Green Deserts

You may have noticed this in the photos from Nevada.  All the deserts we crossed this year were really green, with lots of wildflowers ("lots" of wildflowers for a desert, that is).  We stopped at the Salt Wash Vista Point on Interstate 70 in Utah and took most of the photos in this gallery, Blooming Deserts in Utah. 

You say there's a lot of red rock showing?  It is a desert.  But we saw wildflowers like this:

and like this:

It was a long drive from Fallon to Fillmore, Utah - 448 miles.  Why Fillmore?  Take a look at the map of Highway 50 through Utah - we didn't have a lot of alternatives.  Fillmore had the most motels to choose from, and one of them actually had pretty good ratings. Given what the bed was like, I shudder to think about the others.

You can tell when you get into settled country in Utah, the sagebrush and creosote give way to irrigated fields, and you see buildings.  The water comes out of the Gunnison Bend Reservoir.  The first Utah town you come to on 50 is Hinckley, and we just rolled on through, it was closed, what there was of it.  By this time, though, it was around 6 in the evening and we were getting hungry, so we pushed on to Delta, which had something resembling a main street.  (It was Highway 50.)  A cruise up and down produced a choice of a soda fountain and the Rancher Cafe, part of the Rancher Motel-Cafe; everything else was closed.  Well, it was Memorial Day.  We took a chance on the Rancher Cafe and lucked out - the place is the local Chat 'n' Chew, I think we were the only tourists in there.  I had what I considered a good bowl of homemade chili (beans and meat, and not too spicy), and we chatted with the owner.  My husband didn't like his dinner as well as I did, sadly.  After dinner we drove on to Fillmore in the gathering dusk, past the mechanical irrigators spraying the crops.

The next morning we drove through Fillmore looking for breakfast.  The fast food joint next to the motel (Larry's Drive-in) did not appeal, but we found a family-style restaurant by the other freeway entrance.  Driving through Fillmore was odd - there were very few business establishments on the main drag, and a lot of beautifully kept houses, on huge lots.  And nobody on the road or out in the yards, at 8 AM, the place was empty.  I don't know where these people work.  I know where they eat breakfast, though, and so did we.

Breakfast over, we hit the road for Denver.  The drive took from 9 AM until 8:30 PM, but we stopped a couple of times, once to spend almost 45 minutes taking the photos in the gallery, and of course for lunch and dinner (dinner in Vail, very civilized after all the desert pullouts, even indoor plumbing).  If you've never driven through the red rock country in southern Utah, you really can't imagine it - Interstate 70 plunges between nearly vertical red rock cliffs rising (at a guess) 2,000 feet above the highway.  You're climbing steadily, but it looks like you're going down into a canyon.  It's overwhelming.  Sorry, I didn't get any photos of that stretch - the angle was impossible.  But this is a must-see for people who like road trips. 

The Rockies, of course, were green and beautiful but we just wanted to get on to Denver so we didn't stop for photos.  More about Denver in the next installment.

Driving Across Deserts

I've written about this before, on our 2008 vacation, and I think I described the experience well, so I'll just refer to my earlier post, called Basin and Range.  We drove Interstate 80 in 2008, which is a pretty busy road, all told.  On this trip we took Highway 50, and it isn't called "The Loneliest Road in America" for nothing. 

Highway 50 doesn't have the stately ballet of long-haul trucks and cars that I described in 2008, because it has almost no traffic.  On Interstate 80, you're usually in sight of at least a couple of semis and one or two other cars; on Highway 50, not.  So driving this road is a different experience.  You don't take 50 if you worry about breakdowns, or the fact that there's no cell phone service.

Note:  the photos in this post are just a sampling of the pictures at my SmugMug site, in the gallery called Crossing Nevada. You can see them all larger there, too.

Between Fallon, Nevada and the Utah line, there are exactly three towns, Austin, Eureka, and Ely.  However, 47 miles out of Fallon, where Nevada highway 361 peels off to the south, you'll pass Middlegate Station:

I wouldn't call it a town.  I'd estimate the population at maybe 10 (I found a 2006 post that estimated 19), plus some transient bikers and pool players.  This photo shows about 70% of Middlegate Station:

The rest of it is a motel, a gas pump, and a rusty propane tank.  And some abandoned vehicles. 

In all these photos, observe the crowded, built-up neighborhood.  Don't laugh too hard at Middlegate Station - it was a Pony Express stop.  Highway 50 was the Pony Express route.

It's 112 miles from Fallon to Austin, 70 miles from Austin to Eureka, and 77 miles to Ely - total driving distance 259 miles, and then it's another 70 miles to Garrison, just over the Utah border.  So for 329 miles, this is what you're looking at:

This may be why I tend to fall asleep on long desert trips.  I woke up when we stopped in Austin (pop. 340).  Highway 40 is the main street.

Since it's one of the only places in 329 miles with gasoline and rest rooms, everybody stops in Austin, including this elegantly turned-out biker dog we met at the gas station:

Between Austin and Eureka we passed the most interesting thing on this part of the trip:  the Sea to Shining Sea bicycle ride across America.  They were riding from Austin to Eureka that day, and we passed them on the road. All these guys are veterans and some of them are disabled, we passed at least 3 recumbent bicycles being propelled by the riders' hands and arms - and being "covered" from normal traffic by everything from other riders on normal bikes, to a SWAG wagon, to a local cop car.  We originally planned to stay in Austin the first night, but it was full of the Sea to Shining Sea riders, so we had to rearrange the trip.  I didn't get any pictures; I do occasionally take photos of mountains out the car windows but not of anything small and close like a guy riding a bicycle. 

