Now the election is over, we can look back at the mess in the economy. I see the latest members of the queue at the federal trough are the auto manufacturers. Bail us out, they cry; we're too big to fail. What's bad for GM will be really bad for the country. Give us money or we'll make a big mess when we fail.
But I have to ask: why is GM in this shape? Why are Ford and Chrysler in such straits? And the answer that comes to my mind is, because for thirty years they've all been making stupid, short-sighted marketing decisions. They've been going for the quick, easy buck, selling oversized SUVs getting nothing to the gallon. Their vehicles are junk, too; they routinely score below average on the Consumer Reports reliability scale. It's true that Ford has recently produced a couple of vehicles that score better; but I haven't seen a sign of it from GM.
Worse, they've actively fought attempts to require them to make more efficient (i.e. higher gas mileage) products. The reason it's taken 25 years to get the CAFE standards raised is because of the money the auto industry has poured into lobbying against it.
So Congress says, show us a plan and we'll consider a bailout. Now, this is uncharacteristically business-like for Congress; but I don't think it's unreasonable. There isn't a lender in the world (especially now!) who would hand out money without some idea of what the borrower planned to do with it, and how they expected to pay it back. And the auto CEOs have slunk back to Detroit.
I'll be very interested to see whether they present a plan as requested. I don't think they will, because I don't think they have a plan. I'm not the only one, either - I heard John Boehner, the House minority leader, was quoted on NPR the other day saying he'd been talking to the auto execs, and he didn't think they had a plan. It's very unusual for me to be in agreement with John Boehner.
Does this remind you of Henry Paulson and the $700 billion? Give us a lot of money and we'll fix things. They're tottering on the edge of oblivion and they can't be bothered to convene a strike team to decide what they would do with bailout money if they got it! We'll see what they present to Congress next week, but by God, if they don't have a business plan - three business plans, one each - they shouldn't get any money.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Conduct Your Triumph As A Funeral
The line is from the Tao Te Ching and the context isn't really relevant here because it refers to war. But it's how I feel.
Last night, as Obama's victory was being proclaimed, I checked my email, and received a blow. A man I've known since high school, probably my first true male friend (as opposed to "boyfriend"), dropped dead of a bilateral pulmonary embolism on Saturday. I've known him over 45 years; and now he's gone. We lost touch somewhat, over the years, as people do; but I knew that I could always pick up the phone and Bill would answer, and we'd pick up the conversation where we left it off. He won't answer any more. Why didn't I call more often? I don't have an answer.
I wish Obama all the best, and he'll need it; but I can't rejoice with him now. I have to mourn.
Last night, as Obama's victory was being proclaimed, I checked my email, and received a blow. A man I've known since high school, probably my first true male friend (as opposed to "boyfriend"), dropped dead of a bilateral pulmonary embolism on Saturday. I've known him over 45 years; and now he's gone. We lost touch somewhat, over the years, as people do; but I knew that I could always pick up the phone and Bill would answer, and we'd pick up the conversation where we left it off. He won't answer any more. Why didn't I call more often? I don't have an answer.
I wish Obama all the best, and he'll need it; but I can't rejoice with him now. I have to mourn.
Tuesday, November 04, 2008
The First Black President
And when can we stop using the Jim Crow definitions of "African-American"??
Barack Obama is "black" only under the 19th century definition that "one drop" of "black blood" makes you black. I regularly drink tea that's darker than his skin color.
It is now legitimate to list yourself on the census as "mixed race", and that's what he is, and that's what a lot of people in California are. They aren't all mixed with white, either - I've known African/Japanese, and Hispanic/Chinese, and California has a whole lot of other couples of various backgrounds who have decided that the special person they wanted to marry was from a different ethnic background and didn't have the same color skin they had. My husband works with a guy in the Albuquerque office of his firm whose last name is Hispanic - and whose mother was Japanese. All these people are American.
Can we all just be Americans, please, and start worrying about the real problems?? (Yeah, I know this is hopeless.)
Barack Obama is "black" only under the 19th century definition that "one drop" of "black blood" makes you black. I regularly drink tea that's darker than his skin color.
It is now legitimate to list yourself on the census as "mixed race", and that's what he is, and that's what a lot of people in California are. They aren't all mixed with white, either - I've known African/Japanese, and Hispanic/Chinese, and California has a whole lot of other couples of various backgrounds who have decided that the special person they wanted to marry was from a different ethnic background and didn't have the same color skin they had. My husband works with a guy in the Albuquerque office of his firm whose last name is Hispanic - and whose mother was Japanese. All these people are American.
Can we all just be Americans, please, and start worrying about the real problems?? (Yeah, I know this is hopeless.)
Election Day Wandering
It's 10:50 AM in Oakland, and I'm sitting in Spasso Cafe on College Avenue. In addition to Election Day, this is also House Cleaners Day, and I usually take the opportunity to walk down to the avenue and hang out. I stopped in at my polling place to say hi, even though I voted last week; and they gave me an "I voted" sticker, so I look politically correct.
The lady in the Chimes drugstore agreed with me that she's nervous about the election.
The gift shop called Heartfelt had a chalk board out front that said, "VOTE! Then step back, take a deep breath, and relax - it's a nice day!" (And it is.)
The elderly street guy, with the beard down to his belt buckle, swung his fist and said, "Landslide! Mandate!" and I said, "Damn straight it better be."
In front of Cole's Coffee, a man blowing across a coffee cup into the ear of a baby in a belly pack (mom, wearing the pack, was on the phone) asked me where my polling station was; he had an absentee ballot to drop off. I told him mine was pretty far away; he thought he'd seen one closer.
Waiting to cross the street, I stood next to 2 youngish guys, also wearing "I voted" stickers. We discussed where we'd watch election returns, and agreed we were all going to have to find a new hobby tomorrow.
Everybody's waiting for the shoe to drop.
The lady in the Chimes drugstore agreed with me that she's nervous about the election.
The gift shop called Heartfelt had a chalk board out front that said, "VOTE! Then step back, take a deep breath, and relax - it's a nice day!" (And it is.)
The elderly street guy, with the beard down to his belt buckle, swung his fist and said, "Landslide! Mandate!" and I said, "Damn straight it better be."
In front of Cole's Coffee, a man blowing across a coffee cup into the ear of a baby in a belly pack (mom, wearing the pack, was on the phone) asked me where my polling station was; he had an absentee ballot to drop off. I told him mine was pretty far away; he thought he'd seen one closer.
Waiting to cross the street, I stood next to 2 youngish guys, also wearing "I voted" stickers. We discussed where we'd watch election returns, and agreed we were all going to have to find a new hobby tomorrow.
Everybody's waiting for the shoe to drop.
Election Day
It's 9:10 AM on Election Day in California. I voted a week ago, so I'm just observing things today. I live about a block from my polling station in the music room of the local elementary school, so about 15 minutes ago I stepped out the front door to see if I could see a line at the polls. I couldn't see a line, but I did see a steady line of people coming back from the polls: early election day voters. It's a beautiful sunny morning, crisp and clean after a big rain storm, and everybody looked cheerful.
If you haven't voted yet, get off your butt. This is the biggest election in my lifetime and probably yours - what are you waiting for??
If you haven't voted yet, get off your butt. This is the biggest election in my lifetime and probably yours - what are you waiting for??
Saturday, November 01, 2008
Reality Check
For the last month or so I've been obsessing over the election and the economy to the point that I got almost nothing else done. Today I got my chain yanked; I got a reminder of what's really important.
It started so normally - my husband picked me up from a dress rehearsal, and we drove home on the streets because the freeway alternative was a parking lot, for some invisible reason. To protect as much privacy as possible, I won't name the exact location, and I don't know the names of most of the people.
Anyway, as we drove up this main street, I saw a woman in an orange-brown jacket, crossing the street in a crosswalk. We were in the right lane and she was past us, so we didn't slow.
Then there was a thump, and the next thing I saw was the orange-brown jacket draped across the right front fender of a small station wagon. I can still see it. The woman fell off into the street, and didn't move.
The station wagon rolled a little farther and stopped, and the driver got out.
As my husband pulled our car over to the curb, I dived for my cell phone, entered the password, and speed-dialed the police department emergency number. Then I waited. (Our local dispatch center is notoriously understaffed.) After 1 minute 40 seconds (per the call duration meter), I climbed out of the car and looked around.
I have to give my fellow citizens credit. There were at least 7 or 8 people out there. Five or six were gathered around the woman in the street: reminding each other not to move her, covering her with a blanket, feeling her pulse. Protecting her. The rest had put out flares, parked cars sideways, and were very professionally directing traffic around the accident. One man had a cell phone to his ear, and I yelled, "I'm still trying to get through to 911!"
Eventually I got through (I estimate in about 2 minutes). Since she landed in the street, the woman in the orange-brown jacket hadn't moved. Dispatch asked if she was bleeding; I yelled, "Is she bleeding?" to the group in the street, and relayed the "yes" back to the operator.
After that, response was very quick: first the nearest patrol team, then the ladder truck from the fire station, finally a pair of ambulances. One of the policemen asked me for a statement, and we adjourned to the patrol car to get his paper report form out of the rain. The police, fire, and EMT personnel scurried professionally around, and in about 45 minutes the whole area was cleaned up.
One of the officers told me the injured woman was alive when they put her into the ambulance. I was glad.
But this is a reality check. We Americans, especially younger ones, have an unspoken assumption that we're invulnerable and immortal. If we're older, we know we are neither, but we sometimes think, nothing will happen to me, I don't have time for it. But sometimes it happens anyway. I hope very much that everyone will come out of this intact (or at least, not permanently damaged); but the victim put a hole the size of her head in the car's windshield. And the EMTs took the driver off in the second ambulance, just to make sure she wasn't hurt.
You hear a lot of rhetoric from the anti-abortion zealots about the sanctity of life, as if once those two cells merge, the resulting entity has some kind of right to a full life, the threescore-and-ten or whatever we live to these days. It's because of that "Right to Life" statement in the Declaration of Independence, and it's baloney. It's a nice sentiment, but people get killed all the time, by disease, accidents, and by other people. Life is very uncertain; modern drugs save lives that used to be lost to pneumonia and measles and tuberculosis, and they actually cure many cancer patients these days; but traffic accidents kill 40,000 - 45,000 people every year, or over 110 people a day, every day. And you get no warning, and no chance to clean up those things you were going to get to someday.
I'm not even sure what point I'm trying to make, except maybe: let's cut each other a little slack, and try to listen to each other, because we don't know how long any of us will be here. And maybe, there but for the grace of God go I.
It started so normally - my husband picked me up from a dress rehearsal, and we drove home on the streets because the freeway alternative was a parking lot, for some invisible reason. To protect as much privacy as possible, I won't name the exact location, and I don't know the names of most of the people.
Anyway, as we drove up this main street, I saw a woman in an orange-brown jacket, crossing the street in a crosswalk. We were in the right lane and she was past us, so we didn't slow.
Then there was a thump, and the next thing I saw was the orange-brown jacket draped across the right front fender of a small station wagon. I can still see it. The woman fell off into the street, and didn't move.
The station wagon rolled a little farther and stopped, and the driver got out.
As my husband pulled our car over to the curb, I dived for my cell phone, entered the password, and speed-dialed the police department emergency number. Then I waited. (Our local dispatch center is notoriously understaffed.) After 1 minute 40 seconds (per the call duration meter), I climbed out of the car and looked around.
I have to give my fellow citizens credit. There were at least 7 or 8 people out there. Five or six were gathered around the woman in the street: reminding each other not to move her, covering her with a blanket, feeling her pulse. Protecting her. The rest had put out flares, parked cars sideways, and were very professionally directing traffic around the accident. One man had a cell phone to his ear, and I yelled, "I'm still trying to get through to 911!"
Eventually I got through (I estimate in about 2 minutes). Since she landed in the street, the woman in the orange-brown jacket hadn't moved. Dispatch asked if she was bleeding; I yelled, "Is she bleeding?" to the group in the street, and relayed the "yes" back to the operator.
After that, response was very quick: first the nearest patrol team, then the ladder truck from the fire station, finally a pair of ambulances. One of the policemen asked me for a statement, and we adjourned to the patrol car to get his paper report form out of the rain. The police, fire, and EMT personnel scurried professionally around, and in about 45 minutes the whole area was cleaned up.
One of the officers told me the injured woman was alive when they put her into the ambulance. I was glad.
But this is a reality check. We Americans, especially younger ones, have an unspoken assumption that we're invulnerable and immortal. If we're older, we know we are neither, but we sometimes think, nothing will happen to me, I don't have time for it. But sometimes it happens anyway. I hope very much that everyone will come out of this intact (or at least, not permanently damaged); but the victim put a hole the size of her head in the car's windshield. And the EMTs took the driver off in the second ambulance, just to make sure she wasn't hurt.
You hear a lot of rhetoric from the anti-abortion zealots about the sanctity of life, as if once those two cells merge, the resulting entity has some kind of right to a full life, the threescore-and-ten or whatever we live to these days. It's because of that "Right to Life" statement in the Declaration of Independence, and it's baloney. It's a nice sentiment, but people get killed all the time, by disease, accidents, and by other people. Life is very uncertain; modern drugs save lives that used to be lost to pneumonia and measles and tuberculosis, and they actually cure many cancer patients these days; but traffic accidents kill 40,000 - 45,000 people every year, or over 110 people a day, every day. And you get no warning, and no chance to clean up those things you were going to get to someday.
I'm not even sure what point I'm trying to make, except maybe: let's cut each other a little slack, and try to listen to each other, because we don't know how long any of us will be here. And maybe, there but for the grace of God go I.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Stop the Hate
I'm quoting my fellow blogger, D.B. Echo (at Another Monkey). It's getting really scary. I've already commented about Sarah Palin's apparent pleasure when people at her rallies scream, "Kill him!"
I got another example yesterday. I have a friend who lives in a suburb of San Francisco and has an Obama/Biden sticker on her car. The other day, she said "a couple of guys" made "ugly remarks" at her as she drove past them. Then she stopped at a light, and a well-dressed, prosperous-looking woman in a prosperous-looking car stopped next to her, rolled down the window and screamed, "Traitor!"
When did it become treason to disagree with someone? When did it become treason to want to change the government? This is what the Republican tactics of the last eight years have brought us to - they've been telling us, ever since 9/11, that anyone who disagrees with them is unpatriotic and possibly treasonous, and we must support them so we'll be "safe."
Do you all feel "safe" now? Is that why tens of thousands of people turn out to see Barack Obama and cheer for him, because they feel "safe"? I certainly don't feel safe if my neighbors feel they can scream insults at me because they disagree with me.
And the conservative commentators hammer this home on Fox News daily - Limbaugh. Hannity. O'Reilly. Coulter. In any organization, the tone comes from the top; and the top of this organization tells us that dissent is treason. The whirring sound you hear is Thomas Jefferson, spinning in his grave.
