I often rant about about the wholesale greed and theft that seems to permeate every board room and executive committee in the US, about how this endemic perversion of capitalist enterprise is so readily accepted, justified, and defended by so many. I was a bit stunned when I witnessed the Board of my former employer, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America, raise their CEO’s salary from about $100,000 in 1998 to $500,000 by 2003/4 or thereabout. The top executives in that organization were soon taking home a couple of million per year extra, an amount unfathomable to the 4 billion or so in the world who make less than $5 dollars a day. Frankly, I thought it was criminal. What’s worse, the LLS is a charity, and the newly inflated salaries are peanuts compared to executive compensation in most public companies.

What monster could have eaten up the brains of those in charge of our society so that they think theft on such a scale is justifiable? And now, the house of cards that was, to use William Grieder’s term, “the casino economy,” appears to be tumbling down. I think Noam Chomsky, as quoted in yesterday’s BBC News, has offered the best analysis I’ve seen, pointing as he did to the institutional, structural flaws that have made all of this imaginable:

The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.

I think that it is also useful to keep in mind that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act happened during, and with the encouragement of, the Clinton administration — so before we are too quick to run off and blame our favorite partisan punching bag, it is best to recall that both the aggressive militarism of the US as well as its irresponsible fiscal and economic policies of the past few decades have been very much a product of the two institutional ruling parties.

John McCain’s newly announced running-mate Vice-Presidential candidate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin proclaimed in her acceptance speech that a proposed natural gas pipeline from Alaska to the lower 48 would place the US “on the road to energy independence.”

It is a statement that is risably disingenuous, so crassly manipulative of an apparently ignorant populous as to be comedic were it not so tragic in its demonstration of absolute dereliction of leadership. Only President Carter of all of the Presidents of the last 50 years demonstrated a reasonable grasp of the US’ energy predicament, and he was nearly laughed out of office by the citizenry. While France moved towards 80% nuclear generation, Denmark and Spain moved radically into wind energy, and Germany began lining autobahns with solar panels, the US proceeded to build suburban landscapes ever more frenetically.

Our children will not look kindly on the nearly willful ignorance and rapaciousness of contemporary Americans. That this collective dereliction of responsibility has been wrapped in hyper-patriotism is repugnant. That the putative opposition, including Senator Obama and Speaker of the House Pelosi, have failed to counter the vacuous idea that drilling the continental shelf will have any effect whatsoever on price and the ultimate destiny of an overwhelmingly oil and gas dependent, hopelessly suburban nation; that they have failed to offer any credible, prudent plan is disheartening.

The International Red Cross has delivered its report to the CIA stating categorically that the U.S. has conducted a program of torture and that torture is illegal. The following MSNBC commentary and interview with a legal scholar describes the implications:

During the weekend of June 21-22 8000 lightning strikes started 800 fires in Northern California from Big Sur to the Oregon border. According the the San Francisco Chronicle, “By contrast, 574 lightning-sparked fires blackened about 86 square miles in Northern California in all of 2007.”

The San Francisco Bay Region (and the rest of California) has had its driest late spring since records have been kept, beginning in 1850. Normally, about 5 inches of rain fall in March-May; this year about 1/2 an inch fell in those three months.

Air National Guard MAFFS units from Wyoming, North Carolina, and Colorado are being sent to the region. Firecrews from Oregon, Washington, Iowa and Alaska have arrived to help.

NASA’s Earth Observatory has high resolution images of the region that show plumes of smoke filling the northern 1/3rd of the state.

Photos below are from a hike we took today to Mount Tamalpais, which is located in Marin County, about 10 miles north of San Francisco proper.

I thought that I should elaborate on my earlier somewhat cryptic reference to Clayton (Contra Costa County, California) as “spooky.”

For the last couple of years I’ve been paralyzed, in a state of shock at the sheer hubris, the awful ugliness of post 9-11 America. The country has suffered a paroxysm of jingoistic fervor and of vile nationalism that has served to obfuscate not only why the US was attacked, but the road out of its dilemma.

      Suburban house, Pacifica, California

It is as if the vibrant dissent to the world’s biggest military apparatus prior to 9-11 was for naught. Forgotten was the ugly history of US foreign intervention, that Hussein of Iraq was merely one of an unseemly coterie that did the bidding of US corporate interests under veil of fighting “communists.” Even now, as evidenced by presidential candidate Barack Obama’s repudiation of his minister’s statement that the World Trade Center attacks were “chickens coming home to roost” (I prefer Chalmers Johnson’s term: blowback), the US polity has yet to fully come to grips with its culpability for 9-11. 9-11 was a fundamentally revolutionary act in nature, it was a repudiation of capitalism (that is, capitalism in its 20th century form: corporate-state militarism) and its adjunct, US military dominion. The US military had been cast by its supporters as the noble bulwark against “communism”, and though now the enemy has been magically transformed into “terrorism”, the true goal of such overwhelming military force remains global domination of resources. To wit: Iraq.

