A Memorial to Nothingness

Candace de Russy has discovered yet another reason to be angry at postmodernists:

Academic postmodernism has profoundly influenced the arts, including memorials such as that long, black, unadorned sculpture in a hole in the ground, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, created by a college student a quarter of a century ago.

The Memorial is adorned, of course...with the names of 58,000 dead people.

The design seems to me to be pretty respectful, not least because it avoids needless editorializing. My understanding is that many of the hundreds of thousands of people who visit it each year find it to be emotionally overwhelming, if not devastating. There are probably people who'd rather see a 200-foot statue of Richard Nixon planting his boot on Hồ Chí Minh's neck while running Jane Fonda through with a bayonet, but I think the majority of visitors would find that sort of pseudopatriotic kitsch somewhat...distracting.

The ability to create a monument that moves people from across the ideological spectrum is pretty impressive, I'd say, whether postmodernism inspired it or not.

For de Russy, though, art exists solely to indoctrinate. Thus, the absence of any overt flag-waving or hippy-bashing renders the Vietnam Memorial a "memorial to nothingness" that serves "merely to note the reality of death."

The moral vacuum is in the monument, y'see, and not in the spectator whose instinctive response to it is frivolous ideological bellyaching.

In our next installment, de Russy travels to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and complains about the postmodern aestheticization of ruins.

The Battle Over What To Think

Though I'm as besotted with dialectics as the next lefty extremist, I can't quite approve of Andrew Revkin's attempt to achieve a synthesis of denialist disinformation and peer-reviewed science:

For many years, the battle over what to think and do about human-caused climate change and fossil fuels has been waged mostly as a yelling match between the political and environmental left and the right.

The left says global warming is a real-time crisis....The right says global warming is somewhere between a hoax and a minor irritant....

The thing is, if someone is yelling that global warming is a "hoax," that person is yelling nonsense. And anyone who hopes to give an accurate account of the debate is obliged to say as much.

Revkin can't bother himself with these minor details, though. He's too excited by the thought that reasonable people are beginning to "urge a move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy," as reasonable people must.

Who are these paradigm-shattering pioneers? Well, there's Newt Gingrich, who was "one of the most polarizing forces in politics a decade ago," according to Revkin (how times have changed!). He's now calling for "curbing carbon dioxide emissions (affordably)."

Who gets to decide what is and isn't affordable? Revkin doesn't say, but I'm guessing the honor'll go to a member in good standing of the pragmatic center.

Next, we have Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, whose self-congratulatory approach to torching strawmen is guaranteed by Nordhaus and Shellenberger to light our path towards a better future.

Last and least, there's Bjorn Lomborg, whose appalling new book I've dealt with here and here. Revkin, who's less compromised by partisanship than yours truly, effectively praises it with faint damnation:

In his short new book, “Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,” Mr. Lomborg...tries to puncture more of what he says are environmental myths, like the imminent demise of polar bears. (Most bear biologists have never said the species is doomed but do see populations shrinking significantly in a melting Arctic.)

Ah, but are these "bear biologists" pragmatic centrists? To the extent that their views are not in harmony with those of Mr. Lomborg, one suspects that they are not, and pities them.

For those who came in late, here's a quick recap: The "pragmatic center" on climate change is inhabited by Newt Gingrich, Nordhaus and Shellenberger, and Bjorn fucking Lomborg. Or to put it another way, two pathologically dishonest free-market fundamentalists, and a couple of preening bourgeois polemicists who espouse "an ambitious new [!!!] philosophy that isn't afraid to put people ahead of nature and to dream big about creating economic growth."

This, you'll agree, is a group of thinkers who could solve all our problems, had we but world enough and time. My only complaint is that Gregg Easterbrook didn't make the grade.

UPDATE: David Roberts notes that Revkin's gone this route before.

Roaring So Loudly

Roy Edroso discusses the latest plea for civility from the Assholosphere:

When we laughed at them before, they were roaring so loudly they couldn't hear us. Now they can't help but notice. And they want us to stop.

To me, this implies that people like Megan McArdle have managed to make a small but significant concession to reality. Which is why I'm forced to categorize it as wishful thinking.

In my view, McArdle's playing the civility card for the same reason her ideological brethren and cistern are calling for the use of tactical nukes against Iran: because the point of having a weapon is to use it. By the same token, every binding spell in the wingnut grimoire must be cast and recast, for the simple reason that the movement's sorcerers have nothing better to do.

That said, I do wonder whether the post-9/11 apotheosis of the warbloggers will turn out to be their version of the Summer of Love, by which I mean fodder for endless, maudlin anecdotes about how "we almost brought down the system, man!"

Just as many hippies' pursuit of their own enjoyment is retroactively ennobled by the fact that other people were engaged in a serious political struggle, to the extent that listening to Janis Joplin while stoned seems in hindsight to have been a Revolutionary Act, the warbloggers' brief, borrowed moment of quasi-relevance is likely to become ever more lustrous and exemplary as the years drag on (though to be fair, I'm sure they'll also Keep Hope Alive by supporting politicians who promise to end "entitlements"--veterans' benefits, for instance).

Considering what they deserve, they could have it a lot worse.

But God is merciful unto those who reverence Him, and it may well be that we'll suffer another spectacular terrorist attack, and everything silly will become serious again. At which point, we can expect street-fightin' men like Kim du Toit and Andrew Sullivan and Ace O'Spades to spurt arcs of "rancid ectoplasmic jissom" like the hanged men in Naked Lunch. Which is why, as I've said many times before, I'm less frightened of dying in a terrorist attack than I am of slipping in a reeking puddle of wingnut ejaculate afterwards, and breaking my neck.

Putting that bit of unpleasantness aside, I said pretty much everything I'd care to say about "civility" in this post.

Making Idleness Easy

Thomas Sowell attempts to make a difference by explaining that we should stop attempting to make a difference:

Making a difference makes sense only if you are convinced that you have mastered the subject at hand to the point where any difference you might make would be for the better.

There's a bit of a loophole here, thanks to the word "convinced" (cf. George W. Bush on the invasion of Iraq, or Rush Limbaugh on the role of ocean bacteria in climate change).

But there's no gainsaying Sowell's larger argument, which was given perhaps its most compelling expression by Hellhammer:

In the heat of infernal lightnings
And in the shadows of poisoned clouds
The world will die under the Sword of Destiny.

Just to drive his point home, Sowell shows us fear in a handful of rice:

Among those who make a difference by serving food to the homeless, how many have considered the history of societies which have made idleness easy for great numbers of people?

Not very many, I'm guessing. But probably more than have considered the grave and gathering threat of intravenous alcohol abuse:

How many have studied the impact of drunken idlers on other people in their own society, including children who come across their needles in the park -- if they dare to go to the parks?

Suggest that there's a link between human activity and climate change, and you're a crypto-Stalinist stooge. But the connection between soup kitchens and a dirty needle in the foot of your precious flaxen-haired moppet is plain as day. Won't somebody please think of the children (the ones who aren't homeless and hungry)?

My problem with Sowell's call for moral triage is that it doesn't go far enough. I have no proof that our hedonistic society's "if it feels good, do it" policy of "no questions asked" emergency care has ever saved the life of a larval child molester - or gang leader, or terrorist - but you can't deny that such an outcome is inevitable. I propose, therefore, that we subject ER patients to Thematic Apperception Testing before we give 'em so much as a tourniquet.

