It was Monday, November 30, 1987. 

I was going on eight months of…unemployment?

Well, not really.  Since I’d gotten whacked at KSTP in April, I’d had one contracting job, sold a bunch of newspaper articles, done a bunch of voice-over work.

But things had been slowing down.  It was getting harder to sell newspaper articles; freelancer budgets were tightening up.

Or so I told myself.  I think they were tighter.  Who knew?

Voice-over work had slowed way down, too.  Where I used to get a couple of jobs a month – and October had seen three or four (including the best one of all), I hadn’t actually gotten a call in a couple of weeks.  There’d been one really rough job at a studio in Bloomington – my voice wasn’t in shape, it took fifteen takes to get a spot right, the director was getting audibly frustrated…

“These things happen“, I told myself.  “The next one’ll be better”. 

And it had been.  But it was the last one. And it had been a couple of weeks. 

And money was getting tight. 

Of course I was still talking with radio stations.  Some were interested; New Bedford, Fall River, Santa Rosa.  But nobody could actually hire me.

Yet.

So there was hope.  But money was getting tight.

My other diversion, besides Fridays at Phoenix Games?  I dipped my toe back into writing fiction.  Or trying to.  My efforts usually got 2-3 pages before petering out in ennui.

The band?  We were still playing.  I was still writing music.  Fairly prolifically, in fact.  But rehearsals were becoming a desultory grind through the material.  And the gigs were coming slower and slower, and at crappier and crappier bars.  We’d played our last gig at – Fernando’s, yet again.  Mark and Bill and Casey weren’t getting along all that well – Casey was chafing at the fact that nobody liked his music; Mark was getting tired of my flitting between styles; Bill was getting…hard to say.  Depressed?

For a fleeting moment, life was feeling like a sticky web of frustration.

Bridge design has gone through a lot of different phases.  In ancient Rome, the mere existence of the bridge, given the materials, labor and knowledge of engineering of the day, was a statement in its own right:

The engineering – the simple arch being the state of the load-bearing art back then – was adapted to the materials (wood, stone, iron) and workmanship of the day.  It carried weight without actually needing material below the weight itself – which was a major advance.

Over time, as developments in engineering made it possible to add less-utilitarian features – design – to the bridge:

The goal, of course, was to make bridges into statements – about the people who designed, built, and above all authorized and paid for the bridges.  “We can bridge the mighty [East/Mississippi/Colorado/James] river – we can do anything!”.  The function of the bridge was on full display – the suspension cables, the trusses, the intricate supports that, working with the materials of the day, kept these structures and their passengers up in the air where they belonged.

Then, times changed.  As materials improved (steel became cheap and ubiquitous) and architectural tastes morphed (modernism/Bauhaus/what have you intersected with Urban Renewal and the building of the Interstate highway system), the philosophy changed again.  The statement wasn’t so much “we can surmount this obstacle” as “this obstacle never existed, Winston“.  The bridge, like the obstacle it surmounted, became an unobtrusive, almost unnoticeable, element in the freeway experience.  This seemed to be the dominant philosophy from the fifties through the late eighties.

It’s the philosophy that led us to vanilla concoctions like the “Dartmouth Bridge”, carrying I94 over the Mississippi:

From the middle lanes, it’s possible to have no idea you’re on a bridge, much less crossing a stunning expanse of the Mississippi Gorge, at all.

In the nineties, the philosophy changed – again.  Thankfully. 

I push my conservative penurity aside to note that the Wabasha Bridge – crossing the Mississippi on Wabasha avenue over Raspberry and Harriet islands – was a long-awaited return of style to bridge design.

Yeah, it looks a little bit like something you’d look at at the Walker gallery, or maybe buy at Ikea.  The City of Saint Paul website on the bridge notes (in the future tense, on a page written before the bridge was built, and in dire need of update)…:

• There are only 15 other bridges of this type in the United States with spans this long or longer.
• The maximum span length of 397 feet is long enough to clear a football field from goal to goal,
  plus the end zones and some stands.
• Over 420,000 cubic feet of concrete will be needed. That’s enough concrete to cover a
  basketball court 89 feet deep.
• The bridge will have over 2.8 million pounds of reinforcing steel embedded in it’s concrete.
• High strength steel strand 0.6 inches in diameter, will be used to compress the concrete. If
  laid end to end, the strand would reach for 275 miles, or about from St. Paul to Milwaukee.
• The main piers are designed to withstand a barge impact force of 3.2 million pounds.
• The bridge will be supported on 460 vertical steel I-beams driven an average of 60 feet through the soil to bedrock.
• The thickness of the bridge will vary from 8 feet in the middle of the span to 20 feet at the piers, about the height of a two-story house.

