HinesSight

Are you better off today than when Mitch McConnell said...?

Listening to POTUS (great political talk programming) on satellite radio recently, a caller had a great response to the usual Republican line, "Are you better off today than four years ago, when Obama was elected president?"

He said the question should be:

Are you better off today than two years ago, when Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said, "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president"?

The biggest problem our country has is Republican obstructionism.

The not-so G.O.P. dislikes Obama and his policies so much, it seems that Republicans would rather have the economy hurt, than pass legislation which would make things better.

McConnell's statement made that clear. Republicans aren't serious about working with Democrats and the White House to solve national problems. Their sole selfish goal is more political power.

"You look like Richard Branson." Nice compliment.

Though I'm irked at Hawaiian Airlines for dropping its non-stop Portland, Oregon to Maui flight, on our return from Honolulu a few days ago a Hawaiian employee made me feel really good.

I'd forked out an extra $70 for two seats in an exit row, where I'd stretched my legs in comparative comfort for the five hours it took to cross the western Pacific. As we started our descent into Portland, a flight attendant sat down in the jumpseat that faces backwards across from the exit row.

Looking at me, she said, "I've been thinking for the whole trip that you remind me of someone. A little while ago I figured it out -- the guy who runs Virgin Atlantic, you know, um..."

"Richard Branson!" I blurted out, all excited. "Except, he's blonder, tanner, and better looking. Thanks, though."

She added, "I kept wondering why Richard Branson would be flying coach on Hawaiian Airlines." Good point. Unless he was thinking of buying the airline (which I'd be heartily in favor of, if he brought back that direct Portland-Maui flight).

My wife diplomatically said, "Yes, there's a bit of a resemblance." OK, I guess. I just scrolled through quite a few pages of Richard Branson images on Google. I didn't find many that made me think, "That's me."

Yeah, there's a bit of me reflected in this expression. Branson is just a few years younger than I am, which makes me wonder about his decidedly less gray appearance.

And there's a mild resemblance here. Again, there'd be more if Branson was as naturally gray as me.

Sadly, I can't recognize any commonality between me and Richard Branson in this photo. I suck at anything having to do with water skiing. Having a beautiful naked woman hang onto me would make my suckedness even worse, leaving us both in the water (not a distasteful notion, though).

So in the end, I'll preserve a fond memory of the flight attendant's comments through this blog post, but I won't expect to be treated like royalty if I ever fly on Virgin America/Atlantic.

(Note: over on my other blog I've shared some photos of our trip to Maui, along with life lessons learned on tropical beaches.)

"Real-life Barbie" does appear to be a real woman

When I came across mention of a real-life Barbie on my Twitter feed, naturally my curiosity was aroused. I've always thought Barbie was hot (though my most ardent attraction is to a more mature, yet similarly curvaceous comic strip character, Blondie).

A 21-year-old girl, who has become an internet sensation in her home country of Russia, claims on her blog to be the most famed woman on the Russian-language internet.

Valeria Lukyanova's doll-like features, long blonde hair and 'perfect' body make her look like a real life Barbie.

In fact, with her tiny waist and large breasts, she bears such a resemblance to the famed plastic doll that cynical web users have been speculating about whether or not she is real.

After careful Googling, I've concluded that, yes, Lukyanova is for real. At least, as real as a Barbie-in-the-flesh produced by gobs of makeup and, most likely, plastic surgery can be.

Her Facebook page has so many photos and videos of her, it's difficult to believe that Lukyanona is purely an artifical creature. She's undeniably beautiful. Yet also a bit creepy, when she's in her full-on Barbie look.

Here's some more photos...

Hawaiian Airlines drops non-stop Portland-Maui flights, so we drop Hawaiian

Most likely, yesterday we took our last flight on Hawaiian Airlines. For about twenty years we've flown direct from Portland, Oregon to Maui. In January 2012 Hawaiian dropped non-stop Portland-Maui flights. 

So my wife and I are going to drop Hawaiian. We had lots of frequent flyer miles accumulated through our usually-annual flights to Maui, supplemented by our habitual use of a Hawaiian Airlines VISA card, which gave us one mile for every dollar charged.

This year we used up almost all of our frequent flyer miles to buy "free" tickets for a flight to Maui that required a plane change in Honolulu. Ugh. Never again.

From now on we'll fly Alaska Airlines' non-stop to Maui from Portland. And cancel our Hawaiian VISA card. Hawaiian Airlines made a bad business decision. 

Have you enjoyed direct flights from Maui to Portland on Hawaiian Airlines? That service is about to end. Beginning mid-January, you will need to make connecting flights through Honolulu.

This move is bad for Maui tourism. Nonstop service is what attracts visitors to the Neighbor Islands. With fewer options for direct flights, tourists who understand the consequences of connecting flights will opt for a different airline or a different locale to visit.

The Portland flights always seem full, but if statistics show otherwise, why drop the number of days for the direct service to zero? We understand that difficult business decisions sometimes need to be made, but we don't understand the wisdom of deserting an existing market entirely.

Yesterday we asked a Hawaiian Airlines employee why the non-stop flight was cancelled.

"I have no idea," we were told. "The company doesn't tell us employees anything. The direct flights were almost always full. People liked them. Now we're losing business travelers who can't get to Maui early enough to do a full day's work. You should write Hawaiian and complain."

For sure. I'm going to.

Maybe it won't make any difference, but the more people who gripe about losing the non-stop Portland to Maui flight, the more Hawaiian Airlines will realize that whoever dreamed up this stupid move made a bad decision.

From a Facebook page, I learned that Mahalo@HawaiianAir.com is an email address to send complaints to. And the above-quoted letter from The Maui News says, "Leona Duarte at the airline is accepting email from affected travelers/businesses, Leona.Duarte@HawaiianAir.com" So I'm going to send my message to both email addresses.

I'm going to let Hawaiian Airlines know that it was much less enjoyable to fly to Maui through Honolulu. Yesterday my wife and I left Maui pretty much on schedule at 12:45 pm. Our flight to Portland left Honolulu about twenty minutes late, around 3:00 pm. 

So we spent over two hours getting farther away from Portland. Which meant that by the time we got our bags and hopped on the Park N' Fly shuttle, it was after midnight. Living as we do in south Salem, we didn't get home until close to 2:00 am. 

Not fun. Not compared to the non-stop Portland-Maui flights that we and so many others had come to like so much.

The Hawaiian Airlines employee we talked with had the same attitude as I did: "It just isn't right that now a lot more Oregonians are going to be flying on Alaska Airlines to Maui. Getting to Hawaii should be on Hawaiian Airlines."

I agreed. Wholeheartedly.

My wife and I love the service and island-atmosphere on Hawaiian. More than that though, we love not wasting hours of our time making an unnecessary stop in Honolulu -- which is an unattractive, poorly designed airport with horrible eating options for health-minded vegetarians like us. 

Hawaiian Airlines likely is about to feel the full impact of disgruntled formerly loyal customers. As mentioned above, we've now used up almost all of our frequent flyer miles. From now on, we'll use Alaska Airlines for our annual vacations on Maui.

Good bye, Hawaiian. We've enjoyed your company for several decades. But your inexplicable decision to drop all direct flights to Maui from Portland is causing us to embrace Alaska. Change your ways, and we'll probably come back into your arms wings.

Not if you continue to make us fly through Honolulu, though.

Marijuana rolls into center of Oregon Attorney General race

Ellen Rosenblum would be a much better Attorney General for Oregon than Dwight Holton, not least because of her respect for our state's voter-approved medical marijuana act, which Holton almost certainly would continue to undermine -- notwithstanding politically-inspired attempts to downplay his previous attacks against the act.

I hope she wins tomorrow in the Democratic primary. Rosenblum is the choice of progressives, while a poll showed that Holton is favored only by the most conservative Democrats.

A few days ago I got an email from a US News and World Report editor who wrote a story analyzing the impact marijuana is having on the Attorney General race (Republicans aren't running a candidate, so likely whoever wins the Dem primary will be the next AG).

Hey Brian,

I just read your blog post endorsing Ellen Rosenblum for AG. I just completed a long feature piece for US News & World Report about the race, focusing partially on its national implications for marijuana activists: 

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/05/10/why-the-oregon-attorney-general-race-has-national-implications-for-marijuana-laws

Thought you and your readers would find it interesting.

Take care,
Simon Owens
Assistant Managing Editor
US News & World Report

Well, I'm pleased to publicize your story on my blog, Simon. Glad to suck up to you. Just keep me in mind next time you need a quote on an Oregon-related story.

Here's some excerpts from Owens' piece.

Oregon has a long and storied history with marijuana. In 1973, the legislature voted to make possession of less than an ounce of pot an infraction with a maximum fine of $100. The legislature then tried to reclassify simple possession as a misdemeanor in 1997, only for voters to reject it in a 1998 ballot initiative.

That same year, a majority of voters approved another ballot initiative to legalize marijuana for medicinal purposes, making Oregon one of the first states to do so (this initiative became what is now called the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act). Unlike some states—California, for instance—Oregon does not allow the sale of medical marijuana, but rather allows those granted permission to either grow pot for themselves or designate others to grow it for them.

...If Holton loses on Tuesday, it won't be the first time marijuana activists will claim they were able to tip the scales of an election. In 2010, activists ran ads against Steve Cooley, a Los Angeles District Attorney they considered hostile to medical marijuana dispensaries, when he ran for attorney general of California. He lost by a slim margin, and activists think it was their ads that cost him the election.

Lurking in the background of the Attorney General race is the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act 2012, which would allow personal use/cultivation of marijiuana, and regulate commercial cultivation/sale. It looks like backers of the citizen initiative are on track to get it on the November ballot.

Rosenblum would be a much better fit for Oregon than Holton if the Cannabis Tax Act is passed by voters. Here's what's cited as the best reason for progressives to vote for Rosenblum:

Progressives' top-rated reasons for supporting Ellen Rosenblum:

"A few weeks ago, at the Eugene City Club debate, Dwight Holton, candidate for Oregon Attorney General, picked a fight with medical marijuana patients when he called the Oregon Medical Marijuana Act a “train wreck.” Holton went on to say he would work with Republican legislators who in 2011 introduced legislation that would have effectively gut the 1998 voter-approved law. Holton is the same former US Attorney who authorized raids on Southern Oregon medical marijuana providers last fall, depriving over 200 patients access to their legal medicine. Holton hails from Virginia and only joined the Oregon State Bar in 2009. He has never tried a case in an Oregon State Court. Judge Rosenblum has been a lawyer, prosecutor and Judge in Oregon for 36 years."

"Ellen Rosenblum is Oregon. She knows most facets of the job and has new ideas of improving communication between the Governor, the state agencies and her constituents. She's well-balanced and will be able to work with the Legislature and the Courts better than her opponent. Former AGs Dave Frohnmayer and Hardy Myers endorse her and they both know what it takes to make not just a good AG but a wonderful AG. Vote for Ellen."

1000 Friends of Oregon urges Salem to preserve Sustainable Fairview

Today the Salem City Council has a choice to make: preserve cutting-edge Green zoning requirements for the highly touted Sustainable Fairview mixed use development, or show once again why Oregon's capital deserves it's nickname, "So-lame."

I'm not wildly optimistic, given the Salem Planning Commission's disappointing go-ahead to Simpson Hills, LLC that would allow it to build a bunch of average apartments on what should be an exceptional piece of property.

But if the City Council listens to those in the know, as opposed to those with the biggest short-term profit motive, it will stick with the Sustainable Fairview Master Plan.

1000 Friends of Oregon urges, "Salem Should Keep Sustainable Fairview VIsion Intact."

A flawed proposal can sink a whole vision. That's the case in Salem, where a proposed multifamily housing development seeks to sidestep an innovative, sustainable plan that local residents developed several years ago. The proposal will soon go before City Council, and local advocates are urging the Council to stick to the vision already adopted.

When the City of Salem adopted the visionary Fairview Master Plan in 2005, it was the product of a community with big ideas. It proposed a livable, sustainable future that garnered praise locally and around the country for its creative and productive reuse of a unique large parcel in the middle of a city. “Salem may get used to seeing its name on magazine covers for some time,” crowed the Statesman-Journal editorial board at the time.

Just seven years later, the City has a decision to make: whether to keep to the vision and the potential of that citizen-created plan, or to follow a bland path that it will undoubtedly later regret. 1000 Friends of Oregon hopes the City will choose to stay on the course its citizens so boldly laid in the Fairview Master Plan.

...The nearby Pringle Creek Community, on a different portion of the Fairview site, is a faithful expression of that vision, and has been rightly praised for its accomplishments. But Simpson Hills, citing insufficiently proven constraints on its portion of the site, claims that many of these same principles should be set aside to build utterly indistinctive apartment housing that might be seen anywhere in the country.

Local neighborhood associations, businesspeople, and advocates reject the idea that Salem should embrace blandness and walk away from the community’s vision expressed in the Fairview Master Plan. 1000 Friends of Oregon agrees.

Quality matters. This site can only be developed once. If Salem gets this right, it will set the tone for its own future as a livable and sustainable place, and those magazine covers will keep coming, as will creative and talented residents who will help the city’s economy and culture thrive.

And Salem Breakfast on Bikes has another good overview of what's wrong with the Simpson HIlls, LLC attempt to de-Green Sustainable Fairview.

On Monday, in an appeal on a Planning Commission decision, Council returns to the matter of the third Fairview refinement plan. (For background and analysis see here, here, and here.) The lead images from the plans, though, tell quite a bit of the story in a visual shorthand. The refinement plan strays significantly from the Master Plan and Council will have to decide how much straying should be permitted and, even, whether to construe the refinement plan as "straying."

My (cynical) ideas for a Salem, Oregon city slogan

Yesterday Michael Rose, a business reporter for the Statesman Journal, asked in a Twitter tweet, "What would be a good city slogan for Salem Ore.?"

Oh, great question. My mind is cynically-inclined when it comes to describing Salem's positive qualities, or more accurately, lack thereof. So it didn't take me long to respond to Michael with quite a few suggestions.

Waking up this morning, after my brain had unconsciously incubated additional embryonic seeds of cynicism, I came up with some more. This is my current Salem city slogan oeuvre.

Salem, the blandburger sandwiched between Portland and Eugene's spicy buns

Salem, after you visit just once you'll say, "Now I've seen it all!"

Salem, a great place to buy gas on your way to Portland or Eugene

Salem, visit us and your hometown will look so much more exciting

Salem, the town that could, if it would, but hasn't

Salem, gateway to the Woodburn Mall and downtown Albany

Salem, great places to visit are just an hour away in every direction

Salem, the town that never wakes

Salem, where manic-depressives are cured of what ails them before the hyphen

Salem, a state capital where the Governor sometimes wants to live

Salem, come for the prisons and mental hospital, then stay on our streets

Salem, you'll be surprised how close to Boring we are

Salem, lots of downtown free parking, few places you'll want to go

Salem, so special, there's nothing like us between Keizer and north Albany

Salem, home of... um, let me think... oh, lots of homes!

I suspect there's little reason for me to hope that the Chamber of Commerce will phone and say, "We want to make one of your ideas the official city slogan of Salem."

However, scrolling through Wikipedia's list of U.S. city nicknames (both formal and informal), I found there's some precedent for dark humor. For example...

Forestville - Poison Oak Capital of the World
Pacifica - Fog Capital of California
Gallup - Drunk Driving Capital of America 
Utica - The City That God Forgot 
Cleveland - Mistake on the Lake 
Beaver - Cow Chip Capital of the World 
Bellingham - City of Subdued Excitement 
Forest Junction - You Can Get There From Here 

And Salem can't let itself be shown up, humor-wise, by my favorite slogan that I came across in the Oregon category:

Talent - Our name speaks for itself

Thanks to Obama, I'm going to stop saying "that's so gay!"

Yesterday I was thrilled to learn that President Obama has come out (so to speak) in favor of gay marriage. This is a good move ethically as well as politically. 

Homosexuals are people too, Mitt Romney and fellow gay-bashing Republicans. Recognizing the obvious will energize Obama's base, and it won't cost him many votes since homophobes already plan to vote against him.

Eugene Robinson ends his column on this subject with:

Politically, Obama may have taken a big step toward reclaiming the future.

The magic of hope and change that suffused his 2008 campaign has dissipated after 40 grueling months in office. Obama’s supporters could point to his accomplishments and cite the reasons why Romney would be a poor replacement, but the optimism and excitement were missing.

Obama could have kept silent on gay marriage, and frustrated progressives would still vote for him. Instead, he spoke out when he didn’t have to and took a stance that might hurt him in key states — reminding us how he can surprise and inspire.

Did I just catch a whiff of that hopey-changey stuff in the air?

For sure. I've already vowed to make a change in my habit of blurting out what I now realize is a slur: that's so gay!

Here's an example.

In the past, my wife has tried to get me to buy a Jams World shirt when we've gone to Maui. She likes the Jams World clothing line. High quality; made in Hawaii; kind of expensive, but not super-outrageous given what you get for your money.

Almost universally -- coincidentally, up until yesterday, the day Obama stated his new position on gay marriage -- I've responded to her pointing out a men's Jams World shirt I should consider buying with Oh, no, that's so gay!

Now, I've had good reasons for saying that. Check out the retro Jams World flambe.

lt just isn't me. Most of the time I wear gray and black combinations, often from Hawaii's other cool clothes purveyor, Crazy Shirts. My taste runs more toward a dark-themed macho Chinese dragon or big breaking wave, not pink flowers.

Still, I also like colorful shirts. Yesterday my wife showed me a Jams World shirt that was much more subdued than the one above. I ended up buying it. However...

My first reaction, more from habit than anything else, was to tell her that's so gay when she said, "I like this Jams World shirt." I kept my mouth shut, though. Partly because we were in a public place and I no longer feel comfortable saying that's so gay, in the same way I wouldn't say that's so black. 

And partly because I had just learned about Obama's gay-friendly words a few hours before. I was enthused by them. I felt that the United States had taken a big step toward ending discrimination against homosexuals. 

Which has been a long time coming. 

Back in my high school years, 1962-66, us guys taunted each other with faggot! There weren't any openly gay students in my high school. Any guy who looked or acted too feminine was teased mercilessly. We had essentially zero compassion for gays.

So I was astounded to read what Mitt Romney said about his own (much worse) gay-bashing experience, given that we are almost exactly the same age.

“I don’t remember that incident,” Romney said, laughing. “I certainly don’t believe that I thought the fellow was homosexual. That was the furthest thing from our minds back in the 1960s, so that was not the case."

Ridiculous. Back in the 1960's attitudes were hugely different toward homosexuals than they are now. Almost certainly Romney is trying to erase and excuse his past, as he so often does.

My past is still with me.

I wasn't so clearly aware of that until yesterday, when I caught myself about to say that's so gay! Yes, it seems that there is a certain gay style, though I can't describe it exactly. Likewise, there is a certain black style, though I also can't describe it exactly.

But my use of that's so gay had a homophobic edge to it. I was afraid of looking like I was gay. I didn't want people to think, "Only a gay guy would wear that shirt." 

Why? Why couldn't I simply say to my wife, that shirt doesn't appeal to me; too pink, too bright?

That's what I'm going to say now. No more that's so gay. Of such small steps revolutions are made. May we have legal gay marriage all across the United States soon.

Here's the Jams World shirt that I bought. I've worn it several times. No one has asked me if I'm gay.

In the unlikely event someone does, I'll respond, "Yes. You must have been able to tell from the Jams World shirt. Very observant. By the way, please support gay marriage. We gays deserve equal rights. Along with nice clothes."

Economic austerity humorously ridiculed in Fiore animation

Austerity to bring about prosperity is a ridiculous economic idea. So I liked how Mark Fiore makes fun of this notion in his News in a Nutshell animation, "Assaulting Austerity," or: "Why events an ocean away matter to you."

Check it out.

You'll never again believe Mitt Romney or other Republicans who say that cutting spending and jobs in a recession is the way to... here's the joke... get more spending and jobs! (Not that you ever should have believed them.)

Hilarious.

Or it would be, if right-wingers weren't so serious about pursuing wacked-out policies that would only benefit the rich. Europe is figuring this out, as Fiore humorously points out. Here's the words to his animation, conveniently shared on his website.

News, in a Nutshell presents . . .

"Assaulting Austerity," or: "Why events an ocean away matter to you."

From left to right to really right, across Europe, the Battle of Austerity rages, with leaders and governments falling everywhere-- from the Netherlands to Greece to France as voters say "NO MORE" to cuts!

It all began as a sure-fire solution to Europe's economic woes, which were blamed on government spending and too much debt.

Never mind the banks, it was the fault of those dastardly government spendaholics.

So belts were tightened, lips were stiffened and boot straps were relied upon as government spending was cut and safety nets snipped.

People who did things for or sold things to the government were out of luck, as demand fell in an already-weakened economy.

Which led to a weaker economy and more unemployment.

But there was a solution!

Belts were tightened, lips were stiffened and boot straps were relied upon as government spending was cut and safety nets snipped.

Which, unfortunately for people who did things for or sold things to the government, led to falling demand and more unemployment in an already-weak economy.

Clearly, more austerity was needed!

So belts were tightened, lips were stiffened and boot straps were relied upon as government spending was cut and safety nets snipped.

(Which, for some odd reason, weakened an already-weak economy.)

Budget-cutting austerity stars like Ireland became basket cases, leading thousands to flee!

As Europe double-dipped into recession and depression, banks here at home remained dangerously exposed to the predicament across the pond.

But never fear, America's wise financial leaders and deficit hawks in Congress have a solution!

Belts will be tightened, lips will be stiffened and boot straps will be relied upon as government spending is cut and safety nets snipped.

Gute nacht, and . . . zut alors.

Why biking and other risky activities are dangerous, but not fearful

Thank you, Tim Krieder, for writing such a marvelous New York Times essay, "Cycle of Fear." You wonderfully described why I love riding my maxi-scooter (a Suzuki Burgman 650) so much. Also, why I like boogie boarding on the biggest waves I can find on a Hawaii vacation so much.

Krieder talks about riding his bicycle in New York City. But his explanation of why risky activities are so enjoyable applies to lots of pursuits: motorcycling, downhill skiing, rock climbing, skateboarding, horse riding, many others.

After speaking about our modern-day hypervigilance to mostly imaginary threats, the worries and anxieties of everyday life that obsess our waking brains (and even our dreams), Krieder says:

Which is why it’s such a relief, an exhilarating joy, to break the clammy paralysis of worry and place yourself at last in real physical danger. Even though it’s the time when I am at most immediate risk, riding my bike in Manhattan traffic is also one of the only times when I am never anxious or afraid — not even when a cab door swings open right in front of me, some bluetoothed doofus strides into my path, or a dump truck’s fender drifts within an inch of my leg.

At those moments fear is a low neurological priority that would only interfere with my reaction time, like a panicky manager shoved aside by competent, grim-faced engineers in a crisis. I doubt that the victims of sudden violent accidents die terrified; they’re probably extremely alert, brains gone pretty much blank while their galvanized bodies try to figure out what to do. I don’t think our minds are designed to accept that there’s no way out. Based on my own close calls, I suspect that if I am killed while biking, the state of mind in which I am likeliest to die is extreme annoyance. And at least it won’t be by drowning.

Exactly. I'm never scared while riding my powerful scooter.

(I usually put some sort of macho adjective before "scooter" when I write about my passion, to differentiate a Suzuki Burgman 650 from weenie scooters like teeny Vespas; nothing wrong with them, where I live it just seems like they're almost always ridden by young women wearing pink helmets, a demographic I don't identify with.)

As Krieder says, there's too much that needs concentrating on while engaged in a risky activity for fear to be present in one's mind. Even when riskiness raises its dangerous head, dealing with the situation occupies the brain cells which otherwise might scream Scary!

When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in. I’ve heard people say the same thing about rock-climbing: how it shrinks your universe to the half-inch of rock surface immediately in front of you, this crevice, that toehold.

Biking is split-second fast and rock-climbing painstakingly slow, but both practices silence the noise of the mind and render self-consciousness blissfully impossible. You become the anonymous hero of that old story, Man versus the Universe. Your brain’s glad to finally have areal job to do, instead of all that trivial busywork. You are all action, no deliberation. You are forced, under pain of death, to quit all that silly ideation and pay attention. It’s meditation at gunpoint.

Right now my stomach muscles are sore.

This morning the waves were running nicely high in Maui's Napili Bay. However, they weren't breaking super-cleanly, gradually from side to side. More like crashing down vertically in a single curvaceous whump, then whitewatering onwards.

It took a while to figure out where to position me and my boogie board for optimum wave-catching. I decided to venture past a small reef, rather than wait for a wave in front of it. This was a good decision. But for a split second, I had some doubt.

Not a fearful doubt. Just a calm, albeit highly focused, feeling of Whoa...look at this.

What I was looking at was nothing. Nothing, that is, between me and the ocean some four feet or so below, as the breaking wave had caught me in the curl and presented me with a great view of empty air between me and the ocean (also, somewhere, rocks). 

I managed to hold onto the sides of my boogie board and land halfway gracefully on the wave after falling what seemed like miles. The landing hurt, but any discomfort was quickly erased from my mind as I enjoyed my best wave run of the day, almost all the way into the beach.

So, yes, I know what Krieder is talking about. And heartily agree with it.

I’m convinced these are the conditions in which we evolved to thrive: under moderate threat of death at all times, brain and body fully integrated, senses on high alert, completely engaged with our environment. It is, if not how we’re happiest — we’re probably happiest in a hot tub with a martini and a very good naked friend — how we are most fully and electrically alive. Of course we can’t sustain this state of mind for too long.

People who go through their whole lives operating on impulse tend to end up in jail. We are no longer purely animals, living only in the moment; we are the creatures who live in time, as salamanders live in fire, prisoners of memory and imagination, tortured with dread and regret. That other, extra-temporal perspective is not the whole reality of our condition. It’s more like the view from the top of the Empire State Building, of people as infinitesimal dots circulating ceaselessly through a grid.

Eventually we have to descend back to street level, rejoin the milling mass and take up our lives; you lock up your bike and become hostage to the hours again. But it’s at those moments that I become briefly conscious of what I actually am — a fleeting entity stripped of ego and history in an evanescent present, like a man running in frames of celluloid, his consciousness flickering from one instant to the next.

Video of father-daughter wedding dance I'm envious of

When my daughter, Celeste, got married, I wasn't the dancing fool that I am now.

By "fool," I mean that my dancing is more fun for me than it is artistic to look at; also that I now feel foolish for not having started to take ballroom lessons earlier than my wife and I did, because we really enjoy dancing.

If I had my father-daughter wedding dance to do over again, I'd love it to look like this one. I think I could handle most of the moves this fellow gray-haired guy throws out on the dance floor so engagingly.

His daughter is enjoyable to look at also. Congratulations father and daughter. You've brought smiles, and likely some joyful tears, to many people. 

 

European Union is a success, no matter what U.S. conservatives say

With the French elections happening today, Adam Gopnik's "Vive La France" piece in the May 7 The New Yorker is timely reading. 

Like so much else in the magazine, it's wonderfully written and soundly reasoned.

The piece touches on a question that baffles me: why conservatives/Republicans in our semi good-old USA have such a distaste for European social democracies. Those nations do a lot of things better than we do.

Like health care. Modern transportation. Making it possible to move up the economic ladder. Providing essential social services to all of their citizens.

At the end of his essay, Gopnik reminds us of sixty million other reasons for those of us on the other side of the Atlantic to offer up a rousing chant of European Union! European Union! European Union! 

To the American right, anything that goes wrong in Europe does so because Europe is wrong, and not because of austerity, because austerity is right.

This anti-European bias is producing an indecent-seeming amount of schadenfreude—on the right but also on the left—about the prospect of the dissolution of the European Union. The potential Franco-German split, Germany’s own ambivalences, the Greek crisis, the fall of the Dutch government, the backslide of the British economy—the tone about all this is oddly punitive here, as though the E.U. had been the product of some Brussels bureaucrat’s utopian folly rather than a miracle of coexistence wrought by a handful of quiet visionaries after more than fifty years of catastrophe.

In thinking about Europe and its union, the number that one needs to keep in mind is not the rate of the euro exchange or the measure of the Greek deficit but a simpler one, of sixty million.

That is the approximate (and probably understated) number of Europeans killed in the thirty years between 1914 and 1945, victims of wars of competing nationalisms on a tragically divided continent. The truth needs re-stating: social democracy in Europe, embodied by its union, has been one of the greatest successes in history.

Like all successes, it can seem exasperatingly commonplace. There is something uninspiring about the compromises and the dailiness of a happy marriage, and something compelling about one that is coming apart: it looks more like the due fate of all things. Yet the truth ought to remain central.

A continent torn by the two most horrible wars in history achieved a remarkable half century of peace and prosperity, based on a marriage of liberalism properly so called (individual freedoms, including the entrepreneurial kind) and socialism rightly so ordered (as an equitable care for the common good).

Any pleasure taken in the failure of Europe to expunge all its demons threatens to become one more way of not having to examine our own. A mild-mannered, European-minded citizen king is, at least, better than a passionately convinced exceptionalist. France, and Europe, learned that lesson the hard way. 

Heartland Institute compares global warming believers to "murderers"

As if we needed more proof that anti-science global warming deniers are wackos, here it is:

Well, when facts, reality, and 98% of the world's leading climate scientists aren't on your side, it looks like the global warming deniers are reduced to disgusting fearmongering and personal insults. Here's what part of the Heartland Institute's press release announcing the billboard campaign said:

May 3, 2012 – Billboards in Chicago paid for by The Heartland Institute point out that some of the world’s most notorious criminals say they “still believe in global warming” – and ask viewers if they do, too.

Heartland’s first digital billboard – along the inbound Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) in Maywood – is the latest effort by the free-market think tank to inform the public about what it views as the collapsing scientific, political, and public support for the theory of man-made global warming. It is also reminding viewers of the questionable ethics of global warming’s most prominent proponents.

“The most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists,” said Heartland’s president, Joseph Bast. “They are Charles Manson, a mass murderer; Fidel Castro, a tyrant; and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Global warming alarmists include Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee (who took hostages inside the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in 2010).

Huh? Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, and Osama Bin Laden are/were "global warming's most prominent proponents"? What planet are you spreading your lies on, Heartland Institute?

Al Gore. Barack Obama. The Dalai Lama. Pope Benedict XVI. Desmond Tutu. The Heartland Institute is associating these men, who all accept the truth of human-caused global warming, with the "world's most notorious criminals." 

Andrew Sullivan tells it like it is:

In some ways, this is an almost perfect illustration of what has happened to the "right." A refusal to acknowledge scientific reality; and a brutalist style of public propaganda that focuses entirely on guilt by the most extreme association. 

...Mann and Ornstein are correct. Large sections of the American right are now close to insane as well as depraved. 

The Guardian's Environment Blog says:

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based rightwing thinktank notorious for promoting climate scepticism, has launched quite possibly one of the most ill-judged poster campaigns in the history of ill-judged poster campaigns.

And Climate Progress writes:

The Heartland Institute has launched one of the most offensive billboard campaigns in U.S. history. The Chicago-based anti-science think tank is comparing all those who accept climate science — and the journalists who report on it accurately — to Charles Manson, the Unabomber, and Osama Bin Laden.

Oregon weather breaks my May heart... then heals it

Oregon weather, I'm fed up with you. I've had enough abuse. This afternoon I realized that I can't stand you anymore.

Driving around in south Salem, I just had to pull over, grab my iPhone, and document what a crappy companion you've become. 

Come on! You're ridiculous! My Mini's thermometer doesn't lie. The warmth between us is gone. You're giving me 43 degrees. That's cold any time. Especially...

When the time is 12:50 pm -- middle of the freakin' day! -- on May 4. Spring. In fact, late spring. Yeah, I'd been listening to the "Chill" station on Sirius satellite radio. But that doesn't entitle you to make the outside what I'm grooving to on the inside.

Speaking of outside, Ms. Oregon Weather, this is what you looked like when you were giving me that 43 degree frigid treatment. You've gone gray. And blah. And all rainy weepy. I don't find you attractive any more. It's over!

Oh, sweetheart... I'm sorry for those harsh words. When I got home, after being so pissed-off at you, my heart melted when I saw how beautiful you can be in your sunnier moments.