Don't bother arguing, either. I am convinced that I have mastered the subject at hand, and that any difference I might make will be for the better.

Sowell also objects to the phrase "giving back," because it encourages us to donate blood, instead of defending America's honor by relativizing the slave trade:

[S]lavery...is repeatedly drummed into our heads -- in the schools and in the media -- as something unique done by white people to black people in the United States.

I've never quite understood how slavery elsewhere in the world could excuse its popularity in the Land of the Free. But that conundrum is child's play, compared to this one:

What was unique about Western civilization was that it was the first civilization to turn against slavery, and that it stamped out slavery not only in its own societies but in other societies around the world during the era of Western imperialism.

Sowell's laboring under a few misapprehensions here. He seems to be unfamiliar with the Cyrus Cylinder, for starters, and he also doesn't seem to grasp that while abolition and Western imperialism may've overlapped somewhat, this doesn't mean that the former was an effect of the latter. There's also the fact that slavery still exists. And the fact that it's silly to ask people to "get over" slavery when you yourself can't get over the fact that people sometimes use cliches to espouse charity.

To give Sowell credit, though, he does a good job of illustrating the law of unintended consequences: You start out by trying to justify starving the poor, and before you know it, you're defending slavery.

(Photo: "Children Sleeping on Mulberry Street" by Jacob Riis, 1890.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Our people are clever and masterful;
They have powers in the mass, they accomplish marvels.
It is possible Time will make them before it
annuls them, but at present
There is not one memorable person, there is not one
mind to stand with Ceratosoma amoenum, one life with
the mountains.

(Photo by VictorianSeaSlugs.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The Massachusetts legislature has finalized a bill that will extend the buffer zone around clinics:

The bill, which Gov. Deval L. Patrick is expected to sign next week, will be the nation’s strictest state law establishing fixed zones that protesters cannot enter around those reproductive health clinics that offer abortions.

In Virginia, 84% of NARAL-endorsed candidates were elected:

"This is not a blip," says Sen. Russ Potts, the moderate Republican from Winchester who is retiring in part because of his party's rightward turn. "This is a change in the face of Virginia politics for the next 20 years. This business of no-tax pledges and no-abortions, no-exceptions is not going to fly.

And in New York, Rep. Joseph Crowley has introduced legislation that would restore access to affordable birth control:

Prices have gone through the roof due to an unintended [ha!] consequence of the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA) that was passed in January. The Act included a provision that prevents college clinics and hundreds of clinics that serve women with low incomes from purchasing birth control from drug companies at an extremely discounted rate. Prices have shot up as a result, some as high as $50 a month.

An waitress from the Heartland lashes out against the effete, out-of-touch Liberal Media:

“You people are really nuts,” she told a reporter during a phone interview. “There’s kids dying in the war, the price of oil right now — there’s better things in this world to be thinking about than who served Hillary Clinton at Maid-Rite and who got a tip and who didn’t get a tip.”

Six Nicaraguan field workers have won a lawsuit against Dole Food:

A Los Angeles jury on Monday awarded $3.2 million to six Nicaraguan farmworkers who had sued Dole Food Co. Inc., arguing they had been rendered sterile some three decades ago by the international corporate giant's application of a banned pesticide on the plantations where they worked.

Jurors return today to consider whether Dole, and codefendant Dow Chemical Co., should be punished with more monetary damages. They will decide whether Dole acted maliciously in failing to warn its workers of the danger, and whether Dow engaged in gross negligence in manufacturing the chemical.

BP, meanwhile, has been hit with an unprecedented fine:

This is the largest criminal fine ever assessed against a corporation for Clean Air Act violations and the first criminal prosecution of the requirement that refineries and chemical plants take steps to prevent accidental releases.

Monsanto's profits are down on rBGH:

Monsanto Company recently announced that profits from its genetically modified bovine growth hormone, Posilac, also known as rBGH, will fall 16% in 2007 due to “pressure in the dairy business,” according to chief financial officer, Terry Crews.

Many US dairy companies, including Dean Foods, Stonyfield Farms, and California Dairies, as well as retail supermarkets, such as Safeway, Kroger and Publix are prohibiting use of the GM hormone due to consumer demand.

And the firm that manufactured thalidomide has lost its legal battle to ban a film about the birth defects its drug caused.

A common lawn grass has been found to produce its own potent herbicide:

Reporting on the discovery in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science, Frank Schroeder, the paper's senior author and an assistant scientist at the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research on Cornell's campus, said, "We at first didn't believe m-tyrosine had anything to do with the observed herbicidal activity, but then we tested it and found it to be extremely toxic to plants but not toxic to fungi, mammals or bacteria."

Co-author Cecile Bertin, Ph.D. '05, research director for PharmAfrican, a Montreal-based bio-pharmaceuticals company, made the initial discovery that fescue grasses inhibit plants from growing around them.

There's supposedly some new evidence for the medicinal properties of a substance found in green tea:

They found that an ingredient in green tea rescued mice from lethal sepsis - and the findings could pave the way to clinical trials in patients.

The study was published this week in the Public Library of Science, or PLoS-ONE. Dr. Wang had previously discovered a late mediator of sepsis called HMGB1, a substance expressed in the late stages of lethal sepsis. They wanted to figure out a way to block this substance, which they felt would prevent the lethal sepsis process from moving forward. And it worked.

Mexico is finding that its new health insurance program for the uninsured "is having a positive effect on coverage of antihypertensive treatment in that country, according to a study published in the October 27 issue of British Medical Journal."

Results of the study show that adults insured through Seguro Popular are significantly more likely to receive treatment for hypertension and significantly more likely to have their blood pressure controlled than those without health insurance.

Ann Arbor, MI is courting God's wrath by promoting the use of rain barrels. Seattle's voters have turned their backs on Progress by rejecting a massive highway bill:

The turning point may have been when King County Executive Ron Sims suddenly withdrew his support. He cited the climate-warming emissions from added traffic as one of his chief objections—he was thinking about his granddaughters, he said, not just the next five years.

And Cloncurry, Australia intends to defy the natural order of things by switching over to solar thermal power:

They plan on building 8 thousand mirrors and reflecting light onto graphite blocks, water will be pumped through the blocks to create steam, the steam turns turbines, and wham 10 megawatts of renewable energy. Not that they have to worry much about this, but on the off chance that they have a cloudy day, the graphite blocks will stay hot for a long time and continue making steam (they also make energy at night).

The station would deliver about 30 million kilowatt hours of electricity a year, enough to meet the needs of the entire community. Ergon Energy would develop the project, which is expected to be completed by the summer of 2009/2010.

Triple Pundit discusses desiccant-based cooling:

A wheel that contains a desiccant turns slowly to pick up humidity from incoming air and discharge that humidity to the outdoors. A desiccant system can be combined with a conventional air conditioning system in which the desiccant removes humidity and the air conditioner lowers air temperature.

AfriGadget has a nice feature on modular machines, which allow a few functional parts to be adapted to multiple uses:

One of the things that I find most interesting in my travels around Africa is the similar uses of technology to meet the varied demands of different types of mechanics and workers. The particular case I’ve been thinking over is the use of a simple frame and different engines to meet a specific need.

