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Monday, June 30, 2003
Blarg 
| | Griff gets quoted too. (And to him go thanks for the link.) |
| | It's actually a good piece. I just hate the "audience" stuff. Blogs are journals. They have readers. It's not a subtle distinction. |
Coincidence?
Eliminating the scarcity in deep political thinking
| | We can't count on government, which seems to have devolved into a partisan pit of paralyzed pedantry, focused on neoconservative initiatives and progressive reactions. But, if the government were to suddenly transform itself into a citizen-centric governance model, how would that model be expressed? Through a series of web apps, whether for citizen input or IRS forms. |
| | For the last 20 months, our government has not allowed us to make a difference. On 9/12/01, most Americans woke up yearning to contribute. We donated blood but the blood banks ran out of room before most of us could contribute. We tried to drive to New York to help pick through the rubble, but were turned back at the bridges and tunnels. Instead, we got an ad from our president encouraging us to be loyal consumers and get on airplanes and fly anywhere but to New York! "Keep moving folks, there's nothing to see here. We don't need your help." |
| | If my premise is correct, this snub will be looked back on as one of the great political blunders in history. If it is revealed as a blunder, it will be because one candidate with enough common sense, charisma and speaking ability set up a web application and a related web log that linked to the web logs of people who still had not been permitted to make a difference. |
| | The 44th president of the United States will be elected by a bottom-up, citizen-led production. That president will, literally, be owned by citizens, whose resources trump companies. If we put ourselves in the place of that 44th president, what kind of government will we fashion. |
| | Even if you don' t like Britt's (or Howard Dean's) politics, and even if you like the present president (who often pronounces the latter word as if it were the former), you gotta give Britt points for thinking here. The best political analyses of our time, on all sides, seems to be coming from abundant sources other than the usual producers. |
Santa Barbararisms
| | Yesterday after returning from brunch at Lucky's (which deserves more than the two stars that review gives it), I looked down at the town and saw a geyser of water shooting toward the sky. My guess was that somebody ran over a fire hydrant. Whatever the case, it was easy from here to guess the height of the geyser as something over 100 feet. Our house is at 500 feet, and the column of water blasted nearly as high as the 140-foot broadcast tower nearby. |
| | I stared at it for a few minutes before getting the urge to photograph it. but after I retrieved the camera from the house, the geyser was gone. Later my friend Freddy dropped by with his little boy, and the four of us (two fathers, two sons) drove the old Subaru (still decrepit, but no match for Freddy's '55 VW bug) up to LaCumbre peak, picking up rocks along the way for my kid's collection (more about that later). Freddy said he'd heard about the geyser too, but missed seeing it. Anyway, it was clear that word got around. |
| | So I eagerly awaited this morning's News-Press to find out what happened. |
| | But we had a good time collecting chunks of Eocene and Oligocene sandstone and shale. This morning, on the front deck table, beside the paper where news of the present is remarkably deficient, lay rocks variously labeled Juncal, Matilija, Cozy Dell, Sespe and Coldwater. All but the Sespe are former ocean bottom, lithified to sandstone and shale, then pushed by the Northwest-bound Pacific plate against the North American plate where the San Andreas Fault jogs to the East. (Along the rest of the fault, the two plates slide by each other, but here they collide.) The Santa Ynez Mountains, and the Sierra Madre to the north, are transverse ranges (trending East-West) comprised mostly of crumpled sea floor. Somewhere in the Pleistocene a huge section of the ocean-facing mountain ridge came sliding down, burying the Mission Ridge fault at the base of the ridge. Since then erosion and additional slides have carved a valley along the fault, leaving a footridge of old landslide debris. We live on that. It's called The Riviera. |
| | Anyway, the kid and I have been trying to determine the provenance of sandstone and shale boulders and smaller rocks in the front yard of the house next door, which we're in the middle of remodeling. Our trip up to La Cumbre Peak along Gibraltar Road is a geological tour backward in time, downsection through Sespe, Coldwater, Cozy Dell, Matilija and Juncal rock — a journey roughly from 30 to 50 million years ago, which is recent stuff as geology goes (little of what you see Rockies' dramatic canyons is so new). The strongest rock appears to be the Matilija, which has held up best against erosion. The high buff boulders overlooking Santa Barbara are mostly Matilija, from what I can tell. And so, we've discovered, are most of the rocks in the yard. |
Politics as unusual
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