Returning

  There are special places in most of our lives. Returning is like going back to a source. It is that way for us in Big Sur.

            It's been a couple of years since we've been able to hike into a redwood forest where the hook of California was set in our heart over 50 years ago.

            Pacific storms, years of closure of the magical Highway 1, and fire damage  kept us from a camp and hiking trail that has marked the turns of our life. 

            In our early years there were the camping trips, the great joy of friendship around the campfire and exploring the wilderness. Our first trips were to a private reserve before it became a state park. It was a cosmos away from the pressures of a newsroom and deadlines and urban life.

            As our family grew, our daughters grew up hiking into the forest on our visits. Each visit would add a layer of memory of their growth, friends and California dreaming.

            Once we became Californians, we were here, often. Our home is an enchanting hour away. But we've not been back  for a while and we were more than eager to return.

              The road and the hiking spot are open again and it was time for a "homecoming," to the place that launched the dream of "someday" living on the California Central Coast.

 

                A stretch of Highway 1 is closed and there is heavy work underway, so we had the highway to ourself. Ditto our return to deep in the California Redwood forest.

                The mystical trees carry burn scars, a couple including an old giant were felled by the fire. New trees propagated. New bridges built.

            It was sweet to hear that soul refreshing mountain stream on its way to the Pacific.

            I call the trees mystical not only for their age and rarity, but for their ability to sustain fire, and protect the core as seen above. The outer hairy bark is darkly charred, but the wood just beneath that was not.

            The heat and flame engaged the taller canopy, killing its ability to feed on mist, rain and take in sun. It died from the intensity of the firestorm. The others in the grove survived as flames did not reach the height that killed the old sentry, now returning to the earth and to the mycelia.

        One wonders how many storms and fires these kilns have survived since the 1870's. The Rockland Lime and Lumber company extracted limestone chunks from a quarry in the mountains, used redwood timber to fire the kilns to about 1,700 degrees to create quicklime.

            After a couple of days to cool the product was loaded into barrels and transported down the mountain through a canyon on a pulley system or by wagon to the beach where it was loaded on ships and sent north where it was used to build in San Francisco.

        It's troubling to ponder how many trees were destroyed in the process. The quotation from John Muir on the bench below refers to them as "kings...spires in the sky..towering serene through the long centuries, preaching God's forestry fresh from heaven."  Amen!

        The rugged Big Sur coast, mountains and forests are famed for their beauty and the legendary characters and unique life that emanated from here. Keeping the historic highway open is a constant challenge. It made the heart feel good to return. Lana and I are always grateful our pal Jim Cahill introduced us to the magic a half-century ago.  

See you down the trail.

World Press Freedom---celebrate it and fight for it

 

            World Press Freedom Day comes as journalism and those who do it, are increasingly endangered by authoritarian leaders, terrorists and criminal organizations, financial vultures and dangerous cultural trends.

            The United Nations is trying to raise awareness of the importance of a free press even while news deserts grow and people rely on social media as the venue for their news and information. That information is increasingly bogus and manipulated.

            Journalism is a dangerous undertaking. Since the 1990’s the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma has advocated “ethical and thorough reporting of trauma: compassionate, professional treatment of victims and survivors by journalists; and greater awareness by media organizations of the impact of trauma coverage on both news professionals and consumers.” 

            After about a half century of my work in journalism; reporting, producing, documenting, administering and study, I am still overwhelmed by how little most people know of life, reality as we understand it, and the forces that shape the human drama. The world would know a lot less, even as meager as it is, were it not for the media.

            Spend any time in the pursuit of ethical journalism and one knows danger, pressure, makes enemies and understands the impact of threats. Most of us suffer some level of PTSD. Many of our colleagues have died in pursuit of facts, information, news the public has a right to know. I’ve come to think the public, that portion of it that participates in elections, has an obligation to know. Today most citizens fail miserably.