Facts, figures – all well and good.  But let’s talk aesthetics.  The Wabasha Bridge is OK to look at (compared with utilitarian structures like the Fort Road bridge or bland avoidances like Dartmouth or Lexington).  It shines the brightest, of course, from the perch on the bridge itself.

Saint Paul has always been a river city.  Somewhere along the way (I’m far from the first to observe this) the city turned its back on the river; Saint Paul’s riverfront for the past five decades has been an afterthought – almost a poor, embarassing cousin, to a city that seemed to labor to move its center of gravity up the bluff to the middle of downtown.

The Wabasha Bridge changes that.  Not only are you aware of a river – the river – around you as you cross, but you can actually make the river part of your actual life.  The notion of reconnecting the city to the river is part of the design.  Says Wikipedia (the source of all knowledge these days):

The color scheme of the bridge was also planned to reflect the architectural heritage of St. Paul, with a soft buff color (the color of sandstone) to reflect the colors used in many downtown St. Paul buildings. The color of terracotta roofs in the city was used to select the color of the railings, and the green patina of the St. Paul Cathedral is echoed in the ornamental color of the overlooks.

[I can imagine the howls of alarm on the bridge architects’ part when the Cathedral announced they were getting rid of the patina and refinishing the dome to its original copper, not long after the bridge was completed.  Que sera sera.] 

Plazas on both sides of the river allow lunch-time strollers to eat and ponder the river below them – watching the barges, the river birds, the activity down on the Harriet Island docks or the barge yards downstream.  And – a reprise of the old, 1880s-era bridge it replaced – there’s a stairway to take you down to the river…

…or at least Raspberry Island.

And it’s quite a climb:

And well worth it.

You get the sense that the river isn’t an annoying inconvenience, when you’re on or about the Wabasha Bridge.

It’s my favorite bridge in downtown Saint Paul…

…well, no.  Not quite.  But we’ll get to that.

That noted O’Reillyesque tool Rasmussen notes that public approval of the Iraq war is over the break-even point:

Confidence in the War on Terror increased for the fourth straight month in November and is now near the highest level of President Bush’s second term in office.

The latest Rasmussen Reports tracking poll finds that 47% of Americans now say the U.S. and its allies are winning the War on Terror (see crosstabs). That’s up from 43% a month ago and reflects is the highest level of confidence measured since December 2005. Over the past 35 months, confidence in the War on Terror has been higher than today only twice, in November and December 2005.

And the bigger news?

In what may be just as significant a finding, only 24% of voters now believe the terrorists are winning. That’s down from 30% a month ago and represents the lowest level of pessimism recorded since 2004…Partisan assessments of U.S. foreign policy success remain sharply divided. Sixty-seven percent (67%) of Republicans are optimistic about the short-term in Iraq, versus just 12% of Democrats.

Conventional wisdom says this is bad for Democrats. I’m not so sure.

I think this poll serves as a key item on the party and media’s (pardon the redunancy) to-do lists.  More progress must be covered up.  More crises must be manufactured (what DID all those armored humvees cost?)

I’m loath to use the “V” word in Iraq.  I’m even more so domestically.

At times, it’s hard to believe that it’s been almost five years since the most miserable year of my life started.

In late 2002, with the local software market in a drastic slowdown, I was contracting at a local manufacturing company. My project got de-funded – and when you’re a contractor, “no project” means “no job”. I went five months with no work at all, and six more months working little contracting jobs that barely paid the bills.

One of the low points, in early March – ten weeks into the ordeal – came with an interview at a local branch of a national company. Upside: it would have been a great job, and I’d have knocked it through the goalposts. Downside: it was on the far west end of Eden Prairie, highly inconvenient to Saint Paul. But I wasn’t going to kvetch about it; by this point, a job was a job was a job.

It was one of the most gruelling days of my life. The interviews started at 8:30AM, with one-hour conversations with the department head, the marketing chief and the technical communications lead. Then a lunch-time talk with the lead programmer. Then more one-hour interviews with the graphics lead, the QA lead and another marketeer. Of course, some of the interviews were a little…”off”. One woman sounded like she was trying to justify her job to me; another seemed to be sizing me up as an ally in an upcoming bit of office political intrigue.

