They Never Learn

In the fall of 2008, I wrote a couple of posts (The Sorceror's Apprentice, What a Week) about the joys of credit-default swaps (CDSs), a wonderful financial instrument which lets you take out insurance against the issuer of a bond going broke and failing to redeem the bond.  The amusing thing about CDSs was and is that you don't have to own the bond to buy the CDS - in effect you can bet on a bankruptcy that you have no other stake in.  This instrument was part of what brought down the world financial system over the next two years.

I'm therefor Not Amused to discover that JP Morgan Chase has just lost $2 billion through the actions of a rogue trader (nicknamed "The London Whale") who was betting on - guess what! - right, CDSs. 

This isn't the first time a large bank has lost a huge amount of money due to the actions of a single inadequately supervised idiot, or does anyone else remember the name Nick Leeson?  Nick Leeson's bets brought down Baring's Bank, which had successfully done business as a merchant bank since 1765.  The bank was broken up and no longer exists.  I'll be interested to see what happens to JP Morgan Chase, especially since it is one of the 4 or 5 "too big to fail" companies that the U.S. Government has evidently decided they'll have to subsidize.

It is true that Nick Leeson was trading currency futures, while the London Whale, whose name is Bruno Iksil, was trading CDSs.  But they both made the same mistake.  They told themselves they were "hedging," which is supposed to be a respectable activity for a bank.  As Wikipedia puts it, "A hedge is an investment position intended to offset potential losses that may be incurred by a companion investment. In simple language, Hedge (Hedging Technique) is used to reduce any substantial losses suffered by an individual or an organization."  Sorry, as practiced by these loosest of cannons, hedging is just another word for gambling:  you have investment A, which may go down, so you also buy investment B, which you expect to go up.  Do you know it will go up?  No, you don't.  This is gambling.  The house always wins in gambling; I suspect Mr. Iksil forgot that JP Morgan Chase is not the house.  The market as a whole is the house.  And ultimately, nobody wins.

The other issue here is, why did nobody at JP Morgan Chase know what this wildcard was up to?  Questions are popping up all over the press; I linked Yahoo Finance, but just Google "jp morgan loss" to see the scope of this.  I hope we'll see an answer to that in days to come.

In March 2009, I wrote an article called Evaluating Risk, which summarized a much longer article in Wired Magazine on "the formula that killed Wall Street" (except, of course, Wall Street isn't dead).  Bankers and investors have been plagued by risk for centuries.  In recent decades, brilliant mathematicians have thought that they could measure risk mathematically, and they developed this formula which was supposed to measure risk and reduce it to a single, simple number.  Thereafter, the financial industry assumed they had control of risk.  And the whole subprime mortgage crash happened because bankers thought they could divide risk up and pass it off to others so it wouldn't hurt them. 

This was a lie.  The formula didn't cover all the possible assumptions.  We will continue to be plagued by this sort of crash until "Wall Street" finally admits that what they do is gambling, and that the risks ultmately cannot be controlled.  That means crashes will be around for a long, long time.  Because they do not learn, as this mess shows yet again.

Killing Bin Laden

On the one-year anniversary of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the government has chosen to release some of the documents they captured in Abbotabad, which, with the President's night trip to Afghanistan, has revived the subject.  The general summary from NPR today, of the official documents just released, suggests that Bin Laden was frustrated because the regional jihadi groups kept killing Muslims, thus destroying Muslim support for Al Qaeda, and he felt that he didn't have control over them.

Another story published recently was Truthout's Exclusive Investigation:  The Truth Behind the Official Story of Finding Bin Laden.  This article (which is quite interesting) claims that in 2003, the active directors of al-Qaeda isolated Bin Laden in his Abbotabad hideout, and essentially removed him from "command" of al-Qaeda operations, on the dual grounds that he was (a) physically not well and required care, and (b) a total loose cannon whose ideas where impractical and dangerous.  After reading the Truthout article, a friend of mine posted the following on Facebook:

Hmm. So it seems that the killing of Bin Laden was a completely empty gesture? "bin Laden was not the functioning head of al-Qaeda at all, but an isolated figurehead who had become irrelevant to the actual operations of the organization."

The Truthout account sounds plausible, but it concerns me, because as I read it, it is based on information from a single source, retired Pakistani Brig. Gen. Shaukat Qadir.  Gen. Qadir apparently knew large numbers of both ISI operatives and local militants, because of his long military career, and they all seem to have repeated everything they knew to him.  (Great security.)  If you assume that these sources always told Gen. Qadir the truth, and that he repeated what they said accurately, the story is significant; but those are two large ifs.  Also, frankly, I'm not sure the extent of Bin Laden's control over Al Qaeda over the last few years really matters.

Was it really necessary for the U.S. to assassinate Osama bin Laden?  I believe it was.

Bin Laden was the driving force behind the World Trade Center attacks, even though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did (or says he did) the actual operational planning.  If the World Trade Center attacks had been organized and carried out by a country, they would have been an act of war.  They were the second attack on U.S. territory by a foreign power since the bombing of Pearl Harbor (after the World Trade Center attack in 1993), and one of only a few in the history of the nation.  The casualties were higher than at Pearl Harbor, and worse - 3,000 civilians died in New York, whereas 2,402 military personnel died at Pearl Harbor.

Having been attacked, I believe the United States had to respond.  When President Bush attacked Afghanistan (because the Taliban, ruling Afghanistan, were publicly harboring Al Qaeda) the world supported the action as self-defense.  Unfortunately, Bush and his cabinet soon began planning the insane attack on Iraq.  At that point he lost world support, and the action in Afghanistan took second place to the Iraq war.

Fast forward to the beginning of last year.  President Obama has been in office for 3 years, he is pulling the last troops out of Iraq (finished Dec. 2011).  Osama bin Laden communicates less frequently than he once did, but he's still there, and he was and is the man symbolically responsible for the September 2001 attacks.  President Bush, after talking repeatedly about "getting" bin Laden, ultimately failed to do so.  President Obama now has intelligence that suggests Bin Laden may be in the house in Abbotabad.  What does he do?  We know what he did do:  he authorized a highly risky operation by the Navy Seals to go in and "take" bin Laden.  The Seals say that bin Laden resisted them with arms when they broke in, and they shot him.  Given the Seals' training, this was predictable, although I heard an interview on NPR that suggested they would have taken him alive if he had obviously surrendered.  The point is moot.

What if the President had not sent the Seals?  Bin Laden would have stayed in Abbotabad, probably communicating less and less, and eventually died.  But the man responsible for killing 3,000 civilians in September 2001 would be free and would die a free man.  The symbolic message to the rest of the jihadi world?  You can attack the United States with impunity.  We won't come after you.  The U.S. is a paper tiger - as bin Laden is said to have believed.

It would have been irresponsible of a U.S. President to allow that message to stand, if he could alter it.  The message now is:  attack the United States, and we will hunt you down if it takes a decade.  The operational effect on Al Qaeda may well have been minor; the symbolic importance is overwhelming.

Should we have taken bin Laden alive and tried him in the U.S.?  If we could, yes.  Could we have done it?  I doubt it.  For one thing, I don't believe he would have surrendered.  If we had captured him alive, we couldn't have tried him in civilian courts - we attempted to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the New York courts, and New York refused to host the trial on security grounds.  We would have had to try bin Laden at Guantanamo, which would have tainted the entire proceeding.

If somebody slugs you in the nose, you can choose not to respond, at which point the attacker may or may not hit you again.  No one is at risk but you.  If a group attacks a nation, and kills a number of its citizens, can the government of that nation reasonably say, oh, how sad, we wish it hadn't happened, and take no action against the attackers?  I don't think so.  The rules of engagement with the worldwide jihad are being made up as we go along, but one of the things a government is supposed to do is defend its citizens from attacks by outsiders.

