samadhisoft.com

Dennis:

Your latest email suggested that your pessimism is deepening. How can that be in light of the fact that the Bushies apparently were unable to use Diebold’s machines to win? A small victory, but one nonetheless.

D.

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D.,

Sorry for my slow response. I’ve been a busy boy since I arrived here in New Zealand two weeks ago.

Well, you pose an interesting question. And, if I judged the world’s probable future solely through the lens of US politics, I think it would, indeed, indicate misplaced pessimism on my part. The current turn away from Bush’s policies is a good sign. I wish, however, that I felt that the change of direction was due to the Democrats offering up a new and persuasive visions for the country’s future but, I fear instead, that it was due more to a series of serious misadventures on the Republican side which pushed the electorate in the Democrat’s direction.

I recently read a book named, Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics by Zuniga and Armstrong (review) which analyzes why the Republicans have so badly out maneuvered the Democrats over the last 15 years and what has and continues to be wrong with the machinery on the Democratic side. The book is written from the POV of a new and vibrant thread on the Democratic side – that is those young and technical types who have collectively joined forces to influence politics through the Internet. If you’ll recall, we first heard of these folks when Howard Dean’s campaign surged ahead so strongly due to their organizing via the Internet.

So, until people like Zuniga and Armstrong capture the control mechanisms of the Democratic Party Machinery, I think we’ll continue to see more of the same tired strategies which the Republicans have long since learned to organize around and bulldoze through.

But, in a fundamental way, all of that is peripheral to my concerns for the world’s probable future. The wells springs of why the world is on a collision course with disaster have much more to do with our inborn biological imperatives than with which country is currently sitting atop the dog pile.

I don’t know if you and I have discussed the concept of Biological Imperatives before or not. The idea is that all biological forms here on earth, from very near the beginning of biological evolution until the present, share deep inborn imperatives to propagate their genes forward in time and to create and protect spaces within which their progeny can grow to maturity so that they can, in their turn, propagate their genes forward as well. It is a strategy which has served all of biology well up until now. But now, one species, us, has become so powerful that we’ve broken free of all the checks and balances of the natural world and we’ve grown until we’ve covered the planet and now, with no more frontiers to conquer and no more spaces to fill, this strategy has finally, after billions of years, come to the place where its applicability has run out and a new strategy that acknowledges limits has to be implemented or we are going to self destruct and take much of the biosphere with us.

So, if you buy this hypothesis, then what’s going on with global politics is of only marginal importance. I tend to think of the Democrats and the Republicans these days as Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum. Neither of them seems to have even the faintest grasp of what’s going on and what the stakes are.

Dennis Gallagher
samadhisoft.com
in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Well, I am experiencing just a bit of guilt here. I’m in sunny and warm New Zealand banging away on my keyboard and my biggest problem at the moment is what time’s lunch.

Meanwhile, back home in the US in western Washington State, the snow has been falling steadily and making everyone’s lives difficult. It’s very hard to imagine when I look out and see the trees here stirring in the gentle breeze.

For the curious, here’s the weather news from home:

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Washington state snowed under, iced over

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) — A storm that dumped as much as 2 feet of snow on some parts of Washington state turned freeways and city streets into icy gridlock and left thousands of people without power.

The snowfall capped off a month of heavy rain in Seattle — which was edging closer to a wettest-single-month record.

As of 10 p.m. Monday, Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where official measurements are kept, had received 15.26 inches of precipitation — just .07 inches short of the 15.33 inches recorded in downtown Seattle in December 1933.

“It’s kind of ironic that after all that rain we could be breaking the record with snow,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Danny Mercer in Seattle. “It doesn’t happen this way very often.”

In central Washington, which received as much as 7 inches of snow, a Bridgeport woman and her two sons died in a two-vehicle crash near Orondo on Sunday evening.

Roads were a mess by the Monday evening commute, with cars sliding off Interstate 405.

“There’s cars in the ditches all up and down the road,” said Don Bowman, who drove 20 miles to buy tire chains after he was unable to find any still available in his hometown of Blaine.

More… ➡

If you’ll notice, the title indicates I wrote this on 061128 (Tuesday, November 28th, 2006) but just under my date, it indicates that the post was actually created on the 27th of November. Why?

