Category: Current Affairs

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‘Urgent Fundraising Appeal’

Here’s an email I found in my spam-infested inbox this morning. The subject line reads “CA High Speed Trains – URGENT FUNDRAISING APPEAL” (the all-caps are in the original):

“Dear Dan Brekke,

You are being sent this email because you have been identified as a business leader in your community of BERKELEY by Californians for High Speed Trains. If you would not like to receive future emails please click the link at the bottom of this email.

Please go to our website to view the latest newsletter.

http://www.californiahighspeedtrains.com/newsletter/?mail=302004&email_id=2

Thank you!

The message came from a Gmail account, yesonprop1a@gmail.com.

To start at the beginning, we have a $10 billion bond measure on the November ballot to help fund a high-speed rail service between Northern and Southern California. This email purports to be a fundraising appeal for the yes side.

But right off the top–the email address, the subject line, the lack of detailed information in the note, and the absurd reference to me as a business leader in Berkeley–this looks and sounds like a scam. After checking the whois record for californiahighspeedtrains.com, which shows the domain was registered in May through a third party in Arizona, I checked out the newsletter the mail pointed me to.

The newsletter also raises alarms: the name of the mayor of San Francisco is misspelled. And the site contains this use of experimental English: “Californians Have A History of Supporting Project Like High Speed Rail. From their initial support of the Transcontinental Railroad to Their support of the troops during WWII.” At the very least, the newsletter was slapped together in a hurry.

I looked at the “donate” link in the newsletter. It does indeed send you to a donation page on a site called Californians for High-Speed Trains.” The page contains blanks for all your personal data, including credit card number. But get this: It’s not encrypted. So visitors are being invited to send their information unsecured and in the clear.

I checked the California Secretary of State websites, and there is in fact a group called Californians for High-Speed Trains. Their official site appears to be the same one mentioned in the email. The head of the group is listed as a Robert Pence of Sacramento, and looking him up shows that he has served as a staffer to the state Legislature and has been in the “communications” business for the last four years. He’s been listed as a principal supporter or opponent of other state initiative campaigns before this one.

The Secretary of State’s Cal-Access site has a listing for the group. The organization claims to have had $67,000 in donations from since January 1 to June 30 and to have racked up $111,000 in expenses between April and June. Of the early donations, $53,000 came from a predecessor group, Californians for a Safe and Reliable High-Speed Rail, which appears to have shut down and turned over its bank account to the new outfit. The other 15 grand in early contributions came from a handful of small donations, including $3,000 each from Hewlett-Packard and Oracle. (Just yesterday, the group filed a report saying it had gotten $30,000 from New York engineering and construction firm Parsons Brinckerhoff. What in the world could their interest in the initiative be?)

The expenditures are interesting: $88,000 of the $111,000 spent has gone to half a dozen separate campaign consultants in Sacramento; the biggest amount, $35,000, went to the firm of Townsend, Raimundo, Besler & Usher. The expenditure report also lists $15,000 owed to a political web services firm called Campaign Advantage, part of a company based in Bethesda, Maryland.

I’ve got some calls out about where that mail came from and am trying to find out why the campaign would have created an unencrypted donations page. I’ll post whatever answers I get. The bottom line, for now, is that Californians for High-Speed Trains sure looks like Full Employment for Consultants Inc. For an issue that has a lot of high-profile official support, including that of our governor, this campaign committee seems to be nothing more than a cottage industry for a bunch of Sacramento hangers-on.

[Update 11:26 a.m.: I just got hold of Robert Pence, the head of Californians for High-Speed Trains. He confirmed the campaign sent out the email and said he believes that the email was the work of Campaign Advantage. He said he doesn’t know about the unencrypted donations page. He promised the campaign’s media person, Greg Larson, would be in touch. More soon.]

