Category Archives: Current Affairs

Vegas II

Americana, Current Affairs, Photography, Travel

 

The desert does lots of things well, in my opinion, but civilization is not one of them. Almost any built up area in the desert looks seedy and Las Vegas is not an exception. Except for the Vegas Strip: there the neon lights work just perfectly. The neon sparkles in the clear air and everything seems alive and crisp and clean.

My plan had been to park the truck at one end of the strip, walk down it and back with my tele-zoom, and then repeat with a wide angle lens. It was further down and back as well as a lot more interesting than I expected and Ed had said that he expected to put a wrap on his frolicking early, so I only made one pass using tele. So most of what I have are detail type shots with almost no street views.

As an aside, one thing that surprised me was that I saw several Muslim women in Hijabs. More Hijabs than I saw at Edwin’s graduation in Freemont which has a large Muslim population. End aside. I also saw more than several people dressed in costumes like the Hello Kitty woman below. I think that you could have your picture taken with them for a small fee – that is if you ever wanted to have your picture taken with Hello Kitty, or Spiderman, or a couple of characters that I didn’t recognize – and the costumes themselves seemed too professional and elaborate to be home made or spontaneous. (Maybe the rent them from central casting – I suspect that the women dressed as showgirls fall into that category.)

Of course there is gambling everywhere but gambling is far from the entire show. There are rollercoaster rides,

and lots of themed dining, events, shows,

lots and lots of shopping (the real American pastime),

and lots of sex in all kinds of flavors (I wonder if the HOT BABES direct to you are delivered in the truck).

 

 

 

 

 

The 2012 Eclipse

Americana, Current Affairs, Photography, Sierras

Michele and I went to Pyramid Lake, Nevada to see the eclipse. (Photo above grabbed from the web.) Well, more accurately, Michele went to Pyramid Lake to see the eclipse – because the center line of the eclipse path went over the southern part of the lake – and I went because I wanted to see the people watching the eclipse. We met Michele’s sister at the family cabin in Squaw Valley and then drove the long way to Pyramid.

Starting at Squaw in the Sierras, we drove north through pines and aspens to Sierraville where we semi-picniced.

Sierraville is a scenic little town at the western edge of a large valley – surprisingly enough, named Sierra Valley – that grows drier as we drive to Nevada, heading  east and getting deeper into the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevadas. By mid afternoon, we ended up at the north end of Pyramid Lake and saw our first Eclipsers.

From there, we worked our way south to where Michele had figured would be the optimum viewing place. We found the perfect place: great eclipse viewing for Michele and great wacko people viewing for me. And I mean wacko people in the best possible way; anybody willing to drive this far to see what is essentially a non-event, is my kind of person. I learned a long time ago, when I went to my first Cactus and Succulent Society meeting, that people who are interested in the out-of-the-ordinary are the most interesting people of all.

A couple of portraits by Michele.

Then it was back to Reno through the fading light for a beer and sandwich at the Great Basin Brewing Company. All in all, a very nice outing.

 

 

1. Bahrain Grand Prix – a thought on morality

Current Affairs

In my post on my spiffy Big Bamboo hat, I had a footnote tag after Bahrain Grand Prix and then forgot to put in the footnote. That is probably a good thing because it would have been the tail wagging the dog anyway.

This weekend is the Bahrain Grand Prix and I don’t think the F11  circus should be there. It helps legitimize a regime that shouldn’t be legitimized. A regime that called in the Saudi army to help it put down peaceful protests. A minority Sunni regime that suppresses its Shiite majority and, by its own admission, has killed and tortured its own citizens when they protested. It seems to be a case of  Bahrain’s desire for national prestige and its willingness to pay for that prestige trumping morality.