Sheriff Mirkarimi, Shut Up

For more months than I care to remember, I've been reading the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage of the Ross Mirkarimi case.  For those of you not so informed, here's the 50,000 foot view:

S.F. Supervisor runs successfully for County Sheriff.  Sheriff-elect, not yet in office, grabs wife by arm and bruises her in a heated dispute.  Wife complains to neighbor, who videotapes her (including bruise).  Neighbor takes video to police.  Sheriff-elect says it's a "private family matter."  Sheriff-elect indicted for domestic violence, cops a plea for unlawful imprisonment, takes office.  Mayor suspends sheriff pending Ethics Commission Review.

San Francisco's well developed and active domestic violence prevention community went ballistic at that "private family matter" remark.  This is what domestic abusers always say, it's the classic response.  It hasn't been legally true in the U.S. since 1871, although enforcement has been very variable around the country.  The sheriff-on-leave has gone public recently in several detailed and vocal defenses of his position.  If you really want to read the details, just Google "Mirkarimi" - I don't think there's anyone else in the news with that name right now.  He was even on Michael Krasny's Forum on KQED for an hour.

I have one piece of advice for Sheriff Mirkarimi.  Sheriff, button your lip and zip it up tight.  Shut your pie-hole, and let your lawyer do the talking.  Because you convict yourself every time you open your trap.

Mirkarimi thinks his problem is that the mayor has unjustly suspended him from "his job," and referred his case to the Ethics Committee.  He has problems, but that isn't one of them.

His first problem is that he doesn't think he did anything really wrong.  He's apologized.  He's taken responsibility.  He now thinks that everyone should forget and forgive him, if he only explains himself enough.

His bigger problem:  he doesn't realize (or won't admit to himself) that the Sheriff's job isn't really "his."  The Sheriff is an elected official in San Francisco.  He ran for the job and won; the people voted for him.  Ask yourself if he would have won that election if this incident had happened, say 3 weeks before election day.  You know the answer. I don't think he's ever considered the question.

Why do I care?  I don't even live in San Francisco.  I care for two reasons.  One, I have close female relatives who have been abused by their husbands.  I've never been a victim, but I know victims.  And this guy reminds me of those men.  Two, I care about even-handed law enforcement.  And you can't have a man enforcing the law who thinks it's OK for him to break it, as long as it's just a little chip off the edge.  If the crime involved here was theft, or murder, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.  But it's only domestic abuse, so we get to listen to the Sheriff try to explain how misunderstood he is.

No, sir.  You are not misunderstood.  I understand you all too well.

Reconciliation??

The first step in learning a new choral piece is to read the text through, several times.  The Oakland Symphony Chorus just began preparing Ralph Vaughn Williams' Dona Nobis Pacem, a cantata written in 1936, between "the war to end all wars" and the "world war."  (For those of you in the S.F. Bay Area, we'll perform it on May 20 at the Scottish Rite temple in Oakland, with the Oakland Youth Orchestra.)

In the context of the recent incident in Florida where a "neighborhood watch captain" followed and shot a young black man returning from a convenience store, the text of the third movement of our new piece struck me. 

Before I get to that, I want to say that as a community policing volunteer in Oakland, I am disgusted by George Zimmerman.  Any real Neighborhood Watch volunteer would know his neighbors well enough to be aware of their visiting relatives, and would understand who "has a right" to be walking around in the neighborhood.  That's what Neighborhood Watch is about.  George Zimmerman appears to have had no idea that "his" gated neighborhood could legitimately have a young black man walking around in it - which means he didn't know the neighborhood very well, did he?

But I digress.  A lot of Dona Nobis Pacem is set to poetry by Walt Whitman.  I had forgotten how great Whitman's poetry is. The third movement uses this eloquent text:

Reconciliation

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly, softly, wash again and ever again this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin -- I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Does George Zimmerman really feel that Trayvon Williams is not "a man divine as myself," merely because the face in the coffin is brown and not white??  If he does, what a terrible judgment on us all that we allowed him to learn to think that way.

Stop Calling It Birth Control

Part of the issue with those pills that only women take is that "birth control" - preventing pregnancy - is only part of what they do.  It's a big part, but it isn't the whole Megillah.  They really are a daily adjustment of a woman's hormone balance.  In fact, the wonderfully named site LadyPartsManual.com calls them HBC - hormonal birth control - as opposed to all the other possible birth control methods.  LadyPartsManual is doubtful about HBC - those hormones can have unpleasant side effects, too.  But on balance their impact on a woman's life is positive.

Here is an article from WebMD explaining the long list of other reasons women might sign up for that monthly packet of bubble-wrapped pills, even if they don't actually have a sex life at the time:

Other Reasons to Take the Pill

I personally have used the pill for at least two of those reasons.  Google "other reasons to take birth control" and you'll see a whole list of similar citations from all sorts of sources; WebMB, as far as I know, is a purely medical site.  I also know from experience that, even if you really don't want to get pregnant, the symptomatic relief of menstrual symptoms that the pill gives can be nearly as important to your personal life.  For a very balanced discussion of the issues, read Beyond Birth Control, from the Guttmacher Institute.

It's impossible to discuss this topic from either side without sounding sexist.  The human race comes in two genders, with totally different plumbing and hormonal environments; and in my experience, neither side understands the other's situation very well.  Some men in particular don't even seem to want to understand the implications of living in a body that bleeds for a week every month (associated with pain that sometimes stops you in your tracks)  - it's yucky and they'd rather not think about it.  Sorry, guys, I'm going to horrify you and talk about it.  For a single woman who doesn't get paid unless she goes to work, the ability to control serious menstrual distress so she won't miss a day can be critical.  Believe me, many employers will fire you if you miss one day of work a month.

Wikipedia's article on the menstrual taboo cites a 1981 study which found (emphasis mine):

A substantial majority of U.S. adults and adolescents believe that it is socially unacceptable to discuss menstruation, especially in mixed company. Many believe that it is unacceptable to discuss menstruation even within the family.^[5]

This attitude is still around thirty years later, and may explain something that has puzzled me:  except for the Catholic bishops, most of the men who have been ranting about the evils of contraception are married.  They have wives, and I guarantee you, those wives either menstruate now or have previously done so.  Do their husbands actually not understand about this?  Have they never discussed it?  Given the attitudes revealed in that study, maybe they don't.  Which raises the issue, maybe they should.

The most annoying feature of this debate is that the who-pays-for-health-care issue is being drowned in the screaming over whether women should be able to decide not to have babies for awhile.  The real issue isn't contraception - it's contraception that is paid for by health insurance.  And in this Presidential campaign year, it's contraception that must be paid for under the new health care law. 

The argument comes down to this: are we willing to provide hormone therapy treatment for all women, or only for women rich enough to front it themselves?  Which would include the wives of the men who rant about paying for contraception for poor women because it infringes their religious freedom. 

We have the most rationed health care in the world:  health care rationed by luck.  Are you lucky enough to work for an employer with a paid plan?  You're in.  Are you self-employed and not very well off?  Do you work for a firm too small to pay for a plan?  You're out.  And if you're out and need serious health care, you either won't get it (and may die), or you will get it and they'll bill you directly, at a rate several times higher than they charge the insurance plans they deal with (which will bankrupt you).

Are we willing to pay for the health care that everyone needs, when they need it (and at the same rate for everyone), or shall we continue as we are?  That is the question, ladies and gentlemen.  That is the question.

Polychoral Splendors

Have you ever heard a 40 voice choral piece?  No, not 40 singers singing 4 or 8 parts; 40 singers, each performing a separate individual part.  That's what we heard last night.

When my husband bought us tickets for Cal Performances' Polychoral Splendors of the Florentine Renaissance, I mostly noticed that it featured His Majestys Sagbutts and Coronets (that's pronounced "SACKbutts", by the way).  I didn't realize until I heard the pre-concert lecture that we were attending the 21st century premieres of three choral works that haven't been performed since the sixteenth century.  None of these works has less than 40 voices, and one of them has 60.

That's right.  Sixty separate vocal lines, each sung by one singer.  From the program notes:  "... to experience the important spatial dimension of many choirs that are physically separated, a 16th-century version of 'surround sound' that is almost impossible to reproduce effectively on recordings."  (Although they did record the concert; and if it's ever on sale, I'll buy it.)  In Berkeley's First Congregational Church, we had the acoustics we needed.

