Harris Fire Update...

The photo at right (click to enlarge it) is stitched together from three of the cameras on Lyons Peak (E, S, and W, left-to-right). This panorama shows the entire northern flank of the Harris Fire, from the Barrett Dam area on the left to San Miguel Mountain on the right. I'm sure this looks bad to anyone seeing it – but there's actually some good news visible in these photos.

The first bit of good news is that the winds have died down. Earlier the smoke from each fire was blowing right along the ground (along with the embers spreading the fire). Now the smoke rises, and since I captured these photos that has become even more dramatic. Looming in our southern sky now is a large, ugly smoke plume that looks way too close. If it wasn't for these cameras showing me where the fires are, I'd think they were much closer…

The second bit of good news is that the number of individual hot spots is way, way down – and the intensity of those remaining is also way down. I can't be sure why that is – could be just good luck and lighter winds, or it could be the efforts of the firefighters – but whatever the cause, I'd judge the immediate threat to us to be considerably lower than the early morning hours this morning.

Lawson Valley Update...

Debbie and I are fine, and still in our home in Lawson Valley. I'm feeling a bit more optimistic than earlier this morning – the winds have largely died down, and we hear fixed-wing tankers overhead moving toward the north flank of the Harris Fire that threatens us. Also we have finished our packing and are ready to leave, if need be, with about 15 minutes notice.

I'll be resuming my updates very shortly. But first, I have to say that we have been overwhelmed by the good wishes and offers of help from both our friends and people who are complete strangers and just happened to read my blog. If we have to leave, we must have 50 possible places to go! And that's not even mentioning all the offers of assistance with trucks, places for our animals, etc. Thank you, one and all – it's very heartwarming and comforting to know that help is available if we need it.

One last note: many people have written to thank me for “my” cameras on Lyons Peak. You all should know that those are not my cameras – they belong to HPWREN, which you can read all about at the link at the top of my camera page. All I did was to arrange the feeds on a single page, and to overlay them with place name markers…the HPWREN folks deserve the credit for providing the San Diego community with this great resource.

Fire Update...

Just a short message, folks, as Debbie and I are going to resume packing. While there still doesn't appear to be an imminent threat to our home, the north flank of the Harris Fire moved inexorably closer to us during the night. It overran parts of Deerhorn Valley, cresting the White Mountain/Mother Grundy Peak areas. The branch that ran up Barrett Creek appears to have reached the dam, and moved westward, up and over Elena Peak. All of these are several miles from our home, but all of them are a mile or so closer than yesterday. Not comforting at all. Worse, when the winds die down (and that is forecast for today), the fire will be able to move more quickly in our direction – and the fire crews are desparately short of resources and have been working (in some cases) for 36 hours with scarcely a break.

We're packing, with our fingers crossed, hoping that it is an unnecessary activity. Best wishes to all…

Fires Update...

I'll start tonight with MODIS satellite thermal imagery for the county, with a few annotations of my own. The black, orange, and red areas in the image at right shows progressively more recent “hot spots” detected by the MODIS satellite. It's easy to see the two major fires in the county on this image – the Witch Fire to the north, and the Harris Fire to the south. I added purple lines to show the approximate course and branching activity of the fires. Both fires started at the extreme northeast end of their extent (the upper right) and moved WSW (slightly down from leftwards). Both seem to be marching inexorably to the sea. Both are expanding in the north south dimension, slowly north, southerly in wind-driven bursts.

In both the image above, and the more detailed image of the Harris Fire at right, I've marked the area where we live in green, the paths of the fires in purple, and the area where my niece lives in yellow. At right you can see, vividly, why we've been somewhat anxious all day: the Harris Fire is just a few miles from our home, moving rapidly – but, thankfully, not toward us. We're very aware that this could change in short order, so we'll be watching closely all night tonight to make sure it doesn't surprise us. So far the winds have not changed direction, though they have slowed down.

At right is a panorama made by stitching together the views from the east-facing and south-facing cameras on Lyons Peak. You can see here the two areas that concern us the most. Roughly in the middle of the photo is an area burning intensely, moving northward up Barrett Canyon (toward Barrett Lake). This is moving very slowly northward against the wind. If it broke out to the north, it could come at us from our east, driven by whatever wind remains tomorrow. To the right of the photo, you can see the fragmented burning areas along Honey Springs Road, State 94, and Otay Lakes Road. These have been mainly moving WNW, toward the southern reaches of the town of Jamul, and Proctor Valley. If the winds shifted, these could threaten us; at the moment they mostly present a threat to the eastern edges of Chula Vista (especially Eastlake).

Earlier this evening, we started packing our vehicles. We knocked off after about three hours of work, because (a) we were tired, and (b) things looked a bit less immediately threatening (and they remain that way). So we're going to keep a sharp eye out tonight – we'll get up every couple of hours to check the Lyons Peak cameras, and check for new satellite imagery.

Harris Fire Update...

Now we're starting to get concerned – the fire has advanced incrementally toward us on the latest MODIS pass (which I was finally able to get), but this doesn't tell the whole story. On the Lyons Peak cameras, we can see a branch of the fire advancing southeast of us, moving almost due north up the Barrett Creek Canyon toward the lake (the L shaped lake in the upper right quadrant of the map). Worse, the fire has spread northwest of its largest extent on the map, and is now threatening the Jamul Highlands part of the town of Jamul (the purple-tinted area). We have heard from two different people that that area is now being evacuated, and from one person we also heard that the Steele Canyon High School, which is an evacuation center, is itself being evacuated. Not good.

It remains true that from everything I can see on the Lyons Peak cameras, we are not under immediate threat (we live in that green shaded area). Nonetheless, we're going to start packing some things, just in case we do have to evacuate – so that we're not in a huge hurry when (and if) it happens.

Web Site Issues...

As several of you have noticed, some of the web sites listed under the “Wildfire Information” link at right are not working. This is because of the high number of visitors at the moment. People hungry for information have driven my blog's traffic, and my Lyons Peak cameras traffic, to more than 30 times their normal level (but still holding up just fine). I can only imagine what those information web sites must be experiencing, and I'm not surprised they're having capacity troubles. With a quarter million people evacuated already just in San Diego County, it's easy to imagine they are getting many millions of hits. Just for example, I've been unable to get MODIS thermal imaging data since 6 AM because of traffic problems&helllip;

Santa Ana Weather...

The extreme wildfire danger that southern California is experiencing right now is caused by a weather pattern that occurs every year in this season, usually a few times each year and lasting a few days each time. The main characteristic is the wind, which gives the weather pattern its name: the Santa Ana winds.

