Friday Hope Blogging

The House has passed a bill that reaffirms the illegality of waterboarding and other forms of torture.

The measure, approved by a largely party-line vote of 222 to 199, would require U.S. intelligence agencies to follow Army rules adopted last year that explicitly forbid waterboarding. It also would require interrogators to adhere to a strict interpretation of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war. The rules, required by Congress for all Defense Department personnel, also ban sexual humiliation, "mock" executions and the use of attack dogs, and prohibit the withholding of food and medical care.

A federal judge has upheld California's right to impose stricter auto standards:

California's first-in-the-nation effort to limit cars' emissions of gases that contribute to global warming took a big step forward Wednesday when a federal judge upheld the state's right to control air pollution and dismissed a challenge by the auto industry.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Anthony Ishii of Fresno also was a victory for 16 other states whose laws or regulations on tailpipe emissions were modeled after California's 2002 statute. The 17 states represent nearly half the U.S. population, and their laws would effectively require automakers to cut greenhouse gas emissions nationwide, despite President Bush's rejection of mandatory national standards.

California has also strengthened its restrictions on the use of lead ammunition:

The Condor Preservation Act already requires hunters to use non-lead ammunition for hunting all big game (such as deer, elk, pigs, and bighorn sheep) and shooting coyotes within the condor range in central and southern California, beginning July 1, 2008. The Commission’s new regulations also prohibit lead ammunition for hunting non-game mammals and non-game birds in the condor range. They also prohibit the use of lead .22-caliber and smaller-rimfire cartridges for hunting non-game birds and mammals in the condor range, which had not been forbidden under the Condor Preservation Act.

Houston has won - sort of - its long battle to remove billboards from residential areas:

The City of Houston has come to an agreement with Clear Channel Advertising for the company to remove about 800 billboards from the city -- the result of a citywide plan to clean up the city's "visual clutter" that started more than 20 years ago.

A Japanese architect has come up with an interesting idea for suspended gardens:


I don't know how resilient these gardens are, but it's probably just as well that advances are being made in earthquake detection:

A California earthquake early warning system now being tested accurately predicted the ground shaking in San Francisco a few seconds before the city felt the Oct. 30, 2007, magnitude 5.4 quake near San Jose, according to a statewide team of seismologists.

A bamboo bridge in China can support 8-ton vehicles:

Made from pre-fabricated structural elements, the bridge was erected within a week by a team of eight workers without heavy construction equipment.

AIDG Blog has a post on the Majenn air rotor:

Helium sustains MARS and allows it to ascend to a higher altitude than traditional wind turbines. MARS captures the energy available in the 600 to 1000-foot low level and nocturnal jet streams that exist almost everywhere.

I blogged on this turbine almost exactly two years ago; unfortunately, it's hard to tell from the manufacturer's site whether it's any closer to being commercially available.

A new report claims that increasing broadband access could prevent the release of 1 billion tons of greenhouse gases. I'm a bit skeptical, but I reckon it's worth a look. And if all else fails, we still have the super-earths orbiting Gliese 581.

Thirteen cities have agreed to go dark for an hour on March 29. This brings up some scattered thoughts. I was in New York City during its massive blackout a few years back, and while my impressions may've been colored by my efforts to help a couple of bars on Amsterdam Avenue dispose of their dangerously underchilled beer, it all seemed delightful, from stargazing in Central Park to watching neighbors play Monopoly on their steps by candlelight. The city seemed like a completely different place.

This reminds me of Geoff Managh's observation that climate change is attractive to the extent that it promises us a transformed world, and makes me wonder whether scheduled blackouts, and other forms of privation, could become something people would actually look forward to and build new traditions around. (And that, in turn, reminds me of the little card William Hogarth dutifully saved from the Frost Fair of 1739, which was printed so that "Ages yet to come, May see what Things upon the Ice are done.”)

If I were arranging these blackouts, I'd send out roving gangs to organize impromptu astronomy lessons and magic lantern shows and neighborhood history lessons, and fill the financial districts with fireflies. Even if crisis is unavoidable, there's a lot to be said for rehearsing it as a carnival.

("Carnival Evening" by Henri Rousseau, 1886. Via Some Landscapes.)
Speaking of which, Pruned has a post on cemetery-dwelling in Manila. It's more thought-provoking than positive, perhaps, but it's fascinating reading all the same. And there's something cheering about this picture of a karaoke singer among the tombs:


This is one of the most interesting things I've read in a while:

Using an innovative surgical technique, researchers have rerouted major nerves to give amputees greater control of prosthetic arms — and unwittingly restored the sense of touch and temperature in their "phantom" limbs.

The surgery connects residual arm nerves to a nerve below the pectoral muscle in the chest. The new connection allows nerve growth into the skin of the chest. When certain spots on the chest are touched, the amputee "feels" the sensation in their missing hand.

Perhaps deconstruction really is justice:

Every year, cities across the country spend millions of dollars tearing down condemned houses and hauling away tons of debris to landfills. But progressive engineers and community activists have found a way to reverse that wasteful process. A demolition method called "deconstruction" uses human power instead of the wrecking ball to preserve and reuse everything from floor joists to the kitchen sink.

