HinesSight

"Expansionary austerity" isn't working in Europe

I'm no economic expert. But much of economics is simple common sense.

So it's no big surprise to me that the British economy is faltering after David Cameron's conservative government decided several years ago that cutting government spending in a recession was the best way to stimulate growth and job creation.

Huh? This "expansionary austerity" notion is another example of faith-based voodoo economics, like believing that cutting taxes results in more revenue. That's also a myth.

Recently Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote about Europe's continuing economic problems that have been exacerbated by austerity measures. "The Austerity Debacle" shows why it's so important that the United States shun crazy Republican calls for extreme deficit-cutting when our own economy is finally starting to improve.

Last week the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, a British think tank, released a startling chart comparing the current slump with past recessions and recoveries. It turns out that by one important measure — changes in real G.D.P. since the recession began — Britain is doing worse this time than it did during the Great Depression. Four years into the Depression, British G.D.P. had regained its previous peak; four years after the Great Recession began, Britain is nowhere close to regaining its lost ground.

Nor is Britain unique. Italy is also doing worse than it did in the 1930s — and with Spain clearly headed for a double-dip recession, that makes three of Europe’s big five economies members of the worse-than club. Yes, there are some caveats and complications. But this nonetheless represents a stunning failure of policy.

And it’s a failure, in particular, of the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion both in Europe and, to a large extent, in the United States for the past two years.

...Such invocations of the confidence fairy were never plausible; researchers at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere quickly debunked the supposed evidence that spending cuts create jobs. Yet influential people on both sides of the Atlantic heaped praise on the prophets of austerity, Mr. Cameron in particular, because the doctrine of expansionary austerity dovetailed with their ideological agendas.

...The infuriating thing about this tragedy is that it was completely unnecessary. Half a century ago, any economist — or for that matter any undergraduate who had read Paul Samuelson’s textbook “Economics” — could have told you that austerity in the face of depression was a very bad idea. But policy makers, pundits and, I’m sorry to say, many economists decided, largely for political reasons, to forget what they used to know. And millions of workers are paying the price for their willful amnesia.

Hopefully next November those millions will remember which political party favors job creation for the 99% rather than tax and spending cuts which benefit the 1%: the Democrats.

(For some other arguments against expansionary austerity, see here and here.)

People who throw cigarette butts out of their car are...

My wife and I have quite a few words that finish off the title of this blog post. Jerks. Inconsiderate. Litterers. 

It hugely bugs us when we see someone toss a cigarette butt out of a car window. But usually the offender is driving along in front of us, so it's difficult to see what sort of person is the inconsiderate littering jerk.

Today I had a chance to get a close-up view of that odious species, Cigarettebutt discardiatis.

I was pushing my shopping cart in the south Salem Fred Meyer parking lot. Nearing my vehicle, I saw a car drive past me. A hand flicked a still-burning cigarette butt out of the driver's window. Then the black Volkswagen MK2, with large chrome aftermarket exhaust pipes, pulled into an empty space next to mine.

I took my time with my grocery bags, wanting to see who got out of the car. I expected a redneck. Or a tough-looking guy. 

Instead, a casually dressed young couple emerged, along with their seven'ish daughter. The woman held the kid's hand as they walked into the store. A cute little Chihahua face appeared in their car's front seat, anxiously watching its "pack" disappear.

Neither the man nor the woman looked like jerks. However, I'll stick with inconsiderate litterers. (Am assuming the dog and the child aren't smokers.) Plus, adults shouldn't smoke around children. My mother did, a lot, before the danger of second-hand smoke was recognized. If I ever get lung cancer, I'll know who to blame.

Cigarette butts don't biodegrade. They're tiny trash that piles up. I have no idea why people think they can pull into a public parking lot and throw a burning butt onto the pavement, right where other shoppers have to walk.

I also have no idea why cigarette smokers keep on with their unhealthy habit. If they're into rebellious vices, there's plenty of other ways to get a drug fix that won't be nearly as bad for the body. And they won't be irritating other people by throwing their drug paraphenalia onto public spaces.

Stop smoking cigarettes. That's the best way to go. But if you smoke, keep your butts to yourself. 

Marion County commissioners raked over legal coals again

Ha, ha! We were right and you were wrongI

Thanks to Salem Weekly, our city's alternative newspaper, I got to gloat again about our neighborhood's land use win over the Marion County commissioners after publisher A.P. Walther asked me if I'd like to write an opinion piece based on my recent gloating blog post.

"Of course," I told A.P.

I then struggled to find the perfect lead for the column, one which reflected my maturity, seriousness, and dignified writing style. "Ha, ha!" struck me as perfect, especially since I figured Salem Weekly wouldn't allow stronger language in a publication that's read by minors.

Check out "Marion County commissioners proven wrong."  

The photo accompanying the column in the printed Salem Weekly was what I use in the header of this blog. But the online version was the pleasingly sinister version above. I like the semi-crazed look. "Watch out, law-defying politicians, I see what you're up to!" 

My wife and I have been gloating about our neighborhood's legal victory over Patti Milne and Sam Brentano since 2010. See: Circuit Court reverses Marion County commissioners and Judge slaps down Marion County Commissioner Patti Milne.

I'll probably keep on gloating for a couple of reasons.

One, gloating is fun, particularly when the objects of the gloat are politicians who blatantly favor special interests over the public good. Two, the more light is cast on politicians who ignore the law, the greater the chance they won't be able to hide in the shadows.

I realize that county politics isn't of much interest to the majority of Marion County voters.

Salem residents identify mostly with their city, even though they (obviously) also are county residents. So it takes a debacle like Courthouse Square, which used to house county offices in a block close to downtown Salem until it was declared unusable due to construction defects which were ignored for years by Milne and Brentano, to focus even a modicum of citizen attention on the County Commissioners.

People in our neighborhood, though, have had lots of experience watching Milne and Brentano clown-walk their way through important decisions, ignoring facts, ignoring public testimony, ignoring expert reports.

Here's an excerpt from a previous gloating that shows what I'm talking about:

Patti Milne and Sam Brentano, acting in their quasi-judicial role as county commissioners, concluded that the Ridge View Estates vested rights application deserved a pass on all six factors.

Judge Johnson, however, gave the application a fail on five of the six factors (she gave a rather weak endorsement of the Board of Commissioners' application of the law on the nature, location, and ultimate cost factor).

That's a big legal turnaround: six for six, versus one for six. It reflects how uncaring Milne and Brentano were to getting both the law and the facts of this case straight, in contrast to Carlson, who seemed much more concerned with making a wise informed decision.

In April 2009 our neighborhood's Keep Our Water Safe committee sent a letter to the Board of Commissioners, asking that they hold a public hearing before deciding whether the Ridge View Estates vested rights application should be approved. Here it is:
Download KOWS request for hearing

Sixty-five people signed the letter. Sixty-five. But Milne and Brentano didn't want to learn about the legal and factual errors in a hearing officer's report to the Board. So they voted without a public hearing. In the request for a public hearing we presciently said:

"By holding a hearing, the Board will provide the public with due process and an opportunity to refine these issues before the board makes its final decision. If the board were to decide this application based on incomplete information it could very likely cost more money down the line by requiring this matter to be remanded for further proceedings."

Which is exactly what happened.

We and our neighbors, along with Friends of Marion County, had to spend thousands of dollars in attorney fees and lots of hours in volunteer time working on the briefs that got filed in Marion County Circuit Court.

This wasn't necessary. Just as letting problems go with Courthouse Square until the building had to be vacated seemingly wasn't necessary.

As we indicated in our press release, the citizens of Marion County should be able to count on their county commissioners to be sound decision-makers, gathering all the pertinent facts about an issue before voting on a course of action.

Patti Milne and Sam Brentano didn't do this with the Ridge View Estates subdivision. They clearly had personal political and philosophical agendas which prevented them from making the proper legal decision on the vested rights application, as well as the original approval of the subdivision.

