Not My Best Week

 I feel a need to write all this down.  Slightly over a week ago, my husband announced that he planned to go hiking in the Marble Mountains (very northern California, look it up), and would be gone for 7 days.  He goes hiking regularly, not often for 7 days (although he went to Death Valley for 7 days in early March).  When he does, I'm alone in the house and have to cook for myself, as well as do any necessary shopping, so it takes me awhile to get used to the idea, although I always survive.

A few days later, Monday of this week, I drove down to the local Kaiser Permanente, trying to find some medical supplements I needed.  This means driving down Broadway in Oakland, not normally an issue.  I was in the left of 3 southbound lanes, passing the 38th street intersection, when a car came out of the gas station on the left side of the intersection, tried to turn southbound onto Broadway, and smacked into my left front fender with her right front fender.  Relax - nobody was hurt, and both cars can be driven, but - we had an accident.  I didn't even see her until she smacked my fender and we stopped.  I took the usual photographs and got her name and number, and continued with my errand.  (Oakland PD won't come to an accident with no injuries.)  But I was shaken.  I'm a careful driver; I haven't had an actual car-to-car accident in decades.

Later we emailed each other the insurance information, and I reported to our insurance company.  I spent too many of my lunch periods this week talking to insurance adjusters who all wanted to know "how it happened."  (And they all wanted to call at my lunch time.)  I talked to 3 insurance adjusters, because the other driver drives for Lyft, and Lyft's insurance company also wanted to know about it.  By the end of the week, we had a quote for repairs to my car from a well-known local body shop, we've scheduled repairs for my car for Monday morning, and I'll get a rental car (paid for by our insurance) for the few days it'll take to do the repairs.  All good.

Then this morning I went to my gym for my usual water aerobics class.  I was sitting on a bench in the women's locker room, taking my jewelry off (I don't wear it in the pool), when the young woman sitting on the other end of the bench folded quietly up and landed on her face on the floor.  Several women saw and gathered around, and I said out loud, "Get the front desk," which someone did.  I couldn't tell if she was breathing (she was), but in any case I don't know how to do that stuff.  The club called the EMTs, who were pretty prompt, and it seems she's OK - I heard something about a "blood pressure issue."  After the class, I wrote up the "incident report" they asked me for and headed home.

On top of the planned hiking trip (he leaves Wednesday, probably before I'll get my car back), and the car repairs and rental car, this was sort of more than I wanted to deal with.  But you don't always get your choice of what you're going to deal with.  At least the woman who fell is OK.  Thank you for listening to me rant.

Smog

 The Trump 2 administration has recently decided that it doesn't care what comes out of automobile tailpipes.  They want California to quit insisting on that "clean" fuel; they want us to use that gasoline that made all the smog we thought we'd gotten rid of.

It's been a long time, but my family made a trip to Los Angeles in the 1950s.  We were taking the kids to Disneyland.  I don't remember the exact year, but I'm going to say 1956, because I was 10 that year and my sister Sue was 8.  So Disneyland looked great to us.

We were a lower middle class family so we didn't do anything exotic to get there; we drove.  Since we started in Napa, we probably drove over to the central valley and took I-5 down, thus avoiding the traffic mess that was the Bay Area.  And that meant that we went into LA through the Grapevine, otherwise known as the Tejon Pass.  This pass is 4,144 feet high at the top.  

This much later I'm fuzzy on the details, but we stopped for some reason near the top - we may have stopped at Fort Tejon State Historic Park, or maybe just for gas.

Here's what I still remember, 70 years later or so:  We were over 4000 above the Los Angeles area, and still quite a number of miles away.  And when I got out of the car I could feel my eyes sting.  From the air.  From the smog.

We've largely gotten rid of that kind of smog, and Trump thinks we should have it back.  Consider that.

The Appliance Gods are After Us

 Actually, things look better than they did this morning, The irrigation installation in the back yard is no longer leaking.  The dishwasher still misbehaves now and then, but it's decided to do so only when there's nobody there who can fix it, so we just turn it off overnight and it recovers.  

Today we had a new problem pop up.  We have an agreement with a local firm to inspect our furnace once a year, and they came by today.  This should have been a glance and a wave, but - they said the furnace heat exchanger is cracked.  What?  We asked about repairs, and it turns out that repairing the heat exchanger is more intrusive and nasty than replacing the furnace, which is 18 years old.  Apparently a new furnace is just pop the old one out, and pop the new one in; while fixing the heat exchanger involves taking the whole thing apart and reassembling all the pieces.  The rep also said that 18 years is about a normal life for furnaces these days.  The bad news is that it'll cost low 5 figures; the good news is, they can do it next week.

One of the things this means is that the furnace is now dangerous - in fact, illegal - to run!  Some issue with carbon monoxide, which I didn't quite get.  But we have to turn the old furnace off until we get the new one!  It's a good thing it isn't January.  

The other thing they found when poking around the furnace in the basement is that we have a leaky hot water pipe down there!  This is not a difficult repair, but it'll mean turning all the water off, and I'm trying to do 5 loads of laundry!  The pipe repair guy says he'll have to get a new pipe and he can do the repair tomorrow, when the laundry will be done.  Phew!  There's a load in the washer now.

