I was looking at a moonlit pasture
the other night. There were a couple places in the middle where the
grass was much lighter than the rest; and I attributed it to light
shining directly through the tall trees around the pasture. As I
looked at it longer, I started seeing many more variations in the
lumps of grass. This is probably from my eyes adjusting, but it also
happens every time I work on color illustration. After I've made a
light pencil sketch on the surface, and am starting to look at the
colors in the photo I'm working from (I seldom work directly from the
subject), the process slows while I start noticing many more color
variations. I can be looking at a small patch of brown on a horse,
but as I contemplate the way to mix that color (hue, tint, value,
saturation) I notice that the place I'm looking at actually has four
colors in it, it's four distinct areas. This happens every single
time I do this sort of work, so I consider it normal.
What I contemplated there at the
pasture was if this is universal for people; when we encounter a new
task or a new place, the way we see the whole is to overlook details.
The problem comes when people refuse to ever see details. If denial
is a multi faceted thing, then this is surely part of it. Maybe it's
a survival thing, an emotional survival thing; if you were
continuously aware of the suffering in this world, life would be
dismal. Sufferings like war, sufferings like loaded passenger planes
shot down.
I don't know who did it; and that's
pretty much what the western news reports I read were saying. Then it
became reports of how this was too sophisticated a weapon for the
separatists to have, must be Russian involvement. Then, the last
report I saw was that the launcher can't be found, it must have been
moved back to Russia. Really? This in the space of two days. People
in this country used to cherish the idea of innocent until proven
guilty.
First off, am I the only one that's
been reading of military planes regularly being shot down over
Easter Ukraine? There's a war going on there. Think about this, who
flies a loaded passenger plane over a war zone? If there are criminal
charges to be brought, would this warrant a charge of criminal
negligence? Really weird man. Again, really_weird_man. But that's not
all that's curious. I wasn't there, I don't have indicators one way
or the other; so I try to look at motives.
A big part of the current U.S.
Foreign policy looks to me to be the actions of an irrational
president who's thinks he's been dissed. Seriously. Not hyperbole.
Would the U.S. Government ever resort to such a lowly despicable
thing as this? Look at recent events. Domestically, terrorists aren't
just caught, they first made. Seriously; they used to call it
entrapment, now it's called 'facilitation', or some similar word.
They openly admit the method.
Remember when Saddam Hussein was
finally caught? You knew he was toast, they had to off the guy, thus
wrecking the morale of any followers he still had. But they kept him
around long enough to give him a trial. So...when they finally catch
their big arch rival Bin Laden, do they keep him around long enough
to display the evidence of the huge victory? No, the guy's buried at
sea. Am I the only one that found that strange? From what I
understand, the mission was carried out by one Navy Seal team. Later
the entire team was loaded on a single helicopter. Is that in keeping
with normal procedure? Then the helicopter was shot down by a
missile. As I said, I don't know who did it.
