A Quick Thought About Michael Jackson, And How The Media Still Sucks

Michael Jackson died yesterday.

My brother told me as I was on a break from the X-Box 360, and on my way to the kitchen. It was a surprise, the news at the time was saying that he had died from a heart attack. I told my brother that as this story worked itself out that Jackson was probably abusing prescription drugs, and that the death would be more seedy in the end. As it turned out this is the case.

I'm not a Michael Jackson fan by any stretch of the imagination. However I did buy "Thriller" in 1984, mostly because Eddie Van Halen played the guitar solo on the song: "Beat It". The album itself was a solid offering of high quality Quincy Jones-produced pop music, and most of the guys from Toto played back-up for Jackson. "Thriller" became background music for my friends and me during the summer of 1984. My friend, Bruce, had a 1968 LTD station wagon, and "Thriller" was almost always in the cassette player. Since Bruce was good looking the rear seat of the LTD was usually packed with girls, and as we'd taxi them to the beach Michael Jackson's music usually got them grooving. Girls in bikini tops grooving is a good thing.

Bruce's place was party central, and by June there were a few guys who could "Moonwalk". 1984 was the first year that you could order MTV in stereo, and needless to say Bruce had it. So MTV was always on during the party, and Jackson's videos usually warranted scrutiny by just about everyone there. Michael Jackson ended up being an important part of one of the greatest summers of my life, and for all the stuff that has happened with him since there is no denying this.

Whenever I hear a song off of "Thriller" I smile.

The thing that is disgusting me now is the wall-to-wall coverage by all the networks, with special segments now dedicated to telling Jackson's life. This is ironic because the media has spent the last few years destroying Michael Jackson. Sure, Jackson gave them ammunition, his problem with young boys is well documented. However, the media went beyond the facts, and printed/broadcast almost every allegation without due investigation as to their truthfulness. Stories about Jackson symbolized the legitimate news media's descent into tabloid journalism.

So now that Jackson has died, the media is now milking him for every ratings point they can. His funeral will probably be an epic. Not an ounce of shame will be displayed on the part of the news outlets who will cover it live. Then in the coming months and years we will be flooded with tell-all book that will make Jackson look like a Saint, or Jack the Ripper.

I am not a Jackson fan. I like one of his albums. I was hoping maybe the media in the age of Obama, and economic crisis was going to grow up. I guess not.

Thinking About Anger.

I was an angry young man. I didn't know this at the time. I did a lot of crazy, and self destructive things to myself. There was almost no forethought before I did things, so I just did them. It is funny that people can exist in a clueless condition, completely unaware of themselves.
It is also frightening to me to think that I could have gone on much longer without even getting a clue to my underlying motivations.

I had bad things done to me as a child by a family member, but at an age when I was too young to fully understand what had happened. When you are a child you think that those things are somehow normal, even though you know that you don't like them. Then in your pre-teen years you begin to understand your body, and you get some sex education in school then suddenly you are forced to confront some ugly things. It is like a time-release poison because just as you come to grips with one incident, you then remember something else, and so you are thrown into another whirlpool of emotional confusion.
I was lucky in that I got help in my sophomore year in high school. I was directed to a psychologist who was able to guide me in evaluating my feelings. Which lead to my ability to understand the underlying motivations behind some of the stupid things I was doing. I reached a point to where I felt in control enough to stop going to this doctor. I think I had gone as far as I could anyway. I then entered the second phase of my life. I became a musician and pursued a brief studio career. I began playing guitar in my Freshman year in high school, and I practiced four to six hours every day. EVERY DAY. I took theory classes at the junior college, as well as private lessons. When I listen to the old tapes from those days I hear an intensity that is missing from my playing today. I have said before that I would eventually quit from the stress of studio work, and the hassles of being a guitar player. I still play today but there is no drive for me to take it out of the bedroom.

Something changed in 1990.

My dad (the offending family member) died. We would find out through his autopsy that his actions were caused from brain trauma. So he had no real control over his impulses. This was liberating for me because I feared that my father's behavior would be transmitted to me in much the same way as a werewolf curse. With the knowledge that my father's condition was organic and exclusive to him I was able to relax. The other thing that happened was that I was no longer angry at my father, and I suddenly felt a great weight lifted from me. What I didn't expect was that this revelation would lead to the next phase of my life, and in many ways it would be much harder.

With my deep-rooted anger gone, my life had no foundation to orbit around. The anger of my past had so much defined who I was that without it I lost all direction in my life. I suddenly had nothing to prove, no chip on my shoulder, and I no longer walked with the swagger of an angry man. The problem was that I found that I had lost my ability to assess certain situations and judge people. So I was soon taken advantage of by people that the "Old Me" would have seen coming a mile away. So I began to withdraw from people. My social life evaporated, and my life became work. In 2001, I was laid off after a devastating injury, so I found myself angry once again. I picked up and wore my anger like one would wear a favorite set of clothes from their youth that still fit perfectly. My anger quickly gave me direction again and I was soon learning new things, and began research on my book. It has lead me back to school, and driven me to study hard.

While I hate being angry all the time, I like what my anger does for me. I have a direction again, and I'm moving along with great velocity. I'm not drinking booze nor using drugs, and I'm not using my anger in social settings to justify using women (as I did when I was younger). I go to school, then go to work, and then I come home. The only expression of anger is on my TV screen as I blast Nazis on my X-Box360. What I worry about today is what else is my anger doing to me? Since I was so unaware of how anger affected my life when I was young, it is not unreasonable to assume that I still have a blind-spot. Am I ignoring a chance a love? Have I turned a blind eye to a life-changing opportunity?

I guess that because I'm writing this I may actually be in good shape. That I can still self-evaluated is probably a good sign. I have my fingers crossed.

The Central Intelligence Agency: Reform of Replace?