I captured these graphs from my weather station this morning. At top right, you see the raw wind data (gusts and average). The time and date on the graph are GMT, which is currently 7 hours later than local time. Around 9 AM local time yesterday, the winds kicked into high gear – and they've been there ever since, over 24 hours now. My weather station doesn't show the 60 to 70 MPH gusts we've been experiencing, because it can't respond quickly enough to catch these short but very intense gusts. Next down is the “wind run” graph; this shows how far the wind blows each day. You can see that the steady high wind results in a much higher wind run than normal – and this is what makes the winds so dangerous in a fire.

Finally, the bottom graph shows the barometric pressure over the last week – and you can see that for the past 24 hours, the pressure has been rising very rapidly. The center of the high pressure area is to our east, and the Santa Ana winds are caused by the air moving from this high pressure area to the relatively low pressure area off the coast. This is the direct cause of the winds, and this is the pattern that we see a few times each year, this time of year…

Witch Fire...

North of us the Witch Fire is burning out of control, on several fronts, and causing far more trouble than the Harris Fire that is closer to us. At right is the latest MODIS thermal imaging data, which looks pretty grim – but the news from TV and radio is even more grim: huge swaths of San Diego County are under evacuation orders, and apparently many homes have already been lost.

I got word from my company this morning to stay away from our Solana Beach office, as it was in an area that might be evacuated – and, worse, that at least one of our employees has lost his home, and several others have been evacuated. We have friends in many of the affected areas, and have heard from one (in Ramona) who has already been evacuated. We also heard that an area just north of Ramona, where we know someone with a beautiful horse farm and many animals, burned over during the night. Grim news from all over the county…

Harris Fire Update...

We had an anxious night – the fire was far enough away that we didn't need to stay awake all night, but close enough that we needed to keep an eye on it. So we set the alarm to get us up every few hours, and we kept an eye mainly on the Lyons Peak cameras. The view from Lyons Peak (looking south) at dawn is at right. The areas that look like flames are actually smoke that's lit up by the fire below it; the actual flames have been mostly out of sight from Lyons. Toward the right, the smaller orange areas may actually be flames on the northeast flank of Otay Mountain, but I can't tell for sure…

Just a short while later, I captured the photo at right, showing the same area. If I'm reading the smoke plumes correctly, it looks like the south flank of Mother Grundy/White Peak and an unnamed hill just north of Honey Springs Road (all out of sight from Lyons Peak) are burning and the smoke from those fires is blowing WSW over Otay mountain, completely obscuring it. It also looks like there is some burning on the NE flank of Otay Mountain, but I can't be 100% sure of this…

The MODIS satellite thermal imaging was updated during the night as the satellite made a pass. The orange areas are yesterday's hotspots, the red are the hotspots on the most recent pass. All of these are consistent with what I wrote just above, based on reading the smoke…

As always, you can click on any of these images for a larger view.

This morning the situation in the Ramona area (the Witch Fire, to the north of us) looks much worse than the Harris Fire to our south. We cannot see anything but smoke, but there's lots of that – and within the past few minutes we just started to smell smoke for the first time. The cameras are still not showing anything burning upwind of us, so I'm not sure where the smell is coming from – but most likely it is some branch of the Witch fire…

Fire in Potrero Area...

Update (8:10 PM):

I captured the photos at right (click for a larger view) just a few minutes ago from the Lyons Peak cameras. The top photo is looking due south, and shows the fire stretched out over a considerable distance from east to west. My best estimate of the location of the larger fire fronts (on the right side of the photo) is somewhere near Cottonwood Creek Road and Bee Canyon Road, south of 94. Please don't take that as gospel, or even well-informed – it's just my guess, based on the photos, satellite information, and wind.

The bottom photo is looking due north from Lyons Peak, and the fire visible their is the “Witch Fire”, which started at roughly the same time as the Harris Fire, but 25 miles or so north of us, just west of Santa Ysabel (home of Dudley's Bakery). That fire is burning WSW, straight toward Ramona, which is a few miles from the fire front.

Update (3:35 PM):

We know a little more now... The CDF has designated this the “Harris Fire”. The map at right (click for a larger view) shows some MODIS thermal-imaging satellite data (the overlapping red circles toward the bottom) showing the actively burning areas on the satellite's last pass (which I believe was at about 3 PM). The red area in the upper right corner, with an orange tint, is from an old fire put out some time ago. The green area in the upper left is where we live. There is a purple tinted arrow moving down and leftwards that shows the apparent direction of the fire's burning, from its starting point in the eastern end of Hauser Canyon south and south west through Potrero and the north side of Tecate.

The photo at right is the current view south from Lyons Peak; the smoke plume from this fire is quite large and ugly.

We have not heard any specific reports of structures burned, though we have monitored many reports of structures endangered on the scanner. I'm not certain how, when, or if the CDF reports burned structures on the radio, so I don't know what the absence of those reports indicates. I sure hope it's good news for the folks down that way, though...

Update (11:38 AM):

We heard a CDF man on the scanner call for evacuations along Emery Road down to Humphries Road, and in Tecate. These roads are just north of Tecate. The CDF must not believe they can hold the fire at Emery Road, which is not surprising given the high winds...

Original Post (11:15 AM):

As we were driving home from breakfast in Descanso this morning, we saw exactly what we didn't want to see &ndash: a smoke plume, big and growing. We can see from the Lyons Peak cameras that it is ESE of us. Monitoring the scanner, we hear lots of activity out towards Potrero. From the USGS fire planning site, we see two small fires in Hauser Canyon, just north of Potrero. Given the strong (Santa Ana) winds we have right now from the NE, and putting all these other clues together, it sounds like we have a fast-moving fire that started in Hauser Canyon (almost certainly an illegal's campfire) and is moving southwest through Potrero towards Tecate, Mexico.

We'll keep you posted on anything we learn. Any readers in the Potrero/Campo area, if you know more, please let us know...

The Real War on Children...

Mark Steyn has an excellent column out today, talking about the failed SCHIP bill (the Democrats were unable to override President Bush's veto). In it, he describes the SCHIP bill as an example of creeping Euro-style nanny-statism – the model that Europe is now lurching away from because of its manifest failures and (especially) it's economic madness. Mr. Steyn describes these welfare states well:

So what is the best thing America could do "for the children"? Well, it could try not to make the same mistake as most of the rest of the Western world and avoid bequeathing the next generation a system of unsustainable entitlements that turns the entire nation into a giant Ponzi scheme. Most of us understand, for example, that Social Security needs to be "fixed" – or we'll have to raise taxes, or the retirement age, or cut benefits, etc. But, just to get the entitlements debate in perspective, projected public pensions liabilities in the United States are expected to rise by 2040 to about 6.8 percent of our gross domestic product. In Greece, the equivalent figure is 25 percent – that's not a matter of raising taxes or tweaking retirement age; that's total societal collapse.

So what? shrug the voters. Not my problem. I paid my taxes, I want my benefits.

