polymania

What's making the rounds today in baseball circles is Alex Rodriguez's recent comments about how tough it is to be losing year after year in Texas while pulling in 8 figures. And predictably, talk radio and sport columnists are having a field day with it. But I really liked Buster Olney's metaphor:

Alex Rodriguez will probably leave the Rangers one day; he'll be the one speeding away from the sinking ship in a solid-gold speedboat.

A-Rod's comments add new meaning to "taking one for the team", I suppose.

After weeks of ever-increasing media scrutiny, finger-pointing and tossing around the hot potato of blame, the President finally decided to chime in with an alleged acceptance of responsibility for his own words in the State of the Union address last January. At least that's what we're supposed to believe - that he has final say over what he reads off the teleprompter.

The president's taking of "personal responsibility" for the charge in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought nuclear material in Africa followed three weeks in which he allowed others on his staff and at the CIA to take the blame for including the charge, which was doubted by U.S. intelligence and was later learned to be based in part on forged documents.

However, if you read the fuller content of his remarks today, you find no real acceptance of responsibility of anything. That's because he doesn't really believe there's anything for him to accept blame for in the first place. A man so convinced of his own righteousness certainly won't apologize for his faith, or accept any real blame for what only looks to him like clamoring from naysayers. These words about "accepting responsibility" are merely ear-candy that he wants to throw out to the crowd, in the hopes that they'll stop badgering him with real questions and go back to tossing softballs his way. Pay note to how he furrows his brow and becomes curt and brusque when a reporter tries to ask followup questions - he seems genuinely surprised to be challenged thusly, and takes it as a personal affront. (Although one may justifiably wonder why he wouldn't, given the free pass he's had with the media in general for nearly 2 years.)

Bush is a professional schmoozer who doesn't really know how to handle tough-going - whenever things actually did get tough for him in his life, something has always come up and bailed him out of his own incompetence. That would be fine, perhaps even the source of an amusing Chauncey Gardener-like story, if not for the fact that this guy has control over the world's largest military.

Fortunately it looks like the multitude of issues surrounding the impetus for war have some real media traction, and won't simply be winked and charmed away as if he were at a fraternity reunion. He's gotten away with subpar performance in everything he's done his whole life - but he won't be able to much longer. Sometime soon he'll finally learn what responsibility really means....although I suppose even then he'll deny that he ever did anything wrong. When you have lots of money and power you can pay your enablers to foster your dysfunction indefinitely, and that seems to be the case with Bush and his surreal personality cult.

Anyway, as far as the investigations go, I still quibble with some of the lingering timidity in some of the media corps, but I do recognize a willingness to delve deeper into the pertinent issues that definitely wasn't there just 2 months ago. I just hope they keep following the paper trails, the money, and the story, because it's becoming increasingly clear - not just to bloggers, but to the general public - that this whole war scenario was a concoction done for cheap political gain and cronyism, but with a greatly underestimated human and economic cost.

The pieces are slowly coming back together - the PNAC cabal and their ability to manipulate an intellectually stunted president via his inflated self-image, a secretive VP with shady energy meetings and contacts, and a constellation of loyal but incompetent shoe-shiners who stay in Bush's good graces in spite of their dearth of skill in real foreign policy planning or intelligence assessment. (And the Republicans were gloating that the "adults" were back in charge?) If Bob Woodward hadn't turned into a mere Bush biographer he'd probably have a field day investigating this whole sordid episode. I guess this just means a new generation of honest reporters will have to step up and throw back the detritus and watch the White House roaches scatter in the painful light of day.

I was afraid this was going to happen - that I would at some point go for a full week without making a new blog entry. Shoot. I guess it's not really a crime or a tragedy, but it is a disappointment to me. I certainly have many reasons for not keeping up with it in recent days - for one, I was in Colorado from last Thursday until yesterday, and then after flying back (essentially commuting) I stayed at work til 8pm or so. And since then I've either slept or done other pressing things....ok, maybe not everything I've done in that time qualifies as "pressing"...but I have been occupied one way or another.

Oh yeah, that wedding thing too. And paying my g*ddamn car insurance. Yuccch. Oh, and wringing my hands over the necessity of electoral reform in the US. No wonder I can't get anything done!

On a separate note...have I mentioned how good I think Susan Tedeschi is?

I thought this was kinda funny today:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Just a few blocks from the future site of Bill Clinton's $160 million presidential library, a couple of Clinton haters hope to open a museum devoted to mocking his presidency.

"As long as he's talking, we'll have to be here trying to keep him somewhat honest and stop him from rewriting history," says John LeBoutillier, a former Republican congressman from New York who rode Ronald Reagan's coattails to victory in 1980.

