The Week in Denialism

Ken Green has discovered shocking new proof that climate modeling is inaccurate:

Gore claims that “Recent evidence shows the climate crisis is significantly worse and unfolding more rapidly than those on the pessimistic side of the IPCC projections had warned us...”

Isn’t this, in effect, an admission that scientists with computer models can’t predict the future?

Touché, I guess.

If you've been dying to know what Pat Boone thinks about climate change, your wait is over:

Some months ago, while driving back home from an engagement, I became fascinated with George Noory's late-night radio interview with a solar physicist, one of a number of very dedicated scientists who actually watch and analyze the sun itself, and its ongoing powerful effects on planet earth....

[W]hile the main topic of discussion on Noory's program that night was the remarkable list of prophecies recorded by ancient Aztecs from centuries ago -- gleaned somehow from their study and even worship of the sun -- the guest scientist brought up the concern solar physicists share about "new, unexplained activity and disturbances" on the surface of that giant fireball in space!

As far as I can tell, Boone is talking about John Jay Harper, a clinical hynotherapist who has written a book called 2012: Fact or Myth? At the risk of shocking you, a search of Noory's site doesn't turn up any guests who qualify as solar physicists. Perhaps a careful survey of Aztec calendar stones can explain this anomaly.

One of the things that impressed Boone about this so-called physicist was his habit of speaking "assertively," as thus:

"Men's actions can and do affect his local environment, but neither man nor machine is powerful enough to seriously disturb our global ecology or our weather patterns."

Evidently, there's some physical mechanism that prevents myriad, ongoing local effects from having global ones. Maybe Noory's guest can win this year's Nobel prize in physics by telling us what it is.

Boone's column is worth noting mainly because it allows us to contrast his genial idiocy with the black-hearted dishonesty of the Wall Street Journal:

No one disputes that higher temperatures in the bear's Arctic habitat have disrupted the sea ice that bears use to catch food and breed. The problem is that polar bear populations have been rising over the last four decades, and may now be at an historic high. This is the result of conservation management, including international agreements on trophy hunting and federal safeguards like the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Why is this a "problem"? Because as usual, the gimlet-eyed scourges of "junk science" find it inconceivable that polar bears could simultaneously be rebounding from overhunting, and be threatened by loss of habitat.

This editorial also introduces us to the pejorative term "warmists," which apparently refers to people who agree with the WSJ "that higher temperatures in the bear's Arctic habitat have disrupted the sea ice that bears use to catch food and breed."

The term probably doesn't apply to U.S. trade rep Susan Schwab, who complains that climate change is being used as a pretext for protectionism:

"We have been dismayed at a variety of suggestions where we have seen the climate and the environment being used as an excuse to close markets," Schwab said.....

If we lived in some science-fiction world where it was possible for human activities to have an effect on the climate and environment, I suppose there could be another explanation. But as we don't....

(Illustration from The World Turned Upside Down, or No News, and Strange News, circa 1820.)

Sunday Music Blogging

I'm going to be pretty busy over the next few weeks, at least, and it's unlikely that I'll be able to do much blogging. Which is probably just as well, given how scatterbrained the last batch of posts has been.

I may manage some reposts, film clips, links to other (better) sites, and the like. Anyone who wants to take over Friday Hope Blogging, or post some nudibranch pics, is more than welcome!

Best wishes to you all, meanwhile. And thanks.

XOXOXOXO,

P

Saturday Dancing Pig Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

I study the lives on a leaf: the little
Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions,
Beetles in caves, newts, stone-deaf fishes,
Lice tethered to long limp subterranean weeds,
Squirmers in bogs,
And Thuridilla picta
Wriggling through wounds
Like elvers in ponds,
Their wan mouths kissing the warm sutures,
Cleaning and caressing,
Creeping and healing.

(Photo by jlyle.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The Navy has abandoned plans to build a landing field near a wildlife refuge that "hosts more than 100,000 snow geese and tundra swans, and other waterfowl each winter":

“This is a tremendous victory for the local community and the wildlife refuge that would be devastated by the operation of a landing field at the proposed site. We salute the Navy’s ultimate recognition that this was not the place for an OLF,” said Derb Carter, director of the Carolinas office of the Southern Environmental Law Center which represented the environmental interests in the case.

In related news, a judge has ruled that the DoD's proposed airstrip in Okinawa violates the National Historic Preservation Act:

The lawsuit sought to compel the U.S. Department of Defense to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act by conducting a complete public assessment of the impacts of the proposed project on the dugong — a relative of the manatee sometimes known as “sea cows” — so that actions could be taken to avoid or mitigate any adverse affects. The National Historic Preservation Act requires agencies of the U.S. government to consider the impacts on cultural and historic resources in other nations when undertaking activities outside the United States.

Saudi Arabia claims it will allow women to drive:

Saudi Arabia is to lift its ban on women drivers in an attempt to stem a rising suffragette-style movement in the deeply conservative state. Government officials have confirmed the landmark decision and plan to issue a decree by the end of the year.

In partnership with several other corporations, IBM is creating an Eco-Patents Commons:

The Eco-Patent Commons will start with the donation into the public domain of 31 patents that cover everything from a manufacturing process that reduces volatile compounds to a natural coagulant used to purify industrial waste water.

On Monday, a Web site that hosts the patents is scheduled to launch. The patent commons will be administered by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, a Geneva-based organization devoted to promoting sustainability in business.

There's talk of using rain to generate electricity:

Jean-Jacques Chaillout and colleagues at the atomic energy commission (cea) in Grenoble, France, have shown that piezoelectric materials, which generate voltage in response to mechanical force, can be made to produce useful amounts of electrical power when hit by falling rain. “we thought of raindrops because they are one of the still-unexploited energy sources in nature,” Chaillout says.

Orion has a long article on anti-coal activism:

Can the environmental movement muster the necessary clout to overcome the combined forces of Big Oil and Big Coal? To Big Green advocates like Hawkins and Thompson, it’s a fantasy to think that America won’t continue using coal and oil. To grassroots activists like LaPlaca, Overland, and Muller, the fantasy lies in the opposite assumption: believing that the world can survive without a radical shift away from fossil fuels. “Big Green has the resources,” said Muller, “but the grassroots is where it’s happening in terms of leadership, in terms of work, and in terms of results. To anybody who’s following this, I’d say don’t bet too much money on coal right now.”

Just for the record, more than 50 proposed coal plants were canceled or delayed in 2007.

AIDG Blog explains its Rocket Box stove:

The Rocket Box uses 50-60% less firewood than traditional cookstoves and fires. This provides a huge costs savings for families that buy fuel wood. For instance, women we interviewed at San Alfonso, a cooperative in Guatemala, reported spending 28-56% of their monthly income on wood.

This stove design shows similar fuel efficiency to masonry stoves, but is up to 50% cheaper. Being portable, it is particularly useful in communities where residents are living in temporary housing and/or want more flexibility in where the stove is placed in their home. Like most good ‘improved’ stoves, it comes equipped with a chimney that vents smoke out of the home and thus cuts exposure to the ‘killer in the kitchen’.

Behold the economy-annihilating horror of renewable energy standards:

SCHOTT solar is opening a brand new solar energy technology production facility in the Mesa del Sol region of Albuquerque, NM....SCHOTT was attracted to New Mexico thanks in part to the State’s commitment to the consumption of renewable energy....The long-term economic impact of the site is expected to exceed $1 billion for the state of New Mexico.

Other frightening steps towards neotroglodytism: Whole Foods has vowed to stop using plastic bags by April, and Ontario is ending its ban on clotheslines.

Cuba has banned the hunting of marine turtles:

The decision was applauded by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as a lifeline to all turtle species hatching on beaches throughout the Caribbean, but above all the critically endangered hawksbill turtle.

The ban took effect this weekend, said the Cuban Fisheries Ministry's director of regulations, Elisa Garcia. She said it would remain in effect "until it is scientifically proven that the species is recovering."

Revere has some modest good news about avian flu:

For some time the absence of mild or inapparent infections has been worrying. It means that the current case fatality ratio of over 60% is the real CFR, not one based on just the most serious cases coming to the attention of the surveillance system. Now scientists gathered in Bangkok at one of the many gatherings of those studying the disease have heard some new data involving 674 people in two Cambodian villages exposed to influenza H5N1 ("bird flu") by infected poultry in their households. Seven children were found to have been infected using a test of their blood for antibodies. Seven is 1% of these exposed people, so it is still consistent with low transmissibility to humans. But scant data from previous investigations of health care workers or villagers in infected areas had not turned up evidence of mild infection, so this is good news. Not all H5N1 cases are serious or fatal disease.

Also, the universal influenza vaccine has reportedly been tested successfully in humans:

The British-American biotech company Acambis reports the successful conclusion of Phase I trials of the universal flu vaccine in humans. The universal influenza vaccine has been pioneered by researchers from VIB and Ghent University. This vaccine is intended to provide protection against all ‘A’ strains of the virus that causes human influenza, including pandemic strains. Therefore, this vaccine will not need to be renewed annually.

This is fascinating:

A study of how female lark buntings choose their mates, published this week in Science, adds a surprising new twist to the evolutionary theory of sexual selection. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, discovered that female lark buntings show strong preferences for certain traits in the males, but those preferences change from year to year.

And this is funny.

I was impressed this week by Kevin Cooley's eerie photos of Southern California (via Coudal). And by Matt Callow's pinhole photographs.


But that's nothing compared to Kolmanskop, a ghost town buried in sand:


You'll also want to visit Doodles, Drafts and Designs: Industrial Drawings from the Smithsonian (via Things).


