Preemptive Karma

Best Merkley ad yet

I've seen this ad on TV several times and it consistently grabs my rapt attention. Partly I think it's a cadance thing. I leave the TV on in the background while I play on my computer and audio clues are typically what divert my attention to what is on TV. The audio pace on this ad is a bit slower than the usual fare and perhaps that's what initially grabs my attention.

Whatever the cause, once I'm watching it I devour this ad. It's vintage Jeff Merkley, going to the very heart of why I decided to support him in the first place.

I'm Jeff Merkley. And our troops have done everything we've asked with distinction. We need to start giving them the respect they deserve.

Damn right, Jeff! It's the very least that we owe them.

Too many conservatives treat soldiers and veterans as an inherent extension of their support of a policy - with little apparent thought given to soldiers/veterans as individuals or what they might deserve once they've been used up and spit out by the Pentagon.

Too many progressives treat soldiers and veterans as an inherent extension of their opposition of a policy. In essence, the flip side of the same coin inhabited by their conservative peers.

Merkley strikes the exact right pose, IMO. He treats soldiers and veterans as individuals rather than extensions of a political policy decision made by politicians.

One for the history books

Wednesday's daring rescue of a variety of hostages held by Colombian FARC rebels just amazes me. Truely it could, and should, be characterized as nothing short of brilliant. A finer display of competence by the Colombian military simply doesn't exist.

The Colombian military chief justly bragged about the achievement.

Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said it "will go into history for its audacity and effectiveness." He also acknowledged the risks: "If this had failed, I would have had to resign," he told Caracol Radio on Thursday.

He's right. This feat is right up there with the legendary Israeli Raid on Entebbe for both sheer audacity and the demonstrated competence of those who devised and pulled off both rescues.

None of this should be confused with approval of the pending Colombian Free Trade agreement - which I oppose. It's just that I am deeply impressed with how brilliantly this rescue was conceived and pulled off.

Boys still held to different standard than girls

The math teacher (Kelsey Peterson) from Nebraska who fled to Mexico with a 13 year old boy so that she could have sex with him pled guilty as part of a deal to will allow her to spend less time in prison.

So far so good. But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Peterson's attorney, James Martin Davis, has publicly questioned the boy's birth certificate. Davis said the boy was likely at least 16, and that he was the aggressor.

Amy Peck, an attorney for the boy and his family, said that suggestion was disgusting.

"He was a 12-year-old boy and the defendant knew it," Peck said Wednesday. "The result of this lower plea could have been obtained without playing to every racial stereotype that there is."

In fairness it needs to be pointed out that lawyers and family members of male sexual predators frequently use the same excuse - "she was the aggressor." But of course whomever was the aggressor is utterly irrelevant to whether there was informed consent.

Is it true that boys tend to be more sexually aggressive than girls? Abso-friggin-lutely. But it's a red herring. Young teenage boys are no more mature enough to give informed consent than young teenage girls are. In fact, I'd argue that, aggressivity aside, young teenage girls tend to be slightly more emotionally mature than their male peers. Not enough to give informed consent to have sex with an adult (or anyone else). But they do seem ever so slightly more mature at that age. I base that on both my own experiences as a young teenage boy and as the father of two girls.

At the end of the day it is the adult in these adult/child sexual liasons who bears ultimate responsibility by virtue of being the ONLY person involved who has the capacity to make an informed decision. Whomever was the aggressor doesn't change that reality one iota.

Racism = Classicm = Racism

Not always, of course. But far more often and widely than the mainstream conversations on the subject seem to indicate.

I don't deny that racism exists - of course it exists. And much of it is pure, knee-jerk racism. But much of it is really just plain old classism if you peek beneath the color coded facade.

