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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, January 15, 2005

DOES SOMEBODY NEED A HUG?

...being fully aware that I may be coming down on the wrong side of some component of progressive thought for making this statement, I will make it anyway: somebody please take Michael Newdow for a nice relaxing walk in the woods until the inauguration is over. Invite him to Central Oregon; introduce him to Mt. Bachelor powder skiing; drag him through a couple of microbreweries and have him experience the Pine Tavern in Bend. Do something to keep him busy until the 22nd because, although he is certainly a zealous defender of the separation of church and state and lost his Pledge of allegiance case on a technicality, he is doing nothing positive for the Democratic party or progressives as a whole with his dedicated assault on the concept of a Christian prayer as a part of the inauguration program...

...there are liberals who are Christians. I know this because I'm one of 'em and I occasionally run into others of 'em. As a Christian, I am positive that if someone said to me "guess what, you are about to become the most powerful human on the face of the planet", I would probably, as a natural reaction, wish to have a prayer offered to my God asking for the wisdom to properly bear that awesome responsibility. I don't know whether Mr. Newdow's objection to religion would extend to my desire to have a rabbi offer a prayer were I the first Jewish president or to a Mullah were I the first Islamic president (now, there's an image to contemplate in this particular country), but to me the bottom line is that - if I am taking on this awesome responsibility - a nice little prayer might be nice. It's my inauguration, dammit, and if I want a prayer said over me it's my choice; if you object, stick your fingers in your ears and hum the tune to Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places" or whatever tune is of your choice. I'm not happy about just exactly who is going to be taking the oath of office next week, but I'm not going to begrudge anybody the right to have a prayer said within the religion of his choice asking for wisdom in leading the nation, even if it is a charlatan and poser like Gee Dub who, although he may personally view Jesus as his savior, hasn't exactly acted that way in the balance of his adult life...

...I'm just not going to go there; it's not my place. On the other hand, if Gee Dub can round up somebody to say prayer for him on Inauguration Day, so be it; I seriously doubt that it will turn any of my lefty progressive friends into religious robots...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:39 PM 0 comments

Friday, January 14, 2005

SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECIES

...I can't imagine how other people would react in a similar situation, but if I had spent the last 3 years telling the whole world that I needed to invade a country to keep it from becoming a haven and training ground for terrorists and then had this report slapped on my fine highly polished oaken desk, I would lay hands on the first two or three unopened bottles of whiskey I could find and lock myself in the bedroom with the complete Elvis Presley movie DVD collection and not come out until I had gone completely through both the whiskey and the movies...

...according to this CIA report, not only is this Iraqi conflict providing a recruiting bonanza and real-time hands-on training opportunities against an OPFOR (opposition force) comprised of real live American soldiers, the conflict itself is a rallying point for deepening solidarity amongst radical Islamic elements all over the word. As Tim Russert points out, this is Gee Dub's worst possible outcome, his darkest nightmare, playing out live daily on 24-hour cable news. With some experts making ominous noises about the imminent possibility of civil war among the rivaling sectors of Iraqi society, Gee Dub's Excellent Iraqi Adventure is threatening to spin out of control into something that the phrase "worst-case scenario" just doesn't seem up to the task of covering, a violent political and social 'perfect storm' capable of wreaking more havoc in the Middle East, if not around the world, than if we had simply lifted Saddam's sanctions and turned our backs on him...

...Gee Dub may pull this off yet. In spite of all the protests and objections to his preemptive war of choice, it's in our best interest - since he went ahead and did it anyway - that he does pull it off, because this incursion has damaged us tremendously in the world and failing to get to the place these waterheads claimed they were leading us will only make things immeasurable worse...
Posted by: Jack K. / 1:19 PM 0 comments

Thursday, January 13, 2005

SO NOW YOU TELL US

...and now we find out that George W. Bush actually does believe that he's made a couple of mistakes over the last four years. We heard from his own imperial lips on Thursday that he "regrets" some of the bellicose statements he made regarding Iraqi insurgents and Osama bin Laden...

"Bring it on" was a little blunt, the president said in a transcript of the interview released Thursday.

