Before the world lit itself up like a Christmas tree on every corner we could stand in our backyards and view the Milky Way. Now, the stars are blocked, locked away behind the haze of nights ablaze in light. We can no longer mark our place in the universe, feel the smallness of our being, as we watch the movement of stars across the sky. We can no longer mark time throughout the night. I miss the stars. As a child I spent hours lying on my back in the grassy yard watching the stars move through the sky. We begged to be allowed to sleep outside on warm nights, stringing blankets like a tent over the clothes line. We seldom slept inside the tent. It was more for Mom’s benefit than our own.
I loved the sky, the way clouds moved across it. I sometimes let myself feel earth’s rotation through the passage of stars and clouds. I recognized that stars were fixtures, and it was I who was being moved about while standing on Earth’s surface. Such thoughts were dizzying, electric, compelling. One night, my Father and his brothers gathered all of us cousins in Uncle Frankie’s yard, out beyond any city lights that we might watch the passage of The United States’ first satellite Explorer 1, a year after Russia’s Sputnik 1. Its passage times were charted daily and printed in the newspaper. We stood in a single row with parents standing behind; children and adults both in awe. I was hooked. I was 8 years old. I am still hooked at 74.
Each autumn I made a leaf book. I collected the most beautiful and perfect leaves I could find from the trees along the neighborhood alleys and iron them between pages of wax paper to preserve their color and form, then sew together the pages into a book. I preferred to pull leaves from the tree before ground insects, soil and trampling feet marred their full beauty. The autumn I was 12 I was reaching up for a bright yellow oak leaf when I noticed an object brighter than any star in the afternoon sky. It was three times as high as the jet streaking across the sky, a tiny form one-tenth its size, far below. Such discrepancy in what I had ever seen in the sky startled me. I pointed it out to the neighbor children who were following my progress and searching for leaves. We stopped and simply watched in wonder for perhaps 30-40 minutes. For the first 30 minutes or more it did not move. It simply hung there, huge and brilliant in the sun reflecting off its surface. Everything else in the sky shifted as time passed. It stayed in place. That was confusing.
The shape was also confusing. It appeared as two curved plates turned toward each other, with a smaller curved plate in the center, below the main body of the object. It was a perfectly formed “flying saucer.” We could not believe what we were seeing. Yet, we could not take our eyes off the image. Suddenly, the object moved upward in a straight line faster than we had ever seen an object move in the sky. It was not flying at any speed we could comprehend. It lingered in its position for several moments then moved even more rapidly at a right angle directly right, stopped and immediately flew straight up again. We were not strangers to how planes or even helicopters flew. This was clearly neither one of those. We gasped at each strange move, entranced at its uniques pattern. Then whoosh! It flew so fast it literally disappeared from view. The breathless chatter of our group became a crescendo of need to know what it was we had witnessed. One friend, Paula, remembered a brochure in the box her telescope came in. It had a phone number we could call. She found the brochure and we read about Project Blue Book. It included a phone number. I called.
Project Blue Book was housed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in nearby Dayton, Ohio. An officer there took my call and said he would call back. My Mother was surprised the next day when she received a call from the officer to ask if she would allow me to meet with him and another officer at the Public Library the following day. She and Paula’s mother agreed we could meet. The two officers in military uniform met us and immediately separated us for interviews. I told my story, answered every question and drew photos to illustrate its form, position in the sky, altitude and movements. Then, I answered the questions a second time before the officers switched places. The interview resumed with repetitive questioning. At the close of the interview both officers sat with Paula and me and explained that were checking to see if our stories were consistent and true. They agreed we were truthful. They admitted we had seen what the Air Force called an unidentified flying object or UFO. The next step would take some time. More than 90% of such sightings turned out to be identifiable objects. They told us they would be checking for weather balloons, experimental flying objects of our country and of other nations.
Sometime later, the officer called to tell me what we had seen was a true UFO. They could find no explanation for what we had seen. He began sending me a monthly newsletter covering sightings around the country, some explainable, others not. I wish I had kept it. From that time on I paid attention to what we were putting up in our skies, and into outer space. I have watched the commercialization of space with concern, as the skies have become crowded without clear rules of operation worldwide. What goes up must come down and the duration of satellites and their eventual demise is a real concern for those of us on Earth below. The space race which began in 1957 has only picked up speed and, unfortunately, mass. Fortunately, NORAD, a joint effort by The United states and Canada, monitors those skies from the North Pole to Central America.