            The business model of journalism changes with technology and human behavior. Newspapers were once a cultural force in every community, a public square of details, information and knowledge of all sorts, not what an algorithm or your own penchant and self-selection determined.

Major broadcast media now reaches mostly older citizens and sadly was invaded by a propaganda mindset that openly lies and distorts. There is still solid and fair journalism on that scale, but it competes with declining audience, a growing ignorance among Americans, the for-profit ethos that has turned so much of the process into capturing ratings, click bait, that translates to profits, and the information corrupting outfits, Fox News being the most egregious. In the Fox case they acknowledged their own intentional deception because it meant their viewers stayed with them. To quote Jack Nicholson’s Col. Nathan R. Jessep in the film A Few Good Men “You can’t handle the truth!”

An encouraging trend is the rise of non-profit journalism. I work with a model of that in my own village. I belong to a group that is fostering the rise of local reporting around the US. 

We watch as journalists confront AI and look for ways to use it wisely.

Nordic nations are ahead of the pack on that front. The Fins in particular are working on a model that has traditional reporting, fact finding, investigative work done and submitted to the newsroom where AI then creates hundreds of thousands individual distribution streams to clients. Traditional news, parsed not in BROAD but narrow casting. It may work. Time will tell.

            I was in Brazil shortly after the military dictatorship relinquished decades of power to an elected government. So much of those first months of renewed democracy was the reopening of newspapers, and the turning on of radio stations that had been boarded and silenced by the military. People were excited about the free flow of information.

            It is not an easy job. In Havana, Istanbul, and East Berlin I was watched, or followed. I was chased out of a county in the mid-west when investigating a cult. I had two of my cars firebombed. I was bound and gagged in my own home as perpetrators looked for files I had about hazardous materials that had been illegally transported and dumped. 

            I also recall a December night in Managua I sat with reporters and US Congressmen in the home Violetta Chamorro who eventually became President of Nicaragua. Her husband, Pedro Chamorro Cardenal had been editor of La Prensa, the major newspaper. His assassination was a pivotal moment that helped fuel the Nicaragua revolution. 

On this particular night her son, who was there, was the editor and other children staffed the paper while another son was an editor of the Sandinista mouthpiece and was involved on the other side of the civil war. 

One family divided, but both sides fully engaged in journalism though as competing Sandinistas, Contras, and Journalists. 

La Prensa had been a crucial voice opposing the dictator Samoza, then opposing the Sandinista revolutionaries, the Ortega brothers, who also became dictators.

            Situations like these have played out around the globe, time after time

            Think for a moment how history may have been if there were no reporters and photographers covering the civil rights movement, when dogs were turned loose on peaceful protestors, or when they were fire hosed, or when police attacked them with clubs as they tried to cross a bridge and etc.

            You have a right to know. Today journalists are in peril covering news for you. The press is not as free as it used to be. They’ve been called enemies. History will tell you, that’s what tyrants and dictators say. They try to control what you know. Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Nayib Bukele, Kim Jong Un, Xi Jinping do that. Donald Trump is doing that now. 

            The best thing any citizen can do is to be as informed as you make yourself. That means challenge your own beliefs and assumptions. Fill your mind with information. That’s what good journalists have done, historically. 

            Be grateful for journalists and for a free press. 

Beautiful....the annual peek

 

     Our annual visit to Lana's garden. A good season for the Iris. Take a break from everything else and enjoy.

          It's a ridge top hillside and it gets more challenging to work as one ages. She's had a few episodes of back "issues" but she's painted a beautiful nature's palette. I'm the lucky guy's study look directly onto the hill. 

           Peace. Stay strong. 

           See you down the trail. 

Perhaps a way to get rid of Trump...

Part I 

A Proposal 

There is no time to hesitate in beginning a national discussion about the exiting of Trump. He’s inflicted damage with global impact. American security is suffering strategically and domestically. He threatens a global economic meltdown that could quickly throw us all into a maelstrom of panic and desperation. 