Plep alerted me to an exhibition of Victorian Sheet Music at BibliOdyssey, which I'd somehow overlooked.


Last things last: Preliminary Flickr sets from the Library of Congress. Nu-real: a timeline of fantastic photomontage and its possible influences, 1857 - 2007. And a haunting survey of Japan's scarecrow mannequins.


(Photo at top via Good.)

The Politics of Possibility

As the price of oil skyrockets, and we discuss past and future "surgical strikes" on Syria and Iran, the U.S. Energy Secretary asks our Middle Eastern friends whether they've ever considered the advantages of nuclear power:

Gulf Arab oil exporters and countries around the world should look into nuclear power as an alternative to hydrocarbons, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said on Monday.

"Nuclear power should be an alternative for Gulf countries and other countries around the world," Bodman said in the United Arab Emirates during a visit.

Meanwhile, in the American Southeast, the ongoing drought may force nuclear plants to shut down:

Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn't result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region's utilities may be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.

And in the American Southwest, people are falling in love all over again with oil shale, the perennial fuel of the paleo-future. Estimates of how much water it'd take to develop this low-grade oil range from ghastly to staggering; one thing it's fairly safe to say is that a (subsidized, artificial) oil shale boom would result in a massive influx of thirsty new residents, much as the tar sands boom did in Alberta.

With these stories in mind, it's interesting to learn that farmers in California are thinking it might be more profitable to sell their (subsidized) water to cities, instead of using it to grow crops:

In a state where water has become an increasingly scarce commodity, a growing number of farmers are betting they can make more money selling their water supplies to thirsty cities and farms to the south than by growing crops....

"It just makes dollars and sense right now," said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer in Northern California's lush Sacramento Valley. "There's more economic advantage to fallowing than raising a crop."

All of which can only mean one thing: it's time to transcend the politics of limits, and embrace the politics of possibility.

(Photo: Ship stranded in Aral Sea.)

A Lack of Judgment

In one of those sweeping gestures for which he's justly famous, William Saletan has formally approved the proposition that "the ideal amount of teen sex is zero."

We're still waiting to learn how much and what kind of teen masturbation is ideal, if any. Perhaps Saletan can prepare some diagrams for us with his free hand.

Putting aside the question of whether it's seemly for a grown man to spend so much time fretting officiously over the sex lives of other people's children, I think the belief that teenagers are "good" to the extent that they're nonsexual says a lot more about us than it does about who they are, or should be. The modern concept of childhood exists more for the benefit of adults than children; innocence is the shadow cast on them by our own guilt.

In too many American families, adolescence recapitulates Eve's temptation by the Serpent: will these little angels remain pure, or will they corrupt themselves by learning things they shouldn't know and thus, in a certain uncomfortable sense, becoming our equals? (Girls, of course, can also be accused of failing to manage a valuable resource properly...by preferring use value to exchange value, as it were.)

It's no wonder that as unease about sex increases, the ultimate symbol of "childhood innocence" becomes the fetus, or even the stem cell. According to this school of thought, children shouldn't be seen or heard; they should be imagined.

Real children, meanwhile, get punished for turning out to be human after all...despite all our good-natured attempts to treat their sexuality as something that can vaccinated against like measles, or cured like strep throat. They suffer when they try to live up to our fantasies, and they suffer when they fall short of them.

That's OK, though, because the underlying fear is not so much that children will suffer excessively because of sex, but that they won't (which, among other problematic things, would prove the Knights of Purity wrong on a fairly fundamental point).

Like the people who piously invoke the ideal of "colorblindness" in order to ignore everyday proof of racial inequality, Saletan hopes to lead us to Heaven by settling down comfortably in Hell:

It's absurd to have to say this, but judgment isn't a bad word. You can moralize without losing your soul.

It hadn't occurred to me that judgment is what's been missing from the national discussion about teen sex, but Saletan surely wouldn't say it if it weren't true. Evidently, things will change for the better only if we don't.

Who Needs Facts?

Tom Sears, a "professor of accounting" in upstate New York who has unaccountably been given a column in the Oneonta Daily Star, knows something you don't:

[W]hat you are doing now has in no way a significant impact on global warming. Man is not to blame for global warming.

How does Sears know this? Well, first off, because S. Fred Singer told him so:

A great book to read is "Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1,500 Years" by S. Fred Singer. In it, he points out that the science in Gore's movie is shoddy at best, and then proceeds to back up his claims.

As Joseph Romm notes, one of the many problems with Singer's "every 1,500 years" theory is that as far as we know, there wasn't a comparable global warming trend 1,500 years ago.

Regardless, this is Sears' cue to launch into that classic denialist mantra, everyone's stupid but me:

The global warming advocates and their sophisticated models can't explain the Medieval Warm Period from 900-1300 and then the Little Ice Age from 1500-1800, to say nothing of the countless number of cooling and warming cycles before these two examples.

Right. Because anthropogenic global warming is predicated on, and can only occur in, a world that has never warmed or cooled naturally. If you accept anthropogenic warming, you must reject natural warming, and vice versa.

Just for the record, here's the NOAA's take on the Medieval Warm Period:

In the early days of paleoclimatology, the sparsely distributed paleoenvironmental records were interpreted to indicate that there was a "Medieval Warm Period" where temperatures were warmer than today....The idea of a global or hemispheric "Medieval Warm Period" that was warmer than today however, has turned out to be incorrect.

But again, even if the NOAA were mistaken on this point, it wouldn't follow that the current (and far more rapid) warming trend must be natural.

Next, Sears puts the final nails in AGW's coffin by noting that it's depressing, and that it's a common topic of conversation among people he doesn't like:

Everything has been blamed on global warming -- wildfires, Darfur(!) and dying polar bears. Barbara Boxer said global warming was to blame for a poor 14-year-old boy who died from "an infection caused after swimming in Lake Havasu" (warmer water, you see). Who needs facts?

Sears' argument here is fascinating, in that he accepts that the climate is getting warmer, but is outraged by the idea that a warming climate could lead to more wildfires, or fewer polar bears, or regional instability, or warmer water that hosts a wider range of pathogens. Once you've conceded that the world is warming, it seems as though you'd have to accept these outcomes as at least possible. But apparently, Sears has been immunized against climatological reality by the sole concession he was willing to make to it.

Which makes his parting advice all the more poignant:

So listen, people. Use common sense.

(Illustration from "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Cornell University, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 77, no 6, p 1121-1134 (1999). Via Denialism Blog.)

Stupid Smart Machines

In consumer technology, as in biology, mutations tend to be useless or maladaptive. The Taser isn't improved by being combined with an mp3 player, unless you believe that two capabilities are automatically better than one, no matter how incompatible they may be. I think it's fair to suggest that turning a dangerous weapon into yet another lifestyle accessory - one that distracts you from your surroundings, no less - makes users and innocent bystanders less safe.

Now, there's talk among Serious People of marketing a cellphone that doubles as a radiation detector:

"The likely targets of a potential terrorist attack would be big cities with concentrated populations, and a system like this would make it very difficult for someone to go undetected with a radiological dirty bomb in such an area," said Longman, who also is Purdue alumnus. "The more people are walking around with cell phones and PDAs, the easier it would be to detect and catch the perpetrator. We are asking the public to push for this."

Let's imagine for a moment that I'm an actual terrorist, rather than a member of that Islamopacifascist fifth column, the American Left. Let's suppose further that I have access to radioactive material, and that I don't want it to go undetected. What's to stop me from putting it in magnetic containers on the undercarriage of UPS trucks, or crosstown buses? Or taping it under subway or taxicab or bicycle seats? Or floating it down rivers and canals? Or mailing it?

It seems to me that anyone who took these steps could cost one or more cities a great deal of money, and citizens a huge amount of trouble and worry, while undermining whatever remained of public faith in our "protectors." This is a perfect example of how easily anti-terrorist technology can become a readymade weapon, or a force multiplier, making us more vulnerable to disruption and despair as well as to violence. Schemes like this one are the technocratic equivalent of an autoimmune disorder.

If these modern-day Tom Swifts have considered this argument, they're keeping quiet about it:

The system could be trained to ignore known radiation sources, such as hospitals, and radiation from certain common items, such as bananas, which contain a radioactive isotope of potassium.

"The radiological dirty bomb or a suitcase nuclear weapon is going to give off higher levels of radiation than those background sources," Fischbach said. "The system would be sensitive enough to detect these tiny levels of radiation, but it would be smart enough to discern which sources posed potential threats and which are harmless."

Which would be great, in theory, if human beings of average intelligence weren't more than smart enough to outwit it, and to turn it against us.

In other news, our infrastructure is crumbling. Which is why it's disheartening to learn that research into this miracle cellphone "has been funded by the Indiana Department of Transportation through the Joint Transportation Research Program and School of Civil Engineering at Purdue."

God Rode In the Windstorm

Someone named Tamar Yonah notes that a tornado struck Jerusalem, Arkansas while Bush was en route to the Middle East:

It seems like this is just too uncanny that these are all 'coincidences'. On January 8, 2008 the day that President Bush left the USA for Israel in order to lay the framework for the establishment of a Palestinian State and the division of Jerusalem for its capital , a freak 'January' tornado swept through a city in Bush's own country. The place hit was 'Jerusalem', Arkansas. Coincidence?

One church was totally destroyed in the tornado’s path. The name of it was “Mt. Zion” Community Church. Coincidence?

Cynics might wonder how a tornado could travel across Arkansas without knocking down a church. Others might argue that it's not unusual for a town, or a church, in the Bible Belt to bear the name of a site in the Holy Land.