Events of the past week are not truly surprising. They are inevitable. The strategy behind the positioning of the Chinese spy balloon is interesting and worth considering. Unfortunately, Americans pay more attention to sci-fi thrillers than to facts and are more interested in movie scenarios than reality. The usual suspects are already claiming aliens are landing, one more group of “the other” to fear so white America votes hard right. Perhaps the Chinese strategy is not so inscrutable after all. Perhaps these events will awaken the world to the need to regulate the space where satellites and weather balloons claim dominance over those of us below. Keep looking up. There are challenges ahead and we must unleash imagination to meet those challenges. But, never fear. The best is yet to come.
Do you remember diagramming sentences. Your answer will tell me how old you are. It is a part of the human condition to believe what we know is the full truth. That what we perceive is full reality. My first science project in school led me to state finals and a blue ribbon. The title was “Seeing is believing ?” I studied optical illusions and, created activities demonstrating how what we see is not what really is. It was a mind-opening experience for me and for those who came to my table display. It started a need within me to open minds and challenge thoughts.
My second science project was the new (then) study of genetics. I was particularly interested in how RNA carried messages from the DNA throughout the body. Planaria have an ability to regenerate themselves. Cut off the upper half and it regrows a new upper half. The implications from that study left me in awe of possibilities such as regenerative limbs, eyes, body organs. It also made me question leadership and political growth and regrowth of political parties. For example, I wondered what the Asian subcontinent would have looked like if the British had embraced Ghandi rather than destroy him. Cutting off the leadership of a group may simply create regrowth one finds even more difficult to deal with. What if Martin Luther King and Malcolm X had been embraced instead of assassinated?
Of course, those RNA studies also prepared me to be first in line for Covid vaccination using MRNA technology. Medicine is on a new frontier since the human genome was mapped. Continued research opens up myriad possibilities for human health. As usual, when I think of physical health it also stirs an interest in emotional and psychological health. RNA is on the forefront of research of mental health as well. Then, I wonder what lessons such research teaches us about the social health of our communities, institutions, political structures and all groups.
The United States is singular as a nation which daily adds new DNA to its mix through immigration. Immigration is our RNA carrying new ideas, new ways of perceiving, new challenges to our perception of reality and opening our minds to previously unthought-of possibilities. Immigration is the source of our American body’s innovation and intellectual wealth which fuels our national economy.
Years ago I read articles decrying our education system because our students did not perform so well as Chinese students on standardized tests for comparison of intellectual status. What those articles seldom mentioned was that American students far outpaced students from other nations when creativity and innovation in problem solving was being measured. Instead of recognizing where our strength lies and enhancing teaching methodology to accommodate and pursue such strengths, politicians inserted their nationalistic noses into education and began requiring more standardized tests, more frequently, with worse results. Teachers now “teach to the test” instead of “to the student.”
Now, under the guise of American nationalism, Republicans push to control education even more by banning books, firing and un-licensing teachers who teach about racism, sexism, gender, and anything that even hints at a non-monolithic American (read white-male)identity and belief system. Such arrogant and ignorant intervention will not only destroy our educational system and those who are educated by it; it will destroy our national economy, Indeed, it will destroy our very nation itself. Such fools admire autocrats such as Turkey’s Erdogan, Belarus’ Lukashenko, China’s Xi, Russia’s Putin and Hungary’s Orban ; and American governors such as Florida’s DeSantis, Texas’ Abbot and others like Ohio’s DeWine who play footsie with such autocrats as Trump, McCarthy, Jordan et al. Republican politicians pay state visits, dine at their table, and praise them for their “strong” (iron-fisted) leadership; offering them as examples of the type of leadership America needs.
Voters should be wary of what they see in paid political ads, many funded by dollars given to fake charitable organizations (PACS) which are in fact propaganda machines, often carrying talking points prepared by foreign governments intent on undermining American democracy. Why would foreign autocratic leaders want to undermine democracy? Money! Autocrats do not simply control the lives of the people they rule. They control the means of production, the salary levels and profit margins, the wealth of their nations is their personal wealth. It no longer belongs to the people. The people have no say in how wealth is garnered, stored, maintained and spent. Its only purpose is to serve the autocrats. Undermine the examples of countries where the people rule their politicians, not vice-versa, and political leadership means greater wealth for the politician, but not the nation. The power of the gun lobby over republicans is an example of putting economic gain over public benefit here at home. We, the American voters, are the greatest threat to autocrats world-wide. They would destroy the example we set when we vote out corruption, and assert our control over our government. We do that peaceably by voting. Voting is our greatest strength and best protection.
