Deeds & Words

Today the county put on its Volunteer Recognition event at the Santa Rosa Veterans’ Building. This is an annual thing, always held towards the end of April (I think it must be National Volunteer Week, or something).

I had employees who volunteered many Saturdays during tax season to work with the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance—VITA—program. This is our second year participating in VITA. We don’t have our official figures yet, but we think, in the site that was hosted in my building, that they processed about 64 tax returns and will bring those tax-payers, combined, about $80,000.

Way to stimulate the economy!

This is an exciting program. Many people don’t know about Earned Income Tax Credit or certain credits for child care, and with President Obama’s Work Pays and tax breaks, low income working families should see a little extra money coming in, which is nice when every part of the economic world is really scary.

So, I went to acknowledge my folks, who sat through turgid IRS training and sacrificed Saturdays just to help people they didn’t even know get tax refunds. But the event wasn’t just for VITA volunteers, it was for the county volunteers, all of them, and it was impressive. About 500 showed up. This is one-sixth of the 3,000 people who volunteer some time helping others in Sonoma County. Volunteering might mean being a Search and Rescue volunteer, or a dog-walker or “cat cuddler” at the animal shelters; it might mean being a friendly voice on the end of the phone who calls an elderly person who lives alone; it might mean reading to children who are in an emergency shelter, or making quilts for them. It might mean being an amateur radio operator who provides communication in the event of a natural disaster. For some, it means acting as a chaplain and bible study group leader at the jail. For others it’s teaching a 55 Alive Driving for Seniors class, or being an advocate for someone with HIV, or working a few hours a week as a translator at a clinic or county office.

The county knows how to utilize volunteers, and at this event, at least, they know how to throw a thank-you party. The coffee was donated by Taylor Maid, the food, “volunteered” by a local chef, included a carving station, chocolate chip cookies and brownies. The only things missing were the scrumptious chocolate covered strawberries from last year. Balloon bouquets in green and blue filled the space and two large green and blue balloon arches bracketed the room. Each volunteer filled out a raffle card and the bulk of the event was raffling off the prizes donated by local businesses. One of my folks won a fabulous prize! Then she thought it was one of the grand prizes, and made her daughter take it back to the prize table, only to find that they had reshuffled the prizes and she was allowed to keep it.

On the stage, running on continuous loop, was a slide show of Sonoma County volunteers; everyday extraordinary people doing everyday, extraordinary things.

Politically, we have become a sports bar nation with partisans cheering for their team in much the same way they cheer for the Yankees or the Red Sox. If an umpire’s call or a pundit’s analysis helps one side, that team’s fans will hail the brilliance of the call or analysis. The other side will whine about its unfairness and question the credibility or integrity of the person making the call. Both sides know the talking points, and both sides are willing to switch their interpretation of the rules whenever it helps the home team.

From Rasmussen Reports.

McDonald’s plans to stop serving Pibb Plus and will begin serving Dr. Pepper.

The reason is. . . well, I’ll let them tell you in their own words:

“This is about McDonald’s becoming a beverage destination and building off our offerings of fountain beverages,” Karen Wells, vice president of U.S. strategy and menu for McDonald’s, said in an interview. “It’s another extension to have more variety and choice for our customers.”

McDonald’s, your beverage destination.

Elizabeth Warren is a Harvard Law professor, and head of the Congressional Oversight Panel of the TARP program, so she really is the TARP cop. She was on The Daily Show last week.

Karen saw it the first night it was on and told me about it, so I knew I had to watch it. I had seen Warren on The Rachel Maddow Show a few times. She looks professorial. She looks like Diane Keaton could play her in the movie. She has short, straight light brown hair that looks like it’s got gray streaks in it, glasses, pale blue eyes, and wears mannish Oxford cloth blouses with jackets that actually look like cardigans. In my mental pictures of her she is wearing a cardigan over her shoulders with the top button buttoned, and glasses on a string.

She is smart, engaging and funny. She did a good job with Jon Stewart, managing at one point to crack him up. I don’t think he expected that to happen. At the end of her seven or eight minute interview, he asked her was what going to happen. She said, “After we pull this bus out the ditch? I mean the economy.” Stewart nodded and she said something like:

“This started in 1792; George Washington, a new president. There was a credit crisis. And after that every ten or fifteen years there was a crisis. Boom and bust, boom and bust.. . until the Great Depression.”

Warren said that out the depression came three things: FDIC (insurance for people who put money in banks); the SEC and Glass-Steagle, bank regulation. And, she said, for fifty years we didn’t have a crisis.

