Give Us Money Or We'll Pledge

As I usually do on Saturday, I've been listening to KQED, being a devotee of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. In the break we got the local announcements, including the current round of warnings that the winter pledge drive is scheduled to begin next week. Last fall KQED did pretty well with a "pre-pledge" drive, which urged people to go online and pledge in advance, with the bait that if KQED got enough money up front, the pledge drive could be shortened or, at best, eliminated. They got 6 pledge days worth last fall; this time I think they're only 2 days to the good, so far.

What I realized today is that the wording of these announcements, all friendly and well-meaning as they are (and it's all voluntary of course), is like a shakedown. Give us money or we'll do something you won't like. As shakedowns go, a pledge drive is pretty innocent, and many people were going to donate anyhow; I'm just shaking my head at the way they're presenting it.

I'm also fascinated by the fact that they're only shaking down their Internet-enabled listeners (because, of course, the web site is there; the people who donate by mail already have; and the people who want to donate by phone need someone to answer the phone...).

But it's a good cause, and I'll even endorse it: readers in Northern California, please go to the KQED web site and donate now, so they'll shorten the pledge drive and I won't have to listen to so many pledge breaks!

Who, me? I donate during the fall pledge drive...

And then there's Mrs. Henderson

Speaking of movies, last week we watched Mrs. Henderson Presents. If you haven't seen this movie, go rent it now. It is hilarious. Dame Judi Dench is known for her great dramatic roles, and there are some pretty dramatic scenes in the movie; but trust me, the woman is also a brilliant comedian with wonderful timing. I'm not going to blow the surprises by describing any of the delectable scenes, but do see it.

Fred and Ginger

Now that it's dark on Saturday evenings again, we're watching the occasional movie again, and yesterday we watched Swing Time, starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. This is the second Astaire/Rogers picture I've seen; a couple of years ago the Oakland Paramount showed Top Hat on the big screen with Dolby surround sound, always the best way to see a movie.

I have to admit up front, both of them are amazing dancers, and the costumes are fabulous, and the dancing set pieces are a wonderful show. I'm even more amazed at Astaire's stamina and brilliance because he smokes like a chimney. Ginger Rogers has an occasional puff, but Astaire has always got one going. Nobody was surprised at this in 1937, but it looks a little off now. At least, to a Californian.

What I regretfully admitted to myself last night was: there's nothing to these movies apart from the dancing (and maybe a song or so by Jerome Kern, or, so that's where "A fine romance" came from). Plots? You wanted a plot? For that matter, did you want reasonable dialogue? Go rent a Thin Man movie. Those are really funny, and the humor is - it's kinder. The humor in the Astaire movies, especially Swing Time, is pretty close to slapstick. If you like the Three Stooges, you might enjoy it; I don't. And the scene in Swing Time where Astaire performs as "Mr. Bojangles", in blackface, probably looked fine in 1937.

Not only is there no decent dialogue and no plot: frankly, the characters Fred Astaire plays are not very nice people. He plays sleazy opportunists (especially in Swing Time), and after about 10 minutes, I just want to smack him upside the head. Of the two movies, I'd say Top Hat was better: the plot had a little more to it, some of the dialogue was almost witty, the secondary characters held up well. But I don't think I'll rent another Fred-and-Ginger.

The Surge

So, the brilliant new idea is a "surge" of troops. We're going to flood Baghdad with American soldiers, to "stabilize the government." This drives me crazy. This whole situation is insane, as defined by Albert Einstein: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

We are an invading army in Iraq. That's why they keep shooting at us. You'd think even Dubya would get that.

The only people in Iraq who don't want the American troops to leave are the Sunnis; they know the Shiite militias are after them and the American troops are their only hope. Whenever we leave, now or in a decade, the Shiite militias will slaughter Sunnis indiscriminately (instead of just sporadically as they're doing now); and we will not be able to stop it. This has been inevitable ever since we insisted on democratic elections; 60% of the Iraqi population is Shiite, and they now run the government.

I wasn't blogging then; but before the invasion I said that if we invaded Iraq and took down Saddam Hussein, the ultimate result would be a Shiite theocracy. We're halfway there.

Everyone wonders why Nouri al-Maliki doesn't take down Muqtada al-Sadr. Simple - they're in the same bullpen; and in any case the Mahdi Army is better armed than anything on the ground in Iraq except our troops and maybe the Kurds. Mr. Bush makes noises about new constitutions and national unity governments and sharing oil revenues; this will never happen because the only people who would gain from it are the Sunnis, who are only 20% of the population and hated by everyone else because Saddam Hussein was a Sunni.

This is also why we can't stop the Sunni insurgency: they're fighting for their lives and they know it. Not to mention that, with all the killing there's been so far, in a society that still believes in the blood feud, the revenge killings will go on for years.

How many ways do we have to say this before Dubya hears? We. Can. Not. Win. In. Iraq. No matter how you define "win." We made the mess; but we can't clean it up. Only the Iraqis can clean it up; and we probably won't like the way they decide to do it. There's no way we can impose a solution on them unless we completely take over, establish a puppet government, and rule the place as a satrapy. I don't see Congress funding that.

The only reasonable course for us, in this mess now, is to start pulling our troops out; at least get our own people out of harm's way. Then Iraq will become a failed terrorist state? Iraq is a failed terrorist state now. Iran will influence the Iraqi government? It does that now. Given the stubbornness and stupidity of the current administration, I see no way out of this that won't leave the entire Middle East a flaming mess, and all America's fault.

Actually, there's one option that might - just might - restore some of America's reputation. Nancy Pelosi has taken it off the table; but we need to put it back. We need to impeach both the President and the Vice President, because they are both neck-deep in the lies that got us here, and put a new President in the oval office. A new President, a new administration, could break with the failed policies of the past and start some real diplomacy; and then maybe we would have a chance to clean things up.

Of course, Nancy Pelosi is next in line for the presidency after Dick Cheney. I can see where she would hesitate to give the appearance of reaching for the office. But we could do worse. In fact, we have.

Senator Boxer is Right

Senator Barbara Boxer is taking some flack for her remarks to Condoleeza Rice over the Iraq war. She made what seems to me to be a self-evident statement:

"Who pays the price? I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young," to serve, Boxer told Rice. "You're not going to pay a price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families.''

None of these personal facts is a state secret; and yet everybody is yelling, "Cat fight!" and making noises about "vicious feminine politics". Tony Snow even said that it was "a great leap backward for feminism.'' Feminism is not a subject on which I normally consider Tony Snow an expert, somehow.

What this really demonstrates is the fact that the news media (not to mention the Bush White House!) still doesn't regard women as real participants in the political process, and I'll prove that. Imagine it's 1973. The U.S. Secretary of State is Henry Kissinger, who is single; and that exact remark is made to him by Senator J. William Fulbright, who at that time was 68 years old, 2 years older than Barbara Boxer is today.

I have no idea what Fulbright's family was like, but given his age, he could quite possibly have said something like that to Kissinger about the Vietnam War; and no one would have said a thing about it. If you don't like Fulbright in the role, pick any senator from the 70's who opposed the Vietnam war and was in his middle to late sixties, with children and grandchildren.

This whole flap is because one female politician stated a series of obvious facts to another female politician; if one man had said it to another, or if Senator Boxer had said it to a childless man, it wouldn't have made the news. Senator Boxer is refusing to apologize, and she should refuse to apologize; if stating facts is offensive, we're all in trouble. The furor is being stirred up by the Bush White House, which is trying to devalue Senator Boxer's statements by labeling them a woman's opinion.

Things That Go Bump In The Night

There's an old story that I've read in more than one novel set in rural England before the 19th century:

A man comes home from a journey and asks his servant if anything happened while he was gone.
"The dog died, master."
"How did the dog die?"
"In the fire, master."
"What fire?"
"The barn burned down, master."
"How did the barn burn down?"
"The candles at your wife's funeral, master."

I've never seen it go farther than this; but as a slow revelation of disaster I've always thought it was blackly funny.

I had a "what happened while I wasn't looking" moment this morning on the Internet. We're having a cold snap here in California, the worst in 10 years - maybe the worst in 20. (All of you having ice storms in Texas and Missouri, just quit sniggling. 24 degrees Fahrenheit is cold for a seaside town, even if you're colder.) So the first thing I did when I brought my computer up was to check the National Weather Service site, to check last night's low. (It was 24 degrees.) And the first thing I saw when I checked the special weather statement was, "the tsunami watch for the central California coast has been removed."

