Goddamn Lying Bastards: A Critical Reappraisal

Yesterday, I discussed an apocryphal Iranian magazine article called "Electronics to Determine Fate of Future Wars," which supposedly threatened the United States with an electromagnetic pulse attack, via aerial detonation of a nuclear weapon. I wasn't able to find the article online, and wondered whether it actually existed.

Well, it does. And thanks to the awe-inspiring munificence and sagacity of Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, I now have a copy of it.

There are a couple of interesting things about it. First and foremost, it contains no discussion of an EMP attack against the United States.

For that matter, it contains no discussion of an EMP attack against anyone.

In fact, it contains no mention of nuclear weapons whatsoever.

Yes, friends, you heard me correctly. This eight-year-old article, which a gaggle of "defense experts" is currently presenting as evidence for Iran's intention to launch an EMP attack using nuclear weapons, does not discuss the use of nuclear weapons, and does not discuss EMP attacks. Not once.

What it does talk about - in general terms fairly similar to those of Western articles on the subject - is cyberterrorism. Personally, I'd be hard pressed to see its discussion of that issue as a veiled threat, let alone an explicit one. But even if I did see it that way, it'd do little more than remind me that three of BushCo's top cybersecurity experts have resigned in two years, complaining that they had virtually no official support for their work.

In his piece on the Iranian article, Joseph Farah lifted this quote:

Even worse today when you disable a country's military high command through disruption of communications, you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country. If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults then they will disintegrate within a few years. American soldiers would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot.

Oops...did I say "Farah lifted this quote"? I'm sorry. I meant to say "Farah stitched this quote together dishonestly, with malice aforethought, like the shameless jackal he is."

In the original article, these three sentences have little or nothing to do with one another. Worse still, the final sentence is missing eight of its original words, and is completely out of context. Have a look at these sentences in their original context:

Once you confuse the enemy communication network you can also disrupt the work of the enemy command and decisionmaking center. Even worse, today when you disable a country's military high command through disruption of communications you will, in effect, disrupt all the affairs of that country.

[snip - one paragraph missing]

If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronics assaults, then they will disintegrate within a few years. What is worse, in the information technology warfare there is no longer any distinction between civilians and combatants.

[snip - three paragraphs missing]

In an analysis of the current electronics warfare situation, the American daily, The Washington Post recently wrote that if the enemy forces succeeded in infiltrating the information network of the US Army, then the whole organization would collapse. It said in such a case that the American soldiers could not find food to eat nor could they be able to fire a single shot.

Isn't it droll that the ominous quote about American soldiers turns out to have been paraphrased from an article in the WaPo? I wonder why Farah left that bit out. After all, it proves that the WaPo - like most liberal papers - takes its marching orders from Islamofascist mullahs.

Oh, and for the benefit of the good folks at Rapture Ready, the standard Christian theological term for lying is "bearing false witness." You're not supposed to do it, last time I checked.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Last week, I promised Hedwig that I'd start posting the scientific names of these Monsters of the Deep.

This one is supposedly called Cadlinella ornatissima, but I suspect that it's really just a toy that some Japanese youngster accidentally dropped in the water.

Friday Hope Blogging

A couple of months ago, I discussed a hybridized high-yield West African rice called NERICA, which is admirably resistant to pests.

Now, Australian researchers have used selective breeding to create a variety of food crops with extra-high levels of nutrients. The motivation, as you might imagine, is to reduce worldwide deaths from malnutrition. Professor Ross Welch explains:

If you look at the number of deaths per year from diet-related disease it's approaching 24 million a year that lose their lives due to malnutrition, primarily from micronutrient malnutrition. And in the scheme of things that's much, much more than you can attribute to any other type of death, be it the occupational health and safety, AIDS, smoking, you name it. It doesn't even come close to those numbers.

So this is a massive problem globally and it comes from the fact that agriculture sees itself in production, in farming, in Ag industry and not part of nutrition.

Amen to that. The beauty of the Australian research is that it involves no bioengineering whatsoever, and yet it offers the nutritional gains that biotech bullies like Monsanto promised but failed miserably to deliver. This poses some serious problems for Monsanto's PR campaign, to say the least. And since the Australian crops are the work of compassionate and intelligent people, instead of fiends in human form, there are no restrictions on seed use; poor farmers can save and share them.

I was also pleased to read (courtesy of Triple Pundit) about some positive trends in land remediation. For one thing, it seems that the former "death strip" that marked the path of the Iron Curtain is being turned into a massive greenbelt:

For the past two years, a coalition of environmental and community development groups has pushed to turn the Iron Curtain zone into a mosaic of parks, nature preserves, and organic farms stretching from the Arctic shores of Finland and Russia to the arid frontier between Bulgaria and Greece.

There's also an interesting article about Britain's ambitious Changing Places program:

Britain's urban wastelands have been transformed into parks and wildlife reserves with the help of 500,000 volunteer workers.

In less than a decade, some of Britain's worst wastelands, derelict collieries, former chemical dumps, old quarries and industrial areas have been transformed into parks, wildlife areas, gardens and sports facilities.

