Arizona Thanksgiving at the End of the World

Carol's best friend in Arizona, also named Carol, likes to have an annual Thanksgiving soiree with more friends and relations than Rabbit in Winnie the Pooh. We hadn't been there in a while, so we piled in the car with dog in tow to hit the Valley of the Sun. Best line of the whole trip was in Gallup, where we were having a falsetto-singing contest and Abby said, "Dad, don't quit your day job - oops, never mind."

We stopped in Walnut Canyon, a national monument outside Flagstaff, to see the cliff dwellings:




The wonderful thing about the Phoenix gang is you get all the hilarity of a happily dysfunctional family without the muss and fuss of truly dangerous or disturbed relatives wrecking the week. Carol's son Decker is a strapping six-foot-something lineman for Salt River Project, but he's the intellectual type who reads The Economist, keeps up with the IBEW, and goes through novels voraciously. Since the list can include anything from the Oprah book club, he can cart around a Jodi Picoult novel while teaching a class on basic transformer theory, and not bat an eye. He's living at mom's following a divorce, with the three kids on tradeoff. We didn't realize the ex was barred from the house, she came in to pick up the sick two-year-old, and was charming and delightful, but Decker pointed out later that photos appeared to be missing from the walls. Typical. His new girlfriend, with almost the identical name as the former wife, is a charming and funny Chicago native with her own two-year-old son, who wants to play endless games of pirate and monster.

Carol's daughter Corey and her husband were living in the house for a while, while their own home was being finished, and they still drift in for visits. Her husband is a hilarious process engineer at Intel who's into beatnik culture and Trent Reznor, bearing a goatee and a Maynard G. Krebs grin. Corey is artistically inclined and often stoned, but she's the token Republican in the gang, a source of endless ribbing. She seems to admire the natural dominance of the ruling class, but gets into convoluted defenses of why she feels that way. It reminds of a new song Dar Williams released, "I Press the Buzzer," about stimulus-response experiments and the nature of fascism, except that Corey has her S-R wires crossed.

Carol's brother David was usually a permanent fixture in the house, as a perennial bachelor with custody of a teenage daughter, except that now David has finally married at some grizzled age no one can keep track of. Will meet the new wife soon, everyone loves her.

Carol has warned Decker and David and myself that Uncle Eddy is coming down from Prescott and politics are not to be discussed, as Eddy is adamant about a secret UN-al Qaeda conspiracy led by Obama. I said I'll just leave the new editorial out from The Economist, positing that the Republicans now officially devalue intelligence, so that no one but idiots are left in the party. We'll have fun. Happy Thanksgiving!

Careful with that Axe, Eugene

An article in last week's Economist definitively answers the question,
"Is it ever appropriate to completely wipe out a parasitic species that seems to have no positive role in the food chain?" It's happening with Helicobacter Pylori, the infamous cause of stomach ulcer and gastric cancer. Now that less than 5 percent of U.S. children have H. pylori, scientists are discovering the endangered bacterium just might do a few good things. Since it seems to regulate stomach acid, its absence is causing more reflux syndromes and esophogeal cancers. Since kids use H. pylori as a priming agent for beefing up the immune system, its absence is causing more asthma. As with the hidden hazards of using germicidal soaps, the law of unintended consequences applies big time. No doubt the same could be said for mosquitoes, ticks, and homo sapiens...

Stewart Brand, Nuclear Power, and Military Contracts

We've known for more than ten years, thanks to Wired magazine and other sources, that Stewart Brand, founder of Whole Earth Catalog and Co-Evolution Quarterly, had become an advocate of nuclear power. But last week's Economist magazine had a revealing interview with Brand where he tries to rationalize the Big Oil and military-contractor business he does via the Global Business Network.

Now, Brand says some correct things about how wrong Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome were on neo-Malthusian limits, and suggests the same may be true for genetic engineering and nuclear power. I can buy some of his points, but nuclear power remains too closely aligned to nuclear weapons to ever be made safe. When he tries to point out how energy companies are changing, and how the military is better organized than many corporations, I can agree with him in part. But Brand forgets to mention that Royal Dutch Shell, however much it "transforms", still has a primary business of pumping oil out of the ground. The military, however much it may organize itself well along some fronts, still has a primary purpose of global power projection in the service of empire, and by the way, it kills people and makes things go boom in the process.

How embarrassing that this old Deadhead Merry Prankster has stooped so low.