All posts by Steve Stern

Back home

Americana, Travel

Down East-0868

 

It is great to be home again and we can’t wait to go back. Flying back into Silicon Valley from Back East with – mostly – Maine calibrated eyes, is slightly surprising. Both Boston’s Logan Airport and San Jose’s Mineta Airport are nearly new but that is all that is the same. At Logan, it is hard to find a place to plug in a computer, at Mineta, every seat has a plug (except the chairs in the Meditation Room across from the gate).

Wandering around the Northeast – New England? Down East? – I missed my five o’clock cappuccino, in San Jose, we passed three espresso places between the gate and picking up our luggage. When we left Boston – near noon -it was in the low 50’s, at San Jose, it was in the low 70’s at 6:30.

The most pleasant surprise was the space, the vistas when we got off the plane. To a great extent this is because of our topography; there are mountains to have vistas of. Waiting for the shuttle, to the east was the Diablo Range, pale orange in the fading light, and to the west were the Santa Cruz Mountains, soft in the haze. In New Hampshire, we would drive for miles and see nothing but the next quarter-mile of road. A beautiful quarter-mile but no view until we crossed a bridge.

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The West is just plain opener than the East. Not just long vistas open, but it feels more open to change. I don’t think that Silicon Valley is a coincidence, I think that it is a result. The East is weighted down by the past – of course, if you are from the East, you might say grounded by the past and both are right – there are ghosts everywhere, waiting behind the present.
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On the way home, Michele and I were already making plans to go back. We were a little too late this year

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and the trip was way too short.

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Flying to Boston, where our country was born

Travel

Back east-0848

 

I am flying into Boston to meet Michele and we will fly out of Boston on Thursday the 31st, but we will probably not spend much time there. We are hoping to get as far away as Acadia National Park and then work our way back south. Maybe have a Chinese dinner in Boston on the 30th to celebrate out 20th Anniversary. What could be more American than that?

 

Mixed feeling on the Roma Blond Angel

Current Affairs, Psychological Musings

greek-roma-coupleIn case you missed it, a couple of days ago the police in Greece, while raiding a Roma neighborhood of  Farsala, found a blond girl they say didn’t fit. On one hand, it seems the police just swept up Maria because she didn’t look like her parents, on the other hand, the state asserts that Maria’s parents claim they have 14 children, six who are less than ten months apart which would make them suspicious. Of something, somehow. When I first saw the story, my immediate reaction was that it was just another case of prejudice against the Roma.  Historically, next to Jews, the Roma are Europe’s favorite scapegoats. They are the classic outsiders, after all.

From the newspaper reports, it seems the police were in the area looking for drugs and weapons when they spotted the girl who looked different, and confiscated her. I have a problem with the police going to minority communities looking for drugs anyway, and an even bigger problem with the authorities confiscating kids without real cause. Sure, they will probably find drugs in the community just like they would probably find them with a random drug bust anywhere.

As I type that, a little inside voice is screaming Yea, but there is a better chance of finding drugs in a Roma neighborhood. Then I remembered a story an acquaintance told me. She loves plants and lives in Atherton so she thought she would try growing pot. She figured she would be able to get a better grade for less money, less risk, and more fun. It turned out that it wasn’t as easy as she thought. Cannabis is a dioecious plant, meaning that male and female flowers are on different plants and the idea is to keep the males away from the females so then females continue to grow flowers rather than seeds. In Atherton, so many people are growing pot that the male pollen is everywhere and it was very difficult to keep the females isolated. According to Forbes, Atherton is the most expensive place to live in the United States and you can be sure that nobody is making random drug searches there.

Meanwhile, back in Greece, they had no real cause, they just took Maria away from her parents and decided to find a cause later. In a turn around, they say they have a kidnapped child but nobody from whom she kidnapped but they still charged the parents with abduction. Now. the parents, it seems, will have to prove that she wasn’t kidnapped. She doesn’t look like her parents but they don’t claim that they are the biological parents, they claim that a woman from Bulgaria asked them to take Maria because that mother couldn’t take care of her. Now they are trying to prove that they didn’t commit a crime that may not have even been committed (on the bright side, a Roma kid who was taken from her parents, has been reunited after DNA tests showed they were related).

Here is the thing, though, when I read that Maria’ parents are illiterate, and had registered their family in several towns, collecting about $3,420 a month in child welfare subsidies; when I read that they have 14 children, six who are less than ten months apart: I started to think, Well, yeah, they are gypsies after all, and gypsies are known for abducting children and trafficking in them. I started to buy into the whole gypsy abductor scenario. It scares me how easily I can slip into the same stereotyping that I blame the police for.

And it scares me almost as much how easily I can stereotype the police for doing the wrong thing.