Thanks for the flowers. I'm going to do my best to work things out with you.

Oregon Weather, my dear, you're an alluring creature. Hellish to live with when you're nasty; heavenly when you choose to be seductive.

Salem City Council, preserve the vision of "Sustainable Fairview"

Please, Salem (Oregon) City Council. Pretty please.

Don't allow the beautiful property in south Salem to become less than the world-class Green development that Sustainable Fairview currently is zoned as.

A few days ago I learned that the Salem Planning Commission is OK with turning the undeveloped portion of the property from a vibrant green to a blah gray, architecturally speaking. On May 14 the City Council meets to decide whether to allow Simpson Hills, LLC to build a bunch of typical apartments on 43 of the 104 acres it owns at the site that used to house the Fairview Training Center. This is the big picture of Sustainable Fairview. Pringle Creek Community, a genuinely Green development, is located in the jagged outcropping at the top of the green-outlined boundary of Sustainable Fairview.

Simpson Hills, LLC owns the property at the bottom, lots 1-5. The white area is to be developed in the future. The area just above, lots 1-3, are inaccurately termed the "Refinement Plan Boundary." Refinement, I guess, is how planners refer to modifying existing zoning criteria.

I'd say Demolishment would be a more fitting term in this case. Here's a close-up look at the plan for lots 1-3.

Yes, it's largely colored green. But that's about the extent of its Green'ness, sustainability-wise.

These lots are planned to house typical three story apartment buildings. Even though current Sustainable Fairview zoning requires LEED standards, Simpson Hills, LLC doesn't want to make the apartments any greener or more environmentally sound than the usual Salem zoning requires.

Ridiculous. 

When Simpson Hills, LLC bought 104 acres of the Sustainable Fairview property, the buyers knew that this was, duh..., a sustainable development with especially sustainable zoning regulations that had been approved by the City of Salem quite a few years ago.

The vision of the Sustainable Fairview Master Plan, for example, included having highly energy-efficient homes; all stormwater captured on site; minimal emphasis on cars/roads; varied types of housing; mixed uses on site so people could "live, work, and play" in a conveniently compact area.

Disappointingly, Simpson Hills, LLC now wants to back off substantially from those laudable goals.

Note the expanse of gray in the plan for lots 1-3 above. Those are parking lots and roads. Lots of lots. Lots of roads. The rain water that runs off them, which will be lots, is planned to end up in the holding pond shown on the right of the drawing. Then all the water will go into Pringle Creek. 

Pringle Creek Community, by contrast, has permeable asphalt and other ways of capturing stormwater. And the original plans for Sustainable Fairview envisioned limited "obvious" parking, with cars sequestered behind dwelling units, rather than prominently parked front and center.

The Morningside Neighborhood Association, which represents those already living in the area, isn't thrilled with the Simpson Hills, LLC "refinement" plan.

Geoffrey James, an architect, heads up the association's land use committee. He's put together an excellent critique of the proposed development which can be read here. It starts off with:

Fairview Hills is a current proposal by a developer for the southern ownership [portion of the Fairview property,i.e. the old Fairview Training Center, that was sold by the State of Oregon in 2008 [actually, 2002], and is supposed (by ordinance) to be a Sustainable, Green, and Low Impact Development. Unfortunately, conventional apartments are currently proposed, with conventional parking lots. A public hearing on this is before Salem City Council on Monday, May 14. Morningside Neighborhood Association is the neighborhood, and the Executive Board passed a motion unanimously, that is opposed to this development.

Attachment 7 in this (large) collection of documents related to the Simpson Hills, LLC proposal is a memo from Sustainable Fairview Associates (SFA), the organization which bought the Fairview Training Center property from the State of Oregon. 

If anybody knows how Sustainable Fairview should be developed, it is SFA. And SFA also isn't happy with how Simpson Hills, LLC is trying to cut corners on cutting-edge sustainability/green'ness. In the memo Sam Hall, SFA Managing Member, told the City of Salem:

We are generally supportive of the plan to develop apartments on the site, but there is little evidence that their plan for apartments at Fairview is different from the projects they say they have done many times before on properties all over the country. We see very little understanding or recognition of the goals of the Master Plan and the nature of the Fairview site.

This should be a no-brainer for the Salem Planning Commission and City Council.

Simpson HIlls, LLC shouldn't be allowed to breeze into town with a cookie-cutter proposal for the Sustainable Fairview property that maximizes profits for themselves and minimizes Salem's chance to have a world class Green development. 

Salem Weekly, our city's alternative newspaper, has exposed how the Planning Commission is unfairly (and possibly illegally) comprised: five out of seven members have strong ties to real estate development.

So its no surprise that a short-sighted Chamber of Commerce mentality at odds with the Sustainable Fairview Master Plan has led the Planning Commission to recommend approval of the Simpson Hills application. It's up to the City Council to stop the madness.

Frequently I critique Salem's blah'ness on this blog. There's a good reason Oregon's capital is nicknamed "So-lame." Often, it is.

Sustainable Fairview is a non-lame flash of creativity, innovation, excitement, and world-class Green design that needs to be nurtured, not crushed by a Simpson HIlls, LLC proposal which seeks to markedly diminish those qualities.

Geoffrey James put it nicely in his critique of the ill-considered development plans:

Why was the area described by the Fairview Master plan meant to be different than other areas of Salem? What is the value of a "sustainable" community or neighborhood?
 

It is intended to be a new kind of neighborhood for those who live and work in Salem, that will foster innovative land development and transportation practices. create a strong yet dynamic sense of community, stimulate and create new employment opportunities, demonstrate the efficient use of both natural and human resources,preserve a healthy environment for people, nature, and business, protect nature and develop new techniques for integrating the natural and built environments, use resources to meet the needs of this generation while conserving them for future generations, encourage creative ideas, products, and processes, and share them with other communities and developments, and be a focal point for the growing effort to achieve a balanced,sustainable future.

The distinction of the project is it is becoming a magnet for people out of state wanting to relocate to a community that values sustainability. Protecting the standards of the project will ensure a differentiated project that would attract new people and new talent to Salem, in particular young professionals from out of state. Additionally, for recruitment, such a distinct housing offering will help our large employers attract top talent to Salem, rather than lose workers to other cities or to Portland. Several thousands of workers live in Portland and commute to Salem each day because they believe Portland has a better quality of life. Offering a well- designed housing option in Salem may lure these workers to live in Salem, and spend their money here rather than in Portland.

 Absolutely.

It'd be crazy if the Salem City Council said "OK" to building a bunch of oh-so-average apartments on the Sustainable Fairview property that are indistinguishable from apartments on Liberty Road, Commercial Street, Wallace Road, or many other places in our town.

Sustainable Fairview is designed to be special. Simpson Hills, LLC wants it to be nothing-special. Why? Apparently because the corporation thinks it will make more money by offering an average housing product, rather than an exceptional housing product.

Well, Salem has enough average.

Let's continue to aim for exceptional with Sustainable Fairview, as the Pringle Creek Community is doing, and which I assume SFA intends to do with the portion of the property it still owns.

Hold fast to the Fairview Master Plan and current zoning, Salem City Council. Don't settle for average.

(The Breakfast on Bikes blog has a good post about the Simpson Hills, LLC proposal. Give it a read. I heartily agree with the concluding words: "Salem has plenty of conventional development. The City of Salem should give that Master Plan a fair trial and square deal. Is it really necessary to water it down from the start?")

Dark Sky tells me if it's going to rain soon. Great iPhone app.

Here in Oregon it's super important to know for me to know if rain is coming in the next hour.

Even though I'm retired, I have many crucial things to do -- such as taking our oldest dog for a semi-slow motion walk every afternoon. Our walk takes about an hour though it's less than two miles. Serena is twelve and a half. She doesn't move nearly as fast as she used to, unless a CAT! grabs her attention.

So this morning, when I learned about Dark Sky through my iPhone's AppAdvice app, almost instantly I decided to fork out $3.99 for it via iTunes.

Kind of spendy for a weather app.

But it's also kind of irritating to either (1) wear my waterproof rain hat, coat, pants, and shoes for an hour dog walk, when it never rains a drop, or (2) wear regular clothes and get soaked halfway through the walk.

I love Dark Sky, even after a mere nine hours of using it. All it does it tell you if it's going to rain or snow where you are in the next hour. And that's a lot.

Because Dark Sky offers up forecasts to the minute, using publicly available government radar data along with some sophisticated algorithms for eliminating extraneous info, plus calculating storm intensity, direction, speed, and such. 

For the geeks, here's an interesting explanation from the developers of how they do it (leaving out some of the most secret'y stuff).

This morning it showered off and on. Dark Sky nailed the forecast. That gave me confidence when dog and me set off on our walk around 4:00 pm. Before we left I checked out what Dark Sky had to say: "No precipitation" for next hour. 

Great. I put on a fleece jacket and Teva sandals (with wool socks; it was 55 degrees and windy on the day before May Day). No rain hat.

I trusted Dark Sky, even though clouds were rolling in, some of them looking pretty darn dark. Halfway through the walk I checked my iPhone again. Still "No precipitation." Which turned out to be true.

A Dark Sky update that I just downloaded adds support for Hawaii and Alaska, which makes the app even more useful. The radar animations are well done. You can scroll back quite a few hours, watching the weather pattern repeat itself. Also, go forward an hour in a short term radar forecast.

Dark Sky is a terrific idea. I've often looked at radar images on other weather apps, but it's difficult to make practical sense of them. How fast is the rain approaching? From what direction? How much rain is in the clouds?

Dark Sky calculates all that info, using the iPhone's own processor rather than a remote server. Also a terrific idea. Dark Sky just takes a few seconds to crunch the data into what sure seems to be a highly accurate forecast of rain and snow to come.

My photographic evidence that the world's alright

There's a lot wrong with the world. No doubt about that. But I've accumulated some photographic evidence on my iPhone which shows how alright things are also.

Along with some fellow Trader Joe's-loving friends, we've been worried about how well the recently-opened Salem, Oregon store is doing. Seems like it isn't very crowded whenever I shop there.

But when I glanced into the blue/green glass bin at the D&O Garbage recycling center a few days ago, I thought Alright! 

Tossing my own Charles Shaw (Trader Joe's famous $2.49 wine) bottles into the bin, I was struck by how many similarly labeled bottles -- with the square dark logo on a white label -- already were in it.

And the photo above was taken just after another recycler who had different wine tastes had dumped a large bag of other brand bottles into the front of the bin.

Here's a close-up of the back of the bin that gives a more accurate portrayal of how "Two Buck Chuck" is dominating south Salem's wine bottle recycling bin. If our local Trader Joe's store is selling as much other stuff as it's selling Charles Shaw wine, the store is doing just fine.

Next, not long ago I was short on time and in desperate need of a heavily discounted 16 ounce cup of coffee in my own mug (sitting on the curb in the photo above) from the downtown Beanery.

Love your massive 35 cent discount, Beanery! Starbucks sucks with its measly 10 cents off.

I scanned the parking spots as I drove down Court Street, worrying that I was going to be late for a dog training class that my wife wanted me to attend with her if I had to walk a ways to feed my caffeine addiction.

Then I saw it: Alright!

A "Small Car Only" sign. No problem with my Mini Cooper. Not only no problem, I had lots of room to spare (note the distance between the rear bumper and the white line marking the end of the spot).

Mini Coopers rule. If we all drove them, imagine how less crowded our roads would be. Plus, they'd seem oh-so-European.

Lastly, I assume that you, along with most of the rest of the millions (or billions?) of people who were astonished at the news that our dog had cloned herself, have been waiting to learn whether the clone and the original have continued to get along.

As you can see from the photo above, absolutely. All together now...

Alright!

So true: Republicans are the problem in American politics

Thank you for saying it, Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann. The Republicans are the problem.

These respected centrists (Ornstein is with the American Enterprise Institute; Mann with the Brookings Institution) have written a terrific piece in the Washington Post that's based on their forthcoming book.

It's clear, truthful, undeniable. One major political party in the United States has gone wacko, and it isn't the Democratic Party.

Below are some of my favorite parts of the essay.

The mention of habitual Republican use of the filibuster, something new in Senate politics, is right-on. Why does the media say "The Democratic proposal failed to pass by a vote of 53-47 in the Senate"? The bill got a freaking majority! It succeeded in passing, except for the idiotic 60-vote filibuster rule.

As Ornstein and Mann note, reporters should say just that. A majority of Senators voted for the bill, but it didn't become law because of Republican obstructionism. Here's more on that subject.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

...The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.

...Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies.The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. 

...The GOP’s evolution has become too much for some longtime Republicans. Former senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska called his party “irresponsible” in an interview with the Financial Times in August, at the height of the debt-ceiling battle. “I think the Republican Party is captive to political movements that are very ideological, that are very narrow,” he said. “I’ve never seen so much intolerance as I see today in American politics.”

And Mike Lofgren, a veteran Republican congressional staffer, wrote an anguished diatribe last year about why he was ending his career on the Hill after nearly three decades. “The Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe,” he wrote on the Truthout Web site.

...We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?

Also, stop lending legitimacy to Senate filibusters by treating a 60-vote hurdle as routine. The framers certainly didn’t intend it to be. Report individual senators’ abusive use of holds and identify every time the minority party uses a filibuster to kill a bill or nomination with majority support.

Global warming deniers are "merchants of doubt"

Facts are facts.

Cigarettes cause lung cancer. Coal-fired power plants cause acid rain. Fossil fuel emissions cause global warming.

There's scientific consensus on the causes of lung cancer, acid rain, and global warming. Unfortunately, there also has been, and still is, a systematic effort to spread lies about these serious problems.

In her book "Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming," historian Naomi Oreskes documented how this happened. A review says:

Merchants of Doubt might be one of the most important books of the year. Exhaustively researched and documented, it explains how over the past several decades mercenary scientists have partnered with tobacco companies and chemical corporations to help them convince the public that their products are safe – even when solid science proves otherwise.

These businesses had a goal: to sell cigarettes and chemicals such as DDT. These businesses had a problem: scientists said their products were bad for people. These businesses found a solution: hire scientists to step outside the objective, peer-reviewed scientific academies and spread junk science and misinformation, manufacturing and selling doubt.

...Today, a number of scientists have figured out how to sell doubt in the public consciousness and make money and a reputation in doing so. “Merchants of Doubt” shows how many of these same scientists are still working today on the Grand Poobah of science issues: global warming.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway tell the story of a number of scientists and organizations that they say have established themselves in this practice, but three in particular steal the show – er, charade: Bill Nierenberg, Fred Seitz, and Fred Singer. Oreskes and Conway contend that each of these scientists developed extensive political networks they then used to begin some of the greatest misinformation campaigns in American scientific history.

Today I listened to a podcast interview of Oreskes on Point of Inquiry. It was simultaneously fascinating and disturbing. 

I learned that fear drives many global warming deniers. It's the same fear that impelled Cold War warriors to see Communism as a much bigger threat than it really was, and to trample civil liberties in their efforts to root out nasty Reds who supposedly were undermining the United States from within.

Amazingly, Oreskes said that rabid anti-science "merchants of doubt" still believe in the Watermelon Theory of modern environmentalists: green without, red within.

Corporate greed of fossil fuel companies is one driver of global warming lies. An irrational fear of government intrusion into people's lives is another driver. If human-caused global warming is a serious problem -- and science tells us that it IS -- then something needs to be done about it.

Oreskes said that even though pollution trading mechanisms based on the free market worked with acid rain, and carbon trading would work equally well with global warming, fear of big government leads global warming deniers to spread lies, apparently figuring that their supposedly virtuous libertarian ends justify sleazy untruthful means.

The good news is that the American public is seeing through the lies: 75 percent of Americans favor regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant; 60 percent support a revenue-neutral carbon tax.

A new national survey confirms strong public support for funding renewable energy research, regulating carbon pollution, and signing a global treaty to slash emissions. The study, conducted by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, found a remarkable 75% of Americans support “regulating carbon dioxide (the primary greenhouse gas) as a pollutant.”

