Posted 12:56 PM by Floyd

John Edwards is guest-blogging over at Lawrence Lessig's site. Lessig has previously hosted Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich. Edwards has a good writing voice, and an easy casual style that works well in the context of a blog.

I was reading this post and noticed a catch-phrase which is a staple of Democrats:

Everyone knows how the tech boom of the late nineties created wealth for Americans. But today, we’re seeing a very different trend: high-tech jobs moving overseas to countries like India. In every state where I campaign, I meet people who feel like they did everything they were supposed to do--like staying in school and getting high-level skills--and yet they are still losing work as their jobs leave America.

(Boldface mine.)

"Did everything they were supposed to do." That really bugs me. Life is not a closed environment like a classroom or a sporting match. Sometimes doing "what you are supposed to do" doesn't work. You have to deal with that. I live in Silicon Valley, and there are lots of people who didn't do what they were supposed to do. They did something better.

"Doing what you are supposed to do" doesn't just stifle innovation. It's dangerous. Imagine a French army officer in 1940: "The Germans have taken Paris? How is that possible? We did everything we were supposed to do!"

Posted 4:33 PM by Floyd

Baseball link: Bryan Smith of Wait 'Til Next Year analyzes the Oakland A's potential offseason moves in an "Organizational Meeting" with the Elephants in Oakland blogger.

Posted 11:02 AM by Floyd

Woodside High School, which is at the western edge of Redwood City and is about eight miles down Route 84 from me, has cancelled the remainder of its high school football season:

The principal of Woodside High School, furious after some players on the school's football team chanted obscenities at their coach as he entered the locker room after yet another loss, has canceled the remainder of the school's already dismal football season.

School officials called off the season after a team meeting Monday, when the players refused to name their compatriots who had led a locker-room chant.

On Friday evening, after Woodside's 30-12 home loss to Terra Nova High School of Pacifica, Woodside head coach Packy Moss walked into the locker room,
accompanied by a parent of one of his players. Suddenly, a handful of Woodside players shouted "f -- Packy" several times.

Here's the view of one of the players:

"I think they overreacted, and now it shows our school quits," said senior Jon Blekis, 17, a linebacker and defensive captain. "It was inappropriate (for those players) to do the chants, but to handle that by canceling the season, we're extremely disappointed with that."

Hey kid, you're going to be quoted in the newspaper, so don't sound like a sullen teenager, okay?

"The players respected the coaches for half of the season, but the coaches dissed the players, and it eventually blew up," said Blekis.

Too late!

You can always count of the support of parents when disciplining unruly students, right?

Roger Vaught, president of Woodside's booster club, agreed that the matter should have been dealt with among the team. Vaught, whose son was suspended from school for a day and never returned after a disciplinary action, said the problem had emerged because Moss never acquired the respect of his players.

"For any coach, you have to earn respect of your kids," said Vaught, who also coaches middle school football. "He didn't earn their respect. There was not one kid that looked up to him."

Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the booster club!

Oh well, at least the Woodside players aren't stuffing pine cones up other kids' asses.

Posted 10:24 AM by Floyd

There are nine candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination. Intelligence adds, but stupidity multiplies. Excerpts from a Washington Post article on yesterday's debate in Boston:

Former Vermont governor Howard Dean was harshly rebuked by several of his Democratic rivals here Tuesday night for offending whites and blacks alike by recently saying he wanted "to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."

...

Dean, saying "I'm no bigot," refused to apologize and told his rivals the Democrats will never recapture the White House until they find a way to appeal to working-class white voters in the South. "I make no apologies for reaching out to poor whites," he said.

But:

Dean got the last word, calling the Confederate flag "a loathsome symbol," and said he had proved he is without bigotry by signing a bill authorizing civil unions as governor of Vermont.

"Hi. I'm Howard Dean and I'm here to reach out to you. You have a loathsome symbol on your pickup truck. Any questions?"

After the Democrats dealt with substantive issues, such as whether South Carolina, Georgia, et al should be allowed to secede from the union and enslave negros, it was time to remind voters of the donkeys' Arkansas albatross:

Every candidate was asked a techie version of the famous boxers-or-briefs question posed to Bill Clinton in 1992: "PC or Macintosh?" Most chose the personal computer. And Kerry was asked if he would have pulled Red Sox starting pitcher Pedro Martinez in Game 7 of the American League championship, which Boston lost; he would have.

Second-guessing Grady Little is appropriate for an anonymous nobody calling into a radio sports talk show. For a presidential candidate to do so shows a complete lack of gravitas and class. Kerry's opinion of himself is no better than mine.

Posted 1:46 PM by Floyd

Last week I posted a link to Infinite Monkey Ben's harrowing brush with the San Bernardino fire. Though he fled the advancing flames, he returned to find his home miraculously intact . The Cub Reporter blogger was not so lucky:

Well, my dad finally made it up to Cuyamaca and confirmed our fears -- both our houses have been completely destroyed.

