At Home In The Wasteland: August 2008 Archives

Outer Banks for the weekend

Outer Banks for the weekend, originally uploaded by lfincher.

In Kill Devil Hills until Monday afternoon.

Evolution of a driver's license photo

California, 1998. Age 16: "I can't believe those suckers passed me."

Washington, D.C., 2006. Age 24: "I can't believe they mercilessly shredded my California driver's license right in front of me. I hate this city."

Virginia, 2008: Age 26: "Oh thank god I'm no longer a D.C. resident. I hope they let me personally shred my D.C. license."

Yes, I finally got my Virginia driver's license this weekend. It kinda looks like some kid designed it in Photoshop and then printed it out on his HP Deskjet printer, but whatev. Also, I'm now registered to vote in Virginia as well, thus ending my participation in California's elections. So sad.

Obama's surfboard

Read about this in Surfer magazine today. It was shaped by Rusty Preisendorfer himself. That's quite an honor. Rusty said that if McCain was a surfer he would make a board for him as well, but we all know that McCain don't surf.

Biden?

Wooo, an old white dude!

Zzzzzzzz.....

Obama shoulda picked Wes Clark. Admittedly, Clark, at 63, is also an old white dude, but he's my old white dude.

NYC: View from our room

From the 38th floor of the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square. Massive hotel, and Times Square is an absolute zoo, but still, not a bad view, huh?

NYC: Top of the Rock

Although this was my sixth trip to New York City, it was the first one in which I visited a few of the typical tourist sites. After the Yankees game, we went to the top of Rockefeller Center, which rises 70 stories above the streets of NYC. Unfortunately, I did not run into my hero, Jack Donaghy.

NYC: The House That Ruth Built

I met my dad and brother in NYC this past weekend to see the Yankees play the Royals at Yankee Stadium. This was something I really wanted to do this summer, as Yankee Stadium will be demolished following the end of this season, and the Yankees will start their 2009 season in a new stadium currently being built across from the original stadium.

Despite my extreme dislike for the Evil Empire, seeing a game at Yankee Stadium is an incredible experience. Fans in the bleacher section chant each player's name until he looks back and waves to them, and the cops are regularly called into the stands to eject fans or meditate disputes. The stadium was packed, with only a few seats vacant, and this was for a game against the Royals, who are currently in last place in the AL Central.

While I was a student at GW, pious Yankees and Red Sox fans (I can't stand Boston either) would constantly complain about fairweather California baseball fans and how we always arrived to the game late and left early. Personally, I never do this, but whatev. So I was thrilled to see a ton of Yankees fans not only arrive during the second inning or later, but leave at the bottom of the ninth (during a tied game no less!)

Concessions were pretty basic. Near our section there was the typical fare: hot dogs, pretzels, peanuts, popcorn, dipping dots (WTF is with dipping dots anyways?!), and pizza. Miller Lite, the "beer" at the concession stand, was a ridiculous $7.50/9.50 depending on the size you ordered. The hot dog was nothing special (I've been spoiled by Ben's Chili Bowl at Nationals Park), but the pretzel was pretty good.

Anyways, I'm glad I got to see the stadium before they demolished it. Maybe next year I'll try to hit up Fenway or Wrigley Field. Now, on with the photos...

How could we forget?

View from our seats

Groundskeepers doing "YMCA"

New Yankee Stadium

Russian bombing raid near the BTC Pipeline

Over the past week, Georgian officials have made several claims that the Russians were bombing an area through which the BTC and South Caucasus Pipelines run. An article in today's edition of the Wall Street Journal seems to confirm these claims:

A neat row of large craters in a field in southern Georgia strongly suggests that Russia dropped bombs near oil and gas pipelines bringing fuel to the West.
Georgian officials say Russian warplanes dropped bombs in an early Saturday raid close to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which pumps some 850,000 barrels of crude a day -- or 1% of total global oil demand -- from Azerbaijan to the Mediterranean. The bombs narrowly missed the line, but one exploded just 10 feet away from it.

If the Georgian claims are correct, it isn't clear whether Russia intended to score a direct hit or merely give the West a scare about the security of its energy supply.

Zurab Janjgava, general director of Georgian Oil & Gas Corp., said he believes Russia wanted to blow up the pipeline. "These were pinpointed attacks," he said in an interview.

Russia has categorically denied attempting to bomb pipelines on Georgian soil. Georgian officials were unable to furnish definitive proof the craters were caused by Russian bombs.

But the physical evidence of a recent air attack, witnessed by a reporter, is compelling.

The line of craters left by the alleged Russian attacks runs through the middle of a hilly, mostly uninhabited plain some 15 miles south of Tbilisi, near the town of Rustavi. The area lacks military or even human targets. The only sign of civilization is a small farm surrounded by haystacks and grazing herds of cows and sheep. The 45 craters -- each some 60 feet across -- scar the hillside like footprints left by a giant.

Close by lies the BTC pipeline, operated by British oil company BP PLC and buried at a depth of nearly six feet. It is identified only by small markers spaced out at one-kilometer (0.62-mile) intervals along the pipeline's route.