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‘Este Poderoso y Peligroso Huracán’

Cubagustav

Hurricane Gustav turned out to non-calamitous to the United States. Its greatest fury was focused on western Cuba; the storm was a Category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds up to 150 mph, when it hit the island. A few days before the storm, I overheard a colleague who has been to Cuba more than once say that the government doesn’t mess around there when it comes to getting people out of harm’s way of a lethal-looking storm. An evacuation is ordered, and that’s it.

That doesn’t do much about property damage, though, and Gustav devastated the areas it struck. A country as rich and principled as ours can’t be caught aiding people ruled by a dictator, so the only help the United States has offered has been a relative pittance, $100,000, to be transmitted to aid groups rather than the Cuban government. Cuba’s answer: thanks but no thanks–if you really want to help, lift restrictions on travel and trade so we can buy what we need. (Yes–both the offer and response were political. But you have to wince a little when you read that the vast and boundlessly prosperous nation of East Timor kicked in $500,000 to help the Cuban recovery effort. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t have strong principles like ours.)

Cuba’s facing worse now: Another Category 4 storm, Hurricane Ike, is nearing. If it follows the forecast track, it may travel much of the length of the island (here’s something I didn’t know: Cuba is 700 miles long from Guantanamo in the east to Pinar del Rio, the province most heavily damaged by Hurricane Gustav, to the west; the greatest north-south width is about 100 miles; its area is 42,803 square miles, virtually identical to the state of Virginia. But I digress). The official word on Ike, quoted in the post title, is that it’s a powerful and dangerous hurricane.

Ike is expected make landfall in Guantanamo Province (but not in the immediate vicinity of our navy and detention base there), then spend 48 hours crossing from the northern to the southern coast, then curving back to the northwest and out over the Gulf of Mexico. With a path like that, it’s easy to imagine that it will affect virtually all of the island’s 11.4 million people.

I didn’t start out to write a plea for aid to Cuba–or for Haiti or the other islands and nations devastated by the recent storms–but how can one avoid it after you start to look at what’s going on. Donating to the agencies that might help is not as straightforward as going to the American Red Cross. But there are options:

The Canadian Red Cross, for one, is active in providing relief to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean. It takes donations from us Yanks.

I also did come across a current list of U.S.-based agencies that take donations and operate in Cuba (see message 17 in the thread). Without having done any homework, they all sound reputable.

More later. (Oh, and that picture at the top: It’s a NASA image of Cuba after Hurricane Gustav passed. If you click on the image to look at the larger version(s), you can see the Isle of Youth off the southern coast, which was devastated by the storm. The milky turquoise color along the southern shoreline is sand stirred up the hurricane’s passage.)

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Ike and the Stormettes

Storms

That’s a National Hurricane Center image of currently active tropical-type storms: Tropical Depression Gustav is parked over Texarkana. Out in the Caribbean and Atlantic, Tropical Storms Hanna, Ike, and Josephine (from west to east) are conga-lining toward the North America neighborhood. Those latter three storms are all expected to reach hurricane status before making landfall … somewhere.

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Word of the Day

It’s Schadenfreude. My own spin on the definition: the bitter joy one takes in the suffering of others.

I loved Obama’s take on the Palin misfortune: back off and let the family take care of its misfortune in private. Of course, the world little noted his injunction, let alone remembered it, and the hits just keep on coming. Governor Palin’s embarrassing moment with her daughter’s pregnancy–and hey, it’s Senator McCain’s moment, too–is really the least of her, or his, problems. She’s just a Christmas stocking full of early holiday surprises. See TPM Election Central for a handy list of the pies that hit her (and Team McCain) in the face over the last couple of days. My particular favorite, though it’s of no particular importance, is her giggling on a radio talk show while the host-lout calls one of her opponents “a bitch.” Who knew Christian zealots could be such fun?

Anyway, as Labor Day drew into Labor Day night, I recognized the guilty truth that it’s kind of fun to see a Republican candidate driven from pillar to post over some of the same kinds of issues–including a matter that is arguably private–for which Democrats have been harried for years by the self-anointed saints of the right.

