Nick Moushi’s unsettled eyes betray his meticulously maintained appearance. His thick, black hair is carefully laid back over his head and he sports a tightly drawn beard, keeping the stubble to a day’s growth except around his mouth and chin where a neatly groomed goatee is allowed a little leeway. He wears a crisp t-shirt and leaves a faint trail of cologne behind him as he attends to customers in a little grocery store located in the Antique Row section of Adams Avenue, a small section of the famed street sandwiched between San Diego’s eclectic Normal Heights and University Heights neighborhoods.

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You may have noticed I haven’t been posting much. Sorry for the abrupt stop, but I think a break from blogging is in good order for a while. I’ve got a lot going on in the real world right now, and to be honest sitting in front of the computer for hours and hours gets old. Real old. Instead, I’ve been reading, pursuing a career change, and spending more time and energy on things that matter in the long run.

Questions, comments, complaints? Drop me a line.

-T

Several Oregon fire crew chiefs have been demoted on the front lines recently over safety concerns. Their fault? They don’t speak Spanish.

Via theDenverChannel.com:

With 24 major wildfires burning across the southwestern United States, fire officials need every firefighter they can get. They’ve done that in Oregon, but it’s created another problem.

Officials are now having to lay off some of the bosses who manage those firefighting crews because the bosses are not bilingual. Many of the newer hires in Oregon only speak Spanish.

“What we do know is 85 percent of the crew makeup is of Hispanic descent,” said Jim Walker, with the Oregon Department of Forestry.

The state said all bosses must speak the same language of their crew on the fire lines for safety reasons. They want to make sure that the leader of the crews can quickly communicate during an emergencey [sic] if the fire turns or if there is another problem on the fire lines.

“Our main concern is that they are safe, and they are in a safe environment, and a lot of that deals with communication,” Walker said.

break

So why couldn’t the state require that these crew members speak English? The state doesn’t have a clear answer.

“If it comes down to a safety issue, and it’s determined that’s the only way we can have people safely on an incident, then yes,” Walker said.

There have always been pockets of non-English speaking parts of American cities. Just as Spanish-speaking individuals have little trouble conducting their daily affairs such as banking, grocery shopping or applying for a city permit in much of California, a hundred years ago Yiddish-speaking immigrants enjoyed the same luxury of conducting their affairs in their native tongue on Manhattan’s lower east side. Although many immigrants are hard working, learning English does not need to be a priority because American society is fairly tolerant when it comes to learning (or not learning) English.

However, our nation’s public affairs, such as government business, freeway signs and fire and police services, among other important public spheres, are conducted solely in English, the national language. The quickest way to confuse public safety workers and truly destabilize our world-renowned public safety system would be to introduce a foreign language into the communication apparatus. Having bilingual fire chiefs on the job is great; requiring that they be bilingual is an unnecessary and unfair stipulation, severely limiting the pool of qualified candidates to choose from. What kind of safety does a fire chief afford his fireman when his sole qualification is that he speaks Spanish?

A better way to ensure safety along the fire lines is to require firemen to speak English, so that when they drive to the fires they will be able to read the street signs and maps telling them how to get there; so that whey they coordinate with other agencies (presumably staffed with English speaking personnel) there is no language barrier; and so the world’s premier public safety system does not deteriorate into an uncommunicative mess with the potential to harm workers and the people they are supposed to protect alike.

An easy policy fix to the Oregon problem might entail raising wages for firemen on the front lines. If they pay appropriately, there should be no shortage of English-speaking job candidates willing to perform the work. Safely.

Why is it the ACLU more often than not finds itself trying to thwart common sense solutions to societal problems? Are they trying to make it difficult for law enforcement to catch the bad guys? The short answer is, yes. The long answer is, yes.

AP:

Fed up with deadly drive-by shootings, incessant drug dealing and graffiti, cities nationwide are trying a different tactic to combat gangs: They’re suing them.

Fort Worth and San Francisco are among the latest to file lawsuits against gang members, asking courts for injunctions barring them from hanging out together on street corners, in cars or anywhere else in certain areas.

