Why Truth Is So Illusive? Braun- Blanquet Scale

[I found this draft post from July 2012.  It appears never to have been posted.  But it's interesting to see how what I wrote 12 years ago is still relevant today.  Probably more so. And posting it today - August 3 - is fitting as you will see if you read it.]

Getting the facts right - whether it's in an old sexual abuse case or an attempt to see how ground vegetation has changed over a period of time - is the first step.  Once the facts are established, then models - whether scientific theories, religious beliefs, or the unarticulated models of how the world works we carry in our heads - are applied.

For example, did your son lie to his teacher about his homework?  If the answer is yes, then you must go through various models you have about topics such as lying, education, changing the behavior of young boys and apply them to this situation to get the desired result.  It's not as easy as you might initially think.  You may have a clear value that lying is never good.  Or you may think there are times it is ok.  Do you think his teacher is wonderful and working hard to teach your son to be a great human being with all the necessary skills?  Or is he part of a corrupt educational system that expects all students in the class to be at exactly the same level at all times and finds fault with your son because he's brighter than most and bored in class, or slower than most and having trouble keeping up? Or do you think he is picking on your son because he's a different race from the teacher?  And finally, will you talk this over with your son?  Restrict his internet access for a week?  Or whup him with a belt to help him learn this lesson?  Or maybe you'll go to the school and defend your son and attack the teacher. 

Things get much more complicated when we deal with the collective problems of a community.  If king salmon aren't returning to their rivers in the numbers expected, how should state fish and game authorities deal with this?  First, is their method of counting salmon working right?  Perhaps the salmon are getting through without being counted?  Then, do you restrict subsistence fishers?  Which models do you use to explain the shortage?  Is it climate change which is affecting the water temperatures?  Is it overfishing by commercial ocean fishing vessels?  Is it that these salmon are being caught as by-catch by bottom trawlers?  And when you think you know, what model do you use to decide whether subsistence fishers are allowed to catch any?

All this is introduction to Josias Braun-Blanquet who in 1927 devised the Braun-Blanquet scale.  The Botany Dictionary tells us about the Braun-Blanquet scale.

A method of describing an area of vegetation . . . It is used to survey large areas very rapidly. Two scales are used. One consists of a plus sign and a series of numbers from 1 to 5 denoting both the numbers of species and the proportion of the area covered by that species, ranging from + (sparse and covering a small area) to 5 (covering more than 75% of the area). The second scale indicates how the species are grouped and ranges from Soc. 1 (growing singly) to Soc. 5 (growing in pure populations). The information is obtained by laying down adjacent quadrats of increasing size. One of a number of variations of Braun-Blanquet's method is the Domin scale, which is more accurate as there are more subdivisions of the original scale. The Braun-Blanquet scale also included a five-point scale to express the degree of presence of a plant. For example, 5 = constantly present in 80-100% of the areas; 1 = rare in 1-20% of the areas.

So, essentially, this is a measuring device to calculate the percentage of an area that is covered by different plant species.  Measuring is just the first step.  Once you have the measures, then you can apply your models. (OK, I know some of you will point out that you can't measure anything unless you have models that tell you what to measure.  True enough.  But once you have the measures - in this case of percentage of species of vegetation in a certain location - you have to interpret what that means using a model or several.)

But one problem is that the measurements might not be accurate or might not be used right. 

A 1978 Study in  Environmental Management found the Braun-Blanquet scale to be adequate and more efficient than another method of measuring species in an area.  Here's the abstract:

To document environmental impact predictions for land development, as required by United States government regulatory agencies, vegetation studies are conducted using a variety of methods. Density measurement (stem counts) is one method that is frequently used. However, density measurement of shrub and herbaceous vegetation is time-consuming and costly. As an alternative, the Braun-Blanquet cover-abundance scale was used to analyze vegetation in several ecological studies. Results from one of these studies show that the Braun-Blanquet method requires only one third to one fifth the field time required for the density method. Furthermore, cover-abundance ratings are better suited than density values to elucidate graphically species-environment relationships. For extensive surveys this method provides sufficiently accurate baseline data to allow environmental impact assessment as required by regulatory agencies.

 So, fifty years after Braun-Blanquet's scale went public, it was still being used.  And apparently it is still in use today.  And people are writing about some of the limitations of the model.

In Monitoring Nature Conservation in Cultural Habitats:: A Practical Guide and Case Studies, (2007) by Clive Hurford and Michael Schneider, the Braun-Blanquet scale is compared to the Domin scale and both are found to have two sources of error.  First, is the observer bias that could affect the initial estimate of the percentage of species coverage that is then used to identify the appropriate cover class.  The second problem arises when the vegetation is at or near a vegetation boundary.  This is, apparently, more of a problem in the Domin scale. (p. 82)

And a February 2009 (online) article in Journal of Vegetation Science warns that the Braun-Blanquet abudance-dominance scale cannot be used with conventional multivariate analysis techniques because the Braun-Blanquet scores use ordinal numbers. 

I bring this up for a couple of reasons.  First, today, August 3, is Braun-Blanquet's birthday.  He was born in Switzerland in 1884 and died in France at 96 in 1980.  Second, and probably of more general importance, has to do with science and truth.

We are at a time when science is under severe attack by a combined force of right wing politicians and fundamentalist religious groups.   They pounce on what they call scientific errors and publicize them to 'prove' science isn't trustworthy.  The emails about global warming data is a good example. 

