The Geek's Lament

Or, why are things so hard with Microsoft? (People whose eyes cross at the sound of geek can stop reading here; I just want to vent.)

I've been having a little trouble with my laptop - I decided to buy a faster wireless card, and in the process of installing it, I managed to turn off all wireless connectivity on my laptop.  The built-in card that came with the laptop, which has worked flawlessly for 2 1/2 years including through the upgrade to Windows 7, simply stopped detecting wireless networks.  Any wireless networks, including mine.

In case you want to avoid this nefarious product, it was a TrendNet TEW-642 EC, an N-class wireless express card adapter.  It came with a "wireless utility client" which TrendNet support swore would never leave my system broken like this after uninstall.  As a matter of fact, I think the TrendNet card I received was defective, and I've returned it for a refund; but I don't see how plugging in a defective adapter could shut down a working adapter.  I'm deeply suspicious of that utility software.  But what do I know? 

I've literally worked on this daily, or almost daily, since January 26 - since today is February 5, that's 10 days.  I've busted my brains, tried everything I could think of, researched arcane Windows system commands.  I was reasonably sure that I could get things working again if I could successfully do a system restore to Jan. 22 - the last restore point before I started messing with the new adapter.  System restore rolls your system back to an earlier configuration without touching your data.  I've tried this at least once a day; and every day (until today) the restore failed "because a file is in use."  I learned to turn off the stuff that loads at startup; I tried shutting down ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite; I tried shutting down ZA and telling it not to restart when the system restarts.  Every restore failed with the "file in use" error, and no wireless.  

I finally found, on an Internet bulletin board, a warning that I might have to uninstall ZA to make system restore work, so today I tried that.  And it worked.  The restore succeeded, and my wireless card leapt back to life.  Now, I like ZA because it tells me what it's doing.  But this one has me wondering if I should give Norton another try.

Conversations

As far as I'm concerned, President Obama's high point last week wasn't the State of the Union address, competent but not his best work.  It was that little confabulation he had with the Republicans, where he sat down and talked to them as if they were rational human beings.  (Which has to be an example of "hope springs eternal.")

Now he needs to have the same conversation with the Democrats.  Because the problems afflicting political discourse in this country come from both parties. 

Bombs in Baghdad

Does it seem to you that the Iraqi government isn't doing a very good job catching suicide bombers these days??  Does to me.  But it didn't make much sense until yesterday; now, it makes all too much sense.

Yesterday, James Randi (The Amazing Randi, a lifelong opponent of pseudoscience, snake oil sales, and general fakery) posted a link to this article on CrunchGear:

Magic wand bomb detector deemed fraudulent, inventor imprisoned

You can and should go read this yourself, but to summarize for the impatient:  the Iraqi government has spent $85 million (which we probably gave them) on so-called "bomb detectors" which are essentially - dowsing rods.  That's right.  You wave them at a car and they sense bombs.  Not.  The British government has just jailed the inventor on fraud charges (currently out on bail) and banned the export of this device.  The Iraqi government claims the jailing was because the inventor has refused to reveal to the U.S. and U.K. governments how the device works.  Unfortunately, the actual reason is because these governments understand exactly how the device does NOT work.  Sandia National Labs and the FBI flagged this device as a fraud in 1995.

Do the bombs in Baghdad make more sense now?

You can find more comments and links on the subject at the James Randi Educational Foundation.  Keep in mind that the JREF has a standing offer of $1 million to anyone who can prove that a device like this works in a controlled test.  No one has ever won it, certainly no one associated with this device.

Phil Plait from the Bad Astronomy blog posted another article on the subject at JREF in which he quotes an Iraqi general as saying he likes the devices because they're fast:  "Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle."  But if they used dogs, they might actually find some bombs.

Why is the U.S. government giving Iraq all the money we're giving them if they're going to spend it on dowsing rods??

Sold Down the River

The team that brought you the 2000 presidential election has just presented the American people with another juicy gift.  The U.S. Supreme Court, moved substantially to the right by George W. Bush's appointment of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, has just declared unconstitional almost every campaign finance law that restricts corporate contributions to elections.  Oh, and union contributions.  They still can't donate directly to candidates; but there are now no limits on the amount of money they can pour into advertising during an election.  Your state has local restrictions on corporate contributions?  Also unconstitutional.  The McCain-Feingold Act?  History.

