Yes, we have no agendas

•.....CHANNEL ISLANDS. On Friday, I briefly described tiny Santa Barbara Island, among the Channel Islands off of the So. Cal coast. As it turns out (as one reader informed me), this weekend, the LA Times has a lengthy piece on the Channel Islands: The Channel Islands: Southern California's offshore Eden.
.....Here’s what it has to say about Santa Barbara (and San Miguel, pictured at left and below):

.....Caves are also a draw on tiny Santa Barbara Island, and a beautiful beach is a hallmark of San Miguel, but both are so far out that you really have to work to get there, which is why they're the least-visited in the park.
.....Island Packers schedules a few trips to each annually, mainly in the summer. But sea and weather conditions often cause these to be canceled. I finally reached Santa Barbara on a beautiful day in April, when conditions were ideal. Rough weather last winter ripped out part of the pier, so visitors have to land by skiff on a rocky ledge. It would be treacherous in anything other than totally calm sea conditions.
.....The island is only a mile square, so hiking it is a breeze. And the ocean view is spectacular. Rocky coves are filled with barking sea lions and clear blue water that's reminiscent of the sea color in the Caribbean or the South Pacific. A tiny campground sits on an unprotected bluff.
.....Sea conditions were not as ideal in late May, when I joined a group of campers headed for San Miguel, 64 miles west of the mainland. Twelve-foot seas made the four-hour journey uncomfortable for many of those on board, as the Island Packers' 64-foot power catamaran lurched up and down through huge waves. I loved it, but I kept my views to myself and cheered only inwardly, out of respect for my seasick companions.
.....Luckily, the weather was better on San Miguel. It offers good hiking and, of course, lots of solitude.

•.....RECALL ELECTION. Meanwhile, this weekend, the OC Register previews this week’s Capistrano Unified recall election. The article mentions The Education Alliance, a group to which I referred recently (some of our SOCCCD trustees have links to EA; EA has associations with Howard Ahmanson, Jr.): CUSD showdown in Tuesday's school board recall election:

.....Anti-recall leaders have focused their message on the Recall Committee's link to the Tustin-based Education Alliance, a political action committee that gave $22,000 to the recall and its candidates during the 2006 election. The self-described "back-to-basics" group opposes health clinics and bilingual education in schools, advocates for school voucher programs, and thinks teacher unions wield too much power.
.....The recall committee and the "reform" trustees say they've welcomed the Education Alliance's donations, but that their views aren't in line with the alliance's.

•.....NO AGENDA OUTLINE? Oddly, at the SOCCCD website, no agenda for Tuesday’s board meeting has yet been posted (as of 11:00 a.m.). What’s up with that? Democrats (with the small "d") should be plenty annoyed. How are we supposed to keep track of what our government representatives are up to, if we've gotta go to so much trouble just to see meeting agendas? Tell me that!

UPDATE (Monday, 8:30 p.m.): at noon today, the district still had not posted the "agenda outline" for the Tuesday board meeting. I just looked and the outline is at long last posted: here (it's a pdf file).

“Üye olmak için tıklayın,” we’re told

.....Have you seen the South Orange County Community College District website lately? Nowadays, there, one finds a “video welcome” by Chancellor Mathur in a section entitled “What’s New?”
.....Mathur’s performance on this video is, as usual, wooden, but it is sure to please his fans, namely, Mathur. All others will be consternated and stupefied.
.....Listed among what is "new" are five things:

• IVC Performing Arts Center
• SC Veterans Memorial Project
• ATEP Campus Opens in Tustin
• Annual Report Showcasing Technology
• 2008 Commencement Photo Essay

.....Not much of this is new, of course. I clicked on the first link—IVC’s Performing Arts Center (PAC)—and that brought me to a pleasant-looking blog entitled "IVC Performing Arts" that appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with the IVC performing arts or the IVC PAC. It does, however, appear to be new.
.....The blog comprises seven increasingly badly-written movie reviews of popular films: Iron Man, Sex and the City, The Incredible Hulk, etc. The writing is unsophisticated. Concerning “Iron Man,” we’re told that “the Iron Man costume was kicking major ass.”
.....Then there's the blog's blogroll, which lists four sites, none of them making the slightest sense. The “forum” is indeed a forum. Unfortunately, it is in Turkish. Really.
.....“Üye olmak için tıklayın,” we’re told.
.....Another blog on the blogroll is labeled “ferrari [sic] pictures.” I clicked it, and that took me to a blog called “Freak Cars,” which presents photos of exotic sports cars, including Alfa Romeos, VWs, and Bugattis.
.....No Ferraris.