The survey’s results are counter to widely held assumptions among the media and politicians, but consistent with recent polling. The poll found:

• 63 percent of Americans support “signing an international treaty that requires the United States to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide 90 percent by the year 2050“!
• By a margin of 3 to 1 — 61 percent to 20 percent — Americans say they would be more likely to vote for a political candidate who supports a “revenue neutral” tax shift, increasing taxes on fossil fuels, and reducing the federal income tax by an equal amount.
• 61 percent said they support holding the fossil fuel industry responsible for “hidden costs we pay for citizens who get sick from polluted air and water, military costs to maintain access to foreign oil, and the environmental costs of spills and accidents.”
• By 3 to 1 — 58 percent to 17 percent — Americans say “protecting the environment … improves economic growth and provides new jobs” vs those who say it “reduces economic growth and costs jobs.”
• Asked “When there is a conflict between environmental protection and economic growth, which do you think is more important?” an amazing 62 percent supported “protecting the environment, even if it reduces economic growth” vs. 38 percent who backed “Economic growth, even if it leads to environmental problems.”

More good news: Obama reportedly is going to make climate change a presidential campaign issue. Given that a clear majority of Americans want this country to take strong action to combat human-caused global warming, that's a smart political move.

Obama said:

Part of the challenge over these past three years has been that people’s number-one priority is finding a job and paying the mortgage and dealing with high gas prices. In that environment, it’s been easy for the other side to pour millions of dollars into a campaign to debunk climate-change science. 

I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way.

That there’s a way to do it that is entirely compatible with strong economic growth and job creation – that taking steps, for example, to retrofit buildings all across America with existing technologies will reduce our power usage by 15 or 20 percent. That’s an achievable goal, and we should be getting started now.

Get high on Rosenblum to be Oregon A.G., not Holton, fellow Democrats

The more I learn about Dwight Holton, candidate for Oregon Attorney General in the May 15 primary, the less I like him. Ellen Rosenblum seems like a much better choice. 

Holton, during his stint as United States Attorney for Oregon, tried to undermine our state's medical marijuana law.

It irks me how the Obama administration is raiding medical marijuana providers around the country, desperate to take away a drug that relieves chronic pain and helps cancer sufferers feel better.

So why would Oregon want to elect somebody who supports a crazy federal law which equates marijuana with heroin and erroneously claims marijuana has zero medical benefit? The Oregon Attorney General should be focused on serious lawbreaking.

I liked this comment from Anthony Johnson on the Blue Oregon post about Holton's distaste for our medical marijuana law.

If you believe that enforcing minor marijuana laws is a waste of police time, resources and jail space, vote Ellen Rosenblum. If you think that the state of Oregon should focus police resources on more important priorities, like violent crime, vote Ellen Rosenblum.

If you believe that we should be wasting tax dollars and law enforcement resources raiding medical marijuana providers, then vote for Dwight Holton. If you believe that it is okay for sick and disabled medical cannabis patients to lose their medicine in raids and be forced into the underground market, vote Dwight Holton.

If you are a true Democrat, who believes in compassion and efficient prioritizing of our state's resources, there is only one choice for Oregon Attorney General: Ellen Rosenblum.

You nailed it, Anthony. 

For more reasons to cast a vote for Ellen Rosenblum, check out the Not Dwight Holton site. Also, The Weed Blog, which reports on "Cops Break the Law to Help Oregon Politician." 

I hope Dwight Holton realizes that the Oregon medical marijuana community will not stop what we are doing.

We will not stop pointing out the fact that Dwight Holton has received most of his campaign dollars from outside of Oregon. We will not stop pointing out the fact that Dwight Holton wasn’t a member of the Oregon Bar until 2009. We will not stop pointing out that the fact that he has never tried a case in Oregon courts.

With media services like NBC and NPR watching, we will continue to shout at the rooftops. Dwight Holton and his friends at The Oregonian can try to run a smear campaign against us all they want to. We will continue to run our ‘truth campaign.’

In the meantime, expect charges against Oregon law enforcement for their obvious campaign violations. Hopefully people are more upset about it this time around, so they won’t just keep doing it over and over again.

Also on the subject of marijuana...

It bugs me how Oregon football coach Chip Kelly is buying into the "demon weed" propaganda in the course of responding to allegations that 40 to 60 percent of the players on his highly successful team use marijuana. 

Kelly said he doubts the Ducks would be as successful as they have been over the past few years if that many players were smoking marijuana.

“If we had that many kids doing it, we wouldn’t be 34-6 (for the last three seasons),” Kelly said. This past season, the Ducks defeated Wisconsin 45-38 in the Rose Bowl.

“We win because of how hard we practice, and I see our kids every day in practice,” Kelly said. “If we saw signs of it — I haven’t seen signs of it.”

Hey, Chip, I'm an expert in the daily use of marijuana and how this affects mental and physical performance.

[Note to Dwight Holton and other law enforcement officials: I'm referring to my early college years, 1966-68 at San Jose State College.]

I graduated With Great Distinction from college. I got an "A" every semester in a two-year 12 unit Tutorials in Letters and Sciences program that required a lot of high-level independent thinking/writing/discussing through small seminars with demanding professors.

My friends and I regularly would go out and play pool, or frisbee, after smoking marijuana. Our hand-eye coordination wasn't affected at all, so far as I could tell. We'd ride motorcycles around -- no problem. 

I'd much rather be driving around with someone who just smoked a lot of marijuana, than someone who just drank a lot of alcohol.

So Chip, don't worry if your players use marijuana.

I realize you have to sound all parental and critical of marijuana use. But geez, you're coaching at the freakin' University of Oregon in Eugene. You should worry if your players aren't using marijuana, because that'd show they're cut off from reality.

Photos of "The Mild One" with my Burgman 650 scooter

You can sort of see the resemblance.

If you're near-sighted. Squint real hard. Use your imagination. Isn't it obvious... how Marlon Brando and me are so similar, posing with our "bikes"?

The Wild One.

The Mild One.

Maybe I would have looked more Brando'ish if Jim, a friend, hadn't taken my photo in the parking lot adjacent to the West Salem Starbucks, the wild mild scene of our Sunday morning caffeine-fueled get-together.

But adding a helmet, dark glasses, and a jaunty wave adds to my macho cool'ness, in my decidedly nonobjective opinion. Also, obscuring my facial features makes me look a lot more like Marlon Brando, wouldn't you say?

(For real cool, the Corvette in the background beats me out, big-time.)

Storm Large dazzles Salem in Oregon Symphony show

Last Friday my wife and I went to see the Oregon Symphony in Salem even though we don't like classical music. Or, usually, symphonies.

But Storm Large, Portland's rock goddess, was singing along with the symphony in "The Perfect Storm" show that moved to the Schnitzer Concert Hall this weekend. Which also featured rock violinist Aaron Meyer in the first part of the program -- another amazing performer.

Large was on her best behavior during her sultry lounge-singer sort of performance. She noted this near the end of her show, saying something like "Salem, I bet you were wondering what you were going to get tonight. But look! I didn't curse once. And I wore underwear!"

She was dressed elegantly in a slinky black dress, nicely made up in glittery eye shadow, her blonde hair neatly coiffed. But anyone who saw her sing on Rock Star SuperNova back in 2006 knows that Large has a whole other way of being "Ladylike" (her original song).

 

Storm Large's versatility is hugely impressive. Like Lady Gaga, she can play sophisticated nightclub singer or down-and-dirty rocker. I forked out for center seats, six rows back, in Willamette University's Smith Auditorium.

Good choice.

I loved being able to clearly see Large's expressive face. Not to mention her attractive body. In 2011 she took the place of Pink Martini's lead singer, China Forbes, who had vocal cord surgery. Here's a video of her singing with Pink Martini in her sophisticated style.

 

And then there's "8 Miles Wide" from her show Crazy Enough. Hint: she's not talking about the Grand Canyon, but rather, um, a intimate bit of womanly geography.

 

Friday night Large said she had a "kink" for love songs.

Especially for love songs about relationships that end badly. Even better... love songs about relationships that start badly. I loved her honest, pleasingly cynical, yet still hopeful attitude toward love. Yeah, it hurts. But oh so good.

A big audience pleaser was her unique rendition of "Hopelessly Devoted." Large said the original singer (Olivia Newton-John in Grease, I assume) got it all wrong. Large told us that if she was jilted by a jerk, she wouldn't be sitting on a swing, softly singing about the break-up. 

The guy would be duct-taped in an empty warehouse, his head over a toilet, getting what he deserved. 

 

Her emotionally honest approach to love is even more bluntly revealed in Large's wonderful "I Want You to Die." Great lyrics. Note to self: If you're ever reborn and somehow are on the edge of fulfilling your karmic desire to have a romantic relationship with a reincarnated Storm Large, don't!

For obvious reasons.

 

Storm Large is a fascinating personality. Seeing her perform close-up Friday night, I could tell that a complex, intelligent, highly engaging woman was singing beautifully with the Oregon Symphony.

In an interview with Rosie O'Donnell, Large talks about her childhood, her mentally ill mother, and forgiveness. Honest. Real. Super talented. That's Storm Large. Portland, and Oregon, is fortunate to have her.

 

Starbucks, get rid of the annoying homeless people

Oh, no! To some people I'm about to sound like a heartless right-winger, even though I'm a proud progressive. Tough.

This isn't a left vs. right issue. It's an annoying homeless people vs. courteous paying Starbucks customers issue. 

Understand: I'm almost always a happy Starbucks coffee consumer.

Two years ago I blogged about how I'm strangely proud of my Starbucks Gold Card. Today I pay for my coffee via the Starbucks iPhone app, which makes me even prouder (because fewer people use it).

But recently I walked into a Salem (Oregon) Starbucks store and was immediately aware of a large, noisy, rather slobbily dressed guy slouching on a cushioned chair near the entrance. He was talking loudly into a cell phone...

Obama, I can't stand him! He's a Muslim! What a jerk. [blah, blah, blah along that absurd line]

That was annoying in itself, even if the guy had been a customer. But I saw no sign of a Starbucks purchase anywhere near him, though he could have sipped his way through a 12 ounce coffee before I arrived.

What increased my annoyance were his two friends, even more shabbily clothed, standing with their duffel bags outside the men's restroom, waiting to do whatever once they got inside.

These three guys acted like they owned the place, whereas they should have been grateful the Starbucks staff didn't throw them out -- something I increasingly wished would happen as some friends and I tried to have a normal conversation while the homeless crew talked in a decidedly loud fashion just a few feet from our table.

So where are you going to go the rest of the day, dude? was one subject of zero interest to me, yet it unavoidably penetrated into my brain through three sets of obnoxiously loud male vocal cords.

I'm sympathetic to the plight of the homeless, poor, and chronically unemployed. However, these guys struck me as being perfectly capable of working. Could be wrong, but I felt like I came to know them fairly well after being forced to listen to them blather for over half an hour.

I started to get so irritated, I thought about asking them to take their conversation outside.

That didn't seem like a good idea, though, given their aggressive macho style. Getting up and asking the Starbucks manager to do something about them was another option. However, I figured they'd realize who was the complainant, and I didn't want to stimulate another round of shouting. Or worse, shoving.

Over on the entertaining I Hate Starbucks site, there's a page of posts devoted to "Homeless people!" The lead post, from a Starbucks employee, says:

I'm sure if you work in a Starbucks in a city you get lots of fun homeless people. Some of my favorite regulars in our store:

-the guy who sprawls out on the squishy chair, takes off his shoes, props his feet up on the end table, and proceeds to fall asleep, snoring loudly, until one of us have to go upstairs and ask him to leave, after which he checks his watch and says, "Oh! Look at the time! I was just leaving anyway."

-the guy who, without having bought anything, spends 20 minutes in the bathroom doing god knows what and leaving it smelling like absolute death for the next unwitting customer.

-the guy who paces in front of the store before we open every morning and comes in right before we close and asks for a cup of hot water and tells us about how he has to walk all night long. He's actually really cool, he turns on the lights for us upstairs in the morning and waits in line instead of coming straight to the bar.

-there's this blind guy who comes in all the time who positively reeks of henna and has this ridiculous patched pants and crazy long dreadlocks.. he buys a drink and sits upstairs staring into space for awhile. Then this other girl sees that he's inside and she comes up to us and asks for a refill on iced coffee, claiming that she lost her cup. She drinks half of the coffee, then asks us to fill the cup up with ice and whipped cream. She then sits down next to the blind guy and steals half of his coffee. We thought at first they were friends, but he assured us that they were definitely not.

-this guy who used to come in wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase with his long gray hair slicked back like the suave beast he was. He would sit down and start talking to high school and college girls while they were trying to do work and, even after they tried to get away or make him stop, would keep taking to them. After several complaints from other customers who watched him creep on minors, he got banned from the store but claimed he was going to write a letter of complaint to our manager because he was "wrongly accused."

There are more, but these are the most colorful of the ones I've seen. I live in a pretty tame little city though so I'm sure these aren't very bad comparatively. Do you guys have crazy homeless people stories?

Well, my story isn't about a crazy homeless person. The guy who irritated me was annoying rather than obviously crazy. I'm more sympathetic toward the clearly mentally ill. 

I realize that Starbucks wants to convey an open-minded, compassionate, community-oriented corporate spirit. That's great. But if Starbucks becomes a haven for the homeless, other customers are going to be turned off.

It's one thing for a homeless person to get out of the cold and quietly nurse a hot cup of coffee at a table in the corner for several hours. It's a whole other thing to dominate several chairs in the center of a Starbucks and talk loudly about Obama's Muslimosity and other ridiculous crap while paying customers are trying to enjoy a Sunday get-together at a coffeehouse. 

A positive side of my experience was that I've now discovered I Hate Starbucks. The site is run by someone clever who has a pleasingly cynical sense of humor. Since I moderate comments on my own blogs to keep out spammers and assholes, I enjoyed reading this on the site's home page:

An Answer to the Question... "Hey why did you take down my post?"

About three people, you know who you are, have been putting up heaps of posts on the site that talk about how wonderful Starbucks is, I delete 'em. Why? Because I like to think of people self-righteously typing their little hearts out thinking that they are going to take a stand against some bunch of anti-Starbucks hooligans and with one click of my mouse their work disappears. Boo hoo.

I also liked the rebuttals page, which starts off with:

I have been besieged by these people lately so here they are, for your reading pleasure... hate mail and stupid postings from the Starbucks Posse. My comments are in white.
Name: heather Date: Tuesday May 09th, 2000 01:18 PM  hey, i work at starbucks and i enjoy it and i posted many postthat seem to get taken off. Before,judging on 1 experience why won't you let people stick up for the company too! Take both sides.
How many licks does it take to get to the center of a clue? Post your squishy ideas somewhere else, for example, try to find an ilovestarbucks.com website, or get off your mocha decaf booty and make one.
Name: Starbucks employee  Date: Sunday March 05th, 2000 03:22 AM I happened to stumble upon this site. It saddens me greatly that people are so full of hate. Sure not everbody likes Starbucks coffee, but not everybody likes tomatoes. Are you going to start Bitching about people who sell tomatoes and like tomatoes? Think about it? Aren't you being a little imature? This is the best job that I have ever had. You can't expect everybody to like everything. The way I see it is that you're jelous that one man made it and your still sitting in front of your computer wishing it was you. Sorry but, Get a Life!
Just in case you were curious, this is the most common type of negative correspondence to the site. Who are they? How much time do they waste traveling to sites that they don't agree with trying to lobby for a corporate monster and influence people by saying brilliant things like "get a life" ? These lovely people are true hypocrites. Don't go to a site with different opinions from yours and insult people. Jeez. And once again, the site is ihatestarbucks.com not ihateeverything.com or even ihatetomatoes.com.

Obama vs. Romney on energy: Obama wins!

There's lots of reasons to vote for President Obama rather than Mitt Romney this November. Lots.

Here's one area where Obama triumphs over Romney, big-time: energy policy. The world is running out of fossil fuels (fossils take a long time to form, so we're using up oil and coal hugely faster than more is being created, but the Republican Party doesn't seem to know this basic fact).

Other countries, like Germany and China, are avidly pursuing profitable alternative energy sources like wind and solar.

Obama recognizes that even though oil and coal will be part of our energy future for many years, the time is now to begin transitioning to sustainable, non-polluting sources of energy which will simultaneously lessen our dependence on foreign oil and stimulate the United States economy.

Romney is stuck in the dark ages, energy policy-wise.

