Welcome, 2009

Except for the most wonderful arrival of D in May, I can't say this has been my favorite year.  It wasn't all bad, but it wasn't exactly roses either.

It was pretty sad to watch the housing market and the economy slowly and obviously tank in front of my eyes while the talking heads all claimed this was just a blip or that was just a minor correction.  W won't be missed by many.  It's been pretty embarrassing to have him represent me to the rest of the world, and only to have him become more and more impotent and ineffectual as everybody wished desperately for someone else.  It's sad to see that we are still in two wars, neither of which appear to be close to an end, one of which has not even achieved the goals of getting rid of the Taliban and finding the ass who started this whole mess in the first place.

I'm fully aware that we'll pull through this.  We always do.  When backed into a corner, we've quite often shown ourselves to be a pretty resilient country.  Hopefully, Obama will be able to help channel that energy in a positive direction.  I'm am hopeful that he will at least be able to put a positive and more generally appreciated face on the country.  I feel like he's got a more realistic world view than we've had lately and that every situation will not be approached as black and white or right vs. wrong.  Is it too much to ask that we have a leader that keeps everybody's interests in mind and tries for the best for everyone?  Probably, but I can hope, can't I?

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Well, that was about the most pessimistic Happy New Year I could have come up with.  Plus it was a day late.  Shame on me.  It's really not that bad.  I've got a wonderful wife and two excellent boys.  I've got a decent house, which is still worth more than I paid for it.  Although it's probably not recession-proof, my job appears to be relatively secure.  (At the very least, we service a lot of wastewater plants, and no matter how bad the economy, nobody stops flushing. :)  We've got a new president coming on board that I actually like so far.  Plus a tin full of cookies and candy just showed up in the mail, so how bad can things be exactly?

Here's wishing everyone a happy and safe 2009!

Electoral College Rant Spectacular Extravaganza

I've just been enjoying NBC's SNL Presidential Bash 2008, a collection of presidential skits as well as some new messages from the "candidates". I'm so tired of hearing about this stuff, but the lighter side is enjoyable.

I have been pondering our election system a lot lately. Once again, I'm flabbergasted that what remains the most powerful nation in the world still chooses it's leader with an anachronistic system like the electoral college. This was a weak compromise that barely managed to hold together a loose collection of former British colonies over 200 years ago. In the meantime, the central government has grown immensely in power and citizens essentially have real-time access to information. So why do we continue voting by a system that counts people differently based on where they live?

It seems that lots of people don't really know how the Electoral College works. Everybody is aware of the state map on election night that turns red or blue depending on the winner of that state, and the electoral college vote tally reaching for the 270 that means your candidate won. Most people are aware that there is some mysterious way that more people can vote for you, but you still might not get to be president. Al Gore, especially, is painfully aware of this. (It's happened before too, but not since 1888.) The trouble is that, contrary to popular belief, we are not voting in a national election at all. We are voting in 51 separate elections, the winner-take-all results of which are added together disproportionately to determine who gets to be president.

Your state's number of electoral votes is determined, according to the constitution, by the total of the number of senators and representatives it has. For instance, the most populous state, California, has 55 electoral votes, and the least populous, Wyoming, has 3. So California has approximately 18 times as many electoral votes as Wyoming. Fine, you say, California is much bigger, so it has more votes. However, California has almost 70 times as many people as Wyoming. What this means is that an individual voter in Wyoming has almost 4 times as much say in who get to be president as one in California. Oregon is quite a bit smaller than California, so we only get screwed by about 3 to 1. Yay.

The other problem is that the entirety of a states electoral votes are typically given to the overall winner in that state. That means that maybe more than 50% of a states voters--everyone who didn't vote for the winner--do not count at all in the national picture. Over 50% is correct. Thanks to third parties, the winners in many states have less than half the votes, but they still have more than anyone else.