The pipe repair guy was totally blown away (he's youngish) to find that the leaky hot water pipe was BRASS!  In fact, the leak was at a connection between the brass pipe and a copper pipe.  The house is about 106 years old, and Jim remembers that they told us when we bought it not to drink from the hot water faucet, because brass pipes contain lead!  We'll replace the brass with a nice copper pipe, for much less than the new furnace will cost.

Birthright Citizenship - a Personal Story

We all know by now that our 47th president believes he can change anything in the Constitution with an executive order.  And one of the things he wants to change is birthright citizenship, which would require someone born in the U.S. to be the child of an American citizen.  The classes I took on the subject suggest strongly that he's wrong, but the issue got me thinking, since I personally am the daughter of a Canadian immigrant, who didn't become an American citizen until I was about 3 years old.  How did that happen?

What, you say?  Here's the story, based on my late mother's papers, which I inherited, and a lot of family memory.  On January 11, 1912 in Hamilton, Ontario, John Henderson and Maud O'Brien had a daughter, Mary Jane Henderson.  That was my mother, although I've never seen the name "Jane" anywhere but her birth certificate - in life she was "Mary Jean," and as an adult was often simply called "Jean."  (She died January 29, 2000.)

Her U.S. Certificate of Lawful Entry records that she entered the United States on September 27, 1920, in Detroit, Michigan, by ferry.  She was 8 years old, traveling with her family.  Her Certificate of Lawful Entry is dated January 19, 1943, she is now 31 years old.  (The Certificate, by the way, gives her name as "Mary Jean.")  

Why did the Henderson family come to the U.S. in 1920?  My grandfather, John Henderson, was a photographer, and he had made a living during World War I by photographing miners at the Big Nickel Mine, in Sudbury, Ontario.  They were producing metal for munitions in the war and wanted to send photos home to family.  That fell off badly after the war ended, and he had a cousin with a ranch in Campbell, CA, so he packed up the family and came to California.

Next, I have mother's Application for a Certificate of Arrival and Preliminary Form for Petition for Naturalization (I wonder if they still use that name?).  That form is dated July 1945, without stating a day.  That form spells out her life in the U.S. to date - her family stayed in Campbell, CA for a couple of months in 1920 but moved into San Jose in November 1920, where they lived until 1933.  She attended San Jose State but didn't graduate.  In 1933 she moved to Vallejo, CA with her family.  Her father's photography business wasn't going well in San Jose, and he thought he could do better business in Vallejo with the sailors at Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

Among the places of employment she listed on the Application were the U.S.O. Club - from 1942 to 1944 she was the secretary and bookkeeper.  I'm now leaving the papers and going from memory.  A sailor at the U.S.O. Club introduced her to his buddy, Lestle Ivy (yes, that name is correct), who worked at Mare Island Naval Shipyard as a laborer.  He had moved to California in 1940, looking for work.  And on August 16, 1944, in Reno, NV, he married Mary Jean Henderson.  She filled out the Application the month before she got married. 

[Correction:  mother filled out the Application about a year after she married.  She actually declared her intention to become a citizen in April 1943, the Application says so; it also lists my father as her husband, with the wedding date in 1944.  I think she filed the Application in July 1945 because she discovered she discovered she was pregnant - I was born on April 2, 1946.]

Mary and Lestle had 2 children, Karen Ellen (me, born April 2, 1946) and my sister Susan Carol (born May 19, 1948).  All that time, Mary Ivy was still a Canadian citizen.  I didn't know that until I started researching this.  Her Certificate of Naturalization says she became an American citizen on September 15, 1949.  So it took her 4 years from the initial Application to become a legal citizen.  (Well, there was a war going on for part of that.)  Which means I might not qualify for birthright citizenship under 47's "definition."  I'm not terribly worried, because my father was born in Missouri, and also because I don't think he can get that past the court.  If he does, I may start looking into the dual Canadian citizenship for which I believe I qualify.

Why Our Cars are Killing Us

 The Economist, to which I subscribe, recently (September 7) had a leader called America's killer cars.  (You may hit a paywall for that article).  I can't find it offhand, but within a week or so the San Francisco Chronicle also had an article, or possibly an editorial, on the same subject; I remember reading it.  And it's very unusual for the Chron and the Economist to cover the same subject.

Basically, those huge cars, and especially trucks, that you see your neighbors driving are much more likely to kill you in a collision than a smaller car.  And because of the weight of the lithium batteries, the new electric versions of big trucks are even worse (per the Economist, "The Ford F-150 Lightning weighs about 40% more than its petrol engine cousin...")  And you may have noticed that the old-fashioned sedan is really out of style these days.

It isn't just the size of the cars and trucks.  The design of our roads is lethal - Americans insist on 4 way intersections instead of roundabouts, especially in rural areas - bad for both drivers and pedestrians.  And the wide roads and lanes we like encourage us all to drive faster.

I've never been interested in huge cars.  In fact, my last car but one was a Mini Cooper, which I replaced in 2017, partly because I wanted to be able to give rides to my friends and the Cooper had only 2 doors.  But also, I wanted a hybrid.  I bought a Kia Niro, at least partly because I hate Priuses.  The Niro is a very nice car for the narrow streets in the Oakland hills - tight handling, good brakes, and the 4 doors I wanted.  But even the Niro has a square, high front grille that is hard to see over sometimes, especially when I've climbed a hill and am trying to pull into a flat intersection - I just pray that anyone in the crosswalk can see me, because I can't see them.  

