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The Perpetual Outrage Machine

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“We Should All Get Along, But Progressives Should Be Hunted Down Like Nazis”

Glenn Beck: “We Should All Get Along, But Progressives Should Be Hunted Down Like Nazis”

The level of political discourse in this country has descended to the level of low buffoonery. Instead of rational political thinking, we have people saying things that are so patently offensive that it is amazing that there is an audience for them. Yet there does, in fact, exist a minority of Americans who live and breathe for just this sort of thing. And there are a large number of people both in politics and the media who have no qualms about supplying it.

It seems that Americans are so thin-skinned that anything will set them off. I used to be one of them. I used to read Salon.Com and RawStory.Com religiously, glowering at stories of the things that American wing-nuts would say to get a rise and develop an odd kind of infamous reputation that, somehow, was not considered repellent by certain people. Today, I discovered that there is a website called Liberal Outrage of the Day, so I guess it cuts both ways.

From Democratic Party money raisers, I am contacted seven or eight times a day with the latest Right-Wing outrage, accompanied by an appeal for money that would presumably be used to combat the named offenders. I have long since stopped reading these e-mails. Stories about what Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, James De Mint, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and their like now are like [fetid, stagnant] water off a duck’s back. The people who so crudely attack my political values are doing it for fame, power, and money—not to change my mind. They don’t care what I think, just so long as they can appeal to the saps who send them checks in the mail.

I now consider myself a centrist, someone despised by “libtards” and Tea Partiers alike. American politics is now a vast, fetid morass that breeds nothing but disease. The trick is to avoid getting infected by it.

 

Hot Spark Plugs—and Rats?

An Apocryphal Story?

An Apocryphal Story?

Peru is a wonderful place. It is also wonderfully weird. The first time I visited, in 1997, several people I met in Lima warned me to take extra care when driving, because local thieves had perfected an ingenious new robbery technique. Near isolated intersections, street urchins heated discarded spark plugs over fifty-five-gallon drum fires. When a car stopped at a traffic light, the young thieves pressed a white-hot plug against its passenger-side window, causing it to shatter. Before the driver realized what was happening, a live rat was tossed into his or her lap. During the ensuing wrestling match with the (presumably agitated) rodent, the thief helped himself to handbags or anything else that looked inviting. If the driver understandably chose to exit the vehicle, the thief hopped in and drove off with his bewhiskered accomplice.—Mark Adams, Turn Right at Machu Picchu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time

The Jeep Moment

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It’s in All the 1950s Sci-Fi Films

It’s in All the 1950s Sci-Fi Films

You probably remember The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951): A flying saucer lands in the park in our nation’s capital, and a worried crowd begins to gather. Not to worry, however, a Jeep full of Army officers pulls up, and everyone in the audience breathed a sigh of relief. Our boys are here! They’re invincible. The G.I.’s will take care of the alien menace.

Except, they don’t. Michael Rennie and his robot accomplice Gort have weapons at their command that could turn people and their property into something resembling a tuna melt.

I find it interesting that, after we’ve won a two-front war, we should suddenly feel fear. Was it because of the uncertainty generated by the atom? Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeared to have deeply affected the American psyche. All of a sudden, this relativity thing that no one seemed to understand could not only kill people, but do it in a way that was strangely alien. (Was that why Professor Barnhardt, the Alfred Einstein lookalike, was played by Sam Jaffe in the movie.)

We were right to feel fear—and not only because of the A-Bomb. With the end of the Second World War, we were entering a world we did not understand. First there was Communism, which scared the bejeezus out of us until it all unraveled like a cheap suit in 1988-89. But we didn’t get any kind of respite, because all of a sudden there was all this weird violence in the Middle East.

American Hawks were still around, except now they were called Neoconservatives. They kept having this “Jeep Moment,” where they would meet any crisis by sending in our troops with their Jeeps (though now I guess they ride Humvees). We’re still dealing with something alien that we can’t understand. We keep fighting wars with people who speak a strange language and worship strange gods and in general behave in bizarre ways. And they think nothing of blowing themselves to bits if they could take a bunch of us with them. (In the Arab world, being a suicide bomber is considered to be a good career move.)

It strikes me that there is a mathematical formula for success in a military action against a peoples we don’t understand: K/F=C, or Knowledge divided by Force equals the Chance of Victory. Either that, or a recipe for fried chicken.