Consider for a moment, California again. Say the winner got 51% of the vote and the loser got 49%. The winner gets all 55 electoral votes, and the loser gets squat. Consider the nearly 18 million people that 49% represents who are essentially not counted in the national totals. Now consider that that number equals more people than the 15 smallest states plus the District of Columbia combined. Fair?

This everything for the winner approach also gives rise to the idea of the swing state. Oregon is going to vote for Obama. Nobody really doubts this, which is the reason neither presidential candidate is bothering to visit us or promise us anything. Likewise, Obama doesn't stand a chance in Oklahoma, which means nobody cares about them either. But if you live in Missouri or Pennsylvania or North Carolina right now, demographic oddities mean you get visits every day or two. Not because you really matter more than I do, but just because the campaigns are playing the electoral math game. A change of 10000 votes in Pennsylvania might mean 21 electoral votes, while 10000 votes in Oregon is a footnote. Rather than trying to appeal to the entire country that they are trying to lead, the candidates spend their time pandering the the special interests of specific regions.

But you know what? There's no way this is ever going away. This system is enshrined in the Constitution, and that means it would take a Constitutional Amendment to change it. To pass an amendment, you need 2/3 of the House and the Senate. States representing about 10% of the population (the ones one the better end of the electoral stick), could stop this from happening. On the off chance this happened, you still need 3/4 of the state legislatures to ratify it. This means that states representing only about 5% of the population could stop it. So..., it's not going anywhere anytime soon.

I have many more problems with politics and politicians, but this is what's mainly on my mind right now. I'm sick of voters in Wyoming and D.C. and the Dakotas mattering more than I do. I'm sick of hearing about swing states or red vs. blue. I'm sick of being treated as if I'm irrelevant because my state leans strongly in one direction. I'm sick of voting based on a system designed by people who thought that a black person should only count as 3/5 of a white person. And I'm sick of news media and political junkies getting all hot and heavy about the electoral game without once questioning whether or not it's a good way to do things.

That said, flawed as I obviously think our system is, I'm incredibly happy that I get to vote, and that for the most part, elections are taken as valid and power is transfered peacefully, regardless of the election mess. I'm also happy that I live in Oregon, and thanks to our 100% vote-by-mail system, I've already voted. This means I don't have to worry about it tomorrow. It also means that, since current outstanding voter lists are available to pollsters and campaign staff, I haven't received a political phone call in days. For the rest of you who have to wait, make sure to get out there tomorrow and vote, especially if you want the right to grumble about it later.

(Sorry to geek out on the numbers, but I got on a roll.  In case you're interested, my numbers are rough calculations based on the numbers I found on Wikipedia.)

Well, poop.

Today just didn't work out right at all. A couple days ago, I was going to have a couple quick stops this morning and then be home in Portland sometime in the afternoon, which is good since I was supposed to drop a piece of equipment off for my boss to use tomorrow morning. That slipped a little bit yesterday when I worked with another one of our techs and he was having trouble getting all his stuff done. He's only been with us a few months and apparently doesn't have the Speedy Gonzalez thing figured out yet.

Anyway, in a fit of stupidity, I said I'd pick up a couple things from him, which put me getting home an hour or two later, but no big deal really. Then the last thing I was working on last night ended up requiring a stop back again this morning. Again, not too bad, but not helping. However, when I got there, my contact was in a meeting, but "he'll probably be out pretty soon." Twenty minutes later, I decided to go get something else done and come back. By the time I got back, nothing continued to happen. "I'm sure he'll be done soon. This is much longer than they usually meet." Great. Now what? My next stop is 70 miles up the road, so I'm not exactly going back and forth, and I have to meet this guy before I leave since some of his stuff is broken and he needs to know about it. So, I wait, watching my getting-home time slipping further into the evening.

About half the equipment at the next two places (the originally scheduled places) was not working right, taking even longer. Now I'm looking at getting home at maybe 9 pm. Not what I had in mind, but it's still home.