 

Now is the time for analysts, commentators, journalists, public officials and statesmen to begin examining means to wrest him from power. It is time for the former US Presidents to engage.

 

The chaos he’s unleashed is building like a chain reaction, and threatens to tip into something not even his own delusional sense of self can begin to manage. 

 

Long before the American Republic existed John Milton wrote “It is lawful and hath been through all ages for anyone who have the power to call account of a tyrant or wicked king and after due conviction to depose and put him to death.”  

 

Getting rid of tyrants is a story as old as social organization.

 

Some may argue this is merely politics, that elected presidents are entitled to put their programs before the public. There is an important context; all presidents work for us, and their policies must work for us. We, the employer and our common wellbeing is priority one, not his or her desires, or revenges, or in this case the delusions of an unqualified and flawed man possessed of extraordinary blithe ignorance.  

 

If he was credible I would argue he should be given a chance. There has never been a less qualified person in the office. A good record would be a leverage for him, but he was a failure, twice impeached, refused to acknowledge defeat, plotted to overturn the election results, stole sensitive documents and used them to his business advantage, and has since been convicted on multiple counts of fraud. He likely would have been convicted of other federal and state crimes had he not run for election, his ploy to avoid trials. I know you know this, but I say it to disabuse ourself there is anything near normal going on.

 

Common sense alone should have prevented his election. Now that he’s on the revenge war path, and there are no sane forces to reign in his malignant nature, we’ve already seen historic damage. It’s time to bring him down.

 

One of history’s guessing games has been the dark calculus of how many millions of lives would have been saved if Adolph Hitler has been deposed or assassinated when it was clear he was a mad man, out of control, a narcissist bent on forcing the world to live his evil delusions and revenge.

 

What I suggest may sound preposterous, but we live in a time of preposterous reality.  George Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and their former senior counsels for security, intelligence and diplomacy as well as their senior uniformed officers should gather in a closed summit. Out of the spotlight these former most powerful men in the world need to have a serious heart to heart. It could be the most important gathering of American patriots since the founding. There is no nice option forward, nothing we’ve experienced or tested, no play book guideline. But a play has to be made.

 

We’ve already seen Jamie Diamond from banking and finance and other financial analysts and economists begin to speculate what kind of horror could be ahead.  All of this folks in just a couple of months.

 

This financial and banking sector needs to speak to Republican Senate and House leadership and lay the stinking mess right at their door. This MAGA Republican gang have demonstrated their cowardice and ready willingness to be obsequious. They’ve permitted an idiot to have his delusional way. If, and it’s worth a try, if the likes of Mr. Diamond and friends can explain that whatever economic or security catastrophe may come, will be laid at their feet, these quislings might realize Trump has no power if they do not enable him. Thus far they have abrogated legislative influence in the matter of checks and balance. 

 

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety. Benjamin Franklin

 

As for the true statesmen and women, former Presidents and their senior counsel and advisors, the options begin to enumerate when they begin to talk. 

 

Is there a nice way for former Presidents to convince a sitting lunatic to leave the throne. We are in new territory here. We know that 28 years of Oval Office leadership is a profile of experience and knowledge we can trust. Let them work on it.

 

“It is not unjust that the king be deposed or have his power restricted by the multitude if, becoming a tyrant, he abused the royal power.” Thomas Aquinas.

 

 

 

Part II   MAKING THE CASE

A Reprise

 

 

We the citizens of the US have personally lost $billions. Everyone with a pension or retirement fund that draws wealth from the market, or investments or real estate, or any fungible commodity or exchange. The wealth loss is historic. It didn't need to occur. It was triggered. 

THE OUTRAGEOUS SUMMARY

We’ve attacked enemies and made alliances with butchers. The President is a Russian patsy. (That should be an impossible sentence to publish.) He has embarrassed the US and diminished our status. We are no longer trusted.  

