CitJ 101: Where to find bank TARP repayment info

An instructional post, whose local-news nut finding, possibly news to The Union readers (link) but not to Pelline readers (link), is that Nevada City's Citizens Bank did not pay its most recent quarterly TARP dividend on May 17. ("Citizens still is deferring TARP dividend payments to preserve capital" - JP*)

Report: Community Weaving a.m. presentation at City Hall

At Nevada City's City Hall yesterday morning, 25 people, mostly social services professionals, heard Community Weaver Cheryl Honey talk about & demo the Family Support Network / Good Neighbors website, whose purpose is to help people network to help each other. (There was also an evening presentation.)

Nevada City farmer's market starts today

"8:30 to 12:30. And every Saturday until October 30th." (link)

Just so you know...

Congratulations to CA Science Fair Product Science winner Samantha Beckett

Congratulations Samantha!
(After the recent Castillo hoax, when I saw the Union story Young scientist wins second state science fair prize I went to the science fair site to verify; and indeed, here she is. Well done, Samantha!)

From Sierra College to Tea Party - here's why students need education, not just training

The warmup speaker at Saturday's Tea Party Town Hall (Report#1 here) was a Sierra College student in Communications. He's young; at his age he's entitled to screw up, as we older codgers all have. And he did; but IMO the person at fault was the one who, having heard (of?) the student's class speech, invited him to deliver it at a public gathering.

Meckler: Tea Party to partner with Leadership Institute for online activist training

(Updated Sun. pm with Meckler impressions, below. Also see George Rebane's writeup (link), with almost no overlap.)

At today's Tea Party Town Hall (pdf) in Penn Valley, Mark Meckler revealed two new initiatives for the Tea Party movement - a nationwide Get Out The Vote effort, and an online activist training program with the Leadership Institute, to answer your question "what can I do?"

Lessons from television; an idle post

(Specifically, the TV series[es] Battlestar Galactica, Dr. Who, Eleventh Hour (U.S.), Lost, and Star Trek:Enterprise)

If radio whispers messages into your ear, what does television do?

Keene campaign finance oddity? - a Watts offshoot

Updates, not terribly interesting:
On Mon. the 14th, Keene campaign consultant Cliff Wagner reported that "This [failure to report the Keene for Senate's Chico campaign office in-kind contribution] was an oversight and we are presently filing an amendment to our report with the FPPC"; delays ensued; now on Thurs. the 24th, the information has emerged that it was an in-kind donation by (landlord) Don Rogers Jr., valued at $950/month for two months.
That is all...

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Original post:
(Caveats -
I'm a campaign finance research novice, and am posting this in part with the hope that someone more skilled will point out what I've overlooked. And the timing of this post is suboptimal, since the election was yesterday and Mr. Keene did not win (link).)


It turns out that the same Chico strip-mall-type building that houses Anthony Watts's electric car business ZEV2Go also houses the "Rick Keene For Senate 2010" campaign office. But the Keene campaign office occupancy can't be discerned - by me at least - from the committee's campaign finance reports, in either the expenditures or the nonmonetary contributions.

Encounter with Anthony Watts, side two

June 23 update: Tamino's "Watts encounter" post - wherein commenters came to realize that they'd been had - has been removed due to a complaint by Nevada County's Mr. Greg Goodknight; see Tamino's post Silence (a diatribe, GG says) for the story.

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Original post:
Yesterday I met climate inactivist Anthony Watts, at his main business in Chico. Mr. Watts wrote about my visit (negatively); based on Watts's account, Tamino concurred with him; and once I'd learned of Watts's post, I explained in the comments of Tamino's (now-deleted) post, saying:

Impressions of last night's Sierra Foothills Audbon Soc. talk

Last night's Audubon Society talk was generously provided by Morgan Tingley of U.C. Berkeley, on his doctoral research on changes in avian ranges along Sierra transects since Joseph Grinnell first surveyed them a hundred years ago.

Tingley's work was part of the Grinnell Resurvey Project - and egads, what vision Grinnell had, saying:

“This value [of the Museum collections and other data they collected] will not, however, be realized until the lapse of many years, possibly a century... And this [value] is that the student of the future will have access to the original record of faunal conditions in California and the West, wherever we now work.”

The talk was good, Tingley knew his material, although - since it was about his research - it wasn't a "what seems to be in store and what we should do" talk, which - even from some audience commentary last night - seems to be what we in Nevada County most need to grasp, and is something we really, really aren't getting, from the local science folk.

Findings in a nutshell (filtered through my cranium) -
Compared to Grinnell's early-1900s surveys, Tingley's "maximum elevation" end of bird species ranges, like the ranges of Sierra mammals, has shifted upward for significantly more species than downward - which is also consistent with shifts in phenology (seasonality/timing) and in birds' latitude(northward)-range data. But he encountered lot of other variability in the results, it was by no means "ok everybody, take 10 steps uphill", so in no single instance can you attribute it to climate change. It's a pattern.

As for the talk we haven't been getting - calling Climate Central....

Voter literacy lab - Astroturfing on California's Proposition 16

Updated. (Jump to update)

OK, boys and girls -

Today's San Francisco Chronicle has a full-page ad urging you to vote Yes on what they call the "Taxpayers Right to Vote Act", Proposition 16. The ad prominently features endorsements and stirring quotes from:

* Jim Wunderman, President and CEO of the Bay Area Council;
* Hunter Stern of the Coalition for Green Jobs;
and
* Darnell Turner of the Contra Costa NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People)

Does this create the impression that Bay Area leaders, green job folk, and - ahem - colored people support this initiative? Do you think "Taxpayer's Right to Vote" aptly conveys the initiative's purpose?

OK, here's your exercise: do two minutes of googling or other research, and report back what you found. Don't be shy.

I'll return shortly.