Paul, Bryan and I have embarked on a little road trip to eastern Washington, and we stayed overnight in the little town of Ephrata.
Tuesday/ driving out east
Monday/ (we are) George Carlin’s freak show
‘When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat’. – said George Carlin, American stand-up comedian, actor, author and social critic, 1927-2008.
This is certainly not the craziest year in the American republic’s history (there was the Civil War, and there was 1968, after all) .. but some days sure feels pretty surreal.
1. On Friday, President Trump called NFL players that kneel during the anthem to protest racial inequality ‘sons of b****es’. Surely, a first for any US President in public. Is the F word next? The N word?
2. We all survived the latest apocalypse on Saturday. Some guy called David preached about a biblical doomsday of Sep 23, which came and went .. and hey! we’re still here. He simply issued a new doomsday date.
3. Today Republican Senators Graham & Cassidy (boo! boo! to you) still pushed their zombie healthcare bill that propose to drain tens of billions of dollars out of healthcare. They lied about its effects in the public hearing today. Again confirming Republican health policy: die if you’re sick, and make it quick; you’re costing us money. (The New York Times reports that Republican Senators’ billionaire donors are getting antsy and want their tax cuts). Before the hearing started, Capitol police carried out screaming (disabled) protesters in their wheelchairs.
4. I watch the Vietnam War documentary and think: history repeated itself with Iraq, and is repeating itself right now in Afghanistan. We sent thousands more troops there just a few weeks ago – with no exit strategy. Just last week, the Senate passed a $700 billion defense policy bill, far more than what Trump requested. Someone calculated that the increase in the defense budget can fund free education country-wide for a year.
5. Trump finally acknowledged the post-Maria hurricane crisis in Puerto Rico (tweets), but criticizes them for their poor infrastructure, instead of offering help or support. Houston and Florida is yesterday’s news by now, and I assume they are doing OK.
6. North Korea now threatens to shoot down American warplanes – even outside their airspace, saying Trump ‘declared war’ on them. There are reports that commercial airlines have started to give the airspace there a wide berth. Not a great feeling, this game of chicken between President Trump and Dear Leader Kim Jong-un.
Sunday/ .. and the early results are in
The polls have closed
and the projected results are in. Angela Merkel’s party won, but lost ground, as did her coalition partner Martin Schultz, from the left-center Social Democratic Party. Schultz announced that the four-year coalition between the Social Democrats and Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) is over. The far right AfD gained a lot of ground and came in a solid third. They will be seated in the Bundestag for the first time, something that does not sit well with many Germans. But hey, this is not a Brexit outcome, and it is not a Trump-like victory: so, good.
Saturday/ voting for the 19th Bundestag
Here’s my collage of Twitter pictures for Germany’s federal elections on Sunday. The consensus is that Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union) is safely in the lead for a fourth term as German chancellor, but since there are seven parties vying for votes, it’s all about the second, third and fourth percentages of votes. This will determine the coalition that the CDU will have to form, to get to a governing majority.
Friday/ happy equinox!
The September equinox* arrived today at 20:02 UTC (1.02 pm here in my outpost on the globe), ushering in autumn. So for a moment, night and day are each 12 hours long**, sunrises are due east and sunsets are due west, for all creatures on the globe. The sun’s position crosses the celestial equator (an imaginary equator above the real one on Earth’s surface), and this happens no matter where one is on Earth.
*Equinox from Latin equi (equal) and nox (night).
**Precisely speaking, there is more daylight than nighttime on the day of the equinox, an additional 8 or so minutes of daylight, at mid-temperate latitudes.
Thursday/ Canterbury earthquakes update
I thought I would check back on Christchurch, New Zealand, since it’s been some six years since the city had been hit with a series of severe earthquakes that killed 185 people. Wikipedia says that following the earthquakes, over 1,500 buildings in the city had been demolished or partly demolished by September 2013. In the years that followed, the city has been experiencing rapid growth, with the central city rebuild, which is outlined in the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan, starting to ramp up. I see that residents in the eastern suburbs of Christchurch feel a little left behind in all the recovery efforts, though .. and that ‘distress or anxiety associated with ongoing aftershocks, being in a damaged environment and surrounded by construction, additional financial burdens and loss of recreational and cultural facilities were the top four stresses for people in the city’.
Wednesday/ about the sea otter
The Seattle Aquarium biologists are hosting a ‘Sea Otter Awareness’ day this weekend. Sea otters are native to the coasts of the northern and eastern North Pacific Ocean.
Once almost hunted to extinction for their fur (the densest fur on all animals), their numbers have improved over the last century, but they are still an endangered species. Sea otters keep sea urchin populations in check, which would otherwise inflict extensive damage to kelp forest ecosystems (information from Wikipedia).
