Washing Up on Shore

Yes, it's bad when, far out at sea there is a gigantic oil spill and it upsets the oceans and washes on the shore. But The New York Times reports that land mines have been washing up near North Korea. These devices have been leaving behind unintended consequences for years. Chalk up yet another way we humans make this a scary world.

Need A Job? Need an Adventure?

The young man in the picture above is a dear family friend surrounded by a couple of my great nephews and a great niece. He's like an uncle to them. He and his brother have both gone to Iraq and back.

In 1970, I graduated from college. I had a bit of a struggle to get a job. It was a time of unbelievable inflation and there was a financial crisis. I finally got a job but not before I'd visited some military recruiters. I was determined to get a job and some training somewhere. I had no money to go to law school or graduate school or take a year off in Europe to find myself. Note that this was before the draft ended for the Viet Nam war and before women were placed in quite as much harm's way due to the restrictions on their service. Which is not to say none died. They did.

Today's New York Times notes that as jobs disappear the military recruiters are exceeding their goals. There are other women out there and many men, too, who are looking to the military to support themselves and gain skills. So the bad economy is creating a boon for recruiting. Maybe as an unintended consequence someone will die who would not have. Or maybe someone will gain valuable skills. If Obama stands down in Iraq and somehow solves the problem of Afghanistan and all the other spots around the world, though, we won't need as many soldiers and sailors and Marines. And then these men and women will be 'riffed' (reduction in force is a kind term for being laid off from the military). When the Viet Nam war ended, my brother-in-law's military career ended with it. He went on the a career in the "military industrial complex" but I'm not sure the timing was his choice. And we all remember (OK, probably no one reading this does) when the "boys came home" from WWII and all the women who had been admitted to factory jobs were sent home whether they had a way to support themselves or not.

Employment, war, the economy. A tangle of consequences and most, yes, unintended. People get a job, training. Other people make bombs, Humvees, missiles. They have jobs and paychecks and buy houses and flat screen TVs and give to charity. Some people die. Maybe a lot. Viet Nam? Over 50,000 Americans and probably millions of Vietnamese. Obama promised to step down war and save the economy. Sadly, wars help economies sometimes.

Low Hanging Fruit

Having a Journal of Unintended Consequences when the subprime loans crisis comes due is sort of embarrassing. Yep, if you take out a loan with the certainty that prices will go up and interest rates stay down, you will get burned. If you call 'losing' a house you never even made much of a down payment on losing something you owned, I guess these people are victims. (Ask an elderly couple about paying the exorbitant taxes in Austin on a home they own outright. That, my friends, is criminal.) And if you make these loans or buy packages of them? Well, shame on you, too. Because getting these houses back in foreclosure won't be fun.

Nope. This journal's topic is just too easy. I was thinking maybe of starting the Digest of Unremarkable Headlines. (DUH) for things like "Happy People Found to Live Longer" but then who needs another journal. I'm not keeping up as it is with The Visible Woman and Austin, Texas Daily Photo. And I'm threatening to start a WEB page for all the Baby Boomers and elderly people moving to downtown Austin. (How does The DOWNTOWN AUSTIN BOOMer sound?)

Anyway, two other headlines have caught my eye while I was wearing my Journal of Unintended Consequences hat. In one (The New York Times, Saturday October 6, 2007) entitled "Save the Gnostics" it is brought to our attention that a group called the Mandeans are being wiped out by the war in Iraq. The group is small and pacifist and in spite of surviving in a delicate balance with the conquerers and dictators of the past, the situation now is scattering the group and they are landing in places in small numbers where continuing their culture is not encouraged.

In other news, there is a polio outbreak in Nigeria. Due to cost and training requirements, they use a live oral vaccine. But not enough people get it (some think it is a Western plot to sterilize Muslims). People who do excrete the weak virus and people who aren't inoculated can actually get the disease.

