a hitch in time

A Hitch in Time

 

By

Carl Jarvis

 

In the dark forests of the Olympic Peninsula, there are more strange and mysterious tales than those of Big Foot.  Here is an account told by a totally blind man. 

 

It had been two years since I'd cleared the long, steep trail up to the big water tank sitting high above our house.  We pump the water from a well by the garage, about 160 feet deep, up the hill to the tank, where it gravity flows back at about 30 pounds pressure. 

Now my hip replacement was pretty much healed and I strode out with my trusty old brush axe on my shoulder.  If you never saw a brush axe, it has a long handle like a splitting maul, only longer.  On the end is a large flat curved blade.  Razor sharp.  Great exercise, swinging my way through the tall Thistles, Nettles and Salmon Berry bushes.  Little Alder trees had taken hold, too.  All fell before the mighty brush axe.  The trail climbs straight up for about 600 feet before leveling out at the base of the tank.  My nephew and I dragged that tank up through the brambles about 16 years ago, when he, a massive defensive lineman,  was home from Humboldt State and I was, well I was younger.  It took me three afternoons to pound through that ugly tangle.  But now I was feeling flushed with victory.  I turned up toward the back of our ten acres of forest and began whacking my way down a trail I'd not cleared for over four years.  It followed an old narrow gauge railroad bed and then cut up through a stand of the tallest, straightest grove of Cedars, Douglas Fir and Hemlocks that ever grew.  It was like Nature's Park, covered with tall ferns and only filtered sunlight finding its way through the mighty branches.  But to get to this Fairy Land was like fighting the jungles of Viet Nam.  This trail was going to take a lot more sweat and muscle than the one I'd just reclaimed.  For the next two days I hiked up the hill to that trail, hammering down the bushes and berry vines, slowly working my way back to my forest path. 

On the third day I knew I was closing in, water pouring off my body from a hot, almost windless afternoon.  Suddenly the air became totally still.  No bird song, no hum of busy bees, not even a whisper of a breeze. 

And then the ground shook.  Just a whimper, a suggestion of something in the distance.  Every nerve in my body yelled, "Earthquake!"  But no, it was not the ground.  It was a huffing and grinding of a huge machine.  I backed quickly into the brush at the edge of my trail just as this steaming, screaming monster rounded the bend and roared straight down upon me.  As it lumbered past, I knew, even without being able to see it, that here was a real steam engine.  A locomotive straining down this old logging road pulling a long string of flatbeds.  I could smell the scent of freshly cut logs. 

The relentless noise was hypnotizing and I felt myself being drawn toward the side of the train.  I stuck my brush axe out in an effort to stabilize myself.  With a mighty yank my brush axe was slammed out of my hand and I sprawled backward over an old rotten log. 

Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it was gone.  Just a faint wiggly vibration fading into the distance.  And the breeze reappeared, and the bees went about their business as if they'd never missed a beat.  The song birds took up exactly where they'd left off. 

I stood up and shakily moved forward.  There I stepped on my brush axe.  I picked it up and poked about in the middle of my trail, looking where the tracks must be.  Gone.  Nothing.  I quickly turned and picked my way down the long hill back to the safety of my house. 

My wife was happily watching a golf tournament and I thought of telling her what had happened.  "Oh sure," she'd chide me.  "I keep telling you to drink lots of water when you're out in the hot sun."  And maybe that was it.  Heat stroke, or something like that.  Sure.  That's it.  I took a long deep breath and felt so much better that I went back outside thinking I'd sharpen my brush axe. 

That's when I discovered that the blade had been twisted and flattened. 

 

Our lesson for today

Our lesson for today. 

 

Gather round my children whilst we talk about Nature's wonderful, Trickle Down process. 

You see those big fat clouds?  Well, my dears, when they get fat enough a great Force named Gravity pulls the clouds down to the ground in big fat drops. 

