Pigs Fly After All

Conrad Black becomes a liberal:

Holed up in his Palm Beach mansion, an unrepentant Conrad Black has broken his silence for the first time since his release from prison with a paean to the virtues of fine wine, his wife, Barbara Amiel, and the pleasures of "pristine quiet, free of loudspeakers, screamed argument, and the snoring of a hundred men".

The disgraced media mogul, freed on bail last month after almost two-and-a-half years in prison, also used a comment piece for Canada's National Post to announce (like so many other famous conservatives who end up behind bars) that he has become a convert to the cause of penal reform.

The former proprietor of The Daily Telegraph - once a paid-up member of the hang `em and flog `em brigade - explained that his time among the 1,800 residents of Coleman Low Security Prison in Florida has convinced him of "the fallibility of American justice, which does convict many people, who, like me, would never dream of committing a crime in a thousand years".

...His time inside, Black says, has "been an interesting experience, from which I developed a much greater practical knowledge than I had ever had before of those who had drawn a short straw from the system; of the realities of street level American race relations; of the pathology of incorrigible criminals; and of the wasted opportunities for the reintegration of many of these people into society".

..."I saw at close range the failure of the US war on drugs," he said, "with absurd sentences, including 20 years for marijuana offences, although 42 per cent of Americans have used marijuana and it is the greatest cash crop in California."

Polling Place 2010

Poll Worker #1: (pointing to Poll Worker #2) She has your ballot.

Poll Worker #2: 'Ballot'? I thought you said 'salad'.

Me: I'm hungry, so if you have a salad over there I would be most appreciative.

Poll Worker #1: The ballots are not very tasty!

Me: But they have lots of fiber!

Wait, I Prize My Uselessness!

There is some sort of backlash developing in Britain. I hope it doesn't come here, because my defunctness and general redundancy will be only too obvious:

TELEVISION host James May has hit out at a "useless" new generation of men - describing them as "morons" who do not know how to iron a shirt or put up a shelf.

..."I keep reading women are better at school and now better at parking, better at navigating. We are sort of laughing at it going, 'Ho ho ho, I'm just a bloke', but really in my lifetime men only will be required to keep sperm at operating temperature and they will have no other function."

...He said: "The decline of practical skills, some of them very day-to-day, among a generation of British men is very worrying - they can't put up a shelf, wire a plug, countersink a screw, iron a shirt.

"They believe it is endearing and cute to be useless whereas I think it's boring and everyone's getting sick of it."

...He blamed the move away from old-fashioned masculinity partly on 'lads magazines' such as Zoo, Nuts and Loaded, and said it was a shame that traditional male hobbies were now seen as unfashionable.

He said: "There's this idea that men aren't allowed to be interested in these things as it is a bit sad or a bit weird.

"But enthusiasms are good. Hobbies are healthy. They don't harm anybody.

"It's the people who don't have them that end up going mad and shooting people."

Merriam Webster's "Word Of The Day"

Gabe shares this:

The Word of the Day for November 2 is:

psephology \see-FAH-luh-jee\ noun
: the scientific study of elections

Examples:
Erin is a political science major with a particular interest in psephology.

"To help voters make up their minds, this issue contains a 20-page briefing on personality, policy and psephology." -- From an article in The Economist, April 10, 2010

Did you know?
"Psephology" is from the Greek word "psephos," meaning "pebble." (One relative of "psephology" is "psephomancy," meaning "divination by pebbles.") "Psephology" merited election as the name for the work of analysts of elections, or psephologists, because pebbles were used by the ancient Greeks in voting. Similarly, the word "ballot" was an excellent choice for a means of voting since it is derived from "balla," the Italian word for "ball," and Italians placed balls in a container to cast votes.

Word Trivia: What word meaning "to banish" or "to exclude from a group" comes from an ancient Greek method of voting by writing a name down on a pottery fragment? The answer is ...

Back To The 'Annihilation Of Haiti' Forecast

The NOGAPS model keeps pointing at Haiti as the place Hurricane Tomas will stall. If it keeps pointing there long enough, the forecast might actually come to pass....

[Update: Each new forecast is slightly different. The new forecast shows Tomas as passing over Haiti, and then stalling over the Turks and Caicos Islands. Oh joy, for them!

Update 2; The newer, newer forecast shows Tomas bouncing back and forth between Haiti and Jamaica like a pinball.

Wherever Tomas goes, there will be problems.]

