By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-NY, apologized Monday for being a venial idiot, but stopped short of resigning. Of course, he doesn’t want to resign. He’d have to get a real job. And who would hire him except, perhaps, an Internet company marketing pornography? There are lots of those, if the spam that slinks around the country is any indicator.

He is not our congressman, thank goodness, so it matters not to me whether he goes or stays. But if he were our representative, I would want to see him gone.

Like a lot of Americans, I expect those who speak for us in Congress to be somewhat better in most respects than the average person. What makes a democracy work is that you try to send your best people to represent you. You want those people to be honest, to be thoughtful, to be educated, and to have a sense of morality and ethics that rises above the ordinary fray. You want somebody who works hard, who has a deep feeling for what it takes to be a good American, and whose life is an example of what being an American is all about.

You also may hope that person agrees with you politically — but if he or she doesn’t agree, at least you have the comfort of knowing that person will still try his or her best to do the right thing.

You do not expect these people to be wasting their time sending dirty pictures of themselves around on the Internet. In fact, if during a campaign, a candidate had said, “I hereby promise you that I will waste two or three hours a day taking obscene photos of myself and sending them to women to whom I am not married,” that candidate wouldn’t have received many votes, unless those votes were from people who were bigger idiots than he.

If you can’t trust an officeholder to behave ethically and with good sense, you don’t want him making laws for you, or serving as an example for your children.

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

The California Assembly has passed a bill which would levy sales taxes on online sales, and that’s a good thing.

E-tailers, such as Amazon.com, say the requirement to collect sales taxes on California sales, then pay those taxes over to the California treasury will be a burden too great for them to bear.

But think for a minute. It is not too great a burden for a local bookstore or electronics store. If a mom-and-pop store can collect and pay over sales taxes, why should that be such a problem for a behemoth like Amazon?

E-tailers have been taking billions of dollars in business over the past decade or more from local stores which find themselves at a disadvantage when competing with online stores which collect no taxes. Local businesses have no choice but to collect and pay over sales taxes, because the Franchise Tax Board will beat them up if they don’t.

Few customers of these businesses have any conscience in the matter. They would rather not have to pay the taxes if they can get away with it. So, that gives the e-tailer an automatic leg up, which could amount to 10 percent of any sale.

When they were first starting out, many e-tailers begged not to have to collect and pay over sales taxes. They said such a burden could put their fledgling enterprises out of businesses. Most legislatures went along with their thinking. But that logic had a hole in it. Their business plans, if they were telling the truth, depended not on their being able to provide good products and services, but on tax avoidance. To hell with local schools and services. Not their responsibility. Their only business plan: Undercut local merchants. And tax avoidance has been part of that.

Now legislatures, fortunately, are beginning to see the light, and California’s Assembly is one of those.

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

Two stories this past week made me wonder some more about Moore’s law. That law, or axion, or old wive’s tale, says essentially that in every two years the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit will be doubled. It has generally turned out to be true. What also has turned out to be true is that the functionality of computers, which are driven by those circuits, doubles every two years as well.

One of the stories, written by the San Francisco Chronicle’s technology columnist James Temple, informs us that the threats of cyber attacks are greater than ever even though much has been done to improve security on both public and private Internet systems. In fact, he says, future wars
may be fought online, since an army of hackers could, for example, shut down a target nation’s power grid, or shut off its water pumps or (please, dear Lord, no) shut down its Internet altogether.

The Internet, he says, has become such a good servant, that without it, a whole generation of Americans, particularly the younger generation, may not know what to do without it.

The second story is in The Wall Street Journal, and that describes Iran’s efforts to set up an internal Internet within the borders of Iran, which would be impenetrable from both within and without. Imagine the Berlin Wall, only an electronic one that allows absolute control over how the Internet is used, by whom and why.

These two stories make me think that the last bastion of totalitarianism may be the Internet and how it is used. The more easily security systems can be cracked, the less likely we are to have the ability to maintain any kind of privacy, at least as far as what we have put on line is concerned. Totalitarians such as the Iranians must love it.

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

Perhaps you have been lying awake at night lately worrying about whether Congress will raise the debt ceiling, aka the limits on how much the country may borrow to pay its bills. Frankly, I haven’t been worrying about it so much.