The BlueHost server that this blog runs on is physically in Utah in the United States but I’m writing these posts from New Zealand. And New Zealand is on the other side of the International Date Line so when it is noon on Monday in Utah (mountain time) on the November 27th, it is also 8 Am here in New Zealand on Tuesday, the 28th of November.  Got that?   Yup, I find it confusing as well.

Flying here from the States, you take off on the 14th and you land on the 16th and there never was, so far as you are concerned, a 15th.  Ya sure, ya betcha! as they say in Ballard and Minnesota.

So, about the dates?  Just don’t worry about and you’ll feel better.

I’m back, as they say, in the saddle this morning. I’ve got a half a dozen or so articles I’ve culled from the web to put up. As usual, these bear, mostly, on the Perfect Storm theme which is the central point of the website/blog.

Before I jump into all of that, however, I want to discuss some thoughts and experiences I’ve had recently.

Information permeability – in my opinion, people are either open to new information, indifferent to it or resistant to it.

Those who are open to new information by intention realize that new information is what allows them to grow and shed earlier points of view for newer ones with more to recommend them.  Intentional openness is a form of self-creativity.

I consider myself intentionally open to new information and, of late, I’ve gotten a fair bit which I’m integrating and processing.

Seeing something you’ve been looking at for a long time from a new POV, can expand your horizons.   I consider myself a liberal and, as such, I’ve been inundated with theories about what the Neocons, the Religious Right, the Conservatives and everyone of an even vaguely Republican flavor are doing as they try to take over our hearts and our minds, take away our freedoms and generally drag the world into a new dark ages.  Most of my friends share my views and stories like this pass among us as common currency.

Recently, I was corresponding with a good friend of mine, C., about a conspiracy theory and he related the following to me:

Reading this article immediately reminded me of over-hearing a phone conversation of my right-wing brother, N., the other night with one of his like-minded friends. He completely attributed the Democratic take-over of House and Senate, and the exit of Rumsfeld as manifestations of the vast, surreptitious, media-driven conspiracy by the Left to “take America back down the road to Socialism”. As in this article, my brother considers Bush a dupe (though well-intentioned), being out-maneuvered by sinister, determined, behind-the-scene forces who thwart the American people’s desire for a traditional, family-oriented government through their control of the media, and their manipulation of “weak-minded and weak-willed” “so-called moderate Republicans”. He ENTIRELY blames the Mark Foley incident on House Democrats and mainstream media that held off publishing the scandal until just before the November election (when, actually, Democratic Party operatives had been trying for most of the year to get the press to cover the story, yet it is known that 13 Republican Members or staffers knew about Foley’s e-mails to pages — while no Dem Members or staffers are alleged to have known: the Dem operatives found out from investigating media and/or from Republicans). Since the President, Executive Administration (i.e. the West Wing), Supreme Court, and both Houses of Congress are still (until 2007) under Republican control, and talk-show radio is dominated by the Far Right, my brother and his buddies attribute leadership of the Leftist Conspiracy to “the liberal media”, and believe that it is not at all loose, but tightly coordinated, massively funded, and utterly morally bankrupt.

Sound familiar?

Sorry, I just don’t buy any of these conspiracy
theories (which is not to say that I don’t believe
there are wanna-be conspirators out there). As J.notes, the theories are more convoluted than the
conspiracies they postulate, and all of them are
incompatible with Occam’s razor.

C. makes his living in the political world and has insights into what goes on out in the Beltway that most of us can only read about from a distance so I value his insights greatly.   He is a Democrat and he is quite liberal in his orientation but he is definitely not persuaded by most conspiracy theories and his comments here have given me a lot of food for thought.

I think conspiracy theories ‘work’ for many of us mentally, because they give us what we believe to be a plausible explanation for what we see going on around us.  And it is human nature to prefer understanding over confusion, to prefer apparent clarity over cognitive dissonance.   But, it’s a road too easily taken in most cases because the world is seldom so simple.

