Xenia has another video up. If you ever wondered how to pronounce her name this will remove all doubt on that issue.
You’d be so much more dangerous after law school. Barb may have saved the world from… I’m not sure what. It would be scary.
Sean Flynn
April 9, 2007 17:28
[I once told Sean that I had briefly considered going to law school. That idea was quickly quashed when Barb threatened to divorce me if I did. She accuses me of already being too argumentative (I object to that accusation!).–Joe]
She’s even cute in a video with a bag over her head. At four minutes it is a little long. But that doesn’t stop a father from being proud.
Hope you get a good laugh out of this. According to the felons at PNNL/Battelle the picture below constitutes “adult content”. In the big picture of things this might not even be brought up later on. It’s just a minor example of the egregious nature of the pretexts they used to justify firing me.
This picture was taken by my daughter Xenia at a public fair in Moscow, Idaho on April 30, 2005. I had viewed her Live Journal post believing PNNL’s “reasonable use” policy for company computers would include such material. The image was cached by the web browser and their scan of the hard disk revealed it. I wouldn’t have guessed that it would run afoul of their “adult content” policy or imagine someone would have the gall to use such a picture as a pretext to fire me. Perhaps my daughter’s friend should have been wearing a burqa.
Update: Perhaps that picture is more “interesting” than I thought. PNNL investigators viewed that picture on Xenia’s Live Journal five times. “PUCK” viewed it four times and “WD31448” (Una Carriera) viewed it once as well:
Very, very interesting…
Xenia decided to participate in a Live Journal “A day in my life”. She chose last Saturday when we went to Portland. The results are here.
It was while we were there that I discovered one of our identical quadruplets is gone. We are down to just three now:
Since they kind of keep to themselves and are generally doing their own thing I hadn’t noticed until the Xenia that was with us posted the picture and I asked, “Where’s the other one?!!!!” Xenia immediately, and without any guilt whatsoever said, “We killed her.” Then she gave me “the look” which in this context meant, “So what do you think you are going to do about it?” She was right of course. As far as proof we can only prove the one. And which one is missing? And how do you know she is missing?
[heavy sigh]
Our little murderess also posted a bunch of picture of Voodoo donuts and other highlights of her spring break trip here.
For Barb’s birthday she brought Xenia over to the Seattle area and we celebrated over here. Friday night we had dinner with James at Todai in Redmond where Barb got a free dinner. Xenia, Barb and I then drove to Vancouver (Washington) to spend the night before visiting Portland Oregon on Saturday.
We arrived at Powell’s Books shortly after they opened. Xenia and Barb wandered off into the main store and I headed over to the technical book store a couple blocks away. I didn’t expect to buy anything. I’ve been listening to all my books recently and just don’t have time to actually read anything. But it’s always fun to look. If I had just gone straight to the corner and set up camp with my computer like I had planned after doing a little bit of book browsing I would have been better off. As it was I looked at the books on explosives like I always do when I’m there. There were several books that I had not seen before. And they all looked so useful. I couldn’t resist and had to confess when I reported back to Barb and Xenia at lunch time. They dropped any hint of guilt over their baskets full of books and went back for more.
We then went to Voodoo Donuts (as recommended by Ry with this blog posting) for lunch. Yeah, I know, donuts for lunch. But it was Barb’s birthday weekend. The donuts were good and the location is, well… let just say it has lots of character.
We made it back to the Seattle area in time to stop by Fry’s and buy Xenia a laptop computer for her graduation present then take James and Xenia out to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Redmond before retiring for the night. I was really crashing and James claimed it was because of all the donuts I had eaten earlier and he was not the least bit sympathetic.
Then this morning Barb and Xenia left to return to Moscow, Idaho. [heavy sigh] Tonight, again, I sleep alone…
I was talking to our son James last night at dinner and he said he kept expecting to hear my thoughts “on the D.C. case”. Sure I had posted several quotes and a few links and made a few brief comments. But where was the rest of it? And, also, he wanted credit for bringing it to my attention in an instant message several hours after the decision had been released. I had been very absorbed in work and the just recently reformatted the hard drive on my home desktop machine and was still installing things and recovering my normal environment. That meant I didn’t have my email running which meant my alerts weren’t coming through and I wasn’t reading any of the blogs. I was really out of touch and James gets full credit for getting this important case to my attention.