The story behind this concert is absolutely fascinating, but it's also quite long, so I'll refer you to the concert program notes, which you can find online at Cal Performances.  (Warning:  it's 3.5MB.)  In very brief, it's based on conductor Davitt Moroney's scholarly research into "gigantismo" - the suggestion that in the mid-16th century, there was more than the one known instance of choral works written for 40 or more voices.  His research uncovered three of them, two from the court of Cosimo de Medici, in Florence, the third from Spain.  This was all part of the amazing flowering of art that produced the great visual treasures of Florence - who but Cosimo de Medici could have afforded a sixty-voice choir?  In fact, the pre-concert lecture noted that when Alessandro Striggio's mass, Missa sopra "Ecco sì beato giorno", was composed, there were only 5 places in Europe where it could be performed:  Florence, Vienna, Hamburg, Rome, and Madrid.  My composer can write more choral parts than your composer.

Listening to this music is like looking at a renaissance tapestry.  It's incredibly detailed and dense.  It isn't polyphony, there's no fugue.  The separate parts blend together into a sonorous wall, with brief illuminations as a soprano or a tenor soars above the sound and then blends back in.  I've never felt so much that I was in the presence of another age.  The sound was overwhelming.

I particularly liked the 40-voice canon on the Ten Commandments - ten 4 voice choruses, each singing the same canon 10 times.  When the 10th chorus comes in, all the choruses are singing all the words of all ten commandments at once (in Latin hexameter verse).  You'd think it would be total chaos.  In fact it's a brooding, introspective piece that is amazingly soothing.  You can't understand the words but you're supposed to know what they are.

Oh, the Sagbutts.  That's a proto-trombone, in case you didn't know.  They had a whole family of them, I particularly enjoyed the Gabrieli Canzon primi toni which they performed.  The really significant one was the grand bass sackbutt - I never could quite see the whole thing but it was so huge I wondered how long it was.  Wikipedia says that the double-bass or "Octav-Posaun" sackbut was pitched in A in Michael Praetorius' day, but the modern version is in B flat.  My husband, a former tubist, says that means the fully extended tube is 32 feet long, and the extended slide is probably 10 feet.  It had a "pusher" attached, because the slide is too long for a man's arm to extend fully.   Still according to Wikipedia, the only modern copy of the only surviving 17th century double-bass sackbut "is currently owned and played by Wim Becu," and that was the name of the performer last night.

Astounding music, all around.  Do read the program notes.

Life, Death, and Rules

This isn't the post I started to write last night.  In the interval, the power of the Internet has manifested itself again, and the Susan G. Komen Foundation has agreed that it made a mistake, apologized for cutting funding to Planned Parenthood and agreed to restore it.  Apparently (as happened with SOPA/PIPA a few weeks ago), when we all rise up on Facebook and Twitter to complain, they actually do hear us.  Most of what I read on Facebook yesterday was about this.

It all began yesterday when the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced they had decided to drop funding to Planned Parenthood ($600,000 a year, used only for breast cancer screenings) because Planned Parenthood is under investigation by Congress, some of whose members suspect it of illegally using federal funds to perform abortions.  We have a new rule about donating to organizations being investigated, the Foundation said.  We're just following our rules.

I'm not the only Planned Parenthood supporter out there who thought this was nuts; or the only one wondering, if they were just following the rules, why they hadn't pulled the plug on their $7.5 million dollar grant (for breast cancer research) to Penn State, currently under investigation for ignoring child sexual abuse.  Is providing abortions really worse than ignoring pedophilia?  What a question.

Now that the Komen Foundation has been bombed out of a position that no one with any sense would have occupied in the first place, I want to consider some of the issues this incident raised.  The whole thing is a classic "be careful what you ask for" - one side effect was an absolute avalanche of support for PP, which the Komen folks probably didn't intend.  But it made me think.

In a fit of anger, I wrote this on Facebook:

The anti-abortion people essentially state that they would rather allow poor women (the only ones this affects) to die of breast cancer, than give them any opportunity at all to get an abortion, for any reason.

This was unfair to the majority of anti-abortion people, of course; that's the trouble with writing, or speaking, in anger.  But the Susan G. Komen Foundation's decision appeared to take exactly that position.  They said they were stopping funding for cancer screenings because PP was "under investigation" - but Karen Handel, the Komen Vice President for public policy since last January, who is staunchly anti-abortion and who has said that since she is "pro-life, I do not support the mission of Planned Parenthood," is reported (in an article in The Atlantic) to have driven the decision to create the rule about being under investigation, for the specific purpose of defunding PP. 

So, which is worse - a woman dying from breast cancer or a fetus being aborted?

The trouble with the abortion issue is that there are two lives involved - and each side of the argument insists that only one of those lives is important.  But when you bring breast cancer screening into the equation, in the way the Komen Foundation did, you turn it into a decision on who should die - the mother, or the child. But that's a fool's game, because any child's welfare depends on a living, healthy mother - not one who dies of (or even spends years fighting) breast cancer.

Americans don't like to talk about death.  I suspect that our culture feels if we can just be a little more brilliant and inventive, we can make the whole thing go away.  But we can't.  Sooner or later, all of us will die; the only question is when, and how.  That child saved from abortion by defunding evil Planned Parenthood?  Will die; the only question is when, and how.  The mother with breast cancer?  Will die; in her case, the question is, will she die sooner of cancer or later of something else.

I don't know anyone anywhere who thinks abortion is a good idea.  It's a last resort tool.  The anti-abortion side tends to demonize women who have abortions; I know some women who have had them, and the decision is, always, wrenching.  I'm not going to argue either side; those arguments are unwinnable.  But I want to point out that against the 3% of its time that Planned Parenthood spends doing abortions, it spends 35% of its time providing contraception, mostly to women who couldn't normally afford it - which has probably prevented more abortions than any right-to-life group in existence.

I'm glad that the Susan G. Komen Foundation has changed its mind.  I'm afraid they will find that, even after changing their minds and doing (what I consider) the right thing, they've lost some important credibility.  And only time will show what this has done to their donor base.  Everyone will now look at them and ask, now what?  And that's too bad, because they've done serious good in their day and may still do more.  Ms. Handel is still at the Foundation.

A path to civil war

USA Today published the following quote, from the AP:

BEIRUT (AP) – A senior Russian diplomat Tuesday said a draft U.N. resolution demanding Syrian President Bashar Assad step aside is a "path to civil war," as Syrian troops besieged rebellious areas with hours of shelling and machine-gun fire.

I have one question.

What do they think is going on in Syria right now, anyway?  It looks like a civil war to me.

I don't suggest that we should all crank up the armies again and pile into Syria the way we did into Libya.  But if Russia thinks what's going on in Syria right now isn't a civil war, I'd like to know how they define one.

Tracking the Money

The city of Oakland is facing the loss of $28,000,000 from its general fund, caused by two outside events:  One, Governor Brown eliminated redevelopment agencies in this year's state budget, and Two, the state Supreme Court ruled that the "give-back" the Legislature crafted, which would have let cities and states "buy" their redevelopment agencies back, was unconstitutional.  So - there goes the Redevelopment Agency money.

Why is this causing such consternation in Oakland??  Because they were using the Redevelopment Agency money  for general operating funds, that's why.  In addition to the 159 people who actually work for the Redevelopment Agency, the city was using those funds to pay, or partly pay, for positions all over the city, including (this one staggers me) half the mayor's salary!  What??

Why do they do this?  I've seen this before.  In the early '70s, I worked for the San Jose Public Library.  At that time, Lockheed-Martin was a major employer (pre-Silicon Valley), the economy was booming, the bucks were rolling in.  (Also pre-oil shock.)  And the city of San Jose, having found that citizens were always happy to pass bond issues, had developed the habit of funding basic operations (among other things, the library) out of those bond issues - so as not to have to engage in ungentlemanly conversations about, you know, taxes.

