My first inclination is to agree with President Obama when he leaves Islamic out while talking about ISIS. After all, some Republicans have had taken this to mean that Obama is an apologist for radical Islamic terrorists which is such a simplistic overkill that I automatically default to Oh, shut up you stupid shit, Obama is right, it is not Islam that is the problem, it is these particular wackos. Still, as I think about it, I am starting to think Obama is wrong.
Let me quickly say that I like Obama – alot – and don’t think he is too soft on ISIS. I do understand that Obama wants to be clear that the United States is not in a war on Islam, itself, however, ISIS think they are Muslims. I think that Obama – and probably alot of people who haven’t thought about it – is confusing any one Muslim or group of Muslims or Violent Islamic Fundamentalists with All Muslims. Of course they are not. They only represent themselves. But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t Muslim.
As an aside, the whole thing of labeling somebody we don’t like as a Terrorists is lazy and mis-informative. Why are they terrorists? because they behead people? The Saudis beheaded 79 people in 2013 alone, publicly in a square, in downtown Riyadh. Is it because they behead people and made a tape of it to terrorize potential future targets? If killing people to terrorize the survivors, almost everybody at war is a terrorist. The whole point of our Shock and Awe campaign in Iraq was to scare the survivors. That is why we publish videos of our smart bombs, accurately, killing people; to terrorize. So, when I use Terrorist here, it is just because it is the conventional tag and I am too lazy to come up with a more accurate name. End aside.
But being Muslim isn’t what makes ISIS Islamic Terrorists. Doing what they are doing in the name of Islam, because of their Islam – granted, it is only their Islam – is what makes them Islamic Terrorists. Timothy McVeigh is a Christian but he is not a Christian Terrorist because he didn’t blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in the name of his Christianity. Paul Hill, the Army of God killer who killed Dr. John Britton and James Barrett at their abortion clinic, is a Christian Terrorist because he killed as a result of his idea of Christianity and he killed in the name of Jesus.
When ever I can, I like to take a nap in the mid-afternoon. I do it because I like naps and justify it because all the evidence says that taking a short nap in the afternoon is healthy.
I also like a cup of coffee around 5 in the afternoon, so even before I read an article that touted the Coffee Nap, I was ready to be hooked.
The trick with a nap is to make it short, twenty minutes, thirty minutes max. Once you cross the thirty minute line – plus or minus, duh – you have slipped from easy to wake from Light Sleep to hard to wake from Deep Sleep. With a Nap of twenty minutes, when the alarm goes off, we wake up refreshed. When the alarm goes off after sleeping forty-five minutes I – anybody, really; you – can barely get up. We are just too groggy and it doesn’t want to go away.
By a happy coincidence, it takes about twenty minutes for the caffeine to kick in after a cup of coffee. It turns out that having a cup of coffee and then taking a nap is much better than either one alone. This has been my preferred nap for awhile.
Growing up, in our family, Ivan Pavlov was – what I can only describe as – a man of interest. I wouldn’t say that we were lost in admiration, but for some reason, Pavlov – of the dog that salivated as a conditioned reflex – was a topic that came up often. As I think about it, it may often have been used as a way to bad mouth our dog as being dumber than us; a proposition that I feel less certain about now.
Anyway, today, after a late lunch, I brewed – well, brewed might not be the right word, I heated some water to 200°F and poured it through a coffee-filled filter – a nice cup of coffee. As I had the first couple of sips of the coffee, I realized I was getting sleepy.
Now that I am awake and ready to go, I realize that I have conditioned myself to get sleepy when I have a cup of coffee. It feels slightly strange and, somehow, just wrong.
I was thinking the other night about the olden days when everybody got a phone-book from the phone company – there was only one phone company for any area – that had everybody’s name and address. That is everybody who didn’t pay extra not to be listed (I didn’t know anybody who elected to pay extra).
I wonder what the ratio would be today. I wonder how many people would want their name in the phone-book?