Tsunami watch? Why are we having a tsunami watch? You already know, of course, about the 8.2 earthquake in the Kuril Islands at 20:24 PST on January 12 (that would be last night), but at 9 AM this morning, I didn't. Now, of course, the tsunami warning makes sense; and I'm just grateful that all we had was a tsunami watch, and not another disaster like last year's little Christmas present.

8.2 is a helluvan earthquake, folks; it's roughly the estimated magnitude of the 1906 San Francisco quake, and according to Wikipedia is the equivalent of a gigaton of TNT. Nobody seems to have died in this one, which means the human race dodged a biiiiig bullet. Happy New Year.

The Death Penalty Again

I see this subject is back. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel has ruled that California's current procedure for lethal injection is so flawed that he'll declare it unconstitutional in 30 days if the state doesn't fix it. One problem, of course, is that the current method requires considerable medical expertise to administer, but no doctor in the state wants to have anything to do with it.

This was also Florida's problem, from the description I read of the recent botched execution there - the one that has caused Governor Jeb Bush, not normally a beacon of mercy and compassion, to suspend all elections in the state.

When the subject first came up last February, I posted a suggestion, which I still feel is sound, that we should quit pussyfooting around with lethal injections, and go back to the first and still most efficient method of humane execution ever invented: the guillotine. In further support of this argument, I'll point out that the guillotine can easily be operated by unskilled labor and no medical training is needed. Just a mop and a hose. Even Florida should have no trouble with it, as the guillotine also has no electrical connections. Given Florida's record with execution procedures, however, they should probably arrange for spotters, to make sure the executioner cuts off the correct head...

It's probably too much to suggest that we should just stop executing people. No, no - we can't do that.

A Modest Proposal for Global Warming

One of the problems with global warming is all the CO2 from cars, especially cars idling in traffic. I had a brainstorm the other day: I'm sure this will be a good idea. We should eliminate cars inside cities and use only public transit and horses. Yes, horses. OK, donkeys and mules too. Horses are generally pleasant creatures (unless ill-used), they go by themselves, they produce new horses at regular intervals with only vegetable inputs, and while they exhale carbon dioxide just as we do, they certainly don't put out as much as an idling SUV. And they use zero fossil fuels.

But they're slow, you say. Um, so is most city traffic. Would we really go that much more slowly on or behind a horse than we do in a traffic jam now? Look at how the bicycles whizz past you when you're stuck. Besides, we move too fast these days. Going more slowly would be good for us. We could still use cars on the freeway for long distances, where they get better mileage. I freely admit horses aren't so good for long distance travel.

What about the road apples? People welcomed cars as a solution to pollution in the last century because cars don't poop in the street. There's the brilliant idea. The streets were full of horse poop in the 19th century because it was waste; nobody could think of a use for it except fertilizer, and farmers had their own supply. Some farms are now taking their manure dumps and processing them to extract methane which they burn for heat and power. With today's technology, it could conceivably be profitable to pay for recycled horse manure to feed into a power generation plant. Once people know they will be paid for it, they'll pick it up; look at what they do with cans and bottles. Homes could have their own small co-generation plants, for the local horse's poop; it's another way to go off the grid.

Energy independence through horse manure! It's the wave of the future.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

It's been years since I allowed myself to boggle at advertising. I mean, you expect it to be weird, right? But a recent campaign by the agency for the California Milk Processor Board has gone beyond the weird.

The idea, you see, was that everybody likes milk and cookies. So, in order to make people want to go home and drink milk, the agency got permission to put scratch-and-sniff strips that smell like chocolate chip cookies, in bus shelters in San Francisco, so the people waiting for the bus would smell the lovely aroma and go home and get some milk.

OK, I like milk, and I like cookies; but what I see when I step on the scale makes me just a little reluctant to stuff my face with either of them. And, if I'm standing in a bus shelter, I'm not there to eat (except in extreme circumstances). I'm there to catch a fardling bus, or worst case to get out of the rain for a minute. I can and do ignore printed ads, but smells are much harder to ignore. (Which of course is why they tried this.) Also, I'm an asthmatic, and I'm sensitive to strong perfumes, so I dislike smells that other people impose on me. (I actually dislike almost everything that other people impose on me; let's don't even begin on those rolling boom boxes...) It's one thing to say that it smells like chocolate chip cookies; but if the smell isn't coming from actual cookies, then it's coming from some combination of chemicals, and who knows what allergic reactions they might cause.

The real issue with these smelly bus shelters is that the smell isn't there naturally, as in a local Mrs. Field's. It's being imposed artificially by the ad agency to make you want something; and that, folks, in a space where you go out of necessity, is too much. Not to mention that bus shelters in San Francisco are often occupied by homeless or merely poor people, who may not be able to afford either cookies or milk; and for them, it's not just an imposition; it's an insult.

I'm happy to say that the City of San Francisco has ordered the scented strips removed, after getting objections from people with chemical sensitivities. But it was a dumb idea, guys. Let's stick to cute posters. The city got some flack, in a blog on the SFGATE.com site, about the fact that they were removing cookie scented strips from local bus shelters which normally smell like urinals. Well, if I could remove that smell too, I would. Imagine the awfulness of a urine scented bus stop which also had the chocolate chip cookie strip; yikes.

New Look

Yes, I changed the look. I liked the old template but had gotten a little tired of it. This one appealed to me as appearing calming - I've always found harbors and bays and water's edges soothing. And it doesn't have the blaze of colors some of the templates have.

It's the same blogger, though. Still me.

Hope I will continue to hear from you all.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

Yes, I know that most of what they taught us in school about Thanksgiving wasn't precisely accurate. Although I do think the historian who claims there were no turkeys (spelled "turkies" in the 17th century) at the First Thanksgiving is overstating his case. Just because nobody wrote down, "We ate turkey" doesn't mean they didn't; and certainly the wildlife in that area at that time included turkeys. In fact, it still does, if you get far enough from town.

Just because the historical details have been muddled over the years by people trying to prove a point, doesn't mean that the whole idea of Thanksgiving is baloney. The basic idea of a day when you are thankful for what you have, with no specific requirement to tie those thanks to any religious celebration, is a good one. We spend too much time worrying about what we haven't got. This may be a disorder of youth, although God knows it isn't restricted to young people; but young people are immune and immortal. (Or think they are.) Older people are more aware of what they might not have. Most of my regular readers know that I have two replacement knees. I still give regular mental thanks for the simple, incredible fact that I can walk. Again. Without a cane, at a normal pace, for blocks, without any pain. I remember 5 years ago, looking out the window at people walking their dogs, at the joggers, and feeling a blinding envy.

I'm grateful that I live in a gorgeous house, in one of the most beautiful areas in the world, the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm grateful for the man I've been married to for twenty years. I'm grateful that I have as much as I need, and never have to wonder whether to pay the rent or buy groceries, because we always have money to do both. I'm grateful that I have a job which doesn't require me to stand for hours and be yelled at by angry customers, like the one my mother had. (The artificial knees don't stand as well as they walk...) Sometimes I'm just grateful that it's a beautiful day (it is today), or that a hummingbird is noshing on the Mexican sage in the front yard. Last week I was grateful - and laughing - to be able to watch the penguins in the Monterey Bay Aquarium hassle the photographer who was trying to take photos of them: they tried to eat his chinos, and his camera strap, when they weren't sitting on the aquarium lady and asking to be petted. (Now I know why the aquarium lady wears waterproof overalls.)

There are lots of things I don't have. I don't have an especially expensive car; but I have a good reliable comfortable vehicle. I don't have the latest snazzy techno-gadgets; but in general, I don't want the latest snazzy techno-gadgets. Although I do enjoy my iPod. I don't wear designer clothes; but at my weight, I'd look dreadful in designer clothes, all of which assume you can never be too rich or too thin. I have all the books I want. The point isn't what you have; it's whether you're satisfied with what you have.

People who are so poor they have to decide between paying the rent and the utility bill are, in fact, unhappy about what they haven't got; but those people, by God, have a right to be unhappy. The dissatisfaction I'm discussing here is usually in people who don't have to decide which bill to pay, and who are still not happy, because of what they don't have, but think they need. The ability to identify what you really need, and sort it out from what you merely want, is very liberating. It also frees you from the tyranny of things on sale: if you don't need something, and wouldn't use it, it's not a bargain, even if it is half price. This is why I don't belong to Costco: Costco's whole marketing strategy is based on getting people to buy stuff they don't really need, in quantities they don't really need, merely because it's on sale.

This has rather rambled on, but you get my point. And so I say: I'm thankful, and I hope all of you are thankful as well; more, I hope you all have things to be thankful for. Have a great day, and never eat anything bigger than your head (with thanks to B. Kliban).

