Mastery Over Nature

One of the rules of pop-science journalism is that one must pay lip service to everyday moral concerns before descending into uncritical technophiliac babble. The point is not to achieve balance, but to deploy an army of strawmen that can then be incinerated with Promethean fire.

Thus, The Economist initially seems troubled by the news that scientists have created a synthetic cell. What now of that "divine spark," that "vital essence," in which we all believe, whether we actually believe in it or not? Don't all the world's religions explicitly tell us, somewhere or other, that it's impossible, or at least wrong, to create artificial life of any kind? Doesn't this milestone confirm that we are gods, with all the power and responsibility -- but especially the power -- that entails?

[Creating life] would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

I'm more likely to see atomic weapons as proof of our subjection to nature. But there's no sense straining at that gnat when we've got this camel to swallow:

Biology is about nurturing and growth.

If you doubt this, consider the myriad plagues and injuries from which this new discovery might protect us.

This is a golden age, almost. But inevitably, some people will accuse scientists of "tampering" with nature, and causing more problems than they're likely to solve.

Such questions are not misplaced—and should give pause even to those, including this newspaper, who normally embrace advances in science with enthusiasm. The new biological science does have the potential to do great harm, as well as good. “Predator” and “disease” are just as much part of the biological vocabulary as “nurturing” and “growth”.

In other words, it's a great-idea-but-possibly-not-and-I'm-not-being-indecisive!

[F]or good or ill it is here. Creating life is no longer the prerogative of gods.

So let's reason with the worst that may befall:

What if a home-brew synthetic-biology club were accidentally to launch a real virus or bacterium? What if a terrorist were to do the same deliberately?

In that case, decimating humanity with deadly diseases would no longer be the prerogative of gods! We'd be capable of...of...destroying ourselves! Who ever dreamed that things would come to this?

Luckily, there's a solution, and it has to do with Free Markets and the Wisdom of Crowds:

Thoughtful observers of synthetic biology favour a different approach: openness. This avoids shutting out the good in a belated attempt to prevent the bad. Knowledge cannot be unlearned, so the best way to oppose the villains is to have lots of heroes on your side. Then, when a problem arises, an answer can be found quickly.

It's hard to single out the silliest claim in this paragraph, but I'm going to go with the assertion that "knowledge cannot be unlearned." This entire article is a testament to our ability to unlearn, from its prattle about "mankind's mastery over nature," to its cockeyed optimism about the "openness" favored by "thoughtful observers," to its astonishing assumption that "when a problem arises, an answer can be found quickly."

All this philosophical maundering amounts to a means of sounding serious while avoiding any serious discussion of the political and economic contexts in which this research actually takes place. The moral issues here were old news in the sixteenth century, and The Economist simplifies them to the point of banality by focusing almost exclusively on the idea that there's some clear limit beyond which human science must not go (which wasn't self-evident even in more orthodox ages than ours).

The interesting question is not whether synthetic biology amounts to "playing God," but who gets to define terms like "heroes" and "good," which The Economist throws around like confetti on New Year's Eve.

Encourage the good to outwit the bad and, with luck, you keep Nemesis at bay.

"Luck," in this context, shouldn't be confused with mere chance; it's more like the rain that follows the plow. Or a piñata that will shower candy on you if you keep swinging blindly at it with a stick.

What disturbs me isn't the creation of artificial organisms per se, but this article's assumption that "we" can easily distinguish heroes from villains, good uses from bad ones, and unforeseen accidents from predictable disasters. The problem, as always, isn't what we know how to do; it's who we are.

UPDATE: John Horgan addresses other aspects of the hype surrounding this research.

Side Effects

Tony Brenton argues that we'd better start looking seriously at geoengineering, because "our current approach to climate change is failing."

It's no wonder, given that reducing GHG emissions is widely seen as a tyrannical, big-government solution that relies on dubious computer models and will bankrupt the planet.

Geoengineering, by contrast, is relatively straightforward: it's a simple matter of convincing world governments to agree on, and pay for, a global climate-modification regime based on expert risk assessment and robust computer models. What kind of lunatic would oppose that?

Of course, there are some risks:

There could be catastrophic side-effects. While the global climate may be tamed, there could be regional variations even worse than the problem that we are trying to fix. Above all, how would these techniques be managed? Whose hand would be on the thermostat?

Well, the UN's out of the running, because it's a hotbed of socialistic one-worlders and a probable incubator for the Antichrist. And Algore's disqualified because he's a horrible fat fraud and all good-hearted people hate him. And we can't trust climatologists to do it, because their credibility was destroyed forever by Climategate. If we want maximum buy-in, I think we'd better angle for some sort of joint venture between DARPA, Bechtel and a forward-looking energy company like BP.