I don't claim they're treasonous (although they'd say I am). I say they're wrong; but what's really distressing is that they're so rude. Those who disagree are not merely wrong, they have to be insulted, and assailed as stupid and treasonous. And the conservatives lie - the oft-repeated McCain claim that Obama sponsored legislation authorizing giving sex education to kindergartners is a barefaced lie, repeatedly debunked by www.factcheck.org; and yet McCain keeps saying it, and claims it's true. This is Orwellian.
When did we lose civil discourse? When did it become impossible to discuss certain issues without falling back on slogans and insults? I have to admit my generation, the Baby Boomers, carry some blame for this. We were the ones who screamed slogans at rallies and labeled anybody we disagreed with as "pigs." So, we had something to do with the demise of civil discourse. But we weren't alone.
The most important question about civil discourse is not who stopped it. It's - how do we get it back?? I hate this. I hate conflict and screaming. But if I don't scream back, I'm leaving the field to the liars.
I got another example yesterday. I have a friend who lives in a suburb of San Francisco and has an Obama/Biden sticker on her car. The other day, she said "a couple of guys" made "ugly remarks" at her as she drove past them. Then she stopped at a light, and a well-dressed, prosperous-looking woman in a prosperous-looking car stopped next to her, rolled down the window and screamed, "Traitor!"
When did it become treason to disagree with someone? When did it become treason to want to change the government? This is what the Republican tactics of the last eight years have brought us to - they've been telling us, ever since 9/11, that anyone who disagrees with them is unpatriotic and possibly treasonous, and we must support them so we'll be "safe."
Do you all feel "safe" now? Is that why tens of thousands of people turn out to see Barack Obama and cheer for him, because they feel "safe"? I certainly don't feel safe if my neighbors feel they can scream insults at me because they disagree with me.
And the conservative commentators hammer this home on Fox News daily - Limbaugh. Hannity. O'Reilly. Coulter. In any organization, the tone comes from the top; and the top of this organization tells us that dissent is treason. The whirring sound you hear is Thomas Jefferson, spinning in his grave.
I don't claim they're treasonous (although they'd say I am). I say they're wrong; but what's really distressing is that they're so rude. Those who disagree are not merely wrong, they have to be insulted, and assailed as stupid and treasonous. And the conservatives lie - the oft-repeated McCain claim that Obama sponsored legislation authorizing giving sex education to kindergartners is a barefaced lie, repeatedly debunked by www.factcheck.org; and yet McCain keeps saying it, and claims it's true. This is Orwellian.
When did we lose civil discourse? When did it become impossible to discuss certain issues without falling back on slogans and insults? I have to admit my generation, the Baby Boomers, carry some blame for this. We were the ones who screamed slogans at rallies and labeled anybody we disagreed with as "pigs." So, we had something to do with the demise of civil discourse. But we weren't alone.
The most important question about civil discourse is not who stopped it. It's - how do we get it back?? I hate this. I hate conflict and screaming. But if I don't scream back, I'm leaving the field to the liars.
Poetry on NPR
You never quite know what you'll hear when you tune in to NPR. I tuned into All Things Considered on Tuesday night on the way to the gym (after spending $70 to get my car radio working again - blown fuse - this is the week everything breaks), and found myself listening to a discussion of the election with a group of people from a job training center in St. Louis. And at the end of the section, there was a remark that brought tears to my eyes.
Checking the web site for the transcript, I just realized I didn't even hear all of it, but here is the whole thing, which was sent as a text message to the training instructor:
Checking the web site for the transcript, I just realized I didn't even hear all of it, but here is the whole thing, which was sent as a text message to the training instructor:
"Rosa sat so Martin could walk. Martin walked, so Obama could run. Obama is running so our children can fly."'Nuff said.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
The Heat is Off
Our furnace is dead. This is less critical than if we lived in, say, Wisconsin or Maine, or even Washington state; but the tag end of October is a bad time for the heating system to go Tango Uniform, even in California.
It's only a relatively new furnace. We put it in 20 years ago (almost exactly 20 years), to replace a gravity-feed gas furnace dating from 1938, which took 40 minutes to warm the house up. It's run like a clock since then, we never even serviced it except to change the filter. The other day we turned it on, and it began to cycle - on, and on, and on, and on, about once a second. We turned it off and waited, and it was OK. Then it did it again.
Today the furnace man came. His name is Mike. It took Mike about 5 minutes to find the smoke stains on the control board where a resistor burned out. (He didn't call it that, but it looked like a resistor to me, and I used to sell 'em.) He took the board with him, so he could order the correct replacement. It was a period classic - I haven't seen a breadboard hookup with individual transistors and resistors for years. Mike assured me that the replacement board would be "all digital." He'll also bring an elbow joint for a 4 inch pipe - the one we have has had a segment crack loose and fall off, which Mike tells me has been flooding the basement with carbon monoxide. Maybe it's a good thing we don't spend much time in the basement.
Mike will be back "in a couple of days," with the new furnace motherboard; he'll change the filter and "give it a bath" (OK, after 20 years, I guess it needs one). In the meantime, we have no heat. Today is a lovely warm autumn afternoon in the mid-70's, but mornings are getting colder, and all the windows downstairs (where I prefer to spend my days, as the view of the garden is better) are single-paned. Time to break out the sweaters, and the wool socks. And I think I'll take my travel kit to the gym tonight, and take a shower there instead of at home tomorrow morning. The heat works in the gym.
It's only a relatively new furnace. We put it in 20 years ago (almost exactly 20 years), to replace a gravity-feed gas furnace dating from 1938, which took 40 minutes to warm the house up. It's run like a clock since then, we never even serviced it except to change the filter. The other day we turned it on, and it began to cycle - on, and on, and on, and on, about once a second. We turned it off and waited, and it was OK. Then it did it again.
Today the furnace man came. His name is Mike. It took Mike about 5 minutes to find the smoke stains on the control board where a resistor burned out. (He didn't call it that, but it looked like a resistor to me, and I used to sell 'em.) He took the board with him, so he could order the correct replacement. It was a period classic - I haven't seen a breadboard hookup with individual transistors and resistors for years. Mike assured me that the replacement board would be "all digital." He'll also bring an elbow joint for a 4 inch pipe - the one we have has had a segment crack loose and fall off, which Mike tells me has been flooding the basement with carbon monoxide. Maybe it's a good thing we don't spend much time in the basement.
Mike will be back "in a couple of days," with the new furnace motherboard; he'll change the filter and "give it a bath" (OK, after 20 years, I guess it needs one). In the meantime, we have no heat. Today is a lovely warm autumn afternoon in the mid-70's, but mornings are getting colder, and all the windows downstairs (where I prefer to spend my days, as the view of the garden is better) are single-paned. Time to break out the sweaters, and the wool socks. And I think I'll take my travel kit to the gym tonight, and take a shower there instead of at home tomorrow morning. The heat works in the gym.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Strategy and Tactics
Driving home today, I listened to Talk of the Nation, on which Bill Kristol urged John McCain to fire his campaign staff because it isn't working. Apart from the fact that I want McCain's campaign to fail, I was interested in one remark Kristol made. Loosely paraphrased, he said that McCain had some good ideas (choosing Palin as VP, suspending his campaign to go to Washington to create a miracle for the bailout), but they weren't followed up. They're all tactical, said Kristol; there's no strategic thinking.
No strategic thinking. Isn't that an interesting suggestion? McCain isn't a strategist; he's a tactician. Think about his military career - he flew ground-attack aircraft off carriers. You need tactics in that role; other people take care of strategy. McCain retired from the Navy in 1981 (after 23 years), as a captain, and went into politics, where issues of strategy versus tactics are somewhat diluted. A Navy captain is the equivalent of an Army or Air Force colonel, which I'd argue is the lowest possible command level at which you need to begin to think strategically. Below that level you're dealing with much more day-to-day stuff: tactics and logistics. McCain reached captain; then he retired.
This campaign is the most important operation of McCain's career, and he isn't thinking strategically. Why should we assume that he'll start thinking strategically if we elect him President? And what would be the implications of a President of the United States who is driven entirely by tactical considerations? I wasn't going to vote for him for a number of reasons, some making more sense than others; but frankly, this one seems to me to be quite potent.
No strategic thinking. Isn't that an interesting suggestion? McCain isn't a strategist; he's a tactician. Think about his military career - he flew ground-attack aircraft off carriers. You need tactics in that role; other people take care of strategy. McCain retired from the Navy in 1981 (after 23 years), as a captain, and went into politics, where issues of strategy versus tactics are somewhat diluted. A Navy captain is the equivalent of an Army or Air Force colonel, which I'd argue is the lowest possible command level at which you need to begin to think strategically. Below that level you're dealing with much more day-to-day stuff: tactics and logistics. McCain reached captain; then he retired.
This campaign is the most important operation of McCain's career, and he isn't thinking strategically. Why should we assume that he'll start thinking strategically if we elect him President? And what would be the implications of a President of the United States who is driven entirely by tactical considerations? I wasn't going to vote for him for a number of reasons, some making more sense than others; but frankly, this one seems to me to be quite potent.
Is Sarah Qualified??
I got an email link from a friend that I'm reposting here (with some of the capital letters toned down):
Subject: PBS Sarah Palin poll
http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html
When I voted on it, the poll was running dead even at 49% to 49% - quia absurdum est.
Subject: PBS Sarah Palin poll
- PBS has an online poll posted asking if Sarah Palin is qualified. Apparently the repulican party platform knew about this in advance and are flooding the voting with YES votes.
- The poll will be reported on PBS and picked up by mainstream media. It can influence undecided voters in swing states.
http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html
When I voted on it, the poll was running dead even at 49% to 49% - quia absurdum est.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Shame on You
Shame on you, Sarah Palin. For shame. You stand up in front of a crowd, rouse them up with lies about Barack Obama (yes, they're lies), and when the crowd yells, "Kill him!" - you smile. You encourage them.
This is disgraceful. You claim to be a Christian - this is unChristian. This is what Adolf Hitler did when he encouraged his goons to attack the Jews, before Kristallnacht. Nobody has been hurt yet because of your rabble-rousing - but that's no thanks to you.
And shame on you, John McCain, for allowing your campaign to act like this. Who's in charge, you or she? You weren't ignoring threats of violence from your crowds before she joined you; you weren't hearing threats of violence from your crowds before she joined you. You tried to calm things down the other day; I read about it. You need to try harder.
This is disgraceful. You claim to be a Christian - this is unChristian. This is what Adolf Hitler did when he encouraged his goons to attack the Jews, before Kristallnacht. Nobody has been hurt yet because of your rabble-rousing - but that's no thanks to you.
And shame on you, John McCain, for allowing your campaign to act like this. Who's in charge, you or she? You weren't ignoring threats of violence from your crowds before she joined you; you weren't hearing threats of violence from your crowds before she joined you. You tried to calm things down the other day; I read about it. You need to try harder.
What a Week
I haven't been blogging this week because I didn't know what to say. There's a horrible fascination in watching everything fall apart. I remember the sensation from 9/11, we were all unable to stop watching the instant replay of the falling towers.
However, as the government took step after step to staunch the bleeding, and the credit markets remained stubbornly frozen, my suspicions grew that nothing is working because the Feds are fighting the wrong war. Part of the problem, of course, is that no one believes (I certainly don't) that Paulsen knows what he's doing. He's just hoping that if he throws enough money, something will open up. Injecting capital into the banks may help. But I believe the true problem is the credit default swaps; and until we solve that, the credit markets are going to stay frozen.
For those of you who haven't listened to last week's This American Life, as I recommended, here's a brief summary of credit default swaps, as I understood them from the show:
The basic credit default swap or CDS is insurance against a bond issuer going bankrupt and defaulting on the bond. Just like Lehman Bros. is about to do to me. Company A issues a bond; company B buys it, because the interest rate is so good. Company B, however, is worried about the stability of company A; so they turn to company C, who writes them a credit default swap. Company B agrees to pay company C a percentage of the income stream it's getting from company A's bond; in return, company C agrees to pay company B the full face amount of company A's bonds that company B bought, in case company A goes Tango Uniform (as they say in the military).
Obviously, company C (who wrote the CDS to company B) has more faith in company A's financial soundness than company B does. And they really like that steady stream of income.
Now it starts to twist. Investor D decides that company A isn't a good prospect. So he goes to company C, and says, I want a CDS against X dollars' worth of company A bonds. Investor D doesn't own any company A bonds; he's just betting on the come. He's doing the credit equivalent of a short sale: he's betting that company A will go broke; and he's paying company B an income stream, some percentage of the interest he'd be getting if he owned the bond, in exchange for company C's promise to pay him X dollars (the amount of bond he's buying a CDS on) in case company A goes under. And company C sells him the CDS; another steady stream of money.
Company C has now promised to pay two different parties the face value of a bond that only one of them owns, in case company A goes broke.
Now multiply that by hundreds of deals, all over the U.S. and probably all over the world. And add to that the final twist: thanks to Sen. Phil Gramm's Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (remember the guy who said we are "a nation of whiners"?), all these deals are unregulated. They're "over the counter."
That means they are all private. There's no central place, like a stock market, that has a record of who has written what CDS against what debt obligations. We can be pretty sure, however, that some or all of the major institutions were writing CDS's against the AAA rated sub-prime backed securities that everybody was buying. After all - they're not going to default, and the housing market will never stop rising. Until it didn't. Until the loans everyone was pushing began to default.
Because if you wrote CDS coverage for, say, a mortgage-backed security worth half a million dollars, you're on the hook for the dollars if that security ceases to pay interest. Do you have the dollars? Or are you so leveraged that you'd have to borrow in order to meet the obligation? Remember, all these people operated on borrowed money, all the time.
Now it's the end of March 2008, and Bear Sterns has just gone under. Immediately everybody who wrote CDS's on Bear Sterns debt has to pony up cash. They know who they are; and their counterparties know; but nobody else does, because CDS transactions aren't regulated and are private. You didn't see any news about people paying off CDS on Bear Sterns.
Every time since March that a major financial firm has gone under to the point where they default on their debt, more of these chickens have come home to roost. Every bank knows what their own position is; but because of the private nature of the transactions, they don't know what anyone else's position is. And nobody knows what the real position of the mortgage-backed securities is.
And that, compadres, is why banks are not lending to each other. They don't know who's sitting on CDS obligations that exceed their entire net worth.
I'm not an economist; I'm just a techie, and nobody's going to listen to me. But frankly, I see only one thing the government could do that would really open this up: Force an audit. Require every financial institution to compile and publish a list of all the CDS they have written. Only then will we be able to estimate the real scope of the damage, and make realistic plans about how to deal with it.
The truth shall make you free.
However, as the government took step after step to staunch the bleeding, and the credit markets remained stubbornly frozen, my suspicions grew that nothing is working because the Feds are fighting the wrong war. Part of the problem, of course, is that no one believes (I certainly don't) that Paulsen knows what he's doing. He's just hoping that if he throws enough money, something will open up. Injecting capital into the banks may help. But I believe the true problem is the credit default swaps; and until we solve that, the credit markets are going to stay frozen.
