Poverty In America

I see in today's news that 25% of the children in America now receive government assistance – food stamps. These families are suffering so badly that the kids don't have enough to eat.

Just to set the record straight: We have enough money in America to bail out the Wall Street crooks, and we have have sufficient resources to fight wars without asking the taxpayers to chip in and help pay for the warfare, but our people don't have enough money to feed themselves. Many people don't have health insurance, are behind on their mortgage payments, and yet President Obama is talking about sending more soldiers into war overseas?



http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/us/29foodstamps.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&hp

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Obama's Big Sellout

The latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine arrived today. It has an official date of December 10, 2009. It contains a very good and in-depth article entitled “Obama’s Big Sellout.”

The article argues that “the president has packed his economic team with Wall Street insiders intent on turning the bailout into an all-out giveaway.” It says that “the Rubin-centric appointments may well represent the most sweeping influence by a single Wall Street insider in history” and further argues that “while Obama gave Rubin’s acolytes all the important jobs, progressives got banished to semi-meaningless, even comical roles.”

I worked to get Barack Obama elected, both the primary and general elections. Even at worst he certainly is better than any of his opponents, both Republican and Democrat. But my support is beginning to wear thin.

Obama has no balls. He has not ended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has not brought the troops home. Guantanamo has not been closed. Even if the so called health care reform eventually gets passed, it is clearly not anything close to universal health care. Nor will it stop the vast chicanery going on inside of the health insurance companies.

Maybe he is completely ignorant of economics. He at least should have all sides of the argument at the table. But he doesn’t. Only the right wing capitalists are there. Wall Street and the super rich should love Obama. But he hasn’t done much for the middle class in America.

All in all I give him a pretty poor report card so far. I guess he gets a few points for style, and he is indeed far superior to Cheney-Bush. But by his behavior and results he is behaving more and more like a Republican in Democrat’s clothing.

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Terabyte Hard Drive

When I first began using personal computers your programs and data were stored on cassette tapes. Then 5-1/4” floppy discs. I had 16k of RAM, and when my brother upgraded to 64k of RAM I was horribly envious.

I remember getting a tour of the regional air traffic control center here in El Paso, Texas. The tour guide proudly pointed out their Winchester hard drive. It sat of the floor and looked like a tall end table. It had a capacity of 256k. Yes, 256 thousand!

My brother Michael Dwight Garland got his degree in electric engineering. He was an honor graduate of UT El Paso, and he worked as a computer programmer for Texas Instruments in Dallas before becoming an owner of a high tech start up firm in the DFW area.

When my brother told me that one of his friends had a hard drive with a capacity of 1 gigabyte I seriously thought it might be possible that Mike was lying to me. One gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 bytes or 1,000 megabytes.

Today for just over $100- I bought a 1-1/2 terabyte external hard drive. A terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes or 1,000 gigabytes. Even though I do a lot of digital photography, I don’t really need a hard drive quite that big…I sort of bought it in honor of my brother.

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Desecration Of The Dead

El Paso, Texas has 700,000 people, and if our sister city of Juarez is included we have well over two million inhabitants. In a metropolitan area this large there are many cemeteries including a national military cemetery. Almost without exception the dead buried in these cemeteries are provided with all appropriate respect and decorum.

There is one notable exception: Concordia Cemetery. By American standards it is fairly old. Many graves there date to the mid-1800s. On their web site the group which is trying to preserve the cemetery says:

“Buried here are over 60,000 people including gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, Buffalo Soldiers, Texas Rangers, Civil War Veterans, early Mormon pioneers, Florida (Lady Flo) Wolf, Lawman John Selman and was formerly the first burial site for Mexican Revolution President Victoriano Huerta and numerous other civic leaders, pioneers, and war veterans.”

The Concordia Heritage Association has recently been fostering a carnival atmosphere at the cemetery. Dressing up as 1800’s prostitutes and murderers (gun fighters) they stage simulated gun fights. As a fund raising project they have formed a close alliance with a rather peculiar group of paranormal ghost hunters. Together they have been exploiting the dead by encouraging late night tours, where people are encouraged to believe that they see ghosts, and where paranormal phenomena are treated as reasonable and normal.

These activities taking place at Concordia Cemetery are disrespectful of the dead. This is a genuine sacrilege. Their irreverence by dressing up for the TV camera as whores and murderers demonstrates clear-cut disrespect for the dead. Allowing the paranormal phreaks to use this sacred burial site in order to promote their strange and offensive ideas is a mockery of the civilized way that western civilization has treated its dead for thousands of years.

My grandmother is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery which lies about 400 yards south of Concordia. If some group of people were trying to defile the cemetery she is buried in with the same carnival atmosphere that is happening at Concordia I would be at the front of the angry crowd demonstrating against this sacrilegious despoliation.

