Daily Iconoclast

Obama and medical pot

2011-10-16T18:22:00.001-07:00

When President Obama sent the justice department attorneys after the medical marijuana distributors in California and Oregon, many of his supporters were shocked. Some folks went to him and said medical pot was a good thing, and the states were cool with it, so there's no reason for the feds to get involved.

Obama told them that there were abuses, pot crossing state lines, people getting it who were not really in need. "But," the pot advocates pointed out, "These folks are going to buy it anyway. If they can't get legal pot, they'll get it illegally on the street." Obama dismissed that as absurd.

After those folks left, some representatives from the Mexican drug cartels, waiting in the next room, came in. They said, "El Presidente, you handled that muy perfecto. Keep up the pressure on those damn amateurs, those fools with the licenses. We are your supporters, and we don't have to show you no stinking licenses. Remember, there's 300 million in campaign contributions riding on you getting rid of our competition."

Obama smiled and assured them that he would uphold the letter of the federal law, that being his constitutional duty, and, "by the way, as you leave, drop off a check with my secretary."

The Prehistory of Santa Cruz, a parabull

2011-08-18T09:39:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time there was a tribe of true believers. They maintained that all people were exactly equal and should always be treated as such, be they young or old, rich or poor, wise or foolish, good or bad. Only people who believed other than this could be judged and thus shunned.

This tribe was also a very insecure group. They all felt lonely and isolated, constantly fearing that no one else shared their views or their feelings. One by one they realized that if they showed their positions and feelings publicly, others would see and gravitate to them, thus reinforcing them and making them feel valued and loved.

So they elected to print their philosophies of life on signs, with no more than ten words, as most were semi literate at best. Then they would pick up their signs and walk around the village square and congregate with others with similar signs. From this a now well known question was born, "What's your sign."

Soon people realized that if they had many signs, each proclaiming a different facet of their belief system, they could interact with everyone in the community and thus be accepted and loved. Soon, carrying signs became the entire purpose of the community.

Sacred /site! Oh really?

2011-08-16T17:45:00.001-07:00

If you turn up soil anywhere, except perhaps Antarctica, you'll probably find some human remains. We've been spreading ourselves all over the planet for something in excess of 100,000 years (6,000 if you're a fundamentalist). In essence, the whole world is living people above, cemetery below. After all, we don't bury folks up in trees.

Some local building project has been interrupted because of some Native American bones, approximately 6,000 year old bones. Some archeologist determined they were Ohlone, and thus contacted the remaining members of that tribe. The spokeswoman said these are her ancestors and can't be disturbed. I think of ancestors as going back perhaps ten generations. Beyond that we find ourselves in the deep end of the gene pool and have no idea who is related, or rather that everyone is related.

Naturally, these modern Ohlone folks had no idea there were ancestors buried there and wouldn't have, had not the builders dug them up. It seems a stretch, but then we've treated the Native Americans so badly that we know bend over backward to be respectful.

At the same time some Native Amcricans in Riverside Country are protesting another project. It seems that's the site of what they believe is where the world was created. Now, perhaps their preliterate ancestors believed that, but I'm sure the folks now protesting don't. I think we're all on the same page regarding cosmic creation (fundamentalists, please excuse me).

The telling thing is that these folks in Riverside County built a big casino complex near this sacred site, but again, that benefits them, so maybe "sacred site" is a relative term.

While I think that there are at least as many bad developments as there are good, I think this sacred site argument is just shy of silly. However, if the rest of the world doesn't agree with me, there's a spot on Signal Hill in Long Beach that I'm going to designate as a sacred site. It's where I lost my virginity.

BART cuts cell phone service

2011-08-15T22:07:00.001-07:00

A group calling themselves Anonymous hacked into the BART computer system because BART blocked cell phone service underground for a time. This ostensibly had to do with free speech. Free speech means you have the right to stand up and say what you want, even print it and hand it out. However, there's another "free" in free speech. The newspapers are not obliged to print your rant, unless you elect to pay for space. The same applies to radio and TV.

Cell phone service is just that, a service, provided by businesses. If BART provides it in their tunnel system, it's a service, just as a glass of water at a restaurant, or a bench at a bus stop. BART is under no obligation to provide anything other than safe and reliable transportation from point A to point B. The rest is a perk for riders. They could offer glasses of wine and movies if they choose, perhaps even circus acts, but these would not suddenly become a right.

These anarchist groups seem to want it both ways: no rules and regulations, but all services real or imagined, free of charge.

new retirement plan

2011-05-29T22:02:00.001-07:00

The debate about social security, Medicare and pension programs keeps heating up, and I'm concerned that, at this rate, my so called golden years might end up being brass plate.

What assurance do I have that when I'm put out to pasture, there will be some grass on said pasture? Well, the days of sitting back and believing that the government will take care of me are over. I've got to be proactive.

I've found a simple solution. I'll simple legally change my name. My new first name will be Goldman, and my last will be Sachs. Whenever times get tough, I'll just call the White house and say, "I'm Goldman Sachs, and I'm a bit short this month. How about sending my a couple of million to tide me over?" Naturally, I'll promise to pay them back some day when the economy is all rosy again.

The weird world of Goldman Sachs

2011-05-25T11:05:00.001-07:00

William Cohan, a former Wall Street insider, was on the May 24 Diane Rehm Show, talking about the history and culture of Goldman Sachs. How the firm came to dominate global markets, influence the federal government and play a controversial role in the mortgage meltdown. He explained some financial stuff, which I totally didn't understand.

Goldman Sachs, among other financial firms, dealt in those weird mortgage things that everyone in the business knew were bad news, and which lead to the financial collapse. That was the first thing I didn't understand. The best image I could envision was throwing all these mortgage papers in a financial meat grinder, grinding them up together and then making something like mortgage hamburger patties out of it. But, with all that mixing, who decided where people sent their house payments? And for the people who invested in these things, what exactly did they purchase?

Another thing Goldman Sachs did was after telling their investors what good investments these things were, they put their own money in some kind of bet that these would fail and that the investors who trusted their advice would lose a fortune. Apparently, they were right, and they made billions while their investors lost. That brings up a couple more questions that boggle my mind.

How in the world do you invest money in something in such a way that if it loses money, you make a profit. If I loan the neighbor's kid fifty bucks to help start up his lemonade stand, I make money if he is successful. If he goes out of business, I lose my fifty. So, the more they lose, the more I make, doesn't make a bit of sense to me, but then I'm an idiot when it comes to finance.

Apparently, these big investors aren't much better. They invested in very risky weird mortgage thingies, while Goldman Sachs was betting they'd lose, and then when they did lose, they kept on investing with Goldman Sachs. That kind of makes people who keep buying lottery tickets look a bit less clueless.

Normally I wouldn't trust Goldman Sachs any further than I could throw their corporate headquarters, but in the interest of getting a story, I went to them with my life savings, $213.49, and asked them to invest it for me. Well, they wouldn't even give me the time of day, literally. After telling me they weren't interested, I said I had a plane to catch and wanted to know the time. They wouldn't tell me.

my advice to the President

2011-05-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

In addition to my many other invisible talents, I've decided to become a presidential advisor. That decision came to me after Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's response to president Obama's suggestion that Israel return to its pre-1967 borders. "Mr. President, what would you know about giving back land and returning to previous borders?"

Naturally, Obama was stuck for an answer, and that's where I stepped in. My suggestion was, "Yo, Pres, let's keep it real. Put your money where your mouth is." Since he still had a confused look on his face, I explained further. "If we want them to go back to pre-1967 borders, we need to do likewise. Let's go back to our pre-1845 borders."

He still wasn't totally getting it, giving me that lawyer look of his. So I continued. "We can give Texas and California back to Mexico. Tell them, sorry and just move away, taking all our US goodies with us."

Obama was shocked. "We can't just give up land we've settled, worked and made our homes." At that point, I resigned as advisor, but not before making a final suggestion. "I hear you, Mr. Pres, but Ben, waiting in the next room, needs to hear that too."

Save the elderly, cut off SS and Medicare

2011-05-21T09:15:00.001-07:00

Newspaper columnists, including Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post, have been blasting Social Security and Medicare, wanting to either reform, reduce or eliminate these programs. At first that bothered me, as I realized that people have worked their entire lives with these programs in place, money being taking from their pay and the promise that they will have an income and medical care when they get old and retire. For many, this was the retirement plan.

On second thought, trying to see the other point of view, I realized that these programs were the worst things we can do to our elderly. Let me explain.

People are physically and mentally active until they reach a magic age and retire. Then they have nothing forcing them to get up in the morning, nothing pressing on their minds from morning to night. As a result, these folks get soft and lazy, knowing there will be a check each month. They play bingo, lawn bowl, watch TV, take up quilting, feed pigeons in the park, activities that do nothing to keep them sharp and healthy.

Knowing that they are paying for and will receive Medicare, they are not motivated to stay healthy, figuring the government will pay to get them well when they fall ill. As a result, they abandon healthy living, stop exercising, start eating junk food and probably drink too much.

If we eliminate, not gradually, but suddenly, all support programs for the elderly, they will be forced to continue working, thus keeping them mentally sharp. Without health coverage, they will rededicate themselves to staving off the infirmaries of age, pushing themselves to eat flavorless healthy food and putting hours in on the treadmill.

Think of an 85 year old, faced with competition from 25 year old college graduates. Survival will depend on not only staying current, but keeping ahead of developments. Between working long hours, studying new technology, putting in hours of exercise and cooking all that natural food, these folks won't have time to get bored, lazy, sick or senile.

Save money on public safety

2011-05-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

Like most guys, as a kid I was fascinated by the wild west. I used to read about the Earps, Doc Holiday, Billy the Kid and all those colorful gunmen, and the era when justice was dealt at the business end of a gun. Those memories surfaced as I read about the State and our cities' problems paying for the police and their increasingly costly pensions.

Since cities are either laying off cops or trying to get them to take a cut in pay, work more years or take a smaller pension, it's clear that the future of public safety is in doubt. So, why not fire all the city police, county sheriffs and highway patrol and opt for the wild west model?

California can encourage every citizen to buy a gun, and for those who can't afford one, perhaps provide one of the ones formerly used by the police. Each person would carry said weapon in a holster, clearly visible. If someone tries to break into your home, simply shoot them. Someone accosts you on the street, blast off a few rounds. Same with people who cut you off in traffic. Someone in a bar looks at you like they want to start something, you draw your weapon. And ladies, any guy who looks at you like he's even thinking of grabbing you, shoot him in the crotch.

Sure, as some of you politically correct people will point out, a few innocent people will get killed by over zealous citizens. But, remember that even with our complex and expensive criminal justice system, innocent people get convicted every day. What's a bit of collateral damage in the big picture of public safety?

end of the world

2011-05-19T16:46:00.001-07:00

Looks like it’s the end of the world sometime Saturday the 21^st. It’s a prophecy thing, and you know those always come true. Most of us missed this obscure passage in the bible, even I, who to avoid taking a job stayed on at the university to study ancient biblical languages. Most of us thought this passage translated from Aramaic as some instructions about the annual spring counting of sheep and goats. However, Aramaic was primarily a spoken language, and if read aloud in a deep, southern drawl, it becomes obvious that the world is to end on May 21, 2011.

Another piece of evidence that clinches it was the speech Jesus made about some listening to him would live to see the end of the world. Well, there’s a guy in Israel who just celebrated his 2038^th birthday and who was there that day. His doctors say he’s in bad shape and only has days to live. So, I think we can take this prophecy to the bank, not that banks are going to matter much longer.

With only two days left for the world, how should we spend this precious time? I can’t speak for you, but I plan to deplete my wine cellar and have sex as often as possible.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrested

2011-05-16T18:30:00.001-07:00

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF, the most powerful boys' financial fraternity on the planet, gets himself arrested for sexually molesting a chambermaid. OMG, how shocking. I mean, what normal man would do a thing like that, particularly an aging power broker used to getting his own way? Seriously, folks, can you name one other powerful man who has put it all at risk to jump the bones of some stressed out, overworked young woman. After all, these guys are paragons, people we trust to buy and sell whole counties and enrich or ruin millions of people.

This incident so unraveled my male self-esteem that I had to know the truth of it, so I bribed a guard and slipped into his cell. At first he wasn't talking, but after I slipped him a bottle of pernod, he opened up. "Look, I may be one of the most important, most powerful, smartest, best dressed, most well connected guys who ever lived, but, just between you and I, deep inside, I'm just Joe six pack.

California solves educational crisis

2011-05-14T11:48:00.001-07:00

Been gone on a long adventure, but I'm back to amuse and annoy you.

With California's financial situation growing worse, there is talk of cutting the school year by perhaps 20 days. As everyone in the world who can read a newspaper knows, our students are falling further and further behind students in other developed countries. With 20 less school days, we'll be lucky if our kids can read pulp novels and do simple arithmetic and are educated well enough to work in a fast food restaurant.

Our elected leaders, the folks who got us to this point, have a solution. They will contract with emerging nations to send our thirteen year olds into indentured servitude for a period of five years. The State will get a couple thousand per student from the host country, while the student will get basic room and board for on the job training.

When our kids return at 18, they will have marketable skills, such as mud brick making, sweet potato cultivation or goat herding. As an added plus, California will finally return to the golden age of the simple agrarian life, with blissfully uneducated people toiling in the warm California sun.

Shark fin soup and cultural tradition

2011-05-08T22:11:00.001-07:00

According to a recent news piece, legislation has been proposed to end the taking of sharks' fins for shark fin soup, a Chinese delicacy. A cruel and wasteful practice, fin removal takes only the fin, and the wounded shark is sent off to die.

Naturally, the Chinese community is divided on this issue, but what stuck me was one comment defending the practice: That it is part of their cultural tradition. This, to me, is the weakest argument of all, far weaker than a simple, "we like the taste of the soup."

Most cultures have long traditions, often going back to periods of ignorance or even savagery. Do we really mean to preserve all those old traditions?

At the time of this story, another cultural tradition was being held, Cinco de Mayo. While probably half the celebrants don't even know the meaning of the day, many likely confusing it with Mexican Independence Day, the celebration is relatively harmless. People drink copious amounts of beer, play loud music and often dress in outfits they'd never wear the rest of the year. If you live within blocks of the music, the celebration can be annoying, but, unlike the shark fins, there doesn't seem to be any real damage.

Three hundred years ago my culture had a tradition of burning witches at the stake. I don't think anyone seriously would advocate continuing that tradition in possibly a national witch burning day. Cultures are supposed to evolve and improve. We don't bleed patients with fevers, we don't still keep slaves and we don't sacrifice virgins to stone idols. Cultural tradition is a specious argument and is often merely a front for ignorance and superstition.

Secury Communities program under attack locally

2011-04-19T18:52:00.001-07:00

It was interesting to read that there is local opposition to the Secure Communities program. It's a contentious and messy issue, so sometimes it's easier to clarify an issue if it's reduced from a national perspective to that of an individual.