For those of you who haven't listened to last week's This American Life, as I recommended, here's a brief summary of credit default swaps, as I understood them from the show:
The basic credit default swap or CDS is insurance against a bond issuer going bankrupt and defaulting on the bond. Just like Lehman Bros. is about to do to me. Company A issues a bond; company B buys it, because the interest rate is so good. Company B, however, is worried about the stability of company A; so they turn to company C, who writes them a credit default swap. Company B agrees to pay company C a percentage of the income stream it's getting from company A's bond; in return, company C agrees to pay company B the full face amount of company A's bonds that company B bought, in case company A goes Tango Uniform (as they say in the military).
Obviously, company C (who wrote the CDS to company B) has more faith in company A's financial soundness than company B does. And they really like that steady stream of income.
Now it starts to twist. Investor D decides that company A isn't a good prospect. So he goes to company C, and says, I want a CDS against X dollars' worth of company A bonds. Investor D doesn't own any company A bonds; he's just betting on the come. He's doing the credit equivalent of a short sale: he's betting that company A will go broke; and he's paying company B an income stream, some percentage of the interest he'd be getting if he owned the bond, in exchange for company C's promise to pay him X dollars (the amount of bond he's buying a CDS on) in case company A goes under. And company C sells him the CDS; another steady stream of money.
Company C has now promised to pay two different parties the face value of a bond that only one of them owns, in case company A goes broke.
Now multiply that by hundreds of deals, all over the U.S. and probably all over the world. And add to that the final twist: thanks to Sen. Phil Gramm's Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 (remember the guy who said we are "a nation of whiners"?), all these deals are unregulated. They're "over the counter."
That means they are all private. There's no central place, like a stock market, that has a record of who has written what CDS against what debt obligations. We can be pretty sure, however, that some or all of the major institutions were writing CDS's against the AAA rated sub-prime backed securities that everybody was buying. After all - they're not going to default, and the housing market will never stop rising. Until it didn't. Until the loans everyone was pushing began to default.
Because if you wrote CDS coverage for, say, a mortgage-backed security worth half a million dollars, you're on the hook for the dollars if that security ceases to pay interest. Do you have the dollars? Or are you so leveraged that you'd have to borrow in order to meet the obligation? Remember, all these people operated on borrowed money, all the time.
Now it's the end of March 2008, and Bear Sterns has just gone under. Immediately everybody who wrote CDS's on Bear Sterns debt has to pony up cash. They know who they are; and their counterparties know; but nobody else does, because CDS transactions aren't regulated and are private. You didn't see any news about people paying off CDS on Bear Sterns.
Every time since March that a major financial firm has gone under to the point where they default on their debt, more of these chickens have come home to roost. Every bank knows what their own position is; but because of the private nature of the transactions, they don't know what anyone else's position is. And nobody knows what the real position of the mortgage-backed securities is.
And that, compadres, is why banks are not lending to each other. They don't know who's sitting on CDS obligations that exceed their entire net worth.
I'm not an economist; I'm just a techie, and nobody's going to listen to me. But frankly, I see only one thing the government could do that would really open this up: Force an audit. Require every financial institution to compile and publish a list of all the CDS they have written. Only then will we be able to estimate the real scope of the damage, and make realistic plans about how to deal with it.
The truth shall make you free.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Little Flittering Things
It rained last night, for the first time since oh, March? February? It's been a dry year. However, last night or this morning, something responded to the rain, or something. We looked out the window into the back yard this morning, and the entire airspace over the patio was full of small white flittering insects, orbiting around the area and each other. I don't know what they were, but something hatched.
They're gone now, whatever they were.
They're gone now, whatever they were.
The Sorceror's Apprentice
I've concluded this is the appropriate metaphor for the mess the economy is in. The financial geniuses who have been running things, more or less unconstrained by any regulation whatever, developed a set of "tools" that they thought would allow them to hand off risk to other people. They didn't think through all the possible scenarios, and a worst-case scenario has occurred, and now they don't know what to do. See the parallel with Mickey and his brooms??
I'm not sure I want to go so far as to say that Hank Paulsen is the Sorceror, who will step in and wave a wand and make it all go away. I don't have that much faith in Mr. Paulsen.
I have a recommendation, however, for anyone who wants to understand how we got here. I don't normally listen to Ira Glass' This American Life. Today, however, they had a full hour program, Another Frightening Show About The Economy, which I recommend to anyone who wants to understand why that $700 billion bailout may really have been necessary. You may have heard the term "credit default swap"? This broadcast has the clearest description of credit default swaps, why they exist, and why they are a problem, that I've ever heard; and I worked for a major bank. There's also a solid description of the commercial paper market and why that is also frozen.
It'll take an hour of your time. It's worth it. They did a show in May called Giant Pool of Money, explaining the subprime mortgage mess, which I also plan to listen to, and they're putting out a daily podcast on the mess, Planet Money, which I think I'll add to my list as well.
I'm not sure I want to go so far as to say that Hank Paulsen is the Sorceror, who will step in and wave a wand and make it all go away. I don't have that much faith in Mr. Paulsen.
I have a recommendation, however, for anyone who wants to understand how we got here. I don't normally listen to Ira Glass' This American Life. Today, however, they had a full hour program, Another Frightening Show About The Economy, which I recommend to anyone who wants to understand why that $700 billion bailout may really have been necessary. You may have heard the term "credit default swap"? This broadcast has the clearest description of credit default swaps, why they exist, and why they are a problem, that I've ever heard; and I worked for a major bank. There's also a solid description of the commercial paper market and why that is also frozen.
It'll take an hour of your time. It's worth it. They did a show in May called Giant Pool of Money, explaining the subprime mortgage mess, which I also plan to listen to, and they're putting out a daily podcast on the mess, Planet Money, which I think I'll add to my list as well.
Monday, September 29, 2008
They did WHAT?
Congress - of whom I generally have low expectations - has startled even me today. They actually voted down the bailout bill that Congressional leaders had spent an entire week hammering out.
So now what? No one is quite sure. The trouble with the bailout bill, though, was that even if it had passed both Houses of Congress, no one was quite sure what next. Henry Paulsen had something he considered a plan, but he never explained it in much detail - IMHO because even he wasn't really sure what it was, but he was convinced that if he could throw enough money at the problem, some of it would stick.
The interesting thing is not that the markets are down - everybody expected that - but they aren't down as far as one might expect. They're down about 7% at the end of the day. The Dow is down not quite 778 points, which is the all time high in number of points lost - but is NOT one of the 10 greatest market percentage drops (see the lists in this article from CNNMoney.com), and the market is still above 10,000. Ten thousand on the Dow was a pipe dream for most of the years I've been watching the markets. The market is still higher than it was in March 1999, when it crossed 10,000 for the first time in history.
So the interesting question is: why isn't the market worse? (As well as, "Now what?") I don't have an answer.
Politically, of course, they "had to do it". According to NPR this morning, every Congressional office in the country has been flooded with furious calls from constituents, urging them not to bail the bastards out. They're all up for re-election in November - the entire House of Representatives - and they all felt they couldn't face the voters unless they could justify their votes. In fact, the real political courage today was shown by the people who voted for the bailout.
I wonder if the leaders of the financial industry realized exactly how much they were hated by Joe Sixpak, that quintessential American on Main Street. I'm quite sure they didn't care.
So now what? No one is quite sure. The trouble with the bailout bill, though, was that even if it had passed both Houses of Congress, no one was quite sure what next. Henry Paulsen had something he considered a plan, but he never explained it in much detail - IMHO because even he wasn't really sure what it was, but he was convinced that if he could throw enough money at the problem, some of it would stick.
The interesting thing is not that the markets are down - everybody expected that - but they aren't down as far as one might expect. They're down about 7% at the end of the day. The Dow is down not quite 778 points, which is the all time high in number of points lost - but is NOT one of the 10 greatest market percentage drops (see the lists in this article from CNNMoney.com), and the market is still above 10,000. Ten thousand on the Dow was a pipe dream for most of the years I've been watching the markets. The market is still higher than it was in March 1999, when it crossed 10,000 for the first time in history.
So the interesting question is: why isn't the market worse? (As well as, "Now what?") I don't have an answer.
Politically, of course, they "had to do it". According to NPR this morning, every Congressional office in the country has been flooded with furious calls from constituents, urging them not to bail the bastards out. They're all up for re-election in November - the entire House of Representatives - and they all felt they couldn't face the voters unless they could justify their votes. In fact, the real political courage today was shown by the people who voted for the bailout.
I wonder if the leaders of the financial industry realized exactly how much they were hated by Joe Sixpak, that quintessential American on Main Street. I'm quite sure they didn't care.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Gone
This year has been very strange. Beginning in 1976, I spent my entire working life in the financial industry: corporate librarian for Coopers & Lybrand, then computer technician for Bank of America. Always, keeping an eye on that entity called "Wall Street" or "the markets" - the brokerage houses, the investment banks, the New York Stock Exchange, the Dow Jones.
And now it's gone, or much of it. Coopers & Lybrand, of course, vanished in the '90s when it merged with Price Waterhouse to become PricewaterhouseCoopers, as the "Big Eight" dwindled to the "Big Five" (then the "Big Four", when Arthur Anderson imploded in the wake of the Enron scandal).
But in the last few months, "Wall Street" has - vanished. Earlier financial crises took their toll on firms that were merged or taken over, but the giants remained: Merrill Lynch. Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley. Bear Sterns. They're all gone, or transformed. Merrill Lynch - sold to Bank of America. Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers - sold and dismantled. (In the case of Lehman, taking some of my money with them, damn them.) And Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, reorganizing as commercial banks. I want to be a fly on the wall at their first visit from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. I don't think their corporate culture will take it well. There are - no major investment banks left in the United States. Does that mean that what they did will never be done again? Or will new firms arise to take on the risks (and hopefully not come screaming to the taxpayers for relief when they fail)?
Even the commercial banks are going - IndyMac. Washington Mutual. At the national level there are what? Five banks left? No, four, offhand - Bank of America; Wachovia; JP Morgan Chase; Citi. Of course, there are dozens of local and regional banks left, all over the country, which are NOT falling apart - several of them are advertising actively in my local newspaper.
It's a very strange feeling. It reminds me of the strange feeling I got, earlier this year, poking around the University of California's web sites. I realized that my graduate degree (Master's of Library Science) no longer exists, and neither does the Library School that offered it. The Library School is now the Information School (I know - they still hit me up for donations), and the degree is now Master's of Library and Information Science, and the computers I turned to in my midlife crisis are now the basis of the graduate program in which I learned to type catalog cards on a huge, creaking manual typewriter (because the electric typewriters, which were available, didn't come with the appropriate bibliographic typeface, including the square brackets).
So my degree is obsolete, and the industry I worked in is gone. I guess I have to think of something else to do. I hope we're right that I don't need to find another job; it's an awful time to be looking.
And now it's gone, or much of it. Coopers & Lybrand, of course, vanished in the '90s when it merged with Price Waterhouse to become PricewaterhouseCoopers, as the "Big Eight" dwindled to the "Big Five" (then the "Big Four", when Arthur Anderson imploded in the wake of the Enron scandal).
But in the last few months, "Wall Street" has - vanished. Earlier financial crises took their toll on firms that were merged or taken over, but the giants remained: Merrill Lynch. Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley. Bear Sterns. They're all gone, or transformed. Merrill Lynch - sold to Bank of America. Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers - sold and dismantled. (In the case of Lehman, taking some of my money with them, damn them.) And Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, reorganizing as commercial banks. I want to be a fly on the wall at their first visit from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. I don't think their corporate culture will take it well. There are - no major investment banks left in the United States. Does that mean that what they did will never be done again? Or will new firms arise to take on the risks (and hopefully not come screaming to the taxpayers for relief when they fail)?
Even the commercial banks are going - IndyMac. Washington Mutual. At the national level there are what? Five banks left? No, four, offhand - Bank of America; Wachovia; JP Morgan Chase; Citi. Of course, there are dozens of local and regional banks left, all over the country, which are NOT falling apart - several of them are advertising actively in my local newspaper.
It's a very strange feeling. It reminds me of the strange feeling I got, earlier this year, poking around the University of California's web sites. I realized that my graduate degree (Master's of Library Science) no longer exists, and neither does the Library School that offered it. The Library School is now the Information School (I know - they still hit me up for donations), and the degree is now Master's of Library and Information Science, and the computers I turned to in my midlife crisis are now the basis of the graduate program in which I learned to type catalog cards on a huge, creaking manual typewriter (because the electric typewriters, which were available, didn't come with the appropriate bibliographic typeface, including the square brackets).
So my degree is obsolete, and the industry I worked in is gone. I guess I have to think of something else to do. I hope we're right that I don't need to find another job; it's an awful time to be looking.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Moose
The press has made a great fuss over the fact that Governor Sarah Palin can field dress a moose. Would everyone please remember that this skill is not part of the job description for Vice President of the United States? Unless you think that the economy is about to get so bad that we'll all have to go back to hunting and gathering. In which case she'll either have to move back to Alaska or learn to hunt smaller game - there are no moose in the District of Columbia that I know of, although the Smithsonian may have one stuffed.
I was discussing this issue with my sister this morning, who commented that "She's not going to be allowed to shoot Putin and field dress him." In fact, shooting people isn't part of the Vice Presidential job description either - Dick Cheney shot that lawyer on his own time.
The trouble is, the McCain campaign is keeping such a tight rein on the governor that we can't tell what else she's capable of - and frankly, I think we ought to be able to get some kind of feel for that, before we have to vote. Why are they afraid to let her answer press questions? How many clothes is the Emperor wearing, anyhow?
I was discussing this issue with my sister this morning, who commented that "She's not going to be allowed to shoot Putin and field dress him." In fact, shooting people isn't part of the Vice Presidential job description either - Dick Cheney shot that lawyer on his own time.
The trouble is, the McCain campaign is keeping such a tight rein on the governor that we can't tell what else she's capable of - and frankly, I think we ought to be able to get some kind of feel for that, before we have to vote. Why are they afraid to let her answer press questions? How many clothes is the Emperor wearing, anyhow?
Skunks
Despite the subject line, this post isn't about the Bush administration or the financial bailout.
This is about skunks - the furry black-and-white critters with the unpleasant smell. We have a yard full of luxuriant bushes and plants, just the sort of place that a shy wild creature might like to move into, and I have a sinking feeling that a local skunk may have done just that.
As I look back at my Lunch in the Yard post, it was on August 28 that I complained about the lingering scent of skunk in the back yard. If only that had been the end of things - Friday of that week, we found a dead skunk in our back yard, right where the fence meets the corner of the garage. I took a picture of it, but I'll spare you. I looked up Oakland Animal Control on the Internet, and it basically said, we can't be bothered to send someone around - bury the carcass yourself. So we did.
We don't really know why the skunk died. If it was rabid, wouldn't they want to know? Evidently not. It didn't die in the garage, but according to my husband (who spends more time there than I do), it had been in the garage, and three weeks later he's still trying to air it out. Over the intervening several weeks, we've had skunk smells waft in, through the open upstairs windows, in the evening from time to time, which may be the remains of the last incident. Or maybe not.
Today, though, I came home from an errand, walked into the house, closed the door, and said to myself, "This place smells of skunk." Sniff again - yup, skunk. I turned on the house fan in hopes that the allergy filter on the furnace would help - several hours later I can't tell whether it has, or I've simply got used to the smell.
