Not Jerry Brown

So Gavin Newsom has withdrawn from the 2010 California governor's race.  I didn't plan to vote for him; I consider him a fast-talking flake (too fast talking sometimes).  But this election poses a major problem for me:  the Democrats, at this moment, have nobody in the race - except Jerry Brown, who isn't officially running, but is accumulating campaign funds like they were going to stop printing money tomorrow.

I will not vote for Jerry Brown again.  Ever.  For anything.  I sat through his first governorship, and listened to him oppose Proposition 13 until it passed, when he pretended it was his idea all along.  "Governor Moonbeam," pfah.  I endured his mayorship of Oakland, a town he did a lot to destroy.  He imposed his "strong mayor" government because he couldn't bear to have anyone disagree with him, ever; after he left, the clueless citizens of Oakland elected Ron Dellums, who can't make a decision to save his soul and doesn't really like running a city, anyway.  (I never have figured out why he agreed to run.  Maybe he felt flattered to be asked.)  Lately Mr. Brown has been making a fool of himself in the Attorney General's office - although at least he had the sense to put his wire-tapping assistant on administrative leave.  I wonder how long it'll take for the guy to be reinstated.  The mere fact that he thought it was OK to record conversations secretly, in the AG's office, says volumes about the tone of that office - set by Mr. Brown.  The whirring sound you hear is Pat Brown, an honest and honorable politician, spinning in his grave.

So - no Democrats running.  Whom to vote for?  Well, there's someone I'd like to see win it:  Tom Campbell, the moderate Republican.  Tom Campbell, who actually understands the state budget - he must be the only man other than the Comptroller who does.  And Tom Campbell, being a moderate Republican, hasn't the chance of a celluloid cat in Hell, although I'm delighted to see him hanging in there and will certainly vote for him if he gets the nomination.  The Republicans look like going for Meg Whitman, probably because she can pay for the campaign herself, even though her voting record is nearly nonexistent (great civic participation!) and she's on the record as donating to Democrats.

If the race turns into Jerry Brown versus Meg Whitman, I'm voting Green.  Or Libertarian.  I suppose I could register Republican so as to vote for Campbell in the primary, but it'd put me on the Republican mailing list, and I don't think I could stand it.  We have to have somebody in the governor's mansion who will tell the idiot citizens of California the honest truth about the corner they've painted themselves into; and whoever that person may be, it ain't Jerry Brown.

Learning to Read

I'm listening to an extended discussion on Talk of the Nation about the Baby Einstein videos, whether videos increase infant intelligence, and how best to teach children to read.  You know, I learned to read by the time I was 3 or 4.  My grandmother taught me; she'd sit with me on her lap, and read me the Sears, Roebuck catalog.  It doesn't take a video to teach a child to read, in fact, it's almost certainly counter-productive.  It takes a parent or other adult, some kind of reading material, and a small child.  You could probably teach a child to read from the sports section of the newspaper.

Maternal Mortality

I heard this on National Public Radio this morning, and I'm still shaking my head:

From the BBC World News:  

Health ministers from around the world have agreed that swift action must be taken to reduce the number of women dying during pregnancy and childbirth.

At the UN Population Fund meeting in Addis Ababa the ministers said the number of women dying in this way was actually increasing in some nations.

My basic response to this:  WHY DID IT TAKE YOU SO LONG TO NOTICE??  This has only been going on for, what?  A hundred thousand years?  A million?  How old is the human race?

Gee, women die when they try to have babies.  What a surprise!  Who ARE these yo-yos, anyway, and how many of them are female?  (Guess.)

Not that I disagree.  I think it would be a good thing to reduce maternal mortality; I even agree that family planning is the best way to go about it.  I definitely agree that the rich world is directing all its health aid dollars to "fashionable" diseases like AIDS (stuff that kills us; we don't die in childbed - mostly), and blowing off aid for primary health care which would actually do something about maternal mortality.

I'm just floored by the sheer effrontery of it all; we've just noticed, so it must be a real problem.  Men!

Executive Pay

How did we collectively let it come about that a small group of powerful men, corporate senior executives, is allowed to set its own pay scales?  These people decide among themselves how much they should be paid, and (subject to the vagaries of the tax code) how the pay should be structured (cash, stock, options, etc.).

It shouldn't surprise us that they've quietly agreed, over the last few decades, to wring every drop of blood they could out of the turnip.  If the corporations they run had done this, for the prices of the goods and services they sell, it would be an antitrust violation; but somehow it's OK if the executives are all on each other's boards (they are) and they all agree on what each other should be paid (they do).

Nobody else in this world is allowed to determine unilaterally how much money he makes.  Not you, not I, not the President of the United States.  Congress comes close, in that they can vote themselves a raise; but they're restrained by outrage among their constituents which could prevent them from being reelected.  Only corporate executives (and mainly American corporate executives, although the practice is starting to spread to Europe) can decide, the value of my job is, oh, $750,000 a year base, but it also deserves annual bonuses of (say) $15 million dollars.

Nobody is "worth" that much money, not even if he (it almost always is he) can spin gold from straw, like Rapunzel.  The practice is sheer, unadulterated greed.  In the middle ages, these men would have been vilified as mortal sinners for their greed.  Now they are "the masters of the universe."  Which is right?

So I'm not weeping that the Treasury Department is cracking down on senior executive pay at the banks that have taken TARP money.  Believe me, you'll never see any of these men standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign reading, "Hungry, please help."

Remembering the Loma Prieta Earthquake

Today is the 20th anniversary of the earthquake that leveled the Marina District, knocked a hole in the Bay Bridge, and destroyed the Cypress Structure, killing 42 people unlucky enough to be driving on it.  I looked for my diary for the period (yes, I keep a diary), only to find absolutely no entries between August 1989 and April 1990!  This is what happens when you use a diary to rant about things that bother you; when you're reasonably happy, you don't write in it!  So this entire account is from memory, and I won't swear to any of it.

At 5:04 PM on October 17, 1989, I was at work at the Bank of America's data center in Concord, California, in my window cube on the 2nd floor of Building C.  This wasn't a bad place to be - Building C is only 4 stories high and broader than it is tall, so it's pretty stable.  My friends in Building D (6 stories high and mounted on rollers because at that date it had production mainframes on the 5th floor) told me they had a pretty wild ride.  Still, you couldn't miss it when the place started to rock, and I immediately dived under the desk in my cube.  The quake lasted 15 seconds - when the floor is rocking under you, that's a long time.  I had time to look up at the tangle of electrical wires on the underside of my desk, wonder if I ought to be under there, look at the wall of windows right across the aisle, and conclude that yes, I should be under the desk.

Next, of course, BART shut down.  BART, for the non-local readers, is Bay Area Rapid Transit, the local light rail system, and much of it runs on elevated tracks.  It actually wasn't damaged; but management shut it down until they could inspect it.  Since I had ridden BART to work that morning, I now had no way to get home. 

I didn't really try to get home right away; those of us still in the office spent some time gibbering at each other and phoning people to see if they were all right. 

We also wanted to know the status of the mainframe computers - at that time I worked on the team that supported a secondary set of mainframes (VM, for the technically curious) that the Bank of America used for back-office work, including everybody's email.  (Remember, this is 1989.)  Those machines were in the San Francisco data center, and we were worried about them, because if they crashed, it could take hours to get them safely back up and running.  Fortunately the San Francisco data center (also on rollers) came through the earthquake in fine shape, and the automatic diesel backup generators kicked in when the power failed, just the way they should, and gave the operators time to shut the systems down orderly.  Just time.  The diesels ran out of fuel 10 minutes after the systems came down.  After that, the fuel gauges were checked more often.

Eventually I decided to see if I could cadge a ride home, since the Caldecott Tunnel seemed to be undamaged.  I rode home with a woman I didn't know very well, who lived a mile or so from me in the Oakland hills.  I still remember that ride.  I was in much more danger in that car that I had been from the earthquake, because my driver was out of control.  She kept taking her hands off the wheel to put her palms to her cheeks and shriek, every time the radio reported another development.  It didn't help that she tuned the radio to KPFA, which was broadcasting every disaster it could hear of, in a hysterical tone that I thought was rather irresponsible; they clearly gave the impression that all of downtown Berkeley was on fire, although I found later that it was only one building.  I remember wondering if I should tell her to pull over and let me drive, except that we were on a freeway, and it wasn't clear she wouldn't just stop in the lane.  I was profoundly grateful when she dropped me off.