Eugene girls sue Kitzhaber over climate change inaction

Here's four big Green Thumbs-Up from my wife and me to Eugene residents Olivia Chernaik, 11, and Kelsey Juliana, 15. The Register Guard reports:

...with the help of their mothers, Lisa Chernaik and Catia Juliana, [the girls] filed a lawsuit against the state of Oregon and Gov. John Kitzhaber, accusing them of violating their duties to uphold the public trust and to protect the state’s atmosphere, water, land, fishery and wildlife resources from the impacts of climate change.

Excellent! The lawsuit is being brought under the aegis of iMatter, a group that encourages kids to get involved in the fight to preserve their future from the very real threat of global warming.

 

Pretty darn simple. Too bad so many adults don't grasp these truths.

Like a good share of the membership of the Oregon chapter of the American Meteorological Society, who, bizarrely, have their heads firmly in the sand of global warming denial. The genuine scientists in this bunch must be hugely embarrassed by the antics of their anti-scientific colleagues. 

Earth to the Oregon Chapter: your parent group, the American Meteorological Society, strongly affirms the reality of human-caused global warming, as does every reputable scientific organization in the world. 

Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond.

Focusing on the next 30 years, convergence among emission scenarios and model results suggest strongly that increasing air temperatures will reduce snowpack, shift snowmelt timing, reduce crop production and rangeland fertility, and cause continued melting of the ice caps and sea level rise.

It's embarassing to Oregon that we have so many adults, including professional meteorologists, who don't understand the science of global warming. Hopefully they'll learn from the children and grow up, scientifically.

Still a man's world (in movie trailer voiceovers, at least)

Interesting piece in the New York Times about why movie trailers almost always feature male voices. Here's some excerpts from "Why Men Always Tell You to See Movies." 

The question has been pondered by mystics through the ages, but in the sanctuary of cinema the voice of a sonorous, authoritative, fear-inspiring yet sometimes relatable presence is, invariably, that of a man. Consider the trailer and the omniscient, disembodied voice that introduces moviegoers to a fictional world.

...Do moviegoers want to hear female voices? Research indicates that our brains are wired to prefer theirs to male ones; that’s the reason robotic voices, like those in GPS devices, tend to be female. (This probably has an evolutionary explanation: fetuses in the womb, identifying with their caretaker, can distinguish their mother’s voice from others, a study published in the journal Psychological Science found.) When it comes to credibility, however, research into the perceived believability of a voice — an important quality for the omniscient narrator of a trailer, as well as the spokesman or -woman for any product, which is the function a trailer serves — tells a different story.

“On average both males and females trust male voices more,” said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford, noting some gender disparity exists in that women don’t distrust female voices as much as men distrust them. In one study conducted at Stanford two versions of the same video of a woman were presented to subjects: one had the low frequencies of the woman’s voice increased and the high frequencies reduced, the other vice versa. Consistently subjects perceived the deep voice to be smarter, more authoritative and more trustworthy.

My wife and I have noticed how true this is in relating with our dog, Serena.

A low voice seemingly is interpreted by her as a growl, which gets Serena's attention when we want her to obey a command; a high voice gets her tail wagging, maybe because it sounds akin to the excited "yipping" of dogs when they happily greet each other (we hear coyotes doing this in our rural neighborhood).

Salem's Todd Davidson heading up international tourism efforts

One of our neighbors here in rural south Salem has become a celebrity -- in the tourism promotion world. Recently President Obama announced at Walt Disney World that Todd Davidson will lead an effort to increase international tourism through the U.S. Tourism and Travel Advisory Board. 

Here's a KGW story about Todd's appointment (after a brief ad). 

Davidson is CEO of Travel Oregon, which has been successful in boosting tourism in our state.

"The travel industry is an important part of Oregon's economy," said Governor Kitzhaber. "Appointing Todd Davidson to Chair the U.S. Travel and Tourism Advisory Board was an excellent selection. Todd is a thoughtful and effective leader who will continue to promote Oregon's tourism advantages in his national position."

Davidson was appointed Executive Director of Travel Oregon in June 1996 and was named Chief Executive Officer in September 2004. Under his leadership, the tourism industry in Oregon has flourished into an $8.7 billion industry that employs more than 90,000 Oregonians; in 2011 more than 8,000 jobs were created. 

Way to go, Todd!

I've got some great ideas for luring international tourists to our very own neighborhood, Spring Lake Estates, which those of us who have lived here for a long time like to call "Poison Oak Estates." There's got to be an untapped market of people who want to experience some of the world's largest and most potent poison oak vines.

I'm visualizing busloads of Japanese (and other) tourists pulling up to vacant lots in our neighborhood after they've had their fill of the Woodburn Mall. We'd give them white jumpsuits to put on, complete with masks and gloves.

Then we'd go on a walking tour of our amazing poison oak forests. There'd be some exciting acrobatic acts featuring scantily clad attractive guys and gals who would do their thing above, below, and around dense thickets of poison oak. And every one of them would be super-allergic to it!

Thrill a minute. We'd sell souvenir poison oak leaves enclosed in plastic, suitable for a necklace, earrings, or gift to someone you can't stand.

Anyway, Todd, feel free to give me a call when the Tourism Advisory Board starts discussing plans to increase international tourism. If you meet at Walt Disney World, where I hear you shook Obama's hand, I'll just have to put country first and accept an all-expenses trip to consult with the Board. 

Hines weight loss system: take a crap

Here's a can't-miss way to lose quite a bit of weight almost instantly. I'm sharing it with the world because I'd love it if this became known as the "Brian Hines Weight Loss System."

(Don't hesitate to reblog this post and share it on social networks. Just make sure that my name keeps on being prominently featured.)

I weigh myself every morning as soon as I get up, dutifully recording the result in my iPhone Weightbot app. I've noticed that my weight will mysteriously vary by a pound or two from day to day, even though I hadn't changed my eating and exercising habits.

Recently I conducted a scientific experiment to determine the relationship between having a bowel movement, a.k.a. taking a crap, and my weight before and after aforementioned B.M.

After entering our bathroom with the sports page and seating myself on the porcelain flushable laboratory apparatus, I was pleased to note that the experiment proceeded as planned. (I'll omit the details; and no photographs were taken, for which my blog visitors can be thankful.)

Note: I hadn't consumed any food or water after waking up and first weighing myself. Weight #1, pre-crap, was 182.6 pounds. Weight #2, post-crap, was 181.0 pounds.

Bingo! A 1.6 pound weight loss, almost effortlessly.

The Brian Hines Weight Loss System works! If you ever feel that you're really a pound or two less heavy than your scale says you are, try out my proven system for shedding pounds. 

For some reason science seems to be lagging in this important area of weight loss research. When I Googled "weight of bowel movement," I was surprised to see how few clearly relevant search results popped up.

Here's one discussion of the subject. This web page, sadly, took a frivolous approach to the serious question of bowel movement weight. Thankfully, some Iranian researchers have done solid work on daily stool weight, though annoyingly their results are shown in grams rather than all-American pounds. 

My recalculation of their gram'y results indicates that the average daily stool weight for their 1000 Iranian subjects was 12 ounces, with men coming in at 15 ounces.

So this tends to confirm the validity of my admittedly limited one-time research result of a 1.6 pound bowel movement-produced weight loss, as the researchers noted "The Iranian diet has a fairly high fiber content which can result in an increased mean daily stool weight." Being a vegetarian, I'm pretty damn fibrous.

"The Artist" movie inspires me to... express myself!

When I first heard about "The Artist" (2011) I thought, "This is a movie that I should like, but won't." Black and white. Almost entirely silent, as regards speaking. French actors/director. An homage to films of the 20's and 30's.

I figured "The Artist" would be one of those films my wife and I go to at Salem Cinema because it's an artsy, indie movie that's getting a lot of attention. Afterwards we'd look at each other and say, "What was that all about?," then go home and watch something genuinely enjoyable on TV, like The Colbert Report.

Wrong. I was so wrong.

Last night we went to see "The Artist" with some friends. Loved it. Not only is it one of the best movies I've ever seen, it's one of the most memorable. There are quite a few scenes in it that I hope I'll never forget, and likely never will. 

Go see it, if you're able to. If not, put the movie on your Netflix queue, now. 

What grabbed me the most about "The Artist" was the incredible performances by the lead actors, Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo. Their faces are so wonderfully expressive. Their movements, equally so. Watch videos of the trailer and other clips. You'll see what I mean.