The Niro is a "crossover" - a small SUV, often the smallest SUV in the parking lot.  It weighs a little over 3,000 lb.  But one in 3 new cars in America these days weighs over 5,000 lb., and if my little Kia collides with one of those, I know who will lose.  And I'm constantly amazed by the number of my urban neighbors who feel they're best served by a pickup truck, the bigger the better - I associate pickup trucks with farms and farmers, but I'm obviously out of step on that today.  And why do you need a vehicle so big you have to have a stepladder to climb into the seat?

I'm not suggesting any answers to this; I don't know what they might be.  Just - everyone drive carefully, and slow down!  The accident you avoid could save your life.

My, How Dorm Life Has Changed

 Everyone who lives in the Bay Area knows that U.C. Berkeley doesn't have enough dorm space for its enrolled students.  They especially know this in Berkeley, and parts of north Oakland, where all the students are looking for someplace to live.  

August 21, 2024 was move-in day at Helen Diller Anchor House, a new dorm for transfer students.  The S.F. Chronicle wrote up the event - on that date, but good luck finding the article, sadly, it's behind a paywall.  The dorm, which cost $300 million, is 14 stories, 3 blocks from BART, across the street from campus, and will house 772 students.  The "dorm rooms" have:  full kitchens, with dishwashers and stacked washer/dryers.  Of course, they cost $2,000 a month; but the building includes an indoor/outdoor fitness center and yoga studio and a rooftop vegetable garden.  $2,000 is about what a small apartment costs today in Berkeley anyhow, and the fee includes an off-site meal plan if you'd rather not cook.

Now the voice from the past.  I attended Berkeley in the middle 60s ('63 to '68 including my master's degree) and I was a "dormie" for the first 3 years.  And boy, have dorms changed.

I lived in Peixotto Hall, which was part of the Smyth-Fernwald dorms.  These dorms were built for student housing immediately after World War II, and were recently demolished after some years as married student housing.  When I lived there, starting in fall 1963, it had 2 women's dorms (I can't recall the name of the other) and a larger men's dorm, which was either called "Smyth" or "Smyth-Fernwald."  I remember a single dorm as a long, one-story building with student rooms (2 students each) on either side of a central hallway.  The whole setup, including a central dining hall and kitchen (separate building), was about as far from campus as you could get - it was at the extreme top of Dwight Way!  I believe I recall bus service down to campus, but I also remember an awful lot of walking down hill, and then walking back up!  Google Maps says it was .9 miles one way to where Telegraph hits the campus.

What was my dorm room like?  Well, it didn't have a kitchen - in fact, it didn't have a bathroom.  It had 2 single beds, 2 student desks, and some closet space.  The bathroom, with showers, was down the hall.  This led to the occasional women's dorm call of "Man on the floor!" when a relative or a repairman had to come in for some reason.  And we ate in the central dining hall, unless we decided to go out and forage on our own.  But the dining hall was where the free food was, and we were a long way up the hill from anything resembling a restaurant, or even a fast food joint.

And nobody had a stacked washer/dryer!  If you wanted your laundry done, you either went and found a laundromat, or you took the laundry home to mama, if mama lived close enough.

It was a rather limited living arrangement.  On the other hand, it didn't cost $2,000 a month.  Frankly, I don't think I ever knew what it cost to live in the dorm; my folks paid it.  I didn't get into living costs until my senior year, when I moved into an apartment with 2 other women on North Side.  At which point I learned the joys of running into your roommate's boyfriend at 3 AM - but that's another post.

If you lived in the Smyth-Fernwald dorms in the '60s and remember stuff I've forgotten, I'm interested to hear it.

The Middle East is Not Listening to Us

 Once again, today, there's a news article about a street demonstration in San Francisco demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.  Several Bay Area cities (including mine) have passed resolutions demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.  I've been thinking, and I have to get this off my chest.

Folks, neither side is listening to us and our "ceasefire resolutions."  Certainly not to the cities of Oakland and Richmond, CA.  The Israelis aren't even listening to US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who said recently, 

"In this kind of a fight, the center of gravity is the civilian population. And if you drive them into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat," Austin said, drawing on his experience as a four-star general overseeing the battle against Islamic State militants.

"So I have repeatedly made clear to Israel's leaders that protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral responsibility and strategic imperative."

The real problem in Gaza is that neither side wants to compromise.  Netanyahu has built an entire career on opposing a 2-state solution, which (in my humble opinion) is the only peaceful answer to this.  One of the reasons Hamas is in charge of Gaza is that Netanyahu supported them against the Palestinian Authority, because he knew they would never agree to a 2 state solution, and Mahmoud Abbas might have.  So when Hamas started this (and they did), they knew that Netanyahu would throw everything Israel had at Gaza.  Which is a lot.  I'm going to guess that Hamas also assumed what has happened would happen - millions of people around the world would see Israel bombing civilians in Gaza and killing many times the people the Oct. 7 invasion killed - and would immediately assume that Israel is to blame for the horror.

No, folks.  Hamas started this.  And Hamas' stated goal is to destroy Israel and take all of Palestine back, "from the river to the sea."  Which Netanyahu will do everything he can to prevent.  I don't know if Hamas didn't realize how much Israel would throw at them (I don't believe that), or if they simply didn't care how many Palestinian civilians got killed, because it would all make Israel look worse.  (I wouldn't be surprised.)

