All the Troubles in the World

 Ugh. Sooooo late.

A section of the historic carousel in the little Willamette Valley town of Albany

Sorry. Sorry; I know, I promised something right after my latest "WTF is wrong with these people?!?" rant back in June. Had some ideas for that post, too, and then...

Well, life got in the way.

Since then things have changed enough that the central idea of the original post has been blown apart and shattered by the month-and-change of utterly nutty nonsense that passes for U.S. "politics" and "foreign policy" (if such terms can be used to describe the idiocy, stupidity, and the random free-association that dominate both of them), that being what you get when your national government is dominated by an addled moron and his remoras looking for loot, power, plus whatever loathsome ideas are leaking from their heads.

But let me try to get back to where I was originally starting from and see if I can rebuild something out of what I've got now.

Crystal Springs Garden in Southeast Portland

Okay. So. 

The last time I sat down to type I wrapped up that post with... 

"Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning. And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)"

At the time I had a specific Portland thing in mind; this.

"It is in the public interest to avoid supporting animal cruelty, unsustainable environmental practices, and zoonotic disease risks by removing force-fed products from the marketplace. It is also in the public interest to codify values related to the humane treatment of animals, public health, and environmental stewardship. Therefore, the Council finds it necessary to enact this regulation in the City of Portland in order to achieve these goals."

This is the concluding paragraph of Portland City Ordinance 192190, enacted into code on June 4, 2026.

What it does is ban the sale of foie gras.

 

Tom McCall Natural Area, Mosier, Oregon

Okay then.

I honestly have no dog (or goose, or duck) in this fight. I don't have the taste for, or the grocery budget for, the bloated internal organs of domestic fowl. But I also don't think that all the other aspects of commercial poultry production, from the chicken farm through the poultry processing plant, is anything but an enterprise that needs to be punitively overseen and regulated.

Commercial aviculture, like a lot of other commercial food production, is about making foods relatively cheap and affordable. A lot of the things that everyone involved has to do to make that happen, from the farmers/ranchers through the transporters to the meat-packing plants to the groceries, ranges from quick and dirty to downright revolting. There's a reason that parents don't encourage their kids to dream of working in a North Carolina chicken plant. Gross.

But...cheap and available food? Ask any peasant or smallholder or urban laborer in a pre-industrial or early industrial society how they'd respond to knowing that their lives weren't liable to be upended at any given moment by a killing frost or an avian flu or just a series of poor decisions by their lords and masters. Wars. Famines. Shortages that raised the bare-minimum cost of even the most basic foods like bread beyond the means of the common folk - which in most societies in most of human history meant something like 96% of everyone in that society - and meant that you starved, or rebelled (and were killed anyway, after you starved for a bit...).

So I kinda get both viewpoints.

Making intentionally-diseased bird livers by tube-feeding ducks like suffragettes in Holloway Prison?

Ew.

But if you like and want to buy and eat that stuff?

Whatev'. I don't see the point in making law about it, and here's why it did make me swear and take the piss.

Portland City Council has a whole lot of shit it needs to deal with.

We're stony broke, for one thing. Just like always. If you believe what out local pols tell us about it.

Bills don't stop coming in - roads, schools, fuckin' cops (remind me, Siri, what completes the following statement: "Portland Police Bureau is fucking _________"), firefighters, public buildings - while everybody pisses and moans and, most importantly, votes against raising any sort of tax revenue. 

The constant message coming out of City Hall (and the County offices, and fucking Salem, for that matter...) is "OMFG we just have to cut (insert public good here; parks, pools, roads, daycare, mental and physical health service) because we don't have enough money!" 

It's the same we hear from here all the way to D.C.; fuck your medical care, Gramma, don't you see that Elon Musk (fill in the plutocrat name here) needs another trillion bucks?!?! 

So it kinda chapped my ass that, in the middle of this usual annual budget-crisis-oh-woe-is-us-athon that City Council had five minutes to waste (and money to spend, mind you; someone is gonna have to deal with renegade duck liver pate' smugglers and underground foie gras dealers. I'd love to be a fly on the wall as the Central Precinct command group assigns coppers to the undercover Foie Gras Squad) fucking around with poultry guts.

Adorable child meets adorable woman with fanciful ornament, Cathedral Park Jazz Festival

 
Okay, but.

That was before this bullshit blew up all over the front page:

"The (Portland Trailblazer’s) majority owner, Tom Dundon, is trying to iron out a deal with the city for a major, state-of-the-art renovation of the Moda Center that could cost (the public) more than $600 million."

Now this joker Dundon?

He's a reeeeeal piece of work.

A perfect symbol of the Trump Era, a human-shaped cockroach who made his pile off shitty payday-loan-style predatory loan-sharking and now looks for stolen glory off owning sportsball teams. In this case, Portland and Oregon's only "big" major league sport, NBA basketball.

The scumbag has serious fuck-you money - serious as in this $600M is kind of a rounding error of his tax accountants -  and so far his whole "negotiating" approach to this whole I-need-you-proles-to-gimme-money-for-my-basketball-hobby-farm with the public has been pretty much just "fuck you".

Here I have to confess: I'm totally not a basketball fan.

Despite having spent a chunk of my young-adulthood around Philadelphia in the Seventies and early Eighties glory years of the Julius Erving 76ers...not a damn thing. Not so much as a trickle of hooping excitement trickled into me.  