I began to worry when I went out to tour the foundation vents, and the access door to the crawl space, just outside the back door, was hanging from one rusted screw in one hinge (since fallen off). So anything smallish that wanted to nest under the back stairs could possibly have got in. The other vents were all solid, but it only takes one.
When my husband got home, he crawled part way under the house with a flashlight, and couldn't see or smell anything, except that we both smelled skunk strongly, right around the access door. Our current take is that a skunk sprayed the access door (which is right under an upstairs window we often open) but didn't get under the house. We left the door propped so something could get out but probably not back in, just in case.
I don't actually object to skunks; I wish them well; but I don't want them living under my house. I wish I didn't think that a local skunk had decided this is "his" yard. We already have a squirrel, a pair of towhees, and possibly a pair of Anna's hummingbirds living back there; surely that's enough wildlife support??
This is about skunks - the furry black-and-white critters with the unpleasant smell. We have a yard full of luxuriant bushes and plants, just the sort of place that a shy wild creature might like to move into, and I have a sinking feeling that a local skunk may have done just that.
As I look back at my Lunch in the Yard post, it was on August 28 that I complained about the lingering scent of skunk in the back yard. If only that had been the end of things - Friday of that week, we found a dead skunk in our back yard, right where the fence meets the corner of the garage. I took a picture of it, but I'll spare you. I looked up Oakland Animal Control on the Internet, and it basically said, we can't be bothered to send someone around - bury the carcass yourself. So we did.
We don't really know why the skunk died. If it was rabid, wouldn't they want to know? Evidently not. It didn't die in the garage, but according to my husband (who spends more time there than I do), it had been in the garage, and three weeks later he's still trying to air it out. Over the intervening several weeks, we've had skunk smells waft in, through the open upstairs windows, in the evening from time to time, which may be the remains of the last incident. Or maybe not.
Today, though, I came home from an errand, walked into the house, closed the door, and said to myself, "This place smells of skunk." Sniff again - yup, skunk. I turned on the house fan in hopes that the allergy filter on the furnace would help - several hours later I can't tell whether it has, or I've simply got used to the smell.
I began to worry when I went out to tour the foundation vents, and the access door to the crawl space, just outside the back door, was hanging from one rusted screw in one hinge (since fallen off). So anything smallish that wanted to nest under the back stairs could possibly have got in. The other vents were all solid, but it only takes one.
When my husband got home, he crawled part way under the house with a flashlight, and couldn't see or smell anything, except that we both smelled skunk strongly, right around the access door. Our current take is that a skunk sprayed the access door (which is right under an upstairs window we often open) but didn't get under the house. We left the door propped so something could get out but probably not back in, just in case.
I don't actually object to skunks; I wish them well; but I don't want them living under my house. I wish I didn't think that a local skunk had decided this is "his" yard. We already have a squirrel, a pair of towhees, and possibly a pair of Anna's hummingbirds living back there; surely that's enough wildlife support??
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Baloney
That's what the Treasury bailout plan is. High-grade, all beef, thinly sliced baloney. I like the editor's comment in the San Francisco Chronicle today: Henry Paulsen is not our king. Although I'm not sure he understands that. I also agree with the Senator I heard this morning on NPR (can't recall whom), who said, "Just because God made the world in 7 days doesn't mean we have to do this in 7 days."
Mr. Paulsen doesn't seem to have grasped the concept, basic to our democracy, of "checks and balances." Not to mention, "accountability" and "transparency."
I'm particularly annoyed when the Treasury and the Fed insist that the housing market won't recover unless Congress passes the plan as it stands. The implication is that the housing market will recover if it does pass the plan - and that's baloney, too.
The housing market isn't crashing because of tight credit - mortgage credit isn't that tight. The housing market is crashing because the huge backlog of foreclosed homes, on sale at fire-sale prices, is driving down real estate values. It's going to continue to crash as long as that condition exists - in my personal opinion, about another year and a half. Only major bargain hunters, who plan to stay a long time, want to buy a house that will be worth less than they paid for it in 6 months; and until we've finished the fire sales, that condition will continue to exist.
This is classic Bush administration propaganda: ride the fear. Only we can save you. We can't restrict executive compensation on bailed out firms or companies won't play with us. If that's really true - then don't bail them out. Let them fail. These yoyos are in this position because they are incompetent. They don't deserve huge payouts to go away and do it again somewhere else.
I am beginning to get sufficiently torqued with all of these idiots - who are in this position because they allowed their greed to overcome their common sense - that I think we should let them fail, and pick up the pieces as best we can. It won't be any worse for the people who are being foreclosed; they're already losing their homes. The rest of us watching our houses drop in value also won't see any change; see above, the housing crash cannot be affected by this crap, and they're lying to us.
This is the Bush administration's attempt to get monarchical powers for the Treasury secretary as well as the Presidency, and it should be blocked. Write your congressman; call your senator. Oppose this. I have.
Mr. Paulsen doesn't seem to have grasped the concept, basic to our democracy, of "checks and balances." Not to mention, "accountability" and "transparency."
I'm particularly annoyed when the Treasury and the Fed insist that the housing market won't recover unless Congress passes the plan as it stands. The implication is that the housing market will recover if it does pass the plan - and that's baloney, too.
The housing market isn't crashing because of tight credit - mortgage credit isn't that tight. The housing market is crashing because the huge backlog of foreclosed homes, on sale at fire-sale prices, is driving down real estate values. It's going to continue to crash as long as that condition exists - in my personal opinion, about another year and a half. Only major bargain hunters, who plan to stay a long time, want to buy a house that will be worth less than they paid for it in 6 months; and until we've finished the fire sales, that condition will continue to exist.
This is classic Bush administration propaganda: ride the fear. Only we can save you. We can't restrict executive compensation on bailed out firms or companies won't play with us. If that's really true - then don't bail them out. Let them fail. These yoyos are in this position because they are incompetent. They don't deserve huge payouts to go away and do it again somewhere else.
I am beginning to get sufficiently torqued with all of these idiots - who are in this position because they allowed their greed to overcome their common sense - that I think we should let them fail, and pick up the pieces as best we can. It won't be any worse for the people who are being foreclosed; they're already losing their homes. The rest of us watching our houses drop in value also won't see any change; see above, the housing crash cannot be affected by this crap, and they're lying to us.
This is the Bush administration's attempt to get monarchical powers for the Treasury secretary as well as the Presidency, and it should be blocked. Write your congressman; call your senator. Oppose this. I have.
Friday, September 19, 2008
Hoovervilles
OK, it's official. This is the Depression.
A major characteristic of the Great Depression were the "Hoovervilles", which Wikipedia defines as "a shanty town built by homeless men in the depression years." The term was also used to define tent cities that sprang up on empty land across the country. "Hoover", of course, was President Hoover, who was in charge, more or less, when the economy fell apart after the 1929 stock market crash.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports today that locales all over the country are seeing tent cities spring up, in parking lots and parks, full of people who often have no job as well as no place to live. No one knows how many of these people are homeless due to foreclosure. No one really knows how many there are; the last data on homelessness from HUD dates from early 2007, and this has all happened in the last few months.
So what shall we call these encampments? Bushvilles? Or are these people just "Bushed"? How about "Crawford camps"?
A major characteristic of the Great Depression were the "Hoovervilles", which Wikipedia defines as "a shanty town built by homeless men in the depression years." The term was also used to define tent cities that sprang up on empty land across the country. "Hoover", of course, was President Hoover, who was in charge, more or less, when the economy fell apart after the 1929 stock market crash.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports today that locales all over the country are seeing tent cities spring up, in parking lots and parks, full of people who often have no job as well as no place to live. No one knows how many of these people are homeless due to foreclosure. No one really knows how many there are; the last data on homelessness from HUD dates from early 2007, and this has all happened in the last few months.
So what shall we call these encampments? Bushvilles? Or are these people just "Bushed"? How about "Crawford camps"?
Sunday, September 14, 2008
The Republican Ticket
Like the rest of the world, I was startled - is that the right word? - when John McCain announced his choice for VP. Since then, in an attempt to figure out what was going on, I've been reading everything I can find in the infamous "mainstream media" about Gov. Palin. I'm trying to be as objective as possible, to counterbalance my visceral reaction to her. In short, the lady creeps me out, probably because she's diametrically opposed to me on virtually every position.
I've deliberately avoided the Internet riffs floating around on her, with one exception: the "Letter from Wasilla," attributed to one Anne Kilkenny - largely because the thing was signed, and showed internal evidence that the author was trying to be fair-minded. Snopes.com considers that letter authentic; much of what I say about her here comes either from that letter or from the New York Times.
I've concluded that Gov. Palin is the affirmative action candidate. She is where she is because she's female, and for no other major reason. To prove this to yourself, just invert the situation. You have the one-term governor of a large but thinly populated state, with no national or international experience or (apparently) interest; with a public record of hiring cronies and family members; a gun supporter, a disbeliever in global warming, a born-again evangelical creationist and right-to-life supporter, with 5 children, one of whom has Down's syndrome, and another of whom is pregnant at the age of 17. And this hypothetical governor is male.
Would this person be anywhere near the vice presidency? He wouldn't even be on the backup list. But she's in the catbird seat.
McCain apparently picked her himself, bypassing the usual vetting process. The New York Times ran a major article suggesting that no one in the Alaska Republican Party - for that matter, no one in the national party - was contacted about the governor before the announcement. It's a very interesting read; apparently McCain simply leaped to the conclusion that this woman could save his campaign and offered her the job on the spot, in place of two or three male candidates with real records of competence.
Consider this as an example of McCain's decision making under stress. Is this really the man you want running this country??
Also consider what this implies about McCain's opinion of American voting women. He thinks we'll vote for his ticket because his number two has ovaries instead of balls. The level of contempt for the people he expects to vote for him leaves me gobsmacked. It is an insult. If I were a Republican woman, I'd be furious. If I were a moderate Republican woman, I'd be practically radioactive.
Gov. Palin has one attribute that is usually required to attain high office: ambition. Is that enough??
I've deliberately avoided the Internet riffs floating around on her, with one exception: the "Letter from Wasilla," attributed to one Anne Kilkenny - largely because the thing was signed, and showed internal evidence that the author was trying to be fair-minded. Snopes.com considers that letter authentic; much of what I say about her here comes either from that letter or from the New York Times.
I've concluded that Gov. Palin is the affirmative action candidate. She is where she is because she's female, and for no other major reason. To prove this to yourself, just invert the situation. You have the one-term governor of a large but thinly populated state, with no national or international experience or (apparently) interest; with a public record of hiring cronies and family members; a gun supporter, a disbeliever in global warming, a born-again evangelical creationist and right-to-life supporter, with 5 children, one of whom has Down's syndrome, and another of whom is pregnant at the age of 17. And this hypothetical governor is male.
Would this person be anywhere near the vice presidency? He wouldn't even be on the backup list. But she's in the catbird seat.
McCain apparently picked her himself, bypassing the usual vetting process. The New York Times ran a major article suggesting that no one in the Alaska Republican Party - for that matter, no one in the national party - was contacted about the governor before the announcement. It's a very interesting read; apparently McCain simply leaped to the conclusion that this woman could save his campaign and offered her the job on the spot, in place of two or three male candidates with real records of competence.
Consider this as an example of McCain's decision making under stress. Is this really the man you want running this country??
Also consider what this implies about McCain's opinion of American voting women. He thinks we'll vote for his ticket because his number two has ovaries instead of balls. The level of contempt for the people he expects to vote for him leaves me gobsmacked. It is an insult. If I were a Republican woman, I'd be furious. If I were a moderate Republican woman, I'd be practically radioactive.
Gov. Palin has one attribute that is usually required to attain high office: ambition. Is that enough??
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
Lazy in Las Vegas
I'm visiting my sister again. It's cooler than the last time, only in the middle 90's. The tortoises are stumping around the yard; the dogs got out today and ran who knows where, and we all scrabbled around yelling for them until they came back. It's dangerous for loose dogs - people drive way too fast on these roads.
With nothing else in particular to do, I accompanied my sister to her scheduled visit to get her hair and nails done. I didn't realize when I signed up for this that it was going to take three and a half hours; I love my sister dearly, but even I admit that she's "high maintenance." With a slight advance warning that it would take "all afternoon," I took a book.
As we approached the shop, the noise stunned me - the salon is right under the final approach path to McCarran International Airport. I mean right under - landing planes go over the front door maybe 200 feet up; you can read the letters on the fuselage. My sister says she waves to the pilots. The noise is unbelievably loud - I can't even estimate the decibel level. It completely freaked me out. However, this was where we were bound.
I hadn't realized how early the appointment was, and hadn't had any lunch; so my first move was to ask the desk girl to recommend a place to eat. She suggested a local lunch shop across the parking lot, and I tried it and found it good; and then I returned to the salon and settled down in the lobby with my book.
After not very long in the lobby, the smells began to get to me. This salon does everything chemical to hair - bleach, color, extensions, you name it - and they do nails, which means nail polish, nail polish remover, and whatever they use to glue on those long talons. Most of the chemical activity happens farther back in the shop, but the odors waft out to the reception area pretty regularly.
I read a couple more chapters of my book, and decided that the combination of airplanes and smells was more than I wanted to spend several hours in. I hunted up my sister, who was having something I didn't ask about painted on her hair, and told her that I was going to find a coffee shop to wait this out, and to call my cell phone when she was ready to leave. Going down the sidewalk, her "nail lady" stopped me and recommended a bar nearby where I could sit and read, because all the lunch places close early.
I should have seen this one coming. This isn't the Rive Gauche. Bars, especially in Las Vegas, do not expect people to sit and read; bars expect people to sit and (a) drink and talk, (b) play video poker, (c) watch ESPN, or (d) all of the above. None of these activities requires reading lights; the place was dark as a cave. Fortunately, it wasn't especially hot today, and they have a shaded outdoor patio, so I sat, drinking soda water, long enough to finish my novel and two short stories.
Part way into the third short story, I realized it was after 3 o'clock; no word from my sister, but the sun was coming around onto the patio. I wandered back to the salon, dodging from shade to shade (I forgot to put on sunscreen), and found my sister having her hair blow-dried by a man whose hair looked like someone was blow-drying him. I resettled in the lobby and read another short story, and then she was ready to go.
I still can't quite believe this, but she claims she'd never noticed the smells until I mentioned them. I'm also delighted that a freak of genetics means that I'm going gray gracefully, and slowly - all I get from my hairdresser is a very careful haircut.
With nothing else in particular to do, I accompanied my sister to her scheduled visit to get her hair and nails done. I didn't realize when I signed up for this that it was going to take three and a half hours; I love my sister dearly, but even I admit that she's "high maintenance." With a slight advance warning that it would take "all afternoon," I took a book.
As we approached the shop, the noise stunned me - the salon is right under the final approach path to McCarran International Airport. I mean right under - landing planes go over the front door maybe 200 feet up; you can read the letters on the fuselage. My sister says she waves to the pilots. The noise is unbelievably loud - I can't even estimate the decibel level. It completely freaked me out. However, this was where we were bound.
