This won't take long to spell out. How long it'll take to fix, I don't know.

Spinning around the radio dial Wednesday, I alighted on a news story about the water deal reached in Sacramento. The announcer said something to the effect that the deal balances both ''human and environmental'' concerns.

What? Stop! When are we going to get it through our still-insufficiently evolved craniums [crania, if you like] that environmental concerns ARE human concerns, that we are only as healthy and as likely to survive as are our fellow species and the land and water and air on this planet?

For years, we've been shoved into accepting the false, manipulated choice of jobs versus the environment; now there's the insidious manufactured either-or of "us versus them,"'  the `"them'' being a balanced water system and the habitat and creatures that are part of it. Well, here's some breaking news that should be old news: We ARE them.

-- Patt Morrison

For any parents who are truly shocked and dismayed that propping their babies in front of a TV didn't result in child prodigies, the Walt Disney Company has good news: It is offering a $15.99 refund for Baby Einstein videos, up to four per customer.

The company says this is just its usual satisfaction-guaranteed sort of deal. Not exactly. The videos for this refund could have been purchased at any time and used till they wore out. Receipts not required.

The videos have been the subject of complaints and a threatened lawsuit by an advocacy group called Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, which contended that contrary to the company's early claims that Baby Einstein would enhance child development, watching TV is actually detrimental to children younger than 2. The campaign had more going for its argument than Baby Einstein did, with the American Academy of Pediatrics taking a dim view of the under-2 set as a TV audience and several studies to back that up. The pitch for the videos' benefits softened in the last couple of years. 

Personally, I don't think an occasional half hour here or there of watching colorful images on TV does major harm to a baby. In fact, I see the value of video babysitting. Let's face it, the pediatrics academy isn't spending the entire day with a fussy infant. Parents need a break now and then, and if Baby Einstein keep Mom and Dad from totally losing it, I'll chalk that up as helpful to a child's development, though human interaction, play and an occasional really good burp probably do more for an infant's well-being. If anyone believed Disney had cued into a magic, painless way to create babies guaranteed to test into the Gifted and Talented Education program by third grade, their children's bigger problem wasn't in how many videos they watched, it was in their parents' DNA.

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

--Karin Klein

What's not to like about a proposed fee on California hospitals? The hospitals themselves support it, because it would bring in billions of dollars in federal funding to repay the hospitals and other health care providers for the medical care they give to poor people. The Times editorial board urges Gov. Schwarzenegger to see the logic and sign the bill to make it happen.

They call it overdraft protection, but there's little to protect the consumer from the multibillion-dollar flow of money to banks that charge a fee over and over and over again to debit-card users whose accounts can't cover their purchases. Often the fee is bigger than the purchase, but the customer simply doesn't realize the account is overdrawn. The Times calls on the Federal Reserve to fix this with rules that require better consumer information, a choice for customers who don't want the so-called protection and notification for the customer before that costly but unaffordable purchase is made.

And the board calls on Honduras to allow the return of President Manuel Zelaya -- with limited powers -- until the Nov. 29 election, though it also calls on the international community to make sure Zelaya understands he should not attempt to stay in power.

Let's admit this openly: Tuna aren't as awe-inspiring as whales. They don't spout in the middle of the ocean or do a slow dive that ends with the farewell wave of a giant tail. Nonetheless, they need protection after drastic overfishing, writes Joshua Reichert of the Pew Environment Group. On the Times Op-Ed page, Reichert argues that fishing caps haven't worked and that nothing but endangered-species status will save the Atlantic bluefin tuna.

Finally, energy journalist Richard Nemec writes that Los Angeles has been playing political musical chairs in determining leadership for the Department of Water and Power instead of hiring the experts it so desperately needs.

Photo: Gavin Newman / Greenpeace International / EPA

-- Karin Klein

Should California teachers be evaluated based on their students' performance on test scores? That's the subject of dueling pro vs. con commentaries on today's Op-Ed page. On the pro side is state Board of Education President Ted Mitchell, who says California must change a law forbidding such evaluations if it is to qualify for millions of dollars in federal funds, and that the system would help school districts reward exceptional teaching and weed out instructors who can't make the grade. On the con side is former LAUSD teacher Walt Gardner, who points out that teachers in low-performing schools are often dealing with kids from very poor families who are dealing with pressures that make learning a serious challenge, and expecting teachers to overcome such obstacles on their own is unrealistic.