I had to go to my friend Will, Portland native, massive Blazer fan (as in "still remembers vividly every moment of the 1977 NBA Finals and Championship") and stand-up civic and social justice soldier. I figured if anyone would be in the "let's-do-what-we-need-to-keep-the-team" house it'd be Will.

Nope.

It didn't take ten seconds for my friend to express his down-to-the-ground conviction that our new basketball billionaire can fuck right off with his "pay me you scum" shit.

Which, yeah. I totally get. It took me less time that that. Seriously, Oregon and Multnomah County and Portland pols. You're gonna tell me we're broke, we can't afford to find the jack to do so much as the "something" about the horde of homeless gomers you keep freaking out about 24/7, but somehow we can find enough spare change in the sofa cushions to pay this plutocratic fuckstick to keep keeping his basketball toy here?

My ass. 

And, still...here we are. The public, the City Council, the County Commissioners, even the State legislature and the governor, they're all still dicking around with this damn thing, trying to find a way to ease some simoleons out of the public vault instead of telling the Dundon Organization to either pay for the damn arena themselves or shut up and fuck right off.

Random barn along Highway 99W, somewhere in Polk County

 
You want more? Ohfuckyes there's more.

From the statewide ballot in November there was this:

"The People of Oregon therefore propose the People for the Elimination of Animal Cruelty Exemptions (PEACE) Act to amend Chapter 167 of the Oregon Revised Statutes—which currently provides unnecessary exemptions to laws governing animal abuse, animal neglect, and animal sexual assault—in order to reduce the suffering of animals and improve their quality of life."

That's right; the idea was to allow the Good People of Oregon to vote to outlaw hunting, fishing, livestock raising, chicken ranching, pretty much all meat and poultry production, from your "pets or meat" rabbits in the backyard to the King Ranch.

Driftwood patterns, Otter Crest, Oregon

I have no words for how fucking pointlessly stupid that is beyond "Wow, that's amazingly fucking pointlessly stupid." It's like making hamburgers illegal. Or vodka. Or shoes. Even if it was politically do-able, it's economically and socially impossible. 

And, just here in Portland, was this:

"The ballot proposal aims to use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s annual revenue to hire 400 officers. That would divert roughly $50 million from climate programs to hire more officers and provide training."

Riiight. Siri, what was that line about the fucking useless Police Bureau again..?

And this, too:

"Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where residents of a municipality deliberate and directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget."

(I got to talk to an actual person who was collecting signatures for this one.

(Oh, right. You might not have these "direct democracy"/ballot measure things where you live. The basic deal is that there has to be a "petitioner", an organization, or individual, who draws up one of these proposed pieces of rule- or legislation-changes or additions.

The language has to be approved by whatever the political authority of the polity you want the thing to apply to - the "PEACE" thing was statewide, so the Oregon Secretary of State's office, the other two were City of Portland, so some suit at City Hall - and then you have to get enough valid citizen signatures to get the wording on the ballot. I ran into one of the people they hired - and these folks are almost always paid temps - and we had a long talk about it.

And I kinda-sorta didn't hate it. But. I had and have real questions and problems with the way the proponents and my signature guy hand-wave away the whole issue of "how to these "PB proposals" actually work in practice?" How do you get the public involved? How does the whole "refine ideas into feasible projects or programs" process work?

My concern is that, watching the U.S. public loll about in the firehose of idiot shit issuing from the government, the government's ass-kissers and fluffers, and the "news media" stenography of the two, without so much as a skeptically raised eyebrow, the chances of this process becoming a nutzoid Skinnerbox of foie-gras-sale and dairy-cow-insemination criminalization seem insanely likely.)

"Corgi Beach Takeover", Seaside, Oregon

 
Well.

What's the sitch on all this political galaxy-brain nonsense?

Two of these proposals  - the PEACE no-chicken-schwarma thing for the state ballot, and the cop-fluffing "Safer Portland" one for the City - died stillborn for lack of valid signatures, and I'm not sure how.

Supposedly both petitions had more than the required minimum when they were turned in to the various elections people, but what I'm reading is that the State and City's name-checks (presumably to ensure that the signatures belonged to living people who are actual citizens of Oregon and/or Portland) tossed so many that the both were 86ed.

(Oh, and the cop-fluffers were bashed repeatedly for their paid harvesters just blatantly lying their asses off about how the funding gimmick actually worked. Which would certainly fit with Portland Police Bureau's methods.)

The PB/community funding one made it, I think. We'll see if it shows up in November.

The foie gras ban is in effect, so no fatty goose liver will henceforth soil our Portland charcuterie anymore. 

St. Johns City Hall (1907), North Portland, Oregon

 
The basketball arena tax-money-giveaway scheme?

Oh, Christ, no; nothing definite and all parties are still dicking around about it. The usual "business community leaders" are still trying to stuff dollars in Dundon's pockets, but every dickish move the team owner makes (and he's made a lot) clarifies the suspicion that, yes, he's just an ginormous dick who can't be trusted. Neil deMause over at Field of Schemes has the deets if you care enough. 

This has all been entirely too verbose, but I hope you get the gist. We really are living through the shittiest timeline. 

