Monthly Archives: July 2017

Happy 4th of July….sort of

Americana, Around home

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I – all of us really, I think – are constantly barraged with Trump; he is always on the front page of some newspaper and on the cover of at least one mag a week – this week it’s The Economist – he is almost always the lead story on the Daily Show or John Oliver, CNN has become obsessed with him, and my Facebook friends and enemies are  screaming back and forth like they are in the third grade. Trump is changing our world, our country, in a way that I don’t like and I am reminded of that many times every day. This new normal tempers my usual 4th of July enthusiasm, I am both mad at my country and frightened for it. And it’s not just Trump buffoonery, it’s our Forever Wars, our pious outrage when Russia does to our political system what we feel we have the right to do to anybody we damn well please, it’s our slide into a corrupt oligarchy.

But, from here, where we live, from the edge of Silicon Valley, California, USA, it’s a great Fourth! (and the influence in our day to day lives is really in that order). On Saturday, we went to the San Jose Earthquake~Los Angeles Galaxy Soccer Professional Football Game at Stanford. The tickets were from my Little Brother, Edwin, who now works for the Earthquakes. It was a full house – predominately, but far from entirely, upscale Hispanic – and it felt so American. Really, when you think about it, what is more American than the immigrant experience, all of us are from immigrant stock. Immigrants are what turned a backwater set of colonies into the most powerful country the world has ever seen and today, here, in Silicon Valley, immigrants or the sons of immigrants, are changing our world, they have given us Intel, eBay, Google, and Apple to name a couple. Watching The Earthquakes/Galaxy struggle on a cool summer night also felt typically Californian, another form of the Northern/Southern California rivalry. The game itself was great, LA scored early but The Quakes played a better game finally tieing the game at the 75 minute, and then winning during the Stoppage time.

I was going to continue this post with some pictures of the Redwood City 150 Year Anniversary and Parade, for some reason unfathomable to me, I cannot upload them.  The Parade had all the usual players, The Mounted Sheriff’s Patrol, firetrucks – lots of firetrucks which came early in the Parade –  and our local SWAT Team marching through the streets like an occupying army, but it also had lots of floats and marchers that would not fit in most parts of America. The largest group at the parade, by far, was Falun Dafa, which touts that it is an advanced self-cultivation practice of the Buddha School and the DAR was represented by the Gaspar de Portola Chapter – which, since Portola was the first governor of Baja California having been appointed by the Spanish crown in 1767, is more irony than I can grasp standing up –  for example.

Anyway, while it is still July, I want to say, again, Happy Fourth of July.

Slipping into the future

Uncategorized

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Michele and I have sort of slipped into the habit of using Google – and Apple on the other phone, and, sometimes, Waze – to show us the fastest route on even the shortest of trips, especially when it is rush hour (rush four hours?). At first, the results were a little surprising like when Google told us to go surface when we were driving up Highway 880 to Berkeley from the San Mateo Bridge – I didn’t and Google was right and we got stopped in an East Bay traffic jam – then the results became routine as Google routed us off the freeway and through residential neighborhoods in Los Angeles. Now, when freeway traffic is heavy and Google provides an alternative surface route, cars start to back up at the off-ramp and we follow three or four cars – with cars behind us – through a residential area or along a county road.

All of a sudden a quiet residential street can become somebody’s – lots of somebodies’ – fastest way home and that home may be twenty or thirty or forty miles away. Now, everybody has local knowledge and the real locals are starting to react. Some, especially in rich neighborhoods, are starting to petition their City and Town Councils to have one end of their streets blocked off. It seems that the best way for us to get somewhere is often not in the best interest of the people living in places that are on the way to that somewhere. The world has changed in a major way and the institutional antibodies are starting to kick in.

As an aside, I’ve heard somewhere that “medicine is not revolutionary; sanitation is revolutionary” is a Che quote and I have cheerfully quoted it ever since. Now I can’t find it on Google and I am starting to have my doubts so I’ll say Misquoting an alleged Che quote, ‘Computers are not revolutionary; smartPhones are revolutionary,’. Several years ago, Michele and I were walking through the outskirts of a rural village near Yangshuo – China – when a group of school kids appeared ahead of us on the trail. I’ve been in this situation dozens of times, kids in a dirt-road-poor village asking for pencils or candy, but these kids just waved and took pictures of us with their smartPhones. As an aside to the aside, when we were in China, we were offered iPhone knockoffs in about four flavors, the cheapest was just a phone and camera and the most expensive did everything a real iPhone could do. End aside to the aside. All over what we used to call the Third World people who have never had a landline phone or, even, electricity, are getting smartPhones. In rural Africa, places that have been off the grid for 10,000 years, people are getting solar cells for their roofs. In many cases, they are not powerful enough to run a refrigerator but they can run a signal light bulb and a cell phone charging port (if the family is rich enough, they can even get a small, cheap, low-power TV). With their cell phones, 15 million people in Kenya – using a Kenyan App, M-PESA – transfer money without walking to the nearest big village; with cell phones, farmers in India can now get weather forecasts; In Bangladesh, people look for and advertise jobs on CellBazaar; all over the world people are inventing their own Apps to fit their local conditions. According to The Economist, “Unesco pointed to data from the UN, which shows that of the seven billion people on earth, more than six billion now have access to a working mobile phone. ‘Collectively, mobile devices are the most ubiquitous information and communication technology in history….More to the point, they are plentiful in places where books are scarce.'” End of the aside.