 

 

Mining the Comstock Lode

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Timothy O’Sullivan Rare Photo of a Miner Near Virginia City

Timothy O’Sullivan Rare Photo of a Miner Near Virginia City

The above photograph is one of several taken by Timothy O’Sullivan over a hundred years ago giving rare views of the Old West. You can find a number of them at the Daily Mail website.

What I found interesting about the above photograph were the conditions under which it was taken. According to the caption:

Silver mining: Here photographer Timothy O’Sullivan documents the actvities of the Savage and the Gould and Curry mines in Virginia City, Nevada, in 1867 900ft underground, lit by an improvised flash—a burning magnesium wire, O’Sullivan photographed the miners in tunnels, shafts, and lifts. During the winter of 1867-68, in Virginia City, Nevada, he took the first underground mining pictures in America. Deep in mines where temperatures reached 130 degrees, O’Sullivan took pictures by the light of magnesium wire in difficult circumstances.

Another of my favorites is this view of Paiute Indians taken near Cottonwood Springs, Nevada (in Washoe County).

Paiute Indians in Nevada

Paiute Indians in Nevada

I recommend you view the website when you get a chance.

Predicting Heat Waves

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Southern California Has Been Sweltering

Southern California Has Been Sweltering

I dcon’t know why this is so, but whenever rain is predicted by the weather man, there is only a 30% chance we’ll ever see it. But if we’re in the middle of a heat wave, as we are now, whenever the weatherman predicts an early end to the heat, there is a greater than 80% chance that it will persist for at least several days more, or maybe even a week.

On Sunday, I worked with our network consultant installing a new server and workstations in our offices. Being the weekend, there was no air conditioning—it would have cost us $1,000 or more if we had requested it. It had something to do with paying building engineers overtime to turn the HVAC on and off. So we sweat our way through the job.

Eventually, it will cool down. Every day, the sun sets a minute or two earlier, meaning that there is ever so much less exposure in our uninsulated apartment to the searing heat which doesn’t seem to let up until 3 am or so. Martine and I set up fans all around our apartment to encourage to cool outside air to nullify the fetid heat radiating downward from the roof. It works moderately well, but still both of us have a hard time getting a good night’s sleep.

 

In the Land of the Tattooed Monkeys

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Labor Day Weekend in Hollyweird

Labor Day Weekend in Hollyweird

All the tourists who (1) watch too much television; (2) don’t know much about Southern California; and (3) are decorated all over with piercings and tattoos usually end up on Hollywood Boulevard. Labor Day Weekend is particularly crowded, as crowds stop and take pictures of “tweakers” dressed up as Darth Vader, Spider Man, Wonder Woman and other superheroes and superheroines. Or they take pictures of the thousands of star-shaped plaques embedded into the sidewalks honoring key entertainment figures. Or they just take pictures of each other. (The star commemorating Marilyn Monroe in front of Ripley’s “Believe-It-Or-Not” museum is always a mob scene.)

Yesterday evening, Martine and I found a short cut to get us around the crowd pressing around what was once Grauman’s Chinese Theater (and now called the TCL Chinese Theater). Out of the Loew’s Hollywood Hotel (formerly called the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel), we walked past the entrance to the Dolby Theater (formerly the Eastman Kodak Theater) to a tour bus station on Orange Avenue. That saved us at least 15 minutes on the way to Roubo’s Russian and Armenian Restaurant. Of course, all the re-branding made my head spin.

Especially on holiday weekends such as this, it is impossible to go more than a hundred feet without being solicited by tour bus operators. I always tell them that, as a long-time resident, I am better qualified to offer them a tour.

In fact, at any given time around Labor Day, about 30-40% of all vehicles on the boulevard are tour buses.

The movies at Cinecon made it all worthwhile, though it is something of a gauntlet going between the Egyptian Theater, where the films are screened, to the Loew’s Hollywood Hotel, where the dealers’s booths are set up, or to any restaurant serving halfway decent food.