The injunctions are aimed at disrupting gang activity before it can escalate. They also give police legal reasons to stop and question gang members, who often are found with drugs or weapons, authorities said. In some cases, they don’t allow gang members to even talk to people passing in cars or to carry spray paint.

“It is another tool,” said Kevin Rousseau, a Tarrant County assistant prosecutor in Fort Worth, which recently filed its first civil injunction against a gang. “This is more of a proactive approach.”

But critics say such lawsuits go too far, limiting otherwise lawful activities and unfairly targeting minority youth.

“If you’re barring people from talking in the streets, it’s difficult to tell if they’re gang members or if they’re people discussing issues,” said Peter Bibring, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.

“Discussing issues”? Do these ACLU attorneys realize what an ass they make of themselves sometimes?

h/t Stop the ACLU

$500 and 150 hours later, the man never has to get off the couch to snag a beer from the fridge again:

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The Nose On Your Face:

As baseball fans heatedly debate the merits of Barry Bonds’ inevitable ascendance to career home run king, a different controversy surfaced yesterday when the asterisk, the star-like typographical symbol expected by many to appear alongside Bonds’ place in the record books to denote the slugger’s steroid use, announced that it wanted “no part” of Bonds’ record. In the shocking announcement, a visibly testy asterisk said the association with the slugger’s tarnished image would sully its “storied reputation” and perhaps impact its ability to find meaningful work in the future.

More

“A few women and men come here every for to six months,” says a local man in his 20’s, interviewed while blowing up the condom as a balloon, “and give us this, but no one tells us anything. We do not know what it is. They hand over at least a dozen pieces to each villager and leave without sharing a word. We give them to children to play and we also play with these balloons. What else is the use?”

Um…no comment. Video report here.

Has the thought of global warming got you worried about larger hurricanes and smaller polar bear populations? No need to worry. Just relax and watch this video…

(click on the image to start)

Feel better?

Update: Don Surber linked (thank you!), wondering: “Hmm, maybe Global Warming actually leads to more polar bears. If true, that’s bad news for those delicious baby seals that they like to eat.”

Michael Yon:

So I walked into the TOC at about 0320 that Saturday morning, and there was a video feed coming in from an F-16. Crosshairs were steady on a house the pilot was circling. We could sometimes hear the jet as it orbited over the Baqubah. The Shadow was circling the same house but from a lower altitude.

“What’s up with the house?” I asked.
“An element took SAFIRE (small arms fire) and the enemy ran into that house.”
“What’re you gonna do?”
“Trying to decide. Probably bomb it.”

‘Bomb it,” he said. Sounded simple. Question is, with what?

Read the rest of Michael Yon’s latest dispatch to find out the answer. Also, when US soldiers kick Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) out of Baqubah, grateful Iraqis start smoking cigarettes and drinking cold water again, two activities previously banned by AQI under threat of death and dismemberment.

Let the walls talk:

On my side of the office, there is

A large, framed map of North and South America, circa 1650, hanging on the wall

A handwritten note (by me) reminding me of ways to be kind to my wife, taped to the wall a few inches above my L-shaped desk

A brown, coverless book titled California in Our Time: 1900:1940 (1947), by Robert Glass Cleland

Two black Logitech speakers singing sweet Pogues songs

A desk calendar from Staples flipped to June, 2007, covered by a pile of unopened mail

A small plant, dying

A colorful metal sign poster, bought in Ireland, advertising in red letters “Lovely day for a GUINNESS” above a smiling Irishman pulling his cart and smiling horse behind him

A digital telephone, advertising in red letters “24″ (as in messages)

A silver wireless mouse

A black Belkin gel mouse pad

A Gibson Les Paul electric guitar and Fender Acoustic/Electric guitar, both in black guitar cases

A beech wood book shelf by Ikea, stocked with CD’s, Bibles, law textbooks, Stratego and various volumes authored by names like Shakespeare, Coulter, Foster, Lewis and the like.

A copy of ZooNooz, August 2007

A Dell computer, faithfully grinding the gears late into the night

A yellow post it note from my wife, taped to the bottom of the computer monitor, reading “I [heart] U” in black and red letters

A blue Papermate pen, sans cap

My glasses