Not that I've doubted this for several months now, but today's San Francisco Chronicle reprinted a NY Times article that makes it revoltingly clear what's going on in Iraq, at least in the south around Basra. What's going on is nothing more nor less than the Hatfields and the McCoys.
In one corner, we have Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army.
In the other corner, we have Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and its private army, the Badr Brigade.
These people are all Shiites. Theoretically they believe the same things and support the same things, and they all claim to be patriotic Iraqis (although SCIRI is widely believed to be supported and funded from Iran). What's really going on?A dynastic rivalry between their two families has existed for decades and has carried over into a personal and political rivalry between the men, and their militias have periodically clashed.
"The split is very old, and it has caused a lot of tragedy," said Abd-Kareem al-Mahamedawy, one of Amara's most prominent political leaders and a moderate Shiite. "It's just a fight for power."
Just as I said: Hatfields and McCoys, but with private armies, which we, I point out, obligingly armed. According to the article, the stability of the current Iraqi government depends on the "truce" between these two factions; and as far as I can tell, they'd all rather duke it out for old times' sake than act together for the good of the country. The current eruption began when a local police official (Badr Brigade; in case you wondered about the rumors that the Shiite militias have infiltrated the police? All true) was killed in a bombing, and the police arrested the brother of the head of the local Mahdi Army unit. The next thing anyone knew, the city of Amara was under siege.
Why are we holding these guys' coats? (Apart from the fact that we started it by removing Saddam Hussein, who didn't take any crap from any of these yo-yos.) This isn't democracy and it never will be, as long as the place is ruled by the 21st century equivalent of the Montagues and the Capulets. The concept of turning a country that still practices the blood feud into a modern democracy is laughable (which goes for Serbia and Kosovo, too, I might add).
I remember thinking when we began this absurd incursion that what we'd end up with, after a "free" election, was a Shiite theocracy, because Shiites were 60% of the country. These developments actually convince me I may have been wrong; a Shiite theocracy would presumably enforce order. What we have here is total anarchy, where only the gun rules. We may have bigger guns; but there are 140,000 of our guys and 26 million Iraqis; and we have yet to see, anywhere, a standing army defeat an armed guerilla force on its own ground.
The sooner we bring our troops home and let the Iraqis fight this out among themselves, the better.
As a California Democrat of long standing (except, years ago, when I registered Republican so I could vote for Pete McCloskey in the primaries), I feel I ought to state publicly why I don't plan to vote for my party's candidate for governor.
Frankly, the main reason I don't want to vote for him is the impression I've gotten from him for the last 3 years. He doesn't want to be governor to fix what's wrong with the state, or to balance the budget, or do any of the things that come up in the campaign ads. He wants to be governor because he thinks it's his turn. He's been a faithful party hack for decades, and he's worked his way up to state office, and now he wants the top state office because he deserves it for all his work. I didn't watch the debate between him and the Gubernator, but I gather Arnold accused him of being part of the Davis machine. Well, he was part of the Davis machine, and Davis had a turn as governor, and now Angelides thinks it's his. I'm sorry, Phil, that's not how the game works. It may be how you think it works.
I have very mixed feelings about Arnold. I still think he's a poseur; but he has managed to produce the only bipartisanship the disgraceful California legislature has displayed in many years. I think he's going to win in a landslide, so I may treat myself to a protest vote for the Green party candidate. But I'm not voting for Angelides.
My husband divided the gazanias in the front yard yesterday. He planted them about 3 years ago, and if you don't divide them, they get leggy. Gazanias do well in the front yard; they're showy, reliable bloomers that don't mind if you only water them once a month.
We've been in the house for 20 years now, and we've only had gazanias for about 3 years. Why? Because gazanias aren't cold hardy. They die in a hard freeze. During the first 10 years we lived here, we had regular hard freezes - I still remember the time the water in the bird bath froze solid, all the way through; and the time I looked at the back of the East Bay Hills, from my office in Concord, California, and saw them covered with snow (I think down to 1,500 feet). We haven't had a hard freeze since I think 1998.
Can't be global warming. That's just a theory. Or so they say.
This seems to be the latest hot item on our increasingly reality-deprived administration's agenda. Iran would be a threat if it had nuclear weapons; and it says it wants peaceful nuclear power, but it must be lying; so we have to plan to invade it. To protect freedom. Or something.
Yeah, right. In the first place, the Iranians are correct that they have as much right as any other idiot to peaceful nuclear power. (Not exactly how they say it.) I might even agree that the fact that they lie like rugs about what they're doing at Natanz and Bushehr (and wherever else) gives even rational people pause about what they're up to. But still:
Invade Iran? With what army? The army we have is tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the point that we're pullling people out of South Korea, which must amuse Kim Jong Il no end. No matter what Donald Rumsfeld thinks, if he thinks, you cannot do everything with unmanned drones. We'd have to put boots on the ground.
And there'd be no question of being greeted with flowers by a grateful populace. Weird as it seems, the government of Iran is democratically elected (the last election was at least as free and fair as the 2004 election in Ohio was). We'd be invaders, and every man's hand would be against us, and probably most of the women's. You all know perfectly well that if someone invaded the continental U.S., all those guns that us bleeding-heart liberals worry about would be turned on the enemy. From every rooftop and bush, just like in 1779. What makes the administration think the Iranians are any different from us?
Finally, if we do nuke Iran's nuclear installations (assuming someone in Washington knows where they really are, which I doubt; it's been thirty years since we had "humint," as the spooks call it, in Iran), we would become instant international pariahs. We are already the only people who have ever actually used The Bomb; and then, we were at war. I don't want to see us become the only people who have used The Bomb on a country that wasn't directly threatening them. Let's have NO first strikes.
I'm tired of this. I'm tired of watching a bunch of middle-aged power junkies, who never had the balls to put on a uniform and get shot at for their country's sake when it was their turn, wasting America's resources and ruining America's good name, for the sake of indulging their video-game wet dreams of world conquest. Why are these people not impeachable? Why are we still putting up with them?
We have a priceless opportunity to stop the Taliban dead in its tracks before it takes over Afghanistan again, and it's very simple. All we have to do is legalize opiate drugs. The Afghan opium crop this year is up 59%, and is now providing 92% of the world's supply, according to a recent article. And that money is funding the Taliban and its attempt to overthrow the Karzai government. Given where they seem to be hiding out, drug money is almost certainly also funding Al Qaeda.
The United States is one of the biggest markets for opium and its derivatives. If we legalize opium, morphine, and heroin, we cut the legs out from under the Taliban. We also do a number of other good things for ourselves, which I detailed in my February 2 post, Prohibition Doesn't Work. The "War on Drugs" wastes our time and energy fighting personal habits that would harm no one except the users if we hadn't criminalized them; and at the same time the high price caused by the illegality is pouring money into the pockets of our greatest enemies.
Legalize the stuff; sell it over the counter, subject to the same restrictions as cigarettes and booze, and taxed in the same way; and quit subsidizing Al Qaeda and the Taliban. The purported moral horror at "drug fiends" is a crock. Sure, opiates will kill you. So will a lot of stuff you can get quite legally, starting with booze.
And while we're at it, let's legalize marijuana, too, and not just for medical purposes. Marijuana won't even kill you, which is more than you can say for booze.
I wish I could convince myself that Pervez Musharraf made up the story about Richard Armitage threatening to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age if they didn't support us in the war on terror. Unfortunately, it sounds exactly like something I'd expect the Bush Administration to have done at the time in question. Within the first months after 9/11/2001, this administration was making some extremely loose statements. We'll never know the actual truth, unless Armitage is dumb enough to confirm it.
I'm not an apologist for Hugo Chavez. I think he's a populist demagogue. He does seem to be providing for the poor of his country, which is how he stays in power, but he's blowing Venezuela's oil revenues at a cracking pace, and the minute the oil price drops far enough, either his free-spending ways will stop, or (more likely) he'll keep spending on borrowed money and then default on the debt as hyperinflation flattens the country.
Whatever you may think of his politics, at least he's literate. His well advertised recommendation of Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival does imply that he's read the thing; and having read some of Chomsky's linguistic work back when I was trying to convince myself that linguistics was interesting, I can confidently state that Chomsky is no Danielle Steele. Hell, he's no Jared Diamond; Diamond writes pretty accessibly about complex stuff. Chomsky is dense. Chomsky is obscure. If Chavez reads Chomsky, he has pretty advanced tastes and a good command of language. I wonder if he read him in English or in translation. Of course, Chavez also said it was a shame he never met Chomsky before he died; according to Wikipedia, as of today (Sept. 23, 2006), Chomsky isn't dead, so maybe Chavez can have his wish.
