The SwiftPad Takeover predicts Christian Pulisic's goal (raised in Pennsylvania...)

 See more about the first volume of the SwiftPad Saga

Read more about the SwiftPad Takeover

    The SwiftPad App had a whole interactive story based on just such a

boy, raised in rural Pennsylvania, who had never played basketball

or baseball or football, in fact didn’t even know such sports

existed. The App “player” connected with the actor player in the

App (assuming the device had sufficient voice recognition, otherwise

a keyboard popped up). The young boy, Tad Lopstyk, was not

even the star of his youth team, and he worshiped Aldo Donelli.

The SwiftPad Chooser journey was titled The Lopstyk Effect, and it

predicted when the US had 18.7 million young boys like Lopstyk,

the United States would win the World Cup.

    The App player could change history either way, depending on

actions. Italy won the World Cup championship in 1934 and beat

the US 7–1 in the first game. To make it worse, the Cup was hosted

by Italy, or rather by Mussolini.

    But the App’s Journey changes that fact. An old black and white

film print of the game’s highlights morphed into a full 90 minutes,

importing Lopstyk into the 1934 US team’s mid-field. Lopstyk and

Donelli strike again and again, matching Italy’s goal barrage, with

frequent cut-aways to a not-amused Il Duce. In history Italy’s win

was Mussolini’s victory and Lopstyk’s time traveling (i.e., The Swift-

Pad user/Player) changes history. The fascist victory against the US

turns into a 7–7 tie and Hitler’s enthusiasm for the Berlin Olympic

Games two years later was much diminished and with it, Germany’s

love affair with the Fuehrer. The consequences are only hinted at,

because you can only take the Butterfly Effect so far, because…well,

it is still happening.

    Donelli was the shining example of just who Lopstyk wanted to

be. The App, using still shots both real and auto-animated, jumps to

the future and Lopstyk stays on the pitch and scores the winning goal

in his late twenties, in Qatar in 2022. SwiftPad produced a renaissance-

like, high holy scene, with angels blowing trumpets and saints

gazing with tranquility at an animation of Donelli looking down

approvingly at Lopstyk in his interactive uniform that provided a full

sensory playing experience for the dedicated fan. (Available in several

colors, with free delivery, if you order two. In the future you would

catch the highlights in your head, not on ESPN.)

Review of “No Way to Die” (Cal Claxton Oregon Mysteries Book 7) by Warren C Easley

A Great Procedural Murder Mystery About the Oregon Coast  (As reviewed on Goodreads, 11/22/2022) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49534640-no-way-to-die “No Way to Die” is set in Coos Bay Oregon, a depressed little seaport that the Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) industry has in its sights as a main tanker terminal on the West Coast. There is money to be made by local luminaries, but local environmentalists are warning about the potential for disaster that the project threatens the community. Cal Claxton is vacationing nearby with his daughter, who is taking a break from a high pressure research project at Harvard. While they are fly fishing in a scenic creek, his daughter discovers a body, hog-tied and floating next to a tree snag. The vacation is over, and we are pulled into local scandals, corruption, drug running and of course murder. Warren Easley’s Cal Clayton crime stories are getting better and better. “No Way to Die” is a thoughtful, action packed and totally believable story of big money corrupting a small city that is trying to recover its glory. I have read a couple of his earlier novels, and Easley’s writing style compares well against some of the acknowledged masters of mystery writing. If you like John McDonald’s Florida based Travis McGee novels you will fall happily into Cal Clayton’s Oregon. Easley’s characters reveal themselves in their action and dialogue with verve and intelligence. Calvin Clayton, a widowed lawyer who lives in Dundee Oregon (wine country), is slowly but surely becoming one of the great fiction characters of the genre.  What makes the story “unputdownable” is how Easley skillfully tells the story, making it seem effortless and casual. He weaves together the pressure of running a small law firm, the lives of people struggling on the coast, in addition to following tenuous leads in a murder investigation. The novel unfolds and we are treated to scenic coastal beauty as well as various and surprising depictions of weak people trying to be decent (and occasionally but not always succeeding). We also meet people driven by greed and depravity, but even then we get a glimpse of their humanity.  Cal is not a rich lawyer. He needs to keep his practice afloat, while working through the dangerous investigation. Oregon itself is ever present, it’s natural beauty and treacherous back roads are always zipping along with the intriguing investigatory details that slowing and deliciously come together. But most of all "No Way to Die" is a brilliant procedural that has to take a wild ride with dead ends and trapdoors galore before it all fits together.  It is exciting to watch a good writer in the process of becoming better and better. Easley’s Cal Clayton mysteries are on their way to becoming part of Oregon lore. “No Way to Die” is a great read.

A Halloween Story, (from the early 80s)

 No Marks on the Body

(Written in the early 80s for a Halloween contest sponsored by a Eugene Oregon Literary magazine, (I forgot it’s name, but am sure it no longer exists).  Not only did this story NOT win but, (this was 40 some years ago, so the details elude me) I remember reading notes in the November issue congratulating the winners, and how much better the winning story was than a particularly sick story they had received, one that nearly ruined the experience for the judges. Or some statement that to that effect - but however it was said, it was plain they were talking about how much they disliked this story…

I have done a bit of minor editing, which I doubt would have mattered.)

He sat at the kitchen table watching a squirrel make a quick estimate of the potential nut yield on his front yard. The cool, gray, misty, late October overcast bore down upon the tree-dwelling rodent’s calculations. The yard was raked and manicured, and any nuts that had been there earlier were gone. The squirrel looked  back at him, (there was eye contact, he was sure of that), then it leaped over the fence to seek nuts elsewhere. 

He had just arrived home from work. He popped open a can of beer and looked out toward the street and  saw  a nubile adolescent Cat Girl dressed in black, accompanied by a chunky woman who was dressed as Speedy Alkalizer.

“Damn!” He stood up to pull the drapes and the room got dark. He finished his beer and walked back to his bedroom to change his shirt. The polyester golf shirt he had been wearing all day at work carried a foul B.O., like the plague basilicus and he was visibly relieved when he donned a black cotton hooded sweatshirt that was a size too big. Who was that woman? 