"I remember when I talked about Osama bin Laden, I said we're going to get him dead or alive. I guess it's not the most diplomatic of language," Bush said.


...ya think? It was just a precious few months ago, in a presidential debate, that it didn't even occur to Gee Dub that these may have been mistakes, since they didn't come to mind when he was directly asked for a mistake list. From the time he originally made these comments, he has never exhibited a hint of remorse for having tried to transmogrify into John Wayne. The USS Lincoln photo op indicates, in fact, that this was all a part of the tough guy swaggering "west Texas town of El Paso" image that he and his handlers were trying to project. Even though the entire rest of the english-speaking world rolled its bloodshot eyes and muttered "oh, brother" at these punk tough guy pronouncements (neither of which he has been able to back up), you could almost feel through the floor the reverberations from the cheering of his back-sage yes-men, handlers, and fix-it guys as he portrayed the image they thought was appropriate...

...it must be the result of an unrequited testosterone demand somewhere in the past, and it seems to afflict both the figurehead and his nominal minions. There doesn't seem to be any other sane, normal explanation for this behavior. An early maturing phase spent playing soccer, cheerleading, captaining the debate team, and lurking in the dark corners of high school corridors, dreaming oversized dreams of entitled greatness instead of going out for football or wrestling, snapping towels in the locker room, taking a shot at dating the hot popular girls, and going out hunting and fishing and camping in the woods has led us to this point. Seriously, look at some of these people: there's not a decent pulling guard or sure-handed tough-blocking fullback amongst them (well, actually Cheney has the size, but the lengths to which he went to avoid the draft kind of cancels out any manly tendencies he might have otherwise nurtured; all we're left with is the tough-sounding atrophied bully)...

...so it apparently it was a case of arrested development that led to all those big-talker statements, and only a remarkable - for this guy - sense of introspection has led Gee Dub to finally begin tentatively approaching the conclusion that there's talking and there's doing and talking doesn't get it done. He said "dead or alive" and we are still being bombarded with tapes and letters from Osama; he said "bring it on" and the insurgents in Iraq cheerfully complied, fulfilling his request to such a degree that it may be in our best interest to reinforce some of the taller Baghdad buildings so they will be able to support the weight of a UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter just in case we need to do a reprise of "the last days of Saigon". Nobody but bad guys were served by Gee Dubs ill-advised cowboy comments of the last couple of years; all we can hope is that this amazing broadcast network acknowledgement of these past mistakes will lead to more contemplation and less useless verbal gunplay over these next long long four years...

Posted by: Jack K. / 7:38 PM 0 comments
Holy COW! I'm on the List!

...so I was sitting here puzzling over these hits I'd received from Wampum. After mosying over to their site and verifying that, no, The Grumpy Forester hadn't been added to their blogroll, further investigation revealed that...Holy Moly!...this humble little effort on the cusp of the (at least temporary) failure of Ruminate This has been nominated in the category of "most deserving of wider recognition" in the Kolfax Awards run by MB, Eric, and Dwight. I'm truly flattered, seeing as how I didn't nominate myself, although in the alter-ego part of my brain that little disheveled guy with the bad cigar and sloshing water glass full of cheap whiskey is saying "well, hell, YA, I'm deserving of more recognition". We all are; this blogging thing is an exercise in ego as well as an effort to matter in some small way, trying to have some influence in how the deal goes down...

...anyway, just as so many of the other better-read and more important blogs have said, go on over to Wampum, make a contribution if you can, and cast your vote for your favorite in the eight categories ...and if you were to be moved to vote for this site, I would be right grateful and proud...
Posted by: Jack K. / 2:10 PM 0 comments
THE IRAQI ELECTION...uh..PLAN, PART II

...now the the bloody handwriting clearly visible on the wall with regard to the upcoming Iraqi election, Gee Dub and the gang have decided - as only this administration has shown that they have the skill to do - to begin playing their time-tested game of diminished expectations. Just as lurid stories of closets stuffed full of dangerous chemical weapons morphed gently into an overwhelming desire to simply free the downtrodden people of Iraq from the brutal dictator whoss boot was on their neck, so the elections that would herald the advent of a new, free, and independent nation of Iraq is slowly and softly shape-shifting right before your eyes into just the first step in a process to bring freedom and independence to the Iraqi people. We are being asked now to accept that an election that may well effectively disenfranchise an entire segment of the population representing one fifth of the nation...

