A Necessary Weevil

The US has been invaded by European plants, and scientists are accordingly planning to import European insects that eat them:

Within a year, researchers in Minnesota and New York hope to unleash a German weevil that devours garlic mustard from root to leaf. They've been looking at the bug for a decade, plying it with dozens of other plants to learn whether it might eat anything else.

I assume that they're also looking at which predators eat these benevolent weevils, and with what effect. As this article notes, there have been cases in which insects that were imported to control other species caused more problems than they solved.

More serious is the case of an Argentine moth that dines on prickly pear cactus. Australians imported the creature in the 1920s to curb the spread of the cactus, which had been planted as a living fence. The moth worked splendidly, said George Schneider, biological administrator with the Florida Department of Agriculture.

Then other countries started using the moth, and in 1989 it appeared unbidden in the Sunshine State, chewing its way through already rare cactus species. It has since spread west, and agricultural officials fear eco-disaster should it make it to cactus-rich regions in Texas and Mexico.

Researchers are trying to curb its spread by releasing irradiated moths that will mate with the cactus killers to produce sterile offspring....

Obviously, it would've been better to keep things from getting to this point.

With that in mind, here's the proper way to proceed, as I see it. We should by all means use Ceutorhynchus scrobicollis to control garlic mustard. But instead of giving this pest the chance to get out of hand, we should import the dunnock to eat it. And while we're at it, we might as well bring the Eurasian sparrowhawk along, just to keep the dunnock in check. Planting a few acres of European hornbeam in target areas would help the sparrowhawk to feel at home, and would also present a pleasing picturesque aspect, particularly if we could import some full-bosomed peasant girls to sing Der Mai is Gekommen beneath their umbrageous boughs.

These bedirndled and rosy-cheeked maidens should ideally be employed at beer halls and grist mills (which could either be built according to traditional specifications or taken apart in Germany and reassembled here), and courted by dissolute but visionary students whose poems are overpopulated with naiads and trolls.

The only drawback I can see is the tendency of the Germans themselves to become invasive. While we're probably a match for them, it might be wise to import enough Russians and Brits to keep them from getting any ideas.

If anyone from the USDA would like to discuss this idea further, you can find me lying in the weeds near the corner of Yeon and Express, with a bottle of Cisco in my hand and my pants around my ankles.

Eliminating the Impossible

The lead-up to the tragic knife attack in Tokyo will seem very familiar to Americans. So will the government's response, in some ways (though, I hasten to add, not in others).

Government officials scrambled to respond to Sunday's attack. In an emergency meeting, the ruling coalition considered limiting access to knives like the one used in the stabbing, which had a five-inch blade.

"Obviously, the suspect possessed the knife without a legitimate reason," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said. "I think we have to seriously consider what we can do to step up the restrictions."

Of course, someone might buy a knife for a legitimate reason before deciding to kill people with it. And in this case, the knife seems to have been something of an afterthought, since the murderer began his attack by driving a rental truck into a crowd of pedestrians. It's also fair to say that large knives (and axes, and hatchets, and meat cleavers) will continue to be widely available to any murderer who wants them, government rulings notwithstanding. Indeed, the chances are pretty good that the next person who's destined to go on a knife-wielding rampage already owns a large knife, and has for years.

But let's put all that aside, and reflect for a moment on what a knife actually is: generally speaking, it's a piece of sharpened metal attached to, or equipped with, a handle. How on earth are you going to "step up the restrictions" on a low-tech object that people have been making by hand since the Bronze Age?

It's likely that the goal here is simply to make rattled citizens feel better, by giving them the impression that the People in Charge are seeing to things. But many of us, far from being comforted by gestures like these, are more alarmed by them. How comforting is it to live under a government that not only finds it plausible to limit access to knives, but also believes that successful restrictions would somehow thwart bloodthirsty maniacs, instead of obliging them to stroll down to the hardware store and buy an axe or a chainsaw? More to the point, how comforting is it to live under a government that's cynical enough -- or experienced enough -- to think that people will actually be soothed by talk like this?

