Kit Stolz

The Danger of Using Checks

My piece on being hugely ripped off by check fraud from last week's Ventura County Reporter…I'm still dealing with the mess, and the creditors.

The alarming truth:

According to the accounting firm Ernst & Young, more than 500
million fraudulent checks are written every year in the U.S., out of a
total of approximately 60 billion checks. The Nilson Report, a news
service for the credit industry, estimated four years ago that check
fraud cost the banking system more than $20 billion a year.

Even
when a check-fraud crime results in an arrest, most prosecutors don’t
pursue the case. According to banking industry statistics, 75 percent
of check fraud cases are dropped, and up to 90 percent of such cases in
urban areas that are plagued by more violent crimes. A Department of
Justice survey in 2004 found a 2 percent imprisonment rate for
check-fraud cases.

I loved what one detective said to me, about the danger of putting a check in your mailbox to pay a bill, and raising the red flag:

“A crook could just happen to be driving by, see the flag up and say, ‘Hey, look, it’s my birthday today,’ ” said [Det.] Almazan.

George Orwell Pooh-Poohs the NBA Finals

Well, not exactly, but if he were here today, Orwell would no doubt mock it as part of "the lunatic modern habit…of seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige."

Here, from a memorable essay called "The Sporting Spirit," in a newspaper column from December 14, 1945, Orwell speaks (taken from George Packer's great Facing Unpleasant Facts collection):

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn't know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympics, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles…

Nearly all the sports practiced nowadays are competitive. You play to win, and the game has little meaning unless you do your utmost to win. On the village green, where you pick up sides and no feeling of local patriotism is involved, it is possible to play simply for the fun and the exercises; but as soon as the question of prestige arises, as soon as you feel that you and some larger unit will be disgraced if you lose, the most savage competitive instincts are aroused…instead of blah-blahing about the clean, healthy rivalry of the football field and the great part played by the Olympic Games in bringing the nations together, it is more useful to inquire how and why this modern cult of sport arose. Most of the games we now play are of ancient origin, but sport does not seem to have been taken very seriously between Roman times and the 19th-century. Even in the English public schools the games cult did not start till the later part of the last century…then, chiefly in England and the United States, games were built up into a heavily-financed activity, capable of attracting vast crowds and rousing savage passions, and the infection spread from country to country. It is the most violently combative sports, football and boxing, that have spread the widest. There cannot be much doubt that hte whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism — that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.

"Large power units"…like Shaquille O'Neal, for example, who has played for both Orlando and L.A.?

Always wondered how fans could root for a guy so bullying, but Orwell's right, it's not about the individual player, it's about power, especially to humiliate. Orwell interestingly goes on to point out that these kind of games mean more to those who don't actually exercise:

…organized games are more likely to flourish in urban communities where the average human being lives a sedentary or at least a confined life…in a rustic community a boy or young man works off a good deal of his surplus energy by walking, swimming, snowballing, climbing trees, riding horses, and by various sports involving cruelty to animals…in a big town one must indulge in group activities if one wants an outlet for one's physical strength or for one's sadistic impulses.

Well, why don't you tell us what you think, George, instead of beating around the bush? Jeez.

But he's right, you know — in my basketball days as a younger man the guys I played with might sometimes watch televised sports, but many had a slightly disdainful attitude towards fans — that is, fans were guys who couldn't actually play themselves, and so had to have others do it for them.

Because Orwell seems so modern to us, and so prescient, we sometimes forget how much of a country bumpkin he was…as anyone who checks in with his diary will attest, and David Levine drew in l966:

Lefty vs. Lefty: Was Economic Crash Reagan’s Fault?

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman said yes it was, in a column called Reagan Did It:

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the
clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn — the turn that made crisis
inevitable — took place in the early 1980s, during the Reagan years… We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the
1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income, slightly more
than in the 1960s. It was only after the Reagan deregulation that
thrift gradually disappeared from the American way of life, culminating
in the near-zero savings rate that prevailed on the eve of the great
crisis. Household debt was only 60 percent of income when Reagan took
office, about the same as it was during the Kennedy administration. By
2007 it was up to 119 percent.

