This Isn't Happening

I've often had harsh words for corn ethanol (here and here, for example).

But this is the last straw:

Mexican farmers are setting ablaze fields of blue agave, the cactus-like plant used to make the fiery spirit tequila, and resowing the land with corn as soaring U.S. ethanol demand pushes up prices.

The switch to corn will contribute to an expected scarcity of agave in coming years, with officials predicting that farmers will plant between 25 percent and 35 percent less agave this year to turn the land over to corn.

If anyone wants me, I'll be draped neurasthenically across the fainting couch, with a vinegar poultice on my forehead.

Sending me a few bottles of Del Maguey mezcal might revive me. Might, mind you.

Anyone who's not too grief-stricken can read this post by Tom Philpott, who describes what stumbling after the mirage of corn ethanol is doing to this country, and the rest of the world.

Centre for Holy Wars

An article in the Telegraph makes a startling claim:

Bin Laden is probably as far away from achieving his strategic aims as he was before September 11. However, America, Britain and all of bin Laden's countless other enemies seem no closer to hunting him down, still less to crushing al-Qa'eda.

The probable truth is that what President George W Bush called the "war on terror" has reached a stalemate. Neither side is close to achieving their goals.

Having taken a few deep, shuddering breaths, I’m almost prepared to tackle the assertion that bin Laden is no closer to achieving his goals than he was before 9/11.

Putting aside the fact that 9/11 was, as far as we know, a “strategic aim” of al-Qaeda, let’s consider what 9/11 accomplished. It crippled this country emotionally, putting families, friends, co-workers and complete strangers at each other’s throats. It caused us to throw our laws, and whatever residual shreds of decency adhered to them, out the window, and inaugurated a political order so far beyond the bounds of what normally passes for democracy that even an authoritarian hardliner like John Ashcroft couldn’t stomach it.

The wars we’ve launched have rallied the Islamic world against us, appalled what few friends we had, and made terrorism an attractive career option for every brutalized, alienated Muslim from here to Terengganu. There’s also the small matter of deposing a secular regime in Iraq. You’d have to be fairly dim to believe that this wasn’t welcomed by radical fundamentalists (especially given how often we hear our own radical fundamentalists talk about the importance of deposing secularists).

The goal of terrorism is to destabilize society by provoking overreaction, paranoia, social friction, and the squandering of resources. That’s what 9/11 was intended to do, and that’s what it did. Lest there be any doubt on the point, here’s OBL himself:

All that we have to do is to send two Mujahedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qa'ida in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note….

The fact that we’re stuck in an ever-escalating war of attrition for the foreseeable future doesn’t exactly hurt al-Qaeda's cause, either. All in all, I’d say they're doing a fine job of achieving their "strategic aims."

Not as fine a job as BushCo, though. For them, 9/11 has been an unanswerable excuse for everything from demonizing political opponents; to relaxing environmental laws; to “legalizing” torture, indefinite detention, and murder. It’s been used to hide criminal behavior, silence critics, gut laws, and make countless end-runs around the judicial system. It’s accelerated the transfer of the country’s wealth from the struggling poor to the redundantly rich, and enabled the building of the biggest and most heavily militarized US embassy on earth.

It’s allowed a gaggle of tenth-rate, stolidly anti-intellectual bumpkins to palm themselves off as the defenders of “civilization,” even as they continued an attack on rights, rationality, fairness, cosmopolitanism, and personal liberty that agrees in its broad outlines with the worst of radical Islam’s anti-modern rhetoric. It’s enabled these incomprehensible vermin to swarm throughout every level of government, and fulfill their instinctive, pointless mission of running it into the ground.

And of course, it bathed Bush’s rubbery brow in a fleeting blaze of holy light, before he fell back into his natural metier of blustering, uncomprehending self-destructiveness. If there’s anything Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush can agree on, it’s that 9/11 is the best thing that ever happened to them.

The problem with the “War on Terror” isn’t that it’s reached a stalemate. The problem is that both sides are against us, and both sides are winning.

(Photo at top: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), posing with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.)

The Shales and Husks of Men

There’s some interesting speculation about the effect of California’s pending greenhouse-gas legislation on Canada's disastrous tar sands industry:

[T]he California plan includes a formula that stipulates all greenhouse gas emissions during the life cycle of a fuel will be taken into account. In effect, not only does the crude oil product from the tar sands fail to meet the fuel quality standards of the California plan, but the greenhouse gas emissions that are generated to produce the crude would be more than sufficient to disqualify imports.

Sounds good to me! One can only hope the same calculations will be applied to American shale oil, which is once again being touted as our salvation:

Colorado and Utah have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Indonesia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates combined.

That's not science fiction. Trapped in limestone up to 200 feet thick in the two Rocky Mountain states is enough so-called shale oil to rival OPEC and supply the U.S. for a century.

This is journalism of a very high order indeed. You might as well say that cold fusion isn’t science fiction, because it’ll solve all our energy problems forever, just as soon as we figure it out.

To be fair, shale-oil extraction is a good deal further along than cold fusion:

"The breakthrough is that now the oil companies have a way of getting this oil out of the ground without the massive energy and manpower costs that killed these projects in the 1970s," said Pete Stark, an analyst at IHS Inc., an Englewood, Colo., research firm.

Indeed, the energy costs are negligible, as this description shows:

In the high desert near Rifle, Colo., Shell engineers are burying hundreds of steel rods 2,000 feet underground that will heat the shale to 700 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature at which Teflon melts.

The heat will be applied for the next four years….

In other words, it’ll use less energy in four years than Al Gore’s gloomy fortress atop Death Mountain uses in the average month. Or about the same amount, once you factor in the energy cost of creating an underground ice wall.

Take that, doomsayers!

The AZ Star (second link, above) article notes a couple of other interesting approaches to the shale oil problem; I’ll let you explore those for yourselves.

In unrelated news, please be advised that “some of the nation's largest farming operations are paying rock-bottom rates for the electricity they use to pump federally subsidized water to their fields.”

(Illustration at top: "Night shift in the oil shale processing plant" by Peeter Somelar, 1977.)

Kill 'Em All!

One of the things that makes the death penalty an ethical disaster is the likelihood that it'll be inflicted on people who are not actually killers, but may as well be executed anyway because "they won't be missed."

Louisiana, for instance, wants to execute pedophiles:

The Louisiana Supreme Court last week upheld the death sentence for a pedophile, and the governor of Texas is soon to sign into law legislation to that effect.

The cynic in me welcomes the law, simply because of the merriment that'll ensue the next time a beloved priest or honorable politician is caught raping children.

But then, the cynic in me is a blithering fuckhead with the moral acumen of a spirochete.

It's safe to say that any pedophiles executed under this law will not have Friends in High Places. When a good (i.e., white, Republican, Christian) man like Randal Ankeney molests children, Maggie Gallagher and Peggy Noonan will present us with the edifying spectacle of a titanic battle between Good and Evil, and remind us that no one is beyond redemption. (Besides...were the children truly innocent? And isn't feminism ultimately to blame either way?)

When someone more disposible does it, they'll inform us that failing to punish certain crimes with death isn't morality, but self-coddling vanity that'll come to worse than nothing.

What's really appalling is that allowing the death penalty may actually make these cases harder to uncover and prosecute:

"We are very concerned that this may reduce reporting of sexual assault, since most child abuse is made by someone close to the child," said Karen Rugaard, a spokeswoman for the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault.

Indeed. Given what we already know about familial denial in cases of sexual abuse, it's not hard to imagine parents dealing with the problem privately, instead of consigning Grandpa to Ol' Sparky. As for politicians and priests, the organizations to which they belong will have an even greater incentive to keep misbehavior secret.

I find white supremacists almost as nauseating as pedophiles, but I don't think it's a good idea to execute them, either. Speaking of which, a neo-Nazi named Kevin Strom has been charged with posession of child pornography, and with "enticing" a nine-year-old girl.

Strom was surprised by his wife Elisha...while apparently masturbating nude in front of a computer while looking at photos of young girls. Although he ran away from his wife, "she was able to observe that he was sexually aroused."

He also committed the largely aesthetic crime of writing a love sonnet to the little girl, and setting it to the tune of "Here We Come a-Wassailing."

In my experience, the standard "liberal" response to a case like Strom's involves gloating over the idea of him sharing a jail cell with that classic racist stereotype, the large, amorous black man...as though rape were a legitimate way of settling scores, compared to the "barbarity" of the death penalty.

That's an emotional cesspool I prefer not to plumb at the moment. But I will suggest that the power deeply disturbed predators like Strom seek isn't likely to be made less attractive by the threat of death. As I've argued elsewhere, that threat's likely to lure them like bug zappers lure mosquitoes (much as they're already lured by this country's sick obsession with "childhood innocence," which assuages adult guilt at the cost of making children ideal victims).

UPDATE: In a conversation at Eschaton, Gomez made the additional point that it's unwise to have the same penalty for molesting a child, and molesting and killing a child. Some criminals may decide to take the "in for a penny, in for a pound" outlook.

Maybe so. On the other hand, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. What's important here is taking a tough stand. And what could possibly be tougher than killing people?

Fundamentalism's Tombstone?

I'm absolutely reeling from a recent post by Echidne, who discusses this article about the "Museum of Creation" that will open in Kentucky this spring.

It sounds as though it'll be the ne plus ultra of hallucinatory, high-camp Christofascist freak shows, and it will undoubtedly give America's ever-dwindling population of sane people yet another reason to hang their heads in shame:

[C]ontroversial exhibits deal with diseases and famine, which are portrayed not as random disasters, but as the result of mankind's sin. Mr Ham's Answers in Genesis movement blames the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves, on evolutionist teaching, claiming that the perpetrators believed in Darwin's survival of the fittest.

If this is true, all I can say is that they apparently took a rather dim view of their own fitness to survive, since they shot themselves dead.

This next tidbit is so predictable that it's barely worth mentioning:

Other exhibits in the museum will blame homosexuals for Aids.

I must say, the wheels of God's wrath grind very slowly indeed if it took Him centuries to invent a fatal disease with which to punish homosexuals. But maybe He was exhausted after conjuring up dinosaurs with which to terrorize Adam and Eve:

[V]isitors will see a tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve after their fall from grace. "That's the real terror that Adam's sin unleashed," visitors will be warned.

One always wishes to be tolerant of other people's beliefs. But I have to draw the line at people who think that Adam and Eve were not only real, but were chased from Eden by the Giant Lizards of the Lord. To put it bluntly, it strains my credulity.

This museum is further evidence that for all its sound and fury, conservative American Christianity is in utter psychic disarray, having broken not only with reality itself, but with anything remotely resembling its supposed beliefs. Garish monuments to dogma are exactly what you'd expect from a sickly faith that has replaced agape with triumphalist pomp and circumstance. One can only hope that the Museum of Creation ends up being Christian fundamentalism's tombstone.

(This post originally appeared on January 11, 2005.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

There is nothing too small, but my tenderness paints
it large on a background of gold,
and I prize Chromodoris tinctoria,
not knowing whose soul, released at the sight, may unfold...

Friday Hope Blogging

This feature is exceedingly hard to research each week, so if anyone feels like sending me items, I’d be very grateful (and will of course credit you). My e-mail is at the bottom of the page.

Having made this plea, I expect to be on Easy Street very shortly. But for now, there’s nothing to do but put what's left of my nose to what's left of the grindstone.

There was some fear that bricks made of recycled fly-ash would leach mercury. Oddly enough, they seem to do the opposite:

Researchers have found that bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some researchers had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.

Go figure!

There's good news from POGO Blog:

The Senate Armed Services Committee approved language on the Defense Authorization bill last night which improves disclosure of Congressional earmarks and improves taxpayer protections for whistleblowers who work for defense contractors.

A new program would allow low-income people to use EBT cards at farmers’ markets:

The project will enable food stamp benefit recipients to purchase products from individual farmers' market vendors without each vendor being separately authorized by the USDA Food and Nutrition Services.

David Roberts links to an essay on “religious environmentalism” by Roger S. Gottlieb:

As religions become greener a number of other things happen as well. First, the global nature of environmental problems helps bridge the gap between different names for God, spiritual truth, or simple human goodness. As a result effective interfaith coalitions become increasingly more commonplace. The Interfaith Global Climate Change Network, for instance, has chapters in eighteen states and includes Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and Native Americans in its membership….

This comprehensive perspective of eco-justice offers hope for a new kind of politics that will transcend both blind faith in the "market" and a moribund liberalism of separate and competing interest groups.

Gottlieb also makes a point I’ve made before, on the value of the religious vocabulary in situations where “most people would find even a language of rights inadequate, and one of "consumer preferences" patently absurd.” There are plenty of things to quibble with here, but all in all it's an interesting read.

Also via Grist, Vancouver’s initial stab at a new city plan is pretty impressive:

Vancouver should put high-density housing next to its major parks and along every one of its major streets, suggests the first draft of Vancouver's ecodensity charter, released today.

The city should also close down some roads to cars and require developers to include solar power, rainwater collection, and laundry drying facilities in any new project....The over-arching idea [is that]Vancouver needs to redefine what it means to be livable city.

Fairfax County, VA has voted to restrict big-box retailers:

Fairfax County Supervisors have approved a new measure to restrict the development of stores larger than 80,000 square feet, against the protests of the business community.

