Fragile Fall

Spent a fine fall day immersed in a feast of transient art. Pastels on the Plaza happens the first Saturday in October. This year it happened to coincide with the Redwood Coast Belly Dancing Festival



While not as fragile as sand paintings the drawings will vanish with the first rains of the season. The ladies that came to share their joy of the dance will fade with the Sunday twilight. Enjoy a little taste October.

This is some footage of one of the headliners, Ya Habibi dance troupe, from an earlier performance.

Tea and Hot Rods.

The Republicans are all debate crazy and the Guano on toast points was served up by the usual suspects.


The media as usual has fixated on the shiny object, the anti-vaccination, and missed the bigger picture in the war on women. They would rather have their daughters die then have sex.


Bachman is anti science but you nave to be nuts not to acknowledge the success of the germ theory of disease and vaccinations. The HPV vaccine prevents a common type of cancer with very little risk. Because it is a sexually transmitted virus the wing nuts think it will cause their daughters to have sex if they get them vaccinated. I have never understood their connecting ignorance with protecting but it leads to lots of misery and in this case can lead to death. No rational person makes that choice. I know I am way outside the mainstream in my thought process on public policy but this I find disturbing. The anti government folks cheer when the government kills citizens some of which are most certainly innocent. I do understand the let him die sentiment screamed from the crowd but I have to call bullshit on the Ron Paul response. If the free market and god were doing such a spectacular job Why were Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon all able to find the need for the government to intervene.


The voice in the crowd is the true believer of the Objectivist philosophy. Only the strong should enjoy the fruits of society and the only role of the government is to enforce private property and contract rights. This position is repugnant to me but it is intellectually consistent. The freedom for others to die is an article of faith for these folks.



The Paul position is just ignoring the facts. It sucks to be poor but with the help of society it sucks less. The rising tide didn’t lift all boats and the most recent government bailouts only saved the financial sector. Nothing prevents churches and communities from paying for the uninsured now. They simply don’t do it. There are lots of charities and they do some good but they were not solving the problem. Government has not solved the problem either but it has done a measurably better job.

Paul’s complaint about the vaccine mandate from a freedom standpoint means nothing because he does not extend that body sovereignty to the individual but to the parent. Women are never to be granted sovereignty over their own bodies in the Ron Paul Libertarian Utopia.

The video is from the Cruzin Eureka car show. I chose the 3rd to calm the fear of crazy these folks instill in me.

What might have been?

I cannot help thinking how much more it would have deterred future terrorism if we had spent our efforts rebuilding something really cool at ground zero instead of turning so many countries into rubble. Condi Rice and, "nobody could have predicted" aside the reaction shows us two options and we seem to have gone the wrong way.

The first gives me a little hope. As soon as the passengers on flight 93 were confronted with new data they quickly overthrew the existing paradigm and took some very altruistic actions.

the second is the path more traveled by and it has led to disaster. We decided to team up with a bunch of evil dudes to do something with no thought to the consequences. We might have learned a lesson from that and we will be able to avoid creating new disasters in other peoples countries. The jury is still out. The number of people living without protection of civil society in America says the jury is still out on a lot of things. Somewhere the "In order to form a more perfect union" concept got scrapped. The constitution grew from the failure of the Articles of Confederation. The civil war grew out of the failures of the constitution.

I just do not understand the fetish of the founders. I speculate that it comes from the same place as religion. It uses the indoctrination methods of religion but that is for another day.

I think our little town has enbraced a nice reaction to the 10th Aniversary. The proper amount of over indulgence, materialism and the continuation of that quest for a more perfect union. Enjoy some of that experience.

A bird brained idea

A video blog from the foot of F street.

Pictures of life

Putting a few pictures of a summer's day ride about town up to share. Flowers and birds belie the vacant storefronts and homeless camps a few streets away.

The diversity of life and the devistation of dreams side by side.

Pelican bleat

The day was cool but no fog so I soaked and stretched and rode down to the water to think. Watching the brown pelicans and the king fishers dive for their meals. They are spectacular, the precision with which they operate. It amazes me to watch what 13 . 7 billion years of random chance, of quantum probabilities can produce. The interaction of quarks and strings, the tiny variations in the strength of hydrogen bonds. The solutions to survival that has come out of that dance is awe inspiring when I take the time to pay attention.

We always have lots of seagulls here but I have never seen this many pelicans in a group so that is cool. I wish I had some footage of the trip to Florida where the Pelicans flew by at eye level along the break water. 10 or 15 birds in a line gliding along on massive wings.

I let myself get wrapped up in nonsense too often and forget how spectacular it is to live here on the Humboldt Bay. As we are never likely to win a battle in the future it seems rather pointless to go to war.

I am stable and feel like writing some of the time. Am playing with the 3rd man story again but got weirded out when the EPD showed up in large numbers. I had fallen into the page so did not notice what went on till they were packing up to leave. The encounter had something to do with one of the homeless dudes but I didn’t see an ambulance so I will have to check out the local news in a few days.

I will post an exerpt in a few days if I can keep it rolling.

Wing nuts