His habitual tilt toward corporate interests ("Corporations are people, my friend!") and the 1% causes him to lean away from American energy independence and home-grown sources of fueling our economy.

Here's a summary of how Obama and Romney differ on energy policy, courtesy of Climate Progress (click to enlarge). For more details, check out "How Obama and Romney Compare on Energy Issues."

What modern women want... spanking and submission?

A blindfolded woman, bright red lipstick, with the title of the Newsweek cover story above her right breast: "The Fantasy Life of Working Women: Why Surrender is a Feminist Dream."

Looking at the issue I thought, "This is why print magazines are going to survive. Glad I've stuck with our Newsweek subscription after The Daily Beast took it over."

The old Newsweek wouldn't have had such a provocative article. Kudos to the new Newsweek.

Many of the online comments on the story appear to be from feminists who aren't surrendering to the notion that what successful, powerful, confident, independent women want is..

To be spanked into submission. Which, I gather, is a central theme of "Fifty Shades of Grey," the hugely successful novel by E L James (a woman).

Wow. Amazon shows 1,557 customer reviews at the moment, most decidedly positive -- though there are a considerable number of disappointed readers. For various reasons, such as described in this excerpt from the first 1-star review I came across.

~ The writing was too sterile. There was no depth and I found it hard connecting to any of it. There was a whole heap of - I touched him, he touched me, I did this, he did that. And it wasn't engaging at all. When I read I want to be able to feel the emotion, not be told how a scene is playing out as if the heroine is actually an observer.

~ The sex - it wasn't hot at all. I wouldn't even classify it as erotic. For some strange reason I have the opinion that you need to be able to refer to your vagina as something more erotic than 'down there' before you can pull off a significant hotness rating.

~ Christian - ok, he was relatively hot but not enough to get my blood pumping. He wasn't alpha enough for me. One moment he is trying to be hard core the next he is gasping because she is wearing his underwear. Now if that was my dominant alpha, he would have given me a cocky smile, licked his lips and gave that 'how you doin' look, But no, he gasped like a little girl.

~ The price....I don't get it. How can a publisher charge this much for a book written so badly??

The Newsweek story drew me in (so to speak...) in part because I find the whole romance novel thing intriguing.

Whenever I head to the magazine section of the south Salem Fred Meyer store to thumb through car magazines, I walk past several rows of paperback books featuring the romance genre. There's lots of them. 

As Stephen Colbert likes to say, "the market has spoken."

Women buy tons of books featuring a heroine who is swept off her feet by a macho, albeit sensitive, alpha male. Fifty Shades of Grey is #1 on various NY Times bestseller lists, so this also points to what many modern women are looking for in their romantic/sexual fantasies.

The Daily Beast conveniently extracted fourteen of the "naughtiest parts" for those of us, a.k.a. men, who aren't interested in reading all 528 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey. Here's some samples.

“At the touch of leather, I quiver and gasp. He walks around me again, trailing the crop around the middle of my body. On his second circuit, he suddenly flicks the crop, and it hits me underneath my behind … against my sex … The shock runs through me, and it’s the sweetest, strangest, hedonistic feeling … My body convulses at the sweet, stinging bite. My nipples harden and elongate from the assault, and I moan loudly, pulling on my leather cuffs.”

“His arms are wrapped around me, and he’s pulling me to him, hard, fast, gripping my ponytail to tilt my head up, kissing me like his life depends on it … He drags the hair tie painfully out of my hair, but I don’t care. He needs me, for whatever reason, at this point in time, and I have never felt so desired and coveted.” 

I've got to agree with the Amazon reader quoted above; these don't seem very erotic to me. But, hey, I'm not a woman. Whatever turns you on.

That's one of the messages in Katie Roiphe's Newsweek cover story. Human desire/sexuality is amazingly mysterious. There aren't any hard and fast rules (though "hard and fast rules" sounds like something Fifty Shades of Grey has in a sex scene).

Feminism and independence can go hand-in-hand (or hand in something else) with surrender and submission.

It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace, when they make up almost 60 percent of college students, when they are close to surpassing men as breadwinners, with four in 10 working women now outearning their husbands, when the majority of women under 30 are having and supporting children on their own, a moment when—in hard economic terms—women are less dependent or subjugated than before.

...In the realm of private fantasy, the allure of sexual submission, even in its extremes, is remarkably widespread. An analysis of 20 studies published in Psychology Today estimates that between 31 percent and 57 percent of women entertain fantasies where they are forced to have sex. “Rape fantasies are a place where politics and Eros meet, uneasily,” says Daniel Bergner, who is working on a book on female desire to be published next year. “It is where what we say and what is stand next to each other, mismatched.”

The researchers and psychologists he talked to for his 2009 New York Timesarticle, “What Do Women Want?” often seemed reluctant to use the phrase “rape fantasy,” and in scholarly pieces, the idea makes even the chroniclers of these fantasies extremely nervous and apologetic. Even though fantasies are something that, by definition, one can’t control, they seem to be saying something about modern women that nearly everyone wishes wasn’t said. One of the researchers he interviewed preferred to call them “fantasies of submission”; another said, “It’s the wish to be beyond will, beyond thought.”

But why, for women especially, would free will be a burden? Why is it appealing to think of what happens in the passive tense? Why is it so interesting to surrender, or to play at surrendering? It may be that power is not always that comfortable, even for those of us who grew up in it; it may be that equality is something we want only sometimes and in some places and in some arenas; it may be that power and all of its imperatives can be boring.

Hmmmm. Maybe that's too much analysis.

A woman put up a You Tube review of the book that ends with "I really enjoyed it." Nice and simple.

She helped me understand why Fifty Shades of Grey appeals to so many females. Apparently the young innocent Anastasia Steele helps rich entrepreneur Christian Grey explore his secret, damaged side, bringing out untouched aspects of himself through his passionate relationship with her.

Sounds like Romance Writing 101. Here's the video review:

 

Glaciers are still shrinking from global warming

Almost always, truth runs deeper than a single shallow newspaper story. Especially when the subject is global warming, a subject that has been studied in depth by climate scientists.

This morning Google News led me to a Christian Science Monitor story, "Global warming mystery: some Himalayan glaciers getting bigger." Yes, but only some. And not a lot bigger.

Then I came across another more inclusive story in the Guardian by Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre, "The glaciers are still shrinking -- and rapidly." 

With glaciers and ice sheets covering such a diverse range of latitudes (from the tropics to the poles) and altitudes (from sea level to over 6,000 metres), it is not surprising that there are regional variations in their behaviour. Such variability should not, however, distract from the broader and more important story unfolding, which is one of profound and likely irreversible changes to global land and sea ice cover. Taken as a whole, the evidence for sustained changes to the cryosphere is clear.

The impacts these changes are having on water resources, sea-level rise and climate feedbacks are already observable and significant. Some recent predictions of the increase in sea levels by 2100 exceed one metre. Loss of Arctic sea ice results in enhanced warming of the Arctic Ocean due to a strong positive feedback.

Most glaciologists believe we are witnessing unprecedented changes to land and sea ice. The burning question is not if, but how fast, land and sea ice will disappear, and what we can do to mitigate and adapt to these changes.

That's the deeper truth. Global warming is real. It's happening. And we've got to mitigate and adapt to it.

Treats got me trained at the Willamette Humane Society

Annie Ingersoll is an excellent dog trainer. Also, an excellent human trainer. Yesterday I had my behavior nicely controlled by Annie after only a few minutes of her "Introduction to Dog Training" class.

At first, Annie had the several dozen people who'd come to the one hour class briefly introduce themselves: their name, name of their dog, breed and age of dog, whether it had come from the Willamette Humane Society.

Then she walked over to a whiteboard with a marker in hand and said, "Aside from food, water, and shelter, what other needs do dogs have?"

People started throwing out ideas. "Exercise." "Affection." "Chewing." 

Cleverly -- because this is what I'll always remember from the class, after forgetting everything else -- Annie had tucked a plastic container filled with dog treats under her arm. 

After someone yelled out a suggestion Annie would say, "OK, good idea," then toss a dog treat at them. (She had good aim; almost always she hit her target, even when in the back row.) My wife made one of the first suggestions. I reached out for the treat but dropped it.

Damn! I thought.

Another guy at a table to the right of, and behind, me already had caught two dog treats. I wanted (1) more treats to give to our dogs who were waiting in the car, and (2) to cleanly catch a treat so my male competitiveness could be assuaged. 

I found myself desperately thinking of ideas to yell out. Annie had moved on to another question: "What resources can be controlled by a dog owner to reward their pet?"

I really wanted to get more dog treats.

I'd noticed that Annie was rewarding anybody who made even a half-good suggestion. So I started to yell out whatever popped into my mind, even if the reasonable side of me (as contrasted with the dog-treat-desiring side of me) was whispering "That's a stupid idea" inside my head.

"Fun!" I was almost embarassed to yell that out as loudly as I did, because a more reticent woman at the table in front of me had started to say "Fu..." and I wanted to beat her to the treat.

So I out-shouted her and got a treat thrown in my direction which -- Praise Dog! -- I caught cleanly on the fly. I carefully placed it on the floor next to my growing collection of dog treats, which were pieces of jerky and biscuits.

"Didn't someone else also say 'fun'?" Annie perceptively asked. Whew. Guilt went away. The woman I out-yelled ended up getting a treat also. 

Disturbingly, though, Annie didn't write anything on the board with her marker. "Actually 'fun' should be part of all the other resources you can control, like going for a walk and petting," she said. "It isn't really a separate resource."

Damn!

By this time in the class I wasn't satisfied with just getting a dog treat from Annie when I did something she wanted me to do. I expected to see my suggestion written down on the board, which was, um...

A resource she was controlling. Along with the dog treats. 

Bingo! Main lesson learned.

Annie had me doing what she wanted by giving me stuff I wanted. On the handout she gave us near the end of the class, Dog Training 101 was described in some pithy words:

What's In It For Me NOW?
Establish Calm, Clear, GENTLE Leadership
Life rewards: Nothing in Life is Free (NILF)

l learned a lot from the class. Most notably, that if a human who doesn't even eat dog treats can be motivated to do things by having the treats thrown in his direction, they will work much better with an actual dog.

West Coast Swing is our new dancing thing

We live on the West Coast. We like swing dancing. But my wife and I have had a tough time getting into the West Coast Swing style.

Over the years we've had several lessons. Even a four-week series. The dance just never "set in" with us.

Until recently we'd forgotten almost everything we'd learned about West Coast Swing. So when we'd go to a open social dance night at the RJ Dance Studio here in Salem, and the DJ would call out "west coast swing" as a new tune started, we'd sit down and watch other people dance what looked to be a cool, fun style.

Finally the sitting got excessively tiresome. Last week we had a private one-hour lesson with Kathy Carter, who teaches West Coast Swing along with Jason Carter. She got us doing some basic moves that had slipped from memory: sugar push, left side pass, right side pass/overhead turn.

After the lesson, when I asked her what instructional DVDs she'd recommend, Kathy mentioned Myles Munroe, a Canadian swing champion. Good tip. 

As soon as I got home I fired up You Tube and found this highly engaging short video of Munroe dancing with Tessa Cunningham. Wow. Give me 50% of Myles' style, and I'll sell my soul to the devil. 100%, and I'll throw in my wife's and dog's souls.

Eagerly.

 

Learning about Myles' and Tessa's "West Coast Swing: Starter Kit" video via their web site, I ordered it. Haven't mastered all the basic moves yet, but Laurel and I have made a decent start. With Kathy's help, of course. 

Tonight we had another private lesson. Then Jason took over, guiding us through 40 minutes of beginner instruction prior to the RJ Dance Studio's monthly West Coast Swing night. 

It's a challenging dance. Being basically a slot dance, where the woman travels back and forth while the man moves side to side, the partners usually are doing different steps -- not mirroring each other, as in other ballroom dances.

So we've just taken some baby steps toward becoming West Coast Swing dancers. Already though, I'm getting hooked on both the music and the moves. I found a web site that lists contemporary West Coast Swing music.

My iPhone now is loaded with Lady GaGa's "Just Dance," "Bad Romance," and "Poker Face." Plus Madonna's "Hollywood." I sugar push away on our kitchen floor, trying to get the walk, walk, triple step, triple step rhythm embedded into the swing dance part of my brain.

Here's another Myles Munroe video, dancing with a different partner. Way cool. 

 

Tear down Salem's Courthouse Square! Make it a park.

Courthouse Square is a square block disaster in downtown Salem.

The three story building, previously mostly filled with county offices, is completely unusable because of dangerous construction defects. So is the adjoining bus transit mall/underground parking.

Twenty million dollars still is owed on the $34,000,000 project. There's little chance that any more than the $1.8 million received in a settlement with the architects and contractors will be gotten in recompense for the construction screw-ups.

Yet the Marion County commissioners seem to be headed toward throwing lots more taxpayer money down the Courthouse Square rathole. So says the Statesman Journal in a story yesterday.

Officials will review repair proposals for the Courthouse Square office building and bus mall, county officials said Tuesday. A video summary of the “remediation” proposal recommended by an evaluation committee will also be presented.

No decisions have been made about Courthouse Square’s fate, but attempting to fix its structural problems will be the first option considered by its public owners.

... Preliminary estimates for repairing the entire complex have varied wildly. One consultant group put the cost at $53.4 million. Members of a citizen task force suggested a $16 million fix was possible.

I say, echoing Ronald Reagan (sort of), Tear it down, Marion County Board of Commissioners and Salem Area Mass Transit Board of Directors!

So also says every person who responded to a Statesman Journal "What should be done with Courthouse Square?" question.

We posed that question to readers on StatesmanJournal.com because the Marion County Board of Commissioners and Salem Area Mass Transit District Board are preparing to discuss proposals for remediating all or part of the building, parking garage and bus mall.

Readers were unanimous: Tear it down and start over.

A gathering place, or "park," should replace Courthouse Square. There's already a model for this not far away: Portland's highly successful Pioneer Courthouse Square. Geez, we just need to change one word and we've got Salem Courthouse Square. 

Tear down the unusable building. Don't fix it.

Make that block into the vibrant center of downtown Salem. Events, rallies, entertainment. Food, coffee, snacks. Benches, water feature, people-watching places. Have some covered areas for when it rains, but leave most of the block open. 

The county can continue to rent private office space for the agencies that used to be in the Courthouse Square building. This should cost way less than fixing the unusable current building, which, as noted above, still will take $20 million to pay off even without doing any repairs.

Stop the madness. Stop the massive waste of taxpayer money. Tear down Courthouse Square. Build a Pioneer Square'ish gathering place. This is what the citizens of Salem want.

Question is: Are the county commissioners and mass transit board of directors listening? 

Tell them. Public comments about what should be done with Courthouse Square are being solicited by both sets of decision-makers. Don't be shy. Send them an email.

Written comments about proposed repairs for Courthouse Square are also being accepted. The public comment period will remain open until the next scheduled joint meeting of the county and transit district. The date of that meeting has not yet been determined. 

Marion County Board of Commissioners, P.O. Box 14500, Salem, OR 97309-5036 
Email: commissioners@co.marion.or.us

Salem Area Mass Transit Board of Directors, 925 Commercial Street SE, Salem, OR 97302 
Email: board@cherriots.org

How I'm fighting global warming Internet "trolls"

It's a tough decision: how to handle anti-science global warming deniers who repeatedly leave lengthy comments on my blog posts, filled with untruths, deceptions, and flat out lies at odds with facts about how the Earth's climate is changing because of human carbon pollution.

I've tolerated this crap for a long time, but have decided to take a stand for truth (as contrasted with "truthiness," which is what global warming trolls specialize in. 

In this context a troll isn't a mythical being, but someone set on disrupting courteous, respectful cyberspace discourse. They're a problem almost everywhere on the Internet. I've had to moderate comments on my two blogs to keep them under control.

Up until recently I've been accepting of global warming-related comments which aren't based in scientific reality. I'd correct the factual errors through a comment of my own. However, when someone keeps repeating lies, it gets tiresome to keep on spending time refuting them.

A few years ago DeSmog Blog put up a post about this troll problem.

