Half the blogging team is in Baja and the other half in Santa Barbara. Posting will continue to be light, but here’s a description of Sunday. It also happens to be a fantastic new wine blog, which I hope to contribute to – once I receive a steady paycheck again to do the requisite research.
Meanwhile, an update on the Libyan situation.
Well, maybe not jokes, but I couldn’t help myself with the illustration. Anyway, last week the California Governor prepared to deliver a speech at the Hoover Institution’s meeting to further the agenda laid out in the now-ubiquitously referenced A World Free of Nuclear Weapons op-ed signed by Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and Bill Perry. Arnold couldn’t be there because of the fires. Shultz read it to the assembled fissile cognoscenti, which must have been awkward because the first paragraph is devoted to praising Shultz. Some choice excerpts:
As some of you may know, I grew up in Austria. As a boy, the Red Army loomed over us from its bases in central Europe. Even as children, we all knew about the threat of nuclear war. We knew the blinding power of its flash. We knew the shape of its cloud. Like here, we had nuclear drills in our schools. When I was 18, I went into the Austrian Army for my required service. I really, really wanted to be a tank driver. This was before I had a Hummer. Although you were supposed to be 21, I talked them into letting me drive a tank. I have to say I wasn’t much of a deterrent to a Soviet attack. During lunch one day on maneuvers, I forgot to put on the brakes and my tank rolled into the river. I can’t tell you what a sinking feeling I had as I watched that tank heading backward down the bank and then splashing into the water.
A true, amusing story . . . but the reality of the times, of course, was quite serious. In 1956, the Soviets crushed the Hungarians. Then later, the Czechoslovakians.
We Austrians had three basic fears. One, that Soviet tanks might roll into Vienna the way they did into Budapest. Two, a Soviet invasion of Austria or nearby countries might bring a U.S./Soviet confrontation—with Austria getting caught in the nuclear crossfire. And three, we feared mistakes. Mistakes are made in every other human endeavor. Why should nuclear weapons be exempt? I still remember the tensions of those times. I think Austrians, wedged between the West and the Soviet empire, may have felt the Cold War more intensely than Americans. I think I actually felt less tension here in America.
(snip)
I genuinely believe we must take steps to stop the destruction of the planet’s environment. Looking at this logically, however—although we must address global warming now—its most dangerous consequences come decades down the road. The most dangerous consequences of nuclear weapons, however, are here and now. They are of this hour and time. A nuclear disaster will not hit at the speed of a glacier melting. It will hit with a blast. It will not hit with the speed of the atmosphere warming but of a city burning. Clearly, the attention focused on nuclear weapons should be as prominent as that of global climate change. After he left office, former Vice President Gore made a movie about the dangers of global warming. I have a movie idea for Vice President Cheney after he leaves—a movie about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. If you Google “global warming,” you will find 6,690,000 entries. If you Google “Britney Spears,” you will find 2,490,000. If you Google “nuclear disarmament,” you will get 116,000 entries. And if you Google “nuclear annihilation,” you will get 17,400. Something is wrong with that picture.
The more “butch” politicians bringing the spotlight on the nuclear situation, the better. As much as individual policy victories (Reliable Replacement Warhead, India deal, bunker busters, etc.) are achievable without a broad public debate, a fundamental shift in U.S. nuclear doctrine will not occur without it. The Arnolds and Kissingers signal to the electorate that disarmament as an eventual goal is acceptable even outside the Communist Party/Hollywood/Vermont.
Although I never voted for the guy, I have been thoroughly impressed with his performance as governor. Most politicians are power-hungry egomaniacs – at least Arnold doesn’t pretend otherwise. And his bipartisan (he would say post-partisan) ways are in short supply. In fact, he’d be a great running-mate for Obama.
Bill Maher brought up the Austrian’s national potential on this week’s show and asked his guests about their thoughts on the ban on foreign-born presidents. General Wes Clark (who has morphed into a ’shill for Hill’ over the last couple months, probably because he thinks she’ll pick him as veep) thought it was a good thing. You see, in 40 years, when the Chinese are ruling the world we don’t want one of them to become our president!
Yeah.