Kiss American democracy goodbye, folks.  This is the end of government of the people, by the people, and for the people.  It has just been replaced by the Golden Rule - the guys who have the gold, make the rules.  Ordinary citizens can't possibly match the financial clout of corporations and corporate unions.

Do I seem just a little cynical about the good wishes of corporations and unions?  Well, I can't speak for unions, but I spent 38 years working for corporate America, and I never saw a single public-spirited action that the companies didn't think would contribute directly to their bottom line.  Corporate contributions to elections will focus on improving corporate profits, the public be damned.  A classic example:  the banking industry thought that the Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented banks from trading securities, was keeping them from making all the money they could possibly make.  They poured money into the Congressional campaigns of people who agreed with them.  Ten years ago, Glass-Steagall was repealed, and banks could own brokerages and trade securities.  I don't need to remind you what came out of that.

Do the citizens have any recourse here?  We can't afford to buy our own Congressman; the corporations have already bid the price up way too high.  Our only option is information.  Fortunately the laws that require disclosure of campaign contributions still stand.  As long as they do, we must ensure that we know where the corporate money goes.  If somebody's campaign was specifically supported by campaign ads from Glutco, Inc., we must make sure that candidate is identified as "the candidate from Glutco."  Knowledge is power; it seems to be the only power we have left.

In 1787, as he left the Constitutional Convention, somebody is said to have asked Benjamin Franklin, "What have we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?"  Franklin reputedly replied, "A Republic - if you can keep it."  Can we keep it?

Harry Reid's Comments

Just now there's a lot of flack flying about some remarks of Harry Reid's, quoted in a book called Game Change.  Mr. Reid opined that Barack Obama had a good chance to become President because he was "light-skinned" and "did not speak with a Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one."

Ever since I heard this, I've been wondering what all the hoo-ha was about.  Harry Reid is an extremely skilled practical politician and I thought his assessment of Barack Obama's potential was spot on; he was even proven right when Obama ran and won.  What's going on, of course, is another round of our, um, conflicted attitude toward race.  I've been considering a post on the issue, until I read my San Francisco Chronicle this morning and discovered that Jon Carroll, as he often does, had just written it for me.  I refer you, therefore, to Mr. Carroll's latest column, "The badly expressed wisdom of Harry Reid," identified on the SFGate.com web site as "Find the racist."  It's well worth reading.  (If you follow this link in a day or two and can't see it, it's the January 14 column.)

For Shame, Mr. Robertson

Pat Robertson has a history of blaming the victims; as I recall, he said that the 9/11 attacks were caused by "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians" - not to mention the ACLU and People for the American Way. Funny, I thought it was because Osama bin Laden was pissed about American troops in Saudi Arabia.

Today, though, he chooses to blame the recent disastrous earthquake in Haiti on a "pact with the devil" that the Haitians made two hundred years ago, to get out from under "the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever." This, he says, is why Haiti has always been poor, and why it has just been devastated by a 7.0 earthquake. The Devil did it.

As a historian and a scientist (amateur but quite serious in both), I hardly know where to start. Let's start with the history. Robertson has the wrong damn Napoleon; he has no idea what the history even is. Napoleon III ascended the throne of France in December 1852, 49 years after Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti a free republic (Jan. 1, 1804). The "Napoleon" in charge at the time of Haitian independence was Napoleon III's uncle, the original and only "Napoleon."

Now the science. Haiti is located at the junction of two tectonic plates, the North American plate and the Caribbean plate. There isn't as much action there as there is along the West Coast, because the Caribbean plate is relatively small compared to the North American plate; but it's a strike-slip fault, just like the San Andreas Fault. It hadn't had any serious movement since the 18th century, but we understand why this happened, and the Devil had nothing to do with it. Haiti was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But Pat Robertson chooses to inform the world, during a broadcast asking for disaster relief, that the Haitians sold their souls to the devil in exchange for freedom from the French. They need to have "a great turning to God," he says. Somewhere in the afterlife, if there is an afterlife, I hope he meets the spirits of the men who bought Haitian independence with their blood. I'd like to hear what Toussaint L'Ouverture has to say to this.

In the meantime, I guess we have to put up with him; he owns his own television network, so we can't shut him up. But I want everyone who calls himself a Christian to look at Haiti, listen to Pat Robertson on the subject, and ask seriously: is this the man I want speaking for me? And if it isn't, why haven't we heard from you, reproaching him?