The day capped off with a 90-minute chat with the Product Development director. During each, I tried to walk that fine line between “eager and aggressive” and “desperate” – which I most certainly was by this point. I left feeling things went quite well. And I followed up with a voice mail to the Product Development guy (who’d have been my boss) the next week.

And the next.

And the next, and the next. And the next, and the next.

Seven weeks after the interview, I finally got through. “Oh, you mean we didn’t send you a letter? I’m sorry. We took a different direction, and hired another graphic artist instead”.

I don’t like to indulge in schadenfreud – so I won’t. I don’t believe in Karma, but I do believe what goes around comes around, and I don’t need anything more coming around, thanks.

So I’ll wish the “best of luck” to my coulda-been, now coulda-been soon-to-be-former, colleagues. May your interviews be short, to the point, close enough to home, and successful.

The market’s a lot better now. Y’all will do great.

So not only was every single questioner [1] at Wednesday’s GOP debate a Clinton plant (to say nothing of CNN and YouTube owner Google being in the bag for the Democrats), but apparently every member of the hall staff, the catering staff, and the limo drivers that brought the candidates from the airport were also Clinton, Obama, Gravel or Edwards volunteers.

I’m waiting to see if Ron Paul might actually be a Clinton staffer.

 [1] Seriously – dimes’ll getcha dollars that the “gun nuts” were plants (no real conservative would toss a shotgun through the air), and the “bible-waver” was a performance artist and Kucinich supporter.  No, I have no evidence – but the fallout from this debate shows that not only can’t I make it up fast enough, it’d be futile to try.

Don Surber notes that Dit all depends on what the meaning of the word is “victory” is:

Chris Matthews’s new definition of Victory in Iraq means we lost World War II. But, hey, we finally won Vietnam.

Read the whole thing.

Of course, by Matthews’ definition, if you read it,  you won’t have read it, while if you ignore it you’ll have read it.

The old saying among lawyers goes “if the facts are against you, argue the law.  If the law is against you, argue the facts.  If the facts and the law are against you, argue like hell”. 

As Krauthammer notes in his piece on the  the Dems’ political dodge, the corollary is “if the media will abet and enable you to, just change the terms of the discussion:

And what is the reaction of the war critics? Nancy Pelosi stoutly maintains her state of denial, saying this about the war just two weeks ago: “This is not working. . . . We must reverse it.” A euphemism for “abandon the field,” which is what every Democratic presidential candidate is promising, with variations only in how precipitous to make the retreat.How do they avoid acknowledging the realities on the ground? By asserting that we have not achieved political benchmarks — mostly legislative actions by the Baghdad government — that were set months ago. And that these benchmarks are paramount. And that all the current progress is ultimately vitiated by the absence of centrally legislated national reconciliation.

Remember two years ago, when the left was carping about the US’ lack of understanding of tribal culture?  How focusing on a central government was illusory in a tribal society?

And now – as the US finally sees some success after years of ignoring the historical lessons on how counterinsurgency war is waged – it’s the left that wants to pretend that Iraq is really just a dusty Toledo with a nasty political dysfunction?

I can understand Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 commander in Iraq, saying that the central government needs to seize the window provided by the surge to achieve political reconciliation. We would all love to have the leaders of the various factions — Kurd, Shiite and Sunni — sign nice pieces of paper tying up all the knotty questions of federalism, de-Baathification and oil revenue.

What commander would not want such a silver bullet that would obviate the need for any further ground action? But it is not going to happen for the same reason it has not already happened: The Maliki government is too sectarian and paralyzed to be able to end the war in a stroke of reconciliation.

But does the absence of this deus ex machina invalidate our hard-won gains? Why does this mean that we cannot achieve success by other means?

Never forget (or if your entire knowledge of this subject comes from the media, learn it for the first time); civil wars like this are won in the street first; only when the average Iraqi (like the average Salvadoran or Paraguayan or Dhofari before him) can go out on the street in the morning with reasonable assurance that he’ll come home at night is political change a priority.

Someone tell Nancy Pelosi.

…when I think all leftybloggers get their copy from the same centralized service.

Seriously.  Good example – this past few weeks, some leftybloggers have accuses some of us of “stalking the stalker” – Googling fact-checking certain leftybloggers who show an unseemly interest in us. 

And it’s not just local!  “Stalking” apparently now means “Googling lefties”:

Well, at least I’m assuming that’s the definition in the netroots handbook because Todd Beeton of MyDD today accused conservative blogger Michelle Malkin of stalking for daring to use Google to fact-check CNN.