But consider this: My own research reveals that exactly nine years ago, on January 21, 1999, Yassir Arafat went to Cairo to meet with Hosni Mubarak "on the current status of the Palestinian peace track in light of the Israeli government freezing of its implementation of the Wye River accord." On that very day, a tornado touched down in Egypt, Arkansas!

And on January 4, 1946, an F-4 tornado struck Palestine, Texas...just as the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, under the direction of "Texas Joe" Hutcheson, was assembling in Washington DC "to examine political, economic and social conditions in Palestine as they bear upon the problem of Jewish immigration and settlement therein and the well-being of the peoples now living therein."

QED, as the saying is.

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Now we feel Hypselodoris bullocki to be inexhaustible
like an ancient wine
and no one can gaze on her without vertigo
and time has charged her with eternity.

And to think that she wouldn't exist
except for those fragile instruments, the eyes.

(Photo by Richard Smith, whose other work is equally breathtaking.)

Friday Hope Blogging

Uzbekistan has abolished the death penalty:

The trend towards total abolition of the death penalty has continued with Uzbekistan becoming the latest country to put an end to executions.

From 1 January 2008, it becomes the 135th country in the world to abolish the death penalty in law or practice.

The Jordanian parliament is attempting to address domestic violence:

The draft law, which still needs to be approved by the Senate before taking effect, imposes stiff penalties on violators, ranging from hefty fines to imprisonment of up to six months.

The bill also gives the authorities the power to detain perpetrators of domestic violence for 24 hours "in order to protect the victim" and the court has the right to bar perpetrators from approaching "safe houses" where victims are sheltered in order to guarantee their safety.

Meanwhile, in the Land of the Free, an attempt by fundamentalist groups to overturn the Student Civil Rights Act, which protects LGBT teens from discrimination, has failed:

Geoff Kors, executive director of Equality California, said...."Despite their vicious attack, Californians stood with us and said 'no' to turning back the clock on civil rights and protecting all youth from discrimination in our schools."

Pam Spaulding reports that "NJ Congressman Rush Holt has introduced a bill to help voting districts that want to either go with paper ballots or auditable machines for the 2008 election to fund the switchover in time."

The bill, dubbed the Emergency Assistance for Secure Elections Act of 2008, seeks to fix what many critics fear is a potential problem with paperless electronic voting machines — a lack of voter-verified paper records.

Thanks largely to pressure from ten veterans' groups, the VA will get $3.7 billion in emergency funding:

Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, said the emergency funds were needed because the veterans budget proposed by the president would have underfunded the Veterans Affairs Department at a time when there was a need to expand mental health care, improve treatment for traumatic brain injuries and reverse a claims backlog.

"This could not be allowed to happen," said Akaka, who wrote to the president urging him to release the extra money. "I am relieved that he has seen fit to do so."

Billboards are getting increasingly unpopular. Oklahoma City and Wyoming, MI are considering restricting them dramatically, and in Arizona, astronomers are doing their best to fight light pollution from digital billboards.

"The state is magical in terms of its clear night skies but we're concerned this kind of outdoor lighting will make it harder for the state's observatories to do their work," said Richard Green, director of the Large Binocular Telescope observatory in Tucson.

Last year, California gave taxpayers the chance to donate automatically to a sea otter preservation fund, by checking a box on their state income tax form; this program has raised $255,000, so far:

“Last year, Californians showed just how committed they are to the conservation of sea otters,” said Jim Curland marine program associate for Defenders of Wildlife. “The tax check-off gives people a great way to play a direct role in the recovery efforts for sea otters.”

The Sietch Blog reports on a bicycle that doubles as a water pump, purifier, and storage tank:

A peristaltic pump attached to the pedal crank draws water from a large tank, through a carbon filter, to a smaller clean tank. The clean tank is removable and closed for contamination-free home storage and use. A clutch engages and disengages the drive belt from the pedal crank, enabling the rider to filter the water while traveling or while stationary.

Sierra Leone has halted timber exports:

Sierra Leone's government has banned the exportation of timber after "indiscriminate destruction" by Chinese and other foreign businessmen, a senior official said on Monday.

David Roberts notes that Xcel Energy will spend $100 million to build a smart-grid city:

A smart grid would allow Xcel to charge higher rates during peak usage hours and lower rates during off-peak hours. Consumers could lower their monthly bills by performing power-consuming tasks, such as running the dishwasher, during off-peak hours.

"That's a pretty good way to take care of capacity issues," said Jon Caldara, president of Golden-based think tank Independence Institute. "I'm not a big fan of Xcel, but on this one, I think they're taking a step in the right direction."

Xcel plans to install in-home control devices in the smart-grid city to automate home energy use. The city would be outfitted with infrastructure to support renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. The city would also feature plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles that charge and discharge to the grid.

In related news, Google is investing $10 million in a solar-thermal company:

To serve the renewable electricity needs of utility-scale energy providers, eSolar has developed a market disrupting solar thermal power plant technology. Generation can be scaled from 25 MW to over 500 MW at energy prices competitive with traditional fossil fuels.

It often happens that air conditioners are used on very sunny days, so it makes sense to have them run off the grid on solar power. A Spanish company seems to have invented a small air conditioner that does just that:

From an operation point of view it is very simple: you put hot water in, you get cold water out, which you can run to a conventional fancoil. The hot water in can come from any source, but evacuated tube collectors, which used to be very expensive, are pretty affordable now.

Illinois farmers are taking a stand against a nightmare plan to build a pipeline from Albertan oil sand fields to Texas:

Several farmers are standing in Enbridge's way, however, refusing to let the company build the pipeline through their land. At a public meeting, Bob Kelly, 81, called Enbridge "highway robbers." He said there is no way he will allow the company to tear up farmland that has been in his family for 125 years. "It's not for sale at any price," he said.

Not all farmers agree, of course:

"It should be seen as progress to bring some crude oil down here to central Illinois," said John Gramm, 76, of Gridley. "It's good for business and labor, and it makes us less dependent on foreign oil."

The GOP needs to run this man for president, if you ask me.

Onwards and upwards. First off, ten minutes or so of ambient audio from Antigua, via AIDG Blog.

Next, condom envelopes from the 1930s and 1940s, via Coudal.


And some close-up views of sweets, sweet wrappers and candy.


From there, we'll proceed in an orderly fashion to James A. Scott Collection, which comprises before and after photographs of San Francisco, and the Willard E. Worden Glass Plate Negative Collection (both via Plep).


BibliOdyssey has a typically dazzling post on The Fugitive Beauties of Hexandria. National Geographic investigates The Emptied Prairie and finds "a sense of things ebbing" (recommended soundtrack: Extreme close up recording of a stem cell harvesting machine).

You'll find a couple of entertaining Laulupidu videos at WhirledView. (Also, check out the letter CKR sent to the presidential candidates on the bloggers' nuclear strategy consensus statement. Not sure what will come of this, but it strikes me as a shrewd and potentially very powerful use of the blogosphere as a sort of decentralized thinktank.)

Last, "Danse Macabre," a short film from 1922.



(Photo at top: "Dissin's Guest House, Washington, D.C. 1942" by Esther Bubley, via wood s lot).

A Past Long Gone

I'm sorry to report that Georgie Anne Geyer's faith in our country's "maturity" about race has been shaken:

It had furthermore become hard to imagine that any American candidates would dare to raise race in a negative manner. Those were the days of a past long gone, and thank God for it!

But just as I was reveling in joy at our maturing over race, we were struck by an unexpected challenge.

It's hard to imagine how this racially negative past could be described as "long gone," given that Tom Tancredo - whom Geyer previously praised as "truly eloquent" - only dropped out of the race in late December, and Ron Paul - whose wisdom Geyer says "is something we might attend to at our own gain" - is still in it.

Although public squabbling over race pains Geyer deeply this week, it wasn't very long ago that she was lamenting the chilling effect of "political correctness" on sober discussions of black and Hispanic inadequacy, as modeled by the racialist windbag Richard Lamm:

Lamm politely but firmly suggests that black and Hispanic cultures fall short of Asian and Jewish cultures in fostering ambition and success not because blacks and Hispanics are not as capable or smart, but because "different cultures give different signals, and some cultures are giving out stronger performance signals than others....”

In that column, Geyer went on to say that "the brilliant African-American scholar Shelby Steele" - a man who has explicitly mourned "the world-wide collapse of white supremacy as a source of moral authority" - thinks Lamm is right on the money, so you card-carrying members of the Grievance Industry can keep your talk of effort optimism to yourselves.

At any rate, we now know that it's "mature" for politicians to wax obsessive over the perils of multiculturalism while waving a copy of Victor Davis Hanson's Mexifornia, and "cynical" for them to engage in "a tedious argument" over which candidate is "the greater advocate of civil rights." If Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama want to win Geyer's honest heart, they'll take care to observe this distinction in future.

Just to make clear where I stand on the "inevitable" candidates themselves, I may as well post this immature but heartfelt comment from Eschaton:

I don't like their positions. Whether or not I like their personalities strikes me as totally irrelevant.

That said, there's no way either one of them is going to do as much damage to the US, or the rest of the world, as this country's kneejerk, dipshit misogyny and racism causes every fucking day of every goddamn year.

Can Your Heart Stand It?

Terrorist-coddling techno-hippie Bruce Schneier is trying to promote the pre-9/11 notion that constant abject fear is unhealthy:

[W]orrying about terrorism could be taking a toll on the hearts of millions of Americans. The evidence, published last week in the Archives of General Psychiatry, comes from researchers who began tracking the health of a representative sample of more than 2,700 Americans before September 2001. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the scientists monitored people’s fears of terrorism over the next several years and found that the most fearful people were three to five times more likely than the rest to receive diagnoses of new cardiovascular ailments.