And yet another reason Arnold recommends himself as a sane politician is his “sense of humor:”
The governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was joking when he said marijuana was “not a drug”, his spokesman said today.
The former Hollywood star told the British edition of GQ magazine that he had not taken drugs, even though he has acknowledged using marijuana in the 70s and was shown smoking a joint in the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron.
“That is not a drug. It’s a leaf,” Mr Schwarzenegger said. “My drug was pumping iron, trust me.”
As Gates attempts to mollify the Russians, and Bush enters further into his state of early-onset dementia, one wonders if a missile shield is all that it’s cracked up to be.
The recent fires in Southern California have crystallized this notion in my mind. In no time flat an Air Force and Marine base could face immolation. The fireworks would be stellar.
The point is, of course, that the highly trained war machines of the US military have no experience in dealing with humanitarian disasters. For that we call in the National Guard, or barring that the local Moose Lodge.
We have nothing like the French Foreign Legion, which is adaptive and trained to deal with civilian natural disasters. And even they would have some difficulty with wildfires the size of lower New England, or hurricane winds that rip your eyes out of their sockets
A missile defense shield is far less necessary at this point than protective measures against hazards. This stands for those from the Cro-Magnon lineage that think that global warming is a hoax. And if you’re not planning on planning and controlling for natural hazards Stateside, then the best way to protect our allies would be to bolster the riverine walls of the Danube (in an ecologically sound way, of course), or introduce water harvesting techniques to help out farmers in the formerly lush agricultural regions of Pannonia. (Those are a tinderbox right now, too, so you can forget about your cheap paprika next year).
No, on second thought let’s go back to the SDI and forget about preventing people from building homes where they shouldn’t. And I’m perfectly fine with cherry-picking that one journal article from the adjunct faculty member at the University of Southeast Central Northern Oklahoma State University that states that SoCal will be a Nordic paradise in a few years from now, replete with snowshoeing and Finnish saunas.
San Diego, my erstwhile hometown, is again in flames. It was only a matter of time before Santa Ana winds, one of the worst droughts in recorded history, and the metastisization of suburbia (and now exurbia) would commingle into its present form. In my own capacity as a California State Parks biogeographer, the signs of devastation were clear in February: shit wad dryin’ out ‘fore it could come to seed. The rains weren’t falling in the winter, and predictions for this year were for some of the fiercest Santa Anas on record.
While the flames in Malibu may pull the heartstrings of the celebrity mags and sites like TMZ.com, it is San Diego County that will likely face property damage of Katrina-like proportions.
The humanistic approach to a catastrophe such as this would include calls to distant friends and relatives in their time of need, donations to evacuee aid organizations, or even a heartfelt missive to the local paper. I do draw upon a well of sympathy for those in plight, including my own parents who may have to be evacuated from their quasi-coastal locale in a few short days, but within me also exists a fount; rage can only express my mood when noting that the urban-wildland interface has been increasingly crowded out by an array of manufactured homes (and people).
Wildfires are as essential to coastal chaparral ecologies as the spotty rain that peppers the earth in San Diego. It’s the goddamned people who promote hotter, longer and more deadly fires. To wit: Too much human resource has attenuated the quality of natural resource. This a hypothetical scenario that tests H1A: Overpopulation is the death of us of all, and H1B: The impact of a segment of that overpopulated body, namely the industrialized world, China, and the Seychelles (OK, maybe not them) has compounded preexisting phenomena.
Yes, I am gloomy, and so should you.
Am I espousing a fringe environmental credenda? Should I not indulge in some schadenfreude in seeing horribly unsustainable McMansions built in sensitive canyon ecosystems at a rate Starbucks and WalMart would envy? Perhaps on both accounts.
But this series of fires is just the beginning. One could reductively assert that this is Mother Nature fighting back. However, if anything Mother Nature is colical, and the 100,000+ homes that may face engulfment are the result of a fitful immune system fighting back, not an apocalyptic war.
When considering donations in this time of need, think of where your money is better spent. For obvious reasons Planned Parenthood is as good an investment, if not better, than the Red Cross. We need more public pronouncements from Al Gore, not Dubya and the most current cast at FEMA.
