Saturday Night Videos

The Invisible Peak from Gary Yost on Vimeo.



ELEFANTE from Pablo Larcuen on Vimeo.
Yosemite HD II from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

The Weight of Mountains from Studiocanoe on Vimeo.

Douce Menace from margaux vaxelaire on Vimeo.

Shozo Kato - Way of the Sword from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo.

Heart of Africa from Michael Sugrue on Vimeo.

Trail Therapy from www.KORDUROY.tv on Vimeo.

DELAY from Matt Kleiner on Vimeo.

Monsieur COK from Franck Dion on Vimeo.

A look back at Susan Adams last election campaign.

http://www.marinij.com/ci_15097228

Dick Spotswood: Adams-Mazzoni, Marin's pivotal political battle

By Dick Spotswood

Posted:   05/16/2010 12:09:40 AM PDT

MARIN is enjoying a phenomenon it's not experienced in years, a contested election for an incumbent's seat on its Board of Supervisors. The outcome is likely to determine if county government continues to lean left or returns to the political center.Unfortunately, only voters in the San Rafael-centered First Supervisorial District can participate in the epic contest between two-termer Susan Adams and challenger Kerry Mazzoni.

Voters always claim they want real choices.

This year, their wish is granted.

The two candidates are polar opposites on everything but social issues.

Adams regards herself as a progressive. That's Marinspeak for those to the left of traditional liberals. Mazzoni, a past Democratic Assemblywoman and state Secretary of Education calls herself a centrist, which is what Marinites call liberal Democrats with a pro-business bent.
Mazzoni's goal is to move Marin's Board of Supervisors to the political center.

In a frank analysis, Mazzoni said that if she prevails, a moderate block composed of herself along with Supervisors Judy Arnold and Steve Kinsey would form the new majority on the five-member board of supervisors. That board is now often dominated by Adams and fellow progressives Charles McGlashan and Hal Brown.

On the campaign's marquee issue, the formation of the Marin Energy Authority, the Adams-Mazzoni race is a de facto referendum on the authority's plan to replace PG&E as Marin's principal electricity provider.

McGlashan was the board's spark plug behind MEA, the pioneering effort to allow community choice in selecting local power providers. Adams sees the agency's environmental benefits overwhelming what she considers slight financial risks.

For Mazzoni, MEA was "the precipitating factor" convincing her to enter the race at the last minute. Calling it "too risky in difficult financial times," she urges Marin to instead emulate Sonoma's so-far successful effort offering homeowners low interest loans to install eco-friendly solar heating and cooling systems.

Mazzoni is the first major candidate for supervisor ever to call for systematic conversion of Marin's troubled county employees retirement system into a private enterprise-style 401(k) plan. For new hires that would replace the current defined-benefit scheme which guarantees fixed retirement payments for life.

Adams, while recognizing the pension plan's ruinous five-year $46 million deficit, calls for the state Legislature to enact uniform, statewide reforms. Mazzoni responded that "the way the unions have a stranglehold on the Democrats É waiting for Sacramento to do anything is folly."

Whatever the issue, the Dutra quarry, the proposed $100 million county emergency operations center, the fate of the boarded-up Marinwood Shopping Center, the paper bag ban tax, the need for a Marin Economic Forum or a homeless shelter in San Rafael, Adams is on the left and Mazzoni to her right.

Since both are well-qualified, hard-working and personable, the race isn't a personality contest. This pivotal decision will be made solely on how individual voters come down on these issues.
Those who lean to the left likely would vote for Adams. Moderates and conservatives probably will mark their ballot for Mazzoni.

Whoever wins, the result will be a county supervisor who commences her term with a true electoral mandate.

Susan Adams ran on "Cows not Condos in 2002.  In 2014 favors "Smart Growth" to urbanize Marin at a scale not seen in decades. The housing element for unincorporated Marin encourages the increase in 30% of the housing stock in Marinwood-Lucas Valley with tax free "non profit" housing.

Now Marin Board of Supervisors are considering going into the Medical Marijuana Business

Have you seen my medicine?