Now, there are scientists who for various reasons (fame, money, revenge, you know the usual human failings that lead to compromises) do cheat.  But the beauty of science is that one's work must be made public and when others try to duplicate your work and can't, then your work becomes suspect. 

But the pursuit of truth is and will always be imperfect.  Data collection and interpretation will always be dependent on the ability to observe and measure and interpret.  And the Braun-Blanquet scale shows, in a small way, that even a technique that's been around over 70 years, is not perfect.  But in science no one holds all the cards, no one proclaims truth for everyone else to accept. 

Scientific truth is always being tested and challenged.  That's its strength, but absolutists see it as a weakness. 

DePaul University Professor of Environmental Science and co-director of DePaul University's Institute for Nature and Culture, has an interesting story about a project  to rid the oak woodlands of Rhododendron ponticum, an invasive shrub that was encroaching in the understory of this habitat in Killarney National Park in Ireland.  It talks about the use of the Braun-Blanquet scale.  It's posted at his blog Ten Things Wrong with Environmental Thinking.

Civil Service - Who Are These People ET Are Firing? - Part I

Intro:  Civil Service and Merit System are terms most Americans have heard, but I'd guess that few could tell you, very accurately, what they mean or anything about their history or why they are important bedrocks of American democracy.  

Part I - is a repeat of a post I put up last August 31, 2025.  Part II will be another old post.  It gets into more detail and is based on testimony I gave in a discrimination case years ago.  Although there will be repetition, I'm sure that will be helpful for readers to grasp the concepts. 

This topic is critical to understanding why what is happening right now is both illegal and will lead to serious damage to the U.S. government's ability to efficiently and effectively serve the people of the United States.  

*ET - my conflation of Elon and Trump, though someone else thought it meant Evil Tyrant.  Evil Twins might also work.  Maybe Elon and Trump can journey to Mars and it can then have its original meaning of Extra Terrestrial.  

From the August 31, 2024 post:

From the August 31, 2024 LA Times: [Note the digital and facsimile editions have different titles.]

 

As someone who taught public administration at the graduate level, I'm well aware of the lack of knowledge of what 'the civil service' is.  So let me give you some background.  

Before the civil service was created in local, state, and federal governments, we had what is often called "the spoils system."

Briefly, 'to the victor, go the spoils.'  Winning candidates gave jobs to the campaign supporters.  This was the payoff for working on a campaign.  Qualifications were not nearly as important as loyalty.  This included positions as low as garbage collector and as high as the head of the budget.  

Aside from the incompetence and corruption this led to, it also meant that whenever someone from a different party won, the whole government was thrown out and new people were put in place.  And had to learn from scratch, generally without any help from the fired former workers.

Political machines, like Tammany Hall in New York, would recruit new immigrants coming off the ships to work on their campaigns with the promise of a job if they won.  [US citizenship was not required to vote back then.  That changed later.  The Constitution gave the states the power to run elections and decide qualifications to vote.  The Constitution didn't ban women from voting, the states did.]

At the national level, this came to a head when Andrew Jackson was elected president and invited 'the riffraff' that elected him to the White House in 1830.  But it wasn't until a disgruntled office seeker assassinated President Garfield in 1881 because he didn't get the position he sought, that Congress got serious. 

In 1883 they passed the Pendleton Act that set up a civil service system based on merit.  

Merit, as in the 'merit system' means that positions are filled based on merit, or on one's qualifications for the job, not on who you know.  

Local governments in New York and Boston didn't move to merit systems until the early 20th Century.  

Those merit systems weren't perfect.  The inherent biases of the day meant that women and Blacks weren't qualified except for what Trump would call 'women's jobs' and 'Black jobs.'  

And even today, the top level jobs in most governments are still filled with people who are loyal to the head of the government - whether that's a mayor, governor, or president.   Not only does that include cabinet officials but a top layer of 'exempt' positions.  Exempt meaning they are not covered by the merit system.  They can be hired and fired at will.  Usually the newly elected official picks people based on their loyalty to the policy as well as their professional qualifications to do the job.  But clearly that second part doesn't always happen.  The only check on this, is a required vote of approval by a legislative body - the US or state Senate, a City Council.  But if the newly elected executive  has a majority in the legislative branch too, that approval is often pro forma.

People hired through a merit system process also have job protections.  They cannot be fired except for cause - for violating the law, the policies or procedures, for gross incompetence etc.  Whereas the appointed (exempt) positions don't have such protections.  

After his 2016 election, Trump was frequently frustrated by career civil servants, who didn't jump to follow his often illegal instructions. The media have dubbed these people (who included many appointed positions as well) 'the guardrails' that kept Trump somewhat in line. He wanted the Justice Department to punish people who opposed him.  He did battle with the civil servants in various regulatory agencies who followed the law rather than Trump's illegal bidding.  

So, when we hear that Trump wants to destroy the civil service, as stated in the LA Times headline above, this is what we're talking about.  

He doesn't want a system that hires qualified people who cannot be fired except for cause.  (Again, for cause, means they have to do something that violates the laws, the rules, or is grossly incompetent or corrupt.)  He wants government workers that do his bidding without any resistance, without them telling him 'it's against the law.'

