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

Saturday, February 25, 2006

The Further Adventures of Unintended Consequences 

...if the dispute over the Dubai Ports World acquisition of certain US port management concerns was an effort on the part of the Bush administration to take our minds off of NSA eavesdropping on our phone calls, it can only be said to be the equivalent of smashing your finger with a hammer to take your mind off of your headache. If, on the other hand, this whole little storm has taken the White House completely by surprise, it is a pretty good measure of just exactly how far off of their game these clowns are. As has been mentioned in the punditry world over the last few days, agreeing to the purchase was, at the least, an exceedingly tone-deaf move by the very people who have made an industry out of manufacturing and then exploiting our fears of all things Arab and Muslim. Their one claim to fame politically has been to create a boogy man out of Middle Eastern Muslim males, and even the slightest suggestion that we're going to turn over any aspect of activities at major port cities on the East Coast to a company owned essentially by a royal family that not only fits that description but also has all sorts of casual or not-so-casual connections to both the attacks of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden himself should have made some half-bright minion in the bowels of the White House sit up and say "wait a minute"...

It didn't, though, and despite all of Gee Dub's personal assurances and threats, the whole thing looks to be spinning out of control, ironically as a result of the very same sort of message handling by opponents that has been the hallmark of the Bush Machine. There may not actually be any smoke, much less flames, regarding DP World taking over some operations in however the hell many ports the business deal actually covers (6? 21? Who knows...), but the idea of a business owned by the government of a company with so many perceived connections to the very terror machine with whom we are supposed to be at war simply begs for opposition. There isn't any help for the Bush Monkeys from any direction; every bit of hard news coming out about this proposed sale has a stinking taint to it. Administration members have financial connections to DP World; the specific laws governing review of such a transaction weren't followed; Homeland Security objected to the sale until...well, until what? Even facts specifically put out there to calm the storm don't work. The fact that intelligence assessments cleared the sale stand in specific and stark contrast to the performance of our intelligence assets leading up to the Iraq war. It matters little whether intelligence machinery was wrong, misused, or compromised in the run-up to Gee Dub's Grand Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure because the pertaining fact is it didn't function properly, and there isn't sufficient trust remaining in the connection between the current administration and that machinery to lend a sense of comfort to any bit of information that may come spinning out of it...

There is every possibility that there isn't a thing in the world wrong or threatening about the potential sale of certain port management functions from a British company to one from the United Arab Emirates, even one essentially owned by the same royal family that was hanging out with bin Laden as recently as 1999. Outside of the U.S., the furor is being treated with a good measure of surprise (registration through the hated New York Times process required), and perhaps even a touch of contempt for what is seen as out-of-control xenophobia on our part. It's a situation, however, that is a product of our own national experience exacerbated by the words, actions, and tactics of the behind-the-scene brains, mouthpieces, fixers, minions, mechanics, con-artists, carpet baggers, and hangers-on that make up the corporate entity that is George W. Bush. This entity conciously chose to build it's political empire almost solely on the foundation of a nationally-instilled fear of Middle Eastern male adherents to Islam that the 9/11 attacks offered up to fix what was beginning to look like another rudderless, one-term mistake. Given the proliferation of TV poker contests over the last year or so, somebody somewhere in this administration should have understood that there are risks to sliding that whole pile of chips out into the pot if you're not pretty damned sure about your hand, but apparently all those channels are blocked, for whatever reason. As a result, the Bush Monkeys are left looking like a hapless gang of money-loving goons too willing to avert their gaze away from the creation of just exactly the sort of direct personal threat to American citizens from the specific weak point in security about which many experts have been warning through the exact sort of circumstances from which they said that Democrats couldn't protect us and by the very sorts of people they continually insisted were coming to kill us in our sleep...

There hasn't been a chance in the world that a transaction like this one would be casually accepted by American citizens since September 11, 2001, and the effort of the Bush Administration is mostly the reason for that. All of the working realities of this story are washed away by Bushco's past efforts, so the fact that we are generally talking about the purchase of one foreign port management company by another simply doesn't matter, givne all that history. You can't rebottle a loosed genie or unring a bell, and you simply can't predict the price of unintended consequences...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:58 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Measure 37 Climbs Out Of The Coffin 

...there was hope for a while that the sledgehammer approach to modifiying Oregon's land use laws that is Measure 37 might be forstalled, but the supposedly liberal Oregon Supreme Court took care of that today. Measure 37, which gives landowners whose ownership predates most of Oregon's stringent and protective land use laws the right to either ignore those regulations or haul dumptruck loads of money to the bank as reparation for their loss of usage, is now finally the law of the land - at least as far as the state judicial system is concerned...

