Friday Nudibranch Blogging

I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know Aldisa barlettai....
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

(Photo by Dr. Peter Wirtz.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The Messiah, Walter Benjamin said, "will not wish to change the world by force but will merely make a slight adjustment in it."

This is as good an introduction as any for Things' discussion of the Untergunther, "a secret society dedicated to 'good' deeds," which broke into the Panthéon in Paris, set up a secret workshop, and surreptitiously repaired the building's 18th-century clock.

Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s....

The network was unknown to the authorities until 2004, when the police discovered an underground cinema, complete with bar and restaurant, under the Seine. They have tried to track them down ever since.

Chicago has 2,000 miles of alleys, which comprise "the paved equivalent of five midsize airports":

Imagine having a duplicate set of streets, in miniature, to maintain that are prone to flooding and to dumping runoff into a strained sewer system.

Having noticed the problem, the city intends to do something about it.

Chicago has decided to retrofit its alleys with environmentally sustainable road-building materials under its Green Alley initiative, something experts say is among the most ambitious public street makeover plans in the country. In a larger sense, the city is rethinking the way it paves things.

In a green alley, water is allowed to penetrate the soil through the pavement itself, which consists of the relatively new but little-used technology of permeable concrete or porous asphalt. Then the water, filtered through stone beds under the permeable surface layer, recharges the underground water table instead of ending up as polluted runoff in rivers and streams.

Townspeople in Ohio are trying to prevent foreclosed properties from being bought up by real-estate spectators.

"This is not for the faint of heart. It's a proverbial pig in a poke. You can't inspect it. There's no walk-through. You show up at the auction with a blank check," Sherwood says. "Much like a dog chasing a car, we didn't know what to do with it once we got it."

But having control over the eventual use of the property - and its parking lot, which supports several other College Hill businesses - could help keep control of a strategic property in local hands, she says.

Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi judiciary may possibly be rethinking its brutal punishment of a young girl who had the temerity to get raped.

The remarks by Prince Saud al-Faisal, made in the United States and carried by the official Saudi Press Agency, were the latest in response to a salvo of international condemnation of Saudi judicial authorities' handling of the case.

And in the UK, juries in rape cases will be briefed on common misconceptions about rape:

In 1977, 33% of reported rapes ended in conviction. By 2005, that percentage had dropped to 5.4%. So in one form of response, a number of doctors, judges and academics are in the process of putting together a packet to be presented to juries which addresses these myths (such as the fact that not all rape survivors report the crime immediately, or that not all will act emotionally on the witness stand).

Inhabitat reports on the MagLev wind turbine.

Magnetic levitation is an extremely efficient system for wind energy. Here’s how it works: the vertically oriented blades of the wind turbine are suspended in the air above the base of the machine, replacing the need for ball bearings. The turbine uses “full-permanent” magnets, not electromagnets — therefore, it does not require electricty to run. The full-permanent magnet system employs neodymium (”rare earth”) magnets and there is no energy loss through friction. This also helps reduce maintenance costs and increases the lifespan of the generator.

Keith Farnish has written an interesting post on home energy management:

The peak load will always be around 5.30 in the evening, and the lowest demand will always be in the early hours of the morning. Now, remember my washing machine which did its wash cycle while I was asleep? By moving the time during which appliances do their work, you could help be responsible for shutting down every coal-fired power station on your electricity grid.

A new website allows you to see how much of your electricity comes from coal, and to survey the damage the industry has done to Appalachia's mountains.

With My Connection, a feature from North Carolina-based Appalachian Voices, users can enter their ZIP codes and use Google Earth to view the decimated mountains from which their power provider obtains coal. “When you can show people they have a direct connection to it, it makes it that much more relevant to their day-to-day life,” Mary Anne Hitt, the executive director of Appalachian Voices, told the Wall Street Journal.

Google has launched an initiative to make renewable energy cheaper than coal is claimed to be:

The company announced today their Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative with the stated goal of producing 1 gigawatt of renewable energy, enough to power the city of San Francisco, and to do it within years, not decades, as some less ambitious pundits claim such a goal would require.

Google says it will commit “hundreds of millions of dollars” to the effort in hopes that doing so will spur innovation and make renewable energy sources like solar and wind an economic rival to coal.

An African inventor has devised a generator that utilizes yeast and sugar to deliver up to eight hours of electricity.

My invention will make it easy for these people to charge their cell phones. Also, this generator can be used to charge $100 computers which are being introduced in Africa. It can also be used to charge or operate medical devices in rural Africa.

I don't normally mention fripperies like energy-efficient Christmas lights, but these ones, via AIDG Blog are really pretty nice:


It was deeply satisfying to see John Howard get his ass kicked from here to the Black Stump. He deserves worse, of course, but this was a nice start. His successor, Kevin Rudd, has made climate change a top priority...but I was almost more impressed to learn that he will seek "an end to controversial offshore detention of illegal immigrants."

Meanwhile, membership in the great global warming conspiracy continues to grow:

A sizable fraction of the international business community launched an effort to press for mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions yesterday, on the eve of a major round of climate negotiations set to begin Monday in Bali. In an unprecedented show of solidarity, leaders from 150 global companies endorsed the idea of a legally binding framework in a statement published in the Financial Times newspaper. Some of the world's largest firms -- including Coca-Cola, General Electric, Shell, Nestle, Nike, DuPont, Johnson & Johnson, British Airways and Shanghai Electric -- said that the scientific evidence for climate change is 'now overwhelming' and that a legally binding agreement 'will provide business with the certainty it needs to scale up global investment in low-carbon technologies.'

And there's new evidence that ocean fertilization is a bad idea:

Scientists have revealed an important discovery that raises doubts concerning the viability of plans to fertilize the ocean to solve global warming, a projected $100 billion venture.

Research performed at Stanford and Oregon State Universities, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, suggests that ocean fertilization may not be an effective method of reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a major contributor to global warming. Ocean fertilization, the process of adding iron or other nutrients to the ocean to cause large algal blooms, has been proposed as a possible solution to global warming because the growing algae absorb carbon dioxide as they grow.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is revising seven insane decisions by a disgraced BushCo apparatchik:

The policy reversal, sparked by inquiries by the Interior Department's inspector general and by the House Natural Resources Committee, underscores the extent to which the administration is still dealing with the fallout from the tenure of Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks who repeatedly overruled agency scientists' recommendations on endangered-species decisions.

Mexico is vowing to protect Monarch butterflies:

President Felipe Calderón pledged 4.6 million U.S. dollars toward advertising and equipment for the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, which covers a 124,000-acre (50,000-hectare) swathe of trees and mountains that for thousands of years has served as the winter nesting ground to millions of orange-and-black-winged monarch butterflies.

A rare Chinese tiger cub has been born in South Africa:

"It is truly a historic event, because it is the first time that a South China Tiger has been born outside of China. Only around 60 South China Tigers exist in captivity and less than 30 survive in the wild," Li Quan, founder of the organization, said in a statement sent to Reuters.

More photos here.

The Global Text Project seeks to distribute free textbooks in the developing world:

The project evolves upon a “WikiBooks” strategy (free, open content, permanently updated by common effort), as the result of a “from many to more many” philosophy and mindset.

WorldChanging discusses some implications of Radiohead's decision to release their latest album digitally:

In the United States alone, every month some 100,000 pounds of CDs become outdated, useless or unwanted, especially as their useful lifespan contracts: among younger generations in developed countries, CDs are often only used to upload the content they hold into digital devices, limiting the lifespan of a CD to a single use. The possibility of digital-only distribution to reduce at least some of the current CD production would mean good news for the environment.

In Africa, deaths from measles are down 91 percent.

Measles deaths worldwide have fallen from an estimated 757,000 to 242,000 - 68 percent - between 2000 and 2006, according to the Measles Initiative, which includes the American Red Cross, the U.S. Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

In Africa, the deaths dropped from 396,000 to 36,000.

British researchers have reportedly devised a means of quickly identifying multidrug-resistant bacteria:

The new test is important because it means we can rapidly identify patients who are colonised with drug resistant strains of the bacteria so that special infection control measures can be put in place.

Anne Matthews argues for the preservation of soundscapes:

EW: Will the preservation of sound become more of an integral part of historic preservation here?

AM: Yes, especially as we move away form the urge to re-create and then freeze-dry pretty buildings and think more about human narrative, the material-culture matrix, and the art of hearing time. History is text-based; it favors the eye. But sound is nearly as powerful.

With that in mind, check out Small Sounds / Big World, Tsai-Wei's Sound Journal, The Big Ear, and Xeno-Canto.

Since Toronto's my favorite North American city, I'd be obliged to recommend Toronto Ghost Signs even if it were a good deal less attractive than it is. Also, Vintage Knitting Images (why not?).

The Tabula Peutingeriana, an ancient Roman road map.


And at Luminous Lint, Portugal 1934: Photomontage as Propaganda.


Last, Things alerts me to the embarrassment of riches at Notcot, which includes Polanoid, whence comes the image at the top, which is by a contributor named Bernhard.

Really Good Things

A cryptoclimatological discoverist from the Kansas state legislature expounds on the Great Chain of Being:

A state legislator Wednesday criticized rejection of two coal-fired power plants in western Kansas, saying carbon dioxide emissions were good for crops.

“One of the really good things about CO2 is that plants perform better under stress (drought, etc.) with increased levels of CO2,” Rep. Larry Powell, R-Garden City, said in a letter disseminated to the media.

Ideally, CO2 will increase agricultural yield, which'll increase earth's carrying capacity, which'll increase earth's population, which'll increase CO2 emissions, which'll increase agricultural yield. World without end, amen!

Powell's information comes from a report by Craig and Keith Idso, who've been singing this tune for many years now (with a little help from ExxonMobil and the rabidly pro-coal Western Fuels Association).

All their huffing and puffing will come to nothing, though. Coal is the fuel of the past; the fuel of the future is low-grade synthetic crude extracted from oil shale with "portable" nuclear reactors that may or may not actually work:

Though it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy, Hyperion doesn’t like to think of its product as a “reactor.” It’s self-contained, involves no moving parts and, therefore, doesn’t require a human operator....

“The lab is doing a lot of work on oil shales and oil sands, but there’s no way to get power to those facilities,” Blackwell says. “So, this nuclear battery would be brought in and that would provide the power to run a small city of industrial use.”

Oil shale extraction is thirsty work. But since increasing CO2 emissions will make crops more drought resistant, it seems logical that this'll free up water for the oil shale boom.

All things considered, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic.

(Photo: Mid-day dust storm in Garden City, Kansas, 1935.)

The Queer-Friendly Skies

WorldNetDaily has come up with a truly inspired piece of anti-gay agitprop.

Alaska Airlines' gay travel page offers hellbound sodomites like Ken Mehlman 10 percent off on holiday travel to Newark/New York City (where else?) until January 6, 2008.

Once you manage to wrench your mind away from the frightening thought of hot 'n' heavy, transcontinental, no-holes-barred gay sex, you may presently begin to perceive that the discount is really not all that different from this one, which offers 10 percent off to prostitutes, frotteurs, erotographomaniacs, Discalced Carmelite nuns, toe fuckers...and anyone else who feels like going to Reno, NV.

But here's how WND describes the offer:

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air have announced a new program that will charge heterosexuals 10 percent extra for their air travel to specific locations during the Christmas season.

This is a fine day's work indeed. Your garden-variety hysteric would've presented the discount as a reward, or an incentive, for teh buttsecks. But WND brilliantly depicts the regular fare as a penalty for being heterosexual. So much for the people who say homosexuality is a victimless crime!

It gets worse, though. In an especially lurid instance of closet-case dream logic, this purity tax on straights will also lead to an epidemic of airborne transvestism:

"They are giving preferences to male passengers who want to wear dresses on the planes, and giving them preference over married couples," Fischer said....

Well, that's capitalism for you: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.

If you don't like it, you can always move to Saudi Arabia.

(Illustration via Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy.)

Sacred Texts and Abstract Principles

As we all know, belief in global warming constitutes a religion. And while religion may be fine and dandy for 35-year-old virgins, Southern trailer trash, and softheaded old biddies, sensible people like John Kay of the Financial Times prefer to take their marching orders from the Invisible Hand.

