The Burning Season Arrives

Raging wildfire threatens to engulf 12,000 homes near Los Angeles

• The Guardian, Tuesday 1 September 2009

A firefighter crew made up of prison inmates clears brush from the path of the fire as it burns in the hills above Acton, California. Photograph: Dan Steinberg/AP

A huge wildfire was threatening to engulf 12,000 homes in the Los Angeles area today along a 20 mile (32km) front that was also advancing on a mountain top broadcasting complex and historic observatory.
At least 6,600 homes were under mandatory evacuation orders and more than 2,500 firefighters were battling the flames. Two firefighters were killed at the weekend on the blaze's north-western front when they lost control of their vehicle.

The fire had already burned at least 18 homes and 134 square miles of brush and trees and was moving north, south and east through the foothills north-east of the city. It was only 5% contained and was feeding on dry brush that had not burned for 40 years, fire officials said.

"It's burning everywhere," US forest service spokeswoman Dianne Cahir said. "When it gets into canyons that haven't burned in numerous years, it takes off. If you have any insight into the good Lord upstairs, put in a request."

Five people who refused to evacuate threatened areas reported they were trapped at a ranch near Gold Creek, Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore said. A sheriff's helicopter was unable to immediately reach them because of intense fire activity, Whitmore said. Over the weekend, three people who refused to evacuate were badly burned when they were overrun by flames, including a couple who had sought refuge in a hot tub, authorities said.

More than 20 helicopters and air tankers were preparing to dump water and retardant over the flames.
With flames only a half a mile (800m) away from the communications and astronomy centres on Mount Wilson, crews planned to set more backfires and planes dropped fire retardant around the complex, which holds transmitters for scores of television stations, radio stations and mobile phone providers.

Snip

With a super wet February followed by a long dry summer much of California is set up for an epically rotten wildfire season. Did we mention the Golden State is so broke that it can't pay attention?

STS 128

Beauty in the Night

Billows of smoke and steam rise above Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida alongside space shuttle Discovery as it races toward space on the STS-128 mission.

The STS-128 mission is the 30th International Space Station assembly flight and the 128th space shuttle flight. The 13-day mission will deliver more than 7 tons of supplies, science racks and equipment, as well as additional environmental hardware to sustain six crew members on the International Space Station. The equipment includes a freezer to store research samples, a new sleeping compartment and the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT).

Image Credit: NASA/Sandra Joseph and Kevin O'Connell



Snip

Full geek alert! A NASA night launch of the space shuttle. If a regular launch is dramatic night launches are even more so. Props to NASA honoring Mr. Colbert in such a tongue-in-cheek way.

The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Edward Moore Kennedy (February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009)

Lyndon Johnson is quoted as saying that in the Senate there are show horses and work horses.  What he never noted is that sometime an individual senator could shift between the two types.

Ted Kennedy started out as the very definition of a light weight. His only seeming qualification being that he was the baby brother of the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  As the Kennedys were running the state of Massachusetts as their personal fiefdom, this was sufficient for Teddy to win his brother’s seat.

In the early sixties, the Kennedy brothers formed a triple political threat. By the end of the decade, only the baby brother remained. First JFK, then RFK, were gunned down by marginal characters in an almost offhand manner. The nation has never come to grips the way both Kennedys lost their lives. The nation avoids the essential fact that our politicians are easy targets for lone wolves bearing a grudge and who have access to small arms.

After 1968 Ted found himself the Pater Familias of the Kennedy clan. He took on the  responsibility for raising both JFK’s and RFK’s small children. He also took on the political legacy of his dead brothers. It was a heavy burden and Ted Kennedy struggled very publicly with it. One year after RFK’s death, Ted showed the darker side of the Kennedy gene pool’s legacy. He proved himself every bit as reckless as his brother Jack by piloting his limo off the Chappaquiddick Bridge. In that car was a young woman Mary Jo Kopechne. The details of that accident were never adequately explained by Ted Kennedy nor by his lawyers.  The only agreed on facts is that the car ended up in the water along with a very dead Mary Jo. It is also agreed that Ted’s reporting of the accident was seriously delayed by at least ten hours.  There is a small cottage industry that speculates on what “really” happened at Chappaquiddick: the specific relationship of Ted to Mary Jo, why Ted decided to lawyer up before confessing to the accident, and what kind of condition then Junior Senator might have been in on that night.  Legally, Ted plead to leaving the scene of an accident. Personally and politically the liability was much, much larger. Mary Jo’s incorporeal frame followed Edward Moore Kennedy to the grave and beyond. Her name is forever linked to his.

