Teresa, I liked your projection logic. Very cutting, with a smooth, bitter aftertaste.
Bear with you, schmear with you -- I think you've been absolutely brilliant.
Le petit rhume
C'est dure et fort;
La toux, le goutte,
Alors, le mort.
-- Birmanie-Raser
AuugGGhhGHh.
Yeah, it's not just a Northwest/Canadian thing... they had poetry snippets posted on the ceiling billboards on the Paris Metro when I was there a month ago. It was an enjoyable distraction, trying to use high school French to decipher cryptic bits of verse between stops. I thought it was kind of nice.
... the boring, preachy, rhyming epitaphs they had posted all over the Catacombs, though, not so much. Ugh, shut up! The bones speak very well all by themselves.
Doug K.: Did I mention the guys with machine guns? But wow, landmines would be a bad, bad thing. Wow. (Why is there always somebody who thinks landmines are a good idea? But they never can remember where they put the damn things, can they...?)
From today's AZ Daily Star.
TNH: Well, I do miss the Huachucas. But I think the real immediate human impact of the border situation is better summarized by the rancher article I linked to. That and the staggering death toll of the migrants, of course.
That's an interesting wikipedia discussion. Though I'm not sure I understand the controversy: the commenters are complaining that there's too much emphasis placed on intentional killings? It's certainly true that the majority of deaths are due to exposure and such... but looking down the list of victims, I certainly do see a lot of bodies with "blunt force trauma" "stabbing" and "gunshot wounds" listed as the cause of death. So the question is whether the article implies that Americans were the killers, rather than Mexicans?
The article certainly does need more references.
And I'm not sure I understand your "stark denial of reality": immigrants always die in the desert, sure. But there has been a marked increase in the deaths over the last 10-15 years.
Yes, what Chris and TomB said about the slow funneling into the Arizona wilderness by stricter enforcement in other areas. Very true. But I also suspect that the take-over of the immigration operation by organized crime and drug cartels might still have been an inevitability.
I haven't seen that book. Have you read this one yet? I've been seeing it in airports and on display cases in a lot of nowhere-near-Tucson bookstores the last few months. Devastating, indeed.
Frankly, I'm down with the "this administration couldn't figure out how to use the National Guard to close a window, never mind a border" sentiment. I really don't think you need to worry too much, TNH.
That said:
I don't disagree with your general statement about Bush not liking "actual democracy". And I can't fault you for worrying about being locked inside of an increasingly un-democratic world power. And I can certainly understand why you would roll your eyes at the prospect of trying to effectively close a 3000-mile border.
But I live in Tucson. Five years ago I could go hiking in the Atascosa Mountains near Nogales, or in Organ Pipe National Park, or on the Huachuca Crest Trail (which, incidentally, is the first segment of the newly-completed Arizona Trail.) Bumping into immigrants was pretty rare then; at most, people told us, they might ask you for water or a Powerbar.
Now? I don't hike the border ranges anymore. These days the Huachuca Crest Trail is completely covered in trash: plastic bags, shoes, shirts, water bottle, toothbrushes, defecation. Groups of several dozen immigrants taking a break under the trees try to duck out of sight. People with machine guns occasionally pop out of the bushes and threaten hikers: "If you ever come back here, we'll shoot you." That's what the narcos/coyotes told some friends of mine -- while they were hiking on the Ft. Huachuca military base. But you don't argue semantics with machine guns.
The drug smugglers have replaced the old Mom-and-Pop coyote businesses, and occasionally they get into shootouts on the highway between Tucson and Phoenix, trying to steal groups of pollos -- they call the immigrants chickens -- from one another.
A few years ago a park ranger was shot in Organ Pipe. Which is notable only because he was an American -- 200+ non-citizens died in the desert last summer. (These two lists are incomplete, but they're as good as it gets if you're searching for a particular name.) The ecological impact to Western Arizona's fragile landscape is immense, but not many people venture out there on foot to see it anymore. Too much danger, too much litter, too many bones.
While bushwhacking, we're been threatened several times by increasingly-unfriendly ranchers in Cochise county. People in my hiking club have actually been shot at by ranchers while hiking in the National Forest near the New Mexico border. Well, I suppose a half-dozen bushwhackers probably do look a lot like a small group of migrants, or smugglers... but my perspective is that of a recreational visitor who simply wants safe access to my old stomping ground -- I can't imagine what it's like to actually be a rancher, sleeping every night with a gun beside my bed. I can't imagine waking up every morning to piles of human defecation next to my house, cut fences, missing cattle, and guys with machine guns threatening me on my own land.
It's a war zone here, and it wasn't five years ago. Frankly, at this point closing the border would be a dream come true; Orwellian/Atwoodsian dystopic nightmares seem pretty far-fetched compared to the dirty reality of living in the middle of a drug smuggling warzone.
Then again, you have to wonder what the Tohono O'odham think of all of this? It's their border, too, and we all know what the Bush administration thinks of "sovereign nations."
Answering my own question (sort of): Oh.
Well, in that case, I guess the climate gurus can research away to their hearts' content. I'm all for cold, hard science.
