Category: Arizona

I Was Forced to Show My Papers!

Voting this morning in the AZ state primary I was put in mind of an old post from a couple of years ago that bears reposting and editing:


AZThings are really getting bad here in the fascist state of Arizona.  Why just this morning I was forced to show ID when I went to vote.  I strolled into the polling place looking a fright after several hours of hiking.  I introduced myself as 'King Blog' but that cut no ice with the  old ladies who 'manned' the place.  They asked to see my driver's license! What chutzpah!  What bigotry!  A bunch of damned Nazis, if you want my opinion.  What if I forgot it, or never had one? Then the Nazi bastards would have disenfranchised me!  The very act of requesting ID is an act of

 disenfrachisement and intimidation.  Besides, it prevents me from voting twice, which I have a right to do. 

I should have adapted a line from B. Traven's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.  Papers?  I don't need no stinkin' papers!  I'm a human being.  You just hate me because I smell like I spent the night under a bridge.  I have the right to do whatever I want, wherever I want, and vote wherever I want and as many times as I want.
You Anglo bastards are raaacists because my skin isn't lily-white like yours and because my name ends in a vowel.

I'm gettin' the hell out of this rattlesnake-infested inferno of gun-totin' yahoos, rednecked racists, and xenophobic immigrant-bashers.  I'm going where a man can be free.  I'm headed for Castro's island paradise.  "Live free or die," as I always say.

Another Hiker Lost in the Superstitions

Do as I say, not as I do.  Stay out of the rattlesnake infested inferno known as the Superstition Wilderness in summer!

I often hike alone in the Killer Mountains in the summer.  But I observe the following precautions:  I hydrate throughly before leaving the house and carry at least a gallon of water and enough gear and food to get me through the night if that should prove necessary; I carry a whistle and bright bandannas to attach to my hiking staff for signaling; and I stick to the itinerary that I leave with my wife, e.g., Black Mesa Loop, 9. 1 miles, out of First Water Trailhead, counterclockwise direction.  And of course I stay on the trail.  Don't go looking for the Lost Dutchman's gold.  There ain't no gold in them thar hills, but you could easily fall down a mine shaft.  Naturally you must start such a  hike at first light and be done with that ankle-busting 9 mile loop by about 10:00 AM.  Only a jackass with a death wish hikes in the middle of the day in these mountains in summer.

Here is a tale of three Utah fools who died two summers ago near Yellow Peak near the Black Mesa trail.  Here is Tom Kollenborn's account of when and where and by whom the bodies were recovered.

At the moment, one Kenny Clark of Gilbert, AZ has been missing since Sunday out of that same First Water T-head.  May the Lord have mercy on him.

Here are my Five Ways of roasting your ass to a crisp in the Sonoran desert in summer.

Up for a hike?

Addendum (7/6):  Mr. Clark was found dead this morning, Friday, around 2 AM in Garden Valley about a mile and a half from the First Water trailhead where his car was parked.   Well, at least he died with his boots on.  He was found off trail.  That was one mistake.  Stay on the trail! The other was not leaving an itinerary with his wife.  According to a radio report, this is the second time the poor woman has had a husband die on her while hiking.

 

The Obama Administration’s Contempt for the Rule of Law

We are living in very dangerous times.  You need to inform yourself.

Krauthammer: Obama Intent on Not Enforcing Immigration Law

Charles Krauthammer, Obama's Naked Lawlessness

Thomas Lifson, Rule of Law Now an Election Issue

Diana West, Why Arizona Matters.  Excerpt:

I find it difficult to regard the Supreme Court decision on Arizona immigration law as just another controversial or disappointing highest court decision. There is something almost post-apocalyptic  and certainly pre-totalitarian when, to invoke Justice Scalia's dissent, the Court has ruled that Arizona contradicts federal law by enforcing it. Yes, as Scalia put it, it "boggles the mind." It also conjures up truly alarming comparisons with "justice" as meted out by kangaroo courts, show trials and other horrors of totalitarian dictatorships.

Did we defeat the Soviet empire so that we could become a totalitarian state like it?

