Friday Hope Blogging

Wyoming has rejected a bill that would've defined marriage as an exclusively heterosexual right:

After an hour of impassioned debate Friday, the House defeated an attempt to define marriage in the state Constitution as a union between a man and a woman.

House Joint Resolution 17, also known as the "Defense of Marriage" resolution, failed by a vote of 35-25.

Members of Congress are calling on Obama to freeze construction of the border fence:

"We, along with our constituents, understand the importance of protecting our borders," the letter reads. "Though there are places where a fence is the most feasible option, we strongly believe the Bush Administration's approach of constructing a fence along much of the Southwest border was ill-conceived as it was void of any meaningful input from the local communities or the Border Patrol Sector Chiefs who are most familiar with the challenges of securing our border."

The Migration Policy Institute agrees:

Members of an influential Washington think tank today recommended major changes in the nation's immigration policy, including freezing construction of a security fence along the U.S.- Mexican border and suspending "zero-tolerance" prosecution programs against all people caught crossing segments of the border.

The Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan group whose presenters included former U.S. immigration chiefs under both parties, recommended 36 steps the Obama administration can take without congressional approval to alter policies developed during the Bush administration.

Also, local opposition to the construction of immigrant detention centers is increasing:

The immigration crackdown of recent years has been possible, in part, because the Bush administration has greatly expanded its detention space. This is set to continue in next year's budget, with new centers planned in several states. But some are meeting local resistance.

I don't know what I expect to come of it, if anything, but this is a remarkable thing for a US president to say:

The days where we’re just building sprawl forever, those days are over. I think that Republicans, Democrats, everybody recognizes that that’s not a smart way to build communities.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has shelved BushCo's plans to drill off the US coast...for now:

The Department of Interior will now conduct a 180-day review of the country's offshore oil and gas resources, leaving the door open for possible offshore oil exploration. The agency will hold four public meetings over the next few months - in Alaska and on the West, East, and Gulf Coasts - to hear from state and local officials, industry, and environmental groups on the proposal.

And Nevada has shelved plans to build a coal-fired plant near Ely:

[I]t is welcome that Nevada will be spared this source of smog, haze and unhealthy air and water for the next decade — and probably longer. That is because Congress, likely this year, will pass regulations that have been inevitable for some time.

The regulations will require that coal plants vastly reduce the noxious emissions that have been allowed to pollute our cities, countrysides and waterways, contributing to global warming and causing serious health problems. The cost of bringing about such reductions will almost certainly steer power companies away from building coal plants.

South Carolina's governor is opposing the construction of a new coal plant, too. Better yet, funding for nuclear power and "clean coal" have been stripped from the stimulus package:

"This is a big victory for common sense and the American taxpayer," said Kevin Kamps of Beyond Nuclear who helped lead the campaign on Capitol Hill to cut the $50 billion from the bill.

A new study suggests that improving energy efficiency could cut US electricity consumption by 30 percent:

An assessment of the "electric productivity" of the 50 states indicates that shoring up performance gaps through energy efficiency could not only cut consumption by 30 percent, but also eliminate the need for more than 60 percent of coal-fired generation, according to a new study by the Rocky Mountain Institute.

In many areas, reducing water consumption is an excellent way to reduce energy use:

"It takes a lot of energy to move, treat, clean, and use water. A remarkable amount of water, it turns out," Gleick said. "So whatever we can do to reduce the energy required to meet our water needs reduces greenhouse gases."

The UK vows that it will make every home in the country more energy efficient by 2030:

All UK households will have a green makeover by 2030 under government plans to reduce carbon emissions and cut energy bills.

Cavity wall and loft insulation will be available for all suitable homes, with plans to retrofit 400,000 homes a year by 2015. Financial incentives for householders will also be available for low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, biomass boilers and ground source heat pumps, paid for by a levy on utility companies.

Eleven islands in the North Sea will attempt to become waste-free:

The islands from six countries will follow a "cradle-to-cradle" philosophy, which calls for using renewable energy and products made from materials that can be endlessly reused or organically decomposed.

Innovations will include electric vehicles, a desalination system for drinking water that removes salt in a usable form, and purification of household water – including human waste.

"The islands will be a catalyst for innovation for the whole region," German chemist Michael Braungart said at the unveiling of the project late Wednesday.

Grenada, Spain is using electric hearses:

“We are not only the first cemetery in Spain to use CO2-free, electric hearses to carry coffins, but we are the first in Europe. In one city in Romania, the dead are brought into the cemetery on the back of an electric golf cart while in Tarrasa, Catalunya, they use a trailer pulled by a low CO2 emitting car.

In future, they may be partially powered by bumps in the road:

A team of MIT undergraduate students has invented a shock absorber that harnesses energy from small bumps in the road, generating electricity while it smoothes the ride more effectively than conventional shocks.

In the Philippines, the Catholic Church is taking a stand against mining:

Over the past few years, Bishop Arturo Bastes has spearheaded the church's campaign to shut down a gold and copper mine in Rapu-Rapu island, in the central Philippines. Bishop Bastes hounded the mine's Australian developers after a chemical spill at the site, and now is working on shutting down the new owners -- a consortium led by South Korean industrial giant LG International Corp....

"It's written in the Bible," Bishop Bastes says, quoting the book of Numbers, chapter 35, verse 34: "Do not defile the land where you live and I dwell."

Researchers claim that biodiverse crops seem to result -- somehow -- in less nitrate damage to rivers:

Modern farms tend to produce fewer crop varieties; this lower crop biodiversity can negatively impact surrounding watersheds. According to the study, within a given area, a higher biodiversity of crops led to less dissolved nitrogen in surrounding water bodies.

Speaking of biodiversity, the Center for Biological Diversity, whose effectiveness in raising legal challenges to anti-environmental policies I've praised many times, "has created the Climate Law Institute to extend the reach of current environmental and human health laws to encompass global warming, pass new climate legislation, and reinvent America’s approach to protecting endangered species and public lands."

The path-breaking institute will be directed by Kassie Siegel, the current director of the Center’s Climate, Air, and Energy program. That program will be replaced by the multidisciplinary institute, which will expand and direct climate change work across the Center’s biodiversity, oceans, public lands, urban wildlands, and international programs.

There seems to be some truth to the broken windows theory:

Researchers, working with police, identified 34 crime hot spots. In half of them, authorities set to work - clearing trash from the sidewalks, fixing street lights, and sending loiterers scurrying. Abandoned buildings were secured, businesses forced to meet code, and more arrests made for misdemeanors. Mental health services and homeless aid referrals expanded. In the remaining hot spots, normal policing and services continued.

Then researchers from Harvard and Suffolk University sat back and watched, meticulously recording criminal incidents in each of the hot spots.

