Whilst the Vandals Occupied Themselves

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1014414250/coastal-voices-an-oral-history-of-the-outer-banks

Click the link. Nice little project. It was slated to get funding from the National Park Service. This is one of the problems sensible people face. So many holes in the dike of sanity, with the id-driven zombie hoard on the other side of the barrier armed with drills and steel spikes, three shifts of 'em, poking and drilling and punching, driven by something so deep they have no idea of what drives them forward.

Down here in NC I think the people who for some reason started out as Republicans think it's not fair that the Democratic Party got all the loot for so long. Maybe that's how it looks, from the outside, just rampant looting. Get in, get connected, make the deals, retire with a highway named after you. When the vandals broke through here in NC they simply brushed aside all the rules and laws that stood in their way. Fracking is money, so hell with those annoying ecological tests, get 'er done. Over in Raleigh at the State Fair, which was the small dominion of the North Carolina Secretary of Agriculture for ever and ever, the Democrats had a deal with the James Strates Shows for ever and ever. I'd see the train parked on a siding when I'd go to the Fair as a kid. "James E Strates" written on every car. They hauled the rides and stuff from Fair to Fair. Now they got a new company doing the gig, hired by the Republicans. This year a ride fell down. The owner is in jail in Raleigh, dressed in stripes and cuffed for his initial appearance. Three people fell some 30 feet, condition unknown at this time. Paper said the ride owner had a cocaine conviction in Ohio in 1997. Sleuth reporters, on the case. Course every story on the WRAL website comes with "left-leaning Democrat claims...." in the lead. If only they could discover a left-leaning feature to the Vortex Thrill Ride. "Yep, it war shore leaning left jes afore it fell down, yep, I sez to the little missus, that looks kindly left-leaning."

The Legislature banned the words "sea-level rise" as their small step towards stemming the tide and the warming trend we've initiated with our fancy-dancy industrial revolution. There will be no further studies in North Carolina. As for such projects as an oral history of the outer banks, well, it's hard to see such details from the roof of Mr. Romney's house, and anybody who has to go out in a little boat and haul crab pots for a living is prima facie one of the Forty Seven Percent. Anyways, it'll all be underwater in 50 years, but don't tell anybody I told you so. That'd be illegal.

If you want to consider more sanity, go find Rachel Maddow's show for October 29 and watch the opening segment, about Hurricane Sandy and how they just barely kept the Harlem River from flooding all the East Side subway lines. The scientists predicted the flood within three inches; that is, there was just three inches to spare on the eight foot plywood dam when the storm rolled in. That's pretty good science if you ask me. It won't make some legislator any money though.

Currents

Photo courtesy of NC Division of Tourism, Film and Sports Development; Photographer: Bill Russ

Back when Libby and I were living on Ocracoke Island, off the coast of NC, a water spout came one night and blew up an old house that sat on a point of land sticking out in the Pamlico Sound. A friend of mine was sitting on his porch two houses down and saw the house basically explode. For a while recognizable parts were floating out in the sound, but by morning the house was entirely gone. I drove over to look at the spot--the only thing there was a block foundation and a toaster oven sitting in the middle of it, on the sand. I don't know whether the oven had been under the house, or simply deposited there by the spout, as a calling card. Some folks had been staying in the house for a couple of weeks, deciding whether or not to buy it. It was on the market for over $300,000 as I recall, and given it's fantastic location that was probably a deal in a sense. Like the real estate barons say on Ocracoke, they ain't making any more islands. We looked at a trailer sitting in the middle of a swamp there, which if it were up here in central NC you'd either burn, push into the ditch, or rip apart for the aluminum scrap. It was going for $90,000, and somebody bought it too.

Anyways. About a week or so later bits of that house started washing up on the beach. I mean the beach beach, where there is Atlantic Ocean, waves, all that. The wreckage had been pulled out the inlet, several miles down the beach to the south, and then up the other side of the island. There were recognizable pieces of the house, including as I recall some framed photos, painted chunks of beaded board from some interior wall, a kitchen cabinet. I guess it went on up the coast: Hatteras, Pea Island, Bodie Island. Did any of it make Norfolk?

They say the same thing's going to happen with the Gulf Oil Spill now in progress. Today the spill is the size of Jamaica. The Gulf Stream is a current of ocean that carries warm Gulf water up the Atlantic to Greenland. A whole lot of folks along it's path fish the Gulf, because it's rich in catch. So they say the Gulf Stream will start hauling that oil up the coast too. Maybe by Fourth of July we can run down to Ocracoke and see the oil. It'll be like watching a lift-off from Canaveral or something: a distant event that turns out to be right here.

People over in Brooklyn experienced that on 9/11. Papers from the burning towers drifted on the wind across the East River and landed on people's roofs, fire escapes, streets. They could smell the smoke too, and probably coughed on it. It burned their eyes. Here, of course, it was just on TV.

There's the usual "Libertarian" view on this, as on all things. Here's a link to some happy news concerning the spill.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/greenspace/2010/04/gulf-oil-spill-fishermen-hope-for-hazmat-jobs.html

The Market Godz, ain't they som'n.