Following the attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. there were many questions raised about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) ability to effectively provide the intelligence needed to protect the United States from international terrorism. It took the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission to get the ball rolling on reform, and even then it took: “… [A] bruising fight on Capitol Hill for Congress to pass a reform bill addressing the issue of intelligence failure” (Fessenden). While many reforms were passed into law, including the creation of a new intelligence office, almost none of them address the CIA’s consistently uneven performance in intelligence collection, dissemination, and distribution of vital information to the government bodies it serves. A few question if the numerous flaws can ever be reformed, and suggest that the CIA be replaced altogether with a new agency.
The failure to head off the attacks of 9/11/2001 is probably the CIA’s greatest intelligence failure, so analyzing the events that lead to that tragic September morning reveals the fundamental flaws of the CIA. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, in the summer of 2001, “The system was blinking red” (254), The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) even had a man named Zacarias Moussaoi in custody (273). Moussaoi would later be convicted as the twentieth 9/11 Hijacker. However, at the time of his arrest, the CIA didn’t reveal that Moussaoi‘s association with key Al Qaeda figures, thus the FBI was unable to present an urgent enough case to search his lap-top computer. Had the CIA been forthcoming with vital information the FBI could have at least had a clearer picture of the coming attacks (Wright 397).
The CIA’s unwillingness to share information with the FBI was only matched by its unwillingness to share information between different offices, or provide resources within the CIA itself. The Agency’s hierarchy is inter-competitive often to the point of endangering national security. In April-May, 1998, the CIA’s dedicated Bin Laden unit “Alec Station” was ordered to be shut down and consolidated. This was done without the knowledge of the Director of Central Intelligence’s (DCI) knowledge, and when he found out about it he countermanded the order. However, this created confusion within the unit, and while they continued to do their jobs they were distracted as uncertainty prevailed. This may have contributed to the successful bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania a few months later on August 8, 1998 (Scheuer)
One would think that after the deaths of eight Americans and over 450 African civilians that the CIA would have poured resources into Alec Station so that it could better, and for about a month the leadership complied with many of the requests for Alec Station. All too soon, assistance like complete transcripts of recorded communications between Al Qaeda operatives instead of summaries dried up. Direct assistance from the U.S. military to plan strikes against Al Qaeda targets, never materialized; while the Armydid send two officers to Alec Station, neither had special operations experience, and both were experts on Iran. In fact after 1999, Alec Station was run by Directorate of Operations (DO) personnel who had had little or no knowledge of Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda (Scheuer).
It’s not that the CIA was doing nothing. In his testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, George Tenent listed a number of successful CIA counter-terrorist operations against Al Qaeda:
The third period of peak threat was in the spring and summer 2001. As with the Millennium and Ramadan 2000, we increased the tempo of our operations against al-Qa‘ida. We stopped some attacks and caused the terrorists to postpone others.
We [the CIA] helped to break up another terrorist cell in Jordan and seized a large quantity of weapons, including rockets and high explosives.
Working with another foreign partner, we broke up a plan to attack US facilities in Yemen.
In June, CIA worked with a Middle Eastern partner to arrest two Bin Ladin operatives planning attacks on US facilities in Saudi Arabia.
In June and July, CIA launched a wide-ranging disruption effort against Bin Ladin’s organization, with targets in almost two-dozen countries. Our intent was to drive up Bin Ladin’s security concerns and lead his organization to delay or cancel its attacks. We subsequently received reporting that attacks were delayed, including an attack against the US military in Europe.
In July, a different Middle East partner helped bring about the detention of a terrorist who had been directed to begin an operation to attack the US Embassy or cultural center in a European capital.
In addition, in the summer of 2001, local authorities, acting on our information, arrested an operative described as Bin Ladin’s man in East Asia.
We assisted another foreign partner in the rendition of a senior Bin Ladin associate. Information he provided included plans to kidnap Americans in three countries and to carry out hijackings.
We provided intelligence to a Latin American service on a band of terrorists considering hijackings and bombings. An FBI team detected explosives residue in their hotel rooms
The problem is that none of these actions brought the CIA closer to the inner circle of Al Qaeda, and none of these successful operations prevented the attacks of September 11, 2001. Reform would be needed and that meant that Congress would have to step in. The attacks of 9/11/2001 and the subsequent failure to capture bin Laden as of this date should not be a surprise to anyone. This should be especially true for Congress, who can produce a long list of committee and commission reports and recommendations on how to reform the CIA dating back to the 1970s
After September 11, 2001, the House and the Senate intelligence committees began work on legislation that would lead to the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI). After a hard fight, a compromise was reached in December, 2004, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) was created. While this is viewed as a step forward for national security it is also an acknowledgement of the failure of the CIA.
The DNI’s mission is to be a central clearing-house for intelligence, intelligence collection, and intelligence policy which then reports to the President and the National Security Council (NSC). In short, the DNI is a central intelligence agency, which has the same task that the CIA was supposed to control, and for the most part still has. Lost in the debate of the 9/11 Commission’s recommendation to create the DNI was the question of weather the CIA was still up to the job of keeping the United States safe from attack. The National Security Act of 1947 called for the creation of the CIA with the purpose of preventing another Pearl Harbor style attack. The eleven-story deep hole between Liberty and Vesey streets in Manhattan, New York, is mortal proof that the CIA failed to do its most basic mission. The war in Iraq was based solely on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) intelligence gathered by the CIA. This intelligence turned out to be as much an estimate about Iraqi WMDs based on a formula (60 Minutes) as it was traditional intelligence collection procedures. The Bush Administration’s rushed to invade Iraq, which put off or diluted any immediate short-term reforms.
This has become apparent with the revelations that the CIA was sending captured Al Qaeda operatives in secret to foreign prisons to be tortured by the local intelligence entity. Also the “Water Boarding” of suspects directly by the CIA, and other interrogation techniques that were traditionally viewed as torture. The torture issue was emblematic of an Agency that still refused to share information and tactics with other intelligence
agencies.
The U.S. Army Intelligence and Naval Intelligence had amassed years of doctrine on interrogation dating all the way back to the Civil War. Their tactics had been honed and refined after each war or conflict, and was the most up-to-date as far as Islamic extremists were concerned based on their experiences in Somalia and the Balkans. Although the CIA had a reliable doctrine via the Army, it instead chose to bow to pressure from the White House to use more questionable methods to extract information from suspected Al Qaeda fighters. The revelation of torture has lead to calls that the CIA be abolished. In an editorial in Slate online magazine, Christopher Hitchens argues: “The next stage, very often, is that certain inconveniently damaged secret prisoners have to be made to "disappear," as in the death-squad regimes of Latin America…” (Yet Another).
This is not to say that the CIA is completely useless, since the “War on Terror” began in October, 2001, the CIA has seen many success stories. Most of these stories come out of Afghanistan, where the CIA spearheaded the counter-insurgency movement to drive the Taliban out of power. Afghanistan had been the scene of the CIA’s greatest Cold-War triumph; it had organized Afghan freedom fighters, called Mujahedeen, into a cohesive fighting force which they trained, and equipped with modern Soviet weapons the new “Stinger” anti-aircraft missiles. With the CIA’s backing, the Mujahedeen were able to defeat the Soviet army, and retake the country.


So almost fifteen years later, many of the same CIA veterans from the first Afghan war returned to duty, some even coming out of retirement to strap on boots and operate in the high mountains of Afghanistan (Bernsten 72-74). Their number being less than twenty, they secretly infiltrated Afghanistan on helicopters, and then linked up with old friends in the Afghan “Northern Alliance”. They set up introductions between local warlords and members of U.S. Army Special Forces “A-Teams”, these A-Teams would then train, assess, equip, and assist the various warlords and their tribes so that they could better defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda(Bernsten 79).
This turned out to be a winning combination for the defeat and overthrow of the Taliban. Northern Alliance tanks rolled into the capitol city of Kabul in November, 2001, less than seven weeks after the beginning of the U.S. lead drive to defeat the Taliban. At the same time, Al Qaeda along with its leader, Osama bin Laden, found themselves cornered at a mountainous region called “Tora Bora.” During the Afghan War against the Soviets Tora Bora had been a Mujahedeen strong-hold and hideout. Bin Laden had designed and built many tunnel systems within the mountains here, and the Soviets found it to be impenetrable. The U.S. special operations teams did not.
On the Pakistan side of the border, the CIA began working with the Pakistani Government to hunt senior Al Qaeda leadership. Within 14 months of the September attacks, the CIA would capture or kill:
Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, al-Qa‘ida’s operations chief and the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.
Nashiri, the senior operational planner for the Arabian Gulf area.

Abu Zubayda, a senior logistics officer and plotter.
Hasan Ghul, a senior facilitator who was sent to case Iraq for an expanded al-Qa‘ida presence there.
Harithi and al-Makki, the most senior plotters in Yemen, who were involved in the bombing of the USS Cole.
Hambali, the senior operational planner in Southeast Asia. (Tenent)
However, there was a four year gap void of CIA “Predator” drone action within Pakistan, and it was not until the appointment of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense in December, 2006, that U.S. covert activity on the Pakistan side of the border escalated. Secretary Gates had worked at the CIA for 27 years, and would become the only career CIA officer to ever serve as DCI (1991-1993). Since August of 2008, the CIA has conducted over 55 attacks on Al Qaeda safe-houses in Pakistan using “Predator Drones” that fire guided missiles (Hammond). These constant attacks have affected the surviving Al Qaeda Leadership to the point that they have begun to flee to Yemen and Somalia (Maclean).
In a way, Gates embodies everything that the CIA needs in it leadership, he is willing to take risks and is prone to deal with problems directly. Former Alec Station Chief Michael Scheuer wrote in an open letter to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees complaining:
In the CIA's core, U.S.-based Bin Laden operational unit today there are fewer Directorate of Operations officers with substantive expertise on al-Qaeda than there were on 11 September 2001. There has been no systematic effort to groom al-Qaeda expertise among Directorate of Operations officers since 11 September ... The excellent management team now running operations against al-Qaeda has made repeated, detailed, and on-paper pleas for more officers to work against the al-Qaeda—and have done so for years, not weeks or months—but have been ignored ...
The U.S.-based Bin Laden unit, Alec Station, was deactivated for good in late 2004. Former CIA agent Robert Baer sites that much of the CIA’s senior leadership lacks and foreign experience whatsoever (Getting the CIA), and that since the end of the Cold War, the Agency has shifted away from recruiting new assets overseas. Baer says that instead, the Agency relies too much on technical data and foreign intelligence services.
All of this draws into question weather the CIA can ever be fixed so that it becomes more effective. The Agency has demonstrated that it can collect intelligence when it wants to, and that it can conduct proactive covert action, again when it wants to. The problem is that too often, senior officers don’t want to do anything. At least not anything that would jeopardize their careers. The senior case managers at the CIA are largely risk-averse, which protects their own careers but does little to protect the country.
I would argue that the smart move would be to dismantle the CIA altogether, and create a new spy agency. It would be an agency that would be much smaller and somewhat less reliant on electronic or technical intelligence gathering, and focus more on human intelligence (HUMINT). The CIA has never had the ability to directly infiltrate an enemy’s strategic center to obtain vital intelligence. The CIA never penetrated the Soviet Politburo, the leadership of Cuba, or other enemies of the United States. Instead, the CIA relied on luck, a chance encounter or the defection of a key foreign leader to the west. Both the U.S. Army and Navy’s special operations units have long practiced infiltration of enemy installations. The Navy has detailed bathometric maps of harbors in North Korea, Russia, Iran, Libya and Venezuela. These maps are all hand-drawn by Navy commandos. The U.S. Army successfully infiltrated southern China during the Vietnam War, to kidnap or assassinate Chinese military advisors who were training North Vietnamese army officers (Pearson). This new agency would draw upon this country’s rich immigrant population, and the military as the backbone of the operational arm for intelligence gathering.
With the creation of the ODNI, there is no need for supplemental covert action policy development as there is now at the CIA (which used to be the principle developer of policy), so this new Agency would have a flexible operational doctrine since would not be directly intellectually invested in a set doctrine. This way the new agency could more rapidly adapt to changing world threats to the United States. The CIA is weighed down by its middle and senior management. It is operationally inbred. A new agency would not be handicapped by outdated operational policies that no longer make sense. The new agency could take the things that worked at CIA, and discard the things that did not.