Then he remembered standing in the ghetto Safeway express line on sixth street where Speedy had tried very hard to talk to him.

“What are you going to be for Halloween?” He remembered her asking that stupid question out of the blue, and how he ignored her by pretending to read the National Enquirer. 

But he relented and without looking up said,  “Myself.” 

She said nothing, so he looked and smiled at her, but she seemed perplexed. Then she began telling him about moving into town from some hamlet in the coast range, and her recent enrollment in a computer class at the local community college. He was trapped into listening to her because the cashier was waiting for the manager to bring some quarters. He nodded blankly. She stopped talking, looked at him and smiled. He suddenly realized that beneath her vagabond rustic hippie apparel was an attractive woman, or at least once had been. She continued to smile at him. He quickly grinned back and paid for his beer and walked out. She called out at him as he left,  “There are more things around here than just in your head sweetie.”

Anyway, he sat in his kitchen watching Speedy and what appeared to be her teenage daughter harassing an older man and woman, although they all did appear to laugh at something. He pulled off his socks and shoes and walked over to the living room, laid down on the couch and turned on the TV. 

About five minutes later he heard shuffling on his porch and then a knock. He lay still as a fawn for an uncomfortable length of time, then, again, he heard knocking. He still didn’t move.

Finally it sounded like they walked off the porch. “When I was a little girl,”  he overheard as they left, “we used to soap the windows of people who didn’t give us anything. It’s too bad I don’t have any soap.”  He peeked out at them through the curtains. 

“If they don’t answer, do you still soap their windows?”  The girl’s pipe cleaner whiskers and black Lycra leotards balanced the effect of two floppy, quilted ears that matched neither in size nor color. 

“Sure, if we didn’t like them.”

“Do we like this house?”

“No.”

There was more laughter. He was paralysed with a strange fear. He knew he had to get out of there, before they came back. He waited, not moving a muscle as he heard them walk away and  was glad they had no soap. 

When he was sure they were gone, he changed into loose clothes, put on some running shoes, and locked the front door. He started running. He ran across town, heading south, then up Lincoln street passed a house with columns, then up the hill, and then east, over across Willamette.  He passed hundreds of frightening little demons, all with horrifying single mindedness, out on a socially sanctioned glucose binge. By the time he got into the deeper recesses of south Eugene, it was dark.

He slinked down into a hillside cu-de-sac and crept into some shrubbery outside of a house that was at the bottom of a steep winding driveway. Jack-o-lanterns leered out of every window. Witches and skeletons floated around the fire-lite foyer. 

He noticed that the trick-or-treaters were getting older. Not all of them were in costume, but the unmasked ones were often stranger, and more hideous looking than the fairy queens, gobins, Elephant men, Nixons, bumblebees, Reagans, and Batmen, (and Batgirls), and a Flash that seemed to come and go in an endless procession. Fog was rolling in, and the smoke from the house’s chimney curled down, putting a darkening odor of hellishness in the air.

Someone in a black sweatsuit came out of the house and said something inaudible, and quickly disappeared up the cul-de-sac into the fog. He was disturbed, his stomach was queasy and he felt himself losing control of his thoughts. He continued to watch the house. Purple haired punks, frat boys and freeloaders were making their way into and out of the house.

He didn’t quite understand it. Behind him, (regardless of the direction) was a beating of footsteps that became louder and more rhythmic, raising his anticipation and fear, only to fade again. And then again. He sat still, and closed his eyes and it faded. A long time seemed to pass in an instant.

He pushed his way through the wooded area behind the house and moved quietly away from the houses. He continued running and walking along the Amazon, then turned east to climb up a steep sewer easement.  Again, he thought he heard something behind him, but when he looked he saw nothing. He kept hiking up the hill.

 He found himself under a house on stilts,  that from a distance, looked like a Martian landing craft. It was late. He looked down across South Eugene. Most of the lights were out now.  He picked out the house at the end of the cul-de-sac that he had just watched and saw little flickers of light rising from it like the embers from a fire.  He was very tired, but forced himself to go on.  He jogged on a path through Hendricks Park, and then down through the University, across Franklin Boulevard and then across the Willamette footbridge.

He wandered, jogging and staggering out onto the bark chip covered running trail, built on an old landfill. He could feel the ground moving, breathing, belching gas and growling. He walked east toward I-5, then sprinted under the freeway, and continued, now thoroughly exhausted, on the bikepath toward Springfield. It was well past midnight, into the silent early morning hours. 

 He knew someone had been following him for sometime.   At least he hoped it was someone. The idea that it might be something rather than someone was slowly making its way into his awareness and overwhelming his imagination.  He tried to tell himself  it was only the echoes of his own footsteps, and just as he had half convinced himself of that, he saw darting shadows in the peripheries of his vision.  When he turned to look, it became dead still, and embodied the form of a stunted oak tree…he was downwind from it now and he smelled a certain sulfuric odor. 

He faked left then spun right. He heard a whoosh…then across his vision streaked a sleek, black, nimble feline form that quickly disappeared into the brush. A slight wind swayed the trees. The gnarled branches of the stunted oak tree reached out toward him, then pull away. He stopped and stared. 

 “Pull yourself together”, he whispered. As he restarted walking, there were footsteps again, in front of him now, fading as quickly as they came. The wind died, and the oak tree became still and rooted again. He turned quickly, and felt himself beginning to panic.  He turned again, and started running…

He didn’t feel or see it. But something hit him, and he felt himself becoming smaller as the darkness around him swelled. Then whatever he was, what he had been, if indeed he had existed at all, left like a popped bubble, and he was gone.   

Chapter 23 - The SwiftPad Extinction

 Arkie teaches Sequoia about his brainstorm

Mid-October

The Saint Petersburg Flood Prevention Facility Complex (Ко́мплекс защи́тных сооруже́ний Санкт-Петербу́рга от наводне́ний, kómpleks zashchítnykh sooruzhéniy Sankt-­Peterbúrga ot navodnéniy), unofficially the Saint Petersburg Dam, is a 25-km (16-mi) long complex of dams for flood control near Saint Petersburg, Russia.…The complex is intended to protect Saint Petersburg from [Baltic] storm surges by separating the Neva Bay from the rest of the Gulf of Finland.…The northern and southern parts of the dam act like two giant bridges, providing access from the mainland to Kotlin Island and Kronstadt.