The Best Job In The World

Being governor of South Carolina must be the best job in the world. 


I thought I'd ranted about this last summer, and I even looked through my back posts for the last year or so, but I can't find it.  So if I'm repeating myself, I apologize; but I can't let this one pass without comment.


The South Carolina legislature in its infinite wisdom has just decided that Gov. Mark Sanford's actions last summer don't constitute an "impeachable offense."  

Let's just recap what the governor did:  he left the state for 5 days, not telling anyone (including his lieutenant governor and his security detail) where he was going, and flew to Argentina to be with his popsie.  When he came back and state officials said, where the hell were you, he said he was "hiking the Appalachian trail," a euphemism that makes actual Appalachian (and other) hikers wince.  Only later did he admit, with many crocodile tears, what he was actually up to.  His wife is now suing for divorce.  He went AWOL from his post as governor of the state and left no one in charge.  But he's "not impeachable."


I know of no other situation in which you could abandon your job for 5 days - not show up, not call in, nobody knows where your are or when you're coming back - and then step back into place without any penalty.  In most corporations, not showing up for a week with no explanation is a firing offense.  But this is government, so it's OK.  


It's the government of South Carolina, too, which means that it's heavily tilted toward men.  I got curious and wondered how many of the legislators who voted on this issue were women.  I found one, Joan Brady, who was in office as of June 2009.  I found an online editorial in the Anderson IndependentMail from 2008 which suggested that South Carolina might actually end up with no women in the legislature; Ms. Brady's presence suggests that didn't happen, but apparently it was close.



You think the vote on the governor's impeachment might have been different if the percentage of women in the legislature had matched the percentage of women in the population?  Just asking.

More Decade Retrospective

This was the decade where we learned that what you expect often doesn't happen, and (I'm sorry to say) that you can't necessarily trust the things you thought you could trust.

It started with the Y2K mess.  The world was going to end on Jan. 1, 2000, remember, as all the computers crashed?  All you people who think the world will end in 2012 when the Mayan calendar runs out, keep that in mind.  You can't ignore your problems because the world will end in 2012, because it won't.


Thought you could trust a corporation's accounting to tell you what shape the company was in, and could trust the auditors to find and expose any problems?  Enron took care of that, and Arthur Andersen.  I used to work for an accounting firm, and even us low-level non-partner-track types were aware of the tremendous pressure on the partners to keep the really big accounts happy. 


Thought that you had to be an intelligent, experienced, thoughtful and talented person to be elected President of the United States?  Look at the 2000 election.  If you can stand to.  I never did understand why everybody thought it was great that Bush went through Yale with a "gentleman's C."  And I don't even want to consider Sarah Palin.



Thought that the U.S. would never again be attacked on its home soil?  'Nuff said.  If somebody wants to kill you badly enough that he's willing to die to do it, it's very hard to stop him.



Thought that the U.S. government wouldn't take the country to war on a faked-up lie?  That's how we got into Iraq.  What bothered me about Iraq was not just the one lie - it was a whole series of lies, each more implausible than all the rest, trotted out to justify the situation as each previous lie was exposed.


Thought that "the government" would step in and help people when a natural disaster hit?  Ask the people who lived in New Orleans.  We're on our own, folks, especially if we are poor and not white.

Thought that housing prices would rise forever?  Not when the market decides they're overpriced.  Who is "the market?"  Nobody knows, but it sure changed its mind last year.



Finally, thought that bankers were staid, conservative types who made money lending on a 2 point spread to people who didn't really need it?  The last year and a half blew that idea away; these guys were gambling at the high-roller table, and with borrowed money, too.  The people in casinos putting their whole wad on number 17 were actually taking lower risks.


It's a strange new world, folks, and the best you can do is stay informed, stay alert, and question your assumptions.  The thing you take for granted is the thing that'll turn around and bite you.

Happy New Year

Somebody on Facebook posted a "what were things like10 years ago" questionnaire, and it made me think.  What were things like 10 years ago?  Specifically, what was true 10 years ago that is no longer true?  Well, ten years ago today:

I still had functional knees, or thought I did.  In fact, they were fated to blow out over Memorial Day weekend, but in January I thought they were fine.  (I have perfectly functional knees now, but not the ones that came with the set.)