So I can’t help but pass through the seemingly bucolic landscapes of places like Clayton and not feel both the military cost of making them possible and the improbability of their future viability. And having some affection for the US Constitution of 1787, and for democracy in general, landscapes filled with security infrastructure, nationalistic icons, giant automobiles, and … well, dare I say? … copiously irrigated lawns … make me, to put it mildly, uneasy. (By using the phrase “security infrastructure”, I intend to refer broadly to the “gated community”, inward looking, profoundly anti-civic nature of Clayton and most suburban landscapes)

James Howard Kunstler is typically evocative of the American early 21st century zeitgeist in his recent description, which I’ll take the liberty of quoting at length:

Of course, one of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape from it for a weekend.

We’re at a dead end with all this and a lot of Americans are paralyzed with fear about what’s next. This may actually be a deeper fear than the anxiety about money and banking in 1933, when Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in and tried to reassure the nation. Back then, despite the grave problems of capital, we still had plenty of everything: plenty of good productive land, plenty of manpower earnestly eager for hard work, plenty of ore in the ground, shining cities equipped with excellent streetcar systems, a railroad network that was the envy of the world, sturdy small towns and small cities fully equipped with locally-owned business, and a vast number of small family farms that could re-absorb family members unable to get wages in the cities. Most of all, we had plenty of oil in the ground, and the world’s biggest industry for getting it out and selling it. What we didn’t have in 1933 was cash money.

The crisis at hand now goes way beyond a crisis of capital — though that is certainly part of it. Notice how many of the things we had in 1933 are gone now. Our cities, with a few exceptions, are imploded husks. Our small towns and small cities (Schenectady, home of G.E.!) are gutted, especially in terms of locally-owned business. Our passenger rail system is worse than anything a Soviet ministry might produce (while the airline industry that replaced it is dying of a kind of financial hemorrhagic fever). Our local transit hardly exists anymore. Family farms have all but disappeared.

This is why I find places like Clayton to be spooky. The very placidness of this landscape belies the violence which created it. Clayton is near to an ideal, fictive American landscape in its cartoon-like lush irrigation set amidst the parched, golden hills of the Coast Range. Nevertheless, it is, to me, a gravely flawed landscape.

I cringe at having to attempt to explain any of this to people who hang American flags on their privacy fences, and who have filled their carports with giant, gaudy gas guzzlers; but most of all, who have chosen, as evidenced by the landscape they’ve created for themselves, at some level reject civic life.

Humanity Lobotomy is a video short that attempts to explain in documentary fashion net neutrality and open source media and software.

The video and its sponsoring site can be found by clicking on the image below:

Save the Internet | Rock the Vote

We hiked up to Eagle Peak on Mount Diablo yesterday — photos are in my contacts section. On the way in and out, we passed through Clayton.

Clayton is Stepford wives territory, the sort of surreal, exurban fringe where nature (and common sense) is subordinated to an ideal, English manor-based version of reality, albeit updated with “appropriate” (I love the euphemistic, neutered lexicon of contemporary “human resource” departments) security infrastructure: tasteful, discrete, hidden yet subtly visible, in perfect Panopticon style. The whole illusion is maintained with massive amounts of water, oil, and resources imported from … from somewhere.

Of course, rampant TV-news inspired paranoia is visible everywhere, for the bucolic town of Clayton presents itself to outsiders principally as the blank walls of the gated “communities” (sic) that presumably shelter innocent babes from burglars, rapists and pedophiles.

Occasionally, an American flag pokes over the tasteful wooden “privacy” fences. Giant SUVs prowl the streets, often driven by lone occupants.

Clayton is a fascinating and spooky place.

We recently revisited the Coast Range Ophiolite, which is found on Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County.

An ophiolite is a section of oceanic crustal rocks, a sequence that typifies ocean crust wherever it exists. One might be led, then, to ask what ocean crust is doing on Mount Diablo (40 km outside of San Francisco), 300 meters or so above sea level. Good question. It happens that when a terrane docks with a continent some of the ocean floor is often included in the suture. This particular parcel of ocean floor was formed about 165 million years ago, in the mid to late Jurassic. Subsequently it was buried under 10,000 meters of sediment, and then was faulted to the surface as the Franciscan subduction (~145 - 30 million years before present) of the Farallon plate came to a close, and the right lateral faulting associated with the San Andreas system began.

