Category ►►► Bureaucratic Bullroar

July 30, 2008

Midnight Plus Several Hours, Waiting to Get Home

Hatched by Dave Ross

Well, once more the California Highway Patrol has demonstrated its complete lack of interest in serving the humble motorist. As of Tuesday night State Hwy 76 near Valley Center where I work as a newspaper editor was closed again for interminable hours, as it always seems to be whenever a big rig crashes near the intersection of the highway and Rincon Ranch Road, which seems to happen a lot! That’s near the foot of Palomar Mountain, home of the famous observatory. It’s a road that sometimes winds like a sidewinder on mescaline.

Although traffic has increased dramatically on this rural highway in recent years due to the number of casinos that have sprung up, the state has yet to do anything to make the road more safe.

This night there was apparently a death, and a spill of fuel that required hours of cleanup by Haz-Mat.

So, like hundreds of other people, I'm waiting to get the word to be allowed to go home on the only way in or out that doesn't involve driving several hours out of the way. Finally, about 1:30 a.m. I call the CHP dispatch office and am told by a dispatcher that traffic is being allowed through one lane at a time. I drive from my office to the intersection of Valley Center Road and Hwy 76, where a bored looking, typically arrogant CHP officer tells me that no dispatcher ever told me that traffic was being allowed through. "I don't know who told you that, but it wasn't one of our dispatchers."

Strange, I tell him, but I'm pretty sure I dialed 1-858-637-3800. "I can understand your concern," he says, clearly not understanding my concern.

I return to my newspaper office and call the dispatch number and am told that well, the information was put up incorrectly and that they have to keep track of lots of information, sorry about that, blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, I've driven about 15 miles out of my way based on their faulty information. With the price of gasoline the way it is these days, yeah, my cranial blood vessels are engorged with suppressed annoyance!

Oh well, par for the course when you're dealing with the CHP and CalTrans and other agencies who routinely shut down Hwy 76 and then don't bother to talk to each other, and don't give the slightest damn about residents who are inconvenienced by their total lack of communication.

Let me make it clear. I don't begrudge the CHP keeping a road closed to conduct a death investigation and to clean up a mess as long as necessary. What I do begrudge is the "public be damned" attitude of your typical CHP officer when dealing with the people who pay his salary.

I've seen this happen time and time again in San Diego County during the last year as a result of the wildfires and the resulting dangers posed by mudslides. The needs of residents who must use those roads to go to home and work are treated with a cavalier disregard bordering on contempt. It doesn't just happen to me.

It happens to hundreds of people almost every time there is an accident. This time it happened to me. Next time it'll happen to you -- and the attitude of the CHP will be, "We're overworked, so naturally we get our facts messed up sometimes. Get over it!"

Hatched by Dave Ross on this day, July 30, 2008, at the time of 12:55 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

February 22, 2007

Whack-a-Mole and Seal-a-Hole Redux

Hatched by Dafydd

I already used this analogy before; but there's nothing wrong with it and no reason not to trot it out again for another spin around the park. So there.

Defeatists often portray the Iraq war as an elaborate game of Whack-a-Mole: we drive the terrorists (Sunni or Shiite) out of one spot; they pop up somewhere else. But in reality, we have been playing a different game for a long time now... and the president's new strategic change of course has just made that game a lot more likely to succeed.

I quote myself... and heavens, is there anything we of the chattering class like better?

If you see somebody playing a game where he keeps whacking plastic moles on the head with a mallet over and over again for hours, it would be easy to conclude he's playing Whack-a-Mole. In that game, the moles pop up again and again from the same holes; every time you whack one, it goes down, only to be resurrected moments later.

But when you look closer, you discovered that every time the player whacks a mole, the mallet stays stuck in the hole, permanently blocking it. The player grabs a new mallet and whacks the next one, sealing off another hole. You notice that the moles never come popping up through the sealed holes, only through the holes that are still open... and you also notice that there are a finite number of holes -- and the player is rapidly sealing them up.

This is a new game called Seal-a-Hole, and it has a very different dynamic from Whack-a-Mole: the normal game is one of futility; the game continues until the player gets tired and quits or he runs out of money. But Seal-a-Hole actually has a victory point: when all the holes are sealed, the game is over -- and the player, America, has won.

Even though Seal-a-Hole is not futile, it nevertheless requires a great deal of patience; there are many, many holes, and each hole has a mole who must be whacked. Some of the holes, such as Sadr City, are very big and will require many mallets to properly seal. But if we have the courage and fortitude of our American forebears, we will seal those holes... and we will win.

It's interesting to note that murders in Baghdad have dropped markedly, and attacks are drifting outwards, as Baghdad proper becomes a harder and harder target. StrategyPage notes that, despite all the hullaballoo about suicide car bombings, the actual murder rate in Baghdad has plummeted by more than 70% since the president's strategic change of course began. (Hat tip to the Victory Caucus):

Despite the jump in terrorist bombings in the last few days, the death toll in Baghdad, since the security operations began two weeks ago, has declined by over 70 percent.... American intelligence analysts have also used predictive software to analyze terrorist attacks and movements, and determined the best places to put the new checkpoints, and what to look for....

It will take several months before it is known who won the Battle of Baghdad. It's all a matter of crime rates. If the murder rate comes down, you've won. Actually, the murder rate has come down over the last year, but not enough to become news. Eliminating the suicide car bombings would be a real victory, as these operations are largely for the media. Militarily they mean much less than the gun battles between police and terrorist (Sunni or Shia) gangs, or the raids on terrorist safe houses. At this point, the Sunni Arabs are fighting a media war. On the ground, they have lost. But until the media confirms this, they can keep it up.

Remember -- we're only a couple of weeks into the plan, and we have only augmented our forces by a single brigade (with four more to enter March through May). Besides sending in more troops, we have:

Changed the rules of engagement (ROEs);
Redeployed our forces into a more aggressive posture;
Buddied-up with both Iraqi Army and Iraqi National Police units;
Ended "catch and release";
And secured political backing from Iraq Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (authorization to go after Sunni and Shia with equal fervor).

We've already whacked a number of moles: we killed quite a few, captured others, and drove a lot of very big moles right out of the country (such as Muqtada Sadr, Iranian puppet, and his top lieutenants). Now we're busily sealing the holes.

Let's give the new strategy some time, for goodness' sake.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 22, 2007, at the time of 6:06 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack