Michael Steele Gets It Right, For Once

Michael Steele gets it completely right, for once. Doing so makes him absolutely radioactive to the neocons, of course. As Michael Kinsley says: "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth":

At a Republican Party fundraiser in Connecticut on Thursday, Steele declared that the war in Afghanistan "was a war of Obama's choosing" that America had not "actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in," in a response to an attendee's question about the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal -- which Steele called "very comical."

"The McChrystal incident, to me, was very comical. And I think it's a reflection of the frustration that a lot of our military leaders have with this Administration and their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan," said Steele. "Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in."

"It was one of those, one of those areas of the total board of foreign policy ["in the Middle East"? -- Note: The audio is not quite clear in this section.] that we would be in the background, sort of shaping the changes that were necessary in Afghanistan as opposed to directly engaging troops," Steele continued. "But it was the president who was trying to be cute by half by flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan. Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan."

Exploding H-Bombs In Space

John asks:

Have you ever heard of this? It must have been quite a sight.

David Baltz, a good high school friend, saw this thing when he was living in Hawaii as a little kid. He described it as a pinprick of intense light, then a huge flash that filled the sky.

Impressive, and stupid – a perfect display of the military mind.

Trying To Puzzle Out BP's Mindset

A partial explanation for so few skimmers?:

BILOXI, Miss. — From Washington to the Gulf, politicians and residents wonder why so few skimming vessels have been put to work soaking up oil from the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe.

Investment banker Fred D. McCallister of Dallas believes he has the answer. McCallister, vice president of Allegiance Capital Corp. in Dallas, has been trying since June 5 to offer a dozen Greek skimming vessels from a client for the cleanup.

“By sinking and dispersing the oil, BP can amortize the cost of the cleanup over the next 15 years or so, as tar balls continue to roll up on the beaches, rather than dealing with the issue now by removing the oil from the water with the proper equipment,” McCallister testified earlier this week before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. “As a financial adviser, I understand financial engineering and BP’s desire to stretch out its costs of remediating the oil spill in the Gulf. By managing the cleanup over a period of many years, BP is able to minimize the financial damage as opposed to a huge expenditure in a period of a few years.”

If I Were A Celebrity

I don't even know if this is true, but it would be the sort of thing that would happen if I were a celebrity:

Ok, let’s do some imagining. Picture this: you’re in London, partying at a hotel, having a good ol’ time, and then a beautiful woman approaches you. When the woman gets close enough, you realize that she is not an ordinary beautiful woman, but she is actually Rihanna, famed musical artist and general big deal! While you’re still trying to process this, Rihanna asks you to go to a club with her. Do you:

A) Say yes and spend the evening kicking mad game at Rihanna

B) Say yes and spend the evening creeping on Rihanna

C) Say no and spend the evening being a total dumbass because you said no to Rihanna

If you are Sean Kingston, the answer is C. When Rihanna asked him to take her out to a club, Sean said no because he didn’t have any clothes ironed.

Budget Airlines Rule

But not all is hunky-dory in the sky:

Donna Adamo, a passenger on board flight 1537, said she first noticed a couple of flies when she got to her seat on Monday but did not pay much attention to that.

As the plane was taxiing, she said she heard a passenger behind her causing a commotion and refusing to take her seat.

"Then I heard the word 'maggot' and that kind of got everybody creeped out," Ms Adamo told AP.

Passengers were asked to get off because of a "minor emergency" "All of a sudden, I felt somebody flick the back of my hair and on the front of me came a maggot, which I flicked off me.

But she said she "felt like they were crawling all over me because it only takes one maggot to upset your world".

"And as they're telling us to stay calm and seated, I see a maggot looking back at me and I'm thinking, 'These are anaerobic, flesh-eating larvae that the flight attendants don't have to sit with.'"

...However, the unnamed passenger who brought the spoiled meat in a carry-on bag was put on another flight, US Airways spokesman Todd Lehmacher said.

It was not immediately clear how the passenger managed to take the meat on board.