A cross section of sea floor is typically ordered like this, from top down: chert, pillow lavas, sheeted dikes, gabbro, peridotite. One can see in this set of photos chert, pillow lavas, a diabase (gabbro) quarry, and a manzanita ‘barrens’ (which usually grow on serpentine sourced soils; serpentinite being hydrothermally altered peridotite).

Clicking on any of the images below takes you to a set of images for that day, and away from this web log.

Chert:

Chert (closeup):

Chert (even closer):

Pillow lava:

Diabase (Gabbro) quarry (the next photo is from an earlier visit):

Manzanita barrens:

Over spring break we visited Point Reyes, and happened upon Drakes Beach just as a front was clearing. After Drakes Beach, we went to the light house, and we finished the day at Chimney Rock. Clicking on the photos below brings you to a contact sheet slide for that day.

I just wanted to point once more to iamalwayshungry.com, which is Nessim Higson’s baby. I love his work, and his use of Flash is brilliant. Yes, we like to poo-poo Flash’s web unfriendly nature, but one must admit it permits a creative latitude that is just not possible with html at this point.

So investment bank Bear Stearns has gone belly up, and the FBI is looking into the mortgage lending practices of Countrywide and others. As a financial analyst quoted in a Bloomberg article this morning put it:

One reason banks are losing money is the repeal nine years ago of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial and investment banking after excessive risk- taking contributed to the Great Depression, Eveillard said.

Well, duh.

And, hey, maybe having the meat inspectors work for the meat packing companies wasn’t such a great idea, and perhaps privatising government — and thereby eliminating the checks inherent in a civil service system — was not such a great idea, either. Mercenary armies? Bad idea (see a fellow by the name of Machiavelli on this one). I remember when the Pete Wilson administration in California eliminated Great-Depression era laws capping interest rates and the amount of air that could be in a loaf of bread. Who in their right minds would do these things? Laissez-faire, trickle down? Wait, didn’t we settle these questions several depressions, and several reform movements ago?

And while we’re at it, how about raising fleet fuel standards for automobiles, and beginning planning for the post-oil era? Maybe an end to suburbanization, a resumption of urban planning, and a reconstruction of our rail network might also be in order. Enforcement of the Sherman anti-trust act, a withdrawal from Iraq — I mean, good gods, the US polity in its collective judgment appears to be thoroughly short-sighted and ignorant. Wave that flag in jingoistic fervor all you want (uber-nationalism? Anybody here remember the fine example set by those nationalists par excellence, the Nazis? Didn’t nationalism go out of style with the British Empire, or at least with the demise of demagogues extraordinaire, Radovan Karadžić and Slobodan Milošević?), but the earth will not grow a caramel nougat center of oil, nor will real estate speculation and gambling ever make a sound economy.

Excuse my cynicism at the cravenness and stupidity I see around me, all covered with a gloss of contented self-assurance (’We’re rich, therefore we must be God’s annointed’). It can’t last, you know; it’s just not the way of world. It’s time to wake up.

One can probably gather why I’ve just about given up saying anything about the antics of my fellow citizens. Truly, they are a people who appear to be busily eating their seed corn. I mean, for the love of Gaia, did our president actually try to justify torture? Again?

I think I’ll just shut up now.

James Howard Kunstler is one of the most acid critics of the United States’ “non-negotiable” way of life (Vice President Dick Cheney’s words), of the “happy motoring utopia” (Kunstler). In a series of books and novels (The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, World Made by Hand), Kunstler has laid out a disturbing vision of a nation that is disconnected from the economic and political facts that govern its future.

America, it seems, has bought the Reagan-esque line that it is “morning in America,” and that the first of what will likely turn out to be several resource and geopolitical shocks to its role as global hegemon, the Mid-east sparked twin oil crises of 1973 and 1981, were aberrations, more attributable to the moral weaknesses and foibles of “liberal” America.

Kunstler counters that the incipient crises, principle among them being the peaking of world oil production, are real, and that Americans persist in their suburban and agro-industrial fantasy at their peril. Although I do not agree on some significant points of Kunstler’s thesis (or theses), I agree with his views on balance. I especially agree with him that the American polity has become unmoored from the political and economic realities that surround it.

Here, then, is an interview with Kunstler in which he outlines his views that I’ve pulled off of Youtube (hence the poor quality).

