Rebane's Ruminations

Road Ruminations – 29jun08

George Rebane

We are definitely ready to head for the barn.  This is our last night in Estonia and tomorrow morning we drive to the airport, turn in our mud splattered Opel sedan, and fly to Frankfurt.  Yesterday afternoon we arrived back in Tallinn after a short drive from Muhu and Saaremaa, the country’s big island in the Baltic.  There our stay in Pädaste at the renovated manor cum luxury hotel was most pleasant.  On Friday night we ate in their gracious dining room, this time with sharing it with guests that had arrived for the weekend. 

The five course dinner was a “set table” wherein the entire meal was designed by the chef.  This was a good thing because I probably would have blown the whole thing and ordered stuff that wouldn’t go together – I can imagine the twittering at the neighboring tables.  But seriously, the food was expertly prepared and the portions, which initially caused some internal panic, turned out to be more than sufficient – even for a pudgy old Viking like me.  The only problem with the dinner was its extended elegance – it started at seven and lasted until almost ten – which was camouflaged by the long summer evenings’ light at this high latitude of almost sixty degrees.  Jo Ann and I are early eaters, and they sent us to bed with very full bellies.

One of the gentleman guests ordered a glass of port and a cigar as the dessert was being cleared and the last coffees served.  He properly went to enjoy his smoke and drink on the nearby steps just outside the big glass-enclosed patio.  This stirred up some long-dormant juices, for once long ago I too enjoyed those pungent delights after such dinners.  But today, seeing such pleasures from a distance, all I do is pine and start telling stories of when I too … .  As we left the dining room, I decided to stop by the cigar case for a last, longing look, and discovered another little commentary on Estonian culture – their mandated warning label on tobacco products.  The government here doesn’t go into twisted tirades about tobacco causing, perhaps, lung cancer, or possibly aggravating your emphysema, or maybe having your baby born with its three legs in a knot.  No sir, in very big, black-bordered print they get right to the point – “Smoking can kill.”

So yesterday morning, after saying goodbye to the owner, Mr. Martin Breuer, and a couple of especially helpful staff, we drove to the ferry port Kuivastu and got on to the ferry that was just ready to depart.  Half an hour later we were back on the mainland and on our way to Tallinn.  We took some back roads so that I could visit Vasalemma, the small town outside of Tallinn where my aunt once lived.  My dad took mom and me there during an interval in 1943 when the Soviet bombers were hitting the capital every night.  The old train station was the only building there that I could say with certainty that I had passed through, we no longer have my aunt’s old address.  Oh yes, this report would be incomplete without mentioning the obscene field of wildflowers we drove by.  It’s amazing how fast I can still react to an authoritarian voice screaming that I stop the car so we could take a picture.

Road Ruminations - 27jun08

Jo Ann Rebane

More cultural notes from Estonia.  First, it must be said that WiFi connectivity, although promised at our hotel in Pärnu, was slow to non-functional.  And here at the Pädaste Manor on Muhu Island the excellent wireless connection we had initially was knocked out by yesterday's mid-day thunder, lightning, and hail storm (George said it fried their router's network card).  While we dinned in the Seahouse Restaurant the storm raged outside.  We walked back to our room under clearing skies and the promise of sunshine.  Please visit the hotels’ website to get an idea of the splendor of this place called Estonia’s finest hotel and spa.  Truly, our arrival timing was fortunate.  We were the only guests last night and this morning, so they kindly upgraded us from the simplest “double” I’d reserved, to a fabulous two story suite in the Carriage House (two left hand windows on the second floor are ours).  It looks just like the picture on the website! This morning the entire dining room was all ours for a private breakfast with very attentive service and beautiful music in the background - they even lit all the candles in the dining room and on the patio for us. 

Continuing with cultural notes:

• Tidy road sides.  We learned from a store clerk (studying 20th century wars) that two months ago (May) 50,000 Estonians turned out across the land to pick up trash in public areas and along road sides.  That’s one more explanation for the pristine countryside we see.
• Holidays and businesses.  June 23rd and 24th are both national holidays in Estonia.  We’ve encountered more “closed for the holiday” signs in shops and restaurants than you’d ever see in Nevada City or Sacramento or San Francisco.  In Tartu, merchants aren’t prepared for tourists and tourists don’t come… Is this a chicken and egg problem?  Thank goodness our hotel feels a responsibility to its guests and maintains a first class restaurant.
• Public restrooms.  I’m pleasantly surprised to find restrooms (WC) widely available, free, clean and stocked with toilet paper, soap and paper towels.  What a relief!
• Wildlife sighting.  I saw a mini deer (not a fawn but a small scale deer) today standing at the interface where the forest meets the road’s shoulder.  We were driving from Pärnu to the ferry terminal at Virtsu on a secondary road.  That was a real surprise and treat.