The CIA has many talented, gifted and dedicated people who work hard to protect this country. Unfortunately, because of weak policies that promote the inexperienced to key management positions, the CIA is restrained from doing everything within its capability to gather information. Worse, this leadership has proven that when the White House suggested illegal (or questionable) interrogation practices, they were reluctant to say “No”. Inter-departmental games denied Alec Station vital intelligence assets even after the catastrophic attacks on the US Embassies in east Africa. The CIA dragged its feet on drone attacks in Pakistan for almost four years. Even after the CIA’s extreme caution have proven to be fatal to innocent Americans, they are still constricted by a pre-9/11 mind-set. The country would be better served, and in safer hands with an all new intelligence agency.

Works Sited:

“At the Center of the Storm”. 60 Minutes. CBS News. New York. April 29, 2007
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/04/25/60minutes/main2728375.shtml
Bentsen, Gary. Puzzulo, Ralph. Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander. Crown. 2005.
Baer, Robert. “Getting the CIA Back in the Game”. Foreign Policy. New York.
March 2005.
Fessenden, Helen. ”The Limits of Intelligence Reform”. Foreign Affairs; Nov/Dec2005, Vol. 84 Issue 6, p106-120. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mth&AN=18680595&site=ehost-live
Hammond, Jeremy R., “Pakistan: Half a Million Refugees as Fighting Continues in Swat”, Foreign Policy Journal. May 13, 2009.
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2009/05/13/pakistan-half-a-million-refugees-as-fighting-continues-in-swat/
Hitchens, Christopher. “Yet Another CIA Failure”. Salon.com. April 27, 2009.http://www.slate.com/id/2217002/
Maclean, William. “Pakistan Instability Draws Foreign Militants”. Kuwait Times. May 10, 2009.
http://www.kuwaittimes.net/read_news.php?newsid=MTE0MTIwNDk1OQ==
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report. W.W. Norton & Co. New York. 2004.
Pearson, Roger. Major. US Army Retired. Personal interview.
Scheuer, Michael. “How Not To Catch a Terrorist”. Atlanic Monthly. New York. 2004.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200412/anonymous
Tenent, George, Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. 2004. CIA.gov.
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2004/tenet_testimony_03242004.html

Starships Or Submarines?

When I was a kid in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s my loyalty was divided between two fictional TV Captains. On Star Trek the star ship Enterprise was commanded by James T. Kirk, who along with Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy and the rest of the crew zipped around the galaxy seeking out strange new worlds. The Enterprise was cool. It looked cool, it had cool weapons, it had cool technology, and it had hot women in miniskirts. My other escape was the SSN Seaview, the fantastic submarine of the show "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea", where Captain David Crane ran the show. Captain Crane lead a crew of interesting guys such as Chief Sharky, Ensign Blake and Admiral Nelson (who actually built the Seaview as part of the Nelson Institute) around the world from adventure to adventure. The Seaview was cool. It looked cool, it had big windows on the front, it made a cool sonar noise, and it had a flying sub. As a boy, the idea of a big star ship that went faster than the speed of light was a concept that could only be rivaled by a big submarine.

"Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea" was a fun show that was created by Irwin Allen; the creator of Lost In Space, Land of the Giants and director of "The Towering Inferno", Allen was an interesting character himself who was legendarily cheap. He was the king of stock footage and recycled special effects footage and monster suits between his various shows. As a result, "Voyage" doesn't hold up too well over time as Star Trek has. "Voyage" also was handicapped by bad writing and some lame story ideas. Star Trek used SciFi writers as well as first time writers to generate interesting and compelling stories for the show. This doesn't make "Voyage" a total dog though, there are a handful of great shows in each season that keep it from becoming a total joke. The average story line either involved international terrorists or an uncharted island. Sometimes the show featured an environmental disaster which ring more true today than it did in 1966. Terrorists threatening America was also a concept that was ahead of it's time. As a young boy none of these concepts mattered, all that mattered was that Captain Crane ran a tight ship and if he had to put on his yellow wetsuit and lock-out of the Seaview to kick some ass then that's what he'd do. The Seaview's crew were regular guys who got scared and sometimes had no idea of what to do, especially when the Seaweed monster got loose in the missile bay. As a kid I could totally relate to them because I grew up near the sea and it can be a scary place. Today as I re-watch the show on DVD it is pretty hokey. They spent no money on the show and often the 20th Century Fox back lot doubled as a top secret facility run by a mad scientist. The stories often repeated themselves (how many times was the Seaview stuck below crush-depth with no hope of escape?) and the special effects were pretty lame. I still love the Seaview and I think that Captain Crane was a well fleshed-out character.

Star Trek's appeal is obvious. The show was ahead of it's time in every way and featured high quality writing that is as fresh today as it was when it first aired back in the 1960s. Captain Kirk was everything I wanted to be, good looking, smart, cool and fearless. The Enterprise represented a future that I wanted to become real. Much has been written about Star Trek and there isn't much that I could add to the admiration of this show. I liked that the crew came from all walks of humanity and they were each accepted on their own merits. As a kid I liked the hand phasers. Set to "Stun" was a great concept that was very progressive for a Science Fiction show, this is true even today where the hero still is more likely to shoot first and shoot later. On Star Trek is was "Hey, we don't need to kill these guys if we don't have to," and I like that even when the aliens took the first shot at the Enterprise; Captain Kirk would still go out of his way to try to understand WHY they were shooting, and then try to work out a peaceful solution. This is still (sadly) a very sophisticated concept even in today's world. As I grew into a young man, Star Trek's tendency to cast hot women and dress them in slinky outfits helped keep me loyal to the show, granted for more prurient reasons.

In the end it came down to two Captains. I didn't have a father so David Crane and Jim Kirk became my male role models. Captain Crane was a tough but fair guy. He was very hands-on but he also had earned the respect of his crew. Kirk was clever and brave. Both men were fair and patient with people and chose to do the right thing even if it was hard to do. They both also got the hot women. What helped me was that both Captains were great at avoiding trouble and talking their way out of ugly situations. It has been a long time since I've looked to either Captain for guidance, I've become a man with my own ways of dealing with challenges and I've long since left my youth behind. Still, every once in a while the little boy inside of me comes out and looks at the man I've become; he then measures me against my boyhood heroes, and between the one on the Star ship, and the one on the Submarine I sometimes come up short. I don't see any harm in looking to those guys as I head into the second half of my life.

I sure couldn't do any worse.

Into The Green Again

New Years Day, 2009, I decide that I'm just going to go on a hike just to get my fat ass outside and moving. I put on my boots and drove to Fort Ord again. I had no plan, no objective and I didn't even bring my camera. I just wanted to move and I wanted to get some sweat out of it. So I locked up my truck and slung my hydration bladder onto my back and started moving.