A desperately poor school in Malawi has a remarkable success rate:

There are 1,531 students, six classrooms, no running water and no light bulbs.

Yet Chiseka has the best academic record in its district by far. Last year all 40 students in the eighth grade passed their exams. And 30 did well enough to qualify for secondary school -- a significant achievement in a country where less than 30 percent of students finish primary school.

AIDG Blog reports on a Chinese school that's impressive for different reasons:

Children attend class at the Dongzhong (literally meaning “in cave”) primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China’s Guizhou province, November 14, 2007. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hangar-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts.

I wonder if they take middle-aged exchange students?

An inventor at Cornell has apparently come up with a plastic that uses carbon dioxide as a feedstock:

The Cornell University spinoff’s technology centers on a catalyst that converts carbon dioxide into a polymer that could be used to make everyday items such as packaging, cups, and forks. The plastic, which was originally created by Cornell chemist Geoffrey Coates, is also safe and strong enough to be used in medical implants and devices.

Interesting, if true.

MAKE has compiled a list of books on "lost arts," from chainsaw carving to cabaret mechanics for automata. They also alerted me to this wonderful dual-use dinnerware.


The photo at the top is from a stunning collection of HDR photos by Maciej Duczynski (via Coudal). It's lovely in and of itself, but it also reminds me that tulips shall always grow.

Also via Coudal, Golden and Back by Bryan Schutmaat, which made me feel very nostalgic for the many strange mornings I've spent in cheap Southwestern motels.

The Alaska Highway Archives contain some terrific photos, and they've also come up with an odd in-browser game.

The best graphic I've seen this week comes - not surprisingly - from BibliOdyssey; it's a plate from Chemical Atlas or The Chemistry of Familiar Objects by Edward Livingston Youmans (1855).


You can click through BibliOdyssey to view the entire book.

China on Paper has its moments. As does this site on Thomas Telford, the Colossus of Roads.


Living Color is a nice exhibition of color plate books at the Library Company of Philadelphia. I'm particularly taken with the Mongooz:


Last, "A Colour Box" (1935) by Len Lye. (There's a bit of text to get through at the beginning, but don't let that scare you off.)

Reclaiming Christmas

Well, the War on Christmas has rolled around again, and this time, it’s personal.

Peace on earth? Not ‘til our nation’s enemies are reduced to heaps of glowing ashes. Joy to the world? Only when liberal lunatics like Nancy Pelosi are dragged from the halls of power, pickled in formaldehyde, and put on display in a cautionary freakshow. Goodwill towards men? Not until those Jew bastards get with the program and stop raining on our parade. Hell, it’s only thanks to the USA that those whiners aren’t celebrating Habakkuk - or whatever the damn thing’s called – in a concentration camp.

We’ve outgrown those fairy tales where Christmas makes the miser irresponsible, and turns the stony-hearted industrialist into a socialistic do-gooder. 9/11 changed all that. What’s important at Christmas is the same thing that’s important the rest of the year: Trampling anyone who gets in your way, whether by failing to pledge allegience to the Savior who wisely made us the Kings of the World, or by trying to snatch the last copy of Left Behind: Eternal Forces from the local Wal-Mart.

The real Christmas is about unbending pride, unblushing self-interest, and – above all - settling scores. Sure, Christmas is about being caring and generous...to those who deserve it. But it’s also about finding out who’s "naughty," and putting lumps of coal in their stockings. That could mean a firebomb for the local abortion clinic, or a couple of nukes for downtown Teheran. Either way, the idea is to let the evildoers dip their toes in the lake of fire, and see how they like the temperature. You hear that, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? We’re making a list, and checking it twice!

A big part of reclaiming Christmas is desissifying it. Like everything else in America, it’s been neutered and muzzled by castrating feminists, multiculti America-haters, and their Big Media enablers. The real Christmas is a Doberman with a God-given thirst for heathen blood, but these traitors have changed it into a quivering little lapdog.

Take How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I don’t think I need to tell you that every Who down in Who-ville was a liberal appeaser of the worst sort. But in case you don’t remember, let’s review the facts. Because they’re weak on defense, and have made an idol of "tolerance," all their stuff gets stolen by a Grinch. On their walls, he leaves nothing but hooks and some wire. It’s a day of horror like no other.

So what do they do? Do they form a posse, hunt down the Grinch, and string him up? Do they lob a few thermobaric shells into his cave, and turn him into Roast Beast? Nope. They join hands and they sing. What kind of message does that send? Not just to the Grinch and his sympathizers, but to our children?

You know as well as I do that there are some Grinches over in Iran and Syria who’d like to steal our Christmas this year. And let me tell you, their hearts aren’t going to grow three sizes when they hear us singing “Kumbaya” in the smoking ruins of our cities and towns. On the contrary, they’re going to come in and finish the job. They’re going to give us one chance to renounce Jesus and embrace their mongrel religion. And when we refuse, they’re going to lop our heads off one by one…starting with the Jews who made such a fuss about refusing to acknowledge the Reason for the Season.

