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

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Dial P For President 

...OK, so this story may not be absolutely true, but wouldn't it be wonderful if it were? There are plenty of situations where I wouldn't care to find myself dealing with the local constabulary over the actions of my 15 Y.O., but in this case I would probably be treating him to dinner to the junk food of his choice every night for a week after we both got out of jail (the police would find me to be an angry, hostile parent under the circumstances)...

One does wonder, though, whether the police chief in a small Icelandic community would think that he is "under orders" from the United States government to find out where the kid got the number. Naive waif that I am, I wasn't aware that the United States could give "orders" to the law enforcement officers of other sovereign nations. I can think of half a dozen county sheriffs Ive known over the years who would toss in the drunk tank the first federal official within arm's reach who tried to "order" them to do anything...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:29 PM 0 comments

The Civil War Comes To The Big Apple 

...Derek Anderson was a talented high school athlete in his home town of Scapoose, Oregon, on the south bank of the Columbia River downstream from Portland. During his senior year at Burns High School in eastern Oregon, Kellen Clemens gained statewide attention as probably one of the best quarterbacks the state had ever seen. These two, whose hometowns combined only have 1/10th the population that will occupy the stadium when they step on the field at starting quarterbacks for the Cleveland Browns and New York Jets on Sunday, have faced each other on several occasions in football and other sports, and for those Orygonians who have closets stuffed with either Oregon State Beaver Orange or Oregon Duck Green, this will be a special moment...

Quacker backers and Beaver Fever types have seldom had opportunities to see players from their favorite schools in the big time; it's been a long time since Dan Fouts suited upand some of the other more recent prospects have left mostly fleeting or painful memories (Joey Harrington is struggling to find his place, Akili Smith is just a grim memory, and there is only the occasional opportunity to talk about A.J. Feeley in his backup roll in Philly). There will probably be some confused programmers at Orygun TV stations this weekend, wondering why the hell so many people are clamoring to watch the friggin' Browns/Jets game on Sunday instead of more regional games...
Posted by: Jack K. / 5:04 PM 0 comments

Thursday, December 06, 2007

So Ya Wanna Fight Forest Fires, Eh? 

...the most photogenic aspect of the contest between humans and the power of nature expressed by wildfire is usually the dramatic airshow. The recent California fires had precious few shots of exhausted crews desperately flailing various digging tools at the soil, but had lots of video of helicopters and air tankers dropping water and retardant on the leading edge of flame fronts. Though we never know their names, the people in those aircraft are heroes in their own right because the dividing line between "eating dinner" and "mourning relatives" is so much more starkly defined for them than it is for those of us whohave spent time grubbing around in the dirt and smoke...

But you, too, can take a stab at being a member of that elite world of the Air Tanker Pilot and This is where you can start your journey (comprehension of French is optional; let the 'up/down/left/right keys be your guide)...

[the aircraft in question is a Canadair Bombardier 215/415 sea plane that drafts water while in flight. Left/right arrow keys control speed; up/down arrow keys control altitude; space bar dumps the load on the fire]
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:16 PM 0 comments

Bad Days At Black Rock For The Bush Environment Crew 

...the last couple of days have had grim legal news and bad environmental tidings for Gee Dub and the gang on the environmental front. In rapid succession, they've been whacked with two court losses and a potential loss of bureaucratic control that could have a significant impact on their plans for the management of public lands and the designation of Threatened or Endangered Species...

On the land management front, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court decision and ruled that certain timber harvest and fuels reduction projects could not be conducted without environmental analysis. The decision, which addresses an area known as Categorical Exclusions (CE's), effectively blocks the U. S. Forest Service from using the process of excluding from analysis certain types of projects until it has properly addressed the impact of the process itself, which was a modification to existing CE rules as part of Bush's Healthy Forest Initiative...

On the Endangered Species Act front, a Federal District judge in Idaho ruled that the Bush Administration acted illegally during the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service consideration of the listing of the sage grouse as an endangered species. Judge B. Lynn Winmill's language concerning the actions of Interior Dept. Deputy Assistant Secretary Julie MacDonald is specific enough, using words like "editing" and "intimidating" and other sorts of things that your run-of-the-mill federal employee (at least the career types) would not care to see on an employee evaluation...