A lot of us have a debt ceiling — imposed by the companies that grant us credit cards. They call those impositions “limits.” If you go over your limit, for example, it may cost you more in interest or fees, or it may earn you a call from the card issuer telling you to behave yourself, or your transacction may be denied.

Having a transaction refused can be very embarrassing. You buy a round for everybody at the bar, hand the bartender your Visa issued by Lord Have Mercy Bank, the bartender scans the card, stares at the machine for a moment, then brings the card back to you. “Got another card?” He asks. “This one has been refused.”

That is the embarrassment equivalent to having someone tell you, when you come out of a restroom, that you’ve forgotten your pants. Even if you do have another card, and it is accepted, the embarrassment somehow doesn’t go away. Maybe you stop going to that bar. Maybe you stop drinking altogether. Maybe you do what your wife told you to do and pay off the credit cards before you charge any more.

The people who are warning us about not renewing the debt limit are saying that it would end life as we know it. Entire economies, perhaps entire civilizations would be brought down. But those who say this are the ones who told us the recession would be prevented if we would only give the banks a lot of money, that the banks would lend all that money to businesses and create jobs. That didn’t happen.

So, I’m not positive they know what they’re talking about.

What might happen if the debt ceiling isn’t raised is the equivalent of having the country’s credit card refused. Embarrassing, perhaps, but probably not fatal.

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

The people at the Berlin Zoo are hoping they can keep the Knut brand going, because he generated about $140 million for the zoo before he died. Knut was an international celebrity whose image adorned all sorts of products and advertising. Then, he died unexpectedly in March at age 4, according to Bloomberg News.

It turns out he died of encephalitis, a brain illness.

Knut was a polar bear — a very photogenic polar bear — who was born at the Berlin Zoo and lived there all his life. He was very popular, and brought millions of fans who wanted to see him out to visit the zoo.

As soon as he was grown, photographers came along who took pictures of him that later were used in literature to promote the preservation of polar bears, while failing to mention that Knut had never been near where most polar bears actually live. Knut was cute, though, and it is easy to sell polar bear preservation if you only show the cute ones, and don’t show them ripping the blubber out of seals.

Most of us who have seen polar bears in zoos are impressed by them, but don’t grow all that fond of the critters. They are large and rather frightening animals, and if you decided to visit one in its cage, you probably would be mauled or even eaten.

Knut was almost handraised by people, was relatively clean because he ate raw meat that was already cut up and didn’t get blood all over himself like natural polar bears do, and had a way of being loved by the camera.

It seems a bit ironic that his image was used as a logo for a conference on saving wild polar bears, even though he, himself, was doing just fine — until his death, that is — as a zoo resident.

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

Some good news out of the Madera County Planning Commission: Some rather unimaginative road names in the foothills are going to be changed to names that sound better. Future generations will thank you.

Road 229-B will be changed to Putney Place. How much nicer that sounds, with the two-Ps alliteration. Wouldn’t you rather have your address be on Putney Place than on Road 229-B? It sounds like somebody who really is somebody would live there.

Road 236 is being changed to Church Ranch Road. What a great name for a road, as it implies a church, or a ranch, or a church on a ranch, or a ranch owned by somebody named Church. All of that is very positive. I know a lot of folks who would like living on Church Ranch Road if they didn’t already live elsewhere.

Road 419 will be renamed as Hidden Meadow Road. How pleasant it would be to live on such a road. One imagines an actual hidden meadow (although hidden from what is harder to visualize).

Another change: The uninspiring Road 427 will be changed to School Road. Fittingly, there’s a school museum and a college along that road, in Oakhurst, so a better name couldn’t be devised.

Finally, the planners want to change Road 620 to Bissett Station Road. That name has a nice ring to it, but I
wonder where Bissett Station is. Road 620 meanders northwest from Highway 41 out of Oakhurst, but there is no sign of Bissett Station anywhere. I have to assume that the road namers either know of a station somewhere around there, or plan to build one soon, and name it after the Bissetts.