That’s what’s at stake at Christmas this year - and every year to come for the foreseeable future - and that’s why the best way you can celebrate it is to be vigilant. Santa Claus isn’t the only one who can climb down chimneys, and brightly colored packages are the perfect disguise for enough high explosives to take out most of your block. The carolers outside your house may be singing about “the little Lord Jesus,” but that doesn’t mean they’re not ready to die for Allah.

Beyond that, you need to draw a line in the sand, and let everyone you meet know that Christmas isn’t about tinsel and toys and everyone living happily every after in some socialist wonderland. No, Christmas is about YOU standing up for YOUR beliefs – or God’s beliefs, more accurately – and telling the pagans, the perverts, the postmodernists, the Jews, the atheists, and the Muslims that in America, Jesus is Lord and all shall bow before him. Period, end of story.

In my opinion, there’s no better way to do this than to pay $14.95 for these politically incorrect magnetic bumperstickers. Buy ‘em for everyone on your list, even the liberals. Because in these dangerous times, it often happens that the most generous gift you can give is a piece of your mind. As Jesus himself said, “I do not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

Merry Christmas!

(This post originally appeared on 12/12/06. I added one new link, so it wouldn't seem quite so outdated.)

Our Impoverished Culture

While trying to follow one of Eschaton's links, I suddenly found myself reading a column by Camille Paglia, in which she weighs in on Mitt Romney and atheism (picture a hummingbird's feather settling onto a truck scale, minus the sense of cosmic drama).

Without getting sidetracked by her miserable prose and appalling personality, it's worth looking at a couple of her assertions in (relative) depth...not because they're hers, but because she's plucked them whole from the thicket of essentially bourgeois received wisdom that she routinely mistakes for her own hard-won insight.

[L]iberals must start acknowledging the impoverished culture that my 1960s generation has left to the young. Atheism alone is a rotting corpse. I substitute art and nature for God -- the grandeur of man and the vast mystery of the universe.

One could argue that replacing religious faith with some vague aesthetic sense of the numinous is a way to enjoy sanctimony without the distractions of commitment and responsibility. One could possibly even argue that this, rather than "atheism alone," is the aspect of our impoverished culture for which Paglia's 1960s generation, with its mix-and-match approach to "hip" (i.e., exotic) religions, might be blamed. (That said, I have to give her some credit: this is the first time I've ever seen it implied that the hippies were insufficiently Spinozan.)

She goes on to say that "without spirituality in some form, people will anesthetize themselves with drink or drugs." Which is a bit like claiming that spirituality, in whatever form, will ultimately lead people to torture or even kill their children. (Hey, it's happened before!)

This perfectly superficial notion of "spirituality" - which bathes everything from (talking about) reading Proust to (talking about) experimenting with the Kama Sutra in the same holy light that Thomas Kinkade manufactures by the metric assload - has nothing to do with ethics, and a great deal to do with competitive consumption and what Adorno called "the jargon of authenticity." As such, it's the opposite of serious philosophy, atheistic or otherwise, which John Caputo eloquently defines as "a work of ceaseless critique of our capacity to deceive ourselves."

Our alleged deafness to the clarion call of "spirituality in some form" is linked, somehow, to the alleged decline of Great Art after (post!) modernism:

Europe, which has settled into a comfortable secularism, is no model for the future. The great era of European achievement in arts and letters seems to be over. There are local luminaries but no towering figures any longer of the stature of James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann or Ingmar Bergman.

The curious process by which a figure manages to "tower" isn't addressed, which is yet another example of Paglia's slavish subjection to received wisdom. Picasso towers because he's great, and he's great because he towers. He innovated, he shocked people, he painted Guernica, he liked to fuck, he paid for meals by doodling on bills. His like will not be here again!

There may've been a few "luminaries" around the European art scene in recent years...W.G. Sebald, perhaps, or Anselm Kiefer or Bela Tarr. But are they equal to towering immortals like Mann, Picasso and Bergman? They're not, because asserting that they are would require a leap of faith - a commitment - much like the one Paglia refuses to make in the spiritual realm (which is pretty sad, given that she'd hoped to replace God with art). It could also require giving up her safe position - safe now, thanks to years of antlike labor by thinkers almost as unimaginative, stolid and resentful as Paglia herself - as the arbiter and defender of "meaningful" (i.e., polemically useful) art and spirituality.

I'm not really a fan of Sinclair Lewis, but I think this quote sums up Paglia's intellectual tradition pretty well:

The men leaned back on their heels, put their hands in their trouser-pockets, and proclaimed their views with the booming profundity of a prosperous male repeating a thoroughly hackneyed statement about a matter of which he knows nothing whatever.

(Illustration: "Nigredo" by Anselm Kiefer, 1984.)

A Dangerous Precedent

Punishing Christie Todd Whitman for her misleading statements about air quality after the collapse of the WTC could make other functionaries think twice before misleading the public.

You may be thinking that this would be an excellent reason to throw the book at her, even if her lies hadn't blighted so many people's lives.