I understand that this sort of spectacular freelance violence, in particular, constitutes a challenge that has to be formally addressed by the authorities, and that the Japanese government deserves credit for not pointing out how much better the massacre would've turned out if everyone in the vicinity had been armed with a five-inch blade. Secretary Machimura's quote is interesting mainly as an example of what constitutes an official "solution" in a given society. I don't know much about Japan, but I know that like any other country it has its own pathologies. And I suspect that this eagerness to discuss restricting the availability of knives is based on a reluctance to discuss something a bit more fundamental. When solutions are being debated by the powers that be, it's often what doesn't seem possible that's really worthy of attention.

Which reminds me, in an odd way, of what Sherlock Holmes used to say: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

(Photo: "Canaanite sword with ebony and ivory inlaid hilt (top: KW 275, length: 45.4 cm), Canaanite dagger (middle: KW 296, preserved length: 33.5 cm), and a Mycenaean sword (bottom: KW 301, preserved length:45.5 cm)." Via the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.)

Topography and Proximity

While I don't necessarily recommend reading Rapture Ready, which is a sort of Gambling Times for the pro-apocalypse set, it can sometimes be very informative. This week, it address the "Oil in Israel Myth," which apparently stems from the assumption that if oil is a blessing from the Lord -- which it must be, since it makes people rich -- then the blessed state of Israel must have lots of it, somewhere or other.

There are some who suggest that God didn't leave the Israelis out of the oil bonanza. The oil prize is there, waiting for someone to discover it.

Some Christians have said that prophecy suggests that oil wealth will come to the Jews. They point to a desire to steal Israel's oil wealth as what will trigger the Gog invasion. The prophecies in Ezekiel make no reference to oil being the reason for the attack.

In the past decade, several oil companies have been founded with the goal of finding biblical oil in Israel. None of them has had any success.

The author finds all of this silly for two reasons, and they're both very good ones.

First, "ancient Israel would have no need for oil." You can't really argue with this...unless you're the sort of pedant who'd point out that neither the Persian Empire, nor Texas circa 500 BC, had any obvious need for oil either. Or the sort of heretic who suspects that RR is basically accusing God of an inability to think ahead.

Second, "if Israel were to suddenly hit the mother lode in oil, the material wealth would largely void the supernatural work that God has accomplished in this nation." The supernatural work, that is, of blessing Israel with material wealth. In other words, if the Jews became wealthy because God blessed them with oil, it would prevent us from understanding that "Israel's affluence can only be explained by God's grace." That's clear enough, isn't it?

It's a little unsettling how neatly this belief in the supernatural nature of Jewish wealth complements the bone-deep anti-Semitism of the Darbyist apocalypse. But in a spirit of charity, we'll put these speculations aside. RR goes on to describe how Christians have sometimes been inspired to finance the search for "Biblical oil," in order to fulfill a prophecy that was never made, but clearly should've been, given oil's great significance to man, and therefore to God:

Ness Energy International is one example. In the late 1990s, a Texas oilman by the name "Hayseed" Stevens was promoting the idea that a vast reservoir of oil was under that Dead Sea region.

Mr. Stevens based his conclusions on ideas that would make any respected geologist pull his hair out. He told people at a series of prophecy meetings that the earth contains a layer of hydrocarbons and that the southern part of the Dead Sea is the fountainhead of this oil reservoir. Stevens also said there is a plumbing system that would eventually drain the Arabian oil fields. Yes, all this time the Arabs have been stealing Israel's oil.

The undoing of Stevens’ eccentric theories came when he began drilling. After punching through a salt plug that was said to be capping the oil, nothing was found. I remember him sending out one update to reassure investors, saying that the drillers had found oil; but it wasn't the right kind oil they were looking for.

All of this is news to me, but both the theory and Rapture Ready's rebuttal strike me as the perfect illustration of American fundamentalism's bedrock economism. (You can read more on Stevens here; it's a fascinating story.)