[UPDATE: Rebel Girl informs me that, today {Monday}, the above problems have been ironed out. Today, upon clicking the district website's IVC Performing Arts Center link, one is actually taken to a site about the IVC Performing Arts Center. Those, however, who wish to stroll down Memory Lane can return to that odd, Turk-friendly, Ferrari- and film-loving blog—still entitled "IVC Performing Arts"—by clicking here. ]

.....The “Veterans Memorial” link is a Saddleback College page that lists seven links (in English!) about the memorial, including one called “testimonials.” Police Chief Harry Parmer “testifies” as follows: “That this memorial to veterans will be displayed at an institution of higher learning is precedent setting.”

.....The ATEP link is unremarkable (and 8 months old). It is sad to see Bob Kopecky referred to as the Park Ranger, er, Provost, a title that he has now shed.

.....The technology “report” is actually a glossy and expensive pamphlet packed with colorful whiz-bangery. Unfortunately, it begins with Mathur's mug plus a quotation: “Change is becoming a constant in American society…. Our three campuses are advancing change….”
.....Advancing change? Mathur's an idiot.

.....Still, the pamphlet is impressive. The “District at a Glance” pages (20-23) are especially interesting. I’ve included some of the charts and graphs here.
.....What’s with the 60/40 ratio of women to men? Is this a trend?

As you can see, the "ethnicity" of IVC students is 26% Asian and 4% Middle Eastern. This suggests, to me at least, that roughly 30% of IVC students would likely find the distinctly Judeo-Christian prayers offered by some of our trustees at district and college events to be, well, decidedly otherly.
.....That would be fine, I guess, if some of their faiths (Islam, Buddhism, etc.), along with the perspective of atheists and agnostics ("Let's have a moment of quiet desperation, shall we?"), got some play too. But that doesn't happen, now does it?
.....Nope.

Santa Barbara Island

Occasionally, Rebel Girl and her crew manage to get away from it all, and they usually find special places to get away to.

Yesterday, they took a boat from the lovely city of Santa Barbara to the even more lovely island of the same name.


There's evidence that Native Americans visited the island, though they did not live on it, owing to its lack of drinking water.



According to Wikipedia, "the island was named by Spanish explorer Sebastian Vizcaino, who visited the island on December 4, 1602, the feast day dedicated to Santa Barbara." During WW II, the Navy used it as a lookout station.

It’s way out there—about 40 miles. It’s small—last year, Limber Lou proudly hiked clean around it. There’s no potable water—they’ve got to carry it in.

They love it.

Stoning gay people to death not immoral? The money man behind the "Protect Marriage Act"

.....As Dissent readers know, OC resident Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., is a major funder of right-wing religious causes—creationism, establishing a Christian state, keeping gays down, etc.
.....And he has connections to our right-wing crew in the South Orange County Community College District. He was the key funder of Tustin’s Education Alliance, an organization with which some of our trustees (and our Chancellor) have recently associated and on whose board (SOCCCD trustee Pres) Don Wagner currently sits.
.....Further, he’s a close pal of—you guessed it—Trustee, and former chair of the OC GOP, Tom “Prince of Darkness” Fuentes.
.....Well, Ahmanson is the subject of a Gustavo Arellano’s article in today’s OC Weekly: OC FUNDIE FUNDER GIVES MONEY TO WACKY REEPS, HOMO-HATERS—AND LOU CORREA?!.
.....Some excerpts:

