Month: August 2005

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Gracious, Gracious George

The confidence of a man who, on a do-over, won 50.7 percent of ballots cast by those who bothered to vote: First he says he’s got lots of political capital to spend. And now that the public is feeling less keen about embracing his special gift to posterity, the Iraq War and Constitutional Convention, he graciously allows he respects the rights of those who disagree with him, like Cindy Sheehan:

” I strongly support her right to protest. There’s a lot of people protesting, and there’s a lot of points of view about the Iraq war. As you know, in Crawford last weekend there were people from both sides of the issue, or from all sides of the issue there to express their opinions.”

That’s the thing about democracy: We prevent the majority — like the rabble who really aren’t interested any more in getting up every day to the news that 10 or 20 or 30 more people have been blown up since we went to bed and that our sponsored group of Iraqi civics students still can’t write a pretend constitution despite the fact we’ve dropped $200 billion or whatever to set them up in business — we prevent the impatient many from trampling the rights of the few; the rights of people like our president. And that’s another beauty of democracy, Bush style: If you win, you don’t need to worry about majorities, minorities, nothin’. You’re inside, and you got political capital to spend.

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More Fun with Chemtrails

Today’s installment: An Idaho weathercaster, Scott Stevens, who has started a site dedicated to recording all the chemtrail activity he sees and that the many chemtrail investigators everywhere send him pictures of.

This is a guy who has studied the weather and makes a living standing up acting like he’s forecasting the highs and lows and storms and fair weather for the next few days. And he’s come up with his own interesting theory about the supposedly odd behavior and increasing incidence of jet condensation trails: At least some of the contrails are just contrails. But the planes that are leaving them behind are doing atmospheric research in conjunction with the development of some type of energy weapons that will be used, among other things, to manipulate the weather.

Of course, there’s more to the story than that. Stevens links to a site that contains a long Q and A with a chemtrail expert that tells all, or mostly all, about what’s going on: The trails are part of a global effort to disperse a variety of materials that will create The Shield — a barrier meant to combat meant to combat the effects of global warming. The reason we don’t know about any of this is it’s secret; and it’s secret because … well, let the experts tell you:

“Due to the severity of the situation it is mandatory to maintain public calm for as long as possible. The Earth is dying. Humanity is on the road to extinction – without the Shield mankind will die off with in 20 to 50 years. Most people alive today could live to see this extinction take place.”

Twenty to 50 years? Why are we bothering with Social Security? Or Iraq? Of course, the government is probably undertaking those projects for show — just to keep our minds off the really important stuff that’s happening “in plane sight,” as Scott Stevens says. He also urges his readers to “demand an accounting from your government, now. I know that they can’t believe they have been able to keep this secret for this long.”

OK — besides the principle of Occam’s Razor, here’s my problem with this as with so many other conspiracy theories: It all goes back to the government. Not that the government’s not capable of some secret double-dealing. But the historic examples of “the government” — any government — pulling off the kind of massive undertaking without alerting the world in general that something big is going on are rare. People blab. Even the Manhattan Project was infiltrated by Soviet spies. And once an atomic bomb was actually detonated in New Mexico, it was just a matter of time before word of what was happening down there got to the outside world (in practice, the secret only needed to be kept for about three weeks before the whole world knew we had the bomb).

But I’m digressing again.

The point is, the same government that — just a couple exhibits here — can’t figure out how to put armor on Humvees, that has blown up two spaceship crews in the last two decades and can’t seem to fly the shuttle anymore without getting in trouble — the same government most people don’t think competent to fill a pothole — is somehow credited with unerring use of its vast omnipotence to carry out its secret ends. Of course, there’s no paradox at all: the the Humvees and the Columbia blowing up are just part of the sleight of hand.

[Actually, I’m late, very late to the chemtrail picnic. USA Today was on the case in March 2001. Now they’re just part of the conspiracy, too.]