Words are important to me. As they are to everybody. We use so many of them every day, speaking, writing, reading. Yet...

"The Artist" showed how so much can be expressed in wordless bodily ways, either with or without accompanying words. Great actors like Dujardin and Bejo know how to do this. I was amazed at how easy it was to follow the plot of this movie with very few silent movie captions shown on the screen.

As with art, so with life. Do we really pay attention to body language, our physical surroundings, the sights, sounds, smells, and such which surround us every waking moment of every day? 

And do we freely express ourselves as we respond to all this sensory stimulation?

How much do we hold in, repress, keep under control? Sure, few of us are as engagingly attractive as Dujardin and Bejo. But everybody can let loose what is within through smiles, frowns, gestures, laughter, tears -- whatever feelings beg to be let loose from the emotional cage we often keep ourselves cooped up in.

A few days ago my wife and I took part in a two-hour meeting where everybody was upset about something or other. It wasn't pleasant. Yet it was satisfying. I got to express myself in ways I hadn't been able to before through emails and phone conversations.

I was pissed at how I'd been treated by some other people. Before the meeting started we were warned by the facilitator to "self soothe" if our feelings got too intense, to use "I" messages rather than accusatory language -- all that good counseling stuff.

When my turn came to say what I wanted in the five minutes allotted to me, the facilitator interrupted me partway through. "Too intense." "Too much energy." "Too much body language." 

At the time I tried to look contrite.

But at the moment, as now, I actually felt good that what I was feeling within me was being expressed so vividly to other people. If I'd felt OK with the crappy way I'd been treated by some members of the group, then I would have acted all calm, positive, and huggie-feely. I didn't though. What other people saw was what there was: irritation, dissatisfaction, a desire to change things for the better.

In "The Artist" the main characters go through lots of ups and downs. They don't keep their emotional reactions to these roller coaster rides of life a secret. They're expressed marvelously in ways both subtle and in-your-face.

I'm inspired. To do the same. To let what is within be shared without more freely, openly, energetically. Without words. With words. Whatever. However.

Not crazily; not hurtfully; not aggressively. Honestly.

Life is too short to be lived within cages of our own making. Dujardin's character, George Valentin, gambles on a self-financed silent film just as "talkies" are about to take over the movie industry. He fails at the box office. And succeeds as an artist, as a man, as a human being.

Here's Richard Roeper's A+ video review. 

 

Our Nissan Leaf doesn't give me "range anxiety"

"Range anxiety" is a hyped-up malady potential electric car owners shouldn't worry much about. Yes, at first I worried about how far our Nissan Leaf would go on a charge. Now, I don't. 

After four months of owning the electric Leaf, I enjoy driving the car almost as much as our Mini Cooper S. (Not quite... nothing is more fun than a Mini Cooper in my utterly biased opinion.) 

It's quiet, smooth, responsive, and handles well. The turning radius seems as small as the Mini's. The interior is light, open, and well-designed. For a $26,000 car, after federal and state tax credits, it's got appealing features: navigation system, satellite radio, great-sounding audio system, cool driver displays.

We have two other cars. So we only use the Leaf for our around-town jaunts, which must be over 90% of our driving. I know that even though we live in a rural area about six miles from the Salem city limits, the Leaf is going to get me where I want to go and back again, no problem.

When I researched the Nissan Leaf before my wife and I decided to sell our Prius and get a fully electric car, I read some horror stories about how little range the Leaf had in cold weather -- since the heater, lights, and everything else (including the motor, of course) runs off of battery power. 

Use more of those other electricity drains and there's less left to propel the car.

True. But here's a real life example of why range anxiety isn't a problem for us even in mid-January, when Oregon got about as cold as it ever does here in the mid-Willamette Valley. Consider the facts of a drive back and forth to Salem I made on January 13, 2012:

Throughout the entire trip the Leaf's thermometer showed the outside temperature as ranging between 30 and 35 degrees F. The trip odometer showed that I went 20 miles, total. And that was with three stops: at the Mail Depot to drop off a package, at LifeSource Natural Foods to do some shopping, at the River Road Courthouse Athletic Club to exercise.

Our Leaf was fully charged when I left home. Meaning, all ten bars on the "fuel gauge" were showing electricity available. The estimated range indicator showed 106 miles after I turned on the car.

When the Nissan salesman who sold us the car was showing us how it worked, he said "Don't pay much attention to that" when he pointed out the digital Remaining Range indicator. I've learned to do just that.

Coming home from town, we drive over a mile mostly downhill. The Remaining Range tells you how many miles you probably can go given how you've been driving recently. So freeway driving at 65 mph drops the range rapidly. Driving in town at 30 mph boosts it back up. The lesson is to pay more attention to the "fuel gauge." (Even though it also isn't completely accurate.)

I drove the entire 20 miles with the automatic climate control set to 70 degrees, so the heater was blasting away the entire time. The LED headlights and radio also were on. When I got home, five of the ten bars on the fuel gauge were still left.

So, yes, in cold weather, with about half of a 20 mile drive being at 40 to 50 mph and the rest at city speeds, the Leaf's range isn't anywhere near the 100 miles or so cited in Nissan literature. However, I was able to accomplish everything I wanted to do on a freezing day, and still had half of the car's charge left.

Plus, the Leaf fuel gauge has three red bars after the ten aforementioned bars. We rarely let the car get into this area, so I don't know how many miles it's possible to go in the "red zone." Probably, quite a few.

The Remaining Range indicator showed "49" when I drove home into our carport. That's optimistic, since as mentioned above the last miles I drove mostly were downhill. But the recharge only took 2 1/2 hours, whereas Nissan says a fully depleted battery takes about seven hours to recharge on a home quick charger. 

So I suspect I'd used considerably less than half of the Leaf's battery power on my 20 mile, three-stop, trip into Salem. Again, in 30-35 degree F. temperature, at night, with the heater blasting the whole way.

The cost was 64 cents, given our electricity rate. That's 3.2 cents a mile. By contrast, our Toyota Prius hybrid got about 42 miles a gallon on mixed driving like my Leaf trip. At $3.40 a gallon, that translates into 8.1 cents a mile. The Leaf, even in the dead of winter, is two and a half times cheaper to drive than a Prius.

And the Leaf needs much less maintenance that a gasoline-powered car. No oil changes, tuneups, and such.

Range anxiety? No big deal for us.

Nor for this test driver of a Leaf, who reviewed the car for Automobile.com. Check out "2011 Nissan Leaf: Range Anxiety for No Reason" for another view of this subject.

Salem's great Spring Creek flood of 2012

This is one for our rural south Salem neighborhood's memory book. Until we die or move away, us old-timers will be saying, "Remember the flooding back in 2012? Man, that was something we've never seen before, or since."

Spring Creek is only half a mile long, at most. It's fed by, no big surprise, springs. The creek winds through our property on the way to Spring Lake. Usually it's quite small, even in winter. But the rainfall we've gotten this week isn't usual.

Here's a seven minute video of how Spring Creek and Spring Lake looked to me, my wife, and family dog today. My photographic journey ends with me being out-machoed by a neighbor (but I didn't have to dump water out of my boots).

 

After Laurel got back from our walk, she headed off to the Willamette Humane Society for her usual Thursday dog-walking volunteer duties. Again, though, today wasn't usual.

Instead of walking dogs, Laurel mostly filled sandbags to keep rising water out of the Humane Society building. Then it was announced that all of the animals had to be evacuated because of a broken dike. Laurel grabbed a smallish dog and brought it home.

Sally and I are getting along fine.

However, after some anatomical inspecting Laurel has renamed her/him Sam. Sam and our dog aren't exactly best friends, given Sam's understandable nervousness and barking. Hopefully he will be a fairly brief house guest. (Update: especially since we've discovered he has fleas..)

But for a while, we're pleased to shelter a canine refugee from the great Salem flood of 2012.
Download Salem flooding newspaper story 

Yellowbook, stay out of our mailbox! It's illegal.

Curses to the companies that drop unwanted "yellow pages" directories beside our mailbox. That's littering, and we hate it. 