And then I get the call from the office. It starts by asking can I stop by one more place tomorrow on the way home? I've got the only stuff to work on this particular equipment, so it's got to be me. Hell, no I can't stop by tomorrow. First, the boss wants the stuff I have tonight, and second, I don't want to be out here anymore. So, naturally, I'll be stopping by tomorrow. The boss decided for some reason to switch his schedule around, so getting home tonight, although still desirable, was no longer an absolute requirement. I ended up deciding that neither I nor the guy who desperately needed this last stop wanted to do it starting at 6:30 this evening. He didn't want to come back to work, and it would optimistically put me home no earlier than 10 or 10:30. Given the rest of the day, optimism seemed misplaced. So, I'll see this guy first thing in the morning, fully caffeinated and ready to go, and then drive like a crazy person to get home before the turkey day traffic gets too bad. It sucks that Franny is stuck alone with the Mizz for another probably too early morning, but what can you do?

We'll see if this plan holds any more water than the one I had today. At least I'm getting paid, right? Sorry for the rant. It's been that kind of day. For reading this far, you get a treat. I give you the true origin of hip-hop.

9/11

I'm a tad late with these thoughts, but I took a little time to digest them. I heard a lot of lead up to the anniversary of the September 11th attacks yesterday on the news and such, but it felt kind of contrived. It was like the various news outlets looked at the calendar and just realized that it was almost September 11th and they should probably do or say something about it. You really should acknowledge it, right? They were mainly along the lines of USA Today wondering "Is 9/11 becoming just another calendar date?" The news accounts came across as obligatory and insincere.

I was pretty jaded about it myself during the lead up and most of the day. Although I had heard about it and certainly was aware of the upcoming date, I didn't really have strong feelings about the event. The only mention of anything was the media, but during the day, I never once heard anyone I was around even mention it. I thought about it a lot myself, since, due to my job, I write the date often. Usually I just noted the coincidence and moved on.

Until I got back to the hotel and flipped on the TV.

The first thing that was on was a retrospective of that morning. One tower already had a hole in it and the other was just being hit by the second plane as I tuned in. The commentators were completely lost as to what to say about it. It brought the actual morning crashing back to me. I suddenly remembered exactly what I felt that day, watching as the news showed the crashing and falling videos over and over again. I felt a sudden rush of adrenaline, and I remembered the feeling of just being mad as hell at whoever had done this.

Moreover, I felt pissed off all over again. First, I was pissed at Osama and his minions. How could anyone possibly think this was a rational action? How could intentionally killing civilians be justified? How could we tolerated the existence of someone like that? But the more I stewed about it, the more I realized that I am still very angry that we have not remedied the situation. The person most responsible, both by our accusations and his own admission, is still running around taunting us with videos on the anniversary of the most devastating attack on American soil in 60-odd years, and the best we can do is debate whether or not he has dyed his beard. We're wasting time and money and lives running around in the wrong damn desert while the person who started us out on the War on Terror is still out there, as effective a figurehead as he ever was, at least in part because he has so far evaded the most powerful military on the planet. Why, after all the American (and even world) outcry, did we send only 11,000 troops into Afghanistan, where we knew the man and organization responsible for the attacks was taking refuge? And why did we then send over 100,000 troops (and now over 160,000) into a country that had been pinned down and helpless for 10 years, effectively hamstringing ourselves from doing anything further on the original problem?

Yeah, I'm still pissed. At the original problem as well as our response to it. Sorry for the rant, but yesterday affected me a lot more than I thought it would.

Tagged? Are you kidding me?

So I got tagged by this "8 Facts About Me" meme. From what I can tell, a "meme" is a trendy new cultural thing that everybody who's anybody is supposed to know about and, I guess, feel good about themselves because they know about it. The particular meme seems to just be a blogging version of a chain letter. I've seen it bouncing around and I guess it was inevitable that it got to me eventually, despite the fact that I am hardly trendy and am effectively a dead end on the blogworld street map. Anyway, I'll give my best effort to play along and not be a total stick in the mud.

