Time, and Freedom of the Press

 Time Magazine and Freedom

Time magazine has gotten a lot of flack for putting Elon Musk on the cover as Person of the Year. 

I think that was good choice, as he has shown Ford, GM and Chrysler how to design, make and sell electric cars that will outperform any of the old gas guzzlers they make. 

He has also shown how to build reusable rockets to restart space travel by landing the rockets back on earth, ready for the next trip. He has already sent provisions to the International Space Station on contract for NASA. 

Boeing is still over a year away from their first test trials. Their last couple of years has been a constant reminder of David Graeber’s book “Bullshit Jobs.” Most older companies are full of middle managers who serve no creative purpose to a company, but only hinder progress toward the ultimate goal. 

Not to mention the 737 Max, where the managers cut corners to save money and time, and pushed a plane out the door that automatically dived into the ground if one sensor failed. 

So, yeah, Elon’s an asshole, but he is a genius as well. Sometimes I think they might go together. In any case, he has definitely changed the world for the better.

In this same Time magazine is an article that is far more worthy of criticism and shame. On page 24 is an article labeled Truth, written by Karl Vick. In it he castigates various countries around the world for their attempt to deny journalists the freedom to write and publish the truth.

How can anybody write such an article without even mentioning Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, or Edward Snowden? He relates the forced landing of an airplane by Belarus to capture a journalist and escort him off the plane. He failed to mention the US caused the personal plane of the leader of Bolivia to land so they could search it for Edward Snowden, who wasn’t on board that day.

It makes me wonder if Mr Vick is an employee of the CIA, NSA, or FBI. The USA is no slouch when it comes to persecuting writers and journalists. The hypocrisy of Time magazine is appalling, 

They should rename it Pravda.  

Donald Rogers

December 26, 2021

Law vs. Love

Law vs. Love 

12/19/21

This will be just random thoughts as they well up in my brain. Edits will come at the end.

Today I watched a film at church on the heroic lives of two Unitarians, the Sharps, who went to Europe as WWII was starting, in order to help people escape from the Nazi horrors of the concentration camps and the mass killings that went with it.

A disturbing thought came to me as I watched the film, tied in with my lifelong study into the debate between Law and Love, in Biblical terms.

Most people believe the bad guys were the Nazis, who were also the law abiding ones. Of course, they wrote the laws they wanted, including the law that made Jews no longer citizens of Germany and worse, making them subject to the “The Final Solution.”

Nevertheless, millions of loyal Germans followed the law, and will forever be known as the “bad” guys.

The “good” guys, a husband and wife team named Sharp, who were Unitarians from the US, made it their business to break any law that would keep them from forging documents and visas to sneak prominent Jews out of Europe before the Nazis could find them and kill them. They found ways to sneak them across the border into Spain and Portugal, bribing border guards with money and cigarettes.

Hundreds of Jewish children were smuggled onto ships bound for the US, many of whom never saw their parents again. All because two faithful people were willing to break the law and risk their own lives to do the right thing.

We are replaying this scenario at our southern border with Mexico today. Just as in the old days, parents are sending their children  ahead alone, hoping they can find a safe place in America before the “death squads” or “drug cartels” kill the whole family in Guatemala or El Salvador. 

Once again we have the “law and order” people out catching the refugees as they cross the border, arresting them, jailing them and deporting them.

Once again there are people who risk arrest by leaving water and food out in the desert to try to assist the refugees. I would call them the “good guys.”

When I joined the Unitarian Universalist Church, I did not know of the long history of activism for justice that this church is known for. They fought against slavery, they marched for civil rights in the South, (some died there) and many are still engaged in active pursuits of justice and charity.

Nobody asked me about my beliefs or about any doctrines I might have held. And it occurs to me now that Jesus never asked those things either, before he fed the people or healed their infirmities. In fact, he criticized scribes, priest, and Pharisees for rigidly following the law but having no love for their fellow humanity.

Actually, that is the moral of the parable of The Good Samaritan, but most people now think it’s about being nice to somebody hurt beside the road.

The whole of the New Testament is a fierce debate about keeping the Law, or having Love and compassion for our brothers and strangers within our gates.

James and the original disciples remained Jews all their lives. They advocated strictly keeping the Law (James 2:10), monotheism (James 2:19), circumcision (Galations 5:2,3), and kosher dietary laws (Galations 2:11,12). I can find no specific texts that they still kept the Jewish seventh day Sabbath, but since James makes it plain that all the Law is to be followed, I am sure they did.

