Guess what? The Iraq war is going swimmingly.

Two articles on Iraq that you must read, whatever your politics; free cup of coffee may await.

• Rolling Stone's The Great Iraq Swindle ("How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury")


• Crooks and Liars' American Whistleblowers Tortured - Lives And Careers Ruined By Their Own Government, on the Forbes article Whistleblowers on Fraud Facing Penalties ("One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.").

If you can read these and still continue to support this government and its war in Iraq, please let me know and I'll
a) report your name here (it should be made public)
and b) buy you a cup of coffee; it'll be more than worth the cost see just who you are.*

If you don't read anything else this month, read these 2 pieces.

Food for thought

Newspapers often bullied their way to centrality in a community. They were a kind of Mafia, a kind of protection racket--you don't play nice with me, you don't advertise with me, I mess with you. *

"The press [should be] a watchdog. Not an attack dog. Not a lapdog. A watchdog. Now, a watchdog can't be right all the time. He doesn't bark only when he sees or smells something that's dangerous. A good watchdog barks at things that are suspicious."
-- Dan Rather*

More reading on global warming

NASA's Global Warming Questions and Answers

The recent Newsweek article on Global Warming Deniers

Grist compendium of presidential candidates' positions on climate change - on recognizing it, and on addressing it

RealClimate's 1934 and all that, giving the story behind NASA's recent adjustment of North American surface temperatures; on same topic, see Conservatives vs NASA on Global Warming ("This diary follows a rumor's spread through the conservative blogosphere....")
Also, from the 8/26 NY Times, Quarter-Degree Fix Fuels Climate Fight


Selling Ecocide, Monbiot on hypocrisy in the press ("The editorials urge us to cut our emissions. The adverts urge us to raise them.")

*From the trenches, "they're alarmist because it brings them funding" doesn't ring true:

It seems to me that scientists downplaying the dangers of climate change fare better when it comes to getting funding. Drawing attention to the dangers of global warming may or may not have helped increase funding for the relevant scientific areas, but it surely did not help individuals like Mercer who stuck their heads out.*

It's now ncvoices.us

and unfortunately the forwarding for ncvoices.org is progressing s - l - o - w - l - y so for now that URL won't work. So - ncvoices.us

List of deficient or obsolete major bridges in Nevada County

Just a table, not very informative as-is; will provide more info if I run across it. How many (what %) of our bridges are major? Deficient/obsolete minor bridges won't appear on this list.

(Related: County to ID bridge repairs ("Official says local structures generally 'safe'"), Aug 3 in The Union.)

Status: presumably D=deficient,O=obsolete.

MSNBC provided the following information:

Bridges that carry at least 10,000 vehicles a day and have been rated as either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete by inspectors:

(please scroll down; lots of whitespace between here and the table, for some reason)

Status	Rating	Road	Place	County	Feature	Location
O	92.9		GRASS VALLEY	NEVADA	ROUTE 49	03-NEV-049-R13.66-GVY
D	75.0	80		NEVADA	SR 20	UP RR
D	80.3	80		NEVADA	TRUCKEE RIVER	03-NEV-080-28
O	63.0	80		NEVADA	SOUTH YUBA RIVER	03-NEV-080-R2.63
O	86.3	80		NEVADA	DONNER LAKE ROAD	03-NEV-080-R9.01

(I'd originally published this yesterday as a Nevada County Voices piece, but felt it didn't merit the space and attention, so have moved it to my personal blog.)

NCVoice is down; it's temporary

It will return as Nevada County Voices (since it certainly doesn't speak with a single voice...)

The Psychology of Cleaning (and the importance of framing)

The reason people hate to clean house is that they're looking at the job wrong.

Those of you who know me in real life will find it hard to believe that you could learn anything about cleaning (beyond cautionary tales) from this space, but bear with me.

With the advent of Nevada County Voice(s) I've been reading Shawn's streamlining/organizing/efficiency blog Project Simplify regularly. So when on top of her indoctrinations I read in Paul Graham's excellent essay on Stuff his belaboring of the obvious (to everyone but me) fact that:

One reason [a cluttered room saps one's spirits], obviously, is that there's less room for people in a room full of stuff...

...it triggered an insight - namely, that I've been looking at household entropy reduction the wrong way.

Cleaning is not serving and caring for your home. When you clean, you are not your house's servant.

Cleaning is defiantly reclaiming space that the vile (but spineless! so easily beaten back!) god Entropy thought it could slyly claim via adverse possession, while you were otherwise occupied.

It seems to be working, so far...
(and Shawn, if you already made this point and it's only now springing back out from my subconscious...thank you!)