That's about it.  Our house was undamaged.  My husband was fine - he was walking across a parking lot to his vanpool when the quake hit.  That was the beginning of the time when you couldn't drive directly from Oakland to San Francisco - you had to go down to San Mateo or up to Richmond.  I got out of the habit of going to San Francisco during that period, and I've never really gotten it back.  The destruction of the Cypress Structure bothered me more than the rest, because I have a collection of relatives who, when I was a child, lived in Alameda and San Leandro; and when we drove to visit them, we took the Cypress Structure.  We'd all moved on and I didn't drive that route any more, but that could easily have been my whole family on that lower deck.  Scary thoughts.

Rain, Rain...

They said this was going to be a helluva storm, and it is.  It's raining like the lead-in to that business with Noah and the Ark, only not for so long. Yet. 

I remember Bill Cosby's old routine about Noah and the Ark:  "Noah," said God in an ominous voice, "How long can you tread water?"

We haven't seen a storm like this in years.  Oakland usually gets around 23 inches of rain in a year.  I checked the Oakland North rain station (which is conveniently online) for the damages, and since 03:00 this morning we've gone from .38" of rain (which I think was the year to date since January) to 3.53" of rain.  That's 15% of our annual average, in less than 12 hours, and it's clearly prepared to go on doing this for some little time yet.

I'm wrong.  Oakland North just posted the results for 13:00 - 4.22" of rain, or 19% of the annual average.  Are we really getting half an inch an hour?

Fortunately, due to the previous drought, the ground was as dry as a Sahara dune, so all the water will (probably) soak right in and not even cause any hillsides to slide downward, taking houses with them.  This time.

I don't know who's right or wrong about "global warming," although it seems reasonable to me that there should be some consequences to all the heat-trapping gases we've been belching into the atmosphere for the last 2 centuries.  I read recently that the hottest year on record was 1998, and the more recent temperature changes are actually due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and not to us at all.  I think what we're seeing here isn't necessarily warmer or cooler, but wider extremes.  The storms will be more frequent and stronger, the droughts will last longer before the rain comes; the rain when it comes will be heavier.

Welcome to the 21st century.

President Obama's Nobel Prize

President Barack Obama has just won this year's Nobel Peace Prize, and the blogosphere and the conservative talkshow weenies are going off like a 4th of July fireworks display.

I have to admit, it surprises even me a little.  He's been in office less than a year, he's still fighting 2 wars (even if he is pulling out of Iraq), the American conservative movement maintains a constant state of low-level simmering hostility to him.  But everybody needs to keep two things in mind:

This. Isn't. Barack. Obama's. Fault.

He almost certainly didn't know it was coming.  The Nobel Committee plays its cards so close to the vest that we won't know who the other candidates were for this year's prizes until 2059.

He didn't ask for it.  As far as I know you can't nominate yourself for any Nobel Prize.

Even if someone did nominate him and then tell him they had, the Nobel Committee famously makes its own decisions.

Personally, I think they gave it to him for trying to make peace.  After 8 years of Dubya wandering around waving a (metaphorical) six-shooter, a president who says, "Let's talk" instead of "Let's invade" is an amazing relief, even if you don't agree with every decision he makes.  I am gobsmacked that everyone is blaming him for this decision!  This is incredible.

Yesterday, Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida gave a wonderful speech to Congress, (thanks to my Facebook friend Lauretta for the link!) in which he lambasted both the Democrats and the Republicans on health care.  In this speech, he said:  "If Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world, the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation... If the President has a BLT sandwich tomorrow for lunch, the Republicans will try to ban bacon."  This is the guy who said that the Republican advice to people without health insurance was, "Die quickly;" he's worth listening to.

So now that Barack Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize, what will the Republicans try to ban?  Peace, or Nobel Prizes?

Air Traffic

One of my regular habits, when my schedule allows, is a late afternoon water aerobics class at a local gym.  They have a small outdoor pool, in a slightly claustrophobic enclosure off the locker rooms.  It's relatively rare for us to see any air traffic above us while we splash, but today the sky was practically swarming.

We heard a high-pitched snarling sound, like an angry sewing machine.  We all looked up - sometimes you see a police or a traffic copter - and there were three little propeller planes, the single-engine overhead-wing style, flying very low overhead in tight vee formation.  Cessnas flying in close formation?  I don't know if they were really Cessnas, of course; I don't wear my glasses in water aerobics class, so my vision is limited.  They looked like Cessnas.  What they did not look like was military fighter jets.  Now, it is Fleet Week, and the Blue Angels are in town; but I never heard that the Blue Angels flew single engine prop planes.  Maybe it's just copycats.  Then they were gone, and we went back to exercises.

A little later we heard a lighter snarling sound, and one of the little planes flew back over by itself.

Finally, I happened to glance up and saw a blimp, floating silently past the south end of the pool.  Not the Goodyear blimp; it had some kind of ad for tickets on the side. 

I'd still like to know who was flying single-engine propeller planes in close formation. 

Afghanistan

I have as much right to pontificate about the situation in Afghanistan as anyone else, so here goes.

The question, of course, is:  do we send in more troops, and if so how many?

But the bigger question is:  what exactly are we trying to accomplish here?

Gen. McChrystal has grasped the basic truths of the situation, from what I've read:  straight fighting will not win this, protecting the citizenry from the Taliban and helping to build out infrastructure will win this, but it'll take a long time and a lot of boots on the ground.  This is why he's asking for a lot of boots on the ground.  I think the reason Pres. Obama is taking a long time to thing this out is because of the implications of the bigger question.

Afghanistan is a poor country; it's mostly a rural country, with only a few large cities.  Because of the almost total lack of infrastructure (read:  roads), people who aren't in the cities don't get to them much, and people who live in the cities don't go to the country much.  Since the total lack of infrastructure also means almost no schools, people in the countryside are poorly educated except in Islam, their religion.  The primary organizing force in the countryside seems to be the tribe or clan; national identity is secondary.  People in the countryside voted or didn't vote for Hamid Karzai in the recent election because their clan chief told them to; less so in the cities.  And like a lot of groups where authority is vested in people, not in laws, there's a lot of corruption - you get something done by paying the right man a bribe.

This is a pre-industrial society.  European countries were more or less like this until maybe the 18th century.  The Taliban are a major force because the Taliban are a religious army, willing to fight for their cause; most of the villagers are subsistence farmers, who don't have time to fight for a cause or anything else.  And how do the Taliban eat, if they don't farm?  Extortion from the villagers, of course; it's a protection racket.

So yes, if we can protect the villagers from the Taliban, they'll support us.  But if we leave even for a few weeks, the Taliban will be right back in the village; so how does it profit the villagers to support us?  The Taliban will take it out of their hides when we leave.

This is why Gen. McChrystal wants all those men.  "Securing" Afghanistan means taking, and holding, and defending, every damn village; because every village we don't take, and hold, and defend, the Taliban will take back.  And our troops will have to defend the Afghans, plus the people we send to help build infrastructures - roads, schools, telecoms.

The next question is:  how long will it take?  That's the kicker.  We have to do this until we've improved conditions enough that poor young men won't have to fight for the Taliban to make a wage. How long is that?  I can easily see us in Afghanistan for a couple of generations - how long will it take until the young men now fighting will be too old to hold power any more, in a society that respects old leaders?  How long will it take us to educate an entire generation, an entire society, in the concept of the rule of law?

Our official mission statement is to prevent the Taliban from providing Al Qaeda with a safe haven, because of Sept. 11, 2001.  The only reliable way to do that is to take over Afghanistan and run it ourselves.  Is that really what we want to do??  Especially since it wouldn't solve the issue of Pakistan, where Al Qaeda is actually hanging out these days (according to most people's best guess)?

I don't have answers to these questions.  But there are reasons Afghanistan is called the "graveyard of empires."  I don't want it to be our graveyard.  I read a comment from a Kabul shopkeeper, who complained that yeah, when the Taliban were in charge, the girls couldn't go to school; but so what, they had great security, they kept the thieves out of his shop. 

If that's the way the people of Afghanistan feel, maybe we should let them and the Taliban have each other back, and deal with the country diplomatically and from a distance. 

More on Health Care Reform

I've been debating whether to post about the recently announced changes - future changes, but changes - in my health insurance coverage.  Then a friend of mine on Facebook posted a link to Keith Olbermann's special comment hour on Countdown the other night.  Here is the link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#33217219

It'll take about an hour; but you should watch this.  Everyone should watch this.  Speaking from the heart, he makes the case for a health care system where your income and your insurance coverage doesn't matter.  Every politician who has voted against "the public option," everyone who says we can't have "single payer" because it's "socialized medicine", should be locked into a room with this playing on an endless loop.