George Monbiot has a great article this week citing DeSmog Blog, regarding the vexing issue of “trolls”. Not the kind that live under bridges, but those faceless cyberspace monikers that pop up frequently in comment sections of blogs likes this one, to repetitively froth away against climate science.

Are these real people? Or are they operatives in the employ of Big Oil?  “Paul S”? “Phlogiston”? I’m talking to you.

It seems that Monbiot has same problem that we do. On the Guardian website, a small minority of anonymous“skeptics” often dominate the discussion by regurgitating talking points from well-known climate deniers. Sound familiar?

When Monbiot challenged his trolls to reveal their identity, or even confirm or deny whether they are posting from a PR office, he has never got a straight answer.

Monbiot's post is titled "Climate denial 'astroturfers' should stop hiding behind pseudonyms online." Absolutely. I heartily agree.

Opinion is opinion. Facts are facts.

If someone wants to spew anti-scientific crap that sounds like it's coming from a Big Oil-funded public relations firm, he or she needs to provide proof of a real identity. I don't mind someone leaving a comment on my blog saying "I like hip-hop more than rap." That's opinion. But if someone says "It's perfectly safe to play Russian roulette with a loaded revolver," that's a dangerous lie.

Anyone who says it's OK to ignore human-caused global warming isn't in touch with scientific reality.

Just as I wouldn't let my blog become a forum for promoting shooting oneself in the head with a revolver, neither do I want anonymous trolls to have free rein to leave their lying comments about global warming.

So I've decided to take the approach Monbiot persuasively argues for.

Two months ago I read some comments by a person using the moniker scunnered52, whose tone and content reminded me of material published by professional deniers. I called him out, asking "Is my suspicion correct? How about providing a verifiable identity to lay this concern to rest?" I repeated my challenge in another thread. He used distraction and avoidance in his replies, but would not answer or even address my question, which gave me the strong impression that my suspicion was correct.

So what should we do to prevent these threads from becoming the plaything of undisclosed corporate interests? My view is that everyone should be free to say whatever they want. I have never asked for a comment to be removed, nor will I do so. I believe that the threads should be unmoderated, except to protect the Guardian from Britain's ridiculous libel laws.

But I also believe that everyone who comments here should be accountable: in other words that the rest of us should be able to see who they are. By hiding behind pseudonyms, commenters here are exposed to no danger of damaging their reputations by spouting nonsense.

Our local newspaper, the Salem Statesman Journal, requires a Facebook account log-in to leave an online comment on a story. Increasingly, newspapers, blogs, and other web sites are moving away from unfettered commenting anonymity. Comments may be fewer, but they are of much higher quality when the real identity of commenters are known.

Unfortunately, my blog service (TypePad) doesn't have a way to require a Facebook log-in before leaving a comment. 

So I've asked this blog's most avid anti-science global warming denier to send me a link to his Facebook page. I told him/her that I'd publish future comments if I confirmed a real identity which would be included with every comment.

As I suspected, no response. Just more blather about censorship and such. Hey, trolls: good luck with publishing your no reason to worry about global warming B.S. in a scientific journal under a pseudonym like asswipeXS. 

Like I said, facts are facts. Opinions are opinions. If someone wants to leave lies on a comment to one of my posts about global warming, he or she needs to stand behind that comment by providing a real identity. 

Then I, or anyone else, will at least know the source of the B.S. I have no problem with my name being associated with what I write about global warming. Neither does any reputable scientist. Only trolls hide in the dark of climate science anonymity.

I like the title of another Guardian article on the subject of trolls:  An internet troll's opinion should carry no more weight than graffiti. Nicely put.  

We give Keizer Rapids Dog Park "two paws up"

Our dogs seemed to really like their visit to the Keizer Rapids Dog Park this afternoon. It was the first time my wife and I had been there. Impressive.

Just as Salem (Oregon) is the dowdy little sister to much more glamorous Portland, so is Keizer usually viewed by Salemites as even more lackluster than our aptly nicknamed So-lame.

Well, not when it comes to dog parks. 

My wife and I are pretty sure that Salem doesn't have any fenced dog parks. Keizer Rapids is fenced-- a big plus, especially for dog-owners like us. Recently we got a young dog who hasn't been trained to "come!" reliably.

Today we could practice with Zu-Zu in a safe environment, not worrying about her running wildly after a squirrel, or whatever, and dashing across a street. The entrance even has an "airlock" design, two gates separated by a small enclosed area, to further reduce the chance of a dog escape.

And there's a separate fenced area for small dogs, another good idea.

At first Zu-zu (in the foreground) was a bit overwhelmed by all the dogs playing near the entrance. This might have been her first visit to a dog park. So we took her and our calm older dog, Serena, out to the impressively poop- and mud-free grassy area.

Zu-zu soon calmed down. Laurel and I took turns calling her by name, then giving her a dog treat after she ran up to us. Even though Serena is well-trained, naturally we had to treat her also, to avoid playing favorites.

(In my light brown and black attire, Laurel thought I blended harmoniously with the dogs, though my head fur is grayer than theirs.)

An attractive Husky mix wandered over to sniff our "pack," who were deeply enthralled with their own smell feast.

The Husky'ish dog obviously was trained in ballet. Nice delicate footwork.

We've always thought that our twelve year old Shepherd/Lab mix, Serena, has some Husky in her. Seeing Serena next to the definite Husky mix (confirmed by the dog's owner), we thought in Shakira fashion, "tails don't lie."  

Arctic warming could be cause of NW cool spell

It's been freakin' cold this spring of 2012 in the Great Pacific Northwest. Also, rainy. March saw the most rainfall ever in Portland. I think here in Salem we had the third rainiest March on record.

Today I went for an afternoon dog walk in 45 degree weather. Driving home from my Tai Chi class tonight, my car thermometer "dinged" with a 37 degrees nearing-freezing alert. 

Global warming deniers seize upon any unusual cold spell as evidence that Al Gore is wrong; global warming is a fraud perpetrated by the United Nations One World Order and complicit climatologists; weird record-breaking weather is just doing what the weather does -- be changeable.

Here's the scientific truth: "Arctic Warming Favors Extreme Prolonged Weather Events 'Such as Drought, Flooding, Cold Spells, and Heat Waves." 

By showing that Arctic climate change is no longer just a problem for the polar bear, a new study may finally dispel the view that what happens in the Arctic, stays in the Arctic.

The study, by Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ties rapid Arctic climate change to high-impact, extreme weather events in the U.S. and Europe.

The study shows that by changing the temperature balance between the Arctic and mid-latitudes, rapid Arctic warming is altering the course of the jet stream, which steers weather systems from west to east around the hemisphere. The Arctic has been warming about twice as fast as the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, due to a combination of human emissions of greenhouse gases and unique feedbacks built into the Arctic climate system.

The jet stream, the study says, is becoming “wavier,” with steeper troughs and higher ridges. Weather systems are progressing more slowly, raising the chances for long-duration extreme events, like droughts, floods, and heat waves.

...In addition, the study also mentions jet stream configurations that led to heavy snows in the Northeast and Europe during recent winters. Such events are also “consistent” with the study’s findings, according to the paper.

A map included with the blog post shows why our relatives in the mid-West have been gloating about marvelous warm weather this spring (close to 80 degrees, or even above, I believe), while we've been telling them "it's still cold and rainy Oregon."

Surface temperature departures from average during the March heat wave. Credit: NOAA/ESRL.

Blue colors are colder than average in March 2012. Darker the blue, the more from the long-term average. Red, orange, yellow, and green show March temperatures warmer than average, with red, orange, and yellow being the warmest.

So most of the United States has been basking while the West Coast states have been "enjoying" (if that's the right word, which to me, it isn't) cooler than normal temperatures. Note that western Oregon and Washington had the largest deviation in the cool direction of anywhere in the U.S.

Lucky us. But the weather will change. That's what weather does.

However, with global warming becoming steadily stronger, this study says that as the Arctic warms faster than the world as a whole, changes in the jet stream are going to cause even weirder weather in the future. 

The study contains a stark warning about future weather patterns, given projections showing that Arctic climate change is likely to accelerate in coming years. “As the Arctic sea ice cover continues to disappear and the snow cover melts ever earlier over vast regions of Eurasia and North America, it is expected that large-scale circulation patterns throughout the northern hemisphere will become increasingly influenced by Arctic amplification,” the study reports.

In other words, rapid Arctic warming is expected to exert a growing influence on the weather far beyond the Arctic Circle, for many years to come.

My iPhone speaker survives toilet water. Here's how.

I wish I had a better story involving wild sex, drugs, or fighting off a home invasion about how my beloved iPhone 4 ended up in a toilet this morning. 

Actually...I'd put the phone on some magazines that were headed to the recycling bin. Forgetting where the phone was after, um, I'd done my (stand-up) business, I grabbed the magazines from a counter and heard a highly disturbing splash as the phone hit the water.

Moving as fast as my semi-awake 63 year-old self does that early in the day, I had the phone out of the toilet in just a few seconds.

Luckily, it was snugly enclosed in both an Incipio semi-rigid "bumper" case, and an utrasuede/leather Waterfield slip-in case (highly recommended for slip-in afficionados; great case). So after toweling off the mildly wet iPhone, I decided to turn the phone on and see if it was going to explode in a shower of sparks.

Nope.

I was pleased to see that the phone worked fine. Seemingly. Except when I fired up my Solitaire app and started to play a game. It worked, but absent the clicking sounds that accompany a card turn. Shit! I thought.

Which turned to double and triple Shit! when I found that You Tube videos played, but with no sound. And I could make a phone call to my wife where she could hear me, but I couldn't hear her through the usual phone speaker -- only when I changed to speakerphone. With earbuds, sound could be heard fine through the headphone jack.

That led me to a panic-stricken Google search.

Where I found "How to fix the iPhone speaker problem (water damage)." The simple advice was to strip some cotton off of the end of q-tips, insert them into the headphone jack, rotate, and remove. I did this several times, with no success (other than getting the headphone jack really clean).

I also read the comments on that post, plus the accompanying You Tube video.

These led me to a couple of other attempted fixes: inserting a credit card in the charging slot at the other end of the phone from the headphone jack, and blow-drying the headphone jack. I also blow-dried the charging slot for good measure.

I don't know what worked, one, some, or all of these fixes. Regardless, after the last blow-drying my iPhone had recovered it's soundability. Bliss! I kept playing my "Brazilian Girls" album to confirm that everything was back to normal. 

So give these tips a try if your own iPhone gets wet and refuses to speak to you. The q-tip approach makes sense.

Some commenters on the post surmised that water (a short?) makes the iPhone think headphones are being used, so the external speaker is turned off. I seemed to see a brief message to this effect ("headphones") appear when I started to play "Brazilian Girls" before the phone was back to normal.

If you use a blow dryer, be judicious and don't run it too long.

I left my iPhone on a counter with the dryer on high pointing at it from about six inches way. When I checked back after a few minutes the metal phone casing was really hot. When I tried to turn on the phone, I got a "too hot to use; allow to cool" sort of message. After I waited a while, the iPhone worked normally, so maybe it was the final blow-drying that did it. 

Just don't overdo it, or you might have a bigger problem than a speakerless phone -- a cooked phone.

Metallic coolness & great benefits: Chase Sapphire Preferred card

Up to now I've taken my credit cards pretty much for granted. They've been pieces of plastic which have simply done their job: paying for stuff I want to buy, and giving me frequent flier miles on Hawaiian or United Airlines.

But after Hawaiian dropped it's direct flight from Portland, Oregon to Maui (where we vacation frequently), the luster of our Hawaiian card dimmed dramatically. Even before that happened, I looked around for an awards card that could be used on any airline, for any sort of trip.

And settled on the Chase Sapphire VISA card, which I extolled in a 2010 post.

A few months ago, Chase sucked me into upgrading to the Chase Sapphire Preferred card. The $95 annual fee was waived for the first year. I liked the benefits that come with the card, which include a 7% annual point dividend, and 20% off travel booked through Chase Ultimate Awards. 

When the Preferred card arrived, I discovered another benefit (though some find it a drawback). The card is unusually heavy, because it is made of metal, not plastic. And the numbers are on the back, not the front.

It gets a lot of attention from credit card-familiar store clerks. More often than not, when I use it I hear "Wow, that's a heavy card," or simply "Cool." 

But today I learned that the Chase Sapphire Preferred card is more than a pretty face. It can do some heavy travel-lifting also. My wife has been figuring out airline arrangements for a family reunion in Indiana this summer. This involves some complexities, as she is going to stop off in Wisconsin on the way back to see some old friends.

I told her that since we've accumulated quite a few points on our Chase credit card, we should try out the Ultimate Awards airline booking service. The result, after an initial glitch (apparently caused by the online reservation system being out of service for a while), was excellent.

Making reservations for both of us, including selecting seats on each flight, was at least as easy as any other online system I've used, whether through Orbitz or an airline. There's no extra booking cost. And we did indeed get a 20% discount when we paid for our tickets.

Meaning, Chase's Ultimate Rewards system adds on 20% to the points we redeemed for the airline tickets, thereby making my ticket 20% cheaper (because we had enough points to pay for all of my ticket, though only part of my wife's -- the difference being paid for through, of course, a charge to our Chase Sapphire Preferred card).

So I can heartily recommend this card to those who use a credit card a lot and want a highly flexible rewards plan. For us, the $95 annual fee is less than the monetary benefits we'll get every year from the card.

Plus, it looks and feels way cool.

Our dog cloned herself! Astonishing.

How did our dog do it? My wife and I knew that Serena, our 12-year old Shepherd/Lab mix, is super intelligent. 

But cloning herself... and somehow hiding the experiment from us until a full-grown almost perfect copy was ready to be revealed... astonishing!

This explains all those UPS deliveries from medical supply companies that I thought my wife had ordered for some reason, which mysteriously came to be transported to our "dog room" with teeth marks evident in the cardboard boxes, and the lab equipment I just found hidden behind Serena's dog crate.

Well, we're happy Serena was able to do the seemingly impossible. Her clone is as easy-going and personable as she is. And we assume, just as intelligent.

Our only problem is figuring out where one dog starts and ends when the original and copy lie down together.

April 1 -- big day in marijuana news

Of all the news reports that appeared in cyberspace today, April 1, the most interestingly informative I came across was Toke of the Town's "It's a Wild Day in Weed News. Here's the Roundup."

Wow. Who knew? Some samples...

Jazz Musician' Son Brings Brownie To Fourth Grade Class!

Panic broke out this morning at Redwood Elementary School when a local jazz guitarist's son smuggled in through the opened doors of the grammar school a "red" sequestered Tupperware-covered container of evenly-cut Betty Crocker's "More Fudge Than Fun Brownies," for Pebbles Shapiro-Naguchi's birthday party. There'll be no birthday celebration in Room 102 this afternoon because of the quick judgment of a teacher who thinks profiling is more than tracing a child's silhouette.  

...When Mrs. Jonell Christensen, the teacher who first suspected the brownies might be infused with cannabis was asked, "What was the first clue you had that something might not be right with the plastic-covered glass pan that young Dylan was carrying to school?" 

"From the window in the second-floor library, you can ascertain most of the going-ons that take place in this school. Fifteen minutes before the homeroom bell, I spy a long-haired student being dropped off by his long-haired father in a Prius in front of the school with public radio playing and Greenpeace sticker on the bumper. It was just a matter of putting one plus one together and coming up with three, simple," said the political science teacher.

Dick Cheney Vapes!

Former Vice President Richard Bruce (but rightly prefers to be called Dick!) Cheney is now being forced to vaporize cannabis for a post-respiratory condition caused by the recent replacement of the Ex-Number Two's mechanical heart named the 'Vader 214.'

Previously, the Dark Night's scientific pumper has been kept alive and fueled by a secretion attained from the pituitary glands of baby pandas until a new ticker could be found. When it was announced that a heart had become obtainable, the Mr. Potter look-alike was fitted with a fresh, lawfully procured, totally legal, working organ of a 24-year-old that became available last Saturday night around 2 a.m. when the Georgetown clubs let out.

  

Apparently there is some kind of residue in place from the previous owner and the only known treatment is to blow it out with a natural expectorant. Studies have shown that vaporizing cannabis actually breaks up stubborn blockages and allows the patient maybe for the first moment in their sour lives to feel a moment of tranquility that they may have never experienced before.  

