I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of my organization or by taking a Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.

–Martin Luther King, Jr., in his speech “Domestic impact of the war”, National Labor Leadership Assembly for Peace, November 1967

I have been completely unable to take in, process and write about what’s going on in Gaza right now. Juan Cole, as usual, has expert analysis on his blog, as well as on Salon.

If you know nothing else about this carnage, know that your tax money is going to slaughter women, children, and the elderly. This is not “fighting”, as they keep saying on NPR, this is a massacre.

Cease fire now!

Protest the attacks on Gaza, 11 am – 1 pm Saturday, January 10, NE 13th and Broadway in Portland.

Demonstration against the Israeli attacks on Palestinians

3 pm, January 10, Pioneer Courthouse Square

Called for by Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, Portland Peaceful Response Coalition, Sabeel North America, American Jews for a Just Peace and other organizations. For further information, contact Hala Gores at Hala@goreslaw.com or (503)307-9339 or Peter Miller at Pmiller@auphr.org or (503)358-7475.

Or: How to govern like a woman

On the day that Portland’s seventh-ever woman city commissioner was sworn in, Anna Griffin ran a non-apology in The Oregonian for once (or was it twice?) having called then-candidate Amanda Fritz “shrill.”

Fritz objected to this, naturally, as sexist (how many times has an Oregonian columnist called a man shrill?).

In Griffin’s completely insubstantial column Saturday [warning! Oregonian link; will be dead within two weeks], she begins with “an apology” but goes right on to repeat the original offense:

Fritz can be shrill, in the dictionary sense of the word. Her voice rises to a sharp and sometimes scary point when she’s irritated. Her tendency to nitpick and parse every last syllable and statistic might prove beneficial for taxpayers but can be… an obstacle to building consensus.

Griffin goes to some length to show her feminist cred, but in the end, she can’t rise above her own glee in thinking she’s getting away with it just one more time.

Give ’em hell at City Hall, Commissioner. Just don’t be too shrill about it, OK?

That’s right, folks, on this historical day for women in government in the state of Oregon and the City of Portland, a columnist for the biggest daily in the state called Amanda Fritz “shrill” not once, but twice, in a column ostensibly intended as an apology for having called her shrill in the past.

Hey, why not go ahead and call her hysterical, too?

I can appreciate that Griffin is trying to be humorous, in the mold of old-boy newspaper columnists paid good money to crank out 15 column inches of pablum a couple times a week.

But even if she were any good in that role, what purpose does it serve in the age of electronic media? Her column won’t even be easily available after 14 days, so who cares what Griffin writes in the rapidly declining Oregonian? (This blog entry, gods and goddesses willing, will be available in the archives as long as there is an Internet.)

Fortunately, Amanda doesn’t care what they say in the ol’ fish wrapper. She didn’t want me to write this. She thought it best just to let it go. She’s probably right, but there are a number of lessons here.

One lesson is about the waning relevance of the Big City Daily and the limited range of voices they publish.

A more important lesson is about women of substance, especially those unafraid of appearing feminine, who seek and attain power, and the higher standards by which they are judged when compared to men (or to women who act like men). Griffin clearly doesn’t get this, or can’t articulate it if she does. She mumbles through a few paragraphs about Condoleezza Rice and Hillary and Oregon’s political women, but somehow fails to say anything of substance vis-à-vis Amanda Fritz’s election as a woman who did not play the good ol’ boy game to get elected.

She got elected on her own terms, with massive popular support in a very crowded field of men — all without acting like a man.

I supported Amanda in part because she is a woman, and because she thinks like a woman. We need her attention to detail, and I want her to take stands on principle, even if it blocks consensus. If you call that kind of passion, conviction and steady ferocity shrill, you need a better thesaurus.

For the first time in our avocation as a Web publishers, the family server has been upgraded to a brand new machine.

Until the last box could no longer keep up with the load, I was committed to using only discarded hardware running free software to keep the ol’ Wacky Enterprises blog farm humming. I’m still committed to open source software, but ever-increasing traffic had grown beyond the last machine’s ability to cope.

The last straw was when a disk on the old box started showing errors, and the price of a new machine was only a little more than the price of a new disk. Go figure; I guess the time had come.

