I think this is a Cooper’s hawk, also called a chicken hawk. Hawks are more and more common and I even see eagles sometimes near the Potomac, but I never get pictures because they are on the fly. This one was chasing something by flying and then running on the ground, so I got the picture. Whatever it was after got away. The photo is not perfectly focused because I still had to shoot fast and the light was not great.
According to what I read, these birds eat other birds. I have noticed there are a lot fewer pigeons and I think the resurgent hawk population is one of the reasons. That alone would make the hawks a good thing in my book. A pigeon must be an easy meal for a hawk. This one was right next to Glebe Road just a little north of Henderson, in a fairly built up area. I read that hawks have adapted well to cities. Some of types actually prefer urban living because there are lots of slow witted pigeons and fat squirrels and tall buildings provide many of the attributes of cliffs.
I saw a really majestic bird up close a few months ago on Independence Ave. It swooped right past me, actually frightening a woman on sidewalk in front of me. It was a kind of white color. I think it was an osprey. It was bigger and more impressive than the one above, but it was long gone before I could even get my camera out.
I used to manage a professional staff of around forty-five, most of whom telecommuted twice a week. Telecommuting is not appropriate for all jobs, but in the jobs where it is possible workers can be more productive away from the office. We have to get used to it, anyway, since President Obama signed into law the Telework Enhancement Act.
The bottom line for me is that telecommuting is a good thing that can improve morale and productivity. Take a look at the linked article and the links in it for the pluses But there are caveats & I believe that my experience managing telecommuting as well as telecommuting myself, sometimes between continents, give me some insights, which I can share.
One non-obvious thing that is necessary for telecommuting is a degree of arbitrariness.Some people can handle telecommuting; others cannot. The manager of telecommuters has an additional responsibility to use judgment to make reasonable distinctions among employees. This is very difficult to do. You will often be accused of being arbitrary or unfair.
Those that abuse telecommuting usually can come up with good excuses for why they couldn’t complete their work on time. A good manager cannot let them get away with it. It is unfair to the good workers. What I have seen too often, unfortunately, is an abdication of responsibility in the name of “fairness”. Managers either ignore the transgressions or they punish the innocent and guilty alike with onerous rules and restrictions.
Managers also have to get used to looking for results instead of “face time”. Most managers claim they are interested in results, but they reward presence. Beyond that, although few will admit it, many managers like to have people around that they can boss. We also have to admit that a properly designed telecommuting program may mean that we need fewer middle managers. The organization afforded by technologies can to some extent replace the organization provided by middle management.
Still thinking of this from the manager’s point of view, we have to learn not to ask too much from our good teleworkers. Flexibility is one of the advantages to telecommuting, but some managers think that flexibility means stretching work hours to … forever.
I learned this myself by my own mistakes. I work odd hours and my work and my leisure overlap, i.e. I actually enjoy many of the parts of my work, so I do them in my free time too. I used to check my email when I woke up in the morning and before going to bed at night. When I saw something that needed to be done, I would often make my comments and send it off to whoever was going to have to handle it the next day. What I quickly learned is that my best colleagues also checked their work early and late. They also sometimes took my comments as commands to get the work done right away.
People follow the lead of the boss. The boss often enjoys his work and doesn’t mind – even likes – long hours. More importantly, the boss is in control. He/she doesn’t feel the same stress that the subordinate does. When I sent along a comment, all I meant was that it would be a good idea to work on this tomorrow morning, or maybe just think about. When my colleagues got my midnight message, they thought it was an urgent command. It is a smaller version of the Henry II “command” about Thomas a-Becket.
I finally had to make a rule that nobody was supposed to touch their office work between 8pm and 7am. I know that people looked at the work. I did. But I didn’t send or respond to any emails.
This brings me to my last caveat. Telecommuting is part of the whole technology-social media world. It brings with it the same danger of magnifying the trivial, flattening priorities and destroying the whole idea of actual deliberation. The instant nature of communications creates the illusion of knowledge. It is tempting to act before you have all the information you need for smart decisions. We are tempted to see trends where none exist.
We used to have a saying that you should “sleep on” any hard decision. This gives you time to put things in perspective and it remains a good idea in many cases, but it is much harder to do and much harder to separate the important from the merely urgent when you are awash with information.