In a way, the rest of Kennedy’s career can be seen as a type of penance for his carelessness on that night. He became a more serious political personality after Chappaquiddick.  Still the full transformation required one more act of political self-flagellation. That is the best way to view Ted’s manic run against Jimmy Carter.

The campaign against Carter positively invites amateur psychoanalysis. It started out as a train wreck and ended in self-immolation. Ted started out with a disastrous interview on CBS and went downhill from there. Ted only hit his stride when his chances for the nomination had evaporated. He won some meaningless late primaries and then went to the convention with the crackpot plan of separating the President of the United States from his pledged delegates.  Carter’s team easily quashed Ted’s quixotic plan with   ruthless efficiency.  Still Ted’s petulant behavior at the convention added further disarray to an already fractured party.

Ted sat out the election licking his wounds and Carter failed to live up to his initials of J.C. by being unable to provide the political miracle that his candidacy required.  Enter Ronald Wilson Regan and the long dark night for liberalism.  For the next thirty years Ted Kennedy was fighting a rear-guard action.

For twelve years Ted Kennedy did battle against Regan-Bush and the forces of reaction. He became the consummate insider, working the angles, finding allies in the oddest of places, pulling off minor and major miracles in the era of “Government is the Problem” like SCHIP. Even with the election of a Democratic President Ted Kennedy still had an up-hill struggle; the ideology of Regan still ruled D.C. While Bill Clinton claimed to be a “New Democrat” he actually more resembled a much older type of Democrat from the Gilded Age: the “Bourbon Democrat.”  Bill Clinton’s term of office had more in common with Grover Cleveland than FDR.  The parallels between Clinton’s and Cleveland’s second term are especially unnerving.

If the “Big Dog” was a bit smaller than advertised Kennedy had his hands full with dealing with the un-dynamic duo of George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney. Bush was the consummate ideological reactionary.  Bush’s mission was nothing less than the full dismantling not only of the legacy of the 60’s but also of the New Deal.  Along the way Bush shredded the 4^th Amendment, the separation of church and state, and our nation’s long-standing moral guiding principles.

Once again Kennedy was the road-block, the voice of Liberal consciousness calling out in the wilderness. He was spot on about the error of the Iraq war and much else. Still his leadership example was ignored by his more timorous Democratic colleges. John Kerry, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton all voted for the Iraq War.  Any one of those future candidates had to do was read the unedited CIA report to discover that Bush’s Cassis Belli was supported by a swamp of lies. One can not prove that Kerry, Clinton and Edward were looking at Bush’s stratospheric approval ratings or listening to the clamorous din of the Corporate Media advocating a rating-boosting conflict but one would have good reason to suspect. Kennedy was having none of it.

It is, however, Ted’s last political act that will be the most controversial. Ted Kennedy’s full-throated support of Barack Obama is the most perilous legacy that the Liberal Lion leaves behind.  Hard core, dead ender, PUMA, Clintonistas are still furious about Ted’s support of the Junior Senator from Illinois’ run.  Some are still muttering about how this was Kennedy’s revenge for Hillary’s supposed slight of JFK’s contribution to the passage of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The discussion of that particular bit US History is best left to another place and time. In a primary process that was only decided by some one hundred delegates, it is impossible to really determine what pushed Obama over the top. What effect if any did Kennedy’s support have in the critical month of February? Who really did Hillary in? A “back-stabbing” Ted Kennedy or an incompetent Mark Penn?  One thing for sure political scientists and historians not yet born will be making their bones on these questions and others for decades to come.

For good or ill Ted Kennedy’s final legacy is now linked to the legacy of Barack Obama. If Obama turns out to be nothing more than a very clever technocrat that exploited the justified revulsion against Bush-Cheney’s eight years of incompetence and misrule, then Ted Kennedy turns into just another person who had the wool pulled over their eyes.  Is Obama nothing more than yet another iteration of a Blue Dog Democrat, the spiritual heirs of the Bourbon Democrats? Is Obama in short a fraud? Or is Obama one of those rare politicians who spring up every forty years or so; a man who changes the very rules of the political game? The answer to that question will determine the final coda of Edward Moore Kennedy’s legacy.

