Michele is in Ireland and – I hope – will be making a post or two from there.
All posts by Steve Stern
Israel in the West Bank
Listening to Bibi Netanyahu’s speech – OK, not really listening to it, just listening to stuff about it like Congress fawning over him – just puts me in a rage. I grew up in a family that thought Israel was the greatest. Bringing democracy to the heathens, making the desert bloom, blah, blah, blah. I am not sure when I started to think that Israel was doing evil – maybe it started when I realized that Making the desert bloom. was another way of saying that We are using everybody’s water, including the Palestinians, it was almost certainly by the time I learned that Palestinians children were being killed at a rate of over seven times that of Israeli children1 – but I do now. And I don’t use that term lightly.
For sure, I don’t use that term lightly. Using it opens me up to too many charges. Charges of being a self hating Jew; charges of being an anti-Semite. Because anybody who disagrees with Israel must be an anti-Semite. It puts me in the company of alot of haters that I find abhorrent. But – the bottom line is – what Israel is doing and what they have been doing is evil.
I don’t think that Americans have any idea what is going on with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and I don’t think we want to know.
It’s not just that the Israelis are building settlements in the west bank, it is – to protect those settlements – that they have to control Palestinian movement and access in the West Bank. Like all occupiers, to stay safe, the Israelis have to completely dominate and control the Palestinians. They have to maintain a full press occupation of the West Bank. Of course that leads to harassment both institutional and ad-hoc. Alain Salomon and Katia Solomon have a Op Ed in the New York Times that gives a chilling description of going through an Israeli checkpoint near Ramallah. They say As we entered this narrow space I looked at the barbed wire further on. We are Jewish, and began to weep. How was it possible that our own people, who have gone through such suffering, can inflict this ordeal, intended to humiliate and intimidate another people?
Towns like Hebron have been turned into virtual jails.
And – very importantly – what Israel is doing will lead to failure for Israel. Thoughtful Jews like Emily Hauser and Rabbi Brant Rosen know that as do a huge number of Israelis in Israel. It is sad that our Congress doesn’t seem to.
1. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Interestingly – but depressingly – the American Press reports those killings at a ratio of about seven times – for the New York Times – to twelve times – for ABC Television -more for the Israeli children so we dobn’t know more Palestinians are being killed.
An animal video
Like almost everything, when we think about animals, we think in stereotypes. And, like almost everything, the animals are individuals. My stereotype of cobras – especially King Cobras – is of an almost relentless killing machine. This is partly because – when I was young, say about ten – I read in a book on big game hunting in Africa that snakes killed more people than any other animal and that has stuck with me.
As an aside, about that time, my mother – as a conscience and continuing act of self improvement – was going to lunches in which the entertainment was a lecture by an author hawking their book. I would often end up with the book and they were often a book I would otherwise never have read. In this case, it was a book by – what was called in those days – a White Hunter. I don’t remember the author’s name or the book title, but the subtitle was The truth about animals lying in wait and hunters lying in print. All I remember about the book – aside from it being a fascinating look into a world I had no idea existed – was that the author claimed the Cape Buffalo was the most dangerous animal to hunt and the snake meme. End aside.
So, I know King Cobras to be ruthless killing machines. Of course they are not; they are more like ruthless scaring machines trying to save their venom to be used against something they will eat, like a Rat Snake. Knowing that doesn’t make this video any less scary.
A trip to the mountains west of Death Valley ended
All day yesterday – yesterday, blog time; Saturday May 7th, real time – it was slowly getting cloudier. In the desert, this does not – necessarily – mean it is going to rain, this is a desert because it does not rain very much. It is often cloudy, but – after having the rain squeezed out by the Sierra Nevadas, in which we are in the rain shadow – the clouds usually just move east to rain in Kansas or somewhere wetter. So, when we got up in the morning, it was not raining but it had turned cooler.