The new unit features a modern, fast, 64-bit dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM. This may not sound impressive, but it replaces a single-core 32-bit machine with 256MB of RAM, which was a replacement for the original box, a 200MHz Pentium Pro with 32MB or RAM.

For the non-nerds, that basically means that performance issues we suffered due to memory swapping on our old machine should be non-existent with this one.

For the nerds, on the old machine I had to tune apache to keep it from spawning too many child processes, lest the machine run out of memory, start swapping, and bring the blog farm to its knees. Even with careful tuning, the old machine was so short on memory, it was constantly teetering on swapping, and I had to have a process monitor the load average and kill and restart Web server processes from time to time. That meant the Web server would get itself wedged into a corner, visitors would have timeouts and authors wouldn’t know if their post got saved.

The new box hummed through its first day today without a hiccup (and without the load average rising above 0.31).

For those who are really interested in the nerdly details, here are the particulars:

• Intel Core Duo CPU E7300 @ 2.66GHz
• 2 GB RAM
• Linux 2.6.27.7-9-default x86_64 (openSUSE 11.1)
• MySQL, Apache, PHP, WordPress

It’s a well known fact around Portland that an inch of snow can shut the town down. So what happens when we get a series of storms over two weeks dropping over a foot of snow and ice? Bedlam.

A lack of equipment, which is usually only needed once a year or less, is compounded by a lack of strategic planning and tactical expertise. While in other major cities efficient snow removal is a political issue that makes or breaks politicians and high-level bureaucrats, in Portland we have the Marion Barry approach. His infamous snow removal system? The sun.

In Portland, we depend more on the jet stream to swing back north, bringing us warm, wet Pacific storms like the one currently looming, threatening flooding as it melts off several inches of snow and ice.

But while we wait for the flood to clear the snow and ice, the city has been shut down to various degrees for two weeks.

So, who’s in charge?

There’s TriMet, running public transit across three counties and several cities, at the mercy of the various state, county and city transportation agencies for snow removal. They kept the blue line light rail running, but shut down the yellow and red lines for various periods during the storm. All bus lines had significant delays, and many routes were canceled completely for days. Their Web site at least had reasonably up-to-date information, as did electronic reader boards at transit stations.

Metro picks up the trash, but their Web site offers no information on delays of trash pickup (already interrupted by the Christmas holiday). Are the trucks running today? Our cans are in the snow bank by the curb, waiting.

The storm caught Portland during during the final weeks in office for mayor Tom Potter. You can’t expect much from a lame duck mayor, but where’s Sam Adams, incoming mayor and, notably, current commissioner of transportation?

You might expect a reassuring message to the citizen’s of Portland in the midst of the worst winter storm in decades. Instead, we hear Adams paraphrased on our hysterical (in both senses of the word) TV news that there are no snow chains available in Portland. With the sight of snow flakes striking abject fear into the hearts of Portlanders, that’s not the kind of message you want to send as a leader.

(Here’s a funny parody of our local television “storm team” coverage).

The exceeding rarity of this much snow on the ground may excuse a certain amount of chaos, but there are many things Portland could do better, even with its limited budget and its small, aging fleet of 50 snow plows. Sure, it costs money to be prepared for the occasional winter storms we get around here, but what’s the economic cost of shutting down the city for two weeks?

Mainly we’re lacking leadership and communication. What’s the plan, who’s going to implement it, and what are we going to do if it doesn’t work out? If this were any other city, the 2008 Christmas Storm would be considered Sam Adam’s first test of leadership… and he would be getting failing marks.

What’s going to happen if we have a real crisis, like a major earthquake? Will we have leadership, or is it every fool for himself in Portland? The way things have gone over the last two weeks, I sure hope, for the sake of us all, that the Adams administration isn’t presented with that kind of leadership challenge.

(The cat won.)

Due to ever-increasing visitor loads, the server that hosts this blog (and a few others) is no longer able to keep up. Coincidentally, our router is failing. And we’re dealing with snow and ice in Portland, which could easily lead to prolonged power outages.

A new, more powerful server is on order for the new year, and a new router should be installed in the next two days. Meanwhile, don’t be surprised if we’re offline from time to time in the next couple weeks!