Meanwhile, Arizona has agreed to limit growth based on whether or not growth is feasible:

Arizona lawmakers voted Thursday to expand the state's growth management efforts, approving a bipartisan bill to empower counties and cities to place new restrictions on rural development without adequate water supplies.

Obviously, no one’s informed these folks that rain follows the plow.

In today’s world, minor concessions to reality amount to heroism. Escondido, CA recently toyed with the idea of privatizing its sewer system, and came up with some interesting conclusions:

Deputy City Manager Charlie Grimm said last week that the city had contacted a consulting firm to determine what would be involved in privatizing a sewer system and got answers to three important questions:

- Could the sewer system be run more efficiently?
- Would the city reap any financial benefits?
- Would the city still have some control of sewer operations?

"Basically, down the line it's no, no and no, so we didn't spend a lot of time with it," Grimm said.

Probably wise, all things considered.

Arnold Schwarzenegger has refused to allow the siting of an LNG terminal off the coast of California:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last Friday announced his rejection of BHP Billiton's proposal to anchor a 1,000-foot-long liquefied natural gas terminal 14 miles off the Malibu coast, effectively killing the project outside of the Australian energy and mining giant winning a court battle or an unlikely federal government intervention (which would be difficult since the current federal law states the governor's rejection stops the project).

An Alaskan mine will not be allowed to dump its tailings in a lake:

The decision has important implications for mining. A few years ago, the Bush administration redefined mining waste as “fill”, which can legally be dumped into streams and lakes. Couer Alaska’s mine, the first metals mine to get a permit under that new definition, would have set a dangerous precedent for allowing mines to dump toxic tailings into Western waterways. We can all breathe a sigh of relief — for now.

A fox has withdrawn his bid to guard the henhouse:

Yesterday, Michael Baroody withdrew himself as nominee to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). News of the withdrawal came less than 24 hours before today's scheduled nomination hearing.

It is unclear whether the withdrawal came at the behest of the White House or was of Baroody's own accord. Either way, it is not surprising. The Senate nomination panel was preparing to grill Baroody on his ties to industry and obvious conflicts of interest.

A little-known, endangered species of turtle has been found in the Mekong River:

“This incredible discovery means that a unique turtle can be saved from disappearing from our planet,” said David Emmett, a CI wildlife biologist. “We thought it might be almost gone, but found it in abundance in this one pristine stretch of the Mekong, making the area the world’s most important site for saving this particular species.”

BLDG BLOG has posted a nice photospread on “the implosion of four cooling towers at the Chapelcross nuclear power station, in Scotland, where the UK used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.” Not sure whether this is good, bad, or indifferent in the grand scheme of things, but I’m a sucker for demolition (so long as the buildings are new enough).

That said, here’s a new building I’d rather not see demolished:


This incredible structure – built near Seville, Spain - comprises “a 300ft tall tower surrounded by 624 solar panels which will produce enough energy to power 60,000 homes.” Inhabitat has much more, including a video.

Nissan is attempting to recycle 100% of its vehicles:

Under the Nissan Green Program 2010 action plan, the company plans to accelerate its recycling efforts to achieve an average 95% recovery rate for end-of-life vehicles (ELVs) by FY2010. In Japan, this is four years ahead of the 2015 regulations.

Regulations, you’ll note, spur competitive behavior.

Also via The Seitch Blog, a solar heater made out of soda cans:

After a winter of freezing while working in the garage, Daniel Strohl was struck with the idea of creating his own solar panel garage heater. Fifty cans of Sprite later, he concocted a heater that was easily able to add 15 degrees of heat to the air.

Ethopia’s highest religious official has announced that it’s permissible to take anti-AIDS drugs and drink holy water at the same time:

Yonas, 41, who was in the congregation Wednesday, said he was pleased to know his preferred treatment was acceptable.

"I feel better now. Before, they forbade me to take the medicine," he said of his priests. "Now they welcome it."

Winning ideas in this year’s Development Market awards include novel mosquito traps, riverbank filtration, and health insurance for street children.

This may not be grounds for any sort of hope, but it’s certainly interesting:

Plasma astrophysicists at the University of Warwick have found that key information about the Sun’s 'storm season’ is being broadcast across the solar system in a fractal snapshot imprinted in the solar wind. This research opens up new ways of looking at both space weather and the unstable behaviour that affects the operation of fusion powered power plants.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency has produced the sharpest satellite image of the earth yet. It’s magnificent, and you can see it by clicking here.

With Nature and a Camera is an online version of Richard Kearton’s 1898 book of natural history, which includes plenty of nice photographic plates. (Link via Plep.)

BLDG BLOG has a fascinating post on the West Norwood Cemetery catacombs.


Once you’ve admired this picture sufficiently, be sure to read BLDG BLOG’s earlier post on architectural hallucinations.

BibliOdyssey has posted an amazing collection of engineering diagrams from the Renaissance, as thus:


Where is an interesting blog “about urban places, placemaking and the concept of ‘place’” (via Things). See also Subway Systems of the World, Presented on the Same Scale, which comes via AIDG Blog.

Just for fun, see if you can guess which of these images outlines Moscow’s subway system, and which was created by a spider dosed with chloral hydrate.



God only knows why it’s taken me so long to link to Vitaphone Varieties. Since they’ve recently posted an mp3 of the Dixieland Jug Blowers’ “Banjoreno” - one of my favorite songs - it’s definitely time to remedy the oversight.

On a slightly different aesthetic plane: The films of Irene Moon (some readers will recall that I linked to one of these in an earlier FHB).

Last, an incredible collection of ambrotypes at Luminous Lint, an incredible collection of cameo cards at (what is this?), and an incredible collection at Le Divan Fumoir Bohemien (via Angela).

(Illustration at top by Francesca Berrini, via Moon River.)

Deeper Penetration

The anti-environmental Right has done a good job of inducting off-road vehicle owners into its supremely cynical “Wise Use” movement, by arguing that mowing down the wilderness in dune buggies is an entitlement, if not a moral duty.

It’s not clear where the “wise” part comes in. Unlike hunters, who have a vested interest in conserving the habitat of the animals they hunt, ORV riders need conserve little more than mounds of dirt. A desert tortoise may deliver a satisfying bounce when you run it over, but once they’re all gone, a rock will do the same job perfectly well.

A recent ORV rally suggests that despite the prevalence of libertarian dogma in the Wise Use movement, its adherents tend not to respect the idea that one’s freedoms end where someone else’s begin:

”Groups of partiers were blocking an area and forcing women to bare their breasts in order to leave, along with numerous incidents of unwanted fondling of women. When law enforcement officers took action, the crowd became unruly, throwing objects at the officers.”

It’s probably irresponsible to suggest that this behavior has something to do with the rhetoric coming from our ailing nation’s radical-right thinktanks , but so what? Irresponsibility is my inalienable right as an American. While it’s true that certain subcultures are more likely to be thuggish than others, it’s also true that the Right has done its damnedest to ally itself with those subcultures, and to conflate their witless transgression of racial, sexual, and civic norms with “individual liberty.”

At any rate, this is not an isolated incident:

The U.S. Forest Service also reports rising attacks on its rangers in connection with ORV encounters. ORVs allow deeper penetration into remote, formerly wild, areas by people seeking to escape social restrictions, often leading to destructive acts.

Who could’ve imagined that contempt for the environment would go hand in hand with contempt for one’s fellow citizens, and for the law itself? Like anti-immigration extremism and racial pseudoscience, the ORV situation is a perfect example of how the Right puts a philosophical veneer on sociopathy in order to advance its business interests.

Who's Who?

More than five years after George W. Bush said "You're either with us, or the terrorists," Amnesty International reports that the "War on Terror" is...well, divisive:

Fears stoked by the post-9/11 "war on terror" are increasingly dividing the world, Amnesty International said Wednesday....

The gap between Muslims and non-Muslims notably deepened, fueled by discriminatory counter-terrorism strategies in Western countries, warned the rights group in its annual report.

In related news - possibly - ABC reports that US taxpayers are paying to broadcast anti-Semitic rhetoric in the Middle East:

Al Hurra television, the U.S. government's $63 million-a-year effort at public diplomacy broadcasting in the Middle East, is run by executives and officials who cannot speak Arabic, according to a senior official who oversees the program.

That might explain why critics say the service has recently been caught broadcasting terrorist messages, including an hour-long tirade on the importance of anti-Jewish violence, among other questionable pieces.

This incongruity might puzzle Iraqis, if they didn't have bigger things to worry about:

Bush's "surge" has put army and police checkpoints everywhere in Baghdad but Iraqis are terrified approaching them because they do not know if the men in uniform they see are in fact death squads.

Back home in the USA, the FBI is advancing the daring theory that white supremacist groups might be recruiting from the ranks of anti-immigration zealots:

Charles Frahm, FBI deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said there is increasing concern that the most radical elements of the anti-immigration wing may be "susceptible" to recruitment by white supremacists and other groups inclined toward violence.

Speaking of recruitment, Orcinus reports that in Arizona, the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office hired a deputy they knew to be a former member of Aryan Nations:

Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested Justin Dwyer, 39, a former leader in the neo-Nazi organization Aryan Nations, on drug charges stemming from an undercover investigation. Dwyer himself was employed as a deputy in the sheriff’s office at the time of his arrest.

On the other hand, heavily armed white supremacists - on whatever side of the law - may be the only thing that can save us from WorldNetDaily's latest threat to the Republic: Resentful blacks.

Al-Qaida is aggressively recruiting black Americans for suicide operations against the homeland, say FBI analysts who have reviewed recent videotaped messages from the terror group's leaders.

Zawahiri....citing the teachings of Malcolm X, suggests that black Muslims who do not rise up against America are no better than "house slaves."

Cooler, whiter heads know better:

"The Arab is the true master of the African," said Bill Warner, director of the Center for Study of Political Islam. "Blacks like to imagine Islam is their counterweight to white power, not that Islam has ruled them for 1,400 years."

How true that is. Every day, I see blacks who are manifestly enjoying the thought that Islam is a counterweight to white power. It's as typical of black culture, these days, as razor fights and watermelon theft were in more innocent times.

To be fair, not all blacks have thrown in their lot with Osama; it's just the ones with an axe to grind:

[S]ome analysts doubt al-Qaida's pitch will resonate in today's black community beyond a handful of malcontents. They point out that African-Americans are no longer held back by institutional racism....

Of course, now that we're threatened by these Allah-loving ingrates, yesterday's institutional racism may well become today's common sense.

United we stand!

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of Noumea alboannulata; and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.

(Photo by Jun Imamoto.)

Friday Hope Blogging

Pardon my abruptness, but this is pretty amazing:

The £2m SCORE (Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity) project brings together experts from across the world to develop a wood-powered generator capable of both cooking and cooling food...

Led by the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at The University of Nottingham, the project team will use thermoacoustic technology for the first time to convert biomass fuels into energy, powering the stove, fridge and generator.

Thermoacoustics refers to the generation of sound waves through the non-uniform heating of gas — illustrated by the 'singing' of hot glass vessels which can be heard during the glass blowing process. This phenomena has been known for centuries, but could offer new possibilities in the energy conversion process.

As is Pruned's explanation of the “hydrological playground":

While children have fun spinning on the PlayPump merry-go-round (1), clean water is pumped (2) from underground (3) into a 2,500-liter tank (4), standing seven meters above the ground.

A simple tap (5) makes it easy for women and children to draw water. Excess water is diverted from the storage tank back down into the borehole (6).

Click the link to see the diagram.

Diarrhea caused by rotavirus kills about 600,000 children per year, most of them in developing nations where delivery of the vaccine – which must be kept chilled – can be problematic. Accordingly, a team of students at Johns Hopkins has developed a quick-dissolving oral strip that doesn’t require refrigeration, and is easier to administer:

"The idea is that you would place one of these dissolving strips on the infant's tongue," said Hai-Quan Mao, the team's Johns Hopkins faculty advisor. "Because the strips are in a solid form, they would cost much less to store and transport than the liquid vaccine. We wanted this to be as simple and as inexpensive as possible."

Massachusetts is considering a bill that would keep protestors at least 35 feet from abortion clinics:

The bill would strengthen a 2000 law that created an 18-foot zone in which protestors had to remain at least six feet away from all staff and patients unless they obtained permission to move closer.

And Connecticut has made it mandatory for hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims:

Without fanfare, Gov. M. Jodi Rell on Wednesday signed into law a measure that requires all hospitals to provide emergency contraception to rape victims.

The law has been the subject of intense controversy for two years, primarily because of opposition from the Catholic Church.

The Kansas Board of Education has voted to end its support of abstinence-only sex education:

“It’s pretty much what’s been taught in Kansas schools for 30-plus years,” she said. “It’s teaching kids the only foolproof way of protecting yourself is abstinence. However, it understands that kids need the facts and need information if they choose to become sexually active.”

Massachusetts is moving in the same direction:

"We don't believe that the science of public health is pointing in the direction of very specific and narrowly defined behavioral approaches like the one that is mandated by this funding," said John Auerbach, the state commissioner of public health.

The archfiend Clinton has devised yet another plan to destroy America:

A coalition of 16 of the world’s biggest cities, five banks, one former president and companies and groups that modernize aging buildings on Wednesday pledged investments of billions of dollars to cut urban energy use and releases of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.

Under a plan developed through the William J. Clinton Foundation, participating banks would provide up to $1 billion each in loans that cities or private landlords would use to upgrade energy-hungry heating, cooling and lighting systems in older buildings.