Giant Ponzi schemes…yup, that's it exactly. And our currently underfunded, underearning, laughing-stock of a retirement fund is a big first step in creating just such a Giant Ponzi Scheme here – and one could legitimately argue that we already have one in place.

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago when the Democrats trotted out a 12 year old boy as their spokesman for SCHIP? Here's Mr. Steyn on that:

A couple of weeks ago, the Democrats put up a 12-year-old SCHIP beneficiary from Baltimore, Graeme Frost, to deliver their official response to the President's Saturday-morning radio address. And immediately afterwards Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin and I jumped the sick kid in a dark alley and beat him to a pulp. Or so you'd have thought from the press coverage: The Washington Post called us "meanies." Well, no doubt it's true we hard-hearted conservatives can't muster the civilized level of discourse of Pete Stark. But we were trying to make a point – not about the kid, but about the family, and their relevance as a poster child for expanded government health care. Mr. and Mrs. Frost say their income's about $45,000 a year – she works "part-time" as a medical receptionist, and he works "intermittently" as a self-employed woodworker. They have a 3,000-square-foot home plus a second commercial property with a combined value of over $400,000, and three vehicles – a new Chevy Suburban, a Volvo SUV, and a Ford F-250 pickup.

How they make that arithmetic add up is between them and their accountant. But here's the point: The Frosts are not emblematic of the health care needs of America so much as they are of the delusion of the broader Western world. They expect to be able to work "part-time" and "intermittently" but own two properties and three premium vehicles and have the state pick up health care costs. Who do you stick with the bill? Four-car owners? Much of France already lives that way: A healthy, wealthy, well-educated populace works a mandatory maximum 35-hour week with six weeks of paid vacation and retirement at 55 and with the government funding all the core responsibilities of adult life.

This is the fundamental delusion of the welfare state participants: the notion that somehow all these lovely benefits will appear out of thin air. For about the past five years, Europe has ever-so-slowly been coming to grips with the inevitable results: the flight of the wealthy (who for some reason don't want to see their earning disappear into the maw of the welfare machine), the flight of capital (entrepreneurs know a losing proposition when they see one), and – as France has seen in abundance this past year – widespread unrest amongst the young with no hope of gainful employment. As Mr. Steyn so ably points out, the very human response to the existence of a welfare state is selfishness: “Gimme my benefits!” – and how those benefits get paid for is someone else's problem.

Here in the U.S., the Democratic party is the standard-bearer for our drift toward a welfare state. Mr. Steyn is right: the SCHIP bill was a great example (and thank goodness it didn't go anywhere!). Most of the actual elected officials in the Democratic party are, I believe, essentially political animals: they support certain positions at any given moment not from some deeply held core belief, but because they believe that holding that position will gain them votes. On the one hand I am disgusted by them, for their frank political corruption; on the other hand they are at least “useful idiots” in the sense that if public opinion changes, they will move with it.

More dangerous in the long run are those few socialist-leaning Democratic politicians genuinely motivated by ideology. They're hard to identify with certainty, because they often employ political tactics indistinguishable from their corrupt brethren in order to attain power – and only after they are in power do their true colors emerge. Hillary Clinton, I am nearly certain, is one of these camouflaged ideologues. John Edwards I am certain is not. Barak Obama I simply have no idea about, though just on statistical grounds it is far more likely he's an ordinarily corrupt Democrat.

Hence my motto for the 2008 election: “Anybody But Hillary!”

Puzzler...

An eon or so ago, I posted a puzzler that asked what business Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) got into that bankrupted him. Half the people responding (that would be two people) got the right answer: a typesetting machine. More specifically, his investments in the Paige Compositor (more here) did him in financially.

This week's puzzler delves into the history of digital computing, specifically into the history of a computer's “main memory” (today known as RAM, for Randomly Accessible Memory). In the early days of digital computers, main memory was one of the biggest engineering challenges. There were no integrated circuits at all, much less the massive RAM chips we have today. Magnetic core memory was the mainstay of main memory for a couple of decades – but before core memory, there were other technologies used. For example, magnetic drum memory was used into the mid-1960s on some computers. Some of these earlier technologies seem quite exotic and bizarre by today's standards, far more complicated and less capable than seem normal today.

One of these technologies was still in use (albeit not commonly) in the U.S. Navy when I went through computer technician school in the early 1970s. Even then it seemed like a museum refugee! But I was trained to repair and maintain this main memory, though thankfully I never saw one once I left school. Today's puzzler is this: what chemical element did a once-popular main memory technology depend on?

We Won!

Last Sunday we took a lovely day trip, driving up the back roads through the coastal mountains and high desert to Mt. San Jacinto. Along the way, in Mountain Center (not far from Idyllwild) we stopped at an animal sanctuary we've visited many times before: Living Free. It's a "no kill" shelter that does a particularly nice job with its three catterys, and we stop there to immerse ourselves in felines for an hour or so. We didn't know they had a fund-raiser going on, but they did -- so we contributed a little, and got a couple of raffle tickets in return. I can't imagine how many of these raffle tickets we've "purchased" in the past, but the number is a large one. We've never won anything before.

But this time, we won the first place drawing. If you know us at all, you will understand our amusement when we heard what the prize was: a small collection of Ken Norton memorobilia. Of course my first question was "Who the heck is Ken Norton?" I'd never heard of him. It turns out he is a world champion boxer, apparently most famous for having beaten Muhammed Ali. We have won a pair of his boxing gloves (don't know if they're used or not), an official Ken Norton coffee cup, and some kind of signed Ken Norton letter.

Anybody know something good we could do with this stuff?

Flatlined...

For the past week, we've had weather typical of winters here: cold, damp nights with beautiful days. Last night the pattern broke – this morning it is warm, and it was warmish all night. The relative humidity never got above 20% last night. The NOAA forecast calls for dry, hot Santa Ana winds on Sunday and Monday – at best this will completely negate the additional safety the recent drizzles have brought us; at worst it will fan a wildfire.

Keep us in your thoughts...

Day-by-Day

Several of you have asked why the Day by Day cartoon is blank, thinking that something was broken.

Unfortunately, the reason for the cartoon's absence is much more tragic than a technology failure. I've learned from other blogs that Chris Muir, the artist's behind Day by Day, has lost his sister; I don't know anything beyond that. There is a post on his site that says the cartoon will return on November 1.

Quote(s) of the Day

Peggy Noonan – long one of my favorite political columnists – has an outstanding column in today's OpinionJournal. All of these quotes are taken from this single column, which is all about Hillary Clinton's femininity (or lack thereof):

This is not a woman who has to prove she's tough enough and mean enough; she is more like a bulldozer who has to prove she won't always be in high gear and ready to flatten you.