Hm.  I’ve had so many liberal women I’ve dated (or thought about going out with) google me before meeting, I could make a Lifetime movie.

I’m going to skip the 35E River Bridge – officially the “Lexington” Bridge.  Who cares?

———-

After the 35W River Bridge collapse, Amy Klobuchar famously remarked that bridges just don’t fall down in America.

But if you read the history of the Smith Avenue High Bridge, you’d realize she should have added “But barely”.

First things first; when I show people the Twin Cities at night, there are two views that are were topmost on the agenda; the first was always Minneapolis, coming into town from the north on 35W at night.  The second, always, was downtown Saint Paul viewed from the south side of the High Bridge.  The vista of downtown in all its warm, brownstone glory is really stunning.

Like this view…:

…but at night.

Of course, to get to that view, you have to stomach a bit of history.  The bridge geek carries on:

Claim to fame: the ornamental iron work is made from iron salvaged from the old bridge that this bridge replaced. At 160 feet tall, it is the highest bridge in St. Paul.

The old high bridge was made of wrought iron, and opened in 1889.    

A storm in 1905 destroyed part of the bridge, which was rebuilt using mild steel.

It was a spindly looking structure that looked more like it was made out of metal toothpicks. The bridge closed in the 1980’s, and was imploded in 1985.

The new bridge opened in 1987, and was heralded as one of the seven engineering wonders of Minnesota. The huge steel supports under the bridge looked like a giant letter W, with the two bottom points sitting on piers, and the center forming a large steel arch.    

As soon as it got cold, the bridge contracted a little more than was planned, and one of the steel sections shifted, causing the center point of the W to no longer meet. Instead, the two beams shifted 11 inches, leaving a huge drop-off on the bridge. The bridge was closed several months while engineers designed a way to move the arches back into position and remove the ski-jump from the roadway.

A newspaper account from January 22, 1962, states that a car left the old high bridge, landed upside down on a telephone line, was sprung back up into the air, and landed upright with no passenger injuries. I guess that is what makes winter driving so much fun in Minnesota.

I watched the debate last night with about 350 of my closest friends as well as the Patriot’s nightside host Rusty Humphreys out at the Minnetonka Marriott last night.

Quick impressions:

• Mitt talked too much.  He came across a bit like…a too-slick CEO.  Not that he didn’t have great points – but there were times he needed to stop short of where he did, and just talk less.
• Mike Huckabee presented himself very well, although occasionally at the expense of actually answering the question.  Perhaps he was trying to edge around the “nannystater” rep he’s gotten in conservative circles in the last few weeks.  Oddly, Anderson Cooper didn’t seem to press him to answer the question as much as he did other candidates.
• Giuliani looked nervous, and occasionally distracted.  As a rule, he gave good, solid answers (including, I think, to the “gotcha” question toward the end), but he could have come across better.
• Thompson seemed (a little) more “relaxed” than “asleep”.  He had some sound bite lines, but he didn’t get enough air time.
• It was the first time I’d seen Tom Tancredo in a debate.  He did well, not that it matters much.
• Duncan Hunter, on the  other hand – a guy I’d love to see as a front-runner – could have done a lot better. Part of it may have been lack of practice – I think they only got around to him two or three times.
• Ron Paul seems to be morphing into Ross Perot.  His crowd, incidentally, was out in force last night, with posters and a booth and a big, raucous turnout.  I’m pretty sure Rep. Paul won the straw poll (although I had to leave a bit early).
• John McCain is taking great pains to push his conservative credentials – understandable, given the audience.  At times I found myself painfully wishing he could go back in time and take back McCain-Feingold and the Gang of 14; he almost sounded supportable.  I feel the train has left the station for the Senator, and it made me just a little sad.
• Anderson Cooper is a twit.
• I loved the way CNN picked the two “gun nuts” and one literal “bible waver” that most perfectly fit the most caricatured stereotype of Second Amendment activists and Christians they could find.  And where I say “loved”, I mean “thought it was as predictable as…well, Anderson Cooper being  a twit.
• While I’m ambivalent about the “gays in the military” issue – I don’t personally see a reason to exclude them from military service – I confess that by nature of my background I’m loath to suggest imposing a rule on the military by complete fiat; “unit cohesion” is a matter of life and death.  I’m not entirely sold on the idea that gays in squads will wreck unit cohesion – the British military has allowed openly gay servicepeople for quite some time, and the British army has been famous for unit cohesion for a very long time.  That being said, General Kerr got way too much air time.  While King and I both commented “good question” during the General’s video appearance, the General’s open-mic harangue from the audience was long, preachy, and excessive. 