My husband tells me we drove through Eureka (pop. 1,103), but I must have been asleep.  I remember stopping for lunch at the petroglyph site, where I took this:

I was awake driving through Ely (pop, 4,041), but I'm not sure why; this was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and the place was empty.  And empty is what the whole day continued to be, although we did get a glorious view of Wheeler Peak:

On the Road Again

Our vacation this year involved a lot of time on the road.  We began by driving from Oakland to Denver in 3 days.  The scenery was nice, because for this trip you don't take the infamous Highway 80.  We took California route 88 over Carson Pass.

Our trip to Carson Pass went through the Delta, always very pretty, and up into the Sierras, where there was still snow under trees and on north facing slopes above about 6,000 feet.  It looked like this:








More photos of Carson Pass are available at my SmugMug site.  The problem with all this snowy beauty, we discovered when we stopped to take these pictures, was that the only public loo in the entire pass was still buried under 7 feet of snow.  We couldn't even get back to the vista point where it sits.  Fortunately it wasn't that far to the Kirkwood resort, which is open year round and has public bathrooms. 

We had lunch at Caples Lake, which was just beginning to thaw - it's at 7,800 feet.

Caples Lake, I learned on this trip, is part of the East Bay Municipal Utility District holdings - it's the reservoir on the Mokelumne River - and therefore, my husband tells me, is "my water."  I responded that it's the water I drink, which is not the same thing at all.  We sat by the lake in the sun and it was very peaceful - not much traffic on Highway 88.

You come off Carson Pass into the Carson Valley, go up to Carson City where you pick up U.S. Highway 50 to Fallon, then east on Highway 50 across southern Nevada - "the Loneliest Road in America."  There are signs all along the road that say so, if you define "all along" as "in the 3 inhabited areas you pass between Fallon and Ely." We've driven Highway 50 before, it's about as desolate as you can imagine.   Normally, the irrigated pastures outside Fallon would be the last green green we'd see for quite a while; Highway 50 is desert, unmitigated.  But this year all the deserts were very green.

I'm always fascinated by the unmarked dirt roads that lead away from the highway into the distant hills - who goes there, anyway?  I'll talk more about the desert later, when I have some more photos up.

Oil in the Gulf

Talk of the Nation today had a discussion of the Gulf oil spill, following Obama's press conference, discussing who is and isn't doing what.  One of the speakers, by phone from Louisiana, was James Carville - remember the Ragin' Cajun from the Clinton administration?  Mr. Carville is only moderately pleased with Obama:

"For the life of me, I can't believe that he hasn't called the secretary of the Interior on the carpet, and in fact, he didn't know today that they had actually fired - at least somebody finally got fired in this government. That was wonderful."

 and feels he isn't pushing BP hard enough.  Carville specifically wants to see Obama file criminal charges against BP, and sock them with billion-dollar damages.  Listen to the broadcast, or read the transcript; Carville is always entertaining, and he's really fried right now because he's been out in the marshes, and he says there was nobody there cleaning up the oil.  But his final point was this:

... if he [Obama] drops his hammer on BP, who believe - you understand the chairman of the BP board had the utter gall to say, look, we're a big, important company, and the U.S. is a big, important nation. If he made, if he got them to the brink of going to jail and made that company put up billions of dollars to recompense people for this disaster, I think his approval rating would be 75. I do.

Criminal charges for this sort of corporate misfeasance.  Interesting concept, isn't it?  It's becoming clear that BP was cutting corners in every direction.  But it made me think of the corporations insistence that they are "persons" and that their political donations are protected "free speech."  

If a corporation is a person, and has all the rights and freedoms of a person, does it not also have all the responsibilities of a person?  To obey the laws, to refrain from destroying the environment?  A guy in the L.A. area was convicted of setting a major wildfire, and I believe he went to jail.  (But he was just a guy.)  This is worse than a wildfire.  This is turning into one of those events you date things by, like the Kennedy assassination or the Rodney King riots.  We're going to date things by this for a long time, and it's happening because BP put profit ahead of safety.  

If corporations are "persons" before the law, then when they break the law, they should face a court and a jury, just like actual persons.  And if they are convicted, somebody should do some time.  That's what happens to real people.

Foxgloves

The yard is lush this spring.  It should be - it's the end of May and it rained yesterday!  My husband planted some foxgloves in the yard, and we got quite a handsome specimen:

You never know when you're going to get one of these giants.  We had one once that was over ten feet tall; this isn't that tall, but it's respectable.  I stood next to it, and I estimate it's seven feet tall or thereabouts.  The blooms are gorgeous:

 

It's tall enough that it leans rather threateningly across the bed:

Unfortunately, its height was its undoing.  It rained all day Tuesday, and by the end of the day, that elegant stalk was flat on the ground.  It's sitting in a vase on the dining room table now, and we'll enjoy it for a day or two more.

Freedom of Speech

The latest brouhaha in the blogosphere has been sparked by one John Stossel, a columnist for Fox News.  Mr. Stossel has expressed the opinion that a major section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be repealed, to allow businesses serving the public to refuse service on the basis of race.  He may have thought this up himself, although we heard the proposal first from Rand Paul.  His position seems to be that, since "everybody" now knows that discriminating on the basis of race is wrong, businesses that do so will lose customers through the operation of the market.  Since it didn't work that way in the Jim Crow era, I don't know why he thinks it will work now, but he's entitled to make a public fool of himself if he chooses.

I learned of this through a FaceBook "share" of a petition, originating on ColorOfChange.org,  entitled, Tell Fox:  "Fire John Stossel."  The petition is addressed to Rupert Murdoch, and asks him to fire Stossel to "show America that your media company has no place for the values Mr. Stossel espouses."

