HinesSight

Don’t believe those longevity calculators

Lifespan-wise, I had some good news and bad news today. After reading about the Eons web site in TIME’s “New tricks for living past 96” article, I answered the questions on their longevity calculator.

The article said, “the longevity calculator is what has given the website traction.” It must be popular, as it took a long time for their site to bring up a new page. After I clicked on the final button I was left in suspense for what seemed like, well, eons.

What if the calculator said that I’d likely only live to 58? I’m going to be that age in just five weeks. Should I order that convertible Mini and try to cram in as much living as possible pronto? I felt like my life was hanging by a slow-server thread.

Whew! My Eons birthday cake had a “95” on it. Not bad, though the article says that living to 96 is a typical finding for boomers.

Well, I would have gotten there if I hadn’t checked “no calcium supplements” (even though I drink orange juice and soy milk with extra calcium every day) and “do take iron supplement” (even though the amount in my daily vitamin is small and I don’t eat meat).

So with a little fudging that gets me 96.5 years. Great! I can wait a few more years before I start to seriously embrace my end-of-life crisis.

Which brings me to the bad news. Stupidly, today I also read a New York Times article: “Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn’t Just in Genes.” The title seemed innocuous enough, but as I dug into the piece I began to feel less and less confident about my Eons-promised 95 year lifespan.

For scientists are learning that life is much more of a crap shoot than spuriously precise longevity calculators make it out to be. Identical twins, who share the same genetic heritage, on average die 10 years apart. Only 3 percent of how long you live compared to the average person can be explained by how long your parents lived. The article says:

The likely reason is that life span is determined by such a complex mix of events that there is no accurate predicting for individuals. The factors include genetic predispositions, disease, nutrition, a woman’s health during pregnancy, subtle injuries and accidents and simply chance events, like a randomly occurring mutation in a gene of a cell that ultimately leads to cancer.

The result is that old people can appear to be struck down for many reasons, or for what looks like almost no reason at all, just chance. Some may be more vulnerable than others, and over all, it is clear that the most fragile are likely to die first. But there are still those among the fragile who somehow live on and on. And there are seemingly healthy people who die suddenly.

Not so great. Damn the New York Times! My 95 years of promised life now looked a lot more precarious.

Oh, well. I’ll still try to slather on the sunscreen more regularly, which Eons says could add a quarter of a year to my life expectancy. That will balance out my continuing to drink caffeinated coffee. Supposedly this is chopping three months off of my lifespan, but I think Eons has its facts wrong here.

Anyway, I need somewhere to go when I get my convertible Mini. Cruising in to Starbucks for a non-fat grande vanilla latte on a warm sunny day with the top down sure seems like it’ll be life enhancing.

Now I just need to convince my wife of that. The convertible Mini part, I mean.

Stephen Colbert should put Jon Stewart on notice

Why? Obvious to anyone who watched the Emmys. I cringed each time The Daily Show beat out The Colbert Report for an award. That’s why The Daily Show needs to go On Notice.

Now, I realize it isn’t Stewart’s fault that his protégé has surpassed him in wit, intelligence, and entertainment value. Still, those Emmys that The Daily Show carted back to New York need to be cloned and shared with Colbert.

Just because the Emmy voters chose Barry Manilow (!!!) over The Colbert Report (how can these two even be uttered in the same breath?), doesn’t mean that this offense against television watching humanity has to stand unchallenged.

In one of the few genuinely entertaining moments during the Emmy Awards show, Colbert asked Stewart, “Could I hold some of yours?” Stewart said, “No.” That’s the truth, not truthiness. Here’s proof.

Inexcusable, Jon Stewart. So you’re on notice—in my Stephen Colbert-loving mind, at least. I already much prefer The Colbert Report to The Daily Show. Keep this up, Stewart, and you’ll be dead to me.

One evening Jon Stewart interviewed quasi-comedian Martin Short (boring) and Stephen Colbert’s guest was Janna Levin, a scientist (provocative). He asked her if being a theoretical physicist was like studying unicorn husbandry.

That line is worth an Emmy, for sure. Next year, Stephen.

Progressives are battling for reality

It’s worth fighting for: reality. Indeed, the only thing really worth fighting for. My version of scripture says, “And what profiteth a man, if he wins all the world, and loses reality?”

Right-wingers are out to overturn a vision of the world that has served us exceedingly well since the Enlightenment: there is an objective reality that, broadly speaking, is the domain of “science,” and there is a subjective reality that, broadly speaking, is the domain of “art.”

