Do you see what I see?

One of my favorite riddles, if it even is one, is: Can you see farther in the daytime or the night time?

 

Spoiler alert, or, what we used to call the answer to the question, is that even though the obvious answer is daytime, you know it can’t be daytime or the question wouldn’t be worth asking. But then the quandary becomes Why or How can it be nighttime, when it’s dark out and we obviously can’t see as far? And so the riddle is best answered with a question: Can you see stars in the daytime? J

Sitting in (Quaker) Meeting this past Sunday, I decided to do something that I rarely ever do in Meeting, which is to close my eyes. (The reason is because I am almost certain to do what a certain someone had done right next to me this past First Day – fall asleep!)

And when I did close them, I decided to just watch the inside of my eyelids. Well, actually I don’t know if that’s what I really see when I shut my eyes. What I do see seems to fall into at least two categories.

The first, if I concentrate hard enough, is completely unpredictable –a living, swirling, motion-filled abstract painting.  I see all kinds of amazing shapes and colors. Dazzling, really! Yet, subtle too. Coming and going, shifting, sliding, hanging, staying still. Sparkles, jagged lines, swirls. And layers – lots of layers of colors and shades, though mostly just shades of dark and light. And so much depth. Squeezing my eyes together creates more variety, and rolling my eyes around brings even more dynamic changes.

And if I so choose, I can also see specific things! On Sunday, I chose to look at the Mojave Desert in Southeastern California and the drifting sand dunes I once bicycled over and around, blowing across the road. I could see them so clearly!

 

(Here's a shot from afar - not quite how I pictured it from my bike view, but the best I could muster online):

 

 

Then I thought of other things to see – my brother, Gary. My mom and dad and my close friend, Dennis, all of whom were probably looking back at me, maybe even through that same eyelid subsurface. (I think I feel a Stephen King novel coming on…though it seems almost more Edgar Allen Poe-ish.)

And soon, I was seeing all kinds of things that were, at least as we understand time and space, not otherwise visible to me. Which led me to wonder:

Can we see more with our eyes open...or closed?

 

Hopefully I write one of these in less time than it takes me to write some of the blog posts i've been wanted to post

When I grow up…ok…retire…there are three books I want to write:

1 – On Fame

·        I want to interview famous people to ask them what it means to be famous

o   Is it what they always wanted?

o   Was it worth it?

o   What do they wish they had done differently?

o   What advice would they give to someone they see whose fame is continuing to grow, maybe too fast?

o   Do they miss anonymity?

o   Does the idea of their fame decreasing scare them?

o   How has it impacted the people they knew before they got famous?

·        And I want to interview:

o   the uber-famous, from ex-Presidents to Taylor Swift (!) to Michael Jordan

o   the medium famous – the D-listers

o   the once famous who are no more

o   the 15 minutes of famesters,

…for all of whom there’d be different kinds of questions.

2 – Aphorisms/Truisms

·        What are the basic things we should all know – from:

o    the best known – the key to real estate is locationlocationlocation to

o   that calculation on how to invest as you age – the % in stocks vs bonds vs cash based on your age to

o   cooking basics to

o   sports (oddly, I can’t think of any right now!) to

o   gardening (the corn should be high as an elephants eye by sometimeorother)

·        The simpler the better

·        I think I’d call it How to think like a Middle Aged Man at any age…or…What ya wanna do is!

3 – Your kid knows more than you ever will: What kids know and are trying to tell us when we don’t want to listen

·        I was talking after a memorial service this past weekend with a married couple I have known and been close to for nearly 20 years about a message in the service about that “thin line” between the physical world and the spiritual one and we got around to talking about the gifts children seem to have crossing back and forth over that line, which more likely isn't even a line at all. They told me a very personal story about something their son said to them when he was just 2 or 3 years old. The boy’s mom described how many years ago, she had suffered a miscarriage at a very, very early point in her pregnancy and although there was absolutely no way their young son could have known about it, in a car ride a day or two later, their son started talking matter-of-factly about his sister who had just died.

·        Similarly, how Trev named Emma the day Cheryl found out she was pregnant by pointing at Cheryl’s belly and saying Emma in there!