I agree with the petition originators that Mr. Stossel's (and Mr. Paul's) opinions are offensive.  I also believe they're wrong.  But I'm afraid they (the petitioners) display a total lack of understanding, first of the First Amendment to the Constitution, and secondly of Rupert Murdoch.

I feel quite strongly about the First Amendment.  Like Voltaire, I don't agree with a single word Messrs. Stossel and Paul say, but I will defend to the death their right to say it.  There've been a lot of arguments recently over what does and doesn't constitute protected political speech, but this case is practically the type specimen.  He thinks we should repeal part of a law.  He has every right to express that opinion.  It's a long, long journey from an opinion on a news broadcast and the actual repeal of part of the Civil Rights Act.

If you only allow free expression of opinions that you approve of, you don't support free speech.  Speech is only truly free when it's available to the opinions we despise.  What better way to refute these positions than to state them publicly and debate them openly?  Sunshine is a great disinfectant.

Then there's the petitioners' misunderstanding of Rupert Murdoch, which is quite spectacular.  Mr. Murdoch is a known quantity.  He's been around for a long time.  Fox News allows Mr. Stossel to express his opinions there because Fox, and Mr. Murdoch, understand that controversial opinions sell air-time; and selling air-time is what Fox and Mr. Murdoch are all about.  Are they exploiting the First Amendment for commercial gain?  Sure they are.  So are a lot of people.  And it's perfectly legal as long as all they state is opinion, and they don't try to present it as fact.  I don't know whether Rupert Murdoch personally agrees with John Stossel or not, but it doesn't matter.  Mr. Murdoch's personal opinions are irrelevant; the political slant of the Fox News organization is very clear, extremely consistent over time, and lined up  perfectly with Mr. Stossel's rabble-rousing opinions.

Memories of George C. Hildebrant

I attended a 90th birthday party today, for George C. Hildebrant, the man who directed my high school choir, then called the Napa High School - Junior College Choir.  We should all do this well when we're 90.  He uses a walker, but he stood up and conducted us in singing several pieces.  Most of the people who came had sung under "Uncle Hildy" during his tenure as choral director at Napa High, which began in 1947 and ended in 1966. 

The most amazing and charming event of the afternoon was the appearance of the current Napa High School Chamber Choir.  My friends who organized this told me that the current choral director, Travis Rogers, called them and asked if the kids could come and perform!  And they're a Really Good a capella chorus - beautifully blended, singing as with one voice, everything memorized.  (Some of you who read this will have heard the choirs from Mt. Eden High School, at the Paramount in Oakland; the Napa kids are their equal.)  I looked at their web site, Napa High Choral Boosters, and they're supported by what looks like a pretty standard 501(c)(3) - because, of course, music is a "frill," which we can't afford to support in our schools!  I Googled them,  and they've won international competitions.  They sang a Durufle piece; their director told us they had performed it in Paris, at Notre Dame - a by-invitation trip they took over spring break this year.  They performed two pieces accompanied by a young man with a hand drum; apparently they travel with their own percussionist.

With the current Napa High chorus, we had over sixty years of high school choral tradition represented in that room.  Everybody was crying.  Everybody's life was changed by it.  I can still sing the Hallelujah Chorus from memory (soprano anyway) because of him; we memorized everything.  And we were good - we won choral competitions too.  I still remember the one at UOP in Stockton, with massed choruses walking down the stairs after the final performance, all singing the seven-fold Amen from The Lord Bless You and Keep You, echoing in the roof.

And it all began with George C. Hildebrant.  Roughly a hundred people (not counting the high school singers!) came to this event, from Montana, from Ohio, from New York City, and from all over California, to pay respects to this man who flew bombers over Germany in World War II, and came back from a POW camp to teach generations of people how to sing together.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Hildy.  And as many more as you can make.

Secret Holds

There has been considerable chatter recently about the practice of a "secret hold" in the U.S. Senate, which is preventing numerous non-controversial Obama nominees (among other issues) from coming to a vote in the Senate. A group of senators, headed by Claire McCaskill of Missouri, is trying to put a stop to the practice (see Sen. McCaskill's recent article at Huffington Post).  Given that Missouri is the "Show Me" state, Sen. McCaskill's efforts are incredibly appropriate.  She's written a letter to the Senate leadership, signed by over 30 senators, pledging all the signers not to use secret holds.

It won't surprise anyone that none of these senators is a Republican.

I agree 100% with the good senator from Missouri.   Secret holds are a despicable and cowardly way to do the public's business.  They smack, frankly, of eight-year-old boys in a treehouse, with secret passwords and oaths.  "I'm going to stop the nation's business in its tracks," says the secret holder, "because I have reservations about this nominee or that bill; but - I don't have the cojones to put my name on it.  Why, if I put my name on it and somebody objected, I might not get re-elected!"

Do you people have NO idea how this looks from the outside??  Sen. McCaskill and her fellow signers obviously do.  I'd like to say that this practice is beneath the dignity of the U.S. Senate, except that the members of that body so obviously disagree.  "Secret" anything, with possible exceptions for genuine national security issues (and I have my qualms about that, given the abuses it has covered), is unsuitable for the governing body of a democracy.  The first question you ask about a "secret" is:  what are you people trying to hide??  If the answer is just, "who I am," that's not a reasonable excuse.  We elected you to use your judgment about the best way to govern this country, and now you're afraid to stand up and say what your judgment is.  

