So What About Torture?

We're all talking about torture these days, what with Dick Cheney ranting that torture (and illegal wiretaps, and and and) has "kept us safe." This has got me thinking about it; I think I've said this before, but it's worth saying again. As a hypothetical question, why shouldn't we use torture? If it'll find us that "ticking bomb" they always talk about, why not?

The practical approach, which you will hear from almost every experienced intelligence officer you find, is that it doesn't work. As the very old saying goes, you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. What you get from a man you are torturing is not the truth; it's what he thinks will make you stop hurting him. You get the truth by persuading him, gently, that his interest and yours run together, and that he can help himself by helping you. This is how the pros do it.

But the real issue isn't whether torture "works" or not. What effect does torture have, and on whom? The issue with torture is the corrupting effect on the torturer. I can't remember the names offhand, but there was a famous psychological experiment at Stanford, about 30 years ago - the professor divided his students randomly into "guards" and "prisoners." In almost no time, the experience of having power over the "prisoners" caused the "guards" to behave abusively to them - it got so bad the professor stopped the experiment. Power corrupts. Torture corrupts the torturer. And if we, the people, allow torture to be used in our name, it corrupts us; we are complicit. This is why Obama is right to say that we can, we must, protect ourselves without compromising our values - the values which say that we don't do those things.

The argument about "keeping us safe" is absurd. I simply don't believe the argument that the lack of further attacks since 2001 means we are "safe," and that we're "safe" because our agents tortured the people in Gitmo. Safety is very iffy - any of us at any time could be killed in an automobile accident, whether the government is torturing people in Guantanamo or not. How then are we "safe"? If we die, what difference is it how we die? If a man wants to kill you badly enough that he's willing to die in the process, you can't stop him except by sheer luck.

The real argument in favor of torture, which is never openly stated, is that our lives, our country, our safety, are so important that we can, we should, use every possible means to protect ourselves. The end justifies the means. This is just wrong. The end doesn't justify the means; the means are important. The wrong means will corrupt the end. If we use the enemy's means, we become the enemy. Where did the "enhanced interrogation" methods come from? They come from the army's SERE school, which teaches U.S. soldiers how to resist torture. Whose torture were they meant to resist? The torture used by the Communist Chinese, during the Korean war; that's when SERE was established. Does this mean we've become the Communist Chinese? Prove that it doesn't. We're doing what they did.

And that's why we have to stop this. The Bible says, By their fruits ye shall know them. We have to stop producting these bitter fruits. We should never have started.

Not in Our Back Yard

Our wonderful Congress has just voted, almost to a man (the Senate vote was 90-6) to deny the administration funds for closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Their primary argument seems to be, We don't want those people in our constituency.

This is a disgrace. Guantanamo is a mess; the United States made the mess; it is our responsibility to clean the mess up. Isn't that one of the things we're supposed to have learned in kindergarten? But the mere possibility that some of the people we've kept in jail in Gitmo for what, over seven years now? That these people might possibly be kept in jail in the U.S. seems to have Congress spooked. I think what really alarms them is the possibility that these people might be released in the U.S. - maybe even in their constituency.

So, under what circumstances would they be released? Well, say there was no evidence that proved that they were "enemy combatants." (Whatever that is.) Like, maybe we've kept innocent people in jail for over 8 years?? If we have, shouldn't we admit it, apologize, and let them go home?

Nobody is suggesting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to be released for lack of evidence, but he isn't the only person being held there. I remember reading that some representative from Kansas actually argued that they didn't want Gitmo detainees transferred to Leavenworth. Come on - you're afraid they'll break out of Leavenworth??

We're supposed to be a nation of laws, or at least so I remember from my civics class. The Bush administration's greatest sin was to declare itself above the law; and for our own sake, we should apply our own laws to the detainees in Gitmo, allow them to defend themselves in open court, and release them, if there's no evidence that they wronged us. Or jail them in the U.S. if there is. And in the case where they can't go home - I'm thinking of the Uighurs, who will be in dire danger from the Chinese government if they return home - we owe it to them to let them settle here. We owe it to ourselves, to prove to ourselves and the world that we are ruled by laws, and we truly regret what we did at Guantanamo Bay.

Lift That Bale

After writing that last post, I realize I want to talk some more about the various versions of Show Boat. Full disclosure: I've never read the book and never seen either movie all the way through. I've recently attended two public discussions of the Broadway show; and last night I sang in the chorus of a concert version of Jerome Kern's Broadway version of Show Boat.

In the second public discussion, the Oakland East Bay Symphony's forum on Race Relations in Art, the presenters showed several film clips: the introduction to the 1951 movie, Paul Robeson singing Old Man River from the 1936 movie, a 1940-something clip from a Hollywood medley with Lena Horne singing Can't Help Loving That Man, a clip from the 1951 movie with Ava Gardner singing Can't Help Loving That Man.

Let's start with the 1951 movie. This is a Disney plantation (although MGM made the movie), in technicolor of course. The slaves all have clean clothes with no visible rips or patches, they have nice straw hats, and they all smile, all the time. It kinda made me shudder. It might as well have been a cartoon; anybody else remember Song of the South? The introduction here is Song of the South with real actors.

Then, they showed the clip from the 1936 movie, which you can not rent from Netflix, with Paul Robeson. First, what a voice that man had. If you've never heard a recording of his, get one. Second, this movie is (of course) in black and white; and frankly, this looks like a real plantation. The slaves' clothes are not nice and clean and mended, and they don't smile. The line of men carrying bales of cotton up the ramp can barely carry them - the camera stays on one man who staggers so that I was sure he would fall. The dock workers gather behind Robeson (as Joe) to back him in the chorus, and they look grim. I don't know how much Robeson had to do with the staging; he was a well-known agitator. If the 1951 version is a too-sweet mint julep, this movie is a splash of cold water in the face. I'd love to see all of it.

Now let's talk about Can't Help Loving That Man, sung by the character Julie LaVerne, who turns out (in a major plot twist) to be "passing as white." Having heard Lena Horne sing that, any time anyone else sings it (and last night it was Debbie de Coudreaux, a brilliant mezzo, who sings at the Moulin Rouge in Paris), the voice I hear belongs to Lena, the interpretation is Lena's. Wow. I must get more of her recordings. So with her available, why did Ava Gardner sing the part in 1951? (She couldn't sing, by the way - they dubbed the voice. Lena Horne's interpretation of the song was better, too.) Because Lena Horne was mixed race - and the astounding reasoning of the mid-century world said that a mixed-race actress could not be allowed to play the part of a mixed-race character. Don't ask me. I don't understand any of it. I understand that it was a problem; hell, I grew up in the 1950s and didn't meet a black person until I was around 10. I've just known too many brilliant, capable black people since, musicians and non-musicians, for any of this to make any sense to me any more.

And it was clear from the discussion at the forum that we still have a problem. In 1999 at Indiana University, a very fine black tenor named Lawrence Brownlee sang Tamino in the Magic Flute, and some local Neanderthal wrote a letter to the editor complaining that it was "an abomination" for him to be kissing a white Pamina on stage. For a broader discussion of race in classical music, I recommend the San Francisco Classical Voice's review of the OEBS Forum.

We've come a long way - just think about those happy darkies in the 1951 movie - but we haven't come far enough yet.

Wotta Week

I just realized I haven't posted in 2 weeks. I have to get more control of things - I have this feeling that I'm overcommitted. In the last 3 weeks I've:

• Finished up the National Hunger Study (my microscopic part in it).
• Gone to a retirement lunch for an old friend from work (now he has even more time to send me weird YouTube links).
• Helped the Oakland East Bay Symphony volunteers set up their forum on Race Relations in Art (and attended same - very interesting, showed clips from the 1936 Show Boat, with Paul Robeson singing Old Man River. If you've seen the happy Disney-style 1951 Show Boat, the 1936 movie would knock you straight off your chair. "Lift that bale" has a whole new meaning after seeing some of those shots.).
• Spent 2 mornings stacking groceries at the local food bank warehouse.
• Attended a board meeting for one of my nonprofits.
• Attended a book signing party for an old friend.
• Attended the annual convention for another nonprofit, and took photos of the events.
• Sang at the dinner after the convention.
• Identified, bought, configured and re-configured a new laptop for a nonprofit.
• Spent hours on the phone negotiating nonprofit discounts for Microsoft Office licenses.
• Attended one chorus rehearsal and 2 rehearsals with orchestra and soloists.
• Sang in a concert performance of Show Boat, plus selected Jerome Kern pieces. Lovely concert, great soloists, great music.