Our plan was to go over Hunter Mountain and then down into the Panamint Valley where we were going to spend the night. Panamint Valley is considerably lower than where we were camped, so the temperature turning cooler was very welcome. But the road over Hunter Mountain tops out at at a little higher than 7,000 feet and I was concerned about snow. I had asked the Ranger about Hunter Mountain when we had gone to Scotty’s Castle two days ago and they said it was clear with a few wet spots. My experience with rangers in Death Valley is that they have a tendency to make the roads sound worse than they are to keep the amateurs out – I guess – and the road from Ubehebe Crater – while dirt – had been graded within the last couple of weeks so we stayed with our plan. The road was great for the entire way, another small sign that this trip was working. .
As we climbed, everything got bigger, greener, lusher. We passed a gorgeous plant in full bloom by the side of the road that I was convinced was a form of creosote with lots of water. After much discussion – lasting until after we got home, Michele convinced me that it was member of the rose family.
While the road was smoothly graded, it was dusty. Very dusty; amazing us with the dust’s ability to stick to the license plate letters.
Mountain tops in the desert are like islands in the ocean. Five thousand feet below is an entirely different ecosystem. Any mouse – or desert chipmunk or beetle for that matter – is pretty much trapped on this mountain; twenty five miles from the next 7,000 foot mountain. Over the years – lots of years – the Hunter Mountain mouse has changed from the mouse over at Telescope Peak or Tin Mountain. They are like Darwin’s Finches. Except the finches and hawks can go from mountain top to mountain top.
Michele, who is our resident bird identifier, was kept busy driving, looking at birds, and, – then – looking down into the Panamint Valley. Where we were, it was calm with big puffy clouds, but, to the south, it looked like the wind was picking up. The clouds were getting rounded rather than puffy and the desert looked dusty. We were heading south as we dropped off of Hunter Mountain, so neither one a good sign.
From the top of Hunter Mountain down into the upper Panamint Valley is a long downhill, through a series of eco-zones including a landscape of Joshua trees.
We stopped for lunch at a new overlook that had just been built using funds from the Recovery Act. I am all for that. It sort of echo the Roosevelt Public Works Administration. As we ate lunch, we could see the wind picking up along the valley floor, a couple of thousand feet below.
When it is windy, a good way to stay out of it is to stay in the canyons along the sides of the valley, in this case, the canyon leading to Darwin Falls. Darwin Falls is pretty puny and probably wouldn’t even have a name most places, here it is a big deal. At the start of the walk, there is no water in the creekbed because it has all sunk into the gravel. The water is there but running underground. As we get closer and run into water, the plants become much more lush and the walk becomes a matter of hunt and pecking our way. About half way up, Michele pointed out a couple of clumps of wild orchids that I had walked by. Finally, at the end, was the “waterfall” and other visitors. Darwin Falls, after all is a major destination. One of the other visitor groups was a lovely young couple taking time off from their job of designing weapons at the China Lake Naval Air Station.
There was something jarring about coming back into Civilization by casually talking about designing weapons with a pleasant young couple. Last year, we got some help from a couple of guys on the road to Stripped Butte, one of whom was a Predator pilot so – I guess – it shouldn’t be jarring. It is who we are. The most powerful war making country in the history of humankind. I am not happy about that and it is not how I want to think about my country; but – even in remote death Valley – the signs are all around us.
Outside our cool canyon, the wind was blowing and I suggested that we have dinner at Panamint Springs and see if the wind blows itself out. Basha suggested that we have dinner and spend the night at the motel – using the term very loosely – at Panamint Springs, Howard and her treat. Her suggestion won, four to zero. The next day, we fully immersed ourselves in civilization by driving home for ten hours, finally running into the storm that we had seen hints of the day before.
I had no idea
that NASA had such cool posters. Now I find out that it is a NASA tradition to make a cool poster for each flight. When I was in my twenties and NASA was gearing up, the Astronauts were made to seem as whitebread as possible. This impression was helped by all the astronauts being white guys – usually military. It was only after reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff that I realized this was a group of pretty wild guys. Of course! They were test pilots. High risk takers. And – apparently – geeks. Check them out.