I think any senator who hasn't publicly pledged not to use the secret hold should have that used against him or her when re-election time comes.  Both my senators, I'm happy to say, have signed the pledge.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Arizona's New Law

Someone on Facebook asked me if I was upset just because Arizona just wrote a law that is "almost the same as Federal law."  Yes, I am upset about it, because the "almost" is the problem. The exact issue is that the local police are now essentially ordered to enforce immigration law.

Many people don't understand what a local police department does and how it does it. I've been working with the Oakland, CA PD for several years, volunteering in the local Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council, attending the Citizens Police Academy, and now spending an afternoon a week answering phones and filing papers in the Recruiting division. So I'm not just talking through my hat.  I've been out on a ride-along with an Oakland cop.

 

The job of a local police dept. is to KEEP THE PEACE - to prevent crime if possible, solve crime if necessary, and gather evidence to convict the criminals they need to catch.

A critical piece of this job is having the trust of the community they work in. Oakland has major problems with this. Large sections of the community don't trust the police, and it's one of the reasons we are one of the five most dangerous cities in the country. Is that what Arizona wants? Because if the entire Latino population of the state suddenly feels they can't trust their local police, it's what Arizona will get.

Arizona has just passed a law that tells their local police departments, it's more important for you to find and arrest illegal immigrants than it is for you to keep the peace. Good luck with that.

 

And they claim it isn't racist, but it is, because in Arizona, the odds are very high that any illegal immigrant will be Mexican.  That's why this is being called the "Breathing while Mexican" law.   The annoying thing is, the entire Southwest is sprinkled with Hispanic American citizens, absolutely native-born, whose families have been here since the Spaniards came in the 1770s.  Those people will be pulled over too, and they have every right to be angry about it.

 

Consider trying to enforce this law in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The police would have to stop everyone and check papers, even blonds and redheads - the Bay Area has illegal immigrants from Ireland, from the Netherlands, from England, from all over Europe.  I haven't even begun to count the Asian countries from which we probably have illegals.  Now, that wouldn't be racist; but it wouldn't be possible, either.

Actually, I hope that this law won't stand.  The courts have repeatedly ruled that enforcing immigration law is a Federal, not a state, prerogative.  Arizona seems to think their law is different; we'll see.

Goldman Sachs

I've been wondering for several years how Goldman Sachs got to be so influential in Washington.  Marcus Baram documented this at HuffPo in 2009:  Goldman alumni are all over the capital, especially on the financial side.  It's the money, of course; politicians love people with lots of money, because politicians need lots of money, all the time (which is another post, about campaign finance reform; but I digress).  And there's the general assumption that if you have a lot of money, you must be really smart.  You'd think the case of Bernie Madoff would alert people to the alternative explanation that, if you have a lot of money, you may actually be really crooked.

Goldman Sachs pissed off a lot of people during the bailout; here they are, the richest firm on Wall Street, and we the U.S. taxpayers, who are losing our jobs by the gross, have to come up with billions of dollars to bail out the banks so Goldman can keep paying its people multi-million dollar bonuses.  They paid the money back to the government; but it's the principle of the thing.  As far as I'm concerned, no man is worth the kind of money Goldman pays out in bonuses, I don't care if he's spinning straw into gold.

You've probably seen the latest development in this, but if not, here's a nice analysis from the Washington Post:  "Goldman executives cheered housing market's decline."   When the subprime mortgage security crash was taking down the economy, Goldman Sachs was betting both sides of the table.  They were selling tottering CDOs based on subprime mortgages with one hand, and shorting the housing market (that is, betting that it would fall) with the other.  The 9-year-old version of this is, "Heads I win, tails you lose."  And Goldman won, really big.  They're about to appear before the SEC, to discuss how closely they really did work with the hedge fund manager who was cherry picking mortgage pools he was sure would fail, so he could bet against them after Goldman sold them to their institutional customers - like, your pension fund.

Goldman Sachs used to be a private partnership.  They went public in 1999, which allowed them to raise big money by selling shares in the stock market, without losing very much control over the firm.  This also did two things for the men who ran the firm:  it made them a barge-load of money, and it made them employees instead of partners.  Partners are personally liable if a partnership fails.  Employees just take the money and run.  I wonder if any of the old-line Goldman partners are regretting that IPO now.

I worked in the financial industry (not for Goldman, ever) most of my professional life.  It's a very strange world, and it's gotten much stranger over the last 20 years, as the lobbyists and the Republicans colluded to remove the restraints on financial firms that FDR put in, for damn good reasons, in the '30s.  I want that financial regulatory bill to pass, but it isn't good enough.  I want the Glass-Steagall Act back.

Somebody's Backyard

Irony is always arresting if not necessarily always funny.  The irony this Earth Day is the burning oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, on which NPR is reporting regularly.  I heard a clip about it on Morning Edition today.  The fire is now big enough that it shows on satellite images.  If you listen to the clip, you'll hear industry analyst Scott Burke (sp?), of Oppenheimer, say this:  

"The good thing about being offshore is that it's far enough away that you're not going to be polluting somebody's backyard, or it's not causing any potential danger to a neighborhood or anything like that, so politically I think the fallout should be relatively contained."

I listened to the clip about 5 times to make sure I quoted him accurately.  Is that what you really think, Mr. Burke?  As long as nobody sees this mess when they look out their kitchen window, it'll all be fine.  The 11 missing oil rig workers are just a cost of business.  

Look, BP isn't polluting somebody's back yard, here.  They're polluting everybody's back yard.  The oil slick from this thing is now one mile by five miles in size.  We call the seas by different names, but essentially the Earth has one ocean.  This is one localized instance of the general fouling of our own nest that we've been doing for 200 years.  We've actually been doing it for a lot longer; but only in the last 200 years have there been enough of us using efficient enough tools that we can really do a thorough job.  Throwing the soup bone out the door into the yard, while mildly messy, isn't in the same class as spilling five square miles of oil in the Gulf of Mexico - and besides, the dog will eat the bone.  Apart from some bacteria (which we should be cultivating for this) I can't think of anything that eats petroleum.