But really, would it kill them to suggest signing onto the Kyoto accords? (Or just get them fired?)
Currently, Shell's advisory price in the Netherlands (probably not the price at the pump, because owners are free to sell at their own price) is 1.49 euro a litre, that's 5,64 euro a gallon, currently 6.85 dollar. ... Eep! I guess we do pay a lot.
But it only takes, what, 4 hours to cross the country by automobile? So it's not such a big deal, practically. Eh, you could probably do it on a tricycle if you had to!
Gregory's 2:30 CDT report is still seeing the possibility of a re-intensification after the weekend. I really, really hope that goes away.
And what is up with the director of the NHC and the claims that all this has nothing to do with global warming? Nothing? "We need more study"? This all sounds very familiar... Why do I smell an oil industry agenda?
What's even more worrisome is that a lot of the models are predicting that after landfall, the storm may "stall" for a day or two, dumping huge amounts of concentrated rain ... somewhere. If it stalls over Texas, flash flooding could be a very serious problem. Further east, there's the worrisome prospect of further levee damage.
But no, it gets even better... check out Steve Gregory's Sept. 23, 2005/12:05 CDT report -- specifically, the bit about "POST LANDFALL THREAT -- AND MORE BAD NEWS." It's pretty bad news.
I have a Dutch friend who tells me that $7 is "only" about what people pay back in the Netherlands.
Someone could just as easily get hurt constructing/servicing a moonscope. Where hurt = dead.
No, the argument has to be, we're going to Mars, might as well stop at the Moon on the way out. The Moon is not an end unto itself.
But it's all just smoke and mirrors. The only reason I can think of for this country, let alone this administration, really pursuing either the Moon or Mars is, well, contractors. Somebody has friends at Lockheed as well as Haliburton, and with no tangible wars to fight they're going to need another source of income to keep their share prices high.
Public opinion and the polls certainly can't be the motivating factor -- it's too expensive, and there's just not enough support.
Spin.
Is that pun on "levees" purely accidental up there?
I'm sorry, I meant "a million or two homeless, suddenly unemployed people."
Yeah, Graydon, you're right. There is the distinct possibility that they can't rebuild at all on the present site of the city. Also the distinct possibility that even if they do, this will all get replayed verbatim in another year. Or two. Or... maybe even in the next two months, before they've even finished patching the levees, because this hurricane season isn't over yet.
Good Lord, what happens when a half million people can't go home? Where do they go? Their homes are gone, many of them are very poor, and they probably don't have insurance. They've lost everything, including their jobs. Desk jobs, computer jobs, service jobs, tourism jobs, University jobs, the clerks, the janitors, the middle-managers, the small business owners. Eventually even the nurses, doctors, police officers and emergency service personnel. Everybody's paycheck just disappeared, so they can't even pay the hotel bill or move into an apartment, and suddenly the rest of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Texas have to absorb 485,000 homeless, unemployed people.
This sort of thing hasn't happened in America in a long time. The closest I can think of is the Chicago fires. Except in Chicago, people could still say: "we will rebuild this goddamn town. We will start over on the smoldering ruins." You can't rebuild when the ruins are under 6 feet of water. So it's a real refugee situation.
Actually, the "unscientifically-trained masses" are much more savvy about global warming then they are about evolution vs. creationism. It's hard to get your head around the size of geological time, or a universe that explodes without exploding, with no center, dragging space-time along with it. In contrast, it's easy to understand global warming. Everybody has a grandmother who tells stories about ice skating and 5-foot snow drifts, "and you know, you never see that anymore...." Furthermore, folks are starting to notice it themselves, that summers are hotter and winters are warmer than they remember as children. Sure, the NY Times just published an article stating that Katrina is a product of the natural upswing in Atlantic activity, but you better believe the displaced folks are suspecting something slightly unnatural.
What Barton is trying to do is create debate -- or rather, the illusion of debate -- by holding a witch hunt. He wants to comb through their lives to find that one time when they used the university credit card to buy alcohol... or when they finished work for one grant by pulling money from another, which isn't an uncommon practice. Hopefully, these researchers won't lose their jobs. Their universities are fully behind them, and the National Academy of Sciences has written to Congress that these three scientists have already more than met the burden of proof, and that they believe this is an attack on the scientific process itself, etc. etc. I heard a rumor that there are even people in Barton's own party who are trying to get him to back off... Apparently he's not.
Barton picked these three at random from one plot in the Clinton-era Kyoto accords recommendation document. He doesn't seem to understand that even if he discredits these three data points, there are hundreds of other data points waiting to take their places. Not to mention every American's memory of summers and winters past, which might be much more important in the long run.
You may now continue with your regularly-scheduled lampoon.
My great-grandmother, Agnes Gleason Cramer, died & was buried somewhere in New Orleans in about 1908; we don't know where.... Last night, I had a dream that her bones were floating out to sea.
To make it worse, they usually had to bury folks above-ground in New Orleans, in those little mauso-ovens, didn't they? The good new is, I'm pretty sure I just saw a picture of the Garden District cemetary on CNN, rain-lashed but not water-logged. So maybe Agnes made it through the night.
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| 2006 | 9 |
| 2005 | 9 |
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