A failure to communicate: Scientists, journalists, reality

A very nice explanation of why journalists - and scientists - have failed for so long to inform the public about global warming*, in Pants On Fire, part 1 over at Little Blog in the Big Woods - it's the very forseeable, and very unfortunate, outcome of their different cultural strictures and conventions, regarding communicating about reality:

...we [in our society] rely on scientific opinion, as reported; by reporters.
...
...[It is remarkably common] for humans to speak to each other, hold what passes for a conversation, and leave the conversation reasonably satisfied; but with no information having changed hands.
Scientists, journalists, "policy makers", and the general public, are doing this now, big time...[They] do not, in fact, speak the same languages; and they do not know it. We need interpreters, and have none...
[Consequence, re global warming:]
...The real equation, in 1988, was that 85% of the scientists who studied the problem were 85% sure we were heading for horrifyingly serious problems, and the majority of their opposition were known fools.
...[But] what [journalists] reported was: no one is sure, and Dr. Billy, a colorful contrarian, says "BULL!".

Not unrelated: xarker on Science and Media, and their practioners' respective failures to communicate and to adapt.

...a New Yorker cartoon of two aging scientists in a quiet, darkened lab office. One says to the other, "Well, at least we never stooped to popularizing science." There's a lot of dark humor implied in that subject, and it's not related solely to scientists.

And (Wed update) The Truth About Denial - Newsweek on the deniers' funding machine

Some Best Yet chili in botulism recall

Some Best Yet (SPD's house brand) chili and corned beef are among the cans being recalled for possible botulism contamination.
Please check any cans you may have against the UPC codes in Environmental Health's press release.

Website problems at The Union

Update, 3+ weeks later: never did get a reply from The Union editor Jeff Pelline or IT Director Tom Harbert, to my email about these 3 problems - RSS feeds, commenting, and a 3rd issue that I tried to resolve via email (potential security issue; still present as of Aug 5).

First, The Union's RSS feeds are incomplete; contrary to their statement (here) that "You will receive new stories [on our RSS feed] when our web site is updated", web updates - e.g. these right now:

11:39 a.m. PT - Tree branch caused Monday power outage
10:44 a.m. PT - Families still in need of school supplies
9:35 a.m. PT - Two taken to hospital after bridge collapses on truck near Oroville
8:50 a.m. PT - Air Force reservist announces GOP challenge to Rep. Doolittle
8:15 a.m. PT - Republicans seek to revive tax relief as part of budget talks

do not appear on their News feed* - items in their RSS feeds appear all to have been updated this morning at 1am.

Second, I've been told (by a reader) that commenting was silently and sporadically broken on at least some stories recently, and that rather than post a warning on the paper's website, a newspaper representative encouraged one reader to inform others of this failure behind the scenes via email(see below). (Maybe it still is broken; unfortunately since I can't remember my password or the name of my favorite teacher I can't comment. At The Union password resetting is taken very, very seriously.)

(and, though it's unlikely, maybe they did post a "your comments may silently go into a black hole" warning at some pt; if so I'm unaware of it)

I'll email the paper's webmaster and editor and update this with their responses.
Aug 5 update: re my "a newspaper representative encouraged one reader to inform others of this failure behind the scenes via email" above, I don't think I paraphrased the 'encouragement' very well; here's the relevant part from the rep's email:

"The best workaround I can see for now is for you to forward your comments via email and I will post them on your behalf. Your help in communicating this to any others is much appreciated. Kindly ask they be sent to webmaster@theunion.com

I expect to also be able to add a note to this effect under the "Post Your Comment" tab on the website."

I'm still curious as to whether such a note was provided, since historically this newspaper's pattern has been not to alert readers to deficiencies like this (search ncfocus for 'archive search', for 1 example).

Second bird with West Nile virus found in Nevada County

A Western Tanager from Murchie Mine Rd was reported last week to be Nevada County's second known avian West Nile case for 2007; the first bird, a Black-headed Grosbeak, was reported earlier this month from the same area (Red Dog Rd, above Nevada City).

The virus may be much more prevalent by now, since the West Nile test results typically don't come back until about 3 weeks after the animal is collected.
(The Tanager was collected July 12, and the Grosbeak June 25.)

(Sources: Peggy Zariello of Nevada County Environmental Health, this page on West Nile virus activity by county in CA, this county webpage)

Priorities

(A melting-ice-sheets comment I'd posted at Brad DeLong's blog last year; I keep going back to it.)

Priorities.

How do you set them?
Which issues do you let slide, in order to work on the really important stuff?
And what if the really important stuff isn't workable?

