Starting the morning with a laugh

C-SPAN has a general discussion going on, more or less, "what should Bush's role be once he leaves office?" or "How can Bush help Obama?"

For a start, in any situation, all Obama has to do is ask aWol "What would you do?" and then do the exact opposite. Things would be far more likely to come out okay than they ever did under the current regime. That strikes me as being such a no-brainer that I'm surprised C-SPAN is wasting air time on the question.

As for the more general question of what should Bush's role be once he leaves office? Nothing. He needs to get settled into his new digs in Texas and disappear quietly from the public stage. I don't even want to suggest he emulate Jimmy Carter and get into building houses for Habitat for Humanity -- any structure that aWol touched wouldn't stand for very long.

I woke up this morning at an ungodly early hour, shortly after 3 a.m., wide awake and not sure why. I know I was dreaming, but not sure about what other than it involved babies. I've never been one of those people who can remember dreams very clearly, never had much luck in trying to keep a dream journal, and don't put much stock in what different things in dreams might symbolize. What might seeing a baby fall out of a Johnny Jump-Up symbolize? My Apostle Islands quarry article isn't going to get published? I'm not going to get the new assignment I'd like? Or I'm remembering the Younger Daughter's stories about her cousin Lora, aka The Evil Babysitter, who allegedly dropped her a lot and/or kept her locked in the bedroom while her older sister was allowed to watch tv? Going by the stories my kids tell now, it's a minor miracle either of them made it to adulthood.

In any case, I'm awake, and might as well note a few things that caught my eye, both out in the real world and on teh intertubes, this week:

Annoying comments, commenters, trolls, and related issues: Greta Christina did a great post on her comments policy, and it's one that's true of any blog. What it boils down to is "Commenters in this blog are guests in my home. And I have the right to decide who I let into my home and who I don't." If someone keeps coming around that the blog owner doesn't like, he or she has a perfect right to figuratively slam the door in that person's face -- and it can be for any reason. Might be the commenter is a troll who's just looking to stir things up for no apparent reason, might be the commenter wants to use the blog's comment space to carry on a pissing contest with other commenters, whatever. It doesn't matter. My space, my rules -- if I decide one day to turn comment moderation on and another to turn it off, that's strictly my business. On any blog anyone who doesn't like the comment policy has a perfect right to go start their own blog where he or she can set up his or her own rules and be arbitrary and capricious to their heart's content.

That said, if someone does come around here and annoys me, unless for some truly screwy reason I feel threatened in a real world sort of way, like in the unlikely event I pick up psycho stalker vibes, the most I'm ever going to do in response to a jerk is not publish his or her comments. It's not worth my time or energy to engage beyond that. If some creep living thousands of miles away wants to say something obscene, sexist, racist, or otherwise disgusting in a comment on my blog what is the impact on my actual life? Zilch. Nada. Nothing. A second or two of annoyance, a brief flash of distaste, and that's it. It does not pay to feed the trolls by complaining about them in comments to other bloggers, threatening to report them to Google or Word Press or whoever is hosting their blog, or noticing them in any way, shape, or form any more than you would waste time responding to junk mail or phone calls from telemarketers. Noticing they exist just encourages them to continue in their socially unacceptable behavior.

Teh Fat and Dieting Insanity: Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast has a great post up on eating sensibly and not driving yourself crazy trying to achieve the impossible. Here's a snippet:

You'd think that after all the research, we would have reached a conclusion that there is no magic bullet for being thin. Yes, there are people who have spent their lives struggling with weight who, by devoting their entire waking, nonworking lives to the pursuit of thinness, have managed to fight their bodies' tendency to store fat. But does that mean that everyone should have this as a singular focus? Should fat people be doomed to denying themselves the pleasure of a social evening with friends because it might involve food? Should fat people have to isolate themselves in a cocoon of iPod-fed music, spending every waking hour at the gym when others can get by with a good brisk walk for an hour? Should fat people have to regard a restaurant menu as an enemy while their thin compatriots can feel free to order the fetuccine alfredo if that's what they're really wanting that day?