One of the hot political issues d'jour is immigration. Yeah, most of those belly-aching about it are only focused on those crossing our southern border. And almost all of illegally crossing that border are of one or more ethnic minorities (in the U.S.). It's true that we hardly ever hear anyone complaining about lilly-white Canukistanians coming in here illegally. But it seems to me that the skin color difference there is nothing more than an excuse - albeit an increasingly less often cited one. And last time I checked the estimates of how many illegally cross our northern border pale in comparison to how many cross our southern border.

Time and time again I've read, heard or watched a news report on illegal immigration which boiled down to "they're taking our jobs!" It's about economics first and foremost.

What motivated black slavery in our nation's early history? Was it the overwhelming desire to have someone under their thumb? To feel superior? No! It was about economics.

Wasn't kinda the entire point of post-civil war "share cropping" deals, from the POV of the landowners, all about economics?

Who coined the term "white trailor trash" and used it frequently enough to propel it into our national lexicon? Wasn't it more affluent whites who gleefully looked askance at those they deemed to be "less than" them? And what determined who lived in the trailer court and who lived in the big house with the expansive yard? Economics!

Of course unmitigated racism exists. It's no less onerous than classism, by any means. But I submit that as long as we continue to artificially divorce racism from classism in the public realm that we only serve to perpetuate the problem, no matter how much we talk about it.

Talk about it, by all means! But talk about the whole issue, not just one facet of it.

So anyway... that's what was on my mind today. Sparked largely by having watched Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North on OPB Sunday evening.

Site update notes

Two quick notes here.

1. I finally got Mac's bio updated.

2. My email addy is working again.

Food Scare Hits Home-Grown Veggies

Rice crops wiped out around the world. Grain crops wiped out and/or redirected to fuel production. Floods in grain and pork country. Dangerous tomatoes. Corn shortages. On and on it goes. Thinking about doing a backyard garden? People in the UK who have done that are now being warned not to eat their produce because the natural fertiziler they used, it turns out, has been contaminated by dangerous chemicals.

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) has been inundated with calls from concerned gardeners who have seen potatoes, beans, peas, carrots and salad vegetables wither or become grossly deformed. The society admitted that it had no idea of the extent of the problem, but said it appeared 'significant'. The affected gardens and allotments have been contaminated by manure originating from farms where the hormone-based herbicide aminopyralid has been sprayed on fields...
Problems with the herbicide emerged late last year, when some commercial potato growers reported damaged crops. In response, Dow launched a campaign within the agriculture industry to ensure that farmers were aware of how the products should be used. Nevertheless, the herbicide has now entered the food chain. Those affected are demanding an investigation and a ban on the product. They say they have been given no definitive answer as to whether other produce on their gardens and allotments is safe to eat.

It appears that the contamination came from grass treated 12 months ago. Experts say the grass was probably made into silage, then fed to cattle during the winter months. The herbicide remained present in the silage, passed through the animal and into manure that was later sold. Horses fed on hay that had been treated could also be a channel.

With bees in jeopardy and increasing weather disasters affecting food crops around the world, it would seem people would have sat up and taken notice already. But I suppose our bellies are still full, and only when sudden disaster hits us and it is too late will we finally agree we need to do things differently.

Reality Check: legal handguns & collateral damage

2000 data from the NYPD found that officers involved in actual on-the-job shootings hit their target less than 16% of the time. And they train regularly at shooting ranges. How much worse would it be among the average gun owner who shoots their weapons much less often?

Additionally, an FBI study found a .223 Remington from a rifle had less chance of over-penetration than a 9mm Luger handgun round. Meaning that even if the handgun bullet finds it's intended target it's more likely, with some, but not all, calibers, to pass through and strike something else.

Last but not least, handgun accuracy is notoriously less than that of rifles even when the weapon is being handled by a bonafide marksman.

As I have stated elsewhere, I fully support the individual's right to own and bear non-handgun firearms.

My question is: Where, in your view, does your apparent right to own and bear that subset of arms known as a handgun butt into my right to not be wounded or killed by stray bullets?