We've placed far too much power and influence in the keeping of far too many people who are unscrupulous, or foolish, or ignorant, or greedy, or shortsighted, or simplistic, or some combination of all the above, and we've forgotten that one of the hardest parts of citizenship is that you can't just ignore what those fucking people are up to. Citizenship requires the citizens to stay alert, stay informed, stay involved, and, if it comes down to it, stay - or become - fiercely protective of their rights and duties.

Sometimes...that means a violent - emotionally, politically, and, yes, physically, if it comes to that - collision with the "authorities" that you've elected.

The alternative?

They are your kings, and you are their subjects.

Or their slaves.

Portland Japanese Garden, winter, 2026

(This one was so depressing I didn't have the heart to illustrate it with political imagery. So these are photos from my expeditions out and about my hometown. I hope you like them. At least more than the tales of wretched scum and villainy they illuminate.) 

You WANT to die on this hill..?

 My Bride and the Girl are still in Teacher Strike Stasis, waiting to see if the two sides will settle today.

As I think I said earlier, the union has repeatedly climbed down from its initial (eminently reasonable!) list of objectives because the cheapskate state legislature made it clear that it's more important to hand out tax breaks to gajillionaires than to pay for 21st Century education for everyone.

The final obstacle to settlement is this: "class size committees".

Since the State of Oregon can't be arsed to pay for enough teachers or educational assistants to bring class sizes down to a reasonable level, the proposed "solutions" are to 1) pay teachers more for doing crowd control over those teeming hordes, and 2) refer the worst of the scrums to a committee at each school if the horde gets to be just too huge.

Per the link, this committee will "...negotiate how to resolve class sizes or student loads that exceed agreed-upon limits if the principal, the affected teacher or teachers and a representative of the union don’t agree on a solution."

The union and the district both agree to this thing. What they disagree on is how it should work.

For one, the district wants to appeal process to stay in-house. The union wants to be able to rope in a state-level mediator if they don't agree with the district superintendant's ruling,

For my money? I wouldn't trust the Supe, either. I'm stickin' with the union there.

But the other big disagreement?

Parents.

"Under the union’s proposal, the class size committees could include two parents if school administrators and the teachers union agree to add them."

The district didn't want Joey's mom and Andie's dad, but eventually gave in on the parents. But they want to restrict what the parents (and these committees) can do: "The committees would not be allowed to discuss and make recommendations about class size issues in specific classrooms but would instead be limited to collaborating on potential solutions regarding class sizes and caseloads at their school more generally."

So I get that the primary reason the teachers proposed this is to get public support. They look more parent-friendly if they're pushing for parent involvement.

But, c'mon. Seriously?

You have to deal with these people, teachers. Are you telling me with a straight face that you don't know who is most likely to end up on these committees?

The crank. The obsessive. A Mom For Liberty, a Dad for Anti-Vaxx, and every other socio-edu-political whackadoodle out there in every school intake area.

Oh, fine, okay. Maybe not every parent...but you know who you're most likely to end up with, right, teachers?

And you want that?

Here I just finished ranting about how in the international news governments and "statesmen" are running around wanting things that are stupid things and making plans that are stupid plans...and right here on my street there's...this.

I have no idea how the union and the district will resolve this mess.

But that they started here? That they want this goofy thing?

That's...not particularly encouraging.

Go Directly To Jail

 

This is what was left behind when the funny farmers came and hauled off our "Jesus wants me to show you my tits" homeless Crazy Lady last May.

Now, our Portland area "Mr. Potter Association" (People for Portland, two lies for the price of one, since these folks are not "people" in the humane sense and they're certainly not "for Portland" in any way but "make Portland more like Lake Oswego") have a new homeless-question poll out.

"Portland-area poll finds huge appetite for tougher tactics on homelessness".

Because of course it did.

Because a huge chunk of people want simple answers to complex problems, want a hammer to make everything that bugs them into a nail.

Lots of people are assholes, too, but that's a whole different thing.

But think about this.

What are "tougher tactics"?

Force.

That's the bottom line, isn't it?

"An overwhelming majority of Multnomah County voters say...people in crisis living on the streets should be required to undergo addiction or mental health treatment.Only 25% of Multnomah County voters said that treatment for people experiencing mental health or substance use disorder should be voluntary; 67% believe “we need legal tools to encourage and compel people to get help. "

How?

How do you "require" some doper to get clean, or some nutter to take their meds?

"Legal tools"? A band saw? Pliers?

"Legal tools". Just say it straight; you junkies and loonies are gonna get straight or go to fucking jail.

Because we have all the money and jail space to shove a bunch of crazy junkies for being crazy junkies, right?

Fuck me runnin'.

"Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban..."

That's the latest Wheeler gimmick, BTW; force the hobos to pack their shit every morning. And then...what? Hump their ruck all over town? Drive their RV up and down Interstate Avenue from 8am to 8pm?

The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?

Nothing has changed since I wrote about this last time. Or, for that matter, since I first wrote about it two years ago. And nothing has changed the conclusion I wrote then:

"...there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space."

Except people like "People for Portland" and the angry Potters they polled are more angry and more vicious and less willing to invest time, money, and interest in actually figuring out ways to get these poor bastards out of the parks and off the streets rather than fantasizing about jailing them.

Am I happy about the "homeless problem"?

Look back up at the picture. That was just one person, in one place. That's unacceptable for a dozen reasons. 

No, I'm not "happy" about the homeless situation.

But I'm at least realistic about it.