The results, just now circulating in law enforcement circles, are striking: A 20 percent plunge in calls to police from the parts of town that received extra attention. It is seen as strong scientific evidence that the long-debated "bro ken windows" theory really works - that disorderly conditions breed bad behavior, and that fixing them can help prevent crime.

Inhabitat reports on a rooftop garden prototype in Los Angeles:

SYNTHe is a self-sufficient ecosystem that could offer a myriad of environmental benefits. Besides helping to filter pollutants, increasing thermal insulation of the roof, and reducing storm water runoff, the roof top garden sets forth a complete productive cycle. Food will be grown, consumed, and ultimately returned to the cycle in the form of compost on the premises.

A Spanish quarry has been turned into a "post-industrial" tourist site:

In actuality, not only has the quarry been turned into an outdoor history museum decorated with artifacts, it's been landscaped as an arboretum showcasing native Minorcan flora. In keeping with the stonecutters' tradition of cultivating orchards and vegetable gardens in disused quarries, each excavated spaces plays host to a different plant community. So there is a quarry room for fruit trees, another for bushes and shrubs, and another containing cultivated olive trees and aromatic plants. In one quarry, there is a pond containing freshwater Minorcan plants.

Click through to see more pictures; you won't be sorry!

Apropos of which, Plep mentions the abandoned stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which could benefit from a similar approach to rehabilitation. You can find many fascinating pictures here.


California is reducing the population of its overcrowded prisons:

Tens of thousands of California inmates will have to be released over the next two to three years to relieve overcrowding that has ravaged prison medical and mental health care, a panel of federal judges said Monday.

Pfizer claims that it will reveal the payments it makes to doctors:

The disclosures will begin early next year and are planned to include all payments to a doctor or other prescriber exceeding $500 in a year, the New York firm said.

The move comes after introduction last month of legislation to require such disclosures, and revelations of astronomical payments to some doctors that were not revealed to universities and hospitals that employed them.

In related news, the American Psychiatric Association may cut some of their ties with drug companies:

[Dr. Daniel] Carlat and other psychiatrists have been studying the issue and have proposed that the American Psychiatric Association cut back on medical education seminars funded by drug companies.

Dr. Nada Stotland, president of the group that represents 38,000 doctors, said the proposal is one of several the association's board will take up next month to address concerns that psychiatrists have become too cozy with drugmakers.

The APA and some prominent psychiatrists have been targeted in a probe by Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley. He has faulted several noted child psychiatrists, including Dr. Joseph Biederman of Harvard University in Boston, for failing to disclose hefty payments from drug companies.

Yoplait will no longer be made with milk containing rBGH:

Saying consumers want the change, General Mills on Monday announced it would suspend by August the use of milk produced from cows injected with a synthetic hormone in all Yoplait yogurt.

The work of a researcher who suggested that the MMR vaccine causes autism has been found to be inadequate, to put it very politely indeed:

[A]n investigative report by The Times in London...seemed to show fairly conclusively Wakefield had doctored the data to have in come out the way he wanted....This explains why no one has been able to replicate his findings: in fact there was no demonstrable relationship between the autism seen in his 12 child case series and the vaccination itself.

The linked post discusses the role of science journals in this debate, and is well worth reading.

Clinical trials of an anti-HIV vaginal gel seem to be promising:

An investigational vaginal gel intended to prevent HIV infection in women has demonstrated encouraging signs of success in a clinical trial conducted in Africa and the United States. Findings of the recently concluded study, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the NIH, were presented today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Montreal.

A new approach to antibiotic design could slow the development of drug resistance by targeting bacterial communication:

Individual bacteria monitor the concentration of signalling molecules, and when it reaches a certain level, change their behaviour. That concentration provides a rough indication of when the number of cells in a particular population has reached a certain critical mass - known as a quorum. When a quorum is reached, pathogenic bacteria shift from a benign state and begin attacking the host by secreting toxins.

But hacking the bacterial communication system could make it possible to prevent this transformation, and leave the cells waiting in a safe form for an attack signal that never comes. That would give the immune system extra time to naturally clear the bacteria from the body, says David Spring at the University of Cambridge, UK.

His research group has now developed an artificial molecule that could lead to a treatment to destroy the quorum signals sent out by many bacteria, including Pseudomonas - a bacterium that can lead to life-threatening conditions such as meningitis, and that is the primary cause of mortality in individuals with cystic fibrosis.

Scientists seem to have gained some insight into photosynthesis:

Analysing energy transport is an important way of understanding the inner workings of a wide range of systems, from biological processes to car engines. However, in very small-scale systems such as photosynthetic molecules, quantum effects come into play making it difficult for scientists to explain how photosynthetic molecules are able to transport energy with remarkably high efficiency.

Until now, one of the major obstacles has been the lack of a direct way of probing some of the fundamental mechanisms involved in the flow of energy between electrons in molecules.

"These new pictures are instantaneous snap-shots of energy being transported between electrons across a protein. Remarkably, the pictures go further in unravelling the complex way the electrons interact. This gives us something akin to a fingerprint for electronic couplings," says Dr Ian Mercer from the School of Physics at University College Dublin, the lead author of the new study, who is a visiting researcher at Imperial College London.

This is...interesting:

The extinction of species is a consequence of their inability to adapt to new environmental conditions, and also of their competition with other species. Besides selection and the appearance of new species, the possibility of adaptation is also one of the driving forces behind evolution. According to the interpretation that has been familiar since Darwin, these processes increase the “fitness” of the species overall, since, of two competing species, only the fittest would survive. LMU researchers have now simulated the progression of a cyclic competition of three species. It means that each participant is superior to one other species, but will be beaten by a third interaction partner. “In this kind of cyclical concurrence, the weakest species proves the winner almost without exception,” reports Professor Erwin Frey, who headed the study. “The two stronger species, on the other hand, die out, as experiments with bacteria have already shown. Our results are not only a big surprise, they are important to our understanding of evolution of ecosystems and the development of new strategies for the protection of species.”

Now, then. Photos of Kenyan women, visible from space. Imaging the Thyacline (someone's gotta do it). A history of wine. The rephotographic journeys of John Hannavy. And some postcards from South Dakota.


Furthermore: Photos by Inge Morath (I recommend The Road to Reno). Botanical illustrations by Olive Pink. And entomological illustrations from the Franclemont Collection.


Neanderthal music (I'd give it a nine 'cause I can dance to it, but I wouldn't buy it). Codex Gigas. Beautiful and horrible stalactites of melted brick. An Australian dust storm in the shape of Ayers Rock (via Coudal). Histories and photos of unknown New Orleanians.


And, in conclusion, Colour on the Thames.



UPDATE: If you've got room after all that, RMJ has dessert.

(Photo at top via Stuck in Customs.)

