Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

Congress has passed a landmark conservation bill:

The Democratic-led U.S. Congress gave final approval on Wednesday to sweeping land and water conservation legislation that environmental groups praised as one of the most significant in U.S. history.

The measure, a package of more than 160 bills, would set aside about 2 million acres -- parks, rivers, streams, desert, forest and trails -- in nine states as new wilderness and render them off limits to oil and gas drilling and other development.

One of the areas this bill will protect is Arizona's Fossil Creek:

Despite the success of restoration, management of Fossil Creek as a recreational destination has remained two steps behind, and the creek is in danger of being loved to death. Designation of Fossil Creek as wild and scenic, though, requires that the U.S. Forest Service prepare a management plan and use its authority to protect the outstanding values of the creek, something conservation groups have long sought.

“This is great news for Fossil Creek, for our native fishes, and for future generations,” said Sandy Bahr, chapter director of the Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon (Arizona) Chapter. “Fossil creek is an amazing ecological wonder; a ribbon of life in an arid land.”

The Obama administration has blocked new permits for mountaintop-removal mining:

The Obama Administration just made a major announcement – they have directed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to not issue any new mining permits until the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has a chance to take a hard look at well over 100 pending permits to bury streams with mining waste, an essential part of the mountaintop removal coal mining process.

Beginning with EPA’s recommendation today to deny a permit to bury a stream in West Virginia, this review, using the best available science, will likely halt the flood of permits that was unleashed by the 4th Circuit court decision last month.

Rep. Jay Inslee has introduced legislation that would reduce emissions of black carbon:

Today the Center for Biological Diversity, Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, Defenders of Wildlife, and Earthjustice applauded Rep. Jay Inslee’s (D-WA) introduction of federal legislation that would reduce domestic and global emissions of black carbon, or soot, which is a powerful global warming agent and public health hazard. Recent scientific studies on black carbon demonstrate that reducing emissions of this short-lived pollutant can bring about near-immediate climate mitigation, that governments possess the technological and economic ability to reduce black carbon pollution, and that such reductions will also result in significant public health benefits. Rep. Peter Welch (D-VT) and Mike Honda (D-CA) are original co-sponsors of the bill.

An environmental group won emissions allowances at an auction in order to retire them:

"There are a limited number of allowances available for 2009, and we just bought another 1,000 of them with the intention that they never be used," said Brian Houseal, executive director of the Adirondack Council, a privately funded environmental organization based in New York's Adirondack Park.

"We are the only environmental organization in America – maybe the world – that is actively buying and retiring real pollution allowances, resulting in real emissions reductions from power plants that are under government orders to reduce their carbon emissions," Houseal said. "These aren't offsets or some other form of compensation for emissions. These are real reductions that will make the air cleaner and cooler."

POGO has released the names of suspended and disbarred government contractors:

Last month, the Government Accountability Office released a report titled, Excluded Parties List System: Suspended and Debarred Businesses and Individuals Improperly Receive Federal Funds, documenting 25 cases in which companies and individuals that had been suspended or debarred from federal contracting continued to receive contracts. Unfortunately, the report did not name the companies and individuals at issue.

A school district in Mobile, AL will end its policy of sex segregation:

The Mobile County School System has agreed to stop sex segregation in public schools after being notified by the American Civil Liberties Union that its sex segregated programs were illegal and discriminatory. Late last evening, the Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County approved a settlement agreement changing the policy.

"While schools might think that sex segregated classes will be a quick fix for failing schools, in reality they are inherently unequal and shortchange both boys and girls," said Emily Martin, Deputy Director of the ACLU Women's Rights Program. "We hope that now Mobile County will focus on efforts that we know can improve all students' education, like smaller classes and more teacher training and parental involvement."

Dr. George Tiller has been acquitted of charges that he broke the law when performing late-term abortions:

Jurors have acquitted one of the nation's few late-term abortion providers of violating Kansas law requiring an independent second opinion for the procedure.

Dr. George Tiller was found not guilty Friday of 19 misdemeanor charges stemming from some abortions he performed at his Wichita clinic in 2003.

Voters in Gainesville, FL have rejected a bid to legalize discrimination:

“This is a great day for Gainesville. Voters rejected the right-wing’s attempts to make their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender friends, family and neighbors second-class citizens. While the opposition rooted its campaign in lies and scare tactics, fair-minded Gainesville voters knew that Charter Amendment 1 was really about discrimination,” says Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Action Fund. “We congratulate Equality is Gainesville’s Business for its hard work to defeat this ugly and hurtful measure, and to ensure that Gainesville remains a welcoming community for all — including lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.”

The New Hampshire house has voted that gay citizens should have the same rights as straight ones:

After two days of debating, the New Hampshire House voted for gay marriage 186 to 179 after first voting against it, 183 to 182.

Bills can only be reconsidered once, so the new vote is final.

Serbia has outlawed discrimination:

Parliament passed the bill with a slim majority of 127 votes in favor to 59 against - one more vote than was needed for passage in the 250-member parliament....The law bans any kind of discrimination, whether based on race, religion, sexual orientation or gender or other factors.

Virginia has banned the cul de sac from new subdivisions:

The state has decided that all new subdivisions must have through streets linking them with neighboring subdivisions, schools and shopping areas. State officials say the new regulations will improve safety and accessibility and save money: No more single entrances and exits onto clogged secondary roads. Quicker responses by emergency vehicles. Lower road maintenance costs for governments.

A federal judge has ruled that Monsanto should not be allowed to plant GM crops in a national wildlife refuge:

As a result of the ruling, 37 farming contracts—most of which were being used for GMO soybean and corn crops—have been canceled. Will this set a national precedent, paving the way for tougher rules and closer scrutiny of the environmental impact GMOs?

It could.

I don't entirely understand the logic behind this robotic fish, but who cares?

Soon, the water in Gijon, a harbor in Northern Spain will be monitored by robotic, battery-powered fish. These mechanical, articulating sea creatures were designed and tested by the Robotics Department at the University of Essex. At a cost of $3.6 million, through a European Union grant, these fish will test the water for oxygen levels, detect oil slicks and other contaminants pumped into the water. This is the first monitoring program of it’s kind, and the retrieved data could be very important, with implications for global warming and the state of our water sources.

Sales of bottled water are down:

The popularity of bottled water soared in the 1990s and the early 2000s, but is now s-o-o-o yesterday, according to figures from market research company TNS. Last year the on-going year-on-year increase in sales was halted and sales actually fell by 9%.

Harbor seals are returning to New York Harbor:

New York Aquarium Curator Paul Sieswerda says that the harbor seals are back after such a long break because the water is much cleaner, and there are more fish in it. He also says the seals are no longer afraid to be in the urban waters surrounding New York because they are protected by law and do not have to face the same fate as their relatives so many years ago.

It seems the harbor seals have also brought ecotourism to the New York harbor. People want to protect what they know and see, and after an hour in a boat along the Coney Island coast, little shiny grey heads can be seen popping up like little buoys around Swinburne and Hoffman Islands.

Several undocumented species have been discovered in Papua New Guinea:

Colorful jumping spiders, a tiny frog with a "ringing song" and a striped gecko are among more than 50 previously unknown species discovered during a recent survey in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea.

Click through to see pictures; it's worth it just for the jumping spider.

And a new species of mouse has been found in Peru:

The roughly 3.5-inch-long (8.8-centimeter-long) mouse primarily eats insects and seeds, making it a vital player in the region's ecosystem, researchers say.

Globally, it's very rare to discover new mammal species, added team leader Constantino Aucca, president of the Association of Andean Ecosystems.

Crabs apparently feel pain, and remember it:

Professor Elwood said: "There has been a long debate about whether crustaceans including crabs, prawns and lobsters feel pain. We know from previous research that they can detect harmful stimuli and withdraw from the source of the stimuli but that could be a simple reflex without the inner 'feeling' of unpleasantness that we associate with pain. This research demonstrates that it is not a simple reflex but that crabs trade-off their need for a quality shell with the need to avoid the harmful stimulus. Such trade-offs are seen in vertebrates in which the response to pain is controlled with respect to other requirements.

Cheryl Rofer has launched a new weekly feature that'll offer informed comment on the Obama's administration's diplomatic efforts. This is a great idea, IMO. I'd hope everyone who reads this blog is already reading WhirledView, but if you're not, today is an excellent time to start.

In other news: An interview with the Malian photographer Malick Sidibé (don't miss the gallery). Linkograms and Meccanographs explained. Slow Down. An amazing collection of beer cans. An even more amazing collection of Edo monsters.


Words Taken Out of Context. Rare films from the Warner Bros. archive, available on demand. Strange forms of musical notation. A brief clip of platypus sounds. Images from the insides of rocks (via things).


Graphics galore at but does it float. Sounds from The Ghost Station. At least some of what you need to know about Great Lakes Sinkholes. A sampler of audio illusions. And via Plep, beautiful early views of Montreal.


And, of course, an animated film.





(Illustration at top: "Inland Lake" by John Olsen.)

Reason and Skepticism

The Las Vegas Review-Journal has published what may be the lamest denialist op-ed I've ever read. The basic conceit is set forth in the title: "If we seek to limit CO2, why not water?"

I'm no climatologist, but it took me roughly one second to come up with a basic answer: water vapor condenses rapidly and falls to the earth in the form of rain and snow, while CO2 remains in the atmosphere for years.

This is something the author should've learned in school. This is something the author could've learned from Google in under a minute. This is something the author could've confirmed with a phone call or e-mail to any one of literally thousands of scientists and teachers, including ones who are skeptical about AGW. But you can't let facts get in the way of a good story. And what story is better than one in which you're the hero 'cause you're smarter than most of the scientists on earth?

On to the actual arguments. First off, there's the classic "horrors of dihydrogen oxide" gambit:

Inform someone that the substance di-hydrogen oxide is so corrosive that a new steel nail exposed to the stuff will rust within hours; so deadly that a person attempting to breathe pure di-hydrogen oxide will die of asphyxiation in mere minutes. Now ask the subject whether he or she agrees this di-hydrogen oxide stuff should be tightly regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency -- labeled as a poison, kept out of the hands of children, and so forth.

Alright. I'm willing to concede that if you ask an ignorant person whether experts should label water as a poison, he or she may say yes. But the thing is, experts don't label water as a poison, which suggests that the people in charge of regulating poisons are, in fact, somewhat better at chemistry than the average person who doesn't recognize "dihydrogen oxide" as a synonym for water. By the same logic, then, it's just barely possible that climate scientists know more about CO2 than some witless jerkoff at the LVRJ.

I suppose I should also mention that our society routinely limits the access of children to pools of dihydrogen oxide, for the simple reason that we don't want them to fucking drown themselves.

Furthermore:

[C]arbon dioxide is not a toxin. It occurs naturally in the atmosphere and is vital to the ecology of the planet.

Even if you spent your school years huffing solvents and drawing unicorns on your binder, you could still have learned about the toxicity of CO2 from the countless movies and TV shows where it's a plot device. Failing that, you could have learned about it from the Lake Nyos disaster of 1986. There's virtually no excuse for not knowing that CO2 is toxic, and there's even less excuse for pretending that it isn't, and there's even less excuse than that for pretending that global warming has to do with the toxicity of CO2 as opposed to the fact that it's a highly persistent goddamn greenhouse gas, for fuck's sake.

But even if I'm right, who cares? Greenhouse gases are doubleplusgood:

If the globe were to continue warming at a rate of about one degree per century, the biggest impact on mankind would likely be that crops could be grown further north.

Sure. And if I were to age at the rate of about one day per year, I could live for centuries. Just imagine how much I could make on the stock market!

In summation: We're dealing with someone who believes — or claims to believe — that CO2 is nontoxic, that there's no appreciable difference between carbon dioxide and water vapor, that human CO2 emissions are insignificant compared to natural ones, and that the warming predicted by climatologists is on the order of one degree per century. All of which proves, naturally, that scientists comprise an Arrogant Priesthood of Irrational Zealots:

And here we thought "science" was a discipline that valued reason and skepticism, while occasionally demanding experimental proofs.

Hear that, geniuses? Put aside those computer models, and get busy proving that certain levels of CO2 are toxic, and that water vapor and CO2 have different residence times and different effects on the climate. Then, and only then, will you be taken seriously by intelligent people.

UPDATE: Carbon dioxide is plant food. Say it again: plant food!

(Illustration via Environmental Education Science Partnership.)

Problematizing Progress

Brendan O'Neill argues that we should sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires:

If you want proof of the miserabilist, misanthropic outlook of contemporary western society, look no further than the curmudgeonly reaction to the launch of "the People's Car" in India yesterday.

The Nano, developed by Tata Motors and costing a mere 100,000 rupees (around £1,200), will make the dream of car travel a reality for tens of thousands of Indians. Yet its launch was greeted by a collective groan from western observers, concerned that if the developing world plays "catch up" with us – what used to be known as "global equality" – the planet will fry in a hellfire of greedy car-drivers' making.

This collective groan is an ugly symptom of "eco-imperialism," which is much like classic imperialism, except that instead of traveling overseas to beat or starve foreign populations into submission, you sit at home and fret over the environmental impact of cheap consumer goods. As such, it's one of the most fearsome weapons in the armamentarium of liberal fascism, and can't be criticized harshly enough.

We have become incapable of judging new developments and breakthroughs by any criteria other than their projected carbon emissions. The fact that the Nano will increase many Indians' mobility, their choices, their personal freedom to travel where they want and when they want – a freedom many in the west have enjoyed for decades – is simply overlooked....

Immeasurable benefits to humanity have been usurped by pseudo-measurable levels of planetary destruction.

By which O'Neill means that these benefits would be usurped, if eco-imperialism actually got its way, for once. But fortunately, no one with any real power seriously believes in the miserabilists' pseudo-measurements of atmospheric CO2, polar ice, animal populations, rainfall, glacier loss, ocean acidification, and related phantasmagoria.

It's easy enough to point out that O'Neill is a flaming asshole. But if we were to concentrate solely on that fact, we might overlook the really interesting aspects of his argument. "Western environmentalists" are worried about the Nano; that's a given. Does this mean that Indian environmentalists and scientists aren't worried? Of course not: environmentalists and climatologists all around the world are brooding over "pseudo-measurable levels of planetary destruction" even as we speak, instead of banishing dull care by riding an ATV through a protected wilderness area. That's what makes 'em miserabilists, regardless of race, color, caste, or creed.