[...]

"We already hear he's going to bring a bunch of egghead economists to his library to say how great the economy was when he was president," LeBoutillier says. "And we'll find our own who can say it had nothing to do with him."

[...]

"Reagan, Nixon, that's the past," he says. "The problem is Clinton's still young, he's the most powerful force in Democratic politics, and he would like nothing more than to erase the past so he can return to the White House with Hillary."

Skip Rutherford, president of the foundation paying for Clinton's library, says he had hoped for a political cease-fire.

"The haters don't have to like or agree with Clinton, but they need to acknowledge that only 43 men have done this — reached the pinnacle," he says. "I think they need to move on with their lives."

Move on with their lives? What lives? They'd have no lives if it weren't for Bill Clinton. Believe me, if this "museum" ever gets built, it'll say a lot more about the pathetic Clinton detractors who can't ever let it go than it does about the object of their obsession.

My favorite part is the "Reagan, Nixon, that's the past" deflection. Never mind the fact their criminal cronies (Kissinger, Negroponte, Safire, Buchanan, Abrams, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Weinberger, et al) are very much alive and well and influential in the present.

I've been hearing this for over a year now, about how rents in the Santa Cruz area have been going down gradually. I'm always curious to see if what Cindy and I are paying is above or below the average (or median). The Santa Cruz Sentinel had an article about this yesterday:

According to RealFacts, an average studio rents for $931, a one-bedroom for $1,159, a two-bedroom, one-bath for $1,448, a two-bedroom, two-bath for $1,647, a two-bedroom townhouse for $1,804 and a three-bedroom, two- bath townhouse for $1,700.

We pay $1600/mo to rent our 2BR/1BA house, about 1/2 mile from the beach. So I guess we're pretty close to average, all things considered. Of course, I often think back nostalgically to what I paid to rent a similar-sized house in Davis, or to rent a large 1-BR apartment in Tucson - about a third of what I pay now.

So why do people value living next to the ocean so much, especially when they don't really have to? I know, that sounds like an obtuse question, because I bet most people could spout off an answer right off the bat, even if they've never actually lived near it. But really, what's at work here? What exactly makes "ocean-living" so compelling for so many? I must delve deeper into this topic soon...

I just came across this note in a comment section in response to a recent blog entry on Daily Kos. It is a stunning assessment of the mental capacity of our Commander-in-Chief:

The natural instinct is for people to avert their eyes or other senses at the proper moment so as to not be in the presence of anything risqué, embarrassing or awkward. This act of looking away, not hearing or not perceiving in some other way is the human variant of the ostrich maneuver. So as to maintain some semblance of self-credibility we choose to shield our selves from things that are absurd or ridiculous by failing to notice them, or more creatively, by believing a construct that makes gibberish seem perfectly reasonable, non-sense, perfectly sensible. For example, when President Bush asserts in re-justifying the 'war' with Iraq, as Joe Conason notes, "We gave him (Saddam) a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in.", this is no misconstruction of English grammar, no malapropism, this is simply factually wrong, and it is so factually wrong that it prompts either an aversion or a glossing response. Labels that would have been applied to us, were we to err so glaringly, such as inept, incompetent (in the absence of guile or deceit), simply are held in abeyance when it comes to Mr. Bush. The question is: Why? Part of the answer is that the president has a mental disability that is severe, limiting and, (through no fault of his own) makes him ill suited and unfit to carry out the responsibilities of his office. There is just no way to tiptoe around this fact. The manifestations of this condition are as follows:

1. Inattention. Manifestly, and inability to do detailed work or absorb complex instructions or information, concrete thinking with poor conceptual abstraction. Hence things are black and white for George W. Bush, and he does operate from gut feeling rather than from a position of reason and reflection.

2. Impulsivity: Such a behavior pattern may determine friends and associates who may in turn influence the persons value system.

3. Educational difficulties that would have affected career choices were it not for his family name and power position.

4. Low self esteem leading to depression.

5. Self-medication with drugs and alcohol as a result of low self-esteem.

6. A tendency to blurt thing out that may alienate people: Bring 'em on.

7. A disorganized life style: Beautifully compensated for by his meticulous librarian wife and by a staff of extremely detail oriented people that surround him.

What we have is the Curriculum Vitae of someone who has Attention Deficit Disorder. Much like in the Peter Sellers classic, 'Being There', George W. Bush mechanically goes through the motions of being president without having a clue at times as to what he is doing or even what he is saying. And as in 'Being There' those who believe that Bush is intellectually clothed suffer from a blind acceptance of celebrity, a general disinterest in the truth, and a need to go to wild lengths in order to justify themselves, their lives and their imagined values.