And double curses to Yellowbook for putting the Salem - Keizer 2012 2013 version of their unwanted directory inside our mailbox without postage or an address label. That's illegal, and we hate it even more.

I've filed a complaint with the Postal Service, choosing "tampering" as the offense. If this happened to you, and you want to file your own complaint, here's the Yellowbook corporate headquarters address and phone number (this is needed to file a Postal Service complaint): 

Yellowbook
398 RXR Plaza 
Uniondale, NY  11556
516-730-1900 

Through Google I confirmed that it is illegal to put something in another person's mailbox without postage. This is Section 1725 of the United States code at 18 USC:

Whoever knowingly and willfully deposits any mailable matter such
    as statements of accounts, circulars, sale bills, or other like
    matter, on which no postage has been paid, in any letter box
    established, approved, or accepted by the Postal Service for the
    receipt or delivery of mail matter on any mail route with intent to
    avoid payment of lawful postage thereon, shall for each such
    offense be fined under this title.

May Yellowbook be fined, and fined, and fined again for every directory they illegally put in peoples' private mailboxes. And may every business which advertises in Yellowbook realize that my wife and I never, ever keep the free directories which are dumped unwanted and unasked for on our doorstep. 

Pringle Square gets ripped in a letter to the editor

 

 Ah, I was pleased to read in the Salem Statesman Journal today that another person dislikes Pringle Square for the same reasons I do. 

This monstrosity of a development proposed to be built on the riverfront is ugly and uncreative. It won't draw people downtown. It won't make central Salem a more interesting and livable place. 

Rebecca Custard is absolutely right: "Downtown Salem doesn't need another eyesore."

I very much agree with Carole Duree-Jones (letters, Jan. 13) regarding the plans for the new Pringle Square.

To those who are tasked with making and approving the design and usage decisions for this project, I would implore you to consider something that welcomes and invites visits to Salem and the riverfront area as a destination place rather than adding one more monolithic eyesore to the community.

This is, for Oregon's capital, the perfect opportunity to create an inviting and gorgeous riverfront community of shops, recreation and residential location — to entice visitors and enliven the area, instead of contributing to a continuation of the current "uglification" of the downtown area.

New construction in Salem for the past 10 years has done little to enhance the beauty and grace of this city; i.e., the Conference Center that, to my untrained eye, appears to be a bizarre merging of the architectural styles of Frank Lloyd Wright meets the Jetsons and Walmart.

The Pringle Square property has all the potential to be such an inviting treasure of a location; something of a jewel for the city of Salem and the riverfront.

What Salem really doesn't need is one more uninspiring and vacant apartment/condo building spoiling the view.

— Rebecca Custard, Dallas

Adventurer of the Year 2012: 65 year old Jon Turk

 

Way to go, Jon! At the age of 65, you're nominated for National Geographic's Adventurers of the Year 2012 award, along with Erik Boomer, a youthful 26. (Jon Turk is on the left in the photo above.)

You've inspired this 63 year-old.

Unlike you, I'll never be the first to circumnavigate Canada's frosty Ellesmere Island, dragging my sea kayak overland for a good share of the 1,500 miles, risking death in ice-choked seas, encountering curious wolves and polar bears.

But you've reminded me that us geezers have a lot more living to do, regardless of our Social Security-eligible age. 

The New York Times has a fascinating story about Turk and Boomer's adventure, "Where the Sun Never Sets." And the National Geographic piece about them is here.

There's only one more day left to vote for Turk and Boomer to be Adventurers of the Year. Do it. Today. Tomorrow, vote again. I didn't even check to see what the other nominees did.

Doing what Turk accomplished at 65 got him my vote. 

"Vancouvria" -- sharp satire about the anti-Portland

Man, I'm loving "Vancouvria."

This homegrown You Tube'd video satire of Portland's more conservative neighbor to the north, where the dream of the suburbs lives on, is way better than "Portlandia" -- in my utterly subjective yet totally true opinion.

Two more three-minute'ish episodes have been released, here and here, each as good as the first. Have a look, and a laugh. (In Episode 2, I really like "Ow...it burns!" and the guy continually texting.)

 

 

Photos of rural south Salem's snow-pocalypse

Who says the pioneer spirit in Oregon died out with the pioneers? It was alive and well today on what many are calling our state's 2012 snow-pocalypse.

Though for some reason, many also are not.

Hopefully these photos of my personal snow-pocalypse will change the minds of skeptics who doubt the severity of our recent weather emergency.

My better judgment said, "Stay inside during this wild storm." My daring heart, along with a forlorn looking family pet, said "Risk your life and go for a dog walk." Given the inclement weather, even our dog, Serena, looked unsure about our chances for survival as we left the house (note curled tail).

During the first stage of our two-mile walk we had to blaze a trail along what would have been a snow-covered road, if there had been snow actually covering it. Nonetheless, snow had begun to cover Serena's back. I began to wonder how long a dog covered in fur, and with a husky'ish tail, could survive in 38 degree conditions. After all, by the time this photo was taken we had been walking in the rural south Salem wilderness for at least ten minutes.

Soon our surroundings became completely snow-covered. It was still possible to make out our route, barely, but even the dog was showing signs of disorientation. Her footprints indicate that she'd been walking in circles. I realized that if we were going to make it home, I couldn't depend on her canine instincts.

Dog and man walked on together, leaving a trail that, at the rate the snow was falling, likely would be completely covered up in a time range that I estimated from never to several days. Still, the thought that an extinguishing of all trace of our passing could theoretically occur filled me with existential angst. I yearned to be able to chat with Sartre about this over a strong cup of expresso.

 

Eventually we reached a point in our adventure where dog and man had to leave the road and enter unmarked territory. Or at least barely-marked, since we only had a sign and several tall fences to guide us across snow-covered grassy ground.

Miraculously, the dog regained her homing instincts and guided me to where I could catch a glimpse of home. At this point I felt like we were going to make it, though I recognized that nothing is certain in a storm of the intensity we were out in.

Having endured such hardships on our trek through the snow, our home's familiar surroundings took on a special appearance with the realization that, against all odds, I'd be able to enjoy them for a while longer.

A favorite tree in our back yard looked beautiful in the snow that just a few short minutes ago had seemed so treacherous. 

Our little pond welcomed me home with bubbling arms. As did our three goldfish, still swimming about (and barely visible in the photo).

Lost in my "How did we survive?" reveries, I turned and realized that I had forgotten about my loyal canine companion, who now was huddling beneath the eaves, undoubtedly dangerously close to hypothermia. Or, perhaps more likely, Feed me my damn dinner'ia.

But before I prepared Serena's food, I knew I had to document the intensity of this snow-pocalypse for those who were lucky enough to escape it, and would know of this memorable weather event only through tales like mine. Here is a ruler showing the snow depth on our deck. Certainly over 1/4 inch; probably closer to 1/2 inch.Who knows how much deeper drifts got?

Anyway, those worrying about our safety now should be reassured.

But the AccuWeather app on my iPhone indicates more severe weather is heading our way tomorrow: four-tenths of an inch of snow is forecast. Four-tenths. With two-tenths more on Tuesday. This means that over the three days this storm has ravaged our area, we could be digging out of an inch of snow, total. 

Somehow, we shall endure. Somehow.

In 2012, let's elect Canada as president

Great news! The Canada Party has entered our presidential race. I'd vote for Canada to be the leader of the United States, for sure. 

This is a highly persausive campaign video.

 

But seriously... (though I hope, oh, I so dearly hope, Canada will run for president), other countries have a hell of a lot to teach the United States. We aren't #1 in anything related to quality of life. 

It's a fact.

Check out the OECD's Better Life Initiative web site (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Quality of life rankings for most of the world's developed economies, along with some emerging economies, start off with each topic area ranked equally.

Click on "by rank) in the lower right corner of the display, and you'll see that currently the United States is #7, with Canada #2. Go, Canada! Beat out Australia and you're #1!

So if we were more like Canada, our well-being would be much better. Sure, we'd have to develop a taste for hockey (ugh), but I'm up for that in exchange for universal health care and other Canadian goodies.

See what happens when you leave ten of the quality of life topics at the "1" level, and one by one, give a single topic a "5" (most important). You'll find that the United States isn't tops in anything, notwithstanding how often people in this country erroneously say, "This is the greatest country in the world."

