CAPO crappo: union busting "reformers"?

From a recent OC Weekly article concerning the troubled Capistrano Unified School District’s “reform” trustees:

[At a recent meeting, supportive shouts] jab against rumors that the reform trustees, whose campaigns were largely financed by such conservative groups as the Education Alliance and Howard Ahmanson’s Fieldstead & Co., seek to sabotage public education from the inside out. The Education Alliance, which publicly opposes the influence of teachers’ unions, has been a point of contention for the new board’s critics. The Capistrano Unified Education Association, the local teachers’ union, endorsed trustee Christensen and current board president Ellen Addonizio when they ran in 2006; after the Education Alliance got more involved, though, the union vocally and financially backed the opponents of the “reform” slate in 2008. Posts on the website of the local chapter of the California School Employees Association (CSEA), which represents classified staff (including custodians and librarians), say Carter’s dismissal may have been part of a plan to “break the union,” a charge the trustees deny. (Have the problems of the Capo Unified School Board been solved after the recall/reform movement won?)

The President of the SOCCCD board of trustees, Don Wagner, is on the Education Alliance board.

SOCCCD trustee Tom Fuentes is a close friend of Howard Ahmanson’s. Ahmanson is a religious extremist and key financial backer of Creationism, Intelligent Design, and such measures as Proposition 8.

Education Alliance was first formed in the early 90s to promote anti-public ed and anti-union initiatives (e.g., 1994's “school voucher” initiative and 1998's union-busting Prop 226). For years, it was funded by—surprise, surprise!—Howard Ahmanson.

At the last SOCCCD meeting of the board of trustees, at Fuentes' request, OC Treasurer Chriss Street was on hand to explain that local property tax collections, on which the SOCCCD depends, will soon take a hit. With him was his employee Anna Bryson, a noisy Bush supporter, who happens to be among CAPO's "reform" trustees. Bryson has definitely received financial support for her campaigns from Education Alliance (see).

Gosh it's a cozy world.

Chunky feng shui

I bought a couple of bookcases recently—at Munro's in Santa Ana—and, yesterday, they arrived. Way cool. Made locally.

TigerAnn says "hey."

MUSIC FOR A SATURDAY EVENING:

GENE CLARK & CARLA OLSON: "Almost Saturday Night"

Gene Clark was in the Byrds, remember? Great song by John Fogerty.

RANDY NEWMAN: "Sail Away"

I love this guy's early stuff. Just the best.

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS: “Other Side”

Don't know why I love this song so much, but I do. From about 8 years ago, I guess.

MOTT THE HOOPLE: “Sea Diver”

This is what I was listening to in high school. Still love this stuff. Ian Hunter is one of those lost geniuses, though he still performs.

"Not comforted": new So Cal earthquake data

I’ve long noted that, though individual humans are often dazzlingly perceptive, humans qua groups are dizzyingly stupid.

Our doltish Group Being is a sort of Svengali to most people, and so there you are.

As individuals, we are entranced; we are stupefied.

We are idjits.

This is one reason why, over the years, I’ve occasionally done stories about the real possibility of natural disasters, such as tsunamis, floods. Boy, when it comes to nature’s wicked but predictable ways, societies are way knuckleheaded. Way, way. And Southern Californians are no exception. They'll stare straight into the face of imminent disaster and blithely discuss their next trip to freakin' Disneyland.


Study finds troubling pattern of Southern California quakes (In this morning’s LA Times):

By Jia-Rui Chong

…The Carrizo Plain section of the San Andreas has not seen a massive quake since the much-researched Fort Tejon temblor of 1857, which at an estimated magnitude of 7.9 is considered the most powerful earthquake to hit Southern California in modern times.

But … new research by UC Irvine scientists … found that major quakes occurred there roughly every 137 years over the last 700 years. Until now, scientists believed big quakes occurred along the fault roughly every 200 years.

The findings are significant because seismologists have long believed this portion of the fault is capable of sparking the so-called Big One that officials have for decades warned will eventually occur in Southern California.
…
Many scientists thought the Carrizo area produced relatively infrequent but large-scale earthquakes such as the Fort Tejon temblor. The new work suggests the area produces more quakes but also ones of a smaller magnitude than Fort Tejon, said Ray Weldon, a University of Oregon geologist….

Such temblors, experts warned, would likely be at least as big as the 1994 Northridge quake, which had a magnitude of 6.7.
…
… About 100 miles northwest of Los Angeles, the Carrizo area was one of the main sections that ruptured in the 1857 quake. That rupture, roaring southwest into the Los Angeles Basin, rocked parts of the region so hard that men were thrown to the ground.
…
By looking at the pattern of soils and using radiocarbon dating on charcoal deposits, [Lisa Grant Ludwig, a principal investigator on the study] found evidence of five large earthquakes dating back to the early 1200s. She found a gap of some 400 years between the 1857 earthquake and the one before, but only about 100 years separating the three preceding quakes.

Back then, the earthquake age estimates were very rough and the samples had to be fairly large…. Ludwig saved field notes and hundreds of soil samples in glass vials in her garage for more than 15 years, hoping that radiocarbon dating techniques would improve.
…
[When that finally occurred, they] went back to her archive, and the redating effort, led by scholar Sinan Akciz, found that the four big earthquakes before the 1857 temblor probably occurred around 1310, 1393, 1585 and 1640.

…
Because they are looking at only a handful of earthquakes, scientists can't be sure that the pattern will hold, Ludwig said.

"But we know it increases the probability of an earthquake," she said. "There's not any way I can look at the data and be comforted by it."….

BE PREPARED:

• OC Red Cross Urges Earthquake Preparedness, Awareness

• Earthquake Preparedness Tip Sheets (Governor's Office of Emergency Services)

• Southern California Earthquake Center