I would also compliment him on his remark that "the place smells of sulfur still" - that's a very poetic, effective and memorable line - except that I'm not sure whether he was speaking English or Spanish. If he was speaking Spanish, the poetic, effective and memorable line is his translator's.
The President of the United States is publicly linked with a book too. Unfortunately in his case the book is My Pet Goat...
You may recall that one of the, um, highlights of our summer vacation in Stehekin, WA was the Flick Creek Fire, which caused me to be deeply grateful for a steady north wind. The day we left, they posted a Level 1 evacuation notice, which translates to, "there's a fire in the area." I wondered what would happen if the wind shifted; and by gum, a couple of weeks ago it did. You can read all the alerts at the InciWeb site, the spot for all forest fire junkies.
On Sept. 7, the local sheriff and the fire team raised the evacuation level to Level 2. They have a long explanation of this, which boils down to, "Pack. Now. Leave if you can."
On Sept. 9, they issued Level 3 for the Hazard Creek area, one of the back country areas. Level 3 means, "Leave. Now. Don't wait to pack." No other area had to evacuate, and the notice covered I think 3 vacation homes.
They seem to have it back under control, because last Friday they dropped the evacuation notice back to Level 1 for the entire valley.
I'm still glad that wind didn't shift while we were there.
I consider myself a rational person who believes things based on evidence. I don't do blind faith. So I sometimes lose track of the number of people out there in the world who are apparently comforted by the belief that there is a great Conspiracy afoot to fool us. Or something. Everybody knows about the conspiracy theories around the assassination of President Kennedy. It seems to offend some people that one guy with a rifle and a telescopic sight could kill the President of the United States; they can't believe it. He must have had help, he must have been part of a Cabal. I've always felt, never underestimate what one determined nut can accomplish, especially if what he's trying last happened 60 years or so ago and nobody realizes what he's up to. People see what they expect to see, which sometimes means they miss what's going on.
Last weekend I became aware of the latest flavor of conspiracy theories, which is almost as good as the U.N. Black Helicopters. You may have heard this one: it's the theory that the 9/11 attacks were staged by the U.S. government. That's right: it wasn't Al Qaeda. Because we know Bush wanted to go to war in the Middle East, the theory goes, it's reasonable to assume that he would arrange the attack on the World Trade Center so he could use it to justify going to war. Or maybe he knew about it and didn't prevent it, just like Churchill (as another conspiracy theory goes) knew about the attack on Coventry and allowed it to proceed so as not to let the Germans know he was reading their mail. Yeah, sure he did.
If you want to read the arguments, which are endless and involved, you can find them described in this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, which is about a video called "Loose Change"; or you can go find the video on YouTube. The video has a whole list of things the producer believes aren't covered by the official explanations, and therefore he argues that the government either actually caused the attack, or knew about it and let it go through.
I freely admit that the U.S. administration in 2001 was composed of neocon crazies, who were on public record as saying we ought to invade the Middle East and clean it up. Go check out the Project for the New American Century site if you don't believe the public record bit: they argued in a position paper that "a new Pearl Harbor" would galvanize Congress into strengthening the U.S. military. If you don't know about PNAC, you should; they are scary people, and most of them are running our government right now. Sorry, what I hate about these people is that they make me sound like a wingnut conspiracy theorist...
But I don't believe this, just because I don't think they're that bright or that organized. As Hanlon's Razor suggests, Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice. This is Our Government these people are talking about, the same government that couldn't see a cat 5 hurricane heading for New Orleans; the same government that has all the financial sophistication of a drunken sailor on payday; the same government that thought the Iraqi citizens would greet our (invading) soldiers with flowers and song. Our government? Nah.
Maybe it's the simultaneous approach of the mid-term elections and the 5th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001; but there's been an awful lot of fear in the news lately. Years ago when Garrison Keillor was younger and A Prairie Home Companion was new, one of the sponsors he invented for the News from Lake Wobegon was "The Fear Mongers' Shop", and I sometimes feel that those folks are now running the country.
Dubya, of course, is reminding everyone how frightened they'd be if he wasn't protecting us, so we'll all vote Republican (dream on, Georgie). Ever notice how the threat alert level goes up when his poll ratings go down, and just before elections?
But it isn't only him. The San Francisco Chronicle had a big article today, Kids Remember 9/11, which interviewed four teenagers who were in grade school in 2001, and went on at length about how unsafe they feel now and how worried they are.
In fact, the kids came off better than the adults in that article; the African-American kid from Oakland frankly said he's more afraid of guns and crime in Oakland than he is of Al Qaeda, which is a perfectly rational point of view. The young woman said she now knows the world isn't a safe place, but commented that she would have found that out anyway. Unfortunately, one young man has bought Dubya's ridiculous claim that we're fighting the war on terror in Iraq: "It's to keep the terrorists busy so they don't come here." Still, he's only 15.
The quote that made me furious came from Joel McClough, 38, director for the Families Forward Program at the Institute for Trauma and Stress at New York University's Child and Study Center. Mr. McClough delivered himself of this brilliant thought:
"Teens today have to deal with the threat that they could be in danger or people they know could be in danger ... a danger they may have to confront on a daily basis and one that my generation, and people of the pre-9/11 generation, never had to.''
OK, he's 38. By the time he was 10 years old, in 1978, nobody really believed the Russians were going to try to take us down; we were negotiating nuclear disarmament treaties. But I'm 60. In 1956, when I was 10 years old, we were having duck and cover drills in grade school, so we'd know what to do if the Russians attacked. Even ten-year-olds know that a school desk won't give you much protection from a nuclear strike. I worried all the time that the Russians might attack; I grew up in the shadow of an imaginary mushroom cloud. The Bay of Pigs standoff happened when I was 15. Going farther back, an entire generation of Californians lived in fear for most of World War II, wondering if the Japanese would invade; after all, they'd bombed Pearl Harbor.
It is the height of ignorant arrogance for this man to assume publicly that no generation of young people has ever lived in fear the way this one does.
The real truth is, fear is only a problem if you let it rule you. We are allowing our fear of terrorism to rule us in a way that is way out of proportion to its actual threat. Every time we take a car out on the freeway, we risk our lives at a level that dwarfs anything the terrorists can do; but we don't fear driving on the freeway. We put our children in the car and drive on the freeway, which is a much greater threat to them than than Al Qaeda. The guns that litter this country kill far more people every year than Al Qaeda; but we don't (I'm sorry to say) fear them, in fact we don't even respect them enough to take proper care with them. We must stop allowing our fear of terrorists to rule us; and when we do, the absurdity of the idiots in the White House will become obvious and embarrassing, and we will vote them out of office.
Today's newspaper just had so many amazing things I have to devote a post...
Viva España! According to the AP, Spain's top fashion show, the Pasarela Cibeles, has refused to allow models to appear whose body mass index is less than 18. Too skinny models, the Madrid regional government fears, will encourage young women to starve themselves; they want models who project "an image of beauty and health". Yes!
The town of Atherton, CA is now charging its residents $22 per cubic yard to haul dirt through the city streets. The town has a 30 foot height limit, so if you want to expand your house, you have to dig out the basement; and the excavation can cost you $50,000 and up. Before you feel too sorry for Atherton, remember that the average house price here is $2.5 million, and the area they're digging out for that basement can be as much as 20,000 square feet. A town with 2,500 houses has issued 3,600 home-improvement permits in the last 5 years, so just maybe, the good burghers of Atherton might consider living with what they have for awhile??
The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded, after extensive study, that the CIA was right, and Saddam Hussein really didn't have any ties with Al Qaeda; in fact, he regarded it as a threat, and was actively trying to capture al-Zarqawi. And furthermore, they don't think the U.S. should have believed anything the Iraqi National Congress ever said about WMDs in Iraq... It's taken them 4 years to realize this?? Your tax dollars at work, as the mighty brains analyze the evidence.
Many of you may have read this in the Sunday newspaper (Sept. 3), but this is so good that I'm going to quote part of it here in full, with fervent thanks to Garry Trudeau of Doonesbury for saying something brilliantly, that really needed to be said. I thought I couldn't link the site, but apparently Doonesbury doesn't impose the usual 2 week comic blackout, so here it is.
The scene is "Megaphone Mark" and his partner Chase, and Chase is complaining bitterly that "the mess we're in today" is all Clinton's fault. Mark challenges him that "the right wing has had a complete monopoly on power for four years now," and asks why he is "angrier than ever." Then it comes:
I'll tell you why. Because radicals can only survive when fear replaces reason. So they need enemies, real or imagined. As an old lefty, I know. I was as angry as they come. But being an ideologue robs you of critical thinking. I miss it. Which is why I find myself drifting back into the mainstream.