I'm in the camp that believes the only long-term solution for Israel and Palestine is a 2 state solution, preferably with Israel not run by Netanyahu and his right-wing gang, and with the Palestinian state not run by Hamas.  Israel has a good chance of getting Netanyahu out of office - he was on trial for corruption, and it just picked up again, after being paused for the war.  And before October 7, a lot of Israelis were demonstrating against him.  

I don't know what anyone could do about Hamas; but a non-Netanyahu Israeli government might be able to negotiate something with the Palestinian Authority.  Except that Mahmoud Abbas was elected to a 4-year term as PA President in 2005, and they haven't had an election since then (not to mention that Abbas is 88 - definitely older than Joe Biden whom many are complaining about!).

And the trouble with Israel "destroying Hamas" is that Hamas is not just an organization (one whose leaders, I might add, don't live in Gaza) but an ideology.  Go back and read Lloyd Austin's comment again, he understands.  Every Palestinian Israel kills have relatives who are potential recruits for Hamas.

I wish I had answers.  Should the U.S. quit giving Israel money?  Are we then saying they shouldn't defend themselves?  Is the only real solution the one that neither side will agree to?

There's No Excuse for This

My last post was about believing absurdities leading to committing atrocities.  Well, we have one, and it's right down the block from my house, at Chabot Elementary School.  

We have no kids, but as neighbors, we're on the school mailing list.  Last night about 11:10PM I got an email from the principal.  They had arranged a playdate last Saturday for all the families and children of color who attend the school; they were trying to "to increase a sense of belonging among all of our students and their families."  It seems to have gone very well, especially in a school and a neighborhood that is mostly white, although the news reports suggest that the kids at the school are about 45% BIPOC. 

The email continued, "A member of our community found the idea of this playdate exclusionary and posted their thoughts and questions on Reddit.  This post has gone viral inviting emails and calls from all sorts of anonymous folks who do not understand what we are trying to do at Chabot and in OUSD."  And finally the principal included this appalling message:

“Hi there you racist pieces of sh**! Just wanted to stop by and let you know that if you keep this sh** up we're going to put you back in chains or in the jungle where you belong. Go ahead and keep pushing for segregation. If you want a race war we'll f***ing give you one and you won't like how it ends. Have a wonderful day :)”

This is a school that serves children from kindergarten to 5th grade.  I was and am appalled.  But I wasn't surprised when I left the house at around 10AM to go to an exercise class and saw the school intersection blocked off with crime tape, at least 2 Oakland Police cars there, a couple of Oakland cops walking around, and a person being interviewed by someone carrying a TV camera.  I walked down to see what was up and was told by an ABC reporter (yes, I'm apparently somewhere on ABC's coverage, although I haven't found myself yet; 2 of my friends have contacted me!) that there had been a bomb threat!  I now know from the news coverage that the bomb threat came via email at 7:30 this morning, fortunately before the normal start of class, and that the police, the FBI, and a bomb dog unit were going through the school to make sure it was clear.

If you Google Chabot Elementary Oakland CA today you'll see all the coverage. By noon when I returned from my exercise class it had all been cleared away - I assume they didn't find a bomb.  But it looks like the principal has decided not to have any classes today; there are no kids on the grounds.  I was relieved to see an Oakland police car turning the corner by the school as I left on an errand this afternoon.

There is no excuse for this crap.  Wikipedia says, "There is broad consensus across the biological and social sciences that race is a social construct, not an accurate representation of human genetic variation." I agree with Wikipedia that the genetic differences between the races are smaller than 1%.  

 The whole "race" business was invented by our European ancestors, centuries ago, to explain why they kept finding people (in the areas they were colonizing) who didn't look like them or act like them.  You may not have European ancestors, but I do.  I'm afraid the whole "race" business was really developed because a portion of the human race wants to have someone they can look down on, someone they can feel superior to - because they are disturbed by the people who (for financial, social, or political reasons) are "superior" to them.  We clearly have some of those people making trouble at Chabot Elementary.  I wish they would grow up and get a life.

If You Believe Absurdities ...

 Apparently Voltaire never quite said exactly the quote that's been attributed to him:  

Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities

But that statement has been around long enough that, when I applied to attend the University of California at Berkeley, around 1962 or 63, it was offered to me as a possible subject for the 500-word essay I was expected to submit with my application.  I don't recall what the other possible subjects were.  I chose that one, and drafted a handwritten page or so (on the application) on why it is right.  (At the time I didn't know it was attributed to Voltaire.)  Cal admitted me for the 1963-64 year.

That was (my God!) sixty years ago.  Voltaire has been dead for roughly 250 years.  But the statement stands.  And as I look around today, I see more atrocities being committed, by people who believe absurdities, than I want to consider.  I'm not going to tell you what I think the atrocities are because I don't want to get into an internet screaming match.  But there are dozens of them, being committed by people in the U.S. and elsewhere.  

This isn't a good sign, people.  I think I remember a time when we could agree on the basic facts of life and the world, but we seem to have lost that.  It worries me.  I wish I could close this post with a witty remark, but all I can come up with is, it worries me.

More Labor Issues

I can't get away from this.  NPR this morning covered 2 labor related issues.  The first one was the recent contract negotiations with rail workers - the guys who build and maintain the tracks - to provide them with paid sick leave!  They've gotten 4 paid leave days per year, plus 3 "personal days," with most of the major rail lines.  They're still negotiating with BNSF.