But if O'Neill acknowledged this little detail, he'd have to forego the pleasure of turning what little remains of white liberal guilt against itself, by invoking the horrors of imperialism as an argument for free-market dogmatism. He understands that Westerners are a bit more sensitive than they used to be about dictating terms to the Wogs, and so he figures he can score a few points by painting the IPCC as a new East India Company. Of course, this theory requires us to view Indian culture as monolithic, scientifically backwards, and implacably self-centered...but what matter the victims if the gesture be beautiful?

No one "overlooks" the benefits of the Nano. The people who are worried about it, here and in India, simply see the negatives as outweighing the positives. By contrast, O'Neill and his ilk refuse to concede that any meaningful negatives exist (hence all the talk of "pseudo-measurement"). This tactic is not just necessary, but enjoyable, because once the science is out of the way, there's all the time in the world to dream up neoliberal just-so stories:

In the past it was argued that the developing world was poor because there simply wasn't enough to go around or because Indians and Africans hadn't quite got the hang of this capitalism thing.

Today, the key cultural justification for continuing inequality is the idea that if the south becomes like us – with just as many cars, factories, roads, homes – then the planet will perish.

It's fascinating how many young journalistic firebrands have adapted the language and tone of radical critique to the purpose of blessing things as they are. O'Neill expects us to feel pious outrage at Western arrogance, while suggesting that development in India must follow the Western model or be damned, and that anyone who worries about the consequences is a fraud or a terminal mope, and that India doesn't have competent scientists, diversity of opinion, and a strong and courageous environmental movement. When it comes to purging ourselves of Western arrogance, like apparently cures like.

The funny thing is, O'Neill doesn't seem to believe this gibberish himself. No sooner does he accuse the West of scheming to maintain global inequality than he backpedals, and claims that the real concern is that we're allowing our silly Western guilt to interfere with the Hindoos' progress towards Civilization. This is known as "problematising progress." No, really!

This is a moral righteousness built on privilege rather than principle. The anti-Nano brigade, and all of the rest who problematise progress in the developing world, know the destructiveness of everything but the value of nothing. Just because we have become uncertain about technological progress, guilt-ridden about our luxuries, and cavalier about the feeling of freedom brought about by car travel, that doesn't mean Indians should stay put in their rickshaws.

Of course, it doesn't mean they have to buy a Nano, either. There are other possible vehicles, and wiser forms of progress, and Indian experts who can tell you all about them. (And of course, there are also Western countries that could be setting a good example by cutting their own emissions and working seriously to create a low-carbon economy.) But O'Neill seems to be problematizing every single one of these options except the Nano, for no better reason than that the Nano exists here and now, and environmentalists and climate scientists have dared to measure its carbon emissions instead of hailing it as the salvation of the downtrodden.

So once again, freedom boils down to scrambling to buy what the market offers, instead of demanding what it doesn't, or creating a solution oneself or with one's neighbors. Achieving "global equality" turns out to be a matter of individual access to adequate cash or credit, just as our best and brightest always suspected. And anyone who proposes that there are greater goals or more pressing duties than consumer choice is an Enemy of the People.

This would be a colossally dismal view of human possibilities even if there truly were nothing more to climate change than pseudo-measurements and eco-imperialism. Since O'Neill's theory also happens to be deadly lunacy, it's not hard to understand why he finds his dreary faux-radical boosterism running afoul of "miserabilists."

(Photo: "Roads in India are already congested with traffic." Reuters/Krishnendu Halde.)

Volcano Monitoring

Pointless, just like Bobby Jindal done gone and said:

Alaska's Mt. Redoubt volcano erupted five times overnight, throwing ash as high as 60,000 feet into the air, threatening air travel and raising health risks in some sparsely populated areas.

It was the first eruption of the 10,200-foot Redoubt, about 100 miles from Anchorage, since 1989, when the volcano erupted for four months....

Mt. Redoubt has erupted in 1902, 1966 and 1989, when ash was thrown as high as 45,000 feet. Ash was sent 150 miles away into the path of a KLM jet and its four engines flamed out. The crew managed to restart the engines and land safely but the craft needed $80 million in repairs.

The observatory warned in late January that an eruption could occur at any time as earthquake activity in the area increased.

Action and Reaction

Commentators who've been trying to lead conservatism back to First Principles fail to understand that conservatism is incapable of wandering away from them:

In itself, conservatism is tranquil. In relation to the ever-changing human condition, conservatism is always adapting. Conservatism is “formless” like water: it takes the shape of its conditions, but always remains the same. This is why Russell Kirk calls conservatism the “negation of ideology” in The Politics of Prudence. It is precisely the formlessness of conservatism which gives it its vitality. Left alone, the spirit of conservatism is essentially what T.S. Eliot calls the “stillness between two waves of the sea” in “Little Gidding” of his Four Quartets. Conservatism is both like water and the stillness between the waves — the waves are not the water acting, but being acted upon; stillness is the default state of conservatism.

What some people call adaptation, others would call morally hollow opportunism, but never mind about that. What's amusing about this argument is that far from negating ideology, only ideology can begin to make it comprehensible.

Let's run through the basic concepts here. First, and simplest: Neither water nor conservativism "always remains the same," unless you view the ability to change states, and to become contaminated, as essential qualities. In which case, water remains water whether it's fresh or salt or frozen or full of aniline dye, and conservatism remains conservatism whether its guiding star is T.S. Eliot or Russell Kirk or Sarah Palin. That is, it retains "the spirit of conservatism," which ye shall know by its formlessness, and its ability to adapt to all circumstances and to survive its own negation...almost as if it were nothing more than a certain orientation of ego towards power.

Next, we need to think about what this spirit of conservatism is like, in itself, when it's "left alone." Left alone how, you ask? Well, you know...unperturbed by conflicting social values, and the clamor of nations, and the mandrake shrieks of the persecuted homosexual, and so forth. We seem to be talking about a God's-eye view of conservatism, to which bigotry is as essential and impersonal a force as gravity, and atomic bonding is a microcosm of the Free Market. (As above, so below!)

Having developed a rough idea of how an essentialist abstraction behaves in the natural habitat of an imaginary world, I'm sure we all feel edified. But now, it's time to come down to earth:

Conservatism is both like water and the stillness between the waves....

So conservatism is like water and water that's relatively still? Or maybe it's like water and that essential stillness for which water at rest is an apt metaphor, save for the minor detail that the essential nature of water is such that there is no stillness between waves?

Absolutely, in a certain limited but ontically inexorable sense. But in a stricter sense, not entirely, in relative terms, as of yet, if you follow me. Or as Marcus Aurelius puts it, here's a bunny with a pancake on its head.

The important thing to understand is that water doesn't act, but is acted upon. In just the same way, it wasn't political calculation, but a curvature in space-time that pulled conservatism to the bedside of Terri Schiavo, obliged it to leer onanistically into America's bedrooms, and compelled it to form highly stable rings around Rush Limbaugh. Like water, it simply reacts; it can no more choose or reflect upon the things that agitate it than the big lake they call Gitchigoomee could've avoided sinking the Edmund Fitzgerald when the gales of November came early.

And that's the whole point. In practical terms, all this pseudo-civilized twaddle about Little Gidding, and all this Zen-for-Dummies meditation on "stillness," boils down to the notion that conservatism only raped you because you asked for it by dressing like a slut. What makes conservatism "the negation of ideology" is precisely that it dares to take the ultimate ideological step of conflating itself with God and nature: leave it alone, and it will restrict itself to regulating your existence; defy it, and it'll have its revenge. Either way, the victim gets what he or she deserves.

Which reminds me, inevitably, of a quote from Adorno: "If the lion had a consciousness, his rage at the antelope he wants to eat would be ideology."

(Illustration by R. Avotin, 1970, via Dark Roasted Blend.)

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

New Mexico has abolished the death penalty:

Gov. Bill Richardson signed legislation Wednesday repealing New Mexico's death penalty, making it the second state to ban executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Richardson, a Democrat who formerly supported capital punishment, said signing the bill was the "most difficult decision" of his political life but that "the potential for ... execution of an innocent person stands as anathema to our very sensibilities as human beings."

The execution of this monster, however, will proceed as scheduled.

Women in Egypt are learning martial arts:

In this male-dominated society it is unusual to see these women in their headscarves sparring with men, but such is the concern here at the rise of sexual harassment cases that the number attending this class grows every month.

Shaza Saeed, 14, is one of the new recruits. "I was on my way home from school and I was attacked - I didn't know what to do," she said. "But now I have learnt how to defend myself so I am not afraid any more. I think every girl should go to self-defence classes like this."

Denmark has legalized adoptions by gay people:

Denmark’s Parliament has passed legislation allowing same-sex couples to adopt children. The bill puts gay and lesbian couples on the same footing as opposite-sex couples.

Gay couples had been fighting for a decade to have the law passed.

In related news, the US will sign "a United Nations declaration affirming that international human rights protections must include sexual orientation and gender identity, and condemning abuses against GLBT people." And a court has ruled that an anti-gay Christian group at UC Hastings College of the Law has no inherent right to funding and official support:

The U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that the law school was within its rights to deny recognition and funding to a group that excludes LGBT students and non-Christians....

The ADF had to know this was a losing case—this has nothing to do with freedom of association, or religious freedom—these Christianists just can’t expect the school to support their bigotry with funding, office space and inclusion in official school publications.

The Obama administration has overturned the "Ashcroft Doctrine" on freedom of information:

New Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) guidelines calling for a “presumption of openness” were issued today by Attorney General Eric Holder. The guidelines, fulfilling the directive of a presidential memorandum issued in January, overturn the “Ashcroft doctrine” of the Bush administration that allowed the government to withhold information requested through FOIA whenever legally possible. The attorney general’s announcement comes during “Sunshine Week” and follows the introduction of legislation aimed at strengthening FOIA in the Senate.

The administration has also vowed to stop prosecuting providers of medical marijuana in states where it's legal:

In the Bush administration, federal agents raided medical marijuana distributors that violated federal statutes even if the dispensaries appeared to be complying with state laws. The raids produced a flood of complaints, particularly in California, which in 1996 became the first state to legalize marijuana sales to people with doctors’ prescriptions.

Graham Boyd, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union drug law project, said Mr. Holder’s remarks created a reasonable balance between conflicting state and federal laws and “seem to finally end the policy war over medical marijuana.” He said officials in California and the 12 other states that have authorized the use of medical marijuana had hesitated to adopt regulations to carry out their laws because of uncertainty created by the Bush administration.

Charles Grassley (R-Hell) worries that medical marijuana may lead cancer and AIDS and MS patients to use "harder drugs" (like, for instance, medical narcotics). Hopefully, the money we save on prosecuting these "criminals" can be spent on research into a cure for Empathy Deficit Disorder, which some experts believe may affect up to 100 percent of congressional Republicans.

A few weeks ago, I was lamenting the fact that the Warming Cult hadn't done a very good job of explaining basic facts about the climate to the public, which is really no way to run a global Communist conspiracy. Obviously, people in high places took notice:

In an effort to improve understanding of climate science, a group of government agencies has combined efforts to produce "Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science."

"There is so much misinformation about climate," said Tom Karl, director of the government's National Climatic Data Center. "We want to provide an easily readable document to help everyone make the most informed decisions. Having one product endorsed by the nation's top federal science agencies, as well as leading science centers and associations, makes this document an essential resource." Karl said.

The booklet is available here. Having skimmed it, I have to say that it may be a bit too subtle...not in terms of the information, which is solid and demolishes most of the major misconceptions, but in terms of arrangement and emphasis. Also, it doesn't really explain seasons and hemispheres, which I've come to believe comprise one of the biggest stumbling blocks for Americans. But other than that, it's quite good.

Amusingly (in a sense), the associated site includes quotes from a government brochure published in the fifties:

During the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957-1958, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences published a pioneering science education publication, Planet Earth: Mystery with 100,000 Clues. The brochure pointed out that Earth's natural greenhouse effect was being altered as "our industrial civilization has been pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a great rate." The brochure went on to warn that if this continued, the result "would have a marked warming effect on Earth's climate" that could "cause significant melting of the great ice caps and raise sea levels in time."

It's surely no coincidence that this brochure appeared immediately after Joe McCarthy died. He would've instantly recognized it as a bid by the one-worlders to seize control of our air conditioners.

Apropos of this vast conspiracy, some activist judge has blocked BushCo's last-minute ruling that allowed people to carry concealed, loaded guns in national parks.

And Bruce Nilles describes what happened after the Wisconsin Public Service Commission denied a request to build a new coal plant:

Now, the company has decided to invest that money in clean energy – specifically, wind power.

In a story with an incredible headline – “Denial of Coal Plant Blows Utility Toward Turbine Deal” – Alliant Spokesman Rob Crain says, “The PSC expressed concern over carbon, and we listened.”

The coal industry has been spending millions of dollars to convince us they’re the cheapest and easiest way to keep the lights on. They tell us that change is costly, and they want you to believe that clean energy is not a viable alternative and that greenhouses gases aren’t a concern. And yet here is a utility doing just the opposite – listening to what the public, the science, and decision makers are telling them.

Sale of oil and gas leases in the Monongahela National Forest has been blocked:

Yesterday, a little more than a week after conservation groups filed a protest against a plan to sell oil and gas leases on an area of the Monongahela National Forest, the Bureau of Land Management withdrew the parcel from the upcoming lease sale....

“This oil and gas project was going to further threaten bat species already spiraling rapidly toward oblivion,” said Mollie Matteson, conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. “The Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management have a responsibility to make sure their actions do not harm endangered species or their habitat, and yet that responsibility was being ignored.”

US government agencies claim that they will streamline the process of developing offshore renewable energy:

Under the agreement, the Interior Department will have jurisdiction over offshore wind and solar energy projects, while the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will oversee offshore projects that generate electricity from wave and tidal currents.