My mother, Mary Jean Henderson Ivy, was still alive.  This was another situation about to change; she went into the hospital on her 88th birthday (Jan. 12) and died before the month was out.

I was still working for a paycheck.  This continued for another 7 years; but on Jan. 1, 2000 I was still working as a technician, I hadn't become an "architect/system designer."  In fact, I spent New Year's Eve 1999 on an intercontinental conference call, as Bank of America technicians all over the world watched their systems roll successfully past the date change in real time, just as they had in all the endless time-machine tests we'd done over the previous year.  Our department boss had promised to sing Auld Lang Syne on the phone call but he got cold feet, so I sang it.


My mother-in-law, Florence Ringland, was still alive.  She died in 2003.


I'd never been to Wales, or New Zealand, or Banff.  I'd never gone on vacation in a remote resort and had a forest fire start the day I arrived.  (Yes, now I have, and someday I may even get the photos posted.)


I hadn't exercised regularly in 15 years.  Boy, has that changed, and for the better.

I'd neved had private singing lessons.  I took a few weeks of private singing instruction last summer and enjoyed it thoroughly.



My husband drank only socially.  Now he doesn't drink at all, which is a vast improvement over the period where he was drinking unsocially.


So where am I now?  


I'm retired, which means I don't get a paycheck; but I don't have to get up at oh-dark-hundred every day, either.

By most measures, I'm now definitely a "senior citizen," although I still don't qualify for either Medicare or full Social Security.



I'm managing 4 non-profit web sites, on 2 boards of directors, and volunteering at the Food Bank.  I'm the techie-in-residence for LifeRing Secular Recovery, managing things like the office network.

I exercise regularly and walk enough that I've bought a pedometer. 


I could stand a more human contact.  Most of the communicating I do is either through email or on FaceBook, and while I love my FaceBook friends, reading a post on a computer screen isn't really a substitute for a chat over a cup of coffee.  (Tea for me.)   I may need to do something about that this year. 


I may sign up for more singing lessons, too.  I'm beginning to get that old urge to stand by the piano and sing 20th century standards (Kern, Gershwin, Porter, Berlin), if only in retirement homes.  If I can find a pianist who'll work for free.


I'm not sorry to see 2009 go.  Let's all work to make 2010 better than the last year; come on, that's a very low standard to exceed!

Let Men Their Songs Employ

I'm sure I've complained about this before.  I find the current passion for verbal political correctness grating, if only because it produces such ugly English.  I ran up against this again last week, singing Christmas carols.

I've given up on Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming, where the line "She bore to men a saviour" has been corrected to "She bore to us a saviour."  Which doesn't sound all that bad.  But this year our caroling director decided that it was just too, too politically incorrect to sing, "Let men their songs employ," in Joy to the World.  We were supposed, she said, to sing, "Let all their songs employ."


Well, I'm not a-gonna do it.  (I'm also not going to sing, "The Lord has come."  The line is, "The Lord is come," and that's what I sing.)   The beauty of this song is the line of its poetry, taken from Psalm 98 in that most politically incorrect of documents, the King James Bible; and trying to sing, "Let all their songs employ" is like biting down into a piece of fudge and cracking your tooth on a rock.  It's the right number of syllables but it feels wrong.  I am (believe it or not) a feminist; but I'm also an English major, and I refuse to disinfect my favorite Christmas carols like this.  I won't sing Good Christian People, Rejoice, either - besides, it doesn't scan.



We're missing an opportunity for some historical perspective here, and a little comparative linguistics.  One of the English language's annoying  characteristics (to a feminist, at least) is that it has no gender neutral pronoun.  You can't refer impersonally to a person or class of persons without implying gender, usually male gender.  According to Wikipedia, "most Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, and a number of Niger-Congo languages" do not have a gender-neutral pronoun (who else is there??), and use the masculine pronoun as the general.  (I thought I recalled gender neutrality of a sort in both French and German; but it's been a long time since I studied either.)  Until the French Revolution, and its call for general equality, nobody in Europe complained publicly about this; but it's now very fashionable to insist that we not use the masculine pronoun as the general, because it is sexist and promotes discrimination.  

To quote the Wikipedia article on this point:

Patriarchal societies with genderless languages, such as Chinese, demonstrate that gendered pronouns are not a prerequisite for inequality to exist.