Years ago, I read a lot of material, and saw even more on TV, about the Roswell Incident.  It was all fascinating stuff but later, after I mulled it over, I asked myself what was the probability that the hundreds of military people who supposedly participated in the clean up and the cover up would have not spoken out over the following 60 years?  Imagine someone is in his 80’s now and near the end of his time.   If he didn’t agree with the imposed code of silence, what would keep him from speaking now?  What are they going to do to him at this point – kill him?   And imagine the hundreds of folks who would have been out there picking up every scrap of alien debris – that not one of them would have been able to squirrel away a memento, a piece of something so unique and amazing?   And that now, after 60 years, not one such verifiable piece of alien technologyhas come forward?

Conspiracy theorists would have us believe that the governmental spooks do have such incredible control but I’m strongly doubting it.   This is, after all, the same organization that tried to keep the bombing of Cambodia secret and failed, the same people who bungled Watergate and brought a government down and the same folks who throught they could get away with ContraGate only to find it splashed across the world’s newspapers.  No, when they try to do large scale clandestine stuff, very often, someone lets the curtain fall by accident and then we are looking at what appears to be the Keystone Cops.

So, conspiracy theories may make us feel good and give us a nice explanation of who’s good and who’s bad but I think they are usually vast oversimplifications and as such their adoption blocks us from further and deeper insights into what’s really happening.

I’m going to discuss one more interesting insight I’ve had lately and then we’ll begin to post some of today’s news.

A correspondent of mine, Kevin, who publishes the Cryptogon blog,  hails from Irvine in Southern California. He used to work in the financial industry there but he moved about a year ago to a remote area in New Zealand to create a new life for himself as a permaculture farmer.  I had to laugh some months ago when I read a scathing piece he’d written about why he left Irvine.  He said that the ‘plasticness’ of the place was getting to him and he related how he’d seen a sign posted over a small plot of grass amid all of the concrete and the sign said, “Grass under renovation”.

A few weeks ago, on my way here to New Zealand, I spent a week with my son and his family who live in Aliso Viejo which isn’t far from Irvine and I found myself remembering Kevin’s comment.   All of this area is intimately familiar to me as I lived there myself for many years.  If anything, Aliso Viejo is Irvine in spades.  It is a brand new city built over what was, 15 years ago, just empty rolling hills.   Today, it is a complete city – fully filled in with shopping centers,  housing developments, businesses, and roads.   Everything is new and I dare say that virtually ever bit of greenery one sees there, outside of a few nature preserves, was placed there intentionally by the builders of the city.

I left Orange County and Southern California 16 years ago myself and moved to a semi-rural area about 40 miles northwest of the City of Seattle in Washington State in the US.   My opinions about Orange County are nowhere as strong as Kevin’s are.  I enjoy it and its weather and beauty when I’m there but I also easily acknowledge that I’m glad I don’t live there anymore.  It is just too big, too crowded, too fast paced and too artificial for me as well.

All of this came together for me in the form of a small revelation one night over a beer with my son, Dan, while I was visiting.  We were talking about our family history, the amount of luck we’ve both had in our lives and the major events that have shaped them and he said that in his life one of the things that he was most grateful for was that in spite of the fact that he came from a broken home and that both of his parents (myself and my first wife, Rose) had ended up living outside of California, that we’d been kind enough to drop him in the middle of the best and most affluent place on the face of the earth.  I knew that he liked where he lived but now I got that he really loves it passionately and fully intends to live there all of his life – he’s deeply bonded to it.

So, here we have one place and several different views of it.  It all reminds me deeply of the idea that for any given set of facts, there can be many possible explanations that all seem to explain those facts equally well. Each of us makes sense of things in different ways and each of us typically thinks that our way of making sense is the right way.

And beneath it all, the situations we’re all trying to make sense of don’t really give a hang about any of what we think.

Well, that’s enough time up on the soapbox today.

Well, a week ago, I said I’d post again and catch up with what’s been happening since I arrived here in New Zealand. Today’s the day. I really need to get to it because enough time has passed that I’ll begin forgetting important things.

For those who don’t know, Godzone is how Kiwis often refer to NZ. It’s a contraction of “God’s own” – referring to this beautiful land. You’ll also see me (and many others) use another term, Aotearoa, which is a Maori word and it is their name for NZ. Translated, it means “The Land of the Long White Cloud“.