In a very different frame of mind than I inhabit today, I once argued that President Kerry (remember him?) should bring back the Civilian Conservation Corps:

The Civilian Conservation Corps, which operated from 1934 to 1937, was an environmental remediation program that put millions of people to work maintaining and restoring America's wetlands, forests, beaches, and parks. Because these projects can take time, the program provided free lodging for workers, allowing the government to keep costs down while still providing workers with a living wage.

It sounds like the EU is moving in a somewhat similar direction, which'll give me the sort of vicarious thrill that normal people get from pornography. These perfidious non-Americans are also exploring radical concepts like collecting rainwater, which is as despicable an example of postmodern Marxist-Leninist do-gooder authoritarianism as I've ever seen. If God had meant us to collect rainwater, He would've given us giant saucer-shaped heads.

And last, on a more personal note, I'm thrilled beyond words to learn about the arrival of biodegradable packing tape. Speaking as a longtime eBay seller, this is pretty much a dream come true!

Darn Good Intelligence

The hypercredulous ninnies over at Rapture Ready have been reading Joseph Farah again, and thus they're in a tizzy over the possibility that Iran will detonate a nuclear weapon over American skies, knocking out our power and communications and bringing this once-proud nation to its knees.

Farah has been consorting with a man named Peter Pry, who is involved with a weird group called the "Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack." Pry says that an EMP attack is a grave and gathering threat, because

[A]n Iranian military journal has publicly considered the idea of launching an electromagnetic pulse attack as the key to defeating the world's lone superpower.

That the name of this journal doesn't appear in the article is probably a mere oversight. And when you're talking about something as upsetting as America's defeat at the hands of bloodthirsty Islamists, you can be forgiven for ignoring little details like the author's name, or the date of publication. Farah did manage to include the article's title, though: "Electronics to Determine Fate of Future Wars." And I, for one, am glad he did.

I found only one other reference on the Internets to an article with that title. It claims to be from something called "Iranian Journal," and it was published all the way back in 1998. The citation appears on a rather deranged-looking Powerpoint presentation by Dr. William Graham, a former "scientific advisor" to Ronald Reagan. Oddly enough, Dr. Graham also turns out to be the former chairman of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack.

A Google search for "Iranian Journal" and "EMP" brings up very few pertinent results, and all of them lead to Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, an ultra-right thinktank funded by Scaife and defense contractors. The redoubtable Frank Carlucci sits on the IFPA's board of directors.

The IFPA's reference is to an article called "Iranian Journal Examines Electronic Warfare." Searching the citation for this article leads you right back to the IFPA. To the very same page, in fact. One gets the feeling that "Iranian Journal" is published by the same folks who brought you Paris Business Review.

At this point, I think we've ascertained that the Iranian article is apocryphal at best. But maybe it does exist, somewhere. A more serious problem is that fact that the scenario it allegedly described - eight years ago - is really, really stupid. Take a gander at this quote:

If the world's industrial countries fail to devise effective ways to defend themselves against dangerous electronic assaults then they will disintegrate within a few years. American soldiers would not be able to find food to eat nor would they be able to fire a single shot.

Does that makes sense to anyone?

Well, yes. It makes sense to the batshit-crazy con artist Jerome Corsi, who claims that this hallucinatory gibberish proves

...just how devious the fanatical mullahs in Tehran are. We are facing a clever and unscrupulous adversary in Iran that could bring America to its knees.

That sort of talk is neither hysterical nor simpleminded enough for current CATUSEPA chairman Lowell Wood, who claims that an Iranian EMP attack could "literally destroy the American nation and might cause the deaths of 90 percent of its people and set us back a century or more in time as far as our ability to function as a society."

Farah goes on to report that these EMP paranoiacs are being sneered at by the Department of Homeland Security, which is the only positive thing I've ever read about that august body.

A Dark Green Future

Defense Tech reports that our world-renowned detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has gone green, thanks to the addition of wind turbines:

Together, the four turbines will generate 3,800 kw [kilowatts], and in years of typical weather the wind turbines will produce almost 8 million kilowatt-hours of electricity. They will reduce the consumption of 650,000 gallons of diesel fuel, reduce air pollution by 26 tons of sulfur dioxide and 15 tons of nitrous oxide, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 13 million pounds each year.

The new wind turbines will provide as much as 25% of the base's power generation during the high-wind months of late summer, and are expected to save taxpayers $1.2 million in annual energy costs.

This is wonderful news in itself. But what I find most exciting is that it suggests lots of world-changing possibilities for eco-torture. For instance, it's entirely possible that a redesigned water-torture system could produce a terrifying sensation of drowning for one prisoner, while generating enough microhydropower to shock the genitalia of another. With a few modifications, the Sunpipe could provide an ideal blinding light for interrogations, or produce varying degrees of diffuse or highly localized heat. And of course, replacing plastic-based restraints with hemp could do a lot to clean up Guantanamo's waste stream.

