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

Friday, October 02, 2009

So THAT'S What Happened To Biosphere II 

...sometimes it seems as though the entire population of The Village - and not just its right-wing component - serves as an answer to the trivia question "So what did they finally end up doing with that Biosphere II thing, anyway?" Moving the entire D.C. pundracray into that formerly abandoned isolated and self-contained facility can be the only explanation that I can come up with for both the commentary during the run up to and the after-action analysis of President Obama's trip to Copenhagen to make Chicago's case for hosting the CMGLXXIVDZ (at least I think that's it; I've never been good with Roman numerals but we're talking 2016 here) Summer Olympiad...

Based on a carefully calibrated and mathematically rigorous poll that I conducted today, the methodology of which consisting primarily of listening to various prominent national sports talk radio shows and talking to the few people who were around the office on a Friday, the passion driving a desire to see the International Olympic Committee select Chicago as the venue for the '16 Summer Olympics seemed to hover somewhere around the level of interest about Tom Delay's prospects for taking it all on "Dancing With The Stars". Truth be told, interest in the Bugman's prospects might have held a slight edge. Out in the brisk fall air of the Real World, it was pretty difficult today to find anyone not having some direct connection to Chicago who really cared all that much about who spent time touting for whichever city that might actually be picked to host a Summer Olympics almost seven years from now...

Inside the hermetically-sealed confines of what I guess we should call Politisphere I, circumstances were profoundly different. In that remote, isolated setting, the fact that Obama went to Denmark on a failed mission reinforced building memes: the failure of the Chicago bid was a defeat for Obama, too; the stunning first-round defeat of the Chicago bid meant that Obama and his handlers were either naive or not ready for Prime Time; his image and, in all likelihood, his agenda may well be permanently destroyed by this ill-fated effort and his own personally embarrassing defeat...

Clearly, in the view of the oh-so-smart Villagers who apparently know so much more than all the rest of us who live actual lives in an actual world with a whole host of actual pressing issues, the fact that Obama went to Denmark to assist in making the pitch for Chicago was a Huge Mistake because it didn't pan out. In this strange construct, the Only Logical Conclusion is that the remaining 80 % of his first term will be a fetid hog wallow of failure because the entire world now questions whether he has what it takes to lead us to...well...somewhere now that he has failed to lead us to Chicago in 2016. The fact that it is a challenging task to find anyone outside of the State of Illinois who cares one way or another about who will be hosting the 2016 Summer Olympics doesn't matter; the triple-glazed viewports providing those precious limited views outside Politisphere I are too thick to allow the Politinaut occupants to even hear the conversational murmurings of those of us living our daily lives outside the wall. They don't understand that a sizable majority of us don't actually care all that much about either the Chicago Olympic bid or their own analysis that the outcome of the IOC vote is Obama's own Waterloo on Wacker Drive...

Out here in the real world, the majority of whose residents - when they have the time - watch something other than Faux Noise or any other cable 'news' opinion spewer, folks may be able to formulate an opinion (if asked) about "what Obama's trip to Copenhagen means" that provides grist to all sorts of trenchant analysis regarding the functional capability of the current presidency. None of this matters all that much, however, because most of those respondents couldn't afford to travel to the greater Chi-town Metro Area to get a live glimpse of events in any case. We can probably leave the subject at this point: when most Americans don't really care all that passionately where the 2016 Olympiad is held or whether the President spent a few hours making arguments on behalf of a particular venue, does it really matter what a self-agrandizing cohort of isolated, tone-deaf politinauts think? I thought not...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:40 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Oh, The Joys Of The Northwest Lifestyle! 

...now this doesn't matter to me specifically, since I live a few hours drive or, to put it in geographic terms, two mountain ranges and a broad valley away from the Orygun Coast, but I have to admit that I have never, ever seen this sort of map from the Portland office of the National Weather Service:





So not only do those folks to the west of me get to decide just how much they trust the Tsunami forecasts that have been issued over the last several hours that claim only a one- to two-foot increase in beach water heights, but they also get to weigh the provided information against the fact that whatever is likely to go down is going to go down after dark, when you can't see much in any case. Whatever is about to play out will either be a louder than normal episode of crashing sea surf outside the windows of those living on or visiting the coast tonight or will be a leading news story tomorrow...

It's probably a good thing, every once in a while, to be reminded that the potential of volcanic activity or raging wildfire aren't the only arguments against whatever reasons we Pac-NW'ers offer for willingly choosing to live in a strange and elemental environment. We don't have to deal with hurricanes or tornadoes, by and large, but we have our share of natural events to deal with and Heaven only knows why we do so...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:20 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Well, Actually, Why Not Try This? 

...whatever gland it is that makes me more or less a progressive usually begins, I have to admit, to start pumping all sorts of icky secretions into my bloodstream when I read a story like this one. But every once in a while - and this is one of those "whiles" - I stop and say to myself "well, why not?" After all, the otherwise strange and disturbing behavior described in the story is all about the campaign for the position of adjutant general of the South Carolina National Guard. This is, after all, a story from South Carolina, perhaps the only member of the Union whose state-wide and national leaders are causing it to creep dangerously close to being a place where another declaration of secession would be met with either derision or fond wishes of good fortune...

Why South Carolina is the only state to actually vote for the commander of its own National Guard is a bit of strangeness that shall be left for the citizens of the Palmetto State to explain. The bottom line is that it is what it is, and if you are going to be campaigning for that position, why not have a raffle for a real live semiautomatic assault rifle? This is all about leadership of the National Guard, after all, and holding a raffle for a real live semiautomatic assault rifle doesn't seem all that much different than a raffle for a nice shotgun at some state's Ducks Unlimited convention or one for a 30.06 at some regional hunter's association gathering. It's all about fund-raising in all of these cases, after all...

It all makes perfect sense as a campaign fund-raising event in a red-blooded patriotic American State like South Carolina, except for that one nagging question in the back of my mind: why is a person campaigning for the opportunity to be commander of the United States National Guard troops in the State of South Carolina holding a raffle where the winner receives a Soviet Socialist Communist AK-47 assault rifle? Is a red-blooded patriotic American weapon like the Colt AR-15 not good enough? Is Soviet resident Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov the person that a candidate for adjutant general of the South Carolina National Guard wants to recognize, as opposed to the lesser known but no less influential (and American) Eugene Stoner?

But never mind that. Raffling a Soviet Communist Socialist AK-47 as a fund-raising and attention-gathering gambit is a clever idea, so why not try it...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:08 PM 0 comments

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