Some climate zealots have argued that we have a responsibility to our descendents to address global warming. Kay concedes that it's pretty to think so, but points out that it may not be practical:

The problem of weighting the present and the future equally is that there is a lot of future. The number of future generations is potentially so large that small but permanent benefit to them would justify great sacrifice now. If we were to use this criterion to appraise all long-term investment, the volume of such investment would impoverish the current population.

This is no laughing matter. Let's suppose that your upfront cost of ensuring a "small but permanent benefit" for posterity is one dollar per year. Now, let's assume that the future comprises 500,000 years. That's half a million clams you owe the ingrates who'll someday picnic on your grave, payable this instant.

I'm guessing that if you had that kind of cash lying around, you'd be reading the Financial Times instead of this cold, lonely little vanity blog.

And let's not forget that we don't know what kind of people our descendents will be. They may be protectionists, or neo-Muggletonians, or cannibals, or God only knows what. Why should we pay through the nose in order to subsidize lifestyle choices of which we might not approve? Why should we supply lifeboats to people who may've grown gills, for that matter, or food to people who may've learned to eat tin cans like cartoon goats? Where's the ROI, exactly?

The way some people talk about it, it almost sounds like a gift, for which we'd get nothing in return.

This is the sort of outlandish decision people inevitably make when they "seek to extend our natural, but not unlimited, capacity for solidarity with others by calling on sacred texts and abstract principles."

History illustrates the harm done when the fundamentalism of faith or abstract reasoning overtakes pragmatism as political principle.

What might history eventually "illustrate" about our staunch pragmatism? As our President wisely said, "We don't know. We'll all be dead." The only thing we do know is this: To the extent that we've entrusted our fate to "economic and political marketplaces," we'll be able to enter Heaven or Hell with an equally clear conscience.

UPDATE: Smokewriting goes further and fares better.

(Illustration: “Thoughts of Capitalism by a Missourian in the Depression Thirties" by James Penney, c. 1935.)

They're All Around!

We're in a war for our very survival against radical Islam. Which means it's time for all patriotic Americans to harass Mexicans at the local big-box hardware store:

For Truman Fields, the war against foreign invaders begins at home -- Home Depot.

Several times a month during Florida's latest building boom, the retired IBM executive climbed into his Dodge pickup and cruised home-improvement stores or construction sites in southwest Florida. Armed with a camera and a missionary's zeal, he'd look for groups of Hispanic men and start snapping pictures. Fields, 66, assumed anyone who ran off was here illegally....

"They're all around if people will just open their eyes."

The goal here is to prevent La Reconquista, which is at least as imminent as our national subjection to Sharia. (This dual threat is what makes the strategic thinking of America's own modern-day Clausewitz more compelling than ever.)

Some people call the anti-immigrant movement racist. It isn't, though. It's RACIST.

"Real Americans Committed to Integrity, Sovereignty and Truth."

"That's what 'racist' means to us."

And really, what other interpretation matters?

Truman Fields believes that people who run away from him are probably here illegally. If we could somehow make an armed drone "understand" this deep insight, it'd free confused, angry, and racist RACIST Americans from the drudgery of playing soldier in strip malls, and let them return to more personally fulfilling endeavors.

A French businessman tells AFP his company is working on putting TASER stun guns on a flying saucer that would zap protesters, evil-doers, and anybody else that authorities there don't like.

This technology could also prevent messy situations like the recent tasing of a mildly argumentative motorist; eliminating the human factor will make summary punishment easier to accept, or at least harder to argue with:

Police in Texas want to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to spot speeders, and now Miami cops are also looking at drones for SWAT Teams.

These systems are fallible, of course. That's why we need lots of them, everywhere. Traditionally, the border has been visualized as something like the aseptic seal that keeps a product uncontaminated. We'd be better off seeing it as something more like the immune system, with the official border as a skinlike barrier, concerned private citizens as pattern recognition receptors, and armed drones as monocytes.

Xenophobes, racialists and paranoiacs have an advantage when it comes to viewing human beings as pathogens that are "all around if people will just open their eyes." Thus, their visionary insights will be invaluable in helping to define and deploy this vital new security technology.

You may think this is insane. But to me, "insane" simply means "Improving National Security As Needed, Eternally."

Ambition, Aspiration and Power

Jonathan Adler ladles a generous helping of grease onto those exceptionally squeaky wheels Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, whose new book strikes him as richly suggestive in its depiction of environmentalists as hectoring anhedonic grinches, and eminently reasonable in its embrace of "an explicitly pro-growth agenda."

First and foremost, Adler agrees with Nordhaus and Shellenberger that environmentalists must stop, already, with the "finger-wagging rhetoric." 'Cause as everyone knows, moral appeals for self-denial and personal responsibility are politically appropriate only when one is agitating against premarital sex or socialized medicine.

Another part of the problem is that too many environmentalists perceive "the environment" as a sort of substrate for human existence, like the Free Market, instead of as an optional lifestyle accessory:

The environment, Messrs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger say, is a "post-material" need that people demand only after their material needs are met.

Personally, I can't think of a much more material need than clean air and water, but that's probably just a symptom of my inability to move beyond "a politics of limits."

To make normal, productive human activity the enemy of nature, as environmentalists implicitly do, is to adopt policies that "constrain human ambition, aspiration and power...."

God forbid anyone - or anything - should do that. As President Bush so often says, "if it feels good, do it!"

Nordhaus and Shellenberger do have one fault in Adler's eyes, and that's their antiquated belief in the plausibility of government solutions:

[I]t is hard to see why their centralized subsidy plan would produce commercially profitable -- that is, "pro-growth" -- technologies better than the multiple efforts of private investors. In short: Why would an "Apollo" plan succeed where the Synthetic Fuels Corp. failed?

That teensy little quibble aside, he feels they've got a pretty firm grasp of the problem: doomsaying environmentalists and their philosophically untenable belief in constraining human ambition. Nordhaus and Shellenberger may not be quite ready to sit at the adult table, but when they are, it seems safe to say that no one will welcome them more heartily than Jonathan Adler.

(Illustration: "Monstrous Craws, at a New Coalition Feast" by James Gillray, 1787.)

A Malicious Ideology

A word to the wise from Phyllis Schlafly: Them radical feminist dames is crooked as a barrel of snakes:

Radical feminists have devised a scheme to cash in on the flow of taxpayer money in a big way. Their good buddy, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., has just introduced Senate Bill 2279, called the International Violence Against Women Act.

Some of this money will go to "a certain type of women's organizations" (e.g., the Family Violence Prevention Fund). This exemplifies the shamefully narrow focus of the International Violence Against Women Act, which targets violence against women rather than fetuses or men or conservative Supreme Court nominees or Lasiorhinus krefftii, the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat.

Radical feminists who would be the recipients of the act's awesome bureaucratic and money power are very selective about the kinds of violence they will target in 10 to 20 foreign countries. They have no interest in speaking up for the hundreds of thousands of unborn girls in China and India who are victims of sex-selection abortions.

Schlafly probably hasn't read the UNFPA's statement on gender-based violence, which specifically identifies prenatal sex selection as a form of "gender violence." Feministing recently had some not entirely complimentary things to say about the practice, too. The disagreement, of course, is over methodology. Schlafly wants to solve this problem, and most others, by banning all abortions now and forever. Most "radical feminists" would probably prefer to address the causes of prenatal sex selection, such as social structures that perpetuate the idea that women are inherently less valuable than men.

So far, we've learned that a bill intended to prevent violence against women will try to prevent violence against women by giving money to groups that try to prevent violence against women. And that feminists who support abortion rights aren't calling for a worldwide ban on abortion. We can be forgiven, I think, for feeling that Schlafly's hunt for logical inconsistencies has been a bit of a bust.

She's nothing if not persistent, though:

Feminist ideology about the goal of gender-neutrality and the absence of innate differences between males and females goes out the window when it comes to the subject of domestic violence. Feminist dogma is that the law should assume men are batterers and women are victims.

Just in case you doubt this, here's an example of gender neutrality going out the window, thanks to the "malicious ideology" of feminism:

Political correctness requires that the Illinois Bar Journal use gender-neutral words, but anyone familiar with this subject knows that "petitioner" overwhelmingly means wife and "respondent" means husband.

Yes, we do know that, don't we? (And isn't it odd how the people who dispute this fact tend to be perfectly comfortable with racial profiling?)

Having demonstrated that political correctness is the handperson of feminist ideology, because it demands the gender neutrality that feminist ideology rejects except when it doesn't, Schlafly points out that accusations of domestic violence can give one party - and it's usually going to be a woman, since the little minxes are clever enough to know that they're statistically more likely to suffer abuse - an "unfair advantage in divorce and child custody."

The possibility of this grave injustice - which is far more dangerous, you'll agree, than legally codifying the presumption that women are lying bitches who probably deserved whatever they got - is apparently what justifies Schlafly's headline: Feminists Abuse Domestic Violence Laws.

My brain hurts.

(Illustration via What Were They Thinking?)

Errors and Heresies

Dinesh D'Souza is troubled by a certain...laxity in modern thought, and goes in search of its parentage:

About a hundred years ago, two anti-religious bigots named John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White wrote books promoting the idea of an irreconcilable conflict between science and God. The books were full of facts that have now been totally discredited by scholars. But the myths produced by Draper and Dickson continue to be recycled. They are believed by many who consider themselves educated, and they even find their way into the textbooks. In this article I expose several of these myths, focusing especially on the Galileo case, since Galileo is routinely portrayed as a victim of religious persecution and a martyr to the cause of science.

Like pretty much everyone who's even marginally informed on this issue, I have little respect for the work of Draper or White. But it's not quite fair to call them "anti-religious," since Draper was a deist, and White an Episcopalian. Also, the conflict they described was between science and organized religion, not "science and God."

I'm sorry to say that D'Souza's account of the "Galileo myth" isn't very accurate, either. After conscientiously explaining that "the leading astronomers of the time were Jesuit priests," he assures us that

They were open to Galileo’s theory but told him the evidence for it was inconclusive. This was the view of the greatest astronomer of the age, Tyco [sic] Brahe.

D'Souza's clear implication is that Tycho counted and weighed Galileo's theory and found it wanting. The problem is, Galileo's theory was based on observations he'd made in 1610, with the aid of a new-fangled device known as the telescope; Tycho had been lying in the cold, cold ground for nine years by then.

Next, D'Souza claims that Church didn't "dogmatically" oppose heliocentrism, but simply demanded a little more proof than Galileo was able to provide. From there, it's a short step to the incoherent position that "the Church should not have tried him at all," but nonetheless deserves credit for the tender mercy of putting him under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Finally, he says that "Galileo was neither charged nor convicted of heresy." Which is technically true, sort of: The heliocentric system was described as "formally heretical," and Galileo was therefore "vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy." He was accordingly given the opportunity to "abjure, curse, and detest the above-mentioned errors and heresies and any other error and heresy contrary to the Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church." Which he did, perhaps because he found it preferable to the alternative.

Obviously, I'm not expecting anyone to be shocked that a column by D'Souza is full of serious errors. I am a bit curious, though, as to whether anyone believes that they're the product of stupidity or ignorance, rather than a fairly sophisticated sense of what he can get away with, given his audience's slavering appetite for lies.

(Illustration from Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo, 1610.)

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

I couldn't resist posting this footage, but I strongly urge you to turn the sound off before viewing.

Friday Hope Blogging

Brazil is dramatically increasing the availability of contraceptives:

As part of a new fight against Brazil's sky-high number of unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions, the country's most populous state is offering "morning after" contraceptive pills at metro stops and 90 percent off contraceptive pills at pharmacies.

And that's not all. Federal Health officials are offering to train teachers to give sex education and offering condoms to pupils. And the Health Ministry wants men to take more responsibility and is offering free vasectomies.

The Boy Scouts, as a private organization, have the right to discriminate against gays and the insufficiently religious, according to the Supreme Court. You’d think that’d make ‘em happy as clams, but in an act of true perversity, they insist that their bigotry must be subsidized by the very people it designates as second-class citizens.