Brenton argues that unilateral weather-modification is likely to become commonplace. A while back, I blogged on an interesting conflict caused by China's effort to clean Beijing's air by means of cloudseeding:

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

Brenton imagines a far more drastic situation, in which China would be able to adjust "the planetary thermostat" for fun and profit. Failure to create global "ground rules" for geoengineering, he claims, will make such scenarios more likely. Therefore, he proposes a regulatory system based on nuclear arms treaties:

These combine an effectively global agreement designed to restrain proliferation and keep the technology in as few hands as possible with a web of specific agreements among the nuclear-weapons states designed to maximise transparency, create predictable behaviour, limit warhead numbers and generally minimise the likelihood of a runaway arms race or nuclear war by accident.

I'm especially interested in deterrence. Should we punish cloud-theft with drought or floods?

Kidding aside, if the world isn't capable of reaching "an effectively global agreement" on reducing CO2 emissions, despite 20 years of effort, why would it be capable of reaching one on geoengineering, which is arguably more complicated and dangerous, and can just as easily be portrayed as Socialist Tyranny or Neocolonialism or what have you?

Brenton calls geoengineering a "Third Way." I call it business as usual: ignore long-term problems until it's too late, improvise a short-term response and hope for the best.

Speaking of which:

A massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico has become the testing ground for a new technique where a potent mix of chemicals is shot deep undersea in an effort to stop oil from reaching the surface, and scientists are hurriedly weighing the ecological risks and benefits.

In other news, doctors say that an old lady who swallowed a fly is expected to make a full recovery, now that she's swallowed a spider.

The New Feudalism

According to Joel Kotkin, the fifty-year War on Suburbia ended definitively in 2005, then restarted a year later, then threatened to re-restart in 2009 because of Obama's tendency toward eco-Malthusianism, and has now been launched in earnest.

In everything from land use and transportation to “green” energy policy, the Obama administration has been pushing an agenda that seeks to move Americans out of their preferred suburban locales and into the dense, transit-dependent locales they have eschewed for generations.

When Kotkin says that Americans prefer suburbs, what he really means is that they generally prefer single-family homes. And of course, there are single-family homes in cities and small towns, just as there are apartments and condos in suburbia. But as I've complained before, Kotkin tends to treat all non-urban communities as functionally equivalent. It doesn't much matter whether you're in Old Westbury or Lost Hills, Grosse Pointe or Palmdale; as long as you don't live in a big city, your "choice" tends to prove whatever anti-urban point he wants to make.

Unfortunately, the smug urban sophisticates in the Obama administration lack Kotkin's grasp of Human Nature:

[T]he Obama administration seems almost willfully city-centric.

For example, Obama is in favor of high-speed rail.

Economics writer Robert Samuelson, among others, has denounced the high-speed rail idea as “a boondoggle” not well-suited to a huge, multi-centered country like the United States.

'Cause when you think about it, what possible value could high-speed rail have in a country like ours, where multiple urban centers are separated by large distances?

Obama is also threatening to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions, which we can all agree is egregiously city-centric.

[R]egulators can use the threat of climate change as a rationale to stop funding—and permitting—for even well-conceived residential, commercial, or industrial projects construed as likely to generate excess greenhouse gases.

Next thing you know, they'll be using the toxicology of lead as a rationale to deny permits to well-conceived residential projects that just happen to use lead water pipes.

Since Kotkin doesn't seriously believe in global warming, or peak oil, or carrying capacity, or resource depletion, or anything else that could conceivably be invoked as a sensible argument against cornucopian happy talk, he's baffled and a little frightened by people who choose to live in a nightmare world of limits, no matter how tentatively those limits inform their actions.

Administration officials have also started handing out $300 million stimulus-funded grants to cities that follow “smart growth principles.” Grants for cities to adopt “sustainability” oriented development will reward those communities with the proper planning orientation. There is precious little that will benefit suburbanites, such as improved roads or investment in other basic infrastructure.

That "precious little" includes $27.5 billion in highway funds, which my trusty abacus informs me is a lot more than the $300M allocated to smart growth "smart growth." (Scare quotes like these are central to Kotkin's argument, so it'd be unfair to edit them out.)

As you'd expect from someone who's very fond of military metaphors, Kotkin seems to see urban planning as a zero-sum game: every federal dollar that doesn't explicitly benefit his beloved suburbs is part of a scorched-earth attack on the middle class, and therefore on humanity itself. The idea that good urban planning might actually benefit suburban residents seems alien to him. For instance, he treats suburban growth around Portland, OR as a rejection of that city's planning decisions...as though people were flocking to these areas despite their proximity to Portland, rather than because of it.

Although we're in terrible danger, what with all these New Urbanist radicals threatening our way of life, Americans are sensible people, so everything will be fine.