While the big megaphone in the hands of these People for Portland is just shouting their nonsense, as random and pointless and unrealistic as the ranting of the Jesus Tits lady, all over the sky above and with about as much hope of actually solving the problem.

Trail of Tears

Just to the west of the Little House there's a City park, the Peninsula Crossing Trail, that runs along the east bank of what we call "The Cut", the immense railroad cut that runs through North Portland from the Willamette River side - where the vast Albina freight yards are located - to the Columbia.

The Bride and I discovered it soon after it was opened in 1996. Back then I could still ride a bike and we did, enjoying the quiet wooded trail between the busy and largely-bike-lane-free-at-the-time North Portland arterial streets.

That's actually a pretty good picture of how the trail would have looked for, oh, about a decade or so.

Then Portland's "homeless problem" metastasized. 

Today the trail looks more like this:

 

Most housed North Portlanders won't stray onto the trail anymore; it's not worth the debris and the random whacko and the ride is no longer peaceful and pretty.

Like most Portlanders, I'm frustrated and angry. Almost every public space is now inhabited, and nearly all the habitations are a sour sprawl of...well, everything; filthy clothes, bags of trash, broken bicycles and cars...they're trashpits. There's a reason nobody ever went for a walk in the city dump.

But, like most Portlanders, I'm also baffled by what to do about these camps.

I mean...I know the real answer. It means building a mass of cheap, low-cost rental and housing units. It means staffing organizations that will provide support and structure for the people moved out of the camps and into the housing - both in the form of "support" like addiction programs and medical and/or psychiatric care - and "structure", like nannying them to take their meds and go to the job training programs.

But...here's a good example of why even with all this - and I should note that "all this" is a fever dream; nobody in Portland will vote the taxation it would take to do all that - I despair of figuring out a way to deal with this homeless mess.

The link above takes you to the tale of one "Gary O'Connor", who lived and died - violently - along a similar trail in Southeast Portland. 

The article tries hard to make O'Connor into a sympathetic character, but can't avoid noting that:

"O’Connor couldn’t read or write and resorted to stealing...(h)e struggled with addiction...Court records show O’Connor had burglary convictions in Multnomah County and at the time of his death had a warrant out for his arrest in Clackamas County, where he was accused of giving police a false name and criminal trespassing."

So let's assume you get this guy into a subsidized house. You get him a into a drug addiction program. You get him back in school - at 45 years old, mind - to learn to freaking read and write and do simple math.

What then? Who's going to hire this guy? A former crook and tweaker who lived half his life illiterate? Frankly, I'm guessing you'd have to assign a sort of parole officer/social worker/nanny to the dude full time to keep him from deciding that stealing bikes was less difficult and demanding than his job stocking shelves at Kroger.

Multiply that by thousands or even tens of thousands; people with health issues who need medical help, people with drug issues, people with emotional issues or mental health issues. People who, honestly, prefer to steal rather than punch a clock.

I mean...to be brutal, if this guy was a pet you'd take him to the vet and have him put down. He'd just be too much trouble.

But he's not a pet, he's a person. A troubling, troublesome person, but a person. So you kind of have a moral dilemma on your hands. He's a huge sink of time, money, and trouble, and one who is very like to reward all that investment with...very little. 

But if you don't make that investment, there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space.

Mal y pense

My bride was intrigued by the spectacle of Lance Armstrong and Oprah Winfrey, so that is what we watched tonight.

And it was, indeed, intriguing, but not for the reasons it was advertised.

Most of it was a simple repetition of things we know, or should have known already.

The doping, well, I've said this before; I had no doubt that Armstrong, like most of his great competitors, used the methods they did - EPO, CERA, HGH, testosterone, stimulants, corticosteriods - because they had to, to win. The officials that should have been ahead of the cheaters were helpless, and so it was cheat, or lose.

It was obvious to me that Armstrong fully absorbed the ethic of the peleton of his day; that to win meant to cheat, and that anyone who couldn't or wouldn't cheat was not a hero but a fool.

From tonight's interview it's fairly obvious to me that Armstrong still feels that way. And he is still the carefully unsentimental predator he has always been.

He is remorseful, yes, but only because he was caught and in so doing has harmed people he actually cares about; his children, his mother, perhaps his wife and his ex-wife.

The rest of us, well, we're not really people who matter. We're there to be extras in The Lance Armstrong Story.

Most of us think this way, of course, but it takes a pretty enormous ego to be willing to parade that attitude in full view on national television.

And for the record, Oprah really was an awful inquisitor. She wasted an immense amount of time on things that were self-evident and let slide the real hard questions that might have forced the man she was supposed to be interviewing to reveal himself. He slid around any real acceptance of the wrong he did to those who had spoken the truth about him, notably Betsy Andreu and David Walsh.

Armstrong seems clearly using this as a ploy to win sympathy and as an attempt to gain some sort of toehold back into professional sport. He openly stated that he thought his punishment was excessive and that he was driven by a need to compete.

And that was a point that Oprah, as was her habit during the entire interview, failed to seize upon.

Because if Armstrong really needed to compete he needn't return to the Chicago Marathon or any other sanctioned event. He could train and run or ride in secret and alone, where only he would know how strong and fast he had become.

But for this man what he knows about himself is not important. His life is lived by what others know about him. It is not important to be the fastest, or the strongest. It is important to him that others see him as the fastest and strongest.

That has always been the only real question to me worth asking here: "Why now?"