For various reasons, I'm troubled by the current hysteria about the "obesity epidemic." Too much of it ignores heredity, body type, environment. . . it's an endless list. And too much of it is subjective and/or arbitrary -- the body mass index, for example, got adjusted down in the 1990s. People went from being okay to being overweight overnight without gaining an ounce. Society as a whole is being socialized to view stick-thin models who maintain their weight through copious consumption of black coffee and cigarettes as "sexy" and/or "healthy" while seeing body types considered incredibly attractive not long ago (Marilyn Monroe being the classic example) as too fat. It's insane, it's unhealthy for society as a whole, and it's distracting us all from far more important health issues.

The modern equivalent of a birch bark basket, aka survival skills: I learned (and actually should have known, but had never really thought about it) it's possible to heat water in a plastic bottle over an open flame. Good to know if one is ever unwillingly emulating Survivorman.

Sarah Palin refuses to go away. Fortunately for the rest of us, Mudflats and other Alaska bloggers haven't stopped watching her:

The subject of the interview was the media’s “mistreatment” of Palin during the campaign while she was running for VP, more than two months ago. And the interview was done for the benefit of those in the Lower 48, to whom the governor referred in the video more than once. Palin wants them to know the real her. She wants to tell them to look at her actions. She wants them to judge her by her record…..while she’s playing hooky 11 days before the start of the legislative session.

It was interesting watching the commentary on CNN yesterday about Palin. Even the Repugnican hacks seemed to think she came across as whining, and that she needs to shut up and go away for awhile if she wants to have any hope of a political career beyond Alaska. (If disappearing from public view might help to redeem her, then my feeling is she needs to stay out on that public stage and keep right on running her mouth so no one forgets just how incredibly self-centered, ignorant, and generally clueless the woman truly is.)

Changes

I normally refrain from mentioning directly just exactly where I work, but cannot resist noting there will be dancing on the desktops on Monday -- we're about to experience a change in management. Everyone knew it was coming. Our division had an all-hands meeting this past Thursday where the chief did everything short of passing around a farewell card for folks to sign without explicitly stating what was about to happen, but it is still nice to see it confirmed.

Never argue with the editor

Niobrara National Scenic River

Back when I worked for the Park Service I seemed to end up working the water parks -- rivers and lakeshores like Buffalo National River and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore -- a lot. My colleagues would be keeping their feet dry at Herbert Hoover or Fort Larned, and I'd be leaping in and out of boats, counting lighthouses, and splashing across low water bridges. It wasn't a conscious choice, at least not most of the time. One of those water parks that I started off feeling pretty dubious about but wound up liking a lot is Niobrara National Scenic River in north central Nebraska. (The photo is of the Niobrara just west of Nebraska Highway 11 and was taken in January 2007.)

The first time I saw the Niobrara I had pretty much a "this is it?" reaction. Compared to what I thought of as real rivers, e.g., the lower Saint Croix, the middle Niobrara isn't much to look at. The photo above is deceptive -- in warm weather that stretch of the Niobrara is braided and shallow (i.e., lots of visible gravel and sand bars and not much water) -- so I had a hard time understanding why anyone would bother driving from Omaha to Valentine to tube, canoe, or kayak the Niobrara when the same amount of driving would put a person into Minnesota, land of a thousand lakes and multiple real rivers, ones with water more than waist deep. It took me awhile to figure out that one of the major attractions of the Niobrara isn't the actual river, but the drainage: ecologically it evidences extreme diversity in a very small area.

The middle Niobrara valley, a stretch of river approximately 30 miles long from Valentine down to Plum Creek, is a biological crossroads -- eastern and western zones for plant and animal life overlap, and there's also remnant northern boreal forest. It's possibly the only place in Nebraska where boreal species such as northern white pine can be found growing naturally. Ty Harrison, a University of Nebraska grassland ecologist, described the valley as a "natural experiment where native organisms interact, hybridize, and evolve on the edge of their respective ranges." Eastern deciduous forest, Rocky Mountain pine forest, northern boreal plant associations, mixed prairie grassland, and a typical sandhills prairie can all be found within a few miles of each other along the Niobrara.