Sounds bad, alright. But I know of some things that are even more unhealthy. Being decapitated by Islamic terrorists who then use your head, and the heads of your golden-haired children, as hand-puppets in an anti-Israel kids' show on Al-Jazeera, for instance. Or bleeding to death through your urethra, thanks to some new disease that's being cooked up right now in a filthy Iranian yogurt vat. Or turning the country over to Barack Hussein-Osama, a Black Muslim fanatic who took his oath of office on the Holy Bible so that he wouldn't be obliged to tell Americans the truth about anything, from his bone-deep hatred of Jesus Christ to his role in the transshipment of Saddam Hussein's WMD to Syria.

If there were only a .005 percent chance that one of these disasters could be imagined, we'd need to treat them all as 200-percent certain. However, I've just demonstrated that they're all imaginable, which means that the time for action may already have come and gone.

If I'm right, or even if I'm not, the one thing I can tell you for certain is that as the floodtide of Christian blood begins to rise around your ankles, you and your screaming, sobbing children will wish you could've lived long enough to die of cardiovascular disease. Verily, the living will envy the dead, and after they're dead, anyone still alive will envy them. That's how bad it is, and will be, until every Muslim on earth has either been killed, or forced to convert and then killed.

If you want to pretend that life is worth savoring, even when it's lived in the shadow of the Shamshir, good for you; you'll pay in suffering a thousandfold for every minute of fear-free existence you "enjoy." Speaking for myself, though, I hope fear weakens my heart; with any luck, it'll give out just as President Hussein-Osama opens the first mass-beheading facilities. I can guarantee that on that day, you people will wish you'd had my foresight.

(Photo via The Onion.)

Parallels, Correspondents, and Relations

I'd intended to avoid discussing Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Josef Mengele to Joseph Biden. I can't quite maintain my resolve, though. I find myself fixating not on the illogic of his argument, but on its logic, which is, as Brit Hume would say, "undoubtedly illustrative of something."

His methodology, for all its care and thoroughness, seems to boil down to weak analogical inference. If he can show that fascists and liberals share properties A, B, and C, then he can "reasonably" infer that they share property D.

There are certain pitfalls here. Sir Thomas Browne, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, attacks the belief "that all Animals of the Land, are in their kind in the Sea," which proceeded from the assumption that "from a similitude in some, it be reasonable to infer a correspondence in all," and ended in "conjoyning as it were the species of things which stood at distance in the intellect of God."

Superficially, this complaint is similar to Bacon's observation that "while there are many things in Nature unique, and quite irregular, still [the human intellect] feigns parallels, correspondents, and relations that have no existence." Ultimately, though, Browne's theological objection to correspondence, as a blurring of distinctions between created kinds, points towards the creationist pseudoscience of baraminology, while Bacon's more logical objection points, tentatively, towards the scientific method.

Still, both men are reacting to the analogical excesses of an age in which, as Foucault said, "it was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them." It's this age, I'd argue, in which Goldberg and his ilk still live, partly due to temperament, and partly to laziness, but mainly because it gives them the tools and the latitude they need in order to earn a dishonest living.

I hasten to add that I'm not being entirely serious here; I have far too much respect for Renaissance mystics and logicians to hold them responsible for Goldberg, even if Goldberg's own methodology grants me permission to do so. Like liberalism and fascism, they're entirely and irrevocably different.

All the same, there's something to be said for recognizing that while Goldberg's logic may be different from ours, it "works"...at least within that shadow world from which he launches incursions against our own. Indeed - and this is the main point - it works much better in that world than our logic would. If you free yourself, for a moment, from your bias towards accuracy and honesty, and focus strictly on what gets personal and professional results, you can see that asking Goldberg to use commonly accepted standards of evidence and proof is like asking a tailor to use a railroad spike as a needle. You'd place him at a disadvantage, to say the least.

This, I think, is why it's almost pointless to criticize him for inaccuracy, and why we can take him somewhat seriously when he insists that he made his argument as carefully and thoroughly as he could; given the tools he couldn't allow himself to use, and the facts he was obliged to ignore in order to begin his project, let alone to complete it, it's probably true.

Like the baraminologists, he's forced to look for evidence of lineage where it must be, rather than where it is; to view fascism as a right-wing ideology would be to conjoin things that stand "at distance in the intellect of God." And like the baraminologists, he's caught between envying the power of a respected academic discipline, and being unable to meet its standards. Therefore, like so many other cranks, his tactic is to gather up an assortment of pleasing facts like some ideological bowerbird, arrange them in a pattern for which a "logical" explanation can be offered (as though the pattern were a natural phenomenon, instead of an invention), and peddle that explanation to people who want to enjoy the authority of Science without any of the responsibilities it imposes. (Bonus points are awarded for pretending that this charade intimidates the "academic trade unions," and that peer review is just a fancy name for groupthink. Or if you prefer, fascism.)

Apropos of common sense, it's worth mentioning that the Doctrine of Signatures is a commonsense theory: If a plant looks like a scorpion, it's logical to assume that it has some relation to scorpions. The beauty of theories based on resemblance is that they tend to make perfect sense within the social context that gives rise to them; the fact that they're very often wrong is a mere detail. They deserve to be right, and that's what counts.

Goldberg's approach is exemplary of right-wing history and science, in that its self-styled radicalism comes from its everyday simplicity, its reliance on what'll seem "obvious" to an idealized man in the street: If we'd really evolved from monkeys, there wouldn't be any monkeys left. If global warming were real, it wouldn't have snowed so much last week. If blacks get lower grades than whites, whites must be smarter than blacks. If Hillary Clinton worries, like Hitler, about the health of children, she must be a fascist. It's just common sense, and anyone who can't see it must not want to see it.

This militant appeal to common sense (i.e., to ignorance, misperception, prejudice, and wishful thinking) as an antidote to a decadent, liberal "offical" history is what makes Goldberg's outlook essentially pre- or even anti-modern, and it's typical of...well, we'll just leave it at "typical," for now.

(Illustration from Phytognomonica by Giambattista Della Porta, 1591.)

Vacuuming Up Data

Michael Tanji explains the problem with what he calls "attempting to gill-net bad guys" through mass surveillance:

It's bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What's worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys....

This is not a needle in a haystack problem; it’s a needle somewhere in an unidentified field in the western portion of Nebraska. The problem with vacuuming up data wholesale is that even with a lot of machine-based filtering, an intelligence analyst is left with a massive pile of rock in which may lay a speck of gold. Intelligence does not want, need, look at or even retain the VAST majority of what passes through the ‘Net, which is something privacy mavens conveniently leave out of their angrily worded press releases.

Although I agree with Tanji's basic point - how could you not? - I'm always troubled when people reject textbook authoritarian measures on the basis of their inefficiency, rather than their unconstitutionality.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument (and in spite of evidence to the contrary) that raw data on law-abiding citizens have no political or economic value, questions remain about what constitutes a red flag, and about the construction of what Bruce Schneier calls "an infrastructure of surveillance," and about what Dan Lockton calls "the creeping erosion of norms" regarding privacy rights. What intelligence wants ought to be less important, legally speaking, than what they're allowed to have and how they're allowed to get it.

With this in mind, it's interesting to consider this low-tech version of mass surveillance currently underway in Phoeniz, AZ:

"The protesters, several visibly armed with guns, have been verbally engaging anyone walking by that seems to look illegal or don't seem supportive of them," Strand said. "These are residents, students, business people, neighborhood and spiritual leaders."

In theory, this group's aim is to detect illegal immigrants, which they do by challenging people who "look illegal." In pursuit of their larger political goals, however, and as an expression of the basic animus that drives them, they also end up targeting people who "don't seem supportive" of their brave efforts to defend the Homeland:

Lynne Stevens smiled and pulled open her jacket, revealing her Smith & Wesson....She scoffed at the idea that her fellow protesters are causing harm to the neighborhood. "We just want to get the illegals out of here....It's a black-and-white issue," she said. "I'm here to run them off. You turn the light on them and they scatter like roaches."

I suspect that American citizens of all colors have scattered "like roaches" in order to avoid tangling with these overwrought, abusive, visibly armed loudmouths...not least because businesses around the protest site are reporting a 15-percent drop in customers. If I were heading to a business in this area, would I wear a t-shirt that might offend someone like Lynne Stevens? I suppose it'd depend on whether I felt like getting into a potentially dangerous shouting match with an armed fanatic.

The point being that this demonstrates one of the effects of "screening" on public behavior: it can cause people to feel more vulnerable, and to change their behavior accordingly. They may not take the route they'd planned, or shop where they'd intended to, or say what's on their minds, or what have you. They may do their best not to "look illegal," and to seem "supportive" (or at least neutral); this can then conveniently be portrayed as informed consent.

Ultimately, the threat isn't that ordinary citizens will get caught doing something we're not supposed to do; it's that we'll feel insecure doing things we have every right to do.

(Illustration via Susan E. Gallagher.)

The Gambols of Ghosts

If you're a frequent visitor to Planet Gore, you've probably noticed that posting has become semi-occasional, and that it's relied very heavily on Detroit News cartoonist Henry Payne. Could the site be fixin' to die, less than a year after a hundred thousand celebratory arcs of wingnut semen fell upon it like so much Cheeto-tinted tickertape?

