Gravity more than Global Warming

The UN report on global warming made the front page of the Register Guard here in Lane County, Oregon, today. As expected, all moderation was stripped away and the main point was that catastrophe is now unavoidable. Even if we stop putting carbon into the atmosphere, we've done so much already that we're doomed to suffer. The only question will be, how much.

Actually, I saw very little in the actual report to support panic. In fact, the charts look much less frightening. Take the rise in the level of the ocean. The article suggests that 4.6 feet is realistic. The chart of historical worldwide changes in sea level shows changes in the 100-150 range, but it uses millimeters as the scale. There are 25 millimeters to an inch. The scary numbers are a little less frightening when you realize that.

Even more pertinent, the chart shows a long process of rising seas over a century and a half. Specifically, it shows that in the 25 years from 1945 to 1970, the oceans rose. And from 1970 to 2005, they rose again by about the same amount. The only problem is that the former period of 25 years saw overall global cooling. The rise during 25 years of cooling was as great as in the subsequent 35 years of warming. It makes a person wonder about the warming-rising nexus.

This was another AP report, probably taken by the R-G without editing, so a lot of my criticism is of AP. It was the same with the earlier report on how Bangkok was threatened by rising sea level, due to global warming. In reality, Bangkok is sinking many times faster than the water around it is rising. AP barely mentions that, deep inside the story.

Everyone should understand a basic fact of physics. What tectonic and volcanic activity moves upwards, gravity tends to pull back downwards. Since gravity affects everything, more places are likely to be going downward than upward. This is particularly true in deltas, which is why Dacca, Bangkok, and New Orleans have problems. Human activity tends to cause marshy land to sink under the best of circumstances, and the tendency to pump water from the readily available underlying aquifer just makes it worse.

We are going to have problems with coastal cities during the next century. We will have most of the problems whether we have global warming or not. We will meet and defeat all of them by improved engineering. We will run out of petroleum at reasonable cost, and we will replace it with new sources. We will not be wiped out by tropical diseases. Trust Yankee ingenuity. Or maybe Hindi.

The right plan even if the wrong reasons

I'm torn between wanting to criticize speculation by scientists and supporting the same public policies that they advocate. The UN has issued a warning about the consequences of manmade climate change. I think they're exaggerating the consequences but America should still take exactly the steps they suggest.

The report predicts that more people will die from heat. It ignores the offsetting decline in deaths from cold. Food production in Africa is predicted to decline, but the manmade problem in Africa is not climate, it's unscientific farming practices. We are warned against the rising oceans, but in fact they are going up at about an inch per decade.

But after disagreeing about these points, I fully support making America less dependent on fossil fuels. We have a limited supply of them and we are forced increasingly to buy from overseas. These leads to two unsustainable trends. Economically, we are destroying the greenback as the international reserve currency, and militarily, we are becoming dependent on people with different national interests. We owe the Chinese a trillion dollars already.

I can't understand why there is so much policy debate. Even people who disagree about the science should come to the same conclusions about policies. America needs to go Green for its national survival.

Ku Klux Klan redux

I've had a long comment published to an old post I made in January about the analogy between the Sunnis in Iraq and southern Whites in the Reconstruction South. I'm not really sure what it meant, except that the situation was quite complicated in the American South.

But I wasn't really concerned with Reconstruction, which is pretty much a done deal. I was observing that in a fight without American interference, the outnumbered Sunnis are likely to do pretty well against the Shiites, having the greater tradition of military leadership. That is still the point, but the situation is changing. The American South was more likely the old Iraq, with Whites and Blacks living in close proximity. Iraq has largely been converted into ethnic neighborhoods. The decline in civilian deaths is largely due to the completion of this process.

Leaving the question, what does the US military presence now achieve? Juan Cole has long argued that we are obliged to keep some military presence to prevent the outbreak of large scale civil war operations. I've noted that the action was taking place on a micro scale anyway. But perhaps the micro phrase is past and now the question really is, can we prevent a standard civil war between identifiable military groups by keeping our own troops on the ground?

Maybe we can. And anyone who thinks it's a good use of 200 billion a year is free to use that as an excuse for staying. Something like 15% of the population is now displaced and there is no indication that a political solution will ever get Iraq back to normal. Maybe we can do this forever. Any takers?