Every Thursday, I have about a one and a half hour phone conversation with a good friend, Ed Cooney. Ed and I used to have lunch on Thursdays, but he had the temerity to move to Buffalo, New York so now all we have is Thursday mornings. We – I think we, I, for sure – try to limit the conversation to politics and religion. I consider Ed a good Christian (although I’m not sure that he does, not the Christian part, the Good Christian, part). Ed sends out a weekly newsletter and, lately, he has been talking about the part morality plays in our foreign policy.
As much as I am interested in the part morality plays in our foreign policy, it was an old article that Ed sent me, that got me thinking about how we think about the enemy. In the article, Ed tells about a minster, Archie Mitchell, whose family were the only casualties of World War II on the mainland of the United States. After loosing his family, the poor guy became a missionary in Vietnam. On his third tour, while working at the Ban Me Thuot Leprosarium, Archie…along with a generous supply of medicines and equipment…were removed from the clinic by a 12 member unit of the Vietcong….In 1969, negotiations for their release were near completion when they were suddenly broken off. None of the three have been seen since….Were any tender moments left for Archie Mitchell and his co-prisoners? Did they ever smile or laugh again? What, beside the threat of death, fueled Archie’s energy to keep on keeping on? What sustained his faith?
While Ed wrote this in 2010, I think that his thinking of the Vietcong is based on what we were told about the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. I have a different impression. I have never been to Vietnam and I have never met any Vietcong, but my base impression is much more benign. My default level is based on what I read and see about Vietnam now. And it is reinforced by talking to Ophelia and Peter who have lived there and still have strong Vietnamese friendships. I think that the Vietnamese are, essentially, the same people today as they were in 1962.
This has got me thinking about ISIS and how our propaganda – both overt and covert – has influenced my thinking on ISIS. I heard David Brooks quote someone – in a way that seemed like he agreed – that, today, ISIS is the biggest treat to global security. That is astonishing: ISIS is a bigger treat than global climate change, it is a bigger threat than 15,000 nuclear weapons, a good portion of which are armed and ready to go; as far as that goes, ISIS must be a bigger threat than a nuclear Pakistan falling apart.
Let me try a mind game for a minute. We think ISIS is much worse than the Mexican drug cartels but the cartels killed more than twice as many people as ISIS, the cartels routinely decapitate people – about 700 in 2012 alone – they are on our border, right on our border!, and directly dealing drugs as far north as Bismark, North Dakota. Think about that for a moment. Now think about ISIS, doesn’t ISIS still seems scarier. It does to me, too.
It is amazing, the day in, day out, propaganda we are subjected to. I’m not trying to say that ISIS are the same as the Vietcong. The Vietnamese were fighting a war for independence and did not behead people. I am not saying that ISIS are anything but thugs with an ideology overlay. In that regard, they are more like Nazis than Vietcong, but most Nazis were people just trying to get along rather than sociopaths and I suspect that most of ISIS is also.
As an aside, in May, 1945, when the allies occupied Europe, they vowed to rid Germany of the Nazis. Very quickly, they realized that wouldn’t work and by 1952, the Nazis were back in power. According to Tony Judt in Postwar, In Bavaria in 1951, 94 percent of judges and prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees, and 60 percent of civil servants in the Regional Aquaculture ministry were Nazis. In May 2003 Bush made the same pledge and he kept it. The Coalition Provisional Authority got rid of anybody associated with the Ba’athist Party down to the school principal level. That is is a good part of why Iraq fell apart after the war, it had nobody to run the place who had any idea of what they were doing. End aside.
I have been looking at the picture above – taken from Tracy and Richard’s backyard – for a couple of days, trying to put together an interesting post. To un-stall myself, I’m just going to list what I want to say, post a couple of pictures and go on from there (or let it go and get on with my life).
First I want to say Here, on the coast of California, the long nightmare of winter is over.
