A little more follow up on the Angora fire. As you’d expect and as it should be, there has been a lot of talk in the media the past week about prevention of such disasters. We said last week that there really is no solution, and that’s even more evident now that volumes of prose have been written on the subject. Every imaginable idea has found its way into print. Let it grow and let it burn. Cut it down so it won’t burn. Of course the logging industry says that "commercial thinning" is the only practical way to save our homes. I saw a headline which called the vegetation which fueled the Tahoe fire "Environmentalism Running Amok." Only one thing is clear. When people establish permanent homes in the forest, the forest is permanently changed.

Before people started building buildings, the natural order of things was that an occasional fire took care of the pruning and even nourished the growth cycles of the various flora. The previous inhabitants didn’t build anything especially permanent, but even when the European immigrants arrived in California, forest fires weren’t a huge problem, because they cut down all the nearby trees to build their permanent settlements. The towns burned down occasionally, but the cause usually was human error, and that remains the primary cause of fires which destroy human habitat, whether in the forest or in the city. Protecting the human habitat means that the forest has to be pruned by human hands. It’ll never be the same, but no place on the planet ever is the same after the humans move in. At the core of all environmental arguments is the question of just how heavy the human hand should be. For forest dwelling humans, the experts can’t answer that question; they only can identify the options. We have to decide for ourselves where we want to be on the curve from a tepee to a highrise.

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I haven’t really kept up on the news this past week, because while I was camped on a sidewalk near the front of the line to get an Iphone, I just couldn’t find out what was going on because, of course, I didn’t have an Iphone. As near as I can tell, this thing is the latest Cabbage Patch Kid or Tickle Me Elmo, because it can play music, dial up the Internet AND do all the other stuff a telephone does. Most of us can do all that stuff, anyway, but some people are compelled to be first in that line because this gizmo does it all in one small plastic box you can put in your pocket, or better yet, hang on your belt for all the world to see during those rare moments when you don’t actually have your hands on it.

Naturally, I reasoned that even if I wanted one it probably wouldn’t hurt me to wait until the crowd thinned out, but I was wrong. Just to keep the demand at a fever pitch, Steve Jobs and his people only made enough of ‘em to last in the stores for a few hours. Now the rest of us will have to wait for the next production run. How are we supposed to survive until then?

In the same business section where I learned all about the Iphone I also learned that Hilton Hotels Corporation has been sold for $18.5 billion. Somebody really screwed that story up, because it didn’t even tell me how much of that money Paris gets. No wonder they say newspapers are a dying medium.

This week’s free speech notes: There are mixed messages about whether kids in school can speak freely. You probably heard the "bong hits 4 Jesus" story. Some kids got suspended from school for showing a banner with that message in a parade which they attended on school time. They went all the way to the US Supreme Court before the school won the fight. The court said the students had the right to take stands on controversial issues, but not to advocate illegal drugs. I take that to mean that if the banner had said "Legalize Weed," it would have been okay, but invoking a popular religious prophet in defense of a controversial stand is too much for The Court. Just what WOULD Jesus do?

That was in Alaska. Closer to home in Napa a local judge shot down a school dress code. You might remember this one as the Tigger case, because one of the plaintiffs was suspended for coming to school with the Winnie the Pooh character depicted on her socks. The judge said Tigger was okay unless the school wanted to put all its students in uniforms.

And one more note about the Internet radio flap. The problem, of course, is that the people who license copywritten material and collect the money on behalf of the artists want small time broadcasters, including all those garage door internet stations, to pay just as much in royalties as Clearchannel stations pay. That puts the little guys out of business. It’s a little like saying you’re not allowed to play baseball unless you’re on a major league team. I read one columnist who called this a "bad business plan" on the part of the Internet broadcasters. Actually, it’s bad business for the artists. They have no choice but to do business with the money changers who collect the fees, but they rely on independent radio to reach the audience. Small time artists and small time media need each other to survive, but the big time media waited until this new rule already was adopted before making any noise about it. That’s the bad business plan.

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Scooter scoots out from under his prison sentence. I guess that’s the story of the week. The sarcasm of the week is that Paris Hilton did more time than Scooter will do, but I think each is an equal danger to society. I’ve read lengthy analyses about the difference between a commuted sentence and a pardon, but I doubt the Bushwhacker knows or cares. The message is that lying to protect the boss is okay so long as the boss has enough pull to ensure that you don’t really take the fall.

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Presidential politics have been quiet lately, but it looks like the new popular form of political currency is Obama Bucks. The Senator from Illinois is raising considerably more money than the Senator from New York, and he appears to be doing it primarily with small donations from individuals, about a quarter million of them, so far. The Clinton campaign will tell you how much money, as the law requires, but it won’t tell how many donors it took to reach that total.

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