First, the Rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts

2) List 8 random facts about yourself

3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) people and list their names, linking to them

4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged



Whatever. I've never been a stickler for rules on things that don't matter, especially those that come uninvited via the internet. We'll see how I do.



Some facts:

1) I hate the word "meme". It just drips of elitist internet speak. (Or 1337, if you're that into it.) I'm aware that the word was coined before the internet, but it seems to be everywhere now, since the internet allows a complete explosion of new trendy things you're supposed to keep track of. Google "meme" and you get 322,000,000 hits. It's right up there with "blogosphere" as a word that I wish will go away, but I know will only get stronger. This is probably why I am unlikely to ever be trendy.

2) I used to drive a bus for the University of Virginia. It was a pretty cool student job, as far as student jobs go. We had fairly flexible scheduling options and decent pay, and we didn't have to wear aprons and slop mashed potatoes. We did have uniforms, but they consisted of either a crappy blue shirt or a slightly less crappy blue jacket (I still have mine.) which, as we wore them, made us quite possibly the least professional looking bus drivers you've ever seen. Maybe they've gotten better, but I wouldn't count on it. When your main customers are either irritated nurses or drunken students, it's hard to get worked up about your appearance. The best thing about it all is that it's where I met my wife. I admit I didn't recall her right away the first time I saw her. She was one of a group of new trainees that I met all at once. I'm pretty sure she remembers me though. I was the longhair in a red bandanna rolling around in a wheelchair. I wasn't damaged at the time; I was just showing the newbies how the work the lift on the bus. Romantic, huh?

3) I was a pretty good bus driver too. Each year, most bus companies host a competition among their drivers called a Roadeo. (See the brown box near the bottom of the linked page.) You drive bus around a cone-filled obstacle course, check out a rigged bus for problems, and take a written knowledge test. The top four finishers go to the state Roadeo and the winner from that goes to a national competition. I went to the state Roadeo 3 times, having won ours twice. I came in 3rd once at the state level. I may have come in 2nd once as well, but I could be remembering wrong. This, despite the fact that we kind of made a joke of our competition. The last obstacle on the course was the "controlled stop". You are just coming out of the "diminishing clearance" obstacle, in which you floor it and go through a set of traffic barrels that start with one foot of clearance on each side of the bus and end with one inch. Some people tried to do this right, but many just tore through the barrels on one side, with the logic that if you aren't really going to try anyway, at least you only lose half the points. What we really liked was taking this now-speeding bus, and doing the "controlled stop". This consisted of a cone straight ahead of you. You are supposed to stop within 6 inches of it with one constant controlled braking application. You can't see the cone by the time you are that close, so, to do this right, you need some skill. We, however, preferred to call it the "panic stop." Our method consisted of keeping the speed up until the last minute and slamming on the brake to skid to a stop. Yes, you can skid a bus. It's quite a rush and can't be good for the vehicle. Some people occasionally got close to the cone, but most proved that it's a good thing nobody sat in front of it. We fished a lot of cones and barrels out from under buses. Anyway, the point is that, despite that level of training, I still managed to do well at the state Roadeo. Yay for me. (This is probably more pathetic than Al Bundy continuing to subsist on the glory of one high school football game, isn't it?)

4) Speaking of driving, I drove a race car in college for a short time. It was a Legends car, which is a small race car meant to be a relatively cheap way for people to get into real car racing. The UVA Mechanical Engineering Department bought one, along with several other ACC schools, and we competed against them several times. The program was just getting started as I was leaving, so there wasn't much to it at the time. Several professors were working on getting a motorsports curriculum started, which is now up and running and I think it involves two cars and quite a few students. I didn't actually compete in the car much. I wasn't a bad driver, but others were much better, although, unlike several of them, I never crashed it.

5) I've lived in 6 states and one foreign country. As well as I can remember, I've visited 38 states and 5 countries, staying at least one night in 28 and 3, respectively.