The decision itself is here.
I’m really pleased Silberman mentioned nearly every thing I do in An Individual Right. Because of that there is virtually nothing for me to say beyond “two thumbs up” on the decision itself. What happens next is more interesting.
Watching the anti-gun bigots turn purple with rage (and here) has been fun. There will be a lot more of that in the coming months and I expect this decision and their rage will make gun control an issue during the next election. Both major parties wish it would just go away and Parker V. D.C. means the statists will be afraid they will lose their “right” to have gun control laws. They will be screaming bloody murder as this case heads toward the Supreme Court and the 2nd Amendment will likely end up being a litmus test for all Federal judges (not just Supreme Court justices) being appointed for the next few years.
The most interesting questions to me are:
There are various ways to look at the Supreme Court’s avoidance of 2nd Amendment cases in the last 70 years. My favorite, based on purely emotional criteria, view is that they haven’t taken it up because they didn’t want to rule against it. The following is based in a large part on that totally unsubstantiated mindset.
The Supreme Court does not operate in a political vacuum. I was young but not totally unaware of the political fever of the 60’s and the events that contributed to The Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA68). In those times it would have been hard for the court to resist the political winds and strike down a law that had such modest infringements on the 2nd Amendment guaranteed rights as GCA68 did. In the years since then there have been some potential cases but in nearly all of them there wasn’t a “poster child” that both side were willing to support all the way to the top until Emerson. And even Emerson wasn’t the perfect poster child. He did a stupid things with his gun–brandishing it to his wife whom he was in the middle of divorce. And the political winds of the time were blowing pretty hard against domestic violence perpetrators. The Supremes declined to hear that case as well.
NFA34 had similar political winds blowing at the time and avoided the 2nd Amendment issue in part because it was a tax, not a ban, on firearms. In 1939 the famous Miller case made it to the top court but with Miller nowhere to be found his attorney didn’t bother to show up and the case was decided against us. Miller wasn’t a poster child for our side but if I had the ability to go back in time with the purpose protecting our 2nd Amendment rights 1939 is the time and his lawyer’s office is the place I would show up. I’d give the lawyer $1000 and tell him there was another $10,000 for him if he won the case at the Supreme Court. My guess is that case would have gone the other way and gun rights advocates would have saved billions of dollars, 100’s of thousands of hours, and 10’s of thousands of lives would have been saved. But the only time machine I have is stuck in the forward direction advancing at 1 second for every 1000 milliseconds. I therefore have to concentrate on the future.
It’s would be hard to find better poster children than Parker, et al. Years ago I heard one gun rights leader joke that we needed a elderly, female, person of color, who had never even received a traffic ticket, and was confined in a wheel chair for our case to take to the top. Prosecutors don’t try to put people like that in jail for defending themselves even if they do it illegally. Because of this it was considered unlikely we would ever be able to get a case that we could take to the Supreme court that was winnable. Parker and friends don’t meet that criteria (I think one is confined to a wheelchair but I can’t seem to verify it at the moment) but they may be good enough.
Yes, I know, decisions of law shouldn’t be decided on the basis of who the defendant is. Legally it shouldn’t matter whether it was an elderly, disabled, woman or a young male in the KKK being tried for possession of a banned self-defense tool. The reality is that it does matter. And it especially matters when it’s the first case being tried.
On the other side of the equation from the defendant is the law in question. GCA68, which required a lot of debate to get passed, had relatively mild restrictions on firearm ownership. It wasn’t difficult to argue that GCA68 didn’t place more than a small speed bump in the path of any “good citizen” wanted a firearm. There are “reasonable restrictions” on rights guaranteed by the First Amendment so it’s not surprising that arguments are made that “reasonable restrictions” on the 2nd Amendment get some traction.
What helps our side in the D.C. case is that it is a complete ban on possessing handguns and functionally disabling all long guns for all private citizens. Other restrictions such as those on short barreled shotguns, fully automatically weapons, destructive devices, and restricted access to certain classes of people would be troublesome for our side if brought to the top court. One can argue they are “reasonable restrictions” and that the 2nd Amendment is not infringed because you still have some firearms available. In fact The Gun Guys in a mass email I received actually argues this for the existing case, “You can own a shotgun or rifle in the District of Columbia, so the ‘right to bear arms’ was not infringed upon in the first place.” But even casual observers recognize he is nuts. And Judge Silberman, writing for the majority, shot this argument down with, “We think that argument frivolous. It could be similarly contended that all firearms may be banned so long as sabers were permitted.”