"This agreement will help sweep aside red tape ... our renewable energy is too important for bureaucratic turf battles to slow down our progress," said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Joseph Romm runs through the latest battery research:

Battery advances seems to be flowing as fast as electrons these days -- and super fast charging batteries may hit the market in as little as 2 to 3 years. And that's critical because the car of the very near future, plug in hybrids, are a core climate solution. And electricity is the only alternative fuel that can lead to energy independence.

In Detroit, artists are buying foreclosed and gutted properties, in hopes of transforming them into sustainable homes:

In the crumbling Motor City, Mitch and Gina Cope have been purchasing ailing properties at rock-bottom prices, and are encouraging other artists to do the same....

"Our idea — instead of putting it all back and connecting to the grid, we wanted to keep it off the grid and get enough solar and wind turbines and batteries to power this house and power the next-door house," [Mitch] Cope says.

Time has a somewhat related article on "recycling" the suburbs:

The suburbs need to be remade, and just such a transformation is under way in regions that were known for some of the worst sprawl in the U.S. Communities as diverse as Lakewood, Colo., and Long Beach, Calif., have repurposed boarded-up malls as mixed-use developments with retail stores, offices and apartments. In auto-dependent suburbs that were built without a traditional center, shopping malls offer the chance to create downtowns without destroying existing infrastructure, by recycling what's known as underperforming asphalt. "All of these projects are developer-driven, because the market wants them," says Ellen Dunham-Jones, a co-author of the new book Retrofitting Suburbia.

Another article in the same series includes an interesting discussion of the interstate highway system:

The first great advantage of the interstates is that they represent an established right of way. The government owns the road-beds and adjacent land, so rail and power lines can be laid down without the need to purchase more land. "Right of way is a precious resource," says Representative Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat who has become a point person in Congress on infrastructure issues. "It's been developed over centuries at great cost. It's strategically located and immediately available."

And it's already being put to use in some places. In the new expansion of the Portland Light Rail system in Oregon, the trains run alongside the road. And in Portland some stretches of that road are also being equipped with solar panels to power the roadside lights. But maybe the most audacious idea comes from the Al Gore-affiliated Repower America, a clean-energy advocacy group. Highways could be one of the routes for the new, more efficient electrical power grid that Repower advocates. And that grid would be available for battery-powered and hybrid vehicles to draw from and even sell surplus power back to. Envision a system in which you drive to a light-rail station along the interstate, plug into a smart grid at the parking lot and ride the train to work while your car recharges.

A critically endangered plant has received ESA protection from the Obama administration:

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that it is listing a Hawaiian plant, Phyllostegia hispida, from the island of Molokai as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. The plant is the first species protected under the Endangered Species Act by the Obama administration. The plant was first designated as a candidate for protection in 1997. It was recently thought extinct and Fish and Wildlife had considered emergency-listing the species, but that was delayed by the Bush administration. Today, just 24 plants of the species are known in the wild.

A very small frog has been discovered in the Andes:

The tiny frog took biologists by surprise since as a general rule species in higher altitudes tend to be larger than similar species in lower regions. Measuring at less than half an inch, the Noble's pygmy frog is not only the smallest frog in the Andes, but one of the smallest vertebrates in the world above 3,000 meters.

Frances Moore Lappé describes how the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte ended hunger:

The new mayor, Patrus Ananias—now leader of the federal anti-hunger effort—began by creating a city agency, which included assembling a 20-member council of citizen, labor, business, and church representatives to advise in the design and implementation of a new food system. The city already involved regular citizens directly in allocating municipal resources—the “participatory budgeting” that started in the 1970s and has since spread across Brazil. During the first six years of Belo’s food-as-a-right policy, perhaps in response to the new emphasis on food security, the number of citizens engaging in the city’s participatory budgeting process doubled to more than 31,000.

The city agency developed dozens of innovations to assure everyone the right to food, especially by weaving together the interests of farmers and consumers. It offered local family farmers dozens of choice spots of public space on which to sell to urban consumers, essentially redistributing retailer mark-ups on produce—which often reached 100 percent—to consumers and the farmers. Farmers’ profits grew, since there was no wholesaler taking a cut. And poor people got access to fresh, healthy food.

Lindsay Beyerstein notes that the stimulus will benefit hospitals that care for the poor:

Some good news just arrived in the form of a press release from the Department of Health and Human Services, announcing that the $268 million stimulus dollars have been made available to support hospitals caring for the poor and the uninsured.

A new test can detect Alzheimer's disease in its earliest stages:

The test, which measures proteins in spinal fluid that can point to Alzheimer's, was 87 percent accurate at predicting which patients with early memory problems and other symptoms of cognitive impairment would eventually be diagnosed with Alzheimer's, they said.

There's also word of an improved TB test:

"A report from South Africa showed that the extensively drug-resistant TB strains can kill within 16 days, on average," says Graham Hatfull, Ph.D., the lead author and close collaborator of Dr. Jacobs. "In rural Africa, it takes too long to collect samples, send them off, do the test, and have the data sent back. Clinicians need rapid, relatively cheap, and simple methods for detecting TB and drug-resistant strains in the local clinic. This test provides a quick diagnosis so the patient can be isolated and treated."

This is interesting (though not really surprising, IMO):

Africans who are cocooned from Western culture recognize expressions of happiness, sadness and fear in the same musical passages that Westerners do.

This finding provides the first solid evidence for a universal human ability to distinguish basic emotions in music, asserts a team led by cognitive scientist Thomas Fritz of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany.....

His team’s investigation indicates that Mafa and Western listeners similarly derive emotional meaning from the tempo and key of musical passages. Both groups tended to classify fast-paced pieces as happy and slow ones as scared or fearful, and mostly agreed on which passages were sad, but assigned no particular tempo with them. Mafa and Westerners also generally regarded major-key pieces as happy, minor-key excerpts as fearful and passages with an indeterminate key as sad.

Mafa music exclusively expresses joy and happiness. Village revelers blow fervently through flutes made of iron, clay and wax at various rituals, including a harvest event. No word exists in the Mafa language for music, which is viewed as an inseparable element of ritual.

In conclusion: Secondhand Toys (via things). The almost inconceivable Chand Baori stepwell. Some astonishing photos of an undersea eruption off Tonga. (You can also see live footage here). A film of the Kodak factory, circa 1958. And images of Namibian sand dunes by The Coultate's (via dataisnature).


Walls of death and zipper heads. Images of early machine technology. And unbelievably beautiful aerial views of mountains and glaciers from Bradford Washburn.





Photos by Petur Thomsen (via wood s lot). Playing cards made in a Russian prison versus playing cards made in the Irish Free State. Home economics explained: A Taste for Science (related: Meatless Mondays, Wheatless Wednesdays). And a marvelous collection of historic instrumentation and atomic ephemera.


Last, a brief glimpse of a Shanghai street acrobat.



(Image at top: "Glacier" by Sidney Nolan, 1964.)

Let Them Truckers Roll!

In times of crisis, great men frequently look to the example of a fictional character for guidance.

When Thomas Jefferson was laboring to abolish the death penalty, he was often heard to say that he wished he had a magic hat like Fortunatus. Cecil Rhodes initially tried to win South African mineral concessions through ventriloquism, just like Carwin, the anti-hero of Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 novel Wieland, or The Transformation. After becoming acquainted with R.F. Outcault's Yellow Kid, Mahatma Gandhi wore a saffron kurta emblazoned with the words "Dis gang tinks dey kin queer me but wait an see."

Ronald Reagan based his presidency almost entirely on the character of Jack Browning, the dead-eyed reptilian thug he played in Don Siegel's 1964 version of The Killers. And George W. Bush, of course, was inspired by some guy's painting of a horse thief.

So it's no surprise that the wisest and most productive members of our society would try to overcome the existential threat of taxation by imitating — or at least talking about imitating — John Galt, that sempiternal blowhard and hero of misunderstood teen geniuses from Nova Scotia to Nome.

The thing is, they're doing it wrong. I've argued before that C.W. McCall's 1975 novelty hit Convoy is the finest explication of libertarianism ever penned, and I stand by the claim. The hero these people ought to be emulating is The Rubber Duck, who leads a group of liberty-lovin' truckers on an epic journey to nowhere, for reasons that are never made entirely clear. The song is a celebration of spontaneous collective action in defense of individual liberty, as conceived by people whose revolutionary outlook begins and ends with the glorification of their marginal role in late capitalism, who see speed zones and tollbooths as tyranny, and who would rather shit in their pants for three days straight than pull over and get hassled by The Man.

Let's consider the song's narrative in more detail. Through the democratizing power of CB radio — a sort of proto-Internet, if you will — truckers who are enraged by bureaucracy and speed limits and stuff conspire to drive together across the United States at top speed, without stopping for cops, scales, gas, food, or anonymous gay sex at rest areas.

Come on and join our convoy,
Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way.
We're gonna roll this truckin' convoy
Across the USA.

If that's not an inspiring metaphor for the crazy quilt of modern conservatarianism, what on earth is? The song even anticipates the Crunchy Con movement, with a reference to "eleven long-haired friends of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus."

The police set up roadblocks, prompting The Rubber Duck to boast "I'm about to go a-huntin' bear." Don't ask how, or with what, or to what conceivable end. It's attitude that really counts in life, and the Duck's righteous 'tude seemingly reduces the police to toothless slapstick figures, because despite having chicken coops and choppers, and "armored cars, and tanks, and jeeps, and rigs of every size," Smokey can't do a thing to stop the Duck and his band of brothers in their "thousand screamin' trucks." At least, not before they achieve this apotheosis:

I says, "Pig Pen, this here's the Rubber Duck.
We just ain't a-gonna pay no toll."
So we crashed the gate doin' ninety-eight.
I says, "Let them truckers roll, 10-4!"

The song specifies that the toll is a dime, and there's a thousand trucks, so that's — wait a moment now, while I fetch the abacus — that's one hundred dollars that wasn't extorted from truck-drivin' men to maintain the roadbeds on which they ply their trade. Starve the beast!

It's not clear what happens next to these freedom fighters, but who cares? The important thing is that for a brief time, these men were members of a high-speed vehicular mob that could do anything except handle a sharp turn.

Why shouldn't disaffected conservatives and libertarians stage a similar populist revolt (or at least threaten us with one)? These folks have always had a hard time deciding whether they're William F. Buckley, Jr. or Hulk Hogan, but given the general mood of the country, I think it's time to come down from Parnassus and groove with the People.

I mean, going Galt is all well and good, but it's a bit too upscale, amirite? A bit too stilted and recherche? Organizing a series of national anti-socialist "Convoys," where people race around hootin' and hollerin' and wastin' gas to no clear purpose, would be much more likely to excite the Common Man than Ayn Rand's mindnumbing sophistries. Plus they'd have a readymade theme song. (And a movie, come to think of it, which the New York Times described as "a big, costly, phony exercise in myth-making, machismo, romance-of-the-open-road nonsense and incredible self-indulgence." That clinches it; I really do think we have the makings of an awesome new white-guy uprising here.)

Come on and join our Convoy, America! We ain't a-gonna pay no toll! It's not like you actually have to "crash the gates doin' ninety-eight"; you can simply talk about how cool it would be if someone else did it. Hell, you don't even have to know how to drive, really; this is more about the freedom that driving ideally represents, where you're not hampered by nanny-state obstacles like insurance and stop signs and road crews and bears in the air. As I said before, it's the attitude that counts; what matters is not what you actually do, but which absurd adolescent wish-fulfillment fantasy would guide you if you ever did do anything besides boring the birds out of the trees with your anti-civilization horseshit.

As for myself, I've decided to protest the prison-industrial complex by going Tenzil Kem. Of course, this doesn't mean that I'll actually eat iron latticework, any more than the people who claim to be going Galt will actually shut the fuck up, forfeit their incomes, banish themselves to the wilderness, and die in a shootout over who's gonna dig the latrine. But it does demonstrate my high ideals, don't you think?

Garden Plot

The author of an editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal is worried because Obama intends to provide one billion dollars to the "Food Police," who will use the money to regulate the nation's supply of tainted food, instead of letting market forces decide how it should be allocated.

It's funny how times change. It wasn't very long ago that the most important test of government policy was whether it comforted security moms, who saw the safety of their children as non-negotiable, and therefore mistrusted John Kerry for being a windsurfer.

But now, the timeless conservative vision of women as safety-obsessed nurturers of the innocent runs up against the stark reality of the corporate bottom line, which means that the inspectors of peanut-butter factories must be cast as a new Holy Vehm. "Security moms" who have a problem with this are cordially invited to get bent.

The president will ask Congress for $1 billion in new funds -- for starters -- to add FDA inspectors and modernize laboratories. He further announced the Agriculture Department is moving ahead with a rule change banning sick or disabled cattle from the food supply.

"There are certain things only a government can do," Mr. Obama said. "And one of those things is ensuring that the foods we eat, and the medicines we take, are safe and do not cause us harm."

There's only one possible answer to that:

If "government is the answer," why is there a problem?

This is nearly too nice to talk about. Why does anyone use poppers, or huff solvents, when you can get precisely the same giddy euphoria from glibertarian kōans like this one, gratis and free of charge?

If medicine is the answer, why is there disease? If prison is the answer, why is there crime? If contraception is the answer, why is there unwanted pregnancy? If education is the answer, why is there ignorance? If anti-discrimination laws are the answer, why is there bigotry?

Or to put it another way, if perfection is unattainable, why fucking bother?

After a crescendo like that, the rest of the article can't help but be anticlimactic. The gist of it is that market forces and corporate branding are adequate to protect smart people from food poisoning, because smart people would rather eat at a bright and cheerful fast food restaurant than at some low-rent hash house filled with bikers and hippies and freelance abortionists and rats the size of poodles.

This theory can't survive a cursory rundown of the outbreaks of foodborne illness over the last decade or two, the most serious of which were serious precisely because they involved popular brands and therefore affected far more people than some filthy diner along the Ohio Turnpike. (If brand management is the answer, why are people getting sick from eating at McDonald's?) Furthermore, it's not obvious that people who choose to eat at non-branded restaurants deserve to get sick or die, just because they happened to be "adventurous."

Here's a riddle for you:

Should budget shortfalls require federal food regulatory agencies to shut down tomorrow, do we really believe manufacturers who have spent billions building up the reputations of things called "Cheerios" and "Campbell's Soup" would immediately start ignoring the long-term costs of adding harmful adulterants to make better short-term profits tomorrow?