The danger is that Mr. Bush's cognitive dysfunction underscores our national miasma in Iraq and the daily death of our men and women in uniform. Left to his own limited repertoire of creative communication he leaves a wake of confusion and misunderstanding. In dealing with unstable or volatile adversaries (Kim Jong Il) this level of incapacity can have grave consequences.

I have no doubt that when Mr. Bush addressed the people of Senegal during his jaunt through Africa that he left them all bothered, bewildered and confused when he stated, "...I had the opportunity to go out to Goree Island and talk about what slavery meant to America. It's very interesting when you think about it, the slaves who left here to go to America, because of their steadfast and their religion and their belief in freedom, helped change America. America is what it is today because of what went on in the past..." This is exactly what he said, and I have no idea what message Mr. Bush is trying to convey because he is limited to the language and syntax of a seven year old. I do know that if this is to be understood that African slaves came to America to practice their religion and to have freedom that this will certainly offend Americans whose descendants suffered forced labor and intolerable indignity because of slavery.

There are those who revel in having access and control over a person like Mr. Bush because in an oxymoronic sense his very rigidity makes him compliant for their own self-serving means. There are others who at some subliminal level feel sorry for Bush, and are willing to overlook his complete ineptitude, because he is so non compos mentis. To the later group I say: Wake up; snap out of it. This guy's going to ruin all of our lives for decades to come, and then go back to his patrician, privileged life in Texas. Impeachment of Bush is an act of self-preservation.

David M. Loucas, MD

Wow. Wish I'd thought of that.

That disgusting squishy sound you just heard was the excrement striking the oscillating device:

WASHINGTON -- CIA Director George Tenet told members of Congress a White House official insisted that President Bush's State of the Union address include an assertion about Saddam Hussein's nuclear intentions that had not been verified, a Senate Intelligence Committee member said Thursday.

Sen. Dick Durbin, who was present for a 4 1/2-hour appearance by Tenet behind closed doors with Intelligence Committee members Wednesday, said Tenet named the official. But the Illinois Democrat said that person's identity could not be revealed because of the confidentiality of the proceedings.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan was quick to dispute Durbin's account. "That characterization is nonsense. It's not surprising, coming from someone who was in a rather small minority in Congress who did not support the action we took," McClellan told reporters.

Durbin, appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America," said that Tenet "certainly told us who the person was who was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from Africa."

"And there was this negotiation between the White House and the CIA about just how far you could go and be close to the truth and unfortunately those sixteen words were included in the most important speech the president delivers in any given year," Durbin added.

[...]

Oh, this thing ain't over, like the Republican pundits are saying. No sir, it's just getting started!

The wizard's powers seem ever decreasing with each passing day now. Even with his continuous stream of weasel words, Rumsfeld gets exposed for the schmuck that he is:

[On June 30] He said the problems in Iraq are being caused by five categories of people: remnants of Saddam's government; tens of thousands of Iraqi criminals released before the war from prisons; ordinary looters; foreigners who have entered Iraq; and "people that are being influenced by Iran."

Rumsfeld said these five groups "are all slightly different in why they are there and what they are doing," saying this trait "doesn't make it anything like a guerrilla war or an organized resistance.

Contrast to what Gen. Abazaid now says just two weeks later:

"It think describing it as guerrilla tactics being employed against us is, you know, a proper thing to describe in strictly military terms," Abizaid said during a Pentagon briefing.

[...]

Abizaid said they "are conducting what I would describe as a classical guerrilla-type campaign against us. It's low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it's war however you describe it."

Remember how last winter ol'Rummy was just the cat's meow to the media? How he just charmed their socks off, and they fell for his grandpa-style folksy banter? Maybe from now on they won't be so predisposed to merely accept everything he says, just because, dernit, they like the way he says it. Maybe my pipe dream of a reporter corps that actually investigates claims and challenges those in authority isn't so crazy.

I just got into work a few minutes ago. In the entrance lobby they have a TV which is always tuned to a cable news channel in the mornings. There's no audio, so I can't hear anything, but by always having it on they ensure that I at least take an image with me to my cube, whether I want it or not.

So what byline I do I see this morning on MSNBC? "MEN ARMED WITH PAINTBALLS STALK NAKED WOMEN". I kid you not. They have a shot, probably stock, of some paintballer dude hiding in the brush aiming his gun. Cut into the side of the frame is some talking head, in the middle of a sentence I can't hear. I have no context for this story, but really, do I need one?

