Nevada City Advocate, July 3 issue

Until the Nevada City Advocate's website gets up and running, I'll post the headlines of each issue.

July 3 2009 issue (#1) contents:
* We're taking the plunge; local couple starts a weekly community newspaper
* Miners Foundry makes history
* Nevada City man purchases historic Powell House
* Crime writer to swap, sign his books at community giveaway
* July 4 looks to be a blast; day starts with a parade in GV and ends with live music and fireworks at fairgrounds
* Nevada City repays loan, overdue parking fees
* Council delays decision on pot dispensary
* Top gun fighter jets coming to county air show
* City wants a second look at county's road-naming requirements
* Let's control our own fates (editorial)
* Newspaper begins to take on a life of its own (publisher's column)
* Los Lobos, Indigo Girls part of a global lineup (California Worldfest July 16-19)
* Community Calendar
* Blues and brews coming to fairgrounds (Sat July 25)
* Bella Nota concert to be held July 18 at The Roth Estate
* Heard on the Street (What do you want to see in your community newspaper?)
* Phillips School of Massage has special touch
* Nevada City to host conference workshops
* 2009 Nevada City Classic photos

Nevada City Advocate, July 10 issue

Until the Nevada City Advocate's website gets up and running, I'll post the headlines of each issue.

July 10 2009 issue (#2) contents:
* Smothers Brothers to bring show here
* City to draft cannabis co-op ordinance - Council swears in new mayor, vice mayor [Reinette Senum and Robert Bergman]
* Rolling Stone writer to be among film festival judges
* Report: City water quality exceeds state standards
* Music in the Mountains new conductor is from Budapest
* Broad St next in line for repaving
* Nevada City man new board member for Center for the Arts
* Wilson triplets bring local flavor to Worldfest
* Food education being served at [Nevada City] Farmers Market
* Americana [festival] brightens July 4th on the Ridge
* Community calendar
* Housing market shows signs of bouncing back (realtor column)
* Compost containers can take various forms (gardening column)
* New mayor should bring her own style to council's top job (editorial)
* A new chapter for Nevada City (business groups, city work to bring harmony to downtown) - Pat Butler's view
* Letter - Weber needs help to keep our water
* Should the City Council allow a medical marijuana dispensary to do business in Nevada City? (Heard on the street)

"A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society." - Walter Lippmann

Website: Nevada City Advocate
On Twitter: @NCAdvocate
As of this writing, neither is active; but in the paper they say they'll be updating the website every Tuesday. This makes sense - make the news available to all, but late; for timely news you need to get the paper paper (and read the ads)

Layman's 1-minute guide to smart thinking about climate

You don't even have to look at the science to know.
(but if you want to, there are smart vs. not-so-smart ways to do so)

'I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen...We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going.' ...up to 90% of the Sierra snow-pack could disappear...'
- U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu (*)

(so yes, it matters; see what two with a track record for prescience, climatologist James Hansen (pdf) and Nobel economist Paul Krugman, say about where we're headed if we continue to delay taking action. )

How can you, a nonscientist, get the best climate science understanding for the least effort? Here are a variety of smart approaches, from the speediest approach down to more time consuming ones.

* Quickest: See what reputable groups say. In short, there is a scientific consensus - see this huge list of reputable orgs, including - to my knowledge - all the major scientific societies who've weighed in.
(yes, it's fine to rely on this "consider the source" strategy; we do it all the time. Here's the credibility spectrum.)
(Q: but what about "oh, the scientists are all biased"? Answer: a critical look finds the evidence is against this claim.)

* See the evidence: read The Science of Global Warming - How do we know we're not wrong? (pdf).
(In short - multiple lines of evidence and theory all point the same way; and predictions have been borne out.)

* Understand why there still seems to be controversy among the public:
- Cranking up the back-and-forth noise is an effective PR strategy to delay action on climate: when the noise hides the signal(i.e. the actual information on the threat), the public stays ill-informed and won't pressure for action.
(Climatologist Gavin Schmidt points this out.)
- Watch You CAN Argue with the Facts, exposing fossil fuel industry efforts to manipulate the public.