The short answer: "Yes. Of course. What kind of demented fucking mongrel idiot doesn't understand that, at this late date?"

The long answer: We've seen some evidence, over the years, that insufficiently regulated businesses will do anything they can get away with in pursuit of short-term profits (cf. AIG, W.R. Grace). Also, this is a silly argument, because it assumes that the manufacturers necessarily believe that the adulterant in question is harmful, despite reams of industry-funded thinktank boilerplate that tells them otherwise. In other words, the editorial wants us to consider the problem in terms of radical evil, instead of the wishful thinking that more commonly gets American businesses into expensive or even deadly trouble. There's also the fact that regulation ideally prevents business from making excessive or fraudulent claims for their products (e.g., "eating three bowls of Cheerios per day will ward off the suppurating gleet!"), which can be as dangerous in some cases as adulteration.

By now, you probably have a pretty clear picture of the worldview we're dealing with: Business r00olz, government dr00lz, and the Invisible Hand will save everyone who's worth saving. That's not a very popular outlook in these dreadful times, so the last few paragraphs are devoted to a dystopian vision in which the fascist Obamabot Food Police come down on our crash pads and communes, and seize the zucchini that we were gonna, like, bring to the Dead show and barter for some weed:

Would HR 875 effectively ban seed banking and small-scale organic farming? Would it allow the Food Police to trespass on private property to "check our vegetables"? Would it mandate 24-hour GPS tracking of farm animals? Could lands and crops be seized for "non-compliance"?

A lot can be justified under the rubric of "food safety." Do we really believe granting a monopoly to large-scale factory farms, with their standardized artificial fertilizers and pesticides, is safest for our health and nutritional needs in the long run?

Of course it'd be safe! 'Cause the thing is, see, large-scale factory farms who've spent billions of dollars to build their brands would never dream of using dangerous or unproven fertilizers or pesticides, or producing food that was in any way unwholesome. That'd go against the dictates of rational self-interest. As would creating an elite counterrevolutionary force that goes door to door looking for heirloom tomatoes to trample.

What is this maniac talking about, you ask? Well, it seems that Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) is married to a consultant whose clients include Monsanto, and has introduced a bill that might conceivably become law, after the usual process of bickering and compromise and obstructionism and extortion and posturing. If that happens, it's conceivable that Obama might include it as part of his billion-dollar food-safety initiative. And if that happens, it's conceivable — just barely, provided you're crazy — that a new monocultural Staatssicherheit will make backyard gardens illegal, even though HR 875 currently doesn't provide for any such thing. Translation: Obama wants a billion dollars for teh Food Police, and you will soon have to pay Monsanto royalties for growing radishes. RIP America: 1776-2009.

Tom Philpott finds these worries to be groundless, as does Food and Water Watch. Without arguing in favor of HR 875, I notice that it contains provisions that might not appeal to the death-before-regulation crowd, including increasing the inspection of food plants and requiring imported food to meet US standards. Presumably, that's the real problem here, and all this nonsense about outlawing "backyard gardens" is intended to rile survivalists who are busy stockpiling food and guns against the coming Obamapocalypse.

In summation: Alarmism about food safety is misguided, actual outbreaks of mass poisoning notwithstanding, but alarmism about imaginary "Food Police" is perfectly sensible. Nothing's more important than the safety of our children, except for the principle that government shouldn't and can't protect them from anything but terrorism, collectivism, and rap lyrics. Security that doesn't have a 100-percent success rate is basically worthless, so let's give that billion to the Pentagon instead. You can trust the government to give people lethal injections or bomb foreign capitals, but not to conduct the occasional spot test for E. coli. You can count on big business to do the right thing for consumers...unless it might be influencing a "far-left" member of Congress, in which case Liberal Fascism is practically a done deal, and we don't even get organic arugula out of it.

At the risk of repeating myself, the road towards a non-insane conservatism seems to be an exceptionally hard one to travel.

Human Needs

An op-ed writer named Mike Shelton has some scattered thoughts on climate change, which can be summarized as follows:

1. Some top scientists say it's a hoax, so all the top scientists who say it isn't are obviously wrong.


2. Terrorists are dangerous, unlike hog-waste lagoons.


3. It doesn't matter if you cut down a forest, 'cause you can plant a new one. Animals who don't love it can leave it!


4. zOMG Algore wants me to wipe my ass with my bare hands!!!oneoneone


5. Some guy in Ohio is weird.


6. Farms are wasting away! People are starving! And you expect me to care about the climate?


7. I object strongly to the elitist elitism of elites, unless they're "the world's top scientists" and they're saying stuff that pleases me. (And no, it's not elitism to suggest that personal choice should be as all-consuming a concern to the world's downtrodden as it is to some willfully ignorant loudmouth in Yuma, AZ.)


8. Americans don't care about it very much, which proves that it doesn't matter.

The usual nonsense, in other words. But he does have one interesting argument up his sleeve, which ties in nicely with the current conservative strategy of relying on fictional characters to solve all the world's problems:

[W]hen Kiefer Sutherland left his “Jack Bauer” persona on Fox's “24” and said the set was green, I was so disappointed. The real Jack, and his admiring audience, would care less about the environmental friendliness of his set. Just knock sense into those soft-on-terror senators.

There's no arguing with this, mainly because there's no understanding it. Jack Bauer, who's not actually on TV in his TV show, wouldn't want the set of his show to be environmentally friendly, if he had one, because that'd interfere with his fictional prime directive of roughing up US senators. And Kiefer Sutherland should totally have respected that imaginary stance by sneering at environmentalism just like the real Jack Bauer would've, if he actually existed and starred in a TV show about himself. In real life, I mean.

Or as Joseph Conrad once observed, "what is a TV show about torturing terrorists if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”

Know what else is kind of disappointing, come to think of it? Ayn Rand never went Galt. Which is pretty remarkable, when you look at the high income tax rates in 1957, and the rise of deadly dysgenic evils like Social Security benefits for the disabled.

Here's a closing thought for you. Bear in mind that it comes from a man who thinks that we can mow down forests, and plant new ones, with no net loss of anything that matters.

We have too many real human needs to behave as though the cycles of nature are within our control.

(Illustration: "High winds blow sand at the original north shore of Owens Lake, now miles from the nearest pool of water, on May 5, 2007 near Lone Pine, California. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) is trying to reverse the desertification of the lake that it dried up with the construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913 to divert the Owens River – the lake’s only water source – for growing Los Angeles urban areas." Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.)

Of Hospitality

A few days ago, I argued that our country's "culture of life" is a comfortable fraud that allows us to pursue the important business of oppression, violence and murder with a clear conscience, and pointed out that anyone who truly believes that "all life is sacred" — for whatever reason — will be treated like a mad dog.

Here's a case in point:

A pastor in this quiet, picturesque New England town thought he was doing the Christian thing when he took in a convicted child killer who had served his time but had nowhere to go.

But some neighbors of the Rev. David Pinckney vehemently disagree, one even threatening to burn his house down after officials could find no one else willing to take 60-year-old Raymond Guay.

The Rev. Pinckney obviously misunderstands the Bible, which clearly states that the strict demands of Christian hospitality apply primarily to the owners operators of wombs.

In fact, what Rev. Pinckney is doing is the Christian thing. I can't argue this point better, or with more conviction, than RMJ, so I'll turn the floor over to him:

Hospitality is what is shown to others; and if God is hospitality, then God directs me, not into myself, but out to others. But others, and which others? My friends? My neighbors? The members of my social class, my economic class, my ethnic clan or nationality or race or creed or culture? Am I directed to those who do not share my ideas about hospitality, who do not understand what I mean when I offer my hand for a handshake, or look them directly in the eyes? Am I directed to pedophiles and child molesters and rapists and murderers? And also, to attempt to leave no one out, to their victims, the families of the victims, the people who would punish them, banish them, put them beyond the social law of a hospitable society? Am I directed to do this by the God I worship, the God of Abraham and Jesus?

Yes.

There's a real culture of "personal responsibility" for you, in all its outrageousness and impossibility. Behold it and tremble.

In other religious news, Pope Benedict XVI is traveling through Africa, and has announced that condom use "increases the problem" of AIDS. Which, in addition to being an outrageous lie, is also very likely to kill people. Or continue killing them, I should say.

Hooray, says I, for the sanctity of life.

A Serpent's Nest

I was initially posting links here to my weekend blitherings chez Echidne, but I was interrupted by a long hiatus, and then forgot about it entirely.

For whatever it's worth, here are a bunch of recent posts. Be patient — or not — as Echidne's pages always seem to take a long time to load.

Math Class is Tough! discusses exciting new research that explains how women "choose" to fail at life.

Cell Groups prepares us for the looming radical-right revolution (i.e., an uptick in mass shootings), and compares "liberals," gays, and women to the regulations that impede the spontaneous order of the Free Market.

School's Out Forever takes a dim view of a plan to expel teens from school as a punishment for pregnancy, in a country with one of the lowest rates of contraceptive use on earth.

Dogma and Zealotry is a standard-issue rant against the false principles of climate denial, based on a column by Jeff Jacoby. The main focus is the weird assumption that a lack of knowledge allows you to assume the best possible outcome. Freeman Dyson is mocked too, which never hurts.

Why kNOw? presents such axioms of modern sex education as "if a woman is wet, a baby she may get!"

Thoughtful Discourse dissects WaPo ombudsman Andrew Alexander's careful response to George Will's latest fusillade of denialist lies. If that sounds as boring to read as it was to write, you can proceed directly to the money quote: "When people get angry because you've allowed a smirking ideological hack with a history of lying about this very issue to turn your op-ed page into his personal sandbox, and you respond to the idea of issuing retractions as though you'd been asked to harness a goose and fly it to the moon, what else can this signify but that both sides have failed equally to be Reasonable?"

Mother Pelosi and Father Frank is a horripilating vision of the End Times.

OctoMom Nation is another horripilating vision of the End Times.

A Muslim Tradition points out for the millionth time that Georgie Ann Geyer is a racist dingbat.

The Biggest Crutch bewails the pussification of American culture, as exemplified by anti-discrimination laws and medical care for the destitute.

There you have it! If you're looking for wisdom instead of cheap outrage and laborious gags, you can head over there and read everyone's posts but mine.

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Should the sun press
too heavy a crown,
should dawn cast
over-much loveliness,
should you tire as you laugh,
running from wave to wave-crest,
gathering the sea-flower to your breast,
you may dive down
to the uttermost sea depth,
where no great fish venture,
nor small fish glitter and dart,
only Hypselodoris bennetti and flower
of the wild sea-thyme
cover the silent walls
of an old sea-city at rest.

(Photo by Richard Ling.)

Friday Hope Blogging

Obama has signed the Omnibus Appropriation Bill, which will increase access to contraceptives:

Last night the Senate passed the omnibus appropriations bill, including the “Affordable Birth Control Act.” This provision is a no-cost fix to the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, which contained language that stopped pharmaceutical companies from providing prescriptions at lower than market costs to health clinics and College and University health centers. Previously, companies were supplying schools and safety-net providers with low cost or no cost birth control. As a result of the DRA, low income women and college students were forced to pay market price, approximately $40-$50 per month.

The same bill resumes funding for the UN Population Fund:

President Obama yesterday signed legislation containing a $50 million contribution to UNFPA. This puts in motion the restoration of U.S. funding for UNFPA, which had been suspended since 2002.

"This is a much needed support," added Ms. Obaid, "which will allow UNFPA to maintain its life-saving work, particularly improving maternal and reproductive health, in the world's poorest communities, especially during this financial crisis."

Incidentally, there was an attempt to strip the UNPF funding from the bill:

The bill was rejected in a near party-line vote with the Republican Senators Snowe (ME), Specter (PA), and Collins (ME) voting against the amendment and Democratic Senators Bayh (IN), Nelson (NE), and Casey (PA) voting for the amendment.

There's also talk of rescinding yet another of BushCo's anti-life policies:

Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) applauds the Obama administration for proposing a rule to rescind a Bush midnight regulation that undermines the country’s ailing health care system as well as patients’ access to health care information and services.

“This proposed rule clearly states that the Obama administration is committed to putting patients’ care first,” said Cecile Richards, president of PPFA. “As was made clear at the White House Summit on Health Care yesterday, we should be working together to increase, not hinder, access to care. Patients, especially low- income women, deserve access to complete and accurate health care information and services and today’s action shows that this administration understands and will meet this need. This is a commonsense fix.”

Perhaps sanity is contagious. Australia has just lifted its version of the Global Gag Rule:

The Australian government announced a decision yesterday to repeal a foreign aid ban that mirrored the Global Gag rule in the US. Australia's current policy dates to 1996 and prohibits "any overseas development funding from being used for activities which involve the termination of a pregnancy," according to Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.

In a statement, Smith said "This is a difficult issue and the Government recognizes that there are strong views, firmly held, on all sides….I have decided to change the Family Planning Guidelines for Australia's overseas development assistance program to support the same range of family planning services for women in developing countries as are supported for women in Australia, subject to the national laws of the relevant nation concerned."

The FDA has approved a new female condom:

The polyurethane sheath, originally approved in 1993, costs anywhere from $2.80 to $4 a piece ndash; a steep price for women in developing countries to whom the condom was marketed (never mind those in the U.S., who could pick up several of the male version for not much more than that -- or for free), Reuters reports. That may change, now that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a next-gen female condom made of synthetic nitrile (a form of rubber) that costs less money for its manufacturer, the Chicago-based Female Health Company, to make. The cost of the new female condom, FC2, could fall to around 60 cents per device for health groups and government agencies that want to buy them, according to the newswire.

Time will tell whether this statement from Obama is serious, or simply a nice gesture, but I like the sound of it:

Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security.

The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public.

A judge in Florida has ruled that school officials cannot ban a gay student club:

Adams ordered a local school board to grant official recognition to the Gay-Straight Alliance and afford it the same privileges as any other student organization.

The school district had argued in court that it would grant school access to the group if its name were changed, citing the name as its chief objection. But the judge ruled that the group did not need to make a change.

Bwahahaha, as the saying is.