Don't Confuse Them with the Facts

Eli Saslow has written an excellent piece at MSNBC that looks at the rumor mill surrounding Barack Obama and its impact on voters' opinions in one town in Ohio. I have been on the receiving end of numerous chain emails about Obama, including all sorts of unfounded personal smears such as that he is a Muslim Manchurian candidate - and all from dear friends and family members, most of whom are "Christian." Saslow takes the reader on a visit to one patriotic town and shows why Obama is facing an uphill battle, even among many Democrats. I think the reason can be found in this paragraph from his report:

Gerri Kish, a 66-year-old born in Hawaii, read both of Obama's autobiographies. She has close friends, she said, who still refuse to believe her when she swears Obama is Christian. Then she hands them the books, and they refuse to read them. "They just want believe what they believe," she said. "Nothing gets through to them."

As I have written here several times before, this is a matter of willful ignorance. It is idiotic, fearful, and downright shameful. Many wonderful people whom I love have fallen for the nonsense spewed by the rumor mill in this election and simply will not be dissuaded. It is truly disappointing to me to learn at the ripe old age of 44 that my parents' generation does not wish to engage the brain power and personal initiative required to think logically and, therefore, is easily manipulated by this shrewd, unAmerican, hate-filled, racist propaganda campaign by power-hungry blood-suckers. It absolutely disgusts me. That is not to say I am 100% sold on an Obama presidency; I disagree with him on many issues and lean his way more out of hope for honest and inspired leadership than anything else.

So let me turn your attention to another editorial, this one about the character of John McCain. And I will state that as much as I have disagreed with McCain, particularly his evolution from a "maverick" to a right-wing Republican, I can still see much to be admired in his character. I think it is a travesty that this contest has descended into an ugly choice for many between two "evils" when we could actually be making a choice between two good men, either of whom could make us proud of our country. But I suppose that wouldn't be nearly as dramatic, would it?

Morality Turning the Religious Toward the Left

Macleans has a tantalizing article today about the indications that America's Christians are increasingly turning away from the "Religious Right" (GOP) and toward the more moral left. No need for me to analyze it here, but this excerpt leapt off the page for me because addresses two key points that are largely why I have wondered in awe at the continued support of Christians for the Bush Administration:

"Evangelicals are waking up to the idea that abortion is not the only moral issue. I've heard a lot of evangelicals say that whether we've had a Bush or a Clinton in the office, we've had not much change on the issue of abortion, but we've had an immoral approach to war — and I'm ready for that to stop," says Stephen Mansfield, a conservative evangelical writer who authored the bestselling spiritual biography of the current President, The Faith of George W. Bush. "The average evangelical does not see the Bush administration carrying out a Christian policy on the issue of torture. The idea you would torture a body made in the image of God is abhorrent."

The article also gives credit to Obama's willingness to speak frankly about his religious views in comparison with McCain's awkwardness in the subject. It is well worth the read and full of juicy tidbits. Like this one:

... Douglas Kmiec, a former assistant attorney general under the Reagan administration who crafted Reagan's anti-abortion policies. Kmiec is a well-known pro-life conservative Roman Catholic who endorsed former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney during the Republican primary contest, but now backs Obama.

The shift is not tremendously large, but may be large enough to swing a few percentage points of the Christian voter Obama's way.

Gun rights - y'all are nuts

I'm sure everyone has heard about the SCOTUS ruling lifting the Washington D.C. ban on handguns. I disagree with it. In fact, I find Justice Scalia's opinion intellectually vacuous. But I also disagree with D.C's law requiring that rifles and shotguns, while legal to keep, had to be disassembled.

Striking the requirement that rifles and shotguns be disassembled would have met Scalia's claims of a "historical narrative" supporting an individual's right to bear arms since both rifles and shotguns are, by definition, "arms." Which goes to the heart of why his opinion is intellectually vacuous - he treats handguns as necessary to meeting the definition of "arms" without actually coming out and saying so in so many words.

