Stepped outside to throw away some trash this morning, and it felt like a cold morning in January. The official low this morning was 26. The old record low was 31.
That's what I'm starting to wonder after the past two Octobers. In both this year and the last, they were marked by abnormally warm weather which culminated in an abnormally early arctic outflow event that brought record cold temperatures.
Daytime temperatures have generally been in the low to mid forties, which isn't all that cold, except that there has been no period of gradual cooling to let my body acclimatize to it. Upshot is that it feels a lot colder than it actually is, to the point that I decided to blow off doing anything outdoors this afternoon in favor of sitting in front of my computer working on a web site update.
The presence of defined transitional seasons instead of weather that lurches between summerlike and wintry temperatures is one of the things that I liked about moving to the Pacific Northwest from the Rockies. After two years of there being essentially no period of autumn temperatures, I'm starting to feel seriously cheated.
Shall I comment on the inaccuracies in the article first? One, it's ephedrine, not ephedra. Ephedra is the name of the genus of plants that ephedrine was discovered in, as well as still being used as a natural herbal source of ephedrine. Two, its uses are not limited to "los[ing] weight and boost[ing] athletic performance": it can be used as a decongestant (it's closely related to the active ingredient in Sudafed, pseudoephedrine), or as a mild stimulant similar to caffeine. And its decongestant usage precedes the ones listed in the article by about 5,000 years.
That unscrupulous profiteers are selling products with unacceptably high doses of ephedrine, and people are taking them for prolonged periods of time (and suffering drastic consequences) does not mean that ephedrine should be banned or made prescription-only any more than unscrupulous profiteers selling pain killers containing dangerous doses of acetaminophen means that over-the-counter Tylenol should be banned.
And I wonder how many customers ignored warnings or directions and used more of the products than was recommended. Maybe we should ban Tylenol as well, just because it's possible to kill yourself by swallowing a whole bottle's worth of pills at once.
But who cares about the facts when you're dealing with an evil, dangerous drug.
And that was but the worst of a half-dozen huge stems that had to be sawed through.
Worse, that tree had been infested so long, its trunk wasn't completely a maple trunk any more -- in places, the tree had surrounded an ivy trunk. I couldn't follow the standard technique of girdling at a set circumference; I had to girdle wherever an ivy trunk emerged free of the maple trunk. Hope I got it all.
I took the biggest ivy trunk back home with me. I'm going to show it to the folks at the arboretum tomorrow.
Not that aren't probably some Saddam loyalists and foreigners among their number, but the former two terms come closer to describing the reality of the situation. As well as leaving room for the (probably vast majority) that are motivated by plain old nationalism.
Which is understandable when you realize that in the whole custard-apple (Annonaceae) family of 20,000 or more plants, there's only one genus (Asimina) that can take any frost at all. And with one exception, all species in that genus can't take anything colder than a Florida or a south Georgia winter. That one exception is the pawpaw (Asimina triloba), which can grow as far north as Ontario.
On the subject of cold and frost, I'm finally starting to get acclimatized to the cold that's set in. Which is good, because it was cold enough for snow flurries to fall up in the hills where the arboretum is this morning.
Just ran across the nice set of interpreted radiosonde plots hosted by Unisys.
It's much nicer than the NOAA data you can easily find on the net, because each diagram comes with a quickie explanation on the bottom (nice for those of us who aren't professional meteorologists and only occasionally look at the things), and the charts are marked up with the approximate altitude of each pressure gradient. That makes it easy to find the temperature and dew point of typical jet cruising altitude (around 10 km).
And once you know that, you can rattle off the wind speed, temperature, and dew point spread at that altitude to those idiots who claimed they "had to be" chemtrails because they "didn't dissipate". (Hello? Any cloud ain't gonna dissipate fast if the wind's light and the air around it is nearly saturated. Wanna know why there's so many more trails in the air now than when you were a kid? Consider the great growth in the air transport industry in the past few decades.)
What I find most interesting is neither the parts about the danger of the military-industrial complex, that such danger can be identified and pointed out from a conservative point of view, nor that today's conservatives are woefully remiss in pointing out such dangers. Rather, it's the paragraphs that go:
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.That's at least as significant as the military-industrial complex stuff in my view. Perhaps more significant, as it is an accepted truism of today's mainstream politicians of both stripes that technological progress is an unquestioned good, such progress is impartial, and it is society's duty to simply adapt to whatever technology such progress creates.It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.
Anyone questioning this conventional wisdom is typically smeared with the charge of being a "Luddite". (And anyone who is familiar with the actual behavior and demands of the real Luddites of old should take that as a compliment, not an insult. But I digress.)