The city of Philadelphia begs to differ:

Citing a local 1982 "fair practices" law, the city solicitor has given the Scouts until Dec. 3 to renounce its policy of excluding homosexuals or forfeit the grand, Beaux-Arts building it has rented from the city for $1 a year since 1928.

"While we respect the right of the Boy Scouts to prohibit participation in its activities by homosexuals," the solicitor, Romulo Diaz, said last week in an interview, "we will not subsidize that discrimination by passing on the costs to the people of Philadelphia."

A spokesman for the Boy Scouts points out that they're required by the organization's national charter to discriminate. That being the case, it sounds like they’d better pony up the dough, and be grateful the city’s not demanding 25 years’ worth of back rent.

In wholly unrelated news, "the Jesuit order of Roman Catholic priests agreed to a $50 million settlement with 110 Eskimo victims of alleged sexual abuse."

The Center for Biological Diversity has won yet another victory against BushCo:

The Bush administration has agreed to a court settlement, finalized November 19th, requiring the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to review the environmental hazards of nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides and revise, as necessary, the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for these two dangerous pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

CBD does great and difficult work, year after year; you could do worse than send ‘em a donation.

An effort is underway to gather data on the one billion people of whom there no official records. One could argue that this has some troubling implications – practically and philosophically - but it still seems worthy of mention here:

One important outcome of this enterprise it that it will provide new accurate data for the international aid community and private enterprises looking to do business with the poor, often limited so far to demographic data based on 10-year old surveys. International and local NGOs will also benefit some better leverage from this. The social impact of the initiative is expected to be huge: increased employment, revenue flow to the community, access to critical social services and technology skills while lifting community morale.

By an odd coincidence, one billion is also thought to be the number of people without reliable electricity. A new lamp built around a recycled cell-phone charger could change that:

It is a simple, inexpensive, sustainable alternative to kerosene lamps. The key components are a recycled cell phone charger, a set of rechargeable batteries, and very efficient LED lights. When power is available, it charges the batteries; when light is needed the batteries can provide up to 40 hours of continuous use.

Triple Pundit reports on the astonishing Tate Ambient Power Module:

The Tate Ambient Power Module, patented by Joseph Tate of California, converts radio-wave energy (manmade and natural) into energy that can be used by small appliances such as smoke detectors and clock radios.

And the Naib reports on inflatable cars; unfortunately, the Robert Crumb cartoon I need to illustrate this concept is packed away in my storage space, along with the rest of my books.

A huge new rainforest preserve has been set aside in the Democratic Republic of Congo:

U.S. agencies, conservation groups and the Congolese government have come together to set aside 11,803 square miles of tropical rain forest, the U.S.-based Bonobo Conservation Initiative said in a statement issued this week. The area amounts to just over 1 percent of vast Congo but that means a park larger than the state of Massachusetts.

A new earth observation system may reduce cyclone deaths:

"The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) will help drive further improvements in, and integration of Earth observations instruments, models and early-warning systems," said Achache.

"The end result should be -- and must be -- a continuing downward trend in the death toll from cyclones."

In related news, storm surge maps from LSU helped Bangladesh to save the lives of coastal residents:

Early on the morning of Nov. 16, Cyclone Sidr hit Bangladesh and showed no mercy. The death toll continues to rise even today. Hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless. But, nearly 24 hours in advance of the storm, Hassan Mashriqui, assistant extension professor of coastal engineering with LSU, the LSU AgCenter and the Louisiana Sea Grant College Program, gave Bangladesh emergency officials storm surge maps so detailed that area agencies were able to take action, saving countless lives.

A new type of trawling net may reduce bycatch:

This year’s winning solution, the "Eliminator”, is an innovative device that captures haddock while reducing the accidental netting, or bycatch, of other marine species.

Furthermore:

Diego Gonzalez Zevallos, a marine biologist at the Centro Nacional Patagónico in Argentina, studied the accidental death of seabirds as they dive for food and are struck by trawling cables and dragged under the water and drown. His device, a simple plastic cone is likely to dramatically reduce seabird deaths, while not affecting the profitability for fishermen.

At Grist, Andrew Dessler describes his attempt to find a climate skeptic who’d be willing to visit his classroom and talk to his students. You'll never guess what happens.

A new study suggests that renewable energy is a better option than coal for Nevada:

Renewable power paired with a more aggressive energy efficiency program will mean 'Lower costs and lower risks for ratepayers and probably will produce a higher number of job opportunities for Nevadans,' Ernie Niemi, ECONorthwest analyst and primary author of the report, said during a Tuesday telephone press conference.

The EU is considering a ban on GM corn:

European Union environmental officials have determined that two kinds of genetically modified corn could harm butterflies, affect food chains and disturb life in rivers and streams, and they have proposed a ban on the sale of the seeds, which are made by DuPont Pioneer, Dow Agrosciences and Syngenta. The preliminary decisions are circulating within the European Commission, which has the final say.

There are encouraging prospects for removing endocrine disruptors from water:

"No single process was able to remove absolutely every chemical," says Shane Snyder, an environmental toxicologist at the Southern Nevada Water Authority and lead author of the study. "The findings demonstrate, though, that certain processes can greatly reduce the concentration of many classes of contaminants, while others have little impact on removal."

The study was funded by the drinking-water industry, and is definitely reflects their perspective. Given those caveats, though, the findings are pretty interesting.

All of the above is really just an excuse to promote The Wooden Library in Alnarp.

Each "book" describes a certain tree species and is made out of the actual wood (the "covers"). The spine is covered by the bark, where mosses and lichens from the same tree are arranged. "Books" of shrubs are covered with mosses with split branches on both covers and spines.

Link via wood s lot.

Anything else I link to will probably seem anti-climactic. All the same, I have to recommend the photos of Peter Merts.


And The Super Bolide of September 13, 2007, a movie from Heliotown (see also Ashcraft's Catalog of Fireballs, Meteors and Space Dust).

And, finally, this lovely footage of San Francisco's Ocean Beach in 1903, which I dedicate to someone very sweet:



(Illustration at top via the ESA: “This image shows a simulated view of Earth as seen from the position of Rosetta, just before the spacecraft's closest approach to Earth. It was acquired on 13 November 2007 at 20:30 CET using the WAC with a red filter.”

Drawing a Bright Line

I was sitting in a downtown bar, knocking back a few cold ones after another tough week of agitating for oligarchical collectivism. Suddenly, Candace de Russy tottered in, looking downright incendiary in a red silk brocade gown, replete with a poi de soie bodice and overskirt trimmed with gold-thread jacquard ribbon.

She collapsed onto the stool next to me, and gave me a goggle-eyed leer. "Mind if I ask you something, mister?"

"Shoot."

She leaned over conspiratorially and put her lips against my ear; my head swam with the heady aroma of butterscotch and toluene. "What does 'nuptial mysticism,' as opposed to neo-scholasticism, have to do with winning the war against Islamic terror?"

I thought about it for a while, and drew a blank. "You tell me," I said.

She laughed unpleasantly, her eyes as hard as jujubes. "Learn about this from a most interesting review by 'Spengler' of a theological text by a Scots Dominican, Fergus Kerr," she snapped.

I had plenty more questions for her, but it was too late: she was already halfway to the floor, singing "Mairzy Doats" in a small, dreamy voice. I stabilized her as best I could, and went home to track down this "Spengler" fellow.

And I'm glad I did. His argument is sprawling, to say the least, but I'll try to boil it down to the essentials:

To win a gunfight, first you have to bring a gun, and to win a religious war, you had better know something about religion.

This analogy is unbalanced in several senses of the word, but we'll overlook that for now. The thing to remember is that we're in a religious war, and this makes the Pope "the leader not only of the Catholics but - by default - of the West."

Radical Islam threatens the West only because secular Europe, including the sad remnants of the former Soviet Union, is so desiccated by secular anomie that it no longer cares enough about its future to produce children.

Or, as Heinrich Himmler put it, "A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave.”

So far, so good. Religious war, check. Pope leads the West by default, check. The Muslims are outfucking us, check.

So what does nuptial mysticism have to do with winning the war against Islamic terror? Well, to shorten an extraordinarily convoluted argument, modern secular thought (i.e., Heidegger and Strauss!) has ignored divine self-revelation in favor of "the metaphysics of Being." As it happens, this is a metaphysics "that the Church of Vatican II consigned to the dustbin," while embracing certain congenial currents of Protestantism (Barth) and Judaism (Rosenzweig and Buber). Which just goes to show you how

All of the really important issues were fought out over generations in the one Western institution with a long enough memory. That is why the Catholic Church remains the world's indispensable institution.

The current Pope's dim view of Islam signifies that he comes down on the correct side of this philosophical divide; his belief in "God's self-revelation through love," as opposed to "the irreligious deism of the 18th century" allows him to grasp that "one cannot simply teach political systems, or as Immanuel Kant put it, devise a constitution for devils."

Or, to put it another way, when a good, old-fashioned Holy War is in order, Pope Ratzo's your only man:

Benedict is the first pope in the past century to draw a bright line between Islam on one hand and Judeo-Christian revealed religion on the other, and that may destine him "not to send peace, but a sword."

And that, as far as I can tell, is what "nuptial mysticism" has to do with winning the war against Islamic terror.

Please do make a note of it.

(Illustration: "Entrance of the Crusaders into Constantinople," by Gustave Dore.)

The Tools of Colonial Development

While wandering lonely as a cloud through the Conservapedia, I stumbled on this informative entry:

Neocolonialism is a myth perpetuated by leftist institutions, like Marxism. The basic idea is that colonial powers still have control over their colonial assets like Africa. Proponents of neocolonialism claim that wealthy western countries are responsible for the economic misfortune of their previous colonial assets. These claims are inherently flawed because they forget to take into account that institutions like slavery were not one sided.

It's amazing how many of the Left's intellectual failings stem from the inability to grasp that slavery was "not one sided."

The next section is helpfully entitled "How the Myth Got Started." Have your smelling salts at hand before proceeding, for this is exceedingly stern stuff:

The myth was originally a ploy by Marxists to tarnish capitalist governments, claiming that free trade agreements were simply ploys by the West used to exploit other nations. The myth was used by Marxists to mobilize indigenous nationalists to the the Marxist cause by providing a common enemy; in fact, it was just another way the Communists used people during the Cold War in their calculative chess battle of Proxy wars. Neocolonialism later became a fad by post-modern philosophers such as Escobar, Obadina, Agamben, Spanos, Mignolo, Soja, Massey, Foucault, Said, Lafava to criticize the West. And the list of taint goes on. All speaking the same thing with a twist thinking they are so clever with their big words, when in truth it is all just a myth peddled by post modern academics who wish to deny the agency of African peoples. Post modern academics are, (to use their own critisim against them) bourgeois swine who deny the agency of African people in a selfish attempt to advance their academic careers.

As far as I can tell, "deny[ing] the agency of African peoples" means denying their status as people who traditionally "had limited understanding or control of their physical environment," and accordingly find it hard to reap the rewards of their "inheritance from colonial rule."

The African economy is crumbling but that is not the West's fault; if anything the West is continuing Africa's existence.

And what an existence it is!

Slavery continues to remain prominent in Africa in the form of child soldiers, sex workers, coerced or debt workers.

Coerced or debt workers, eh? Must have something to do with the famously low IQ of Africans, or their "barbaric practices such as pagan worship"; to believe otherwise, after all, would be to "deny their agency."

In summation, you must not be taken in by the Marxist myth that "colonial powers still have control over their colonial assets like Africa," and you must also comprehend that "the tools of colonial development will allow for countries like Africa to develop and become equal trading partners in the future."

Unless, of course, the African susceptibility to debt, coerced labor, and the "calculative chess battle of Proxy wars" makes further progress impossible, and the West is at last obliged to stop "continuing Africa's existence."

(Illustration: "The Filipino's First Bath," 1899.)

A Few Bad Snowstorms

Irving C. Sheldon, Jr applauds St. Mark's School in Providence, RI for inviting climate skeptic Richard Lindzen to reassure students who've been scared stupid by An Inconvenient Truth:

Lindzen has been a minor affliction to those like Gore who maintain that the science on global warming is settled and the debate is over.

Who does he mean, exactly, by "those like Gore"?

