May, 2003

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

Thursday  May 1 , 2003

Ride down Bouquet Canyon, and stopped to see Tony Natoli, no special reason, just needed a place to go. The bike is a dream, I enjoyed the ride thoroughly, something that didn't happen on that big old Honda Shadow. The Shadow was/is a good bike for what it was designed for, a Short Ride Cruiser. I just dreaded taking it on a long ride, it was uncomfortable. I don't know that the Katana is going any different, I haven't taken it more than 100 miles yet, but that 100 miles was a kick.

While I was talking to Tony he mentioned that the CPMF Banquet was tonight. I knew it was coming up, and I was contemplating looking for the notice in a day or two. Damn. I called Christy and told her she would have to take the kids to her Church meeting. I have been looking forward to going, I like the people and I want to be selected for doing the same jobs next year.

Getting out wasn't easy, "B" was being obstinate, Mike just left, Autumn was even being stubborn. I finally made it out with about 20 minutes to go 30 miles to be there at 1830, I almost made it too. I am really glad I went, I got an AWARD!!!! A small Lucite star with the Santa Clarita Crest and my name with a thank you... I was one of only three or four Volunteers that got one of these things... very cool!!!!

On the ride home from the CPMF Banquet I did a silly reckless thing,  I pulled up behind a kid on a Yamaha 750, all decked out in racing gear, he waved me up next to him and revved his bike, the instant he did that a little synapse shut down the "Common Sense" center somewhere in  in my brain and activated the long disused "What the Hell", "Just DO IT", "I'll be damned",  and dusted off the "How to race" file in the "You know how to do this" centers all at once. In less than two seconds:

the front wheel came up about two feet and stayed there for about five seconds it was perfect, absolutely beautiful! Would have felt like a a foolish old man if I had been pulled over... I had a drag race!... I'm a 60 year old delinquent...Wiped his butt too!... it would have been an $850.00 fine for Exhibition of Speed...   Exhilarating!!... but stupid... felt good... shame on me... I'd do it again in a heart beat... scary thought.

I may have to start another page called WHY CAN'T I WRITE LIKE THIS?!" to put short pieces like this in:

CHOOSING ELEVATORS

By Garrison Keillor
 

On an elevator, I stand and watch the numerals over the door as they light up or I examine the footwear of other passengers. If the elevator license is posted, I read that, and try to estimate how close we are to the posted weight limit. If we are packed in tight, I imagine what it would be like to spend the next few hours together.

An elevator is a delicate mechanism, a box on a string. Some of them are ancient, and they clank, and you wonder, "If it plunged twenty stories to the basement, would I stand a better chance of survival if I jumped up in the air just before it hit bottom?" This makes sense, doesn't it?

Elevators don't come with guarantees entitled "Our Pledge To You, The Passenger." Some come with telephones for emergency use, not a reassuring thought to those of us with extensive telephone experience. Chances are good you could dialing the emergency number and get a guy who says, "Stuck where? Where's that? I donno. You betta talk to Benny about that. He ain't here now. I'll have him call you. What's your number?" Yes, chances of that are pretty good, I would say.

Oftentimes, riding elderly elevators grinding and whining up the mineshafts of New York, I have asked myself, "Is it perhaps more common than one might think that in this city an elevator stops without warning between floors and hangs there for two or three or six or ten hours while the occupants sit like rats in a coffee can and try to keep panic at bay?" Yes, probably it is. New York journalists have more to do than record small disasters --- "6 Passengers Sweat Profusely for 2 Hrs. in Trapped Elevator; "I Was Afraid This Might Happen," Says Man, 51 --- and so, yes, probably it happens all the time.

For the trappee, it would not be a small disaster though. It would be big, perhaps the sort that makes a guy quit his job and move to Vermont and raise purebred goats and dip candles for a living.

The elevator suddenly lurches, stops, the lights go out, there is a faint odor of burning electronics, and each one of us thinks, "I am not here and this is not happening to me." But we are here --- me, the messenger, the ladies in tweed suits, the three hairy brutes with the briefcases, the sensitive guy in sneakers, the girl with the big rhinestone hair clip, and the mouth breather behind me. It is pitch-black. Someone says, "Everybody just stay calm," in a weird little voice. Oh boy. We perspire, we start to smell bad. You hope your entrapment will be an experience in which strangers are brought together in a powerful reaffirmation of their common humanity, a Reader's Digest story, but wasn't there an article in the paper a couple weeks ago that said one out of eight Americans is mentally unbalanced? Assuming all of these folks are Americans, which one is going to snap?