He wants to fire all those people who were hired based on merit (their qualifications to perform the job).  These include Democrats, Republicans, and non-partisan employees.  He wants to replace them with people whose main qualification is undying loyalty to Trump.  

That's pretty much all I want to say.

One of the very best books on this subject is Robert Caro's The Power Broker.  It's a biography of Robert Moses who played a major role in getting a merit system in place in New York.  It's a massive [1168 pages] book.  But it is also riveting as it goes into detail on how the young, idealist Moses evolved into the powerful and corrupt power broker of New York. And in doing so tells the story of the civil service. Not only did the book win the Pulitzer Prize, it was also selected on most lists of the 100 best non-fiction books of the 20th Century. I challenge you to read the first hundred pages and not want to keep turning the pages.

Introduction to Robert Caro's The Power Broker 

Part II is here.

Discovering Islands Around The World

I found the following passage intriguing.  And since it is bad form to copy whole passages of other
books without adding value or a new context, I should say a little bit more.  

In the film about diving in unexplored underwater caves, Diving Into The Darkness, that was featured at the Anchorage International Film Festival last December,  an astronaut says cave divers' explorations were much more dangerous than that of the astronauts because they were totally on their own, out of contact with the rest of the world.  If they had a problem, they had to overcome it on their own.

Think about how much more that applied to the sailors of the past - especially those who went on long voyages of exploration.   

 "It took Western civilization* about 1500 years to discover all the oceanic islands, and it appears that Captain Cook and his lieutenants were almost the only people in all that time who took their surveying job very seriously.  

The probability that an island will be found by sailors depends on its size, its distance from a home port, the number of voyages from  port, the freedom of action and spirit of adventure of captains, the likelihood of ships' being driven long distances by storms, and so on.  All in all, it is not surprising that the largest oceanic volcano, Iceland, was the first to be discovered, in the fourth century A.D., by the Norsemen, who lived not far to the east.  They colonized the island by the ninth century and roamed the northern seas - which contain few oceanic islands.

The next phase of discovery was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when Portuguese, Spanish, and other European explorers began to seek a sea route to the spice and silk of the East.  Just as Columbus accidentally found the vast area of the Americas, so others sighted tiny oceanic islands or ran aground on them.  In 1420 the Portuguese Zarco discovered the Madeira islands, for the last time, when storms drove him west from his exploration of the coast of Africa.  A Genoese map of 1351 shows that contact had been made before - the islands are only 670 km west of Africa and the Straits of Gibraltar.  The Azores, even further west, were already known to the Carthaginians, who left coins, and Arabian geographers.  They were discovered for the last time in 1432, when Van den Berg was driven on the islands by a storm.  Although the Azores are in three widely separated groups, all nine islands were found and some even colonized by the Portuguese within twenty-five years. . .

As the Europeans sailed farther south, further discoveries were made apparently for the first as well as the last time by man.  These included the cluster of the Cape Verdes in 1456;  the tiny, isolated, mid ocean islands of Ascension, in 1501, and St. Helena, in 1502.  Clearly, the explorers were tracking far into the Atlantic to follow the latitudinally zoned winds.  The Portuguese reached oceanic islands in the Indian Ocean soon after.  Mauritius in 1505, and Reunion in 1513.  All of the islands discovered to this time had several features in common.  They were high volcanoes, active or dead, uninhabited, and wholly lacking gold, diamonds, or anything else offering quick profit.  Some were ironbound by great cliffs  but even these had a few protected anchorages and fresh water, so the islands had some use.  Moreover, being high, they were visible from great distances and thus hardly hazardous to navigation.  

So when Magellan entered the Pacific, in 1520, he had some knowledge of oceanic islands.  We may pause to consider what else he knew and his situation.  He knew about the trade winds.  After beating his way through the straits that bear his name it could hardly have escaped his attention that he was in the wrong latitude to sail west.  Not to mention that the known riches of the East were in the Northern Hemisphere.  His ship was marginal for the voyage and his supplies were already low.  Considering all these factors, his only logical course was to sail northwestward until he reached the tropics and the gentle, persistent easterlies of the trade winds.  This he did.  

The state of the science of navigation in Magellan's time enabled him to determine latitude at sea, but not longitude.  Indeed, in those days before surveying by triangulation, no one knew longitude very well on land , either.  The course being steered and speed made through the water could be measured, but wind and sea drift were always uncertain, and often hopelessly so after a series of storms.  As a consequence, the longitudinal positions of ships not infrequentlywere in error by hundreds of kilometers and occasionally by more than two thousand kilometers.  Not until Captain Cook's time, in the late eighteenth century, were nautical chronometers accurate enough to permit determinations of longitude.  Even two centuries after Cook, positioning errors of 15 km to 30 km were common in celestial navigation.  Not until the invention of electronics and artificial satellite navigation in the 1960s and 1970s did a ship at last know where it was most of the time.  Then, naturally almost everything that had been discovered had to be relocated."

From H. W. Menard, Islands, Scientific American Library, 1986, (pp. 6-9)

*Reading The Adventures of Amina Al Sirafi  recently also piqued my interest in this passage.  And is also a reminder that there were non-European discoverers as well who are documented in Western libraries as well as the European discoverers.  The book does mention this.  It also mentions the plant and animal 'discoverers' that made their way to distant islands.  