The second was about a new federal law providing pregnant works with "reasonable accommodations" at work, with tales of women who were fired because they asked for things like a bottle of water at their work station, and a temporary shift to a position with less heavy lifting.

All I could think as I listened to this was the lyrics from Bodies on the Line (see this post http://hederascorner.blogspot.com/2023/06/labor-issues-are-still-with-us.html) where the management was responding to worker requests for sick time by saying, "Die, and prove it."

Die, and prove it.  And I thought we'd moved on.

Labor Issues are Still With Us

 On May 19, as a member of the Oakland Symphony Chorus, I participated in the spectacular (if I may brag!) world premiere of Bodies on the Line, an oratorio commissioned by the Symphony's late director Michael Morgan, about the 1937 auto workers sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan.  I've been rehearsing that for almost 6 months.  It's full of facts about what happened in the old GM auto plants, and what the strikers wanted, and every time I turn around these days, I hear echoes of those lyrics.  

For example, the first of the strikers' eight demands was the end of piecework pay, to be replaced by a daily salary.  A few weeks before performance, there was an article on NPR about the law, passed by California in 2022, banning piecework pay in the garment industry in California!  In 2022 they were still paying garment workers piecework!  And of course we regularly hear that Starbucks workers are trying to form a union, and the workers at Trader Joe's in Rockridge (a little over half a mile from my house in north Oakland) are trying to organize a union.  And on and on.

Today I heard another story on NPR that brought the oratorio lyrics back to me with a bang.  It was a story about a ceremony in (I think) Stratton, Ohio, where the W. H. Sammis coal plant will shut down in mid-July.  It sounded kind of like a memorial, if not a funeral, for the plant, which has operated in the area since 1959.  The plant had employed the people of Stratton (population under 300) for most of their lives.  And listening to this story, another lyric came back to me.  Late in the oratorio, during the strike, the chorus sings about it, and everyone but the altos was in favor of the strike (I sing alto).  The altos sang, "What would we do without GM?  It's GM who feeds us, who feeds the people of Flint."  And you know, I listened to the story of the memorial to a dying coal plant in Stratton, Ohio, and those words ran through my mind; and I cried.  I'm crying now.  These are stories about human beings, and sometimes we're not as much in control as we think.

The A's Are Leaving Oakland

 So - the A's have signed up to buy land for a stadium in Las Vegas.  Many people in Oakland are furious - many of my friends are.  I sympathise with them; but I'm not furious. This is going to annoy them, but I want to speak my mind.

I can't deny that the Coliseum is a mess, although it's easier to get to than the proposed stadium at Howard Terminal would have been.  Coliseum even has a BART station, with a pedestrian walkway to the stadium, and lots of parking.  The proposed stadium near the Port of Oakland is at least half a mile from BART and is not served by any major bus lines.  At one point the A's were suggesting an overhead tram arrangement to get to the stadium, but I haven't heard that in quite a while.  (For those who don't know, Howard Terminal is the name of a part of the Port of Oakland facility that the A's wanted do buy.)

I've been in Jack London Square, and I know the area around the port.  It hasn't got parking.  It isn't set up to manage heavy traffic.  The main traffic street along the waterfront has an active railroad line, for God's sake, which I know carries Amtrak passengers and I'm fairly sure also carries freight to and from the port.  How would that fit in with 35,000 people on game day??  I know that both the Port and the railroad people opposed the site.s

The housing they propose would be nice, we can always use more housing; I don't recall hearing how much of it would be affordable.  But they're also suggesting 270,000 square feet of retail space (along with 1.5 million of "commercial space").  If you don't live in Oakland you may not know how much of the existing retail space has "For Rent" signs, but it's a lot.  Who do they think will rent all that retail space??  

I've never heard an A's person admit to this, but I've been convinced since it was first proposed that they A's want a baseball stadium on a waterfront - because the Giants have one.  That's all this is about.  They thought they could con Oakland into paying for a lot of the infrastructure upgrades this would need.  But they forgot one thing:  Port of Oakland is a working port, a major container ship facility.  There is water traffic (BIG ships!) in and out of there all the time.  The Giants' nice waterside stadium went in long after the Port of San Francisco stopped being a working port, now it's mostly cruise ships, and they're farther north.  Everyone thinks the people who hang out in canoes in McCovey Cove, trying to catch foul balls, are really cute.  You couldn't have that outside a Howard Terminal stadium; not with container ships going back and forth in a relatively narrow estuary.  McCovey Cove backs onto the Bay.

So they're going to Las Vegas to play ball, they say, in a stadium they say will have a retractable roof.  Have fun playing there in the summer, boys.  I thought that about the Raiders, too, but they usually play in the fall and winter.  Still, they start in September.  I used to visit Vegas regularly to see my sister, and summer is not fun.  I've seen 117 in the shade (and no shade!) in September.  Better keep that retractable roof closed, and turn on the A/C.

Fighting the Phishers

 We've all gotten them - the phishes.  The email about a purchase on your Amazon account that doesn't exist, with a link that doesn't lead to Amazon.  And others.  Now they've found my cell phone number and they're texting me with phishes.  In the last 2 days I've gotten 2 texts that claimed to be about my EBT card.  (For the non-Californians - EBT stands for Electronic Benefits Transfer; and an EBT card is basically a debit card you can use to buy food.  It's also called CalFresh, and SNAP, and it's food stamps.  I don't have one.)