As we've seen, God's conscientious withholding of oil from teh Jews reveals Israel's wealth as something that "can only be explained by God's grace." If that's true, at least one mechanism of His grace is not entirely a secret. Christian tourism is an important source of Israel's income; hundreds of thousands of Christians visit each year in order to walk along some arbitrary Via Dolorosa, and to visit monuments known to have been built near the probable site of temples that tradition says are very near to a place where buildings Jesus may have visited are reputed to have stood.

Many of these sites were made holy in order to meet the popular demand for holy sites (the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime). It's charming that Stanley Spencer depicted Jesus carrying the cross down Cookham High Street, but as Mr. Gradgrind observed, "You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them." The official Via Dolorosa may not be strictly accurate, but at least it's in Jerusalem.

And just imagine if you arrived in, say, Bethlehem, and no X marked the spot where Jesus was born. It'd be like drilling for the Lord's light sweet crude precisely where it ought to be, and coming up dry. God must be spared this embarrassment, if at all possible.

A site called Bible Walks exemplifies this selfless concern for God's good name with its page on Tell Hadar, which is thought to be the site of the miracle of loaves and fishes:

The topography of the site and the proximity to the major Roman road makes this tradition sound reasonable....A heavy rock has been placed in the parking lot to mark the site of the miracle.

A heavy rock, mind you; nothing less could assure us that this world is not our home.

(Illustration: Satellite image of the parting of the Red Sea, via BLDGBLOG.)

Food Deserts and Fortifications

A paper in The International Journal of Health Geographics discusses the use of GIS to track the evolution of urban "food deserts":

The findings indicate that residents of inner-city neighbourhoods of low socioeconomic status have the poorest access to supermarkets. Furthermore, spatial inequalities in access to supermarkets have increased over time, particularly in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Central and East London, where distinct urban food deserts now exist.

The problem of spatial inequalities isn't confined to southern Ontario, needless to say. Cervantes goes so far as to suggest that the current food shortage deserves some of the attention that's currently being given to lapel pins and bowling scores:

This is not a temporary problem. It's a long-term, secular (as the economists say) trend. The planet is running out of stuff -- water, land, topsoil, petroleum, atmosphere.

In America, at least, higher food prices may have some connection with the crackdown on immigrant workers, as well as hard-right hysteria over the AgJOBS Act. Still, this is the sort of situation that can trigger mass migration and civil unrest, making border security -- regional, national and local -- more important than ever.

The $20 million prototype for the virtual fence near Tucson may've been scrapped -- along with the law it was supposed to protect and represent -- but the outlook for solid walls and barriers is very promising indeed, especially when it comes to protecting microborders. Whether you're planning "a gated community or an insurgent holding pen," or some convenient amalgam of the two, blast walls are de rigeur in the modern City of Refuge (which will ideally protect us not only from being punished for unintentional killing, but also from being accused of it).

Unfortunately, simply building walls isn't enough to protect yourself from the tired, and the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. You also have to make sure that no one gets around, under, or over them. In that regard, knowledge is power, especially when it confirms what you already believe.

The Drug Enforcement Agency wants to find a small business with a Top Secret security clearance that can snoop on Spanish language conversations transmitted over foreign communications systems and "instantaneously" translate those conversations from Spanish into English....

The translation company would be expected to create online records of "complex foreign voice radio transmissions containing technical terminology, advanced grammar and syntax, and colloquial conversational forms"....

The problem is, when people know they're being overheard, they can use codes, or intentionally spread misinformation, or simply agree to meet up in person. That's why DARPA's Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (HI-MEMS) is so exciting:

These half-bug, half-chip creations — DARPA calls them "insect cyborgs" — would be ideal for surveillance missions, the agency says in a brief description on its website.

Scientist Amit Lal and his team insert mechanical components into baby bugs during "the caterpillar and the pupae stages," which would then allow the adult bugs to be deployed to do the Pentagon's bidding.

The article ends with a joke that has considerably more than a grain of truth to it:

Presumably, enemy arsenals will soon be well-stocked with Raid.