It was a beautiful day, around sixty degrees with the sun in the sky. There were many mountain bikers and horseback riders out and why not? I couldn't think of any place where I'd rather be once my hike was under way. I had decided on a three mile loop that would take me up and down and up and down the hills of Planet Ord. I also figured that if an opportunity presented itself I would explore. Almost right off the bat, as I had descended to a road in a shallow canyon I veered off into the Oak trees that lined an open area. I have walked by this place hundreds of times but I'd never explored the opposite side. Needless to say that as soon as I was in the shade of the Oaks I was surrounded by fighting positions, some still had their green sandbags in place. The recent rains had exposed dozens of spent .762 shells. As I moved beneath the trees I found the white splatter droppings from a large bird-of-prey. I quickly spotted a "Pod" from an Owl and then looked to the branches to locate the bird. This is a fun exercise as your eyes scan for an animal who will remain invisible until it moves. I guess I made it nervous because a Barn Owl broke cover and flew a short distance to another stand of trees. It's massive wings made no sound. I then cut across the field which had once been the site for M.A.S.H., CPs and LZs for choppers. I saw spent simulated .203 rounds and other remnants of the Army dating back to the 1940s.
I then moved up a ridge, moving close to a gully that has been slowly eroded into the hillside since 1994. I do this to look for unexploded munitions and other goodies that may be revealed by the rains. I found nothing new by the time I got to the top. From the top I looked down onto another road that lay about 200 feet below me. I followed a secondary trail down to the road and rambled down to an area just past the ancient plow. There has been clearing of this area for development, which is sad, so I wanted to see what the clearing had revealed. As it turned out, not much had been hidden by the thick brush. After a quick look I began another climb up the ridge adjacent the clearing zone and made my way to the top where I was soon enveloped by the Oak trees at the top. The Oaks are thick here and the angle of the Sun paints everything in a green halo. Many plants are starting to bud which means that we are in a drought. I moved down the trail to begin to return to my truck, which was about a mile and a half from here.
I love moving through the green. Everything smells good and the green light makes me feel thirty years younger. My mind wanders in different directions. For a while I think about when I was a kid and how I loved to ride my bike in places like this. Then I think about the Army that trained here and I wondered if a place could have an impact of the quality of soldier and I decided that it did. Every man and woman who was based at Fort Ord loved being here. In Vietnam, Fort Ord graduated always stood out. I wondered if a place could make you a better person? Maybe, it was making me feel better at the very least. I moved easily through the trees and along the trail. Birds sang and rodents rooted through the underbrush as I passed by. I finally broke out into the open again and I made good time back to where I was parked. Once there I paused a few minutes to enjoy a little floor-show put on by a Turkey Vulture and a Raven. The Vulture had perched upon an electrical tower and the Raven didn't like it one bit. So the Raven puffed up his feathers until he was almost as big as the buzzard and eventually he decided to leave.

It was a good day and it felt good to vanish into the green light of the Oak trees of Fort Ord for a couple of hours.

Getting Over Hating People

Since I drive a long way to school and work I have a long time to think about stuff. Last week the radio station (yes I listen to the FM radio, my tape deck died years ago and I don't have money to get a CD player) was having a "Totally 90s Weekend" and they played that one Blind Melon hit. I'm not a fan. The thing that I'm ashamed of is that I was happy when I learned of the death of their lead singer, Shannon Hoon, in 1995. At the time I hated the music of the 1990s and the retro-hippie shit/grunge thing that was going on. So when I heard that Hoon had died of an OD I laughed.

So last weekend when I heard the song and I remembered how I enjoyed the singer's passing I felt bad. I felt bad about myself, so I spent the next few days thinking about this concept of hating people that you have never met for reasons that really have no direct (or even indirect) effect on your life.

I never met Hoon, Hoon never did anything to me and yet I celebrated his death. At the time I was a hard-rock guy who was having trouble dealing with the fact that the 1980s were gone and the music went with it. Still this is no excuse. It was a shitty thing for me to do and I'm sorry about it. It wasn't fair to Hoon, the guy needed help and was probably a lost soul long before he OD'd and there I was applauding his failure. The guy had a family who loved him and he had fans who loved his music, his life was as valid and valuable as mine. It wasn't just Hoon either, Kurt Cobain's death made my friggin' week. His band hammered the nails in the coffin of a brand of music that I was too stupid to realize was long since dead. Those kids gathering in the park to mourn him was a huge source of amusement for me. What an asshole I am. Kurt Cobain was another guy who I'd never met and had never done anything to me personally. Worse, he didn't do anything to anyone else but himself. I hated Nirvana back then and yet today I have a couple of their albums. The guy was an original.

So where does this hatred come from? Was I so much better than those guys? No, not really. On top of making me a giant douche bag it also takes a lot of energy to hate people you've never actually met. I wonder what that hate did to me physically? Did it make my ugly? Shorten my life? Make me fat? Today I don't really hate as much as I used to and I'm making an effort to let what hate that I do have go. I think the big change came when I learned to be happy for other people and their success. When I was young I had a lot of jealousy and resentment and I've made a great effort to let all of that go because it came from a bad place to begin with. I wish I'd learned this earlier in my life.

So to Cobain and Hoon I offer my apology, I'm sorry I felt the way that I did and I'm genuinely sorry that you guys aren't still around.

The Show "Life on Mars": How Would I Handle Something Like That?

ABC television debuted a show called "Life on Mars" which probably won't be around too long because it's over the heads of a lot of people. The story is that NYPD Detective Sam Tyler gets hit by a car and wakes up in 1973. He's still a cop but everything else is different. The series also stars Harvey Keitel and Michael Imperioli and has a great supporting cast and cool music. The show itself is a solid police drama but it has it's fun side as Sam has to adjust to the world of 1973 New York City.

I have always loved the idea of time travel. Mostly going backward in time to witness events like the Constitutional Convention, Gettysburg, the JFK Assassination, Titanic and other events in history. Then sometimes I wonder what if I did go backwards in time somehow? How would I cope in what has to akin to living in an alien world? I was born in the mid-1960s so going back to the 30s,40s or 1950s wouldn't be too much of a stretch but what about the 1840s? The shoes must have been uncomfortable and the clothes scratchy. People smelled bad because they bathed once a week - MAYBE. Work for a nickle a day? .25 cents if I was college educated? Mattresses were mats stuffed with straw on a rope frame, which would suck if my oil lantern ignites.

Oh, and crapping in a chamber pot that I either keep under my bed or in a night stand next to my bed. I have an image of Mary Todd Lincoln getting up in the dead of night in the White House and pulling the chamber pot from her side of the bed and curling a long one out and then placing it back inside the nightstand and going back to sleep. Yeah, I can't even stand to think about it let alone living that life.

Then there are the diseases like Small Pox, Measles and Polio. What if I get sick? 1840s medical care makes the back of the average ambulance look like the Mayo Clinic. There's a lot of things to think about if time travel ever becomes a reality. I think that depending on the year I would be equally lost in the past as I would if I were to go 150 into the future.

Heck, think about life in 1960...

You had to walk into the bank to withdraw cash and the bank opened at 9:00am and closed at 5:00pm (banker's hours). Few people wrote check fewer businesses took the two credit cards that were available (Master Charge and Diner's Club). Gas was cheap but your car didn't have seatbelts. Sneakers were not worn in nice restaurants and everyone wore a tie on a work day. TV was black and white and your music was played on a record player with one speaker. The television networks signed off at midnight, usually to the national anthem. Smoking was allowed just about everywhere. You had a lot of restrictions that you do not have in 2008.

Time travel still sounds fun just as long as it's not too far backwards and I can return to the present when I want to.

A Random Hike Can Be Good For You

The thing that I hate about being a grown-up is that I always have something to do that isn't fun. Most of the time it's five or six things that I have to do. So my fun time during the week is pretty slim. I'm lucky if I can squeeze in an hour of video games here or a chapter of a book there. The danger of this is that I quickly become stuck in a rut and I seem to stay in that rut until I force myself out. The evil fact is that ruts are comfortable, even the ones that suck, and this is because people like routine. So every once in a while I have to shake myself out of yet another rut. School was a great way to break out but once Summer break started I can't seem to drag my ass out of bed before 10:30am . I wouldn't mind this except that I'm not really enjoying sleeping late.



So Wednesday came and I had to drive into Monterey to deposit my paycheck and I thought maybe I'd get in a short walk somewhere later. On the way back from the bank I found myself in Borders trying to find a DVD to buy so that I could blow off my walk. This made me mad, once I realized that this was what I was doing I left the store and drove to Fort Ord (my home away from home) and parked my truck. I grabbed a bottle of water and hauled ass into the tree-line. I decided that I would walk down to East Garrison to survey the development of that part of the base. I'd heard that it was stalled because of the housing crunch but I needed to see the damage for myself and this was a great excuse to do a long walk. You see, it's about 3 1/2 miles from where I'd parked to East Garrison so I was looking at a minimum of six miles to walk round-trip.



Cool.



It was a perfect day, in the upper 70s and no wind. I had my jungle boots and boonie cap and I figured I was set. I quickly discovered that in the five weeks since school had let out that I had slipped out of shape but this just made me mad and I pushed myself harder than I probably should have. Fort Ord will kick your ass. The first mile was a gentile uphill grade that lead into rolling hill country. Worse, about every 500 yards there are patches of sand that can stretch for 50 yards just to kill your momentum. Still, it was nice to be out on the Oak trees and moving. I didn't see a lot of animal life this time around except for lizards which I mostly heard zipping thought the oak leaves on the ground. I kept an eye out for Rattle Snakes but all I would find were their unique tracks in the sand. I was also not too thrilled to find a nice set of Mountain Lion tracks heading the same way that I was. Mountain Lions love to circle human housing developments, I think they are just curious but I'm sure they're also stalking prey. Still, I didn't see one or come close to one and that's just fine with me.



