Generalizing the travel advice of Rick Steves

My daughter and I just returned from a trip to Europe, where travel guru Rick Steves served as our primary guide. We relied heavily on his travel books regarding Berlin, Paris and London. These travel guides are detailed, well-organized and well-written. I highly recommend them to anyone intending to travel to Europe. What I especially like about Rick Steves, though, is his constant urging to live close to the ground while traveling, to work hard to interact with real people and to avoid expensive travel arrangements that prevent you from interacting with others on their terms. This approach does not come naturally to many Americans. Steves thus works hard to prepare Americans for visiting places that are not America. He doesn’t mince his words. Consider, for example, this passage from his London 2011 book, at page 17:

We travel all the way to Europe to enjoy differences-to become temporary locals. You'll experience frustrations. Certain truths that we find "God-given" or "self-evident," such as cold beer, ice in drinks, bottomless cups of coffee, hot showers, and bigger being better, are suddenly not so true. One of the benefits of travel is the eye-opening realization that there are logical, civil, and even better alternatives. Europeans generally like Americans. But if there is a negative aspect to the image the British have of Americans, it's that we are big, loud, aggressive, impolite, rich, superficially friendly, and a bit naive. [More . . . ]

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Is this painting obscene?

I'm in London on vacation, enjoying many of the museums, including London's National Gallery.   Today I spotted the following painting, which is part of the National Gallery's collection: This is a painting by Palma Vecchio (painted around 1520).  The art gallery is open to all ages, including small children, and there were plenty of young children in the vicinity of this painting today.  The description next to this painting announces that the woman displays a "sensuous beauty" characteristic of Roman courtesans. Frankly, I find the woman in Vecchio's painting to be quite fetching, and I find the painting itself to be most excellent. To my eye, it is not in the least obscene.  But seeing it today made me think of Janet Jackson's "nipple" incident at the Superbowl XXXVIII.  What an incident that was, ending up with a fine of more than 1/2 million dollars for the TV network, and America ending all up bent out of shape because somehow . . . somehow . . . the sight of Ms. Jackson's nipple harmed children.   I strongly disagree with the attitude that the naked human body should be seen as perverse.  I have never seen any evidence that any child has ever been harmed by seeing a nipple; I've never seen any scientific evidence suggesting that it is harmful to view a nipple, despite millions of protests to the contrary (As to why so many Americans are so terrified about the public viewing of female nipples, I have a theory). Seeing this painting reminded me of  Dan Dennett's comment that people in American don't believe in God, but they believe in belief.    Likewise, we don't really believe that children are harmed by mere nakedness, but we believe in the belief that children are harmed by mere nakedness. If we  Americans really believed that mere images of nakedness and sexuality harmed children, we'd pass a law to remove quite a bit of art from our own museums, and we'd also take down quite a  bit of our suggestive advertisements currently on billboards and storefronts. It's incidents like Jackson's that make me think that we Americans are not even capable of having meaningful conversations anymore, unless the topic is sports, TV, movies, or consumer electronics. On important issues we'd rather yell at each other in tribal ways.

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Some Thoughts On Independence Day

It’s the Fourth of July.  I’ve been pondering whether or not to write something politically pithy or culturally au courant and here it is, almost noon, and I’ve made no decision.  I think I pretty much said what I had to say about my feelings about this country a few posts back for Memorial Day, so I don’t think I’ll revisit that. Last night we sat on our front porch while the pre-Fourth fireworks went off in the surrounding neighborhood.  Folks nearby spend an unconscionable amount of money on things that blow up and look pretty and we benefit from the show.  Neither of us like large crowds, so going down to the St. Louis riverfront for the big explosion is just not an option.  The older I get the less inclined I am to squeeze myself into the midst of so much anonymous humanity. We’ll likely go to bed early tonight after watching the rest of our neighborhood go up in brilliance, starbursts, and smoke. I suppose the only thing I’d like to say politically is a not very original observation about how so many people seem to misidentify the pertinent document in our history.  The Declaration of Independence is often seen as more important than the Constitution and this is an error, one which leads us into these absurd cul-de-sacs of debate over the religious nature of our Founding.  [More . . . ]

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The obvious ideas of a comedian and the “genius” of Osama bin Laden

