All posts by Steve Stern

A Story

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A long time ago, when I was a kid, I’m not sure exactly when but surely before the seventh grade, I had one of the most memorable and traumatic thirty seconds of my life. It was at a summer camp in the Santa Cruz Mountains up the hill from Los Gatos. The camp was at a school named the Montezuma Mountain School for Boys and the only reason I know the name is because I went to a photography weekend retreat at the same location but with a different name about forty to fifty years later. During the photography school, it started to dawn on me that I had been at the same location years before.

I don’t remember anything about that summer or the summer camp except for a thirty-second burst of violence. There were four of us sitting on the ground in a sort of circle, in the shade of a building. I have no idea why, maybe we were waiting for the cafeteria to open, maybe they were giving out free balloons, all I remember is that we were sitting in the shade with one guy leaning up against the stucco wall, I’m going to call the wall-leaner Ben. Ben may have been younger or he may have been lower on the cool-guy scale, either way, he was sitting with his back to the wall.

An older camper, way higher on the cool-guy scale than us, joined us and started asserting his dominance. Then, Mister Cool punched Ben in the face. For no observable reason. Just leaned into the circle and punched the poor guy in the face. Hard enough to draw blood (and tears).

I’m reminded of that senseless attack by Putin’s senseless attack on Ukraine. What a prick! Putin is a narcissistic sociopath with no regard for the carnage he is creating other than how it might help him. When Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv, they left behind a devastated landscape littered with dead bodies, a population traumatized by rape and murder, and destroyed houses and schools, the result of an army that was more of a mob than an effective military force. When the units got back to Moscow, Putin rewarded them with medals. Even now, the Russians will occasionally lop a missile into some city far from the battle lines – aiming at an apartment house or a maternity hospital to kill civilians – for no reason other than he is trying to terrorize the population. Other people’s pain means nothing to Putin so powerful is his imagined self-importance.

Now Putin’s army is cutting off the export of Ukrainian grain and cooking oil, trying to use the starvation of uninvolved people as a lever. It is hard to imagine that level of inhumanity but some people are evil, irredeemably so.

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The Land Of The Free

Politics, Uncategorized

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Second Amendment to the US Constitution.

Our nation is shocked and saddened by the news of the shootings at Virginia Tech today. President George Bush after the Virginia Tech shooting

We cannot and will not be passive in the face of such violence. We should be willing to challenge old assumptions in order to lessen the prospects of such violence in the future. President Barak Obama after the Tucson shooting.

I can speak for all of the senators, congressmen and congresswomen, all of the people in this room that are involved in this decision, that we will act and do something. We will act. President Donald Trump after the Parkland shooting.

Another massacre: Uvalde, Texas – an elementary school, beautiful, innocent second, third, fourth graders. And how many scores of little children who witnessed what happened see their friends die as if they’re on a battlefield, for God’s sake. They’ll live with it the rest of their lives. President Joseph Biden after the Uvalde School shooting.

This is not who we are. America is better than this. President Joseph Biden this time but it could be anybody in power.

 Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus Going on before. Christ, the royal Master, Leads against the foe; Forward into battle, See his banners go!… Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war, With the cross of Jesus Going on before. a Christian hymn by Arthur Sullivan (1871)

“It’s impossible to pick up the paper or listen to the news on the radio and not get depressed.” I’ve been saying for months, years, really, but it is especially true now. Well, maybe especially true is the wrong way to put it, it was also true after a White eighteen-year-old male killed ten Black people in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York a couple of Saturdays ago. Now, it is true again, after another White eighteen-year-old male slaughtered nineteen children and two adults in a school in Texas. I saw a picture today that just wreaked me; small kids, grammar school age, lined up across from the NRA Convention, each holding a picture of another child who had been slaughtered by another child, a larger child, but still a child, really.

CNN said, “We may never know why a shooter gunned down 19 children and two teachers in a massacre Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.” That’s wrong – I’m trying to resist saying “That’s bullshit.” – we do know. We know that a very disturbed young man thought the best way to solve his real and imagined problems is to kill people. Liberals will tell you that guns are the problem, not the violence in our culture or the breakdown of families, they are both right and wrong. Conservatives will tell you that guns are not the problem, the violence in video games, movies, and on TV is the problem along with the breakdown of the family and they are also both wrong and right.

We live in a culture that glorifies violence. Our public heroes – police officers, and people in the military – are the most violent people in our culture. Our press fetishizes Navy Seals sort of ignoring that they kill people for a living. Bruce Willis, as Police Detective Lieutenant John McClain, even killed ten people in Die Hard – all for a good cause, of course, because it was the only thing he could do to solve the problem – Die Hard! is considered a Christmas movie. From a very young age, we are subtly told violence solves problems, it certainly does in movies and video games. Our make-believe culture of violence is a big part of the problem of violence in our real culture.