Road Ruminations – 24jun08

George Rebane

Estonian Health Care.  In Viljandi Jo Ann and I were surprised to learn that our friend Bruno, who is a surgeon at the large provincial hospital (pictured on the horizon), is paid less than we pay our yard and garden help in Nevada County.  The country has a socialized health care system of the kind that our progressive politicians are trying to put in place.  Estonia, on the other hand, is currently seeking other solutions.

The system has the usual problems of long wait periods for certain kinds of treatments, difficulty of referral to specialists, and so on.  And the situation is getting worse because Estonia trains excellent physicians (e.g. here at the University of Tartu) who are much in demand all over the world where they can enjoy much higher wages relative to their cost of living.  Therefore, many of them emigrate and consequently leave the country with marginal staffing levels at hospitals and clinics.

Also the good Dr. Bruno and many others are forced to go to other countries to get timely medical care, especially for those involving procedures that the state declares to be discretionary.  It’s always puzzled me how these bureaucrats know what I consider critical and/or necessary to my quality of life.  They just sit there at a distance and tell the population what it really needs, and what it doesn’t need – amazing!

Estonian national health insurance adds an employer paid 13% burden to each worker’s base pay.  Additionally, each worker pays a 26% flat tax deducted from his paycheck that will be stepped down to 20% in about four years.

It will be interesting to see what these very practical people come up with as they seek to fix their healthcare system (a good summary of which is found here).  The respected think tank Cato Institute studies American healthcare as one of its main public policy research areas.  They have some information about healthcare solutions here that you don’t see on the evening news.  Sometimes it feels that in many areas we in the US are following a trail littered with abandoned and derelict public policies picking and choosing among the worst as we mindlessly mumble the new mantra ‘change’.

Tomorrow we leave Tartu and drive across southern Estonia to the beach resort city of Pärnu.

Road Ruminations – 23jun08

Jo Ann Rebane

Some cultural observations from Estonia:

• The Estonian people are physically beautiful, especially those in the big cities of Tallinn, Viljandi and Tartu.
• Service staff (hotel front desk, wait staff, store clerks) seem to have a aloof, couldn’t care less attitude.  Friendly, helpful personnel are the exception.  We’ve had particularly helpful young people manning the front desk here in Tartu.  They are university students eager to speak English.
• People are strictly formal with newcomers, taking time to assess intent.
• There’s affluence here.  We see Jeeps, Toyota land cruisers and families in minivans.
• On weekday mornings and evenings people walk with a sense of purpose, briskly headed to train, bus and job.
• Evenings we see people carrying cut flowers surrounded by a cone of brown paper and wonder who will get the flowers.
• In Tallinn we saw very few babies, so few that we began to count them. We counted on average ten a day in a city of 400,000 which seems very low.  In Viljandi, population 20,000 and located in the center of the country, babies and mothers were everywhere so we abandoned counting strollers and buggies.
• It’s rare to see a police car – maybe 3 a day, total.
• These people, the youth in particular, haven’t heard or don’t believe that smoking causes cancer.  Almost all smoke.
• The Otepää “alpine” resort area we visited reminded me of the German or Swiss alps except many fewer people have trod the paths, dropped their bottle caps, and snuffed out cigarette butts.  Therefore that place seemed fresher.  It’s also less crowded.  Less impact from fewer people.  Just wait!
• In the countryside the dominant color is green.  Green rye and turnip fields, green forests, green weeds.  It’s no wonder country housewives prefer bright red flowers in their gardens.
• There’s a bus stop about every two kilometers.  Sometimes it’s just a wide spot in the road marked by a signpost.  Other bus stops include a shelter of various designs with roof and benches.
• Wood piles.  Wood is widely used for heating, probably year round.  Therefore each dwelling, including apartment blocks have huge stacks of firewood.  We have seen firewood stacked against a building, in free standing rows, covered and uncovered, massed in multiple rows, and the most interesting – in the shape of a stout cylinder.
• Field stones.  Glaciation tumbled boulders across the land and deposited them everywhere.  The smooth boulders which are too big to move have been left in fields and plowed around.  Smaller stones are dug up and moved to the edge of the field and piled up there.  In Otepää and in eastern Estonia near Lake Peipsi the stones have been arranged into low walls and to form planted garden mounds.
• Old people.  We were told that it’s cheapest for them to live in very rural villages.  You don’t see many really old people in the cities but it is common to see an old woman shuffle across a country lane oblivious to the occasional automobile.

