Flooding Louisiana to Save It

As I watch the video of the first gates of the Morganza spillway opening and releasing a foaming rush of water from the Mississippi River into the Atchafalaya and look at the maps of the areas that will be flooded, I ponder the choices that our decades-long public works experiment is forcing on us. I ask along with one of the folks in Gibson, Louisiana, forced out by the rising waters,  "what gives them the right to flood us?"

Protecting the numerous residents of Baton and Rouge and New Orleans -- even if it means risking the less populous areas of Louisiana -- is probably the right choice. Still, I can't help but think that the way the US Army Corps of Engineers is handling the Mississippi flooding reflects on the inequalities of American society. Flooding the Atchafalaya river valley protects.... who, besides the residents of big cities? How about B. F. Goodrich, E. I. du Pont, Union Carbide, Reynolds Metals, Shell, Mobil, Texaco, Exxon, Monsanto, Uniroyal, Georgia-Pacific, Hydrocarbon Industries, Vulcan Materials, Nalco Chemical, Freeport Chemical, Dow Chemical, Allied Chemical, Stauffer Chemical, Hooker Chemicals, Rubicon Chemicals, American Petrofina, as described in Fighting the Mississippi River, an article written in 1987, long before the current crisis in Louisiana, by Pulitzer prize-winning author John McPhee. McPhee's article was later expanded into a book titled The Control of Nature.

So along the banks of the Mississippi in the big cities, we have businesses and residents with the means to build and maintain riverfront properties. In the areas the Corps projects will be inundated we have poor people, their homes, their farms, fishing grounds, and their livelihoods. Aren't they more vulnerable to being wiped out, compared to the businesses along the banks of the Mississippi? Do we as a nation really believe it's better to save the assets of companies than the homes of families?

Water policy in the US has long favored the powerful and wealthy. In his book Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, author Marc Reisner outlines the history of water rights in California and surrounding states. Reisner makes a pretty good case that some, in places like the Owens River Valley, had their water taken from them by means at best unscrupulous. In Louisiana, maintaining the river as the conduit of commerce to the Gulf of Mexico has taken precedence over homes and communities away from the big cities. In the short term, political and financial forces ensure that this tradeoff will favor the wealthy, but in the long term, what happens to the folks who will have nothing to go back to if the floodwaters carry everything away?

Dogen Zenji

I just found out about Shambala's forthcoming new translation of Dogen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen's Shobo Genzo, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi. This looks to be an edition worthy of the name treasure, edited in consultation with numerous respected American Zen teachers, among them the late Robert Aitken, Chozen Jan Bays, John Daido Loori, Mel Weitsman, and the late Philip Whalen.

Redundant and Useless: The Transportation Security Administration Misses One

The Transportation Security Administration is facing criticism after three box cutters were discovered aboard a JetBlue flight at New York's JFK airport on Saturday.

Eusebio D. Peraltalajara, 45, a Jersey City factory worker, passed through security with three box-cutters in his carry-on luggage. The box cutters fell out when he was putting his bag in an overhead compartment. The flight was evacuated and the passengers re-screened.  Peraltalajara was not charged with a crime.

Several  TSA agents are facing discipline and extra training as a result of the incident.

TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said, "There have been a number of additional security layers that have been implemented on aircraft that would prevent someone from causing harm with boxcutters, " adding, "They include the possible presence of armed federal air marshals, hardened cockpit doors, flight crews trained in self-defense and a more vigilant traveling public who have demonstrated a willingness to intervene."

As a result of the incident, the Dominican Republic-bound flight was delayed three hours.

More from the NY Post article TSA staff jet blew it.

Related reading: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation

Wisconsin Governor Walker's Union Busting

Most of the major media outlets are still reporting the situation in Wisconsin as being about a budget crisis. There is, in fact, no real crisis, just a false one generated by Gov. Scott Walker's rhetoric. Using this shock doctrine tactic, Gov. Walker is trying to achieve a political end by claiming that drastic steps are necessary.

While the Wisconsin SB11 is purportedly about saving the state from deep deficits, the justification goes, in part, along the lines of how public sector employees are overpaid and have unusually good benefits. If this were true, then why aren't the Wall Street financiers and corporate CEO's ditching their private sector gigs and lining up to go to work for the states? The pay differential is a big lie, but one that is believed by enough supporters of the Tea Party conservatives to be a substantial talking point. As noted in The Economist, this argument is absurd when given a little thought. How many folks would say they or someone they know goes to work for the government to rake in the big bucks?

