Government bureaucrats are incapable of doing anything right. That's why it's so shocking that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab wasn't prevented from boarding a plane in Amsterdam, as he would've been if the Obama administration were competent, which just goes to show that government-run healthcare can't possibly work, the VA and Medicare notwithstanding, especially since the USPS sometimes misdelivers packages during the Christmas rush.
That, more or less, is the considered opinion of Star Parker. If you want to understand it, all you have to do is "connect the dots."
First, think about this: How can a government that didn't adequately inspect Abdulmutallab's underwear hope to offer adequate healthcare?
Despite extensive information on the would-be terrorist, each piece of which was incriminating on its own, the man evaded a vast government bureaucracy and almost blew up a plane filled with Americans.
Yet, Democrats, with the health care bill they are now piecing together behind closed doors, will bring all American lives and health care under the purview and control of government bureaucracy.
Talk about an inability to connect the dots.
Unfortunately, that's just how bureaucracy is. Unless we're talking about corporate bureaucracy, in which case we need to remember that nobody's perfect. Just as white conservative men who go on shooting sprees tell us nothing about white conservative culture, corporate bureaucrats who make fatal errors while toying imperiously with people's lives tell us nothing about corporate bureaucracy.
The plain fact is that government is hopelessly unreliable and untrustworthy, except when it comes to administering the death penalty, bombing foreign capitals, and regulating our sex lives. To deny this is to be an idealist of the worst sort.
Obama himself admits that the horrific act of violence Abdulmutallab (would've) committed (if he'd been able to) is "not the fault of a single individual or organization, but rather a systematic failure across organizations and agencies." Like the existential threat of taxation, this underscores the need for spontaneous collective action:
What saved the lives of innocent Americans were private citizens, using their own brains and initiative that acted to bring this terrorist down.
Think of the money and lives we'd save if we let airlines rent guns and Tasers to American air travelers, instead of relying on Interpol to protect them! And besides, who's gonna be better at screening airline passengers: a vast, dithering bureaucracy that's been corrupted by quotas and diversity training, or a spontaneously organized group of concerned citizens with an inbred skepticism of names like "Abdulmutallab"? I say we give obviously non-Islamic passengers access to metal detectors, specula, and bulletnosed flashlights, and let rational self-interest and the Wisdom of Crowds work their magic.
Parker goes on to report that during this past holiday season, a package she mailed went astray. Imagine that the USPS is the Obama administration, and the package is the physical well-being of your dimpled, golden-haired children, and you can see just how dangerous this error would be, if it actually were. And consider this: If you can't trust the government to deliver an autographed copy of Liberal Fascism to a centrist relative in Houston, how can you trust it with the health of your sigmoid colon? Connect the dots, people!
FedEx, by contrast, is a private company and never loses or misdelivers anything. Star Parker knows someone who heard this from his dentist, so that settles that.
None of which should be taken to imply that government is completely useless:
National security is a job of government.
We can only pray that these freedom-hating bean-counters will restrict their blinkered, incompetent, inefficient efforts to this fundamental task, before someone gets killed.
(Illustration via The Fed. Thanks to Abie for the reminder.)
Where, where shall I find, When winter comes, the flowers, And where the sunshine And Glossodoris cincta? Walls stand Speechless and cold, in the wind The weathervanes clatter.
U.S. EPA today proposed significantly tougher smog standards after reconsidering the George W. Bush administration's controversial 2008 regulations.
The draft rule released by EPA proposes to revise the two standards aimed at protecting public health and welfare to comply with recommendations made by the agency's science advisers. The Bush administration had rejected those suggestions when issuing the 2008 national air quality standards for ground-level ozone, or smog, drawing criticism and legal challenges from environmental and public health groups.
Similar EPA rulings may reduce pollution in Texas, in the holy name of Islamo-etatiste dirigisme:
For decades, national environmental activism has crashed into Texas' go-slow policies. Now the Obama administration wants much more action from Texas on clean air.
To some, it's an unprecedented and unfair use of federal muscle.
"It's just an approach that is – I'm sorry to use the word, but hostile," said Kathleen Hartnett White. She's a former chairwoman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality under Gov. Rick Perry....White said she suspects that predominantly Republican Texas might be a White House target. "Call it paranoia if you'd like to – Texas paranoia," she said.
To others, the EPA is just making up for having sleepwalked through the President George W. Bush years.
The administration is also toughening standards for oil and gas drilling:
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Wednesday that big oil and natural gas companies will no longer be "the kings of the world" like they were under the Bush administration, announcing new drilling policies to protect the environment on western federal lands....
Under the reforms, the department's Bureau of Land Management, which oversees onshore drilling activities, would take a more active role in deciding which parcels of federal lands should be leased instead of relying on energy companies to nominate the areas they want to explore.
The CIA has joined -- or rather, rejoined -- the Warming Cult:
[A] new data-sharing initiative between the CIA and top scientists...will use spy satellites and other CIA tools to help scientists figure out what climate change is doing to cloud cover, forests, deserts, and more.
The CIA collaboration isn’t entirely new — it was an ongoing project from 1992 until 2001, when the Bush administration shut it down. The original program, known as Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis (Medea), also used CIA tools to observe changes to the environment. Now that the Medea project has been restarted, scientists will try to continue research that has been left unfinished since 2001.
Obama has directed federal agencies to classify less information:
The new rules were outlined in changes Obama made to Executive Order 12958, which governs the management of classified information....
"I think the order will invigorate the declassification of historical records, and I hope that it will also prompt a new way of thinking about the classification of current records," Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, said....
Obama also ordered efforts to declassify hundreds of millions of pages of classified material be speeded up.