If so, you fail to understand the intricacies of statecraft:

Holding Christine Todd Whitman liable will set a dangerous precedent, leaving public officials to worry that their words to reassure the public after disasters will open them up to personal liability, Justice Department attorney Alisa Klein told the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

There's enough material here for a dozen posts, but I'll restrict myself to a couple of points. First, I'm not likely to be reassured by people I don't trust. But if I were, it'd probably be because I felt that there was some chance, however small, that they'd be held accountable if they lied to me. That was a rather forlorn hope even before 2000, God knows, but the solution is surely not to treat the anodyne gibberish of party hacks as a balm for which we should be grateful.

Second, if I'd lived in lower Manhattan on 9/11 (instead of the Bronx), I would've found it much more reassuring if Whitman had said, "It's not safe for you to go home." It would've agreed with the evidence directly before my eyes, for one thing, and it also would've given me the feeling that marginally competent people were in charge.

Last, I've never seen much evidence that this government worries at all about frightening people. They've tried to frighten us with anthrax-laden balsa-wood drones drifting across the Atlantic, and a radical homosexual attack on traditional marriage, and ticking time-bombs from which only torture can save us. Worse, they expect us to be more frightened of these threats than the horrific behavior they were invented to justify (e.g., pre-emptive war, institutionalized bigotry, and outright barbarism).

And of course, they've consistently tried to frighten us with the consequences of holding them responsible for their own actions:

"If you speak, you will be potentially held liable," [Klein] said. "Then the clear message for government officials is to say nothing."

I didn't think that any false dichotomy could be venal or insane enough to shock me at this point, but this one does the trick: Officials must be able to say whatever they think will "help" during a national disaster, without any fear of being held responsible, or they'll be forced to preside mutely over the carnage like a funerary statue.

All things considered, I think I'm willing to take the risk.

(Photo: Ruins of Dresden, 1945.)

The Decline of the West

George Leef explains that academics are expected to publish stuff about things:

Professors at most colleges and universities these days have to publish their research in order to win tenure and impress fellow academics who might some day offer them a better job. Often that research is of extremely dubious value and only gets published by university presses.

That's what happens "these days," mind you. Furthermore, academic titles tend to suck because they're usually published by university presses (instead of, say, Regnery).

To be fair, there's a bit more madness to Leef's method than this. We can also recognize substandard research by looking at a book's title and subject matter. In this instance, Mal Kline - whose intellectual independence is signaled by the fact that he sports a cigar and a bow tie - has done the heavy lifting for us:

Our academic elites love to point out to the rest of us how unenlightened we are. Perhaps they can explain the scholarly value of some of the books rolling off of their own university presses....

Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning, by Murat Aydemir (University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

Impotence: A Cultural History, by Angus McLaren (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man's Most Precious Fluid, by Lisa Jean Moore (New York University Press, 2007).

These, you'll note, are books about penises. Why would anyone write about this unedifying topic, when important facts in the case of Alger Hiss often go unreiterated for days at a time?

By way of an answer, Kline trots out the cock-addled frauds who cobbled together this frenchified whacking material. Ms. Moore comes in for particular scrutiny, being as she's "a professor of women’s studies and coordinator of Gender Studies at the college." (How much could she know about sperm, given that she's obviously a dyke?)

Kidding aside, there are two arguments to be made against these books by someone who has no intention of reading them. The first is that it's not possible to write a worthwhile scholarly book about ejaculation or impotence or sperm. The second is that it'd be wrong even if you managed it. There's not much you can say about either stance, except that they go nicely with cigars and bow ties.

Anyway, despite Leef's impotent ejaculations, I remain unconvinced that American academic research standards have declined all that much since the heyday of Lothrop Stoddard and Joseph Pomeroy Widney.

Too Much Reality

NBC, the public-relations arm of General Electric and Vivendi, is refunding money to advertisers because its programs have failed to generate the necessary ratings.

Part of the problem seems to be that NBC is scheduling too many reality shows, like "American Gladiators" (which, as you probably already know, is a pitiless Adornian analysis of the pseudo-aleatory reproduction of the modalities of repressive state apparati among America's gladitorial leisure class).

In criticizing the network's decision, Starcom Entertainment's Laura Caraccioli-Davis carves this pleasingly economical epitaph on our tombstone:

[T]oo much reality just doesn't play well with advertisers.

A Theory in Crisis

Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute is trying to frighten the public by passing off the opinions of a small group of politically connected zealots as the consensus view of all economists:

Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute said "scientists are in no position to intelligently guide public policy on climate change." Scientists can lay out scenarios, but it is up to economists to weigh the costs and benefits and many of them say the costs of cutting emissions are higher than the benefits, he said.

In effect, these extremists have created a new Inquisition; any economist who dares to question the official dogma on the cost and appropriate methods of addressing climate change is promptly labeled a heretic (i.e., a "socialist"), and cast into the outer darkness. The message is clear: conform to the reigning economic ideology, or suffer the personal and financial consequences.

Thanks to the wide dissemination of this carefully constructed Consensus Myth, many Americans now confuse fashionable opinion with scientific fact, and accordingly accept the far-fetched claim that climate change mitigation efforts will somehow "destroy civilization."