If so, today's post by Roy Spencer should be considered the rhetorical equivalent of Cheyne-Stokes breathing:

Everyone has heard of "global warming deniers," which is what Al Gore (in his usual half-truth fashion) likes to call those of us who believe that current global warmth might not be man-made. Well, in my view the truly dangerous group of people out there are the "Reality Deniers" — those who not only believe that global warming is man-made, but also think that we can do something significant about it in the next 20 years or so.

Or as Dutch Schultz would say, "Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword!"

I'm prejudiced, of course, but I suspect that PG's woes are at least partially attributable to Jim Manzi's debate with Steven Milloy, which I discussed here. Although Manzi did his best to hew to the conservatarian party line, the fact remains that he pissed in one of the denialists' best-beloved wells, right in front of God and everybody.

A quick stroll through PG's archives shows that prior to June of 2007, the site averaged more than 100 posts per month. Manzi's dust-up with Milloy took place in the last few days of June; between July and September, posting declined dramatically. In November and December, it was down to about 17 posts per month (Algore, you'll recall, won his Nobel in October).

I should add that Manzi probably didn't convince anyone that Milloy is a liar, let alone that AGW is real. I remember reading an article about a warehouse owner who frightened away rats by playing a tape-loop of a rat being killed by a weasel; Manzi's posts - and Gore's prize - may've dampened PG's spirits in much the same way.

This is idle speculation, of course, and it's offered for entertainment purposes only. There are other possible explanations for PG's lack of activity, and not all of 'em involve the site going belly up. That said, my guess is that PG is indeed on its way out.

(Illustration: The gambols of ghosts according with their affections previous to the Final Judgement by William Blake, 1806.)

A White Army of Terror

Fox News offers shocking new proof that al-Qaeda doesn't fight fair:

Al Qaeda is building a white army of terror in the United Kingdom, according to the U.K.'s Scotland on Sunday.

This will make things much harder for the UK's white army of anti-terror:

Security experts say the growing number of white terrorists poses a serious threat because they are less likely to be detected than members of the Asian [?] community.

Want to build your own white army of terror? Here's how:

One reported strategy the terrorists use is to look for converts in prisons, where those in custody tend to be lonely and particularly susceptible. Recruiters comfort and support the inmate, with little mention — if any — to religion, according to the paper. Over time, conversations turn more radical.

This is altogether terrible news. I don't want to sound like an alarmist...but we're all gonna die! (Eventually.)

On the bright side, Western civilization does have an ace up its sleeve:

One of leading Muslim leaders [sic] disputed the claims of radicalization, saying Islam's strict moral code made it unattractive to many Westerners, the paper reported.

Mass murder is one thing, but giving up booze and porn is quite another. Thank heavens for Western decadence!

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

Congress seems to have thwarted BushCo's attempt to privatize thousands of environmental protection jobs:

Buried in the new budget bill is a complete ban on further activities directed toward outsourcing any Forest Service jobs. That legislation also severely limits any outsourcing-related activities within the Interior Department to $3.5 million to complete ongoing studies....

“Congress just put a bullet into the heart of the Bush administration’s strategy to commercialize resource management,” stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch, whoseorganization has campaigned against the Competitive Sourcing Initiative since 2002.

In related news, the administration has decided not to appeal a court decision that overturned new forest management rules, which, believe it or not, would've made logging easier and public input harder:

The Justice Department notified the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this week that it was withdrawing its appeal, saying that the other parties, including the timber industry, would do likewise.

"We are glad the Bush administration has thrown in the towel," said Trent Orr, an attorney for Earthjustice, one of the environmental advocacy groups that had challenged the new forest management rules in court.

China has announced that it will ban plastic bags:

This new law could have a considerably positive environmental impact, given that Chinese citizens "use as many as 3 billion plastic bags a day." The law is part of a larger campaign to fight "white pollution" in China, which includes other forms of rampant plastic and styrofoam use as well. This bold and surprising move demonstrates that the Chinese government is starting to take pollution concerns seriously.

Australia is following suit. Also in China, activists have compelled the government to relocate a chemical plant:

The decision, hailed as a milestone for China's environmental and democratic movements, follows the release of an environmental-impact assessment of the project at a public hearing in December. The relocation is even more surprising given that sources close to central government reveal the plant had been given the go-ahead because of the special relationship between Chen Youhao — the plant's Taiwanese investor and a fugitive of Taiwan — and some of China's top party leaders.

“This is the first time public opinion was properly expressed through official channels and had an impact on government policies,” says Liu Jianqiang, a Beijing-based environment writer who is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. Some commentators regard the orchestrated incident as the most significant public event in China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square student demonstration that was so brutally suppressed.

Andrew Dessler makes a point so obvious that it's easy to overlook: If the consensus on anthropogenic climate change is driven by the lust for research grants, as denialists claim, then why is the consensus that the science is pretty much settled?

[I]t should be obvious that the scientific community would be better off saying we're not sure that climate change is caused by humans: "It might be human-induced, but it might not be. What we really need is more money for models, satellites, and analysis."

After reading this, all the pieces fell into place; I suddenly realized that the denialists are part of the conspiracy they've been attacking. Sure, a couple of 'em may've started out as honest skeptics, but like everyone else who dabbles in atmospheric science, they were eventually pulled into a maelstrom of corruption from which no deliverance is conceivable. Battle ye not with Algore, lest ye become Algore!

Speaking of self-defeat, the wife of the founder of the Ozarks Minutemen is in a bit of trouble:

The wife of an Ozarks Minutemen founder has been charged with filing a false report after investigators determined her story about being raped and shot by three Hispanic men was untrue.

And Oral Roberts U. continues to implode:

Benny Hinn and I.V. Hilliard resigned as regents, where they were involved in making major school decisions, university spokesman Jeremy Burton said Thursday....Hinn and Dollar are among six televangelists being investigated by Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley to determine if the high-profile preachers violated their organizations’ tax-exempt status by living lavishly on the backs of small donors.

South Carolina's State Board of Education has rejected a creationist challenge to a standard biology textbook:

Today, in a stunning reversal of votes, the State Board of Education approved the Miller/Levine Biology Textbook that was under scrutiny. The vote went from 9-7 (vote in December) in favor of dropping the Miller/Levine textbook to 10-6 in favor of keeping the textbook on the list. This is a major victory for science education in the palmetto state.

A Swedish office will allegedly be warmed by the body heat of commuters:

Real estate firm Jernhusen AB believes the system can provide about 15 percent of the heating needed for a 13-storey building being built next to the Central Station in the Swedish capital.

There's also talk of using body heat to power cellphones.

A British hotel chain is building a recyclable hotel:

Budget hotel operator Travelodge said on Tuesday the steel modules could be dismantled if necessary at the end of the 120-room hotel's life and moved elsewhere -- and that the model could ultimately be used to build temporary hotels for sporting events or festivals.

Scientific American "proposes a massive, far-reaching plan to get solar power generating 69 percent of America’s electricity 35 percent of our total energy by 2050, thus replacing all of our foreign oil needs and slashing global warming emissions." It's worth a read.

New York City claims it will stop sourcing hardwoods from the Amazon:

In a meeting with representatives of environmental groups Rainforest Relief and New York Climate Action Group, Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe unveiled a plan to phase out the use of hardwoods logged from the rainforests of the Amazon, which the agency uses for benches, boardwalks and the decking of bridges in the thousands of parks and areas overseen by the department.

Also in NYC, deaths from HIV have dropped dramatically:

Between 2005 and 2006, death from HIV fell almost 15 percent, from 1,419 to 1,209, reflecting the lowest numbers since 1984 when 952 deaths from AIDS were recorded citywide.

Revere discusses a promising new test for influenza-like illnesses:

nstead of using tissue culture to isolate a virus, the new test uses polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to amplify any viral genetic material present and then employs identifiable beads coated with material specific to particular viral sequences to identify which viral genetic sequence was amplified. This eliminates both tissue culture and separate tests for each of the viruses, cutting total time down to about 6 hours instead of days....

This particular test could conceivably be part of a screen for an emerging pandemic not involving H1 or H3 subtypes. In addition, it is just the leading edge of more routine use of multiplex viral diagnostic tests. Once they are more widely employed we can expect to learn a great deal about the epidemiology of ILIs during the typical "flu season."

There's also word of a breakthrough in avian flu research:

This new paradigm should help researchers develop a better way to track the evolution of avian flu leading to human adaptation, Sasisekharan said. Now, they know to look for avian viruses that have evolved the ability to bind to umbrella-shaped alpha 2-6 receptors.

That knowledge could help them create vaccines tailored to combat a potential pandemic. Similarly, these findings will help in the development of more effective strategies for seasonal flu, which still is a leading cause of death.

In other medical news, researchers may have found a viable replacement for the problematic Dryvax smallpox vaccine.

Strictly No Photography is a site compiling "pictures taken where you are not allowed to take them." And Paleo-Future provides "a look into the future that never was," as thus:

Doubtless some day the operators will have to meet the problem of increased fuel costs, for consumption of gasoline cannot go on forever at the present rate. But the day seems far distant when curtailment will be necessary - so far distant that no one save a few scientists and government conservation people are giving it any thought.

(Both links via things).

You don't know all you should about Crossbill vocabulary. Or orgasm schematics.


Rosemarie fiore creates what she calls firework drawings from the residue of exploded fireworks. Here's a sample.


Furthermore: Shanghai cigarette cards. And a fine collection of photos, maps, and ephemera from Pantufla, organized by decade.


Last, some incredible time-lapse animations of heavenly bodies. And The Peleliu Project, a haunting photo series by James Fee.