Anyone else?

UPDATE:   Michelle Malkin notes that there was more to the questions than met the casual eye:

Retired Brig. Gen./gays in the military lobbyist/Hillary-Kerry supporter Keith H. Kerr wasn’t the only plant at the CNN/YouTube debate. The plant uncovering is in full-swing over at Free Republic.

Example: “Journey,” a.k.a. “Paperserenade,” the girl who asked an abortion question, is a declared John Edwards supporter.

You couldn’t tell from the video that CNN aired, where she’s wearing a plain shirt:

But if you click through on her YouTube profile, you see her latest video in response to the candidates’ answers. And she’s prominently wearing…her John Edwards ‘08 t-shirt:

And on, and on, and on.  Read the whole thing.

And for the record (on the off-chance that anyone is keeping the “record” of my statements), I don’t care that they’re Democrats; merely that CNN presented them – I would suspect with full knowledge – as just regular folks.

Ed sums it up well:

CNN deserves the brickbats it will receive for its atrocious research skills. However, Republicans should be prepared to answer the questions the candidates received in this debate. At some point, this will cease being an intramural fight and we will have to convince all of America to vote for our nominee. That won’t happen if we can’t handle fastballs, with a couple of curveballs in the mix.

True.  As long as America knows that CNN is putting spit, pine tar, bondo and/or spackle on the ball without telling anyone.

CORRECTION:  Yep.  Pine tar is for bats.  I plead caffeine-deprivation.

CORRECTION 2:  Or not.  Sentence rewritten to cover all possible permutations.

As you’re no doubt well aware, True North – my other blog – deleted a contributor yesterday for plagiarism.

True North took immediate action.  Unlike other local blogs with printed codes of ethics, we actually acted…ethically, when an ethical infraction surfaced.

Some of the usual lefty suspects jumped up and down like poo-flinging howler monkeys, of course (ironically, of course, in Eva Young’s case, given her habit of copying and pasting entire comment threads).

But dig a little further; the post that Eva links to in the post above is…well, still more irony.

Joe “Learned Foot” Tucci from KAR also noticed, and dug a little further; it’d seem former pr0n industry temp worker and Eva’s pal and fellow obsessive blogger copy-and-paster Ken “Avidor” Weiner is on ethically ironic ground in commenting on the Seventh Son (emphasis added):

Weiner stole some pics from our good friend Ben’s blog. Ben, in a comment section (the cowardly Weiner supplies no email address), politely asked Weiner to take the pictures down. Weiner, displaying the class he become known for, deleted Ben’s comments, restricted outsiders from commenting, and promised to keep stealing the intellectual property of others.

Coward.

Do these people actually have ethics? 

You can read Ben’s post about this here.

What makes Avidor-Weiner’s actions especially laughable, is that immediately above the first post containing stolen material flagged by Ben, is a post ripping on a plagiarism flap at True North (captured in beautiful haiku here).

 Yet another “prominent” leftyblogger (or at least one who is cited with breathless credulity by the local Sorosphere) is caught with his ethical pants down.  So what will their side do about it?

Will Blogger Copy-and-Paster Young continue to breathlessly support Ken “Avidor” Weiner, thief and coward?

Tucci notes that the “rules” have morphed a bit…

With the explosion of online publishing, things are now a little bit different. Instead of the old way of asking permission before using someone else’s property, now it’s pretty much the norm to take first and ask for forgiveness later. I think that’s a fair trade off and efficient way of doing things.

…and the problem we face: 

I don’t think anyone with an iota of class or integrity would refuse to take down a picture posted on his or her blog if the owner of that picture asked. In fact I have obliged such a complaint in the past. It’s called class. It’s called respecting the rights and the property of others.

I’ve honored such requests as well.

It’s that “class” and “integrity” bit.  Or at least “not being a juvenile”.

(more…)

…to the part of my readership that knits for fun, profit or enlightenment…

…I submit direct you here.

Don’t say I never did nothin’ for ya.

I inadvertently published tomorrow’s “bridge” a day early.  Dang calendars.

All you High Bridge fans, tune in tomorrow.

The next bridge down the river is the Fort Road Bridge, best known as “the shortcut from Mitch’s place to the Mall and the Airport”.