As an example of the unfettered techno-enthusiasm, look at the enthusiasm both Democrats and Republicans have for biotechnology. The debate is over how best to support the rise of the new industry (via laissez-faire policies, regulatory incentives, or public-private partnerships), never about whether the technologies themselves are desirable.
Sorry, guess again.
The Douglas fir I selected on the previous walk (I've acquired the habit of selecting the next patient on the walk back from the one I've just finished) turned out to have the nastiest ivy infestation I've seen so far.
It was no worse in terms of burden of growth than many other trees I've treated, but the damn thing didn't have the decency to have a few big stems. Instead, it had dozens upon dozens of anastamosed small to medium stems. It seems that instead of growing a stem big, that individual just branches off extra stems to weave between and join with the existing ones. End result was a curtain of ivy wood totally encasing about one third of the tree's diameter.
Except of course it wasn't solid wood, being an agglomeration of interwoven smaller stems, full of bits of bark and incompletely incorporated stems. So the saw blade was continually getting wedged and jammed by all the loose matter. I almost gave up because it was getting dark and I had had to abandon several attempts to cut through the ivy curtain, then I saw another alternative and decided to give it one last try.
I finished as night fell, and walked back with thoroughly sore and tired arms from all the sawing and prying. It was dark enough that I was unable to select a patient for the next time.
"The Splendid Table" is playing on the radio as I write they this. They recently ran a segment on kitchen sinks, mentioning how single sinks are superior to double ones, because double sinks are intended for hand washing and rinsing dishes and "nobody does that anymore".
I guess I'm a nobody then, because it's been over a decade since I lived in a place with a dishwasher.
Bombing civilian towns from the air? My, that's sure a way to win their hearts and minds.
From an Oregonian article on Zoobomb:
"You've got to do it at night," chuckles one cyclist waiting to ride. "If you saw the road during the day, you'd chicken out."Oh, please. It's the same road I ride down twice a week after volunteering at the Arboretum. Lots of other people ride it during the day as well. There's nothing particularly scary about it. Yes, it's a long downhill ride, and you can zip along pretty darn fast if you want (bicycles do come equipped with these things called brakes that allow them to slow down). But there's many roads in the West Hills that allow one to descend at faster speeds (Burnside and Cornell come to mind). Moreover, I've ridden Zoobomb once, and during a Zoobomb ride the road was so crowded that I couldn't ride as fast as I normally did during the day.
That's not to say that it wasn't thrilling or a new experience to do it as part of a mass of people: it certainly was. But the initial quote is just plain silly, and smacks of a non-cyclist reporter swallowing whatever B.S. is fed to him.
On a more serious note, it appears that, prompted by that article, the cops are harassing Zoobomb riders again. Like the Indymedia article says, it's nice to know they've got their priorities straight and are protecting the city from zany bicyclists instead of wasting their time fighting violent crime.
Kept the computer turned off yesterday because I didn't wanted to piss away time on the Internet (something I've been doing all too much of these days). Murphy, of course, came into play ensuring I kept thinking of thoughts to write down here, so I wrote them down on paper. The number of such scribblings reached critical mass this morning.
Finished reading Ward Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology recently. Maybe someday I'll write a complete review of it; until then, here's a few brief (and necessarily incomplete) observations.
U.S. troops mounted air and ground attacks in the Iraqi capital yesterday for a second straight night, targeting suspected insurgent positions around Baghdad.(Full story here.) How nice. So if your house (or any house in your block) happens to be "suspected" as an insurgent position, it's bombs away.
Let's just be honest, drop this "Operation Iron Hammer" crap, and call it "Operation American Gestapo", OK?
Most adults would probably find something worrisome about it; you're supposed to know it all and be settled by the time you're my age. I see nothing desirable about either goal. First, knowing it all is impossible; so avoiding big changes in mind in response to changes in the world is really a sign of mental ossification, not wisdom. Second, change is life; to be alive means to be changing and dynamic. Living beings only are "settled" when they're dead. This desire to find one's right situation and settle down is nothing but a desire to embrace the values of death while still alive. No thanks.
While reading a book on résumé preparation, I came across some stuff about the contents of one's home page and the professionalism thereof. The book recommends canning the non-professional stuff.
That got me to thinking of how many people I've sent résumés to who have done Google searches on my name and have came across my writings (anarchist sympathies and all) on the Internet. On the other hand, I'll be damned if I let the capitalists squelch my speech like that (that they do exercise sanctions like this is yet another example of how Capitalism Is Not Freedom). So maybe a good pen name is what's called for. Maybe. I'm not sure how much I like the idea of letting them intimidate me into not associating my face with my ideas, either.
Oh, by the way, there's a labor dispute brewing at Powell's. If you're tempted to purchase that (or another) book from them, consider having them put it on hold for you until the workers have a new contract.