The once almight dollar

The dollar is being propped up, believe it or not, by the Chinese yuan. Although the Chinese run a positive balance of trade with virtually everyone on the planet, they have currency that, due to its close connection with the greenback, is actually depreciating in relation to the really strong currencies like the Euro and the Canadian petro loonie.

The artificial tie between the greenback and the yuan has been pulling the yuan down and eventually the connection will be broken. When it does, the dollar will drop further. Probably a lot further. We have no option except to import oil at whatever the producers choose to charge and we have eliminated so much manufacturing capacity that we have little choice except to buy Chinese. American commodity farmers and Boeing will benefit, but it will take an enormous growth in those areas to offset the increasingly expensive imports.

There will be serious inflation. A central bank can prevent inflation through monetary policy only if there is something close to foreign exchange equilibrium, but that is lacking. The Fed cannot lower interest rates without sinking the dollar completely. Inflation will result from import substitution, not cost-push.

Sarkozy and Stahl

The headlines say that Sarkozy lost his temper and ended his interview with Leslie Stahl after she kept asking about his marriage. I don't know where the "temper" part comes in. The video clip shows that she asked him again after he said he wouldn't answer. Sensing that he was dealing with a tactless dolt, he gave up and left.

The French have a more sensible view of private and public lives than we do in America. I applaud President Sarkozy for telling Stahl that he had better things to do with his time. I wish the headlines had been "Stahl proves that she isn't ready to interview international leaders."

For half a trillion, we could be energy self-sufficient

I'm tired of hearing how it's naive to think that America could become energy self-sufficient. It's just money. At the outset of World War II, the physics of nuclear chain reactions were only hazily understood. At the end, we had a bomb with explosive power orders of magnitude greater than anything theretofore known. How did we get it? By expending money at a rate never before contemplated on physics research and the production of fissile material. At its peak, the Manhattan Project was comparable in size to the pre-war domestic automobile industry.

It cost billions of dollars at a time when a billion dollars was a lot of money. The country spent the money because it felt that it was necessary to win a war. We are now in a self-proclaimed war against terrorism, in addition to two "hot" wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The people we are fighting only have enough money to fight us because we consume so much oil. Otherwise, oil would be $25/barrel and a lot of Arab countries would be barely staying afloat economically. If we didn't need their oil, we wouldn't care who ran their countries. If we weren't in Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda would really not much care about America. The Saudi royal family would have to pay cash for their next 747 because their credit wouldn't be good, but otherwise everyone would be happy.

I guess this doesn't quite apply to Afghanistan, but there it's a different product -- heroin. We can't stamp out heroin use. We've been trying for two or three generations with little success. So let's give it up. Legalize it, tax it, use the proceeds to provide treatment for those who want it and let the others have enough that they can shoot up till they die. And stop funding the Taliban with the money that our addicts steal in order to support their habits.

Turks, Armenians, Stupidity and Hypocrisy

It looks like we're going ahead and branding the Turkish suppression of Armenians during World War I as genocide. I'm trying to figure out why we're doing this. It's not as though Congress is required to pass judgment on every outrage in history. This goes back nearly a century. Why stop? What about Genghis Khan?

More to the point, why is America criticizing the Turks for ancient history when we're pretty comfortable owning all the land that once was populated by Indians. We're quick to judge the Ottoman Empire but slow to hold the US Army to account.

But even if we supposed that it was generally a good idea for the US Congress to establish who had or had not committed genocide in history, is this the time to tick off the Turks? We have damned few allies in the region. The Israelis naturally side with us because we pay them to and they wouldn't survive otherwise. The oil producers are people we wouldn't be seen in public with if it weren't for their money and oil.

All in all, we aren't going to do much better than the Turks. Is this some kind of death wish? Congress is controlled by Democrats so we can't lay this one at the feet of George W. Bush.

Mark Twain once began a piece with, "Suppose I were a Congressman. Suppose I were an idiot. Ah, but I repeat myself."

Weekly Unemployment Claims

Today's headline: Jobless claims rise more than expected. Last week's headline: Jobless claims unexpectedly fall.

There are thing about which we cannot be certain with absolute precision. Then there are things like the weekly jobless claims, where the noise in the weekly statistics exceeds the trend by a factor of ten. In truth, there is hardly any trend.