The United States and South Korea have dropped their respective HIV travel bans:
As of January 1st the HIV travel bans instituted in the United States and South Korea were lifted. President Obama first announced the end of the twenty-two year ban on visitors and immigrants entering the US in October. Michel Sidibe, UNAIDS Executive Director, called the development "a victory for human rights on two sides of the globe."
Two endangered birds have gained protection under the ESA.
As the result of a Center for Biological Diversity settlement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last June, a federal rule was finalized today to protect the Galápagos petrel and Heinroth’s shearwater as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. As part of the settlement, the Service also published proposed listing determinations for 12 birds from Peru, Bolivia, Europe, and the islands of French Polynesia.
The NOAA has proposed habitat protections for the leatherback sea turtle.
If approved later this year, the areas would be the first critical habitat for leatherbacks in the open ocean....Only nesting beaches on the U.S. Virgin Islands and nearby waters are currently protected.
A judge has overturned a plan to re-open ORV trails in the Mojave Desert.
An administrative law judge for the Interior Board of Land Appeals upheld the Center for Biological Diversity appeal of the Bureau of Land Management’s decision to open two off-road vehicle routes in desert tortoise habitat in eastern Kern County. The Bureau’s decision was tiered to the flawed West Mojave Plan, which was struck down in federal court last year. The two routes at issue in the Rand Mountains Management Area, an area of critical environmental concern, had been closed in 2002 to protect the imperiled desert tortoise from destructive off-road vehicle use that was tearing up the fragile desert habitat.
A study by the Earth Policy Institute updated yesterday revealed that while Americans purchased 10,000,000 cars in 2009, they actually ditched 14,000,000 cars. This decline in the US car fleet by 2% could be a great sign of what is to come in terms of transportation preferences for the US. 2009 was the first year since WWII that the number of cars scrapped exceeded the number of cars sold, and more importantly the EPI study predicts that this trend will continue at least through 2020. The US car fleet is currently at 246 million cars dropping down from 250 at the beginning of 2009.
An African inventor has designed a flat parabolic mirror:
Dominic has cut inch wide 2 foot long pieces of flexible acrylic mirrors and arranged them at specifically computed angles. When angled towards the sun, this creates a perfectly focused beam of light. This concentrated energy can be used to heat water in a pipe for numerous purposes including generating electricity. The beauty of this gadget is that
It is very cheap,
It can be quickly dismantled or moved,
It is easily transportable as it can be carried flat or in a tube,
It is easily repaired if broken as the individual mirror pieces can be replaced (rather than having to fix or replace an entire parabolic mirror).
Inhabitat discusses a solar energy storage system based on compressed air:
The system uses clean technology during the day to pump heated and compressed air into an airtight chamber, which is released through a turbine to create power when it is needed the most.
A new solar-based technology desalinates lakes and ponds.
Around the world, closed-basin lakes, like the Great Salt Lake, the Alton [sic] Sea, and the Aral Sea, are losing water as a result of human and natural processes. With no outflow and high salt and mineral saturation, these lakes, through drought and evaporation, are being transformed into highly saline pools and some, like Walker Lake in Nevada, have become toxic to aquatic life.
A new system, developed by a doctoral candidate at the University of Nevada in Reno, uses solar-heated ponds and an innovative membrane technology to rescue these lakes with low-temperature desalination.
Scientists are calling for an end to mountaintop removal mining. As David Roberts notes, this is a daring stance:
Let’s say you trundle a bunch of enormous industrial equipment into North America’s oldest mountains (an intact temperate ecosystem boasting rich biodiversity, including a number of endangered species), clear-cut the forests, blow millions of tons off the top of the mountains, dump the rubble into the pristine streams below, and carry out the coal you find on enormous trucks, at high speeds, on narrow roads, through some of America’s oldest communities.
Think that would cause any ecological or human damage? Hmm ...
It might seem obvious, but as the media will tell you, “opinions on shape of earth differ,” so it’s helpful that a group of scientists has come along to assess the existing body of research on the subject.
While we're on the topic of intellectual breakthroughs, Uganda's president apparently believes that executing gays may not actually be a very good idea:
A provision that would impose the death penalty for some gays is likely to be removed from the proposed legislation following opposition from Uganda’s president, the country’s ethics minister said Thursday.
President Yoweri Museveni has told colleagues he believes the bill is too harsh and has encouraged his ruling National Resistance Movement Party to overturn the death sentence provision, which would apply to sexually active gays living with HIV or in cases of same-sex rape.
The Obama administration has added language forbidding discrimination against gender identity to the federal jobs Website.
[C]ivil liberties and gender rights groups welcomed it on Tuesday as the clearest statement yet by the Obama administration that such discrimination in the federal workplace would not be accepted.
Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, said, “The largest employer in the country is doing what all the other large employers in the country are doing, so that’s really great news.”
The International Women's Health Coalition has compiled a list of the top ten wins for women's health and rights in 2009. It's well worth reading.
An immigration activist is using social networking technology to thwart Sheriff Joe Arpaio's "crime sweeps":
Every time word spreads that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is conducting one of his controversial crime sweeps, Lydia Guzman drives to the scene to see for herself.
The rumors often turn out to be false. But when they are true, Guzman, an advocate for immigrant and civil rights, springs into action, sending a wave of text messages to a wide network of contacts, who in turn forward the texts to their own contacts.
Guzman is the trunk of a sophisticated texting tree designed to, within minutes, alert thousands of people throughout the Valley to the details of Arpaio's crime sweeps, which critics contend are an excuse to round up illegal immigrants.
Guzman says the messages are part of a well-orchestrated effort to protect Latinos and others from becoming victims of racial profiling by sheriff's deputies. Deputies have been accused of stopping Hispanics, including U.S. citizens and legal immigrants, for cracked windshields and other minor traffic violations just to check their immigration status.