But I also wonder how much better we know where we are today, with the constant flood of social media misinformation?  

I don't just mean if we're in the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of Power, but whether we're in a democracy, a failing state, an insane asylum, or a fascist dictatorship, or all of them at once.  

You can probably get Islands at your public library.  Loussac library in Anchorage doesn't have it, but they can get it from several University of Alaska libraries.    [Not sure how well that library search link will hold up, but we can try.]

The Palisades Fire - Personal Connections And More General Thoughts

We're back in Anchorage.  As we went to the airport in the late afternoon Friday, there seemed to be a lot less smoke blowing from the Palisades fire toward the ocean.   By the time we took off, it was dark out and while we sat on the wrong side of the plane, we could still see the flames through the window on the other side as we banked to the north.  It was the first time we saw actual flames.  

I grew up in LA and my mom lived in our house for 65 years.  So I know the area fairly well.  Especially the west side where the Palisades fire is.  I've seen huge changes over time and I have some thoughts, having been in LA when the fire started.  

We discovered KCAL on the radio while we were driving - which had the most up-to-the-minute and detailed coverage of the fires.  You can watch the KCAL coverage here.  I listened again this morning from here in Anchorage.  I know the places they're talking about, but even if you don't it's pretty addicting and I don't recommend watching more than 15 minutes at a time.  

History - Marquez, Will Rogers State Park, UCLA, Santa Monica Pier

Here's a recent map from the Los Angeles County Emergency site.  These maps keep being updated.  I've done a screenshot of an area of importance to me.  The orange is mandatory evacuation areas.  The yellow is a warning area - be ready to evacuate.  I'd note I was still getting alerts on my phone as we were headed to the airport.  

My mom's house is down at the bottom, just below the Santa Monica Airport which is the border between SM and Los Angeles.  It's a long way off from the mandatory evacuation area.  It probably doesn't look that far, but the fire is mostly in mountainous areas - large lots, hillsides covered with (now) dry brush.  The land between mandatory evacuation and be ready to evacuate areas and my mom's house is much more urban.  Directly above my mom's house is the concrete and asphalt runway of the Santa Monica Airport.  

I went to school at UCLA.  As you can see, the Evacuation Warning area touches the northwest corner of the campus.

My last two years at UCLA, I was a noon duty aide and afterschool playground director at Marquez Elementary School.  It's one of two schools that burned down Thursday.  Every day, about 11:30am I took off from UCLA and rode along Sunset to Marquez Elementary School.  Sometimes I napped in the nurse's office between lunch and after school duty.  Other times I rode the last mile or so of Sunset to the beach where I played volley ball and body surfed.  

One of my favorite places in LA was Will Rogers State Park.  This was the great Cherokee cowboy/actor/humorist's estate where he could escape Hollywood.  It had his house and other buildings including a large stable for horses and a polo field.  And the surrounding area had beautiful hiking trails.  It was pretty much the only thing around when I first went there.  I remember seeing quail there.  This picture is from a 2011 blog post.  More pictures of the area around the Will Rogers estate are in a 2021 post.  It appears to have all been destroyed.  Will Rogers died in a plane crash with Wiley Post, in 1935 outside of what was then called Port Barrow, Alaska.  

If you don't know much about Rogers, I urge you to read his Wikipedia entry.  And/or watch this Youtube talk from 1931 much of which applies today.  

In more recent years, when I come down to LA, I bike down to Venice Beach and then north along the coast up to the where Pacific Palisades meets the ocean.  In the previous post, I put up a picture from a recent ride, looking up at a couple of houses on the bluff above the ocean there.  

The Santa Monica Pier, which is just about where the SA of Santa Monica are on the map, has also been a favorite spot in the LA area.  We took the grandkids to the pier on New Year's Eve before going to see Cirque Du Soleil which was in a tent in the pier parking lot.  And the pier is still there and likely not in danger, despite earlier reports that it was, and what almost certainly was a fake photo of the pier with the sky full of flames behind it. Though the Cirque Du Soleil tents are gone.  

On Wednesday, the second day of the fire, I biked (with a good mask on) to the pier and a little beyond it.  Here's a video I took from the pier.  Downtown Santa Monica is where the  tall buildings are to the right.  

Today's map has the evacuation line right up to the ocean for a good part of it.  But at downtown Santa Monica, the air was relatively clear and was still reasonably so a couple of miles north of the pier.  I rode beyond the pier until I could see that up ahead the smoke was down on the highway and bike trail.  I didn't need to get that close to thick smoke.  But you can see, in the picture below, a runner, without a mask, heading for it.  I'd note that as a Jr. High and High School student, LA air frequently looked like that and on the worst days, we'd get a pain in our chest when we breathed deep.  

I'd also mention that Pacific Palisades was the home of "Weimar on the Pacific."  

"In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism."

If you don't know these names (and I acknowledge that most people probably don't, despite their being important cultural figures), and others mentioned in the linked book announcement, I'd urge you to google them.  They're pretty remarkable people.  My mother had connections to Schoenberg family through her work, and through the owner of the dress shop who was featured in the film Woman In Gold. who hired Schoenberg's grandson to represent her in her fight against the Austrian government to recover pictures stolen from her family by the Nazis.  My mom shopped at her store and sent me clippings from the newspaper of the lawsuit while it was happening.  