I’ve kvetched in the past about the dubious aesthetics of bridges built during the Interstate Highway era, when the operating philosophy seemed to be “bridges should be un-noticeable”.  And as you saw yesterday, I do love the old, grand, monumental bridges from the twenties and thirties, when you knew you were on a bridge, and the bridge was damn proud of it.

The Fort Road bridge, through a combination of design philosophy and (one might suspect) Scandinavian penurity, though, is the most unprepossessing bridge around.  Indeed, it’s hard to know you’re actually on the bridge, if you’re focused on traffic (and one must frequently do that, since late rush-hour traffic coming to Saint Paul from 494 can clog the works up pretty easily). It’s actually hard to find pictures of the bridge online,and the bridge seems to blend pretty seamlessly into its surroundings.

And what surroundings.  Indeed, one can forgive this bridge for being such a non-entity; it’d be a shame to draw attention away from this particular part of the Mississippi gorge.  The bridge crosses at Fort Snelling, just upstream of Pike Island, one of the most gorgeous places in the Twin Cities.

So we’ll excuse the blah architecture.

But keep your eye on the damn road.

Andy “AAA” Aplikowski writes over at True North:

We have just been informed that one of our Contributors has been lifting content from other blogs.

The Seventh Son is a guy I know, and I did vouch for him to be here at True North. I just talked to him and informed him of the matter. It sounds like he is guilty of laziness and not knowing blog etiquette, but I will let him defend himself. I have no tolerance for people who take credit for others’ hard work, whether through stupidity or laziness. And together with the Nucleus here at True North we came to a decision.

We’ve removed The Seventh Son as a Contributor, and pulled down all of his posts.

We can’t tolerate that sort of thing.  And while Andy may be right – there might be extenuating issues of misunderstanding – ignorance of the rules is really no excuse.

Conservative bloggers; we don’t publish “codes of ethics”, but we follow ’em anyway.

UDPATE: Seventh Son fesses up and leaves the ring:

That being said, I have gone to posts, linked to articles from those posts, and cut and pasted some of these articles to my blog. My fault here is not properly acknowledging the original post as I should have.

Some of my blogger friends made me aware of this controversy today, for which I sincerely apologize. So I have asked them to remove links to my blog and I will let this be my final post.

It’s sad, of course.  Sorry it came to this.

But right is right.

But this time he’s got numbers – scary numbers – about black American society:

It’s hard to argue with the numbers. The disintegration of the black family that was accelerated by welfare, has stunted a generations of Americans. This is why we fight so hard to stop the social programs that ruin lives, communities and families.

And the numbers come from that noted O’Reilly-esque tool The Economist.

I’ve fisked Nick Coleman a zillion times. 

No, really.  I have.

And I’ve done it virtually every way possible; the traditional style; opening it up to groups of readers; as a contest; as an exercise in ironic reinforcement. 

I’m almost at a loss for new ideas.

Almost.  But not quite.

Today, a new technique – the “Sudden Death” fisk.  Here’s the rules: 

1. I’ll present the column without comment, until…
2. …I see a piece of Coleman’s projection or transference that totally beggars the conventional definition of “irony”. 
3. At that point, the fisking stops cold. 

Any questions?  No?

OK.  On to last Sunday’s column:

Paulose’s contempt for fairness…

Doh.  Didn’t even get through the headline!

Tune in next time!

The Sunday Herald – Scotland’s award-winning independent newspaper

 A NUCLEAR attack by terrorists causing widespread panic, chaos and death is inevitable and will happen soon, a senior Scottish police officer has warned.

Ian Dickinson, who leads the police response to chemical, biological and nuclear threats in Scotland, has painted the bleakest picture yet of the dangers the world now faces.

Efforts to prevent terrorist groups from obtaining materials that could be made into radioactive dirty bombs – or even crude nuclear explosives – are bound to fail, he said. And the result will be horror on an unprecedented scale.

“These materials are undoubtedly out there, and undoubtedly will end up in terrorists’ hands, and undoubtedly will be used by terrorists some time soon,” he declared. “We must plan for failure and prepare for absolute terror.”

Dickinson is assistant chief constable with Lothian and Borders Police, and has responsibility through the Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland for protecting Scotland from chemical and nuclear attacks. He has been closely involved in co-ordinating the country’s counter-terrorism response.

