Just enough

My coffee table is a charred juniper log. The tree was killed in a fire 30 years or more ago. It’s just flat enough to keep the cup from tipping, if I am careful enough. The log/table works if I move slow enough. If I pay enough attention. Making it work is not high effort, just slow effort, attentiveness.

I thought about laying in boards to make it easier to put down the cup without thinking, but in some ways it would be more effort to make it easy. It would also deprive me of the need to pay attention, in the moment, to how the cup sits crooked on the log.

The twins and I are up here at our new address, living in a tin tent of about 260 square feet with snowcapped and pine clad mountains outside the door. At 13 they still fit in their bunk beds at one end, I have a pseudo queen bed at the other. We have a kitchen. I let them choose which seat they each own at the table, back packs for school on the bench next to them and against the wall, lunch boxes on the table flanking a rack of newly purchased silverware.

The landlord turned our home of the last year into a vacation rental. I thought we had it worked out for the rest of the summer, but nothing is good unless it is in writing and when the FedX’d agreement arrived from San Francisco, there were terms not discussed. The strain on our blended family had become cataclysmic, Lauren and her two boys have gone one way, the girls and I another.

There is wonderful closeness of living in the trailer. I am never far from the girls as they are doing homework, I watch them draw and hear the rustle of turning pages in Manga books they read backwards. They have their iPods, of course. We will have a tipi next week.

My living room is outside, acres of living room. A lawn chair 50 feet from the trailer looks out over the Cascades. Move the chair and see different mountains, the Three Sisters from one point, Mt. Washington from another, Mt. Jefferson from beneath the tree over there.

There is more quiet than I’ve had in many years. It is a lonely, lovely, healing quiet, often quite full. Last night the girls’ godfather came over for a steak. We sat out there in a thunderstorm booming over the mountains and to the north of us, pummeling Black Butte. Jon looked out through juniper to mountains 20 miles away but in our lap, then he looked up at clouds roiling overhead.

“Love what you’ve done with the ceiling.”

Pheasant wander through the sage with double hollow clarinet call, escapees from the nearby hunting preserve. A snake track disappears under the contractor’s outhouse, I look very, very carefully before sitting down. Breezes brush the pines.

Choices are often hard. Rewards hard to see. There are days when sadness clings like humidity. But two beautiful girls read books and do homework, I have a project in concrete and steel 20 yards away. We don’t have TV. We have cell phones, and high speed internet is pumped to us wirelessly from an antenna three miles away when I choose to start the generator.

It is enough. And if I pay slow attention, it is more than enough.

Blazers bigger than Portland?

Blazers general manager Kevin Pritchard on getting the top draft pick for NBA basketball (read it here):

"Huge. Unbelievably huge. Franchise-making," Pritchard said. "This is bigger than the Rose Garden, bigger than the organization, bigger than the city of Portland. The whole state and the whole area revolves around the Portland Trail Blazers... As we go, so does the city. This has a chance to change the organization and the city..."

Um, Kevin? It's just basketball. A game, a game played by some often very spoiled adults wearing shorts.

Tax reform; great schools; a non cyclical economic base; healthy Ponderosa forests on the east side, clean water on the west side; health insurance for all Oregon children; opportunity for all Oregon children: These are bigger than the City of Portland, these are the priorities around which the State of Oregon revolves, not the Blazers, not basketball.

Get some perspective, will ya? And talk that guy from Seattle into selling the team to a local consortium with some class.

Protect us from ourselves

“Sen. Margaret Carter, D-Portland, suggested (in The Oregonian, read it here) that many consumers get taken in by sham sales, and counted herself among them. She said she bought a bedroom set at a furniture store’s 'going out of business' sale, only to find the same set at a lower price at a different store. And the store where she bought the furniture didn't close.

'I was stupid; I was an idiot,' she said, before voting for the bill."

C’mon, Margaret, grow up, shop around. You weren't stupid, you were lazy. Don’t deprive the rest of us the opportunity to learn from our own laziness, don’t protect stores that charge higher prices, by passing a law (Senate Bill 684).

Neither Republicans nor Democrats favor liberty: Republicans want to control our bedrooms, Democrats want to control our wallets.

But Democrats just can't seem to resist the need to pass laws to set the world right for everyone. This bill will cost more to enforce than everyone lost buying a cheap bedroom set from the same store that has been going out of business for the last three years. What a waste of Legislative time and money.

Don't waste money on state police

Democrats in Oregon want to waste hundreds of millions of dollars on the Oregon State Police. And they want make the funding an entitlement, so if money needs to be saved in the future, OSP will not have to share.

The budget is scheduled for a work session on Monday, May 14 at 3:00 pm at the Oregon State Capitol.