I hadn't realized how early the appointment was, and hadn't had any lunch; so my first move was to ask the desk girl to recommend a place to eat. She suggested a local lunch shop across the parking lot, and I tried it and found it good; and then I returned to the salon and settled down in the lobby with my book.
After not very long in the lobby, the smells began to get to me. This salon does everything chemical to hair - bleach, color, extensions, you name it - and they do nails, which means nail polish, nail polish remover, and whatever they use to glue on those long talons. Most of the chemical activity happens farther back in the shop, but the odors waft out to the reception area pretty regularly.
I read a couple more chapters of my book, and decided that the combination of airplanes and smells was more than I wanted to spend several hours in. I hunted up my sister, who was having something I didn't ask about painted on her hair, and told her that I was going to find a coffee shop to wait this out, and to call my cell phone when she was ready to leave. Going down the sidewalk, her "nail lady" stopped me and recommended a bar nearby where I could sit and read, because all the lunch places close early.
I should have seen this one coming. This isn't the Rive Gauche. Bars, especially in Las Vegas, do not expect people to sit and read; bars expect people to sit and (a) drink and talk, (b) play video poker, (c) watch ESPN, or (d) all of the above. None of these activities requires reading lights; the place was dark as a cave. Fortunately, it wasn't especially hot today, and they have a shaded outdoor patio, so I sat, drinking soda water, long enough to finish my novel and two short stories.
Part way into the third short story, I realized it was after 3 o'clock; no word from my sister, but the sun was coming around onto the patio. I wandered back to the salon, dodging from shade to shade (I forgot to put on sunscreen), and found my sister having her hair blow-dried by a man whose hair looked like someone was blow-drying him. I resettled in the lobby and read another short story, and then she was ready to go.
I still can't quite believe this, but she claims she'd never noticed the smells until I mentioned them. I'm also delighted that a freak of genetics means that I'm going gray gracefully, and slowly - all I get from my hairdresser is a very careful haircut.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Notes on the News
Leah Garchik's column in the San Francisco Chronicle reports this tidbit from the Democratic Convention in Denver:
And Jon Carroll of the same paper has a column on resentment, related to bicycles, that is worth reading. In my neighborhood there's been a great deal of concern over bicyclists, riding on the sidewalk, running red lights. Pedestrians (including, once or twice, me) feel threatened. Bicyclists feel unjustly accused. In their defense, this neighborhood has very narrow streets and no bike lanes. Speaking for the prosecution, I see them run lights and stop signs all the time.
I'd like everybody to memorize this column. I particularly like this remark:
Scattered Denver observations from Noah Griffin, veteran of seven previous conventions: He's never seen such a police presence ... helmeted, on horseback, hanging on the running boards of humvee-like vehicles in full riot gear." They're nice to delegates, but "they surround the bull-horned protesters in a massive show of force."Sounds as though we learned something from the Beijing Olympics, but I'm not sure it's the right lesson. Whatever happened to the First Amendment? At least we don't seem to have sent anyone to a re-education camp for requesting permission to protest.
And Jon Carroll of the same paper has a column on resentment, related to bicycles, that is worth reading. In my neighborhood there's been a great deal of concern over bicyclists, riding on the sidewalk, running red lights. Pedestrians (including, once or twice, me) feel threatened. Bicyclists feel unjustly accused. In their defense, this neighborhood has very narrow streets and no bike lanes. Speaking for the prosecution, I see them run lights and stop signs all the time.
I'd like everybody to memorize this column. I particularly like this remark:
Inferred arrogance is a way of enabling bad behavior. He's being a jerk, so I can be a jerk."Why is that a good thing? The last thing any of us needs is more jerks around, even if it's us. Especially if it's us.
Lunch in the Yard
I like to eat lunch in the yard when it's warm enough; this is one of the rewards of retirement. It's certainly warm enough today - the Google weather gadget says 92 degrees, although that's probably at the airport with all the concrete. To show you why I like to have lunch in the yard, here's what I see when I sit under the patio umbrella:
It's a small green jungle out there, and very pleasant.
This week, though, it's a little less pleasant than usual, and not because of the heat. Earlier this week we had a nocturnal visit from one of the local skunks.
I don't know what pissed the skunk off, but pissed he was, and he sprayed our driveway thoroughly, just around the corner of the house from the garden. This was I think Monday night, 3 days ago - I remember getting up in the middle of the night and thinking, "What is that smell??" I actually went downstairs to see if anything seemed to be smouldering; nothing but the smell. The next morning Jim went out and reported that it seemed to be strongest right next to our neighbor's chimney base, so that was the scene of whatever happened.
So we have an experiment in progress - how long does it take a full skunk spray to wear off?? Believe me - 3 days is not enough.
It's a small green jungle out there, and very pleasant.This week, though, it's a little less pleasant than usual, and not because of the heat. Earlier this week we had a nocturnal visit from one of the local skunks.
I don't know what pissed the skunk off, but pissed he was, and he sprayed our driveway thoroughly, just around the corner of the house from the garden. This was I think Monday night, 3 days ago - I remember getting up in the middle of the night and thinking, "What is that smell??" I actually went downstairs to see if anything seemed to be smouldering; nothing but the smell. The next morning Jim went out and reported that it seemed to be strongest right next to our neighbor's chimney base, so that was the scene of whatever happened.
So we have an experiment in progress - how long does it take a full skunk spray to wear off?? Believe me - 3 days is not enough.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Causal Dynamical Triangulations
What? You ask. Say what? And well you might. But this is the working description of the most exciting cosmological theory I've read about in probably twenty years. It was written up in the July 2008 Scientific American and you can find the article here, entitled The Self-Organizing Quantum Universe.
I began to try to summarize it; and realized that I don't know enough about it to do it justice. Read the article yourself - it's surprisingly accessible - but here's what excites me about it:
I read cosmology and quantum physics articles as a challenge. I don't understand the math; I want to see if I can read the words and get a feel for what they're talking about. I have a general feel for quantum theory - the broad concept that any entity from an atom to the universe exists in what they call "superposition", which means that it "exists" in all possible states simultaneously, and only "collapses" into a single state when you measure it. (I told you this wasn't my world.) But quantum theories don't explain gravity and never really have.
Increasingly expansive attempts to develop a "theory of everything" (including gravity) have postulated ever-increasing crowds of elementary particles (quarks, gluons, etc.) and even minuscule vibrating "strings" - and the theories based on these predict universes that exist in dozens of dimensions, all so small they can't be detected. Nothing they predict resembles anything you can see when you look around, or point a telescope at the universe. And their theories are so complicated they require massive supercomputers to work out the mathematics of the simulations. Frankly, they've never made any sense to me; and they've always made me think of the epicycles that medieval philosophers developed, to explain why their increasingly precise measurements of planetary motion didn't match what the Ptolemaic theory predicted.
It's probably too much to suggest that this team of scientists - a Dane, a Pole, and a German - is the equivalent of Copernicus and his heliocentrism. For one thing, I doubt anyone will actually burn at the stake for advocating their theory. But the theory, which they call causal dynamical triangulations, has a number of points in common with Copernicus':
All cosmological theories assume basic building blocks, which have certain properties. In the authors' theory, each triangular building block is assigned an arrow of time, pointing from past to future; and the rules governing gluing building blocks together require that their arrows of time point in the same direction. The spacetime this predicts looks like the four-dimensional spacetime we live in, and conforms to the predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity (which has never been disproved). I was actually reminded of the computer game "Life", where you define a starting state and a fairly simple set of rules, and let the program run to produce a world.
Additionally, as far as the authors can tell to date, the universe predicted by this theory is fractal - that is, it looks the same at any scale, as far down as one can measure. I don't know why this appeals to me, except that as far as I can tell, the living universe tends to be fractal.
I don't know if this will appeal to anyone else the way it did to me, but it fascinated me and I had to share it.
I began to try to summarize it; and realized that I don't know enough about it to do it justice. Read the article yourself - it's surprisingly accessible - but here's what excites me about it:
I read cosmology and quantum physics articles as a challenge. I don't understand the math; I want to see if I can read the words and get a feel for what they're talking about. I have a general feel for quantum theory - the broad concept that any entity from an atom to the universe exists in what they call "superposition", which means that it "exists" in all possible states simultaneously, and only "collapses" into a single state when you measure it. (I told you this wasn't my world.) But quantum theories don't explain gravity and never really have.
Increasingly expansive attempts to develop a "theory of everything" (including gravity) have postulated ever-increasing crowds of elementary particles (quarks, gluons, etc.) and even minuscule vibrating "strings" - and the theories based on these predict universes that exist in dozens of dimensions, all so small they can't be detected. Nothing they predict resembles anything you can see when you look around, or point a telescope at the universe. And their theories are so complicated they require massive supercomputers to work out the mathematics of the simulations. Frankly, they've never made any sense to me; and they've always made me think of the epicycles that medieval philosophers developed, to explain why their increasingly precise measurements of planetary motion didn't match what the Ptolemaic theory predicted.
It's probably too much to suggest that this team of scientists - a Dane, a Pole, and a German - is the equivalent of Copernicus and his heliocentrism. For one thing, I doubt anyone will actually burn at the stake for advocating their theory. But the theory, which they call causal dynamical triangulations, has a number of points in common with Copernicus':
- It's based on a few simple assumptions, using only very basic quantum principles.
- The calculations are simple enough that they can do their simulations on a laptop. (Keep in mind that today's laptops have a lot of computing horsepower!)
- What it predicts looks remarkably like what we see.
- When they change details in their simulations, the results barely change at all.
All cosmological theories assume basic building blocks, which have certain properties. In the authors' theory, each triangular building block is assigned an arrow of time, pointing from past to future; and the rules governing gluing building blocks together require that their arrows of time point in the same direction. The spacetime this predicts looks like the four-dimensional spacetime we live in, and conforms to the predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity (which has never been disproved). I was actually reminded of the computer game "Life", where you define a starting state and a fairly simple set of rules, and let the program run to produce a world.
Additionally, as far as the authors can tell to date, the universe predicted by this theory is fractal - that is, it looks the same at any scale, as far down as one can measure. I don't know why this appeals to me, except that as far as I can tell, the living universe tends to be fractal.
I don't know if this will appeal to anyone else the way it did to me, but it fascinated me and I had to share it.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Road Food
NB: I actually began this post at the beginning of July and got distracted; so here it is in full.
Dining on the road is always an adventure, and a risk. When we're on the road, we always get too much salt, and usually too much fat, compared to what we cook at home. Neither of us can stand the chain restaurants any more, so our solution while traveling is to ask the B&B host, or the desk girl at the motel, for a local restaurant they like. This produces mixed results, although on this trip we never had to resort to a chain.
The awful meals, at least for my husband, began in Elko, Nevada. I've concluded that Elko is just not a good place for Jim to eat; on an earlier occasion he got actual food poisoning, on this pass he merely got a tough, fatty steak full of gristle. The desk girl at the motel had referred us to the restaurant in the casino down the road, saying it was, "Pretty good." I guess it depends on what else there is. I've learned that I do better, eating on the road, if I order some kind of salad with chicken in it, and dressing on the side; I did that, and it wasn't bad.
Our next memorable meal was in Wendover, where we stopped for lunch before crossing the salt flats. We had a choice of casinos to eat in and not much else; so we picked the Peppermill.
It was like eating inside a pinball machine. Because of the slots, it sounded like a pinball machine; and of course, in standard casino mode it had no windows. What it did have were mirrored black glass interior walls, accented at unpredictable spots by neon tube lighting, reflecting off all the other black mirrors. You literally could not tell where the walls were, or the ceiling. And on the walls, where you'd expect paintings or posters, they had frames with live action video loops of various scenes. The food wasn't bad as the joint in Elko, but the ambience was surreal. I went to U.C. Berkeley in the '60s with some people who would have paid serious money to get stoned inside that place.
We fought our way through Salt Lake City commute traffic to Brigham City, where we gave up and found a motel. The desk girl referred us to Maddox's Fine Food, down the road in Perry, and we ended up getting probably the best "American home cooking" I've ever had in a restaurant. My diary reads: "Bison and local open range beef, Idaho trout (Yum!), fresh homebaked everything (rolls, cornbread fingers, pie), two kinds of homebrewed root beer, birch and sarsparilla" (this is Utah - coffee and tea were not offered). It was a family owned place, and full of families, we were almost the only table that didn't have at least 3 generations and 3 children. "Local open range beef" means the slaughterhouse was at the bottom of the hill. Honest, it's almost worth driving to Utah to eat there; and if you're in the vicinity, it's absolutely worth a detour.
In Paris, Idaho, the next day, we stopped at "the local place." Paris is a few blocks strewn along the main highway toward the Tetons, and this little joint was right across the street from the (really impressive) Mormon Tabernacle, which we toured. I'm always interested to try the local place, but it's a crapshoot, and Jim rolled snake eyes. I had a hamburger, which was edible, but he decided to try the specialty of the house, which was chicken with something they called "Huckleberry fire surprise." I didn't try it; but he reported that it was simply awful, and didn't finish it.
Once we got into Yellowstone, our dining options became severely limited. You can't just drop in and eat at the restaurant in any of the hotels because they book 24 hours in advance; and you're at least 2 hours (on relatively bad roads) from anywhere else. So the first thing you do after checking in is book all the nights you want to eat there. We stayed 5 nights, and we ate at Yellowstone Lake twice and Old Faithful twice, and the first night we walked over to the gift shop and ate fast food at the lunch counter because it was the only thing that didn't require reservations.
I'd say we batted 500 in Yellowstone. Our first formal meal was at the Old Faithful Inn, and I've described the snowstorm that enlivened that evening in another post. The food at Old Faithful was good, but I couldn't focus on it because I was wondering how we'd get back to sleep. It didn't help that we'd gotten lost in the Old Faithful grounds and spent most of 45 minutes walking around in a snowstorm. But the food was OK. The next night, though, we had reservations at Yellowstone Lake Hotel, and we returned in late afternoon to find that the power was out. The story at the desk was that they had blown a transformer. I've described that meal elsewhere also; it really was one of the worst meals I've ever had.
Apart from those harrowing incidents, the food in Yellowstone was quite good, and the breakfast buffet was reliable if a little heavy on the fat. Eventually we set out for Bozeman and then Missoula, and on to Glacier. One of the things we no longer do when we're traveling is eat lunch in restaurants; Paris, Idaho was an aberration (and the exception that proves the rule!). We get bread, and almonds or cheese, and fruit, and we just eat that by the road somewhere.
From Bozeman onward I found myself eating cayenne pepper in various dishes that hadn't said they contained it. In fact, in Bozeman, Jim and I actually switched dinners. I really can't eat a dish with too much pepper. In Missoula we had a dubious deli meal in a little semi-vegetarian grocery, mostly fascinating for the meeting of a local non-profit board at the next table, discussing where they were going to get volunteers and how they could meet the city council's funding deadline. The next night we went to a restaurant at a golf course, notable for a fabulous view of the valley and a clientele whose average age we lowered by at least a decade. Food was OK.
