Here are some pics of the traditional ride to Windy Point. It seemed cold enough for icicles to form on the bikes. Or was there something wrong with the camera?

Icicles?

It was a fair turnout, with 35 bikes at the top. Not much in the way of riding chic as everyone was bundled up…many layers and a fair amount of heated riding gear.

Outside Mickey D's

Windy Point

Stephany Baldwin, a single cylinder fan, was there on her Honda.

Technical Note: My previous post appears on the Citizen website, but if you click on the post’s title nothing comes up. The link to The Data Port works, however, so you can get to the last post of the year by clicking there. Nothing to be done until our two editors return from vacation.

In the meantime it seems that no one is minding the store.

Happy New Year

(Technical Note: To read this post click “The Data Port.”)

No, wait a minute, Data Port has been absent and you guys—readers and colleagues—have been here right along.

I’ve pretty much avoided looking at TC.com, and most other favorite sites, during “the Season.” A good deal of time has been spent at rehearsals for the Rogue Theatre’s production of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,”in which the Data Port’s  resident writer has a small, but engaging, part; about which more later.

It must be gratifying for the conservatives among us—for whom all change is anathema— to see that the TucsonCitizen.com format has not changed and is still shot through with its trademark “dismal blue.” Gannett does make a buck, through its TNI connection, with what goes on here. It might be nice of them to throw a bone in the Citizen’s direction and come up with some money for dedicated designers.

I’m sorry to see the “latest media” feature disappear. It was one way for those of us who bothered to use it to call attention to our blogs. Oh, well, that’s an editorial decision. I’m sure that faithful readers check in every day to see the latest Metro Mix results.

A really bad idea: The Hot Off The Press (Release) blog. This seems to smack of an act of desperation. (We can’t pay reporters to do business stories so we’ll simply let the flacks do it for us.) Even when newsroom droogs rewrite the stories they get published without criticism. Phooey.

We seem to have become a major sports reporting outlet. I don’t much follow sports but it seems to me that our guys are doing a pretty good job. Have to feel sorry for them, though. If you’re  writing about football and basketball it’s hard to wax optimistic about teams that ought to go “Mountain West.” Will Arizona get a mercy slot come March Madness time? An enquiring mind wants to know.

Attention Motorcyclists: There is a New Year’s day tradition of riding up Lemmon. Here’s the announcement the Southeast Arizona Touring Riders:

Every year for many years a group meets at the MacDonald’s in the shopping center at the junction of Catalina Hwy and Tanque Verde Road at 9 am. They ride to Windy Point. There are usually 30 or 40 riders. (they don’t ride as a group) Last year 3 of us went to the top too.

All motorcyclists are invited. (Pictures Friday.)

Press Release: The incisive and much loved Data Port returns after a protracted Merchants’ Day hiatus. The publisher has announced the regular appearance of The Data Port on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Happy New Year!

Busy times, eh? On the holiday side of things there’s been buying, wrapping, and mailing the necessary presents in celebration of our great collective festival: Merchant’s Day.

While all that was going on rehearsals for The Rogue Theatre’s production of “Our Town” heated up and we began the downhill run towards the January 7th Opening. Line rehearsals are just around the corner and everyone is expected to be “off the book.”

There really has been nothing new to say about the current political fiasco up at the state legislature. The Republican-dominated legislature continues to thrash about trying to balance the budget by ever more Draconian budget cuts.

Not surprising, though, since they have only one tool in their political tool box: The tax cut hammer. They would rather swallow their ties than admit that maybe they (and we) need to endure the pain of raising taxes if our state is not going to look like some particularly scruffy third world backwater.

All is not political gloom, however. The United States Senate has labored mightily and finally looks to be delivered of a legislative mouse: The Insurance Industry Preservation Act and Health Care Reform bill. Hot diggety!

It’s been a bit more than six months since TucsonCitizen.com was launched. There were  tears for what passed and a good ration of happy expectation for what was to come. We are still, I think, a work in progress but on balance I think we have done a remarkable job.