Cleaning House

Well, the Democrats did it - they took back the House, and they have a razor-thin majority in the Senate. Really razor-thin when it will rely on Joe Lieberman, who lost the Democratic primary and went on to win his seat back not only without party support but with the Democrats supporting his opponent. Great start, guys. Actually, if I could say one thing to each member of the Democratic leadership, it would be Han Solo's advice to Luke Skywalker: "Don't get cocky."

Just to illustrate this, we now have Charlie Rangel, newly elected chief of the House Ways and Means committee, all set to reinstate the draft, a move that polls have shown is opposed by 70% of the American public. Nancy Pelosi is reported to be a great political leader. Surely she must see what a disastrous idea this is. Mind you, this isn't a new idea for Mr. Rangel - he's been pushing it for years. But if Pelosi can't herd her cats any better than this, the Democrats may have a very short time in power this round.

Mr. Rangel's chairmanship of Ways and Means illustrates something else that worries me about this Democratic takeover. Look at the list of committee chairmen. The Dems have stuck with straight seniority for chairmanships: that means there are only 2 committee chairmen under 60 (and none under 55), Kent Conrad of N. Dakota at Budget, and Tim Johnson of S. Dakota at Ethics. Furthermore, three of the new chairmen are over 80: Akaka and Inouye of Hawaii, and Byrd of West Virginia. I have the greatest respect for these men, especially Dan Inouye, but how about some new blood and new ideas?? I objected to Phil Angelides, as I've said elsewhere, because of my feeling that he ran for governor because it was "his turn." This is just more of the same: people are chosen to run the Congress, and the country, based on time in office, and we don't get the full benefits of any ideas the new folks might have.

I'm not arguing for legislative term limits. They are a disastrous idea, and the California legislature is the primary example of it. The only term limits we need are the ones we impose when we vote the rascals out. (Fairly drawn district boundaries and public financing of campaigns would help, too...) But I do think that the party and the country would benefit if legislative committee chairmanships rotated after a set number of years.

Incomprehensible

Like most of the rest of the universe, I can't imagine why O. J. Simpson has done it. Publish his appalling book, that is. There were I think 8 people in the country who actually gave him the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that he must be innocent because he was acquitted. He's just changed all 8 minds.

I've read at least one speculation that he did it because he can't stand not to be in the limelight; he's hooked on the talk shows and seeing his name in the paper. If that's true, he's even sicker than I thought, and I hope the trend continues of refusing to carry the book or air the interviews (except for Fox which will run anything), because that's the real punishment, and the only one that will hurt him.

The Sinking Ship

The rats are going over the rail. The doomed band is playing "Nearer my God to Thee" on the promenade deck of the Titanic. People and groups have come out against the current situation, that I never thought to see:

Richard Perle, the anchor of Republican defense departments since Ronald Reagan, has said that if he'd known how this would work out, he would have suggested other strategies.

Kenneth Adelman, who said that liberating Iraq would be "a cakewalk", now says the Bush national security team is "among the most incompetent teams in the postwar era".

Most telling to my mind, the Military Times Media Group, a Gannett subsidiary which puts out Army Times and its sister sheets, will publish an editorial Monday in all its titles (liberally leaked in advance), calling for Rumsfeld's dismissal, on the grounds that he "has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large."

If you yourself have never been around the military, you may not realize how apocalyptic this is. They have to be hearing this from their readership, the serving military; in fact, the editorial will say that "active-duty military leaders are beginning to voice misgivings about the war's planning and execution." The American military just doesn't do that. The code that says you never criticize the brass is tremendously strong. But the American military is also nothing if not pragmatic, and the truth of the situation in Iraq is sinking in.

Online Networking

The online networking sites seem to be past it. Old news. According to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday, it's too, too exhausting to maintain an active social life online. "Social networking fatigue", they call it.

I'll admit I've been following the flap over MySpace and FaceBook and all the other online hot spots. I actually joined one of the "class reunion" sites, after my high school class had a reunion; but I've never found any real information there (why would you put real information up on a site like that?), and no one ever really tries to contact me. (My email address is there, not much else.)

The networking sites do remind me of something, though. They remind me of The Naked Sun, a novel Isaac Asimov wrote in 1957, when Tim Berners-Lee was 2 years old, computers took up entire rooms and had 64K of memory, and the World Wide Web wasn't even a hallucination. Except that the Inimitable Isaac hallucinated, in The Naked Sun, the planet Solaria, where people live one to a dwelling, miles apart, and never come together in person at all; where they communicate with each other by projecting images of themselves, through which they speak. Electronic communication in place of human interaction.

It isn't possible today to approach the astounding isolation of the Solarians; for one thing, there were only twenty thousand of them on the whole planet, a number which seems as absurd to us now as it did to Asimov's detective Elijah Baley, who lived on an Earth that was a massive rabbit warren of crowded multi-level cities, with no open space left - Baley is an agoraphobe. But it's possible for, say, an addicted gamer living alone to go for days without leaving the terminal except to get food, sleep, or relieve himself; never to see another human face or have a direct conversation. And in the cases where we approach this, we approach the Solarians - they were afraid of germs, of contagion, and so they stayed apart and only spoke with each other through electronic media.

It's dangerous for us to do this. We're social beings; we need other humans. We need to talk, sing, dance, eat with each other, even if none of it has any deep significance. The trouble with the networking sites is that they foster the illusion that you don't actually need to meet people in order to be their friends; and that is a contradiction in terms. Unless you actually meet someone, you will never know if they are honestly describing themselves, or merely sustaining a brilliant, coherent lie. As the cartoon says, "On the internet, no one knows you're a dog."

It isn't, by the way, necessary to have a purely electronic connection in order to lie to someone; I've read cases of extended deceptions done entirely by letter in the 18th century, when travel was very difficult. It's just easier on a terminal.

Leaving apart the issue of honesty and dishonesty, we need direct contact with each other because that is the kind of animals we are. We need to hear each other's voices, touch each other's hands. We need to get out in the sun, feel the wind, walk in the rain. If we isolate ourselves and never go outside, we harm ourselves; and we harm each other because we forget how to deal with each other. Let us try to be more together, to be in the real world, and not place a flat-screen terminal between us and reality.

And for those of you who comment on my blog, please don't take this to mean that I think you're lying to me about yourselves; in fact, I don't. I'm just aware that I'm accepting your word, the evidence of things not seen; as you accept my word about me.

The Radical Homosexual Agenda

Some of the GOP's favorite fighting phrases this election are "the homosexual agenda", and the "San Francisco liberal" attitude. If the Democrats win, Nancy Pelosi will likely be speaker of the House and all these awful things will come to pass. As a heterosexual resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, with homosexual friends and neighbors, I thought I'd try to give a general idea of what these things might be.

All the homosexuals I know are fully employed, middle-aged, middle-class people: a dentist, an insurance agent, a computer systems manager, a computer technician. Their hobbies as best I can observe them are gardening, singing (one of them sings in the choir of a landmark church), and camping. My neighbors across the street are quiet and reserved, but come over to chat with me, my husband, or the neighboring family with two small children. The computer technician does have a tendency toward unfortunate romantic entanglements, but no worse than some of my college roommates. If any of these people have an agenda, it's to pay the mortgage and retire in comfort. Some of them would certainly be married if it were legal; some of them have been together longer than some married couples I know.

I am completely baffled by the argument that extending the tax and legal benefits of marriage (which is what we're discussing here - the less formal benefits of marriage are already available to homosexuals) to people who are sexually attracted to their own gender, will contribute to the Downfall of the Institution of Marriage. With a 35-50% divorce rate in heterosexual marriages for the last several decades, how much worse can it get? And how does the idea of devoted, committed homosexual couples legally joined in marriage threaten it?

I refuse to discuss the Biblical pronouncements on the subject. Unless the U.S. actually does become a theocracy (I'm cautiously more optimistic that will not happen than I was a couple of years ago), the moral opinions of one or other religious group are their own business and should not be imposed on society at large. I include here Islamic puritans like the Wahhabists as well as Christian evangelists. If you, dear reader, are one of the people who responds with visceral disgust at the idea of gay sex, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

So what about the "liberal San Francisco agenda"? Oooo, terrifying. But it fascinates me that the GOP never actually says what the "liberal San Francisco agenda" is - it's a boogeyman, a frightening shadow in the corner. Shine a light on it, and it turns into:

• opposition to the Iraq war
  
• dismay at a foreign policy reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm in 1918 (read The Guns of August if you think I'm kidding)
  
• opposition to a skyrocketing budget deficit
  
• disgust at a level of corruption that reminds me of the Democrats just before they lost power the last time
  
• distress that half the population is without health insurance, coupled with fear that they could lose theirs next
  
• shame that people with full-time jobs are unable to afford a home and have to get groceries from the food bank

Maybe I am a San Francisco liberal but none of this sounds especially terrifying to me. The general burden seems to be: Democrats Will Raise Taxes and Spend The People's Money On The Poor. As opposed, I gather, to Republicans, who cut taxes, but spend the people's money anyhow, largely on the rich. If you don't think that thee and me is going to have to pay back that national debt, think again.

