when Trump Jr. deflected to discussions about adoptions in the infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with the Russians. Senator John McCain had a leading role in the Magnitsky Act.
Russia is a nation run by organized crime. It kills opposition inside, and it sows corruption outside. Since Trump took office, Russia now spreads corruption in the United States.
The Trump regime, in my opinion, is nothing but an organized crime ring, installed in the Oval Office. Nepotism abounds. Don Donald installed his relatives in key positions, whether they are qualified or not. Clearly, none of them were elected. Trump unabashedly profits from the presidency. When Jimmy Carter took office, he was accused of somehow having his peanut farm profit from the office. That was a scandal at the time. Don Donald’s conflicts of interest are not even news anymore. It’s a new normal. Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, is serving in prison in Colorado for openly trying to profit from his office and selling Obama’s senate seat. But Trump can try to repeal Obama’s sanctions against Russia so he can continue with his real estate projects in Moscow. All he has to do is tell us often enough that the Russians are our friends, and the American public starts accepting it as reality.
We do not have an administration now. We have a regime. We have joined the likes of Russia, and Iran, and Syria and all the banana republics that came and went. Criminal activity goes unchecked in the White House, and the Republican Party just goes along with it, in the name of power.
The Republican Party has stopped serving the country. What’s best for the country does not seem important to them anymore. Instant gratification is what matters.
It may be that we have to wait until the midterm election before we can throw them all out. With Don Donald and the Trumpashians swept out of the White House, Pence will take office.
Pence is a man who I believe would never have been able to win the presidency on his own. Pence’s ideology is 180 degrees opposing to mine. I don’t agree with his policies. I don’t agree with his decisions.
But I will be relieved. He will bring decorum and dignity back into the White House. He will turn what was a regime back into an administration. We will once again at least not have to be embarrassed about boorish remarks, sleazy public comments, leering behavior against wives of world leaders and personal Twitter attacks against private American citizens from the President of the United States.
Pence will serve for two years, and then he will lose the re-election campaign in 2020.
Crimes and a Rookie Mistake
If I had dealings with Russia, or Iran, or North Korea, and I got caught, the FBI would arrest me and I’d be charged with treason.
Republicans have dismissed Trump Jr.’s email smoking gun with “he made a rookie mistake, no big deal.”
It’s still a crime, folks, when you collude with a foreign government to attack the United States.
If I got caught with my dealing with Russia, or Iran, or North Korea, I’d be going to prison, and if I told the judge or the jury “sorry, I didn’t know what I was doing, it was a rookie mistake,” they’d simply laugh.
And I’d rot in prison.
China’s Scientific Leadership Eclipses U.S.
China has a government that makes up its mind to do something, and boom, it gets it done.
For instance, China has more high speed rail than the entire rest of the world combined. China is currently building almost twice as much high speed rail as the entire rest of the world combined. The United States is ranked along with tiny countries like Belgium, Austria, Taiwan and Uzbekistan in its installed base. Greece, yes, Greece is building more high speed rail than the United States (see more details here).
Another example is quantum research. Here is an example of China’s advance in teleportation. They succeeded in teleporting an object from earth to orbit.
In the United States, we are vilifying scientists in many areas of study for reasons that are incomprehensible to me. For instance, our government is squelching research in stem cell technology because of a religiously guided notion of what an embryo is. Our government is systematically shutting down climate research because some members of that government are financially supported by corporations that might lose some of their profits if the public realized the damage they are doing. The White House let all its people in the science office go.
China has an active space program. The last time the United States launched humans into space was July 8, 2011. That’s over SIX YEARS ago. We rely on Russia to launch our astronauts. On October 17, 2016, China launched its sixth manned space mission. They are rapidly becoming a space superpower all on their own. They don’t need the Russians to launch their astronauts.
I am not a friend of China, its policies, and its government. I am just an observer. 50 years from now, China will be the undisputed superpower in the world. The U.S. will look like a crumbling nation, with shoddy infrastructure (we already have that, I agree with Trump on that). We will have to import all technology from other countries. All goods sold at Walmart and Amazon will be made in China. We will be busy praying to hold the waters back in Florida, Louisiana, Boston and New York City.
China is moving ahead of us rapidly and we don’t even notice. Our leaders are on a reverse course, ceding scientific, political, moral and ethical leadership to other nations. We’re supposedly busy making our nation great again, while we apparently are fixated on building useless walls (which the Chinese did many centuries ago), keeping out immigrants because we’re afraid they might kill us, and spending enormous money ($700 billion) on weapons so other countries can’t come and take our stuff.
