August 2008

Fri Aug 01 21:47:13 PDT 2008

Hmmm, Let’s See Now…

He quits his church, after first putting on a good show about standing by it.

Then he flip-flops on the basic constitutional issue of warrantless wiretaps.

Now it’s offshore drilling.

Are there any lingering doubts that my earlier conjecture that Obama was merely a fast-talking smooth operator with no underlying principles turned out to be spot-on?

Smooth Operator is starting to make Slick Willie look like a man of principles.

Mon Aug 04 19:10:58 PDT 2008

Wish Granted

One of my neighbors sweet-talked the building manager into making an exception to the no-pets policy for her pet peach-faced lovebird when she moved in. I can almost hear the sales pitch in my head: “But he’s only a tiny bird, and he stays in his cage and can’t damage anything…”.

Tiny but loud, that is. Not only loud, but endowed with a psittacine shrillness unlike any native temperate-climate bird. The creature is comparable to a stereo at medium-loud volume; it never ceases to amaze me just how loud such a small bird can be.

Which could possibly be manageable if she (and more importantly, her partner) were conscious of the potential for disruption to others such a pet could cause, and took pains to minimize it.

But, all too often, they don’t. They tend to keep the birdcage in the bedroom, adjacent to bedrooms in other apartments (including mine). They do nothing to calm the creature when they turn the lights on and awaken him at 4:30 in the morning when one half of the couple awakens for a job on the early shift somewhere. (I certainly wouldn’t play my stereo at medium-loud volume at that hour, especially in a room adjacent to where my neighbor is sleeping.)

It’s been a continual process of confronting them and reminding them about their animal companion’s intrinsic disruptive tendencies, and of their responsibility to minimize them.

Been. As in past tense.

Last June, I overheard the female half of the couple talking on the phone about having “our” floors installed. The only way such a phrase can make sense is if they’ve bought a home and are having it renovated to their specifications. Which means they’ll be moving into it soon. So I hoped.

On Friday, a good part of their furniture disappeared. Yesterday, a tenancy termination agreement was on their door, awaiting their signature.

I can now only hope that my new neighbors will be more compatible, and that I shouldn’t have been more careful of what I wished for, lest I get it.

Thu Aug 07 22:33:23 PDT 2008

The Ghost Brickyard

In 2001, my first year in Portland, I noticed on a map of bicycle routes a trail extending way off to the east and off the map. That was the Springwater Corridor.

On one of the first warm spring weekends, I explored it. Finding the start was something of a problem: it was hidden away in Southeast Portland. I finally happened on it a little after the start, and backtracked to the start out of curiosity. And then set off on on a long ride eastbound.

The trail passed through neighborhoods ever newer and more suburban in character as I got more distant from downtown. I crossed Southeast 82nd Avenue — a landmark in my mind as being way out in outer Southeast, then Interstate 205, even further out.

The trail entered a long, linear, greenbelt park, and I slogged onward. Eventually I noticed that the signs by the trail now bore the name “Gresham Parks Department”, indicating I was in the first major suburb east of Portland proper.

At the east end of Gresham, I passed a brick works on the left side of the trail. It was a fairly modern factory at first glance. Then things started getting ever more surreal. The age of the bricks stockpiled next to the bike trail grew ever older; the plastic shrink wrap the palletized loads were encased in grew tattered and dingy. Old, rusting, crumbling industrial structures appeared in the background.

The stockpiled bricks lost their plastic wrap and became moss-covered in places. I noticed they were in styles that became passé a decade ago. Remains of the old, now-rusted-through steel straps then used to secure such loads were visible. Grass and weeds started appearing atop the bricks, some of which were no longer stacked so neatly anymore as rotting pallets had collapsed underneath them.

It was all so odd. The plant’s owners had spent good money firing those bricks; they evidently had passed quality control (I could see nothing wrong with them) and been prepared for sale and shipment. And then just left there. You’d think they have sold them as rubble for fill if nothing else. Yet there they were, taking up valuable real-estate in a fast-growing suburb.

