It looks obvious

I read in the last week a lot of genuine posts and columns commemorating 9/11 and the aftermath, few were good and one touched my soul:

The yellow flecks remained, resting like small stars on the surface of everything in the Heights for three days until the first rains came on a late afternoon to wash them away. I walked out into that rain and back down Pierrepont Street to the Promenade where for months yet to come the fires would burn across the river.

The rain came straight down that day. There was no wind. As I walked down the sidewalk I noticed the rainwater running off the trees and the buildings and moving down the gutter to the drains that would take it on to the harbor and on to the sea. And that water was, for only a minute or so before it ran clear, gold.

And if we are talking about Magical writing:

Inside the moon: another moon.
Half the world is dark.
The shadow self lies beneath the water:
fear of the natural mind.

Some more about the alarming accumulation of power in the executive branch since 9/11 in this Cato institute daily podcast. On the other hand it is interesting to follow the use of technology by the Philippine’s police in the global war on terror… 

I wrote here in the past in favor of different approach in US foreign policy, approach that doesn’t identify America’s national interest in maintaining its superpower position and is more closer to the original isolationism. The daily show demonstrate it much better…

I have hard time deciding which story is crazier  - an increasing group of spoiled middle class American that make carping through other people trash an ideology or a VA town that using its power to rob one’s property.

NEW YORK — For lunch in her modest apartment, Madeline Nelson tossed a salad made with shaved carrots and lettuce she dug out of a Whole Foods dumpster. She flavored the dressing with miso powder she found in a trash bag on a curb in Chinatown. She baked bread made with yeast plucked from the garbage of a Middle Eastern grocery store.

Nelson is a former corporate executive who can afford to dine at four-star restaurants. But she prefers turning garbage into gourmet meals without spending a cent.

On this afternoon, she thawed a slab of pate that she found three days before its expiration date in a dumpster outside a health food store. She made buttery chicken soup from another health food store’s hot buffet leftovers, which she salvaged before they were tossed into the garbage.