Harry Reid Profile

This New Yorker article is purportedly about the Sharron Angle-Harry Reid Senatorial race, but it's much more about the character of Harry Reid. Economically speaking, Nevada, like all intermountain states (like New Mexico particularly) is much more like a colony than it is independent (economically, Nevada is an appendage of California). Nevada, like the rest of the intermountain states, relies very, very heavily on the federal government. If Sharron Angle wins, she will not be able to replace Reid's contacts and expertise, and it will prove to be an unmitigated disaster for the state in general, and Las Vegas, in particular:

This jaunty hyper-confidence is the essence of the conservative mood right now—a sense that the tide is antigovernment, and sweeping everything along with it. Nevada is in such bad shape that comparisons to the Great Depression are justified. It has the highest foreclosure rate, the highest bankruptcy rate, proportionally the highest state budget deficit, and the highest state unemployment rate in the country. In Las Vegas, everywhere you look are empty buildings, abandoned construction sites, unkempt houses with for-sale signs in their yards, and apartment complexes offering spectacular deals.

...Sharron Angle, more than most other Republicans, has been willing to oppose government not just in general but in particular. Over the years, she has called for abolishing the Departments of Energy and Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, and for privatizing Social Security, Medicare, and the Veterans Administration. ... Reid kept saying that government should provide something that he knows is popular (like mandated insurance coverage of mammograms), and Angle kept saying that it shouldn’t. Reid plainly had gone into the debate with the idea that he could demonstrate that Angle is “extreme,” but nothing seemed to stick.

...It is a mistake, though, to regard Reid as ineffectual. He is obsessive in his work habits. Everybody in Nevada politics has a story about the brusque telephone calls he makes at all hours. He’ll check in as often as several times a day, for five minutes, two minutes, thirty seconds. You’ll be saying something and it will dawn on you that he has hung up without saying goodbye. Once, Reid recruited a candidate to run for an important state office, and during a phone call she complained about fund-raising difficulties: click. Reid doesn’t like whiners. He found another candidate.

“He is truly hard as a diamond, and tough,” Bryan says. “Nobody pushes him around. He’s always thinking one step ahead. He never forgets. Never forgets.” ... But what shines through is Reid’s lack of the natural gregariousness and geniality that most people associate with the political personality.

Harry Reid was born poor and out of wedlock in the desert mining town of Searchlight, Nevada. His father was a hard-rock miner who didn’t get through the eighth grade; Reid hints broadly that both his parents were drunks. ... Another time, Reid took a .22 rifle and went out to shoot a rabbit for dinner. With his last bullet, he merely wounded the rabbit, so he gave chase on foot for “what seemed like hours,” he wrote. “I got that rabbit. Took it home. Skinned it. Took it to my grandmother. . . . Best rabbit I ever ate.” At fourteen, Reid had a fistfight with his father (because he was beating Reid’s mother). At nineteen, he had a fistfight with his future father-in-law (because he opposed his daughter’s marriage).

Mike O’Callaghan, a high-school teacher and coach of Reid’s, taught him to channel his aggression by becoming an amateur boxer.

...Reid’s lack of natural electioneering talent and a certain over-aggressiveness in seizing opportunities led to an uneven career. He narrowly lost a U.S. Senate race in 1974, then ran for mayor of Las Vegas and lost badly. O’Callaghan rescued him in 1977 by giving him a job that nobody wanted: chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission. Charged with cleaning up the casinos, Reid faced down the real-life versions of the Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci characters in “Casino.”

The 1980 census showed that the state’s population had grown so much that Nevada got a new congressional district, in Las Vegas. Reid ran for the seat in 1982 and won—bringing with him to Washington, he writes, the gun he kept in his desk drawer in Nevada. When Paul Laxalt, who had beaten him in the 1974 Senate race, retired, in 1986, Reid ran for his seat and narrowly won. He has been reëlected three times and has become the deeply trusted protector of all the most established interests in Nevada. Still, only once in his long career has he won more than fifty per cent of the vote in an election. He’s a will-power politician.

