Department of Unlikely A. mississippienses

Claude the Albino Alligator is 15 years old tomorrow. This is a picture of him from December of 2009. He's more than eight feet long now. I don't know how much that is in handbags. He lives in strictly observed comfort at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

Happy Birthday, you terrible thing.

The Boat Fished Out of the Sea

For a number of decades lots of boats (like the Santa Cruz, seen here parked on the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf) plied the waters of Monterey Bay and beyond, harvesting the rich established fisheries along the eastern shore of the Pacific Ocean. Agriculture, fishing, and the relict of the redwood lumber industry still gnawing away at the county's remaining hills and dales were the bastions of what local economy existed during those times in Santa Cruz. Fishing boats like the Santa Cruz helped boats from Monterey and elsewhere empty the waters of sardines as fast as the loggers could clip the hills of trees, and eventually there was hardly a sardine left to fish for, and like the loggers and millhands who dispersed, having little left to do once most of the forest had been seen to, the fleet of fishing boats tied up near the Wharf dwindled in number before relocating to the friendlier confines of an improved Harbor just down the coast, leaving the Wharf in the main to the customer-friendly uses of shops and restaurants.

My father knew a guy in Santa Cruz whose business was shrimp cocktail, packaging small shelled shrimp in little glass jars with some proprietary red sauce or other, cases and cases of the stuff he sold to grocery stores and delis, and handed out to pals when they showed up. I have a haze of a memory of going along on a visit to the guy one time in the earlier 1950's, Dad working the waif angle maybe to pry another carton of the things out of his pal. I've always wondered where they scraped the little shrimp up from, some nearby spot crawling with the things at the time, I suppose. Dad's pal worked out of a big warehousey sort of place hard by the old Union Ice Company's plant on Chestnut and Laurel streets in Santa Cruz. They don't do that sort of business near Chestnut and Laurel anymore, selling shrimp surrounded by some tomato-based something of a sauce in little glass cylinders. Whoever's selling shrimp, from wherever it comes from now, has another way to get it to market these days. And the Union Ice plant is long gone, the need for a facility to produce the vast quantities of ice demanded by the best practices of fishmongering on the enormous scale supported by all the fleets of boats identical to the "Santa Cruz" melting away years before the structure exploded and burned during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989.

The Reported Explosion

Within just a couple of hours, news cobbled together of the the explosion in San Bruno had gained the attention of the entire world. The BBC News RSS headline, linked to an article on its website, stated, inaccurately, Blaze engulfs San Francisco homes and continued, inaccurately, "Dozens of homes have been set ablaze near San Francisco International Airport, after a reported explosion."

Residents and travelers alike have long noted that San Francisco International Airport is not in San Francisco, but on the shore of San Francisco Bay miles south of the city. If the body of the RSS feed is accurate, and the blaze, caused by a reported explosion, caused dozens of homes near the airport to be engulfed in flames, then its headline is simply wrong, as there are no houses both in San Francisco and near its airport. Complicating matters, the actual homes set ablaze in San Bruno are not only not in San Francisco but not particulary close to the airport, either.

The BBC's RSS feed makes for a crude approximation of the event it points to. "San Francisco" BOOM! would do as well. But it's notable that even garbled word of this local catastrophe was reverberating in London less than three hours after the terrible explosion.

Argument: On History On

James Bridle has printed a collection of every edit made to the Wikipedia article "The Iraq War" from December 2004 to November 2009, amounting to 7,000 printed pages in twelve volumes on the arguable subject. No argument regarding the Iraq War, however blunted by the forces of fact and reason, however sharpened to its best possible point by the intercessionary fashioning of some later better way of saying it, is likely to have been skipped over lightly in this enormously lengthy public handling and mishandling of the article "Iraq War" on Wikipedia. So if at some later time some historian is at all interested in becoming immersed in what people were capable of saying about the Iraq War while it was going on in an effort to make some final sense of the matter which has eluded people up till now, here is a primary document without peer:

That Old Refrain

Some People Knew What
Nobody Could Have Known,
…Somebody's Been Seeing
My Maaaaaaan!

Yesterday marks the notional end of the ongoing American invasion of the famous Middle East of the planet which began more than seven years ago with a spectacular attack on Baghdad, the capital city of the justly reviled Sadaam Hussein regime. President Obama has now officially closed the books on the matter with an address from the Oval Office following the reshuffling this past week of the last U.S. combat troops remaining in Iraq to posts just outside the country.

Of course one of the object lessons of this now-officially concluded adventure is that the US is militarily "just outside the country" with respect to any country anyplace in the world, that it remains, on the evidence, quite capable of rapidly deploying overwhelming military advantage to a specified target virtually anywhere on the globe the President cares to finger for whatever reason, and to stay there and mix it up as necessary for as long as the President says.