I just read an interview with Ben Cohen, formerly of Ben & Jerry's, who now spends his time arguing that we should quit building weapons that were useful against the Soviet Union and devote the money to:

education, health care, world hunger, energy independence and even a little debt reduction

instead of building Cold War holdovers like the F/A-22 fighter jet - really useful against the Taliban, I'm sure you'll all agree. Of course, the real reason we're still building the F/A-22 is all the jobs in all the districts of all the congressmen who vote to keep it going, not to mention all the campaign contributions they get from Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Ramblings

I haven't been posting enough lately; my job is getting in the way; for one thing, it sent me to Dallas for a week. (For that matter, my job is getting in the way of a lot of things, including getting enough sleep.) Blogging takes more effort than I realized - it takes thought and research. Also, rehearsals have started again - the Oakland Symphony Chorus is putting on a pair of Christmas concerts and we're desperately memorizing, which takes time away from the blogging too (not that I'm complaining about that!).

I'm still bemused by the fact that Dick Cheney can, in practically the same breath, insist that "a dunk in water" is a "no-brainer" (that is, waterboarding is acceptable if it saves lives) and still say, "We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in." This just staggers me. Is he actually not listening to what he's saying? Or does he believe that everything he says is true because he says it? - a level of folie de grandeur that would be amazing even in him.

Easterners believe that California has no seasons, but they're wrong; we have more subtle seasons. We're currently enjoying a lovely California autumn: the liquidambars and Chinese pistaches are turning color, the days are warm and windy, the nights are crisp, not too cold, with occasional foggy mornings. (Eat your heart out, Massachusetts!) The sun comes in the south-facing windows of our dining room in the mornings, the way the house was built to do on chilly mornings after the equinox. In 1917 when our house was built, they understood about orienting the house to the climate; we can also open windows and get cross-drafts. Of course, the liquidambars and Chinese pistaches are also dumping leaves on every flat surface, as is every other tree in the neighborhood; but that's part of the ambience, and raking them up is good exercise. For my husband.

Unfortunately, 400 miles south, the bad side of the California autumn is only 5% controlled, and authorities think someone deliberately set the Esperanza fire, an incomprehensible act which is right up there with Dick Cheney's remarks on torture. I've occasionally made the crack that California has two seasons, wet and on fire; the trouble is, I'm not kidding. They're offering half a million dollar reward for the perps, and I hope they have to pay it out.

And thank you, Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, for speaking truth to power. If you haven't been following his remarks on the Bush administration, you're missing some very straight talk.

Civil War in Iraq

Not that I've doubted this for several months now, but today's San Francisco Chronicle reprinted a NY Times article that makes it revoltingly clear what's going on in Iraq, at least in the south around Basra. What's going on is nothing more nor less than the Hatfields and the McCoys.

In one corner, we have Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army.

In the other corner, we have Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and its private army, the Badr Brigade.

These people are all Shiites. Theoretically they believe the same things and support the same things, and they all claim to be patriotic Iraqis (although SCIRI is widely believed to be supported and funded from Iran). What's really going on?

A dynastic rivalry between their two families has existed for decades and has carried over into a personal and political rivalry between the men, and their militias have periodically clashed.

"The split is very old, and it has caused a lot of tragedy," said Abd-Kareem al-Mahamedawy, one of Amara's most prominent political leaders and a moderate Shiite. "It's just a fight for power."

Just as I said: Hatfields and McCoys, but with private armies, which we, I point out, obligingly armed. According to the article, the stability of the current Iraqi government depends on the "truce" between these two factions; and as far as I can tell, they'd all rather duke it out for old times' sake than act together for the good of the country. The current eruption began when a local police official (Badr Brigade; in case you wondered about the rumors that the Shiite militias have infiltrated the police? All true) was killed in a bombing, and the police arrested the brother of the head of the local Mahdi Army unit. The next thing anyone knew, the city of Amara was under siege.

Why are we holding these guys' coats? (Apart from the fact that we started it by removing Saddam Hussein, who didn't take any crap from any of these yo-yos.) This isn't democracy and it never will be, as long as the place is ruled by the 21st century equivalent of the Montagues and the Capulets. The concept of turning a country that still practices the blood feud into a modern democracy is laughable (which goes for Serbia and Kosovo, too, I might add).

I remember thinking when we began this absurd incursion that what we'd end up with, after a "free" election, was a Shiite theocracy, because Shiites were 60% of the country. These developments actually convince me I may have been wrong; a Shiite theocracy would presumably enforce order. What we have here is total anarchy, where only the gun rules. We may have bigger guns; but there are 140,000 of our guys and 26 million Iraqis; and we have yet to see, anywhere, a standing army defeat an armed guerilla force on its own ground.

The sooner we bring our troops home and let the Iraqis fight this out among themselves, the better.

Why Not Angelides?

As a California Democrat of long standing (except, years ago, when I registered Republican so I could vote for Pete McCloskey in the primaries), I feel I ought to state publicly why I don't plan to vote for my party's candidate for governor.

Frankly, the main reason I don't want to vote for him is the impression I've gotten from him for the last 3 years. He doesn't want to be governor to fix what's wrong with the state, or to balance the budget, or do any of the things that come up in the campaign ads. He wants to be governor because he thinks it's his turn. He's been a faithful party hack for decades, and he's worked his way up to state office, and now he wants the top state office because he deserves it for all his work. I didn't watch the debate between him and the Gubernator, but I gather Arnold accused him of being part of the Davis machine. Well, he was part of the Davis machine, and Davis had a turn as governor, and now Angelides thinks it's his. I'm sorry, Phil, that's not how the game works. It may be how you think it works.

I have very mixed feelings about Arnold. I still think he's a poseur; but he has managed to produce the only bipartisanship the disgraceful California legislature has displayed in many years. I think he's going to win in a landslide, so I may treat myself to a protest vote for the Green party candidate. But I'm not voting for Angelides.

Gazanias

My husband divided the gazanias in the front yard yesterday. He planted them about 3 years ago, and if you don't divide them, they get leggy. Gazanias do well in the front yard; they're showy, reliable bloomers that don't mind if you only water them once a month.

We've been in the house for 20 years now, and we've only had gazanias for about 3 years. Why? Because gazanias aren't cold hardy. They die in a hard freeze. During the first 10 years we lived here, we had regular hard freezes - I still remember the time the water in the bird bath froze solid, all the way through; and the time I looked at the back of the East Bay Hills, from my office in Concord, California, and saw them covered with snow (I think down to 1,500 feet). We haven't had a hard freeze since I think 1998.

Can't be global warming. That's just a theory. Or so they say.

Invading Iran

This seems to be the latest hot item on our increasingly reality-deprived administration's agenda. Iran would be a threat if it had nuclear weapons; and it says it wants peaceful nuclear power, but it must be lying; so we have to plan to invade it. To protect freedom. Or something.

Yeah, right. In the first place, the Iranians are correct that they have as much right as any other idiot to peaceful nuclear power. (Not exactly how they say it.) I might even agree that the fact that they lie like rugs about what they're doing at Natanz and Bushehr (and wherever else) gives even rational people pause about what they're up to. But still:

Invade Iran? With what army? The army we have is tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the point that we're pullling people out of South Korea, which must amuse Kim Jong Il no end. No matter what Donald Rumsfeld thinks, if he thinks, you cannot do everything with unmanned drones. We'd have to put boots on the ground.

And there'd be no question of being greeted with flowers by a grateful populace. Weird as it seems, the government of Iran is democratically elected (the last election was at least as free and fair as the 2004 election in Ohio was). We'd be invaders, and every man's hand would be against us, and probably most of the women's. You all know perfectly well that if someone invaded the continental U.S., all those guns that us bleeding-heart liberals worry about would be turned on the enemy. From every rooftop and bush, just like in 1779. What makes the administration think the Iranians are any different from us?

