Ohio voyage

Last week­end I took a trip to vis­it Unisia in Ohio. Pic­tures are at my Fot­ki site.

When­ev­er I vis­it Unisia in Colum­bus, we try to go to the Colum­bus Zoo. It’s a real­ly nice zoo and it’s a fun way to spend a nice day.

The pet­ting zoo is always fun, since they have lambs and kid goats and Unisia seems to enjoy it more than many of the lit­tle peo­ple. I most­ly just tried to take pic­tures of sheep look­ing noble or cute.

After that much excite­ment, we sped over toward the ele­phant house. You see, last time we were there, we saw a baby ele­phant that was stun­ning­ly cute (pho­tos in a dif­fer­ent album). Now, it’s a few months old­er, and still cute.

The baby ele­phant was remark­ably hairy. If I had a prop­er tele­pho­to lens, you’d be look­ing at the fuzz on it’s back, but for now, you just have to believe me. It also liked play­ing around with it’s keep­ers, try­ing to sit on their laps and shak­ing hands with them. There’s some­things dis­turb­ing about the idea of any­thing weigh­ing 700 pounds sit­ting on you. Then again, giv­ing birth to some­thing that weighs 400 pounds is scary, as is the idea of gain­ing 17 pounds a week. And yet, ele­phants are any­thing but scary.

Odd­ly, this lion was even less scary. After we left the ele­phants, we wan­dered past lions and bears and prairie dogs and prong­horns and rhi­noc­er­os­es and wolves and some gib­bons hav­ing sex right in front of dozens of small chil­dren. There was many a “Look at the cute mon­keys. [beat] Actu­al­ly, look over there,” from parents.

After that excite­ment we had some lunch, corned beef sand­wich­es from a great Jew­ish deli.

Out the oth­er direc­tion, we hit the flamin­gos, then the rep­tile house. I got fas­ci­nat­ed by reflec­tions of kids. They had a python out for peo­ple to han­dle, and it’s always fun to see how peo­ple react to snakes. There’s an ini­tial fear, man­i­fest­ed in these boys as kid­ding, and then amaze­ment that the snake feels noth­ing like you expected.

They were feed­ing the pen­guins out­side, which is always fun to watch. Appar­ent­ly pen­guins mate for life. I won­der if peo­ple have done genet­ic stud­ies of the parent­age pat­terns. Since they spend months apart, there are copi­ous oppor­tu­ni­ties for extra-pair cop­u­la­tions, but that sep­a­ra­tion is after the eggs are hatched.

We fin­ished in the new Aus­tralia sec­tion. Kan­ga­roos rock, even though they pre­fer to rest all the time. They also have a koala, which they were, for some rea­son, feed­ing from a bot­tle. Inside, there was a kiwi, and a jun­gle cat, which moved too fast for the low light.

Fur­ther on, we saw orang­utans, a Komo­do drag­on, and some otters. Otters are beyond cool.

Even­tu­al­ly we saw a baby colobus mon­key, some trop­i­cal birds, and a baby goril­la. The moth­er had aban­doned it, so the nice lady you see in that pic­ture spent all day hold­ing it. That does­n’t sound total­ly awful, although she seemed to be ner­vous about shift­ing around even a lit­tle bit. It was very cute. It was hold­ing one hand in the oth­er, and one foot in the oth­er foot, and just rest­ing sweet­ly after, appar­ent­ly, stay­ing up all night. Even­tu­al­ly they’ll put back into the troop, whether to its moth­er or to a sur­ro­gate gorilla.

We fin­ished up by walk­ing past the okapi, but it was being secre­tive.

The next day we went to some caves at Hock­ing Hills. It’s this neat region that must have been scoured by glac­i­ers prob­a­bly some odd inter­ac­tion of sand­stone and ground­wa­ter left odd caves and val­leys. We had been to Rock House last time, and it was pret­ty much just us. Now it was packed, which is less thrilling.