For all the talk of what nobody could have known about the invasion of Iraq, it was certainly knowable by August of 2002 that the President had fingered Iraq, and that the US military would deliver a crushing blow to Iraqi society would make the Mongols look like a tea party, precipitating a generation-long engagement in military adventures in Iraq and elsewhere in Asia by the US, the first phase of which is just now, officially, strictly speaking, drawn to a close.

Weedmonth Fall Preview 2010

This Week in Rick Puchalsky

[For a much fuller discussion of the removal of Mr. Brent Lindsey from the rolls of the Cato Institute, FWIW, see this post and its ensuing cascade of comments at Crooked Timber]

I find myself at odds with Henry Farrell when he argues this way:

If an actual causal relationship had obtained, one would expect that if one subtracted Brink Lindsey’s influence, one would see, at the least, a marginally appreciable difference in the likelihood of war.

This is the "he was just a raindrop in the gathering stormcloud of war" argument in different clothes. Add or subtract Mr. Lindsey from that cloud and it retains its full force, yes. The influence of that one raindrop eludes measurement. But logically we could turn to any other raindrop of punditry in that cloud and say the same: subtract it and one would see no appreciable difference in war's likelihood. The gathered cloud was a mighty cloud, and made up of more than pundits. Even if Thomas Friedman himself had shut the fuck up, that stormcloud of war was set to break.

And yet somehow, every participating raindrop did share an irreducible responsiblilty for constituting the cloud's being. Brent Lindsey participated in a collective call for war, lending his agency to the project of creating the proper atmosphere for waging the thing like so many others did at the time. Later he admitted he was wrong about that.

I'll pass on the politics of atonement in Mr. Lindsey's case. Like so many others unaware of what he'd said, I was unimpressed at the time by his pro-war pronouncements and by his many recantations later. I don't know what the benchmarks for quality and frequency of expression are when repudiating the wrong a person has previously advocated, but I note that Henry and others seem to agree Mr. Lindsey has met their standards in this.

But what are we to think of anyone who, presented with the greatest, most momentous global challenge of a generation, the choice of whether or not the US should plunge into a vast open-ended foreign military adventure, chose freely and horribly and proactively wrong? What's the half-life of justified opprobrium for Lindsey's irreducible role in promoting the thing in the first place? What's the justified level of suspicion that Mr. Lindsey's thought on any subject is congenitaly faulty thought, inferior when put to the test, given the evidence of his expressed thoughts on going to war?

This Week in Weedmonth

 
SUPERWEED!!!1!

via Tristero at Hullabaloo
 

August is Weedmonth

Gould Adopts Piano

 

 








 
Gould suggested by Atrios

Saturday Morning Cartoon Carnival

 

 

Not Contrary to Public Interest, Report Claims

 
Top Banks Paid $1.6 Billion in Excessive Bonuses, U.S. Finds
 

Opening A Bottle Of Wine The New French Way

Ah, you'll be pounding away at a jeroboam wrapped in a workboot before long, the way these French Ways go when brought over to America, is what I'm saying.

Death in the Gulf

View Larger Map
The orange tab labelled "A" is meant to indicate the whole Gulf of Mexico. The green arrow points to the place where the Deepwater Horizon once drilled.

image via NOAA

Keep in mind that all the estimates of probable landfall in the map created by NOAA are based on an assumption that the equivalent of 33,000 barrels of oil a day is gushing out of the ground a mile under the surface of the Gulf of Mexico where the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster took place, when it is currently agreed that two or three times that much oil is erupting into the waters every day.

The Futures Market for Violence in Afghanistan Holds Firm

Recently, for some reason I had cause to remark that some of the best political writing of the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine. Somehow, almost overnight, noticing Rolling Stone's political writing is the new black.

General McChrystal's sudden demotion followed almost immediately on his surprising appearance in Michael Hastings's article, word of which spread so fast that the General was already days gone from his post before the print version of the article even hit the street, although the gist of the piece, and even the magazine's own exact words, were more or less instantly available through the internet to anyone who cared to see them.

On principle, I would personally fire anyone who drank lite beer with lime flavoring in it, so McChrystal's removal doesn't trouble me. For his role in orchestrating the cover up of Pat Tillman's death he probably deserves to have his career crimped anyway, although the months I spent in the military years ago gave me the perhaps contrary impression that covering up such things was just one of the many duties thrust on those in command and which, when successfully accomplished, inclines the officer commissioned to deal with it toward rapid promotion rather than reprimand. Colin Powell earned his first star for polishing the turd of My Lai, giving up to his superiors in the Pentagon an earnest and workable telling of the tale that so enwrapped them all in asscoveredness that Powell's future career was assured.