(Oh, Chinese.  That's who else.)  According to Wikipedia again, there have been a number of attempts to produce a gender neutral pronoun (I like hir, myself - Larry Niven used it in Ringworld), none of which have ever stuck.  Our languages are wired very deeply into our brains, it seems.


In pre-industrial Europe, the general pronoun was the masculine partly because most of the actions of any significance were, in fact, taken by men.  I don't necessarily approve of this; but it was so.  And we can't really evaluate how far we've come toward the demands in Mary Wollstoncraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) unless we look back at where we were then, when women were not allowed to vote, hold property, or become educated.  


But I digress.  This isn't a defense of women's rights.  This is a plea that we should find a way to respect everyone's rights without destroying the beauty of our language and the astonishing poetry it can produce.  We need the beauty of the poetry, too.

Schizophrenic Republicans

OK, this is it.  The Republican party is officially talking out of both sides of its mouth.  Today's business news proves it.

In one article from the AP, Obama administration extends bailout program, several Republicans urge strongly that the unspent portion of the $700 billion TARP funds "should be devoted exclusively to curbing the country's soaring budget deficits," instead of putting it into a jobs program (tax breaks for hiring new employees, increased small business lending, and an infrastructure program) as the administration proposes.

In a second article from the AP, House vote raises taxes to pay for extending tax breaks, Republicans object to proposed tax increases, which would pay for extending a number of miscellaneous tax breaks by increasing the penalties on international tax cheats (nobody objects to that!) and by taxing fees earned by investment managers as ordinary income (top rate 35%) instead of capital gains (15%).  

Republicans argued that the tax increase would reach far beyond Wall Street, hitting real estate investment funds across the country. Instead, Republicans said, the tax breaks should be financed by federal borrowing, increasing the budget deficit.

So - it's OK to increase the budget deficit to protect the favorable tax treatment of some of the richest people in the country, but it's not OK to increase the budget deficit by helping get unemployed Americans into work.

Do these guys ever actually listen to what they're saying, or do they just pick talking points off the list, as the spirit moves them??  I understand that the national Republican Party, as an organization (I except various individual Republican politicians), has no interest in the welfare of this country and its citizens at all - its only interest is in getting back into power.  But do they really think that this form of "white man speak with forked tongue" will do that??

Memories of Cal - Smyth Fernwald

The U.C. Alumni Association has a discussion thread going on LinkedIn called "what did you do while you were at Cal, other than go to class?"  I've posted a couple of notes there, but the exchange has got me thinking, and I think I'll put some of those memories up here, too.

Going to Cal was tremendously exciting to me.  I'd literally never been away from my family before, and here I was, living by myself in a dormitory, sharing a room with a stranger!  I didn't live in any of the dorms you see at Cal now, certainly not in any of the classy new ones with wireless Internet and actual interior decoration.  The dorms I lived in, called Smyth Fernwald, aren't dorms any more - they're student family housing and they have been extensively remodeled!  Trust me.  No modern families would live in those rooms. 

The Smyth Fernwald complex was unique because of the location:  it was and still is at the extreme top of Dwight Way, a solid mile from the Bancroft and Telegraph intersection (and probably a couple of hundred feet difference in elevation!).  The last block up that hill was steep enough to give small cars a problem; it certainly gave hoofing students a stiff climb.  A geological web site I found suggests that the old buildings were torn down in 1999 because of seismic problems; they were right on the fault scarp for the Hayward Fault!  I never did athletics at Cal, but walking back and forth to the dorms kept me pretty fit.  There was a shuttle bus, but it didn't run out of class hours or on weekends.

I started at Cal in the fall of 1963, and the dorms were still segregated - women in one building, men in another.  I don't think co-ed dorms evolved for another 10 years.  The Smyth-Fernwald buildings were U-shaped, two long 2 story wings connected by a lobby and lounge at one end.  Women lived in three two-wing buildings; men lived in a single building, Smyth Hall, with three wings in a W.  Persons of the opposite gender were allowed only in the lounges, under close supervision by the building housemother.  You went through a permanently locked door to get from the living wings to the lounge.  You signed in and out when you entered or left the dorms; on weeknights you had to be back in by 10 or 11 (this time may be wrong), on weekends you had till 2:30 AM.  After that the doors were locked, and you had to ring and wake the housemother to get in - or climb through the window of an accomodating friend.