Everybody's fussing about whether humans are or aren't responsible for climate change; of course we are.  It's just a special case of the larger practice we've had for the last 200 years of dumping everything we have no immediate use for out into the world we live in.  As I said, we're fouling our own nest.  We're the only animal that does.  The trouble with Mother Nature is that she always bats last.  If we make the world too hot and messy for the human race to continue to live in, we will die; but Mother Nature will go on.  She has no opinion about the relative merits of a world inhabited by us versus a world inhabited by cockroaches.
 

Training the Lab Techs

The local media have been full of the situation at the San Francisco Crime Lab lately.  For you out-of-state people, SFPD discovered that one of their drug analysts may have been poaching the evidence, which led them to realize that a number of other things were wrong.  The best summary I've seen recently is in this post from www.officer.com - I'm not surprised that the professionals have an eye on this.

In one sense, this is off my turf; I don't live in San Francisco.  But I do live in a town with major budget problems and an understaffed police department.

The situation was discussed for an hour last week on Michael Krasny's Forum, on KQED-FM.  As I listened, I heard several people comment that the lab had some of the latest greatest analytical equipment, but they'd never turned it on; they hadn't even calibrated it.  The panelists spoke as if this was some inexplicable, possibly even deliberate, failure by the staff.  "They kept using their older, less accurate methods."  

Nobody on the panel seemed to understand why this should be.  I can explain it, and it's very simple.  This lab had 3 people doing the work of at least a dozen, against absurdly short deadlines (48 hours; read the summary).  They had the latest equipment because somebody in the city-and-county arranged funding for the latest equipment - but the staff couldn't spare the time to get trained on it!  With only 3 people handling between 13 and 19 cases a day, when the norm is around 2 per day, they barely had time to go to the bathroom!  I'm not surprised that their lab protocols were sloppy and their records weren't kept properly.  I'm not even surprised that amounts of cocaine somehow "disappeared."

The only good thing about this mess is that Chief Gascon has taken full responsibility for it.  But I hope the city budgeters, here and elsewhere, can remember that it does no good to buy the latest, fanciest equipment for a staff so overwhelmed it will never have time to learn how to use it.

Second Thoughts

I've never found a way to go back and do anything over.  What's done is done.  But I wish I hadn't allowed my bad mood last night to make me sign that Facebook petition.  This is the one that says:

SIGN THE PETITION ON FACEBOOK: Tell the Republican Party to STOP Inciting Tea Party Racism!

Doing this has gotten me into several uncomfortable conversations, and I'd like to clarify my stance.  Also, I started getting fan posts from the group that originated it, and I find I don't agree with them on a lot of points; I'm no longer a "fan."

I don't actually claim that the Right, as a group, is "racist." I do claim, I think justly, that certain people who publicly identify themselves as "the Right" have acted in a way that most people would consider racist. I consider shouting "n*gger" at a black Congressman, and "f*ggot" at Congressman Barney Frank, outside the halls of Congress, to be racist and bigoted (and incredibly discourteous) acts, and I'm appalled by it. 

And I haven't even gotten to the bricks thrown through various Congressmen's windows, for the crime of passing a health insurance reform bill; or the propane gas line someone cut, at the address published as belonging to another Congressman.  The address and the propane line turned out to belong to the Congressman's brother, who has 4 kids under the age of 8; it could have killed them all.

What really appalls me is the fact that nobody in the Republican Party hierarchy - and for that matter, nobody in whatever hierarchy the Tea Party has - has stood up and said publicly, this is not the behavior by which we want to be identified. Not even (unless I missed it overnight) Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who, dammit, IS black! I have to assume this IS the behavior by which they are, at least, willing to be identified.

I'm incredibly sick of both sides screaming invective at each other instead of talking. Give me some of those old time politicians, like Tip O'Neill and Lyndon Johnson (not to mention California's immortal Jesse Unruh), none of whom ever screamed invective at anybody.

And while I'm on the subject, I know whom I blame for the total decay of civility in politics over the last 10 years or so.  You may not recognize the name; he stays much in the background.  But I blame Rupert Murdoch.  Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News.  Fox News commentators Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck - and now Sarah Palin - make a lot of money for Mr. Murdoch by encouraging their listeners to think in violent, apocalyptic, one-sided terms.   Check out Sarah Palin's chart of Democratic seats she wants to "knock over", marked on a map with - gun sights.  These Fox News commentators are rabble rousers; and boy, have they successfully roused them.

The Single Number

Why is the human race so fascinated with single numbers for evaluating things?  The classic is "your IQ number" - a single number that's supposed to sum up "how intelligent you are."  Leaving out all the extended (and valid) criticisms that IQ tests are culturally biased, Stephen Jay Gould made it clear (in his book The Mismeasure of Man, 1981) that "your IQ number" is an artifact of the mathematical methods used to analyze the scores from IQ tests.  The researchers could have chosen to use a multivariate method that returned several scores - they chose to go with The Number.

Look at your credit score.  Whether you can get a loan or a new credit card depends on The Number, compiled from your financial history by Fair, Isaac & Co.  A whole industry of financial advice has grown up to teach people how to "tweak" their FICO scores, because of the influence of that Number.