[S]uch policies have little or no chance of being passed by Congress. Too many representatives come from suburban or rural districts to back policies that would penalize a population that uses automobiles for upwards of 98 percent of their transportation and account for 95 percent of all work trips.

In other words, the fact that we currently have low walkability and poor mass transit is the reason we can't have high walkability and better mass transit. The system works!

Better yet, technological advances will soon make cars much more fuel-efficient, without improving the efficiency of mass transit in any way. This means that we get to compare the glorious new supercars of the Kotkinian workers' paradise with today's antiquated buses, which are ridden primarily by basilisk-eyed welfare queens and hoboes with 100-proof vomit all over their shoes. Never underestimate the power of new technology to carve conventional wisdom in stone!

Speaking of which, did you know that many of our environmental problems can be solved by telecommuting? From suburbia, I mean? Laugh if you want, but modern technology has allowed Kotkin to retool the same pro-sprawl arguments again and again, and send them electronically to various media outlets without leaving his gracious single-family home. Multiply that gain in efficiency by, say, 150 million people, and you can see that federal regulation of CO2 emissions is a waste of time, in addition to being immoral.

From here, we proceed directly to Kotkin's traditional litany of complaints against liberal snobbery and doomsaying. Tweedy academics say suburbs are drab and ugly, even though the people who live in them seem to like it just fine. Liberals say suburbs are "the racist spawn of 'white flight,'" just because "in 1970 nearly 95 percent of suburbanites were white." Environmentalists say it's possible to run out of oil and water and land, even though that kind of talk makes people feel bad. With enemies like these, suburban developers and homebuyers (and the banks who lend to them, and the politicians who subsidize them) must be doing something right!

In conclusion, Kotkin warns us about a looming "new feudalism," in which "questions of land ownership and decision making would be shifted away from citizens, neighbors, or markets and left in the hands of self-appointed 'betters.'" As if anything could be "better" than market decisions with which Kotkin agrees! Nulle terre sans seigneur, motherfuckers!

Be sure to tune in next month, when the War on Suburbia will either end again or start anew, depending on whether the coin Kotkin flipped came up heads or tails.

(Image at top: Oppressed cottagers use appropriate technology to create a locavorist "garden city" on a royal desmesne in 12th-century Northumberland.)

Advertising Space

Google has patented a new system that will allow companies to advertise on billboards and signs captured in Street View.

In this patent, Google describes how it plans to identify buildings, posters, signs and billboards in these images and give advertisers the ability to replace these images with more up-to-date ads. In addition, Google also seems to plan an advertising auction for unclaimed properties.

As fascinating as this idea is, I'm far more interested in the options for product placement. Old pickup trucks covered in NRA stickers could be replaced with the latest luxury sedans. Soda bottles could be placed label outwards in pedestrians' hands. Up and coming bands could be seen leaning arrogantly against brick walls, or loading their gear into clubs.

Better yet, why not have movie tie-ins? If some dramatic scene takes place at a certain intersection in Baltimore, Google could easily add that imagery to the appropriate address on Street View.

It needn't be done digitally. A more logical method would be to reshoot the street scenes as needed, with whatever content reputable advertisers are willing to pay for. And it needn't be strictly mercenary, either; a scheme like this might well aid community redevelopment and rebranding efforts. If a street or town has a bad reputation, discarded mattresses can be cleared away, feral dogs hauled to the pound, and figures of ethnic menace replaced with Boy Scouts and nuns. With a little spit and polish, the mean streets of Trona could look like a Norman Rockwell painting.

There are also interesting possibilities for political campaigning. Candidates could be "accidentally" photographed enjoying local delicacies, tackling purse-snatchers, or praying outside abortion clinics. It'd be useful for negative campaigning, too: We're not saying that's definitely Nancy Pelosi burning an American flag in front of an inner-city mosque, but the controversy is undoubtedly illustrative of something.

Of course, there are possibilities for abuse. But that's true of everything under the sun, and I suspect that sensible guidelines for self-policing are being drawn up as we speak. All in all, I'd say this is the most exciting marketing idea since 19th-century British electricians "made the well known features of Mr. Gladstone appear in ghostly outlines in the heavens."

(Photo by Cobalt123.)

Casting the Runes

The CIA is allegedly supplying foreign informants with electronic chips that help UAVs to identify and destroy targets:

It sounds like a tinfoil hat nightmare, come to life: tiny electronic homing beacons, guiding CIA killer drones to their targets. But local residents and Taliban militants in Pakistan’s tribal wildlands say that’s exactly what’s happening. Tribesman in Waziristan are being paid to “plant the electronic devices” near militant safehouses, they tell the Guardian. “Hours or days later, a drone, guided by the signal from the chip, destroys the building with a salvo of missiles.”