In the long view though Kennedy’s legacy is secure, his near half century of  public service will be a beacon shining out long after lesser lights have faded. The rise, fall and subsequent rise of Ted Kennedy is a story we will tell ourselves for generations yet to come. Each generation will add to the myth, each generation will find its own meaning to this uniquely American life. The story of Edward Moore Kennedy has not ended; it has barely begun.

Asia Just got a little more "Interesting"

S Korea satellite 'burnt and lost'

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/08/2009825233939179441.html

The rocket launched successfully but failed to push the satellite into orbit [AFP]

A satellite launched by South Korea's first space rocket has fallen to Earth and burnt up after missing its designated orbit, officials say.

"The satellite fell to earth and was burnt and lost," South Korea's science and technology ministry said on Wednesday, adding the government would form a team to analyse findings of a South Korea-Russian investigation and prepare for a re-launch.

The problem was caused by one of the two fairings which covered the satellite at the rocket's tip, the ministry said.

Because one of them did not fall away from the rocket after opening, the rocket could not achieve enough speed to overcome gravity and to place the satellite in its intended orbit.

'Half success'

After years of delays, South Korea successfully launched its two-stage Korea Satellite Launch Vehicle 1 (KSLV-1) from the Naro space centre in the south of the country on Tuesday, but Lee Myung-bak, the president, called the exercise only a "half success".

Snip.

Not to be a wet blanket but one does have to look at the Geopolitics of this launch.

This "satellite launch" had a less benign implications. Specifically it was a response to Soul's less than friendly neighbor to the north the DPRK. Pyongyang has been tossing up a large number of malfunctioning Taepodong for the last few years. While many of these devices only managed to belly-flop into the Sea of Japan the implicit threat of these missiles has unnerved both South Korea and Japan. It doesn't help that Kim Jong Il's proletarian paradise has been busily tinkering away at nuclear device for the last decade. Fortunately the Stalinist state has been rather incompetent in its effort to make something that goes Ka-boom in the night. They still have not got that implosion thing sorted out--yet.

Thus the launch was a lot more successful than one would think. The South Koreans can down-grade this satellite launcher into a very credible weapons system. North Korea and its Chinese enabler has been put on notice.

H/T to  Cujo 359

Good Advice on Race

No Nukes is Good Nukes.

With the anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki receding faster than a middle-aged mans hair line it becomes important to once more use the event to talk about an ignored subject. No, not the monster multi-megaton devices perched on missiles ready at short notice to turn over the globe to the cockroaches but the even less discussed issue of tactical nuclear weapons.

The very term tactical nuke is a misnomer. Let us pick up a dictionary and define the word “tactics.” tactics - the branch of military science dealing with detailed maneuvers to achieve objectives set by strategy. (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=tactics) also from the same source “a plan for attaining a particular goal” Thus tactics are the deep into the weeds things one does to achieve the much bigger goal or idea of strategy. It is the nuts and bolts acts one does to achieve a military victory.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki are excellent examples of how the “tactics” of using nuclear weapons plays out. One of the dirty little secrets hidden in plane view about tactical nukes is that the two bombs used on those Japanese cities are now considered quite small. Fat Man, the device that flattened Nagasaki was “only” a 21 Kiloton device. Please note that a kiloton is roughly the explosive power of a cube of TNT ten yards on each side.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent) If an average citizen wants to truly understand the disconnect between military and more normal thinking they can start at this fact: military planners consider a device that delivers a destructive force equivalent to twenty-one thousand tons of TNT “small.” . We are well beyond Alice in Wonderland and in the court of a monarch much less grounded in sanity than the Red Queen on one of her “off” days.

It takes a very special type of person to work in this particular niche of national policy. It take an even more special type of person to glibly talk about the necessity of thinking in a “tough” and “hard edged” way about the supposed utility of tactical nuclear weapons. It takes an ivory tower intellectual with serious issues with his own masculinity to beat his small, cadaverous chest in this way. It takes a man who spent most of his high-school years stuffed into his locker by jocks to have to “prove” himself in this manner.

For the rest of us who are not overcompensating for their disastrous adolescence this type of “tough thinking” looks patently insane. That is because it is patently insane. The very thought that is wrapped up in the term “tactical nuclear weapons” is the product of a warped mind.