Historically, storm surges from the gulf have caused over 300 floods of varying severity within the city, some with devastating effects. The dam has the capability to protect the city from water rising up to 5 m (16 ft).

From Wikipedia Article on the Saint Petersburg Dam

Sequoia and Arkie walked over to the house. Nate and Elwood were sitting at the kitchen table, in front of two glasses of white wine and a bottle that was almost empty. Two .22 pistols (a Walther and a Beretta) were also on the table.

“What are you guys doing?”

“Playing Russian roulette. Want in?”

“The last line of defense, huh?”

They both gave Arkie the finger as he and Sequoia went down the basement stairs.

“Actually, that is what we are going to do right now,” said Arkie.

“Russian roulette?” Sequoia looked concerned.

“No. Design the last line of defense.”

Only one person was working in the monitoring center. Usually there were at least four, but neither Arkie nor Sequoia was surprised everyone was topside. Alice was hosting a vegan barbecue, and it was nice fall weather. They sat in front of one of the stations and Arkie logged in.

“OK, let me do a little navigating.” Arkie then pulled out a scribble he kept in his back pocket, filled with IP addresses and users and passwords. “Go ahead, write this down. Don’t video it or even store it on your systems. I mean it, this is – of the highest possible importance. It has to remain secret!” It was a layered set of systems, about seven deep, meaning he had to pass through six portals, darkweb-type entry points, just to get to the starting point.

“OK.”

“OK here – I was up all night looking up Siemens Switch command syntax. And researching hacks into the OS of the switches themselves.”

“But – why?”

“Ever since 2011, the Russian city of St. Petersburg on the Neva River has been protected against the threat of high water from the Baltic by a dam and giant gate across the Neva Bay. There is a low pressure system in the Gulf of Bothnia, between Sweden and Finland. It might be nothing, or it could mean a Baltic cyclone. They sometimes  take a couple of weeks to form. There have been cases of it lasting a month or longer, before it breaks up or forms a storm.”

“OK, so will the dam hold?”

“Ha!” Arkie smiled, and continued to test. “Probably. The dam is five meters above sea level. That is a lot. No, it is going to take a major off-the-charts storm to overflow that! Someday, sure, with climate change, and rising sea levels, but not yet. Unless…”

“Yeah…”

“Unless the gate on the dam doesn’t close during a storm. Here is the piece that will be difficult. Check this out! I am into their control center. I came in through a server in the St. Petersburg City Admin building, so – the thought is – that their intrusion detection won’t see me if I come in from one of their boxes. The Russians are good at attack, and sloppy on defense. Anyway, I have been working on this off and on for the last two months. We need to give Chubby some leverage when and if he tries to get GG out.”

“So,” said Sequoia, “What does that box control?”

“This is the Simatic PCS 7 system. I know this system. I helped some people with a simulation of an attack on process control systems years ago. It still looks pretty much the same. Command set is similar to Cisco’s, turns systems off and on to activate, then steps down to lower levels to control those system functions. Of course the operators don’t do it like this, they have a GUI they can mouse around. I know a guy who can crack it. He owes me.”

“Who?”

“Well, I don’t actually know him. I don’t even know what country he lives in; I think he is in Europe somewhere. But he hates Siemens, the company. I don’t know why.  Maybe used to work there, or maybe something to do with the war, or maybe it is even more personal than that. Doesn’t matter.”

Arkie demonstrated how they could move around the system; he was displaying and cutting and pasting the current settings of the devices it controlled – pumps for flooding and draining the lagoons, motors for lifting, and releasing the gates, etc.

“Here,” he said. He looked over and saw Sequoia was mesmerized. “See, look – here is a map of St. Petersburg. See where the city is? It is all reclaimed marshland. Peter the Great built it during the 1700s and hundreds of thousands of workers died – froze, disease, the whole thing. It is hard to see how it was different from Stalin’s worst atrocities. But the results speak for themselves. It is a waterway to Western Europe – the Baltic. Here – see this line across the bay? That is called the KZS – 16 miles of dams. Flood control. During storms it stops the flood surge and protects the city. The whole thing – the key point – is here. The S-1. On Russian maps it is “C-1” because C in Russian is pronounced like an S. This is a gate – 200 meters long – a floating gate that is almost always open – for shipping. But during a storm – it closes. It has only closed a couple of times since 2011.”

“And the Siemens industrial control system controls it.”

“Exactly. Well, there might be a storm coming; it might be nothing or it might be big. But there is an extremely low pressure polar vortex developing and if it moves south and hits the high-pressure hot air – bang! We have a massive Baltic cyclone that moves up into the funnel of the Neva Bay. So if we can take control of this system…before it hits…if it hits…”

“…Take control of the system and don’t let them control the S-1! Right?”

“Exactly.”

“Give us the girl, or we flood the city!” Sequoia said in a low, gravelly, hoodlum voice. Arkie laughed.

“As you can see we have breached the first layer of their defenses – we can get to the Simatic login prompt. Which means we can change things – but we need to understand the procedures they use to make it work. Their failsafe systems, etc.”

Sequoia took over the controls and started maneuvering around. She listed out the users, and their authorities. “We are just a guest user here. Go slow. We can look but not touch, right?”

“You are right. We will need to get super-user authority. Have to find a buffer overload sequence. I know we can do that – or my friend can – in fact he probably already has the steps for that. Hear, listen to this – ‘The S-1 submersible storm surge barrier is 200 meters across and 16 meters deep. In the event of a flood warning the barrier’s giant gates close shut. Each one can move freely, functioning like a submerging submarine.’”

Arkie and Sequoia spent about 14 hours straight working on penetrating the dam operation. Arkie’s friend in Europe found a working version of the Simatic PCS 7 – including its virtualized panel – and allowed them to practice on it. He also gave them a technique to buffer overload the guest user and – voilà – super-user! Which meant they could lock out everybody else when the time came. His friend also gave him access into the classified section of Siemens databases, and found the full specs on the hydraulics and access points into the dam.