At the latest NRA Convention, Ted Cruz said that guns were not the problem, broken families, absent fathers, and low church attendance were the problem. I don’t like Ted Cruz, however, I think Ted Cruz does have a point although I would change the causes to dysfunctional families, and absent and distracted parents. I even agree with Cruz on low church attendance but it is much bigger than that, it is the decline in membership in what I would call social clubs. By social clubs, I mean organizations nominally built around a particular interest or activity whose secondary function is the community it generates, including service clubs like the Lions and Rotary Clubs, sports clubs, hobby clubs as well as the community aspects of churches. The great majority – it is probably more accurate to say all – of mass killers are loners, feeling isolated.

To Cruz’s list of problems, I would add three factors that contribute to the background existential angst many Americans feel (maybe most Americans, even if it isn’t conscience). The loss of primacy in our society of White Christian males just because they are White, Christian, and male. The rise of a ruling elite, many of them rich beyond imagination, and the consequential fall and loss of power of the middle class. And for young people especially, Earth’s worsening climate. All of this while the adults in charge don’t seem to really care (after all, if you are over fifty, it is easy to think you will miss the worst of the coming disaster).

I don’t think that having a gun, per se, is the problem. I don’t even think that having an assault rifle is the problem. But, and it is a huge but, when a violent person feels unheard, is isolated and feeling alone, or feels unloved and unrespected, or is upset or is inraged, having a gun handy is a force multiplier and it is much easier to commit catastrophic damage. Having an assault rifle puts that catastrophic damage in a different league. AR15s are a perfect example: it weighs in at about six and a half pounds including twenty rounds in the clip while an old-fashioned hunting rifle, like a Remington Model 141 weighs just shy of eight pounds plus another five pounds for twenty rounds of ammo. The AR15 can accurately fire those twenty rounds in less than ten seconds and the damage caused by even one round of AR-15 ammo is so extensive that it is worthless for killing an animal for food. What it is not worthless for is killing people. That’s what it is designed for, killing people. If all the owner wants is to kill people, the AR15 is the perfect weapon.

Interestingly – which may not be the best word for something as ghoulish as guns and killing people – Switzerland has almost as many guns per capita as the United States and it has had zero mass shootings since 2001. As sort of an aside, I crossed through Switzerland by train in October 1988 and I was surprised at how many young men got on the train with assault rifles (and got off a stop or two later). I’ve been told they were Army reservists although it may have been Knabenschiessen which is a very popular, yearly, Swiss gun festival. End aside.

What is different is that Swiss gun owners are required to take background checks, take comprehensive yearly training with their weapons, and register both their guns and ammunition. In Switzerland, gun ownership is strictly controlled (you could even say well regulated ). In the United States, one can get enraged at an imagined insult, go out and buy a pseudo-assault rifle and kill somebody, or twenty somebodies, within an hour.

Lastly, I think that it is germane to point out that the NRA Convention does not allow guns at their meetings which should give you a good idea of what the NRA thinks of the wisdom of some idiot walking in with a loaded weapon.

Lunar Eclipse 2022

Around home

Last night, we went up to Highway 35 – what we used to call Skyline when I was a kid – to watch the May 2022 Lunar Eclipse. The moon was supposed to rise at 8:04 but we didn’t see it until well after 8:30. Even before we went, I was wondering how they determine the moonrise time in a hilly area like Coastal California; it deems to me that, if we had moved two hundred yards to the right, the moon would have come up sooner. Whatever the method of measurement, the moon did rise and it was spectacular. Spectacular for Michele, for me, it was sort of a bust moonwise.

Everything but the feeble moon – almost dulled into invisibility by mist – was well worth driving up to Skyline for, however. When Michele – driving – and I first drove up to Skyline about an hour before the 8:04 moonrise, we both had the same overlook in mind but, when we got there, Michele plotted the exact moonrise direction only to find that we were in the exact wrong place. We ended up on a low ridge above the Monte Bello Open Space Preserve parking lot. The air was coolish and, unusual for the Skyline area, there was no wind. The sky put on a nice sunset which, of course, always comes with a full moonrise.

We had debated going to Twin Peaks or Corona Heights in San Francisco but the forecast was for fog and now, looking north to Mt. Diablo, we could see the fog filling the bay and signs of the wind picking up. Here, above the very improved Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District parking lot, it was calm as Michele patiently – and I, impatiently – waited for the moon to rise.

A Couple Of Random Thoughts On Ukraine

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04:00 #Donetsk (occupied): “The oil depot in Kirovskyi district is on fire. `Have the orcs smoked again in an undesignated area?” via @hochu_dodomu A Tweet by English Luhansk @loogunda Occasional reporting and translations about Ukraine. (formerly “English Lugansk”)

Our Congressional Delegation traveled to Kyiv and met with @ZelenskyyUa to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine. A Tweet by Nancy Pelosi @SpeakerPelosi Speaker of the House, focused on strengthening America’s middle class and creating jobs; mother, grandmother, dark chocolate connoisseur.

The West is a series of institutions and values, Russia is European but not Western. Japan is Western but not European. Western means rule of law, democracy, private property, open markets, respect for the individual, diversity, pluralism of opinion…historian Steve Kotkin quoted in the New Yorker.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. ― Margaret Mead

Ukraine is a poor country, much poorer than it looks on TV. U.S. News – the same U. S. News that ranks colleges and universities and that I pick up at newsstands to see if my alma mater’s ranking has changed – ranks Ukraine #71 out of the top 78 countries, with a GDP per capita of $13,350 (for comparison, the GDP per capita of the US is $65,280 and Luxumbourg is highest at $124,590).