But every week, there's the "expected" value. It is derived by asking a lot of economists what they think the number will be and averaging the answers. It reminds me of an old, politically incorrect joke. Nobody has ever seen the emperor of China. How do you calculate the length of the emperor of China's beard? Answer, you ask 100 Chinamen how long they think the beard is and take the average.

So every week, the news services calculate the average of a few dozen opinions from people who don't know, and compare it with a government report that contains no statistically significant information. They then always have a headline, because the two are never the same. OK, it's possible that due to some fluke they would match, so there would be a headline, "Economists finally get one right."

It's much the same thing when the Weather Channel broadcasts some ninny breathless announcing that the high temperature in Des Moines today will be 12 degrees "higher than it should be."

Public education would be well served by taking an hour a week for two weeks for each graduating high school senior and explaining the uses and misuses of statistics and probability. Not the formulas, just the rough principles. It would be really useful.

Here's a pop quiz. If you have a room with 35 randomly selected people, what are the odds that you'll have two of them with the same birthday? Day and month, not year. email me with your guess and I'll explain it to you. You're almost certain to be far wrong. Statistically speaking.

If you like Iraq and Aghanistan, you'll love Darfur

A few days ago, a rebel group in Darfur (not the rebel group since there are several) overran an African Union peacekeeping camp, immediately killing ten and taking others who have not been found and are probably dead. Later, the Sudanese government forces retook the camp and, in a show of solidarity with UA, looted it.

We decided to bring economic revival and political freedom to Afghanistan, after rooting out its old government. President Karzai is now ready to talk to Mullah Omar of the Taliban to end the escalating violence.

We decided to bring economic revival and political freedom to Iraq, after rooting out its old government. We're going to have troops there for ten years and anyone who thinks we'll leave a democracy in place deserves a drug test.

People keep telling us that if we have any moral fiber at all, we'll rush to the help of the defenseless souls in Darfur, in order to ...

Exactly what?

The only plus for Darfur is that it is already in the midst of a civil war, so we couldn't be accused of having started one. It's pretty cold comfort.

Saddam and Pol Pot is a bad analogy

I recently wrote a letter to the editor of the Register Guard, Eugene, Oregon's local rag, commenting that I was personally not happy that Saddam was gone, not because he wasn't a terrible man, but that the consequences of Iraq being run by a terrible man were not as bad as having him removed have been.

Someone in Eugene bravely sent me an anonymous envelope, containing a clipping about Pol Pot and his murderous regime in Cambodia. The comment was, "Here's another one you can ad [sic] to your list of those who kept the 'lid' on."

Illogical thinking like that can, well, get you elected President of the United States. The analogue to Saddam in Cambodia is not Pol Pot, who came to power as the result of America's being unwilling to leave well enough alone, but Prince Sihanouk. Sihanouk headed a "neutral" regime that was too accommodating to North Vietnam for our tastes, so we ignored their neutrality and dragged them into the conflict. Sihanouk eventually lost control and was replace by Pol Pot.

Pol Pot is the analogue of someone yet to come to power in Iraq. Not a good analogue, because Pol Pot did control what everyone agreed was Cambodia, and it's unlikely that anyone will ever again assert overarching control of the old Iraq. There may not be anyone at all. This could be the Congo with oil.

Hurricane Activity

It is human nature to report research results that benefit you in the future. In the travel industry, there are prominent "research" organizations that consistently that every state agency in America runs highly effective advertising campaigns. They then get lavish checks from the people about whom they make these comments. Not surprisingly, they are always asked to do followup "research" which produces the same results.

So we might ask whether it's surprising that research by climatologists shows dramatic consequences to climate change. First, let me say that I have no doubt that CO2 is increasing. I'm willing to accept tentatively that it is causing an increase in average global temperature, although I'd be more comfortable if I saw an explanation for global cooling in the quarter century after WWII when CO2 was also increasing.

But there aren't going to be any conferences to attend or research budgets to spend just because we're getting a little warmer. The trend in American populations has been steadily towards warmer climates over the past half century. It's what people want in the place they call home. They aren't likely to panic if they face the prospect of a little more summer heat and less winter snow.

So research is stretched to devise consequences. We are constantly hearing about rising sea levels. The actual change in the average level has been trivial, less than the height of waves on the calmest day imaginable on the ocean. Here on the Oregon Coast, parts of the coastline are rising and others falling. Anybody who builds a structure next to the ocean on the assumption that nothing will change for 100 years is a fool. In actuality, the shoreline shifts and people rebuild a few years farther inland.

