Nicholas Kristof (Did Putin Try to Steal an American Election?) correctly cautions against viewing the apparent Trump-Putin political alliance in terms of cold war conspiracy. Trump is not some “Siberian Candidate,” a deep cover agent for Moscow. It’s worse than that.
Trump’s is not an ideological or moral commitment to a foreign adversary. His willingness to walk up to the line of treason in spirit if not in law is rooted in a pure lust for power and personal gain by any means; one that leads him to conflate himself, his prejudices, and his business interests with American national interest. That is the sum of his America First patriotism: Trump First. Putin also conflates himself, his power, and his gain with Russian nationalism. It’s the core of his own demagogic appeal. Trump’s “I alone” affinity for Putin’s post-communist authoritarian kleptocracy is a frighteningly natural one of like minds and like leaders.
That Trump’s financial interests coincide with the Putin kleptocracy and its overseas stash of untold billions looted from Russia’s economy is not merely a matter of money and currying favor for investment. Though it is that, it is also a matter of the company Trump keeps. It is no surprise to find a man as poorly grounded in any genuine knowledge, moral commitment, or ideology as Trump, with the attention span of a flea according to his ghostwriter, mouthing views that are commonplace consensus in his pool of prospective investors.
Trump is a fellow traveler along the path of greed and self-aggrandizement.
I only bother to look once in a great while. So it happened only this evening that I noticed the “whybother.com” domain next door had fallen into the hands of some breed of Adventists, evidently the kind of Christians convinced that atheists are doomed to plunge into the depths of despair, their lives meaningless, teeth-gritting bouts with emptiness, anguish and enui, until they hit bottom — Praise the Lord! — and click on FindGod.com. Yes, such is name of the tediously god-infested site to which poor whybother.com is now undignified portal, and such is the design of the apparatus, the page layout of the lure. I’m not going to dignify either with link. If you want to look, you’ll have to do it yourself.
Dredged up this ancient thing from the bottom of the sea.
File date September 15, 1997.
A 15fps Super Wide Production
3 Beach Monkeys
Starring Laurel, Troy & Brighton
We had walked along Garnet from Zanzibar to the pier, then headed south along the boardwalk for a way, to a bit south of Grand as I recall. Not much further. I sat on the crest of the beach, shielding the camera on its squat mini tripod, and just let it roll.
I was into weird video aspect ratios in those heady days, serving up composite still and video web page backgrounds, so this one got cropped down to its “action” rather quickly, the next day. 512×128 The bare essentials of sand, surf and sky; silly mortals playing in between.
Rotate the planet to look around. We’re in the California “stack,” closest to the top in the “Community” sort. It’s more fun to hunt through and see the range of pictures people thought representative of “a moment in time,” but if you want to get to us quickly, click Sunday morning dog wrangling in Ocean Beach, CA.
Here it is: Earth, covered by stacks of thousands of virtual photographs, corresponding in location to where they were taken by Lens readers at one “Moment in Time” (15:00 U.T.C., Sunday, May 2).
Zach Wise designed the interactive gallery and Jacqui Maher developed the submission process.
Spin the globe in any direction to get where you want to go. Click on a stack and the top photo will open, giving the photographer’s name or pseudonym (if supplied) and a brief caption (again, if supplied). Another click will send that picture to the bottom of the stack so the next one can open. The uppermost pictures in any stack are those you’ve recommended to one another. The height of the stacks reflects the number of submissions from any given area. Note the pull-down menu in the upper left corner. Pictures can be searched by topic – community, arts and entertainment, family, money and the economy, nature and the environment, play, religion, social issues or work – but not, unfortunately, by photographer. (That’s for “Moment in Time 2.0.”) From any individual picture, you can always return to the globe by clicking on “Return to Globe X” in the upper right corner.
It seemed appropriate to pay attention. A full moon lights this New Year’s Eve, by necessity, a blue moon. At fifty-two, I have the time and relative lack of commitments to pause a moment, or two, or more than several and pay attention. They happen, or so I am told, about every nineteen years or so, or perhaps it is exactly and I wasn’t paying sufficient attention. Nineteen years would mean that I had missed two previous New Year’s Eve Blue Moon events. One at about thirty-three when I was distracted by the demands of a young family and the other at fourteen, when I was just distracted or conversely far too self absorbed to notice much outside my own evolving turbulent self. One cannot say really if another nineteen years down the road I will be here, or sufficiently aware to notice. So, I wandered outside, into the cold, well, this is Southern California and cold is a relative issue, and stared for awhile. A lovely moon set in a clear cold cloudless sky. Assuredly bonus points are allocated in some karmic register for noticing the turning of these cosmic cycles and I wandered back inside.
This site is somewhat abandoned, in disuse it would appear. Perhaps they are too easy to make, or people, this generation of the commercial driven attention span, the thirty second sound bite, are too easily distracted by the next game, the next crisis, the next toy. In any event, the shell of this site is lying here disused, so it seems reasonable to co-opt it, at least for a little while. Like a hermit crab, to try on the fit and see if it suits. Sites like this are armor, camouflage, perfect anonymity. You can say what you like and only a select few, who likely care little or not at all, will know.
So, it has been an odd year. A year sufficiently odd that I hesitate in contemplation of what to wish for. Wishes get twisted. So, here’s to the New Year, whatever it might come to be, and the opportunity to see it through.