Well, you know...those people. Stupid people, fat people, alarmists, foreigners, Wiccans...the usual crowd. The kind of people who throw common sense out the window by predicting "the melting of the Greenland ice sheet," or daydreaming about "rising sea levels," instead of cheerfully doubting, with Lindzen, "that the effects of warming are necessarily bad."

Some people claim that Lindzen may not be objective. But if that were the case, however could he have "infiltrated one of the country’s leading science institutions"? Accusing "those like Gore" of bias is one thing. But casting doubt on the veracity of members of "leading science institutions" is something else entirely. Not quite pukka, don't you know. Not our sort at all.

Ultimately, the only real danger the climate change "consensus" poses is to environmentalism itself:

[W]hen the theory is inevitably discredited and dismissed, possibly after a few bad snowstorms, the whole package of environmentalism will be discredited too, along with all the worthy parts involving the reduction of harmful pollutants and preservation of wildlife habitat.

Too true, begob. And with Old Man Winter preparing even now for his annual rounds, the warning couldn't be more timely. Two or three serious blizzards, and the public will rise as one to demand more pollution in its drinking water and more clearcutting in its national parks. And who'll be to blame? Those like Gore.

Meanwhile, Tom Teepen pokes a bit of fun at arguments like Sheldon's, and manages to cook the denialist position down to its pitchy essence:

The U.N. panel has it that if climate change isn't checked, North America will suffer longer, hotter heat waves and water shortages, Europe will lose many of its species, Asia will be hit by huge floods and, worldwide, new diseases will evolve.

Yeah, right. Well, we'll just see about that!

UPDATE: Tim Lambert reports on a pair of French denialists who don't seem to realize that the world is round. Teach the controversy!

(Painting at top by Philip Vaughan, after the 1934 Ub Iwerks cartoon "Jack Frost.")

A Pre-Emptive War

Henry Payne endeavors to describe the Great Global Warming Swindle in terms the average American can understand:

The Greens-Government-Media Complex – the new Iron Triangle – was on full display this weekend as the U.N. tried to muster a frightening dossier of intelligence to convince the international community to fight a pre-emptive war on global warming.

That's a pretty daring metaphor coming from a conservative, wholly apart from the calculated obnoxiousness of calling this last-ditch plea for mitigation "pre-emptive."

They're trying to frighten us, the story goes, and we mustn't give in...partly because it could distract us from more serious dangers (e.g., balsawood drones bearing anthrax spores), and partly because attempting, however modestly, to mitigate global warming would destroy the economy and plunge us into a Second Dark Age where cannibalism is seen as the PC alternative to eating animals, and antibiotics are rejected as "speciesist."

With these terrifying (but plausible!) scenarios in mind, let's take a closer look at how the conspiracy works. The UN craves untrammeled power, so it created the IPCC to describe global warming in frightening terms. The media want the UN to have untrammeled power, so they dutifully report on what the IPCC says:

New York Times’s green reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal (in dispatches that ran across the planet via the Times News Service) committed journalistic malpractice as she uncritically reported on the “forceful language” of the “most powerful” IPCC report warning of “mounting risks.”

See how the pieces fall into place? The NYT is so committed to propping up the UN and the Greens that it's using its wire service to disseminate this article worldwide, instead of targeting its green agitprop at the thousand or so irrelevant academic Marxists who still read the daily paper.

The Nobel Committee is in on it too, needless to say:

The triangle was further reinforced by the Nobel Peace Prize, “an honor,” wrote Rosenthal, “that many scientists here said emboldened them to stand more forcefully behind their positions.” Science? Sounds like raw politics.

Real science, in case you're wondering, involves weaving a web of circumstantial ad hominem wide enough to entangle everyone except you and your ever-shrinking group of industry-idolizing co-religionists.

I've heard it argued that some catastrophe will one day force people like Payne to change their tune. I disagree. I reckon they'll simply claim that the UN itself caused the disaster - with Iranian plasma weapons, perhaps - because it needed "a new Pearl Harbor" to ensure the triumph of Socialism.

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Chromodoris magnifica are blest
Do eastern stars slope never west,
Nor pallid ashes follow fire:
If hours be years the twain are blest,
For now they solace swift desire.

(Photo by Edouard Potjes.)

Friday Hope Blogging

I wouldn't want FHB to emphasize feeling good over doing good, so I'll start out this week with a couple of pleas for action.

For a limited time, you can buy an XO-1 laptop for a child in a developing country, and get one free for yourself. The cost is $399, $200 of which is tax-deductible. You'll also get a year of free access to T-Mobile wi-fi. The offer's only good for 11 more days, so get busy!

PZ Myers has a fascinating, frightening post on an infectious form of cancer threatening the Tasmanian Devil. He asks readers to make donations to researchers who are working to save them, which you can do by clicking here. (It shouldn't need to be said, but as PZ points out, understanding this disease will benefit human beings as well.)


Virginia has rejected abstinence-only funds:

"The governor supports abstinence-based education, but the governor wants to see us funding programs that are evidenced-based," said Skinner, who added that Virginia will now offer "more comprehensive" sex education.

A federal judge has ordered anti-abortion zealot John Dunkle to remove threats against abortion providers from his website:

Golden also ordered the government to monitor Dunkle's Web site to ensure he did not post names, addresses or photos of clinic physicians, staff or patients....Jennifer Boulanger, executive director of the Allentown Women's Center and another target of Dunkle's protests, said Golden's ruling was "wonderful" and added that it would improve safety for abortion providers, clinic staff and patients.

Yet another federal court has ruled that the Bush Administration has - steady, now - broken the law:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals today announced its ruling that the Bush government violated the law by ignoring global warming when it set national gas-mileage standards for SUVs and pickup trucks. The court sent the decision back to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for a full Environmental Review of the gas-mileage standards.

POGO announces "a victory for transparency in Congress":

Thanks to the diligent efforts of Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), a provision that would have undermined transparency in government spending will be removed from the final version of the House FY 2008 Transportation, HUD, and Related Agencies Appropriations bill. Cited as Section 193 of the appropriations bill, the provision would have prohibited the public as well as congressmen not on the Transportation-HUD appropriations committees from viewing agency budget justifications prior to May 31 of each year.

Coturnix has landed a major scientific paper in his open-access journal PLoS ONE. Revere explains:

This is a Big Deal for paleontology and also a Big Deal for Open Access publishing. The hollow bones of this beast make it a lightweight among dinosaurs, but this publication makes PLoS ONE and Bora heavyweights in Open Access publishing. Bora is justifiably excited and we are excited too. The significance of some events is not appreciated until long afterward, but we think this one speaks for itself.

Research into the chemical vocabulary of cholera bacteria offers hope of treating bacterial diseases:

Bassler's team realized that the cholera must be signaling each other with some unknown chemical when the time was right to stop reproducing and exit the body. But no one before had found it.

"We generically understood that bacteria talk to each other with quorum sensing, but we didn't know the specific chemical words that cholera uses," Bassler said. "Doug (Higgins) led the hard work that was necessary to figure that out."

Higgins isolated the CAI-1 chemical, which occurs naturally in cholera. Then, Megan Pomianek, a graduate student in the laboratory of Martin Semmelhack, a professor of chemistry at Princeton, determined how to make the molecule in the laboratory. Higgins used this chemical essentially to control cholera's behavior in lab tests.

Marketplace has an interesting interview with the head of Interface Carpets:

Interface is nearly halfway toward its goal of having zero environmental impact -- basically, taking nothing from the Earth that isn't renewable, and doing no harm to the biosphere in the process. To get there, Anderson wants to reinvent the way the industry works.

For example: Instead of selling carpets, he wants to lease them to corporate clients. That guarantees Interface a steady stream of recyclable material once the carpets wear out. But it also introduces a revolutionary concept to manufacturing -- corporations taking lifetime responsibility for their products.

Their report on local economies is also worth reading:

McKibben rejects criticism that he's an idealist who just wants to turn back the clock to 19th-century localism. The utopians, he says, are the ones who think our rates of consumption can keep on growing forever.

Both links via Adventus; there's more here.

Treehugger reports that a poor and dangerous neighborhood of Mexico City "is on track to become a prototype for green development":

The community of 5,900 residents is receiving a cash injection of $2 million (20 million pesos) from Venustiano Carranza borough president Julio César Moreno to build gardens in schools and apartment buildings, install solar panels, and recycle wastes.

Also: Structural building blocks made from garbage. A home made from discarded materials from Boston's Big Dig. Lamps made from old irons. Rugs made from old blankets. And - possibly - tires made from orange peels.

Here's some news on hydrogen production, just to keep my hand in:

In certain configurations, nearly all of the hydrogen contained in the molecules of source material converted to useable hydrogen gas, an efficiency that could eventually open the door to bacterial hydrogen production on a larger scale.

There's more at Sietch.

Use of a different type of fish hook is helping to save sea turtles:

Unlike the J-shaped hook that has its point parallel to the shaft, the circular hook points toward the shaft and is also wider, making it more likely that it will lodge in the lip rather than the throat or stomach, which is fatal, the WWF says.

A group of rare birds has been released back into the wild after being rescued from smugglers by Russian authorities:

The falcons were brought in special crates by air from Moscow, then driven into the forest about 70 km (44 miles) outside the regional capital, Barnaul. They were then set free one by one.

"The return of every bird into the wild is a unique process and for us it is also a great joy," said Viktor Plotnikov, director of the Barnaul falcon sanctuary.

Ever considered how many clothes hangers are manufactured and discarded? You should.

A nicely done parody site: The Predatory Lending Association. It's funny 'cause it's true!

Geoff Managh discusses Climate Change Escapism. See also the related - in a certain sense - post on Bannerman's Island, which includes some incredible photos by Shaun O'Boyle, as thus:


Who's Afraid of the Dark? is an amazing collection of "night and night life in photography." The City Night gallery is especially striking.


Botland compiles anonymous photographs "acquired in archives and fleamarkets all over the world." It's small, but definitely worth a look! Have a peek at the Abandoned Photo Museum while you're at it. Or skip directly to this remarkable gallery by Denise Fuson.


(Illustration at top by Tove Jansson, from her illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, 1966. I'll been looking for this book for decades; feel free to send a copy along if you have a spare!)

Now We Are Three

I just noticed that Buffoonia's third birthday has came and went. Traditionally, I celebrate by indulging in a bit of arch self-mockery about my method and madness, and offering a slightly less fanciful shout-out to my worthy constituents.

Not this time, though. Anyone who's stuck with me over the last year deserves something a bit less theatrical.

This has been a stressful year, personally and professionally and politically. It's been hard to think, and to write, and almost impossible to do both at the same time.

Part of the problem is my own personality, which, as I've pretended to overstate before, is hopelessly melancholic. Beyond that, though, it's become clear to me that what's happened in the last few years - during and after Hurricane Katrina, especially - has pretty much broken my heart. I've consciously indulged my tendency towards abstraction since then, partially out of escapism and cowardice, but also because I felt like I had an obligation to rethink...well, everything.

The positive side of all this is that I've had any number of longstanding preconceptions challenged by any number of absolutely brilliant people, whose exemplary goodheartedness assures me that whatever I become will be far better than what I was.

RMJ, for instance, has gently forced me many times to reconsider pet theories, and to forego premature allegiances (the proof is more in the absurdities I didn't write than in the ones I did).

I could say much the same of Thers and Rorschach and Echidne, but that's less important to me than my conviction that they're family.

There are plenty of people in my blogroll who are equally thought-provoking and inspiring; listing them here would be a waste of time given that I've listed them there. And I'm also very grateful to my commenters, who've reassured me many times that I'm not mad...or that if I am, I'm in exceptionally good company.

Drop in and say hello, if you feel like it.

Thanks, and may we all meet at last in better times.

Getting to No

This morning, I read an article on the UK's plan to demand unprecedented amounts of personal information from travelers, which made reference to this dissenting argument:

Critics warned of mayhem at ports and airports when the system is introduced, beginning in earnest from mid-2009.

Not long after, I heard AAR's Thom Hartmann try to argue against drilling in ANWR, on the grounds that the pipeline is vulnerable to terrorist attack.

