Rajah

I went out to do some work today in a place called Fairview Village out in east Portland. The funny thing is that I was the field geologist for this site over ten years ago - I walked the then-fields and -woods with a tracked excavator trailing behind me digging test pits for the future - now existing - development.

I have been responsible for a lot of crap development over the years: Subway stores, cell towers, animal shelters, even a prison. But Fairview is one I have always felt good about, a great idea well realized.

But the visit today reminded me of a funny story relating to this place. The original site had a large area that was underlain by a virtual pavement of immense basalt boulders ripped from the Columbia Gorge by the vast Missoula Floods. This area was untillable, and the farmer had left it in timber.

The forest cover made it delightful for Portland's urban pioneers, and the homeless camp inside the woods was one of the biggest I'd ever seen. The litter was truly stupefying. Clothes, food, auto parts, over 100 woodstoves...the excavator and I picked our way through a wonderland of debris.

And among the debris were scattered individual pages of a paperback novel. Not just ANY paperback novel. This was one of those paperback novels, the ones with the cartoon of immensely-endowed women in deshabille on the cover. The kind newsstands used to sell back in the corner, next to "Juggs" magazine.

The forest floor was littered with torn pages of this thing. As we travelled about we accumulated about a chapter, enough to get the gist of the thing, anyway. Let's just say that the main characters were a woman...and a gorilla...and leave it at that, shall we?

So, anyway, when I sat down to write geotechnical report the "Surface Conditions" portion read something like this:

"...and a thick understory of swordfern, snowberry, rhododendron and blackberry canes. An extreme variety of man-made debris was observed on the ground surface including soil and rock excavation spoil, wood (including dimension lumber), brick, metal, plastic, cloth and household items, paper, several automobile bodies and scattered individual pages of a grossly salacious and pornographic novel entitled: 'Rajah'."

I knew that he'd got to that section when my then-boss started laughing so hard I heard him through the door to his office.

That item didn't make the final revision.

7.8

The final toll from today's M7.8 earthquake centered in Sichuan Province may run to the tens of thousands.

One thing this disaster reminds me forcibly is the importance of building codes. One of the large losses of life was at a school in Juyuan. Buildings likes schools, apartments, hospitals are all now required to be built to earthquake-resistant standards in the International Building Code. But...

As always, enforcement is the crucial part. In countries like China, where many laws and codes are not enforced, or enforced selectively based on the connections and wealth of the enforcee, well, you get things like this.

The other reality this event drives home is that for much of China the notion of China as the "next superpower" is a laughable fiction. The slum dweller in Guangzhou, the child in the unheated orphanage in Fujian, the farmer still using muscle-powered equipment in Hunan...these people are still living in a China that the Qing officials would recognize.When I look at the faces of these little girls all I can see is my own little girl, and think of how I would feel knowing that she was huddled terrified under a flimsy desk in an ancient unreinforced masonry school building. My heart goes out to all the parents in China tonight.

Mother's Day Weekend

I'm looking at my Mother's Day post and realizing that it comes off a little...cynical? Grouchy, in a "You-damn-kids-get-the-hell-off-my-lawn" kind of way? Maybe even nasty.

Mmph. Well, that morning was hell with the lid off. One thing I'm learning about this parenting business is that it's like bipolar disorder that no amount of lithium can treat. Kids, to paraphrase Churchill, are either hugging you or choking you...there's little middle ground. Snday morning they were at our throats. But the weekend as a whole...that was different.

Acually, the weekend started early for the Peeper and I. We headed out for my work with a stop at Beaterville for breakfast.Then there was much fun watching the pavers do their thing (the Peep was VERY excited about the breakdown roller) before stops at the Icky Clown House (a.k.a. McDonald's, or L'Arc d'Or) and Home Depot before going for a long hike in Forest Park.Spring is at its acme in the wooded hills above Portland, with the trillium purpled by pollenation and the maples and alders leafing out in a soundless explosion of green.Peep raced and climbed hills and chattered happily,

...while I puffed along up the steep trails above Leif Erikson Drive, pointing out the land snails, wood violets and old-mans-beard. Peep's enthusiasm for the woods is a treat for me, too; no "nature-deficit disorder" for this little guy.

Good little enviromentalist that he is, the Peep took to heart the plan of ripping up English ivy (nasty invasive thing that it is) and acumulated quite a pile of dead behind him.

So it was good outdoors fun: jumping in puddles and looking under stones, listening to the lazy afternoon putt-putt-putt of the Wilson's Warblers(I love these little black-capped yellow guys. Their lawnmower stuttering fills the spring woodlands in the mornings and they're often the last bird calling late in the day).