Meanwhile, physicist Frank von Hippel aims to debunk claims from the nuclear-power industry that reprocessing nuclear waste is a solution to our problems with storing the highly radioactive materials. Not only is it extremely expensive, it fails to reduce the stream of long-lived nuclear waste and provides access to weapons material that could fall into dangerous hands.

Today's editorial page notes the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Bros. by pointing out that the $700-billion federal bailout that followed helped prop up the nation's financial system, and without it the economy would undoubtedly be in worse shape than it is. Nonetheless, now that the economy is on the rebound, "it's time for the administration and the Federal Reserve to lay out a strategy for pulling the government out of the financial industry."

The Times also weighs in on prospective furloughs or layoffs for city employees, who in tough financial times may be sacrificed in order to keep alive Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's ambition to keep hiring more police officers. Though that seems unfair, it's the right thing to do for Los Angeles.

And we give a boost to a package of state bills aimed at fighting animal cruelty, including a ban on puppy mills, a crackdown on dogfighting (thanks Michael Vick!), and a measure mocked by the governor to forbid docking (cutting off) the tails of cattle.

Photo by Seth Perlman / AP

The Times doesn't buy arguments that Jaycee Lee Dugard's 18-year ordeal as a kidnapping and rape victim is a reason to oppose coming reforms to California's parole system. The Assembly passed a bill Monday that would reduce the case rolls of parole officers by mandating less supervision for low-risk, non-violent ex-convicts, while increasing supervision for more dangerous criminals. That doesn't mean Dugard's alleged abductor, Phillip Garrido, and his ilk would be off the hook -- in fact, it means they would get more attention in the future, the editorial page argues.

What's the upside to the Station fire, which has killed two firefighters, burned dozens of homes, fouled L.A.'s air and destroyed thousands of acres of scrubland? It's that fire is a natural part of Southern California's ecosystem that will clear wild areas for new growth and deposit fertilizer. The real problem, The Times points out, is that the frequency of such fires is rising, and continued sprawl into wilderness areas is increasing the costs and the environmental woes.

And Japan's dramatic changeover Sunday, when the party that has ruled the country almost continuously for half a century was booted from power, gets a thumbs up from The Times. Though the Liberal Democratic Party has helped turn Japan into an economic powerhouse, a one-party state seldom makes for good governance; "competition is as important in politics as it is in business," The Times asserts.

On the Op-Ed page, global warming skeptic Jonah Goldberg wonders whether the media are giving short shrift to sunspots. Evidence is mounting not only that we're living through a period of highly unusual sunspot activity, but that such events can have a dramatic impact on Earth's climate -- meaning the current warming we're experiencing might have more to do with solar activity than the greenhouse gases Congress aims to reduce. "I don't know what [this evidence] tells you, but it tells me that maybe we should study a bit more before we spend billions to 'solve' a problem we don't understand so well," Goldberg concludes.

Rivka Carmi, president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, sounds off against one of his faculty members -- Neve Gordon, who published an opinion piece in The Times last month arguing for an economic boycott of Israel. Carmi says he can't fire Gordon for his controversial views under Israeli law, but his explosive anti-Israel rhetoric could seriously harm both the nation and the university.

Finally, Leo Hindery Jr., Leo W. Gerard and Donald Riegle argue that the "buy American" provisions of Washington's economic stimulus package level the playing field with our trading partners and boost U.S. manufacturing jobs. They back legislation that would expand them to cover all national government procurement. "'Buy American' is neither un-American nor anti-globalization. It is simply good, necessary, balanced and reciprocal economic policy."

* Photo: The Station fire as seen from a hill overlooking Tujunga. Credit: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

I headed off to bed on Monday night hoping that the smoke I was breathing and the ash that was accumulating on my car's windshield did not come from any smoldering ruins of the Mt. Wilson Observatory.