Did you know that, if you have no health insurance, your odds of dying, here in the 21st century, are roughly the same as the odds on a poor person dying, who lived in the slums of Manchester, England in 1846?  Olbermann quotes the studies.  How is this progress?  What has happened to our priorities, if we've let ourselves get to a point where you can die for no better reason than that you're too poor to afford treatment, and you have no insurance?  Happens here all the time. 

It isn't happening to me.  I have, right now, what I and others consider some of the best health care in America: the Kaiser Permanente HMO, which covers almost everything.  The trouble is, I have it because of my husband's job; and my husband's employer, which I won't name, has decided that it's too expensive.  In a couple of years, two things will happen:  my husband will retire (sooner than he planned; but if he doesn't, the promise they've made him for 30 years, that he'd have health insurance in retirement, will be broken); and we'll still have Kaiser, but we won't have the HMO.  We'll have an annual cap, and a deductible, and an HSA, and we'll pay for 20% of everything.

Actually, I'm relieved.  What we've been told we'd have was obviously too good to be true.  They've dropped the other shoe, and the result isn't as bad as I was afraid it'd be.  At least we'll still have group coverage.

For me personally, this will make very little difference.  By the time it goes into effect, I'll be on Medicare (government run health care!  OOOOOga!), and my access to Kaiser Senior Advantage won't be touched.  But my husband will be on this plan for something like 9 years, until he qualifies for Medicare; and he'll be retired, on a fixed income.  I hope he doesn't come down with something expensive to treat - like some of the conditions I have.  We're pretty well placed; but medical treatments can eat through the biggest nest egg. 

I have "pre-existing conditions," big time.  I couldn't get individual health coverage to save my life.  (And it would be "to save my life.")  I'm an AARP member, so I might be able to get their group coverage if worse came to worst; but I couldn't get Kaiser, and in anything but the Kaiser HMO, there's the constant question:  how much will 20% of this be?  Can I afford that?  My ongoing medications aren't hugely expensive under the current plan, being mostly generic (who knows what Medicare will be like?), but there are a number of them, and keeping myself supplied, and monitored for side effects, would be prohibitive without insurance.  I could be one of those people, dying because they can't afford the meds and the insurance has maxed out; or, worse than dying, living in constant pain and with reduced ability to function.  That's what the meds do for me; they allow me to function.  But only because I have insurance.

Best health care system in the world, my ass.

Who Are We, Anyway?

This post came together from several sources:  a Newsweek article reviewing a study at the University of Texas on the reactions of very young children to people of other races (See Baby Discriminate); Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times about Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina (may his giblets wither) calling Pres. Obama a liar; and a post on a blog called Religion Dispatches called "Fear of a Black President," by Jonathon L. Walton, assistant professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside. 

Start with the Texas study, which explored the attitudes toward race in a group of Caucasian families near Austin.  The article is fascinating.  Most of the parents in the study couldn't, literally could not, discuss race with their children, beyond mouthing platitudes like, "Everyone is equal."  (I loved the 7 year old who eventually asked his mother, "What does 'equal' mean?")  In the total absence of guidance from their parents, children concluded that:  white people were nicer than black people; black people were more likely to be mean than white people; or (to generalize) "people like them" were better than "people who aren't like them."  This is pure tribalism; frankly, this attitude is what drives much of the conflict in Afghanistan.  In families where the parents did discuss race frankly with their children, the children concluded that skin color didn't matter much.

If you don't talk about something with your children, the conclusions they draw on the subject may not be what you expect.  Note, parents, that this applies to sex, too, but that's another post.

Maureen Dowd, of course, drew the obvious conclusion that a Southerner like Rep. Wilson, when he shouted, "You lie!" at President Obama, implicitly followed it with the time-dishonored epithet, "boy!"  Her column concluded (reluctantly, she says) that the screaming objections to Obama and his policies really are racial.

Of course they are.  As the U.Texas study found (remember, Texans are generally considered Southerners), children form racial attitudes very very early.  Children raised in the American South more than 40 years ago (including my late father, and also Joe Wilson, who is 62) were openly taught that black people are by nature inferior to white people in all ways.  So if you were a small town failure with a small job, whose high point was a couple of beers with the boys on Friday night, you could still reassure yourself that you were better than "them," just because you were white.

It's very hard for Bubba to defend that position when the representative of "them" is Barack Obama.

"Fear of a Black President" begins with this comment:

Ever the statesman, and often candid to a political fault, President Jimmy Carter asserted this week that much of the animosity directed toward President Barack Obama is “based on the fact that he is a black man.”

God bless Jimmy Carter, who speaks his mind.  And he's perfectly right.  Prof. Walton's point, which I strongly recommend you read in full, is that the real problem isn't so much that the ranters can't tolerate Obama's blackness, as that they can't tolerate any change in their personal perception of their own superiority as white men:

President Obama can’t win with these folks because they are blinded not just by his race but also by an uncritical devotion to their own. His pigmentation rather than his policies cut against the grain of what these persons wrongly consider “natural” or “American.” More specifically, his very being is a haunting rejoinder to such white Americans of what they are not—indeed what they have never been. This African American man with an Arabic name has dared to usurp all of the cultural and cognitive tropes that white supremacy has historically claimed for itself. He is calm in the face of their unrestrained emotion. The more illogical they act the more rational he comes across. And, of course, the more eloquent and erudite he presents himself, the more he provokes the Joe Wilsons of the world to mindlessly blurt out, “You lie!” 

I've been slapped down before for suggesting that we'll never move forward as a country until we can learn to judge and react to a person (thoughts, actions, ideas), and not a skin color - and that includes our judgements of ourselves.  I still think it's true; the hysterical reaction to President Obama confirms it.  What I don't know is how we get there.  But I suspect racism is like alcoholism - you can't quit doing it until you admit you have a problem.

Driving in the Desert

I recently did the "cross-Sierra shuttle" for my husband, who wanted to climb Mt. Whitney:  I dropped him off in Kings Canyon, then picked him up 9 days later in Lone Pine, on Highway 395.  In the meantime, I drove to Las Vegas to visit my sister.

During that week or so, I drove something like 780 miles, maybe 680 of it through the desert, in three separate sessions.

Driving through the basin and range country always fascinates me.  You have a long way to go, and the traffic is often quite light, so everybody drives as fast as they can - I drive as far over the speed limit as I think I can get away with, so I'm regularly passed by people who think they can get away with more.  The immediate roadside whips by, but there's nothing on the immediate roadside except sagebrush, and the occasional dead truck tire, so you focus on the landscape.  The road can be anything from a 2 lane highway to Interstate 15, and you share it with a steady procession of big rigs. The traffic all moves at roughly the same speed; occasionally a car passes a truck, or a truck passes a truck, at a relative speed difference of maybe 5-10 miles an hour.  It's all very stately.

The landscape is flat, with mountain ranges rising on both sides, anywhere from 5 to 30 miles away; the road trails across the middle of the flat part, and eventually vanishes into a notch.  You have a lot of time to watch the mountains rotate past you in slow grandeur. 

Occasionally you pass a highway turnoff, which leads to a dirt road, which leads over a low hill to - who knows?  A ranch?  An abandoned mine?  Once in a while the dirt road will lead to a solitary house, a mile or two back from the road, with a couple of outbuildings, surrounded by empty desert.  It's hot as the seven hinges of Hades - I don't think I saw a temperature below 95 on my car thermometer the entire trip - and you wonder how they can possibly live in that bare building, with no shade trees.  There are no shade trees, of course, because there's no water for them, which leads you to wonder where the people in the house get water.  It seems a little outside the range of the Alhambra man.

Driving through the basin and range country makes you feel very small and fragile.  The mountains are huge, and they loom over you.  If you ever took geology, you may remember what an alluvial fan is - you can see a lot of gorgeous examples of them.  The rock colors are beautiful and subtle.  All you can think is, I hope the car doesn't break down, I hope the air conditioner holds up.  Between Tehachapi and Barstow there is one settlement (I hesitate to call Kramer's Corners a town) that's right on the road (Highway 58) - you pass the towns of Mojave and Boron, but they're off the road a mile or five.  I stopped in Boron to find a rest room; I didn't see a building taller than one story (how would you keep the second story cool?).  The town seemed to huddle under the lash of a furnace-hot wind; and yet, the people were friendly and helpful, I saw an antique store, they have a museum to the twenty-mule team era.  They didn't have a gas station that I saw; they must drive to Kramer's Corners for gas.  What must it be like to live in a blast furnace?

For that matter, what must it have been like to cross those deserts, not in an air-conditioned car at freeway speeds, but on a horse, making maybe 20 miles a day (horses can go faster than that but they have to have water)?  Or in a Conestoga wagon behind a span of oxen (10 miles a day)?  Terrifying and beautiful. 