Passage of the Omnibus bill will also make it easier to scrap Bush's anti-environmental regs:

Congress today passed an omnibus appropriations bill that gives the Obama administration power to rescind rules weakening both the Endangered Species Act and protections for the polar bear. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will now be able to rescind rules without going through a new, formal rulemaking process. This legislation gives the administration authority above that utilized in President Barack Obama’s memorandum issued last week, which directed federal agencies to follow the old rules.

“This legislation makes it much easier for the administration to remove rules weakening both the Endangered Species Act and protections for the polar bear,” said Noah Greenwald, biodiversity program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “This is Secretary Salazar’s first opportunity to really set himself apart from the previous administration.”

And it'll change corporate reporting rules for toxic chemicals:

The measure -- which affects chemical manufacturers, oil refineries, automakers and electronic manufacturers nationwide -- reverses a 2006 regulation enacted by President George W. Bush that eased the reporting requirements for nearly 600 chemicals, including arsenic, benzene and cadmium. The legislation restores the standard established by law in 1986, compelling all facilities to inform the public of any chemical releases that total 500 pounds a year or more, lowering the 2,000-pound threshold Bush had adopted.

An important wildlife protection act has been expanded:

Enacted in 1900 by William F. McKinley the Lacey Act is the oldest wildlife protection law in the US; for a over a century it has protected animals from being illegally hunted and trafficked. An amendment made last year has now extended the law to protect plants for the first time, making it possible for the US to support efforts abroad and at home to combat illegal logging.

According to an article by the International Tropical Timber Organization, any wood that is harvested illegal in its native country now comes under the Lacey Act and “anyone who imported, exported, transported, sold, received, acquired or purchased the wood products made from that illegal timber, who knew or should have known that the wood was illegal, may be prosecuted for violation of the Lacey Act”.

Treehugger has created a slide show of things that Obama's stimulus bill will help you to buy (h/t: Karin). As they put it, "tucked into the thousands of pages of confounding language, there are tons of fantastic new tax credits you can get simply for buying great green stuff." (And of course, it's also a diabolical plot against gun owners everywhere, so what's not to love?)

A new study suggests that Munich could cut CO2 emissions by 90 percent without affecting quality of life (or without worsening it, anyway):

Using examples, the study demonstrates that many investments in efficiency measures are, in fact, cost-effective. For instance, to meet the requirements of the energy-saving passive house standard – which is stricter than the 2007 Energy Savings Ordinance now in force – Munich will have to invest an additional €13 billion by mid-century in the renovation of old buildings and the construction of new ones. This amount comes to roughly €200 per city resident per year – about one third of an annual gas bill. However, these added costs will be offset in 2058 by energy cost savings of between €1.6 billion and €2.6 billion – that is, of some €1,200 to €2,000 per resident. If all savings potentials in the area of electrical power are realized, the lion’s share of the city’s electricity needs can be met by renewable low-carbon sources. Although relatively high at first, initial investments in efficient energy-saving technologies generally pay for themselves through energy savings.

In related news, it looks as though the EPA plans to make an important statement on CO2 in April:

a leaked Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) document shows that the agency “is fast-tracking its response to the Supreme Court’s 2007 climate decision with plans to issue a mid-April finding that global warming threatens both public health and welfare.”

This is very big, very historic, very exciting news – this action by EPA will set the stage for the first-ever national regulation of CO2 in US history. This so-called endangerment finding is the first step the Obama administration must take to start regulating global warming pollution from cars, coal plants, and other sources.

Rodale is promoting organic no-till farming as a carbon sequestration method:

No-till agriculture, in which farmers don’t plow their fields anymore, is one practice said to promote carbon sequestration in the soil. Organic farming is another. Researchers here at the nonprofit Rodale Institute are now developing a hybrid “organic no-till” farming system that they say could sponge up more carbon than any other way of growing food.

The claim: If organic no-till agriculture were used successfully on all of the earth’s 3.5 billion tillable acres, it would absorb and sequester more than half of all present-day CO2 emissions every year, according to Rodale Institute research director Paul Hepperly.

Scientific American examines claims that geothermal power may be "cheaper" than coal — we're pretending here that external costs don't exist, as sensible people should) — and finds some problems, and some grounds for optimism.

{T]he new analysis is backed up by earlier ones, such as a 2006 Western Governor's Association (WGA) report on geothermal resources in the U.S. Southwest. Using nearly the same economic model, but assuming a higher cost of capital than the one used in the Credit Suisse analysis—in other words, the interest rate that is so troublesome in today's economy—the WGA found that geothermal could be produced from existing resources, using existing technology, for around 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, once a 1.9 cent per kilowatt-hour tax credit furnished by the federal government is included.

A bill called the Complete Streets Act is currently being debated in Congress.

Good news: the Complete Streets Act, which is before the House and the Senate right now, would ensure that stimulus funds spent on new transportation projects adhere to “complete streets” guidelines. Streets would have to have sidewalks, raised medians, better bus stop placement, and various traffic-calming features, among other things.

Click the link to see how similar legislation improved a street in La Jolla, CA, and then contact your representatives to support the bill.

AfriGadget reports on an "analog blogger" in Liberia:

Alfred serves as a reminder to the rest of us, that simple is often better, just because it works. The lack of electricity never throws him off. The lack of funding means he’s creative in ways that he recruits people from around the city and country to report news to him. He uses his cell phone as the major point of connection between him and the 10,000 (he says) that read his blackboard daily.

Cadbury is switching over to fair trade:

The move, which also includes Cadbury’s hot chocolate beverage, will result in the tripling of sales of cocoa under Fairtrade terms for cocoa farmers in Ghana. It will both increase Fairtrade cocoa sales for existing certified farming groups, as well as open up new opportunities for more farmers to benefit from the Fairtrade system, according to the company.

This is interesting:

She could have gone down in history as the woman who developed a cure for scurvy, the scourge of sailors the world over. Ebbot Michell seems to have concocted a remedy decades before physician James Lind published his revolutionary Treatise Of The Scurvy in 1753 - but her name is forgotten and appears in no medical text book.

And so is this:

Scientists have used a substance from the shells of shrimp to create a new material that repairs itself when exposed to ultraviolet light. The properties of the polymer, described in the March 13 Science, are still being investigated, but it could in a matter of years make its way into all kinds of coatings, such as paints, and surfaces on everything from surgical instruments to countertops.

And this:

Administration of a tissue-cultured smallpox vaccine showed signs of an effective vaccine response with no serious adverse events, according to a study in the March 11 issue of JAMA.

"The threat of smallpox bioterrorism has prompted reconsideration of the need for smallpox vaccination. Serious adverse events associated with first-generation vaccines such as the New York City Board of Health (Dryvax), Lister, and Ikeda strains have raised obstacles to vaccination campaigns in the United States," the authors write. They add that certain second-generation vaccines are also often accompanied by a high frequency of adverse events. "Developing a vaccine that is safer than first-generation vaccines yet highly immunogenic [producing immunity or an immune response] is crucial to constructing a prevention plan in the event of bioterrorist attack."

The photo at the top is from Fritz Fabert's Archaeology of Work. It comes to you via wood s lot, as do these photographs by Maria Levitsky (the empty interiors and crime scenes are particularly evocative). Also, strange paintings by Josh Keyes. And a lovely image of Manhattan Bridge at Night.


Models of surfaces. Notes on computerized love poems from 1952, with examples. A bestiary of Uniform Polychora. And some stunning images from Reed Flute Cave.


Also: A beautiful photographic survey of NYC's Chinatown. Astonishing negatives from Russia and Tibet (via Dark Roasted Blend). Forays into fluorescence, and stereoscopic micrographs.


Last, a tour of Holland, consisting entirely of its reflection in water.



UPDATE: I hope you can stand a little more good news....

In a move that represents both a formality and a historic gesture, the Obama administration has announced that it's withdrawing the designation of "enemy combatant" for Guantanamo detainees. The Bush administration had drawn widespread criticism for its use of that designation, which allowed it to deny detainees rights they otherwise would have been entitled to.

The Human Community

Those of you who know Michael Gerson primarily as a man who was willing to write outrageous lies about Iraq's nuclear program, in order to make carpet-bombing Baghdad seem like self-defense, may be shocked to learn that he has a softer, more tender side. He worries about children, and puppies, and snowflake babies, and human-animal hybrids, and the emasculation of religion by dime-a-dozen graces like humility and mercy. Which just goes to show that no one is all bad.

In a new column, Gerson worries about stem cell research, which is nothing but a way-station on the road to Auschwitz:

Biotechnicians have been freed from the vulgar moralism of the masses, so they can operate according to the vulgar utilitarianism of their own social clique -- the belief that some human lives can be planted, plucked and processed for the benefit of others.

This is potent stuff. Note the careful distinction between "vulgar moralism" and "vulgar utilitarianism," which may or may not be two different things. And the alliteration, which is always a sign of deep moral seriousness. And the implicit understanding of Lysenko's great truth that "a class enemy is always an enemy, whether he is a scientist or not." Above all, note the portrayal of scientists as the equivalent of the "greys" in UFO lore, who represent a cold, alien, parasitic intelligence with a sinister fixation on genetic engineering and hybridization.

The effect is wasted on me, since I don't care to be lectured on vulgar utilitarianism by the guy who came up with the line "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"; killing foreigners for fun and profit doesn't become moral just because you forged God's signature on your permission slip. But as crackpot scapegoating goes, it strikes me as fairly impressive. It might even inspire some freedom fighter to shoot a bunch of people at his local mall, which seems to be the gold standard for conservative rhetoric these days.

So far, so good. If we get sentimental enough about innocent life — and what life is more innocent than one that exists solely as potential? — then no one can call us a bloodthirsty nation. No one who frets over unborn babies can be brutal or heartless, and anyone who dares to suggest otherwise needs a serious ass-kicking, at the very least.

Now, Katherine Sebelius is Catholic and supports abortion rights, which makes her a hypocrite, obviously. But there's more here than meets the eye, according to Gerson:

It is probably not a coincidence that Obama has chosen a Roman Catholic -- Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius -- to implement many of these policies as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Obama has every right to a pro-choice Cabinet. But this appointment seems designed to provide religious cover. It also smacks of religious humiliation -- like asking a rabbi to serve the pork roast or an atheist to bless the meal.

Right. 'Cause if you want "religious cover," it makes excellent sense to publicly humiliate the person who's supposed to provide it. That's Machiavellianism we can believe in!

We've ascertained that Sebelius disagrees with the Catholic Church, while Gerson disagrees with the Sermon on the Mount. Which means it's now time to x-ray the so-called conscience of the liberal God-hater:

Some say they will not impose their private religious views on others. But moral beliefs about human dignity are not religious dogmas such as transubstantiation or the Trinity. They are assertions about the nature of political justice.

They're not dogmas, see, but assertions based on...on...on transcendental fact. Which means it's A-OK to impose them on other people, by force of law if possible, and by force if not. At the same time, the unwillingness to impose such "assertions" on other people has nothing at all to do with "moral beliefs about human dignity," so there's no reason to defend it as a principled stance, despite its manifest contribution to the development of Teh Greatest Country Ever.

And besides:

Removing the transcendent basis for human rights would also remove the central argument of the Declaration of Independence and the primary motivation for American social reform from abolition to the civil rights movement.

Gerson recognizes slavery and segregation as injustices, to his credit. But the idea that these injustices were justified by "moral beliefs about human dignity," and that this is exactly what made overcoming them such a difficult and gruesome endeavor, doesn't seem to have occurred to him. The average anti-abolitionist had no more regard for the human dignity of slaves than Gerson has for the human dignity of Iraqis, or his correligionists have for the human dignity of gays. Political oppression and murder rarely suffer for lack of a transcendental basis. Honestly, I thought everyone knew that.

Being as you, dear reader, are an ivory tower elitist with a closet full of buttplugs and abortion pills, you might argue that the environment and healthcare are also "pro-life" issues. No way, says Gerson.

It is true that nearly every political issue concerns the preservation of human life. But not every issue concerns the definition of the human community -- who we count as one among us, and who we cast beyond our protection.

Sometimes I wonder if writing columns like this one is some new form of Satanic rite, to replace reading the Lord's Prayer backwards. Of course healthcare and environmental issues have to do with "who we cast beyond our protection," and of course Gerson has no problem booting inconvenient human beings into the outer darkness, for the sake of money or personal righteousness (assuming there's a difference).

If developing life is merely protoplasmic rubbish, it has the legal claims of a cyst or a toenail. But if a politician believes life is sacred, the destruction of more than a million lives a year cannot be merely one issue among many.

If this is the fundamental question, I can address it easily. No American politician believes that all life is sacred. Gerson doesn't believe it. Sebelius doesn't believe it. Obama doesn't believe it. Bush didn't believe it. No one who has ever been president of the United States believed it. You'll see an atheist connoisseur of child pornography elected president — an admitted one, I mean — before you see a believer in the unqualified sanctity of life elected to the city council in the most Christian town in the country. Anyone who truly does believe this, and makes a serious effort to live according to that conviction, will be treated by Gerson and his ilk like a mad dog.

The main reason public figures claim to believe this is because it makes them and their constituents feel better about the mercenary cruelty of the culture and country in which they live, which is why the most highminded "pro-life" rhetoric amounts to little more than grotesque self-flattery (as well as an attempt to define the human community to exclude nonconforming women, and cast them beyond "our" protection). As always, sentimentality and political violence go hand in hand, and a mawkish preoccupation with "innocent life" justifies any crime we wish to commit. Which is why Michael Gerson will probably never have to worry about being out of work.

The Week in Denialism

The world-renowned economist and humanitarian Bjorn Lomborg has blundered into an argument with an actual climate scientist, with entertaining results. After calling on politicians to be guided by the "careful" work of the "hugely respected" IPCC, Lomborg cites IPCC author Stefan Rahmstorf's views on sea level rise as proof that consensus ≠ agreement.

Stefan Rahmstorf argues that sea level rises will be much higher than those anticipated by most researchers. Rahmstorf is a well-established, serious researcher on climate change who holds a minority view on the rise in the sea-level — the IPCC's estimate is an 18cm to 59cm rise by the end of the century. I mentioned him to make the point that meeting with like-minded colleagues does not somehow create a new global scientific consensus.

In his response, Rahmstorf labels me a "spin-doctor" who is "fooling the public". Often, such strong language can belie poor arguments. In this case, I believe that is the case.