Like the earnest claim that "torture doesn't work," these criticisms amount to little more than sales objections; they imply that if a few minor logistical problems could be worked out, the objections would be withdrawn. If people are worried about longer lines at ports and airports, you can propose a plan to streamline the process. If people are worried about attacks on an aboveground pipeline, you can offer to bury it, or militarize the area through which it runs, or both. If people are concerned that torture isn't reliable, you can explain that this is precisely why more research into "enhanced interrogation" is so necessary.

The Right routinely complains that the Left is too emotional and too subjective. If anything, the opposite is true. The way to oppose an unprecedented invasion of personal privacy, or an insane energy policy, or torture, is to refuse to consider it. You don't say, "I don't like this feature, or that defect"; you say, "I don't want this, period, for myself or anyone else." The supposed liberal virtue of dialogue, of the "free exchange of ideas," is precisely what we should reject here, in favor of what Judith Butler calls "the active and difficult resistance to the temptation of war."

Because as I've said elsewhere, mainstreaming surveillance and torture is not about breaking the terrorists' will; it's about breaking ours. You can't hope to save yourself from brutality; you can only hope to save yourself from being brutal.

Pity and Awe

We all have to draw the line somewhere, and I draw it at Camille Paglia. I can manage Goldberg, Derbyshire, and even the occasional dose of Steyn, but I avoid Paglia's thought almost as assiduously as I avoid chewing tinfoil.

Today, though, I'll make an exception. Thers advises me that La Paglia objects to Hillary Clinton's "mercurial, soulless self-positionings." Which strikes me as a bit odd, coming from someone who hails Madonna as our liberator precisely because "[she] says we are nothing but masks." Maybe I'm not Dionysian enough to appreciate the distinction.

What's more interesting, in a very mild sense of the word, is her theory on global warming (which, you may recall, was previously advanced by David Limbaugh and some quasi-Paglian chatterbox named Adri Mehra):

This facile attribution of climate change to human agency is an act of hubris. Good stewardship of the environment is an ethical imperative for every nation. But breast-beating hysteria merely betrays impious tunnel vision. Thousands of factors, minute and grand, are at work in cyclic climate change, whose long-term outcomes we cannot possibly predict. Nature should inspire us with awe, not pity.

Perhaps because I've never suckled at the milk of wisdom that seeps from Harold Bloom's breast, I'd question whether "good stewardship" is possible once you've embraced Paglia's weird notions about human agency. Perhaps she meant to say "wise use."

Note, too, that we know - somehow! - that climate change is "cyclic," but we "cannot possibly predict" any of its long-term outcomes.

More to the point, there's no reason why nature's vulnerability should make it less awe-inspiring. Rainforests are as magnificent a manifestation of "nature" as you could hope to see, but they're also very easy to burn and chop down. And Glen Canyon was pretty impressive before we submerged it under Lake Powell, or so I hear.

We have it within our power to destroy virtually everything on earth, gradually or in a matter of hours. The assumption that the climate somehow remains beyond our reach makes no sense at all. And the argument that recognizing it as vulnerable amounts to "pitying nature," and that pitying nature is "impious" by definition, is as spiritually bankrupt as it is logically incoherent.

Then again, Althouse calls Paglia's argument "a nice twist," so I may have to rethink my position before I'm much older.

(Photo at top: The Babbling Head.)

A Memorial to Nothingness

Candace de Russy has discovered yet another reason to be angry at postmodernists:

Academic postmodernism has profoundly influenced the arts, including memorials such as that long, black, unadorned sculpture in a hole in the ground, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, created by a college student a quarter of a century ago.

The Memorial is adorned, of course...with the names of 58,000 dead people.

The design seems to me to be pretty respectful, not least because it avoids needless editorializing. My understanding is that many of the hundreds of thousands of people who visit it each year find it to be emotionally overwhelming, if not devastating. There are probably people who'd prefer it to comprise a 200-foot statue of Richard Nixon planting his boot on Hồ Chí Minh's neck while running Jane Fonda through with a bayonet, but there are other people who might find that sort of pseudopatriotic kitsch somewhat...distracting.

The ability to create a monument that moves people from across the ideological spectrum is pretty impressive, I'd say, whether postmodernism inspired it or not.

For de Russy, though, art exists solely to indoctrinate. Thus, the absence of any overt flag-waving or hippy-bashing renders the Vietnam Memorial a "memorial to nothingness" that serves "merely to note the reality of death."

The moral vacuum is in the monument, y'see, and not in the spectator whose instinctive response to it is frivolous ideological bellyaching.

In our next installment, de Russy travels to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, and complains about the postmodern aestheticization of ruins.

The Battle Over What To Think

Though I'm as besotted with dialectics as the next lefty extremist, I can't quite approve of Andrew Revkin's attempt to achieve a synthesis of denialist disinformation and peer-reviewed science:

For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.

The left says global warming is a real-time crisis....The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant....

The thing is, if someone is yelling that global warming is a "hoax," that person is yelling nonsense. And anyone who hopes to give an accurate account of the debate is obliged to say as much.

Revkin can't bother himself with these minor details, though. He's too excited by the thought that reasonable people are beginning to "urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy," as reasonable people must.

Who are these paradigm-shattering pioneers? Well, there's Newt Gingrich, who was "one of the most polarizing forces in politics a decade ago," according to Revkin (how times have changed!). He's now calling for "curbing carbon dioxide emissions (affordably)."

Who gets to decide what is and isn't affordable? Revkin doesn't say, but I'm guessing the honor'll go to a member in good standing of the pragmatic center.

Next, we have Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, whose self-congratulatory approach to torching strawmen is guaranteed by Nordhaus and Shellenberger to light our path towards a better future.

Last and least, there's Bjorn Lomborg, whose appalling new book I've dealt with here and here. Revkin, who's less compromised by partisanship than yours truly, effectively praises it with faint damnation:

In his short new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” Mr. Lomborg...tries to puncture more of what he says are environmental myths, like the imminent demise of polar bears. (Most bear biologists have never said the species is doomed but do see populations shrinking significantly in a melting Arctic.)

Ah, but are these "bear biologists" pragmatic centrists? To the extent that their views are not in harmony with those of Mr. Lomborg, one suspects that they are not, and pities them.

For those who came in late, here's a quick recap: The "pragmatic center" on climate change is inhabited by Newt Gingrich, Nordhaus and Shellenberger, and Bjorn fucking Lomborg. Or to put it another way, two pathologically dishonest free-market fundamentalists, and a couple of preening bourgeois polemicists who espouse "an ambitious new [!!!] philosophy that isn't afraid to put people ahead of nature and to dream big about creating economic growth."

This, you'll agree, is a group of thinkers who could solve all our problems, had we but world enough and time. My only complaint is that Gregg Easterbrook didn't make the grade.

UPDATE: David Roberts notes that Revkin's gone this route before.

Roaring So Loudly

Roy Edroso discusses the latest plea for civility from the Assholosphere:

When we laughed at them before, they were roaring so loudly they couldn't hear us. Now they can't help but notice. And they want us to stop.

To me, this implies that people like Megan McArdle have managed to make a small but significant concession to reality. Which is why I'm forced to categorize it as wishful thinking.

In my view, McArdle's playing the civility card for the same reason her ideological brethren and cistern are calling for the use of tactical nukes against Iran: because the point of having a weapon is to use it. By the same token, every binding spell in the wingnut grimoire must be cast and recast, for the simple reason that the movement's sorcerers have nothing better to do.

That said, I do wonder whether the post-9/11 apotheosis of the warbloggers will turn out to be their version of the Summer of Love, by which I mean fodder for endless, maudlin anecdotes about how "we almost brought down the system, man!"

Just as many hippies' pursuit of their own enjoyment is retroactively ennobled by the fact that other people were engaged in a serious political struggle, to the extent that listening to Janis Joplin while stoned seems in hindsight to have been a Revolutionary Act, the warbloggers' brief, borrowed moment of quasi-relevance is likely to become ever more lustrous and exemplary as the years drag on (though to be fair, I'm sure they'll also Keep Hope Alive by supporting politicians who promise to end "entitlements"--veterans' benefits, for instance).

Considering what they deserve, they could have it a lot worse.

But God is merciful unto those who reverence Him, and it may well be that we'll suffer another spectacular terrorist attack, and everything silly will become serious again. At which point, we can expect street-fightin' men like Kim du Toit and Andrew Sullivan and Ace O'Spades to spurt arcs of "rancid ectoplasmic jissom" like the hanged men in Naked Lunch. Which is why, as I've said many times before, I'm less frightened of dying in a terrorist attack than I am of slipping in a reeking puddle of wingnut ejaculate afterwards, and breaking my neck.

Putting that bit of unpleasantness aside, I said pretty much everything I'd care to say about "civility" in this post.

Making Idleness Easy

Thomas Sowell attempts to make a difference by explaining that we should stop attempting to make a difference:

Making a difference makes sense only if you are convinced that you have mastered the subject at hand to the point where any difference you might make would be for the better.

There's a bit of a loophole here, thanks to the word "convinced" (cf. George W. Bush on the invasion of Iraq, or Rush Limbaugh on the role of ocean bacteria in climate change).

But there's no gainsaying Sowell's larger argument, which was given perhaps its most compelling expression by Hellhammer:

In the heat of infernal lightnings
And in the shadows of poisoned clouds
The world will die under the Sword of Destiny.

Just to drive his point home, Sowell shows us fear in a handful of rice:

Among those who make a difference by serving food to the homeless, how many have considered the history of societies which have made idleness easy for great numbers of people?

Not very many, I'm guessing. But probably more than have considered the grave and gathering threat of intravenous alcohol abuse:

How many have studied the impact of drunken idlers on other people in their own society, including children who come across their needles in the park -- if they dare to go to the parks?

Suggest that there's a link between human activity and climate change, and you're a crypto-Stalinist stooge. But the connection between soup kitchens and a dirty needle in the foot of your precious flaxen-haired moppet is plain as day. Won't somebody please think of the children (the ones who aren't homeless and hungry)?

My problem with Sowell's call for moral triage is that it doesn't go far enough. I have no proof that our hedonistic society's "if it feels good, do it" policy of "no questions asked" emergency care has ever saved the life of a larval child molester - or gang leader, or terrorist - but you can't deny that such an outcome is inevitable. I propose, therefore, that we subject ER patients to Thematic Apperception Testing before we give 'em so much as a tourniquet.

Don't bother arguing, either. I am convinced that I have mastered the subject at hand, and that any difference I might make will be for the better.

Sowell also objects to the phrase "giving back," because it encourages us to donate blood, instead of defending America's honor by relativizing the slave trade:

[S]lavery...is repeatedly drummed into our heads -- in the schools and in the media -- as something unique done by white people to black people in the United States.

I've never quite understood how slavery elsewhere in the world could excuse its popularity in the Land of the Free. But that conundrum is child's play, compared to this one:

What was unique about Western civilization was that it was the first civilization to turn against slavery, and that it stamped out slavery not only in its own societies but in other societies around the world during the era of Western imperialism.

Sowell's laboring under a few misapprehensions here. He seems to be unfamiliar with the Cyrus Cylinder, for starters, and he also doesn't seem to grasp that while abolition and Western imperialism may've overlapped somewhat, this doesn't mean that the former was an effect of the latter. There's also the fact that slavery still exists. And the fact that it's silly to ask people to "get over" slavery when you yourself can't get over the fact that people sometimes use cliches to espouse charity.

To give Sowell credit, though, he does a good job of illustrating the law of unintended consequences: You start out by trying to justify starving the poor, and before you know it, you're defending slavery.

(Photo: "Children Sleeping on Mulberry Street" by Jacob Riis, 1890.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Our people are clever and masterful;
They have powers in the mass, they accomplish marvels.
It is possible Time will make them before it
annuls them, but at present
There is not one memorable person, there is not one
mind to stand with Ceratosoma amoenum, one life with
the mountains.

(Photo by VictorianSeaSlugs.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The Massachusetts legislature has finalized a bill that will extend the buffer zone around clinics:

The bill, which Gov. Deval L. Patrick is expected to sign next week, will be the nation’s strictest state law establishing fixed zones that protesters cannot enter around those reproductive health clinics that offer abortions.