Thus we have the sciences and the arts. We have physics and we have mystics. We have demonstrable facts and we have improvable beliefs. We have the predictable orbits of planets and we have the wild improvisations of lovers.

This is the way the world is. But it isn’t the way the Bush administration, conservative talk radio, and the Christian right want it to be. They seek to turn reality upside down, making the objective world subjective and the subjective world objective.

Crazy.

Weapons of mass destruction in Iraq either were there or not there. The objective fact is that no substantive evidence of them was discovered. Yet 72% of those who voted for Bush in 2004 believed otherwise. They were wrong. Kerry voters were much more likely to be right.

This shows that you can fool a lot of people some of the time. But reality wins out in the end. It’s too powerful to be kept down for long. The Dark Ages didn’t last forever. And the American people will get their wits about them again. Soon, I’m confident.

We’re seeing evidence of this in Bush’s continued low approval ratings, notwithstanding his tired attempts to resurrect the “we’ve got to fight them over there so we won’t have to fight them here” lie. Also in the courtroom and ballot box defeats of intelligent design, another example of subjective belief attempting to masquerade as objective reality.

Most people understand the difference between truth and illusion. They know that truth manifests in various guises, some outward and some inward. Not all of reality can be known by science, not by a long shot.

Poetry, music, painting, emotions, religiosity, philosophy, imagination, dreams—these are as much a part of being human as mathematics, logic, research, statistics, reason, observation, experimentation, deduction.

However, the social fabric is threatened when attempts are made to elevate the subjective above the objective in public policy, when truthiness is valued over truth in making decisions that affect society as a whole.

Recently Republican Rep. Katherine Harris of Florida, who is running for the U.S. Senate, said that if Christians are not elected to political office, politicians will “legislate sin” and that God does not intend this country to be “a nation of secular laws.”

Harris is entitled to her own beliefs, as unfounded as they may be. However, neither she nor anyone else is entitled to substitute their subjective view of the cosmos for how things really are.

Human-caused global warming is real. So is evolution, the promise of stem cell research, the dangers of massive budget deficits, looming Medicare shortfalls, and systemic problems in Iraq that show no sign of abating.

Come November I’m betting that most voters will cast their ballots for reality. After six years of neo-con efforts to pull the wool over our eyes, this nation deserves to see clearly again.

Just when I thought right-wing talk radio couldn’t get stupider

I was proved wrong by a fill-in host for Mark Levin (another “Mark,” who I assume was Mark Simone). This afternoon I heard him blabbing about how Google has purposely jiggered with its search engine so typing in “failure” brings up, as the #1 result, the official biography of George Bush.

Simone claimed that this shows the left-wing bias of Google, which he said has Al Gore on its board of directors. That’s false. Gore is a Senior Advisor to Google and a member of Apple’s board.

But he was correct about the “failure” search. And it’s also true that typing in “liar” offers up the official biography of Tony Blair as the top-ranked result. However, these aren’t nefarious Google tricks.

They’re the clever product of a Google Bomb—an attempt by outsiders to influence Google search results through fair means.

Simone could have found this out himself in a few seconds, just as I did by Googling “george bush failure google result.” He was having a great time doing Google searches on air, looking for embarrassing “Clinton” or “Gore” results.

Obviously he never thought of saving himself some embarrassment by fact-checking his ridiculous claims about Google’s slanting of search results before he spouted them.

Amazingly, when Simone eventually learned from callers about Google Bombing, he still blamed Google. A perfect example of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness.” It feels so right to blame Google, rather than his own ignorance about how its search engine works.

At first Simone castigated Google for purposely manipulating search results. Then when he learned that Google didn’t manipulate the “failure” and “liar” results, he castigated the company for not stepping in and manipulating the results so Bush and Blair’s biographies would fall off the top of the hit list.

I think they belong right where they are. If you want to learn about a failure and a liar, George Bush and Tony Blair are excellent examples to start with.

Osama Bin Laden’s mistress, a topless womanist

Kola Boof claims that she was Osama Bin Laden’s mistress in the mid-1990s. In her book Boof reveals juicy details about Bin Laden’s sexual and cultural predilections.

From a Harper's excerpt I learned that Boof’s Al Qaeda boy toy made her dance naked to Van Halen; he didn’t know the difference between being vicious and being tender (shock!); he enjoyed hitting the hookah before sex; his favorite TV shows were The Wonder Years, Miami Vice, and MacGyver; and he adored Whitney Houston so much, he wanted to give her a mansion in Khartoum.