Finally, if we do nuke Iran's nuclear installations (assuming someone in Washington knows where they really are, which I doubt; it's been thirty years since we had "humint," as the spooks call it, in Iran), we would become instant international pariahs. We are already the only people who have ever actually used The Bomb; and then, we were at war. I don't want to see us become the only people who have used The Bomb on a country that wasn't directly threatening them. Let's have NO first strikes.

I'm tired of this. I'm tired of watching a bunch of middle-aged power junkies, who never had the balls to put on a uniform and get shot at for their country's sake when it was their turn, wasting America's resources and ruining America's good name, for the sake of indulging their video-game wet dreams of world conquest. Why are these people not impeachable? Why are we still putting up with them?

Stop the Taliban

We have a priceless opportunity to stop the Taliban dead in its tracks before it takes over Afghanistan again, and it's very simple. All we have to do is legalize opiate drugs. The Afghan opium crop this year is up 59%, and is now providing 92% of the world's supply, according to a recent article. And that money is funding the Taliban and its attempt to overthrow the Karzai government. Given where they seem to be hiding out, drug money is almost certainly also funding Al Qaeda.

The United States is one of the biggest markets for opium and its derivatives. If we legalize opium, morphine, and heroin, we cut the legs out from under the Taliban. We also do a number of other good things for ourselves, which I detailed in my February 2 post, Prohibition Doesn't Work. The "War on Drugs" wastes our time and energy fighting personal habits that would harm no one except the users if we hadn't criminalized them; and at the same time the high price caused by the illegality is pouring money into the pockets of our greatest enemies.

Legalize the stuff; sell it over the counter, subject to the same restrictions as cigarettes and booze, and taxed in the same way; and quit subsidizing Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The purported moral horror at "drug fiends" is a crock. Sure, opiates will kill you. So will a lot of stuff you can get quite legally, starting with booze.

And while we're at it, let's legalize marijuana, too, and not just for medical purposes. Marijuana won't even kill you, which is more than you can say for booze.

Back to the Stone Age

I wish I could convince myself that Pervez Musharraf made up the story about Richard Armitage threatening to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if they didn't support us in the war on terror. Unfortunately, it sounds exactly like something I'd expect the Bush Administration to have done at the time in question. Within the first months after 9/11/2001, this administration was making some extremely loose statements. We'll never know the actual truth, unless Armitage is dumb enough to confirm it.

Presidential Reading

I'm not an apologist for Hugo Chavez. I think he's a populist demagogue. He does seem to be providing for the poor of his country, which is how he stays in power, but he's blowing Venezuela's oil revenues at a cracking pace, and the minute the oil price drops far enough, either his free-spending ways will stop, or (more likely) he'll keep spending on borrowed money and then default on the debt as hyperinflation flattens the country.

Whatever you may think of his politics, at least he's literate. His well advertised recommendation of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival does imply that he's read the thing; and having read some of Chomsky's linguistic work back when I was trying to convince myself that linguistics was interesting, I can confidently state that Chomsky is no Danielle Steele. Hell, he's no Jared Diamond; Diamond writes pretty accessibly about complex stuff. Chomsky is dense. Chomsky is obscure. If Chavez reads Chomsky, he has pretty advanced tastes and a good command of language. I wonder if he read him in English or in translation. Of course, Chavez also said it was a shame he never met Chomsky before he died; according to Wikipedia, as of today (Sept. 23, 2006), Chomsky isn't dead, so maybe Chavez can have his wish.

I would also compliment him on his remark that "the place smells of sulfur still" - that's a very poetic, effective and memorable line - except that I'm not sure whether he was speaking English or Spanish. If he was speaking Spanish, the poetic, effective and memorable line is his translator's.

The President of the United States is publicly linked with a book too. Unfortunately in his case the book is My Pet Goat...

Summer Vacation Postscript

You may recall that one of the, um, highlights of our summer vacation in Stehekin, WA was the Flick Creek Fire, which caused me to be deeply grateful for a steady north wind. The day we left, they posted a Level 1 evacuation notice, which translates to, "there's a fire in the area." I wondered what would happen if the wind shifted; and by gum, a couple of weeks ago it did. You can read all the alerts at the InciWeb site, the spot for all forest fire junkies.

On Sept. 7, the local sheriff and the fire team raised the evacuation level to Level 2. They have a long explanation of this, which boils down to, "Pack. Now. Leave if you can."

On Sept. 9, they issued Level 3 for the Hazard Creek area, one of the back country areas. Level 3 means, "Leave. Now. Don't wait to pack." No other area had to evacuate, and the notice covered I think 3 vacation homes.

They seem to have it back under control, because last Friday they dropped the evacuation notice back to Level 1 for the entire valley.

I'm still glad that wind didn't shift while we were there.

Conspiracies

I consider myself a rational person who believes things based on evidence. I don't do blind faith. So I sometimes lose track of the number of people out there in the world who are apparently comforted by the belief that there is a great Conspiracy afoot to fool us. Or something. Everybody knows about the conspiracy theories around the assassination of President Kennedy. It seems to offend some people that one guy with a rifle and a telescopic sight could kill the President of the United States; they can't believe it. He must have had help, he must have been part of a Cabal. I've always felt, never underestimate what one determined nut can accomplish, especially if what he's trying last happened 60 years or so ago and nobody realizes what he's up to. People see what they expect to see, which sometimes means they miss what's going on.

Last weekend I became aware of the latest flavor of conspiracy theories, which is almost as good as the U.N. Black Helicopters. You may have heard this one: it's the theory that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the U.S. government. That's right: it wasn't Al Qaeda. Because we know Bush wanted to go to war in the Middle East, the theory goes, it's reasonable to assume that he would arrange the attack on the World Trade Center so he could use it to justify going to war. Or maybe he knew about it and didn't prevent it, just like Churchill (as another conspiracy theory goes) knew about the attack on Coventry and allowed it to proceed so as not to let the Germans know he was reading their mail. Yeah, sure he did.

If you want to read the arguments, which are endless and involved, you can find them described in this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is about a video called "Loose Change"; or you can go find the video on YouTube. The video has a whole list of things the producer believes aren't covered by the official explanations, and therefore he argues that the government either actually caused the attack, or knew about it and let it go through.

I freely admit that the U.S. administration in 2001 was composed of neocon crazies, who were on public record as saying we ought to invade the Middle East and clean it up. Go check out the Project for the New American Century site if you don't believe the public record bit: they argued in a position paper that "a new Pearl Harbor" would galvanize Congress into strengthening the U.S. military. If you don't know about PNAC, you should; they are scary people, and most of them are running our government right now. Sorry, what I hate about these people is that they make me sound like a wingnut conspiracy theorist...

But I don't believe this, just because I don't think they're that bright or that organized. As Hanlon's Razor suggests, Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice. This is Our Government these people are talking about, the same government that couldn't see a cat 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans; the same government that has all the financial sophistication of a drunken sailor on payday; the same government that thought the Iraqi citizens would greet our (invading) soldiers with flowers and song. Our government? Nah.

The Fear Mongers

Maybe it's the simultaneous approach of the mid-term elections and the 5th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001; but there's been an awful lot of fear in the news lately. Years ago when Garrison Keillor was younger and A Prairie Home Companion was new, one of the sponsors he invented for the News from Lake Wobegon was "The Fear Mongers' Shop", and I sometimes feel that those folks are now running the country.

Dubya, of course, is reminding everyone how frightened they'd be if he wasn't protecting us, so we'll all vote Republican (dream on, Georgie). Ever notice how the threat alert level goes up when his poll ratings go down, and just before elections?

But it isn't only him. The San Francisco Chronicle had a big article today, Kids Remember 9/11, which interviewed four teenagers who were in grade school in 2001, and went on at length about how unsafe they feel now and how worried they are.

In fact, the kids came off better than the adults in that article; the African-American kid from Oakland frankly said he's more afraid of guns and crime in Oakland than he is of Al Qaeda, which is a perfectly rational point of view. The young woman said she now knows the world isn't a safe place, but commented that she would have found that out anyway. Unfortunately, one young man has bought Dubya's ridiculous claim that we're fighting the war on terror in Iraq: "It's to keep the terrorists busy so they don't come here." Still, he's only 15.

The quote that made me furious came from Joel McClough, 38, director for the Families Forward Program at the Institute for Trauma and Stress at New York University's Child and Study Center. Mr. McClough delivered himself of this brilliant thought:

"Teens today have to deal with the threat that they could be in danger or people they know could be in danger ... a danger they may have to confront on a daily basis and one that my generation, and people of the pre-9/11 generation, never had to.''