Let's say someone looks out her window and sees a family camping on her front lawn. She is likely to do one of two things. She can evict them, the kindest alternative, or she can have them arrested, the more harsh alternative. Should she do neither, other people would see the campers and set up camp, until the entire property becomes covered with trespassers.

In this analogy, undocumented (illegal) aliens can be deported, which is like being evicted. It isn't cruel, as these people go back to their prior homes, where they have roots and speak the language. The harsh alternative is throwing them in prison for being here illegally. Since, unless they are felons, they will be deported, it doesn't seem such a bad policy.

A third alternative would be for our hypothetical homeowner to allow the people to continue camping and let others do the same. Soon, the yard would be packed with campers, making it necessary for the owner to install sanitary facilities, clean water, and mitigate disputes between increasingly densely packed campers. Then there is the issue of buying insurance in case someone is hurt on the property. It rapidly becomes unmanageable.

That alternative, one advocated by people who are thinking with their hearts, rather than the organ that evolved for that purpose, would be to throw the gates open and welcome anyone who wishes to cross our boarders. That would mean not only throwing out our immigration policies, but abandoning the concepts of citizenship and national boarders, a radical social experiment few would have the stomach for, and one that would not find favor in most other countries.

Unlike electrons, we can't exist in that fuzzy area between wave and particle. We either have a policy with mechanisms in place for immigration, or we don't. Secure Communities may not be a perfect plan, but it is a plan, and any objections to it should be attached to a sensible way to amend it.

Rewarding screw up kids

2011-04-17T20:13:00.001-07:00

You reward your kid if he or she does something well, right? I mean, the kid brings home a great report card, and you purchase some gizmo on his or her wish list. Perhaps if the kids graduates with straight As and gets into a major university, a good used car is in order. So far, makes sense I hope.

So, why does a kid, perhaps as young as 11 or 12, one who does no home work, gets mostly Ds and Fs, is always getting in trouble with the school and probably doesn't help around the house get rewarded with a $300 i phone/ i pod or some such? What message are parents sending? Being a total screw up is good, makes the old man proud?

Then, naturally, having something fancy to play with all day reduces what little motivation the kids still has. It comes down to, "I can't multiply 4 times 5, but I've got 300 apps.

The sad thing is that the school principal is legally forbidden to slap the shit out of the dumb ass parent.

The end of the world, again!

2011-04-16T16:02:00.001-07:00

Planet X, 2012 (Mayan calendar) and strange, spooky thing that will cause the end of the world (as we know it). If you are bored, gullible, obsessed with the "end time" and get your kicks out of being in fear for your life, you're in luck. YowRadio.com is apparently your one stop shopping location for all this mumbo jumbo.

A friend send me the link to this, telling me how I should check it out. I really think he believes all that, but then the sky is not the same color in his world as it is in mine.

There are a few things I find fascinating about stuff like this. One is that if something is really obscure or the product of some ancient writing or ritual, it is taken as more valid than everything modern science can offer up. Another thing is that there are always experts who write or go on the radio to promote this stuff. Often they have some quasi legitimate credentials. The most amazing thing is that if it has to do with the end of the world, people just love to believe. All the times the world was supposed to end would fill a book, and it fact it did. I read such a book, but it's gotten away from me, likely taken up by aliens in space ships or loaned to an absent minded friend.

Prison for the elderly

2011-04-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

There are always alternative ways to solve any problem. Since there are folks in congress who want to slash or perhaps eliminate Medicare and Social Security, the elderly, unhealthy and soon to be both are concerned about their futures. Will they be left with no income or health care?

Of course not. They simply need to think outside the box and ask themselves, "Where can I get a roof over my head, three squares a day and total medical for free?" The simple answer is prison.

So, when congress finally drives the last nail into the coffin of programs for seniors, each of these elderly and probably not terribly healthy people should spend their last government check on a small hand gun. No need to even invest in bullets, as none will be needed. Then they need to tie handkerchiefs around their faces, mostly to make it look authentic. Then walk into a bank, produce the gun and demand the money.

Now, the average senior doesn't move all that fast so before they can get a block down the street, the police will all over them. Gun and cash in hand, the old folks will just have to confess. After a short trial, an armed robbery conviction should net somewhere around 15 years, so if one is 75, that's pretty much security for life.

Naturally, the prison system isn't going to take a frail senior citizen and subject him or her to hard labor. More likely, incarceration will involve a comfortable cell, passable meals and medical care on demand. All in all, not a bad retirement plan.

shutting down the governement

2011-04-07T09:45:00.000-07:00

Budget talks are down to the wire, and the parties can't agree, so perhaps the government will shut down. Well, it won't completely shut down, as much as the Tea Party would like that. Essential services will be maintained, and you can find a list of those in your daily paper. Also, possible cuts being negotiated will not include essential items like keeping soldiers in Afghanistan through a second decade, along with some in Iraq.

Well, it's nice to see our elected officials are serious.

How disappointed am I in the two major parties?

2011-04-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

I'm so past partisan politics and the Democrats and Republicans, so I'm wondering who I'll vote for in 2012. The Democrats will put up Obama, and assuming the Republicans put up the best person they have, and then some third party puts up Charles Manson. So, who do I vote for? Damn, Manson isn't looking all that bad any more.

Olympics in stupidity

2011-04-02T12:41:00.000-07:00

Well, the games are on for the gold medal in stupidity. On the eastern front, a group in Afghanistan attacked a UN office to protest a Qur’an burning by a church group in Florida. The fact that the people they attacked and killed weren't from Florida or even the US didn't matter. Disrespect the religion or the holy book, and they attack something or someone.

Not to be outdone, some of our states are protesting and even passing laws against the replacement of outmoded incandescent light bulbs, mostly 'cause the gov'mint ain't got no right to tell us what to do. So, while electricity becomes more expensive, and incandescent bulbs use the majority of this costly energy on throwing off heat, rather than light, these states are going to protect their right to waste more money on inefficiency. I guess there's a problem with updating 130 year old technology. I wonder if those people objecting to the new bulbs are also going to throw away their tractors and hook the wife up to the plow.

Earliest writing translated

2011-03-31T10:14:00.001-07:00

A French scientist, after two decades of work, has managed to translate some 30,000 year old markings on a cave wall, likely the earliest example of written communication. This short passage, roughly translates to: "This new discovery, fire, should be banned from human society. This technology is so dangerous that it threatens to wipe out all human life. And for what, just to make our food warm?"

So there you have it, human nature.

call it gulch or creek, but respect the power of nature.

2011-03-29T20:50:00.001-07:00

A local town, Capitola, experienced flooding when a six foot in diameter pipe burst under the pressure of water from recent rains. The city, state or someone once upon a time decided to cram a creek into a pipe, showing an arrogance that almost always comes back to bite people in the ass. Little creeks usually trickle, but water is dynamic, and sometime little creeks become, for a short time, raging rivers. This particular creek is called a gulch, further compounding our arrogance.

Yeah, sure, call it a gulch, shove it through a pipe and forget about it. Well, not quite.

Radiation Monitoring

2011-03-27T17:49:00.000-07:00

Big news! There are some gaps in our radiation monitoring system, some sites closed down for maintenance and the like. So, this is now a big deal, with the EPA and elected officials in a panic.
OK, some radiation manages to drift over the US. What are we going to do about it? Perhaps there's a big fall out shelter in some mountain in Colorado we can all run to. New flash, there's nothing much you can do about radiation, whether you know about it or not. I mean, there's no spray that will keep it off you.
However, panicking about possible undetected radiation is easier than fixing our economy, our failing schools, our crumbling infrastructure, our massive unemployment and our addiction to empire building on credit.
Excuse me while I yawn about the monitoring system.

Sacred ground, nonsense!

2011-03-26T10:51:00.001-07:00

Another piece about some project on hold because of tribal sacred burial grounds. Seems that every tribe, ethnic group and religion has a catalog of holy or sacred places. Sometimes I wonder if there are any places outside of Antarctica that aren't sacred.

A good example is Jerusalem, a very old city that is holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims. I've always wondered why, for what reasons is it holy? Is it just because these people have been fighting over it for centuries?

In my opinion, there is no such thing as holy land. Land is land, and people use it to live on, to work on, to grow crops on or even to leave alone because its ecological, aesthetic or natural resource value requires us to do so. When some tribe talks about ancient burial grounds, I have to think that these buried bones are likely as distantly related to the tribes as Oog, the caveman who painted on cave walls in France 40,000 years ago is to me.

I suspect consecrated ground is derived from constipated minds.

2011-03-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

Each day the newspaper is stuffed with ad inserts, which I guess is OK, because my subscription doesn't cover the paper's costs. However, one retailer, which shall remain nameless has a flyer that advertises a sale, and there is always a mid week sale and a weekend sale, so their stuff is on sale 4 out of 7 days. So since there are more sale days than not, what is the regular price? Logically the regular price is the 4 day price, and the other three days they are having a... what do you call it when they raise prices on special days?

redevelopment agencies

2011-03-24T10:45:00.001-07:00

Local redevelopments agencies in California are up in arms over Gov. Brown's plan to eliminate them. As a result, they are locking up as many redevelopment funds as possible before the axe falls.

Oh, my, what would life be like without redevelopment agencies? I guess we'd all have to drive a full mile before getting to the latest strip mall with all the usual suspect chain stores. Wouldn't that be terrible?

So. Daktoa abortion law

2011-03-23T10:13:00.001-07:00

South Dakota passed a law making women wait and get counseling before getting an abortion. With the world population climbing toward 7 billion, women should get cash rewards for having abortions.

It ain't personal

2011-03-21T13:44:00.001-07:00

Exciting world! earthquakes, floods, drought, hunger, disease, radioactivity. Some of us would feel better if there were a reason, perhaps some god or gods sitting in judgment of what your neighbor did last Saturday night, judging and bring down tornados throughout your state as a sign of disapproval.

We might blame ourselves for being environmentally insensitive, thinking that the earth is now striking back, putting us in our places.

The reality is that none of it is personal. We live on a little rock, with a dynamic core and atmosphere. Stuff just happens, and we just happen to get in the way. Think about when you accidently step on a line of ants.

All about "me."

2011-03-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

Apparently, to many people, it's all about "me." A serious disaster in Japan, along with a partial meltdown of a reactor becomes a reason of protest and panic thousands of miles away, on California's central coast.

Suddenly, fear of nukes has been ramped up to new levels, and people are running around thinking the radiation in the sky is falling, falling particularly on them. These are the usual suspects, the ones who push the panic button over everything. To these folks, the ubiquitous "They" are always doing something that will cause the undoing of the good people milling around in the streets.

I suspect that these are the same folks who will drive their cars across town to protest against air pollution.

Obama stands up, we think, to Ghadafi

2011-03-19T13:32:00.001-07:00

Obama has issued an ultimatum to Ghadafi, telling him to stand down his troupes or else.

My question is, "Or else or what?" Despite the rumors I've heard about our President going in for a spine transplant, I can't help wondering what he plans to do if Ghadafi thumbs his nose at us.

So, because everything from choice of soft drinks to running the country is now put to a public poll, I have one for all of you.

If Ghadafi doesn't heed the warning, Obama will do...

A. Pass a series of resolutions

B. Give a very long speech to the American public

C. Send a few hundred soldiers to Afghanistan

D. Write a check to some Wall Street bankers

grab an opportunity where you can

2011-03-18T15:43:00.000-07:00

An email from our assemblyman, Luis Alejo contained the following line: "On Monday, March 14th, my colleagues and I joined to adjourn in memory of the victims of this on-going disaster." Calif is in a financial crisis, and the two major clown parties can't agree on a budget. However, they can all agree on one thing, use a disaster on the other side of the globe as an excuse to take the day off.
Gotta love this creative thinking.

Good ol' American priorities.

2011-03-17T19:28:00.001-07:00

All over the world, people are dealing with heavy problems. Japan has the earthquake disaster, followed by nuke meltdown. All over the middle east, people are fighting in the streets against dictators. There are civil wars in Africa and the world economy is on the verge of collapse.

Here in American, the feds raided a medical pot place in Montana. It's nice to know that at least America has it's priorities straight.

a nation of 12 year olds

2011-03-15T10:37:00.001-07:00

Let me see, we spend billions occupying Iraq and Afghanistan for year (eventually decades), but we can't send a few planes to fly over Libya to keep a dictator from bombing his countrymen. We can lay off public employees who do vital jobs, but we can't ask multibillionaires for an extra couple thousand to pay for services we all use.

We can spend hundreds of hours debating things endlessly in our legislative halls, but we can't spend ten minutes passing the most mundane budgetary law. We can cause mass panic with trumped up accounts of tsunamis, but we can't educate our people about what to do in a real disaster. We, as a nation, can bullshit endlessly, but we can't take a moment to think about what we're saying.

We've become a nation of 12 year olds.

Sudden panic over nuclear power

2011-03-14T10:05:00.001-07:00

The unfortunate partial melt down of Nuclear reactors in Japan has provoked the expected knee-jerk reactions back here. The people in Washington who get paid to talk are all chatty about rethinking our nuclear plans. Now, I'm sure some senators will get up and vote against any new nuclear plants.

No energy source is without risk, from coal to oil to nukes. Short of covering every square inch of the US with wind farms, wind isn't going to supply our needs, and solar isn't ready to pick up all the slack, if it will ever be.

The issue isn't black or white. It's not build nuclear power plants everywhere or nowhere. It's a matter of thinking about where you build them. Earthquake fault lines, in low coastal areas prone to tsunamis, at the foot of active volcanoes are among the least desirable places for them. Cautious planning and construction, along with continuing research into storage of spent radioactive material, will make nuclear power safe enough for us to use.

What the hell; we can always just turn off all the lights.

Natural disasters

2011-03-13T10:43:00.001-07:00

Often people search for either meaning or some pattern in natural disasters, often attributing them to human action or some divine punishment.

The relationship between disasters and humans come in three varieties. There are the ones we are responsible for. If we channel a river and then build in the flood plain, when there's a good rain and the river comes up, we cause our ill-conceived building to flood.

There are disasters that are a hybrid of human and nature. Pumping CO2 into the atmosphere causes climate change, which, through a chain of activity, can make hurricanes, natural occurrences, more intense, thus causing more damage.

Then there are disasters that have nothing whatsoever to do with humans, such as the huge earthquake that hit Japan. In those cases, the earth does what it does, and it has nothing to do with us. We aren't all that important.

Panic in Watsonville

2011-03-12T10:23:00.001-08:00

I've always wanted to go to Norway and see the migration of the lemmings, where then swarm to the edge of the bluffs and often plunge into the sea. I haven't made it yet, but I saw the next best thing. The recent earthquake in Japan caused a tsunami warning, actually more of an advisory along our coast. People who lived along the three sea level neighborhoods were advised to go to higher ground to avoid possible problems from a projected 2-3 foot tsunami.