We spent the after­noon at Ash Cave, which is this big half dome with a water­fall (as you can see). I saw some neat cray­fish and a cou­ple sala­man­ders. I also took a bunch of pic­tures of water.

We stopped at an orchard stand and got some cider and apples and apple but­ter. I also took pic­tures of var­i­ous gourds and pump­kins.

Torture

The Faf­blog is pissed. It seems Con­gress wants to out­source tor­ture. In the bill work­ing its way through the House that imple­ments a watered down ver­sion of the 9–11 Com­mis­sion’s rec­om­men­da­tions, some­one slipped an amend­ment that would allow depor­ta­tion of pris­on­ers to coun­tries that allow tor­ture with the intent that the pris­on­er be tortured.

Inter­na­tion­al law for­bids that, but we’re all neo-cons now, so we don’t care. At least, it seems that way some­times. Luck­i­ly, there are good peo­ple like Ed Markey stand­ing up against stu­pid­i­ty. He has an amend­ment that would reaf­firm our nation’s his­tor­i­cal oppo­si­tion to tor­ture, and for­bid such “extra­or­di­nary rendition.”

The post that start­ed this all points out that we already got in trou­ble for send­ing Maher Arar to Syr­ia, where he was born, to be tor­tured and beat­en for almost a year before being repa­tri­at­ed to Cana­da, where he is a cit­i­zen. Is it even worth point­ing out that no evi­dence exists that he ever did any­thing wrong?

No, because tor­ture is always bad. It nev­er serves a pur­pose, and it low­ers us to the lev­el of thugs. I’ve got bar­rels of steam­ing bile to spew over Abu Ghraib, but that was “unof­fi­cial.” This crap would be out in the open.

Ted at Crooked Tim­ber has a sam­ple email against the bad amend­ment. Every­one should write, email, fax and call your Con­gress-crit­ters. If this gets into the bill that comes to the floor, no sen­si­ble politi­cian will vote against it. This issue has to be resolved now.

Just in from Boyda

This morn­ing, Boy­da swung back at Ryun.

My oppo­nent has repeat­ed­ly lied in a des­per­ate attempt to mis­lead vot­ers about his fail­ures in Con­gress. This week, my cam­paign will high­light one of his lies to his con­stituents every day, and today, I’m start­ing with his biggest, most appalling lie of all: the insin­u­a­tion that I oppose the war on Osama bin Laden. Mr. Ryun, if you’ve sunk so low as to ques­tion my ded­i­ca­tion to pro­tect­ing Amer­i­ca, I think it’s clear that your ded­i­ca­tion to pre­serv­ing your seat in Con­gress far exceeds your ded­i­ca­tion to truth, to the war on ter­ror, or to the hon­est debate that pro­vides the back­bone of democracy.

Now we just have to get Ker­ry to hit back like this.

Jim Ryun and Corruption

In pok­ing around Jim Ryun for my pre­vi­ous post, I looked at what The Cen­ter for Respon­sive Pol­i­tics would tell me about the mon­ey race. As of the last fil­ings, he and Nan­cy Boy­da are pret­ty much tied. He has a bit more cash on hand, but both have tak­en in around half a mil­lion dollars.

Then I looked at who was giv­ing. It turns out that he got $10,000 from Amer­i­cans for a Repub­li­can Major­i­ty, Tom Delay’s lead­er­ship PAC. Those fol­low­ing the news know that var­i­ous peo­ple asso­ci­at­ed with Delay’s fundrais­ing have been indict­ed for mon­ey laun­der­ing in Texas. Var­i­ous com­pa­nies gave to ARM, which laun­dered the mon­ey and gave it to Tex­ans for a Repub­li­can Major­i­ty. TRM gave mon­ey to can­di­dates for the Texas leg­is­la­ture. This is all ille­gal because cor­po­rate con­tri­bu­tions are ille­gal under Texas law. So Delay’s cronies are alleged to have cir­cum­vent­ed that law by laun­der­ing mon­ey through these oth­er PACs.