OK, he's 38. By the time he was 10 years old, in 1978, nobody really believed the Russians were going to try to take us down; we were negotiating nuclear disarmament treaties. But I'm 60. In 1956, when I was 10 years old, we were having duck and cover drills in grade school, so we'd know what to do if the Russians attacked. Even ten-year-olds know that a school desk won't give you much protection from a nuclear strike. I worried all the time that the Russians might attack; I grew up in the shadow of an imaginary mushroom cloud. The Bay of Pigs standoff happened when I was 15. Going farther back, an entire generation of Californians lived in fear for most of World War II, wondering if the Japanese would invade; after all, they'd bombed Pearl Harbor.

It is the height of ignorant arrogance for this man to assume publicly that no generation of young people has ever lived in fear the way this one does.

The real truth is, fear is only a problem if you let it rule you. We are allowing our fear of terrorism to rule us in a way that is way out of proportion to its actual threat. Every time we take a car out on the freeway, we risk our lives at a level that dwarfs anything the terrorists can do; but we don't fear driving on the freeway. We put our children in the car and drive on the freeway, which is a much greater threat to them than than Al Qaeda. The guns that litter this country kill far more people every year than Al Qaeda; but we don't (I'm sorry to say) fear them, in fact we don't even respect them enough to take proper care with them. We must stop allowing our fear of terrorists to rule us; and when we do, the absurdity of the idiots in the White House will become obvious and embarrassing, and we will vote them out of office.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

Today's newspaper just had so many amazing things I have to devote a post...

Viva España! According to the AP, Spain's top fashion show, the Pasarela Cibeles, has refused to allow models to appear whose body mass index is less than 18. Too skinny models, the Madrid regional government fears, will encourage young women to starve themselves; they want models who project "an image of beauty and health". Yes!

The town of Atherton, CA is now charging its residents $22 per cubic yard to haul dirt through the city streets. The town has a 30 foot height limit, so if you want to expand your house, you have to dig out the basement; and the excavation can cost you $50,000 and up. Before you feel too sorry for Atherton, remember that the average house price here is $2.5 million, and the area they're digging out for that basement can be as much as 20,000 square feet. A town with 2,500 houses has issued 3,600 home-improvement permits in the last 5 years, so just maybe, the good burghers of Atherton might consider living with what they have for awhile??

The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded, after extensive study, that the CIA was right, and Saddam Hussein really didn't have any ties with Al Qaeda; in fact, he regarded it as a threat, and was actively trying to capture al-Zarqawi. And furthermore, they don't think the U.S. should have believed anything the Iraqi National Congress ever said about WMDs in Iraq... It's taken them 4 years to realize this?? Your tax dollars at work, as the mighty brains analyze the evidence.

We Have Nothing to Fear...

Many of you may have read this in the Sunday newspaper (Sept. 3), but this is so good that I'm going to quote part of it here in full, with fervent thanks to Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury for saying something brilliantly, that really needed to be said. I thought I couldn't link the site, but apparently Doonesbury doesn't impose the usual 2 week comic blackout, so here it is.

The scene is "Megaphone Mark" and his partner Chase, and Chase is complaining bitterly that "the mess we're in today" is all Clinton's fault. Mark challenges him that "the right wing has had a complete monopoly on power for four years now," and asks why he is "angrier than ever." Then it comes:

I'll tell you why. Because radicals can only survive when fear replaces reason. So they need enemies, real or imagined. As an old lefty, I know. I was as angry as they come. But being an ideologue robs you of critical thinking. I miss it. Which is why I find myself drifting back into the mainstream.

Thank you, Garry Trudeau - this is probably the most incisive single panel you've ever written.

The Awfulness of Fox News

Out of sheer curiosity today, I surfed over to the Fox News web site. (I was probably impelled by mentioning Fox in my last post.)

What a disaster of awful web design that is! Politics, nothing - the site is practically unreadable. First of all, the dominant color is red, with bold black type on white in little squares; repulsive. Second, there is NO "white space" on it, virtually every square inch is covered, which means it takes forever to load. Third, the advertisements and the news stories have basically the same web presentation, except that the news stories don't usually have animated GIFs. Maybe the people who read Fox News don't care if they read a news story or an ad. I thought CNN was too busy, but this makes CNN look like fine art; it makes Yahoo News look positively elegant.

Marauding Democrats

On a simple trip to the dentist the other day, I was intercepted by a pair of earnest young men with clipboards, who asked me if I wanted to help the Democrats take back Congress this fall. This was in Montclair, a neighborhood of Oakland, California; since I never go to Montclair except to see the dentist or shop, I don't really know whether this was fertile ground for them or not: it's in Barbara Lee's Congressional district, but it's rich enough to lean rightward if it chooses, and it may; I saw several people brush them off. I fended them off in the interests of being on time for my appointment, but chose to stop and chat with them on the way back.

I was impressed. (Mildly.) The Democrats have grassroots organizers on the street. I haven't seen that in years. They had energy and enthusiasm, they had the Democrats' platform (the Democrats have a platform??) and could explain it, and I actually allowed them to persuade me out of a contribution. (I already get regular mailings from the DNC so it shouldn't add too much junk to the mail.) I normally ignore fundraising requests from the Dems, on the grounds that they are such hopeless nebbishes that there's no point in funding them. But somewhere - can we credit Howard Dean with this? - someone has remembered the tactics that ran Tammany Hall for 150 years, and ran Chicago for a generation. Two generations. Whatever you may think of the morals of machine politics, it's really efficient. Ask the Republicans.

Of course, they're still bucking the most impressive fundraising machine known to man, a grassroots organizing structure fueled by evangelical zeal, and a control of the media which the Republicans have been carefully building for thirty years (after all, with Fox, the Repubs have their own news network); but at least the Dems are trying, and they're using stuff that works for the other side. Precinct captains. Street organizers. People who go and give people rides to the polls. If they put their backs into it, this could work.

Now if the people at the top of the party can just maintain the focus...

More Social Nazis

The timing is amazing. Hard on the heels of yesterday's post about otherwise nice people who insist that you must do things that are good for you, comes an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle opposing the currently fashionable persecution of smokers, and I'm amazed to find I agree with it.

Let's get the disclaimers out of the way. I don't smoke; hell, I'm an asthmatic. I've smoked I think 7 cigarettes in my life, when I was in grad school, to see if I liked it. I didn't; you wake up in the morning and your mouth tastes like an ash tray. They say that kissing a smoker is like licking an ash try (I was married to one, and it's not quite that bad, but you do notice it); try waking up with that in your own mouth. So I never contracted the habit, which is fortunate because if I had, I probably couldn't breathe at all now.

But this hounding of smokers by constantly reducing the list of places where they're allowed to indulge their habit is getting into the category of the people who yell publicly at pregant women drinking wine (see yesterday's post). The official justification for segregating smokers is that secondhand smoke gives non-smokers lung cancer. OK, that may even be true; but the guy with the Camel in his mouth is at much higher risk. Also, the nicotine habit is the hardest addiction to break - worse than heroin. But as long as they stay in their corners and don't breathe the smoke at other people, how is their nasty habit anybody else's business? Enough already.

This comes back down to civility, a topic I've ranted about before. If I have a nasty habit of some sort, which I manage so that it doesn't harm or threaten other people, then it is nobody else's business. If I'm fat, that's my business. If I drink too much, as long as I don't drive, that's my business. Ditto with the smoking: as long as they control where they light up, it is nobody else's business. But the category of people I call "social Nazis" (yes, I realize I'm echoing Rush Limbaugh, with whom I disagree on almost every point) feel that they, through their superior moral characterstics caused by their possession of The Only Truth, have the right to chastise other people publicly for indulging in habits that injure only the habituee.

But the pregnant lady with the wine, they cry: she's harming her baby. Well, maybe she is: but there was a whole generation of people born in the Roaring Twenties, when everybody drank socially all the time, and that's the generation that won World War II. It's probably better if she doesn't drink, but you don't see fetal alcohol syndrome in the child of a woman who has an occasional glass of wine with dinner. You see it in the children of women who drink their dinner, and breakfast and lunch too. Besides which, it's her baby. It's not the critics' baby. And, getting back to the smokers: as long as I don't have to inhale their smoke, if they want the habit, that's their problem.

The critics really just want somebody to look down on, so they can feel morally superior, safe in their possession of The Truth, which gives them the right to criticize, because they are Right. Try criticizing something they do and see how they like it.

A True Believer

I was proselytized today - and all I set out to do was take a water aerobics class. The instructor is a temporary substitute, while the normal Tuesday instructor is recovering from knee surgery; this was the first time I'd seen her, as the regular instructor just had surgery last week.