The way I see it, if we keep going like this – and not very long – there won’t be much here that others will want to come and get. We’re sending our money overseas, for oil, for cars, for TVs and for food, and the countries overseas like it that way.
Never in the history of this country has our leadership been on such a wrong, misguided and self-destructive course.
Trump and Hannity
Trump didn’t like the negative press he got for having his daughter sit in for him at a meeting of the world leaders at the G-20 summit. The ridicule was universal. So, to make it better, he thought he should lash out at – the Clintons. This is what he tried:
If Chelsea Clinton were asked to hold the seat for her mother,as her mother gave our country away, the Fake News would say CHELSEA FOR PRES!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 10, 2017
The President of the United States lashes out at the daughter of an Ex-President in a puerile tweet. Yes, that is really going to make me think of him as presidential!
But Chelsea wasn’t having any of it.
Good morning Mr. President. It would never have occurred to my mother or my father to ask me. Were you giving our country away? Hoping not. https://t.co/4ODjWZUp0c
— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) July 10, 2017
What Trump means with “giving the country away” is beyond me, but even if it made sense, how would that somehow justify his presumptuous action of sending his daughter to that table? Even IF Clinton had done the same thing, it still would not make his action right.
This is what the Trump supporters always do. When someone criticizes Trump, they point out that supposedly Obama or Clinton, or lately even Carter somehow did the same thing, and therefore why are we critical of the president?
Hannity, in his monologue tonight, used the same technique. He called the national uproar about Trump Jr.’s admission of collusion a “Russian Psychosis.” The entire left-wing media was foaming at the mouth about nothing, he said. Then he pointed out that supposedly Clinton had colluded with the Ukrainians to win advantages over Trump during the election.
Let’s just analyze that for a minute and assume that whatever Clinton did with Ukraine was equivalent to what it looks like Trump did with Russia. If that were true, and equivalent, McConnell and Ryan would be going after Clinton now, and we’d have special prosecutors, and 21 investigations underway, and Trump would be calling to “lock her up!” Hannity, by making the two equivalent, does all but agree that Trump did apparently collude and that it was wrong. But we’re supposed to be angry that there is no outrage over Clinton and Ukraine.
Well, Hannity, Clinton is not the president. Trump is. And it looks like he and his staff committed crimes to get to that office. The media are just helping expose the facts. The media didn’t make Trump take those actions. The media are witnesses. The media are not trying to make Trump unable to do this job, as you said tonight. The media is reporting as best as it can.
It’s not the media’s fault Trump is unable to govern effectively. It’s not the fault of Congress or, as you so condescendingly put it, the “lazy Republicans in Congress.” Trump messed this up all by himself.
And while I am ranting: It is the height of arrogance for Hannity to call those Republicans who can no longer stand by and participate in this destructive behavior “lazy.” Let’s see what these “lazy Republicans” will have to say when this is all over, and Hannity’s darling falls.
Unqualified and Unfit
Trump is our president. He vowed to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
I am not convinced that he is doing that. Making a deal with Putin about not looking to quarrels of the past and moving forward productively is condoning what happened. Accepting Putin’s denial of the Russian hacking is naïve at least, negligent of duty more likely.
Russia is one of the world’s most corrupt countries. If you need further education or information about Russian corruption, read the book Red Notice by Bill Browder. It will convince you.
Up to now, America was in an entirely different league. But that is changing rapidly with Trump and is ilk in office. Nepotism abounds.
He put his daughter at the table with the G-20 world leaders, rather than another elected official or a cabinet-level appointee. His daughter! Who has never held a job in her life that he didn’t hand to her or appoint her to. Who has no diplomatic experience whatsoever. Our president left the cockpit while the ship was under full sail, and he gave the helm to his unqualified and inexperienced daughter. Are the nuclear codes safe with him? Nothing else seems to be.
I wonder what we would have said to Obama if he had sat his daughter at that table in 2014? Seriously!
By inviting the Russians to jointly investigate cyber security, he is inviting the proverbial fox into the henhouse. This is foolish. The Russians are playing Trump like a fiddle. And we’re all sitting here watching in disbelief.
