It feels like the end of summer even though it is mid-August and I think that is because the Amaryllis belladonnas – pink ladies – are blooming ahead of time (they used to bloom in mid-September). Still, it has been a lovely summer here on the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains with clear skies and the temp hovering about 80°F, plus or minus – today, the 15-day projection for max temperature is 84° 77°, 77°, 77°, 78°, 75°, 74°, 75°, 77°, and 77° – glorious except that it is dry, too dry.
A couple of days ago, we were having a cocktail at the end of the day, sitting on our deck, watching the quail and doves, and a couple of chickadees. They were eating some seed I’d thrown on the ground when something startled them and they all took off at once with a thrashing of wings. As my eyes followed the flock of mixed birds heading up and to my right, something streaked down and to the left. Fast! I bearly caught the flash of striped feathers as it banked hard right, rolling on its side like a fighter plane flying down Star Wars Canyon.
Then, stillness. The silence broken only by a chattering that sounded somewhat like a squirrel.
A couple of minutes later a harrier hawk casually flew over to us, landed on the back of a chair, and started complaining – we think complaining about Precious Mae but it is hard to tell with us not speaking hawk – and then he/she/or it flew up to the edge of the roof to complain some more. Michele caught it on her phone.
Last week was the twentieth anniversary of my heart valve operation. I wouldn’t have died on August 5th, 2002 when I had the operation, or the day after, or even, the month after August 5th, but it is doubtful that I would have lived for another year without the benefit of modern medicine. It is enough to make one a modern medicine believer.
While I was whiling away my day in the hospital, Seton Medical Center in Daily City, Michele, was having lunch – or dinner, I have no idea – at the local Outback, and she noticed a new-to-us Chinese restaurant tucked away at the back of the parking lot. And that’s how she found Koi Palace, a huge – 450-seat huge – traditional Cantonese seafood restaurant. Koi Palace became one of our go-to restaurants but it sort of faded in our consciousness as newer Chinese restaurants, opened, most of them much closer. Then, the Koi Palace people opened another restaurant, Dragon Beaux which has great Dim Sum in a much newer style and we fell in love again.
During the quarantine, I think on our way home from Olympic Valley, we got some takeout from Palette Tea House in San Mateo and it was terrific. Somehow, I got the impression that this was a Chinese chain like the Din Tai Fung chain which has super Dim Sum restaurants in both the LA area and at Valley Fair in San Jose. It turns out, though, that the Palette Tea House was part of the burgeoning Koi Palace chain.
It seemed like it would be natural for a celebratory dinner. And it was. Actually, it may have been the best Chinese meal I’ve ever had. I was astonished and thrilled in the same way as my first meal at Cecilia Chiang’s Mandarin in Ghirardelli Square in the late 1960s or Alice Water’s Chez Panisse in 1972. It was such a great way to celebrate that we went back with Peter and Ophelia.
In the modern world, the level of democratic society is measured, among other things, through state policy aimed at ensuring equal rights for all citizens. Every citizen is an inseparable part of civil society, he is entitled to all the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution of Ukraine. All people are free and equal in their dignity and rights. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in response to a petition calling for the legalization of gay marriage.
At the heart of the Russian attack – attacks, is more accurate – on Ukraine is that Ukraine considers itself European and wants to be integrated into the European Union and Russia considers The Ukraine an integral part of Russia. It is an argument that goes back a long time much of which Ukraine was part of Russia or Poland or, even Lithuania but, recently, mostly Russia. Still, I think that countries, like individual people, should have the right to be who they want to be, and most Ukrainians, who do speak a different language and have a different culture than Russia, want to be part of the European Union. Looking at the differences in the quality of life between Russia and the European Union nations, it seems like a good choice.
Last Night, Michele and I watched Winter On Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom by Evgeny Afineevsky which is about one of the battles in that ongoing conflict. It is a hard movie to watch and, to be accurate, I watched the movie and Michele gave up after watching the first two-thirds. The movie follows the eighty-nine days of the buildup, from a feeble start of a relatively few protestors in November 2013 to the five-day Revolutionof Dignity in February 2014. The Revolutionof Dignity was a big hunk of the Ukrainian people against pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his refusal to sign a Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. For lack of a better way to put it, the movie is shot from inside the protests and while that robs the movie of some context, what it does well is showing us the feeling and tenor of the conflict.
It also put us, the movie-goers, on the side of the protestors while we follow the evolution of the protest from a small group of protestors to hundreds of thousands of protestors. As the protests elevated in size and ferocity, the encampment, in Independence Square – its name in English, in Anglicized Ukrainian, it is Maidan Nezalezhnosti and the revolution, itself is often called The Maidan Revolution – took on the aspects of its own city within Kyivn with kitchens, first aid posts, and a stage. I thought the movie was fascinating but I’ve become very interested in all things Ukrainian and it isn’t for everybody.