It did come, and the ocean retreated and than washed in again and up the beach. It didn't inundate the beachfront streets. However, in Watsonville, over three miles from the beach, a beach which is backed by 30 foot sand dunes, thousands of people crowded the streets, stopping traffic for miles, in a effort to get up the hill. Some went as far as Hollister, almost 30 miles inland. At most of the schools perhaps 10 percent of the students showed up. I can only guess about the businesses that tried to open without their employees.

I doubt that a herd of sheep would have acted this way.

wilful ignorance

2011-03-11T15:32:00.001-08:00

I call it willful ignorance, and it's much like what happens to the frog in hot water, but you can't blame an animal with an IQ of under 7. You can, however, blame humans, most of which have an IQ well over 7.

The frog in question will, if dropped in boiling water, immediately leap out. The same frog placed in cool water that is gradually warmed to boiling, will simply sit there, unaware of its impending doom.

As the various problems in our society become crises, the public just sits in that national tub of warming water, ignoring the signs around them. Crises, what crises? A short list would include foreign policy, domestic politics, the economy, education, outmoded religious notions, the environment and public discourse. And that was the very short list.

Anyone who has been forced to confront even a smattering of history can see that a society that follows unsustainable social policies ends up on the trash heap of history. Quite likely, as in our society, most people were totally taken by surprise when everything suddenly came down around their ears.

People believe, without thinking about it, that we can continue to pollute our water and still have water to drink, that we can starve education and still have a creative, dynamic work force, that we can neglect our infrastructure and still have active trade, that we can cling to antiquated religious notions and still not descend into barbarism, that we can continue to trust one or the other major political parties to fix things, when neither have had a workable solution in years, that we can continue to make war when there is no money to pay for it or that we can continue to spend without going broke.

Unfortunately, most people don't want to hear this. When someone tries to break through the insulation of willful ignorance, they put their fingers in their ears and shout, "Lalalalala."

This attitude probably wouldn't bother me as much if I were not in the same leaky boat with these folks.

Discovery, end of a era

2011-03-10T08:41:00.001-08:00

The space shuttle Discovery is about to wrap up its final flight, and soon the whole program will be history. I know that we can debate the scientific benefits of the program vs the costs, but I think there's a bigger issue, something symbolic.

Our manned space program was a symbol of a time of pride, a time when we all looked up to the stars and dreamed big dreams about big changes. Now, we are reduced to looking down at the ground and dreaming of finding small change.

Some things don't necessarily go together

2011-03-09T08:10:00.001-08:00

We tend to love to lump things together and treat them as all the same stuff. It's so much easier than taking each thing on our list and thinking about it separately. It's human nature, I guess.

One case in point emerged in the conflict in Wisconsin, over public workers rights to collective bargaining and other union issues. Seems all the public employees are protesting, the teachers among them. Some teachers were talking about an attack on collective bargaining and tenure, as if these were like items, fit to reside in the same bag. They are not.

Collective bargaining is an organized way for employees to negotiate wages, working conditions and benefits. Management and labor can sit down and engage in give and take until they work out an arrangement that both sides can live with. Neither side has absolute power, so neither side gets totally screwed.

Tenure is a different animal, and not every job has something like it. Someone who starts his or her third year as a contracted teacher suddenly has a job essentially for life, whether he or she continues doing it properly or not. That's a right no one should have, teacher or janitor.

Naturally, firing anyone should involve due process, where perhaps a panel drawn from workers and management can hear the case and decide the merits. In the case of teachers, a school board member and perhaps a parent should be involved. In any case, a good teacher should be retained, a bad one fired. And that has nothing to do with the pay or benefit package, which apply to those who are worth to receive them, not to anyone who managed to hang in there until the magic day.

Last word on fallen actor, Sheen

2011-03-08T08:57:00.000-08:00

I inadvertently started a debate when I commented on all the hype about the activities of a TV actor, Charlie Sheen, whose program, I would guess, was probably mediocre. I was told yesterday that he'd been fired by whoever way paying him, station, sponsor, whatever. That should be the end of it, but I'm afraid it's only the beginning.

At some point he will likely go into some rehab program for whatever addiction issues prompted his firing. After that, he'll have someone ghost write a book about his experiences, which will be picked up and discussed endlessly by celebrity voyeurs, which will serve to distract them from the serious issues of the day. This attention will reanimate his career, make him a big star and prove, at least in America, that vacuous still rules.

Can't stop the guns?

2011-03-07T13:26:00.001-08:00

New article: US can't stop the flow of guns to Mexico. Weak-kneed reporter. Our government can but won't stop the flow. Remember people can walk in and buy many crates of automatic weapons, pretty much as easily as you buy a case of beer. And they need these guns because... going hunting? Need to protect against burglars? No, between the corruption in Mexico and our unwillingness to regulate sales of assault weapons, let the carnage begin.

Sociial Retard needs help

2011-03-06T20:50:00.000-08:00

Since I'm a social retard, I seem to be concerned about the economy, education, the environment when I hear I'm supposed to care passionately about the carrying on of that marginal actor, Charlie Sheen. Someone help me adopt the proper level of concern.

American kids living in poverty.

2011-03-06T20:47:00.000-08:00

On 60 mins tonight, 25 percent of American kids living in poverty. At the same time the weasels who conned us into sending them to Washington, rather than put the crooks who caused our economic problems in jail, have given them billions to reward them for their corruption. But what happened to the rest of the money that could restore the economy? Oh, yeah, the weasels sent it to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Working at the Cow Palace on Acid

2011-02-26T19:49:00.001-08:00

There is a venue for concerts, rodeos and the like in San Francisco, called the Cow Palace. One year, in the late 80s when I lived near the City and was out of work for the summer, I signed up for some temp work, and one job was for some weekend event at the Cow Palace.

When I showed up on Saturday, there were many of us, and we were sent around to basically keep the place picked up and neat. Not hard work, but boring.

Thinking it would be the same on Sunday, I dropped some acid before going to work.

I was starting to trip when I got there and someone singled me out. I thought, "Oh, shit, busted. I'm going home." But no. The guy assigned me to the back barn where the livestock were kept, telling me to just sweep and keep it all looking good for the visitors.

Between the cattle and the human cattle pushing, mooing and almost stampeding, I was amused for the entire day. I remember the day going by quickly.

The one bad part was lunch, when I went next door to McDonalds and tried to eat one of their burgers. A Big Mac on acid isn't anything one would choose to confront.

I came down just in time to drive home. Tripping is the only way to work.

The truth about store reward cards

2011-02-24T20:10:00.000-08:00

More and more stores are asking people to get those damn cards. Some of them even insult your intelligence by calling them "rewards cards." What rewards? For what?

But, you may insist that these cards save you money. No. Here's how it works. "Candy bars, regularly $3.95, with our rewards card, only $1.10. You save $2.85." Believe that, and I have a really nice bridge in San Francisco to sell you cheap.

Let's take beer. I shop at a store that doesn't have cards, nothing to carry, none of your personal information in their marketing file. One of my favorites is normally $7.95 a six pack, but it's often on sale for $6.95, perhaps a couple days per week. That's when I buy it. The card store down the street has it for either $7.95 or even $8.95, knowing you'd never pay that much. However, with the card you get in for $7.45, sometimes $6.95. They call it a reward, my store calls it what it is, a sale. It's honest, and you don't have to carry a wallet full of cards.

It's even worse when the call it a club. Oh, goody, I'm a member of an exclusive club, and they give me benefits for membership. Get a clue, anyone who willing to put their name and address on a card is a member. The only benefits you get is paying what you would expect to pay anyway. Unless you are having a party and have just run out of beer, no one is going to pay $8.95 for a six pack they can get for $6.95, and no one is going to pay other inflated prices, such as a four buck candy bar.

I suggest that the next time some store asks you for your card, have them call the manager over. Once he or she is there, explain how easy it is to roll up the little card and use it for a rectal suppository.

A world composed of words

2011-02-21T21:20:00.001-08:00

Once upon a time humans learned to talk. From that humble beginning, we've created semantic societies. We've fashioned our cultures, politics, social and religious systems with words, and we've used words to shore them up, remodel them and reaffirm them to each other. We've even pinned nature to our semantic structure. The word and concept "tree" has meaning to us, depending on whether it produces fruit or lumber or provides shade in a park. A rock can name just a rock or a chunk of "granite" which has economic value. We encounter very little in our lives that isn't filtered through our semantic system.

Fortunately for our connection to reality, we've traditionally had a foundation to rest our semantic skyscrapers upon. That foundation is that which we produce, often with little or no semantic input. We grow things to eat. We fashion dwellings and tools. We built the things we use. Sure, a chair is only a chair because we design it as a chair and name it such, but even without that, we would fashion something we could sit on, even if it were just flattening out a fallen log.

The problem now is that it takes fewer and fewer people to actually do things, leaving more people to engage in the strictly semantic pursuits, such as business, politics and information. Add to this the technology that allows almost every one of us to communicate instantly and endlessly with everyone else on the planet, and our semantic world is starting to look like a sub atomic quantum vacuum, filled with energy and wildly erratic. The reality is that, left with nothing physically to do, we fill our spaces and our lives with words, explanations of our world and lives in human terms.

Because of all this, we now live in a world where irresponsible, ignorant people can talk their way into positions of power and authority, and once there, they must maintain these positions by a steady stream of verbiage, whether they have something constructive to say or not. The result is that those with genuine information, knowledge and wisdom to share are often drowned out by the vacuous shouts of people whose only goals are self promotion and financial success. Think of the old radio and TV horror called "dead air

The terrorist of talk are not about to stop, so perhaps we can learn to construct personal filters that screen out the semantic noise. If we can't manage that, maybe we'll need to just put our fingers in our ears and stop listening.

Someone please warn me if I'm becoming one of those vacuous noise makers.

The New Age has reached Old Age

2011-02-20T09:52:00.000-08:00

The dawning of Aquarius, an anthem for a quasi spiritual movement going on forty years old now. The New Age movement, a blend of optimism, eastern spirituality and loads of potent dope was the natural byproduct of the baby boomer generation. And it was popular because, well, because it really felt good.

The point seemed to be that if the young people banded together, believed anything was possible and prosperity depended only on positive thinking, they could have it all. After all, even their gods knew they were special. In theory you could meditate your way to becoming a millionaire, back when a million wasn't chump change.

Those young folks are now filing for Social Security, and Medicare is around the corner. I'm wondering how many are still new agers. I'm guessing that those folks who were making loads of money but then got downsized because younger people had skills that were more current and they'd work for far less, have likely given up their utopian notions.

There are still a few new agers around. I run into them now and then, sprouting things like "All you need is love." I never fail to add, "Plus three squares and a roof that doesn't leak." But, for the most part, these hold outs are still enjoying the trust fund set up by their industrious parents who made a bundle during the post WW2 boom.

To be fair, they probably aren't the only generation to feel so blessed. I'm guessing that there are many young people today who feel that their i phones, apps and Twitter will save them and make them immune to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

I ran into an old hippy I know and asked him if he plans to enjoy the revival of the play Hair. His response was, "Say, what?"

A 21st Century Modest Proposal

2011-02-19T10:47:00.001-08:00

People who know my past sympathy with social safety nets may be surprised by my reversal, but times have changed, and I'm changing with them.

Some members of congress are trying to reduce or eliminate many Social Security and Medicare benefits, along with programs for the poor, in order to save money. It took me a while to see the wisdom of this idea, the big picture idea.

The bottom line is the economic bottom line, and let's face it, old people are not the best demographic group. Few businesses court them, as they generally either have little money to spend or have pretty much accumulated everything they really need. Add to this, unlike the young, old people don't often feel the urge to keep up with trends. The result is a group of people, retired and not producing for our businesses and also not spending. In short, drags on the economy.

So, logically, the sooner we're rid of these folks the better. By cutting off Social Security and Medicare, these old folks will either starve to death or contract some disease that they can't afford to have treated. The result is way less burdensome elderly. Naturally, none of this applies to the wealthy elderly, who can afford food and medical care and still spend money.

The same kind of argument can be made for the poor. These people either don't have jobs or our marginally employed at best. They produce little but demand much, such as food, shelter, warm clothing. With little or no money, they don't support our business community. You seldom see the poor in our malls doing their patriotic fiscal duty. If you cut their programs, most will die of exposure on the first cold winter night, thus aiding the economy. After all, as our puritan founders realized, being poor is a moral flaw. It is indicative of sloth, lack of vision, low self respect and spiritual bankruptcy. This country would be better off without them.

The wealthy, the business owners, the investors are the morally upright people, and they need our support. Their success in life proves their moral worth. Thus when they make more money, the whole fabric of our society becomes richer and in many ways more noble.

With the money we save by taking away free money from slackers, we can fund things that have social value: For example, the military. Any undergraduate sociology student knows that it's necessary to always have a war running in some part of the world. This keeps the undereducated young men employed and gives them a socially acceptable outlet for their youthful aggressive impulses.

Also, military spending supports the patriotic business that make the planes, bombs and guns we use in our just wars and also sell to friendly countries, run by benign dictators who watch our back in remote parts of the globe. And, naturally, the billions in foreign aid we send to these countries are ultimately an investment in our economy and our future.

So, it's time to dismantle these feel good but useless programs and put our money where it will do the most good.

A rich conversation

2011-02-16T10:21:00.000-08:00

The eyes are the first things you notice and the last things you see. They lock on to you with an intensity that almost burns, and they never drop, never avert their gaze. You know from the first that this isn't a typical encounter, a normal, casual conversation.

A freshman in a big university, she seems anxious to absorb the world, an intellectual sponge, a great, consuming fire of curiosity. She's also a bundle of contradictions, confident but nervous, outgoing but lonely, mature but homesick. Tempted to pull back to the small town from the big university world, she digs in and soldiers on, determined to make her way, to live her dream.

A natural communicator, she talks as fast as I do, making our conversation sound like the gunfight at the OK corral. There's never a break, not a pause as we pick up ideas mid sentence and continue running with them, like a basketball passed back and forth down the court. And she never tosses out a trite comment or an unconsidered idea.

Each new bit of knowledge is filtered through layers of analysis, categorized and filed away. It's easy to forget that she's still hardly more than a child.

She's an aspiring journalist in a world where journalism is undergoing drastic, perhaps catastrophic changes. While many would be reluctant to enter a field in such flux, she appears to revel in it, confident that she'll survive and perhaps prosper.

There is a tendency to be concerned for the young people starting out, a concern about the kind of world we've left for them to navigate. However, if she's any indication, we have nothing to worry about.

Protesters in the Rain

2011-02-14T14:23:00.000-08:00

As I was driving through town today, I saw a group standing in the rain, protesting abortion. I find it fascinating how people who seem not to have lives of their own can become so obsessed with other's lives. To spend one's day standing on a corner in the rain casts doubt on the depth or richness of their lives.