Much is being made of the radio and TV towers there -- important, certainly -- but the observatory is irreplaceable, a shrine of science past and science yet to come. It is more than 100 years old, its telescopes marvels of astronomy in their times. Its scientists recorded first upon first -- that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy, and that we are not even at the center of it. The first measurement of a star's diameter -- Betelgeuse, as it turned out -- and other firsts beyond my understanding but not beyond my appreciation.

There is an old cane chair at the observatory; Edwin Hubble used it on those cold, cold nights when he sat peering through the eyepiece of a telescope. In 1931, Albert Einstein visited and sat in the same chair. And a few years ago, when I was reporting from the observatory, the staff kindly let me park my rear end on the same hallowed chair. The connection with vital and significant human history -- even via my fundament -- was profound.

I wondered, as the reports of fire on Mt. Wilson became more fearsome -- and where, as a fire official told The Times, ''the fire is boss'' -- what had become of the chair. Had it been evacuated early Monday morning, along with the personnel? The superintendent, Dave Jurasevich, told me on KPCC radio that the chair had been sealed away tight in a special stay-and-defend vault at the observatory, and should survive whatever the landscape chooses to throw at the place.

Which, as of late Monday night, was an awful lot for a centenarian observatory to handle.  

-- Patt Morrison

Photo: The Mt. Wilson Observatory in 2002. Credit: Kevin Casey / Los Angeles Times.

Today we honored the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 that brought astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the moon's surface. But we also discovered that NASA indeed taped over the footage of that first landing.

NASA TV specialist Dick Nafzger, who headed the search for the tapes, spoke to KPCC this morning:

"I don't think anyone in the NASA organization did anything wrong," Nafzger says. "I think it slipped through the cracks, and nobody's happy about it."

After a three-year search for the tapes, NASA concluded that the original footage was deleted when the program started erasing old magnetic tape so it could record satellite data. Search team members say that as they discovered that tens of thousands of magnetic tape boxes had disappeared from the enormous government records center, their hope waned for ever finding the original moon landing footage recorded on the lunar camera operated by the astronauts. NASA says the picture was much clearer than the TV broadcast of the historic moment. How sad...

But wait! There's hope.

After piecing together a complete version of the moonwalk from a variety of broadcast television sources from around the world, NASA has contracted with Lowry Digital in Burbank, the digital restoration firm responsible for restoring movies from "Bambi" to "Star Wars," to make the "original" better. They're touching it up, making it less fuzzy and brighter so you can actually make out Neil Armstrong descending from the "Eagle" instead of the dark blob viewers saw in 1969.

So while technology makes it so that our generation and future generations will see the moonwalk with more clarity than ever before, the fact remains that it's not the original. Are we tampering with history, or preserving a moment?

--Catherine Lyons

Credit: Mark Wilson / Getty Images

An international accord on global warming? The editorial board celebrates, even though the agreement falls far short of what's needed to make a real difference. Still, it represents a new willingness by industrialized nations to tackle the issue in a serious way. The board finds something else to celebrate in the new get-tough stance by L.A. schools chief Ramon C. Cortines, who sent out letters saying that teachers who don't perform basic job duties -- like giving required tests -- will be written up. A week later, the union suspended its boycott of the tests. Coincidence? The board thinks not. One final thing to kvell about: LAPD did a great job on security for the Michael Jackson memorial, the board cheers -- but what was going on with the rest of city government? Ordering sandwiches in from Wrightwood and posting a humiliating plea for pennies to cover the costs of the memorial? The posting didn't even work; the website went down.

It's not like the city is incapable of doing anything right. By all accounts, the Police Department and traffic officers handled their end of Tuesday's event flawlessly. But in so many other ways, City Hall bumbling makes Los Angeles look laughably low-tech, shamefully disorganized, simultaneously an easy mark and a swindler, and cheap and pathetic besides.