Another thing we should certainly do is increase the torture options legally available to us, in order to end the energy-intensive practice of flying prisoners to client states for "rendering." As we approach a peak-oil scenario, local torture and detention centers will become essential. It simply won't be feasible to ship "persons of interest" from one end of the country to another, let alone to Cuba. As in everything else, our guiding principle for torture and detention facilities should be "small, local, and green."

As usual, California leads the way. Alameda County's new solar prison provides a dazzling glimpse at the future of sustainable eco-incarceration.

As the Midas Touch of eco-design transforms processes and products at every level of society, it becomes more and more obvious that we really can have it all: We can tread lightly on Mother Earth, and keep our boots planted firmly on the necks of evildoers.

It brings a whole new meaning to the term "renewable power."

Comparing the Price of Liquids

This bright morning, Triple Pundit has offered up some evocative statistics about the price of liquids:

Upon comparison to a relatively simple commodity such as Coca Cola whose supply is seemningly limitless, the tremendous impact government subsidies have on one of our most coveted resources is suddenly obvious. When gasoline prices are compared to other liquid products, Snapple comes out costing 5 times that of gas, with nasal spray topping the list at a whopping 230 times the price of gasoline.

This information comes from the official site of the Virginia Petroleum, Convenience, and Grocery Association. In essence, it explains that gas is one of the cheapest fluids you can buy, and strongly implies that consumers should stop whining and pony up the dough cheerfully.

How the VPCGA comparison is supposed to make people feel better about gas prices, or the U.S. economy - or economics in general - is completely beyond me. Aside from confirming yet again that what we call "the free market" is actually a colossal, incoherent shell game, the comparison offers very few comforts indeed. One should remember, too, that persistently higher gas prices have occasionally been known to result in higher prices for consumer goods...such as Scope mouthwash (currently at $27.20 per gallon), Visine eyedrops ($995 per gallon), and Nasalcrom nasal spray ($2615.28 per gallon).

The VPCGA neglected to compare gasoline prices to the price of Jeff Gannon's semen. Just for the record, I estimate the latter at $256,000 per gallon, based on a statistically average ejaculation of 1.5 teaspoons, at $500 a pop. I have a suspicion that gasoline, if its actual production costs and externalities were factored into its price, might well cost a good deal more than that.

In related news, rest assured that President Bush feels your pain:

President Bush will propose measures to address the "root causes" of high energy prices, including possible construction of oil refineries on closed military bases....

Beyond Timber and Fish

Some folks may remember me discussing the concept of ecosystem services a while back.

The Economist has an interesting article on this subject. (If you haven't noticed yet, "interesting" tends to be my polite way of saying "thought-provoking in a not entirely pleasing way.")

The article should inspire me with hope, in theory. It promotes the valuation of ecosystems, after all, and describes a new willingness among economists to consider externalities. And yet I came away from it in a gloomy mood, because it shows just how deep-rooted and destructive certain attitudes are, and how much of our economic life is based on mere silliness.

Consider this grotesque attempt to explain why it's suddenly possible for economists to discuss ecosystem services without getting wedgies, purple nurples, and the dreaded "Rear Admiral" from the Kool Kids:

[S]cience is producing abundant evidence that the natural environment provides a wide range of economic benefits beyond the obvious ones of timber and fish.

To me, this statement betrays a really remarkable amount of alienation from everyday reality; I'm less relieved to see this attitude faltering, than unsettled to see it persisting. (Of course, it's always possible the author's being ironic, just as it's possible that Pope Benedict XVI will canonize Sylvester.)

Anyway, be it known: the natural environment is a source of more - far more - than timber and fish. Once you've grasped this fact, you may congratulate yourself on inhabiting the bleeding edge of economic heterodoxy.

Next, you may want to try wrapping your mind around the notion that better information can lead to better decisions:

[T]he more there is known about the ecology of, say, a forest, the better the valuation of the services it provides will be. Fortunately, according to two reports published by the World Bank at the end of 2004, significant progress has been made towards developing techniques for valuing environmental costs and benefits. There is, says one of these reports, no longer any excuse for considering them unquantifiable.

If any of you good people thought that my snotty comments about the Refusing-To-Pay-Any-Attention Principle were exaggerated, I invite you to re-read that last quote. Obviously, there's a perfectly good excuse for treating unquantifiable things as unquantifiable. What's problematic is treating unquantifiable things as irrelevant. This is something economists have been doing for centuries, unfortunately. What's more, they've occasionally presented it as hard-headed pragmatism, even when it's clearly bad-faith Candyland bullshit.

It's also problematic to internalize and promote obscure forms of paranoia, as thus:

Forests and swamps (or "wetlands", to give the latter their politically correct modern moniker) filter and purify water, and act as reservoirs to capture rain and melting snow.

"Politically correct"? That's an absolutely daft thing to say. "Wetlands" doesn't refer merely to swamps; it also refers to marshes, estuaries, floodplains, ponds, and any number of other combinations of land and water (including areas - like meadows - that are seasonally inundated).