No, we aren't. Canada is. Or maybe France.

Regardless, it makes a lot of sense to elect another country to be our President, since we're way behind other nations in just about everything except incarceration rates.

On a related note, Nicholas Kristof correctly asks why Europe is a dirty word in our political discourse. Beats me. Europeans get to watch much racier and funnier commercials that we do, so let's elect Europe vice-president. 

 

Weight training women, respect egos of older men

Astoundingly, via Google I wasn't able to find a reference to the most important bit of weight training etiquette every buff woman who frequents an athletic club needs to know:

Do not, repeat, do not, leave a higher weight on a machine or piece of equipment than the senior citizen men in the weight room can handle themselves.

This has bothered me for a long time. Today I learned that I'm not alone. Clearly, the time has come to educate women about proper weight training etiquette -- other than the obvious, like here, here, and here.

This afternoon I chatted with a fellow geezer older gentleman at the River Road Courthouse Athletic Club here in Salem, Oregon. Somehow, in our rambling time-to-kill retired conversational way, we got to talking about how nice it is to see attractive fit young women work out in the weight room, yet how irritating it is when we plop down at a machine (I don't do free weights) after an Attractive FIt Young Woman has just used it and find that we need to adjust the weight downward. 

Look, it's tough enough getting old without this added aggravation.

I enjoy getting a Social Security check every month, but that's just about the only glistening part of the so-called "Golden Years" that I can identify. So please, Attractive Fit Young Women, take pity on your elders of the male persuasion.

If you are working out in a room with a gray-haired man who is doing his best to keep himself from falling apart physically more than he already is, shift the weights on the machine you've finished pumping iron on down to a petite, feminine level.

Thirty pounds, say, for an upper body machine. I'll allow you more on a lower body machine, since women tend to be proportionately stronger in that area -- maybe up to 80 pounds. 

That way, the good-looking, distinguished, charismatic, slim, 60-something man (why, I could almost be describing myself) who follows in your weight-training footsteps won't feel mortified when he discovers that an Attractive Fit Young Woman can kick his butt on the machine he's about to use.

Admittedly, this doesn't happen very frequently to me. But once is too often. So ladies, don't be like the woman who crushed my male ego last week.

The warning signs were obvious, in retrospect. She looked like a female version of the buff young guys who venture into the machine room at the athletic club to work on some aspect of their near-perfect anatomy that, apparently, can't be improved by the free weights which usually demand their attention. 

She was wearing gloves, a tip-off of a serious weight trainer. Her makeup was spot-on; her workout attire form-revealing without being excessively flashy. She was slender, yet not skinny. A short-sleeved top revealed biceps that I'd gladly trade for.

I should have known what to do when I sat down at the "back" machine she'd just used: pull out the pin that determines how much weight is being lifted without looking at where she'd had it, then put back the pin at the 150 pound level that I typically use (I could handle more weight, for sure, but choose not to; wanted to get that aside in to fend off any comments along the line of You're a weenie!; to which I'd maturely reply, Saying so doesn't make it so and Takes one to know one, just like I did in third grade).

Instead, I sat down, glanced at the stack of weights, and thought "Oh, screw me! She just did a bunch of reps at 150 pounds, like I'm about to do." Geez. I'm six feet, 180 pounds. Ms. Attractive Fit Young Woman appeared to be about 5' 4" and 120.

She ruined my day. Ruined it. Well, part of it. OK, a tiny bit of it, because I spent the rest of my workout rationalizing away her ability to push the same amount of weight with her back muscles as I can.

Probably just did a few hyper-intense reps at her upper weight limit. Lower back strength is no big deal; who cares? Maybe she lifted at a lower weight and then put the pin back at a level for us macho men to use.

All that rationalizing took energy, though. I needed a longer nap once I got home. So have compassion, women: be aware that whenever you leave a high weight in place at an athletic club, you could be crushing a senior citizen male ego. 

Mitt Romney -- job destroyer, "vulture capitalist"

Do you think Mitt Romney is a guy who will add jobs to the American economy? Think again.

He's a job destroyer, not a job creator. He doesn't care if people get hurt when businesses shut down, so long as CEO's like him make loads of money.

Here's the proof: a persuasive video, "When Mitt Romney Came to Town."

Watch it and weep... for the workers whose lives were torn apart by Mitt Romney. If you don't have time for the full 28 minute video, there's a three minute trailer.

  

iPhone DiffCase: a lot to like, not quite right for me

I'm a naked iPhone user.

Meaning, sometimes we both are, but usually only my iPhone is. I've enjoyed feeling the glassy, metallic sleekness of the iPhones I've owned without a screen protector or case coming between me and my beloved bit of technology.

But after dropping my naked phone several times onto the (thankfully) carpeted floor of an athletic club, I decided to look into protection options. 

And came upon DiffCase, an aptly named different sort of case.

You should look into it if you're an iPhone user who is into tripod-necessary photography, seeks full protection for your phone, and/or needs a way to prop up the phone in either a horizontal or vertical freestanding position. 

That said, after buying a DiffCase and pondering its pros and cons for a few days, I ended up returning it. (The DiffCase folks were easy to deal with via email; I appreciated the prompt and courteous customer service). 

It was "close, but not quite" for me. Other iPhone users with different needs would find DiffCase to be just what they're looking for. The case is cleverly designed. It's well made, with parts that fit together precisely.

Even though I've been a minimalist in regards to dressing up my iPhone, I enjoyed how the DiffCase provided a, well, different feel when I held the phone. The curved portions of the case allow thumbs and fingers to curl around the phone in a more secure fashion. I didn't mind the extra heft of the DiffCase encased phone. It felt more substantial, yet not awkwardly bulky.

What did bother me was the lid. This was the main factor that made me return the DiffCase.

I wanted to be able to easily flip up the lid when I used the phone, and just as easily flip it down when I was finished with whatever vital iPhone activity I was doing (like checking Facebook posts from "friends" who I accepted into my Facebook life early on when I didn't have many, and now have no idea who they are, or why I should care about their kid's birthday party).

The lid is designed to come apart from the case when it is opened into a horizontal position.

When I made a phone call, the lid fell on the floor in a moment of excessive opening. Since I'm 63 and need an iPhone to bolster what little aura of "coolness" I have left, unpredictably dropping pieces of my case in public places didn't seem like a plus for my fragile ego.

Also, when the lid is fully pushed down, it's kind of difficult to loosen the four pins that enable it to move in either a vertical or horizontal direction.

I'm used to pulling my naked iPhone out of a slip case and getting it going immediately. Fiddling with the lid was another non-plus for me. I toyed with leaving two of the pins loose, which helped with quick opening, but this made the DiffCase look half-closed. Which, of course, it was.

Responding to my return request, a DiffCase rep said they'd be working to improve the design. Good for them. DiffCase is an innovative product which deserves a place in the iPhone case marketplace.

I like the notion of a lid for my iPhone, given that I live in Oregon where it rains occasionally (the Tourist Bureau makes us Oregonians use that word, "occasionally"). Having a built-in umbrella for either the sun or raindrops is a great case feature.

Improve the functioning of the lid, DiffCase folks, and you'll sell me on your product -- this time for keeps.

"Portlandia" needs a comedy makeover

My wife and I live in Salem, a.k.a. "So-lame," Portland's dowdy, plain, uncool neighbor to the south. We wish our city could be half as ravishingly interesting as Portland is. No, one-tenth as interesting.

Heck, give us any little slice of Portland and we'd devour it hungrily. (Salem just got it's first Trader Joe's store, eons after Portland, Corvallis, and Eugene got theirs. We still don't have a true vegetarian restaurant, much less a vegan one.)

So we really want to enjoy IFC's "Portlandia."

We watched every episode of Season 1, chuckling only episodically. It kept seeming like Portlandia was on the verge of being a spot-on laugh-worthy satire of Portland's cultural quirks, but the cable series never got there.

I blogged last February:

The saying, Keep Portland Weird, is truthful.

Portland is weird in many wonderful ways. Once in a while Portlandia manages to successfully satirize those quirks, such as in the opening episode where a hipster couple grill their restaurant server about how happily the chicken they're considering ordering was raised.