Editorial Update 2/27/2014: Marin Board of Supervisors considering going into the Medical Marijuana Business HERE.


The Marin IJ reported on May 20, 2013, that the Grand Jury recommends the sale of Medical Marijuana in Unincorporated Marin which includes Marinwood Lucas Valley.  Maybe Marinwood Village will have it's own dispensary.

In May 2012, The Board of Supervisors unanimously banned cigarette smoking in apartments in Unincorporated Marin including all of Marinwood -Lucas Valley. 

Supervisor Susan Adams, a maternity nurse, noted the law and associated legislation cracking down on vendors who sell tobacco to minors was "another tool in the toolbag to help us create healthy communities."

Marinwood Village to allow Medical Pot use 

by Law

The county law, called the "Marin County Smoke Free Air and Health Protection" ordinance, does not apply to smoking other plant or herbal matter, including marijuana. Approval of the tobacco law was delayed for several months because an initial version also applied to herbs including marijuana, confusing a definition of tobacco and raising legal flags.

See the full article here: Marin County Bans Tobacco but Allows Pot

Or just maybe a pot dispensary will go into one of

the vacant commercial spaces in Marinwood Village?

see: Marin supervisors explore possibility of permitting medical pot dispensaries

Perhaps our Supervisor Susan Adams has a comment. She has served on a committee to study legal use and implementation

see: Medical Marijuana

[Editor's Note: The County Housing element which will place 71% of all affordable housing for unincorporated Marin in Marinwood-Lucas Valley. It is important to consider how these high density developments will affect quality of life.  We can't resist the cheap shot to point out how the topsy turvy logic of the County Supervisors cannot be underestimated.  To be fair, it should be noted that medical marijauna use is allowed under certain California legal restrictions everywhere.]

Friday Night Music Mix with Planxty

Balance

The Secret Behind How This Guy Balances Rocks Is Very Unusual. Can You Guess It?

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Michael Grab has mastered the art of stone balancing. He explains how he does it. “The most fundamental element of balancing in a physical sense is finding some kind of “tripod” for the rock to stand on. Every rock is covered in a variety of tiny to large indentations that can act as a tripod for the rock to stand upright, or in most orientations you can think of with other rocks. By paying close attention to the feeling of the rocks, you will start to feel even the smallest clicks as the notches of the rocks in contact are moving over one another. In the finer point balances, these clicks can be felt on a scale smaller than millimeters. Some point balances will give the illusion of weightlessness as the rocks look to be barely touching. Parallel to the physical element of finding tripods, the most fundamental non-physical element is harder to explain through words. In a nutshell, I am referring to meditation, or finding a zero point or silence within yourself. Some balances can apply significant pressure on your mind and your patience. The challenge is overcoming any doubt that may arise.”

Michael says “it’s a fun way to relax, release stress, play, create… learn… all while challenging my skills and dabbling with countless possibilities…”

Credit: www.gravityglue.com

Where the One Bay Area Plan came from.."

The One Bay Area Plan has it's roots in academic and activist circles decades ago.

Learn more about the One Bay Area Plan at www.onebayarea.org and speak up. This overambitious plan is for the next 25-40 years of your life. 

Speak out.  Democracy is not a spectator sport.

Congratulations to Strawberry for stopping the PDA (for now)

Strawberry is Safe from the PDA (for now)

Read about it in the Marin IJ HERE

Video: The Invisible Peak

The Invisible Peak from Gary Yost on Vimeo.

This is a beautiful visual poem to Mt. Tam.  Narrated by Peter Coyote.

Brave New Schools

Guest post by California English teacher Cherie Zaslawsky

The much touted Common Core Standards (CCS) Initiative that is being pushed as a silver bullet to improve our schools is not simply the latest fad in education: CCS is actually an unprecedented program that would radically alter our entire K-12 educational system, affecting content (i.e. curriculum), delivery (largely via computer), testing (also via computer), teacher evaluations (connected to test scores), as well as creating an intrusive database of sensitive information from student “assessments.” This program, for all the protestations to the contrary, represents the nationalization of education in America, extinguishing any semblance of local control. Furthermore, it was essentially developed at the behest of billionaire Bill Gates, who also funded it to the tune of some $150 million, and who clearly thinks he knows what’s best for everybody else’s children. (His own are safely ensconced in private schools).

