Sunday, June 26, 2005

Has The War Ended?

I read a lot of newspapers, and I watch a lot of TeeVee news. God only knows why, I suppose it's an addiction. In my recent channelsurfing, I've noticed that Fox News (an interesting conflation of words indeed) is reporting well-nigh nonstop on the overwhelmingly important events in Aruba (BBC Report)
I think what they say is true; if a missing person report gets a lot of news coverage, odds-on the missing person is young, blonde, and pretty.


Natalee Holloway
Others, sorry, just not newsworthy!
Iraq has fallen, so to speak, off the map. To listen to and decide, based on FNN reporting, would be to conclude that the war in Iraq is over. I presume we won. However, looking around on the web, or in the (back pages) of the newspapers, I find that US military people are dying in Iraq at a higher rate than ever before, and that Iraqis are certainly doing the same (Yahoo News). I suppose all this increased destruction has to do with the increasing numbers of Operations taking place in that poor benighted country. If we keep operating on Iraq at this rate, pretty soon the patient is likely to expire completely.
One wonders; after thumping the drums for the war for so long, has Fox News decided to declare victory and go home? Or are they simply hoping it will go away if they stop reporting it? Sort of a solipsist view that seems to be pretty much inline with their normal operation.
In another cute story, House whip Tom (The Hammer)DeLay defended Karl Rove's pugnacious comments about spineless liberals. And I suppose it helped, considering that no one in recent history has been able to state things as competely incredibly astoundingly as Tom DeLay (with the possible exception of Anne Coulter of course).
Still, being defended by Mr. DeLay

seems to me a bit like being kissed by Don Corleone.
I am personally enjoying it all.
Except for the senseless stupidity of the war(s).
Parenthetically, I have to say that when George (W.) Bush set out to restore the luster of his father George (H.W.) Bush's legacy, I didn't believe it possible. But he has certainly succeeded at that! His father's incumbency now seems like a veritable golden age, compared to his son's.

Thursday, June 23, 2005

What Last Throes?

The vice president, Dick Cheney, in spite of evidence, in spite of the testimony of his own military commanders


Abizaid and Rumsfeld


continues to insist that the Iraqi insurgency is "on its last legs", "in its last throes", "there is no guerilla war".

Its kind of reminiscent of


William Buckley
William Buckley
in the time of Vietnam, who for years cited the evidence of
    Captured Enemy Documents
to claim that the VC (Viet Cong, for the young among you) were in their last throes. It seemed unlikely at the time, and history has shown it to be wrong at the time. In fact, the successor to the leader of the VC was just in Washington DC, meeting with the President. Something I don't believe Bill Buckley has managed lately.
The last time Buckley's column cited the captured enemy documents, his column was followed (in the Los Angeles Times, anyway) by one of my all time favorite columns by Art Buchwald. In Buchwalds column, he interviewed the manager of North Vietnams Captured Enemy Document Factory Number 1. The poor manager was in a terrible state. It seems the demand for Captured Enemy Documents was surging, as more and more US officials and newsmen wanted them, while at the same time the US military kept bombing his factory and shutting down production. He was talking to Buchwald in hopes of getting him to intervene with the military so that they'd stop bombing his factory, which had by that time assumed a critical function for North Vietnam, as their primary source of foreign money and was also critical for the US, as providing propaganda cover to keep the war going.
I think it was too much for Buckley, and he went on to other things, like going sailing.
A good thing, in my opinion.
Perhaps Dick Cheney has been reading some of those old Captured Enemy Documents. Or, since we have progressed a great deal since the 1970's, we are getting our information directly from Captured Enemies themselves. Note: We do not torture them; we aren't like that, we don't do that, and if we do, they deserve it anyway.

Our Leaders In Iraq

Abu Graib - Model of American Military Justice
Its more important to believe everything your President tells you than the evidence in this picture, no?

Monday, June 20, 2005

Tom Friedman's Visionary Car

Tom Friedman, the Pulitzer-winning columnist for the New York Times, is one of my favorite reads. He is articulate, knowledgeable, and literate. Qualities I think not sufficently prized in these times. He is however, perhaps not entirely numerate. Here he talks about a visionary automobile which will save us from energy dependence:

I think Thomas has been shopping in the Something-For-Nothing aisle of the supermarket.
Like most, I am not one to let facts get in my way, but the facts here are a little too large to ignore.
. Electricity Generation (US): 3,870 gigawatt/year
. Power to move a car 1 mile: 2 KW (highly approximate)
. Oil Consumption (US): 20 million barrels/day
. Gasoline Consumption (US): 12.5 billion gallons/year
. Theoretical yield of ethanol from corn: 120 gallons/ton
. Water required to process biomass: 25 gallons H2O/ gallon C2H5OH
Thus;
1. To charge 100 million cars that have travelled an average of 20 miles would place a load on the electric grid of 4 gigawatt/day, 1400 odd GW/year. To put it poetically, What Is The Sound of 100,000,000 Cars Plugging Into The Grid? Answer; The Sound Of Silence (as every circut breaker in the country flips).
2. To replace eighty percent of the gasoline currently consumed with ethanol would require us to produce 10 billion gallons of ethanol (assuming ethanol produced the same energy per gallon as gasoline, which it doesn't; it produces about 2/3 the energy) would require 80 million tons of thirsty corn which would take 30 milion acres to grow along with some amount of irrigation water which I didn't look up. After harvest, shipment, delivery; generating ethanol from the corn would require 250 billion gallons of water! Most of this water can be reclaimed, but it would take some amount of energy to purify it, in addition to the energy required to process the corn to begin with.
In fairness to Thomas, and everyone who spotted my primary assumption here; ethanol can be made from any biomass. It Thailand, there's a village school that's generating cooking gas (CNG) from elephant ummm, byproduct. Two elephants can supply a village of 200 people! Mixed paper, a common recyclable, can produce about 90% as much ethanol/ton as corn.
Still, looking at the numbers (found in these locations):