The Concordia Heritage group means well. But they have lost their way. Fund raising and continued growth of the group has overcome all sense of respect for the dead.

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The War in Afghanistan

America has now been at war in Afghanistan for eight years. Before us the Russians fought and lost a bloody war there.

Our country is spending in excess of $40 billion each year on warfare. President Obama is falling under the hypnotic spell of the military that destroyed Lyndon Johnson and resulted in the death of many thousands of people.

If Barack Obama were half as smart as we thought he was, he would make the decision to not send any additional troops to Afghanistan. He would then set a timeline/deadline for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops.

The fight against governmental corruption in Afghanistan needs to be taken seriously. The people of that country need real help; the kind that civilians and non governmental aid organizations can provide.

The military is good at waging wars and killing. They are not the correct group of people to be advising the President on this foreign policy issue. They don’t have the skills needed to help the people of Afghanistan either.

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Learning To See Through Photography

Dorothea Lange is credited with saying that learning to be a good photographer also teaches one “how to see without a camera.” Ansel Adams and many of the other masters have said something similar.

In the end the subject matter and the composition is far more important than the technical details about pixels, sensor size, the lens, ISO, exposure, and aperture.

What I find especially powerful about Dorothea Lange is that she understood how much more interesting a photograph is when it also contains a person with great strength of character.

According to Wikipedia “Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother". The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson.

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In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.

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According to Thompson's son, Lange got some details of this story wrong, but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.”


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Thanksgiving Turkey

This year I have been hearing increasing amounts of “chatter” regarding cruelty to the birds we eat in order to give thanks for our good fortune.

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I have never been a vegetarian, and I am convinced that our species is omnivorous. Complete, total avoidance of all animal products can easily result in serious nutritional deficiencies and long term health problems. But so can obesity and eating lots of meat and cheese.

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I think it is time to shine the light of honesty on factory farming of animals. The way they are treated; their diet of antibiotics and growth hormones.

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This is a link to a rabble rousing pamphlet about the evils of factory farming and animal cruelty. It is short and well worth reading:

--------------------------- http://tinyurl.com/yda5z58

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Green to Blue

Green to Blue from Elizabeth on Vimeo.

Stop Global Warming.
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Camera Straps

Until recently I believed that the Op/Tech camera strap was the best one to use with a heavy SLR type camera. In fact I still have one on my Nikon D300, and I still do really like it. But I have recently become aware of a strap which I like even more.
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The R-Strap by Black Rapid is a wonderful product. It allows you to carry and use a heavy SLR camera without all the problems associated with a neck strap. It is what I am now using on my Nikon D300s which has a dual battery and a GPS.

R-Strap - How To from Matteo Bava on Vimeo.

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There Has Been An Event

It is now 11:40 p.m. on Saturday 21 November 2009. I am 60 years old; almost 61. In about six weeks I’ll be 61…if I make it.

In the last ten days I have had three different events, always at night, which seem to be getting more intense. Each time I was sound asleep then awakened to a sensation of absolute crushing weight upon my chest. Then comes the sweats. Within an hour I have to urgently have one or more bowel movements. My left arm isn't especially painful, but the entire top part of my torso is.

Each time, the way to survive the event has been to get up and go take an aspirin. Tonight I did so, then an hour later I took another one. I lay in bed very quietly and try to breathe deeply - In then Out. Over and over again. It seems to help. Maybe just a little.

Tonight I got to thinking about talking with my father about two hours before he died (at age 62). He said to me, “I almost died last night.” At the time and over the years since then I have wondered, how did he know? Well the chest pain is so intense that it is clear this is something well out of the ordinary. Tonight at one point I even began thinking, “If this gets much worse I just won’t be able to take it.” The thought of putting the barrel of my .44 magnum in my mouth and pulling the trigger kept coming to mind.

I even prayed. I prayed to God. I told him what a hypocrite I felt like, that I thought Christianity and prayer was a total bunch of crap, etc. But I did it anyway. Heavenly Father, blah, blah, etc. I tried to think of some/many of the worst things I have ever done, and ask God for his forgiveness.

Are these events precursor heart attacks? Maybe. Probably.

If I had health insurance would I be in the hospital tonight? Almost certainly. And no doubt the cardiologist would find a major blockage to the blood flow to my heart muscle, and within a day or so I would be in surgery getting a multiple bypass.

But this is America where we do things The American Way. You work your ass off for many years, forfeit your family life, etc. to help the company you are working for to prosper.

Over the years the marriages seemed to come and go, but I kept getting promoted and working my way up the career ladder. I suppose this is because I was loyal, worked such long hours, and gave so much of myself to the company.

You end up being one of the very top managers, in fact my last job title was General Manager, and you find that you are at least partially responsible for the company having made many, many millions of dollars of profit. Then one day the greedy owners of the company decide to bail out; they sell the company and sell you out too. You find yourself suddenly old and unwanted. Out of work. And because you have lost your job you lose your health insurance too. So you die, even though modern medicine could have provided you with several more years of good life.