All this, we were assured, was a
good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt, and they weren’t
putting aside any of their income, but their finances looked fine once
you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock
portfolios. Oops.

Old-school Robert Scheer, in a column called Reagan Didn't Do It, says no — Clinton-era hacks did it:

Ronald Reagan’s signing off on
legislation easing mortgage requirements back in 1982 pales in
comparison to the damage wrought 15 years later by a cabal of powerful
Democrats and Republicans who enabled the wave of newfangled financial
gimmicks that resulted in the economic collapse.

Reagan didn’t do it, but Clinton-era
Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, now a top
economic adviser in the Obama White House, did. They, along with
then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican congressional leaders
James Leach and Phil Gramm, blocked any effective regulation of the
over-the-counter derivatives that turned into the toxic assets now
being paid for with tax dollars.

Reagan signed legislation making it
easier for people to obtain mortgages with lower down payments, but as
long as the banks that made those loans expected to have to carry them
for 30 years they did the due diligence needed to qualify creditworthy
applicants. The problem occurred only when that mortgage debt could be
aggregated and sold as securities to others in an unregulated market.

The growth in that unregulated OTC market
alarmed Brooksley Born, the Clinton-appointed head of the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission, and she dared propose that her agency
regulate that market. The destruction of the government career of the
heroic and prescient Born was accomplished when the wrath of the old
boys club descended upon her. All five of the above mentioned men
sprang into action, condemning Born’s proposals as threatening the
“legal certainty” of the OTC market and the world’s financial
stability.

They won the day with the passage of the
Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which put the OTC derivatives
beyond the reach of any government agency or existing law. It was a
license to steal, and that is just what occurred. Between 1998 and
2008, the notational value of the OTC derivatives market grew from $72
trillion to a whopping $684 trillion. That is the iceberg that our ship
of state has encountered, and it began to form on Bill Clinton’s watch,
not Reagan’s.

Hmmmm…think Scheer may have won this round. Fascinating to see two men who despise Reagan bicker over his legacy. Was he not always so bad? Be interesting to hear more from Brooksley Born…

[pic from the Reagan library]

The Inexplicable Rightness of Good Poetry

How does Rae Armantrout write so eloquently without (exactly) making sense?

Sky

god

girl.

Pick out the one

that doesn’t belong.

From a longer poem called Advent, in this month's Poetry.

All great art has a mysteriousness, an inexplicable rightness, at which we can only marvel…

Killer of Abortion-Provider May Have Foreshadowed Murder in Bitter Comments Posted On-Line

Last fall this blogger noted in a post on Grist a truly murderous threat directed at Dr. James Hansen, the scientist hero who more than any other single individual has awoken the planet to the threat posed by climate change.

In a comment thread on a far-right anti-global warming blog, the commenter called for Hansen not just to die, but to be eaten alive.

This I thought was a bit troubling. I wondered if Hansen might want security.

Now we learn that the man suspected of killing Dr. George Tiller, an abortion-provider in Kansas, has been making pointed and sometimes vicious comments about Tiller on various far-right blogs for years, according to right-wing Little Green Footballs.

Authorities suggest that the alleged killer Scott Roeper had links to the anti-abortion Operation Rescue movement; in a statement, Operation Rescue hinted that Tiller deserved his murder.

George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God.

Next question: How stable was commenter/suspected killer Scott Roeder?

Here's one of his comments, from September 2007:

It seems as though what is happening in Kansas could be compared to the
“lawlessness” which is spoken of in the Bible. Tiller is the
concentration camp “Mengele” of our day and needs to be stopped before
he and those who protect him bring judgement upon our nation.

Here's what we know about him, from the AP in Kansas City:

Scott P. Roeder, 51, of Merriam, was arrested on Interstate 35 near
Gardner nearly four hours after Tiller was shot to death just after 10
a.m. in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita. Roeder was
a member of an anti-government group in the 1990s and a staunch
abortion opponent…in the rear window of the car that Roeder was driving when police
stopped him was a red rose — a symbol that is often used by abortion
opponents. On the rear of his car was a Christian fish symbol with the
word “Jesus” inside.

Those who know Roeder told The Kansas City Star that he believed killing abortion doctors was an act of justifiable homicide.