“The problem – well – the ultimate problem – we have a bunch of problems,” Arkie shook his head.

“Let me get you some coffee; I need a cup myself,” said Sequoia.

“The default setting – if you just let it float and open the valves – is for the S-1 gate to be closed. But they almost never close it. To keep it open they have to activate the hydraulic piston – and the motors that push it – there are two of them about five meters in diameter.”

“Is there a manual override?”

“Of course,” said Arkie. “Here, look at this schematic.” Arkie pulled up a visual of the floor plan of the control room. “In order for this to be a surprise, we would have to activate the gate and lift it after the storm is surging. They will close it well before the surge arrives. So we will have to time locking it ‘open’ before they close it.”

“Or figure out how to open it after it closes.”

“Yeah. I hadn’t thought of that. We will need to game both scenarios.”

“We don’t have time. We have to keep it from closing. Which means we have to sabotage it in a way they don’t suspect until it is too late – for them. And of course have a way to fix it,” said Sequoia, “to open it later.”

“Right.”

“The good news is that the dry dock where it sits when open will be flooded. The gates float out and close on their own. We just have to keep the dry dock ‘dry’ and keep people off it so they can’t open the spigot manually – assuming we can shut it down with the process control.”

“So if the hydraulics don’t work – it will lift the gate up until it floats free, then the water pushes it closed. We can’t let the gate float,” said Arkie.

“It seems impossible. We have a long way to go…”

Longing for the Year Zero

photo - Album cover "Year Zero" Nine Inch Nails.

 I am midway through my 70th year. 

I always had a premonition that life would get shitty around this time.  My Dad went though WW2 and it was over when he was 25. It was all gravy after that. I was born in the gravy, but I always knew, somehow, it wouldn't last forever. I “read'' history in school, (as opposed to ‘studied’; I never studied anything.) And from my reading I came to believe that everything was cyclical, from the vibrations of subatomic particles to the business cycle, and to the alternate stages of peace and war, chaos and harmony, etc.  The cycles of history seemed more likely to me than the inexorable rise from the Flintstones to the Jetsons.  Then I went to China, and learned that this cyclical stuff was all old ground for them, that they saw that yin and yang, and the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ controlled the ups and downs of everything. 

I think that these cycles have sped up, the amplitude, (the measure of how shitty it is going to get) and the technology coefficient 'b', have both increased causing the sine curve to get steeper and narrower. 

Below is a “Natural” sine curve.  The Amplitude on the Y axis is the severity of “disturbance” or distance from the harmony.  An Amplitude of ‘1’ is ‘normal’, whatever that is. 

X axis is time.  The ‘period’ in is π,but in this case, it is x number of generations. When the curve is  near zero life is good. As it approaches zero on the X axis it is getting better, as it moves away it is getting worse.

When amplitude is at its zenith, the maximum benefit of the technological shift is enjoyed, but it is also the point where the retrenchment against the effects of technology begin to consolidate.

  

Our current state - amplitude has increased, and each cycle is farther from harmony. Time (number of generations) between cycles has shortened.

Technology coefficient T = 2

The amplitude (a)  increases to 2 as T increases.

The period decreases as T increases. Multiple the reciprocal of T by the base period π = π/2.   

So as ‘T’ increases, (technological innovation) the time between cycles shortens, and the severity of the cycle increases. If π= One lifetime, (a measure of the change in the 20th century, say 70 years) then we should expect one cycle every 35 years or so. As tech innovation increases, it will get shorter still, and the amplitude will correspondently increase.  

In the Middle Ages life didn’t change much from year to year. As we learned more, life changed faster. 

In my life we in the U.S. have gone from fear of nuclear annihilation, the McCarthy era of fear and silence, with legalized racial discrimination, to a youth revolt against injustice and the constant preparation for war, to a kind of stability in international relationships (with the opening of China and the Fall of the Soviet Empire) leading to a sense of progress, an ‘end of history’.  Social attitudes softened, people’s differences began to be accepted, and from the outside it appeared that we had  a general agreement as to how we want to live. (Of course there was the Balkan War, the Falkland War, and all kinds of other nasty occurrences to provide fodder for naysayers).

Now that seems to be unraveling.  We have passed zero on the x axis, and are moving toward a downward amplitude, perhaps a very steep amplitude.  The decline started with the Bush/Cheney unprovoked War in Mesopotamia, then Russia fell back into tyranny, and started an unprovoked war in Ukraine, China reneged on its pledge to leave Hong Hong alone for fifty years after 1997, and now seems to be saber rattling in the Taiwan Straits. We just came out of a worldwide plague, and frequency of mass murder in the US, much of it racially motivated, is increasing.

Global deaths in combat

This shortening of the period, and the increase in the amplitude (the ‘b’ coefficient  getting larger) is driven by technology, which has been shrinking the world over the last two millennia.  Shrinking the world, as in driving us closer together. Over the first thousand years after Rome, it moved very slowly, but then in the Renaissance, it began to speed up.  In the last 600 years, technology gave us the printing press, voyages of discovery, gunpowder, steam engines, transatlantic cables, the airplane, dynamite, wireless communication, Relativity, rocketry, nuclear bombs, the computer, smart phones, and social media.  Did humans evolve fast enough to keep up? Maybe not.   

Think about the past, and here I speak of the cycles in Western civilization.  Starting with the disintegration of the Roman Empire, which took a thousand years if you count Byzantium (Constantinople) , to the herding of wandering tribes into nation states, the rise of monotheism and the countless wars it engendered, the slow advances in agriculture which moved people into cities, where they discovered politics, and diseases like the Black Death discovered them.  All of those processes took centuries.    People’s lives didn’t change much, they lived and died in the same village they were born in.  And over the course of generations - they changed but only imperceptibly.  Stirrups arrived from the Steppes putting soldiers on horses, creating a demand for bigger horses, allowing deeper and earlier plowing to increase food supply, increasing populations.  But while all this was happening, nobody noticed.  Century after century, stuck on the same farm, families developed habits and customs that suited their unchanging lives. They were sure about their place in the universe. 