Maybe Things Won't Be So Bad This Month For Hurricanes In The Gulf

I've been worried that the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be made much worse by hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, so I've been looking for budding hurricanes.

Nevertheless, except for Alex, there is little sign of these storms.

There are clear routes for such storms. One possibility is for mesoscale convective complexes (MCCs) to form over Columbia, roll off over the southern Caribbean, travel along Central America, and emerge into the western Gulf of Mexico (much like Alex did). Despite lots of thunderstorm activity, these developments don't seem to be taking place right at the moment.

Another possibility is that storms can form, in place, in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, there is a depression (95L) in the northern Gulf right now, but further development is unlikely.

The Bermuda High seems very strong right now, which has pushed tropical lows in the Atlantic much farther south than usual. One consequence is that storm development in sub-Saharan Africa is greatly-affected. Sub-Saharan drought has shut down that most-reliable source of tropical lows - the sub-Saharan MCC conveyor belt, that can dump storm after storm into the Atlantic.

So, for the moment, the Gulf's luck is holding.....

The Era Of Permanently-High Unemployment

Recovery of employment from recession has been taking longer and longer every time we have a recession. Now, recovery is taking so long that unemployment is effectively permanently-high.

I tend to blame technological changes, rather than economic stagnation or overregulation, for the development. Employers lay off whom they consider to be crucial workers, only to discover they no longer need those workers, because savvy computer use allows one to do more with less. Times changed. So those workers never get rehired.

Another factor might be rising economic polarization and inequality. The sad fact is that the rich just don't need the poor, or at least, not enough to bother hiring them. Not even in a trickle-down world.

We're becoming more like the Philippines every day....

Something Odd On Q Street Last Night

Left: All sorts of fire engines and emergency response vehicles lined up along Q Street about 2:00 a.m., between 20th & 21st Streets. A block away, at Q Street and the railroad, another fire engine was busy putting out a grass fire in the dark.

Something odd was happening!

Latest Rankings Of The Presidents

Oh, those historians are at it again! It's time to rank the Presidents! This has been one of my favorite games ever since childhood!

Some Presidents tend to gravitate to the same approximate level - Lincoln, Washington, FDR near the top: Harding, Buchanan, and Pierce near the bottom.

Nevertheless, as time passes, the estimations of historians of certain Presidents changes dramatically.

When I was young, Ulysses S. Grant was considered the all-time worst President - EVER! EVER! Even worse than Harding and Buchanan! (It was all that Gilded Age corruption, plus Reconstruction). Nevertheless, Grant's reputation is simply zooming these days. People have since taken a fresh look at the 19th Century and Grant just wasn't that bad. In this tabulation, Grant comes out 26th. As time goes by, Grant's liable to end up tenth, or so. Because, in truth, he wasn't such a bad egg.

Truman is also another mover. He was near the bottom when I was a kid. Now he's ninth! Amazing! I read somewhere that both Grant's and Truman's bad ratings can be attributed to their unpopularity among a school of Southern historians, then active, that have now passed from the scene. Plus, it can be very hard to appropriately pigeonhole someone recently out-of-office, such as Truman then was.

What else.... Teddy Roosevelt 2nd and Woodrow Wilson 8th: too high for both. Clinton 13th, above Andrew Jackson? too high. Ronald Reagan 18th: way too high! Hoover 36th: too low. George W. Bush 39th: too high - he should be on a par with Buchanan as the worst dolt ever to occupy the office! Andrew Johnson, dead last at 43rd?: too low - wrong guy at the wrong time, of course, but nowhere near Buchanan's league of douchebaggery. Interestingly, Polk remains stable at 12th - when I was a kid, he was tenth.

There will never be true consensus on this list, but that's all right - it's a fun game!

Did A Cat Get Lucky?

For the last two days I've found an unusual number of pigeon feathers near the place I feed the local birds. Today, I found a pigeon wing in the alley, repeated smashed by passing cars. Clearly, something violent happened to this pigeon, but what was it? Where's the rest of the bird?

