Smoky Mountain High

imageWe are moving slowly through North Carolina today, on our way to Spartanburg, SC, eventually to the coast, but no timetable. We spent yesterday in Smoky Mountain National Park. It’s a good time to be there, just as with Yellowstone in spring. There are few tourists other than us.

I had heard of the Trail of Tears, when the US government drove the Cherokee off their land and over to Oklahoma. 4,000 died on that journey, perhaps in despair. What we took from them is a charming land of low, forested hills and mountain streams. Game was abundant, and life, as wilderness life goes, was easy.

We wandered around an old farm this morning, all of the out buildings still preserved. A family could live here on pigs and corn. It was hard work, and not much surplus went to market. It was perhaps nothing like Eastern Montana, where weather always held potential disaster in store. This land gives reason for optimism, and yields a different people.

And the people are nice – charming actually. Bearded men with nasal tone hold your attention, as it takes a little time just to drawl out short sentences. We spent fifteen minutes with Barry Higgs, visitor center guy. His family goes back to the 1700’s. He wants to get out west and see Montana and Colorado. His dad used to go to Twin Bridges every year to fish. I wanted to tell him not to bother, that he’ got is all here, but could not get a word in between his.

imageI just picked up the Un-Civil War, one of those ‘teacher never told you’ books. Should be fun, and who knows what is true? The events in the Ukraine are not even a week old, and all we got was lies. Can the Civil War be different?

So let’s finish here. Much ground to cover. This area is so much fun to get to know. Even just passing through, I am filled with warmth. It is a place that engenders a fondness that I will take home with me. Just thinking of it will bring back lovely memories. We must return someday.

Traveling again

Off on a new adventure tomorrow, this time the Southeast. We have an aunt and uncle south of Tampa, so we decided to fly into Atlanta and rent a car and just wander, their home the final destination. The trip will include Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North and South Carolina, and finally, Florida and Bonita Springs.

Years ago we took our family (our five kids ranged in age from 13 on down) on a cross-country trip from Montana to Long Island. Going there I felt a need to schedule, to have a booked motel at every stop. One of those stops was Monroeville, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh. My stereotype was steel mills, air pollution and devastated landscapes. We arrived late in the day, and the last part of the journey was through the beautiful forests of Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh is part of that, a beautiful city set in rolling hills.

The trip back was delightful – until we got to North Dakota and Eastern Montana, of course. (OK – I might have had a temper tantrum in the Eisenhower Expressway around Chicago.) We had learned how to travel with kids. Each morning we would get up very early, and I carried them one-by-one to the Dodge B300 van, the Blue Zoo. I had built a platform in the back so that between that and the seats there was enough flat space to accommodate all five of them asleep and still have a hold underneath for luggage. It was not safe, I know. One-by-one as they awoke we had an ice cold juice waiting for them, so that it would be a pleasant memory. Then we would stop for a late breakfast. I am not sure how pleasant those memories are for the kids, but we tried to make travel less grueling. In late afternoon, say 4 or 5 PM, we got off the road and found a motel with a swimming pool, and let them go to release all of their pent-up energies.

So the trip, the fact that we traveled, changed me and the way that I looked at Pittsburgh and the way that we should accommodate kids as we force them to sit in a small space for long periods of time.

(New Jersey was just as I imagined, a place that one has to endure on the way to somewhere else.)

It is always interesting to travel, to have formed notions about places and then to learn that those places are not at all what we imagine. In doing so, we open our eyes and ears and hearts. I think Mark Twain had something to say about that too.

Professional incuriosity

I said something nasty to Polish Wolf the other day, and that’s OK because he’s nasty to me in turn. The only way to avoid nastiness with him is to give him the respect he thinks he’s due. He’s young and has many years to ripen, so for now I’ll just repeat the nasty statement: “There seems to be a high degree of correlation in this country between self-proclaimed expertise and incuriosity.”

This came to mind last night when I again said something I regret, this time to my son. I immediately took my comment down off of Facebook, but too late. It went out over the tubes. He is young too and has many years to ripen, and him I like quite a bit. So the comment sticks in my craw as a piece of advice that I could have used (but been too dense to grasp) at any time in my life. Wish I’d just shut up.

He put up brief comment about the events in the Ukraine, and there followed another comment from a young friend of his who talked about how awful that the Soviets were invading. I chimed in that it appeared to me that Ukraine had been invaded by the EU. The friend advised me that there were no EU uniforms there. I said oops – my bad. I did not know that invaders always wore uniforms. And my son said that it was off-topic anyway, and that there is lots of stuff there that can’t be knowed. And that’s when I dropped the rich morsel on him. I said “You could try being curious.”