The new instructor had just read a book, after seeing the author interviewed on public television; and she was full of the enthusiasm of the converted. Nothing would do but that she must share her bright new truth with the class, especially since it was about our health. We must know this, it would be good for us. I don't remember the author's name, she said he was a researcher at Cal Berkeley; but the burden of her song was that it doesn't matter how much you exercise or how carefully you watch your diet: you must eliminate bread. If you eat bread you will be fat, and you won't be able to control it. Bread is evil, especially white bread. We all know, of course, that sugar is evil, too; but I admit I've never before heard high-fructose corn syrup described as "toxic." I think that may be a little overstated. Even fruit should be eaten only in moderation, as it contains - yes - sugar. She particularly warned the group against mangoes.

About this time, I stopped listening. I went there to exercise; if I want advice on nutrition I know how to find it. I also know a fad when I hear one, and this, by God, is a fad; in a couple of years they will have found some other thing to be appalled about. A few years ago it was the carcinogens in grilled meat. Her horror at the unsanitary conditions in a soda pop factory - they get so many flies, she said, that the FDA gives them an allowance of insect parts that are acceptable in soda pop - led me to remark that they probably do filter out the biggest bits; but mostly I just let her rant.

The interesting thing about the whole incident was her tone. She spoke with the accent and the emotional verve of a recent convert to a new religion. In another era she would have been standing on a street corner with a tambourine, singing hymns and exhorting passers-by to believe in the Lord Jesus and be saved, brothers! I guess it's true that you don't have to follow a formal religion to be religious; she certainly exhibited a religious fervor over this.

And I, of course, immediately raised my hackles and growled; I don't like people who know the only Truth. The step from "I know the only Truth" to "The people who refuse my Truth (translation: don't agree with me) are evil and must be destroyed" is all too short: and the next step after that is into war and ethnic cleansing and other unpleasant pastimes. I doubt anyone would kill someone because they eat white bread; but there are people in Berkeley who publicly embarrass pregnant women whom they don't know, if they see them drinking wine or smoking in public. This is a form of social assault, and is a lesser manifestation of the impulse that leads the Taliban to beat women who appear in public without a burqa.

I also have little patience with ascetics; this is the new asceticism, where we will only be purified if we give up the foods we like. I like bread, and it's certainly better for me to snack on than, say, potato chips or pork rinds. For that matter, I like soda pop, although I limit my intake because I'm trying to control my weight. My main reflection on the proposed diet is that you wouldn't be able to tell if it actually made you live longer, or if it merely seemed that way...

St. Michael of Washington??

Has anyone else seen the wonderful AP photograph of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff? Here's the link from Yahoo News. He looks like a dyspeptic Russian icon...

Comments on the Proposed Ceasefire

Here's a summary of the proposed U.N. "peace deal" for Lebanon and Israel:

U.N. resolution: Steps toward a permanent cease-fire in Lebanon

-- The resolution calls for the "full cessation" of fighting. Hezbollah would stop all attacks, and Israel would be limited to defensive military operations.

-- Once fighting ends, the U.N. force would be expanded from 2,000 to 15,000 troops to help deployment of Lebanese soldiers and withdrawal of Israeli forces.

-- It spells out a series of steps toward a permanent cease-fire and a lasting political solution, including the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon.

-- It stresses that the Lebanese government must be the only armed force in the country.

-- It requests international aid for the Lebanese people.

I have several comments on this, but they all boil down to: What on earth do they think is going to make Hezbollah abide by this agreement? Let's keep one thing in mind here. Hezbollah started this. They invaded Israeli territory just for the kicks they get from pulling the Israeli tail, and Israel reacted, big time. Worse, Hezbollah is getting major PR goodies on the Arab street for their valiant stand against the evil Zionists. They say they'll quit per the deal, but really, they have no incentive to quit. Why would they? We'll see whether they do. (How many of those damn' Katyushas do they have, anyhow? And how are they getting resupplied, if they are?)

I've heard remarks about Israel's incursions into Lebanon's sovereign state. That's ridiculous. Between Syria and Hezbollah, Lebanon isn't a sovereign state. They certainly have no control over their foreign policy: Hassan Nasrallah is in charge of that. The deal suggests that the Lebanese government should be the only armed force in the country; of course it should; and from that I deduce that at this point, Hezbollah is the Lebanese government, since it's clearly the only armed force in the country.

I'd also like to know where the extra 13,000 soldiers will come from, with which the agreement proposes to reinforce UNIFIL. This falls into the "You and what army?" category. At the best of times, the U.N. has trouble getting people to put boots on the ground under those blue hats, and the situation in Lebanon is disastrous. The U.S. has already weaseled out. Who's going to provide 13,000 additional U.N. troops? Santa Claus? The Arab League should, but in their hearts they think Hezbollah's doing just fine.

The only part of the deal that actually makes sense is the request for international aid for the Lebanese people. If only the people who promise millions of dollars in aid were willing to write the actual checks...

More Road Signs

Our recent trip turned up 2 new road signs plus an "honorable mention". The best one was

Fruit Antiques

seen in Yakima, Washington. A close second was

Espresso Burgers

just south of Orland, CA on I-5. Finally, although it doesn't fit the general category, I was charmed by the sign in Vacaville, CA advertising

Live bait indoor shooting gallery

The combination is just too odd.

My Summer Vacation

I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, because I was on vacation and out of computer reach. I actually had my cell phone along for emergencies, but since at least half the trip was spent in locations with zero reception, I'm still not sure why I lugged the thing along.

It was an interesting vacation. Our normal process is that my husband finds a place he thinks he'd like to go, and makes all the arrangements, and I go along for the ride. He's aware of my preferences and shares most of them, so it usually works pretty well, and on major shifts we consult more closely. On this one, though, we both were bitten by our assumptions, and by the weather.

First, the weather. Remember the heat wave that flattened the country in late July? OK, we left on about day 3 of that (having spent day 2 doing laundry, packing, and attending a wedding in full regalia including pantyhose for me and a tie for him), to drive up the California Central Valley on I-5, a trip that normally sees temperatures in the 90-100 degree range. On that trip it never got below 100 degrees, although my bet that it would be over 110 in Redding failed. By 1 degree. We spent the first 3 days of our trip driving to our ultimate destination, Lake Chelan in eastern Washington, and it was at least 100 degrees all three days. Thank God for Volkswagen air conditioning.

After overnight stays in Wolf Creek, OR, and beautiful Yakima, WA, we went up a back road to Wenatchee, WA. My gardener husband wanted to stop in Wenatchee to look at the Ohme Gardens; but my enthusiasm for touring gardens, no matter how lovely, flags rapidly in that kind of heat, so I retreated to the shade and waited for him. The Ohme Gardens are on top of a bluff and really are quite lovely; you can see the confluence of the Wenatchee River and the Columbia River from there. If you can stand the heat.

From Wenatchee we went on to the town of Lake Chelan, WA, on Lake Chelan. Now, Yakima isn't exactly nowhere, although you can see nowhere from Yakima; but Lake Chelan - Lake Chelan is Nowhere. It's a 3 day drive from the San Francisco Bay Area and at least 2 days from Portland. In Lake Chelan we boarded a boat, and rode another 50 miles up Lake Chelan (it took 4 hours) to our ultimate destination, Stehekin, which can be reached only by boat or air. Our room in the Stehekin Lodge had no air conditioning. (It did have good cross drafting.)

And all this area is high desert. This is where the assumptions came in. We both assumed, without exactly stating it, that a remote lake surrounded by mountains would be cool. Lush, green, and relaxing. We learned on this trip that everything in Oregon and Washington east of roughly The Dalles is high desert. Can you spell "rain shadow"?? Brown as toast, no trees, sagebrush, etc. And, given the heat wave, hot enough to fry eggs on the rocks. Furthermore, this entire area has a more or less constant wind coming down off the Cascades. Stehekin does actually have trees, but it's pretty dry, and the downslope wind from the head of the valley stops only briefly around 4 AM. When we stayed in Seattle some years ago, we bought a book called "The Wet Side of the Mountains", and I think we just visited the other side.

We hadn't been in Stehekin 3 hours the day we arrived, when we ran into one of the side effects of a dry, windy, hot climate. It's called the Flick Creek Fire, and it started while we were in the visitor center talking to the rangers; and the only good thing about it is that it was 2.5 miles downwind from us. I have never been so grateful for a steady north wind; if that wind had changed, we might not have been able to get out. I think I got some photos of the first hour or so of a forest fire (film not developed yet); very scary. Everyone was nervous the 2 days we were there, going out on the dock to watch the fire; and the firefighting teams used the Stehekin docks as a staging point.