There are real budget problems at the state and federal level -- financially many of them are showing deficits. It's appropriate for elected officials to take a hard look at the programs they have and the revenues they expect and make difficult choices. But revenues are falling for states and that has nothing to do with the pay of public sector employees or their union contracts. The real culprits behind the fiscal problems are the folks that broke the economy and looted the taxpayer for their bailout. Why do people like Gov. Scott Walker and his Koch brothers-financed supporters want to blame the unions and let the financiers off the hook?

The political purpose of Walker's posturing isn't to save the state's budget. His goal is to break the unions and impose his (and his wealthy backers') fiscal policies for the state, and the manufactured budget crisis is just part of a Koch-financed strategy to further widen the gap between the very wealthy and the rest of us.

Recommended reading for this issue is Naomi Klein's excellent book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled...

The 'Internet Kill Switch'?

Egyptian authorities disconnected the entire country from the Internet during the current revolution. This is a clear sign that the worldwide network is seen as an important enabling technology for organizing opposition to corrupt and oppressive governments. Some people are looking at proposals in the United States to create an Internet 'kill switch' in light of the events in Egypt, finding comparisons and suggesting dire consequences. But first, looking a how Egypt's access to the internet got shut off, it's not clear that any magic technology was at work -- just old fashioned authoritarian government action. That prospect, not a technical kill capability, is more foreboding.

Reports suggest that officials in Cairo simply contacted -- by telephone, perhaps -- each of Egypt's major ISPs and ordered them to cut off access. Each of them acquiesced meekly. The limited connectivity remaining is telling: Only Noor Data Networks is still connected. Egypt's stock market connects to the world over Noor. In addition, a majority of traffic to the middle east and Asia passes through Egypt, and that traffic is not blocked.

Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) has filed the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (S. 3480) to give the president “emergency measures" for shutting off Internet access, without judicial review. Sen. Lieberman has shown his hand in response to Wikileaks, when he intimidated Amazon into dropping Wikileaks from their cloud servers. Paypal caved and cut off Wikileaks without even being directly asked by any US official.

Experience indicates that neither technological magic nor enabling legislation is needed when a government wants to crack down on dissent by closing off communications.

DADT and Dirty Politics

So, shortly after DADT was repealed, videos surface of some wackiness on the Navy aircraft carrier USS Enterprise while Capt. Owen Honors was the executive officer, and some people are shocked, just SHOCKED that this kind of thing went on. But news stories all note that senior Navy officers knew about the videos years ago, and put a stop to it at some point. As the New York Times notes, "it remains unclear why it took five years for the videos to surface".

Why leak the videos to The Virginian-Pilot, the source of the story, now? Why would the editor who decided to make it news now?

YIR

This is the time of year when people work on reviewing the previous year and thinking ahead to the next. I've been on the road, though, and haven't given it a lot of thought.

I'm happy with the amount of writing I did, both here, in my paper journal, and other outlets, but I'd like to do more and put more polish on the pieces I put out for public consumption.

I'd like to write more music, and especially more music with lyrics.

Towards the end of the year I decided that President Obama failed to live up not only to the pre-election expectations that generated so much buzz, but even failed to accomplish the minimal change of direction I'd believed he was capable of and likely to accomplish.

I didn't work at all this year. I managed to do a picture-a-day project through June but fizzled out for the rest of the year.

I read a great deal, and spent a lot of my reading time updating and expanding my knowledge and awareness of Islam. With the spike in Islamophobia generated by the teabaggers and conservative GOP politics, I felt it my duty as a citizen to be substantively informed. Even moreso, I felt it was an area of my religious autodidactism that needed attention. Not surprisingly, learning about what Muslims believe and practice shed considerable light on other traditions I already knew something about.

Really my primary goal for this coming year is to be 10% less lazy and inert, about my writing, my photography, and my music.

Holiday Drinkin'

Just a quick note here for the recipe for the new traditional holiday party punch, Cunningham's London Fog:

1/2 gallon vanilla ice cream 2 cups bourbon 2 cups cold coffee
Put all ingredients in a punchbowl, mix halfheartedly, and pour.

If you happen to run out before the party ends, in a pinch you can pour the coffee straight from the coffee maker into the ice cream and bourbon. It helps melt faster, too.