Is that enough? I'm tired all over again just reading it.

This week was enlivened by computer failures. I had to give the photos I took at the convention to someone else, so I tried to burn them to a CD. Got a blue screen of death. Three times. Fortunately, two of those times also produced usable CDs. The system seems fine as long as I'm not burning copies of photos.

Then there's the new laptop. By the way, there are some great deals on Vista laptops out there if you're interested. Bought it, built it out, patched it, everything copacetic. Then we tried to install an ancient version of FileMaker Pro that we've been using (because it was paid for - this is a nonprofit). Couldn't install it; it's supposed to have an auto-play feature, but it wouldn't even run under 64-bit Vista. So I decided to switch to the computer admin user with the install CD still in the drive. The CD drive whirred loudly for a minute and the whole box died. No keyboard, no mouse, no touchpad. Dead. I turned it off, and tried to turn it on again, and it wouldn't come up. To make a long story short, I had to rebuild it from the recovery disk, which took another entire day. I'm really tired of rebuilding computers.

And somehow I still have to make up my mind how I'll vote, Tuesday, on those unspeakable California budget propositions. I don't like any of them very much; I'm in favor of a spending cap (since the Lege has all the spending discipline of a drunken rock star), but I object to using the State Constitution for budget management. I don't like the budget cuts and spending changes the propositions will make, but it's pretty clear that defeating them will cause even more budget cuts. I may never vote for another incumbent again given that the incumbents got us here.

Unreal

The citizens of California often complain that their elected representatives do a poor job of managing the state budget. Hell, I complain about this all the time. A new Field Poll reported in today's San Francisco Chronicle makes the situation perfectly clear:

The citizens of California are nuts.

The poll reports that:

• 67% of voters want to fix the budget through spending cuts, not tax increases.
• 70% of voters want to keep the two-thirds majority requirement to increase taxes.

On the other hand:

• By a roughly 3-to-2 ratio, Californians are NOT willing to raise taxes to balance the budget. Except on millionaires. Certainly no sales, gasoline or business tax increases.
  

I'm relieved to see that 53% of Democrats would favor paying higher taxes to fix the state budget; but that ain't enough to pass it. Eighty-one percent of Republicans oppose paying higher taxes.

The general consensus seems to favor sin taxes (booze, tobacco, and porn), and - get this - legalizing and taxing marijuana. 56% backed legal weed. It doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone that legalizing and taxing pot won't save the day, because - marijuana is a weed. It's extremely easy to grow in the back yard, and requires very little processing to make into your own tea, or even your own smokes - unlike tobacco. Once it's legal, there will be some market, but the main buyers will be people who either don't want to bother growing their own, or want the high quality weed produced by specialty growers. That isn't gonna cut it, folks.

Maybe it's my depression background, but it seems clear to me that if we want the services - and this poll makes it clear that we do want the services, especially public schools, public health, and higher education - We Have To Raise Taxes, including the income tax.

We pay the highest taxes in the country, you complain. Actually, I think New York is worse; but not by much. But - citizens of this country pay some of the lowest taxes in the world - particularly the gasoline tax. Europeans currently pay between $5.75 and $6 per gallon for gasoline - except the Netherlands, where it's $6.41.

You want to discuss taxes, talk to a Swede. Or a Frenchman. They pay the taxes, and they get the services.

So maybe the citizens of California are getting exactly the legislators they want. Sigh. I wonder how long it'll take all of them to grow up and realize that the money isn't going to fall out of the sky to fix this - even with what we're getting from the Obama stimulus package.

Where Are The Locusts?

Every time a new strain of influenza appears, everyone thinks, "1918!" and goes into overdrive. But from what I can see, even in Mexico where things seem worst, this isn't all that bad. Yet. According to the AP today, there are fewer than 3,000 cases worldwide, and fewer than 160 deaths. The U.S. kills more people than that in traffic every week, and we don't even twitch. And we even have a drug that cures the stuff (so far); in 1918 they didn't know what a virus was.

The world situation is getting so bad you wonder - is someone trying to send us a message? Global warming is changing the climate; the global economy has tanked; millions of people are out of jobs; international trade is in the sewer; and now we have the swine flu.

We need to start worrying when we see the plague of locusts. Or the rain of frogs.

Live Beethoven

I don't usually write reviews of concerts I attend; I'm not a music critic. But I attended a concert of the Oakland East Bay Symphony tonight, and I have to talk about this.

The concert ended with the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 in C Major, op. 15, with Sara Buechner at the piano. It had been a good concert - a rousing Russian Easter Overture, a lively Petrouchka, a new piece from a young composer. But the Beethoven was - amazing. Sara Buechner played the piano like no one I've ever heard - her playing was crystalline, and yet strong. The piano sounded so light that at first I thought it was a fortepiano, and then I remembered two things:

One, Beethoven didn't use the fortepiano; in fact, Beethoven is largely responsible for the modern concert grand.

Two, I've never heard a Beethoven piano concerto performed live before (really!). I've only heard recordings. And on recordings, they over-mike the piano to make it sound more "muscular." This is what the real thing sounds like - I just didn't realize it.

Frankly, I thought the performance was pretty close to perfect, although Maestro Morgan took the first movement a little slower than the recording I'm used to; but once he got into it, the first movement sounded wonderful, and the precision of the piano took over. And the third movement just ripped - I thought it would take the roof off the hall! That's why you go to live performances, in fact; you go to hear events like this - and it'll never be available on CD. The OEBS doesn't usually cut CDs. But it got a five-curtain-call standing ovation, from an audience that hadn't come to its feet all evening; and I ran into one of the French horn players after the concert, and he thought it was brilliant too.

Brava, Ms. Buechner! Brava!

Current Research on Addiction

Last week I indulged in one of those extended side conversations bloggers get into, in the comments on an original post about some other subject. In this case, Curtis Faville, the blogger at Compass Rose Books, expressed his personal pleasure in drinking Cadenhead's Classic Green Label Rum, and in the course of the comments expressed an opinion on the subject of alcoholics and their fate with which I chose to disagree. Then followed a long discussion on what does and doesn't characterize an alcoholic, during which another poster, who signed himself Georgie, expressed a wish for links to some current research on the subject.

I personally am not an expert - I just live with a recovering alcoholic, which only classifies me as an interested party - but my resident alcoholic is a very studious sort and he does keep up with the literature, so I asked him if he could give me some useful links to pass on to Georgie. He gave me the following email, which is such a comprehensive review of good current sources that I'm reproducing it here in full, in hopes that Georgie and anyone else may find it useful:

Here are all sorts of links. Read through them and decide what to send along to Curtis and company.

As I think I mentioned, the best popular introduction to the physiology of addiction I've seen is in the book that went along with the HBO Addiction Series. Much of that information is on the HBO addiction website: http://www.hbo.com/addiction/ Follow the button on top labeled "Understanding Addiction". It's been a while since I read the book and I don't think I ever did more than skim the web site but I think the basics are there.

I remember being fascinated by this 45 minute video presentation: http://videocast.nih.gov/ram/ccgr121306.ram

The common thread in both of the above is Dr. Nora Volkow, who is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and did a great deal of pioneering brain imaging work on addiction while at Brookhaven National Lab.

This article in SF Gate was pretty good too: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/02/11/MNGDEO2QOC1.DTL&feed=rss.news The picture is great. It's complex but it captures all the basics. This came out right after Gavin Newsom sought help with alcohol.