Even if this law had been brought up in the late seventies, shortly after the D.C. law was enacted, courts might have been willing to say it was “reasonable” to assume such a law would save lives. After demonstrating the abject failure of the law for the last thirty years no reasoning person can claim the law needs just a little more time before it’s benefits will show up.
We have other Federal districts that have ruled the 2nd Amendment is not an individual right. While this was and is very discouraging and makes bad precedent with the Parker ruling the other direction it means the Supreme court can’t easily ignore the case. They will have to do a very fancy verbal tap-dance to justify to themselves that they should not get involved.
The 2nd Amendment has never been ruled to apply to the states via enforcement of the 14th Amendment. Parker, et al. sidestepped this issue by not addressing a state law.
Hence without a poster child and 70+ years of infringement the 2nd Amendment has been eroded to the point the anti-gun bigots have gotten too cocky. It is very difficult to argue we don’t have an infringement case. It’s very difficult to argue that Parker et al. belong to some special class of people unless you are willing to claim, as some are, that the 2nd Amendment only applies to governments arming themselves. We have our poster children, we have infringement, and we have different jurisdictions ruling in opposite directions. I think the Supreme court will, most likely, take the case.
There were a lot of gun rights leaders quietly engineering (at least one of them does have a degree in engineering) this case for years knowing that if a court case were to be successful it would have to be designed just right. The only 2nd Amendment case they dared push had to be a wedge with no rough edges to get caught by some legal or political nuance. They may have succeeded. It certainly looks like they have a good design and it has survived contact with the enemy.
This is a different conclusion than I predicted just three months ago. This is because I didn’t foresee Parker going our way at the appeals court level. What Silberman did was write (with the help of the plaintiffs attorneys–thank you!) such a narrow opinion that ruling in our favor won’t risk releasing thousands of scumbags from jail. Hence the courts can relieve themselves of the burden of throwing society into chaos with a favorable ruling in our direction.
Assuming they take the case how will they decide? As I said before they will do everything they can to avoid throwing thousands of convictions into question with a broad ruling. They won’t suddenly agree “…shall not be infringed” means what it says. They will either rule the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual right in a very narrow window of situations or they will rule it does not apply to individuals. With the current political climate it’s not a slam dunk either way but I expect it will go our way. The anti-gun bigots must think that too. Otherwise you would hear them claiming the Parker decision will be thrown out by the Supreme Court and they don’t appear to be saying that. They are just wailing about the end of the world which is music to my ears.
If the Supreme Court decides in favor of freedom there will be almost immediate challenges to New York City and Chicago gun laws. City and state legislative bodies will scramble to preserve whatever they can to keep “those uppity gun owners” in place. With the 2nd Amendment ruled to be an individual right California and other states “assault weapon” bans may be revisited by the courts since at least some of those were based on ruling that declared the 2nd Amendment didn’t guarantee an individual right. They may or may not be able to find sufficient foothold in the Supreme Court decision to maintain their oppressive laws. It all depends on the exact wording the Supremes come up with. I expect bans on full autos, destructive devices, and suppressors will be very safe for a long time. I hope than any challenges to them are carefully and narrowly designed such that any opening created by the Parker wedge can be further widened rather than slammed shut at that level.
If the Supreme Court decides in favor of statism then things could get ugly. But the Supremes will have anticipated this too and write a ruling that gives us some sort of bone to gnaw on. Something hoped to prevent a violent response. A lot of legislatures sort of tiptoed around the 2nd Amendment issue and will be remarkably emboldened if they don’t have that shadow hanging over their heads. Things will get worse for our side fairly quickly in a lot of states with some states standing fast to our status quo at least for the next several years. In some states there is a strong constitutional guaranteed right to keep and bear arms and the main restrictions will come from the Feds. Over the coming decades the right to keep and bear arms will become just a few paragraphs in the history books or there will be a civil war fought over it perhaps fueled with some other anti-freedom decisions along the lines of McCain-Feingold or Kelo v. City of New London.
So James, there you have it. My thoughts on the Parker decision. Now let’s have a good time watching 300 this afternoon.
Xenia redesigned her website. Wow. Our little artist.
