Mom's January flowers

LA may have looked so ungreen when I flew in because it is ...January and lots of the trees are pretty naked. One forgets that about LA because there are so many other trees and bushes that don't lose their leaves. here's a sample or what's blooming in my mother's yard right now

Eating Indian and Bosnian in LA

I've meshed two pictures of my mom at Pradeep's Indian restaurant in a two story strip mall on Washington near Marina Del Rey. It was nice to sit out in the sun, though even with the glass shield, the breeze was a little chilly by the end of lunch. That was Wednesday.

Friday, on the way to the airport, we went to a Bosnian restaurant in another strip mall, this time on Overland near Pico. I'd found it on a blog that highlights good, interesting, little restaurants in LA.




I don't recall ever eating at a Bosnian restaurant call Aroma and it wasn't until last night at SeaTac with eating with my daughter and telling her about the Bosnian immigrant picture I'd posted that I began to wonder whether my brain had perked up at "Bosnian" because of the picture and description I'd read and posted. Any way, it was very good. And we were snuggled into a little corner with nice warming sun as a group of men nearby had a very animated conversation in what I assumed was one of Bosnia's languages. I had the Burek, sort of like a calzone made of phylo dough. Mine had spinach inside. I took one to go for my daughter.



And this doesn't really fit anywhere better than it does here. But at the 99¢ Store, they've kept all the prices at 99¢. But now instead of a dozen eggs for 99¢, you get half a dozen according to my mom.

Venice Beach Spiritual Center

This center is free. Well, if you drive you have to pay to park. But for walkers and bikers there's no charge.

This is one of the places I go in the world to remind me who I am and to get reconnected with the earth. Along this strip of California beach I learned the rhythms of the ocean and spent much of my childhood and young adulthood. The power of the these waves has as much hold on me as the mountains and forests of Alaska.

Run to Venice Beach

Just about two miles from my mom's house is Venice Beach. So here's the halfway point of my run down Rose to the beach. It's early Friday morning so all the hustle and bustle of Venice Beach - the booths, the bikes and skaters, not yet there. The rest are pictures as I complete the return trip.






This funky old neighborhood right up against one of the world great beaches - lots of sand, good surf - is still a mix of all kinds of income groups. The buildings are still mostly old. I think this neighborhood shows the positive effects of Prop 13 which froze property taxes back in 1977. While the freeze seems to have hurt infrastructure, the University, and other public programs and caused real disparity issues between people who have lived in their homes a long time and newer buyers, here it seems to have allowed people of modest means to stay in their homes while the value of their coastal property soared. If they hadn't had the freeze, many of the people here would not have been able to afford the proerty taxes as land values so close to the beach went way up.








The values have tempted a lot of people to sell and there are lots of fixed up places and totally torn down and rebuilt places. And Main Street has become a pricy shopping spot.







But the people I pass are not wealthy people by a long shot. But they do live near the beach which is a spiritual wealth. Many beach communities have no place for the people who live here and that, I think, is a positive by product of Prop. 13. I was running and I didn't feel right taking pictures of the many colorful looking folks, so you'll just have to imagine.


This new condo sign caught my eye. I'm 90% sure this is where the Pioneer Bakery used to be. There was agreat little shop that sold wonderful bread here at reasonable prices, but it was a small part of the bakery that used baked bread for the whole Pioneer Bread Company and it always smelled good here. This should be called the Pioneer Condos and they should have a little bakery - including the aroma of fresh bread - on the grounds.

[UPDATE Feb. 2012:  Here are the condos, four years later, finally getting built.

 Not sure what happened to these photos, I'll have to see if I can find them.  If not I'll delete them.]






A lot of places have just been spiffed up like this one, but the building is still relatively modest by Southern California beach standards.



Now I'm passed Lincoln and nod to this lady caring for her garden as I did the last two days and whenever I'm visiting my mom.






This whole area was swamp when I was growing up here. Just small dirt hills, among wetlands with opportunities limited only by our imaginations. In fact, Rose didn't go through then. Now it's a public golf course - certainly much better than more houses - and relatively ordinary people play golf here.




And now I'm close to Walgrove and almost home. I love the smell of the eucalyptus trees here. I've got a little bowl of leaves at home that I can sniff whenever I need a quick trip to LA.

