Herman Cain

When accusations were first heard from women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment, it was possible to pass them off as cultural misunderstandings, perhaps between northern and southern ways of interacting. Because the women were anonymous, one didn’t know anything about their appearance, race or class background.

Then, Sharon Bialek spoke out.

Cain was right. It wasn’t sexual harassment. It was worse. It was abuse of power.

She reported his response to her protests at being groped was “You want a job, right?”

Abuse of power isn’t something most politicians and journalists recognize as a problem. In fact, most don’t recognize it at all. They continued to believe he was a viable candidate for president.

Finally, Ginger White became so disgusted with the way Bialek and others were being treated, she announced she’d had an affair with Cain that lasted for years.

Again, Cain claimed sex wasn’t involved. And, again he was right.

He went on to tell the New Hampshire Union Leader that “She was out of work and had trouble paying her bills, and I had known her as a friend” so he gave her money because "I'm a soft-hearted person when it comes to that stuff.”

He revealed himself to be a predator of an entirely different order, one who feeds off women with financial problems whom he may also suspect are defenseless.

Before he suspended his campaign, rumors were still burbling about other women. Many, if they ever surface, may turn out to be what we first expected, the consequences of a flirtatious nature that occasionally errs from a failure to recognize others don’t see things as he does.

They are not what made people uneasy. It was the nature of the cases that came to light that revealed something more dangerous than sexual harassment was involved.

The media and politicians may tolerate lustful men, but even they get a bit uneasy with more vicious predators.

Notes:
Henderson, Nia-Malika. “ Sharon Bialek Accuses Herman Cain of Sexual Harassment as She Sought Help Getting a Job,” Washington Post, 7 November 2011.

Knickerbocker, Brad. “Herman Cain Admits Payments to Ginger White, Edges Toward Quitting,” Christian Science Monitor, 1 December 2011.

The Fire That Didn't Happen

What the forest service lost Thursday, June 30, when fire spread through lands of the Santa Clara pueblo, wasn’t a battle with fire. I’d learned from their own local website that all fire fighters can do with big fires is try to direct the flames away from human targets. It's always the hurricane fed monsoons that actually extinguish them.

What they lost was the trust people like me had developed last summer when their website gave honest reports on a fire in rough country in the Jemez to the north. That credibility had increased with their reports on the Wallow fire in Arizona and the Pacheco fire near Tesuque.

I wasn’t angry at any particular person, but at the display of cultural values that have been evolving in the decades since Ronald Reagan until they threaten to overwhelm any alternatives.



There was first the suspicion that the forest service was undermanned for a catastrophic fire season. Modern managers have learned to detest labor intensive enterprises and replace them with better managers of machines. Government doesn’t have to hire businessmen or business school graduates to get this attitude in their employees: it’s what the young absorb growing up.

A Congress willing to barter funds to help people whose towns were destroyed by tornados is only a culmination in a trend of budget cutting.

At its height the Wallow fire had something like 4,000 people fighting it. There were less than 800 with the Las Conchas fire Wednesday, before reinforcements arrived. That same day, there were still 1,320 people fighting the 538,049 acre Wallow fire, 530 assigned to the 10,116 acre Pacheco fire, and 326 fighting the 72,650 acre Donaldson fire started by lightening Tuesday in Lincoln county. And these weren’t the only fires burning in Arizona and New Mexico this week.

Realistically, there are only so many people the government can keep trained and ready for what is seasonal work. In the past, the National Guard would have been used as a highly disciplined additional resource. That stopped when George Bush the elder converted the National Guard into the regular army in Kuwait.

We learned the consequences of they’re not being available when hurricanes hit New Orleans in 2005, but we’ve only responded by deploying even more men overseas.

Our Tea Party supported governor has been willing to call them out, but either she or their commander can visualize no role for them greater than standing guard. That’s all they did for the first few days they were utilized when we had no power last winter. With this fire, their primary purpose seems to have been aiding the evacuation of Los Alamos. It was the sheriff and the state Livestock Board who helped move animals from dangerous juniper grasslands in Lincoln County.

The perception of modern business and modern warfare is that people can be replaced with machines, especially in situations were aereal support is more effective. The problem is various types of planes cost money to buy, require skilled crews to use and expend fuels that are sensitive to inflation.

The most recent incident reports indicate Las Conchas has18 helicopters, Donaldson has 5 helicopters and 3 air tankers, and Wallow has 2 helicopters and air tankers available if needed. The last update for Pacheco on June 28 indicated they had 9 helicopters.



It wasn’t simply the problems with not having enough resources to fight the fire that made me angry It was the outside managers who appeared to be more interested in protecting their careers than in fighting the fire, something that may have been necessary given the level of politicians and power involved when the lab feels itself in danger.