Thanks to conservation efforts, the population of Amur tigers seems to be rebounding:

During the past 100 years, the Amur tiger population of the Russian Far East was decimated by forest destruction, trophy hunting and poaching for tiger body parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine. By the 1940s the number surviving had dwindled to an estimated 50. Thanks in part to $611,131 in U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service grants that, combined with partner donations and in-kind contributions, push the total to more than $1 million, the big, distinctive cats appear to be rebounding in Russia.

Scientists have discovered some new species near the Aleutians:

During the dives, two potentially new species of sea anemones have been discovered. Stephen Jewett, a professor of marine biology and the dive leader on the expedition, says that these are "walking" or "swimming" anemones because they move across the seafloor as they feed. While most sea anemones are anchored to the seabed, a "swimming" anemone can detach and drift with ocean currents. The size of these anemones ranges from the size of a softball to the size of a basketball.

The Forest Stewardship Council claims to be tightening its standards in the wake of an expose by The Wall Street Journal.

In response to inquiries from the newspaper, the FSC this month proposed stricter rules for certification. The regulations would ban any company known to be destroying rainforests or engaging in illegal logging from using the FSC's label.

The photo at the top was taken with a camera-equipped kite by Charles C. Benton. I was also impressed, this week, by Hilary Hitchcock's site, especially the collection of emulsion lifts and transfers.


Bruce McKaig's Time Markers "is a project in which a single cumulative pinhole photograph and a digital time-lapse animation are made of scenes from the arts, science, business, family and social rituals." Be sure to click on the animations.

The Art and Craft of Toy Design has a nice collection of toys improvised from found objects.


I'm pleased by this modest but suggestive attempt at a roundabout typology by Colin Tweedie (why didn't I think of it?).


Furthermore: Hidden Glasgow (via Things). Also from Glasgow, Iconic Moments of the 20th Century, as reenacted by senior citizens.

A new issue of Polar Inertia. A very thorough exhibition of needle books. A page of natural icons from the work of Ernst Haeckel (via Good). The Red Village, photographs of a Jewish village in Azerbaijan by Jason Eskenazi. Inuit games and songs at UBUWEB. Music of the John Frum cult (which I previously discussed here).

Last, Autour d'une Cabine, a short film from 1894.

Gauntlets of Deterrent

Back in 2006, the Wall Street Journal cautioned Republicans against relying on immigrant-bashing to win political victories:

[I]mmigration is an issue, like trade, that always looks better in the polls than it does on election day; very few people vote because of it.

The truth of this statement is nicely borne out by a post at Migra Matters, which contrasts pre-election excitement over "the Republican advantage in the emotional debate over illegal immigration" with the post-rout realization that immigration "won't be a silver bullet for Republicans."

We won't linger over this sad scene; as Shakespeare wrote, it's "better to weep at joy than to joy at weeping." Let's turn instead to the Minutemen's private border fence, which Chris Simcox formerly described as a "high-tech, double-layered gauntlet of deterrent."

Behold this fence, you would-be maids and lettuce-pickers, and tremble:

Simcox now says that he never promised to build the high-tech security fence on Ladd's ranch. And he insists the barbed-wire fence really does protect the country.

Meanwhile, a fence proposed along the Rio Grande may "cut farmers off from prime farmland close to the water," but that's the way things go in our ever-accelerating era of dromological conflict:

The fence would be at least 15 feet high and capable of withstanding a crash of a 10,000-pound vehicle going 40 mph, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

And Boeing's virtual border fence is sending border agents scurrying after raindrops and whirling leaves:

“When you promise to have a screen in a car that’s supposed to help you chase aliens and you find out you’re chasing raindrops, it causes skepticism,” Richard Stana, director of Homeland Security and Justice issues at the Government Accountability Office, told the House Homeland Security Committee on Oct. 24....

Then again, maybe it's just as well that all these fences are ill-conceived or defective, given that a secure border would be bad for business:

"Building a wall in and of itself is not the solution, we know that. Our economy would not respond very well to that, that's not the goal of our program."

(Ilustration at top: "Security Fence" by Rodger Roundy, 2006.)

Recording Angels

This afternoon, after taking a good stiff dose of tenocyclidine and striking my forehead robotically with a ballpeen hammer for the better part of an hour, I read an article by Gail Russell Chaddock and became convinced that Mike Huckabee is the ideal person to lead our troubled nation:

Huckabee is shaping his come-from-behind campaign on the same principle that grew the Church at Rock Creek from a few dozen people in 1996 to more than 5,000 today: Every life has value – and don't count anyone out.

This, Ms. Chaddock points out, is a message that can't help but resonate with "values voters" (an eccentric but politically significant subculture whose vote - unlike yours or mine - is strongly influenced by things they believe about stuff).

There's a lot more to Huckabee than that, though. He's guided by moral absolutes, and he's a "conciliator" with "a great sense of humor." He grew up poor, and "set up a 24-hour broadcast ministry." He understands the problems average people face, and strives to criminalize abortion.

Better yet, in an age when American presidents are all too willing to let their resolve be shaken by empirical evidence of their own failings, we can count on Huckabee to measure his accomplishments against nothing but his own sense of self-satisfaction:

"He felt that God wanted him to run for the Senate. I, too, felt that that was what he was supposed to do," says his wife, Janet, in an interview. "We didn't have a Plan B" when he lost, she adds. "But you can't second guess something when you think you've done the right thing. You have to make the decision and have peace about it. That's where your faith comes in."

Faith is also the basis of Huckabee's preternatural empathy with the downtrodden:

Put in the terms of his faith: It's the Golden Rule in action.

This is what allows Huckabee to feel the sinner's soul-deep craving for punishment as if it were his own, and to fulfill it:

Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas today refused to authorize a Medicaid payment for an abortion for a 15-year-old girl whose stepfather has been charged with incest, despite a Federal judge's order that such payments were required by Federal law.

It's a little odd that Ms. Chaddock chose not to mention this episode in the course of her otherwise uncompromising profile. Then again, maybe it's not really relevant. After all, we have it on excellent authority that Huckabee's a "conciliator."

Meanwhile, Governor Matt Blunt of Missouri is conducting an unbiased scientific probe into the insupportable horrors of the Abortion Holocaust:

The task force was conceived by John McCastle, president of Alliance for Life-Missouri, who recruited many of the group’s members. Among the questions McCastle poses: Does abortion lead to crime?

McCastle draws that question from unspecified studies, which he says suggest an overwhelming majority of women prisoners have had abortions.

But people in prison typically have numerous problems. Determining whether abortion is a cause, rather than an effect, could be challenging.

After Ms. Chaddock's rather one-sided profile of Huckabee, you can't help but be impressed by AP's presentation of both sides of the argument: Did these women have abortions because they had problems, or do they have problems because they had abortions? Teach the controversy!

In other news, only 37 percent of Fox News viewers describe themselves as pro-life.

(Illustration: "The Recording Angel" by Elihu Vedder, 1883.)

Poems of Force

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Locked Into Concrete

Randal O'Toole moistens a finger, thrusts it into the prevailing political breeze, and concludes that the time is right for yet another attack on the theory and practice of planning:

After 30 years of looking at government plans -- forest plans, park plans, transportation plans, city plans, state plans, all kinds of plans -- I've realized all government planning is bad.