I stopped for a rest and a drink of water at a little shelter next to a wooded area just past the strange scene. And then I did a double-take as I glanced at the embankment leading up to the woods:

It was all old bricks! And then second double-take: those bricks were stacked in regular patterns! They weren’t rejects, they were pallet-loads! This was no “woods,” this was merely a continuation of the ever-older ghost brickyard! I walked along the trail, looking in. Trees grew on some of the old piles. There were bricks in styles I hadn’t seen on buildings newer than 50 years old. All carefully stacked here, many decades ago. Then forgotten.

I felt like a time traveler into some post-apocalyptic future, looking at a brickyard that had suddenly stopped operating as civilization fell. It was such an odd feeling that after I got home that evening I still had trouble believing what I had seen.

Over the years, I mentioned the sight to others who had ridden far east on the Springwater Trail. To a person, nobody else I’ve told this story to ever noticed the ghost brickyard themselves. I decided it must have been cleaned up shortly after I saw it.

Last weekend, I had a chance to explore that stretch of trail again for the first time in about seven years. As I was leaving the eastern edge of Gresham, there it was: a brickyard. But the pallets of bricks never got ever-older; they just abruptly ended. There were still a few old industrial structures in the background, amidst a landscape of rubble from an astounding variety of bricks. Obviously some cleanup and demolition had taken place.

But not completely. When I got to the shelter, the super-overgrown part of the ghost brickyard was still there, trees growing out of old pallet-loads and all.

This time, I had a camera with me (the Olympus XA I take with me almost everywhere), so I managed to capture some evidence of the sight.

Mon Aug 11 18:57:56 PDT 2008

What a Difference Nine Years Makes

It’s amusing to hear all the rhetoric swirling around regarding South Ossetia and compare it to the rhetoric that swirled around about Kosovo. Each side was making precisely the opposite arguments back then.

But that’s making the false assumption that the verbiage actually means anything. It doesn’t.

Imperialists view the rest of the world like a hyena views a piece of meat: as something to be devoured. All the seemingly lofty rhetoric about “national sovereignty” and “ethnic self-determination” is simply the way these hyenas snarl at each other when competing for their meal.

And the snarling will exist as long as the hungry hyenas do.

Tue Aug 19 20:19:46 PDT 2008

Telling News from Pakistan

In case you’ve been living under a rock, the president who was once self-appointed dictator has been forced to leave office under threat of impeachment. This comes after widespread public resistance forced him into allowing an elected parliament (the one that just forced him from office) in the first place.

There’s actually two crucial facts in this that many in the establishment media would prefer us not to draw:

First, while there are indeed big problems in the Islamic world, it’s hardly the complete lost cause the “clash of civilizations” crowd would have us believe. The agitation that eventually led to the downfall of Pakistan’s dictator started when he began meddling with judicial independence, and took the form of demands for an independent legislature and judiciary. Not exactly the sort of hunger for a medieval world that we’re asked to believe third-world Muslims have.

Second, that dictator they were upset about was a US ally. He was removed from office despite US support for his role there. Instead of being a force for progress, the West acted as a force for reaction and oppression.

Not surprisingly, neither trend is unique to Pakistan.

Fri Aug 22 20:06:46 PDT 2008

Just for the Record

I predict Smooth Operator will pick Bill Richardson as veep. He has the foreign policy experience Obama lacks, and he will also provide needed help pulling in the Hispanic vote.

Sat Aug 23 09:08:30 PDT 2008

Well, Blew That One

But, I don’t have nearly as much egg on my face as the Drudge Report fans on Craigslist. They were absolutely sure their favorite yellow journalist’s poorly-substantiated attempt at a scoop would be proven true. And you should have seen how testy they got when I announced their hero botched it.

Wait. I’m being too generous here, calling Drudge a “journalist.”

Mon Aug 25 22:07:21 PDT 2008

The Problem with Right-Wing Anti-Communism

While attempting to find out how many people Ernesto “Che” Guevara really did execute (or order executed), I ran across plenty of screeds like this, which prompts me to observe that the trouble with right-wing anti-communists is not that they’re opposed to Stalinist tyranny, but that they are opposed to such tyranny for all the wrong reasons.

That becomes clear when one reads the article’s chilling rationalization of the brutal military junta that unseated the democratically-elected leftist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, unleashing a decades-long brutal civil war that killed tens of thousands:

Five years earlier, while a communist hobo in Guatemala, Che had seen the Guatemalan officer corps rise against the Red regime of Jacobo Arbenz and send him hightailing to Czechoslovakia.