To understand what the addiction feedback loop is working on, it is helpful to know how the brain operates. I found this article on "normal" brain function really interesting: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_18_156/ai_57799547/ There is nothing on addiction here, but this article clearly lays out that the brain operates by having a bunch of default habits and an interrupt system to cut them off where they are not appropriate. It this seems very natural for addiction to work by the any mix of mechanisms that builds drug-reinforced habits and/or weakens the interrupt mechanism.

The single biological factor that's been most linked with addiction has been an allele associated with the brain chemical dopamine and in particular the D2 dopamine receptor. These are highly involved in the brain's pleasure and reward system that plays a role in those drug-reinforced habits. Dopamine shows up in that SF gate picture. A 1990 paper all but said there was an alcoholism gene (well, allele). This article (http://www.faqs.org/abstracts/Health/D2-dopamine-receptor-gene-is-associated-but-not-linked-with-alcoholism.html) is part of the follow-on discussion, and a far as I can tell, this is not too far from the view today: it's part of the explanation but not the whole explanation. As you can imagine, there has been lots of back and forth since in the research community. Do a search on "D2 dopamine receptor alcoholism" and you'll find a very mixed story. And having done that search, I like the discussion that starts at the bottom of the page here: http://books.google.com/books?id=UzhXJ4l3OBYC&printsec=frontcover#PPA97 I'm going to order the book.

At a slightly more complex level is this Scientific American Article: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=seeking-the-connections-alcoholism-and-our-genes&page=1

And if anyone believes there is one type of alcoholic, I think this http://www.nih.gov/news/pr/jun2007/niaaa-28.htm puts that simple notion to rest. I've got the whole article, not just this press release.

California Budget - Proposition 1C

Of all the weird ballot propositions that came out of the California Lege's late budget standoff, I have the most trouble with this one. Data on the proposition in this post came from the San Francisco Chronicle's article on Proposition 1C today.

To begin with, I have serious reservations - and had at the time, I voted against the state lottery - about using gambling money to fund our education system. Our education system is a major and mission-critical investment for the future of this state, we should be funding it out of normal revenues. We as a state should not be profiting off gambling, which at its worst destroys lives.

The sad fact is that our state government regards the school system as a drag on it, and never misses an opportunity to cut education funding - as they've done in the current crisis. This is why, in case you wondered, California has so many ballot initiatives locking in education spending. It's because we can't trust the Lege (as Molly Ivins used to call it in Texas) to fund it properly.

Now they want to do two colossally stupid things:

1. They want to borrow $5 billion (that's with a B, folks) against future lottery revenues, and put the entire amount into this year's operating budget.
   
2. They want to remove the requirement that lottery money go directly to the schools. If this passes, schools will be funded from the general fund. They'll get "approximately" the $1 billion a year they get now, adjusted in future for inflation and student population.
   

What's wrong with this picture?

First, as far as I'm concerned, the lottery's only moral justification is to fund the education system. If we aren't using the money for education - and if this passes we won't be - then we should not be in the lottery business.

Second, they want to borrow money for operating expenses. This means the state will be paying down that $5 billion that we use to run the state this year, for the next thirty years, out of the lottery profits. The two objections to this are:

1. Borrowing money for operating expenses is colossally stupid (ask anybody who did a cash-out refi to finance a vacation, or a flat-screen TV), and
2. What happens if the lottery doesn't produce enough revenue to pay down the bonds? Nobody discusses this, but the proposal commits the state to pay $400 million a year for 30 years out of lottery revenues. But lottery sales have been "anemic," according to the article. Only addicted gamblers will buy lottery tickets if they're out of work; everybody else cuts back. And a lot of people are out of work. If the lottery doesn't produce that $400 million a year, who does? We do, folks. Us taxpayers.
   

Third, this is going to cut education funding. Again. The schools currently get about $1.1 billion a year from the lottery (that's all that's left out of $3 billion in lottery sales, after payouts and administrative expenses); so Prop. 1C will already remove $ .1 billion from the school allocation - that's $100 million, folks. And in future, the lottery profits will go into the general fund, and education funding will come out of the general fund. Yeah, sure it will. And increased as inflation and school population go up, too. Right. Just the way they always do.

There's an old military joke about the general who turns to his aide and says, "Bring me a rock." So the aide goes out, looks around, picks up a rock and comes back. And the general says, "Wrong rock." The legislature's carefully hammered solution to the budget crisis is the wrong rock. If we defeat these propositions, they'll have to have another emergency session to do it again; and I'm sorry, but I think they should. I can't support Prop. 1C.

The New Car

I wasn't planning to get a new car for another 4 or 5 years; I like to buy new cars, with the features I want, drive them for 10 years or more (doing all the services), and then sell them to someone and buy another new one. I find this reasonable, and not wasteful; and ten years gives you time to save up the price of the next one. The last car I bought was a loaded 2002 Passat, a wonderful, comfortable, easy-riding road car with a huge trunk.

Now that I've retired, I don't need a commute car any more. And my Passat, while still enjoyable, eats more gasoline when I'm tooling around town than it did when I was commuting 17 miles each way on the freeway. Still, I wouldn't have chosen to replace it; and in fact, we didn't replace it. We replaced my husband's 2002 Mercedes C-230.

In 2002 my husband needed to replace his commute car, even though he hates shopping for cars. (I'm actually the car buff.) He test drove several cars, including a Passat, and didn't really like any of them; and then he drove the Mercedes. It was love at first sight; it was small, nimble, tight handling, and he could get it with a 6-CD changer in the glove compartment, so he could listen to Haydn symphonies on the way to work. The trunk was smallish; but he forgave that.

About 6 months ago, the Mercedes started breaking down; commuting to Livermore (90 miles a day) has put 140,000 miles on it. Mercedes repairs are really expensive, and over the last 6 months we actually paid out more than half the bluebook value in repairs. A couple of weeks ago the water pump went out, for another four-figure bill; and he said, that's it. We're getting a new car.

Our long term car plan was that, in retirement, instead of having "his car" and "her car", we'd have "the town car" (small, nimble, high mileage) and "the road car" (lots of storage space for backpacking equipment, and able to take rough back roads). His backpacking car has been the Passat because of its huge trunk, but he can't take it on the really bad roads; it's just a sedan. Once we decided to buy, we agreed it was time to get "the town car," and he would take the Passat for his commute car; it only has 65,000 miles on it, and should last several more years. I went to Consumer Reports and got a list of the top-mileage cars. This boiled down to two major choices: some kind of hybrid, or a MINI Cooper.

MINI Cooper, I thought. That's a cool little car, and it gets amazing mileage. I decided I had to test drive a MINI; and I fell in love. That car is just fun to drive, even more than the Passat. I dutifully test drove a Prius, and a Camry hybrid; but I'm sorry to say that Toyota has changed since they made the 1981 Tercel that I drove happily until 1992. The seat position in the Prius had my back aching before the test drive was over; I have to be able to sit straighter than that when I drive. And the Camry - well, the seat was comfortable, but it was like driving a big marshmallow. You can wiggle the steering wheel almost a quarter of the way around, and the car's nose barely budges. I'm used to German cars; I can't stand loose steering. So I dragged Jim out to the MINI dealer, and he liked it too; and we bought one. I think I'm twenty years past having a "mid-life crisis" - but I sure enjoy driving that car!

Standing in Line

As part of my volunteer efforts at the local food bank, I'm doing interviews for the National Hunger Survey, organized by Feeding America (you probably remember it as America's Second Harvest, they recently changed the name). They do these every 5 years, to assess what's going on at America's food banks, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters, in getting food to people who can't afford to buy all the food they need.

So every few days, a small team of us, wearing our Food Bank T-shirts, shows up by appointment at a church, or a volunteer center, or somewhere similar (usually a church); and we use statistical techniques to randomly choose a small number of people from the group standing in line; and then we ask them questions. Some of the questions are standard census data: how old are you? Who else lives with you? Do you own or rent? Do you have a job? Then there are the questions that break your heart: How often in the last month have you gone hungry so the kids could eat full meals? How often have the kids gone hungry? Can you afford to eat balanced meals? Have you had to choose between buying food and paying rent? Buying food and paying for medicine? Buying food and paying for heat?