Boy­da has called on Ryun to return that dirty mon­ey, and he should. He won’t.

Ryun has oth­er ques­tion­able con­tri­bu­tions. Wes­t­ar Ener­gy, a Tope­ka based ener­gy com­pa­ny that sup­plies my elec­tric­i­ty, got in big trou­ble last year for attempt­ing to bribe Delay and his allies to pass an amend­ment that would save Wes­t­ar big bucks. In the end, it all came out, the CEO got in hot water, and var­i­ous peo­ple gave back mon­ey. Not Ryun, though. When the CEO was indict­ed for defraud­ing the com­pa­ny and rate-pay­ers of mil­lions of dol­lars, Ryun kept his Wes­t­ar money.

Nan­cy Boy­da is right to go after this guy for tak­ing dirty mon­ey. You’re known by who you spend time with.

Boyda for Congress

Nan­cy Boy­da is run­ning for con­gress in the Kansas 2nd. She rocks pret­ty hard, for a for­mer Republican.

Jim Ryun is a do-noth­ing slack­er. I just saw his attack ad yes­ter­day, and it pissed me off. He claims that by oppos­ing the war in Iraq, Boy­da under­mined the war in Afghanistan.

If Boy­da is smart, and she is, she’ll come back say­ing that Ryun under­mined the war on al Qae­da by autho­riz­ing a war on Iraq before we caught bin Laden.

Ryun claims that Boy­da attacked first, which is true in some sense. She asked why Ryun vot­ed against a pro­pos­al to lim­it insur­ance com­pa­nies abil­i­ty to rip off sol­diers. It’s a good ques­tion, and one which Ryun should answer, and he cer­tain­ly can try. To claim that they won’t pull an ad that claims Boy­da sup­ports bin Laden is fac­tu­al though, is going way too far.

It says a lot that on his web­site (which I refuse to link to) he does­n’t have a link to his vicious attack ad.

I hope that Boy­da goes on the offen­sive. I hope she explains that noth­ing is more sup­port­ive of troops than mak­ing sure we’re right before we send them to their deaths. So far thir­teen Kansans have died in Iraq (scroll down). Ryun is on the Armed Ser­vices com­mit­tee, so he has direct over­sight of a war that is a dis­as­ter. I have more to say about that lat­er, but let’s just note that the plan for this war was flawed from day one, and Con­gress did too lit­tle over­sight of the process.

A Lex­is-Nex­is search reveals that there are 4 bills which Ryun wrote which were con­sid­ered in the House. The first is in 2001, so either he slept through his first few years, or Lex­is isn’t going back that far. The bills most­ly passed, and were meant to: name a post office after some guy, give a Pres­i­den­tial Medal of Free­dom to some guy, estab­lish a com­mis­sion to com­mem­o­rate the Brown vs. Board of Ed. rul­ing, and cre­ate Nation­al Speech and Hear­ing Month.

There are a total of 41 bills that he wrote which Lex­is knows of. All but four died in com­mit­tee. He sits on the Bugdet and Armed Ser­vices com­mit­tees, but nev­er seems to have writ­ten a bill to do any­thing for sol­diers. He rep­re­sents Fort Riley, a huge base, and in 8 years, nev­er wrote a bill on the military!

More on Ryun later.

Spring cleaning

Some lit­tle tid­bits are drib­bling out, just to get them off my chest.

It’s the Harvest Moon

Who knew? Har­vest moons are real.</p?

Har­vest Moon from the album “Har­vest Moon” by Neil Young.

Politics trump science in protecting Florida panthers

A sto­ry about how a US Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice employ­ee named Andy Eller is being fired because he is work­ing too hard to pro­tect Flori­da pan­thers. He want­ed to deny per­mits to devel­op­ers because the cumu­la­tive effect of their actions would harm the pan­ther, even if one or two acres here or there don’t mat­ter. Even if one does­n’t mat­ter, it can add up to a heap of difference.

