We are at Michele’s family’s mountain cabin in what was formally known as Squaw Valley. When we got here, the Truckee River was almost dry with shallow pools of standing water, and the creek behind Michele’s place was even drier. Then it started to rain and rain and rain, just constant, heavy, rain for two days. During that time, the creek went from “Oh, good, there’s water in the Creek.” to “Holy shit, the creek might jump its banks.” Sunday, we spent the day watching Max Verstappen beat Lewis Hamilton in a tight race at the United States Grand Prix and running to the windows to watch the Creek rise. Sunday, as the light started to fade, the rain changed to snow, just as Weather Underground predicted and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

After two days of listening to the constant sound of rain on the roof and the roar of the Creek, the snow brought a welcome silence with big snowflakes floating down like the remnants of a pillow fight covering the landscape. In one night, late summer has changed to winter.

Local lore says that this area has been called Squaw Valley since the 1850s when a couple of white explorers came across a group of Indigenous women working in the meadow. A hundred years later, Alex Cushing named his new ski resort after the valley. At the time of the ski resort naming, Cushing – and many of the rest of us – probably did not consider it a racial or sexual slur, but the local members of the Washoe Tribe do and they have been working to get it changed.

Now the owners of the ski area have renamed the ski area Palisades Tahoe which has left the valley below the ski area is sort of in a linguistic limbo. Because Squaw Valley has been a  census-designated place located near Fresno, California, since 1879, the valley below the Ski Resort has always had an official postal address of Olympic Valley. The rub is that everybody, from out-of-town skiers to the locals, calls Olympic Valley Squaw Valley or just Squaw, and very few people want to change. They feel that they have been calling it Squaw their entire lives and, since they do not mean it as a slur, they should have the right to call it what they want.

I don’t hold that position, I think that anybody and everybody has the right to determine what offends them. If somebody calls me a heeb, I have the right to be offended and, if the person calling me a heeb says that they don’t mean it as a slur, that doesn’t trump my right to be offended. They can continue to call me that – their right is even enshrined in the US Constitution – but they’ll be demonstrating that they don’t care about my feelings. In effect, they’ll be declaring that they either want to offend me or, at best, don’t give a shit about me.

I realize that this is also somewhat of a slippery slope. When people started tearing down statues of southern secessionists, or traitors if you prefer, I understood their anger, but when people started talking about changing the name of Sir Francis Drake Blvd*, I was taken back at first. But if the original settlers, the Coastal Miwok, find that name offensive, I think we should change it to a more neutral name. I don’t know how far into the rabbit-hole we should follow this string of thought but there is no doubt that we white people have labeled the landscape in a ratio out of proportion to our number (and actual contributions). That that labeling is now being challenged is not always an easy concept to accept.

*I originally wrote St. Francis but Gina Matesic pointed out that I had the wrong dude.

On January 21, 1991, the US bombed the only factory that produced baby formula in all of Iraq. Shortly after, Colin Powell dismissed the attack: “It is not an infant formula factory…It was a biological weapons facility, of that we are sure.” A Tweet by Human Rights Watch @queeralamode Anti-imperialist producing content for @MintPressNews.

In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent. A statement by Colin Powel on Dec. 13, 1968,  when asked about a complaint, saying that American soldiers “without provocation or justification shoot at the people themselves.”, by Specialist Fourth Class Tom Glen referring to incidents like the My Lai massacre that were taking place in, then, Major Powell’s command.

Secretary Colin Powell was an incredible American. An independent thinker and a barrier breaker, he dedicated his life to defending our nation and always showed the world the best of who we are. @SecondGentleman and I send our deepest condolences to his family. A Tweet by Vice President Kamala Harris @VPUnited States government official Vice President of the United States. Wife to the first @SecondGentleman. Momala. Auntie. Fighting for the people.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) Walt Whitman

Poor Colin Powell, he seems like a decent guy that just fell in with the wrong crowd, and then, when it wasn’t quite too late, he seems to have redeemed himself. Like John McCain, he was a Republican that turned on – maybe it is more accurate to say was repulsed by – Donald Trump. Both of them became beloved by the Democrats because of that, but Powell even more so. He was a Black trailblazer and that helped, the first – and so far the only – Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the first Black Secretary of State. He also fits very much into the inside the Beltway Washington mold of a thoughtful man, he was handsome, well mannered, and charismatic. He spoke in a calm, measured, voice and spread calm in chaotic situations.

