We are sitting in our hotel room in Venice, and head for the airport at checkout time, 11AM, which is 3AM in Denver. Tonight when we arrive in Denver, it will be 10:30 there, but in our heads 2:30 in the morning. I have always had a harder time traveling west than east,  so getting back on Colorado time will take some effort. 

Sitting in our hotel room waiting to go to the airport, not wanting to get there too early, is tedious. It’s like watching election returns, which I have not done in years. They don’t have the final numbers, but need to keep you glued so you watch the commercials. So you just sit and watch. 

Continue reading “Waiting to catch a plane … like watching election returns?” →

We were booked on Delta to fly to Venice out of Atlanta on Monday, but Delta could not find a gate for their plane. We ended up in B107, and left there three hours late. That meant we missed all our connections the following day, and depended on the kindness of strangers. At the train station Bolzano a shuttle driver agreed to give us a ride to the airport, even as he was off duty. We offered him twenty euro, and he only reluctantly took it, hiding it under papers on his passenger seat. Our car rental agency was closed, so we needed to get to our hotel, but no cabs were available. Two police officers, the only other people in Bolzano Airport, called all over and finally ran down a cab for us. They were very kind. Europcar the next day downgraded our reservation to a tiny Fiat since we were late getting there. I have to duck my head to lower the visor.

White guy problems? I suppose. Delta, by way of apology, gave 200 of us a free snack, airline peanuts or tiny bags of chips.

But here is the interesting thing, and I have experienced this once before. Delta announced when we finally boarded that our faces would be our boarding passes. To get in the plane we stood for maybe a second before a camera that looked at our facial plates, recognized us from passport photos, and let us pass.

My facial work is far less sophisticated, but this reinforces my notion that no two of us look alike. Take that, all you Martin Luther King/Don King doubters.

Question: What do comedian Bob Newhart and baseball greats Babe Ruth and Tom Seaver all have in common?

Continue reading “Pop Quiz” →

Look up the “Quarry Fire” on any search engine, and you will be as up-to-speed are we are, that is, wanting a little more information. The best I can usually do is information that is 11 hours or one day old. When I use the Brave search engine, it rolls  its AI down from the top and is not reliable. Yesterday it said that the fire was at 9,000 acres and was definitely caused by arson. The fire is at 450+ acres, and arson is suspected. Authorities will only say “human-caused”.

There’s a somewhat wild area to the east of us, and last Wednesday at 9PM a deputy on patrol saw something on a steep trail, one that has switchbacks. He saw a 10×10 area of fire. By morning it was at 200 acres and growing.

We’ve had no rain, no lightening. How that 10×10 area came about is under investigation, and is, according to law enforcement, “very suspicious”. That’s all we know.

Continue reading “Life in pre-evac” →

I had a vague memory of an exciting idea some years ago. I watched a report where a Treasury official held up what he called a “Trillion dollar coin*.” He claimed he could use it to march across the street to the Federal Reserve, and pay down the national debt.

I ran with that thought, but did not understand what was going on well enough. I thought the Treasury official was merely making light of our monetary system. At that time I had not theorized deeply on things, but all by myself in subsequent years came to believe

• We could eliminate the national debt tomorrow, and nothing would change. Just eliminate it, draw a line through it with a #2 pencil, not pay it off. It’s all funny money.
• Budget deficits are political tools used to deny funding to some things while funding others. For instance, what I consider a noble cause, funding college education for well-performing students, would be denied due to “deficit constraints.” But a new war? We have tons of money, no restraints!
• Social Security and Medicare could be perpetually funded.
• The Social Security Trust Fund, an illusory “fund” at best, could be eliminated.
• Medicaid, which is in part funded by individual states, could be funded in full by the federal government. States are truly constrained by real budgets and would be relieved to be free of paying for Medicaid.
• Taxes on the public, merely a means of controlling spending and inflation, would continue. But the idea that the federal government is using that money to pay its bills is nonsense. The money just evaporates.

Continue reading “A trillion dollar idea” →

By: Steve Kelly

Newsflash! Property law in the U.S. is not rooted in the Constitution. America’s legal foundation for property law (possession), “anti-Indian law,” and the concept of nation-states is religious, not secular.

Where did this deep sense of entitlement, hierarchy, and dominion over unknown lands and its original sovereign peoples originate?

Continue reading “The origins of European dominion over the New World” →

The phrase used in the title above, Deus absconditus, is new to me. It means “the hidden God”, or “God who hides from me. I ran across it today in a book by Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I am borrowing it from her just as she borrowed the expression from Pascal.

“Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s once having called for the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened? Was the sense of it there, and God absconded with it, ate it, like a wolf who disappears round the edge of a house with the Thanksgiving turkey? “God is subtle,” Einstein said, “but not malicious.”

Continue reading “Deus absconditus” →