Road Ruminations – 22jun08

George Rebane

Today was another one of those days which makes you think whether you took the wrong turn somewhere and wound up in a travelogue film.  We took a trip down to Otepää (unpronounceable by tongues born and bred in the US), a resort and winter sports training community in southeast Estonia about 30 miles from Tartu.  The country here, now a bit more hilly, continues to be what one can only call Disneyesque – every scene is sculpted to perfection, we have yet to see our first piece of trash *anywhere*.

Before going to bed last night, a squall passed over Tartu and in its waning trail left a complete double rainbow.  I had to take a picture of it through the rain covered skylight window in our hotel room.  Note that the brighter rainbow strongly demarks the regions of light and dark sky as if they were painted that way on purpose – they were.

We headed south toward Otepää along what have now become typical Estonian highways – Jo Ann says she is getting a bit jaded by it all and wants to see something out of order.  For those of you having been in New Zealand or the German Alps, this is the closest to which I can compare this land.

We stopped in Otepää for directions to Pühajärv (Holy Lake, equally unpronouncable) that was also visited and consecrated by the Dalai Lama in 1992.  This beautiful lake is the jewel of the region and has two swimming beaches, an eight-mile-long paved and wide hiking/training trail that circumnavigates the 2.5 mile long lake.

Road Ruminations – 21jun08

George Rebane

We arrived in Tartu – Estonia’s university city – early this afternoon after a short 40-mile drive from Viljandi that passed by Võrtsjärv, Estonia’s largest lake.  Again, it was a beautiful drive along a countryside where every community has assembled the makings of the annual and traditional very large ‘John’s Day’ bonfire.  This is the summer solstice weekend which in 2008 gives the Estonians a four-day period of merrymaking and we can already hear groups of young men belting out traditional and not-so-traditional songs in the big town square in front of Tartu’s impressive city hall – a rendition of the Beatles’ ‘Yellow Submarine’ just ended.

We settled into the hotel and then got directions to go on another discovery trek, this time to find the location of where a well-known and oft-described 1936 photo of my uncle Ralph and his girlfriend.  We found the location, but that’s another story.  On the way there we stopped for a picnic lunch at a park across the small lake that separated us from our destination.  Seeking a place to sit down next to the lake we ran into the abomination of a war memorial pictured below.

Carved in stone are commemorative lies in both Russian and Estonian –

“1941 Great Patriotic War 1945 – Our defenders and liberators, the sons of all the  peoples of the USSR are gratefully remembered forever by (the people of) Tartu.”

Such monuments are a blight on the Estonian countryside and a reminder of a wound that has little chance of healing.  Estonians who witnessed and lived through the horrors of Soviet occupation would tear down such monuments in a heartbeat.  However, the Russian ethnic minority would then riot as they did last year when such a monument in the center of Tallinn was only moved to a less prominent place.  This incident launched the first cyber attack by one nation against another when denial-of-service messages from Russia flooded the Estonian internet servers and sites.  With the help of a multi-national team that included US experts, the attack was thwarted and now Estonia is the site of a new institution in which such tactics of future IT wars are studied.

Road Ruminations – 20jun08

Jo Ann Rebane

This is a land where we are very comfortable.  Not because we have our very own language expert and native Estonian speaker along (the language is very hard for the foreigner to pronounce, much less read).  We’re comfortable because the countryside is tidy and homes well tended.  The roads are good and the cities are easy to navigate once the traveler has a good map in hand. 