Bittersweet - Sophie Ellis-Bextor (Freemasons Extended)

Molly Ringle's Success Ricochets Across The Pond

From The Guardian (UK):

A sentence comparing a kiss to the sucking of a very thirsty gerbil has won Seattle-based novelist Molly Ringle the world's worst writing contest.

Ringle, who says she only writes bad fiction when she fails at good fiction, took the Bulwer-Lytton prize for the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels yesterday with: "For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss – a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

...Ringle, the author of the published novel The Ghost Downstairs, in which the romance between a nurse and a houseboy is played out against growing paranormal activity, is the 28th winner of the contest. "I feel quite ridiculous. But there are definitely worse ways to get 15 minutes of fame," she wrote on her blog.

The author told the Seattle Times that she had been inspired to write her winning sentence as she nursed her infant son. "Something about his attitude and posture ... It reminded me of those guinea pigs we used to have as kids," she said. "I've asked myself, probably belatedly, is that what I want to be famous for? But hopefully people in the publishing world know it's all in the name of comedy."

And anyway, she added, "you kind of have to have a certain amount of skill to write a sentence so bad it would win. You have to work at it."

Contest judge Scott Rice, a professor at San Jose State University, praised her "outlandishly inappropriate comparison" to the paper. "It is a send-up of writers who try too hard to be original, and it is a send-up of those revolting couples whose public displays of affection make them poster children for celibacy," he said

Wondering About BP's Motives

Here is a darkly-cynical article that I still find quite inadequate when guessing about BP's motives for their strange response to this oil spill:

In a shocking interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on June 29th, Allegiance Capitol Corporation V.P. Fred McCallister said that BP is deliberately sinking oil with the toxic chemical disbursant Corexit, to hide the size of the oil spill. By sinking the oil before it can be collected, BP won’t have to pay fines on it.

McCallister said, “Everybody in Europe, where the standard practice is to raise the oil and collect it, is scratching their heads, and quite honestly laughing at what’s happening in the Gulf.” He added, “Everyone is looking at us and wondering why we’re allowing this to happen.”

McCallister is set to appear before a Senate investigative panel on Thursday and testify that BP’s only interests regarding the Deepwater Horizon spill is protecting their own financial interests. His statements explained why BP has been refusing offers of help from additional foreign skimmers.

BP’s fear is that independent skimmers would be able to count the number of gallons collected, and thus provide the US government with data to assess spill rate financial penalties against BP, according to McCallister.

Well, of course BP has been using Corexit to hide the size of the oil spill! Like, duh! But the mystery is why. Government fines, no matter how big, just seem inadequate as an explanation for their behavior. Oil is valuable, and even recoverable, given enough time to collect it, and enough ships. But BP would rather emulsify it, and bury it, and even burn it, than try to corral it. Was it because there weren't enough oil tankers around? Unlikely: they could rent some ships from other oil companies if that was the hang-up. No, it's something else.... Something else....

In any event, the article's stab at guessing at BP's motives became invalid by the end of May anyway, when much more reliable estimates finally became available (despite BP's resistance) regarding well-flow rates. So it sort-of makes sense for BP's early response, but not its current response.

And who cares about snickering Europeans anyway? This is no Amoco Cadiz, or Exxon Valdez. It's a Super-Ixtoc disaster!

So why is BP doing what it's doing? I think it's more complicated situation than we know as yet, and we still don't have enough information for an authoritative guess. But that's why the blogger is here: to guess, even in an information void.

Oceans are surprisingly-empty of life, at least, when compared to land. Even though oceans cover 75% of the world's surface, nine out of ten living organisms are land-based. The reason oceans are so devoid of life is that ocean life is restricted by the availability of iron and phosphorus in the seas. They just don't have enough fertilizer! And if too much fertilizer becomes available, exploding plankton blooms get suffocated anyway by lack of oxygen. Can't win in the oceans!

Nevertheless, there are oases of life in the oceans, in shallow waters, particularly in those places where upwelling waters bring up minerals from below. Even though the Deepwater Horizon is in deep water, it is located on the edge of prolific shrimp and oyster habitats in shallow water.

