This Racetrack
Category Archives: Americana
Occupy Wall Street far west edition
I went to an Occupy Wall Street protest last Friday. We occupied an overpass over Highway 92. The theory being that this overpass was one of 74 bridges have been found to be structurally deficient in San Mateo County. That is a pretty amazing figure; San Mateo is one of the richest counties in the United States and pretty consistently votes democratic and even we doesn’t take care of our infrastructure. There were 122 people signed up to be here and I talked to a couple of people who said that they hadn’t signed up so there were probably somewhere between 120 and 150 people spread out over the overpass.
They were just regular people, some of whom took off work early and some – like me – that didn’t have work to take off of. The crowd seemed completely middle class.
I especially liked the accidental juxtaposition to the sign in this picture.
It was mostly a late middle age group although there were people of all ages.
I am not sure how much of what I saw and felt was reality and how much is my projection, but – with that qualifier – everybody seemed more sad than enraged, disappointed with a deeping realization that it wasn’t going to get better. At least without a huge amount of work on our part. I talked to one woman who said that it was a typical San Mateo crowd, We are nice people who don’t make waves. These are people who believe in democracy, who haven’t given up or they wouldn’t be here. They are aware that America’s day in the sun is ending but are not happy with the government only helping the rich. I had the sense that they weren’t going away.
Two questions and a macro lens
Last summer, Michele bought a seedling at the San Francisco Succulent and Cactus Society show. She bought it because it was fuzzy and the deer – seen here looking for something tasty after chomping down on an Acacia sprout –
don’t normally eat fuzzy plants so it seemed like a good choice for the backyard.
Then, a week or so ago, it bloomed at the very tip, right where the new leaves are. I have no idea what the plant is and I am pretty good at identifying plants partially because I am a lumper and not a splitter. A lumper says that an onion is a Lily and leaves it at that, a splitter wants to know exactly what kind of onion it is. With cacti, the lumper sees the fairly common tree cactus and sees a Opuntia of some kind, or – maybe – a Opuntia brasiliensis; a splitter sees a Brisiliopuntia brasiliensis. Being a lumper is much easier.
After photographing the plant, I went for walk around the neighborhood and saw a baseball laying by the side of the trail where there are no houses. I am tickled by the fact that the ball is OFFICIAL LEAGUE which – let’s face it – is never Official League. Actually, we used to use Official League as a joke, sort of like Industrial Strength or the amp goes to 11. Also, as you can see, the ball is made in China.
Now, for the two questions: what IS that plant? and, are real major league baseballs made in China? or are they still made in the good ol’ USA because baseball is our national pastime, after all?
The Free Press
Check out the two pictures above. According to Sociological Images, what really happened is that the police complained to the New York Times and they changed the article. I am not much of a conspiracy kind of guy but I do think that the press does have a point of view and is susceptible to influence. Even the New York Times. We liberals think that Fox is a right wing propaganda machine and the rest of the press is neutral. That is not true.
Almost all the press is owned by the establishment and tends to back the establishment and protect the establishment and listen to the establishment. We, on the other hand, are pretty much trained to passively and uncritically absorb whatever is in front of us. So when the New York Times says that In a tense showdown over the East River, police arrested hundreds of Occupy Wall Street demonstrators after they marched onto the bridge’s Brooklyn-bound roadway we believe it. Except that that isn’t what really happened.
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We Killed Anwar al-Awlaki, shit!
The New York Times has an editorial saying that killing Anwar al-Awlaki is a justified act of war. The editorial is worth reading saying in part
The United States did not claim the power to kill Mr. Awlaki because of his political views or because he was a mere member of a Qaeda affiliate against which Congress had authorized the use of force. It claimed the power to kill him, rather, because he was an operational leader of a Qaeda affiliate that had been involved in terrorist plots on American soil and because he was hiding in a country that lacked the capacity to arrest him and bring him to justice.
Of course the New York Times editorials usually say that what the president did was justified whether it is killing an American citizen we don’t like or invading Iraq. Anyway, it seems to me that Obama is doing a crackerjack job of what Bush the Younger bollixed. I wish that made it right but it doesn’t. We are fighting a war against a bunch of wackos that we should be rounding up and trying in court just like the Symbionese Liberation Army.
How much different the world would be if Bush had declared 9-11 the biggest criminal act in history and committed to tracking the criminals down and bring them to justice. Maybe we wouldn’t have fought two stupid, un-winnable, wars at the cost of bankrupting ourselves.
Instead, we have a war on terror. So maybe that is three, stupid, un-winnable wars.