"I would . . . really encourage people not to focus on numbers, which in themselves don't have any meaning, but to look on the outcome and to look at the government that will be the product of these elections," a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity...


...well, of course we know that turnout numbers have no meaning to Republicans. They have certainly demonstrated, at least to my satisfaction, their aggressive disdain for turnout in voting precincts all over Florida and Ohio over the last four years. They have established such a strong track record in the area of skewing turnout to their advantage that, were it not for the certainty that they are blowing smoke in our faces with this statement, it would be easy to accept that they really believe it...

...so, see, it's easy; numbers don't matter because the assembly being elected will be short-lived so it won't even matter that few if any Sunni's are elected to that body. We'll be able to draw them out of their bomb-cratered and shell-pocked homes by negotiating proportional representation in government ministries and on the constitution-writing committee for these hated former masters of Iraqi society. It's not just about January 30 anymore, it's all part of the greater process leading to final elections later in the year (or whenever the ratified constitution takes effect)...

...it was nice of Gee Dub's gang to let us know...
Posted by: Jack K. / 11:20 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

THE KINKS IN THE SYSTEM

...it's so compellingly bizarre when you think about it. The echo chamber keeps reverberating with the residual noises from the big bang of CBS's dismissal of "the gang of four" over the George W. Bush/TANG/unverified memos story. It won't go away; the crowing and catterwalling by the wingnuts refuses to die. In the meantime, the big "media-run-amuck" story of the season concerning Armstrong Williams' creation of a 21st Century version of payola seems to have little traction at all. The fundamental unfairness of this inequitable coverage is remarkable, speaking volumes about who gets to make the decisions about what the topic of the day is going to be...

...the Williams case is clear-cut. He accepted payment from the Federal Government in exchange for shilling for the "No Child Left Behind" act and for trying to recruit other commentators to his side, all without disclosing that he was being sponsored for his efforts. While assessing whether this is a legally actionable case of payola could be something of a close call (although as a one-time long-ago disc jockey, it looks pretty clear to me), it is clear that he has hacked his way through all the ethical lines with a meat axe and passed cleanly through to the other side of appropriate behavior. He's not out there alone, either. For the second time in a year, we find the White House engaged in the prohibited activity of spending appropriated dollars to pay for commercial advocacy of a position (with the first being last spring's flashy false dummied up news reports touting the benefits of the Administration's proposed Medicare drug plan). On top of that, tantalizing hints loom on the horizon of other paid pundits that may be illegitimately walking the land. As Dave Johnson over at Seeing the Forest points out, this may well be just the tip of some dark massive propaganda iceberg and something that needs to be pushed and pushed to see how many other conservative talking heads are actually doing piece-work under contract to the Bush Monkeys...

...and then we have "Rathergate" or whatever the hell it's being called. While what the CBS crew did was excessively zealous and lacked due diligence to professional standards, it didn't do all that much to contribute to what was already known about story of Gee Dub's remarkable tour of duty with the Texas Air National Guard. It amounted to little more that rounding up some of the loose ends to what most folks had already pretty much assumed to be the case: Gee Dub got preferential treatment and special deals going in to, during, and going out of the National Guard. The four dismissals appear to be little more than a defensive reactive move, given that the authenticity of the documents has never been established one way or another, all the bizarre and misguided rumblings about proportional fonts and word processor reproducibility aside. Those documents may well be true; nobody has made a perfectly rock solid case that they aren't; you're fired anyway, just in case...