Since when did we, as a nation, as concerned citizens, as parents, lose the capacity to judge babies having babies, to condemn teenagers having unprotected sex?
What will it do to every American mother’s and father’s ability to discourage their children from having sex before marriage and to insist, failing that, upon proper precautions not just against pregnancy but against deadly sexually transmitted diseases if we rollover to a wave of Republican permissiveness and install the bad example of Bristol and Levi in the White House?
Is it fair to Palin to hold her responsible for her daughter’s mistakes?
Certainly not. It is horribly unfair.
But since when has the national interest become secondary to fairness to politicians?
Far Right Republican Family Values apparently include not only knowingly choosing to have a Down’s Syndrome child when one already has a full family of four, but also the fine example of parenting displayed when one has a 16 year old teenage daughter (now 17) — the daughter of a state governor, no less — running around having unprotected sex and who, as a not very surprising result, is now 5 months pregnant.
One can sympathize with their challenges as a family, but is this really the “model” of parent, family and teenage behavior the adoring Right, or the rest of us for that matter, wants to have in or anywhere near the White House?
Far Right Republican Family Values apparently include not only knowingly choosing to have a Down’s Syndrome child when one already has a full family of four, but also the fine example of parenting displayed when one has a 16 year old teenage daughter (now 17) — the daughter of a state governor, no less — running around having unprotected sex and who, as a not very surprising result, is now 5 months pregnant.
One can sympathize with their challenges as a family, but is this really the “model” of parent, family and teenage behavior the adoring Right wants to have in or anywhere near the White House?
Let us consider the assumed symmetries:
Obama’s inexperience =~ Palin’s inexperience
Biden’s experience (6 terms in Senate; worst vices: likes to talk too much and has sense of humor) =~ McCain’s experience (4 terms in Senate, worst vices: violent temper and see-no-evil, hear-no-evil relation to lobbyist buddies — poster-child for enlightening & ennobling effects of torture applied long, long ago.)
Let us consider the putative symmetry:
Obama chooses Biden as his Vice President, at worst admitting that he might need more seasoned advice in an international crisis, and responsibly providing Americans with assurance should something happen to him.
McCain chooses Palin as his Vice President, implicitly claiming he already knows everything there is to know about life and death, peace and war, health and the economy, and is entitled to show a big “FU” to everyone else in his choice of Vice President.
Whose temperament and judgment do you want to trust in the White House?
Personally, I don’t see any symmetry at all.
Let us consider the assumed symmetries:
Obama’s inexperience =~ Palin’s inexperience
Biden’s experience (6 terms in Senate; worst vices: likes to talk too much and has sense of humor) =~ McCain’s experience (4 terms in Senate, worst vices: violent temper and see-no-evil, hear-no-evil relation to lobbyist buddies — poster-child for enlightening & ennobling effects of torture applied long, long ago.)
Let us consider the putative symmetry:
Obama chooses Biden as his Vice President, at worst admitting that he might need more seasoned advice in an international crisis, and responsibly providing Americans with assurance should something happen to him.
McCain chooses Palin as his Vice President, implicitly claiming he already knows everything there is to know about life and death, peace and war, health and the economy, and is entitled to show a big “FU” to everyone else in his choice of Vice President.
Whose temperament and judgment do you want to trust in the White House?
Personally, I don’t see any symmetry at all.
“I’m going to start inquiring about your own personal agenda, whether your positions and your scoffing tone might not be viewed as little more than cover in lieu of a defense of the indefensible.
In truth, I don’t presume much worse than that you hold a good many of your opinions and views primarily, consciously or not, as ornaments of some long-term but still evolving notion yourself.”
Requiem
They turn off the water you know, as if it was some gigantic spigot. At night and in the off season, when the tourists are not around to admire and be awestruck, they turn it off. Well, not off completely although perhaps that is possible and has actually happened, at least once naturally due to the formation of an ice dam one winter.
During the main part of the tourist season 50% of the water is diverted. At night and during the off season about 75% is diverted. The reasons for doing so are multiple, however, it appears to be an extraordinary waste to let all of that potential energy escape. Instead, they reroute it through the hydroelectric plants on both the Canadian and U.S. sides whose power is then shared, by virtue of international accord, between the interested parties, the US and Canada.
However, power isn’t the only reason for diverting the the flow of water. Another major consideration is erosion. The falls are receeding toward Lake Erie at a rate of about a couple of inches a year. The rate used to be a foot or so, but the diversion has slowed it down, along with some fix it work on the American Falls by the Army Corp of Engineers, yes, those of Katrina fame.
What is the problem here? Why not just let the falls erode, let nature do its thing? Several reasons, the tourism, shipping and hydroelectric industries all require that the location of the falls be somewhat stabile. Shifting the tourist hotels might be farily easy, but recutting the Welland Ship Canal would be a problem. Another issue is that the bottom of Lake Erie is higher than the bottom of the falls. So, eventually, as the falls receed at whatever rate, the lake will drain.
So, why write this who really cares. I like the ironic juxtaposition that environmentalists have concerned themselves with restraining industry and development in the area, when to my way of thinking, they should be concerned with letting the falls return to their natural state. Let them erode. Free the Falls. I want to see the evolution, the change.
Nonetheless, even in their diminished capacity, it is an awesome sight.
PS For serious fun, try the jet boat trip up the Niagara Gorge.