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Memorial

The weekend’s major activity was a trip up to the Sierra foothillls, near Grass Valley, to go to a memorial for our former neighbor Bret Tilson, who died of cancer at age 68 earlier this month. I think the main reason we went was to see his wife, Christine, who went through a rough couple of years with Bret sick. Although they lived next door for 13 years — they moved in about six months after we did — I never felt I got to know Bret very well. He avoided crowds, partly because he was sort of shy and partly because he had suffered profound hearing loss and just couldn’t understand what people were saying when they all started talking at once.

His work — he was involved in advanced mathematics research most of his adult life — also might have made him something of a recluse. Christine’s sister said that once, in a show of interest in Bret’s work, she asked him if he could explain the work he was doing. “He looked at me, and didn’t say anything. He looked at me and looked at me and looked at me, and finally he said, ‘I don’t think so.’ ” He wasn’t putting her on. The dissertation for his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley was titled, “Group-Complexity and p-Length of Finite Semigroups.” With another mathematician, he’d been working on another paper that had been published and presented over the past several years, “Categories as Algebras, II.” An advanced math illiterate, the very first sentence in the abstract throws me: “A theory of the semidirect product of categories and the derived category of a category morphism is presented.”

So, yes, he was kind of a stranger to us, though extremely friendly whenever we had a talk over the back fence or commiserated about computer problems. But really, we got to know him better yesterday than we had in all the years he was next door. Just one thing that astonished me: His parents were killed in a plane crash when he was 18 and had just finished his first year at MIT. He had three much younger brothers — age 4, 6 and 8, I think — and he somehow managed to keep them all together and more or less raise them by himself with help from various relatives. Maybe people always rise to the occasion — but hey, no they don’t; a pretty amazing feat for an 18-year-old.

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An Important Thing You Must Know

Chemtrails

A special message to the tiny sliver of humanity that reaches this dust-bunny-ridden corner of the World Wide Web: condensation trails aren’t what you think they are. For months, I’ve seen the mysterious stickers up all over town referring to "chemtrails." Probably some sort of conspiracy crap, right? But it wasn’t until I heard people talking about them at last week’s peace vigil and subdued hootenanny that I did what one of the stickers suggested and Googled "chemtrails." You should be glad I did — if it’s not too late.

You think condensation trails are … condensation trails. Caused by the near instantaneous freezing of water vapor in aircraft exhaust at high altitude. You might call them contrails for short.

But whatever nifty terminology you use, if you believe that they are just the product of some sort of garden-variety jet exhaust and cold air, then you’re just a patsy for a huge government conspiracy.

Open your eyes! "Contrails," my … you know … bum! They’re really chemtrails. An evil, or at least unwholesome, rain unleashed by whoever unleashes things like that. The United States government, for sure. Could be the United Nations. And United Airlines is probably getting a piece of the action — getting secret payments to use their harmless-looking though increasingly unpleasant-to-ride-in airliners as long-distance crop dusters. We can only guess who else. (Can I get odds on Satan?)

And what’s the crop. We are? Capacity for independent thought immobilized by the vapors wafting down from on high. Or maybe the effect is physical. No one seems to know. Yet.

 

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GoogleCrime

Another incarnation of Google Maps: IncidentLog.com. The site takes preliminary police reports from several dozen participating jurisdictions and maps their locations and details. Here’s the report for Berkeley (Google defeats my feeble efforts to make a screenshot of one of their maps — hey, sounds like a weekend project). Anyway, it’s a useful display if your thinking about what the ne’er-do-wells are doing in your town (we recently had a couple of daylight stickups within a block of our place). The limitation right now is that so few localities are listed, maybe because relatively few offer readily usable data.

OK, so poking around, I see a reference to ChicagoCrime.org, which does essentially the same thing as the IncidentLog does elsewhere. ChicagoCrime has a new Google Maps gadget that essentially combines the routemaking feature on Gmaps Pedometer and the site’s crime database. The resulting tool lets you plot a route anywhere in the city, set the parameters for time and type of crime, then get a Google map showing all the bad stuff that happens along the path of your evening constitutional. When you reach a danger spot, you can break into a run, resulting in fitness and personal safety benefits, or at least a good sweat.