I believe it all. Sure, there are skeptics who doubt her story just because of minor details like the fact that she claims she performed sex acts on a group that included Bin Laden and several of his lieutenants, some of whom were dead or in prison at the time.

Like I said, details, details.

Guess I’m a sucker for an African womanist who proudly poses topless on her web site. She says that publicity and vanity have nothing to do with it.

Rather, Boof explains, “"I am topless to honor my mothers and grandmothers, my own African womenfolk who were always bare breasted in the sun and who gave birth to this whole world.”

I definitely can get behind her religion (in front of it too). She writes:

They [her relatives] were naked because it pleases God…and I do believe that it's an abomination against God for any woman's breasts to be covered. So I have it written in my book contracts that I must appear topless on the back covers of my books. I also do it because it's not Christian and it's not Islamic. I truly want to plant a seed in favor of women creating their own institution of religion, because that's all religions are-institutions.

Ms. Boof, if you start up a religion where all the women are topless in church, sign me up as the first male convert. I’ll be happy to hold the collection plate as the worshippers pass by. With my eyes humbly cast downward, of course.

My bathroom habits: facts about flax

After years of blogging, it occurred to me that I’ve never written about my bathroom habits. This oversight needs to be corrected. After all, some of my most satisfying moments occur on the toilet.

Now, you might be thinking, “Brian, you need to get a life.” But going to the bathroom is part of my life. And since I’m a vegetarian, it takes up a larger share of my day than it does for most people.

Yes, it’s a scientific fact. Vegetarians and vegans kick butt, so to speak, when it comes to the frequency of bowel movements (detailed BM statistics for veggies and meat-eaters can be found here).

I’d always suspected this. Normal bowel movement frequency ranges from three times a week to three times a day. I’m at the high end of normal, that’s for sure. (It’s nice to be special). Without nasty heavy animal flesh clogging up my intestines, food flows freely through me.

Sometimes, too freely.

I recently realized that I’d overdone my flax consumption. For a long time I’ve taken a flax oil capsule twice a day. Then for breakfast I started eating an organic cereal with flax seeds in it. Concerned that I still wasn’t getting all the potential benefits from flax, I started adding two tablespoons of ground flax seed to the cereal.

I enjoy my sit-down bathroom time—that’s when I read my TIME, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report subscriptions—but I came to realize that I was going to have to bring in a few more magazines to get through a week’s reading if I kept eating all those flax seeds.

For according to the Mayo Clinic flaxseed and flaxseed oil have laxative properties. That’s great if you’re on the low end of the bowel movement frequency bell curve. However, if you’re a vegetarian high-scorer like I am, too much flax seed is going to put you over the top. Or rather, on the top of the toilet seat.

Moderation in all things. Including bowel movements. However, more often is better than less often when it comes to preventing colorectal cancer and decreasing the risk of Parkinson’s Disease. Plus, I can testify to how frequent trips to the bathroom keep you up to date on current events, if you store the right reading material next to the toilet.

Most of us yearn for normalcy, though. Check out the Bathroom Habits Survey and learn how you compare to over a million other people who were also willing to share (anonymously) what goes on behind the bathroom door. Which is always closed by 51% of respondents.

And 82% always or sometimes inspect what they’ve left in the bowl before flushing. I’m normal!

Follow Up: steal this great idea for a website

I dearly hope that someone will take this idea for a “Follow Up” website and run with it all the way to Internet stardom. Wouldn’t you visit a site that kept track of stories that fall off the media-frenzy radar before the final chapter is written? (to mix metaphors)

I sure would. Consider these “what ever happened with…” examples:

--What ever happened with the investigation into the shelling of the UN observer outpost on the Israel-Lebanon border? At first Kofi Annan accused the IDF of deliberately targeting the outpost. The Israelis claimed it was an innocent mistake, notwithstanding repeated urgent calls to them from the UN force to stop the bombing. I haven’t seen any follow up stories on this incident.

--What ever happened with the inquiry into the attack on the car that was carrying the Italian journalist who had just been freed from her Iraqi captors? American troops fired on the car, even though the Italians claimed that advance notice had been given to those manning the checkpoint. An investigation was supposed to get to the bottom of why a bodyguard (as I recall) was killed. I’ve never seen any mention of it.

--What ever happened with the killing of many Iraqis in a remote province who locals said were innocent people celebrating a wedding, and the U.S. said were insurgents planning dastardly deeds? I don’t remember the details of this attack, but it caught my attention at the time. The Army promised to find out what really happened. I assumed Iraq war reporters then would tell us. Guess I assumed wrong.