Then Lockheed-Martin lost a big contract.  In the intervening 40-odd years, the details of the disaster have escaped me; but I distinctly remember that they laid off what seemed like half the Santa Clara Valley, and the next bond issue that came up for a vote died like a skunk on the freeway.  And suddenly the city had payroll obligations that it didn't have enough general fund money to meet.  And citizens who were even less likely to vote for new taxes than they had been when they were approving bonds.  I forget what gyrations they used to solve their problem; I didn't lose my job, the city of San Jose still has a library.  But this all came back to me when I heard that the city of Oakland was paying half the mayor's salary with redevelopment funds.  (If I keep repeating that, it's because I still can't believe they did that.)

The cases in the two cities are identical.  They couldn't get the taxpayers to raise taxes enough to pay for what they wanted to spend (and the San Jose case was before Proposition 13, they only needed a majority), there was this other money "lying around," so they used it.  They ignored the fact that, technically, the other money had another purpose they were legally required to use it for.  I would love to hear the justification for paying half the Oakland mayor's salary out of redevelopment funds.

The minimal good news out of all this, for Oakland today, is that the new City Administrator has devised a plan to consolidate services and remove duplications, including eliminating a number of "jobs" that weren't actually being performed by anyone, and will be able to correct the situation by laying off no more than 105 people (out of just over 3,000) and not closing any libraries or senior centers.

This is the first glimmer of fiscal responsibility I've seen in Oakland since before we elected Ron Dellums.  God bless Deanna Santana.  The mayor (and previous city council member) has tried multiple times to get citizens to vote for property tax increases, without success; and she didn't succeed because none of us trusted the city to spend the money in a responsible and prudent way. We all suspected the city government was full of duplicated services and overstaffed departments, and if we gave them more tax money they would just continue to throw it away.

The new budget is responsible and prudent.  I'm still not ready to vote for a property tax increase.  But if Ms. Santana stays around and continues to talk turkey about consolidation and simplification, some day I might consider it.

On the other hand, the city council hasn't accepted the new budget yet.  Maybe it's too soon to relax.

Why I Oppose SOPA and PIPA

Who could be in favor of Internet piracy?  For the record, not me.  But PIPA and SOPA are not only about Internet piracy.  (For the record:  SOPA is the house bill, PIPA is the Senate bill.  Any law would have to be a combination of the two.)

In the interest of the free Internet, I will do something that could potentially be illegal under SOPA/PIPA:  I will quote two extended discussions of the legislation from other blogs.

Yesterday on the global blog Crooked Timber (which I'm delighted to learn about), blogger Maria Farrell posted this:

Because Freedom isn’t Free: Why We* Blacked Out Crooked Timber
Yesterday

This is a detailed and thoughtful analysis of what could easily happen under SOPA/PIPA to almost any blog.  Including this one.  And it wouldn't even have to be anything I did:  if any poster on Blogger were to post allegedly pirated content, the attorney general would legally be able to - shut down Blogger.  All of it.

If this seems extreme, read this from Chris Heald at Mashable yesterday:

Why SOPA is Dangerous

Heald analyzes in detail exactly what's so threatening about this legislation, with links to the actual bill, so you can read it for yourself.

But this is my blog, so here's why I think this is wrong, based on reading these two sources (and other sources, but these were the best):

It is so broadly written that all anyone would have to do to shut down a web site, any web site, would be to file a complaint with the attorney general that the site was "facilitating the commission of copyright infringement."

Section 102(a)(2) permits the attorney general to take action against foreign sites (i.e., sites that do not fall under U.S. jurisdiction) if “the owner or operator of such Internet site is facilitating the commission of [copyright infringement].”

And as you notice, it doesn't even have to be a U.S. site.  This is the United States trying to impose its own legal structure on the entire world.  Must be okay because we're just trying to get criminals, right?

There is no definition of "facilitating" in the bill.  Here's the actual definition in SOPA (for the record this is sec. 102):

(a) Definition- For purposes of this section, a foreign Internet site or portion thereof is a `foreign infringing site' if--

(1) the Internet site or portion thereof is a U.S.-directed site and is used by users in the United States;

(2) the owner or operator of such Internet site is committing or facilitating the commission of criminal violations punishable under section 2318, 2319, 2319A, 2319B, or 2320, or chapter 90, of title 18, United States Code; and

(3) the Internet site would, by reason of acts described in paragraph (1), be subject to seizure in the United States in an action brought by the Attorney General if such site were a domestic Internet site.

That's it. That's the entire definition.  That means that a site is a "foreign infringing site" if the attorney general says it is.  Don't let the code sections they list fool you.  There is no standard of proof in this act.  There is no way for a site to prove that it isn't "infringing."  You are infringing if someone says you are.

This disturbs me deeply.  This is another step toward the end of the rule of law in this country, following on the legalizing of indefinite detention of U.S. citizens in the N.D.A.A. recently.  Even more disturbing, the attorney general is only required to make a cursory attempt to locate the owners of the site before starting proceedings.  (Read the Mashable article, and the bill, if you don't believe me.)  So your totally innocent site could be blocked and you might not find out until you tried to go there yourself.

And they're doing this based on bogus numbers.  The GAO concluded about a year ago that commonly quoted "government statistics" on internet piracy can't be validated and appear to have been mostly made up:  see this article by Nate Anderson in ArsTechnica on a GAO review of commonly published piracy estimates:

US government finally admits most piracy estimates are bogus

 

If you haven't already done it, I urge you all to contact your representatives in Congress and the Senate and ask them to oppose these bills.  Sure, Internet piracy is wrong, but this isn't the way to fight it.

In and Around Whistler

I'll admit I wondered about visiting a world-famous ski resort in the summer.  After all, don't you go to a ski resort to ski?  But the mountains around it are gorgeous, and when there's no snow you can hike.  There actually was snow, above about 5,000 feet - on the peaks, around 6,000 feet, it was quite snowy.  It only rained on us one day, and one of the days we were there was glorious - sunny and warm!  I'd say the activities we saw the most of included snowboarding (at appropriate altitudes, of course) and mountain biking (everywhere!).

The gallery On to Whistler starts with some photos I took on the drive from Powell River; waiting for the ferry at Saltery Bay I got some shots of a bald eagle, who was just hanging around the ferry terminal waiting for something edible to come along:

We watched the ferry come in and dock, a very slow and stately process.  We've gotten so used to cars and airplanes that we forget how long it takes to make a boat do anything in the water:

At Langdale I got some shots of seagulls from above, they were cruising below me, looking for garbage (sorry, but it's true):

I don't have a lot of photos of Whistler itself, the town just isn't that photogenic.  I've written about the bears we saw in another post, they have their own gallery.  The day I enjoyed the most was the nice day, when Jim went on a strenuous hike and I strolled around Lost Lake, a lovely lake that you can get to on the bus.  Here's Lost Lake from part way around, you can see the beach:

The high points of Lost Lake were the female merganser duck, with her five very small ducklings riding on her back:

 
I got several more photos of the ducks, and some very beautiful shots of the lake edges, but the other highlight was this fellow:

That, my friends, is an osprey, who hovered overhead long enough for me to get several other photos!  All the photos are at the gallery Lost Lake, for your viewing pleasure.

More Template Problems

I was still more annoyed to learn that I can't modify the design and layout of my blog template anywhere except in the Chrome browser.  Trying to rearrange the layout in FireFox just doesn't work.  Grump.  For now, this will be my now blog template.  I still want the old one back but it isn't going to happen.

Be Careful What You Ask For

I've lost my nice template.  I tried one of Blogger's new templates just to see what it looked like - it looked crappy - and now I can't get my old template back because it doesn't fit in their "new" system.  Damn.  Watch this space.

A Christmas Hike

Somehow, hiking at Sibley Regional Park seems to be a good way to spend a sunny Christmas Day, when my various physical issues allow it.  My photo site shows that I did this in 2009, too.  Last year, no, but this year the new knee is doing great, the ten year old knee is cranking right along, and the weather is clear and cold.  And smoggy, sigh - we haven't been able to have a fire in the fireplace for days.  You can see the smog obscuring Mt. Diablo in this photo from Volcano Trail:

I set out to hike around the Lafayette Reservoir, always a pretty trek; but when I got there I couldn't park.  On Christmas Day, of course, there was no human taking money for parking; and the machine was apparently taking people's money and not producing a parking voucher.  By the time the 3 of us in line realized this, the last of the coin-metered spots was gone.  Phooey, I thought, I'll go to Sibley; it's on the way home anyhow.