He was also a big contributor to the breakdown of our faith in our government. First, in the US Army in Vietnam and then in the “They are building weapons of mass destruction.” crowd. He was often the only Black guy in a room full of powerful White guys, White guys that not only wanted their own way but, no mattered what, wanted the story told their way and he, maybe reluctantly, was willing to deceive to do that.

Everybody plays? acts? I don’t, know the right term exactly, performs, maybe, toward what is being tested. Toward the company goal, the organization’s goal because that is what is being tested. In the mid-twenty-teens, Volkswagen had the goal of becoming the biggest car manufacturer in the world (an easy metric to measure). What mattered were sales and, big surprise, people were willing to cheat to increase those sales. In Vietnam, the United States Army’s goal was to win, a much harder metric to measure. As Wikipedia put it, For search and destroy operations, as the objective was not to hold territory or secure populations, victory was assessed by having a higher enemy body count. That led to counting killed civilians as killed enemy combatants, and that led, eventually, to the United States Army doing more things it didn’t want to be public. The grunts were doing the actual war crimes but it was the leaders of those grunts that were doing the actual war crime hiding and lying about the grunts activities.

Colin Powell served two tours of duty in Vietnam in that Army, first as a Capitan advising South Vietnamese commanders then as a Major on a General’s staff, and he learned that to get ahead, it was best to go along. Whistleblowers, most especially Black whistleblowers, do not become generals, they become outcasts. I have no idea how hard it was for Powell to learn those lessons but he did learn them and took the lesson of going along to get ahead with him when he came into the elder George Bush’s Administration and then into Bush the Younger’s administration as Secretary of State. He was a man who would do as he was told and sometimes he was told to lie.

I don’t want to give the impression that lying to satisfy his bosses was all that defines Powell, it wasn’t. He was a genuine war hero having risked his life to save several people from a downed helicopter. In the chaotic battles of Vietnam he also learned that we need more than technological superiority to win wars, he learned we also need numerical superiority. It was a lesson that, as Chief of the Joint Chiefs he practiced but it was also a lesson the military and both the Bush Obama administrations soon forgot.

Poor Colin Powell, I don’t think he lived up to his own high standards. May he rest in peace.

Our mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Facebook @Facebook

Good on @brianstelter for saying it straight out to Facebook VP Nick Clegg on @ReliableSources. “A part of me feels like I’m interviewing the head of a tobacco company right now.” Jay Rosen @jayrosen_nyuI teach journalism at NYU, critique the press, direct @membershippzzle. PressThink is the name of my subject and my site.

When Patagonia organized a boycott of Facebook, I was all for it and I still am. Sort of. Facebook is such a great idea but, it also features a big downside. From what I read, it is not only my queue that keeps filling up with stuff that promotes fear and loathing, almost everybody’s queue does. Facebook is designed that way. Aparently, it wants to make me angry, which generates clicks and keeps me in their claustrophobic universe. Or, to be more accurate, Facebook stirs up my fears which my body reacts to as anger. Anger is a great motivator and my reaction to a post like Sherrif in Bumfuck Texas kills Hispanic toddler, just encourages Facebook to send me more of the same. When I got off of Facebook, I thought it would just be for a month or so, but I fell out of the habit and I’m calmer for it. But, I would still like to hear – or read – what going on, and I miss that about Facebook. If you have a comment – pro or con – about something I’ve written in my blog, I can be reached in the comments below. Even if you don’t have a comment, I would love to hear from you.  

Speaking of Facebook-type news, this has been a hell of a couple of weeks for Michele. It started with her seeing a podiatrist for a hammertoe and they discovered that her “tibial sesamoid” – also known as a small bone in the foot – is degenerating. There is an outside – way outside, we are told – chance that it is malignant and will require a biopsy of the bone to know for sure (or, as the poditrist recommended, skip the biopsy and just remove the bone). About this time, Michele’s esophagus started spasming which resulted in a trip to the emergency room and cascade of tests, none of which have shown the problem. While that was going on, Michele started seeing strange blotches and made an appointment with our eye doctor. She – the eye doctor – immediately sent Michele to an eye surgeon where she had a tear in her retina lasered-sealed. So far, this weekend hasn’t brought any new medical disasters. Our fingers are crossed.