"We've heard you say you're sorry. We've heard you claim that you feel that you have to tell the truth now for your children's sakes. But if that were the case, why didn't you tell the truth when you, of all men, could have told the truth and changed the very sport you claim you loved? Why should we believe any of your apologies now, when you had the chance to be a truly great man and you didn't; worse, instead of merely lying and cheating you savaged those who DID speak the truth about you?"

Sadly, this interview just made clear what we've known; that this man will never do anything for itself. He is simply not made to value such things.

Lois Bujold - I always seem to come back to her when I'm talking about Armstrong, for some reason - writes that the difference between honor and reputation is that reputation is what others know about you, while honor is what you know about yourself. That "(t)here is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul-destroying."

Which it may well be for a man or woman who prizes honor above reputation, the inner truth over the outward show.

But, if otherwise irritating, obscure, and incomplete, this interview did show me one thing clearly; Lance Armstrong was not that man.

And he still is not.

Gods and Heroes

The tale of Lance Armstrong has become almost tragic.

The only thing that saves it from true tragedy is that the tragic hero doesn't seem to be aware to his fatal flaw. He seems unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge that he has paid too grievous a price for his glory.

Lois Bujold said it best: "Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart." When Lance traded his honor - the very thing he trades on most, his reputation as a clean rider - for victories he gave away the gift. And he can never regain that gift; it is gone as though it had never been.

The fact that it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that Armstrong, like nearly all the other top-flight cyclists in his era, relied on a combination of transfused blood and drugs like EPO and CERA to boost their endurance to impossible levels does not make the other facts of his lifestory - the cancer and the recovery - less true, or less moving.

Yes, there's a lie there. But there is truth, too. And to accept the truth you have to accept the lie; you cannot have the man without his failings, and it is for you and I to decide if those failings are too great for the man's achievements to have any meaning.

We want our heroes to be perfect. We want them to be pure, without stain, without sin. We want them to be bigger than we are, better, in short, we want them to be more than human.

But to be more than human is to be closer to a god than a hero. There are those among us who wanted Lance Armstrong to be more than a hero, more than a human, who wanted him to be perfect as a god.

And that will always end in heartbreak.

Where's Blinky?

The ongoing emergency at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant raise some interesting questions about the current state of nuclear power generation.Specifically; why is there no "go-to-hell" plan in place for these facilities?

From what I can figure out (being, as a nuclear engineer, a hell of a former paratroop sergeant...) the issue with most of these pile-meltdown incidents is cooling.

Unlike a coal or gas plant, or a hydroelectric dam, a nuke plant can't be "turned off" by sluicing the fires or opening the spillway. Even with the control rods fully inserted a typical 460 Megawatt (MW) reactor like the Fukushima plant retains about 3% of its operating heat immediately after shutdown. Three percent of 460MW is about 14MW at SCRAM, or about 14 million Joules (1 Watt = 1 Joule/second). 4200 Joules will heat 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree C. So 14 million joules would heat 1 kg of water to ~3300 degrees C in a second.

So the problem is that even after you flick the "off" switch the damn thing has to be cooled, and cooled a LOT.

But almost all of the cooling schemes rely on some sort of power; steam generators, electric pumps...and as the Sendai earthquake showed us, in power stations built near large seismogenic faults, power is almost always lost.

You'd think that there would be a "last-ditch" cooling plan that did not depend on external power, but so far as I can tell there was no such plan in place for the Fukushima plant, and that such plans are nearly unthought of. But it seems to me, a natural pessimist, unthinkable to not-think of such a contingency. What would throw a nuclear plant off-line if not a major accident, and what would be more likely - where in the case of a fire, a storm, an earthquake, an internal control element failure - than losing electrical power?

Count me as someone who doesn't reflexively fear nuclear power. Nuclear seems like something that should be considered in our technologic society as an option, with positives and negatives much like other power production schemes.

But the active-cooling requirement seems like a real potential deal-killer. It seems to me that if you can't figure out a way to flood coolant through the core - without power, without pumps - then you have a significant roadblock to keeping these things safe. And safe with nukes is a problem, too. When the floodwaters from the failed hydropower dam recede, or the fire from the gas-power plant is extinguished, people can move back in and start to rebuild. But a core-containment failure has the potential to poison the surrounding area for years, even generations.Nuclear engineers are among the smartest, best trained people in the entire engineering profession. There has got to be an answer to this cooling problem; why haven't they found it?

The Devil at 4 O'Clock

You'll have to excuse me; the rainy season has begun and I'm feeling curmudgeonly.

Or not. Feel free to curse, revile, and heap obloquy upon me. I'm not feeling particularly accomodating at the moment.

One of the especially frustrating things about living in a polity whose fundamental tenets are completely subject to the intelligent participation of its citizens in the political, social, and legal life of the Republic is the moment when you are confronted with the reality that a hell of a lot of your fellow citizens are volatile, credulous, irrational, prejudiced, and even foolish and willfully ignorant yahoos.

The past election was one of those moments. This is another.

Now most of you know that I am completely uninterested in who puts what in whom and why. You want three husbands, sweetie? Knock yourself out. What to marry your cousins? Whatever. Live in a big well-oiled heap of transgendered bliss? It's your life.

I have two rules; don't do it if it injures someone, and everyone has to agree to it.