I made East Garrison in two hours and saw that it had been graded into a generic set of lots for the future homes. About half of the old buildings are still there and that's good but they're fenced off and who knows how long it will be before I can get close to them again. I hate fences. I then decided to continue to the Pre-Ranger site and survey the grounds there. This called for some serious bush-whacking and since this was a "Walk" I didn't bring my compass. However, I knew where I was and I knew that I'd eventually hit a main trail but it was interesting navigating the maze of Poison Oak and coastal Sage as I wove my way through the Oaks. It's a great way to test my nerves because it can get confusing in the bush and if I lose my cool I'm in for a bad time. No problem this time, I followed a game trail (bad idea in Mountain Lion country) that lead me to the trail above the old civilian firing range and down to the road that would take me to the pre-Ranger site. The site is still untouched and that made me feel good. The old sign is only hanging by one D-ring but it's still readable. I walked up the road and did a quick survey of the Monterey Pines (since Fort Ord closed in 1993, there are 40 new trees out in this one location) and found that there were 24 saplings reaching for the sky.

Then it was time to turn around and head back. By this time I was hurting, my feet were sore and my right ankle was in a little pain thanks to my boot. I headed back as best I could and I just let my mind wander. This helped with the pain and made the time pass a little faster. The thing I hate about Fort Ord is that there's always one more hill to climb, it takes the fun out of the return trip on a long hike because it never fails that I find myself cresting a steep hill and find that I have to climb yet another steep hill. The worst part is that I don't remember this next steep hill being here on the way in. Fort Ord is a unique place in many ways in that there are geologic features that occur only within Fort Ord and nowhere else on Earth. One of the main features is Fort Ord's magnetic field, according to the U.S. Army, the old base has the greatest magnetic declination from true-North of anywhere in the U.S.. The normal declination in Monterey is 15 degrees, but it's 18 degrees at Fort Ord. The reasons for this are that Fort Ord is a geologic hinge that sits between to faults. As the Peninsula pushed northwest away from the coast the land that is Fort Ord was shoved eastward into the base of the Santa Lucias and then twisted south by the San Andreas, which lies to the east. Fort Ord's soil has a high Iron concentration and all of that Iron is what drives compasses crazy.

Anyway, sometimes I think that the screwy iron-rich soil plays tricks on my head because it's so damned easy to get lost out there. The hundreds of trails twist and turn and the rolling hills disguise small gullies and ravines that make no sense. I found six more small canyons on this hike alone that I'd never seen in all my many missions on the base. I'm always puzzled as to how I could possible miss large geologic features but that's just the way it is on Planet Ord. This just added to my growing aggravation as I slowly made my way back to my truck. I reached my vehicle as the sun started to set and I dumped a bunch of water on my head and changed my shirt. It was nice to get back to my vehicle. Then I climbed in and started up my beast and slipped it into gear and began my take-off roll towards the front gate and the highway.

In spite of being sore and sunburned it was a good day. I'm glad I did it.

Advice For Those Returning To School After Many Years Away.

Okay, Sports fans, I finished the Spring semester with 2 "A"s and a "C". Spanish was the "C", it kicked my butt because I farted around too much the first half of the semester. I had to downshift into high gear to save the class. I'm already signed up for Fall, I have Spanish and Marine Biology (and I may add an English class too but I'm not sure yet). Most of the folks who read this blog tend to be over 30 so I'm going to share some tips about returning to school. I'm doing this mostly for myself while things are still fresh.

1. Think about your schedule. If you are taking more than one class, try to arrange them so they don't conflict. Example: I had a Communications class that followed my Spanish class, so all that cool Spanish stuff just dribbled out of my brain. If I were to do it over I would have taken a later Spanish class and then parked my ass in the Language Lab for an hour afterwords.

2. If you can avoid early morning classes, do it. Two days a week I had to climb out of bed at 5:45 and while it isn't the end of the world it did suck. It did get me into the language lab for a full hour in the morning but I'm not sure that it was the better move. I had to work around my job so I had no choice.

3. By a serious backpack. Running back to your car is for the birds. A cheap backpack will let you down. I bought a cool pack with all kinds of side compartments to store cool stuff and stuff I needed.

• Cough drops. These things saved my life.
• Extra pens and pencils. I went to Staples and bought them by the box.
• Masking tape and glue sticks.
• Stapler.

4. Ask questions if you are not clear about something. I actually missed my first homework assignment because I didn't bother to clarify what she expected from me.

5. If you think that you need extra gear to get through class, buy it. It became clear early on that I would need a protractor, a compass set, rulers and colored pencils for my Marine Science class. I also bought a special organizer that had a built in calculator and a clear plastic clip board with a ruler on the side. All these things just made the labs so much easier and gave my work standout quality.

6. If your study partner sucks, get another one. Nice guys get a "C" in Spanish.

7. Don't wait for the teacher to tell blabbing students to shut the fuck up. Hey, you paid good money to be in this class, those two airheads are screwing you out of an education. You can bring your concerns to the teacher or you can confront the offenders after class and politely tell them to knock it off.

8. Figure out a way to get in more studying time. I thought that I could get time in at work, and I did but I couldn't count on getting that time on a daily basis. I tanked my Spanish mid-term because it came after Spring Break. I was so busy that I had zero time to study. I'm also buying a third pair of reading glasses to keep in my room to have at the ready.

9.Idiot-Proof your routine. Adults are masters of sabotaging themselves, I know I am so I developed a ruitine that kept me focused. The big backpack was one, since I had all of my books I had no reason not to study in the lab or the library or both. I had more pens and pencils than I needed in my pack so I was always ready. I made sure that I was a ready as I could be.

10. It's easier to get there early than to stay late. My Marine Science class was at 11:00am, so if I got to school at 8:30 I could kill an hour in the Language Lab and then study my notes in the library for an hour and a half before class. I know that I bitched about getting up early but there is a difference between being there early and HAVING to be there early. The flip-side was that on my days off it was all that I could do to stay an extra hour to study. I was thinking about all the other things I needed/wanted to do and I'd quickly develope happy feet and haul ass out of there.

If you're thinking about going back to school then do it. Take a class, even if it's just for fun. Plus, young people make you laugh.

The Blackhawk X-1 R.A.P.T.O.R. Backpack. (A Review)

In April I bought myself a birthday present. One of the smartest buys that I have ever made. I bought the X-1 RAPTOR from the cool folks at Blackhawk!.com and I love it.

As you know, I returned to school in February and found myself trucking around $350 in textbooks. I had a day pack that I use for hiking and it was quickly pressed to it's limit. As school progressed I found that I had to spend more time in the language lab to study. This mean that I had to hump around my Spanish textbook, workbook and notebook every day along with my Marine Science gear. My poor budget pack popped the chest strap one day and I knew that I needed something more serious. Since I've been researching my book I've become familiar with all kinds of military load-bearing equipment and for a while I used to wear web-gear when I hiked because it was perfect for day hiking and it scared the hippies. Sadly, my web-gear was stolen and I've used a $20 backpack to get around. I became aware of Blackhawk! from the Cav Store when I was looking for Nomex gloves (another story) and I sent away for their early catalog. Blackhawk! had great catalogs with cool pictures of Navy SEALs doing Navy SEAL stuff and they were the closest thing I'd experienced to the old Sears catalog as far as repeated cover-to-cover reading.

So once I decided I was getting a new pack I gave Blackhawk! the first look. At first I thought that I'd go with one of their hunting packs because I wasn't sure how well a military-style pack would go over on a college campus. They make nice hunting packs but they didn't look like they could pull off the dual-role mission. So I looked through the combat packs and settled upon the X-1 because it was big enough but not huge and the price ($230) was in my range. I ordered it in Olive Green so it would be neutral, they make it in desert tan and Army MARPAT camo pattern but OG seemed the way to go. I ordered it with Next Day delivery but there was a snafu. I e-mailed customer service and they e-mailed me right back (within ten minutes) and explained the situation and told me when to expect my pack. Well damned if it didn't show up exactly when they said it would, so I was happy even before I opened the box. I used to be in sales and I'm big on customer service and Blackhawk! has that covered. They should be proud. So I open up the box and lay eyes on my new backpack. I have to be honest, it wasn't love at first sight but that would soon change. This thing has a hydration bladder that holds 100ml of water, I didn't know that when I bought it and I was concerned about how this would effect the load carrying capacity. The inside of the main compartment features straps to secure gear, I assume for silent movement on a mission and I wonder how they will factor in my stuffing this thing to the gills.