I've recently learned how to get into Sibley the back way, up Old Tunnel Road to the Quarry Road.  Here is the Quarry Road:

This looks flat, but I assure you, it isn't - the Quarry Road is roughly a 10% grade, and you climb it for a 390 foot elevation gain in about 3/4 mile.  This takes you to the beginning of the Volcano Trail; and it took me 50 minutes, mainly because I kept stopping to pant.  (Asthma.)  Sibley has several dead volcanoes and I've never gotten up to them before, so I was determined to do it.

The back end of Sibley is astoundingly silent.  You can hear small birds rattling around in the underbrush.  Way off in the distance you hear a dim roaring sound that represents the rest of the Bay Area; but for much of my 2 1/2 hour hike there was nobody there but me, and no sound but my steps and my breathing.

There were other people there; in the first half of the trip I ran into roughly a dozen people and 4 dogs.  This is dog walking country because for much of it you can let the dog run off-leash.  I was leaning over putting my jacket in my backpack, when suddenly I had a tan muzzle in my face - somebody's friendly mutt.  The owner apologized; no harm done.

There were more people (and dogs!) around in the second half of the trip - they came in from the main park entrance on Skyline, where you don't have to climb a continuous mile to get anywhere.  There had been horses quite recently but I could only see their traces.

I walked part of the Volcano Trail (another 75 foot elevation gain for a total of a little over 450 feet), stopped carefully at all the numbered points of interest and read the descriptions in the park map.  There's no steaming caldera, these are dead volcanoes.  There are several very dark red tuff formations (heated by the lava, says the map):

There's no great philosophical message here, just a pleasant three-mile hike on a brisk day.  I got some nice bird photos at the beginning of the Volcano Trail, here's one:

You can see the rest of my photos in my new gallery Christmas Day at Sibley 2011.

Interpreting A Christmas Carol

During a recent online discussion of whether Dickens' A Christmas Carol is really a "great activist story for the Working Class" (imagine an adaptation inspired by Occupy Wall Street), I was asked offline to post my opinion of the book, by someone who isn't familiar with it.  This seems a reasonable thing to do on Christmas Eve.

For those not familiar with the story:  Ebenezer Scrooge is a very rich and successful Victorian businessman, not noted for his philanthropy.  ("Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?")  On Christmas Eve he is visited by the ghost of his dead business partner, Jacob Marley - who tells him that he (Marley) is damned forever, and he (Scrooge) will also be damned forever unless he changes his ways.  Marley has arranged for Scrooge to be visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, as a way to encourage him to change.  In the course of the visits he does change, and the book ends happily.  Terrible synopsis.

First of all, if you really have never read this book, read it.  It isn't long, it's available at every library, and it's a world classic.

Second, although the book is full of poor working people being treated poorly by the rich, the book isn't about them.  They're there because that was the world Scrooge lived in.  If you want a slightly different take on the same period, read the detective stories by Ann Perry, especially the ones about William Monk - they're set in the 1860s, about 20 years after Dickens' book, but it is the same world.

The center of A Christmas Carol is Ebenezer Scrooge, who has great wealth, but no happiness and no friends, at least in the sense we usually speak of friends.  He is tolerated at best and feared at worst, even by his relatives.  All his adult life he has focused on himself, his wealth, and his mastery (he's clearly proud of his skill at business).  At the peak of his career, that's all he has.  The ghostly intervention of Jacob Marley is meant to give him a second chance - a chance to reconsider whether his wealth and power are really so valuable that he should devote all his attention to them.

The three Ghostly Visitors show Scrooge events from Christmases in his past, from the Christmas being celebrated at the time by people he knows, and from a Christmas which may be celebrated in the near future.  In the course of all this, Scrooge changes his mind about charity and compassion - as Dickens means him to do.  In changing his mind, he changes his present and his future, and is happily absorbed into a society that values him for his willingness to be charitable.  I don't mean that he's willing to give away money, although he does; I mean that he comes to view other people, poor people, as human beings like himself ("fellow passengers to the grave"), worthy of his compassion and his help.  In Dickens' day, people still understood "charity" as being derived from caritas, or altruistic love of others.

The real statement of A Christmas Carol is that the worst of us can change.  No matter how evil we are, if we truly choose to do so, we can become something better.

I'm on thin ice here, because I haven't reread the book yet this year; but the really interesting thing about it is how "non-Christian" it is.  I don't recall that Scrooge changes because he's what we would now call "born again."  There's no mention of accepting Jesus as his savior.  Jesus is mentioned, if at all, in passing as a model of how a compassionate man would act.  Scrooge is "saved" because he chooses to change, and does change.  It is a story of personal redemption, after what must be the weirdest intervention in fiction.

Bears, Oh My

No lions or tigers, I'm sorry to say.  Almost the first thing we did in Whistler was to go on a "bear viewing tour" led by one Mike Allen, a local self-taught bear researcher.  This involved driving around Whistler Mountain and then Blackcomb Mountain in an SUV, looking for bears, and stopping to take photographs when we found them.

I think there may have been some misunderstanding about the best time to find bears; we found I believe one bear on Whistler Mountain in over an hour of searching; then we drove over to Blackcomb Mountain and found four of them - two hanging around the luge track (Whistler hosted the 2010 Winter Olympics)!  Wilderness bears, right.  Nonetheless, it was a very interesting afternoon, Mr. Allen was extremely knowledgeable about bears, and we saw places we'd never ordinarily get to.

This is the best bear photo I got, if not the most handsome bear:

This scruffy soul was foraging around uphill from the luge track - in fact, on the luge track platform.  The photo is sharp because we were only about 20 feet from him; he never even looked at us.

It's harder than you think to photograph bears, especially on an overcast day.  You have to use telephoto, which reduces the light available for the shot, which makes it grainy; and you're pushing the limits of the image stabilization (I refuse to carry a tripod around), so it's also kind of fuzzy.  This one, of the "matriarch of Blackcomb Mountain," came out pretty well:

Mr. Allen said she's lived there over twenty years.  The other good shot I got was this guy, a yearling who was foraging around below the luge track, near the road:

The rest of my bear photos are at my gallery Bears!.

A Good Deal

Today being Thanksgiving, tomorrow is Black Friday - the day the Christmas sales officially start.

Personally, I hate to shop, and shop only to replace things I need.  I rarely buy anything on impulse (and often regret it when I do); and I certainly never go near a store on Black Friday, because I dislike crowds.  Boy, am I in the minority.  This year some stores (yes, Target, I mean you) are actually opening on Thanksgiving Day itself, in hopes of squeezing a few more dollars out of the ravening hordes.  Someone wrote an appalling "be grateful you have a job, punk" editorial in the Twin Cities StarTribune (Target's home town), after a part-time Target employee put up an online petition asking Target not to open quite so early, please, so he could have a Thanksgiving with his family.

People are camping out in front of stores, hoping to be first in line for the deal.  A friend of mine posted a shot on Facebook of a bunch of people in tents, lined up outside a Best Buy - which was still open...

Why are we so fixated on getting things cheaply?  What ever happened to paying a little more to get good quality?

I concede that a lot of people have to count pennies these days.  In their cases, standing in line for sales is a reasonable choice.  But most of the people I hear quoted in the news seem to be focused, not on getting something they normally couldn't afford, but on buying anything at all - as long as it's on sale.  As long as it's cheap.  It's a game - how much can I get away with?

If you don't need it, it isn't cheap, now matter how much it's marked down.

And it's a self-reinforcing downward spiral.  The lower the price of an item, the less the workers who make it generally get paid, labor being a major cost.  When the price goes low enough, the amount the workers can get paid is less than the amount you can live on.  The factory closes and reopens in China, or Vietnam, or Mexico, paying local wages.