While Winter On Fire is intimate and graphic, Ukraine: The Latest a daily podcast by the staff of the English newspaper The Telegraph is equally fascinating but much more cerebral and heavy on context. They talk about everything from explaining the HIMARS system to analyzing the insurance problems with shipping grain in a war zone. I highly recommend Ukraine: The Latest, again, if you are interested.
We went for a walk on Russian Ridge the other day and I was gob-smacked over the soft beauty of the grass-covered hills. I once read that humans have a natural affinity to landscapes like this because we evolved in the Savana and, at the time, it seemed logical to me. Now I am not so sure. Over the years, I’ve met enough people from lusher areas who were not enamored with our dry hills to convince me that they are an acquired taste. Either way, I find them beautiful.
Less is more when it comes to hearing from lawmakers. Big shout-out to whoever jettisoned the common practice of letting every committee member prattle on at every hearing. That genius deserves a bonus. And a medal. And should be put in charge of future hearings. from an editorial in the New York Times by Michelle Cottle.
I want to write a little about the 8th hearing on January 6, but first I want to talk about Fox News. OK, not Fox News per se, but their website on July 22, the day after the hearing. One of the discussions I’ve had with friends – I’m saying discussions because I don’t think they have ever risen to the level of arguments – is about Fox News lying.
My position is that Fox doesn’t lie, they are like the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, or the LA Times – or anybody, really – in that they just curate the news. But sometimes curating is so heavy-handed that it is the same as lying and Fox News on the day after the last Jan 6 Hearing, is one of those times. Looking at the front page above, the first thing I saw was the headline then the four snippets or pseudo-paragraphs below. In three of the four references, the Seattle police are featured and I erroneously jumped to the conclusion that the whole Seattle police force had resigned, big news indeed. Big news that nobody else seemed to notice.
It turns out that what I overlooked was the police badge in the center of the picture and the start of the first pseudo-paragraph that clearly says FLASHBACK. Those are clues – which I missed – that this headline is not about Jan 6th, July 21st, or Seattle. It is about something that happened in Kenly, a small town in North Carolina, a week or two earlier. It’s hard for me to not think that the day after the damning Jan 6th Committee hearing, the headline and pseudo-paragraphs are misleading on purpose.
Anyway, on to the hearings, where, because Democratic Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson was out with Covid, it was almost an all-Republican show. Not surprisingly, the hearings were better for it. It was two and a half hours of testimony about President Donald Trump trying to work up a crowd to change the results of an election. As an example, after the attempted insurrection had begun and after all of Trump’s advisors were begging him to calm everybody down, Donald Trump tweeted, Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done. It was powerful and damning to have a Republican Congressperson, Liz Chaney, ask questions of a fellow Republican, Matthew Pottinger, a former National Security Council official and a former Trump advisor who, in reference to the Tweet, answered “I read it and was quite disturbed by it. I — I was disturbed and worried to see that the President was attacking Vice President Pence for doing his constitutional duty…that was the moment that I decided that I was going to resign”. It was even more powerful because Pottinger had just said, “I felt then as I do now that it was a privilege to serve in the White House…I’m also very proud of President Trump’s foreign policy accomplishments.”
Usually, these kinds of hearings consist of various committee members trying to play to the crowd; their posturing is almost unbearable to watch. This was different, this hearing was actually choreographed to play to the crowd at the expense of individual committee members and it made for much better TV. To hear Sarah Matthew say, “I am a lifelong Republican and I joined the Trump reelection campaign in June of 2019. I was one of the first communications staffers actually on board for his reelection campaign”…and “It was obvious that the situation at the Capitol was violent and escalating quickly. And so I thought that the tweet about the Vice President was the last thing that was needed in that moment. And I — I remember thinking that this was going to be bad for him to tweet this because it was essentially him giving the green light to these people, telling them that what they were doing at the steps of the Capitol and entering the Capitol was Ok, that they were justified in their anger.”
It is easy to say that “the attempted insurrection is over, and we should just move on” but that ignores the deaths of five Capitol police officers, that ignores the physical damage that was done to our Nation’s Capitol, and, most importantly, it ignores the damage done to our nation’s psyche. As Matthew Pottinger said, “And that is, that it — I — I think it emboldened our — our enemies by helping give them ammunition to feed a narrative that our system of government doesn’t work, that the United States is in decline.”
No wonder Fox News wanted us to think about something else, like Kenly, North Carolina.