I’m an ambivalent New York Times subscriber, it is far from being the perfect newspaper, but it does do special stories better than anybody. What I mean by special stories is deep reporting on something that is not very controversial. A perfect example is an in-depth story on CalFire. It is fascinating the amount of manpower and equipment that is now involved in trying to protect people who live in the interface between the wild – for lack of a better word – and civilization. Check it out at Inside the Fight Against the Dixie Fire – The New York Times (nytimes.com).

As an aside, several news-type websites, including the LA Times and the NY Times, are leading this kind of story with a full-screen picture or, even, a series of full-screen short videos. I’m sure that the Dixie Fire piece is in the dead-tree NY Times, but it can’t be as impressive as opening up the story on my computer and having my 27″ monitor filled with a series of pictures. End aside.

When did fried chicken sandwiches become such a big deal? It sort of snuck up on me. Now, almost every fast-food chain offers a fried chicken sandwich and the LA Times has become obsessed with them having no less than six videos on them. Here is my favorite sandwich – which I haven’t even seen in real life let alone tasted – How two Michelin-starred chefs make the ultimate fried chicken sandwich – YouTube. And a video on the best fast-food chicken sandwich. We found the best fast-food chicken sandwich – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

Meanwhile, California continues to have warm, dry weather which prompted the great Erin Brockovich to Tweet this. 

Meanwhile here on earth. Erin Brockovich@ErinBrockovichConsumer advocate & Environmental Activist. Founder of The Brockovich Report Newsletter http://thebrockovichreport.com#TruthUnfiltered Agoura Hills, California brockovich.com

Finally, Max Verstappen leads the Formula One championship by six points, 262.5 to 256.5 over Lewis Hamilton with six races to go. Their Instagram posts tell the story.

Today, more than 8,600 personnel remain assigned to 10 active large wildfires. To date, more than 2.4 million acres have burned statewide. Get the latest on these incidents at: https://fire.ca.gov/incidents CALFIRE @CAL_FIRE· Official Twitter Account of CAL FIRESacramento, CA

The day after our walk along the Truckee River, the smoke arrived at Tahoe and we departed for the cleaner air at home in Portola Valley. We decided to drive along the West Shore and cross the Sierras on Highway 50 at Echo Summit thinking we would ghoulishly see the fire damage from the still smoldering Caldor Fire. Driving down Highway 89 on the west side of the lake, we couldn’t see across the lake, not even from above Emerald Bay. But, the good news was that driving around south of the lake, it was hard to find fire damage.

Once we got over the pass, we started running into burnt out sections of forest. Then it was down into the Central Valley and home to clear skies.

This is the sense of the desert hills, that there is room enough and time enough. Mary Mary Hunter Austin

Last week, Michele and I went over to the east side of the Sierras to preview the fall color. Well, really, to get out of the house, to have some input other than the television and the fall colors were the excuse. This year was hotter and drier than it used to be, so does that mean the trees will change into their fall finery earlier or later? Does it make any difference? My guess is earlier because the lack of water should trigger shedding leaves to cut down on transpiration, but that’s just a guess. Like almost any trip, we started in traffic on a freeway and the crowded highways turned into much emptier roads east of Groveland.

We had left home under clear blue skies and the PurpleAir sensors were telling us that it was clear in the greater Bishop-Lone Pine area, but, as we headed east the sky started getting hazy and then smoky. We passed The Rim Fire overlook and, even in this dry year, the land is recovering. Faster than I had expected. I had passed the Rim Fire overlook right after the fire, like right after in October of 2013, and the devastation rattled me but now I am starting to accept that this will be a normal part of the West’s biosphere.