Well, at the end of the '90s, I was working in the data center of a major bank, and I was the team lead of the group that set up the bank's first SMTP server, which allowed email exchanges with the rest of the internet.  I saw the first phishes develop, lousy spelling and all.  I've watched them get weirder, but there's always something that isn't right.  In the texts about my EBT card (which doesn't exist), the phone number to call was not the phone number you get when you go to the EBT site.  

I decided to be a good citizen and make sure they knew they were being phished, so I called the real number and waded through the menus until I got a human.  When I told her, you're being phished, she said grimly, "We know."  (If you look at their main page, there's a big "Beware of Scams" notice.)  So I said, OK, I just wanted to make sure you knew, and I hope you catch the bastards.  

There was a brief pause, and she answered in the least "official" tone you could imagine, "You are so right, sister, and I hope they put them underneath the jail!"

I hope I made her day.

King Charles III

 Queen Elizabeth II is dead, God rest her; and her son Charles Philip Arthur George reigns as King Charles III.  

Why does that name bother me?  He could have decided to use any of his names; his grandfather, George VI, was called Albert Frederick Arthur George, and chose to reign as George.  So if Charles Philip Arthur George chooses to reign as Charles III, why not?  Who was Charles II?  For that matter, who was Charles I?  

I warn you, succession to the British throne depended on primogeniture (who is the eldest legitimate child - a son, for preference; daughters only succeed if there are no sons).  So this gets really complicated.  I've gotten all these details from Wikipedia.

When Queen Elizabeth I died without issue in 1603, the Tudor royal family was extinguished, and the next family with an actual claim to the throne was the Stuarts, represented by James VI of Scotland (1567-1625).  He added the title James I of England and Ireland when he succeeded (1603-1625).  

James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots and her King Consort, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who had a claim to the English throne through a grandmother, Queen Margaret Tudor, daughter of King Henry VII of England.  And when James VI and I died in 1625, his oldest surviving son Charles succeeded him as Charles I.

Charles I (1625-1649) was born in Scotland but moved to England after his father inherited the throne.  His reign was tumultuous and relatively short - he believed firmly in the divine right of kings, and he argued with the English Parliament almost immediately.  For one thing, he believed he could impose taxes without consulting Parliament.  He also married a Catholic (Parliament was heavily Puritan), although he supported High Anglican clerics.  He went to war with Parliament's New Model Army (look up Oliver Cromwell), lost a couple of times, and was tried, convicted, and executed for treason in January 1649.

We've all just learned that the crown passes to the heir immediately on the king or queen's death.  But not in this case; the country was at war.  Charles II was proclaimed King of Scotland by the Scottish Parliament on 5 February 1649.  There was no King of England and Ireland during the period called the Interregnum or English Commonwealth, which was a de facto republic led by Oliver Cromwell.  

Charles II lost the Battle of Worcester to Cromwell on 3 September 1651 and ran to the Continent, spending the next 9 years in exile in the coastal countries facing Britain.  Cromwell died in 1658, producing a political crisis that led to the restoration of the monarchy and an invitation to Charles II to return and rule, which he did.  He was 30.  He ruled until he died in 1685, quarrelling regularly with Parliament about religion, especially after his brother James became a Catholic. He left no legitimate children (but at least 12 illegitimate!).

That was the end of the Charleses, and pretty much of the Stuart dynasty.  James II succeeded his brother Charles in February 1685 and was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, mainly because he was Catholic and had just had a son, which meant he could found a Catholic dynasty.  In 1688 Parliament invited William of Orange (a Protestant grandson of England's Charles I, married to James II's eldest daughter) to invade, which led to James eventually settling in France and William and his wife Mary taking over the throne by invitation, after a not very serious battle.  Neither one lived very long and they were succeeded by Anne, James' youngest daughter) for about 5 years.

But the Stuart dynasty produced one more Charles, who tried to become Charles III in the 1760s:  Charles Edward Stuart, also known as Bonnie Prince Charlie.  He didn't do very well at it but he made a lot of noise.  Just read the Wikipedia article.

At this point I'll quit listing kings.  In 1714, after Queen Anne's death, the House of Hanover was invited to the throne, because the Elector of Hanover was married to the granddaughter of James I and VI and heiress presumptive to the throne.  Believe it or not, the Hanovers are still on the throne.  Queen Victoria was in the Hanover line; the family name changed to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha when she married Prince Albert of that house.  And yes, it's still there - Saxe-Coburg-Gotha became Windsor in 1917, by royal proclamation.  In 1917 it was a little embarrassing for the royal house of Britain to have a German family name.  So King Charles III is of the house of Windsor, once upon a time Hanover.  

But every time I see "King Charles III", I think of Bonnie Prince Charlie.  I wish the new King Charles III better luck than the Bonnie Prince had.

I Can't Understand Why He's Not Behind Bars

I love the conversations I get into when I'm waiting for something - in this case for a shot, at Kaiser's injection clinic Monday.  (What shot?  None of your business.)  The clinic has a set of chairs to wait in, you only stand in line to register; I started talking to the nice woman in the next chair.  After some brief political rumbles about The Former Guy (we agreed about him), she leaned over and whispered that to me.