Rather than shar­ing his alarm, Eller says man­agers at the wildlife ser­vice told him not to raise the cumu­la­tive effects issue when review­ing pro­posed devel­op­ment projects. “My super­vi­sor told me that if I did [raise the issue], he would give me a poor per­for­mance eval­u­a­tion,” he says.

Eller adds that he was also instruct­ed to use inflat­ed pan­ther pop­u­la­tion esti­mates and was warned against writ­ing any­thing in his reports sug­gest­ing a project might jeop­ar­dize the panthers.

Why we haven’t caught Bin Laden

Care of Brad DeLong’s invalu­able blog, this nugget out of the Times from Michael Scheur­er, head of the CIA bin Laden unit from 1996–1999. The fol­low­ing was excerpt­ed from a let­ter he wrote to the con­gres­sion­al over­sight intel­li­gence committees:

Sep­tem­ber 2004: In the CIA’s core, U.S.-based Bin Laden oper­a­tions unit today there are few­er Direc­torate of Oper­a­tions offi­cers with sub­stan­tive exper­tise on al-Qae­da than there were on 11 Sep­tem­ber 2001. There has been no sys­tem­at­ic effort to groom al-Qae­da exper­tise among Direc­torate of Oper­a­tions offi­cers since 11 Sep­tem­ber. Today, the unit is great­ly under­staffed because of a “hir­ing freeze,” and the rota­tion of large num­bers of offi­cers in and out of the unit every 60-to-90 days–a process in which expe­ri­enced offi­cers do less sub­stan­tive work and become train­ers for offi­cers who leave before they are qual­i­fied to sup­port the mis­sion. The excel­lent man­age­ment team now run­ning oper­a­tions against al-Qae­da has made repeat­ed, detailed, and on-paper pleas for more offi­cers to work against the al-Qaeda–and have done so for years, not weeks or months–but have been ignored.

Since Sep­tem­ber 11 there has been a hir­ing freeze in the bin Laden unit!? Why are we run­ning up a deficit if not to hire guys to find “the evil one”? Scheur­er, the once anony­mous author of “Impe­r­i­al Hubris,” writes “The pat­tern of deci­sion mak­ing I have wit­nessed seems to indi­cate a want of moral courage, an over­whelm­ing con­cern for career advance­ment, or an abject inabil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish right from wrong.” That seems aimed at CIA man­agers, but applies equal­ly well up and down the chain of command.

Mark Twain on our press corps

Some­how, I fell into read­ing bits and pieces of Mark Twain’s writ­ings. It start­ed with this piece linked from some mp3 blog. Then I start­ed pok­ing through the more obscure works at Project Guten­berg, and wound up with What Paul Bour­get Thinks of Us. I don’t know the pre­cise back­ground of this, but I did find some great quotes.

Twain grabbed me with this para­graph, which may be repack­aged for a per­ma­nent place­ment on this site:

I saw by his own inti­ma­tions that he was an Observ­er, and had a Sys­tem that used by nat­u­ral­ists and oth­er sci­en­tists. The nat­u­ral­ist col­lects many bugs and rep­tiles and but­ter­flies and stud­ies their ways a long time patient­ly. By this means he is present­ly able to group these crea­tures into fam­i­lies and sub­di­vi­sions of fam­i­lies by nice shad­ings of dif­fer­ences observ­able in their char­ac­ters. Then he labels all those shad­ed bugs and things with nice­ly descrip­tive group names, and is now hap­py, for his great work is com­plet­ed, and as a result he inti­mate­ly knows every bug and shade of a bug there, inside and out. It may be true, but a per­son who was not a nat­u­ral­ist would feel safer about it if he had the opin­ion of the bug. I think it is a pleas­ant Sys­tem, but sub­ject to error.