We raced back to Wendy the Truck and then had a treat at the St. John's Burgerville on the way home. A special boys' day for Peeper and I.The evening was lovely, warm and calm. We had dinner and sat out on the deck with Missy while Peep played with his trains. I tried to get Little Miss to see the tiny Bushtits she was hearing - it was funny to listen to her imitate their "pop-pop" calls scolding the cats. They have been constant visitors this spring gathering flower petals from the cherry I suspect they're nesting nearby. Not TOO nearby, I hope, if they want to avoid the Cat-claws of DeathSomewhat off-topic: here's two Portland Lumberjax fans celebrating the Jax winning the NLL West on the way to the title game next weekend. Peeper loved my plaid jersey so one of his birthday presents was a little jersey of his own - matching outfits? Dude! Anyway, Pp and I both shout:Go, Jax!The next morning was just a typical Saturday morning at the Fire Direction Center: Missy looks for a treat while Miss Lily prays to Bast the Goddess of Cat Food......as Mommy and the Peeper sleep in, and......Daddy cooks the breakfast. Bacon! Yum...And I should add that after the rugged Sunday morning we had a lovely day. Peep and Mojo went looking for a scooter for her (yes, you heard right. She loves Peeper's new scooter).

While Little Miss and I went out to find some dandelions - "puff flowers" - as Peeper calls the gone-to-seed version. I never fail to get a kick out of watching Missy pull these and try to blow off the seeds. She hasn't quite figured out the blowing part, and usually spits all over the seedhead. Eventually she either waves the dandelion around, blowing off the seeds, or, better yet, finds something to rub the seeds on.

Enter Nitty Kitty (meowing).

She luuurves to rub dandelion seeds on The Nitty, which is just dandy with The World's Dirtiest Cat who loves to roll in the dust and get her fur full of debris. Nitty always cleans herself fairly well, mind you (she's a cat, not a dog...) but that's just so she can get dirty again. Note Missy's hip-hop style, saggin' and baggin' trousers. Thank heaven for high-rise diapers: nothing like two-year-old plumber's buttSo I'd like to leave you with a happier image of a sunnier day, with a sweet litle girl and her flower just like a greeting card. May I add a genuine wish for all mothers, fathers and their children to enjoy each other, and the love that holds them together. "And, though each spring do add to love's new heat,
As princes do in times of action get
New taxes and remit them not in peace,
No winter shall abate the spring's increase."

John Donne

Mother's Day Gifts

So when Little Missy went off this morning at 6:30 (having done the same at 1:30 and driven the Peeper out to the living room couch, which he did without demur - noble lad!) I staggered in, picked her up and transported her to Nirvana, or Mom-and-Dad's-bed, which comes to the same thing in Missyworld, there to drowse on into the early forenoon.

First Peeper, then Missy and then parents finally roused, sort-of, and were all lolling about in the family bed when Missy, lying on her tummy but coiled, like a puissant viper, launched herself and drove the top of her head into Mommy's face.Both children were sobered as Mommy flailed out of bed, hands to her lip muffling her cries of agony. We had a little session where I tried to teach Missy to say "Sorry, Mama". She didn't - she is very resistant to repeating the little phrases you say to her - but looked very chastened, and went and patted her mom where she sat in the kitchen icing her lip.

Then both kids had big poops.

Everybody is fine. Mojo is having her morning coffee, I'm down here recounting the morning to you, and the kids are playing with trains. But the gifts of the day have already been distributed. Motherhood: blood and shit.

There you have it. Like combat, except without artillery to add tone to the vulgar brawl.

To all you moms and non-mom moms: happy fucking mother's day.

Like a Football Bat

Clausewitz talked about the four types of officers.

The bright and lazy, he said, made the Great Captains, because they wanted an easy victory and were smart enough to figure out how to do it.

The bright and energetic made good staff officers, doing the hard work of translating the Great Captain's vision into fifteen page operations orders.

The dull and lazy were easily enough shunt into dead-end jobs and kept out of the way.

But the stupid and energetic, he warned, should be shot out of hand before embarking on campaign. Because they were going to be A Problem.

Would that someone had remembered that maxim before letting Dick Cheney out of the Naval Observitory.

I've gotten to the point where I'm no longer amazed when a Bushite foreign policy plan floats belly-up like a carp in a crapper. The wonder is that anything these idiots plan works out, given what we now know about their moronic cronyism and faith-based policies. But this week's fiasco in Beirut seems impressive even for the sort of people who consider Darth Cheney a "statesman".