Islam in Oakland

It doesn't surprise me to see Muslim women in Oakland; I see the standard wrapped headscarf all the time.  It did startle me, the other day, to see a woman walking along Telegraph Avenue wearing the full niqaab.  This isn't the full-coverage Afghan burqa, but you've probably seen photos of Saudi women wearing something similar - full black, head to toe, except for a narrow slit over her eyes.  She was pushing a double stroller and accompanied by a small boy, about 4 or 5 years old.  Since I was driving a car, I didn't get a photo, but I did think about taking one.

On one level, it's her religion, and I defend her right to practice it.  But on another level, the niqaab really gets to me.  Islam as a religion imposes a great deal of physical modesty - men and women are both expected to keep themselves covered except in the presence of spouses.  But you'll never see a Muslim man who covers his entire body except for his eyes; only women are expected to do that.

I don't know enough about Islam to evaluate the differences among the various requirements to cover the hair, or more; and I've read interviews in which Muslim women explain that covering themselves makes them comfortable, and if so, more power to them.  But it bothers me.  It disturbs me in a way I can't quite define, that has to do with personal empowerment, and equality, and the absence of choice.

It also disturbs me in a way I can define:  concealment of identity and purpose.  I don't really know whether that was a woman pushing that stroller.  It was a human being wearing an all-enveloping black robe that revealed only the eyes.  (I don't recall whether I could see the hands or not.)  I assumed it was a woman because men don't wear the niqaab.  But there've been cases in Afghanistan when male suicide bombers disguised themselves in burqas to get past checkpoints.

Thoughts on Climate Change

In the August 2009 issue of Scientific American (no link; they now require a digital subscription; your library has the issue), author Kate Wong considers some of the reasons the Neanderthals may have died out, since there's now considerable evidence that they coexisted with homo sapiens for around 15,000 years.  Analysis of isotopes trapped in "primeval ice, ocean sediments, and pollen retrieved from such locales as Greenland, Venezuela and Italy" seems to show that, during a period known as "oxygen isotope stage 3" (OIS-3), which ran from around 65,000 years ago to 25,000 years ago, the climate became wildly unstable heading into the last glacial maximum: 

So rapid were these oscillations that over the course of an individual's lifetime, all the plants and animals that a person had grown up with could vanish and be replaced with unfamiliar flora and fauna.  And then, just as quickly, the environment could change back again.

The Neanderthals were preliterate; they had no way to pass information on hunting, edible plants, survival techniques, and so on, to the next generation, except orally.  Later in the article, Ms. Wong notes that until around 30,000 years ago, neither homo sapiens nor Neanderthals lived long enough to be grandparents; around that time, homo sapiens began to live to see their grandchildren - but not Neanderthals.  Living long enough to be grandparents is a tremendous evolutionary advantage - additional help in child rearing, plus the transmission of learning and experience to the new generation.

Was it lack of the ability to pass on workable survival techniques that did in the Neanderthals?  Or was it merely those wild climate swings, themselves?  How would we cope with a climate that took an area from forest to open grassland within a generation?  How will we, if it happens to us?  The climate swings the team studied covered 40,000 years - longer than recorded human history.  We're worried about human caused climate changes (well, some of us are) - we need to remember that climate changes we didn't cause may be just as significant and just as threatening.

Climate Change Data

A recent newsbrief from Scientific American reports that climate change skeptics are using normal variations in scientific data on the climate to attack the principle that the climate is changing, caused by us - a principle believed by 97% of the 3,000 scientists surveyed by the University of Illinois in January.  Apparently an automated system of the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) published obviously incorrect data on Arctic sea ice, and the skeptic community went nuts - "they don't know what they're talking about!"  In fact, NSIDC discovered it had a faulty sensor, fixed it, corrected the data, and audited all their past data; but - "they don't know what they're talking about."

OK, the first point here is that if we provided a genuine education in the scientific method, enough people would understand peer review and data revision in the light of new information that these arguments wouldn't fly.  But, regrettably, we don't.  Even the students who manage to graduate with the ability to read and write stand a sporting chance of not understanding the concepts that drive scientific investigation, or the idea that it's possible to correct errors.

But the paragraph that really caught my eye summarized the opinions of one Marc Morano of the site Climate Depot, a leading climate change skeptic:

Rather he believes that “lack of warming in recent years” has helped his cause—although this decade is the hottest in recorded history, there hasn’t been a record-breaking year in 10 years. Moreover, recent papers suggest that natural climate fluctuations might continue to mask the expected warming trend for up to three decades.

You can boil a living frog to death if you start him out in a pan of cold water and raise the temperature very gradually.  Are we sitting in a pan of water?  How hot is it, anyway?

A Night Out in Las Vegas

First, let me say that Carlos Santana was great:  wonderful band, awesome rhythm section (all three of them), fine lead singers, and of course the man himself on lead guitar.  Santana is the most relaxed performer I've ever seen on stage, leading to a continual game of "where's Carlos right now?" as you look for the velvet shirt, the cap, and the red electric guitar.  He wanders around and stops to play wherever he is when his next lick is due, occasionally exchanging a high five with another musician.  And the lighting designer is a damn genius.  You couldn't really see Santana clearly from halfway back, but the video monitors did continual close-ups of him (and the others) - his face is mellow and warm, and totally focused on his music. 

Now let's talk about the venue:  the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino.  The concert was in "The Joint," their performance venue (recently upgraded, according to the web site).  I agree with their hype about the sound system and the lighting, both were excellent; but the web site raves about "seven VIP luxury suites and a prestigious VIP level." Don't think this implies any sort of luxury for the schmucks down on the floor.  We sat in folding chairs (cheap folding chairs), locked together to make a row.  Worse, the peon who numbered the chairs in our row (in chalk, by hand, on the underside of the seats) couldn't count; our tickets were for seats 4 and 5, and the seats in our row were numbered "3 4 6 7...," so they effectively sold us a non-existent seat. The ushers on the floor finally got everybody settled in, and the seats really were quite good, except for the six-foot dude in front of me who spent almost the entire concert standing up and grooving.  Fortunately the two video monitors gave a continuous if disjointed view of the stage action.

I brought earplugs with me.  I can't imagine why I didn't think to take them to the show.  I think my hearing has largely recovered.

No place that seats 4,000 people can realistically be described as "intimate."

I give points for effort to the casino staff on the ground, but my overall impression of the place was of poor maintenance and tacky patrons.  The bathrooms were dirty; one of the handicapped stalls in one bathroom had been out of order so long they'd removed the door and were using it to store cleaning supplies.  The other "handicapped" stall was barely wide enough for a walker or wheelchair, and had not been cleaned since someone puked in there, despite the fact that the restroom had an attendant.

Now for tacky patrons:  I've never seen so many cheap hookers - obviously cheap hookers - in one place in my life, even on earlier trips to Las Vegas.  (We usually go to shows in the higher class casinos.)  Even on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland.  Waiting for the valets to retrieve our car was a runway show of the latest in 5 inch stiletto heels, micromini skirts, and push-up bras.  Oh, and thongs.  They had a sign on the door saying "dress code after 6 PM."  Given what we saw before, during and after the show, I shudder to imagine how people dress before 6 PM!

Another plus for the casino staff on the ground:  when the valet captain saw my sister's walker, she jumped our ticket to the front of the line, saving us probably 40 minutes.  But the valet staff was edgy in the extreme, and tonight - 2 days later - we found out why.

They were being busted.  The police raided the casino that night:  narcotics and prostitution, in an area somewhat oddly called "Rehab" ("the ultimate Vegas pool party").  As we tried to drive away (it must have taken us 10-15 minutes to clear the casino driveway), we saw medical techs, and assumed somebody'd had an accident; but we also saw a K-9 unit, which isn't usually dispatched to an accident.  But it sure is dispatched to a drug bust!

Wicked, the Musical

We saw Wicked, the musical, recently at the Orpheum Theatre. Wicked is quite a show. I had a switch flipped in my head that it was a comedy because it was a musical, but trust me, it isn't funny. It's a very good show, though - staging, dancing, singing, lighting, costumes, all excellent.

I started this post as a review of the show, but what I really want to do is talk about Elphaba, the Wicked Witch. I've now read the book and seen the musical, in that order (not always the best order!), and although the stories are quite different, the central character is very consistent in both forms. Elphaba is a misfit who was born with green skin. Everybody looks at her and shudders. She's also very bright, a rebel, and an underdog who passionately defends other underdogs.

There are sequences in both stories where Elphaba attends college away from home; this doesn't resemble my college years very much (I went to U.C. Berkeley, where nobody worried about "popularity" but the sorority girls), but it brought back vivid, painful memories of high school! It isn't fun to be unpopular in a school, any school. Some of the things Galinda (later Glinda, the "good witch") does to Elphaba just rang big, clanging bells for me. So by the middle of the first act I'm identifying solidly with the Wicked Witch (and resenting the way everybody treats her!).