There needs to be a better balance between the sensational beginning of a dramatic story, and the low-key fizzling out of subsequent details that often are more important than the tantalizing first impressions.

Recently Fox News splashed “Terror suspects caught with 1,000 cell phones” all over their red, white, and blue telecast. When it turned out that the Muslim guys were just trying to make a few bucks by re-selling the phones and had no connection with any terrorist organizations, I didn’t see nearly as big a follow up splash.

So some enterprising web-savvy news junkie needs to get moving with my great idea. If he or she wants to call it the Hines Follow Up Report, I won’t object. And if 10% of the advertising revenues flow my way, I really won’t object.

Unfortunately, FollowUp.com already is taken. Good name, but not at all what I’m looking for.

Measure 37 proving to be Oregon nightmare

Just as those of us who opposed the dismantling of Oregon’s land use laws predicted, Measure 37 has turned out to be a nightmare.

People voted for it because they thought little old ladies would finally be able to build a family homestead on acreage put off-limits by rigid zoning restrictions.

Some of that is going on. Which is fine. I don’t have a problem with putting a single home on land that turned into “exclusive farm use” after a couple bought it as “rural residential.” But I do object to putting a pumice mine and geothermal generating plant in the Newberry Crater National Monument, as a Portland man wants to do.

Ted Shroeder, who lives in northeast Oregon’s Grande Ronde Valley, says that he voted for Measure 37. He also says:

If you polled a lot of people who voted for Measure 37, none of them voted for these mega-projects that are going to create multimillionaires. … People got bamboozled, they got suckered in. … I kick myself for being so naïve.

A neighbor of Shroeder wants to build 335 homes on 1,400 acres of prime farmland. Not exactly the little old lady situation that Oregonians in Action deceptively promulgated in their 2004 political advertising. Shroeder adds:

The way Measure 37 was presented to the public, prior to the election, they paraded the little old lady who had 20 acres in the ads, they had (her) saying, ‘Well, my retirement was going to (rely on the) 20 acres, and I was going to sell five acres, and the land-use laws won’t let me.’

… The other ad had to do with families who had farmed, say, a 300-acre parcel for a lot of years and (regulations prevented their children from putting) a house on five acres so they could stay on the farm. That was the appeal they made to the public.

… There are people like me who aren’t sophisticated voters, who don’t read the fine print in the voter’s pamphlets. In my naiveté, I thought I was voting to help relieve those sorts of situations.

Measure 37 is pitting neighbor against neighbor. Some Yamhill County residents thought they were moving to the country when they bought rural land. Now a Measure 37 claimant wants to build a 30-acre subdivision next to them. The rights of the many are getting trampled by the few.

A Hillsboro couple want to keep farming on property that has been in the family for over 100 years. Now a Measure 37 claimant wants to put 54 homes on 54 acres next to their land. They’re understandably worried that residents of this subdivision will object to farm noise, smells, and chemical sprays.

Scariest of all, property rights zealots are trying to export Measure 37-like initiatives to other western states. These efforts are mostly funded by out of state sources, as this excellent article by a concerned Montanan, Ray Ring, points out. Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Washington are in danger of joining the Oregon nightmare.

Ring cautions:

The initiatives have titles like “Protect Our Homes,” “The Home Owners Protection Effort” and “People’s Initiative to Stop the Taking of Our Land”—as if the government is about to come in with bulldozers to sweep everyone off their property.

But here’s how the initiatives would work: If you could fit 20 houses on your land, plus a junkyard, a gravel mine and a lemonade stand, and the government limits you to just six houses and lemonade, then the government would have to pay you whatever profit you might have made on the unbuilt 14 houses, junkyard and mine. If the government can’t or won’t pay you, then it would have to drop the regulations.

Measure 37 has hit close to our home. Leroy Laack wants to put 80 homes on 215 rolling acres next to the Spring Lake Estates area where we live. He shares ownership of the property with other people who don’t qualify for a Measure 37 claim.

But one of the quirks of Measure 37 is that if Laack were to be compensated under this law for supposed lost value owing to a government regulation imposed after he bought it, if he owned a 25% interest the value of the compensation would be based only on his share of the property—one fourth.

However, if land use laws are waived instead of compensation being paid, then 100% of the property can be developed. That doesn’t seem right, but this is how Measure 37 is being interpreted in Oregon.

So even though a majority ownership of the 215 acres near us is by people who don’t qualify for a Measure 37 claim, the single authorized claimant gets to develop the whole damn thing.

