All posts by Steve Stern

Damp jeans

Around home

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The other day I was meeting a friend for lunch, and I was planning on wearing a pair of jeans that I had just washed for the occasion. But, when I had to leave, my jeans – in the drier – were still damp around the edges. They were warm so I decided to put them on and let them finish drying in situ.

Driving to lunch, in the car, in my damp jeans, I started thinking about my Uncle Wilhelm von Borstel, my maternal grandmother’s younger brother. He was 6’6″ tall  and was known as Little Bill because his father’s name was also Wilhelm and stood 6’3″. He was Big Bill and, of course his son became Little Bill even when he grew taller than his father. To me, uncle Wilhelm was more myth than real person.

Typically, around an hundred and twenty years ago, European monarchs had special guards. Wilhelm II, the emperor of Germany – Kaiser in German – had a group of bodyguards called the Garde du Corps Potsdam. To be in Corps, one had to be – at least minor – royalty and over six feet tall.  My Uncle Wilhelm qualified and, as his family was impoverished as well as royal, he ended up in the the Potsdam Guards (as my family called it).

One of the stories  that I heard growing up was that while Uncle Wilhelm was in the Potsdam Guards, he had to get up at four or five – AM – to put his uniform on. Still damp! The uniform was white suede and – as it dried – it became form fitting. Driving in the car, it didn’t seem like a great way to start the day. Maybe occasionally, in the middle of the day, like I was doing, but not every day. Not at five in the morning. On the other hand, at 6’6″ tall with  black-over the knee-boots and a black leather breastplate over the tight, white-suede, cat-suit, Little Bill must have cut an imposing figure. Especially when he was wearing his gold helmet with an eagle on top.

I think that my mother was slightly in love. She was certainly in love with the image: the strikingly good looking young man in the even more impressive uniform. When I turned 16, we took a trip to see him. I think it was a trip in which my mother – who didn’t graduate from highschool – planned to  show off her heritage. Uncle Wilhelm had come to the United States after World war I and even though I had met him a couple of times when I was very young, I really didn’t remember him. He was now living in Alturas, about as far north and as far east as we could drive and still be in California.

When we got to Alturas, he didn’t really live in town, but in a trailer, alongside the highway, a little out of town. Oh! and with a huge hole between his trailer and the highway. It turned out that the State was enlarging the highway and he had dug a hole and moved the dirt to a pile behind his trailer. His plan was to sell the dirt back to the State to augment his day job which was, apparently,  poaching geese. When we got there, Uncle Wilhelm von Borstel greeted us wearing a pair of loose overalls with the fly unbuttoned and he didn’t change for our afternoon get together. It turned out that he didn’t really like to get up early to put on those damp clothes afterall.

(The picture is Wilhelm looking dashing in his uniform, I don’t think my mother kept any pictures of him, in overalls.)

My atrial fibrillation is gone!

Around home, Bay Area Walks

I went to my ablationist, yesterday and he told me that my ablation procedure is a success and my heart is no longer fibrillating. I realize that I am having a hard time believing – accept may be more accurate – that my heart really has been repaired and I have no idea why (maybe I have become attached to the problem, I hope not). The header that I first wrote said My atrial fibrillation ablation seems to be a success and I had to force myself to make it more positive. Either way, I celebrated by going for a walk at one of my favorite walks, Russian Ridge.

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I have been reading John McPhee’s Annals  of the Former World about his discovery of the new geology. Like me, he went to college before the plate tectonics revolution and bumped into it while reading about something else (in my case, I was reading about evolution). The last section of the book is Assembling California and, over the last 40 years, the understanding of California’s geological history has changed even more than California has.

Geologists now know that over the last 60 million years, or so, California has been assembled from a series of  island arcs (that once were parts of the ocean floor that had been uplifted and exposed above sea level). These island arcs – think Japan against Asia – are being swept  into the North American Plate and attaching themselves to North America. (In the process, the Sierra Nevadas got pushed up by the heat generated from the collision.) So, the land that I like to walk at Russian Ridge is the same layers of materials that make up the Pacific ocean floor. It is also to the east of the San Andreas fault, so I am walking on the Pacific Plate, not the North American Plate.

I like that.

I like the walk, too. It starts by slowly climbing around soft, grassy, hills. Last year’s grasses are dry and bent over in clumps in even patterns and this year’s grasses are green and growing between the clumps.