This is no accident, I assure you. The goal of these economic alarmists - many of whom have the full attention of our most powerful politicians and business leaders, thanks to their fellow membership in the Global Elite - is to advance their longstanding "one-world" agenda of crippling representative government, eroding national sovereignty, and undermining democracy by demanding our submission to the "superior morality" of the market.

Since healthy debate over the "wisdom" of market forces, or the damaging effects of externalities and opportunity costs, could interfere with these plans, it must be discouraged at all costs. Thus, apostles like Taylor are careful to portray economics as a monolithic discipline within which there's no meaningful dissent, and about whose accuracy there can be no reasonable doubt. They simply can't afford to let the public know that theirs is a theory in crisis.

This is why it's so vitally important that we continue to demand debate and teach the controversy.

(Illustration from Puck, 56:1436, 1904.)

Sunday Music Blogging

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

How shall I dote on Dendrodoris denisoni with more advice
That thus without advice begin to love her!
'Tis but her picture I have yet beheld,
And that hath dazzled my reason's light;
But when I look on her perfections,
There is no reason but I shall be blind.

(Photo by Ian Skipworth.)

Friday Hope Blogging

I'm getting a late start because I didn't have DSL for most of the morning, which means that this edition will probably be a bit shorter than usual.

Treehugger describes the drought-resistant water system in Clayton County, Georgia:

Clayton County wastewater and storm water runoff are diverted to a series of man-made, wetland ponds and channels that eventually feed two small reservoirs. Afterward, naturally polished wastewater can be withdrawn for human consumption via the existing potable water treatment and distribution system.

Way better than desalination or pipes from the Great Lakes or the other pointless punditry and prayer sessions: it works; and is apparently quite cost effective. Other drought-impacted municipalities from around the world are modeling their systems after the one in Clayton County Georgia. At last: design emerges as a preeminent force in drought adaptation. Why did it take so long for a positive local example to surface?

Food banks in Ontario are distributing energy efficiency kits to poor families in the region:

Friends of the Earth and Enbridge, the gas distributor, have put together 25,000 Greeboxes to be given out at food banks. "We wanted to do something with a population of people in Ontario who have an interest in climate change but might not have access." said Beatrice Olivastri, CEO of Friends of the Earth.

Sydney, Australia is talking about greening all its roofs:

If Sydney-based architect Tone Wheeler gets his way, the Australian metropolis will soon be sporting brand-new rooftop playgrounds and open space areas as a means to green the city. How? By greening every single roof in Sydney!

A federal appeals court has partly overturned BushCo's "Healthy Forests Act":

A federal appeals court on Wednesday blocked a Bush administration rule that allowed logging and burning projects in national forests without first analyzing their effects on the environment.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. Forest Service violated the National Environmental Policy Act when it issued the 2003 rule, which was billed as a way to reduce wildfires.

PacifiCorp seems to be abandoning its plans to build new coal power plants:

PacifiCorp has backed away from plans to build any new coal plants within the next 10 years, conceding that coal no longer can overcome tightening regulations and environmental opposition.

Manatees will stay on the Endangered Species List, for now:

Manatee advocates said they would have preferred the commission vote definitively not to move the manatee off the endangered list, but said they were happy with Wednesday's outcome.

"This is probably the best outcome we could have had," said Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club.

Four Legs Good responded to my FHB-related whining on Eschaton by alerting me to the downfall of a tiger-poaching ring:

In a rare success for India's embattled conservationists, police in the city of Allahabad raided a meeting Tuesday of suspected poachers, traders, and couriers who were negotiating over three tiger pelts and skeletons, senior police official Arvind Chaturvedi said.

Also via 4LG, girls won the top prizes in an important high-school science competition:

Girls swept a prestigious high school science competition for the first time Monday, winning top prizes of $100,000 scholarships for their work on potential tuberculosis cures and bone growth in zebrafish.

Many rare, endangered, and previously unknown species have been discovered in Ghana:

The RAP discoveries include a Critically Endangered frog species (Conraua derooi) whose presence in Atewa may represent the last viable population in the world; an unusually high 22 species of large mammals and six species of primates including two species of global conservation concern: Geoffroy’s pied colobus (Colobus vellerosus) and the olive colobus (Procolobus verus); 17 rare butterfly species; six bird species of global conservation concern including the brown-cheeked hornbill (Bycanistes cylindricus) and the Nimba flycatcher (Melaenornis annamarulae)(first time recorded in Ghana); and nine species new to science: a spider tick whose lineage is as old as the dinosaurs and eight species of katydids.

China is heavily taxing non-agricultural use of farm land in an attempt to slow development:

"China is set to quintuple tax on the use of arable land for non-farming purposes and charge foreign invested companies as much as their domestic peers in a bid to protect farm land and better control land supply, according to an ordinance released by the State Council on Thursday.

Signed by Premier Wen Jiabao, the instrument took effect as of December 1 and replaced the 1987 edition which had allowed foreign-invested companies to be exempt from the land use tax.