When you're competing on labor price with people who think $50 a week is a lot of money, you have to be able to live on $50 a week yourself.  Yes, I'm over-generalizing, but not by much.  I'm not the only one who thinks that's why so many manufacturing jobs are now in China, or Vietnam.  In fact, some of the manufacturing jobs are moving out of China - Chinese workers are starting to ask for higher wages!  Wages for Indian computer programmers started rising a decade ago.

The same principle applies to buying from small local merchants, as opposed to stores like Walmart and Target.  The merchandise from the little guy will never be as cheap as the big chain can price it, because he can't buy in that volume.  But you almost always get better service from the little guy - isn't that worth a little more?

If you refuse to buy things except at the lowest possible price, you will eventually destroy your own ability to make a living.  Henry Ford understood that his factory floor workers were also his customers; many firms these days have forgotten that. (It wasn't widely understand it then, either - a lot of people thought Ford was raving crazy to pay those wages.)  And then they cry that the American Consumer isn't spending enough.  The American Consumer has either been out of work for awhile or is wondering how long she'll have a job.

Shop the local stores.  Pay a little extra for "Made in America," if you can find it.  And Happy Thanksgiving.

The Flick Creek Fire

In 2006 we decided that driving to Washington state to visit Lake Chelan would be interesting.  Lake Chelan is a relatively narrow, very long lake in eastern Washington, mostly surrounded by the Lake Chelan National Recreation Area.  We planned to stay at Stehekin, a small resort near the head of the lake, reachable only by boat (or emergency helicopter) from the town of Chelan at the foot of the lake.

We left on July 23 - you've probably forgotten, but in late July 2006 we had a record-breaking heat wave (at least, for then) - according to my travel diary (and USA Today at the time), it was all over the U.S. and southern Canada.  Californians expect temperatures in the 100s when driving up I-5 in the summer, but we usually expect them to drop quite a bit when we cross the Oregon border; no such luck.  My diary says it was 102° when we stopped for lunch at the Lake Shasta overlook, and that's typical of the trip but not of Lake Shasta.  It took us 3 days to get to the town of Lake Chelan, and I don't think it dropped below 95° degrees the entire time; and I nearly got heatstroke touring a (very beautiful) garden we stopped to see.

So on July 26 we took the Lady of the Lake II from Chelan for the four hours it takes to get to Stehekin - the jet boat does it in one hour, but this is the local, it stops about 4 times to offload and onload passengers and mail.  I'm almost sure I remember a bunch of kids heading for a Christian retreat, located up the lake on the west shore, past the last point you can drive to.  Stehekin is on the east side, and driving isn't even a remote option.

By two in the afternoon we had moved our stuff into the cabin.  The cabin was not air-conditioned (although the cross-drafting was very good); the temperature was still knocking against 100°, somewhat mitigated by a strong and steady north wind from the head of the lake. We walked over to the visitors' center and read the notices about the Tinpan and Tripod fires, burning some distance away.  Then we walked out and looked south and saw - smoke. 

I thought it was smoke from the Tinpan fire, and went for my camera, but by the time I got back it was very clear that this was a brand spanking new forest fire, less than 3 miles away and on our side of the lake, driven by 100° temperatures and a wind I estimate at about 20 MPH.  Here's my very first photo of the infant Flick Creek Fire:

We'd been there less than 4 hours.  By evening the fire was 1,000 acres.  Here's a later photo I took that day:

We actually stayed our scheduled two nights.  The saving factor was the wind; it never once slackened or shifted, and it blew the fire away from us, and of course the first thing they did was saturate the area right near the resort, with helicopters dumping lake water.  Nonetheless, the jet boat I mentioned was taken out of daily service and berthed in Stehekin for the rest of the time we were there.  Just in case.  By the time we left the fire was over 3,000 acres, and it was still smoldering as we passed it on the way out:

The rest of my photos of the area and the fire are in my gallery The Flick Creek Fire.

I'm not sure I recommend Stehekin, although they don't have fires every year, I'm sure.  The food was mediocre and low on fresh produce - almost everything they cook has to come up the lake by boat.  The cabins are, well, spartan.  But the surrounding area is stark and beautiful - mixed forest, some pine, some broadleaf, very dry and dusty.  It has a small permanent community of people for whom the wilderness is more important than the availability of cars or dry cleaners, who don't mind sending their kids "down" to Chelan to boarding school past the 8th grade.  If you like being a long way from civilization, this may be your spot. 

Baroque Opera

We had an unusual treat last Friday.  We attended a performance of Handel's Xerxes, one of the forty-some operas he composed and put on for the delight of 18th century London.  Handel's operas are unusual now because, well, the male leads tend to be sopranos.  Georg Friedrich was nothing if not fashionable, and the height of opera fashion in his day was the castrato. It's very hard to find castrati these days, so Handel operas have a lot of women singing male roles, although you do get the occasional counter tenor.

The singing - all the music - was wonderful; never having attended a live opera at the opera house, I was fascinated to discover that they do not amplify the singers.  No lapel mikes here.  This means you actually have to listen to them; and because the War Memorial Opera House has fabulous acoustics, you can hear them, at least where I was in the orchestra section.  But you will not be deafened by an amplified orchestra, as we were when we saw Wicked.  If you're interested in the details, including the names of the cast and more about the plot than you could ever need to know, it's all on the S.F. Opera's web page for Xerxes.  In fact, you might still be able to get seats - as I write this there are 2 performances left.

Most of Handel's operas were tragedies, opera seria, but Xerxes is a comedy.  (This may be why the premiere bombed in April 1738; the audience was Not Amused.)  Xerxes the king (sung by a soprano, originally by a castrato) and his brother Arsamenes (sung by a counter tenor, but originally sung by a woman soprano!) are both in love with Romilda, the daughter of a general.  Romilda (sung by a woman, phew!) is in love with Arsamenes.  Romilda's sister Atalanta (another soprano) is also in love with Arsamenes and is willing to lie, cheat and steal to get him, and she does.  There are a lot of sopranos in this cast.  In fact, the only  non-sopranos are Elviro, Arsamenes' servant (a bass), Ariodates, Romilda's father (a bass), and Amastris, Xerxes' official fiancee (a contralto).  Amastris has come, disguised as a soldier in Xerxes' army, because she can't bear to be separated from him, only to discover that he plans to jilt her for Romilda. Amastris as sung last Friday is the most masculine presence on the stage, and sings several fabulous arias, swearing revenge.

If this sounds like something you might have seen on Days of Our Lives, only with royal courts and good singing, you're right.  It's actually worse - I don't think anyone in Days of Our Lives ever declared their love for a tree, but when the opera opens that's what Xerxes is doing.  And he's doing it in an aria that I've known for years without ever realizing what it really was:  it's called Ombra mai fu, but if you know Handel's music at all, you know it as Handel's Largo.  I'll never hear the Largo quite the same way again.  In the next scene, Romilda entertains the court with a charming aria explaining how silly it is that Xerxes is in love with a tree, Xerxes hears her and is smitten, and off we go. It's bad luck to make fun of the king.

In the third act, Arsamenes, who thinks Romilda has betrayed him, and Romilda, who thinks he has betrayed her, have a major lover's spat which, of course, is a soprano duet.  Sorry, in a soprano argument, the female has the bigger voice - the counter tenor is all in his head voice.

I had a wonderful time.  I've always loved Handel's music, and here was a whole evening of it, brilliantly performed, with gorgeous costumes and hilarious staging.  The chorus was gray - they wore grayface makeup, gray clothing, gray caps.  They moved around in a stately way, being the crowd, and singing a couple of short pieces.  A small group of stagehands was made up as servants, in whiteface, bald, wearing black clothing with white collars, stockings, and shoes, and walking in perfect step to rearrange lawn chairs and other furniture, move giant Assyrian statues in and out, and so forth.  Nobody but the soloists ever displayed any expression of any sort, they were like statues.  I'm sorry, but Arsamenes' costumes too often looked like pajamas, maybe it's the way he wore them.  The one with the gorgeous 18th century male costumes is Amastris - I'd love to have that hat!  And that voice, and that lung power!

