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

Saturday, March 29, 2008

The Slippery Slope Between Lucky And Good 

...the basic problem with trying to make a living on the wrong side of the line between being lucky and good is that things can go so sharply and painfully south when your luck threatens to run out and you weren't good enough to begin with. It's a fundamental thing, an elemental physical truth like "snow is cold" or "wind is windy", and the strung-out Bushco hustlers who brought us Gee Dub's Great Iraqi Nation-Building Adventure are either truly too stupid to understand that they have been misreading the direction of the "not equal" sign in this equation or have been hoping that they could make it over the county line before the rest of us caught on. We may be on the verge of finding out just what exactly is the correct answer to that question...

It is arguably fair to stipulate that a reasonable portion of all the ballyhooed "Success" of The Surge is directly attributable to the decision of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to declare a truce last year. This isn't in any way a denigration of the efforts of the troops who have had to do the grim dangerous work of trying to quell the violence in the country. They have done all that could be asked of them while a grateful nation obsessed over missing blonde college students, fretted over the latest episodes of "American Idol" and "Dancing With The Stars", and totally ignored - or, on a really lucid day, paid lame lip service to - the families of those lost or to soldiers who came home with serious physical or psychological wounds that were only occasionally addressed after a rare, brief, intense spate of old-fashioned investigative journalism embarrassment forced the Bush administration to do the right thing. As has been far too often documented, however, the only measuring stick that mattered for the success of The Surge hasn't been used. The much-discussed reduction of violence and insurrection that would provide a space for the Iraqi government to get all its fecal matter in one sack hasn't been a sufficient counterweight to offset the raw primitive tribalism and hatreds - both near-term and ancient - that continue to infest this useless artificial nation of convenience that came from the defeat of the Ottoman empire in World War I...

So, here we are. The eternal desperate shyster optimism of Gee Dub and his merry band of synchopants compels them to tell us just exactly how successful The Surge has been, when the real truth all along was that Sadr was that man behind the curtain that we were supposed to ignore. The Surge may have dealt with all that Sunni extremist/al Qaeda violence that we were supposed to see as the focal point of the War On Terra, but it was the cease-fire between competing Shiite factions that conjured up the false dawn toward which the Bushco cock crowed. That's all looking as though it's falling apart right now and all that Luck that Gee Dub had during the life of the surge (at least as far as the situation in Baghdad is concerned, since nobody in the media has cared all that much about the situation in Basra) is threatening to run out. The Green Zone is looking like some cheap cross between Diem Bien Phu and the Fall of Saigon and the Iraqi Army that was supposed to step in behind the British to control Basra is dangerously treading on the edge of failure after the Maliki government apparently decided to show who could pee highest on the wall in the on-going dispute about which Shiite faction will be in charge of the country. Since presentation is the whole story for Gee Dub and the gang, this excerpt from the link is profoundly instructive:
Petraeus is known for opening his recent presentations by displaying what aides call his favorite slide: a chart showing attacks in Iraq spiking last year, then dramatically dropping amid the deployment of 28,500 additional U.S. troops.

Pentagon officials worry that the recent violence will mar that otherwise compelling narrative.

People are dying; people who aren't evil-doers or agents of terror or 'bad guys' are dying, people who are innocent men and women and children, and they are doing so at rates and under circumstances that would send the most peaceful DFH liberal in the world storming down to the local gun store with battering rams and cutting torches to even the odds if the same sort of things were happening on the streets of this country. None of this is about a "narrative", regardless of how compelling any number of Gee Dub suck-ups view the situation. The bottom line is that George W. Bush and the people who have used him as the vessel for their own strange dreams of empire have been more lucky that good over the last several months, thanks in large part to Moqtada al-Sadr, as they tried to salvage their misguided misbegotten neoconservative world-view shot at nation-building and that luck is starting to run out. The ugly prospect we are facing is that they were able to pull off some neat trick that distracted us with that bit of luck even though they weren't adept enough to make "good" work. Moqtada al-Sadr appears to be on the edge of calling in all the "luck" chips and "good" probably isn't going to be able to cover the wager....
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:43 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 27, 2008

View With A Room 

...Mrs. Jack K. asked me the other day, sort of out of the blue, "So, where would you like to retire to". Thinking back to a life spent primarily in the high places of the intermountain West and reflecting on the man-against-nature battles of two decades' worth of winter east of the Oregon Cascades, I carefully arrived at a thoughtful, well-reasoned decision. It took a good 0.6723 seconds...