That knocks "pedophilia" in the head right there. Because a child, any child, regardless of how sophisticated, depraved, or carnally inclined, cannot "consent" in any sort of informed way, to physical congress. As a sexual act I lump it in with fooling around with animals - it's not so much "wrong" as just unconscionable. One of the supposed participants isn't a participant but an object, worse, a living object that can be hurt and more than hurt.

You want to poke something that doesn't know how to protest? Here's a melon baller and a cantaloupe.Go wild, Romeo.

But.

As morally out-of-bounds the act of molesting a child is, the THOUGHT is not legally actionable. More than that; in a land where the free expression of ideas is legally sanctioned, it MUST be legally and politically out-of-bounds to run the nasty old perv out of the public square for stating his nasty, pervy ideas in public.

So while I think that the publisher of "The Pedophile's Guide To Love And Pleasure" could have plausibly red-lighted the pervy piece of shit, and the owners of Amazon.com might have been well advised not to carry it, and the outrage of the citizenry that caused the bookseller to eighty-six the damn thing was a fairly natural reaction to the entire notion of publishing and selling a user's manual to kinderfucking, I am fairly disgusted at the entire notion that this bizarre incident means that we need some sort of official censorship and the abandonment of the rules of civil law that make the U.S. part of the endowment of intellectual liberty begun in the Enlightenment.

Here's one example of what I mean, a post by a ferociously intelligent and usually skeptical adoption mom who states that she left her profession because she had to provide legal representation to scummy pedophile sex predators.I have no doubt that representing scummy pedophile sex predators was revolting. But our entire justice system depends, indeed, demands, that these scum get the best legal counsel that they can.

Because have we gone so far down the memory hole that we've forgotten the scummy pedophile Satanist predators that ran the McMartin preschool? That were pilloried based on an accusation by a schizophrenic drunk woman and perpetuated by hysteria and public outrage into the most expensive trial in U.S. history? That ruined the lives of dozens of people and turned out to total bullshit?

I can only repeat what I replied to the post:

"Those damn pedophiles! Let's string 'em up!
Those damn pornographers! Let's string 'em up!
Those damn Satanists! Let's...

Oops.

Remember when everybody and their dog in the daycare trade were evil Satanists and were molesting kiddies? Except they weren't. Remember when the evil Obama Negroes attacked the poor McCain woman? Except they didn't. Remember when we interned all those Japanese who were spying for the Emperor?

Except they weren't, didn't, and we effed their lives up based on lies, fear, and racism.

So you were well within your right to refuse to represent people who you despised, Lorrie.

But what happens to the law if everyone who breaks the law doesn't get a lawyer?

No question that the publisher should have redlighted this book and the seller should have chosen not to sell it. But that's a world of difference away from the adversarial justice system and the need for attorneys to represent, yes, even the most vile of human beings. Because without that it becomes not justice, but vengeance."

The outrages of sick kiddie-raping bastards will be with us always; there is no sexual act so vile that some humans will not attempt or perform it.

But the intellectual liberties we share as citizens of this country, and as denizens of the West, are exceptionally unusual; for most of history a combination of religion, fear, ignorance, political repression, and public mobocracy have made the free expression of ideas - even, perhaps especially, vile ideas - anywhere from difficult to impossible.We live in a nation where intelligent discourse, always a premium and often absent, has again become rare, where foolish and vile display has become the prime fodder of the public infotainment industry, where more people know who was Dancing With The Stars than who was torturing prisoners and stealing public wealth, where the powerful and wealthy can lie, cheat, and swindle with impudent ease because the public is ever more indolent, badly informed, easily swayed, and foolish.

Mind you, it has been ever thus. But we are now the sole remaining superpower. Our public acts are the 21st Century equivalent of a vermilion degree, "swaying the wide world". Add to this the power, the incredible power, of the electronic media, and you have a hell-brew that can sicken vast swathes of the Earth.

We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to those whose lives we bend to our whim, we owe it to the world itself, to be smarter, more judicious, more thoughtful than we could be. Especially when dealing with this very sort of matter, more explosive because of the visceral disgust most of us feel towards the subject.We should be as careful in dealing with this issue as if we were juggling nitroglycerine because, in a sense, we are. If we drop the vial of free expression - even expression of this vile notion - then the resulting explosion could very well destroy the very stage we stand on.

I seem to keep posting this video clip and, yes, I know the real More was a Catholic fanatic who burned heretics. The point here is not the historical More but Bolt's More, More as the Voice of the Enlightenment, as spoken by the wonderful Paul Scofield; a voice that is increasingly hard to hear amid the din and babble of foolish popular hysteria.

Big

Who didn't love the scene in "Big" where Tom Hanks and Bob Loggia dance out "Heart and Soul" and "Chopsticks" on the giant floor piano?

Yeah, Stockholm, too, it seems.

Cool.

(h/t to Group News Blog)

LP/OP

Busy week this week: little Miss's third birthday yesterday;big Peeper's sixth this coming Sunday.

Plus all the usual work and worry.

But I'm still here listening and observing. Observing, with increasing trepidation, the epidemological news out of Mexico and now across the globe. We've already proved that 2008 can be like 1929. Are we getting set to see if 2009 can be like 1918?Brrrr...And listening to the news from the domestic political front as well.

Not good.