Mayors

Oakland has had quite a string of mayors, the last few years.  We had Jerry Brown, who wanted to be in charge so bad he pushed through a change to the city charter to give us a Strong Mayor.  Then we had Ron Dellums, who almost never exercised the powers of the mayor at all (and who rarely even appeared in public).  Now we have Jean Quan, who seems - scattered.

The good news about Quan, after Dellums, is that she goes out and about, she talks to people - there's even some evidence that she can listen to people.  But she doesn't seem to understand what being the mayor entails, and I don't think I've ever seen a public figure so blind to how her actions look to other people.

So this has me thinking - what does being a mayor entail?  What should a mayor do??  If we wrote a job description for the mayor (not a bad idea, come to think of it), what would it say?  In fact, I was going to do a whole blog post on what is a mayor - and then in today's Sunday S.F. Chronicle, the inimitable Willie Brown said it all for me, and better than I could:

Jean Quan, frustrating everyone, must take charge

(Note:  this is the column from October 30, 2011, so if the link takes you to a different column on a later date, look for it in the archives.)

Looking at the Occupation

My curiosity got the better of me today, and I rode the bus to downtown Oakland to take a personal look at the Occupy Oakland encampment.  It was a nice day and I wanted to see it for myself.  I just missed the parade, with shouting and signs, by (I think) the SEIU. 

The camp looks about the way the photos look.  Lots of tents all over the lawn, pitched elbow to elbow, on a base layer of straw.  People asleep in tents, and on the ground in front of them; people sitting and standing around talking.  Dogs, with and without leashes.  A plastic bucket full of cigarette butts.  A group down in the little arena, arguing.  A man with a sign, shouting.  A tent labeled Acupuncture.  Of course, it was two in the afternoon, so there wasn't a general assembly or anything in particular going on. 

Then two men walked up to me, and one said, "Can I talk to you?"  I looked at him and asked, "What about?" and he said, "You know why we're here?"  I said I had a pretty good idea.  He asked me to tell him, and I said there were probably as many reasons as people there; at which point he said, "Tell me one reason."

At no point had this guy introduced himself, explained what he was doing or said what he wanted; and he had this cocky little I-know-better-than-you-do grin.  I told him I'd changed my mind, and I didn't want to talk to him, because I didn't like being attacked.  He claimed he wasn't attacking me and I told him he was, and walked away.  I had the feeling he was trying to goad me into taking a position, or at least stating one, so he could jump at me (metaphorically) and prove how wrong I was.  I call that an attack, if not a physical one.  Nobody stopped me leaving. I went back to wait for the bus home.

My problem with protests is that they're all based on confrontation (like my confrontational acquaintance) and they all involve crowds, both of which make me very uncomfortable.  I avoid confrontation when I can; I much prefer to negotiate and try to build consensus.  And crowds just make me nervous; it's way too easy for a crowd to turn into a mob.

The crazy thing is, I agree with them:  income inequality is bad, we need more jobs, the banks and the "top 1%" are totally out of line.  But am I going to go down there and carry a sign around?  No, I'm not.  And the newspapers have quoted some of the more extreme sorts (I'm sure) saying that violence is necessary and nothing will get done unless they break things.  It's clear this is a minority viewpoint, but I haven't heard that wording from any of the other Occupy movements, which is why this whole Oakland phenomenon just feels different to me.

This post isn't meant to be any kind of definitive analysis; it's just my take on the situation.  I don't know what the answer to our situation is.  But I'm not convinced the protestors do, either.

Finally, the Truth

I've been waiting for someone to say this on air for months, and today I finally heard it, on Rose Aguilar's Your Call on KALW 91.7 FM.  Rose's Friday program is always a "media roundup," discussing the week's best recent reporting, and today they started out with this one:

Citigroup settles for $285 million; no Wall Street exec jailed yet

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/19/127742/citigroup-settles-for-285-million.html#ixzz1bTgeSRQe

While discussing the question of why nobody from Wall Street has gone to jail yet, one of the panelists (maybe Jake Bernstein from ProPublica but I'm not sure) said the Unsayable Thing:

Nobody from Wall Street has gone to jail because what they did wasn't really illegal.

It was deceptive; it was a scam; it was wrong.  Read the linked McClatchy story for details of what Citi did, which had all the moral rectitude of a pea-and-shell game.  But - it wasn't illegal.  Why not?  Because we spent the previous 15 or so years removing so much regulation from the banking and financial industry.  The Citi deal centered around a "collateralized debt obligation", a form of derivative - if you aren't sure what a CDO is and would like to know, take an hour and listen to the classic This American Life broadcast from May 2008, Giant Pool of Money.  After that you'll know more about CDOs than you're comfortable with.  But CDOs were unregulated; the financial industry made sure years ago that all financial derivatives were totally unregulated.  No rules on how they could be set up and managed at all.  That's one of the reasons the Lehman crash caused the short-term credit market to freeze solid:  they didn't have to publish records on the derivatives they traded, so they didn't; and when a big player went down, nobody know what anybody else was on the hook for.

So after the crash, Congress put together the Dodd-Frank Act, to put some regulations back in place on the banking industry.  Remember that when you hear the Republicans screaming that Dodd-Frank has to go.  Some of the stuff that went on actually is illegal now, and the Republicans can't stand it.  Personally, I'd like to see Dodd-Frank gone too; but I want it replaced with the Glass-Steagall Act, which probably won't happen.

Along with the PG&E (and other) gas pipelines that regularly blow up and kill people, the financial crash was just one more side effect of the prevailing right-wing believe that All Government Regulation Is Bad.  Personally, I could use a little more of it.

Discovering Powell River

We spent 3 nights in Powell River, staying in a bed and breakfast (photos in the last post on this), and spending time hiking with my friends Janet and Wes.  Because we also spent a lot of time just sitting around talking, I took fewer photos than I sometimes do.  I did take some of the tiny crabs that just covered the beach in front of the B&B, they were none of them over an inch long.  Here's the best one:

Dinner the night we got there was quite a surprise.  Our B&B hosts referred us to the Laughing Oyster, near Okeover Arm Provincial Park (and past the turn for Desolation Resort!).  I thought the body of water nearby was a lake, but a look at Google Maps says it's just another arm (Okeover Arm, I guess) of the Strait of Georgia.  The food was excellent, but we weren't expecting the live classical music concert.  There was a small group of musicians - 2 harpists, a cellist, and a singer who was also waiting tables (yes, she usually works there).  I think we got the last available table in the place, and we were three feet in front of the harpist.  At least one of them was from Brazil, we never quite learned who the group was or where the others came from.  We happily put money in the tip jar for them!

The next day we went out for a "short" hike through a Douglas fir forest near Gibson's Beach, and then had dinner and talked.

 
The day after that, we split up; Janet and I took a leisurely hike part way around Inland Lake, while Wes and Jim did a much more strenuous hike over by Saltery Bay where the ferry is.  I got some nice garter snake shots - we walked past a little bank just as the sun came out, and all the garter snakes scrambled out to get warm, saw us, scrambled back in.  So we stood still, and after a minute here they came again.  One of them sat still long enough for a portrait shot:

It was a very peaceful visit, ending with dinner in a local restaurant.  If you'd like to see the rest of the pictures from this stay, here's the link to the gallery:

Around Powell River

The Tools of War

Recent discussions of our current crop of wars, plus a session on drones on Talk of the Nation, got me thinking about the evolution of war in general.  Because it has evolved.  The warriors of ancient Athens and Sparta, the Roman Legions, would barely recognize what we consider "war."  As far back as we have records, up until, say, the sixteenth century, war was a hand to hand affair, with hand-held weapons and defenses - swords, knives, spears, clubs, and shields.

But also as far back as you look, humans have been trying to devise ways to kill each from a greater and greater distance - that is, from beyond arm's length. Primitive tribes, and prehistoric man, used spear throwers (atlatls) to give their spears more range, but more advanced peoples don't seem to have used them.  But it's obviously advantageous if you can kill Joe before Joe gets in stabbing range of you.