Whether or not the typical recreational user of the Niobrara thinks consciously about the ecological diversity when he or she plans a float trip is debatable, of course. I'm sure most don't. The typical tuber or kayaker just recognizes that there's so much variety along the river they're not going to be bored. There's going to be eye candy: wildlife, wildflowers, waterfalls. Lots and lots of waterfalls. Nothing real big or dramatic, with the possible exception of Smith Falls, but definitely water falling over rocks. It really is worth the drive from Omaha.

Gupta for Surgeon General?

I have mixed feelings, and apparently I'm not alone. Lots of chatter over on the science and medical blogs about it. Orac had a long piece at Respectful Insolence in which he expressed doubts about Gupta based in part on Gupta being a little too credulous about "alternative medicine," Physioprof did his usual WTF, PZ Myers isn't thrilled (but then he rarely is), the list is long one -- and the Pump Handle was nice enough to do a round-up with links to some of the more articulate reactions.

In an odd way it looks like many of the things that make Sanjay Gupta a good choice -- his likeablility, the fact he looks good in front of a camera and knows how to communicate complex scientific and medical information in a way the general public can understand -- are the same things that are being used as reasons he'd be a poor choice. There's a sense he lacks gravitas. He's not sufficiently . . . what? Dour? Old? Fatherly? Too much Dr. McDreamy and not enough Bob Kelso?

My own feeling is that from a political perspective Gupta's an ideal choice. He's not an ideologue, the public trusts him, and he'll make a great salesman for whatever healthcare plan the Obama administration proposes. He practices at Grady Hospital, Fulton County's public hospital that's had budgetary woes for years due to its high charity caseload, so he's had an upclose look at everything that's wrong with the current U.S. healthcare system. At the same time, the qualms I have are similar to Orac's: would Gupta buy into New Age woo a little too easily, for example, and give the anti-vaccine crowd and others more of a hearing than they deserve?

Life's little mysteries: A review of Lazy B by Sandra Day O'Connor

A few weeks ago Tracy over at Possum Living had a review of Sandra Day O'Connor's memoir, Lazy B. The book is loose collection of anecdotes about growing up on a large cattle ranch in eastern Arizona. Tracy owns a patch of desert in western Texas, so he was naturally intrigued by Justice O'Connor's descriptions of the ranching life on what has to be equally arid ground.

Tracy also tends to be more than a tad skeptical about the ability of the federal government to manage anything, so he pretty much agreed with Justice O'Connor's conclusions regarding the role of the Bureau of Land Management in pushing ranchers out of the business. My skepticism usually falls in a slightly different direction -- I don't trust memoirs (people self-edit) and I don't trust family histories (they miss the bigger context). We did a little back and forth discussion about the book, I recommended a book or two that provides more of a big picture view of ranching (Starr's Let the Cowboy Ride, for example) and I promised him I'd read Lazy B for myself when I had the chance. And I did.

First, the good stuff: Justice O'Connor's descriptions of her childhood, the ranch, and the ranch hands are fascinating. She contradicts herself a lot -- for example, at one point she says all the hired help were bachelors, and then a few pages later she describes a rather colorful character, a long-time employee, who married, divorced, and remarried -- but that's a minor quibble in a memoir. This isn't a book written to provide a definitive history of anything; it's a memoir in which Justice O'Connor gets to remember fondly her pet bobcat. Her brother, Alan, is credited on the cover, too, so I have a hunch the book was "written" by the two of them sitting down and swapping stories in front of a tape recorder.

If a person is interested in Justice O'Connor as a person this book might provide some insight into things that may have shaped her character, but it's not going to tell you much about her life as an adult. She was the oldest child, and there was a long gap between her birth and those of her two younger siblings. When she reached school age, her parents sent her to El Paso to live with her grandmother during the school year. The Lazy B became a place where she lived for only a few months out of the year, and that she then left behind fairly quickly after going off to college. She entered Stanford at 16, combined her last year of undergraduate studies with her first year of law school, and was married about the same time she passed the bar exam.