Patriots and Tyrants

As we all know, Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. And an unabashed Muslim. And a Muslim apostate. And a socialist. And a friend of terrorists. And an America-hater. And a Jesus-hater. And an Israel-hater. And a Marxist. And a snob. And a baby-killer. And an adulterer. And a coked-up homo. And a gun-grabber. And a domestic terrorist who lobbed bombs at a South African rugby team in 1981.

Be that as it may, he won the presidential election against two white conservatives honorable patriots. Which means that the results of that election must now be annulled by means of frivolous lawsuits:

A new lawsuit is being prepared by a California attorney who already has four cases pending over the issue of President Obama's eligibility to occupy to Oval Office, and this one will include a demand from state lawmakers who forward state funds to Washington for documentation of his qualifications.

The linked article includes a helpful guide to recent and current lawsuits that are intended to cast Obama from his throne by revealing him a foreign-born pretender. It notes jeeringly that "Obama's campaign team called the cases garbage"; since almost all of the cases cited have been denied or dismissed, the courts seem to agree.

My flippant tone notwithstanding, I don't find any of this particularly funny. Over at Orcinus, Sara Robinson discusses the sentencing of James Adkisson for his murderous attack on a Unitarian Universalist church that he considered to be a hotbed of liberalism. When Adkisson insists that he took his marching orders from the likes of Michael Savage and Bernard Goldberg, she takes him at his word:

A significant part of this country's media infrastructure is thoroughly devoted to inciting people to commit horrific acts of violence against us -- and now, we know for a fact that people are acting on those incitements. It's time to start taking this far more seriously.

With that sound advice in mind, I feel somewhat troubled by all these theatrical, bad-faith attempts to seek a "legal remedy" for the Obama presidency. When that remedy is denied, the people who've been aching for it probably won't say, "Well, I guess Orly Taitz was full of shit." More likely, they'll conclude that the fix is well and truly in. And some of them may decide that a violent response is justified, or even necessary.

As I see it, these lawsuits aren't a test of Obama's eligibility for office; they're a test of the courts, which will be judged in terms of their willingness to conform to a narrative these extremists already know to be true. The logic here is similar to that of the tax-protest movement: once you come up with a plausible-sounding theory that explains why Americans shouldn't have to pay taxes, any court that fails to validate it becomes illegitimate by definition; the only verdict with any legal authority is the one the protesters had their hearts set on from the start.

In the same way, when the highest courts in the land collude to keep a Islamo-Socialist con man in office -- despite incontrovertible evidence that he was born deep in the Kenyan jungle, to a witch doctor and a fugitive member of the Baader-Meinhof gang -- it's clear that the law has effectively suspended itself. Which means that pretty much anything goes.

I'd be happy to be wrong, of course. But I can't help feeling that this entire charade is some bizarre form of wingnut proceduralism; it's not hard to imagine a scene of carnage along the lines of the OKC bombing being justified by some manifesto that explains, in plaintive terms calculated to soften the stoniest heart, how long and patiently these oppressed patriots worked to redress their grievances legally.

My Appointed Rounds

Jesse Taylor on the stimulus bill:

If you wonder why the voting public distrusts Republicans on the stimulus, it probably has a lot to do with the fact that they wrecked our national car and are now holding a bandage to their head, demanding to drive the ambulance that they didn’t want to call to the hospital they insist is full of filth and decay.

Echidne on healthcare:

Most of the currently uninsured do not offer great money-making opportunities for the private markets, however much competition we might wish to inject there (ironically enough, usually through regulation), but must be covered and treated through government programs, charity or not at all. And when the utterly uninsured finally seek help for a medical problem, it is often late in the disease process and at a hospital emergency room, one of the most expensive patches in our quilt and an inappropriate one as a setting for primary care.

BLDGBLOG on the ceaseless knocking of opportunity:

One man in Burbank, unable to sell his house for its asking price and having to compensate for a loss of rental income, "posted an Internet notice that the property, which has an eight-person hot tub, was available to the adult-film industry, which he had heard pays as much as $5,000 a day....

Apparently, "Income from residential filming for fewer than 15 days a year isn’t subject to federal taxes," so there might yet be something of a boom in short-term film sites around the city, a distributed micro-Hollywood of economically depressed domestic space.

Ann Friedman on the point at which people becoming the "deserving" poor:

[W]hat happens when the people who need welfare are not characterized in the media as solely urban women of color? When the aid recipients include well-educated, former white-collar workers affected by the economic crisis, the vocabulary changes. Now it's suddenly a "safety net" -- a more positive, temporary-sounding term that does not have the same connotations as the much-maligned "W" word.

The archfiend NTodd on the monstrous Nadya Suleman:

[W]e as liberals, progressives, pro-choicers, whateverers, allegedly believe in a woman's fundamental reproductive freedom. To castigate Suleman for CHOOSING to exercise her prerogative seems not only uncompassionate but illiberal.

The dehumanizing of Suleman by calling her "octomom" and "nuts" and reducing her to a "breeding vat" is part and parcel of this. It makes it easy to feel good about and/or ignore our own moral choices, and while we might cover our disgust with clever arguments about bioethics and whatnot, really it's just cognitive dissonance and a bit of correspondent inference theory as we decide what her real intentions are.

Bruce Schneier on the new and improved No-Fly List:

The House approved a bill creating a whitelist of people who are on the blacklist, but shouldn't be. No word yet about what they're going to do about people who are on the whitelist, but shouldn't be. Perhaps they'll create a second blacklist for them. Then we'll all be safe from terrorists, for sure.

And Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi on the dealy perils of investing in alternative energy:

While the push for alternatives is important, we must also be mindful that efforts to rapidly promote alternatives could have a chilling effect on investment in the oil sector.

More Fire!

Read a random page from Foxe's Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, and you'll soon realize that the martyrs of the past had it pretty easy. William Tyndale, for instance, was strangled before being burned at the stake.

This basic courtesy has been denied Dr. Jim Buckee, who is being immolated -- figuratively speaking -- while in full possession of his senses.

Dr Jim Buckee says he feels like a heretic, persecuted for his views and treated like an outcast. His crime? Being a climate change sceptic.

Next week the former chief executive of the oil and gas firm Talisman, who has a PhD in astrophysics from the University of Oxford, will try to convince others that climate change has nothing to do with human activity.

Dr. Buckee, who has no one on his side but sympathetic journalists and media outlets, countless interlocking conservatarian thinktanks, a fair number of influential politicians, and the oil and gas industry he served so honorably, "believes human behaviour has no effect on the climate." Not only that, but we're about to enter a global cooling period. And furthermore, "it's teh sun, stupid!"

Scientists who have seen evidence against each of these propositions believe that Buckee's wrong, which naturally means that they comprise a new Holy Vehm:

"Any dissension is like a heresy," he says. "People are stamped on so they can't be heard. That has religious overtones."