I think Thomas should stick to Iraq. He's wrong there too, when he talks about a way to "do it right", because there is no way for us to impose rightness (whatever that means) on that country, but it is his area of expertise.

Saturday, June 18, 2005

Just Wandering/Wondering

I was doing some driving around the state (California) yesterday. Now, California is historically mostly part of Mexico. In school the children are taught about Fr. Junipero Serra, the priest who brought civilization to the primitive indians of the state. The schools don't actually mention the methods used in the civilization process, but the record is there. All that aside, one result of the original exploration is that most place names are religion-based. We have cities such as: San Bernardino ~ Saint Bernard; Santa Monica ~ Saint Monica; San Jose ~ Saint Joseph; Santa Barbara ~ Saint Barbara; San Francisco ~ Saint Francis; Santa Teresa ~ Saint Teresa; San Juan ~ Saint John; Santa Clara ~ Saint Clare.
A lot of Saints!

TheresaAndPope

Recalling this caused me to wonder. If women can be saints, why can't women be priests?
One person I asked said it was because saints were all dead, so it was safe to include women. Surely, though, that cannot be. A fundamental tenet of the Church is that we all get to have life eternal, albeit in a condition I personally would not care to have to endure. So, again, Why Can't A Woman Be A Priest?
Just wondering.

Wednesday, June 08, 2005

The Downing Street Memo Oh My!

You know, I spent a considerable number of years trying to find a cure for reality. I never succeeded. I think though that George W. Bush must have found the answer. One thing is certain - If he's aware of reality, he sure doesn't base his actions on it!
Perhaps if I try a little harder, I, too, can succeed in banishing old reality from my life.
The latest citation from Chairman W.


Man of the YearPM Blair

"There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush told reporters as Blair stood at his side. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," Bush said in response to a question about the memo. "It was our last option." Reuters, June 8 2005.
There are so many things wrong with this sentence it's hard to know where to start. I think George is hoping the more literate portion of the audience will be distracted by the infelicity (to put it mildly) of the grammar. I personally noticed the bald-facedness of the claim. Sometime in January of 2002 I noted that the war was "on", and that while the president was claiming then as now that "War is our last option", it was also his first and his only option. As was pretty clear to the million people marching in opposition to the fantastically idiotic idea that we'd be a welcome invader in Baghdad.
Now there's nothing farther from the truth than that!

Friday, June 03, 2005

We all need an Eskimo sometimes

Back in '96 (that's 1996, not 18.. or 17.. or..) I was having a tough time. I was working as a fisherman that year, not exactly getting rich. I'd headed offshore to go for Albacore, on my nice new (1960 vintage) boat, Seabreeze


Seabreeze


Somewhere (well, I can look up the exact co-ordinates; I wasn't 'lost at sea', really) about 800 miles west of Eureka I caught an old floating hawser in my prop, blew out my engine. Not much I could do out there, except spend a lot of time checking my bilge pumps, putting out distress calls, the usual thing for anyone floating around the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
After what seemed forever, but was actually just four days, I caught a lucky bounce off the ionosphere, and got hold of US Coast Guard Station Brookings. It took a few more days, but a Coast Guard ship finally got to me, about the time the weather was getting really iffy. They took me in tow, and in a few more days I wound up tied to an abandoned fishbuyers dock in Eureka California. Having had little-to-no sleep for weeks, I pretty much collapsed. Spent about 15 hours dead out.
But time has a way of moving along no matter my state of consciousness, so next morning I had no choice but to wake up and try to get things set to rights.
I was standing in the wheelhouse, surveying the chaos, when a cheerful little woman with sensible walking shoes and a slouch hat, looking perhaps a little like Miss Marple, came striding by along the beatup old dock. She waved and gave me a cheerful "Good Morning!". I growled at her. She said "What a beautiful boat you have!" (she had a remarked tendency to speak in exclamation points). I said it was a piece of junk (well, something a bit stronger than 'junk') with a blown engine, unusable, a disaster, etc. She persisted in engaging me in cheerful chatter until, finally, in exasperation at her impenetrable cheeriness, I said: Look, I wouldn't even have a way to get around, except a friend is letting me use his truck.
She said, without even a pause "Oh, you have a friend!"
I must have blinked, or blacked out, or something, because when I looked next, she had disappeared. I wanted to say thank you, or something, but, having delivered her message, she could then depart. That was my eskimo, back in July of 1996.