Pat Lang sums it up: "We Americans (well, the Bushies) brought this on with our insistence that Shia numbers and electoral success would not be reflected in the division of power within the government of that sad little country. Did we encourage the Sonorans to think that they could demand the self-disembowelment of Hizbullah? Did we really think the Government of Lebanon actually could do that. We may well have. It would be of a piece with the fantasy driven policy of the last eight years. Any gamble, no matter how absurd and improbable of success has fit the pattern of desperate longing that has driven American policy this last decade."

The demographic reality on the ground in Lebanon has been that the Shiite Arabs there have a plurality of both the numbers and politco-military power. The were always going to win out eventually. When you insist that the pit bull defer to the chihuahua you're livin' in a dreamworld, Sparky. But that's BushWorld, where we'd rather be "right" and lose than deal with the devil and win.

Yes, they are allied with Iran. No, they do not have to be enemies of the U.S. They hate Israel and will use whoever they can (Syria, Iran, us...) to get the wherewithal to fight the jewish state. Once we start to understand that Israel's policies do not have to be ours we will be on the way to getting our head out of the quagmire-ass that is the Middle East.

Honestly. These people could fuck up a hot oil foot massage.

What you watch when your daughter is screaming at 1 a.m.

I love this little monk.

I've posted him here before, but it's been a while and I thought y'all needed another visit with him. I sure did. I needed something to laugh at, at a point where there's not much else funny going on. Of the whole gruesomely funny short I'm not sure if I enjoy the "blow out the candle!" bit more than I enjoy his idiotic happy dance at the end. Hey, it's all good.

BTW - anyone who has a suggestion for how to get adorable Chinese ex-orphan girl toddlers to lie down and go the FUCK back to sleep, please feel free to drop them in the comments box. Please.

So here is..."SuperMoine":


Watch more cool animation and creative cartoons at aniBoom

SPQR III: Tribunus plebis

Our primary ballots came in the mail this week.

Somehow the august solemnity of exercising the Franchise seems sorely diminished when its accomplished by hastily augering pencil marks in paper ovals amid the shoved-aside litter on a dining room table surrounded by rioting children. Somewhere in the back of my head I recalled an apocryphal tale of early Federal New England where the act of voting was surrounded by the stern dignity of classical republicanism to include the town selectman tolling the bell and announcing "James Otis has now voted!"

I'll be quite open and tell you I voted for Obama.As I discussed earlier, I have little or no illusion of where we stand in the process of desuetude of our Republic, and I don't have any real hopes that any current office holder or aspirant will reverse the ever-steeper descent into autocracy.

I'm just tired of "Democrats" who think that Jim Carville is the Ideal they should aspire to. Democrats whose philosophy is that they need to become more like, well, Republicans in order to get elected. It wasn't the ludicrous "massacre of Sarajevo" lies or the gas tax pandering or the generic Clinton air of having learned nothing and forgotten nothing. I'm tired of Clintonist triangulation. After eight years of corruption, mendacity, crony capitalism and plutocracy I want a Democratic candidate that treats the GOP like the treacherous, ci-devant hillbilly-aristos they are; lovers of authoritarian and religious conformity, torturers and enablers of torture, war-lovers and bankruptors of the public purse. Traitors to the Revolution, the anathema of everything the Constitution and the Bill of Rights stand for. I want a Democratic leader who will treat the Coulter/Limbaugh/Cheneyites like a Provo, and an armed one at that.

I don't have one of them, but Obama is the closest I could find.

And that in itself is perhaps the best place to start a discussion of the wretched state of American politics.

It's not difficult, really, to understand what is needed for a sound Republic.

Peace, first and foremost, because in war the first demand is for force and leadership, and from the the demand for the Leader. Authoritarian, monarchical principles have always advanced further during wartime than any other time in American history.

Prosperity, then. Specifically, the broad-spread prosperity of a wide and deep middle class. Smallholders, freeholders, entrepreneurs, craftsmen, farmers. People owning their own land, their own homes, their own lives. Beholden to no master, not wage-slaves, fearful and insecure, but proud and in dependant. Not poverty-defeated. The poor, insecure and fearful make bad defenders of their own freedoms.

Knowledge, too. Knowledge of the world and the matters of gravity in it. The ability to discuss and debate, reason and argue these matters.

Ignorance is the toxin of liberty.

Civility and respect, for ourselves and each other and the nation that we make up. A nation that has no civic virtue - public virtue as distinct from private - cannot maintain civil independence.

And yet, look at what our "leadership" has overseen, and through its actions, engineered.