Lomborg's proof essentially consists of evidence that sea level fluctuates, along with a bit of finger-wagging to the effect that "one cannot pick the timeframes to fit the argument."

Rahmstorf is correct to note that the levels are no longer dropping — which they were from 2006 to early 2008, the data available at the time of my article — but curiously seems disinclined to explore why the rise over the past four years (2005-2008) has been half the previous rise at 1.6mm/year. The inescapable point is that sea levels are not escalating out of hand – if anything, they are doing the exact opposite right now.

Rahmstorf's entire response is priceless, but here's my favorite part:

Lomborg argues that 18 years could be too short for a robust trend comparison because of decadal variations in trend – but the 42-year period analysed by IPCC yields the same result. And it is telling that he then goes on to draw an "inescapable" conclusion about a slow-down of sea level rise from just four years of data. This is another well-worn debating trick: confuse the public about the underlying trend by focusing on short-term fluctuations. It's like claiming spring won't come if there is a brief cold snap in April.

Why does Lomborg cite the trend since 2005? Last October, he cited that of the previous two years. Why now four years? Because the trend of the past two years (2007-2008) is now + 3.7 mm/year? It is even worse. The trend since the beginning of any year of the data series varies between 1.6 mm/year and 9.0 mm/year, depending on the start year chosen. Using 2005, Lomborg cherry-picked the by far lowest. He's done this before, see for example his recent claim that the globe is cooling.

Fortunately for Lomborg, the intrepid climatosophical discoverologist Greg Pollowitz has his back. Citing recent icy conditions at Lake Huron, Pollowitz establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that spring won't come if it gets cold in March.

Pollowitz also complains that it's "odd that the Greens look at Prince Charles as some sort of visionary on global warming, yet on other aspects of his life he is widely ridiculed."

Although I've devoted many years of my life to enviro-fascism, I've never encountered anyone who sees Prince Charles as any sort of visionary, online or off. Maybe it's the title that turns people off, or the somewhat unfair public perception of Britain's royal family as an anachronistic gaggle of inbred halfwits. It's also puzzling that not thinking world climatology has been subverted by Marxists would qualify anyone as a "visionary."

But whatever, as the kids say. Apparently, the Prince stands accused of exploiting public credulity by peddling some sort of snake oil that will make everything OK if you'll just believe in it. I leave it to the reader to decide whether he sounds more like the IPCC, or Greg Pollowitz.

Robert Knight asks his readers to imagine Dr. Frankenstein "jumping for joy" over Obama's lifting of certain restrictions on stem cell research, the objectively horrific outcome of which is linked in some bizarre way with Dr. Al Gore's Global Warming Theory:

[S]cientists can kill human embryos for medical research, create and distribute abortion pills without any public input, and systematically shun any contrary information.

If they have any questions about how to do this, they can consult Al Gore’s followers, who have been frantically plugging leaks in their global warming dam as fast and as effectively as the proverbial Dutch boy. What, they found a new arctic ice floe the size of California? What, a cooling period is underway as sunspots wane? Pay no attention!

As bad as this sounds, Knight has only stumbled onto half of the conspiracy; I have it on good authority that Obama has suppressed damning research into the carbon footprint of human-animal hybrids. Is it time to panic? My sources say yes!

Bill Steigenwald interviews George Will on his recent heroic stand against eco-pessimism, that crimson sin for which the penance is either eco-optimism, or simply not giving a fuck about anyone but yourself. Here's Steigenwald's account of the debate:

[Will] and his editors at The Washington Post were blasted with thousands of angry e-mails, most of which challenged Will's assertion that global sea ice levels have not been dramatically reduced by man-made global warming, as environmentalists claim, but are essentially the same as they were in 1979. Will, who had used data from the Arctic Climate Research Center as his source, also was accused of multiple inaccuracies by The New York Times' Andrew Revkin.

Note that Steigenwald uses the authority of the ACRC to give Will the necessary scientific gravitas, even though it was the ACRC who objected to Will's misuse of their data in the first place. It's kinda dishonest, I guess...but if you'd tell a lie to prevent a box of kittens from being thrown into a furnace, you'll have no trouble understanding why Steigenwald lies to protect George Will from the wrath of his own sources.

As for the interview itself, suffice it to say that Will is glutinous with self-approbation, and Steigenwald absolutely cannot get enough of him. If that's your idea of an edifying discourse, have at it. I won't wait up.

Finally, there's distressing news from the Heartland Institute's conference on climate change. As you may know, ExxonMobil has reduced its funding for this important anti-environmental thinktank. But HI president Joseph L. Bast says they're only doing it to make themselves look better. Take that, warmists!

Worse yet, Richard Lindzen has launched an untimely attack on the science of glowball warming. Which is a shame, 'cause it's one of the few subdivisions of climatology that any layperson can master, simply by walking outside on a nice day.

Dr. Lindzen...criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, is erroneous, he said.

Maybe he can come up with some catchy slogan, like "it's not the sun, stupid," and e-mail it to Robert Knight.

S. Fred Singer is also trying to impose ideological uniformity on these freethinkers, instead of letting a hundred Pollowitzian flowers bloom:

S. Fred Singer, a physicist often referred to by critics and supporters alike as the dean of climate contrarians, said that he would be running public and private sessions on Monday aimed at focusing participants on which skeptical arguments were supported by science and which were not.

“As a physicist, I am concerned that some skeptics (a very few) are ignoring the physical basis,” Dr. Singer said in an e-mail message. “There is one who denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which goes against actual data,” Dr. Singer said, adding that other skeptics wrongly contend that “humans are not responsible for the measured increase in atmospheric CO2.”

Or as Polyakov put it back in 1939, "We must object to the attempt to universalize Mendelism which exists, but on the other hand, to throw Mendelism off the books and declare it pseudoscientific I consider impossible and incorrect."

Still, I approve of the effort. If the IPCC and allied scientific organizations can manage to maintain iron discipline over tens of thousands of scientists, Lindzen and Singer should have no trouble convincing roughly 500 economists, oilmen, and retired orthodontists to toe the party line.

And if not...well, perhaps some use can be found for them regardless. Op-eds don't write themselves, after all.

(Cartoon via The Onion.)

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

The water gardens, Fed By the Vains of current
Fluid - that skim the rubber sponge plants
That wave as the palms in a strong Breeze
The ghostly sea roses of Yellow, long - and
Short growing thick stems. The thousand Branch
Wildly growing sponges - midst the stuBy sprouts,
The sea stars - the ugly strange carved trees, thousand
Unnamed Flower Beds - large covered rocks with slimy
Moss, the Shelly Bottom - and suken marines - share
The Heaven - with Fish and Dendrodoris denisoni - That occupy the deep Waters


(Photo by Nick Hobgood.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The Obama admininstration has reversed an insane BushCo decision on the Endangered Species Act:

The rule change, which was made final in mid-December last year, left it up to government agencies to decide on their own whether new dams, logging or mining operations posed a threat to endangered species or their habitat.

The rule also said that a project's impact on climate change should no longer be a factor when taking into account its impact on wildlife. The Bush-era changes amounted to rolling back the clock on 35 years of protocol.

The Senate has taken further action in defense of the ESA:

In the waning days of the Bush presidency, the administration pushed through two species-related rules, one that scaled back scientific reviews for endangered species and another that limited protections for the polar bear specifically. The Obama administration wants to undo those rules, and congressional leaders have stepped up to help, adding language to an omnibus spending bill that gives the admin 60 days to withdraw the rules. The House passed the bill with that language last week.

But earlier this week, Alaskan Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R) and Mark Begich (D) -- no fans of polar-bear protections -- introduced an amendment that would remove that language. On Thursday, their fellow senators voted down that amendment 52 to 42.

Obama has also pledged to change how government contracts are awarded:

President Barack Obama plans to change how government contracts are awarded and who can earn them, a move his aides say would save taxpayers about $40 billion a year by making the process more competitive.

Obama will sign a presidential memo Wednesday that changes government contracting procedures, an administration official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the decision before it was announced.

In Washington DC, activists shut down the Capital Power Plant:

Today, climate activists from across the country braved a snowstorm and freezing temperatures to successfully block and shut down the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C. Thousands of people of every age and race participated in the action, the largest act of peaceful civil disobedience on climate change in U.S. history.

A company in Oakland, CA has come up with an interesting new solar panel:

The panels snap together, so people will be able to buy just one to start and add more later on if they like. The solar inverter, which converts the direct current (DC) electricity from the panels to alternating current (AC) electricity that can be used in the electric grid, plugs right into a wall socket.

One of the biggest problems with solar panels is the high cost. Before rebates, the price can easily exceed $30,000 to outfit a residential roof. J'neva began asking who really wanted to have solar power and realized it was the 20-something generation--people who typically have smaller budgets but aspire to live greener lifestyles. Most of the interested customers she knows over 30 are looking to spend $2,400 to $4,000 on panels; folks in their twenties will spend much less.

A Swedish city has given up most uses of fossil fuels:

The city of 60,000—and its surrounding 12-town region, with a quarter-million people—has traded in most of its oil, gas and electric furnaces for community "district heat," produced at plants that burn sawdust and wood waste left by timber companies. Hydropower, nuclear power and windmills now provide more than 90 percent of the region's electricity.

A "cash for clunkers" program is doing well in Germany:

The idea is simple: local governments offer cash incentives for people to get their old, low-mileage, high-emissions cars off the road in exchange for buying new, inherently more efficient cars....

While globally car sales are tanking, the BBC reports German car sales are actually up 22 percent right now due to the help of this program which offers a 2,500-euro incentive for participating. In fact, Germany just had its strongest February car sales in 10 years!

The New York Times has been floating the theory that because incandescent bulbs generate heat, switching over to CFLs will require more central heating, which means more greenhouse emissions. There are many problems with that idea; Lloyd Alter mentions the biggest one:

Does it seem logical to burn fossil fuels to make heat that boils water that makes steam that turns turbines that generates electricity that gets transported long distances to simply turn it back into heat? No.

Coal fired electrical plants generate between 200 and 230 pounds of CO2 per million BTUS, whereas natural gas releases 116 pounds per MMBtu. So burning that bulb for heat generates twice as much CO2 and we haven't even accounted for transmission losses.

Geologists are mapping rock formations that may be able to absorb excess CO2 from the air:

The report, by scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey, shows 6,000 square miles of ultramafic rocks at or near the surface. Originating deep in the earth, these rocks contain minerals that react naturally with carbon dioxide to form solid minerals. Earth Institute scientists are experimenting with ways to speed this natural process, called mineral carbonation. If the technology takes off, geologic formations around the world could provide a vast sink for heat-trapping carbon dioxide released by humans.

A new program in Washington state helps victims of domestic violence use technology safely:

"Domestic violence is built around control, not anger, and an abusive partner often limits a woman's access to information and support. Monitoring computer activity is one of many ways to control a spouse. In a shelter a woman needs to keep her identity secret, but a fax number can be tracked to her location. Abusive partners also can track their victim's cell phone calls or can use a keystroke logger on a computer to intercept and read e-mail. This program shows women ways in which they might be monitored and steps they can take to prevent being stalked and tracked."

An anti-gay adoption agency has stopped doing business in New York:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that Arizona-based internet companies Adoption Profiles and Adoption Media have stopped doing business in New York.

The Attorney General’s announcement follows a complaint filed last year by Lambda Legal on behalf of a New York gay couple who were barred from posting their on-line adoptive-parent profile solely because they are a same-sex couple. The complaint said that the companies were violating New York laws prohibiting such discrimination.

Papua New Guinea has created its first nature reserve:

Unique in structure, the park is owned by 35 surrounding indigenous villages which have agreed unanimously to prohibit hunting, logging, mining, and other development within the park. The villages have also created a community organization that will oversee management of the park.

In related news that will probably be of interest to Bryan Finoki, conservationists are discussing the fascinating idea of a nomadic sanctuary:

Getting protected areas drawn on a map is hard enough...Establishing one that moves or adjusts with changing conditions — a roving [marine protection area] — will be harder still.

But some are already thinking about how to design MPAs that still function as climates change. Maybe they’re bigger, say scientists, or spaced like stepping stones so species can hopscotch to higher latitudes. Perhaps they’re not tied to a geographic location at all, but follow conditions scientists know are important.

New technologies for tracking marine species and people, and more sensors to monitor conditions at sea now make what was once impossible at least theoretically possible. Questions of governance and human bureaucracy are the greater challenge, scientists say.

In Brazil, deforestation has dropped by 70 percent:

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell to 291 square miles (754 square kilometers) in the November 2008-January 2009 window, a drop of 70 percent compared to the year earlier period when 976 sq mi (2,527 sq km), said Environment Minister Carlos Minc.

A decrease in forest clearing had been expected. Economic turmoil, which has reduced the availability of credit, and collapsing commodity prices — especially beef and soy — have undermined the main drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Minc also credited government efforts, including increased vigilance and new loan policies, for the decline.

Researchers have identified a more efficient way of fertilizing Chinese crops:

[A]verage fertiliser use — around 600 kilograms per hectare — can be cut by 30—60 per cent, with farmers retaining the same yields.

By efficiently recycling manures and crop residues, and rotating crops with nitrogen-producing leguminous plants, it is possible to reduce reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers....

I may have blogged on this before, or not...but either way, here's a merry-go-round that doubles as a water pump:

We all know kids have boundless amounts of energy and a need to play - so why not channel some of that energy into much needed rural infrastructure? That was the brilliant idea behind the PlayPump: a humanitarian design project that consists of a water pump hooked up to a small village merry-go-round. Access to clean drinking water is a huge concern in developing regions of the world, and now the PlayPump system is bringing clean water into the hardest hit regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, where it has been installed in rural villages and primary schools, so that kids can have fun while pumping all the clean, potable water that their families need.

Here's another idea that seems kinda obvious: two-way envelopes.

Are you a business (or person) that frequently mails envelopes inside of envelopes in order to get a customer to ship something back or for reply mail? Seems kind of like a waste of envelopes, eh? Well now EcoEnvelopes has come up with a solution - a USPS approved "eco-indicia" stamp that is bi-directional. Considering that over a billion reply envelopes are sent in credit card, bank statements, utility bills and other reminders, reusing the same envelope saves more than just paper.