Folks, the OSP gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year. How many more highway patrols to you want? What about schools? What about roads? What about investment? What in the hell are you getting for your money?

Will someone please give us some facts here?

Let's talk first about response times and support for other police: Response times have been improved by the increase in the number of cell phones far more than the number of troopers.

Then we need to ask, what is the cost per officer of an OSP Trooper versus a Clackamas County Sheriff if each is a five-year veteran? What is the "efficiency" of those officers, that is, what is the "Total cost per trooper" versus the "total cost per deputy?" or better yet, "total cost per trooper per mile on the road" versus "total cost per deputy per mile on the road?"

Is it possible we might get three deputies for the cost of two troopers? What does that mean for response times?

Let's move on to support for other agencies: do OSP and Clackamas County work as well together as Clackamas and Multnomah Counties on a true mutual aid call? Ask a couple of deputies, and promise them absolute anonymity. Ask them how they like working with the other sheriff's office, and ask them about working with OSP. There are culture differences between all of them: Bernie's agency may be hard to work with, etc. But it's a good question to put out there.

It has been said that a proposed 139 additional troopers alone will cost $17.6 million of new money initially, growing larger every two years, at least $80 million of new money in the next decade for just the increase. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO GET FOR THAT MONEY? You will not get $80 million of lives saved, or $80 million of meth busts, or $80 million of anything that has a positive impact on the lives of Oregonians.

The emphasis so far has been on 24 hour patrols, and more cops on the road. On that subject, see if you can find any statistics, anywhere, that shows that issuing tickets causes a population to drive more slowly, or saves any lives.

OSP sells budget increases with a misuse of numbers: In an accident, force at impact increases by the square of speed increase, (true) therefore, issuing tickets saves lives (false). Invalid because (1) Few accidents are caused by speed in a way that more troopers would prevent; (2) We don't really want traffic to move more slowly, we want it to move more safely, and they are not the same; (3) Things that are true in the singular (one driver) often fail in the aggregate (traffic safety).

Over the same period the number of troopers has been going down, the number of fatal accidents per mile driven has been going down. Ask again: What are we getting for our $17.6 million of new money that will directly benefit Oregonians?

We could put that money into schools, teaching boys and girls how to pound nails, how to weld, how to earn a living; We could create a state service program for all 18 years olds; We could put that money into a bypass around Sisters, Oregon; We could put that money into investments in alternative energy, growing soybeans for diesel fuel, turning logging slash or underbrush clearing into ethanol; We could attract a business with jobs to Newport or Coos Bay; We could improve a bridge. Widen a road. Reform K-8 education by teaching parents how to parent.

There is so much to do with that money, my god don’t throw it away on the OSP.

Time is short. Write your legislator. Find the address on the right side of this article.

Life is not always nice

An article in today’s Oregonian by Shelby Wood talks of gay rights taking two historic steps (read it here). I would agree, but worry they are steps backward.

The first is creation of domestic partnerships for gays. We have now defined another class of human being. To limit discrimination based on sexual orientation, we have created another category by which to discriminate. It would have been better to get Oregon out of the marriage business altogether and we have missed a historic opportunity. But we have railed on this before (read it here).

The second step has to do with laws against job discrimination based on sexual orientation.

It is said the workplace is a nicer place since sexual harassment lawsuits changed behavior in the 1990s. Maybe, but I don’t know if we can equate the addictive power of sex and extortion power of supervisors over women to the stupid insults of ignorant men.

A fellow traveler said a while ago that it is shame, not guilt, that modifies behavior. The problem, of course, is that some men will never feel shame, and others may feel it for all the wrong reasons.

It is difficult to legislate attitudes, but perhaps if we can legislate behavior, the attitudes will follow. I don’t know. But I do believe the power of the state is so great that it must be used judiciously. Or we shall consume ourselves in fruitless debates over what was said, what was meant, who was hurt, and how.

Replace or repair

The other day ... about three weeks ago really, I asked my local computer store about the latch on my lap top. The lid would not stay closed, the result of being hauled around in my less-than-tidy briefcase.

The tech behind the counter said it would be about $250 to open the case and replace the latch. “Yeah, you really get hammered when these things are out of warranty.”

Yeah.

So, I hauled out a can of compressed air, some Q-tips and the dry lubricant I use on my Sig P229 .40 semiautomatic and went to work. I worried the lube might cause a short in the keyboard or elsewhere, but I figured a dry lube used sparingly right at the point of friction would be safe enough.

In about 10 minutes I had the latch free and the lid would stay closed. Power of the pen, indeed.