Amazingly, it looks like my truck and my car are both OK, so at least we have that. We fly back home tomorrow and we'll figure out what to do next.

Thanks to everyone who sent best wishes and prayers. It means a lot. Hopefully I'll be able to get some Cubs content up soon to help take my mind off of everything.

(Link via the excellent Baseball Musings.)

Posted 10:20 AM by Floyd

Special Agent Negative 179 reports on the San Francisco mayoral election. Just how extreme is the city of, uh, brotherly love?

It generally looks as though Gavin Newsom (or, as some guerilla signs around town put it, "NewSCUM") is going to win the mayoral race, and if you go to his site, you'll see these endorsements:

Gavin Newsom has won the endorsements of leaders and organizations representing the broad spectrum of San Francisco. Newsom is endorsed by Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi and Jackie Speier. He is strongly supported by labor organizations such as the SF Building and Construction Trades Council, Laborers Local 261 and IBEW 1245 as well as business groups such as the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, BOMA and the SF Association of Realtors.

Newsom has won the strong support of public safety organizations as well as neighborhood and community groups like Rescue Muni, the City Democratic Club, Latinos Political Action Committee and Plan C.


Of course, on the San Francisco spectrum, this means that he's been universally derided as a right-wing fascist with fairly open plans to pave the roads with thinly-sliced homeless people.

This is not an isolated occurence. When Willie Brown was speaker of the California Assembly, he was a tax-and-spend liberal who was the Republicans' most hated opponent. The 1990 term limit initiative was aimed squarely at Brown, and succeeded in driving him from state office. In 1995 he ran for mayor in San Francisco and was elected. For awhile Brown had the supervisors under his thumb, but he was too conservative for the tastes of the city and eventually lost his grip over the board. When Brown ran for reelection, he was endorsed by the San Francisco Republican party!

And before Brown there was Frank Jordan and his "Matrix" program, which as I remember was designed to annoy the homeless in the hopes that they might gather in some other metropolis. Jordan was openly reviled as a fascist. He was of course a pro-gay liberal Democrat, and during his reelection campaign made a radio broadcast while naked in the shower. That's the kind of conservatives they have in San Francisco.

But enough about the mainstream. San Francisco has the best joke candidates in the country. 1999 saw the mayoral candidacy of the funk singer SuperBooty. SuperBooty! Evan didn't mention SuperBooty, so I assume he was not on the ballot. (If he was, and Evan didn't vote for him -- well, I hope it doesn't come to that.)

Did I mention that SuperBooty was the Reform Party nominee?

Posted 9:22 PM by Floyd

In the aftermath of the vast destructive fires in San Diego and San Bernardino, there has been a lot of talk about how the residents of these areas are idiots for building their houses in fire-prone habitats. I present a sample of such opinion.

First, from today's San Jose Mercury News letters page:

Though the fires are still burning in Southern California, it's not too soon to point fingers at the causes of this human and environmental tragedy.

Aside from the alleged arsonists and a careless hunter who may have started some of the wild fires, public officials and real estate developers share a major portion of the blame. It's obvious that there are lands in California wholly unsuited for homes and other infrastructure. Building homes on the edges of forest lands is foolish. Building so-called dream homes in the middle of those forests is incomprehensible.

Why is it allowed to happen? Why aren't there any restrictions on development within and adjacent to fire-prone areas?

Time and time again fires ravage California communities. When the fires are out and the embers cool, rebuilding takes place, setting the stage for yet another tragedy. When will we ever learn?

Anthony Stegman
San Jose

Environmentalists are commonly criticized for advocating for stronger controls on growth and for fighting diligently to limit sprawl. Well, the disaster taking place in Southern California would not be occurring if citizens and their elected representatives would stop subsidizing sprawl into areas that simply should not be developed.

...

California is destined to suffer these and even worse disasters in the future unless we all take the questions of unlimited growth and sprawl much more seriously.

David Drake
Ben Lomond

(Ben Lomond, for those of you who don't know Northern California geography, is a small town in the hills above Santa Cruz -- a heavily forested region.)

We all feel bad for the people in Southern California who have lost their homes and more importantly the families of those who have lost their lives in the terrible fires.

I know it is great to look out over all of the beautiful forests, but you have to be a moron to build a house right in the middle of a forest. I see many of the people whose houses have burned down are vowing to rebuild in the same spot with the insurance money they are going to collect.

Guess what will happen to your own homeowners' insurance premium because of these burned-down houses. It is surely going up so these people can have million-dollar houses in the middle of a forest.

Jim Carlisle
Cupertino

A few days ago the Merc ran an op-ed by Frances Dinkelspiel:

We manage to deny danger . . . for awhile
LIVING IN THE HILLS MAKES US HAPPY, BUT IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE
By Frances Dinkelspiel

...

