Live from Austin!

Guardian:

The US marine corps has been forced to call up its reserves for compulsory service in Iraq and Afghanistan because it has not been able to find enough volunteers - a reflection of the strain the two wars are putting on America’s armed forces.

The marines’ involuntary call-up, seen as a “back-door draft” by Pentagon critics, is the first since the start of the Iraq war, and will begin in a few months when a first batch of up to 2,500 reservists will be summoned back to active service for a year or more. The army has already sent 2,200 reservists back to the front, of which only about 350 went voluntarily.

[...]

The marine corps will be drawing on its 59,000-strong “individual ready reserve” - recent veterans who have returned to civilian life but who still have up to four years remaining of the military obligation they signed up to when they enlisted. The compulsory mobilisation of the reserve is normally ordered only in case of national emergency, but this year there were not enough reservist volunteers to fill the gaps in marine ranks.

Emphasis mine. Then again, as we saw with Hurricane Katrina, what on earth could go wrong as a result of using troops held back for national emergencies as an alternative to the draft? I mean, it’s not likely we’ll see another major hurricane is it?

Hell may not have frozen over, but Texas has, and that’s almost as rare. Last night we were driving home from Houston when the temperature dropped below freezing, and the car showed a black ice warning light. Soon it began to sleet.

Texans really don’t know how to deal with snow and ice. I drove slowly and carefully, but people who had bought into the SUV myth were overtaking. Unfortunately, no amount of all-wheel-drive or traction control will help if you hit a patch of wet ice. Before long we rounded a gentle curve, and passed a major accident scene. A big patch of smashed glass was by the central barrier, and an SUV was a little further on, pointing the wrong way with its front left corner crumpled. Seconds later we passed another car, similarly wrecked, then another SUV in a ditch.

Fortunately, we had set out from Houston as soon as it began raining, so we were only around 20 miles from home by the time the roads got really treacherous. I found a truck to follow. My reasoning was as follows:

1. Chances are, the truck driver has years of experience driving in all kinds of weather conditions. So, let him set an appropriate speed.
2. He’s got good visibility to see what’s going on up ahead and slow down in plenty of time.
3. Behind the truck, the ice will be broken up somewhat.
4. Anything an 18 wheeler can safely negotiate, I can probably safely negotiate.
5. One of the biggest dangers when driving in icy conditions is inability to brake. In which case, it’s better to be behind the truck than in front of it.

I also did my best to stick to the middle lane where possible. Again, the reasoning was pretty simple: if the car started sliding, I’d have the maximum time possible to let it stop sliding before I ran out of road.

It’s always worth remembering that a 40mph collision with a solid concrete barrier is quite sufficient to kill you. Combine that with a road that may at any moment decide not to let you put on the brakes, and it’s not hard to deduce that doing 50 mph is a bad move. Some of the trucks put their hazard lights on and drove slowly in formation to block the way and stop various idiots from killing themselves, which I thought was very charitable of them.

By around 15 miles from home, everything had slowed to around 6-8 mph. Fortunately, after 15-20 minutes things eased up a little, and we made it the rest of the way at around 20-30 mph.

The final problem was getting from I-35 to our house, the biggest hazard being the big dip in Oltoft Street just west of the freeway. I eased the car to the top of the hill, and tried to start the descent as slowly as possible. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to brake significantly before I got to the bottom; I took my foot off the accelerator completely, and let the electric motors provide a little drag on all 4 wheels.

As we hit the bottom of the hill and came up the other side, we realized that the power was out–along with all the traffic lights. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to slow before the first junction, and people were pretty much behaving sensibly in the absence of signals. We made it home safely, and I started trying to un-knot every muscle in my body.

Normally at this time of year, the average temperature hits a high of just over 60°F, 15°C. Today the high was 2°C. Apparently it hasn’t been this cold since 1927. But as Texas’s own Bill Hicks might have put it: Remember, increasing incidence of climactic extremes has nothing to do with so-called global warming, and you’d be a fool and a Communist to think otherwise. This is just a perfectly normal bit of freak weather you’d expect every hundred years or so…and so was Hurricane Katrina, and so is this year’s Amazon drought, and so is the sudden lack of ice in the arctic, and so is the freakishly warm Carribean ocean weather that has bleached the coral reefs, and the drought emergency in the western USA, and the heaviest rainfall since records began in Australia, the freak snowfalls in Kazakhstan, the record heat in Prague, the blizzards in the UK, the floods in Cumbria, and the 195km/h storms in Sweden.

Anyway, Houston…

We’d gone there because I have some time off, and it was a fairly cheap alternative to sitting on my ass watching TV all day, nice though the new television is. We both got a religious experience into the bargain; I got mine at the Johnson Space Center, and rothko got hers at The Rothko Chapel, of course.

Online forum SomethingAwful managed to raise $27,695 to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Then suddenly, PayPal locked the account.

When someone finally managed to contact PayPal, they were informed that PayPal has an exclusive contract with United Way—and that United Way’s contract would not allow PayPal funds to be transferred to the Red Cross.

Yup: United Way and PayPal would rather block $27k in relief funds, than allow the money to go to the Red Cross. So the money had to be refunded.

A lot of people are blaming PayPal for this. They certainly deserve a big chunk of blame; but really, what kind of charity makes you sign contracts saying you won’t let people donate to competing charities? Can you imagine if your bank bounced a check because they had signed a United Way contract and you were trying to give to the Red Cross?

Please, I beg you: do not donate through United Way or PayPal. If you want to donate to charity, send the money directly to The Red Cross.

The United Way also fund bigotry—they give funds to organizations which practice deliberate discrimination on the basis of religion and sexuality. If your local United Way has a non-discrimination statement, don’t believe it—at least one regional United Way has continued to fund organizations that don’t comply with their written policy. You need to specifically check what organizations your chosen United Way is funding; for example, Austin’s United Way no longer funds the Boy Scouts as of July 2005—but in Ohio, the BSA is still getting money. It looks as if United Way regional groups cutting off the BSA Are the exception rather than the rule—even in Vermont some are still funding the BSA.

I’m all for religious freedom, but if you want to teach kids about your god, be honest about it and send them to your church. And don’t expect me to pay for it, and don’t try to con or force other people to pay for it.

To me, having to read through a list of grand recipients seems like a lot of hassle when you could give to a charity that focuses purely on funding things that are actually important, like feeding the starving, rather than one that may siphon off money to teach kids not to be gay and indoctrinate them to believe in Jesus. You can also check sites like Charity Navigator for advice on which charities use the funds effectively, and which ones waste them on overheads and fat executive paychecks. (Hello, American Cancer Society.)

The Boy Scouts of America are a pretty sleazy organization all round. Not only was their director arrested for collecting kiddy porn, they also lied about their minority membership to try and get more money from United Way, and the FBI is investigating whether they might have made up names to boost their membership. Many local BSA groups also lie that they will not discriminate in the hope of getting funding.