If you're thinking back to your last interstate drive, or subway ride, or trip to a national park, and worrying that O'Toole is painting with a rather broad brush, think again. Indeed, if there's one thing in the world this genial man dislikes, it's oversimplification:

Cities, forests and so on are just too complicated to plan, so [planners] oversimplify, and since they don't pay the costs of their mistakes, they don't have an incentive to try to get it right.

One might just as easily say that cities are too complicated not to plan. But for now, we'll take O'Toole's argument at face value (except for the part about there being no incentive for good urban planning, which is utterly demented horseshit).

How do we solve the problems caused by our all-too-human lack of omniscience? Why, nothing could be easier!

I'm arguing that we need to stop planning. We need to repeal planning laws. Congress and the states should stop passing new planning laws.

That may seem impetuous to some readers, and agonizingly stupid to others. But consider this chilling fact: planning will never lead to an ideal outcome for every single resident of a city:

[C]ities are really, really complicated organisms. They consist of hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Each of those people has different tastes, different travel needs, different housing needs and desires. It's impossible -- literally impossible -- to plan to the level of detail to make sure that everybody achieves what they need and want.

Well, yes. But that's not what planning is intended to do. And you'd have to be pretty fucking silly to imagine that any system could ensure "that everybody achieves what they need and want." You might as well argue that medicine is a failed project because it can't fulfill the public's demand for eternal life.

The fact that "most Americans prefer to live in a house with a yard" is interesting in psychological terms. But it doesn't have much to do with what's possible in the real world. Land and water are limited resources, last time I checked, and they're vulnerable to human activities. When you refuse to acknowledge those facts, as cornucopian goofballs like O'Toole have an unhappy tendency to do, you forfeit your right to accuse anyone else of oversimplification. And when you do acknowledge them, as sane people must, planning begins to seem like something of an...obligation.

O'Toole also argues that government planning is driven (unlike the planning of multinational corporations, I presume) by financial and political interests:

When government writes a plan, that plan gets locked into concrete because immediately special-interest groups consisting of people and businesses that benefit from that plan form to make sure that the plan never changes. So it becomes extraordinarily difficult to change the plan no matter how mistaken and costly it turns out to be.

And that, boys and girls, is how our nation came to be saddled with the vast terra mortua of Central Park, and why the Grand Canyon remains tragically undammed to this day.

That settles it, I guess. We can't plan our communities, the pretty conceits of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa or Christopher Wren or Baron Haussmann or Daniel Burnham or the Shakers notwithstanding. And we can't change how and where we want to live, which is as eternal as our love of Beauty and Truth. You can't fight human nature, although it's human nature to try.

The interesting thing is, every argument O'Toole makes against planning could just as easily be made against political involvement per se, which is probably not an accident. What he's actually attacking - much like an assassin who pretends to be a bodyguard - is personal responsibility and personal freedom. Instead of engaging ourselves, for better or worse, with real-world issues like carrying capacity and resource depletion, we're commanded to turn our troubles over to a higher authority, and let hierophants like O'Toole interpret the resulting signs and wonders. Good citizenship is simply a matter of going along with whatever O'Toole and his ilk claim is "good for business"; follow this splendid principle, and you're guaranteed a moral victory no matter what sort of misery you bring upon yourself and others.

This astonishingly weird and infantile approach to our collective Short Life of Trouble isn't liberating, except to those of us for whom infantilization is liberation. Even if planning were just as bad as O'Toole says, it'd still be morally preferable to free-market fundamentalism, if only to the extent that it prevents us from blaming our problems on "market forces."

(Illustration by Jules Guerin, from The Plan of Chicago by Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, 1909.)

My Appointed Rounds

CKR on the “ticking time-bomb" scenario that supposedly justifies legalizing torture:

The simple and justifiable response to the extreme scenario, whatever its details, is that the person deciding to use torture assumes responsibility for his actions. Later examination of the scenario determines whether or what punishment is suitable. Making law to suit the most extreme situations is always a bad idea.

Bryan Finoki on Camp Justice:

‘Camp Justice’ is – to its credit – just what it says it is: justice in the form of a camp. There is absolutely no pretense here whatsoever, nor can it be mistaken for anything else either, really, which is partially what makes it so disturbing. Not to mention how obnoxious and arrogant it is in its crude declaration of itself.

Question Technology on "techno-globalization hype" circa 1920, which includes this timely quote from George Orwell:

Reading recently a batch of rather shallowly optimistic 'progressive' books, I was struck by the automatic way people go on repeating certain phrases which were fashionable before 1914. Two great favourites are the 'abolition of distance' and the 'disappearance of frontiers'. I do not know how often I have met with statements that 'the aeroplane and the radio have abolished distance' and 'all parts of the world are now interdependent'.

Smokewriting on Richard Dawkins and the Sokal Hoax:

The strategy Sokal and Bricmont employed in carrying out this assault, and which Dawkins (whose entire review amounts to little more than fawning submission to the argument from authority) takes as some sort of model of academic practice, basically runs as follows.

1. Take a short extract from a text, chosen more or less at random. I have selected Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole.

The feeling that the world is a limited whole is the mystical feeling.

2. Say ‘what the fuck was that about?’


3. Wait to be accepted as a new intellectual authority, whose name defenders of the Enlightenment everywhere can invoke in order to shut people up.

Roy Edroso on the poverty of conservatarian conspiracy theory:

Ad agencies don't get their strategies from Satan or the Democratic Party -- they get them from market data, laboriously collected and analyzed. And they employ them because they bring in money.

Conservatives often seem to miss, when raging about the stuff on their teevees, that it's really their beloved Invisible Hand that's slapping them in the face.

Last, but assuredly not least, The Disposal of Surplus Sodium, 1947. (Via Danger Room.

(Photo at top by Amy Stein, via Coudal.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

We have greeted great horned idols,
Thrones starry with luminous jewels,
Figured palaces whose fairy pomp
Would be a dream of ruin for a banker,

Robes which make the eyes intoxicated;
Women with tinted teeth and nails
And cunning jugglers caressed by Chromodoris annae.

(Photo by Richard Seaman.)

Friday Hope Blogging

The House has passed a bill that would drive a stake through the black heart of the General Mining Law:

A measure that would amend the General Mining Law of 1872 to establish environmental protections and eliminate land patenting passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday.

Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo, voted with the 244-166 majority and hailed the legislation for its environmental protections and reclamation requirements on hard-rock mining.

The act would prevent the sale of federal lands to miners, and force them to pay royalties on gross income from mining, which would go to a clean-up fund. (Bush claims he'll veto it, of course.)

Congress also seems to be willing to fund Amtrak:

The Senate passed legislation boosting Amtrak funding, as passenger rail is seen as part of the solution for global warming, traffic congestion and high oil prices....The bill changes the Amtrak debate by setting a goal for the passenger railroad to improve train service rather than to achieve financial self-sufficiency.

A garbage-burning stove could simultaneously reduce pollution in Kenya, and save its trees:

Through trial and error, the developers of the oven used technology that can produce temperatures of up to 930 degrees F., enough to burn many of the hazardous pollutants.

It uses a superheated steel plate inside the incinerator box to vaporize drops of water. The oxygen released then helps burn discarded "sump" oil from vehicles – itself a pollutant in the slums – driving temperatures higher.

