Peeking into the rock

I'm not crazy. I applied for a part-time, temporary field research job that begins in January. I should be able to handle it: I won't be undergoing heavy medical treatments anymore. It sounds interesting. It's interviewing people for a tobacco use study sponsored by the FDA. I'm qualified. We'll see what happens.


As for the biggest & most terrible thing that's on everybody's minds and tongues: I don't have much to add right now. You could do worse than to read Nick Mamatas's analysis. Probably I could argue with him about certain historical details, but on the whole, he has it.

Somewhere along the line we allowed people to say that civil rights, labor justice, human respect, and demands for equality were elitist values. And all too often a lot of us acted like they were. Obviously a lot of other things went down, but on our side, we did that, and it meant that the broad coalition that is necessary to defeat fascism simply wasn't there. Also, something happened to coalition building. That's hard work, yes, but I don't think it's laziness that keeps people from doing it: I think it's other things, one of which is people approaching politics as self-expression.

But coalition building doesn't, as some people seem to think, require embracing the most center-right position available. It requires picking the one or two or three most righteous things you can get these groups to temporarily agree on, and driving hard on those things, building from small victories to large ones. If you can't get that coalition to agree on some things, you build another coalition that works on those. And then come election time you build a coalition that gets the election won.

But the election is not the goal anyways. If we'd gotten Hillary, we'd have been much better off, but we'd still be facing off with a hawkish, center-right government, just like we'd had for the last eight years. Most likely, a lot of people would have been complacent about it, but now, a lot of people are in danger of their lives, and that's worse.

Sarah Kendzior, a very wise Missourian journalist and anthropologist (whose earlier writings tended to cover Central Asian dictatorships, which she finds much more relevant these days than she'd like), is suggesting that, rather than undertake vast protests at this time, people should be getting together quietly and planning focused political action, including a longer timeline. Not least of the reasons she's suggesting this is safety. But though safety is a real issue with the most hateful and violent of our country feeling both vindicated and still aggrieved, and also being armed to the teeth and beyond, it's also true that protest can be the easiest and least effective political tool we have. I say "can be," because often protest is effective and it's often not easy. Donald Trump has already made statements about protestors that suggest he'll be ready to "crack down". Sometimes it's the only thing available--and that might become the case here too, if the Republicans continue to move in the directions they've been moving in, consolidating power and abrogating the Constitution so that legal recourses are less and less available. But for now we have the full toolbox to the degree that we are organized to use it, and it makes sense to use all of the tools, each in their most appropriate ways.

I am thinking about my own personal role. I'm not yet well, and I don't have financial resources to throw at the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center. But I know a little about organizing. Not a lot. I hate to be the one saying "let's you and him fight," so I have to figure out some way I can actually contribute to this. And I don't kid myself that some tweets or this journal are that way.

So. Right now, the UK has Theresa May: Russia has Putin: Turkey has Erdogan: (imagine much longer list): the US has Trump. It's a worldwide thing. It's terrifying. But despair is not what we need: anger, maybe, if it fuels determination.

What is the actual difference between a drone and a remote-control device?

At the dog park I saw a couple with a flying object a bit over a foot in every dimension, which had four rotors (horizontal blades) and a payload that looked like a video camera. They were controlling it with a rig that one of them was wearing which looked like it had a video camera on it also. I didn't know what to call the thing and this raised this question.

I didn't go talk to them because I had the dog with me (dog park, right?) and it seemed like more than I could handle to get their attention and talk to them.

Meanwhile, barbie pink laptop just got turned into a brick by a short in its cord and I'm borrowing this slow Windows 8 machine while I'm shopping for the laptop of my dreams. My prejudices have been confirmed. I want a windows 7 machine, with CPU of 2.7 GHz or more, a small, textured touchpad, a smallish laptop-style keyboard without all the redundancies, a gamer's dedicated graphics card (I have lists of what will work for my needs), and not a wide screen. Also its fan shouldn't be loud and weird and get louder and weirder when I press the shift and tab keys. Seriously, that sounds frightening. Also what is this function called that keeps zooming in and out on the screen when you're trying to line up the cursor you can do things? I want to turn it off and maybe not even have it on my new laptop. I think I know how it's supposed to work but I can only get it to work properly on purpose a quarter of the time so I keep having to simply accept giant text and having to scroll to see it. Like, just now I seem to have temporarily fixed the zoom by accident after having tried to do ikt on purpose for several minutes.