(Photo at top: "A sprawling island universe, IC 342 would be a prominent galaxy in our night sky, but it is almost hidden from view behind the veil of stars, gas and dust clouds in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy. Similar in size to other large, bright spiral galaxies IC 342 is a mere 7 million light-years distant in the long-necked, northern constellation of the Giraffe (Camelopardalis). Even though IC 342's light is dimmed by intervening cosmic clouds, this remarkably sharp telescopic image traces the galaxy's own obscuring dust, blue star clusters, and glowing pink star forming regions along spiral arms that wind far from the galaxy's core." Via NASA.)

Life-Enhancing Progress

Jay Ambrose describes a bloodcurdling scheme that'll destroy American life as we know it:

I know this sounds far-fetched, but in their deep concern about saving energy, some congressional leaders meeting in secret have come up with an idea that goes by the code name "TCM." The acronym stands for "The Candle Mandate."

The idea, they think, is marvelous in its simplicity. To make Americans consume less electricity, they are going to outlaw electric-powered light inside and outside homes and workplaces....

[T]his step is perfectly in line with a provision in the nation's recently enacted, new energy law, a measure Congress approved and President Bush signed. It does not go quite so far as TCM, but in its potential sabotage of life-enhancing progress, is headed in exactly the same direction.

Ambrose eventually acknowledges that "The Candle Mandate" is just something he made up, though it'd be very easy to miss this little detail, especially if you're ignorant or crazed enough to see his argument as coherent.

What I find funny about this - besides...well, everything - is that for Ambrose, Progress is represented by a technology that we've "been using since Thomas Alva Edison and his co-inventors came up with a carbonized filament that could last for 1,000 hours and more 125 years ago."

Within the next 12 years you will have to start using bulbs consuming 30 percent less electricity, meaning the bulbs you've learned to love will have to go.

Are we so callous, so unfeeling, so spiritually inert, that we would turn our backs, after all these years, on light bulbs with a carbonized filament? Is that the human thing to do?

Ambrose concedes that even if u no can haz teh awesum Edison bulbz, it doesn't mean that you're stuck for life with CFLs; other options are available, and will continue to be invented or improved. But that's just the preamble to a litany of complaints about CFLs: they cost more (in a sense); some of them may be the wrong size for your fixtures (what will you do?); you'll probably need two or three of them if you want to read a newspaper (huh?); and - steady now - they're full of deadly poison:

I did a Google search and found a news account about a kid who took a quarter of a cup of mercury to his school several years ago, resulting in intensive care for one 17-year-old who may suffer from the exposure for the rest of his life....

So, if you break one of these CFLs, run for the woods while calling your congressman on your cell phone to come open your windows for you. Be prepared to spend an interesting amount of money in cleaning things up.

I guess it's possible that some of Ambrose's readers have never gone to school, or ridden on a subway, or worked in an office, or visited a hospital, or gone to the supermarket, or spent time in any other building or vehicle that was lit by the fluorescent bulbs we've learned to love over the 150 years that've passed since Heinrich Geissler first produced illumination in a glass tube evacuated with a mercury vacuum pump. If so, you can't blame them for being frightened by this nightmare scenario.

Normal people, however, are likely to perceive Ambrose as a mongrel idiot (to borrow a phrase from my pal Steve Simels). Here's how we handle broken fluorescent bulbs in the treehugging nanny state of Californistan:

[W]ear latex gloves and carefully clean up the fragments. Wipe the area with a damp disposable paper towel to remove all glass fragments and associated mercury....

After clean up is complete, place all fragments along with cleaning materials into a sealable plastic bag. Wash your hands. Recycle along with intact lamps.

This complex operation could easily cost the unlucky consumer tens of cents, which is not what I'd call "an interesting amount of money." (Just for the record, the expensive clean-up myth seems to have been invented, with malice aforethought, by none other than Steven Milloy.)

This is not to say that the mercury in CFLs isn't an issue when considered en masse, or that I'm a fan of CFLs as opposed to, say, LEDs. But trying to pass fluorescent bulbs off as some apocalyptic threat is pretty fucking ludicrous, especially considering that the new bulbs contain less mercury than the ones that most of us have been exposed to virtually every day for the last six decades.

(Photo: Geissler tubes circa 1860, from the apparatus collection of Dartmouth College.)

Sophisticated Sensors

An article in the Washington Post describes the controversy in NYC over the deployment of sensors that are supposed to provide early warning of a biological attack. It seems that the initial sampling equipment, which has cost about $400 million so far, leaves a lot to be desired:

The older samplers catch airborne particles in filters that are manually collected once a day and taken to a laboratory, requiring up to 30 hours to detect a pathogen. They may not preserve live organisms that scientists use to select treatment options. And the process is cost- and labor-intensive, leading to false alarms, quality-control problems and limits on the system's size, despite an $85 million-a-year national budget.

The new sensors aren't exactly ideal, either:

Runge said technical challenges remain in ensuring new sensors' accuracy and reducing their size and operating costs. He said DHS plans to begin pilot tests this year of alternative sensors -- which it hopes will be better than those made by Lawrence Livermore -- and to oversee a competition between two private bidders, IQuum and Microfluidic Systems, beginning in 2009. As a result, Runge said, decisions on what and how big a system to deploy will be left to the next administration.

That's probably just as well. It sounds as though the BioWatch system isn't in much better shape than it was back in 2005, when the EPA's inspector general announced that the EPA hadn't "ensured the reliability, timeliness and efficiency of air sampling that Bush directed be part of a $129 million early warning system."

EPA sometimes placed sensors too far apart, failed to make sure they were all in secure locations and didn't always factor in topography and seasonal wind pattern changes in some cities.

As I argued a couple of years ago, "agent detection is an interesting but comparatively minor field; it doesn't work well, but even if it did, mere data aren't all that useful unless you have a staffed and funded and organized public health system." Thanks to BushCo's technofetishist belief that every problem can be solved by paying private contractors to build some high-priced gizmo, this is precisely what we don't have:

How fast do public health departments nationwide respond to a medical practitioner's alert that a patient has a serious infectious disease like smallpox or meningitis? Or respond to a doctor who thinks he's seeing the first symptoms of anthrax from bioterrorism?....The new study found an average response time of 63 minutes, and some agencies took nearly 17 hours to call back. The report ranked one-third of the health departments as “poor” because one or more of their reply calls came more than four hours after the alert.

In her recent testimony before Congress, biosecurity expert Tara O'Toole raised a fascinating question:

Environmental sensor technologies are now being marketed to individual companies for installation in privately owned buildings. Will DHS develop commercial standards or regulations to ensure that such systems are reliable and maintained properly? Should public health agencies be required to assess every warning signal (“hit”) registered by privately owned sensors? Should public health agencies be reimbursed for such assessments?

With that in mind, read this:

The NYPD is moving to license private biological, chemical and radiological detectors because of "concerns" raised by the feds, a police official testified yesterday....

Falkenrath said the private deployment of sophisticated sensors has increased since 9/11. Information about where the sophisticated sensors are and how reliable they are is sketchy.

Opponents of licensing claim that "the measure could stifle the independent collection of environmental data," which is a valid point, especially given the official suppression of air-quality data after 9/11. But again, there's a definite limit to what data collection can do for us, given that Ayn Rand has expressly forbidden us to have a fully funded, equipped, integrated, and accessible public healthcare system.

Worldly Concerns

The way I hear it, Jesus was unjustly condemned to death, and was brutalized and jeered by a mob who mistook their bloodlust for righteousness, and was finally executed alongside a pair of criminals.

The meaning of this story, assuming I understand it, is that we know not what we do when we refuse to be merciful and hospitable: God is, as Kierkegaard said, "attired in unrecognizability"...and who is less recognizable, as God and as neighbor, than the poor, the sick, the insane, and the imprisoned? The message of his resurrection - the one that interests a bystander like myself, anyway - is the impotence of worldly power at the precise moment that it presents itself as all powerful.

In the topsy-turvy victimology of Bill Murchison, however, it's not the death penalty that threatens the innocent, but the innocent who threaten the death penalty:

[G]rowing numbers of Americans [are] working to put capital punishment itself to death. The technique is, object to everything about the death penalty -- fairness, pain, cost, international opinion, the prospect of executing the innocent. Death by a thousand cuts is the prescription for the death penalty.

Objecting to everything about the death penalty...that's a daring new tactic for abolitionists, alright.

Murchison's love for the death penalty - his faith in it, and therefore in the human judgment that crucified his God - is nothing new in his circles. I wouldn't bother bringing it up, if he didn't go on to insult his own faith to a degree that actually surprises me:

Considerable help [in "killing" the death penalty] would come from liberal Christians, including evangelicals of the Jim Wallis/Sojourners stamp, with their worldly concerns for "social justice."

The quotes around "social justice" are a fairly standard tactic, of course. What really impresses me is the use of "worldly" to describe a belief in mercy and redemption. It's an inversion I'd call Satanic, if I found it possible, let alone necessary, to believe in an entity more deceitful than the average hard-right Christian blabbermouth.

Murchison continues:

What about capital punishment? Does it suddenly, after all these centuries, make no sense? The principle, I mean, not every application, as in the burnings-alive of the Reformation era -- none of which we're likely to imitate as a society.

If nothing else, Murchison has demonstrated that it's possible to get from false premises to false conclusions. Putting aside his assumption that the death penalty made sense previously, what strikes me about this argument is that it's precisely the one Murchison set out to attack. He began by sneering at the idea that pain should be "a central consideration in the legal equation"; here, he objects fastidiously to burning people alive. The debate over methods of execution, and the amount of suffering they cause, seems to be a legitimate one after all.