Everything there is knowable. Everything going on now in Egypt and Venezuela is knowable. It’s just history playing out. CIA, MI6, NATO and Mossad have unimaginable resources and can make large events happen, and our incurious news media reports all of it as if it is what it appears to be. But it’s not. Ukraine is what it always has been – a buffer for the Russians against invading western forces. The whole of the World War II played out as just another invasion of Russia. Had not Neville Chamberlain and certain British and American factions wanted that invasion, a certain angry maniacal Austrian would have been stopped early in his tracks.

Ukraine is a breadbasket, and a strategically located country from which force can be projected. Whichever imperial power controls Ukraine has hegemonic power over other places, most notably, the Balkans. It’s part of the great game, and sad for them that lives there to be in a place that imperial powers are concerned about. Like the poor schmucks in Afghanistan.

How do I know this? How can this not be known? I don’t want to brag, but I have many years of curiosity behind me, and these questions are long answered in my mind. These events are easy to understand. It doesn’t do me any good to be the only one I know* who understands them, so all my years of burrowing amount to no useful purpose. That’s why this blog is taking a different tack, on to more important things.

I just wish I knew what those things were.
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*Oops! SK, SW – just poor wording. There are at least three of us.

PoM moving to private domain

Advertising has gotten totally out of hand on this blog, and I have decided to upgrade to get rid of it. I don’t know the details but assume that with purchase of the domain, readers will automatically be linked from the old address.

Bill Hicks summed it up nicely. Lizard first showed me this performance, Dead-on. Google has gotten so bad that I don’t use it anymore – I cannot get past the paid links. And it’s funny, as each one who pays is guaranteed front page visibility, which cannot be.

In regular venues, I cannot move the cursor over the screen without the annoying pop-ups. They have gotten around pop-up blocking by making them part of the web page. Perhaps the worst is the pre-roll where we are forced to sit through an ad before seeing a video. The worst I ever saw was at a Cincinnati Reds site where a man with a baton backed by noise appeared from the left and danced across the screen hawking cars. That was a browser closer.

The Internet started out a quiet place. Advertisers have done everything in their power to destroy it. They first hit us with pop-ups. Then pre-rolls, and now embedded pop-ups. Spyware tracks our buying behavior. Parasite software sneaks on and asks you to buy their product in our lower right screens, without us even knowing how they got there. I have spent now over two hours removing parasite ads from this computer, a new one. Most recent was a box saying it was time to upgrade my “real player” at one time a real product. It wasn’t that at all. It was parasite programs, and it took a long time to get the bastards off.

Most recently, a bar full of ads appears on this blog screen at the bottom with the slightest maneuver of the mouse on the screen. That was my last straw.

They are ruining the Internet just as they ruined commercial TV and AM radio. What’s that you say? Without the ads we don’t get the content? I DON’T CARE. Without the ad-supported content, something better will come along. PBS and NPR, for all their amazing crap news, offer cultural programming that has few rivals. (Our NPR outlet down here in Denver, by the way, runs advertising all day long. They just don’t call it that.)

Advertising is the curse of modern life. Advertisers have to be annoying and intrusive, subversive, loud and repetitive. They have to get our attention.

Thank you, free market, for destroying our serenity, privacy and sanity with your ads. You really, really suck.

Pikus-Pace-in-our-face

sochi-24.siI was deeply moved last night hearing the Russians belt out their national anthem. It is a powerful song with mood shifts, somber, serious, glorious and ebullient. Our American anthem is so stiff and requires too much vocal range for ordinary people. It would not even make the top 1000, much less top 40 in the twentieth century. It’s a crappy piece of music. We might as well sing the Darth Vader’s theme from Star Wars … bump bump bum dump da dum dump da dum …

Here in Colorado, we have “Rocky Mountain High.” If you ever want a shiver in your spine and a tear in your eye, stand in an auditorium and sing that song at the top of your lungs with everyone else. THAT is an anthem. THAT is what it should be – a glorious celebration of people and place.

Some people want our anthem to be “America the Beautiful.” If we have to choose between only two, I’ll take that one. But Paul Simon’s American Tune is more realistic:

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right
For lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road
We’re traveling on
I wonder what went wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong.

Continue reading “Pikus-Pace-in-our-face” →

Breaking news! This just in! This just in! Jon Tester, John Walsh in Crow Agency! Their faces show concern! Cameras happen to be there to catch it!

My goodness! Look - just look! - at the concern on their faces. It will go away when the cameras leave.
My goodness! Look – just look! – at the concern on their faces. It will go away when the cameras leave.
Back when Marc Racicot was governor of Montana, Libby and cancer were beeping on public radar. Since Racicot was from that area, he was thought to have special concerns.