Gravity continues to pull the drops along until they reach the Sea.  There, another great force known as The Sun heats the water and turns it into vapor.  This mist rises back up to  become a big fat cloud once again. 

 

Upon learning this lesson, a once powerful leader named Herbert Hoover decided that if it were good enough for Nature, it must work for our economy, too. 

President Hoover told us that, just as water trickles down from the sky, so money will also trickle down from the towers on Wall Street , into the waiting hands of the common people.  

And so my children, Mister Hoover dumped lots of money into the banks and into Wall Street and stepped back to watch Gravity do its work.     

Poor President Hoover.  He had failed to note that money does not trickle through the hands of the bankers and Wall Street.  Unlike Nature, the bankers and Wall Street functioned like a giant sponge, soaking up every last trickle down drop. 

There must be a moral to this story, my dear children, but President Obama seems not to have learned it. 

And so ends our lesson for today. 

 

Uncle Curious Carl

 

************************
We have met the enemy and

, he is us. -- Pogo

 

************************
We have met the enemy and, he is us. -- Pogo

parenthood, ain't it grand?

Isn't it grand?  Being a parent is probably the most challenging and most rewarding job in all of Creation.  And being a blind parent is all the more rewarding.  And exhausting.  

I can tell you that color crayon is a real bugger, too.  It shows right through the new coat of paint.  And wall paper in a child's room is not the wisest thing a parent could do.  One little spot that comes away from the wall and it is an open invitation to see what's behind it.  

My two youngest decided that since daddy couldn't see what they were doing, they could sneak out of bed, walk right under daddy's nose and into the kitchen.  There, they quietly, almost quietly, lifted the lid of the big old cookie jar and gently lifted out a few cookies.  Then they returned, boldly marching past daddy and into bed, where they tucked their ill gotten gains under their pillows.  

Enter daddy.  "You guys still awake?" daddy asks.  

"Huh?" comes the sleepy answer.  

"Here, let daddy fluff your little pillows so you can sleep better", daddy says.  

"Jamie made me do it", Renae squeals before I can lift her pillow.  Younger than her brother by two years, she was far and away the more vocal.  

"There have been two crimes committed here tonight.  Can you tell me what they are?" I asked.  

"Jamie and I took cookies when we knew we were not supposed to", Renae  ventured, thinking that they constituted the two crimes. 

"That's one," I agreed, "What's the other crime?" 

After several bad guesses I explained, "Your second crime is that both of you believed that because your daddy is blind, he is too dumb to know what you are doing.  But of course tonight you have learned that this is not true.  Still, the crime remains.  You have insulted your daddy.  You have broken the Trust.  Trust is so important in our family.  Love and Trust.  Once you break it, Trust is so very hard to get back.  I love you both beyond words, but you will now have to begin the hard job of gaining my Trust again." 

And they did.  I will put my children up against all the children in the world and I will always swell with pride at how well they are living their lives and raising their children. 

 

Curious Carl

 

Smart grid could turn appliances into spies,experts warn

Subject: Smart grid could turn appliances into spies, experts warn
(The good news is that we live off the grid.  All our appliances can do is talk to themselves)

Curious Carl

ELECTRICITY
Power vs. privacy
Smart grid could turn appliances into spies, experts warn

Thursday, February 18, 2010
By Paul Gallant, special to CBC News

Do you want your fridge talking about you behind your back?

With the rapid adoption of a North American "smart grid" aimed at helping
consumers conserve electricity, it's also possible that smart appliances
will be able to transmit information about their activities (and yours)
through the power lines. Your electricity utility may not yet be able to
determine when you snack, do laundry or shower, but privacy advocates are
sounding the alarm that systems need to be put in place to guard details
about a household's electricity usage from prying eyes.

A paper released last November by the Office of the Information and Privacy
Commissioner of Ontario and the U.S.-based Future of Privacy Forum proposes
building privacy controls right into the smart grid before the system is
fully rolled out.