I think BP decided to use Corexit to bury emulsified oil under the water's surface in order to try and preserve sensitive, shallow fishing habitats. It was a deliberate effort to try to save the shallow-water based bottom of the food chain pyramid - the plankton, shrimp, birds, etc. - by deliberately sacrificing the deep water habitats, the top of the food chain pyramid, where whales and squid go. The calculation is based on money, of course, but ultimately it's based on life-viability. And no one wants to talk about it, because...well, because it's whales.

If that was the calculation, then I'd have to agree. Better to save the base of the food chain and sacrifice the top. Under those circumstances, we'd want desperately-cynical BP to succeed. But it's a desperate "Hail, Mary" maneuver, with no guarantee of success.

Nevertheless, there is so much oil coming out of this well that desperate, calculating BP will likely lose both ends of the bet. Everything is going to get ruined: top and bottom of the food chain.

Alternatively, maybe I give BP too much credit. Perhaps BP really is being run by idiots. Goodness knows, that explanation has sufficed for explaining much of human history!

Dead zones are already present near the Deepwater Horizon site and it isn't even the oil, or only the oil - it's the natural gas:

Scientists are confronting growing evidence that BP's ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico is creating oxygen-depleted "dead zones" where fish and other marine life cannot survive.

In two separate research voyages, independent scientists have detected what were described as "astonishingly high" levels of methane, or natural gas, bubbling from the well site, setting off a chain of reactions that suck the oxygen out of the water. In some cases, methane concentrations are 100,000 times normal levels.

Other scientists as well as sport fishermen are reporting unusual movements of fish, shrimp, crab and other marine life, including increased shark sightings closer to the Alabama coast.

Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University, said there were already signs that fish were being driven from their habitat.

"The animals are already voting with their fins to get away from where the oil spill is and where potentially there is oxygen depletion," he said. "When you begin to see animals changing their distribution that is telling you about the quality of water further offshore. Basically, the fish are moving closer to shore to try to get to better water."

Such sightings – and an accumulation of data from the site of the ruptured well and from the ocean depths miles away – have deepened concerns that the enormity of the environmental disaster in the Gulf has yet to be fully understood. It could also jeopardise the Gulf's billion-dollar fishing and shrimping industry.

In a conference call with reporters, Samantha Joye, a scientist at the University of Georgia who has been studying the effects of the spill at depth, said the ruptured well was producing up to 50% as much methane and other gases as oil.

The finding presents a new challenge to scientists who so far have been focused on studying the effects on the Gulf of crude oil, and the 5.7m litres of chemical dispersants used to break up the slick.

Joye said her preliminary findings suggested the high volume of methane coming out of the well could upset the ocean food chain. Such high concentrations, it is feared, would trigger the growth of microbes, which break up the methane, but also gobble up oxygen needed by marine life to survive, driving out other living things.

Joye said the methane was settling in a 200-metre layer of the water column, between depths of 1,000 to 1,300 metres in concentrations that were already threatening oxygen levels.

...Even without the gusher, the Gulf was afflicted by 6,000 to 7,000 square miles of dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi river, caused by run-off from animal waste and farm fertiliser.

..."Things are changing, and what impacts there are on the food web are not going to be clear until we go out and measure that," said Joye.

And where will the oil go? I'm surprised that it hasn't plastered the Florida Keys yet. The surface oil almost certainly will end up plastering the northern Gulf beaches. The Gulf of Mexico just isn't large enough to fully dilute it (Taylor's dispersion coefficients for long distances and times). And that emulsified oil is probably still there in the northern Gulf, killing everything it comes in contact with. And waiting to make its full effects known.

This oil spill crisis has just started.....

Casinos Are Like Full-Service Cities

But they can't handle every problem:

A homeless woman was charged Monday with two counts of animal abuse after police said they found 25 cats and two dogs suffering inside her locked car at Ameristar Casino.

Someone called 911 about 12:15 p.m. Sunday after spotting the animals trapped inside the woman's Chevrolet Lumina on the casino parking garage's covered fourth level.