It's been more than 12 years since my home burned in the Oakland Hills fire, and while I've rebuilt my life and cluttered my house with too many things, I still haven't completely relaxed. I live with a permanent edge of tension, an awareness of disaster much keener than before. In the fall, I fear fire. During the rest of the year, I am wary of earthquakes.

Built on disaster

I was born in San Francisco and am a fifth-generation Californian, but it was only after the fire that I realized this state is built on disaster. San Francisco has been engulfed in flames seven times since the Gold Rush. Parts of Berkeley and Oakland have burned twice; Mill Valley has burned once. Numerous other communities have also been lost to earthquakes.

...

Of course the answer is not to build on the edge of wilderness. No one should be living in houses tucked among forests, on top of winding, inaccessible roads. There should be a clean edge between city and country, a defensible line to prevent fires of this magnitude.

But just as those Midwesterners who refuse to move from the flood-prone Mississippi and who instead build levees and dikes to keep back the waters, we Californians won't do what makes sense, but what makes us happy. And that means living in the hills, tucked among the trees, in areas that are not fire-safe, but are beautiful.

The state's inhabitants have always looked at the land as something to conquer, something to subjugate to man's will. We have diverted rivers, denuded mountains of their trees and sprayed jets of water into hills to uncover hidden gold. There's no reason to think that this aspect of our nature will change any time soon.

...

It's something residents of California have to accept. We manage to deny it for years at a time, but then disaster erupts again, just as it has in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego counties. We watch helplessly as the flames burn and destroy, and feel despair for those who have died. We shouldn't be surprised. Natural forces are the true masters of the state.

The letters I quoted were criticisms of others' behavior. Dinkelspiel's essay by contrast is a peculiar type of self-criticism. The author pretends to criticize herself, but really asserts her superiority by criticizing all mankind. Such works vary with the fashion of the times. The 19th century version of Dinkelspiel would have told us that we were doomed because we sin, and that God is the master of our fates. Now Gaia has supplanted Yahweh, and Dinkelspiel indicts us for offending Mother Earth.

And yet all the people I have quoted are wildly overstating the danger that wildfires present to Californians. Twelve years ago, a fire in the Oakland hills burned about a thousand homes. The Southern California fires have burned a few thousand homes. California has more than thirty million people. Let us say that there are 100,000 homes in areas of "high fire danger". If each home had an average lifespan of 100 years, then 1000 homes would wear out every year and need to be replaced.

Dinkelspiel goes even further off the deep end by listing every natural disaster that has ever occurred in the Golden State. "San Francisco has been engulfed in flames seven times since the Gold Rush" is a laughable misrepresentation of the historical record, as the last major conflagration in that city occurred, oh, 97 years ago. Dinkelspiel also invokes the spectre of earthquakes. Again, when the cold facts are viewed, the danger of earthquakes is negligible. Major earthquakes occur once every decade or so. A few dozen people die. Some small proportion of property is damaged (of course, because the state is so wealthy, even a tiny fraction can run into the billions of dollars). A fraction of one metropolitan area's commuters are inconvenienced until roads are repaired. Easterners have a smug attitude about the foolish Californians' propensity to live where the ground shakes. But it is likely that a New England winter would cause us more hardship and inconvenience than the amortized damage of earthquakes. Again, run the numbers: Given a population of 30 million, four hundred thousand people die every year and some one hundred thousand dwellings need to be replaced.

Dinkelspiel's essay is even weirder when you consider that it is not just a criticism of human beings, but of all living things. All animals subjugate their environment to their will to the extent that it is possible for them to do so. All living things inhabit areas that are potentially dangerous but also sustain life. (I doubt that a fox or deer would enjoy being transported from the San Bernardino forests to the Mojave desert, the considerably fewer number of fires in the latter area notwithstanding.)

When you think about it, Dinkelspiel's argument is that a living thing should choose only those habitats that can remain static for all eternity. What a bizarre misunderstanding of the dynamism of nature!

* * * * * *

It is interesting to read Jim Carlisle's complaint about the effect of the fires on insurance customers: Guess what will happen to your own homeowners' insurance premium because of these burned-down houses. It is surely going up so these people can have million-dollar houses in the middle of a forest. It's obvious that Carlisle, like so many people, have no conception of the nature and purpose of an insurance agency.

If insurers were allowed to do their job, then the effect of these fires on you and me would be absolutely nothing. The function of an insurance agency is to calculate and assess risk, and the risk of a non-forest-inhabiting policyholder has not changed in the slightest. It is the premiums of the people who live in dangerous areas that should sharply increase. But of course that would conflict with the bleeding-heart belief that insurance companies should act as a welfare organization. As Matt Welch noted in last week's Hit and Run:

... natural disasters and bad public policy go together like drought and fire. There will be plenty of government actions to second-guess in the wake of what is being called the worst inferno in modern California history; near the top of my list is the 1968 state law that specifically orders insurance companies to pool together and offer homeowner policies to people who live in high-risk brush fire zones, a non-market last resort enjoyed by 20,000 people, most of whom live in the foothills of Southern California.