News channels are so desperate for eyeballs that they now completely prostitute themselves to the most gullible and seizable demographic. Journalism? Who cares. It's all about "infotainment". God they suck.

For some reason I felt motivated enough this morning to sign an online petition urging congress members to start an independent bipartisan investigation of the Iraqi intelligence scandal. For what it's worth, here's the content of the letter I submitted:

Too much focus is being placed merely on the "16 words" in Bush's State of the Union address last January, and not enough in the long-standing pattern of deception that took place over the past year. Frankly, dissenters in congress (and surprisingly, the usually aggressive media) were way too timid for the past year of sounding alarm bells before this disastrous Iraq policy came to fruition. The fact is this whole matter could have been exposed as the fraud that it is 6 months ago.

Be that as it may, please PLEASE start doing something about it now. Investigate all the evidence that was trotted out to whip up support for this highly politicized war. Revisit those satellite pictures. Inquire about the connections betweeen the AEI and this administration, and our increasingly "faith-based" intelligence and foreign policy. Hammer on the issues regarding the *urgency* of waging this war, when it is apparent now that we as a country were in fact in no imminent danger from Iraq at all.

We need accountability in government, and you folks are in the best position of any of us to raise a stink about this whole thing. You have to be adroit about this, I understand that - the political and media climate surrounding security issues in this country often pays more attention to "attitude" than to substance. But it can be done if you frame the issue in the way it needs to be framed. "Framing" is not a dirty word, like "spinning" - it speaks of understanding the way the electorate thinks, and highlighting the truly important aspects of reality in a clear, expressive, and cogent manner.

This petition is a call for you to start work on this. For all of us who feel increasingly vindicated in our dissent towards the President's misguided policies, please take action. Thank you.

It's funny that I inserted that little bit about "framing". But I couldn't help it - it just seemed so appropriate. So much discourse nowadays is dismissed even if it is substantive, just based on the perception of the motivations of the speaker. But I still think you can have transparency in your motivations (which is what liberals often strive for) and still get your points across through proper framing. And in this case I just think the stakes are too high to not drive the point home that people who come at least a little closer to representing me finally get their collective act together, say what needs to be said, and do what needs to be done. We want to bring democracy to Iraq? Why not practice a little bit of it here first?

Followup from last week:

Well, they completely closed off the railroad crossing again - but this time, instead of one they put three big road closed signs at the north intersection, including one which very explicitly states, 'ROAD CLOSED 1500 FEET AHEAD'. They even put these signs square in the middle of the street as it heads southward to the crossing. And still, as I write this, a few cars every minute are trying to get through, and getting thwarted utterly at that railroad crossing. Amazing.

I talked about this with Cindy for a while, and I pondered whether this phenomenon was a Santa Cruz thing, a California thing, an American thing, or just a human thing. What is it that promotes exceptionalism in people's minds, at least when it comes to challenging a 'Road Closed' sign? The drivers obviously see the sign, but for whatever reason they don't think it applies to them. Of course they figure out soon enough that it does, but where does that exceptionalism come from? Do all these people doubt the veracity of the sign's claims? What would it take to make them believe?

I tend to think exceptionalism is a more distinctly American trait - after all, this nation is replete with notions of exceptionalism. Some might call it "rugged individualism", but that word choice seems to ennoble what is frequently just selfishness or shortsightedness. I'm curious as to how commonplace this particular behavior is in other parts of the country, or the world - and I bet it wouldn't be hard to do a fuller sociological study on it (assuming no one has already). My hunch is that given the same amount of signage that we have on our street today, but placed in similar settings in other parts of the world, you'd find far fewer attempts to sneak through the closure than what I can see right out my window.

OK, so I have posted a lot on the whole issue of the Iraq War lately. What may not have been clear to anyone reading when I started this blog was that I'd been following the whole run-up to the War for months, so the percentage of postings I make here is still representative of the amount of time I spend keeping up with new events. Last spring Cindy noted something I'd said which I'd actually forgotten, which was that a couple weeks after September 11, 2001, I had guessed that before all was said and done, the US would end up occupying Iraq. I had said that if there was just the flimsiest connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the US was just going to invade Iraq outright and finish him.

For once in my life, I'd actually made an astute political prediction. But it took Cindy to remind me that I'd ever even made it in the first place! (Maybe that's what the blog is for - so I can remember what the heck I'm even thinking.)

In any case, I still follow events as they develop with great interest and concern. The way I see it, how can I not care? This is my country too dammit, and those in power have been saying and doing things which I consider arrogant, self-serving, short-sighted, and dishonest. So why shouldn't I follow with great interest as the mainstream media, which for months has been acquiescent and gullible to the Bush message, are finally starting to wake up to what the real political blogs have been hammering on for months now.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."