* Or, if you have time in spades, you can know thine planet's "enemy"*, by checking out some claims from a contrarian climate blog. A smart strategy for doing this: wait about a day, then scan the headlines at my climate-related science blog aggregator Warming 101 for a post debunking it*; typically someone will have done so*.
(I checked out the claims at a local contrarian blog for an entire month, in Sept 2007; it's not worth doing again. I'd started out assuming good faith misunderstandings, and got increasingly frustrated as my corrections had zero effect on the ensuing output of the blogger, a strong-willed local emeritus engineer; unfortunately the tone of my comments reflected this.)
(There's no shortage of contrarian websites you can try this calibration with. These sites commonly tout short-term variation as contraindicating longterm trends - they confuse weather(short term) with climate(long term), and they lump weathermen in with climate scientists. They'll also tout "lists of experts" rich in folks with no climate expertise; e.g. the anti-regulation group The Heartland Institute still lists biochemist/molecular biologist Bruce Ames among these "global warming experts", six months after Ames wrote them pointing out that he had never claimed to have any climate expertise.

* Become an expert yourself; learn the physics of climate from U. Chicago climatologist Ray Pierrehumbert's "Climate from First Principles" ( read it now, or when it's published by Cambridge University Press.)

And please, talk, gently, about the threat posed by climate change, to your less-clued-in friends and neighbors; we're all in this together, we should be on the same side. It matters; and you owe it to the young people you know.
(And if you still don't care, keep in mind that they will care, and they'll be choosing your nursing home.)

"If only it were true that all that was at stake was a debating society trophy." *

my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

Surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?
... *

"My measure is to imagine how this will all read to youngsters in 50
and 100 years, if they look back to assess how well we did by them,
managing what would become their world." *

Why "argument from authority" is a perfectly good strategy for nonexperts

Excerpts from the excellent Climate Change and Argumentative Fallacies by Julian Sanchez.*
------------------------
In short: If you're a layman - as most of us are, in most areas - it makes sense to adopt the experts' views - as long as they are, in fact, credible experts in the field in question.

We’re accustomed to calling the “argument from authority” a fallacy, but in fact, that’s what the vast majority of us have to go on most of the time. Provided you ensure that authority’s authority actually applies to the field in question, it’s as good a strategy as any.

Obviously, when it comes to an argument between trained scientific specialists, they ought to ignore the consensus and deal directly with the argument on its merits. But most of us are not actually in any position to deal with the arguments on the merits. (The problem...is gauging your own competence level well enough to know when to assess arguments and when to assess arguers.)

...[The "baffle-em-with-BS works unfortunately well, since] a peddler of horseshit...need only worry about what sounds plausible. If my opponent is trying to explain what’s true, he may be constrained to introduce concepts that take a while to explain and are hard to follow, trying the patience (and perhaps wounding the ego) of the audience.
[When] the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely” ...we’ll systematically tend to go wrong...at least outside our own necessarily limited domains of knowledge. Indeed, in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants.

and

If climate change is actually going to be profoundly harmful, then it’s precisely the sort of problem libertarian principles say the state ought to be trying to solve.

and from a commenter:

"Most fallacies aren’t really fallacies when you reinterpret them as ...reasons to give an idea more credence rather than iron-clad syllogisms. Without the “argument from authority” and the “ad hominem fallacy”, you would either never get lunch or you’d give all your money to Nigerian spammers."

----------------------

Intuitively, we grasp this.

Related, from The One Minute MBA -

"There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world..."

The climate science consensus - organizations

Pulled from LogicalScience's The Consensus on Global Warming: From Science to Industry & Religion.