Scalia also argued that handguns are the preferred weapon for self-defense because they allow one to hold the gun with one hand and dial with the other. Setting aside the inherent dangers of holding one's finger on the trigger of a loaded weapon while diverting attention elsewhere (violation of fundamental gun safety guidelines)... I've shot plenty of rifles and shotguns and they are no more difficult to hold with one hand than a handgun is. So that part of his opinion doesn't hold any water IMHO.

I've long supported (and still do) both the limitation/prohibition on handgun ownership AND the individual's right to own and bear rifles and shotguns. Heck, I'd be perfectly fine with us going back to rifle racks in the back windows of vehicles. Just put 'em out there where I can see them and thus make INFORMED decisions based on that knowledge.

We need look no further than the recent shooting deaths of half a dozen people at that Kentucky plastics plant to see why I hold the views that I do.

The shooter apparently pulled a handgun on his supervisor as he was being escorted out of the facility and shot the supervisor dead. It seems pretty obvious that the supervisor didn't know the guy had a handgun on him because they are so easily hidden. Which is why I favor handgun restrictions.

As long as I have a reasonable opportunity to discover for myself that you are packing heat... then I'm okay with it. You have a right to defend yourself and I have a right to defend myself with the knowledge that you've got a gun.

What Obama really thinks of Smith

What Took Her So Long?

Today, Queen Elizabeth II revoked Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's knighthood. And all I could think was why did she wait until now?

Mugabe was made an honorary knight in Britain in 1994. Sure, at that time we had not yet seen the full measure of his evil, but it is surprising to me that the Queen would bestow any honor on him when we already had seen so much evil.

More than 20,000 Ndebele civilians were killed by Mugabe's North-Korean trained 5th Brigade during the "Gukurahundi" (which translates to "the early rain that washes away the chaff") beginning in 1982. I was in Zimbabwe in the middle of Ndebele territory at the time. His soldiers were terrorizing the people - wrapping them in thatch and burning them alive, among other horrors.

That was twelve years before the good Queen knighted Mugabe.

She allowed him to retain his knighthood despite his country's collapse into hell. Since 1995 - one year after his knighthood - we have known Zimbabweans' life expectancy was dropping spectacularly. Today, Zimbabweans have the lowest life expectancy of any nation - 37 years for men and 34 for women.

The Queen also allowed Mugabe to retain his knighthood despite his leading the country into such massive extremes of hyperinflation as to outrank everyone else in the world - it is right now at 100,000%.

His country used to be the bread basket of Africa, but now a third of its population relies on food aid to keep from starving to death. Apparently, this didn't bother the Queen, either.

It seems what troubles her is that Morgan Tsvangirai has dropped out of the Presidential race because after years of arrests and torture himself, not to mention assassination attempts and assassinations of those around him, none of which deterred him from pressing forward in his effort to save his country, he decided he could not enter the presidency at the price of further brutalization and murder of his fellow Zimbabweans at the direction of Mugabe. Without Tsvangirai in the race, the killing can end, at least for now.

Maybe that's the whole problem. Mugabe took things a little too far for the rest of the world to stomach and now the slow decimation of a nation of black people is over. We can't be having that, can we?

Nuclear power as a stopgap to geothermal power

I started to dig into what John McCain's energy policy is vis-a-vis renewable energy. But then I realized that his policy tomorrow may not be the same as it is today or the same as it'll be the day after tomorrow. He has recently called for building 45 new nuclear reactors by 2030. But as I say, that's subject to change on a day-by-day basis.

A couple days ago, during a meeting with Governors, Barak Obama noted that nuclear power doesn't emit greenhouse gases and thus is worth devoting research dollars to. However he noted, "I don't think that nuclear power is a panacea."

An increasing number of environmentalists are calling for the nuclear option as a means of avoiding the impending global warming crisis. but only as a medium-term measure rather than as a long-term solution. James Lovelock (author of Gaia Hypothesis) and Jesse Ausubel, head of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, are at the forefront of them.