It's easy to imagine pesticides being the first line of defense against these cyber insects, regardless of any collateral damage to "useful" species; one thing DARPA will probably want to do is create hybrids that are immune to common pesticides (particularly in Latin America, where a much wider range of chemicals is used).

At that point, I suppose evildoers would have to clear their confidential meeting places with flamethrowers, or perhaps jamming signals. There's also the possibility that natural predators -- for lack of a better term -- will eat some of these semi-mechanical bugs; they should probably be equipped to deliver an electric shock, or a squirt of some noxious liquid, that'll discourage hungry birds and bats.

Surely none of these problems is insurmountable, given what's at stake in a world that's low on resources (or finds it impractical to distribute them equitably, which amounts to the pretty much the same thing).

In completely unrelated news, Bruce Schneier asks a serious question, and provides a serious answer:

[G]iven a security patch, can you automatically reverse-engineer the security vulnerability that is being patched and create exploit code to exploit it?

Turns out you can.

Frightening, isn't it? There oughta be a law.

(Illustration from The War Illustrated, April 3 1915.)

Aping White Elites

Thers is developing a veritable Barnum Museum of conservatarian bombast. Get a load of this specimen:

Unfortunately, I don’t have time enough right now to give these thoughts the treatment I think they deserve. The importunate urgency in our age is very strong: it militates against my inclination to let them marinate for awhile, in the hopes that a structured essay may issue from the marinade.

This is entertaining, God knows, but it's also educational. In the first few decades of the 20th century, one of the things that made blacks so comical to regular people was their alleged fondness for big words, which was supposedly an attempt to gain status by acting white. The historian Ronald L.F. Davis evocatively describes that era's frenzy for songs and plays that showed blacks "aping white elites to comic effect, trying to ice skate, clumsily walking along a high fashion boulevard, haplessly trying to ride horses in the manner of an English gentleman, and strutting proudly in exaggerated dress at parties and 'darkey' balls."

Reading Cella, it struck me that these stereotypes are much more true of bone-ignorant conservative whites than they ever were of the blacks for whom they were invented. What is Cella doing if not "aping white elites to comic effect"? Der Kulturkampf is essentially a cakewalk, in which hard-right bullyboys vie to represent "civilization" by strutting around in tuxedos made from its scraps. Dime-a-dozen phrases from Plato and Burke, tin-eared attempts at antique eloquence, and metric assloads of earnest exhortation...these are the rhetorical equivalents of the traditional cakewalk contestant's ludicrously oversized top hat.

The difference, obviously, is that cakewalks mocked white elitism; the haughty prancing of Cella & Co is an absolutely humorless celebration of it. It all has to do with monocles, mint juleps on the veranda, and the pleasure that comes with perceiving oneself as a thinker of Elevated Thoughts. Movement Conservatism is a sort of endless Renaissance Faire for people who think saying "prithee" makes them Sir Philip Sidney.

And now, having distilled these lucubrations into a true aqua divina, and served it in nuce lest this too-puissant spirit should overmaster your own, I must away betimes.

God Rode In the Windstorm

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

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

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

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

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

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

QED, as the saying is.

Actionable Intelligence

While listening to the radio this morning, I heard a caller arguing that torture doesn’t work, because by torturing people, you can get people to say anything.

I’ve objected to this argument before, because it implies that torture would be OK if only it were more reliable.

There’s another problem with this line of reasoning, though. Suppose you need someone to say something that isn’t true. Suppose that a single lie, professionally extracted from some anonymous victim, will help you to launch a war, or enact an unconstitutional law, or round up a horde of political enemies, or boost defense spending.

Eventually, you might end up in a situation reminiscent of the subprime mortgage crisis, in which vast fortunes are staked on little more than promises made under duress.

If this ever happened, the problem with the existence of a videotaped torture session might not be its brutality, so much as the insight it’d provide into the process by which “intelligence” is manufactured and passed off as legitimate.

This isn’t an accusation, of course; I’m just thinking out loud. But in purely political terms, this does strike me as the most dangerous possible aspect of allowing torture: it can produce “useful” information when reality can’t.

Poems of Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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