Thank you, Garry Trudeau - this is probably the most incisive single panel you've ever written.
Out of sheer curiosity today, I surfed over to the Fox News web site. (I was probably impelled by mentioning Fox in my last post.)
What a disaster of awful web design that is! Politics, nothing - the site is practically unreadable. First of all, the dominant color is red, with bold black type on white in little squares; repulsive. Second, there is NO "white space" on it, virtually every square inch is covered, which means it takes forever to load. Third, the advertisements and the news stories have basically the same web presentation, except that the news stories don't usually have animated GIFs. Maybe the people who read Fox News don't care if they read a news story or an ad. I thought CNN was too busy, but this makes CNN look like fine art; it makes Yahoo News look positively elegant.
On a simple trip to the dentist the other day, I was intercepted by a pair of earnest young men with clipboards, who asked me if I wanted to help the Democrats take back Congress this fall. This was in Montclair, a neighborhood of Oakland, California; since I never go to Montclair except to see the dentist or shop, I don't really know whether this was fertile ground for them or not: it's in Barbara Lee's Congressional district, but it's rich enough to lean rightward if it chooses, and it may; I saw several people brush them off. I fended them off in the interests of being on time for my appointment, but chose to stop and chat with them on the way back.
I was impressed. (Mildly.) The Democrats have grassroots organizers on the street. I haven't seen that in years. They had energy and enthusiasm, they had the Democrats' platform (the Democrats have a platform??) and could explain it, and I actually allowed them to persuade me out of a contribution. (I already get regular mailings from the DNC so it shouldn't add too much junk to the mail.) I normally ignore fundraising requests from the Dems, on the grounds that they are such hopeless nebbishes that there's no point in funding them. But somewhere - can we credit Howard Dean with this? - someone has remembered the tactics that ran Tammany Hall for 150 years, and ran Chicago for a generation. Two generations. Whatever you may think of the morals of machine politics, it's really efficient. Ask the Republicans.
Of course, they're still bucking the most impressive fundraising machine known to man, a grassroots organizing structure fueled by evangelical zeal, and a control of the media which the Republicans have been carefully building for thirty years (after all, with Fox, the Repubs have their own news network); but at least the Dems are trying, and they're using stuff that works for the other side. Precinct captains. Street organizers. People who go and give people rides to the polls. If they put their backs into it, this could work.
Now if the people at the top of the party can just maintain the focus...
The timing is amazing. Hard on the heels of yesterday's post about otherwise nice people who insist that you must do things that are good for you, comes an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle opposing the currently fashionable persecution of smokers, and I'm amazed to find I agree with it.
Let's get the disclaimers out of the way. I don't smoke; hell, I'm an asthmatic. I've smoked I think 7 cigarettes in my life, when I was in grad school, to see if I liked it. I didn't; you wake up in the morning and your mouth tastes like an ash tray. They say that kissing a smoker is like licking an ash try (I was married to one, and it's not quite that bad, but you do notice it); try waking up with that in your own mouth. So I never contracted the habit, which is fortunate because if I had, I probably couldn't breathe at all now.
But this hounding of smokers by constantly reducing the list of places where they're allowed to indulge their habit is getting into the category of the people who yell publicly at pregant women drinking wine (see yesterday's post). The official justification for segregating smokers is that secondhand smoke gives non-smokers lung cancer. OK, that may even be true; but the guy with the Camel in his mouth is at much higher risk. Also, the nicotine habit is the hardest addiction to break - worse than heroin. But as long as they stay in their corners and don't breathe the smoke at other people, how is their nasty habit anybody else's business? Enough already.
This comes back down to civility, a topic I've ranted about before. If I have a nasty habit of some sort, which I manage so that it doesn't harm or threaten other people, then it is nobody else's business. If I'm fat, that's my business. If I drink too much, as long as I don't drive, that's my business. Ditto with the smoking: as long as they control where they light up, it is nobody else's business. But the category of people I call "social Nazis" (yes, I realize I'm echoing Rush Limbaugh, with whom I disagree on almost every point) feel that they, through their superior moral characterstics caused by their possession of The Only Truth, have the right to chastise other people publicly for indulging in habits that injure only the habituee.
But the pregnant lady with the wine, they cry: she's harming her baby. Well, maybe she is: but there was a whole generation of people born in the Roaring Twenties, when everybody drank socially all the time, and that's the generation that won World War II. It's probably better if she doesn't drink, but you don't see fetal alcohol syndrome in the child of a woman who has an occasional glass of wine with dinner. You see it in the children of women who drink their dinner, and breakfast and lunch too. Besides which, it's her baby. It's not the critics' baby. And, getting back to the smokers: as long as I don't have to inhale their smoke, if they want the habit, that's their problem.
The critics really just want somebody to look down on, so they can feel morally superior, safe in their possession of The Truth, which gives them the right to criticize, because they are Right. Try criticizing something they do and see how they like it.
I was proselytized today - and all I set out to do was take a water aerobics class. The instructor is a temporary substitute, while the normal Tuesday instructor is recovering from knee surgery; this was the first time I'd seen her, as the regular instructor just had surgery last week.
The new instructor had just read a book, after seeing the author interviewed on public television; and she was full of the enthusiasm of the converted. Nothing would do but that she must share her bright new truth with the class, especially since it was about our health. We must know this, it would be good for us. I don't remember the author's name, she said he was a researcher at Cal Berkeley; but the burden of her song was that it doesn't matter how much you exercise or how carefully you watch your diet: you must eliminate bread. If you eat bread you will be fat, and you won't be able to control it. Bread is evil, especially white bread. We all know, of course, that sugar is evil, too; but I admit I've never before heard high-fructose corn syrup described as "toxic." I think that may be a little overstated. Even fruit should be eaten only in moderation, as it contains - yes - sugar. She particularly warned the group against mangoes.
About this time, I stopped listening. I went there to exercise; if I want advice on nutrition I know how to find it. I also know a fad when I hear one, and this, by God, is a fad; in a couple of years they will have found some other thing to be appalled about. A few years ago it was the carcinogens in grilled meat. Her horror at the unsanitary conditions in a soda pop factory - they get so many flies, she said, that the FDA gives them an allowance of insect parts that are acceptable in soda pop - led me to remark that they probably do filter out the biggest bits; but mostly I just let her rant.
The interesting thing about the whole incident was her tone. She spoke with the accent and the emotional verve of a recent convert to a new religion. In another era she would have been standing on a street corner with a tambourine, singing hymns and exhorting passers-by to believe in the Lord Jesus and be saved, brothers! I guess it's true that you don't have to follow a formal religion to be religious; she certainly exhibited a religious fervor over this.
And I, of course, immediately raised my hackles and growled; I don't like people who know the only Truth. The step from "I know the only Truth" to "The people who refuse my Truth (translation: don't agree with me) are evil and must be destroyed" is all too short: and the next step after that is into war and ethnic cleansing and other unpleasant pastimes. I doubt anyone would kill someone because they eat white bread; but there are people in Berkeley who publicly embarrass pregnant women whom they don't know, if they see them drinking wine or smoking in public. This is a form of social assault, and is a lesser manifestation of the impulse that leads the Taliban to beat women who appear in public without a burqa.
I also have little patience with ascetics; this is the new asceticism, where we will only be purified if we give up the foods we like. I like bread, and it's certainly better for me to snack on than, say, potato chips or pork rinds. For that matter, I like soda pop, although I limit my intake because I'm trying to control my weight. My main reflection on the proposed diet is that you wouldn't be able to tell if it actually made you live longer, or if it merely seemed that way...
Has anyone else seen the wonderful AP photograph of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff? Here's the link from Yahoo News. He looks like a dyspeptic Russian icon...
Here's a summary of the proposed U.N. "peace deal" for Lebanon and Israel:U.N. resolution: Steps toward a permanent cease-fire in Lebanon
-- The resolution calls for the "full cessation" of fighting. Hezbollah would stop all attacks, and Israel would be limited to defensive military operations.
-- Once fighting ends, the U.N. force would be expanded from 2,000 to 15,000 troops to help deployment of Lebanese soldiers and withdrawal of Israeli forces.
-- It spells out a series of steps toward a permanent cease-fire and a lasting political solution, including the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon.
-- It stresses that the Lebanese government must be the only armed force in the country.
-- It requests international aid for the Lebanese people.