The local fire information website stopped being informative. Indeed, for a few days, we were directed to another website altogether, the national Incident Information System. At the bottom of each entry there’s a form with standard categories like Basic Information, Current Situation and Outlook. The second item includes Fire Behavior. Whoever has been updating the information has been including Fire Behavior for the Wallow, Pacheco and Donaldson fires, but not for Las Conchas.

Each day the fire fighters have been issuing maps of the fire based on the nightly infrared reconnaissance flights. One June 27 they issued both a PDF and a Jpeg (picture) version of the map. On June 28 the map was a Jpeg, on June 30 and July 1 they were PDF’s that were not readable by older versions of Adobe, and on July 2 they returned to Jpegs.

On Tuesday the 27th, the map showed the fire edge, location of previous fires, and points of intense heat where the fire was the most active and points of isolated heat where it may have been preparing to spread. Since the fire had not spread north of Los Alamos, no territory to the north was shown.

On Wednesday, the map still showed the areas of intense and isolated heat, but no longer showed the previous fire scars. At the time, the fire was active to the west of Los Alamos and so nothing to the north was included.

A later map of Wednesday added a third day’s spread and showed the boundaries of Santa Clara pueblo lands for the first time.

The map for Thursday when the fire spread north did show the footprint of the Cerro Grande fire, but gave no place names. Instead of the daily growth, it showed only the perimeter of the fire. The only way you could tell the general location of the pueblo was with the county line.

On Friday the map again showed only the fire perimeter, but this time it included the spatial organization of the fire fighters. The legend didn’t explain all the symbols used, but Santa Clara appeared to be divided between two groups by the county line.

On Sunday, the map returned to its original format, showing the growth by day with a clear indication of what was destroyed when it entered Santa Clara land. It’s useful to finally have information I can use to know what it is I’m seeing and smelling, but it appeared two days after it was needed.



Those changes in format, those omissions or delays in information suggest some blunder was made in predicting the behavior of the fire, and that ever since men have been denying an error that could easily have been made in allocating scarce resources to fight a fire growing in all directions.

At 8:30 Thursday morning the Incident Information System reported

“Firefighters are monitoring long-range spotting, which have been seen as far north as the Santa Clara Pueblo. Firefighters will also be dealing with unfavorable winds which may result in extreme fire behavior and continue to push the fire to the north. Firefighters will continue scouting for potential fire line and burnout opportunities to prevent the fire from spreading.”

At the same the local Wordpress blog said “As of Thursday morning, fire crews reported the northern finger of the blaze is extending northward toward the Santa Clara Pueblo.”

Later that same day the Santa Clara suggested that that “long-rage spotting” or “northern finger” had “exploded across the western third of the reservation” producing the smoke visible from my back porch.

That night, the fire fighters described that as short runs with “spotting less than 1 mile occurred on the north head of fire” and then said it had crossed “moved northeast past NM Hwy 144 and spread into parts of the Cerro Grande burn area.” 144 in fact is a forest road west of Los Alamos and may represent the western side of the fire’s movements, but it does not appear on the maps they publish or on many other state maps.

Once the Santa Clara issued their press release, they have not been mentioned in the daily reports, except by obscure references to forest road 144 and the Cerro Grande scar.



Indeed, once the pueblo said they had “attended briefings and given recommendations and data to the Incident Command” and “repeatedly asked that adequate resources be devoted to the north end of the fire” another cultural game began: the one that says how dare a minority claim to be a victim.

Right after they issued their press release, the lab issued one in which the lab director discussed all the real victims of the fire, those who worked for the lab and lost their homes. They still had their lives and their way of life, but the loss of a tangible private asset made them the greater victims. He even listed the communities involved. In order they were: “Cochiti, the Jemez mountains, Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos and communities to the North.”

Then, like Princess Di, the lab director stopped in at “the Santa Claran Event Center in Española and the Cities of Gold Casino in Pojoaque” to personally meet with refugees from Los Alamos. He noted “one of the messages I heard loud and clear from evacuees was that many of them are isolated from information sources and they do not have a good understanding of what is happening at the Laboratory.”

The forest service also held community meetings in Jemez Springs, Cochiti Pueblo and at Santa Clara. They said local residents “received updated information on the fire and had their questions answered.”

On Friday they also began adding that “archeologists work with our dozers, graders and hand crews to minimize damage to sensitive areas.” They now also report “All firefighting crews receive a daily briefing on sensitive historical and cultural sites within the fire area.”