In fact, Teal Wicks, who played Elphaba, was gorgeous, especially in the second act when she finally got some decent clothes! She had presence and style in the face of an appalling costume and everyone else's (acted) disdain. She has a fabulous low alto range, which I thought added substantially to the role. I love a good alto. And she visibly strengthened and matured her character through the show.

It's very clear in both the book and the musical that Elphaba's "wickedness" lies in her refusal to accept the wickedness of the people in power (speaking of people in power, you must see Patty Duke as Madame Morrible!); and that's as close as I'll get to a plot synopsis. Read the book yourself (or see the show!). We all know how her story ends from the L. Frank Baum book (not to mention the movie!); but it's the story and not the ending that matters. And she maintains an integrity throughout her story that I wish I thought I had.

Abbreviations

I often glance at the Google News "Top stories" to see if anything important has happened; since I have a pretty full iGoogle page, I see a lot of abbreviations (which of course you can expand by mousing over the link, you know this).

This morning I saw one that made me stop, from Bloomberg:

Existing Home Sales In U.S. Jump to Two...

Mousing over the story, I find that "Two..." translates to "Two-Year High," which is more reassuring; but for a minute there I wondered if Bloomberg was just being unusually honest.

Sick Bird

Scrub jays nest in our neighborhood. In fact, I ate lunch in the back yard a few days ago to a continual "serenade" from one. But one of them - more than one? I can't tell them apart - doesn't seem to be well. My husband came home night before last and found him sitting on our front stoop. I'm not a bird vet, but he looked sick to me. I like taking photos of birds, though, and I had one posing for me, so I snapped a few shots.





He didn't seem very happy.












I got my long lens out and took a couple of closeups:






He looks ill, doesn't he?





























The next day, we saw either the same bird, or a different bird with the same problem, sitting on the woodpile in the back yard. I didn't take any other pictures, but I walked out to look at him, and he didn't look any better than this. It's a very unusual scrub jay that will let a human being walk to within 3 feet of him. I saw a (healthy) scrub jay fly off the woodpile when a squirrel jumped off the fence onto the pile, and got within 3 feet of him. This guy just sat and stared at me, breathing very fast.

I wondered if I should report it, but to whom? Who cares about scrub jays?

Health Care Reform

I've been reading all the rants about this, and this isn't any attempt to analyze the issues and cite sources. This is just my personal opinion on the situation.

First, I agree with my blogger friend Linkmeister, who commented in a post today that the Republican party has now made its position clear. They aren't interested in health care reform. They are only interested in defeating whatever President Obama tries to do. This being the case, the hell with bi-partisanship.

Second, I've thought about this a lot, and I'm convinced that we will never get health care costs under control until we separate health care from capitalism. Health care isn't something you should plan to get rich at. It's a service that should be provided to everyone, like fire and police protection. (Okay, in Oakland, California, "police protection" as a service provided to everyone is kind of a touchy subject. But my point stands on the "should.") The profit motive in health care is what's driving costs inexorably upward, and we won't get costs under control until we come to a common agreement that for-profit health care is a Bad Thing. It's the defense of the Bottom Line that causes companies to cancel people's coverage the minute they come down with something that will be really expensive to treat, like cancer.

Yes, this means I want a "public option." Actually, I don't - I want single payer. So far, the Repubs have managed to shove that off the table. Maybe, now they've made their position clear, we can bring it back; since they aren't going to agree to anything anyway, we can ignore the fact that they don't like it.

But there's one more thing we have to do to make this work: we have to reform medical education. Becoming a doctor is fiendishly expensive; people come out of their training fully qualified and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. That training has to be subsidized, as part of the subsidy for medical care itself, or no one will go into medicine. This is just part of providing the service. Hopefully such reforms will attract people who want to provide health care, instead of people who want to become filthy rich doing specialties like cosmetic surgery and neurology. I have nothing against either cosmetic surgery or neurologists, I use the specialties as a general example; I am aware of a shortage of general practitioners, because it's so hard to pay off your medical school debts on a GP's income that everyone wants to get into the high-stakes specialties.

And this is personal. I'm in favor of single payer (or at least a "public option") because I expect to need it. Right now my access to health care depends on my husband's employer; I have a fall-back position at my own former employer. I have no faith that either of those companies will continue to support health care for retirees. I really think we need to separate health care from employment, and if that means taxing employer-provided health care, then let's tax it.

I'm hearing a general consensus on several critical points: everybody should be have health insurance; nobody should be refused coverage because of a pre-existing condition; nobody's coverage should be dropped just because they got sick. The only thing we're still arguing about is "socialized medicine," AKA "how do we pay for this?"

People have been bitching about this for fifty years, for Crissakes; I remember the screams of "socialized medicine" in the '60s when Medicare was passed. We're now in the 21st century, and most of the major industrialized countries have universal coverage, and none of them is Socialist. (You really think Canada or Great Britain are Socialist?? You don't know what "socialist" means.) And they all look at us and shake their heads and say, "Crazy Americans." Can we please get on the train that everyone else is on, and start figuring out how to control the costs??

Mendocino

I feel a great sense of accomplishment - I've finished something! Specifically, I've finished weeding, tweaking, and posting the photos I took over the long weekend we spent in Fort Bragg last November, to celebrate my husband's birthday. They're all now available at my site on SmugMug, in 7 separate galleries.

It's amazing how many photos you can take in 3 days with a digital camera. I didn't post all of them, either, but I think I posted the best. I may post one or two more photos of the Point Cabrillo Fresnel lens, but the best of them are up.

I have to be honest - I decided to go with SmugMug, which is paid, when I could have put up free galleries at www.karenivy.net. SmugMug lets me put a few photos up at a time; with the galleries, I pretty much have to do the whole thing at once. Doing photo galleries on the web site is just more work.

Enjoy the photos.

Computers Have No Memory

No, that's not what I mean.

Years ago, we kept our personal schedules, and our personal address lists, in paper books. If we were really organized, we kept them all in the same book, which may have been called a DayRunner or a Filofax. I used DayRunner, because it let me change out only the calendar pages, and keep my address pages from year to year. When an address or a phone number changed, you crossed it out (if you kept the list in ink) and wrote in the new one above it. I remember my mother's address book with sometimes 3 or 4 addresses scribbled in. (My sister moved a lot when she was in college.)

Now, we keep our addresses, and our schedule, and a whole lot of other things, in our electronic devices - computers. Cell phones. iPhones. Cell phones are a lot easier to carry around than DayRunners; I quit using a DayRunner because the weight of it in my purse was breaking my arm. But I've lost those crossed out addresses - I've lost the history. Electronic calendars have no memory of what the appointment was before you changed it. They don't remember what Aunt Betty's address was, before she moved to Cleveland. But my mother's calendar did - and her address book did.

I thought of this because, the other day, I had to reschedule an appointment for a haircut. Like half the world, I use Microsoft Outlook, and I rescheduled a "recurring" appointment to happen one week later - and the entire history of my haircut appointments vanished. Now, I don't especially need to know when I got a haircut in March. But if the issue ever came up, it's gone.

Historians now can read the diaries, the desk calendars, the daily life records of people who kept their daily information in paper books. What will future historians know about us, 200 years from now? Will they be able to read what's in our cell phones? Mine has a password. Or will human history disappear, somewhere around 2003? Is a blog really the same as a diary? Will they even be able to read our blogs?

Pioneer Basin

My husband is about to go backpacking again, this time in the vicinity of Mammoth. In fact, he's going in at McGee Creek, then over McGee Pass, eventually to Big McGee Lake. (You think Mr. McGee lived around here??)

He was looking at all this on Google Earth last night and showed me an area called Pioneer Basin, a high-altitude valley in the eastern Sierra, which we both agreed was misnamed. The peaks surrounding this basin are: Mount Crocker. Mount Hopkins. Mount Huntington. Mount Stanford. The obvious name for this valley is Robber Baron Basin, although Railroad Cartel Valley might do.

About Professor Gates

Everybody else has weighed in on this, why should I be left out? I think by now everyone knows the story of Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of Harvard, who was hauled into the Cambridge police station because - well, there we get into disagreement. One group says it's because he was Entering a House While Black. One group says it's because he sassed a cop. One group says his neighbor called the cops on him because he was black.

Here are my thoughts on this mess, in no particular order.