I guess the word "swamp" is supposed to be pejorative - all good economists know, after all, that swamps are horrible places of no utility to anybody - and thus, the use of "wetlands" must be a devious attempt to hoodwink the public with feel-good PC platitudes. Well, let there be no more sugarcoating of the awful truth: from here on out, any damp locale that's neither a swimming pool, nor a lake, nor an ocean is a swamp, and is very likely to be populated by water moccasins, 'gators, and haints. Tell your friends.

The article goes on to describe - approvingly, mind you - the shortsighted misuse of ecosystem valuation:

Valuing ecosystem services can also point to places where inaction is best. After fires in Croatia had damaged many forests, a study was done to see if restoration was worthwhile given their value to the tourist industry. Examination of 11 sites revealed that the net benefits varied significantly. Some sites were not worthy candidates and were dropped.

Evidently, these forests - despite their handy ability to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen - didn't count as "public goods." But then again, so what if they had?

Public goods are those which are in everybody's interest to have, but in no one's interest to provide. Clean air, for example, or, more controversially, the preservation of rare species of plant or animal.

On the contrary, the interest of the public is to provide these goods to itself, through the medium of government, which is one of the reasons we pay taxes. If something is in "everyone's interest to have," then it's logically in everyone's interest to provide and protect it. If this doesn't work reliably in real life, it's not because the concept is flawed, but because economic considerations - which in this instance is simply a synonym for criminality - cause government to put the interests of business before the interests of the public, so that the tax money that should protect public goods goes instead to subsidies and bailouts for developers and their ilk.

By the way, the Economist would like you to know that just because economists are catching on to things that conservationists have been saying for decades, it doesn't mean any of us should listen to what conservationists are saying now:

[M]any conservationists dislike valuation. Some misunderstand it as an approach that ignores cultural and spiritual values. It does not.

That's debatable. If the decision as to whether a given forest should be saved depends wholly on whether it attracts tourists, one could certainly make a case that cultural and spiritual values are being ignored. Viable ones, at any rate.

All my ill-tempered ranting aside, the article's worth reading. It's more positive than I'm making it sound, and its occasional ethical and logical incoherence probably could've been a lot more glaring.

Make Way For Ducklings

I spent a good deal of yesterday wallowing in anaerobic mud. The wife and I were visiting a marsh near our house when a trio of tiny ducklings lumbered out of the weeds and headed straight for us, letting out shrill little calls. As always, I reacted swiftly and surely; to turn dead white, shriek like a child, and teeter on the edge of syncope was, for me, the work of seconds. Fortunately, my wife was able to calm me down with the injectible valium she carries for just such emergencies.

It was obvious to my wife - who works as a wildlife nurse and rehabilitator - that these birds were lost or abandoned, and that their prognosis was extremely poor. She caught two, and I caught the other. We took them down to the water's edge and let them loose on the mudflats, and they immediately set off to join the nearest family. It may not have been the ducklings' biological family, but they were in no mood to be picky. While ducklings are precocious feeders, swimmers, and divers, they need a mother to protect them from hypothermia and predators, and to waterproof their feathers.

While we were carrying the birds, a passerby warned us that "the mother will reject them" because we'd touched them. That's a myth. Mothers don't care if ducklings have been handled by humans (they have a very poor sense of smell); and in many cases, they'll "adopt" the abandoned offspring of other parents, an interesting phenomenon known as "post-hatch brood amalgamation."

Within a few minutes, the mother had herded her brood out of the water - our foundlings included - and was warming them up on the shore.

Having done our good deed for the day, we wanted to get on with our walk. We went about fifty feet before we heard another duckling's distress call. This one was paddling in circles in a narrow canal surrounded by mud and pickleweed. To make a long - and messy - story short, we eventually caught it. After drying and warming it, we put it in a well-populated pool. It tried to attach itself to a number of couples, who outswam it or flew away. Things were looking pretty bleak, but it finally followed a female ruddy duck who led it to a mallard family, which it joined without incident.

Another passerby hinted that we were interfering with the Laws of Nature, which had mandated that these particular ducklings should be food for predators. There are a number of reasons why this was a silly objection; the main one is that it may still happen. In this marsh, egrets, kites, gopher snakes, and other predators abound, and these ducklings have a dangerous few weeks ahead of them.

But more to the point, you really can't romanticize the impersonal workings of nature in an essentially manmade ecosystem, where hatchlings face a galaxy of threats from humans, chemicals, fishing line, plastic bags, pets, and introduced or invasive species, in addition to their natural predators. A level of reproduction that's sufficient to keep a population stable in normal circumstances may not do the trick when new development, for instance, increases the threats to a species' survival.

We only traveled ten more feet before we came across two more lost ducklings. We tried for about ten minutes to catch them. I sank up to my calves in foul-smelling muck more than once. In the end, all we managed to do was separate and terrify them. They finally either hid themselves very well, or - more likely - drowned. Needless to say, we wished we'd left them alone, and went home feeling depressed and stupid.