Police found the animals jammed inside the car without water, soiled by their own feces and eating bits of food scattered on the car's floor, said St. Charles Police Lt. Mike Akers. At least eight cats had been packed into one crate. The car windows were cracked open about 1 inch with the outside temperature Sunday afternoon about 90 degrees.

Casino security told police the temperature inside the garage typically runs about 7 to 8 degrees hotter than outside. Police did not know the temperature inside the car.

The owner of the car, Lori Pellin, 39, had arrived at the casino shortly before noon and was found about 2:15 p.m. in the casino hotel's computer room.

She told detectives she was homeless after being evicted from her apartment three days before. She said she had been living in her car and had gone to the casino to gamble and use the hotel's computer to search for an apartment.

Come On, Kenneth, We're All Suffering From This Oil Spill!

Kenneth Feinberg is the best-prepared person in history to administer this compensation fund, and he is trying to lower expectations regarding awards. That may be a good idea, considering how the scope of the disaster is as yet unclear. He also wants to use his 9/11 fund experience as a guide, but it's not clear if he has the same latitude now as he got from Congress then. Does BP still have some say, or is it completely out of their hands? Will Congress and the Administration yield as much authority now as they did then? The attacks of 9/11 are small potatoes compared to this fiasco:

The prominent US lawyer managing BP's 20-billion-dollar oil disaster fund said Wednesday not all claimants will be paid, especially some of those seeking compensation for falling houses prices.

"There's not enough money in the world to pay every single small business that claims injury no matter where or when," Kenneth Feinberg told the House of Representatives Committee on Small Business.

"You've got to decide in a principled way... and work out some definition in that regard," he said, while stating his determination to "pay every eligible claim."

...He assured lawmakers it would be "totally independent" and said BP "has agreed to supplement this escrow fund as needed to assure full and fair compensation to all individuals and businesses that are found to be eligible for payment."

"I'm inclined to begin with the same analysis I did in 9/11," added the leading attorney, who plans to set up procedures for paying claims in the coming weeks.

First Of AOL's Two-Part Series Regarding The Roswell Incident

I'm less interested in the Roswell incident itself and more interested in how it became a cult sensation. When I was a kid in NM in the 60's, the Socorro incident was all the rage and the Roswell incident was rarely mentioned. Now, the Socorro incident is forgotten and Roswell is world-famous. How strange is that?:

At the time, in 1979, I was producing nightly UFO reports for NBC Radio in New York, when Friedman put me in touch with Roswell participants who were finally willing to supply other pieces to the long-forgotten flying saucer/weather balloon puzzle.

Marcel, who had been in charge of intelligence and security for the Roswell base in 1947, told me his commanding officer ordered him to check out the reported debris left by whatever it was that came from the sky.

"We started picking up the debris, loaded as much of it as we could into a pickup truck and I filled up my car with the stuff, as well," he said. "It's almost indescribable -- it's not the kind of material I'd ever seen in my life, nor have I seen it since.

Looking Into The Oily Crystal Ball Again

Hurricane Alex is preparing to come ashore, and some of the forecasts show that as the storm breaks up and becomes part of a Great Plains cold front, it might drop very, very heavy rains in the deserts of northern Mexico - normally the very, very driest parts of Mexico. Deserts are ill-prepared to handle that much water, and so flooding is bound to happen there.

Looking out a week in advance, the NOGAPS model suggests that a tropical low will generate along the NE coast of Nicaragua by Sunday evening and strengthen into a tropical storm. By next Wednesday, the storm will be poised to enter the Gulf of Mexico, along a path likely to cross the out-of-control BP oil well, in ten days, or so.

How good is that forecast? The NOGAPS model is good at estimating storm paths, which is why I like it, but it is usually much too ready to generate the storms in the first place. NOGAPS usually predicts twice as many tropical storms coming into existence as actually come into existence. The GFS model doesn't show a new storm generating, for example.

So, how to tell? According to NOGAPS, the low that strengthens along the NE coast of Nicaragua actually forms in the Pacific, off the west coast of Columbia, and crosses the isthmus of Panama. That Pacific low should already exist - and looking off the southern coast of Panama - there's a big patch of clouds present. The Caribbean animation shows tropical thunderstorms already making the Panamanian crossing.