As I sit typing, it is 6 PM and the sun is blazing in the front window-doors of my apartment and just across the street in Christchurch’s Hagley Park, people have been assembling all day for a huge show which is going to be put on this evening. It’s called “Christmas in the Park” and I’ve heard that as many as 100,000 people may show up. I’d be amazed if that many do since that would be 10% of the South Island’s population – but we’ll see. last night, when I went out for a run, they were doing a rehearsal and I stopped and listened to two or three numbers and it was pretty good stuff. The space they’ve laid out is HUGE so they are expecting a lot of folks.

Well, when I first arrived here back on November 16th, I had a cold and it stayed with me for about five days and made everything a bit of an uphill struggle – as colds do. The other major thing that happened right away when I arrived and checked into my room at the guest house i was staying at was that I discovered that the wireless Internet service they were providing wasn’t up to what I needed to do with it.

So, even on that first day, I began looking for other accommodations. But, it wasn’t easy because I needed to find a furnished place for just a month and if it didn’t already have Internet, I was going to have Telecom wire it in.

One place I looked at on Thursday looked good but we couldn’t get the Internet to do everything I needed (like Skype).

I had another idea that I thought might work and I gave it a try on Friday. And that was to take a bus out by the University and see if I could find a room for rent out there. College is out this time of the year so rooms that would normally be occupied by students might be setting free – and who more than college students would need the Internet?

I got there just as it started to rain lightly. And then I discovered the problem with my plan. Friday’s a big holiday here in the Canterbury area of New Zealand. Its called Show Day in honor of the huge once a year County Fair-like show they hold at this time of the year. I originally was going to go to the show but after I arrived, I thought finding a place was a higher priority. I had no idea they’d created a holiday for it.

So, the upshot was that essentially the University was closed. I did find a fellow in the security complex and he said that they did have such ads for rooms in the library building but that I’d have to come back on Monday to see at them. because the building was locked up.

Someone else told me that students often placed ads in a big store on the other side of the U and showed me where it was on my map. It was quite a walk but I decided to go for it. now, it started raining in earnest. And my nose? Oh yeah, it was being rude rude rude and my head was a brick.

When I was almost to the store, I came across a big complex of student housing called College House and decided to go on in and see what the possibilities where. The place was pretty empty but I found four people sitting in their cafeteria talking over coffee and tea and I told them of my quest. They were great people and a lot of fun to talk to but the bottom line was that they weren’t the decision makers and I’d have to wait and call in on Monday. Ah well.

I went on to the store and the ads there were no help so I just had some sushi there for lunch and bussed back to my room at the guest house.

On Saturdays and Wednesdays, The Press newspaper here in Christchurch runs all of the houses and rooms for rent ads. So, on Saturday I bought a copy and went through it closely. I made a number of calls and just missed a nice studio apartment that I think would have worked. But, most of my calls were in vain because in spite of the fact that the ads come out on Saturday, most folks here aren’t interested in messing with all of that on the weekends or they are professional property management types who are off for the weekend. In the end, I concluded that most of the ads from the paper would have to wait for Monday.

I was pushing pretty hard to get my housing problem resolved but, in the end,it was looking like nothing was really going to happen until Monday – no matter how hard I pushed.

Sunday, I walked and looked at things but with no results. I walked so much in these few days that I got a good sized blister on the ball of my left foot. But, I actually think I preferred being really busy like this with a cold rather than sitting around waiting for it to depart. I think the time passed quicker.

On Monday, I called the leasing manager at the Park Terrace Apartments where we’re buying our apartment and he gave me some good news! The tenants in out apartment, who have a legal right to stay until December 31st, if they want, had decided that December 18th would be their last night there.

That was very good news indeed because our real estate deal is set to close on the 20th of December *and* even better, my real estate agent had earlier offered me the option of leasing another apartment he owned in the same Park Terrace complex. The rub was that I had to be out of his unit by the 22nd of December because he had it rented after that. I’d declined his offer earlier thinking that I needed a place to stay through December 31st. Now, suddenly, this option worked! I called him and it was still free. Yahoo!! I met him there and we shook hands on it and I began to call the power folks to switch the power into my name and the Telecom folks to get the telephone and Internet broadband connected. We agreed to meet there at noon on Tuesday and sign the lease papers and transfer the keys.