Crazy. This is the nightmare of Measure 37. It doesn’t make sense, but, so far, you can’t wake up from it. Hopefully Oregonians will arouse soon and make changes to this disastrous law whose implications few people understood before voting for it.

In Tango, as in marriage, the man is always wrong

Last night our dance instructor reminded us of the Tango truth: “The man is always wrong.” A murmur of agreement was heard from the women. I could hear several men mutter, “Just like marriage.”

Carlos, a guest instructor a few months back, gave us the same message. Guess I’ll have to live with it. Not that I disagree with the adage, especially after repeatedly stepping on Laurel’s feet as we tried to learn some cross foot moves.

Tango, Carlos told us, is just a man walking with a woman so she will fall in love with him. At least during the time she’s dancing with him. I don’t think any of the women in the class fell in love with me yesterday.

A few hours ago Laurel made a point of showing me the bruise on her foot where a variety of unlovable partners, including moi, had stepped on her. I feel good that I wasn’t the only one. I’ll feel better when I can step cross footed anywhere near as smoothly as Peter, our instructor, can.

You can try this at home, even if you know nothing about Tango. Stand toe to toe with your partner, man’s hands on woman’s shoulders, woman’s hands on man’s chest (guess you could reverse things if you’re intimate with each other.)

Man steps forward, woman steps backward. With parallel stepping, you’re both stepping with the same side leg as you face each other. If the man steps forward with his left leg, the woman steps backward with her right leg. Pretty simple. Feels natural.

With cross stepping, both the man and woman step with the same side leg in the absolute sense. Right and right. Or left and left. So as the woman steps back with her right leg, the man will step forward with his right leg. Not so simple. Feels unnatural.

Especially when I’d step forward with my right leg and bang into Laurel’s left leg. Which, entirely appropriately, was directly in my way. The woman, you see, always steps naturally. It’s the man who has to switch step his way from parallel to cross stepping.

The goal is to step between her legs and, if you wish, trap the forward foot. Or push the foot gently to one side so the woman has to step over it in one of those cool yin-yang “dance of love” moves.

Not so cool is the move that I kept repeating over and over, the one where I either step on Laurel’s retreating foot because I’ve moved too quickly, or on her stationary foot because I haven’t stepped between her legs.

Observing the semi-chaos on the dance floor, at one point Peter shut the music off and taught us another Tango truism.

“Guys, if you’re tentative and don’t step in confidently, your partner will do the same—step back tentatively. Then you’re going to bang legs and step on feet. You’ve got to lead boldly so she knows what to do. Also, don’t be afraid to be thigh to thigh. In some dances it’s bad form to touch legs. In Tango, it’s a good thing. If the man is in touch with the woman’s leg as he steps, it’s easy to move it out of the way.”

After that, we carried on. Sometimes the cross stepping felt good. Sometimes it didn’t. Just like life.

And also just like life, for an hour and fifteen minutes every man in the room was responsible when something went wrong. The women just kept on stepping backward naturally. The men had to figure out how to stay in touch with their partners and move as gracefully as possible with them.

Eventually I got used to always being wrong. After thirty-four years of being married, I’ve had lots of practice. I only wish that everything else in Tango came so easily.

I didn’t know strangling was part of poker

Last night I played poker for the first time since high school. And thus also for the first time without being drunk. I learned a lot about five-card draw from our poker-savvy neighbors, Tim and Jan.

From the other player at the table besides me, Laurel, I learned that it isn’t a good idea to take almost all of your wife’s chips on the last hand of the game. Unless you enjoy being strangled when the chips are redeemed.

I’m considering becoming a poker pro. At nine p.m. I put in $5. At ten fifteen I got back $8.65. That’s almost a 75% return on investment. In a bit over an hour. At this rate I should be a gazillionaire within a few weeks after I start playing poker professionally.

First, though, I humbly recognize that I need to do a little fine-tuning on my game. For example, my crutch last night was a print-out that Tim kindly provided me of winning poker hands in rank order.

Whenever I had what seemed like a good hand, I’d lean over and check where, say, three of a kind stood in the grand poker order of things. I have a feeling that I won’t be able to get away from that when I turn pro. At the least, it might lessen my mojo with the other players.

Leaving aside such minor barriers between me and poker playing stardom as my current shaky knowledge of what constitutes a winning hand, it’s evident to me that the cosmos is on my side.

I was up only a few chips until Jan announced, “It’s after ten. This will be the last hand.” I looked at my five cards. An ace of clubs and king of spades seemed worth keeping. I discarded the other three cards.

