Maybe it’s a slow news week, or maybe I’m just slow on the news this week, but nothing I want to talk about is especially topical. I guess the closest thing to current news is Governor Arnold’s big production about signing a bill that’s supposed to put less junk food and more nutritious food into the public schools. In general, that’s a good concept, and as a noted body builder, I imagine the governor knows a thing or two about nutrition. But it’s amazing how a little change of language can make such a big difference in what a sentence actually means. In a last minute modification, a bill which referred to "fresh" fruits and vegetables in 12 places ended up saying "nutritious" fruits and vegetables in those twelve references.

According to the SF Chronicle reporters who covered the story, the legislator who made this change, Abel Maldonado, was influenced by lobbyists for commercial food industries. Mostly, this bill was about the move to get the vending machines with high sugar products out of the schools, and ultimately, concerned parents can have a lot more influence on the menu at their local schools than any state legislation ever can have. But it’s worth a thought from all of us that the manufacturers of processed food would be paying enough attention to influence the deletion of the word "fresh" from this bill. It tells us that these manufacturers actually see themselves as competitors of fresh fruit and vegetables. There are plenty of legitimate uses for processed food, but being against fresh food is kind of like being against fresh air. People in southern California like to say they don’t trust any air they can’t see. Mr. Maldonado doesn’t trust any food that doesn’t contain additives you can’t pronounce.

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Here’s a juxtaposition of two little stories that say volumes about the criminal justice system. A 73 year old woman in Louisiana was arrested for looting because she stole some sausages from a flooded delicatessan. The younger people who were looting the same deli ran away, so the cops busted the old and slow one. She spent two weeks in jail because her people couldn’t make her $50,000 bail. The 21 year old son of the governor of Florida, John Bush, nephew of the guy who thinks he’s president, got himself arrested in Austin, Texas for drunk in public and resisting arrest the same day. His bail was $2500.

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This was hidden in the business section of the papers when it probably should have been on the front pages. Both Delta and Northwest airlines have filed bankruptcy petitions. Coming right on the heels of United’s widely reported stiffing of its retired employees, it’s starting to appear that the current methods of moving people from one place to another through the air may not be a profitable industry. Considering the current cost of gasoline, getting from place to place on the ground doesn’t look too promising, either. We all may have to just hunker down where we are.

For most of us, air travel is a luxury we use only occasionally. The bread and butter for the airlines lies in two places. On any given flight, most of the tickets were bought by the employers of the people in the seats. Out of pocket travelers aren’t really too important in the business plan. The other place the airlines make money is at the front of the airplane where people who have unlimited money are willing to pay for better food and a little leg room. Business travel is a dinosaur. People now can look each other in the eye and talk to each other electronically. They don’t need to get on airplanes to do business anymore. I suspect that the first class section will expand through the whole plane in the future. How will the rest of us get around? I don’t know, but if United, Delta and Northwest can’t figure it out, someone smarter probably will.

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Most people in this part of the world now use the Internet in one way or another, directly or indirectly, and most of us know it as wide open communication where anyone can say anything. This provides unprecedented opportunities for charlatans, con artists and common thieves, but it also has defined "free speech" in a way never before imagined. This country always has talked a good game on free speech, but if you said something too inflammatory from your soap box on the sidewalk, or even in your own living room, you could end up in jail. The Internet allows anyone to say anything, semi-anonymously. Sure, if you put it out there, someone can track you down, but when free speech really gets rolling, there’s just too much of it to control.

That’s the US version of the Internet. Consider the Chinese version. You can say anything you want as long as you don’t say anything about democracy, Tibet, sex or any of numerous other subjects which the government prohibits. That probably doesn’t surprise anyone, but the story here is that US companies cooperate in this by providing software to facilitate such censorship. Microsoft, for example, eliminates the words "democracy" and "Dalai Lama" from its blog site, and Google allows the Chinese government to tell it which publications must be omitted from its news service. Yahoo even turned information over to the Chinese government which resulted in a journalist being thrown in jail for the crime of forwarding an Email. That’s China and this is US, right? But these are US companies. If they’re already doing it there, they are obviously prepared to do it here.

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The Grass Valley Union bannered the top of the front page yesterday with the news that a man had been busted with "a ton of pot." I can remember times when I would have used that description if I had a couple of joints, but that’s another story. This story is the typical modern story of the medicinal defense. The local prosecutors have a pretty clear definition of how much weed you can grow and keep, personally, behind a doctor’s recommendation, but nowhere is it clear if you can grow and keep more on behalf of groups of users, such as the clubs which now exist in most of the urban areas of California.