I'm impressed by Buckee's courage, Lord knows. But let's also have a round of applause for Jenny Haworth and her paper The Scotsman, who have dared to record the words of this brave man, despite the likelihood that Haworth will be prosecuted under the State Secrets Act, and the paper will be turned into an official organ of the Alliance for Green Socialism by an act of Parliament.

Please be advised that Dr. Buckee doesn't like wind farms unless they're "economic." Most of them, however, are "non-economic," in the sense that the government makes them viable through incentives and subsidies, which is what distinguishes wind farms from coal mines and nuclear plants.

That is Dr. Buckee's view of the matter. You would do well to make it your own.

Also, just because Dr. Buckee is a heretic, and has had his tongue pierced -- figuratively speaking -- by the white-hot poker of professional disagreement, don't go thinking that his views are somehow out of the mainstream.

"I think it is the dominant view in professional science circles," he says.

Why shouldn't it be? All climatologists can read and understand the data at least as well as Dr. Buckeee, and they surely agree with Donne's claim, regarding the sun, that "thy duties be to warm the world." If they won't admit it, they must be afraid. And if they're afraid, someone must have frightened them. QED!

Above all, don't imagine that Dr. Buckee's career in the energy industry has warped his perceptions. If he had any conflict of interest, he'd keep quiet in order to avoid scandal and contention:

"A vested interest would make me shut up because it would drag up controversy," he says.

At this point, Ms. Haworth buckles under the pressure of the Warming Cult, and devotes the rest of her article to people who think that Buckee's a self-aggrandizing schmuck with a poor grasp of the facts.

Mr McLaren says that, far from having their views suppressed, sceptics have been given too much exposure.

"It has been massively damaging on a public and political level that the views of a small minority of ill-informed sceptics have been given virtually equal weight to the consensus of the scientific community by the majority of the mainstream media," he says.

"Something that's contrary to the accepted wisdom is more likely to be seen as news. If a scientist stood up and said the IPCC was right, there wouldn't be any news."

Harsh words, alongside of which the terrors of the bastinado are as nothing. But at least Dr. Buckee can take some satisfaction in the fact that Haworth's treachery proves his point: why would she go to the trouble of reporting other people's opinions censoring him, if his views didn't pose a threat to Teh Powers That Be? Anyone can see that in damning Buckee, these babblers damn themselves.

That being the case, Buckee would be wise to follow the example of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, who, having been placed upon the stake and set alight, "said with an indifferent loud voice, For God's love, good people, let me have more fire!"

Our Best and Brightest

Fort Detrick can't seem to keep track of its pathogens:

It's the only place in the American military complex equipped to handle the worst of the worst diseases -- those that have no cure and are transmissible by air. Which makes it extremely unnerving, that the place had to suspend biodefense research on Friday, "after discovering apparent problems with the system of accounting for high-risk microbes and biomaterials...."

The concern this time is that the lab may not be accurately tracking the use and storage of all of its biological organisms in an internal government database -- leaving the door open to misplacement, mishandling, or worse.

The federal government has delegated food-safety responsibilities to states that can't afford them:

The U.S. government has increasingly relied on food-safety inspections performed by states, where budgets for inspections in many cases have remained stagnant and where overburdened officials are trained less than their federal counterparts and perform skimpier reviews

There's a shortage of water in the desert:

The Central Valley has been hit harder than most parts of California, in part because housing was so overbuilt there. But the valley faces a problem that much of the rest of the state doesn't: Its economy is heavily tied to the farming industry, which in turn is dependent on water imported from the mountains of Northern California.

Who or what is to blame? The Endangered Species Act, naturally:

Republican George Radanovich of Mariposa, who introduced a bill to this effect last week, called the Endangered Species Act a "horrendous" law and said that pumping restrictions to protect Delta smelt and other species at the expense of farmers amounts to "economic eco-terrorism."

The NOAA is punishing a marine biologist for advocating conservation:

Professor Rick Steiner, a noted marine scientist and environmentalist with the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program, incurred the wrath of NOAA officials by protesting a pro-industry slant in Sea Grant programs to promote oil drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

And the Pentagon has come up with a fraudulent mitigation banking scheme:

The Pentagon has been funding Texas A&M University to pay landowners near a Texas military post to protect endangered bird species on their land under a secretive program designed to free the military to conduct training activities that would damage the birds' habitats inside the post's boundaries....

Meanwhile, the Canadian government is funding an asbestos lobbying group:

[T]he new federal budget continues to provide funding for the Chrysotile Institute, which promotes the use of asbestos throughout the world.

"When Canadians find out we're actually doing this, they can't believe it," said Bradley, who has written Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff urging the party to support an end to the funding.

All of which is pretty depressing. But take heart, for the economy, at least, is in good hands:

Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday morning, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.

Clearly, prosperity is right around the corner.

Truth and the Common Good

I've been staring at the screen for about fifteen minutes now, wondering how I can introduce the latest column by Dennis Clayson. A few glib, sarcastic words won't do justice to the abyss he's opened at our feet, and casting doubt on his sanity is unnecessary given the beliefs he's proud to express. Calling him a garden-variety inactivist would obscure his talent for making shit up, while presenting him as some sort of inexhaustible wingnut Scheherazade would downplay the poverty of his thought.

There's nothing to do, really, but proceed.

The first thing you need to know is that Clayson is upset because people intend to celebrate Charles Darwin's 200th birthday. In order to understand his dismay, you need to realize that science is sometimes put in service of political ideology.

No, really! For instance, there used to be a theory which claimed that if the US and Russia launched all their nuclear weapons at each other, it would somehow result in something called "nuclear winter."

Not only would cities and military targets be destroyed, but the climate would be so altered that almost everyone would be exposed to famine and environmental collapse. In other words, there could be no winners of a nuclear war.

A fanciful notion, you'll agree, for which we can imagine no physical mechanism or natural precedent. Still, this scenario was politically useful, in that it made all-out nuclear war seem like a bad idea.

If you've ever seen a film called The Corpse Grinders, in which cats develop a taste for human flesh after a cat food company tries to cut costs by raiding the local graveyard, you can probably guess what happened next:

Unfortunately, whether this theory was true or false, scientists learned a lesson about the relationship between the truth and the common good that the left had used for over a century to justify lying.

In other words, they found out that lying about stuff was a fun and profitable way to advance the secular-humanist agenda, and they decided to make a career of it.

This is all very exciting. But for some reason, Clayson feels a need to digress:

If you lived 600 years ago, and if you were rich and didn't have to work, you could take on the task of learning everything there was to know, and no one would be astonished at your ambition.

If someone were to say the same today, we would wonder if they were sane. Know everything there is to know; about what? Sharks? What aspect of what type of shark?

The difference in the amount of knowledge that is available is due to a number of factors, but primarily to something called the Scientific Method.