I'm pleased to say that this is not the worst of Arpaio's problems:
Two Maricopa County executives said Thursday they will appear before a federal grand jury next week to testify about allegations that Sheriff Joe Arpaio and others in his office have abused their power.
In related news, a new study quantifies the economic benefits of immigration reform:
[L]egalization of 12 million people who are already here in the United States would result in a $1.5 trillion increase in the GDP over the decade following implementation of the law. Taking a more lukewarm approach, that is, simply giving those folks a legal status with no path towards citizenship, cuts that benefit almost in half, but is still a shot in the arm to the tune of $792 billion over 10 years. In contrast, pursuing a mass deportation policy leads to a net loss of $2.5 trillion.
Planners are increasingly rejecting suburban cul de sacs:
Earlier this year Virginia became the first state to encourage walkable neighborhoods by limiting the use of cul-de-sacs. State rules now require that subdivisions have through streets connecting them to adjacent residences and shopping areas. Developments that ignore the new rules will be denied snowplowing and other state services. Research shows that neighborhoods with more street connections and intersections reduce car use. Some of the country's most progressive-minded cities, including Portland, Oregon, and Austin, Texas, have also made it difficult to build new cul-de-sac subdivisions....
All indications are that cul-de-sacs are less safe than pre-war neighborhoods layed out in the traditional grid. An article by Philip Langdon in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of New Urban News shows that, according California accident statistics, cul-de-sac neighborhoods see more car crashes than the denser pre-war neighborhoods. The older grid patterns also have quicker response times for fire trucks and other emergency vehicles. And accidents and crimes in the older neighborhoods are more likely to be reported faster since they have more people on the streets.
Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie (HZB), in cooperation with colleagues from Oxford and Bristol Universities, as well as the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, have for the first time observed a nanoscale symmetry hidden in solid state matter. They have measured the signatures of a symmetry showing the same attributes as the golden ratio famous from art and architecture.
Scientists who compare insect chirps with ape calls may look like they are mixing aphids and orangutans, but researchers have found common denominators in the calls of hundreds of species of insects, birds, fish, frogs, lizards and mammals that can be predicted with simple mathematical models.
Compiling data from nearly 500 species, scientists with the University of Florida and Oklahoma State University have found the calls of crickets, whales and a host of other creatures are ultimately controlled by their metabolic rates — in other words, their uptake and use of energy.
"Very few people have compared cricket chirps to codfish sounds to the sounds made by whales and monkeys to see if there were commonalities in the key features of acoustic signals, including the frequency, power and duration of signals," said James Gillooly, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the department of biology at UF's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a member of the UF Genetics Institute. "Our results indicate that, for all species, basic features of acoustic communication are primarily controlled by individual metabolism, which in turn varies predictably with body size and temperature. So, when the calls are adjusted for an animal's size and temperature, they even sound alike."
Apropos of which, a new technique measures the amount of disruption underwater noise causes to whale communication:
A small group of researchers, with Chris Clark of Cornell as the lead author, took a giant step forward in addressing the impacts of ocean noise on the communication ranges of whales. They came up with a clear and strikingly rigorous set of new metrics that will allow researchers and ocean planners to have a much more practical picture of how numerous noise sources combine to create cumulative impacts on acoustic habitat. The new approach centers on the “Communication Space” of individual animals, as well as groups, and provides an intuitively obvious way to both imagine and assess the effects of ocean noise – measuring the area in which an animal can hear or be heard by others of its species.
Scientists in Italy have reportedly used rattan to make synthetic bones:
Scientists at the Institute of Science and Technology for Ceramics in Faenza found that by heating rattan wood at high pressures while adding calcium and phosphate, they can create a synthetic for bone that is load-bearing, durable, and structured so much like real bone that blood and tissue cells have no problem treating it as if it were a continuation of the actual bone.
The material has been tested out successfully in sheep, finding that the material is so thoroughly accepted by the body that it became difficult to see the fuse where the synthetic bone ends and the real bone begins.
The Library of Congress has put thousands of historic texts online:
Nearly 60,000 books prized by historians, writers and genealogists, many too old and fragile to be safely handled, have been digitally scanned as part of the first-ever mass book-digitization project of the U.S. Library of Congress (LOC), the world’s largest library.
Barry Goldman is worried that we are becoming "a nation of fruitcakes." Once upon a time, y'see, Americans were reasonable and had a certain inborn respect for whatever authority they happened to find emotionally or intellectually or legally compelling. But nowadays, we're prone to syncretic religion and communication with the dead and Lord only knows what else.
A new poll by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life concludes: "Large numbers of Americans engage in multiple religious practices, mixing elements of diverse traditions. Many also blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs such as reincarnation, astrology and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects. And sizable minorities of all major U.S. religious groups say they have experienced supernatural phenomena, such as being in touch with the dead or with ghosts."
Shocking. It makes me long for the good old days, when Americans entrusted their souls to Madame Blavatsky, or the Mormons, or the Free Market, and the belief in ghosts was as rare as a sober Irishman.
On second thought, maybe the problem isn't simply that Americans believe outlandish things. Maybe it's that they can easily find confirmation of these beliefs on the Internets. It used to be that if you wanted to know the divine meaning of a monstrous birth in the next village, you had to buy a broadsheet from some itinerant peddler. Now, you can simply visit www.poughkeepsiedevilchild.com.
On third thought, maybe the problem is that "people feel entitled to make choices about things that used to be within the exclusive purview of the priestly class." The recent activities of Anne Hutchinson are a sobering example of this tendency, and a reminder that we who dwell in in these latter days must keep close watch against the spirit of Apostasy.