In Virginia, 84% of NARAL-endorsed candidates were elected:

"This is not a blip," says Sen. Russ Potts, the moderate Republican from Winchester who is retiring in part because of his party's rightward turn. "This is a change in the face of Virginia politics for the next 20 years. This business of no-tax pledges and no-abortions, no-exceptions is not going to fly.

And in New York, Rep. Joseph Crowley has introduced legislation that would restore access to affordable birth control:

Prices have gone through the roof due to an unintended [ha!] consequence of the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) that was passed in January. The Act included a provision that prevents college clinics and hundreds of clinics that serve women with low incomes from purchasing birth control from drug companies at an extremely discounted rate. Prices have shot up as a result, some as high as $50 a month.

An waitress from the Heartland lashes out against the effete, out-of-touch Liberal Media:

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Six Nicaraguan field workers have won a lawsuit against Dole Food:

A Los Angeles jury on Monday awarded $3.2 million to six Nicaraguan farmworkers who had sued Dole Food Co. Inc., arguing they had been rendered sterile some three decades ago by the international corporate giant's application of a banned pesticide on the plantations where they worked.

Jurors return today to consider whether Dole, and codefendant Dow Chemical Co., should be punished with more monetary damages. They will decide whether Dole acted maliciously in failing to warn its workers of the danger, and whether Dow engaged in gross negligence in manufacturing the chemical.

BP, meanwhile, has been hit with an unprecedented fine:

This is the largest criminal fine ever assessed against a corporation for Clean Air Act violations and the first criminal prosecution of the requirement that refineries and chemical plants take steps to prevent accidental releases.

Monsanto's profits are down on rBGH:

Monsanto Company recently announced that profits from its genetically modified bovine growth hormone, Posilac, also known as rBGH, will fall 16% in 2007 due to “pressure in the dairy business,” according to chief financial officer, Terry Crews.

Many US dairy companies, including Dean Foods, Stonyfield Farms, and California Dairies, as well as retail supermarkets, such as Safeway, Kroger and Publix are prohibiting use of the GM hormone due to consumer demand.

And the firm that manufactured thalidomide has lost its legal battle to ban a film about the birth defects its drug caused.

A common lawn grass has been found to produce its own potent herbicide:

Reporting on the discovery in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Frank Schroeder, the paper's senior author and an assistant scientist at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research on Cornell's campus, said, "We at first didn't believe m-tyrosine had anything to do with the observed herbicidal activity, but then we tested it and found it to be extremely toxic to plants but not toxic to fungi, mammals or bacteria."

Co-author Cecile Bertin, Ph.D. '05, research director for PharmAfrican, a Montreal-based bio-pharmaceuticals company, made the initial discovery that fescue grasses inhibit plants from growing around them.

There's supposedly some new evidence for the medicinal properties of a substance found in green tea:

They found that an ingredient in green tea rescued mice from lethal sepsis - and the findings could pave the way to clinical trials in patients.

The study was published this week in the Public Library of Science, or PLoS-ONE. Dr. Wang had previously discovered a late mediator of sepsis called HMGB1, a substance expressed in the late stages of lethal sepsis. They wanted to figure out a way to block this substance, which they felt would prevent the lethal sepsis process from moving forward. And it worked.

Mexico is finding that its new health insurance program for the uninsured "is having a positive effect on coverage of antihypertensive treatment in that country, according to a study published in the October 27 issue of British Medical Journal."

Results of the study show that adults insured through Seguro Popular are significantly more likely to receive treatment for hypertension and significantly more likely to have their blood pressure controlled than those without health insurance.

Ann Arbor, MI is courting God's wrath by promoting the use of rain barrels. Seattle's voters have turned their backs on Progress by rejecting a massive highway bill:

The turning point may have been when King County Executive Ron Sims suddenly withdrew his support. He cited the climate-warming emissions from added traffic as one of his chief objections—he was thinking about his granddaughters, he said, not just the next five years.

And Cloncurry, Australia intends to defy the natural order of things by switching over to solar thermal power:

They plan on building 8 thousand mirrors and reflecting light onto graphite blocks, water will be pumped through the blocks to create steam, the steam turns turbines, and wham 10 megawatts of renewable energy. Not that they have to worry much about this, but on the off chance that they have a cloudy day, the graphite blocks will stay hot for a long time and continue making steam (they also make energy at night).

The station would deliver about 30 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year, enough to meet the needs of the entire community. Ergon Energy would develop the project, which is expected to be completed by the summer of 2009/2010.

Triple Pundit discusses desiccant-based cooling:

A wheel that contains a desiccant turns slowly to pick up humidity from incoming air and discharge that humidity to the outdoors. A desiccant system can be combined with a conventional air conditioning system in which the desiccant removes humidity and the air conditioner lowers air temperature.

AfriGadget has a nice feature on modular machines, which allow a few functional parts to be adapted to multiple uses:

One of the things that I find most interesting in my travels around Africa is the similar uses of technology to meet the varied demands of different types of mechanics and workers. The particular case I’ve been thinking over is the use of a simple frame and different engines to meet a specific need.

Thanks to conservation efforts, the population of Amur tigers seems to be rebounding:

During the past 100 years, the Amur tiger population of the Russian Far East was decimated by forest destruction, trophy hunting and poaching for tiger body parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine. By the 1940s the number surviving had dwindled to an estimated 50. Thanks in part to $611,131 in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grants that, combined with partner donations and in-kind contributions, push the total to more than $1 million, the big, distinctive cats appear to be rebounding in Russia.

Scientists have discovered some new species near the Aleutians:

During the dives, two potentially new species of sea anemones have been discovered. Stephen Jewett, a professor of marine biology and the dive leader on the expedition, says that these are "walking" or "swimming" anemones because they move across the seafloor as they feed. While most sea anemones are anchored to the seabed, a "swimming" anemone can detach and drift with ocean currents. The size of these anemones ranges from the size of a softball to the size of a basketball.

The Forest Stewardship Council claims to be tightening its standards in the wake of an expose by The Wall Street Journal.

In response to inquiries from the newspaper, the FSC this month proposed stricter rules for certification. The regulations would ban any company known to be destroying rainforests or engaging in illegal logging from using the FSC's label.

The photo at the top was taken with a camera-equipped kite by Charles C. Benton. I was also impressed, this week, by Hilary Hitchcock's site, especially the collection of emulsion lifts and transfers.


Bruce McKaig's Time Markers "is a project in which a single cumulative pinhole photograph and a digital time-lapse animation are made of scenes from the arts, science, business, family and social rituals." Be sure to click on the animations.

The Art and Craft of Toy Design has a nice collection of toys improvised from found objects.


I'm pleased by this modest but suggestive attempt at a roundabout typology by Colin Tweedie (why didn't I think of it?).


Furthermore: Hidden Glasgow (via Things). Also from Glasgow, Iconic Moments of the 20th Century, as reenacted by senior citizens.

A new issue of Polar Inertia. A very thorough exhibition of needle books. A page of natural icons from the work of Ernst Haeckel (via Good). The Red Village, photographs of a Jewish village in Azerbaijan by Jason Eskenazi. Inuit games and songs at UBUWEB. Music of the John Frum cult (which I previously discussed here).

Last, Autour d'une Cabine, a short film from 1894.

Gauntlets of Deterrent

Back in 2006, the Wall Street Journal cautioned Republicans against relying on immigrant-bashing to win political victories:

[I]mmigration is an issue, like trade, that always looks better in the polls than it does on election day; very few people vote because of it.

The truth of this statement is nicely borne out by a post at Migra Matters, which contrasts pre-election excitement over "the Republican advantage in the emotional debate over illegal immigration" with the post-rout realization that immigration "won't be a silver bullet for Republicans."

We won't linger over this sad scene; as Shakespeare wrote, it's "better to weep at joy than to joy at weeping." Let's turn instead to the Minutemen's private border fence, which Chris Simcox formerly described as a "high-tech, double-layered gauntlet of deterrent."

Behold this fence, you would-be maids and lettuce-pickers, and tremble:

Simcox now says that he never promised to build the high-tech security fence on Ladd's ranch. And he insists the barbed-wire fence really does protect the country.

Meanwhile, a fence proposed along the Rio Grande may "cut farmers off from prime farmland close to the water," but that's the way things go in our ever-accelerating era of dromological conflict:

The fence would be at least 15 feet high and capable of withstanding a crash of a 10,000-pound vehicle going 40 mph, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

And Boeing's virtual border fence is sending border agents scurrying after raindrops and whirling leaves:

“When you promise to have a screen in a car that’s supposed to help you chase aliens and you find out you’re chasing raindrops, it causes skepticism,” Richard Stana, director of Homeland Security and Justice issues at the Government Accountability Office, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Oct. 24....

Then again, maybe it's just as well that all these fences are ill-conceived or defective, given that a secure border would be bad for business:

"Building a wall in and of itself is not the solution, we know that. Our economy would not respond very well to that, that's not the goal of our program."

(Ilustration at top: "Security Fence" by Rodger Roundy, 2006.)

Recording Angels

This afternoon, after taking a good stiff dose of tenocyclidine and striking my forehead robotically with a ballpeen hammer for the better part of an hour, I read an article by Gail Russell Chaddock and became convinced that Mike Huckabee is the ideal person to lead our troubled nation:

Huckabee is shaping his come-from-behind campaign on the same principle that grew the Church at Rock Creek from a few dozen people in 1996 to more than 5,000 today: Every life has value – and don't count anyone out.

This, Ms. Chaddock points out, is a message that can't help but resonate with "values voters" (an eccentric but politically significant subculture whose vote - unlike yours or mine - is strongly influenced by things they believe about stuff).

There's a lot more to Huckabee than that, though. He's guided by moral absolutes, and he's a "conciliator" with "a great sense of humor." He grew up poor, and "set up a 24-hour broadcast ministry." He understands the problems average people face, and strives to criminalize abortion.

Better yet, in an age when American presidents are all too willing to let their resolve be shaken by empirical evidence of their own failings, we can count on Huckabee to measure his accomplishments against nothing but his own sense of self-satisfaction:

"He felt that God wanted him to run for the Senate. I, too, felt that that was what he was supposed to do," says his wife, Janet, in an interview. "We didn't have a Plan B" when he lost, she adds. "But you can't second guess something when you think you've done the right thing. You have to make the decision and have peace about it. That's where your faith comes in."

Faith is also the basis of Huckabee's preternatural empathy with the downtrodden:

Put in the terms of his faith: It's the Golden Rule in action.

This is what allows Huckabee to feel the sinner's soul-deep craving for punishment as if it were his own, and to fulfill it:

Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas today refused to authorize a Medicaid payment for an abortion for a 15-year-old girl whose stepfather has been charged with incest, despite a Federal judge's order that such payments were required by Federal law.

It's a little odd that Ms. Chaddock chose not to mention this episode in the course of her otherwise uncompromising profile. Then again, maybe it's not really relevant. After all, we have it on excellent authority that Huckabee's a "conciliator."

Meanwhile, Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri is conducting an unbiased scientific probe into the insupportable horrors of the Abortion Holocaust:

The task force was conceived by John McCastle, president of Alliance for Life-Missouri, who recruited many of the group’s members. Among the questions McCastle poses: Does abortion lead to crime?

McCastle draws that question from unspecified studies, which he says suggest an overwhelming majority of women prisoners have had abortions.

But people in prison typically have numerous problems. Determining whether abortion is a cause, rather than an effect, could be challenging.

After Ms. Chaddock's rather one-sided profile of Huckabee, you can't help but be impressed by AP's presentation of both sides of the argument: Did these women have abortions because they had problems, or do they have problems because they had abortions? Teach the controversy!

In other news, only 37 percent of Fox News viewers describe themselves as pro-life.

(Illustration: "The Recording Angel" by Elihu Vedder, 1883.)

Poems of Force

Subtopia's post on Camp Justice, to which I linked yesterday, makes a point that's near and dear to my heart. In his discussion of Giorgio Agamben's theories on the "state of exception," Bryan raises the spectre of the "morbid aestheticization" of power among those who ostensibly oppose it:

Another point [Derek Gregory] makes about Agamben’s observations is that they are too heavily steeped in a kind of obsession with the look or the image of the camp; with a fetishization of the camp – meaning he falls into the lure of the camp as a kind of political pornography, which I think is an interesting and timely criticism today given how western culture seems so lustful for its own fantasies of the apocalypse.