$250 means something to me. And the latch was not broken, it was dirty. Would a new latch have been better? No. My fix will last as long as the 1.67 GHz CPU and the 2 GB of SDRAM, the hinges on the lid and the LCD.

My grandfather was an engineer, so were all three of my mother’s uncles. They repaired and replaced, I was amazed at what they could take apart and rebuild. I used to work on cars, never could call myself a mechanic but I know not to over-torque with a 3/8 inch ratchet.

But the kids in my house don’t do that stuff. They can’t do that stuff at ages 12 or 13 or 17. They haven’t learned, they don’t want to learn, they have no place to learn. And because they don’t pay the bills, they think that paying $250 for a latch is just fine, or perhaps latch failure is a sign from God that it’s time for a new lap top.

I’ve let them down.

Imus and the hypocrites

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: I don’t care if Don Imus lost his job. I don’t like Don Imus, nor any of the breed. They have lowered the intelligence of America. While I support their right to speak, I support the right of CBS and MSNBC to pull the plug from the loudspeaker.

Is that clear?

According to one of dozens of stories, this one in the Miami Herald (read it here), Black leaders Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton met with the president of CBS and helped get Don Imus fired for his calling a women's basketball team “nappy headed hos,” with Jackson calling the firing a “victory for public decency,” and Sharpton coming out against “commercialized racism and sexism.”

Now, let’s point out another seemingly glaring bit of the obvious. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are hypocrites. And so is every single commentator, black or white, left or right, who has clamored for the head of Don Imus while at the same time remaining silent about the violence, racism and sexism in popular Black culture.


“Nappy headed hos?” Disgusting. Racist and sexist. But the fact is, you can listen to far worse stopped at any intersection in Portland or Eugene or Salem or Bend as some bass-addled teen next you in a slammed Civic or Evo shakes the tarmac with Rap. The river of violent, denigrating, misogynist profanity coming from Rap is a far worse commercialization of racism and sexism than a two-second comment from Don Imus.

It would be far more potent for the leaders of the Black community, even tired old pols like Sharpton and Jackson, to join Bill Cosby in his disgust over the loss of another generation of young black men and women to stereotypical rage. And the right wing should remember the value of providing education and opportunity to every American, especially the underprivileged.

Here’s praying for the opportunity to vote for Barak Obama.

OSP correction

Reporter Elizabeth Suh just wrote to say that Kulongoski had asked for $17.6 million for 139 new patrol officers over the next two years. That means our thumbnail estimate of about $24 million for 120 troopers was off by quite a bit. Well, we said it was rough.

Either the new officers are paid considerably less (with a strong union, if there were reductions in force, the most senior hold their jobs), or the overhead represents a much larger portion than the 15% we used (new troopers do not mean more command staff if the agency was "top heavy").

It may also be that when resisting budget cuts in the past, OSP decided to take the most visible off the streets, a little game of legislative extortion, and left their infrastructure intact. Agencies and unions want the cuts we impose upon them to hurt us.

Thank you, Elizabeth. I wish that info had been in the original story. How about a follow up talking about how that $17.6 million will actually be distributed, why there is a difference in per officer cost, etc. Yeah, I am a numbers guy, but we are talking about numbers, here.

And so now we have a request for an additional $17.6 million for two years, at least $87 million over the next decade. Still a lot of money (it's just the additional!) for Oregonians to get more speeding tickets, and the occasional meth bust. We would use the funds elsewhere.

More troopers a waste

Ladies and gentlemen, today we offer an example of government waste, Kulongoski fiscal irresponsibility, power politics, public apathy and media laziness. It’s quite the combination.

But first, a warning: the writer of this blog is snarling and biased, in need of a shower and second cup of strong black coffee, listening to hounds outside barking over crescendoes of Pink Floyd at deer far too close to the electric fence, and some time today wants to fire up 427 cubic inches of aluminum block V8 and run enough NOISE through the straight pipes to put ripples in the Pacific or shake a small slide of rock down the snowy side of Mt. Jefferson outside the door. Okay? Are we on the same page?

In today’s Oregonian (read it here), reporter Elizabeth Suh wrote that “In Gov. Ted Kulongoski's proposed budget, he recommends funding 139 more patrol troopers so that the state police can return to patrolling the entire state 24 hours a day. The Legislature's budget proposes funding 100 more patrols.”

We can’t find in Suh’s lazy little article how much this will cost, what the current staffing is, or any other meaningful information.

Instead, she mindlessly quotes the OSP, which spoon feeds her factoids: “In October, state police officials issued a report comparing patrol trooper levels nationwide. They found that with 254 patrol troopers, Oregon had the lowest staffing level in the country: about seven per 100,000 population.”

