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

Friday, July 11, 2008

Paying Peter To Leave Paul Alone 

...one of the pressing problems for federal land management agencies over the last several years has been the cost of fighting the growing number of large wildfires that threaten life and property. Because of the Antideficiency Act, these agencies can only spend the amount of money they have been given in the annual appropriations process to get done all the things that need gettin' done (the deficit and debt that get moaned about don't come from agency spending itself, but rather from Congress appropriating more money than can be covered by tax revenue)...

For land management agencies, the need to use available funds for fire suppression - barring the occasional special appropriation - has resulted in the need to engage in a process known as "fire borrowing", where other programs are required to turn over a portion of their appropriations to cover the costs of fire suppression. It's a deceptive-sounding concept, because it isn't really borrowing in the sense that the borrowed money won't be paid back, and the impact can be dramatic for other programs ranging from road and facilities maintenance to all of the "-ologists" who frequently are operating on a shoestring already. Finally, though, relief may be on the horizon...

This is a solution that has been looking for champions for a while now. The initial reaction to the first round of 'fire borrowing' ranged from "you're kidding, right?" to "you're gonna pay that back, right?", with the answer in both cases being "well, no." A sort of quiet, obsequious numbness settled in over subsequent years as program managers became reluctantly familiar with having to change plans, scale back programs, and adjust their workforce late in the fiscal year as a result of 'fire borrowing'. Anything that will give proper due to the increasingly consistent demand for funding to combat the increasingly large and dangerous fires along what is known in the biz as the wildland-urban interface (or, as the acronym is pronounced internally, "woo-ie") without purloining year-to-year funds from other land management programs is a good thing in two ways: it stabilizes funding for non-fire programs and it gives fire managers a better sense of the resources they can acquire ahead of the game to deal with unpredictable but generally growing suppression needs...

This legislation has yet to make its way through the Senate and God alone knows what roadblocks, barriers, and impediments may be thrown in its path by newly-fiscally-conservative wingnuts, but it's a piece of proposed law whose time has long since arrived...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:05 PM 0 comments

Short Random Thoughts About Computers 

...there are most certainly worse things in the world than having the hard drive on your faithful old Dell laptop cross over the River Styx, but in the depth of the moment it can be a vexing and disturbing experience. When I become President my very first official act will be to sign an Executive Order mandating "Clear Language" requirements for all on-screen computer error messages, so future generations won't have to spend three evenings googling what the hell all these mysterious quasi-english half-sentences and alpha-numeric gobbledegook mean...

Fortunately, my laptop isn't the main computer supporting family operations, so there isn't anything that qualifies as "critical information" residing in the cold, dead, silvery little brain laying on the kitchen table as the computer whirs away in the background installing stuff on the new hard drive I bolted into it a little while ago. This fact will greatly ameliorate any remorse I might otherwise feel when I take a hammer to it...in order to protect personal information, of course. At least I'm saving money on that registry cleanup software I was just about to buy for the old girl...

UPDATE: It has become clear to me that hopeless hardware tyros such as myself should probably have an easily accessible on-line version of "Reinstalling Stuff On A New Hard Drive For Dummies". It should include a bold-printed warning that systems diagnostic utilities insisting that all of the appropriate drivers have been installed are lying festering mongrel dogs. At least I now have working audio and scrolling/dragging that isn't all whacked out - at the cost of a great gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair that wasn't all that substantial to begin with - but the guy that brags within range of my hearing down at the local pub that he wrote the apps/drivers installation utility for Dell is getting a beer bottle between the eyes...
Posted by: Jack K. / 1:40 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Let The Media Games Continue 

...there has never been any hope that a Democratic candidate for state or federal office would get an even break from Main Stream Media. Any sort of objective voice coming out of all the talking heads and radio voices that we used to understand decades ago as some sort of "Fourth Estate" pretty much gasped its last live breath somewhere shortly after Richard Nixon crawled onto Marine One for that last long ride out of federal service, and there hasn't been any evidence that it would ever come back for a couple of decades now...

