Words Like Locusts Flew From Her Fingers

“Science”, the Bush Administration, and The Bottom Line

In Fire’s Wake, Logging Study Inflames Debate
Logging after fires is becoming more and more important to the bottom line of timber companies. It generates about 40 percent of timber volume on the nation’s public lands, according to Forest Service data compiled by the World Wildlife Fund, and accounts for nearly half the logging on public land in Oregon.

But there is much more to the dispute than money. The Oregon State study was published in Science, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal. It appeared after a group of professors from the university’s College of Forestry, which gets 10 percent of its funding from the timber industry, tried to halt its publication.

Professors behind the failed attempt to keep the article out of Science had earlier written their own non-peer-reviewed study of the Biscuit fire — a study embraced by the Bush administration and the timber industry. It said post-fire logging and replanting were exactly what was needed to speed growth of big trees and suppress fire.

Sierra Club magazine recently published a little photo essay about a “vacation trip” to the “Biscuit” fire area in Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest. It was pretty awful — a clear cut of many very old, very big trees — some of which were still viable. Worse, the logging company apparently also cut trees outside the area they’d been approved for. You can read more about it on the Sierra Club web site.

This all reminds me of the controversy over cutting white pines in northern Minnesota. As in Oregon, the Minnesota DNR has a history of embracing bad “science” (which isn’t really science at all) to support its money-making schemes and our natural environment is suffering for it.

Lurching Gait

I’m proud — PROUD, dammit! — to tell you that I have just purchased “Lurching Gait” as my newest skill for the Urban Dead game. With “lurching gate” I can now move around the city just as fast as the living can!

Also, I have advanced to being a Level 5 Zombie.

But… I need to be more careful about where I run out my action points every day. Inevitably, I wind up out in the open and some punk zombie hunter comes along and gives me a head shot and then I have to spend 15 action points just to stand up and start shambling around looking for people to bite.

Freak of Nature

Other people may get excited about tortillas that seem to have an image of the Virgin Mary on them — but not me. What gets my adrenaline going is a sweet potato that looks like a mutant orange rat with antlers!

Notice the very thin squiggly tail coming out the back?? Here’s a closeup of the sweet-potato-rat’s head showing the delicacy of the antlers and the beginnings of TUSK FORMATION!

This is very exciting stuff by pretty much anybody’s standards, I’d say!

I’m thinking I might be able to start a religious cult based in some way on this remarkable discovery.

Life Sucks And Then You Die

Salon.com Life | Getting over happiness
“Our [ACT] model — of accepting your feelings, disentangling yourself from your mind, connecting with your values, showing up in this moment and getting your feet moving in accordance with your values — it helps an amazingly broad array of problems, from chronic pain and epilepsy to doing well at work, anxiety, depression, substance abuse …”

Well… this is Buddhism! And yet, oddly enough, in salon.com’s interview with psychologist Steven C. Hayes not a single mention is made of it. Hm.

Hayes is promoting his new book Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Apparently it’s a big deal — article in Time magazine and all that.

Huge disclaimer: I haven’t read the book — only a few reviews of it — so feel free to take everything I’m saying here with several grains of salt.

“Acceptance and Commitment Therapy” (ACT) is supposed to be a whole new kind of psychotherapy but it doesn’t sound new to me. I suppose, though, that there are millions of Americans who have no familiarity with Buddhism whatsoever and so, to them, these ideas are brand new. The amazon.com site (link above) does have several reviews mentioning Buddhism, though, so I know I’m not the only one who’s seeing it.

I don know… It almost seems a little intellectually dishonest that Hayes doesn’t mention in the salon.com interview that “his” ideas aren’t really HIS at all — that they’re simply a rehash of Buddhist teaching. Maybe he gives the credit where it’s due in the book itself.

Anyway… if you want to learn a little about this way of living without having to buy Hayes’ book, check out this essay on The Four Noble Truths.

Truth Number One: Life Is Suffering.

Sound familiar?

Iraq’s Civil War

Achenblog: Daily Humor and Observations from Joel Achenbach
The symbolic power of the [Samarra shrine] bombing exceeds its lethality. Iraq has been a seething mess for so long it is easy for us to get innured to the latest news bulletin, and perhaps it is a purely semantic matter to argue that the country is on the verge of a civil war (as though it’s been the Era of Good Feelings up to now).

Obviously, this is one of Joel Achenbach’s non-humorous observations. If you’re not a regular reader of his column and blog in the Washington Post, you really ought to become one. For a guy who’s often extremely funny, he’s really quite smart. (As though the two were usually mutually exclusive? Maybe not.) Anyway…

We should never have invaded Iraq. We should never have taken out Saddam in the way we did. We should have left him in power and persuaded him to improve the lives of Iraqi citizens — even if it meant [gasp!] that he wouldn’t sell us any oil. It was a HUGE mistake to cut aid to Iraq before the war — it just made things worse for the average Iraqi and stirred up even more resentment for the US. Oh… people will whine “But we tried to work with Saddam and he wouldn’t cooperate!” To that I say BULLSHIT. We tried to turn Saddam into yet another Arab-lackey and he wasn’t having any. (And we wonder why many in the Arab world hate us and hate the Europeans? You think they can’t see that many of us still think of them as wogs whose assets need to be “managed”???) Listen, I’m not saying Saddam was a great guy who was just misunderstood. He was a jerk and, apparently, not a particularly good leader. (Hell, we should recognize THAT, right? We’ve got one of our own in the Oval Office!) I’m just saying that the US government pretty much screwed up every opportunity we might have had to make things go right over there.