Two year old who can dance better than me

Oh, great.

Just what my 63-year old mildly-competent-at-ballroom-dancing insecure self didn't need to see today: a You Tube video of a 2 year old who can dance the jive better than I can. 

 

Geez. He probably can write blog posts better also. 

Why conservative Supreme Court justices are wrong about the mandate

My respect for the four most conservative Supreme Court justices has gone down a lot this past week, now that I've been able to learn how their supposedly top-notch legal minds view the Affordable Care Act's mandate that every American have health insurance.

A cartoon by Politico's Matt Wuerker sums up the absurdity of how Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito seem to be viewing the mandate issue.

Columnist (and economist) Paul Krugman made pretty much the same point as cartoonist Wuerker in his column, "Broccoli and Bad Faith."

Let’s start with the already famous exchange in which Justice Antonin Scalia compared the purchase of health insurance to the purchase of broccoli, with the implication that if the government can compel you to do the former, it can also compel you to do the latter. That comparison horrified health care experts all across America because health insurance is nothing like broccoli.

Why? When people choose not to buy broccoli, they don’t make broccoli unavailable to those who want it. But when people don’t buy health insurance until they get sick — which is what happens in the absence of a mandate — the resulting worsening of the risk pool makes insurance more expensive, and often unaffordable, for those who remain. As a result, unregulated health insurance basically doesn’t work, and never has.

There are at least two ways to address this reality — which is, by the way, very much an issue involving interstate commerce, and hence a valid federal concern. One is to tax everyone — healthy and sick alike — and use the money raised to provide health coverage. That’s what Medicare and Medicaid do. The other is to require that everyone buy insurance, while aiding those for whom this is a financial hardship.

Are these fundamentally different approaches? Is requiring that people pay a tax that finances health coverage O.K., while requiring that they purchase insurance is unconstitutional? It’s hard to see why — and it’s not just those of us without legal training who find the distinction strange. Here’s what Charles Fried — who was Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general — said in a recent interview with The Washington Post: “I’ve never understood why regulating by making people go buy something is somehow more intrusive than regulating by making them pay taxes and then giving it to them.”

Slate's Dahlia Lithwick looks at the bizarre anti-morality of Scalia, and, likely, other conservative justices who agree with him, in her thoughtful piece, "The Supreme Court's Dark Vision of Freedom."

When Solicitor General Donald Verrilli tries to explain to Justice Scalia that the health care market is unique because “getting health care service … [is] a result of the social norms to which we've obligated ourselves so that people get health care.” Scalia’s response is a curt: “Well, don't obligate yourself to that.”

...Freedom is the freedom not to join a gym, not to be forced to eat broccoli. It’s the freedom not to be compelled to buy wheat or milk. And it’s the freedom to purchase your health insurance only at the “point of consumption”—i.e., when you’re being medivaced to the ICU (assuming you have the cash).

...Sotomayor, again pondering whether hospitals could simply turn away the uninsured, finally asks: “What percentage of the American people who took their son or daughter to an emergency room and that child was turned away because the parent didn't have insurance—do you think there's a large percentage of the American population who would stand for the death of that child if they had an allergic reaction and a simple shot would have saved the child?”

But we seem to want to be free from that obligation as well. This morning in America’s highest court, freedom seems to be less about the absence of constraint than about the absence of shared responsibility, community, or real concern for those who don’t want anything so much as healthy children, or to be cared for when they are old.

Until today, I couldn’t really understand why this case was framed as a discussion of “liberty.” This case isn’t so much about freedom from government-mandated broccoli or gyms. It’s about freedom from our obligations to one another, freedom from the modern world in which we live. It’s about the freedom to ignore the injured, walk away from those in peril, to never pick up the phone or eat food that’s been inspected. It’s about the freedom to be left alone.

And now we know the court is worried about freedom: the freedom to live like it’s 1804.

E.J. Dionne expressed exactly how I felt about the tone of debate among the conservative Supreme Court justices. What the hell were the justices doing, with all their talk about whether Congress could, or should, deal with the consequences of a court decision that the individual mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional? 

Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health-care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Senator, excuse me, Justice Samuel Alito quoted Congressional Budget Office figures on Tuesday to talk about the insurance costs of the young. On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts sounded like the House whip in discussing whether parts of the law could stand if other parts fell. He noted that without various provisions, Congress “wouldn’t have been able to put together, cobble together, the votes to get it through.” Tell me again, was this a courtroom or a lobbyist’s office?

It fell to the court’s liberals — the so-called “judicial activists,” remember? — to remind their conservative brethren that legislative power is supposed to rest in our government’s elected branches.

Justice Stephen Breyer noted that some of the issues raised by opponents of the law were about “the merits of the bill,” a proper concern of Congress, not the courts. And in arguing for restraint, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what was wrong with leaving as much discretion as possible “in the hands of the people who should be fixing this, not us.” It was nice to be reminded that we’re a democracy, not a judicial dictatorship.

The current membership of the Supreme Court arguably is the most conservative in modern history. OK. It is what it is. But we can still expect that the conservative judges will act like judges, not legislators, politicians, or lobbyists. 

Greg Sargent asks, "How did legal observers and Obamacare backers get it so wrong?" His answer: because they over-optimistically believed that conservative Supreme Court judges like Scalia wouldn't allow their personal political beliefs to overwhelm their legal analysis.

I didn’t mention this yesterday, but in his interview with me about the limiting principle, former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried was scaldingly critical of the willingness of the conservative bloc of Supreme Court justices to traffic in some of the most well-worn Tea Party tropes about Obamacare.

“I was appalled to see that at least a couple of them were repeating the most tendentious of the Tea Party type arguments,” Fried said. “I even heard about broccoli. The whole broccoli argument is beneath contempt. To hear it come from the bench was depressing.”

Which raises a question: How did so many commentators predicting this would be a slam dunk for the Obama administration get it so wrong?

...During oral arguments this week, Scalia invoked the broccoli argument to question the goverment’s case. He mocked the government’s position with a reference to the “cornhusker kickback,” even though that’s not in the law. As Fried notes, this language is straight out of the Tea Party guerrilla manual that was written during the battle to prevent Obamacare from becoming law in the first place.

All of which is to say that the law's proponents were badly caught off guard by the depth of the conservative bloc’s apparent hostility towards the law and its willingness to embrace the hard right’s arguments against its constitutionality. They didn’t anticipate that this could shape up as an ideological death struggle over the heart and soul of the Obama presidency, which, as E.J. Dionne notes today, is exactly what it has become.

Great deal on used Nissan Leaf -- here in Salem, Oregon

Car has been sold. Sorry. Hope you find another used Leaf. 

The all-electric Nissan Leaf is a terrific car. It's just turned out to be a less-than-ideal fit for our lifestyle. We live about six miles from the Salem city limits, so we use up twelve miles of range just getting to the edge of town.

Plus, our aging dog doesn't seem to like the sloping Leaf hatch compartment (it slopes because of the mid-car battery stack).

While that may not seem to be a big deal, you don't know how dogcentric my wife is. Whenever we look at a new car, one of the first things we do is tell the salesman we need to put our dog in it to see if she can stand up easily.

So we've ordered a Chevy Volt, wanting to keep ourselves in the electric car world, and put up an Auto Trader ad for our 2011 Leaf with only 3,000 miles on it. 

As I say in the ad...

Leather seats! Level III quick charger! ... If you want a Leaf, our car is a great deal. We added aftermarket leather seats and electrically-activated adjustable lumbar support ($1500 value). And this is a 2011 SL-E with the Level III quick charge port for full charging in about 30 minutes ($700 value).

Of course, the car also has the usual SL features. Navigation. Back-up camera. Intelligent Key entry. Level I and II charging. Bluetooth. Solar panel spoiler. Etc. Etc. Our Leaf has some dealer-installed options: all-weather rubber mats (hey, we live in Oregon), bumper protector, splash guards, cargo floor organizer.

At the time of this ad placement, there are twenty-five 2011 Leaf SL's for sale via Auto Trader in the entire country. Average asking price is $30,914. Ours is $27,995, about $3,000 LESS. Yet our Leaf has over $2,000 worth of MORE features -- the leather seats, lumbar support, Level III quick charger. 

Someone who wants to buy a Leaf for about $10,000 less than a new 2012 model should find our offer really attractive.

Not everybody can make full use of the $7,500 federal tax credit (Oregon also has a $1,500 state tax credit). And the credit can't be taken on a new Leaf until the person's 2012 tax return is filed a year from now.

Our used Leaf has everything useful a 2012 Leaf has, aside from heated seats/steering wheel/mirrors. I don't consider the 2012 battery heater (which is only needed in really cold weather) and the rear HVAC duct to be truly useful.

And our car has leather seats plus electrically-activated lumbar support in the front seats.

Consumer Reports noted that the Leaf's seats aren't very comfortable, which we agree with. That's why we had leather put on the seats by Beaverton's Coach Automotive Accessories, who did an excellent job. Again, a $1,500 value.

Our Leaf can be easily driven home within an 80 mile or so range.

So if you live in Portland, Corvallis, Eugene, or thereabouts, and are looking for a Leaf, head over to the Auto Trader ad and check out our car.

The car also can be shipped via an auto transport company for not a whole lot of money -- way less than a buyer will be saving by getting our used Leaf. And since our car has a fast Level III charger, this offers more options for getting the car home.

Cool real-time wind map of United States

Thanks to Climate Progress, I was turned on to what's described as the "coolest wind map ever."

Well, since I've only seen one wind map in my life -- the one they're talking about -- I'll have to take the scientists' word on that.

Indeed, it's intriguing to see a countrywide flowing view of what the wind is doing today.

The map creators advise using the Chrome browser to view the map, which I use, but even so I discovered that after that web page was open for a few minutes, my MacBook's fan went noisily on. Checking the Mac activity monitor, Chrome was sucking up a lot of processor juice. 

So if your computer slows down after viewing the map, close that browser tab.

Fox News gets positive about Chevy Volt

It must have been my recent blog post that convinced Fox News it should stop lying about the Chevy Volt and get behind an all-American car that has won both the North American and European Car of the Year awards.

Because this Steve Doocy interview strikes a whole different tone from the Volt-bashing that's been going on at Fox News.

Oil-loving conservative Texan Lee Spieckerman of Spieckerman Media started off by saying that Fox News commentators have had "a fetish for demonizing the Volt," then went on to explain why the Volt is such a great car.

I love Fox news, and I feel like I’m kind of attacking my own family here. I love O’Reilly, I love Neil Cavuto, I love Eric Bolling, but like a lot of my fellow conservatives, they seem to have kind of a fetish for demonizing the Volt.

They are perpetuating the myth that the Volt was some kind of Obama administration green energy fantasy that as you say was forced on General Motors during the bailout.

It’d been in development two years before Obama was elected. And it was championed by … Bob Lutz, who is a conservative and a climate change skeptic. So you know it’s a myth.

The tax break for buying the Volt was implemented by the Bush administration. It was not  something that was implemented under the Obama administration.

So unfortunately, there have been a lot of myths perpetuated.

Have a look. 

My favorite part is when Spieckerman asks Doocy if he knows how electricity is generated in Ohio. I thought, "Oh, no! They're going to criticize the Volt for using electricity from global-warming exacerbating fossil fuel."

Not so surprisingly though, both Spieckerman and Doocy loved how the Volt and other electric cars are able to use coal for "fuel." American coal! USA, USA, USA! Driving an electric car is the height of patriotism, according to Spieckerman.

On the personal front, my wife and I ordered a Volt today from Capitol Chevrolet here in Salem. We're going to sell our Nissan Leaf and shift to the Volt's approach to going electric. The Leaf also is a great car, but it ended up not being as suitable for our lifestyle as we expect the Volt will be.

Sneak preview of the Auto Trader ad I'm putting up tomorrow: Our price for a 2011 Nissan Leaf with only 3,000 miles will be the least expensive used Leaf being sold in the entire United States. (I'm pretty sure of that; need to double-check prices tomorrow.)

Plus, our 2011 Leaf has leather seats and a Level 3 (fastest) charger. If you're looking for a Leaf, and want to pay a lot less than the $37,250 MSRP for a new 2012 Leaf, look no further. We've got a great all-electric car for you, at a great price.

Reality doesn't register in the Republican brain

Yesterday Amazon delivered Chris Mooney's new book, "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science -- and Reality." 

I've only read a few pages so far, but I can tell that I'm going to like it. And not just because Mooney agrees with how I see the two major political parties, Republicans being way more reality-denying than Democrats. 

I want to understand why Republican science-deniers do what they do. Like all human behavior, they really can't help themselves. Something in their brains causes them to look upon facts in decidedly unfactual ways. 

Us liberals will be ineffective in changing conservative minds if we don't grasp how the Republican brain distorts reality. In his introduction, Mooney promises that he'll give advice along this line.

Here's some right-on quotes from what I read last night.

What's more, no matter how much the fact-checkers strive to remain "bipartisan," it is pretty hard to argue that the distribution of falsehoods today is politically equal or symmetrical. It's not that liberals are never wrong or biased; a number of liberal errors will be described and debunked in these pages. 

Nevertheless -- and as I will show -- politicized wrongness today is clustered among Republicans, conservatives, and especially Tea Partiers.

...The cost of this assault on reality is dramatic. Many of these falsehoods affect lives and have had -- or will have -- world-changing consequences. And more dangerous than any of them is the erosion of a shared sense of what's true -- which they both generate, and perpetuate.

...Science. This is the area I care about most deeply, and the denial here is particularly intense. In a nationally representative survey released just as I was finishing this book -- many prior surveys have found similar things -- only 18 percent of Republicans and Tea Party members accepted the scientific consensus that global warming is caused by humans, and only 45 and 43 percent (respectively) accepted human evolution.

In other words, political conservatives have placed themselves in direct conflict with modern scientific knowledge, which shows beyond serious question that global warming is real and caused by humans, and evolution is real and the cause of humans. If you don't accept either claim, you cannot possibly understand the world or our place in it.

The evidence suggests that many conservatives today just don't.

Our trail camera captures...Nursing fawn! Coyotes! Bucks!

See 'em here. Absolutely free. No waiting. 

Amazing (well, sort of) sights of animals in the wild, captured by our trail camera, which is ably managed by my wife, Laurel.

She moves it around to where she thinks critters on our rural western Oregon property are most likely to do their critter'ing.

Got some pretty good shots of...

 

A fawn nursing. Awwww... So cute.

 

A buck prowling around in the daytime.

 

Deer twins. More cuteness.

 

A raccoon family making a nightime excursion.

 

A coyote in our lower field.

 

Another shot of a coyote.

A still photograph of a deer, posing nicely for the camera.

U.S. justice system locks up way too many people

In some areas the United States may truly be exceptional. But our health care and criminal justice systems suck, big time. We should learn from other countries who do a much better job keeping their citizens healthy and safe.

In health care, we spend twice as much as other industrialized nations, yet our health status indicators are below average and forty or fifty million Americans are uninsured. Crazy.

The Affordable Care Act is a step in the right direction. A single payer health care system, a.k.a. Medicare for All, would be a leap in the right direction.

Our criminal justice system doesn't get as much media and political air time, but it should. Fareed Zakaria helps bring our attention to our equally crazy incarceration rate in his column in this week's TIME magazine, "Incarceration Nation."

Here's some excerpts which point out that the United States prison system has way too many people locked up, and some reasons why this is.

"Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today," writes the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik. "Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America--more than 6 million--than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."

Is this hyperbole? Here are the facts. The U.S. has 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens. That's not just many more than in most other developed countries but seven to 10 times as many. Japan has 63 per 100,000, Germany has 90, France has 96, South Korea has 97, and Britain--with a rate among the highest--has 153.

Even developing countries that are well known for their crime problems have a third of U.S. numbers. Mexico has 208 prisoners per 100,000 citizens, and Brazil has 242. As Robertson pointed out on his TV show, The 700 Club, "We here in America make up 5% of the world's population but we make up 25% of the [world's] jailed prisoners."

...This wide gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world is relatively recent. In 1980 the U.S.'s prison population was about 150 per 100,000 adults. It has more than quadrupled since then. So something has happened in the past 30 years to push millions of Americans into prison.