I know that many people have strong feelings about many issues and are often moved to stand up and make their feelings know. There is, however, a qualitative difference between protesting things that do not have the potential to harm you and things that do.

For example, when people stand up and ask that the laws that allow mentally unstable or possible criminal people to purchase assaults weapons, often in quantity, be amended, there are real concerns that they or others they know might be victims of these gunmen. This would be an example of people protesting something that poses a danger to them and their community.

Abortion is a personal matter. One person's abortion poses no harm to her neighbor or community. The drugs people take in the privacy of their own home is another personal matter, as well as whatever religious practices make them feel good. And, while religious conformity isn't a current issue in this country, it is in many places, and there are those who would make it so in the US.

If banks foreclose on someone's property without due process or companies pilfer employees' retirement accounts, these are issues that do harm people and should be loudly protested.

Actually, I was being facetious when I claimed to find the protesters fascinating. It is clear why these people stand in the rain with these signs. Their world view is so narrow and on such shaky ground, that they must bolster and protect it at all costs. It is sad to realize that some people see themselves as perpetually under siege. It is also sad that they see the rest of us as the enemy.

Are there patterns in the events in Egypt.

2011-02-04T11:09:00.000-08:00

It would be interesting to see some math analysis of the popular uprising in Egypt.

I know that mathematicians have theories and formulas that describe large groups of individuals in random motion: molecules of gas, flocks of birds, population projections, to name a few. These could be or perhaps already have been applied to this seemingly leaderless revolt.

First, I realize that while the overall motion of large groups can be calculated, there is no way to determine what one individual will do, particularly one very complex individual human, with an assortment of abilities, opportunities and motivations. So, which individual or group will ultimately rise to power, should Mubarak be removed soon, is, for the moment, pure speculation, the general process will probably unfold in some predictable pattern.

Right now the scene looks rather chaotic, although there are people cooperating to fend off the attacks of the government's hired thugs. To me, all phenomena are much more interesting and beautiful if the pattern is discernable, and this uprising looks like it is unfolding like an elaborate flower or condensing like a gas cloud into a solar system.

A complex system set in motion will run its course, following some natural pattern. I am anxious to see how these events unfold.

The loss of analytic thought

2011-02-02T17:51:00.000-08:00

The following quote by Nobel Prize winning scientist, Peter Medawar, speaks ominously to this society at this time.

"The spread of secondary and latterly of tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought."

As a society, we seem to have substituted the boisterous babbling of bewildering balderdash and the relentless ranting of redundant rubbish for clear, analytic discussions.

As Medawar points out, we have many people who are educated and sophisticated in their tastes. However, something has been neglected in their education or in their personal intellectual quest. One thing that seems to be lost is the reflective gap between some event and the assessment of it.

For example, the recent protests in Egypt were immediately proclaimed by some as a great and noble revolution, leading to a new era of democratic government. Others immediately denounced it as an Islamist take over. At this writing, it is too early to tell, but it could end up as either of those, the rise of a new autocrat, a complete break down of government or perhaps some other alternative. The point being, these folks didn't take a moment to think it through before pontificating on the subject.

Take our current political climate. If you were to plot a graph with the political far right on one end and the far left on the other end of the X axis, and then plotted the amount of analytic thinking on the Y axis, once the American voters were each placed in the appropriate spot, I strongly suspect that we would end up with a bell curve, that is, as you move out to the extremes, the number of analytic thinkers drops off to nearly zip.

Perhaps we've learned to harness our thinking into 140 character tweets, or perhaps our educational system is focused only on preparing students to do something, rather than to think deeply about something. Whatever the case, we are inundated with the sound of many intelligent loose cannons.

Money for education from the private sector

2011-02-01T19:44:00.001-08:00

One way to help cash strapped school districts is with partnerships with the private sector.

I realized the power of this when I advised a Middle School newspaper. The paper was part of the afterschool program and did not rely on either funding or support from the school administration. In our last year of operation, we were totally self funded, made a profit and provided a scholarship for a student to go to DC for an educational event. We even had money left to pay student reporters for their stories. We did this through selling advertisements. The students sold these ads over the phone and collected a commission on each sale.

The outpouring of response from the business community made me realize what an untapped resource we have all around us. How can we best use this resource?

1. If each high school and middle school had a school/community newspaper with ads, a journalism program could be established that not only paid for itself, but made a profit that could be returned to the schools.

2. Magazines could be started at the high schools. They could center on subjects like the sports programs, the Fitness for Life program, a literary quarterly, academics, school community, etc. Each of these mags would teach reading, writing, editing, sales and layout skills, all practical activities that could lead to careers.

3. Business sponsors for our sports teams would pay for uniforms and the cost of lighting the games.

4. Apprenticeship programs would put students in local business for several hours per week, giving them hands on experience, providing entry level workers for the companies, training the next generation of employees and bringing in some money to support the program. The companies would pay the district an amount that would normally be paid to part time, entry level employees.

5. Academic competitions could be held in various subject areas, with sponsorship from businesses. Award would be given, sponsors recognized and excellent students would have another item for their university resumes.

6. The arts: Drama and music programs could be paid for by sponsorships for school plays and musical recitals. Young musicians could elect to be in classical orchestras, jazz bands or rock groups. They would perform, and money would be collected at the door as well as from the sponsors.

To me, the important thing is to get a double benefit from each project. One benefit would be the sponsorship money, and the other would be practical skills to augment the usual book skills taught in the classroom. Everyone wants something tangible for their efforts, and abstractions only motivate those already highly motivated.

I believe these suggestions would help save a district's budget, but only if the district doesn't spend it all on running the program. This doesn't need a whole new department, another top level administrator or a huge staff. The trick to making this work is to have students help run these programs--another important life skill.

Best of all worlds

2011-01-17T10:26:00.001-08:00

The other day I went to the local farmers market at Cabrillo Community College. It was an unseasonably warm day, one of those little islands of sunshine that usually pop up in January. I was helping the animal shelter promote cat adoption, so I was there for half the day.

At one point, I decided to talk a walk to the top of the college, which is built on a hill. The gardening department is on top, quite a climb up from the street, and when I go there, I found a bench overlooking the Monterey Bay. I sat down and just took it all in. I could see the hills of Monterey and Carmel, looking like islands rising from the sea, and the smoke stacks of the Moss Landing power plant seemed to be coming up out of the morning mist, which spread out in shades of pink and cream. Santa Cruz was filtered through a thin curtain of fog, and everything look photo-still and peaceful.

On the way back down, a path along a row of classrooms was lined by maple trees, leaves yellow, gold and redish-brown. Leaves were still on the trees and also on the ground. On that path were two small boys, bundled up in winter wear, each holding a balloon on a length of ribbon. It was like an old Norman Rockwell scene.

Then, a bit later, back in the car and driving up an off ramp, a red tail hawk flew in front of me and hit the ground, wings out and neck arched. I couldn't see what it had caught, but I knew it had it's breakfast.

Now, two days later, as I walked the neighborhood in the early morning, I saw the first buds and flowers on trees along the road. It is, indeed, the best of all possible worlds.

automobile economy

2011-01-07T18:03:00.001-08:00

While I’m certainly no expert on banking or Wall Street, I know enough basic economics
to sense what has gone wrong. It has to do with what kind of economy we choose. Unless you’re a hunter gatherer, you basically have three choices: Socialism, Capitalism or some mix of the two.

Socialism doesn’t have the financial incentives for innovation and success, but it creates equality, the equality of financial stagnation. Capitalism has periods of boom and
bust, the boom making many people rich, the bust causing many to go broke.
Capitalism with regulation cushions the up and down motion, hopefully avoiding the nasty booms and busts.

It’s like the early attempts to build an automobile. People bolted the body to
the frame, and everything was secure and controllable, but the ride was so rough that you couldn’t go over five mph. That’s sort of like socialism.

So, people installed springs, softening the ride. However, when the car hit
bumps or holes, the car would alternately bottom out and send the passengers
through the roof, plus making steering almost impossible. That’s sort of like
capitalism.

Then someone invented the shock absorber. The car was still able to go up and
down on the springs, but it was kept from full compression and full
extension. That’s sort of like capitalism with regulation.

I’m sure that even the guys in banks and on Wall Street know this. They just don’t want to admit it.

what are our rights

2011-01-07T17:45:00.001-08:00

Our “rights” are a constant source of discussion, making one believe that we are naturally endowed with a list of these, and the only argument revolves around which items are on the list. The reality may not be so simple.

Looking at the natural world, it’s hard to find anything resembling rights. From birth on it is a struggle to eat and to keep from being eaten. A creature’s survival depends on luck and on how good it is at these two things. Lions don’t have a right to a fat gazelle, and gazelles don’t have a right to plentiful grass or to immunity from lions.

What humans consider rights are part of the social overlay we place over the natural world, something that imposes our concepts of order on what we perceive as natural disorder. Like most other items in human culture, these are artificial, in that they do not occur naturally. We build certain rights into the structure of our societies. For example, most societies feel one has the right not to be murdered, so they impose severe penalties on murderers.

When the Declaration of Independence claims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” they start the sentence with “We.” In this they are saying that our culture, our society, our leaders hold these things to be true. They did not claim that this applies to people in far away places, bob cats, inch worms or oak trees.

Not all societies have our long list of rights. In some places, the king or chief has most of the rights, and the people have the right to do whatever doesn’t displease the leader. The old Soviet Union believed most rights were reserved for the collective, not the individual, and the collective was embodied in the leaders. Other societies base all rights on their religious books.

Naturally, we prefer our long list of rights, but even in our society some people would rather sacrifice some of those for a bit more order and security. In times of war, we tend toward order and security, and the degree and timing of the return to rights is always debated. The bottom line being that there are no set of rights that seem natural and proper for every human and for every occasion.

We can add to our list or subtract from it. We can have the right to universal medical care, equal civil rights for all, rights of the poor equal to those of the rich, rights of women regarding child bearing and many others. We can even lose our rights and allow someone to enslave us.

We, individually and as a people, have to decide what rights we are to have, and then we must secure these and defend them, once secured. We can secure them by force, which often backfires on us, leaving us with fewer rights, or we can secure them through legislation and jurisprudence. We can also convince others that our list of rights is best, and then we build a consensus which changes our society’s point of view. We can stand up individually against transgressions against our rights, or we can act collectively. However we choose to do it, and whatever list of rights we deem proper, we must do it, for without a conscious social act, we revert to the natural world, where the concept of “rights” has no meaning.

Creating wilderness

2011-01-07T17:42:00.000-08:00

One of the most personally satisfying things I’ve ever done was to help create wilderness. I hiked in beautiful, unspoiled country, took pictures and notes, drew lines on a map, and a few months later we had new wilderness.

I was volunteering with the Ventana Wilderness Alliance and The California Wilderness Coalition on the Wilderness 2000 program. We were concentrating our efforts in the northern Santa Lucias, a land of mixed oversight. These mountains above the Big Sur coast have BLM, National Forest, and Wilderness lands, plus scattered private lands. One can walk among the various federal designations and not see the difference.

Our plan was to survey wild public land, put it in a big bill, and send it to Congress, followed up with a public support campaign, along with lobbying. The result was Congressman Farr’s, “Big Sur Wilderness and Conservation Act of 2002," which created over 50,000 acres of new Wilderness. So, with a map, a notebook and a camera, I got to “play God” and help create new Gardens of Eden.

Late December seemed more like summer as I climbed the Coast Ridge Road out of the Ventana Resort in Big Sur. It’s a steep, dirt road that’s used by the Forest Service and the few land owners. You can’t drive or bike it, but you are free to hike it for twenty miles along the ridge. About four miles up the road is an unspoiled piece of forest nicknamed Outlaw.

The walk to Outlaw passes through cool, second growth redwoods before it opens to the grassland hills. The ground undulates away to forested canyons, down to the highway and the sea.

Outlaw sits between the Coast Ridge Road and the Ventana Wilderness. The Terrace Creek Trail descends into Outlaw and drops two impressive miles to the Pine Ridge trail in the Wilderness. It begins in hillside meadows studded with oak and madrone and drops into redwood groves with cascading waterfalls.

The few homes on the ridge were deserted, and without other hikers I was alone with the sounds of nature. The air was thin and clear in a way peculiar to sunny winter days. The smallest details from miles up the coast seemed only yards away. The dirt road undulated along the corrugated ridge. I took photos down toward the Big Sur Gorge below. Then I walked most of the way down the Terrace Creek Trail, almost to the campground and the wilderness.

Terrace Creek Trail was in disrepair. Downed trees requiring climbing and scrambling. In the wooded canyon, the terraces in the creek became visible, long cascading waterfalls that dropped to the Big Sur River below.

Outlaw wasn’t the only parcel I surveyed. Logwood, another, larger parcel, was a bit further up Coast Ridge Road. It also extended down toward the Big Sur Gorge from the road and had all the qualities of a wilderness.

At the Boronda Ridge trailhead, the rain and wind almost changed my mind. I lacked rain gear, and there might not be enough visibility to survey and photograph. But, the rain was stopping, and I could turn back if things got uncomfortable.

Within minutes the sun started to break through the clouds. Before long I was so warm I had to remove my sweater.

The ridge was vivid green from the rains, and along the trail were tiny violet flowers. Too small to survive in the meadow, they’d found a niche on the abandoned roadway. The trail occasionally turned from the exposed ridge to stands of oaks and a brief respite from the wind.

An hour up the trail, I stood on a rocky outcropping. The wind had whipped the ocean to a silver-gray meringue. A couple of hundred feet below me two deer looked up and watched me until I moved on.

Coast Ridge Road was deserted. Walking north, I looked east toward Logwood Creek. I found an abandoned road going east, down toward the creek. I followed it until I was sure it was impassable. The large fallen tree and young madrones in the roadway convinced me.

Having hiked almost to Outlaw, I turned back south, towards Cold Springs Camp, at the southern extreme of Logwood. The wind in the trees was so loud that I turned around often, thinking a truck was coming. The pines were leaning and shaking, and I was concerned about falling branches. The solitude and the howling of the wind gave an eerie, surreal quality to the five mile walk.

The wind was getting stronger, and the temperature was dropping, and I was anxious to find the De Angulo trail. The first part of the trail was treacherous, a steep trail bed of loose rock. Even below the rocky section, the piles of leaves, freshly wet from the rain, made the trail slippery, and in places the trail had broken away leaving it the width of a single boot. The dark stillness of occasional wooded patches was a welcome change.

I stopped to enjoy the view. The cloud cover was cumulonimbus piles rushing by. The shadows of the clouds on the ocean were like lines of ghostly, gray, giant amoebae marching southward across a mirrored sea. Sunlight streamed through the clouds in fan-like rays. I might have stood there the rest of the afternoon, but the moments of sunshine ended suddenly with gusts that almost knocked me off my feet.