6) I was a pole vaulter in high school. By the time I graduated, I held the school record at 12' 6". Those of you who know anything about pole vaulting probably already realize that, although it's over twice my height, that's not a very impressive number. I only did it for a year and a half, and there hadn't been any pole vaulters for a few years. The track coach got us started, but he didn't know what he was talking about, and we only got to about 8' 6" that first season. I and one other guy that had some skills went to a pole vaulting camp that summer and came back to coach ourselves the next year. By the time I left I had that record I mentioned, but nobody outside the school was impressed (and most people in the school were unaware). The other guy was two years behind me and got to something like 14' the next year. He ended up getting a scholarship somewhere to continue, maybe even with real coaching. (I also tried high jumping for one season, and actually jumped 5' 10", which is over my head. Nobody was impressed though, because in the spring when the basketball players came back to track and field, they were hurdling our bar. Real high jumpers are up over 7 feet in high school.)

7) I'm a pretty good cook if I have a recipe, or at least some general guidance. However, if left to my own devices to come up with something, I look at the kitchen like it's Chinese market and I have no idea what's in the various packages. This works out well with Franny. She has no trouble breezing into the kitchen and grabbing random stuff out of the fridge and coming up with something good. However, it's almost comical to give her a recipe and see what actually comes out. I've seen 7-layer dip with only 6 layers. We make a good team though. She's an artist with no tolerance for details and I'm a computer who won't do anything until told, although I will do it well once pointed in the right direction.

8) I never would have guessed it, but I actually enjoy yard work now that I own a yard. All I remember of growing up was being forced (coerced/bribed/whatever) to mow the lawn. I was also cheap labor for Dad's planting and digging and building projects. Apparently I learned something from all that though. Now that I have a yard, I find myself interested perennials vs. annuals, ground cover, fill-in plants, flowers, trees, bushes, mulch, compost, and gardening gadgets. Who knew?

9) I do enjoy home projects as well. I learned a ton of this kind of stuff growing up. Dad and I always did pretty much any home improvement project ourselves. We rarely had anyone else come in. We did have an electrician tie our electrical additions into our breaker box, but we had done the rest of the wiring already. We also had a plumber install some copper piping. Other than that, we did pretty much everything else. Carpentry, electrical, drywall, painting, furniture building, concrete, hardware installation, repairs, whatever. I won't claim to be an expert at any of that, but I find that I'm not afraid to try most projects and I'm willing to find out how to do most anything. This is a source of continual amusement for Franny. "You don't know how to do that!" Sometime I do and sometimes I don't, but I'll try anyway. I haven't done anything too bad yet, although I occasionally do pull off some bonehead mistake that takes a bit of time to fix. Anyway, I usually get to impress my wife with my house skills. It's all about picking your audience.

10) I was in Navy ROTC for a year. I didn't get booted or anything, but I did feel like I didn't belong. Most of the other guys (and gals) were WAY too into marching in straight lines and keeping their hair buzzcut. I kind of figured that if the Navy ever decided they needed me enough to draft me, I'd be back, but until then, we were both fine without each other. I did however enjoy being on our pistol team. I never knew I had it in me, but I was pretty good with a .22 target pistol. This came back to me later when somebody pointed out that I had a very weird stance at an arcade shooting game but that it was kind of scary how good I was. It's been a while though, so I'm not sure it's still there.



Oops. Too many facts. I kind of got on a roll there. Too bad. Now you have some facts about me, along with a good deal of rambling. Congratulations if you made it this far. I'm not sure I know any bloggers who haven't already been tagged, so I'm just tagging everyone willy-nilly. If you feel tagged, put a link in the comments and I'll add you on here. In fact, I think I like the chain letter thing via a blog better than the e-mail way anyway. I can amuse myself with this silliness without foisting it on anyone else.

What's a little more debt?

Check out our new ride. It's a 2007 Hyundai Tucson SUV. (If you look close, you can see the top of Mizz's head trying to take it out for a spin already.)