Teleworking is more than just letting people work at home or cutting the commuting time. It is not just something that can be tacked onto a workweek, like pinning a tail on the donkey. It requires a system wide adjustment. Some people will thrive in a telework environment; others not so much. It is a bigger change than most people think and a bigger opportunity.
“Groundhog Day” is one of my favorite movies. I was watching it this morning, dubbed into Portuguese with Portuguese subtitles, so I could assuage my guilt for not studying enough.
I like it for several reasons. One is unrelated to the movie itself. The movie was on cable at the Condo where we stayed when we took the kids to the theme parks in Orlando back in 1994. It seemed to be on over and over, so I recall it being on the whole time. It was a good time. The kids were excited about Disneyland etc. The weather was perfect that October when we went and our sense of relief was accentuated because we were coming from Krakow, where the weather was turning bad and – more significantly – the air pollution in those days was horrendous. So I remember being in a clean, green place with Chrissy and the kids having a good time. Everything associated with that basks in the glory of that moment, including “Groundhog Day”. But there must have been other things on too that I don’t recall. “Groundhog Day” had other things going for it.
The setting is comforting. The movie is set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it was filmed somewhere in Illinois, so it has a thoroughly Middle American feel. Of course, I have never actually seen a small-medium sized city that is as lively or has so many diverse things to do, but it is nice to imagine.
If you have not seen the movie, you should. A brief summary is that a weather man comes to Punxsutawney for the annual groundhog festival, but each day he wakes up to the same day. It repeats, over and over. They never say how long this happens, but it is a long time, maybe thousands of years’ worth of February 2. The main character, Phil Connors played by Bill Murray, goes through predicable stages. At first he is confused; after that he takes advantage of life with no consequences; then he gets depressed and kills himself many times in many ways, but each day he wakes up in the same place. Finally he decides to live in the moment. He improves himself by reading and learns to play the piano. He also improves the lives of the people around him w/o any expectation of personal gain. He does these things essentially because they are the right things to do at the time when he does them. Finally, after living the perfect day, he progresses to the next day and that is the end.
The movie raises lots of philosophical questions, but it does it in a stealthy almost unconscious way, which makes it such a unique film. I suppose you could watch the whole thing just for the fun of it w/o getting any deeper than the funny lines and situations. But I think it would be hard not to think about it, if you were at all paying attention. Most of us have thought about how we might do things differently if we could do things over again, if we had a second chance. This takes us a little beyond that. What should be your ethics in a world where there are no permanent consequences to your actions? I think that the film leads to the conclusion that there ARE permanent consequences, even if external conditions don’t change, because the consequences are contained in the person, who chooses, or not, to do the right thing. The movie is a story of personal development, of redemption.
Phil starts out a selfish a-hole, who after many renditions of the same day develops into a man balanced and at peace with himself. It is not the he just becomes unselfish and helpful to others. More profoundly, he becomes selfless in the true sense of the term. He merges himself with the people, things and the place around him. He becomes his task no matter what it is, he becomes what he does and loses himself in it. He no longer works on being good, no longer thinks about doing the right thing, he just does it because it has become what he is.
I suppose I am reading way too much into a Bill Murray movie. But I have read many books of wisdom: the Zen of this, the Tao of that or meaning of everything. I am not saying that watching the movie is the one-big-thing. There is no one-big-thing; however, if someone asked me about the great spiritual sources, I would include this movie. Like all works of philosophy, it should be watched, considered and discussed over time. The book – or in this case the movie – doesn’t change but your different experiences make it different each time. That is why it is impossible to understand any philosophy at the first sitting. It takes a while to sink in, maybe years with differing conditions.
Lately I have been giving a more philosophical career advice. I tell the young people who ask me that they should strive to become the person they want to be, become the person who deserves success rather than strive for success itself. Success can be limited. Only a few people can be the bosses, champions or among the best at anything. But everybody can aspire to become what they think is a good person. Reasonable success will almost assuredly follow anyway, but no matter what, you will have something of value when you are finished.
The picture up top I took of the TV with “Groundhog Day” playing. The other pictures I took when I was wandering around getting the car serviced. You can see Fairfax Honda and the Borders Book where I got the Hadrian book I wrote about yesterday. The last one shows the respect that pedestrians get around there. I was clearly in the middle of a car-preferred zone. It is no place for old men, since you have to make a run for it when you want to cross the road.