I was almost seven and a half hours into the hike before I saw other humans, a young couple coming up the trail.

On the last two miles of the way down, I experienced hail, rain and even snow. And at that point I was greeted by two dogs, who walked up as if they knew me and took it upon themselves to escort me the rest of the way to the highway, as if I were somehow expected, as if this entire drama was staged for my enjoyment or education.

It was an exhilarating and satisfying way to help the environment.

You can be a fool

2010-12-21T12:17:00.000-08:00

Remember when you were a kid and your overly supportive parents said you could be anything you wanted to be? Then you struggled through high school and college, and now you're not working at your dream job.

You haven't won a Pulitzer prize, an Oscar or the Nobel. You haven't discovered a cure for cancer, started the next mega Silicon Valley business or married the person of your dreams. Discouraged?

Don't be. You can still become a fool. It's easy, and it will make you popular. Here's a couple easy steps.

First, have lots of opinions and shout them out with conviction at every opportunity. You don't have to do the careful research necessary to determine if your opinions have any basis in fact. That takes valuable time away from forming opinions and using them to make friends. Better to get your opinions from vocal opinion makers. Just choose opinions that have a strong emotional appeal and repeat them, changing the wording slightly to personalize them. People will either agree with you and be your friends, or they will disagree with you and you can have an argument. Either way, people are talking to you and acknowledging you.

Then make sure you think in black and white. Gray areas confuse people, and you will be left with only those insufferable intellectuals to talk with, and we all know how they are regarded by the public.

Once you mastered "basic fool," there are higher levels you can work on.

Ha ve a merry, secular Xmas

2010-12-19T12:22:00.001-08:00

It’s that time of year again, the time I write a short piece to justify my enjoyment of Christmas, or my preferred “Xmas.” People assume that since I’m an atheist, I would shun this religious holiday.

On the contrary on two counts. First I welcome it, rather than shun it. Second, I’m convinced Christmas is really a secular holiday, despite what the church-goers say.

Historically, Christmas has most often been an excuse for wildness, drunkenness, and rowdy behavior of all sorts. In fact there was a period in the 1600s when the celebration of Christmas was outlawed in England, mostly because of the excesses of the party animals. It was even outlawed for a time in parts of New England, for much the same reason.

Once we shook off the Middle Ages, Christmas became a time to cut loose, with only a tip of the hat, at best, to the birth of Jesus. Times and work were hard, and in mid winter not much work could be done, so people had time to celebrate the way people always tend to, with excess.

Religion started creeping back into the holiday in the 19^th century, but at the same time a different tradition was starting. Charles Dickens was one of the first and best at promoting this new attitude toward an old holiday. With the writing of A Christmas Carol, he got people thinking about the idea that Christmas was a time of unselfish acts toward others, generosity of wallet and spirit. Note that Jesus wasn’t mentioned in his delightful little book.

People now not only give over-priced gifts to family, friends and co workers, they also donate to charity, bring sacks of food to can food drives, drop money in the little pots the bell shakers have in front of stores, and generally act nicely toward people in the street.

Strangers pass me on the Boulevard and we wish each other a Merry Christmas. It makes us both feel good, and it doesn’t require a debate or conversation about the existence of God.

At the same time as A Christmas Carol, the idea of using the holiday to get together with family and rekindle ties became popular. The Christmas feast became tradition.

We send cards to friends in distant places, rekindling friendships that might otherwise fade. Some of us decorate our homes to stave off the darkness of mid winter. We have house parties, where we give our friends and families food and drink, and we don’t ask them to contribute or to reciprocate.

I have a great time doing things most of us enjoy: giving and receiving gifts, eating good food, drinking good wine and talking with good friends, and none of this comes with the requirement to talk about an itinerant Jewish preacher who was born two thousand years ago.

Educational Reform Starts with Tenure Reform

2010-12-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

Tenure is a relic from long ago, perhaps a good idea 100 years ago, but a disaster now. Eliminate tenure and start improving education immediately.

What is gained with tenure. Excellent teachers aren't going to lose their jobs, and hiring new teachers to replace higher paid older teachers wouldn't even be an issue if teachers were paid for how well they teach, not for how many years they sat in a chair in front of a class.

In California we decided that we wouldn't even give our elected representatives a chance at tenure when we passed term limits. Do we really believe a group of people who sit around in eternal political gridlock are more deserving to be replace for poor performance than the people who make the difference between our children growing up to be successes or failures? And that is the issue, our children's futures.

Does anyone really believe that teachers are interchangeable, like those fast food workers that one day wait the counter, the next day work the fries? Do teachers who pass out work sheets deserve the same pay as someone who is actively teaching and continually checking for understanding? What about the teachers who opt for fun activities and cultural enrichment rather than teaching students to read and compute?

I have substituted in a number of classes over the years, and I can see a difference. In some classes, the teacher has provided a rich set of learning activities for the students, and the class understands the expectations. In classes like that, I've worked for my pay. I've babysat in other classes, with 1 hour, 45 minute blocks, where the assignment was a one page worksheet, something I could do in 20 minutes, the better students in 30 and the slackers in well under an hour. The rest of the interminably long block is spent chatting, texting, playing games on their phones or actually napping. These kids are bored, and it's no wonder many drop out, opting for a minimum wage job that at least give them a small monetary feedback.

The teachers who will yell the loudest about this suggestion aren't the ones who would be retained and earn a higher wage. Rather it will be the people who, without tenure to protect them, would be out on the street, looking for another job.

Eliminate poorly performing teachers, pay the good ones more money, hire support staff to do the non teaching, routine paper and phone work, and we will start turning out graduates ready to take on the demanding work of the 21st century. The alternative is stagnation.

Naturally there are other measures that must be taken, such as redesigning the make up of school boards, and having checks and balances between certificated, classified and administrative employees in order to keep one group from abusing the rights of anot

Productive and fun time

2010-12-10T21:32:00.000-08:00

So far Dec. has been both fun and productive. I just got another article published in California Kayaker
See pages 18-20
Also took a wonderful paddle in the Watsonville slough system and filmed it.
Hope my readers enjoy these, and I'm always anxious to hear from you.

Book Review

2010-12-03T12:25:00.000-08:00

Sam Harris' new book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, provides a clear and insightful challenge to those who have conceded the moral argument to the moral relativists. He has made, sometime redundantly, the point that moral good can be derived from whatever creates human well-being, thus being a subject that can be studied scientifically, allowing us to make objective claims, at least in principle, about moral right and wrong.

Harris doesn't shy away from the label, "moral realist," and in fact he defends this position admirably. He makes excellent points about some of the cultural practices that create misery for large numbers of a population, under the moral umbrella of religious practice, and how many of our intellectuals are reluctant to condemn these practices as morally offensive and just plain mistaken.

I think this should be a must read for any open-minded intellectual who seems to think that moral issues can't be objectified and that we shouldn't impose our values on other societies. He believes, rightly so, that our political correct, multiculturalism has gone too far, and now refuses to recognize any standards of human behavior.

Harris did, in my opinion, miss some opportunities to make a good point. He quotes philosopher and neuroscientist, Joshua Greene, and then argues against Greene's points.
However, when Greene states: "And like may of our common sense abilities, our ability to make moral judgments feels to us like a perceptual ability, an ability, in this case, to discern immediately and reliably mind-independent moral facts. As a result we are naturally inclined toward a mistaken belief in moral realism."

I believe that Harris should have jumped upon this implication that because something isn't mind-independent, it can't be a real fact and subject to the idea of realism. There are many objective facts that are mind-dependent and also collective mind-dependent. One great example, used by philosopher John Searle, is that of money. There is no physical, mind-independent fact about those little green pieces of paper, and lately, those little ones and zeros in bank computers that makes them intrinsically money. They are money because we accept them as money, believe they are money and treat them as money. Money is mind-dependent, actually also collectively mind-dependent, and yet it has an objective reality. It can provide food and shelter for people, cause the building of cities, allow governments--an other mind-dependent fact--to function and finance bombs that can level cities.

Values and morals are no less objectively real than money, justice, elected leaders or other facts of society. We can't relegate mental and social process to some ambiguous concepts where objective evaluation can't proceed.

While I can look at Harris' work, one that really needed to be written and read, and in the process find some points that weren't made strongly enough for my taste, as well as some that I felt might have been overstated, that in no way takes anything away from this book. He has said something that, at this moment in history, really needed to be said.

In short, if you ever think about these issues, you need to read this book.

Messiah Chronicles

2010-11-29T20:28:00.000-08:00

Let's face it. The New Testament is kind of boring, and it's filled with supernatural stuff, like raising the dead and walking on water. So where's the story? Seriously, Jesus was a man bent on reforming his religion, getting it back on track. He surrounded himself with a dozen guys who liked his message and decided to go with him to bring it to the people.
They had some adventures that later were perhaps hyped a bit too much, and they met some interesting people, such as a Roman centurion who, while being the opposite of Jesus, ended up becoming his friend.
In the end, it was a tragedy, but it was a true human interest story, a mixture of drama and comedy. That was what I was after when I wrote Messiah Chronicles: (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004DI7OFE)
This book is now available at Amazon.com for your Kindle.

spinning real life

2010-11-29T20:02:00.001-08:00

Spinning Real Life is a satirical novel. A young idealist drops out of college to live the writer's life and to write the great American novel. He ends up at Texas Jake's Trailer Park and Harley Repair, in the woods along the Smith River in NW Calif. He starts to meet the kinds of characters who might be found in a combination trailer park and bike repair shop. He also becomes involved in a series of romances, all destined to fail due to his cluelessness about relationships, women and himself. He also finds himself in the middle of a bizarre environmental war that has kamikaze logging activists and a government war with the forest. A bumper sticker artist/ sinister mastermind, a young girl who becomes a master Harley mechanic, an ex B movie actress destined to be the first woman president, some brawling hillbillies and a parade of strong and interesting women round out this commentary on modern life, environmentalism, politics, literature and youthful idealism. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004DNWCZQ

Cosmic Coastal Chronicles

2010-11-29T19:48:00.000-08:00

Here's another of my books, an older one from the mid 1990s. Cosmic Coastal Chronicles (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004DI7IZ0)is a love affair with the west coast from Central Calif to British Columbia. It's one man's solitary exploration of the coast and of himself, with kayaking, surfing, hiking, camping and travel adventures. It is a giddy and exuberant outpouring of one person's soul. You can get it as a print book or for your Kindle (above). You can also search Amazon.com by typing in Meade Fischer.
If you're not sure you'll like it, respond to this post with your email, and I'll send you some reviews.

Shattering the Crystal Face of God

2010-11-29T19:32:00.000-08:00

I'd like to introduce you to one of my books. Written in Y2K, Shattering the Crystal Face of God is a leap into a new millennium and a new way of exploring one's life and environment. From the first chapter, Lucidity, to the last, Delirium, the book passes through: Big Sur after El Nino, Dreary Days of Dark Despair, Patterns of Life, Creating Wilderness, Of Snails and Immortality, California Screamin', Up with the Trees, Selling the Cosmic Coast, The Unbearable Wonder of it all, The View from a Purple Kayak, Wild Among the Mildflowers, Big Daddy Religion, Behind the Crystal Face of God and In Praise and Defense of Earth. This is a romp, an adventure, an impressionistic philosophical rant, a celebration of the natural world and a few scenes that are hard to label. You may or may not agree with what I've written, but you won't be bored.
It's now available in both print and Kindle versions on Amazon.com. Search "Meade Fischer," or to go straight to the Kindle version: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004DI7J0O

Eliminate Tenure and improve education

2010-11-28T19:58:00.000-08:00

There seems to be a growing consensus about education reform in this country, at least a consensus about how we have a serious problem. Unfortunately, education is a complex affair, made up of many components. Many of the diverse small problems that make up the large one require leadership skills, buy-in from a diverse group of stakeholders and revised curriculums. There is, however, one area that isn't complex and would go a long way toward true reform, even though it would be hard to implement.

Tenure is a relic from long ago, perhaps a good idea 100 years ago, but a disaster now. Eliminate tenure and start improving education immediately.

What is gained with tenure. Excellent teachers aren't going to lose their jobs, and hiring new teachers to replace higher paid older teachers wouldn't even be an issue if teachers were paid for how well they teach, not for how many years they sat in a chair in front of a class.

In California we decided that we wouldn't even give our elected representatives a chance at tenure when we passed term limits. Do we really believe a group of people who sit around in eternal political gridlock are more deserving to be replace for poor performance than the people who make the difference between our children growing up to be successes or failures? And that is the issue, our children's futures.

Does anyone really believe that teachers are interchangeable, like those fast food workers that one day wait the counter, the next day work the fries? Do teachers who pass out work sheets deserve the same pay as someone who is actively teaching and continually checking for understanding? What about the teachers who opt for fun activities and cultural enrichment rather than teaching students to read and compute?

I have substituted in a number of classes over the years, and I can see a difference. In some classes, the teacher has provided a rich set of learning activities for the students, and the class understands the expectations. In classes like that, I've worked for my pay. I've babysat in other classes, with 1 hour, 45 minute blocks, where the assignment was a one page worksheet, something I could do in 20 minutes, the better students in 30 and the slackers in well under an hour. The rest of the interminably long block is spent chatting, texting, playing games on their phones or actually napping. These kids are bored, and it's no wonder many drop out, opting for a minimum wage job that at least give them a small monetary feedback.

The teachers who will yell the loudest about this suggestion aren't the ones who would be retained and earn a higher wage. Rather it will be the people who, without tenure to protect them, would be out on the street, looking for another job.

Eliminate poorly performing teachers, pay the good ones more money, hire support staff to do the non teaching, routine paper and phone work, and we will start turning out graduates ready to take on the demanding work of the 21st century. The alternative is stagnation.

Today's idiotic news

2010-11-19T15:34:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I really love the news. Today, Nov. 19 is a wonderful day for the absurd. First, the survivors of Jonestown want to build a memorial to the 900 people who died there 32 years ago. This will be, I assume, a memorial to the gullible nature of humans. Most of those folks willing went with a nut case to a compound in South America and willingly drank the poison drink. What the survivors should have done at the time was to get their friends and family out of there.

Next, students are protesting fee hikes at California's university system. That what they do, drink beer at night, protest by day. The folks who run the university are saying the state isn't giving them the support, which appears to be true. Students should work to change the reality on the ground, rather than protest it. Don't they realize that the same cutting of resources at the university level is also happening at K-12.

Maybe, rather than choke off our educational system gradually, we should cut to the chase and close all schools, higher and lower education, thus turning our gradual decline to a third world country into a freefall.

And when some idiot says we can't raise taxes to pay for education because it's a job killer, first spit in his eye and then explain that there's no worse job killer than an illiterate, uneducated population. Perhaps, before long I'll be able to command a six figure income simply because I'll be one of the few left who can read and write.