I have several comments on this, but they all boil down to: What on earth do they think is going to make Hezbollah abide by this agreement? Let's keep one thing in mind here. Hezbollah started this. They invaded Israeli territory just for the kicks they get from pulling the Israeli tail, and Israel reacted, big time. Worse, Hezbollah is getting major PR goodies on the Arab street for their valiant stand against the evil Zionists. They say they'll quit per the deal, but really, they have no incentive to quit. Why would they? We'll see whether they do. (How many of those damn' Katyushas do they have, anyhow? And how are they getting resupplied, if they are?)
I've heard remarks about Israel's incursions into Lebanon's sovereign state. That's ridiculous. Between Syria and Hezbollah, Lebanon isn't a sovereign state. They certainly have no control over their foreign policy: Hassan Nasrallah is in charge of that. The deal suggests that the Lebanese government should be the only armed force in the country; of course it should; and from that I deduce that at this point, Hezbollah is the Lebanese government, since it's clearly the only armed force in the country.
I'd also like to know where the extra 13,000 soldiers will come from, with which the agreement proposes to reinforce UNIFIL. This falls into the "You and what army?" category. At the best of times, the U.N. has trouble getting people to put boots on the ground under those blue hats, and the situation in Lebanon is disastrous. The U.S. has already weaseled out. Who's going to provide 13,000 additional U.N. troops? Santa Claus? The Arab League should, but in their hearts they think Hezbollah's doing just fine.
The only part of the deal that actually makes sense is the request for international aid for the Lebanese people. If only the people who promise millions of dollars in aid were willing to write the actual checks...
Our recent trip turned up 2 new road signs plus an "honorable mention". The best one was
Fruit Antiques
seen in Yakima, Washington. A close second was
Espresso Burgers
just south of Orland, CA on I-5. Finally, although it doesn't fit the general category, I was charmed by the sign in Vacaville, CA advertising
Live bait indoor shooting gallery
The combination is just too odd.
I haven't posted in a couple of weeks, because I was on vacation and out of computer reach. I actually had my cell phone along for emergencies, but since at least half the trip was spent in locations with zero reception, I'm still not sure why I lugged the thing along.
It was an interesting vacation. Our normal process is that my husband finds a place he thinks he'd like to go, and makes all the arrangements, and I go along for the ride. He's aware of my preferences and shares most of them, so it usually works pretty well, and on major shifts we consult more closely. On this one, though, we both were bitten by our assumptions, and by the weather.
First, the weather. Remember the heat wave that flattened the country in late July? OK, we left on about day 3 of that (having spent day 2 doing laundry, packing, and attending a wedding in full regalia including pantyhose for me and a tie for him), to drive up the California Central Valley on I-5, a trip that normally sees temperatures in the 90-100 degree range. On that trip it never got below 100 degrees, although my bet that it would be over 110 in Redding failed. By 1 degree. We spent the first 3 days of our trip driving to our ultimate destination, Lake Chelan in eastern Washington, and it was at least 100 degrees all three days. Thank God for Volkswagen air conditioning.
After overnight stays in Wolf Creek, OR, and beautiful Yakima, WA, we went up a back road to Wenatchee, WA. My gardener husband wanted to stop in Wenatchee to look at the Ohme Gardens; but my enthusiasm for touring gardens, no matter how lovely, flags rapidly in that kind of heat, so I retreated to the shade and waited for him. The Ohme Gardens are on top of a bluff and really are quite lovely; you can see the confluence of the Wenatchee River and the Columbia River from there. If you can stand the heat.
From Wenatchee we went on to the town of Lake Chelan, WA, on Lake Chelan. Now, Yakima isn't exactly nowhere, although you can see nowhere from Yakima; but Lake Chelan - Lake Chelan is Nowhere. It's a 3 day drive from the San Francisco Bay Area and at least 2 days from Portland. In Lake Chelan we boarded a boat, and rode another 50 miles up Lake Chelan (it took 4 hours) to our ultimate destination, Stehekin, which can be reached only by boat or air. Our room in the Stehekin Lodge had no air conditioning. (It did have good cross drafting.)
And all this area is high desert. This is where the assumptions came in. We both assumed, without exactly stating it, that a remote lake surrounded by mountains would be cool. Lush, green, and relaxing. We learned on this trip that everything in Oregon and Washington east of roughly The Dalles is high desert. Can you spell "rain shadow"?? Brown as toast, no trees, sagebrush, etc. And, given the heat wave, hot enough to fry eggs on the rocks. Furthermore, this entire area has a more or less constant wind coming down off the Cascades. Stehekin does actually have trees, but it's pretty dry, and the downslope wind from the head of the valley stops only briefly around 4 AM. When we stayed in Seattle some years ago, we bought a book called "The Wet Side of the Mountains", and I think we just visited the other side.
We hadn't been in Stehekin 3 hours the day we arrived, when we ran into one of the side effects of a dry, windy, hot climate. It's called the Flick Creek Fire, and it started while we were in the visitor center talking to the rangers; and the only good thing about it is that it was 2.5 miles downwind from us. I have never been so grateful for a steady north wind; if that wind had changed, we might not have been able to get out. I think I got some photos of the first hour or so of a forest fire (film not developed yet); very scary. Everyone was nervous the 2 days we were there, going out on the dock to watch the fire; and the firefighting teams used the Stehekin docks as a staging point.
We left Stehekin on Friday the 28th, as planned; the fire was still burning but had settled down to a widespread smoulder. We were frankly happy to see it recede down the lake. The rest of our vacation was much less interesting, spent poking around Vancouver, B.C. in cool comfort (the heat wave having broken). Someday I'll figure out why pleasant, uneventful vacations make such dull stories...
The new University of California campus in Merced opened last year, and apparently part of the first freshman class is already ready to bail:"In college, you want to meet different people, but there were only 800 of us, so after the first month, we all knew each other. It was like summer camp. There are no sport teams and nothing was established, and there is no tradition. It is not the college experience you hear about."
I won't use the young lady's name; I don't need to, you can find it in the article in the San Francisco Chronicle, right here. I realize she's only 19, but honestly, what has she been reading? Nancy Drew books? Did it not occur to her that you go to college to get an education? To broaden your mind and learn to think? Possibly even to prepare for a job somewhere? (That last point didn't occur to me until my senior year in English literature, but that's another issue.)
This young lady evidently went to college intending to party hearty. I'm impressed with her ability to remember (and immediately get bored with) 800 people, too - there were 750 in my high school graduating class and I remember maybe a dozen of them. (This is because I ran into them again at the reunion last week. Of course, high school was a few years ago.)
I have a dreadful feeling that all this means that she just hasn't met Mr. Right yet. I keep waiting for her to complain that she'll never get her M.R.S. in this dull school. I thought the feminist movement had taught us to look beyond marriage as the single goal of any young female.
The real statement about college is, what you get out of it is directly related to what you put into it, like most experiences of value. If all this young woman is willing to put into it is rooting for sports teams and participating in rituals that would be more evidently silly if they weren't so old, she's not going to get much out, even if she does transfer. But then, maybe I'm expecting too much from a 19 year old. I also hope that, if she does leave this new campus of my alma mater (full disclosure, but the campus was Berkeley), her place will be taken by someone who will really benefit from what the University of California has to offer.
One of the articles I read recently on the gay marriage flap quoted a judge who asked on what basis the state of California could refuse to extend "the right of marriage itself" to same-sex couples. Not the rite of marriage, but the right.
Now, just a minute here. Americans talk a lot about their rights (and not enough about their obligations, but that's another post); but where do we get a right to marry? Marriage is a voluntary contract between two people; marriage is a rite, as in a ceremony or ritual; when did it become a right, as in, something we are all entitled to have, like iPods and stereos and double cappucino no-fat lattes? If marriage is a right, how come I spent 10 years as a single divorcee?
I asked my co-worker Mike this question, and he said, "Marriage became a right when it became a tax break," and the awful thing is, I'm afraid he's right. Correct. The marriage relationship and the property and tax codes of this country are wound together in a way that makes a mockery of the separation of church and state. Married people pay fewer taxes. Married people have the right to visit each other in the hospital if they're really sick. Married people inherit each other's property, even when they're too lazy or scared to make wills. We seem, thank God, to have quit blaming children for being "illegitimate" when their parents don't bother to get married, but we still regard people who aren't married as somehow less fit to raise children. And the 50% divorce rate doesn't seem to affect any of these opinions.
A few days ago, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a wonderful opinion piece on this subject by Robin Lakoff, a U.C. Berkeley professor of linguistics; I strongly recommend it. According to Ms. Lakoff, the purpose of a constitution is to define the agreed relationship between the government and the governed. That being the case, she argues, it has no place for rules about relationships between members of "the governed" - that would be us. She states, "Marriage is a relationship in which the government is not a direct participant." The proper place for rules governing relationships between individuals, such as marriage, is in statutory law, not in the Constitution. At that point you get to argue about whose statutes, federal or state; but the Constitution is clearly the wrong place for anything to do with marriage.