The issues are actually pretty simple, despite all of the action and excitement that the original implementation of Measure 37 engendered. The basic set of Oregon land use laws enacted three decades ago were intended to protect the integrity of open spaces and agricultural land in an effort to save some of the cachet that made Oregon what it was. While certain property rights advocates objected to that idea from the outset, it was finally the pressure of population expansion that forced the issue, when agricultural land owners discovered that there was way more money in them thar hills to be made selling out to subdivision developers than there was actually getting sweaty and dirty trying to make an agricultural living off of that land. The risks that 37 posed to a whole lot of people were obvious at the time of its passing: those farmers and ranchers who didn't qualify under 37's terms could likely be looking down the barrel of a particularly pernicious gun, unable to practice their traditional craft because of the sudden objections of a bunch of subdivision neighbors living on what was once a neighboring field or orchard but having no opportunity - because of their more recent land acquisitions - to be able to cash out in the same way. In a way, Measure 37 creates the very problems of conflict between traditional agricultural practices and encroaching suburbia that the original land use regulations were intended to avoid...

Unfortunately, common sense lost, in large part because once again common sense doesn't have a comfortable home in the law. This decision doesn't really solve anything; it merely exchanges one set of problems for another. For all of the campaign stories about how some poor farmer couldn't build a home on his farmland because of Oregon State land use regulations, the specific ad's featuring the little old lady who couldn't make a decent profit off of her land was the more instructive and illuminating story. We are, for whatever reason, plunged back into the uncontrolled madness that accompanied the original passage of Measure 37, and there is every reason to believe that honest, God-Fearing people who wanted nothing more that to derive their family existence from the land that they own will eventually be forced out of business because the residents of the newly constructed, cutesy-named subdivision on the other side of the fence don't like the smell of their cows or the noise of their tractors at 7:00 am or the mixture of chemicals that they use to promote their crops or herds. It will happen, and it's wrong at all sorts of levels that even the Oregon Supreme Court should have understood but didn't, and Oregon will become a poorer, less attractive place because of it...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:23 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 20, 2006

Boil Them In Their Own Friggin' Oil 

...the specific question I asked my wife today was "So, Dear, would you like to become rich?" It seemed a reasonable enough question, given this revelation and the fact that our son, aside from being a Type I diabetic, also is saddled with Celiac disease, which is an intolerance to wheat gluten. He doesn't have a severe case, becoming suddenly or violently ill at the first exposure. In fact, we only discovered the fact through a biopsy that came after the detection of antibodies in a blood test. He otherwise appears just fine, and that is perversely the most painful part: having had to sacrifice one of the tribal kid rights of being able to occasionally gorge himself on carbohydrate-dense food at birthday parties and such because of diabetes, he has had to even give up the pleasure of pretending that he can go to a birthday pizza party or hit Taco Bell after school with his basketball buddies or stay overnight at a friends house without have to pack his own menu. If he doesn't toe the mark, his penalty will be an undetected malabsorption of nutrients leading to malnutrition and bone loss...

As Celiac sufferers and their loved ones know, the world is not a friendly place for them. The new FDA rules regarding the listing of alergens promises to be a Godsend for trying to sort out the ingredients of packaged foods without having to always be calling the customer service line - if there even is one listed on the package - to find out just exactly what kind of "modified food starch" is in a given product. McDonalds was one of those havens we thought could be trusted, because they SAID their french fries were gluten-free. The fact that they are now having them tested after admitting in accordance with FDA rules that they do in fact contain some form of wheat would seem to suggest that they simply didn't even have a clue whether that was a true statement or not. I'm normally not the litigous sort, but this strikes me as a perfect example of why the idiot class (that would be certain conservatives) is wrong in its tort reform efforts and why someone with the wherewithal should be free to sue McDonalds to within - or, what the hell, maybe even just beyond - an inch of their corporate lives. If it transpires that their fries do contain gluten, that represents an intentional violation of public trust and intentional endangerment to certain customers that bluntly challenges their right to even exist as a corporate entity. Given that societal norms argue against the much more satisfying remedy of roaming the Mickey D halls of power with a baseball bat and a list of names, looks like a hefty lawsuit may be the most promising game in town...
Posted by: Jack K. / 1:12 PM 0 comments

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