A speculative mind

  Much has been made in the news lately about whether soldiers are required to follow an illegal order. That got me thinking. Full disclosure: I am not a legal scholar, nor have I ever been in the military. So, I would not presume to tell you what constitutes an “illegal order.” I presume that is the kind of thing that has to be decided by a court of law. I am not trying to make a political point here for one side or the other. I just have an observation. One thought I keep coming back to with all the discussion is this: if you follow an illegal order, you might find yourself in the shoes of Lieutenant William Calley. Those of us who grew up during the Viet Nam War have the My Lai Massacre seared on our psyches. It was one of the most shameful chapters in American military history, and helped to galvanize the protests against the war. In 1968 a company of soldiers led by Lt. Calley entered the village of My Lai and slaughtered everyone they could find. These were unarmed civilian...

  One time when I was a kid, maybe 9 or so, I was trying to make something in the kitchen. It might have been a chocolate frosting for something. Anyway, the directions said to melt the chocolate. So, I put the chocolate in a Pyrex bowl and set it on the burner and turned it on. The chocolate was starting to melt when all of a sudden, the bowl broke. Pieces of Pyrex and chocolate all over the stove. I was following the recipe, but when my mother came in, she explained to me that you never put the bowl directly onto the burner. You are supposed to put the bowl in a pan with some water and heat the water. Well, the recipe did not say that. Another time I was making cookies. The recipe said to “cream the butter and sugars together.” I tracked down my mom and asked her how much cream to put in it. “Cream?” she said. “There’s no cream in it. I showed her the recipe, and she explained to me what the verb “cream” meant. A lot of recipe writers assume you already know how to do certain...

  I live on the Oregon coast. For part of the year, we have great weather. But part of the year we have storms. We generally don’t get the Summer and fall thunderstorms and tornadoes that the Midwest and southern states get. Our storms tend to be in late Fall and Winter. In recent decades the Weather Service has gotten better at predicting them, so we are usually not surprised. We are too far north to get hurricanes, but sometimes we get the remnant of hurricanes. We usually get a couple of storms a year with wind gusts over 70 MPH and once decade or so we will get a storm with gusts up to 100 MPH. That may not seem so bad for the folks who live in hurricane zones, but it’s enough for me. The worst storm I ever lived through was one I don’t remember (I was 3 years-old at the time). It was called the Columbus Day Storm. This storm devastated parts of northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. It was possibly the worst storm ever to hit the region in the historic...