I have to say that it's been about 8 years or so since I bought a car, and after today, I think I can wait another 8 for the next one. I knew going in that I'd have to play the car-sales, if-I-can-can-get-your-payment-down, let-me-go-check-with-the-guys-in-the-back, I'm-really-trying-to-make-this-work-but-I-don't-think-they'll-go-for-it, how-about-that-undercoating, what's-it-going-to-take-to-put-you-in-this-car-today game, but it's still incredibly frustrating when you get into it.

There even seemed to be an extra layer in the process. The first salesman sat with me for a while writing down random numbers that must have been beamed into his head because they had almost nothing to do with what happened later. Then he disappeared into the back and summoned ANOTHER salesman, who then proceeded to do the running in and out of the back hard-sell part of the process while the first kid just sat there looking bored, I assume to keep me from wandering too far.

And they weren't kidding about the undercoating either. Both salesmen pushed it and were shot down. Then the guy at the end, who seemed much nicer and more relaxed and was mainly just the sign-here-and-here-and-here guy, also surprised us by pushing it and having to be denied too. Then, when it was all finished, the first sales guy asked again if I had gone for it. I assume the majority of the cost would have gone into paychecks. No thanks, guys.

In the end, we got what I feel like is a decent deal, although we won't win any haggling awards, I'm sure. We ended up with a fair price on a very safe and reliable vehicle that gives us more flexibility than the beloved but busted ole' Corolla. (Sorry Franny, but the missing hubcap, the puddles on the floor and the fuse-frying taillights probably indicated that it was time for her to retire. I'm sure she's going to go live on a farm where she can play with other old Corollas and be happy.)

I just wish I didn't feel like I had just gone 15 rounds with Jackie Chan by the time it was over. Jackie and I both felt like we came out of the deal okay, but neither one of us seemed to enjoy it much. I don't mean to be completely negative. I like the car and I'm happy with both it and the fact that we can put car hunting behind us. I just wish the experience didn't have to suck so much.

At least we made the Mizz happy. His only request when we asked what kind of car he wanted was "Blue." I suppose Arctic Mist will do.

What to drink, what to drink...?

A couple days ago I wrote about wine snobs and their corks. Specifically about the silliness of natural cork loyalty. Well, maybe the wine snobs aren't so dumb after all; they're just being environmentally friendly. Apparently, the lowering demand for natural cork is putting pressure on cork forests. I was unaware, before reading this article, that cork is harvested from trees without destroying them. In fact, the cork that is good for stoppering bottles isn't even found until at least the second harvesting. All this means that the forests and their associated ecosystems remain intact despite the commercial use. If cork ceases to be a viable crop for someone, the cork trees will be replaced by something that will be cut down for lumber, effectively gutting the forest ecology of that area. And if you want to push it further, I suppose that a renewable cork resource is greener than petroleum based plastic stoppers or metal caps. Just don't tell me it makes the wine taste better. That's all I'm sayin'.

Since I can't feel quite as superior to wine drinkers, I'll move on to bottled water people. I've always thought that buying water was silly, especially if it has to come from France or Fiji or whatever, and it's even more silly that people believe that it's melted off a glacier or scooped out of a cave or whatever. But with the recent revelation that Aquafina (from Pepsi) is tapwater, now everybody seems to care. In truth, most of the bottled water out there comes from tapwater. Certianly Dasani (from Coke) and all the store-brand stuff is tap water. Granted, it is filtered through some serious equipment, and not your store bought PUR or Brita stuff either. But seriously, these companies use the same water for their other sodas and such, and despite the complete lack of other, more expensive ingredients including secret formula flavors, you still pay the same price for the plain water. Just the cost alone ought to be enough to deter, as noted by the New York Times. But beyond that, understand that bottled water is usually not even regulated as much as your tap water, meaning that there are things that, by law, cannot come out of your tap, but can legally be sold to you at 7-11 with a picture of a pristine mountain spring on the front of them. One the one hand, buying bottled water is silly when the water in your house is probably plenty good, especially filtered through your fridge or whatever. On the other hand, you may live in a place that has nasty tap water. Check here. I've certainly been to places (some of the places I travel for work, especially) where the water doesn't taste so great. Luckily, Portland water is pretty good, and is in fact, some of the best water in the country. But not everyone lives in a place where the tap water is anything more than passable. On the OTHER other hand, remember that your bottled water=somebody else's tapwater anyway.