All that great stuff in the paper, and I didn't even get to the section with the celebrities and all of their romantic and addiction problems.

Committee finds ways to cut budget

2010-11-12T11:31:00.001-08:00

The bipartisan commission on the budget finally reached an agreement on what can be cut to balance the budget. Many items have proved contentious, so agreement has been difficult to reach.

Democrats and union leaders objected to any cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans dismissed any idea of new taxes. There has also been a tug of war over items like the child tax credit and deductions for mortgage payments. Farm subsidies are another area so entrenched that eliminating them is a hopeless endeavor.

Every senator and representative agreed that earmarks need to be abolished, that is, except for their earmarks, which were obviously essential.

Finally, after sifting through 843,219 government programs, the committee has found something they can cut with minimal objection. So, they believe they can soon start cutting our massive deficit.

However, unwed mother, Polish immigrants will no longer get subsidized polka lessons.
Let the austerity begin.

US makes major changes to war plans

2010-11-12T09:16:00.001-08:00

After the announcement that the US would stay in Afghanistan until 2014, the Afghans protested with a collective, "Why me?" Much of the same sentiment was heard in Iraq. As a result, the United States is planning to change its war strategy.

Starting next year, we will go on a rotating war plan. The way this works is that we acknowledge that invading, bombing and killing one group of people for over a decade could be construed as cruel, and we're not a cruel nation. Instead, we will go on a rotating war deployment.

This is how it will work. Every two years we will pull out of wherever we are waging war and move to another third world or emerging nation. To make this fair, we'll use a lottery system, and the countries we will invade will be chosen at random.

An unnamed spokesman for the government of Uruguay applauded this move, saying that his country had less than a one in thirty chance of being attacked in the next decade.

Our military personnel also received the news optimistically. Sgt. Ben Dover said he was sick of fighting in deserts and barren mountains and was looking forward to some warfare in a tropical wetland or a grassy valley.

Pentagon spokesman Captain Jonathon Ahab said that the new policy will not dilute our commitment to furthering our goals. "We will pursue the illusive vision of American style democracy across the seven seas."

freedom of speech and responsibilities

2010-11-11T09:58:00.001-08:00

Freedom of speech is a bedrock principle of a free people. To suppress a book, article or speech on any subject, is to potentially suppress everyone. Certain social, political and religious subjects inspire passion, often to the exclusion of reason, and these can make freedom of speech an intellectual mine field.
You have the right to stand up in front of a group and deliver a speech on any topic you like. However, I do not have the right to shout you down and drive you from the podium, no matter how passionately I disagree. That would be my free speech negating yours. I do, however, have the right to wait my turn and then offer a rebuttal to everything you've said. That's how freedom of speech should work, and I'm fairly certain it is how our country's founders meant it to work.
Also, when we move into the stormy seas of personal attack, we test the limits of free speech. If I don't have a cogent argument against your position and thus decide to attack you as a person, what are my limits? I can certainly point out your past support of organizations that oppose my position, you prior remarks denigrating my position or your past actions that might reflect on your credibility. That, however, does not give me the right to lie about you or insinuate things about your character and behavior that is speculative. This last has become an issue within the social networking sites.
In the end, all rights come with responsibilities. Civilized debate is essential to a civilized society, and a verbal mob is no different in essence that a physical mob. Freedom is a high concept, one we must continual rise to meet.

Put me on HBO

2010-10-26T10:25:00.001-07:00

Recently someone sent me something that Dennis Miller used on his HBO show. I don't get HBO, but I recall Miller from when I could watch him for free, and I recall that he has a sarcastic, politically incorrect and sometimes abusive sense of humor. I like that because I'm the same way.

Now, I do this blog, which doesn't bring me one red cent, and Miller, who is on TV, probably gets paid a few hundred bucks a week for saying the same kind of crap. Now, I ask you, is that fair? Oh, hell, quick thinking about it. I'll answer for you. No! It's not one damn bit fair.

I can insult your intelligence just as well as Miller, and I think I should get the same exposure, and maybe the same pay. Right now I'm only getting paid for my good looks, so you can see how desperate I've become.

Now, and this is just for those of you who are literate, if you think I'm every bit as obnoxious as Dennis Miller, take a few minutes to write to HBO or one of those other cable stations and say something like this: "Put Meade Fischer on your station. He's just as big of a loud-mouthed jerk as Dennis Miller."

That's all you have to do, and when I'm on, I promise to give whatever internet scam you're running a big plug.

Something to check out

2010-10-26T09:52:00.001-07:00

I've recently been in contact with an old friend from college, a guy who has been trying to earn his living from the written word for better than 30 years, and if anyone has had that experience, they know that it's sort of a blissful state of Zen poverty.

Recently he's been another casualty of the recession, the one where the rich got tossed a lifeline, and the working people were sent a care, reading, "Having a nice recovery. Wish you were here."

Anyway, this guy, Scott, who also goes by Rusty and Mick, depending on which alter ego fits the occasion, has come up with a fairly novel idea. He sends out a weekly news letter, interesting bits and pieces gleaned from various media, along with his brand of commentary. http://nstar312.blogspot.com/

Anyway, he likes my blog (no accounting for taste), so I thought I'd send some of my readers his way. No obligation, so if it isn't your thing, so be it.

However, the novel idea was to put a Pay Pal button on this newsletter, so if you become a fan, and you want to keep electricity flowing to his computer, you can donate to him.

Anyway, I always assumed that Pay Pal was some big deal, and that you had to be a profitable company and spend lots of time to get into this. He said, "No; it's easy," so I added Pay Pal to my website, making it easier for my 6 or 7 loyal fans to buy my books.

I figure that if I suddenly start generating sales, I'll donate a bit of that to him, sort of a thanks for the tip kind of thing. I've come to appreciate the "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" philosophy, rather than my former, "You Scratch my back, and I'll pick your pocket."

Get over yourself

2010-10-24T20:45:00.001-07:00

By nature, we humans are self-involved, self-centered and just plain selfish. Self improvement is the struggle against these other "self" oriented tendencies. Unless we stop ourselves, we tend to get mired in our own needs, wants and problems.

It's like, "Poor me, I gained 5 pounds," or "Poor me, I didn't get that raise I deserved," or "Poor me, I earned an A, and the professor gave me a B," or "Poor me, the person I'm really hot for doesn't give me a second look," or, worse yet, "Poor me, my phone isn't as new as my friend's."

Well, my friends, get the hell over it. You ain't special. Actually you are special, but no more special than any other slob shuffling down the street with foul breath and bad hair.

But, you say, "What can I do about it? I mean, the world is out to screw me, even after my mommy spent years telling me I could be anything I wanted to be." Well, you could, and you did, and this is apparently what you wanted to be. I know it sucks, but it seemed a good idea at the time.

You want some advice? Of course not, but I'm going to give it to you anyway. If you're like 99 percent of us, you're too damn self absorbed, but there's a cure for that, or at least a treatment. Pay attention; this isn't brain surgery.

Get involved in something outside yourself and bigger than yourself. The best way is to volunteer your time for some good cause, something that will help others or the environment, but will not give you money, fame or fortune. The word, and you may have never heard anyone you know say it aloud, is altruism. It's great, and it's easy. Take a bit of it externally each day, and you'll find yourself saying "I," or "me" far less often.

Protests in France and flaws in democracy

2010-10-20T18:23:00.001-07:00

The massive strikes in France, protesting raising the retirement age from 60 to 62, have highlighted some basic problems in a democracy. The general public isn't always deeply informed about the issues, and people often do not vote their best interests.

In France, protesters are "voting" personal interests in these strikes, but they are ignoring their collective interest. Sarkozy is doing the right thing, even though it is trashing his approval rate and may see him replaced. He knows the retirement system will not sustain itself, and he's taking an unpopular position. The people striking are not thinking beyond wanting their perks.

In this country, politicians are not always as brave as Sarkozy. Often they will pander to the loud voices, even though they know it's the wrong approach. Budgets are one example. When a state or the federal government is having trouble with the budget and is bleeding red ink, the people at the helm know that something must be cut and more revenue must be brought in. However, usually nothing much gets cuts, as Americans, just like the French, raise hell if their slice of the pie gets smaller. Also, new revenue doesn't come in, because people raise hell if their taxes go up.

Americans often vote against their collective interests, and they even often vote against their personal interests. While this doesn't seem to make any sense, we need to realize that ideology often trumps common sense, and that loud sound bites are easier to digest than complex political and economic realities. Quite simply, people often don't know enough to make an informed decision.

In the interests of being continually more democratic, we have placed a burden on the average voter that he or she may not be up to carrying. After all, anyone eighteen or older can vote, even if they have dropped out of school and are functionally illiterate, have never read a newspaper, know nothing about how the government works and know nothing about the issues and people on the ballot.

The wise folks who founded this country were aware of this. They provided some checks and balances. Among those was that senators were not elected directly by the people, but rather by state legislators, people who were assumed to be both better informed and cooler heads. Even the president was not elected directly, but by a body called the electoral college. The will of the general populace was expressed most directly through the house of representatives. Our founders trusted the people, but not completely.

Now we pretty much elect everyone directly, plus we pass legislation ourselves, though ballot measures. As a result, sometimes we get it right, and other times we are sidetracked by special interests with deep pockets or by our ideologies or even by sound bites coming from every direction.

What's the answer? I would opt for some balance, rarely achieved, between top down and bottom up government. I am certainly in favor of having citizens make political decisions, but if we expect them to be conversant in politics, economics and world affairs, perhaps we should teach those things in our schools.

High Mileage Cars: no mystery

2010-10-03T20:28:00.001-07:00

High mileage cars: not a mystery
Meade Fischer

There are plans to mandate 62 mpg standards for the cars of the future. Currently, we have the hybrid, a bit expensive, but capable of 48mpg. This is all exciting stuff, almost rocket science. Or is it?

High mileage cars are not a high tech mystery. We've had them before and let them slip away. In 1992 I bought a new Geo Metro, one of the least expensive cars on the market. A few years later, they were renamed Chevrolet Metro, had a bigger engine, poorer performance and less mileage. But the original was a wonder.

This little car, which held four people comfortably, had a three cylinder engine, displacing 1000 cc, about the same as an average motorcycle. People who didn't own them claimed that they were too underpowered for the highway and that the small engines would wear out in a few miles.

The week after we bought the car, my wife and one of her friends took off, along with lots of luggage for a week, to Ashland Oregon. They filled the 10 gal. tank in Gilroy, and after driving 70 mph up the interstate with the air conditioner going full blast, they still had gas when the arrived in Ashland, averaging 48mpg.

We drove the car for nine trouble-free years, never getting less than 45 mpg, even with a sixteen foot kayak strapped on top. Every ten or twenty thousand miles I'd have the brakes checked, figuring it was time to have them replaced, and each time the mechanic would shake his head and say they were fine.

at 120 thousand miles, we sold the car to a friend, who moved to Nebraska with all her belongings in it. Since then she married, and now her husband uses it for a work car. We visited them recently. The car, which now sits outside summer and winter, still looks the same. The husband says that there is a minor oil leak and that he finally did have to get new brakes, as well as a new clutch. The Geo now has 220,000 miles and gets a consistent 45 miles per gallon, down slightly from when it was new. Also, it never fails to start.

So, it's possible to build a fun, peppy, high mileage car that last indefinitely and is cheap to buy. Now, what's the problem with turning out a few million more like that?

crocidle morality

2010-10-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

A recent news segment showed a man with a very friendly croc, which one could call either a pet or a friend, although a 17 foot, 950 lb animal doesn't really fit the definition of a pet.

While I have no doubt that should I dive into that croc's favorite river, it would have me for lunch without the slightest hesitation, it was shown nuzzling the man who had found it as an injured baby and had taken care of it. It was clear these two vastly different creatures had bonded. This is just the most extreme version of many incidents of interspecies bonding I have seen, but that's a separate issue.

There is a fundamental and probably instinctive moral code at work here, and it is best summed up as, "don't eat your friends." After all, there is plenty to eat out there, but no creature has all the friends it can use.

Humans, not being exclusively predators and having much more complex minds and social systems, have nuanced this basic moral code and have extrapolated from the fundamental. From "don't eat your friends," we've evolved "don't kill your friends," and since we're social animals, we extend it to "don't kill members of your community, your tribe, your country and even your country's friends. We also extend it to not only don't kill them but don't kill their livelihood, thus, "don't steal." With a bit of effort, we could likely extrapolate the rest of our human moral code from this starting place.

The essential thing is that crocs, like humans, seem to need and value friends. We might also suspect that we can extend not eating friends to protecting them from someone else eating them. I would not want to attack the man in question in front of his croc friend in an effort to check this theory.

I'm becoming convinced that there are deep, fundamental principles at work in nature, principles that are independent of species. Apparently "don't eat your friends" is one of these.

New habitable planet

2010-09-30T15:42:00.000-07:00

Good news and bad news: Astronomers have discovered the first possible
habitable planet other than earth. It's only 20 light years away, a
serious road trip, but doable in a multigenerational flight.

The good news is that some of us might escape the foolishness of the
contemporary politics, social policies and religious practices that keep
us at each other's throats. Just load the family in a space ship, and our
grand kids could have the good life.

There are downsides. For one, we'd become the illegal aliens and would
probably be unwelcome. Whoever or whatever lives there would not
appreciate us using up their resources and perhaps taking their jobs.
Another problem is that if you and I decide to go there, what's to stop
all the people we're trying to escape from? I'm guessing that in a couple
of generations every whacky ideology that plagues us on earth will be
firmly established on this new planet.

So, on second thought, moving isn't going to work. Perhaps the solution is
an advertising campaign, touting this new planet as the promised land, and
when all the "seekers" and opportunists leave, Earth will once again be
the legendary Garden of Eden .

Sociology of beer ads

2010-09-01T09:44:00.001-07:00

Let's take beer ads to investigate Americans' capacity for analytical thought. An ad tells you why you should buy something, so beer ads should have something to do with flavor.

The most striking example is a very popular beer that bases its ads on it being cold. Now, anyone who got through 4th grade physical science knows that the temperature of beer is the temperature of the refrigerator. One beer in that refrigerator is a cold as any other. Still these ads draw customers.

Another ad just shows people relaxing on a beach, doing nothing particularly other than sipping beer. Hello. You can relax with any beverage, alcoholic or otherwise. You can relax with a bag of peanuts or with nothing at all.

During sports seasons, beer companies advertise that they sponsor the event. Does that mean the players drink it? The coaches? It only says they paid to put their ad on TV.

By the way, what does "Where there's life, there's Bud" actually mean?
How about a beer that claims its name is the Aussie word for beer?

There is one beer ad that comes to mind that actually talks about the flavor, and that just happens to be the better beer. Funny thing.

