Boreal B[l]og

I have been quiet about the depressing primary season.  I kept hoping, starry-eyed, that there would be an honest, thoughtful discussion about the many serious issues that face the country today.  Instead, when I did listen, I heard a litany of racism, xenophobia, simplistic solutions, and inane slogans.  An incredibly boorish, impolite, narcissistic man who doesn’t listen, talks over people, and screams without thinking has a high probability of becoming president, because his boorishness resonates with many.  The House Speaker  can work with Mr. Trump, and the other side is too busy squabbling to deal with the clear and present danger.  The boor is telling crowds what they want to hear, even if 85-95% is not true, according to fact checking.  Facts don’t matter much in America these days.  Repetition of lies wins.  How people look and sound is more important than what they have to say.  Tweets matter.  Nerdy stuff about water on a third-rate blog changes nothing.

The Republicans sowed the wind and the country is now reaping the whirlwind.  The nastiest people in the Party couldn’t stop Trump, and too many Democrats tend to stay home when they don’t get their way.  Or, worse, they decide purity matters and cast their vote for a perfect candidate who has no chance of getting elected.  How did McCarthy work out in 1968, Nader in 2000?

Worse, a third party candidate like Gary Johnson could siphon off enough votes to throw the election into the House, where the Republicans will pick the president.  I wonder how many have thought of that scenario.

If fewer than 540 people in Florida had changed their vote from Nader to Gore in 2000, we wouldn’t have elected Bush.  Had the Democrats united in 1968, Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War wouldn’t have occurred, I doubt there would have been the Christmas bombing, and we wouldn’t have had Watergate.  I am going to be “taught a lesson” by the purists: they will teach me what happens when the Republicans control the Court, Congress, and the country.  When we are at war, in debt from emergency authorizations, have destroyed public education, sold off the national parks, wildlife refuges, and the wilderness, and gutted safety standards, yes, they will have taught me a lesson.

When Medicare is privatized and Social Security is removed, I will survive.  When Roe vs. Wade is overturned, and birth control is made illegal, I will be asked for money.  I always am.  But few will listen to my ideas or thoughts.  Want my thoughts without reading further?  Unite and work to extend voting hours and days, push vote-by-mail, and get every last voter on our side out.  Every one.

OK, back to Mr. Trump, who said that there was no drought in California.  Oh, some were quick to say that California has to allocate water better and at the proper price.  But California is in drought. Not only is 86% of the state in D1-D4 categories, only 6% of the state is not in drought, and those 9000 sq mi are in the far northwestern part of the state.  A fifth of the state is in D4, exceptional drought.  Drought is about measurement and science, not about what one states.  Trump is dead wrong, but people believe him. He said it, people believe it, and that settles it.  California does have a water allocation problem, but that only exacerbates the 5 year drought that shows no signs of abating, after two other multiyear droughts since 2000.  Two of those years, San Francisco had zero and 0.01 inches rainfall in January, which had never occurred once, let alone two years in a row.

The economists who deal with California’s water problem invoke the market, but they don’t factor in the price of endangered species and are curiously silent about the quarter million homes and businesses in California that lack water meters.  The law mandating water meters doesn’t fully take place until 2025.  Not metering water is about as stupid as charging people $30 a month for gasoline and letting them use all they want.  Incredibly, Bakersfield and Fresno have actively resisted meters.  What century are they living in?

Because of groundwater use, the Central Valley is sinking: near Mendota, 9 meters, 29 feet, from 1925 to 1977.  Many places have sunk a meter between 2006 and 2010. This affects the canals, which must be repaired because of shifting.  Ground water pumping has changed the aquifer from deep to shallow, which gets more irrigation recharge with salts, making the water less useful.

Some crops are more water intensive than others, and as the climate changes, we need to change what is being grown.  Or, people like Tom Selleck may try to get truckloads of water from elsewhere hauled to their property.  Mr. Selleck got off cheaply for his “me first” approach, paying the P.I. (probably not Magnum, I would guess) who caught him $22,000.  He denies ever receiving letters telling him he was out of compliance.  Ignorance of the law is not justifiable, but he’s famous.

Trump is good at telling people what they want to hear, even if it flies in the face of science and common sense.   Sarah Palin at least admitted California needs water: she just thought it could be obtained from the ocean and placed in reservoirs.  Are the voters that dumb? One example.*

Trump could have been presidential:  he could have taken the high road and said  that we are now seeing the “new normal” of climate in the western US—higher temperatures, less rainfall, more extreme events— and offered solutions.  We need to meter water, for money drives use.  We need to harvest rainwater, not let all run into the ocean or evaporate.  We need to have better ability to fix leaks, be they in houses or canals.  We need to change our usage at home and regionally. Neither lawns nor golf courses belong in arid regions.  We need to consider desalination if it can be done safely and with renewable energy.  That is a tall order.  Mr. Trump could have said that climate is going to change what happens in California, and the citizens must start preparing for it.  Instead, he catered to what people want to hear: everything is fine, if only the Democrats, the environmentalists, and “Big Government” would get out of the way.

This is an election where the Democrats, environmentalists, and “Big Government” may all lose.

And this time, I won’t likely live to see the damage from another bad president get repaired.

*2006 AP polls showed that a majority of Americans were unable to name more than one of the protections guaranteed in the first Amendment of the Constitution — which include speech, assembly, religion, press and “redress of grievance.” Just 1 in 1000 could name all of these five freedoms. However, 22% were able to come up with the name of every member of the Simpson family.  Author’s note: I never once watched the show.