This reminds me of M.R. James' 1911 horror story Casting the Runes, the villain of which murders a man by handing him a slip of paper covered with runes that mark him for death at the hands of a demon. The tables are turned on the villain when the paper is eventually passed back to him. (That's fiction for you.)

Presumably, someone always doublechecks each chip's coordinates before sending out a UAV, in order to make sure it hasn't been placed on a hospital or a school or an NGO facility. If so, we can stop worrying about that, and concentrate on worrying about this:

19 year-old Habibur Rehman made a videotaped “confession” of planting such devices, just before he was executed by the Taliban as an American spy. “I was given $122 to drop chips wrapped in cigarette paper at Al Qaeda and Taliban houses,” he said. "If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars.”

But Rehman says he didn’t just tag jihadists with the devices. “The money was good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money,” he added. Which raises the possibility that the unmanned aircraft — America’s key weapons in its covert war on Pakistan’s jihadists and insurgents — may have been lead to the wrong targets.

Apart from the remote possibility that people could collect these chips on behalf of AQ (or whomever), and use them for all sorts of practical jokes, it seems like there are some excellent opportunities here for very emphatic score-settling. It's not difficult to imagine a couple million bucks going up in smoke so that we can inadvertently take sides in some longstanding local feud.

That's assuming Rehman's story is true. The idea that we'd give a 19-year-old $122 to scatter these chips around like a lethal Johnny Appleseed seems farfetched to me. On the other hand, so do the last sixty years.

If it is true, we can at least be fairly certain that the evildoers will not be reverse-engineering these chips; hell, they barely understand how to use telephones. If they want sophisticated equipment like this, they'll probably have to wait until their wealthy proxies can buy it readymade at IDEX.

In the meantime, that thoughtful centrist Leon Panetta assures us that UAVs are "the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the al Qaeda leadership." (Apart from feeding them cookies, that is.) This overconfident, illogical assertion is entirely different from Dick Cheney's overconfident, illogical assertions on torture. For one thing, it's Panetta speaking.

The virtue of these weapons is supposed to be that they allow us to act as we see fit, without taking "unnecessary" risks, let alone suffering casualties. In fact, that's one of the worst things about them. As P.W. Singer argues, "These weapons don’t just create greater physical distance, but also a different sort of psychological distance and disconnection. The bomber pilot isn’t just above his target, but seven thousand miles away. He doesn’t share with his foes even those brief minutes of danger that would give them a bond of mutual risk."

Which brings us back to James' story. The odd thing about casting the runes is that you can't simply mail them to the victim, or slip them into someone's jacket pocket or wallet. The spell doesn't work unless you meet your target face to face, with whatever personal risk that may entail. Even demons have their limits, it seems.

In unrelated news:

Glasgow video game company T-Enterprise has hired Moazzam Begg, a former inmate at Guantanamo Bay, as a consultant on upcoming video game Rendition: Guantanamo, a title set in the infamous U.S. prison camp.

(Illustration from Jacques Tourneur's film Curse of the Demon, 1957.)

Non-Lethal Protection

As everyone knows, pirates (!!!!) are the worst existential threat this nation has faced since sometime last week.

What to do? If you've browsed the comments sections on popular blogs and news sites, you're probably aware that "KILL 'EM ALL!" remains the acme of sophisticated strategic thinking in many circles. This plan is usually recommended as though it's the easiest thing in the world to do, and the hardest thing to imagine doing. Its advocates always seem very proud that they know something the experts don't...just as their forebears did when they leaned against the pickle barrel with their thumbs in their suspenders, and offered a one-step solution for the nigra problem.

You'd think that this resolute optimism would make equally short work of every other problem we face. But if you scream "INSURE 'EM ALL!" or "PAY 'EM ALL A LIVING WAGE!" you'll be astonished at how quickly these folks develop an appreciation of nuance. (I suppose it's possible that these positions are actually consistent, in that they're both informed primarily by bone-deep sadism...but honestly, what are the odds?)

Anyway, there's the "KILL 'EM ALL!" school of anti-piracy. And there's their great enemy, the "Offer the Pirates Aromatherapy and Jungian Analysis While Holding Hands and Singing 'Kumbaya'" school, which comprises everyone who doubts that screaming "KILL 'EM ALL!" really makes you the new Clausewitz.

And then there's the reasonable, centrist Third Way, which is spearheaded by defense contractors and theorists; its motto is "kill some of 'em; torture, burn, blind, poison, electrocute, detain, or starve others; threaten the rest of 'em; and eventually become rich and influential enough to drive US policy towards your preferred high-ticket weapon system." This approach has the support of conservatives and liberals, so you know it's much closer to correct than anything on the extremist sides of the argument.