But for really, really obvious ideas, nothing beats this:

Every day, 500,000 gallons get sucked up from a limestone basin in northern Florida by the Nestle Water Co. Every hour of each of those days, the water fills 102,000 plastic bottles at a nearby bottling plant. Nestle, and the 22 other bottled water companies in Florida, make a profit anywhere between 10 and 100 times the cost of each bottle. So how much does Nestle pay for the water it drains from the state's natural resources? Nothing. Oh, excuse me — the company had to pay a one-time fee of $150 dollars for a local water permit. The water they use isn't even taxed a single cent — but the Governor's looking to change that, big time.

In an attempt to correct this free reign, water supply depletin' madness, Republican Governor Charlie Crist is proposing a 6 cent per gallon state tax on all water usurped from aquifers by commercial water bottlers — a tax that could land $56 million in state coffers its first year in effect alone, according to the Miami Herald.

Let's hope Nestle doesn't decide to go Galt.

There's lots of medical news this week. Children's exposure to lead has dropped dramatically:

In a stunning improvement in children's health, far fewer kids have high lead levels than 20 years ago, government research shows -- a testament to aggressive efforts to get lead out of paint, water and soil....

Federal researchers found that just 1.4% of young children had elevated lead levels in their blood in 2004, the latest data available. That compares with almost 9% in 1988.

A doctor in Canada is distributing unused prescription drugs to the homeless:

Dr. Jeff Turnbull, chief of staff at the Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa, acknowledges the practice is controversial but says it is one way to ensure that homeless people get the medication they desperately need.

He and Dr. Ron MacCormick, an oncologist in Sydney, N.S., want provincial governments to establish regulations that would guide doctors who want to recycle unused prescription drugs that would otherwise be thrown out.

A combination of existing drugs may be effective against drug-resistant tuberculosis:

Blanchard's team tested whether administering clavulanate might make TB vulnerable to other antibiotics — and found a combination that in laboratory tests blocked the growth of 13 different drug-resistant TB strains.

The combo: Clavulanate to drop TB's shield, plus a long-sold injected antibiotic — meropenem, part of that penicillin-style family — that then attacks the bacteria.

Researchers have unraveled the workings of C. difficile:

Professor Julian Rood from the Department of Microbiology and lead author, microbiologist Dr Dena Lyras, made a major scientific breakthrough which allowed mutants of the superbug to be made. They then identified which of two suspected toxic proteins was essential for the bacterium to cause severe disease.

This is odd:

A new discovery published online in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) shows that cellular mechanisms used by the blind mole rat to survive the very low oxygen environment of its subterranean niche are the same as those that tumors use to thrive deep in our tissues. The net effect of this discovery is two-fold: first the blind mole rat can serve a "living tumor" in cancer research; and—perhaps more important—that unique gene in the blind mole rat becomes a prime target for new anti-cancer drugs that can "suffocate" tumors.

A pair of deadly tropical viruses turn out to be susceptible to the common drug chloroquine:

The researchers, based in Weill Cornell's pediatrics department, were surprised by their discovery that chloroquine, a safe, low-cost agent that has been used to combat malaria for more than 50 years, is a highly active inhibitor of infection by Hendra and Nipah.

"The fact that chloroquine is safe and widely used in humans means that it may bypass the usual barriers associated with drug development and move quickly into clinical trials," says Dr. Anne Moscona, professor of pediatrics and microbiology & immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College and senior author of the study.

Scientists have reconstructed an ancient musical instrument:

[A] team based in Salerno and Catania, Italy, has reconstructed the “epigonion,” a harp-like, stringed instrument used in ancient Greece. With data from numerous sources, including pictures on urns, fragments from excavations and written descriptions, the team has been able to model what the instrument would have looked and sounded like. Their model has become sophisticated enough to be used by musicians of the Conservatories of Music of Salerno and Parma in concerts.

I'm tired of sitting indoors, so you'll forgive me if I wrap things up in a hurry.

Mapping Mutual Incomprehension. Stereo daguerreotypes and ultrasonic ringtones. Covers from nurse romance novels.


One hundred horror film posters, and other graphic design ephemera. Tender scenes of subaqueous domesticity. A collection of found photos from Hamtramck and Detroit.


The unconscionable suppression of Earthquake deniers. An abandoned shipyard, taken over by vegetation (via Plep). And more urban archaeology, courtesy of Kingston Lounge (via Eli.)


And this.



(Photo at top by Matt Callow.)

Ordinary and Human

Over at Grist, Ken Ward says that environmentalists are in denial, and it's driving them crazy, which is why they haven't made more progress on climate change:

If we accept the worst, or precautionary assessment, then U.S. environmentalists have perhaps a year to avert cataclysm, and nothing we are doing now will work. We are dealing with this terrible situation in a very ordinary and human way: by denying it.

Our denial comes in a variety of forms: we believe that President Obama can and will solve the problem; we ignore Jim Hansen's assessment and timeline; we concentrate on our jobs and organization agendas and pass over the big picture; we focus on the molehill of climate policy rather than tackle the mountain of climate politics; we assess our efforts by looking back on how far we have come and do not measure the distance still to be traveled; we scrupulously avoid criticizing each other, lacking conviction in our own courses of action and not wishing to invite criticism in turn; and we are irrationally committed to antique approaches that are self-evidently inadequate.

That's one way of looking at things, and there's surely some truth to it (though the idea that environmentalists, or leftists generally, "scrupulously avoid criticizing each other" is so bizarre that it calls Ward's overall judgment into question).

Although Ward makes some good points, he seems to me to be mired in typical rationalist oversimplification: If something terrible is happening, and we're not doing everything in our power to stop it, the problem must be that we can't truly accept that something terrible is happening. Otherwise, we'd act rationally, in our own self-interest, and do something about it. That's just common sense!

Caught in a bind, we act unconsciously to ease our psychological burden in two ways: (1) by reducing the sources of conflict, and (2) by avoiding, rejecting or denigrating new information that would increase dissonance.

Plausible or not, this theory doesn't provide an actual explanation for the "failures" of environmentalism. There are countless internal and external obstacles to effective action, no matter which serious global problems you're talking about, which makes it kind of silly to single out "denial." Having a good grasp of the problems can lead to apathy, too. Or to wallowing in the pleasures of the apocalyptic sublime. To some people, disaster may seem like the only conceivable path to social change. To others, it's a sort of justice, at long last.

Freud claimed that dreams are "the guardian of sleep"; in the same way, the function of most political rhetoric is to avoid responsibility, or at least to push the lion's share of it onto someone else, which amounts to the same thing. If this is correct, then Ward's invocation of the Awful Truth may not serve as a wake-up call, but as an invitation to doze a little longer. "Realism" can be a strategy for avoidance, too. Anything can.

I agree with Ward that it's difficult to think of catastrophe per se, without the consolation of blaming someone else for it, or aestheticizing it, or being "proved fucking right," and without a secret hope that we'll actually survive to see the transformed landscapes that fascinate us in apocalyptic books and movies. It's hard to think about it not because disaster on this scale is unthinkable — we're actually very good at picturing the worst that could happen — but because of the unbearable burden of responsibility it places on us, as individuals, to accomplish the impossible. It's not the scale of the threat people are balking at, in my opinion; it's the scale of the commitment. And nothing Ward proposes changes that, as far as I can see.

Which is not to imply that he proposes anything particularly concrete. After affirming that "we are the custodians of the only true solution," he suggests that we should convene "a general conference of environmental leadership to consider what to do," and perhaps even "experiment with new approaches." (Great idea! And this time, let's not "scrupulously avoid criticizing each other." Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend!)

I know very well that hope is not a plan. But it's also true that hope is a measure of our openness to change. Most Americans didn't lift a finger to end slavery, either, but the fact that doing so became first thinkable, then desirable — even if only from the comfort of an armchair — was not entirely irrelevant to the larger struggle that continues today. It's not enough, of course; nothing is. But it's necessary.

In saying all this, I'm ignoring the central fact that Ward himself ignores: countless people are doing what needs to be done, selflessly, in defiance of the perfectly rational fears that hold the rest of us back. And that effort is not made ridiculous by its probable failure, any more than its success would be made ridiculous by the eventual death of the sun.

And that's what bothers me about Ward's position. The "unrealistic optimism" he's complaining about is all we have, really. He concedes as much when he says that "the odds of success are vanishingly small." In that situation, optimism is unrealistic by definition, just as it is in most other really serious human endeavors. It's crazy, in a word. It always has been.

Ward seems to feel that we've been failing to communicate the necessity for change for many years now. He seems to think that what was missing, all that time, was the right message...as though there could be a "right" message, or a "sane" one, when it comes to turning society upside down.

This is why, when Ward worries that environmentalists are going crazy, I'm inclined to suggest that they're not yet crazy enough. If it's sane to fixate gloomily on "the distance still to be traveled," in whatever time remains to us, then stark insanity may be our only hope.

(Illustration: "The Collapse of the Tower of Babel" by Cornelisz Anthonisz, 1547.)

A Listening Session

The only thing worse than the Obama administration's rabble-rousing hatred of billionaires is its patrician contempt for the common man.

Claire Suddath reports; you decide:

Last Friday, Vice President Joe Biden and seven White House cabinet members traveled to Philadelphia to kick off the inaugural gathering of President Obama's Middle Class Task Force. The task force will convene monthly in cities across the country to confront the problems faced by average Americans. It's an admirable goal....

Still, the middle class may have a better shot at making ends meet than at influencing the Middle Class Task Force. That's because no member of the Middle Class Task Force is actually middle class.

Worse yet, they're not even interested in getting input from the middle class...unless it comes from people who are able to go "online," and "surf" the "web":

While middle class Americans are invited to submit questions and ideas through the task force's website, AStrongMiddleClass.gov and tickets for the Philadelphia meeting were distributed to labor and environmental groups, the task force did not accept questions from the audience.

Okay, so maybe this callous plutocratic task force is seeking a certain amount of middle-class "influence," through some kind of impersonal computerized punchcard system that only a PhD could master. But that only makes matters worse, amirite?

And besides, these people are so goddamn smug with all their talk of progress, and helping people, and stuff.

In Philadelphia, the task force members and panelists spent a long time congratulating one another one on their good intentions before turning to the meeting's single topic: green jobs. The stimulus package bestows $500 million for green job training programs, $6 billion in loan guarantees for green industries, and $5 billion for a weatherization assistance program that could save homeowners up to $350 per year on utilities. Van Jones, president of Green For All, made an impassioned plea to "give young people the chance to put down that handgun and pick up a caulking gun." Greg Nelson, official Middle Class Task Force liveblogger, commented on an argument between representatives from Portland, Los Angeles, and Philly, who tried to out-green each other for the title of most environmentally friendly city.

A veritable Walpurgisnacht, you'll agree. It's like the Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove and a Skull and Bones hazing rolled into one; the only thing missing is Henry Kissinger prancing around in the nude with a lampshade on his head.

It may seem as though this narcissistic, cyber-elitist task force has a few ideas that could possibly benefit the middle class, sort of. But what if those ideas don't work? And what if they do work, but only to an extent that is not yet known? What do we really know about anything, when you come right down to it? Why does every dialectic take refuge in negation, without founding it dialectically and without even being able to establish it as a problem? And more to the point, who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder?

The task force didn't specify the number of jobs it hoped to create in the green sector, or how much of an impact the programs are expected to have on the middle class as a whole. Annie Tomasini, Biden's deputy press secretary, says the Philadelphia meeting was just "a listening session" and that the task force will not actually make any decisions regarding green job creation. They'll have to go back to Washington to do that.

And that, remarkably, is where the article ends.

This appears to be the latest MO for AP writers: present a snapshot of a process that has barely begun, and compare it unfavorably to whatever outcome the process is intended to accomplish. If part of the process is to decide what ought to be accomplished, and how, so much the better, because this proves that nobody knows anything and all is darkness.

Be sure to tune in next week, when Suddath blows the whistle on Martha Stewart: she says she's making a cake, but all we see is some sort of unappetizing yellowish mess in a bowl. She calls it "batter," and maybe it is. But what if it isn't? Remember, too, that cakes sometimes fall, or burn. This one may not, granted, but it's also true that some people don't like cake, while others like it perhaps too well. Isn't she being rather imperious on the one hand, and rather irresponsible on the other?

Some say "yes," and some say "absolutely." Time will tell who's right. But for now, it seems very likely that no good can come of any of this.

(Illustration: The inaugural gathering of President Obama's Middle Class Task Force. Photo courtesy of AP.)

A Problem On Our Hands

Maggie Gallagher, whose deep and abiding interest in our sex lives is strictly professional, has a new column entitled "The Child Pornographer Next Door."

In one of those surprise twists for which she's famous, it turns out that the child pornographers in question are themselves children, whose activities with sexual partners of their own age is...well, not shocking, exactly. And not titillating, either (that'd be a dead giveaway).

Predictable, maybe?

Six high school students from Greensburg, Pa., were charged with possessing, manufacturing and distributing child pornography this month after nude pictures of several underage girls were confiscated from one of the boys' phones. The three 14- and 15-year-old girls who sent the self-made child porn and the three 16- and 17-year-old boys who received it were arrested.

There are legitimate concerns here. One of them is that these kids — the girls, especially — may be humiliated, victimized, or even physically attacked. The problem is, arresting them as "pornographers" accomplishes two of those cruelties right off the bat, in the name of protecting them, and may make the third more likely.

The line between protecting children and pathologizing or criminalizing normal sexual behavior is not all that thin, in my opinion, but most people who share Gallagher's outlook couldn't find it if their lives (or, more realistically, the lives of their children) depended on it. As always, the most sensible methods of addressing these problems tend to be opposed tooth and nail by the people who make the biggest issue of them: if a sex-ed class that dealt honestly with the question of self-made porn were so much as proposed, it'd be listed on Rapture Ready before the day was out. (And feminism is responsible for our current bumper crop of girls gone wild, so it's clearly of no use whatsoever.)