Probably the most devastating Single Number we've had to deal with recently was the output of the Gaussian Copula formula developed by David X. Li (see Felix Salmon's Recipe for Disaster in Wired Magazine, 2/23/09, for a detailed analysis).  As the article will explain in probably more detail than most of you want to read (I still recommend it), Li's formula produced a single number that allowed traders to estimate the risk of default on extremely complex financial debt instruments.  It didn't, as it happened, account for all the possibilities - specifically a broad fall in overall house values.  But most of the people who used it to guide their day-to-day trading didn't understand it well enough to gauge its limitations.  It was quick and easy to use, and it gave them The Number.  And here we all are.

We do this all the time.  It's a regular habit.  I don't know if it's because we're intellectually lazy (most of us are, of course), or because we have a mystical faith that "the experts" must be right.  But we'd be much better off if we questioned these Numbers more closely, and perhaps didn't assume that they are an absolute guide to The Truth.  The idea that you can get The Truth from a single Number is just - too good to be true.
 

Don't Make Me Keep Repeating Myself

So in this morning's news, three Americans were shot and killed in Ciudad Juarez.  They worked for the U.S. Consulate there.  The Washington Post says the FBI, the DEA, and other inhabitants of the alphabet soup are down there trying to figure out why.  

I can tell you why.  They got across the Mexican drug gangs somehow, that's why.  And why are the Mexican drug gangs so nasty?  Because of all the money they want to make, selling marijuana and cocaine to rich (by comparison) addicted Americans, whose country is stupid enough to consider being addicted to chemicals a crime instead of a medical problem.  Stupid enough to allow alcohol and nicotine to be sold legally to adults but to throw people in jail for a small amount of crack or Mary Jane.  The "reefer madness" folks are destroying the country of Mexico by keeping this stuff illegal here.

This isn't new information, people.  We did this before in the 1920's.  We made alcohol illegal in 1920, and in the 13 years before we came to our senses and legalized it again, the bootleg trade turned the United States into one big shooting gallery - the kind with bullets.  Albert Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity; what does that make the "war on drugs"??  The war on booze created a lucrative black market, and the bootleggers shot up each other and everyone else in a war for control of the money.  Has the war on drugs done anything different?  No.  Then why are we still doing it?

The last time I ranted about this, it was only Al Qaeda.  ("Only" Al Qaeda!  Yikes!)  Al Qaeda is one of the biggest drug dealers in the world.  They are shooting up, in partnership with the Taliban, the entire country of Afghanistan, which we, I point out, are trying to return to civilization and the rule of law.  How are they supporting this full-scale war effort??  With the proceeds of the opium trade, which they are selling, in part, to - us.  (Some of their heroin goes to Europe, yeah; but some comes here.)  That in itself is stupid enough.  But Afghanistan is on the other side of the world.  This mess on the Mexican border, that's our neighborhood - and it's only a matter of time before we start finding beheaded corpses on American side streets.  

The only answer to this is legalization.  All of it.  Every damn mushroom, herb and chemical.  All of it legal, all of it regulated by the FDA, all of it taxed (we could use the revenue), and on sale at Walgreen's.  Or in specialty stores.  There is no profit in the drug trade if you can buy the drugs over the counter in the corner store.  After 1933 when booze was legal again, the crime didn't go away - crime never goes away completely - but the bootleggers went out of business, and it dropped way back.

Am I in favor of addiction?  Certainly not.  And it would be morally imperative for us to use some of the law enforcement dollars we'd get back, when the cops don't have to arrest everybody who has couple of joints, on education and rehab.  Is addiction good for a society?  No.  But some low level of addiction, dealt with as a medical, public health problem, would be better than what we have now.  We are one of the biggest markets for illegal drugs in the world.  If we legalize everything and regulate it, we will take the profit out of the trade. And the trade will go away if it isn't profitable. 

We'd still have problems with teenagers.  We have problems with teenagers and booze now.  That's the nature of teenagers.  But our insistence on classifying drug use as a moral failing, as a crime, instead of as a medical problem, is killing us.  In Ciudad Juarez today, it's killing us literally.

I'm being published!

This is mildly amazing to me.  Late last year, the Cal Alumni Association group on LinkedIn sent out a call for submissions - the Association plans to publish a literary anthology of stories about student life at U.C. Berkeley, written entirely by U.C. alumni.  Authors had to attend after 1960 - they only want stories since 1960.

OK, I attended Berzerkeley during that period - I was there from September 1963 through December 1968.  So I decided to write up my memories of the Free Speech Movement.  I drafted the account, pared it down under 700 words as required, went over it a few times, and - sent it off.  That was the day after Christmas.  Checking my email archives, I see they told me originally that they notify me "by the end of the month" - of January.  I didn't hear from them, and it slipped my mind.

Today, I got an email from the coordinator - they've accepted my piece!  I'm going to be published in an actual book, with pages and covers!  I'm not getting paid for this, but what the hey.  I've sent back the signed Contributor Agreement - now to sit and wait for a publication date.  I guess I'm an author.

Random memories of New York

Checking some incidents in my travel diary, I found this note from one of our subway trips, which I just have to share verbatim:

Our trip down was enlivened by a young man (18? 23?) who spent the entire trip tying his yellow Spongebob Squarepants tie in a full Windsor, without bothering to button his collar or tuck in his shirttail.

Children's Libraries

Joyce Carol Oates' reminiscences of her childhood in upstate New York contained many memories of the library in the neighboring county, where she had a library card courtesy of her grandmother.  I remember a library like that when I was a child, with the children's room downstairs, and the adult library, up the stone staircase, accessible only with written permission from one's parents.  This was the Goodman Library, now the home of the Napa County Historical Society.  The Goodman Library and the Lockport Public Library had one thing in common:  neither was a Carnegie.  The Lockport Library was built by the WPA, and the Goodman was designed by a local architect in 1901.