Now, if people can be manipulated into buying something as mundane as beer by ads that say virtually nothing about the product, how are they going to react to ads that deal with political, economic, social and religious issues?

Anti Nuke Activists and Ancient Fears

2010-08-31T11:13:00.000-07:00

There seems to be a new chapter in the old "no nukes" story. Recent stories tell of old time activists teaming up with younger ones to oppose nuclear power plants. Regarding the demonstrations during the 70s, a 66 year old activist said, "It was just the correct, moral thing to do."

That comment leads me to think that this person equates nuclear power with bombs, which is like saying that since there are wildfires, it is morally wrong to toss a log in the fireplace of your mountain cabin.

Yes, there have been safety issues with nuclear power, and we still don't have a perfect solution to disposal of used materials. However, any way of generating energy has a downside. When you think of coal fired plants, think of fatal mining accidents, whole mountains destroyed, trainloads of coal crossing the country and millions of tons of greenhouse gasses. Oil fired plants? Well how about the BP gulf oil spill. Hydroelectric plants? Think about inundated valleys, disrupted fish spawning grounds, massively altered ecosystems and the silting up behind expensive dams. Wind farms take up huge tracks of land and kill birds, and solar simply isn't developed enough to fill our needs.

While the debate on whether we should have dropped the bombs on Japan still rages on without closure, and while few people are coming out in favor of using nuclear weapons in the future, the issue of the peaceful use of nuclear power still seems tethered to these old images of destruction.

For years I drove past the San Onofre power plant weekly, never with the slightest fear. The only two high profile nuclear accidents happened many years ago, and France gets a major part of its energy from nuclear power. Our technology gets progressively better and more reliable, and there are many safety measures in place to prevent accidents. We have a viable way of generating the energy we all use daily, and it's high time to put ancient nightmares to rest and move on.

vote to save our parks

2010-08-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

It's common knowledge that our state government is dysfunctional, and it's getting so that the only way to get things done is through the initiative process, which ultimately makes state government even more dysfunctional, if that's possible.

While I can't imagine what clever ballot measure will surface to save our schools from being boarded up and abandoned, we do have the chance to at least save our state parks. A yes vote on proposition 21 in November will keep our parks open and good condition for all Californians. An additional 18 bucks when you renew your auto registration will get you in anywhere, anytime, preserving a park system going on 150 years old.

I've heard weak arguments against it. There are a very few people who claim they never go to a park and feel they shouldn't have to pay. Still, there are people who don't go to school but still pay for that. Then there are the anti tax people who don't want to pay for anything, anytime, any place.

The most interesting was the person who said it would be too expensive, as he had four cars and two motorcycles. Let's see, that comes to 108 extra bucks a year. Seems anyone who can afford four cars and 6 bikes can easily come up with 108 dollars.

True, the most popular parks, like state beaches, will have a parking problem, but that can be solved with the extra money.

Don't forget, yes on 21

red and blue money

2010-08-24T11:38:00.001-07:00

Our money isn't keeping up with modern trends. We have the same dull green bills we've had for, probably forever. Green doesn't get an emotional reaction or symbolize anything. Well, I guess it could symbolize the Green party, a very small segment of Americans. We need money that reflects the rest of us.

I propose our money resemble the political maps from the last elections, where we had red and blue states. We should have red and blue money. This way, people could carry the money that reflects their political persuasion. When getting change, a republican could say, "Don't give me that blue cash. I want red."

Every time someone made a purchase, he would also be making a political statement. Also, we could start tracking how people use their money. Do Democrats make better tippers? Do Republicans buy top of the line? Which party buys which beer and how much? We could even color code our ATM cards. Soon we'd have a huge data base that could be used to target the left and right. Of course, the few people in the middle would be ignored and left out.

As this moves from ridiculous to absurd, maybe people will stop and think about what they're doing and that answers to our problems don't come in the choice of black and white, or red and blue. And that if they appear that way, we are probably asking the wrong questions about the wrong problems.

The true secret security organization

2010-07-29T17:52:00.001-07:00

Many people have taken the recent news of the expanding security and spy system as being equal to Homeland Security. That seems true on the surface, but in reality, Homeland Security is an office in DC with a head and a couple of assistants. It's a cover, a front, a sham designed to keep people from knowing about the actual organization.

It took months of probing, but I've uncovered the real, super top secret organization, called the Department of Suspicion, Outrage and Paranoia, or SOP for short.

This organization is so secret no one knows who actually works for it. Everyone has a seventeen digit secret number. What's more, no one knows the titles of the operatives. You see, the person hiring someone picks the title and is the only one in the organization who knows who that person is and that he or she actually works there. Each person has the right and duty to hire one subordinate, thus becoming the handler or supervisor for that new person. Each person in the organization, which now has over a half million agents, only knows the identity of two other people, his subordinate and his supervisor. I use "he" because most women, once learning how the department works, want no part of it.

This will be easier to explain with an example. Say a level one agent, an L-1, files a report, which says, "Agent Albert Roberts discovered on June 27 of last year that a 57 year old Al-Qaeda agent, one Salib Maqwarh, a Moroccan national, posing as a food importer, passed vital information to three Saudi men in Fatima's coffee house in downtown Damascus." Now, his supervisor gets this information, and in the interest of secrecy, edits out the names, actual locations and exact dates, leaving something like this: "In June of last year an agent identified an Al-Qaeda agent in a business in Damascus who was passing information to three other men."

Now, the supervisor, who is an L-2, passes the information to his supervisor, an L-3, who knows who he is but not the actual name of the other L-2 who reports to him, since he only hired one subordinate. The L-3 further edits the report to make it fit with the other report, so they look like they were written by one person. The L-3 than passes it up to the L-4, where the process repeats again. This continues up to the top of the chain, the L-17, who consolidates all those reports, further editing for secrecy, so that when the final document crosses the President's desk, it says something like: "Last year in the middle east some agents discovered Al-Qaeda operatives passing information."

Now, since each person can and should hire one other person, by the time you read this the L-1s will have hired another layer, who will then become the new L-1s, moving everyone else up one number and making the top layer now L-18 and adding ten or fifteen thousand new agents, each with a unique title, to the organization.

And that, my fellow citizens, is how we keep America safe.

Bell, CA: a lesson for us all

2010-07-27T10:52:00.000-07:00

There is a huge lesson in the recent developments in Bell, California. After the news got out on how much some people were earning, the townsfolk got the biggest earners fired and the council to take a 90 percent cut in pay. So, you can fight city hall after all, and you, the public, can prevail over the entrenched political machines. So, what's the trick?

The Bell saga points to three steps in the process. First the news of something egregious needs to get out to the public. Openness and transparency is vital to our civic life, as are the people who dig through records and bring these things to the people.

Second, you need a critical mass. People who dislike what's happening go about to the community, stirring people out of their apathy, until a number of people, all with the same issue in hand, constitute a movement.

Finally, there is the demand, not request or humble suggestion, that things change and change now. A large and vocal group confronts the power structure and says it ends right here, right now. The officials have the choice of backing down or beating a hasty retreat out the back door.

Admittedly, it's easier in a small town, a bit harder at the state level and harder still in DC. However, it has been done before, and it can be done again. Get informed; get up and get involved.

Looking at the Obama Administration

2010-07-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

Looks like President Obama has gone from a very approval rating after taking office, to a low rating a year and a half later. In fact, there is talk now that he may be a one term president and that republicans may retake the house. How, as the saying goes, did he squander his political capital?

For openers, somehow he didn't get the nature of his mandate. People voted for an untried junior senator due to his vague message of hope and the perception that he was the anti Bush. People, most democrats and independents and even some republicans were fed up with Bush politics and the jaded attitude of an oilman-run, war-obsessed, corporation-loving administration. Obama, many people naively believed, would fix all that and bring us back to the America we wanted to see. Didn't happen.

The first clue was that we were sick and tired of Bush's war, his paranoia about terrorists and the trillions of our money he was pouring into middle east countries that were never going to become clones of us, no matter how many bucks and troops we sent. He missed the clue, and Bush's wars became Obama's wars, made even worse by the financial melt down that left Americans jobless and homeless. Get a clue, Mr Obama, we are hurting, your policies are spewing out new terrorist, and the people over there think we're A-holes.

Companies start out small, and like people, if they are healthy and adaptable, the survive and grow. And, like people, they lose vitality, age and die. But Obama kept many of these financial institutions alive (think transplants) beyond their normal life span. Worst of all he bailed them out when they were weak and could have signed anything. Now, they are strong again, on our money, and the financial reform will likely not fully reform anything to any great degree.

Health care reform is complicated, watered down and possibly filled with pitfalls, but what the hell, he promised it, and if we keep our collective fingers crossed, it might just work.

fixing the mineral management agency should have been done prior to a major disaster. Posturing after the fact does little good for those people who have lost their incomes along the gulf.

I'm tired of hope which, like dope makes you feel things are good when they are not. Just recently changed my voter registration from democrat to none of the above.

changing my voter reg.

2010-07-11T19:46:00.001-07:00

Republicans and Democrats are bashing each other at every level: candidates for office, members of every legislature, media pundits and people on the street. Amid all the finger pointing and name calling, nothing worthwhile is getting done. Well, some lobbyists are getting their special favors, but nothing for the rest of us.

I was a democrat, thinking that they were a bit better, more on my side. However, I now have trouble telling the difference, as our debt mounts, wars drag on, the economy continues to falter, a few corporations get rich or bailed out or both and our once great education system crumbles.

I'm going down to city hall in the morning and change my voter registration. I'll look at the current assortment of third parties and either choose one or register as an independent.

I think we all should do that. Perhaps if the two major parties saw their numbers drop down to single digit, they might just get the idea, cut the pointless games and start working together to get something worthwhile done. And, if they didn't perhaps some third parties would become major parties, and the Republicans and Democrats would go the way of the Whigs.

There is nothing written in stone that says these two parties are all we get for now and for all time. They've served their purpose, and now it's time for us to walk away from them, leaving the remaining vocal few to shout endless invectives at each other, while the rest of the country gets on with it.

Homeless sleeping ban

2010-07-11T19:24:00.001-07:00

Attorney Ed Frey's commentary (Santa Cruz Sentinel 7/11) insists that the sleep-in is a protest for freedom and justice, two overused words. However, looking closely at his comments yields different fruit.

Frey states: "When he (Mr. Facer) arrived in Santa Cruz a few years ago, he tried many times to obtain shelter space." This apparently indicates that Facer came here years ago as a homeless person seeking shelter, not someone seeking employment and affordable rent. Also, for whatever number of years, Facer has continued to be a homeless camper. Frey doesn't say where Facer came from, why he came or how he occupied himself at his former home.

Again: "The accused must run three separate errands." How many errands do those of us who are not homeless run? We run to work. We make trips to stores to buy materials to maintain our shelters, such as paint, lumber, plumbing supplies, and when we wish to replace a crumbling fence, we must run to city hall to pay for a permit. Our lives are filled with errands that accompany being a member of the community.

In reality, we have a pool, known as the common good, and most of us both contribute to this pool and draw from it. Frey's client apparently enjoys drawing from it but has no interest in contributing to it.

I'm having trouble feeling sorry for him.

World belongs to salesmen

2010-07-09T12:54:00.000-07:00

I think the world belongs to the salesmen. After all, no matter what you have, it's useless unless you can sell lots of it to lots of people.

I just completed my, I think, seventh book. I'm losing count. Writing it was the easy part. Selling it is another matter. I'm simply no good at sales and marketing, which I discovered when I've taken sales jobs in the past, only to earn zip.

I know of a number of excellent writers who languish in obscurity because they don't know how to catch the attention of a publisher. I also know a number of artists who are at least as good as Tom Kincade, but who live on the edge of starvation. The difference is obvious. Kincade is a marketing wiz. As a painter, he's probably a bit above average, but as a salesman of his paintings, he's a genius.

During the summer, I travel to Big Sur each week for the international short film festival, where I see the greatest films by people you and I have never heard of. However, I'll bet everyone knows the names of the directors of all the summer formula blockbusters.

Then factor in the great bands that only get to play the local clubs for beer money.

Would I opt for being a formula writer in exchange for fame and fortune? That I even ask the question dooms me and proves I'll never be a salesman.

trying to understand anarchy

2010-06-25T19:42:00.001-07:00

Anarchy, like solipsism, is not something you can organize like minded people around.

Solipsism is the position that yours is the only conscious mind and that all others are somehow robotic projections. Anarchy, with it's fundamental ideas of total individual responsibility and no organized government, also refutes, by definition, the idea of an organization. Yet we have a group in Santa Cruz that is actively trying to put that square peg in the proverbial round hole.

In a recent news article about an anarchist info meeting, one member was quoted as saying: "Collectively, we have power to design how our lives look." Collectively, to me, means some organization and governance. You can't have it both ways. A true anarchist isn't going to respect a group vote that he doesn't agree with.

But, even if we could wiggle past these deep inconsistencies, could anything even resembling anarchy actually work in the real world?

Without a government and all that entails, we would have no common money--only barter--, no schools, no roads and no police or military. While no police or military rings nicely with anarchists, think about no one to stop someone from robbing you or some teen from driving drunk at 100 miles per hour. Any country could attack us with impunity.

Like most of us, I kind of like anarchy applied to myself, but I'm not comfortable with it for every questionable character I pass on the street.

How about assigning our taxes?

2010-06-24T09:47:00.001-07:00

My long distance provider, CREDO, has customers vote each year on which environmental and social organizations the company profits are donated to. We can vote by organization, by percent.

Wouldn't it be a great idea if we could do the same with our taxes? There could be an additional page at the end of our tax form, listing the various things our government spends money on, and each of us could assign our money by percentage.

I could see a list that includes: transportation, education, infrastructure, public safety, consumer protection, environmental protection, parks, forests and beaches, and war.

When faced with the choices, seeing things like the gulf oil spill, the Wall Street meltdown and our seemingly endless involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, where might each of us put our check marks?

I suspect that many of us, myself included, would opt for spending the money to make things better at home: create jobs, clean up our water supplies, fix our roads, educate our kids and keep up our national parks.

When forced to think about it, we see that there is only so much money and that something is going to get short changed. We'd have to vote our priorities.

Then, how many people would vote to send the lion's share of our national wealth to the middle east to try to, well, what exactly are we trying to do?

I'm guessing that the military's share would be much smaller.

Israel/Palestine and a thought-provoking short film

2010-06-12T21:23:00.000-07:00

The Israel/Palestine issue has polarized our communities, and the emotions run high and usually in black and white. I saw a short film recently that shed some light on the people behind the headlines.

On the Road To Tel Aviv opens with a bunch of ordinary folks on a bus. A suicide bomber boards and blows the bus up. Next, a playful scene with a young couple in bed. She has to get back to the university, and her boyfriend is driving her to the bus.