Let’s drill down and try to take the idea on its supposed merits. First let’s look at the weapon itself, specifically let’s look at the “bunker buster” that was the apple of the Bush Administration's eye. Let us go into Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location and spy on him stroking his “precious” the B-61 Mod 11 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_Nuclear_Earth_Penetrator). In dead-eye Dick’s warped mind the device is quite “small,” “only 500 Kilotons.” That is almost 23 times as large as the Nagasaki bomb. Still Dick has a point it is “smaller” than the Nine Megaton device, the B-53, that preceded it. That device was more than 600 times the size of the device that flattened Hiroshima. What might Dick be planning to do with this “smaller” device?

Dick and his sock puppet W claimed they needed the bunker buster to take out a “hardened” site some future tin-pot dictator might set up. This would set up a “clean” kill of that site that more conventional tactics could not offer. The nuke would prevent the casualties a conventional ground assault would inflict on American troops. We just fly in, release the big boom and be safely back home to watch Idol on TV the same day.

It was a nice story and like most stories told by Bush and Cheney a big fairy tale. First off most hardened sites do not sit in out-of-the-way pristine surroundings. They sit near other stuff, stuff like major population centers, stuff like other non-military buildings. The use of these weapons would incur considerable “collateral damage” that is dead, innocent, civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Since we are talking about collateral damage let’s look at what happens to the ground that the device is penetrating. It is being blown up into the sky and irradiated. Gravity being what it is and air currents being what they are that means tons and tons of irradiated dirt being scattered far and wide. That means even more luckless civilians becoming casualties. Thus at best while American casualties may be few our opponent will be in for a major hurting.

How will that fact play out in the broader, non-military world? The U.S. zaps a hardened site in some third world or at least non-nuclear nation killing not only the “bad guy” directly but also thousands of innocent civilians. The number of civilians both directly and indirectly maimed by the bomb could easily be in the hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions. How does world opinion look after such an act? Throw in the fact that the U.S. is still the only nation to use nuclear weapons in anger and it used the device on a non-European nation and how do we look then? Even by the crassest of political considerations the use of a bunker-buster for its supposed function is a no-go.

There is however a “strategic” reason to have these weapons. They are a perfect “first strike” weapons. At least they seem to be at first blush. Ground based missiles are the “perfect” target for a bunker-buster bomb. They are high value fixed targets that be easily identified and hit. This is why the bunker-buster is such a danger to stability. The apathetic American public may be fooled by the talk of taking out tin-pot dictators but the Chinese and especially the Russians know what particular bulls-eyes these bombs are aimed at.

The Russians, who are world class paranoids in the best of times, are particularly “concerned” by the direction our nuclear thinking is proceeding. Our pursuit of a new set of tactical nukes is viewed with deep distrust by the Russians—as it should be.

We should share their deep misgivings about these “new and improved” weapons. The advertised reason for having them in the first place is deeply suspect. They can not be used against the hardened military sites of a nuclear power. At best they are a form of blackmail to be used against Russia or China, “that’s a nice hardened command and control center you have there; it would be a shame if some one dropped a bunker buster on it.” If we bluster with our bunker buster that way it turns our nation into nothing better than an out-sized Mafia Don. At worst we might have to actually back up the threat by really using the weapon and who knows what happens after that?

That is the real danger of these weapons; they are a gate-way weapon. Because they are “tactical” planners come up with tactics that employ them. There is always a danger that some future president might actually employ those tactics for some short-term goal. The weapon is just lying around so why not use it? The temptation will always be there. Because there is a chance that the “tactical” weapons will be used there is a chance that the “limited” strike will spiral wildly out of control bringing about an exchange of the really big booms of the Strategic nuclear weapons. Don’t believe such a scenario would ever play out? Three words for you: President John McCain. Or try these words: President Sara Palin. We were only one economic (and candidate) meltdown away from that possibility.

That is why it should be not only one of Obama’s top priorities but one of our top priorities that we do something serious about non-proliferation. Cutting the strategic nukes is a good idea, getting rid of the tactical nukes is an essential act of sanity.

A day late but still worth mentioning

An important anniversary passed by with little fan fare. Maybe it is because the anniversary fell on the weekend. Maybe it is because our attention has been diverted by the bright shiny object of health care. Maybe it is because we as Americans just don’t “do” history. It is odd that this day managed to pass us by with little notice, that we managed to miss the sixty-forth anniversary of the Atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but somehow we managed it.