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GoogleWalk

Even though I love Google Maps, I found a flaw in the service: For whatever reason, the maps don’t always show rivers. If you call up a map of the Quad Cities, no problem. The Mississsippi and Rock rivers are depicted in beautiful traditional mapper’s blue (if that’s not an actual color, it should be). Now check out Princeton, California, one of America’s favorite former ferry crossings; if you click on the satellite image of the view, though, the Sacramento River pops into view.

What gives? I have no idea. On the maps, the river just kind of disappears about 75 miles north of Sacramento for some reason.

But what I really wanted to point out was a pretty cool application built on Google maps, the Gmaps Pedometer, that lets you chart your walks — the app is really designed for urban hiking, because it relies on drawing straight lines from point to point — and calculates the distance you’ve covered. Here’s a picture of Wednesday’s rambles in a well-known western town. You could put it to the test in Chicago and Brooklyn, but maybe not in neighborhoods that didn’t exist a year ago.

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Berkeley Vigil

Vigil

About 8:30 tonight, corner of Solano and The Alameda. (Yes, auslanders, The Alameda.) The MoveOn site said 500 people had signed up to join the vigil at this location. We got there about an hour after it started, and there might have been a total of 250 or 300 on the four corners of the intersection, though I’m a big crowd overestimator from way back. It was a social occasion for lots of people. I ran into an old colleague from The Examiner, and Kate met up with a group of her Oakland teacher buddies.

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Worth Promoting …

Last night, I started to write a long, drawn out something about Cindy Sheehan and about the vigils being held across the country tonight. Well, without going the long, drawn-out route: Go out to one of the vigils. Sure it’s political. But regardless of what you think about the war, it’s a pretty direct and visible way of expressing concern about its human cost (easy for me to say — it looks like Berkeley will be full of vigils this evening). And not that this is of any practical value, really, at this late moment: If you want to find a vigil near you, check the directory on MoveOn.org.

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Dustbin

Listening to the A’s game tonight (they lost, and having lost three out of four they’re close to officially cooled off from their long, long run). Sammy Sosa was up for the Orioles, and announcer Ken Korach observed that with the Cubs last year, he was 2 for 9 against the A’s. Then he said to Bill King, who’s been doing the A’s games since 1981 (before that, he did Oakland Raiders and Golden State Warriors games, and was the best play-by-play announcer I’ve ever heard in both football and basketball; he started as a broadcaster in Pekin, Illinois, in the late ’40s, one-time home of the Chinks (the nickname of the Pekin High teams) and late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen. …)

How easily I digress.

Then Korach said to King, speaking of the A’s interleague series against the Cubs last year, “But you wouldn’t remember that, Bill.” King hates interleague play, period. He said something like, “No, no I wouldn’t. They play those games and then they go into the dustbin of history.” Korach: “Dustbin of history — I like that.” I was thinking, how many baseball announcers out there are quoting — who? Marx? no, Trotsky — and how many people are making the connection? I’ll bet, but do nothing to back up my wager, which will involve neither doughnuts nor dollars that King knows just where the phrase comes from.

And that concludes this broadcasting day.

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Miscellaneous Mundane Inquiry

I just found myself using the phrase “I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that. …” I wasn’t really betting anything. But eventually my brain said, “Dollars to donuts? Where’d that come from?”

The personal answer is, who knows? I don’t think anyone in the family had a habit of saying it, so it must be the product of my lifetime immersion in popular entertainments.

But in an “origin of the phrase” sense, it’s easy to find what purport to be answers: here (sort of official looking), here, and here among many others, though none really get beyond the obvious meaning of the phrase to tell you much about how it came into use.

(On the inevitable donuts vs. doughnuts debate: Google shows 21,800 hits for “dollars to donuts” and 11,300 for “dollars to doughnuts.”)