However, when they list the sites that are closed they don’t mention Puye Cliffs. It was damaged by the Cerro Grande fire and only reopened in May of 2009. The nearby recreation area is still closed. When I drove by Saturday there was check point indicating only authorized people could go beyond the gas station.

I suspect the basic problem, apart from not having enough resources, managers who are under extreme political pressure from a narcissistic lab, and directives that use economic criteria to define priorities, is that many do not understand the difference between the forest as a recreational alternative to urban life and its existence as an extension of an agricultural life rooted in a migratory past.

Economic impacts are easy to define. Los Alamos has more than 12,000 people and the lab employs many more from places like the Española valley. The Pueblo is less than 1,000. Measuring the comparative social and psychological impacts is impossible.

The real shortage hasn’t simply been firefighters, money, or time to respond. The real problem is there’s been no rain, was almost no snow, and the storms we’ve had so far have been better at starting new fires and taking out power than quenching flames.



Notes: Daily postings at nmfireinfo.wordpress.com and its link to the Incident Information System. Information is updated often, even in an existing report, and old postings are discarded.

Los Alamos National Laboratory. “”LANL Director Expresses Concern for Communities Across the Region,” 30 June 2011 press release.

____. “LANL Director Visits Los Alamos Evacuees,” 1 July 2011 press release.

Santa Clara Pueblo. “”Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.

Pictures Taken the Day after an Unrecorded Event
1. Looking towards Los Alamos, 1 July 2011 about 7:03pm.

2. Driving into the afternoon void on highway 84/285 somewhere between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.

3. The air turned brown from smoke coming down from Los Alamos as the road entered Pojoque; taken at La Puebla exit, 1 July 2011 about 6:17pm.

4. Looking west towards Santa Clara lands, 1 July 2011 about 7:36pm.

5. Looking north towards Española, 1 July 2011 about 7:37pm.

6. Sun coming in the car window between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.

Detroit Driving

Last week Detroit had another fire make the news, only this one was a sign of the state’s is resilience, not its decay.

On Wednesday evening, July 15, an inexperienced driver entered a curve too fast on I-75. His small car slid sideways into a passing gasoline hauler, causing it to jackknife. A following semi stopped short of the accident, just before the tanker exploded and melted the steel overpass at Nine Mile Road.

Witnesses took pictures of the orange inferno where the street ended in an abyss. Others captured the black or brown smoke that billowed out over their neighborhoods. Men at the scene commented on hearing the steel squeal as it softened in the heat.

By Friday, most of the destroyed overpass was demolished, and core tests had been taken of the pavement. The state reopened the road Monday, for the 130,000 vehicles that use it each day.

I’m living in a part of the country where people would still have beeb trying to locate some cranes when Michigan traffic was flowing again. There they know it will take several months to rebuild the overpass; here it probably would never happen. After all, the estimated population of the state capital is not much ove half the number of vehicles that drive under that overpass in Hazel Park in a single day.

Apart from the ability of Michigan and its bureaucracy to respond so quickly to an emergency, the thing I found remarkable was the quick reactions of the people involved. The two truckers stopped semis with little injury to themselves, then fled from danger as quickly as they could. The man running a gas station at the overpass heard the explosions and immediate closed down the pumps and shut the station.

There are no time to think, only seconds to take necessary physical actions to contain the disaster. They were men who understood their world and its dangers, and instinctively knew what to do.

The man who caused the accident still doesn’t understand what happened, doesn’t realize he’s lucky to be alive. He’s a 27-year-old graduate student who just got his probationary license in May. No matter his intelligence, he missed the crucial experience of growing up riding in a car and hadn’t yet driven enough to know how you sense when you’re moving too fast into a curve.

I discovered the importance of childhood perception training when a friend from the Bronx asked me to be his observing driver while he practiced for a driver’s license in Philadelphia. After a few minutes on the Schuylkill Expressway, I asked him to please get on the surface streets. There I discovered he had no idea where to look for traffic lights. They simply hadn’t mattered on the subway.

I’m not a great driver. As a child I was near sighted and never learned to judge speed or space. As an adult, I overcompensate, leave too much room between me and the vehicle in front, rarely pass. I still pay little attention to my rear view mirror, but continually watch the people in front and beside me.

Here there are people who don’t even realize they have limitations. Several years ago, I was the only one on my section of a two-lane road in mid-morning. A women pulled up to my bumper, and rode there before passing. There was no need to get so close at the speed we were going.

A few miles later I came upon an accident. Some car, probably the same one that made me nervous, pulled out to pass in an area with small dips. When she saw an oncoming car, she pulled back into her lane, nicking the bumper of the truck ahead and sending it into the path of the oncoming van. People in both vehicles died, while she was untouched, unaware of the consequences of misjudging space and speed.