But now this process has been upended. In the 20th century, people born on the farm died in the city. Now we are born into towns that die off between grammar school and high school, while some become so rich on this process of capitalistic 'creative destruction" that their wealth buys a ticket off the planet, while others are stuck, and social statistics say they will stay that way.  And many look back and wonder if it was worth it, if it is better now.  If you read social media, you know you are a loser, you know you are missing out on everything, that they are getting rich and having fun are you are not.  You look out at the weather - is it really changing? If it rains, the forest grows too fast, and when it is dry there is more fuel to burn. And storms more storms are on the way.  

Our system of resource allocation has led us into some vicious traps as well.  Capitalism proved effective at first, but it led to a new class of tyrants, and a deep wealth divide.  Capitalism was based in part on an unlimited supply of natural resources.   We have come to the end of that supply. Now we have to control our use of nature, or we will end our rise as a species, and perhaps begin a catastrophic decline.   

Now the world is listening to the call of the demagogue again.  

The nation state is dying. The would-be American nationalists are looking abroad for allies. Putin wishes Trump was still President, because he knows he would have green-lite his invasion. American conservatives are worshiping Hungary's Viktor Orban who has ended free expression in Budapest.

In China and Russia I admire those democrats and liberals who refuse to break, even if they have to remain quiet for now. Only by destroying their own lives and their families lives can they oppose their governments. Nevertheless some still stand up and oppose.

We know we in the US might be one election away from being in the same 'State'.   

Politics is slowly becoming international.  I have compatriots in Russia and China, and  political opponents in the U.S.  

I am with my compatriots fighting authoritarians, not with the Americans in Budapest.

Geography, ethnicity, and language are fading as barriers. We are divided by social media, a ‘Meta” political landscape. Neighborhoods and families are being fragmented.  ‘Texas’ is controlled by the same “party” that controls Russia now.  Millions of good Texans are stuck in a state that they don’t seem able to change, just like the people in St. Petersburg, Russia. 

 

We have no agreement that any of this is true. This is a fart in the wind. People will dispute every detail of this, and in the end, will avoid the questions until we can no longer ignore it. We have seen how this plays out. We ignored the rise of Fascism after WW1, then we didn’t, and after that we seemed to begin a long steep dive toward zero. 

When did the peaks occur? Was one in 1969? Woodstock, Charles Manson and the Moon landing? Maybe, maybe not, but we have definitely  passed the zero, and are on our way to another amplitude.  If the last peak was the end of the Clinton administration, when did we pass zero? When will we hit perigee?

 

Around Italy - By Virginia Landgren

Buy on Amazon This memoir is about several trips to Italy taken over the years by Bridget and Bruno. They are married, both retired, empty nesters, and have a mutual love of Italy. They have lived in a condo in Eugene Oregon for years, and plan their lives around the trips. The story is written in 3rd person but from the perspective of Bridget. It took a while to come to terms with this peculiar point of view. Why wasn’t it written in 1st person, would not that have given it a more immediate feel? The trick to reading, (I frequently have to tell myself) is to accept the terms of engagement that the writer sets. What this means of course is we learn what Bridget is thinking and planning but we only see Bruno through her eyes. But - the bones of the story - where they are staying, what they are eating, how they are traveling is presented at a 3rd person distance. You still feel Bridget is telling the story, but somewhat formally, and that is oddly comforting. The formality drops at unexpected and appropriate times too, such as when they hold each other at night, feeling the effect of the lights and “vapors'' of the Grand Canal in Venice. There is no apparent pattern or method to when the formal veil drops and we see more deeply into their lives, and this lends a pleasant tension to the story. The story unfolds like a Rick Steves’ PBS episode, where he tells you the history of the cathedral in one scene, in a brief, neutral, National Geographic manner, and then in the next scene he is introducing you to the innkeeper who he has known for years, and who always prepares, (along with his wife who speaks no English), a special meal for Steve when he comes the city. It is a comforting story, one that I came to quickly appreciate. It is repetitive, but in a good way, like a Buddist chant or a Catholic Mass. Bruno is slightly mischievous, always out front, finding the cafe, or the museum, but he never breaks character and intrudes on Bridget’s story. They arrive in a city - Rome, Florence, Naples, Milan, Assisi, Venice, Trieste, and more, sometimes returning to the same city, but always the same ritual: Get to the small hotel or rental home, met the proprietor, learn the foibles of the place, (closet that doesn’t shut properly, stair that creaks) , fall on the bed to rest, get up, eat, go wandering around the city, stop in a small cafe, eat, (always with luscious detail of the food, or the interior, or the scene on the sidewalk) come back, Bridget takes a nap, Bruno continues to explore, comes back they go out again meet people, drink wine, come back sleep. On to the train, a new city, new people they met by plan or happenstance, a new adventure. It took me a few pages, but I really began to love this story. Bridget has a wonderful eye for architecture, and color, and natural scenery and it gets better and better as the story continues. She brings it. While the story feels breezy and light, there are no narrative cliches. It is never dull. You come to like Bridget too. You learn her doubts about herself, her physical and emotional weaknesses, her own internal pettiness, but with clear headed self acceptance, no maudlin regret, all the while delivering picture perfect stories. While the rhythm of the story does not change, the details within it do. Even when she comes back to Rome or Florence a second time, Bridget sees her surroundings differently. She just lets you tag along with her. The best part? I learned quite a lot, and plan to bring Around Italy as a guidebook when I finally end up going to Italy. It is one thing to look through coffee table books of the art and architecture of Italy, but a whole other thing to be led to the Spanish Steps in Rome by a woman who you would like to get to know better. She knows what to look at, (although she says it is actually Bruno who knows these things). This memoir is an unpretentious story, told by a really smart and learned woman who passes herself off as a little bit ditsy, with her tongue slightly up against her cheek, and that is the most wonderful aspect of the story. Reading Around Italy 2011-2019 makes me want to go to Italy even more than I did before. (less)

Dead Microphones, by Mark Oulton

 

“Dead Microphones” is an omnivorous look at China today. Mark Oulton has produced a very interesting sequel to his first book about China, “Lure of the Red Dragon”.  I think that the two books together comprise an honest, unfiltered 360 degree  look at life in China.