All of those names will be improvements over the old, but it also will mean those who live on those roads will have to go to the trouble of
letting everybody know their addresses have changed. It seems a small price to pay for such improvements in how their addresses sound.

The environmental page of the Tribune is the funniest thing of the whole paper. I read the other day about the “freshwater” intrusion into the bay killing the bay shark. Hasn’t it been the saltwater intrusion that was killing the smelt? Can’t they make up their
minds?

Now it’s the wind people mad at the power companies because they have an abundance of hydroelectric and they are not taking the unreliable wind power into the grid. Hydro is ungreen? No, it’s just that the green people have a useless and unstable product and it’s unrealistic to use it when real stable hydropower is available. They say that the power company is not doing enough to “store” its wind power when its available and not used.

How do you do that? Do you put the wind into balloons to use later? Do you convert it to DC and put it into batteries? Best way to “store” it is to run pumps, and pump the water back up hill to use later as clean, efficient, regulated hydro power.

You want regulated freshwater and saltwater? Build more dams. You want more regulated power? Build more dams. You want more good snowmelt freshwater to drink and wash your car? Build more dams. You want an abundance of good food in your grocery store? Build more dams. You want flood control that works? Build more dams.

Simple, isn’t it?

Bill Hoffrage,
Madera

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

A few California teachers showed up in Sacramento on Wednesday to call for higher taxes to balance the state budget, as opposed to cuts, which could take money from schools. Tom Torlakson, the state superintendent of public instruction, joined them. The teachers especially want to “Tax the Rich and Their Corporations,” as it said on one sign being carried outside the Capitol.

It is the easiest thing in the world to say “tax the rich,” as if the rich, and also corporations, weren’t already paying taxes. It is much more difficult to say “tax the middle class,” because there are a lot more of them to yell back, including the teachers themselves.

How about saying, “Tax those who don’t pay at all”? There are quite a few of them. More than 40 percent of Californians pay no income tax. Considering all tax income the state takes in, just 20 percent of Californians pay 80 percent of the taxes.

Of course, it would not be necessary to raise taxes if those who don’t pay any taxes at all would just send in voluntary contributions earmarked to keep the schools open. Just write “for schools” at the bottom of your check.

If the 40 percent of Californians who pay no income tax would send just $500 each to the state for the schools, it would raise $7.4 billion, which probably would eliminate most if not all of the cuts for education.

People would say that was a silly idea, that people who don’t pay now wouldn’t pay then. You may be right, but those tax deadbeats would still expect their children, if they have any, to be given an education — on somebody else’s nickel.

It is just so much easier when somebody else writes a check to educate hundreds, even thousands, of other people’s kids. Should the rich pay their fair share? Of course, but first you have to define what “fair share” means. To more than 40 percent of Californians, it means the rich have to pay for the 40 percent’s share, too, and that may not really be fair.

By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune

Fans of electric cars are glad to hear that San Francisco will open some 80 new, free charging stations around the city in city-owned public garages.

Free is a lot better than gas at $4.32 a gallon there for unleaded regular, they figure. The $500,000 this will cost is coming from various government grants (in other words, us), and a report on the project in the San Francisco Chronicle says the local air district hopes more people will use electric cars because the electric cars won’t pollute the air as much as gasoline-propelled cars do.

We should probably be glad for that, because no small portion of our own pollution comes from the Bay Area because of prevailing breezes and the geography of our valley.

The electricity for the chargers will even be green, coming from the Hetch Hetchy hydro power system.

If that seems almost too good to be true, it is. While the experiment is interesting, it also creates some misunderstandings. First among these is that electricity for cars is somehow free — or at least unbelievably cheap. Second is that this cheap electricity comes to us pollution free.

None of that is the case.

Those big motors in electric cars use a lot of electricity, and the last I looked, my electric rates had gone up, not down. Also, while the San Franciscans may delight in plugging into Hetch Hetchy now, they should look over their shoulders. A lot of their fellow citizens believe Hetch Hetchy should be torn down, and no new dams built.

Solar and wind projects are increasingly hard to site, again because of environmental objections. And they are very expensive and require taxpayer subsidy.

