All posts by Steve Stern

Some local color

Around home

Backyard-1051

Michele pointed this out to me in this morning’s Portola Valley Forum, an interactive email group.

Mon Mar 2, 2015 5:11 pm (PST) . Posted by:

Pxxxxx Bxxxxxxxx

Hi PVForum,

My rats and I were more or less cheerfully co-habitating, but today they
went too far when they ate the Ethernet cable that enables me to listen to
Pandora. I’m angry, really angry. I need not only an exterminator but
someone who can find and block the point(s) of entry. Finding the point(s)
of entry will require exploration in two crawl spaces-by someone small and
nimble, as the crawl spaces have less than a foot of clearance in several
key places. Recommendations would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

Pxxxxxxx

So far all the answers have said Don’t use poison, it will hurt the other wildlife and the local cats and dogs. It is kind of neat having a local community bulletin-board even though a good portion of the comments are complaints about airplane noise – from San Francisco Airport about twenty miles away – and people driving too fast.

ISIS and “Islamic-terrorists”

Politics

ISIS-6591

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.

 

 

Pavlov’s…eeer, human?

Around home

Pavlov-1423When 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.

Thinking about privacy

Uncategorized

IMG_7629

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?

 

ISIS and the crazy bad guys.

Psychological Musings

SF Bookmarker-

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.