Home town fruit tree planting

My home town boasts a growing food-sharing network, thanks to a home-grown nonprofit called Daily Acts.



On March 22, Daily Acts co-hosted a workshop called "Digging, Drumming, Dancing" with Common Vision, a statewide nonprofit composed of mostly beautiful, healthy young people who have been touring the state planting fruit trees at schools, community centers and now the backyards of Petalumans who are willing to share their bounty with the community. Click on the link to see one of their brightly painted "hippie buses."

The Common Visioneers took about an hour to install 10 fruit trees in my backyard--nectarines, early and late peaches, apples and an apricot (my favorite!).

During the day they planted trees in four yards, conducted a grafting workshop (see slide show above), and livened up the digging with traditional African agricultural rhythms on African drums.

Most of us workshop attendees were on the shady side of 40, and one of us commented on the fact that we were the old learning from the young. Hurray for youth! I remember it well.

Many thanks to Common Vision, Daily Acts, and especially Trathen Heckman and Ellen Bicheler, for seeing this project through. Come see me in a couple of summers. I'll have some fruit for you.

My hometown mechanic

I dropped by my hometown garage last night on the way to dinner. My car had been making some noises, and Maria had already warned me my CV boots were cracked.

Sure enough, the axle was bad. And of course, I was overdue for an oil change.

I wanted to go to San Francisco today to have dinner with my son, and I asked Maria if she kept urgent care appointments open for people, like Kaiser does.

She said yes, but they were all booked. Then she said--as she always does--maybe she could get it done by noon if I brought the car in at 7 am. I said, "Sure!"

Then I remember that I had a meeting this morning from 7 to 9 am--a meeting I needed to drive to. She thought a moment and then said, "No problem. Leave your car here tonight, take my car and bring it back after your meeting," and tossed me the keys to her brand new custom-painted Scion.

Maria likes to walk to work, anyway. She says.

Would YOUR mechanic give you her OWN car to drive while she fixes your car? I think not.

Back when Out West Garage first came to Petaluma, I wrote an article about Maria. She's one of the things I like about living in Petaluma.

Blogging and Beer

I'm on the couch with my trusty miniature laptop. Cleo is asleep on my foot. Blogging right now is an excuse to sit down and drink a local brew as the setting sun slants through a gap in the storm clouds that actually released three and a half drops of rain before the north wind began ripping them apart.

Questions for Mr. Blogger:

Why is the editing window so tiny? Why can't you insert a picture where you want it, rather than at the top of the post? Have you ever tried dragging a large graphic down to its appropriate place using a window that's only half its size? Why doesn't the preview window look anything like the finished product, meaning that you have to actually publish before you can see a real "preview"?

Odds and ends

Mark Twain: Primitive Buddhist?

"In Sydney I had a large dream. . . . I dreamed that the visible universe is the physical person of God; that the vast worlds that we see twinkling millions of miles apart in the fields of space are the blood corpuscles in His veins; and that we and the other creatures are the microbes that charge with multitudinous life the corpuscles."--Following the Equator, 1897

Whatever, this is a beautiful vision of the sacred. Some say Buddhists don't believe in God. Some Buddhists say that they don't believe there is anything that is not God. And some say that Following the Equator is a gentle vacation you can take whenever you feel the need to just stop and stare out to sea.

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Hussein: Common Arabic name. Meaning: Handsome one.

And when it comes to Barack, I gotta agree--the name his daddy gave him was right on. Whatever your politics, the guy is gorgeous, and yes, he can dance!

He can also converse intelligently without coming across like he's promoting himself. All this stuff about how he has no specific policies--I just don't find that to be true. He addresses an issue and then he tells how he would deal with it. It's true that no elected president yet has been able to deliver on even a fourth of what s/he promises, but there are plenty of specifics there.

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Study finds immigrants commit less California crime (my bold)

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) Feb 26, 2008. Immigrants are far less likely than the average U.S.-born citizen to commit crime in California, the most populous state in the United States, according to a report issued late on Monday.

People born outside the United States make up about 35 percent of California's adult population but account for about 17 percent of the adult prison population, the report by the Public Policy Institute of California showed.

According to the report's authors the findings suggest that long-standing fears of immigration as a threat to public safety are unjustified. The report also noted that U.S.-born adult men are incarcerated at a rate more than 2 1/2 times greater than that of foreign-born men.

"Our research indicates that limiting immigration, requiring higher educational levels to obtain visas, or spending more money to increase penalties against criminal immigrants will have little impact on public safety," said Kristin Butcher, co-author of the report and associate professor of economics at Wellesley College.

Why torture doesn't work

No Torture. No Exceptions. - Jack Cloonan

When we speak today of "breaking" a terrorist suspect, many people picture something grim—perhaps a subject curled up in a fetal position and begging for mercy. But it's not what I picture. I worked as a special agent for the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. During that time, my colleagues and I had the chance to question numerous operatives from al-Qaeda. We broke many terrorists. But we did it the right way: by being intelligent and humane. . . .