Then we have hurricanes. Those who have pointed out that we got warmer and then Katrina happened, from which they deduce that we got warmer and therefore Katrina happened, ignore the Butterfly Effect, which in its classic form says that a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and months later the pattern of Atlantic hurricanes changes.

The research that purports to show the increase in hurricane activity, which must be linked to global warming, fails many times as science. The first is that the trend itself shows up only over a period when sampling improved. They claim that this is a minor factor, but that's an assumption that can't be tested. They claim a causal relationship that can't be tested. I can hypothesize a variety of causes and provided my independent variable grows steadily over time, it will do just as well.

The "science" is that increased heat energy in the water will lead to increased hurricane activity. Sounds reasonable to me, but there doesn't seem to be a very good correlation. Last season we supposed to be hyperactive and although CO2 continued to rise, it was a medium season. This year, we were supposed to have a medium season. The hurricane guru for Wunderground predicted in late June that the odds of a named storm in the first half of July was 70%. We're about to finish the entire month of July without one. The last named storm was around June 1. I wonder what the last sixty-day period during hurricane season was when no named storms developed.

There are many reasons why hurricanes form. And don't form. However, a hundred people like me can say that no clear pattern has emerged and nobody will notice. One "research" result showing a connection, however, and it's a headline. People prefer to get headlines. We should all keep that in mind.

Gaza down the tubes

There's a book called "Collapse," or something like that, which explains why certain societies collapse. The author has a list of reasons, including wars and environmental problems. One of them is that at some point there are simply too many people to be supported by the resources available. I think Gaza is getting there.

It's an area that in 1948 supported about 100,000 people. It now has about 1.5 million and they are still breeding like rabbits. That's about 10 times what we have here on the Oregon Coast, with a tiny fraction of the land and no resources.

The world has no record of letting that many people die since World War II except in Africa, but nobody wants a lot of disaffected Palestinian refugees in their country and Hamas is likely to continue the Koranic theory of women-as-breeding-stock. Is it possible for an area to become human "black hole," which collapses upon itself and from which nothing escapes?

Fatah is corrupt and ineffective, but perhaps not unusually so by Arab standards. They may get control of the West Bank and Israel may actually decide to cut a deal just because they aren't Hamas. But Gaza? It's like Scientology with its own country. I have a really bad feeling about this.

Bong Hits for the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court is being described as more conservative than in the past. I think a better description is fascist. A conservative court would have deep reservations about the role of government in guiding individual actions into "proper" channels. This one seems ready to leap right in.

The kid in Alaska was penalized for displaying the phrase "Bong Hits for Jesus," which his school administration interpreted as advocating drug use. He did it on his own time, outside the school. The school is a government agency with a semi-monopoly on a vital service. There is a lot of coercion involved in making students show up in the first place.

There is no common English usage that leads from "Bong Hits for Jesus" to advocacy of anything. It doesn't make sense, as the kid pointed out. One would think that for words to show a specific intent, they would need to show some intent unambiguously, but apparently not in Alaska. It is not a sentence. It isn't even an intelligible phrase. There is no history of this student otherwise advocating drug use. The phrase does not match sentences or phrases used by others who are advocating drug use.

All we have is that some school administrator chose to assign a meaning to words, used outside the school, to which they then ascribe an intent on the basis of which they impose a punishment. This is scary stuff and certainly not something that a small-government advocating conservative should find appealing.

Democracy as Panacea

I'm working on a visitor guide to the Oregon Dunes, so yesterday morning I was having breakfast in a Reedsport cafe. A number of Reedsport's senior citizens were enjoying breakfast at the same time and I couldn't help overhearing the conversation. It covered Iraq, and if Bush expects to hold the support of generally conservative old geezers, I think he may have trouble. They were not happy about Iraq.

Then the conversation turned to politics. "Did you hear that Obama announced that he's running for President?" "No, who's Obama." "He's this black guy. He's in Congress. I don't know if it's the Senate or the House, but he's there. Looks like he's figured out that the problem is graft and corruption. And he's only 35!"

Based the opinions of such people, we will run a primary process that determines two candidates, between whom the contest will be settled by who has the best media consultants and the most money to buy advertising. This is democracy. It's what we're trying to give the Iraqis. It's what the UN was trying to give a tribe of pygmies in the Congo, helping them vote for the next government, when the pygmies clearly did not understand either (a) what a government was or (b) what the Congo was.

