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Highway to Harrachov

The city has had as much snow as I’ve seen in my 11 years here, but it’s been on the ground for almost a month now and it is looking somewhat less than pristine.  That changed shortly after Cerny Most, as the snow lay in long white blankets over farm fields.

You don’t get much whiter than this, I thought.  Then, as the ground started to rise after Turnov, it did.  The snow adorned every branch of every palm tree, and the roofs of the houses were white.  It can’t get much whiter than this, I thought.

As we got a bit higher, the snow on the rooftops got deeper, standing up stiff and straight like every house was wearing a bright, white hat, icicles hung from the eaves, and the snow on the branches was so thick the trees were more white than green.  Can’t get much whiter than that, I thought, for sure, this time.

Then we got a bit higher and a wind kicked up and the snow was blowing from the rooftops in wispy waves and the snow was still coming down and it was not like sweetly falling flakes, it was like a cloud, a fog of white.

Then we were in Harrachov.  This was a ski trip for my wife and kids.  I don’t ski.  I’ve tried.  I suck.  We double dated with my wife’s sister’s family and my job was to drag the 3 and unders around on a bobsled while the adults and Sam (7) skied.  Without marijuana, I’d have surely gone insane.

I can understand, and respect, the thrill of skiing, and there is certainly an appreciation of the natural beauty that it exposes you to, but a town like Harrachov can pretty much kill that.  Cars and pedestrians compete for space, the snow in town is ground into an unattractive slush and whether you are actually on the slopes or walking through the center of town, you cannot escape the masses of other people.

It’s ironic.  Or maybe that’s not the right word, I know Alanis Morrissette got a lot of shit over that.

Anyway, it’s tragic.  A place of beauty can relax you, can inspire you, can give you the peace of mind you need to find the answers to the problems in your life.  So people flock to places of beauty.  People mess it up.

So, apparently there’s a thing going on where you can ask the President questions on YouTube, and I guess at some point he will choose some and answer them.  I’m not sure exactly how it works.  I didn’t get that far.

Anyway, I typed in my question and got a message back that I needed to register.  Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve already got a YouTube account, but I don’t use it much, have never actually uploaded a video, so I went ahead and re-registered.

Then, I typed in my question, which I think is an important one.  Why don’t you prosecute the Bushies for all of the evil things they have done?  I phrased it a little bit better than that.  I got back a message that there were already similar questions, and would I like to vote on them.

I felt a tingle of hope.  Glad to know other people are thinking along the same lines.  The hope was quickly dashed.  The other questions had to do with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  The computer had picked up on the key phrase “crimes against humanity.”

There are two lessons to be learned.  One is that computers haven’t really passed the Turing test yet.  They are getting better.  I am frequently amazed that my computer can correct me when I say their instead of there, fail to capitalize the word ‘I,’ of misspell ‘occur.”  Computers are amazing, but they are still no substitute for a human moderator, even though they are a jillion times faster.

The other lesson is that prosecution of the many crimes commited by Bush and co. is probably never going to happen.  It has moved out of the main stream of political discourse so completely that nobody is even bringing it up.  That happens, when an issue is ignored for long enough.

I remember one time when Arianna Huffington had an interview scheduled with Nancy Pelosi, and she threw the question out to her readers:  What should I ask her?  Well, the answer was clear and unambiguous.  Thousands upon thousands of comments, and at least 2/3rds were on the subject of impeachment.

Arianna ignored the results completely.  Just because they say they want to hear the public’s opinion, doesn’t mean they really do.

So, I hung around the thread for awhile, voting for every questioner that asked about the legalization of marijuana and flagging as abusive anybody that sounded like a teabagger, but my heart wasn’t really in it.  If they don’t care what I think, why should I care about them.

O’Keefe, Flanagan, Basel and Dai.  O’Keefe seems to be getting the most press, it sounds like he was the ringleader and also it follows neatly on the whole ACORN filming episode.  He’s trying to be the right wing’s answer to Michael Moore but he’s forgetting, as people on the right tend to, that Michael Moore is a serious, ethical investigative journalist and a brilliant film maker.  O’Keefe is just a punk kid with a teabagger agenda.

They all have their claims to fame, though.  Flanagan is the son of a U.S. attorney who was in tight with the Bush administration.  Basel may be dating Scott Brown’s daughter and Dai wrote a really stupid thing in college called The Penis Monologues which is supposed to be a parody of The Vagina Monologues but just comes across as the miserable whining of a guy who isn’t getting any.  The kind of guy who thinks feminist and lesbian are the same thing and any girl who doesn’t want to go out with him must be one.