Apropos of which, Rep. Joe Sestak wants us to deter pirates with the Active Denial System, or "pain ray." David Hambling begs to differ.

Theoretical studies for the maritime tests showed that reflections from the hull could produce "hotspots" with twice the normal energy density, while reflections off the water could be three to four times the baseline....

The whole point of the ADS is that it is not supposed to cause harm. If you zap a boatload of suspected pirates and some of them jump into the water while others keep coming, do you cease fire? Continue firing until you cause real damage ("Ha ha, let's fry 'em!") and legally you might as well have a machine gun. If you're forced to stop, then how useful is the weapon?

Good question. Since the whole point is to avoid making merchant crews feel like they're in a real-life game of Area 51 or House of the Dead, the pain ray does seem like a nonstarter. Fortunately, Sestak is not out of ideas:

According to Rep. Sestak, a barrier might be what's needed to protect merchant vessels. One maritime security company makes an electric fence called Secure Ship. It's linked to a sophisticated alarm system and provides 9,000 volts of non-lethal protection which completely blocks access to the ship. Plus, it has the added benefits of preventing stowaways or thieves from getting on to the ship when it is in port. However, for obvious reasons, Secure Ship only recommended for vessels with a non-flammable cargo. And determined pirates will probably eventually get through it – if they remembered to bring wirecutters and insulated gloves. Despite the shortcomings, the fence might buy the crew valuable time while they call for help.

If the fence had three layers, it'd buy the crew even more time. And as always, the perimeter should be patrolled by drones or militarized animals (unless the Minutemen are willing to trade their pickups for speedboats and redeploy to the Indian Ocean, which would give us the best of both worlds).

Still, these are all stopgap measures. I think it'd be best to enclose each ship in a huge metal sphere filled partially with water, and let it travel over the bounding main like a hamster in a ball, thanks to a rotary apparatus at the prow. It could even be spiked all over, like an enormous pollen spore (isn't biomimesis all the rage these days?).

I imagine David Hambling will have some petty objection to this scheme, too, so I'll just launch a pre-emptive first strike on his pet idea:

Instead of going after the pirates, why not disable their boats? Something like the Running Gear Entanglement System -- or "James Bond Harpoon"-- might do the job. It releases a high-tensile line which snags on the boat's propeller. This would allow the pirates' target to escape, leaving the stranded pirates to be dealt with by the nearest warship in due course.

An entangler has a number of advantages over other options. One is the low cost, which should be thousands of dollars, rather than tens of thousands for LRAD or millions for ADS. Given a suitable launching system, it should be possible to deploy an entangler at a good range. And its method of operation means nobody gets deafened, blistered or blinded by friendly fire if it all goes wrong. Of course there's a risk of entangling the wrong small boats, but that's not the same as the risk of leaving people injured for life.

The thing is, there's also a risk of entangling whatever birds, fish, and aquatic mammals have managed to survive years of toxic dumping and overfishing. I'm not convinced that choking and strangling and drowning what's left of Somalia's wildlife is the best way to deter regional piracy, in the long run. As I've argued elsewhere, we only have one planet, so it's essential that we find sustainable, eco-friendly ways to thwart, cripple and destroy the subhuman filth who threaten our way of life.

All of which makes me more certain than ever that my giant metal sphere is the only feasible solution to Somali piracy. If anyone from Raytheon or BAE wants to discuss this further, you'll find me lying in the gutter in front of the Alibi tiki bar on Interstate Avenue.

Problematizing Progress

Brendan O'Neill argues that we should sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires:

If you want proof of the miserabilist, misanthropic outlook of contemporary western society, look no further than the curmudgeonly reaction to the launch of "the People's Car" in India yesterday.

The Nano, developed by Tata Motors and costing a mere 100,000 rupees (around £1,200), will make the dream of car travel a reality for tens of thousands of Indians. Yet its launch was greeted by a collective groan from western observers, concerned that if the developing world plays "catch up" with us – what used to be known as "global equality" – the planet will fry in a hellfire of greedy car-drivers' making.

This collective groan is an ugly symptom of "eco-imperialism," which is much like classic imperialism, except that instead of traveling overseas to beat or starve foreign populations into submission, you sit at home and fret over the environmental impact of cheap consumer goods. As such, it's one of the most fearsome weapons in the armamentarium of liberal fascism, and can't be criticized harshly enough.

We have become incapable of judging new developments and breakthroughs by any criteria other than their projected carbon emissions. The fact that the Nano will increase many Indians' mobility, their choices, their personal freedom to travel where they want and when they want – a freedom many in the west have enjoyed for decades – is simply overlooked....

Immeasurable benefits to humanity have been usurped by pseudo-measurable levels of planetary destruction.