• Global warming
  
• Peak oil
  
• Vote fraud software
  
• Slouching toward theocracy
  
• Consistent corruption at top levels of govt
  
• Corruption at newspapers; the payola punditocracy
  
• Conserving nature
  
• Equal rights
  
• Bird flu/personal preparedness/public health
  
• Improving the lot of those less fortunate
  
• Social security
  
• Terrorism (incl. nukes and bioterrorism)
  
• Reaching talk-radio listeners who're plugging their ears eyes closed saying la-la-la-la-la
  
• Acquiring leaders who demonstrate genuine leadership
  
• Exposing "leaders" who don't

no answers here; just curious about what one should do, when the whole edifice is breaking apart.

for a noncontroversial example - if the carrying capacity, post-peak, is 1.5 billion less than now, where should "research to extend lifespan" fit into the priority scheme?

A good discussion; this reply in particular made sense to me:

Paul Ehrlich, who['s] been thinking about this stuff longer than many of us have been alive, has very much switched to the answer that the problems that have to be solved are changing the US political leadership and culture...
His conclusion, after trying to solve these problems for at least 40 yrs is that without putting the political/cultural management in place, nothing will happen, and that with proper political/cultural management in place the science and engineering can happen pretty fast.

Study finds flaws in Nevada County's electronic voting system

"Review Finds Potential Flaws in Voting Systems", a UC Davis press release reports:

Flaws that leave electronic voting machines vulnerable to security attacks were discovered by University of California researchers as part of an unprecedented "Top-to-Bottom Review" of the systems commissioned by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen.
...teams were able to compromise the physical and software security of all three systems tested...made by Diebold Elections Systems, Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart InterCivic, respectively.
...
"The problem with the systems should have been detected early in their development," said Bishop. "There are ways to develop and implement systems that resist compromise much better than the systems we examined. Many of these safeguards are taught in undergraduate and graduate computer security courses, but it was clear they were not used effectively in the electronic voting systems we evaluated."

...testers were [also] able to bypass the machines' tamper-resistant seals and locks, physically gaining access to the memory cards that store the votes. Such a vulnerability could potentially be exploited on Election Day, the researchers said.

"In many cases, this could be done in less than a minute, and in a way that would not necessarily be noticed by poll workers, particularly if there are privacy shields and curtains blocking their view of the voter," said Bishop.
...
knowledge of a voting system's source code, while helpful, is not critical to breaking down its security barriers...

From the LA Times article on same study:

Testers "were able to bypass both physical and software security in every system they tested," Bowen said.

Environmental awareness

*Very scary.

* Text - Monbiot's A Sudden Change of State and climatologist James Hansen's Huge sea level rises are coming - unless we act now in New Scientist. The sea level rise if we continue to conduct business as usual may be closer to 75 feet than 2 feet.
Monbiot in general.
His book Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning; it's on its way.

Want to see what the coastline will look like, when it's 25m higher? So do I, but flood.firetree.net's max "sea level rise" setting is only 14 meters. Which puts Sacramento largely under water already.

* Video - The final third of this BBC program on global dimming, laying out the implications for global warming


And some personally disturbing information on meat:

Producing 1kg of beef results in more CO2 emissions than going for a three-hour drive while leaving all the lights on at home.*

Corollary:

[I]t’s actually better [for a typical American] to be a vegetarian that drives a Chevy Tahoe, than to be a meat eater that bikes or walks everywhere. *

I suspect this will be a golden opportunity for purveyors of grass-fed beef that's locally raised, slaughtered and sold.

and finally, not news but a good resource:
New Scientist's Climate change: A guide for the perplexed ("our round-up of the 26 most common climate myths and misconceptions."). For those short on time (or who've been watching Fox Entertainment), the take-home message is this:

...a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences.

Travel tip - Get airline flight status

"Simply send a text message or e-mail to info@ezflt.com with the airline code and flight number and you receive back the status of the flight. It’s a great help when you are picking someone up at the airport . . ."
- Bob Fyfe

"(They say it works with all U.S. carriers except Jet Blue and Southwest ('coming soon') and major overseas carriers.)
I just sent ezflt an email with AA 1197 in the subject line - nothing more - and moments later got back:

From: ATL
Sch: Jul 24 8:10am
Act: Jul 24 8:07am
Gt: T9

To: DFW
Sch: Jul 24 9:20am
Act: Jul 24 9:16am
Gt: C27/C
Bag Clm: C26

As you know, American = AA, Delta = DL, Continental = CO, United = UA, Northwest = NW, and so on."
- Andrew Tobias

Of course, pretty soon this may be moot.