the mojowire

Greetings from the Providers of Triskelion

To:              Foolish Earthlings

From:        Provider Biz (Green Brain on the right)

Subject:    Hello from the Providers 

Greetings,

Since I am disembodied brain on a farway planet who has slight gambling problem, I occasionaly place a few bets.  Gladiatorial combats on alient planets, football, March Madness, whatever.  Occasionaly, my fellow providers and I enjoy putting a few quatloos down on the outcomes of political contests and events in American politics.   I thought you on the miserable planet Earth would enjoy playing this game with us.  No?  Too bad earth scum!  Being a Provider means you get your way or we teleport you to our private gladiator planet and make you wear ridculous costumes.  

Lets get started...

Debt Ceiling:   Yes, the dipwads in your House of Representatives are going to threaten the most important economic asset of the United States, its credit rating, to fulfill  their Ayn Rand fantasies.   There is considerable debate among the providers whether or not they will manage to screw up the situation so badly that it causes a world wide financial panic.  A worse one than 2008 possibly.  Or maybe they fold under intense pressure from the banker friends on Wall Street.  Or the President caves and cuts a deal with these yahoos.  

Provider Biz says:  500 quatoloos that the President caves.  Ultimately, he isn't crazy enough to pull that trigger and the bugeyed crazy nimrods in the House truly are that crazy.  Are you kidding, they are ten times crazier than it is required to do that.   The President doesn't want his legacy to be an worldwide financial panic.  And many of the clowns in the House don't care if Wall Street is pissed at them.  They will come back.  The President caves.  Moving on...

Filibuster reform:  Democrats in the Senate are, according the news transmission we are receiving on Triskellion, pissed about the holds on executive branch nominees.  Bold words, well, bold words for Democratic Senators.  Will they do what they say, or wuss out like they usually do.  

Provider Biz says:  Seriously?  1,000 quatloos nothing real happens on the Filibuster.   You can only pull the rug from under my brain pan so many times before I get the message.  These guys aren't ready to back up their rhetoric.  

Afghanistan:  This one is a bit murky even to me.  The President is threatening to pull all troops out by 2014 and not leave a force behind which is the plan he laid out a few years back.  Karzai is pissing him off and it seems to this Provider the President feels he was sold a ration of crap by Petraeus when he agreed to the surge.  Apparently Uncle Joe Biden was right on this one and when did you thing you would read those words.   Will the President stick to their original plan or will he pull forces all the way out? 

Provider Biz says:   800 quatloos the President pulls all the way out.  2nd term is legacy time and I get the feeling he doesn't want to leave the conflict in Afghanistan to his successor.  It's been a horrific mess all the way through his Presidency and nobody has any idea how to make it better.  I think walking away is going to start looking really good as the clock winds down on his 2nd term.

This will be a regular feature on the Mojowire, so please feel free to lay your bets in comments.   More wagers from the Providers will be coming in the future.  Obey the Providers Earth creatures and lay your bets....

'B' Ark Congress

I can't remember if this was in the original book or just the original BBC radio play script, but towards the end of "The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy" there is a scene where the population of the 'B' Ark -- a population of dullards and nitwits ditched by their own  civilization -- end up stranded on prehistoric Earth.

They are having a conversation about fiscal policy, to wit: Once they decided to use leaves as negotiable currency, they all became immensely rich, but with the rather large supply of leaves on hand, they had run into something of an inflation problem. At that point, they decided to embark on a fiscal tightening policy to effectively re-value the leaf... by burning down all the forests...

It was this scene playing again and again in my mind when I read that Congressional Republicans have decided that for the safety of wildland firefighters in Arizona, the most expidient and clearly the best alternative is to ... wait for it ... cut down all the trees.

This is from an LA Times editorial appearing this morning:

Within days of the devastating news that all but one member of an elite firefighting team had perished, the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation arranged an oversight hearing on the topic for Thursday. Its conclusion, though, seems to have been reached in advance. "Unnatural, excessive growth and unhealthy forests increase the risk of wildfire," last week's announcement said. "Active management helps protect and restore forests while also helping local economies and creating jobs."

So let me get this straight... 19 firefighters perish fighting a wildfire and the immediate GOP response is to level the forests. "Forest Thinning" and "Active Management" are the quaint bits of political legerdemain they have come up with for renewed push to clear cut the land of anything larger than a blade of grass.

And make no mistake, clear cutting is what we're talking about here. There are western logging interests that have wanted to plow through the national forests for decades and they will use any excuse to forward that policy.

There are sensible forest management and risk abatement policies that could -- and probably should -- be put in place. Defensible space around forests, enforcing more stringent fire safety codes for residential areas adjacent to wildlands, a policy of "let it burn" given that fire ecology is a critical part of the life cycle of a forest.

One reason fires like Yarnell get so out of hand is that for the better part of a century, the organizing principal of the Forest Service, and most other like agencies, has been to put out fires, which they have learned to do very well. The problem is that areas that don't regularly burn  get overgrown and then when they do ignite it is with the fury of decades of unspent fuel.

The problem is not that we're lax in our deforestation duties, it's that a policy of natural fire ecology in our wildlands has always had fierce political opposition from a wide variety of interests: loggers, mining, agriculture, home builders, etc...

I just wish that for once -- for once! -- those interests would come correct and talk about what they really want, and it's not firefighter safety and it's not responsible range management, it's tapping a resource for all it's worth like a plague of drunken locusts, stripping the land and moving on to the next patch... and their enablers in Congress are making it all that much easier now.

Well, I guess you get what you pay for...

 

mojo sends

Okay, we'll make this quick...

The Wire is back up and live.

There's a lot to talk about, and we'll be getting to it all soon enough here... The NSA, Egypt, the ever-popular War-On-Plurality, the Supreme Court and the future of the Republic... it really is a full docket, as the kids like to say...

So stand by to stand by while we get ready to pull the pin on this thing... again!

 

mojo sends