Mr. Janjgava said another raid Tuesday appeared to have been aimed at a second pipeline, known as Baku-Supsa, which brings Azerbaijan oil from the Caspian Sea to a terminal in Georgia's Black Sea town of Supsa.

The craters are concentrated in an area close to where BTC and the Baku-Supsa line intersect, near BTC's 15-mile marker. There were no other reported Russian attacks for many miles around.

The raids suggest Russia wasn't only aiming to humiliate its neighbor militarily but also to damage its reputation as an energy corridor.

The outbreak of hostilities in Georgia and vulnerability of the energy infrastructure there certainly does not bode well for any future projects such as the Nabucco and Trans-Caspian gas pipelines.

Is Charles Krauthammer high?

Seriously, I cannot believe he gets paid to write this stuff:

President Bush could cash in on his close personal relationship with Putin by sending him a copy of the highly entertaining (and highly fictionalized) film "Charlie Wilson's War" to remind Vlad of our capacity to make Russia bleed. Putin would need no reminders of the Georgians' capacity and long history of doing likewise to invaders.

Right. And while Bush and Putin are conducting their own personal Netflix relationship, maybe Putin can send Bush a copy of Russia's greatest hits from the Chechen wars, including footage of Russian forces leveling Grozny.

Say what you will about the CIA, at least they use the best web browser

They were browsing the archives of my South Caucasus trip. Guess they gotta get their information somewhere, eh?

Is anyone else sick of Obama and McCain trying to one up each other on the Georgia/Russia issue?

Some of the back and forth between the Obama and McCain campaigns is listed here, and Robert Amsterdam has a great editorial on the subject:

It is a great pity that while thousands die in Georgia, so many Americans can only see the issue for how it can help put their horse ahead. Having McCain and Obama fighting about this is pushing many parties into the margins, and does not contribute whatsoever to the preparation of an intelligent and effective response.

Too easy

LOLBush, courtesy of the Guardian. The entire gallery is quite good:

Washington Post addresses offshore drilling myths

I was actually quite surprised to see this editorial in Tuesday's edition of the Washington Post. It does a very good job of putting to rest a few of the myths in the current debate over lifting the moratorium on drilling in the OCS:

· Drilling is pointless because the United States has only 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. This is a misleading because it refers only to known oil reserves. According to the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service (MMS), while there are an estimated 18 billion barrels of oil in the off-limits portions of the OCS, those estimates were made using old data from now-outdated seismic equipment. In the case of the Atlantic Ocean, the data were collected before Congress imposed a moratorium on offshore drilling in 1981. In 1987, the MMS estimated that there were 9 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. By 2006, after major advances in seismic technology and deepwater drilling techniques, the MMS resource estimate for that area had ballooned to 45 billion barrels. In short, there could be much more oil under the sea than previously known. The demand for energy is going up, not down. And for a long time, even as alternative sources of energy are developed, more oil will be needed.
· The oil companies aren't using the leases they already have. According to the MMS, there were 7,457 active leases as of June 8. Of those, only 1,877 were classified as "producing." As we pointed out in a previous editorial, the five leases that have made up the Shell Perdido project off Galveston since 1996 are not classified as producing. Only when it starts pumping the equivalent of an estimated 130,000 barrels of oil a day at the end of the decade will it be deemed "active." Since 1996, Shell has paid rent on the leases; filed and had approved numerous reports with the MMS, including an environmentally sensitive resource development plan and an oil spill recovery plan that is subject to unannounced practice runs by the MMS; drilled several wells to explore the area at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars; and started constructing the necessary infrastructure to bring the oil to market. The notion that oil companies are just sitting on oil leases is a myth. With oil prices still above $100 a barrel, that charge never made sense.

· Drilling is environmentally dangerous. Opposition to offshore drilling goes back to 1969, when 80,000 barrels of oil from an offshore oil well blowout washed up on the beaches of Santa Barbara. In 1971, the Interior Department instituted a host of reporting requirements (such as the resource development and oil spill recovery plans mentioned above) and stringent safety measures. Chief among them is a requirement for each well to have an automatic shut-off valve beneath the ocean floor that can also be operated manually. According to the MMS, between 1993 and 2007, there were 651 spills of all sizes at OCS facilities (in federal waters three miles or more offshore) that released 47,800 barrels of oil. With 7.5 billion barrels of oil produced in that time, that equates to 1 barrel of oil spilled per 156,900 barrels produced. That's not to minimize the danger. But no form of energy is perfect or without trade-offs. Besides, if it is acceptable to drill in the Caspian Sea and in developing countries such as Nigeria where environmental concerns are equally important, it's hard to explain why the United States should rule out drilling off its own coasts.

Addressing Russia's demographic crisis via the legal system

While I was a student at GWU, I spent 1.5 years interning for the Central and Eastern Europe division of the American Bar Association, where I certainly heard more than a handful of appalling stories about Russia's legal system. This one, though, is really quite shocking:

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.
The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

"He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court. "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

The Ghosts aren't coming

South Ossetian Autonomous Region
April 16, 2008, 05:45
Welcome to Tbilisi, gentlemen - I hope you got some shuteye on the flight from Bragg, because now that we're here we've got a lot of work to do.