In any case, although the book would have benefited from tighter editing, it is an interesting and easy read, and you do learn a lot along the way about ranching in Arizona in the first half of the 20th century. That's the good part.

Now for the slice and dice -- and why I referred to life's little mysteries. One of those little mysteries to me has always been why the people who benefit the most from government largesse/subsidies/handouts/freebies/whatever are the same people who always bitch the loudest about government interference. This is particularly true in the western and southern states. According to Justice O'Connor, the Day family ranch, the Lazy B established by her grandfather in the 1880s, the land they considered theirs in terms of where they ran their cattle, consisted of over 160,000 acres. How much of it did they actually own? About 1/2 of a percent, or approximately 8,000 acres. The rest was owned by the state of Arizona, the state of New Mexico, and, of course, the largest land owner of all: the federal government in the form of either the BLM or the U.S. Forest Service. For the first fifty years the Days used that federal government land they paid nothing to do so -- no grazing fees, no leases, not a dime in property taxes or other land ownership costs. They had labor costs (the cowboys), they had livestock costs, but the majority of the land they used as pasturage was essentially gratis -- all they had to do was push the cows on to it and persuade the neighbors not to run their stock there, too.

Which in turn explains a great deal as to how the Days were able to make any money at all ranching in desert country. Based on the numbers Justice O'Connor provides, it took 80 acres of land to support one animal unit. 80 acres! No wonder every dry year found cows dropping dead from starvation. Carrying capacity, in contrast, in the Nebraska sandhills (also a dry, fragile environment, but obviously not nearly as dry and fragile as Arizona desert) ranges from 15 acres to 30 acres per animal unit, with the eastern Sandhills having a higher carrying capacity than the western regions. Having done a fair amount of research into ranching while working on a history of the Niobrara drainage, I know that 30 acres is considered the upper limit for being able to run cattle and still make money. After that the critters are walking too much to find food to put on the weight they need to be marketable as anything other than canners and cutters. In short, if the land hadn't been available free no one in their right mind would have tried ranching on it.

Apologists for ranching always claim that the ranchers didn't own the land because land laws prevented them from buying it. Hence, they were forced against their will into exploiting the public domain. Unfortunately for them, that explanation is totally bogus. The truth is that as long as public domain land was available at effectively no cost, there was little incentive for ranchers to spend money acquiring anything other than the key to western livestock success: the acreage that controlled access to water. So a rancher (and selected hired hands) would homestead a few hundred acres and end up controlling many thousands. The fact that the Days themselves wound up owning 8000+ acres fee simple stands as proof it was possible to buy the land; the Day family chose not to.

In any event, the entirely foreseeable consequence of being allowed to graze with minimal regulation on the public domain was that the public domain was thoroughly abused. Historian Donald Worster noted in 1992 that "after more than a hundred years of ranching, more than half the lands devoted to it are still in poor to very poor condition." As early as 1929 historians such as Ernest Osgood began documenting western history and describing how ranchers routinely overstocked the range as the cattle industry overall followed a boom and bust mentality well into the 20th century. The cattlemen eventually learned to make hay and practice a more intensive style of ranching on land in private ownership, but continued to abuse the public domain until forced by law, e.g., the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, to change their ways.

The Days were quite obviously no different than their peers when it came to using and abusing the land. Like every apologist for ranching I've ever read, Justice O'Connor trots out the line about ranchers being good stewards. Pshaw. It's utter humbug*, and O'Connor herself provides the proof: the only examples she provides of good stewardship, if they can be called that, are of her family drilling wells on the land they owned. When asked to invest money in a spreader dam project designed by the BLM to reverse generations of erosion and ecological damage, a 15% match to the government's paying 85% of the cost, O'Connor's father's response was to say no. At that point in the 1950s, the Days had been ranching on the Lazy B, sucking off the government teat for close to 80 years, but Mr. Day was unwilling to give anything back. Justice O'Connor's mother said she'd put up the money herself, and the project went forward.