I took the car in for routine maintenance at Fairfax Honda. They always treat me well; however it takes time to get it done. But I didn’t really mind. I wandered over to Barnes & Noble across the street, bought a book – “Hadrian” by Anthony Everett – and for the price of a cup of coffee, and I suppose the book, got to sit and read in the Seattle Best coffee shop associated with the bookstore.
Anthony Everett specializes in biographies of famous Romans. I read his earlier books about Cicero and Augustus, so I figured this one would be good too. So far, so good. I haven’t really gotten that much about Hadrian yet. The author is talking about the Roman world, which is as interesting. He admits that it is hard to write a real biography of ancient people. The sources are just not that good and they tend to be sensationalized.
For example, the big biographer of the first “Twelve Caesars” is a guy called Suetonius. He wrote distant in time from his subjects, so he includes lots of gossip and legend. The stories you hear about Caligula and Nero probably come from him. In some ways ancient biography is like trying to get information from tabloids. I read parts of the “Secret History” by Procopius when I was in school. He writes about the Emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora, who had been a circus performer and maybe a prostitute before she met Justinian. Some of the parts are sort of like classical “Penthouse Diaries,” which is probably why these histories survived for more than a thousand years. I recall the line from one of those teenage films, that history is just the story of dead celebrities. That is not wrong.
Everett point out that some new, or at least overlooked sources of information about the life of Hadrian are those architectural monuments you see in the pictures. When Hadrian visited or caused them to be build, there was always an inscription marking the event. Modern scholars can follow in Hadrian’s footsteps by following the monument trail. Of course, archeology has its limits and is subject to significant interpretation. It can also tell you little of the person’s inner thoughts, which is what many people really want in a biography.
Hadrian has recently become much more interesting to some segments of modern society because he was gay, or at least bisexual. To many modern readers, establishing justice and sound administration in the world’s greatest empire takes a back seat to sexual preferences of a man now dead for 1800 years. I think this is the “history as dead celebrities” school. But anything that gets people exploring the classics is probably a good thing. Hadrian is one of my favorite emperors for equally venal reasons.
My mother bought me a Roman coin when I was ten or twelve years old. Alex has it now. It was a silver denarius from the time of Hadrian and featured his profile on the coin. Roman coins are less valuable than you might assume, BTW. (I think my mother paid around $10, which even in those distant days was not a great deal of money.) The Empires coin stampers made a lot of them w/o distinctions that excite collectors, such as dates and consistent mint marks. I suppose they are also easy to fake, although you can tell some fakes because they are smooth, like our coins today. Romans stamped their coins, i.e. the pounded them with hammers, so the real ones, and good copies, show the evidence of that. I was happy to have it, nevertheless. It put me in touch, I thought, with the brightest part of the golden age of the Roman Empire. I also have a “relationship” with Hadrian because of all his statues. He was a vain individual and, anyway, it was imperial policy to make a cult of the emperor. So you find his statues all over the place. I saw dozens in the “Roman” places I visited, such as Italy, Greece, Jordan & Egypt. Hadrian traveled all the time and evidently left a statue of himself wherever he went.
Although he was from a Roman family from Spain with some Carthaginian/Phoenician/African ancestry (the empire was becoming cosmopolitan) Greece was the place Hadrian came to admire most and he made Athens into a kind of spiritual capital of the Empire. You can still see the evidence of his largess in Athens today. Lots of what you think is classical around Greece is really from Roman times, or at least rebuilt by the Romans.
Everett talks a little about the ambivalent attitude Romans had toward Greeks, whose cleverness and sophistication they both admired and despised. This was no short term thing, BTW. It persisted for many centuries and ultimately was one of the dividing lines between the Eastern & Western Empires.
“Greece” in those days did not include only the little country we think of today. Most Greeks and certainly most people who aspired to Greek culture, lived in places like Sicily, North Africa, Asia Minor (now Turkey) and Syria. Alexandria, in Egypt, was a completely Greek city. Cleopatra was a Greek in ancestry, language & culture, descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great’s generals. Greeks of at least people who had become Greek in culture and outlook, ran the place from around 300 BC until around AD 700 when Muslim armies conquered them. Even after that, Greeks persisted until recently as merchants and craftsmen in Egypt and the Levant. Greek was the language of the whole Eastern Mediterranean, which is why the original language of the New Testament is Greek.