This would be sloppy journalism if it were journalism, but it doesn’t qualify.

So, let’s grab a shovel and do just a rough excavation, because this is a blog, not an article in the state’s major daily. Live with it.

The OSP claims on its web site it has 322 sworn patrol officers, 38 professional positions, for a total of 360. For the 2005-2007 biennium, patrol funds are $84,726,605 out of a total budget of $519,128,681, though the OSP reports that of that half-billion, $193,099,576 are Federal “pass-through” funds and do not support OSP programs.

So, if Kulongoski adds about 30 percent more patrol troopers, what will it cost? Let’s take the easy way out and just add 30% to the existing patrol budget. This will probably overstate the actual amount, since newly added troopers will not make (yet) as much as retiring troopers, and different shifts might use the same car. And let’s pick a number, say 85%, and say that labor is 85% of the cost of the patrol program.

So, if we currently spend $84,726,605 per biennium on patrol troopers, and 85% of that is for labor, we spend $72,017,614. If we increase that by about a third, we get $95,783,426. so we will spend about $23,765,812 more for the new patrols.

Another way to do the math is to divide the patrol budget of $84,726,605 by the number of personnel, 360. That gives us an eye-opener: $235,351 per person. WOW!

And if we again multiply that by the troopers added (let’s use 120), and mix in our 85% payroll modifier, we get $24,005,871.

Close enough. Now to the next question. What are we going to get for our fresh $24 million?

We assert the following: Nothing. Oregonians will not benefit from this expenditure. There is no hard evidence anywhere that we have been able to find, that putting one more OSP trooper on the road, let alone somewhere between 100 and 139 of them, will improve public safety.

The evidence, though awkward, is to the contrary: At the same time the number of troopers per “mile driven” has gone down, the number of accidents per mile driven also decreased. So one could argue, (we won’t) that reducing the number of troopers reduces the number of accidents. OSP has used that kind of false logic in promoting their expansion.

We wish reporter Suh had asked the OSP when they gave her that stupid report about having the lowest staffing in the country whether we had also had the lowest safety in the country. But she didn’t.

Which leads to the final issue: Where else could we spend that $24 million that would do some good? Well, the Sisters School District could use some money. A half-million would make a pretty good addition to teaching staff, and Sisters is better off than John Day or Burns or the Wallowas.

Central Oregon is going to be out of jail space soon. Gresham could use some help attracting investment to their high tech business parks. Mill City could use some help that would create a job or two. I bet Lakeview would be better able to use a couple of deputies. We need technology to get some of the slash burned along the highway east of Mt. Jefferson turned into diesel fuel. More importantly, that is at $24 million more every two years, so over 10 years, we are talking about $100 million more just for the increase proposed today.

For that, we are going to get 120 men and women in funny hats and fast cars pointing laser guns paid for by insurance companies at the license plates of citizens trying to get somewhere safely but over the speed limit.

What a waste. A waste of reporting, of government, of time, of money.

Time for coffee.

Grace-full

Elizabeth Edwards gave a wonderful gift to the country last week. Faith and courage, awareness of Grace.

The wife of presidential candidate John Edwards, Elizabeth is likely dying of metastasized breast cancer. She is handling it better than most of us.

In an interview with Newsweek, (read it here) she talked about God and dying.

“I had to accept that my God was a God who promised enlightenment and salvation. And that's all. Didn't promise us protection.”

It is remarkable when you look at Hillary and McCain, Rudy and Kerry and the others, how different they are from Elizabeth Edwards, her husband John. There is a reality missing from the others, like “everything they say was written down before they said it.” I don’t know yet about Obama.

But in the reality distortion field that is national (and more frequently Oregon) politics, the bitter Right Wing are wringing their hands and complaining that the Edwards’ should hunker down at home with their children and prepare to meet a fearsome God. What brass! They would tell us how to live, when to die, who to love!

But Elizabeth has an answer for them:

“There's going to be a day before each of us die, and you have to think a little bit about how you want that day filled. Maybe when you're doing that judging thing, think about how you want the day before you die to look. I want that to be a productive day about which I am enormously proud, as opposed to a day where I had the covers pulled up over my head. That's unbelievably important to me. And if somebody is judging me, and doesn't hear me say that, maybe it's partly my fault for not saying it clearly and maybe it's their fault for not thinking about it.”

I think the likelihood that John Edwards will be our next president is quite small. The gnashing teeth of the grinding machine that is power politics in this country will take its due, and mediocrity will, again, be the outcome of a process that forces us to vote against, not for.

But thanks to the Edwards, we will have seen something lovely and strong, a couple of true faith facing their trials with grace, passion and integrity.