He said: “An incident will continue for days and all the public will see is people dying without reason. What will we do when our children come home from school with blisters on their skin and their parents don’t know what to do?

“What happens if 10 deaths, 50 deaths, 100 deaths start occurring in an unconnected and random way all over the country? The public will be rightly and understandably terrified.”

Oh, there’s more.

When I think “scary”, I think Richard Broderick, the former Green Party St. Paul School Board candidate who wanted, quite overtly, to turn the Saint Paul public schools into Green Party indoctrination centers.  Y’know – the kind of thing over which lefties get their undies in a knot when the subject is “the existence of faith” or “patriotism”.
And sometimes I wonder – what is that little fella doing these days?

And then I get my answer – being a bigger tvetch than even Susan Lenfestey.

That is all.

We’ve taken our shots at liberal bumper stickers in recent years.

Dr. Emil from Atomic Trousers has taken the logical next step; a top ten (?) list.

To wit (with some post-facto nominations of my own):

“COEXIST” (spelled out with various religious symbols) – If some of the followers of the religion represented by the crescent moon “c” on your cute little bumper sticker would stop hijacking planes and blowing up buildings, coexisting would be a little easier.

“Honorable” mention in this category: “My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma”.  That’s right, oil-belching Subaru-driving earth-granny, the fact that you don’t attend a “church” with other “believers” does make you “better than me”.  Or whatever.

“A PBS Mind In a FOX News World” – This particular bumper sticker is positively oozing with smugness. “God, I can’t stand being surrounded by these Wal-Mart-shopping, NASCAR-watching, deer-hunting troglodytes. How can these country-fried rubes allow themselves to be spoon-fed White House talking points from Bill O’Reilly? They must not be smart enough to enjoy watching some dusty old Brits mumble through a clunky drama on PBS like I am.”

 As if Bill Moyers isn’t the left’s high-gloss Bill O’Reilly (or, for that matter, that Bill O is a “conservative” in the first place).

“Live Simply So That Others May Simply Live” – The airheads with this little chestnut on their bumpers are confusing simple wordplay with incredible profundity. This bumper sticker sounds really deep until you realize that a.) it doesn’t mean a damn thing and b.) the dork in your office who asks if you’re workin’ hard or hardly workin’ is making an equally clever play on words.

And when all of us tax-paying, charity-donating first worlders move to yurts and revert to tending cattle and hunting and gathering, who is going to help those who can’t “simply live”, simply, live?  Without western (read: First-World) charity, whither Gambia? 

(…)

“Pro-Child, Pro-Choice” – I’m for the kids, but I’m also for aborting them willy-nilly too. This bumper sticker has the intellectual consistency of “Pro-Ants, Pro-Raid.”

• A close runner-up in the worst abortion-related bumper sticker goes to “Against Abortion? Don’t Have One.” (Against Robbery? Don’t Rob People!)

(…)
“Defy Corporate Domination” – I spotted this gem on the rusty bumper of a Honda Civic on November 8th. Chances are you have never heard of Honda, but its a small automobile-making co-op based out of Mazomanie.

(…) 

“Peace Through Music.” – Trouble in the Sudan, you say? Send in State Street’s bongo-playing hippies. They’ll calm things down. Al-Qaeda insurgents wreaking havoc in Iraq? I’m sure Mr. Johnson’s fourth-hour band class can get in there and straighten things out.

A few nominations of my own:

“You Can Not Simultaneously Prepare for Peace and for War” – This quote, attributed to Einstein, ignores the fact that Einstein had to flee for his life from a continent that largely “prepared for peace” after World War I, in the face of a belief that repudiated “peace”, and ran to a nation that did prepare (belatedly) for war.  Better sticker idea; “Preparing for peace without preparing to defend it is worse than meaningless”. 

Heh.

The NYTimes’ share value is down nearly 2/3 in five years.

Kaus:

I wouldn’t worry about Rupert Murdoch buying the Times at this point. I’d worry about Rupert Murdoch’s nanny buying the Times. …

I might start a collection.

The next stop on my Lileks-like bout of architectural canoodling; the Ford Bridge. 

The Ford Bridge just screams “Saint Paul” to me. 

Completed in 1927, in the same general era as my other favorite Twin Cities bridges (the Central Avenue, Cedar, and Robert Street bridges), the Ford exudes art-deco. 