Then again, perhaps this national crisis really boils down to a lack of consensus. Perhaps the trouble is not so much that we embrace false beliefs, as that we don't embrace them unanimously.
This is genuinely scary. And it's scary in a new way. For the last several thousand years, large groups of human beings enjoyed consensus about the big questions. We may have believed that the universe rested on the back of a giant tortoise and the tortoise rested on the back of an elephant...but at least there was widespread agreement.
To be fair, some people "enjoyed" this consensus a bit less than others. But I suppose it served them right for feeling entitled to make choices about things that used to be within the exclusive purview of the priestly class. As John Winthrop wisely said, "Your conscience you must keep, or it must be kept for you."
Of course, the larger problem is that for the first time in recorded history, "we have no agreement on what constitutes a fact." As William of Ockham recently noted on his blog:
[I]t is absurd to claim that I have scientific knowledge with respect to this or that conclusion by reason of the fact that you know principles which I accept on faith because you tell them to me.
All the same, there's a lot to be said for accepting things on faith, so long as it leads to the sort of widespread agreement we enjoyed before the Internets came along and ruined everything.
We used to be a nation with a broad consensus. If you had a religious question, you asked a religious leader. If you had a scientific question, you asked a scientist.
And if you wanted to know something about history, you asked a historian, instead of cobbling together a bunch of harebrained bullshit in order to flatter your own hopelessly confused prejudices.
Those were great days, indeed. And their like will not be here again.
The climate denialism beat is kind of depressing, by and large, but it has brought me one great joy: Lord Christopher Monckton. Though I suppose there's at least as much "evidence" for his birth as there is for President Obama's, I prefer to believe that he sprang full grown into this world, after escaping from the pages of some unpublished manuscript by Flann O'Brien.
As evil or (to be fair) stupid as he is, it's oddly comforting that such a creature stalks abroad in our drab age. In Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics, a certain Colonel Thornton is annoyed by a friend's claim to have suffered a "broken head," and issues this rebuke:
I am the only man in England, Sir, that ever had a broken head, to live after it. I was hunting near my place in Yorkshire, when my mare threw me, and I was pitched head foremost upon a scythe which had been left on the ground. When I was taken up, my head was literally found to be cut in two, and was spread over my shoulders like a pair of epaulettes -- that was a broken head if you please, Sir.
Monckton is the nearest thing we have to Colonel Thornton, and I can't help but admire him for it.
He's also one of the most entertaining prose stylists of our time. Here, he explains that while markets may not be perfect, they're close enough for government work:
[I]n general the market is better at solving problems than the habitual but repeatedly failed dirigisme of the etatistes predominant in the classe politique today.
What equitable man or woman would neglect to asseverate likewise? Who among us is so far descended into the Tartarean depths of erreur or imbécillité as to confess the scantest incertitude anent this effulgent specimen of bon sens, or communis opinio? To traduce Monckton on this point, in some forlorn hope of abligating his inordinate labors in defense of harmonia mundi, were folly de jure and de facto. Surely we can all agree on this, ab intra and post coitum, if on nothing else.
Monckton has never been one to hide his lanterne under a bushel, and so he speaks warmly of his courage in "daring to oppose the transient (!) fashion for apocalypticism." Having taken this lonely stand for lux et veritas, to say nothing of the Historcial Perspective sub specie aeternitatis, he announces that OMFG climate alarmism is killing MILLIONS!!!111.
Worse yet, "this slaughter is founded upon a lie," unlike the good kind of genocide. (Or as Tertullian would put it, mea navis aëricumbens anguillis abundat.)
Apart from the conspiracy to commit wholesale murder on a global scale, Monckton also objects to "the goody-two-shoes EU," in which carbon trading has become "a giant financial fraud." This is due in part to the shameful money-lust of corporations, which, I'm sad to say, can be almost as greedy and unethical as climatologists when given a chance to dismantle capitalism.
This collusion between government and industry is a cruel blow against what Monckton calls "the little guy" (perhaps because "homunculus" has too many negative connotations...noblesse oblige and all that rot, don't you know).
Nota bene: Just 'cause he lolls around in his stately ancestral home drinking Legrand Armagnac 1956 and thumbing through his first edition of The Romance of Chastisement, don't go thinking that he's deaf to the mandrake shrieks of the oppressed, nor that he's unwilling to put his incomparable apparatus criticus at their disposal. A contrario: He will not rest until the jackboot of the biofuel industry has been removed from the honest throat of the Common Man, and replaced by the stylish Italian dress shoes of the oil industry.
The change will enable same-sex couples to adopt, apply for bank loans, inherit wealth and be included in the insurance policies of their spouse – rights they were denied under the civil unions allowed in the city.
"We are so happy," said Temistocles Villanueva, a 23-year-old film student, who celebrated the new legislation by kissing his boyfriend outside the city assembly.
The US Senate has confirmed the country's first openly gay US marshal:
Minneapolis assistant police Chief Sharon Lubinski has become the first openly gay U.S. marshal. The U.S. Senate confirmed the Green Bay, Wis. native to be the U.S. marshal for the Minnesota district. Last week’s confirmation also makes her the first female marshal in the state.
Apropos of which, Blog of Rights has a three-part post summarizing progress on LGBT issues in 2009. (You may also want to watch this.)
A new device uses GPS to lead desert-crossing immigrants to water:
The Transborder Immigrant Tool was developed by UC San Diego prof and activist Ricardo Dominguez and UCSD lecturer Brett Stalbaum. Both believe it will save the lives of hundreds of people who die each year during their trek across "Devil's Highway."