And, again, even before the print version of the Rolling Stone article hit the newsstands, it had already been determined that Obama must respond to McChrystal's impertinence directly and forcefully, that a line had been crossed and Obama needed to show the general the I'm in charge here clause in the Constitution. Fretting over whether he would actually do it or not dissolved when, only a few dozen hours after word of the story began to spread, he actually did remove McChrystal from command and replace him with General Petraeus of Iraq invasion fame.

This is a very peculiar episode. Hamid Kharzai, who many suspect is our ally in Afghanistan, bemoaned the loss of General McChrystal, while Obama gave a stay-the-mysterious-course speech in the immediate aftermath of the episode which among other things reaffirmed the ongoing resolve of the Administration to accomplish something or other in Afghanistan in the next eighteen months or maybe longer, depending, so help us God.

So in the national political Kabuki, firing McChrystal is the symbolic act by which it is revealed that Obama has the mojo necessary to commandingly announce the continuation of the current US policy of going on and on in Afghanistan, which he promptly does after disposing of McChrystal: the pledge of an endless future there is freshly and importantly reaffirmed in public, even before the story that sacked the general hits the street in printed form.

e to the i times pi

I guess the order of the exponents in Euler's famous identity doesn't matter, so that e to the italicized i times pi arrives at the same terminus as e to the pi times italicised i, which is another way of ordering those three fundamental mathematical objects, e, pi, and italicized i, when going on about the profound interrelation of those objects arrayed just so that resolves itself inexorably at long last into a confirmation that the mathematical value we call "minus one" actually exists, is, in fact, identical to the very same thing pointed to by those mathematical objects when so arrayed. And if minus one exists, well, there you are. All the rest of the numbers can be reached from that simple unit that we, QED, don't have one of.

Salman Khan of the invaluable Khan Academy wends his way toward a demonstration of the circuitous and lovely math involved here and here.

"Bloomsday" 2010

The Chairman of BP cares about the small people, and so do I most days, and especially on Bloomsday. Much of the charm of the character of Leopold Bloom in James Joyce's comic novel Ulysses is in the fact that Bloom is one of the small people, living a run-of-the-mill urban existence in a backwater city of the mighty British Empire. Not a general or a statesman or a great poet but a near-Chaplinesque character bumbling through the jumble of events that accrue on one relatively representative day, Thursday, June 16, 1904.

Although Bloomsday has been commonly celebrated (at first by a small pack of literary drunks including Brian O'Nolan/Flann O'Brien in Dublin some years ago) each and every year on June 16, I continue to maintain that only the June 16 which falls on a Thursday is legitimately called Bloomsday. Is Bloomsday Thursday, or is Bloomsday June 16? It's both, forever both. The rest of those June 16ths, like today's, falling on a Wednesday, well, I don't know. Sure, you can call such a thing "Bloomsday" if you must, but just don't call it Bloomsday.
 

Relief for the Unread, An Anniversary

 
On this date in 1966, the Vatican abolished the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, originally instituted in 1559 to keep good Catholics current on what it was they were forbidden to read. The Index went through 20 editions in its 400+ years of existence, the final refinement of its accumulated distaste printed in 1948, specifying 4000 titles and the entire works of over 500 authors. From the first, hand in hand with the Index proper went wide-ranging and variously effective efforts to expunge from the stock of available reading material works identified there.

Since the moment the Index was nullified, the whole domain of reading has been thrown open to the searching eye, more's the pity. A judicious list, however contentious, of what's safely left unread would really come in handy some days.
 

From The Wharf in Santa Cruz

The Gulf Oil Eruption of 2010, Day (n + 1)

 
Some of the best political reporting in America over the past 40 years has appeared in Rolling Stone Magazine, for some reason. Tim Dickinson takes the story of our oily Gulf for a spin in the latest issue, online here.

Here's a marvelous representation of Earth in cross-section in 5,000 foot increments, from more than 35,000 feet above sea level to more than 35,000 feet below. Scroll down toward sea level, and on the right you can follow a red line representing the descent of the drilling done from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. It wasn't plain to me until I saw this graphic that the site of the eruption of oil, at about 5,000 feet, is actually 13,000 feet above the deepest point reached by the drillers,the oil shooting out of that broken section of pipe on the sea floor carried under immense pressure from way, way down below.
 

History Channel

 
All the dead seem to be. There they are, clogging up our remembrances. They seem to be, the way we regard them, cognizant of all their influential remains. The dead seem to be. It's not that they are, no.

We are. They seem to be.
 

It's Not a Spill. Nothing Spills Up.

 
It's an eruption, folks. Stop calling it a spill.
 

Walking Over To Watch Some Guys Watching Some Guys Racing Through Santa Cruz

Some Guys Watching Some Guys Racing Through Santa Cruz

Some Guys Racing Through Santa Cruz