The rooms were just large enough for two single beds, two small desks, and two modest closets.  They had two double-hung windows.  I think I remember steam heaters.  I don't think they had telephones (I'm not totally sure of this); if you wanted a telephone you used the pay phone in the lounge.  Communal bathrooms and showers were down the hall.  The rooms were painted one of four pastel colors - pink, blue, green, or yellow.  You decorated your room with anything you could attach with a pin - tape was verboten because it took the paint off.  Draped madras bedspreads were fashionable curtains, and one of my roommates went in for a draped fishnet dyed hot pink.  At the time it seemed tremendously romantic and exciting, but as I think back now, the place was a dump, the paint was applied thinly, the bathrooms were Soviet (although they did mostly work).  The communal bathrooms meant that residents regularly marched up and down the hall in varying states of undress, so any male visitors to the living floor (workmen, family members) were supposed to be preceded by a female, loudly announcing, "Man on the floor!"

Dorm residents had a meal ticket that entitled them to three squares a day in the dorm cafeteria, except for Sunday nights.  Because we were so far from the campus, I think I recall that we could use our ticket for lunch in the campus cafeteria; most dormies had to go home for their ticket lunch.  I was having lunch in the cafeteria on campus on November 22, 1963, when one of my fellow Smyth dormies set her lunch tray down on the table next to me and announced flatly, "They just shot the president."  I can't recall her last name but her first name was Marsha, and I can still see her face.

Sunday nights you were on your own for food.  I remember walking down the hill on Sunday nights to a pizza joint on Telegraph which even I recognized as dubious (but it was cheap!), for a slice and a coke.  Then I'd walk back up to the dorm and listen to old episodes of The Shadow being rebroadcast on a local radio station.  The pizza joint didn't survive my tenure at Cal; the space is now occupied by Amoeba Music.

I remember the food at the dorm cafeteria as pretty ghastly, but it was probably just standard steam-table fare.  Unlike the campus cafeteria, I have no special memories of the Smyth cafeteria, except this:  they used to serve red snapper on Fridays, fried and breaded (these were still the days when Catholics didn't eat meat on Friday), and I still won't eat red snapper if I have a choice of any other fish.

More on Afghanistan

So we're sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.  But we'll start pulling them out in 18 months.  I expected better than this from the president; but it is a difficult and complex situation.  Back in October I thought through some of the issues with sending an army into Afghanistan, and you could have concluded from that, that I didn't think we should.  So now I'll look at some of the other arguments.

The first and biggest argument is:  the United States made this mess, the United States ought to clean it up.  You wouldn't let your ten-year-old walk away from a broken window with the argument that he had other things he needed to concentrate on.  That's roughly the position being taken by the folks who say, bring the troops home, we need to spend the money on health care / jobs / climate change / fill-in-the-blank.  It's true that we actually had a reason to invade Afghanistan (unlike Iraq); but the fact is we invaded.  And now some people argue that we can't afford it, we have responsibilities at home, etc.   Yeah, but we invaded.  We broke the window; we ought to sweep up the glass.

A second related argument will probably be pooh-poohed as old-fashioned.  OK, I'm old-fashioned.  We're getting a reputation as a nation that others can't depend on, because when the going gets tough, the Americans go home.  That wasn't the reputation we had in World War II, or even in Vietnam (until Nixon decided to cut his losses).  We've been building this rep since the first Bush administration, when George I let the Iraqi "marsh Arabs" think he would back them against Saddam, and then sat back while Saddam gassed them; it picked up steam when Clinton pulled the Marines out of Somalia after the "Black Hawk down" incident, because nobody at home was willing to accept American casualties.  We're in the process of pulling out on the Iraqi Sunnis (or so they could argue).  And now we've just told the Afghans that we're only there for another couple of years.  Believe me, the Taliban was listening.

If we aren't willing to finish these little expeditions, we shouldn't start them.  So in this case I'll say, very reluctantly, that Obama is right - at least right that we should send the 30,000 more troops. 

There were two very interesting op-ed pieces in this morning's San Francisco Chronicle that I'd like to bring to the president's opinion, although I think Gen. McChrystal may already understand them.  Both of them make the point that the central government in Afghanistan is an active hinderance to our efforts; both of them point out that Afghanistan has, in John Arquilla's words, "no history of successful democratic rule from Kabul."