Problem is, most of the time Portlandia is absorbed in its own self-reflective cinematic weirdness. It's sort of satirizing itself, which isn't funny. Meaning, typically the sketches don't make fun of some green/ environmental/ progressive/ cultural Portland excess, but are over-the-top in their own right.

Like, in the most recent episode, the mayor asking the main characters to form a baseball team, which they do in a wholly unrealistic manner. Or the sketch where the stars are chefs getting photographed for a magazine story, and start posing in increasingly bizarre ways.

What's that got to do with Portland? It was good acting, but ultimately uncomedic -- except in a "that was really weird" sense. Again, Portland's weirdness is getting lost in Portlandia's own weirdness, causing the original premise of the series to be forgotten.

Watching the first episode of Season 2, I feel that everything I said before still applies. Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, the couple who appear in various guises throughout Portlandia, would start off with a promising sketch premise.

Greenies who consider they can pickle anything. Outdoorshumans who arrive at an air mattress-friendly river over-prepared for white water. A nightspot "mixologist" who is way too into the intricacies of cocktail preparation. 

In each case I was prepared to laugh at the humor in the situation. Playing the sketch more subtly, not desperately milking it for laughs, that would have been much more comedic than -- as noted above -- steadily ratcheting up the ridiculousness until the original premise got lost in excessive craziness.

The only part of the first episode that got my wife and me laughing out loud was the scene in a southern California restaurant where Armisen and Brownstein just want some simple food, and the waiter (oops, "server") keeps leading them through complicated menu options. 

I wish every sketch in Portlandia could be played like this one was. Most viewers could identify with the situation, having encountered similar trendy restaurants and best-friend servers. The dialogue was just slightly on the zany side of believable, not on the outer limits. I could easily visualize something like this ordering disaster actually happening.

But otherwise my wife and I kept asking each other, "Is that supposed to be funny?" For us, it wasn't. Hopefully Portlandia will find its groove in later episodes. Portland deserves to be made fun of. 

"House of Lies" resonates with our cynical souls

Damn you, Showtime! Last year I cancelled your half of our HBO/Showtime subscription, because you didn't have on anything we liked to watch. 

But last night we took advantage of DirecTV's offer to see Showtime premieres for free. And already we're hooked on "House of Lies." 

What's not to like about cynicism, sex, money-grubbing management consultants, dysfunctional relationships, and other reflections of reality? About halfway through the first episode, my wife said "This is our kind of show."

A quick review of some early reviews, here, here, and here, indicates that our enthusiasm isn't universally shared. Well, we're used to liking TV shows that others don't have the good taste to appreciate. (We still miss "Cop Rock.")

Keep it up, Showtime. Given all the explicit sex on the show, that shouldn't be difficult.

Stick with the stop-action scenes that some find corny. Stick with the profanity that offends delicate ears. Stick with the depiction of corporate CEO's as uncaring about the public good (the most unarguably truthful aspect of the show). 

My wife and I will be laughing with you. And, damn you Showtime!, paying another $13 a month, or whatever it is, for the privilege of feeding our love of cynicism.

Here's a promo that gives a feel for House of Lies; it starts after the 30 second intro.

[Update: "House of Lies" already is changing my life. Can't tell if it is for the worse, or for the better. That's the beauty of this show. Cynicism promotes a so what? moral ambiguity.

In my usual quasi-neurotic fashion, this afternoon I was mulling over the pros and cons of taking the last few pieces of a tasty tofu dish at the LifeSource Natural Foods deli area. A woman was standing beside me, spooning mashed potatoes into her container, seemingly glancing at how I was steadily depleting the tofu.

I considered leaving a few pieces for her, even though there barely was enough tofu for my wife and me to eat tonight. Then "House of Lies" came to mind. I thought, Screw it.

If it's OK for Don Cheadle to go to a strip club, pick up a dancer, persuade her to pretend that she's his wife during an important dinner meeting with a corporate client, and then get into a fight with the prospective client after the stripper gets it on with the guy's wife in the women's restroom, after which she tells her husband that sex with the stripper is way better than with him, which understandably puts the guy in a foul mood -- then damn it, I should be able to take the last few pieces of tofu at a deli without feeling like a sinner.

After I did just that, the woman said to me, "That tofu is really good. I bought some earlier today." Great decision, Brian, I told myself. It would have been stupid to sacrifice my tofu-desire when my fellow shopper didn't even want any. Plus, I enjoyed living on the edge, just like the characters in "House of Lies" do.

Today, taking the last pieces of tofu. Tomorrow, who knows how wild and even crazier I may become, spurred on by the example of "House of Lies."] 

Salem's Pringle Square development: ugly, unwanted, uninteresting

Oh, man... just what I didn't need so early in the new year -- another reason to be depressed about the prospects of Salem, Oregon being able to ditch it's well-deserved nickname, So-Lame.

Today the Statesman Journal newspaper revealed what the Tokarski clan at Mountain West Development are planning for the 13 acre downtown riverfront site which used to house a Boise Cascade paper converting plant and now is to become Pringle Square.
Download Pringle Square story PDF 

Rental apartments. Unbeautifully stacked in what reminds me and my wife of (1) North Korean housing, (2) Chicago "projects," or (3) a poorly designed airline terminal. The development doesn't look any better from closer up.

Garish. Flat roofs. Seemingly no attention paid to sustainability. (The newspaper story says "Salem staffers have recommended approval with a number of conditions, such as improvements to pedestrian access and the addition of bicycle parking.")

A shell of the paper plant still uglifies the view from Commercial Street. Some Pollyannish commenters on the newspaper story say that us critics of Pringle Square should shut up, because anything would be better than what is there now.

Wow. That's a reflection of Salem's disturbing acceptance of mediocrity.

While our much more vibrant neighbors to the north and south, Portland and Corvallis, press ahead with 21st century developments, we here in So-Lame are supposed to accept an oh-so-blah barely-mixed use plan for a highly important riverfront area that deserves a hell of lot better than a design which might have looked trendy in 1960.

I understand that the real estate market is in a downturn at the moment. But Salem shouldn't allow temporary financial conditions to dictate how the southern portion of the downtown riverfront will look for decades into the future. 

Only a few years ago, Mountain West Development had quite different plans for Pringle Square. The plans above are from a 2008 Statesman Journal story.

At a Thursday open house where a developer unveiled its plans for the Boise Cascade site, a small crowd of Salem residents looked over drawings showing the dormant industrial site replaced with a mixed-use development.

Most seemed to have an optimistic outlook for the transformation planned for the 13-acre property.

"I think it's a great idea and a great opportunity," said James Kohn, whose home is a 10- minute walk from the Boise property. Many critics think Salem can't pull together a showcase downtown development, Kohn said, but in his view, the mixed-use project is "pretty much on the mark."

"I want to live here. I want to be right at the top," Salem resident Hazel Patton said as she looked over plans for town houses. The property is a perfect location for a mixed-use development, and it will provide "a strong anchor" for the downtown area, she said.

...Where the old mill building now stands on Commercial Street SE, developers want to build a hotel, a restaurant and office space.

Meanwhile, a large share of the building's southern portion of the site would be spared and remodeled for new uses. The first construction work on the site likely will be converting the warehouse on the south block into a parking garage with as many as 550 spaces, Gerling said.

In addition, about 80 town house-style apartments would be built on top of the warehouse.

Site plans also call for a full-service gymnasium with a swimming pool to be built alongside the former warehouse. Several local gym operators have expressed an interest in the location, but no deals have been struck, Gerling said.

Now, no talk of condos, restaurant, or hotel. The "mixed use" side of Pringle Square reportedly is to be such wildly unexciting businesses as insurance and medical offices. This isn't what people in Salem envisioned when the city worked out a deal with the developers back in 2007. 

Like I said last year in "Salem's riverfront development looks like a loser":

So my wife and I pictured being able to walk to the development from downtown, strolling along the river to restaurants, shopping, night spots. We could enjoy a taste of Paris, or at least San Antonio, sipping our lattes with a view of Minto Brown Island and pleasantly people-watching.