Subtopia reports on a small California town's effort to block a new Blackwater training facility:

Andy Trimlett of Alternate Focus tells me "there is a recall election taking place right now in Potrero to recall all of the pro-Blackwater people from the Potrero Planning Board," which sounds like a major move to not only force Blackwater to go through a proper and unbiased legal process with the project (which would reek considerable havoc on the small community) but also to wring out the bureaucratic corruption that has been trying to approve this despite public protest.

Bruce Schneier has a helpful post on computer security:

Do you really need 10 years of old e-mails? Does everyone in the company really need to carry around the entire customer database? One of the most incredible things about the Revenue & Customs story is that a low-level government employee mailed a copy of the entire national child database to the National Audit Office in London. Did he have to? Doubtful. The best defense against data loss is to not have the data in the first place.

Lots of nice stuff to look at this week. First off, From Water Lillies to Comb Jellies is an almost pornographically exciting collection of biological wall charts.


I'm also breathing heavily over the British's Library's Database of Bookbindings.

Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae is a beautifully designed site that offers "virtual itineraries" through Renaissance Rome, among other things.

From there, you can proceed to The Afterlife of Alice and Her Adventures in Wonderland. And The Nancy Gast Riss '77 Carleton Cabinet of Wonders, which "explores the liberal arts through natural history specimens, miniature images and documents, and unique artists' books. Jody Williams '78, book artist and printmaker based in Minneapolis, created the cabinet as a memorial to Nancy Gast Riss '77."

We Are Amused is a collection of essays and images relating to Victorian entertainments. It includes this rather eerie drawing of a toboggan ride (note the figures in the background).


Fifty Years of Dining on the Las Vegas Strip is worth visiting for its vintage menus and promotional photos. Here's my favorite:


As long as you're in the neighborhood, you may as well look at Neon Nights, too.


Barren Regions: Early Dutch Books on the Exploration of Australia has a rather confusing interface, but how can I pass it by? You'll probably have better luck with the photographs of Marion Butts, though.

Last, Summer Milky Way From Pointe de Trévignon, France, some incredible HDR photos by A guy with A camera, and (via Dark Roasted Blend), a collection of orreries, planetaria and tellurions.

(Photo at top: "Civilization" by Mitch Dobrowner.)

Ever-Present Necessity

CKR makes some speculative connections between a book of stories about Estonian serfdom, and the persistence of ancient viruses in human DNA, and the exigencies of our "post-9/11 world":

People balance their spirit, their will, against the ever-present necessity imposed on them. We can feel a bit of this in apprehension as we approach the airport’s TSA checkpoint; the care we must take in behavior, speech, even thought as the monitor waves us through; the humiliation of stuff we must quickly gather up as the bins emerge from the x-ray machine. But then it is over. Just a few minutes of that world that Kallas’s characters lived in.

I'd barely had time to think about that, when I read this:

The CIA videotaped its interrogations of two top terror suspects in 2002 and destroyed the tapes three years later out of fear they would leak to the public and compromise the identities of U.S. questioners, the director of the agency told employees Thursday....

"The tapes posed a serious security risk," Hayden wrote. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaida and its sympathizers."

This claim recalls the Pentagon's earlier argument for suppressing evidence of prisoner abuse.

It is "probable that al-Qaeda and other groups will seize upon these images and videos as grist for their propaganda mill...."

In other words, they'll point to our use of torture as evidence that we're torturers, instead of placing these acts in the context of necessity, or divine right, or manifest destiny, or whatever it is that supposedly makes our stolid bureaucratic cruelty so wise and wonderful. The funny thing is, this argument concedes that torturing people makes us less safe. Which is what the rest of us have been saying all along.

CKR makes an important connection between the apprehension many of us feel as we approach TSA checkpoints, and an earlier world - or a parallel world, or even a "real" world - of force that, in Simone Weil's words, "turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing." At these times we feel how precarious our status is in regards to the law, since it has the power to create guilt as well as punish it. That'd be one effect of what Foucault called the inspecting gaze.

Overall, CKR's vision of a behavioral virus strikes me as Deleuzian, which is to say that it combines a handy biological metaphor with genealogy a la Foucault (cf. Discipline and Punish) and, ultimately, Nietzsche (cf. On the Genealogy of Morals).

Which I find interesting, to say the least. Whether CKR will be pleased with the comparison is another matter entirely....

(Illustration from De Naturae Simia by Robert Fludd, 1626. Via BibliOdyssey.)

The Common Cause

Thanks to the doomed candidacy of Mitt Romney, we're learning some interesting things about faith in these United States. It turns out that the founders' insistence on the separation of church and state was "profound," for one thing, which'll come as an unpleasant surprise to many of Romney's prospective voters.

Romney also claims to share "moral convictions" with Americans of all faiths. Although my moral convictions are at least as otherworldly as the next person's, I've seen no sign that Romney understands them, let alone shares them. Still, I suppose that when it comes to things that really matter - like killing Iraqis, or punishing the poor for their failure to thrive - the political differences between the hellbound fanatic Romney and his God-fearing rivals are indeed vanishingly small.