Another member of the group was Leon Feuchtwanger.  When I was a high school or college student, my father took me to visit an older German woman in West Los Angeles or possibly Santa Monica.  Close to the yellow evacuation warning area today.  I could be wrong, but I believe this was Leon Feuchtwanger's widow, Marta.  (My father also fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.)

The End, But Not The End

I wanted this to be one integrated post, tying a number of different ideas together.  But while I think some of my readers could read on beyond this, I've got several more topics and there is already a lot in the links to explore.  So I'll save the others for tomorrow and maybe the next day.  

Coming:

1.  Development in the hills -  Why have people built way up in this area known for fires?

2.  Pacific Palisades and Malibu, and now Brentwood ( especially Mandeville Canyon), Encino on the valley side are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, probably the US.  Would we be paying such close attention if this were a poorer neighborhood?  Would a poorer neighborhood be getting all the resources coming in to help like this?

3.  The idea of ownership and loss - humans are short term inhabitants on earth.  We don't 'own' the earth, or anything else really.  We are the temporary guardians until the 'properties' are lost, sold,, destroyed, stolen, or by the death of the people who believe they own them.  

4.  Phone Alerts  - I kept getting loud alerts on my phone with warnings to evacuate immediately

5.  How television news (in particular) distort reality by showing the most sensational snippets and ignoring the fact that most people are going on with their lives normally.

6. Warning to Anchorage hillside residents, and people everywhere who live in wooded hillsides. Or any area that is threatened by nature's reaction to Climate Change.  

LA - Skateboarding, Googie, Bernie's, And More

 

If you walk the path along Venice Beach, you'll come across the skateboard park.  

Skateboards first appeared along the beaches of Southern California, particularly Venice.  As a junior high student back then, I joined the others nailing half a roller skate to one end of a 2x4 and the other half to the other end.  We didn't have a lot of control. My street was one of the better hills.  One block to the south wasn't steep enough.  One block to the north was too steep for most.  I survived the steep one a couple of times. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  You can read more about the history of skateboards from the Hermoso Beach Museum site.

Skate boarding has come a long way since then as have the places people ride them.  

Tuesday it got up to 75˚F and we spent a couple of hours at Venice Beach near the end of Rose Avenue.

Friday, when I biked down there, the fog blocked the view of the ocean from the bike trail.

 We went to the LA County Museum of Art on Thursday.  And passed this bit of graffiti on the way.  We also passed an Indian grocery store.  

This is just a part of the loooooooong spice shelf.  One of the reasons that Indian food is so good - lots of spices and thousands of years experimenting how to prepare them.  

We also passed Johnie's Coffee Shop.  It's an example of Googie architecture - but I didn't know that when I took the picture or I would have taken a better picture of the whole place.  My interest was that this coffee shop had been turned into Bernie's Coffee Shop. LAist has a January 31, 2019 story by Jessica P. Ogilvie about this transformation:

"Johnie's Coffee Shop was built in 1956 by architects Louis Armet and Eldon Davis, masters of the space-age Googie style. The restaurant came to be known for its striking design and by the 1980s, began making appearances in films like Miracle Mile, The Big Lebowski, American History X, Reservoir Dogs and City of Angels. In 1994, it was purchased by the Gold family, an entrepreneurial L.A. clan whose patriarch, David Gold, founded the 99 Cents Only Stores.

In 2013, Johnie's was designated an historic cultural monument, and for a short while, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority debated turning it into a Metro stop for the purple line."

That Metro stop is still being built kitty-corner from Johnie's/Bernie's.  The article goes on to tell the history of how it became Bernie's.  

This is at Fairfax and Wilshire.  Across the street is the old May Company department store - about 

2 1/2 blocks from where I lived as a kid.  Now it's the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum.  Fortunately the kept the historic facade of the building.  They used to have elaborate Christmas display windows right at that corner.  

We ended up checking out the Motion Picture Museum, but passing for now.  Instead we went to the Art Museum that is on the (now, there used to be a street between them) adjoining block.  But I'll save the museum for another post.  

Some of the apartment buildings on the street where I used to live.  Ours didn't have such fancy entrances.  

It was a hazy day which gave these buildings in Century City a surreal look as we drove home.  (None of the pictures in this post were edited except cropping.)

And I'm adding on this picture (below) of the LA airport.  I commented in an earlier post about the unsatisfactory taxi/Uber/Lyft parking lot that's a distance from the terminals.  The whole terminal traffic situation is beyond awful.  There are places where you can pick up arriving passengers.  But during Christmas vacation the three to four lanes are jammed.  You aren't supposed to be stopped unless you are actively picking up a passenger.  But it's near impossible to time when the car gets to the terminal to match when the passenger gets to the curb.  I pulled over at Terminal 5 with the expectation I'd move up to Terminal 6 when my daughter and family got out.  If a cop told me to move on, I could stop again at Terminal 6.  (I have been told to move on at LAX in the past, but no cops were sighted Saturday.)  If I got told to move on at Terminal 6, I'd have to go around the whole airport again.  I'm not sure what the solution is.  They're building a skytrain (which i assume will be similar to what they have in San Francisco) to get passengers out of terminal area.  I'm not sure it's just bad design.  More, just that LA's population grew so much.  They do have a target date to do something - the 2028 Olympics will be in LA.  The Metro line is also supposed to be all the way out to the airport.  The problem has been the taxis and other interests didn't want the Metro to get to the airport, I'm told.  