I like the mea­sured skep­ti­cism about our abil­i­ty to tru­ly under­stand the world, and his descrip­tion of nat­ur­al his­to­ry is as good as any, I suppose

Twain then pro­ceeds to a more pre­cise con­sid­er­a­tion of M. Bour­get, but could just as eas­i­ly be talk­ing about David Brooks:

The Observ­er of Peo­ples has to be a Clas­si­fi­er, a Grouper, a Deduc­er, a Gen­er­al­iz­er, a Psy­chol­o­giz­er; and, first and last, a Thinker. He has to be all these, and when he is at home, observ­ing his own folk, he is often able to prove com­pe­ten­cy. But his­to­ry has shown that when he is abroad observ­ing unfa­mil­iar peo­ples the chances are heav­i­ly against him. He is then a nat­u­ral­ist observ­ing a bug, with no more than a nat­u­ral­ist’s chance of being able to tell the bug any­thing new about itself, and no more than a nat­u­ral­ist’s chance of being able to teach it any new ways which it will pre­fer to its own.

Mov­ing on from Paul Bour­get’s unfor­tu­nate ten­den­cy to clas­si­fy peo­ple as “the Amer­i­can Coquette,” or “the Bobo in Par­adise,” Twain address­es anoth­er unfor­tu­nate prac­tice: credulity.

He entered those things in his note-book with­out sus­pi­cion, he takes them out and deliv­ers them to the world with a can­dor and sim­plic­i­ty which show that he believed them gen­uine. They throw alto­geth­er too much light. They reveal to the native the ori­gin of his find. I sup­pose he knows how he came to make that nov­el and cap­ti­vat­ing dis­cov­ery, by this time. If he does not, any Amer­i­can can tell him–any Amer­i­can to whom he will show his anec­dotes. It was “put up” on him, as we say. It was a jest–to be plain, it was a series of frauds. To my mind it was a poor sort of jest, wit­less and con­temptible. The play­ers of it have their reward, such as it is; they have exhib­it­ed the fact that what­ev­er they may be they are not ladies. M. Bour­get did not dis­cov­er a type of coquette; he mere­ly dis­cov­ered a type of prac­ti­cal jok­er. One may say the type of prac­ti­cal jok­er, for these peo­ple are exact­ly alike all over the world. Their equip­ment is always the same: a vul­gar mind, a puerile wit, a cru­el dis­po­si­tion as a rule, and always the spir­it of treachery.

In his Chap­ter IV. M. Bour­get has two or three columns grave­ly devot­ed to the col­lat­ing and exam­in­ing and psy­chol­o­giz­ing of these sor­ry lit­tle frauds. One is not moved to laugh. There is noth­ing fun­ny in the sit­u­a­tion; it is only pathet­ic. The stranger gave those peo­ple his con­fi­dence, and they dis­hon­or­ably treat­ed him in return.

But one must be allowed to sus­pect that M. Bour­get was a lit­tle to blame him­self. Even a prac­ti­cal jok­er has some lit­tle judg­ment. He has to exer­cise some degree of sagac­i­ty in select­ing his prey if he would save him­self from get­ting into trou­ble. In my time I have sel­dom seen such dar­ing things mar­ket­ed at any price as these con­science­less folk have worked off at par on this con­fid­ing observ­er. It com­pels the con­vic­tion that there was some­thing about him that bred in those spec­u­la­tors a quite unusu­al sense of safe­ty, and encour­aged them to strain their pow­ers in his behalf. They seem to have sat­is­fied them­selves that all he want­ed was “sig­nif­i­cant” facts, and that he was not accus­tomed to exam­ine the source whence they pro­ceed­ed. It is plain that there was a sort of con­spir­a­cy against him almost from the start–a con­spir­a­cy to freight him up with all the strange extrav­a­gances those peo­ple’s decayed brains could invent.

The lengths to which they went are next to incred­i­ble. They told him things which sure­ly would have excit­ed any one else’s sus­pi­cion, but they did not excite his. Con­sid­er this:

“There is not in all the Unit­ed States an entire­ly nude statue.”

If an angel should come down and say such a thing about heav­en, a rea­son­ably cau­tious observ­er would take that angel’s num­ber and inquire a lit­tle fur­ther before he added it to his catch. What does the present observ­er do? Adds it. Adds it at once. Adds it, and labels it with this inno­cent comment:

“This small fact is strange­ly significant.”