She showed me her “progress report” this weekend. It was her grades so far this semester. She got an A+ in sculpture, a couple A’s, and two A-‘s. Barb and I have no idea where she gets the artist stuff from. And with me being an engineer… I joked with her about that A+ in an art subject and said something like, “You’ve got to do something about that. I’m so embarrassed that you got a grade like that.” She gave me “the look” and said, “You’re not my father!” So I told her, “You’re grounded for a month for getting the two A-‘s.”
It’s interesting to me how I’m so frequently associated with survivalists. Just because I’m into guns, explosives, and live in Idaho shouldn’t necessarily mean I have anything to do with survivalists. Sure, I have a electric generator but it’s for Boomershoot. Sure I know a lot about growing both animals and plants for food. But that’s because I grew up on a farm. I even went hunting once. But I don’t consider myself even loosely associated with the survivalist crowd. Not that I think associating with them is something to be avoided. I just don’t think it’s accurate to make that link.
Over at Survival Blog part of my post on biofuels and farmers was picked up as the quote of the day.
My brother Doug still lives on the farm. While visiting recently we talked about the recent trend to make grain into fuel. It’s been done for years but recently there has been a lot of new ethanol plants going in and using up a lot of the corn production. We don’t raise any corn on the farm but prices for wheat and barley have risen because the corn previously used for livestock feed is being pulled off the market for ethanol. Cattle, sheep, and pigs will eat chopped barley and wheat as well as corn so wheat is now at something like a 30 year high. Ignoring for now the fact that it’s not an all time high, that 30+ years ago wheat sold for more than it does today, we realize that there might be an increase in prosperity of some farmers in the near future.
Some people are fantasizing about replacing nearly all our non renewable fuels with “natural” fuels made from grain. The key word in previous sentence is fantasizing. I knew Doug had done the calculations 15 or 20 years ago and realized then farms cannot begin to supply our fuel needs and I asked him to redo the calculations. He sent me this short paper (Microsoft Word .DOC, slightly edited by me). The important information is as follows:
Comparing potential alcohol production to current petroleum production, we see that if we stop eating and make ALL of the world grain production into alcohol, we will produce:
1.77e16/1.447e17 or 12% of the energy we currently get from petroleum.
…
…we are falling behind on world food production versus consumption in the last 10 – 15 years, so there are a few billion people that will have to stop eating if the rest of us want to stop using fossil fuels and switch to biofuels.
Also on the negative side is the fact that the huge increase in agricultural production that we have seen in the last 50 years is mostly due to fertilizers that are based on natural gas. Modern agricultural production also depends on fossil fuels for farm equipment and transportation. Thus, the “renewable” biofuels are also based in part on fossil fuels.
He doesn’t take into account that a fair amount of the oil pumped from the ground is not burned as fuel but is used as lubricants, paints, and materials such as plastic. So that 12% number is wrong in that it assumes all oil is converted into energy. So you can probably boost that number up to something like 15 or 20%. But still that is assuming that the entire world’s production of grain is used for energy. So assuming that we only ask half the planet to stop eating foods that have grain products in them (no more bread, cookies, noodles, or Twinkies and don’t forget most of your meat is grain fed) we can only supply about 8 to 10% of our energy requirements with our current production levels of grain. Also he probably wasn’t aware of this recent news on converting cellulose to fuel.
Maybe we can increase production, right? Yes, some. But the last time I checked the U.S. was losing about one million acres of farm land per year. Farm land is easily converted into roads, housing developments, and shopping malls so that’s what is happening to most of that one million acres per year. Add to that dwindling supply of farm land the increasing population and the fact that most of the prime farm land is already in production and you rapidly realize biofuels aren’t going to be the answer to our energy needs.
Something no person living in the U.S. has experienced is a shortage of food. In Europe during and after WWII there were times when there just wasn’t enough food for everyone. In China and Africa it’s been even more common. But in the U.S. someone might go hungry because they didn’t have enough money for food but there was always food available.
For at least the last 15 years my brother and I have asking each other “when are things going to turn around on the farm?” They are running equipment that is over 30 years old which only keep running because they have a good machine shop and can do their own repairs and even build new parts and equipment. Things have been tough on the farm for a long time and we watched as the cost of production kept rising and the crop prices remained flat or even dropped. Dad figures the government should “set a fair price for everything and keep it there”. Nixon tried that and it didn’t work. That sort of thing will never work. It simply can’t work. There has to be a shortage or at least the threat of a shortage before the price of our crops will increase. Maybe then “things will turn around”.