The airport was much easier to navigate back in 1967 when I drove a Yellow Cab out of the airport for several months between graduating from UCLA and returning to the second summer of Peace Corps training.  Those were good times - mornings at the beach playing volley ball and body surfing, evenings driving a cab.  I learned a lot about LA.  I'd never realized how many bars there were until I drove a cab.  

To the left us at this spot is the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) 'theme building."

"To truly immerse oneself in the world of Googie, a visit to the "Theme Building" at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is an absolute must. Completed in 1961, this architectural marvel resembles a futuristic flying saucer perched upon four curving legs. With its observation deck, it was once a popular spot for locals and travelers to admire the planes taking off and landing at LAX. The Theme Building perfectly encapsulates Googie's out-of-this-world charm and stands as a testament to an era when the skies were no longer the limit."  from LA Explained Blog

I had a high school graduation dinner there with a dozen or more friends.  The restaurant is long gone.  

How to Live?

That's the question raised in a book I picked up at the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle during Thanksgiving.

I've just started reading Sarah Bakewell's  How To Live or A Life of Montaigne.  The picture puts the book into the context of the life I'm living at this moment, which, I hope will make more sense after you've read a couple of excerpts.  

"This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever.  It had to be invented.  And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person:  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Péirgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592."    

I no longer assume that people reading something like the end of the last sentence will automatically determine how long Montaigne lived (not quite 60 years), or the historical context (he was born forty years after Columbus reported the existence of a part of the world that Europeans hadn't known existed.  Or maybe some descendants of Vikings knew but others didn't.  I don't take this for granted because long ago I realized that things I do aren't necessarily the same things that other people do.  Though I expect that regular readers of this blog figured that out before I mentioned it.  Or would have if I hadn't placed this parenthetical paragraph here.  The author will offer some more historical context in the following.

"Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it.  Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements.  Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events, although he could have done;  he lived through a religious civil war which almost destroyed his country over the decades he spent incubating and writing his book."  

Again, if I didn't know what religious civil war was being referred to, I would have stopped reading and looked it up.  Here's a link to give you more about the French religious wars of the 16th Century.  Meanwhile further south, the Spanish Inquisition was going on.   I think the fact that he lived in difficult times makes the book more interesting to us today as we slide into our own version of an inquisition to rid the country of immigrants and other 'undesirables' in the eyes of Trump's people.  

"A member of a generation robbed of the hopeful idealism enjoyed by his father's contemporaries, he adjusted to public miseries by focusing his attention on private life.  He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history.  All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles:"

At this point author Bakewell lists a number of his titles.  I'll skip that.  I'm not trying to copy her book, but rather to focus on ideas I found stimulating.  This was just the context.  And you'll note that while she says he lived in difficult times, the fact that he went on with his life as a nobleman and ran his estate as well as served as the mayor of Bordeaux, suggests that despite the wars, he was privileged enough for them to be irritants rather than serious interferences into his life.  But this musing is based on the words in that paragraph, not further research, so take it with a grain of salt. 

 

"He used [his] experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big questions that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries.  Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words:  'How to live?' 

"This is not the same as the ethical question, 'How should one live?' Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did.  He wanted to know how to live a good life - meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one.  This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present.  He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did.  And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself."

And now we'll get to some of the questions he pondered.  And I hope you will find them to be pretty close to ones we ponder today.  

"A down-to-earth question, 'How to Live?'  splintered into a myriad other pragmatic questions.  Like everyone else, Montaigne ran up against the major perplexities of existence:  how to cope with the fear of death, how to get over losing a child or a beloved friend, how to reconcile yourself to failures, how to make the most of every moment so that life does not drain away unappreciated.  But there were smaller puzzles, too.  How do you avoid getting drawn into a pointless argument with your wife, or a servant?  How can you reassure a friend who thinks a witch has cast a spell on him?  How do you cheer up a weeping neighbor?  How do you guard your home?  What is the best strategy if you are held up by armed robbers who seem to be uncertain whether to kill you or hold you to ransom?  If you overhear your daughter's governess teaching her something you think is wrong, is it wise to intervene?  How do you deal with a bully?  What do you say to your dog when he wants to go out and play, while you want to stay at your desk writing your book?  

In place of abstract answers, Montaigne tells us what he did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it.  He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need."

Okay.  That's your appetizer.  I haven't read further in the book than this, but I thought that this book probably has lessons for the current world.  Though as I read it again to type the words into the blog, I also wonder whether the author is phrasing things in a way that sound perhaps a little too contemporary.  

I much prefer reading books that are not being reinterpreted today, so that the contemporary applications are ones I see, not ones that are spoon fed to me.  But since I haven't read the rest of the book yet,  or anything Montaigne wrote, don't blame Sarah Bakewell yet.  Though her opening paragraph was about people being fixated on telling the world, through the internet, their every action and thought.  

But I'm being overly careful (some would say picky).  I'll give you a better informed opinion later when I've finished the book.  But I think the book might help people overcome the temporal bias that we in the present are far more advanced than people in the past.  Technically that may be true, but as human beings capable of thinking, or moral contemplations, of understanding human behavior, and advanced concepts, the ancient people were just as capable as we are, given what humans understood about how the world worked.  Though many had a better lived understanding of how nature operated than many, if not most Americans today.  