-- Dick Cheney, August 26, 2002

"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."

-- George W. Bush, September 12, 2002

"If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world."

-- Ari Fleischer, December 2, 2002

"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

-- Ari Fleischer, January 9, 2003

So, fast forward to the present:

"When it's all said and done, the people of the United States and the world will realize that Saddam Hussein had a weapons program."

-- George W. Bush, July 14, 2003

So we've gone from being absolutely certain that he had weapons of mass destruction, ready to deploy or sell to terrorist organizations, to having to hunt for months on end just to find out if he had a weapons PROGRAM. Not actual weapons, mind you, since those are nowhere to be found, but a PROGRAM.

It's like he's reverting back to his C-student mindset - you know, "I couldn't turn in my report - the dog ate my weapons of mass destruction."

Please, someone PLEASE tell me that the American electorate won't fall for this half-assed shell game.

Anyone who knows me knows I have a deep fascination and respect for birds. And I was certainly excited when I learned of a movie called Winged Migration which came out recently. I saw it with Cindy some weeks ago, and was enchanted by the amazing cinematography. I had noted also a few odd aspects to the film while I watched it - things that seemed a little odd or out-of-place to me. But I let those things go at the time, and simply appreciated the remarkable viewpoints shared by the movie.

But as the weeks pass I think back more to the film, and now think that as great as the imagery was, as a whole it didn't really live up to its potential, or even form a truly coherent whole. I just came across a blog entry at Pedantic Nuthatch which describes the problems pretty well:

...I'm really concerned that non-naturalists will get a warped view of avian ecology. The only use of subtitling is to introduce species and give us an idea of the distances each migrates. The sparse voice-over narration is content-free, and leads us to believe that all species migrate to the Arctic. We see a cuckoo chick push a host egg out of the nest, with no explanation; we see various displays and outlandish vocalizations with no interpretation. The whole film degenerates into a series of music videos about "the whacky things those birds do."

The footage of birds in flight is dominated by Anseriformes (geese and their relatives), cranes, and other large birds—one surmises because birds of that order (1) fly during the day and (2) are most tolerant of the film-maker's equipment. Except for the bird parasitized by the cuckoo, there are no passerines (perching birds, of which the abundant songbirds make up the greatest number).

There's a lot of "Julia Child" natural history. A King Penguin is tending an egg, followed by a cut to a much larger chick attacked by skuas.

There's no question that there are some stunning images. The camera pans across an immense flock of Snow Geese in motion, until the frame is filled with white.

Just don't confuse this flick with a documentary.

I had forgotten about that shot of the newly hatched cuckoo chick. I'll bet 90% of the people watching this movie had no idea about the context of that action (brood parasitism), that the cuckoo is in the nest of a different species of bird, placed there intentionally by the parent cuckoo. Of course, you can't blame the audience for not knowing these things, and I think the filmmakers should either have omitted that scene or explained what the heck it had to do with the rest of the story (as such). What did it have to do with migration?

The interposed human interaction with the birds was also incongruous. It almost seemed as if there was a point to be made, especially with the boy clipping the nettings away from the goose's leg. But it was generally so brief and had so little significance to the narrative that it certainly could have been left out without reducing the impact of the visuals. (This is especially true when you learn that some of the scenes were contrived by the director - not maliciously, but perhaps maladroitly).

Still, I do give a lot of credit to the editors for ensuring that the emotional manipulation was generally kept at a minimum. That is, shots of birds in difficult moments or facing certain death are restrained, and segue to different types of scenes almost immediately. And with over 400 hours of film from which to select just 90 minutes, we can only wonder what fascinating sequences may have ended up on the cutting room floor.

The All-Star Break is upon us. With a win that clinches a 3-game sweep of the Rangers tonight, the Royals are now 10 games over .500, and 7 games ahead of the second-place White Sox. This is the first time in 23 years that the Royals have been in first place at this point in the season. Jimmy Carter was president the last time that happened, for gosh sakes.

Before this season began, I really thought this would be more of a "learning year", with the Twins and Sox vying for control of the division, and the Royals doing well to hold onto third, maybe scratching their way close to .500. I liked the idea of going with a young rotation, and letting them learn how to pitch in the big leagues, maybe taking a few knocks, but learning together, building cohesion as a team along the way.

With injuries, surprise failures, surprise successes and so on this team has taken a somewhat different tack than anyone really forecast. And it of course still is a learning year, but now they're learning a lot more than just what life is like in the big leagues. They're learning how good it feels to win at this level.