Unfortunately, he derails this interesting train of thought just as it's nearing the station. Instead, he uses correspondent inference theory to "prove" that scientists are lying about global warming:

Think about what the idea of human-caused global warming justifies. It demands global solutions dependent upon global governments. It demands that business and production be controlled. It demands that human behavior be controlled even down to private decisions that now magically become public policy; such as how many children a person may have.

It's easy to point out what's wrong with this argument: the fact that global warming may result in a given outcome doesn't prove that it was invented to cause that outcome. But pointing out what's wrong with it and defeating it are two different things, sad to say.

Many people find it easier to believe that AGW is a worldwide conspiracy to destroy capitalism (or feminize men, or redistribute wealth, or reduce population) than to accept that we're endangering our own survival through our own bad decisions. The more frightening science's predictions are, the more desperate the Global Liberal Elite must be to make postpartum abortion legal. It's just common sense!

Make no mistake: "there are numerous leftist and environmental groups that want global warming to be true so bad they could wet their pants." Accepting the science, therefore, would make leftists happy. If pleasing leftists is your idea of a good time, you might as well cook them a nice meal of tofu and arugula while you're at it, and then let them buttfuck you 'til the cows come home and are granted human rights by an activist judge.

Remember how Clayson said it's impossible to know very much about science these days, 'cause human knowledge has increased thanks to "something called the Scientific Method"? Well, scratch that. It takes nothing more intellectually strenuous than patriotism to understand that "there is no 'consensus' on the causes of global warming." (As for the likely effects...well, if we can't even be certain that global thermonuclear war would have serious consequences for the climate, why should we worry about building a few more coal-fired power plants?)

So what does any of this have to do with Darwin? It's simple. Sort of.

What about a Darwin Day celebration? Why not a Newton Day, or a Neils Bohr Day? Both are rated higher on scientific importance than Darwin on many historical rankings.

Why Darwin? Because, like the science of global warming, there are some "sciences" that are more important to personal and political aggrandizement than others.

I'd be interested in having a look at the "ratings" Clayson consulted, but never mind about that. He's asking a straightforward question, and I think I can answer it. The reason some people celebrate "Darwin Day" is because the theory of evolution -- unlike the theories of Newton and Bohr -- is under continual attack by invincibly ignorant zealots, whose alleged religious faith is so weak and sickly that it can't survive the strain of understanding the biological processes that occur in a world they claim was created especially for them.

No matter how you feel about Darwin Day -- I tend to think it's waste of time, personally -- you should be able to grasp that people make a point of celebrating Darwin's birth not because he's Teh Bestest Scientist Ever, but because ideologues like Clayson have portrayed him as a fool, a charlatan, and a midwife to Hitler for decades, and pretended that evolution stands or falls with his character.

All of which makes defending evolution roughly equivalent with defending science, both as a source of practical (if occasionally dangerous) knowledge about how our world works, and as a necessary counterbalance to the maniacs who insist that global nuclear war is "winnable," that the concept of race corresponds to a genetic reality, that teh gays don't deserve equal rights, and that some magical force prevents human activity from affecting the climate.

To put it another way, if Clayson really wants to know why Darwin's birthday is being celebrated, and (more to the point) treated as an occasion to review the basics of evolution and science, he should ponder his own career in journalism, and the degree of public ignorance required to make it not just possible, but respectable.

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

Weeks 2 and 3 of the Failed Obama Presidency^® have been something of a mixed bag.

On the one hand, the gutters did not run red with the blood of guillotined plutocrats, and the abolition of the rule of capital seems as far away as ever.

On the other hand, the Administration did cancel drilling leases in Utah:

Scolding the Bush administration for rushing in its final days to drill near treasured Utah national parks, President Barack Obama's new Interior secretary Wednesday shelved oil and gas leases sold during a chaotic December auction.

It also reauthorized and expanded SCHIP:

No child in America should be receiving his or her primary care in the emergency room in the middle of the night. No child should be falling behind at school because he can't hear the teacher or see the blackboard. I refuse to accept that millions of our children fail to reach their full potential because we fail to meet their basic needs. In a decent society, there are certain obligations that are not subject to tradeoffs or negotiations, and health care for our children is one of those obligations.

And banned commercial fishing in 200,000 square miles of the Arctic:

Federal fisheries managers have voted to bar all commercial fishing in U.S. waters from north of the Bering Strait and east to the Canadian border in light of the rapid climate changes that are transforming the Arctic.

In a unanimous vote yesterday, the North Pacific Fishery Management Council ruled that scientists and policymakers need to better assess how global warming is affecting the region before allowing fishing on stocks such as Arctic cod, saffron cod and snow crab.

And nominated a respected marine biologist with an excellent track record to head the NOAA:

[Jane] Lubchenco is a different breed of scientist, one as comfortable testifying to Congress as she is conducting research in the field. For years she's been a clear-voiced advocate for marine protection and for addressing the impact of carbon emissions on ocean ecosystems. She helped found the COMPASS program, an effort to help scientists better communicate their messages to the media, politicians, and the public.

Her leadership, coupled with President Obama's much-heralded "return of science" to the executive branch, could give NOAA a newly prominent role in the work to address climate change.

And filed a lawsuit againt Westar Energy for violating the Clean Air Act:

Asked whether the federal government is revving up its investigations into clean air violations against utilities, Andrew Ames, an EPA spokesman in Washington, declined to comment, saying that an agency news release speaks for itself.

And ordered the DoE to draft new energy-efficiency standards:

President Obama ordered the Energy Department on Thursday to immediately draft long-overdue standards to make a variety of appliances and light bulbs more energy efficient. Over the last three decades, Congress has demanded stricter efficiency standards on 30 categories of products, as varied as residential air-conditioners and industrial boilers. But successive administrations have failed to write regulations to enforce the laws, even when ordered to by the courts.

And rehired a woman whom Monica Goodling fired from the DoJ because of rumors that she was a lesbian:

The Justice Department’s already reforming itself in the post-Bush administration era. In addition to Eric Holder’s confirmation this week, the department rehired Leslie Hagen, a woman who was fired over rumors that she was a lesbian.

In India, meanwhile, undereducated women who excel at the traditional art of henna tattoos are being tutored in computer animation:

"Technology for the People" trains those skilled at drawing Henna tattoos to create designs. It also sends their work to production companies.

Until now, the future for 20-year-old Rubeena consisted only of marriage. Now she wants to prove to everyone she can be an animator.

The project aims to help women earn money and lift them out of poverty using technology - which has enjoyed a boom in and around Hyberabad.

The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Portugal violated the rights of Women on Waves:

The European Court of Human Rights ruled today that article 10, that guarantees the freedom of expression, was violated when the Portuguese government send warships to prevent the Women on Waves ship from entering Portugal in 2004. With a ship, Women on Waves sails to countries where abortion is illegal. After sailing to international waters, early medical abortions can be provided safely and legally. National penal legislation, and thus also abortion laws, extends only to territorial waters; outside that 12-miles radius the law of the country where the ship is registered applies. Women on Waves’ mission is to prevent unsafe abortions and empower women to exercise their human right to physical and mental autonomy.

