My fellow Americans

I spent half an hour in line at the post office today. You know, people are always bitching about the post office, but I've decided the problem isn't the post office, it's the customers.

We are talking Morons on Parade. Little old ladies in tennis shoes who act like they're mailing a letter for the first time in their lives, bozos wanting to mail packages in boxes that look like they've already been run over, idiots who can't understand why if their packages are sealed with Priority Mail tape (or are Priority Mail boxes) they have to pay the Priority Mail rate . . . and through it all the clerks kept on smiling and patiently trying to explain to these fools just what they had done wrong.

I kept having this feeling that I'd wandered into a scene from "Idiocracy" by mistake. If this group was a cross section of the US populace as a whole, the country's in even more trouble than I thought.

Why does this not surprise me?

In today's Washington Post:

Blackwater Founder Accused in Court of Intent to Kill

The founder of Blackwater USA deliberately caused the deaths of innocent civilians in a series of shootings in Iraq, attorneys for Iraqis suing the security contractor told a federal judge Friday.

The attorneys singled out Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who is the company's owner, for blame in the deaths of more than 20 Iraqis between 2005 and 2007. Six former Blackwater guards were criminally charged in 14 of the shootings, and family members and victims' estates sued Prince, Blackwater (now called Xe Services LLC) and a group of related companies.

"The person responsible for these deaths is Mr. Prince,'' Susan L. Burke, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in U.S. District Court in Alexandria. "He had the intent, he provided the weapons, he provided the instructions, and they were done by his agents and they were war crimes.''

h/t Blue Gal

Adventures in bureaucracy

The new director at Large Nameless Agency held an all-hands meeting today. Various heads in the bloated levels of upper management have been rolling since he came on board in mid-June -- the standard joke has become "who'd he fire today?" -- while rumors circulated about "reorganization."

Well, today we got the good news/bad news, depending on one's perspective. Our center is disappearing. Various functions are going to be absorbed by other pieces of Large Nameless Agency, the various communications specialists (writer-editors, graphic artists, whatever) will go back to working directly for different divisions within LNA instead of serving as internal contractors. Whether this is good or bad depends, I guess, on whether or not a person's current position carries a job title like "branch chief." It's hard to be a chief when the branch vanishes.

I don't think it's going to affect me. The journal will continue to be published no matter what, so there may be changes in division names and the hierarchy above me but my actual job should stay pretty much the same.

Besides, this is a bureaucracy. It's going to take awhile to disassemble a center that employs hundreds of people. The Director may want it gone, but it's not going to happen overnight. If it gets done at the usual speed at which the government functions, I'll be retired long before the string of names (Large Nameless Agency/Coordinating Center/National Center/Division/Branch/Team) that describe my current location on the organizational chart changes.

Book review: Your Inner Fish

Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish is one of the best science books I've read in a long time. Shubin manages to explain paleontology, human anatomy, evolutionary theory, and geology in terms the average semi-literate reader can understand -- and does it all seamlessly in a fairly small number of pages. Your Inner Fish had been on my "must read" list since it was published last year, and now I'm wishing I had gotten around to it sooner.

Shubin looks at various parts of the human body -- the hand, the bones of the inner ear, and others -- and explains how the fossil record shows those body parts evolving over time. It's fascinating. Who would have thought that the auditory ossicles started off as part of the jaw and moved over millennia?

While he's doing that, he's also throwing in personal anecdotes about the joys of field work (he's been doing his in the Arctic so the hazards he gets to deal with include polar bears), explaining geology, casually explaining genetics and mutations, and describing both how fossils form and how paleontologists decide where to go looking for them. It's a great book for anyone who has any interest at all in the how and why of science.

This book was one of those rare ones, too, in nonfiction where you pick it up and get sucked right in. It's actually fast, fairly easy reading. I zipped through it in a couple evenings. I spent actual money on this book instead of looking for it at the library, and it was money well spent.

Fort Larned National Historic Site

The photo from the small town in Kansas reminded me of Fort Larned NHS, which is no doubt one of the less visited sites in the National Parks system. It's a few miles west of Larned, Kansas, which is on US-56 well south of I-70, so unless travelers feel a need to get to Dodge City they're not likely to go anywhere near FOLS. I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent there as an NPS employee updating the List of Classified Structures, but in all honesty don't know if I would ever have bothered to seek it out if I hadn't been getting paid to go count the buildings* to make sure they hadn't managed to misplace any.

Fort Larned was established 150 years ago, in 1869, to protect freight traffic, wagon trains, and the mail service along the Santa Fe Trail. (One of the fort's features is a piece of land that still has original trail ruts visible.) Troops stationed at the fort included the 10th Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers. This year's 150th anniversary celebration will include a Buffalo Soldier Cavalry Drill on Labor Day weekend as well as Buffalo Soldier living history programs on October 10. After the fort was decommissioned in the 1880s the site was privately owned for many years. Fort Larned NHS was established by an act of Congress in the 1960s. The Park Service has restored many of the buildings, and has a really nice little museum on-site. In addition to the museum that's part of the Visitor Center, they've restored a number of the buildings, including outfitting the interiors to look like what they would have back in 1870 when the fort was fully manned. As the above photo shows, when you look into the barracks there's bedding on the bunks, uniforms hanging on hooks, and so on, right down to oil cloth on the tables. The blacksmith shop has an interpreter doing living history (i.e., actual blacksmithing), and the setting overall really conveys a sense of what the fort was like 140 years ago.

Of course, part of the integrity of the site lies in the fact it's far enough outside the town of Larned, Kansas, to be safe from development. The viewshed is empty enough to help a visitor forget which century it is. Overall, the Fort is a great example of just how good the National Park Service can be at preserving historic sites.

It's also an interesting contrast with a state-managed site, Fort Hays State Park located in (of course) Fort Hays, Kansas. Fort Hays (pictured below) has, if I recall correctly, two buildings left. The park sits on the edge of town, it's next to a busy street, a golf course abuts it, and in general there isn't a whole lot there anymore that's especially evocative of the nineteenth century. Exhibits are pretty minimal, although the interpretive signage is good, and the overall integrity of the site is rather dismal. It's almost as much of a disappointment to a knowledgeable visitor as the park's buffalo "herd," which when I last saw it consisted of three animals.

I don't mean to suggest that state parks are always less well-done than NPS sites; I've seen some great examples of state historic parks over the years. It's just that in this specific case the difference between the two sites is particularly striking.

[*Seriously. My job involved making sure that what was listed in a database inventory of historic structures matched up with what was on the ground at the parks.]

I love Google

Anyone else notice Google's design today? It's the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope.

Thinking about housing

MSN has an article up at the moment about today's suburbs becoming tomorrow's slums. It's kind of an odd piece -- if the traditional buyers of those tract mansions give up on them because costs of commuting get to be too high, or the owners decide to downsize as they get older, why on earth would today's urban poor move out to the fringes of Cobb County (to use an Atlanta area example) to turn those McMansions into multi-family housing? They could afford the commute even less, and would have absolutely no reason to move that far away from where all the jobs are. Seems like a far more likely fate as the population of the urban cores climbs again would be for the McMansions to simply moulder there abandoned indefinitely, the 21st century equivalent of the abandoned houses from the 20th century that a person sees now when driving in rural areas. Society changed, and no one needed those houses, either out on what used to be a farm or in the small towns that have shrunk over time, and owners eventually just abandoned them to collapse on their own.

I've actually been thinking about something similar in a vague way lately. I watch a lot of HGTV. I know. It's a sickness, but at least it's a fairly benign one. One of the shows I watch a lot is "House Hunters." And one thing I've noticed over and over and over is that 99% of the househunters want brand-new construction. They want to move into a place where the paint is still wet and nothing's been used. At all. They want to be the first persons to slide a bottle of overpriced merlot into the pretentious wine rack in the kitchen (which is almost always located in the worst possible place for storing wine, someplace hot and bright, but that's a digression), the first persons to use the ostentatious multi-head shower that's big enough to service a high school football team, the first persons to discover that they've just spent way too much money on a house that has so many rooms they'll never use half of them. . . Once in awhile there's an exception, but not often.

Well, one thing that hit me is that every single one of those househunters also talks about re-sale value a few years down the road. Apparently it hasn't occurred to them to ask that if they're not interested in buying a "used" house, why should they expect anyone else to be? If a house from the 1990s seems too dated and too old, how is a house from 2009 going to come across to buyers ten years from now? I can see it now: "OMG. All that stainless steel. That's so passe. And those hideous granite counter tops. . . they're going to have to go. And this shower? What was the builder thinking? Hadn't they ever heard of water conservation?!"

I used to think mobile homes, trailer parks, were the ultimate in disposable housing. Maybe not. Maybe the real disposable housing is sitting out in the high dollar 'burbs, but that just hasn't become obvious yet.

[Photo is from a small town in western Kansas somewhere between Fort Larned and Fort Hays. We could tell that at one time it had been a fairly prosperous little farming community that covered the equivalent of 12 blocks or so and had had a commercial strip several blocks long. When we drove through in 2006 there was no longer a single business open, nothing. The residential area was still looking lived in, but we all knew that wasn't going to last much longer.]

Garbage in my In Box

There are days when it doesn't pay to check the In Box for my Hotmail account. Or, for that matter, my work e-mail. For some reason, several different friends and relatives of the right-wing Faux News indoctrinated persuasion decided to forward a piece of crap about the "gold plated" free coverage that politicians enjoy. Apparently it reallys chaps their collective ass that President Obama, members of the Senate and House of Representatives, and various others who collect federal paychecks actually have employer-provided health insurance.

In fact, those politicians have the same employer-provided coverage that I do: they also fall under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan. And you know what? It's not free. It's not gold-plated. And it's not a single "government run" health plan. It's a smorgasbord of private insurance and HMO plans, including Kaiser, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and a bunch of others. Like every other private plan functioning in the U.S. today, the plans in the FEHBP have premiums, co-pays, exclusions, deductibles -- all the same stuff every other private plan entails.

Is it better than what a person can get if a person is working in the private sector? Maybe, maybe not. From a purely personal perspective, the best health insurance we ever had was while the S.O. was working as an aircraft mechanic in the 1980s -- since then it's been steadily downhill in how much insurance costs and what all it will cover.

I do know, however, that it is truly bizarre that I am getting these e-mails from (and there's no polite way to put this) dumbfuck cousins who don't see just how incredibly stupid it is for them to fear a theoretical government-run health plan when the family tree is full of relatives who have struggled with medical bills for many years. My idiot cousin Wayne, for example, got to watch his sister totally stress out over her inability to pay her bills while she was dying of breast cancer. On what planet is it more acceptable for a dying woman to have to beg friends to put on spaghetti feeds and hold bake sales to raise money to pay her bills than it would be for her to have access to a system that would eliminate the bills to begin with? And this was a woman who had a decent job (school teacher) and the health insurance that came with it. So much for the private sector always doing a better job than the government.

One of the other people who sent me the anti-government health plan propaganda is a woman who's also dealing with cancer -- and she's past 70 now so her bills are all being paid by Medicare.

The stupid, it burns.