HAIGHT SPEECH

A police officer runs towards the fire (Getty Images: Justin Sullivan)

San Bruno is a small town just south of San Francisco, on the peninsula. Apparently, a couple of hours ago, a neighborhood exploded.

Witnesses reported hearing a huge explosion. An entire neighborhood is engulfed in flames, and so far 12 homes have been confirmed destroyed. PG&E has just confirmed that it is a ruptured natural gas line under Sequoia Ave and Sneath Lane.

Another view of the San Bruno fire. (Photo by osxdude via SFist.com)

Photo by RodrigoBNO via SFist.com

Current updates indicate the fires are moving from house to house, and the nearby hospital has reported a large number of people with injuries. Flights in and out of SFO are operating and on time. Residents displaced by the fire can find food and shelter at the Veterans Rec Center at 251 City Park Way in San Bruno.

This is just incredibly weird. I can’t help but wonder if there are shenanigans, because a gas main blowing up is just something that doesn’t happen with any regularity. The last one I can even recall reading about was in New York City several years ago. Kyle speculates that this would be a good pilot project for a terrorist attack on infrastructure. A test run on a soft target (residential neighborhood in a low-risk area) would be one logical step toward such an attack.

On an entirely unrelated note, when I drove to class this morning, the entire campus was blocked off and posted “campus closed until further notice”. The emergency turned out to be a campus-wide power outage. I suspect the construction crews that are working there. Last semester they kept setting off the evacuation alarm. It wouldn’t surprise me overmuch to learn that they somehow severed power for the whole college.

A firefighter walks from the scene of three destroyed homes in Detroit Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010. (AP Photo/Detroit Free Press, Kathleen Galligan)

Normally when a major city in the United States is swept by more than 85 fires over the course of a single night and 74,000 people have a power outage, the national news media talks about it. High winds overnight may have been the initial cause:

Detroit Fire Commissioner James Mack addressed questions from reporters who asked how all of these fires started. Commissioner Mack said the high winds and the downed wires played a major role in the outbreak of the house fires. However, he says at least two fires may have been the work of an arsonist.

Some of the worst damage is on the city’s east side. At least 20 homes burned in the area of Robinwood and Van Dyke. The fire spread across the city block to Robinwood Street. Firefighters say it’s possible the blazes in this neighborhood were ignited by a faulty transformer spraying sparks. Those sparks were carried by strong winds and started fires at a number of other houses.

A home is engulfed in flames on Detroit’s east side Tuesday, Sept. 7, 2010. (AP Photo/Detroit Free Press, Marcin Szczepanski)

The number of buildings affected is currently estimated in the dozens, and it has been noted that many of those buildings are abandoned or uninhabited (which is not unusual in Detroit these days).

More interesting, however, is the possibility that there were known, preexisting problems with the power grid that residents reported and which were ignored by the utility company:

The family of a Detroit couple whose home was burned in one of dozens of fires that swept the city Tuesday night said they had been trying to get DTE Energy to the home to check on power surges and service interruptions since last week, but no one from the utility came.

The family also suspected a neighbor was trying to hook into the electric line illegally and told DTE as much, Michelle Denton said.

It would not surprise me much to learn that there is a lot of illegal power grid tapping going on in Detroit these days, given the abject poverty and decay of the city.

Also at issue is the fact that Detroit doesn’t have enough firefighters on the payroll to deal with an emergency of this magnitude.

“We’ve had aid before, just to help out in a specific area, but this time is different. We don’t have anyone available,” said Detroit Fire Capt. Dan McNamara, a 33-year veteran of the department who is president of the Detroit Firefighters Association. “It used to be we could throw enough resources to knock something big down and work our way into it. The day of reckoning has come.”

Though the city does not have enough fire trucks, McNamara said the main concern is the city doesn’t have the firefighters to staff them. Eight or nine fire companies out of 65 are shut down each day, he said.

A Detroit firefighter looks through the smoldering yards of burned homes and garages on East Robinwood in Detroit, Michigan Sept. 8. Dozens of fires swept across Detroit Tuesday night, fanned by high winds and downed power lines with as many as 20 of the fires on East Robinwood and adjacent streets. (Reuters, Rebecca Cook)

Even after firefighters arrived at the scene of a fire, they had to wait for DTE to send people out to deal with the high voltage power feed.

So why is the mainstream press apparently uninterested in this story?

UPDATE: Here’s some raw video. No voiceover.

It has come to my attention that I have not been clear in my blog over the past couple of years (due to the fact that I largely stopped blogging for reasons now unclear to me) that my opinions of Bush and his policies have changed significantly from when he was first elected.

I was recently challenged on another forum to cite examples of my own writing where I have denounced various Bush era activities and policies. I was surprised to find that I was not able to give such citations, as they exist only in my mind. I have never committed it to print. So I will rectify this.

GUANTANAMO BAY
The capture and detention of prisoners of war is acceptable. What was not acceptable was the fact that the facility simply imprisoned them and then did nothing more. The prisoners should have been investigated according to military procedures to establish their crimes and involvement (to make sure we didn’t imprison actual innocent bystanders).