But she is making progress. She is trying every day to change her image, and I suspect it's working. One senses not that she has become more authentic, but that she has gone beyond her own discomfort at her lack of authenticity.

Her grin is broad and fixed. She is the smile on the Halloween pumpkin that knows the harvest is coming. She's even putting a light inside.

The question, actually, is not whether America is "ready" for a woman. It's whether it's ready for Hillary.

Hillary's problem is not that she's a woman; it's that unlike these women (Ed. this is a reference to other powerful women, such as Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, etc.) – all of whom have come under intense scrutiny, each of whom has real partisan foes – she has a history that lends itself to the kind of doubts that end in fearfulness. It is an unease and dismay based not on gender stereotypes but on personal history.

Ms. Noonan has a gift for writing clearly about subtle impressions and perceptions…

To win the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton will have to (a) win the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters, (b) win a clear majority of independent voters, and (c) win an interesting number of normally Republican voters. Her big problem with Democrats comes from the “nutroots” – those liberals for whom the Iraq war is the only issue (they want out, and Hillary has made it clear she'd stay there). Who knows on the independents? But she's betting that her best hope for winning any Republican votes lies with Republican women, who will vote for Hillary simply because she's a woman. To make that work, she has to convince the world that she really is a woman (not in the biological sense, of course, but rather in the behaviorial sense). Read Ms. Noonan's whole column for much more on that…

Marine Meets Terrorist...

The result may not be what you'd expect:

A U.S. Marine squad was marching north of Fallujah when they came upon an Iraqi terrorist, badly injured and unconscious. On the opposite side of the road was an American Marine in a similar but less serious state. The Marine was conscious and alert and as first aid was given to both men, the squad leader asked the injured Marine what had happened.

The Marine reported, "I was heavily armed and moving north along the highway here, and coming south was a heavily armed insurgent. We saw each other and both took cover in the ditches along the road. I yelled to him that Saddam Hussein was a miserable, lowlife scumbag who got what he deserved, and he yelled back that Ted Kennedy is a fat, good-for-nothing, left wing liberal drunk who doesn't know how to drive. Then I said that Osama Bin Ladin dresses and acts like a frigid, mean-spirited lesbian! He retaliated by yelling, "Oh yeah? Well, so does Hillary Clinton!" "And, there we were, in the middle of the road, shaking hands, when a truck hit us.

I'm sure this didn't really happen, but it's a good chuckle…

We Have NOT Disappeared!

Rumors of our demise are definitely premature. I've simply been very busy with my new job. Spotty blogging will continue for a while more…

Deficit Falling...

The standard liberal narrative calls for a failing economy, driven by the failed policies of the Republican administration. The liberal lapdogs of the lamestream media pour out one stupid story after another, trying their best to stick to the narrative – despite all those pesky facts pointing the opposite way. Just about the only place in the media reporting those pesky facts is the Wall Street Journal. For instance, in this mornings paper I read this ($):

We hate to be the bearers of good news, but someone's got to do it: The Congressional Budget Office has released its preliminary estimates for Fiscal Year 2007 that ended September 30, and the federal budget deficit fell again, this time by 35% to $161 billion.

There's more to applaud, if you can stand it: Since 2004, deficit spending has tumbled by $251 billion, which is one of the most rapid three-year declines in U.S. history. The deficit as a share of the economy is down to 1.2%, or about half the average of the last 50 years. This improvement is especially remarkable given the $150 to $200 billion a year of post-9/11 expenses for homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, this most definitely doesn't fit the narrative – those tax cuts were supposed to increase the deficit, not decrease it! Oops! Right about now, the liberals should be apologizing for their appalling ignorance of basic economics and their outrageous support of centrally-planned economies (given the abundant evidence of their utter failure). But I'm not holding my breath.

I shall be very sad to see all this progress disappear when (and if, of course) Hillary is elected. I fear she will dismantle the progress of the past 8 years in just a few weeks…

Old White Women...

Warning: if you're offended by political incorrectness, don't read the rest of this post.

If you ever drop your wallet somewhere, hope that an older white woman finds it – they are the most likely group to deal honestly with a wallet they find. Such are the result of this study, by Paul Kinsella. He made up 100 wallets, complete with cash and other things to challenge the ethics of anyone finding the wallets. He set up cameras to watch the wallets, and waited to see what would happen.

The good news: 74% of the wallets (with their contents) were returned. Those are better odds than I would have guessed.

The bad news: the chances of your wallet being returned depends heavily on the age, gender, and race of the person who finds your wallet. Your wallet is most likely to come back to you if an older white woman finds it; least likely if a younger black male finds it.

Something the web site doesn't mention is that their results are roughly correlated with overall criminality rates: young men (of all races) are by far the most likely to engage in criminal behavior, but young black men are much more likely even within that group. And older white women are quite unlikely to break the law. So perhaps these results shouldn't be surprising.

Doesn anyone have any brilliant ideas for how to encourage honesty amongst young people, and young black people in particular? All of the ideas that I've had would be impossible to put into place, from a political perspective…

This issue struck close to home for me recently. A few years ago, I had a young black man working for me. He was an IT technician – smart, fun to work with, and eager to learn; the kind of employee I cherish. I spent a lot of time mentoring him, and he made a great deal of progress, professionally. He was married and had two very young children, and was very ambitious. He eventually quit his job and started his own business providing IT services to small companies. That all sounds great, doesn't it?

Well, last week I discovered that he was in jail – caught and convicted of selling stolen software licenses to his customers. Software licenses that he stole from the company we both used to work for.

That's a sample of one, far too little to draw any conclusions from. But I can't help doing so, for reasons I haven't yet disclosed: I know from the conversations I had with this man that his attitudes about criminality – his ethics – were far different than mine, in a way that directly applies. Any inhibitions he felt about criminal behavior were founded in a fear of being caught, rather than in any sense of morality. The wallet test is a pretty good filter for ferreting out this difference. I suspect my former employee would have failed the wallet test…

How could we change this? How do people acquire a sense of morality? The religious right has a quick answer (church!), but that had nothing whatever to do with my own sense of morality, or that of many other people know. And black attendance at church, and religiousity in general, is higher than whites. That can't be the answer. But what is? Any ideas?

Fascinating Widget...

The folks at Blogger (a Google product) host many, many blogs, including this one. A goodly proportion of those blogs often post photos or other images. I'm not sure how many images get posted each day, but it must be tens of thousands.

Someone at Blogger had the brilliant idea of creating an unending slide show from these images. They did a bang-up job of it, too – you can vary the rate at which the images are changed, you can choose whether or not to show the associated text, and you can even click to go visit the blog that posted an image you see. I found this site to be strangely addictive. Some of the images are very beautiful; some are puzzling; many are entertaining in various ways. In a half hour of watching them, I was compelled to go visit a dozen or so new blogs I'd never heard of, and several of them are now on my read list.