Tomorrow K and I both go to work at the polls. He's an inspector at the University and I'm electronics voting specialist at my neighborhood voting center (which generally has either two or three precincts at it).  So today I intend to cook us food to take with, and also go to bed early.

So I've been trying to find out more about the Senate and House races. To me the most remarkable thing is that, like this story at the Washington Post"Dole among losers as Democrats gain in Senate," in case that horrendous link doesn't hold up, some of the newspapers are less concerned with the Democratic victory than they are with the plight of the poor Republicans and their "task" going forward. What the hell?

Isn't the story here the general changing of the guard? Isn't the interesting thing the quality of the congress with these new people in it? Apparently, for the Post, as well as for the LA Times, the interesting thing is the Republicans.

Oh well. I mean, the Republicans are interesting, they are still there, still evil, still powerful, and still willing to go to any horrible lengths to serve their own narrow interests. But surely that story is for Thursday morning, isn't it? Isn't Wednesday morning the day to contemplate the winners?

By the way, it looks like Mary Jo Kilroy is going to win in Ohio after all.

We had more voters in my precinct by noon today than we had all day in the Presidential primary. A lot of first time voters. We're hopping (I'm home for my dinner break, to write this and walk the dog).

I have had to assist two mentally-challenged voters. Rule is, if they can get themselves to the polling place, they get to vote. We have a place in the roster to write down the names of the voters who received assistance. Voters can be challenged but I've never seen it happen. They took their task very seriously, though they had even more trouble with the propositions than everybody else. It's painful, by the way, to do this when the person's convoluted logic is taking them in the opposite direction from where you wish they would go, and they keep asking you to explain things and you're being carefully objective and neutral. What's worse is when their logic seems to be taking them away from the thing they seemed to be saying they wanted to do. You can't second-guess them and manipulate them even if you're trying to manipulate them into doing what you think they want to do. If there's anything unfortunate about their vote, it's just the breaks, and your consolation is that you're doing the opposite of voter suppression. It's the motto of our local elections clerk: "Let the voter vote!"

A lot of people seemed to be riding a high when they came to vote. Like they were so glad to vote today that they'd walk over coals to do it, let alone stand in a line. The lines are not Disneyland in quality. They're not that long. But they also aren't that well laid out geometrically. We have the space laid out all wrong and there are four different things they can be waiting for, and the lines end up crisscrossing in the middle of the room. I can't see how we should have done it.

I like our scanning ballot boxes, actually. The voters vote on these huge sheets of paper which are then fed into a scanner which will spit out spoiled ballots. If the problem is an overvote, an extra mark in one of the contests, the voter has a choice of overriding or getting a new ballot. It's really a step in insuring that the voter actually votes the way they intended to.

Prague: there's talk of forming a new Indian students' association and making Frank the first president. You may ask why, since his heritage is decidedly not Indian and as he says the closest he's been to India is Cupertino ("that's pretty close," I said). Well, that's why: he is a completely neutral figure, being an atheist Jew from California and therefore not any particular religion or tribe or caste.

On the other hand, Kafka seems to have invaded the overseas absentee balloting operation, enough to maybe keep Frank from being able to vote.

I got a cheerful letter and a check today from the county clerk for primary election day. One hundred and twenty-five dollars for election clerk. It's actually more than I make in a day of childcare.

On another front, I had five bruises in two weeks -- all but one of them mysterious, and all painless -- and I normally don't get five bruises in five years. I mean, really, I don't bruise easily. Naturally my first thought was leukemia or some damn thing, but my second thought was that five bruises isn't much evidence. I could construct a probable cause for each one. So I called the doctor and the doctor said, "No more monkeys jumping on the bed!" No, wait, he said it was probably a benign side effect of the meloxicam I take to minimize hand pain and so on. And I should bring it on in if it got alarming.

Phenological observations: my plum tree is about to crack its buds. Yesterday I sprayed with a stupid little pump sprayer because I couldn't find the miscible oil. Today the nice fellow bought me some miscible oil. It's not supposed to rain for several days so I guess I'll do some spraying in the morning. Since the apricot tree is in almost-full bloom, I guess I have to use the lower solution that I would use in summer.