It does seem to me that this kind of observ­ing is defective.

In this long, but illu­mi­nat­ing pas­sage, Twain essen­tial­ly describes the prob­lems in jour­nal­ism today. On issues like the Iraq War, the 9–11 report and its uneasy rela­tion­ship with its con­gres­sion­al coun­ter­parts, stem cells, Abu Ghraib, John Ker­ry and George W. Bush’s time in uni­form, and a host of oth­er issues, the press response is sim­ply to report what was said, rather than to assess it’s accuracy.

Amer­i­cans fear nudi­ty, even in art

Date­line: Amer­i­ca. Well placed indi­vid­u­als stat­ed today that “there is not in all the Unit­ed States an entire­ly nude stat­ue.” This small fact is strange­ly sig­nif­i­cant. Great world pow­ers includ­ing the ancient Greeks and Romans have appre­ci­at­ed the artis­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of nude peo­ple. In many cas­es, the decline in this form of art cor­re­lates with the decline of those empires. The reign of Queen Vic­to­ria marked the end of the ascen­dan­cy of the British Empire, and is also not­ed for its repres­sion of pub­lic sexuality. …

And so forth. I ask lit­tle of the world, but I do ask that reporters dig deep­er. When John Ashcroft announces that his agents have avert­ed dozens of attacks and con­vict­ed bajil­lions of ter­ror­ists, I’d like the press to report that only after review­ing doc­u­ments. I’d like the press to announce that Pres­i­dent Bush released all of his mil­i­tary records only after deter­min­ing that all the records that must exist actu­al­ly do. I’d like arti­cles about Sam Brown­back­’s tout­ing of adult stem cell research to make clear not only that he is try­ing to under­mine embry­on­ic stem cell research, but that med­ical researchers are in broad agree­ment that both approach­es are impor­tant in the search for cures to dev­as­tat­ing dis­eases. The sto­ry isn’t “Brown­back touts adult stem cells,” it’s “Brown­back asserts false dichoto­my between adult and embry­on­ic stem cells.” It seems like reporters who are giv­en nick­names like “Steno Sue” are prac­tic­ing the same defec­tive style of observ­ing that Twain skew­ers so brilliantly.

When Twain writes the para­graph begin­ning, “But one must be allowed to sus­pect that M. Bour­get was a lit­tle to blame

him­self,” he gets to the heart of the prob­lem. We can and must blame admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials who lie to a reporter because “they seem to have sat­is­fied them­selves that all he want­ed was ‘sig­nif­i­cant’ facts, and that he was not accus­tomed to exam­ine the source whence they pro­ceed­ed.” But a jour­nal­ist who allows that per­cep­tion to stand is equal­ly cul­pa­ble. This is why peo­ple are so exer­cised about Robert Novak’s will­ing­ness to blow a CIA agen­t’s cov­er just because the White House leaked the infor­ma­tion to him. Many peo­ple have point­ed out that the sto­ry a good jour­nal­ist would have writ­ten was “White House attempts to leak ID of secret agent.” Many – per­haps a dozen or more – reporters received the leak. Many did the hon­or­able thing and refused to act on it. But the leak­er knew he must “exer­cise some degree of sagac­i­ty in select­ing his prey if he would save him­self from get­ting into trou­ble.” He only leaked to peo­ple who would look the oth­er way, and kept try­ing until some­one actu­al­ly ran the story.

This is also why the New York Times mea cul­pa was so frus­trat­ing. They admit­ted that they had been fooled as bad­ly as M. Bour­get – that there was, in Twain’s words, “a con­spir­a­cy to freight [it] up with all the strange extrav­a­gances those peo­ple’s decayed brains could invent”. The Times right­ly calls the “con­science­less folk” what they are, but refused to make Twain’s leap and call the kind of observ­ing defec­tive, even as the liars lied.