So despite morally pure intentions and a considerable amount of expertise, our efforts apparently ended in catastrophic failure one-third of the time. Or is the fate of the last two ducklings "acceptable," since they would almost certainly have died of hypothermia or been eaten by predators regardless? Did we save four from "certain" death, or did we kill two through our blundering? Or was it a little of both?

Questions like these - trivial as they may seem when applied to the rescue of abandoned ducklings - are pertinent to far more serious undertakings. When your mistakes are counted in lives, precisely how many should you be allowed to make?

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Still too busy for real posting...I should be back on top of things on Monday.

As for Friday Hope Blogging, you'll have to settle for this: I hope you have a nice weekend!

Cheap Imitations

It's strange how often we romanticize aspects of America that we blithely destroyed because there was money to be made. And it's even more strange that having destroyed such things, we replicate them shoddily, and market them as antidotes to the very psychic emptiness that made the real things seem worthless.

For instance, Bush and his creatures trumpet precisely those ideals of small-town life that his actual policies are destroying. The idea that we are a nation of caring families, or cooperative communities, doesn't withstand the slightest critical examination. But the concept of family and community - of belonging - remains eminently marketable. It's as though we've been locked in a bare cell, and are comforting ourselves by imagining the ineffable perfection of Platonic beds and chairs.

In America's smaller towns, neighborhoods have been destroyed and businesses torn down, only to be replaced by chain businesses that offer a cheap imitation of the community values they ruined. "Old-fashioned" qualities - such as conscientious workmanship - are promoted in cavernous, dismal buildings that were made cheaply, out of shoddy materials, by people whose emotional investment in their work was at a bare minimum. Lovely Victorian buildings are torn down, to make way for some gigantic drab enclosure where faux-Victorian gaslights are sold. Our neighbors are driven from their houses and scattered to the four winds, so that chain stores can arrive and proclaim themselves our "good neighbors."

Whatever you consider the human spirit to be, our official culture has stopped making an effort to appeal to its kinder or saner aspirations, or to please it with anything more profound than the numb familiarity one feels when entering a Starbucks or a Wal-Mart...which is really just an adjustment to diminished expectations.

Perhaps our diminished expectations explain some of our strange bitterness towards the rest of the world. We work harder and harder, and pay more and more, and get less and less, but it's almost as though we defend our lifestyle all the more fiercely because of its very shabbiness. For if this is success, who could survive failure? If this is profit, who could bear loss? The closer we come to outright failure, the less we want to admit it.

Whatever the cause, this life - for which our children must now kill and die - is so meager and occluded that it's no wonder our homegrown religion has emphasized the tantalizing nearness of the Big Payoff, in language more suited to a casino than a church. Indeed, as escaping poverty and debt becomes more and more difficult, gambling itself takes on an almost holy allure. It's not just the money, either. It's also the idea of recognition; winning a fortune would provide proof that one is special, and really was meant for better things. Ultimately, though, there's very little to say about a society that sees a place like Las Vegas as an "escape" from its burdens, rather than as an intensification of them, or at least as an insultingly explicit metaphor for them.

Surely, there's more than a little of Las Vegas in America's religious notions, which increasingly boil down to the worker's daydream of getting the last laugh. But here, the fantasy turns a bit darker. It's not enough to thrive, not enough to be singled out for reward while the scoffers turn green with envy; everyone who's "bad" must suffer. If the American God - the God, that is, of Scofield and Darby - is made in our own image, he's based partially on the office drone's vision of winning the lottery, and partially on the coward's admiration for brute force, but mainly on the overworked postal worker's dream of double-barreled justice. This God shares in our petty prejudices, damns whatever frightens us or angers us, and pointlessly punishes people whose personal knowledge of suffering is already more than deep enough.

Meanwhile, patriotism, like materialism, has defined itself through opposition until it's little more than a litany of denials. It's a denial of shared destiny, of community and responsibility, of guilt and shame and consideration and obligation. It's neither cosmopolitan, nor secular, nor intellectual, nor "green," nor tolerant. Nor is it welcoming or compassionate; the inscription on the Statue of Liberty was probably, after all, just a dirty trick of the perfidious French.

What we're pledging allegiance to at this point is unclear. In theory, it's probably some ideal of freedom that we're too scared, busy, ignorant, or debt-ridden to achieve. In practice, it may be the freedom to buy pills that will ease the infirmities our labors cause, or the freedom to forget our worries by watching complete strangers get punished for real or imaginary crimes. Americans are so relentlessly kicked around, so consistently made to feel helpless and insecure...it's no surprise that "kicking ass and taking names" sometimes seems like the closest thing we have to a shared national dream.

We were made for better things, but seem to have no sense of what those things might be. The idea that success and money will make us happy - a proposition which virtually everything we see and hear in our daily lives proves false - is weirdly persistent. The lives of the most wealthy, glamorous, famous people are daily revealed as grotesque and awful farces; we dwell lovingly on every detail of their humiliation, while imagining that "success" will solve our problems (after all, with enough wealth, we can buy replicas of all the things we lost or threw away).

