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

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

On The List Of Things I Hope To Never Have To Say In Public 

...I have a list of things that I hope to never have to say in public, and specifically hope to never have to say in front of a Congressional committee. This is on that list:
"Mr Chairman and members of the committee on advice of my counsel, I respectfully decline to answer your questions based on the protections afforded me under the US Constitution."

I'm just engaging in wild unsubstantiated speculation here, but it seems to me that when you have to get to this point in your public pronouncements, you are in a whole heap of trouble. This is the kind of public statement that suggests that the simple idea of going home at night to have a stiff drink and chat with your spouse about how your day sucked is the sort of charming personal lifestyle minutia that you may not for the whole rest of your life be able to enjoy...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:46 PM 0 comments

Car Wrecks In Space 

...even though I've always been kind of a space wonk, today's news that satellites are crashing into each other 400 miles up there above our heads came as a bit of a shock. In the mind of a grown-up kid like me who insisted his parents drag him out of bed to watch the Mercury Program launches back in the early 1960's, the idea that there isn't enough room out there in the vastness of space to make sure that satellites don't run into each other like a couple of economy cars at a snow-slick intersection is mind-boggling...

An obvious question arises: how is it that we can apparently track objects in space down to four inches in size but can't shout out a warning to the Iridium folks that their cute little Honda Civic of a satellite is on a collision course with an H2 Hummer of a hulk at an approach speed of twenty or thirty thousand miles per hour? Sometimes it seems as though we are replaying the mistakes of the last century in the skies above us rather than in the oceans and on the lands around us. The near space surrounding our planet has replaced the ravine out behind the house or the local dump or some convenient nearby body of water as a place where the final resting place for assorted junk and garbage is perfectly acceptably and devoid of any particular ramifications...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:12 PM 0 comments

Monday, February 09, 2009

Who Needs Puppy Cam When We Have Republicans? 

...Puppy Cam was one of those incredibly rapid and powerful viral phenomena that sucked up band width all across the intertubes like some crazed and unexpected miniature black hole suddenly ripping an ugly gash in the space-time continuum in the control room of the Large Hadron Collider and dragging the entire village of Prévessin-Moëns across the event horizon. In homes and offices and cubicles across the world, otherwise sentient beings spent hours fawning and drooling over the real-time antics of a litter of Shiba Inu puppies live-streaming onto their computer screens. Productivity plummeted around the globe; First World GDP numbers suffered a body blow; the European Union met in emergency session to draw up plans to respond to this latest assault by the Japanese puppy juggernaut with a Bernese Mountain Dog Puppy Cam site...

Those first puppies grew up and were given away, though. No longer what there the release of watching cuuuttee little baby dogs fighting and growling and tumbling around and with each other. A dark emptiness settled across the developed world.....but Hope is on the horizon. No, it's not puppies; it's conservatives that we now have the opportunity to watch. As it so happens, there are various breeds of conservatives: one the one hand you have the reactionary shallow-thinking litmus-test conservatives (most commonly found sitting in front of microphones in sealed radio sound studios where they can't get their hands on any of the sophisticated equipment) while on the other hand we have a small cadre of relatively quick-witted feral conservative politicians who make the occasional grand show of common-folk populist outrage (that never translates to any actual action) that they hope will foster a sense that they are actually calm reasoned common folk their own selves, mostly in hope of continued electoral success rather than as a means of properly representing their constituents...

For your consideration, today we have the cute growling tumbling faux-fight between Laura Ingraham and Arlen Specter. By way of stipulation, it must be said that any resemblance between Specter and an actual reasonable "moderate" Republican is only the result of careful political craftsmanship and not the product of any legislative or political action on his part. Specter earned his chops in his verbal assassination of Anita Hill during the "high-tech lynching" of Clarence Thomas's SCOTUS nomination hearing and has never really looked back. Over a good portion of the last eight years he has made Harry Reid look like some sort of pale imitation of righteous indignation, using his chairmanship/ranking membership positions to express various varieties of populist outrage at the actions of Bushco, but - just like Reid over the last couple of years, except with much more heartfelt outrage - he has always managed to knuckle under to his conservative masters. Today, though, you could almost feel the building pressure of another onrushing campaign that Arlen is going to have to run all across a political landscape that even he can feel beginning to shift dangerously under his feet...

Specter doesn't come close to being the first person I would hate to see getting verbally beaten for his political stances and votes, regardless of the venue host. The dialogue in this particular interview is truly precious, though, and answers the needs of an internet world crying out for a new cage full of growling, tugging, and tumbling after all the past stars have gone off to new homes. Arlen has decided to position himself for his general election contest as the calm moderate Republican of great seniority, and the True Believers will be tugging and tumbling with him - like Laura Ingraham did today - to try to drag him into line or at least get him pointed in a different direction when it comes to issues like economic stimulus. This is, if anything, even better than Puppy Cam if only because the stakes seem so high. At the rate Republicans in both the House and Senate are going, however, the stakes aren't going to be all that high for them, because they aren't going to matter much more than any past version of Puppy Cam, although they will be cute to watch...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:32 PM 0 comments

Sunday, February 08, 2009

"It Sounded Like A Train" 

...sometimes it does sound like a train. Other times it sounds like a jet that is just about to land on the piece of ground on which you stand. The sounds of a wind- and convection-driven wildfire bearing down on you with terrifying speed can vary, depending on the type of fuel being consumed and your own personal aural history and sense of peril at any particular moment. That sound, whatever comparisons it may challenge you to come up with, almost doesn't matter because there is always way more drama in the surrounding sights and smells for your brain to process that let you know just how dire the circumstances are...

The wildfires currently devastating southern Australia have more dimensions of tragedy than we are normally accustomed to seeing. This isn't just about lost homes and businesses; it isn't only about the sheer awesome power of Mother Nature when she has had enough and wants to deliver a serious message about where and how we choose to live. At last count, over 160 people have died while either trying to shelter in place or flee these fires. That is an almost immeasurable tragedy; it is one thing to understand the loss of property but another entirely different thing to contemplate loss of life on a scale such as this. Being in the presence of an uncontrolled running wildfire can be a scary experience even when you are there on purpose and supposedly know what you are doing. It is even more terrifying when the Beast comes roaring into town with such a raging demonic power that you have to quickly come to grips with the grim realization that you don't know what to do or where to go. There will be time enough later to discuss the extreme conditions and climate change and all that. There will need to be time made later to discuss all those traditional takes on making property fire safe and the whole flee vs. shelter in place matrix and all the other nuts and bolts of living in a fire-prone environment. All there is time to do now is pray for those who have lost and who have been lost and those they left behind...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:41 PM 0 comments

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