But then, that's Romney's whole problem. "I do not define my candidacy by my religion," he says. Unfortunately, many of the voters who were put on this good earth to appoint our nation's pietistic autocrats feel differently:

Fifty-six percent of white evangelical Christians — a major portion of likely participants in the early GOP presidential contests in Iowa and South Carolina — expressed reservations about a Mormon candidate. Among non-evangelicals, 48 percent said it troubled them. Almost a quarter — 23 percent — of evangelicals said they were very uncomfortable with the idea.

Well, why shouldn't they be? Why on earth should they choose an unregenerate infidel like Romney over a Godstruck golden boy like Mike Huckabee? What's in it for them?

Nothing, that's what. And yet, Romney adds insult to injury by insisting that every faith - except for "the religion of secularism," natch - is basically equivalent, even though the rest of us know that "the gate is small, and the way is narrow that leads to life, and few are those that find it":

"If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause and no one interest. A president must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States."

Romney's crazy if he thinks this is the way to win over suspicious values voters; America's cause is God's cause, and Mormonism's role in these final days is to lure otherwise viable souls to Hell. My problem with Romney's ecumenical platitudes is that I don't think he believes them; the evangelicals' fear is more likely to be that he does.

You don't have to be Karl Rove to see the solution: Conversion, in as media-friendly a form as possible. The prophetic dream (crescent moons rise to form a swastika in the sky over Jerusalem). The dark night of the soul (staying up late reading Left Behind). Long twilight walks on the beach with Michael D. Evans (honeyed light pours through a sudden break in the roiling clouds). Mormonism his path, not his destination (he has been humbled!). A manly tear before the baptismal font, while Mrs. R undergoes a tasteful but compelling attack of glossolalia. The zeal of the newly converted (girls gone wild? Not on Mitt Romney's beat!).

I reckon that if Romney took this approach, and spent a few million dollars more on his campaign, he could easily cut his unfavorable rating among white evangelicals to 16 percent or so.

Arid Wastelands

A long article in the New York Times discusses Nevada’s practice of selling federal land to subsidize local development:

More than $1 billion in proceeds from the federal land sales have been allocated for parks, trails and nature areas that often amount to public amenities — many of which elected officials say they would not have been able to pay for otherwise.

To be precise, they couldn't pay for them without raising taxes, which'd be tantamount to telling Nevadans that you can't get something for nothing. Better by far to turn public land over to private corporations, and let market forces work their world-healing magic:

The projects have enhanced property values, and benefited big-name developers, including Focus Property Group, the American Nevada Company, the Del Webb Corporation and the Olympia Development Group, all of which have bought large parcels of arid public lands and turned them into elaborate housing tracts.

And why not? Unused land just takes up space. But land with elaborate housing tracts on it will inevitably generate wealth, as long as there’s enough water to support the population.

Which there will be, because there must be:

The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the agency that has long provided cheap [!] water to the valley’s two million residents, has received $285 million from the federal land sales, which it has used on a variety of water treatment, testing and transport projects, including facilities at drought-plagued Lake Mead. Plans for revenue from future land sales, water officials say, could include work on a pipeline to import water from 250 miles away.

In other words, they’re selling land that belongs to all Americans in order to support unwise local development, the primary effect of which will be to increase Las Vegas’s already staggering demand for “cheap” regional water. To suggest that they have no right to do this is to reveal yourself as a collectivist of the worst sort…the type of person, in other words, who doesn’t understand the dignity and sense of self-worth that come with being self-reliant.

In an earlier post, I quoted SNWA general manager Pat Mulroy on the “impossibility” of changing water consumption patterns in Las Vegas:

Mulroy says raising water rates and pushing aggressive conservation is politically impossible in Vegas, partly due to the ingrained culture of waste. “We’ve had the luxury to let water run down the streets, and quite frankly, it’s created a mindset that it’s something you take for granted,” she says.

The NYT article goes into a lot more detail on how this “luxury” is maintained and justified. Even so, there are several points at which it basically accepts the same disordered thinking that naturalizes and glorifies this behavior:

[W]hat exactly do America’s national lands represent: Are they expendable, tradeable, and now, salable resources meant to be made private for the sake of progress and individual gain? Or are they public treasures to be protected at all costs, even when they are essentially arid wastelands?

You can’t have it both ways. If the lands in question are “essentially arid wastelands,” then covering them with housing tracts and casinos, on the assumption that demand and carrying capacity are limitless, is a terrible idea; the "cost" of protecting them is bound to be less than the cost of developing them.

Unless we can do it “sustainably,” that is. Triple Pundit discusses a recent paper on the “efficiency paradox,” which explains how gains in efficiency actually increase resource consumption:

It’s a bit like the dieter who buys a box of low-fat cookies and ends up eating the entire box in one sitting. So much for the diet.

Little wonder, then, that Pat Mulroy has suddenly started prattling about how “adaptable” Las Vegans are when it comes to environmental issues:

"If you go to this community and you tell them there is a need for something," she says, "they step up to the plate. They are very agile and very willing to make those changes."

Given the city’s burgeoning commitment to green building, how could anyone begrudge them the trickle of water they need to fuel their “sustainable” growth, or the paltry acreage of public land they need to sell off in order to maintain their reputation as a refuge from the Taxation Holocaust?