As much as I want to think otherwise, that is what Grand Prix racing is all about: money and national prestige. It is an incredibly expensive sport. The top teams pay about a half a billion dollars a year to play. The top drivers are some of the highest paid athletes in the world.2 

It brings up the question of, as a fan, how much do I want to support a sport that is amoral at best and probably really – by a lot of reasonable standards – immoral. And, yet, I love cars and so enjoy seeing the best cars in the world race. I have been critical of Giants fans who supported Barry Bonds and I still support Fernando Alonso who once cheated and then  tried to blackmail his team owner in an effort to get an advantage. But, man, is he a good driver.

What my mini moral dilemma boils down to is this: I don’t want Formula One to race at Bahrain, but, because they are, I will watch it. It seems that I want somebody else to govern my moral behavior. I don’t think that puts me on the level of a child abuser, but I am also pretty sure that the Buddha would not approve.

1 F1 stands for Formula One, the highest class of racing cars specified by the FIA  – Federation Internationale de L’Automobile, the governing body of international auto racing – that race in twenty races a year, each race in a different country.

2 Michael Schumacher is the most successful and highest paid driver, so far making over one billion dollars in his career.

Romney, Bain Capital, and the amorality of business verses Santorum, righteousness, and the immorality of being certain

Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings

Following the Republican primary has been both fascinating and scary. Fascinating because the players seem flawed to the point that the race sometimes seems like fiction. Scary because one of these guys could be the next president of the United States; unlikely, in my opinion, but possible. Of the two main players, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Romney seems like the best bet because – as the conventional wisdom has it – he is probably just bullshitting and would be more moderate than he is pretending to be now. Maybe….I guess.

Romney is a businessman and business is, usually, amoral. Not immoral, just amoral as in morality is not really a factor. There are exceptions when the founder has a vision of a product or service that he or she wants to get into the marketplace, but I have never heard of a business that was founded to provide jobs. A business has to make money to survive and business, done right, becomes about making money. Even Apple, under Steve Jobs, which was one of the most Vision driven companies in the marketplace, moved its production to China to make more money. It is axiomatic; the better the business is run, the more money it makes.

A business that invests or takes over other companies doesn’t even have a product, it is only about making money. A couple of months ago, The New Yorker had an article about  the Stella D’oro Biscuit Company, a Bronx bakery that was bought by a private-equity firm like Bain Capital in 2006. It makes for fascinating reading and I suggest you follow the link, but the gist of the article is that a company that had taken great pride in its product and the way it treated its workers was  destroyed after it was bought out by a company that did not share that vision.

The private equity firm, Bain Capital, founded by Mitt Romney was founded to make money. Not to hire people, not to produce a great product, only to make money. They go where they think they can make  the most money like surveillance cameras when the Chinese government spends multibillions in an effort to blanket the country with devises to watch their citizens. Bain has bought in because they think they will make a  profit. The morality of China spying on its people is not a factor, the profit is. Jobs is not a factor, according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal, 22 percent of the companies in which Bain invested wound up either in bankruptcy or shutting their doors entirely. But Romney made money from them; apparently he is very good at making money.

I suspect that Romney would be pretty pragmatic as president. I wouldn’t like his appointments to the Supreme Court1, I wouldn’t like his Secretary of the Interior, but I doubt that he would be another George Bush the Younger attacking random countries.  Maybe a Nixon foreign or Clinton foreign policy and Bush the Elder domestic2 policy.

Rick Santorum, on the other hand, seems like a True Believer. 3 Somebody who would rather be right than President and, to misquote a former Speaker of the House, Thomas Reed, hopefully for the country, he will never be either.  Unfortunately for the country, he is and, seemingly, will be an influence. To see what kind of influence, check out this latest ad fro Santorum. Notice the subliminal flashing of Obama with  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at about the 40 second mark. The Santorum ad does its best to dehumanize Obama and when we dehumanize the other, the deranged take their cues. I think he is very scary.

1. Which is probably an understatement.

2. Or do I have to say heartland, now?

3. The True Believer is a book by San Francisco’s own Eric Hoffer on fanaticism.