Trump is unqualified and unfit. We knew that all along, and even his GOP opponents proclaimed it before the election. Together with unqualified and unfit, he is now also uneducated and unsophisticated. The world laughs about us and about him. He doesn’t even seem think there is anything wrong. After all, his supporters wanted him to “fix America” and not the world. But with the role and influence of America in the world, that’s just not possible. He is passing world leadership to China and Russia, and that may never be reversed.
China and Russia are smarter, more experienced, more shrewd and more corrupt than we are.
And we are the laughing-stock of the world.
Movie Review: Maudie
Maud (Sally Hawkins) is afflicted with rheumatoid arthritis and has been since she was a child. Her fingers are twisted, her legs misshapen, and she has a hunchback. When her parents died, her brother sold their home and put Maud up to live with her overbearing aunt. Nobody takes her seriously.
Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) is a local fish peddler in a village in Nova Scotia. He is a socially challenged, extremely reclusive, and verbally and physically abusive. When he puts up an ad for a housemaid, Maud sees it and applies for the job. She comes to live with him in his very small house out in the country.
Maud starts cleaning up around the place and decorating it with her own little paintings. By chance, one of Everett’s customers sees the artwork and starts commissioning works from her. Over time, Maud’s work gets the attention of the folk art scene in New York City.
Gradually the unlikely couple develops a bond of love.
Maudie is based on the life story of painter Maud Lewis, who lived in Nova Scotia with her husband Everett Lewis. They lived in poverty for most of their lives in a famously small house. You can google “Paintings by Maud Lewis” and find many of her paintings, her house, herself and her husband.
Maudie is a movie of unusual circumstances and deep emotions. It’s a story about life, its simplicity, and its cruel reality. Watching it made my eyes tear from time to time, and most of all, it made me go home and pick up my paint brushes again, which have been lying idle for too long lately.
Maudie is a celebration of the human spirit and life. In one of the scenes, when asked what painting means to her, she looks out the window and says:
The Whole of Life, Already Framed, Right There!
The World According to the Trumpashians
Ivanka Trump sits at the table with Putin and Xi, while our president is absent. We have elected Donald Trump. We have not elected Ivanka or Jared. I consider the president a con man who faked his way into the presidency. Now we have a reality TV freak show running our government, and the Trump clan is systematically gaining notoriety, and wealth and influence, well beyond what I think they deserve.
There is no doubt, Trump is the most successful real estate salesman in the history of the world. I grant him that. That is a title he has earned.
But our country is not a reality show. Our country affects all of us, and in the end it affects me. The Trumpashians have hijacked the American government, and we’re letting it happen.
Ivanka probably thinks that she will inherit the presidency from her father one day, just like Kim Jong-un did from his. The nepotism and glaring inappropriateness of this in front of the world does not create sufficient outrage here in the United States.
They embarrass all of us, and it’s done in the name of the American people.
Book Review: Without You, There is No Us – by Suki Kim
Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite
Suki Kim is a Korean-American writer from New York City. She went undercover as an English teacher in a college-level all-boys-institution in North Korea where the sons of the North Korean elite were educated. She tells the story of how she got into her position and how dangerous it was for her to be there.
Through her narrative we get an amazing glimpse into the society of North Korea and its people, its culture and its political system that we can’t get looking in from the outside simply from what the media tell us, or what the occasional tourist reports after visiting.
Being in North Korea was profoundly depressing. There was no other way of putting it. The sealed border was not just at the 38th parallel, but everywhere, in each person’s heart, blocking the past and choking off the future. As much as I loved those boys, or because of it, I was becoming convinced that the wall between us was impossible to break down, and not only that, it was permanent. This so saddened me that some frozen dawns, when I woke up to the sound of the boys doing their group exercises, I had to fight not to shut my eyes and go back to sleep.
— Kim, Suki. Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korea’s Elite (p. 257). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.
Today North Korea is a vilified nation, a nuclear proliferator, and a world-aggressor. All we know about North Korea, for the most part, is the iconic image of the boy-dictator Kim Jong-un, and the lackeys in uniform who surround him. We think about parades of tanks, masses of soldiers in goose step, and missiles hauled on trucks through wide boulevards lined with trees. We think about nuclear missile tests. We don’t know much about this country that gets so much bad press around the world.
Reading Suki Kim’s book Without You, There is No Us opens up a wide window into this elusive and closed society. North Korea is an example of an entire nation of 25 million people completely and totally brainwashed for generations. The country’s elite does not get Internet access or modern computers. They cannot research because most topics are taboo. They have been told, for 75 years, that they are one of the most powerful and prosperous nations on earth. And they have no idea that they are actually one of the most isolated nations, resembling a concentration camp of 25 million occupants, who live under 19th century conditions, with shoddy power, terrible infrastructure, malnutrition even for the elite, complete suppression of the media, no access to modern music, art, literature or cinema.