...the Talking Dog may have the most useful perspective on the whole "Rathergate" affair: whatever journalistic honors that might have accrued, whatever well-deserved political damage might have come hurling down the sewer pipe in Gee Dub's direction by these additional disclosures, the bottom line is that this was a far fresher 2000 story than it was a 2004 story. The bang may well have pretty much been gone by then, and it could be argued that by focusing on his military service as a counterpoint to Gee Dub's sordid little story, John Kerry invited and enabled the creation of the Swift Boat Veterans and footed part of the bill for his own mid-summer loss of focus and stature at the hands of their attacks. The CBS "gang of four" could be seen as just the most recent victims of that misguided effort, but - in another example of the brutal unfairness that stalks real life, it's Armstrong Williams who seems to be paying the far lesser price for the commission of a far greater sin...
Posted by: Jack K. / 11:02 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

SO IT'S OUR FAULT AGAIN

...it's probably all me; my fault all the way. I just can't help it, though. After a 3-decade investment as one of those nameless faceless little bureaucrats who try to come to work every day and do the best they can, I can feel an easy connection with the employees of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. They are - like me and the people I work with - people working within the career fields that they chose for themselves, trying in whatever way they can to make some sort of difference instead of wads of money. On Sunday, December 26, they were witness to gathering strands of information indicating that a major earthquake had occurred on a fault zone off the coast of Indonesia in the Indian Ocean. It was outside of their normal monitoring area, so they were forced to rely on deductive reasoning instead of sophisticated sensors to make some sort of call regarding the potential generation of a tsunami. Given that it was not just a Sunday but was the day after Christmas, and given the fact that none of the nations surrounding the Indian Ocean were parties to the PTWC warning system, and given that there was no sort of decision tree established to respond to the need to attempt to contact governments or agencies outside their area of operation, I have felt that they probably did the best they could under the circumstances. It turns out, however, that my view isn't shared by everybody...

...Smith Thammasaroj, former chief of the Thai meteorological department and now, after an ignominious termination following a false tsunami warning a few years ago, the newly hailed hero and leader of an initiative to develop a tsunami early warning system in Thailand, feels that "the United States" could have done more...

I'm not angry at them for failing to warn Thailand, because at that time they did not know for sure, they merely said a tsunami was possible after the earthquake, Smith told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Tuesday.

But after the giant waves hit southern Thailand, the center had more than an hour to alert India, Bangladesh and the Maldives, and if they warned those countries, they could have saved thousands of lives, he said.


...my first reaction is to say "yeah, well, sport, so did everybody else, once the first one hit". I shouldn't be so defensive, I suppose, but I have had a few occasions to plunge through the phosphor into the wrong side of the TV screen; from these experiences I have learned that the possession of a telephone number on a Saturday morning or a Sunday evening or at 3 a.m. pretty much any day of the week is an entirely different matter than "having the capability" to call someone to warn them that it's time to get the hell out of Dodge. I have personally tested this particular hypothesis in the face of fire, flood, and volcanic eruption, and I have learned from experience that - sometimes, perhaps more often than not - there isn't anybody there to pick up the phone to receive the warning when the timing of the call falls outside certain societal norms. It may well be that the PTWC people on duty on that quiet day after Christmas froze at the controls or somehow refused to pick up the gauntlet of that day's challenge from Mother Earth. I don't buy it, however, and it will take demonstrable evidence that they really screwed the pooch to make me revise my opinion. Given the absolute lack of an integrated warning system, the likelihood of being able notify even a few oceanside communities (which would have to be done one phone call at a time by whoever would have been around to receive the warning that Smith insists should have been given) would have had perhaps some positive impact on the resort communities that were so devastated but would have had little positive effect on the tens (if not hundreds) of small villages that were destroyed in this disaster...

...changes need to be made to improve the warning capability for the nations surrounding the Indian Ocean. Sensors need to be planted on the seabed; specialists need to be trained to be able to handle the data input, notification trees need to be established and rapid evacuation plans need to be developed. Was the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center responsibility for shouldering some of the blame for the ineffective response? My answer (hard-headed defensive bureaucratic that I am) will always be "no". They did the best they could operating in a strange foreign world outside of the area of their responsibility and, according to some reporting I've seen, operated with a remarkable sense of intuition in trying to disseminate a warning about potential tsunami's, even though they were in a totally reactive mode because of the lack of sensing equipment that might provide confirmation of what was going on. Sometimes shit just happens and there isn't anything you can do about it. Sometimes bad things happen and there just isn't really anyone to blame, no matter how badly you want to....