A final note.  I'm not blogging as much as before, in part because life is keeping me busy on other things.  And I have too many things I want to write about.  If I don't get back here sooner, have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hanukah, or Kwanza or Solstice, or whatever celebration you observe this time of year.  

ADDED Jan 8, 2025:  The image below is for my Jan 8 comment.  I've put it here since I can't put images into a comment.  

AIFF2024: Cigarette Surfboards; Alaska Native Masks Out In the World

Two more days of festival.  Well only one more for us.  Not that long ago, the Festival website said the festival was Dec. 6-14 and we made our plane reservations for December 15.  Then the more recent edition of the website moved it to December 15.  

This festival has been filled with crazy good documentaries - Champions of the Golden Valley, Ultimate Citizens, Porcelain War, 76 Days Adrift, The Empathizer, Diving Into the Darkness - and I heard Unearth was also great.  And I thought Queen of the Ring was also quite good, but not quite at the level of those others.  

Today we saw two more:  So Surreal:  Behind the Masks and The Cigaret Surfboard.  The basic 'discovery' in Surreal, was how Yupik Alaskan Native masks along with Native Masks from British Columbia had a huge influence on the surrealist artists early in the 20th Century.  This was something I'd learned some time ago.  But the film combined a number of themes - the spiritual meaning and use of Alaska Native masks, the history of how the churches and white government banned the ceremonies in which masks were used and confiscated them, how the Surrealists discovered these masks and were inspired by them, and a detective tale of where some of the masks were today and how to get them repatriated.  The magic of the film is how seamlessly all these themes were intertwined.

Perry Eaton (center) and Drew Michael, both Alaska Native mask makers featured in the film, talk afterward about masks and the film.  

But I also was very pleasantly surprised by how good Cigarette Surfboard was.  I'm biased.  I grew up near Venice Beach, and while I was too lazy to lug a surfboard around (they were big heavy monsters back in those days, and none of my friends were surfers) I was an avid body surfer growing up.  
 

This film starts out with Taylor talking about how cigarette butts are the most numerous item when people are cleaning trash off the beach.  (I had encountered this once long ago when I helped pick up trash with a Covenant House mentee in downtown Anchorage.  So many cigarette butts.)

Not only is the tobacco full of chemicals, but the filters are not biodegradable.  So Taylor decides to make a surfboard using cigarette butts to draw attention to the pollution they cause.  The first one - in the photo - was two heavy.  But he got it down in weight and then got professional surfers to use the boards as a way to get the environmental message across.  The basic question people seemed to ask when they saw these boards was "It must take forever to collect all the butts."  They get told, "Not really, they're everywhere."

So this is an environmental movie and a surfing movie.  We see lots of people riding the waves on their cigarette surfboards.  

Taylor also visits surfers in different parts of the world.  In Ireland one former surfer decided flying around the world to go surfing, while fun, was not environmentally defensible, and he switched to sustainable farming that won't harm the ocean.  In southwest England, a group of surfers had successfully lobbied - with surfboards at Parliament - to end the practice of dumping raw sewage into the ocean.  

A fun film with a message.  

A Fork In The Road Of US And World History

This is one of those historic moments when the world will pull back from the bring of disaster or go crashing into a new world of callous destruction.  The US AID (Agency for International Development) [poster] from Thailand in the late 1960s isn't too dramatic for the choice we face right now.  On the left side it says "Communism,"  in the middle it says "or" and on the right side it says "Freedom." Our choice now is Authoritarian vs. Democracy.  

Despite its many flaws, the US Democracy has been one of the better examples of how humans can work together to build a society based on law and aspirations of peace, of freedom, and of comfort.  The reality has favored some more than others - in terms of freedom, justice, and economic and social security.  And it has had serious negative impacts on the environment.  

But we're at a critical fork in the road.  To the right, we crash into the despotic world ruled by Trump and those who pull his strings, like Putin and his meddling into our election as he has meddled in the Brexit vote, Hungary, France, Italy, and, of course, Ukraine.  He's a force of evil turning the world toward chaos that he thinks he can better thrive in.  

If we go the Trump route, it's not Trump so much I'm worried about.  But it's his backers - from Putin, to the Christian Nationalist mob, and the wealthy cabal on the far right who have been plotting for decades and have already successfully captured the Supreme Court.  

The left fork would give us the first woman president, who is also part East Indian and part Black.  And she's incredibly capable as her career and short campaign has demonstrated.  

There should not even be any doubt that Kamala Harris should win this election.  That there is reflects serious failures in our system.  Failures in the education system that has produced tens of millions of voters who would choose a candidate with hundreds of flaws and misbehaviors any one of which would have destroyed any other presidential candidate.  

Failures in our system that have allowed foreign propaganda to be broadcast through outlets like Fox News and all sorts of internet sites to sow seeds of distrust in our system and in the idea of Truth itself.

Failures in our justice system that allow a convicted felon, who is ineligible to vote in most states, to be a candidate for the presidency.  Who would be ineligible to join our military to be its Commander in Chief.  

Fairlure in our electoral system that disregards the popular vote for an arcane system that focuses all the attention on seven purple states.  

A Harris administration will face many serious problems (including the disgruntled cult members), but it would work on them rationally and in good faith.   And that a Trump administration would exacerbate.  