The reaction to a brutal right-wing government precisely mirrors the loyal western Marxist-Leninist’s reaction to brutal communist regimes: demonization of the regime’s enemies, denial of the regime’s brutal nature, and rationalization of whatever the regime did.

Clearly, we’re not dealing with people motivated primarily by the desire for greater human freedom, here. Else they’d be horrified at how removing Arbenz and tearing up the constitution resulted in dramatically less freedom in Guatemala. (Guatemala under Arbenz was no one-party state; there was a lively parliamentary opposition, and the majority of the media outlets freely editorialized against the president.)

It’s not a particularly pretty explanation, but their motives can be adequately explained by a strong desire to maintain a society based on social stratification grounded in wealth. This explains both their objection to Stalinism (it replaces such stratification with a stratification based on loyalty to the party line) and democratic leftists like Arbenz (who threaten to reduce the level of wealth-based stratification). It also perfectly explains their willingness to approve of right-wing dictatorships, which although they destroy freedom do still maintain the sort of social stratification the right-wingers desire.

Wed Aug 27 19:41:15 PDT 2008

Liberal Delusions Hurt the Entire Left

One of the recurring topics right-wingers bring up on Internet chat forums is how the victims of Hurricane Katrina were responsible for their own suffering because they stupidly refused to evacuate. It’s complete bullshit, of course, but the hordes of Nice Liberals are utterly powerless to debunk it.

Why? Two quotes come to mind, the first from George Orwell’s essay Notes on Nationalism (which is really more about choosing a side and toeing its line than simply nationalism in the strict sense):

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

One of the greatest crimes in New Orleans was the failure to make any preparations for the evacuation of the approximately 27% of New Orleans households which owned no car. The plans called for everyone to simply drive out of the city. In fact, hundreds of buses sat there, unused in the hour of their greatest need, only to be destroyed by rising waters later on. It was the local government that was responsible for making evacuation plans. That local government was controlled by Democrats (as it has been for decades).

It gets worse. The refugees at the Superdome and the Convention Center could have easily walked out of the doomed city after the storm blew over. Go to Google Maps and enter in the following two addresses:

Note the close proximity of each refugee shelter to US Highway 90. Switch to a satellite view and you’ll see US 90 is an elevated freeway (thanks to this fact, it never flooded, and remained intact throughout the disaster). Instead of helping the able-bodied majority of refugees use the highway to walk to safety, the Louisiana national guard turned the both sites into what were effectively concentration camps and prevented refugees from leaving at gunpoint. That national guard was under the control of the state governor at the time, also (and inconveniently if you are a Nice Liberal) a Democrat.

Even if the guard had let them leave, Guardsman would still have had to have a stand-off with the police department of Gretna, LA, across the river from New Orleans. That city’s mayor had ordered his police department to shoot anyone who tried to cross the bridge. That mayor, one Ronnie C. Harris, is (once again most inconveniently) a Democrat.

The upshot of all these facts were a huge chunk of New Orleans’ most vulnerable citizens were simply unable to evacuate: they didn’t stay out of choice, they stayed by force of circumstances at first, and by virtue of plain old brute force later on.

But it is of no avail to the Nice Liberal searching for a rebuttal. The necessary facts all point to atrocities committed by members of an institution — the Democratic Party — with which s/he strongly identifies. The “remarkable capacity” Orwell spoke of prevents the Nice Liberal from even being consciously aware of these facts. So the hateful lies and distortions go largely unanswered.

Which brings up the second quote, from a writing of Bertrand Russell’s whose title refers to a rather more broad and open-minded meaning of the word “liberal” than it’s current meaning in US political context, his Liberal Decalogue:

Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.

I wish I could be smug and say that anarchists are immune from this sort of thing. Unfortunately, we aren’t. Anarchism is yet another “ism” that can all-too-easily degenerate into the sort of groupthink Orwell fought all his life. It’s one reason I resisted the label for so long. I only relented when I realized that’s how most of the people who knew me best were describing me anyhow.

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Last updated: Tue Sep 13 16:14:10 PDT 2011