All posts by Steve Stern

The Earth is alive

Around home, Evolution
San Andreas
Road cut on Highway 25 closed by the winter rain.

I feel like I have been cooped up all winter, watching it rain, watching the Warriors on a record-setting roll, and giving in to the allure of idleness. To put a purpose to getting out, I took the first of – hopefully – several drives along the San Andreas Fault between home and the Carrizo Plain. It is a part of California that I don’t know.

But it wasn’t until I started driving down Highway 25 that I realized how cooped up I had been. I rolled – buttoned? – the windows down, slowed the truck, and soaked in the spring day. The grass was bright green, just starting to go to seed in some areas, and the oaks were flaunting their new growth, a green that is so green, so bright, that it seems artificial. San Andreas-2 San Andreas-3San Andreas-5

Running along the fault, it was pretty hard to not think about earthquakes and how they affect the people who live here. Maybe a confession is due, I like earthquakes. I know that earthquakes kill people – lots of people all over the world, although not so many in Northern California and other parts of the developed world – and cause damage, but nobody I know has ever been hurt and the damage around here has been minimal. I like earthquakes because they remind me that the Earth is Alive.

By Alive, I mean Alive, as in living, not just the opposite of inert. When I drove back home, I detoured to the western gate of Pinnacles National Park just to marvel at what seems to be an incongruity but is really an artifact of the Aliveness. San Andreas-6

Pinnacles is a strange little National Park. First, it is small and pretty inconsequential with only about 200,000 visitors a year – for comparison, the Grand Canyon has almost 5,000,000 visitor a year – and yet it was made a National Monument about eight years earlier than the Grand Canyon. Even this week, in what the Ranger said was a busy week because of Spring Break, the entry gate was close and we were told to pay, on the honor system, by dropping our money into a collection kiosk.

The Park is here because the rocks are very strange and, I am guessing, when it was first made a National Monument, nobody knew why. Now we know that the rocks were formed by a volcano on the San Andreas fault about 23 million years ago – that is about 20 million years before Lucy – a little north of Los Angeles. Because the volcano was directly over the fault, the western part of the volcano was on the Pacific Plate and the eastern part was on the North American Plate, and because the fault was and still is moving, the western part of the volcano was dragged about 200 miles northwest over the ensuing 23 million years. Now one large chunk of that volcano is in Northern California and the remainder is still in Southern California. Although I don’t think anybody knew it at the time, Pinnacles is a perfect San Andreas Fault demonstration.

Heading north, back to civilization and home in the fading light, the Wildness turned into a manufactured landscape. The Earth is our home and we are trying to bend it to our will, but here, along the San Andreas fault, it is obvious that is impossible. The earth is Alive and still bats last. This spring afternoon, it is starting to bat flowers.  San Andreas-7San Andreas-8
San Andreas-9

What can we do?

Uncategorized

GlassWatching the evening news about the horrible events in Belgium today. Aside from sadness -which I definitely feel – I’m at a loss as to how to stop it. They are talking about paying more attention to people carrying Belgium passports. The vast majority of Belgians – and Syrians – and young men here at home – are not terrorists. That’s one of the problems here – there really no way to guess who might be radicalized….Poor Brussels. A beautiful city. Karen Amy on facebook

Thinking out loud, it seems to me that our first priority should be make no more terrorists. Then we should protect our borders, and track down the terrorists that are here. I realize that those are both overlapping and conflicting goals and I have almost no idea how to reconcile and accomplish any of it.

I do know that when ISIS tells Belgium, “We bombed you in retaliation for you bombing us”, it is probably worth thinking about. I do know that Trump is making things worse, and, additionally, that his scapegoating is scary not just to Muslims and Mexicans, but to everybody.

I do know that He who defends everything, defends nothing. which has been attributed to  Frederick The Great of Prussia, is still true. If we have a million people on a watch list, we are not really watching anybody. That is why people on the watch list can still kill people at a Christmas Party in San Bernardino.

I also know that saying we are at war is wrong. These are criminals, thugs, and have to be treated as criminals. If some young man goes to Syria and comes back, saying he is sorry, he should be charged as aiding the enemy and put in jail. Armies are not going to solve this as fast as good policing.