Lots more holiday drinking recipes from The Portland Mercury's article The Drunken Host.

Skygazing

Tonight is the peak for the 2010 Geminids meteor shower. If you have clear skies where you are, look towards the northeast any time overnight. The moon will set around midnight, and if you happen to be up before dawn tomorrow, you'll have even better viewing with a darker sky, but you'll want to look more westward.

Intelligent Life On Earth?

On Monday a NASA press release promised a news conference to talk about "an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life". The wording of the release made a lot of news outlets run stories speculating about actually finding life on another planet. Officially, the news was supposed to be embargoed until the 11 a.m. PST Thursday press conference, but The Sun, in the UK, broke the embargo early on Wednesday with a story titled NASA researchers find life in poisonous arsenic lake in USA. This lake is Mono Lake, in California, near Yosemite National Park, and the finding about arsenate-reducing bacteria is what the press conference is supposed to be about.

Hooray for overhyping. NASA used to do really cool stuff that was naturally exciting, even to laypeople. Now they are involved in what the masses thing of as boring. Although very important basic research, the PR folks feel the need to hype it up to get the Idiocracy excited. It helps keep the funding and grants flowing, at least. Even sober and conservative news outlets like The Times of London just want to get to the "good stuff" -- is there life on other planets?

I don't personally think this this kind of work is boring, but public interest in science is falling. I really don't support over-dramatizing things to get interest from the Idiocracy, because such interest has a limited attention span and only reinforces the dysfunctional relationship between the media, the public, and researchers.

If journalists were educated the way ABC News Science Editor Jules Bergman was, we'd have meaningful communications of science concepts to the public, but because the standards are so much lower now, every story has the gee-whiz angle hyped, often with egregious errors in fact. This sort of dynamic does nothing to educate laypeople, and for the NASA PR office to play into it serves to bury stories of real advancements among junk like the whole "missile launch" video business.

The punch line? This isn't even really new stuff. This August 2008 article from Chemistry World titled Arsenic-loving bacteria rewrite photosynthesis rules, says pretty much what the Sun article said, although more technically.  Maybe the findings to be announced have some important but technical detail that the mainstream non-scientific press hasn't picked up on, but NASA's PR machine is still in error for pushing the ET angle so prominently.

Fiji Water Goes Under

Fiji water will be shutting down, the owners in mega-flounce mode.

Goodbye to that overpriced, giant-carbon-footprint water. Don't be shocked if the half of Fijians who don't have clean, safe drinking water put their collective foot on the company's head to hold it under.

Privatize the Bad Old TSA?

The ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. John Mica of Florida, is a longtime critic of the Transportation Security Administration

An AP story Airports Consider Congressman's Call To Ditch TSA, carried by NPR, notes "Federal law allows airports to opt for screeners from the private sector instead" and says the Florida congressman is behind a push to have airports ditch TSA screeners altogether. Sounds great, eh?

Watch out, though, Congressman Mica counts among his campaign contributors some of the companies who might take the TSA's place. Could be just another GOP 'privatization' move. Like prisons and Iraqi contractors, the outcome could be bad for everyone except the executives and stockholders in those companies.

The backlash against the TSA's backscatter "porno scanners" and groping patdowns is real, and the very authoritarian-sounding responses by TSA head John Pistole reveal a genuine gap between the measures being imposed on the flying public and implementing real air travel safety measures, along with contempt for what the public expects from their elected government and the institutions created to serve them.

Really, after the things we hear about Blackwater and how Arizona prisons supported the law to criminalize being brown, do you think the private screeners will be any less abusive and oppressive than TSA employees?

progress

It's been two weeks since I had the Melody implanted, the flu is abating enough I feel I can start to test my new limits. So far I've found that I can walk back up the hill to my house from the coffee shop easier.

In other news, I finished Waiting for the Barbarians: A Novel yesterday. Written in 1980 by Nobel Prize winning author J. M. Coetzee, its themes of empire, scapegoating, torture, brutality, and militarization are immediately relevant. Worth a read.

Table Fellowship

The economy is in the dumps. The teabag wing of the GOP just schemed their way into a majority in the House. The deficit hawks and their commission of fools will find ways just to continue the depression for another 2 years at least (just like when Hoover was president and kept the Great Depression going). Pretty bleak. I can hardly stand to read the news any more, even the sources I find sensible must report the facts that show just how indifferent and greedy the folks in charge are. It's too depressing. I can't even read news about the environment and outdoors how, because the climate change deniers have taken over the discourse.