By which O'Neill means that these benefits would be usurped, if eco-imperialism actually got its way, for once. But fortunately, no one with any real power seriously believes in the miserabilists' pseudo-measurements of atmospheric CO2, polar ice, animal populations, rainfall, glacier loss, ocean acidification, and related phantasmagoria.

It's easy enough to point out that O'Neill is a flaming asshole. But if we were to concentrate solely on that fact, we might overlook the really interesting aspects of his argument. "Western environmentalists" are worried about the Nano; that's a given. Does this mean that Indian environmentalists and scientists aren't worried? Of course not: environmentalists and climatologists all around the world are brooding over "pseudo-measurable levels of planetary destruction" even as we speak, instead of banishing dull care by riding an ATV through a protected wilderness area. That's what makes 'em miserabilists, regardless of race, color, caste, or creed.

But if O'Neill acknowledged this little detail, he'd have to forego the pleasure of turning what little remains of white liberal guilt against itself, by invoking the horrors of imperialism as an argument for free-market dogmatism. He understands that Westerners are a bit more sensitive than they used to be about dictating terms to the Wogs, and so he figures he can score a few points by painting the IPCC as a new East India Company. Of course, this theory requires us to view Indian culture as monolithic, scientifically backwards, and implacably self-centered...but what matter the victims if the gesture be beautiful?

No one "overlooks" the benefits of the Nano. The people who are worried about it, here and in India, simply see the negatives as outweighing the positives. By contrast, O'Neill and his ilk refuse to concede that any meaningful negatives exist (hence all the talk of "pseudo-measurement"). This tactic is not just necessary, but enjoyable, because once the science is out of the way, there's all the time in the world to dream up neoliberal just-so stories:

In the past it was argued that the developing world was poor because there simply wasn't enough to go around or because Indians and Africans hadn't quite got the hang of this capitalism thing.

Today, the key cultural justification for continuing inequality is the idea that if the south becomes like us – with just as many cars, factories, roads, homes – then the planet will perish.

It's fascinating how many young journalistic firebrands have adapted the language and tone of radical critique to the purpose of blessing things as they are. O'Neill expects us to feel pious outrage at Western arrogance, while suggesting that development in India must follow the Western model or be damned, and that anyone who worries about the consequences is a fraud or a terminal mope, and that India doesn't have competent scientists, diversity of opinion, and a strong and courageous environmental movement. When it comes to purging ourselves of Western arrogance, like apparently cures like.

The funny thing is, O'Neill doesn't seem to believe this gibberish himself. No sooner does he accuse the West of scheming to maintain global inequality than he backpedals, and claims that the real concern is that we're allowing our silly Western guilt to interfere with the Hindoos' progress towards Civilization. This is known as "problematising progress." No, really!

This is a moral righteousness built on privilege rather than principle. The anti-Nano brigade, and all of the rest who problematise progress in the developing world, know the destructiveness of everything but the value of nothing. Just because we have become uncertain about technological progress, guilt-ridden about our luxuries, and cavalier about the feeling of freedom brought about by car travel, that doesn't mean Indians should stay put in their rickshaws.

Of course, it doesn't mean they have to buy a Nano, either. There are other possible vehicles, and wiser forms of progress, and Indian experts who can tell you all about them. (And of course, there are also Western countries that could be setting a good example by cutting their own emissions and working seriously to create a low-carbon economy.) But O'Neill seems to be problematizing every single one of these options except the Nano, for no better reason than that the Nano exists here and now, and environmentalists and climate scientists have dared to measure its carbon emissions instead of hailing it as the salvation of the downtrodden.

So once again, freedom boils down to scrambling to buy what the market offers, instead of demanding what it doesn't, or creating a solution oneself or with one's neighbors. Achieving "global equality" turns out to be a matter of individual access to adequate cash or credit, just as our best and brightest always suspected. And anyone who proposes that there are greater goals or more pressing duties than consumer choice is an Enemy of the People.

This would be a colossally dismal view of human possibilities even if there truly were nothing more to climate change than pseudo-measurements and eco-imperialism. Since O'Neill's theory also happens to be deadly lunacy, it's not hard to understand why he finds his dreary faux-radical boosterism running afoul of "miserabilists."

(Photo: "Roads in India are already congested with traffic." Reuters/Krishnendu Halde.)

Electricity Plus Water

Although most of us are preoccupied with the agony of our country's self-inflicted wounds, the extent of which an amateur like Osama bin Laden can only envy, the threat posed by Islamic frogmen is still grave and gathering.

A few military experts hoped that this problem could be solved by training dolphins to attack enemy swimmers. But some people -- let's call 'em "traitors" -- argued that that was...well, not entirely ethical, but also pretty fucking stupid, when you come right down to it.