These Estonians are a strikingly beautiful people, especially the young.  They are overwhelmingly tallish, thin, blond and beautiful.  Every other 20-30 year old is simply gorgeous.  One can hardly take your eyes off of the toddlers and their mothers.  Estonians dress in that international style, indistinguishable as to nationality.  And that’s what’s so confusing.  We’re in a wonderland of attractive people.  How can it be?  Did the homely ones emigrate or did the Soviets send them all to Siberia?

 

Road Ruminations – 19jun08

George Rebane

Yesterday morning we left a rainy Tallinn and drove south toward my birthplace Viljandi.  The country outside of the capital continues the style, wealth, and mood of the capital – the highways, fields, and forests are modern, well-signed, and as neat as a pin.  Estonia is, perhaps, the only country in history to refuse US aid after liberation - they didn't want to become dependent on a very addictive teat.  The land now compares favorably with Germany and New Zealand, places where people take pride in where they live.  The only reminders of a tragic past are the Soviet built factories, processing plants, and workers’ apartments that startle the eye when encountered – the products of socialism resemble pieces of crap no matter where you encounter them.  (Witness ‘the projects’ of government housing in our own fair land.)

Before reaching Viljandi, we stopped to discover and visit important places in the Rebane family history that were located a few miles off the main highway.  Again, the country roads are in meticulous condition as are the fields and villages off the beaten path.  We saw the community of my maternal grandparents who operated the local windmill that ground the local grain before WW2.  Lots of pictures and tromping around old churchyards.

Then we found the graves of my paternal grandparents – I was named Jüri Rebane after my paternal grandfather (how I got to be George is a long story).  This involved a search through two grave yards required some serious time wandering through weeds and broken masonry crosses.  Tending Christian graves was frowned upon during the occupation and things do go to seed after sixty years in a country as lush and green as this.

In the late afternoon we finally pulled into Viljandi, a community of about 20,000 which is the capital of the Viljandimaa province.  Jo Ann had booked us in the Grand Hotel which was completed in 1938 and in which my mom worked after I was born.  There she met her lifelong friend Rita who became part of our family as we escaped to Germany in 1944 and was with us when the war ended in 1945 – she emigrated to Canada and lives there now.  We have had a picture of them both at a 1941 employees’ luncheon in the hotel, and last night we confirmed that the picture was taken in the existing main dining room of the establishment.

Road Ruminations – 15jun08

George Rebane

We landed in Tallinn, Estonia about noon today after a short flight up from Frankfurt, Germany on Estonian Air (Boeing 737).  This completes a circuit I started in 1944.  The perfect hosts Hans and Gitta had breakfast ready for us at 630am, and then drove us to the airport on Sunday morning traffic-free streets and autobahns.  We said temporary good-byes since we will see them again before we come home.

(Yesterday our hosts organized a perfect Teutonic tourist terror tour of Frankfurt.  I didn’t know it was possible to see so much on trams rides interspersed with forced marches led and paced by Gitta.  At times I thought that Peter would pop his newly emplaced stent, at other times I thought I could use one.   Here we – l to r, Helga, Gitta looking at camera, Hans, Fatso, Jo Ann - are smiling in front of the doors of the old city hall where Gitta and Hans were married over forty years ago.  Don’t believe your lying eyes; inside I am trying to think of the German equivalent of 911 on my cell phone.  Hans at 66 still plays soccer and Gitta was a Wehrmacht drill sergeant in a previous life ;-)  In sum, it was a wonderful day.)

Estonia seems to live up to its press as a modern very western European country that just happens to be located in northeastern Europe.  Having already entered the EU through Germany, we didn’t need to go through passport or customs when we arrived since Estonia is both a member of the EU and NATO (with troops in the mid-east conflicts).  It was as easy as flying from Sacramento to Seattle.

But before starting the Estonia log, I have to close out last night in Germany.  Another couple whom we have known for some time – Manfred and Irmgard – came for the BBQ dinner and talk.  For the topic of the evening Hans asked me to pose my question about the EU’s lack of a military to the entire group.  The answer(s) that came back were both surprising and disturbing.

Here’s the short form.  What is the EU doing to build up the ability to project force so that it can defend its interests around the world including eastern Europe since the US – especially with a likely new and left-wing Executive and Congress – promises to begin reducing our military involvements, commitments, and capabilities?  Detail – the EU economy is now the biggest in the world, and many powers (Russia, Islam, and China) are looking forward to taking advantage of the EU as the US tires of being the champion of western civilization while having to pay for its own guns, bullets, and body bags.