To make a long nothing-happened story shorter, I’ll summarize it with we went over the Sierras just in time to catch the wind direction changing with the smoke from the Knp Complex fire that has been threatening the sequoias in the King’s Canyon-Sequoia National park area now drifting over the mountains into the Owen’s Valley. But Purple Air said Tahoe was clear, so we drove north, through Nevada, to Tahoe where it was Indian Summer warm and the air was sparkling clean…until the next day, when it wasn’t, so we drove home where the air was still soft and clear.

On our drive north through Nevada, we drove by Boundry Peak, the highest point in Nevada, where a hiker had been lost and had come close to dying a couple of days earlier. Looking at Boundry Peak, it seems that it would be impossible to get lost, but the West is immense, the spaces way bigger than they seem, and the humans on the land invisibly small. I know, I spent a good part of a day trying to be seen by a helicopter.

In my early twenties, I was involved in rescuing a badly hurt climber who had fallen on the steep side of Mt. Banner. Three of us were camped at Thousand Island Lake waiting for a fourth, coming in a different way, to climb Ritter. It was a warm afternoon and we were basking in the sun by the side of the lake when a guy came running up saying that his buddy had fallen on the south side of Banner the day before. Two of us packed our equipment and some warm clothing and started up the mountain. As it got dark, we stalled out trying to get onto the glacier above Catherine lake and spent the night in a boulder field. We got up early – even in one’s early twenties, sleeping sitting up on rock promotes getting up early – got on the glacier, and hiked to the top. Once we got there, we were a little like the dog that caught the bus, now that we were on the saddle at the top of the glacier, we really weren’t sure what to do next.

Luckily and almost magically two more climbers showed up right after us. Both of them were doctors and way more experienced climbers than us. They had heard about the fallen climber and had climbed up from Lake Ediza to offer help. The doctors took over and we helped, eventually finding the injured climber who had fallen about twenty feet before being stopped by a ledge. By now, the climber had been on the mountain, exposed, at about 12,500 feet, for three days and two nights. He was a mess with severe gangrene on two fingers and a swollen foot peeking out of his crushed boot. He was hallucinating, calling for his mother, which was disturbing, but we could hear the distant sound of a rescue helicopter and we all felt that it would find us soon.

But it didn’t. We 3/4s carried and 1/4 dragged the injured guy to the saddle between Banner and Ritter where we were more visible. There, we tried to attract the helicopter’s attention. Picture four of us, standing on white granite in the middle of a saddle above a glacier, jumping up and down and waving two large orange panels, and for hours a helicopter, not knowing exactly where we were, was flying around looking for us but didn’t see us, couldn’t find us. We could see it but it always seemed to start towards us and then turn the wrong way. Finally, as the shadows got longer and the air colder, the helicopter flew away, leaving us in the fading sun and empty silence.

We were deep in the Ansel Adams Wilderness but were only twelve to fifteen miles away from civilization at Mammoth and that is where the helicopter went to find the guy who had told us about his fallen buddy. About half an hour later, the helicopter showed up again. Now, with a guide, they knew exactly – well, within a football field size space – where we were. Now they could see us.

As an aside, the helicopter had burned up almost all of its fuel and only had time enough to winch up the injured guy, drop us a one-man survival pack including an insulated field coat – the kind with fur around the hood – and fly back to the trailhead to refuel. We had to spend a second night on the mountain, huddling together in the cold, sharing the pseudo food in the survival pack four ways. End aside.

But that was almost sixty years ago and, on this latest trip, we were comfortably cruising north in the climate-controlled cocoon of a Hyundai Tucson. About forty miles north of Boundry Peak and eighty miles northwest of Banner is Hawthorn Nevada, a small town in a large valley. The valley has been denuded to build storage facilities for various munitions. Normally, I don’t think that civilization sits very well in the desert, too much of the normally hidden rubble and detritus is exposed, but in Hawthorn, everything has been swept clean and it looks almost like a giant art project. An art project illustrating the banality of the weapons of war and death.

The last time I was here was in July of 2011 with Ed Dieden and we stopped at the local museum called the Hawthorne Ordnance Museum but, really, a museum dedicated to a variety of increasingly effective ways of killing people. Happily, we skipped it this time, cruising by Walker Lake on the way to Squaw Valley where, the next day, we walked along the paved trail overlooking the Truckee River which was almost empty but still almost impossible to get lost on.

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