wallpaper Ketchup

For all the wet dreams happening on the right side of our political "spectrum" (which seems to range from right to far right to extreme right) over Saint Ronnie's centennial, and the predictable eye rolling on the "left," I just wanted to give some credit where it's due. He improved the health and nutrition of millions of children by proposing to designate ketchup as a vegetable for the purposes of school lunch programs.

And to top it off, he reversed the Carter administration's policy of sanctions against P.W. Botha's Apartheid South African Government for something he called constructive engagement. Which basically meant not noticing what was happening to blacks in that country.

So let's give the man a break, okay? His efforts mean this is a healthy meal:
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wallpaper I Slept Through the Big One

311 years ago today, a so-called "great earthquake" struck the coastal region of the United States Pacific Northwest. Here's my post from last year explaining some of the details of why we think we know this; I'm not going to rewrite it here. However, this year's anniversary is somewhat special for another reason: Oregon conducted its first "shakeout" to encourage preparedness for the inevitable next great quake at 10:15 this morning.

I slept through it.

Unfortunately, metaphorically speaking, so did public awareness. @GlacialTill pointed out earlier that many members of his geology department weren't even aware of it. I was aware of it, and its coincidence with the anniversary, but it was sort of a peripheral awareness, something to which I wasn't paying attention. As I mentioned to him, this is our first such event, so expectations shouldn't be too high. On the other hand, I see my own complacent attitude toward the exercise as cautionary and a little shaming: if a person who is pretty well informed and concerned about this issue is essentially ignoring the shakeout, how can he expect that the general public will catch on? As it turns out, slightly more than 1% of Oregonians are reporting their participation.

So in the spirit of trying to do better next time, here are some links, resources and commentary. The official homepage is here, and the graphic at the bottom claims "Over 37,000 participants." Of particular interest to me are the instructions for how to react at the onset and for the duration of a quake (and the page upon which these instructions are apparently based, with more detail and explanation).

Unfortunately, I think the biggest failure during this first attempt was the lack of media coverage. As I commented to GlacialTill, I remember quite a few cursory articles last fall when the drill was announced. I thought about writing up a post then, but decided to wait until it was closer with the assumption I would be reminded by news releases. I know I've seen at least one article on the event during the last week, but I can't find it now. An article from KVAL (which I do skim over) shows up in Google- though not my RSS- but the link goes to a generic search page with no results. There have been a few articles and press releases, but not in places where I might have seen them without an intentional search. For example, despite my general contempt for press releases, this one at Newswire is very well done, in my opinion. (Oregon State University source is apparently here, with some links I haven't followed yet.) This one, from Portland's Fox affiliate, is shallow and cursory, but at least it's something. A brief at Medford's News Tribune notes the event... in this morning's edition. This seems like a day late to me, at least, but again, it's something.

I don't want to point fingers here- I think it would be wrong-headed and counterproductive. Further, as I implied above, I do not hold myself unaccountable. Between one route and another, I estimate I get somewhat fewer than a thousand readers a day. This is certainly a situation where a trivial amount of effort on my own part could have- likely would have- made a significant and substantive difference. The Medford article claims that 24,000 participants were anticpated, so the actual number tallied thus far- which may increase- is better than 50% higher than expected.

Still.

I don't think Oregonians, Washingtonians and British Columbians have fully grasped the disruption we're talking about here. Roads, water, power, airports, hospitals, food distribution and all sorts of other physical and social infrastructure that we take for granted are likely to be knocked out for weeks, or, at the very best, functioning at very low levels of efficiency. Are you ready for that? Have you really thought about what that means?

It could strike in the next few minutes. It might not strike within the lifetimes of children born today. We don't know. To say it becomes more likely as time goes on, I think, would be misleading: seismologists and structural geologists are constantly reassessing their understandings of how stress and strain are relieved and distributed at any given moment and through time. For example, the recently discovered "slow quakes" of the PNW (that article is also a pretty good back-grounder) are still mostly mysterious. Do they concentrate strain and make a great quake more likely, or relieve strain and make one less likely? We don't know.

Given the unknowns, the potential consequences, and relatively low hassle and cost of being prepared, it seems obvious to me that being prepared is clearly preferable. As I said in last year's post, there is some good news here. I don't feel bleak about the situation. But I do feel we could be doing better.

As I looked back over the above to proofread for obvious errors, one sentence jumped out at me: "This is certainly a situation where a trivial amount of effort on my own part could have- likely would have- made a significant and substantive difference." I earnestly hope and pray you don't recall that sentence as you huddle in the rubble with your family, wondering when help will arrive.

Followup: Glacial Till, a geology student in Portland, and About.com Geology (Andrew Alden) have posted on The Shakeout as well. Both mention, as I forgot to, that British Columbia also conducted a shakeout. Glacial Till notes that the reported participation in BC is 460,000. Wikipedia says the population of that province is about 4.5 million, so that's a 10% participation rate, even though this is their first such event as well. C'mon, Oregon. We can do better. And Washington? You might want to come along next year.