Here's how the tool works. The phone, loaded with free GPS software, displays a digital compass that locates water stations installed by John Hunter, founder of the Water Stations project. Stations that are too far will not be displayed. The phone pinpoints "safety sites" -- such as Border Patrol station, a clinic or a church -- and includes poetry written by Amy Carroll to "welcome you to the U.S," said Dominguez. Encrypted to avoid detection by authorities, phones are $30 and should be available by summer.
The Obama administration has reversed Bush's policies on habitat protection in Texas.
In response to a lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity, Citizen’s Alliance for Smart Expansion, and Aquifer Guardians in Urban Areas, the Obama administration agreed late Friday to reconsider critical habitat designation for 12 endangered Texas invertebrates, including three species from Comal Springs and nine species from caves in Bexar County....
The Center for Biological Diversity has been actively working to overturn Bush-era decisions limiting protection for endangered species, including suing to overturn decisions affecting 55 species. To date, this campaign has been highly successful, with the Obama administration agreeing to reconsider 45 of the 54 decisions, including the 12 Texas species today.
If you want to support this effort, you can make a donation here.
A new study emphasizes the importance of cross-border conservation efforts.
The study -- featured on the cover of a recent edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA -- found that there could be a $67-billion savings in costs if conservation efforts of endemic vertebrates were coordinated across all the highly threatened Mediterranean ecosystem, compared with an uncoordinated plan
Brazil has established nine new indigenous reserves in the Amazon:
On Monday, Brazil decreed nine new indigenous reserves covering 51,000 square kilometers (19,700 square miles) of the Amazon rainforest, an areas larger than Denmark or Switzerland, reports the AFP.
"We will never be able to do enough for the indigenous people," said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in a speech announcing the decree. "The debt is historic and we can never reimburse through money, we can only make concrete gestures...."
39 indigenous reserves have been decreed since 2007 and there are now 663 in Brazil, amounting to more than one million square kilometers. More than half the Brazilian Amazon is now under some form of protection.
Guyana has agreed to improve oversight of its gold mining industry:
As a part of a deal with Norway to preserve its rainforests, Guyana will step up oversight of its gold mining industry, which has been accused of causing significant environmental damage including deforestation and mercury and cyanide pollution.
"The recent agreement with Norway, through which Guyana receives payments to avoided deforestation and degradation, now puts a significant monetary and moral cost to any unnecessary degradation of forest areas for any purpose," reads a statement from the Office of the Prime Minister of Guyana.
The USDA is working with dairy producers to promote the adoption of manure-to-energy systems:
The US Department of Agriculture announced an agreement with U.S. dairy producers to accelerate adoption of innovative manure to energy projects on American dairy farms. The agreement represents a dynamic public/private partnership and is another demonstration of the Obama Administration's commitment to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases.
"This historic agreement, the first of its kind, will help us achieve the ambitious goal of drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions while benefitting dairy farmers," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
The Food and Drug Administration came down on Nestle earlier this month for marketing its childrens’ juice boxes as “medical” foods.
In a Dec. 3 letter, the FDA said the company mislabeled its Boost drink, which comes in flavors like chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, “as a medical food for the medical condition of ‘failure to thrive’ and also for ‘pre/post surgery, injury or trauma, chronic illnesses.’”
Inhabitat reports on a new breed of tiny photovoltaic cells.
The glitter-sized solar sequins are made from crystalline silicon and use 100 times less material to generate the same amount of electricity as standard solar cells made from 6-inch square solar wafers. Perfect for soaking up the sun’s rays on unusual shapes and surfaces, the solar cells are expected to be less expensive, more efficient, and have promising applications in textiles and clothing.
Manufacturers of the brominated flame retardant decaBDE have agreed to a three-year phaseout of the chemical:
The phaseout was announced on December 17, 2009, by EPA, along with the Louisiana company Albemarle, the Connecticut company Chemtura (previously Great Lakes Chemical Company), and the Israeli company ICL Industrial Products and its subsidiary Dead Sea Bromine Company. According to Dave Clary, vice president and chief sustainability officer for Albemarle, the manufacturers came to EPA proposing the voluntary phaseout. "It was an industry initiative," he said.
Here's my favorite part of the story:
While Albemarle and the other manufacturers continue to argue that decaBDE (also called decabrom) is safe, "we decided to spend our efforts in more positive ways developing new products, rather than spend them defending decabrom," Clary told EBN.
The EPA is also moving towards stricter regulation of several other chemicals:
As part of Administrator Lisa P. Jackson’s commitment to strengthen and reform chemical management, the US EPA today announced a series of actions on four chemicals raising serious potential health or environmental concerns, including phthalates. For the first time, EPA intends to establish a Chemicals of Concern list and is beginning a process that may lead to regulations requiring significant risk reduction measures to protect human health and the environment....
In addition to phthalates, the chemicals EPA is addressing today include short-chain chlorinated paraffins, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) and perfluorinated chemicals, including PFOA.
The White House is poised to order all federal agencies to evaluate any major actions they take, such as building highways or logging national forests, to determine how they would contribute to and be affected by climate change, a step long sought by environmentalists.
Unfortunately, new and existing wars probably won't count as "major activities."
France will compensate victims of its nuclear tests:
The French parliament has passed a law to compensate victims of nuclear tests in Algeria and the South Pacific, a response to decades of complaints by people sickened by radiation....
The text, hammered out with help from some victims' associations, recognises the rights for victims of France's more than 200 nuclear tests to receive compensation. About 150,000 people were on site for the 210 tests France carried out, both in the atmosphere and underground, in the Sahara Desert and the South Pacific from 1960 to 1996.
Quebec is the first Canadian province to adopt California's strict rules on auto emissions.
The new rules will come into effect on January 14 and will impose increasingly stringent limits on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from cars and light trucks made between 2010 and 2016 that are sold in the province.