Poor Brussels…and poor  Raqqa. Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind, John Dunn

A watching the game on TV dinner hack

Uncategorized
Photo by Michele Stern
Despite the watermark, the photo is by Michele Stern

Saturday evening, Laura Atkins joined Michele and myself to watch the Warrior vs, Spurs game and we thought it would be nice to have pizza while we watched it. We had picked up some sausage, veggie, and cheese at the Farmer’s market and a ball of dough for two bucks from Howie’s Artisan Pizza. The Warriors lost, although it was a good game, but the pizza was great.

Driving to the Peterson and back, talking politics

Americana, Politics
Peterson (1 of 1)
The Bruce Meyer Family Gallery with a show of outstanding cars all painted the same color silver.

A week or so ago, Malcolm Pearson and I drove down to Los Angeles and back. We wanted to see the newly renovated Peterson Automotive Museum and driving to Los Angeles and back in the same day seemed like the best way to do it even though it makes for a long day, about 18 to 19 hours, with only about one third of it at the museum. That is a long time for two opinionated guys, often on different sides of the political spectrum, to spend together without arguing.  We talked about our kids, schools, the Warriors, Donald Trump and single payer healthcare (among other things) and we agreed on almost everything starting with our kids and grandkids being superior human beings.

As an aside, I have a theory on the superior human being thing, and I am serious here, I think our kids and grandkids really are superior human beings, not to their contemporaries, but to my generation. This is a generation whose mothers – not always but alot – didn’t smoke or drink when they were pregnant. and most of my generation were carried by mothers who did both. Living a clean life during pregnancy does make a difference, just like we were told by the government. End aside.

Malcolm is an emphatic Moderate and I am a card-carrying Lefty, so it is easy for our conversations to slip into arguments and it often has during one of our all day trips to some auto related event,  but that didn’t happen on this trip much to our mutual amusement and pleasure. Up until a couple of years ago, I always thought of Malcolm as a Conservative but a) I think he has moderated and b) he Self Identifies as a Moderate and c) I believe everybody has the inalienable right to Self Identify. I Self Identify as a Bernie Sanders Liberal because he is the only serious candidate with whom I have totally agreed. “Global Climate Change is the biggest threat to our security,” check; “Single Payer health Insurance”, check; “A living minimum wage,” check; check; check.

On this trip, we had Trump to agree on. We agreed that he is – to quote Malcolm’s daughter, Emma –  an “ugly, hairy chimp’s butt”, but we also agreed that Trump didn’t just come out of thin air, we agreed that there is a reason for Trump that most of the political establishment doesn’t want to understand. I get two or three emails a day pointing out something Trump said as proof of how stupid he is. My cue – or whatever it is called – on facebook is chock-a-block full of posts badmouthing Trump and, often, his followers. The political establishment says that the people voting for Trump are stupid and my corner of the netverse agrees. Despite that – or, maybe, because of it – both Malcolm and I agreed that the people voting for the establishment-authorized candidates, expecting to get a different result this time, are really the stupid ones. Trump is the political equivalent of a disruptive technology; if Trump were to get elected, things would change (maybe, probably, not for the better, but they would change and Trump’s supporters want change).

 

The Oligarchy Strikes Back

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

USA USA (1 of 1)What we are seeing this election season, with Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, is two political outsiders trying to take political power away from the Oligarchy. I want to say this as neutrally as possible because I know that Oligarchy is a loaded word, almost always in the negative. In this case, however, I don’t mean it to be. I’m using Oligarchy in the strict definition of a small group of people having control of a country, organization, or institution, and that is not always bad (or good).

The United States was founded as an Oligarchy with only property-owning white men being able to vote. That was not an oversight, it was done to limit the power of people. In terms of the form of our institutions, we have become more Democratic since then. First the property owning qualification was eliminated giving all white men the vote, then black men were also given the vote by the Fifteenth Amendment. Finally, 130 years after our founding, women were given the right to vote with the Nineteenth Amendment. Still, there has always been the subtext of limiting what seemed like the people’s power, with literacy tests, poll taxes, picture ID requirements, Citizen United, and in the Democratic Party, Superdelegates.

I don’t want to give the impression that I think the Oligarchy is monolithic, I don’t, however they do have common interests and Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders is a threat to those interests and the Oligarchy is fighting back.