But is she right? When you go down to city hall and get a marriage license, the government issues it; and you do that even when you're getting married in a church. Then there are all those tax laws; not to mention our Fearless Leader trying to make learning how to stay married a condition for getting welfare. This could go on and on; but the more I think about it, the more I think I want the government to get its nose out of the personal relationships between human beings, except in cases of domestic violence.
I've just done something new, which I'm disproportionately excited about. You'd think that volunteering to let someone else use my computer would be a problem. However, I've just signed up for Rosetta@home, and what I'm letting people use my computer for is to run complicated algorithms to try to determine how proteins fold and what is the lowest energy configuration for a given protein. These solutions are used by researchers to try to figure out ways to combat diseases like malaria, HIV, and Alzheimer's.
It absolutely charms me that the software you download, to run these problems, is called BOINC (that's Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). BOINC runs in the background using CPU when you aren't using it. It's absolutely zero maintenance: it goes out to the Rosetta server, downloads as many problems as it thinks my computer can handle (seems to be two), chews through them, and then when it's done, uploads the results to the server. I have a Rosetta account and get credit for problems solved - think karma, it's not money.
So far I haven't noticed much effect on web browsing and email, although it takes a little longer to open files. Plus, it acts as a screen saver showing you how it thinks the current protein it's working on might fold. Rosetta always needs more computing power - this is an active research facility. So if any of you would like to let the CPU you probably don't use much contribute to serious medical research, let me encourage you to check the site out and sign up. They have BOINC clients for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. Also, there are other projects you can sign up for once you have the client - SETI@home for instance.
I had a very odd conversation with my sister today. She lives on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and their phone service has been interrupted lately; she wanted to know if I'd been trying to reach her. (No, I was working.)
When this first happened, last weekend, she said someone had "cut the phone cable". I assumed accident, but it seems to be a form of semi-organized crime: the price of copper has gone high enough, and the rural phone lines in Nevada are installed carelessly enough, that some people are driving around in the small hours, and stealing the phone lines to sell for scrap. Seems like it's time to upgrade to fiberoptics?? Also, isn't this carrying good old American initiative a little too far?
The ever-reliable (as a source of weirdness) San Francisco Chronicle had a lead article today in the business section on the joys of broadband wireless. This is a wireless card for your laptop that talks to your cellphone, so you don't have to waste time finding and negotiating a Starbuck's hot spot: you can sit down right there in the parking lot and email away. You'd probably be more comfortable at Starbuck's, but that's a detail.
We used to do something like this back in the day when I was on 24-hour pager support. Of course, at that time the duty cell phone was a brick that weighed 10 pounds (we bought a luggage cart for it), and the connection with the laptop was a phone cord plugged into a dial-up modem; but I remember one of my colleagues troubleshooting a mainframe problem with this rig while seated cross-legged on the grass at a company party. Since this was not only pre-wireless but pre-Starbuck's, it was pretty fardling advanced. (Full disclosure: I stole the epithet from Anne McCaffrey's Ship who Sang series...)
Anyway, back in the story about the 3G broadband, I loved the last quote in the story:"It's phenomenal," Ask said. "It's great being able to open your laptop and get Internet access and not get nickel-and-dimed for service everywhere you go."
This was from someone who is paying $60 a month for access. Yeah, I guess it's fair to say she's not being nickel-and-dimed...
Business travel isn't anything remotely resembling fun, but at least you get to look at new places from the window of the taxi, coming in from the airport.
I got a look at San Antonio, Texas this week, and found it rather charming. Unlike Dallas, San Antonio has resisted the urge to tear down all their old light industrial buildings and put up glass towers, so there are only a few skyscrapers, and lots of older few-story brick and stucco buildings with interesting architectural details, plus some pretty churches. The town was more relaxed than Dallas, too, with lighter traffic. They've done fairly nice things with their river: it's nothing resembling a riparian habitat, since the channel is bricked in solid (sigh), but they've turned it into a pleasant "river walk", below street level and lined with trees and shrubs. If I'd had time, I could have taken a water taxi along the canals; but I was in the town less than 48 hours. For that matter, if I'd had time, I could have toured the Alamo; it's easy to find, right next to the mall.
The heat was appalling, in the high nineties; with the usual corollary that the air conditioning was so cold you needed a jacket indoors, which you immediately had to shed when you left the building. They haven't had any rain for awhile, and the taxi driver said they'd been on the verge of water rationing. The hotel had signs saying we won't change your towels during your stay, and you have to ask for water in the restaurant. One of these days our tendency to use water as if there were an infinite supply of it, is going to catch up with us.
I got into a conversation at the gym today on the subject of Kim Jong Il and his proposed missile test. It was started by the wacko suggestion, mooted by William Perry and Ashton Carter, that if they do appear to be going to fire the thing, the U.S. should pre-emptively bomb the launch site and destroy it and the missile. The rationale seems to be that the U.S. shouldn't allow North Korea to develop a long range missile with which it could conceivably fire a nuclear missile at U.S. territory. My gym mate asked what I thought we should do, and my answer was, we should do nothing. We absolutely should not shoot at the thing.
Consider Kim Jong Il, if you can. There are a number of things we aren't sure of about him and his country, starting with do they actually have nuclear weapons and is the Taepodong-2 missile as good as they say it is. The one thing we are sure of is that this guy is a complete wingnut, and one of the ways he stays in power is by waving around the threat that the U.S. wants to invade North Korea. The last thing we should do is give him any support for that notion. The U.S. wouldn't have North Korea if they gave it away with a pound of tea; but of course Kim doesn't think that way. If we shoot at his missile, we've confirmed every paranoid fantasy he's ever had. No.
I've also heard an unnamed genius from the Pentagon say he's "very confident" that if North Korea does fire the missile, U.S. interceptor rockets can destroy it. Is he talking about our missile defence system? The one that's never had a successful intercept, even when we staged the whole test and in essence told it where to point? This is a really bad idea - we absolutely don't want to give the world the notion that if they shoot stuff at us, we can't take it down. Maybe he was talking about the Patriot, which actually did shoot down some incoming during the first Gulf War, although if you look at the analysis, the actual success rate is very unclear and depends strongly on who's counting.
Clearly, our best possible response is not to dignify the effort with a response, as my mother used to say, but just keep encouraging the North Koreans back to the six-way talks.
The Economist's latest Technology Quarterly has an article on the "future force warrior" (which you won't be able to read unless you subscribe, unfortunately; but if you Google the phrase you'll come up with a whole list of public sites). The gist of it is that the U.S. military has decided it needs to protect its soldiers better (about time, too). The technology bug has bit them, however, and instead of just investing in more Kevlar body armor, they propose turning each soldier into a walking internet node (wireless, of course), complete with sensors to tell not only where he is but how he is (vital signs, asleep or awake, etc.), portable power sources, all under lightweight Kevlar armor plates (black, of course); and with a fully integrated night vision/heads up display with video feeds from robot drone scout planes, and a data link to every other soldier and vehicle.
I'm sorry, these guys have been reading too much science fiction. They have seen Matrix and Star Trek one time too many. I'm not suggesting that your basic GI can't handle all this; with training, he probably can. I am suggesting that the designers have lost sight of the K.I.S.S. principle, and of the fact that the more complicated a system is, the more likely it is to fail in unexpected ways. I do not think it's a coincidence that the picture of the proposed outfit looks exactly like an Imperial Storm Trooper, only in black.
These designers are the same people who thought the Star Wars anti-missile defense was a good idea, despite the fact that it would have required tens of thousands of lines of software code which couldn't be debugged except under fire. Virtually every computer programmer in the world thought it was a Bad Idea, and so is this. This "battlesuit" - yes, they use the term - is so complicated that the likelihood of system failures is quite high, and the early wearers of this will be, I'm sorry, sitting ducks. The only good thing is that they'll be sitting ducks wearing Kevlar armor. In addition, if the whole thing is based on the GPS and the wireless data link, what does our soldier in his battlesuit do if the other side comes up with some easy way to jam the transmission frequencies?? Or simply blow up the transmission towers? Wireless still required line of sight, last time I looked.
Go back to the video games, guys, and just buy the boys overseas some better armor. The lightweight Kevlar armor plates are the only good idea you've come up with. The really good idea would be to come up with some way to settle international disputes without shooting at people, but that's apparently way too far out.