Followup 2: I was half expecting this would get some after-the-fact coverage, despite there being effectively no coverage ahead of time. The Portland Tribune chimes in with the first such article I've seen, and I'll post any similar reports here as I come across them.

wallpaper Golly. More Casualties Than I Realized.

The right has managed to pass itself off, at least in it's own eyes, as an enormous group of helpless victims ground under the heel of Liberal Oppression for nearly two decades now. Limbaugh really rose to prominence in the wake of Clinton's election, and he is certainly the first-ranked victim over the last five presidential terms. Until now. Imagine my shock to read that there weren't just 19 20 dead and injured in Saturday's massacre: the entire Tea Party is also in critical condition:

A nine-year-old girl lies in the morgue. A member of Congress faces a lifetime of struggle to recover from a bullet in the brain. A city is bracing itself for a string of funerals as it tries to fathom the carnage. But Trent Humphries says there is another innocent victim left by Jared Lee Loughner's killing of six people and wounding of 14 others in his assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. It is his Tea Party movement and, more particularly, his family. The killings, he says, are evolving into a conspiracy to destroy his organisation and silence criticism of the government.

And here's an example of the life-threatening vitriol that has sent a whack-a-loon political fiasco into the ICU:

"It's time to change your message of hate. If not, get out of politics because the American people are not going to take it any longer. We want our country back."

Brain damage is such a sad thing. But the subsequent delusions can be breathtaking in their grandeur.

wallpaper Twins Born in Different Years

What with dead birds, dead fish, and more dead birds, 2011 doesn't appear to be off to an auspicious start. But I found this amusing: a pair of twins were delivered near Chicago by Caesarian section, one in the last minute of 2010, the other in the first minute of 2011.

The twins' father, Brandon Lewis, said one of the doctors was counting the minutes down before the births, adding that it was "definitely the best" new year's countdown he had ever experienced.

wallpaper Thanks, Paul

Leave it to a Jewish economist to bring Christmas tears to my eyes. I feel strongly that Christmas and nationalism should be firmly separated, but history is history. It's all too easy for me to be pessimitic and cynical, and it does my heart good when another all-too-frequent (and all too frequently right) pessimist finds reason for optimism.

If this season isn't about finding hope, what is it about?

wallpaper Twelve-One

wallpaper 55 years ago, an unassuming woman refused to give up her seat on a bus. The first volley in the modern civil rights movement had been fired. (Quote below from Campanastan, with the further note, "...her refusal to surrender her seat ignited the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted over a year and left the public transit system with a crippling financial deficit.")

"People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."-- Rosa Parks, in Rosa Parks: My Story (1992)

Another notable item from today's anniversaries came when I was very nearly two months old: via the NYT, "On Dec. 1, 1959, representatives of 12 countries, including the United States, signed a treaty in Washington setting aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve, free from military activity." In many ways, this can be seen as merely symbolic. On the other hand, this treaty has endured for 51 years now, and has for the most part been respected. Given the cynicism and despair with which I regard humanity's awareness of and respect for our basic life support system, I can still muster a bit of hope when I witness such an enormous expanse of potential resources- and potential enrichment- set aside for scientific purposes. There is hope for a species and culture that has the awareness to say "We don't really understand this. Maybe we shouldn't mess with it for the time being."

This is World AIDS Day. (Note that the link is to the first page of several; click the "next" button for more.) I remember when the condition that came to be called AIDS was first getting a lot of attention: it was pretty scary. It was also one of the events that spurred reflection on my unthinking homophobia: I was stunned and quite upset when a person who I respected, admired, and frankly, had a bit of a crush on- despite the fact she was married- said she thought it was a perfectly natural response to an unnatural behavior. If gays were going to have unnatural sex, nature would respond by creating a way to wipe them out. First, "nature" and evolution don't work that way. To assume that the natural world has a "purpose" is the first step in concluding that you are that purpose- the self-centric, or anthropocentric universe, so to speak. Secondly, in a world populated with so many sociopaths, those who see no further than their own ends regardless of what those ends cost others, to assume that "nature" is going to go out of its way to punish and exterminate those whose sex lives you disapprove of strikes me as repellant. Other people's sex lives have no effect on mine; why shouldn't nature kill off bankers and other con artists, whose shenanigans really have hurt me? Answer: nature and evolution don't work that way.

At any rate, while the news could certainly be better, most of items I'm seeing on AIDS today are pretty positive. Even articles that are attempting to take a hard, realistic look at the costs- both human and economic- of this epidemic seem curiously positive and optimistic. Though again, this is not to say the costs, as horrific as they are, are no longer worth worrying over.

Today is also the first day of Hanukkah. As I commented on FaceBook last night, "Yeah, I'm a non-believer. But as we start this season of gloom and cold, I wish joy and contentment for all my brothers and sisters, regardless of their faiths or lack thereof."

So the take-away message for this first day of the last month of the first decade of this new millennium is one that I would hope we can celebrate every day: empathy, compassion, and as hard as it may be for me to actually practice it, optimism.