“I
know that he believed in justifiable homicide,” said Regina Dinwiddie,
a Kansas City abortion opponent who made headlines in 1995 when a
federal judge ordered her to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of
any abortion clinic. “I know he very strongly believed that abortion
was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones, both born and
unborn.”

Hmmmm…was this a murder that could have been prevented?

A newspaper picture of the suspect being taken to an arraignment…wearing what looks to be a bullet-proof vest. Can't help but see an irony in that…

Why Santa Barbara Homes Burn and Ventura County Homes Don’t

The excellent story in the Ventura County Star doesn't come right out and say it, but essentially it's simple — homes built after modern fire codes are far less likely to burn.

'Specially on large lots:

There are thousands of homes in Ventura County that, like Eichele’s,
are on what fire officials call the “urban-wildland interface,” the
most dangerous place to be in a wildfire.

But in the past five years, despite fires that have consumed
hundreds of thousands of acres of brush, only six homes in Ventura
County have burned. The last fire to cause widespread destruction was
in 2003, when 38 homes were lost in Simi Valley.

In the past six months, the Santa Barbara area has lost about 300 homes in two major fires.

Luck has played some part in our differing fortunes. But fire and
planning experts say there are other factors that have made Ventura
County safer in recent years, from the terrain to the pattern of urban
development to the county’s early embrace of strict fire codes.

The story by Tony Biscotti quotes fire chief Bob Roper, who gets into the details:

The most important factor
in fire safety isn’t where you build, it’s how you build, said Ventura
County Fire Chief Bob Roper.

“The No. 1 thing is when the homes were developed, what the planning
conditions were and what the building conditions were at the time,” he
said. “Wherever you are, you can make a community not fire-proof, but
what we call a fire-adaptive community.”

Roper went to Santa Barbara with some of his fire crews and surveyed
the Jesusita burn area. He saw hundreds of homes in danger because they
were built in the 1960s or earlier, before modern fire codes were
common. They were “structural fuel,” just as much as the dry brush was
“native fuel,” Roper said.

The newest homes were considered so safe that firefighters took
shelter in them when the fire approached, Roper said. Like any home
built recently in a fire-prone area, they had double-paned,
heat-resistant windows, fire-resistant materials for the roofs and
walls, and vents small enough to prevent burning embers from blowing
inside.

Roper said he also saw some substandard brush clearance in the
Jesusita fire. Most cities and counties in California have laws on the
books that require property owners to keep weeds and other flammable
brush away from their homes, but Ventura County was one of the first,
he said.

Specifically, Ventura County doesn't get the direct north-to-south sundowner winds that Santa Barbara does…but on the other hand gets plenty of the better-known and just as dangerous Santa Anas.

Let me put repeat the story's point, a little more bluntly: In the last couple of years both Santa Barbara and Ventura counties have suffered huge fires.

Santa Barbara has lost over 300 homes.

Ventura County?

[Here's a pic from the Jesusita fire by Jonathan Alcorn]

But Can Jesus Dunk?

Very Important News: the Lakers will be going, for the second year in a row, to the NBA Finals. This year they will win it all, mostly because of #24. As Denver coach George Karl put it, reported by snarky Los Angeles Times columnist TJ Simers:

"I think Jesus would have had trouble covering" Kobe Bryant.

When Karl's comment was relayed to Bryant, he said, "It's
tough to say that's a compliment, you know what I mean? It's a
tremendous honor . . . I don't know, I did a great job using my
teammates, and they knocked shots down and put the defense into a
position where I could play one-on-one a little bit and take advantage
of that."

Added Simers:

As you notice, he never denied that He would have had trouble covering him.

True enough, but here's my question: Why assume Jesus can play at this level? Because he can get up? One good head fake from Kobe might be enough to put him clean out of the building…

[pic from Robert Gauthier of the LA Times]

Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lake Imprisoned Again

The life of the elected (but imprisoned) leader of the unhappy nation of Burma, Ang Sang Suu Kyi, suffered a tremendous blow this month when a middle-aged American, John Yettaw, described as "a well-intentioned but misguided man" swam to her compound from across a lake in Burma. This gave the infamously secretive regime in Burma a perfect excuse to yet again imprison the greatest threat to their grip on power, the woman George Packer of The New Yorker calls "the lady of the lake."