Democracy is a concept that Americans are in love with. We think it's indispensable to an advanced society, although Singapore does rather well without one. I think it's more an inevitable condition, when enough people gain such a high opinion of themselves that they feel that they must be allowed to participate in decisions. In most advanced society, this works better than any alternatives. In places like Iraq and Congo, it's a dangerous fairytale.

Pre-War Iraq Intelligence

The current controversy over the quality, sources, and purposes of the pre-war "intelligence" that wrongly linked Iraq and al-Qaeda does nothing to change my original assessment. The United States spends thirty or forty billion dollars a year on spying. A portion of this is used to prevent criminal acts, and I consider it police work rather than espionage. It is the latter that I regard as useless.

Advances in research are made by professionals, mostly working in universities, due to the process of peer review and an insistence on replicability. This is the basis for quality assurance. A single piece of research is checked for such things as inappropriate research methods or simple errors in analysis, and all research is regarded as no more than a piece of the puzzle. The puzzle, whatever it is, is gradually solved to the satisfaction of the participants by an accumulation of evidence from assorted sources. Or not. Sometimes, as we so often see in medical studies, initial studies are refuted or at least modified by later ones.

The problems of espionage are the subject of congressional hearings, closed or open, and the consensus always is that there has been some structural flaw which can be fixed by a better structure. This is not and never has been true. The problem is that espionage relies explicitly on special knowledge, from sources that cannot be verified through processes that cannot be replicated. Its quality can therefore never be relied on.

That's the problem. Not whether on any particular day, the espionage turns out to be correct, but that a nation like the United States cannot have public debates about issues when the "facts" are private. I argued at the outset of the war that the rationale was wrong for reasons that the White House could have determined for perhaps $29,999,999,999 less by buying a copy of the International Herald Tribune and reading what William Pfaff was saying. They could save a dollar more than that now by going online and checking with Juan Cole, who gets most of the information by himself going online and checking Arab newspapers and blogs.

One of my favorite lines goes "... an oxymoron, like Catholic education or military intelligence." The latter is a play on the two meanings of intelligence. The United States puts faith in the definition I've been discussing, analysis drawn from secretly obtained information. The second meaning is the ability to draw from many sources, assimilate the data, and be smart about drawing conclusions. If the United States had shown more of the latter kind of intelligence, we wouldn't be in the quagmire that we now find ourselves in.

I was just checking Google to see if any of my earlier posts showed up, and I discovered that looking for "Charles Krauthammer" and "predictable" yielded my post of four days ago, along with with many more than I had anticipated. Predictable seems to be a word that people associate frequently with the man, and that he uses himself.

There was a particularly interesting article from Charles himself, discussing reparations for African-Americans. He proposed, not entirely seriously, to trade off a payment of $440 billion to African-American families for the terminaton of affirmative action. He commented that although a steep price, it represented only a thirteenth of the projected ten-year federal surplus.

That was in April, 2001, before W. had worked his magic on the federal budget. Less than six years, but it seems so long ago.

Charles Krauthammer was predictable

Early on, those of us who thought the rationale behind the war in Iraq was phony also thought that the promoters of the war would follow one or more predictable patterns when they were trying to avoid eventual responsibility. Among them would be the classic notion that by criticizing the war, we encouraged the opponents just enough that they hold on until we leave. They don't bother showing any examples of insurgencies against foreign troops that have died out from lack of motivation.

Another would be that we just needed a little more and victory would have been ours. It's always a little more than whatever we've committed. Just a little more money, more troops, more time. It's an impossible argument to completely counter, but I'm grateful that Bush asked for more troops and more time and seems to be getting them. There will be those who will argue that we need just a little more yet, but the argument will be more hollow.

Finally, there's the approach of blaming the Iraqis. The ingrates! We gave them freedom and they chose civil war. No fault of America! We abolished their army, their police, their civil service, and much of their economy. Things didn't work out. Time for us to home.

Krauthammer is taking this approach. For him to do so, after being one of the flag wavers for this splendid little war, is morally repugnant.

The Backwardness that dares not speak its name

Dinesh D'Souza is at it again. Ten years ago, I thought he made some intelligent points about the excesses of political correctness, but as so often happens, he ran out of bright ideas but kept talking. His editorial in the Eugene newspaper today is a case in point.