I'd go along with that (although I had a stronger reaction in that regard to Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz, which I felt came very close to romanticism in its discussion of depersonalized death-camp prisoners).

I'm often troubled by the extent to which such theories constitute a “poem of force,” to take Simone Weil’s phrase somewhat out of context. These visions of the "Society of Control" have the attraction of what Frederic Jameson calls “reassuring extinction fantasies," without necessarily threatening extinction (it's the best of both worlds!). Even bureaucratic dreariness has an awe-inspiring side, if it’s comprehensive enough. And it’s a small step from awe to submission, particularly for people who enjoy our privileged position (cf. Susan Sontag's interesting argument that theorizing reality-as-spectacle involves "a breathtaking provincialism").

What’s often missing from analyses like these is a simple openness to human possibilities beyond eking out some sort of semi-autonomous life in the “interstices” of the Administered Society, like barnacles on the hull of a warship. This, to my mind, amounts to colluding with power by projecting an efficacy onto it that it doesn't and can't have.

Speaking of which, Robert Koulish discusses "emergency politics":

The scholar Ole Weaver's idea of "securitization" suggests that by labeling immigration as a security issue, authorities (including officeholders, the media and large nongovernmental organizations) legitimize efforts to move immigration out of the realm of "normal politics" and into that of "emergency politics" - a realm where allegations that have no basis in fact can trigger extreme government responses that have no basis in law.

This seems accurate enough. But at the same time, it reminds me of Rebecca Solnit's complaint that the Left tends to overlook what she calls "liberation conspiracies." The villains in Koulish's piece comprise a vast, powerful network that "mass-produces and localizes fear in novel ways." His vision of resistance is somewhat less imposing:

We should all decry this manipulative and racist "assault on reason" in the local anti-illegal immigrant ordinance campaign.

Fair enough...consider it decried! I hope this'll be a sufficient rebuke to "officeholders, the media and large nongovernmental organizations," and that they won't force me to demonstrate the indomitability of the human spirit by producing a photograph of that guy who blocked the tanks in Tienanmen Square.

Kidding aside, I think part of the problem here is that upheaval and disaster are easy to describe in a compelling way, whereas utopia - or at least, any utopia worth believing in - isn't. Consider the gory particularity of Hell or the Tribulation in our literature and art, versus the wooly vagueness of Heaven. Whether the author is Dante, Milton, or Tim LaHaye, descriptions of suffering and oppression tend to be concrete and memorable in a way that goodness rarely is (perhaps because, as RMJ argues via Wittgenstein, it's "outside of the space of facts"). If I were inclined to overgeneralize - God forbid! - I'd wonder at this point whether it's possible for aestheticization not to be morbid. Without going to that extreme, I'd stand by this earlier assertion:

There's a real longing for upheaval and catastrophe in some quarters, and horror stories about the future - even if they're intended to shock people into awareness - may amount to little more than fuel for that fire....As odd as it sounds, we're simply going to have to offer people something a bit more fulfilling than the end of the world.

(Illustration: "Pandemonium" by John Martin, 1841.)

Locked Into Concrete

Randal O'Toole moistens a finger, thrusts it into the prevailing political breeze, and concludes that the time is right for yet another attack on the theory and practice of planning:

After 30 years of looking at government plans -- forest plans, park plans, transportation plans, city plans, state plans, all kinds of plans -- I've realized all government planning is bad.

If you're thinking back to your last interstate drive, or subway ride, or trip to a national park, and worrying that O'Toole is painting with a rather broad brush, think again. Indeed, if there's one thing in the world this genial man dislikes, it's oversimplification:

Cities, forests and so on are just too complicated to plan, so [planners] oversimplify, and since they don't pay the costs of their mistakes, they don't have an incentive to try to get it right.

One might just as easily say that cities are too complicated not to plan. But for now, we'll take O'Toole's argument at face value (except for the part about there being no incentive for good urban planning, which is utterly demented horseshit).

How do we solve the problems caused by our all-too-human lack of omniscience? Why, nothing could be easier!

I'm arguing that we need to stop planning. We need to repeal planning laws. Congress and the states should stop passing new planning laws.

That may seem impetuous to some readers, and agonizingly stupid to others. But consider this chilling fact: planning will never lead to an ideal outcome for every single resident of a city:

[C]ities are really, really complicated organisms. They consist of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Each of those people has different tastes, different travel needs, different housing needs and desires. It's impossible -- literally impossible -- to plan to the level of detail to make sure that everybody achieves what they need and want.

Well, yes. But that's not what planning is intended to do. And you'd have to be pretty fucking silly to imagine that any system could ensure "that everybody achieves what they need and want." You might as well argue that medicine is a failed project because it can't fulfill the public's demand for eternal life.

The fact that "most Americans prefer to live in a house with a yard" is interesting in psychological terms. But it doesn't have much to do with what's possible in the real world. Land and water are limited resources, last time I checked, and they're vulnerable to human activities. When you refuse to acknowledge those facts, as cornucopian goofballs like O'Toole have an unhappy tendency to do, you forfeit your right to accuse anyone else of oversimplification. And when you do acknowledge them, as sane people must, planning begins to seem like something of an...obligation.

O'Toole also argues that government planning is driven (unlike the planning of multinational corporations, I presume) by financial and political interests:

When government writes a plan, that plan gets locked into concrete because immediately special-interest groups consisting of people and businesses that benefit from that plan form to make sure that the plan never changes. So it becomes extraordinarily difficult to change the plan no matter how mistaken and costly it turns out to be.

And that, boys and girls, is how our nation came to be saddled with the vast terra mortua of Central Park, and why the Grand Canyon remains tragically undammed to this day.

That settles it, I guess. We can't plan our communities, the pretty conceits of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa or Christopher Wren or Baron Haussmann or Daniel Burnham or the Shakers notwithstanding. And we can't change how and where we want to live, which is as eternal as our love of Beauty and Truth. You can't fight human nature, although it's human nature to try.

The interesting thing is, every argument O'Toole makes against planning could just as easily be made against political involvement per se, which is probably not an accident. What he's actually attacking - much like an assassin who pretends to be a bodyguard - is personal responsibility and personal freedom. Instead of engaging ourselves, for better or worse, with real-world issues like carrying capacity and resource depletion, we're commanded to turn our troubles over to a higher authority, and let hierophants like O'Toole interpret the resulting signs and wonders. Good citizenship is simply a matter of going along with whatever O'Toole and his ilk claim is "good for business"; follow this splendid principle, and you're guaranteed a moral victory no matter what sort of misery you bring upon yourself and others.

This astonishingly weird and infantile approach to our collective Short Life of Trouble isn't liberating, except to those of us for whom infantilization is liberation. Even if planning were just as bad as O'Toole says, it'd still be morally preferable to free-market fundamentalism, if only to the extent that it prevents us from blaming our problems on "market forces."

(Illustration by Jules Guerin, from The Plan of Chicago by Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, 1909.)

My Appointed Rounds

CKR on the “ticking time-bomb" scenario that supposedly justifies legalizing torture:

The simple and justifiable response to the extreme scenario, whatever its details, is that the person deciding to use torture assumes responsibility for his actions. Later examination of the scenario determines whether or what punishment is suitable. Making law to suit the most extreme situations is always a bad idea.

Bryan Finoki on Camp Justice:

‘Camp Justice’ is – to its credit – just what it says it is: justice in the form of a camp. There is absolutely no pretense here whatsoever, nor can it be mistaken for anything else either, really, which is partially what makes it so disturbing. Not to mention how obnoxious and arrogant it is in its crude declaration of itself.

Question Technology on "techno-globalization hype" circa 1920, which includes this timely quote from George Orwell:

Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic 'progressive' books, I was struck by the automatic way people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are the 'abolition of distance' and the 'disappearance of frontiers'. I do not know how often I have met with statements that 'the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance' and 'all parts of the world are now interdependent'.

Smokewriting on Richard Dawkins and the Sokal Hoax:

The strategy Sokal and Bricmont employed in carrying out this assault, and which Dawkins (whose entire review amounts to little more than fawning submission to the argument from authority) takes as some sort of model of academic practice, basically runs as follows.

1. Take a short extract from a text, chosen more or less at random. I have selected Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.

The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.

2. Say ‘what the fuck was that about?’


3. Wait to be accepted as a new intellectual authority, whose name defenders of the Enlightenment everywhere can invoke in order to shut people up.

Roy Edroso on the poverty of conservatarian conspiracy theory:

Ad agencies don't get their strategies from Satan or the Democratic Party -- they get them from market data, laboriously collected and analyzed. And they employ them because they bring in money.

Conservatives often seem to miss, when raging about the stuff on their teevees, that it's really their beloved Invisible Hand that's slapping them in the face.

Last, but assuredly not least, The Disposal of Surplus Sodium, 1947. (Via Danger Room.

(Photo at top by Amy Stein, via Coudal.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

We have greeted great horned idols,
Thrones starry with luminous jewels,
Figured palaces whose fairy pomp
Would be a dream of ruin for a banker,

Robes which make the eyes intoxicated;
Women with tinted teeth and nails
And cunning jugglers caressed by Chromodoris annae.

(Photo by Richard Seaman.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The House has passed a bill that would drive a stake through the black heart of the General Mining Law:

A measure that would amend the General Mining Law of 1872 to establish environmental protections and eliminate land patenting passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday.

Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo, voted with the 244-166 majority and hailed the legislation for its environmental protections and reclamation requirements on hard-rock mining.

The act would prevent the sale of federal lands to miners, and force them to pay royalties on gross income from mining, which would go to a clean-up fund. (Bush claims he'll veto it, of course.)

Congress also seems to be willing to fund Amtrak:

The Senate passed legislation boosting Amtrak funding, as passenger rail is seen as part of the solution for global warming, traffic congestion and high oil prices....The bill changes the Amtrak debate by setting a goal for the passenger railroad to improve train service rather than to achieve financial self-sufficiency.

A garbage-burning stove could simultaneously reduce pollution in Kenya, and save its trees:

Through trial and error, the developers of the oven used technology that can produce temperatures of up to 930 degrees F., enough to burn many of the hazardous pollutants.

It uses a superheated steel plate inside the incinerator box to vaporize drops of water. The oxygen released then helps burn discarded "sump" oil from vehicles – itself a pollutant in the slums – driving temperatures higher.

A Chinese man claims to have invented a battery-recycling machine:

His machine distills the mercury from the batteries, then separates out the zinc, iron, and manganese for reuse. “Even if the batteries don’t pollute the environment, used batteries should still be recycled for the purpose of reusing resources,” said Wang.

He predicts it would cost roughly 2.5 million RMB (roughly US$350,000) to manufacture his machine on a larger scale.

In the wake of Uganda's ban on plastic bags, citizens are collecting discarded bags and making useful things out of them:

[L]ocal and international NGOs are helping Ugandans in a suburb of the capital city of Kampala to collect plastic bags and turn them into items like baskets, handbags, shoes and roofing tiles. The material would otherwise be left to clog drainage systems, contributing to flooding, or hurt livestock who eat and digest them.

In related news, DIY Life explains how to knit using plastic bags as yarn (link via Red State Green).

In other recycling news, Treehugger reports on a new line of designer clothing made from rejected Goodwill donations, and a UK retailer's attempt to recover "over-loved" sex toys. And Bill McKibben discusses waste-heat recovery:

A few years ago, a predecessor energy-recycling company installed this kind of equipment on the smokestacks of the plant's coke ovens. In 2004, this single steel plant generated roughly the same amount of clean energy as was produced by all of the grid-connected solar collectors throughout the world. Casten's company estimates that recycling waste heat from factories alone could produce 14 percent of the electric power the U.S. now uses. If you took much the same approach to electric generating stations you could, says Casten, conceivably produce the same amount of energy we use now with half the fossil fuel.

ENN has an interesting article on the economics of alternative energy in the Caribbean, which has some of the highest energy prices in the world:

In the Caribbean, PV solar systems are already getting close to the cost of generating electricity from fossil sources because of the intense sunshine and high cost of diesel, Once the production cost of PV solar systems further decreases, they will create savings for their owners. This will likely induce a massive breakthrough.