Prisoners of war captured on the battlefield are not entitled to the protections of the American civilian justice system.

But as a prison for convicted terrorists, I don’t have a problem with it.

IRAQ
Wrong target. Although it is nice that Saddam Hussein is no longer around to torture his people, that was never our job or our responsibility. We should not have invaded Iraq. We should have invaded Iran.

AFGHANISTAN
Although terrorists do hide in and are supported by Afghani forces, Afghanistan is not the main target. It is peripheral. Establishing “democracy” in Afghanistan is not going to solve the problem.

IRAN
Iran is the hornet’s nest, the source of the funding and training of most Islamist terrorists. We should have invaded Iran and wiped out that support infrastructure, but we didn’t.

THE MIDDLE EAST IN GENERAL
We should not be trying to “liberate” the Middle East. For one thing, what Bush/Obama want to do is not liberty. Secondly, the cultures of the Middle East don’t know how to be democratic (nor do they really want to be). Sometimes various factions hate their governments, but tyranny is okay. They just want it to be their kind of tyranny.

Dictatorship, especially Islamic dictatorship, has been the government of choice in that part of the world for centuries. Various religious factions vie for supremacy. They don’t want to get along — they each want to be the one in charge.

Even if we free them and give them democratic choice, they will just choose to install another dictator, and be back to square one. We are seeing this pan out in Iraq right now.

PATRIOT ACT / WIRETAPPING
I am not an expert on the contents of the Patriot Act or the implications of it. But in general I do not endorse the restriction of individual rights and/or liberty. Government invasion into personal freedoms never has an innocent motive and never has good results.

TSA / AIRLINE SECURITY
All this new “security” at airports in the US is a farce, a dog and pony show some call “security theater”. It doesn’t actually make us safer. There are still many obvious loopholes that would allow a determined terrorist (or even a halfway intelligent one) to destroy an airplane and kill everyone on board.

The failure to apply proper profiling further reduces it to a circus. That 82-year-old white grandmother from Iowa is not a terrorist. But that 27-year-old Arab guy from Turkey might be.

DEFICIT / NATIONAL BUDGET
Bush’s military spending would have been justified if we had actually fought the right war, in the right place, against the right enemies (Iran). But we didn’t.

TORTURE / WATERBOARDING
I do not and have never endorsed torture (including waterboarding) as a method of interrogation on prisoners. It doesn’t work. A torture victim will say anything to avoid more torture. Information thus gained is not reliable.

SUSPENSION OF HABEAS CORPUS
On November 13, 2001, Bush suspended the right of habeas corpus by executive order. Basically, habeas corpus means that detainees have the right to seek relief from unlawful imprisonment. This is tied up in the right to a hearing, a trial, legal counsel, and the right to be free from detention if not charged with a crime.

This was to be used on “enemy combatants”, to allow the government to capture and indefinitely detain terrorists. The status of “enemy combatant” has been applied to American citizens, effectively suspending their rights to due process.

Foreign enemies are not “tried in courts”. They are captured on the battlefield and dealt with as prisoners of war by the military. The people waging war on the United States are typically not Americans. They may be here on visas, but that’s not the same thing. They are usually citizens of a foreign nation, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, etc.

I do not support the suspension of habeas corpus. An American citizen who wages war on the United States (such as John Walker Lindh) is guilty of sedition and treason, and should be charged and tried appropriately, with all rights normally due to citizens in an American court.

TARP / BANK BAILOUTS
This was never a good idea and I opposed it entirely from the first moment it was mentioned. “Too big to fail” is ridiculous. The banks should have been allowed to fail and recover on their own. Yes it would have impacted the economy. But it has anyway because TARP doesn’t work and was never capable of working.

AUTO INDUSTRY BAILOUTS
That’s Obama’s mess, not Bush’s.

I will add more material later as necessary.

I stumbled over this amusing video talking about the correct procedures for oil containment booming and why it’s being done totally wrong by BP and why everybody else is contributing to it being done totally wrong.  CAUTION: lots and lots of cursing. NSFW.

Bill Dupray says “Remind me again why Chris Christie can’t be president in 2012?” Um, because the winner of the next Presidential election won’t be inaugurated until January 2013?

That said, I know what he meant. Christie is definitely a breath of fresh air in the morass of contemporary politics — not necessarily because of his substantive policies, the full impact of which remains to be seen — but simply because he treats the people of his state like adults. He doesn’t pretend that the hard choices aren’t necessary, or that they can be made without pain, and he believes the public is mature enough to grasp the facts, evaluate them and act appropriately.

It’s a sad comment on the rest of our political leadership, on the left and the right, that that alone is enough to make Christie stand out from the crowd.

Herewith my and Anne’s entries.  You will note that Anne is a much better artist than I am.

For those interested in more drawings of Mohammad, Craig Biddle has a collection over at the Objective Standard website.  And for those who just can’t get enough, check out the Mohammed Image Archive.