Tuesday, we met at noon and signed stuff and I moved in. Man, was it nice to finally unpack my suitcases. I’d been living out of them since I left home for Dan’s place in Southern California on November 9th – and this was now the 21st.

....

Since then, things have gone well. My cold lifted for the most part the day I moved in. The telephone was on the first day I was there and the DSL broadband modem arrived the next morning on Wednesday.

Wednesday evening, a Kiwi friend, Bob, came and picked me up mid-afternoon and took me out to his place for dinner with him, his wife and her mother and their kids. They live in the Harewood area not far from the airport on five or 10 acres. Bob and I met some time back on the Internet because we share deeply held convictions about the way mankind’s history is working itself rapidly into a nasty corner. It was nice seeing him and his family again. They’d had Sharon and I out for dinner as well on our previous trip back in August. Very nice people.

The last few days, I’ve been settling in here and getting my computer systems working like I want them to. Telecom gives their customers a modem/router with only one port to connect your computer to. I wanted to link to the Internet with both my laptops and one or more of my PDAs wirelessly so I spent a lot of time working out how to stack my WRT54G router up behind their DSL-502T router and get a multi-way Internet setup like I wanted. Eventually, it all came together.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, I made it over to Dick Smith’s Electronics Store (New Zealand’s equivalent of America’s Radio Shack) and bought myself a small laser printer for $150 NZD. I also went to Office Max and got a high intensity lamp and a ream of paper for the printer.

On Friday, the 24th, I met with a fellow who knows New Zealand tax law pretty well so I could find out what the implications are for Sharon and I now that we are official New Zealand residents. I was a bit scared because I’d read that once you become a NZ resident, all of your world-wide income becomes taxable under NZ law. But, on the other hand, NZ and the US have a reciprocal tax law to prevent double taxation. I just wanted to see how it was all going to shake out.

Jamie, the tax expert, was really a pleasure to talk to and even if I hadn’t come away with good news, I would have been very happy to have made his acquaintance.

The good news would appear to be that:

(1) any money I move to NZ is tax free there so long as I’ve already paid US taxes on it and

(2) If I take a job here, my employer will take out all the necessary taxes so I won’t have to file income taxes at year end.

So, it looks like the only time I’ll be entangled with New Zealand’s tax people is if I employ people here and/or start a business here. Jamie’s still confirming the details on this.

Life with the Internet here at the new place hasn’t been all roses and kisses. Internet here in NZ can be problematic. The government is still working its way through the recognition that easy, fast and dependable access to the Internet is a grease that makes everything run better in a society from human rights to business deals. They’ve had a near monopoly here and only recently has the government forced the company sitting on top of things (complaining loudly that they couldn’t so any better) to ‘unbundle the loop’ and let some others onto the physical network structure to see if they could spur competition and improve quality, services and prices. It is all still a work in progress.

Here at Park Terrace, I sit 1.5 km from the switching station so with that distance (according to their tech types), I should have a good, fast and reliable signal. I signed up for Telecom’s new “Go Large” plan for $49.95/mo NZD. This plan is New Zealand’s first to offer the public a plan with unlimited throughput. All previous plans have had 1 GB or 5 GB limits per month on usage. I’m close to the station, I’m in a new building – you’d think this should work well?

Well, it does work and it’s at DSL speeds. The problem is that in any 30 minute period of time, I’m likely to lose my connection for 30 seconds to a minute at a time. Then, it reappears, magically. It’s been a minor annoyance and thus far, they’ve been unable to resolve it. In fact, I’ve been all through the first level of tech support and they’ve had me try various things and have finally escalated my case (#12933084, if you are interested – who knows, maybe a Telecom executive is reading this) up to the second level. These 2nd level folks will ‘watch’ my line for three days and then contact me by phone. It’s Sunday here and I’m hoping to hear from them on Monday.

Yesterday, on Saturday, at noon, I walked to the Art Center here in Christchurch. They’ve given an entire city block in the CBD (Central Business District) to art and things associated. They have an arts and crafts fair there on most weekends and I walked down to see what it was like and it was fun.