A Chinese man claims to have invented a battery-recycling machine:

His machine distills the mercury from the batteries, then separates out the zinc, iron, and manganese for reuse. “Even if the batteries don’t pollute the environment, used batteries should still be recycled for the purpose of reusing resources,” said Wang.

He predicts it would cost roughly 2.5 million RMB (roughly US$350,000) to manufacture his machine on a larger scale.

In the wake of Uganda's ban on plastic bags, citizens are collecting discarded bags and making useful things out of them:

[L]ocal and international NGOs are helping Ugandans in a suburb of the capital city of Kampala to collect plastic bags and turn them into items like baskets, handbags, shoes and roofing tiles. The material would otherwise be left to clog drainage systems, contributing to flooding, or hurt livestock who eat and digest them.

In related news, DIY Life explains how to knit using plastic bags as yarn (link via Red State Green).

In other recycling news, Treehugger reports on a new line of designer clothing made from rejected Goodwill donations, and a UK retailer's attempt to recover "over-loved" sex toys. And Bill McKibben discusses waste-heat recovery:

A few years ago, a predecessor energy-recycling company installed this kind of equipment on the smokestacks of the plant's coke ovens. In 2004, this single steel plant generated roughly the same amount of clean energy as was produced by all of the grid-connected solar collectors throughout the world. Casten's company estimates that recycling waste heat from factories alone could produce 14 percent of the electric power the U.S. now uses. If you took much the same approach to electric generating stations you could, says Casten, conceivably produce the same amount of energy we use now with half the fossil fuel.

ENN has an interesting article on the economics of alternative energy in the Caribbean, which has some of the highest energy prices in the world:

In the Caribbean, PV solar systems are already getting close to the cost of generating electricity from fossil sources because of the intense sunshine and high cost of diesel, Once the production cost of PV solar systems further decreases, they will create savings for their owners. This will likely induce a massive breakthrough.

An even more rewarding source of solar energy in the Caribbean are solar water heaters. They produce abundant hot water and the installed cost can be as low as $800 for a 50 gallon system. In many cases they pay for themselves in two to three years, yet they are far from popular.

In New Delhi, meanwhile, "solar water heating systems are now mandatory for all hotels, hospitals, nursing homes, and commercial buildings."

Each 1,000 residential systems (of 100 L per day capacity) is expected to reduce peak electricity demand by 1 MW, a significant figure for a city whose energy demand is constantly increasing. When all city hospitals and hotels install solar water heating systems, the Power Department expects to reduce demand by 200 MW!

With that in mind, have a look at this.

IBM claims to have found a way to turn semiconductor wafers into solar panels:

The new process uses a specialized pattern removal technique to repurpose scrap semiconductor wafers -- thin discs of silicon material used to imprint patterns that make finished semiconductor chips for computers, mobile phones, video games, and other consumer electronics -- to a form used to manufacture silicon-based solar panels.

American cities are increasingly willing to consider dimming their lights overnight:

The International Dark-Sky Association in Tucson, which promotes better outdoor lighting, is intent on making the Milky Way visible to more people across the USA. It's starting to work.

Cities like Hilton Head Island, S.C.; Harmony, Fla.; and Jackson, Wyo., could soon become dark enough to join Flagstaff, Ariz., as the only dark-sky cities, says David Crawford, co-founder of the association.

The Deccan Herald reaffirms the efficacy of low-tech arsenic filters:

In recent years, about half a million villagers like Majeda have escaped the curse of arsenic-tainted water by using the sono filter.

"I don't know anyone who is using this filter who is still living with arsenic," said Abul Hussam, the inventor of the technology, speaking to AFP by telephone from his home in the eastern US state of Maine.

There's reportedly been a breakthrough in treating the fungal infection responsible for the worldwide die-off of amphibians:

Chloramphenicol, currently used as an eye ointment for humans, may be a lifesaver for the amphibians, they say.

The researchers found frogs bathed in the solution became resistant to the killer disease, chytridiomycosis.

Scientists are recording manatee sounds in hopes of preventing them from being killed and injured by boats:

“We will have a detailed picture,” said Athena Rycyk, a doctoral student at Florida State University working with Nowacek. “We will be able to ask questions like, what does a 20-foot boat traveling 200 meters from a manatee swimming in six feet of water sound like? This can help us determine what, if any, acoustical cues manatees do or do not react to.”

You can listen by clicking here.

Researchers have been trying to figure out whether African villagers could use bee sounds to protect their crops from elephants:

The Oxford team set up concealed loudspeakers in trees where elephants regularly came to find shade.

While the animals rested, researchers played either buzzing sounds recorded at beehives, or a control sound of white noise. The buzzing clearly had the animals concerned. Ninety-four percent of the elephant families left the tree within 80 seconds of hearing bee sounds, nearly half of the time at a run.

This makes me curious about how long, in an era of extinctions, such cues would remain effective after the disappearance of a given animal. But that's a rumination for another, less festive day. Getting back to the story, the fact that elephants would soon become accustomed to the buzzing has led to discussion of beehive fences:

[T]he passage of a hungry elephant would trigger bees to start flying and buzzing, giving the animal cause to turn and not come back.

One experimental set-up involves suspending a chain of hives from stanchions, linked together by wires which would be disturbed by an elephant's leg.

I'm pleased to announce that the world's hottest chile pepper has been discovered:

In replicated tests of Scoville heat units (SHUs), Bhut Jolokia reached one million SHUs, almost double the SHUs of Red Savina, which measured a mere 577,000.

One faction of the Klan is protesting another:

Ken Mier, who described himself as an investigator for the Alabama Ku Klux Klan and the national office of the Ku Klux Klan LLC, said in an e-mail to The Cullman Times that his group is against the tactics of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which held an anti-immigration protest last month in Athens.

"We are opposed to the ignorance and stupidity as displayed by the individuals that thumbed their nose at the area churches by continuing to use racial slurs, threats and avoided Christian deportment," he said.

Or, as the Klansmen on Reno 9/11 would say, "We're not burning a cross...it's a T, for 'tolerance'!"

Bruce Schneier alerts me to a fascinating paper on architecture and paranoia:

(In)Security questions the ideas of freedom, security, fear and complacency within the United States, and challenges our nation’s current philosophy that security = freedom. The project’s aim is to invent a new barricade vocabulary that can be applied to each of the existing security checkpoints, creating viable security alternatives while simultaneously maintaining their visibility, and prodding people to ask themselves just how much of their personal freedom they are willing to relinquish in order to assuage their fears.

Four security barricades were conceived. By creating thresholds into and throughout the district, (In)Security sets the tone for the experiences within this walled city. During the design process, archaic and contemporary methods of fortification were researched. Each barricade is an investigation of both fortification and subversion; designing for the defense of each checkpoint, while simultaneously attempting to undermine it's perceived raison d'être through a means of confrontation, provocation, or absurdism.

Here's a description of one such barricade:

A set of five, staggered, steel prongs reaches upward out of a ridged cor-ten plate, meeting pedestrians at face level. The tectonic hybrid of tire spikes and medieval Abbatis castle fortifications, their precise arcs allow for only shallow intrusion into existing street infrastructure. As a vehicle approaches, the prongs retract. A slow, mechanical clanking of a single gear alerts those nearby that the gate is opening. The prongs in turn emerge from the opposite side acting as a lock system, restraining the vehicle for inspection. After the vehicle is cleared for entry, the prongs then retract in the opposite direction allowing, the vehicle access, and resetting themselves to their initial positioning.