The fact that Bush's tawdry, heartless counterfeits of family and community and spirituality appeal to so many Americans isn't necessarily proof that they're stupid. More likely, it's proof that they're so starved for these things - and for the sense of belonging they engender - that they'll swallow anything. Because just as starving explorers used to eat strips of leather and splinters of wood while straggling through some wasteland, starving hearts will swallow lies.

(Originally posted 12/13/04)

Planetary Management At Its Finest!

This story will delight you, no matter how sick, sad, or suicidal you may have thought yourself. It's a grand medicine for melancholy, and it'll cost you next to nothing. Tell it to your children in place of a bedtime story, and watch their lovely little eyes fairly glow with wholesome wonderment.

A federal facility that pumps salty water 14,000 feet into the Earth's crust probably is associated with a magnitude 3.9 earthquake that struck the Utah-Colorado border this month, an official said. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation facility removes salt from the Dolores River, then pumps 230 gallons of brine per minute into deep wells in Utah's Paradox Valley Area.

The process is intended to decrease the salt content of the Colorado River downstream, but scientists say it also lubricates faults. The facility has caused thousands of earthquakes in the area since 1991, but most have been too small for people to feel. The 3.9 quake, which struck Nov. 6, was felt in Grand Junction, some 60 miles away. No damage was reported.

For those who don't know, the Colorado River is salty because Western soil is salty, and often has poor drainage conditions. Accordingly, we've found ways to drain irrigation run-off back into the river, along with tons of salt. This water is re-used continually as it travels through agricultural land, so salt concentrations increase dramatically as the water travels to Mexico. By the time it gets across the border, it's downright poisonous.

Our solution? Force astonishing amounts of this salty water into the earth's crust, presumably (though I haven't checked) without contaminating aquifers or other sources of fresh groundwater. One result of this solution? Earthquakes.

Spooky, eh? It's almost as though the earth were a complex system, in which certain actions lead to unforeseen results.

(Originally posted 11/14/04)

Klinghoffer Agonistes

In matchless prose that has all the forcefulness, and twice the pathos, of a sick kitten, David Klinghoffer announces that Pope Ratzinger is just what the doctor ordered for world Jewry.

Hark to his cold inexorable logic: Ratzinger's against moral relativism, and since "Jewish leadership" has come down on the side of moral relativism, mainstream Jews should admire Ratzinger, because - like all popes - he believes that Catholicism is the One True Faith, which gives Jews carte blanche to assert that Judaism is the One True Faith, which will lead - obviously! - to a new era of intransigent religious conservatism and the downfall of moral relativism.

The great question of our time, you see, is whether there is no truth anywhere - an ironically absolutist stance flirted with by a tiny group of confused postmodernist undergrads - or some truth somewhere, as pretty much everyone else on earth believes. What Klinghoffer - in his disingenuity or invincible ignorance - calls "moral relativism" is actually tolerance and pluralism: the notion that while there may be only one truth about deity, there is also a moral responsibility to respect freedom of conscience and freedom of religion and the integrity of the individual. Which is, of course, a perfectly firm and reasonable ethical stance that has nothing to do with moral relativism, but a great deal to do with the founding of this country.

Klinghoffer does, at least, demonstrate that if you start out with hopelessly flawed premises, you can end up with a grotesquely stupid conclusion:

Pope Benedict XVI has his truth. Jews who believe in Judaism, as opposed to relativism, have ours. The pope and the Jews can't both be right — but that fact, that there can only be one truth, is a singularly important truth in itself, arguably more important than any of the doctrinal points on which Jews, Catholics, and other Christians differ.

Look here, friend: If there's One True Faith - one narrow path to salvation - then any faith that contradicts it is false. A false faith prevents knowledge of God's truth, and without knowledge of God's truth, there's no salvation. And anything that stands in the way of salvation is evil, for all intents and purposes. If "the pope and the Jews can't both be right," then one of them is not merely wrong, but catastrophically evil.

It's not that goddamn complicated. In fact, the drab, plodding, lunatic simplicity of these notions is precisely their attraction to faux-spiritual vulgarians like Klinghoffer, which makes it all the more droll that he's pretending that these absolute values impose no intersubjective moral obligations (conversion at sword's point, for instance). Gee, that almost sounds like moral relativism!

(Link via Alicublog.)

Tuesday Crow Blogging

I was hiking around Big Sur this weekend, and experimented with taking pictures through the eyepiece of my binocular. I like the way this one turned out.

Infectious Incompetence

In response to the disturbing release of the A/H2N2 influenza virus by Meridian, POGO offers a rundown of recent lab accidents involving pathogens. Plague baccili transported in suitcases, accidental TB infections...it all makes for comforting bedtime reading.

But POGO's focus on US accidents means they left out some other exciting cases, like the accidental smallpox release that led the head of a British research facility to slash his own throat. And the hapless Australian researchers who tried to engineer a contraceptive for mice, and inadvertantly created an deadly form of mousepox that was able to overcame the animal's natural genetic resistance. Plus,unless I'm mistaken, there have been at least three overseas lab accidents involving SARS.