A stellar crew.  And their plan was brilliant.  Pretend to be telephone repairmen, go into Mary Landrieu’s office, plant bugs in the phones, and wait to harvest some nasty information.  Happens all the time on TV.

Therein lies the problem.  It probably doesn’t really happen like that in real life.  If the government wants to bug your phone, they don’t send in a bunch of college kids dressed up as telephone repairmen.  They have the phone company send out some telephone repairmen.

So, they got busted when some sharp eyed staffer asked to see their credentials.  Perhaps even, since O’Keefe was on the news quite a bit during the whole ACORN kerfuffle, someone recognized him.  Or realized that the mustache was fake.  Or that their toolboxes still had the price tags attached.  Or that they seemed too clean and efficient to be actual telephone repairmen.

In real life, there are a million things that can go wrong when you pretend to be something you’re not.  On TV, it works every time.  These kids have just been watching too much TV.

I believe that right wing forces within the U.S. government were responsible for the events of September 11^th, 2001, and I’m a little bit sick of people saying I’m nuts because of that.  I could be mistaken.  I don’t claim to have absolute proof.

However, in view of the fact that the George W. Bush administration lied about virtually everything they were ever involved in and refused to co-operate with the commission investigating the disaster, I think it’s reasonable to suspect them.

I began to suspect it was an inside job when I saw how determinedly Bush and Cheney were trying to weasel out of testifying.  It wasmuch later, maybe even over a year, when I saw footage of the collapse of WTC 7 for the 1^st time.  It was in the Loose Change video. I had been involved in the debate, heard and participated in discussions about the building’s structure, proximity to the others, and so on, but I hadn’t seen it.  The weird thing is, I didn’t realize I hadn’t seen it until I actually saw it.

Now, I’ll admit that the collapse of the twin towers was much more dramatic, but WTC 7, happening 7 hours later, should have been well covered by the media.  It wasn’t.  That made me even more suspicious.

Today, because somebody linked to the famous Popular Mechanics article as a way to settle the argument, I went back and reread it.  I remain unconvinced.

First, they talk a lot about how steel, even though it will not melt at the temperature at which rocket fuel burns, will be weakened, thus allowing the building to collapse.  Bullshit.  The steel in those buildings wasn’t just weakened.  For the buildings to fall at the speed they did, that steel had to be zapped.  Beyond melted, it had to be flat out missing.  I’m not saying that pancaking can’t happen, but if there are any kind of steel columns at all, those points will pancake slower than the open air around them and the whole thing will be a tangled mess.

2^nd, they do not speak about motive at all, or mention the Silverstein confession: “As for building 7, we’d already decided to pull it.”  I give them a bit of a pass on that, because they are Popular Mechanics and investigative political journalism is not their thing.  Still, I consider that, the PNAC statement and the escort of the Bin Laden family out of the U.S., so they couldn’t be interviewed by the F.B.I., to be pretty strong evidence.

3^rd, they do not seem to be clear, themselves, on whether the building collapsed due to fire or due to structural damage.  So, it seems a bit cavalier on their part to totally rule out bombs in the basement.

We may never know.  However, you can count me as one vote in favor of reopening the investigation.

I don’t hate shopping malls.  I know many people of the lefty-green persuasion, which is sort of where I see myself, think they are horrible abominations of urban development, a symptom of the shallowness of our culture, and killers of community spirit.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s in about as typical American town as there is, and I don’t remember any candy store with a kindly old man who knew all the kids by name.  I suspect that that whole thing is either a myth, or maybe something that existed in the 1890s, and I just can’t work up a good sense of nostalgia for it.

As to the horrible abomination of urban development, there may be half a point there.  Most malls are pretty unimaginative architecturally, at least on the outside, and they have huge parking lots, but that’s not their fault.  Blame the automobile culture.

It’s the shallowness issue that I’d like to address.  It’s true.  In any mall you visit (I live in Europe, but we are becoming more and more like the U.S. all the time) you will see overpriced clothing store after overpriced clothing store, gift shops selling crap that could not possibly appeal to a person whose I.Q. is measured in double digits, food courts which specialize in McDonalds and KFC rather than exotic cuisine.  That’s because each of the shops in the mall is a business, and the purpose of a business is to make money and to do that you have to be selling something that people want to buy.  Blame the customers, not the mall.

I like malls because they are convenient, you have an entire downtown shopping area under one roof.  No traffic.  No rain.  In 1888, Edward Bellamy wrote a novel called “Looking Backward.”  He took a stab at predicting what life would be like in the year 2000.  I remember one bit where the guy from the future was looking at a 19^th century painting of umbrellas and he thought it was supposed to be social satire.  Everyone carrying their own awkward protection with them instead of just putting up a roof.

I think Edward Bellamy predicted the modern shopping mall.