And now… NOW Iraq’s not just headed for civil war. Let’s be brutally honest, okay?

Iraq is already IN a civil war.

Who Owns Us?

Taste of the Future
Let’s rashly assume that Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert, the Republican Senate and House leaders, are serious in their expressions of concern about foreign ownership of American assets. What they should do right now is begin changing the fiscal policies that are transforming the United States into a ward of the world.

EXACTLY.

This is what I was talking about earlier in the week. It’s crazy that another country — ANY other country — should own any of our ports. For Pete’s sake! They’re OUR PORTS. It would be like your next door neighbor owning the front door to your house. Oh sure, he keeps it painted and in good repair and he’s never given you any problems about you coming and going at all hours. But, still… he OWNS it. He can sell it if he wants, maybe to someone who insists on painting it a color you hate. And don’t even think about what could happen if he should get really pissed off at you for some reason! No — it’s craziness. The United States should own and manage its own ports.

Brokeback Mountain — But No Equal Rights

The radical middle: Will “Brokeback Mountain” change anything? Nah.
by Dennis Kempton
Reader Weekly, Issue 358, February 16, 2006
I swear if I hear one more person, gay or straight, tells me they were “powerfully moved” or “cried like a baby” or were “forever changed” by the movie Brokeback Mountain, I’m going to scream.  Yes, I said scream, reader. Pretty gay, huh?

Dennis Kempton makes some excellent points. Be sure to check out his entire article on the Reader Weekly site. Why should people be so moved by the doomed gay love affair in Brokeback Mountain? What? They didn’t think gay people could actually LOVE one another? They always figured it was just about kinky sex?

I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain. I have no interest in it. Romance movies don’t typically interest me — I’m more of a horror and sci-fi kind of gal. (Now, if the gay lovers were battling giant alien pseudo-pods… THAT’s a movie I might want to see!) The only possible good thing that I can imagine maybe coming out of Brokeback Mountain’s popularity is that it might help some people along in the process of thinking of homosexual people as just… people. People who, of course!, deserve the same rights heterosexual people enjoy. The more likely outcome, though, is that Brokeback Mountain will encourage straight people to think of gays as being like sweet, precious pets. Aren’t they adorable! They’re so… gay!

Sigh.

I can’t imagine most gay people want that.

Non-Americans Are Running America’s Ports

Bush Threatens Veto Against Bid To Stop Port Deal
President Bush yesterday strongly defended an Arab company’s attempt to take over the operation of seaports in Baltimore and five other cities, threatening a veto if Congress tries to kill a deal his administration has blessed.

Here’s my problem with this deal: It’s got nothing to do with it being an Arab-run company. I’d object to it if it were a Swedish-run company. I just think government contracts for running ports and such ought to be given to US-based companies. I mean…duh!…don’t we want to keep all that money here in the US? Isn’t the government supposed to be, above all, protecting the interests of US citizens?

The company that’s currently running the ports is English. It’s been sold to a UAE-based company. Fine, I don’t care about that. The English company shouldn’t have been running OUR ports to begin with.

“I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a [British] company,” Bush told reporters.

Well, gee whiz George! Maybe YOU can explain why US citizens of Arab descent are held to a different standard than citizens of British descent?? People applying the double-standard are just following the Bush administration’s lead.

Why are we hiring foreign companies to run our seaports to begin with?? THAT’s the real question!

Get High, Feel Good, See God

Court Allows for Use of Hallucinogenic Tea
The Supreme Court decided unanimously today that the government cannot prohibit a small religious sect in New Mexico from using a hallucinogenic tea as part of its rites, ruling against the Bush administration in a case that pitted religious freedom against the nation’s drug control laws.

Hnh. Well, what do you know? I’m pleasantly surprised by this decision. I’m especially surprised that the decision was unanimous.

While I do believe that any “god” you need be stoned to commune with is a pretty lame deity, I also think adults ought to be free to get high if they want — as long as they don’t endanger anyone else in the process.

This country’s drug laws have created a situation where the “king pins” are getting insanely rich and the users often resort to crime to fund their habits. It would be so much smarter to legalize all these drugs. I absolutely do not buy the argument that legal drugs would create a nation of junkies. And, if they were legal we could tax the heck out of them.

Jimmy Carter is Right Again

Don’t Punish the Palestinians
This common commitment [between Israel and the United States] to eviscerate the government of elected Hamas officials by punishing private citizens may accomplish this narrow purpose, but the likely results will be to alienate the already oppressed and innocent Palestinians, to incite violence, and to increase the domestic influence and international esteem of Hamas. It will certainly not be an inducement to Hamas or other militants to moderate their policies.

As usual, Jimmy Carter’s got it exactly right.