Food is an interesting exercise in supply and demand. Classically one would claim that as prices go down consumption will increase. But in the U.S. today ask yourself, how much more would you eat if the price of food dropped by half? What if the price of food was 10% of present day prices? Or what if food was free? Would you and your family significantly increase your consumption? Probably not. And in the other direction, how much would you pay to avoid cutting your consumption in half? Food demand is extremely inelastic.
15 or 20 years ago there was something like a years supply of wheat in storage. Stop production, and assuming perfect transportation and distribution, and it would be a year before the supply of breads, noodles, and Twinkies disappeared. Recently that surplus has dwindled down into the neighborhood of 30 to 45 days. And during that time the price of wheat did not increase above the “noise”. Why? Because there was still a surplus and the demand is inelastic. Now, with the ethanol plants coming on line and wheat and barley replacing corn in the feedlots we might see an actual world-wide shortage of wheat in our near future. And then what happens?
That’s an interesting question. Far more interesting that what one might think at first glance. Farmers, contrary to popular impression, are not stupid. All the stupid ones went out of business years ago. What you are left with are smart farmers that were too stubborn to get a job in the city. Smart, stubborn, and making do, scrimping by for 30 years. When it looks like there is actually going to be a shortage do you think those farmers will sell their crop as soon as they get it in from the field? Or will they hold on to it for a while to get a better price? If there wasn’t going to be a shortage there will be as all those smart, stubborn farmers figure it’s payback time. It’s time to make up the missed profit for the last 30 years. They are going to sit on that wheat and wait as long as they can. And with the prices going through the roof it shouldn’t be hard for them to get the banks to loan them the money to pay their bills while they “wait for prices to peak”.
What happens next? My speculation, and everyone I have talked to about this, is that the people in the cities won’t stand for it. Once they start seeing they can’t buy an unlimited number of Twinkies and Big Macs anymore and the ones they can buy are twice as expensive as they were a couple months ago they will demand the government “do something”. Maybe then Dad will get his wish, the government will set a “fair price” for wheat and the farmers that refuse to sell at that price will have their crop forcibly taken from them. Those smart, stubborn farmers with 30 years of resentment built up will have their crops taken.
Every farmer I knew growing up owned one or more guns. Most of them went hunting. I wonder what they will hunt when the government says they have to sell their crop for less than what the market would pay for it?
Interesting times we live in…
Update: Doug made the following comments:
I am aware of cellulose. I went on a tour last summer on WSUs conservation farm north of Pullman. They talked about switch grass in the midwest. It doesn’t grow well here, but we would probably grow things like Reed’s Canary grass here. You can get more energy per acre from switch grass, but they are still working on ways to convert the cellulose to starches and sugars so the yeast can digest it. It didn’t seem like the technological difficulties were insurmountable, but we aren’t there yet. In 10 years, we may be replacing corn ethanol with switch grass ethanol, but I would be willing to bet that without a major crisis of some type, the world demand for energy will continue to outpace production of biofuels. China for example is ramping up their industry and will have an insatiable thirst for energy if that continues to go well for them.
The second point is what happens when we actually have a shortage of food. First off, the wealthy people in the world, (Americans and Europeans) won’t have a food shortage. Africa, the poor contries in the middle east and south east asia will all be unable to buy food. They can’t afford it right now, so we give them a lot of food. If the price of wheat triples, it would then cost a whopping $0.27/lb. This should barely be measurable when you buy a big mac or other prepared foods. Breakfast cereals often cost that much per ounce, so I don’t think the American consumer will get hurt that bad. What I do think will happen is the American people will feel empathy for the starving people of the world and the guilt that people of western european culture seem so eager to feel will take over. The media will start scolding us for taking food out of the mouths of starving children in Africa to put in our SUVs. The political correctness of biofuels will butt head to head with the political correctness of feeding the starving children of the world. The media, which controls the thinking of the American people and which takes sides in nearly every issue will have to decide if we want biofuels or if we want to continue fueling the population explosion of undeveloped countries. My guess is they will instruct the American people through biased reporting to send our food to the starving children of the world. Politicians will respond accordingly and the ethanol mandate and biodiesel tax credits will be swiped away as an experiment gone wrong.