I've asked these questions in a tent on a sunny day, in a cold church in the rain (with buckets on the stairs to catch the drips from the leaking roof), in offices walled with unpainted pressboard, and standing with people in line, out of doors on a cold rainy morning. I don't know what mental image you have of the people who get free groceries; but I'm talking to Everyman. The landscaper with four kids, whose salary isn't quite enough to cover the groceries. The couple in their 70's, retired working man, own their house free and clear; their pensions and Social Security just aren't enough any more. The women with children in tow. Everyman's complexion tends to be darker than the American "norm", and he doesn't always speak English; but there are white people in those lines too, and only one of the people I've interviewed wasn't a citizen. (Sure, they tell us; we aren't ICE, we're the food bank.)

What are we doing to ourselves? To each other? We are the richest country on earth and we let people starve? We let children starve?

I don't have an answer for this, but when I was growing up, a family could live on one man's wages. How did we blow that away? How do we get it back?

Rest In Peace

Over the last few years, from my work on a Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council, I've gotten to know a number of Oakland cops. They're solid professionals: intelligent, polite, competent, dedicated. I'm absolutely appalled at the events of this weekend, in which two police officers died in a hail of bullets from a young man they pulled over on a routine traffic stop, and two more died later when he shot at them from a closet with an AK-47. I have several comments on this:

To the members of the Oakland Police Department: my heart breaks for you. You have my deepest sympathy and my unqualified support.

To the people who feel the police are rude to them when they pull them over for a traffic violation: if they seem a little harsh, they're wondering whether you might possibly be another Lovelle Mixon. These aren't the first police officers to be killed during a routine traffic stop, and they won't (unfortunately) be the last. If you get pulled over, be polite to the officer, and the officer will (probably) be polite to you. And yes, I do know about D.W.B. (driving while black) - but I firmly believe that's a minority of officers.

To the NRA: You've had your Supreme Court decision. You definitely have the right to own guns and keep them in your house. Can we now have a conversation about what weapons you can own? There's probably nothing we can do about the semi-automatic pistol that killed the two traffic officers; but the SWAT team died in a hail of bullets from an AK-47. An AK-47 - that's a military weapon. Why can civilians even buy this damn thing? What are you going to do with it - hunt deer? You'd cut the deer in half. At one point, in this country, civilians couldn't buy these weapons, then we elected the neocons and that was repealed; can we please discuss, again, restricting civilian access to guns normally used on the battlefield? Two good officers are dead because a civilian - no, a paroled felon - had access to a military assault rifle. Frankly, members of the NRA, I hold you at least partially responsible because of your mindless insistence that anybody, anywhere, any time, should be able to own any weapon.

Old Science Fiction Movies

We watched Journey to the Center of the Earth last weekend, the 1959 one with James Mason and Arlene Dahl. The first time I saw it I was a teenager, and while I knew intellectually that you can't go down inside the earth and find all that stuff, emotionally I bought the whole load.

Watching it again 40 years later, I noticed more weird stuff than just Pat Boone (remember Pat Boone?) in tartan pants. No, I don't know what tartan. I admit that Pat Boone in 1959 was extremely decorative - the uncritical would say that he was a smokin' hottie - but frankly his character comes off kind of stupid. He did look good in full Highland formal dress, with kilt and sporran.

I wondered about the phosphorescent algae that allowed our adventurers to dispense with their wind-up lamps, just about the time the salt in the salt cavern corroded the coils and made them fail. OK, salt does corrode metal; but in caverns under the earth, why is the salt loose, in granules, like table salt? Wouldn't it be a solid mass? And even loose, how did it get into the lamps? Did they roll in it? But mostly, why are there phosphorescent algae? What advantage do the algae get from glowing, if they're in a cave?

Ellery Queen, in The Player on the Other Side, had a character comment that "Y is a crooked letter." (You have to read it to get the context. In fact I strongly recommend the book - it's one of Queen's best.) So I know I shouldn't ask "why" about old science fiction movies, but:

When they run into a field of subterranean mushrooms (OK, that works), 6 feet tall (ah, excuse me?), how lucky are they that, when they chow down on them, they're not poisoned?? None of these people is a mycologist, how do they know it's safe? Also, they chop the mushrooms down with an axe to make a raft, but most of the mushroom stems I've seen can be snapped between two fingers.

Why is there a sea below the earth, with a high ceiling covered with those phosphorescent algae, so they can all see to build a raft and sail on it? Why isn't there just a big dark cavity full of water?

Why are there giant lizards on the shores of the sea beneath the earth? Giant flesh-eating lizards? What do they eat, in between visiting groups of Victorian adventurers? (I say, "visiting groups," because, of course, there was an earlier visit from "Count Saknussen" - they find the count's bones, and his finger bone is pointing to the way out. No, really.) The question of what the lizards eat when they can't get at James Mason or Arlene Dahl never seems to occur to anybody in the film, even though there are no animals of any kind except for the lizards.

The true and regrettable answer to all these nit-picks, of course, is that if they weren't like that, we wouldn't have the story. Blame Jules Verne.

For all that, I enjoyed it thoroughly, and I may not bother to see the new 3D version. It won't have James Mason being the irascible Scottish scientist (a role he does wonderfully), which will outweigh the fact that it also won't have Pat Boone. And I enjoyed the scientific idiocies quite as much as I enjoy Star Wars, even if I do cringe when Luke Skywalker fires the laser cannon on the Millennium Falcon, and they recoil...

Bernie Madoff's Ponzi Scheme

The more I hear about Bernie Madoff, the more I shake my head. The common stereotype of a criminal is that he steals because it's easier than working for a living. And yet, look at what Bernie Madoff did to support his Ponzi scheme. He had, I think, something like 4,000 clients; and he sent every one of them a brokerage statement, showing assets, stock trades, etc., every month for something like nineteen years; and every one of those statements was completely fictional. He had to invent a consistent stream of data for each one of those 4,000 or so clients, and maintain it month to month, at least enough to keep them from getting curious. (Not that any of his clients was distinguished by curiosity or critical thought.)

How did he keep track of all this? Did he have it in a computer? Did he type stuff by hand? His accountant too - the "strip-mall accountant" - did they sit together in the office, making up stuff to put in the SEC reports? I've never had a job in my life where I worked so hard with so much at stake. I think he turned himself in so he wouldn't have to deal with those statements any more.

Why I Don't Tweet

The whole Twitter phenom just amazes me. Now, I can claim to be pretty techno-savvy. I was doing stuff online long before most people. I had a PDA when most of my peers were carrying DayRunners around. Hell, I was doing online searches for currency exchange rates in 1978, on a 300 baud TI SilentWriter 800. But Twitter - I don't get Twitter. Or rather, I get it, but I don't want it.

Readers of this blog may sometimes feel that I don't know when to shut up. I feel that if a subject is of sufficient importance to write about, it's important enough to do some research, give it some thought, carefully consider all the angles. This process is impossible on Twitter, because Twitter restricts you to 140 characters at a time. That's not a blog entry, it's a haiku; in fact, most haiku wouldn't fit on Twitter. Maybe in two successive tweets you could do a haiku, but who would know?

I started thinking about this the other day when Adam Felber, one of my favorite bloggers, announced on his blog that he is now on Twitter. I read Fanatical Apathy for two reasons, first, Adam's biting, insightful satire, and second, the charming group of posters who respond to him and to each other. So, when Adam set up on Twitter, I went and looked at his tweets. ("Tweets" - the word itself is just demeaning.) They weren't insightful, or meaningful, or satirical - they weren't anything. (OK, he has a baby under 1 year old. This is bound to have some effect.) In fact, I told him as much.

As far as I can tell, the point of Twitter is either to dribble out your immediate thoughts to the world as the spirit moves you, 140 characters at a time, or alternatively to subscribe to other people's tweets as the spirit moves them. I gather that celebrities have tens of thousands of random people subscribing to their tweets. I assume the tweets come into your cell phone as text messages; so your cell phone is constantly going off.