Now, Republicans, more than ever, seek to undermine the power of our vote. They lie about election fraud, poll workers, election outcomes. They fuel distrust in fellow voters. They suppress the vote of those who challenge their leadership. They accept funding from foreign governments to boost such lies. The seek to place election deniers in Secretary of State offices, on county election boards, as poll workers etc. in order to control school board, local, state and nationwide elections. Republicans are now openly autocrats. How do they get away with this ?
I taught law as an Associate Professor in the colleges of Business, Medicine, Education and Social Work while also acting as Assistant Attorney General and Associate Director of Legal Affairs for Ohio University before retiring. I always started with discourse on the Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights before I even began to use the casebook we would be using for that particular academic field of study. When I began, I was looking through the lens of my own educational experience. The students soon opened my eyes to new ways of looking at their readiness to understand law. I had summed they had been given a sound background in principles of democracy, civics, government and American history. I was wrong to assume so. Such courses were no longer “mandatory for graduation” course requirements. Very few of my students even knew there are three branches of government and that each branch creates law. I first had to teach American democratic principles, policies, structures and history before the cases I would teach them to decipher. I also scheduled a second classroom two nights per week to teach English grammar and writing to those who wanted a prayer of passing my essay exams. The first batch was unintelligible, lacking sound sentence and paragraph structure, and grammar. When I wrote a sentence on the board and asked for a volunteer to diagram it, no one volunteered. Instead I faced a class full of quizzical looks. They had no idea what a diagram was and had never heard of such a thing. I only did this for my first year of teaching, when my class size of 30 plus students still allowed for the time required. Soon, my glasses grew to 200-300 and I, ashamedly, resorted to multiple choice tests.
I know how so many Americans are duped by the Republican party today. They have been undereducated for several decades. We stopped supporting public schools since integration required us to face the results of our history of racism face-to-face, with real people instead of the racial tropes we had devised to assure us of our noble humanity. Recognizing equality was a slap in the face of white America. No one likes to take a hit. Better to pretend and create the illusion of superiority, instead of openly investigating our true historical reality. The Republican party was cut in half and has regenerated a disturbing adherence to autocratic rule, even if it requires divorcing itself, and us, from reality. This is not a true political party, but a cult, based on optical illusions and fear of facing the reality that no one is superior in a true democracy. No vote is superior in a true democracy, unless Republicans gerrymander those votes. Ah, yes, that they did! It seems, they still fear that even gerrymandering is not enough. How far will they go? To armed insurrection at our Nation’s Capitol and beyond ? Guess we know the answer. Go vote.
I cannot write carelessly about the Law. I am a retired attorney-at-law, former State Assistant Attorney General and former Associate Director of Legal Affairs for a university. I love the law with a passion. I am dedicated to the protection it affords individuals, my state, my country, my world.
The Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States are foremost in our minds when speaking of the treasure which is our Democratic republic. Brave documents written by men who had had enough of autocratic rule by a king out of touch with his subjects’ concerns an ocean away. Self-rule advanced eons by the declaration and constitutional reign of this nation of laws and not men. But, this new form of governance was at terrible risk of failure as it sought to establish itself among the colonists in the many states of the new nation. In 1789 George Washington signed into law the firs act of the new congress, the Judiciaries Act. The Judiciaries Act established a three-part judiciary made up of district, courts, circuit courts and the Supreme Court, out-lining the duties of each branch. It also defined the role of Attorney General and the Dept. of Justice. It has been amended over the years, but never up-ended. The rights of appeal and the ultimate supremacy of the highest court to assure the constitution and the principles of the newly established republic were upheld in every state of the new union. Cases decided under this new system cemented the Rule of Law as the authority over its citizens. We have no king. We have no prince. We have political parties; but they have been given no authority to rule us. Let me repeat. Political parties have no legal authority over a free people. Only the law does so.
