Drought

Photography, Politics

Cathedral -

Cathedral in the Desert 2005, exposed by low water level in Lake Powell (really a reservoir). © srstern

On January 17th, Governor Jerry Brown finally declared a drought emergency in the state. He also asked all citizens to cut back at least 20% of their water use. In typical  Jerry Brown fashion, he had lots of charts and photographs showing us how bad it is and it is very serious. Last year was the driest year that California has had since we started keeping records in 1895. The Department of Water Resources said that Gasquet Ranger Station in Del Norte County has only 43% of normal and Sacramento is even worse with 5.74 inches of rain instead of the typical 18 inches.

This is probably not news to anybody who lives here and has gone outside this year. I have never seen it this dry and I have lived here since 1940 and paid attention since about 1956, when I started backpacking. The scary thing is that we don’t really have enough water for our lifestyle even if there were no drought. The good news is that the drought, which is aggravating the problem, may actually make us think about the underlying problem.

Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus

 Felt Lake, irrigation water for the Stanford University Campus. © srstern 

That is not something we – we meaning, probably, all Homo sapiens, maybe all mammals – are good at doing; looking at subtle, underlying, problems and correcting them before they become big emergencies. Jerry Brown was the first politician that I remember who talked about national limits, saying The country is rich, but not so rich as we have been led to believe. The choice to do one thing may preclude another. In short, we are entering an era of limits. He got laughed off the stage as Governor Moonbeam. Jimmy Carter was the first president to really face an energy crisis, complete with gas lines. He asked everybody to turn their heat down to save energy, and he was belittled for it, losing to Reagan’s It’s morning again in America campaign.

As an aside, Carter had several firsts as a president; he was the first president born in a hospital, he was the first president to wear jeans in the White House, he was the only president – so far – to have lived in subsidized public housing, and he was the only President to have been interviewed by Playboy. End aside. My friend Ed Cooney is in love with Jimmy Carter, Ed is an amateur presidential historian and smart enough to know that, in many ways, Jimmy Carter was not an especially effective president but enough in love to want to overlook these Presidential flaws. However, I think that he is actually in love with Carter because of Carter’s political flaws.

What hurt Carter as a president, is partially what made him admirable. Carter graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Annapolis and later did graduate work in atomic reactor technology and nuclear physics; he was a rational man more than a political man. He knew we weren’t going to solve our energy and resource problems by ignoring them, and we haven’t.

I am not sure if I have become more or less cynical over the years. I used to think that we would know when we really have a water problem when they stop watering the golf courses, now I am not so sure. Now I think that water flows towards money more than downhill and we can be in a very serious drought with very green golf courses.

Silverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srsternSilverado Golf Course, evening mist. © srstern

Justified

Television

justified_rayboydWe watched the second episode of Season 5 of Justified last night. It is, by far, my favorite drama on TV. I’m not sure drama is the right word but comedy doesn’t fit either. The program is partially written by and based on a book – and, more importantly, characters – by Elmore Leonard who wrote movie sources like Out of Sight, Jackie Brown, and 3:10 to Yuma.

Leonard had a stroke in July of last year and died a month later so I am not sure how that will reflect on the coming season of Justified, hopefully everybody will energize their inner Elmore and it will continue to be good. Graham Yost – Speed with Sandra Bullock in her first major role, Broken Arrow, and Boontown, a short-lived L.A. cop program that Michele and I wished had lived longer – is now the writer and producer.

What I like about Justified are the great characters, the language, and the plot twists that we didn’t see coming but look obvious in retrospect. The hero is  Raylan Givens, a US Marshall that is not very good at relationships including that of his estranged wife who has left town with his daughter. The bad guy is Boyd Crowder who does have a good relationship with his wife and is easily the smartest, most morally ambiguous and, interestingly bad guy on TV. The third main character is Harlan County, Kentucky, a way-past-its-peak coal mining area that plays similar to Winter’s Bone with Jennifer Lawrence.

Check it out on FX.

Watching the Golden Globes, thinking about the ads

Film

Globes Winners 2014Watching the Golden Globes last night, with all the glittering stars, what I most remember is the Bing Ad. For some reason, I have decided that am a Google guy and Microsoft, in general, sort of bugs me. Maybe it is because, when they ruled the world, Microsoft quit innovating. Maybe it is because they were never an innovator to start with, just a company built around making money off of other people’s ideas.

There were so many good movies this year that I wasn’t particularly rooting for anybody. I had my favorites, but it is impossible to argue that the winner weren’t terrific. I haven’t seen The Wolf of Wall Street and have no idea if Leonardo DiCaprio should have won for best actor, but both 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle both winning for best picture, was great. Woody Allen got an award he deserved and didn’t ruin it by showing up, and Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were funny for the second year in a row. But all that is a blur the next morning and I still remember the Bing Ad and the Apple Ad. They are both well worth watching.