Noses were accordingly reapplied to the grindstone, and in due time, we arrived at Plan B:

[T]he sea service is bankrolling an alternative project: an "electrical swimmer barrier... that will take advantage of ocean oil-barrier deployment technology, the conductive properties of near-coast waters, and the physiological sensitivities of human swimmers to electrical shocks."

Electricty plus water usually makes for a dangerous combination. But this system will be "non-lethal," promises Bedford, Massachusetts' Diversified Technologies, Inc., which recently won a Navy contract to start development on the thing.

Here's one of those tiresome semantic quibbles that've made me famous from Uelen to Shishmaref: the opposite of "dangerous" is not "non-lethal." The Taser, for instance, is a non-lethal weapon. All it really takes to earn that designation is the lack of an intent to kill on the part of the weapon's designers; without that intent, any deaths that occur are simply unfortunate accidents that happen to troublemakers who deserve whatever they get.

I don't want to be seen as a coddler of terrorists, who may be plotting to strap themselves with explosives, swim from Bullhead City to Laughlin, and launch a suicide attack on the Colorado Belle Casino, for all I know. But I can't help thinking that this barrier is more likely to be used to protect our language, borders, and culture from migrant lettuce-pickers.

The system is "deployable and retrievable by two persons working from a 24- to 28-foot boat," which begs the question of how we'll keep evildoers from tampering with it and its power source. Maybe its perimeter can be patrolled by attack dolphins.

What really interests me about this scheme is how well it'd work against people who are wearing some sort of electrically insulating suit. Which, in turn, brings up the question that always fascinates me about projects like these: what's the cost to evildoers of adapting to a barrier of this sort, versus the cost to us of re-engineering the system once it's been overcome?

(Image at top via Modern Mechanix.)

Two Planets, No Waiting

A new study suggests that by 2030, we'll need two planets to support ourselves in the style to which we've become accustomed.

This study has some obvious conceptual problems. First, it ignores the potential benefits of wise policies like granting Monsanto patents on food crops, or killing all Islamofascists. Second, it's an example of what Gregg Easterbrook calls the Fallacy of Uninterrupted Trends: it overlooks the fact that science and markets will inevitably solve the problems caused by overconsumption, just as they've always done in the past.

As if to prove my point, India is lighting our way into the future by announcing its intent to mine the moon for uranium:

The Indian mission is scheduled to last two years, prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the moon and prospect the lunar surface for natural resources, including uranium, a coveted fuel for nuclear power plants, according to the Indian Space Research Organization.

This could provide a virtually limitless source of cheap, safe energy...so long as you ignore the staggering expense of interplanetary extraction and transportation, along with all the other little details that make this idea pointless, impractical, dangerous, and bizarre. Still, it's the thought that counts!

Of course, once India sets up housekeeping up on the moon, we know precisely where that will lead: Great Britain will move to establish a Lunar Raj and a new era of Company Rule, which will be cheered on interminably by Niall Ferguson and John Derbyshire (who has already been worrying himself sick over the threat of lunar multiculturalism).

One thing the moon doesn't have is fish. Rain follows the plow, granted...but I still think we should suspend this practice until we can get our lunar fisheries up and running.

Despite continuous warnings of emptying oceans due to overfishing, a new report finds that one-third of the world’s total marine catch is not feeding humans, but livestock. The fish are ground-up into meal and fed to pigs, poultry, and even farm-raised fish.

At the risk of sounding like some sort of radical firebrand, this is simply wasteful. There are plenty of redundant animals we don't eat that could just as easily be ground en masse into poultry feed. Rats come to mind, as do squirrels, vultures, and snakes; all of 'em will taste like chicken, in the end. That ought to keep us going until we're able to set up Punch and Judy shows by the lunar seaside.

If anyone doubts that scientific progress will reduce the resource exploitation that it constantly makes easier and more efficient, here's an inspiring example of human ingenuity:

A device placed on, say, a supermarket shelf scans the face of the person standing in front of it. It determines whether the person is a man or a woman and sends that information to a digital screen nearby. The screen will play an ad for women's razors if a woman is watching, Jeeps if a man is watching, or Gap if both a man and woman are watching. "People are not even aware that they are being watched and monitored," Rabenou said.

The video analytics software to do this was developed for the Israeli homeland security department. It can determine, by facial clues, the gender and age of the faces it scans. By next year, the company says, the software will be able to ascertain ethnicity as well.

The device can also track how long people stand in front of a retail display, determining whether the display is clear. In an Israeli trial, it helped advertisers realize that a lot of men were buying Pampers on Thursday nights, so the company started a promotion that gave free razors to shoppers who bought two packs of Pampers.

How's that for beating swords into plowshares? Of course, this sophisticated technology is intended to increase witless hyperconsumption...but why couldn't it be put to better uses?