It'd be like saying they don't deserve it.

(Photo: Golf course in Las Vegas Valley, by Marli Miller, whose other photos are well worth a look.)

Let's Roll!

Apparently, short-fused sourpusses like yours truly are increasingly using jammers to block other people's cell phone calls:

One afternoon in early September, an architect boarded his commuter train and became a cellphone vigilante. He sat down next to a 20-something woman who he said was “blabbing away” into her phone.

“She was using the word ‘like’ all the time. She sounded like a Valley Girl,” said the architect, Andrew, who declined to give his last name because what he did next was illegal.

Andrew reached into his shirt pocket and pushed a button on a black device the size of a cigarette pack. It sent out a powerful radio signal that cut off the chatterer’s cellphone transmission — and any others in a 30-foot radius.

It's funny until someone gets hurt. Given the role passenger cell phones played in the downing of United Flight 93, I'd say that people who try to carry jammers onto an airplane should be viewed with at least as much suspicion as blind Calypsonians and phylactery-wielding Jews. Especially when they've got these potentially deadly weapons disguised as cigarette packs. Or worse, cell phones.

If we're really serious about fighting terrorism, people who buy jammers (or the components required to make them) should be monitored much as we monitor people who buy Sudafed; if their surnames or political enthusiasms seem to warrant it, we should add them to the No-Fly List.

These days, you can't be too careful.

Almost 100 Percent

Candace de Russy alerts me to some shocking new statistics:

Even though almost 100% of the violence in the world today is perpetuated by followers of the Islamic faith, and roughly 0% is initiated by followers of any other, the media continuously chooses to lead us to believe that it is almost normal for "youths" of "undefined affiliation" to spontaneously react to an accident with violence and mayhem.

Almost 100 percent, mind you. It's this sort of conscientious attention to detail that distinguishes dispassionate scientific inquiry from the ravings of bigots and ideologues.

This statement is interesting because although the author otherwise shows few symptoms of being a competent writer or thinker, he or she is very careful to use words like "perpetuated" and "initiated," in order to put violence committed against Muslims under the heading of violence caused by Muslims. In short, the Islamofascists are hateful not just for what they do to us, but also for what they make us do to them.

It's a good effort, but I don't know how many members of PBC's target audience it'll convince. What about the Abortion Holocaust, which kills many more people each year than Osama manages even in his wettest dreams? Or teh Mexicans, who are killing 12 Americans per day (not counting the ones they're infecting with leprosy)? And what about secular humanism, which — as the Pope himself reminds us — is the bloodiest religion of all?

If only there were some sort of Grand Unification Theory that could provide a single explanation for these seemingly unrelated phenomena....

(Illustration via Cubic Awareness Online.)

Sunday Music Blogging

Whitey on the Moon

John Derbyshire gathers rosebuds while he may:

Political Correctness came too late for the naming of lunar features, though no doubt there is a campaign about this operating somewhere. (I mean, we could always re-name them.) Most craters are named after DWMs. There's a scattering of Arabs and Chinese, but very few Hispanics — no Garcia, no Rodriguez. Someone alert La Raza.

Or as Gil Scott-Heron put it:

A rat done bit my sister Nell with Whitey on the moon.
Her face and arms began to swell but Whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made last year for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain't no money here? Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.

In an essay entitled "Outer Space and Inner Cities," Lynn Spiegel presents the American space program as an extension of segregationist practices on earth to "the imaginary geography of the universe at large." In making her case, she mentions the 1896 minstrel song "I Got a Message From Mars," in which a black congregation emigrates to the moon after being promised a better life, only to find that it's essentially a slave plantation.

Spiegel misunderstands this song (which she says is symptomatic of "a degraded popular culture"), possibly because she doesn't realize that its author, Gussie Davis, was a black man who was forced to become a janitor after being barred from entering college. To me, the song's at least as pointed as Scott-Heron's.

But on the whole, her research into the ambivalent response of African Americans to the US space program - the heyday of which was more or less contemporaneous with that of the civil rights movement - is invaluable, as is her point that travel per se had very different cultural connotations, and likely outcomes, for whites than for minorities.

More to the point, her claim that "in order to maintain and reproduce its power, a group must...occupy imaginary space" is borne out nicely by the manifest pleasure Derbyshire takes in pointing out that the lunar landscape bears the names of "DWMs" almost exclusively, and by his anxiety that we might someday change this in the name of "political correctness," leaving him to mourn over the fallen white stronghold of the moon as mawkishly he now does over the vanished splendor of the Raj.

(Illustration: Sheet music for "If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon," circa 1905.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

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

(Photo by Dr. Peter Wirtz.)

Friday Hope Blogging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inhabitat reports on the MagLev wind turbine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mexico is vowing to protect Monarch butterflies:

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

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

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

More photos here.

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

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

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

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

In Africa, deaths from measles are down 91 percent.

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

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

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

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

Anne Matthews argues for the preservation of soundscapes:

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

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

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

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

The Tabula Peutingeriana, an ancient Roman road map.


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


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