I stand quietly in the dark and retrace those fateful steps that led me to take this exact elevator --- why didn't I duck into the coffeeshop as I was just about to do and grab a buttered bagel? I was going to but then I thought, "Nope, I'm two minutes late for the meeting," so I dashed for this elevator and now I am huddled here with eight panicky people listening to acetylene torches cutting through steel beams a few inches away, and when the rescuers finally tear a hole in the door with crowbars and we crawl to safety, dusty and smelling like old camels, do you think they'll write out a slip for me, saying, "Please excuse Mr. Keillor for being tardy, he was trapped in an elevator." No, I'll have to tell everyone myself, and though they say, "Oh, that must have been terrible for you," secretly they don't believe me. "By the way," they say, "we decided at the meeting that you're not the right guy. We decided to go with Dave instead."

And in a couple months, when I sell my apartment, shave my head, move to Salt Lake City and embrace Scientology, my friends will never connect all that to the terrible stress of the elevator experience. They will say, "Well, men his age do that sometimes."

In the city of New York, you go out the door in the morning, you take your life in your hands. You may not get off an elevator the same person you got on as. Choose your elevator wisely. If it feels unsteady, get right off and wait for the next one.

Friday  May 2 , 2003

Vituperative; I have heard that word several before and never looked up it's meaning... shame on me... it means Insulting. Interesting... 60 years and I am just getting around to learning the meaning of a word I have heard too many times to count... apparently being cognizant of the fact that the word has a negative connotation has been sufficient... what a lazy way to think.

Monica went to the San Fernando Mission for her field trip. I asked "What did you learn?" She said "They have a lot of crosses there."

I took Monica, Calie, Christian and "B" to the movies, The girls watched the new Lizzie McGuire Movie and the boys and I watched X-2, a very good fantasy adventure movie. The characters were actually quite interesting and you actually cared about what happened to them. It got good reviews.

Saturday  May 3 , 2003

Lots of rain today, not enough to really mess up the roads but enough to be exciting, I went into town and had to stop by the mall, I walked by the theater we went to last night and the line for the X-2 movie was incredible. The theater is running it on three screens.

I am still bothered by the little flags that folks are flying on their car windows are littering the freeways, there's something very "New Millennium" about that. Knee-jerk patriotism after the terrorist atrocity impelled all of us to thrash around looking for something to do and we all went out to buy flags to show, I don't know what... solidarity I guess, by noon the next day there wasn't an American Flag to be had in all of LA County. Within a week entrepreneurs had seen the opening and everywhere I looked I was seeing the flags that clip to the window and decals and bunting and all manner of patriotic paraphernalia. What is also very American is that the phenomenon died  

Sunday  May 4 , 2003

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on anti-war protesters at Kent State University, killing four students and wounding nine others.

You can't act crazy and expect people to treat you like your sane, you can lie and steal and expect people to treat you like you were honest. Fundamental concepts you think? So do I, why can't I teach them to my kids?

I took Christian and the girls to Apollo Park, it was pretty cold but the kids had fun feeding the ducks, I took some pictures.

We picked up Mike from Marks on the way home, Christy and "B" brought back Pizza and met us at the house about 20 minutes after we got home. Christy and "B" had a rough time last Wednesday but they have been getting along amazingly well since last Thursday. Christy has been trying very hard and so has "B".

Another "Lie-Mail"

The e-mail appended below is another Hoax... well, was it really just a hoax or a calculated lie... who knows:

 Subject: Fw: service pay

 

 Rush Limbaugh and Social Security  

 Love him or loath him, he nailed this one right on the  head.............  

By Rush Limbaugh:  

I think the vast differences in compensation between victims of the September 11 casualty and those who die serving the country in Uniform are profound. No one is really talking about it either, because you just don't criticize anything having to do with September 11. Well, I just can't let the numbers pass by because it says something really disturbing about the entitlement mentality of this country. If you lost a family member in the September 11 attack, you're going to get an average of $1,185,000. The  range is a minimum guarantee of $250,000, all the way up to $4.7 million.  

If you are a surviving family member of an American soldier killed in action, the first check you get is a $6,000 direct death benefit, half of which is taxable. Next, you get $1,750 for burial costs. If you are the surviving spouse, you get $833 a month until you remarry. And there's a payment of $211 per month for each child under 18. When the child hits 18, those payments come to a screeching halt. Keep in mind that some of the people who are getting an average of $1.185 million up to $4.7 million are complaining that it's not enough. Their deaths were tragic, but for most, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.  

Soldiers put themselves in harms way FOR ALL OF US, and they and their families know the dangers. We also learned over the weekend that some of the victims from the Oklahoma City bombing have started an organization asking for the same deal that the  September 11 families are getting. In addition to that, some of the families of those bombed in the embassies are now asking for compensation as well.  