Give it a try!

Brrrr!

Today I turned on the heater in our house, for the first time this season. I was sitting in our livingroom, trying to type on my laptop, when it dawned on me that my fingers were stiff from cold – it was 52°F in the house!

You can see from the red temperature line on the graph at right that the temperature has been dropping for the past few days. Last night it got below 45°F for the first time this season, which explains the chilly house.

Tomorrow, sadly, the forecast calls for Santa Ana winds. Not only will that bring wind, but also heat and dry air – and fire danger conditions…

Hot Winds

One of the rallying cries of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) crowd is “The Arctic Ice is melting!” The high priests of the AGW faith jumped quickly on this readily observable fact (the Arctic ice sheet has been melting) as evidence of AGW, and their lapdog media followers have repeated this claim endlessly. Something not usually linked with that claim, though, is a different puzzling fact: the Antarctic ice sheet has been growing, and quite dramatically. If AGW is the cause of the Arctic ice sheet shrinking, then why isn't the Antarctic ice sheet also shrinking? Somehow the AGW faithful managed to ignore this inconvenient little observation.

But now NASA has released a new study about the causes of the Arctic ice sheet melting. From the belly of the AGW beast (NASA is the home of the high priest of AGW, Jim Hansen) comes the news that the culprit appears to be a new pattern of winds:

The scientists observed less perennial ice cover in March 2007 than ever before, with the thick ice confined to the Arctic Ocean north of Canada. Consequently, the Arctic Ocean was dominated by thinner seasonal ice that melts faster. This ice is more easily compressed and responds more quickly to being pushed out of the Arctic by winds. Those thinner seasonal ice conditions facilitated the ice loss, leading to this year's record low amount of total Arctic sea ice.

Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic," he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.

"The winds causing this trend in ice reduction were set up by an unusual pattern of atmospheric pressure that began at the beginning of this century," Nghiem said.

The Arctic Ocean's shift from perennial to seasonal ice is preconditioning the sea ice cover there for more efficient melting and further ice reductions each summer. The shift to seasonal ice decreases the reflectivity of Earth's surface and allows more solar energy to be absorbed in the ice-ocean system.

The biggest surprise for me in this news is that the NASA press flacks allowed a press release about weather to go out without an obligatory mention of the linkage between this climatic phenomenon and AGW. Ordinarily I'd have expected some completely unsubstantiated mention of how AGW caused this change in wind pattern. The fact that such a statement is missing suggests (a) the scientists involved don't believe such a linkage exists, or (b) the PR flack involved was drunk, stoned, about to quit NASA, or possibly all three.

How To Call The Cops...

Passed along by Mike D.:

HOW TO CALL THE POLICE WHEN YOU'RE OLD AND DON'T MOVE FAST ANYMORE.

George Phillips of Meridian, Mississippi was going up to bed when his wife told him that he'd left the light on in the garden shed, which she could see from the bedroom window.

George opened the back door to go turn off the light but saw that there were people in the shed stealing things.

He phoned the police, who asked "Is someone in your house?" and he said "no". Then they said that all patrols were busy, and that he should simply lock his door and an officer would be along when available. George said, "Okay," hung up, counted to 30, and phoned the police again.

"Hello, I just called you a few seconds ago because there were people stealing things from my shed. Well, you don't have to worry about them now because I've just shot them." Then he hung up

Within five minutes three police cars, an Armed Response Unit, and an ambulance showed up at the Phillips' residence and caught the burglars red-handed.

One of the Policemen said to George: "I thought you said that you'd shot them!"

George said, "I thought you said there was nobody available!"

Don't mess with the ancient and venerable folks!

Snopes has this listed as "true", though some of the details are wrong...

Weekly Puzzler

Last week's puzzler got some interesting results: exactly half the people who answered got the right answer (picking a random number), and the other half all picked the same wrong answer (computing the angular distances between all the stars in the sky).

Despite experiences you may have had with a computer that seem like random events, computers are actually deterministic devices – for a given set of inputs, they always produce the same results. Computers have no capability that is the equivalent of rolling a pair of dice; they simply don't know how to. Some very clever programmers have developed some very clever approximations to random number generation, but even the cleverest of them is still repeatable: given the same set of starting conditions, they generate the same darned numbers, every time.

It is possible to build special-purpose computer hardware to generate truly random numbers. Such hardware usually depends on some natural phenomenon (such as radioactive decay) that is, so far as anyone knows, truly random. Some innovative folks in recent years have developed other, less expensive techniques. For example, one such technique involves a lava lamp and a digital camera watching it; the image is then compressed to generate random numbers. To my knowledge, nobody has yet proved whether these systems are truly random…

This weeks puzzler is another history factoid...

Beautiful Photos...

I found these on a German website, and I have no idea what the context is. But … I do know that if you go here and just keep scrolling, you're in for a real visual treat!

Bearly Hanging In There...

From the photo, things don't look too good – but this story has a happy ending. Here's the beginning:

According to the Truckee BEAR League’s Dave Baker, a medium-sized bear jumped the railing of Rainbow Bridge, a 100-foot concrete arch near Donner Summit, on Saturday afternoon.

“The bear was crossing the bridge as cars were coming from the east and west,” said Baker. “[The cars] pinched the bear up and over the guard rail.”

The bear apparently jumped to avoid the cars, then found itself trapped in the concrete girders beneath the highest point of the bridge from 3 p.m. Saturday until its eventual rescue at noon Sunday.

“I’ve been on a lot of bear rescues, and this is the most intense bear call that I’ve been on,” Baker said.

One of the first on the scene, Baker said he saw claw marks etched into the concrete railing where the bear leaped and then scrambled for a secure hold to prevent falling about 80 feet.

You can read the whole story (and see more photos) here and here. This all took place on 9/15/2007.

America's Greatest Generation

Stephen Ambrose (historian and very popular history writer), I believe, is the man who first called the Americans who were of adults during World War II the “Greatest Generation”. Like many others, he was moved and impressed by their incredible courage, unstoppable optimism, and frank patriotism. I share those feelings, and my parents are members of that Greatest Generation.

Someone who was 25 in 1945 would be 87 years old today, if they are still alive. In not so many more years, America's Greatest Generation won't be here to share their experiences.

Simi L., one of my faithful (and patient!) readers, sent me a link to a tribute to the veterans of World War II, created by a doctor in San Antonio, Texas. He was motivated by observing that his elderly patients often had experiences in their lives that were surprising; he has come to cherish meeting them, however briefly, in his emergency room duties. One example:

There was a frail, elderly woman who reassured my young enlisted medic, trying to start an IV line in her arm. She remained calm and poised, despite her illness and the multiple needle-sticks into her fragile veins. She was what we call a "hard stick." As the medic made another attempt, I noticed a number tattooed across her forearm. I touched it with one finger and looked into her eyes. She simply said, "Auschwitz." Many of later generations would have loudly and openly berated the young medic in his many attempts. How different was the response from this person who'd seen unspeakable suffering.