On the other side of the fold, former longtime legislator John Vasconcellos analyzes the ingredients that went into making the state budget crisis so bad (Hint: Proposition 13 gets dragged in by its tax-restricting toes), and offers his personal recipe for climbing out of the hole. And Miguel A. Estrada, a native of Honduras and member of the U.S. delegation to President Manuel Zelaya's 2006 inauguration, explains why Zelaya's ouster isn't the millitary coup people think. To understand that, he writes, you need to know a couple of quick things about the Hunduran constitution:

Article 239 specifically states that any president who so much as proposes the permissibility of reelection "shall cease forthwith" in his duties, and Article 4 provides that any "infraction" of the succession rules constitutes treason. The rules are so tight because these are terribly serious issues for Honduras, which lived under decades of military rule.

As detailed in the attorney general's complaint, Zelaya is the type of leader who could cause a country to wish for a Richard Nixon. Earlier this year, with only a few months left in his term, he ordered a referendum on whether a new constitutional convention should convene to write a wholly new constitution. Because the only conceivable motive for such a convention would be to amend the un-amendable parts of the existing constitution, it was easy to conclude -- as virtually everyone in Honduras did -- that this was nothing but a backdoor effort to change the rules governing presidential succession.

Photo: The closing moments of the Michael Jackson memorial event at Staples Center. Credit: Mark Terrill-Pool / Getty Images

It's been interesting to watch the slowly developing concerns about Ritalin and other stimulants used to help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). After a few reports of sudden deaths among children taking the drugs, the Food and Drug Administration asked drug manufacturers in 2007 to include better warnings with the medications. Now a new study is out that might concern some parents, although it provides no real answers for them.

The study, funded by the FDA and National Institutues of Mental Health, looked at the files on 564 children and teenagers who had died suddenly, with no real explanation for their death. They compared those files with those of an equal number of youngsters who had died in auto accidents. The findings: 10 of those in the first group had been taking Ritalin (other medications were not widely available at the time), while only two of those in the control group had been.

It sounds frightening at first glance-- five times as many? But the children taking Ritalin made up a small portion of either group, and sudden unexplained death is itself an extremely rare occurrence among children and teens. There were other possible factors the researchers couldn't account for. For example, teenagers with ADHD are more likely to experiment with illegal drugs. Could it be that those drugs, rather than Ritalin, caused some or all of the deaths?

The study's conclusion: That there is an association between stimulant use and sudden unexplained death in use. NIMH's conclusion: It always pays to remember that correlation does not imply causality. Just because there was an association doesn't mean that one caused the other. NIMH calls for further studies as well as better screening for heart conditions among youth. And parents are left, as always, to make the best judgment they can on whether to use these daily medications.

Photo by Robert Bukaly/AP

Oh, countries listen to the International Whaling Commission all right -- as long as they want to. Most nations observe the international ban on whale hunting because they agree with it. As for the rest -- well, of the big three that continue to kill whales, Iceland and Norway simply ignore the ban. And for years, Japan has operated under an exemption allowing it to take whales for scientific research. But with each whale worth tens of thousands of dollars in meat and other products, you can bet a lot more than research is going on, like whale dinners served in upscale restaurants. And does it really take close to 1,000 whales to conduct this research, which is the quota that Japan sets for itself? 

The whales that the Japanese hunt, mostly minke, are considered to be at "lower risk" of extinction. Now Greenland wants to hunt 50 endangered humpback whales over the next few years, saying this would be subsistence hunting for its indigenous people. There's certainly precedence for this: The Inuit have been allowed to take several dozen bowhead whales for years. This kind of subsistence hunting is an ancient part of their tradition. But there's more to it. Under the Inuits' tightly managed hunt, the bowhead comeback in the eastern Arctic has been a conservation success story. Adding an endangered species like the humpback whale to the list, though, raises a new set of complications -- which the International Whaling Commission put off dealing with at its recent meeting.

Another issue that has to be addressed is which individual whales are selected out for hunting by the Japanese whalers. A study presented at the IWC meeting found that nearly a third of the whales killed were pregnant. Assuming those whale calves would otherwise have been born and survived, this means a lot more whales are being killed than the number being counted as part of Japan's research.

* Photo of humpback whale by Greenpeace