A nice idea, I think.

Smart Mobs suggests that you click here to test your vocabulary and provide rice to needy countries. Make of this what you will.

An important pre-Columbian site has been discovered in Puerto Rico:

The archaeologists believe the site in southern Puerto Rico may have belonged to the Taino or pre-Taino people that inhabited the island before European colonization, although other tribes are a possibility. It contains stones etched with ancient petroglyphs that form a large plaza measuring some 130 feet by 160 feet, which could have been used for ball games or ceremonial rites....

The petroglyphs include the carving of a human figure with masculine features and frog legs.

In other archaeological news: vampirism in New England.

"When the grave was opened, JB's skull and thigh bones were found in a skull and crossbones pattern on top of his ribs and vertebrae, which was also rearranged."

I was completely floored, this week, by Brian Dettmer's Book Autopsies, whence comes the photo at top. And Luminous Lint has a marvelous exhibition of the photographs of Homer Sykes, which depict traditional British customs like the Haxey Hood Game:


You'll find plenty of interesting photos and other aesthetic flotsam at Dirty Beloved (via Things). And at Micscape, Richard Howey explores the "crystalline labyrinths" of Vitamin C:



At parenthetically, Angela waxes enthusiastic over color charts. Apropos of which, color mapping "reveals neurons of the CA1 area and their dendrites" in the brain of a mouse.


Also: 1960's Polaroid Pictures of Signs, a flickr set by Roadsidepictures. Photos by migrant workers at The Photo Essay. An amazing collection of Victorian ephemera at The Trade Card Place. Antique audio at Phonozoic. And 24 paintings by Sidney Nolan (including the instructive "Tarred and Feathered," 1946).

A Delicate Matter

Longtime readers know how enthused I am about Greenland's bid to become the Tahiti of the Arctic. It's not just the idea of being served mango and breadfruit by zaftik Norse beauties wearing coconut-shell brassieres that appeals to me (though you can be sure that in that regard, I'm as human as the next gink). It's also my conscience, which cries to me in the wee small hours that the Greenlanders have suffered enough. Must they be blasted by subzero winds, or menaced by sleet, or annoyed by walruses simply because they have the misfortune to be situated in the realms of the Boreal Pole?

The New York Times seems to agree with me, to some extent. A new article by Sarah Lyall explains that Greenland is movin' up, yo, and no hataz need apply:

Kenneth Hoeg, the region’s chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests....

“The limiting factor for human survival here is temperature, and there’s a lot of benefits with a warmer climate,” Mr. Hoeg said. “We are on the frontier of agriculture, and even a few degrees can make a difference.”

After bringing Greenland's history to radiant life by describing Erik the Red as "pugilistic," Lyall explains that yes, a few degrees really can make a difference:

Climate is a delicate matter in a place like this. A degree more of warmth here, an inch less of rain there; these can have serious repercussions for a farmer eking out a living raising sheep on the harsh terrain.

Can you believe it? It's a real-life science-fiction world where shifts in climate actually have agricultural repercussions. Makes you glad to live in America, where rain invariably follows the plow (unless we sin against the Holy Spirit, as Atlanta did when it proclaimed itself "the city too busy to hate").

Lyall does note that

Greenland’s great ice sheet, a vast white landscape of 0.695 million square miles covering 80 percent of the island’s land mass, is melting rapidly, alarmingly, with repercussions not only for the traditional way of life on an island of 56,000 people, but also for the rest of the world. The more the ice melts, the higher sea levels will eventually rise.

In Greenland's semi-inhabited south, however, "the changes are more subtle and carry more promise."

More promise, that is, than extinctions, hunger, and worldwide flooding.

A Lesser Evil

Rumor has it that Beijing plans to clear away its air pollution with cloudseeding:

China has announced plans to induce rain in Beijing in the days before the 2008 Olympics in an effort to clean the air. Scientists are wary about the effects of the process.

It’s interesting to compare this story with a similar story from last year:

Rain won't be the only threat when the Olympics take place in 2008. Beijing's smog is as big a threat to China's image-makers as a few raindrops.

That's somebody else's problem, says weather guru Zhang: "I can't do anything about the air pollution."

The widespread practice of cloudseeding has led to disputes between Chinese cities. Oddly enough, the attempt to modify weather tends to make ordinary weather events seem sinister:

One Zhoukou official accused Pingdingshan of intercepting clouds that would probably have drifted to other places.

These rather surreal conflicts notwithstanding, the question of whether cloudseeding actually increases rainfall remains open:

A 2003 report by the US National Academy of Sciences…concluded that after over 30 years of trying, "there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification efforts."

I mention all this as the preamble to an interesting article on the ethics of geoengineering by Professor Steve Gardiner at the University of Washington, Seattle. Gardiner addresses Paul Crutzen’s argument that geoengineering may be a “lesser evil” than runaway climate change, and should accordingly be researched now in case it becomes “necessary” later:

It is not silly to think that substantial investment in geoengineering will itself encourage political inertia on mitigation and adaptation, and also facilitate the actual deployment of geoengineering "solutions". In short, Crutzen treats the decision to do research and the decision to deploy as if they were causally isolated. But it is not clear what justifies this assumption - indeed, the history of technological innovation suggests otherwise.

This is precisely correct, and it can’t be overemphasized. The similarity to space-based missile defense would be striking even if fanatical star warriors like Lowell Wood weren’t already positioning themselves to cash in on it. Money warps the perception of options like gravity warps space-time, and it’d be a shame if the self-justifying “necessity” of some geoengineering project caused us to overlook more practical adaptive tactics, like installing gills in Glenn Reynolds’ neck.

Gardiner also finds fault with the notion that geoengineering might be justified, despite its risks, by the state of exception in which the changing climate has placed us. The fact that we’ve put the world in grave danger doesn’t automatically ennoble whatever flailing attempt we make to remedy the situation, any more than our invasion of Iraq has ennobled torture or indefinite detention or the erection of security walls. As Gardiner notes, “there seems to be an important difference between preparing for an emergency and preparing for an emergency that is to be brought on by one's own moral failure.”

The most cogent argument to be made for geoengineering is that we’re already doing it, and may as well get good at it. It’s agreeably romantic to believe in Virgin Nature, but romanticism about virginity generally does more to enable brutality and exploitation than to oppose it.

On the other hand, “in for a penny, in for a pound” isn’t a very good guideline for ethical decision-making. And I’m not comforted by the idea that future climate change may result from techno-messianic busywork instead of shortsighted greed. Gardiner’s prescriptions – which include alternative energy research, “a massive international climate assistance and refugee programme,” and “a very substantial compensation fund” – seem a lot more sane, ethical, and achievable.

(This post originally appeared on 4/27/07. I hope to have time to write some new ones after the weekend.)

All-Day Suckers

Kevin Drum claims that “the fact that Iraq is a clusterfuck” doesn’t necessarily vindicate people who were against the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, and also doesn’t necessarily prove that preventive war is wrong (he initially says “preemptive,” but then corrects himself).

