When you have video of kangaroos hopping around telescope arrays and awe-inspiring Australian night skies, you just have to go with it. (h/t slashdot)
How California hates on kids
I don’t know that I’d ever consciously thought it out, but I’ve long felt how difficult/expensive it is to raise kids in California. This University of Southern California analysis (“L.A. Is ‘Ground Zero’ for Shrinking Child Population”) documents the sorry situation. The bottom line:
Los Angeles County is now the epicenter of California’s shrinking population of young children as families are driven away by stressful economic conditions, according to a USC analysis of census data released today. Overall, California lost 220,041 children aged 5 to 9 in the last decade, a decline of 8.1 percent. Los Angeles County lost 21 percent of its children in that age range. “We are ground zero of the ‘missing children’ of California,” said co-author Dowell Myers, professor of urban planning and demography at the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development. The loss of children in the region reflects the difficult living conditions for families facing high housing costs followed by high unemployment during the Great Recession, Myers said.
The report is on the mark as far as it goes, but it seems to be missing the education factor. Major California urban areas sponsor a sort of educational apartheid; to put your kids in a public school that isn’t hideous, you need to pay up for housing in a wealthy area of town, or pay up for private school. Everybody who can’t pay up throws his/her kids into a maelstrom of lowest-common-denominator classrooms sprinkled liberally with gang-bangers who scare the hell out of teacher. I’ve seen this first-hand in San Francisco and now, yes, even in Santa Barbara, where my kids go to some of the best schools anywhere, but others living just a few miles away go to schools that are a splendid training ground for life-long failure. (NB: The wonky among you may want to go here to look at a series of analyses of population dynamics recently put out by USC.)
Filed under California, education
In case you thought multimedia was just a buzzword
W
hen you have a new multimedia offering on Brian Storm’s path-breaking multimedia site, mediastorm.org, you go with it, each and every time. This piece, African Air, features extraordinary photography of just about every country in Africa, shot from a hang glider. I can’t describe the piece in a way that does it justice; you just have to see. That’s the way it is, with art.
Filed under Africa, multimedia
Wind powerlessness
Even if you’re someone who thinks (s)he has followed the followed the failures in U.S. renewable energy policy closely, this brief published by the Center for American Progress will likely impress you, and not in a good way. That’s not to say the piece is bad in terms of the facts it asserts, or the ways in which they’re presented. For a think tank publication, the writing here is about as clear and sprightly as it gets. The facts themselves are what unsettle. The authors, Michael Conathan, CAP’s director of oceans policy, and Richard Caperton, a senior policy analyst, thoroughly catalog a host of wind farms proposed to be built offshore of Maine, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island, North Carolina and even Ohio, which could be served electricity generated by a wind farm in Lake Erie — if our government didn’t keep the rules and regulations for offshore wind in a constant state of flux. Even the one, lone offshore wind farm permitted by the federal government — the long and laboriously battled Cape Wind project off Massachusetts — has recently had the rug pulled out from under it, with the Department of Energy putting a federal loan guarantee for the project on hold. But that’s an inapropos description of what the government has done to seagoing wind power, and the authors do better. The U.S. government doesn’t pull the rug out from under the offshore wind industry; like Lucy does to Charlie Brown, the feds tee up a nice fat football for offshore wind developers to kick — and then pull it away at the last instant, insuring that offshore wind flies high in the air and falls flat and painfully on its back, time and again. The chart showing how far ahead of us China and Europe are in the wind energy field may be the most horrifying element in this well-researched and finely written piece. Congratulations to the authors; would that the mainstream press recapped their work and horrified some voters.
Filed under energy, wind power
Hidden vengeance
Here’s a truly amazing and heartwarming revenge story — one that seems almost too good to be true — about a guy who essentially forced the police to arrest the person who stole his Macbook, using the an app called Hidden and the camera on the laptop to catch the alleged perpetrator. (I haven’t reported this out but am posting off a Facebook item by Jeremy Mullman, a former journalist whom I trust. Let me know if you hear anything about it actually being too good to be true, which I severely doubt.)