An even more rewarding source of solar energy in the Caribbean are solar water heaters. They produce abundant hot water and the installed cost can be as low as $800 for a 50 gallon system. In many cases they pay for themselves in two to three years, yet they are far from popular.

In New Delhi, meanwhile, "solar water heating systems are now mandatory for all hotels, hospitals, nursing homes, and commercial buildings."

Each 1,000 residential systems (of 100 L per day capacity) is expected to reduce peak electricity demand by 1 MW, a significant figure for a city whose energy demand is constantly increasing. When all city hospitals and hotels install solar water heating systems, the Power Department expects to reduce demand by 200 MW!

With that in mind, have a look at this.

IBM claims to have found a way to turn semiconductor wafers into solar panels:

The new process uses a specialized pattern removal technique to repurpose scrap semiconductor wafers -- thin discs of silicon material used to imprint patterns that make finished semiconductor chips for computers, mobile phones, video games, and other consumer electronics -- to a form used to manufacture silicon-based solar panels.

American cities are increasingly willing to consider dimming their lights overnight:

The International Dark-Sky Association in Tucson, which promotes better outdoor lighting, is intent on making the Milky Way visible to more people across the USA. It's starting to work.

Cities like Hilton Head Island, S.C.; Harmony, Fla.; and Jackson, Wyo., could soon become dark enough to join Flagstaff, Ariz., as the only dark-sky cities, says David Crawford, co-founder of the association.

The Deccan Herald reaffirms the efficacy of low-tech arsenic filters:

In recent years, about half a million villagers like Majeda have escaped the curse of arsenic-tainted water by using the sono filter.

"I don't know anyone who is using this filter who is still living with arsenic," said Abul Hussam, the inventor of the technology, speaking to AFP by telephone from his home in the eastern US state of Maine.

There's reportedly been a breakthrough in treating the fungal infection responsible for the worldwide die-off of amphibians:

Chloramphenicol, currently used as an eye ointment for humans, may be a lifesaver for the amphibians, they say.

The researchers found frogs bathed in the solution became resistant to the killer disease, chytridiomycosis.

Scientists are recording manatee sounds in hopes of preventing them from being killed and injured by boats:

“We will have a detailed picture,” said Athena Rycyk, a doctoral student at Florida State University working with Nowacek. “We will be able to ask questions like, what does a 20-foot boat traveling 200 meters from a manatee swimming in six feet of water sound like? This can help us determine what, if any, acoustical cues manatees do or do not react to.”

You can listen by clicking here.

Researchers have been trying to figure out whether African villagers could use bee sounds to protect their crops from elephants:

The Oxford team set up concealed loudspeakers in trees where elephants regularly came to find shade.

While the animals rested, researchers played either buzzing sounds recorded at beehives, or a control sound of white noise. The buzzing clearly had the animals concerned. Ninety-four percent of the elephant families left the tree within 80 seconds of hearing bee sounds, nearly half of the time at a run.

This makes me curious about how long, in an era of extinctions, such cues would remain effective after the disappearance of a given animal. But that's a rumination for another, less festive day. Getting back to the story, the fact that elephants would soon become accustomed to the buzzing has led to discussion of beehive fences:

[T]he passage of a hungry elephant would trigger bees to start flying and buzzing, giving the animal cause to turn and not come back.

One experimental set-up involves suspending a chain of hives from stanchions, linked together by wires which would be disturbed by an elephant's leg.

I'm pleased to announce that the world's hottest chile pepper has been discovered:

In replicated tests of Scoville heat units (SHUs), Bhut Jolokia reached one million SHUs, almost double the SHUs of Red Savina, which measured a mere 577,000.

One faction of the Klan is protesting another:

Ken Mier, who described himself as an investigator for the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and the national office of the Ku Klux Klan LLC, said in an e-mail to The Cullman Times that his group is against the tactics of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which held an anti-immigration protest last month in Athens.

"We are opposed to the ignorance and stupidity as displayed by the individuals that thumbed their nose at the area churches by continuing to use racial slurs, threats and avoided Christian deportment," he said.

Or, as the Klansmen on Reno 9/11 would say, "We're not burning a cross...it's a T, for 'tolerance'!"

Bruce Schneier alerts me to a fascinating paper on architecture and paranoia:

(In)Security questions the ideas of freedom, security, fear and complacency within the United States, and challenges our nation’s current philosophy that security = freedom. The project’s aim is to invent a new barricade vocabulary that can be applied to each of the existing security checkpoints, creating viable security alternatives while simultaneously maintaining their visibility, and prodding people to ask themselves just how much of their personal freedom they are willing to relinquish in order to assuage their fears.

Four security barricades were conceived. By creating thresholds into and throughout the district, (In)Security sets the tone for the experiences within this walled city. During the design process, archaic and contemporary methods of fortification were researched. Each barricade is an investigation of both fortification and subversion; designing for the defense of each checkpoint, while simultaneously attempting to undermine it's perceived raison d'être through a means of confrontation, provocation, or absurdism.

Here's a description of one such barricade:

A set of five, staggered, steel prongs reaches upward out of a ridged cor-ten plate, meeting pedestrians at face level. The tectonic hybrid of tire spikes and medieval Abbatis castle fortifications, their precise arcs allow for only shallow intrusion into existing street infrastructure. As a vehicle approaches, the prongs retract. A slow, mechanical clanking of a single gear alerts those nearby that the gate is opening. The prongs in turn emerge from the opposite side acting as a lock system, restraining the vehicle for inspection. After the vehicle is cleared for entry, the prongs then retract in the opposite direction allowing, the vehicle access, and resetting themselves to their initial positioning.

A nice idea, I think.

Smart Mobs suggests that you click here to test your vocabulary and provide rice to needy countries. Make of this what you will.

An important pre-Columbian site has been discovered in Puerto Rico:

The archaeologists believe the site in southern Puerto Rico may have belonged to the Taino or pre-Taino people that inhabited the island before European colonization, although other tribes are a possibility. It contains stones etched with ancient petroglyphs that form a large plaza measuring some 130 feet by 160 feet, which could have been used for ball games or ceremonial rites....

The petroglyphs include the carving of a human figure with masculine features and frog legs.

In other archaeological news: vampirism in New England.

"When the grave was opened, JB's skull and thigh bones were found in a skull and crossbones pattern on top of his ribs and vertebrae, which was also rearranged."

I was completely floored, this week, by Brian Dettmer's Book Autopsies, whence comes the photo at top. And Luminous Lint has a marvelous exhibition of the photographs of Homer Sykes, which depict traditional British customs like the Haxey Hood Game:


You'll find plenty of interesting photos and other aesthetic flotsam at Dirty Beloved (via Things). And at Micscape, Richard Howey explores the "crystalline labyrinths" of Vitamin C:



At parenthetically, Angela waxes enthusiastic over color charts. Apropos of which, color mapping "reveals neurons of the CA1 area and their dendrites" in the brain of a mouse.


Also: 1960's Polaroid Pictures of Signs, a flickr set by Roadsidepictures. Photos by migrant workers at The Photo Essay. An amazing collection of Victorian ephemera at The Trade Card Place. Antique audio at Phonozoic. And 24 paintings by Sidney Nolan (including the instructive "Tarred and Feathered," 1946).

A Delicate Matter

Longtime readers know how enthused I am about Greenland's bid to become the Tahiti of the Arctic. It's not just the idea of being served mango and breadfruit by zaftik Norse beauties wearing coconut-shell brassieres that appeals to me (though you can be sure that in that regard, I'm as human as the next gink). It's also my conscience, which cries to me in the wee small hours that the Greenlanders have suffered enough. Must they be blasted by subzero winds, or menaced by sleet, or annoyed by walruses simply because they have the misfortune to be situated in the realms of the Boreal Pole?

The New York Times seems to agree with me, to some extent. A new article by Sarah Lyall explains that Greenland is movin' up, yo, and no hataz need apply:

Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests....

“The limiting factor for human survival here is temperature, and there’s a lot of benefits with a warmer climate,” Mr. Hoeg said. “We are on the frontier of agriculture, and even a few degrees can make a difference.”

After bringing Greenland's history to radiant life by describing Erik the Red as "pugilistic," Lyall explains that yes, a few degrees really can make a difference:

Climate is a delicate matter in a place like this. A degree more of warmth here, an inch less of rain there; these can have serious repercussions for a farmer eking out a living raising sheep on the harsh terrain.

Can you believe it? It's a real-life science-fiction world where shifts in climate actually have agricultural repercussions. Makes you glad to live in America, where rain invariably follows the plow (unless we sin against the Holy Spirit, as Atlanta did when it proclaimed itself "the city too busy to hate").

Lyall does note that

Greenland’s great ice sheet, a vast white landscape of 0.695 million square miles covering 80 percent of the island’s land mass, is melting rapidly, alarmingly, with repercussions not only for the traditional way of life on an island of 56,000 people, but also for the rest of the world. The more the ice melts, the higher sea levels will eventually rise.

In Greenland's semi-inhabited south, however, "the changes are more subtle and carry more promise."

More promise, that is, than extinctions, hunger, and worldwide flooding.

A Lesser Evil

Rumor has it that Beijing plans to clear away its air pollution with cloudseeding:

China has announced plans to induce rain in Beijing in the days before the 2008 Olympics in an effort to clean the air. Scientists are wary about the effects of the process.

It’s interesting to compare this story with a similar story from last year:

Rain won't be the only threat when the Olympics take place in 2008. Beijing's smog is as big a threat to China's image-makers as a few raindrops.

That's somebody else's problem, says weather guru Zhang: "I can't do anything about the air pollution."

The widespread practice of cloudseeding has led to disputes between Chinese cities. Oddly enough, the attempt to modify weather tends to make ordinary weather events seem sinister:

One Zhoukou official accused Pingdingshan of intercepting clouds that would probably have drifted to other places.

These rather surreal conflicts notwithstanding, the question of whether cloudseeding actually increases rainfall remains open:

A 2003 report by the US National Academy of Sciences…concluded that after over 30 years of trying, "there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts."

I mention all this as the preamble to an interesting article on the ethics of geoengineering by Professor Steve Gardiner at the University of Washington, Seattle. Gardiner addresses Paul Crutzen’s argument that geoengineering may be a “lesser evil” than runaway climate change, and should accordingly be researched now in case it becomes “necessary” later:

It is not silly to think that substantial investment in geoengineering will itself encourage political inertia on mitigation and adaptation, and also facilitate the actual deployment of geoengineering "solutions". In short, Crutzen treats the decision to do research and the decision to deploy as if they were causally isolated. But it is not clear what justifies this assumption - indeed, the history of technological innovation suggests otherwise.

This is precisely correct, and it can’t be overemphasized. The similarity to space-based missile defense would be striking even if fanatical star warriors like Lowell Wood weren’t already positioning themselves to cash in on it. Money warps the perception of options like gravity warps space-time, and it’d be a shame if the self-justifying “necessity” of some geoengineering project caused us to overlook more practical adaptive tactics, like installing gills in Glenn Reynolds’ neck.

Gardiner also finds fault with the notion that geoengineering might be justified, despite its risks, by the state of exception in which the changing climate has placed us. The fact that we’ve put the world in grave danger doesn’t automatically ennoble whatever flailing attempt we make to remedy the situation, any more than our invasion of Iraq has ennobled torture or indefinite detention or the erection of security walls. As Gardiner notes, “there seems to be an important difference between preparing for an emergency and preparing for an emergency that is to be brought on by one's own moral failure.”

The most cogent argument to be made for geoengineering is that we’re already doing it, and may as well get good at it. It’s agreeably romantic to believe in Virgin Nature, but romanticism about virginity generally does more to enable brutality and exploitation than to oppose it.

On the other hand, “in for a penny, in for a pound” isn’t a very good guideline for ethical decision-making. And I’m not comforted by the idea that future climate change may result from techno-messianic busywork instead of shortsighted greed. Gardiner’s prescriptions – which include alternative energy research, “a massive international climate assistance and refugee programme,” and “a very substantial compensation fund” – seem a lot more sane, ethical, and achievable.

(This post originally appeared on 4/27/07. I hope to have time to write some new ones after the weekend.)