Do go read (and see) the whole thing…

Lost Cat!

A beautiful and much-loved cat has gone missing:

My daughter's adored cat disappeared 7/14/07. He is friendly, curious, and doesn't know how to get back home. He is a marbled bengal, brown/gray with black swirls, short coat. She is heartbroken. She will pay a reward. We would be eternally grateful for his return. Please call 669-0314, home and message machine, or leave comments on the blog. Thanks, Ellen and Marley.

Do you know anything about this cat? Please let Ellen or Marley know if you do…

An Important Ruling

Earlier this week, I read about an appeals court ruling that I thought was a very important one. I'd planned to post about it, but the Wall Street Journal beat me to it, with an editorial that captures my reaction better than I could have done myself:

You probably haven't seen it reported, but the Guantanamo trial system for enemy combatants won a big victory earlier this week. A military appeals court overturned a much-ballyhooed decision in June that had dismissed all charges against Omar Ahmed Khadr, an al Qaeda operative captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan in 2002 after killing an American serviceman with a grenade.

The June decision was widely portrayed as a repudiation of the Bush Administration's antiterror legal policy, so perhaps this should be described as vindication. Under the 2006 Military Commissions Act, a panel called the Combat Status Review Tribunal makes a threshold determination of whether or not terror detainees are enemy combatants, before they are moved into military tribunals. Judge Peter Brownback ruled in June that the Review Tribunal had only screened for "enemy combatants," not "unlawful enemy combatants," thus giving his court no jurisdiction.

Never mind that "enemy combatant" is defined in a way that is inherently "unlawful" -- i.e., someone who is part of an international terrorist organization and engages in hostilities against the U.S. in violation of the laws of war. The legal hitch was not using the magic word "unlawful."

The appeals panel agreed that the Review Tribunal had not specifically determined that Khadr was an unlawful enemy combatant, but it also ruled that it wasn't obliged to. Rather, it said Judge Brownback ought to have considered the unlawfulness of Khadr's conduct under common courts-martial procedures, as defined by the Military Commissions Act. To do otherwise, let alone dismiss the charges, was "contradictory to the statute's clear structure, wording, and overall intent."

There's little doubt how the coming trial will turn out. There is a video, for instance, of Khadr preparing explosives to be used against American forces. But in the media's current terror narrative, it's only worth celebrating when the Bush Administration's judicial rules are overturned. When they're upheld, almost nobody notices -- so we thought you'd like to know.

How so many Americans believe we should coddle our enemies, and grant them the same rights as American citizens, is beyond my ken. Even more astonishing to me is how so many Americans don't even seem to realized that we're engaged in an existential war with radical Islamic fundamentalists. The American media, reflecting and amplifying this left-leaning bias, was very quick to report (and laud) the lower court ruling that limited our country's ability to prosecute its enemies. That ruling generated giant, joyful headlines across the country.

Reading the last couple of sentences back, I'm filled (again) with wonder at the self-destructive – suicidal, really – beliefs of my fellow countrymen.

The appeals court ruling, by contrast, is virtually uncovered in the lamestream media. I found one brief mention on Fox News, and a few mentions in the foreign press (mostly as a disaster report there). I found out about the ruling not through the lamestream media, but rather through one of the law blogs I read daily. This is so sad – an important ruling that helps this country defend itself, and the media just doesn't seem to care. Of course, the real problem is that the appeals court ruling doesn't fit their narrative at all, because that ruling vindicates the Bush administration's original position vis a vis the Guantanamo detainees' legal status.

Sigh…

Dog Found!

Dr. Christine Wilson and the folks at Steele Canyon Veterinary tell me that they have a dog that's in desperate need of finding its owner. From their email to me:

We have a dog that was found on 09/20/07 by a man who lives in Jamul off Lyons Valley Rd. The dog is an Akita Shep X, Spayed Female and brindle in color. The dog was found with tags and turns out that this dog was a patient of ours belonging to a different owner. When contacted about the dog they explained that they had adpoted the dog to someone in jamul....names and residence are unknown. The dog is very friendly and on the chance that there is a family in Jamul missing her we would like to get her back home.

If this sounds like it might be your missing dog, or if you know of anyone whose dog is missing, please give the Steele Canyon Veterinary Clinic a call, at 619/669-7274.

Photo of the Day

From the Botany Photo of the Day mailing list (which you can join by going here – just put your email address in the box at the upper right, and click the button!).

Who Said This?

Jim M., almost certainly my only reader from the mountains of northern New Mexico, sent me this little message:

Who said this?

1. "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
   
   
2. "It's time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few, and to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity."
   
   
3. "(We) can't just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people."
   
   
4. "We have to build a political consensus, and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own turf in order to create this common ground."
   
   
5. "I certainly think the free-market has failed."
   
   
6. "I think it's time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy - that they are being watched."

Now you might think these were the famous words of the Father of Communism, Karl Marx. And you would be on the right track in thinking so. But you would be wrong. These pearls of socialist/Marxist wisdom are from none other than our very own, home-grown Marxist…

Hillary Rodham Clinton

Comments made on: (1) 6/29/04 , (2) 5/29/07, (3) 6/4/07, (4) 6/4/07, (5) 6/4/07 , and (6) 9/2/05 .

Be afraid, be very afraid!

These actually seem sort of tame to me, compared to her rantings about socialized health care.

Jamul Casino Update

The effort by the Jamul Indian tribe to build a casino on State 94 has hit another roadblock: CalTrans has told the tribe that they need to supply more information before CalTrans can decide on their application for a permit to install a signal light and turn lanes on State 94, in front of the proposed casino's driveway. From the San Diego Union article:

Jacob said last week that the tribe should be treated the same as any other developer. She wants Caltrans to keep the tribe from using its historic driveway for a casino, even if it adds a stoplight there.

“If the tribe thinks that would create a safe situation on Highway 94 to use that driveway, they are dead wrong,” she said. “That would create a huge traffic-safety problem.”

Jacob noted that a developer building houses across the road from the tribe had to move access up to Melody Road and close its original driveway.

County Public Works Director John Snyder, who deals with roads and negotiates with Indian tribes over gambling projects, said it's a stretch to say the county wouldn't approve a casino driveway off Melody Road.

Previous applications by the tribe haven't had enough information for a proper environmental review, Snyder said.

“I haven't made up my mind,” he said.

Caltrans isn't taking a position on the suitability of the casino, agency spokesman Edward Cartagena said.

“We're sort of in the middle,” he said.