I recall reading that Prof. Gates had been on an extended trip to China; he'd been gone for several weeks. Did his neighbor know he was due back that night? As a member of a local community policing citizen group, we encourage people to call the cops if they see what looks like a break-in attempt, especially if they know the homeowner is away. I give the neighbor full marks for civic involvement. I'm appalled to read on CNN that what H.L. Mencken called the booboisie is phoning her and threatening her for being a racist.

The 911 tape from this incident has been released, and the neighbor simply said, "two men." She didn't mention their race. In fact, she said she couldn't see one of them at all, and she thought the other one "looked kind of Hispanic." Obviously, when Sgt. Crowley arrived at the scene, he could see that both men were black. But it's clear that the 911 call was caused by the appearance of a break-in.

It's very clear that Prof. Gates took immediate and extreme umbrage at being accosted in his own house. I can understand that. On the other hand, in my experience it is never a good idea to argue with a cop at the scene, even if you think he's wrong. I read one account that said the professor was trying to keep the sergeant from phoning in. It sounds to me as if the professor over-reacted and caused a scene, and Sgt. Crowley hauled him in for disorderly conduct.

Here again, I've been working with the police in Oakland, California for a couple of years now. I rode along with an officer for a shift, when I took the Citizen's Police Academy. Their level of professionalism, in general, is very high. (Disclosure: I have no personal experience with the Cambridge police.) But you have to keep one thing in mind about police officers, and we learned this the hard way last March: police officers have the only non-military job in which you can be killed at any moment, in the normal course of work, by someone you don't know has a gun. When they walk into any new situation, as Sgt. Crowley did, they are on edge. They have both professional training and personal desire to stay in complete control of the situation. Sgt. Crowley, when he approached the house, had reason to believe he was accosting two burglars; and he was alone. When the professor showed his ID, the sergeant obviously knew he wasn't dealing with a burglar; but by that time he was dealing with an angry man who was yelling at him.

As far as I can tell, the only good thing about the incident is that it has all of us talking about it. I hope all parties can discuss it rationally when they have their beer at the White House.

You Can't Mean ME??

I listened to NPR's Talk of the Nation today while taking a shower. They were discussing a proposal, from Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe, to create a Federal ban on talking on the phone while driving. Here's a link to his op-ed piece, which lists the research that suggests that driving while talking on the phone is equivalent to driving after a 3-Martini lunch.

I agree with Mr. Jackson, but that isn't the point of this post. What amazed me was the people who phoned in to comment on the show. To a caller, they all said that yes, yes, it's terrible, other people can't talk and drive - but they can. The callers all have the superior wisdom or multitasking capacity or whatever to drive a car and have a phone conversation - hell, maybe they juggle plates too. One man ("I've been a truck driver for 24 years") even suggested that there should be an advanced driving license that allows one to telephone while driving, after demonstrating ability.

This demonstrates a feature of the American psyche that has been driving me nuts for some time. I sum it up in this phrase:

"You can't mean those rules apply to me??"

People rarely actually say this; but they act it. When you see someone jaywalking, or crossing against the light, or doing some other damn stupid thing that happens to be against the law, they're implying that the rules don't apply to them. And they're terribly offended if they get a ticket for it. The infuriating ones are those who drag their kids along with them, against the light; they're raising the next generation of people who don't believe the rules apply to them.

It's the people whose cell phones go off in movie theaters, or concert halls. I was charmed to learn recently that using a cell phone in a New York theater during a concert will get you a $50 fine. It's the people who throw McDonald's wrappers on the sidewalk, and Coke cans in the shrubbery. My shrubbery. It's the people who walk their dogs off-leash in leash-only areas, and who don't pick up the poop. From my flower beds.

It's the people in every chorus I've ever sung in, who routinely ignore the director's instructions on singing on pitch, because, of course, she can't mean them; they aren't singing flat. (I said this to my voice coach, who teaches classes as well as individuals; and he just slumped over the keyboard for a minute.) I'm happy to say that eventually the singers do get up to pitch; but we'd get there a lot faster if all of them would stop for a second and ask themselves, can I be doing that?

There was just one caller on Talk of the Nation who admitted that she herself had run 3 red lights while talking on the phone and driving; but that was as close as anyone came.

Yes, folks, the rules do apply to you, just as they apply to me; and we'll all get along together a lot better if we realize that.

Speaking of driving, the activity I really want to see prohibited while driving a car is applying mascara using the rear-view mirror.

The Least of These

I was going to begin by asking, rhetorically, why Arnold Schwarzenegger invariably decides to solve the state's problems by taking funding away from people who are short of funds to begin with. Unfortunately, I know why - these are people who never, under any circumstances, contribute to his campaigns. School children, sick people, blind people, old people - they have no power and (usually) no money, which is why they rely on state funding.

Arnold's latest target, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle's Andrew Ross, in his Bottom Line column today, are the sick, disabled and elderly people who manage to stay out of nursing homes by using the state's In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) program. $95 million of the "savings" in the governator's so-called budget are projected to come from this program, by eliminating "waste, fraud, and abuse."

Why do Republicans always assume that the poorer and more powerless a group is, the more likely they are to be responsible for "waste, fraud, and abuse"?? We got the same mantra in the '90s when Bill Clinton allowed himself to be Republicanized into "reforming welfare" and getting rid of "welfare queens."

The vaunted savings aren't there. Mr. Ross quotes a representative of the Legislative Analyst's Office who states that repeated investigations have found minimal fraud in the program - "minimal" meaning "1% or less." So, not only will the service cuts force these people into nursing homes (where, by the way, it will cost the state a lot more to give them a lower standard of care), it won't solve the budget problem it's touted to solve. This is insane, and Schwarzenegger has to know it's insane - he isn't stupid. I don't know exactly what he is, but I do know one thing: he's wrong. And it's going to cost the State of California even more money.

Birth Certificates

One of the current wingnut obsessions going around is the idea that Barack Obama isn't really an American citizen. He was born in Kenya, goes the theory, and "slipped into Hawaii by his mother," and his U.S. birth certificate is a fake. (Details of this ridiculous story come from Willie Brown's column today in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

In the first place, if this were true, it would have come up during his Presidential run, and it would have gotten him thrown out of the race. The McCain-Palin team would not have let that slip by.

In the second place, this birth wasn't in East Waterless Ford in the middle of the 19th century - this was the State of Hawaii in 1961. Hawaii had been a state of the Union for 2 years in August 1961, and the birth certificates issued then were as valid as any. There's absolutely no evidence for challenging Barack Obama's birth certificate.

Willie Brown made an interesting point in his column, that he himself never had a "formal" birth certificate - his birth in 1934, in Mineola, Texas, was only recorded in the family bible:

I had to get what was called a delayed birth certificate. In other words, we had to go back and find people who lived in Mineola, who were citizens themselves and who swore that my mother had a little boy on the date that I said I was born.

Mineola, Texas in 1934 may not have been East Waterless Ford, but I think you could see it from there.

For that matter, my own father was born in 1907 in Wolf Creek, Missouri (which is even closer to East Waterless Ford than Mineola) - and his birth certificate, along with a whole load of other information that makes doing genealogy in my family a challenge, went up in smoke in the 1930s when the county courthouse in Wright County, Missouri burned.

A lot of people, especially older people from poor rural areas, have questions about their civil documents; but Honolulu, Hawaii in 1961 was not a poor rural area. The whole idea is absurd, and its only purpose is to make noise. If you want to read some of the reasons it's crazy, take a look at this entry on snopes.com:

Is Barack Obama a natural-born citizen of the United States?

Oh, and the birth certificate he displayed on his campaign web site because of all this dreck isn't a forgery, either.

Now You Know

Why shouldn't we torture the enemy combatants at Guantanamo and Bagram? Why should we follow the outdated - was it Cheney or Bush who called them "quaint"? - rules of the Geneva Convention? We're fighting for our country and our lives, they said - we have to use every tool available.

Now you know why we shouldn't have done that. Now, for the first time since Vietnam, I think (I don't recall any American captures during either the Gulf War or Iraq), an American soldier is a POW. The Taliban is holding Bowe Bergdahl, a 23 year old PFC from Idaho; and he says on their propaganda video that he's "scared I won't be able to go home."

He should be scared. We've spent the last 8 years treating Muslim "enemy combatants" like some lower form of life, not deserving respect as human beings. Ask yourself: if you were the Taliban, what incentive would you have to treat Pvt. Bergdahl any better?

I shouldn't have to explain this, but evidently we've forgotten: the Geneva Conventions were formulated in 1949, after World War II, to standardize the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians in time of war. If you read the history section in Wikipedia, the first 10 articles in the first treaty actually go back to 1864, and Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross. 194 nations have signed these treaties, including the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

The whole basis of the Geneva Conventions is the principle that "there, but for the grace of God, go I." You treat the enemy's prisoners humanely in the hope (vain during World War II) that any of your people taken prisoner will also be treated humanely. If you're trying to get information from them, you treat them humanely because you get better and more reliable information that way, but that's another post.