Let the bridge geek speak:

The Intercity Bridge [the Ford’s official name] is a reinforced concrete, open-spandrel, two-rib, continuous-arch bridge. Each of the three main arches has two five-centered ribs with a 300-foot span. The main spans are flanked by single arch spans of 139 feet each. The bridge is historically significant as one of the largest reinforced concrete bridges ever built in Minnesota and is a significant engineering accomplishment. The bridge is also historically significant as the major work of Norwegian-American engineer Martin Sigvart Grytbak. Although the deck was rebuilt and widened in 1972-1973, the bridge retains full engineering integrity as a monumental, continuous-arch bridge.

I grew up amid the last of the detritus of the Art Deco era; Popeye cartoons, my grandma’s toaster, the occasional thirties-era car that soldiered on in Jamestown, and (I swear I remember this) the odd old NRO poster stuck in the corner of someone’s garage.  So the Ford Bridge seems – familiar, almost?  Comfortable? 

The other impression you get – like with a lot of bridges from this era, when materials weren’t as strong and engineering was, while an exact science, very aware of its own limitations – is that it’s overbuilt. 

It’s graceful – not as clunky as, say, the Central Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis – but it still looks like a monument as much as a bridge.  It reminds you, in some ways, of the woodwork – hutches and buffets and bookcases – you find built into the houses of the era, with filigrees and ornamentation that nobody would design, much less pay for, in the dark ages of bridgebuilding that would follow a few decades later:

And of course, bridges were monuments back then; testimonials to the wisdom and foresight of the people who planned them, the skill of the designers and builders, and the power of a city that could carry people and traffic over a mighty river and a deep gorge, and do it in style. 

You can almost imagine Al Capone in his O’Connor-era heyday, tooling across the Ford in a Dusenberg SJ (or so I imagine), snug in the knowledge that the St. Paul Police were covering his back, coming back from Lake Minnetonka to a party at the Saint Paul Hotel. 

It’s as a stop on a biking trip that the Ford excels, of course.  Although you’re in the middle of a major metropolitan area, you can stop at the peak of the Ford’s span, and look up the gorge and, with a little creative filtering (like, ignoring the few visible houses and apartments and the Minneapolis skyline six miles upstream, and the Ford Lock and Dam just downstream…), imagine the place as it was when the first US soldiers started building Fort Snelling in 1819, just a mile or two downstream. 

Jeff Dobbs at the Thinker on how Iraq could smack the Democrats in ’08:

It was just this past spring that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was proclaiming:

“We’re going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war,” Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) told reporters yesterday. “Senator Schumer has shown me numbers that are compelling and astounding.”

The Democrats clearly understood that the worse the situation in Iraq became, the better their electoral prospects.

It was just this past summer that House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn worried that a positive report on the surge in September by General David Petraeus would be “a big problem for us”.

The Democrats clearly understood that the better the situation in Iraq became, the worse their electoral prospects.

Hence the wall-to-wall proclamations that “Iraq is a worse disaster than ever” on MPR? Just curious.

Dobbs continues:

Iraqis are voting with their feet by returning home after exile

The figures are hard to estimate precisely but the process could involve hundreds of thousands of people. The numbers are certainly large enough, as we report today, for a mass convoy to be planned next week as Iraqis who had opted for exile in Syria return to their homeland. It is one of the most striking signs that not only has violence in Baghdad and adjacent provinces decreased dramatically in recent months, but confidence in the economic and political future of Iraq has risen sharply.

Violence is down. Iraqis are returning. The American people are beginning to see this progress, despite the efforts of Democrats and many in the media to hide it from them.

For now, the number of Iraqis returning may seem small compared to an estimated 2 million that have fled. But the number is growing faster than anyone has anticipated. And those returning are not returning as targets of opportunity for terrorists, but as participants in the opportunity for freedom.

To the extent that the war in Iraq will play a significant role in the 2008 elections, the numbers should be compelling and astounding to Democrats, in a direction they never could have imagined just a few months ago

But…But…John Stewart still says it’s a quagmire!

Go read it.

Exhibit 1:  Margaret from Anti-Strib (among others) takes on Tracy’s infamous “Dirt Worshipping Heathens” post, and does the issue justice.

Exhibit 2:  As opposed to local (?) leftyblogger “Ragweed”, who rants like a delusional toddler who didn’t get the X-Box he wanted.

Anonymous leftybloggers with big mouths .  Whoop-di-doo.  Been there, done that, watched most of ’em (Daddypants, Kevin McKay, Rush Limbaughtomy) disappear in clouds of teeth-clenched dyspepsia.

I’m still here.  They’re all gone.