Many Glaciers Lodge is like the hotels in Yellowstone: if you're there, you eat there, because that's all there is. I suppose we could have driven in to Babb and eaten at the Cattle Baron Supper Club, just outside the park boundary; but we didn't. The food at Many Glaciers is just so-so; you go for the view, not the food. The Yellowstone hotels set a higher standard on food. As part of our bus tour, we had a very nice lunch at one of the commercial lodges on the Blackfoot reservation.
Coming home, we stopped for the night in Sandpoint, Idaho, and there we stumbled into a world-class meal at the Sand Creek Grill, right on the lake - a restaurant in the style of Alice Waters, with fresh local everything.
Our greatest disappointment was the Columbia Gorge Hotel, in Hood River. We stayed there a few years ago and had wonderful food (if the 7 course breakfast was a little much) and fabulous service, in a legacy luxury hotel. So we stayed there again and found that someone is building "Columbia Gorge" condos on the lot next door, the excellent service has disappeared, and there are huge flat-panel TVs in every room except the dining room, including the lounge, which last time had a talented singer/comedian doing live entertainment. Now they have ESPN. The room drains were stopped up and they couldn't unstop them. And the experienced serving staff in the restaurant had been replaced by beautiful boys who can't handle a complicated order, and can't tell skim milk from 1% (and don't realize that the customer can). Sic transit gloria mundi. They still have their views, but they won't have their reputation very long at this rate.
They were so bad that we chose to find another restaurant for our last dinner in town. That was my next unexpected encounter with cayenne pepper, which the restaurant, the Stonehedge Gardens, chose to put in the house salad dressing. I complained about it and they just said, "Oh, we always do that." They advertise as a high-end restaurant, but all I remember about them is that they put too much pepper in the salad dressing and didn't give me a choice.
Our last stop was at our old friend, the Wolf Creek Inn. It's a restored stage stop near Grants Pass, Oregon, run by the Oregon Parks Dept., with about 8 rooms; and the food was reliable and excellent as always. My only problem with the Wolf Creek Inn isn't food - when they built that enclosed staircase to the second floor, suitcases were smaller than they are now...
Dining on the road is always an adventure, and a risk. When we're on the road, we always get too much salt, and usually too much fat, compared to what we cook at home. Neither of us can stand the chain restaurants any more, so our solution while traveling is to ask the B&B host, or the desk girl at the motel, for a local restaurant they like. This produces mixed results, although on this trip we never had to resort to a chain.
The awful meals, at least for my husband, began in Elko, Nevada. I've concluded that Elko is just not a good place for Jim to eat; on an earlier occasion he got actual food poisoning, on this pass he merely got a tough, fatty steak full of gristle. The desk girl at the motel had referred us to the restaurant in the casino down the road, saying it was, "Pretty good." I guess it depends on what else there is. I've learned that I do better, eating on the road, if I order some kind of salad with chicken in it, and dressing on the side; I did that, and it wasn't bad.
Our next memorable meal was in Wendover, where we stopped for lunch before crossing the salt flats. We had a choice of casinos to eat in and not much else; so we picked the Peppermill.
It was like eating inside a pinball machine. Because of the slots, it sounded like a pinball machine; and of course, in standard casino mode it had no windows. What it did have were mirrored black glass interior walls, accented at unpredictable spots by neon tube lighting, reflecting off all the other black mirrors. You literally could not tell where the walls were, or the ceiling. And on the walls, where you'd expect paintings or posters, they had frames with live action video loops of various scenes. The food wasn't bad as the joint in Elko, but the ambience was surreal. I went to U.C. Berkeley in the '60s with some people who would have paid serious money to get stoned inside that place.
We fought our way through Salt Lake City commute traffic to Brigham City, where we gave up and found a motel. The desk girl referred us to Maddox's Fine Food, down the road in Perry, and we ended up getting probably the best "American home cooking" I've ever had in a restaurant. My diary reads: "Bison and local open range beef, Idaho trout (Yum!), fresh homebaked everything (rolls, cornbread fingers, pie), two kinds of homebrewed root beer, birch and sarsparilla" (this is Utah - coffee and tea were not offered). It was a family owned place, and full of families, we were almost the only table that didn't have at least 3 generations and 3 children. "Local open range beef" means the slaughterhouse was at the bottom of the hill. Honest, it's almost worth driving to Utah to eat there; and if you're in the vicinity, it's absolutely worth a detour.
In Paris, Idaho, the next day, we stopped at "the local place." Paris is a few blocks strewn along the main highway toward the Tetons, and this little joint was right across the street from the (really impressive) Mormon Tabernacle, which we toured. I'm always interested to try the local place, but it's a crapshoot, and Jim rolled snake eyes. I had a hamburger, which was edible, but he decided to try the specialty of the house, which was chicken with something they called "Huckleberry fire surprise." I didn't try it; but he reported that it was simply awful, and didn't finish it.
Once we got into Yellowstone, our dining options became severely limited. You can't just drop in and eat at the restaurant in any of the hotels because they book 24 hours in advance; and you're at least 2 hours (on relatively bad roads) from anywhere else. So the first thing you do after checking in is book all the nights you want to eat there. We stayed 5 nights, and we ate at Yellowstone Lake twice and Old Faithful twice, and the first night we walked over to the gift shop and ate fast food at the lunch counter because it was the only thing that didn't require reservations.
I'd say we batted 500 in Yellowstone. Our first formal meal was at the Old Faithful Inn, and I've described the snowstorm that enlivened that evening in another post. The food at Old Faithful was good, but I couldn't focus on it because I was wondering how we'd get back to sleep. It didn't help that we'd gotten lost in the Old Faithful grounds and spent most of 45 minutes walking around in a snowstorm. But the food was OK. The next night, though, we had reservations at Yellowstone Lake Hotel, and we returned in late afternoon to find that the power was out. The story at the desk was that they had blown a transformer. I've described that meal elsewhere also; it really was one of the worst meals I've ever had.
Apart from those harrowing incidents, the food in Yellowstone was quite good, and the breakfast buffet was reliable if a little heavy on the fat. Eventually we set out for Bozeman and then Missoula, and on to Glacier. One of the things we no longer do when we're traveling is eat lunch in restaurants; Paris, Idaho was an aberration (and the exception that proves the rule!). We get bread, and almonds or cheese, and fruit, and we just eat that by the road somewhere.
From Bozeman onward I found myself eating cayenne pepper in various dishes that hadn't said they contained it. In fact, in Bozeman, Jim and I actually switched dinners. I really can't eat a dish with too much pepper. In Missoula we had a dubious deli meal in a little semi-vegetarian grocery, mostly fascinating for the meeting of a local non-profit board at the next table, discussing where they were going to get volunteers and how they could meet the city council's funding deadline. The next night we went to a restaurant at a golf course, notable for a fabulous view of the valley and a clientele whose average age we lowered by at least a decade. Food was OK.
Many Glaciers Lodge is like the hotels in Yellowstone: if you're there, you eat there, because that's all there is. I suppose we could have driven in to Babb and eaten at the Cattle Baron Supper Club, just outside the park boundary; but we didn't. The food at Many Glaciers is just so-so; you go for the view, not the food. The Yellowstone hotels set a higher standard on food. As part of our bus tour, we had a very nice lunch at one of the commercial lodges on the Blackfoot reservation.
Coming home, we stopped for the night in Sandpoint, Idaho, and there we stumbled into a world-class meal at the Sand Creek Grill, right on the lake - a restaurant in the style of Alice Waters, with fresh local everything.
Our greatest disappointment was the Columbia Gorge Hotel, in Hood River. We stayed there a few years ago and had wonderful food (if the 7 course breakfast was a little much) and fabulous service, in a legacy luxury hotel. So we stayed there again and found that someone is building "Columbia Gorge" condos on the lot next door, the excellent service has disappeared, and there are huge flat-panel TVs in every room except the dining room, including the lounge, which last time had a talented singer/comedian doing live entertainment. Now they have ESPN. The room drains were stopped up and they couldn't unstop them. And the experienced serving staff in the restaurant had been replaced by beautiful boys who can't handle a complicated order, and can't tell skim milk from 1% (and don't realize that the customer can). Sic transit gloria mundi. They still have their views, but they won't have their reputation very long at this rate.
They were so bad that we chose to find another restaurant for our last dinner in town. That was my next unexpected encounter with cayenne pepper, which the restaurant, the Stonehedge Gardens, chose to put in the house salad dressing. I complained about it and they just said, "Oh, we always do that." They advertise as a high-end restaurant, but all I remember about them is that they put too much pepper in the salad dressing and didn't give me a choice.
Our last stop was at our old friend, the Wolf Creek Inn. It's a restored stage stop near Grants Pass, Oregon, run by the Oregon Parks Dept., with about 8 rooms; and the food was reliable and excellent as always. My only problem with the Wolf Creek Inn isn't food - when they built that enclosed staircase to the second floor, suitcases were smaller than they are now...
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The Bag Lady
After my last post on retirement, I had that exchange with my husband again, the one where he says, "The finances really are all right, you don't need to worry about the money." Except, of course, that I do worry. I don't obsess over it, but I think over purchases more carefully than I did when I had a salary, and I look for bargains.
I think this is a female thing, and it has to do with the 77 cents on the dollar that women make (according to the National Committee on Pay Equity in 2006), as opposed to men. I've been married (and bringing in a good salary) for 22 years, and we've built a solid retirement fund; but before that I was single for 10 years, and I wasn't making anything like enough money to fund a reasonable retirement, even when I could put anything away. I was a professional woman, too, with an advanced degree in my field; but the field was library work, which isn't an area that generates the astronomical salaries that, say, investment bankers get. Or even computer programmers; in fact, that's one of the reasons I changed careers and went into data processing. I could make more money there; and I did.
I will bet that every woman who's ever had to earn a living on her own has this niggly little voice somewhere in the back of her mind - not always very far back, either. I call it "the Bag Lady" - it pipes up and says, "You're going to run out of money. You'll be old and sick and broke, and you'll have to push what's left of your belongings down the street in a shopping cart." I have to deal with the Bag Lady every time I make a big purchase - I bought a digital camera recently, and I had to stifle her to do it.
I really don't obsess over this much. But it's there, in the back of my mind, and I regularly have to shove it down and latch the lid. Because it is true, especially after 7 years of neoconservatives in charge and twenty years of globalization, that what used to be a fairly reasonable safety net has more holes than a pair of fishnet stockings; in this day and age, if you haven't saved it up yourself, you're out of luck. I may have gotten this from my parents, who lived through the original Depression, before there was any safety net at all.
FDR built the New Deal on the principle that we're all in this together, and in a country this rich it's ridiculous to let people starve just because of misfortune. That's always seemed to me to be a reasonable approach; I don't understand why the neocons don't get it. Maybe they don't think that "There but for the grace of God, go I" applies to them.
I think this is a female thing, and it has to do with the 77 cents on the dollar that women make (according to the National Committee on Pay Equity in 2006), as opposed to men. I've been married (and bringing in a good salary) for 22 years, and we've built a solid retirement fund; but before that I was single for 10 years, and I wasn't making anything like enough money to fund a reasonable retirement, even when I could put anything away. I was a professional woman, too, with an advanced degree in my field; but the field was library work, which isn't an area that generates the astronomical salaries that, say, investment bankers get. Or even computer programmers; in fact, that's one of the reasons I changed careers and went into data processing. I could make more money there; and I did.
I will bet that every woman who's ever had to earn a living on her own has this niggly little voice somewhere in the back of her mind - not always very far back, either. I call it "the Bag Lady" - it pipes up and says, "You're going to run out of money. You'll be old and sick and broke, and you'll have to push what's left of your belongings down the street in a shopping cart." I have to deal with the Bag Lady every time I make a big purchase - I bought a digital camera recently, and I had to stifle her to do it.
I really don't obsess over this much. But it's there, in the back of my mind, and I regularly have to shove it down and latch the lid. Because it is true, especially after 7 years of neoconservatives in charge and twenty years of globalization, that what used to be a fairly reasonable safety net has more holes than a pair of fishnet stockings; in this day and age, if you haven't saved it up yourself, you're out of luck. I may have gotten this from my parents, who lived through the original Depression, before there was any safety net at all.
FDR built the New Deal on the principle that we're all in this together, and in a country this rich it's ridiculous to let people starve just because of misfortune. That's always seemed to me to be a reasonable approach; I don't understand why the neocons don't get it. Maybe they don't think that "There but for the grace of God, go I" applies to them.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Retirement Reconsidered
It's been just over a year since I retired, and I thought I'd do a little stocktaking. Where have I come in this year?
Well, one thing I've done is to successfully build a new web site, on new software, for LifeRing Press, the online bookstore for LifeRing Secular Recovery. It went live a week ago and seems to be doing fine, although I had one or two minor tweaks to do. I'm really proud of this. It took me most of 8 months, much of which was spent figuring out what I was doing, and trying to understand whether the things that weren't working were actual problems with the software or just my ignorance. I now know a lot more about PHP than I did when I started, also a lot more about CSS - I'm about confident enough with CSS to start playing with it on my own web site. I've also been polishing up the Oakland Symphony Chorus' web site.
Is that all? Have I just been sitting around geeking away? Well, no. I'm on 2 volunteer boards, and I attend those meetings, and do stuff for that. I still blog - I may actually have a little more time for that, now that the LifeRing site is up.
I spent some time last spring volunteering with Girls, Inc. - I turned up once a week at a local elementary school and acted as an aide to the Girls, Inc. staffer who ran the meetings. This is to encourage girls to be interested in science and math, and to realize that they can do it and enjoy it. It was interesting but kind of truncated - I was only there 6 weeks, and by the time I left I had just about learned most of the girls' names. I'm still deciding whether I want to do it again in the fall and go for a whole year. I'd like to have some regular human contact, but I'm not sure whether 10 year old girls are the humans I had in mind.
Am I sorry I retired? Well, no and yes. No, because I love not having to get up in the morning, and I love not having to be in the same place at the same time every day. I certainly don't miss the endless conference calls! I've gotten to the point that I don't even want to take a Pilates class because it requires me to go at the same time every week; I like my loose schedule. Yes, because I miss the camaraderie of a large office (see note above about human contact); yes also because I miss the income. We planned this all carefully, and I bought into the plans; but the economy over the last year or so has been a scary time to be depending on investments (though my husband is still working). I keep telling myself that what goes down eventually comes back up.
What I really like is that I'm not locked into anything (unless I agree to take on a project). I can choose to go visit my sister. I can choose to spend the afternoon loafing, or blogging; or organizing the 17 rolls of film I shot in Yellowstone and Glacier in June. I can choose to go to San Francisco and tour a museum show with an old friend (now also retired). So on the whole, I'd say retirement is going pretty well for me. We'll see where I am next year.
Well, one thing I've done is to successfully build a new web site, on new software, for LifeRing Press, the online bookstore for LifeRing Secular Recovery. It went live a week ago and seems to be doing fine, although I had one or two minor tweaks to do. I'm really proud of this. It took me most of 8 months, much of which was spent figuring out what I was doing, and trying to understand whether the things that weren't working were actual problems with the software or just my ignorance. I now know a lot more about PHP than I did when I started, also a lot more about CSS - I'm about confident enough with CSS to start playing with it on my own web site. I've also been polishing up the Oakland Symphony Chorus' web site.