Picking up the replacements, I almost screamed “Wow!” Then I remembered something about a poker face. Three deuces. The Poker God is great!

Tim and Jan quickly folded, leaving me mano a womano with Laurel. I suckered her in with a quarter (blue chip), then threw in the big guns (two black chips, one dollar!) when I could tell that she had taken the bait.

With a smile she threw down her cards. Two pair. I smiled bigger and showed her my three of a kind. Laurel reached for the chips. Tim and I simultaneously grabbed her hand.

“Three of a kind beats two pair,” we told her. Laurel couldn’t believe it. She figured that four good cards should beat three good cards.

What a neophyte. I felt so superior. I’d learned that three of a kind beat two pair a whole thirty minutes previous, during one of my frequent perusals of the cheat sheet.

Vegas, here I come. As soon as I strengthen my neck muscles. From my experience, that’s important if you intend to play winning poker.

Once more, with feeling: “Oregon is not a high tax state!”

Today, on KPAM’s Victoria Taft show, I listened to Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron Saxton blather on about out-of-control state spending.

That’s a fiction. I proved so in my April post, “Oregon is not a high tax state.”

In my blogger delusionality, I figured that would be the end of it. Politicians and talk show hosts would have learned the truth. My post would have changed the world.

Sadly, the message obviously hasn’t gotten through. So I’ll sing my song again.

Oregon ranks 36th out of the 50 states in state and local taxes as a percentage of per capita income. Colorado is #37, and it already has a cap on state government spending.

So where is the need for the Oregon TABOR (Taxpayer Bill of Rights) ballot measure that would starve state spending and cut necessary services like education and law enforcement?

There isn’t any need. Even Ron Saxton knows that. He isn’t supporting TABOR. Yet he told Victoria Taft that if the measure passes and he’s Governor, he could happily live within the spending limit.

Saxton must have taken campaigning lessons from John Kerry. He isn’t for TABOR, but he’s not against it either.

The most nonsensical words that I heard Saxton utter (and many competed for this distinction) were in response to a Taft question: “Could you ever see yourself raising taxes?”

Saxton said that he couldn’t, because taxes shouldn’t be raised in a down economy, and taxes should be cut in a booming economy. So there never is a reason to raise taxes.

Well, mathematics isn’t my strong suit. But it seems evident that if Oregon (A) kept taxes the same in bad times and (B) cut taxes in good times, eventually the state tax rate would be zero. Oregon would have starved itself to death, just like an anorexic who believes that she (or he) never can be too thin.

Yet you can be too thin. That’s why anorexia nervosa is a disease, not a desirable lifestyle.

In the same fashion, tax-cut anorexics (otherwise known as right-wing Republicans) have the delusion that government spending can go on a limitless spending diet without ever incurring any ill effects.

I’d like to ask Saxton, “Could you ever see yourself spending more of your household income on health care?” I assume he’d say “Yes.”

If not, I’d follow up with: “What if your wife or child fell ill and needed expensive medical treatment that wasn’t covered by insurance? Would you be willing to spend more money to save the life of a loved one?” Almost all of us would. All of us who have more than an ounce of human compassion.

So Ron, what if it was your beloved state of Oregon that had fallen on hard times and needed more money to cure health, education, environmental, transportation, or other serious problems?

No one should vote for a candidate who says that he’ll never raise taxes. Especially when he lives in a state that already has a below-average state and local tax burden. Fall another ten places in the rankings, from 36 to 46, and Oregon will enjoy the company of Alabama.

Whoopee.

You can be too thin. And you also can be too tax-starved. Don’t vote for Saxton. Or for the TABOR measure. Keep Oregon lean, not anorexic.

[Next day update: just came across this excellent Daily Kos piece about TABOR-like state spending limitations. It hits on the same themes I did, and points out what a disaster the Colorado experience has been.]

Who’s to blame for Black Crater fire? Bush, of course.

Now that the 9,400 acre Black Crater fire near Sisters, Oregon is nearly contained, the local weekly is asking why the fire wasn’t stopped when it was 50 to 100 acres in size, before it threatened residential communities.

The Nugget newspaper’s answer: lack of resources. Sisters District ranger Bill Anthony is quoted:

“The fix is, obviously, to make more resources available,” said Anthony. And that would take a considerable ramping up of funding. “I would say that that discussion needs to be between the citizens and the public representatives that represent them,” Anthony said.

My wife and I are part owners of a cabin in nearby Camp Sherman. Last Sunday we drove into Sisters and strolled through the Summer Faire in Village Green Park. The Forest Service had set up a table with maps and other information about the Black Crater fire.