Murchison claims that we execute murderers in order to affirm the "human worth" of their victims, who have a "unique place in the created order." He uses some astonishingly weird examples to make this point:

It would have made sense to spare the lives of Goering and Himmler rather than visit on them personally and publicly the consequences of their war crimes? What of Hitler himself, had he survived the war?

Murchison doesn't seem to realize that all three of these men committed suicide as a final act of defiance. Would justice have been done if we'd prevented them from making that decision, and then executed them? More to the point, is justice even conceivable here, in human terms? What could those three corpses possibly signify, next to six million?

The thing that Hitler and Goering and Himmler - and Timothy McVeigh, to use a more recent example - demonstrate, once again, is the impotence of the death penalty; like the saint, the criminal can always call the state's bluff, as it were, and die in a state of acceptance. Or fulfillment. Or holy martyrdom. Some of 'em may even have this in mind right from the start.

All of which confirms me in my belief that what makes fundamentalist Christianity so ugly and dangerous isn't its otherworldliness, but its smug, stupid, rationalist materialism. From its obsession with the body - that vapor, that husk - to its cheerful quasi-Skinnerian belief in the power of pain and pleasure to produce "good" behavior (or to be experienced as pain and pleasure, for that matter); to its belief in that supreme denial of human worth and uniqueness that masquerades as "closure," this ideology is as worldly - in the proper Biblical sense of the term - as it's possible to be.

The Power of Men's Tears

The LA Times alerts us to the plight of "post-abortive men," who are suffering unjustly and intolerably from their lack of control over other people's bodies:

Jason Baier talks often to the little boy he calls Jamie. He imagines this boy -- his son -- with blond hair and green eyes, chubby cheeks, a sweet smile.

But he'll never know for sure....Baier, 36, still longs for the child who might have been, with an intensity that bewilders him.

As well it might. You don't have to be a psychologist to suspect that Baier's fixation is indicative of larger problems, and that they existed long before he reveled in the ejaculation that got his fiancee pregnant.

But in a world where misogyny is routinely confused with morality, pathology can easily pass for principle:

These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement of "post-abortive men." Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

"We had abortions," said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. "I've had abortions."

Who on earth cares if this madness is "deeply personal"? Like the maudlin description of Baier's "child who might have been" (behold childhood innocence at its most beatific!), this language comes perilously close to glorifying, or at least mainstreaming, a reaction that's basically pathological. Sane people don't "talk often" with aborted children, any more than they celebrate Hitler's birthday or wash their hands twenty times per hour.

I'm actually in favor of support groups for "post-abortive men," so long as they aim to assuage inappropriate grief and rage and textbook Freudian melancholy, instead of intensifying and exploiting them. You'll never guess which approach Morrow favors:

The activists leading the men's movement make clear they're not relying on statistics to make their case. They're counting on the power of men's tears.

And God knows these men have plenty to cry about:

Morrow, the counselor, described his regret as sneaking up on him in midlife -- more than a decade after he impregnated three girlfriends (one of them twice) in quick succession in the late 1980s.

Alright, then. Two decades after this fellow saw fit to behave like some jizz-spraying version of Johnny Appleseed, he wants society to acknowledge and honor his pain...not because he made a mess of three women's lives, mind you, but because he woke up one day wishing he'd forced them to bear and raise his children. First he wanted sex, and now he wants sanctity; either way, no sacrifice is too great for Modern Womanhood to make.

Here's another cute anecdote:

Chris Aubert, a Houston lawyer, felt only indifference in 1985 when a girlfriend told him she was pregnant and planned on an abortion. When she asked if he wanted to come to the clinic, he said he couldn't; he played softball on Saturdays. He stuck a check for $200 in her door and never talked to her again.

Aubert, 50, was equally untroubled when another girlfriend had an abortion in 1991. "It was a complete irrelevancy," he said. But years later, Aubert felt a rising sense of unease.

It's sad that so many people would see this as evidence of moral progress, or at least a change of heart. It isn't. Aubert's "unease" is even more pathological than his indifference; it's progress only in the medical sense, like the progress from primary to tertiary syphilis. His post-abortive regret - which seems to be based on the crude assumption that he had some all-compelling power he failed to exercise - demonstrates perfectly why abortion must remain legal, and why men should never be given a formal right to decide whether a woman can have one.

Sorry if that sounds harsh, guys. I'm suffering from PMS right now, and my bitch of a wife won't bring me a Midol.

(Illustration: "Crying Man" by Kauzya Akimoto.)

Bondage 101

With her cheeks flushed and her bosom heaving, the pneumatic Candace de Russy announces that the only edjumacation American college students are getting is in the fine art of...perversion!

On one campus, as Miriam Grossman notes in Front Page Magazine, students may win cutesy stuffed toys – “Giant Microbes” – as raffle prizes for knowing their STDs, such as “the bright yellow Herpes, the pink Pox (Syphilis), the blue-grey Clap (Gonorrhea), and … the Kelly green Chlamydia.”

In a just and equitable world, they'd know nothing of these microbes until they'd caught them. If God had meant for us to avoid the Suppurating Gleet, He wouldn't have gone to all the trouble of inventing it!

At another university, students can attend events such as the following sponsored by a campus organization dedicated to “discussing” B.D.S.M. issues:

Bondage 101: "get the basics of beautiful and functional rope-work . a very hands-on workshop . bring four lengths of 30-foot rope ." [sic]

The art of piercing: "if you like the idea of playing with needles, this meeting is one not to be missed."

Und so weiter. For some reason, de Russy can't be bothered to name the schools, nor the campus organization promoting BDSM. For the record, Princeton was handing out the stuffed microbes (according to Grossman, anyway), and the BDSM group is Conversio Virium at Columbia.

CV was briefly expelled by the Columbia Student Governing Board in 1994, after a Christian group accused them of failing to abide by their constitution. As I understand it, the charges were later found to be groundless, and the group was readmitted.

Since then, it's repeatedly been invoked by the Right's pseudomoral chatterboxes in order to titillate their audience (cf. Kinsolving and Coulter). I submit that this has at least as much to do with sex and power as any of CV's activities; the difference is that the Kulturkampfers are incapable of being honest about the nature of their interest in sexual command and control. (Which is what makes them the real perverts, natch.)

I think de Russy goes back far enough in New York academia to remember the initial ruckus over CV, and I'll bet she's heard it croaked about many times since in the political frog pond she calls home. It'd be interesting to know why she's playing dumb in this post.

In any case, here's the part that actually irritates me:

On campuses where such “salutary discussion” abounds, smoking is usually “strictly forbidden.”

This is pretty easy to explain. If someone smokes next to me, it may annoy me if I'm eating, or sicken me if I'm asthmatic. Thus, I ought to have some say in the matter. But if the local bondage enthusiasts want to fool around with handcuffs behind closed doors, it's none of my goddamn business (which is just as well, because it's also not very interesting; I have bills to pay and books to read).

Beyond that, it's not inconsistent or hypocritical to forbid smoking in public, while spreading awareness of sexually transmitted diseases and allowing the teaching of safe bondage techniques in private. But de Russy and her ilk would presumably prefer bondage enthusiasts to kill or injure themselves or their partners, no matter how many GOP seats and pulpits it'd leave vacant nationwide.

(Photo: Harry Houdini, circa 1924.)

My Appointed Rounds

CKR has posted the first installments of her inter-blog debate on nuclear strategy. Here's part one, and here's part two (and here's my contribution in full).

There's broad agreement on the main points; the specific details are a bit more knotty (don't you hate it when that happens?). For me, much of this debate hinges on national sovereignty's likely fate under what Zygmunt Bauman has called "the divorce of power and politics." Most participants agree that the Cold War model is outdated; I'd argue that the elements that make this model outdated are the very ones that people tend to hold onto: its statism, and its rather essentialist view of America's role in the world.

Apropos of which, Bryan Finoki, in a post on floating prisons, quotes Keller Easterling to good effect:

Worlds and empires shelter and fatten offshore, dropping into protected enclaves, free economic zones, and paper sovereignties long enough to avoid taxes, engage inexpensive labor, or launder an identity. Streamlined logistics and loosened legalities are among the bullet-pointed features of every logistics park and free economic zone in the world. Their segregation from other worlds and other nations helps them to garner power, and shapes them into distended and dominating territories that are constantly expanding and excluding. They are the world with their own seas.

Meanwhile, Smokewriting discusses nuclear power and intergenerational equity:

It gives a good example of how the principle of consent can lead to massive injustice, given that the consent sought is that of a small subset of the present generation to collude with the Government in imposing unasked-for and unfair burdens on future generations. The risks of long term disposal, unquantifiable as they are, are inevitably inequitably shunted into the future.

And Echidne dissects an article on the "market for sex" among monkeys:

How do we know that what Gumert describes is a market with a currency? If we were to force monkey behavior into the human construct of a marketplace, then the one he describes sounds a lot more like one of barter: a situation where two monkeys trade services. Why can't we view the market as one for grooming, where the female monkeys are buying grooming services and paying for it with sex? That would make the male monkeys into the sellers and the female monkeys into the buyers. See how deciding that this is a market for sex and not for grooming warps our views and prepares us to superimpose all the human values and all the human biases on what is happening?

Last, Eli is impressed with the new and improved Taser:

Just think of the compliments and admiring looks your sexy new leopard print taser will garner in between agonized screams! And if you get tired of the screams, well you can just tune them right out with that nifty MP3-playing holster! Awesome!

I predict that next year they will partner up with a cellphone company to develop the Motorola TAZR - zap ‘em and then call the cops with the same convenient device!