Is that all? Have I just been sitting around geeking away? Well, no. I'm on 2 volunteer boards, and I attend those meetings, and do stuff for that. I still blog - I may actually have a little more time for that, now that the LifeRing site is up.
I spent some time last spring volunteering with Girls, Inc. - I turned up once a week at a local elementary school and acted as an aide to the Girls, Inc. staffer who ran the meetings. This is to encourage girls to be interested in science and math, and to realize that they can do it and enjoy it. It was interesting but kind of truncated - I was only there 6 weeks, and by the time I left I had just about learned most of the girls' names. I'm still deciding whether I want to do it again in the fall and go for a whole year. I'd like to have some regular human contact, but I'm not sure whether 10 year old girls are the humans I had in mind.
Am I sorry I retired? Well, no and yes. No, because I love not having to get up in the morning, and I love not having to be in the same place at the same time every day. I certainly don't miss the endless conference calls! I've gotten to the point that I don't even want to take a Pilates class because it requires me to go at the same time every week; I like my loose schedule. Yes, because I miss the camaraderie of a large office (see note above about human contact); yes also because I miss the income. We planned this all carefully, and I bought into the plans; but the economy over the last year or so has been a scary time to be depending on investments (though my husband is still working). I keep telling myself that what goes down eventually comes back up.
What I really like is that I'm not locked into anything (unless I agree to take on a project). I can choose to go visit my sister. I can choose to spend the afternoon loafing, or blogging; or organizing the 17 rolls of film I shot in Yellowstone and Glacier in June. I can choose to go to San Francisco and tour a museum show with an old friend (now also retired). So on the whole, I'd say retirement is going pretty well for me. We'll see where I am next year.
Trouble
The more I look at the situation in Georgia, the worse it looks. It looks distressingly as though Russia is setting itself up to take over the country: they've destroyed the main cross-country rail line, they're encamped on the major east-west highway, they're 20 miles from the capital. And all this despite the fact that they say they've withdrawn and are observing the brokered ceasefire.
The Economist this week has an excellent briefing article on the situation, The scripted war, which I highly recommend, it gives detailed background on how this all came to be.
And the real problem is: if Russia chooses to go in and take over, and ignore all the remonstrations from the U.S. and the E.U., there's no way to stop them, short of open war. And nobody wants open war with Russia.
The Economist's recommendations run to economic sanctions and public shaming. I hope they work. I hope someone tries them.
The Economist this week has an excellent briefing article on the situation, The scripted war, which I highly recommend, it gives detailed background on how this all came to be.
And the real problem is: if Russia chooses to go in and take over, and ignore all the remonstrations from the U.S. and the E.U., there's no way to stop them, short of open war. And nobody wants open war with Russia.
The Economist's recommendations run to economic sanctions and public shaming. I hope they work. I hope someone tries them.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Health Care
I started to write this earlier today and then my Internet connection died... but it's important enough to come back to, now the bytes are byting again.
The hot story in California this morning the request, from the court appointed overseer of the state prison health care system, for $8 billion dollars over the next 5 years to build new facilities. He wants almost half ($3.1 billion) this year, which would bring the budget gap to $20 billion. The argument is that health care in California's prison system is so bad that it violates prisoners' constitutional rights.
There's a constitutional right to health care? Where did that come from? And can I get some?
Don't get me wrong. I actually agree with the court that California's prison system is broken and should be fixed (well, I really think it should be downsized by about half, at which point the existing facilities would be adequate). And I buy the court's argument that, having locked these people up so they can't take any action on their own about their health, we've assumed the responsibility to maintain it for them - which we are shirking.
But a constitutional right to health care: how about that as the basis for a single-payer system? Hmm?
I also liked this quote:
Or we could just continue our existing attitude, which is that, since we're not willing to provide health care for our hard-working, law-abiding folks (and we aren't), we shouldn't even try to provide it for the people we've locked up in prison. Let 'em die, and "decrease the surplus population."
I'm sure Mr. Villines would agree.
The hot story in California this morning the request, from the court appointed overseer of the state prison health care system, for $8 billion dollars over the next 5 years to build new facilities. He wants almost half ($3.1 billion) this year, which would bring the budget gap to $20 billion. The argument is that health care in California's prison system is so bad that it violates prisoners' constitutional rights.
There's a constitutional right to health care? Where did that come from? And can I get some?
Don't get me wrong. I actually agree with the court that California's prison system is broken and should be fixed (well, I really think it should be downsized by about half, at which point the existing facilities would be adequate). And I buy the court's argument that, having locked these people up so they can't take any action on their own about their health, we've assumed the responsibility to maintain it for them - which we are shirking.
But a constitutional right to health care: how about that as the basis for a single-payer system? Hmm?
I also liked this quote:
"I think it's a sad day for California taxpayers when we're talking about health care improvements for convicted prisoners when hard-working, law-abiding folks are having trouble finding affordable health care for themselves and their families," said Assembly Republican leader Mike Villines of Clovis (Fresno County). "It just shows how one is so out of touch with reality."Mr. Villines is right; it is a sad day for California taxpayers when hard-working, law-abiding folks are having trouble finding affordable health care. Let's apply some of those constitutional rights to them, shall we?
Or we could just continue our existing attitude, which is that, since we're not willing to provide health care for our hard-working, law-abiding folks (and we aren't), we shouldn't even try to provide it for the people we've locked up in prison. Let 'em die, and "decrease the surplus population."
I'm sure Mr. Villines would agree.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Invading Georgia
I hope not, but it sure looks like here we go again. I'm not sure what was in any of these people's minds, but there are several mistaken assumptions floating around.
Mistaken assumption 1: Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian president, assumed that if he invaded South Ossetia, Russia would not respond in force.
I have to admit, the scale of the Russian response is pretty startling - they seem to be throwing the whole army across that border, and from what I hear on the news, they aren't staying in South Ossetia. They're in Georgian territory, and in force. Are they trying to take Georgia back?? They say not; I'm not sure I believe them. Vladimir Putin would love to be the man who brought Georgia "back into" Russia; and if he succeeds at it, Ukraine is probably next.
Mistaken assumption 2: Russia having responded, Saakashvili assumed that Western countries (maybe NATO, which he's trying to join) will support him in some way.
I don't know why he thinks that. Is "the West" intervening in Darfur? In Tibet? Did it intervene in southern Sudan, during a civil war that ran for (I think) 20 years? Did it intervene in Rwanda, or in Congo? "The West" intervened in the Balkans for exactly one reason: the United States President at that time was Bill Clinton, who was willing to throw U.S. forces into the game, and who had both international cred and the forces to throw in.
The U.S. has just made the usual critical statements about the Georgian situation, but I'm sorry, remonstrances about invading sovereign nations just don't have the force from George W. Bush that they had from Bill Clinton. Not to mention that the U.S. military is tied by the leg in Iraq and Afghanistan, and simply doesn't have the forces to divert; and the entire world, including Russia, knows this.
Mistaken assumption 1: Mikhail Saakashvili, the Georgian president, assumed that if he invaded South Ossetia, Russia would not respond in force.
I have to admit, the scale of the Russian response is pretty startling - they seem to be throwing the whole army across that border, and from what I hear on the news, they aren't staying in South Ossetia. They're in Georgian territory, and in force. Are they trying to take Georgia back?? They say not; I'm not sure I believe them. Vladimir Putin would love to be the man who brought Georgia "back into" Russia; and if he succeeds at it, Ukraine is probably next.
Mistaken assumption 2: Russia having responded, Saakashvili assumed that Western countries (maybe NATO, which he's trying to join) will support him in some way.
I don't know why he thinks that. Is "the West" intervening in Darfur? In Tibet? Did it intervene in southern Sudan, during a civil war that ran for (I think) 20 years? Did it intervene in Rwanda, or in Congo? "The West" intervened in the Balkans for exactly one reason: the United States President at that time was Bill Clinton, who was willing to throw U.S. forces into the game, and who had both international cred and the forces to throw in.
The U.S. has just made the usual critical statements about the Georgian situation, but I'm sorry, remonstrances about invading sovereign nations just don't have the force from George W. Bush that they had from Bill Clinton. Not to mention that the U.S. military is tied by the leg in Iraq and Afghanistan, and simply doesn't have the forces to divert; and the entire world, including Russia, knows this.
Success!
It's always a pleasure to finish something you've been building, try it out, and have it work the first time. (Given the amount of testing I did on the thing, "the first time" is a little misleading here.)
For the last 7-8 months, I've been rebuilding a web site - the bookstore at the site lifering.com, which is the eCommerce arm of LifeRing Secular Recovery. This is the group that has helped my husband stay clean and sober; and the web site sells their small list of publications, and is one of their sources of income. The organization wanted to move it to a different hosting company and to a different "platform" (different set of management tools) - so instead of just calling the new hosting company and saying, haul it over (which takes about 3 days), I had to rebuild it from scratch using a new set of tools (ZenCart, an open source shopping cart) to make it do all the things it used to do.
Last Friday, I renamed it and "brought it live" - until then, people going to lifering.com went to the old site. Now it's up and running and working, and I'm astoundingly pleased with myself. We toasted my success in Calistoga water, Saturday night. I've learned a great deal, and enjoyed it; but I was really spending a lot of time on it (one reason I've been blogging less), and I keep reminding myself, I don't have to work on the web site today... (Don't worry, I'll find something else to do.)
For the last 7-8 months, I've been rebuilding a web site - the bookstore at the site lifering.com, which is the eCommerce arm of LifeRing Secular Recovery. This is the group that has helped my husband stay clean and sober; and the web site sells their small list of publications, and is one of their sources of income. The organization wanted to move it to a different hosting company and to a different "platform" (different set of management tools) - so instead of just calling the new hosting company and saying, haul it over (which takes about 3 days), I had to rebuild it from scratch using a new set of tools (ZenCart, an open source shopping cart) to make it do all the things it used to do.
Last Friday, I renamed it and "brought it live" - until then, people going to lifering.com went to the old site. Now it's up and running and working, and I'm astoundingly pleased with myself. We toasted my success in Calistoga water, Saturday night. I've learned a great deal, and enjoyed it; but I was really spending a lot of time on it (one reason I've been blogging less), and I keep reminding myself, I don't have to work on the web site today... (Don't worry, I'll find something else to do.)
Saturday, August 09, 2008
More Questions
I've now read the government's case against Dr. Bruce Ivins. I read it carefully. I also listened to his attorney discussing some of the holes in the case. I think they blew it. I don't think they could have proved that case beyond a reasonable doubt, with any kind of a competent defense attorney bringing up the unanswered questions. They say they're convinced that he sent the anthrax letters. They haven't convinced me; not beyond a reasonable doubt.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Mrs. Grundy
Katherine Parker of the Washington Post had an excellent column today, printed in the San Francisco Chronicle, in which she deplores the tendency of the blogosphere (of which I am a humble member, although I hope I don't act like this) to wallow in unsubstantiated gossip about public figures, which isn't printed in the "mainstream media" precisely because it is unsubstantiated. It's worth reading, and it contained a wonderful story about Mrs. Brown and Mrs. MacQueen:
This story reminded me of a bit of doggerel I'd like to share, which John Dickson Carr once included in one of his detective stories; his character was talking about English society but I think it applies here:When I was a little girl, my best friend was Mrs. Brown, a 65-year-old widow who lived on the corner across the street. Several times a week, I joined Mrs. Brown for lunch. She always ate the same thing: a hamburger patty, a scoop of cottage cheese, two slices of tomato with pepper, and a cup of hot tea with lemon.
One day, Mrs. Brown veered from course and also ate a slice of pecan pie. No sooner had she taken her last bite than her telephone rang. It was Mrs. MacQueen, another widow who lived on the opposite corner: "I saw you eat that piece of pie," she said.
Mrs. Brown and I were both horrified, even though I knew that Mrs. Brown also watched Mrs. MacQueen's every move from her own dining room window. They gossiped incessantly about one another. Heaven forbid, one should have had a night visitor.
Or that either had been a blogger.
They eat and drink and scheme and plod,Mrs. Brown and Mrs. MacQueen, meet Mrs. Grundy.
And go to church on Sunday,
And many are afraid of God,
But more of Mrs. Grundy.
Questions
Today's uneasy question is: did Dr. Bruce Ivins kill himself because he was guilty of sending anthrax-laced letters in 2001 and he thought the FBI was onto him, or did the FBI hound an innocent man into suicide?
Now that he's dead, we'll probably never know. The FBI's record in this affair isn't distinguished; they spent years trying to convict Steven Hatfill of the same crime, only to have him sue them for violating his rights by talking to reporters; they just settled that case for $5.82 million dollars. How good was their evidence against Dr. Ivins? The accounts I've read, from the NPR main site, suggest that the FBI was at least a couple of weeks away from any indictments, and still had several witnesses to take before the grand jury. So we don't know whether they could have gotten an indictment at all.
Dr. Ivins' therapist tells a hair raising tale of an unbalanced man who ranted about killing people and threatened her to the point that she asked for, and got, a restraining order against him. But he applied for and got a security clearance, after the 2001 attacks tightened security everywhere.
His colleagues at Fort Detrick say they don't believe the accusations. They do say he was deeply upset at the way the FBI had been questioning him, questioning his wife and children, staking out his house. He "just couldn't get past the fact that the FBI suspected him."
Here was a 62 year old man - my age, by the way - with a 30 year career at Fort Detrick and no incidents on his record that I've seen mentioned. And he thinks he's about to be indicted for a major public crime, bioterrorism. Let's assume for the moment that he was innocent - may he simply have been unable to contemplate the prospect of seeing any good work he'd ever done overshadowed by a public trial? How do you prove you didn't do something? It's very hard - that's why, in our legal system, the defendant doesn't have to prove anything. The prosecution have to prove guilt. But Dr. Ivins must have known that some people always assume "where there's smoke, there's fire," and, "they wouldn't have accused him without proof" - even if there wasn't really any proof. And what about the money to defend such a case? It would have cost tens, maybe hundreds of thousands - taking all his hope of a peaceful retirement with it. It would have destroyed his life - even if it was false.
As I said - he's dead now, and we'll probably never know.
Just remember: the FBI acts in our name. As Pogo once said, we have met the enemy, and he is us.
Now that he's dead, we'll probably never know. The FBI's record in this affair isn't distinguished; they spent years trying to convict Steven Hatfill of the same crime, only to have him sue them for violating his rights by talking to reporters; they just settled that case for $5.82 million dollars. How good was their evidence against Dr. Ivins? The accounts I've read, from the NPR main site, suggest that the FBI was at least a couple of weeks away from any indictments, and still had several witnesses to take before the grand jury. So we don't know whether they could have gotten an indictment at all.
Dr. Ivins' therapist tells a hair raising tale of an unbalanced man who ranted about killing people and threatened her to the point that she asked for, and got, a restraining order against him. But he applied for and got a security clearance, after the 2001 attacks tightened security everywhere.
