08/14/2008

General Wheeler’s War

On the morning of June 24, 1898, American forces advanced toward Las Guasimas, Cuba under the command of Brigadier General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler. The aged general was a cavalry commander who’d fought for the Confederates in the Civil War. Heavy fire from Spanish troops halted the advance and battle ensued. Gen. Wheeler called for reinforcements and the Spanish began to pull back. Overexcited in the literal and figurative heat of the moment, Gen. Wheeler turned to his troops and yelled, “We’ve got the damned Yankees on the run!”

I’m sure John McCain knows how Gen. Wheeler felt. After weeks of publicly confusing Shia and Sunni, of erroneously stating that Iraq shares a border with Afghanistan and not remembering when the surge he takes credit for began; the Russian invasion of Georgia must feel like cool rain on a hot summer’s day.

It’s so much easier to fight the war of 40 years ago than today’s. We’ve already decided who the good and bad guys are and the history books tell us how it comes out. No need to worry about faceless terrorists or dance carefully around the Constitutionally guaranteed religious rights of Muslims. “We’ve got the damned Russkies on the run!”
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Oil | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
07/31/2008

The Least We Can Do

Summers are short in Vermont. You can feel this one beginning to slip away already with the recent chill in the evening air. It seems, however, that from the minute the snow melts until it falls again, someone is running a gas-powered engine within one hundred yards of my house.

Power mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, chain saws and wood chippers – they overlap and blend into an almost-constant symphony of aggravating noise through what would otherwise be the most blissful season of the year.

I’ll give you the chain saws and wood chippers. A city crew was in the neighborhood yesterday, trimming overhanging branches from the roadways and chipping the branches. Trimming branches by hand would take forever and chipping would be impossible. (The chips were taken to our local wood-burning electric plant.)

Gas-powered lawn mowers, on the other hand, seem foolish. I live in a neighborhood of one-eighth acre lots. No one’s going to drop dead of exertion from cutting the grass in a back yard on my street with a human-powered mower.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Global Warming, Oil, Peak Oil | Tagged | Comments (0)
07/24/2008

… And I Can’t Shut Up

Remember those commercials from 20 years ago with senior citizens using their electronic buzzers to summon help? “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” was the tag line. A friend of mine used to parody that commercial at parties. “I’m talking and I can’t shut up,” she’d say.

My friend has more self-awareness than many of our fellow citizens. How often are we subjected to someone on a street corner braying into his or her cell phone like a homeless jackass?

Remember when cell phones came out and everyone got one “just for emergencies”? Do you just use your cell phone only for emergencies? Have you EVER used your cell phone for an emergency? It was a contrived justification, like the line about driving an SUV: “I just feel safer.”

This week Ronald Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, sent a memo to 3,000 members of the staff, advising them to limit their cell phone use. If they must use a cell phone, Dr. Herberman said, they should use a wireless headset or the speaker phone option. He strongly advised that children not be allowed to use cell phones.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)
07/17/2008

Get Used To It

A reader said to me the other day, “You’re stuff’s getting dark lately.” She was right; it has. I don’t know what to do about that, given I define the mission of this site as calling it as I see it. Right now, it looks dark. If it’s any consolation, it’s worse if you live with me. Adrienne says she doesn’t want to hear about it anymore. I have to go find someone else if I want to have those conversations. (Actually, those “conversations” are starting to turn into monologues.)

So here we go again and let’s see if we can find some reason to chase the clouds away. It won’t be easy. What’s sticking in my mind is a piece New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a week ago about the leaders of the G-8 nations failing to take any action on the Darfur genocide at their recent meeting.

Mr. Kristof ran through the reasons for inaction – that more people die annually of more soluble problems, that perhaps we should apply our efforts where we will get the most significant results. A fine argument, if the industrialized world actually did anything significant to combat malaria or AIDS, but our efforts are not commensurate with what is needed. Our efforts are not even commensurate with what we spend on say, pet care.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Global Warming | Tagged , , , , | Comments (1)
07/10/2008

In the Good (?) New Summertime

It’s hot in Vermont. It’s been in the 90s and humid for weeks. This is great for cherries and plums, grapes and apples. My neighbor’s been making cherry jam for days (add a hot stove to the equation) and she’s had to prop up the boughs of her plum tree, so heavy are they with fruit.

The sun was shining through the weekend, so farmers followed the adage and made hay. Global warming models show the northeast getting warmer and wetter, which is a better fate than the drought modeled for much of the continental U.S. Still, it will take some adjusting. As good a growing season as this has been, it’s been lousy for hay. Farmers lost a cut because it was too wet to bring it in and so it rotted in the fields.

Some fight back with technology. There’s a baling technique that will supposedly allow farmers to bale wet hay in plastic. If you live in the country and see those things in fields that look like overgrown marshmallows, they’re hay in plastic bales. The idea is that the plastic creates an anaerobic (i.e. “no oxygen”) environment, which means even wet hay won’t rot. Supposedly.
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy, Electoral Politics, Energy, Global Warming | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
07/03/2008

Like a Motherless Child

Vermont had its first AMBER alert last week. (AMBER is an acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, a cumbersome tribute to Amber Hagerman, who was abducted and murdered in Texas in 1996.)

Twelve-year-old Brooke Bennett disappeared on the 25th of June. Stories soon circulated that she had lied to her mother about where she was going and instead had gone off with a man she’d met on the Internet.

Different versions of the story displayed different photos of Brooke. One looked like school photo, showing a pretty young girl wearing a sweater. Another showed a sexualized pre-teen with heavy makeup on her eyes.

I won’t try to build suspense with this story; Brooke was murdered. Although the Internet was involved, this is not one of the horror stories we warn our kids about, it’s worse. Brooke’s uncle and former stepfather have been arrested in connection with Brooke’s abduction and for their involvement in a sex ring that traded in under-aged girls. They apparently intended to initiate Brooke into the ring. Instead, she’s dead.
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By floegel | Posted in Civil Liberty, Commentary, Economy, Global Warming | Tagged | Comments (0)
06/26/2008

Back to the Garden

There are a number of opinions about the Bible and, as is too often the case, they tend to divide, rather than unite us. Some people think the Bible is the unerring word of God, each and every verse. Others think it’s “divinely inspired,” but perhaps not absolutely correct in every respect.

Other people – many of my friends on the left – are surprised when I make a reference to the Bible. “Do you read that?” they ask, in a tone of incredulity and amusement.

Yes, I do. I don’t think it’s all true and I have no ideas about its inspiration. I do know it is a book written from centuries of human experience and the people who wrote it are, whether we like it or not, the ancestors of much of the culture in which we live today. I don’t think it makes sense to either blindly believe all it contains or ignore it and it’s truly foolish to determine one’s position on the book based on being in opposition to some other group. The more we learn about our history, our anthropology our (dare I say?) evolution, the more light we have by which to re-read the text.

But this isn’t about the Bible. It’s about the cavemen. Last week’s New Yorker has an article by Judith Thurman about the Paleolithic cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain. (If you think people have diverging opinions about the Bible, don’t even get started on the New Yorker or the French.)
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By floegel | Posted in Commentary, Economy | Comments (1)