The Clinton Foundation is also working with Microsoft “to develop new technology tools to help large cities create, track and share strategies to reduce carbon emissions.”

If you’re blessed with friends or family who fancy themselves climate skeptics, you might want to bookmark the handy guide to climate myths at New Scientist (including my all-time favorite, It’s too cold where I live – warming will be great).

The ports of Vancouver, Seattle, and Tacoma have pledged “to reduce particulate emissions from ships at dock by 70 per cent by 2010 and those from cargo handlers by 30 percent."

At Entropy Production, Robert MacLeod discusses “the glittering future of solar power.” Data-hungry geeks will want to read the whole thing; others can get the highlights at Grist. My favorite part:

If solar can maintain the same growth rate is has for the past decade, solar can supply all of mankind's projected electricity demands 26 years from now.

There’s also an interesting article on solar power from space. Not sure how I feel about it, but I thought it was worth including anyway.

Bald eagles seem to be resisting the efforts of American patriots to wipe them off the face of the earth:

The number of bald eagles in Wyoming has grown to 185 breeding pairs, a population recovery that has exceeded expectations from ornithologists who predicted much lower recovery rates when the birds were first granted federal protection in 1967.

The bald eagle population is soaring nationally, as well, with the number of breeding pairs in the lower 48 states climbing from a low in 1963 of 417 to more than 9,700 today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday.

Sonoran pronghorns are doing pretty well, too:

Five years after drought whittled the deer-like animal's population to a handful, pushing it to the brink of extinction, its numbers are back above 100.

You can read 100 more ESA success stories here. And you can read about hundreds of new life forms discovered in the Antarctic deep sea here:

"What was once thought to be a featureless abyss is in fact a dynamic, variable and biologically rich environment. Finding this extraordinary treasure trove of marine life is our first step to understanding the complex relationships between the deep ocean and distribution of marine life."

In California, a judge has reversed the approval for a Hilton hotel on the shore of Big Bear Lake:

“Not surprisingly, the courts have once again held that developers and the government agencies that support them must obey the law and deal with the environmental consequences of their actions,” said Drew Feldmann, president of the San Bernardino Valley Audubon Society.

Another judge has issued an injunction against developers in Palm Springs:

“This injunction is critical to protecting the endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep and its critical habitat in Chino Canyon as well as least Bell’s vireo nesting sites along Chino Creek. It also protects a crucial movement corridor for the bighorn in the northern part of its range,” said Lisa Belenky, staff attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We take heart that the judge agreed that there is no need to rush to develop yet another golf course and luxury housing development before the court can thoroughly review the merits of the case.”

And yet another judged has ruled that fish-stocking efforts must comply with the California Environmental Quality Act:

“This ruling is a tremendous victory for California’s native fish and frogs,” said Deanna Spooner, conservation director of the Pacific Rivers Council. “Now we can work to prevent future harm to these sensitive species from overstocking of the state’s streams, rivers, and lakes.”

California is also preparing to implement severe restrictions on fumigant pesticides:

"The agricultural industry had a free ride for over 10 years. These regulations should have been adopted in 1997," said Brent Newell, an attorney for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment who represents the plaintiffs. "Emissions have increased, and the public has borne that cost by breathing polluted air in three air basins."

Industry groups are saying farmers will be driven out of business, because as everyone knows, it’s absolutely impossible to grow plants without fumigants. I refer them to that pitiless dictate of capitalism, adapt or die!

Vitamin D could help protect people against TB, especially during times of diminished sunlight:

Scientists have shown that a single 2.5mg dose of vitamin D may be enough to boost the immune system to fight against tuberculosis (TB) and similar bacteria for at least 6 weeks. Their findings came from a study that identified an extraordinarily high incidence of vitamin D deficiency amongst those communities in London most at risk from the disease, which kills around two million people each year.

The "One Laptop Per Child" project is off to a promising start in Uruguay:

The computers are designed for children, boast extremely low electricity consumption, a pulley for hand-generated power, 1 gigabyte of flash memory, built-in wireless networking and a screen with indoor and outdoor reading modes.

The photo at top is from a glorious exhibition of photographs by Hugh Mangum, "an itinerant photographer from a prominent Durham, North Carolina, family, [who] traveled a rail circuit through North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia" from the 1890s to 1922. Very highly recommended!

You might as well have a look at The Muybridge Cyanotypes, a Flickr set listed at Coudal.


Also via Coudal, All 6,288 Smithsonian Images; some lovely examples of industrial silhouette photography; and Soviet matchboxes, a Flickr set by Dan Mogberg.


I heartily recommend Glimpses of Navajo Life in the Fifties, a series of photographs by Don Blair. And Saturn from Above.

Audubon's Aviary is also worth a look. As are Majesty Sublime - which commemorates Alexander Wilson's 1804 walk from Niagara to Philadelphia - and this collection of American relief prints. Furthermore, Images de Bretagne has a nice collection of vintage postcards.


Those with a green thumb may wish to visit Harvest of Freedom: The History of Kitchen Gardens in America, and Mail Order Gardens, which compiles gorgeous graphics from early seed catalogs.

There are more great graphics in The World Awheel: Early Cycling Books at the Lilly Library:


And From Revolution to Republic In Prints and Drawings:


And, of course, no tour of the Internets would be complete without a visit to this history of Scottish Cinema Design:

Novelty Plus Dread

A post at Danger Room describes how the Iraq War serves as a proving ground for IEDs and triggering devices, and how designs pioneered against our troops are being globalized.

Take the improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, which have become so common in Iraq. "Bomb makers [there] during the past four years have benefited from the lessons of trying to defeat a sophisticated enemy who is using complex countermeasures, National Defense magazine notes. Now, "the daily onslaught... is spreading to... Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Algeria." And there are "strong indications that [the Philippines'] Abu Sayeff, [Indonesia's] Jemaah Islamiyah and other terrorist groups are really collaborating to have a common type of IED."

Which shows once again that the ticking time-bomb scenario so beloved of authoritarian hacks has nothing to do with reality. Terrorists are constantly adapting and evolving, like so many other organizations, towards decentralization, automation, remote action, and information warfare.

Apropos of which, David Hambling discusses the possibility of using toy planes as remote-controlled missiles.

Some of these planes can carry a significant payload – like Bergen's Industrial Twin helicopter - "a workhorse capable of lifting up to a 25 lb. payload or fly for one half hour on a tank of gas" - take one away today for $5,500.

Obviously, we need to ban model planes. And pull instructions for building them off the Internet. And while we're at it, let's increase surveillance of hobby shops.

Stories about clever new terrorist tactics make good newspaper copy, which - thanks to the phenomenon of misleading vividness - makes them seem more plausible. Which in turn makes it seem that something must be done about them, now, before we're all killed!

As Bruce Schneier says, "Novelty plus dread equals overreaction":

We need to "do something," even if that something doesn't make sense; even if it is ineffective.

Or even if it's evil. In a fine op-ed, retired Marine generals Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar describe how torture, once it's accepted as effective, becomes seen as a duty:

These assertions that "torture works" may reassure a fearful public, but it is a false security. We don't know what's been gained through this fear-driven program. But we do know the consequences.

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture -- only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works -- the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb.

Absolutely. After all, if you don't torture 'em, how will you know if they're holding out on you?

All of which is really just a scatterbrained preamble to Danger Room's interview with John Robb, who argues that there are no American politicians who understand the novel aspects of fourth-generation warfare. The whole thing is well worth reading, but I particularly liked this passage:

My solution -- and this could be for anything from terrorism, climate change, to bird flu -- is to start at the bottom to build resilience at the local level. You can’t stop global system shocks at the border. They occur too quickly and our borders are too porous. So, in order to mitigate their effects, you need to build stability into our systems at the lower levels. One way to do this is by enabling systems that help communities operate autonomously of the national services grid for a period of time. If that were to occur, autonomous communities little affected by the shock, would help to rapidly reboot the larger system.

Cities of Panic

In an article on “the urbanization of panic,” Franco Berardi argues that panic increasingly “tends to become the urban psychic dimension”:

During the past centuries, the building of the modern urban environment used to be dependent on the rationalist plan of the political city. The economic dictatorship of the last few decades has accelerated the urban expansion. The interaction between cyber-spatial sprawl and urban physical environment has destroyed the rationalist organisation of the space.

It seems doubtful to me that “rationalist organization” was ever a reliable bulwark against urban anxiety, not least because Kathryn Milun argues so convincingly in Pathologies of Modern Space that the “intense emptiness” of the 19th-century city’s rationally planned public squares created a near-epidemic of agoraphobia.

It’s not clear what Berardi means by “panic.” He has a firm idea of what causes it, though:

The social organism is unable to process the overwhelmingly complex experience of metropolitan chaos.

Maybe not. But then, the social organism has no obvious need to do this. On the contrary, we function by not processing all the stimuli that come our way. We may indeed be overstimulated or confused or anxious, but it’s not certain that this is simply because urban life is too “chaotic” or “complex”; some city dwellers may be panicked because they hate their job, or can’t afford to pay their medical bills. After all, man is born to trouble. Or so I hear.

Berardi goes on to insist that cities produce “a stimulation too strong and too rapid” for human beings. Granting that urban life has some intractable problems, this seems a little highhanded. Speaking for myself, I’ve noticed that some people seem to be…well, happier in the city. But perhaps it’s only because they don’t understand their abject subordination to "Semio-Kapital":

Semio-Kapital…is not about the production of material goods, but about the production of psychic stimulation. The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual mind as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse.

”The mental environment is saturated by signs,” eh?

Why am I always the last to know these things?

Honestly, it’s a little late in the day to assume that cities are inherently productive of alienation and anxiety or “a state of collapse,” whether or not they’re interacting with “cyber-spatial sprawl.” As I see it, Berardi’s critique is not all that different from the Nazi critique of Weimar cosmopolitanism. Which is to say that it’s one-sided, at best.

What I find interesting about these anxieties is not the extent to which they’re causing minds to collapse, but the extent to which they’re holding them together. There’s a fairly obvious link between panic and escapism (and between cultural theory and escapism, for that matter), and what seems like a nightmare to you or me may be preferable, for some people, to a far more intolerable reality.

While traveling in the Midwest recently, I spent some time talking to a self-professed libertarian at a coffee shop. He told me he lived alone on 40 acres, about an hour outside the city, and had a good-sized stockpile of weapons. He was prepared (i.e., yearning) for the breakdown of society, and if “they” came to get him, he was willing (i.e., hoping) to go out in a blaze of glory. His vision of human nature was fairly dark, even by my dour standards. But it seemed to make him happy, and the more apocalyptic his scenario became, the more he seemed – in Charles Mackay’s fine phrase – “to delight in hearing his own organs articulate it.”

In my experience, that attitude is a lot more common among suburban and rural dwellers than urbanites. At Eschaton the other night, we were talking about what it was like to live in NYC on and after 9/11 (as I and many other regulars did). Several of us felt that there was far less panic among New Yorkers than among Americans who lived thousands of miles away (in the suburbs, usually) and were at little risk – then or now – of falling prey to terrists.

Thinking about it today, I wonder if these people simply felt left out, and were jealous. One thing I do know is that downplaying the threat of terrorism in general, or of some specific weapon like botulinum toxin or EMP, tends to make them angry. They seem to want more panic in their lives, not less.

Maybe it’s not panic at all, for all I know. Maybe it’s desire, dressed up in an emotionally acceptable disguise.

Over at Subtopia, Bryan Finoki uses Berardi’s article as a jumping-off point for a far more compelling discussion of “the implicit panic in structures like border fences and detention centers, bunkers and nuclear shelters, urban conflict zones, foreign embassies, paramilitarism and slumaphobia, etc.”

If we want to, we can find “implicit panic” in everything from seatbelts to non-slip shower mats. I think that what’s important about Bryan’s examples of “architectures of control” is who they represent as a threat (i.e., the poor, minorities, foreigners, and so forth), and to what extent we experience that representation as gratifying, or convenient, or what have you. From this standpoint, one could argue that Berardi is wrong because he misses the point that “cities of panic,” far from being too complex, are too simple, inasmuch as they tell us what we want to hear. (Unlike, say, the somewhat more ethically demanding City of Refuge.)

Bryan suggests the possibility of viewing “panic as a new prototypical capitalist form,” which I think begs the question of what capitalism has been based on up ‘til now. You don’t have to be a Marxist to see that a system that treats competition as a quasi-religious duty is going to be fueled to a huge extent by panic. In concentrating on the city “as an architectural weapon to enforce behavior” – as something imposed on us, in other words - I think we run the risk of ignoring the extent to which “cities of panic” are where we want to live, perhaps because (as I’ve argued previously) there’s a lack of meaning elsewhere.

(Illustration: "Apocalyptic Landscape (Nr. Halensee Railway Station), 1913" by Ludwig Meidner.)

Unscreened

Lou Dobbs stands by his reporting on America's leprosy epidemic, which he says is caused by - wait for it, now - immigrants:

On "Lou Dobbs Tonight" this past Monday, Dobbs said he stands "100 percent behind" his show's claim that there had been 7,000 new cases of leprosy in the United States over a recent three-year period, and he further suggested that an increase in leprosy was due in part to "unscreened illegal immigrants coming into this country."

It's shocking how those illegals sneak past our leprosy detectors. Is nothing at all sacred to these subhumans?