There have always been citizens seeking a king, or a party to undermine the Rule of Law. This is not new. What is new is a party which would be king. What is new are judges on our courts willing to acknowledge that party as king.
A judge by definition must be an independent arbiter, looking to the American law and its principles to guide her decisions. No judge should EVER comment before all parties to a lawsuit have even filed their briefs; nor that she in “inclined” to decide in favor of a party to the suit. No judge should ever place party interest above the rule of law, its principles, and the security of the nation she serves.
Judges, like all public servants, serve the people.
There is a principle at work in legal ethics supported by courts to protect an individual’s conversation with his attorney regarding a legal issue. There is a principle at work supported by courts to not reveal through the normal exercise of court transparency those secrets of the nation which, if exposed, could cause irreparable harm to the very nation and its people’s national security. There is a principle at work supported by courts to protect witnesses and keep them safe.
In this case, an about to be charged criminal who stole the most desperately protected top secret documents, and it appears those likely including nuclear weapons secrets, hid that evidence of his crime amidst personal papers. Thus, we the people represented by the Department of Justice and FBI are faced with trying to sort the evidence of the crime for two reasons: to successfully prosecute a treasonous ex-president, and to protect our own national security and those who act on our behalf to do so every day.
Let me be clear, this case should have been disposed of by summary judgement the first day it was filed by the ex-president. He should have been re-directed to the court which handled the case from its inception, and this argument reviewed by the judge who already was handling the search and its legal issues. Or, it should have been dismissed since he had no standing to contest anything since the papers were seized as evidence of a crime. Not just any crime. A crime that endangers an entire nation, and other nations within our alliance. His criminal act of hiding documents should not then be used to further his and others’ crime. The delays caused the moment this judge accepted, and now continues to delay the efforts to unravel the crime and shut-down the threat to each of these nations, furthers the crime. A Special Master appointment furthers the crime. Justice delayed is Justice denied. The people of this nation deserve justice.
My guess is that the attorney-client communication at issue likely is more evidence of criminal activity affecting the survival of the country, which the attorneys should have reported, not argue should be protected. We are putting the interest of a single criminal over the interest of the continuing existence of the United states of America, and the republics around the world who strive to be equally free of kings, princes, autocrats and thug parties.
Individual interests are sacrosanct within our courts. This situation reminds me of the philosophical question about three people in a life boat with only enough food for one to survive delayed rescue. Who is sacrificed as the danger continues and prompt rescue is unlikely? Do we sacrifice one to save more? Who could decide such case? Judges face difficult situations every day. Solomons are not that rare. I once had a case where the divorcing parties last remaining dispute was who got the parrot. The Judge ordered the parrot split in half unless an agreement was reached in 10 minutes. Opposing counsel and I were thrilled to carry that message since nothing we said had moved either party over months of discussion.
Judges must be decisive. It is implied by their title, right? “Under consideration” is a dodge where the legal issues are is clear as they are here. This judge seems to be looking for a way to satisfy the party which holds her future appointments in their hands. Or, perhaps she was just not so qualified as she needed to be to decide cases at this level, or perhaps she has the nation’s interest at heart. But, if so, is she blind to the cost to the nation by her non-decisive action? Is she struggling to find some way, any way, to defend and support her “inclinations”?
The Rule of Law, the Judiciaries Act, are the cement holding together the foundation of any democratic republic. Our foundation is crumbling before our eyes, Silence is not an option.
annarino writes 
SKY WARS
Before the world lit itself up like a Christmas tree on every corner we could stand in our backyards and view the Milky Way. Now, the stars are blocked, locked away behind the haze of nights ablaze in light. We can no longer mark our place in the universe, feel the smallness of our being, as we watch the movement of stars across the sky. We can no longer mark time throughout the night. I miss the stars. As a child I spent hours lying on my back in the grassy yard watching the stars move through the sky. We begged to be allowed to sleep outside on warm nights, stringing blankets like a tent over the clothes line. We seldom slept inside the tent. It was more for Mom’s benefit than our own.
I loved the sky, the way clouds moved across it. I sometimes let myself feel earth’s rotation through the passage of stars and clouds. I recognized that stars were fixtures, and it was I who was being moved about while standing on Earth’s surface. Such thoughts were dizzying, electric, compelling. One night, my Father and his brothers gathered all of us cousins in Uncle Frankie’s yard, out beyond any city lights that we might watch the passage of The United States’ first satellite Explorer 1, a year after Russia’s Sputnik 1. Its passage times were charted daily and printed in the newspaper. We stood in a single row with parents standing behind; children and adults both in awe. I was hooked. I was 8 years old. I am still hooked at 74.