I'm tired of politics. Let's contemplate a little Americana (well, North Americana, since some of this was Canadian). We're planning a driving vacation in July, up the Coast to the Cascades and then Vancouver (B.C.); driving vacations have always been my favorites (gas crisis be damned! apres moi, le deluge...), they being the way we could afford to vacation when I was a child.
One thing I always enjoy, and in fact, collect, are the advertising signs by the side of secondary roads, some hand-lettered. Most of you will have seen ads for "beer pool", but those are common. I have a small collection of rarities to share:
parking cherries (near Sebastopol, California)
diesel cheese (somewhere in Wisconsin, courtesy of my brother-in-law)
coffee minnows (on the road from Toronto to Sudbury, Ontario)
video worms (same road, a very good source)
fountain burrito gizzards (Newberg, Oregon - a deli and butcher...)
The drive to Sudbury was a fruitful source for these signs; I'm still trying to decide which is superior, coffee minnows or video worms. We also found the following which I feel qualifies for Honorable Mention:
Shoe repair and live bait
and a motel which advertised:
Cold Rooms Warm Beer Cozy Food (Oops!)
(Yes, "Oops!" was part of the sign.) How about some that you've seen?
Let me say up front that in the case of Representative William Jefferson, D-LA, I am in solid agreement with Nancy Pelosi (not always a given): he ought to step down from the Ways and Means committee until his guilt or innocence is established. The principle here is very old: "Caesar's wife must be above suspicion." The members of Congress would get a whole lot more respect from their constituents, and the country in general, if they realized that they are in the position of Caesar's wife: it isn't enough for them to be innocent of wrongdoing. They must appear to be innocent of wrongdoing. For a public figure the appearance of venality is almost as bad as venality itself.
Mr. Jefferson has offered three arguments for staying on the committee: he's innocent; Louisiana needs the help he can give it while a committee member; and he's being picked on because he's black.
Since Mr. Jefferson hasn't yet been tried or even indicted, he is, of course, assumed to be innocent; but some very peculiar allegations have been published about him, and the Justice Department feels it has grounds for indictment. Not to mention that two of his former associates have pleaded guilty to bribing him. If Congressmen, like Caesar's wife, should be above suspicion, he's clearly failed that test. I've said before that I thought he had some explaining to do.
Louisiana certainly needs all the help it can get. But I have some reservations about how much it needs Mr. Jefferson's help.
I hardly know how to approach the suggestion, made by Mr. Jefferson and supported by the Congressional Black Caucus, that he's being victimized because he's black, because no white Congress members have been asked to step down from their committees. There certainly are white Republican members of Congress who, if this principle were equitably applied, should resign their committee seats; but Nancy Pelosi has no authority over Republicans, and I haven't seen any news articles about any other Democrats in just this equivocal position. In fact, Ms. Pelosi's point, which Mr. Jefferson appears to miss entirely, is that Democrats ought to hold themselves to a higher ethical standard than the Republican "culture of corruption."
Does the Black Caucus really believe African Americans ought to be immune from the consequences of their behavior, because their ancestors were forced into slavery? Does the Black Caucus really think that African Americans don't want their elected African American representatives to be held responsible, if they act as Mr. Jefferson appears to have acted?
The Republican Party leadership has spent the last few years disgusting the electorate with its corrupt and arrogant behavior. One of the strongest arguments the Democrats can make in the fall elections, if they can pull it off, is that they are honest public servants. Mr. Jefferson seems to feel that his personal privilege is more important than his party's advantage.
I can't feel too sorry at the loss of Abu-Musab Al-Zarqawi. He wasn't a nice man, and you couldn't call him an ornament to society. Still, I thought the photos of his dead face, plastered all over the news media, were a little much. Frankly, it reminded me of my dear, and late, aunt; except that she had better taste. We visited her once, shortly after her husband had died; and she showed us a photo of him in his coffin. Given the family history, I assume she wanted some definite proof that he was really dead and she was finally rid of him. She, however, didn't publish the photo in the newspaper to make her point.
If you've read the link from where cooper posted it at Fanatical
Apathy, you can skip this post; cooper, you already know all this.
Did you ever wonder why John Kerry lost so solidly in 2004, when the exit polls said he had it nailed? Well, folks, the answer is simple and sad, and it's laid out in extreme detail, with footnotes and documentary evidence, in the article published last week in Rolling Stone, by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The answer is fraud. The Republican administration in the state of Ohio, fraudulently prevented tens of thousands of Democratic voters from casting ballots; connived at tampering with voting machines so that votes cast for Kerry actually went to Bush, or weren't counted at all; imported goons from Texas to threaten and intimidate minority voters. These people make Kathleen Harris, in Florida in 2000, look like a chocolate cupcake.
Make no mistake: they succeeded. They swung the election. The wrong man is in the White House. The Republican machine is nothing if not efficient. Honest, no; honorable, no; but efficient. This is vote-rigging on a scale not seen in America since Tammany Hall, except maybe in Chicago on occasion.
It's a long article, but everyone should read it, and then everyone should write to their elected representative and urge them to Get Those Bastards Out Of There. Jimmy Carter, where were your election monitors in Ohio in 2004, when we needed them? This is the sort of shenanigan I associate with Belarus, or Zimbabwe; the only thing they left out were the armed goon squads actually shooting opposition voters.
No, this isn't about June, or busts, or anything rational. I can't think of a subject, so maybe I'll just vamp for a bit.
The California primary elections are over, and most of who/what I voted for lost. (Come on, folks - rejecting library bonds?) No one is sure about the hot Oakland mayoral race, though, because Alameda County went back to paper ballots (carefully marked by filling in the ovals with a black felt pen), and they've been counting for 24 hours now and they still have almost 40,000 absentee and provisional ballots to go. Ron Dellums thinks he's got it sewed up but with a margin of 125 votes past the line labeled "Runoff", it's not sewed very tight.
The "dangerous" date of 6-6-06 is over, and the English lady who rescheduled childbirth to protect her child from being born on that Satanic date (the birthdate of the Beast?) can sigh with relief. Based on the Chronicle's review of the remake of "Omen", I won't bother to see this one either.
The administration is getting weirder and weirder. The anti-gay marriage amendment never had the chance of a celluloid cat in Hell, but they shoved it through the Senate anyhow, so they could point at it and "energize the base" to turn out for the election. If your base is fanatical Christian theocrats, and some of theirs is, you end up doing some very odd things to make them happy.
And I can't find the reference, but I'm sure I heard some govmint authority on the radio the other day, confidently predicting that there will be a major terrorist attack in the continental U.S., sometime in the next year. Unstated but there: vote for us Republicans again in November, and we'll protect you, just like we did the last time. Yeah, right.
Meanwhile the FBI wants to subpoena all of columnist Jack Anderson's papers, now that he's dead - they never did this while he was alive - they say, to protect any classified documents that may have been leaked to him. I think, to find out what he really knew, especially about J. Edgar Hoover...
Finally, according to Scientific American, the world has 4 "super-volcano" locations. These are places that, when they blow, spit out 750 cubic kilometers of magma all at once, eliminating the landscape, anything living on it within a radius of about 300 KM, and the entire world climate for at least decades. Mt. St. Helens blew out less than .5 cubic KM. Think Bishop tuff, those of you who know California geology. And of these 4 places, 2 of them are in North America (Yellowstone National Park, and Long Valley in California); how do we rate? Actually I don't think I want to know the answer to that. Fortunately, they don't blow very often.
And the latest report from the National Academy of Sciences says that, as the level of carbon dioxide in the air grows, the poison ivy grows bigger and leafier (3 times the size, they said), and produces a more toxic version of urushiol - that's the stuff that makes you itch, in case you wondered.
They didn't mention poison oak, which is the version we get here in California, but I can't believe it reacts any differently...
In case anyone had any last, lingering doubts that Iraq is a parallel to that notable quagmire, Vietnam, we've just had the Iraqi equivalent of My Lai, in a place called Haditha. As with Abu Ghraib, it looks like the military command plans to blame it on the guys on the ground. And they wonder why they aren't meeting their enlistment quotas. Enlist, go to Iraq, a country where every household is allowed to have a Kalashnikov because there's no effective police force. Be in constant danger from IEDs and snipers, be entirely unable to tell the neighborhood regulars from the insurgents, and when you finally crack under the strain of losing one more buddy and shoot every Iraqi you can find, including an old man in a wheelchair and a 1 year old girl, it's your fault, and we'll send you to jail for it.