So I load it up, I put all of my books in the main compartment and then put my Spanish dictionaries in the secondary compartment. Yes, that's right, it has a secondary compartment. I load all of my pens, pencils and reading glasses into the left side compartment. This compartment is clearly designed for M-16,M-4 magazines and features internal bands that are perfect for clipping my pens on. On the right side it has two thinner compartments. One that is clearly for a flashlight or maybe a sniper scope. I loaded a flashlight into that one. The second one is larger and has Velcro and an elastic chord, I assume this would be for either a radio or GPS or some kind of important piece of equipment that you don't want to lose. I stuffed a stapler, scissors and scotch tape into that one. Finally there is a small outer compartment that I stuff my cough-drops into. I assume you would put maps or MRE's in here. So once I had it loaded I waited until Monday to see how things went.

Monday I grabbed my pack and headed out the door. I stuffed it behind the driver's seat and it sat there like a Sumo wrestler, very cool. When I got to school I hauled it out and slung it onto my back. Good fit. I went to tighten my shoulder straps and was surprised to find that I could do this easily. This is the heaviest amount of weight I've had on my back since my operation and while it's not a combat load or anything close it is heavier than my old pack could handle. The easy adjustment makes the load comfortable to carry since I can shift the weight into my sweet-spot. The pack has an innovative foam back panel that is ventilated so I don't sweat like a pig during the long walk from my truck to my class. It is just a damned comfortable pack to wear. As it turned out, it is also much larger than I first though. I have actually "Lost" my Spanish dictionary in it because I forgot which compartment I'd put it in. The pack is solidly constructed from 1000 denier nylon and breaks-in well. The compartments are zippered and pretty quiet. I've been hauling the pack around every day and I'm really happy with it, I cannot wait to get it out on a hike if for no other reason then it won't be as heavy as it is during school.

I would argue that this pack has made my grades in Spanish go up because I can now hit the language lab every day without walking the quarter-mile back to my truck to swap out books. I think I'm going to have this pack for a very long time.

Screw Tibet

I have been watching the hypocrisy that is the Olympic Torch protests and shaking my head a lot. The kicker came last week when the torch came to San Francisco and the city did something right for once and changed the route at the last moment. Protesters had a hissy-fit for the rest of the week because they were denied something or other and that San Francisco played into the Chinese propaganda machine.

Screw them and the horse they rode in on.

Here's my problem. Less than ten days before most of those same people who were out there protesting Chinese oppression were in the streets protesting the war in Iraq and demanding the U.S. withdraw. Six years ago the people of Iraq (the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south) were also living under the exact same oppression that the folks in Tibet live under today. Sanctions had not worked, innocent Iraqis were being tortured, raped and murdered and President Bush wanted to believe that Saddam's ties to international terrorists made him a threat to the National Security of the United States...so he invaded Iraq. He invaded Iraq and freed the oppressed people of Iraq from the Baath Party and Saddam Hussein. No, there weren't any WMDs and Iraq's over-all threat to the U.S. will be the subject of debate for the rest of the century but that honest fact is that Bush did a good thing. Any true American recognizes this. Now Iraq isn't going to turn into Omaha, Nebraska. Not ever. Whatever it does turn into it will be much different than what the White House had envisioned but there is a chance to establish a true democracy in the Middle East and this makes our continued presence in Iraq paramount to allow the new government to take flight.

Yet these people protested this fact. They protested against liberty.

During the second faze of Iraq, when the insurgency started, the protesters in San Francisco marched in support. This in spite of the fact that the insurgency was targeting educators, doctors and intellectuals which in other countries always draws a huge outcry; yet the SF protesters marched in support of the insurgents. Then last week they march in opposition to China for doing the exact same thing that their Iraqi Insurgent heroes continue to do. What is it that the protesters believe? Why is oppression and murder okay when committed in Iraq by our enemies but not okay when committed by China? What am I missing here? Alright, I'm not actually missing anything. These people are so socially and politically inbred that they are intellectually dead. No person who's intellectually living thinks that pulling out of Iraq is a smart idea. They may not like the war but they understand the bigger picture.

Let us examine the history of these morons. It underlines their hypocrisy.

Remember when most of these folks started marching in the streets? It was during the Vietnam war. We were fighting to keep the Communist North from taking over the South. All that Communism was coming from both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China and it was spreading into Laos and Cambodia. It wasn't being spread by a willing population but by brutal tactics. For some reason the college kids thought that this was okay, I suggest this because they would often march carrying posters of Chairman Mao. For some reason the U.S. was the bad guy in the war and we needed to get the hell out of there so that those poor Vietnamese folks could determine their own future. So eventually we did just that. Let me underline what the anti-war toads were saying:

"What ever communist countries do in Asia it's fine by us!"

This should include, if I follow the logic, the way China deals with Tibet. We were fighting the way China does business in SE Asia, that was the god damned point. So you cannot turn around and feel bad because of Chinese oppression in Tibet. Those protesters of the 1960s sealed Tibet's fate.

Either America is in the liberation business or it is not. You can't have it both ways. If you want us out of Iraq then Tibet has to suck on it too. Seriously, what are the grand plans to get China to leave Tibet? Sanctions? China makes everything and has enough backdoor deals to get the stuff it doesn't make. Maybe a strongly worded letter from the UN? Oh, do please try that one, I love to watch Chinese people laugh. China isn't going anywhere, Taiwan is talking about re-establishing relations and the US is in debt up to it's eyeballs to China.

Why should China listen to us anyway. If you're not willing to send guys with guns to free Tibet then they've got nothing to loose.

Grow up.

My Brilliant Plan To Reform Washington - Green Friendly!

Our founding Fathers had figured it out; put the nation's capital in the middle of a swamp and it will deter folks from getting too comfortable in the seats and corridors of power. It worked for about 100 years too and the few career politicians were so slimy that they belonged in a swamp.

The problem is that the founding fathers didn't anticipate air conditioning.

So today, Washington D.C., instead of being filled with poisonous snakes, mosquitoes and toads is now overrun with even lower forms of life. There seems to be no way to dislodge them either.

Thus I have devised a plan:

Outlaw AC within Washington D.C. and mandate that no lawmaker take a vacation between June and October.

It's so simple, we can simply turn up the heat on these people and make them go away. Not just lawmakers will succumb to the heat either; lobbyists and career upper government management types will wilt in the heat and leave DC for cooler climate. Think of the energy the East Coast will save as well. I'm not sure of the exact ratio but removing one career politician from Washington D.C. is like putting 10,000 Americans back to work.

I don't know why I have to think of this stuff. Get on this you people.

I Want Clinton To Take It To The Convention

Don't quit, Hillary.

No way.

The Democratic Party needs a good dose of DEMOCRACY for once. The choice is not clear and there should be a debate and maybe even a full on fist-fight on the floor of the convention. That's the way it used to be and it's refreshing to see it looming once again because the Party needs to decide what it is to become and what direction it will go in the future. The first President Clinton moved the party away from is weak, leftist ties and moved it towards the center and this allowed it to become a realistic option in 2006 to replace a screwed-up Republican Party in the Congress. Democrats elected in 2006 were not far-left freakazoids but (YIKES!) fiscally responsible, level headed thinking types. These were not Howard Dean/Nancy Pelosi flakes but serious roots for a productive and respectable Democratic Party of the future. Obama represents a giant step backwards to the policies and philosophies that brought the party down and turned it into a bad joke. To force Hillary out of a race that is clearly not settled shows a darker side of the Democratic Party that for some reason the party leadership can't understand how much this turns the average American off. Fair is Fair.

Then again, if the Democratic Party was at all interested in fairness they would have counted Florida and Michigan primaries. Instead the Party decided to - PUNISH - the voters in those states for making the choice to move up their primary elections so that they would have a say in the choice of candidates for the White House. PUNISHED. PUNISHED for exercising their right to vote and when they damn well please to.

What a wonderful message to America: "Fuck you, it's our way or the highway".

That is the message to Floridians and Michigan voters, if you otherwise you are a fool. Speaking of fools, all of this can be laid at the feet of Howard Dean, the Democratic Party Chair, a man who is in the wrong position at the wrong time and is undermining the Party's forward progress with every decision he makes. The downward spiral will speed up with an early Hillary departure as Americans would then focus on Obama, who is a troubled candidate in so many ways.