California adopted the Common Core Standards (CCS) Initiative on August 2, 2010, only two months after the standards were released. Nor has this multi-billion dollar program ever been piloted anywhere! It’s a nationwide experiment—with our children as the subjects.  Nor was CCS ever internationally benchmarked. In California, as in most states, there was no time to devote to studying the intricacies of the program, vetting it, or introducing it to the public. Instead, Race to the Top money was dangled in front of state legislatures, and 45 states sprang for it, but 16 of these states at last count are already seeking to withdraw from the program.

Parents need to understand the implications of the Common Core Standards. These standards, which amount to a national curriculum via bundled tests, texts and teacher evaluations, would severely degrade our local schools. How? By lowering the standards of high-performing schools to make them “equal” with low-performing schools, in a misguided attempt to reach what its proponents call “equity” or “fairness” by mandating the lowest common denominator for all schools. True, this would close the muchballyhooed “achievement gap”—but only by dumbing down the education of the best and brightest to better match that of the unmotivated and/or less academically gifted.

The idea that all students should perform identically sounds eerily like something out of  Mao’s China. What happened to our relishing of individual talents and uniqueness? Would we lower the standards for the best athletes to put them on a par with mediocre athletes to close the “performance gap” in, say, high school football?

How do a few of the experts view this program? Dr. James Milgrim of Stanford University, the only mathematician on the Common Core validation team, refused to sign off on the math standards because he discovered that by the end of 8th grade, CCS will leave our students two years behind in math compared to those in high-performing countries. And according to Dr. Sandra Stotsky, the respected expert who developed the Massachusetts standards, widely regarded as the best in the nation, “Common Core’s ‘college readiness’ standards for ELA are chiefly empty skill sets and cannot lead to even a meaningful high school diploma. Only a literature-rich curriculum can. College readiness has always depended on the complexity of the literary texts teachers teach and a coherent literature curriculum.”

As English teacher Christel Swasey notes:  “We become compassionate humans by receiving and passing on classic stories. Souls are enlarged by exposure to the characters, the imagery, the rich vocabulary, the poetic language and the endless forms of the battle between good and evil, that live in classic literature.”  Instead, students will swim in the murky waters of relativism where all things are equal and no moral compass exists. We should not be surprised if they are also encouraged to view history along the lines of multiculturalism, “social equity,” and the Communitarian glorification of the collectivist “global village.”

Consider how drastically literature is being marginalized (30%) in favor of “informational” texts (70%) in the 12th  grade, with a maximum of only 50% literature ever, throughout middle and high school English classes. The switch to a steady diet of “informational” texts virtually ensures that students won’t be learning to think critically or to write probing, analytical essays, let alone to develop the love of reading and appreciation for the literary masterpieces of Western culture. Put in practical terms, it means that instead of reading Hamlet, Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice, your child will be reading computer manuals and tracts on “climate change,” “environmental justice,” and the virtues of recycling.

And the price of mediocrity? In California, implementation cost is estimated at $2.1 billion, with $1.4 billion as upfront costs—mainly for computers (every child needs one—along with special apps—could that be one reason Bill Gates poured a cool $150 million into this program? Perhaps giving new meaning to the word “philanthropist”…) along with training teachers to navigate the complicated new programs. Even though it’s been proven—as if we needed proof—that children learn better from real live teachers than from staring at LCD screens.

In addition, tests and “assessments” will be taken on computers—resulting in the harvesting of personal data that amounts to a dossier on every child, including choice tidbits about Mommy and Daddy.  And what is to stop the powers-that-be from using these assessments and test results to “re-educate” “politically incorrect” students who show too much independence?

Clearly Common Core is a disaster in the making.  So what can we do? The simplest solution is to insist that our school boards turn down the carrot of federal funding and reject Common Core in order to preserve the integrity of our local schools through local control and to continue to allow our teachers to use their creativity in the classroom. The price of compliance with Common Core, however tempting monetarily speaking, is just too high— the mortgaging of our children’s future.