 

More Morose Delectation

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Bessie Love (1898-1986)

Bessie Love (1898-1986)

Once again it is Labor Day Weekend in the United States, and Martine and I have celebrated by seeing loads of films and seeing old friends at Cinecon 49 in Hollywood. Among the pictures we saw were:

  • The Holy Terror (1937) with Jane Withers
  • A Blonde’s Revenge (1926) with Ruth Taylor
  • The Good Bad Man (1926) with Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Bessie Love, directed by Allan Dwan
  • Transient Lady (1935) with Frances Drake
  • Their First Execution (1913) by Mack Sennett
  • Suddenly It’s Spring (1947) with Paulette Goddard and Fred MacMurray

Once again, I was impressed how beautiful many of the young actresses were almost a hundred years ago. Bessie Love in The Good Bad Man wasn’t much of an actress, but her beauty was heartbreaking.

Ruth Taylor (1905-1984)

Ruth Taylor (1905-1984)

Then there was Ruth Taylor with a small role in the Ben Turpin two-reeler A Blonde’s Revenge. It’s difficult to believe that she was the mother of Buck Henry.

Tomorrow, I’ll have to go in to work to help our computer consultant set up a new file server and seven workstations. But then, on Monday, Martine and I return to Hollywood and Cinecon for more movies.

 

Extreme Weather

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Are You Ready for Biblical Storms?

Whether or not you believe in climate change, it’s going to happen—all over you! The Montana thunderstorm illustrated above looks like something from a science fiction movie, but it’s just typical of the kind of intense weather we can expect from now on.

The reason my mind dwells on the subject right now is that we are having a heinous heat wave in Southern California, the kind of heat wave that makes a good night’s sleep impossible. My apartment building was built just after World War Two, so it wasn’t insulated. When I woke up at 6:30 this morning, it was still 82 degrees Fahrenheit in the bedroom. Tonight I expect it to be still hotter.

At lunch today, I read an interesting article in The New York Review of Books (June 20, 2013) on Henry Petroski’s To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure. In it, reviewer Bill McKibben writes:

In the course of Petroski’s life, and all of ours, we’ve left behind the Holocene, the ten-thousand-year period of benign climatic stability that marked the rise of human civilization. We’ve raised the global temperature about a degree so far, but a better way of thinking about it is: we’ve amped up the energy trapped in our narrow envelope of atmosphere, and hence every process that feeds off that energy is now accelerating. For instance, this piece of simple physics: warm air holds more water vapor than cold. Already we’ve increased moisture in the atmosphere about 4 percent on average, thus increasing the danger both of drought, because heat is evaporating more surface water, and of flood, because evaporated water must eventually come down as rain. And those loaded dice are doing great damage. The federal government spent more money last year repairing the damage from extreme weather than it did not education.

Haboob Time

Haboob Time

Now I’m not going to point any fingers, because, frankly, it’s too late. We can expect a lot of terrible weather all around the globe, from hundred-year floods to hundred-year-droughts—except occurring in much less time than a hundred years. Every year we seem to break new records, such as the Rim Fire now threatening Yosemite National Park.

Speaking as a Californian, I hope that the phenomenon we are now facing does not affect the movement of tectonic plates under the earth, or we are in for a wild ride. No, California won’t fall into the ocean, but it will continue to shake and bake … at an accelerated rate.

Memory and Expectation

Obsessed with Time

Obsessed with Time

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.—Alan Watts

Another War Nobody Wants

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Just What We Needed!

Just What We Needed!

I guess things have been going too well for us lately. It must be time for another war. Let’s dust off those “Support Our Troops” signs and wave that raggedy flag. We are about to step once again into that Tar Baby par excellence, the Middle East, which is full of people who hate us and want to get even with us for … for … I forget what. We don’t understand them, though they understand us somewhat from being exposed to our entertainment media for so long.

There is no possible good outcome from our involvement in Syria. Innocent Syrians will be killed by our weaponry, and thousands of people will thereupon discover they have a blood feud with the United States. I thought Obama was smarter than that.

Let’s say we have a super bomb in our arsenal that will seek out Bashar al-Assad and blow him to kingdom come. Then what? Even such a surgical strike will lead to a civil war among Islamists, al-Qaida, Baathists, Druzes, Shi’ites, Alawites, and others. Are we going to send in referees with striped shirts to declare who will be the winner and who is fighting fair. No one will be fighting fair, and of one thing I am certain: Before long, all weapons will be aimed at us. So much for gratitude, huh?