Tuesday/ ‘Rocket Man’ and Maria
All right .. I know there are on-going wars and catastrophes in the world, but it was still a day filled with unsettling news. I woke up at 7 am to President Trump’s bombastic speech at the United Nations. A little restraint, Mr President? Why (again) call Kim Jung-un ‘Rocket Man’?
Then reports of the 7.1 earthquake near Mexico City came in, with buildings that collapsed and 150 reported dead so far.
Hurricane Maria has been in the news the last few days, striking Dominica (pop. 73,543) today and projected to make landfall in Puerto Rico (pop. 3.4 million) with Category 4 winds on Wednesday morning.
Finally, back in the category of man-made disasters, there is another effort underway from the Republicans in the United States Congress to shove the country’s healthcare system off a cliff (the Graham-Cassidy Bill).
_________
Update Wed 9/20: The death toll in Mexico City rose to 245 on Wednesday. No casualties reported so far from Puerto Rico, but the entire island is without power.
Monday/ the horrors of the Vietnam War
I have started to watch a 10-episode Vietnam War documentary, currently airing on the public television channel PBS, here in the United States.
Long ago in South Africa on Friday nights, I would watch a TV series about the war, called Tour of Duty, but dubbed into Afrikaans as Sending Vietnam (Mission Vietnam). Best I can recall, this was in 1993 & 1994. At the end of each episode, ‘Paint It, Black’ would play – a song by the Rolling Stones that describes extreme grief and loss. No doubt: it pointed to the post-traumatic stress that soldiers and civilians alike, had suffered (still suffer?) from the war.
From ‘Paint It, Black’ (The Rolling Stones, 1966) :
‘No more will my green sea go turn a deeper blue
I could not foresee this thing happening to you
If I look hard enough into the setting sun
My love will laugh with me before the morning comes ..’
Sunday/ We the People
The Constitution of the United States was signed by 39 delegates 230 years ago to the day on Sunday.
There were several glowing tweets on Twitter (#ConstitutionDay), such as ‘greatest political document ever written in human history’ and ‘written by patriots, protected by patriots’.
To me, it is more complicated than that. There is no question that the United States Constitution was a landmark document, and an enormous influence over the constitutions of republics in other parts of the world that came into being later. But over the years, there have been 27 amendments to the original US Constitution, so it had to change and clarify itself with the times. And take the 2005 Iraq Constitution. It guarantees minimum wage, universal health care and free education (acknowledging that Iraq still has a lot of basic peace and security problems to deal with). Section 9 of the 1996 South African Constitution explicitly forbids discrimination on the basis of sex, gender or sexual orientation .. something which is not clear at all in the US Constitution. In fact, the proposed Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) of 2009 that would end workplace discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by employers with at least 15 employees, has still not become law.
Saturday/ who watches the algorithms?
It’s the 21st century, and we no longer ask ‘Who watches the watchers? (on the city walls)’. What we should ask is ‘Who watches the algorithms? (on Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft).
ProPublica* found that Facebook to this day had perfectly enabled marketers of say, Nazi memorabilia, or recruiters for marchers for a far-right rally, to find ‘Jew haters’ (it was an actual ad category, gleaned from Facebook profiles and posts), and send them ‘promoted posts’. (After the ProPublica report, Facebook removed the anti-semitic categories and promised to improve monitoring).
And just last week, Buzzfeed News reported that Facebook’s vast reach was used in the 2016 elections by a Russian troll operation that set up fake accounts and sent misinformation (presumably about the Clinton campaign), to the tune of $100,000 worth of political ads. The new media/ social media are escaping many regulations and media standards that are far behind the curve, and that have yet to catch up with the digital age.
*ProPublica is an American nonprofit organization based in New York City. It describes itself as a nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.
Friday/ the ‘Luncheon of the Boating Party’
Here’s my latest puzzle project : the wonderful impressionist painting, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party. It’s fun to use the artist’s colors and textures to build out parts of the picture, and then to find out how they link up in the big picture.
[From Wikipedia: As he often did in his paintings, Renoir included several of his friends in Luncheon of the Boating Party. The painting, combining figures, still-life, and landscape in one work, depicts a group of Renoir’s friends relaxing on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise restaurant along the Seine river in Chatou, France. The painter and art patron, Gustave Caillebotte, is seated in the lower right. Renoir’s future wife, Aline Charigot, is in the foreground playing with a small dog, an affenpinscher. On the table is fruit and wine].
Thursday/ last days of summer
It’s getting cooler here in the Pacific Northwest, and the first big weather system will move in this weekend, bringing rain to the parched forests on the Olympic Peninsula and lawns in the cities (such as mine).
Meanwhile, the very long road to recovery for the flooded and damaged parts of Texas and Florida, and the devastated islands in the Caribbean has started.
Newspaper USA Today reports that for the first time in 300 years, there is not a single person on the tiny island of Barbuda (pop. 1,800). Every last one was evacuated, after 95% of the structures there, had been destroyed by hurricane Irma.