U.S. National Academy of Sciences; American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); American Meteorological Society (AMS); National Research Council; Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS); Federal Climate Change Science Program; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); American Geophysical Union; Geological Society of America; American Chemical Society; Federal Climate Change Science Program, 2006 - commissioned by the Bush administration in 2002; Engineers Australia (The Institution of Engineers Australia); American Association of State Climatologists; US Geological Survey (USGS); National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) ; NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS); World Meteorological Organization; Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospherice Sciences; International Council on Science; Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); American Astronomical Society; Chinese Academy of Sciences, China; Royal Society, United Kingdom; Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia; Academia Brasiliera de Ciencias, Brazil; Royal Society of Canada, Canada; Academie des Sciences, France; Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher, Germany; Indian National Science Academy, India; Accademia dei Lincei, Italy; Science Council of Japan, Japan; Australian Academy of Sciences; Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts; Brazilian Academy of Sciences; Royal Society of Canada; Caribbean Academy of Sciences; Chinese Academy of Sciences; French Academy of Sciences; German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina; Indian National Science Academy; Indonesian Academy of Sciences; Royal Irish Academy; Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy); Academy of Sciences Malaysia; Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand; Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; Royal Society (UK); Woods Hole Research Center; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); The Australian Meteorological And Oceanographic Society; the American Institute of Physics; The Pentagon; Presidents from 319+ Universities and Colleges; Arnold Schwarzenegger; Tony Blair; former President Clinton; British Energy Minister Malcolm Wicks; John McCain; The Economist; USA Today; BBC; The Australian; and the Christian Science Monitor.

My "behind climate inactivism" research; status and location

I have spent many moons digging (extremely inefficiently, I'm sorry to say, with much time spent in blind alleys, off in the weeds, cowering under the couch, you name it...) behind a few of the "pellets" of climate disinformation that have been spread to, and spread by, the climate denial-and-delay community.

I've written about them here at Daily Kos and here at TPM Cafe. They're not conclusive, they're not done, and those of you who want hard and fast proof, rather than documentation of investigations-in-progress, will find the browsing elsewhere to be far more rewarding; I'm still working on them.
They're not conclusive, they're not done, and they're not all that great. But we do what we can, if we feel it's a world worth saving, and this is something I have to do.

Thoughts on a baby shower and treason

Some very fine people invited me to a baby shower last weekend, for someone who will almost certainly be a very fine baby.

She was showered with adorable outfits, from friends and relatives alike - without a doubt, she's shaping up to be one of the most charmingly dressed young - very young - women in Nevada County.

The assemblage was thinking of her first year; but what about her future as a child, a teenager, an adult? If we choose to continue dithering about global climate destabilization, we choose to seriously endanger her world, and that of her classmates. Please, for her sake, read Krugman's new column Betraying the Planet:

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees (F) by the end of this century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there’s growing evidence that climate change is self-reinforcing — that, for example, rising temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
...[W]e’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?
...
Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

This baby girl deserves better.


(Tom McClintock, she's your constituent)

Twitter tagging ideas for Grass Valley, Nevada City, Nevada County

I would love to be able to pull in tweets (i.e. Twitter entries) from&about our community - after Marsha's intro and playing around with it myself a little, I think Twitter or the like is the way of the future.

But I want a local Twitter "channel" that's ours, that's more focused than the low-value-to-us chatter that characterizes the location-names-based Twitter search (which gives stuff like "New hat, got it in Nevada City")

And there needs to be a way to find what hashtags our community is using
(Explanation, for twitterilliterates: a hashtag is a term that starts with "#", e.g. #gvnc - all tweets that contain it become part of the discussion - if you search Twitter for that hashtag, you can see the conversation, and if you include it in _your_ tweets, you join the conversation.)

..since if you don't know what hashtag is being used, you can't hear what others are saying, which is sad and inefficient.
A real-life example: after the (Lance Armstrong) Nevada City Classic last weekend, C. suggested that racegoers elsewhere on the course, who were out of earshot of the announcer, really would have benefitted from someone Tweeting the announcements. And perhaps someone was - but unless you knew who, or what hashtag(s) they were using, you wouldn't know how to receive the info. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just go to one page to find out what hashtag was being used for an event, or to meet a need?