The bombs explosions and fall out are still being felt some three generations hence. The defenders of the bomb point out that it shortened the war and prevented possibly millions of Japanese and American deaths by its use. The Revisionists are not so sure. The use of the nuclear device is not as clear cut as it seems at first blush. Japan was sending peace feelers, the entry of the Russians into the Pacific theater might have been the real reason for the Japanese surrender.

Historians will never settle this particular debate. Our present concerns and fears about nuclear weapons are reverberated back in to history. Some simple facts though are inescapable. One is that we are still, sixty-four years later, the only nation to have used nuclear weapons in anger.

The other stubborn fact is that it was an Asian people, the Japanese, who were the target of that attack. Digging only a little bit deeper one finds the long and nasty history of anti-Asian bigotry that gripped the USA especially in its Western portion for nearly a hundred years. Even though Nazi Germany was the bigger and existential threat to American Democracy it was the Japanese who were interred.

Looking into the almost slap-dash way the decision was made to use Leslie Grove’s “gadget” on Japan one does have to wonder if anti-Japanese bigotry made the decision that much easier to make. The decision makers were rather cavalier to the concerns of people who spoke out against the use of the device.

In defense of those decision makers one must not overemphasize the element of racial bigotry. The same decision makers who green lighted the flattening of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no compunction about fire-bombing Dresden or turning Berlin into a smoldering pile of rubble. The conventional fire-bombing of Tokyo was much more devastating than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

One of the odder bits of history is this salient fact: August 10, 1945 marks the last time the world was entirely free of nuclear devices. Think about that for a few minutes. The USA was not only was the only possessor of nuclear weapons but had run through its entire stockpile of those weapons after attacking Japan. One wonders what our history would look like if the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not been “successful.” It was a near thing; military dead enders attempted a coup to prevent the Emperor from broadcasting his surrender message.

Since that singular day in 1945 we have lived with the presence of nuclear weapons. From the three devices that were created at Alamogordo we have seen the proliferation of devices to literally tens of thousands. From one nation having these weapons we now have six and half (Israel being the half –they have nuclear weapons but they won’t admit to having them) Even after the collapse of the Soviet Union the threat of nuclear annihilation is still very near. The US and Russia still have the overwhelming proportion of the nuclear devices. Each nation can still vaporize each other multiple times over and still have weapons left over to eliminate any other nation that it may find to be an annoyance.

It is unfortunate that the anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing passed without much comment. We are spending a lot of time navel-gazing about health care reform, tea-baggers, and god help us Governor Stanford’s failed marriage. It is August and that means it is the silly season for the news. We need days like August 6^th and August 9^th to remind ourselves about the serious issues that involve more than our parochial obsessions. Non-proliferation and loose nukes are matters of the utmost concern too. How do we put the genie back into the bottle?

It is all well and good to talk about getting tough with Iran or North Korea but how does that further the goal of first curbing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons? Both North Korea and Iran see these weapons as a way to gain status and legitimacy—how do we disabuse them of this notion? More importantly how do we curb the real rouge nation, our so-called great ally in the war on terror, Pakistan? Both Iran’s and Iraq’s nuclear weapons program got yeoman service from A.Q. Khan’s proliferation network. Ditto for North Korea. The halting of proliferation starts in Islamabad.

Islamabad is not the only capital that needs a wake up call though. Tel Aviv needs to be more honest about how its non-possession possession is destabilizing the Middle East. Both Washington and Moscow need some nudging too. Washington is speaking out of both sides of its mouth by demonizing Iran while it develops a whole new series of “tactical nukes” that are much more destabilizing than Tehran’s efforts. Russia’s current bit of saber-rattling with nuclear subs is not making many friends either.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be constant reminders that nuclear devices are much more than toys for oversized boys. People who glibly talk about using tactical nukes need to visit both these ground zeros and the museums that commemorate the victims of the attacks before they spout off nonsense about how useful “bunker-busters” may be or what a “clean kill” they provide. The term tactical nuke should be an oxymoron; no military on earth should ever consider the use of these weapons as part of any battle plan. People who advocate the use of any nuclear device as part of tactics or strategy are not tough, they are clinically insane.

If there is a silver lining in noting the passage of another anniversary it is this: we are still only talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No other cities have joined this unhappy club. Let us hope that on August 6^th and 9^th of 2010 that we have continued the streak.