A thought-provoking TED talk on the connection between effective leadership and communicating the ‘why’ of what you’re doing:

While trundling around Usenet, I stumbled over a piece of spam by a religionist with the subject “What have atheists ever done for humanity?”  The question struck me as interesting, not because of its contents but because of the way it frames the conflict between the religious and non-religious worldviews.  The poster wants to provoke the following line of thought: ‘What have atheists done for humanity?  Well, let me think of some famous atheists… hmm, nobody really comes to mind.  I guess there were the Communists, and Madeline Murray O’Hare.  Gee, I guess all we’ve gotten from atheism is mass slaughter.  Wow, I guess religion really must be a good thing!”  And, indeed, he is correct that overt atheists are pretty sparse on the list of great benefactors of humanity.  But does his conclusion follow?

The problem comes from the way the distinction is framed: religion versus atheism.  But is this the right way to think of the dispute?  Atheism, per se, is a purely negative doctrine.  It indicates the lack of a specific kind of belief.  But men act on the basis of what they do believe, not what they don’t.  I’m an atheist, but that isn’t the essential defining characteristic of my beliefs.  Fundamentally, I’m an advocate of reason.  Atheism is a derivative consequence, not a primary.  I don’t believe in God because there is no rational basis for doing so.

If you reframe the question in terms of reason and faith, the entire playing field changes.  What has reason ever done for humanity?  In a modern industrial society it’s difficult to identify a concrete value that doesn’t flow from reason.  Science, technology, medicine, industry, political freedom — all are children of the age of reason.  (Stephen Hicks has a nifty diagram of the connections in his book Explaining Post-Modernism; on-line version available here.)  Now consider the contrary question: What has faith ever done for humanity?  The era of history in which faith was most dominant is aptly named the Dark Ages — a time when the average lifespan was approximately 30 years and everyone existed in what we would today consider grinding poverty.  Disease ran rampant, literacy was extremely rare.  Heretics were burned at the stake.  Men who took their faith the most seriously, like Saint Francis, would use rocks as pillows, drink laundry water, and sprinkle sand on their food to dull the taste.

Reason is man’s basic means of survival.  In essence, the answer to the question “What has reason ever done for humanity?” is “Allowed it to live and prosper.”  The answer to the question “What has faith ever done for humanity?” is “Led it to suffer and die.”  The religious men whose actions benefitted humanity created those benefits to the extent that they acted rationally, i.e. to the extent that their faith did not interfere with their reason.

Attempting to think about this issue in the terms laid out by the religionist is futile.  The setup leads down a blind alley to a false conclusion.  The lesson is that one should never uncritically accept the terms in which an intellectual opponent wants to frame a debate.  Concepts matter.  Don’t let your enemies pick the ones you use.

Anyone paying attention to the news knows that 2010 is shaping up to be a Republican year.  A growing grass-roots backlash against the Democrats is reflected in both election results and polls.  But one should never underestimate the ability of the GOP to blow an advantage, and here’s an example of why — they don’t understand the power of narrative.  The left is expert at setting up narrative lines that provide the structure for media coverage of events.  Facts that play into the narrative get picked up, repeated, elaborated.  Facts that run counter to the narrative are ignored, suppressed, abandoned.  And the narratives are almost always ones that benefit the left and damage the right.

One of the narratives the left has been setting up recently is the classic “conservatives are just a bunch of racist rednecks”.  They’ve been particularly anxious to set this frame up around the Tea Party movement in the hopes of scaring off and/or driving away the independent voters who have been attracted by the Tea Party’s message of fiscal responsibility, but they’ll use it on mainstream Republicans too.  It never gets old.  Now, if you want to fight a narrative line, you must not do anything that feeds into it and gives it credibility.  Any fact that even seems to support the narrative may be seized upon, repeated endlessly as ‘proof’ of its accuracy, and used to cement its power in the upcoming news cycle.

In light of the above, I now present to you Bob McDonnell, the recently-elected governor of Virginia.

Idiot.

Rick Moran writes, of the Tea Parties, that he has “been very critical of those in the tea party movement who seek to use anger and fear as a wedge to gain support for their cause.”  The implicit assumption here is that anger is somehow an inappropriate response to recent political events.  Excuse me?  Let’s take one example: ObamaCare.  In my judgment, the Democrats passed a bill which was:

• Profoundly immoral.
• Ruinously impractical.
• Defended mendaciously.
• Supported corruptly.
• Enacted through procedural abuse, in the face of strong public opposition.

Exactly which of these things should I not be angry about?  Anger is a response to perceived injustice.  Condemning anger means one of two things: either the object of the anger is not in fact an injustice, or we should be emotionally indifferent to questions of right and wrong.

Moran goes on to note that “that reason wins a lot more converts than screaming” — which is true.  But reason and anger are not mutually exclusive.  The appropriate response to our current political situation is anger, rationally grounded. It is the rational identification of the facts which gives rise to the anger, and the anger provides the motivation to act to correct the injustice.  This is not an academic exercise.  Our lives are, quite literally, at stake.  If we’re not allowed to get emotional about that, when is anger appropriate?