You see where this is going, don't you? Folks, this is part and parcel of over 50 years of entitlement politics in this country. It's just really sad. Every time a pay raise comes up for the military, they usually receive next to nothing of a raise. Now the green machine is in combat in the Middle East while their families have to survive on food stamps and live  in low-rent housing. Make sense? However, our own U. S. Congress just voted themselves a raise, and many of  you don't know that they only have to be in Congress one time to receive a pension that is more than $15,000 per month, and most are now equal to being millionaires plus. They also do not receive Social Security on retirement because they didn't have to pay into the system. If some of the military people stay in for 20 years and get out as an  E-7, you may receive a pension of $1,000 per month, and the very people who placed you in harm's way receive a pension of $15,000 per month. I would like to see our elected officials pick up a weapon and join ranks before  they start cutting out benefits and lowering pay for our sons and daughters who are now fighting. "When do we finally do something about this?"   This must be a campaign issue in 2004.   

SOCIAL SECURITY: (This is worth the read. It's short and to the point.)  Perhaps we are asking the wrong questions during election years. Our Senators and Congressmen do not pay into Social Security. Many years ago they voted in their own benefit plan. In more recent years, no congressperson has felt the need to change it. For all practical purposes their plan works like this:   When they retire, they continue to draw the same pay until they die, except it may increase from time to time for cost of living adjustments. For example, former Senator Byrd and Congressman White and their wives may expect to draw $7,800,000 -- that's Seven Million, Eight Hundred  Thousand), with their wives drawing $275,000.00 during the last years of their lives. This is calculated on an average life span for each. Their cost for this excellent plan is $00.00. These little perks they voted for themselves is free to them. You and I pick up the tab for this plan. The funds for this fine retirement plan come directly from the General Fund--our tax dollars at work! From our own Social Security Plan, which you and I pay (or have paid) into -- every payday until we retire (which amount  is matched by our employer) --we can expect to get an average $1,000 per month after retirement. Or, in other words, we would have to collect our average of $1,000 monthly benefits for 68 years and one month to equal Senator Bill Bradley's benefits!   Social Security could be very good if only one small change were made. And that change would be to jerk the Golden Fleece Retirement Plan from under the Senators and Congressmen. Put them into the Social Security plan  with the rest of us and then watch how fast they would fix it.

ooOOoo

First, I think Limbaugh is a pompous, arrogant,  blowhard who uses his intelligence and glibness to bully anyone who disagrees with him. You will never see him face to face in a moderated debate because he can't stand up to the whole truth. He will sit safely behind his microphone and say what ever he has to say to keep his demographic coming back for more. Not to hard to understand, it's what he's paid to do and he wants to keep his cushy job. He abuses the power of his pulpit to whip up the passions of hate and discontent in his “Ditto Brain” minions with innuendo, half truths, feigned patriotism, and sanctimonious preaching. He is doing his damnedest to ferment distrust and fan the fires of hatred causing the rift between the Rabid Right and the Looney Left to get wider and more contentious. I am convinced that it is a conscious effort by him and the people he works for to sustain him as a dominant player and can keep pulling off his act, and I find that reprehensible. For someone who ducked the Vietnam War by getting himself declared 1-Y because he had a Cyst on his ass, he has a lot of nerve preaching about the righteous nobility of war… but that’s another topic. Putting all that aside.

First, According to Truth or Fiction and Urban Legends Limbaugh denies writing or saying any of this. The facts in the first part are accurate enough regarding the numbers for the Military and for the surviving families of WTC murders.

Second, Again, According to Truth or Fiction and Urban Legends, the “facts” about congressional Social Security and pensions are wrong.

Third, if the jerk who really wrote the first part can’t differentiate between the deaths of innocent victims and the deaths of professional soldiers then he’s not worth listening to. Trying to diminish the loss to the families of the 9/11 atrocity by demonizing them as being greedy is unconscionable. To date there has been 1.2 Billion donated to the victims families under the pretext that it would be divided equally, someone in the government decided that the families of the wealthy victims should get more then the busboy’s and secretaries and they have created a sliding scale for distributing the money. (See Truth or Fiction) The people who donated it (Me for one) are raising the stink not the beneficiaries… makes me pretty upset when some Right Wing rabble-rouser tries to stir up controversy where there isn’t any just to promote his personal agenda. Is he saying that the victims families don’t deserve what they are being paid? That’s Bullshit, there isn’t enough money in the world to compensate them. Is he saying that the families of soldiers aren’t getting paid enough. As I recollect I signed a paper when I enlisted spelling out what my life was worth to Uncle Sam (not much) but I sighed it and I was paid well for that era plus I signed up for an insurance policy as I recall, not to mention I was eligible for several perks when I got out… what is to be served by pitting the families of the 9/11 victims against the families of soldiers killed in action? I don’t get it. As a matter of fact I don’t understand the point of any of the things being said in that e-mail… 

Just my humble opinion…

The United States of America has gone mad

John le Carré

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press.