Stewart interrupted and tried to say something about savings and loans, and Warren cut him off, her hand raised. “I said, fifty years. We began to pull the threads out of the regulations. First we had the savings and loans; seven hundred saving and loans went under.” She went on to list Enron and other crises leading up to this one. What did we do in response? Pull more threads out of the fabric of regulation.

And, she said, we have a choice to make, one she thinks we’ll make in six months to a year; to ignore the obvious need for regulation and go back to “boom and bust, and good luck with your 401(k),” or we will do the smart thing and put in smart regulation.

I’ve done a terrible job of reporting her monologue here but I know you can find it on the internet. Warren also writes a blog called creditslips.com with six other economists.

I never really thought a bankruptcy and economic law profession from Harvard would be a rock-star TV celebrity, but times change. Elizabeth rocks.

That was written across the bottom of a one-dollar bill I got as change the other day. Actually there’s a slash between the MK and Ultra so it looks like: MK/Ultra. And the pen skipped on the down strokes of the M and the U in “Subject.” What would the CSI teams make of that? Or Sherlock Holmes? Or House?

As everyone knows, MK Ultra was a CIA experiment in the 50′s and 60′s (or 40′s and 50′s?) that had to do with brainwashing and messing with people’s minds. I think they used LSD—at least they were rumored to. It had one of the cooler names for a dark, twisted clandestine operation—much better than PRANK, which was, I think, also the name of a CIA operation. The difference is that PRANK sounds disarming and kind of cute—like a prank—while MK Ultra sounds more like what it really was, so PRANK is probably the more effective name.

I don’t know what the words on this bill mean. Who was/is the mysterious Test Subject #308? The bill is a 2003 vintage bill with the completely centered George Washington picture. Rosario Merin and John W Snow signed it. And someone, somewhere, slipped it to Test Subject #308, perhaps while he/she was tripping. Hmmm. Is there a novel idea there? No, not really. I’m just a sucker for money with words written on it.

Turn Coat
Jim Butcher
ROC Press, 2009

I love to watch Jim Butcher play
But I’m afraid I have to say
He’s jumped the shark
And missed his mark
Is he really here to stay?

I like the Harry Dresden series. I like the idea of a wizard-detective in novel-noir Chicago, VI Warshawski with testicles and a magical staff instead of high heels. I liked the wise-crackery of the early books, and I loved the whimsy of Harry’s potion-making (something we’ve seen little of in subsequent books).

With Turn Coat, the eleventh book in the series, however, Jim Butcher has wobbled off course.

First and foremost, he cheats on the mystery. Butcher gives us a serious murder that ripples across the overarching multi-book plot he has been developing. A “minority member” of the wizards’ White Council has been murdered, apparently by another wizard, the Merlin’s sword arm and Harry’s nemesis, Morgan. Plainly Morgan has been framed, perhaps by the Red Court Vampires who are in cold-war with the wizards, perhaps by the agents of the Oblivion War, or perhaps by a group of unknowns Harry has dubbed “the Black Council.” Harry reluctantly agrees to shelter Morgan and uncover the real murderer/traitor.

Here’s where Butcher cheats. He gives us clues that make it obvious who the murderer should be, but switches away at the last minute to a “straw man*” character he’s just set up. If the book were a stand-alone, only about solving a murder, this would have been fine. It isn’t, it’s about uncovering a conspiracy that has brewed up over several books. . .several books in which Straw Man never made an appearance. Cheat, Cheat! No fair.

(Oh, and the hands-on murderer is exactly who we thought it was, but they were under Straw Man’s mind-control spell, so they aren’t responsible.)

This is either a failure of will or a bad tactical decision on Butcher’s part. Maybe he’s saving the real villain for a later book. If so, somebody remind me to act surprised.

In a larger sense, Butcher is having some other problems. The White Council is starting to look like an apparatus from Harry Potter, not Harry Dresden—a hidebound bureaucracy at odds with the few really “cool” wizards, like Harry with his badass spell-laden, weatherproof brown leather duster. Substitute “Hogwarts” for “Edinburgh” and there you are.

A few intriguing clues about Harry’s mysterious mother, Margaret, help out the book, the island of Demonreach is top-drawer awesome, and there is a mano a mano battle between shapeshifters that is exactly as great as it should be. The incubi/succubi White Court vampires are overexposed, however, in more than one sense. And Molly? Can’t she go off to summer camp or beauticians’ school or something, just for a while?

Jim. Get back on track. Give us a stand-alone Dresden book, Harry with Murphy at his side, where he finally delves into the history of his mysterious wizard mother.

*”straw man” is used in a generic sense here and does not refer to the gender of the character.