But the American Way is: No job, no health insurance. No insurance; too bad old man. Screw you, just die; and quit all that nauseating complaining too.


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NOTE: It is now the next morning - I made it through the night. This was the first time that this sort of thing has occurred more than once during one night; and in fact I survived three fairly intense bouts of it last night. Each one lasted about 1 to 1-1/2 hours.

Last night at one point I was surfing the internet, learning about heart attacks. It seems that the plaque which gets deposited on the inner walls of your blood vessels is largely made up of lipids (oils and fats) and a type of white blood cells called macrophages.

I quit smoking 8 years ago, 7-1/2 years ago gave up all alcohol, and then 7 years ago I was diagnosed with a cancer affecting the white blood cells which is called chronic lymphocytic leukemia. I just checked my old blood tests. Although my level of total defective white blood cells was indeed quite high, and 7 years later my lymph nodes are now incredibly swollen, the macrophages weren’t at all high when I had to stop getting blood tests. So I guess that maybe lipids are playing a bigger part in the problem. In a way that is good news, because it is possible to lower one’s intake of foods containing lipids, thus it might be possible to take some corrective action.

But I think I can read the tea leaves pretty well here. I don’t want to be pessimistic about this, especially since this is such an important matter, but it seems pretty clear that we are nearing the end of this little one act play. Well, it has sure been a good ride! No complaints. I would like to thank everyone who was involved along the way in helping this life of mine turn out so surprisingly wide-ranging and wonderful.
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November 24, 2009
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It just happened again. This time it was not at night but just before noon. I chewed an aspirin and breathed deeply for 30 minutes. Big time sweats. Great bowel movement. Thank goodness I survived it again.


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It is November 27 now. I've made it through two more "events." The longer I am off all cheese and lipids, it seems to be getting a little bit better. But it is still pretty bad.

At least I am getting good at the routine of chewing up an aspirin tablet. Then soon the sweats come and the inexorable bowel movement(s).

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Good Evening New York

At age 67 Paul McCartney has still got it.

I saw him and Linda McCartney perform in 1972 in Germany right after the Beatles broke up. They were with Wings and were plalying in a small club. I must have been standing about 10 or 15 feet away from them.




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Standing Side-by-Side with Al Gore

In today’s news from the Netherlands I read that:


* Central America wants billions for climate damages

Seven Central American countries are going to demand $100 billion from industrialised nations in compensation for damage caused by global warming.

Belize, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama will raise the issue next month at the Copenhagen climate summit. Guatemala's Environment Minister Luis Ferrate says Central America is facing food shortages due to drought and flooding, whose scope is unprecedented.


This is really just the very beginning. I have been involved with various tree hugging causes for more than 40 years. I drove a second generation Prius when I was living in Europe, and now that I have moved to the high desert of America I am driving a third generation Prius. My house has a white roof, and all the light bulbs are compact fluorescents. I’ve even been central to one genuine success in the environmental movement - the Guadalupe Mountains National Park Wilderness area.

But these poor countries are taking the wrong approach by demanding compensation from the more polluting countries. First off, long before these guys get up on their high horses and begin preaching to the big polluters these little tin pot banana republics need to stop cutting down their own rain forests, put an end to corruption, impose genuine environmental restrictions on their mining industry, and stop eating bush meat.

America, China, India, and the other big polluters are mostly just talking a good game, if that. There may even be many people in power in these countries who are sincere and concerned about the impending global environmental problems. But when it comes right down to it they aren’t about to reduce their carbon footprints significantly, if at all. They certainly aren’t going to accept restrictions imposed by anyone outside their countries. No way Jose’.

And as much as I wish it were otherwise, I don’t think the polluters will be willing to force their people to consume less energy if that also means their people having to undergo any meaningful reduction in the standard of living. Mankind has been successful by being competitive, and very often warlike and blatantly brutal. This aggression has now suddenly become a detriment to the future survival of our species.

I will stand shoulder to shoulder with Al Gore as we go down, but in my heart I know this is a lost cause.
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Computer Virus Protection

I was writing computer programs in the late 1960s, and by the 1970s I had my first personal computer.

The internet has become very useful (some would say essential) within the last 5 or 10 years. The internet has exposed a real dark side of humanity. Why are there so many hackers, and so many people trying to cause random pain and destruction to people who have done noting to harm them? Not to mention all the crooks and scam artists who are constantly trying to get their hands on your money or steal your identity.

Over the years I have had experience with several different software packages which attempt to protect one’s computer from these depredations. I currently have Norton installed on one of my machines and McCafee on another. For a few years I used Norman. As far as I can tell they each do a good job of stopping viruses from infecting your computer.