What did she do to deseve this fate? She took pity on the deluded idealist. Writes Packer:

Suu Kyi tried to send him [Yettaw] away, because his presence was a violation
of her house arrest, but apparently she took pity on him after he
begged to be allowed to stay until he was strong enough to swim away
again. Her visitor left the next day, or the day after, depending on
whether the government’s or the opposition’s version
of this strange encounter is correct. He was picked up by the police in
the middle of Inya Lake. And now Suu Kyi has been locked away in
Rangoon’s notorious Insein Prison. The authorities have announced that
they will try her for all kinds of security violations. Her current
six-year house arrest, which was due to end later this month, will
probably be renewed. And John William Yettaw will have given the nasty
Burmese authorities exactly the pretext they needed to keep Suu Kyi cut
off from the world as they prepare for next year’s sham elections.

Was she set up? Or did her tremendous charisma compel the swimmer across the lake?

Based on my family history, it's not exactly either, though closer to the latter. I had an aunt, who sometime after renouncing her family, remaining herself Deborah Fahrend, and taking up with a Lebanese man in Berlin, was kidnapped with him and a child in Beirut, apparently, and briefly made the news pages of The New York Times, back in l980. She, the Lebanese man, and the child were released the next day. Or perhaps they were never abducted at all. No one ever could quite figure it out.

Similarly, I predict with total confidence that no one will ever figure out what was up with the American nutball American Yettaw, because it will never make sense to anyone but him.

Here's my thinking: A lot of people in this world are unhappy, many of them for most of their lives. Some of these unhappy people are driven to inflict their unhappiness on others…as was my aunt.

It's a sign of terminal childishness, sez me, and causes endless endless trouble.

And it's a fate the sad-eyed Aung San Suu Kyi surely deserves less than nearly anyone else in the world.

[pic of the woman known as "The Lady" in Burma from Chris Robinson of Amnesty UK]

Camping on Angel Island (the beta)

Countless folks warned myself and the fam last weekend to watch out for the fog on Angel Island (as if I didn't know that the San Francisco Bay could get foggy in the summer).

This maybe is a difference between locals (who have to live with the fog for months at a time, and weary of the chill of blowing greyness) and one-time locals who moved away years ago, and like to revisit the fog, as a sort of nostalgic novelty, the way one might enjoy the jolting of a cab ride in New York, or the snootiness of a Parisian waiter — a kind of local color.

You know you're in the Bay Area when you can hardly see across the road in the evening.

That's my excuse, anyhow. In any case, yours truly will not back down from the idea that camping on Angel Island is a rare treat, with or without fog. Here are some tips on how to do it.

First, if you visit the Angel Island Association site, you'll get the basic choices quickly, but it's helpful to know that there are but nine campsites on the island, in three different places on the island.

The most popular are the Ridge Sites (#4,5, and 6), facing the Golden Gate, which a helpful parks ranger told us are booked seven months and a day in advance for summer weekends, but that you can often "slide in" on weekdays. These sites, like the less-popular Sunrise sites (#7.8.9), where we stayed, are exposed to the fog and the wind, so expect blustery nights. More protected are the Eastbay sites, (#1,2,and 3) which are in the lee of a pine grove. Sites cost about $25 a night, thru ReserveAmerica. You can do it through the site, but I suggest calling to nail down the details: 1-800-444-PARK.

Wood fires are not allowed, 'specially after the spectacular fire on the island of last fall, but the sites have not just tables, basic food cabinets, water, and toilets, but even trash and recycling.

The ranger told us that the Ridge sites have a "$10,000,000 view." Faithful readers of this site will recall that with global warming, coastal areas such as San Francisco will actually get a little foggier. But if you like camping with a city view, and can stand some weather, Angel Island is a must.

My
advice is look for a weekday in Indian summer, which does sometimes
happen in the Bay Area, usually in late September or early October.
Maybe if you're really lucky, you'll find me there….

[pic from a trail atop Mt. Livermore, at about 750 feet, via SFYer]