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

Friday, February 22, 2008

Why Did It Have To Be Snakes? 

...climate change will come, like Carl Sandberg's Fog, on little cat feet. It will not be heralded by some singular cataclysmic event, like a volcanic eruption; there will just be one seemingly disconnected episode after another, many of which will be misunderstood because of the misnomer "global warming". One of those seemingly disconnected events may well be one of the most...er...interesting invasive species spreads in American history...

Think about it for just a minute: snakes almost as long as a FEMA travel trailer weighing as much as an NFL linebacker - the sorts of snakes who used to spend all their time plotting on how to leap out of trees to engage in a roiling, twisting, slashing attack on Tarzan - spreading out across the lower U.S., prowling habitats as diverse as San Francisco's Market Street and the worker/sailor bars outside of Norfolk Naval Shipyard. They won't move into all these new habitats entirely on their own, of course. The same humans who have modified the climate to expand their habitat will play a role in introducing them by releasing unwanted snake pets into the wild in the same way that people dumping Mortimer The Unwanted Goldfish into some local water body so the kids won't dissolve into hysteria at the "Final Toilet Solution has resulting in ponds all across the country being infested with breeding populations of splotchy gold/white carp the size of smallmouth bass...

In a preemptive PR move, the good folks at the US Fish and Wildlife Service would like you to know that the Burmese python is "not considered a danger to humans". Now, given all the trouble they gave Johnny Weissmuller that I watched With My Own Eyes back in the day, I'm not inclined to buy into this in the first place. Aside from any snarky observations that "this was all Hollywood, stupid", the fact that that these snakes consider alligators a prey source is - all by itself - an instructive bit of information. More to the point, having grown up working and playing in a part of Central Idaho where encounters with rattlesnakes was not unheard of, I tend to generally view snakes - any and all snakes - the same way Nixon's Attorney General Ed Meese viewed arrested people: they are presumptively guilty. I am extremely confident, without having personal experience to draw on, that I will view any snake running to 20 feet in length and 250 lbs. with nothing less than extreme prejudice...

All of the outcomes of climate coming down the tracks toward us, whether they big the big 'knowns' or the small 'unknowns', are of consequence. None of them are anything to fool with and it may be that the only celebrants will be the cockroaches when this deal finally goes all the way down. Between here and there, though, there are going to be lots of interesting moments if we don't get it all figured out and, for the lower third of the country, mother-effing snakes on some mother-effing plane could be shoved into the deep shade by persistent questions about where the heck all the neighborhood dogs and cats are disappearing to...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:50 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

The Effects of Blue-ing On Bank Accounts 

...there was a time, one that some of us would like to think was not all that long ago (at least for the sake of our thinning hair and painful knees), when the Republican party in the State of Oregon was a robust organization with money galore, two U.S. Senators, majorities in the two chambers of the state legislature, and a reasonable number of state-level elected officials. Republican leaders rode high and proud in the saddle in those glistening day, no doubt dreaming of the time when they would be able to claim their own permanent majority years before such a dream seemed within the reach of national Republican leaders. It was a high-rolling fat time for Oregon Republicans, but it is - for now, at least - all gone...

Today, the Oregon Republican party is in the sort of position that all those late-night "are you hopelessly mired in debt" ads are supposedly addressing. They are facing liens from the IRS (that would be the IRS of the Bush Administration), their cell phones are in danger of becoming of little use other than paperweights to keep important papers from blowing off of the picnic tables they will soon be forced to work at, and they may well be faced with the prospect of competing for parking spaces with strip bar patrons and meth pushers in whatever hole-in-the-wall storefront they can finally pony up enough money in which to install the state party offices. They haven't been able to successfully recruit candidates to run for a couple of statewide offices, and the abrupt announcement by Democratic Congressperson Darlene Hooley of her retirement from a seat in a closely-split swing district has resulted in only the usual cast of perennial candidates leaping out of the lush western Oregon underbrush to proclaim their interest in having a go at the spot...

This isn't about the normal lame argument offered by state Repub's about the overwhelming influence of the oh-so-Blue Willamette Valley dominating state politics; this is about loss of identity and faith. As was the case with the Republican party in many states and at the national level, a certain twisted brand of social conservatism, complete with a specific number of well-defined litmus tests, took hold over the last decade at the expense of the understandings and beliefs of the more traditional conservatives who formed the backbone of the party in years past. They became a party that Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, and Bob Packwood (whose political demise-inducing predilection for rounding up some boxed wine and getting crazy with less-than-willing adult women looks like some sort of bizarre tin-plate of a more innocent Republican world these days) wouldn't even recognize what the party has become. The party of Tom McCall became the party of Tom Delay; the people who thought they were rock-ribbed members of a party that believed in leaving people alone found themselves outside the tent looking in at a smug group of self-sanctifying zealots who didn't view 'leaving people alone' as part of their life mission and saw anyone who didn't turn that litmus strip the proper red tint to be somewhat less than worthy...

These citizens have fallen upon hard times, and it is our Christian duty to help them where we can. So when you see some down-on-his-heels street person standing on the corner outside of some Oregon Walmart parking lot with a cardboard sign that says "Will Politick for Food", be a sport. Give up one of those cans of cat food for the poor guy; he may be your next Republican state office candidate...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:48 PM 0 comments

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Consequences Of A Smoke-Filled Room 

...that swelling rumble you might think you have been hearing over the last few weeks is the growing discussion of the role that Superdelegates might play in the selection of the Democratic presidential nominee come August in Denver. I really don't have a dog in this fight, given that my candidate is long gone from the process, but I do have some thoughts...ok, so one preeminent thought and an observation or two...

Superdelegates came into being in the Democratic party for the sole purpose of making sure that the wildly uncontrollable grass-roots dirty frikkin' hippy elements of 1972 or the confused panicky voters of 1980 never again force a left-wing George McGovern or weakened incumbent Jimmy Carter on the Wise Men and Women who are the elites and Know What Is Best For The Party. While I suppose there is some sort of compelling argument out there for the curried, sleek insiders to trot out that can explain why they need to maintain a controlling interest in the selection of the party's nominee that can somehow overrule the preference expressed by a plurality of the voters (and, yes, I know that there is a contrary argument about the number of open primaries, but that is the way the general election is going to be run, too). I won't be listening, though. Brokered conventions can be exciting; they can also be the death of a promising opportunity to take back the White House. It's all about the people, though. The people who took part in the process and the delegates they selected need to be the folks to work this all out, not the privileged few of the party hierarchy...

My primary thought is thus: if the Superdelegates intervene to give the nomination to the candidate who rolls into Denver with the lesser number of committed delegates, I'm out. I'll open up my Oregon Vote By Mail ballot when it comes and cast votes for those local and regional issues and candidates about which I have some interest, lick the envelope and slap a stamp on that puppy, drive it down to the Post Office, and then I will subscribe to the Book Of The Month Club and never pay more than passing interest in national politics again. It won't matter all that much anymore, anyway, because the ardent supporters of whichever candidate that might come into the Democratic National Convention leading in the delegate count only to lose on the Superdelegate vote are going to stay home on Election Day anyway and we will be able to enjoy a few years of misguided sabre-rattling, wasted young American lives, and fatcat-favoring economic policy under President McCain (oh, darn, did I forget to mention Supreme Court nominees)...

...there still is a Book Of The Month Club, right?
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:56 PM 0 comments

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