Sooo…

Season’s Greetings to all of you–including all our regular commenters, without whom these pages would have a good deal less snap and crackle.

Have a joyous Chanukah, a wonderful Kwanzaa, a rackety Saturnalia and a Merry Christmas!

I do a fair amount of night riding…quite a bit more now that I have been riding to Rogue Theatre rehearsals for Our Town.

I never ride a motorcycle at dusk, or after dark, without shrugging into my reflective vest. Motorcycles are too often “not seen” by car drivers not to make a maximum effort to be conspicuous.

Most motorcyclists tend to think they’re perfectly visible because they have a headlight array that would burn holes in the retinas of oncoming motorists. In fact their single tail light is often lost in the light clutter of the cars ahead of them in a line of traffic.

Bicyclists at night are the invisible men of the road. People with an interest in bicycle safety should make a maximum effort to get their fellow riders to be more reflective.

The Data Port

I think the answer is yes. Although there is considerable thunder on the left in opposition to the escalation of troop forces in Afghanistan, it seems that most Americans are in favor of pressing on to “Victory.”

This victory is being won at the cost of multiple redeployments of the men and women of the armed forces, some of whom have returned to the conflict three or more times.

The burden of sacrifice should be spread across the whole of a society that seems clearly in favor of pressing on.

A reinstatement of the draft is clearly one way of doing this.

“Peace on earth, good will towards men.”

It’s a fine old season, a good old season, the best old season of all the good old seasons in the year. It’s  jolly and merry. It’s a mistletoe and holly berry time when grudges and spites are set aside and when for some few short weeks it seems there might really be a little good will towards men. Or at least it used to be.

As a motto for the current Holiday Season this Peace on Earth thing looks as dead as a door-nail… Although, as Charles Dickens once observed, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail I don’t know. “I might have been inclined, myself,” he said, “to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it or the country’s done for.”

This year no place on earth is less likely to capture the spirit of  the old motto about peace and good will than the Holy Land. In that little patch of ground, sacred to three of the world’s great religions, there seems little promise of peace and precious little good will.

The Israelis and the Palestinians appear to have settled on explosion as the most efficient language of political discourse. The Muslims, when not blowing up Jews, are casting around for ways to blow up the rest of us; and  the Christian leader of the world’s only hyper-power (that’s us, gang) is  taking the Crusades as a model for rational dispute resolution.

Ordinary folk, when they find that something doesn’t work, try something different. Not these guys. They have stumbled on a strategy for resolving their differences that even the dull normal among us recognize isn’t getting the job done. When it doesn’t work they simply take up the same old cudgel and try it again. Harder. More explosively.

Sniping, bombings, and savage little fratricidal conflicts around the world are the order of the day. The people responsible for them have unleashed pestilence, famine and death on their fellow citizens, frequently on the grounds of differences of religion. Or sometimes over differences of oil reserves.

Forgive me for pointing out that it ain’t  the rational humanists who are out there whuppin’ other folks in line.

What would peace and good will be if ever we could achieve them?

Peace is not simply the  absence of war;  good will towards men is something greater than simply leaving them alone. The word  “peace”  is more nearly a verb than a noun. It suggests a  continuous activity rather than  a condition we can passively enjoy while we turn our attention to other things. It is not something we have, but something we do.

If there were a word for this activity it would be “peacing.”

Nor is peace that quiet serenity of the spirit in which all our personal disturbances are dissolved and set to rest. It is not the peace of the expression “He is at peace now,” which is what we say of the dead.

A world at peace is not a world without problems or challenges. Nor is it a world in which we don’t know personal anxieties, sorrow or despair. It’s a world in which the human spirit is freed to be constructive rather than destructive. It is a world in which  human energies can be channeled against anxiety, sorrow and despair wherever they are found.

Peace and good will are connected in very practical ways. War, even in a righteous cause, is costly: In human energy, human life, suffering, and money. It is the great corrupter of good will.

However much you wish it you cannot simply settle for the state of not-being-at-war and then proceed to ignore poverty, disease, or hunger in other parts of the world. Those are the causes that drive people to make war in the first place.