One of the many unfortunate things about BushCo's robotic fixation on "biodefense" is that it's increased the number of labs working with these pathogens - and encouraged irresponsible genetic engineering experiments - and has thus increased the risk of a catastrophic accident. Here's a map of high-containment biodefense labs in operation as of November 2004. Rest assured that many more are on BushCo's wishlist.

You'll be glad to know that the WaPo is concerned about lab safety, in its usual tepid way:

[A]fter three weeks no one at CDC is yet able to explain whether Meridian put this particular strain of virus in its testing samples knowingly or by accident. Meridian does not respond to questions. CDC spokesmen say the agency is "working on" coming up with an explanation, but they point out that it has no mandate to monitor lab safety. It appears that this strange accident falls through the cracks of regulation. The virus in question is not classified as a "select agent," the misuse of which would be a criminal offense, although it may eventually be reclassified that way.

Regarding "select agent" classification, Effect Measure points out yet again how the tunnel-vision focus on biodefense scenarios is leading us to make stupid decisions:

The third, and perhaps most important question, relates to why H2N2 is handled under biosafety level 2 (BSL 2) conditions in the US ("good laboratory practice") but requires BSL 3 protection in Canada (use of safety cabinets and other protections). CDC Director Gerberding explained that because influenza isn't a bioterrorist agent, it did not receive the proper attention. Besides showing unbelievable stupidity, incompetence and a blind sense of misplaced priorities, we note that despite Canada's pleas and WHO's dismay the US has still not taken the required step of classifying H2N2 as a BSL 3 agent....

Getting back to the WaPo editorial, I find it irritating in that it simply questions whether enough safety precautions are in place, without questioning whether research of this type is wise or necessary:

[I]f the relatively free exchange of such materials is to continue, safety standards need to be updated more regularly, and everyone needs to be much clearer about what those standards are.

This is a remarkably vague and casual sentiment, I think. And I dislike its implication that unethical, wasteful, stupid, and dangerous research is acceptable as long as everyone takes the proper precautions. Open-air vulnerability testing is fine, by this logic, so long as a "harmless" organism is used. It seems to me that flawed research programs often lead to flawed practices; the massive influx of taxpayer dollars into this field is very likely to make a bad situation worse.

The Shale Game

The Utah radio station KSL 1160 asks the immortal question Could Utah Oil Lower Gas Prices?

[M]ore and more of your money is going towards skyrocketing oil and gas prices. Alternative sources other than the Middle East are being looked at for oil, and one place is right here in Utah.

That sounds terrific, until you read the full piece, and realize that they're talking about - wait for it - shale oil and tar sands.

Utah has plenty of oil but it's all stuck in rock or sand....Utah Geological Survey Energy and Minerals Program Manager David Tabet says the reason no one has mined the oil is the extremely high cost.

However since a barrel of oil is now over $50 dollars companies may consider doing it if they get help from the government.

Where does one start? The cost of extracting and refining shale oil is, obviously, going to put its price well above $50 per barrel - if Australia's disastrous experience is any guide, the per-barrel cost could be three or four times that amount, without factoring in external costs - so the idea that it'd reduce gas prices is insane on its face. The corporate welfare hinted at in this article would come from taxpayers, of course; I fail to see how it'd help consumers to have them subsidize artificially low oil prices out of their own pockets.

Further, the greenhouse gas emissions of shale oils are about four times higher than that of regular oil, depending on the refining method used. It's also unbelievably water-intensive, which is a serious consideration in the desert West.

Via Energy Bulletin, today's Denver Post has a good, skeptical editorial on the financial hazards of investing in shale oil:

The boom of the late 1970s and early '80s was fueled by crude-oil prices that reached a high of nearly $40 a barrel in late 1981 (or about $80 in today's dollars).

It was thought that the 1.8 trillion barrels of oil locked in the Green River formation in Wyoming, Utah and northwestern Colorado could be developed economically.

Then oil prices plunged sharply, and on "Black Sunday," May 2, 1982, Exxon Corp. pulled the plug on its $5 billion Colony Oil Shale Project near Parachute. Others followed, leaving western Colorado's super-heated economy in a shambles.

Basements and Bedrooms

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis of Arms Control Wonk has seen fit to coarsen our national discourse by writing a piece entitled "Fuck the Washington Post." His complaint is with some remarks on China's nuclear capabilities that appeared in an article by Edward Cody, WaPo's man in Beijing:

Cody’s piece of lazy, news analysis trash has a few paragraphs devoted to Beijing's nuclear deterrent. Each and every one of the four sentences containing a factual statement is inaccurate in some way. That’s an amazing 100 percent "suck" factor.

Dr. Lewis notes that the WaPo has refused to run his rebuttal. From where I'm sitting - the living-room, if you must know - it looks as though the mass media are just as unwilling to accept criticism from acknowledged experts as they are from bloggers working out of their basements and bedrooms.