Arizona Can’t Do It; Washington Won’t

Debra Saunders' article begins:

President Barack Obama hailed the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision Monday that struck down most of Arizona's 2010 immigration law. In a statement released by the White House, however, the president said that he remains "concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

All eight voting members of the Supreme Court upheld this provision, which requires that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration.

Please note the difference between what the president is quoted as saying and what Saunders correctly reports the S.B. 1070 provision as requiring.  The law requires "that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration." President Obama of course knows this.  So Obama lied in his statement when he said that "the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

Obama's egregious misrepresentation has been repeated time and again by leftists over the last two years.  See my 1 June 2010 post, The Misrepresentations of Arizona S. B. 1070 Continue.  Other of my 1070 posts are to be found in the Arizona category.

Why are leftists so mendacious?  Because in their scheme the glorious end justifies the scurrilous means.

Don't forget to read the rest of Saunders' article.

The Case of Morris Starsky

Quite by chance this morning I stumbled upon materials relating to one Morris Starsky, a professor of philosophy at Arizona State University who was fired from a tenured position for his political views in 1970.  Here is the Wikipedia article; here is something from the Phoenix New Times; this is from The Militant.  All of these sources to be consumed cum grano salis. 

A search at PhilPapers turned up nothing on the man, which says something.  Some commentary later, perhaps, once I know more about the case.

Addendum (7:05 PM):  The ever-helpful Dave Lull reports that Morris Joseph Starsky earned the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1967 with a dissertation entitled, "On the Ontological Problem of Oratio Obliqua.

Addendum (5 April):  Lull informs me that the Morris J. Starsky archives are housed at the ASU library.

Desert Light Draws Us into the Mystical

Cathedral RockJust as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like the lambent light of the desert. The low humidity, the sparseness of vegetation that even in its arboreal forms hugs the ground, the long, long vistas that draw the eye out to shimmering buttes and mesas — all of these contribute to the illusion that the light is alive.

 
Light as phenomenon, as appearance, is not something merely physical. It is as much mind as matter. Without its appearance to mind it would not be what it phenomenologically is. But the light that allows rocks and coyotes to appear, itself appears. This seen light is seen within a clearing, eine Lichtung (Heidegger), which is light in a transcendental sense. But this transcendental light in whose light both illuminated objects and physical light appear, points back to the onto-theological Source of this transcendental light. Heidegger would not approve of my last move, but so be it.

Augustine claims to have glimpsed this eternal Source Light upon entering into his "inmost being." Entering there, he saw with his soul's eye, "above that same eye of my soul, above my mind, an
unchangeable light." He continues:

     It was not this common light, plain to all flesh, nor a greater
     light of the same kind . . . Not such was that light, but
     different, far different from all other lights. Nor was it above my
     mind, as oil is above water, or sky above earth. It was above my
     mind, because it made me, and I was beneath it, because I was made
     by it. He who knows the truth, knows that light, and he who knows
     it knows eternity. (Confessions, Book VII, Chapter 10)

Red Mountain'Light,' then, has several senses. There is the light of physics. There is physical light as we see it, whether in the form of illuminated things such as yonder mesa, or sources of illumination such as the sun, or the lambent space between them. There is the transcendental light of mind without which nothing at all would appear. There is, above this transcendental light, its Source.

Gunfire Tonight!

One of the exciting things about living out here in rural Arizona is that all too many local hombres love to greet the the New Year with a hail of gunfire aimed heavenward. It adds a nice Middle Eastern touch to the Copper State.
 
Part of the problem is the sad state of science education in these United States. There are people who do not understand that a falling projectile poses a threat. (I have actually met such people.) They   understand that they cannot catch with their bare hands a round fired at them; but they don't understand that that same round, falling on a human head from a sufficient height, will kill the head's unlucky possessor.

Let's see if we can understand the physics. If I jump from a chair to the floor, no problem. Same if I jump from a table to the floor. But I shrink back from neighbor Bob's suggestion that I jump from my roof to the ground. "Just kick away the ladder, like Wittgenstein, and jump  down." Nosiree Bob! But why should it be any different? The mass of my body remains invariant across the three scenarios. And the gravitational field remains the same. But the longer I remain falling in that field, the faster I move.