LA was definitely warmer than here

The sun IS shining and it is above 0 F (it's 6). Let me catch up on some of the LA pictures. Flying in on Tuesday - lots of puffy white clouds but otherwise crystal clear. Here's the Pacific just off LA as we turn in to swoop over the city.









The land is covered with whipped cream clouds. A bit of beach shows through the clouds.







I was struck by how little green I could see. It was all roofs and streets from the air. Except for a couple of parks or golf courses or cemetaries.

Tree Cutting - Another Perspective

When my family moved into this house in the late 1950s, I was taller than the tree (foreground on the right of the picture with the white tape.) Now the trees make a canopy over the street and wreak havoc with the sidewalks and the driveways. The roots cause the sidewalks to lurch up in strange ways.





My parents have paid for the driveway and sidewalks to be repaired a number of times.. When the city asked my mom recently if she would give permission to have it removed, she said yes. She doesn't walk on the sidewalk any more because she's afraid of falling. Here you can see the newest bulge - it hasn't been that long since my mom had to pay for the old sidewalk to be repaired. It had sharper upthrusts and big cracks.


I have mixed feelings about this. The street has been transformed from a barren new subdivision into a tree covered oasis. But my mom's tree does seem to lean way over into the street. I suspect it makes sense to take out a few trees at a time and plant new ones that won't have quite the root problems. Let them grow, and slowly replace them all gradually. That would keep the flavor of the street, and allow for a gradual change over time. We'll see. This is the only street in the subdivision that I know of to have this particular kind of tree.





But when I came back from my run, I saw there was a sign on the tree. I guess the execution is not yet a done deal. The neighbors may have a say. (Apparently one other neighbor also agreed to have their tree cut down.)

Postponing Allen and Smith's Sentencing

[Update Sept. 5, 2010:  Someone pointed out that these links are dead.  This one seems to have both pieces still up.]

From The Anchorage Press website today:

Here's an excerpt from today's filing in Allen’s case, dated Jan. 31, 2008:

"As the court is aware, Mr. Allen has been cooperating with the government in its investigation and he continues to do so. The investigation is exceedingly complex due to a variety of issues and is ongoing. Given the substantial amount of work that remains to be done in the government's investigation, the government requests that sentencing continue to be postponed in order to give the defendant time to fully realize the benefit of his cooperation."

An accompanying story by Tony Hopfinger and Amanda Coyne reports that Anchorage Police Department spokesman Lt. Paul Honeman says they were told to call off an investigation of Bill Allen by the FBI so as not to interfere with the FBI's investigation.

"The feds said that if you go down that road, you'll compromise our investigation," Honeman said. "They said they were working an ongoing case that they couldn't tell us about."

But that conflicts with statements from the FBI. Eric Gonzales, an FBI spokesman in Anchorage, said he has heard rumors about the police investigation, but his agency knows nothing about it. "I've spoken to people here and nobody recalls us telling the police to drop an investigation," he said.

That sounds suspiciously like the kinds of denials Congress has been hearing from the Bush administration people. No one says it didn't actually happen, just that they don't recall it. How can something like telling the the APD to stop an investigation be something they 'don't recall?" The FBI and the prosecutors at the various trials last year seemed to remember every detail and now they can't recall?

The investigation itself was related to the Boehm case where the contractor was convicted of luring runaways into sex parties with crack.

I'm not sure whether there is is any fire here or not. The implication in the article seems to be that Allen was involved in more than the prosecution let on to at the Kott and Kohring trials and their attorneys should have known about it so they could have raised more questions about Allen's credibility as a witness. I'm guessing this story had a tight deadline and that explains why the story itself is not as tight as it could be.

Knowledge, he says, is the antidote to anxiety.

The name of this blog has the word "know" in it because I take particular interest in the idea and power of knowledge - not just knowledge of things, but of how we know what we know.

So, I'm always happy to see people who are clearly experts in their fields talking about the importance of 'knowing'. In a first page story in today's LA Times , Greg Krikorian writes about terrorism expert Brian Jenkins, who has worked on this topic since he was a Green Beret in VietNam and for forty years at the Rand Corporation.