This is carrying electronic connectivity to absurd lengths. I spent a number of years, in my last job, carrying a duty pager, AKA the Electronic Leash. This went off whenever anything went wrong, or when someone wanted to talk to me about something, or when there was a meeting, or whatever. In fact, after one upgrade, the system would deliver news and sports updates to your text pager - constant buzzing. Frankly, I turned the sound off, except for actual messages to me. I don't want to be that frigging "connected"; and that's my objection to Twitter.

But that isn't my only objection - Twitter is constant "connection," but without any actual human contact. Just because you subscribe to Bill Gates' tweets doesn't mean you know Bill Gates. (Doonesbury nailed this pretty effectively, if you saw the strip about Roland Hedley and his tweets on March 9) I'm all in favor of constant connection if it has a human being attached to it. I want to have lunch with a friend. I want to go to a museum with a buddy. I don't want to get random 140 character blurts from someone I'll never meet.

So have fun, all you Tweeters - but if you want to talk to me, I'll be here, writing in complete paragraphs.

Evaluating Risk

Wired magazine had a really interesting article on Feb. 23, which I just saw today, called Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street. It's the story of how a Chinese mathematician (or quant) called David Li developed a formula for modeling risk, which was so brilliantly simple that it came to be used all over the financial industry - until the assumptions it was based on fell apart. For the mathematically inclined, the formula (called a Gaussian copula function) is reproduced and analyzed (at a very high level).

The article describes the curious reactions in the financial industry to Mr. Li's formula. The principal response seems to have been, "This is so easy, it must be right." Here's a quote from Wired:

At the heart of it all was Li's formula. When you talk to market participants, they use words like beautiful, simple, and, most commonly, tractable. It could be applied anywhere, for anything, and was quickly adopted not only by banks packaging new bonds but also by traders and hedge funds dreaming up complex trades between those bonds.

Why was it so simple and beautiful? For one thing, it didn't bother to use real data on mortgage defaults behind the securities to make the estimation; that would have taken too much time to gather. It used the historical prices of credit default swaps on the mortgage-backed securities as the measure of risk, assuming that the financial markets had priced those risks correctly. Of course, all those prices were based on a world in which housing prices went ever onward and upward. Unfortunately, the people who used it to make investment decisions weren't mathematically adept enough to understand the distinction between correlation and causation.

The whole episode reminds me of a famous quote from Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

Dead Banks

So Citi wants yet more money, and AIG needs another huge infusion. None of the Treasury's efforts so far have had any effect on all those toxic assets. The really disturbing assumption on all this was quoted by Paul Krugman today, from a blog called Tim Duy's Fed Watch. The Tim Duy article is interesting if dense, but here's what you really need to know (emphasis mine):

Policymakers are assuming that restoring proper functioning in credit markets - and confidence in general - is equivalent to a housing price rebound. They seem incapable of envisioning a world in which this is not the case. This tunnel vision prevents policymakers of trying to devise policy which assumes that the many of the assets in the banking system are simply “bad.” For Bernanke and Geithner, there are no bad assets. Only misunderstood assets.

Think about this. We are in this mess because too many people borrowed more money than they could pay back on overpriced houses. The houses were overpriced. House prices have been falling for awhile; they have farther to fall to reach their "true" price, which is the price paid to a willing seller by a willing buyer, who will be paying an acceptable fraction of his total verified income to a willing lender. With people losing jobs left and right, willing buyers haven't got the money to throw around that they did a few years ago.

Meanwhile, many of the oversized mortgages taken out on overpriced houses are in default. In a real world, this would mean that the securities built around those mortgages are worthless. The security owners bought them, assuming they would get a specified income stream; not gonna happen. But if we all admit these securities are worthless, then the banks that own them have to write down their asset value; they should be doing it anyway, it's called "marking to market," and the banking industry is desperately, maniacally fighting doing it. And given the amount of dud securities that were sold, it's odds on that the banks doing the writedowns will have to admit publicly that they are - insolvent. Broke. Stony. They owe more than they own.

The government - two administrations now - has been trying for 6 months to figure out what to do about these "toxic assets" because they "can't establish a value for them." What they really mean is that they need to figure out a way to put a value on them that will allow the banks holding them to maintain the illusion of solvency. You know and I know that the value on the basic mortgage-backed securities is maybe 15 cents on the dollar (I made that up; but it won't be high, whatever it is); the value of the derivatives on them, like CDOs and CDO-squared (see the glossary on Planet Money), is effectively zero. Zilch. Since they're electronic, they won't even make good wallpaper. The latest government scheme, also quoted by Krugman from a blog called Calculated Risk, is to involve "public-private partnerships". Once again, here's the gist:

By offering low interest non-recourse loans, these public-private entities can pay a higher than market price for the toxic assets (since there is no downside risk). This amounts to a direct subsidy from the taxpayers to the banks. It is amazing how many different ways they've tried to recycle the same bad idea.

This is yet another effort to avoid admitting that one or more "major" banks, "too big to fail" banks, are - insolvent. Broke. Their capital and assets won't cover their liabilities.

I'm sorry - I think we need to admit that some of these institutions are dead, and bury the carcasses. Will there be fallout? Yes. Do I know how bad it'll be? No. But if we continue to try to prop these dead institutions up, in the hope that some day the economy will recover and housing prices will return to where they were in 2006, and all the mortgage-backed securities will miraculously have value again, we will fail; and we will bankrupt ourselves and our descendants in the process. We all need to get used to the fact that housing prices may never return to where they were in 2006.

A Plague O' Both Your Houses

Consider this an open letter to the California Legislature (it wouldn't hurt the U.S. Congress to read it either).

I am fed to the teeth with the whole boiling of you. I am seriously considering never voting for an incumbent again - how's that for term limits? You have all spent the last eight months bickering and squabbling over the state budget, and posturing about how holy you are and how you can't walk away from your principles - while the State of California, for whose governance you are (at least theoretically) partly responsible, slides into the economic pit with the rest of the country. The state can't sell a bond to save its life, it is about to run out of frigging cash to pay the bills, and you STILL can't bring yourselves to pass a budget.

The Republicans claim they can't vote for higher taxes because "it would destroy the economy" - how does it improve the state economy to have the state unable to pay its bills? How many poor elderly people will die, you ranting maniacs, because you are too whatever-it-is to vote for the higher taxes necessary to get the state out of this astounding fiscal hole? How do you plan to lure businesses to locate in a state with a credit rating one notch above junk? Businesses need services from the state too, and right now, they'd be better off in Mississippi.

And don't you Democrats start feeling all righteous, just because I started with the Republicans. I'm finally starting to hear, from both sides, the real reason you're all so inept in this crisis: you're afraid that, if you vote the way you have to, to get the state out of the quicksand, you won't be re-elected. Well, get this, children: we did not elect you so you could be re-elected. We elected you so you could govern the goddam state in our name. Your job is not to be re-elected. It is to use what passes for your brains and judgment to make the hard decisions about how to run the state. If you can't do that, maybe we should recall all of you. And it doesn't help that you're cutting this program and that program, most of which benefit the poor and the helpless - but cutting your salaries, and your per diem, and your office staff? Nooo, we can't do that!

And what really fries my tomatoes about all of you is this: You. Never. Talk. To. Each. Other. You huddle in your little caucuses and never talk to anybody you don't already agree with; and your party leaders stand at the podium and posture at each other. The Internet has been intensifying this trend, with people only reading the blogs they agree with; but when it spills over into the legislative body of the State of California, it's downright dangerous. When was the last time you went out to lunch with a member of the other caucus, and actually listened to him talk about the issues in his district, considered whether your district had any similar issues, and discussed a solution that might help both of you? When was the last time you talked to anybody but your party whip and your favorite lobbyist? You're all supposed to be doing your best to govern the state. I would think this meant talking to the other people doing the same job; but I see no evidence that Democrats ever talk to Republicans, or vice versa.

What the Senate Thinks is Important

The Senate, especially the Republicans therein, has made a big deal about the fact that they don't like the House version of the stimulus package. They've crafted their own version, which will have to be reconciled with the House version somehow, in conference. The differences between the two bills tell you a whole lot about what the Republicans in the Senate consider really, really important in these disastrous times.

