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

Thursday, June 22, 2006

Wag the Dog, Ver. 2.0 

...Rick Santorum, with all of last night's sweaty hyperbole, does do us the service of pointing out the rather limiting utility of catchphrases. There is such a thing as a weapon of mass destruction. Little Boy, the nuclear weapon that fell from the belly of Enola Gay over Hiroshima on that crystal blue August morning in 1945, now that was a weapon of mass destruction. Chemically degraded artillery shells, not so much...

While there is the chance that Islamic jihadists could just possibly smuggle a battalion of 155 mm howitzers into the United States, given the hopelessly inadequate efforts by the Bush administration at addressing port security, and could just possibly set them up unobserved in some suburban shopping center parking lot just outside of a major metropolitan area in order to salvo off a few hundred rounds to actually cause some mass destruction, the odds are kinda long. But the point that Santorum and other hanger's on on the wingnut side can't seem to come to grips with is exactly this: If we went to war with Iraq over the existence of an undisclosed but small number of tactical munitions, some folks needs to be disgraced, impeached, and run naked out of town by angry torch-wielding crowds goosing them along with powerful Tasers, because the existence of threatening WMD was the only 'just war' reason for that famously staunch Methodist George W. Bush to condemn several tens of thousands of Iraqis and several thousand more American soldiers to death or life-changing injury...

Oddly, or maybe not so much, it feels like a desperate play for Santorum to address, more than anything else, a sinking smoking hulk of a reelection campaign. The sad part for ol' Rick is that, intead of finding some sort of support from his masters in the White House, he barely cleared the news cycle before the refutations started to come tumbling out of the Executive branch machine. This leaves him looking repudiated and...well...stupid; more importantly, it leaves his reelection campaign bleeding from every orifice that isn't heavily taped over. With the addition of this newest self-inflicted wound, Democratic candidate Bob Casey must be wondering why he sweated trying to scrounge up all those campaign donations...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:04 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

On Losing One of Our Own 

...there is a certain sense of pain, for those of us who support the troops even though we may not support the mission, when you hear about a soldier dying. Somewhere, you know, there is a home - usually more than one - where people have just been informed unexpectedly that an important, even critical, part of their lives is no more, that someone - a brother or sister, father or mother, husband, wife, lover - will never ever walk through that door again. Most of us can connect - at least a little bit - with the rawness of that moment, having had the knock on the door or the phone call telling us that someone important in our lives is gone but, still, it isn’t so much the same. That little stab is sharper, however, when that lost soldier is from nearby, because it means that now the bastards came after one of us, a member of our community, rather than some picture with a name from New York or Nebraska or Florida. The apparent death of PFC. Thomas Tucker is bringing it all home to Central Oregon....

Central Oregon is something of a conundrum, being at the same time both big and small. Geographically, the area that we call Central Oregon is covers a pretty broad expanse, stretching a good 100 miles from north to south along the east slopes of the Cascade Mountain and nearly that far from the Cascade Crest to the east. But it is also small, in that there are only 8 identifiable communities in that expanse, and Bend with it’s 70,000 residents is by a huge margin the largest of those 8 communities. We shop in each other’s towns; our children play against each other in sports; we go to each other’s community events, fairs, and rodeo’s; and we read about each other in the local newspaper. We are one community who’s components just happen to be separated by 20 or 30 miles of pine forest, juniper sage land, and agricultural fields. We all feel the sense of loss when one of ours is so publically declared missing in Iraq, and we share that jarring sense of horror and sadness when it appears that the whole thing ended badly...

That the bodies, purportedly of PFC’s Tucker and Menchaca, are being sent back to the States for DNA confirmation of their identities speaks to a reality that we don’t even want to know. What I think I know from that statement both stirs an anger that calls for picking up a weapon and going after somebody and, at the same time, makes me feel old and tired and fed up with it all. The pain of loss spreads out in concentric rings from it’s center, and this is the second time in this misbegotton war that one of those rings has reached this far, the first being when the brother of an acquaintance of mine was killed outside of Baghdad during the actual invasion. The hurt and anguish of such an event creates a rigid bubble that you cannot penetrate. All you can do is say weak, useless, inadequate words of sympathy, offer support, and pray that some sense of peace and acceptance will eventually come to supplant some of the pain and loss. There will be time enough later to ask those hard questions about this episode that need to be asked. For now, in Central Oregon, it’s time to provide support to Tommy Tucker’s family and pray that this nightmare will someday end for the families and communities of those who have journeyed into harm’s way in our name...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:50 PM 0 comments

Sunday, June 18, 2006

Is There An Economist In The House? 