Since publishing his first book, Mark has become an even more fluid, confident writer. Mark is a very open, unabashed, self-reflective man who has had a successful career in business, and has retired to a town outside of Suzhou with his wife Yan Yan.  He writes about everything, history, law, business, technology, society, food, etc.  It is difficult to find a weakness in his knowledge or presentation, even though when one sets themselves up as an expert on everything, they make a tempting target.

We get a tour of the many Chinese festivals and holidays, and how people celebrate them. He gives a deep political analysis of the 70 year anniversary of the founding of Communist China, which culminated in the massive military  parade in Beijing.  He writes about travelling by train, and the different classes of tickets and services, and what to expect from your fellow riders. 

He has a huge section of the Chinese Diaspora in Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and the US, and how these cultures have affected China.

Mark has a long section on food, and the many regional varieties. He has great descriptions about the foods (and his own experiences eating) for the regional styles: Shandong (鲁菜)， Jiangsu (苏菜), Cantonese (粤菜), Sichuan (川菜), Hunanese (湘， Fujian (闽菜)， Anhui (徽菜)， Zhejiang (浙菜), etc. Here is a description of one of my favorites, (I lived in Xian for a year and this was one of my goto street foods)

“Cold Noodle Dish (凉皮　– liang2pi2). Region:  Xinjiang and Shaanxi.  The noodles are generally made from wheat flour. The dough is soaked for up to a day, and the milky water, which is mostly starch, is then discarded to leave a cold skin (the meaning of liangpi) of mostly gluten. Then it is boiled and then chopped into long rectangular noodles as the basis of the cold dish.  Vegetarian ingredients are now added depending on the different recipes and include chilli oil, vinegar, sesame paste, cucumber, bamboo shoots, peanuts, garlic, coriander, tofu, etc.  It's a perfect dish for a hot summer day and has a similar cooling effect to Spanish gazpacho cold soup.”

Here I think Mark displays a slight “foreign snobbishness” for their adopted region. (In his case Suzhou, which has some of the most sophisticated and delicate dishes in China). Other regions in China consider Shaanxi a culinary wasteland, but it worked for me, for some reason. (Above description - he adds too much shit on the noodles. The noodles just plain, with just a splash of some vinegar, are so satisfying.)

Chapter 10 brings you up to date on the latest archeological finds, some real gems: 

“Current thinking is that trade was extensive within most of modern-day southern China and Thailand and with some credibility with ancient Mesopotamia.  Shu-style tree and sun worship were also an essential part of those other civilizations, and historians have struggled to explain how China's Bronze Age developed compared to the west. The oldest known bronze artefact in China is a primitive knife found in Gansu Province dating from around 2800 BC, but the level of sophistication in the mysterious Kingdom of Shu is exponentially higher, and perhaps this is the missing link?”

Another interesting passage, pulled out almost at random by me here: “During the Long March (1934 to 1935), the main body of 86,000 communist soldiers (7,000 survivors) were 70% Hakka. Although the Hakka have been fleeing throughout history, they have a fearsome reputation as fighters.  The Nationalist pursuer of the Long March soldiers in the Fifth Encirclement Campaign, General Xue Yue, was also a Hakka.  A further example is the Communist Hakka, Marshal Chen Yi, also from Sichuan, who in the War of Resistance against the Japanese (1937 to 1945) commanded the New Fourth Army and led the forces that defeated the nationalists in the Huaihai Campaign.  In 1955, he was made a Marshall (pg 2661).”

ark writes about how the Warring States official and the greatest hydraulic engineer of the ancient world Li Bing diverts a tributary of the Yangtze in Chengdu.  

“The three part system Li Bing devised is still in use today. In winter the (tributary)  Min river is pregnant with fast flowing water that caused flooding but (at the same time) there was a shortage of water for nearby farmland in the summer. First Li Bing built a levee called the Fish Mouth, that split the Min river in two parts. In dry times the inner main channel continued its course, but in times of flooding 40% of the water was diverted by the levee to follow a course away from the Chengdu plain and eventually join up with the Yangtze River..  …There are steep drops to the pounding river and waterfalls in the ravines below.   Several small groups were cycling. The thought did occur to me that apart from the apparent diversity of vegetation and wildlife, this would make a world-class motor rally stage if properly supervised and then retracted such a thought in deference to the verdant and tranquil countryside.”

As you can see from the passage  above, Mark is an old school guy, who I could imagine in a David Niven movie, racing down the mountainside to save a high born damsel...

Another fun fact - “Howard Johnson is a premier brand in China and has nothing in common with the sometimes-grungy hotel in the United States.” As an immigrant and now citizen of the US, Mark apparently does not remember when Howard Johnson was a premier brand...but I digress (which is what Mark does continually and mostly delightfully).    

He has long discussions about architecture and climate. Which takes him to Harbin and the Ice Festival there and he  goes off talking about Unit 731 the grisly Japanese BioWarfare outpost based in Harbin during WW2 and the extensive descriptions of the experiments done on human beings there.

He discusses the Chinese military, (although even only being a year old, some of his conceptions seem already outdated). 

Of course he talks about how the virus affected him and his neighbors in their apartment block near  Suzhou China.  The details of living with the extensive government controls put on the population to control its spread are really interesting when compared with our own primitive response to the virus. 

He test drives a robot electric car.  He is reporting on technology: “As we progressed down the road, a line of cars, drivers frustrated by the jams, were coming down the wrong side of the dividing “do-not-cross yellow line”, a pretty regular sight in China.  The Model W did not make the more normal manoeuvre which is to push the same direction traffic towards the edge of the road to try and create an extra lane.  More furious honking from both directions. The next set of traffic lights was interesting.  The traffic signs indicate no right turn and no left turn, i.e., straight only, but this was blocked by a barrier The Model W voice is temporarily silent, no doubt fizzing with terabytes of calculations, and then announces, "driver, please take control of the vehicle" in perfect Eton House English.”