So back to my original premise, stick with beer.

Happy 4th of July!

I think it's awesome that we get a chance to celebrate telling King George and England to stuff it. And to think it was all just because they decided to slap a little tax on the tea. (Oregon just told our legislature the same thing when they tried to put another 5 cents per beer tax in place. Although I'm not sure how we would have declared independence from Oregon. It's the thought that counts anyway.) So here's to diplomatically giving the finger to the King.

In the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson in The Declaration of Independence:

You don't frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, son of a silly person! Ah blow my nose at you, so-called "[George] Keeeng"! You and all your silly English Knnnnnnnn-ighuts!!! ... Ah don' wanna talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food-trough wiper! Ah fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries! ... Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time!

I couldn't have said it better myself.

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On a serious note, Franny and I were discussing the state of things the other day, and it got me thinking about our country and what direction it has come and is going. I can't for a second agree that "We're number #1" about everything, but we do a pretty good job about a lot of things.

We've got the longest lasting constitution in the world, and although we were about 3000 years late for the first democracy, we have one that is surviving quite well despite the beliefs of those at either end of the political spectrum. We have one of the highest standards of living in the world, some of the best unspoiled protected wilderness, the ability to grow something like twice the food we need, and the strongest work ethic and ingenuity around. We have shown time and again that as a country we can rise to whatever challenge confronts us. The Japanese hit us with an attack that was intended to cripple us and we came back out of a decade-long depression to beat both them and the Nazis. The Soviets launched a little beeping satellite and we sent so many men to the moon that the country got bored watching. The Asian tiger economies looked like they were about the buy the country right out from under us, so we invented the internet (thanks Gore), which has shown itself to be a dominant new paradigm in world-wide communication.

This is not intended as a flag-waving, toot-our-own-horn, we're-the-best type of jingoism. We clearly have some issues. I just mean to point out that for all our faults and foibles, this is a pretty good setup we have here. Mexicans will still want to move here. Gays will still want to get married. Hunters will still want assault weapons. Whatever. We will absorb all that, settle somewhere in the middle, and move on to the other "big" issues to keep ourselves occupied, all the while remaining one of the most successful countries on the planet.

For the most part we disagree endlessly about lots of things, but I can't think of a single time when a governing official in this country has refused to relinquish power after an election, or when we had anyone forcefully take control of any part of government. We have the occasional close call that sparks lots of debate about the "real" winner, but with 300 million opinions to worry about, that's not surprising, and we somehow manage to keep functioning anyway regardless of the outcome. We make a lot of noise about contentious issues, but in the end, almost everyone agrees that peacefully continuing the system we've got is far better than anything else we could come up with right now.

I hear too often that what's going on right now is the worst ever or that this is the straw that's going to break the camel's back, but from what I know of history, there's pretty much always been someone saying those things. And as far as the worst ever, we've survived the British trying to take us back, all out civil war, slavery, and two World Wars. The fact that we don't completely approve of what the president is doing right now is hardly even noteworthy in the long run. As long as we have the national will to give a damn about Paris Hilton, our situation is not that bad.

So Happy 4th of July and enjoy what we've got going here. Wake up tomorrow and work to make it better; just don't forget what you've got to work with.

Melamine II: The Homegrown Version

In a followup to my melamine rant from a couple weeks ago, it appears that a U.S. Company is guilty of exactly the same thing that we found in China. Once again, the lowest common denominator and the almighty dollar triumph over legality and morality. Yay.