It proved highly successful and became a demonstration project used to persuade other ranchers to undertake similar efforts. Once that happened, of course, Mr. Day promoted it as though it had been his own idea.

In the final chapters of the book, Justice O'Connor lays many of the woes of the ranching industry in the dry states at the feet of the overbearing and meddlesome federal government, e.g., unreasonable regulations promulgated by the Bureau of Land Management. She tells a sad story about a neighbor who willfully and repeatedly breaks the rules by running more cattle on federal land than his BLM lease allows, as well as refusing to practice rest and rotation as instructed, and then she is horrified and sympathetic when he's made to pay the consequences for doing so. I find it distinctly odd that a former Supreme Court justice thinks it's fine for laws to broken when they're a personal inconvenience, but perhaps Justice O'Connor is more of moral relativist and judicial activist than I thought.

[*Worster notes that "every study of the Western range made since the 1930s has tended to the same conclusion: the combination of scientifically trained, disinterested supervisors and public land tenure provides better protection for the range environment, on the whole, than simple private ownership."]

Sources:
Benjamin Hibbard, A History of the Public Land Policies, NY: Peter Smith, 1939 [1924]; Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman, University of Minnesota Press, 1929; E. Louise Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain: Disposal and Reservation Policies 1900-50, Stanford University Press, 1951; Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991; Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West, Oxford University Press, 1992.

Signs of the apocalypse

Bob Barr, one of the chief architects of the infamous Defense of Marriage Act, has admitted he was wrong to promote it. He's also saying publicly that Obama was right:

In 2006, when then-Sen. Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment, he said, “Decisions about marriage should be left to the states.” He was right then; and as I have come to realize, he is right now in concluding that DOMA has to go.

So why don't politicians ever have these brilliant flashes of insight while they're still in office?

What's the definition of insanity?

Answer: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Case in point: Israel. The Israelis have been pounding the crap out of the Palestinians for 60 years now, and for some odd reason the Palestinians still hate them. And, by extension because we're the ones providing the Caterpillar tractors, F-16s, and other nifty pieces of technology along with absolutely obscene amounts of money, us. The U.S., the superpower that seems to employ the same approach to foreign policy that an abuser does towards a battered spouse. Then we're shocked, absolutely shocked, when that battered spouse decides to beat us unconscious and then set the bed on fire.

Back when I was teaching sociology to engineering students (and you think herding cats is hard? At least cats respond to can openers), we'd always get into long discussions about "root causes." No one ever wants to talk about root causes, to ask the very basic "why" questions. Okay, we can all agree that it's bad that someone is doing drugs/robbing banks/getting pregnant/swearing jihad and strapping on a C-4 bra prior to strolling into a shopping mall, now can someone explain the Why? What is the root cause? How do we eliminate that root cause? Even more important, how do we eliminate the root cause instead of exacerbating it?

Well, in the case of the C-4 underwear and the desire for martyrdom, you don't eliminate the root cause by turning the occupied territories into a giant concentration camp, building illegal settlements, evicting people from houses their families had occupied for generations, bulldozing olive groves that were hundreds of years old, and doing bombing runs with F-16s and then describing dead toddlers as acceptable collateral damage. How do you eliminate the root causes? In the case of Gaza, maybe talking to the government the citizens of Gaza elected would be a start. Three years the Bush administration held a meeting in Maryland to discuss peace in the middle east and a solution to the Palestinian question -- lots of people at the table, with one notable exception: the Palestinians. And we're surprised that particular peace plan didn't work?

I'm not sure just what sort of meddling the U.S. will end up doing this time around. Bush has a mere 16 days left in which to screw things up more; Obama already has blood on his hands with his off-hand comment about rockets and protecting his daughters. Although who knows? Maybe he didn't envision active genocide when he greenlighted the Israeli army. It's a mess. It's going to get worse. The nuclear weapons Israeli possesses aren't going to do them a whole lot of good when they're fighting on their own ground.