I don’t know how long she’d been driving. It may not have mattered. Another part of the cultural experience of riding in a car in Michigan where traffic is heavy is you absorb an awareness that there are things you must learn. Those experiences are the ones that lead to the ability to respond to crises the way men did outside Detroit.

And, only in Detroit would people notice the steel crying.

North South - Part 1 - Traffic

Sitting at a traffic light is one of those times I can’t do much except stare ahead, so I let my mind wander. Instead of following the byways of Walter Mitty, I find myself pondering the ways traffic reflects the values of cities who install traffic lights.

The one thing all planners do is try to slow drivers to prevent accidents. Beyond that, they have little in common.
In Detroit in the early 1980s, legend held that lights were set so a driver, who went the correct speed, would never stop for a second light. Automobiles are the local economy, and no one wants driving to be a painful experience. The ideal speed for each town was passed on as covertly as the name of the local bootlegger in prohibition..

New Jersey in the mid-1970s was divided between traffic circles in the north and jug handles in the south. Both were attempts to engineer the roads themselves to control traffic flow. Circles were the more challenging. You entered on the edge, and by centripetal force ended in the center before trying to edge out to make an exit. If you failed, you simply went around again. It was all a bit of a carnival ride, an exercise in vertigo that made my favorite circle the one that emptied into a road with an overpass for horses leaving their barns for a racetrack.

In Georgetown in the mid-1970s, drivers simply ignored lights. Whenever traffic moved, people would charge into intersections, even though they knew they wouldn’t clear when the light changed. Gridlock was not just deliberate; it manifested that every single person was too important to yield or compromise for the greater good.
Abilene, Texas, came close to that attitude in the middle 1980s. Someone had installed a traffic circle, but someone else erected stop signs at two places. If you came from the south, as I did, you had to stop every few feet. If you came from the wealthy neighborhood, you never stopped, never had to yield, and certainly never experienced vertigo. The democratic forces of the one were overruled by the power elite of privilege. I admit, I used to fantasize dropping those drivers into northern Jersey.

In Dallas in the early 1990s, I used to imagine the drivers suddenly transported onto Telegraph Road or a Detroit expressway. They had no concept of fast lines to the left, slow lanes to the right. The three lane road north towards Plano were always stopped as slow cars filled each lane. Since the only shopping mall was miles up that road, I turned to mail order catalogs. E-commerce hadn’t developed yet, but it was an idea waiting to be born.

If the patterns in Detroit and New Jersey demonstrated efficiency which promotes egalitarianism and the Texas roads showed the elitism of the old south, the place I live now exemplifies traffic in a world where government either does not exist, or is directed by people who think it a costly luxury.

The place I live has never risen above family ties to organized government. I go through four lights to get to the post office. They not only are not consistent among themselves, they are not consistent to themselves. Sometimes, the left turn arrow is at the beginning of the cycle, sometimes at the end; sometimes both directions get the arrow, sometimes only one. When only one gets it, sometimes only turning traffic is allowed, other times through traffic is permitted. Then, since they are supposedly on demand, sometimes no arrow appears for several cycles.

The most accidents I see continue to be at the lights that were placed where there were the most accidents. People act on the patterns they expect, but haven’t learned to cope with no pattern. The only sure thing is someone will run the red light.

In the town where I work, it’s worse. The city planners seem to think the smooth flow of traffic is as dangerous as recreational sex. Folklore says the merchants don’t want traffic to move where the chains are building, and think making traffic bad will encourage people to continue to use them. I learned early to either do my essential shopping early Sunday morning, or get through the place as quickly as possible early Saturday to shop in the next city.

Even so, I often get stopped at every single light early Sunday morning, and marvel that people still have accidents at that hour. It got worse when they were widening the road near the area where the big boxes were building. The cops ran speed traps, ticketing anyone going more than ten miles through a construction zone when no men were working, no equipment was stored and the pylons had been moved.

I used to visit some of the stores in that area to see what they had; I haven’t been back since the road construction, except when it was absolutely necessary. I’m usually in such a foul mood by the time I get through the traffic, that I grab what I need and get out as quickly as possible, irritated even more by long check-out lines.

When one drives through cities on the interstate the landscapes look like the cities have been homogenized by government engineers. The persisting variations in surface roads may be as surprising as the discovery that red and blue states signify more than political preference. The roots of the differences are probably the same.

Back during the age of Andrew Jackson, politicians argued the function of government in encouraging economic growth. Northerners promoted internal improvements like turnpikes and canals, while southerners argued limited government. When automobiles appeared, states like Pennsylvania and Ohio built turnpikes; Detroit started it expressways. Folklore says North Carolina developed speed traps to fleece northerners headed for Florida and to harass and intimidate Negroes.