"The coast", I said. Looking west from our secret Spring Break hideout last night, I couldn't think of a single reason to reexamine that decision...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:08 PM 0 comments

Defeating The Evil Ones, One Nipple Ring At A Time 

...there are days you smack up against the sort of story that makes you realize that the terrorists are far closer to having won that anyone really suspects. Obviously, this is one of those days...

I can only assume that I am merely a hopelessly innocent waif unfamiliar with that host of terrifying, nameless dangers that lurk around every stinking corner, because I would never in a million years be able to determine just what exactly the hell sort of threat a nipple ring would pose to an airliner full of passengers. When every little old lady in the friendly skies is sufficiently amped up to start leaping over seat backs with a sock full of quarters toward some nut waving a box cutter in the air, the idea that somebody is going to commandeer a flight armed with a pair of gleaming sharp nipple rings seems to be a concept that is just beyond my capability to grasp...

Speaking as a bureaucrat of long experience, I know that there are some things that bureaucracies do an ok job at and some things at which they are hopelessly inept. Bureaucracies are the sharpest kids in class, for example, when it comes to making rules. As this example shows, however, bureaucracies - especially those who don't take sufficient care in trying to hire employees who can even be pretenders to the title "best and brightest" - are woefully, absymally, depressingingly incapable of administering those same rules in any way that begins to make sense to people who are outside the cocoon. Giving people with too small a decision-making space, too little common sense, and too much authority is a bad recipe in any case, but this is just another small story that highlights how the whole thing can go completely off the rails. There are far too many other stories just like it that we never hear about, none of which make any sense. I only have to think of my friend of 30 years who is an absolute nightmare to travel with because he - a blond-haired, blue-eyed native-born American of Northern European descent - is absolutely incabable of making it from the ticket counter to the plane without being pulled off to one side and virtually strip searched while answering a rapid-fire battery of questions (you would think that he would, somewhere in his thirty years of federal service, have made his evil terrorist move before now, but apparently there is a pretty good chance in the eyes of the TSA that he is a really deep sleeper agent just patiently marking his time)...

Thank God he doesn't have nipple rings. I might have to denounce him in public just to make my flight if he ever accessorizes to that level...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:14 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Global Climate Change Is A Myth!!! (now where's my snow shovel) 

...it has been a hard cold winter in Central Oregon. OK, so the last few weeks have featured the usual "false spring" that has driven more than one stout soul over the edge through the decades, but the memory of the feet of new snow in early February is still hard, grim, and freshly raw because of the desperate and expensive efforts to keep the mile-long path to pavement open for anything other that my low-mpg four-by-four rigs....

It's Spring Break time, now, though, and we are on the Oregon Coast anxiously looking for daffodils, actively transspiring green grass, and something - anything - that doesn't evoke the grim death-like grip of a snowbound winter. This particular window of time has been a traditional time for Mrs. Jack K (a child of the Central Washington Coast) and I (reared in the mountains of Central Idaho) to connect spiritually with those primordial ancestors who first crawled on their fore-flippers onto dry land. For our entire marriage, which will reach the 25-year milepost early next week, we have been coming to the Oregon coast in late March or early April (and may well have done so prior to that, but we need not discuss those trips in the presence of her mother, thank you very much). This morning, for the first time in all my visits to either the Orygun coast or the Mrs.'s ancestral Washington coast, I stood on the deck outside our room taking in the panoramic coastal view through a heavy wet pelting rain/SNOW mixture...

It's been a tough winter along the Pacific Northwest coast, what with a seemingly neverending series of hurricane-force winter storms pounding the western face of the nation, unusually low snow levels in the Coast Range mountains, and enough rain to make southern Arizona look like a reasonable alternative to anyone with the right maps and the wherewithal to make it all happen. Still, this is my time at the coast. I don't ask for "Beach Blanket Bingo" weather and a host of 21st-century Annette Funicello wanna-be's engaged in serious beach frolic, but a wet mix of rain and snow falling on my beach view is not supposed to be part of the contract I have with the coast...

I blame Al Gore. Just see if I ever watch his movie again...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:27 PM 0 comments

The Walls Close In On D.B. Cooper 



...ok, so they probably really aren't - one way or another, but still this news is interesting...