For many centuries, canal boats were propelled by men, horses or mules on the towpath beside the water. Before diesel power took over, engineers developed several interesting methods powered by electricity: trolleyboats, floating funiculars and electric mules. Many of these ecological solutions could be applied today instead of diesel engines. Because of the very low energy requirements, they could easily be powered by renewable energy, generated on the spot by water turbines located at sluices.
Sections of Detroit are being converted to farmland:
"There's so much land available and it's begging to be used," said Michael Score, president of the Hantz Farms, which is buying up abandoned sections of the city's 139-square-mile landscape and plans to transform them into a large-scale commercial farm enterprise....
Although company officials declined to pinpoint how many acres they might use, they have been quoted as saying that they plan to farm up to 5,000 acres within the Motor City's limits in the coming years, raising organic lettuces, trees for biofuel and a variety of other things.
In related news, closed auto dealerships are increasingly being repurposed:
With hard times in the auto industry and car dealerships closing around the country, the gleaming showrooms that once featured next year's models are becoming this year's new store, restaurant, school, day care center or yoga studio....
Architects and historians say the shock that American automakers could go bankrupt has combined with depressed real estate values and enthusiasm for green energy to bring a unique level of interest to reusing showrooms.
People are reducing their reliance on cars to save money on gas and shrink their carbon footprint; they are renovating showrooms because relying on recycled water or solar energy makes it cheaper to renovate than to build new.
Philadelphia is looking for a better way to handle stormwater:
Philadelphia has a groundbreaking idea about what to do with stormwater: Use it to feed grass and trees instead of letting it rush into the sewers. The concept may seem obvious. But for most cities, a stormwater management plan that doesn't expand sewers or treatment plants is counterintuitive....
The plan involves replacing streets, parking lots and sidewalks with water-absorbing porous pavement, street-edge gardens and trees.
"We want to do anything we can do to return us as close as possible to the way nature intended the water cycle to be," said Howard Neukrug, director of the Philadelphia Water Department's watersheds office.
Best wishes for the coming year, and thanks for bearing with me through the last one.
(Photo at top: "The eerie Spitzer Space Telescope image shows infrared radiation from the well-studied Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) a mere 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. The two light-year diameter shroud of dust and gas around a central white dwarf has long been considered an excellent example of a planetary nebula, representing the final stages in the evolution of a sun-like star. But the Spitzer data show the nebula's central star itself is immersed in a surprisingly bright infrared glow. Models suggest the glow is produced by a dust debris disk. Even though the nebular material was ejected from the star many thousands of years ago, the close-in dust could be generated by collisions in a reservoir of objects analogous to our own solar system's Kuiper Belt or cometary Oort cloud. Formed in the distant planetary system, the comet-like bodies would have otherwise survived even the dramatic late stages of the star's evolution." Via NASA.)
Having written and deleted three ill-tempered preambles detailing my massive problems with the theory and practice of American liberalism, and suggesting that the trouble with our elected officials is not that they don't represent us, but that they represent too many of us too well -- particularly when they throw in the towel preemptively, after a meager effort, and pat themselves on the back for it -- I'll forego editorializing entirely and get straight to the good news.
Washington DC has decided that gay people have the same rights as everyone else.
The city council passed the measure Tuesday to legalize same-sex marriage in the city. Congress has final say over D.C.'s laws, however, so the mayor's signature doesn't mean the bill immediately becomes law.
New York is coming to a similar realization about transgendered people:
New York Governor David A. Paterson issued an executive order extending anti-discrimination policies to gender identity for state employees Wednesday.
“Governor Paterson has taken significant action to advance equality for all New York state employees,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “The ability to provide for our families is non-negotiable. We applaud Governor Paterson for his commitment to the LGBT community and look forward to working with fair-minded New York legislators to pass the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act which will protect private employees.”
The FY2010 Omnibus Spending Bill contains some good provisions:
The legislation eliminates traditional sources of funding for abstinence-only programs and instead provides funding for "a new evidence-based teenage pregnancy prevention initiative." The bill calls for $114.5 million to be appropriated for the new programs, which will include age appropriate and medically accurate information on both contraception and abstinence....
The District of Columbia also made major gains with the passage of the bill. A provision that would eliminate a long-time prohibition on using DC-raised monies for abortion assistance within the District is in the final legislation as well as a provision overturning a ban on medical marijuana in the District.
Female genital mutilation has been outlawed in Uganda under a bill passed unanimously by the Parliament, lawmakers said.
Ugandans convicted of the practice, also known as female circumcision, face up to 10 years in prison. If a girl dies from the surgery, which involves cutting off the clitoris to reduce sexual feeling, convicted offenders would be sentenced to life in prison.
The United States is speeding up the patent process for green technology:
Green technology patents will see a year shaved off the average forty month wait time to approve new patents in the US. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is implementing a one-year pilot program to push green technology patent applications through the process more quickly, so that the technologies can reach the market faster.
Frigid seawater pumped in from the ocean’s depths will soon help cool more than half of the buildings in Honolulu’s downtown. Honolulu Seawater Air Conditioning LLC, which is undertaking the $240 million project, expects its technology to cut the Hawaiian city’s air conditioning electricity usage by up to 75 percent while slashing carbon emissions and the use of ozone-depleting refrigerants.
A plan to open Vermont state land to off-road vehicles has been blocked:
The rejection of the rule was based solely on procedural grounds and did not tackle substantive issues such as the environmental impacts of ATVs or the impact on other users of public lands. Still, one of the fatal flaws in the rule, according to the committee, was that it failed to provide any scientific information or support for allowing ATVs on state lands. The provision of scientific background is a requirement of any new administrative rule.