I'd like to suggest some tags that we could use, that I think would work well for the community. If you have feedback and/or a better/alternative way please, please share it. (Zuri and Marsha, this likely means you.)

#gvnc for info of community interest. There are no Tweets using this hashtag at present, so it'd be all ours (Since "nc" is also the abbrev. for North Carolina, #nctweet (the previously-suggested tag) wouldn't necessarily stay just us...)

Maybe...
#gvnc #tag both, for a tweet that proposes or announces a community-related hashtag that you'll be using?

#gvnc #biz for business-related tweets, so those who just want to see noncommercial entries can do this (by searching for tweets that contain #gvnc but not #biz) and those who want only commercial entries could do that, too.

Also, when & if #gvnc Twitter traffic should increase to the point that we need to segregate further, we could also do:
#gvnc #news
#gvnc #events
#gvnc #lost
#gvnc #found
#gvnc #wanted
#gvnc #forsale
#gvnc #free
#gvnc #realestate (in place of #biz)
(It wouldn't hurt anything to use these extra tags now, but it's not needed.)

A question for Zuri, Marsha or anyone else who's not a Twitter newbie like me - does it make more sense to do dual-labeling (by which I mean "use two hashtags" - eg #gvnc #biz), or would we just want to have a "gvnc" prefix for all our hashtags (eg #gvncbiz) ?

(The answer, I think, would depend on whether it's possible to do a search for "all tweets containing a hashtag that starts with #gvnc" - but I don't think it's possible, or at least I don't see a way to do this from Twitter Advanced Search - so I'd lean toward "use two tags".)

Citizens Bank officials loan to selves, quietly - how common is this?

I keep seeing crowdsourced journalism opportunities wherever I look.

Today's dead-tree-based The Union has an extremely interesting story from Dave Moller, about our locally-owned bank - "Citizens Bank Officials loaned [to themselves] $11 million" ("...the lending institution's leader would not divulge who received the loans when, or how much they are for"; "the bank landed $10.4 million in federal [TARP] funds"; "“We're a private bank...so that information is not public”"; "“It's common for directors and bank officials to get loans. They are typically some of the best borrowers, because they're stakeholders,” [bank president and CEO Judy] Hess said.")

How prevalent is this sort of arrangement in other communities? Are there any regulations against it, and if not, what keeps banks from serving primarily to benefit their owners?
(Doesn't this become the S&L debacle all over again?)

Update: in comments, Jeff P. pointed to this SacBee story on the phenomenon at a different bank -

A Bee investigation of internal shareholder documents and public lending records found that at Community Business Bank, those likely to benefit most from the taxpayer-funded windfall are a small group of insiders and their associates. From its inception 3 1/2 years ago, the bank has steered many of its assets to a handful of directors, as well as their relatives and business partners.

New Blogger commenting SW bug?

I find I can't leave comments, on Blogspot blogs using the newfangled commenting format.

While this is irritating in the short run, it does save time in the long run...

Moonshine Ink, soon on NCVoices

I emailed the folks at Truckee's Moonshine Ink asking if they had an RSS feed yet, & was told -

We are this close to launching a new much better home page and general interface. We are adding RSS Feeds...

It's so nice not to be a voice-in-the-wilderness anymore, asking orgs about their site feeds - though some sites still don't have them.

I'd like to add Sac News&Review too, but I don't see a way to get a feed or feeds from them that's of local (to us) interest.

p.s. If you'd like to see more local orgs on NCVoices, please encourage them to get an RSS feed - the easiest way to do so, being to get a blog - and then suggest it, in the Nevada County Voices suggestion box.

NevCity "parking fines monies" Union story, add'l info

Let's shed a little more light.