In some ways, Jenkins knows too much. He is immersed routinely in risk assessments and intelligence reports brimming with the stuff of nightmares. His assessment: "We are not going to end terrorism, not in any future I see."...

He is a relaxed frequent flier, traveling more than 200,000 miles a year, much of it to terrorism conferences or briefings around the world.

And he thinks the country can cope as well.

"During the Cold War both the U.S. and Soviet Union spent a great deal of time and money understanding each other. To a great extent, that spared us from mutual annihilation," Jenkins says.

Similarly, he says, in the war on terrorism "we have to have a better understanding of what we're up against." Demonizing terrorists as "wicked and evil" plays into their hands, while learning about "their quantifiable goals and understandable motives" demystifies them.

Knowledge, he says, is the antidote to anxiety.

The challenge is complicated, however, by evolution. Terrorist methods, motives and members keep changing.

Why Did Frank Murkowski Leave the US Senate to Become Governor?

I’ve been waiting for someone to have a contest. The winner would be the person who would write the best answer to the question: Why Did Frank Murkowski Leave the US Senate to Run for Governor? I think we’d get a lot of interesting entries. But since the ADN said yesterday that Murkowski has returned to the state to get the gas pipeline going and no one seems to be holding that contest, I’m just going to have to post my answer here.



Being a US Senator is a nice job. There are only 100 of them. A lot of power concentrated in a few hands. Lots of people with money are suddenly their best friends. If you have any ego at all, you’ll find no shortage of strokers. The basic story, though this one was played out in the minor leagues, was spelled out in the testimony at the Anderson, Kott, and Kohring trials.

Being a Governor isn’t quite as cushy as being US Senator. While there are only 50 of them, they actually have to do things. They are the administrators of their states. What they do directly affects the lives of their constituents every day. Their decisions aren't hidden by 99 other deciders. And they aren’t way off in Washington where their constituents can’t see them. If they are out of state, tv announcers tell people if they are off at some tropical resort on a large corporations expense account.

No one in his right mind would leave the Senate to become a Governor.

But Senator Murkowski did just that. Why? If I recall correctly, one of his reasons was that he wanted to be back home in Alaska, near his grandchildren. (Has anyone seen him in Alaska since he left office? The ADN story yesterday says he'd been missing a year til he just showed up.)

I can’t tell you for sure. He hasn’t called me up to tell me. But after attending the Anderson, Kott, and Kohring trials last year, I’ve got a possible explanation that seems to be consistent with all the known facts. (Well, other people know a lot more of the facts than I do, but at least the ones I know.)

I think there was a careful plan. His job was to go back to Alaska and set up an Alaska natural gas pipeline deal that met the needs of the big three oil companies who don’t seem to have any interest in giving up the natural gas until they have used it to squeeze out every possible drop of profitable oil. Then, and only then, might this be of interest. So, it was with this in mind, that they talked Frank Murkowski into giving up his plush Washington DC life. So what does Frank get out of this? We don’t know what kind of promises they made him for future jobs or other sorts of payments when the various ethical statues no longer covered him. But there was one very public prize he got in his first months in office.

Lisa goes to Washington.

We know this was well thought out before he even announced he was running for governor. The oil controlled state legislature passed a bill that said, in case a US Senate seat becomes vacant, the newly elected governor, not the currently sitting governor, makes the appointment. Everyone knew the purpose was to give Murkowski the power to appoint his successor. If this hadn’t passed, retiring governor Tony Knowles would have appointed the next US Senator. But it did pass assuring that, if Murkowki won, he could appoint his daughter. If he lost, he was still in the Senate.

With a fool proof Republican majority in the state house and senate, Murkowski began closed door ‘negotiations’ with the big three oil companies for a petroleum profits tax, that was the first step toward the gas pipeline deal. The deal included a lot of sweetness for the oil companies, including a 40 year ban on any changes to the tax rate, without their having to guarantee anything. He told us he was negotiating hard to get the best deal for Alaska, except that no one but his closest staff got to sit in. So how do we know what they did behind those closed doors?