We did this to them, we the people of the United States. Even if we didn't vote for Dubya, and I didn't, we've sat by and muttered, and let this farce go on. These are our boys (leaving aside actual gender for a moment; besides, if there's been a woman in that squad I think it would have made the news). If they're like most Americans, they're kind, well meaning people who want to do the best job they can. Since they're Marines, we can further assume they are tough, seasoned professionals. They're even my neighbors: they're from Camp Pendleton, in California. And yet they did this: because we've put them in an impossible situation and left them there until they couldn't bear it any more.
When are we going to stop this? When are we going to impeach the President who got us into this? When are we going to admit that whatever happens in Iraq from now on is not up to us, and cut our losses? And by the way did anyone else notice the Iraqi foreign minister backing Iran's right to enrich uranium?? So much for a stable, democratic U.S. ally in the Middle East.
This must be the week for legal extravaganzas. The most obvious, of course, is the Enron trial. The conviction of Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling is extraordinarily satisfying; as a colleague of mine said on a conference call yesterday morning, "Maybe there is justice after all." From what I've read about the trial, the worst move either man made was to take the stand in his own defense. I've never believed, on the face of it, that either man could have gotten where he was and still be so stupid as not to realize what was going on; and from first hand observation of the two on the witness stand, evidently neither could the jury.
But if I'd been on the jury, one remark of Mr. Lay's would really have stung. This jury was middle America doing its civic duty: a school principal, a dairy farmer, a personnel manager, a dental hygienist. These were people whose entire net worths were less than Ken Lay's debts. And to this audience he had the gall to complain that "It was difficult to turn off that lifestyle like a spigot."
On balance, the jury decided that if they could be responsible to their employers, and keep their jobs and their families going (at night after the trial) for four months, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling ought to have been able to be responsible to their employees and shareholders. And I think that says it all.
And then we have legal extravaganza Numero Two-O (to quote the inimitable Molly Ivins), the honorable (?) representative William Jefferson, D-La., whose House office the FBI searched last week for evidence of bribery. Mr. Jefferson, as is his right, insists that he is innocent; but let's keep in mind, folks, this wasn't one of those NSA warrantless wiretaps. The FBI had gone to court with probable cause, and they had a warrant. Moreover, they have a videotape of Mr. Jefferson accepting $100,000 in cash from an FBI informant (who was also wired for sound), and they found $90,000 in cash in Mr. Jefferson's home freezer, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "cold cash". (I couldn't resist.) Unless you can think of a rational reason why someone would store that much loose money in a freezer, I think Mr. Jefferson has some explaining to do. He claims there are "two sides to this story", but he doesn't seem inclined to offer his side now. I will merely comment again that the price of Congressmen seems to have gone up since the Abscam affair in the '70s; the Abscammers sold out for a mere $25 grand apiece.
Mr. Jefferson's personal rectitude, or lack of same, however, is much less astonishing than the reaction of the rest of Congress. The immediate response of certain Congressional leaders was to complain that the FBI had no right to search a Congressional office, and to demand the return of the seized documents. Nancy Pelosi gets a point for asking for Mr. Jefferson to step down from the Ways & Means Committee; she loses one for being right there with Denny Hastert asking for the documents back. This whole incident is being shouted as a threat to the separation of powers, which is the most ridiculous claim I can imagine. And Mr. Jefferson seems to think that his seat on Ways & Means is some kind of personal fief, to which he has a right, whereas in fact that membership is a privilege, which he has just jeopardized.
You know, you couldn't make this stuff up. Do the members of Congress actually think they should be immune from criminal investigation?? Or only from criminal investigation by the FBI, because it's part of the Executive Branch? I suppose the overworked Washington, D.C. police department is supposed to investigate bribery of a Congressman, in between drug busts. Many of us have been saying for months that nobody, not even the President, is above the law, and Rep. Jefferson, that includes you.
And on top of all of this, President Bush steps in and seals all the documents from everybody for 45 days, putting them in the solicitor general's custody. I didn't think he had a dog in this fight, but he says he's giving everybody "time to cool down." If it was anyone else, it would almost sound like a rational statement; but given the source, I'm suspicious of the motive. Maybe I'm being unfair.
Judge Robert Freedman of the Alameda County Superior Court has just slapped some 380,000 California high school students in the face. This is the 89% or so of students who studied hard, did the work, made the extra effort, and passed the California high school exit exam. Thanks, Judge Freedman. You've just told the entire world that a high school diploma in California is nothing more than a gold star for attendance. Park your butt in the classroom long enough and you can graduate. You may not be able to read, or speak English, but by God, you're a high school graduate.
Judge Freedman says the 47,000 students who haven't passed the exam have not had an equal opportunity to learn because their schools are terrible. This is probably true; the California school system is a disgrace. But - how many kids in those terrible schools did pass the exam? I can't find the numbers school by school, but for the kids in the low-end schools who passed the exam, this is a terrible insult. They've just been told that their hard work was worthless.
The young woman who filed one of the lawsuits was quoted as saying, in Spanish because her English is so bad, that she was happy because now that she'll get her diploma, she can go on and become a nurse, as she wants. I hope to God I'm never a patient on a ward where the nurse doesn't speak English. I wonder how she thinks she's going to complete nursing school in Spanish?
If the schools are so terrible that only 89% of students can pass the exit exam (which isn't that bad if you think about it), the solution is not to eliminate the exam for everybody, to accomodate the 11%. The solution is to improve the damn schools, and hold the 11% to the mark of completing the exam. I'm sorry, I think at least some of this is just a desire to walk up and get the diploma with friends; and I have very little sympathy for it.
I'm still not sure I want to write this. I'm not sure what I want to say; or even what I think.
I recently had my 60th birthday - the "Big Six-Oh". When I turned 40, I told myself that I was aging as a good brandy does: mellowing, improving with age. It helped that I got married again that same year; nothing like a good love affair to give one confidence! I suppose I can still say that, but there's less confidence behind it. And yet: I don't look 60. My hair isn't gray (just the occasional silver thread; I get that from Dad's side of the family). My face isn't especially wrinkled (lots of expensive moisturizer, religiously used!). Since my first knee replacement, I've exercised regularly; I haven't been in shape this good for years (still overweight, though). I don't think I act 60, whatever that means. Why am I so unsettled?
I look at people and wonder how old they are - and I suddenly realize they may be younger than me. This is very unsettling. I was the oldest child of the youngest son of a large family, so I was usually the youngest person in the room (except my sister); I skipped the first grade because I could read, so I was always the youngest person in the class. I'm used to thinking of myself as the youngest person - although the last few years working with 20 and 30 something computer kids has gone some way toward curing me of that! How did I get to be older than so many people?
What have I done with the time? I didn't have children; too late for that now. Not for me the thousands of dollars and months of discomfort, trying desperately to beat the biological clock. It was already too late with my second marriage, I didn't want to have a teenager in my fifties. That means, whatever happens at the end, it's up to me to cope. Not having children seemed like the right decision at the time; these decisions always seem right at the time. One doesn't always see through to the end; maybe one gets through by deliberately not seeing through to the end. I took care of my mother in her last years; who will take care of me? My husband is eight years younger than I am; does that mean he'll be around to do it? Is that fair to him? And anyway, just having kids doesn't mean they'll take care of you when you're old.
I've had two careers; I've done the best I could at them, still working on the second one. People tell me they think I'm good at what I do. I've recently gone back to singing, and I know I'm good at that - not solo quality because of the asthma, but a good solid choral singer, able to hold the part and keep the beat, and anchor weaker singers. I'm beginning to think perhaps I can write. I don't feel I've made a difference; the world isn't necessarily a better place because of what I've done. On the other hand, I don't think it's a worse place. Maybe that's enough. But what do I do next? When I retire (and when do I retire?), then what? I don't have an answer yet.
The time - where does it go? The older you get, the faster it goes by; I don't think anyone under 50 really understands the lyrics to Harry Belafonte's "Turn Around", or to "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof. I just turned around and it's May; wasn't it January yesterday? Where did it go? And the the less you have left, the faster it goes. We only get so much. No matter how you measure it, more than half of mine is gone. Now what?
"But, Mother of God, where are they then? And where are the snows of yesteryear?" Francois Villon, 15th century.
I just learned something. If you start a post and don't publish it, and then do another one on a different subject, and then go back and finish the first one and publish that, the post that you published second will be below the one you published first, because it's saved under the date you started it, and Blogger won't let you change the date. Bizarre. Obviously the people who built Blogger value linear thinking.
There. Now it's in the right order.
Anonymous David asked, in his last comment, "What does the immigrant uprising look like from your vantage point?"
This is a serious enough question that I think it deserves a post, not just another comment.
