Time to say goodbye?

A casual reading of the news since WikiLeaks (an online group dedicated to making secrets public) released about 76,000 classified American military field reports and other documents, would suggest that little of the information was news or actually very secret. Such a reading would be superficially correct - we've known for some time that President Hamid Karzai is corrupt and hated by civilians, that Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) agency is in cahoots with the Taliban, and so on. As a Wall Street Journal editorial said, "Among the many nonscoops in the documents, we learn that war is hell."

But a couple of examples - from documents rife with such examples - might shed some light:

- A police district commander reported to have raped a 16-year-old Afghan girl was confronted by Afghan civilians. He ordered his body guard to shoot them. The bodyguard refused. So the commander pulled a gun and shot him. Guess which taxpayers are paying for this sort of thing.

- The ISI, in May, 2007, sent 1,000 motorcycles for use by suicide bombers to the Haqqani network, which attacks U.S. forces. Guess which taxpayers ultimately paid the bill.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page may find such stuff insignificant, but I would suggest that, echoing Amy Davidson, senior editor at the New Yorker, information like this just might be important. We could narrow our focus to just the Taliban. We might even decide, she offers, that "nine years after our arrival, it is time to leave Afghanistan."

The world's greatest do-little body

Learning a new thing is such a hoot. Today I learned that the word "filibuster" comes from vrijbuiter - old Dutch for "looter."

"Looter," of course, is a pejorative term, one we tend to feel is perfectly appropriate when we - and a majority of the Senate - favor a bill that is being delayed by the minority. We must remember, however, what Senate old-timers would say to young, reform-minded new-comers: "You've never been in the minority."

Anyway, I picked up my latest bit of etymology in a New Yorker article by George Packer detailing how the U.S. Senate has become a steaming pile of delay, obstructionism, and inability to address issues vital to our country.

Packer's long piece shows with excruciating clarity the year-and-a-half Senate battle leading to the narrow passage of health-care reform and financial regulatory reform. But he points out that filibusters hardly exhaust senatorial obstruction. In this session, for instance, 345 bills passed by the House never have been allowed to come to a debate in the Senate. Meanwhile, 76 nominees for judgeships and executive appointments approved by Senate committees have been blocked from a full-Senate vote.

Packer warns that the passage of health and regulatory reform depended on special circumstances - like a strong Democratic majority and a president with an electoral mandate - that may not be repeated. Two days after regulatory reform was passed, it was announced that the Senate would not address comprehensive energy reform legislation for the rest of the year.

Let me quote some of the article's final words: "And so climate change legislation joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans' care, campaign finance, transportation security. labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world's greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing."

Stargazing today

Professor Mark Whittle, a Brit cosmologist currently at the University of Virginia, is one of those teachers you want - someone really jacked up about their subject. And he's hardly alone. There are few cosmologist not jacked up in the past few years. Suddenly, within the past decade, bits and pieces of tantalizing data and theoretical work over the past 80 years is coming together. New data, made possible by new technology, is connecting nearly all the dots.

At a time when humans are screwing up down on the surface of the Earth - was there ever not such a time? - cosmology, says Whittle, "is in a golden era - the story has more clarity and coherence than ever before."

The basic deal is that all the measurements - entirely different data sets - are coming together. These parameters include accurate distance measurement to galaxies both near and far, the microwave background, the huge web pattern that all the galaxies have formed, and the abundance of light elements. This information not only has allowed a sure-thing estimate of the age of the universe (13.7 billion years), proof that the universe has a flat (Euclidian) geometry, and the necessary and stunning existence of dark matter and dark energy that make up 96 percent of all there is. (Matter we could see makes up a mere 4 percent.)

All this mathematical and observational information together makes the current Big Bang model of the origin of the universe almost certainly correct.

But, as Whittle points out, not all is solved. Not least, he suggests, the question of "why there is something and not nothing."

It was pop, dammit, not soda

Having grown up in Wisconsin, I had to smile as I read an article by Joan Houston Hall, currently the chief editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Hall moved to Madison, Wis., in 1975, and she recalled being flummoxed by a restaurant sign that said: "BRATS ON THE TERRACE." She soon learned that this "was not an effort to segregate unruly children but to invite people to eat bratwurst alfresco." Some help with pronunciation would have given her a clue: When you pronounce "brat" you say "ah."

Hall also was amazed that Wisconsinites might call a pastry a "kringle" and a water fountain a "bubbler." (Actually, I only called it a bubbler when the water bubbled straight up from the center of the bowl - not when the water streamed across the bowl from the side.)

