Look here. Not there.

I am having a bit of a chuckle here this morning as I read the Western media from my perch in Italy. The manipulation is so clear! It is classic “look here, not there” journalism. At the center of everyone’s concern now is the Syrian refugee crisis.

Why?

Well, for one thing, it’s a nice distraction, and a good framework for blaming the enemy of the day, currently the Russians. Consequently, we get to wring our hands, see bodies and bombed out neighborhoods.

The media could easily have show photos of bodies and neighborhoods in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, but did not. They could talk about millions of refugees from those countries bombed by the U.S. and its agents, but they don’t. Do not look there! Look here.

Who is bombing out the neighborhoods, killing the children? The U.S. and it’s agents. Why? What has Syria, the Assad government done, to warrant such a bloody attack?

Nothing. Just like Iraq, just like Libya, nothing. It is aggressive war. It is a contemptible crime of the highest order, the type of crime for which toes twitched at the end of ropes at Nuremberg. It is the U.S. and it’s agents at work. Again.

But now our controlled media says “Oh the carnage! Oh, the humanity!” The hypocrisy is of historic proportion.

Why? Please answer, any one of you foreign policy experts, especially those of you who think party politics has any influence in these matters. Why?

Silence. If you are suddenly concerned about the refugee crisis in Syria, but blissfully unaware of the cause, and if you are not aware of similar and much larger crises among Palestinians and Kurds, Iraqis and Libyans and soon enough Yemenis, please be silent. I will know by the lack of comments below who you are.

Cinque Terre

Manarola, Italy
Manarola, Italy

This part of Italy is called “Cinque Terre”, or five towns. They are primitive tourist towns near a national park with miles of hiking trails, part of the Italian Riviera on the west side of the peninsula.

We had some bad luck – there was a rail strike on Sunday, which delayed our arrival, and then rains the night before last which caused them to close all the trails. The hillsides can be very dangerous.

Luca Brasi, it turns out, does not sleep with the fishes.
Luca Brasi, it turns out, does not sleep with the fishes.

Consequently, we rode the train yesterday to the five towns, Rigamortis, Corningware, Motorola, Vernazza  and Monty Python. Those are not the real names (Vernazza, where we stayed, is the actual name), but that was the only way I could remember them.

Today we travel to Milan, and from there fly home tomorrow. It has been so much fun, but we’ve been gone so long. Italy is like a drug, with its climate and food and wine. The people are beautiful to look at and friendly. The place is affordable. unions are strong, and jobs like bus and train work, waiters and cooks are all held by Italians. There is no need for tipping, as the jobs pay well enough to support them, due to the unions. The trains run on time (when not on strike). The water is clean and fresh, the European coffee is a treat by itself. We don’t eat much, and locals don’t seem to either, so we don’t see too many overweight people (except Luca).

I hope you all have a chance to travel, as we have. We know we are fortunate souls.

September 11th remembered

September 11 should not pass without remembrance of honorable people who died in an act of disgraceful cowardice. A building symbolic of democratic government had its dome blown to bits. A respected president was shot by American Greeen Berets, execution at the hands of thugs. Then followed concentration camps and inquisitions, and a fascist government installed – one of the great criminals of the 20th century, Augusto Pinochet, came to power.

September 11, 1973 was the day the democratically elected government of Chile was overthrown in a US backed coup d’etat. It is a dark day in history.

May we never forget Pinochet or the thousands of victims left in his wake. May we 32 years later vow that it never happens again.

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see ….

As I sleep less than most people, I have time to watch videos as the following one, put up by SK over at RD. I listed some reactions there but won’t repeat them here. At this point there are two people capable of sitting through a three hour presentation, me and SK. So I imagine it stops here, but if indeed you do so, please share your reflections below.

If you merely start and quickly stop when you find something disagreeable, please do not share your reflections below.

In Florence, Italy

Well, we left Ljubljana and drove through northern Slovenia and Italy in our rented car. It was a spectacular drive. A few photos follow.