The only news I can read now is food news, and even then I have to skip over the stories detailing how messed up things get with factory farms, patented plant genes, and profit-focused agribusiness.

So what, then, must we do? For the time being, without forgetting that we need to stay engaged, let's focus on each other. You, me, your friends, family, and close associates. I'm going to touch on something from Christian teachings, but please stay with me a bit, I promise I won't preach at you.

One of the central themes of Jesus' ministry in the gospels was something we call "table fellowship" -- eating and drinking together around the same table with the lowly, despised, and outcast of society. In your own experience, maybe you haven't sat down to dinner with lepers, but surely you can remember the times when you've shared an enjoyable meal and companionship around the table.

So starting today, let's focus on something we can do between you, my reader, your friends, and me. Let's have dinner together. Ideally, at home, but eating out will do in a pinch. My ideal is that each of you will take a day to put together a gathering where you will serve food. It doesn't have to be fancy -- remember that Jesus was known for fish, bread, and wine. Just put together something you can share, invite a couple of friends or a multitude, whatever you wish, and focus just on being with each other and what Martin Buber called the "I and Thou": existence in a relationship without bounds.

Just do this, and continue to reciprocate as long as you can, and I believe that we can avoid being buried in the hole that the principalities and powers are digging beneath us.

A Stinking Whale of a Problem

It's Exploding Whale Day!

On this date in 1970


No, it's not an urban myth. It really happened in Lane County, near Florence, Oregon, forty years ago today.

Dominionists Shoot Selves in Foot?

That Oklahoma law that seeks to ban the consideration of shariah in deciding cases in that state (a situation that has never occurred -- even Sen. Rex Duncan, the co-author of the measure, says it was preemptive) comes with possibly unintended consequences.

I may be leaping to conclusions to associate the backers of this law with the Christian dominionists who seek to pass laws declaring the US a Christian nation and basing laws directly on the Christian bible, but it's not a big leap.  Given that there is some commonality of goals between Sen. Sykes and the dominionists it's amusing to me to see an Oklahoma law professor comment that the law could arguably make state courts unable to consider the ten commandments in deciding cases.

And then...

Blah. Flu shot reaction. Got my 2010 flu shot on Thursday on the way out of the hospital and of course combined with the rest of the post-op stuff I got a reaction to it this year.

In other news, guitar lesson yesterday was good.

Post-Op

This is the part of surgical procedures I hate most: immediate post-op out of the hospital. The enforced fasting pre-op fucks with the body. The anesthesia fucks with the body. Of course the trauma of the surgery fucks with the body.  Objectively I feel worse than I did the morning before I went in to the cath lab. Recovery involves the body both returning to its pre-op normality as well as adjusting to the new post-op conditions -- in this case, the new valve where there wasn't one before.

I know I'm getting slowly better, and soon will feel the real benefits. For now, though, at night when I wake up with strange pains, or chills, or when I look at the bruising on my body, I fret some. After a lifetime with my body, I know its quirks, and new and different stuff puts me off my oats.

Justice for Some

I'll just leave this here.

A financial manager for wealthy clients will not face felony charges for a hit-and-run because it could jeopardize his job, prosecutors said Thursday.

HuffPo has the story now, too: Martin Erzinger, Morgan Stanley Wealth Manager, Won't Face Felony Charges For Hit-And-Run

Too bad the Facebook page for Colorado AG John Suthers is gone and replaced by a bland locked-down page. I guess it was too troublesome for him with all folks commenting on his wall suggesting he investigate the DA for corruption.

Melody Valve In Place - Nov 3 2010

On Wednesday, Nov 3rd, I had my heart worked on. Instead of open heart surgery, though, we have new technology -- minimally invasive. The conduit from my right ventricle to my pulmonary artery was narrowed and had a lot of back-pressure into the heart. In the past the repair would have involved opening the chest and going on the heart-lung machine, the whole complicated deal. Not any more.

Today they can go in with a catheter and insert a stent with a valve built into it, without major surgery, and under only a light general anesthetic. I was out of the hospital the next day. The device is called the Melody Transcathether Pulmonary Valve and is newly approved for implantation in the US as of January 2010.

This video was taken during the procedure after the Melody was in place and working. I hope to post some additional videos later. In the mean time, I'm doing good and thankful for my family's support.