The problem with the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan right now is that - surprise! - the Taliban is not a "nation," and therefore not a signatory. At least, the Taliban isn't a nation yet. Since they haven't signed any treaties, the only leverage we might have had, to persuade them to treat our prisoners with dignity and humanity, would have been our humane treatment of captured Muslim "enemy combatants" - but we couldn't be bothered to do that, we had important things to do. Besides, they can't capture one of our men! We sacrificed the moral high ground to gain a victory - and now we need the moral high ground. But we can't get it back just like that. Barack Obama is making some strides, in closing Gitmo and trying to place the prisoners, but it'll take us a looong time to regain that moral high ground.

The trouble with the whole "war on terror" - and thank God we've quit using that phrase! - is that it isn't a war. It's a police action which is being mismanaged as a war. Al Qaeda and the Taliban are criminal organizations, just like the Mafia, except that their stated primary goal is religious, not commercial. (Although I notice they're perfectly happy to get rich off the opium trade.) We should have been pursuing the entire operation as an international police investigation from the beginning; but it's so much more fun to have a war.

Greenwich Village

One of the first places we went in New York was, of course, Greenwich Village. I have to confess, here, that my mental images of the Village stem from a book called The Butterfly Kid, a stoner alien invasion fantasy written in 1967 by one Chester Anderson, who is also the narrator of the book. The book is theoretically set in "the future" - actually, probably about now, and of course there is no resemblance! But I enjoyed The Butterfly Kid enough to buy a second copy when my first one began to fall apart. Believe me, the Village in that book is Very Strange.

I liked Greenwich Village. We arose from the subway to find ourselves looking at (a) a pickup basketball game, and (b) a garden, locked and walled, with a plaque commemorating a long dead pub where Eugene O'Neill used to drink. This seemed appropriate. Like the rest of New York, Greenwich Village is very dense; but it isn't very tall. Most buildings were about 5-6 stories, with some 10-15 story exceptions; no skyscrapers. There is no space between buildings here - that would be wasteful. We strolled through the Washington Mews (converted stables, and not always very completely converted either) and Gay Street (a name which predates the current usage). Gay Street is curved, and lined solid with 5 story dwellings.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon, and Washington Square (a central location in The Butterfly Kid) was boiling with people and dogs of all ages. Also pigeons. I sat on a bench to rest, and a woman near me yelped, and complained that a pigeon had just shat on her leg - I think that's the first time I've ever seen that happen. We passed a group of folkies with a bass fiddle added to the usual guitars, singing Good Night, Irene - all the people sitting and listening were singing along softly. A few yards farther along we passed a 5 piece jazz combo playing some extremely hot licks, especially the sax player; they were surrounded by a small intent crowd. The fountain was full of kids; the lawn was littered with sunbathers in bikinis.

Being in the Village, we thought it appropriate to go and look at the Stonewall Inn, and the monument to the Stonewall Riots in Sheridan Square. One memorial statue was wearing an old LinkSys router for a hat; by the time we left, a maintenance man had removed it, but I got a photo. The entire memorial is viewed with grim disapproval by the bronze equestrian statue of Gen. Philip Sheridan, at the other end of the square. I wonder what he disapproved of before they installed the Stonewall statues.

We wandered around looking for a place to eat; I don't know why this is always so hard in a strange town. I have an Internet enabled phone, and I used Google maps to try to find a place near us, but every one we went to look at had something we didn't like, or was closed; in the end we wandered down a street and saw sign reading Home. We looked at the menu, it looked interesting, we went in and dined; the food was good, rather in the Alice Waters style.

Walking around New York City

In every novel I've read set in New York, everyone is always hailing taxis, and God knows 5 out of every 7 cars on the New York Streets are taxis; but with a couple of exceptions, we traveled the Big Apple by subway (and, once, by train) - we got unlimited MetroCards. We traveled by subway, and of course we walked; I thought my feet were going to fall off the first couple of days. We stayed in the Essex House hotel (now the Jumeirah Essex House), on Central Park South, so we had several nearby subway stations to choose from.

Subway stations in New York have stairs. There may be an occasional dark, hidden elevator; there are no escalators. There are stairs, often several flights, but separated - you think you're done with them and then you find another flight. I haven't climbed so many stairs since we visited London in 1996 and the Tube people were repairing all the escalators in Victoria Station.

New York is beautiful. The buildings are beautiful; unexpectedly among the glass towers, you find a 5 or 10 story gem with delicate architectural details. The houses on the side streets go up 4 and 5 stories, and come right out to the sidewalk, except for an area to access the basement - yards, if any, are in back. God help you in New York if your knees go out.

Our first morning there, we were looking for a place to have breakfast (I never eat breakfast in a big city hotel, there's always a cheaper place a block or two away), and I suddenly realized I was looking at Carnegie Hall! Now explain to me why I took a couple of photos, but never bothered to find out what was playing there and whether we could get tickets. I haven't figured that out.

So where did we walk? We walked through midtown to Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall. The decorations on the buildings are astounding - gorgeous bas-reliefs (not painted), bas-reliefs painted in brilliant colors, decorative designs just painted on the wall. We saw the Prometheus statue, and more statuary around the skating rink (converted to a restaurant for summer) - and, we saw a procession of Fox News supporters, marching around Rockefeller Center, waving signs advertising their patriotism, and suggesting that Keith Olbermann should be sent to Guantanamo Bay. I never did find out what he said.

We paid to go to the Top of the Rock and see all of southern Manhattan Island, spread out on a brilliant sunny day. Rockefeller Center is gorgeously, outrageously Art Deco, which I adore. The observation platform is protected by the usual suicide barriers, ten foot panels of thick scratchy glass - conveniently spaced just far enough apart to fit a 50 mm camera lens between the panes! Only on the very top level, which is a setback (so you can only fall about 8 feet), can you see and photograph over the glass panels.

I'm doing a new thing with photographs, we'll see how it goes. I've signed up for SmugMug, and here's a link to a photo gallery with some of my New York photos. If you like them, check back - I'm nowhere near done uploading!

Sarah Palin

OK, everyone else has weighed in on this. Why do I think Sarah Palin resigned?

I know why I don't think she resigned. It wasn't because she can't take it. If I ever saw fame go to someone's head, it went to hers, when McCain drafted her out of nowhere to be the V.P. candidate. She loved it; she's hooked on the fame drug. I also don't believe that anyone whose school nickname was "Sarah Barracuda" is a sensitive, tender plant who can't take the heat in the kitchen.

I've seen one speculation, on Another Monkey's blog, that she resigned just ahead of a huge, breaking scandal that she couldn't have avoided if still in office. He said that on Tuesday, and it's Thursday, and the scandal still hasn't broken. It still could; but it could also be another conspiracy theory. None of the multifarious ethics investigations has nailed her for anything yet.

So I guess I'll come down in the camp that believes she's setting up for a Presidential run in 2012. Do I think she can win? No - in fact, hell no. But I think she thinks she can.

I noticed one bizarre thing as I listened to her explanation of why she was stepping down. It was all in buzzwords and catch phrases. I didn't hear one single original thought expressed in English. I could actually hear her pausing between phrases. There used to be an Internet game where you could make up sentences by picking buzzwords from columns one, two and three and stringing them together - Google isn't turning it up for me, but it sure sounded as though she'd used it to compose that speech.

Shrinking Coinage

No, this isn't what you think it's about. Now and then I drop in over at the Bad Astronomy blog, on the Discover site, just because it's cool. Today I dropped by and found a post called Coin Deflation, about a group of techies who "strap a scary big capacitor onto a U.S. quarter and zap it with 15,000 Joules." If you are into techno gadgetry, you should follow the links and look at the slow-mo videos they posted of this process, because they're fascinating - and for the bang-and-flash addicts, there's even a video section entitled "gratuitous explosions."

The point is what happens to the quarter when you do this: it shrinks in size. Quite a lot. It doesn't become lighter, I'm interested to read; so it must become denser.

These guys are evidently total lab rats, because of all the comments (9) on the original site, and on the Bad Astronomy post (20 when I looked), not one single person made the obvious (to me) joke about the value of the quarter decreasing! One guy asked if it was still worth 25 cents (nobody answered); and one guy admitted sheepishly to have "plunked down good money for bad" by buying a shrunken quarter because it was "awesome." No currency deflation references. No bad economy jokes at all. We're in the worst economic mess in living memory, and these folks shrink a quarter to half its normal size, and the connection doesn't even occur to them.