We went for a walk on the western edge of the North American continent but we also went for a walk on the eastern edge of the Pacific plate.
Saturday was Michele’s birthday and Sunday was Super Bowl Day. Saturday was clear, warm, and calm (when I took the top picture). Sunday started foggy and warm – when I took the picture below -then cloudy and warmer, and it seemed like a perfect day to walk on a beach.
Now, I’ll try to do some ‘splaining. When I say that the long nightmare is over, I’m just bragging. I love the weather here, I love that it is so micro-climatish, that it can be cold and windy at Candelstick and hot where we live. I grew up here, it just seems natural. Although it may not look like it in these pictures, this doesn’t mean we don’t have four seasons, just milder and different seasons. Winters are the rainy season and the summers are the dry season. Spring is spring and the fall is summer; it’s simple. I should say used to be rather than are because, rather than just being a drought, the rainy season has slid to Late Spring. This means that the rains are warmer and we get less snow in the mountains. Because we used to store our water in the mountains as snow, that change is not for the better.
Meanwhile, back in the Winter Walk department, on Superbowl Sunday, after celebrating Michele’s Birthday on Saturday at Tracy and Richard’s weekend home, the people who stayed over went for a walk at Kehoe Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. Our guides choose Kehoe because Michele’s sister, Claudia, was with us and had brought her dog,Emma, and Kehoe is a Dog Beach. It is also at the western edge of the North American continent.
I don’t know how old I was when I learned that there are seven continents, but I do know that I was much older when I figured out that the whole continent thing is Eurocentric phony baloney-ness. Continents are supposed to be large land masses with an inference that they are separate areas. But Europe isn’t a separate landmass – any more than, say, India is – it is a part of Asia and is about the same size as China which doesn’t get awarded Continental status.
Point Reyes National Seashore, where we went for a walk, is on the western edge of the North America continent but we are really walking on the Eastern edge of the Pacific Plate. Almost all of the so called North American continent is on the North American Plate. Unlike continents, plates are real things. The hard outermost shell of Earth – the part where we live – floats on a viscous interior. This hard crust is broken into rigid plates like the sections of a soccer ball. Where the plates bump or rub against each other are most of the world’s geologically active areas. One of these boundaries is our very own San Andreas Fault which separates the North American Plate from the Pacific Plate.
The North American plate is some what misnamed because it not only consists of most of the continental North America, it is also Greenland, Western Russia, and part of Japan. What isn’t on the North American Plate is Point Reyes, that is on the Pacific Plate. The Pacific Plate is probably better named because it is mostly the Pacific Ocean along with Point Reyes, part of southern California, part of southern Japan, and part of South Island in New Zealand.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Tectonic plates
Point Reyes, the peninsula, seems to have been very loosely attached to the rest of California, but that is only partly true. It is attached, but it is just passing by as its homeland plate slides serenely north (of course, that is only serenely on a geological, deep-time as John McPhee calls it). North of us, the San Andreas fault runs along the coast of California, as it goes south, it comes inland and, almost to Los Angeles, it bends more easterly and runs along north of the San Gabriel Mountains. Along the way, the fault cut off a little of the granite batholith basement of our Sierra Nevadas. As the Pacific Plate moved north during the last 80 plus million years, it has dragged this southern section of the Sierra base-rock with it. Just north of where we went walking is an area of exposed granite that used to be 300 miles south, near Tehachapi, east of Bakersfield.
Back at the trail to Kehoe Beach, we follow a small stream down to the beach where the seagulls are standing around, feeding on what ever is washed down the stream. I guess it is the animal equivalent to a desk job.
We walk along the beach in the cool air with a soft, warm, sun. We walk in groups of, mostly, two; stop and cluster; then walk in a different pattern.
As we walk back to the car, I think about the drought, that it is real and as unstoppable as the incoming tide. Walking, in the soft air, I fall in love with Life again. In love with California, with the lovely people I am walking with, with their shadows and reflections that join them at their feet.