That something, of course, is the war on drugs. Drug convictions went from 15 inmates per 100,000 adults in 1980 to 148 in 1996, an almost tenfold increase. More than half of America's federal inmates today are in prison on drug convictions. In 2009 alone, 1.66 million Americans were arrested on drug charges, more than were arrested on assault or larceny charges. And 4 of 5 of those arrests were simply for possession.

...Bipartisan forces have created the trend that we see. Conservatives and liberals love to sound tough on crime, and both sides agreed in the 1990s to a wide range of new federal infractions, many of them carrying mandatory sentences for time in state or federal prison.

And as always in American politics, there is the money trail. Many state prisons are now run by private companies that have powerful lobbyists in state capitals. These firms can create jobs in places where steady work is rare; in many states, they have also helped create a conveyor belt of cash for prisons from treasuries to outlying counties.

"Stand Your Ground" laws are absurdly dangerous

The more I read about the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17 year old, by a neighborhood watch volunteer who followed the black boy around his neighborhood, looking for an excuse to play policeman even though he was told by a 911 responder to stay put in his car, the more absurdly dangerous "Stand Your Ground" laws look to me.

And many others. Like a former Miami police chief. 

Police officers are trained to de-escalate highly charged encounters with aggressive people, using deadly force as a last resort. Citizens, on the other hand, may act from emotion and perceived threats. But “stand your ground” gives citizens the right to use force in public if they feel threatened. As the law emphatically states, a citizen has “no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground.”

...As Florida police chiefs predicted in 2005, the law has been used to justify killings ranging from drug dealers’ turf battles to road rage incidents. Homicides categorized as justifiable have nearly tripled since the law went into effect.

...Gov. Rick Scott of Florida can make all Floridians proud by being the first governor to reject and repeal such misguided laws.

Like a former police reporter who wrote a terrific piece on this subject, "Welcome to Florida. Beware of gunmen standing their ground."

It’s no wonder that professional law enforcement officials oppose these new laws. They are, at best, a license for any fool with a firearm to shoot anyone he decides to fear, and at worst, an invitation to murder.

Conservatives often argue that personal responsibility is the doctrine by which America will heal itself, and yet “Stand Your Ground” offers exactly the opposite. Rather than holding people accountable for taking human life and keeping the burden of proof on those citizens who choose to kill, the new standard requires society to prove that the taking of human life wasn’t necessary.

Like a talented cartoonist who said it all in eight comic, but not-funny, images.

Last month I blogged, "Best self defense technique: run away!" The Treyvor Martin killing/murder/manslaughter (almost surely, not self-defense) speaks loudly in favor of what I said. 

If Stand Your Ground laws can't be repealed, as they should, at least they should be amended to require that before someone who feels threatened stands his/her ground, he or she has a duty to do everything possible to escape from the situation.

Walk or run away. Look for help. Head in the other direction. Whatever.

Nobody should have a right to kill another human being and call it self-defense when there were other options open to them. Nobody. Never. Ever.

Crazy March weather points to global warming

This morning my wife and I had to cope with five inches of snow on the ground here in rural south Salem (Oregon). It was weird. I've lived in Oregon for forty-one years. Can't remember a time when the blooming daffodils were crushed by so much snow.

Because our newspapers couldn't be delivered, over breakfast I read a story about the spring storm in the Oregonian online. Turning to the comments, I saw predictable comments along the lines of "Ha, ha, Al Gore is wrong. Can't be global warming if the Willamette Valley got record-breaking snow for this time of year."

That sort of ignorance isn't bliss. It's disturbing. Because if lots of Americans keep on denying the reality of global warming, we're headed for much scarier and much weirder weather.

The global warming deniers who used comments on the Oregonian story to display their foolishness forgot, or ignored, an inconvenient truth: while the temperature in the Pacific Northwest has been unusally cool this month, most of the rest of the United States has been extremely warm.

On the highly recommended Climate Progress blog, check out March Madness: 'This May Be an Unprecedented Event Since Modern U.S. Weather Records Began in the Late 19th Century.' The post starts out this way.

Dr. Jeff Masters: A spring heat wave like no other in U.S. and Canadian history peaked in intensity yesterday, during its tenth day. Since record keeping began in the late 1800s, there have never been so many temperature records broken for spring warmth in a one-week period–and the margins by which some of the records were broken yesterday were truly astonishing. Wunderground’s weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, commented to me yesterday, “it’s almost like science fiction at this point.“

Yesterday, meteorologist Masters published a detailed statistical analysis that concluded, “It is highly unlikely the warmth of the current ‘Summer in March’ heat wave could have occurred unless the climate was warming.”

See that strip of blue on the northern portion of the Pacific coast? In addition to south Texas, that's the only spot in the United States that has been unseasonably cool from March 8-15, 2012.

All that red, including the really dark red? That's record-breaking heat. 

Global warming is real. We need to deal with it. Now.

Chevy Volt -- Rich Lowry is wrong about a great car

My wife and I are seriously considering selling our Nissan Leaf and getting a Chevy Volt. We've got good reasons for doing so, but that's the subject of another post.

What I want to talk about now is the trashing of the Volt by conservatives such as Rich Lowry, who wrote an absurd column, "The Sad Plight of Obama's Edsel," that ran in the Portland Oregonian yesterday.

There's so much wrong with Lowry's piece, it's tough to know where to start with truth-telling. I guess the title is a good place. The Volt isn't Obama's car. General Motors revealed the concept car version in January 2007, and unveiled the production model in September 2008.

President Obama took office in January 2009. So Lowry is way off-base when he calls it "Obama's Edsel." It isn't Obama's car. And it is nothing like the ill-fated Edsel.

Lowry says the Volt is "government approved." Well, no more so than any other car. There are safety and other standards for cars. That must be what Lowry is talking about in his snarky attempt to disparage a car that has won both the North American and European Car of the Year awards.

He misleadingly says that the Volt gets 35 mpg on gas (a generator kicks in to run the electric motors after the Volt's battery is depleted, which is good for about 40 miles). Lowry ignores the "infinite" mpg mileage on battery power.

I've read lots of reports from happy Volt owners on various forums. Frequently they go months without buying gasoline, because their daily drive is less than 40 miles. Even with occasional use of the gas generator, it's possible to enjoy hundreds of miles per gallon with the Volt.

The official EPA figure is 93 MPG Equivalent using the battery only (cost of electricity is equated to cost of gasoline; here in the northwest, electricity costs less than average, so the MPG Equivalent is higher). Consumer Reports (April 2012 auto issue) shows the Volt as getting the best overall fuel economy, 61 mpg, of any car -- except the all-electric Nissan Leaf, which gets 106 mpg.

So Lowry is wrong when he says the Volt's mileage is "comparable to the Cruze." Consumer Reports says the Chevy Cruze gets 26 mpg, less than half of the Volt's mileage.

Lowry disparages the cost of the Volt, about $40,000. Even though he and his fellow Republicans endorse subsidies for oil companies and other fossil fuel enterprises, offering tax credits for purchase of an electric car bothers him.

Here in Oregon, a Volt buyer can qualify for a $7,500 federal and $1,500 state tax credit. That brings the price down to about $31,000. While browsing a Volt forum I came across a "Volt Cost Comparison with Average US Car Ownership" spreadsheet.

Pretty interesting. Shows that the Volt is cheaper than the average car over a six-year ownership period, even without the federal tax credit.

Like I said before, Fox News and other right-wingers have been lying about the Volt. Now Rich Lowry has joined the Untruth Squad. I enjoyed this letter to the editor in the Oregonian, written in response to Lowry's column.

Thank you for publishing Rich Lowry's hilarious anti-American car infomercial ("Obama's Edsel: Electric car has a grim future if it's the Chevy Volt," March 21). His portrayal of Americans as feeble oafs unable to plug in their cars cracked me up.

Imagine a hand-wringing actor: "How does this crazy electricity work?! Too complicated, I give up. I need the convenience of waiting in line to pump an expensive, highly flammable liquid carcinogen that we fight wars to get! Boy, oil companies need even more subsidies!" 

Lowry has gotten the conservative memo to attack American innovation and the successful (bipartisan) rescue of the auto industry since 2008. Heaven forbid we think that keeping nearly a million Americans in good jobs creating award-winning vehicles is a good thing. 

My father-in-law's Volt is getting over 199 mpg; he tops off at home. 

PETER NOORDIJK 
North Portland  

Right on, Peter. Nice letter.

Pared down HB 4095 won't harm Oregon land use system

I'm feeling better about what I called "land use shenanigans" that popped up at the very end of the Oregon legislature's short 2012 session.

After learning more about what the $550,000 appropriated by the joint Ways and Means Committee for a pilot regional land use planning project in Josephine, Jackson, and Douglas counties would do, it looks like Oregon's efforts to protect irreplaceable farm and forest land from unnecessary development aren't much at risk.

This is because HB 4095, which was a major threat to Oregon's land use system, died without getting a vote in either the House or Senate. 1000 Friends of Oregon noted that HB 4095 was called a "major threat" by the Oregon Conservation Network. 

What the bill proposes: HB 4095 would allow the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC) to redefine agricultural and forest lands in three Southern Oregon counties based in part on factors other than the productivity of the soil or the history of resource use. The bill then allows the counties to redesignate current agricultural and forest lands as "non-resource", paving the way for development.  The bill includes such factors as speculation about the future viability of resource use and proximity to other land uses.

Why 1000 Friends opposes this bill: HB 4095 could allow sprawling rural residential development on lands that have been in continuous farm or forest use for generations. 

...The bill would also add unnecessary complexity to the land use program. If Southern Oregon counties require a new definition of agricultural and forest lands specifically reflecting the usability of such lands for resource uses, current law provides the means to do so. Also, re-mapping of lands that do not meet the definition of agricultural land or forest land is already possible under HB 2229, passed by the Legislature in 2009. However, no county has taken advantage of that authorization. This bill is not only bad policy, it is simply unnecessary.

So if HB 4095 was unnecessary and didn't even get a hearing in the joint Ways and Means Committee, why was $550,000 in general fund taxpayer money allocated by that committee to enable three Oregon counties to do what already can be done under existing laws and regulations?

Apparently because lots of legislative "horse-trading" goes on at the end of a session. Republicans were stymied on some of their favorite bills and wanted to be able to point to some wins, no matter how small, in exchange for supporting Democratic legislative priorities.

Also, many people view Oregon's land use system as being too rigid.

So giving the three southern Oregon counties some money to support an attempt to come up with regional definitions of farm and forest land throws a bone to the barking dogs who would prefer to see land use planning go away completely.

It looks like nothing substantive will be done with the $550,000 until the next biennium, which begins on July 1, 2013.

The state Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) will have to come up with rules to guide the activities of the three counties. Then any request to redefine what is productive farm and forest land in southern Oregon would need to be approved by the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC).

Since all state land use laws remain intact, and no new legal criteria for defining farm/forest land were added because of the failure to pass HB 4095, if the three counties succeed in getting LCDC to agree to some proposal, it will be no different from what could have been done prior to the 2012 legislative session.

In the end, then, Republican members of the legislature will be able to claim a small victory for local control over land use decisions, even though actually Jackson, Josephine, and Douglas counties don't have any more control now than they did before.

They just have $550,000 to do what they could always have done: petition DLCD and LCDC to define farm and forest lands differently based on the usability of these lands in a regional area. LIke I said before, to me it seems like that money would have been better spent on other needs -- such as education, health care, or public safety.

But since the bad aspects of HB 4095 were pruned away by the Ways and Means Committee, what's left is almost certainly innocuous.

Land use system-hating county commissioners in the three southern Oregon counties will huff and puff about the need to pave over farm and forest land so that illusory jobs can be created. In the end, whatever definitional changes allowed to take place will be what is already permitted under state land use laws.

We are the 1%! (heart-health wise)

My wife and I have proudly marched in Occupy Salem events, chanting "We are the 99%!" But we're pleased to learn that we're also in the 1% -- the percentage of Americans who met all seven metrics of cardiovascular health.

Which are:

• Not smoking
• Physical activity (being active)
• Having blood pressure under control
• Maintaining healthy blood glucose levels
• Maintaining healthy blood cholesterol levels
• Maintaining a healthy body weight
• Following a healthy and balanced diet

I barely made it past the body weight criterion, finding that my six feet tall'ness and 182 pounds of weight'ness gave me a BMI (body mass index) of 24.7, just a bit under the 25 that qualified me for normal weight.

Otherwise, though, I'm clearly in the Healthy Zone on the other six criteria. And it really isn't all that difficult to do. 

Yet only 1.2% of Americans met all seven metrics during 2005-2010, compared to an also-measly, but somewhat better, 2% from 1988 to 1994.

Conclusion: Americans are in bad shape.

That's obvious from watching my fellow citizens gorge themselves on crappy food, and try to cram their fat butts into airplane seats that are plenty wide for normal bodies -- but not the abnormally obese American physique.

Health insurance plans and employers are catching on to how much medical care money goes to pay for conditions that could have been prevented if people had healthier lifestyles. Good news.

If people's insurance premiums were partly based on how many of the seven heart-healthy metrics insurees met, that'd be a monetary incentive to engage in healthier behaviors. 

Fox News and Krauthammer lie about Chevy Volt safety

We own an electric car, a Nissan Leaf. So while I'm irritated when right-wingers lie about anything, it particularly bugs me when untruths are spread about alternative energy cars -- including the Chevy Volt. 

Conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer joined the Volt lie parade in his "Obama's Oil Flimflam." In yesterday's Portland Oregonian, I read:

Instead, Obama offers what he fancies to be the fuels of the future. You would think that he’d be a tad more modest today about his powers of divination after the Solyndra bankruptcy, the collapse of government-subsidized Ener1 (past makers of the batteries of the future) and GM’s suspension of production — for lack of demand — of another federally dictated confection, the flammable Chevy Volt.

Naturally a print newspaper doesn't have a clickable link.

But when I located Krauthammer's column on the Washington Post web site, I was curious to see where the Chevy Volt link in the paragraph above led me, because I knew that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had exonerated the Volt.

NHTSA remains unaware of any real-world crashes that have resulted in a battery-related fire involving the Chevy Volt or any other electric vehicle... Based on the available data, NHTSA does not believe that Chevy Volts or other electric vehicles pose a greater risk of fire than gasoline-powered vehicles.

lndeed, the web link in Krauthammer's column didn't lead to proof of the Chevy Volt's flammability, but to a story which said the opposite.

GM executives have said the recent frenzy over a Volt battery fire in crash tests has hurt sales. On the merits, the fires weren’t a huge concern — the Volts only caught fire days or weeks after extreme lab testing, and according to a government investigation they’re no more likely to catch fire than gas-powered automobiles. Still, panicky headlines ensued. Conservatives started denouncing the company (Rush Limbaugh called GM “a corporation that’s trying to kill its customers”).

Fox News and other conservative mouthpieces hate General Motors because it is one of Obama's big success stories. The auto industry bailout worked, saving many thousands of jobs. They also hate electric cars, because the oil industry is a big contributor to Republican causes, and alternative energy is one way to deal with global warming -- a reality that most conservatives deny.

So Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and Tea Party types have been spreading lies about the Chevy Volt, as ably documented by Media Matters. 

Disgusting. As was Charles Krauthammer's piling on with his "flammable" remark. I've sent the Oregonian a letter to the editor and also emailed it to Krauthammer:

I just sent a letter to the editor off to the Portland Oregonian. You should check your facts before repeating untruths in your column. It damages your credibility on other issues where you express a legitimate opinion. It took me about ten seconds to find the NHTSA report on the Volt. Couldn't you have done the same?

http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/2012/NHTSA+Statement+on+Conclusion+of+Chevy+Volt+Investigation

Here's my letter to the editor:

"In a recent column, Charles Krauthammer repeated the Fox News myth that owners of GM's electric vehicle should fear car fires, referring to "the flammable Chevy Volt." The National Highway Traffic Safety Commission (NHTSC) says it is unaware of any real-world crashes resulting in a battery-related fire involving the Volt or any other electric vehicle.

But many times I've watched the evening news and seen footage of a gasoline powered car bursting into flames. The NHTSC concluded that electric cars aren't more prone to fires than conventional cars. Krauthammer needs to check his facts before repeating untruths spread by haters of the auto industry bailout and alternatives to fossil fuels."