She boards a small shuttle bus, and as the boyfriend starts to leave, he sees a young Muslim woman in thick layers of clothes and carrying a big carpet bag get on the bus. He's concerned and tries go get the girl to disembark. At the same time, a middle aged mother with two daughters catches what's going on, and she panics. Soon everyone gets off the bus except the Muslim woman, who is sitting, silently staring straight ahead.

An argument ensues, and the middle aged woman becomes hysterical, demanding the driver search the Muslim. He refuses, and one of the passengers is a soldier with a rifle. There is a scuffle over the rifle, and finally the driver says he isn't searching anyone, and he is an Arab and has been driving for 30 years, has a family and doesn't want to die either. He assures everyone that there is no terrorist on board, and slowly, reluctantly, they all board again.

As the bus is about to leave, a pregnant woman wants on the full bus, so the girlfriend gives up her seat and walks away with the boyfriend. The bus pulls away, and the film ends with the young couple walking up to a regular city bus.

We expect something to blow up, but it doesn't. Maybe one of the busses will, maybe not. Maybe the mother was just hysterical, maybe just reacting to the recent bombings. Maybe the young Muslim woman was an innocent girl feeling intimidated, or perhaps she had explosives in her bag. We don't know what's behind the exterior of these people, and the point is that neither do each other.

How do ordinary people go about the ordinary things of daily life with all the fear, uncertainty and inability to trust the person sitting next to them? Do we become hysterical or stoic, brash or frightened?

The film gave the audience a taste of the range of feelings of these people, and the uncertainty, but it couldn't bring it all the way home to a country where no one thinks twice about getting on a bus.

There is no black and white here. There are many shades of grey, and it is very complicated.

The campaigns from hell

2010-06-07T10:19:00.001-07:00

I'm tempted not to vote. Admittedly, mud slinging political campaigns are nothing new, but, and maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to it, it seems that it has become nastier and more continual. I don't know what annoys me the most, the primary campaign for the Republican nomination for Governor or out local Democratic campaign for assembly.

The Republican contest seems to be about who is not far right enough. Any detour from the unthinking Fox News position is seen as degenerate, and the two front runners slam each other hourly.

At our local assembly race, it seems the only things these people haven't accused each other of is poisoning pigeons in the park and having sex with small animals.

The rest of the races and issues are just as bad, and quite frankly, I'm sick of the whole lot of them. No real problems are going to be fixed because they aren't even being discussed. Perhaps it is because these candidates haven't a clue about the nature of the real problems or their possible solutions.

Protesters and the need for personal meaning

2010-06-02T09:34:00.001-07:00

The confrontation between Israel and the activists attempting to bring supplies to Gaza is, at least, a complex mix of international diplomacy, national security and public relations. It certainly isn't a black and white, simplistic issue, in spite of the sign-carrying protesters that have sprung up almost everywhere.

I'm not against activists gathering with marches and signs. It works well to stop pesticide spraying near the local school, getting your local polluted stream cleaned up, getting the state to provide funds for education or fire protection and even, although much less effective, to protest a nine-year-long war, where the decision makers are thousands of miles away.

People who are passionate about the Israel/Palestine issue, people who probably have never been there nor personally know anyone living in those areas, and yet turn out for every protest march, are a different group, and I have to reconsider their motivations.

One idea I've come up with, and it may only be one of several factors, is that everyone has a need to find meaning in his or her life. Some find it in religion, their careers or their families. I suspect that some people, lacking other sources of meaning, find it by becoming passionate protesters, whether their moral and ethical high has much to do with the realities of the situation or not.

amanita poisoning and natural selection

2010-05-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

An antidote for amanita mushroom (death cap) poisoning, known for some time in Europe, is now being tried successfully by Dominican Hospital. On the surface, this is a good thing, but things are not always how they appear.

People actually pick these mushrooms, confusing them with editable types. This is rather like confusing a redwood tree with a manzanita. Since almost everyone knows that there are toxic mushrooms, particularly anyone who goes mushroom picking, you might think they would avoid anything they were suspicious of. Apparently not. Then, they don't just nibble, but make a meal of these before finding out if there are bad effects.

Now, remember Darwin's natural selection, the process by which individuals most fit survive to pass on their genes. “Most fit” for an antelope means being able to run fast, for a hawk, having good eye sight and for a human, being intelligent. So, people who do really stupid things don't survive, thus they don't pass on genes for stupidity. However, if we take idiots, cure them of the idiotic things they do to themselves, well, there goes the gene pool.

People who climb mountains in a snow storm, do skateboard tricks without a helmet, drive too fast on narrow, dirt, mountain roads, play Russian Roulette, pick fights with heavily armed toughs in a bar or pick unknown mushrooms are saying loud and clear, “I'm too damn dumb to live.”

Drilling and environmental protection: the pendulum swings.

2010-05-04T22:21:00.000-07:00

The pendulum swings, always back and forth, never stopping in the center, and so the ramifications of the Gulf oil spill will play out.

Environmental damage has led to restrictions on drilling, off our coasts, north, west and east. Then, with the middle east situation, a new push for energy independence and more competition for petroleum products, the "drill baby, drill" mantra is again being heard.

Now, with this horrible spill, the voices for more drilling will be all but silenced for a time. However, with demand for oil rising even faster than the world's population, prices will go up while supplies become limited. The oil producing countries of the middle east, growing less enamored of the US due to our policy of making friends with them by making war on them, will be happy to sell to growing Asian economies, hungry to develop and to put their newly affluent people behind the wheel of autos.

So, in a very few years, collective memory being all too short, Americans will forget this spill and the call for drilling will again be loud and clear. And since the pendulum keeps swinging, another spill will start the cycle over again.

The reality is that until we develop alternative sources of energy well enough to end our dependence of fossil fuels, the pressure to drill will continue. Given a choice between drilling in ecologically sensitive areas and taking millions of cars off the roads, Americans will conveniently forget what is happening in the Gulf.

So, what can we do? Accountability is the key. When we allow an oil company to drill, there must be stipulations, rigid controls. We need further research into safety, with our government and the oil companies engaged in the best engineering and science. Once best practices are codified, these would be the law of the land regarding any new drilling, constantly updated as new knowledge is gained.

Would this be 100% effective? Nothing is 100%, but done right, we could raise the bar to very nearly 100%. When our river levies that are built to 25 or 50 year flood standards fail, we usually upgrade to 100 year protection, which all but prevents any further failure. The same type of thinking should apply to drilling, even though this would be done by a public and private mandated team effort.

immigraton and perception

2010-05-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

The new Arizona immigration law, along with the protests against it, has just increased the polarization of the immigration issue. Concerns about the negative effects of illegal immigration on one side, and about immigrants' rights on the other are adding fuel to this growing fire. What is the reality of the situation?

From a societal perspective, perception is reality, literally, not metaphorically. Unlike observer independent reality, such as rocks, trees, elements and stars, things that would still exist even without humans, social reality is observer dependent, but is none the less real, as in national borders, elected offices, corporations, marriage and money.

Does illegal immigration pose a serious threat, a mild threat or none at all? That's a matter of perception. Does Arizona's law constitute a major assault on the rights of Latinos, a minor assault or none at all? That's also a matter of perception, and who and where you are influences your perception. The non-Latino in a border community has a different experience than a recent immigrant.

The central problem is that immigration has become something that is perceived to be an important issue, an emotional issue, an area of concern to many people. Areas of deep concern need to be addressed, and solutions offered, before they grow deeper and more polarized. Frustrated, angry people tend to make bad decisions. Think of the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Nazis in Germany. Our constitution probably prevents something that radical from happening here, but even lesser reactions can be disastrous.

There is no shortage of talking heads who will agitate for anger and retaliation on both sides. If reasonable people don't solve this problem, unreasonable people will step forward to do so. A vocal candidate will undoubtedly come forward with immigrant bashing a central plank in his or her platform. We've had our war on terror, war on drugs and war on poverty. Perhaps we'll have our war on immigrants. Some people are already advocating that.

I imagine that most people see some immigration as non threatening, even, I suspect, a small amount of illegal immigration. At some point many see it as a cultural or economic threat. One person crossing the border has a face, is an impoverished, desperate person seeking a better life for himself and his family. A half million of these are a faceless invasion. And that is the reality of perception.

Recent events have raised a red flag, and if these issues aren't addressed, more people, currently neutral on this issue will start to become polarized. The end result will be a protracted conflict and is not going to be pretty.

my favorite campground

2010-04-26T21:17:00.001-07:00

I've camped all over northern California, preferring the quiet, out of the way places to the crowded RV and boom box camp cities. While I've had many nights alone, near a stream in some scenic spot, one place stands out, for several reasons, as my favorite.

The first time I visited was on impulse. Taking a very leisurely trip up the coast, I decided to explore the Mattole River, turning off the 101 near Garberville, on the road to Shelter Cove. Then, turning off on a side road, I drove through Ettersburg, a very small community. Just outside of town, in the mid afternoon warmth, I opted for a swim in the Mattole, a wonderful little river in an almost unspoiled part of Northern California.

I continued on to Honeydew, a store and a wide spot in the road, and then on to Petrolia.
It was there that my map and curiosity led me, as a side road runs five miles down to the beach, a section of the coast rarely visited. At the end of the road, paved part of the way, dirt the rest, I found a lovely BLM campground, twenty sites, right on the beach. Only two other sites were taken, so I took my pick.

The first thing that impressed me and actually brought tears to my eyes was the sign, indicating that this beach was adopted by the second and third graders at Petrolia school. There were wonderful paintings of beach and sea creatures and a caption: We love our beach; please take care of it." I wiped away the tears and took a photo before exploring.

There is another parking lot, just south of the campground, the jumping off point for the 25 mile backpack along the lost coast to Shelter Cove. So, within a few yards walk, I'd left civilization behind, along with the normal trash one expects to find on the beach. I walked a couple of miles in total solitude, accompanied only by the sound of breaking waves and the cries of sea birds.

The mouth of the Mattole is a mile to the north, and just south of the campground is Punta Gorda, slightly east of Cape Mendocino, the westernmost place in the lower 48, just a dozen miles north.

After spending one of the most quiet nights I can remember, I drove back to Petrolia and started north, along the private lands along Cape Mendocino, which I wish was open to the public. And the road twisted steeply up and away from the beach. After miles of narrow road winding through the hills, I came back once again to civilization at Ferndale, the little Victorian town south of Eureka.

Yes, this campground is an hour and a half off the main road, so if you are in a hurry to get somewhere, it's not for you. But, if you want peace and quiet and an unspoiled beach to wander, and you don't mind slow, winding roads, you will be rewarded.

Rethinking Nuclear disarmament

2010-04-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

Intellectually, I know what President Obama is doing about reducing nuclear arms is a good thing. Yes I know that nukes are bad, cause lots of destruction and radioactive fallout and all that. But...

You see, there's a part of me that feels that once I've bought something, spent good money on it, I should use it, like the electric blanket that feels like I'm sleeping in a waffle iron. But, what the hell, I can't return it, so suffer with it for a short time before dumping it.

Well, I spent good money on nukes, as did my parents. In fact anyone who paid taxes from the 1940s through the 1980s paid something toward developing and building nukes. I hope you can see where I'm going with this.

Who knows how many millions or even billions were spent building enough bombs to blow the earth half way to Uranus. And now we have them stacked up, in ICBMs, in silos, perhaps even under our downtowns. In all these years, we've only used two of them. Two out of how many thousand? We proved in WW2 how effective these babies are. Put an instant end to the war in the Pacific. And that beautiful mushroom cloud. Remember the final scenes of Dr. Strangelove? Awesome.

But I digress. Now, before we toss all these potent reminders of what a bad ass America really is, we should remind the world again. Our government has identified a number of international bad guys, nasty dictators, genocidal maniacs, political leaders without a sense of humor. Why not, and take a moment to consider this before reacting, drop a few on some really nasty folk?

Perhaps a half dozen of these big 100 megaton fusion bombs, not those wimpy fission firecrackers we used on Japan, would get people's attention, reminding them to behave or else.

After that, when our state department sends the message, "Don't slaughter your own people," they will undoubtedly listen.

So, if I've convinced you, write our President and tell him to bomb someone. After all, that's what made this country great.

Frames and definitions make all the difference

2010-04-12T18:14:00.001-07:00

Any argument, theory or line of thought will be indelibly shaped by how you frame it and define terms. Therefore two people can cite the same idea, using the same words and mean something totally different, perhaps even opposite meanings.

A illustrative example of this is the once highly popular "behaviorism." Starting with Pavlov and his classical conditioning and through Watson and Skinner, the theory was framed to depict the subject as a passive reactor, rather than an active actor. Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to salivate when a bell was rung, the bell having been associated with giving the dogs food. Skinner went so far as to claim that linguistic acts are conditioned responses to stimuli, and his definitional ambiguity earned a critical rebuke in 1957 from linguist, Noam Chomsky.

In behaviorism, the subject simply responds to stimuli and can be conditioned to respond to secondary stimuli, such as the bell. This makes the subjects, dogs in Pavlov's case, passive agents, responding but not initiating. This theory rejected something we all are personally aware of, the inner condition of our consciousness, yet, in spite of that, many philosophers and psychologists were enamored of it for a long time.

Pavlov could have framed his experiment another way. By ringing the bell in conjunction with food, he allowed the dogs to construct a chain of expectations, where they first expected him to feed them, and then learned to expect the bell to indicate that food was shortly to follow. Then when the bell no longer was paired with food, the dogs would have started to suspect that the bell wasn't a reliable indicator of food and eventually that the bell was irrelevant. The same kinds of reframing could have been applied to Skinner's boxes, with his rats and pigeons.

At the purely observational level, both frames would look exactly the same: Man rings a bell, dog salivates, then food arrives. However, looking at the dogs as either active or passive agents creates opposite psychological scenarios. Had this been framed the other way, whatever psychological theory would have arisen, it would not be what we now think of as behaviorism.

Now substitute any political or social theory for behaviorism and you can see the foundation of much current misunderstanding.

custom conspiracy theories for nut case fringe grp.

2010-04-06T11:24:00.000-07:00

Filling imaginary needs has been the key to the Eclectic Press business plan. Recently we've identified a definite psuedo-need in our society, and we are rushing eagerly in to fill it. In addition to our other questionable services, we're introducing something new, something your organization could profit from.

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assemble useless merchandise for the galactic black market. "

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Now, we can't promise to make you as successful as America's two biggest nut case groups, the Democratic and the Republican parties. These groups attained mainstream status without losing their quirky, nutty roots through decades of constructing complex and convoluted conspiracy theories. While this level of sophistication takes generations, one of our basic theories should be enough to let you become at least a minor religion.

Just log on to www.baymoon.com/~eclecticpress. Remember that if you're nutty enough to think you need a conspiracy theory, you're nutty enough to pay us money for it.