I've already dealt with this nonsense at some length, so I won't reiterate it here. What's interesting is that Dobbs claims that he got his leprosy stats from Madeleine Cosman.

The late Ms. Cosman was a prominent conservative activist with no degree in medicine, and a rather lurid fixation on the "versatile" sexuality of immigrants:

Recognize that most of these bastards molest girls under age 12, some as young as age 5, others age 3, although of course some specialize in boys, some specialize in nuns, some are exceedingly versatile, and rape little girls age 11, and women up to age 79.

Perhaps daydreaming over Medieval history inspired her lunatic claim that there were 7,000 cases of leprosy in America over the course of three years. That's as good a theory as any, given that there's no evidence for her statistics, and plenty of evidence against them.

One can only speculate as to whether she was familiar with this evocative passage from The Confession of Agimet of Geneva:

On Friday, the 10th of the month of October, at Châtel, in the castle thereof, there occurred the judicial inquiry which was made by order of the court of the illustrious Prince, our lord, Amadeus, Count of Savoy, and his subjects against the Jews of both sexes who were there imprisoned, each one separately. This was done after public rumor had become current and a strong clamor had arisen because of the poison put by them into the wells, springs, and other things which the Christians use - demanding that they die, that they are able to be found guilty and, therefore, that they should be punished.

In addition to her race-baiting misrepresentation of leprosy statistics, the versatile Ms. Cosman left behind "a vast library of illuminated manuscripts and a large collection of handguns."

(Illustration by  Giovanni Sercambi, via The Florida Holocaust Museum).

A Faulty Anthropology

Given that Iraq's child-mortality rate is the highest in the world, it's a trifle...unedifying to see Western commentators fretting over a "shortage of children."

That said, it's hard not to admire the ease with which Patrick Kelly, vice president of the Knights of Columbus, anatomizes the problem:

"The problem consists of a faulty anthropology that detaches human freedom from the truth and values the person in strictly individualistic and materialistic terms," observed Kelly. "This was the great error of communism, and it now presents an enormous challenge to the consumer cultures of the West."

The great error of communism was its overemphasis on individualism? Surely Mr. Kelly is a queer farfetched man.

Though he's not alone in that, God knows:

Author and public policy expert Phillip Longman says the concept that if your parents never had children, chances are you won't as well, rings true across the world today.

That's a sentence worth printing out and carrying with you, just in case you come across someone who needs an anaesthetic.

The article insists that the child shortage is "not being fueled by high child mortality rates." I guess that makes a certain sort of warped sense, so long as your concern is with regulating sexual behavior, rather than with the survival of children per se. But even so, it's quite possible that some people are failing to procreate to the satisfaction of busybodies like Patrick Kelly because they're so completely fucking horrified by how we treat the children who are already here.

(Illustration at top: "An exhibit comparing white and Negro fetuses from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1921." Via The Adoption History Project.)

A Sadder, Duller Place

When Sao Paulo, Brazil voted to ban outdoor advertising, one member of the City Council complained:

"I think this city is going to become a sadder, duller place," said Dalton Silvano, who cast the sole dissenting vote and is in the advertising business. "Advertising is both an art form and, when you're in your car or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom."

Brazilian journalist Vinicius Galvao describes what happened next:

[I]n a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown. People were shocked because they never saw that before, just because there were a lot of billboards covering the area....

Sao Paulo's just like New York. It's a very international city. We have the Japanese neighborhood, we have the Korean neighborhood, we have the Italian neighborhood and in the Korean neighborhood, they have a lot of small manufacturers, these Korean businessmen. They hire illegal labor from Bolivian immigrants.

And there was a lot of billboards in front of these manufacturers' shops. And when they uncovered, we could see through the window a lot of Bolivian people like sleeping and working at the same place. They earn money, just enough for food. So it's a lot of social problem that was uncovered where the city was shocked at this news.

The notion that Sao Paolo's well-off citizens were previously unaware of the city's slums is hard to accept, not least because that troubled city's best and brightest are inclined to travel everywhere by helicopter. Still, this is an effect of outdoor advertising that I hadn't really considered before.

On the bright side, the city's blanks signs provide the perfect testing ground for subliminal advertising.

(The photo at top is from Sao Paulo No Logo, a Flickr set by Tony de Marco.)

Things About Stuff

CKR has an interesting post on climate science:

One of the objections to climate science and the IPCC process is that science is about facts, not consensus.

It’s about both, actually. Scientists are a lot less deterministic lot than is popularly supposed. Some do indeed measure particular properties or effects down to the fourth or ninth or whatever place after the decimal point, but for the most part, the world is slipperier than that. Or it would be nice to believe that scientists pin down causes and effects in an unambiguous way: smoke cigarettes, and you’ll get lung cancer.

That example shows that it’s not so simple. We all know someone who smokes and has lived a long and healthy life. But it still makes sense to discourage smoking, because many people who smoke do get lung cancer, and the cigarettes are the cause of that lung cancer. Probability there, not determinism.

Subtopia discusses an article on "the urbanization of panic":

Berardi describes the state of urban territory as striated by new dimensions of panic where the mental and physical environment of the city overlap in an over-saturation of signs “that create a sort of continuous excitation," he writes, "a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual mind as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse.”

There's an awful lot of stuff I'd take issue with in the theory-laden source article. It's hard to say whether I'll ever get around to it, though. For now, the questions that occur to me are: 1) Is panic really "urban"?; and 2) Is "panic" really panic?

David Neiwart reports on a picnic in Rapid City, MI, at which a KKK flag was flown:

Probably the most noteworthy aspect of the story is the way everyone in the community scrambles to cover for the person who raised the flag. They're all equally quick to deny that the flag's appearance meant anything racial....

If white people sometimes wonder why minorities sometimes view their protestations off innocence on racial issues with deep suspicion, they need only look at incidents like these for a simple explanation.

Except that for many people, assigning ill will to the accuser rather than the accused provides the simplest possible explanation for racial incidents.

Stories like this one show how racism has essentially become inadmissible; it's as though it were so rare a phenomenon, and so inexplicable a form of mental or ethical perversion, that almost any other explanation is not only more plausible, but also more in keeping - perversely enough - with the "civilized" value of tolerance.

Speaking of tolerance, VastLeft extols the virtues of being reasonable:

Maybe it’s part of the plan, the rightwing going so far off-the-rails that the Democrats are stuck being the boring Mr.-and-Ms. Fixits, while the Repubs create all those mind-boggling new realities. But, maybe it’s time we remind people how boringly reasonable we are. It just may be that reasonable is the new reasonable.

Damn straight. Death to extremists!

Kidding aside, Amanda Marcotte would take issue - as would I - with the "Mr.-and-Ms." part of VL's equation:

If you pay very close attention to the way Democrats and liberals are dismissed by the right and in the mainstream, you’ll notice that it’s the same set of dismissals issued to silence and discredit women out of hand. Despite all indicators that we marched off to war because a bunch of neocon wingnuts watched way too many war movies in the 80s, the idea that liberals are ruled by emotions and conservatives are rational still has play (look at any Sensible Liberal® defending his support for the war, and you’ll see that myth played out)....

And it’s all because Republicans have been coded as masculine, and the Democrats as feminine, and thanks to sexism, we believe that masculine is more rational than feminine, regardless of piles of evidence to the contrary.

My thrusting, probing male intellect tells me that the young lady is on to something (I'd emphasize that the "rationality" in question is of the conservatarian variety, and therefore has more to do with kicking ass than, say, devising a sensible trade policy).

Which reminds me: Echidne has written an excellent piece on the media's portrayal of gender research.

(The photo at top is by David Levinthal, from his series "Hitler Moves East 1975-77." Via Coudal.)

Stuff About Things

Here are some links that didn't make it into last week's edition of Friday Hope Blogging.

Exquisite Surprise: The Papers of Joseph Cornell compiles Cornell's source material, notes, and other ephemera.

Historical Photography of the American West in 3D is a fascinating collection of stereo cards and anaglyphs.

Out of the Teeming Sea comprises 19th-century glass models of marine invertebrates by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.


The Illustrated Word at the Fin de Siècle details "the relationship between fin de siècle aesthetic and political theories, and between literary, artistic, and journalistic culture and paid particular attention to the role of the visual in the media of the period."


America and the Utopian Dream is notable less for its rudimentary survey of utopian and dystopian literature than for its collection of ephemera relating to American utopian communities like Kaweah.


Death of the Father: An Anthropology of Ends in Political Authority asks the immortal question: "Of what significance is the symbolization of the Father and his dead body for the form of national authority that follows the collapse of a regime?"

A Buzz About Bees presents historical material on bees and beekeeping.

New York Street Photography features photos taken in the 1960s and 1970s by Diane Arbus, Roy Colmer, Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, Thomas Struth, and William Gedney.


Also:

Time, Tide and Tonics: The Patent Medicine Almanac in America.

Vive la différence! The English and French stereotype in satirical prints, 1720-1815.

Under the North Pole: The Voyage of the Nautilus.

The Animal Kingdom: Six Centuries of Zoological Illustration. See also Animals Are Allowed in the Library.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Let my senses be lit
by Mexichromis multituberculata
without which love dies or sleeps!

(Photo by Jun Imamoto.)

Friday Hope Blogging

Lots of interesting community redevelopment stories this week. For starters, Youngstown, Ohio has come up with an interesting plan for smart shrinkage:

Youngstown, a former steel-producing hub, has been losing residents for years as a result of the closing of most of its steel mills. But rather than struggle to regain its former glory or population, it has adopted an economic-development plan that boils down to controlled shrinkage. By accepting the inevitable, the city says it can reduce its housing stock, infrastructure and services accordingly.

Neighborhoods that are "emptying out" will eventually be converted to greenspace through mass demolitoin of decaying housing and commercial structures. The city estimates it will take about four years to bulldoze the biggest eyesores, including about 1,000 abandoned homes and several hundred old stores, schools and other structures.

WorldChanging has a great article on the Harlem Children’s Zone:

It costs $3,500 per child per year to educate a kid in a Harlem Children's Zone school. In return, it's been shown, those kids are much more likely to be well educated, have better job prospects, live healthier, contribute more to their communities and in general contribute to the general good. Early investment in kids shows a solid ROI.

An urban planner whose family formerly lived in St. Louis’ ghastly Pruitt-Igoe projects is helping to revitalize this blighted area:

To date, more than 200 apartments and homes in the neighborhood have been renovated, and new restaurants and shops have opened, many along the Manchester Avenue business district.

There are interesting efforts afoot to increase land-ownership among denizens of “manufactured housing” (e.g., trailer parks), through such mechanisms as resident-owned communities:

The New Hampshire model of resident-ownership is a cooperative one. To acquire a community, homeowners first form a nonprofit co-op in which each household has one share and one vote. The co-op finances the purchase by borrowing money from local banks and the loan fund. This means that homeowners do not have to take out individual loans to buy in. Public subsidies are used for fixing unhealthy and unsafe water and septic systems and deteriorating roads.

The Los Angeles City Council has agreed unanimously to restore the LA River:

It took five years to frame the details, but the roots of the proposed river restoration go back to a fledgling group of environmentalists who in the late 1980s began insisting that the river could be much more than a concrete-lined flood control channel.

"This is a great step," said Lewis MacAdams, founder of the activist group Friends of the Los Angeles River. "One of our first slogans was when the steelhead trout returns to the Los Angeles River, then our work is done, and to see an acknowledgment of steelhead in the plan -- well, I like that."

A new bill would dramatically expand cleanup of the Everglades:

The measure...includes new restrictions on polluted stormwater runoff from new developments, and on the dumping of sewage sludge into the Lake Okeechobee watershed, which environmentalists say is a major victory.

In other news, scientists are creating an “Encyclopedia of Life” that will catalog and track every species on earth:

The ambitious electronic encyclopedia will catalogue the details of every species thus far identified and put all this information on the Internet so anyone can access it.

"This will be a fantastic resource for the developing world," said James Edwards, the new executive director of the Encyclopedia of Life project headquartered in Washington at the Smithsonian Institution. Until now, researchers and students from the South had to travel to the big 10 natural history museums located in the North to learn about species in their own countries, Edwards told IPS.

A speculative project called seedPOD would offer similar benefits to farmers:

seedPOD will host an open archive of resources which can be augmented and developed through the discoveries made by citizens and farmers. We call it Wikiseedia -- a collaborative, free online agricultural encyclopedia.

Speaking of which, eight South African plants allegedly hold potential for treating hypertension. It’s amazing what you can find, when you bother to look.

South Pacific nations have joined together to ban bottom-trawling:

The landmark deal will restrict bottom-trawling, which experts say destroys coral reefs and stirs up clouds of sediment that suffocate marine life.

There’s been yet another resignation at the Department of the Interior, which BushCo stacked with a gaggle of pro-extraction industry, anti-environment zealots:

Burton’s tenure at the agency was fraught with decisions and policies which impaired the government’s ability to collect oil and gas drilling fees owed to the federal government and Native Americans.

Glenn Beck has one of the least popular shows on TV, but his “expose” on global warming didn’t even manage to meet his conservatarian paymasters’ sadly diminished expectations:

Beck's special, "Exposed: Climate of Fear," was a commercial flop, finishing dead last in total viewers among CNN, Headline News, Fox News, and MSNBC programs that night.