John Arquilla, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, argues that we need to negotiate with the Taliban (Flaws in Obama's Strategy for Afghanistan), because many of the people who look like Taliban to us are actually Afghan patriots who regard us as invaders.  If we can treat them with respect and help them to develop their own societies, they may turn on the actual Taliban, whom they don't like either.  This is what happened in Iraq with the Sunni Awakening.

Mizgon Zahir, an Afghan-American freelance journalist, urges Obama to bypass the Kabul government and deal with local tribal elders (Afghanistan needs nation-building from U.S.), because Afghan citizens don't trust the corrupt government in Kabul.  Ms. Zahir argues that "community self-governance makes the most sense in a tribal country."  Afghans trust their tribal elders, and a true government can only be built on the basis of that trust.

If we pull out in 2011 with the Taliban just waiting to take over, we'll add Afghanistan to the list of people who believe that you can't depend on the Americans.

Never apologize...

Tiger Woods' current mess has got me thinking about the phrase, "Never apologize, never explain."  Which Tiger certainly should have taken to heart, but let that pass.

This is one of those phrases that you hear, or read, and you can never quite remember who said it.  I had a list of names in my mind that I thought were responsible for "never apologize, never explain" - they included Disraeli, Napoleon, and the Duke of Wellington.  I'm not the only one who thought of this in connection with Mr. Woods, and there's been some web discussion, which led me to Google the phrase.

Apparently nobody knows where it really came from.  What seems to be the authoritative research was done on a site called Ask Metafilter - I've found multiple links to it and of course, here's another one.  One source, according to Metafilter, is:

... the screenplay for the 1949 film She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, written by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings. The line is spoken by John Wayne and the exact quote reads, "Never apologize and never explain--it's a sign of weakness."

Evidently I had the wrong Duke.  The Ask Metafilter site has a series of posts about the phrase, and a lot of interesting back story, but apparently none of the people I had it associated with ever said it.  So much for my erudition; John Wayne, indeed.  I've never even seen She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.  If you read the whole thread, though, the screenwriters copped the line from someone - but no one is quite sure from whom.

But back to the Tiger. On December 1, the day before it all came out about the girlfriend and the voicemail message and the sheaf of emails (can emails be in a sheaf?), somebody on a local forum I follow posted the following link to the Wanda Sykes show - and Wanda summed it all up, and it's even funnier considering what came to light the next day:

http://tinyurl.com/ydyx7pd

Poor Tiger.  I wonder how he likes the taste of crow.

Energy Bars

When you're traveling, the food you get to eat can be very variable.  We spent last weekend in Yosemite Valley, which limited our dining options; we mostly ate at the Ahwahnee Hotel, which is Very Good and Very Expensive.  When we came home, however, we had to decide what to do about lunch, since Jim wanted to come home via Crane Flat and Big Oak Flat (I forget which road that is).  Frankly, along that route at this time of year, you can't even rely on an open convenience store until much later in the day than we wanted to eat.  


We were in Curry Village when we decided to get something we could eat sitting in the car, by the roadside somewhere, which meant that "lunch" was "something we can buy in the store at Curry Village."  Jim had the remains of a sandwich from the day before, and he ate that; I decided to get a couple of energy bars.  


They didn't, of course, have any of the ones I like; I've tried both Luna and Clif Bars, and I'm not impressed.  (I like the energy bars Kashi makes.)  But I like peanut butter, so I chose something called "thinkThin," in the "chunky peanut butter" flavor.  This was the strangest energy bar I've ever eaten.  It had no flavor.  It didn't taste of anything; not peanut butter (certainly not chunky peanut butter, since it had a very uniform bland texture), not the chocolate which appeared to coat it.  No flavor at all.


A look at the label (I should have done this first) explains it.  The first ingredient is "protein blend (calcium caseinate, whey protein isolate, soy protein isolate)," followed by glycerin, and sugar-free chocolate coating.  (Maybe that explains the lack of chocolate flavor.)   They claimed it was flavored with "sea salt" but I couldn't taste any salt, either.  In other words, this is sort of "essence of food" without any of the usual characteristics of food like scent, flavor, or texture.  It said it had 8 grams of fat (probably in the chocolate) but I couldn't taste that either.