.....The most influential Orange County man you've never heard of is undoubtedly Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., heir to the Home Savings … fortune. He rarely makes public appearances due to suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, but that hasn't stopped him from giving millions of dollars away to some of the craziest causes imaginable: creationism, anti-gay marriage, anti-gay clerics in the Episcopalian Church, and so many others that in its list of America's most influential evangelicals a couple of years back, Time listed Howard and his wife Roberta as simply "The Financiers."
.....It's no surprise then, that Ahmanson has so far been the top individual donor to the Protect Marriage Act, the November ballot initiative that wants to create a California constitutional amendment that would define marriage as between a man and a woman. Through his private philanthropic enterprise, Fieldstead and Co., Ahmanson has donated an amazing $400,000 to the initiative—even more than Focus on the Family and topped only by the National Organization for Marriage, a nationwide group whose campaign headquarters to defeat those marryin' gays are in Santa Ana. And remember: this money was spent just to get the ballot measure qualified for November—heaven knows how much money Ahmanson will donate to this cause for the rest of the year.
.....Going through Fieldstead's campaign contributions (he was also one of the principal funders behind Proposition 22, the 2000 measure that the California State Supreme Court recently overturned to allow homosexual nuptials [sic]), we found Ahmanson also gives money to the county's crazy Republicans—last year, he donated to supervisors John Moorlach, Pat Bates, Janet Nguyen and Diane Harkey; Assemblymember Chuck Devore and Mimi Walters; Dana Point Mayor Diane Harkey, and DA Tony Rackauckas, while 2006 saw him donate to the campaigns of Irvine councilmember Christina Shea, Costa Mesa Minutemen councilmembers Allan Mansoor and Wendy Leece, South Orange County Community College District trustee (and former OC GOP chair) Tom Fuentes, and more to Walters and Devore. If the local Democratic Party had any brains, they'd pull a Jeremiah Wright on all these people for accepting money from such a paleo-conservative (just read up on his mentor, R.J. Rushdoony—and the Wikipedia entry doesn't do justice to the looniness of the man. Or consider that when the Orange County Register's Peter Larsen interviewed Howard and Roberta for a 2004 story, Howard said of countries that stone adulterers and homosexuals, "It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things," and that Howard saw "homosexuality as an illness akin to alcoholism, which treatment might cure."). But they won't do that, because to criticize politicians for taking money from Ahmanson means they'll have to go after one of their own: State Senator Lou Correa….

"G.I. Bill" benefits more than doubled; other news

• Some are very unhappy with how this will be funded, but, yes, the increase in benefits will be funded. According to the Associated Press (Bipartisan accord reached on war funding bill), a bipartisan agreement reached yesterday would provide “$162 billion in long-overdue funding to carry out military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year.”

.....House passage of the bill, expected Thursday, would also pave the way for a quick infusion of emergency flood relief for the Midwest, a 13-week extension of unemployment payments for the longtime jobless and a big boost in GI Bill college for veterans.
…
.....The White House — and Capitol Hill Republicans — had signaled greater flexibility in recent weeks after Democrats orchestrated impressive votes to more than double GI Bill college benefits and give a 13-week extension of unemployment payments for people whose benefits have run out.
.....In late-stage talks, Democrats dropped a provision to pay for the GI college benefits by imposing a half-percentage point income tax surcharge on incomes exceeding $500,000 for singles and incomes over $1 million earned by married couples….
…
.....Conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats are upset that the new GI Bill benefits, with costs tentatively estimated at $62 billion over the next decade, will be added to the deficit instead of being "paid for" as called for under House rules.
....."We know the day of reckoning is coming," said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Calif., who called the measure "totally irresponsible."
.....The new GI Bill essentially would guarantee a full scholarship at any in-state public university, along with a monthly housing stipend, for people who serve in the military for at least three years. It is aimed at replicating the benefits awarded veterans of World War II and more than doubles the value of the benefit — from $40,000 today to $90,000.
.....Full details of the nuts and bolts of the measure won't be released until Thursday….

• In this morning’s Inside Higher Ed:

A civil grand jury blasted the governing board of San Joaquin Delta College in a report released Wednesday, accusing trustees of misspending millions of dollars in public funds and of repeatedly violating the state’s open records laws by discussing the contents of closed session outside its meetings. “The Grand Jury has no confidence in the Delta College Board of Trustees as they are currently constituted,” its members wrote in the report of their investigation, which was prompted by citizen complaints. “The District needs capable trustees who are able to meet the task of bringing Delta College into the 21st century.”