Next stop, Palookaville! It’s also interesting that Rupert Murdoch claims to have gotten religion on climate change; time will tell whether this is sincere, or an attempt to promote industry-approved “solutions” from a standpoint of faux-centrism. Ditto for GM's decision to join the Climate Action Partnership.

Meanwhile, 31 states are working together to track greenhouse gases:

"This includes a lot of deeply conservative states who have signed on that we weren't expecting," said Nancy Whalen, spokeswoman for the California Climate Action Registry, the only current statewide emissions tracking system, which helped develop the multistate program.

A coal-fired plant in upstate New York is being shut down, which is good news for Thers and Molly, their 257+ children, and their ducks.

The emissions from the 350-megawatt Lovett plant are linked to acid rain and smog. At the time of the settlement, state environmental officials said the emissions from Lovett alone, which looms over the west bank of the Hudson River, represented a quarter of the sulfur dioxide and almost a third of the nitrogen oxide released by electric generators in seven counties in the Hudson Valley.

And Wal-Mart is apparently taking steps to reduce the amount of mercury in its compact fluorescent bulbs:

Wal-Mart said it estimates a third less mercury will be used in the production process of the bulbs it buys, effectively removing an average of 360 pounds of mercury per 100 million CFLs sold in its stores.

Not bad. But as David Roberts notes, LEDs are a better bet:

The cost of LED lighting should be coming down quickly. Polybrite founder Carl Scianna said the cost of individual white-light diodes, several of which go into an LED bulb and make up much of the cost, have come down in price from about $8 to $1.50 in a year.

“They're going to keep going down,” Scianna said. “By the middle of next year, they'll be priced for consumers.”

A Swiss-built ship has completed the first solar-powered Atlantic crossing:

According to the organisation, the 14m-boat produced 2,000 kilowatt hours of solar energy during its voyage thanks to a roof of photovoltaic panels mounted above the twin-hulled design.

The solar energy was used to power the boat's electric motors and any surplus was stored in batteries, allowing it to travel at a constant speed of 56 knots day or night, the group's website said.

Meanwhile, affordable solar-power systems are making a big difference in rural India:

Jyoti Painuly, senior energy planner for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), lists examples of people who have profited from the scheme: "There is the food vendor who told us 'Now my food doesn't smell of kerosene, so I sell more of it,' and the tailor who said that he can work a few extra hours during the day, bringing in more money."

There’s talk of using the jet stream as an energy source:

"My calculations show that if we could just tap into 1 percent of the energy in high-altitude winds, it would be enough to power all civilization. The whole planet!" said atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University.

Make of that what you will.

Argonne National Lab claims to have found a way to improve rechargeable lithium-ion batteries:

In recent tests, the new materials yielded exceptionally high charge-storage capacities, greater than 250 mAh/g, or more than twice the capacity of materials in conventional rechargeable lithium batteries….In addition, by focusing on manganese-rich systems, instead of the more expensive cobalt and nickel versions of lithium batteries, overall battery cost is reduced.

And there’s some interesting work being done on engine redesign:

The new method would eliminate the mechanism linking the crankshaft to the camshaft, providing an independent control system for the valves.

Because the valves' timing would no longer be restricted by the pistons' movement, they could be more finely tuned to allow more efficient combustion of diesel, gasoline and alternative fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel….

And an initial conference on agrichar brought experts together to discuss the potential of carbon-negative biofuels:

n simple terms, the agrichar process takes dry biomass of any kind and bakes it in a kiln to produce charcoal. The process is called pyrolysis. Various gases and bio-oils are driven off the material and collected to use in heat or power generation. The charcoal is buried in the ground, sequestering the carbon that the growing plants had pulled out of the atmosphere. The end result is increased soil fertility and an energy source with negative carbon emissions.

As some of you may recall, Engineer-Poet has discussed this process at exhaustive length.

The New Yorker has a fascinating article on the Antikythera Mechanism, a mysterious device that was recovered in 1900, after spending roughly 2,000 years in the Aegean Sea.


I also recommend Country and Landscape, a gorgeous online exhibition comprising early images of Australia. And the magnificient pinhole photography of Bill DeLanney


Via Things comes Catalog Tree, your source for Broxomatic tachographs, and mental maps of Werkplaats Typografie.

If that's too much for you, you can calm yourself with Bert Teunissen's Domestic Landscapes (via Coudal). Or the Expériences amusantes unearthed by Agence Eureka. Or NASA's amazing panoramic view of "A Dark Sky Over Death Valley." (Click the link, or the photo, to see an enlarged version.)


Last, here's a time-lapse film of an auroral display from British Columbia:


(Photo at top: "The Downs by Moonlight" [1870], via Luminous Lint.)

Some Like It Hot

The next time you hear someone promoting the exciting new doctrine of industry self-regulation, you can bring up this story:

The aging Midwest Generation plants suck up nearly every drop of the Chicago and Lower Des Plaines Rivers to cool their massive equipment, then churn it back out as hot as bathwater, sometimes hotter than 100 degrees. Illinois has banned the process at newer plants because it can kill fish or discourage them from sticking around.

State regulators are proposing new temperature limits that could force the utility to spend up to $800 million on equipment upgrades, which would curb the amount of warm water pumped into the waterways. But the power company's executives contend there are more benefits than drawbacks from keeping the rivers hotter than normal.

They even suggest that killing all of the fish in the rivers might be a good thing.

MG's logic is that keeping the rivers hot would pose a barrier to "Asian carp and other invasive species." Scientists disagree, not least because the Asian carp likes warm water.

As surprising as I find the proposition that it's in society's best interest to keep a river's temperature at or near 100 degrees, I'm even more impressed with MG's argument that the presence of pollutants is an argument against environmental clean-up:

During a recent presentation to environmental regulators, they argued that the government should give up trying to improve water quality, illustrating their point with slides showing tons of slimy garbage skimmed off intake pipes at the power plants.

You know what I love about American industry? Its can-do, forward-looking, never-say-die spirit. That, and its unblushing evil.

Incidentally, May 12th is the 15th annual Chicago River Day. Almost 4,000 volunteers will be working to clean sites along 100 miles of the river. At the risk of sounding like an extremist, it might not be a bad idea to chain a few top MG executives together at the ankle, and have them pitch in.

(Photo: A solid crust of pollution over the Chicago River, circa 1901. Via Of Time and the River.)

Hardly Working

Jonah Goldberg (above right) provides us with valuable insight into his working methods:

[O]ff the top of my head, the examples of anti-science bias on the left are easy to come up with.

You don't say.

What follows is a whirlwind tour of exceedingly familiar terrain:

The MIT biology professor who got the vapors like a 17th century wallflower in response to academic speculation about cognitive differences between the sexes seems a good place to start.

Yes, because neither this nameless professor (Nancy Hopkins, for the record) nor anyone else had a single substantive argument to make against the content or the context of Larry Summers’ “academic speculation.” It all boiled down to hysteria and hissy fits, probably aggravated by PMS or menopause or a bad hair day. After all, what other possible reason could there be for a prominent professor of biology to get upset by an economist's pseudoscientific theorizing about genetics?

The abortion-breast cancer link might be another.

Yeah, it might be...assuming a conclusive link between abortion and breast cancer is someday demonstrated. Meanwhile, in the real world, the link remains dubious at best.

“Easy to come up with,” indeed. He's only on his second example, and he's already channeling the Amazing Criswell.

You'll never guess what comes next.

There were thoughtful criticisms to the Bell Curve from the left, but they were few and far between.

Putting aside the irrelevant issues of quantity and frequency, what’s important about these “thoughtful criticisms” is that they were absolutely devastating. (If you ask me, Gould and Lewontin effectively demolished TBC before it was written, but that’s an argument for another day.)

Most came to a conclusion that any such science had to be bad and then went looking for evidence to support their case.

Maybe they did, for all I know. But what Goldberg fails to mention is that they found it. The Right, generally speaking, failed to look for it, and ignored it when it was presented to them.

Here’s where things get a tiny bit more interesting:

[T]he harms of out-of-wedlock birth seem to still be discounted irrationally on the left.

Without debating whether or not this is true, I’d point out that there are several possible ways of dealing with these “harms.”

One would be to make out-of-wedlock births illegal, which requires choosing an appropriate punishment. I think it’s safe to say that neither conservatives nor liberals would want to impose mandatory abortions. Failing that, we could allow her to have the baby, and then prosecute her, or give the baby to a willing married couple (or both). These sound like “big government” solutions to me, and I suspect they might result in “harms” of their own.

Since there's no realistic way of forbidding “illegitimate” births, and conservatives generally object to both sex education and birth control, their default stance is that single mothers should be scapegoated as slutty or irresponsible, and denied a social safety net, to whatever extent is politically feasible. Undermining social programs is the real purpose of the entire charade, natch, so any negative outcomes will accordingly be portrayed as the “natural” consequence of being born out of wedlock (to some filthy whore). These children are at a disadvantage; to prove it, we'll do our best to put them at a disadvantage.

But enough about that. Goldberg goes on to claim that environmentalists engage in scaremongering and alarmism. He's right, of course. It's all part of their plot to bring back Stalinism and cave-dwelling and Medieval medicine, and kill us all in the wind-up.

He wraps things up by complaining that Marxists did “violence to rational inquiry," which is pretty rich coming from the Right’s leading exponent of class-addled pseudosemiotic horseshit.

But the biggest laugh comes in the last line:

Anyway, back to work.

I can't tell you how amused I am by the idea that in this post, Goldberg was taking a break from his work...as though the dunced-out nonsense he spouts here is somehow distinguishable from the dunced-out nonsense he spouts day in and day out, without let or hindrance, and with no more shame or self-awareness than a goddamn planarian worm.

Oh well, back to work. Those peep-show floors won't mop themselves!

The Mortar of Assimilation

Jason T. Ready, an anti-immigration activist who recently ran for Mesa, Arizona’s City Council, is displeased with a local police detective who investigates racially motivated crimes:

Speaking about his 12 years of undercover work, Browning said illegal immigration has become a lightning rod for violent skinheads who randomly [!] attack Mexicans.

Browning's testimony raised the ire of Ready, whose e-mail says: "All border activists, constitutional study groups, and tax protestors, and especially any White Heritage Club members, have been labeled ‘domestic terrorists.'"

If so, they join a good percentage of the country, from environmentalists, to the National Education Association, to advocates of media reform, to Democrats. If you haven’t been labeled a terrorist, or a terrorist sympathizer, in post-9/11 America, you probably don’t get out much.

That said, "border activists" do tend to have larger weapons caches than the average Democratic senator or pacifist vegan. Take, for instance, the Alabama militiamen who allegedly planned to kill them some Mexicans.

Adam Nesmith, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, testified that the five men planned an attack on Mexicans in a small town just north of Birmingham, and went there on a reconnaissance mission April 20.

Nesmith said one of the men told an informant that the group, which calls itself the Alabama Free Militia, saw government agents as "the enemy" and had a standing order to open fire if anyone saw government agents approaching.

And rightly so. As Ronald Reagan once observed, the thirteen most frightening words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to prevent you from murdering darkies.”

I use the latter term advisedly, since anti-immigrant vigilantes have never shown much ability to tell Mexicans from, say, American Indians, or legal immigrants from illegal ones (cf. Steve Boggs, who murdered three fast-food workers in Mesa, AZ in an attempt to "rid the world of a few needless illegals").

Meanwhile, an arson fire at a day-labor camp near Gaithersburg, Maryland seems likely to have been the work of anti-immigrant forces. However, one member of an anti-immigrant group has an surprising alternative theory:

Brad Botwin, director of HelpSaveMaryland.com, reiterated his belief that the center be shut down and suggested the fire might have been started by one of the workers.

"We don't know who these workers are," he said. They could have done this."

Very true. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before this form of asymmetrical warfare spreads, and immigrants start beating themselves to death in order to make anti-immigrant groups look bad.

Don’t put it past ‘em. After all, as the appalling Georgie Anne Geyer reminds us, illegal immigrants don’t respect America’s laws.

Of course, neither do the companies that hire and exploit them. Or the anti-immigrant groups and media personalities who think that murdering them in cold blood should be legal. Or the vigilantes who don’t believe that gun laws apply to them.

Neither does the Bush Administration, for that matter. Indeed, Geyer herself decries the existential threat posed by “the Mongol Khan-style disdain for the Geneva Conventions shown by Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, and…their ambitious, amoral neocon minions.”

I believe that illegal immigration is a serious issue (a serious humanitarian issue, to be precise), but I don’t accept that it’s a more serious problem than disdain for law and morality at the highest levels of our government…especially given that our government and its cronies are enabling and profiting from this influx of disempowered, dirt-cheap workers, while pursuing policies that are calculated to turn foreign laborers into economic and political refugees. (I’d include in this group the “pro-labor” firebrand Lou Dobbs, who has an admirable ability to keep his hatred of exploitative labor practices from finding its way into his subscription-only investment advice.)

Anyway, if refusing to respect the rule of law truly makes people unfit to be American citizens, we’re going to have to deport half our population, and most of our business leaders and politicians. Failing that, we could stop demonizing “illegals," and start thinking about the central role of wage slavery in conservatarian economic theory, and the central role of politicians and the media in mainstreaming racism.

Sure, it may cost us some job growth in the indefinite detention sector. But sometimes, you have to make sacrifices in order to do what’s right.

(Illustration: "The Mortar of Assimilation - And the One Element That Won't Mix," by C.J. Taylor, 1889.)