None of this success guarantees anything, of course. The A's have had great young talent for the past 3 seasons, and have at times completely dominated the AL landscape. But all they have to show for it so far is three first-round exits in playoffs.

Still, compared to the starvation diet that's been Royals baseball the past few years, this season is sheer gluttony. Yes, they're in a weak division which with the unbalanced schedule helps pump up their record. And yes, the Twins and Sox have played far worse than most would have guessed. But the Royals can take some credit for bringing that about, and in any case, it's better to win in a weak division than to lose in it, which is what the Royals had been doing for years. And for the first time since, well, the great 14-game winning streak back in '94, I believe this team could make it to the postseason. For me, the eternal skeptic, that's saying a lot.

It's obviously not a perfect bunch, and there's still plenty of room for improvement, but damn if I ain't having a great time following their development, and their WINNING. In first by 7 games at the ASB? This is *amazing*!

On July 11, President Bush said that he considered the matter of the false claims he made regarding Iraq's nuclear weapons program closed:

Bush asserted in his State of the Union address in January that Iraq had sought nuclear materials from Africa. Nearly six months later, the White House acknowledged the charge was false, and the tempest that followed has shadowed Bush on his five-country trip through Africa.

Bush considers the matter closed, said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. "The president has moved on," he said.

Well, that's a relief to know that the President has moved on. Let's review for a moment who else has also "moved on" in the wake of these propagated falsehoods:

As of this writing, 217 US soldiers and their families have "moved on".

As of this writing, over 6000 Iraqi civilians have "moved on".

Saddam Hussein and his sons have also "moved on".

All those ready-to-be-deployed Weapons of Mass Destruction that the Bush administration was so eager to tell us about just a few months ago have apparently "moved on" too.

$4 BILLION a month in military and other discretionary expenditures to maintain the US occupation of Iraq are "moving on".

My hope at this point is that by January 2005, the American electorate will make Dubya "move on" back to his ranch in Crawford TX.

We live along a fairly busy street. It's a main conduit for people coming from Highway 1 and heading toward the beaches, the main boat harbor entrance, or most of the Live Oak area. A quarter mile north of us on the street is a three way intersection, and just about 100 yards south of us is a railroad crossing, with the next intersection being another 200 yards or so past that. Between that intersection and the crossing there are no other outlets from this street.

The railroad company closed of the crossing yesterday and today, so that they could tear out the existing crossing and put in a nicer one. They announced that they would be closing off this crossing last week with signs throughout the area. And yesterday, in fact, they erected a "Road Closed" sign at the aforementioned three-way intersection, so that transiters would take the detour there. It even cautioned "Railroad crossing closed - residents only".

But last night I took great amusement at the number of people, most of whom are presumably locals and regulars, who ignored the road closed sign and drove the full quarter mile down the street, only to arrive at the closed-off railroad crossing. They would of course have to turn around and head back the way they came. I actually stood out in our yard for a while just to watch them, hoping that they'd feel at least a tinge of embarrassment that somebody saw them in their failed attempt at circumventing the signage. Cindy tells me the crossing was closed around 9am, and that all day people were doing this. When I got home around 7pm, they were still doing it. And when I got up this morning, there were still people doing it.

Why do people insist and heading down a road where it's plainly marked that it's closed to thru traffic? I'll muse more on this later....

So I read that President Bush is in South Africa, of all places. However, just 20 years ago his ideological brethren (many of whom are still his brethren now) were trying to ensure that apartheid remained the status quo in that same place:

Democrats in Congress pushed President Reagan to impose sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa. Mr. Reagan opposed sanctions-and so did Messrs. Lott and Nickles, as well as Republican Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, the new House majority leader.

You can read more about this dubious legacy in race-relations here.

I guess I'd be more upbeat about his travels if I had any reason to think he actually cared about where he was going.

This may be what it takes to finally make me invest in a cell phone....

Mr. Rees, my senior high school English teacher, was a peculiar man - eccentric but stern, culturally literate but old-fashioned, sharp-tongued but mindful of courteousness. But one thing I will always remember about him was his way of responding to the occasionally impolite behavior of his students. Although he was widely respected and sometimes feared in class, sometimes a smart-aleck would make some impudent comment, usually good-natured, but still just to get a rise out of him. In reply, Mr. Rees would stare back at the offender, hunch his shoulders, press his eyes into a squint and snarl, "RUDE!!" He responded thusly not overly often so as to dilute the impact of the word, but often enough to sink in over time and impress upon me, intentionally or otherwise, with the importance of civility in dialogue and communication. Not that I needed so much correction like some others around me, but it was enlightening to see a forceful response to disrespectful behavior that doesn't sink to the level of the initial offense.