'The Smart Grid will enable third parties to peer into your home. You can
imagine how tempting the marketing opportunities will be.
- Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann CavoukianAlthough different utilities
define the smart grid in different ways, the key feature is a two-way
communication system between a household's meter and the electricity utility
so that energy consumption can be tracked with incredible - sometimes even
minute-by-minute - detail.

"The Smart Grid will enable third parties to peer into your home," says
commissioner Ann Cavoukian. "You can imagine how tempting the marketing
opportunities will be."

So-called smart meters are the first step in creating a smart grid. In
Canada, Ontario has been first off the mark. The province has already
installed 1.1 million smart meters and plans to have one in every household
by the end of 2010. In the U.S., Boulder, Colo., has taken the lead to
become the first city with smart meters for every customer.

"Our expectation is that this network will be 100 or 1,000 times larger than
the internet," Marie Hattar, vice-president of marketing at U.S.-based Cisco
Network Systems Solutions, said when the company announced last year that it
intended to make communication equipment for the smart grid. "If you think
about it, some homes have internet access, but some don't. Everyone has
electricity access - all of those homes could potentially be connected."

How it works
In its most basic form, the smart grid allows utilities to read meters
without sending out an employee; instead the meters send a reading back to
the utility automatically. But Ontario's push into smart meters has been
aimed at changing consumer behaviour, so the launch in that province goes
further.

"The Ontario government wanted to get price transparency into the hands of
the consumers," says Rick Stevens, director of distribution development at
Ontario's Hydro One. "So we're building all the back-office systems to allow
customers to get better price transparency through time-of-use rates, which
is something we'll be rolling out in the next few months."

Many households with smart meters can already go online and log in to an
energy-use account to see how much energy they used during a specific time
period. By giving people more detailed information about their electricity
usage, the assumption is that they will be willing to reduce their
consumption or re-schedule it to off-peak hours when the rate may be
cheaper.

Privacy concerns
Things get trickier from a privacy perspective if the system offers
real-time statistics, since electricity use is a good indication of whether
someone is at home at that very moment and what they are doing - if they're
awake or asleep, for example.

Eventually, utilities will have the ability to allow consumers to see how
their energy use compares to that of their neighbours, information that, if
not sufficiently protected, could reveal many things about your neighbours'
comings and goings as well.

Utilities promise this data will be encrypted and assigned an anonymous
number that can't be tracked back to an individual customer. But the cyber
security co-ordination task group that has been addressing smart grid
privacy concerns in the U.S. has warned, "there is a lack of formal privacy
policies, standards, or procedures by entities who are involved in the smart
grid and collect information."

It added that, "comprehensive and consistent definitions of personally
identifiable information do not generally exist in the utility industry."

Stevens, who has been in touch with Cavoukian and has read the smart grid
report, says Hydro One has both hardware and software safeguards in place to
preserve customer privacy.

"Hydro One's approach is to build security requirements right up front and
put them into our tender documents so that safeguards are integrated as part
of the overall design," says Stevens. "Privacy by design is what we live and
breathe."

Smart appliances
Hydro One has policies in place that prohibit it from selling customer
information to third parties. But the pressure for third-parties to access
power-usage information will only increase.

Many companies are working on new products - electric vehicles, smart
appliances and energy-production systems like solar panels - that have the
potential to take advantage of the smart grid's two-way communication system
to send usage information from individual appliances and devices to a
central office where it can be accessed by the utility or by the user.
Whirlpool Corp., for example, announced in January it would produce one
million smart appliances by the end of 2011 and make all its appliances
smart grid-compatible by the end of 2015.

Device-specific information would be useful to the consumer to get credit,
for example, if they were feeding electricity back into the grid from solar
panels or a windmill. Some appliances could adjust their own energy
consumption according to the time of day or by monitoring what other
appliances were running in the home.

This kind of information could help make a home more efficient in terms of
energy consumption, but it would also be tempting information for marketers,
governments and even thieves. The Future of Privacy report suggests that
extensive information could be gleaned from the grid - everything from when
you shower or watch TV to which appliances and gadgets you have in your
home, and when you use them.