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When I cross into the forested area, everything changes.

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With the trees covered in moss – that is bright green and growing like crazy – and Spanish Moss which is really a member of the Pineapple family (Bromeliaceae). Then it is back into the sunlight and walking – with a view – back to, the car. An easy two and one half miles.

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Malala Yousufzai, Gabby Giffords, head injuries, and our wars

Current Affairs, War

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousufzai was shot in the head by a religious fanatic and Gabby Giffords was shot in the head by some-other-kind of fanatic. By all rights, they should be dead but they both seem to be prospering (prospering being a relative term here, I am sure that it has not been a net positive experience).

As an aside, I hold the position the anybody who tries to kill another human being is crazy. That may be my main definition of crazy, any body who thinks they have the right to kill somebody else is crazy. I suspect that alot of PTSD is otherwise sane people being forced to kill other human beings which is why drone pilots, living and working near Syracuse New York, get PTSD. End aside.

How disheartening that must be for the madmen that pulled the trigger on Malala, she is now a world wide celebrity living in England and he is living a life of an hunted animal. And poor, smiley,   Jared Lee Loughner after everybody argued over his sanity – in public – he will be spending life in prison without parole, reading about how terrific Giffords is. The new technology used to save both Malala and Gabby – if I may be presumptuous enough to use their first names – is a collateral benefit of our wars in the Gulf and Afghanistan.

In the Civil War, if somebody was wounded, they had only about a 40% chance of living. Those were the days before anesthesia or antibiotics like penicillin but it was also before IED’s or hollow-point bullets. In World War II, the odds climbed to about 70%. Now, in Afghanistan, it is better than 80%. With Malala and Gabby, it is 100%. Much of this is because of how fast we can get wounded people to help, but it is also because, once we get them to help, the doctors have learned so much about stopping the damage from getting worse and, then, repairing the damage.

It is extraordinary how far these little wars have pushed trauma medicine. I still don’t think they are worth it, though.

Shot schoolgirl treated in the UK

The power of My Team

Americana, Politics

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Just look at this couple. Look at the guy, with that charming smile. How can anybody not trust him to always do what is right.

And that is the rub, a big part of me thinks it must be right if Obama did it instead of looking at it objectively.  For the first time, I am starting to understand why otherwise sane Republicans overlook Bush’s many flaws. Like I look – or, maybe, overlook is more accurate – at Obama’s ordering of Drone Strikes backwards, they must do the same with Bush’s overspending.

I read where one of the mothers of the children killed at Newtown wanted her son shown in an open casket at his funeral service. She wanted people to actually see the damage that a modern assault rifle causes: the child’s face half missing, his left hand almost gone (the weapon used is designed to cause as much damage as possible, the damage is not collateral, it is the point). I think we should do the same with drone strikes.

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The strike above killed 12 civilians – three were children – on their way back from the market. According to Yemeni paper that printed this picture, The villagers who rushed to the road, cutting through rocky fields in central Yemen, found the dead strewn around a burning sport utility vehicle. The bodies were dusted with white powder — flour and sugar, the witnesses said — that the victims were bringing home from market when the aircraft attacked. A torched woman clutched her daughter in a lifeless embrace. Four severed heads littered the pavement. I think that this should be in The New York Times, I think that it should be on television.

Obama ran on transparency, or – at least – that is what I most resonated with. I didn’t think that he was going to be a wild eyed liberal but I thought that he would be more transparent than the Bush Administration. I did think we would get away from the Under Siege mentality that justified The Patriot Act – what a hypocritical name! – that justified torture: I did not think we would get an administration that would deny – for a year – even the existence of a paper authorizing the killing of Americans.  It never occurred to me that we would get an administration that says it has the right to kill Americans without a trial, or even a hearing, or even a judicial second opinion. An administration that issues a white paper that says: Were the target of a lethal operation a U.S citizen who may have rights under the Due Process Clause and the Fourth Amendment, that individual’s citizenship would not immunize from a lethal operation. An administration that uses that kind of Orwellian language to hide what is really going on. That wants to keep the lid on the casket.

The Obama Administration is saying We have the power – the legal right – to kill anybody we want without a trial. Trust us we won’t abuse that power. I do trust them, but I didn’t trust Chaney and that is a problem. We are supposed to be a nation ruled bu Law not the decision, no matter how well considered, of one man. Even if if that one man is Barrak Obama.