We left Stehekin on Friday the 28th, as planned; the fire was still burning but had settled down to a widespread smoulder. We were frankly happy to see it recede down the lake. The rest of our vacation was much less interesting, spent poking around Vancouver, B.C. in cool comfort (the heat wave having broken). Someday I'll figure out why pleasant, uneventful vacations make such dull stories...

You went to college why?

The new University of California campus in Merced opened last year, and apparently part of the first freshman class is already ready to bail:

"In college, you want to meet different people, but there were only 800 of us, so after the first month, we all knew each other. It was like summer camp. There are no sport teams and nothing was established, and there is no tradition. It is not the college experience you hear about."

I won't use the young lady's name; I don't need to, you can find it in the article in the San Francisco Chronicle, right here. I realize she's only 19, but honestly, what has she been reading? Nancy Drew books? Did it not occur to her that you go to college to get an education? To broaden your mind and learn to think? Possibly even to prepare for a job somewhere? (That last point didn't occur to me until my senior year in English literature, but that's another issue.)

This young lady evidently went to college intending to party hearty. I'm impressed with her ability to remember (and immediately get bored with) 800 people, too - there were 750 in my high school graduating class and I remember maybe a dozen of them. (This is because I ran into them again at the reunion last week. Of course, high school was a few years ago.)

I have a dreadful feeling that all this means that she just hasn't met Mr. Right yet. I keep waiting for her to complain that she'll never get her M.R.S. in this dull school. I thought the feminist movement had taught us to look beyond marriage as the single goal of any young female.

The real statement about college is, what you get out of it is directly related to what you put into it, like most experiences of value. If all this young woman is willing to put into it is rooting for sports teams and participating in rituals that would be more evidently silly if they weren't so old, she's not going to get much out, even if she does transfer. But then, maybe I'm expecting too much from a 19 year old. I also hope that, if she does leave this new campus of my alma mater (full disclosure, but the campus was Berkeley), her place will be taken by someone who will really benefit from what the University of California has to offer.

The Right to What??

One of the articles I read recently on the gay marriage flap quoted a judge who asked on what basis the state of California could refuse to extend "the right of marriage itself" to same-sex couples. Not the rite of marriage, but the right.

Now, just a minute here. Americans talk a lot about their rights (and not enough about their obligations, but that's another post); but where do we get a right to marry? Marriage is a voluntary contract between two people; marriage is a rite, as in a ceremony or ritual; when did it become a right, as in, something we are all entitled to have, like iPods and stereos and double cappucino no-fat lattes? If marriage is a right, how come I spent 10 years as a single divorcee?

I asked my co-worker Mike this question, and he said, "Marriage became a right when it became a tax break," and the awful thing is, I'm afraid he's right. Correct. The marriage relationship and the property and tax codes of this country are wound together in a way that makes a mockery of the separation of church and state. Married people pay fewer taxes. Married people have the right to visit each other in the hospital if they're really sick. Married people inherit each other's property, even when they're too lazy or scared to make wills. We seem, thank God, to have quit blaming children for being "illegitimate" when their parents don't bother to get married, but we still regard people who aren't married as somehow less fit to raise children. And the 50% divorce rate doesn't seem to affect any of these opinions.

A few days ago, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a wonderful opinion piece on this subject by Robin Lakoff, a U.C. Berkeley professor of linguistics; I strongly recommend it. According to Ms. Lakoff, the purpose of a constitution is to define the agreed relationship between the government and the governed. That being the case, she argues, it has no place for rules about relationships between members of "the governed" - that would be us. She states, "Marriage is a relationship in which the government is not a direct participant." The proper place for rules governing relationships between individuals, such as marriage, is in statutory law, not in the Constitution. At that point you get to argue about whose statutes, federal or state; but the Constitution is clearly the wrong place for anything to do with marriage.

But is she right? When you go down to city hall and get a marriage license, the government issues it; and you do that even when you're getting married in a church. Then there are all those tax laws; not to mention our Fearless Leader trying to make learning how to stay married a condition for getting welfare. This could go on and on; but the more I think about it, the more I think I want the government to get its nose out of the personal relationships between human beings, except in cases of domestic violence.

Scientific Research and Me

I've just done something new, which I'm disproportionately excited about. You'd think that volunteering to let someone else use my computer would be a problem. However, I've just signed up for Rosetta@home, and what I'm letting people use my computer for is to run complicated algorithms to try to determine how proteins fold and what is the lowest energy configuration for a given protein. These solutions are used by researchers to try to figure out ways to combat diseases like malaria, HIV, and Alzheimer's.

It absolutely charms me that the software you download, to run these problems, is called BOINC (that's Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). BOINC runs in the background using CPU when you aren't using it. It's absolutely zero maintenance: it goes out to the Rosetta server, downloads as many problems as it thinks my computer can handle (seems to be two), chews through them, and then when it's done, uploads the results to the server. I have a Rosetta account and get credit for problems solved - think karma, it's not money.

So far I haven't noticed much effect on web browsing and email, although it takes a little longer to open files. Plus, it acts as a screen saver showing you how it thinks the current protein it's working on might fold. Rosetta always needs more computing power - this is an active research facility. So if any of you would like to let the CPU you probably don't use much contribute to serious medical research, let me encourage you to check the site out and sign up. They have BOINC clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. Also, there are other projects you can sign up for once you have the client - SETI@home for instance.

Scavengers

I had a very odd conversation with my sister today. She lives on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and their phone service has been interrupted lately; she wanted to know if I'd been trying to reach her. (No, I was working.)

When this first happened, last weekend, she said someone had "cut the phone cable". I assumed accident, but it seems to be a form of semi-organized crime: the price of copper has gone high enough, and the rural phone lines in Nevada are installed carelessly enough, that some people are driving around in the small hours, and stealing the phone lines to sell for scrap. Seems like it's time to upgrade to fiberoptics?? Also, isn't this carrying good old American initiative a little too far?

Unclear on the concept

The ever-reliable (as a source of weirdness) San Francisco Chronicle had a lead article today in the business section on the joys of broadband wireless. This is a wireless card for your laptop that talks to your cellphone, so you don't have to waste time finding and negotiating a Starbuck's hot spot: you can sit down right there in the parking lot and email away. You'd probably be more comfortable at Starbuck's, but that's a detail.

We used to do something like this back in the day when I was on 24-hour pager support. Of course, at that time the duty cell phone was a brick that weighed 10 pounds (we bought a luggage cart for it), and the connection with the laptop was a phone cord plugged into a dial-up modem; but I remember one of my colleagues troubleshooting a mainframe problem with this rig while seated cross-legged on the grass at a company party. Since this was not only pre-wireless but pre-Starbuck's, it was pretty fardling advanced. (Full disclosure: I stole the epithet from Anne McCaffrey's Ship who Sang series...)

Anyway, back in the story about the 3G broadband, I loved the last quote in the story:

"It's phenomenal," Ask said. "It's great being able to open your laptop and get Internet access and not get nickel-and-dimed for service everywhere you go."

This was from someone who is paying $60 a month for access. Yeah, I guess it's fair to say she's not being nickel-and-dimed...

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Business travel isn't anything remotely resembling fun, but at least you get to look at new places from the window of the taxi, coming in from the airport.

I got a look at San Antonio, Texas this week, and found it rather charming. Unlike Dallas, San Antonio has resisted the urge to tear down all their old light industrial buildings and put up glass towers, so there are only a few skyscrapers, and lots of older few-story brick and stucco buildings with interesting architectural details, plus some pretty churches. The town was more relaxed than Dallas, too, with lighter traffic. They've done fairly nice things with their river: it's nothing resembling a riparian habitat, since the channel is bricked in solid (sigh), but they've turned it into a pleasant "river walk", below street level and lined with trees and shrubs. If I'd had time, I could have taken a water taxi along the canals; but I was in the town less than 48 hours. For that matter, if I'd had time, I could have toured the Alamo; it's easy to find, right next to the mall.

The heat was appalling, in the high nineties; with the usual corollary that the air conditioning was so cold you needed a jacket indoors, which you immediately had to shed when you left the building. They haven't had any rain for awhile, and the taxi driver said they'd been on the verge of water rationing. The hotel had signs saying we won't change your towels during your stay, and you have to ask for water in the restaurant. One of these days our tendency to use water as if there were an infinite supply of it, is going to catch up with us.