In Reid’s accounting of his political life, there are more enemies than friends. ... Jack Gordon, a minor concessionaire at one of the casinos who dreamed of getting a full-fledged gaming license, tried to bribe him when Reid was head of the Gaming Commission. Reid called the F.B.I., which set up a sting operation that wound up ensnaring Gordon, but Reid’s attitude went beyond cool professionalism: “I lunged and got him in a choke hold. I was in a rage.” He took personal umbrage at George W. Bush. “I have made no secret of my antipathy toward the second President Bush,” he wrote. He added that Bush “is an ideologue who has done incalculable damage to the government, reputation, and moral standing of the United States of America.” He twice publicly called Bush a liar, explaining, “When one lies, one is a liar.”

...Other than a few close relationships, like the ones with his wife, Landra, and with Mike O’Callaghan, what most reliably draws warmth from Reid’s tempered-steel heart is New Deal liberalism. He likes to say that his parents’ religion was Franklin D. Roosevelt; practically the only good thing that ever happened in the life of his father was joining a union. “The American government is the greatest force for good in the history of mankind”; Social Security is “the greatest social program since the fishes and loaves.” Sig Rogich, a Nevada adman who worked in George H. W. Bush’s White House, and who, like most establishment Republicans in Nevada, is backing Reid over Sharron Angle, told me that during many evenings at his house he and Reid have relaxed to old Woody Guthrie songs on the CD player—“poignant songs about society and the poor.”

...On the morning after the 2004 election, Bush, reinvigorated and aiming for historical significance, indicated that he was going to turn Social Security into a system of individual retirement accounts, as Republicans had long dreamed of doing. Reid pounced. He brought Senator Max Baucus’s chief of staff, Jim Messina, into his office to create a war room and work the issue relentlessly. Messina, now the deputy chief of staff in the Obama White House, told me, “When Bush had his kickoff”—for the Social Security initiative—“Reid was already out ahead of him by a month, and by March or April of ’05 I knew we had won.”

...After Obama made his first speech on the Senate floor, in 2005, against the Iraq war, Reid approached him to compliment him on its eloquence. (Reid, who has never been as liberal on social or military issues as he is on the provision of government benefits, voted for the war.) As Reid tells the story, “And I will never forget his response. Without the barest hint of braggadocio or conceit, and with what I would describe as deep humility, he said quietly: ‘I have a gift, Harry.’ ” Surely, Reid’s sense of awe was intensified by knowing that Obama’s gift is one that he lacks. Conversely, Reid’s gift—relentlessly working the Senate Democratic caucus, member by preening member—is one that Obama lacked any interest in during his four years in the Senate.

In the House, an adept Speaker with a majority can herd her entire party caucus, using the Rules Committee, which decides what legislation gets to the floor. The Senate requires far more individual attention to the members, especially if they include people as ideologically disparate as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist, and Joe Lieberman, the Connecticut almost-Republican. In the partnership between the Obama White House and the Reid Senate, Obama supplied the eloquence and grace and originated the policy ideas. Reid’s role was to get it done. Between Obama’s Inauguration, in January, 2009, and the congressional recess early last month, more consequential liberal legislation passed than at any time since the Great Society: health-care reform, the economic-stimulus package, financial regulation, a big education bill, the rescue of the auto industry, and the second phase of the rescue of the big banks. Others (a large expansion of protected public lands, funding for universal broadband access) didn’t get the attention they normally would have.

...His strength is knowing and playing to his caucus. He “has an amazing ability to figure out what the other person needs,” Billy Vassiliadis, a Las Vegas adman, Democratic political consultant, and old friend of Reid’s, says. In talks with the White House, Reid would explain that each senator is a “brand”: Maria Cantwell, of Washington, is high-tech; Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, is a Federalist; and so on. One had to understand each member’s sense of himself and then find a way to play to it.

...Angle is a curious political commodity: she seems marginal but always does better than people expect her to. She started out in politics as a member of the far-right Constitution Party, and in 1998 she won a seat in the state assembly as a Republican, and beat a rising star in the Party for reëlection in 2002. There she was anything but a prominent member; she was best known for voting against tax bills. Yet in 2006 she ran against Dean Heller for Congress and came within five hundred votes of beating him. In 2008, she ran against the senior Republican member of the Nevada state senate, Bill Raggio, and almost beat him. She is unlike Reid in almost every way except in her relentless determination.

Reid, as Majority Leader, has access to all the top national Democratic funding sources, as well as the ones in Nevada, and he has ceaselessly battered Angle in campaign ads. Yet she and Reid are in a dead heat in the polls. Reid’s prominence helps Angle financially, because it attracts donations from national conservative groups that want to take Reid out. Now she can afford to pound him in advertisements, too.