Editor's Note: The Common Core curriculum is being taught in the Dixie School District and Terra Linda High

The Game’s Afoot

see  The Game's Afoot

Have professional consultants descended on your town and “facilitated” meetings to “envision” more “vibrancy” in your downtown?

If we’d been paying attention, we might have noticed that Al Gore, while using highly controversial—some say spurious—evidence to sell us on the notion of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, leapt to a rather curious and drastic solution: the “wrenching transformation” of America.

That’s wrenching, as in “to pull or twist someone or something suddenly and violently,” and transformation, as in “a radical change”…whether for better or worse. After all, with the US clocking in at only 4.5% of the world’s population, even if Americans traded their beloved cars for skateboards, this would hardly make a difference in the earth’s climate. No, this was never about cooling off supposed planetary fever. It was about grinding America down into an oppressed, de-industrialized nation.

So how do you “wrench” the world’s foremost free and prosperous nation into a downtrodden, virtually third-world status? In a word, sneakily.

You do it by creating Orwellian terminology to hoodwink the public into accepting new paradigms that lower peoples’ standard of living and impinge on their freedoms. You use incrementalism, changing things ever so slightly, little by little. (Think of the proverbial unsuspecting frog in the gradually heating pot of water.)

You fill the media and state and local governments with your agenda, masked as strategies to “save the planet” or to create “equity,” or to “protect” lizards and minnows. (In Texas, 4,400 acres are currently “protected” for the benefit of a species of blind salamander—I kid you not. And in California, 250,000 acres of prime Central Valley farmland were “transformed” into a virtual dustbowl after the irrigation water was cut off to “protect” a tiny minnow called the Delta Smelt.)

You do it by forcing cities to march to a new drumbeat as you quietly alter their zoning laws and land use policies, striking surreptitiously at the heart of property ownership and individual rights.

Take your own city. Have professional consultants descended on your town and “facilitated” meetings to “envision” more “vibrancy” in your downtown? Was the outcome a new Specific Plan or “Gateway Project” with new zoning laws permitting substantially higher density because the “consensus” reached during the “visioning” favored the “vibrancy” of multistory, mixed-use, high-density housing projects adjacent to rail or bus lines? What a coincidence! That happened in my town, too.

And perhaps, once the precedent of urbanized, higher density development had been set in your heretofore tranquil suburb, it became time to “update” the town’s General Plan for “consistency” with your new “Specific Plan.” Get the idea?

In fact, much of the wrenching transformation we are now facing is being presented to us under the seemingly innocuous guise of the “update.” For this is not only being applied to General Plans, but to Housing Elements, and Zoning Ordinances as well. We might say the cancer of the wrenching transformation that began in our Specific Plans soon metastasized to cover our whole city.

But it did not stop there.

Here in California, much of said transformation is being inflicted on us via newly powerful regional boards. Again, as with the supposedly innocuous “updates” of pre-existing city planning documents, these regional boards existed for decades without doing harm, so why be concerned about them now? Why indeed! Seemingly overnight, these boards of unelected, non-representational bureaucrats began to dictate to the residents/citizens/voters all over the Bay Area, precisely in the manner of Soviet councils imposing top-down, central planning agendas on a disenfranchised citizenry. The now-hated though innocent-sounding boards ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) and MTC (Metropolitan Transportation Commission), in spite of vehement public opposition, passed their infamous Plan Bay Area last summer. This Plan will compel people to live in high-density multi-story stack-and-pack housing projects in narrow “transit corridors” and drastically curtail driving, all for the “good of the planet.”

Plan Bay Area also creates Priority Conservation Areas (PCAs—these guys love acronyms), which comprise the majority of Bay Area lands, and woe to those who live in such newly designated areas. Their property rights are no longer worth the paper they are printed on. For, ominously, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is in the process of “updating” the State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP).  And from here, anything goes—very likely including swaps (OK, pun intended, but you can bet they thought of it first). For example, your backyard may be deemed essential to the well-being of long-toed salamanders, so off you go into a cramped apartment in a high-rise near the train, the better to leave the salamanders in peace.