This process should be taken to the convention floor where a genuine debate might actually take place. I think that this would be a bright moment in US history as the democratic process gets a full workout for the first time in a great while in the United States.

Point Lobos, Because I Can

Wednesday found me with four hours to kill on the Big Sur coast. I was in a great mood because I had just had my breaks done and I'm now mobile again. My Marine Science class had intended to go on a field trip but it was rained out half way through so we scheduled a make-up session and I chose to tag along with the PM class so I could have Thursday off all together. This meant linking up with them at Garapada Beach at 6:30pm and since my last class wrapped up at noon I had to figure out how to kill all of that time. I have no money so shopping was out and I needed to begin a new fitness regime so I headed down to Point Lobos.

Since 2001, I haven't been on that side of the hill. Carmel is my home but it sure ain't my town any more. Driving through the city I silently grieved for my home town that has lost it's way. The building of over-sized homes in Carmel is an obscenity and I'm glad I don't live in a place where such vile tackiness is allowed. I drove past my boyhood home and the folks there are keeping te place in great shape. I then headed down Pacific Coast Highway 1 to Point Lobos. Since I'm a broke college student I parked on the highway and walked into the park for free and first went to the east side of Whaler's Cove. The place has been overgrown with young Monterey Pine which were planted by the state to replace the ones killed by the Pitch Canker pandemic that wiped out thousands of pine trees. I made the shoreline and I began my transformation back into the spiritual creature that I keep hidden from the world and spent time photographing rock formations as the ocean hissed it's ancient song to me in the background.

Once I'd seen enough at this location I turned and went south on a trail the bisects the park at it's widest point and too me into the beautiful Forest. It has begun to bloom so in the mid-afternoon light the forest glowed green with highlights of purple wildflowers. I could hear cars speeding past the park a hundred yards away and I felt sorry for those people because this place is so amazing and they were missing it. At the mid-point of this trail I encountered a dead Monterey Pine that was still standing tall, it's branches weathered and bare. I stopped for a second to really think about what I was looking at; this was a tree that sprang to life about 120 years ago and had seen many changes. Even though it was all but dead it wouldn't surrender to gravity, at least not now and stood there defiant in the forest daring God to knock it down. It made me think about if I had been alive 120 years ago, how would I have defined myself in the world? Who would I have been back then? Would I be so different? I mulled over these questions for the rest of the hike until I made it to the south shore of Point Lobos. I never answered those questions either, I just didn't have a clue.

I worked my way along the shore photographing rock formations. Ansel Adams and Edward Weston photographed many of the same places 60 years ago and I already know that I will return soon with black & white film to duplicate some of their work. I stopped at the tide pools and lost myself for a while inside of the mini-worlds offered in each one. Tiny fish, Hermit Crabs and larger crabs seemed to lounge around as they waited for the sea to return. Then it was time to head south so I walked the mile back to my truck and drove down to Garapada. When I arrived the sun had begun to drop making a quarter of the horizon vanish into a bright, shimmering light. The wind was cold and I bundled up. I went down to the beach to shoot pictures in advance and then decided to get back to my truck because it was freezing. Once I returned to the road I looked out and saw the spout of a whale about 500 yards off shore. I grabbed my binoculars and saw the giant tail disappear into the water. So I decided that I would sit in the bed of my truck and count whales until the gang showed up and that's exactly what I did.

I counted 28 Gray Whales. Just a great way to kill an hour and a half if you ask me.

I love it here.

Science...Who Knew?

I'm now heading into my seventh week of school and it turns out that Marine Science is my strong suit. I mean, it's a great class and I'm doing great with the subject. I mean today we looked at rocks but not they're not just rocks they're Igneous, Lithogenous or Biogenous rocks. Holy crap, those were three words that weren't in my vocabulary let alone being able to tell you about them.

It seems I've found my major.

Monterey is Disneyland for Marine Scientists of every stripe, I'm going to be one of them.

I'm still writing my book and all but Marine Science looks like something I can make a difference in. It seems that most scientists are so focused on their specialty that they have little knowledge of other things. Subjects such as local history and folklore would give scientists of every discipline an advantage in their studies. I can bring that to Geology and study of the Marine environment.

This is going to be fun.

So I Watched "Outfoxed" In My Communication Class...

I'm taking Communications at my local Junior College and it's a cool class. I figure that since I'm writing a book and I'm thinking about doing something with film or TV I should get a serious background and I'm learning a lot of new stuff that I didn't know before. So today we watched about an hour of "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism", the intention being to show the influence of Fox News upon the cable news industry. You can tell from the title that it's not a favorable portrait of Fox News but the film is flawed in many ways. In the end the hypocrisy of the story telling overwhelms a very important message about the sad state of what passes for journalism today.

To be fair and balanced (he he) I should tell you that I don't like Fox News over all. I like Sheppard Smith and I will watch Bill O'Reily once in a while depending on what story he's covering because the guy can be entertaining and even right about certain issues. Beyond that I find that Fox News gives me mental diarrhea. Working in a Motel with the TV on for eight hours has given me a front row seat and since I'm a news junkie I have one of the three cable news outlets on at any time (unless LOST, Smallville or The Office is on) and I have seen everything that passes for Cable News at one time or another. Fox's morning show, 'Fox & Friends" is so vapid that it actually sucks IQ points from my brain. The hosts are the stupidest humans in North America and I didn't think anyone could beat the Today Show in that department. I picture the office manager for Fox & Friends deciding to stalk the supply cabinet with the kind of paste they use in Kindergarten because the Hosts are prone to eating glue. Gerraldo Rivera? What can I say? Fox News and Gerraldo are a match made in Heaven. Fox News is my main source of missing college kids, murdered housewives and scary news stories. So "Outfoxed" should have made my day, but it didn't.

The problem with the movie is that all the source material comes from Left-Wing and FAR-LEFT organizations and even thought the film starts off well it quickly slides into an unfocused mess. At about the half-hour mark the film loses it's focus on journalism and heads into political issues. Fox has never tried to hide their point of view, they're like a Right-Wing Pravda and there's no point in emphasising the obvious. Yet the director cannot help himself and it quickly becomes a shrill, anti-Bush, anti-Republican, anti-Christian rant. From here there is a sad, intellectual blindness that hurts the film's credibility. The prime example is an on-air confrontation between Fox's Bill O'Reily and an anti-war activist named Jeremy Glick, who was using the fact that his father had been killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center to give himself legitimacy. O'Reily has a patriotic hissy-fit and everything that comes out of Glick's mouth just tick's him off even more. O'Reily kills the interview and they have security escort Glick from the studio. Not Bill's best day. The problem is that the documentary tries to say that O'Reily then misstated what Glick had said on the broadcast. They dispute O'Reily's claim that Glick claimed that Bush (George HW Bush) was to blame for the attacks of 9/11 and imply that Glick hadn't even implied this. Yet when you check the transcripts that is EXACTLY what he implied:

Glick:...is that in - six months before the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, starting in the Carter administration and escalating while Bush's father was head of the CIA, we recruited hundred thousand radical mujahadeens to combat a democratic government in Afghanistan, the Turaki government.

Later:

Glick: Why would I want to brutalize and further punish the people in Afghanistan...

O'Reily: Who killed your father!

Glick:...didn't kill my father.

O'Reily: Sure they did. The Al Qaeda people were trained there.

Glick: The Al Qaeda people? What about the Afghan people?

O'Reily: See, I'm more angry about it than you are!

Glick: So what about George Bush?

O'Reily: What about George Bush? He had nothing to do with it.

Glick: The director - senior as director of CIA.

O'Reily: He had nothing to do with it.

Glick: So the people that trained a hundred thousand Mujahadeen who were...

Later:

O'Reily: As respect - as respect - in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians...

Glick: By radical extremists who were trained by this government...

**I'll comment on this at the bottom**

The film shows this exchange in it's entirety and yet the film then tries to tell you that he (Glick) didn't say what he said. This is sad and a telling commentary about the true power of Fox News.

As Fox News rose in rating's prominence the competing cable news channels and even the network news agencies took notice. When I say they took notice, what I mean is that they began to freak out. CNN, once the most reliable news source in the world, has now become a sad, cowering shadow of it's former self. No longer news-driven, CNN now frames it's news into packaged stories just as Fox News does and they populate the morning with pleasant talking heads who seem to be gunning for Fox's reign of vapidness. Or is it vapidity? Anyway, CNN is like a sinking aircraft carrier, you hate to see it go but you cannot help but watch. I should state that CNN' downfall stems from other factors as well: relocating from Atlanta to New York and the sale by Ted Turner, who's maverick outlook on life was reflected by his news network. CNN is competing with MSNBC in the race to see which one can become the Liberal answer to Fox News. MSNBC's actions are probably less forgivable than CNN's because of it's lineage to NBC News, and there was a time when NBC was the best television news for about twenty years. MSNBC is a mess. They have decided to directly counter Fox News' flagship shows with alternative programming. Keith Olbermann runs opposite Bill O'Reily and just like O'Reily there is very little credibly news and a lot of opinion. So for that hour there is no real news discussed on two of the three cable news networks. MSNBC does have Chris Matthews, who's been around the track enough that you can get information from him that you can't get elsewhere.