...As Nevada’s senior senator, Harry Reid, a teetotaller who doesn’t gamble, was at the center of the creation of this new social order. He delivered for the casinos, a heavily regulated industry that lives in fear of federal gaming taxes and relies upon airports and highways, and they supported his campaigns. None of the major casino owners have publicly endorsed Angle; Steve Wynn, who recently suggested on CNBC that the government of the People’s Republic of China is more hospitable to business than the Obama Administration, gave Reid twenty thousand dollars last year.

If you think of yourself as a champion of ordinary people, you can build a case for helping the casino industry. An unskilled laborer—a valet parker, a dishwasher, a chambermaid, a waiter, a busboy—can make more money in Las Vegas than just about anywhere else. Except for the Venetian and the Palazzo, all the big casinos on the Strip have contracts with the Culinary Workers Union, which has fifty thousand members, many of them Latino. They make high wages and have decent job security, a guaranteed full workweek, no-premium family health care, and company-paid pensions. It sure beats working in a mine, as Reid’s father did.

...Then, beginning in 2007, and escalating in 2008 and 2009, Nevada went spectacularly bust. Last year, the state lost population for the first time since the Great Depression. Next year, the state legislature will meet to balance a budget that, on a two-year cycle, has a three-billion-dollar deficit, on total spending of less than seven billion dollars. The construction industry—Nevada’s second-largest, after casinos, during the boom years—has nearly disappeared. More than half the students in the Clark County public school system are eligible for the federal school-lunch program. The school system used to have to recruit teachers from elsewhere because it was growing so rapidly; now it has a waiting list of two thousand job applicants.

...Late one afternoon, I met with Donya Monroe, a former basketball player for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and financial adviser with Merrill Lynch, who runs a counselling center for people with housing problems. She is a commanding woman—the daughter of a two-star general—but she looked weary. “It was literally mass hysteria here,” she said. “You had a large group of people from California who took advantage of the system. Come here, buy a house, no money down, take out a HELOC—a home-equity line of credit—use it to buy another home, get a second mortgage, get some cash. And then they’re gone—poof. They all came at the same time and they all left at the same time. Then, there’s another group, the people I deal with every day. Uneducated, sign here. Their payment has gone up. They lost their job. They’re panicked. A huge portion just walked away.”

Reid reacted to the bust just as you would expect. He helped extend unemployment benefits, gave special aid to schools so they wouldn’t have to lay off teachers, secured money for potentially job-rich alternative-energy projects in the desert, and funded foreclosure-prevention counselling.

...CityCenter, a vast new casino and shopping complex on the Strip, is the largest private building project in the history of North America. In 2007, its primary owner, MGM Mirage, took on Dubai World as a partner. With construction well under way and five billion dollars already sunk into CityCenter, the crash of September, 2008, hit. Dubai World sued MGM, and then the banks collectively announced that because Dubai World had sued they no longer had to honor their own obligations.

Harry Reid called Jim Murren, the chief executive of MGM, to offer his help. “I asked him to call Ken Lewis of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon of J. P. Morgan, John Mack of Morgan Stanley, and I’m sure he did,” Murren told me. “Everybody in the Nevada delegation called, but there’s only one Senate Majority Leader. That’s the call that got returned.” When a contractor needed a two-hundred-million-dollar payment in order to continue construction, “Reid called, the banks released the money, and we kept constructing.”

Murren, a Republican, appeared in the first television ad the Reid campaign ran this year, saying that Reid had saved twenty-two thousand jobs in Nevada with his calls to the banks. MGM is not just Nevada’s largest employer and taxpayer; it is proportionally among the largest single taxpayers in any state, supplying eleven per cent of the budget of Nevada’s government. Murren told me that Sharron Angle has never tried to meet him. She has said that she would not have made the calls that Reid made on CityCenter’s behalf.

The Reid campaign considered that comment a gift from Heaven, but it wasn’t able to sink Angle. Angle’s campaign ignores what would seem to be a basic rule of elective politics: that you have to promise to deliver government services to your constituents, especially in hard times. It may be that a large number of people in Nevada dislike Reid more than they like his works. ... It may be that people aren’t aware of Reid’s many services to the state. It may be that the unpopularity of the Obama Administration’s accomplishments, which Reid had so much to do with, outweighs the popularity of his more mundane local record. It may be that Reid gets blamed for the state’s depression because he was in office when it arrived. Or Sharron Angle could be right: many Americans don’t want the government to help them.