Since we started with Dickens let’s remember the pain of Marley’s ghost: That he cannot now intercede to help the sufferers he sees around him, and that he did not do so in life. For him good will toward men was simply letting them alone.

We need a second motto for the Holiday Season, one which is not a goal to strive for or a hope to be made real but which, sadly, reminds us of the principle upon which the world is now acting. It reminds us of what now, and in all the year to come, we should struggle to avoid.  I saw it once posted as a sad little note in the break room of a place I worked…

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

The following is reprinted with the kind permission of its author. It expresses far better than I could my own outrage and disappointment…not least of all with Congressional Democrats.

Harry Reid, and What Happened to the Public Option

by Robert Reich

First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn’t hear of it, and Republicans and “centrists” thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada — which, by the way, cost Canadians only 10 percent of their GDP and covers every Canadian. (Our current system of private for-profit insurers costs 16 percent of GDP and leaves out 45 million people.)

So the compromise was to give all Americans the option of buying into a “Medicare-like plan” that competed with private insurers. Who could be against freedom of choice? Fully 70 percent of Americans polled supported the idea. Open to all Americans, such a plan would have the scale and authority to negotiate low prices with drug companies and other providers, and force private insurers to provide better service at lower costs. But private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn’t hear of it, and Republicans and “centrists” thought it would end up too much like what they have up in Canada.

So the compromise was to give the public option only to Americans who wouldn’t be covered either by their employers or by Medicaid. And give them coverage pegged to Medicare rates. But private insurers and … you know the rest.

So the compromise that ended up in the House bill is to have a mere public option, open only to the 6 million Americans not otherwise covered. The Congressional Budget Office warns this shrunken public option will have no real bargaining leverage and would attract mainly people who need lots of medical care to begin with. So it will actually cost more than it saves.

But even the House’s shrunken and costly little public option is too much for private insurers, Big Pharma, Republicans, and “centrists” in the Senate. So Harry Reid has proposed an even tinier public option, which states can decide not to offer their citizens. According to the CBO, it would attract no more than 4 million Americans.

It’s a token public option, an ersatz public option, a fleeting gesture toward the idea of a public option, so small and desiccated as to be barely worth mentioning except for the fact that it still (gasp) contains the word “public.”

And yet Joe Lieberman and Ben Nelson mumble darkly that they may not even vote to allow debate on the floor of the Senate about the bill if it contains this paltry public option. And Republicans predict a “holy war.”

But what more can possibly be compromised? Take away the word “public?” Make it available to only twelve people?

Our private, for-profit health insurance system, designed to fatten the profits of private health insurers and Big Pharma, is about to be turned over to … our private, for-profit health care system. Except that now private health insurers and Big Pharma will be getting some 30 million additional customers, paid for by the rest of us.

Upbeat policy wonks and political spinners who tend to see only portions of cups that are full will point out some good things: no pre-existing conditions, insurance exchanges, 30 million more Americans covered. But in reality, the cup is 90 percent empty. Most of us will remain stuck with little or no choice — dependent on private insurers who care only about the bottom line, who deny our claims, who charge us more and more for co-payments and deductibles, who bury us in forms, who don’t take our calls.

I’m still not giving up. I want every Senator who’s not in the pocket of the private insurers or Big Pharma to introduce and vote for a “Ted Kennedy Medicare for All” amendment to whatever bill Reid takes to the floor. And if this fails, a “Ted Kennedy Real Public Option for All” amendment. Let every Senate Democratic who doesn’t have the guts to vote for either of them be known and counted.

The major disadvantage of working at home is that you are never out of the office. Twenty-four hours a day you could be working. You can’t say, “By golly, if I were at the office I’d re-write that character sketch,” because you are at the office, it’s just down the hall from you. Hence, your worry pendulum swings relentlessly back and forth between work, guilt at not working, and anxiety about unfinished assignments. This is not relaxing. Rats.