Also, from the weekend I have this information: hors d'oeuvres with the use of an 18-mm melon baller:

cut in half and hollow out kumquats with the melon baller. Pick out the seeds and smash the pulp into cream cheese (or ricotta, which is what I had since the dog seems to have eaten a three-quarter pound lump of luxury cream cheese within minutes of me bringing it home!) with large quantities of very finely cut candied lump ginger and some tiny bits of whole kumquat chopped even finer. Stuff this into the kumquats, and chill.

slice a thin bit off the top of cherry tomatoes and scoop everything out with the melon baller. Put the cherry tomatoes upside down in a sieve for a couple of hours so they drain. Chop very fine the bits of cherry tomato tops and mix them with a very large amount of chopped parsely and dill and mix that with equal parts cream cheese (see above) and hummus and maybe a little grated extra extra sharp cheddar or other pungent or piquant cheese and stuff this into the cherry tomatoes, and chill.

hollow out small red radishes with the melon baller. Also with the melon baller cut balls of extra extra sharp cheese and force them into the radish holes, and chill. You can eat the radish balls or marinate them in Japanese seasoned vinegar. I ate them. These you may call radish eyeballs, or if you are too squeamish, you may call them radish acorns.

I also stuffed dates with blue cheese, but that did not use the melon baller. I also made a mash of grated extra extra sharp cheddar, jarlsberg, blue cheese, ricotta, and lots of finely cut parsely, dill, and sage, and a little Spanish paprika (I thought I had used agridulce but it tasted like ahumado), and put little balls of this on Belgian endive leaves and pushed a candied walnut half on that. You could use the melon baller to make the amounts of cheese mash the same on each leaf, but I did not do that. I also marinated little onions, artichoke hearts, button mushrooms, and carrot balls (melon baller!), garlic cloves, and bits of sweet peppers, and threaded all that on skewers.

Everybody ate them all up. Even the radish eyeballs which I thought might be a little too weird for some people.

Also, I do love gin, but I am a wimp and I cannot finish my drink.

I came home for my lunch break.

Precincts in the polling place: 3
Number of out-of-precinct voters: 12?
Number of touchscreen voters: 10
Number of paper voters: 25ish
Number of phone calls necessary to get the touchscreen going: 3, plus a conversation with the rover in person
Number of voters disgusted with the process who say they'll never vote again: 1
Number of local celebrities voting at the polling place: 1 (Bruce Bratton)

I'm going back in a few minutes.

I kind of like the technology we have. It's pretty well tamper-proof, short of a really vast vertical conspiracy. Which is possible, but not here.

It didn't go entirely well in California.

Governor: the entirely evil, opportunistic, say-anything but serve the rich Gov. Schwarzenegger beat the nerdy, fairly honest, labor-sympathizing challenger Angelides by a big margin.

Insurance commissioner: the idiot dot-com right-wing Poizner ("shocked, shocked, that medical offices keep paper records") beat the labor-sympathising, fairly honest Cruz Bustamonte by a big margin.

Late negative ads and blatant big-media bias helped those guys a lot.

34 of 53 US House of Representative races went Democrat, but all of 2 of those were incumbents, and 5 of them had no Republican candidate (there was one district with no Democratic candidate). I know that at least two of those, the Republicans had to drop out of the race because they were indicted. Basically, where there was an incumbent, it stayed. One of the Republican wins was without a Democratic candidate.

Board of equalization (tax board): half and half. I don't know what it was before.

State Senate: 14 out of 20 races Democratic, again no incumbents lost. And again, two districts had no Republican candidate.

State Assembly: 49 out of 80 Democrats, again no incumbents lost, but there weren't that many incumbents, so I'll have to do more research to see where we were before. 5 races without a Republican candidate.

One of the State districts (Central Coast, but I forget which) had no Republican candidate because the Republican disappeared a month ago, with rumors that he had moved to another county.

The propositions were not an unmitigated disaster. It kind of looks like voters were going "yes, yes" until they hit the parental abuse proposition (the one that would require parents to be notified if their daughters came for an abortion, without regard to the girls' home situations), and then they just went "no, no" till the end.