Also note that the book of James makes no mention of Jesus as the Son of God or as the Redeemer on the cross. He was the Lord, the Messiah, Christ, (Anointed One) but not the Son of God.

Paul’s church was a new religion, with Jesus as the Redeemer, sent from God to ransom us from our sins, and take away the condemnation of the Law by paying for our sins on the cross.

Paul’s answer to the problem of sin is to change us - make us new people inside - to have love in our hearts. Faith in God’s mercy and love in our hearts is the only thing Paul believes will save us in the end. I believe it will make us better people, too.

I believe Paul got closer to Jesus’s message (at least as recorded in the Gospels) than the Twelve Apostles did. 

But others think differently. I have a book by David Danizier called “Betrayal of Jesus” which takes Paul to task for changing the original religion of Jesus. He seems to believe that we should all go back to carefully keeping the Law, completely missing the point that if we have God and love in our hearts, the Law will be kept, (or fulfilled), but for the right reasons. 

It is better to have Godly love in our hearts, and break a few laws, than to keep the law perfectly and be a hateful a**hole or Nazi or ICE officer.

If Paul had not founded his new religion, I believe we would never have heard of the Christian religion again. Paul’s church at Antioch was the first church called Christian, for obvious reasons. The church at Jerusalem was a small sect of Judaism, which was driven out of Judea by the Romans in 70 AD.

My mind is drawn to the life my wife and I lived in Nevada, where the speed limit between towns was whatever you wanted it to be, using your adult judgement about what was safe, but that would be way off topic.

Maybe I’ll go there some day later. I still remember what freedom felt like.

Don Rogers

  

 

Merced Tule Fog

 Tule Fog

This morning I watched a YouTube video by blancolirio on flying out of Sacramento in dense tule (too-lee) fog. It brought back many memories of the unbelievably dense soup in the Central Valley of California.

Quite often is is so thick that visibility out the windshield is gone completely and anybody who has to drive somewhere learns to open the window and look for the centerline on the road. 

My uncle Roy Ostrum was involved in a minor door bender when he was driving slowly with his door open watching the center line next to the running board (remember those?) and tangled with another driver doing the same thing going the other way. Nobody was hurt, but the startle factor was off the charts as a couple of doors got slammed shut suddenly as they connected across the centerline. 

My distant cousin and best buddy Gleason Appling was visiting our family when we lived next to the Catholic school on Santa Fe Drive during the Christmas season one year. The fog was so thick that the road was invisible from the front seat of our VW Microbus. He lived out on Arboleda Drive near Le Grand Road.

Years before, my father had wrecked a 1937 Pierce-Arrow taking Gleason’s sister Marlene home and had gone off highway 99 near Le Grand road in heavy fog. Neither were seriously injured, but I knew better than to get out on the highway. Too many drivers don’t understand the illusion of slowness in deep fog and speed up to make the scenery move faster outside. 

We decided to follow highway 140 east to Arboleda Drive, since nobody was driving on that road to Yosemite at midnight. I was following the white line out my open window, and Gleason was watching the edge of the road on his side. I don’t think we ever went faster than 15 miles an hour.

When the center line stopped as we got to Tuttle, where the turn was, I stopped and Gleason got out and walked in front and guided me around the right turn onto Arboleda Drive until I got lined up on the new southbound center line. We stopped at the railroad tracks there and listened for a bit with both windows still open to make sure no trains were approaching the crossing.

We arrived at Gleason’s home safely, and both got a stern chewing out from his mother for attempting the drive on a night like this. I don’t remember how I drove back to my home, so it’s likely she made me stay until morning when the fog lifted. 

A few years later, Gleason was driving into Merced on Highway 99 in the fog. I think it was early in the morning with some sunlight filtering through the fog when he was run off the road by two trucks side by side going much faster than he was. 

He steered into the oleander bushes in the median and encountered a row of concrete pylons with a cable on top. He survived, but the 1959 Plymouth didn’t. The whole drive line from engine, transmission and rear axle were destroyed.

It’s possible that the truck drivers were above the top of the fog layers, which often stratify in weird, sharp layers. 

My father told me a story about being at the airport one morning waiting for the fog to burn off so he could go flying, and discovering that if he bent over he could see for miles, but if he stood up, he was in the soup. In aviation weather terms, there was a solid overcast with a ceiling at four feet.

I have lived in many different states since I was born and raised in Merced,   but nowhere have I ever seen tule fog like that in the Central Valley of California.