I found interesting a juxtaposition of articles in the newspaper about excessive classroom size in Eugene, and bonuses paid to Oregon football coaches 3 seasons ago.  The University (UO) paid $688,000 in bonuses, $490,000 for an insurance policy that was supposed to cover their cost, but apparently didn’t, and finally accepted a settlement of $242,000, lawyer fees not stated, meaning it cost UO at least $936,000 that year for football staff bonuses.

They didn’t win a national championship.

I knew Eugene was a big football town, but I underestimated how big. The head coach makes $3.5 million; the rest of the coaching staff altogether makes another $3.5—before bonuses.  The Science Factory, a small children’s museum near Autzen Stadium, gets a significant portion of its income from renting space on their lawn for tailgaters during home games. That’s “trickle down.”  For $7, a child can spend several hours in the exhibit hall with a lot of cool exhibitions.  Plus, there is a planetarium show where kids and parents learn about the night sky. They can find the North Star, which escaped slaves knew 150 years ago, and which very few Americans can find today.  Yet, 40% believe in astrology, and some wonder how Trump might become president.  Education matters.

For “$29 and up” (well into three figures for decent seats), one can see the Ducks play my alma mater Colorado in football this year, stay 3 hours, likely longer, because TV timeouts have lengthened the game considerably.  Parking is a minimum of $10, a mile from the stadium.  I don’t know what food costs. You won’t learn about the night sky, except that we light it up so much, wasting electricity, because we light the sky and the ground, that many have never seen the Milky Way.  Football may be played any night of the week.  The concept of “school night” has disappeared, along with the stars.

The local school district had many complaints about classroom size, a surrogate measure of educational quality.  I find that interesting, because when I was young, our classes had about 30 students.  Research has shown that large classroom size doesn’t mean bad outcomes.  Granted, it is a different world today.  We didn’t have cell phones when I was in school.  The teacher’s rule was law, and if we disobeyed, our parents believed the teacher, not us.  We had standardized tests, but they didn’t count for promotion.  “A”s were given for results, not effort.  We lined up for polio vaccination in school, rather than cite medical or religious reasons not to get it.  We all knew somebody with polio. Science eradicated the disease.

Diversity is prominent today, along with a change in gender dominance.  I grew up when boys were better students.  Schools didn’t push girls as hard.  Today, girls are pushed to excel, and do, but boys in general are falling behind, an unfortunate observation I made where I volunteered.  Parents question exam grades and the difficulty of the material.  I tutored a student in chemistry, whose parents were teachers who felt the material too difficult.  It was analytical chemistry for high school.  We learned how to write, both the action and the content.

Back then, however, we called one black student integration.  We had bullying, fights, and more deaths in motor vehicle accidents.  Gays were quiet.  They must shake their heads today when they hear that being gay is a choice.  Back then, you stayed quiet. Smoking cigarettes in the bathroom was bad; we didn’t know what transgender was.

We liked our sports, too, but we didn’t worship them.  Our football stadium seated maybe 1000, not the 12,000 a town in Texas is going to build for $60 million. Goodness, the whole city of Wilmington couldn’t find a venue that sat 12,000.  It was only football, for heaven’s sake.  We didn’t have a state basketball or football championship.  We didn’t rank our sports teams nationally, and there wasn’t a McDonald’s All-American team, because McDonald’s had barely opened restaurants.

Sports at colleges weren’t big business.  There was a time when freshmen couldn’t play varsity, only on a freshman team.  Athletes didn’t leave early for the pros.  In 1971, Roger Staubach was MVP of the Super Bowl and made $50K a year.  Now, the average salary is twice that per game, called by “Business Insider” magazine as “Poorly paid.”

We can find money for a new stadium, and for the world track and field championships—in Eugene—the whole state is going to have the lodging tax increased.  Thirteen of the $100+ million cost will go for trophies and a gala gathering place, but we don’t have money to house the homeless, get meningitis vaccine for students, or hire more teachers.  Additionally, the UO blew nearly a million buying out the contract of the last president.

Some still say that children are our future, but state of the art stadiums trump state of the art schools. I see license plate frames with “Duck Athletic Fund Supporter.”  I have never seen one with “UO Scholarship Supporter,” or “Eugene Public Schools Donor.”  People have the right to send their money where they wish, of course.  It’s America.  It’s just that football stadiums are used fewer than a dozen times a year and schools 180 days a year, often more.  Furthermore, football is harmful to the brain, and I haven’t heard of any significant changes in the game.  Schools are built to increase the intelligence in the brain.  Our priorities are backward.

Lack of support of public education is part of both the dumbing down of America, an anti-science agenda supporting for profit and religious schools.  The Other Side calls higher education “liberal bastions.”  There are plenty of conservatives in those schools, but liberal arts tends to mean liberal thinking—the search for truth, new ideas, and extolling intelligence.  Instead, the Republican standard bearer is bashing two and not offering anything regarding the third.

I’m perhaps a cantankerous grouch, but one who embraces the changes in the world, questioning changes that I don’t think are improving it.  Those families and groups who support education tend to have children who are successful in life, success being defined by a career that is considered honorable and important.  We all know the stereotypes who succeed; their families believe with education an individual has a strong chance to succeed in life.

Football

72,788 NCAA Players

16,175 Draft Eligible

256      Drafted.

The NCAA says the probability is 1.6%, but when compared to the number of NCAA players, it is 0.35%, and being drafted does not guarantee playing, let alone succeeding. 

We need to pay teachers appropriately, making teaching a profession many aspire to become.  Let’s expect much from our teachers, but give them training, support and respect they deserve.  We should make teaching a profession the best and brightest aspire to become. We’re running out of time to fix the problems that will end humanity in a century or less.  Education may or may not succeed; nothing else comes close, not even a national championship in football.