Lake Bled, Slovenia
Lake Bled, Slovenia
Peaks in the Julian Alps, Italy
Peaks in the Julian Alps, Italy
back in the Dolomites, Italy
Back in the Dolomites, Italy

We drove from Ljubljana to Vicenza, a huge mistake – not the drive, but entering an Italian city with a car. They do not mix. There happened to be an annual fair in the city, and parking was hard to find. We ended up parked at the railway station with a warning from the hotel clerk that the car might be towed if left overnight. (There was that to worry about, but with no other parking to be had, we had no choice. It was not towed, and we paid €9.10 to retrieve it the following morning.)

Which reminds me: Mr. CPA here has his numbers backwards – the current exchange rate, dollars to euros is $.89, meaning that euros are worth about $1.10. Oopsie.

And then we drove to Florence. There is no parking to be had in Florence. None for tourists, anyway. Having a car there was foolishness, so we turned it in four days early. That was cheaper than parking in the streets or garages in a place not designed for cars.

Here’s a couple of Florence pictures:

The Duomo
The Duomo

There are naked men all about this city, statues, that is, far outnumbering women. I managed a camera angle on this one to keep it clean or family viewing.

image

Ljubljana on my mind

Among the many ghastly offerings given us by PBS, America’s answer to how to stay uninformed and really, really not know it, is a guy named Rick Steves. He is to travel as Doris Kearns Goodwin is to history, all over it like the Rio Grande – a mile wide and one inch deep. His shows offer a brief glimpse of various places, most often in Europe. It’s all done with aging white people in mind, with excellent tips on how to pack (he sells a line of travel books and luggage).

My favorite scenes are those where he pretends to have walked a long staircase to a monument (more often restaurant), gasping for breath after having done the last five as the camera waits. The end of each show is outtakes, or bloopers. Goodness gracious, the humor.

Anyway, we are in Ljubljana, Slovenia, victims of Rick Steves. We bought it, and even rented a car to drive here.

Slovenia is a pretty place, Ljubljana (pronounced “all right Rick, you got us”) is a moderate large city that has awoken in the last 25 years to cars and western dress. At the center of it is an area where cars are not allowed, and which contains fancy clothing stores, restaurants, one of them damned cathedrals (a small one), and three bridges over Ljubljanica River (designed by a famous local architect – if you want to know more, consult Steves. He’s all over Giolvanni Picco.)

Not to be too hard on Ljubljana, a nice place, a bustling city with a long history and many nice things to see and do. But the concept of our trip here, to see the area at the City Center with its shops and restaurants, was Stevism, silliness, a mistake. It is like deciding to visit Colorado, and instead of spending time in the Rockies, spending your whole trip at the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder.

Today we are heading north, if we can find our way out of here. This is the first time we’ve rented a car while traveling abroad. It is a mixed bag … we have freedom, but not really. We are bound to roadways with thousands of other cars. We waited for long periods yesterday due to line painting crews at work, backing up traffic for miles. I think that is known as “the illusion of progress.” Steven Weinberg, the astrophysicist, mentioned this. He noted that it takes as long now to drive from one side of Manhattan Island to the other as it did in the old days of horse and buggies.

We’ll head up to Lake Bled, another Steves recommendation, and with that in mind, will drive by it without stopping. We are all caught up on modern dress and modes of dining. Ideally, we’ll wander through the less well-known parts of The Julian Alps and Northern Italy, stopping who knows where for the night.

One very favorable thing to report to anyone wanting to travel Europe: Once we got out of Switzerland, it got very affordable. Fifty euros will get you through a whole day, including meals. Lodging is cheap. Yesterday we stopped at a grocery store and bought two bottles of wine, crackers and vegetables, and the bill was nine euros (about $7 $11). The wine is not top-shelf, but for my palate, fine wine is overkill. I cannot distinguish between a Cabernet and a Chevrolet. And frankly, in this part of the world, bad wine is a rarity.

Sorry, no photos to show. Consult Steves.