What a waste of prime riverfront property. Nobody is going to want to visit Pringle Square to peer through the window of an insurance office, dreaming of how cool it would be to walk in and talk about a multi-car premium discount.

Last year a fellow griper, John Craig Nielson, wrote a letter to the editor about the Mountain West riverfront development. He nailed it then; given the recently revealed Pringle Square plan, he's still right-on now.

After years of talk, studies, proposals, etc., we finally get an idea of what the new owners of the Boise Cascade site are planning for this critical riverfront property.

What a joke! One hundred apartments and a huge parking structure, all based on rehabbing an old industrial warehouse?

Downtown Salem does not need 100 apartments and a mega-parking structure. To construct that amount of apartments obviously means they will likely be low-income units because Salem can't fill any of the "upscale" units that already exist.

I can't imagine too many professional, medical or retail companies that would want to locate in that environment.

The developers are taking the "cheapest" way to maximize their investment. What happened to the multi-use, park-like setting with shops, restaurants, open spaces, etc., that was originally touted?

This plan is a big mistake and would turn the property into another eyesore and waste of potential. But it would complement Courthouse Square and provide a view of the storage units that border Wallace Marine Park and enhance the beauty of our West Salem Riverfront.

Come on Salem, wake up to this "fiasco." Don't allow this waste of prime downtown riverfront. Make it something that all of us can enjoy and take pride in.

Science supports the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

There are many reasons why Obama and the Democrats were absolutely right to press for a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), billions upon billions of them -- all the dollars that people have lost in the Wall Street-led financial crisis that we've been suffering through since the end of the Bush presidency.

Today I came across a persuasive scientific reason for the CFPB in Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow." (Kahneman, a psychologist, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on decision making.)

We Homo sapiens aren't Econs; we are Humans.

The distinction between Econs and Humans was made in another book about behavioral economics, "Nudge." Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein pointed out what should be obvious, but unfortunately isn't, at least to Republicans who oppose protecting consumers from shady financial practices. 

People aren't Spock-like, highly rational, and fact-based in any aspect of their lives, which certainly includes financial decisions. Thalel and Sunstein write:

To prevent future catastrophes, regulators should focus explicitly on how to provide safeguards against two all-too-human frailties explored by decades of work in behavioural economics: bounded rationality and limited self-control.

The standard (non-behavioural) econ­omic model has greatly influenced regulators. In that model, economic agents (econs for short) choose optimally, no matter how hard a problem they face. They play chess as well as they play tic-tac-toe. The problem with this approach is that the world is populated by humans, not econs. Humans are not stupid, but when things get complicated they flounder: they suffer from bounded rationality.

So scientific evidence doesn't support the libertarian, unfettered free market, buyer-beware notion that American citizens don't need any help from the government in protecting themselves from confusing, manipulative, deceptive financial dealings.

Kahneman's book talks a lot about how we use both fast intuitive (System 1) and slow rational (System 2) brain processes when deciding what to do. There are plenty of scientific studies cited by Kahneman which back up these assertions:

Humans, more than Econs, also need protection from others who deliberately exploit their weaknesses -- and especially the quirks of System 1 and the laziness of System 2. Rational agents are assumed to make important decisions carefully, and to use all the information that is provided to them. An Econ will read and understand the fine print of a contract before signing it, but Humans usually do not.

An unscrupulous firm that designs contracts that customers will routinely sign without reading has considerable legal leeway in hiding important information in plain sight. A pernicious implication of the rational-agent model in its extreme form is that customers are assumed to need no protection beyond ensuring that the relevant information is disclosed.

The size of the print and the complexity of the language in the disclosure are not considered relevant -- an Econ knows how to deal with small print when it matters. In contrast, the recommendations of Nudge require firms to offer contracts that are sufficiently simple to be read and understood by Human customers... Humans, unlike Econs, need help to make good decisions, and there are informed and unintrusive ways to provide that help.

The Republican backlash against President Obama's recess appointment of Richard Cordray to head up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is absurd. Hopefully there will be an even bigger citizen backlash against the self-serving backlash.

"Self-serving," because Republicans obviously aren't interested in serving the public interest. They're concerned about Wall Street, executives of big financial firms, and other members of the 1% who are big donors to G.O.P. politicians.

Last month we saw Republicans in the House of Representatives dead set against extending a payroll tax cut for the middle class. That turned into a public relations nightmare for them. Now, we see the G.O.P. weeping and crying about -- gasp! -- someone being appointed to lead an agency that will protect consumers against predatory financial institutions.

Next, I suppose, Republicans will come out against puppies and babies. Their usual finely honed political instincts have gone awry, which is great news for Obama and the Democrats. 

Keep it up, G.O.P. Keep on fighting against the 99%. Keep on battling on behalf of financial wheeler-dealers who are out to screw the public. You'll find out next November how this is going to play with voters. 

I predict: not well.

Have a look at the guy who Obama chose to head up the supposedly horrible, evil, malevolent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Listen to his two minute description of what he and his agency hope to achieve. Then marvel at the Republican effort to shut down the CFPB.

 

My favorite dark, twisted (and funny!) Christmas letter

Laurel, my wife, has a friend with a deliciously cynical sense of humor. Every year Nancy, which may or may not be her real name, sends out "The Dreaded Christmas Newsletter." 

And every year I rejoice when I read it.

It's always my favorite Christmas letter. Somehow I feel much better after reading her twisted outlook on life, than I do after perusing someone else's description of how much they enjoyed their overseas travels, visits with the grandkids, and the joy of growing older.

I guess it takes the pressure off when Nancy shows me the lighter side, which, strangely, also turns out to be the darker side.

Enjoy. (At least you will, if you share my sense of humor.) I may or may not have changed some names in her newsletter to protect the innocent guilty. It came a few days ago; that explains the altered title this year.

The Dreaded Christmas New Year's Newsletter

Yes, well... Happy whenever this does reach you. As the year closes, I look at my family and think, "We are hella cool!" I've started showing a pregnancy bump just like Jessica Simpson has. Mine is both front and back. As always, my height continues to be a challenge but my weight's fine!

With all the celebrities carrying 5-pound Yorkies around in a tote bag, my son Ethan has succumbed to the trend. It's hard to carry off both tats and a yipping Yorkie but he manages. Seriously -- I think he's in love. He called for the family recipe for Cranberry Pudding, which I fondly remember stealing from a restaurant I once worked at. He wants to impress her folks with it.

Lizbeth moved out and got her own apartment. She is now in her 7th year of college and is majoring in Literature, Spanish, Chemistry, Math and History. I visit every month to wipe away the chemistry experiments that have infested her apartment. Laundry continues to be a challenge as she finds that 83 pairs of underwear are still not enough to cover the semester.

My sister announced that this year was her 25th wedding anniversary. 25 years of sleeping with the same man -- wow! I once spent a year sleeping with 25 different men. Almost the same...

Everyone in my neighborhood has a house that is underwater. Looking back I realize what a wise move it was getting that 84-month car loan. My car is also underwater, which makes parking easier. And Occupy Dublin has begun! Our platform is demanding equal housing values with our upscale neighboring towns. We have all pitched tents in our front lawns, stopped taking showers and throw Hallmark cards at the police. It brings a tear to your eye.

I now teach piano to 137 students. Having discovered that reading piano music involves the simultaneous processing of completely disparate informational series, inter-related in a uniform manner that involves structural dependencies in a randomly predictable progression and, guaranteed to boost your GPA -- well, my business is booming!

Fido is well. The massive fangs in his under bite would suit him better if he would stop wagging his tail so much.

Still haven't had my identity stolen. Tried to auction it off on Ebay. A very nice gentleman from the Cayman Islands contacted me and we have started up a correspondence. He promises to totally change my financial profile. So in the meantime we remain at the same address and wish you all:

Merry Christmas and best of luck for the New Year!

Nancy, Ethan, Lizbeth (& Fido)

 

Marion County commissioners owe us an apology

By "us," I mean hundreds of people in our rural south Salem neighborhood who vigorously opposed a 217 acre Measure 37 subdivision proposed to be built on high value farmland that threatened our ground and surface water (wells and community lake).

My wife and I led this fight.