The photo on the web site was taken on a bright sunny day, but if you look at the architecture of the Goodman Library, you'll realize why my memory word for this building is "dark."  The photo is carefully cropped, but there were buildings right next to the library on either side, and the windows in the front faced more north than anything else, so direct sunlight in the building was rare.  Ms. Oates mentions the smell of her library, but I don't remember the Goodman smelling of anything but dust and old paper.  I worked as a librarian for 17 years, and I don't recall ever using "library paste"!

When I was between 7 and 12 years old, I shuttled back and forth to the Goodman on my gearless Schwinn bicycle every 2 weeks, the number of books I checked out limited by the capacity of the bicycle basket between the handlebars.  The 1950 Census data shows that the city of Napa in 1950 had 13,579 residents, 98% of them "in households."  Traffic on the city streets wasn't heavy, and stop lights were few, even on Jefferson, then as now the main north-south route through town, although then there was no freeway alternative a few blocks to the west.  My route this time was up E Street to York Street, right to A Street, right again on Jefferson and across the creek.  From there I had a choice of routes, but I usually crossed Jefferson onto Calistoga, Polk, or Clay and then cut across to the library, rather than going all the way down to 1st Street; even then I preferred back routes, and I still do.

Looking at Google Maps for downtown Napa, I see the "Napa Old World Inn Bed and Breakfast," right in the bend of Jefferson Street, across from Calistoga.  In fact, there's quite a collection of B&B's in that area.  What I remember from that area is the basement apartment where my grandmother lived, right on the bend.  This was what we now call a "soft story" house, a three story stick Victorian with a garage on the first floor, next to a wooden staircase climbing a full story to the porch and front door.  Sometime in the early 1950s (Grandma Ivy died in 1957, when I was 11), my parents decided that a house containing them and 2 children under 10 was too small also to contain two grandmothers - one somewhat deaf, the other annoyed by loud noises.  So they arranged for the grandmothers to move to small, separate, apartments elsewhere in town; and Grandma Ivy moved into the converted garage, after MUCH persuasion from Dad.  She fussed and fumed that she was being "kicked out" - and then she discovered that she was alone for probably the first time in her entire life, and she loved it!  I remember the concrete floor, from my visits - our house had a wooden floor, so a concrete floor was very unusual.  And cold.

But I digress - I was talking about libraries.  I don't really remember the children's library at the Goodman very well, though I know I used it; because as soon as I could persuade Mother, I got permission to climb the stairs and use the adult collection.  Those were daunting stairs (the place had at least 10 foot ceilings) for a 9 year old kid to climb.  The psychological barrier of putting the adult collection upstairs was immense (in addition to giving the librarians a choke point to control access!).  But I climbed them, and discovered Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Alexander Dumas and all sorts of other fascinating authors.  This was before libraries put plastic covers on books, so the covers of the books in my bicycle basket were always a little scuffed; I rarely read new books, and I still rarely read new books.  If a bestseller is still considered "interesting" ten years after publication, I may consider it.

Oddly, this dislike of new books is why I rarely go to libraries any more, although I always vote for library funding.  Libraries have to carry the new books and they only have so much room; so if you like older authors, as I do, you have to collect them yourself.  My collection of early-to-mid 20th century detective stories is better than any library's I've seen in recent years.  Also, of course, libraries now can barely keep their doors open.  We are cutting our own throats, as a democracy, if we restrict access to public libraries.  I wish I thought we would wake up and realize this.

Childhood Solitude

The latest edition of Smithsonian magazine has a fascinating article by Joyce Carol Oates, entitled Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again, in which she reminisces about her childhood in upstate New York, next to the Erie Canal.  I read it with increasing interest as I realized how much my own childhood had in common with hers.  She's eight years older than I am, so her childhood was in the 1940s while mine was in the 1950s, but our experience was very similar, although she grew up on a working farm in New York state and I grew up in a small California town, Napa.  It's a fascinating article and I won't try to quote it in depth - go read it yourself, it's worth your time.  But something struck me that I want to talk about.

She spoke of all the time she was able to be alone, to explore the woods and fields near her home, and of walking alone to school.  For some years she actually rode a Greyhound bus seven miles to school in a nearby town, standing alone by the highway to wait for it. 

I too remember walking alone to school, even to elementary school:  up the long block of E Street, past York Street to the short blocks of Georgia and Spencer Streets, across Jefferson (a major street, I was to be very careful and look both ways as there was no stop sign), up long kitty-cornered Legion Avenue, then left on Brown Street, past the winery warehouse, and over to Lincoln School.  No one thought anything of a ten year old child walking to school alone in 1956, a point Ms. Oates also makes.  The only time I had to take a bus to school (NOT a Greyhound!) was to junior high; I attended two different junior highs, both too far across town to walk to.  I don't remember why I had to change junior high schools.  But the high school, again, was within walking distance, six blocks down York Street.

I'm sure some parents now allow their children time to go out alone and discover who they are and what they can do; but the children attending the elementary school in my neighborhood are only rarely alone.  Usually they have Mom or Dad or both; often the entire family.  And many of them don't walk; the cars clog my neighborhood streets as parents drop children off or pick them up, and the parking spaces fill up with SUVs and minivans. 

I always liked to go out and walk along the railroad track, looking at the unbuilt world, more than I liked walking on the sidewalks.  I walked on the sidewalks to get places; I walked on the railroad track to think.  I spent as much time as I could around "the creek," another good place to think - I learned much later that it was Napa Creek, a major tributary of the Napa River.  It's built up now, and the railroad track is a 4 lane street, but the area I lived in, south of the old High School, was semi-rural then; I remember before the sidewalks went in, when the entire area was bisected by an active railroad, that ran freight cars past our house; the tracks crossed the creek on a wooden trestle, massive wooden supports dripping congealed black tar.  Of course we put pennies on the tracks to see them mashed flat, but after a few pennies it loses its fascination. 