The world would not see anything like this kind of cosmopolitan culture again until the 20th Century, when English came to play the “world language” that Greek played.
Hadrian recognized the power of “Hellenism” and used it to strengthen the Empire. He was not the first or the only person to try to melt the Latin & the Greek cultures, but he was among the most effective. It is probably one of the reasons we call it Greco-Roman sometimes today.
I am a little ahead of myself. I have not finished the book yet. In fact, I have to put it off for a while. During this week I am doing “self-study” for my Brazilian-Portuguese. I have to keep up with Brazilian news and finish two books. One is relatively easy. It is “the Accidental President of Brazil” a memoir by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who with his “Plano Real” was the individual most responsible for reforming Brazil into the very promising country we have today. It is a very easy and interesting book to read, and it is in English. I am learning a lot about modern Brazil from learning about Cardoso’s life experiences. My other book, “Brasil, País do Presente – O Poder Econômico do Gigante Verde” is much harder because it is in Portuguese. It is not difficult Portuguese and since it Is mostly about economics many of the words are familiar variations of English terms. Beyond that, the book is conveniently broken up into manageable sections, but it presents a challenge. I have to write up decent notes on both books by the end of this week, so Hadrian will have to wait. The pictures up top show Roman ruins in Jordan at the edge of the empire. The picture with Chrissy is one of Hadrian’s arches in that city, now called Jarash in Jordan, and the other one is Hadrian’s arch in Athens. You can see that he stuck with a kind of formula, but it worked for him. I was going to put in the pictures I took around Fairfax Honda, but I suppose I can post them separately. They don’t seem to fit the story.
Old people are happier than young people, according to an article I read in the Economist. Studies show that people have a declining happiness from youth until their mid-40s. In your forties, many people go through the mid-life crisis, when you realize that you probably won’t achieve all those things you aspired when you were still a callow youth. Age 46 is the nadir, but also the turning point; after you start to get happier again.
I suggest you look at the article linked above for details. The authors discuss some of the objections that might be raised about the data-sets. But they explain that the results hold even when you control for income, education, location etc. Of course, these things make a difference. Richer people are generally happier than poorer people, for example, but the age differences hold when adjust for such things.
There are a few interesting permutations. Women tend to be happier than men, as a group, but women also suffer depression at significantly higher rates. Some people are naturally happier than others in ways that you might expect. Some neurotic Woody Allen types can never be happy even in good times, while outgoing people are often happy even when conditions around them suck. Another interesting apparent contradiction is that when asked about OTHER people, both young and old say that younger people are happier, but when you ask them about their OWN happiness, the older guys come out on top. It is hard to remember with certainty, but I think I am happier now than I was twenty-five years ago. I don’t remember being unhappy back then, BTW, but I have reasons to be happier now. Life is easier. It is exciting to start out in life and a career, but it comes with lots of stress and uncertainty. I used to feel like I was falling behind. At this stage of my life, I know what I have achieved and what I am likely to in the future and it is good enough. Maybe you just get used to being “average.” The article quotes the philosopher William James who said. “How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”
Not many people work on the day after Thanksgiving. The Metro was mostly empty and the streets were eerily silent. It was pleasant, actually. This morning was unseasonably warm and balmy. The overcast weather added to the feeling of relative solitude. It cleared up a bit by evening and got a lot cooler. This is the time of transition to the colder weather. It will be warm again, but less and less.
I still went to Portuguese class today, wouldn’t miss it. We aren’t supposed to take any leave during language training, except for optional days designated. The day after Thanksgiving is such a day as are days around Christmas and New Year. But these are the best times to go to work, since few people are on the roads and Metro and in language class there is a good chance to get an instructor to yourself. I had my own class in the morning; my colleague came in the afternoon.
As usual, I watched the Brazilian news before class. Almost all of it was about fighting crime in Rio. They are waging what looks like a war against drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro. The military police and actual military units, such as armored vehicles and helicopters are involved in cleaning the bad guys out of the favelas near the city and then setting up checkpoints to structures to keep them out. Many of the drug kingpins are already in jail, but they were evidently still running operations from inside, so they have been relocated to far away locations usually undisclosed, although some have gone out to Porto Velho, which is the capital of the state of Rondonia. You really cannot get too much farther away from anyplace than Rondonia.