By "commissioners," I mean Patti Milne and Sam Brentano, Republican county commissioners here in Marion County who did everything they could to approve the Ridge View Estates development. Janet Carlson, the third commissioner, was on the losing end of several 2-1 votes.

Carlson, by and large, believed in applying the law to the appeals filed by our neighborhoods' Keep Our Water Safe committee. We didn't agree with everything she did or said, but Carlson was much more fact-based and reasonable than Milne and Brentano.

Today the Salem Statesman Journal had a story about Oregon Court of Appeals and Supreme Court rulings that made my wife and I want to scream We told you so! at the county commissioners.

Which, I guess, is what I'm doing in this blog post. 

We and the attorneys who fought the developers and Marion County, Ralph Bloemers of the Crag Law Center and Sean Malone, a Eugene attorney, kept telling the commissioners what Oregon's land use laws and the common law of vesting required of them.

Unfortunately, Milne and Brentano chose to ignore those laws, until a Marion County Circuit Court judge ruled in our neighborhood's favor and the subdivision developers didn't appeal the decision.

A wise choice, because last week the Oregon Court of Appeals issued another in a string of rulings that support one of the key points that we kept making, and Milne/Brentano kept ignoring: whether someone who has started work on a development should be allowed to continue after a law changes depends in large part on what the completed project is planned to be.

That's common sense.

If you build three rooms of a five room house, you could justifiably say "I'm about 60% done." But if you've built three rooms of a 1000 room apartment building, you've barely begun.

Milne and Brentano owe us and our neighborhood an apology because they willfully ignored this common sense. Oregon law says that whether a vested right is granted to a partially completed Measure 37 development depends on what was done by the developer prior to December 6, 2007.

That's the drop-dead deadline. Nothing done after that date counts as development. (In fact, Measure 37 claimants were required to stop work on December 6, 2007, the effective date of Measure 49 -- which scaled back Measure 37 considerably.)

In our written appeals, in our oral testimony, in our letters to the Marion County commissioners, we kept telling Patti Milne and Sam Brentano what the law said. And they kept ignoring it.

In our case, just as in the Clackamas County case, Campbell v. Clackamas County, the subdivision developers planned a high-end project with expensive homes that would cost around $500,000. Yet after Measure 49 put an end to development, suddenly the developers claimed they'd had a change of heart and planned to build cheap homes.

The Oregon Court of Appeals and Supreme Court didn't buy this argument. It was obvious to us that they wouldn't, just as it should have been obvious to Milne and Brentano if they hadn't chosen to be blinded by ideology, rather than being clear-eyed about what the law demanded of them.

Here's an excerpt from the Court of Appeals ruling:

Because the vested rights determination under Measure 49 is made as of December 6, 2007, the effective date of the measure, "it is incumbent on the property owner to establish the likely total project cost in relation to the size and character of the structures that the owner contemplated building in compliance with a Measure 37 waiver as of December 6, 2007."  Kleikamp, 240 Or App at 66-67.  Moreover, the likely total project cost is "'based on construction costs as of December 6, 2007.'" 

We and our neighbors spent a lot of time and money in court undoing the mistakes made by the Marion County commissioners. If Milne and Brentano had followed the law, rather than their own "pave it over" right-wing political mentality, this could have been avoided.

Note the twice-mentioned "as of December 6, 2007" in the quoted passage above. That's what we kept telling Milne and Brentano.

A developer can't say, "Oh, the housing market is so bad now in 2009 (or whenever). The total cost of our subdivision has been much reduced given these new plans." They don't get to change their plans. Whatever the plan was of December 6, 2007, that's the total cost of development to be considered in a vested right decision.

We and our attorneys were correct. Commissioners Milne and Brentano were wrong. We accept their apologies, in abstentia, because we doubt such will be forthcoming. 

Progressive activists -- an unsleepy side of Salem

This afternoon my open house fears turned out to be unfounded.

Since I figured that I wouldn't know anyone at the gathering but the hostess, new Salem resident Laurie, my ever-anxious mind envisoned awkward moments standing around with a glass of wine in my hand, wondering what I was going to talk about with strangers other than the weather and if the Ducks were going to triumph in the Rose Bowl tomorrow.

I should have known better, because after moving to Oregon from the Boston area, Laurie has found a home among Salem's activist progressive community. She's been a part of Occupy Salem, along with other progressive efforts.

So when my wife and I walked into her home, we found a bunch of gray-haired rabble-rousers sitting around who instantly made us gray-haired rabble rousers feel right at, well, home.

We like outgoing people who speak their minds. And, boy, progressive activists aren't shy about doing just that. Not in any sort of irritating fashion (unless, perhaps, you're a Tea Party type), but in a this is what I think, and I'm not afraid to say it sense.

Introducing us, Laurie told the group that she'd found my blog when she started looking for information about Salem prior to her move. Semi-jokingly, I said, "I tried to talk Laurie out of coming here because Salem is so boring. That's one of the most interesting things to do here: complain about how there's nothing interesting to do here."

"You're wrong!" Those decisive words came from a little woman with big ideas who I instantly liked (also, I almost instantly forgot her name).

We got into a conversation about how Occupy Salem has invigorated this town. She sees lots of ways Salem is headed toward changing for the better, along with, hopefully, Oregon and the nation as a whole.

Spending a few hours in the company of energetic, committed progressives was a great way to start off the year. And you know, I think I also would have felt almost (but not quite) as good if I'd hung out with energetic, committed conservatives.

Passion makes the world go 'round. Without it, who are we? Listless, drifting, cynical, uncaring, passive, lackluster. I'd rather have someone vehemently disagree with me than walk away with a "Whatever."

One person at the open house who I did already know, or at least recognize, was Peter Bergel of Oregon PeaceWorks. I enjoyed talking with him about his representing Occupy Salem at a meeting of Marion County Republicans.

"There was common ground," he said. "Some extremists there called us communists, but others said they agreed with much of what the Occupy movement was trying to do."

Absolutely.

That's why the Occupy folks refer to the 1% and the 99%. Given the political make-up of this country, the 99% of Americans include almost all Republicans, Democrats, and independents. Plus everybody else, for that matter.

What frustrates me, and what fuels the passion of folks who range from far-left progressives to Tea Party conservatives, is how the desires of the 99% have come to take such a back-seat in our supposed democracy. 

I'm fine with majority rule. That's how democracies are supposed to work. But a lot has gone awry in these United States. Somehow corporations have gotten legal rights which should belong only to people, and unlimited political donations have become equated with free speech.

Several people at the open house are passionately involved with the Move to Amend effort whose mission is a constitutional amendment.

We, the People of the United States of America, reject the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United, and move to amend our Constitution to firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights.

They're trying to get Salem on board with this notion as part of a bottom-up movement. After initially expressing some skepticism about whether Move to Amend could succeed, I eventually changed my mind after recollecting how, not that many years ago, gays were very much in the closet. 

Now, TV shows openly celebrate gay relationships. Several states have legalized gay marriage. "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is gone. Clearly this country is on its way to full equality for gays. Given how unlikely that seemed a decade ago, anything is possible for the future.

If -- and it's a big if -- we can preserve, and as necesssary, restore, our democracy. The 1% should basically have 1% of the power. The 99%, basically the rest of the power.

I told Bergel that I was more than a little surprised to see a prominently featured Daily Kos post that supported the Republicans doing-away with the filibuster rule if the G.O.P. takes over the Senate next November.

I, for one, would very much like to see Republicans do what Democrats didn't have the courage to do in 2007, 2009 and 2011: Turn the Senate into a functioning body of government where the majority rules. Simply put, you cannot have a functioning government where it takes a super-majority to do even the most mundane, routine tasks. Where you can't even get something as basic as an up or down vote. Where you have to constantly concoct these ridiculous "gangs" and "super-committees" because regular order is broken.

Politicians should have to account for their votes. It is time to accept the obvious fact that "gentlemanly comity" is a joke and a relic of a bygone era. Let the majority rule and let the voters take account.

Yes, that would give Republicans almost total control, if they have 51 Senators. But isn't this what majority rule means in a democracy? Seems like people from all parts of the political spectrum could agree on that. Except for those in the 1% who are afraid of what the 100% would decide to do.