He explains technology - and is interesting doing it, and there is no doubt it relates to China, but I think it would be more interesting if he had “skipped ahead” of the general explanations and dove into the China specific ramifications. I think sometimes he explains too much. But then, in most cases I see where he is going and of course learn something.

“There are five pieces of technology currently being developed in China that will have long-term ramifications for its citizens: Facial Recognition (FR), 5G networking, social credits, blockchain, and monitoring/welfare.

“Today in China, you will see police officers wearing a special type of sunglasses with an attached camera/processor, and these do work.  They are used for FR and something familiar to mobile phone users who use FR instead of a password.  Next to the person under scrutiny are text bubbles showing items such as name, age, home, and of course, if wanted by the police.”

China and 5-g - the history of electronic communications starting with the breakup of Ma Bell…he has a long discussion about blockchain and China’s foray into crypto-currency.

He also comments on the coming importance of “Social credit” - This is the score that  is currently being developed to measure citizen’s “social credit” which is more than just if they pay their bills on time, although that is part of it. There are cameras everywhere and if you do your recycling wrong you can get a demerit on your social credit.  Any infraction, a traffic ticket, a bad report on your weChat posts, anything can lower your “social credit”. Naturally if you do “good” it adds to your credit. This is like your permanent record, and can potentially affect all of your future prospects - employment, marriage (people post their social credit scores on singles apps) and whether you get a visa to leave the country.  

He gets off track when discussing the US domestic political events of 2020. He has long criticisms of Trump, and his approach to the virus, and his foreign policy statements, and frankly the whole mess. It is clear he gets most of his information from CNN, and from reading news reports that he must get via VPN connections.  There is nothing wrong with anything he says, but it doesn’t belong in this book. It doesn’t ruin the book. And I can see where someone might disagree, and say the US response to the virus and the election itself plays an important role in understanding how China sees itself and reacts to it. But to me, a reader who has lived through this, up close from the US vantage point, I learn nothing from his comments. Saying Trump is deranged doesn’t inform me, no matter how much I agree with the sentiment. When I read a book like this, I want to escape from the trap we Americans have built for ourselves.

But other than that, I continued to learn a tremendous amount from Mark. He is a brilliant autodidact. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, but his knowledge is encyclopedic. He is a fine, entertaining writer, and if you are interested in what is happening “On the Ground” in China today, it is a great read. 

The Covered Bridge Murders by Jerry Rust

Limited edition is available direct from the Author

Send check for $25.00 to 

THE COVERED BRIDGE MURDERS

c/o Jerry Rust

9296 Highway 126

Florence Oregon, 97439

Kindle version also available

 

From a  Review on GoodReads

“The Covered Bridge Murders” by Jerry Rust is a very entertaining and adventurous detective novel with its roots plumbed deeply into 19th and early 20th century Oregon lore. It introduced me to one of the most fascinating (and real) writers/characters in the history of the West, Opal Whiteley. Before you begin reading Jerry’s novel, I urge you to look her up on Wikipedia. She was a savant and a prodigy, a famous American nature writer, and a beautiful yet mysterious woman, whose unpublished book “The Fairyland Around Us” is legendary as one of the “lost” books. Her sensational diaries were published by Atlantic Magazine in the 1920s. She was raised in logging and mining camps around Cottage Grove Oregon, and ended her days in an “aristocratic” asylum in London, claiming to be the lost daughter of the Duke of Oreleans. Her attendants in the asylum called her Françoise Marie de Bourbon-Orléans. Her life story is amazing, (and her claims of a royal birth are not completely beyond the range of possibility). Anyway, Opal plays a major role in this story.

The main story in the novel is set within the last 20 years, and is about two University of Oregon college boys, looking to make some extra money by spending the summer panning for gold up in the Bohemian mountains east of Cottage Grove. They meet an oldtimer, Ray, who has lived up in those mountains for all of his 90 some years. Ray is a very interesting character as we gradually learn, and befriends the boys and tells them the story of 10 lbs of lost gold nuggets that were robbed while being transported from the Bohemian mines to a bank in Eugene. He convinces the boys to help him look for the gold, and they follow the clues around Lane County, some of which are in the Opal Whiteley museum in Cottage Grove.

In addition to being a good storyteller, Jerry is a wonderful nature writer, and describes Oregon's feral beauty with poetic grandeur. His knowledge of western Oregon’s “flora and fauna” is very deep and he paints a picture of the wild colorful natural wonder of the area, both now and in the past, that alone makes the book worth reading.

From a very unassuming story-telling manner, with the old timey style of a Hardy Boys adventure, the pacing of the novel grows faster and more profound with each succeeding chapter. . It gets better, and better and in it leads the reader to the “answer” of one of the most profound mysteries in American literature.

As I said, if you don’t know who Opal Whiteley was, (as I did not) then read a little bit about Opal Whitley online (there are many articles about her) and then read “The Covered Bridge Murders”. With its Local color, and adventure, this literary “murder” mystery is will be a fun and absorbing read.

Gabbard and Greenwald

 Sometimes, like now, I try to write about politics when my attempts to write fiction are floundering, and it is just not feeling true. While writers block often affects my fiction attempts, writing about politics seems pretty easy, even when I know what I write can be justly called "bullshit", and is mostly a kind of a lie. Political discourse always, in some ways simplifies and blocks out conflicting narratives, in the name of expediency. It always involves fibbing, distorting or shading out or outright ignoring evidence, especially when writing about national political phenomenon in the US. A big country we are, in many senses of the word "big". Yet here and now, as before, there are only two choices, and both the R's and the D's compress ideology into almost meaningless slogans or silly memes. And to make it worse, I  always feel dirty when I try to write seriously about any of it. Any other subject of importance such as science, technology, history, economics all require a level of intellectual investment and competence that is difficult to attain, in order to feel comfortable discussing any of it. But not so with politics. I feel perfectly at home braying my opinions without any shame. It is a full contact mass scrum that I believe we have to join in, and we ignore it at our peril, particularly these days. 