I have to agree with her - with everything he's done, he should be in jail, or at least under indictment.  But I do understand why he isn't.

First of all, America has never (thank God!) had a president who behaved like that.  Who assumed that the rules, the laws, didn't apply to him.  (The attempts to declare the 2020 election invalid.)  Who assumed everything in his vicinity belonged to him.  (The multiple boxes of paperwork that should never have been moved to Mar-A-Lago.)  He breaks the conventions and the laws with such aplomb that your first response is, "What the hell?"  It's taken a while for all of us to realize just how bad it is.

But he's used to getting away with stuff, and he always has lawyers in his service who are happy to delay and argue and put things off until everyone gives up.  (Given how he tends not to pay people if they don't get the results he wants, I don't know why they work for him, but they do.)  Also, if he ever goes to a trial, there may be people on the jury who approve of him.  So any case against him has to be absolutely solid - iron clad and proven.  Unarguable.  I believe that's why Merrick Garland's Justice Department is taking its cautious time building the case - because they can't lose this case.  I genuinely believe that if He Whom I Will Not Name is elected president again, we can kiss democracy and the rule of law goodbye.  And I think Mr. Garland knows that.

The founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution built a government that assumed all educated men of good will (that's who they thought would be in government) understood the rules of behavior, the checks and balances, that were laid out in it.  They never in their lives imagined a man like this - who is not educated, who has good will only for himself, who doesn't think he has to obey anything or anyone, and particularly who cannot bear to lose.  

I wonder who would now be Attorney General if Merrick Garland had been appointed to the Supreme Court in 2016.

I Spit On You

 The message in the title is directed to certain members of the Supreme Court of the United States.  SCOTUS has thrown out the Roe vs. Wade decision that made abortion legal at the federal level for 50 years.  And now that the federal protection is gone, state after state is moving to eliminate abortion entirely. 

This is going to kill women.  Lots of women, especially poor and black women.  Women who already have 3 or 5 kids and can't afford to feed any more.  

This decision was made by 5 men and a woman.  I am appalled that a woman could do that to her sisters; but I understand she belonged to a patriarchal sect which believed that women should obey men.  Hence the betrayal - she did what the men wanted.

Full disclosure:  I don't have a dog in this fight.  Yes, hedera is a woman, but I'm well past menopause, and I won't ever have to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.  I'm not affected here.  But I feel for the women who can't afford the contraceptives, who can't afford to feed one more kid, who are underage and can't have a child without blowing away the education that would allow them to feed and clothe it.

The current majority on the Supreme Court is working on eliminating the 19th and 20th centuries, and throwing the U.S. back to the 18th century, when only landowning white men could vote, and women were their husbands' chattel property - along with the black slaves who served both of them.  And nobody who wasn't a heterosexual white male had any rights at all.  Am I overstating?  I don't think so.  Clarence Thomas has already suggested eliminating the court decisions that allowed gay sex, gay marriage, and contraception!

With all that in mind, I repeat my initial statement to the 6 judges of SCOTUS who did this:  I spit on you.  You are a disgrace to your office.

I except the three dissenters.  I do not spit on them; I thank them for their courage.

Guns and Originalists

More mass shootings.  More discussions of gun control.  More worries about it, because a judge recently upheld upheld a California law which would ban the sale of semiautomatic rifles to persons under 21 but was overruled by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, on the "originalist" assumption that "the arming of young adults is a tradition dating to the nation's founding."  This produced an absolutely reasonable letter to the editor a few days later in which the writer made the following arguments:

When the Second Amendment was written, most young people lived in rural areas and had to defend themselves against wild animals and roving bands of marauders, as well as having to hunt for food. Those in the more urban coastal cities had to worry about British invaders. Many had to provide their own weapons to serve in the militia.

Thank you, Joseph Chance of Emeryville; you're perfectly right. But you left out some other important differences between guns in the late 18th century and now.  I found all this information in an interesting site called NCPedia, a North Carolina historical site - I've linked it, and will now summarize what it says.  But do go read it.

In the 18th century, European militaries used muskets.  The British, being the ones we were fighting, used a musket they called a Brown Bess; but all muskets were alike.  The NCPedia site links a video showing how to fire a musket.  They were not rifles because the barrel wasn't rifled.  They weighed 10 pounds.  A 75 caliber musket had a barrel 3/4" in diameter and it could shoot anything smaller than that.  They had no sights.  You just pointed and pulled the trigger.  It was meant to fire at a rank of men, standing next to each other, shooting at you.  Also, you can load a musket in about eight seconds.

American settlers generally used flintlock rifles, although the British had made them illegal.  Rifles had (of course) rifled barrels (which spins the bullet and makes it fly straight), and sights - you could aim them at something and probably hit it.  Or him - that's why the British said they would hang any man caught with a rifle.  The Americans tended to aim at officers, and medics, not just the front rank.

Here's my point:  It takes two to three minutes to load a flintlock.  It was designed for hunting, not fighting.  And it has a lot of moving pieces.  At this point I strongly recommend you go to the site - Firing a musket: 18th-century small arms | NCpedia - and read the section labeled, How a flintlock works, because I couldn't possibly tell it as well as the man who wrote the article.  He does this sort of thing to educate people.