Despite the hysterical repetition of the lie ("We do not torture!") from the former Liar-in-Chief so many times that any discussion of the "enhanced interrogation of our helpless prisoners that occurred between 2001 and 2009 took on the surreal dimensions of discussing cell division with a three-year-old, it not appears exceptionally clear that we tortured our captives.

There's a couple of ways to look at this.

There is the way that old Tom Paine looked at it:

"But where says some is the King of America? I’ll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America the law is King. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.

Or you can take the approach that that well known Islamofascist Teddy Roosevelt took:

"No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man's permission when we require him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favor."

Or...you can look at it the way that the Beltway Pundits; the Official Spokesworms for our Governing Classes would like you to look at it (this is Jon Meacham from Newsweek:

"And to pursue criminal charges against officials at the highest levels—including the former president and the former vice president—would set a terrible precedent. . . . That is not to say presidents and vice presidents are always above the law; there could be instances in which such a prosecution is appropriate, but based on what we know, this is not such a case."

Did you get that? Our Leaders aren't ALWAYS above the law, just sometimes, like when they need to waterboard you 183 frikkin' times. Because you're an eeeeevil terrorist.Or because he...SAYS...you're an evil terrorist.

It's this simple: torture is against the law. It's against the law because torture and the culture torture foments is a toxin, lethal to the rule of law and to open government. It is the Star Chamber. Not for nothing did our Founders forbid "cruel and unusual punishments" - not because they thought that Americans were noble and that criminals needed to be kissed and caressed. It was BECAUSE they understood the evil that men do is corrosive, and in certain dark ways beautiful and attractive in the way that power and strength are always beautiful and attrative, like a shining curlique of blood against a sheet-white pavement.

If we do not, if we CANnot, pursue and punish those who broke the law, regardless of their "reasons", then we are no longer a nation of laws.

Period.

And from there, it becomes harder and harder to turn away.

While my Republican friends will deny and demur, you can take it from me or you can read this powerful essay from The Minstrel Boy over at Group News Blog.

Either way, from this LP/OP it seems like the falcon is listening less and less these dark days.

What do you think?

Update 4/28 p.m.: As always, a little more, a little less...

On the "good news" side, the Ninth Circuit panel came down hard on the Bush/Obama Department of "Justice" for trying to put the entire government outside the law. Judge Hawkins' opinion pretty much sums it up: the U.S. government stated that the entire "subject matter" of rendition and torture was so secret that to merely discuss it was dangerous to the public good. This, as I've said, is the logic of the Star Chamber; we are condeming you for reasons that we cannot tell you because if we did you would know how we gained the "evidence" to condemn you and might be able to evade condemnation. As Hawkins says, this would "cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law"

On the other hand, the "conversion" of Sen. Arlen Specter (once-R-now-D-PA) seems to represent everything that is dysfunctional about our federal legislative branch. Specter, who was pretty much Bush's rubber love doll throughout the past 8 years, is being challenged in his primary by an even bigger right-wing nutjob. Rather than wait for the nutjob to win and then bitchslap him with an actual Democrat, the Senate D's are welcoming Specter in the same way they have nestled down with Lieberman; Ried is on record as saying that "Specter is with us until we need him to be with us". This says to me:

1. Specter has no political morals; he is a whore that will bend like Gumby into whatever position it takes to stay in power. And

2. The Democratic Party STILL doesn't believe that it should be genuinely, openly liberal. They're rather take a hard-right Democrat they believe can win an election than stand for THEIR principles and run someone firmly in the middle of their own supposed ideology.

How the hell are we supposed to care if it's this obvious than they don't..?

One the subject of the possible flu pandemic, Meghan reminds me in the comments that we don't have any hard evidence that this flu will be either especially infectious or especially lethal. True. One problem that we have that our grandparents didn't is information overload. We're now bombed by news that isn't really "news" but a newslet, a tiny fragment of a much larger issue that was jammed unto the wires or the air to make morning newstime. Combine that with the news organs' now-endemic inability to perform analysis or discriminate signal from noise and we are buried under an avalanche of information; some critical, some useful, much completely worthless.

But I would argue that this potential pandemic may be significant for the time it arrives; in the midst of the worst economic crash since the 1930's. This disease may not HAVE to be lethal to be...lethal. If governments - and there is some evidence that this may be happening in Mexico already - act to close down the movement of humans and goods (a reasonable precaution in the case of a highly communicable, potentially high-mortality disease) the effect will be to increase the downward pressure on the global economy. ISTM that finding a balance between trade and public health may be very, very difficult. I don't know how I would do it - hopefully the people working at the CDC and the US Public Health Service and the Commerce/Tansportation/Border Patrol executive levels are smarter than me.

SPQR II: O tempora! O mores!

Missed my deadline for the Friday "think piece" - got home, had dinner, played with little peeps and within fifteen minutes of getting the older one into his high bed I was pounding my ear. Ah, sleep. Sleep is good.

But I have been following the news and thinking about...not so much the individual news items but what our headlines and the national interests they purport to represent are telling me about the State of our Union.

Domestically our economy continues to misfire in an ominous fashion, but the principal public response seems to be no more than a nervous glance or three. Certainly the so-called "stimulus" tax giveaway seems to be a ridiculous sop to a credulous public, as useless a tool for halting the deflation of the retail bubble as a tampon in a typhoon.