That’s the reason many writers are driven to find an office someplace else: anything to get out of the house. That’s what I’ve done, and it seems to me lots of foothills people have done the same thing. Unfortunately they have all chosen my office space, but I try to treat this as just another opportunity to get to know my neighbors.

From my office window I  watch  SUVs  and luxury cars as ponderous as elephants, gingerly swap parking places;  angling in and out of the lot. My motorcycle is there, because I’m working today. Writing this, as a matter of fact.

Friends and intimates criticize me for my office  choice. I am deaf to the criticism, which most often (and annoyingly) takes the form that I spend too much for a cup of coffee. But that’s absurd. I’m not buying coffee at all, I’m renting office space.

Starbucks rents me the space. I get a table, a chair, and an executive washroom. If I beat the guy  writing the novel to the corner table by the electric outlet, I get power for my laptop. Best of all the management throws in a cup of whatever is in the big urn behind the counter to say thanks for the business. Two bucks, change in the tip box. A deal.

The novel writer is not here today, but the distinguished older gentleman is. That’s the way I think of him, The Distinguished Older Gentleman. Always elegantly, if informally, dressed, razor-sharp crease in his slacks, polished shoes, shirt collar open but under a blue blazer with four gold buttons on each sleeve. Bent over papers, making a careful note or two with a pen and clearly thoughtful, he makes a fellow proud to be seen working here.

We do try to be reasonably discreet in our commercial activities so as not to disturb  the folks in the library… the man reading the biography of Churchill, the woman deep in a book of anatomical drawings, or the teacher tutoring a student for her SATs.

One day a young guy my grandpa would have called ‘a traveling man’ set up a complete office. He spread out over a table for four with cell phone, laptop, sample book, PDA, and calling list. Starbucks must have been very glad to see him because they gave him a super sized coffee-flavored beverage, a drink with a name six words long that ended in ‘latte’

Now all I need is a time clock and a place to display my business cards. Need to write a proposal? The writer is in, but his coffee is cold.

Americans from President Obama and members of his administration down to armchair generals and political junkies puzzle over what to do and how to do it in Afghanistan. No one seems quite sure.

This is odd because once, between October 19th, 2001 and the early months of 2002 we got it exactly right.

“In all, about 350 special forces soldiers, 100 CIA officers, and 15,000 Afghan troops succeeded where the British in the nineteenth century, and the Soviets in the 1980’s had failed…..When the Special Forces teams left the country the United States would eventually have spent a mere $70 million.”

The story of the bravery, sacrifice and endurance of a relative handful Special Forces soldiers is the substance of Douglas Stanton’s “Horse Soldiers,” from which I quoted above.

If you are a fan of the sort of military history that vividly recreates the heart of battle (I’m thinking here of Sir John Keegan) then this book is a must-read. If nothing else it is as exciting as one of Alistair Maclean’s action thrillers.

The focus of this book is on two combat teams of thirteen men each. Captain Mitch Nelson’s team rode with the forces Abdul Rashid Dostum. Captain Dean Nosorog’s team rode with Atta Mohammed Noor.

These men were not fighting isolated and alone. The helicopter pilots and crews of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flew re-supply missions in zero visibility and at altitudes where chopper blades claw for a grip.

Overhead were the circling B-52s with the smart bombs that functioned as the teams’ heavy artillery. Of course in order to be effective the teams’ Air Force combat controllers had to get close enough to their targets to locate the exact location of bunkers that needed to be destroyed.

This meant riding their little Asian horses at night, along narrow mountain tracks where a misstep meant plunging over the edge. On more than one occasion they had to ride until their saddle sores bled.

“To win wars against enemies like the Taliban, which are often stateless in their affiliation, you adapt. You eat what they eat, sleep where they sleep, and think like they think. This was the essence of the Special Forces soldiers’ training and experience.”

…..Doug Stanton.

The audience laughs, but it is always a laughter of nervous recognition.

Kathleen Allen’s review in the Star will put you in the picture. You want Family Values? The Rogue shows you family values.

Visit The Rogue Theatre’s web site for tickets and information about the season. (click)