JHK, LE 1 (swf)

JHK, LE 2 (swf)

JHK, LE 3 (swf)

JHK, LE 4 (swf)

JHK, LE 5 (swf)

We visited Fort Funston on a beautiful, warm February day (trust me, this locale is never this warm — summer or winter), and above is a panorama taken from the cliff top. The promontory peeking out from behind the cliff in the photo’s the far right and left sides is Point San Pedro, which is the seaward foot of Montara Mountain. Mt. Tamalpais, in Marin county, is in the photo’s center. Barely visible to the left of Mt. Tamalpais is Point Reyes National Seashore. The San Andreas Fault runs from the gap between Mt. Tam and Pt. Reyes offshore to Mussel Rock, which is visible at the foot of Montara Mountain (it’s the dark sea stack visible to the right of the apex of the shoreline’s bend). San Francisco is visible just to the right of the large, sandy, grassy hummock in the photo’s center. Fort Funston is located in San Francisco’s southwestern most corner, and is part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

The recent spate of winter storms in Northern California brought to mind photos I took at Baker Beach three winters ago (below). In the first photo one can also make out the lighthouse at Point Bonita in the Marin headlands on the image’s left side, just above the wave. If I recall correctly, this was an exceptionally late storm, occurring as it did in June, when the storm door has typically long slammed shut, and the Pacific high has begun blocking the march of mid-latitude storms for duration of the summer.

Tom Hodgkinson of the UK Guardian has done an excellent report, With friends like these …, on the background and motivations of the investors behind Facebook. The teaser from his article:

Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site

Another choice quote:

He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled “The PayPal Mafia” by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the “multiculture” led to a lessening of individual freedoms.

It is a nice piece of investigative reporting, though there is little in it to surprise me. Capital does what Capital will do, and in this late-stage, deeply corrupt society, such ideological extremism — cloaked in “conservatism,” but in truth serving the interests of an oligarchic elite thoroughly disconnected from the interests of the rest of society — is to be expected. I place conservatism in quotes because the conservatism that reigns today bears little resemblance to anything that may have had that name in the past (I should also offer the disclaimer that I have little respect for the extremes of the left of the last century or so; it is difficult to sort out who has more blood on their hands).

It is a shame, however, to see that so many so readily abandon their privacy and freedom. Remember: the “web” is not the internet, it is merely one application that rides on it. To communicate directly with other people, one need not use the AOLs, Facebooks, Googles, or Yahoos of the world — one need only be connected to the internet.

And so long as ISPs and the Telecom companies respect one’s bits, then the medium retains its usefulness. To that end: Sonic.net is my ISP, and unlike Yahoo/SBC/AT&T and the like they regard themselves as providers of bandwidth, not as providers and regulators of “content” (whatever that is). Hence, their terms of service lack onerous restrictions on what kind of packets one may ship back and forth and do not prohibit one from running servers.

Tor is a web anonymiser service (free) that permits one to browse web sites without giving corporations detailed records of one’s every eyeblink.

And: How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling. (And for those who do not know what BitTorrent is: the Wikipedia entry on BitTorrent. The short version: BitTorrent is a protocol, just like SNMP of email fame, and HTTP of the web. BitTorrent is extremely useful because it is so profoundly efficient at utilizing bandwidth.)

Finally, keep the telcos from strangling the goose that laid the golden egg: Save The Internet. For more in depth information, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I particularly like the work of legal scholar Eben Moglen on the issue of liberty in cyberspace, and as always the best source of muckraking on technology oligopolists’ machinations can be found at Groklaw.

The January 4/5 storm that San Francisco and the west coast of North America experienced was a once in a decade event: impressive in scope and intensity. The coast in San Francisco saw 9 meter waves and high winds. About 2 million customers lost power (a ‘customer’ typically represents more than one person).

As the storm progressed, I grabbed some images from NWS Monterey (they’ve put up a page for the storm):

Atmospheric pressure plummeting at the San Francisco buoy.

Water vapor being entrained from just north of Hawaii.

11 am PDT. San Francisco is in middle of storm. Winds on Bay Area ridges reach a maximum of 160 km per hour, and on Sierra peaks they will be clocked at 240 km per hour. The Sierra will receive 2 to 3 meters of snow.

53 Knot wind gusts at the San Francisco Buoy.

Center of storm swirls just over Vancouver Island, San Francisco is in the clear, southern California in midst of storm, storm’s leading edge has entered Colorado.

A rather impressive storm came ashore over the past few days. The road just visible on the right side of the first photo gives scale for the breaking waves. Swell was 9 meters. The storm was a 10 or 11 on the Beaufort scale. “Trees uprooted. Considerable structural damage” — indeed.