Even family members are kept apart. The boys in the college are not allowed to communicate, even by letter, with their families or friends. When they are in the military, for years at a time, they don’t get to come home – in a country the size of Pennsylvania!
North Korea is a threat to world peace, particularly now, where the president of the United States is widely viewed as the most serious threat to world stability.
Every American should read Suki Kim’s book to better understand the tragic and failed experiment that is called North Korea. One man, with the aid of his father and grandfather, has managed to subjugate 25 million people, by keeping them underfed, uneducated and in constant fear – just so he can aggrandize himself – and eat well.
Trump vs. CNN
I found this odd poll today on my Facebook feed:
There are a lot of things wrong with polls like this. Whom do we trust more? A single person or a news corporation? That makes little sense as it is. I guess it means whose word, whose honesty, do we trust more?
CNN is thousands of reporters, correspondents, news professionals, with decades of history. Some might be “dishonest” to use a Trump word. But not every one of them. Not all of them. There is no conspiracy of CNN news professionals that have conspired to lie to make Trump look bad.
And why is this a thing all of a sudden? Do we really believe that CNN, or any other news organization, like the Washington Post or the New York Times all of a sudden became evil and dishonest because we have a new president? Surely that didn’t happen. If CNN were as dishonest to the core as Trump seems to indicate, it could not have just started last November. They would have been dishonest all along, or at least for a few years, right? Or do we think they just had a meeting after the election and decided from now on they were all going to make shit up?
Trump has lied many times. This is evident and documented. He has said things one day and denied saying them the next day. There are probably hundreds of examples, on video, of this. Trump lies. I really have a hard time understanding how 89% of Republicans can then say they trust Trump. But they are not saying they trust Trump, are they? They are saying they trust Trump more than CNN, that’s all. So if I am a Republican, and I trust Trump just a smidgen more than CNN, I’d have to say Trump, and obviously, 9 out of 10 will say that. Still, it boggles my mind. Trump lies so obviously, so unabashedly, I certainly wouldn’t trust him with my children, or my money, or my business. But then again, I am not a Republican, I am an Independent.
When we don’t trust CNN, we apparently don’t trust what they say. CNN’s investigative reporters, like all investigative reporters, are interested in going after the truth. If you are a reporter and you get caught lying, you don’t last very long in your job. You can’t afford dishonesty. Your boss will fire you. So I just don’t buy that CNN is conspiring to hurt Trump. CNN’s reporters try to tell the truth.
Could it be that it’s that truth that the Republicans just don’t like? When you don’t like the truth, but you know deep down that it is the truth, the easiest thing to do is to deny it, call it fake news. And I think that’s what Trump is doing. Trump needs adulation, and anything but adulation is therefore inimical, and the target of his wrath.
Here is the biggest problem I have with all that: If CNN is really dishonest, we can turn it off and listen to something else. If the New York Times is dishonest, we can just not read it. Then it no longer does damage. I have to believe that for every dishonest news outlet there is another one that’s honest. We as consumers get to choose what we want to read or listen to. That’s a good thing.
We as consumers do not get to choose what our president says and does, and if the president lies, we can only expose those lies as what they are. But he gets to keep going. In contrast, the news reporters who lie get fired.
I am an Independent, and I am not going to say that I trust CNN more or less than I trust Trump. It does not matter and it’s an irrelevant comparison. CNN is a news outlet that I can ignore. Trump is the President of the United States.
And I don’t trust him whatsoever.
GOP Healthcare Plans
We have to come up, and we can come up with many different plans. In fact, plans you don’t even know about will be devised because we’re going to come up with plans – healthcare plans – that will be so good.
— President Donald Trump
Desipere in Loco – The Latin Corner – Take Three
Dulce est desipere in loco.
— Horace, Odes Book IV, Poem 12, Line 28
Wolfgang in German: Süß ist es, sich der Torheit zu überlassen (leichtsinnig zu sein, sich kindisch aufzuführen, zu blödeln …) am rechten Ort (also dann, wenn es am Platz ist, wenn es paßt).
Norbert in English: It’s fun to goof off when appropriate.
I might note that, after all, the Latin form is the shortest. Even succinct, colloquial English doesn’t beat it.