1A Y Transp Fund Protect 1B Y Hwy/Air/Port Bond
1C Y Housing Shelter Fund 1D Y School Facility Bond
1E Y Disaster/Flood Bond 83 Y Sex Offender Reform
84 Y Water/Flood/Park 85 N Parental Notificat.
86 N Cigarette Tax 87 N Energy/Oil Tax
88 N Educ. Fund/Prop. Tax 89 N Campaign Public Fund
90 N Eminent Domain

It's a problematic vote in a few ways. 1A and 1B together amount to a permanent commitment to building highways at the expense of public transportation (though they could be interpreted in other ways, if we had a gutsy state government). 83 amounts to 1984 for deviants, and since deviance is defined in extemely broad manner, your 20 year old who comes on to a 17 year old is potentially prevented for life from living in walking distance to a school: so is the flasher. The position here is that nobody can overcome their problems, nobody who has ever done anything untoward can ever be trusted to not be a demon after that. See also the widespread use of the word "predator" to mean a person who looks at pornography or a person who says suggestive things to a 16 year old. 86-89 were all attempts to get some decent liberal politics rolling in the state (I myself voted against 89, because it read like there was a gotcha in it that would entrench the same-old same-old), and they all went down. 90 was an attempt to keep state and local governments from being able to have strong land use power, and it went down. Probably because Californians have seen how eminent domain has helped to keep the coast open and clean, and we have a lot invested in that.

Locally:

My man for COunty Superintendent of Schools, Michael Watkins, won. In Santa Cruz City Counsil elections my man Bruce Van Allen did very poorly, half the leading vote getter (Cynthia Matthews, about whom I do not care). I do care that the fairly evil Lynn Robinson won. Mike Rotkin, of course, won. In Watsonville, I don't know the races well, but I notice that in a town with I think 40% Hispanic voters (which means a much higher percentage of Hispanics overall), only one of the races was one by a Hispanic person. I also recognize one of the winners, Dale Skillicorn: he's the guy who proposed that poorest parts of Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and possibly Santa Clara counties split off to form perhaps the poorest county on the coast (maybe Del Norte county would be poorer). In other words, he's an urbo-phobic idiot.

For local measures in the city of Santa Cruz:
G, to raise the minimum wage, went down by a high margin, based I think on the threats by a small number of businessmen that they would relocate if it passed.
Everything else passed handily: H, to raise the sales tax for the purpose of fixing the roads, cleaning the parks and river: I and J, to hold the University accountable for the demands its growth makes on city resources: and K, to direct the police to make marijuana law enforcement lowest priority.

So. The election was not a wash, but it was not an unmitigated victory either.

Oh, and in Ohio, my friend's sister-in-law, Mary Jo Kilroy, seems to have lost by a 2 point margin, which to me is small enough to ask for a recount . . . oh, but wait! it's Diebold country! They can't have a recount!

Me, I'm still kind of tired -- I was working the polls from 6 to 10. We had 191 paper ballots, 26 absentee ballots dropped in, and 3 touch screen ballots. We had one assisted vote and 31 wonky provisional ballots of which I guess maybe half or more will go through. That is, of the ballots cast at my precinct, 16% were wonky in some way.

But -- I HELPED CURTIS RELIFORD CAST HIS VOTE!

This guy is the real deal. He's the guy whose truck is plastered with exhortations to help the victims of Katrina -- still -- he takes regular trips down to Louisiana with his truck filled with stuff and money and he gives it to people. No bs, no head trips, no grandstanding. So he shows up at my precinct -- he's recently moved from mid-county to north county and he did re-register but he can't figure out how to vote. So I call to County, and because we do not live in Florida the answer is he lives in a mail-only district (because it's way out in the wilderness where there are bears and no public buildings for polling places) but all he has to do is to come into the county building and they will give him a ballot and he can vote. Ta-da!

We do not purge our voting rolls in Santa Cruz County (the election department slogan: Let the Voter Vote!). We put inactive voters on a list and they vote provisionally along with the people whose address is in doubt or have some other wonky thing going on (they can't reach their home precinct in time, they had an absentee ballot and they lost it, whatever). Provisional votes are put into a special pink envelope (the election department slogan: Think Pink!) which is all sealed up with the voter's information and the reason they're in the pink envelope written on the outside. Then somebody at the County goes through all these pink envelopes and figures out which ones are too wonky to count and which ones can be counted. Then the ballots of the votable ones are counted.

You know why we do this? Because of left-wing agitation throughout the seventies, that's why.