I ate the thing because it was what I had, and I assumed it had some nutritional value.  It's supposed to help you lose weight.  A diet of those things would drive you to a double cheeseburger with a chocolate milk shake in sheer frustration.  When we finally found an open convenience store, I bought a pair of Reese's Cups, and finally got my peanut butter fix.

Civilian Trials for Terrorists

There's been a lot of flap lately about Attorney General Holder's plan to try the half dozen men suspected of the 9/11 attacks in civil court in New York.  The AP quotes Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina as calling it a "perversion of justice" to put wartime enemies into a civilian criminal court.

I guess the Allies were wrong to try the Nazi leaders in Nuremberg, then.

Mr. Holder believes he has the evidence to convict these men in a normal civilian court.  I'm not sure whether the people who oppose his plan don't believe him, or whether they're afraid a New York jury wouldn't convict these guys.  Frankly, I believe a New York jury is so likely to convict that, if I were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's defense lawyer, I'd be moving for a change of venue.  We're supposed to have one of the best legal systems in the world; do we really not trust it to give these men honest justice? 

And let's stop talking about a war.  This isn't a war.  We're being attacked, not by an enemy nation with an army, but by a group of criminal thugs who use a perversion of Islam as justification for acts that no religion, including Islam, condones.  These are criminals, and the criminal system is the right place for them.  We'd do better if we took that mindset to Afghanistan, too:  the Taliban, and Al Qaeda for that matter, are armed thugs practicing extortion on the people of Afghanistan (and Pakistan), just like the Mafia in Chicago in the thirties.  They even run dope, like the Mafia.  They're just another form of organized crime, and we need to use our crime-fighting tools on them, and quit dignifying them as opponents in a "war."

About Abortion

Let's be clear about the Stupak Amendment to the House health care reform bill.  This amendment won't prevent any woman, by itself, from getting an abortion.  It will only prevent poor women from getting abortions; rich women will be able to fund their own.  But any woman poor enough to require federal subsidies to buy insurance (which will be a lot of women, I suspect) would have to pony up her own dollars if she found herself in a pregnancy which she couldn't, for some reason, carry to term.  This could be anything from an inability to feed the children she already has to a life-threatening health condition; the Stupak amendment makes very little distinction.

I thought the problem with our current health system was exactly that the care you get depends on the amount of money that goes into your health insurance.

I'll offer a trade, though - the Stupak Amendment can stand if we also add an amendment to prevent any Federal funding for Viagra and similar drugs.  Ever.  In this case there would be no exceptions, since the inability to get it up is not a life-threatening condition.  We'd have the same condition:  rich men would still be able to get the drug through private insurance, poor men would have to find their own dollars if they want it.

Seems only fair to me.

It's Being Dealt With

It's now all over the San Francisco Bay Area that Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and his wife have some problems with the IRS.  The IRS has slapped a tax lien on some property they own, for $239,000 in back taxes covering 2005-2007, during most of which period Mr. Dellums has been Mayor of Oakland. 

The Mayor has recently told the Montclarion newspaper that "it's being dealt with."  I can't link this statement because, although some of the Montclarion is online, this article isn't; and a quick Google search for "Dellums tax" doesn't produce any online published response from the mayor.  But I have the paper in my hand.

There you go again:  the passive exonerative (sometimes called the passive evasive), so favored of politicians .  Heaven forbid that Hizzoner should say exactly who is doing what, or anything as direct as, "We're going to pay the money."  I've blogged about this practice before (Hiding behind the passive, March 2007).  What's really clear from the article is that Mr. Dellums doesn't want to talk about this:

"I told you that it's being dealt with," he said Monday night.  "We owe taxes.  It's now being dealt with, and it will be dealt with expeditiously.  Period ... P-E-R-I-O-D."

Well, I wouldn't want to talk about it either, but - I'm not the mayor.  This is unfortunately typical of Mr. Dellums' entire tenure as mayor - he doesn't want to tell people what he's doing, ever, about anything at all.  In this case, the situation he doesn't want to talk about could theoretically (if something goes wrong in those expeditious dealings) end up with the mayor of Oakland in tax court.

This is not the behavior that voters expect from the mayor of a large city.  I didn't vote for him, and I've only seen him do one thing in office that made me consider I might have been wrong - the negotiations over the garbage contract in his first year in office.  I recently read a speculation that he may be considering a run for a second term.  I think he should reconsider.  Based on the comments on his lifestyle in all the articles about this mess, I don't think he can afford this job.

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!