The Union ran a story in today's paper - titled Nevada City cash missing again — this time it's parking fines - which also addressed Nevada City's TRAN ("tax and revenue anticipation note"), money loaned to Nevada City from Nevada County's reserve fund -

In light of the poor economy and concerns about the city's stability in the future, supervisors requested the review [of Nevada County Treasurer and Tax Collector Chris Dabis's practice of making TRAN loans to our towns].

“Right now, with the way the economy is, I think everyone is concerned about everything. Things are going to get tough. It's like the beginning of a bad storm,” said District 3 Supervisor John Spencer [- implicitly - and, presumably in the meeting today, explicitly - questioning Dabis's actions].

Not mentioned in the story: Dabis is challenging Spencer for his County Supervisor seat. (from here)

And, regarding the parking fine money (which went into the general fund - "The funds aren't missing, Albaugh said") - I wish I'd had a Flip to capture Barbara Coffman's response when I asked her about this.

I guess I'm buying one.

Very scary climate news from MIT - up 10 deg. F by 2100

This is twice as bad as previously predicted. And even so,

"...this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur, for example, if increased temperatures caused a large-scale melting of permafrost in arctic regions and subsequent release of large quantities of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. Including that feedback “is just going to make it worse,” [study coauthor Ronald] Prinn says."

Published in The American Meteorological Society’s (peer-reviewed) Journal of Climate, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change. Read about it in this post on Joe Romm's blog Climate Progress.

Note to readers, and to fellow bloggers - the NCFocus comments section is now a climate-crank-free zone, and will be maintained as such. Those who wish to provide disinformation can do it on their own turf.

Brian's leaving KVMR News

Reliable sources (plural) informed us today that Brian, the keeper of the news at KVMR, gave notice a week or two back.

Another journalism-at-KVMR news flash - a couple days ago I learned we have another big-fish editor here in town, Michael Young from the LA Times foreign desk; he's on the KVMR board. Move over JeffP; it looks like we're going to have to rename a certain street Editors' Row...

Edited*:
Welcome Michael and Karen (belatedly; they moved here a summer or two ago.)
(Michael, if you start a local blog, please put it in the the Suggestion Box for Nevada County Voices.)

What happened to Somerville?

Former The Union editor (~2002-2004) Rich Somerville, who left Nevada County for the Eureka Times-Standard in fall 2006, started a blog there in late 2007. All went well for about six months; then in early June 2008, he expounded, unfavorably, on the, ah, "rough-and-tumble", fistfighting political landscape of Nevada County, relative to his new home turf:

...considering the sometimes polarized politics of Humboldt County, decorum reigned.

It was a different story in Nevada County, where I did a stint as an editor a few years back. Once, a last-minute whispering campaign said a candidate had rats in his restaurant. (An inspector had found mouse droppings some years before.) Not only did the candidate lose, but his restaurant soon went out of business.

In a particularly nasty supervisor race, one candidate had nails strewn on his driveway, while another was the subject of postcards titled “Supervisor for Sale?,” accusing her of dispensing governmental favors for campaign donations. Included was an invoice with county letterhead, later proven to be faked.

Once, at a meeting of the county Republican Central Committee, anger bubbled up over an old slight about the lack of an endorsement, leading to a fistfight in the street in front of the meeting hall.

Humboldt County seems polite by comparison — knock on wood!

- Posted by Rich Somerville at 06:39 PM

A week and a half later, he was dead.
Their coroner's office ascribed it to a heart attack, but didn't do an autopsy, or else did an autopsy and then the paperwork misplaced itself...when I asked, the story was a bit hazy.

I'm writing about this only now, almost a year later, because a) I may have been irking the unstable, recently, and b) I didn't stumble across Rich's blog & that post until just a couple days ago. Before that I hadn't pursued it, since I'd just assumed that "heart attack" was a euphemism for suicide.
(Confidential to my recent caller: it's poor form not to say anything, when you phone. Confidential to my readers: I am *not* suicidal, I look both ways when crossing the street, my housemate's nonvolatile, and my ticker's just fine.)

For those of you pointing out that it could have been coincidence: yes, it could have been. But remember Weismann.