Melamine everywhere

I'm sure everyone has heard about the melamine contamination in pet foods. Mostly just the dog and cat foods have made the headlines, but the contaminated wheat gluten got in lots of other animal feed too. Last week, I was working at a US Fish & Wildlife research fish hatchery and they were in the process of investigating a die-off of some of their juvenile trout. They were concerned because there was nothing they could find about the water or any microbiological issue, but they were loosing fish at a fast enough rate that it might jeopardize their ability to continue the study long enough to get results, which means wasting grant money and not getting it again. Anyway, they were just looking into the possibility that they might have some melamine contamination. According to this article, they were probably right. They do get some of their food from Bio-Oregon, which is listed in the article. Incidentally, I work there every summer too.

The thing that gets me about this melamine thing is how far it got before it was caught even though it clearly has widespread health effects. The problem is an over dependence on China as a supplier for everything: a) because they have as much manpower as we want them to throw at anything, and b) because they are willing to make everything very cheaply. This is fine for a lot of things, but cheap food ingredients are not necessarily the best choice.

The melamine was used because it fools a test for protein, but is much cheaper than actually fortifying the food for real. The normal test for protein in food is a determination of the amount of nitrogen in the food. Melamine has a lot of nitrogen, but unless further testing is done, it just raises the overall result of the nitrogen test, which is taken as higher protein content. Now, the companies involved are no longer in business, but it has been pointed out that this is a widespread practice well known in the industry in China.

So now we've discovered another test to run on foods from China, and I'm afraid that we'll pat ourselves on the back for solving this particular problem and then go back about our business of buying basic food ingredients from the lowest bidder. But how many other kinds of routine deception are happening, in China or elsewhere? If they are not an immediate health issue, would we even know? What if some petroleum byproduct happens to be a good looking substitute for vitamin C or something? What if it accumulates in people and causes birth defects or whatever? The problem is that we are getting our most basic needs filled by the lowest bidder and until something happens, we have no idea at all. Just look at the ingredient list on just about anything you eat. Chances are, unless it says nothing but "apple," there is probably something on it you can't identify. Guar gum, or soy lecithin, or some chemical you can't even pronounce that is added to keep the guar gum from sticking to the soy lecithin while your frozen whatever is shipped to your grocery store. Even the things you do understand (this case was wheat gluten) have unknown origins.

The problem is that we like to pretend that we are at the top of the world food chain, that we have the safest and best of everything, and that all the food companies have our best interests at heart. In real life, we are incredibly dependent on the rest of the world for our food supply, we have food that is safe until we find melamine or e-coli or whatever, and food companies want to avoid contamination only because it causes lawsuits and hurts shareholder value. We love to have anything we want, anytime we want, and as cheaply as possible, and in order to do that we have to keep pretending.

The alternative is making all this stuff ourselves. We have the capacity to do a lot of that, but right now, our main ability seems to be growing freaking corn. So we use it for everything we can imagine: plain corn, corn meal, corn starch, corn oil, animal feed, and high fructose corn syrup. These days we even use it as a fuel and for other industrial compounds. Aside from plain corn, most of these uses are better served by other items, i.e. sugar instead of corn syrup, but we are in a good climate region for corn, so we subsidize the hell out of it, put tariffs on the competing products, pour on gobs of fertilizer and grow as much corn as we possibly can. This is great for products that can be made out of corn, but for many other things, we now have to look elsewhere, and that is what makes us vulnerable.

The irony is that we are one of the most efficient food producers in the world. By sheer volume or total calories or whatever, we make far more than we need. But we've concentrated it into a few basic products (corn, wheat, potatoes, a few other basics), but for most other things, we have to buy from the rest of the world. We grow a lot of other things, but not in the volumes we need. We import meat, fruit, vegetables, and lots of basic ingredients from all over the world, and that puts us at risk for unscrupulous companies or even entire industries taking advantage of any cost-saving shortcuts they can think of.

As a country, we have to change our attitudes about what is worth paying for. There are many reasons I can think of for eating locally produced foods, but this may top the list.

Sorry for the rant.

But not really.