Ausebel explains,

"As a green, I care intensely about land-sparing, about leaving land for nature," he wrote. "To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy such as wind, water, and biomass cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square meter, nuclear has astronomical advantages over its competitors."

For example, it would have required windfarms covering 301,000 square miles to have met the round-the-clock American electricity demands in 2005. By 2030 our electricity demands are expected to increase by 50%.

Which brings me to The Great Forgotten Clean-Energy Source: Geothermal

If we could extract all the geothermal energy that exists underneath the United States to a depth of two miles, it would supply America’s power demands (at the current rate of usage) for the next 30,000 years.

Geothermal is considered to be decades away from being able to make a significant contribution to our electricity needs. But the reason is more financial than technical. As MIT chemical engineering professor Jefferson Tester says, "It's not as if we don't know how to drill holes and fracture rocks. But we have to demonstrate EGS on a scale that would be useful for commercial enterprise." Another part of the problem is that hunting for good candidate sites for geothermal requires the exact same skilled geologists who the Big Boys are employing hunting for more petroleum sources because that's where the big money is at... currently. Which makes it that much more difficult for the geothermal wildcatters who are currently at the forefront of the business in this country to secure the necessary talent.

Doug Glaspey, chief operating officer of U.S. Geothermal, an Idaho-based company that just finished building a 13-megawatt geothermal electrical plant in southern Idaho, says that it currently costs up to $4 million per megawatt to build a geothermal plant. The 2005 electicity demand was roughly 4 trillion megawatt hours. So the financial costs of actually building geothermal facilities are obviously daunting too. But that's largely because so little research has been put into it. Much of our technology dates back to the oil prices were sky high - the 1970s.

The bad news: "The United States alone pumped the equivalent of nearly 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2005. More than 2 billion tons of that came from electricity generation."

The good news: Obama has pledged to plow $150 billion over the next 10 years into clean/cleaner energy and to double R&D funding for the same.

I know that this is heresy in some circles but I think that Lovelock and Ausebel make a lot of sense.

OK, Here's Why I've Come to Hate Fox News

Classic example of Fox News bias:

We have heard endlessly from Fox News about the whole "Michelle Obama said she wasn't proud of America" red herring. And how Barack Obama's "spiritual advisor" said "God damn America." And how Barack Obama didn't place his hand over his heart for the National Anthem.

Did the oh-so-patriotic Fox News tell you about John McCain's statement that he "didn't really love America"? No, of course not. It would be so easy to take the statement out of context and turn it into something explosive, as Fox News has done in all three examples above. But their extreme bias only runs one way.

So not only did Fox News not tell its readers about McCain's statement, they went so far as to completely delete the statement from a transcript of the interview in which he said it (the bold portion is the deleted portion)!

HANNITY: You spent two years of this five-and-a-half-year period in solitary confinement. What does that do to a person, to spend that much time in solitary confinement?
MCCAIN: I think it makes you a better person. Obviously, it makes you love America. I really didn't love America until I was deprived of her company.

Oh. My. God.

How long will all those patriotic, honest, American-values Republicans who listen to Fox News continue to allow themselves to be manipulated like this? Sadly, I think the answer is for fricking ever.

Michael Totten - relinking after a long hiatus

We'd linked to Michael Totten back in the first year or so of PK. He's another one of those "centrists" that I was so fond of for a long time and who used to comment at a long-time favorite blog of mine - Centerfield. Totten also lives here in Portland.

But Totten had been supportive of the Iraq War from the beginning and out of disgust I delinked his blog. No great loss to him I suppose since he gets tons more traffic than we do here. But I also stopped commenting on his blog.

So anyway I was surfing links earlier today and found myself at Totten's blog where I read what has to be one of the very best articles I've ever read on the Balkans that I've ever read. It's really long. But it's got some great photos and maps and is exceptionally well written.

I still don't agree with Totten on everything. But he's a gifted writer who throws a lot of solid information at you in the process of writing his posts and essays.