...People go to Nevada to loosen the bonds of traditional society and try something new. What has happened there over the past twenty years is a particularly American version of the economic cycle. European governments get into trouble by overloading on pensions and other expensive benefits; American governments get into trouble by practicing a kind of casino liberalism, in which credit flows too easily, everybody goes too deeply into debt, and if the growth ever stops, everything crashes. Now Nevadans are being presented with a great clash of social visions: help from Washington with Reid versus less of Washington with Angle. The stakes are real, not rhetorical. Reid’s reëlection campaign is about the role of government in the United States. Obama’s reëlection campaign will be about that, too.

FOX News' Prop. 24 Campaign

FOX News goes all out for Prop. 24:

FBN attacked proposition 24 with five straight hours of live coverage last Tuesday without once mentioning that its parent company had contributed $1.3 million to the campaign against the measure. FBN even interviewed the spokesman of the group that News Corp.'s donation bankrolled without disclosing the conflict of interest. FBN pleaded ignorance, claiming it was unaware that News Corp. had donated to the anti-proposition 24 campaign.

Prop. 19 Donors

It's fun using this interactive Web Page to identify the donors for and against Proposition 19. George Soros, Sean Parker, and even George Zimmer show up.

This Agonizing Dance

What will Hurricane Tomas do? The current forecast shows it basically stalling in-between Jamaica and Haiti, and basically being the 800-lb bull tip-toeing through the delicate china shop of the northern Caribbean. It can go anywhere. And if it stalls long enough, it just might go everywhere!

Negative Political Ads

A historical perspective.

Some History Of Mexico's Drug War

I find this article helpful in describing the bicoastal rivalry in Mexico's Drug War, and also the identities of some of the people executing it. The war is pretty scary stuff, but there are identifiable people behind it, and it's not random. History, as always, helps:

For reasons they themselves probably do not completely understand, the various Mexican drug clans and organizations responsible for so much bloodshed have acquired a liking for public attention, and to hold it they have developed a grisly theatrical performance of death, a roving display of grotesque mutilations and executions.

...In 1989, an up-and-coming drug trafficker called Joaquín Guzmán, and known generally as El Chapo or Chapo—which is what short, stocky men are called in Guzmán’s home state of Sinaloa, on the northwest coast of Mexico—picked a fight with some of his business associates in Tijuana. Four years later, the estranged associates sent a hit team to Guadalajara, where Chapo Guzmán was living. According to records of the investigation, the Tijuana team was supposed to intercept Guzmán on May 24, 1993, as he arrived at the airport on his way to a beach vacation, but the murderers appear to have confused Guzmán’s white Grand Marquis with one owned by the burly Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, cardinal of Guadalajara.

As the unfortunate cleric pulled up to the curb, the Tijuana hit men opened fire. (According to some versions, Guzmán had arrived at the airport by then, and engaged in a shoot-out with the killers.) The cardinal died on the spot, and even though this was to become one of the most scandalous murders of the century, a subject for endless conspiracy theories, the hit team managed to get on the next commercial flight to Tijuana. No one has ever been tried for the crime. Guzmán’s comment on the day’s events, before he packed his bags and went on the run, was “Esto se va a poner de la chingada,” or roughly, “Things are going to get really fucked now.” ... Guzmán didn’t foresee his own long-term prospects, though. At the time of the cardinal’s murder he was merely one of the more ambitious Sinaloa traffickers plying their trade along the Pacific coastal states and the northern Mexican border. Seventeen years later—eight of which were spent in a Mexican prison, from which he escaped in 2001, reportedly in a laundry van—Guzmán may be more embattled than ever, but he is also the most powerful trafficker on earth, or certainly the most influential.

...But what we mostly understand here, as in de Mauleón’s parallel biography of Arturo Beltrán Leyva—Guzmán’s former associate turned bitter enemy, who was killed in December—is his influence at the highest levels of the Mexican government. Throughout these records army generals provide Guzmán with information, police officers provide security, major airports are run by his allies, and the dark suspicion grows steadily that cabinet members in several administrations, including the current one, are also on friendly terms with him.

It’s not that Guzmán has influence whereas other traffickers do not; it’s that every trafficker has a great many appointed officials and elected politicians on his payroll but Guzmán has more than the rest. The most distressing conclusion one can draw from de Mauleón’s articles is not that President Calderón’s war on drugs is being lost but that it may not even be fought.