The agency's focus, he said, is to ensure the highway is safe. That includes taking into account whether the road can handle the number of cars the casino would likely add.

Like most residents of Jamul, I am very much opposed to this casino. I'm hoping that recent events incline the financial backers to give up on the project. This particular event looks to me like one more of the proverbial “death by 1000 cuts”. I hope so…

Orbital Turkey

My 3.5 long-term readers have heard me rail about the waste and uselessness of the U.S. manned space program, and my rants about the funding it steals from the far more productive robotic space programs. Well, I'm not the only one who feels that way – Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate and renowned particle physicist, had this to say (this past Tuesday):

“The International Space Station is an orbital turkey. No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value."

Orbital Turkey. That's a much better moniker for the ISS!

Dr. Weinberg went on to say this about the manned space program:

"No important science has come out of it. I could almost say no science has come out of it. And I would go beyond that and say that the whole manned spaceflight program, which is so enormously expensive, has produced nothing of scientific value. Human beings don't serve any useful function in space. They radiate heat, they're very expensive to keep alive and unlike robotic missions, they have a natural desire to come back, so that anything involving human beings is enormously expensive.

I think the public imagination gets very rapidly bored with the sight of humans in space knocking golf balls around. On the other hand, [the public] was fascinated by the kinds of things done by rovers on Mars. I think our political leaders underestimate the intelligence of the public in thinking they won't be fascinated by real scientific discoveries. I think enormous sums are wasted on manned spaceflight that continually crowd out science missions."

Aside from those scientists whose funding depends on NASA's manned space program, most scientists seem to hold similar views as Dr. Weinberg – though most are also far less eloquent and forthright about it. NASA is, after all, a major source of science funding. The views of such independent scientists – especially their assertions that little worthwhile science is getting done by the manned space program – puts the lie to the usual political justifications. The truth is that the manned space program is yet another political boondoggle, motivated by some combination of pork treats (e.g., major contracts issued to favored constituents), geopolitical posturing (my space program can piss further than your space program!), and fuzzy-brained romanticism (mankind can't be locked into just one planet!).

Personally, I'm so frustrated by the huge waste of my tax dollars by NASA that my preferred solution is to just kill it – shut down the whole damned thing. I'm convinced that once a bureaucracy achieves the scale and political power that NASA has, reform from within is nearly impossible. The country would be better served by a hiatus in the space program, followed by a new, trimmer, smarter program that addresses high-value science and research on fundamentals (such as alternatives to chemical rockets)…

News stories on Dr. Weinberg's remarks can be found here, here, and here. I'll leave you with a quote from The Register (a UK paper):

Here at the Reg, we don't quite know what to think. The idea of manned spaceflight is frankly more appealing than just sitting here on Earth looking at the rest of the universe until the end of the world, maybe sending out robots now and again. On the other hand we're not terribly impressed with the idea of chemical rockets as the only propulsion technology for the foreseeable future, which is mainly what NASA plans on.

Maybe if the boffins got loads of cash for atom-smashers, deep space Einsteinian-physics-bender probes, etc, they might finally come up with hyperspace drives or antigravity or something. Then there could be a proper space exploration effort. It could be worth playing the long game.

Another Photo

Here's another photo from the series...

Photo of the Day

A friend sent a small collection of spectacular images to me by email. These have been circulating on various lists, none of which seem to provide attribution. That's a shame, because whoever this photographer is deserves some recognition…

I'll post the rest of the collection over the next week or so. Click on the small picture to see a full-sized version.

Free Lunch

My mother sent me this little parable:

Free Lunch

There was a Chemistry professor in a large college that had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Prof noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back and stretching as if his back hurt. The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student Told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country, who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a Strange question: "Do you know how to catch wild pigs?"

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.

The young man said this was no joke. "You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America . The government keeps pushing us toward Communism/socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. While we continually lose our freedoms - a little at a time.

One should always remember "There is no such thing as a free lunch!"
Also, "You can never hire someone to provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself."

Also, if you see that all of this wonderful government "help" is a problem confronting the future of democracy in America , you might want to send this on to your friends. If you think the free ride is essential to your way of life, then you will probably delete this email, but God help you when the gate slams shut!

Most politically-aware people in America reading this would immediately associate the fence-building with the Democratic party, and not without reason. However, in point of fact the Republican party is also guilty of much fence-building, especially in the regulatory sphere. In more recent years, it's sometimes been hard to distinguish between the two parties on the basis of their fence-building (think Medicare drug supplements and tax policies).

The only serious political party that has consistently positioned themselves against this sort of fence-building is the Libertarian party – but unfortunately it seems to be infested with lunatics and fractured by multiple agendas so disjoint they make the Democrats look unified. The probability of the Libertarians winning any real political power is close to zero.

So the only real hope any of us who would like to see fewer fences have is to reform one of the two major parties, to get them on board with the fence-demolition project. If your only practical choice is between the Republicans and the Democrats, clearly it is much more likely that we could move Republicans in that direction.

But, sadly, I think the real problem is nearly intractable. It is this: each metaphorical fence that is built represents more power for the political class. Conversely, to pull down a section of the metaphorical fence requires some elements of the political class to relinquish power – something that most humans are not inclined to do. Here's a concrete example: one of the biggest metaphorical fences we have right now is the federal income tax. Its regulations, hulking size, and mind-boggling complexity warp our behavior and reduce our free choices in many ways. The “flat tax” is a credible alternative, with the attractive virtue of utter simplicity. If any business faced a similar opportunity to dump the current tax code and adopt the flat tax, it would be an absolute no-brainer: the flat tax would be implemented immediately.

But consider this: switching to the flat tax would mean that a veritable army of bureaucrats at the IRS would have no job, that one of Congress' cherished tools for controlling our behavior (tax exemptions and credits) would be removed, and another army of tax accountants (who are big contributors to political campaigns) would be out of a job. From a politician's jaded perspective, there's nothing good about switching to a flat tax. Aside from a very few elected officials with genuine beliefs of their own, just about the only politicians who support the flat tax are those who are struggling to win their first election, or those who are threatened in their incumbency and need some way to attract voters. All the other politicians see the flat tax as a threat (to themselves, of course) or a reduction in their power – and they will resist its implementation with all their might, no matter what their public posturing is (much like the recent move to expose earmarking to public scrutiny has been successfully resisted, despite public statements to the contrary).