There's a whole lot less aid to the states - $40 billion less. Apparently state governments should be left to cut services and lay people off. That'll help the economy a lot, that will, especially in the long term - $16 billion of the cuts will come out of school construction. (What is it about Republicans and education funding??)

Also helpful to the economy will be the absence of Medicaid coverage for the unemployed uninsured, cuts in Food Stamps, and the limitation of the child tax credit to families with wages of at least $8,100.

Since the bills spend about the same amount, what are the Repubs putting it into?? Tax cuts. $70 billion in alternative minimum tax relief - for one year. Believe me, poor people don't pay the AMT. The Repubs are also fond of the $15K tax credit for home buyers - Paul Krugman, in yesterday's N.Y. Times, calls it a "$15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses."

You people in states with Republican senators: write this stuff down, will you? And remember it, at the next election. Please remember that your senators didn't feel Medicaid and food stamps were important in a downturn. And then vote.

TANSTAAFL

For those of you not familiar with this classic acronym of the mid-twentieth century, it stands for There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. According to Wikipedia, it originated in the 1940's, and was popularized in the 1960's (when I heard it) by Robert Heinlein's classic novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. (I'm not going to give you a link to the novel synapsis. It's good enought that you should go get it - the library has it if you've been laid off - and read it.)

TANSTAAFL came to my mind when I read the Washington Post's article listing the victims of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. All of these people bought into Bernie Madoff's story because they thought they could get something for nothing. They thought they could get a free lunch - endless returns, higher than the market normally gave, with no risk. Madoff's fund never had a down year, even when the market did.

The list, which was made public in a court filing, is 162 pages long, with about 80 names per page! (There's a lot of duplication for people with multiple accounts.) For the many charitable foundations, I just shake my head; their investment advisors exercised poor judgment. I'm involved with 2 non-profits, and funding is always an issue, and the one that has an invested endowment has lost serious dollars this year. (But not to Madoff!) The same applies to the individuals (I was really sorry to see Sandy Koufax's name); they were very badly advised. But the names that really pissed me off were in this paragraph:

Several investment advisory firms, including Argent Wealth Management, Bank of America Private Bank, Citi Smith Barney, Citigroup Private Banking, Fairfield Greenwich, Fleet Bank and Ivy Asset Management, made the list, ...

It gives me cold chills. I used to work for Bank of America, and at one point I actually investigated whether I should move all my investments to the Private Bank. The answer was no (I think we weren't rich enough). These people are supposed to be investment experts. And they swallowed Madoff's scam hook, line, and sinker.

Did nobody at any of those firms have the brains God gave bastard geese in Ireland? Did nobody have a "too good to be true" alarm that went off in his head? It wasn't impossible; Harry Markopolis spent 9 years trying to convince the SEC that, on the basis of his published returns, Madoff had to be cooking the books. NPR's Planet Money blog has put up several stories about Markopolis' quest; and he was before Congress this week saying that he's got a "mini-Madoff" (only about $1 billion) to give the SEC again. I've seen the document they ignored; Planet Money linked it a couple of months ago. If the SEC ignored that, they were either giving Madoff a pass or they can't add.

We may get out of this economic mess, I don't know. But I know this: until we as a country learn that There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, we'll be in constant danger of getting back into another one. Unless we can cure ourselves of the conviction that we can make it big, quick and easy, with no risk - that we can get something for nothing - we'll be wide open to the next Bernie Madoff.

The late great Leslie Charteris wrote a number of his Saint short stories about various forms of bunco games; the Saint made a hobby of beating the bunco artists at their own games. This was in the 1920's, but all the games Charteris wrote about are all still out there; and they all still work, because everybody believes that he can get something for nothing; and none of the bunco schemes ever work on people who understand that there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Faith-Based Initiatives

I heard a representative of one of the major religious charitable organizations the other day - I forget which one - complaining about President Obama's campaign promises that government money couldn't be used by faith-based groups that discriminate in hiring. You know - that won't hire gays, or members of other religions. How can we be expected to fulfill our mission, said this man, if we have to do all this? We do a lot of good, he said; we need this money to do more good.

As a matter of fact, although I myself am not especially religious, I have a lot of respect for the religious charities. It's arguable that they are the truest Christians around, out there on the streets, feeding the hungry, succoring the homeless, and so on. I donate to a couple of them regularly.

But in this case, I'm on President Obama's side. There's a very simple answer to your dilemma, sir, whether you're with the Salvation Army or the Catholic Charities (two groups I'm fairly sure I've heard had issues with hiring gays).

Don't take the money. Stick with private fundraising from private donors who agree with you, and stay true to your principles.

Yes, the U.S. Government (at least for now) is a boundless source of money. You could do a lot of good with it. But the U.S. Government, like you and me, doesn't want its money used in ways it disapproves of. You, sir, wouldn't give money to a gay rights group. But gays pay taxes, just as you do; and they don't want their tax money given to groups that won't hire them. The U.S. Government represents all its citizens, even the ones you disapprove of.

Then there's the whole issue of the separation of church and state. If the government gives you money which you use to forward your religious mission, isn't that "creating an establishment of religion"? The only way to get around that would be for the state to give money to all religious groups, and allow them all to use it for their sectarian goals - and I mean all religions, including the Wiccans and the pagans.

Actually, as I was writing this, I saw an article on Obama's new Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Initiatives. The complaining gentleman will be able to get funds from the office; but his bookkeeping had better be good, because he can hire and fire based on religious tenets, only for projects which don't get government funding. On the other hand, this office will also work with secular non-profits.

I didn't see any mention of Wiccans and pagans.

Taxpayers - Enemy Action

Well, now we are up to three - I heard on NPR this morning that Nancy Killefer, the candidate for "performance czar" (czarina, surely?) is withdrawing her candidacy "because of a tax issue." Specifically, she didn't pay unemployment compensation taxes on her household help, and the District of Columbia put a $925 lien on her property.

I'm sorry - that's the worst tax flub yet. Geithner "didn't realize" he had to pay the full Social Security tax when working at the IMF; OK, that's just stupid, even if he was using TurboTax (TurboTax?) to do his returns. Daschle "didn't realize" that the car and driver his dear old friend the plutocrat "loaned" him actually represented a gift of income; he was "used to" having a car and driver as Senate majority leader. That's just arrogant. But this woman didn't pay the unemployment tax on her housekeeper or nanny - that's really inexcusable. That means that if and when she fires them, they can't pull unemployment.

The good news is that Daschle has shown more class than the senators who were all set to confirm him - he's withdrawn his name from nomination. He still shouldn't have done it; but at least he realizes that it's a problem, which is more than Geithner did.

Remember Leona Helmsley, who said that only the little people pay taxes??

Debra Saunders of the San Francisco Chronicle devoted her column today (Feb. 3) to this mess. She's even more bitter than I am about it. She makes the valid point, though, that if we're going to require absolute perfection for anybody who wants a job inside the Beltway, the pool of applicants will be very very small. But on this one I agree with her - these mistakes are not only stupid but venal. Dashle and Killefer did the right thing by withdrawing (finally); and frankly, I think Geithner should resign as well. But we may be stuck with him.

Taxpayers

This has happened twice, now, so we've gone from happenstance to coincidence; one more instance and we'll be looking at enemy action.

Out of the dozen or so candidates for cabinet office in the Obama administration, two have problems with their back taxes. Those of you with really long memories may recall that unpaid taxes finally sent Scarface Al Capone to the slammer for good. To make it even better, the first candidate with a "tax malfunction" is up for Secretary of the Treasury (and supervisor of the IRS)! And the other is Tom Daschle, of whom I just thought better.

In fact, I thought better of the whole Obama team. I expected, of course, to discover that they're only human, but I didn't realize it'd come quite so fast. Something is wrong when you pick the dozen or so best people you can think of, to help pull the country out of the worst mess since the Depression; and two of them have fluffed their taxes. And this comes out after the nomination has been submitted. Did the vetting team miss this? Did the candidates not think it was worth mentioning?