The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck, but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world's poor, the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They might also have to be telling us why they support Israel in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.

But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet. The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are told. The US defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer's pocket? At what cost - because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly decent and humane people - in Iraqi lives?

How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into the next election.

Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall - just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.

The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God. And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.

God also has pretty scary connections. In America, where all men are equal in His sight, if not in one another's, the Bush family numbers one President, one ex-President, one ex-head of the CIA, the Governor of Florida and the ex-Governor of Texas.

Care for a few pointers? George W. Bush, 1978-84: senior executive, Arbusto Energy/Bush Exploration, an oil company; 1986-90: senior executive of the Harken oil company. Dick Cheney, 1995-2000: chief executive of the Halliburton oil company. Condoleezza Rice, 1991-2000: senior executive with the Chevron oil company, which named an oil tanker after her. And so on. But none of these trifling associations affects the integrity of God's work.

In 1993, while ex-President George Bush was visiting the ever-democratic Kingdom of Kuwait to receive thanks for liberating them, somebody tried to kill him. The CIA believes that "somebody" was Saddam. Hence Bush Jr's cry: "That man tried to kill my Daddy." But it's still not personal, this war. It's still necessary. It's still God's work. It's still about bringing freedom and democracy to oppressed Iraqi people.

To be a member of the team you must also believe in Absolute Good and Absolute Evil, and Bush, with a lot of help from his friends, family and God, is there to tell us which is which. What Bush won't tell us is the truth about why we're going to war. What is at stake is not an Axis of Evil -- but oil, money and people's lives. Saddam's misfortune is to sit on the second biggest oilfield in the world. Bush wants it, and who helps him get it will receive a piece of the cake. And who doesn't, won't.

If Saddam didn't have the oil, he could torture his citizens to his heart's content. Other leaders do it every day - think Saudi Arabia, think Pakistan, think Turkey, think Syria, think Egypt.

Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain. Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, if he's still got them, will be peanuts by comparison with the stuff Israel or America could hurl at him at five minutes' notice. What is at stake is not an imminent military or terrorist threat, but the economic imperative of US growth. What is at stake is America's need to demonstrate its military power to all of us - to Europe and Russia and China, and poor mad little North Korea, as well as the Middle East; to show who rules America at home, and who is to be ruled by America abroad.

The most charitable interpretation of Tony Blair's part in all this is that he believed that, by riding the tiger, he could steer it. He can't. Instead, he gave it a phoney legitimacy, and a smooth voice. Now I fear, the same tiger has him penned into a corner, and he can't get out.

It is utterly laughable that, at a time when Blair has talked himself against the ropes, neither of Britain's opposition leaders can lay a glove on him. But that's Britain's tragedy, as it is America's: as our Governments spin, lie and lose their credibility, the electorate simply shrugs and looks the other way. Blair's best chance of personal survival must be that, at the eleventh hour, world protest and an improbably emboldened UN will force Bush to put his gun back in his holster unfired. But what happens when the world's greatest cowboy rides back into town without a tyrant's head to wave at the boys?

Blair's worst chance is that, with or without the UN, he will drag us into a war that, if the will to negotiate energetically had ever been there, could have been avoided; a war that has been no more democratically debated in Britain than it has in America or at the UN. By doing so, Blair will have set back our relations with Europe and the Middle East for decades to come. He will have helped to provoke unforeseeable retaliation, great domestic unrest, and regional chaos in the Middle East. Welcome to the party of the ethical foreign policy.

There is a middle way, but it's a tough one: Bush dives in without UN approval and Blair stays on the bank. Goodbye to the special relationship.

I cringe when I hear my Prime Minister lend his head prefect's sophistries to this colonialist adventure. His very real anxieties about terror are shared by all sane men. What he can't explain is how he reconciles a global assault on al-Qaeda with a territorial assault on Iraq. We are in this war, if it takes place, to secure the fig leaf of our special relationship, to grab our share of the oil pot, and because, after all the public hand-holding in Washington and Camp David, Blair has to show up at the altar.

"But will we win, Daddy?"

"Of course, child. It will all be over while you're still in bed."

"Why?"

"Because otherwise Mr Bush's voters will get terribly impatient and may decide not to vote for him."

"But will people be killed, Daddy?"

"Nobody you know, darling. Just foreign people."

"Can I watch it on television?"

"Only if Mr Bush says you can."

"And afterwards, will everything be normal again? Nobody will do anything horrid any more?"

"Hush child, and go to sleep."

Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car saying: "Peace is also Patriotic". It was gone by the time he'd finished shopping.