Seventy-five countries have signed on to a new clean energy agency:

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the first multinational agency focused solely on spreading clean energy across the globe, officially launched this week.

The expectations are that the agency will help governments and private industry to expand renewable energy installments throughout the industrialized world, where investments are already on the rise, while also assist the developing world acquire the expertise to establish its own clean energy industries.

In the United States, wind industry jobs now outnumber coal mining jobs:

According to a report released by the American Wind Energy Association, wind energy jobs increased 70 percent to 85,000 in 2008, 4,000 more workers than are employed in coaling mining (based of Department of Energy figures).

And the coal industry continues to suffer serious setbacks:

Michigan’s Governor Granholm announced sweeping new energy policies that prioritize clean energy before coal....[A]ll new coal plants in the state will have to go back to the drawing board while officials decide if they are the best option for Michigan.

Michigan is not alone; Georgia legislators have proposed a bill that would put a hold on new coal plant construction in the state, preventing the state from being locked into a dirty energy source before fully evaluating the alternatives. The bill also includes a groundbreaking provision that would prevent coal plants in Georgia from burning coal mined using devastating mountaintop removal techniques.

On Monday the electric cooperative behind the Highwood coal-fired power plant in Montana announced that it was giving up on coal and going with a clean mix of wind and natural gas.

That decision comes on the heels of the Air Force’s finding that a new liquid coal plant planned for Malmstrom Air Force Base, also in Montana, was “not viable.’

Gainesville, Florida has approved a feed-in tariff for solar power generated by consumers:

Under the program, electric customers who generate electricity from solar panels sell all of the electricity they generate back into the grid and are paid a fixed, above market-rate price for it. The costs of administering the program, and encouraging greater adoption of solar power are spread across all consumers of electricity.

Inhabitat reports on a cardboard computer tower:

Biasci’s design approaches the problem of e-waste head-on by calling for a computer case made from recycled and easily recyclable materials. The Cardboard Case comes complete with case panels, spots for cable connectors and ports, and interior slots for holding computer components. It is also easily customizable, offering a fun added incentive to consumers.

A new biomass charcoal heater could reduce energy costs in rural Japan and elsewhere:

In the study, Amit Suri, Masayuki Horio and colleagues note that about 67 percent of Japan is covered with forests, with that biomass the nation's most abundant renewable energy source. Wider use of biomass could tap that sustainable source of fuel and by their calculations cut annual carbon dioxide emissions by 4.46 million tons.

Using waste biomass charcoal, their heater recorded a thermal efficiency of 60-81 percent, compared to an efficiency of 46-54 percent of current biomass stoves in Turkey and the U.S.

Also in Japan, a new method of demolition reduces air pollution and makes it easier to recycle building materials:

The support pillars of a building’s lowermost floor are replaced with a series of jacks until the entire weight of the building rests on them. Next, workers come in, smash the interior, remove the walls and cart the rubble away for recycling. Finally, the building is lowered to the ground, one story shorter than before. And then the process is repeated.

Here's a time-lapse video of the process.

In Kansas, a student group is helping bars to recycle their glass:

Saturday morning, Andrew Stanley and fellow students took 145 pounds of glass to be recycled at the 12th and Haskell Bargain Center. All 145 pounds came from Wilde’s Chateau 24, 2412 Iowa, and were the result of one Friday night of business.

“That would all have been thrown away without us,” Stanley said. “And that’s just one night...."

During start-up efforts, Stanley said he estimated group members called 30 bars around Lawrence and asked them if they recycled glass. None of them did.

Ten new species of amphibian have been found in Colombia:

The "new" amphibians included spiky-skinned, orange-legged rain frog, three poison dart frogs and three glass frogs, named for their transparent skin.

Photo by Marco Rada, © Conservation International Colombia
A South American tree produces a mosquito repellent that's allegedly more effective than DEET:

The authors, led by Aijun Zhang of the USDA's Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory, found that isolongifolenone deters the biting of the mosquitoes Aedes aegypti and Anopheles stephensi "more effectively than the widely used synthetic chemical repellent N,N-diethyl-3-methyl benzamide (DEET) in laboratory bioassays" and repels blacklegged ticks and lone star ticks "as effectively as DEET".

It seems that butterflies have tiny solar collectors on their wings:

The discovery that butterfly wings have scales that act as tiny solar collectors has led scientists in China and Japan to design a more efficient solar cell that could be used for powering homes, businesses, and other applications in the future.

Speaking of butterflies, this is pretty amazing:

With cohesive hierarchical societies and a number of communication techniques, ants have been able to conquer a wide variety of ecosystems with great success. However, according to a recent paper in Science ants’ highly structured society comes with a price. A number of insects have evolved means to covertly infiltrate the ants’ society and live off their work and bounty by closely mimicking various ant communication methods. While scientists believe that these parasitical insects largely mimic ant communications like chemical exchange and physical contact—such as touching antennae—the study, however, discovered a butterfly which succeeds in infiltrating the highest echelons of ant society by vocalizing like a queen.

Onwards and upwards! The Museum of Found Photographs (via Plep). The Magnitogorsk Metal Kombinat. The pleasures and pains of Stoopnocracy. And, inevitably, The Book of Eclipses.


The Kinetoscope of Time. A stellar nursery. Worldwide field recordings made with mobile phones; you can listen, or upload your own. Typographical art by Tauba Auerbach. And a small but rewarding gallery of found typography.


Also: You can now go underwater with Google Earth, while listening to the sounds of Slovenian cicadas and glancing from time to time at these beautiful typewriter ribbon tins.


You may as well watch this, while you're at it.



(Photo at top: "With the Clarity of Architects [The American Typologies]" by Pine & Woods, 2006.)

That's Entertainment!

Like gay marriage, Bill Ayers, and the public library system, illegal immigration is a deadly threat to our democratic republic. Not only is it turning the land of Our Forefathers into a cesspool of rape-crazed lepers and bilingual chlorine labels, but there's also a very real chance that Islamofascist terrorists will decide to pay coyotes a few thousand dollars for the privilege of being forced to cross the Sonora Desert on foot, instead of striding confidently through US Customs like Mohammed Atta and his friends.

That was the pressing concern last year, anyway. This year, it's obvious that the declining market for dirt-cheap foreign workers is leading to the total collapse of Mexico itself, since that unhappy country is financed almost entirely by the money that dribbles in from underpaid maids and gardeners and lettuce pickers in the USA. Like every other conceivable development in US/Mexico relations, this means that hordes of bloodthirsty Mexicans will soon be coming to murder us in our beds. Which is why we need a border fence more than ever.