I knew something was up when the weather service forecasters strayed from the usual droll discussions of adiabatic lapse rates, orographic lifting, and vort maxes and included — gasp — two sets of double exclamation points!! It was definitely time to collect loose items about the property and to get out the candles.

A web search using key words “” led me to a UNR class (Geology 100: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and other Natural Disasters) page titled Earthquake Effects, which focussed on the 1995 Hyogo-Ken Nanbu (Kobe) quake. I took two key pieces of information from the page: 1. Wood frame structures, if they lack adequate shear strength, can actually fail more dramatically then adjacent concrete structures; and, 2. Do not, under any circumstance, run outside.

Regarding the first point:

Behind this completely collapsed wood-frame house is a house of reinforced concrete that suffered no structural damage. The number of wood versus masonry buildings that collapsed in Kobe astonished most observers, as wood-frame structures are usually thought to be much better at resisting shear forces. Possibly the concrete house was better-designed and stronger even for its greater weight. The proportionally heavier tile roofs on wooden houses also might have been a factor.

A picture tells of what happens at street level during an earthquake. Trust me, you’re safer inside:

John Walker has been so kind as to write a demoroniser perl script for cleaning up documents produced by Microsoft applications. I have, too, abandoned use of any Microsoft applications (some time ago), and I go so far as to (politely) ask those who send me things such as MS Word .doc formatted documents to please resend in an open, non-proprietary format. It’s just rude to send documents to the public at large with the expectation that they will buy whatever monstrously bloated, virus ridden software the sender has deigned to choose, is it not? So, please, please: do not send Microsoft formatted documents.

The excerpt below is from the demoroniser script’s introduction, and explains better than I could why this, unfortunately, is necessary:

Many slick, high profile corporate Web sites I visit seemed to exhibit terrible grammar completely inconsistent with the obvious investment in graphics and design. Apostrophes and quote marks were frequently omitted, and every couple of paragraphs words were run together which should have been separated by a punctuation mark of some kind.

This remained a mystery to me until I wanted to convert a presentation I’d developed in 1996 using Microsoft PowerPoint into a set of Web pages. A friend was kind enough to run the presentation through PowerPoint’s “Save as HTML” feature (I have abandoned all use of Microsoft products, so I did not have a current version of PowerPoint which includes this feature). When I got the PowerPoint-generated HTML back and viewed it in my browser, I discovered that it contained precisely the same grammatical errors I’d noted on so many Web sites, and which certainly were not present in my original presentation.

A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame. Western language HTML documents are written in the ISO 8859-1 Latin-1 character set, with a specified set of escapes for special characters. Blithely ignoring this prescription, as usual, Microsoft use their own “extension” to Latin-1, in which a variety of characters which do not appear in Latin-1 are inserted in the range 0×82 through 0×95–this having the merit of being incompatible with both Latin-1 and Unicode, which reserve this region for additional control characters.

These characters include open and close single and double quotes, em and en dashes, an ellipsis and a variety of other things you’ve been dying for, such as a capital Y umlaut and a florin symbol. Well, okay, you say, if Microsoft want to have their own little incompatible character set, why not? Because it doesn’t stop there–in their inimitable fashion (who would want to?)–they aggressively pollute the Web pages of unknowing and innocent victims worldwide with these characters, with the result that the owners of these pages look like semi-literate morons when their pages are viewed on non-Microsoft platforms (or on Microsoft platforms, for that matter, if the user has selected as the browser’s font one of the many TrueType fonts which do not include the incompatible Microsoft characters).

You see, “state of the art” Microsoft Office applications sport a nifty feature called “smart quotes.” (Rule of thumb–every time Microsoft use the word “smart,” be on the lookout for something dumb). This feature is on by default in both Word and PowerPoint, and can be disabled only by finding the little box buried among the dozens of bewildering option panels these products contain.

For weather, tide, and wave information at Ocean Beach: Ocean Beach United States Surf Forecast and Surf Reports from Surf-forecast.com.

San Francisco Bight Coastal Processes Study.

The USGS is conducting a study that documents and analyzes the processes that control the sand transport and sedimentation patterns of Ocean Beach, a National Park site within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. This area encompasses a complicated coastal setting that is impacted by the tidal influence of San Francisco Bay, as well as the southwest and northwest Pacific swell. High-energy conditions at this site have restricted comprehensive field surveys in the past, but recent innovations in field techniques now make it possible to perform detailed analysis of the physical processes operating on high energy coastlines, such as Ocean Beach.

Ocean Beach USGS webcam.

Wandering around also brought me to this USGS page on the 1700 Cascadia subduction zone earthquake and tsunami, The Orphan Tsunami of 1700—Japanese Clues to a Parent Earthquake in North America.