...I am obviously in need of professional help. I need to be wheeled into whatever is the economist's version of an Emergency Room, STAT!. And I need it because I have no idea what these people are saying. I mean, I understand the words per se, and I recognize the sentences as being of somewhat conventional English construction, but I don't...uh...GROK this stuff, I guess. Am I being told that the $3.17/gallon I'm paying for gas right now a result of inadequate supply? If so, where are the gas lines? Or are they telling me that they are unilaterally trying to control demand by jacking up the prices? Or maybe, just maybe, is this a collusive effort to force Americans to such desperation that they will allow drilling any damned place the oil moguls want to drill, whether it be in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge or out by the vegetable garden in the back yard?

I have the same gut feeling that I had when ENRON was running up electric rates on the West Coast several years ago: somebody is lying to me. I was right then, and I have my suspicions now. I don't even want to hear any meaningless claptrap from oil fatcats about how I should thank my lucky stars that I'm not in Europe where prices are even higher. In the first place, Europe has rail services that actually serve the needs of citizens without being treated as some unloved step-child by a government whose interests would best be served by providing reasonable transportation alternatives to it's citizens. In the second place, European car manufacturers offer reasonable vehicles for their customers; turbo-diesel vehicles (which get tremendous mileage and still have reasonable performance) are commonly found across all the vehicle classes, whereas the only currently available mass-market turbo-diesels in the US are offered by Volkswagen, and they won't be available in the 2007 model year because of US diesel formulation issues. In the third place, Europe isn't the United States. The county I live in is bigger than some European countries. The western US where I live is characterized by small communities separated by vast distances and too few services; I have to drive two hundred miles to get to the nearest endrocrinologist to treat my son's type 1 diabetes. Hitler's Panzer divisions had captured half of Europe by the time they had traveled that far, for crying out loud. There simply isn't any reasonable comparison between the driving distances that many Americans have to deal with as opposed to Europeans.

So clearly, I need help. What I'm hearing from the Big Oil moguls stands in stark contrast to everything I was forced to learn in those college economic classes that some liberal arts clown insisted I needed in order to get a degree having nothing to do with economics. I need someone who actually understands that aptly named 'dismal science' to explain to me just what these people mean, because otherwise it sounds to me like they are just blowing smoke up my...well, never mind that...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:01 PM 0 comments

Is That Rock Art In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Happy To See Me? 

...OK, so let's make this clear, just in case there was any confusion on the matter. It is against Federal Law to pick up and cart off items of archaeological interest from Federally - managed public land. No arrow heads. No pottery shards, no beads or skulls or scrapers. And, particularly, no boulders with rock art on them. Unfortunately for Federal land managers interested in protecting archaeological resources from the on-going problem of theft and vandalism of cultural sites, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just increased the difficulty in trying to convict those who might choose to make off with archaeological objects...

The basic problem resides in the laws used to prosecute the two boulder packers. The two men were acquitted of stealing archaeological resources, based on their convincing a jury that they didn't know they were on federal land. They were convicted of theft of government property, but even though federal law assigns a value to cultural objects representing the knowledge they represent and the cost of getting that knowledge, a property theft conviction required that the market value be at least $1000. In order to avoid getting into the situation that Ninth Circuit has addressed, it may well be necessary to clearly define all archeological sites on Federal public land. Given the fact that there is a whole hell of a bunch of Federal land with scads of archaeological sites and precious few employees to constantly keep watch over them all, cultural specialists rightfully fear that there would be wholesale looting of sites...

The plundering of cultural sites, which has been a persistent problem, is a two-fold loss. Not only are the items gone forever, lost into the worldwide market for such antiquities, but the knowledge they could impart about past cultures and the sacred value they represent to the descendents of those cultures are also lost. As any archaeologist will patiently explain, especially after you excitedly lay a fist full of arrowheads on their desks that you found out in the woods, the highest value of archaeological items is found in the context of their setting. Cultural sites tell a story and particular items have value as being pieces of that story; removing them eliminates their value to the story and complicates the efforts to even learn the story. When a particular site is dug up in a search for arrow points or tools or whatever, the ability to learn when and how and for how long that site was occupied and what role it played in the life of past residents is gone. This case is going to complicate the ability to attempt to prevent that sort of thing from happening...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:36 PM 0 comments

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