So pollution-free power isn’t free in any other respect. When enough people drive electric cars, putting huge new demands on the electrical grid, $4.32-a-gallon gas might not look too bad.

Deborah Koons Garcia’s screening of her work-inprogress movie “Symphony of the Soil” at California State University Fresno Thursday night, and the debate that followed the movie are creating a buzz in the Central California Valley today.

The gorgeous movie made a powerful argument for soil conservation, by methodically illustrating the many ways in which soil was created, how it evolved and how soils interact with plant life, how they both give and receive from each other, how they “dance together”.

We were introduced to soil taxonomy, with illustrations of each major soil category: Alfisols, Andisols,Aridisols, Entisols, Gelisols, Histosols, Inceptisols, Mollisols, Oxisols, Spodosols, Ultisols and Vertisol.

This beautifully crafted movie also featured many scientists and farmers who showed how erosion and farming can be easily related and how water conservation is directly affected by farming
practices. In a stunning experiment featuring four samples ranging from conventional farming to no-till organic farming soils, Koons
Garcia showed how water washes minerals away on conventionally farmed soil, itself unable to hold on to any of its water, and how virtually none of the minerals and organic matter is disturbed by the rainwater, itself trapped by the organically farmed no-til soil. In fact, most of the water in the last sample stayed within the soil and the very small excess was clear water.

The experiment demonstrated how our water table is directly affected by the farming above ground.

The movie painted easy-to-make connections, and also offered serious and promising solutions, as the film featured farmers who had successfully reversed poor soil management into highly productive farms from India, Washington, the Midwest and Wales, all within very few years, with clearly visible improvements, even within the first year.

After the movie, a panel of speakers from various professions directly involved with soils: Paul Betancourt, farmer and past president, Fresno County Farm Bureau; Don Cameron, organic
and conventional farmer; Kerry Arroues, soil scientist, USDANRCS; Nat Dellavalle, agronomist and soil scientist, Dellavalle Laboratory, Inc.; and Rob Mikkelsen, western director, International Plant Nutrition Institute (IPNI) all shared their opinions on the movie and, as the panel discussion progressed, increasingly indicated their fundamental displeasure with many of the arguments articulated in the Symphony of the Soil.

Most of the “counter” arguments did not actually address the science from the movie; instead, the speakers claimed that the market requirements, their legal intricacies and the extensive nature of California Central Valley farming could not apply the remedies announced in the movie, because of scalability isssues. In other words, the bulk of the panel, failed to realize that the
very industry they drive is itself unsustainable, the market demands they, themselves, created and the governmental food and
agricultural policies which govern their practices, are inherently unsustainable and potentially devastating to our land resources
as they could eventually lead to rampant food insecurity in a
country unusually blessed with some of the most fertile soils on
the planet.

One of the speakers even boasted the conclusion that organic farming actually recycles industrially created nitrogen, in a laughable attempt to dismiss organic farming altogether. Although a century of Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis has indeed created a large supply of fixed nitrogen, some of which inevitably is recycled in organic farming, the comment was meant to deride the importance of organic farming, specifically in comparing the nitrogen content of compost compared to purely synthesized
industrial fertilizers. One could counter that the recycling of nitrogen going on in organic farming, in itself, is an argument in favor of the practice, as opposed to the loss of nitrogen that accompanies the incessant chemical washing of the soil that occurs in poorly managed conventional farms.

As I watched members of the crowd, slowly exiting the room
during the one-sided debate, my wife observed them meeting outside of the auditorium, discussing the movie and how the panel had failed to understand what seemed so obvious to the large audience that filled the Fresno State auditorium. Guests were commenting that we have a lot of work to do: powerful agribusiness is still blind to its practices’ devastating effects on our planet and clearly not ready to face the consequences of the destructive pattern of their poor soil management, so eloquently and powerfully illustrated in the movie before them.

At one point during the debate, a conventional farmer stood up
and told the panel and the large audience that although her farm had been in her family for generations, she had never made the connection between the aquifer and farming practices. She
looked as if she had had an epiphany and was clearly moved by what she had seen and understood on the screen. The panel’s eyes may have been opened as they watched the movie, but their minds seemed to have been closed shut the whole evening.

Fredo Martin,
Madera