OK, they've paid all the back taxes. And the fines. But it bothers me. It bothers me more that the Democrats essentially just waved them through. Boys, I suppose, will be boys. I remember some candidates with tax issues in a previous administration, and domestic-servant-without-papers issues, who had to withdraw from nomination; and frankly, I thought it was reasonable that they should. It's just not clear to me why Timothy Geithner is such a hot pick for the Treasury spot that we should ignore the fact that he blew off his Social Security taxes. Twice. Even if he has paid everything now.

I pay all my taxes, every year. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect this of the people I hire to represent me. For shame, Mr. Obama.

Mr. Boehner, Shut Your Potato Trap

How can you spend hundreds of millions of dollars on contraceptives? How does that stimulate the economy?

Thus spake John Boehner, R-Ohio, the House minority leader, in commenting on the stimulus package.

I'm reminded of an old feminist saying: if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament. Mr. Boehner obviously believes that a measure that only benefits half of the population isn't worth doing. And this isn't even abortion - this isn't about abortion. This is about giving women the tools they need so they never have to have an abortion. But it's not worth the effort, he thinks.

Here's a little arithmetic, Mr. Boehner. The median family income in the state oof Mississippi, the lowest in the country, is $35,533. The median family income for a family with 2 kids in Mississippi is $53,697. The median family income for a family with 5 kids in Mississippi is $45,494.

(What? but that's what the numbers say. I got these numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau. I'm guessing the median is lower for a 7 person family because the wife can't work outside the home, she has to take care of the kids. But that's a guess.)

I think the numbers actually make my point. With some exceptions (most corporate CEOs could support as many kids as they could beget), the more children a family has, the poorer they are. This effect is worst at the low end of the economic scale where salaries have stagnated for the last 25 years. And of course, the poorer you are, the less money you spend to stimulate the economy.

Mr. Boehner is correct that expanding the provision of contraceptives won't give the economy an immediate stimulus. But for a longer-term stimulus, it'll have a definite effect in terms of smaller families, reduction in teenage pregnancies, etc.

Of course, what he's really doing is grandstanding to the Republican supporters on the Religious Right, some of whom object even to contraception. That's not an economic argument. But don't say it won't have any economic effect.

President Obama

Tuesday morning is my weekly shift stacking groceries at the Food Bank warehouse, so yesterday morning at 7:40 I hit the freeway. I thought it was appropriate, given Obama's emphasis on service, to show up and stack groceries as usual. I found a bin of green apples and the usual conveyor belt arrangement, and with a half-dozen other volunteers, set out to bag apples. Virtue was rewarded, though - at about 8:45 the volunteer coordinator stuck his head in the door and said, "Come on in - they're going to swear him in in about 3 minutes!"

We all trooped into a big conference room, where they had live television coverage projected onto a screen. We saw Rick Warren's invocation, Aretha Franklin's solo, and on through the inaugural address - no internet delays either. (Let's hear it for 20th century technology!) Then we all went back and bagged more apples.

Let me tell you, seeing Aretha Franklin really made me feel old! Unfairly, I'm sure, it also tickled my funnybone. I read a comic strip called Curtis in the Sunday paper, which is about an urban black family with 2 small boys, and Curtis, the older son, regularly makes fun of the older church ladies and their elaborate Sunday hats. I'm afraid, when I saw Aretha and her hat, I immediately though of Curtis. I don't know, maybe Aretha wouldn't mind.

Everybody is deconstructing the inaugural address today, but here are the parts that impressed me:

He talked about our great history, and invoked us all as part of it, to carry it on. I don't recall George Bush ever invoking American history, I suspect because he never read about it.

"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." Ya-HOO! Damn right we do. Now deliver on that, Mr. President. Also deliver on your promise to "do our business in the light of day" - the Bush administration's insistence on classifying everything always made me wonder what they were trying to hide.

"We will restore science to its rightful place." It's embarrassing to have a president who doesn't believe in evolution; you keep wondering if he thinks the earth is flat.

He included "nonbelievers" in the people who make up the American nation. (If only he'd managed to restrain Rick Warren from sailing off into Jesus-land - until he went there, he'd given a very good, broad ecumenical prayer that even I could agree with. But when he invoked Jesus, he locked out everybody but the Christians.)

"We will not apologize for our way of life." THANK you!

I could go on, but I've got to get back to work - I have some volunteer stuff to do today, and I have to do my Pilates. (After all, our new pres works out 45 minutes a day, 6 days a week - I hope he can keep that up now he's in office; he'll need the stamina!)

Welcome aboard, President Obama.

Inauguration

Well, tomorrow we'll have a new President. I've been reading a great deal about it from all kinds of sources - the newspaper, the Economist, my fellow bloggers - and I find I really only have one thing to say:

It's. About. Damn. Time.

I was thinking about this "first African American president" business. American attitudes toward race are weird (only less weird than American attitudes toward sex); and really, my lifetime has spanned the full range, except for slavery itself. When I was a small child, in the Fifties, Southern black people drank from "colored" fountains and sat in the balcony at movie theaters; and the town I lived in (not in the south) didn't sell land to blacks. Negros, we said then. I didn't meet a black person until I was 10 or 11 years old and joined the Vallejo Junior Symphony - Vallejo was a Navy town and had lots of black people.

In the Sixties, I was in college (at U.C. Berkeley no less); we watched the marches, we saw the dogs and water hoses on the news, we read about the murders. The Black Panthers arose here in Oakland, and I didn't approve of their armed stance (I never have liked guns), but they did schools and child care and social services. If only they'd stayed with that; but they had to have the guns. White women still crossed the street when black men came along, but people were beginning to say it was wrong.

That was forty years ago. Now, nobody (well, almost nobody) even blinks at interracial marriage; whites work side by side with black people (and Hispanics and Asians) and think nothing of it; the American population is a spectrum of shades of brown. Black people still face some discrimination, but the Jim Crow laws, the miscegenation laws, are history; the "white only" rental signs are gone; it's a lot better. It amazes me how much better it is, within one lifetime; people who get stopped for "driving while black" may not agree with me, but really, it used to be much worse. Now racial profiling is questioned. And with Barack Obama, who ran as an American (not an African American), maybe we can take one more step along the road.

Maybe we can just be Americans. Those of us who were born and raised here still have more in common with each other than we do with anyone from another country, no matter what color we or they are.

Oscar Grant III

I don't blog much about Oakland; plenty of bright people already cover that beat, and frankly I get tired of spitting into the wind. With the Bush administration, bad as it was, we all knew it couldn't last past Jan. 20. With Oakland, who knows??

Since it made the national press, you've probably read the accounts of the death of Oscar Grant III, a supermarket worker who found himself in the wrong company on New Year's Eve and was shot to death by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer. While lying face down on the platform with his hands behind his back, waiting to be handcuffed. The officer refused to answer questions and, in a first, has been arrested for murder, based on the videos captured by the BART riders' ever-present cellphones. (Do people actually not realize that their every public action could end up on YouTube??)

What I want to talk about here is the reaction of the local citizenry. We're all appalled, of course, without regard to skin color; but the local black community is especially outraged, seeing this as one more example of "the police" treating black people "as if we're nothing." (Oakland PD wasn't involved in the incident, and in fact has behaved extremely well during the resulting protests; but I guess one uniform looks like another.) As a result of this outrage, 2 successive peaceful (by intent) protests have expanded into violence and vandalism against downtown Oakland businesses. Most of which are owned by black and Asian businesspeople.

Here's my question, both for the peaceful protesters (the majority) and for the minority of thugs who smashed up businesses, bus shelters and cars: I understand your outrage over Oscar Grant's death, but where the hell were you all last year, when 124 people were murdered in Oakland?? Most of whom were young black men? Is the death of a "young black brother" only worth a protest in front of city hall when he's killed by a police officer?? I guess it's a closed shop: only young black men are allowed to kill young black men.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson published an excellent analysis in last week's Daily Voice, Obama Alone Can't Halt the Black Murder Surge, which is worth your attention. Criminologists (and the boys in the 'hood) have known for years that the majority of murdered young black men are killed by other young black men, and that there aren't any consequences when it happens.