Team owners, bosses, setting the tone, and Chris Christie

Uncategorized

Occupy-4071

During the last couple of days, I have found it hard not to keep bumping into Chris Christie. During that time, he has gone from ridiculing the very idea that shutting down the lanes leading to the George Washington Bridge was done on purpose, to admitting it – as the evidence grew – but denying he knew anything about the shutdown. It seems to me that the question of whether Christie knew or not isn’t relevant.

During the 1960’s and 70’s, I was a close-to-fanatic Oakland Raider fan. At the time, the Raider’s primary owner was Wayne Valley, the owner of the – then – very successful Besco home building company. Valley brought on Al Davis as Managing General Partner and Davis, as Managing Partner, turned the Raiders into one of the premier football teams of the era. At the same time, the 49ers were owned by the widows of the previous owners,  Josephine Morabito Fox and Jane Morabito. After a disastrous 2-14 season, the widows sold the team to  Edward DeBartolo Jr. who hired head coach Bill Walsh and the rest is history (at least in San Francisco).

When you read the history of the two teams during that era, the instrumental people most mentioned are Bill Walsh and Joe Montana, John Madden and Ken Stabler, along with various other players. Not much is said about the owners, but – I contend – the owners are the most important members of the team. The 49ers turned around because of Eddie DeBartolo. Under the Morabito widows, the 49ers had some great quarterbacks, like John Brodie and Y. A. Tittle, they had some great receivers and defensive backs, but they were never a great team.

When the Enron bubble burst, CEO Jeffrey Skilling and Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow got most of the credit but Ken Lay, the founder of Enron who claimed he knew nothing about the various frauds, was also charged and convicted as he should have been. As an aside, after he was convicted but before he was sentenced, Ken Lay died. He was vacationing in Snowmass, I guess when you steal as much as he did, you don’t go directly to jail. End aside. When Apple was run by John Sculley, it made some great computers but it didn’t become the Apple worth more than Microsoft, until Steve Jobs came back to turn the company around.

Steve Jobs didn’t do everything himself, but he set the tone. He created the culture, just like Ken Lay. Just like Al Davis and Eddie DeBartolo. And just like Chris Christie in New Jersey. Christie said that he fired his Deputy Chief of Staff, Bridget Kelly, because she lied to me. He didn’t fire her because of the traffic problems she caused or the because she acted in a petty and vindictive way; he fired her because she lied to him. Christie may be a governor that doesn’t like being lied to, but he has created a climate in which doing things that hurt the people of New Jersey is accepted, in which acting in a petty and vindictive way is accepted.

Strong Tea parties and weak tea

Politics

Protest-5934

A day or so ago, I got an email requesting that I sign an online petition. Like most people, I suspect, I get these alot . It seems so much like petitioning  the choir that I often just delete them and move on. But, I read an interesting article in The Economist that started me thinking about that petition and other ones like it. The article shows the results of Tea Party rallies over April 15th, 2010.

new research suggests that the people whom left-wing pundits once dismissed as “teabaggers” made a big difference in the mid-term elections of 2010, when Republicans recaptured the House of Representatives….When it rained, attendance at rallies halved….Dry rallies created momentum…and the rallies a year later were twice as large. Such enthusiasm translated into a 7% rise in the Republican vote in 2010, compared with wet areas. If the Tea Party merely expressed voters’ frustrations rather than inflaming them, one would expect no difference between wet and dry districts. The authors conclude that protests can indeed shape policy.

In a way, this is what I expect, it is why I walked precincts for Obama and turned out for Occupy protests. But, often, when I am doing that, my mind tells me that what I am doing is not going to change anybody’s mind and I didn’t walk as many precincts as I had time for, I didn’t go to most of the Occupy and Move-On protests I was invited to, and I haven’t signed most of the petitions I believe in.

It is nice to see that rallies have effects, and scary because it means that not doing anything has an effect, even if it is negative. Liberals seem to concentrate on Presidential elections and Conservatives on local and down ticket elections. I think the conservatives are right. Having a school Board that is in agreement with  their basic beliefs is more germane to their daily lives than having a President that is. We Liberals scream like scalded cats when the School Board wants to buy books that say Intelligent Design is a real theory but the best way to stop that is to get people on the School Board that don’t believe in that nonsense in the first place.

The article ended with Watery tea may be weak, but the strong stuff makes lawmakers sit up and take notice, which reminded me that Courtney Gonzales brought over some green tea on Christmas Eve and showed us how to make it weak. I – we – think of tea as a way to administer caffeine but  for hundreds if not thousands of years, it has been a way to make water safe to drink.

To stretch my ramblings on The Economist’s article a little further, I would say that the same is true in politics. The strong tea of presidential politics gets the headlines but it is the weak tea of down ticket politics that, eventually, makes the water safe to drink. It is state and local policies that determine if family planning clinics stay open and determine the boundaries of electoral districts. It is easy for me to fall back on the belief that politics is a way to shock the system into change every four years, but I am starting to believe that politics is the almost daily work of signing protests, the daily work of trying to be heard.

Occupy-5923