His colleagues at Fort Detrick say they don't believe the accusations. They do say he was deeply upset at the way the FBI had been questioning him, questioning his wife and children, staking out his house. He "just couldn't get past the fact that the FBI suspected him."
Here was a 62 year old man - my age, by the way - with a 30 year career at Fort Detrick and no incidents on his record that I've seen mentioned. And he thinks he's about to be indicted for a major public crime, bioterrorism. Let's assume for the moment that he was innocent - may he simply have been unable to contemplate the prospect of seeing any good work he'd ever done overshadowed by a public trial? How do you prove you didn't do something? It's very hard - that's why, in our legal system, the defendant doesn't have to prove anything. The prosecution have to prove guilt. But Dr. Ivins must have known that some people always assume "where there's smoke, there's fire," and, "they wouldn't have accused him without proof" - even if there wasn't really any proof. And what about the money to defend such a case? It would have cost tens, maybe hundreds of thousands - taking all his hope of a peaceful retirement with it. It would have destroyed his life - even if it was false.
As I said - he's dead now, and we'll probably never know.
Just remember: the FBI acts in our name. As Pogo once said, we have met the enemy, and he is us.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Deserts
I've been visiting my sister and brother-in-law this weekend, which means I'm in Las Vegas. I haven't been anywhere near the Strip; they live way out in the southwest quadrant, more or less on the way to Pahrump. When they moved out here they had to dig their own well, and neighbors were scarce; now, the city has moved much closer. But they still have a big, cool house on 5 acres of desert, which they've landscaped (mostly; there is a moderate lawn) to look like, well, desert. They have a small patch of ground devoted to half a dozen or so rescued desert tortoises, in three sizes; their yard is inhabited by wild rabbits and tiny ground squirrels, and two mellow dogs.
As Vegas goes, it isn't too hot, for July - it's been running from 95 to 105 degrees. It's supposed to go up another 5 degrees next week, but I'll be home before then. The weather station says the humidity is 20%, which doesn't sound like much - I'm used to 55% or so - but with these temperatures it's pretty muggy. My sister says the normal humidity is 5%. Even with 20% humidity I can't keep my lips moist. But it's peaceful out here; quiet (except for the overflights from McCarran), little traffic noise, and the nearest things to look at are the Red Rock mountains, west and a little north. And the dogs, rabbits, and tortoises.
Heat like this rearranges your priorities; I normally work out on Sunday morning, and I've done it here before (they have some gym equipment), but today it would have been like doing situps in a steam room. I gave up. And you don't just go out for a walk in this heat. It doesn't cool down much at night either - at 8:30 this morning it was already 89 degrees outside.
It's a different world from Oakland, where half the time the sun doesn't burn off the fog bank until noon, and I wear sweaters in the house in the morning.
My sister and her husband love the desert. Myself, I wouldn't want to live in a climate where the failure of the air conditioning unit is a life-threatening event. But I don't mind visiting, and checking in with my sister, my brother-in-law, the dogs, the rabbits, and the tortoises.
As Vegas goes, it isn't too hot, for July - it's been running from 95 to 105 degrees. It's supposed to go up another 5 degrees next week, but I'll be home before then. The weather station says the humidity is 20%, which doesn't sound like much - I'm used to 55% or so - but with these temperatures it's pretty muggy. My sister says the normal humidity is 5%. Even with 20% humidity I can't keep my lips moist. But it's peaceful out here; quiet (except for the overflights from McCarran), little traffic noise, and the nearest things to look at are the Red Rock mountains, west and a little north. And the dogs, rabbits, and tortoises.
Heat like this rearranges your priorities; I normally work out on Sunday morning, and I've done it here before (they have some gym equipment), but today it would have been like doing situps in a steam room. I gave up. And you don't just go out for a walk in this heat. It doesn't cool down much at night either - at 8:30 this morning it was already 89 degrees outside.
It's a different world from Oakland, where half the time the sun doesn't burn off the fog bank until noon, and I wear sweaters in the house in the morning.
My sister and her husband love the desert. Myself, I wouldn't want to live in a climate where the failure of the air conditioning unit is a life-threatening event. But I don't mind visiting, and checking in with my sister, my brother-in-law, the dogs, the rabbits, and the tortoises.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Silverware
This is too much. Things have gone too far.
I normally enjoy Leah Garchik's daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle; it reminds me that people are still really strange. Today, however, she published a snippet that set me right back on my heels. You can read the entire column (don't miss the Public Eavesdropping section at the bottom), but I'll quote the section that stopped me:
Or did they fear that one of the guests at this extremely exclusive and high end entertainment would grab an olive fork and have at him? This level of official paranoia surpasses anything I've ever heard. If I remember the news reports, this was a Republican Party fundraiser; it was a room full of people who were willing to give money to the GOP. And yet they served finger food, because "organizers" were afraid to have silverware available.
This is beyond embarrassing. Let's tell the world that the President of the United States is afraid of forks. Did they also use paper plates and cups, lest someone should break a glass or a plate and attack the President with the shards?
And I haven't even begun to consider the weirdness of a menu including both Belgian endives and Kettle Chips...
I normally enjoy Leah Garchik's daily column in the San Francisco Chronicle; it reminds me that people are still really strange. Today, however, she published a snippet that set me right back on my heels. You can read the entire column (don't miss the Public Eavesdropping section at the bottom), but I'll quote the section that stopped me:
Thanks to Monty Sander for calling my attention to a Napa Valley Register report about the four-course meal catered by Meadowood, listing such ingredients as Belgian endive and Kettle chips. Caterers told that newspaper that dinner was in "sandwich form," because organizers felt silverware could "pose a potential security threat to the President."Excuse me? Readers of this blog know that I have my opinions about President Bush, and they're not especially complimentary; but I did assume he was capable of using a knife and fork. (Still, this is the man who choked on a pretzel while watching a football game...)
Or did they fear that one of the guests at this extremely exclusive and high end entertainment would grab an olive fork and have at him? This level of official paranoia surpasses anything I've ever heard. If I remember the news reports, this was a Republican Party fundraiser; it was a room full of people who were willing to give money to the GOP. And yet they served finger food, because "organizers" were afraid to have silverware available.
This is beyond embarrassing. Let's tell the world that the President of the United States is afraid of forks. Did they also use paper plates and cups, lest someone should break a glass or a plate and attack the President with the shards?
And I haven't even begun to consider the weirdness of a menu including both Belgian endives and Kettle Chips...
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Accusations
I can't say I remember the Fifties from when they happened; when they happened, I was in grammar school. I remember the nuclear duck-and-cover drills (yeah, right. Even at the age of 11 I thought that was pretty weird.); I remember everyone freaking out over Sputnik. But most of the current events I read about, I got from Scholastic magazine, or whatever it was.
Later, I began to read about the Cold War, and the Communists, and the loyalty oaths, and the Hollywood blacklists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Anyone else remember HUAC? And Joe McCarthy? I thought you did.
In those halcyon days, you didn't need any proof to destroy a man's career. All you needed was an accusation - "He's a Commie." (Do we hear echoes of the Salem witch trials? We should.) At that point, the principle that the accused is innocent until proven guilty went out the window, and the accused was in the impossible position of trying to prove a negative. "You're a Commie." "No, I'm not." "Yes, you are." And then what? Usually, the accused ... lost his job. And didn't get another.
I'm thinking about all this because of the appalling cover on the New Yorker, showing Michelle Obama in fatigues and an ammo belt, and Barack Obama in a turban and robe, doing what Fox News really did call a "terrorist fist-jab." (Note to Michelle: next time, do a high five.) No, I don't think the New Yorker really thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist. I also don't think the New Yorker staff devoted any thought to the fact that there's a small (I hope it's small) but visible group of uninformed people out there who really do think that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist. Or, at least, a Muslim. I heard one of them being interviewed on NPR, just the other day - a member of "Latinas for McCain."
I can't find it right now, but I read someone quoting BHO telling some idiot interviewer that it isn't an insult to call someone a Muslim; and I wanted to cheer. One of the things that encourages me about his campaign is the web site, FightTheSmears.com - he's actually trying to fight the rumors about him with facts. Wotta concept: a Presidential candidate who thinks he can reason with the American people. I hope he's right.
What is it about us as a society, that makes us create some Awful Thing to fear, and then accuse people we don't like of being part of the Awful Thing, so that they're in the position of having to prove - that they are innocent. Our legal system says, we have to prove the accused is guilty. But we don't believe it, or at least we don't act like we believe it. Witch. Royalist. Kraut (WWI). Nazi (WWII). Commie. And now - Muslim terrorist. (Disclaimer: there was no attempt to make this a complete list.) And once the accusation is raised, it's up to the accused to convince us, who already believe it, that we're wrong.
We'd be much nicer people if we didn't behave this way. And I don't think we'd be any less safe.
But next time - do a high five.
Later, I began to read about the Cold War, and the Communists, and the loyalty oaths, and the Hollywood blacklists, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Anyone else remember HUAC? And Joe McCarthy? I thought you did.
In those halcyon days, you didn't need any proof to destroy a man's career. All you needed was an accusation - "He's a Commie." (Do we hear echoes of the Salem witch trials? We should.) At that point, the principle that the accused is innocent until proven guilty went out the window, and the accused was in the impossible position of trying to prove a negative. "You're a Commie." "No, I'm not." "Yes, you are." And then what? Usually, the accused ... lost his job. And didn't get another.
I'm thinking about all this because of the appalling cover on the New Yorker, showing Michelle Obama in fatigues and an ammo belt, and Barack Obama in a turban and robe, doing what Fox News really did call a "terrorist fist-jab." (Note to Michelle: next time, do a high five.) No, I don't think the New Yorker really thinks Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist. I also don't think the New Yorker staff devoted any thought to the fact that there's a small (I hope it's small) but visible group of uninformed people out there who really do think that Barack Obama is a Muslim terrorist. Or, at least, a Muslim. I heard one of them being interviewed on NPR, just the other day - a member of "Latinas for McCain."
I can't find it right now, but I read someone quoting BHO telling some idiot interviewer that it isn't an insult to call someone a Muslim; and I wanted to cheer. One of the things that encourages me about his campaign is the web site, FightTheSmears.com - he's actually trying to fight the rumors about him with facts. Wotta concept: a Presidential candidate who thinks he can reason with the American people. I hope he's right.
What is it about us as a society, that makes us create some Awful Thing to fear, and then accuse people we don't like of being part of the Awful Thing, so that they're in the position of having to prove - that they are innocent. Our legal system says, we have to prove the accused is guilty. But we don't believe it, or at least we don't act like we believe it. Witch. Royalist. Kraut (WWI). Nazi (WWII). Commie. And now - Muslim terrorist. (Disclaimer: there was no attempt to make this a complete list.) And once the accusation is raised, it's up to the accused to convince us, who already believe it, that we're wrong.
We'd be much nicer people if we didn't behave this way. And I don't think we'd be any less safe.
But next time - do a high five.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Tanker Contract
So - the contract for the Air Force's tanker plane is up for rebid? Despite already having been awarded twice, once to Boeing and once to Northrop Grumman/EADS?
Let's leave aside for a minute the issue of whether the Air Force can manage the business affairs of a hot dog stand in the park, and talk about this plane, for which they propose to spend $35 billion dollars. Why do they need this plane? (A question nobody ever seems to ask.)
The purpose of this plane is to allow mid-air refueling of other airplanes; it is a refueling tanker. Why do we need to refuel planes in mid-air? Isn't that dangerous, and can't they land to refuel?
There was a time when we thought we needed to refuel airplanes in mid-air; it was a long time ago. Back in the good old days of Mutually Assured Destruction, we kept bombers, loaded with nuclear missiles, in the air around the clock; this was so we would be able to retaliate against Russia (sorry, the U.S.S.R.; but a lot of us called it "Russia" just the same) in case it were somehow able to land a nuclear missile on an American city. Since these bombers were in the air around the clock, of course, refueling them in mid-air was a good idea; then they'd never have to land.
So - it's 2008. The U.S.S.R. is gone. Russia is still there, but it's more interested in selling natural gas to Europe, and bullying the neighbors, than in shooting nuclear missiles at the U.S. We've even spent a lot of the years between then and now, destroying nuclear weapons in Russia and here, by mutual agreement.
You tell me why we need to spend $35 billion we don't have on a new refueling tanker.
Let's leave aside for a minute the issue of whether the Air Force can manage the business affairs of a hot dog stand in the park, and talk about this plane, for which they propose to spend $35 billion dollars. Why do they need this plane? (A question nobody ever seems to ask.)
The purpose of this plane is to allow mid-air refueling of other airplanes; it is a refueling tanker. Why do we need to refuel planes in mid-air? Isn't that dangerous, and can't they land to refuel?
There was a time when we thought we needed to refuel airplanes in mid-air; it was a long time ago. Back in the good old days of Mutually Assured Destruction, we kept bombers, loaded with nuclear missiles, in the air around the clock; this was so we would be able to retaliate against Russia (sorry, the U.S.S.R.; but a lot of us called it "Russia" just the same) in case it were somehow able to land a nuclear missile on an American city. Since these bombers were in the air around the clock, of course, refueling them in mid-air was a good idea; then they'd never have to land.
So - it's 2008. The U.S.S.R. is gone. Russia is still there, but it's more interested in selling natural gas to Europe, and bullying the neighbors, than in shooting nuclear missiles at the U.S. We've even spent a lot of the years between then and now, destroying nuclear weapons in Russia and here, by mutual agreement.
You tell me why we need to spend $35 billion we don't have on a new refueling tanker.
The Brown Moon
Driving home last night from a "summer sing-in" (I'll explain later), I saw a quarter moon in the sky, a waxing crescent. It was brown. The sky has been brown all week, too, because of all the fires in California; once or twice I've even smelled smoke, and I think the nearest fire is now around 100 miles away (the Basin Complex fire in Big Sur).
And it's only July. It's going to be a bad summer.
Oh, yes, "summer sing-in" - the Oakland Symphony Chorus, in which I sing second alto, does these for 6 weeks every summer. For a modest fee, you can show up at a local church on Tuesday night, borrow a score, and sing classical music, conducted by a professional conductor and accompanied by a pianist. Of course, if you own the score (some people do), you can bring your own copy. No auditions, and no requirement that you've ever sung the piece before; if you want to come and sight-read the Bach B Minor Mass (Tuesday August 5), go for it. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested, details are here. It's our 50th anniversary season and we'd love to have you.
And it's only July. It's going to be a bad summer.
Oh, yes, "summer sing-in" - the Oakland Symphony Chorus, in which I sing second alto, does these for 6 weeks every summer. For a modest fee, you can show up at a local church on Tuesday night, borrow a score, and sing classical music, conducted by a professional conductor and accompanied by a pianist. Of course, if you own the score (some people do), you can bring your own copy. No auditions, and no requirement that you've ever sung the piece before; if you want to come and sight-read the Bach B Minor Mass (Tuesday August 5), go for it. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and are interested, details are here. It's our 50th anniversary season and we'd love to have you.
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