Game change

Every experience is refracted by the senses, augmented by past experience and rendered in it’s telling. We rarely get a glimpse of events as they occur. Interpretation happens way to fast. Consequently, even first-hand accounts come mixed with the observers point-of-view. I’ve come to accept this as human nature and just be mindful of the process. 

 I’m reading about the filming of a biography on Sarah Palin. Actress Julianne Moore says “We researched and sourced this as well as we could, but every experience is perceived through somebody’s worldview. You could do a ‘Rashomon’ kind of thing with this story and come out with a different version every single time. Is it the truth? Yeah, but the storyteller’s truth.” Reproducing actual dialogue is another trick. According to Moore: “As important as it was for me to nail down Palin’s great northern accent, with its sing-song musicality, I also had to master the rhythm of her phrasing, which is kind of baroque. She pauses at odd intervals between phrases and sometimes emphasizes prepositions, rather than verb-phrases, like “I need to make a decision” rather than “I need to make a decision.” They depict Palin as a caring mother and an inspiration. Moore said she felt she understood the tremendous stress Palin must have been under serving as governor and the mother of five children, including a pregnant teenage daughter and a son headed to war. “Then she is thrust on the national stage and subsequently asked not to be herself, to do it somebody else's way ..imagine how hard would that be?” Even so, Palin and her team have lambasted the movie as a “sick fiction.”

False sense of consistency

I’ve never known anybody who didn’t contradict something they said before. Myself included. So it doesn’t surprise me when I hear it coming from the President of the United States. The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted, “terrorists be brought to justice in U.S. federal courts rather than executed by military tribunals.” Last year however, Obama ordered the execution of an American-born terrorist (Anwar Awlaki) in a military drone-attack overseas. Today, Atty Gen Eric Holder said “..the president has the authority to target and kill American citizens overseas when those individuals pose a threat to this country .. the executive branch does not require judicial oversight or court order to do so.” So now republicans want the administration to explain why this doesn’t square with statements they made in the past. Since it’s not in our nature to be consistent with everything we say in the past; I say we let it go and move on. However, I don’t think it’s in our nature to understand that it’s not in our nature. Makes me wonder if the things we dislike in others are often the things we blindly dislike in ourselves. That’s probably why I hate politicians so much.

A fake veneer

We’re rarely in a position to see causal relationships directly. We know them mostly by the effects they have on us locally ..or what we hear from others who claim to have been there. Most often what we hear is ‘the most likely’ cause .. passed down 2nd or 3rd hand from news reporters. What I like is when we get it directly from the source ..and even they admit they can’t see it either ..so they also give us the most likely cause. For example, the Klamath is seeing a tremendous boost in salmon this year. The fishermen can’t see the reason. “Nothing dramatic has changed ..most likely due to healthy stream flows in the Klamath.” Oceanographers say “fewer predators” Others credit the efforts of Native Americans to protect fish habitats. I like what Kristen Boyles (attorney for Earthjustice) says “Since this boost occurred outside the expectations of both conservationists and the fishing industry ..the battle between environmental protection versus economic activity is most likely a fake veneer covering up a much larger cycle of events occurring outside the narrow interest of individuals.”