Then, last night, when I began typing this, the city was having a huge party across the street at Hagley Park. Many tens of thousands showed up for a big Christmas show. At one point, I stopped typing and went over and just walked through the crowds as they were pouring in and getting places for themselves on the grass.

..

..

It felt good and relaxed unlike many such large gatherings in the US. I saw no groups of sullen hoodlum youths prowling like sharks. Just people out having a great time at a big event. I’m going to post a few photos here later today if I can figure out how to make the WordPress blog software put photos into the text that people can click on to see a larger image. The big show ended at 10 PM with a large burst of fireworks which I walked out onto the grass in front of this apartment to watch. Very nice.

Today’s Sunday. The weather’s shifted into light rain and I plan to resume blogging and post some environmentally related articles here on this blog later today. I’ll also be posting more recaps of my experiences here in New Zealand as I go along.

I can sum up my thoughts about it so far, however. I haven’t seen anything yet to make me doubt my opinions about this beautiful little country. It truly is a haven in an increasingly insane world.

Golly-gee, Batman, but a lot has happened since the last time I updated this blog. Today’s Sunday here in New Zealand and I arrived last Thursday so this is my fourth day here. But, before I go into all that has happened since I arrived here, I want to go back and deal with all that happened before I left the States.

My last post was about the big storm that hit Western Washington State in the days just before I left. To say it was huge would be an understatement. It broke records left, right and center and caused an awful lot of folks heartache and grief. Sharon and I just saw one small part of what happened but thousands of other folks all had their adventures and trials as well. Sharon told me that the local newspaper in our town had an entire issue primarily dedicated to the storm. if you want to get some sense of just how big all of this was, you can link to the paper on-line here. As I write this, the current issue has the story but, if you read this later and access the link, you will want the 14Nov06 edition.

I left Washington on November 9th bound for a five day visit to Southern California with my son and his family before continuing on to New Zealand.

Amazingly, the storms kept coming even after the one that broke all the records. The last I heard from my wife, they’ve continued to come one after the other with barely a day of decent weather between them. The weather folks are saying that all of this activity is part of a larger pattern which is setting up as the result of a new El Nino forming in the eastern Pacific. The last time we had a big El Nino like this was in 1990 and I remember the storms that year in Western Washington were ferocious as well.

My visit to my son’s place was great. It’s been a year and a half since I’ve seen them last and in that time, they’ve had another child, a little girl named Eden. And their first, a boy named Cody, has grown up into a three year-old full of love and questions and curiosity.

We did so many things during the five days, it’s becoming hard to remember them all. I worked with Dan two days on a patio reconstruction project he’s doing for his boss in Dana Point. I went with him into his office where he works as a loan officer. We went out to Silverado Canyon where Larry Branham lives and saw his place and talked with folks from the Warriors Mountain Bike Club which both dan and Larry are members of.

Dan tends bar at a one-of-a-kind bar named the Swallow’s Inn in San Juan Capistrano and I went in there on Friday night after having a great sushi dinner with one of my wife’s dearest friends and had a few beers and just watched the action until almost closing. The Swallow’s Inn is a piece of true and remarkable Americana. I told Dan that someone ought to take a video camera in there one afternoon when it is quiet and just go around and slowly film and record the walls. There are more than fifty years of scribbles, posters, nick-nacks, discarded bras, cowboy hats and God knows what else layered there. People put up most whatever they want and stuff rarely comes down. Dan told me that in one place, there’s a note by someone under some later posters scrawled there just before he went off to fight in WWII and then just beside it is the note he wrote when he returned four years later. Someday, the Swallows will be gone and I hope someone goes around and captures it all first. In a world plagued by corporate restaurants pretending to be the genuine article, this is, indeed, one of the last real ones and right there in the midst or Orange County in Southern California which is virtually by definition, one of the most affluent and fastest developing areas in the world.

This story wouldn’t be complete without something about Dan. I’m sure most parents love and cherish their children and I’m no different. But I wonder if many of them respect the man their son has grown up to be as much as I do Dan. He is truly an amazing person. I told him my thoughts about this over dinner one night. I told him that even if he wasn’t my son, I would be immensely proud to know him and call him my friend. I think his wife, Ann, perhaps said it best. She said that when she first met him and had watched him for awhile, that it was his genuineness and the fair and even way he treated everyone that impressed her. I couldn’t agree more. I wish that I thought that a lot of what he turned out to be was because of my input – but the truth is that I don’t think so. His mother, Rose, and I loved him truly but beyond that, I think all the magic and steel was in him from birth. And I see this as yet another example of all the blessings I find here in my life.