I stopped to chat. A Forest Service employee told me pretty much what the Nugget reported. They threw as many resources at the fire as they could, which wasn’t much. For example, only one helicopter was available when the lightning-caused fire had just gotten going in the Three Sisters Wilderness area.

Bill Anthony believes that more helicopters are needed. They can drop 2,000 gallons of water on a spot fire with precision, and refill from a lake or pond within minutes. The Nugget article goes on to say:

It more heavy helicopters are to be made available, and if more fire crews are to be trained and put in the field, it will take funding action in Congress, where priorities including war, homeland security and the deficit make ramping up spending a tricky political proposition.

Near the end of my conversation with the Forest Service employee I said, “It sounds to me like the problem is President Bush.” The response from someone who should know: “I wouldn’t disagree with that.”

Shooting the breeze with the proprietor of a Sisters business later in the day, I got the same opinion. He thought it was ridiculous that the Forest Service had to scramble to find equipment to fight several central Oregon fires while hundreds of billions of dollars has been spent to fight an unnecessary war in Iraq.

So, yes, it can be reasonably argued that Bush is responsible for the failure to limit the size of the Black Crater fire. If his administration hadn’t squandered Clinton’s budget surplus on the Iraq war and tax cuts for the rich, there would be plenty of money to meet pressing national needs. Such as fighting forest fires.

In the same issue of the Nugget, Chuck Humphreys expresses his opinion in a letter to the editor:

If I were to draw a lesson from this experience, beyond reaffirming my faith in the goodness of people, it is that we systematically underfund our public efforts to manage wildfires. As others have written, it is easier and cheaper to manage fires when they are small—but we often cannot do this because there aren’t sufficient resources to go around.

The answer may be to rethink our public priorities—it is more than a little ironic that our government opens its purse to spend billions on destruction abroad, but is so miserly when it comes to being more constructive at home.

Fortunately, the Black Crater fire (which ultimately cost more than $7 million to control, when stopping it at 100 acres would have cost about $1 million) ended up having some bright spots. A lot of brushy undergrowth burned without destroying many big Ponderosas, which will reduce the danger of future fires.

One dark spot, though, was Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron Saxton trying to gain political advantage from the fire while it was still burning. He tried to blame Gov. Kulongoski for not reducing fire risks in the state.

Saxton should talk to federal Forest Service employees before he shoots his uninformed mouth off. And read the Sisters newspaper. Then, blame his Republican comrade, George W. Bush.

Simple pleasures on the Metolius

This is the title of an article in the August 2006 issue of Sunset magazine. Read it. If you’ve never been to central Oregon’s Metolius River, it’ll make you want to go. If you’re there already, like we are, it’ll help explain the smile on your face.

Not that smiles need explanation. And not that every moment on the Metolius is pleasurable.

Take, for example, simply standing in the 48 degree water. The air was 90 degrees when Laurel did that this afternoon, on a hike downriver from the Wizard Falls fish hatchery. Yet a few seconds after I took this photo, she wasn’t standing there anymore.

Serena enjoys the water a lot more. Might have something to do with being half-Lab. And being covered with fur.

You can fly fish from the banks. Most fisherpeople don’t. They wade right in. Not knowing much about fly fishing, I don’t know why. It’s sort of a mystery to me why people catch fish just to let them go. It’s not a mystery why they come to the Metolius.

A solitary discarded shoe. It could tell a story, I’m sure. But probably not a very interesting one.

Clear calm cold water. If I were a trout, I’d love this place. Which they do, I’m told.

On both sides of the river there’s a stretch of private property that the trail skirts, going up and away from the water. Some basic shelters face a meadow. Like the article says, simple pleasures.

On the “up and away” part of the hike we came to a tree threesome: one dead, two alive. I pictured one of the standing trees saying to the other, “Honey, for some reason I don’t feel as close to you anymore.”

I prefer to walk along the river. But there’s a forest charm to the detour around the private land.

The Metolius, meandering.

Here’s how a true Stoic stands in the Metolius. However, following in Laurel’s frigid footsteps, I have to admit that it wasn’t for long.

U.S. military in Iraq can’t even count

It’s no wonder things are going so bad in Iraq. The U.S. military can’t even count.

Images taken from drones flying over the recent massive pro-Hezbollah rally in Baghdad supposedly showed that 14,000 people attended the demonstration.

The organizer of the march, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mehdi Army, said the crowd totaled one million.

So who are you going to believe? I’d say, “none of the above.”