The creek was across an alley and a field; in the first 10 years or so of my life there, the field was actually farmed by a man called Mr. Massa (or Massey?), who plowed it with a horse, a big black mare (if I remember right) with a white blaze.  The horse lived in a pen next to a big fig tree, and we used to go and feed it figs, although we weren't supposed to go on Mr. Massa's property.  I don't know if feeding the horse convinced me that figs weren't "people food" or if I subconsciously thought that figs belonged to Mr. Massa, but it was forty years before I tasted them and realized that I love figs! 

Behind Mr. Massa's field was the creek, which my dad pronounced "crick."  The creek fascinated me because it was wild.  No houses faced on it where I lived.  It was screened by a row of trees and blackberry bushes, and when you scrambled down into its 20 foot deep bed, you were alone.  Of course we weren't supposed to go there, especially alone.  It was the resort, we were told, of "tramps," although I never saw anyone but an occasional neighborhood kid.  There was a rope swing on one of the big old trees, over the only really deep pool.  The later in the year, the lower ran the creek, until September or October when it was down to a few stagnant, scummy pools.  In a rainy winter, those 20 foot banks ran brimful of muddy, fast-moving water, and it was dangerous; we didn't go there in winter.  Farther downstream, people had built houses next to the creek, and winter storms undercut some of them badly - I don't recall if one ever actually washed away, but I've seen some that had to be abandoned or moved.

I envy Ms. Oates her Erie Canal.  I would have loved to have an actual canal to look at, with real boats on it, when I was a child.  But I made do with "the creek."  Unlike Ms. Oates, I didn't explore the town, but I had my own little patch of wild at the creek, to go and be alone in.  I wonder how a child can grow up today with no chance to spend time alone, thinking.

The February garden

The early tulips are up.  In fact, the winter garden looks pretty nice right now. I took a few photos of some of what's blooming right around the patio. Click on the photo to go to the full gallery.

Keeping the City Going

Oakland, like many cities, is broke.  The outgo is bigger than the income, and what do we do about it, especially when we have contracts with the city workers' unions that guarantee high salaries, benefits, and pensions?

Well, now we have an example of what we might do about it.  Colorado Springs, it seems, has the same problem Oakland does, only smaller - a $28 million shortfall in its budget. Oakland's deficit is $100 million, but then, we're a bigger town.  Colorado Springs citizens resoundingly voted down a proposed tax increase to cover the deficit, so Colorado Springs is - shutting down.  According to a recent article in the National Post, the city is:

• Turning off every 3rd streetlight.
• Cancelling bus service at night and on weekends.
• Stopping park maintenance, draining municipal pools, closing city recreation centers and museums.  (Not that you could swim in Colorado Springs right now anyway, but you get the picture.)  These facilities will have to find private support to stay open.  They're asking citizens to bring lawn mowers and mow the grass in public areas.
• Removing trash bins from local parks.  Haul your picnic garbage back home, slobs.
• Offering police helicopters for sale on the Internet (from the Denver Post).
• Laying off firefighters, beat cops, the vice squad, the burglary investigators.
• Stopping payment for street paving, relying on a regional authority.

You know, I always thought that you lived in a city because you liked the amenities - the paved streets, the parks, the rec centers, the museums.  And because you liked the public safety - the street lights, the police and fire protection.  If a city isn't going to provide any services, why should you live there??  What do you get?  The residents of Colorado Springs are still paying property taxes, you bet your bippy.  In fact, while the city is doing all this, it's also spending millions to keep the U.S. Olympic Committee's headquarters in Colorado Springs, which is not sitting well with some residents.  At least Oakland isn't doing that - no, wait, Ron Dellums just started angling to keep the A's, that's our equivalent of the Olympic Committee HQ.

I don't know what the answer is here.  Cities, like a lot of people, have developed the habit of spending the money they think they ought to have, instead of the money they have, which is almost always a smaller amount.  Somehow we have to break that habit, and go back to more frugal practices; but nobody wants to hear that they can't have all the perks they're used to.  Come to think of it, Oakland is now doing some of what Colorado Springs is - cutting park maintenance, for example.  And OPD is already understaffed.

If you live in Oakland, there's a city budget meeting next Tuesday, Feb. 16.  You have an interest in this.  If you're interested in some possible solutions from other citizens, take a look at the letter Make Oakland Better Now! sent to Jane Brunner as city council president - you'll find it here.  We have to solve this.  I just don't know how.

Men in Pants

Dockers has been running an ad campaign, which culminated at the SuperBowl in a field full of chanting barelegged men, urging men to "put the pants back on."  Context clearly implies that this means, "Become more manly.  Get back in charge."

Considering that most men in most places throughout history have not worn pants (the pants we now know were invented a little after 1800), this is just silly.  The warriors of early medieval Scotland were feared all over the island; they wore long tunics, a form of skirt.  A few centuries later, the Highland regiments in the British army had a reputation similar to the U.S. Marines today - the Highlanders wore kilts, a form of skirt.  For that matter, ever seen a picture of a Roman warrior?  Knee-length tunics, with an overskirt made of leather flaps with bronze armor attached with studs.  The Roman army conquered its world, and held it for centuries, and they did it in skirts.  

If you want to argue about masculinity, self-esteem, and being in charge, then argue about it; but it has absolutely nothing to do with who wears the pants.

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!