·        And there are so many similar stories I’ve heard that indicate that our children are trying to tell us about things they see and know that we cannot fathom how they see or know them.

·      And in Meeting yesterday, someone else stood and gave another example of all this…without his knowing what I had been thinking about

Of course, I see these as books, but by the time I seriously consider actually writing/researching them, books may have been completely replaced by websites collecting this info, if in fact they either haven’t already been written or the websites already created.

And the bigger challenge might be that Cheryl’s dream is to travel cross country sampling all kinds of local foods at various little restaurants and writing about them. Hopefully she wants me to come along...if only to eat the foods she has no interest in eating, the sweeter and greasier the better!

And then there’s the whole procrastination thing…

 

Letter II

...and as promised, here is the letter that was in the Daily Local on 12/9/14:

http://www.dailylocal.com/opinion/20141209/obamas-economy-strategy-remains-healthy-and-stable

It is such a reflection of the conservative-leaning mainstream media that so few of these facts are ever publicized. There was a conference of conservatives in Washington DC many years ago where a Frank Luntz-type announced a new strategy to the eager participants - that heretofore, they should never refer to the media without emphasizing that it was a left-wing mainstream media or a liberal press - yeegods! It's been a remarkably effective campaign, even though there is easily shown evidence that if anything, it is the exact opposite.

And the letters and calls published in the Local are so incredibly one-sided, I really want to try to at least present some facts to the readers who so easily gloss over the almost daily drumbeat of positive news buried in the business section, adding in what is virtually never reported, particularly in terms of the corporate profits in comparison to how little they actually pay - a fraction of the tax rate they are "supposed" to pay.

DLN Letter of 11/20/14

I had a letter to the Daily Local published yesterday, but before I post a link to that one here, I should go back a few weeks to the one that was published around 11/20/14 that the Daily Local never posted to their website. People who don't get the Local have asked me to let them know when they get in so they can read them, and so here it is:

Along with the appointed experts on the election last week, I thought I might add my non-expert observations of last week’s elections. It seems that except in the case of our wonderful new Governor, voters rejected the Democratic party almost across the board. That is, we rejected the party responsible for 65 straight months of economic growth, a record 56 months of consecutive private sector job growth, unemployment falling from 10.1% to 5.8%, (after losing nearly 800,000 jobs a month when Bush left office, the country is now adding a minimum of 200,000 jobs per month) the budget deficit reduced by two-thirds, and almost daily records in the stock market. Corporate profits are at record highs and the U.S. gross national product growth is now among the best in the world.

The dollar is at its strongest levels in years, gasoline prices are falling, there’s no inflation, interest rates are the lowest in 30 years, U.S. oil imports are declining, U.S. oil production is rapidly increasing, and the wealthy, as opposed to most of the rest of us, are still making astonishing amounts of money.

So, in summary, Americans voted for the party that got us into the mess that Obama just dug us out of. And we, the people, rewarded the party who, last time they held the White House, gave us an almost total world economic collapse, the worst terrorist attack in history, the two longest wars in US history, the worst record of job creation since Herbert Hoover, a complete collapse of the stock market and a budget SURPLUS that they turned into a trillion dollar annual deficit.  

And in the absence of any actual reasons that republicans have to explain these incredible accomplishments by President Obama, the best they can do is hope that it is a bubble, so somehow, someway, their economic theories of trickle-down economics that have thus far only had disastrous results, will finally prove to help us. I also hear some people think Ryan Howard is going to turn it around next year. Well actually, their economic theories do benefit one group - the upper 1% who bankroll their favorite republican politicians through dark money, to the surprise of no one, as the Daily Local exposed last week.

And if we had any doubt as to the continuing lurch to the extreme right, it was confirmed by the ouster of a “moderate” (by republican standards anyway) Dom Pileggi from his Senate leadership. Elections have consequences, indeed. I was encouraged at least to see in Michael Rellahan’s excellent interview with Ryan Costello this past week that he pledges to be non-partisan and listen carefully to his constituents to hear all our concerns regardless of party affiliation. I hope this is a promise he can keep despite the pressures he will be under from his far-right party leaders these next two years.