This is no time for penny-pinching, friends. At an average of $3.9 million per mile, the fence is a bargain on a par with Mexican labor. How many workers will it prevent from slashing costs for agribusiness and hotel chains? And how many terrorists will be forced to fly Air Canada, instead of staggering through a desert full of drunken Minutemen, violent gangs, and rattlesnakes?

Plenty. You have my word on that.

Which is why it's so frustrating that residents of the Rio Grande Valley are posing an obstacle to its progress.

Opponents of the fence have petitioned the Obama administration to halt construction. Environmentalists are demanding a top-level review of the route, which they say would block such rare species as the ocelot from critical habitat. Property owners are contesting federal seizure of their land. Engineers are struggling to address flooding concerns.

Well, what would you prefer: A bit of flooding now and then, or some wild-eyed bandito hacking at your throat with a machete, like a Posada woodcut come to life? And what would you rather have: Fewer ocelots, or more meth-addled narcoterrorists?

If you can't answer these simple questions correctly, why should your opinion matter to anyone? Think about it.

Even if you're fool enough to believe that the fence is a bad idea, or an unworkable one, there's the all-important matter of national pride. Right now, as we speak, the evildoers are refusing to take our fence seriously:

The smugglers build ramps to drive over fencing, dig tunnels under it, or use blow torches to slice through. They cut down metal posts used as vehicle barriers and replace them with dummy posts, made from cardboard.

As I've said many times, the solution to this problem is not to embrace La Reconquista, but to protect the fence with another, bigger fence that will be made inaccessible by a fenced-off restricted area patrolled by drones and monitored by the best surveillance gadgetry money can buy. If necessary, we can add a moat filled with Candiru.

And let's not have any talk of reducing our redundant population of border patrol agents.

As part of a new effort to justify its seemingly ubiquitous presence in remote areas like Ft. Hancock, the Border Patrol is increasingly asserting that it is protecting border communities against criminal aliens....And as the number of border crossers drop, the Border Patrol is increasingly patrolling areas far from the border but still within the 100-mile band north and south of the Mexican and Canadian borders.

That involves plenty of driving, of course:

[T]here are currently three vehicles for every two agents, and one vehicle for each supervisor. One of the reasons that the Border Patrol needs so many vehicles, explained Officer Cordero, is that even if agents aren’t driving they have the engines idling while they are on watch, which, he noted, is really hard on the Border Patrol’s vehicle fleet.

It's pretty hard on the atmosphere and the taxpayers, too. But would you rather have fewer idling cars and less harassment of legal residents, or more anti-white bloodbaths like the ones that would almost certainly be occurring weekly if these vehicles weren't idling on some desert byway, day in and day out?

Besides, money shouldn't be an issue when we can put on edifying spectacles like this forced march through Phoenix:

Sheriff Arpaio closed down the city streets so that everyone could witness their public humiliation as they walked in chain gangs from a "hard" jail to the infamous Tent City, where they will be forced to endure unsafe conditions including summer months with temperatures of upwards of 120 degrees.

If advertisers can underwrite the Joe Arpaio show, why shouldn't they chip in for his enforcement efforts, too, from salaries to weapons to detention tents? (Food for prisoners is already covered, I'm happy to say.)

Better yet, why shouldn't we let each network have its own border patrol, and let honest competition for market share keep our borders safer, our detention camps for children slightly less brutal, and our public humiliation of the poor more entertaining?

Hell, we could even teach these predatory foreign monsters to dance.

Some might argue that all this could have a degrading effect on the body politic, but I'm convinced that, to quote Camara Laye, we will "take pleasure in it only to the extent that it satisfies our sense of justice."

(Photo via La Frontera.)

Eppur Si Muove

We all know that Galileo, after being forced by the Inquisition to deny that the earth orbits the sun, is supposed to have said, under his breath, "Nevertheless, it moves.”

The story doesn't make much sense and is undoubtedly false, but it does underscore the point that Galileo remained free to believe whatever he wanted about earth's behavior in the privacy of his own skull. The recantation and imprisonment the Church forced on him did nothing to change his mind, and nothing to reconcile church dogma with astronomy. (You may applaud here, feebly and briefly.)

On the other hand, it did prove, once again, that you can get people to say almost anything if you threaten to kill them.

Now, the Vatican is asking the ex-excommunicated Bishop Richard Williamson to recant his belief that the Holocaust didn't happen. They're not going to kill him if he doesn't; they're going to reward him if he does, by readmitting him fully into the Church. As soon as Williamson says that Hitler did so kill Teh Jews, his public utterances will once again be backed by the full faith and credit of the institution that coaxed this apology from him by dangling the bauble of Worldly Power before his eyes. As for the Holocaust, it will be no more reasonable to deny that than it is to deny the Holy Trinity, or the evils of contraception.

The Pope's stance amounts to nothing more than a flexing of muscle. For some, it'll prove the power of the Church. For others, it'll prove the power of the Jews over the Church. But no one, I hope, actually believes that when Williamson says what he must in order to get what he wants (and what the Pope, significantly, wants to give him), there will be one less Holocaust denier in the world. While I don't doubt that race-obsessed lunatics can change, I'm not convinced you can reliably get them to do so by promising them spiritual authority and a funny hat.

If I had a million dollars to spare, I'm sure I could get almost any white supremacist on earth to publicly recant his or her views. The problem is, what I'd probably end up with, for all my trouble and expense, is a white supremacist with a million dollars in the bank.

Granting that the only real forgiveness is forgiveness of the unforgivable, what we're talking about here seems to be a sort of perpetually dispensed forgiveness that begins to look almost like like collusion...especially when you read the odd phrasing of the Vatican's demands:

"Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the church, will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah...."

So Williamson must distance himself from his position. Or to put it another way, he must distance himself from himself, as certain priests do when they present themselves as the shepherds of the children they're molesting, and certain gays do when they marry people of the opposite sex in order to keep up appearances. Perhaps Williamson can affirm the reality of the Holocaust, while reminding the faithful that God has His reasons.

Ultimately, the Church is in the same position it was vis a vis Galileo, and that position is not made any more tolerable, morally speaking, by the fact that in this case, it's defending the truth against a lie.

(Illustration: Galileo facing the Roman Inquisition by Cristiano Banti, 1857.)

Endearing Innocence

Frank Furedi warns us that "the totalitarian impulse to control people's reproductive lives has received the blessing of sections of the political elite."

It's probably unnecessary to explain that he's not talking about a new mutterkreuz, or some Steynian scheme to outfuck the Islamofascists. Political encouragements to be fruitful and multiply don't represent a "totalitarian impulse," after all; they merely signify that our public servants are humbling themselves before the Natural Order, and asking all goodhearted citizens to follow suit.