• In this morning’s New York Times: Seas Rising and Warming Faster Than Realized:

.....On a very busy climate-oil-politics day I was able to just squeak in a short print piece last night on a new study in the journal Nature clarifying what’s happening with the oceans in a heating world (the heat held in by a building greenhouse blanket has largely accumulated in the oceans and physics demands that it will eventually add to atmospheric warming).
.....As you may be aware, those rejecting the enormous body of evidence pointing to a growing human influence on climate had embraced some transitory findings implying that the oceans were cooling. This new work may help resolve that particular line of debate. The formula holds: more CO2 = warming world = less ice + higher seas + lots of changing climate patterns.
.....The study, by Australian and American researchers, reviewed millions of measurements of ocean temperatures taken using a particular instrument on submarines and other vessels over four decades. The researchers found a subtle error that, when fixed, shows that the rate at which seas warmed and rose between 1961 and 2003 was about 50 percent greater than previous estimates.
.....The instrument in question, an expendable bathythermograph, is cheap and disposable, used for example by submarines to find the thermocline, the depth where warm and cold layers of ocean water meet. It was designed to take snapshots of water temperatures, not to collect readings that could be compared year after year, as is required with climate studies. Oceanographers have been trying to identify errors in the ocean-temperature data for awhile....

• Did you notice this one in Tuesday’s OC Reg?

OC tsunami ready

.....We’re not actually ready, of course, but we did meet certain minimal standards. Better than nothing.
.....Dissent has covered the topic of OC tsunamis before:

So Cal Tsunamis?
Preparing for the Big Wet One

The upshot? If a big landslide occurs on the Catalina side of the channel, we've got about ten minutes to prepare for a huge tsunami that will devastate our coast. Such events have occurred historically—and are thus inevitable?—but remain unlikely any time soon.

Sunny's back!

She's back from the vet, and she's more peevish than ever! Plus, now, she's only 4 pounds of brat! And she's sick and tired of that McCain fella, too!

Chuck D (aka Charles Darwin) was a spectacular fellow

.....The Origin of Species was published nearly 150 years ago, and so, soon, a celebration of that event will begin. Naturally, the anti-science crowd—including our own Trustee Tom Fuentes—will piss and moan in private and, sometimes, in public.
.....Let 'em. Chuck was a spectacular fellow, a hero to those who will use their goddam minds, not shut 'em off and roll their eyes in mindless ecstasy.
.....In yesterday’s New York Times (Darwinmania!), evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson asks, Does Charles Darwin deserve all of the glory that is about to be bestowed upon him?
.....Her answer: “Yes.”

.....…Does he deserve all this? He wasn’t, after all, the first person to suggest that evolution happens…. Natural selection is what we normally think of as Darwin’s big idea. Yet he wasn’t the first to discover that, either….
.....…[The “Origin of Species”] changed everything. Before the “Origin,” the diversity of life could only be catalogued and described; afterwards, it could be explained and understood. Before the “Origin,” species were generally seen as fixed entities, the special creations of a deity; afterwards, they became connected together on a great family tree that stretches back, across billions of years, to the dawn of life. Perhaps most importantly, the “Origin” changed our view of ourselves. It made us as much a part of nature as hummingbirds and bumblebees (or humble-bees, as Darwin called them); we, too, acquired a family tree with a host of remarkable and distinguished ancestors.
.....The reason the “Origin” was so powerful, compelling and persuasive, the reason Darwin succeeded while his predecessors failed, is that in it he does not just describe how evolution by natural selection works. He presents an enormous body of evidence culled from every field of biology then known….
.....At the same time, he uses every form of evidence at his disposal: he observes, argues, compares, infers and describes the results of experiments he has read about, or in many cases, personally conducted. … In short, he tests his reasoning over and over again.
.....… The “Origin” does not just expound natural selection. It contains a wealth of additional ideas and hypotheses, some of which Darwin went on to elaborate in other books….
.....This is not to say that the “Origin” is flawless, or that Darwin was right in every respect. … Yet his knowledge of the natural world is so immense, and the scrutiny to which he subjects his ideas is so thorough and scrupulous, that the “Origin” presents a grand new vision of the world. A vision that, as far as possible given the knowledge available at the time, he worked out in every detail. A vision that changed the world forever.
.....Let’s party!