So, I'll make a big leap and forecast big problems for Gulf oil recovery by the weekend of July 10-11.

Networking With The Sacramento Connect Networking People

Left: I go down this way?


In May, I decided to accept the Sacramento Bee's invitation to become part of their Sacramento Connect community of bloggers. Part of what I do, and I'm sure part of what the other bloggers do too, is to function as reporters for those aspects of the Sacramento area that we know about. It is only reasonable that, as reporters, we should affiliate in some kind of loose alliance with Sacramento's largest newspaper.

Nevertheless, I was a little apprehensive about accepting their invitation to meet them in person:

Join us for a Sacramento Connect Mixer! As one of our partners, you'll have the opportunity to meet The Bee team, and preview the upcoming beta release of Sacramento Connect. Afterwards, enjoy networking, light appetizers and wine. We hope to see you, here!

To me, blogging is sort of a solitary activity; an opportunity to mentally babble in cyberspace. To meet other cyberbabblers in the flesh seemed contrary to the spirit of the activity. It would be sort-of like attending a convention of spies (HELLO. My name is Boris Badenov. Have you seen Moose and Squirrel?)

Left: Revolution Winery entrance.


But we are all in this together, I guess, so Tuesday evening I headed down to Revolution Wines on P Street, just a short distance from the Sacramento Bee. The invitation instructions directed that we should enter the winery from the alley between Q & P Streets, but interestingly, there was a woman whose sole job seemed to be that of waving people off and directing them to enter the winery from the front (strange job, that).

Left: Network, network, network!


There were some forty people within the winery. A noisy fan and A/C system helped tamp temperatures down a bit.

After two free glasses of wine and some hor d'oeuvres, even my laconic self seemed to relax a bit. I talked at length with the folks who run five separate blogs of the sixty-or-so Sacramento Connect partners:

Nanny Goat In Panties (Margaret Andrews)
Breast Cancer?....But Doctor I Hate Pink! (Ann Silberman)
Sue's Dog Blog (Sue Owens Wright)
The Farmer Fred Rant (Fred Hoffmann)
Plus a fifth blog.... What was it called? My memory is shot! It was that wine!

Nanny Goat In Panties is one blog I've been reluctant to go to before now, because my blog and hers are often nearly-tied on Bressler's Sacramento Top 25, and I was afraid any link through the the Top 25 would give her an unassailable lead in the oh-so-important biweekly competition for ratings. Nevertheless, I agree with her that we all have more to gain by linking to and with each other than by each keeping to ourselves. The prime directive here is Network!

I recognized several other notables in the crowd, but didn't have time to network with them....

Left: Souvenir Revolution wines in very nice bags.


The Sacramento Bee folks gave a short presentation where they discussed various infrastructure initiatives and improvements. As a content provider, I found the buzzwords a bit formidable, but it all sounded good. Heading out to the Improv Workshop about 7:00 p.m., I picked out a bag containing a free bottle of wine as a souvenir. Tomorrow they are hosting some kind of virtual wine tasting, but as a wine naif I'm not sure my input would be especially revealing (This wine is dark red, unlike the White Zinfandel. This wine isn't sweet, unlike the White Zinfandel. Funny, nothing here tastes like the White Zinfandel. It's almost like there are more kinds of wine in the world than White Zinfandel....)

So, all hail networking and infrastructure!

2010 Bulwer-Lytton Contest Winners And Runners-Up

Here they are, in all their wretched finery!

I can't believe Molly won! Such an honor!

2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winner

And the winner is:

San Jose State University said Tuesday that Molly Ringle of Seattle was the grand prize winner of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

In her entry, Ringle describes a "lengthy, ravenous kiss" between two lovers: "Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil."

I wonder if this is the same Molly Ringle as the Lightboard Operator for DMTC's "Oliver!" in November, 2000, and on stage as a 'Lass' in "Tommy" in March, 2001? That would be pretty cool, if so....

[Update: Holy, freakin'... it's the same person!]