His tariff trade war is a foolish notion, improbable. On the longest of shots and if it were to work it would take decades. But service industry jobs pay more than what factory workers make abroad. New manufacturing will be people light, and mostly automated. His rationale: "It will make us wealthy." Who is the "us?" the Oligarchs? Already the wealthiest nation what good has that done for working Americans, to housing prices, for the homeless? His antiquated idea is a dud.

Donald Trump is not an intelligent man nor a student of history. His only business success was a role he played on TV. He considers everything is "deal making" missing the more complex nature of international stability, diplomacy and keeping the peace. 

The painful truth America, our President is not a genius onto something great, he is simply a blustering moron who has become a clear and present danger not only to the US but to the world. 

 

He threatens to take Greenland. He betrays allies, weakens strategic alliances born out of world history he never studied.  

He’s allowed the agencies that have protected us, medicine, food and drink, water and air to be gutted. We live with less safety and assurance. 

He’s let his DOGE Bro cut government services and then cherry pick those that his companies will benefit from. 

Trump is  too much of a threat, too reckless and too corrupt to be permitted to remain in power. 

Millions of Americans including military veterans think he is a traitor. 

How many warning signs can we ignore before signing our own death warrant?

 

Many of the poor souls who believed his lies or could not see through him, or did not listen to those who knew him best, are now among those who are the first to begin to suffer; job losses, loss of benefits,  the breaking of what had been the world’s best economy. It will get worse.

 

“This tyrant whose sole name blisters our tongue, was once thought honest.”

William Shakespeare

WHO IS HIS MAJORITY? 

Who put him in office? His voters were the least educated, people who felt left out, over looked, those who admire his arrogance, personality and are motivated by the “culture war.” 

They are consumers of right wing media and social media. 

 

As a general rule they are not a sentiment that should guide America's course in trying to fulfill its aspirational goals or to confront its problems and sins. 

Revenge is not a navigating star, ignorance is not a virtue. Neither can ignorance be an excuse. 

One need not think too long about this reality; Trump freed the insurrectionists and police killers, but cracks down on college free speech, threatens law firms and Universities in a kind of extortion and is surrounded by lightweights like the national security cowboy text party and pole dancers or looney’s like Laura Loomer and Stephen Miller.  Already they’ve shredded the idea of due process, sending wrong people to El Salvador’s dark hole prison where people disappear. Who else might they come for? They've fired thousands of important workers, arbitrarily to our detriment.

REVENGES AND MALICE 

It is a knife to the heart that for the first time America has not been able to come to the assistance of those most in need of food, shelter, medicine, and assistance after disaster or the continued evil of war. Shame on us! In the past Americans flooded the zone with relief when humans were suffering. We sent only three relief experts into the quake zone and Trump fired them while they were there. His Rasputin, Elon the strange, said “empathy is a weakness.” Elon, that is dead wrong! That idea is evil. And that attitude is steering our ship of state into a turbulence of Trump and the unelected Musk’s own making.

 

It's past time for Donald Trump. 

 

It felt good for Millions of American citizens and more around the world to hit the streets and demonstrate against this tyrant fool, but that’s not going to knock him off the throne.

So Americans need to start thinking and talking about the need and means to separate Trump from power. Talk and foment and steal the spotlight from his own control of media. Social media, street protests, pushing a news agenda, conversations, wherever and however to raise the issue of deposing a tyrant.  

He is malignant and has created a toxic whirlwind. It is time for the storm to take him. Time to end the chaos. It is time to try to make the world more stable, safe, secure. Don’t you miss the security and value of 100 days ago. Dare you permit a thought of what 3 more years of Trump might do? It’s time to make him go away. Time to build a consensus. 

See you down the trail. 

 

 

A swelling anger in X America...

 

      The anger grows. Even those who voted for the fool are outraged. The courts are rebuffing the capricious ripping up of the federal system. America's reputation is broken. The richest man in the world has free rein and wants to nib into our most sensitive security secrets. Lives are damaged or destroyed by incompetence. Has there ever been such a mean spirit and depravity of soul in the White House? Has there ever been such a deplorable and malignant narcissist with so little knowledge, or skill to hold such power?