Road Ruminations – 14jun08

George Rebane

We arrived in Frankfurt am Main yesterday, descending through a cloud filled sky that sprinkled the countryside with brief showers.  This reminded me of the exact scenes I saw 45 years ago as a young second lieutenant arriving in Germany for my first duty station after Artillery School.  That eight-hour flight had been on a CL-44 turboprop run by Varig Airlines under contract to the Dept of Defense, and full of military personnel and dependents with young children.  I was blessed with a little screamer about six months old in the seat behind me – that kid must have held the Leather Lungs of 1963 title.

On yesterday’s flight Jo Ann and I were on an American Airlines 767 in business class – what a difference.  We breezed through passport and customs and were met by our longtime friends Hans and Gitta.  After lots of hugs and frenzied conversation where everyone wanted to ask all questions all at once, we walked about three miles to the airport’s parking structure where their van was waiting.  Frankfurt is the economic center of the EU and the commercial hub of all Europe with an enormous airport to match.

Tagasi Eestisse

George Rebane

Tomorrow we leave on a trip that has been anticipated for about fifty years and has been in various stages of planning for about twenty-five years.  I am returning to Estonia, the little Baltic country where I was born, which we left as refugees in the spring of 1944 during the depth of World War II, and have not seen since then.  Jo Ann’s planning for the trip competes favorably with Eisenhower’s effort for D-Day.  We will fly to Germany and stay with dear friends we have also known for about fifty years – Jo Ann first stayed with their family as an exchange student, and then they became our family away from home when we were in the Army and I was stationed in Germany.  From there we fly to Tallinn, rent a car, and begin an odyssey of discovery guided by old family photos and documents that survived the war and have served as the link to my roots all these decades.  I think I still speak the language – we shall see.

Depending on the ease of connectivity, I will try to post some reflections and pictures from the old sod.

The Walking Desk is Here!!

George Rebane

This comes to you from our ‘Live Long and Prosper’ department.  In this morning’s WSJ I saw an ad that elicited a “Sumbich!  They finally did it.”, and a startled “What?!” from Jo Ann.  Someone is introducing a walking desk into the workplace to keep us all healthier (more info here)

About ten years ago a friend convinced me to get a heavy-duty treadmill (True 550), and I started dividing my running between the outdoors and indoors.  Along the way more birthdays brought more joint creaks and injuries, so I started throwing in some walking sessions on the treadmill.  I was immediately hit by the utter boredom of the experience and understood why people stare at TVs while so engaged.  Not a big TV fan, but an avid reader, I built a simple PVC pipe frame to which I attached the top of a music stand that held a stained plywood book stand.  I built this stand with an array of peg holes that lets me put a book or magazine up there, and with a couple of appropriately placed pegs it will hold a wide variety of books open at any page and allows the pages to be turned easily. 

Friends who looked at it thought it strange that I built this PVC gizmo and asked why I didn’t just buy the manufacturer’s book stand.  Well, those kinds of stands are rickety, poorly designed, and attached to the treadmill which makes things jiggle with the footfalls of my powerful body.  I explained that I wanted a rack that was completely separate from the treadmill and therefore very steady.  Some years passed with my being able combine reading with exercise at any time of day or night.  An added benefit of such a setup is that it really makes time pass quickly.

I usually make notes and need to scribble ideas and stuff on a pad while I read.  No problem in a chair, but impossible on a treadmill.  So it immediately hit me that all I need is to design and build a writing surface that easily fits on the treadmill and I would have a walking desk.  Measure, measure, saw, saw, sand, sand, stain, stain, and it was finished.  I proudly showed it to Jo Ann who long ago got used to all such crazy things her husband proposes and sometimes builds.  To unsuspecting friends I often launched into my new walking desk sermon, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could have one of these walking desks in an office so that … .’  Well, you get the picture.  The usual response was one of mild surprise, a lightly reined-in smile, sometimes a tolerably polite interest, and ‘We are going to have some wine, aren’t we?’

Since the treadmill lives in our game room with the poker table, my poker pals immediately saw the real use for the walking desk as another surface to pile stuff when we clear the table at the end of our congenial dinners and prepare for a serious evening of studying the game.  But, dear reader, today I am vindicated and the philistines will have to take another tack – ‘OK, if you’re so goddam smart, why didn’t you patent it and … ?’