These numbers, however, although commonly used are deceptive, thrown off by the number of very rich in each country; if one billionaire gets richer but no one else does, the GDP per capita still goes up. A better number is probably the median income which is $4,434 in Ukraine, the USA is at $19,306, and Luxumbourg is at $26,321. Ukraine’s median income is about a third of the median income of South Korea or half that of Poland and twice that of nearby Georgia. Counterintuitively, I believe that is one of the reasons they are doing so well. These are not people who are used to having somebody else fix their problems.

In this case, however, somebody else is, at least, helping; NATO, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and now, Isreal. Ukraine’s military budget is $5.94 B but, so far, NATO, alone, has given and pledged $6.4B worth of equipment to them and it is arriving fast.

Over the years, as we bollixed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’ve been very critical of the US Military and even more critical of our Intelligence Community which seemed incapable of predicting world-changing events like the fall of the USSR. But, what our Military Establishment is great at is logistics and our Intelligence Community has been training for picking Soviet or Russian targets – mostly by satellite – for eighty-two years. Getting equipment to people who are willing to use it and giving them the location of high-value targets is exactly what is needed right now. We have been moving equipment into Ukraine at astounding speed, about 60% of the large artillery pieces Biden released were sent in 72 hours and they are killing generals at an unprecedented rate.

As an aside, I think a lot of this high regard for and expertise in logistics is because of the great Ulysses S. Grant. Much to his dismay, Grant was assigned to the Quartermaster Corps after he graduated from West Point but the training he got served him well during the Civil War. For example, the North built 22,000 miles of railroad track during the Civil War compared to only 9,5000 miles for the South. Moving soldiers and equipment fast was in Grant’s DNA, during the Mexican-American War War, Grant even dragged a canon up into a bell tower to give it better range. The Army he built during the Civil War was based on better equipment and faster movement and it still is in the United States Army’s DNA. End aside.

While Ukraine is a European country, it is not what I think of as European because, when I think of Europe, I’m really thinking of Western Europe. I’m really thinking of France or Germany, Spain or Italy. The Ukrainian character is closer to Russian than French, just like their language. Obviously, now, they want to change that and a large part of the population is willing to die for it. As the Ukrainians say, “Glory to Ukraine!”

Happy Spring

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It is drizzling and chilly outside but it feels like Spring. After an unending, cold, dry winter, in the last couple of weeks, it must have rained three inches and the garden, Michele, and I are happy for it. Between rains, the sky is blue and the sun is bright, and the flowers are blooming. Everything looks fresh, and new, just like spring. And, after being in what seemed like an endless loop of medical problems, it is starting to feel like spring for me too.

The endless loop started, about the time Fall had turned into Winter and I noticed, after trying not to – a troubling open wound on my leg. I had always sort of held a mindset that whatever the specific problem was, it was a specific problem and could be fixed. But The Wound really rattled me. Holy Fuck, it is like I’m rotting from the skin in, like a rotting pear. Like a leaper, like an old leaper. Unclean, unclean. This was not a problem to be solved, this was just my old body giving up the ghost.

Up until The Wound, I didn’t really think of myself as old. That’s not quite right, I thought of myself as old, but not Dianne Finesteirn old, more like oldish with a lot of new parts. Most old people I know seem to be stuck in the past and I don’t yearn for the past at all. I feel young-minded, but The Wound rattled me. It made me feel very old.

This was also a time of backed up doctor appointments, a foot doctor who would, after a month or so of my thinking about it, remove part of my big toenail to stop it from being driven into my very sore flesh by the neighboring hammer toe, and a skin doctor doing a biopsy on my arm. Neither doctor ran screaming from the room when I showed them The Wound which was encouraging and both bandaged the wound in different ways but it kept getting worse. Finally, a couple of days later, I went to a rheumatology specialist that Michele had recommended and he recommended that I go to the wound center. Now! They recommended that I start wearing compression socks to mitigate my varicose veins and they put a new bandage on The Wound.

As an aside, and, since it came from the certified Wound Center, I’m going to call it a tip. They put a square of Duoderm CGF directly on the Wound. The Duoderm CGF is like an artificial scab over a wound that retains the moisture and I left it there for something like four or five days between changing. Underneath, a wound just heals itself. End aside.

About this time, at the apogee of my age-angst, I tore the meniscus in my left knee making it much harder to get around and then I gouged a hole into my left hand with a sharp fingernail on my right hand and I sank into a winter lethargy. The Wound Center also recommended that I get an ultrasound of my varicose veins to see if they were a problem that could be solved. The ultrasound led to my having a radiofrequency ablation of my varicose veins last week and I feel like the endless downhill loop is starting to end. Next week I’m getting a steroid shot in my left knee and my hand gouge has even miraculously healed under its Duoderm CGF scab all of which has led to my feeling much more spring-like this week.

So, Happy Spring.