The action is broadly popular with the population. The inhabitants of the favelas have long been terrorized by the criminals and lately they have been expanding their operations to attack traffic on roads, as a kind of retaliation for increased police presence in the favelas. It is interesting ho different this is in this time and place than it would be in others. Think about how this might have been in the 1960s, when the Soviets and their Cuba surrogates were spreading tyranny and murderers like Che Guevara were fomenting trouble. (I will never understand how that guy, a sadistically mass murderer and an incompetent one at that, can still be acceptable on posters and t-shirts.) The drug traffickers would have characterized themselves, and been characterized, by many in the press as revolutionaries. Or consider the same sorts of events in a Middle Eastern country, one ravaged by violent extremism. It is a lot better if the crooks do not have some kind of unifying ideology to turn them from local menaces to worldwide terrors.
This evening Chrissy & I watched “Tropa de Elite,” a Brazilian film about a special police unit (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE)) that deals with crime in the favelas. The film was wildly popular when it came out in Brazil in 2007. Now they have made a “Tropa de Elite II,” which has broken all records to become the most popular Brazilian film of all time, beating out perennial favorite “Dona Flor & Her Two Husbands,” featuring Sonia Braga, probably the most famous Brazilian actress in the U.S.
If you click on the “Tropa de Elite II” link above and watch the trailer and then watch the actual news stories from yesterday at this link, you will see the similarities.
“Tropa de Elite II” is not yet available on video. The first one is okay. It is in the spirit of the Dirty Harry movies, maybe mixed with something like “the Shield” or “the Wire.” Gritty. When people feel affected by crime and corrupt cops, they like to watch films where the bad guys are hunted down and maybe killed. When the danger passes, or among those who were always more or less secure, these things are less in style and people sometimes feel a little guilty about them.
There is an interesting sub-plot, almost like an American stereotype of the spoiled rich kids v the hard working guy who came up from poverty. One of the good cops is the poor kid who wants to be a lawyer and goes to school with a bunch of privileged rich kids. They all say the cops are bad and are just tools of ruling elite to oppress the poor. Despite their evident wealth and privilege, they consider themselves part of “the people.” When the character – Mathias – speaks up in class to question the prevailing wisdom, admitting that many police are corrupt but that the drug dealers are also bad, the other students shun him.
The film was criticized in some circles for glorifying violence and rough measures. The interrogation techniques & other methods.
The BOPE in the film has a general Spartan or maybe a Nietzsche feel. Very violent and not for the faint of heart, but the movie is worth watching.
The photos – Up top shows Thomas St on the way to FSI. The construction workers are not there today and there was little traffic anywhere. Next is the cloudy sky at FSI. Under that are construction cranes at sundown from Ballston Gold’s Gym. The movie poster below is from “Tropa de Elite.”
I attended a conference on REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace. It was interesting, but not very much. They talked about things I knew about already. But what I really didn’t like was the lack of diversity. There were NGO people and officials, who disagreed about whether using international funds to preserve forests was just very good or great.
I like the spirit of saving forests very much, but I don’t think that making international payments for conservation is a long term solution, even if we overcome the problems of measurement and corruption (which is a big if). In the long run, we need to make a sustainable forestry system that allows for change and development. I think that the panel members understood this. A guy from the Nature Conservancy talked about the need to integrate human needs.
But I think they should have had the diversity of someone who had different interests, i.e. loggers, farmers etc. I bet there would be a lot of common ground, but it would make for a more interesting discussion. I mentioned this to one of the organizers. She seemed open to the idea, but seemed to think that such a person would not be well received by the audience. Maybe.
I walked back down to the Metro along Massachusetts Avenue. When I first joined the FS, I stayed at a Hotel called the General Scott, near Scott Circle. This is a nice part of town and it was a good introduction to Washington and our American heritage to live there. The General Scott hotel is gone. I remember the name so well because I accidentally stole one of their hangers. I suppose the statute of limitations is run out.I didn’t do it on purpose and didn’t notice the crime until much later. Anyway, I probably left one of my own hangers, but since it was more than a quarter century ago, I don’t really recall. I know I took one of their hangers because I still have it, stamped with the hotel name, too late now to give it back, sorry.