Two different storylines are in play here, but the outcome is still the same. The Healthy Forest Initiative was/is an intentional political overreach of what are otherwise relatively sound land management concepts. Much about the initiative was an effort to take those several extra steps that represented a rollback of federally mandated protections, but it came to life right up there on stage where everybody could see it. HFI was a ratification of the idea "to the victor go the spoils" and sort of supported my long-held contention that environmental protection is whatever the majority says it is. The 9th Circuit dope-slap is actually directed at process, not philosophy; the promulgation of rules left out the step of actually considering what the effect of expansion of CE authority actually meant. It may have been an intentional oversight, but it was out in the open...

The sage grouse decision, on the other hand, is a glimpse at the dark dirty underbelly of control, showing what goes on behind the scenes. It represents the abandonment of propriety, ethics, and professionalism - not to mention, in some cases, The Law - to implement a specific commodity-oriented philosophy in certain areas of natural resource management; not that this isn't something we've grown accustomed to this cast of characters. In both cases, the intended effect was some benefit to groups for whom protecting the environment is a massive nuisance in the pursuit of the big dollars. In both cases Gee Dub is losing...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:08 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

When A Tree Falls In The Woods... 

…the small seed first germinated and sent its primary root into the ground a few decades after the English Barons forced King John to sign the articles that comprised the Magna Carta. By the time Columbus first set foot on a dry chunk of the Western Hemisphere, it had grown into a strapping hunk of a tree, a couple of feet in diameter and over 100 feet tall. When Lewis and Clark struggled through typical Pacific coast misery of the winter of 1805-06 fifteen or so miles to the north at Fort Clatsop, this Sitka spruce on the north Oregon coast that would eventually come to be known as the Klootchy Creek Giant was well and truly an “old growth” tree…

It somehow survived the logging activity of the late 19th and early 20th century that removed most of its contemporaries, and came to be crowned co-holder of the title “Nation’s Largest Sitka Spruce with a tree in Olympic National Park to the north (the Washington tree was greater in diameter; the Klootchy Creek tree taller). But Sunday, during the 100 mph gusts of the first of two storms that pounded the Pacific Northwest over the last 48 hours, it split at a weak spot created by a decades-old lightning strike and exacerbated by a high wind event last winter, and once again tested the notion of “when a tree falls in the woods…”

A tree can just be a tree. Lord knows we’ve got millions of ‘em sitting around here in the Northwest, and there are still lots of places you can travel both on or well away from the beaten path where you can encounter plenty of examples that could reset one’s notion of what “big” means. But this tree, through the sheer serendipity of its survival to advanced age and the historical context of its survival to the status of ‘World’s Biggest’, made it more than just another tree. There are far greater losses and way bigger stories to come out the powerful set of Pacific storms that swept across the Northwest coast over the last couple of days; the rain and wind and flooding and damage and helicopter rescues of rooftop victims are rightfully the lead stories. Beyond that, there are plenty of other trees that came down under the hurricane force of the winds. Still, though, there is a little bit of time for reflection of the changed status (or loss, depending on how you want to consider it) of Oregon’s first Heritage Tree…
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:24 AM 0 comments

Sunday, December 02, 2007

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like...Oh, Never Mind 

...as I sit here in the foggy 7 a.m. half-darkness of a Sunday morning, it finally dawns on me that the Pacific Northwest really doesn't matter in the larger national narrative. The lead story on NPR at the top of the hour is about the vicious storms sweeping the Midwest and headed for the East Coast today; in the meantime, the National Weather Service map for Southern Washington and Western Oregon looks like this (this is a link and not a capture so the map will change over time, but - as of this moment - there are 15 entries in the 'Watches, Warnings, and Advisories' key). Not a word in the news about this...

This isn't pouting or self-pity; just a final little epiphany about how population densities and the location of news centers affects national perceptions...

"Hurricane-Force Winds"? I can just envision Coast Guardsmen along the Northern Orygun coast pawing wildly through their signal flag lockers trying to find some mildewed old set of these babies:
 'Hurricane' isn't a word much used up here in the upper left hand corner of the Continental map in a weather sense. Not that we don't get high coastal winds; this will be the second or third high wind event in the last couple of months. But 'Hurricane'?!1? This is something of a first for the weather folks, because I don't recall that word being used as part of an official warning in the past...

The next couple of days should be interesting....
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:57 AM 0 comments

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