Yeah, life is teeming with UCs (unintended consequences) but I'm clearly not paying enough attention. Being caught up in the vortex of downsizing will do that to a person.

They Hate Each Other and They Hate Us more

In the continuing journal of unintended consequences called the Iraq war, militants (insurgents? Al Queda? Freedom Fighters?) are attacking the new posts in the neighborhoods that were rolled out in the 'surge' to, um, secure the neighborhoods. When our troops stayed inside their zones, they got hurt in smaller numbers than the citizens. It would be interesting to know how many insurgents there are compared to the number of U.S. and Iraqi troops. As in all wars, your heart goes out to the ordinary citizens with no desire to bomb their way to power.

No picture for this one. Refer to this NY Times article.

Kicking off This Blog

Humans like to think that their actions are carefully calculated to elicit certain results. And that if they are strong and brave and righteous that their outcomes will be as they wish. However, there is something to that old saw about Hell (or the road thereto) being paved with good intentions.

The world spins through space, all chaos begetting chaos (and evolution), and we ride along, a species full of ideas about steering our ship.

Whenever I see something that reminds me of this state of affairs I think "that belongs in The Journal of Unintended Consequences." I don't believe there is such a journal. You know, after a quick search on a few search engines, I couldn't find such a journal, scientific, humorous or whatever. There is another blog right here on blogger that seems pitched at this concept. I discovered it while trying to get a blogspot URL for this satellite journal. This journal is called "Unintended Consequences" and seems to be pitched at collecting links. While I'll do that, too, I hope in this space to collect enough info so you can simply read each entry, without following links, and say to yourself "yeah, weird outcome" or "this woman is insane to draw that conclusion."

A few newspaper articles I've read in the last few days really cried out for inclusion in this journal. (Note: links may require you to login to a site to obtain more info. I read the old-fashioned paper papers myself.)

• In Nepal, conservationists have opened a 'café' to serve safe food to vultures who were endangered by feeding on dead cattle that had been treated with a drug that helped the cattle thrive and presumably poisoned people not at all or more slowly. (The article in The New York Times mentions that the drug is banned in India and Nepal but that the ban is widely ignored.)
• The Wall Street Journal reports that blind pedestrians want hybrid cars to emit a sound when turned on. Now, I've noticed sighted pedestrians in parking lots who have not heard my car coming along. It's not a hybrid. But it is a Ultra Low Emission Honda Civic. And it is quiet. Ditto our new Honda Accord. Take away something unpleasant (pollution, noise and otherwise) and you take away something that grounds folks to the danger of speeding cars.
• Out in San Francisco, there is a old, historic armory building. Naturally the heritage-minded don't want the thing knocked down or transformed. So someone is buying the property for adult movie-making. You know they sort of like the bare, castle- and dungeon-like appearance of the place. Folks are protesting. Maybe some of the same folks who would protest if someone wanted to level it and create condos. To me, this has the ring of unintended consequences.

I'll bet, if you read this far, you are starting to wonder (1) what this entry has to do with war (see labels); and (2) what it has to do with Tom Hanks. And for reading this far you deserve that explanation. I took the picture on June 6, 2004 near a phalanx of portapotties at the sixieth anniversary ceremony of D-Day. Tom wasn't headed to those, of course, but rather to his VIP transportation, probably a helicopter. The vets and others who surrounded him might have been headed the the temporary toilets, though, shut out of the nicer ones in deference to their betters like the presidents of the U.S. and France. I've written a journal entry about that day that you can find here. Suffice to say that on that day George W. Bush pretended to salute these vets (all near 80 and above) by inconveniencing their celebration. Just in my opinion, of course. Now, I never knew whether George (or his 'people' or the French security) saw this situation or the irony of it. But it is right up there in the Journal of Unintended Consequences.

So, I've kicked off the companion blog to The Visible Woman. Over there, we talk about whatever. Here we will concentrate on those things that we humans make happen but never intend.