Furedi's specific complaint against limiting population growth is fascinating:

Throughout history, different cultures have celebrated birth as a unique moment signifying the joy of life. The reinterpretation of birth as a form of greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour speaks to today's degraded imagination, where carbon-reduction becomes the supreme moral imperative. Once every newborn baby is dehumanised in this way, represented as a professional polluter who is a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions, it becomes increasingly difficult to feel anything other than apprehension about the growth of the human race.

Robbing babies of what we perceive to be their endearing innocence makes it easier to scare people off having them. In recent centuries, babies were described as a blessing; now some argue that not having a baby is a blessing, at least for the environment.

Now, you can't actually rob babies of "endearing innocence"; the people who are being robbed, here, are the ones who have an ideological need for this sentimental myth, which they can use to justify virtually every type of brutality and viciousness on earth.

What interests me about Furedi's argument is that he knows this is a sentimental myth; he says as much. He's not worried about myth per se; he's worried about a degraded myth, and he's worried about it specifically because it's not comforting. "Dehumanizing" babies, to his way of thinking, is a simple matter of humanizing them: It's a simple matter of acknowledging that it costs money to feed and raise them, and that they use up resources and produce waste.

We are not to look at things this way, no matter how useful cost/benefit analysis may be for assessing every other goddamn thing under the sun. As James Pethokoukis argued last week, babies are a blessing, period; fretting over how you'll afford one -- in a society whose best and brightest view child-protective social programs as way-stations en route to the Gulag -- is like complaining about the vintage of the wine into which Jesus just changed your water.

We can be marvelously unsentimental when it comes to explaining away famine and sweatshop labor and slum dwelling and the loss of species and the bombing of foreign capitals, but looking realistically at the "miracle of life" -- with an eye to preventing the very miseries that are routinely shrugged off by our "political elite" -- is the act of soulless bureaucrats and baby-haters, by definition.

Furedi goes on to praise Western society's "unprecedented degree of affirmation for human life," as exemplified by our "phenomenal growth in health expenditure." (I know what you're thinking...but honestly, why else would costs be going up?)

In some cases, Western societies go to extraordinary lengths to keep alive a premature baby or to prolong the life of elderly people or people who are chronically ill.

Hooray for us! Of course, Western societies also demand that we wave the flag over the corpses of pregnant foreigners and the smoldering ruins of hospitals and schools, or that we blame the poor and undernourished for their failure to thrive, and treat every dime that's spent on helping them as a moral scandal. But Furedi's worry, curiously, is that by treating newborn children as real, living, breathing human beings instead of perfect angels, we'll devalue the very same human life that we routinely throw away as casually as old batteries:

[I]t is difficult to celebrate human life if people, or at least the growth of the number of people, are looked upon as the source of the world's problems.

See, that's where we differ. I'd argue that it's "difficult to celebrate human life" when you're starving people, and bombing them, and torturing them, and detaining them indefinitely, and withholding medical treatment from them, and insisting that they bear children against their will, and obliging them to dig through medical waste to earn what passes for their living. (Though to be fair, some of these people aren't innocent babies, so they probably had it coming.)

Next, Furedi makes perhaps the oddest argument for human exceptionalism I've ever seen:

The idea that civilisation is responsible for the perils we face today assigns an undistinguished status to the human species.

On the contrary, it burdens us -- uniquely -- with the very responsibilities and powers that Furedi rejects in favor of waxing maudlin over Western civilization and its adorable little cherubs.

When an opinion columnist starts cooing over a cradle, you can be pretty sure that he intends very shortly to demonize an entire class of people. Sure enough, Furedi frets that the goal of environmentalists is "to make us scared of ourselves" (even though the 20th century should've made it quite clear that our affairs are in good hands). These alien pseudo-people are afflicted with "a loathing for everything human," which is why no degree of opposition to them can really be considered excessive. (Behold the better nature to which the sweetly sleeping infant recalls us!)

Make no mistake, friends: it's us against them:

[M]aybe the solution is the extinction of the human race? The argument for limiting family sizes in Britain is the first [!!!!] hesitant step in that direction.

Actually, I suspect that step was taken long ago, not at all hesitantly, to applause and acclaim from shameless ideological shills like Mr. Furedi.

A Skewed Worldview

It's a new day in America. And not just because we've elected a foreign-born America-hating Islamo-Marxist babykiller with no experience to the highest office in the land.

For proof, I direct you to Phi Beta Cons, where David French and Robert VerBruggen are urging college Republicans to "stop whining" about their persecution at the hands of the Liberal Elite.

Here's French:

If you are afraid professors won't grade you fairly, put them to the test and respond appropriately if their bias manifests itself (you'll be surprised how well you might do). If you don't think people will like you, grow a thicker skin and see what happens. I still have dear lefty friends from my law school days, and I never pulled any punches in my conversations with them (and still don't). But, above all. Stop whining. Please.

And here's VerBruggen:

College cons, if you want to say that professors present a skewed worldview to students—or even that conservative ideas often get mocked — fine, but knock it off with the whole I-can't-even-speak-in-this-police-state persecution complex.

Every word of this is a sermon in itself. Better yet, French and VerBruggen have come tantalizingly close to the realization that even if every single claim these malcontents make about college life were true, they'd still be crazy and stupid and unworthy of reasonable people's respect.

Even if every teacher in academe were trying to tear conservatism from the American soil like so much crabgrass, even if every class required a pledge of allegiance to the Rainbow Flag, even if every paper were graded on the basis of its agreement with the thought of Luce Irigaray, the average College Republican would still be an intellectually flabby, self-pitying whiner who deserved a swift kick in the slats.

In reality, however, an untold number of these pobrecitos are getting hassled by the Gender-Neutral Authority Figure not for lovin' America too much, but for waving a copy of Ken Ham's Dinosaurs in Eden around in biology class, or citing Conservapedia's entry on settled science as a primary source, or insisting that "zOMG u loosers Hilter wuz totly a librul bwahaha!!1"

Recognizing that these students have a persecution complex may not be quite as insightful, by my standards, as recognizing that they're willfully ignorant layabouts who are trying to drag America's schools down to the level of their own cherished inadequacies. And it's definitely not as insightful as recognizing that a certain humility is appropriate among students, no matter how many books by John Stossel they may've read: for instance, they probably shouldn't be encouraged to, in essence, self-grade their own papers and tests, and then attack teachers for failing to validate their unparalleled grasp of African collaboration with the slave trade (or what have you).

Still, this is as much as we can reasonably expect from this quarter at this time, and I welcome it wholeheartedly. I'm not sure when young conservatives decided that having their ill-informed pretensions coddled and nurtured by teachers was an entitlement on a par with voting rights or equal treatment in the workplace, but if French and VerBruggen can do anything to disabuse them of that notion, I'll gladly buy 'em a round of cruelty-free piña coladas at the gay Stalinist vegan fetish club of their choice.

(Illustration at top via The Onion.)

Sunday Music Blogging