Today's news feed is instructive:

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama is spending yet another day defending his positions of a variety of issues against the charge of 'flip flopping'. Never mind that John McCain has over the last several months carried on like some fresh catch in a bass boat live well; Obama is being set up by the MSM as the real 'flip-flopper' in this campaign. Never mind that Huggy Bear has recently turned his back on commonly understood standards of torture, on the very immigration legislation that he sponsored, on the truth-to-power moments he had several years ago about the disturbing power that leading right-wing religious zealots had on our political discourse, and on his views of Gee Dub's trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy. The daily news is about Obama supposedly moving away from past positions; he's the 'flip-flopper'...

With regard to the Campaign of Continued Darkness, we have the current specter of ol' Maverick running ads all over the place telling us how he hates...really detests...war as only one who experienced it really can. And yet - and one more time - we have the vision of this Hater Of War casually speculating about the casual killing of Iranians. No matter that the victims of either bombings - "bomb bomb Iran" and all that - or cancer may very well be the very Iranian citizens that need to be reached out to in order to bring some semblance of peace to the Middle East; John McCain has taken the steps necessary for a military person to dehumanize the opponent in order to be able to sleep at night after a hard day of killing the women and children that are residents of the aiming point. We won't be hearing anything about Huggy Bear hungering for a military adventure against Iran, because he was just joking about all that both this time and the last time and he really doesn't harbor any particular desire to launch another preemptive war even though he in no way accepts the idea that actually talking with one's opponents is a logical or reasonable approach to foreign policy as long as there are aircraft carrier task forces...

And, as far as the media is concerned, Sedona barbeques are more important than dropping bombs on other sovereign nations or who has changed positions on important issues for electoral purposes in any case...

It's not a beginning; it's a continuation, and this is the nonsense we will have to deal with all the way up to November as the MSM fights to elect its 2008 beer-drinkin' buddy...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:20 PM 0 comments

Sunday, July 06, 2008

On Food Colors And Clown Car Planning 

...one thing that would be really nice if the Democratic National Committee could actually pull it off would be if it could somehow get all its fecal material in one sack when it comes to planning a Democratic National Convention doesn't cause potentially fatal embarrassment to the nominee. How that all works out won't be known, of course, until the end of July, but at the moment the odds are looking to be only even money that there won't be any problems that Republicans can point to as examples of how Democrats can't organize their way out of a wet paper bag...

It was a long,long time ago that Voltaire said some variant of "The perfect is the enemy of the good", but the effort to pull together the 2008 Democratic convention doesn't offer any particular evidence that the concept has become timeworn or quaint. There are plenty enough examples of circumstances where people may be in charge of planning some aspect of the shindig probably weren't the best choice for the jobs at hand, but even the little things are out of whack. Aside from the passably strange idea of food groups being divided into five colors - and Praise the Lord that nobody is interested in my being there, because a ban on fried food Will Not Stand as far as I'm concerned - and mandates on locally-grown organic food, some of the steps being taken to make this the Greenest Convention Of All Time (Wall Street Journal Alert, but the basic facts are probably trustworthy) seem to my jaundiced aging eye to be just plain silly, not to mention a questionable expenditure of money that could better be spent explaining Who John McCain Really Is to the American people...

Organic cotton fanny packs? Given that the base is all of us Dirty Frickin' Hippies, why not hemp?

Probably the most glaring failure of understanding that "perfect/enemy of good" thing is accepting the donation of biofuel for its official flex-fuel fleet from the Coors Brewing Company. Of course, this may perversely be the greenest move of all; given the long-time opposition of union supporters, teachers, affirmative action advocates, gun control proponents, and LGBT supporters against the personal politics of the scions of the Coors fortune, there may be so few conventioneers willing to be caught dead in a Coors-fueled vehicle that the convention's carbon footprint would be dramatically reduced even if every meal was served with disposable plastic plates and utensils and the fanny packs were made out of nylon in coal-fired Malaysian sweat shops and individually shipped across the Pacific by tramp steamer...

Now that the Obama camp is rolling into to town to try to get things back on track, this all might get turned around yet and what has transpired to date doesn't prove that you can't throw a big ol' convention without being environmentally conscious. All it proves is that you might not want to put the planning in the hands of a bunch of oddly dressed characters who pulled up in front in a clown car...
Posted by: Jack K. / 4:57 PM 0 comments

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