3/9/06
How’d you like seeing Dubya on video tape being told in
advance that Katrina was going to breach the levees and flood
New Orleans, then being totally impassive? I’ve always thought
that the news spin about how the federal government blew the
response to the hurricane was a little overblown, but when you
see Bush in this video and contrast that to his statement two
days later that no one could have predicted the failure of the
levees, you realize that the feds really were indifferent, and
the neglect filtered down from the top. Maybe the most
interesting part is Michael Brown, the FEMA director who took
the fall. The news media told us, at the time, that he was more
interested in how his hair looked on TV than in doing anything
about the hurricane damage, but this video shows that he was the
guy telling the president how bad it was going to be. Things
just are not always what they seem or what they tell us in the
papers.
* * *
And how about the Arnold Classic. The governor of California
lends his name to an event in Ohio that might loosely be
described as a sporting event, but might be more aptly described
as entertainment in the sense that professional wrestling is
entertainment. It includes some boxing, wrestling, martial arts
and of course some guys showing off their muscles, and the thing
was expected to attract 120,000 people last weekend. I don’t
know why Senator John McCain felt the urge to comment about it,
but he called it "human cockfighting inside a mesh
cage." That might be a little harsh, but it is a pretty
strange image for the governor of California, and Arnold decided
to back away from it after some newspaper stories spread a
little ridicule. It is, however, exactly the image the governor
brought with him to the job. The people of California elected a
body builder turned action movie star to be the governor. We
have to assume that’s what they want. But now the governor is
backing down from that image. Once again, politics is not what
they tell us in the papers.
* * *
Locally, we’ve had a little white weather lately, and a
bunch of parents got a little ticked off the other day when they
sent their kids off to school in the morning, then were told to
come and get ‘em and take ‘em home. That can be pretty
inconvenient. I know they don’t like having those school
busses on the road in the snow, but that’s not much different
from having the parents on the road to come and get the kids. It
just transfers the liability. Another example of the lawyers and
insurance companies running our lives. Most places, they just
chain ‘em up and keep going.
* * *
Okay, moving on to the business page, AT&T is trying to
swallow up Bell South and Cingular. Several years ago, a big
deal was made out of breaking up the phone companies. The idea
was that competition between a bunch of smaller phone service
providers would result in better deals for the consumers. The
capitalist ideal of free market competition. Now it looks like
phone companies may be reforming into more monopolistic
enterprises. Two things are different these days. Phone service
is no longer just phone service. In fact, telephones are just a
small piece of the picture. Computers connect to each other a
lot more often than people connect to each other. The other part
is an administration in Washington that’s willing to let big
businesses go about their business with no government
interference. The idea of communications becoming one big phone
company again is ominous, not just for what it might cost in
money, but for what it might cost in communicating freely.
Along those lines, we’ve talked a couple of times about
U.S. based companies cooperating with the Chinese government in
censoring Internet content. I read an analysis last week that’s
worth repeating and expanding a little. The idea was a lot like
the sign my wife put up in our barn, "My barn, my
rules." Our animals take it seriously. If China wants to
limit its citizens’ access to information, it’s not the
responsibility of U.S. corporations, not even Microsoft, to stop
them. The essence and the spirit of capitalism is to sell the
product without any moral judgement toward the buyer. Even in
this electronic age, however, information still is hard to stop.
Broadcast signals still go everywhere, and that includes
wireless internet access. We have printers and we have
telephones. Government can slow communication down, but it can’t
stop it.
* * *
You remember the story a few months back about the U.S.
Supreme Court’s decision allowing the concept of eminent
domain being applicable to seizing private property for
commercial development. Apparently hanging their hat on that
decision, the city council in Sacramento has decided to seize a
couple of liquor stores in the Oak Park area. These stores are
regarded by the council as places which foster crimes such as
prostitution, so the city wants to take the properties for some
unspecified future residential development. I might not want to
patronize one of these stores, but I’m pretty sure the city is
going further than even the Supreme Court would allow.
* * *
I’ve been wanting for a long time to mention my favorite
feature of the Grass Valley Union, the police blotter. It
used to be edited, but it now appears to be a complete rundown
of all the calls to law enforcement agencies, sorted to each
agency. Usually, the Grass Valley PD is listed first, followed
by Nevada City, followed by the county sheriff’s office.
People call the cops for a lot of pretty strange reasons, but it
has been my observation that it’s strangest is Grass Valley.
Maybe we’ll collect some amusing examples for a future report,
but it’s quite clear from reading this feature in The Union
that the most common cause of arrest in Grass Valley is a charge
of drunk in public. If you read this feature, you have to
conclude that many of the citizens of Grass Valley are hammered
and the cops are spending most of their time rounding ‘em up.
Film at 11:00.