Don't Blame the Oil Companies

Michael McDaniel

Yes. I said don't blame the oil companies for excessive prices at the pump.  For months now I have put up with comments attacking the companies that provide fuel for our vehicles.  I do concede that oil company management teams both past and present may be to blame for a portion of the prices we are paying at the pump. However, I contend that the oil companies cannot be solely blamed for the high prices.  An examination of facts...

The Devaluation of the US Dollar:

• Blame the United States Federal Reserve.  First and foremost our very own FED has been implementing a monetary policy that continues to crush the value of the US dollar (both via inflation and weakness versus other nations currencies).  As our currency becomes worth less, countries selling us oil require us to pay more. 
• The current ill health of our banking system (an extremely important variable in any economy) decreases the demand for US Dollars. Would you be eager to invest in a foreign country which is taking historic means to keep their banks solvent? As our currency appears to be more risky, countries selling us oil require us to pay more.
• Growth in other countries have proven to decrease the demand for US Dollars.  With the global economy growing at a faster pace than the US it is natural to see other currencies strengthen versus the US Dollar. As our currency becomes worth less, countries selling us oil require us to pay more.

Supply and Demand:

• Increased demand for oil by India and China (and the rest of the developing world) force prices higher.
• Our leaders continue to ignore the resources available here at home, ANWR anyone? I expect most cultures are confused that the USA would rather go to war and kill humans in search of oil, rather than put our Alaskan wildlife in jeopardy. 

Education, Values, Ambition:
Where have all the Scientists gone?  Didn't we get a glimpse of the threats/addiction to oil in the 1970's? Am I to old fashioned to expect that the greatest country in the world could design a solution to this issue over the past 30 years? Again I ask, where have all the scientists gone?  We cheer our athletes, actors, musicians... maybe it is time to give some hype to our future scientists/technicians knowing full well that it will be one of them that will answer the call and save the day. 

Profit Margins:

• Where do the energy companies stand in terms of Profit Margin? For every dollar of sales or revenue how much do their owners earn in "profit?"
  
  • Exxon Mobile owners manage to take home approx 10 cents on every dollar of total revenues, or a 10.85% profit margin.
  • Johnson and Johnson is often noted atop lists for exemplary ethics, their profit margin is 18.64%, owners of JNJ profit approx 19 cents for every dollar of total revenues.
  • Microsoft owners earn over a 28% profit margin.

Though I do not give the oil companies a full pardon, I hope these insights provide a more productive discussion than just pointing fingers at the oil companies.

Ruminations - 8jun08

George Rebane

• A Democrat agrees with George Will
• TechTest2008 Awards Coverage
• Trillion dollar 'Stupidity and the State'

A notable Democrat agrees with George Will (but just this once).  My friend Dick Dickenson took a look at the latest from syndicated columnist George Will on Obama choosing his VP.  Will writes a short and compelling piece – ‘Obama's choice can't be Clinton’ - about Obama making up his own mind and Hillary disappearing into the night quietly.  I asked Dick to comment, not knowing what to expect from a dedicated Democrat and former political editor of The Washington Post.  With his permission I share with you his reasoned, revealing, and somewhat testy observations.  (Would love to be at a lunch table with these two gentlemen.)   

This is one of the rare Will columns with which I agree.  He wastes so much of his intelligence, erudition, and articulateness on being just dead-ass wrong most of the time (I would add intellectual arrogance and all the problems that entails to his list of qualifications) but he does hit the mark on this one.  It's inevitable that we all waste some time on Hillary's run and her future ( ! ) because she is not the run-of-the-mill candidate--how much would we be talking about John Edwards or Chris Dodd at this point?--but she after all is the loser.  I think Obama has made the right moves so far.  He has been totally unmoved by the idea of even considering naming her to the ticket at this point.  He's making it clear that it's his decision and he'll do it on his own schedule.  He's also not responding yet to McCain's self-serving proposal of informal "town meeting" debates, the only format in which McCain is adequate, and not letting McCain set the agenda for the general election.  My final thought on Hillary as vice presidential candidate: Who in his right mind would choose as his running mate the one person in the U.S. who can unite the Republican party?  It certainly isn't John McCain.