I’d asked Dan months before I came down if we could go out to Joshua Tree in the high California desert like we used to when he was a teenager. On Sunday morning, after a big family breakfast, he and I took off and drove out there. It’s about three hours from where he lives in Aliso Viejo. I know that the trips we made when he was young made an impression on him because he’s been back there many many times in the years since and he’s explored and hiked a lot of the remoter parts of the place. I’m and older man now than I was back then and I told him I wouldn’t be up for climbing huge rocks and jumping down off of them and making difficult traverses. Just something that an older fellow in decent shape could expect to do without breaking something on the eve of his departure to new Zealand, I said.

Well, he found a good one. We drove to a place called Split Rock and hiked for about an hour and a half up and over a big ridge to enter a valley behind the ridge where he knew of some old mine shafts and a miner’s cabin built into the rocks. it took us awhile to find the shafts and the cabin since it had been five years since he was last there but we did and it was cool.

After exploring it all, we sat down and opened a can of oysters and put them onto crackers and squirted cheese-in-a-can on them and gobbled them up. I had to laugh. He told me that many people just can’t get past the idea of eating something that looks as gross as an oyster out of a can and so many times when he brings them on hikes or mountain bike rides to eat, there are no takers even though folks are starving.

Cody’s a trip. For at least a year now, he’s had a near obsession with ‘plugging things in’. So, after making very sure that he knows the difference between and the rules concerning real electrical plug-in and pretend ones, they gave him his own power strip and extension cord which he drags all over the place plugging them in. He really wants to know how things connect together and how they turn on and off. One of the best things he and I did together was to go through my bags slowly. I was carrying lot of computer gear for use in New Zealand and he was intensely curious about it all.

So, each evening, as a aid to getting him to go to bed without a struggle, we promised him to open my bag and take out one more thing and to see what it was and how it worked. It was hugely popular and before the week was out, he’d seen every bit of computer gear I had and checked out what could and could not plug into it.

On Tuesday the 14th around noon, I left Dan’s and headed north towards Los Angeles to meet Charles, whom I’ve known since college in the early seventies. My flight to new Zealand didn’t take off until 8:30 PM so we had a lot of time to have a late lunch. He lives in a nice area just north of LAX called Culver City. it seems to be undergoing a renaissance and many of the big Hollywood movie studios are establishing themselves there and it’s a vibrant place.

Charles and I have had a running thirty-year philosophical discussion and even if I haven’t see him for years, we always seem to pick it up again and wade in once more better armed than the previous time with all the stuff we’ve learned, experienced and thought in the mean time. This was no exception and I found it as much of a pleasure as I always do. Charles is a brilliant man and I take it as a compliment that he deigns to talk with me. Whereas I pursued natural science in college, he pursued the liberal arts and our careers have diverged wildly. He works these days as the chief political strategist for a California US Congresswoman and he is the one person I know that actually has some real and direct knowledge of what goes on inside the Beltway.

If I had to sum up our afternoon’s philosophical output, it would be that (A) The existence or non-existence of an omnipotent God can neither be proven nor disproven and that therefore we each are free to make an a-priori choice in the matter and none can gainsay us and (B) that now that we’re older men, we find that our weenies have significantly less influence over what we are thinking or doing at any given time and this is not bad.

After lunch, Charles took me around to meet several of his extended family members who all seem to live within just a few miles of his place. I have to say that Charles has one of the most amazing and diverse extended family structures I’ve ever seen and from what’s he’s told me, it all seems to work. It would take several very long paragraphs to try to describe what I know about his family and I think I’ll just leave it at that for now. Everyone I met seemed exceptionally bright and I am not surprised.

This has grown exceptionally long so I’m going to cut it loose now and my next piece will describe what happened after I left Charles and journeyed on to Aotearoa – the land of the Long White Cloud – New Zealand.