Is it Summer Yet?

I have not kept up with this endeavor, mostly because the surf has been dismal, I've spent my time working, I've been wringing my hands over work, the surf was still dismal, and I already spend a lot of time writing before I get the chance to write here. As my title suggests, we've had some early south swell activity. A couple weeks ago a south ground swell rolled through, weekend of course, and it produced some head high sets. Tiburones was fun, and while not as consistent as JTH, the lack of kelp made up for it. Anyone who calls Tiburones home must give thanks to those who created the cut-away. I've heard those complain that not enough effort was directed to the left - but the overwhelming consensus is significant appreciation. Let me echo with resonance - thank you boyz - Joe, Rick, and the unnamed. In the intervening days since that south swell, various small south swell windows have opened and closed. I caught a few days with the glide and went fishing on some others. We had a heat spell through some of it - some taking advantage by surfing without wet suits - I broke out the 2/3. The souths finally enticed me to take the Pavel out -it worked well and I have had some fun waves on it.

The day of reckoning came today. It's been raining, and after a day off, I decided to surf some double-up wind swell at Tiburones. A couple of guys were out - Dr. Cory was the only SB rider. Caught two waves on the Pavel before I noticed 15 guys had entered the water. A few familiars I didn't need to worry about, but a whole crew of others who I did not trust. Yes - I had only logged two waves - but it was time to go. Took off on a small insider - the only objective was getting out without an altercation. But no. LB out of control - evasive manuvers - hands out reaching for the nose of the LB - trying to hold it up before it hits me, or more importantly, my board. I heard a small collision; the kind you hear but don't feel. At this point I was on my belly trying to negotiate the shallows and head to the safety of the beach. After a close - very close - inspection, I decided I made it out of the water with just a scratch. Might not be so lucky next time. Looks like some west swell in on deck, and possibly a trip to the Ranch. We shall see.

Well, I heard someone say that the new president has been in office 100 days and the economy is still in the tank. Really - I thought he was going to fix things straight off. Typical lagger surfer - swell shows up and responsibilities are out the window. Should have known better than to elect someone from Hawaii.

I also heard the new guy is into health care reform. My gosh, what does he think? A study found that if the same medical program that congress gets was offered to the public at large, enrollment in private insurance plans would plummet. God forbid. The private insurance industry, who for another consecutive year increased my rates by 20 percent, might just fizzle out altogether. The government plan would be able to set premiums well below what private plans charge. Insurance firms endangered - not in this country - corporate socialism - not public well being.

Note From the Field:
“The wings also provide lift; a useful trait for an aircraft, but very hazardous for a car. To compensate for this, the designers have added small wings to "stick" the car to the ground, in the same way Formula 1 cars do.” The same design on a longboard, tail rocker, can compensate for the load on the nose.

Lucubrate -(LOO-kyoo-brayt) - verb intr.: To work (such as study, write, discourse) laboriously or learnedly.

“It may seem counter-intuitive, but a successful policy on international nuclear weapons security must strive to support stable possession and effective stewardship of nuclear technology. Only by stabilizing nuclear capabilities, not by eliminating them, will the world be safe from the threat of nuclear weapon use. The only time in history atomic weapons were used in warfare was when only one country possessed them in very small numbers. Stability since then through deterrence has rested on assured mutual destruction. A world with no nuclear weapons creates an unstable environment in which the first country to redeploy even one gains an extraordinary advantage.” What kind of logic is this? The author would have me believe we need nuclear weapons because if we didn’t have nuclear weapons, the globe would be unstable because someone could have them.

We still have those who argue torture is proper in the right circumstances – and that line of individuals springs from those who were in the upper echelon of our government over the past 8 years. It’s embarrassing to go from the country who would never stoop to emulate the hideous acts of inhumanity practiced by others we condemned, to being the leaders of inhumanity – not only that, we had our greatest legal minds fabricate fantasized justifications in the face of binding law to allow whatever immorality we wanted to engage in. For those other countries we condemn, it was just orders in an authoritarian setting. I include better words than my own:

“I will leave others to claim that torture, in fact, does not work, that confessions obtained under duress - such as that extracted from the heaving body of that poor Argentine braggart in some Santiago cesspool in 1973 - are useless. Or to contend that the United States had better not do that to anyone in our custody lest someday another nation or entity or group decides to treat our prisoners the same way. I find these arguments - and there are many more - to be irrefutable. But I cannot bring myself to use them, for fear of honoring the debate by participating in it.

Can't the United States see that when we allow someone to be tortured by our agents, it is not only the victim and perpetrator who are corrupted, not only the "intelligence" that is contaminated, but also everyone who looked away and said they did not know, everyone who consented tacitly to that outrage so they could sleep a little safer at night, all the citizens who did not march in the streets by the millions to demand the resignation of whoever suggested, even whispered, that torture is inevitable in our day and age, that we must embrace its darkness?
Are we so morally sick, so deaf and dumb and blind, that we do not understand this? Are we so fearful, so in love with our own security and steeped in our own pain, that we are really willing to let people be tortured in the name of America? Have we so lost our bearings that we do not realize that each of us could be the hapless Argentine who sat under the Santiago's sun, so possessed by the evil done to him that he could not stop shivering?” Ariel Dorfman, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, October 28, 2006

“You cannot disentangle the torture program from the war of aggression in Iraq – nor from the illegal wiretapping program, the corrupt war profiteering, and all the other degradations of liberty and law that have been so accelerated in the past eight years. They are all of a piece, part and parcel of a plan to expand and entrench America's "unipolar domination" of world affairs with a thoroughly militarized state led by an unaccountable, authoritarian "Unitary Executive."
This is one reason why Barack Obama is so obviously reluctant to tug on the torture thread too hard. If you tear it out, with full-scale prosecutions and top officials locked up behind bars, the whole rotten skein would fall apart. Once you start genuinely subjecting government officials – including security apparatchiks and military brass – to the full extent of the law, there would be no end to the unraveling: senators, contractors, representatives, bureaucrats, generals, lobbyists, judges, corporate chiefs – the whole edifice of Establishment power would be shaken to the core as its leading lights went down, one after the other.

Thus the mere act of applying the ordinary, bourgeois laws of the land as they stand right now would constitute a world-shaking revolution, an overthrow of the existing order every bit as radical as any ideologue's dream of mass uprising. It would be, in effect, a re-founding of the Republic – and the end of the empire, which cannot survive without continual war, lawless rule and endless corruption.” Chris Floyd, April 2009

On Black Bears in Arkansas – after almost wiping them out of existence, wildlife officials began a program to bring them back – now - "If people won't tolerate them, they won't be there for long. That's why they were gone to start with," an official said. "If we can manage them so that they have value to the human occupants that they have to share the habitat with, it's a plus, I think, to the bears. I think the hunting is a good tool to enable us to give them that kind of value." Value = killing bears – hmmm.

“A man’s got to know his limitations” Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, 1973.  ¶ 7:20 PM