Here is a telling quote from the CDFW pertaining to the update in question: “The conservation strategies take into consideration the relationship between the biology and ecology of the natural environment, together with the social, economic, political and institutional systems that may affect the habitats being conserved.” So the priority is the “habitat” for reptiles, fish and assorted predatory and other animals, trumping the rights of property owners, i.e. people/residents/voters/American citizens/human beings.

And what does the CDFW seek to accomplish? To “create a common vision (that word again) for fish and wildlife conservation in California,” and to “update species at risk, vulnerable species and species of greatest conservation need lists,” among other things. By the way, the other things will apparently include a huge, statewide land-grab by means of claiming that most of the land in California is necessary for “conservation” purposes—the lizards and minnows again. Interestingly, Stalin didn’t find it necessary to rationalize his “land reforms” so that the peasants would quietly accept the State confiscation: he just starved them to death. But then the Ukrainian peasants would have surely seen through such ruses as “species protection” or “biodiversity” arguments and continued to fight against collectivization of their lands.

Of course, it couldn’t happen here…or could it?

Cherie Zaslawsky is a writer/editor/educator who lives in California. After many years as an unquestioning liberal Democrat, she woke up to reality, and hopes to help others do likewise.

You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.(Problems with Common Core)

You think you know what teachers do. Right? Wrong.

• By Valerie Strauss

• February 22 at 11:30 

(freepik.com)

You went to school so you think you know what teachers do, right? You are wrong. Here’s a piece explaining all of this from Sarah Blaine, a mom, former teacher and full-time practicing attorney in New Jersey who writes at her parentingthecore blog, where this first appeared.

By Sarah Blaine

We all know what teachers do, right? After all, we were all students. Each one of us, each product of public education, we each sat through class after class for thirteen years. We encountered dozens of teachers. We had our kindergarten teachers and our first grade teachers and our fifth grade teachers and our gym teachers and our art teachers and our music teachers. We had our science teachers and our social studies teachers and our English teachers and our math teachers. If we were lucky, we might even have had our Latin teachers or our Spanish teachers or our physics teachers or our psychology teachers. Heck, I even had a seventh grade “Communications Skills” teacher. We had our guidance counselors and our principals and some of us had our special education teachers and our study hall monitors.

So we know teachers. We get teachers. We know what happens in classrooms, and we know what teachers do. We know which teachers are effective, we know which teachers left lasting impressions, we know which teachers changed our lives, and we know which teachers sucked.

We know. We know which teachers changed lives for the better. We know which teachers changed lives for the worse.

Teaching as a profession has no mystery. It has no mystique. It has no respect.
We were students, and therefore we know teachers. We denigrate teachers. We criticize teachers. We can do better than teachers. After all: We do. They teach.

We are wrong.

We need to honor teachers. We need to respect teachers. We need to listen to teachers. We need to stop reducing teachers to arbitrary measurements of student growth on so-called objective exams.

Most of all, we need to stop thinking that we know anything about teaching merely by virtue of having once been students.

We don’t know.

I spent a little over a year earning a master of arts in teaching degree. Then I spent two years teaching English Language Arts in a rural public high school. And I learned that my 13 years as a public school student, my 4 years as a college student at a highly selective college, and even a great deal of my year as a master’s degree student in the education school of a flagship public university hadn’t taught me how to manage a classroom, how to reach students, how to inspire a love of learning, how to teach. Eighteen years as a student (and a year of preschool before that), and I didn’t know anything about teaching. Only years of practicing my skills and honing my skills would have rendered me a true professional. An expert. Someone who knows about the business of inspiring children. Of reaching students. Of making a difference. Of teaching.

I didn’t stay. I copped out. I left. I went home to suburban New Jersey, and a year later I enrolled in law school.

I passed the bar. I began to practice law at a prestigious large law firm. Three years as a law student had no more prepared me for the practice of law than 18 years of experience as a student had previously prepared me to teach. But even in my first year as a practicing attorney, I earned five times what a first-year teacher made in the district where I’d taught.