It seems that some time ago, D'Souza wrote a book identifying American liberals as one of the causes of the hatred that Muslim extremists feel towards this country. He argued that they pushed for an extension of relaxed American views towards such topics as abortion and homosexuality and that conservative Muslims interpret this as an attack on their religion.

This overlooks the tiny fact that America's official government policies on these issues are almost as "conservative" as the supposedly offended Muslims and that Europeans are far more tolerant than we are. However, none of this addresses his notion that if a country has "conservative" values, they should be respected.

He is from India, and noted that he enjoys far more freedom in America than he would had he remained at home. A telling point. When the British arrived, it was the "conservative" practice in India to burn widows on their husband's funeral pyre. It is still the "conservative" practice in parts of the Muslim world to mutilate the genitals of young girls to prevent their ever enjoying sex.

Such practices have endured for centuries and would have continued, and in some cases do continue, without pressure from the "liberals" in the West. Evidently, Mr. D'Souza feels that our obligations to the rest of the world do not extend beyond our commercial interests. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide are grateful that he is incorrect.

Is Obama Black?

The question was posed by a newspaper columnist that I read online this morning. Then again, is Tiger Woods black? Is Mayor Nagin of New Orleans black? If the question is, do they trace 100% of their ancestry to black Africans, then no. If more than 50%, the answer is no for Osama and Tiger, and I have no idea about Nagin.

But on the more important question, would they be perceived as black in America, then the question is yes across the board. Next question, was Senator Biden off-base by saying Obama is the first clean and articulate black candidate? The columnist offered Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson and, remarkably, Al Sharpton as precedents.

Let's leave Shirley and Jesse alone, but Sharpton? Does no one now remember the Tawana Brawley hoax, which Al Sharpton largely orchestrated and exploited? Clean is a term that applies to more than personal hygiene.

More to the point, none of those three had any credentials for office apart from being black. Would Jesse Jackson be taken seriously if he represented farmers from Minnesota? Be serious. Obama, on the other hand, might be a candidate regardless of his color. He is articulate and thoughtful at a level with any other candidate I've seen the Democrats offer.

With Jesse Jackson, the question for any progressive minded individual was whether it was worth ignoring his shortcomings to express solidarity with the aspirations of black Americans. The answer was always no. With Obama, it's possible to consider him without any mental affirmative action fudge factor. I think that's what Biden was trying to say and it's a correct statement.

Global Warming Insurance

On the question of global warming, or "global heating" as the new politically correct phrase would have it, I'm ambivalent. On the one hand, we seem to be warming. It's perhaps due to humans. Maybe even probably due to humans. I'm still puzzled why in the first 25 years after CO2 starting rising (corresponding to the onset of World War II), there was a global cooling trend. I've never heard a good explanation of that which also blames CO2 for current warming.

I'm also wondering why there isn't more evidence out here on the Oregon Coast of the rising oceans we were told to expect. Why aren't the waves lapping over the jetties at the mouth of the Siuslaw River? Why hasn't the Columbia River started to back up and flood Astoria. Why isn't there anyone in the Pacific Northwest who has an actual problem, 20 years after the alarm was first sounded?

That said, I support a lot of conservation and research. Three reasons. One is that oil will run out sometime and we need to be ready. Another is that we get our oil from people I don't really like. It's worth something not to depend on crude oil from crude people. Finally, it's like life insurance. You don't expect to die young, but you get life insurance anyway. I'm not expecting catastrophic effects from global warming, but if we invested as much in at least slowing it down dramatically as we do in ipods and big screen TVs, we could reduce what may be a small likelihood of disaster. Seems worthwhile to me.

Neahkahnie Mountain

Neahkahnie Mountain has generated a lot of stories that you could tell your grandchildren. According to one of them, an 18th century Spanish ship wrecked near here and the survivors buried their treasure somewhere. Treasure hunters have been looking for it ever since without any luck. It may be there, but nobody has found it. A better bet is the treasure of the view from one of the turnouts in Oswald West State Park along Highway 101. Built during the Depression, they're pretty cool by themselves and the view down the Oregon Coast towards Rockaway Beach is spectacular. Manzanita is right at the bottom of the mountain. Consider Manzanita vacation rentals as a good way to spend a vacation on the Oregon Coast.