The world's largest solar office building has opened in China:
he design of the new building is based on the sun dial and “underlines the urgency of seeking renewable energy sources to replace fossil fuels.” Aside from the obvious sustainable nature of the solar panel – clad exterior, other green features include advanced roof and wall insulation practices resulting in an energy savings of 30% more than the national standard. In addition, the external structure of the building used a mere 1% of the amount of steel used to construct the Bird’s Nest.
A famous Nevada brothel has inadvertently aided efforts to restore the Truckee River floodplain:
The tax woes of the Mustang Ranch, the first licensed brothel in the United States, may prove an boon to the Nature Conservancy's efforts to restore the Truckee River in Nevada, the New York Times reported this week, saying that "like many acts of salvation, this one has its roots deep in sin."
The brothel's original high-desert location, a 420-acre site eight miles east of Reno and 300 yards from the riverbank, was confiscated by the Internal Revenue Service a few years ago. While the working women continue to ply their trade a few miles downriver, the old property is being restored to floodplain. The river had been straightened and widened by the Army Corps of Engineers half a century ago to reduce flood risks to Reno's growing population.
A new process extracts lithium from geothermal wastewater:
We need electric vehicles to curb our thirst for oil, but there’s a problem: EV’s generally use lots of lithium in their batteries, and that’s another limited resource. Now Simbol Mining thinks it has a partial solution in a new technique that extracts battery lithium from the wastewater of geothermal plants.
Currently, most lithium is sourced from soil or dried brine in a water-intensive process. But Simbol’s technique uses water that is already being extracted for geothermal energy. The technique, which Simbol hopes to use in the geothermal and lithium-rich waters in California’s underground Salton Sea, pulls lithium ions out of the water and into a lithium chloride compound that can be mixed with sodium carbonate for shipping. Heat from the water helps power the process.
A substitute for tropical wood could help to save the rainforests.
Kebony, a Norwegian company, has developed a process to make softwoods similar to tropical hardwoods without the use of chemicals. The product, also called Kebony, stops softwood from rotting by treating it with a chemical-free process that involves sugarcane waste, pressurizing, and heating. The process makes softwood that is actually harder than tropical hardwoods and resistant to fungi and insects. Since the wood only needs to be treated once, it is cheaper than soft woods over the long run that need to be treated throughout their lifetime, each treatment releasing toxic chemicals into the environment.
And there's good news about the ongoing arms talks between the US and Russia.
The new version of Start would require each side to reduce deployed strategic nuclear warheads to roughly 1,600, down from 2,200, according to a senior American official. It would also force each side to reduce its strategic bombers and land- and sea-based missiles to below 800, down from the old limit of 1,600.
Last, thanks for rising to the occasion last week! Marvelous stuff, and I really appreciated it. (Of course, you're more than welcome to post positive stories this week, too. Or any other.)
(Photo at top: "General view towards Merok, Geiranger Fjord, Norway" between ca. 1890 and ca. 1900. Via the Library of Congress.)
I'll be very, very, very...distracted this week, and won't be writing anything here.
However, I'm going to schedule a Friday Hope Blogging post, so that anyone who feels the urge can post heartening stories in the comments field. The life you save may be your own, but it'll more likely be mine.
Whatever's left of me will resume blogging a week from tomorrow, unless I change my mind for some reason.
Until then...well, let's just say tautugniagmigikpiñ.
The Senate has passed the Women's Health Amendment to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) proposed this amendment...which will require all health care plans to cover women's comprehensive preventative care and screenings (like gyno exams, mammograms, STD testing and treatment and family planning) with no cost to women (or with limited co-pays)....
[T]he most significant thing about the Women's Health Amendment is that it could potentially save the lives of millions of low-income women who often skip basic health care exams and screenings because of added costs, says the National Women's Law Center. And that's huge.
Baltimore has passed a bill requiring crypto-religious "pregnancy centers" to inform prospective clients that they do not offer abortion information.
Just three councilmembers voted "no" to the limited pregnancy center bill. It requires all pregnancy centers that do not offer abortion information to post signs in English and Spanish to that effect.
If the mayor signs the legislation, they'd be required to put up a sign in the waiting room making it clear they don't offer the service.
A library in Ames, IA will continue to carry Sex, Etc., a magazine comprising sex ed info written by and for teens.
Free copies of a sex-education magazine for teens will still be available at the Ames Public Library despite a petition to have them removed.
The library board voted 6-1 Thursday to continue offering Sex, Etc., which is published three times a year by Rutgers University.
In Australia, boys in Victoria state schools "face compulsory feminism programs," in addition to their compulsory literature and math and history and science programs.
[The classes] would combat common attitudes among boys such as young women are either "good girls or sluts", the report said.
It said feminist theories were best at explaining the link between gender power relations and violence against women, and must underpin the programs.
Apparently, this proposal is controversial because there is "considerable community hostility to feminism, even among teachers and students." As always, it's unseemly to fight for equality by questioning the ideological underpinnings of inequality. Regardless, a pilot program is supposed to begin next year.
The Salvation Army has dropped a policy requiring parents to show proof of citizenship before receiving holiday toys for their children:
The charities' policies had attracted criticism from immigrant advocates, who charged they were punishing children for the actions of their parents by requiring such documentation.
Cesar Espinosa, a Houston immigrant advocate, said that the Salvation Army's decision to no longer ask for Social Security numbers for the Angel Tree program was “the right thing to do.”
The USDA has decertified an "organic" livestock operation:
[O]ne of the largest organic cattle producers in the United States, Promiseland Livestock, LLC, was suspended from organic commerce, along with its owner and key employees, for four years. The penalty was part of an order issued by administrative law judge Peter Davenport in Washington, DC on November 25.
Promiseland, a multimillion dollar operation with facilities in Missouri and Nebraska, including over 13,000 acres of crop land, and managing 22,000 head of beef and dairy cattle, had been accused of multiple improprieties in formal legal complaints, including not feeding organic grain to cattle, selling fraudulent organic feed and “laundering” conventional cattle as organic.
Incidentally, regulators were aware of these improprieties during the Bush administration, but "documents secured under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by The Cornucopia Institute indicate that the initial investigation was squashed for political reasons by Dr. Barbara Robinson, who until recently directed the USDA’s organic program."
Farmers' markets in NYC are increasingly accepting food stamps, and this is improving low-income residents' access to healthier food.
Food stamp sales from July to November, when the stamps are valid at the markets, doubled to $226,469 in 2009 from $100,772 in 2008, according to numbers released by the City Council on Sunday. While that is but a small fraction of the $200 million that New York’s surging food stamp population receives in benefits each month, it can represent a significant portion of business for farmers. In some low-income neighborhoods, food stamps can make up 70 percent to 80 percent of sales at the markets, according to the report.
All this time, I thought the urban poor ate potted meat and drank quarter water as a matter of personal preference. Go figure!
The EPA has withdrawn its pollution permit for the Black Mesa coal mine.
In response to an appeal brought by a diverse coalition of tribal and environmental groups, this week the Environmental Protection Agency withdrew a controversial water permit for the massive Black Mesa Coal Complex, a coal-mine complex located on Navajo Nation and Hopi lands in northeastern Arizona....
Nicole Horseherder of TO' Nizhoni Ani (Navajo for Beautiful Water Speaks), who lives 20 miles south of the Black Mesa Complex, said: “I am very happy about the EPA’s decision to withdraw the permit. I am glad to see a federal regulatory agency finally doing its job. In the course of our struggle to protect the water and bring awareness to the impacts of this coal-mining operation, we have never had such a favorable decision by any agency charged with regulating the impacts of Black Mesa.”
The National Marine Fisheries Services has proposed habitat protections for the Cook Inlet beluga whale, and all it took was the threat of a lawsuit.
The federal National Marine Fisheries Service today took an important step toward protecting critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act for the Cook Inlet beluga whale in Alaska by proposing to designate more than 3,000 square miles of the imperiled whale’s habitat for protection. The overdue proposal comes on the heels of a formal notice of intent to sue by the Center for Biological Diversity.
Rinderpest, a deadly cattle disease, is expected to be eradicated within 18 months.
When successful, the disease will become the second to be driven to practical extinction in the world. Smallpox, which was eradicated in 1980, was the first.
The disease, caused by the morbillivirus, has killed countless cattle since it was first introduced to the Roman Empire around 376 AD. It has also been responsible for severe famines, particularly in Africa, after decimating herds used for food and plowing.
An ecologist has discovered the world's smallest orchid.
The bloom has, for now, no name. "It's just sitting here with lots of others that need to be described," Jost said. "These forests are just filled with new things."
Speaking of new things, Inhabitat discusses solar-powered camel clinics:
Kenya’s camels recently started sporting some unusual apparel: eco-friendly refrigerators! Some of the African country’s camels are carrying the solar-powered mini fridges on their backs as part of a test project that uses camels as mobile health clinics. Organizers hope the eco-friendly transport system will provide a cheap, reliable way of getting much-needed medicines and vaccines to rural communities in Kenya and Ethiopia.
And Helsinki plans to use waste heat from an underground data center to heat 500 homes.
The new server farm will be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, which places it in close proximity to the district heating network, which consists of an underground system of pipes filled with heated water. Heat from the servers will be captured and transferred to this network, which will then send it out to 500 homes throughout the city.
According to Reuters, data centers account for up to 30% of many corporations energy bills and 55-60% of that energy goes towards cooling costs. Helsinki’s new server farm stands to greatly reduce this cost while keeping the servers cool, so by all accounts it’s a win-win situation. The new data center is set to open in January 2010.
According to Jillian Bandes, there's a troubling downside to publicly funded healthcare, apart from that whole "death panels" thing: it may make it harder for mentally ill people to get the firearms they'll need in order to take their final, bloody stand against the Culture of Death.
Government health care reform "will most likely dump your gun-related health data into a government database...that can preclude you from owning firearms,” said Gun Owners of America, in an email notification to their members, shortly before the health care debate on Saturday.
Worse, the government might decide to treat mental illness as a preexisting condition, and charge more for coverage:
GOA said that diagnoses such as post-traumatic stress disorders or other mental illnesses could be a reason the government uses to charge you more for health insurance under the public plan, or as part of co-op regulations.
That being the case, it's much safer to stick with private insurance companies. Granted, they already treat diagnosed mental illness as a preexisting condition, and price their plans accordingly. But they do it in a patriotic, God-fearing way that preserves our fundamental American right to buy lots of guns while suffering from persecution mania and delusions of reference.
Calls to Sebelius’ office were not returned, though a member of her press office laughed out loud when questioned about the prospect of health care being tied to gun ownership, saying, “that’s crazy.”
But Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, said such regulations were quite possible.
Indeed. And once healthcare is tied to gun ownership, we all know what will (probably) come next: a mathematically perfect One State in which all radical nonconformists -- e.g., ordinary folks who are offended by Obama's outlandish thirst for orange juice -- will be sent to the Gas Bell Jar for asphyxiation.
Harry Reid would probably laugh out loud and say this is crazy, but these guys say it's quite possible. It's one thing to maintain a sunny disposish in regards to global warming, which is either not happening, or beneficial, or both...but when you're talking about gun rights, the slightest possibility of an imaginable scenario that could conceivably lead to the eventual threat of a theoretical outcome that might turn out to be a slippery slope to the hypothetical brink of a potential disaster is grounds for immediate, uncompromising action.