(Illustration: With Us or Against Us by Francesca Berrini.)

Friday Hope Blogging

Having been chased from my house and trapped in traffic by a dreadful storm, I only have a couple of hours to throw this week's edition together. Please adjust your expectations accordingly!

Danger Room reports that "the Army has destroyed the last TMU-28B spray tank in its chemical weapons stockpile":

The Umatilla Chemical Depot had held 156 of the tanks and began the destruction campaign on November 23, 2007. Deseret Chemical Depot in Utah had held 862 of the Cold War-era dispersal devices, which were destroyed in 2004-2005.

A federal judge has restricted the Navy's use of sonar:

"The court is persuaded that the (protection) scheme proposed by the Navy is grossly inadequate to protect marine mammals from debilitating levels of sonar exposure," Marie-Cooper wrote in her ruling.

Oregon now requires health insurance plans to cover birth control and other prescription drugs:

The measure, which Gov. Ted Kulongoski (D) signed into law in May 2007, also requires hospitals to inform sexual assault survivors about emergency contraception and make it available upon request.

An absolutely demented energy project in Southern California has suffered a serious setback:

State and federal agencies have dealt a stunning blow to San Diego Gas and Electric’s proposed Sunrise Powerlink transmission line project with the release of a draft report that identifies local electricity generation as a far superior alternative to the Powerlink....

“This could be a death blow for SDG&E’s project,” said David Hogan, conservation manager at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The report confirms that the wasteful Powerlink would result in tremendous harm to nature, people, and property. Now is the best opportunity for the public to get involved and help hammer the last nails in the coffin of this terrible project.”

While we bicker over dead-end projects like Powerlink, a Dutch company harvests heat from asphalt:

Solar energy collected from a 200-yard stretch of road and a small parking lot helps heat a 70-unit four-story apartment building in the northern village of Avenhorn. An industrial park of some 160,000 square feet in the nearby city of Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 square feet of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base in the south supply heat for its hangar. And all that under normally cloudy Dutch skies, with only a few days a year of truly sweltering temperatures.

And German scientists claim to have found a way to supply the entire country with renewable energy:

In an ongoing experiment called the KombiKraftwerk....they link 36 biogas plants, wind, solar and hydropower installations in a distributed network to show that no matter what the weather, or what time of day it is, germany could get all its energy from renewable power.

And an electric airplane takes a test flight over France.

Several far richer outfits, mainly in the USA, are working on similar power packs but so far none have got off the ground. Lavrand told me that they started the project quietly 18 months ago, partly financed by donations from aerospace groups.

That said, we're not completely out of ideas:

United Technologies Corp.'s Hamilton Sundstrand unit, is teaming with US Renewables Group to commercialize a solar-power plant that will use molten salt to store the sun's heat and release it in a controlled manner for steady steam turbine power generation.

China has apparently decided not to dam Tiger Leaping Gorge, a scenic site on the Yangtze River:

China has abandoned controversial plans to build a huge dam which would have submerged one of the country's most renowned tourist areas and forced the relocation of 100,000 residents in the south-western province of Yunnan.

Meanwhile, India plans to subsidize new solar power plants.

Andrew Dessler continues to profile the Inhofe 400, with amusing results. And Congress has declined to approve Bush's renomination of a particularly ghastly recess appointment:

Richard Stickler appears to be out as the Bush administration’s top mine safety regulator. Earlier this week, Stickler’s biography was removed from the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration’s Web site.

Matt Hidek has written an interesting post on security and urban planning, which I hope I'll have time to discuss in more depth later. For now, this is the part I find intriguing:

While claiming to “secure” everyday life in the city, urban security systems clearly intrude upon the would-be privacy of people. We must ask ourselves how effective these systems can be, and if they are worth both the financial and societal expense. If integrated intelligence systems in Iraq cannot stop the destructive effect of an Improvised Explosive Device (IED), how can we expect them to work at home?....

As this debate continues we must remember that despite today’s ongoing political rhetoric, communities can never be truly protected. This means that we can fight for the abandonment of the current urban fortification strategy, which is unevenly oriented towards protecting economic lifelines, and for a more holistic approach.

With this in mind, it's interesting to read Buffalo mayor Byron Brown's thoughts on the anti-urban bias of American politics:

It's a sensible, almost self-evident point. Mayor Brown also called out a race / class dynamic that shapes the way presidential candidates talk about cities. To many Americans, "urban" is code for poor people and minorities -- not often popular topics in the heartland.

Archaeologists are increasingly using satellites to detect traces of ancient structures:

Sensitive detectors, on satellites or aircraft, can reveal slight differences in ground cover through tiny variations in temperature. So if a region contains more stone, water or wood than its surrounds, it will stand out in a multi-spectral image.

In August 2007, an international team of researchers used these methods to peel back the ground cover in Cambodia and reveal intricate waterworks around the famous temples of Angkor Wat, the capital of the Khmer empire that flourished between in the ninth and 14th century.

"Dust from curious near-Earth asteroid 3200 Phaethon seems to fall from the constellation Gemini in this fisheye skyview. The composite image was recorded over four December nights (12-15) just last year from Ludanyhalaszi, Hungary. Of course, the streaks are meteor trails from the annual Geminids meteor shower. The work of astronomer Erno Berko, the finished picture combines 113 different frames and captures 123 separate meteors." (Via NASA.)

Last, a very quick collection of links.

Photo postcards by Henry M. Beach.


Astonishing Colour Pictures of the Great War.


Nora , the Piano-Playing Cat.

Brutalist architecture.

San Fernando Valley Alphabet.

Finland's Unnamed Islands (via things).

(Illustration at top by Max Ernst.)

Getting Richer, Faster

Bjorn Lomborg worries that we're worrying too much:

Since time immemorial, people have worried about the earth’s future. We once believed that the sky would fall. More recently we worried that the planet might freeze, and then that technology would grind to a halt because of a computer bug that was supposed to be unleashed at the turn of the millennium.

Those fears melted away, but today the world has many real, pressing problems.

One problem that's not real or pressing is deforestation, because it's been solved by the Free Market. Or will be. Or could be, in theory.

[D]eforestation is a diminishing problem. The solution wasn’t found in condemnation from the West of developing country practices, or in protests by well-meaning environmentalists, but in economic growth. Developed countries generally increase their forested areas, because they can afford to do so. Developing countries can’t. To encourage less deforestation – and more reforestation – the best thing we can do is help undeveloped nations get richer, faster.

After reading this, I was placed in three vats of cold water to extinguish my wrath. The first vat burst its staves and its hoop. The next boiled with bubbles as big as fists. In the third vat, the water grew hot enough that some might endure it and others might not.

Honestly, I hardly know where to start. Lomborg ignores the fact that undeveloped nations often get “rich” (or failing that, pay a bit of the interest on their debts) by mowing down their forests. While it’s possible that these countries will reforest as they become wealthier, it’s not a foregone conclusion by any means. And even if they do, what they'll end up with is likely to be a far cry – both in terms of acreage and biodiversity – from what they had. To Lomborg, though, "forested areas" are as interchangeable as hotels in Monopoly.

As usual, he accompanies this sort of lunatic assertion with arguments that almost sound reasonable. Why are we so worried about pesticide pollution, he wonders, when “fumes from cooking indoors with firewood and dung will kill more than 1.5 million people this year”?

It’d arguably be possible to address both problems at once, given the relationship between global agribusiness and third-world poverty. But Lomborg refuses to make these connections; what tends to matter to him are the dangerous “choices” made by victims. If we can prevent these backwards people from asphyxiating themselves, they may actually live long enough to be sickened by pesticide run-off. You can't deny that this would be progress!

He applies the same logic to climate change. We shouldn’t waste money on climate research, he says, let alone on reducing emissions; a better use of that money would be to “discourage people from living in foolhardy locations.”

I’m not sure any other kind of location can be said to exist on a planet that calls Lomborg “the 14th most influential academic in the world.”

(Photo: Clearcut forest, Sumatra. Taken by Jens Wieting.)

Historical Connections

Carol Iannone concedes that there's some "Clarification Needed on Use of the Term 'Islamo-Fascism.'"

On the one hand, she says, it's used to "highlight the historical connections between the Muslim world and Nazism and Fascism"; on the other, it's used "in a generic sense [!], to say that Islamic sharia law constitutes a form of fascism, a form of totalitarian control of society."

My interpretation is a bit simpler. I think that like long-playing records of people repeating "Polly wanna cracker," this endlessly reiterated term gives parrots something to say. Accuracy is completely beside the point; it makes good people sound bad and bad people sound worse, and encourages our stateside racists, dupes, and rageaholics to view themselves as The New Greatest Generation (even as they wax indignant at the idea that this unprecedented Battle for Civilization might require more seriousness and competence than BushCo has displayed so far).

Iannone does deserve some credit. While she blithely assumes that Islamofascism is a "factual and probably unexceptionable" term for the Grand Mufti's anti-Zionist marriage of convenience with Hitler - an assumption that raises some interesting questions a lot closer to home - she worries that using it in regards to al-Qaeda "forces the uniqueness of Islamic fundamentalism into the familiar mold of European fascism and national socialism."

You don't fucking say. I'd applaud this sentiment, if it weren't for my suspicion that the uniqueness she's insisting on has more to do with ethnicity than with any plausible definition of fascism.

In conclusion, Iannone suggests that philosophers, scholars and people of good will should explain whether they're using "Islamofascism" in the historical sense, to imply that Islam is historically fascist, or in the generic sense, to imply that Islam is inherently fascist.

Eventually its spelling should be regularized too.

Thus shall a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend.