PAgent’s Progress

A friend has informed me that the RSS feed from this site is now featured on AllTop’s Portland page. I am in very good company there. Now, as large as my ego may be, I can’t for the life of me figure out why I have been accorded this honor. I can only assume that someone, at some time, will correct this error. In the meantime, there I am.

Today is the Girl’s birthday. Thirteen years old, and almost as tall as I am. She has developed alarmingly quickly over the last year, physically and emotionally. A large portion of the responsibility for this has to be given to the meds she takes. After years of dead ends and bad starts, we now have her on two medications that go a long way toward controlling her impulsive behavior and allow her to function at school. She still drives us nuts, but she’s also quite a remarkable young lady.

Her involvement with Girl Scouts is paying dividends, as the lessons of personal and social responsibility gradually sink in. Her artistic ability continues to develop, much to the chagrin of her teachers when they find her notes covered in doodles. She can draw amazingly well, and just continues to get better every day. This may be the first (of many, I’m sure) areas in which she has surpassed the abilities of her old man. It’s an odd feeling, but ultimately a good one.

I went to work yesterday, and almost immediately turned around and came home. Between the coughing, the wheezing, and the stuffy head, there wasn’t any way I was going to be productive, anyway. Spending a few hours in bed probably did me a world of good.

Partly because I’ve been so sick the last week, we are woefully unprepared for Halloween. At this point, I may just haul out the firepit and put on the robe I wore last year and be Mysterious Figure Near The Fire. If I haul out the big mask this year, I promise to take pictures.

The Posse Comitatus Act is perhaps best known to far-right militia groups and white supremacists. At least, they are the ones that often scream that the U.S. is violating the Act. But it is an important law and important concept, one that bears consideration.

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed by Congress after the Civil War, and forbids the use of the U.S. military (with the exception of the Coast Guard) from acting as law enforcement within the United States, without explicit authorization by the Constitution or by Congress.

Posse Comitatus is one of this nation’s most important safeguards in preventing a corrupt administration from using the military to suppress internal dissent. That’s why I was so astounded to read at Our PDX that Dieselboi had encountered active-duty soldiers on the Portland waterfront.

You should be astounded, too.

Beginning on October 1, the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division 1st Brigade Combat Team was deployed within the U.S., as a federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks. And presumably, civil unrest.

How did this happen? In part, you can thank the royal screw-up that was the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina (Ref).

After the Bush administration looked like complete incompetents in the aftermath of Katrina, the administration began lobbying for elimination of key aspects of Posse Comitatus, so the President could deploy U.S. military forces inside the U.S. at will. Well, you would think that the Congress would never go along with such an idea. And you would be wrong. The Defense Authorization Act of 2006 empowered President George W. Bush to impose martial law in the event of a terrorist “incident,” or a breakdown in “public order.”

In 2007, the “Insurrection Act” of 1807, which also created limits on how a President could deploy U.S forces within the U.S., was renamed the “Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act.” Instead of permitting the deployment of troops in case of “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy”, the new act now permits deployment in the event of “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident, or other condition.”

Of course, “other condition” is not defined.

So now back to 3rd Infantry Division 1st BCT. It turns out they have been issued a whole bunch of new toys to play with in their first-ever domestic deployment. Specifically,

The 1st BCT’s soldiers also will learn how to use “the first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded,” 1st BCT commander Col. Roger Cloutier said, referring to crowd and traffic control equipment and nonlethal weapons designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals without killing them. (Ref)

All of this plays out like the first hour of a bad political conspiracy movie. And you can be forgiven for imagining that I’m paranoid, because I am paranoid, particularly where the right wing of the Republican party is concerned.

What I want to know is, why are members of the 1st BCT deployed in Portland with gear that has been designed for crowd control and putting down riots, in the week before the election? Does the government anticipate rioting in the near future?

Polls right now show Barack Obama with a commanding lead, well beyond statistical uncertainty. Our nation has always prided itself on the peaceful transfer of power — this is one of the tenets of democracy that we wish to export to the rest of the world. So, why would anyone fear that this election would be any different?

Perhaps if you knew that Obama was not going to win, despite the polling numbers, you might well believe that having a few lads in fatigues with beanbag rounds and tazers at the ready is a good idea, particularly in cities where you expect there to be a strong reaction. A brigade, while large (1,500 to 4,000 soldiers) is hardly strong enough to crush a popular uprising, but it would be more than enough to shut up the loudest voices raised in any given city.

I sincerely hope that this is simply the ravings of a liberal paranoiac. That on the day after the election we can congratulate ourselves on yet another demonstration of democracy to the rest of the world. And of course, I hope that Mr. Obama is convincingly elected.

I just think it’s ironic that the Bush administration may be responsible for convincing me that a strict construction of the Second Amendment could be a good thing after all

I stopped by New Season’s last night and brought home many tasty foodie treats. For dinner we had lovely fresh spinach and feta chicken sausages, basil chicken sausages, and for me a cranberry chicken sausage and a marsala fig chicken sausage.

We also had some absolutely decadent Pierre Robert triple-creme cheese and marinated mozzarella balls on artisanal bread. I got to enjoy Maytag Blue cheese on slices of Cox’s Orange Pippin apples — heaven. With all this bread and cheese I had several glasses of Shiraz, which I blamed for the thick head and fatigue I suffered later in the evening.

But no, that was just the head cold I was developing letting me know it was settling in. This morning I woke up coughing, sneezing, and stuffy-headed, and have felt lousy all day.

I’m also feeling a little iffy about social networking in general, and twitter in particular. Someone with as much self-doubt as I have shouldn’t be casting things out into the ether. I invest too much energy into waiting for a reply or a comment. This blog more or less stands on its own, but twitter almost demands a conversation.

Similarly, I’m feeling angsty about the new blogs, which are attracting surprisingly few readers. I can more or less understand that about ‘nonobvious’, which I would suspect is an acquired taste, but I am very surprised at how few people have shown any interest in ‘flotsam’, where I’ve invested some effort and already posted some neat stuff.

When I confess these concerns to the Wife, she shrugs and says “So put everything back into one blog again.” But it’s not that simple. I like the structure that I’ve set up. I like separating the content in this way. If anything, if it turns out that so few people are interested in the odds and ends I find, I’ll probably just stop posting them.

And if you’re interested in this historical narrative I’ve been developing over the last couple of posts, please let me know. If you don’t want to comment, you can always just drop me an email. Thanks.

Strange Trip continued….

Washington State is divided by the Cascade Mountain range. On the west side of the mountains, there are thick temperate rain forests, ferns, lichen, and moss aplenty. And rain. Lots of rain. Not necessarily a lot of inches of rain, but a fine drizzle or mist that stretches out for weeks or months. Western Washington is salt water, snow-capped mountains, and rich dark green as far as the eye can see.

I love it. I grew up there.

Eastern Washington State is a beautiful place, but it’s very different from the west side of the Cascade Mountains. The Cascades prevent the majority of the moisture being carried by the prevailing winds from the Pacific Ocean from ever reaching the east side of the state. All that water gets dumped on the way. Also, the Columbia basin is at a higher elevation than the low, overgrown west side of the state. So the east side is hot in the summer, and cold in the winter, and dry.

It’s immediately apparent when you’ve crossed the imaginary line dividing Western Washington from Eastern Washington — the vegetation changes dramatically as you cross the pass. After miles and miles of closely-growing Douglas Fir and thick undergrowth, as you start downhill the trees become Ponderosa Pines, separated by open space carpeted with a thick pad of needles.

After a few more miles, you’ve left the trees far behind you, and you are crossing a rolling brown expanse of grass, or wheat, or sagebrush. It’s not green. It’s not wet. And it’s not mountains.

As I drove east on Interstate 90 from Seattle to Spokane, there could hardly have been a better metaphor for my leaving home and heading into parts unknown. And if crossing the vast grasslands of the Columbia Basin wasn’t alien enough, I was driving a 7-year-old used car that I’d owned maybe two weeks, with no real conception of how reliable it would prove to be. My first car. The first time I would be responsible if something went CLUNK! on the highway, leaving me stranded in the desert.

Oh yes, I was sweating, and it wasn’t simply due to the blast of heat coming through the open windows.

I kept one eye on the gas gauge and the other on the huge dust-devils that kept forming out on the fields. These weren’t the little whirlwinds that might form and scoot across the playground. These were monsters, several stories high, easily big enough to encompass, say, a compact station wagon.

If one headed across the highway, should I try and avoid it? It couldn’t really move the car around, could it? Could it?

What if my car died, and I wasn’t near a phone, and a tornado came and just carried my car away with all my stuff in the back?

Welcome to adulthood. Sucks to be you.

Back in 1986, as my senior year in college was progressing, it slowly began to occur to me that I was going to need to figure out just exactly what I was going to do after graduation.

Fortunately, our placement office was incredibly helpful in helping students polish their resumes and arrange interviews. Except I really didn’t want to have to interview. For one thing, I had nothing to wear. So, I’d have to buy a suit. I didn’t want to buy a suit. For that matter, I had no idea what I wanted to use my degree for, but I had a pretty good idea that being a B.A. chemist pretty much guaranteed I’d be doing something fairly repetitive, like taking pH measurements all day, or performing some other quality assurance inspection.

Maybe I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t it. But if I had a Ph.D., I reasoned, I could do stuff that was a lot more interesting. And that’s how I made the decision to go to graduate school. So I wouldn’t have to buy a suit, or interview with anyone, or get a job. These were not good reasons to go to grad school.

Now, whenever anybody asks me if they should go to grad school, I try to make sure they really, really WANT to go to grad school. For example, because they are absolutely crazy about their major, and doing anything else would leave them hollow and empty inside. Because going to grad school when you aren’t 100% thrilled with your chosen field is a big mistake. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So, where to apply? I had a bourgeoning interest in inorganic chemistry, and asked around the department for opinions. The general consensus was that the University of Illinois was one of the top schools in the country for the kind of chemistry I wanted to do. Or, as my P-Chem prof put it, “They have a great reputation, and a lot of money. The money will be helpful while you’re there, and the reputation will help you when you get out.”

So I applied to four graduate schools, including the University of Washington (my safety school), MIT (for grins), the University of Illinois (where I really wanted to go) and Stanford (which was Stanford, after all).

I remember the materials from the UW said “Congratulation on being accepted into our graduate college! Your application ID no. is 273948-DW-4211, please use it on all future correspondence.” The rest of the packet consisted of computer-generated forms in various shades of pink and goldenrod. I really didn’t want to go to a college where I’d just be a number.

The packet from MIT said something like “So, you believe you are intelligent enough to aspire to study under the best and brightest? Well, we will deign to let you enter our hallowed halls.” I was amused to find that much attitude in an acceptance letter, and decided thanks but no thanks. Besides, who wants to live in Boston?

I honestly don’t remember what I got from Stanford, except I got accepted.

From the UI I got a personal letter indicating how excited the graduate school was that I was interested in studying there, with the promise of a tuition waiver, and an assistantship worth $11,000 a year.

$11,000 a year??? That was more money than I’d ever even contemplated making in a single year. And tuition was free? The decision was made.

And that’s how sometime near the end of July or the beginning of August, I took out a loan for $7,000, bought a 1980 Mazda GLC wagon with $2,000 of it, and headed east from Puget Sound on I-90 with most of my earthly belongings jammed in the back, and $700 in cash stashed under the driver’s seat. I was heading off in search of my destiny.

For the first time, I was really leaving home.

To be continued…

I’ve spent the evening exploring the parental control options provided by Mac OS Tiger. As you might guess, there is a specific reason I’m doing such a tedious thing. The Wife went to look up a website she’d found yesterday, and found a whole lotta porn sites in the History.

Of course, this kind of curiosity is perfectly natural. The Wife is actually angrier that the child involved snuck onto the computer when they had lost screen privileges, than the content at which they were looking.

Nevertheless, each child has their own account on the iMac now, with their own login, and their own highly restrictive set of parameters.

They still don’t have computer access right now, but when they do return to the iMac, they will have a very, very big surprise.