Wars, in particular overseas wars, in pursuit of chimeric enemies and dubious victories. In fact, a permanent war footing, with a monstrous "defence" construct larger than anything in human history. Internal "wars" like the so-called "war on drugs" and the war on illegal immigrants, created and funded to billions, creating a vast population of voteless, hopeless felons without a single debate on the efficacy of their campaigns or the victory conditions of these "wars".

The systematic hollowing of the nation's manufacturing base, offshoring, the creation of an economy based on service jobs and consumer spending. Fiscal policy crafted around not the creation of goods but the creation of "wealth" that has resulted in a succession of bubble economies, each bursting in a coruscation of public bailout cash and leaving behind yet another soap-scum of enriched malefactors of great wealth. The concentration of agriculture into immense corporations of great economic and political power and few moral and political scruples.

I hope I need not detail the decline of public knowledge that has returned us to the days of the yellow pressand the scandal sheet, where Fox "News" is considered, well, news and the public press spends more time discussing haircuts, bimbos, lapel pins and preachers than it does what our political leadership actually does.
And civility...Despite what is sold to the public, this drive to the bottom, this coarsening and deadening of the public soul hasn't been demanded by the People, which, in its lazy and inchoate way, seems to want something more inspirational, more adult, more challenging. Not enough to demand it, mind you. But enough to thrash feebly, like a salted slug, under the ceaseless lashing of moronic punditry and celebrity gossip that passes for public comment in the fora of 2008. We sense, in our dim insulation between "American Idol" and worrying about our household finances, that our "leaders" are not doing anything beyond posturing and posing, bound by their debts to wealthy contributors and their promises to powerful lobbyists. The recent Crocker/Petraeus hearings on Iraq were the perfect example. Given the record to date of lies, mistakes, stupidity and egotism you would have expected the legislators to have hammered on the representatives of our current pointless tactical-victory-and-strategic-confusion "plans" in that benighted land like Jove of the Thunders.Instead we watched as our representatives of the People in Congress behaved like the Tribunes of the Plebs of the title. No one was hurled from the Tarpean Rock. Instead our elected nobility postured. They puffed and wheezed and in the end neither we nor they learned anything more, anything really useful, to help us make informed choices about what our nation is doing in our names or planning for our patrimony.

And that is the perfect position for a Potemkin Government. They don't care because they don't have to. It's not about us, or what's happening in the World. What matters to our "leaders" is who is the Alpha Cheney, who gets what and how much inside the Beltway. The Senate is arguing precedence and patronage as the barbarians howl outside the frontiers and the citizens fall into servility and fear.

And I confidently predict that we will not - until we are willing to abandon our comforts and stake our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor - receive anything better.

Our national history has been a record of give and take between what our President would call "my base: the haves and have-mores" - that combination of wealthy and well-connected that desire most their own enrichment - and those whose desire it is to spread power and wealth as far amongst the people as possible. The have-nots pushed in the 1840s, the have-mores pushed back after the Civil War (to the apogee of the Gilded Age). The excesses and corruption of that era saw the rise of the progressives and the muckrakers...but it was only the Crash and Depression that saw the plutocrats exiled for a generation, as programs like the New Deal and the GI Bill helped leaven American society.

In the past thirty years we have seen this cycle turn again, with the rich and the well-born shoving cash and influence into the system. The gap between rich and poor in this country are as wide and deep as any time since the 1890s.This is not a coincidence. It has been engineered by those we have elected, as surely as Cicero engineered the emasculation of the Senate and the People of Rome. And, like Cicero, those doing this surgery are sure that they are doing what is best for themselves and their country, since what is good for the Waltons, the Koches, the Bushes and the Walkers IS good for the country.

I only wish that this was news. It's not even new to the blogosphere: Fabius Maximus (as always), got here two years ago and said it better. Our system of government, designed for a small agrarian republic, is failing under the weight of size, wealth and power. I don't think we can reverse this cycle, this time. I think the system has broken down, overwhelmed by lucre, by fear and greed and cynicism. I think the American people have lost their zeal for liberty. I think that we are fated to decline into an increasingly turbulent diminution. I think that my children's lives will be more difficult than mine, and theirs more difficult still.And like the Roman century left at the last frontier milecastle, sacrificed by our Emperor and ignored by our Senate, we can only hope to do our best to go down as slow as possible, die as hard as practical, before the fall of the gathering dark.

Update 5/12: Just in case you thought I was exaggerating when I accused our legislators of bought-and-paid-for whores for their big contributors who spend much of their time in precious Beltway kabuki theatre instead of addressing real issues there comes a news item too insane to have been invented. And here it is.

We Are Truly So, So Fucked.