He didn’t care about it of course, not to single him out. It was a big complicated issue, and the appearance of an unusually high occurrence of asbestos-related cancers in the town threatened bankruptcy to WR Grace and Company. That was the problem. The story (naturally) was exposed by non-Montana newspaper (Seattle PI), just as all scandals involving Montana politicians usually appear elsewhere before being reported here, and only reluctantly.
Continue reading “Breaking news! This just in! This just in! Jon Tester, John Walsh in Crow Agency! Their faces show concern! Cameras happen to be there to catch it!” →

Bungling bundling ambassadors

The United States is the only industrialized country to award diplomatic posts as political spoils, often to wealthy campaign contributors in an outmoded system that rivals the patronage practices of banana republics, dictatorships and two-bit monarchies.” (See link below.)

Interesting article here about the circus that the Obama ambassador appointment regime has become. Luxembourg, Hungary, Norway and other countries have been graced with ambassadors whose only qualification has been bundling contributions to get Obama’s sorry ass elected.

Max Baucus, ambassador now to China, gets off lightly in this article even as he knows nothing about China. (Many have interpreted his public stammering as a Cantonese dialect – that might have played a part in the appointment.) But the idea that he is somehow fit to be ambassador to such an important country is nonsense. He was chosen to get him out of the senate to make room for John Walsh, the top-down “choice” of a Montana Democrats to take Baucus’ seat this fall. (The new Senator from Montana will be Rep Steve Daines. He’s a Republican, a fitting senator for this mostly Republican state whose Republican Party leadership has for too long conceded the senate seat to Baucus with only token opposite because … Baucus is a cloaked Republican.)

The article notes how Obama, who pledged to limit the abuse of the ambassador-appointment process, has instead abused it beyond any before him in modern politics. It’s just one more piece of evidence Obama is, as Nader described him, nothing but a “con man.”
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PS: Most readers, politically in-astute, will interpret this article to conclude that I am a Republican, that I support Daines. Not true. I simply conclude that of our two choices (only) for public office, Democrats somehow manage to consistently top Republicans in sleaze.

It’s over, Billings, and really, it’s not you. It’s me.

Downtown Billings intersection
Downtown Billings intersection
There’s something about Billings … the place makes me want to swing my fists and not stop until I get to city limits.

It’s unfair, I know – a whole damned city, 100,000 people, creeps me out. I probably know a hundred people here. But I was part of it until 2001, and feel it every time I return – the redneck right wingers with their homespun all-knowingness and the comfortable liberals who are more interested in cliche art than real people. (I think there is a small part of Richard Adams’ Watership Down devoted to them.)

From the movie Contact - where they got the idea, I think.
From the movie Contact – where they got the idea, I think.
Perhaps it’s the liberals that make me swing hardest. They have populated Montana avenue with their trendy stores, built a new library, have their own magazines to honor one another as they listen to YPR and vote for Democrats.

I guess I prefer the redneck right-wingers. At least they are on the outside true to the inside. The liberals are so full of pretense. (There are some pwoggies around, I know. I just don’t know where anymore.)
Continue reading “It’s over, Billings, and really, it’s not you. It’s me.” →

The guessing game

[Swede Synopsis: Believe what you are told. Do not trust your lying eyes*. Proceed to comment section.]

fakebinladen2Today we learn that immediately after the “killing” of “Osama bin Laden” in 2011, Admiral William McRaven, head of US Special Operations Command, ordered all photos of the corpse destroyed or turned over to CIA. Suspicious minds might want to know why such photos might be hidden from view. I suppose it could be due to their gruesome nature, but could as easily be for what they don’t show: Osama bin Laden.

It must be said, however, that bin Laden, as with many NSA intelligence assets, probably had a doppelgänger or two or four. (There were several “Oswald’s” in Dallas, and more than one in Dealey Plaza that day.) The scary videos of him over the years were obviously of impostors. The fact that his beard went from gray to black, that his nose widened, that he started wearing jewelry, and that his dominant hand changed from left to right, is really confusing. So is the absence of deterioration from his kidney disease (which is most likely what killed him in Pakistan in 2001, if he was not murdered by US intelligence agents). The question might then be which, if any, of the multiple bin Laden’s was really killed that day.

Or, another possibility, it could have been some dude who was watching TV and eating Lay’s seaweed potato chips. Or yet another – it could be that the images of the site, with the bodies of Navy Seals and a downed helicopter splattered about, was too revealing of the true nature of that PSYOP.

One never knows in the hall of mirrors that is the National Security State of the United States of America. They do keep us guessing.
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*Sorry to make synopsis two sentences long, Swede. I know you like brevity.