I'm reading a 900-page compendium of George Carlin's written works: 3 x Carlin. It includes a full copy of Napalm and Silly Putty, a book Carlin published in April, 2001. Take a look at this excerpt from the chapter Carlin titled "Airport Security" (p. 325):

I'm getting tired of all the security at the airport. There's too much of it. I'm tired of some fat chick with a double digit IQ and a triple digit income rootin' around inside my bag for no reason and never finding anything. Haven't found anything yet. Haven't found one bomb in one bag. And don't tell me, "Well the terrorists know their bags are going to be searched, so now they're leaving their bombs at home." There are no bombs! The whole thing is fuckin' pointless. And it's completely without logic. There's no logic at all.  They'll take away a gun, but let you keep a knife!   Well, what the fuck is that? In fact, there's a whole list of lethal objects they will allow you to take on board. Theoretically, you could take a knife, an ice pick, a hatchet, a straight razor, a pair of scissors, a chainsaw, six knitting needles, and a broken whiskey bottle, and the only thing they say to you is, "That bag has to fit all the way under the seat in front of you." And if you didn't take a weapon on board, relax.  After you've been flying for about an hour, they're gonna bring you a knife and fork!  They actually give you a fucking knife!  It's only a table knife--but you could kill a pilot with a table knife.  It might take you a couple of minutes.   Especially if he's hefty.   But you could get the job done.  If you really wanted to kill the prick . . .Or suppose you just had really big hands, couldn't you strangle a flight attendant?  . . .

.   .   .

Airport security is a stupid idea, it's a waste of money, and it's there for only one reason: to make white people feel safe!. That's all it's for. To provide a feeling, an illusion of safety in order to placate the middle class. Because the authorities know they can't make airplanes safe; too many people have access.
Indeed, George Carlin pretty much summed up American airline security back in April 2001.  Consider what happened only five months after he wrote these words, a dramatic series of attacks that depended on the lax American security described by Carlin, as well as the less-than-brilliantly-conceived strategy of allowing flimsy doors to the cockpit. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, American political and military leaders elevated Osama Bin Laden to the status of alleged evil genius, essentially to give themselves cover for the pathetic American security protocol described by Carlin. The American establishment embraced bin Laden as an evil genius because it served two purposes. A) It was an attempt to deflect criticism from the abject stupidity of the American approach to airline security; recognizing the "genius" of bin Laden allowed hawks to continue with their mantra that Americans can do no wrong, and it was an exceptional and evil man that spilled American blood; B) Calling bin Laden a genius and broadcasting his brown-skinned non-English speaking image all over Televisiondom justified pouring trillions of dollars into America's warmongering-torturing-spying machine; it "justified" an immense job-security program for those who wanted to use those many of those exciting Yankee weapons of war to pretend to solve complex international social and economic problems. And lots of bombs have been dropped ever since. Here we are, a decade later, with our economy and our infrastructure on the verge of a second collapse, with almost nothing good to show for all of that money we've poured into our wars of discretion.  We Americans continue to demonstrate that we are absolutely incapable of self-critical self-examination, in that we continue to pour two billion dollars per week into our Afghanistan adventure despite the lack of any meaningful military objective.  It's merely an adventure in sunk costs (and see here).  And the American corporate media cozily continues to conspire with the American military to pretend that we've been making great strides in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history.  Americans are currently mesmerized by their "Peace President" to continue supporting, if not escalating, the most expensive self-deceptive con-job in history.  But at least we killed an evil man whose genius was that he was about as observant as an American funny man. To summarize by paraphrasing George Carlin, the American military involvement in Afghanistan is a stupid idea, it’s a waste of money, and it’s there for only one reason: to make white people feel safe!. That’s all it’s for. To provide a feeling, an illusion of safety in order to placate the middle class. Because the authorities know they can't make America completely safe from terrorism; too many people have access. [Photoshop image by Erich Vieth. Image of George Carlin by Creative Commons; Image of Osama bin Laden, public domain]

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What Americans think of banks

What do Americans think of banks? According to this Huffpo article commenting on a Gallop poll, not much:

According to a new poll by Gallup, 36 percent of Americans now say they have "very little" or "no" confidence in U.S. banks, the highest percentage on record since Gallup first started tracking that data. Those saying they have a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in banks has also stagnated, stuck at 23 percent for the second straight year, after falling to a low of 22 percent in 2009.

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