Just War

According to one of Rupert Murdoch’s rags, a Muslim sheik has announced that it’s morally defensible to kill children.

Sort of.

Sheik Shady Suleiman, a youth leader at Lakemba Mosque in Sydney's southeast, told his students in a one-hour Arabic and English lecture that it would be "self defence" to kill children who were attacking them in battle.

Muslim leaders yesterday attacked the 29-year-old cleric, who has a substantial following in Sydney and is deputy to leader Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali. They accused him of delivering a message contrary to that of Prophet Mohammed who said children should not be killed in war.

Rather than suffer under the lash of outraged idealism, the Sheik hastily backtracked:

"When I said children, I did not mean, of course, if you're going to get a five- or seven-year-old coming to attack you, you can stop him," he said yesterday.

"I was talking about self-defence. If you get attacked by someone, then you have the right to defend yourself. It doesn't mean you go kill them, especially if it's someone young."

Once again, the theory of "just war" lags daintily behind the practice of wholesale killing. Children were killed on 9/11, and I’m sure they’ll continue to be killed in jihadist bombings around the world, just as they’re killed daily by American bombs and bullets and malign neglect.

As usual, airy disputations over what constitutes “just war” provide armchair warriors and ethicists with an agreeably civilized pastime, while other people do the messy work of killing and dying and going mad.

Terrorists are bad because they target civilians; we’re good because we don’t, even though targeting a city center with bombs is the same thing as targeting civilians. The civilian deaths we cause are simultaneously foreseeable and unintended, pursued and accidental, avoidable and inevitable.

It all seems to come down to the question of whether or not one enjoys killing civilians, except that this unreasonably assumes that terrorists are never anguished by their “duty,” and that advocates of “just war” never revel in the spectacle of burning cities and mutilated bodies.

Anyway, I often wonder to what extent the polite fictions that help keep us “sane” contribute to the mental breakdown of the people who do our killing for us.

(The illustration at top is from an 1889 edition of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.)

Arguing About Causation

At Planet Gore, John Hood has dreamed up something called The Climate Religion Test. The premise is simple enough: If Hood can prove that your concern over climate change is “essentially religious,” you lose the debate (because as all good conservatives know, religious notions must not be allowed to infect science, nor to influence public policy).

The thing is – and I can’t stress this enough - you have to be fair enough to meet Hood halfway. He can’t demonstrate that you’re a fearmongering obscurantist with a sinister hidden agenda unless you’re willing to concede the point right off the bat:

Here's a handy way to test the real motivations and intentions you face when debating a climate-change alarmist. Give him this challenge:

Just for the sake of argument, assume that skeptics are right about one thing only — that human-generated carbon dioxide is not a significant contributor to the global warming trend of the past century, nor will it be a significant contributor to the future warning trend.

Once you’ve granted Hood this small favor, you’ll see how easy it is for him to dismantle your sophistries, and prove that they lack any rational foundation.

Assume that everything else the alarmists claim is true….Assume that land ice will melt, dump into the sea, and push sea levels up. Assume more flooding, more powerful storms, more precip in places that don't need it and less precip in places that do. Assume that polar bears and bullfrogs will die. Assume kudzu and other weeds will swallow the countryside. And so on.

Even if the warning trend is a natural phenomenon, caused by sunspots or other cycles uncaused by human action, shouldn't we try to stop it, anyway? Why are we arguing about causation?

Dude, seriously. You, like, already admitted that the skeptics are right. So why are you still talking about cutting emissions? If you really wanted to stop global warming, you’d do something about…you know…whatever it is that’s causing it.

Here’s the clincher:

If your sparring partner argues that human beings shouldn't interfere with a natural process, then he is giving the game away. His goal is not to maximize benefits and minimize costs associated with climate changes. His goal is to change human action for other reasons, and his motivation is essentially religious.

Fair enough, I guess. But by that standard, the project of maximizing benefits and minimizing costs is “essentially religious,” too.

Putting that point aside, I think readers who decide to experiment with Hood’s argument are going to be disappointed, unless they’re content to sit in a remodeled basement debating a hand puppet. Disease and drought are “natural processes” too, but most people are willing to take steps to prevent them or mitigate their effects, regardless of their political views.

Next week: Hood proves to hairy-legged feminists that abortion is immoral, by asking them to concede “for the sake of argument” that fundamentalists are correct in calling it murder.

Despising Intelligence

Danger Room reports on a little-known episode of imaginary Candian espionage:

The harmless "poppy coin" was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as "anomalous" and "filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology," according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

A good argument against coin-based espionage is that there’s no guarantee your target won’t pump the coins into a vending machine, toss them superstitiously into a fountain, or drop them in a homeless person’s cup. Honestly, you’d think that any idiot would be able to figure this out. And yet, this problem apparently bedeviled the minds of presumably well-educated people who held positions of great authority.

Which brings me to an excellent post by PZ Myers, in which he attacks the eugenicist assumptions of C.W. Kornbluth’s story “The Marching Morons”:

[I]t fed into a strain of self-serving smugness in science-fiction fandom, the idea that people who read SF are special and brilliant and superior, we are the technological geniuses and far-seeing futurists, while the mundanes leech off our vision. The eugenics movement built on the same us-vs.-them mentality, that there are superiors and inferiors, and the inferiors breed like cockroaches.

This quasi-Platonic claptrap is far more widespread on the Left than it ought to be, given that it’s the natural ideology of objectivists, racists, and their allies. PZ’s remark about fandom reinforces my distrust of consumerist identity politics (e.g., music snobbery, and underground culture generally), but that’s a rant for another day.

The most troubling part of it all is the attempt to root the distinction in biology—it's intrinsic. "They" are lesser beings than "us" because, while their gonads work marvelously well, their brains are inherently less capacious and their children are born with less ability. It's the kind of unwarranted labeling of people that leads to decisions like "three generations of imbeciles are enough"—bigotry built on bad biology to justify suppression by class.

And race:

Do you have any Irish, or Jewish, or Italian, or Native American, or Asian, or whatever (literally—it's hard to find any ethnic origin that wasn't despised at some time) in your ancestry? Go back a hundred years or so, and your great- or great-great-grandparents were regarded as apes or subhumans or mentally deficient lackeys suitable only for menial labor.

He also deals a glancing blow to the notion of “dysfunctional culture”:

[T]hat isn't about despising intelligence, it's about conforming to the trappings of your group and not adopting the markers of another class, especially when that class has a habit of treating you like dirt and talking abstractly about how to expunge you, your family, and your friends from the gene pool.

While assuming, foolishly, that you're too stupid to notice.

I won’t quote any more of the post, because everyone ought to read it in full; every word is a sermon in itself.

Since it's more or less the theme of this blog, I have to add that despite – or perhaps because of - their opportunities, their education, their knowledge, and their privilege, our expert class tends to make an awful lot of stupid, shortsighted, and dangerous decisions. The fact that they do so while living in relative luxury doesn't make them superior to people who make stupid decisions while living in ghettoes or trailer parks. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Indolence and Ruin

Lawrence Downes of The New York Times pronounces New Orleans “a city of indolence and ruin.”

I came here to talk to day laborers, because I had been told that this was the worst place in America to be one….They work without gloves or masks or the promise of medical care. Crooked contractors withhold pay and threaten violence if the men complain. Wage rules and safety standards are not enforced.

A city that cannot restore order or rebuild itself has somehow summoned the energy to harass the people who are doing much of the building and repairing.

Meanwhile:

Some of the most celebrated levee repairs by the Army Corps of Engineers after Hurricane Katrina are already showing signs of serious flaws, a leading critic of the corps says….Dr. Bea, an author of a blistering 2006 report on the levee failures paid for by the National Science Foundation, said erosion furrows, or rills, suggest that “the risks are still high.” Heavy storms, he said, may cause “tear-on-the-dotted-line levees”….

Corps officials argue that Dr. Bea is overstating the risk..

I’m not sure how one goes about “overstating the risk” of disastrous flooding in New Orleans, especially given that the city’s pumping system recently failed during a heavy rain:

Knee-deep water could be found near the Superdome Friday. 40% of the city's pump system lost power.

The head of the New Orleans Sewage and Water Board says aside from the pump problems, Friday's downpours were simply too heavy to manage.

Not unlike the burden of debt being accrued by families in Louisiana and Mississippi:

Displaced families have faced moving costs and often two housing payments: rent on their new dwellings, plus mortgage payments on their damaged homes.

"People have been trying to finance this crisis on credit cards," says Allen Flowers, a bankruptcy lawyer in Mississippi. "You have someone after Katrina being promised money and using credit cards because they think Uncle Sam is coming."

Like Dick Cheney, however, Uncle Sam has other priorities:

The rebuilding effort in tornado-ravaged Greensburg, Kansas, likely will be hampered because some much-needed equipment is in Iraq, said that state’s governor….The Kansas National Guard has about 40 percent of the equipment it is allotted because much of it has been sent to Iraq.

And rightly so, given the existential threat posed to this country by terrorism. If you doubt this, just imagine the economic and social disruption that could result from a terrorist attack on a major American city.

Speaking of which, you can put Trent Lott down for another Friedman or two:

Senate Republican Whip Trent Lott said Monday that President Bush's new strategy in Iraq has until about fall before GOP members will need to see results….

Lott declined to say what he thinks should happen if Congress does not see improvement in the security situation by then. But he said lawmakers have time before they must decide.

Of course they do.

Why wouldn’t they?

(Photo by Robert Polidori.)

Concerning Ourselves

Dan Savage argues that Democrats and their ilk need to recognize themselves as essentially urban, and build a new, uncompromising identity politics around that fact.

I don't believe that what America needs is more identity politics, and I think Savage’s assumption that the American countryside is and will always be populated primarily by “hateful,” “bovine” “rubes” is wrongheaded and counterproductive. Demographics isn’t destiny, and as personally embiggening as identity politics may be, founding a new political order on current divisions would be a victory for the Right and its media enablers, which to a large extent have created these divisions. Savage’s prescription seems to me like capitulation tarted up as triumph.

Which is a shame, because he makes some excellent, heartfelt points, especially on the issue of wingnut-welfare states like Wyoming, and the decline of the federal government’s role in overcoming (instead of exploiting) racism, xenophobia, and ignorance.

Unfortunately, they’re buried under mounds of horseshit like this:

The only time urbanists should concern themselves with the environment is when we are impacted--directly, not spiritually….[I]f West Virginia wants to elect politicians who allow mining companies to lop off the tops off mountains and dump the waste into valleys and streams, thus causing floods that destroy the homes of the yokels who vote for those politicians, it no longer matters to us. Fuck the mountains in West Virginia--send us the power generated by cleanly burned coal, you rubes, and be sure to wear lifejackets to bed.

I’m aware that being “outrageous” is part of Savage’s schtick, and I’m normally entertained by it. But this is just stupid. It’s not possible to limit environmental damage to states you don’t like, and to imply otherwise is both silly and unscientific. (I mention the latter point only because Savage elsewhere casts himself and his fellow urbanites as defenders of Science and Reason.)

There’s worse to come, though. Much worse.

We won't concern ourselves if red states restrict choice. We'll just make sure that abortion remains safe and legal in the cities where we live, and the states we control, and when your daughter or sister or mother dies in a botched abortion, we'll try not to feel too awful about it.

Shouldn’t be too hard, right? They’re only women, after all.

For some reason, Savage’s daring manifesto doesn’t have a similar passage relating to red-state oppression of gays. Should we “try not to feel too awful” when rural gays are beaten or killed, or denied basic human rights? Should we shrug our shoulders and say, “Hey, if they didn’t want to be treated that way, they should’ve moved to the city”?

The notion that fatalities from botched abortions could comprise an acceptable level of collateral damage in this alleged “war” between rural and urban populations is contemptible, and belongs to no form of progressivism I recognize. We certainly don't need more people turning a blind eye to poisoned rivers and butchered women.

It’s also depressing that he issues his declaration of war at a time when prominent rural Republicans have risked their careers to support gay rights, and concern for the environment is increasingly transcending demographic and even psychographic boundaries. The potential for positive change in these areas and others is enormous (as is the amount of work and thoughtfulness it'll take to achieve and sustain it, natch). And it’s not astute or responsible to argue that the problems we face can be solved by reveling in division and hostility, especially when we’re winning the goddamn debate on any number of issues.

Savage himself makes this case inadvertently, when he sneers at non-urbanites for their failure to recognize "the fundamental interdependence of all citizens.”

Yeah, that's a pretty stupid mistake to make, alright.

UPDATE: Speaking of stupid mistakes, it turns out this essay actually ran in 2004. I missed it back then, and assumed it was new because I saw it cited today at Coudal. That doesn't change my overall take on it, of course, but I wouldn't have wasted my time griping about it if I'd known it was that old.

By the way, Bush says Rumsfeld is doing "a fantastic job." As if!

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

What wonder you my Lords? why gaze you gentlemen?
And wherefore marvaile you Mez Dames, I praye you tell mee then?
Is it so rare a sight, or yet so straunge a toye,
Amongst so many nooble peeres, to see Cerasomata sinuata?

Friday Hope Blogging

When I was a kid, I was fascinated by Philip K. Dick’s story “The Preserving Machine,” in which musical scores were converted into animals so that they’d survive the collapse of civilization. Now, an article in Genome Biology describes the conversion of genome-encoded protein sequences into music:

Biologists have converted protein sequences into classical music in an attempt to help vision-impaired scientists and boost the popularity of genomic biology.

