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.

Small, surreal world

Stephen Bechtel (Jr.) and I went to the same high school.


And on a related note - I sure wish The Thacher School in Ojai did a better job of instilling environmental consciousness in their graduates. Perhaps they do now, but 40-odd years ago they were dropping the ball.
(caveat: n=2, not much of a sample size)

[Upon reflection, I have removed some remarks that seem inappropriate]

That pesky gulag

(This post is moot, BTW. Just so you know...)

Back in 2004, the day after George W. Bush was elected to a second term, after I'd done my crying I wandered over to a neighbor-of-sorts who'd I assumed had voted for him, and asked, quietly, only half in jest - "Will you come visit me in the gulag?"

To my surprise he exploded. "You are so full of $%^&!"

At the time the overreaction baffled me. Now I think I understand better; and what's more, I could - conceivably - be headed there after all.

So, y'all, if I do go, I hope you'll feel free to drop by.
(either there or the place with the straightjackets, if I'm merely losing my marbles)


Bring books, please.

The problem with metaphors

The problem with thinking in metaphors, or rather with expressing your thoughts if you think in metaphors, is that if you have more than one thought they're likely modeled using incompatible metaphors which makes for a muddled mess of mixed metaphors when you try to put them into print.

That is all.

Flu news site, interpreted by experts

The public health blog Effect Measure at Scienceblogs.com is the go-to site for pig flu news and interpretation thereof.

Just so you know.

Update - the latest Effect Measure post is on naming the strain; contenders include Aporkalypse and Hamthrax.

Me, I'm sitting this one out, unless it becomes a lot more newsworthy.
(I devoted a lot of blog real estate to bird flu, back in the day, not, at that time, being clear about some of the factors that would preclude it from becoming another severe 1918-style pandemic; am now older and more jaded and have more important things to work on.)

FYI though - I had started a rather cool, intended-to-be-month-long "~90 years ago today" blog history series on the 1918 pandemic (albeit in Oct 2005 not 2008) but life and work got in the way of completing it. If someone wants to spend some pleasant, old-book-smelling afternoons in the historical library on Pine St, to take it through the rest of the month, it's a worthwhile project.
...especially if cranking through microfilm doesn't make you carsick.

What you can't say

I forgot how good this is.

It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.

Is our time any different?

...

Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?

I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself.

Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. ...

Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to. ...

Aphorisms on inactivism

...they've been piling up. Google will tell you where they came from.
(and fortunately, many of these are obsolete, in locales more culturally advanced than ours)

Global warming deniers are "like polar bears on shrinking real estate." *

It’s their point of view. Annoyance, not collaboration, is their idea of effective action.

It's a munitions factory for saturation bombing of any debate that might actually be interesting and useful. There’s no interest in acquiring knowledge. It’s all for politics.

Conspiracies happen all the time. But we deny this because of a classic American fallacy, born of our relative unconnectedness to the old world: what I like to call the fallacy of insufficient cynicism.

In this persistent and well-funded campaign of denial [the skeptics] have become interchangeable ornaments on the hood of a high-powered engine of disinformation. Their dissenting opinions are amplified beyond all proportion through the media while the concerns of the dominant majority of the world's scientific establishment are marginalized.

‘How can we expect Americans to know anything beyond what they happen to remember from science class? Journalists certainly don’t tell them.’

It is a belief that can gain consensus and then become a permanent cultural carbuncle.

It seems to me we should be using mole traps, and not mallets, as the whack-a-mole game is nonending.

One partisan can tie up a whole company of the enemy’s troops by sniping from good cover and forcing them to pay attention to him, while maneuvers are going on elsewhere.

I don't think these people who believe that stuff ... I think they're not really getting it from the print either. They're getting it from Fox News and, I've heard, from their ministers, at their churches.

[Elke] Weber’s research seems to help establish that we have a “finite pool of worry,” which means we’re unable to maintain our fear of climate change when a different problem ...comes along. ...And even if we could remain persistently concerned about a warmer world? Weber described what she calls a “single-action bias.” Prompted by a distressing emotional signal, we buy a more efficient furnace or insulate our attic or vote for a green candidate — a single action that effectively diminishes global warming as a motivating factor. And that leaves us where we started.

What too many people refuse to understand is that the global economy's existence depends upon the global environment, not the other way around.

Someone asked [Dr. James Hansen] what the most important thing to do is, what can we personally do to help stabilize climate, to "answer the call to action"--what is the most important lifestyle change?

Hansen's answer was unequivocal. Take part in the political process. Help make our democracy real. Hold our candidates accountable.

Keynes’s genius – a very English one – was to insist we should approach an economic system* not as a morality play but as a technical challenge.

it was that night, a year ago today, that provided the lesson - never let a setback wreck our spirits, and never presume it's as bad as your opponents tell you it is - and gave the opening for a "teaching moment" about the contagion that is panic and the antidote that is hope.

and of course

It's not enough to pull drowning victims out of the river; we need to walk back upstream and find out who's throwing them in.

Update, some more* -

A newspaper's main product is neither news nor information but influence.

...the strong version of the Copernican thesis - where ever you are is, by definition, unimportant.

Reality is that which, when you refuse to believe in it, doesn't go away.

It's clear that the body politic is subject to power disorders. By this I mean events where some person or group suddenly concentrates a lot of power and abuses it. Power disorders frequently come as a surprise, and cause a lot of damage.