Enabling legislation for interstates depended a great deal on Eisenhower arguing the military necessity of moving materiel quickly. The first exit opened near by Michigan hometown in 1959 just three years after the act was passed. It took southern cities choked by traffic years to take advantage of available money.

Where I live, there still are no good roads. When I told a woman I work with that one deep ravine on a county road I cross to get to my house has no shoulder or guard rail, and that the dry river bed beyond my house has no bridge and at least one woman has flipped her car there during a storm, she dismissed the problems. She said, don’t you realize how much bridges cost?

Competition - Part 1 - Brand X Telephone

My telephone company just changed hands, and it looks like things are going to stay bad. I had hope a few years ago when the company that owned our company got bought by a major utility that we might finally get some genuine service. But, as part of the deal, they sold us off, to maintain competition.

What competition? A group of men in Texas formed a company for the purpose of buying the "had to be solds" and kept them long enough to make a profit reselling (I assume). They didn’t develop a company, they didn’t invest in one. They were playing the markets.

Meantime, we remained mired in the rural poverty of the early twentieth century when small companies developed to serve areas the major utilities disdained.

I’ve had private companies or cooperatives in three areas I’ve lived. The service has always been more expensive and the equipment more antiquated than the big name competitors. In Ohio and Texas, the customer service was better.

But here, it’s been one long tale of poor service.

When my line needed repair, the service man dug it up, spliced the cut wire, and left the wire in the gaping ditch. I was told a different crew filled in the hole. If I wanted it filled, it would cost additional.

Another time when my line was out, I called and they checked the switch in their main building. A number of people were having the same problem, but instead of running some diagnostic tests on their equipment, they simply waited until each person called and fixed individual lines.

Their reactive service got so bad, the electric company blamed them by name for making a storm worse for all of us. A large area had lost its power on a holiday, and the telephone company had no one working to field calls that needed to be made. The power company couldn’t even call all its personnel because the telephone company wouldn’t bring any of its people in for an emergency.

When I wanted to get my internet connection, I called the telephone company to ask what it would cost. They told me they couldn’t tell me without an engineering work order, and they wouldn’t write one until I agreed to pay for a year’s undefined service at some unknown price. When I asked the service rep how I could compare my options, he snickered.

I found a local DSL provider, and still have to pay that telephone company for the privilege of not using their service. They alone provide the modem at their price. When I was scheduled to be connected their service rep called to say the connection was made. When I asked her to hold while I checked, she said she didn’t have time to verify the line, and besides, if it wasn’t installed properly, that was another work order.

I called by local internet provider and let them deal with it. They earn their monthly fee. The technician told me it was a tossup which was worse, the brand X company I had or the major company they had in the city.

While the records were being transferred from one telephone company to another, my bills got confused. They gave me a credit several months ago that probably was a mistake. They sent me a bill due August 8 that still had a credit, and a few days later the new company sent me a cancellation notice for an unpaid amount that was not related to the original credit.

Since I had been getting so much advertising related to the transition I didn’t open the cancellation notice until I paid my bills yesterday. There were two more letters from them . Simultaneously they sent a bill that showed the credit being removed and a letter telling me they were suspending the service they had already disconnected even though I still had time to pay the bill I’d just received

They tell me I’m stuck with this company to maintain competition in the industry.

Where’s the competition for the customers?

Many have bought cell phones as a way to circumvent brand X. When I bought one, I happened to be in the next town, twenty miles away. It turned out the cell phone company was using the same service definitions as the old cooperative, and it was still long distance to call twenty miles away. Or, in my case, every time I used it in my home, it was long distance.

I know the government concern for monopoly goes back to the 1930s when utilities, especially power companies, were consolidating networks and using their size to gouge consumers and drive competitors out of business. They were as predatory as railroads in the nineteenth century, or cable companies and Enron today.

The cost of infrastructure creates utility monopolies, not greed. Competition comes from different technologies that can provide similar services. Regulation should exist to prevent the abuses that inevitably come from monopoly, not ensure the existence of multiple monopolies.

The defining element has always been the company’s purpose. In the years of regulation, corporations at least gave lip service to the importance of products and services. When I lived in Texas, the serviceman knocked down my neighbor’s mailbox when he was installing my phone. He was back the next day, unasked, to repair the post. In between, he had been setting up chairs for the annual cooperative meeting.

Since deregulation, money has been the only legitimate purpose for many companies. Instead of a technician who repairs his messes, we’re left with open ditches and exposed utility lines. For them, customer service is another work order.