Enjoy your time in the spotlight, governor. If the tide keeps running this way, you just bought yourself a ticket back to Juneau.

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Gustav

Here’s what the National Hurricane Center has to say (public advisory and forecast discussion) about the storm melodramatically (and cross-dressingly) labeled “the mother of all storms” by the mayor of New Orleans. (How many people remember the origin of that “mother of” formulation? I think it’s time to retire the phrase and try some new personifying descriptions. A hurricane of Gustav’s reputation could be called anything from “unwelcome visitor” to “mannerless brute.” Any other suggestions? While we’re at it, we’d like also recommend a lifetime media ban on use of “The Big Easy” to describe New Orleans. If some hard-up news writers need a colorful handle for the city, let them use “The City that Care Forgot.”)

What’s it like down there in hurricane country? A blogger acquaintance I’ve followed for quite some time is named Rob. He lives near Bush, Louisiana, about 50 miles north of New Orleans. His blog is called Crabapple Lane, and he’s reporting on his preparations for the storm–including explaining why he’s choosing to ride it out at home rather evacuate. It’s compelling, immediate stuff. Thanks, Rob–we’re pulling for you.

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Game Token

Venturing into deep waters, but here goes: I think it’s safe to say that with Sarah Palin on the ticket, Team McCain has all but sewn up the battle for Alaska’s three electoral votes.

Palin’s sudden elevation from obscure environmental menace to No. 2 on the ticket is the most surprising rise to national prominence since Bush II named Harriet Myers to the Supreme Court. It’s reminiscent, too, of the cynicism that led Bush I to nominate Clarence Thomas to the court.

In the Myers case, the choice met with derision: Mr. President, you’re asking us to believe you have searched our great land high and low and that this is the best candidate for our most august tribunal? Of course, under this president, the notion that competence is a prerequisite, or even desirable, for high office has taken a beating. But in the Myers case, the howls were so loud and insistent from all quarters that the president was forced to let his friend withdraw herself from consideration for the court.

McCain’s choice of Palin provokes the Myers reaction all over again. Senator McCain, you’ve combed the ranks of GOP officeholders everywhere–and even a non-GOP one in the repugnant person of Joe Lieberman–and this is the person you want us to believe is the best-qualified to vault into high office?

OK–if you say so.

As even the dimmest pundit can see and as Palin herself made clear in her debut, she’s on the ticket as a magnet for the legions of Hillary Clinton voters so crushed by Obama winning the Democratic nomination that they’re going to vote for McCain. For them, Palin would clinch the deal. Or maybe McCain and his brain trust believe that everyone who voted for Clinton voted for her because she was a woman. Run out a new body in a pantsuit, put some of the same rhetoric on stage, and see whether anyone notices the difference.

We’ll see how that works, I guess. Meantime, from the Republicans, the party that has fought affirmative action at every turn, arguing that it begets tokenism and promotes the unqualified over the qualified, we get another bizarre episode of tokenism to ponder. When civil rights pioneer Thurgood Marshall died, they found a black man bent on reversing his legacy to take his seat on the Supreme Court. When Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the court, they suggested a woman without a scintilla of judicial experience or preparation to replace her. And now, to appeal to the partisans of Clinton–as steadfast an opponent of the GOP right as any Democrat–they put up a right-wing Republican.

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The Clinton Speech

Watching her speak at KQED over C-SPAN’s feed. Hell of a speech number one. Especially her asking her delegates whether they were in the race for her … or for all the things she want to stand for. The C-SPAN pictures are wonderful. So many of the women in the crowd look like they are hanging on every single world. Many of them are near tears and look almost stricken. If anyone can rally them, though, it’s this woman talking to them right now. There was a quick cutaway to Bill Clinton where he looked so proud and happy he might break down.

My mom–my mom would have loved to see this.