Meanwhile, Megan McArdle claims that “doves” don’t deserve any credit for being right about Iraq, because “nothing that they predicted came to pass”:

If I say we shouldn't go to dinner downtown because we're going to be robbed, and we don't get robbed but we do get food poisoning, was I "right"? Only in some trivial sense. Food poisoning and robbery are completely unrelated, so my belief that we would regret going to dinner was validated only by random chance. Yet, the incident will probably increase my confidence in my prediction abilities, even though my prediction was 100% wrong.

The differences here are subtle, but important. Drum is being a schmuck, in that he suggests the invasion would’ve been acceptable if the UN had okayed it. The problem is, preventive war is illegal, so Drum’s essentially arguing that the war would’ve been better if a) it hadn’t been illegal; or b) the UN had ignored the fact that it was illegal.

McArdle, by contrast, is either lying or nuts. Plenty of people on the left predicted treasury-draining cronyism, insurgency, sectarian violence, civil war, a bumper crop of new al-Qaeda recruits…you name it. Atrios offers one example. There are others. The problem wasn’t a lack of informed or even prescient dissenters; the problem was that in the rare cases where they received any attention or airtime, they were presented as charter members of Saddam’s shoeshine brigade.

Who cares, though? The important thing is, people like McArdle and Drum were wrong for the right reasons. Sure, they may’ve been too naive, careless, cowardly, ignorant, or idealistic to be suspicious of BushCo’s motives or methods or lack of evidence. But at least they weren’t cynical (not about anyone who mattered, anyway).

Better yet, they didn’t fool around with giant puppets, or stride around on stilts while wearing rainbow-colored wigs. They kept their dignity. And isn’t that what this is all about, in the end?

I was a good deal less reasonable, I’m sad to say, in that I noticed that the people who wanted to invade Iraq were, by and large, war profiteers and former Iran-Contra figures. I found this more frightening than Saddam's balsawood drones, just as I'd previously found Elliot Abrams' whitewashing of the El Mozote massacre more frightening than the Sandinistas' prospective invasion of Harlingen, Texas.

In my admittedly extremist opinion, no one who’s unfamiliar with the background of these people has any business offering opinions about current American politics. And no one who is familiar with them could believe in good faith that their peculiar combination of postmodern theatrics and old-school racketeering would lead to anything but blood-drenched disaster in Iraq.

The Bush administration and its pet advisors are people who've demonstrated over the course of several decades that they can’t sneeze without costing the taxpayers billions, and can’t open their mouths without getting innocent people killed. They’ve been morally or factually wrong on almost every important issue of our time, from apartheid to SDI to public health. But they’re never so wrong, never so dishonest, never so dangerous, and never so deserving of pitiless, unyielding skepticism as when they propose to start wars.

I know it's not considered polite to say so, but political commentators who claim not to know this are either woefully ignorant dupes, or flat-out liars. Either way, they’re a danger to themselves and others, and don’t deserve to be taken seriously on any level. At least, not without first going through the rigorous public ritual of truth-telling, apology, repudiation, and atonement that we normally demand from, say, sexually indiscreet beauty pageant winners.

And even that’s not quite enough, really. Personally, I’m tormented by my knowledge that I could’ve and should’ve done more to stop this war before it started. The number of Iraqis we’ve killed thusfar weighs on my conscience, and makes me feel that I have blood on my hands. That’s one reason why I’m horrified by Drum’s casual claim that he turned against the war partly because “Bush wasn't serious about postwar reconstruction.”

The problem isn’t that Bush didn’t follow through on reconstruction; the problem is that commentators like Drum were foolish and ignorant enough to imagine that he might. That foolishness, that ignorance - that lack of seriousness - has helped, however tangentially, to kill and cripple a huge number of Americans and Iraqis.

It doesn’t mean that these commentators are unforgivable, necessarily. But it does mean that they should avoid abstracted, self-serving, pseudorationalist posturing like recovering alcoholics avoid bars.

And yet, Drum somehow finds it seemly to slap Atrios on the wrist for failing to devise a really airtight critique of the Bush Doctrine. As Iraq spirals out of control, he seems to want some acknowledgement of the fact that if everything had been completely different, he would’ve been right.

Iraq isn’t just a “clusterfuck.” That's a tough-sounding word, maybe, but it’s really just abstract, escapist bullshit. What’s happening in Iraq is murder, with malice aforethought, and it was enabled to a great extent by the casual contempt of people like Kevin Drum for the rule of law. Of all the political decisions an educated, intelligent person could’ve made in the last six years, the decision to support the Iraq War was by far the most serious. And if you got it wrong - if you helped, however modestly, to get us where we are today - you made just about the worst mistake you could’ve made, as an American and as a human being.

UPDATE: Thers has come up with a clever joke about Richard Cohen; see if you can divine its grain of deadly truth.

Cohen walks out into the street wearing a paper bag over his head. He gets run over by a bus. When he wakes up in the hospital a month later, he says, "who could ever have seen it coming!" And everyone laughs as the sitcom ends and the credits roll.

(This post originally appeared on 1/17/07.)

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of Chromodoris hintuanensis
and quick surprise.

Friday Hope Blogging

Everything old is new again! AIDG Blog reports on a hyperefficient engine built with existing GM parts:

[H]is conversions consist almost entirely of taking stock GM parts [emphasis] and snapping them together in clever new ways. “They could do all this stuff if they wanted to,” he tells me, slapping on a visor and hunching over an arc welder. “The technology has been there forever. They make 90% of the components I use.”

An African man has built a helicopter from scrap parts:

Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi of the Kano Plains of Nigeria who has built a working helicopter over the last 8 months using scrap aluminum and parts from a Honda Civic, an old Toyota and from the remains of a crashed Boeing 747.

Also from Afrigadget, an interesting version of the horse and buggy:

Fitted with a solar panel that charges a 12 volt battery under the driver’s seat, the “HAPPY” becomes an independent, sustainable source of energy that powers cell phone connectivity, front and rear emergency lights and a small neon tube at night. Add a water filtration system, and the “HAPPY” doubles as a multi functional mobile business unit, that can empower an entrepreneurial owner, to generate income from it as a fresh water outlet, a mobile phone kiosk or a spaza shop – even after dark.

Israel is turning a dump into a recycling-themed park, complete with this scenic arch made of plastic bottles:


The historical and philosophical overtones of this article are a bit disturbing, overall, but I did like the stuff about benches made of crushed soda cans. (See also The City Museum, in downtown St. Louis.)

A more modest approach to recycling involves using old chewing gum to create street receptacles for old chewing gum:

Anna Bullus’s Bubble Gum Bin is made from Gumnetic, a new biodegradable material she developed made from sterilized used chewing gum and bio resin. The bin keeps chewing gum litter from our sidewalks and shoes and when full, the entire container is recycled to make even more bins. How’s that for cradle-to-cradle?

In a very early edition of FHB, I lamented "cases in which 'progress' causes people to abandon a technology before it's perfected," and discussed improvements that were being made to sails, so I was pleased to read Inhabitat's post on the KiteShip:

[C]ompany executives have announced a potential partnership with four shipping companies to build a $2 million, 13,000-square-foot kite to help haul ships as large as 400 feet long.