For example, how to react to Glenn Greenwald and Tulsi Gabbard appearing so often on the FOX network, particularly on segments of Tucker Carlson or Hannity or Laura Ingram. Without elaboration, I feel these three at FOX are scum-sucking purveyors of hate, shameless liars, deniers of truth, dedicated to convincing their viewers that some form of fascism is preferable to a government decided by honest elections and universal suffrage.  For me, "to hate" is a reflexive verb. It always comes around like it goes around. So I try to push it out of my mind, but with those three, (who really are only avatars, not even real, any humanity they have is left outside their studios) with them it's a constant effort to flush out hate from seeping into my emotions. 

 I admire Tulsi and Greenwald. I saw Tulsi speak in 2019 in a park in Portland and talked briefly to her afterwards. She's a dynamic speaker and a full-fledged force for peace, and she is whip smart, (as well as quite beautiful, an asset in politics for certain). While in Congress, she called out the hypocrisy of Hillary and other establishment Dems who voted for the Bush/Cheney Mesopotamian wars. Back in the beginning of the century, Tulsi, as an army officer in in the Middle East, saw firsthand the dishonesty and futility of the effort and she was an eloquent voice against our presence there, pointing out our ignorance of the region and the self-defeating nature of our own effort.

Glenn Greenwald helped Snowden publish exactly how our intelligence services eroded the constitutional protections of our rights and liberty.  His resume, to me, is admirable. I always learn something substantial when I listen to him.

Neither one, Greenwald especially, seem to care much about political party.  He refuses to be pulled into the political argument that one side was bad, so what they did had to be bad, while the other side was not as bad so what they did was not as bad. Tulsi of course ran for President, and was the only candidate - well it doesn't matter, she lost.

 Their attitude toward politics and the truth is uncomfortable, not just to other pols, but to us, or at least to me as well. We just can't be pulled into it, because it muddies the preferred narrative. For me, I feel especially dirty as an avowed fiction writer, supposedly above the lies, arguing partisan points, leaking out whatever shred of moral authority I might have had as cover. 

I believe that there's no such thing as nonfiction. Everyone has an angle, no story is neutral.  I subscribe to the corollary of Rashid Wallace's dictum that both sides played hard. The corollary is both sides are both good and bad. Yes we are to some extent a racist, ignorant country, but still, I know these people, and they are not as evil as we tend to see them on TV. But how do you say that in a 30 second ad, which is the "creative" side of politics? 

Believe it or not, I try to askew politics or at least pretend to see and explain the whole field of play when I write fiction. That is why it is so much harder than when I write about politics. In politics there can be no such rule, but if you believe, as I do, that  there is no non-fiction, then you can't avoid the sin of prevaricating, no matter the subject. It is all lies, in one  form or another.

As for Gabbard and Greenwald, they are now media personalities and I guess they need exposure to make a living. They believe in their "truth messages" and that apparently trumps any political or rhetorical ammo they may be supplying to the FOX authoritarians. Or maybe they just like being on TV. 

We are now watching the media reanimate the reputations of Bush through his weird paintings and his daughter appearing with Hoda on the TV show Today. And don't forget that his former flack, Nicole Wallace is one of the biggest voices against Trump on MSNBC. We also see Cheney becoming less of a pariah while his daughter is the one and only R to sound the alarm against the orange faced former Reality show "star" ("When you are a star they let you do anything"). 

Bush-Cheney's decision to invade the Middle East was the greatest disaster in US history, at least I believe history will see it as such. If the US is in the process of historical decline then that action was what set the decline off. 

Without doubt Trump has played a big  part in this process of decline, if in fact it is a decline. Trump undoubtedly accelerated it even though paradoxically, he condemned Bush-Cheney's war. Now he is the real and present danger while the "real" Cheney and Bush live in their Dallas fortresses of retirement. 

 So what should think? What should we do? Should we condemn Tulsi and Glenn for aiding and abetting the present day enemy and should we forget their past actions which focused a bright light on the worst aspects of the worst foreign policy disaster in the nation's history? Or should we say history smidgely, what have you done for me lately? How do we acknowledge the opposing truths? 

Time does not stop. It's a river, it is never the same. We can't freeze moments in time and move them into other eras and expected all to fit. We are now in a struggle for a future that we can't see. Remember the show trials of the 20th century from Stalin's to Joe McCarthy's. Should we put Gabbard and Greenwald on the dock and send them to the proverbial block? Do we want a return to that?  Do we want to replay the lies, the evil barbarity and stupidity of the past in order to accommodate our very murky present? 

If not, that means we have to chart our own course, and let the past go, while at the same time never forgetting it. That is the scariest course of all.  Leaping into the unknown, led by the new and unfamiliar.

 19th century France couldn't stomach the horrible side of  their own revolution, but they could not let go of the part they admired, so after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, they returned to monarchy and after that to the mediocre authoritarian, and silly nephew, Louie Napoleon. That turned out to be an even bigger disaster for France, and led to the first World War, eventually.  Does our future have another Cheney or Bush or Clinton or Kennedy or even a younger Trump in the wings? Can we escape the past? Can we get to a sane place, a livable place without going over the same ground?

If you were waiting for an answer, then don't ask a fiction writer.  We are the most untrustworthy of them all.

PS Sun Feb 28 2022 (Tulsi Gabbard spoke to CPAC. My comment on her Facebook page)

What a disappointment! No one disagrees with the meaningless cliches you spout, but no one is listening either. But at the current moment, to speak to the Traitors at CPAC as a warm up act for tRump and you new boy friend Tucker is disgusting. Yes I liked you once, but no more. Yes I supported you in the D primary. What you said then, about our Imperialism in Mesopotamia was right. But your primal need to stay relevant, to be in the News, to be on TV outweighs any wisdom or judgement you might have possessed. I never saw this side of you, and it is shame on me, and this should be used to judge my own political judgment. I was warned by people who know you, but I ignored them. You can’t change the past. But you can change now. That is a journey you are going to take alone. I won’t be with you. Wake up now and realized yo are being used as a shill for Fascists like tRump and Putin. And not even a very important Shill. You are now just filler, a Segway between the main acts, while the CPAC incels go together to the bathroom. You beauty is your curse. If you were not pretty, you would be laughed off the stage. Sorry, Tulsi, but I am breaking up with you. Long live Ukraine!