***

Intelligence failures had much to do with the atrocity of September 11, but those had nothing to do with a lack of torture. Let me be clear on one crucial point: it is the terrorists whom we won over with humane methods in the 1990s who continue to provide the most reliable intelligence we have in the fight against al-Qaeda. And it is the testimony of terrorists we tortured after 9/11 who have provided the most unreliable information, such as stories about a close connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. I never regret that the FBI didn't abuse its detainees. Had we done so, we would have had much less reliable intelligence, and we would have been morally debased. By instituting a pol-icy of torture in the years following 9/11, we have recruited thousands to al-Qaeda's side. It has been a tragic waste.

Read the rest.

The exaggerated threat of terrorism

The Fading Jihadists

By David Ignatius
Thursday, February 28, 2008; A17

Politicians who talk about the terrorism threat -- and it's already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign -- should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman. It stands what you think you know about terrorism on its head and helps you see the topic in a different light.

Sageman has a résumé that would suit a postmodern John le Carré. He was a case officer running spies in Pakistan and then became a forensic psychiatrist. What distinguishes his new book, "Leaderless Jihad," is that it peels away the emotional, reflexive responses to terrorism that have grown up since Sept. 11, 2001, and looks instead at scientific data Sageman has collected on more than 500 Islamic terrorists -- to understand who they are, why they attack and how to stop them.

The heart of Sageman's message is that we have been scaring ourselves into exaggerating the terrorism threat -- and then by our unwise actions in Iraq making the problem worse. He attacks head-on the central thesis of the Bush administration, echoed increasingly by Republican presidential candidate John McCain, that, as McCain's Web site puts it, the United States is facing "a dangerous, relentless enemy in the War against Islamic Extremists" spawned by al-Qaeda.

The numbers say otherwise, Sageman insists. The first wave of al-Qaeda leaders, who joined Osama bin Laden in the 1980s, is down to a few dozen people on the run in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. The second wave of terrorists, who trained in al-Qaeda's camps in Afghanistan during the 1990s, has also been devastated, with about 100 hiding out on the Pakistani frontier. These people are genuinely dangerous, says Sageman, and they must be captured or killed. But they do not pose an existential threat to America, much less a "clash of civilizations."

It's the third wave of terrorism that is growing, but what is it? By Sageman's account, it's a leaderless hodgepodge of thousands of what he calls "terrorist wannabes." Unlike the first two waves, whose members were well educated and intensely religious, the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action. Like young people across time and religious boundaries, they are bored and looking for thrills. More...

House of Men, House of Women

What if men and women had separate but equal roles in government?

I was reading an article in Discover Magazine about whether the impulse toward war was innate and inevitable or not. One group says it is and point to the chimpanzees, who are vicious fighters. One group points to the bonobos, who prefer to work things out and follow up with lots of sex.

One anthropologist, Richard Wrangham, is in the "war is innate" camp. But like those on the other side of the issue, he does think we can overcome our propensity to fight.

Primate violence is not blind and compulsive, he asserts, but rather calculating and responsive to circumstance. Chimpanzees fight "when they think they can get away with it," he says, "but they don't when they can't. And that's the lesson that I draw for humans."

Much depends, he says, on the empowerment of women.

He points out that as female education and economic opportunities rise, birthrates tend to fall. A stablized population lessens demands on governmental and medical services and on natural resources; hence, the likelihood of social unrest also decreases. Ideally, Wrangham says, these trends will propel more women into government.

"My little dream," he confesses, is that all nations give equal decision-making power to two entities, "a House of Men and a House of Women."

What an interesting idea. The trend in civic life has to try to erase distinctions between men and women, to be "gender blind." I don't know if this idea of giving each gender its own co-equal legislature is feasible or not. Any responses?

Did Obama get shafted for something Hillary did?

'NAFTAgate' began with remark from Harper's chief of staff

by Alexander Panetta
The Canadian Press
March 5, 2008 at 8:53 PM EST

(emphasis mine):

At the end of an extended conversation, Mr. Brodie was asked about remarks aimed by the Democratic candidates at Ohio's anti-NAFTA voters that carried serious economic implications for Canada.

Since 75 per cent of Canadian exports go to the U.S., Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton's musings about reopening the North American free-trade pact had caused some concern.

Mr. Brodie downplayed those concerns.

"Quite a few people heard it," said one source in the room.

"He said someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry."

Government officials did not deny the conversation took place.

They said that Mr. Brodie sought to allay concerns about the impact of Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton's assertion that they would re-negotiate NAFTA if elected. But they did say that Mr. Brodie had no recollection of discussing any specific candidate — either Ms. Clinton or Mr. Obama.

CTV News President Robert Hurst said he would not discuss his journalists' sources.

But others said the content of Mr. Brodie's remarks was passed on to CTV's Washington bureau and their White House correspondent set out the next day to pursue the story on Ms. Clinton's apparent hypocrisy on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Although CTV correspondent Tom Clark mentioned Ms. Clinton in passing, the focus of his story was on assurances from the Obama camp.

He went to air on Feb. 27 with a report that the Democratic front-runner had given advance notice to Canadian diplomats that he was about to engage in some anti-NAFTA rhetoric, but not to take it too seriously.

Read the whole story...