...Still, most murders in Juárez are, indeed, the result of gang warfare. The murder rate in Mexico City is eight per 100,000, comparable to Wichita, Kansas, or Stockton, California. The overall murder rate in Mexico is fourteen per 100,000. But in Ciudad Juárez it is 189 per 100,000. And as in Tijuana, Reynosa, or Nuevo Laredo—other border cities also afflicted by runaway violence—all but a very small number of the Juárez victims are, in fact, involved in one way or another in the drug trade.

...None of us reporters understood much then about the new religious cults mushrooming in the drug world—notably the Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, a Halloweenish figure identical to the hooded skeleton who makes frequent appearances in biker art. Her cult has spread well beyond the jailhouses where she is revered, and now that altars to the gloomy skeleton are everywhere in the country and we have heard of young migrant girls from Central America being killed and offered to the Santa Muerte by the particular branch of the drug mafia devoted to human trafficking, there is more reason to wonder if the current traffickers’ obsession with nauseating forms of murder did not start back then.

Carrillo Fuentes, the lord of Juárez, died in 1997. He was given the wrong kind of sedative—perhaps even accidentally—while recovering from plastic surgery in a boutique Mexico City hospital, and his death left the Juárez plaza (meaning a combined drug distribution territory and supply route) wide open. Chapo Guzmán of course tried to move in immediately following Carrillo Fuentes’s murder (or before, if he was behind the fatal injection), but so did a trafficker who, unusually, comes not from the Pacific coast state Sinaloa but from Tamaulipas, which lies across the country on the Gulf of Mexico. His name is Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, and for quite a few years he held the profitable monopoly of all the trafficking in Tamaulipas, whose border cities Reynosa, Matamoros, and Nuevo Laredo are collectively the largest commercial crossroads in the world. Nuevo Laredo is, consequently, the most lucrative plaza in Mexico; some eight thousand trucks pass the US customs inspection checkpoints at Laredo every day. Cárdenas, a man of ambition and keen business sense, baptized what was then just a gang, calling it the Cartel del Golfo (Cartel of the Gulf).

...All the traffickers before him had relied on their own gatilleros, or hired killers, to enforce their law, but in the late 1990s Cárdenas figured out the logistical and intelligence advantages of hiring military men—particularly highly skilled military men who had been trained to fight him—as his own private defense force. That is how the rogue drug gang the Zetas was born. Today it is a collection of former police agents and Central American army special forces, gang members, and what amounts to indentured killers, all led by a group of Mexican former special antinarcotics forces who destroyed all the existing narco codes of honor and rules of engagement.

...The ever-fluctuating war among the constantly fragmenting and multiplying drug clans and families is, among other things, a culture war, one being fought by the old campesino marijuana-growing and smuggling families along the Pacific coast against the wholesale traffickers of the Gulf of Mexico, who grow nothing. It’s also a war with, on one side, Pacific coast criminals who have a romantic vision of themselves as renegade outlaws—and who commission old-timey biographical ballads about themselves (narcocorridos) to spread that vision.... On the other side are former members of the Mexican military establishment in the east, whose taste in music, as far as one can tell from the narcovideos frequently put up on YouTube, runs to techno and reggaeton.

Pacific coast smugglers like Chapo Guzmán have yet to catch up with the Zetas’ ability to intercept the conversations of even the lowliest politicians along the Tamaulipas border and their delight in chest-thumping (they appear to have been the first to use trucks to block major thoroughfares, sometimes just for the hell of it). If recent news reports are correct, the Zetas also use antiaircraft weapons and satellite trackers. The traffickers from Sinaloa rely on backroom alliances with local politicians to keep the business quiet and safe—one can only think with envy of Chapo Guzmán’s Rolodex. The Zetas show no sign that they have ever heard of the word “compromise” and seem bent on a direct challenge to all authority.

The Sinaloa traffickers’ cult of a rural trickster hero, Jesús Malverde, is in equally stark contrast with Gulf coast worship of Holy Death. The Zetas seem modern and the Pacific coast gangsters old-fashioned, but at the moment we have no way of knowing who is winning, partly because the Zetas are so out of control and partly because the clan leaders on the Pacific coast who used to form an alliance are busily trying to kill one another, as are the Zetas and their former masters in the Cartel del Golfo.