I love the human race. I just hope it can keep from killing itself with those gadgets.

Supporting a Friend

Here we go again. The Republican Party has no shame and no sense of how things look to the man on the street. Or woman, in my case.

I'm sure you've all heard the latest Repub sex scandal: Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., is now under investigation for allegedly having an affair with one of his campaign aides. A married campaign aide. Whose husband worked in Ensign's Senate office. I say, "allegedly," but I'm not sure I have to - Ensign copped to the affair last week, amidst many crocodile tears. There's an ethics committee investigation going into whether either the aide or her husband, or both, were fired because of the affair; but that isn't what fried my tomatoes today.

The Associated Press report, printed in today's San Francisco Chronicle, has a section at the end describing Ensign's return to the Senate floor:

On the Senate floor during a vote on a tourism bill, several lawmakers took time to speak with Ensign.

Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., talked with Ensign for several minutes, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., gave him a quick embrace. Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama patted Ensign's hand. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, shook Ensign's hand, and the two stood side-by-side for about a minute in silence as the vote continued.

Isn't that touching? His friends surround him with hugs of support and murmured words of sympathy - the randy hypocrite! He should have a scarlet A embroidered on the lapel of every suit he owns. All these yoyos claim to stand up for Family Values, and the sanctity of the hearth, and all that jazz. And they wonder why their approval ratings are heading for Antarctica.

Democracy in Iran

I keep reading articles suggesting that President Obama isn't being forceful enough about Iran's election mess. Frankly, I think he's doing about as much as is reasonable. When it comes right down to it:

• It's not our election. It's all Iranian, all the time.
• We don't have any skin in the game. We don't even have formal diplomatic relations with Iran.
• If he did want to act, what could he do? We can't send in the Marines - they're busy in Afghanistan.

The situation there is volatile enough without giving the theocrats any excuse to accuse Mir Hossein Mousavi of being backed by the CIA. There's plenty of history of CIA skullduggery in Iran - ask anybody in Teheran about Mohammed Mossadegh, who really was overthrown in a CIA coup in the early 1950s (after trying to nationalize the oil industry; some things never change).

We've all suffered in the last few years from the Bush administration's insistence on "exporting democracy." Democracy isn't something you can "export," like a crate of ball bearings. It's a delicately balanced series of agreements among the citizens of a country, and the version that exists in the U.S. and Britain now took centuries to develop. But while the English were fighting the Civil War, in the 17th century, asserting the right of the people over the monarchy, the Persians were ruled by the Safavid dynasty of Shiite shahs (some things really never change - details of Persian history taken from the timeline at From Ancient Persia to Contemporary Iran).

If democracy isn't exportable, though, it seems to be contagious; and I think the Iranians may have caught it. Not only have they just had an election, they're now furious because the election was obviously rigged. And that anger really is a democratic urge.

I wonder if the people in charge of those election results really thought anyone would accept them, when they're statistically so extremely unlikely. And I really wonder what the results of a fair count would have been. You never know - Ahmedinajad might have won. He might even have won by a wide margin. But we'll never know, because they decided to fake a result.

I wish the Iranians all the best; my heart aches for them, because the democracy in Iran right now is a paper label over a theocratic tyranny, and if they really want a democracy, they'll have to fight for it. But if they're willing to fight, they may just end up with a truly democratic Iran. Reuel Marc Gerecht, in a N.Y. Times op-ed piece (The Koran and the Ballot Box), thinks we may be seeing the start of "the final countdown on the Islamic Republic." I hope he's right.

Working for the Man

Pardon me while I indulge my inner curmudgeon. San Francisco Chronicle writer C. W. Nevius wrote a column the other day on the inability of a local clothing shop owner to get anyone to work for him on his terms - except illegal immigrants. The (presumably) solid American citizens only want to work for him on their terms: wanted to be paid under the table; unwilling to fold things, or dust things, as needed; unwilling to work on Saturday morning, or Friday night ("I go out on Friday nights"). The only people willing to come when he needed them, work until the end of the shift, and do whatever jobs came along, were the illegal immigrants.

I wouldn't take the column so seriously if this were the first time I'd heard this refrain; but it isn't. I heard a virtually identical lament a few years ago, when I was recovering from my second knee surgery. Home all day doing rehab exercises, I took a break to go outside and gab with the contractor who was remodeling my neighbor's house. (Did a nice job, too.) He said the same thing: he's tried to hire Americans and they won't work. They don't show up, or they don't stay, or they don't do the job the way he wants it. The workers who show up, work all day, and do what they're told to do as it's explained to them - are the people whose papers are, um, not in order.

The anti-illegal folks rant loudly about the way illegal immigrants are going to ruin this country. If Americans lose the will to do a day's work for a day's pay, we'll ruin the country all by ourselves. The illegal immigrants won't have to do a thing.

The whirring sound you hear is my dad, spinning in his grave. Dad worked from the time he was I think about fourteen; he didn't graduate from high school until he was 21 because he was working. He took any job he could get; on every job, he worked his hours, and did whatever they told him to do: sell shoes, make ice cream, chip paint, drive a forklift, supervise a crew, move furniture. After he retired from Federal civil service (he had a civilian support job for the Navy), he got another job doing cleanup at an auto body shop, just to get his Social Security quarters in; and by the time he was ready to retire again, they begged him to stay, because he did more work in a day than anyone else.

That work ethic is what built America; it's what won 2 wars and pulled the country through the Great Depression. It's what makes the international commentators say that Americans are the workingest fools on the planet, taking less vacation than anyone and working crazy overtime. I wonder. I realize I sound like a bunch of people I actually have very little in common with; but I was raised to believe that a regular paycheck was a contract, and my side of the contract was a solid 40 hours of work a week, in exchange. It sounds to me as if we may be losing that attitude. If we do, we'll regret it. And we may try to blame the resulting trouble on the Mexican immigrants; but it won't be their fault.

Touring the East

Having ranted (see last post), I want to share some of the oddities I noticed while traveling. We did an urban vacation this year - New York City and Philadelphia, separated by a few days in Cape May, NJ.

Given that it's almost impossible these days to get rare meat from a restaurant (they're all terrified of being sued for salmonella), why do the restaurants in the Atlantic coast states turn their air conditioning down so far you could hang meat in the dining room? They can't be afraid of it going bad, they've cooked it through. The weather was very muggy while we were there, mostly too warm to carry a jacket; and I'm still surprised I didn't catch a chill from the air in those restaurants.

This being the first time I've ever driven through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, I had my first experience with Wawa. If you've been there, you know. It seems like a perfectly competent convenience store chain; but the name floored me. If you go to their web site and look at the Milestones section, you'll see the history and it actually makes sense: wawa is a Native American word for a Canada goose in flight. I foolishly assumed that Wawa, Pennsylvania was named after the firm, but I was wrong.

I was also startled to find that a dominant provider of gasoline in New Jersey is: Lukoil. When we drove down the Garden State Turnpike from New York to Cape May, Lukoil had the concession at practically every turnpike rest stop. With all the noise we hear about the U.S. energy companies, how did a Russian firm get to be so wide-spread in New Jersey? Wikipedia tells me that Lukoil bought Getty Oil in 2000 and rebranded some of the stations. I kept looking for Pikov Andropov.

WHAT is Going On?

I can't take a vacation these days without everything going to hell. I go out of town for a couple of weeks, and:

• A whack job with a gun takes out the only 3rd trimester abortion provider in Kansas.
• Another whack job with a gun goes to the Holocaust Museum and starts shooting, killing a guard who did him no more harm than to open the door for him.
• Kim Jong Il tests another [deleted expletive] nuclear weapon, and fires off a couple of medium range missiles for good measure.

Listen, people, I want peace and quiet on my vacations! Can't I leave you alone for a minute?

On the murder of Dr. Tiller, I don't really have much to add to what others have said. The revolting hypocrisy of the Operation Rescue position is self-evident. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that they are paying for the defense; just a suggestion for investigating journalists, if there are any left. I'm disturbed but not surprised by Cristina Page's analysis (on HuffPo) suggesting that violence against abortion clinics and providers increases in inverse relationship to the president's position on the subject. No abortion providers were killed during the Bush administration.

On the guy at the Holocaust Museum (I really think it's dignifying these people too much to refer to them by name) - if we're going to allow every idiot to buy a gun, then we have to expect that once in a while, one of the idiots will shoot somebody. Frankly, it's the price of the Second Amendment. All you NRA types, are you happy now? This one was from left field - the perp had no criminal record. He falls in the same class as the jihadi suicide bombers; unstoppable.

And there isn't much you can say about Kim Jong Il.

OK, I'm back home now; you can all stop this. (I wish...)