I was also fascinated, this week, by the recreation of the Great Squirt, an irrigation device depicted in a 1577 tome called The Gardener's Labyrinth:

Using traditional oak carpentry and leather valves and wooden pipes, it was built as closely to Hill's references as possible," he said.

"The machine is essentially a rudimentary" pump in a large oak barrel.

Researchers are investigating the alleged antimicrobial properties of French clay:

French clay that kills several kinds of disease-causing bacteria is at the forefront of new research into age-old, nearly forgotten, but surprisingly potent cures. Among the malevolent bacteria that a French clay has been shown to fight is a "flesh-eating" bug (M. ulcerans) on the rise in Africa and the germ called MRSA, which was blamed for the recent deaths of two children in Virginia and Mississippi.

"There are very compelling reports of clay treating infections, but that's anecdotal evidence, not science," said Lynda Williams, an associate research professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, Tempe. Williams is coordinating three teams of U.S. researchers (at ASU, USGS, and SUNY-Buffalo) studying healing clays under a two-year, $440,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health-National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Her ASU colleague Shelley Haydel is lending her expertise in clinical medicine to perform the microbiological research.

In Montana, a dead stream seems to be coming back to life:

Silver Bow Creek, contaminated for more than a century by tailings and other mine waste, appears to be responding to environmental cleanup.

Recently, Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks' employees found populations of live trout in the creek, once considered a dead stream.

The inventory revealed a larger presence of trout — including westslope cutthroat — than has been in Silver Bow Creek for about 120 years, Joel Chavez, who is managing the creek restoration project for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

Scientists have discovered an enormous flock of sociable lapwings:

The RSPB’s Dr Rob Sheldon...said: “This discovery is something we didn’t dare dream of. The sociable lapwing is one of the rarest birds on earth and suddenly it’s been found in these large numbers.

“It shows just how important both Kazakhstan and Turkey have become for the survival of this species. The next step is to protect the bird, both on its breeding grounds and at all the key sites on its migration route.”

And a new population of the critically endangered Iberian lynx has been found in Spain:

It appears that the new population was discovered in previously unsurveyed estates in Castilla - La Mancha (Central Spain). This Iberian community is one of the most sparsely populated of Spain's autonomous communities.

At present, the exact numbers and location of the newly discovered population are being kept confidential, but the population is thought to be made up of both adults and cubs.

WorldChanging discusses hopes for biomimetic solar cells:

As a university write-up of the research says, "Nature produces silica on a scale of gigatons." The sponge's secret is molecular templating, which Morse and colleagues are learning to imitate. Technology Review reported that "Morse and colleagues have made more than 30 types of semiconductor thin films and tested their photovoltaic properties. They are now working to incorporate the semiconductors into functional solar cells."

In other news, Berkeley, CA plans to finance solar panels for thousands of residents:

The City Council will vote Nov. 6 on a plan for the city to finance the cost of solar panels for property owners who agree to pay it back with a 20-year assessment on their property. Over two decades, the taxes would be the same or less than what property owners would save on their electric bills, officials say.

An NYC apartment complex is using ladybugs for pest control:

Some 720,000 [ladybugs] were released by groundskeepers at the complex, which occupies 18 square blocks northeast of First Avenue and East 14th Street. The ladybugs are part of an effort by the complex’s new owners, Tishman Speyer, to move away from using chemical insecticides to protect the plants and grass that cover 40 acres there.

Pittsburg Paints will reportedly offer no VOC paints in 2008:

Aside from being free of carcinogenic volatile organic compounds, the paints are pigmented to echo the growing interest in the ecological and environmental lifestyle choices and themes.

Greg Harman explains why San Antonio’s coal- and nuke-loving CPS Energy “must die”:

A collection of reports released this year argue that a combination of ramped-up efficiency programs, construction of numerous “combined heat and power” facilities, and installation of on-site renewable energy resources would allow the state to avoid building new power plants. Texas could save $73 billion in electric generation costs by spending $50 billion between now and 2023 on such programs, according to the research group. The group also claims the efficiency revolution would even be good for the economy, creating 38,300 jobs.

A high-desert straw-bale building has won LEED gold certification:

Resource- and energy-efficient, the Santa Clarita Transit Maintenance Facility designed by HOK exceeds California Energy Efficiency Standards by more than 40 percent, securing a new standard for straw-bale in high performance building design.

Carmakers are reportedly taking a new look at the electric car:

[T]wo allied car makers, France's Renault SA and Japan's Nissan Motor Co., as well as Honda Motor Co...have expressed skepticism about the economic wisdom of hybrids and are talking up all-electric cars.

This is very interesting:

Dr. Tracey discovered that the vagus nerve speaks directly to the immune system through a neurochemical called acetylcholine. And stimulating the vagus nerve sent commands to the immune system to stop pumping out toxic inflammatory markers. “This was so surprising to us,” said Dr. Tracey, who immediately saw the potential to use vagus stimulation as a way to shut off abnormal immune system responses. He calls this network “the inflammatory reflex.”

Research is now underway to see whether tweaking the brain's acetylcholine system could be a natural way to control the inflammatory response.

In other medical news, a biotech company is producing an anti-malarial drug at an amazingly low price:

Keasling can chemically synthesize artemisinin. He feeds microbes sugar, and the microbes produce the drug....

The result of his work is that the price of artemisinin is dropping - quickly. To take that price drop to market, Keasling partners with Amyris Biotechnologies and OneWorld Health. He does this without patents and without royalties - open-source pharma, if you will.

The UK will offer vaccinations against cervical cancer to every young girl in the country:

Every girl in the UK aged 12 and 13 will be offered a vaccination to help protect them from developing cervical cancer, it was announced today.

The injections, to be rolled out by the Government from the start of the next school year, will protect the girls from human papillomavirus, known as HPV, which causes around 70 per cent of cervical cancer cases.

And in Scotland, every child will be given free school meals:

The Child Poverty Action Group hailed the move as a "massive step forward".

John Dickie, head of the campaign group in Scotland, said: "Universal free school meals could make a huge impact in tackling family poverty and improving children's health and ability to learn.

In America, meanwhile, "60% said they would be willing to repeal tax cuts to help pay for a health-care program that insures all Americans." (9/11 changed everything!)

Time has a nice article on Freeplay Energy, a UK company that provides battery-free devices to the developing world.

"It all comes back to the problem of power. There is huge energy poverty in the world, and that energy poverty causes more pollution," says Rory Stear, founder of Freeplay Energy, a London-based company that makes hand-powered radios, lanterns, flashlights and portable generators — ingeniously simple products that provide affordable energy anywhere without requiring disposable batteries.

This is part of Time's massive feature on Heroes of the Environment, which is well worth a look.

The photo at the top is by Carol Golemboski. It's from her series entitled Psychometry, which recycles material from thrift stores and estate sales.

Speaking of recycled material: The Wilhelm Scream, via Effect Measure. And the BibliOdyssey Book, which I hereby command each and every one of you to buy. Now.


Coudal directs me to an astonishing gallery of Japanese manhole covers:



Also: Peter Schoeffer: Printer of Mainz. A plea for help from the Global Electrophonic Fireball Survey. The elusive dog’s nose fungus, "a large perithecial ascomycete." Cycles of Arthropods. And some gorgeous photographs of Prague by Stanko Abadžic.


And last, for CKR, a small collection of scientific illustrations from an Estonian schoolbook (via Things):