You can learn more by clicking here, and you can submit code sequences, and receive a music file in return, by clicking here.

There's good news in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but you might want to swallow anything you're eating before reading about it:

University of Manchester researchers are ridding diabetic patients of the superbug MRSA - by treating their foot ulcers with maggots.

Professor Andrew Boulton and his team used green bottle fly larvae to treat 13 diabetic patients whose foot ulcers were contaminated with MRSA and found all but one were cured within a mean period of three weeks, much quicker than the 28-week duration for the conventional treatment.

Hooray for the Great Chain of Being! There’s also talk of fighting MRSA with a compound secreted by bullfrogs:

Researchers at St Andrews University have developed a novel treatment which kills the infection. One of its key ingredients is ranalexin, a protein secreted by the Rana species of bullfrogs.

When scientists combined it with the enzyme lysostaphin they found had a "potent and significant" inhibitory effect on MRSA.

Granted, amphibian populations are plummeting. But there’s hope that part of the problem can be addressed with probiotics:

[A]t least one of these bacterial species — Pedobacter cryoconitis — can help amphibians to survive. The team allowed red-backed salamanders to swim in a bath of this bacteria for two hours, and then infected them with the lethal fungus.

When tested 18 days later, the salamanders given the bacterial bath were nearly 30% more likely to have rid themselves of the fungal infection than were the untreated animals.

There’s an interesting new wound treatment for pediatric patients:

Negative pressure wound therapy is a new innovation in treating severe and complex wounds in children that decreases the need for frequent and stressful dressing changes. A new study in Wound Repair and Regeneration shows that this technique has a wide range of applications with children, and can be life-saving….Ninety-three percent of the children given the treatment showed decreased wound volume, and the average amount of wound closure was 80 percent. “This is very good news for children with large and complex wounds, such as abdominal wall defects or disrupted surgical wounds,” says Dr. Olutoye. “Not only is the therapy very effective, but it eliminates the need for dozens of painful and frightening gauze dressing changes.”

In other medical news, a new drug for MS looks promising:

The Phase I and Phase II studies involved people in Canada and the USA with relapsing-remitting MS, in which symptoms flare up and then subside. Treatment with the drug rituximab significantly reduced the number of new brain lesions and the frequency of relapses, times when symptoms of MS flare up.

And scientists claim to have inoculated mice against brain-destroying prion diseases:

Researchers have developed a way to vaccinate mice against deadly prion diseases, which include scrapie, kuru, mad cow disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The findings, presented today at the annual American Academy of Neurology meeting in Boston, suggest that these degenerative brain diseases can be stopped if caught early enough.

Here’s an obvious idea for wind-turbine design, via Inhabitat:


Why didn’t you think of that? Or this?

For that matter, why didn't you think of lunar-resonant streetlights?

The lamp dims itself depending on how much light the moon is putting out, saving energy and providing a consistent amount of light. If the moon is beaming, it'll hold back, but if it is a new moon, or cloudy then the lights will be on full blast.

There’s allegedly been some sort of breakthrough in solar-powered scooters. Unfortunately, the article is a bit stingy with details. Still, now you know!

In related news, Australian researchers are claiming a breakthrough in solar panel efficiency:

[R]esearchers at UNSW’s ARC Photovoltaics Centre of Excellence, led by PhD student Supriya Pillai have reported a 16-fold enhancement in light absorption in 1.25-micron thin-film cells for light with a wavelength of 1050 nm. They have also reported a seven-fold enhancement in light absorption in the more expensive wafer type cells light wavelengths of 1200 nm.

Also in Australia, Foster's Brewery has partnered with the University of Queensland to produce a beer battery:

The beer battery works by feeding the waste sugar, starch and alcohol to microbes which, in turn, get excited and produce electricity....While the hundred thousand dollar, 2 kilowatt project isn't the most economically viable method of creating renewable energy. But project planners are quick to note that it's "primarily a waste water treatment that has the added benefit of creating electricity."

Scientists at Rice University hope to use quantum dots to improve solar technology:

The research, by scientists at Rice's Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN), appears this week in the journal Small. It describes a new chemical method for making four-legged cadmium selenide quantum dots, which previous research has shown to be particularly effective at converting sunlight into electrical energy.

"Our work knocks down a big barrier in developing quantum-dot-based photovoltaics as an alternative to the conventional, more expensive silicon-based solar cells," said paper co-author and principal investigator Michael Wong, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

Self-powered display screens could make cellphone batteries last longer:

Nokia has already built a working 200-pixel-square prototype of its monochrome self-powering display, according to its inventor Zoran Radivojevic. The key to this device is the use of titanium dioxide nanoparticles both to generate the image and to harvest power from light.

The cells that make up the display are packed with these particles, which can be switched from a colourless to a black form by applying a voltage to them. When the particles are in the colourless state, they generate a voltage when struck by light, and this can be used to drive a current to charge a battery. To turn the pixel black, the screen's control electronics reverse the current and apply a voltage from the battery to the nanoparticles.

Speaking of nanoparticles, here’s this week’s obligatory “breakthrough” in hydrogen cell technology:

Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a unique photocatalytic cell that splits water to produce hydrogen and oxygen in water using sunlight and the power of a nanostructured catalyst.

In New York, young people are increasingly getting involved in preservation efforts:

Preservationist Seri Worden, 30, grew up in Brandon, Fla., shopping at big-box stores such as Target and eating at strip mall chains like Bennigan's. Now, as the executive director of the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic Districts, she is fighting to save the Upper East Side's low- and mid-rise landscape, and to extend the neighborhood's landmark districts. Ms. Worden is part of a cadre of under-40 professionals who came of age during a time of tremendous suburban sprawl, but grew up to lead some of this city's most high-profile preservation groups.

There’s an ongoing trend to ban automobiles from public places:

One mile of road in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park will be closed to cars every Saturday this summer, just one of many examples of car-free zones that are being proposed in the U.S. The auto's demotion at Golden Gate Park follows dozens of similar moves in at least 20 American cities in the past three years. It's a trend that is gaining ground rapidly in the US, say urban planners. Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, and El Paso, Texas, are planning events to promote car-free days in public parks, most in the hope that the idea will become permanent or extend for months.

One of the neo-Lysenkoists tasked by BushCo with keeping science ideologically pure has resigned in disgrace:

Julie MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary, today submitted her resignation just weeks after an Interior Department Inspector General (IG) report criticized her for overriding recommendations of Fish and Wildlife Service scientists about how to protect endangered species.

Good riddance! In related news, POGO reports that a number of contractors working on Iraqi reconstruction projects have been suspended or disbarred:

The big news is that the Army has asked the Parsons Global Services Company (a subsidiary of Parsons Corporation) to show cause why the firm should not be proposed for debarment….Parsons ranks outside the Top 100 contractors on OMB Watch's www.fedspending.org, but the government's action is a positive sign that it wants to work with responsible contractors.

POGO has also joined with Congresspedia to produce a wiki page on oil and gas royalties, which you can check out by clicking here.

A California hotel offers copies of An Inconvenient Truth in place of the Gideon Bible. More important, it has some interesting features, like waterless urinals and solar lighting, and seems to be starting a trend:

Wen-I Chang opened the 132-room Gaia in the town of American Canyon last year. He's building other green hotels in Anderson and Merced and said he hopes to develop at least six more within three years….

Chang said 43 cities have asked him to build green hotels. Some offer incentives to help cover construction costs, which were about 15 percent more for the Gaia. Chang said it's saving 25 percent on electricity and almost 50 percent on water, which may enable the hotel to turn profitable next month.

David Roberts discusses Stamford, CT’s attempt to build a microgrid:

Stamford's immediate motivation is escaping reliance on a shaky electricity grid that's causing more and more blackouts, to the city's great detriment. After all, corporations don't want to locate in your town if they can't rely on the power.

However, I suspect once these things start spreading, other benefits will manifest -- at both the town and state level -- and soon the demand for a smarter, more flexible grid will become universal.

And Tom Philpott discusses a remarkable bipartisan farm bill:

This is epochal. For 35 years, the U.S. government has spent billions of dollars every year paying farmers to produce inputs for industry at rock-bottom prices. The dividends on that policy have included public health and environmental calamities as well as a rural economic meltdown; and a windfall for a few agribusiness giants.

DeLauro/Gilchrest would end that policy, and instead leverage the efforts of small-scale farmers and food activists to rebuild health-giving food-production networks nationwide.

Meanwhile, WNYC reports on an interesting barge-based greenhouse:

The crops thrive on rain water, which is collected off the slanted rooftop and re-circulated through a series of pipes. There’s no soil. The plants are kept in pots filled with a crunchy blend of rocks and straw that soaks up the water and passes along the nutrients….

The greenhouse is on a 50-foot long barge that’s completely sustainable: powered by solar panels, wind turbines and bio-fuels including used cooking oil. So it doesn’t emit any carbon dioxide.

And a federal judge has ruled that the USDA broke the law when it approved the planting of GE alfalfa without conducting the proper environmental review:

In what will likely be a precedent-setting ruling, US District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California decided in favor of farmers, consumers, and environmentalists who filed a suit calling the USDA’s approval of genetically engineered (GE) alfalfa a threat to farmers’ livelihoods and a risk to the environment.

Afrigadget has a nice feature on toys invented by African children, such as this scooter:


The waterwheel photo at the top of this post is from the Fife Slide Collection of Western U.S. Vernacular Architecture, courtesy of Things. It's well worth browsing by subject; by the time I got to "Root and Potato Cellars," I was starting to hyperventilate.

If you'd like a soundtrack for your browsing, try Excavated Shellac, which compiles ethnographic recordings on 78rpm discs. Or, via ES's blogroll, Shortwavemusic.

Planetizen has posted an audio interview with Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG. Haven't had time to listen to it yet, but I have no qualms about recommending it; he's always interesting.

You probably ought to look at this exhibit of radiator emblems. And, via Coudal, the Worldwide Labyrinth Locator, complete with Labyrinth Typology. If that's not mystifying enough for you, take a gander at Charles Huguenot van der Linden's Interlude by Candlelight (1959).

Be advised, however, that nothing beats BibliOdyssey's survey of ephemera from The Antikamnia Chemical Company.


Wait, there's more! Moon River has dredged up this amazing map of New York:


You can find other old NYC maps here.

I liked the collodion photographs of landscapes at Studio Q.


If you have a fast connection, or a fair amount of patience, you should also look at the collodion work of William Dunniway. Otherwise, you may as well ponder this image of the orbital coverage of NASA's Lunar Mapping Camera:


Last, but certainly not least, CKR’s roadrunner has returned.

Mama Tells Me to Study Lei Feng

The jury’s still out on whether postmodernists can be held responsible for the Virginia Tech Massacre. But there's little doubt that they’ve launched a War on Shakespeare:

In the post I lamented the disappearance of the study of Shakespeare from the teaching of literature in American universities (due largely, I believe, to the repellant force of the addled, jargon-ridden rhetoric of antiquated postmodernists….

A couple of quick points. First off, the groundless, hyperbolic theorizing seen daily at most NRO blogs makes Jean Baudrillard sound like Euclid.

Beyond that, I’d argue that the only thing that makes, say, The Corner remotely entertaining is the fact that it’s an essentially postmodern project (cf. its squirrelbrained, motormouthed superficiality; its playful, improvisatory approach to truth; and its moderately inventive attempts to “subvert” cultural artifacts by “reinscribing” them as inherently conservative).

For all its mandarin earnestness, it’s basically an online game of Calvinball, whose players can go from scolding postmodernists for failing to take Western culture seriously, to sneering at Al Gore for reading Stendahl, in less time than it takes Jonah Goldberg to eat a stick of butter. To paraphrase a gag of Erik Satie's, they may reject postmodernism, but their work accepts it.

Now, I’m perfectly willing to accept that the stereotypical postmodern approach to Western culture can be superficial. But it’s seldom as superficial as the conservative defense of Western culture, which generally communicates as little about art and literature as a poster of Stalin astride a tractor communicates about agriculture. Scrape away the dreary, blood-and-soil sentimentality about Western Civilization, and you’re likely to find that Shakespeare is little more to the conservative imagination than a stick with which to beat up on political opponents. Granting my own biases, it seems to me that identity politics - as typified by the content-free, question-begging form of “respect” for culture favored by scheming blowhards like Bill Bennett - is at least as likely to prevent people from reading Shakespeare as the machinations of "antiquated" French theorists.

Carol Iannone approvingly quotes Allan Bloom to the effect that Shakespeare “shows most comprehensively the fate of tyrants, the character of good rulers, the relations of friends, and the duties of citizens.” She then goes on to fret about the horrors that might be visited upon us if “Shakespeare is taught as exposing the injustices of white male racist sexist colonialist society.” The irony, oddly enough, seems to be lost on her.

She also claims that “conservatives…believe along with Richard Weaver that ideas have consequences.” A daring philosophy indeed, and one I’m sure Foucault and Derrida would find incomprehensible. But I’m not sure how she reconciles this notion with the equally daring conservative claim that ideas - like, for instance, the Bush Cult's belief that "existential threats" must be met with massive firepower, and the law be damned - can have unintended consequences.