Both of my current suppliers of virus protection charge around $50- per year to provide “protection.” And both are engaged in a practice which I consider highly questionable ethically. Once you buy into their “protection” you are automatically renewed each year. You are not easily allowed to opt-out of this automatic renewal by either of these large providers. I am sure that there are lots of dead computers laying in the trash heap or stored away in the back of people’s closets that have up to date virus protection which is automatically being charged to their credit cards each year.

Visualize a small business owner in New York City who has to pay the mafia for “protection.” This is a racket.

On the PC which uses McCafee I have shut off their child protection feature. I am an adult, I do not have children, and I have no desire to allow someone to censor my web surfing. This is the kind of stuff they do in China. But because I have shut off the child protection feature, McCafee puts a very prominent red X on the screen and continues to warn me that I am not adequately protected. This is like condoms. I no longer carry a rubber in my wallet. I have reached that age where I no longer have sex with other people. Since I do not own a condom some would say that I am not properly protected, but to them I would say Hogwash.

The government authorities should provide citizens with protection from criminals and bad guys automatically. That is their job. Thanks to years of deregulation and the constantly reiterated lie that government is the problem, not the solution, the authorities do not have the resources to provide this type of “protection” so they now just shut their eyes to it.
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Supporting The Troops

I periodically get e-mails from my comfortable middle aged colleagues. They sit in the their nice suburban homes and drive their big SUVs back and forth to work or the store. On the back of the SUV there is a self adhesive ribbon which claims to indicate their support for our brave troops.

There are several ways to really show support for our troops, but self adhesive stickers are not one of them.

Political action is foremost:

1. Do everything you can to get the government to quickly end these senseless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

2. Support an immediate 25% reduction in the defense department's budget. Then another 25% next year.

3. Support a tax increase to pay for the wars; especially among taxpayers with an annual income over $200,000-. We have been paying for all this warlike behavior by borrowing money from the Arabs and the Chinese.

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Universal Health Care

There have been many compromises made to get the House bill passed. No doubt it will be watered down even further by the Senate.
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"The health insurance companies are going to make an extra 70 billion dollars as a result of Americans being forced to buy their health insurance. What company wouldn't love this bill?" – Michael Moore in Toronto Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
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Even if the House bill were to pass undiluted 13,000,000 Americans would still be excluded from the health care system. Only in America does one have to choose between death due to lack of medical care and bankruptcy/losing your house. I still support President Obama. He is a far better alternative than the lunatic right wingers. But he is too afraid of a fight over this or any other issue. I guess it has to do with him having being raised as a white man with black skin.
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Mr. Obama: You need to just veto this legislation. It has gotten so far off track that it is worse than nothing.
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Leonids

The meteor shower which appears to come out of the constellation Leo is called the Leonids. It is a prolific meteor shower which is associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle.

It is now 3:30 a.m., and the dog and I have been outside in the back yard for the last 20 minutes. Since it is in the 30s F I wore an arctic parka, some ski gloves, and a watch cap that I bought one very cold morning in northern England. I brought a folding chair out there so I could sit and watch.

Even though I did not see any shooting stars it was really pleasant being out there. My little black doggie has a very thick coat, so he thrives in this cooler weather. He loved it.
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LINK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonids
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Constructive Debate

"Last week the Environment and Public Works committee, under the able leadership of Senator Barbara Boxer, passed the most comprehensive piece of climate legislation in a generation. The vote was 11-1. Not a single Republican on the committee showed up.

This is a serious issue that requires our full attention. Republican Senators have decided that the better tactic is to ignore and stall and delay. After not showing up for the vote, they now complain about not being part of the process.

There is room for bipartisanship on this issue, as Senator Lindsay Graham has demonstrated. It is my hope that other Republicans begin to take their cues from him."
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The above is from Al Gore's blog. Former vice president Gore is much more diplomatic than I am. I say these Republicans are unpatriotic and this is absolute proof. They should all be thrown out of office. Corrupt bastards!
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LINK: http://blog.algore.com/2009/11/a_constructive_debate.html
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Dr. Jane Goodall on Jon Stewart

Trekkie

Yes, I admit it. I am guilty as charged.

I am a long term, loyal fan of Star-Trek. Especially Jean Luc Picard. I am not the slightest bit gay, and I have no reason to believe that he is either, but I would consider giving it a try for this guy!
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Loves to Foolishly Waste Money

I have driven Toyotas for years. The Lexus is nice, but it is nothing more than a grossly overpriced Toyota. For people who want the quality of a Toyota but choose to get worse fuel economy and spend much more money for the illusion of luxury.

The same applies to laptops. Several good friends are Mac phreaks. Why would anyone in their right mind waste the money to buy a Mac when you can now get a fully functional throw-away Windows computer for less than $300- including sales tax and delivery?
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