Hiking the Dolomites

We are hiking across a small portion of the Dolomites, and tonight will be in Cortina again. The hikes are long, many ups and downs, the scenery unforgettable. These are a rock formation of very light material with white peaks and landslides all about. The peaks have a castle-like quality about them, that is, those that are not honed by glaciers. It is all spectacular.

I was thinking yesterday about the distance I’ve come from – as a young guy in his thirties I laid in bed one night and decided I was not only not going to be a Catholic any more, but would not even believe in God. I then did something so simple as to be part of the manifesto of basic human freedoms: I told my kids they were free themselves to believe or not believe, to explore and make up their own minds.

To this day I think it backward and enslaving to demand that kids believe in our God, go to our church, believe as we do. Long before there was a Bible, there was good and evil. The Bible is not a source of goodness as much as a collection of important essays of high literary quality with a smattering of history here and there. Very little of that.

I went through the usual steps after rejecting religion, being angry at what the priests and nuns had done to my young mind, critical of all religion, and highly cynical of the TV preachers and pretentious fools that preach to the rest of us as they live debauched materialistic lives.

And then slowly came around again. I’ll never be a believer as I was brought up to be, but I’ve come to a point where I am not so critical of truly religious people. They may only be hoping, or may be connected to an ethereal communication channel that eludes me. But I remember the words of my brother, a priest, on a camping trip shortly before his death, that there are means of transmitting important truths from generation to generation. Science is one, mythology another. He valued mythology over science. He was not an ignorant or unread man, and knew of the important truths uncovered by science since Galileo.

Anyway, we have a long hike ahead today, mostly a 4,500 foot drop, but it looks gradual. Should be another day lending itself to deep thought. Today I’ll try thinking about football.

A little piece of a large jigsaw puzzle

20150904_141813A little chunk of history here – war before the advent of aircraft was about high ground.

In the early days of World War One Austro-Hungary occupied parts of what is now northern Italy, and perhaps thinking itself overextended, withdrew from Cortina and built fortifications along parts of the Dolomites where valleys might allow Italians to invade in the wake of the withdrawal.

We walked through some of the fortifications today. The loss of life was said to be large, though I’ve not found any numbers (World War One was a slaughter so large that the conflict in the Dolomites might be a footnote).

Notice the high mountain on the right – Il Castelletto. It is the high ground over a valley that looks down over a potential invasion route for Italian forces. All we read in the area say that casualties were devastating on both sides. The mountainside itself was bombed to great effect.

”The Dolomite mountains have become a legend and will be remembered not only for the blood that was shed there, but for the kind of warfare that was engaged: it did not set anonymous armies against each other as it did on the Russian Front – it was a war of man-against-man that valued heroic individual actions.

In addition, the idle moments that soldiers were forced to undergo because of the extreme conditions and severe winters in the high mountains provided time to study the adversary who – during the pauses between one battle and another – sometimes assumed a human face: conversations between “tenemies” – the exchange of cigarettes, letters, Christmas wishes – are now the stuff of legends.” (L. Palla)

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It is quite different to read about such human conflicts, and walk through and see the places they took place. It creates a sense of awe.

Big tent = no substance

James Conner used an expression I have heard often before, “big tent,” which refers to the need to win elections over advancing any ideology. (He uses the opposite, “small tent” to criticize a fellow Democrat.) In theory, it means that politicians have to forge coalitions of people often at odds with one another, the real talent required in that profession, necessitating the art of the well-told lie.

In practice, it opens the floodgates for Republican leadership of both parties. It’s an odd thing to watch, but Democrats are absorbed in partisan sniping based on party name only. The policy pursued by Senator Conrad Burns was vile, the identical policy (with a new name) pursued by Senator Jon Tester is thoughtful, wise, well-considered and only opposed by “purists.”

In the “big tent” there is only one objective, winning elections. Those events are fraught with high emotion, as if life and death were at stake, when in reality either party is bound by financial backers and the corporate-owned media to pursue the same objective, exactly contrary to anything they might have campaigned about.

This system of fake elections goes back in time to the introduction of the mass franchise and use of mass propaganda in the early twentieth century. In theory, everyone’s vote mattered. In reality, voting ceased to matter.