I took a couple pictures near the circle. The top is General Scott’s statue at the circle. Next is Daniel Webster. The first contact I had with Daniel Webster was when I read “the Devil & Daniel Webster” in junior HS. I chose it because it was a short book. The real Webster was more interesting. Speaking of interesting, the next picture is a monument to Samuel Hahnemann. I didn’t know who that was, so I looked him up. He was the “father of homeopathy” and he once thought that coffee made you sick. I don’t know why he gets such a nice monument in Washington.
The last two picture are trees I like. The yellow ones are ginkgo trees; the red one is a red oak, with its beautiful fall colors. The oak, BTW, is not near the circle. I took that yesterday.
Ethanol has lots of advantages, according to what I heard during a program on biofuels at the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center. One of the biggest advantages is that it is dispersed, both nationally and internationally. Within a country, ethanol production tends to be in rural areas. It is difficult to over centralize, since moving the feed stocks is much more expensive than moving the ethanol. (This is a very old advantage, BTW. In our own history, the whiskey rebellion was fueled by exactly the same consideration. It was much more effective to move whiskey made from grains than move the bulky raw materials.) It is also dispersed internationally, unlike petroleum, which is heavily concentrated in the Middle East. Feed stocks for ethanol can be grown almost anywhere in the world, which is why people can make booze all over the world. Of course, not all feed stocks are equally good, but sugar cane, one of the best feed stocks, can be grown all over the tropics.
Sugar cane is especially well suited to Brazil. The climate is nearly perfect in many regions. Sugar cane requires lots of water during some seasons and not much later on. The sugar doesn’t form well unless the plant is stressed by drought. This is why sugar cane does not grow well in the Amazon, where it rains throughout the year, but other areas of Brazil have very distinct wet and dry seasons.
The sugar cane wet/dry rotation also works well in Brazil’s energy equation in another way. Brazil is heavily dependent on hydro-power and hydro is heavily influenced by rain. During the wet seasons, there is a lot of river flow, but not so much in the dry season. Dry season shortfalls are filled with thermal plants, usually burning fossil fuels. This is where sugar cane comes in again. Besides the ethanol produced by the cane, there is also the biomass (i.e. canes). Refiners have long used the biomass as an energy source, but this co-generation potentially produces much more energy than is needed in the refineries. Sugar cane is harvested in the dry season, which means that the fuel is available exactly when it is most needed.
Sugar cane is a six year crop, i.e. it must be replanted every six years. They use a kind of six field rotation in Brazil. A grower divides his land into seven sections for each of the growing seasons for the cane, plus a non-cane rotation. So each year, one section gets the final harvest. This one is then planted with a alternate crop, usually a legume such as beans or soy. These crops fix nitrogen and restore the soil fertility. The non-cane rotation also serves to allow diseases of cane to die out on those fields. After the year, cane is again planted, but a different variety in order to avoid blight. There are more than 400 varieties of sugar cane.
The Brazilian biofuels endeavor has meant an increase in land devoted to cane, but not really very much. Less than 1% of Brazilian land is devoted to cane for ethanol or crops for biodiesel. Better plant varieties and methods of growing have allowed more production. Of course, there has been expansion onto other land. Most of this land was degraded pasture land. Brazil is a high intensity cane producer, but beef production has been extensive, i.e. requiring a lot of land per unit of production. Brazil has only 1.1 head of cattle per hectare of pasture. This could be greatly improved and since Brazil has a lot of pasture land (more than 20% of Brazil is pasture) there is significant scope for cane production w/o contributing to deforestation.
Sugar cane production in Brazil is almost entirely rain fed and Brazil has a lot of water in general. Brazil accounts for 19% of the world’s total river discharge. Of this, 13% of the rain actually lands on Brazil itself. The rest comes from water flowing into the country from neighboring countries.
Sugar cane culture is being mechanized. All new plantations must be harvested mechanically and by 2014 it will no longer be legal to burn stalks, which means that all plantations will need to be harvested mechanically. Why? It is actually very practical Sugar cane has sharp leaves, so sharp and still that they cut people working among the plants. For centuries, growers have used surface fires to singe the leaves off, which allow workers to go into the cane and harvest it. W/o fire, it is practically impossible to harvest cane by hand. Mechanical harvesting eliminates the need for surface fire. Even with the singeing fires, work in the cane fields is dirty & brutally hard. While it is always difficult to throw lots of this kind of semi-skilled labor out of work, these are not the kinds of jobs you want to preserve going into the next century.