As Atrios would say, "Time to convene a panel on blogger ethics and the caustic nature of online criticism!"

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

I have no time to write at length today, so I'm simply going to draw your attention to a great new site called Triple Pundit, which provides fascinating and heartening information on new trends in energy, design, government, business, ecology, and so forth. It's well worth checking daily, along with Near Near Future, Treehugger, and WorldChanging. I love the fact that I don't have to brace myself for bad news while these pages are loading!

I also thought this recent post from Living the Scientific Life was touching and inspiring. And the current post has lots of great bird links!

The Lighter Side of Human Sacrifice

(Originally posted on 11/16/04)

I was thinking the other day about the old rites of sacrifice and propitiation that were associated with preindustrial mining and logging. It occurred to me that they often served to limit the environmental damage that such activities caused; the supernatural "demand" for human life or wealth, as payment for access to natural resources, made deficit spending a very uncomfortable prospect. That idea of a relationship with nature that requires sacrifice and accommodation on both sides is pretty much gone today, and I don't think that's a good thing.

While I don't believe we should go back to burning people alive in wicker cages or burying them under foundation stones, I do like the notion of treating our use of resources as a formal transaction between ourselves and nature, in which both sides must benefit, or at least break even. If nothing else, the logic behind sacrifice and offerings placed human obligations to the environment above the human right to exploit it, which is precisely where they should be.

Currently, we treat the natural world as something between a free all-you-can-eat buffet, and a conquered enemy who can be violated at will. Since there's no scientific evidence to support such an outlook, nor any logical or moral justification for it, it's hard not to think of it as a form of insanity. In fact, it's insane enough to make almost any earlier concept of our place in nature seem perfectly lucid.

For instance, a personified, sentient Nature that feels and punishes human abuse might be an irrational concept in materialist terms, but it's really a pretty accurate metaphor for what actually happens in a complex world. I mean that this concept is far more likely to promote a respectful understanding of complex causal relations than is the current irrational belief that actions and reactions in nature happen neatly and intelligibly, one at a time, like a slow-motion game of Whack-a-Mole.

We have a very funny notion of what's rational, these days. I honestly wonder where we find the heart to sneer at even the most fanciful beliefs of our ancestors. Given how little attention our "experts" have devoted to the likely consequences of human actions - let alone the possible ones - and how surprised they are when one of their pet schemes brings ruinous consequences, we might as well blame a Vengeful Deity for any disaster in which the chain of causality is longer than the two or three links we'll ordinarily deign to look at. After all, once you've cast aside basic notions of cause and effect, there's very little of rational thought left to be salvaged.

If laws of physics and chemistry and common sense no longer impress us - and can be shrugged off as "junk science" - then we may as well start believing that skyrocketing childhood asthma is an angry god's revenge for our failure to perform the necessary propitiatory rites at coal-burning power plants. As crazy as that is, it's still better than refusing to believe in the asthma, which is what the Bush administration would prefer us to do.

A false conception that led us towards self-preservation would surely be justifiable in utilitarian terms, making it a lesser evil (and, in that sense, a lesser lie) than a distressing amount of our current scientific and economic philosophy. If we really must base our economic and environmental policies on irrational beliefs and imaginary forces, we ought at least to choose ones that limit the harm we can do to the world and ourselves. The way things are going lately, we'll soon forfeit our right to be appalled by societies that practiced human sacrifice, and to call any age "dark" but our own.

This is especially true when you consider that we still conduct human sacrifices. We've simply placed them at the far end of our transactions with nature, where they're less apt to stand in the way of whatever delusion looks like progress this week. Instead of the "pay as you go" philosophy of preindustrial times, we've decided to run a sacrificial trade deficit, and let Nature collect her burnt offerings at her leisure, along with whatever interest has compounded.

People used to think it was worthwhile to sacrifice one person to protect a city. Now, we think it's worthwhile to sacrifice a city to protect first-quarter profits. Both viewpoints may be utterly irrational, but only one of them is evil.

Delivering Disease

There's a moderately alarmist article here about the shipping of pathogens:

Every day, deadly germs are shipped across the country and around the globe, right alongside the books, gourmet foods and birthday presents sent through FedEx Corp. and similar couriers.

Often their journeys can be circuitous, too.

Follow, for instance, a single vial of the potentially deadly flu virus causing a world health scare because it was included in test kits sent to more than 4,000 laboratories. It was grown in a Virginia lab, spent time in a Cincinnati freezer and passed through a small medical company on the Mexican border before it finally arrived at a Milwaukee lab.

I have to say, I don't see a lot of reason to be paranoid about legitimate labs shipping pathogens via legitimate couriers; IATA and FedEx overpack regulations for infectious substances and diagnostic specimens are very strict, and the packaging can withstand just about any accident it's likely to have. I'm far more concerned about mishandling or malice at the receiving end. In most cases, the labs themselves are far more dangerous than transportation, both in terms of accidentally infecting people (as thus), and providing pathogens to people who shouldn't have them (as thus).