I recount all this now because I had an event today which made me say "RUDE!!" to myself. I was walking down the stairs of my office building, on my way to the fitness center for a solo workout and a run around the ponds. At the base of the stairs is a large glass window and a glass security door that separates the lobby of the building from the interior, and access to all the employee areas. As I reached the stairs, I could see into the lobby that a woman who I met recently at a social event had just entered the building. We saw each other and I even smiled and waved through the glass. At that moment I was turning the corner to walk away from the security door, when the thought came to me that I should open the door for her (since I knew she was a fellow employee, and was on her way in).

But for some reason that I cannot divine, I didn't. Instead I just walked on.

She was still several seconds away from reaching the door, but was close enough that I could easily have waited. It wasn't as though I was in a hurry to go someplace.

I mean, I wasn't blatantly rude or mean, but I could easily have opened the door for her, at least sparing her from having to get out her badge to flash past the electronic detector. Once I took a few seconds to imagine the situation reversed, I immediately realized how much I'd have liked it if she had done the same for me. That's when the castigating voice of Mr. Rees came resounding from all directions. My technically defensible but suspect action, or rather inaction had been caught by my conscience, but only too late.

So why did I let that opportunity for politeness pass? I don't know. For some reason I seized up, as though the thought came into my mind that if I opened the door, I'd seem like I was trying to curry favor. In my desire to stay cool and aloof, I then estimated to myself "Aw, she can get that door. I'll just keep walking - purposefully - the other direction. That'll prove my independence."

And no, that reasoning isn't supposed to make sense. It certainly doesn't to me now as I write this. But it did several hours ago when it happened.

Hopefully that's the last time I make some lame excuse for not doing a nice thing for someone just because it wasn't absolutely necessary.

Cindy and I have been in Santa Cruz for just over three years now. We first moved to this area together in the crazy summer of 2000, and the expectation was that her stint at UCSC would be somewhere around 4 years total. Although it's not totally clear at this point when she'll finish, it's still quite possible that she'll be wrapping things up sometime next summer. This would make the initial prediction pretty much on the mark.

We went for a walk early this afternoon, down past the yacht harbor and over toward the Boardwalk and the Wharf. Our main motivation was just to observe the teeming masses enjoying the whole Santa Cruz tourist experience, and of course enjoy another magnificent day here on the coast. And observe we did, although to our surprise and amusement, the power had gone out at the Boardwalk, and all the rides were inoperable. There were still many hundreds of people milling about the park, but there was nothing to do - no rollercoasters, no bumper cars, no skyride, no arcade or skeeball. Actually, the "stuffed animal" activities were still going, but I'm sure that was little consolation to anyone. I pondered this for a moment, thinking about the whole situation from the kid, the parent, the holiday partier, and the park manager perspectives. I would never have cared about a managerial perspective before (in my youth or as a grad student), but I guess even for a man-child like me, you know you're an adult when you can be in an amusement park with no power midday on a holiday weekend and think to yourself, "Wow, this must be costing them thousands of dollars!" Maybe this is truly a sign of lost innocence.

In any case, during our walk Cindy and I also figured we should make more of a point to do more uniquely Santa Cruz activities, especially since it's doubtful we'll live around here or anyplace like it after next summer. (We'll be going wherever Cindy can find work - the prevailing wisdom is that the partner with the tougher job to place should be the one whose career choices are placated first.) This means more beach days, a whale-watching trip one of these weekends, even taking in a kitschy concert at the beach next weekend featuring Jefferson Starship (why, you ask? Because we can!).

I guess I have to give credit where it's due - our executive branch is masterful at deceit and conflation. This is off the AP wire today - Poll Says Most Believe Saddam-9/11 Link. From the article:

WASHINGTON - Seven in 10 people in a poll say the Bush administration implied that Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein were involved in the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States.

And a majority, 52 percent, say they believe the United States has found clear evidence in Iraq that Saddam was working closely with the al-Qaida terrorist organization.

The number that believes this country has found weapons of mass destruction is 23 percent, down from 34 percent in May, according to a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

Prewar assertions by the Bush administration about al-Qaida's ties to the Iraqi government have not been proven, and weapons of mass destruction have not been found since the invasion of Iraq.

[...]

Only four in 10 of those polled, 39 percent, said they thought the government was being fully truthful when it presented evidence of links between Saddam and al-Qaida. But among those who thought the government was not telling the truth, people were more likely to say the government was "stretching the truth, but not making false statements" rather than "presenting evidence they knew was false."