Where does that leave us with energy? I am not certain, but I suspect we will be drilling for more oil and speeding up the process of depleting that natural resource. Greenhouse fears are the fad right now, but will probably fade away when people like Al Gore realize they can’t enjoy the things they want in life without consuming fossil fuels.
Update2: I don’t expect prices to just triple if a shortage occurs. Prices tripled once before when the Russians had a crop failure and started buying a noticeable portion of the worlds supply. They didn’t produce a world wide shortage just reduced the reserves. If there is an actual shortage I wouldn’t be surprised to see prices increase by a factor of 10. This might increase the cost of processed food in the U.S. by something like 25 to 50%. Not so much that most people in the U.S. would be unable to buy it and most probably wouldn’t change their shopping habits. But something Doug did bring up will put some elastic into the demand. We give a lot of food away to other countries. Those give aways are almost for certain dollar based rather than quantity based. As the price rises less food can be purchased for the same amount of money. Hence the demand (demand in the sense that people with money to actually purchase the food as opposed to just being hungry but without the means to buy it) will decrease some with increasing prices. And of course what will happen when people start actually going hungry in some of those other countries? People will die both from actual lack of food and from fighting over what food is available. Interesting times…
Xenia was in the school play a few weeks ago. She played one of the lead roles of course (since she and Meghan WON FIRST PLACE IN STATE COMPETITION). I took a bunch of pictures for them and Xenia finally had the time (and the computer which I just got up and running for her last weekend) to Photoshop them into “good enough” condition to be presented in public. Below is just one of the many pictures. In this picture you see my 30+ year old coveralls (I don’t wear them much now that I’m not on the farm) Xenia borrowed for another cast member:
Weekend before last I had the joy of spending a little more time with my wife and remaining child at home when they came over to the Seattle area on Thursday night and stayed until Monday. Xenia tells the story with pictures.
I did a little bit of roping with the cattle we had when I was growing up on the farm. And I’ve seen a lot of deer, some of which I have been close enough to rope, but it has never occurred to me to consider it. Perhaps I unconsciously knew that wasn’t a good idea. Or perhaps it was my parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents that always gave a very simple, and what I always thought was cryptic rather than profound, answer to any suggestions of attempts to interact with non-domestic animals, “They’re wild animals.”
After reading this story and taking into accounts such as Deerslayer by Ray Stevens I’m thinking my most recent effort to reach out and touch a deer, with my .300 Winchester Magnum, is the most appropriate.
Microsoft is donating $1.00 to Seattle’s Children’s Hospital (worthy cause, one of our kids spent several days there and we were very happy with the care provided) every time you use their search engine at this link.
It appeals to my inner electrical engineer.
Decades ago my brother and I made some pretty “healthy” sparks for tormenting various farm animals. We probably got zapped ourselves more than any of the animals but it was a lot of fun. This is way beyond “healthy”. This is like “holy mother of immortal gods” quality of sparks.
Thanks to Brutal Hugger at Say Uncle.
Barb had an epiphany this weekend. She announced it was because of me that our kids always question authority. They don’t automatically believe anything their teachers, parents, or other authority figures say. She says it’s because I lie to them all the time.
I thought this was a little harsh. Sure, I tell them lots of things that aren’t true. But when I do it’s so outrageous they should know it’s not true. If asked, “Where is Leo (the dog)?” I’m just as likely to tell them, “I think there is still some left in the refrigerator.” as I am to say Barb took him on a walk. Or, real example, when picking up Xenia after school three teenage girls got in the van rather than just one. They shut the door and as I pulled away Xenia said girl number two is coming home to work on a project for a while and asks if girl number three can get a ride to her home because it’s raining, she didn’t bring a coat to school today, and her dad doesn’t have a car. I tell the girls, “No. I think she should walk home in the rain. If she gets pneumonia and dies it will just be Darwinism in action.” As I head toward girl number three’s home I look in the mirror to see the open mouth and shocked look on her face. Xenia gave me “the look” and translated for the others, “That means yes.” It wasn’t too much later that they developed a code word for Xenia to use to signal “Dad isn’t serious.”