As the agreement, kept secret from the Republican legislators even, finally got to the legislature, in spring 2006, the governor kept delaying his announcement of whether he was going to run for a second term as governor. That upstart Republican controlled legislature began asking questions and the bill wasn’t sailing through. It was only at the very last minute, when his critical PPT bill was falling apart, and the deadline loomed for officially becoming a candidate, that Murkowski announced he was running for reelection. At this point, his popularity was lower than all but one other US governor, and polls had him trailing. Why oh why would any sensible politician run in that situation?

The only explanation I can think of that makes any sense is that he had a sweetheart deal with the oil companies that he was going to go back to Alaska and deliver them their tax deal and then their guaranteed “if it eventually looks ok for us, we’ll build the damn pipeline, but until we're ready you can’t harass us” pipeline deal. It should have been done by then, but it wasn’t, so he had to run again to finish the business. I don’t know what they all promised Frank. John Perkins, who wrote Confessions of an Economic Hitman, says that he (Perkins) got a do-nothing six figure job to NOT write a book about how multinational corporations operated. The limit on US Senators going to work for companies with connections to their Senatorial work would be over by then. I think he had a two year limit then after being governor. So in the meantime he could get, say, six $50,000 a pop speaking engagement a year for $200K, or the oil companies could find some friendly company that had no involvement that could hire Frank.

But it didn’t pass in the regular session. Frank had to call a special session. And it didn’t pass, the way they wanted it, in the special sessions. And there was still the pipeline deal to finish. But at least now, he would have until January to do the deed. But then the unthinkable happened. Frank lost the Republican primary. It was clear that he wouldn’t get away with the deal, even though there were rumors he was going to do it administratively. So what went wrong?

Frank couldn’t wait. He’d gotten too used to all the perks and to everyone agreeing with whatever he said. Getting Lisa her Senate seat riled a number of folks, including Republicans - some who just thought it was unseemly, others who had coveted the position themselves. Then he just couldn’t wait for his own private jet. He didn’t care what anyone thought. Then he went on to rile a bunch of people by cutting the Longevity Bonus and various other actions that left few people on his side.

Frank, I’m guessing, thought he could take all these politically unpopular actions because he knew he wasn’t going to run again. He would have delivered his part to the oil companies and then they would deliver whatever it was they had promised to him. His life would be sweet and rich. His daughter would be in the US Senate. All would be well in his world

While the oil companies worked directly with the governor, their intermediary, Bill Allen was taking care of the legislature. But they didn’t count on how obtuse Frank could be and how badly his actions would antogonize the electorate and other Republicans. And no one could have counted on a former small town mayor, a former jock and beauty queen no less, who would stand up to the party bosses and call them on their corruption. Well, maybe they could have imagined that, but they couldn’t have imagined that she would not only get away with it, but that she would rally the voters to her cause.

In the end, he couldn’t deliver. Are they going to reward him anyway? In most years, we would never know. But this year we have the FBI checking out all sorts of things, and there is a chance we might find out if my story bears any resemblance to what actually took place.

And now he's back negotiating. As who? As what? Well, clearly they must have offered him something really good and he's not going to give up that easy. Of course, there's also the possibility that he only has the state's best interests in mind and he sees Sarah screwing things up, so he's back, like Daddy, to fix the mistakes us voters (like rebellious, immature children) made by electing Sarah.

Victor Lebow Bio

I'm in the parking lot of the Fairview branch library in Santa Monica where I borrowed tons of books as a kid. I'd walk home with a pile of ten or twelve books a week or so balanced under my chin. Now I'm using their wifi since my Mom's computer is difficult (I'm not complaining, she uses email and checks my blog in her mid 80s) to load pictures on and I don't have the right connectors to hook into her modem. So, I'm doing as much as I can while I'm here. I could go in now, but they weren't open when they arrived so I started here in the car.

I've been getting lots and lots (at least for my little blog) of traffic from people looking up Victor Lebow. I earlier posted the complete article that his most famous quote (that has gotten lots of play on the internet) came from. So, before I left Anchorage I asked the Interlibrary loan folks if they could get me the beginning of Lebow's Free Enterpirse: The Opium of the American People so I could see if there was more info on Lebow. Well here's the brief bio at the beginning of the book. I haven't read what they sent me yet, and if it is worthwhile, I'll post more. This was published in 1972 - 36 years ago.