I wake up every morning grateful that Barack Obama is in the White House so that the extreme right doesn’t continue to try to eviscerate our environment, ruin our economy and get us back into multiple wars. And I am also grateful that so many thousands of moderate Chester County voters have switched to the Democratic Party and gave a majority of their votes to Tom Wolf, whom Corbett has left with a $2 billion deficit and our ability to borrow completely maxed out. This after Corbett, according to the state 2011 fiscal year financial statement, entered office with a $1 billion surplus, There is still a long way to go to get more competitive balance in the more local elections, but at a state level, we are clearly headed in the right direction with Tom Wolf, and for that, I am most thankful of all.

Jamie McVickar

West Vincent Township

Troll self-revealed! And his query answered.

Following up on my post below about the RW troll, that also referred to my having been impressed by Mr. Oleck's lack of hesitation in identifying himself in previous posts, as it turns out, they are one and the same. Thank you, sir, and I understand your confusion over how to avoid the anonymous tag. Blogger.com makes it harder than necessary to avoid that.

So, to reply to your question regarding the President's impact on the price of oil, I am at a disadvantage for a few reasons. I do very little online between 5pm Friday and Monday morning, and further, since the Local is so bad at posting letters to the editor, or, thankfully, Sound-Off, for that matter, I don't remember what I wrote exactly, but that said, here is my reply regarding your questions.

From this link, you can see an excellent summary of Obama's involvement, but highlighting here:

Here are some of the other measures recently taken by the administration to boost domestic oil production:

* An increase in the sales of leases for oil and gas drilling on federal lands.  In 2013, the Bureau of Land Management held 30 such sales -- the most in a decade -- offering 5.7 million acres for lease by industry.

* An increase in the speed with which permits are being issued for actual drilling on federal lands.  What’s called “processing time” has, the White House boasts, been cut from 228 days in 2012 to 194 days in 2013.

* The opening up of an additional 59 million acres for oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the site of a disastrous BP oil spill in April 2010.

In other words, global warming be damned!

Now, as to your other claims, you are putting words in my mouth. I did not denigrate the voters. Rather, I merely gave all the evidence voters used to make the decision to vote so heavily for republicans. If you infer from that that voters are stupid, that is your choice. I did not call them that.

Furthermore, it is lost on no one that I made a substantial list of Obama's incredible accomplishments and you have so little you can pick out of that to find fault or disagreement with, falling only on the hope that quantitative easing (which was slowed considerably and has now ended) will bring on a Bush-like economic collapse.

Also not lost on me is that you have nothing positive to say about the Republican agenda, to the extent you can identify one, or any refutation for Bush's disaster of a Presidency. Instead your constant fascination is to attack Democrats and this President instead of trying to find something/anything nice to say about anything the republicans have done...may I add...with easily understood reasons.

Gotta problem with me?! Let's have coffee and we'll tawk.

Unfortunate that I even need to write this, but there is an anonymous right wing troll on my site who posts occasionally literate comments, so I feel a need to state that my policy, heretofore not posted, is that unless I know the commenter personally, as I usually do, or unless the person identifies themself instead of hiding behind a cowardly nickname, I won’t reply to their comments.

And I want this site vitriol-free, so if your post is respectful, I will generally enjoy engaging in any discussion you’d like to have. And that includes you, Mr. Oleck, whom I have complimented in the past for your courage in identifying yourself without hesitation.

But I don’t want to get into a lot of back and forth because I’ve found that there is rarely any point in trying to convince each other of something that we are so strongly in opposition to.

I don't even know why they make any other kind of cookies besides chocolate chip cookies.

If you want to know what I think of Oatmeal Raisin cookies, and I'm sure you woke up this morning wondering exactly that, watch this video, and substitute the words "eating oatmeal raisin cookies" for the words "drinking merlot" and you'll get the drift.

As someone wiser and funnier than me once said: "Oatmeal raisin cookies that look like chocolate chip cookies are the main reason I have trust issues."

OK, I'll just cut and paste it here, but the video link at the top is funnier:

Jack: If they want to drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot.
Miles Raymond: No, if anyone orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am NOT drinking any fu**ing Merlot!

And now I feel a need to apologize to merlot, which is one of the few wines I actually occasionally like.