DUI, DUI, DUI. No, it’s not a chant.
When you have an amazing and frightening hat trick like this, you go with it. But you stay far, far away from the guy, who, I hope, gets the long-term treatment program he clearly needs. (h/t Matt Palmquist)
Filed under Uncategorized
Coordination to the fourth power
Well, the republic is saved and this week’s competition for best academic abstract is all but over. The title alone — “Emerging Theoretical Understanding of Pluricentric Coordination in Public Governance” — essentially ended the competition. But within the abstract itself, the Danish authors of the paper surpass the title by miles and miles, hitting this new height of obfuscatory explanation: “Although the traditional theories of coordination tended to view vertical and horizontal forms of coordination as radically different modes of coordination, the new theories question the analytical value of this distinction by pointing to the relational, interpretive, interdependent, and interactive aspects of all coordination processes including processes in which public authorities seek to govern their subjects.” Game, set, match (without mentioning four uses of the word “coordination” in a single sentence). Even if they were aided by a bad translation or less than fluent English language skills, I have only one thing to say to these researchers: Good work, Danes!
Small is beautiful, even in spy planes
I wasn’t going to post anything else this weekend, but when you have a remote controlled miniature SR-71 with real jet engines, you just have to go with it. (h/t Ira Flatow)
Filed under Uncategorized
Me and my abalone
When you have an abalone farm in your own town, I guess you have to go with it. Besides, I’ve been there, and it is one fascinating operation.
I’ll be out of Internet range over most of the long weekend but will then be full of postings about the strange and terrible land known as … Fresno.
Filed under Uncategorized
California corruption roundup
I grew up in Chicago, with its legendary history of colorful corruption that continues to this day, Rod Blagojevich’s hair having recently been acquired by the museum that holds the mummified remains 
of Capone, Ness, Daley I, and too many congress- and aldermen to count. I reported for a long time in Houston, which has had its own cast of larger-than-life sleazebags down through time, crossbred, of course, with the Texas Legislature, whose absurd venalities made Molly Ivins famous.
I suppose Chinatown should’ve tipped me off, but I really wasn’t ready for the scale of the take-anything-not-nailed-down culture when I came to California. More than a decade in the Bay Area and the Southland, however, have made me an avid watcher of the can-you-top-this performances of the actors involved in California’s greed and corruption industry. By now, you’ve no doubt heard of the city of Bell, where city officials paid themselves so much that they won the L.A. Times a Pulitzer Prize. But the corruption hits just kept coming this week, with the former administrator of the city of Vernon, who in his last year made $911,000 in salary, pleading guilty to misuse of city funds. Prosecutors had accused Bruce Malkenhorst of “illegally reimbursing himself for expenses such as golf outings, massages and meals — including paying off his personal Visa credit card — and getting the city to pay for his political donations.” With the guilty plea, he got two years’ probation and had to pay $95,000 in fines and restitution — but he gets to keep his $500,000 annual retirement package. This, as the current Vernon government twists and turns, trying to keep the state from disincorporating the town of less than 100 citizens, almost all of whom live in city-owned housing. Half a mil that can’t be touched, every year — Bruce Malkenhorst, take a bow!
But now, get off the stage, because the star has arrived. That would be Blue Shield of California CEO Bruce Bodaken, who made $4.6 million last year. The lowdown from the L.A. Times:
In its report to the state, Blue Shield said that its 10 highest-paid executives earned more than $14 million total last year. The insurer identified the executives only by number, saying each earned $749,643 to $4,601,226. The top earner was listed as “chief executive officer,” Bodaken’s title.
The Times story gradually descends into wonderful deadpan comedy as Blue Shield officials try this, that and the other line to defend Bodaken’s salary, which has turned Malkenhorst into a footnote and sparked a private convocation of Chicago aldermen who have developed a sudden interest in the health care industry. If you consider public greed and corruption to be the most engaging spectator sports in America — and I certainly do — you should read this piece right to the bitterly funny end.
Filed under California, corruption
John Mecklin, writer/editor 