    Nearly 250 years of history and progression of self-governance shaken and hammered, beaten and attacked like a petulant demon brat slamming a precious gift on his crib floor as he dirties himself.

    There's a fellow on our local next door posts who I charitably describe as poorly educated and without a wit of knowledge of history, who yammers away as do others, "this is what he was elected to do." If that were so, why are millions of red state, red hatted red faced voters so angry their red republican congressman are now refusing to hold constituent meetings? I would say, too, he was not elected, even by red hatted Magats, to turn our back on our allies, attack our friends and become a kiss ass puppet of one of the truly evil and dangerous brutes in the world. He was not elected to upend veterans rights and access to medicine, or cut the welfare programs so many of his voters depend on. It doesn't matter they were all warned, they believed the lies and now he is destroying their lives too. He's engineered an economic tumble.

    This is what happens in an empire of lies, where revenge is life blood, where the only thing that counts is the mad man at the center and where incompetents bow obsequiously and murder any vestige of morality. Oh and the circle of sycophants extend beyond the cabinet, beyond the House and Senate, to those Universities and heavy hitter law firms, and newsrooms, who toil now in fear of the rotten and stinky bully. 

    But the Courts are holding, for now. There are journalists who remind us that some of those so called narco gangsters "really bad people," stuck in a dark hole El Salvador prison we are paying for, are people like students, refugees, a soccer coach. Their sin? Tattoos and a name the White House white supremicsts didn't like. No one voted for that.

    No one voted for one of the biggest recipients of federal money, an unelected meddler to cut aid to the starving and sick. No one voted for insurrectionists, "cop killers" and attackers, to be freed while college students are arrested or deported for exercising free speech. No one voted to have a chain saw taken to the intricate world of social security and medicare and medicare or to have their most private of records made public by teenaged hackers. No one voted for the vibrant market and healthy economy to suffer only to worsen because of a trade war started by a dolt.

    There is a swelling anger. My village's meeting hall, jammed beyond capacity was locked by the fire marshal as people lined the building, entrance ramps, listening in windows and open doors  to hear a Democratic Congressman give them some assurance that the America we trusted and believe in, the nation that some of us and our fathers and mothers or brothers and sisters served, the nation that struggles forward to provide human dignity and liberty, and to be a friend and ally to nations, that that nation and beacon still exists. That someone in Washington remembers who we profess to be, who we aspire to become, that we are a nation of law, that we are not a nation of selfish, care only for ourselves, narrow minded, uneducated, money worshiping would be mobsters, racists and fascists. 

    Childish and propaganda media think it's important to excoriate Democrats, who have yet to become an effective opposition. At least we know they told us how bad  it would be. Republicans remain the least honorable gaggle of ego, gas and goofballs in modern history. For 8 years they profess their disdain behind closed doors, but fold and cower in the presence of their blustering subjugator. They've abandoned the tradition of legislative power and a co-equal branch of government as quickly as any coward has run from a bully. They define shame.

    I maybe wrong. There may people who did vote for this. A couple of lines from Mark Twain come to mind; "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately defined by stupidity." Hence he offers this caution, "Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience."

    This will take courage. This will take principle. This will take a belief in the aspiration of imperfect people who are better when we jointly seek a more perfect union.

   Stay focused. Keep cool. Tell it like it is. Do not suffer fools easily, but remember a lot of the fools who put us in this position, are just that, in the same boat as we are. We need to give them space, so they can count in the number of citizens who will stand against the destruction. We must think even red hats can learn and change their mind. 

    While the party system stumbles, citizens need to assert objectives. The elected officials work for us. The founders were wary of political parties. We are living validation of their concern.

    Now, enjoy the visual elements.....

    See you down the trail.