I connect to this somewhat because I spent almost nine years living and working right smack dab in the middle of this area. While I knew the woman who would become Mrs. Jack K 24 years and 361 days ago from the vicious summer evening "jungle rules" vollyball games we young folks used to play on the nearby federal land management agency compound, she and I actually first hooked up at Nick's Bar and Grill (it was "Nick's Tavern" back then, although they did the 'grill' thing and I will owe my eventual cardiovascular demise in part to a great many "Nick's Burgers"). My boss and several coworkers could still remember the stormy night many years earlier when a Boeing 727 flew so low across the landscape that it sent the widely scattered rural residents out into the driving wind and rain to watch for the fireball that never came. We were occasionally reminded, eight years later when I first went to work in this region 20 miles southwest of Mt. St. Helens to keep an eye out for odd things that might seem out of character for the southwestern Washington Cascade mountains, things like fabric caught up in tree limbs or piles of human bones entwined in a parachute or satchels full of banded twenty-dollar bills ("oh, YES, sir; you'll be the first...or so...to know!")...

May 18, 1980, gave us things to think about that literally blew all thoughts of D.B. Cooper and bags full of money raining out of the sky completely out of our collective minds; when part of your workplace is the woods and a portion of that workplace just got violently horozontalized by a natural event only seen once before in the history of the continental U.S., distractions can ensue...

There was a bit of a stir earlier that year when a kid cavorting on a Columbia River beach found bundles of D.B.'s money, but not much else since then except for the occasional TV show or the annual festival at the Ariel Store (which is a good half-hour drive from Amboy, but not so far as the crow or 727 flies). The discovery of the parachute badly messes with all the working "where'd he go" theories because the 'chute is a couple of unreachable watersheds to the west - or downstream - of the one that would have naturally delivered those discovered bundles of money to the beach where they were dug out of the sand...

Fascinating stuff, in a local who-the-hell-else-cares way. I haven't darkened any Clark County doorways myself in over 20 years, but this is the place where I first started my career, met my wife, and welded those first post-college friendships into my psychic framework that have stayed with me for the better part of 30 years. I wasn't in-country when ol' Dan hurled himself out of the back airstairs of that Northwest Orient 727 with all the marbles in play all those years ago, but the residue of that event as a part of local culture is at the very least one of the lesser but fundamental alleles expressing who I ended up being. It's also far more interesting - at leat to me, these days - that how Hillary Clinton is responding to Barack Obama's choice of pastors...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:49 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

When You Know That The Primary Season Has Gone On Too Long... 

...I don't know that I actually care about this. No...wait a minute...I'm pretty sure that I don't really care who's related at the most remote genomic level to George or Laura or Brangelina or my son's African Grey parrot Audrey (although I would have put good money on a Gee Dub/St. John/parrot connection on general principle and ample circumstantial evidence)...

I suppose that this is all innocent fun, and it is certainly more entertaining than watching Barack Omama's minions and Hillary Clinton's minions do their best to piss off enough voters to guarantee a John McCain presidency. It certainly beats the daylights out of having to deal with the sight of l'il Jimmy Carville doing another twisted garden gnome impression in a misguided effort to rachet up all sorts of unnecessary and divisive anger, hatred, and dissention. We have probably been dealt a disservice by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, since we will now have to endure another brutal round of fake analysis by the hopeless waterheads of the MSM as they try to decide whether Obama's disturbing genealogical ties to Gee Dub's family, Big Dick Cheney, and Robert E. Lee are somehow leavened at the mitochondrial level by his relation to Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, and Winston Churchill or whether some meaningful truth can be teased out of Clinton's faint blood connection to Madonna or Alanis Morissette and - of course - the questions that she simply must answer about that Kerouac connection (the Camilla Parker Bowles thing can probably be passed off as simple karma, don't you think?)...

We may well now see God knows how many visual assaults by caracturist representations of Hillary Croft, Superdelegate Raider and of effete Ivy League Kennebunkport-based cigarette boat-driving Barack Herbert Walker Obama. We deserve no less, given the loose reins that we have allowed what passes for political pundrity these days. We won't see much on John McCain, mostly because he is probably within actual handshake distance with any ancestors who's names would ring a bell anyway, but that's not really where the real action is in any case, so he doesn't really matter in this particular bizarre exercise...

You know a primary season has gone on too long when we start talking about who is related to whom at a level that even the most stalwart real-live geneaolgists don't care about and which may well not be able to be mapped by the most sophisticated genome mapping project in any event. It means nothing, really, but there is no real tangible hope that we will escape this particular exercise unscathed....
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:02 PM 0 comments

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