The little parable has an important message. I believe those fences are being built, and they threaten our freedoms far more than the Patriot Act or its ilk ever did. The only way I can think of (with any real chance of success) to demolish those fences is to reform the Republican party. I really hate to say this, but I'm not very optimistic about the chances of that reform – too many people in this country are attracted by that free corn, and are comfortable with it. And so far, their consistent history is to vote for the politicians who promise the most free corn…

Hell Is Over

Michael J. Totten – one of the extraordinary independent journalists in the Middle East – has filed a new report on his blog, full of excellent photos like the one at right, detailing his recent observations in Anbar province, Iraq. It is one of the most compelling pieces I have read about the current situation in Iraq – if you have any interest at all in events over there, you should read this post. Here's a tiny teaser for you:

I saw so many pictures of crazed Iraqis wearing ski masks and carrying rocket launchers and Kalashnikovs before I went to Baghdad and Ramadi that I slowly started to think, against my better judgment, that such people are typical. I never once saw anyone like that. They are around, obviously, but they are not in any way typical.

These are the typical faces I saw in Iraq.

They are the ones I now think of when trying to figure out what the United States should do in Iraq. They are the ones who will have to suffer the consequences the longest.

Don't miss reading the whole thing – and while you're there, please hit his tip jar; he depends on contributions to keep up his fine work…

Quote of the Day

By Karen Toggery:

“They say we're supposed to have fair and equal justice,” she said. “Where is it?”

Karen is one of the Jamul Indians evicted from her own reservation on March 10. Protesters at that incident were roughly treated, and had asked for criminal charges against the tribe and their security people. Yesterday District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis finally issued her decision about those charges: she declined to file any, saying that it was a civil matter, not a criminal matter. From the San Diego Union report:

“Tribal governments are recognized as sovereign nations,” she said. “Our office is authorized by Congress to prosecute state crimes committed on Indian reservations, but we have no jurisdiction over civil matters. An eviction process is a civil matter.

“Based upon this unique and unusual set of circumstances, our office has declined to file criminal charges against any of the persons involved in the events of March 10, 2007 on the Jamul Indian Reservation.”

Dumanis won't answer questions about her decision, spokesman Paul Levikow said.

I'm no lawyer, and I don't know what the “right” thing to do here is, from a legal perspective. Speaking as an American citizen, though, I can't see any way to claim justice has been served through this decision. Basically our District Attorney has just endorsed all manners of behavior in such “civil” matters. Now that the tribe has learned they can act with impunity, protesters on the reservation can expect to be treated violently. If the casino is ever actually built, protesters will be taking their lives in their hands to protest on the site…

Does that sound like America to you?

Route 94 Improvement Plans

In this morning's San Diego Union:

People concerned about the condition of state Route 94 will have a chance to tell Caltrans planners what they think of a plan for improvements on an 18-mile stretch from Jamul to Tecate.

Officials with the California Department of Transportation will be available to explain the proposal and take comments in a meeting scheduled from 4:30 to 8 p.m. today at Jamul Primary School, 14567 Lyons Valley Road in Jamul.

The proposed improvements include passing lanes, widening the road and realigning curves, said project manager Sam Amen, who estimated they would cost $90 million to $100 million to build.

There isn't enough money for the project in state and federal budgets right now, he said, but the planning is important for any eventual improvements. More information is available online at www.rural94.com.

I checked out the web site above; there's a bit of information, but nearly all of it is included on the map I've linked to above (click on it for a full-sized view). All of the improvements listed are for the section of 94 that lies between Jamul and Tecate, so for all of us who commute from Jamul toward San Diego, these have no benefit at all. It's another story altogether for those folks who travel between San Diego and Tecate, Campo, or points beyond – this stretch of 94 is (and has been for years) a notoriously dangerous route. Adding large numbers of trucks from Mexico isn't going to make it any safer, either…

Light Posting

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting much. My feeble excuse is that I've just started a new job, and I've been devoting much time to coming up to speed there. Losing some sleep, too, as the work is quite interesting…

My new title, at the moment, is my all-time favorite (which I'd love to keep forever!): “TBD”

That pretty much describes my entire career!

Puzzler Update

Only two people even guessed at the name of the first microcomputer kit, and both got it wrong. The kit was called the "Jolt", and it was a very simple 8008-based design with just a numeric keypad and two seven-segment LED displays as I/O.

This week, back to science and technology.

Imagine that you had access to an infinitely powerful, infinitely fast digital computer. Which of the listed tasks would be impossible for even this computer to perform?

Update: Gunfire in Jamul

A few days ago, I reported on the gunfire that led to the closure of 94 for about an hour. Last night I received the following email from a woman who notes that she is Scott Amerman's mother:

Regarding Jamul man jailed for allegedly shooting in Transient Camp. You might be interested in some background: 2003 My son came to nurse me for 8 months after doctors gave me 2 mos to live. Deplorable state of vagrant camp behind my (not his) mobile home upset him. Once he was hit over the head in the grove, robbed and left for dead. Scott moved on when my health was restored. My Mobile Home Park was overrun with rats. 2006 I launched campaign to clean up the olive grove. Responses: Fire Dept, "call if you smell smoke." Immigration -"got green cards." Sheriff -"no crime. " DEA-"can't find anything." Vector Control gave me traps. County Health- "Yes, bacteria count in creek's high." It's gone on for years! Sent DVD's of campsites to everyone. Duncan Hunter directed me to a Santee meeting. Heather Lucas (Ch 8 News) did a spot on me. People began to listen. Was directed to Code Enforcement. They fined the owner. He cleaned up acreage. Hurrah! Rats gone! Short lived victory. Visiting me, Scott found they're back, lighting campfires in that tender box environment. My daughter lost her home and narrowly escaped with her life in 2003 Alpine fire. Campfires 40' from my home aren't acceptable to Scott. Criminal element of drug runners is intolerable. He felt he had to protect me since no authority does. Took his life in his hands to single handedly go tell them to leave. Incredible -about 30 patrol cars rushed here! Couldn't get them here after real criminals until after they'd gone. Scott surrendered peacefully. All charges were dropped. I don't know if the illegals & vagrants are still there. I'll ask a Sheriff to go with me so I can take photos and start the process again - if I don't get burned out first. Question: What do you do when the system is broken and no longer functions to protect you? Sheriff said get a petition signed by park residents and send it to the owner saying we hold him responsible. So….doesn’t that still put it back in our lap…and if the owner doesn’t cooperate, it’s another useless paper like the ones the Sheriffs give the transients.

Scott's Mom

Transients and illegals lighting campfires is one of our nightmares out here in the chaparral. The Horse Fire last year, and the Pine Fire (97% contained as of 6 PM last night) were both started by such campfires. Assuming the account by Scott's mom is accurate, the asymmetry of the law enforcement response to the prior complaints versus the gunfire is appalling – and infuriating to anyone who cares about the lives or property of residents here. It's easy for me to understand how Scott could be very angry and frustrated in that situation. If I saw a campfire on my property (or on a neighbor's) in our current dry fuel conditions, I'm not at all certain that my reaction would be civil, level-headed, or within the bounds of the law…