No one could accuse Victorian England of failing to hold Shakespeare in high regard, but his teachings on "the fate of tyrants" didn’t pose an obstacle to the Chinese Opium Wars, or the Black War, any more than modern conservatism’s regard for Hayek has prevented it from embracing surveillance without oversight and indefinite detention without trial. If anything, cultural highmindedness may’ve enabled these crimes, by confirming the aggressors’ status as defenders of civilization.

The problem with art – for ideologues, at any rate - is that it’s not a reliable method for producing social change, or social stasis, or anything else except art. Which is why it drives them so crazy.

Us

After conducting extensive research into the cultural and moral worthlessness of nonwhite minorities, Pat Buchanan (shown above in a characteristic pose) has arrived at the unexpected conclusion that there’s a “dark side to diversity.”

A crucial piece in this puzzle fell into place when Buchanan noticed that Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui “was not an American at all, but an immigrant, an alien.” This caused him to wonder if other aliens had ever gone on murderous rampages. The stringent analytical methods of applied golliwogology (i.e., cribbing data from VDare.com) soon proved that they had. For example:

Juan Corona, who murdered 25 people in California to be ranked with the likes of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, was a Mexican.

You probably didn’t know that, because it’s been covered up “by a politically correct media, which seem to believe it is socially unhealthy for us Americans to see any correlation at all between mass migrations and mass murder.”

Which is pretty droll, coming from an apologist for US support of Central American death squads.

Anyway, I’m usually no more inclined to discuss Buchanan’s ravings than I am to drink from toilet bowls. But in this case, I was intrigued by Buchanan’s claim that Cho "decided to kill in cold blood dozens of us"; it’s such a perfect example of the conservative tendency to de-diversify victims of mass murder.

Academe being what it is, how could Cho’s victims not have included larval or actual feminists, socialists, gays, multiculturalists, race traitors, blame-America-firsters, and terrorist appeasers?

More to the point, how many were immigrants?

A fair number, judging from Wikipedia’s list of victims. Before they were killed, they were unwelcome aliens, sucking like vampires at the gardenia-white throat of Christian America. Now, thanks to Cho's value as a figurehead of ethnic menace, murdered immigrants - “from countries whose peoples have never fully assimilated in any Western country” - have magically become “us.” Buchanan’s ideology obliges him to feign – or to feel, for all I know – a kinship with them that he’d be incapable of feeling if they’d lived.

It's nice that these "invaders" found a way of earning a respectable place in Buchanan’s America.

Saturated Fat and Excess Sugar

Mona Charen is troubled because Oregon governor Theodore Kulongoski is attempting to feed himself on $21 worth of food stamps per week.

There really aren’t any logical reasons for her to be annoyed by this, but she didn’t rise to her current eminence in conservatarian circles by being unable to manufacture overdetermined grievances on the fly. Thus, we learn right off the bat that Kulongoski is prone to grandstanding:

Associated Press photos showed the governor pushing a shopping cart and ostentatiously relinquishing a noodle cup and two bananas at the checkout counter when his total topped $21.

A typical liberal! He’s supposed to be calling attention to the plight of the poor, and instead he’s swanning around in ruffles and frills, ostentatiously relinquishing noodle cups like some debauched princeling out of Ronald Firbank. The fucker probably windsurfs, too.

Onwards and upwards. Just as piranhas must swim and mosquitoes must fly, Charen must display ostentatiously display her credentials as a Caring Person before beating up on the untermenschen:

Let us stipulate that in a country as wealthy as ours, the idea that anyone should go hungry is unacceptable.

With that humanist boilerplate out of the way, it’s open season on the ungrateful poor and their pathetic liberal courtiers (many of whom, you may be interested to know, are still living in the sixties).

Why is it that whenever you listen to a Democrat you feel that the year is 1966? They seem to live in a time warp in which no progress has been made on race relations, poverty, childhood malnutrition, and on and on.

We’ll hear more about that “progress” in a moment. Meanwhile, Charen notes that “a family of four with no income…is entitled to $518 monthly or about $32 weekly [in food stamps] for each person.” In other words, by trying to support himself on the average recipient's income, Kulongoski’s making things worse than they need to be, to the tune of eleven whole dollars. Think how many noodle cups he could’ve bought with that windfall!

Because this is such an important point, Charen conscientiously dumbs it down for the chumps in the nosebleed seats:

Perhaps the governor’s office is correct that the average food stamp allotment in the state is $21. But that means some get more and some less.

I advise you to cling to that scrap of logical thought as to a life-preserver, because the seas are about to get very rough indeed.

Charen concedes that $32 isn’t much more money than $21, but points out that it’s “only a small part of the largesse provided by the U.S. government.”

It doesn’t count hot breakfasts and lunches at school (which push high-calorie, high-fat diets on kids).

This is odd for two reasons. The first, obviously, is that stuffing children with dirt-cheap, low-quality, unhealthy food hardly qualifies as “largesse.”

The second is that Charen goes on to cite obesity as evidence for her claim that “progress” has been made on malnutrition since 1966:

Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute notes that while he can recall visiting rural Mississippi in the 1960s and seeing severe cases of malnutrition, the problem among the poor today is more likely to be obesity.

And as everyone knows, malnutrition and obesity are mutually exclusive.

Charen seems to feel that welfare programs, or "entitlements run amuck," are behind at least some of the nation’s obesity problems. And she’s right, inasmuch as the low quality of school food (and the presence of soda and fast-food vendors in lunchrooms) has a great deal to do with agribusiness subsidies. And I’m not just talking about our heavily subsidized overproduction of corn (and high-fructose corn syrup). There’s also the fact that the school lunch program itself comprises a gigantic handout to agribusiness:

"Basically, it's a welfare program for suppliers of commodities," says Jennifer Raymond, a retired nutritionist in Northern California who has worked with schools to develop healthier menus. "It's a price support program for agricultural producers, and the schools are simply a way to get rid of the items that have been purchased."

Solving this problem would, among other things, require a national rejection of the crony corporatism that Charen and her co-religionists at NRO have devoted their careers to defending, so it’s not surprising that the remedy she suggests is a trifle...lackluster:

We are pushing food at the poor as if hunger and malnutrition still crouched at the door when the bigger threat these days is saturated fat and excess sugar. The Food Stamp program arguably needs a massive reform, offering cash grants instead of vouchers or credit cards, which encourage over-consumption.

This is surely the handiwork of wisdom, because I don’t understand a word of it. Who’s pushing unhealthy food at the poor, according to Charen, and why? It’s hard to say. What’s any of this got to do with Gov. Kulongoski’s attempt to highlight the difficulty of living on $21 per week? Your guess is as good as mine. How do food stamps “encourage over-consumption,” and why wouldn’t “cash grants” do the same or worse? I can’t begin to imagine.

It's interesting how she wavers momentarily on the threshold between her world and ours, as she tries to tease out the connection between childhood obesity and government welfare programs. But in the end, of course, she recognizes it as the only thing it can be: Yet another unintended consequence of the Nanny State.

Clearly, we need to get private business involved...

Scriptural Elements

For a nation that prides itself on its matchless business sense, America has been slow to learn that consistently spending more money than one has can lead to financial problems.

Christianity - or the weird amalgam of vulgar materialism, ressentiment, and magical thinking that most often passes for it - seems to me to bear some responsibility for the problem, partly because it tends to treats wealth as a visible indicator of grace, partly because it encourages people to believe that they "deserve" financial miracles (God will guide the hand of the righteous to the winning lottery ticket!), and partly because it picks their pockets like an eight-armed Jenny Diver.

Apropos of which, a gruesome article in the Telegraph reports that churches are increasingly offering financial services to their flock:

They tend to offer a package of advice on budgeting, household cost-cutting and debt management bolstered by a strong Scriptural element.

If you're thinking that this "strong scriptural element" involves an injunction against turning a house of prayer into a den of thieves, think again:

The church financial programmes differ from secular plans in two key areas: bankruptcy is frowned upon as un-Christian and charitable donations are encouraged, even when the donor is struggling. Participants are encouraged to give as much as 10 per cent of their income to their church.

"Encouraged" is one word for it, I suppose. The article notes that the cost of one Christ-approved debt management system is about eighty dollars. Of course, you're bound to get all of it back three times full and brimming over, like George Amberson Minafer. All the same, eighty dollars is a lot of kale in any deity's English.

Luckily, there are inexpensive alternatives. For the time being, Christian deadbeats in the great state of Indiana can get "In God We Trust" license plates without paying the standard administrative fee. A set of those might just convince the Lord to knock down your mortgage rate by a couple of points, or otherwise soften the hearts of your creditors.

Another possibility would be to ask friends and neighbors for donations so that you and the little ones can make a pilgrimage to the "working model" of Noah's Ark, which is now on display in the Netherlands.

Better yet, build an ark of your own as an Act of Faith, and charge the rubes twenty bucks to get an eyeful of it. Fill it with stuffed animals for sale by the pair! Get the family involved, like Johan Huibers did!

"The design is by my wife, Bianca," Huibers said. "She didn't really want me to do this at all, but she said if you're going to anyway, it should look like this."

Not only will it pay for itself in a matter of months, but it presents an excellent opportunity to explain the knottier points of theology to those who are less scripturally grounded than yourself:

Under sunny clear skies Saturday, Huibers said he wasn't worried about another biblical flood, since according to Genesis, the rainbow is the sign of God's promise never to flood the world again. But he does worry that recent events such as the flooding of New Orleans could be seen as a portent of the end of time.

The end of time? May God turn a deaf ear to the man!

Now, it's always possible that local authorities will tell you that you don't have the right permits, or enough cubits of land, to build a replica ark. But in that case, all you have to do is announce that you're being persecuted for your beliefs. Watch how fast the donations pour in!

The point is, there are plenty of shrewd ways of cashing in on your religion. Why shell out your remaining greenbacks to what Edward Lear called "the screamy ganders of the church," when you can build a scale model of Sodom in your basement, and destroy it on the hour for the edification of road-weary travelers?

Remember: The Lord helps those who help themselves.

'Round the Town

Danielle Brian at POGO Blog takes issue with an anti-oversight op-ed by Harvard Kennedy School of Government Professor Steve Kelman :

Ironically, Mr. Kelman is himself an example of the revolving door. As he disclosed in his op-ed, he is a registered lobbyist for government contractors. What he did not note is that he also serves on the board of GTSI, a billion-dollar-a-year government contractor. Just a year ago, the Small Business Administration IG recommended that GTSI be debarred from receiving federal contracts (pdf). Small wonder he has it in for IGs.

Robert M. Jeffers anatomizes the moral economy of political journalism:

The bottom line is: if you want to change the world, you have to do the hard work of changing yourself. And just reading a blog, or writing a blog, or watching TV, won't make you do that. The world is just slightly beyond your grasp. And what is within your grasp, is notoriously hard to get hold of.

Echidne very patiently dismantles Lord Saletan's latest diktat on abortion:

Today Saletan has written about the idea that women contemplating getting an abortion should be made to watch an ultrasound of the fetus. This is something pro-lifers advocate because it is intended to make the women suddenly realize that it is a fetus they have in their wombs, not an aquarium fish! Wow. Saletan likes the idea, because it opens up the aquarium to the general public.

Cervantes hints at the odd tension between the twin imperatives of "personal responsibility" and consumer-driven medicine:

[D]id you know that pathological gambling can be a side effect of drugs called dopamine agonists, which are prescribed for Parkinson's disease? It's true, and it's actually astonishingly common. According to Sui Wong and Malcolm Steiger in BMJ (April 21, subscription only), citing a study by Voon, et al in Neurology, in the UK 7.2% of people taking dompamine agonists develop gambling problems. The pervasive availability of gambling opportunities on the Internet, and at the corner grocery store and the newsstand, as well as in the enticing fantasy world of the casino, no doubt interacts with the bad chemicals to make the problem all the more common.

Olvlzl insists on saying something that a lot of people don't want to hear:

[P]retending that occasions when you are subjected to nothing more than an affront to your aesthetic sensibilities and mislabeling those as “discrimination” will make your legitimate complaints in matters that require action less effective. They have the potential to lose you allies you will need for those serious fights. I can tell you this from going on forty years of being a witness to and participant in the struggles for gay rights. You have to be realistic and you have to be smart. You also have to be mature and ready for a lot of work. And you will fail unless you have strong alliances within the wider population. If, as atheists seem never to stop pointing out, you are that few in number and that hated, insulting potential friends is the stupidest thing you can do.

Subtopia discusses "the architecture of long struggle," and notes that:

Iraq is literally becoming a cumulative representation of all that has gone wrong in imperial conflict before it.

And Thers reveals himself as a horrid old Scrooge who has forgotten the meaning of Loyalty Day:

The problem we have in Iraq is not that Al Qaeda, or more accurately its local franchise, operates there. Realistically, AQ may be prevented from running entire cities, but in a nation as awash in explosives as Iraq, even a dramatically reduced AQ will be able to cause significant devastation for decades, if they so wish. Look at what a small group of nuts did to us in 2001. AQ will have no shortage of Iraqi suicide martyrs perpetrating spectacular mass killings from Iraq for generations. That's just a given....

How we are going to be more secure by indefinitely administering a remote equivalent of the Palestinian Territories where we will never really be liked, nor able to ever really provide security, completely escapes me. Of course, I'm told that such a result would be "victory." Right.

All of which tends to confirm me in my estimation that I have the bestest blogroll ever.

(The photo at top is a still from Bela Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies.)