Here's the situation: We've been deployed at the request of the Georgian government to help them deal with rebels on their Russian border. Our area of operations will be the South Ossetian Autonomous region - 1500 square miles of small villages and rugged backcountry. The Ossetians have been skirmishing with the Georgian army for years, but lately the attacks have escalated to the verge of all-out war. Washington thinks that the Russians have engineered the current flare-up as an excuse to step in and annex the whole region. Our job is to cut the legs out from under the revolution before that can happen.

Did anyone else play Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon? It's one of my favorite games for Playstation2. The plot involves a group of hardcore Russian nationalists who seize power in Moscow with the intent of reviving the Soviet Union. You lead a U.S. Special Forces squad through several missions in Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, and eventually Russia, where, in true Tom Clancy style, you gun down Russian fighters in Red Square.

Unfortunately for Saakashvili, though, there won't be any Ghosts in Georgia, no matter how much he pleads for assistance from the United States.

Weekend of bad luck

So, how was your weekend? Here was mine:

Saturday: For the past few months, I've been paying taxes to the state, er, sorry, Commonwealth of Virginia, have been registered to vote in the Great State of California, and have been driving with DC plates and showing my DC driver's license to the doormen at Brickskeller. I decided that I need to change this, so after taking the XTerra to the state required emissions and safety tests, I went down to the DMV around 9am on Saturday. About 10 minutes before my number was called, an emplyee announces over the loudspeaker that their system that links up with the Social Security database had crashed and they would not be issuing any licenses to those who wanted to exchange their out of state license for a Virginia license. Ugh. My number is called shortly thereafter, and thankfully they are able to register my car and give me plates, so the visit isn't a total waste of time. One of the DMV employees had mentioned that the other DMV locations were still issuing licenses, so I decided to drive to the Alexandria DMV so I could get all of this stuff done in one day. When I got to the DMV and told them I needed to get a Virginia license, the employee said that the system was down statewide (apparently this happens quite often) and that the Arlington DMV shouldn't have directed people to other offices. WTF DMV, over?

Sunday: I decided that Sunday would be a good day to go to the beach, so I left Arlington around 7:30am and was making great time until I hit the Bay Bridge. The road was at a stand still about 1.5 miles from the toll plaza, and the information sign was flashing news of a delay on the bridge. The eastbound span of the bridge had been shutdown in the early hours of the morning after a horrible accident in which a semi-truck hit a jersey barrier and plummeted into the Bay below. There was one lane for eastbound traffic on the three lane bridge, so it took about one and a half hours to get across to the Eastern Shore. After that, traffic was pretty light for the next 100 miles to Assateague Island. Once I got to Assateague, though, it literally started raining and HAILING like crazy the minute I pulled into the parking lot. I waited for the storm to pass, all the while thinking, "Wow, this definitely doesn't happen in California." Once it stopped storming, I got out of my car and checked the surf. Choppy and nothing remotely rideable, but I tested the water and found it to be quite warm. At least it had that going for it. The air temperature was actually quite cold, and it was incredibly windy, but there were still a few people sitting on the beach as if it was sunny and warm. Another storm was quickly approaching, so I decided to head out. Assateague was incredibly beautiful, though, and I plan on visiting again, perhaps in September and October when the surf is (supposedly) a bit better. Assateague is a National Park, so there is no development anywhere near the beaches, just sand dunes and water that stretches for miles, as well as the occasional wild pony frolicking in the surf. I've never seen anything like it.

Traffic heading back was fine until I came within 15 miles or so of the Bay Bridge, where the 50 had turned into a parking lot due to the accident on the bridge. What should have been a 3-3.5 hour trip back to Arlington stretched to over eight hours. At one point, I was stuck in the middle of nowhere watching as my fuel gauge slowly crept downwards to empty, and praying that a gas station was nearby. Thankfully, one appeared before I ran dry. Needless to say, Big Oil made a nice sum of money off me that day, but I prefer to think that that I'm just contributing to my retirement fund every time I swipe my credit card at the pump.

While I was stuck in traffic, my mom called me to see what I was up to, and if I had made it out to the beach.

"Yeah I got to the beach and it started HAILING and there was no surf and now I'm sitting in traffic doing my part to change the climate."

"Oh, well we're sitting on the beach right now. It's beautiful."

Nice.

Google Maps censoring the South Caucasus region?

Take a look at this screenshot I took from Google Maps:

Notice anything odd? The capital cities, or any cities for that matter, are not displayed for Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. I know they were previously there because I often consulted Google Maps while planning my trip to the region a few years ago. (Edit: But just to be clear, there was never any street data for those countries). So why, in this time of conflict when people might want to take a look at the region, has Google stripped out all the identifying information for these three countries? Surely they don't think the boots on the ground are consulting their iPhones for artillery coordinates? (Or maybe they actually are?!)

Posted by Lindsay at 04:46 PM | Permalink |

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August 30, 2008