And she was struck by the idea of a "golden birthday" - when, say, you were born on the 20th and you turn 20. You mean EVERYONE doesn't know the concept?

My smile broadened as I remembered that Hall's "My Turn" article in Newsweek had been edited by New Yorkers. You don't pick up much lingo at 30,000 feet.

But then I remembered that when my wife and I moved to Montana, I just had to start talking and people assumed I was from Canada. Uf Da!

In defense of young marriage

As someone whose marriage ended distressingly short of the "until death do you part" part, but lasted long enough to pretty much raise a couple of cool kids, it is with mixed feelings that I read this week an article in the "New York Review of Books" that examined a handful of new books on the subject of getting hitched.

(I get the following statistics from the author, Diane Johnson, a novelist and writer of non-fiction.)

First off, religious conservatives frightened by gay marriage have little to worry about. Americans continue to see a "normal" marriage as an ideal. A mere 10 percent of people here think marriage is outdated compared, say, to a third in France. Fact is, by the time they are 40, 84 percent of American women have been married - a figure that's higher than in any other other Western nation.

Unfortunately, 54 percent of those marriages end in divorce within 15 years. (About the same percentage of breakups between men and women living together also happen in that time frame ... but even sooner.

It turns out that 40 percent of American children will "experience the dissolution of their parents' intimate partnership" by the time they are 15 - a higher figure than anywhere in Europe.

Anyway, the review of the books in question - ranging from what essentially are marriage manuals to sociological studies to best-seller Elizabeth Gilbert's new one called "Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage" - bats the idea of marriage all over the place. Is it good for women? For men?

After reading the review, I'm left with a basic question: If there is a better way for a young man and woman to start their adult lives, what could it possibly be?

An apple feast

It's apple time in the Northern Rockies, and at least one deer in Helena is a happy, if perhaps a bit sated, ruminant.

The doe was relaxing in my back yard when I got up, no doubt enjoying the 60-degree morning temperature. She sat in the grass for about another hour. I'd glance out my kitchen window once in a while, and usually there was no movement beyond a twitch of ears. Sometimes she'd twist her long neck around to groom her flank, or lift a hind leg to scratch her cheek.

Then she arose in that awkward way of deer - first rocking to her front knees, then straightening her back legs, then lurching to stand all the way. It soon was apparent what she had in mind.

I have an ancient apple tree. It produces smallish fruit, yellow in color, sweet but somewhat mushy. By early August, apples have begun ripening and falling to the ground. The mule deer walked directly to the nearest ground fall, sniffed the apple, and downed it with obvious relish.

Before she quit eating, she had gulped no fewer than 17 apples.

Then she walked back to her original position, dropped to her front knees, collapsed her hind legs, and settled down into the grass. She had some digestion to do.

Some minor, century-and-a-half-year-old news

Watching the network news this past week, I found the line-up rather depressing. The news often would start out describing how Democrats remain inept. (Remember Mark Twain's comment to the effect that "I'm not a member of an organized party. I'm a Democrat.") Then would come another example of Republicans' on-going problem with being brain dead. This would be followed by news that the Gulf disaster is intractable, people remain freaked about Arizona's immigration law, and the economy might be tanking again. Somehow, the final half of the programs, focusing on "people making a difference," and so on, really didn't help a hell of a lot.

With this unhappy news in mind, I turned to my complete "Poems of Emily Dickinson." She's my buddy. It has been said that Dickinson's 1,700 or so poems can be divided as: one-third not so good, one-third pretty good, and one-third wow. Many of the not-so-good poems can be called not so much poems, as aphorisms - adages, so to speak.

Regarding the Arizona law, not long ago I noted that as a young girl, Dickinson parroted her elders in bemoaning the "invasion" of the Irish. Yet, at her death in 1886, she directed that six Irish servants be her pallbearers. (Her brother, appalled, quickly named six upstanding Amherst citizens as her "honorary" pallbearers." But I wondered: When did this change come about?

This evening I stumbled on one of Dickinson's "minor" poems. It was early in 1864. The Civil War still raged, it's outcome uncertain. Dickinson was 34 years old. She had recently traveled to consult an eye doctor. In Boston. Her "aphorism" went like this:

"These Strangers, in a foreign World,
Protection asked of me -
Befriend them, lest yourself in Heaven
Be found a refugee"

Hmm. Maybe I need to watch more of those "people making a difference" segments.