...An easy conclusion would be that Mexico, or the drug war zone, is in the hands of a failed state. But a failed state does not constantly build new roads and schools, or collect taxes, or generate legitimate industrial and commercial activity sufficient to qualify it as one of the twelve largest economies in the world. In a failed state drivers do not stop at red lights and garbage is not collected punctually. The question is, rather, whether in the face of unstoppable activity by highly organized criminals, the Mexican government can adequately enforce the rule of law and guarantee the safety of its citizens everywhere in the country.

Rihanna & Shy Ronnie On SNL

The Long Vigil

Three enormous bags of candy, and just two trick-or-treaters. Two!

(My neighborhood is composed of empty-nesters and starving students, and very few families with young kids.)

What am I going to do with all the candy?

Finished Painting The East Exterior Bedroom Wall

I had hoped to finish by November 1st, or the beginning of the rainy season, whichever came first. I actually finished by November 1st, or the beginning of the rainy season, whichever came last. But whatever.

I now have finished the minimum of what I wanted to finish this year. I still have to finish painting the porch, but that was an extra work item.

Celebrating The Birthday

Left: Dinner at California Fats in Old Sacramento.
Halloween season wouldn't be complete without shopping at Evangeline's!

I purchased two items: A T-Shirt saying:

Ten Reasons To Procrastinate:

1. ...

plus a book for hypochondriacs, with a list of diseases I may already have!

Afterwards I headed to DMTC for convivial bonhomie!

Adopted By The Neighbor's Cat

Kitty want some steak?

Jarring Noontime False Alarm

Saturday morning, I rolled out of bed for a beginning ballet class taught by Dian Hoel at Curtis Park's Sierra 2 Community Center dance wing. Several DMTC folks attended the class. I stayed for some tap/jazz as well.

Nevertheless, shortly before noon, at about 11:45 a.m., a fire alarm went off. The fire alarm not only disrupted our class, but also disrupted Darryl Strohl's Musical Theater Workshop farther down the dance wing, and possibly interfered with the children's performance at RSP's 'Storytale Theater' (although they may have finished by that time, but just barely). Too disruptive!

City of Sacramento firefighters prepare to reset Sierra 2's alarm system.

"Dial 'M' For Murder" - Sutter Street Theater

After dinner at Old Spaghetti Factory in Rancho Cordova, we headed to Sutter Street Theater in Folsom to see "Dial 'M' For Murder".

I had forgotten how 'straight' plays, particularly murder mysteries, rely upon intricate details. Musicals, with their simpler plots, have spoiled me.

An interesting show. Friend Jeff Nauer played the victim. It was sad to lose Jeff so early in the show, but murder mysteries generally depend on the victim 'losing it' in Act I.

(more)

The-Chicken-In-The-Handbag Dodge

E.: MMMMMAAAARRRRCCCC! I was stopped by the cop last night! I was on I-80 and the cop came up behind me and he turned on his lights, and said on a loudspeaker "Exit on Madison!" So I exited on Madison. Then he said: "Turn right!" So I turned right. Then he said: "Turn right again!" So, I turned right again, and parked!

M.: What did the cop want?

E.: He looked at my license and insurance, then said he stopped me because I was weaving.

M.: Why were you weaving? Were you under the influence?

E.: I only had two glasses of wine. I told him "Sorry, officer, I was trying to get something out of my handbag." And it's true: I had some chicken in the handbag that I was going to snack on. So, he let me go....

M.: Two glasses? Did he make you take a breathalyzer test?

E.: No.

M.: You are lucky! You probably wouldn't have passed a breathalyzer test having had two drinks.

E.: Four, actually.

M.: Four glasses? Then you are very, very lucky!

E.: I know! I guess I shouldn't do that again. Is there anything he can do to me now?

M.: No, but you've got to be careful!

Vision Of Catastrophe To Come

These NOGAPS model forecast animations play out alternative futures - weather, to come. They get some details wrong, of course, but they are seldom dramatically wrong.

The current model forecast shows one of the bleakest forecasts I have ever seen. The forecast shows Hurricane Tomas, currently a rather humdrum Category 1 hurricane, as stalling in the immediate vicinity of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Given the complete destitution of Haiti, particularly after the January earthquake, having any hurricane pass anywhere nearby will be a catastrophe. Having the hurricane essentially park itself near Haiti for a few days will make the calamity many times worse. Humdrum Hurricane Tomas could be the Hurricane Mitch of 2010.

I pray this nightmare does not occur! I pray the model is wrong!