The problem is that instead of being quality news outlets, CNN and MSNBC are trying to play Rupert Murdoch's game and we viewers are the ones who are losing out. Because Fox News's format is profitable the other cable news networks ( specifically the corporations that own them) are losing their grip on credibility from all of their drooling as they chase Fox's money train. The greatest evil today is that news agencies (papers, TV and radio) are owned by companies that do not understand news and need to make higher profits. While it is possible to get rich with a news organization you (if you are smart) have to live with about an 8% to 12% profit margin. Those margins give regular companies a heart attack, so when some corporation buys a news organization and they look at the books they immediately try to figure out how to boost that margin to 19% to 25% (or more). So they first start to cut positions and consolidate the newsroom. The first thing to go are the foreign correspondents. In the 1960s and 1970s viewers then could count on reliable coverage from just about anywhere in the world. ABC, CBS and NBC all had foreign correspondents all over the globe. They were invaluable because they lived in the countries that they covered and we able to offer perspective and insight that is lost today. The next to be cut are editors and with them go little things like common sense and rational thinking. Stories today just aren't as well sourced as they once were and this has eroded credibility with the public as increasingly stories run my major network and cable news outlets are proven to be wrong. The Internet today features dozens of blogs that do nothing but correct news stories and the bi product of this is that the public has begun to turn to blogs to get their news.

This is all due to Fox News and it's business model: Political one-sidedness+ sensational stories+sleazy stories+ loudmouth pundits = $$$. Who cares if any of it is correct of even true?

"It's not a lie if you believe it" George Costanza, Seinfeld.

**

Mr.Glick is confused, as many Americans are about who the Mujahadeen were. More specifically he is clueless as to who the CIA trained.

The CIA trained Afghan refugees in camps along the Pakistan/Afghan border. Foreign fighters were usually on their own and this included the Arabs. Osama bin Laden had been contacted by a third party and asked if he desired assistance from the CIA and he said no and for two reasons: 1. He felt that this was a Muslim cause and the west should but out and 2. He hated the United States even back then. So Glick's assertion that the CIA trained the men who would later make up Al Qaeda is false.

The Taraki government was not democratically elected. He came to power in a Communist coup. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan as his government began to fail. Glicks assertion that we had over-thrown a lawful government in Afghanistan is false. Worse, he overlooks the mass-murder of civilians by Soviet forces during their occupation.

George H W Bush was director of the CIA from 1976 to 1977. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It wouldn't be until 1981 that the CIA would get serious about training the Mujaheddin.

Once again Glick is wrong.

Al Qaeda is a sophisticated organization run by very smart men. Their capabilities are matched only by their sense of dramatic irony. The fact that their pilots all trained in the United States speaks to both.

Junior College 22 Years Later

The last time I walked out of a classroom at the Junior College it was 1986 and I had finished Music Theory. I got a "B".

I was not a serious student when I was a teenager, the only reason that I'd even sign up was so that my mother's medical insurance would cover me. I took Arabic and did well in that class but my college transcript is a wasteland of drops and incompletes. Then my family situation changed and I was forced into working full time. Working full time meant that I no longer paid attention to the semesters and time of year so by the time I'd think about registering for a class it was too late. Time went on and I just settled into my life.

Then last December I was goofing around on the Net and went to the local JC's website and looked at the classes and schedules. I then registered and then signed up for three classes: Spanish 1A, Introduction to Communications and Marine Science. This week I went back to school for the first time and it has been fun and not the stressful encounter that I thought it was going to be. The teachers are all really great at what they do and I can already fumble around greeting people and asking them where they are from and where they live in Spanish. The biggest suprise has been Marine Science because it is shaping up to be the most fun of all three classes, this to the point of maybe making Marine Science my major. The teacher is really into his subject and interested in his students which makes for a positive environment.

The coolest thing about this turn at education is that there isn't the social pressure that I felt when I was a kid. I don't know anybody here now and I'm older than 95% of the students and thus I am free from the soap opera that underscored school in my youth. You know, worrying about how cool people think I am, worrying about looking lame in front of women and just the whole post-Highschool social pecking order that I'm no longer involved in. The saddest thing about the local junior college (or any local JC) is that you will have students who try to maintain their highschool's social climate. It's sad because they still act like it's highschool and they disrupt classrooms as they insist on talking durring lectures and they take their show to the student common areas where they perpetuate their immature behavior. I paid for my enrollment with my VISA card. I wonder how the hell they paid for their classes?

Anyway, I am a free man. A Grown up. I'm going to school to work for my future.

It feels good

The Bullwinkle Question

There has been a serious push to draft Bullwinkle into the 2008 Presidential race. I understand to felling behind it, the ugliness of the Democratic race and the snore fest that is the Republican Party, but is Bullwinkle really the answer?

Bullwinkle has always been a hack and the only reason he’s anywhere today is because he’s ridden Rocky the Squirrel’s coat tails. During his college days at Wattsamatta U, Bullwinkle spent most of his time in his mohair jacket partying and going to football games. He has never addressed the rumor of joining Skull & Bones even to this day. Worse, there are rumors that while in Indonesia, Bullwinkle J. Moose attended a madrassa and that the “J” of his middle name stands for “Jihad”. It is no surprise that Bullwinkle would team up with one Rocket J. Squirrel; perhaps they met at the same radical mosque.

Supporters point to Bullwinkle’s success in fighting Pottsylvanian terrorist Boris Badenov as his chief qualification to lead the United States in its war on terror. However, documents made public under the Freedom of Information act show that Bullwinkle’s success was largely due to Badenov’s incompetence and not any tactical or strategic prowess on Mr. Moose’s part. Some charge that the whole conflict between Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov was staged and funded by Israel’s Mossad as a “False Flag” operation. Whatever the truth may be one fact remains, Bullwinkle’s anti-Pottsylvanian operations cost the American taxpayer untold amounts of money. These days Bullwinkle can’t seem to make a speech without mentioning Badenov and this is yet another sign that there is no THERE there. If you take away Boris Badenov from Bullwinkle’s past and what do you really have?

Yet people seem to be attracted to his populist ideals. Me, I see his folksy charm for what it is: Buffoonery. Go ahead, draft Bullwinkle if you must but don’t expence me to get on board with this one.

Oh, and if he says anything about pulling a rabbit out of his hat? RUN!

The Bullwinkle Question

There has been a serious push to draft Bullwinkle into the 2008 Presidential race. I understand to felling behind it, the ugliness of the Democratic race and the snore fest that is the Republican Party, but is Bullwinkle really the answer?

Bullwinkle has always been a hack and the only reason he’s anywhere today is because he’s ridden Rocky the Squirrel’s coat tails. During his college days at Wattsamatta U, Bullwinkle spent most of his time in his mohair jacket partying and going to football games. He has never addressed the rumor of joining Skull & Bones even to this day. Worse, there are rumors that while in Indonesia, Bullwinkle J. Moose attended a madrassa and that the “J” of his middle name stands for “Jihad”. It is no surprise that Bullwinkle would team up with one Rocket J. Squirrel; perhaps they met at the same radical mosque.

Supporters point to Bullwinkle’s success in fighting Pottsylvanian terrorist Boris Badenov as his chief qualification to lead the United States in its war on terror. However, documents made public under the Freedom of Information act show that Bullwinkle’s success was largely due to Badenov’s incompetence and not any tactical or strategic prowess on Mr. Moose’s part. Some charge that the whole conflict between Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov was staged and funded by Israel’s Mossad as a “False Flag” operation. Whatever the truth may be one fact remains, Bullwinkle’s anti-Pottsylvanian operations cost the American taxpayer untold amounts of money. These days Bullwinkle can’t seem to make a speech without mentioning Badenov and this is yet another sign that there is no THERE there. If you take away Boris Badenov from Bullwinkle’s past and what do you really have?

Yet people seem to be attracted to his populist ideals. Me, I see his folksy charm for what it is: Buffoonery. Go ahead, draft Bullwinkle if you must but don’t expect me to get on board with this one.

Oh, and if he says anything about pulling a rabbit out of his hat? RUN!