The number who want the United Nations to take a leadership role in Iraq has grown from 50 percent in April to 64 percent now.

In other words, every other person you meet believes Saddam was in on 9/11. Never mind the complete lack of evidence - it's a convenient idea that Bush administration is content to let thrive, much like their tolerance of the absurd anti-French sentiment that has now died down after months of drumbeating. Even if their words didn't always explicitly guarantee or delineate this Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, it was certainly implicit in almost every public statement made from Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, all the way on down to lower-level officials like Negroponte (I can't believe that guy's still around.) After all, as long as that connection is in people's minds, the invasion and occupation of Iraq seems worthwhile, especially since WMD's weren't found there. I guess there has to be some consolation for all the US soldiers who are still dying in Iraq on a daily basis, in the sweltering summer heat of the desert, with an increasingly restless and decreasingly sympathetic population underfoot, with no end in sight for the next several years.

Of course, this terrorist conspiracy notion is pure invention, but I understand where this sentiment comes from. Many Americans (unfortunately including those in our leadership) like to think that those who dislike our country for whatever reason and to whatever degree must all be in cahoots - they couldn't possibly be independently against us. Many Americans can't or don't conceptualize anything more sophisticated than the idea of Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, Good Guys and Bad Guys. "Either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists", intoned Bush back in 2002. A vague statement to be sure (who exactly is "us"?), but one which epitomizes the reasoning expressed in the article above. How can people simply assume a connection when no evidence exists? Because of faith - people want to believe, in my opinion, partly because the alternative - the idea that our government invades and occupies other countries based on phony evidence and fearmongering - is too abhorrent to contemplate. Americans don't like to think of themselves as dupes, but those who supported this invasion under the idea that we were under immediate threat from Iraq were totally played by this Bush administration. This article shows that although the truth is finally beginning to filter into the mainstream media, there's still a ways to go in disengaging people from the distracting song-and-dance that Bush and Company have been peddling for the past year.

Another sad and ironic aspect of this article is that last bit - "now let's have the UN run things". More on that some other time....

You may have noticed the list of blogs on the side. They're mostly political blogs, at least at this juncture. Political blogs are how I became motivated to start my own blog, it turns out.

My first foray into anything like a blog is still viewable on my personal geocities site. I actually made a pretty lame attempt at a bird blog, but I can be forgiven because I didn't really know at the time that there were better tools for accomplishing what I was attempting, and that I was just starting to do something that was in fact very new to the webworld. Well, maybe not very new, but certainly nowhere near the craze it is now. I had the right idea, but I didn't follow through.

But what with that god-awful war and its aftermath that still lingers, I've taken fully to the web, looking for discussion and insight that the major news media (magazines, newspapers, and - ugh - television) just can't provide. I mean, if I really want pre-packaged, infantilized right-wing approved pap, then I'll switch on the tube and go cross-eyed trying to watch the newscrawl, the stock quotes, the ever-waving flag and the talking heads all yammering their pseudo-syllogisms on Faux News, CNN or MSNBC.

But instead I've found a fountain of remarkable insight coming from motivated people who aren't featured week after week on the Pundit Parade, and who are diligent and succinct without sacrificing meaning or relevance. How they keep up with so many events day after day astounds me, and inspires me. I don't envision that this blog will ever be a truly political one, which is just as well - some of the blogs I link to can be sometimes be a bit catty (I'm looking at you, Josh Marshall), with he-said-she-said exchanges that more resemble after-hours in the high-school parking lot than they do intelligent discourse. But for the most part, that's nitpicking - the rapid-fire updating capabilities of these sites ensures that you only need to check back in a day or two to have sufficiently moved on. News cycles now seem to follow the diurnal instead of the lunar anymore.

I should also add that what really appeals to me about these blogs is not that they're simply political, but that they're political and realistic. Anyone can create a gripe site, and make the most basic of complaints and criticisms of whoever they don't like. Heck, that's something I could do. But rather, the blogs that impress me the most are the ones that make honest assessments, and yet still retain the passion and the courage of conviction. The Daily Kos probably does this better than any other blog, but Calpundit also delivers. Passion doesn't (and shouldn't) mean mere invective - leave that to Ann Coulter, Cal Thomas and their ilk. Passion means standing up honestly for what you believe in, and in this case, believing in something greater and nobler than oneself. It's a shame that other media is so enslaved to advertising that any real message is now secondary to drowning it first in crass commercialism....especially when that message is itself and attempt to liberate the mind from that type of boorish manipulation in the first place.