Having absorbed this very brief summary of the guns that were around when the Second Amendment was written, I now urge you to stop a minute and think about modern semi-automatic rifles.  These are not the same as those old rifles, and they don't require anything like the skill and experience it took to shoot a flintlock.  Any idiot can fire a modern semi-automatic, and a lot of idiots do.  Which is why the originalist argument that modern 18 year olds should be able to buy automatic rifles because 18th century 18 year olds had rifles is ridiculous.  Two of the 3 appeals court judges in this ruling were appointed by Donald Trump.  The third was a temporary on assignment from New York, appointed by Bill Clinton.

Because We Say So - Marijuana

Full disclosure:  I don't use marijuana.  I tried it once in college and was not impressed.  I also don't smoke cigarettes; with my tendency toward asthma, I don't like inhaling smoke.  And I no longer drink alcohol.  So I have no stake in this.

But I have always wondered:  why is it, that people can buy and consume booze and cigarettes with no issues, but for decades, if they bought marijuana, they were setting themselves up for arrest and possible prison.  It's not the addictive properties; as far as I know, pot isn't addictive, and alcohol and tobacco are.  Too much alcohol, too much tobacco, will kill you; even the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration admits that “No death from overdose of marijuana has been reported.”  I've lost at least 3 relatives to entirely legal tobacco use.

A very interesting post by Becky Little on history.com (Why the US Made Marijuana Illegal) confirms what I remember reading elsewhere.  In the 19th century ("at least since the 1830s"), marijuana was a normal part of the medical pharmacy.  It has real medicinal uses; we've determined recently that it can help with epileptic seizures.  I've seen boxes in museums that were used by 19th century ship's doctors; they have a partition for marijuana.  This was a normal medical tool.  You could buy it in a pharmacy.  And yet, between 1916 and 1931, 29 states outlawed marijuana; and the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 (they couldn't even spell it) banned it nationwide, in the face of objections from the American Medical Association!

Given all our recent discussions of systemic racism, I concluded that it was banned in the '30s because it was a drug largely used by people of color - I was thinking about the Harlem Renaissance in the '20s.  I was right about the systemic racism, but wrong about which people of color.  According to Ms. Little, during and after the Mexican Revolution in 1910, a lot of Mexicans immigrated to the United States.  These Mexicans smoked marijuana to get high, and they terrified the good people of the United States, who didn't understand people who were too poor to drink booze to get high.

This has been fully written up by Eric Schlosser in his book Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market, but I have to share some of the details because they are hilarious - and sad.  The Texas police apparently believed that marijuana incited violent crimes (it doesn't), including a "lust for blood" (ditto), and that it gave people "superhuman strength" (no, it doesn't do that either).  But people were additionally terrified by a 1936 movie (?!) called Reefer Madness, which warned parents that drug dealers would invite their teenagers to jazz parties and get them hooked on “reefer.”  The Marihuana Tax Act passed the next year, and the feds and the states continued to increase punishments for the substance until the people they were arresting morphed into upper-middle-class white college students, in the late 1960s.

Marijuana is now legal in California, and in a number of other states; and so it should be.  I know people who use cannabidiol for medical conditions, especially cancer treatments.  It's still illegal at the federal level.  

We banned the use of marijuana because we didn't like or understand the people who used it, because they didn't look like us or speak our language, and in spite of the fact that we knew the substance was medically useful.  How stupid was that?  Let's eliminate the Federal ban and go back to the 19th century, but with better technology.

Education in Texas

 One of the people I follow on Facebook is Heather Cox Richardson, a political historian who writes interesting posts about current events.  She wrote one yesterday (10-16-21) on a new Texas law which requires teachers to "present opposing views on controversial subjects." Like racism. And the Holocaust. That's right, Texas teachers may be expected to present "both sides" of the Holocaust. I didn't think the Holocaust had another side, unless you are a Nazi who believes in Aryan superiority - aka white superiority.

Worse, Texas has passed a bill on Critical Race Theory (S.B. 3), which will go into effect in December, laying out exactly what should be taught about what we used to call civics: "the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment in self-government; the history, qualities, traditions, and features of civic engagement in the United States; the structure, function, and processes of government institutions at the federal, state, and local levels.” This new law essentially limits the study of these things to certain specific documents and people.

I don't want to quote her entire essay, it's quite long, but if you are on Facebook, look it up. We should all read it.

What blew me away were the items and people who may not be taught: the writings of George Washington! Anything about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings! The history of Native Americans and of "founding mothers and other founding persons!" Frederick Douglass! I could go on. It essentially restricts the history of the U.S. and its government to the brilliant deeds of a few white men, leaving out anything that might make white men look bad. Like systemic racism, and genocide of Native Americans, and the fact that until the 20th century, married women were essentially their husbands' property.

I stewed about this all morning - really. History is important to me. If we don't know how we got here, how do we know where we're going? And facts are important to me - if you don't know all the facts, you make wrong decisions. But as I stewed, something occurred to me.

These legislators have forgotten the Internet. (Based on observation of various elected bodies, many of the people elected barely know how to send email.) Many of the kids whose education they want to warp have access to the Internet, and know how to use Google, especially after the last year and a half of virtual learning. If you know how to ask the questions, the Internet will tell you anything you want to know, whether the State of Texas likes it or not. I encourage myself that at least some Texas kids may start wondering about what was left out, and asking the questions.