Pioneer Basin

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

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

About Professor Gates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Can't Mean ME??

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Least of These

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

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

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

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

Birth Certificates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now You Know

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greenwich Village

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

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

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

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

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

Walking around New York City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Palin

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

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

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

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

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

Shrinking Coinage

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

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

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

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

Supporting a Friend

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy in Iran

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working for the Man

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

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

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

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

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

Touring the East

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

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

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

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

WHAT is Going On?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So What About Torture?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not in Our Back Yard

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

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

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

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

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

Lift That Bale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wotta Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unreal

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

The citizens of California are nuts.

The poll reports that:

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

On the other hand:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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