Early long-range weapons were mainly bows and slings, both of which go back about as far as we can research.  Bows are spectacular and showy, but slings were also popular - a Roman or a Greek slinger could kill his enemy with a rock as effectively as we now do with a bullet, and much more quietly.  I found a fascinating discussion of slingers on OneSixthWarriors.com, the poster was describing a figure he had created of a Roman funditor, and the research that went into it.  The Greeks developed the catapult, a large mechanical sling, as early as 399 B.C.; and catapult design was also associated with crossbow design, both using mechanical means rather than human muscle to throw a projectile.

Bows, slings and catapults were it for killing beyond arm's length until Marco Polo's trip to China opened up the Silk Road, and brought gunpowder back.  I found a history of firearms on About.com which suggests that the first matchlock guns were used in the 15th century.  Also in the 15th century, forts begin to be built in the shape of a 5 pointed star - they were easier to defend against cannon than the traditional square bailey.  Guns in the 15th through 18th centuries were dangerous but had limitations - they weren't very accurate, they were hard to load, and they only shot one ball at a time.  And black powder sometimes explodes when you don't want it to.  In the early periods, crossbows or longbows were much more accurate.

The 19th century saw mass-produced arms, and improvements in long-distance killing which outpaced the military tacticians who fought against them - that was why the American Civil War was so bloody, both sides were using tactics meant for smoothbore muskets, with a range of about 300 feet, but they were shooting rifled muskets which were accurate up to half a mile.  (While researching this post, I found a most interesting dissent from this standard conclusion:  Firearms and Tactics of the American Civil War: A Minority Opinion, by Dr. Howard G. Lanham, which I recommend to those interested in military history.)

Over the next century or so, the accuracy and range of the armaments continued to outpace the military tactics in use, until World War II when the Nazi tacticians really understood how to use the Panzer tanks and small fighter planes they had developed.  That's one of the reasons they were so hard to defeat.  And then there are the nuclear bombs.

Our latest development is armed drones, which may well make the romantic figure of the fighter pilot obsolete.  A man can pilot an armed drone in Afghanistan while sitting in a control room in Iowa.  This has to be the ultimate in long-range killing - you aren't even on the same continent.

What worries me about all this is the impact on the warrior using these remote weapons.  I have no personal experience of war, but my reading suggests a vast difference in the impact on the warrior between stabbing someone with a knife, sword or spear, at arm's length, and killing someone you may not even be able to see without a magnifying aiming scope - or a camera image on a screen.  It's clear why one would want to distance oneself; but if the distance makes the victim less real, less human, then it merely contributes to the endless cycle of wars that plague us.  Not to mention that the farther the warrior is from his target, the more likely he is to kill an innocent bystander, by sheer chance.

I don't mean to suggest that our soldiers currently fighting in Afghanistan aren't fighting hand to hand; they are, of course.  Both sides in that conflict continue to use weapons that kill the enemy at as great a distance as they can manage.  The ubiquitous IED is the Afghan tribesman's effort at a distance-killing machine.

I have no real claim to be a military historian; I'm a widely read layman with a strong interest in military history as a subset of history in general.  But I wanted to write, and work through, some of my thoughts on the overall evolution of the ways we like to kill each other.  We become so involved in the politics of our wars that we lose sight of their effect on the people who fight them for us; and I believe that is a mistake.

No More War

You hear this a lot lately.  We should get out of Iraq, get out of Afghanistan and Libya, spend the money at home.

Well, of course we should get out of Iraq; we never had any serious business in Iraq.  If we had really wanted to block Al Qaeda, which is what they said they wanted at the time, Saddam Hussein was our best friend, a secular dictator with no tolerance for anyone else's power.  But that train has left the station.

We should have had better sense than to get tangled up in Afghanistan, too.  The British Empire was in Afghanistan for generations and they never managed to do much more than control the roads.  The Russian army went up against Afghanistan in the '80s and bounced - helped by the U.S., who armed the people who are now aiming those arms at us.  Afghan society is tribal, largely illiterate, and rural Afghans (the majority) are deeply suspicious of anybody they haven't known from birth.  Trouble is, we have no way right now to leave Afghanistan without major loss of face; and avoiding loss of face is a big reason people go to war at all.

We aren't really in Libya, at least we've managed to avoid putting any troops in there - which is as it should be.  But we sure seem to be spending a lot of bucks on logistical support.

In spite of all the noble sentiments I hear, I don't really believe we'll ever get rid of war.  As long as we have records of humans, we have records of humans at war.  Some of the earliest Cro-Magnon tools?  Spear points.  Beautifully crafted spear points.  Of course they used them for hunting; the question is, hunting what?  Humans must like war a lot; we do it all the time, and the less educated we are, the more we think war is a good solution.  Ask the Taliban.  We're a violent bunch, when you get down to it.

We forget, between wars, how awful war is; and the people who haven't experienced war don't really get how awful it is, which is why we treat our veterans so casually.  And why we keep starting new wars.  Our taste for killing, if possible at a considerable distance, has led us to develop ever more effective arms (more on that in a separate post), until we've finally made war so dangerous it really could dispose of all of us.

Blessed are the peacemakers - but they sure are outnumbered.

No More Free Speech at Berkeley

I've been following the current flap about the Increase Diversity Bake Sale, put on today at U.C. Berkeley by the campus Republican students' group.

U.C. Berkeley students, I'm ashamed of you.  And I don't mean the Republicans, who are exercising their constitutional right to be publicly offensive in order to make a point.  To paraphrase Voltaire slightly, I don't agree with their point, but I will defend to the death their right to make it.  In fact, if their purpose in this was to stir up debate, I'd say they've succeeded brilliantly.

Michael Krasny's Forum gave the brouhaha half an hour this morning, during which the earnest Vishali Loomba, president of the ASUC (for you non-Berkeley folks, that's the student union), complained that the bake sale was "rude," it "dissed people" and made them uncomfortable.  Well, yes.  Welcome to U.S. political discourse, Ms. Loomba - that's what free speech is supposed to do.  For the record, after listening to Ms. Loomba speak, she was either born here or has lived here most of her life; for those of you who don't understand satire, that remark was intended to be satirical.

For a somewhat earlier example of satirical free speech which made some people very uncomfortable indeed, I recommend Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, published in 1729.  (For the record, I wrote my honors thesis for my B.A. on Jonathan Swift.)

I attended U.C. Berkeley during the original Free Speech Movement.  I remember people standing on top of police cars with microphones, and sitting in at Sproul Hall.  And the students all thought that was fine because they agreed with the protestors.  Your lesson for today, U.C. students:  free speech is meaningless if it is only available to the people you agree with.  I remember some time ago when an Israeli official was booed off the stage at U.C. Berkeley by Palestinian supporters.  I was more appalled then than I am now; but I hereby state that this is it:  as far as I'm concerned, U.C. Berkeley has forfeited the right to call itself "the home of free speech."   

And I have another bone to pick.  With all the emoting about the "discount pricing" for buyers of color, none of the complainers, not even Ms. Loomba (at least until I became so annoyed I turned Forum off), has even mentioned the 25 cent discount for all women!  Apparently it's OK to insult women as long as you don't insult them for their skin color.  As a feminist, now I'm really appalled!

Photos from Carmel

I just got around to processing the photos I took while I was in Carmel for the Bach Festival.  Since I spent most of my time doing non-photographic things, they boil down to two groups - some shots of the Carmel Mission, interior and exterior (taken while waiting for the organ concert), and some photos of surf on the beach, just before I came home.  I learned on this trip that beaches don't appeal to me as much now as they did when I was 11.  Somehow the prospect of getting sand in everything made me take some long lens shots from the pavement edge and leave the soft white sand to the people who were willing to live with it!

The interior shots of the mission were very interesting, they have a lovely reredos (look it up!):



and the only statue I've ever seen personally of St. Joseph with the Holy Child instead of the Madonna:



The pipe organ is quite beautiful and visually very baroque.



When I got down to the beach, a couple of days later, it was a gorgeous day with a strong surf running, and I got some nice ocean shots.  I got a big wave just breaking:



and we mustn't forget the surfer waiting for his wave:



 

It was so gorgeous I was surprised there was only one surfer.  Feel free to check out the rest of the photos.