The situation in Oakland isn't simple. The police department has internal problems, the mayor is missing in action, the city council is dysfunctional, the city has massive budget deficits which are going to cut what services we have, and there's an active antipathy to the police in the roughest neighborhoods which means that when something happens, nobody will speak up for fear of being labeled a "snitch" - a label which does carry consequences. The result is that armed gangs hold the city and the neighborhoods hostage.

OK, I don't live in those neighborhoods; I'm a middle-aged white woman living in the hills. Why do I care? Because, dammit, I hate to see the bad guys win; and they're winning here. I'm outraged when a "young black brother" is shot to death. I just don't see what I can do about it. None of these kids is going to listen to me. Marching on city hall and smashing cop cars does nothing except sell newspapers and get on the evening news. We've built an entire generation of young urban black men who don't think life is worth anything, theirs or anyone else's; these guys are dangerous, and I don't see anything concrete standing between me and them except that they haven't gotten over here yet.

I know there are plenty of good people in Oakland organized and working to fight this culture, but so far I don't see any widespread success. Mr. Hutchinson closes his article with this comment:

Obama has a role to play in the fight to reduce black homicides. But so do many others.

It's going to take everyone.

Bird in the Window

I actually saw this happen, out of the corner of my eye: something dark flashed against the window facing the street, and I heard a thump. Damn kids throwing something, I thought, and then thought again: did we just have a bird fly into the window?

It's a big square window with no interior panes. It was possible. I went out and peered among the hellebores under the window. Yup, on the ground was a small brown bird - lying on its back, with its little feet sticking up in the air, panting rapidly. I wondered if I should try to rescue it, and then thought no, it's likely just stunned. I never saw a bird lie on its back before.

I hadn't, of course, brought my camera, since I wasn't sure what I'd find. I scrambled back in the house, changed to the long lens, and came back out. The bird was still there, now right side up, standing (actually sort of squatting) on the ground. I took a picture:


The bird ignored me. I watched it for a minute and then went back in the house. I went back out to check on the bird maybe 4 or 5 times over the next half hour, and every time it was sitting there staring blankly. Finally, I went out to check and it was looking around, then it turned, hopped a couple of times, and flew off. OK, recovered.

My husband says there's a reason for the term "bird brain."

Gaza

Somebody posted an opinion on the situation in Gaza on a local discussion forum I frequent; and I want to share here some of the comments I wrote in response:

I'm appalled by the way Israel has handled the Palestinian situation; I believe that what they're doing is perilously close to apartheid; I believe that in their paranoia they have allowed themselves to become the enemy by using the enemy's methods. (Listening, Mr. Cheney? Sorry, that's another argument.)

As long as the two parties maintain their diametrically opposed positions, the situation in the Middle East is insoluble. The Israelis insist that they have a right to exist as a nation, as a Jewish nation, on the lands they believe Yahweh granted to their ancestors generations ago; and, existing as a nation, that they have a right not to be shot at by their neighbors. The Palestinians insist that they've been living on those lands for two thousand years, and Allah granted the lands to their fathers, and the Israelis have no right to inhabit them at all. This one can't be solved by phone calls from Condi Rice, folks, especially as both groups regard Jerusalem, and the Temple Mount, as central to their faiths.

Part of the problem is that the U.S. insists on arming the Israelis, and the Arab nations insist on arming the Palestinians (although I haven't seen any Arab nation offer the Palestinians anything except inferior weapons, and scruffy refugee camps).

I sometimes think the rest of the world should just build a wall around the whole area and cut off contact, and walk away for 10 years; and then see who comes out. Any science fiction writers interested in the concept? But it won't happen. Too many outsiders have too much invested in the conflict. The initial post that I responded to, argued that a joint state with full citizenship for both peoples is "the only possible solution." It's a solution, but we must all hope that it isn't the "only possible" solution, because attaining it will require both groups to change their entrenched positions, and I don't think it's gonna happen. I know stubborn when I see it.

The New Dog

My sister has always loved dogs, and her husband (surprise!) also loves dogs, so they've never had less than 2 dogs, usually 3, and I think once they had 4. Patton the boxer died recently, much to everyone's dismay, (a great way to go; he went for a walk with my brother-in-law, chased some critter away from the neighbor's chickens, turned and looked at my brother-in-law and keeled over), so they were in the market. Since they're both suckers for a stray who needs help, the new dog (like all their dogs) is a rescue dog; what's unusual is that the new dog is a Doberman puppy, about a year old. They've never had a Doberman before.

So, here's Duke:


Duke's previous owner lost his job, and stopped buying dog food so as to feed his 3 kids; the scraps left over for the dog weren't enough. Also, he left the dog tied alone in the yard all day, which attracted the attention of Animal Control.

The rescue people called my sister, and they've had Duke about a month now. They're stuffing him madly, but you can still count most of his ribs and all of his vertebrae.

He's a nice puppy, if understandably a little nervous about being left alone. He also thinks he's a lap dog, which can be trying when the dog stands over 3 feet high and weighs around 65 pounds. Wait until he fills back out; his projected adult weight is 80-90 lb. That's a lot of lap dog! Due to a total lack of training, he was a little pushy when they got him, but even in the few days we were there he was getting much calmer and responding much better to commands.

But the funniest thing about Duke is the way he looks when he curls up to sleep; he looks like a Swiss army knife:

Officially they're "fostering" him, but I think he's going to stay.

Holiday Travels

We drove to Las Vegas between Christmas and New Year's, to visit my sister and brother-in-law. From our house this is about 550 miles one way, and takes between 10 and 12 hours depending on how fast we drive, how often we stop, and whether we stop for a meal. We could fly, but then we'd have to stand in lines, sit in uncomfortable seats with no leg room, and put all the fluids and gels in a quart Ziplock bag. On the other hand, flying only takes about 4 hours. You pay for everything in either time or money, and this time we decided to pay in time.

We got some payback for the decision, too. As we came over the Altamont Pass, around 9 AM, we saw a (now) very rare sight: the Sierra Nevada mountains. The air was clear enough to show a full view of the snow-capped peaks, and the Central Valley between. This doesn't happen much these days; if you can see the mountains at all, it's usually over a haze of smog. We watched the mountains all the way across, and down Highway 99 as far as Fresno; by then it was early afternoon and the daily cloud bank was covering up the mountains. It's much more interesting to drive down 99 than to take I-5; 99 goes through towns. Before 99 became freeway bypasses, it had the Oranges - big round orange buildings by the roadside, from which people sold (originally) fresh orange juice; but the last Orange is now gone. Driving down 99 lets you see what life in the Central Valley looks like now.

I'll do some other posts on the trip, but for now I want to mention 2 other things I saw that charmed me:

I saw a roadrunner cross the road in the red rock country west of Las Vegas. It looked astoundingly like the one in the cartoons.

Coming back up I-5 on December 30, at 6:48 in the evening near Patterson, I saw a meteor. I was staring blankly out the passenger window, and a bright light streaked across the sky and vanished in a small flare of more bright light. No, I didn't get a photo; we were driving in a car at 65 MPH, and apart from the meteor it was black as the inside of your hat, not the ideal situation for low-light photography.

Coming back up the central valley, we had no more views of the Sierras. We could barely see the side of the road. OK, that's an exaggeration, but if you've never driven past Bakersfield on a damp winter day with no wind and an inversion, you really can't envision how bad it is. I estimate maybe half a mile visibility at the worst. When you read that the Central Valley has the worst air quality in the country, think about driving through a thin brown soup, which blurs out the power lines paralleling the road.

By the way, a road trip for you California types: if you're coming back from Nevada over the Tehachapi Pass, heading for I-5, don't cut straight over through Bakersfield. Endless stop lights and town traffic, believe me. Go north on 99 to highway 46 and cut over to I-5 through Wasco. No traffic to speak of, only 3 lights, and you get to envision Cary Grant running down the rows of orchard trees, because Wasco is where North by Northwest was filmed. It hasn't changed much since then, either.