I went down to Arlington Cemetery for Veteran’s Day, as has become my custom. It is a good day to think about the ones who have sacrificed and died to protect our liberty. I remember in particular a young man named Aaron Ward, who was killed by a sniper in Hit, Iraq on May 6, 2008. I wrote about him previously. He was only nineteen when he came to Iraq. His story made a particular impression on me because it was close and he reminded me of Alex. I can never again think of young soldiers, marines, sailors or airmen in the same way as I did before. It brings the pity of war closer whenever I think of him. I understand that my determination to remember Aaron Ward’s sacrifice does nothing to help him. A couple years later, I understand that I have to thank him not only for his service and sacrifice, but also for helping make me a more thoughtful and, I hope, a better man.
I walked from Roslyn to Arlington Cemetery, going past the Marine Memorial, with the Iwo Jima statue. I have posted pictures before. Above is a closer detail. Below is Memorial Bridge that connects Washington, near the Lincoln Memorial, with Arlington Cemetery.
Below is one of the statues near Memorial Bridge. They were a gift from the people of Italy to the people of the United States.
Below is the memorial to the 101 Airborne, the “Screaming Eagles.” Maybe appropriately, I saw a bald eagle flying over the Potomac. I got a good look at it, so I am sure it was an eagle. Unfortunately, by the time I got my camera out and ready, it was too far out of sight to get a picture. Eagles are becoming fairly common again. They are primarily fish eaters, so you see them along rivers like the Potomac or Mississippi.
Farther up the river is Theodore Roosevelt Island. It is literally an island of nature in the largely urban area. It used to be cultivated, but went back to nature around 100 years ago. They claim that it is an “island of tranquility” but that is not really true. You may be able to pretend that the persistent traffic noise is the sound of the ocean, but the airplanes going over every couple of minutes from Reagan National Airport are harder to rationalize. The only time I really found tranquility there was when I was stranded in Washington after 9/11/2001. They stopped the flights and there was not so much traffic, so it was quiet, but in a sort of eerie way. Below is the Roosevelt Memorial, with old Teddy talking to the trees.
Below is the George Washington Parkway, which follows the Potomac from Mount Vernon, one of the sources of traffic noise on Theodore Roosevelt Island. It is a bit classier than some other highways, with its beautiful natural stone walls separating the lanes of traffic. They just just don’t build things like that anymore.
Those weirdos whose false god wants dead soldiers were out again in front of Arlington Cemetery. Only a handful were there and although they were loud and persistent, they were well obscured by a group of patriotic bikers, who blocked the view by walking in front. One of the bikers told me that the police wouldn’t let them stand, but it was okay if they were “pedestrians.” A cop I talked with told me that he wasn’t serving the weirdos, but rather protecting the good people who might otherwise pummel them. Last year a young Marine got in trouble for rescuing an American flag that a protester was dragging in the dirt.
We just have to take it. These clowns have a right to speech & assembly. They were joyful as they predicted that America was doomed & we were all going to hell. I recognized a women I met last year when I challenged her false god to strike me dead. He couldn’t, but she assured me that I would go to hell. Only one comment seemed to fluster her. When she told a guy standing near me that, “god hates fags”, he quickly retorted that her god obviously didn’t hate incest, implying she enjoyed a closer than healthy relationship with her father. Maybe he hit too close to home.
I think it worked out as well as it could have. The bikers effectively prevented the weirdos from getting the attention that they craved. Their impact was limited to the couple dozen people took pride in forming a human barrier; they were immune to the protesters. It also provided an environment where people could get close enough to ridicule the protesters w/o shouting, which energizes protesters.
On a day when thousands of us gather to honor the brave people who sacrificed and sometimes died to defend our country, we tolerate the few disrespectful weirdos whose behavior any honorable person cannot but hate. It shows the kind of people we are.These protesters managed to unite liberal and conservative in dislike of them. We agree that we have to tolerate them, but nobody says that we have to like them. We have to respect their right to protest, but we don’t have to respect the protesters.
You can see on the picture up top taken from across the street that the protesters were effectively and peacefully neutered. The picture below shows the people who were spontaneously taking turns to block the view. I made a special point in not to show the protesters. You can see a little part of one of their signs, which were very offensive, believe me.