A body falling in the earth's gravitational field falls at the rate of 32 feet per second PER SECOND. Thus the body ACCELERATES.*  Now the momentum of a moving object –  which is roughly a measure of the amount of effort it would take to stop it from moving — is the product of its velocity and its mass. So a small mass like a bullet, left falling for a long enough time, will attain a high velocity and thus a high momentum, and so do a lot of damage to anything it comes in contact with, a human skull for example.

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*Velocity is a vector, hence has a scalar and a directional component.  So it is possible that an object accelerate without 'speeding up.'  Consider a satellite orbiting the earth.  The scalar component of the velocity stays constant (more or less) but the object accelerates.  This sort of falling toward the earth  is not relevant to the case I am considering.

First Water to Canyon Lake

Here are some shots from last Sunday's Superstition Wilderness 7.6 mile point-to-point hike from First Water trailhead to Canyon Lake trailhead.  A delightful hike that starts out easy as one meanders out on the soft and flat Second Water trail though Garden Valley.  But then it gets rocky.  By the time you come to the junction  with the Boulder Canyon trail, you're in deep with plenty of ankle-busting rocks and lung-taxing upgrades.  This hike has a lot to offer: easy walking, challenging climbing, solitude, history (one passes right by the Indian Paint mine,) great views of Battleship Mountain and Weaver's Needle, and even a couple riparian areas.  The two young whippersnappers depicted, Larry and James,  acquitted themselves creditably.  I made 'em work.

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Scenes from the Superstitions

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James L., fanatical hiker, who I have been introducing to the Superstition Wilderness.  A native Arizonan, he has no problem with hiking in the summer in this rattlesnake infested inferno.  I hope not to have to make use of his nurse practitioner skills.  The knife hanging from his belt suggests he might, in a pinch, be up for some 'meatball surgery.'IMG_0843

 

 

James and I encountered this tarantula on the Dutchman's trail near dawn, last Wednesday.  And then a bit farther down the trail, and smack dab in the middle of it, we spied a baby diamondback rattlesnake:

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Weaver's Needle at daybreak from the Dutchman's trail near Parker Pass.  We were doing the Black Mesa Loop out of First Water trailhead in the counter-clockwise direction.  Covered the 9.1 miles in 5 1/2 hours.  Not bad considering the monsoon humidity and a high of about 108 deg. Fahrenheit.  Last year in July three Utah prospectors died near Yellow Peak which is on this route.  We passed right by the black basaltic rock on which they expired, rock that can reach a temperature of 180.  See Another Strange Tale of the Superstitions.  For the rest of the story see Tom Kollenborn, A Deadly Vision.

 

Bluff Spring Loop, Superstition Wilderness, 6 May 2011

This is a 9.3 mile hike out of the Peralta Trailhead, Superstition Wilderness, Arizona.  I have done it countless times in both the clockwise and counterclockwise directions.  The route sports about 1260 feet of elevation gain according to David Mazel (Arizona Trails, Wilderness Press 1991, p. 47)  We commenced hiking at 6 AM on the dot and finished at 11:35.  The dialectics slowed down the peripatetics.  Clockwise takes the hiker up rather than down what the locals call "Heart Attack Hill"  when they are not calling it "Cardiac Hill."   I much prefer the uphill to the downhill, heart stress to knee strain, though we have it on the authority of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus that "The way up and the way down are the same." (Fragment 60)  A second advantage of the clockwise route is that fewer fellow hikers are encountered.  Human nature being what it is, the path of least resistance is preferred by the many.  The fewer of the many encountered the better, or so say I.  Here is the elevation profile in the easy counterclockwise direction:

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Eschewing the Peripatetic approach to philosophy, Peter L. deemed us "crazy" for hiking in the desert in summer.  (High was near 100 Fahrenheit on the day in question.)  Hiking is a "delectable madness" as I seem to recall Colin Fletcher saying.  The first shot depicts the young philosopher Spencer Case at Miner's Summit standing before Miner's Needle while the second shows what the locals call "Cathedral Rock."

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