Not surprisingly, Gallagher's description of these events is sicker and more disturbing than anything of which the children stand accused. As usual, she treats female desire as tepid and devious, and male desire as uncontrollable and direct. That way, you always know who's to blame when the inevitable happens:

The sexting craze underlines the way the creation of pornography has been equally democratized -- in this case right into the hands of suburban 15-year-old girls pathetically trying to attract or keep the attention of porn-jaded boys.

Why do girls act like this?

Good question! Girls don't want sex per se, you see; they want something else, and they use sex to get it. Which is what makes them contemptible, as opposed to merely bestial.

Oddly enough, whenever Gallagher worries herself over porn or sex, the "shocking" cases she cites tend to be shocking precisely because they portray the stark reality of her own view of male-female relations, minus the pietistic soft focus and the baby fetishism. The consequences for women of the "traditionalism" she promotes in her columns are routinely seen in porn, God knows, and constitute one of its main selling points.

But that's a discussion for another day. Now that we've learned all we need to know about boys and girls and sex, it's time to get serious and make some tough choices:

Right now we have a decision to make: Is underage porn (these aren't really children) a crime or not? If so, how do we treat girls and boys who engage in it "for fun" and not for profit?

I think Gallagher has answered her own question, here and elsewhere: Boys will be boys, and girls who give in to them will be pathetic sluts (unless it was their idea, and they enjoyed it, in which case they'll be dirty sluts). A stern dose of public humiliation would seem to be in order, too...if not for their sake, then for ours.

Here's the punchline; bear in mind that it comes from a firm believer in the transformative power of sexual fearmongering:

If the thought that their fellow students, their teachers, their employers, their college admission officials, the entire football squad, their mothers and the local district attorney may well see these cell phone photos is not enough to discourage teens -- then we really have a problem on our hands.

No kidding. Obviously, we need a lot more funding for abstinence programs!

Losing the Plot

Some ideas are so stupid that they can prevent you from realizing how stupid they actually are.

Normally, I dismiss out of hand the idea of a multi-decade international socialist plot to convince people that a) CO2 is a greenhouse gas; and b) there's no magical force field that prevents local emissions from having a cumulative global effect. But perhaps it'd be worthwhile to assume, for a moment, that the conspiracy theory is true.

What has this enormous, well-regimented cabal accomplished since 1991, when an NAS panel claimed that "greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses"?

Not much, I'm afraid. It scored a bit of a coup by getting Algore, the inventor of global warming, into the White House for eight years. But its hopes were dashed when the Clinton administration passed virtually no meaningful climate legislation. It didn't cap emissions, nor did it ratify the Kyoto Protocol. It had a perfect excuse for authoritarian overreaching delivered to its doorstep on a silver platter, and it couldn't even be bothered to issue an imperial edict banning wood stoves or gas-powered leaf blowers or SUVs.

More to the point, the Warming Cult hasn't even managed to impose an understanding of the basic facts on the American public. And I'm not talking about the "fact" of AGW, by any means; I'm talking about elementary matters like the difference between weather and climate, or the fact that North America's winter is Australia's summer, or any other grade-school knowledge that would give the average citizen a fighting chance of understanding the issue at hand.

If we had a really effective global conspiracy, the latest effort by conservative pundits to establish the proposition that it's winter in America would've been met with gales of laughter and a blizzard of pink slips. Instead, an untold number of Americans nodded sagely when presented with clear proof that seasons exist, and felt themselves superior to all the scientists whose blinders force them to overlook the really salient issues:

Echoing a Drudge Report headline from the previous day that read, " 'Largest public protest of global warming' ever in USA faces DC March snowstorm!" Fox News hosts Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity each suggested on March 2 that, in Cavuto's words, a "massive snowstorm," which recently hit the East Coast, calls into question the scientific consensus on "global warming."

Media Matters goes on to explain, dutifully, that weather is not climate. What they fail to mention is that local weather is not national weather; it was sunny and warm in many parts of the country on March 2, and severe to exceptional drought conditions continue in California, the South, and elsewhere. They also don't mention that national weather isn't global weather. (It's supposed to hit 91°F in Kuala Lumpur tomorrow...in winter, no less! Maybe Algore is on to something!)

Trillion of dollars are at stake in this conspiracy, as well as the right to rule the globe with an iron fist. And yet the entire well-laid plot is in danger of unraveling, because no one thought to remind the average American citizen that it can be cold in one place and hot in another at the very same time.

I'm being flippant, of course. But this is actually a real problem. There are plenty of people, on the left particularly, who simply expect everyone to kowtow to scientific authority whether they understand its simplest concepts or not. Honest confusion ends up getting ridiculed, with the result that people become resentful and dig in their heels. Never mind AGW for a moment; the fact that Beck and Hannity can spout peabrained gibberish like this and be applauded for it would be tragic even if there were nothing more serious at stake than people's rudimentary understanding of the world in which they live.

If the idea of AGW as an elitist plot is so appealing to so many Americans, maybe it's partially because so many people who actually do understand the issues enjoy feeling superior to those who don't. If so, that's kind of obnoxious, given that people on the left ought to be aware of the forces that have crippled our educational system, instead of simply blaming the victims.

Blaming Hannity and Beck would be acceptable, natch, as would launching them headlong into the sun. But I'm sorry to say that the Warming Cult has tended thusfar to coddle dissenters. Nonconforming scientists should be languishing in a new Gulag as we speak. Instead, they wax fat and sassy, secure in the knowledge that a single sentence from them outweighs the official position of every major scientific organization on earth. In essence, their oppression is of the type that a diner at Citronelle suffers when asked to extinguish his Gurkha Black Dragon.

Worse, even though the media is owned and operated by eco-socialist one-worlders who know that doomsday predictions sell papers, conservative politicians who deny AGW enjoy instant access to a respectful, if not fawning, MSM, while a conservative politician who calls Rush Limbaugh "incendiary" is obliged to issue an immediate self-criticism.

This amounts to doing things exactly backwards, in my view; it's no wonder our cardboard-grey dystopia is so many years behind schedule.

Meanwhile, power-drunk communist madmen control China, North Korea, and Venezuela, and all we got was this lousy increase in emissions. And the People's Republic of Canuckistan has decided that exploiting Alberta's tar sands is more exciting than destroying capitalism.

I could go on, but you get the idea. As diabolical socialist plots go, this whole thing is a bit of a washout, and we'll be lucky if we're reduced to shivering in moss-lined caves by 2050.

On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People

The recent defeats suffered by movement conservatism have forced some of its leading lights into an agonizing reappraisal. Something went wrong, and while most of the blame can be placed squarely on ACORN, the media, and activist judges who failed to acknowledge that Obama was hatched in Kenya from some Soviet test tube, the possibility that conservatism itself must change, for once, can't be ruled out.

Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think what's needed is a mass purification and a return to First Principles. They see a country that's 51 percent female, and blessed with plenty of blacks and Latinos and gays and poor people and city dwellers and voters under forty, and they conclude that the best way to regain power is to intensify their efforts to insult and demonize all those demographics.

This was the great theme of CPAC, where the really exciting speakers upheld the bedrock principles of our democratic republic by arguing that anyone who doesn't agree with Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter is a total fag, and vowed to double down on race-baitin', homo-hatin' insanity until the rest of the country joins them out of pity or terror.

What's needed, according to this line of thought, are more effeminate singsong voices with which to mock any plausible proposition from the Left, more deft detournements like "porkulus," and more dim-bulb mantras like "drill baby drill!" And above all, more Palin, more Jindal, and more Joe the Plumber, 'cause admitting that the public's rejection of these fantastically weird characters may've had some justification would be tantamount to admitting that Reagan was not the most popular president ever, or that Atlas Shrugged got a bit tedious in spots.

Other, more genteel voices feel that the timeless principles of conservatism are being submerged in a flood tide of identity politics and adolescent name-calling; they prefer to draw people's attention to the self-evident virtues of Western Civilization, and demolish their foes with quotes from G.K. Chesterton. The usual tactic here is to plant the conservative flag on something admirable like the Enlightenment, or logic, or self-reliance, or the unwillingness to rape children, and present that as the still-beating heart of the movement. The fact that these are not actually conservative ideas — and that really existing conservatism has not done a very good job of upholding them, precisely because it'd shatter into its constituent atoms if it ever made an honest effort to do so — is a mere detail.

These people live in a dreamworld. The plain fact is that when you strip conservatism of its cheerful Social Darwinism, in which "market forces" are conflated simultaneously with natural selection and God, you're left with little more than masculine and nationalist insecurity. The confusion that arises when you try to impose a coherent plot on conservative sentiment is demonstrated by the following ideological Gordian Knot: People are basically evil, but evil is basically good because of the aggregate power of individual self-interest to bring about the best possible social outcomes. "Do-gooders" are basically bad, because they're secretly self-interested and therefore hypocritical, and also because doing good, unlike pursuing your own self-interest, inevitably has "unintended consequences" that will make your efforts come to worse than nothing. Meanwhile, Americans, who are basically good, are accordingly passionate about doing good in the world, which means that any gruesome consequences that arise from our missions of mercy should be judged charitably, given what we all know of our essential decency.

All that's required to prevent these propositions from annihilating each other like the Kilkenny cats is to say, "Fuck you, we do want we want," as some conservatives, to their partial credit, actually have. But other conservatives, to their own partial credit, find that this doesn't satisfy them emotionally (and might not win elections, either). And so we're treated to the improvisatory and yet eversame spectacle of modern conservative philosophy, which is like watching an amphetamine-dosed spider try to build a web between a pair of whirligigs.

I'm not arguing that a principled, intelligent conservatism isn't possible, or that it isn't clinging to life at this moment, like some rare amphibian on a mountain surrounded by clearcut rainforest. The question is whether such a conservatism can actually win elections, without any help from corporatist sideshow attractions like Limbaugh and Malkin and Coulter, and without coded appeals to racism and blatant appeals to sexism and homophobia.

The situation is similar to what we've seen happen with the Minutemen: there are undoubtedly people patrolling the border who are not race-obsessed lunatics, but the very nature of the problem, as defined by the movement, brings race-obsessed lunatics out of the woodwork and gives them undue power and influence. A truly non-racist border patrol group would look nothing like the Minutemen (it probably wouldn't be patrolling the border, just for starters, and it certainly wouldn't be as appealing to the Right). In the same way, a really principled conservatism is likely to find itself friendless and alone, because the power structure into which existing conservatism fits demands instant gratification, ethics that are as flexible as Silly Putty, and plenty of red meat for the yokels.

Which brings us to the concerns of a conservative blogger at New Majority.com, who attended CPAC and reacted as a reasonably intelligent and sensitive person must:

All day, the message I got was this: The movement enjoys being hated by its enemies, more than it cares about its own goals....

CPAC is just unpleasant. And it is not just the elites flattening the ambitions of the people, it is the people dumbing down their own elites. Well-adjusted people, even if they feel alienated from certain parts of American society don't wish to be hated by society. People who want to advance some goals, want more responsibility, not less. I hate that CPAC seems to give credibility to Adorno: that conservatives have defective personalities.

I agree with this, of course. People on the left have been saying for years that conservatives would eat a plate of dogshit if Hillary Clinton told them not to. The movement has been rallying around Bush for so long, and with so little justification, that it's become second nature for them to rally around a useless cipher like Joe the Plumber, on the theory that anyone liberals think is stupid and ridiculous must've been sent by Heaven to rejuvenate the GOP and smite its enemies. Modern conservatism is a bit like a cargo cult, in that regard.

But the blogger misunderstands Adorno, and in doing so displays the same taste for victimhood that has turned conservatism into a source of merriment for people who find its absurdities more pleasant to think about than its victims. Adorno believed that all of us, not just conservatives, have defective personalities: there's no right living in a wrong life. What he set out to do in The Authoritarian Personality was to outline the nature of a specific defective personality.

The methodology has rightly been criticized, as has the tunnel-vision focus on right-wing authoritarianism. That said, we've just lived through eight years in which we heard a gospel preached of total submission to a unitary executive, and total war against a hydra-headed enemy that comprised everyone from Osama Bin Laden to Nancy Pelosi to Hans Blix to atheists to climatologists to the guy across the street with a peace symbol on his car. We were told to respect theologically and scientifically empty superstitions like intelligent design, to prefer faith and "common sense" to evidence we don't like, to view empathy as treason and negotiation as surrender, and to reject the effeminacy of "nuance" in favor of dick-waving Manichean bluster. And through it all, we were also expected to worry ourselves over what kind of consensual sex grown adults were having in the privacy of their own homes, which is something for which no sane and sexually secure person has any time or inclination. To all of this, Adorno's response would've been, "Well, duh."

That being the case, to worry that CPAC might give people the impression that movement conservatives are batshit-crazy sociopaths is like complaining that Jonestown made the public unduly suspicious of authoritarian death cults.

All the same, I'm sympathetic to this blogger's concerns. And I agree with Atrios that a functional, non-crazy conservative party — one that actually respects "individual liberty," instead of using it to justify beating up on queers and paving over the nation's wetlands — is in everyone's best interests.

The problem is, when you imagine even the most timid accommodation to reality that movement conservatism might make in order to adapt and improve, it seems like sheer fantasy. I mean, can anyone imagine Michael Steele standing before the nation and admitting that there's more hard evidence for AGW than there is for a worldwide conspiracy to falsify decades of scientific data and research in service of eco-Stalinism? Or Bobby Jindal acknowledging that whatever faults Canada's healthcare system may have, the fact remains that it costs less than ours, and delivers better outcomes? Or Rick Santorum conceding that perhaps gay citizens should, after all, have the same legal rights as straight ones?

You might as well ask these good men to suck cock at high noon on the Capitol steps. They'd probably find that suggestion a lot more tempting, come to think of it.

It may just be a failure of my own imagination, but trying to conceive of a conservative movement that doesn't look very much like the one we have right now is a bit like trying to picture a four-sided triangle. I'd find it very hard to recognize a conservatism that had given up on micromanaging people's sex lives, promoting racial and gender-based hatred, treating the regulation of asbestos and DDT as crimes against humanity, and redistributing the nation's wealth upwards while expecting to be thanked for it.

And I assume that most rank-and-file conservatives now living would find it even harder.

(Illustration: "There is no end to the road of revolution; render new services in the struggle against arrogance and complacency" by unknown artist, 1971.)

Sunday Music Blogging