This epiphany of Barb’s came about after Barb and I took Xenia to the Seattle wharf with a first destination of the Ye Old Curiosity Shop on Saturday. On our way there Xenia asked what was there. “Shrunken heads”, I told her. Xenia gave me “the look” and said, “No, really.” I told her, “Mummies and shrunken heads.” She wasn’t satisfied with my clarification and announced, “You’re smiling. I don’t believe you.” Barb backed me up but Xenia just wouldn’t buy it.
As soon as we arrived at the shop I led Xenia to the back of the store and introduced her to Sylvester and Sylvia. After she adjusted to them I showed her the shrunken heads. “Now do you believe me?” I demanded. She finally, grudgingly, gave me her agreement that I was telling her the truth. Of course this made my day and I lorded it over her several times later during the day. She defended herself saying she it’s hard to know for certain when I’m serious and when I’m just making stuff up. It was during one of these times that Barb had her epiphany. “That’s why our kids question authority! It’s because you lie to them all the time!”
Sunday night when we had dinner at Outback with Jaime we told the story to Jamie and she said she too would have “called bullshit” if I had told her we were going to see shrunken heads and mummies. Xenia elaborated, “Dad, you say things exactly the same whether they are true or not.”
Okay. So maybe it’s true. I’ll have take credit for raising such great kids. And all this time I thought it was because they just had great genetic material.
Last night Barb and I watched the movie the The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The DVD box quotes Roger Ebert, “The most erotic serious film since Last Tango in Paris.” The IMDB plot summary is:
Tomas is a doctor and a lady-killer in 1960s Czechoslovakia, an apolitical man who is struck with love for the bookish country girl Tereza; his more sophisticated sometime lover Sabina eventually accepts their relationship and the two women form an electric friendship. The three are caught up in the events of the Prague Spring (1968), until the Soviet tanks crush the non-violent rebels; their illusions are shattered and their lives change forever.
Tomas is a surgeon, living in Prague. He has a physical relationship with Sabina – but not an emotional one. They are happy with the situation. Then, Tomas meets a waitress in a station, but leaves. Eventually, she comes to see him in Prague. Will he go against his ‘values’ and let himself get emotionally involved?
It was about that and it did have a lot of erotic content and pretty graphic sex for a film made in the 1980s (among other things full frontal nudity of women). But what I got out of the movie was a lot more than just the sex. My first clue was when one of the characters talks of “socialism with a human face” (a real life phrase). Then when the Soviet tanks rolled in I immediately saw the movie from a completely different viewpoint.
Where were the snipers picking off the exposed tank crew members? Why weren’t there Molotov cocktails being thrown from the windows? Why didn’t the communist officials fear a suppressed .22 bullet to the head every time they stepped out of their homes? But I knew the answer. The answer was in socialism and the culture it creates. There isn’t the sense of individual responsibility. People aren’t really expected to provide for themselves and they certainly aren’t expected or even encouraged to protect themselves or their country. That’s the job of the government. In real life the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček, told the people not to resist. This was despite the fact that he had initiated the welcomed reforms to the Soviet view of “unshakable fidelity to Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism and declared an implacable struggle against ‘bourgeois’ ideology and all ‘antisocialist’ forces.”
Late in the movie Tomas and Tereza move from the city to a farm. I grew up on a farm and own some land that my brothers still farm. Sometimes they let me help or I borrow some equipment to make some improvements for Boomershoot. The contrast between being on the farm driving a tractor, a truck, or a combine one day and then being 300 miles away in an office building writing software in the city the next is incredibly jarring to me. The contrast is so incredible that I don’t think I can really explain it even if people were to express an interest–which they don’t.
Boomershoot is that way too. My crew and I spend days making explosives and over a hundred people with rifles show up from all over the world to our little patch of land and we make the earth shake with hundreds of explosions and fireballs soar up above us heating our chilled skin in the cold morning air. From 700 yards away targets no bigger than a human head disappear in a cloud of water vapor, dirt, and a chest thumping boom. The day after Boomershoot I’m back in an office in the city writing software. It’s so odd to me when I first sit down in front of my computer again and look across the hall at the other people in front of their computers. Do they know what I was doing yesterday? In a sense, yes, they do know. But in many ways I can’t imagine they do. I don’t think people realize what a difference in mindset living on a farm makes. I wish they had captured that in the movie. But probably nearly all the people involved in the movie didn’t really realize it and how could they capture something they didn’t know existed? And even knowing it exists, I’m not sure I can capture it and put it on display is such a way that non-farm people can really understand.