The report urges that any third-party access to the information should not
be a deal between the utilities and the third parties, but between the
consumers and the third parties. As well, third parties should agree not to
correlate data with data obtained from other sources or the individual,
without the consent of the individual.

"There always needs be a policy to provide levels of protection, or at least
transparency, about how the data will be used," says Christopher Wolf of the
Future of Privacy Forum. "It's not the technology that's bad, it's the use
of the technology."

Stevens says it's hard to predict how smart appliances and vehicles will
interact with the grid. For example, in the future you may be able to plug
your electric vehicle into a friend's meter and, by keying in your code,
have it billed to your account. This system could make it easier for a
person's whereabouts to be tracked, but right now it's just an idea.

"It's not that we're not thinking about it - it's just that we don't build
cars, so we have to watch the car makers to see where they're going," says
Stevens. "We can't start building functionality because we don't know the
requirements at this point."

Ontario privacy commissioner Cavoukian has been calling for companies,
governments and other agencies to build their information systems with
privacy as the default mode. "If privacy is to live well into the future, we
can no longer rely on regulatory compliance. Smart privacy is about having a
whole arsenal of protections. That includes having regulations, but they're
not going to be enough for the future."
++++

I was wondering if someone might answer a question?

February 21, 2010

 

Jeopardy gives the answers and we fill in the questions.  So it's the answers that I miss.  Asking me an answer always did confuse me.  But then, it does fit down the Rabbit Hole. 

 

So here's today's answer: 

Jace is celebrating his first birthday today in Orting Washington. 

 

The Question:

Who is Carl Jarvis' youngest grandson? 

 

Curious Carl

 

Hey God! You'd better get busy.

Noah had it so easy.  All he had to do was to build the Ark and grab two of every animal.  Did you ever wonder who was going around collecting plants and trees and shrubs? 

But the question today is, who is God going to tell to build an Ark with enough air conditioning to keep every pair of creatures safe during what will most surely be a longer trip than 40 days and 40 nights?  Maybe more like 400 years? 

God, you'd better get started because we can't wait for the US Congress to do anything. 

 

Curious Carl

 

"You Need to Know What's Really Going On": WikiLeaks Founder JulianAssange on the Fight for the Truth

Subject: Re: "You Need to Know What's Really Going On": WikiLeaks Founder JulianAssange on the Fight for the Truth

The US reaction to the WikiLeaks' "Afghan War Diary is downright scary.  Of course we would expect the Pentagon and the White House to initially deny the validity of the reports.  Even going so far as to claim that they are fabricated.  And we are not surprised by the posturing .  And of course we know that a good offense is always the best defense, so we knew that there would be an all out attack charging the reports to be undermining our war efforts. 

But after all the huffing and puffing was over there was not one word from our civilian or military officials regarding the most important revelation.  That is, America's behavior  cannot be differentiated from that of the most ruthless, tyrannical governments on the planet. 

If ever Americans needed proof that we are not the wonderful, loving people going about the Land, doing good, the report lays it out. 

But the content is ignored by the very leaders who have condoned it.  and the American people appear to be shrugging it off, preferring to allow ourselves to be herded along stomping and shouting threats against Wikileaks.  And that's the scary part.  That we Americans have been so dulled and misdirected that we are no longer able to think for ourselves.  How can any thinking person believe that the way to defend Freedom is to deny it to everyone else, including themselves? 

How can we allow our heads to be turned away from concerns over the illegal wars and the uncaring slaughter of innocent people?  Have we really given our Souls over to our Masters? 

America, with all its flaws, had, and perhaps still has the potential to lead the way to a better life for all people.  But that will only happen if we are able to take our minds back from the clutches of the Empire Builders and begin thinking for ourselves.  And of course, that will call for action on our part.  Resistance and refusal to play their war games will bring down their house of cards. 

 

Curious Carl