First of all, David, go back and read the comments under my post "Walls and Borders" (March 21), especially Boggart's long comment on the view of the situation from a residence 11 miles from the Mexican border. I don't necessarily agree with everything in it, but most of Boggart's points are really well taken.
I saw the immigrant uprising from the viewpoint of my office on the 6th floor of a building near a main street in northern California. It was amazing to watch - at least 10 visible blocks of people, filling the sidewalks about 3-4 abreast, walking quietly onward for another 4-5 blocks before they turned right toward a park where they gathered. When I saw them they were stopping for traffic lights, although some of my co-workers said they didn't at first. I didn't see any flags, just all those white T-shirts. That was the day the garbage guy didn't come around to my office to empty my wastebasket, and the cleaning lady didn't refill the toilet paper dispensers. Nobody was really inconvenienced; the office building is immaculately maintained.
If you mean, what do I think about all this, I don't know. As Boggart pointed out, there aren't any easy answers here. So I'll just give some random impressions, please don't expect these to be consistent or to make sense:
I read an English translation of the Spanish version of the anthem, Nuestro Himno, and I was tremendously moved. It's a staggering compliment to our country, our flag, and our ideals. You'll find the translation at the bottom of the article at the link.
James Sensenbrenner is freaking insane, absolutely barking mad, if he seriously thinks he can classify 12 million people as felons and then do anything realistic about it. We can't handle the prison population we have now.Not to mention making felons of teachers who teach their children and doctors who heal them; I guess the good Christians of today want to throw the Good Samaritan in jail. Besides which, you can catch an infectious disease from an illegal immigrant as fast as you can from a good Murrican citizen; faster, in fact, because they don't have health insurance and so don't go to the doctor until they're REALLY sick. Once upon a time we had a concept called "public health" but we seem to have forgotten it.This country was built by immigrants who came here with nothing but their hands and their work ethic; we didn't limit immigration until 1924 (except for the Chinese). The undocumented illegals are a whole lot closer to those immigrants than to some of our current citizens. "I lift my lamp beside the golden door" - but the golden door isn't on the Mexican border, apparently. Some people seem to think, my family is aboard, now pull up the gangplank, and that gives me kind of a queasy feeling.On the other side of the coin, it takes years to become a citizen legally, and granting these people amnesty will skip them to the head of the line, and that's not fair to the people who've tried to obey the law. Do we have all these illegals because Reagan granted an amnesty in the eighties?On the third side of the coin (sort of like the third half of the show on Car Talk), the urge to not let people in because they're not like us is not only racist and xenophobic, it's boringly racist and xenophobic. All the things they're saying about the Mexican illegals now have been said, in the past (in only approximate reverse order), about: the Poles. The Slavs. The Italians. The Irish (for generations, "No Irish need apply"). The Swedes and Norwegians. The Germans (and that was Benjamin Franklin, ranting that they refused to learn English and they bred like rabbits, and haven't we heard this before?). Which of those were your ancestors? The real question is, why don't we want them to come here? Why do we feel so threatened by them?
Finally, a little full disclosure, so to speak: it's very likely my lace-curtain Irish, boned-lace-choker grandmother was a wetback (as we used to call them before it became politically incorrect), all 5 feet 2 inches of her. A Canadian wetback: she came to the country in 1921, and just never bothered to become a citizen; and sometime in the 40's she insisted on going home to Toronto to see the relatives, and they had to smuggle her back across the border because by then you needed papers. She's dead now, God rest her; if they want to deport her they'll have to dig her up.
So I don't have any answers. I can't argue with Boggart's points about the load on our services, and the taxes they don't pay, it's all too true; but this whole country is built on immigration, right back to the "Native" Americans whose ancestors came over the Bering Strait in the last interglacial, or whenever. The only continent in the world with people who really can't be called immigrants is Africa, it's the only place the species evolved. Everybody else is an immigrant at some level; and I think we need to quit arguing about who has the "right" to be where, and start trying to think of the practicalities that we all need to deal with, like educating children and preventing epidemics.
Twelfth Night - isn't that a play by Shakespeare? Well, yes - and in 1996 director Trevor Nunn made a movie out of it which is great fun to watch, and even more fun to shake your head over. This is one of Shakespeare's "twin" comedies: it starts with a great shipwreck in which twin brother and sister Sebastian and Viola are separately cast ashore in "Illyria", and each thinks the other is dead. I won't go into the plot any deeper; you can always look it up in Cliff Notes if you haven't got time to read the play.
I owe them an apology about the shipwreck, though. When we were watching, I though, Oh, God, they've seen Titanic: but they hadn't. This movie came out the year before Titanic. Maybe James Cameron had seen this one...
The most delightful thing about it is how astoundingly alike Sebastian and Viola are. Because this is also a "breeches" comedy, Viola decides to survive after the shipwreck by gluing on a mustache and dressing as a young man, whom she calls Cesario. Late in the show, of course, Viola/Cesario and Sebastian meet again, dressed exactly alike, almost the same height, both wearing the little blond mustache, and while you can tell them apart if you've been watching, you really have to look twice. I wonder whom they found first, Sebastian or Viola?
Shakespeare didn't, of course, have to worry about these issues, because his "actresses" were young men; but I did wonder how Cesario managed, for three whole months, never to get caught where she had to explain why she couldn't pee into the bushes like all the guys. Especially since she becomes Duke Orsino's good buddy and drinking companion, spending most of her time listening to Orsino whine about why he's dying of love because Olivia won't have him, and how men's love is more important than women's because women aren't capable of passion.
Orsino is a Victorian (originally Elizabethan) male chauvinist ess-oh-bee; however, Viola falls for him, and is therefore pining for him while he pines for Olivia. Isn't chemistry great? It gets better when Olivia falls for Cesario/Viola. The poleaxed look on Olivia's face, late in the movie when she sees Sebastian and Cesario together, having just married Sebastian thinking he was Cesario, is worth any price of admission - it's just wonderful. She can't tell them apart either. Helena Bonham Carter is a really fine Olivia.
It never seems to occur to anybody that Cesario's tight black uniform pants are on a behind that isn't, well, shaped like a normal guy's - it's the one part of the female anatomy that you really can't hide when dressing like a man, especially a late Victorian military man. (Null has set it around 1885-1890.) She does have a very small tush, but still.
And in three months she has to have had three periods - how do you hide that when you're faking being a man? This is why you have to suspend your disbelief at the theater, I guess. I suppose if none of the servants ever notices that she peels her mustache off at night and sticks it on the mirror, they'll slide right past anything else. Actress Imogen Stubbs makes a wonderful Cesario, though - half the time you look at her and catch yourself thinking, what a handsome young man.
Shakespeare would have liked this, I think; it's the way he would have done it himself if he'd had the resources.
How much are we going to put up with from this man?
He lied to us about the reasons for invading Iraq; in fact, he lied several times, making up new fake reasons as the old fakes were exposed. Because of those lies, tens of thousands of people have died; Iraq is a shambles, slouching toward a Shiite theocracy, a training ground for every anti-American fanatic in existence.
He claims to be above the law due to a "war on terror" that he invented, after the Sept. 11 attacks, to bolster his power. Sure, there are terrorists out there, who would like to harm us. What he's doing isn't making them any less likely to attack us; quite the opposite.
He has authorized warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens (4th amendment, unreasonable searches and seizures), declared that he can hold suspects indefinitely without trial (6th amendment, speedy and public trial, confrontation of witnesses), and claims the right to "try" them before military tribunals (7th amendment, trial by jury). He ignores pretty much all the international treaties previous administrations signed in the twentieth century, including the Geneva Convention, just because.
And now we find that he feels his godly power as Commander in Chief allows him to declassify sensitive information on the spot, when he needs it to make the opponents of his policy look bad, and without letting anybody else know. I wondered when Mr. Libby would finger someone in the White House; well, he has. There's been some backing and filling, but the initial response was unbelievable: yes, the president was the source of the leak and he has a right to be... This is the man who was so self-righteous about leaks when the question was who told the NY Times about his wiretapping campaign.
Enough. Write your Congressman. Write your senators. Demand impeachment. I have. By God, if Bill Clinton can be impeached for lying about a blow job, surely a man who takes us to war on a lie is impeachable.
The argument against impeachment is that it would leave Dick Cheney in charge. That is daunting. The answer, then: impeach them both. Both are complicit in this mess. Get them both out, and put a caretaker in for the next few years. It's what we got after Nixon resigned; and you know, Gerald Ford looks pretty good right now.
On one level, I don't even care if it does leave Dead-Eye Dick in charge. I want that man to know that the American people believe he is a criminal and should not be in office. It is outrageous when you cannot believe a word the President of the United States says.