Posted by: Jack K. / 7:48 PM 0 comments
THE IRAQI ELECTION...uh...PLAN

...aside from purely philosophical questions about how you run an election without election officials, it appears that all of us ardent supporters of invading Iraq for the pure hell of it just to see what happens are facing the very real prospect of having to deal with the sticky question of how the various bodies elected to serve as national and regional governments and to write the new Constitution for Iraq will have any particular legitimacy when an entire segment of the population is either excluded from or boycotts the election. Even Our Man In Baghdad Ayad Allawi is beginning to publicly concede that segments of the population may not be in a sufficiently secure position to vote in the upcoming election...

...this begs the obvious question, given the track record of Gee Dub's Excellent Iraqi Adventure: do we have a plan for this? Some idea of how to draw Sunni's into the process? Anything at all? Failure to involve the Sunni's virtually guarantees the failure of the entire process, but it seems as if the only plan that the Bush Monkeys have had in their pocket was a so-far futile effort to subdue all those dead -enders and hanger's on that Rummy kept telling us about and a bull-headed drop-dead election date of January 30. Small glints of light have been escaping from this black hole of an administration: the mere fact that they are even considering the idea of extending the Guard and Reserves to multiple 2-year deployments would seem to suggest that they don't think that this little occupation obligation that we accrued to ourselves is going to go away anytime soon, but is that our only plan?

...some days it's impossible to even dredge up even the most meager little bit of grim satisfaction that this whole mess is just exactly what we were talking about two and a half years ago...

Posted by: Jack K. / 11:26 AM 0 comments

Sunday, January 09, 2005

FALSE WARNINGS AND STRANGE HOPES

...one of the truly strange aspects of living along the Eastern hip of the Orygun Cascades in the south central part of the state is the absolute unreliability of weather forcasting. We lay here on the cusp between two separate National Weather Service forecast areas; as a result the general predictions for weather can tend to range from close to the mark when large weather patterns dominate the region to breath-takingly stupidly wrong when the forecasting is on the margins. This year, however, is setting new records for inaccuracy in weather forecasting. The last several days have been an almost unendurable nightmare, featuring on-going forcasts calling for multiple inches - if not feet - of snow that has not yet manifested itself. The stress becomes almost moonbat crazy for two very important reasons: A) the Jack K. family lives along a road that - though it is a public road according to Deschutes County standards and practices - is not maintained by the county, so if I want it plowed, I need to round up somebody to do the work for a price and 2) once in a great long while we actually do get enough snow to close the schools, so any forecast mentioning numerous inches of snow sends the household contingent of tomorrow's leaders into a frenzy of planning for how they will spend the upcoming snow day. When, as has usually been the case this year, tomorrow dosn't deliver the requisite snow deluge suffucient to force a school closure, a deep pall of disappointment decends on the house far greater than anything the Democratic party has experienced over the last three election cycles...

...there is almost a sense of survivor's guilt. While California and the mid-west are being pounded with literally feet of snow as a product of the last couple of storms, we sit here in the heart of Oregon's winter wonderland watching the occasional snow flurry pass through, accumulating less snow than than that being battled by the residents of Reno, Nevada. It's almost tragic, in a sick perversely humorous fashion. We get snow here, in multiple senses of the word. My particular community has as a large component of its population retired folks who flee to Arizona at the first hint of a hard frost. The overwintering population either understands not getting a glimpse of the ground from December through March on an average year or simply can't scrounge up the gas money to get the hell out of Dodge for keeps...

...and so here we sit tonight, looking down the barrel of another prediction of at least 9 inches of snow by morning. Gameboy, computer game, and book reading strategies are being mapped out in various bedrooms in the Jack K. household, even though patches of stars can be seen in the sky and the barometer seems to be slightly on the rise. While all across the country people will be battling the violent anger of winter elements tomorrow, the anger around here will be around the kitchen table as our contribution to the next generation is poked and prodded into the realization that they aren't going to get a cheap day off thanks to good ol' mother nature and so it's time to get breakfast eaten right now, thank you very much. Winter can truly be hard here sometimes....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:01 PM 0 comments

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