 

Kicking the can

Americana, Politics, Psychological Musings


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The government is back up and running – using the running, very loosely – and nothing seems to have changed. In some ways, it seems like Congress has just kicked the can down the road. Maybe the road will look different next January when it will be closer to elections, maybe it will look different because the assessment of the players – on both sides – will be different going in, and maybe it won’t.

I started to write about an incident with a woman in a supermarket to make my point and then remembered that I told the same story in 2011 – it obviously made a big impression on me – so here it is Something like twenty-five years ago – I remember it like it was only five years ago – I was waiting in the ten items or less line, when I realized the person two or three people in front of me had an over-full cart being pushed by a crazy looking teenager. Just then, her mother came running over very embarrassed saying something like Oh! no, dear; it is not nice to put a full cart in this line. The crazy teenager just looked at us like somebody yelling in the street and said “They don’t care”. She probably wasn’t drooling but I do remember her looking slightly dangerous in a ready to go berserk way.  We all looked at our feet, including the checker, and she went ahead.1

It was a vivid demonstration of  how much power the craziest person in the room has and it has, obviously, stuck with me. I am going to define crazy person – here – as someone being willing to let the government collapse if they don’t get their way. Leading up to the shutdown, the right fringe of the Republican Party – who I am calling  the Tea Party, for brevity – gave every indication that they would be the only crazy person in the room. They constantly made statements indicating that they were willing to take the country down to get their way (and that the government was so bad, or so big, or so ineffectual, or so something, that taking it down wouldn’t matter or might, even, be good). The Tea Party power, however, rested on the belief that they were the only people crazy enough to actually take this government down.

Obama has a long history – as long as you can have in four and a half years of  being president – of compromising (sometimes it even seemed as if he was compromising before the settlement talks started).  This time however, Obama said he would not compromise, We’re not going to pay a ransom for America to pay its bills ….we can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy. Like the Tea Party, his beliefs were strong enough, he was crazy enough, to let the government shutdown. Additionally, he seemed willing to not compromise to raise the debt ceiling, no matter how much damage it would do.

Obama bet that he could justify his motives for his crazy behavior better than the Tea Party could and the polls proved him right. He bet that, what Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker calls the Republican “survival caucus”, would vote for a compromise if there were two crazy people in the room. He was right. In the end,  just eighty-seven out of two hundred and thirty-two Republicans in the House of Representatives, changed their collective minds, but that was enough, along with the Democratic members who compromised on the timeline.

I am not sure that the Democrats had much of a choice in this except to compromise on the timeline. They had to compromise on something to make a deal and, with Obama refusing to give on Obamacare, all that was left was the time line (the did agree to means test reimbursable payments for low-income people buying insurance but that was, apparently, already in the bill). In the end, everybody agreed to kick the can down the road.

1. https://srstern.com/2011/in-defense-of-obama-or-the-advantage-of-being-crazy/

 

From way too fast on the road to beauty in cyberspace

Art, Cars, Web/Tech

Stirling-Moss-and-Denis-Jenkinson-Mercedes-Benz-300-SLR-in-1955-Mille-Miglia-front-three-quarter-2 If you grew up in California in the 50s and were obsessed with cars, at some point you raced on the street. In my case, it was right after I got my license and I got caught about three weeks later and lost my license for the next 60 days. Our idea of racing on public roads was pretty much limited to drag racing, And, for the most part, only the first five hundred feet from a stop light.  But in Europe, they were hardcore; they had real, official, racing on the street.

OK, they called it roadracing, but it was the same thing. I am not sure when they started roadracing – probably less than one week after the car was invented – but it pretty much ended by the end of 1950s. By then, racing on public roads had become truly insane with the all-out-racecars hitting speeds more commonly associated with airplanes. Probably the craziest of all these races was the Mille Miglia – meaning a thousand miles and pronounced mille mille as a sort of pun – that started at Brescia near the Alps, ran south to Rome, and then north back to Brescia. All of this on second rate Italian roads with an estimated 5,000,000 Italians watching. Usually watching from very close.

The record for the Mille Milga was set by Sterling Moss in a Mercedes Benz at an average speed of 97.96 miles per hour (on narrow, rough, windy, Italian roads). The car was called a 300SLR and was supposed to resemble the standard Mercedes Benz 300SL sports car, however, in reality, the car was a full blown, hand built, race car. Several years ago, Mercedes built 75 updated versions of this car – only about ten originals were built – to sell to very rich people at about a million dollars each (very rich people who, apparently, don’t need a windshield). OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA But the point of all this is that Jimmy at Peak-Design – I think, it is Peak-Design, I know it is via Deviant Art – thought Wow it would be awesome with a normal hardtop and some black rims. He then resigned it on his computer. I’m impressed and would buy it in a minute, if it were real and I had several hundred million dollars. Mercedes_Benz_Stirling_Moss_by_Peak_Design Stirlingmoss_Wallpaper_by_Peak_Design