Wednesday/ to freeze or not to freeze?
The latest massive internet security breach here in the United States involves a credit ratings agency called Equifax.
1. On July 29, Equifax discovered that 143 million records of personal data (credit card numbers, social security numbers, dates of birth and first name, last name) were stolen.
2. Equifax waited six weeks to publish this information. (By the way, it seems that their Apache web server software was to blame. A patch had been issued in March for a vulnerability, but the patch was not applied).
3. The emergency-information website that they then had set up, looks like the site that a scammer would use to get one’s social security information. Oh boy.
4. The stolen information could be used MANY YEARS from now by criminals to get credit cards, tax refunds, commit Medicare fraud – who even knows what else.
5. Three Equifax executives sold shares worth a combined $1.8 million just a few days after the company discovered the breach.
Some observers say this could finally bring to an end the ubiquitous use of social security numbers as a personal identification number in the United States. (It was never intended to be used for that; only for citizens to record and obtain their social security benefits). I already try to keep a sharp eye on my credit card transactions, but feel I now have to figure out if I need to put a credit freeze on my accounts at the three credit ratings agencies. A credit freeze is the nuclear option for protection, but also blocks anyone to access one’s credit history. So for new credit, or a new job, or signing an apartment lease or a buying a new car with financing, one would have to lift the freeze, which takes time and money. But surely that is far less of a convenience than getting one’s identity stolen?
Tuesday/ the iPhone X has landed
I watched Apple’s webcast today, of its annual product announcement, beamed from the new Apple ‘spaceship’ headquarters in Cupertino. It’s been ten years since the iPhone took the world by storm in 2007, and today the ‘one more thing’ (as Steve Jobs used to say) was the iPhone X (say ‘ten’, not ‘X’).
Apple ‘haters’ (they hate the ‘fanboys’) were quick to point out that many of the ‘new’ features have been available in Android phones for some time. (Yes .. but it’s new in an iPhone).
I don’t think of myself as an Apple ‘fanboy’! – but I will probably upgrade my iPhone 6 to the iPhone X early next year. It’s all about the camera for me, and the new 12 MP cameras come with nifty software settings and photo options. The new phone can take beautiful portrait pictures with the background filtered out to black, for example. I’d better start putting my money aside: $999 for the 64 GB model and $1,150 for the 256 GB model. That’s the price of a full-blown new notebook computer, since that’s what these phones are: super-mini-tablet computer-cameras-in-our-pockets.
9/11
It’s hard to believe that it has been 16 years since the terrible events of Sept 11, 2001. A lot happened in the 16 years, of course. There was the invasion into Iraq in 2003, justified with questionable intelligence by the Republican administration. Bin Laden would finally be tracked down and killed in May 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan. And who would have thought that the war in Afghanistan would drag on to this day? September 2014 was supposed to mark the end of combat operations there, but the Afghan army just could not wipe out a resurgent Taliban.
Check out these pictures from last year’s Tribute in Light memorial in Lower Manhatten. The lights were switched on for tonight, as well.
Sunday/ landfall in Florida
It was a perfect day in Seattle: not too hot, not too cold, blue sunny sky.
Of course: a different story on the other side of the continent down south; a very bad weather day in Florida. Here is a collage of a few interesting pictures of the hurricane that I ran across on-line.
Saturday/ almost here
The wait is almost over (for Irma’s landfall in Florida) .. the latest tracking has hurricane Irma has Key West in the cross hairs, pass on the east of Ft Myers and Naples, and then hit St Petersburg and Tampa.
Florida Governor Rick Scott urged people on the coast all day Thursday and Friday to get out, and hundreds of thousands did, but many still stayed in their homes. The big problem is the storm surge that will surely flood thousands of homes on the Keys, and those on right on the Gulf of Mexico.
Friday/ Irma update
Check out the Washington Post’s free updates for Hurricane Irma, here. Late Friday night the storm system was brushing by the north of Cuba. (It devastated Barbuda, St Martin and the Turks & Caicos Islands). It is expected to make landfall on Sunday morning in Florida (but storm conditions will start to appear on Saturday). The latest modeling has shifted its landfall slightly to the west — but all of Florida will feel the effects of the hurricane. 
Thursday/ bracing for Irma
Nevermind that Donald Trump Jr. testified before a Senate committee today (about his admitted meeting with Russians in June 2016), or that President Trump made an agreement with the Democrats on Wednesday*, blindsiding the leadership of the Republican Party. It’s all about the Category 5 monster hurricane Irma coming for Florida. There are gas shortages and the interstate freeways are clogged, as some 500,000 residents were told to evacuate to safer areas up north. Hotel and motel rooms as far away as Atlanta are said to be sold out. There were long lines at Miami, and other airports with people trying to get out before the airports close down on Friday.
*To raise the debt ceiling until December, and to provide $15 billion of funding for hurricane Harvey