An Iraqi working for the Los Angeles Times estimated there were at least 100,000 demonstrators. Tellingly, the story in which this estimate appeared said, “American military officials, eager to play down support for Hezbollah, put the figure at 14,000.”

USA Today reported hundreds of thousands. ABC News reported hundreds of thousands. Local police reported hundreds of thousands. The NY Times reported tens of thousands, noting that the protestors filled twenty blocks of a wide boulevard and dozens of side streets.

This is a small sidebar to the increasingly nasty Middle East situation. But once again it indicates how Bush administration policy either is disturbingly incompetent, or disturbingly dishonest. Or, both.

Bush doesn’t like facts. He wants the world to be how he wants the world to be, not how it is. It’d be nice if only 14,000 Iraqis turned out for al-Sadr’s rally. So that’s how the U.S. military made the count turn out. Wrong.

Just like so many other Bush administration policies. When you aren’t willing to see what’s really going on, it’s tough to change reality to your liking.

Images of 2006 Salem Dog Parade

Once again this year I guaranteed a loss for Serena in the Best Costume category by simply tying a bandana around her neck and heading off to yesterday's Salem Dog Parade.

I’d considered entering the dog/human look-alike contest, but couldn’t decide whether to dye my hair blonde or Serena’s fur gray. But this couple looked muy adorable even with different colored coiffures.

T-shirts and micro-skirts were, as always, popular on larger dogs. Next year we’re going to dress Serena up properly, I almost promise.

If I was an Oregon State fan, I’d caption this photo “A dog of an Oregon cheerleader.”

Anyone allergic to Cute needs to stay away from a dog parade.

Laurel, Official Humane Society Dog Walker Volunteer, took a shelter dog to the parade. “Shaggy” (don’t know its real name) attracted a lot of attention. Be nice if it’d pay off with an adoption.

A fetching Oriental look. For future dog dressing reference, I asked the owner how she was able to keep the hat on. She had a big roll of the secret in her hand: duct tape.

Pink ballerina skirts on big white dogs. A big cliched, but classic.

When I met up with Laurel at the end of the parade Serena showed just a teeny bit of jealousy toward Shaggy. All in good dog play fun, though. Sort of.

Here are two contestants in the Waggiest Tail contest. The little dog on the left won. While standing there taking photos, the M.C. asked me to show off Serena’s tail-wagging stuff. Pretty pathetic. Big tails just don’t move like little tails.

Lastly, I’ll fight against every instinct to the contrary and throw in a photo Laurel took of me and (half of) Serena. For the past few years, every time I look at a photo of myself I think, “Nick Nolte mug shot.”

Bush finally embraces sustainability. For a bad reason.

I’m still trying to get my head around George Bush’s new love for sustainability, a Green word decidedly at odds with this envirophobic president. Yet there he is these days, calling for a sustainable this and that.

The problem is, the “this and that” Bush wants to sustain is the war in Lebanon and its extension to Syria and Iran.

Sure, he speaks about his desire for a sustainable cease fire in the Middle East, but what Bush really means is that he wants Israel to keep pounding Hezbollah (and innocent civilians) until fire from across the border ceases, because anyone who could pull a trigger is dead.

Being a firm believer in sustainability, I see this as dismally sad.

Bush ignores the clear evidence for human-caused global climate change, which threatens the ability of Earth to sustain our lives. Bush ignores massive trade and budget deficits that have mushroomed during his administration, which threaten the sustainability of the U.S. economy. Bush stifles cutting edge medical research on embryonic stem cells, which offers much promise of sustaining lives that now are cut short by death or debilitating diseases.

Yet when he wants to keep a war going that is devastating Lebanon, a country that was on the verge of embracing a genuine democracy, Bush finally finds his voice for “sustainable” — speaking about it for all the wrong reasons.

There are times when it makes sense to look far into the future. I’ve just mentioned three: when the Earth is warming dangerously; when deficits threaten the economy; when meaningless religious dogma is favored over advancing medical science.

But there also are times when action needs to be taken, now. If a street gang is killing passersby, you don’t conduct a sociological analysis of what made them turn to violence before you call 911 and get police on the scene. Likewise, when thirty-seven children are killed in a war that no longer has a discernible purpose, you don’t babble on about finding a “sustainable” way of ending the violence.

You end the violence. Now.

President Bush, I’m all for you getting on the sustainability bandwagon. However, you need to learn what is worth sustaining, and what isn’t. You believe that its fine and dandy to sustain the killing of innocents.

You’re wrong.