In fact, no one in power seems to be particularly concerned about the frailty of an economy driven mostly by retail spending this mess exposes. Ah, well.And our foreign policy remains mathematically compounded of "ambition, distraction, uglification and derision". Given the feeble mix of Congressional self-importance and inanity on display at the Petraeus-Crocker hearings we can now rest assured that our pilgrim's progress in the Middle East will remain on track to do to the incoming President and the 111th Congress what in the Army we used to call "putting the turd in your pocket."

So. Rather than flog these motionless geldings, I thought I'd talk a little about something I ran across on a China adoption bulletin board.

Last week one of the correspondents - let's call her "A" for short - wrote this:

Someone just set off an M-80 in a stairwell at my stepson's high school. No one was injured, but the school was evacuated and all the nearby schools are on lockdown.

Apparently a few kids where quite shaken up. Today is the anniversary of Virginia Tech, various schools have been either closed or locked down in Chicago with week with different threats, and the NIU shootings 2 months ago are still very fresh in everyone's mind around here. A couple of the students in that shooting were from our
immediate area.

I don't know what the answer is to this. Schools are incredibly vulnerable, and most of the safety procedures in place can't prevent things like what happened at Andrew's school today.

Now first, let me explain that "A" is neither foolish, credulous nor a hysteric. Her posts have constantly shown her to be a bright, capable person with a full compliment of morals. She is probably in the 90th percentile for civility, the sort of person that the republican system of government was practically designed for.

And yet, here she is, shaken and almost panicked ("schools are incredibly vulnerable") because of a firecracker.

Last summer I wrote a long essay on the fall of the Roman Republic. I promised that in Part 2 I'd talk about how the present United States reflects these same failings. And this panic-in-the-classroom is where I want to start.

Fabius Maximus has a good discussion of his opinion of the two most dangerous enemies the U.S. faces: paranoia and hubris. We'll leave hubris for next time. Let's talk about fear.

Think about the fear expressed in "A"'s post. The evacuation and lockdown of her stepson's school. Virgina Tech. NIU. School shootings. Incredibly vulnerable. Safety procedures. This is the language of a city under siege, or a dangerous frontier. The underlying sentiment is a dangerous, frighteningly out-of-control world, where violent death is an everpresent danger and "safety precautions" are imperative to prevent the faceless but powerful enemies from harming us.

And is this conclusion surprising? Visit your local news channel. Watch a snipbit of the morning infotainment - sandwiched amid the celebrity gossip and the live-from-the-local-animal-shelter-adorable-pet segment most of the news is about fires, murders and assorted domestic horrors - many of them far from your local area. A shooting in Tumwater. Child killer in Bethesda. Home invasion in Los Angeles.
Given the relative sizes of our populations, 21st Century America is a fantastically peaceful nation. We have no Mongol Invasions, no Black Death, no Servile Wars. As an American citizen of middle class aspirations and late middle age, circa 2008, I have about the same ridiculously tiny, statistically insignificant chance of being: immolated in aerial bombardment, ventilated by a crazed gunman, perishing of a pandemic plague, being crucified by rebel armies or getting lucky with Lucy Liu.But you'd never know this if you didn't venture outside television news and newspaper articles.

OK, you'd get the "Lucy Liu" thing if you've seen my pictures. Sigh.

But our principal sources of information are dominated by death and violence to the point where I suspect that most Americans truly believe that we live in the most perilous times that have every been.Whether your terror is Islamofascism, global warming, invading Meskins...I believe that many, many citizens of my country are hypersensitized to fear. I find it hard to believe, for example, that America in 2008 is truly more brutish and violent than America in 1808 or 1888, what with the earlier combinations of frontier war and raid, lynching, easy access to weapons and liquor, poor hygiene and rudimentary medical care and little or no access to nonlethal redress in the form of courts, newspapers, mediators, Judge Judy and Montel Williams.

The difference? The madman who butchered six strangers and himself over in the next county was, at most, the subject of distant gossip in 1808 or 1888. What happened the next state over was ancient news, the next country? Wild rumor. We weren't hammered with images and sounds of carnage. We didn't have CNN - we had Goya.

So here's why I see this as a problem. Let's take "A"'s school. First, any bodyguard will tell you that if some jerk wants to hurt you and doesn't care about paying for it, he can. So the ONLY way to prevent the sort of violent disturbances in schools is to provide them with the kind of security we now reserve for prisons and airline terminals.And - if we are convinced that the world is so frightening and vile that the ONLY choice we have is the level of this protection we will provide - we will end up seeking and spending more for all kinds of expensive gadgets up to and including weaponry to defend them.

Or to attack. And so we pursue ever increasingly expensive solutions for ever less critical problems - foreign wars, antimissile systems, F-22 fighters and metal detectors for schools - while closing our eyes and ears to things that can truly harm us: a dysfunctional economy, foreigners furious with foreign occupation, graduating poorly educated kids - usually minority kids - with just enough marginal skills enough to fail in a technological society, thus insuring a semi-permanent underclass and a widening gap between those wealthy enough to succeed, prosper and rule and those who are not.

"What kind of a crisis was it in which it was not Roman society that fell apart, but Roman reality - the sense of shared security in an order that was essentially unquestioned?" Christian Meier, Caesar (1982)

It is in this way that great nations decline. But the foolishness, fear and ignorance of the plebians isn't enough. Greed and pandering of the popular press isn't enough. There must be stupidity, blindness and greed amongst the equestrians and the senators.

Next time: SPQR III: Tribunes of the Plebs