Often such turning points aren't realized until after they happen - Pearl Harbor, 9/11, the election of FDR, for example.  

But we know today.  We've known a long time that this election is a choice between two very different futures.  One continues to move us toward greater equality, and one hopes, more equal economic prosperity, and continued fights to minimize CO2 emissions and the worst ravages of climate change.  

The other unleashes nasty brutish anger and hate on our country and the world.  

And even if Harris wins the election decisively, we know the depraved one will fight to overturn the election.  

Fortunately, this time round we know his past behaviors and are better prepared.  The public is more aware because, except for his cult members, we've seen how he operated after the last election.  Our government is better prepared for the same reason.  And more importantly, Joe Biden is still president and in control of the military and the national guard and other resources that might be needed.  

My logical brain tells me that it will be a Harris victory.  Reason says that the world has changed in ways that disfavor Trump.

Clinton beat Trump by nearly 3 million votes.   

Biden beat Trump by over 7 million votes.  

Since the 2020 election, we've learned so much more about Trump's evil ways.

He was impeached for the second time.

He created a plot to challenge Biden's victory

He instigated the January 6 insurrection of the Capitol

He stole boxes and boxes full of classified documents and stored some of them in a bathroom in Mar-A-Lago. And shared them, well, we don't know for sure with whom.

He's become a convicted felon and rapist.

He has several serious indictments and trials still waiting for him

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade

His public appearances have shown him to be more and more deranged

He's presided over a Nazi rally in New York City

Many of the 'very fine people' he selected to serve in his administration have publicly warned us what a disastrous president he was.  

I can go on and on, but the point is that we know so many more terrible things about him.  Even if his cult stays loyal, there have to be other Republicans and Independents who voted for him last time who either won't vote for Trump, and many who will vote for Harris.  And young people who now are eligible to vote, but weren't four years ago.

We know that the Dobbs decision has galvanized women, especially in light of the Republican states who have passed draconian anti-abortion laws that are killing women who have had miscarriages and other problems with pregnancy.  And we're hearing about many women forced to give birth to their rapists' children.  

Conservative states like Kansas and Ohio have put the right to abortions in their constitutions through ballot measures, by-passing their legislatures.  

The numbers of early voters shows Democrats returning their ballots more than Republicans, shows women outvoting men, shows young voters voting at higher than past levels.  So everything points to a Harris victory.  

But nothing is certain until the votes are counted and whatever gimmicks Trump pulls if he loses are blocked.  

This is one of those huge moments in history where human destiny hangs in the balance.  

[Soon after I arrived in Thailand in 1967 as Peace Corps teacher in rural Thailand, I was taken out one night to a village by an AID employee.  A village not unlike the one on the right of the poster.  He hung a sheet up across the road and showed movies about the danger of communism.  I suspect, in hindsight, I was being tested and I failed dismally - to my credit, I'd like to think.  AID (CIA?) never approached me again, to my knowledge.  But I did end up with this poster.]

A Good Day At The Renaissance Faire

We went to the Three Barons Renaissance Faire Sunday at Russian Jack.  For us Russian Jack is the southern section with the Chalet, golf, and the greenhouse.  But there were only a couple of golfers there.  

Things were happening behind a playground  at Pine an 8th.  It was a cloudy/sunny day with the possibility of sun, rain, both, but it turned out just perfect for going to the Faire.  Lots of people were in costumes.  

I sent this picture to a much younger friend who tends to know lots of anime characters. 

He immediately texted back:  Lucifer, Hazbin Hotel.

So I looked Lucifer up and got this picture.  (Apparently his wings aren't always visible.)

From Aminoapps

So I sent him so more pictures to see if he could ID them too.  

The sorcerer's hat from Fantasia.  Well he said Mickey's hat, but this one is my generation and I knew that Mickey used the sorcerer's hat when the sorcerer was away to make his chores easier.  It didn't work out the way he intended.    

From Reactormag

This one he couldn't identify. They're own selves maybe.

He wasn't sure.  Hazarded it might be the Valkyrie Gunnr

Maybe she's another Valkyrie.

From Creator

And Gandalf.

From USAToday

Lots and lots of people.  Some long lines at the food booths especially.  We got to see Fractured Fairy Tales - a production of Hansel and Gretel with a narrator  (to the right), 

The woodcutter and his wife (she also played the wicked step mother in the same outfit) and Hansel and Gretel.

And a bunch of other characters, some, like the Big Bad Wolf, from other fairy tales - had to be shooed off the stage by the narrator for being in the wrong play.   It wasn't high drama, but it was cute and we enjoyed it a lot.  Sitting out in the warm sunshine didn't hurt.  (For people in parts of the country where the temperatures are above the 90s, warm sunshine here means high 60s, maybe low 70s.)

This, as I understood it, was a slippery fish, who kept interrupting the play and had to be chased off the stage.  

And this (woman on the left) was the witch, who insisted she was being maligned.  Not a witch, a widow.  And the children were destroying and eating her house that she spent so long to bake and build.  

As I said, a lot of people dressed special (very special) for the occasion.  

We bought a turkey leg.  More like an ostrich leg, it was so big (and delicious.)  

We sat out on the grass and watched jousters take each other on with big foam clubs.  

And the turkey made me sleepy so I lay back an watched the clouds roll by.  

A good day.