I worked hard in my first year of practicing law. But I didn’t work five times harder than I’d worked in my first year of teaching. In fact, I didn’t work any harder. Maybe I worked a little less.

But I continued to practice. I continued to learn. Nine years after my law school graduation, I think I have some idea of how to litigate a case. But I am not a perfect lawyer. There is still more I could learn, more I could do, better legal instincts I could develop over time. I could hone my strategic sense. I could do better, be better. Learn more law. Learn more procedure. But law is a practice, law is a profession. Lawyers are expected to evolve over the course of their careers. Lawyers are given more responsibility as they earn it.

New teachers take on full responsibility the day they set foot in their first classrooms.
The people I encounter out in the world now respect me as a lawyer, as a professional, in part because the vast majority of them have absolutely no idea what I really do.
All of you former students who are not teachers and not lawyers, you have no more idea of what it is to teach than you do of what it is to practice law.

All of you former students: you did not design curricula, plan lessons, attend faculty meetings, assess papers, design rubrics, create exams, prepare report cards, and monitor attendance. You did not tutor students, review rough drafts, and create study questions. You did not assign homework. You did not write daily lesson objectives on the white board. You did not write poems of the week on the white board. You did not write homework on the white board. You did not learn to write legibly on the white board while simultaneously making sure that none of your students threw a chair out a window.
You did not design lessons that succeeded. You did not design lessons that failed.
You did not learn to keep your students quiet during lock down drills.

You did not learn that your 15-year-old students were pregnant from their answers to vocabulary quizzes. You did not learn how to teach functionally illiterate high school students to appreciate Shakespeare. You did not design lessons to teach students close reading skills by starting with the lyrics to pop songs. You did not miserably fail your honors level students at least in part because you had no books to give them. You did not struggle to teach your students how to develop a thesis for their essays, and bask in the joy of having taught a successful lesson, of having gotten through to them, even for five minutes. You did not struggle with trying to make SAT-level vocabulary relevant to students who did not have a single college in their county. You did not laugh — because you so desperately wanted to cry — when you read some of the absurdities on their final exams. You did not struggle to reach students who proudly announced that they only came to school so that their mom’s food stamps didn’t get reduced.

You did not spend all of New Years’ Day crying five years after you’d left the classroom because you reviewed The New York Times’ graphic of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and learned that one of your very favorite students had been killed in Iraq two years before. And you didn’t know. Because you copped out and left. So you cried, helplessly, and the next day you returned to the practice of law.

You did not. And you don’t know. You observed. Maybe you learned. But you didn’t teach.

The problem with teaching as a profession is that every single adult citizen of this country thinks that they know what teachers do. And they don’t. So they prescribe solutions, and they develop public policy, and they editorialize, and they politicize. And they don’t listen to those who do know. Those who could teach. The teachers.

Never be Fearful - Rosa Parks

The planning ideas behind Marin County Urbanization-Smart Growth

The above shows the PDAs in Marin that Supervisor Susan Adams created on August 7, 2007  The 101 corridor PDA is all land within 1/2 mile of 101 freeway.  It is projected to have 80% of all urban growth in the next 25 years through changing zoning laws, building more apartments, condominiums and splitting lots. The result will be the transformation of Marinwood-Lucas Valley to city living. Here is a video that was produced  for people of Lafayette, LA to warn them about the "invasion of the politicians and smart growth planners".

The Supervisor's Races are likely to be Brutal

The Supervisors Races in Marin are likely to be brutal. The beleagered Susan Adams faces San Rafael Vice Mayor Damon Connelly and Judy Arnold faces the young, energetic Toni Shroyer. Old school politicians Adams and Arnold are known for their aggressive attacks funded by special interest money. 

Adams and Arnold have been tone deaf to their local constituents and have pushed for the urbanization of Marin. To survive this campaign, they are expected to go all out to keep their seats. We would hope that instead they actually engage the people who elected them into office and save Marin from rapid urbanization and overdevelopment.

Surveillance, National Identity Cards, in England for "Public Safety" .

The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It.