The “gun culture” is very closely related to life on the farm. Think about it. In both cases who is considered responsible? The individual. You are responsible for your safety and you are responsible not only for yourself and your family. But it goes much further with the farm culture.
It is my memories of farm life that drive a lot of my hostility to socialism. We had a few cattle on the farm when I was growing up. I see the socialists as treating people as cattle (see also this post). I’m certain the cattle viewed us as benign. No different than socialists view government. The cattle-owner/government provides food, shelter, medical care, and protection from predators. What they don’t readily see is being herded, fenced, branded, de-horned, and castrated. The images of Nazis (National Socialism, remember?) putting Jews in cattle cars to be taken away and slaughtered validates the metaphor.
I remember at some meals mom announcing all the food on the table at dinner except for the spices and sugar came from the farm. It included the milk, the homemade butter, cottage cheese, the jam or jelly, the meat, the vegetables, and the fruit. We cut wood from the small forest behind the house for heat in the winter time. Our water came from our own well. We had our own septic system. We burned and/or buried our own trash. We built and maintained our own buildings, machines, private roads, and even our own private telephone system among our buildings.
Just after Christmas 1968, the same year the Russian tanks rolled into Prague, it snowed about six feet on the farm. In places there were snow drifts twice that deep across our driveway. As soon as it stopped snowing and blowing the temperature dropped to -30 F, the electricity went out, our pipes froze, and the phone went out. But our family was fine. We kept the wood stove red hot at times, we melted snow for water and we cooked over what we called “the trash burner” in the kitchen–in essence a small wood cook stove. It was week before the electricity came back on but during that week we never once concerned ourselves about when or if “the government” would help us. We took care of our cattle and we eventually plowed the snow from the county road so we could check on the neighbors–who, of course, were doing the same. It was probably 10 days before we saw the first, and last, government assistence. That assistence was in the form of the county road crew plowing the snow (they had better equipment for it and did a much better job than we and our neighbors had done).
In the movie when the tanks came the people had mass demonstrations, yelled, and shook their fists at the invaders. If they were brave they took pictures of the Soviet tanks and they talked about the failure of their government. I saw perhaps two tanks that burned but they didn’t really fight back. This is consistent with the real life reaction. Early in the movie the people talk about the Soviets in relation to some hostile political writings and conclude, “What can they do?” What they didn’t realize is the Soviets concluded essentially the same thing when planning to send in the tanks, “What can the people of Czechoslovakia do?” And the answer was, essentially, nothing. They had accepted socialism. They did not have a gun or farm culture as I know it and if their government abandoned them to a predator there wasn’t much more they could do than what cattle do when herded into a corral for branding and castration. The cattle make a lot of noise, snort, and give you hostile looks. I saw those crowds surrounding the tanks in Prague as just like those cattle.
I see now the disappearance of the farm culture is a major contributing factor to the loss of our freedom. As much as I love life on the farm I will not even suggest pushing our country in the direction of a farming society. It’s not feasible or even desirable for so many reasons. But is it only our gun culture that can defend our culture of freedom and protect us from, among other things, what Tereza calls The Unbearable Lightness of Being? I don’t know. But I do know this is a part of why I do Boomershoot.
James and I finished up the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise last night. James has been harping about the “space tourists” nearly throughout the entire series. On Monday when we watched In a Mirror Darkly: Part 1 and In a Mirror Darkly: Part 2 James changed his tune and gushed, “Best episodes of the series!” and “Hoshi rocks!” He even wanted to watch the opening credits and listen to the theme music a second time.
Going through the episodes a second time with the commentary it was kinda fun to watch Hoshi carefully and see the hints of her scheming, in addition to her bed hopping, throughout the two part story.
Our daughter Kim called me today. She was having a really rough day. She and her fiancée were having problem with the bank and problems with their van which caused cascading failures in other aspects her life. I could hear it in her voice before the first word was out of her mouth. I asked what was wrong and as she started explaining she started crying. A few seconds later I closed the door to my office and started crying with her.
She is 20 years old and hundreds of miles away and although I was able to help solve some of her problems more than anything I wanted to hold her on my lap and rock her just like she was two years old and had skinned a knee or had some other minor injury. I suppose those feelings will still be there when she is 40 and I’m in my 70’s.