An acquaintance at the Arboretum (who, like me, regularly ride his bike down that hill on Fairview used by the Zoobombers) pointed out another inane thing about the recent Oregonian article on Zoobomb.
Everyone straddles some kind of bicycle, ready to zoom en masse down the winding streets leading to downtown. Speeds will approach 40 mph. Still, hardly anyone wears a helmet.(Emphasis added.) Forty miles per hour?!?
I've had cars pace me going down the hill on Burnside, which as I've already mentioned is faster than the one on Fairview. My speed usually tops out at around 35. My acquaintance (whose bike is equipped with a speedometer) once got up to 41 mph on Fairview, but he had to pedal like hell on a bike with a super-high gear to do it. Those little kiddie bikes aren't getting anywhere near 40 mph on that hill.
The other day I happened to notice the book shelf at the local Fred Meyer. Political books included titles by the likes of O'Reilly, Hannity, and Limbaugh. Not one left-wing (or even mildly liberal) book was present on the shelves. The political spectrum ran from hard-right to middle-of-the-road.
I really can't think of a logical reason for this other than deliberate bias -- Portland is, as a whole, politically very liberal (with a significant leftist undercurrent) and Michael Moore is a very well-selling liberal author. Even if Freddie's is ignoring its neighborhood and stocking standard Middle America fare, any measure of what sells in Middle America has simply got to include Moore's books. Moreover, this particular Fred Meyer store is one that made a big ballyhoo about remodeling itself to better serve the tastes of the neighborhood a year or so ago. Despite their willingness to stock gourmet and organic food items popular in the neighborhood, they appear curiously unwilling to stock the kind of mental food this neighborhood's residents prefer.
There was one other book that caught my eye. It's title and author escape my mind at the moment, but it purported to demonstrate how the mainstream media is dominated by left-wing views. Go figure.
Though it does accurately express the first half or my saying that "I neither have gaydar nor do I trip other's gaydar." What I really, really, hate about the test is how the various ratings all tend to assume that how fem you are is directly correlated to how honest you are in letting your outer emotions reflect your inner self.
Starting in the wee hours of the morning, it began raining hard. When I awoke, the gutters in the street were full and radio stations were warning drivers to be careful of ponding water. After eating breakfast, the little kid in me felt the urge to unclog some sewer gratings (I've always enjoyed small-scale drainage engineering), so I grabbed an old broomstick and went outside.
I was surprised how nippy the air was when I stepped out the door. Obviously a major cold front had passed. After a few minutes of playing with wet leaves and hearing the satisfying noises as the water rushes back into the formerly clogged drains, I notice white stuff falling with the rain. Sure enough, its fifteen minutes later and the city skyline as seen through my window is vanishing in a swirling mass of big, juicy, white flakes.
If (and that's definitely an if) this keeps up, it could be an interesting day. (Go ahead, cold-winter people, snicker at this. But any snowfall at sea level here is a rare event.)
Almost gave into the urge to respond to a comment comparing Earth Liberation Front direct actions to US state-sponsored terrorism in Afghanistan in a particularly inane thread in the or.politics newsgroup.
But I didn't. I don't need to start pissing away endless amounts of time in amUsenet discussions (fun as this particular exercise in getting debating opponents to furiously shadow-box would be). I spend too much time in front of computers as it is.
For the curious, I was going to post a one or two sentence reply mentioning the ELF's greater care in preventing and lower tolerance for casualties. And then have fun with all the inane "you're a terrorist" and "you support whatever the ELF does" type responses.
And don't tell me it's "just a uniform". The fact that the Sheriff's Office would consider such a design appropriate speaks volumes as to how much they've bought into the idea of militarizing the police.
The cable is a black electrical cable, about two inches thick. They hit me with it everywhere on my body. They mostly aimed for my palms, but sometimes missed and hit my wrists -- they were sore and red for three weeks. They also struck me on my hips, and lower back. Interrogators constantly threatened me with the metal chair, tire and electric shocks. The tire is used to restrain prisoners while they torture them with beating on the sole of their feet. I guess I was lucky, because they put me in the tire, but only as a threat. I was not beaten while in tire.Full story here.
The subject heading for this entry, by the way, is a quote from an unnamed Bush Administration official to a reporter from the Washington Post.
Apparently the only way he can be greeted by a cheering crowd is to appear in front of a bunch of folks who can get in trouble for failing to show respect to their commander in chief.
On Monday, the U.S.-appointed Iraqi government raided the Baghdad bureau of the Al-Arabiya TV network.Full story here.The network's crime was to broadcast an audiotape from Saddam Hussein complaining about Iraqis who were cooperating with the U.S. occupation force and calling for resistance. The tape had been sent to Al-Arabiya's headquarters in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates.
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