Each autumn I made a leaf book. I collected the most beautiful and perfect leaves I could find from the trees along the neighborhood alleys and iron them between pages of wax paper to preserve their color and form, then sew together the pages into a book. I preferred to pull leaves from the tree before ground insects, soil and trampling feet marred their full beauty. The autumn I was 12 I was reaching up for a bright yellow oak leaf when I noticed an object brighter than any star in the afternoon sky. It was three times as high as the jet streaking across the sky, a tiny form one-tenth its size, far below. Such discrepancy in what I had ever seen in the sky startled me. I pointed it out to the neighbor children who were following my progress and searching for leaves. We stopped and simply watched in wonder for perhaps 30-40 minutes. For the first 30 minutes or more it did not move. It simply hung there, huge and brilliant in the sun reflecting off its surface. Everything else in the sky shifted as time passed. It stayed in place. That was confusing.
The shape was also confusing. It appeared as two curved plates turned toward each other, with a smaller curved plate in the center, below the main body of the object. It was a perfectly formed “flying saucer.” We could not believe what we were seeing. Yet, we could not take our eyes off the image. Suddenly, the object moved upward in a straight line faster than we had ever seen an object move in the sky. It was not flying at any speed we could comprehend. It lingered in its position for several moments then moved even more rapidly at a right angle directly right, stopped and immediately flew straight up again. We were not strangers to how planes or even helicopters flew. This was clearly neither one of those. We gasped at each strange move, entranced at its uniques pattern. Then whoosh! It flew so fast it literally disappeared from view. The breathless chatter of our group became a crescendo of need to know what it was we had witnessed. One friend, Paula, remembered a brochure in the box her telescope came in. It had a phone number we could call. She found the brochure and we read about Project Blue Book. It included a phone number. I called.
Project Blue Book was housed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in nearby Dayton, Ohio. An officer there took my call and said he would call back. My Mother was surprised the next day when she received a call from the officer to ask if she would allow me to meet with him and another officer at the Public Library the following day. She and Paula’s mother agreed we could meet. The two officers in military uniform met us and immediately separated us for interviews. I told my story, answered every question and drew photos to illustrate its form, position in the sky, altitude and movements. Then, I answered the questions a second time before the officers switched places. The interview resumed with repetitive questioning. At the close of the interview both officers sat with Paula and me and explained that were checking to see if our stories were consistent and true. They agreed we were truthful. They admitted we had seen what the Air Force called an unidentified flying object or UFO. The next step would take some time. More than 90% of such sightings turned out to be identifiable objects. They told us they would be checking for weather balloons, experimental flying objects of our country and of other nations.
Sometime later, the officer called to tell me what we had seen was a true UFO. They could find no explanation for what we had seen. He began sending me a monthly newsletter covering sightings around the country, some explainable, others not. I wish I had kept it. From that time on I paid attention to what we were putting up in our skies, and into outer space. I have watched the commercialization of space with concern, as the skies have become crowded without clear rules of operation worldwide. What goes up must come down and the duration of satellites and their eventual demise is a real concern for those of us on Earth below. The space race which began in 1957 has only picked up speed and, unfortunately, mass. Fortunately, NORAD, a joint effort by The United states and Canada, monitors those skies from the North Pole to Central America.
Events of the past week are not truly surprising. They are inevitable. The strategy behind the positioning of the Chinese spy balloon is interesting and worth considering. Unfortunately, Americans pay more attention to sci-fi thrillers than to facts and are more interested in movie scenarios than reality. The usual suspects are already claiming aliens are landing, one more group of “the other” to fear so white America votes hard right. Perhaps the Chinese strategy is not so inscrutable after all. Perhaps these events will awaken the world to the need to regulate the space where satellites and weather balloons claim dominance over those of us below. Keep looking up. There are challenges ahead and we must unleash imagination to meet those challenges. But, never fear. The best is yet to come.
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Tagged as ALIENS, CHINESE BALLOON, NORAD, SATELLITES, SCI-FI, STAR WARS, UFO, weather