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Dogs, Wolves, Us

The New Scientist site is carrying a story headlined, “Dogs aren’t stupid wolves; they are much smarter.” Sadly, the oddly headlined story (“much smarter” than what? stupid wolves? whoa!) is just a come-on for a feature in the print edition of the magazine and only the first paragraphs appear online. But people aren’t stupid subscriber-sheep, and someone somewhere has seen fit to post the entire text of the article in a Usenet group.

The gist of the article is that dogs’ close association with humans over the last 100 centuries or so has endowed them with some “remarkable mental skills.”

“Domestic dogs evolved from grey wolves as recently as 10,000 years ago. Since

then their brains have shrunk, so that a wolf-sized dog has a brain around 10

per cent smaller than its wild ancestor. That was one

reason why animal behaviourists felt dogs were merely simple-minded wolves. It

has become clear, though, that despite the loss of brain volume, thousands of

years spent evolving alongside humans have had a striking effect on dog

cognition.

“For one thing, researchers are increasingly convinced that dogs must possess

some sense of right and wrong in order to negotiate the complex social world of

people. A pioneer in this area is Marc Bekoff from the University of Colorado at

Boulder, who has spent decades watching animals at play. He has championed the

idea that in many social species, including dogs, one of the functions of

rough-and-tumble play is to develop a rudimentary sense of morality.

“The fact that play rarely escalates into full-blown fighting shows that animals

abide by rules and expect others to do the same. In other words, they know right

from wrong. Bekoff argues that this is a survival adaptation that allows animals

to smoothly navigate other social interactions.

“Friederike Range from the University of Vienna, Austria, takes the concept of

dog morality even further. In a series of experiments, her team rewarded dogs

with a food treat if they held up a paw. They found that when a lone dog was

asked to give its paw but received no treat, it would persevere for the entire

experiment, which lasted 30 repetitions. However, if they tested two dogs

together but only rewarded one, the dog who missed out would make a big show of

being denied its treat and stop cooperating after just a few rounds. ‘Dogs show

a strong aversion to inequity,’ says Range. ‘I prefer not to call it a sense of

fairness, but others might.’ ”

Fascinating. I don’t know how the resident dog in these parts comes down on the fairness question. But he has shown a strong disapproval of profanity, which he no doubt has observed is associated with human emotional states he has no desire to be around.

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‘Ask the Powerful’

Blackboard082208

This comes by way of a fine Sacramento blog: a succinct democracy manifesto from Britain’s Tony Benn (who is he? Maybe a little like the Jim Hightower of British politics). There’s a story behind the blackboard presentation, too. Check it out. (And click the above for a larger image.)

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‘You Don’t Need to Know’

A nice entry on The New York Times Olympics blog on the hair’s-breadth finish in the men’s 100-meter butterfly that gave U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps his seventh gold medal in Beijing. The Times and its sister publication, the International Herald Tribune, tried to get underwater footage from the official timekeeper, Omega, that reportedly gave a clear view of the finish. At first Omega said the footage would be distributed. Then FINA, the body that oversees competitive swimming, said the news media would not be allowed to view the pictures. The explanation, as related by the Times, is a pretty good working definition of arrogance:

“[FINA’S Cornel] Marculescu said it was a matter of policy, and that the Serbian team [whose swimmer finished second] was satisfied with the ruling after seeing the images — so there is no need to share the images.

“[Asked] why FINA wouldn’t distribute the footage if it showed the margin conclusively. Marculescu said: “We are not going to distribute footage. We are not doing these kinds of things. Everything is good. What are you going to do with the footage? See what the Serbians already saw? It is clarified for us beyond any doubt.

“He’s the winner in any way. He’s the winner no doubt. Even if you could see the pictures, I don’ t know how you could use them.”

[By way of Pete in the comments: Sports Illustrated has the next-best thing to the official photos–an amazing underwater sequence showing the race’s final two meters or so.0

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