Ozone Politics

George Rebane

Yesterday a lot of government scientists, state bureaucrats, and local politicians got together for the Sierra Ozone Summit (SOS) in Grass Valley.  This was a well-prepared and executed event put together by a coalition of elected officials, Save the Air in Nevada County, and the Northern Sierra Air Quality Management District.  Its purpose was to again highlight the ozone pollution problem in northern California and the Sierra foothills.  A notion oft-repeated during the day was that solving the ozone problem should be bipartisan since we all breathe the same air.  Well, it turned out to be a very political and partisan gathering for those who were paying attention.

For the distant reader, Nevada County in the Sierras is the downwind recipient of Sacramento and Bay Areas’ ozone pollution as the prevailing winds blow it and its precursors into the mountains.  By any reasonable measure there is little that folks in Nevada County can do to affect local ozone levels short of convincing people in the Central Valley and Bay Area to stop driving their cars and trucks.  But there are many things we can do in these foothills to support and advance the road to collectivism.

The SOS audience was predominantly left-of-center and sensitive to that possibility as witnessed by the spontaneous applause that it gave to speakers and questioners proposing greater controls imposed by the state and feds.  The biggest hand was given to the proposition that land-use planning and ordnances - the lynchpin of American local governance – be removed from the cities and counties, and made another instrument of state diktat.  The apparent wisdom underpinning this sentiment was that ‘the movement of air knows no boundaries’.

So, as Supervisor Ted Owens implored in his introductory remarks, the objective would be to “develop strategies” and “regionally based solutions”.  This immediately begs the question of why we (in the foothills) as the sparsely populated recipients of pollution would ever want to impose on ourselves the same solutions as would be needed for densely populated pollution generators.  The audience, of course, loved the regional approach.

OPEC – “Thank you America!”

(I received this piece from a Nevada County friend and a community leader.  Its author is anonymous, and I post it here with a few edits as a message that should be doubly on our minds today.)

Any Islamic OPEC minister could look you in the eyes and state:

"Islam is at war with you infidels. We have been since the embargo in the 1970's. You are so arrogant you haven't even recognized it, and so dumb that you don’t even know that Vienna 1683 was just halftime. You have more missiles, bombs, and technology; so we are fighting with the best weapons we have and extracting on a net basis about $700 billion/year out of your economy.  Now halftime is over, we have resumed our offensive, and you idiots still think that you are fighting ‘terrorism’.  We will destroy you! Death to the infidels!

And while I am here I would like to thank you for the following:

Not developing your 250-300 year supply of oil shale and tar sands. We know if you did this, it would create millions of jobs for US citizens, expand your technology and engineering capabilities, and keep the wealth in the US instead of sending it to us to finance our war against you bastards.

Thanks for limiting Defense Department purchases of oil sands from your neighbors to the north. We love it when you confuse your allies.

On-the-Go Social Networking

George Rebane

We have all heard about online social networking – think MySpace and Facebook, etc - that is keeping our younger generations busy telling friends (the world?) about themselves and finding out about each other. Social networking is about to take another leap forward as we become ever more connected no matter where we are or go.  MIT’s Technology Review reports in ‘The Future of Mobile Networking’ that “IPhone users will soon be able to enjoy Whrrl, software that combines activity recommendations with real-time location data.”  In a few days

(w)hen Steve Jobs strides onstage at Apple's annual developers conference on June 9, many will be expecting fireworks. Some industry analysts think Jobs will announce an iPhone upgrade, one that takes advantage of faster networks and includes new hardware, perhaps a GPS receiver. Jobs is also expected to demonstrate some third-party iPhone applications, available in June, which could include games that use the phone's accelerometer as a control, new mapping software, and quick ways to update profiles on social networks such as Facebook or MySpace.

Whrrl is a mobile application to be offered by the start-up Pelago whose CTO Darren Vengroff says,

"If you think about your day-to-day life and how you discover things around you and places to go, to a great extent the source of that information is your friends,"  With Whrrl, a user can "look through the eyes of friends and see the places they find compelling." The software begins with the user's position on the iPhone's map and indicates a smattering of nearby establishments. If the user's friends have visited and rated these places, the software indicates that as well. The map also shows the positions of nearby friends who have enabled a feature that lets them be seen by others.