Just imagine if it were used to display comforting messages when it detects shoppers with haggard, worried faces. Suppose I go into the drugstore, looking for a straight razor with which to slash my wrists. The store's video analytics software would recognize my puffy, red eyes, and the tears streaming down my cheeks, and it'd promptly cue up some reassuring message like "there is plenty of uranium on the moon," or "Precious Gems Discovered on Mars." And suddenly, I'd find the strength to carry on.

And that's just what's possible today. Who knows what we'll accomplish tomorrow?

Freedom Machines

It's no use talking to Ernest Istook about donkey carts, or velocipedes, or ornithopters. The plain fact is, he's simply wild about automobiles! He likes them so much that he refers to them, rather tautologically, as "great American Freedom machines."

Consider the evidence: As long as you've got enough money to fill your tank, you can use your car to travel from the place where you live to the place where you work. If that's not freedom, what is?

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. In some states, you can also drive your car to a late-term abortion appointment, or a same-sex marriage ceremony (though you filthy perverts may rest assured that Mr. Istook and his colleagues are working on these problems as we speak).

Also, unlike mass transit, transportation by car is not subsidized by taxpayers (so long as you ignore the cost of oil and gas subsidies, and building freeways through residential areas, and treating pavement runoff laden with automotive fluids and heavy metals, and sacrificing parks and agricultural land, and protecting oil tankers and infrastructure, and air pollution, and congestion and crashes, and the billions of dollars that driver fees and taxes fail to cover in any given year).

In NYC, meanwhile, plans are being made to screen every vehicle Freedom machine that visits the island for radioactivity.

The proposal — called Operation Sentinel — relies on integrating layers of technologies, some that are still being perfected. It calls for photographing, and scanning the license plates of, cars and trucks at all bridges and tunnels and using sensors to detect the presence of radioactivity.

A while back, I suggested that purposefully triggering urban radiation sensors would be a cheap and easy way of causing chaos. That was idle speculation, of course, and there's no reason to believe that our pitiless enemies are capable of coming up with a tactic like that (not without dedicating an hour or two to working out the logistics, anyway).

Which is just as well, because if Noah Shachtman is to be believed, the current system is very sensitive indeed:

I spent some time with an NYPD unit, armed with these sensors. Just about anything would set them off -- like a patient getting chemotherapy, for example.

Even assuming they manage to reduce the false alarms to a bare minimum, it sounds as though this extraordinarily data-hungry Emancipation Contraption will cause more problems than it solves:

Data on each vehicle — its time-stamped image, license plate imprint and radiological signature — would be sent to a command center in Lower Manhattan, where it would be indexed and stored for at least a month as part of a broad security plan that emphasizes protecting the city’s financial district, the spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said.

In other news, we need better icebreakers (or Exalted Yankee Liberty Devices, as I prefer to call them) if we're going to keep the goddamn Russkies away from the North Pole:

Russia -- which last year planted a titanium flag under the North Pole, claiming 460,000 square miles of Arctic waters -- "has 20 icebreakers in its fleet, seven of them nuclear powered, including the largest ice-breaking vessel in the world," Homeland Security Today observes. Of the Coast Guard’s three polar icebreakers, two have outlived their originally designed service lives of 30 years.

The third sets sail this week, Reuters notes, "to determine the extent of the continental shelf north of Alaska and map the ocean floor, data that could be used for oil and natural gas exploration." And maybe claim some turf for America, too.

(Illustration at top by Bruce McCall.)

Sensitivity and Spam

If you're in a lab, it's nice to have a sensor or a reagent that's incredibly sensitive to trace amounts of a given compound. If you're in an airport screening line, this level of sensitivity is likely to create far more problems than it solves.

Designers of a new testing system boast that it's able to detect "an incredibly small quantity of material, as small as one dust-speck-sized particle weighing one trillionth of a gram, on an individual's clothing or baggage."

Which is exactly what we don't need. As I said in an earlier post, the primary practical result of deploying such a system would be that terrorists and practical jokers could "bring an airport almost to a standstill with an ounce or two of the right material." Intentionally overwhelming an airport with false positives would not only be globally disruptive and costly, but might also be the perfect prelude to an attack of a completely different type, for which no sensors are available.

Given its potential for rendering airport security useless or worse by overwhelming it with anti-information, it's quite appropriate that this system is called SPAMS (which stands for Single-Particle Aerosol Mass Spectrometry). Better yet, one of its capabilities is to assess multiple threats at once...so if all goes well, it should be simultaneously able to detect medical technicians, people who've handled pseudephedrine tablets, and people who've fertilized their lawns. And all in mere seconds. Take that, Osama bin Laden!

Here's my favorite part:

The instrument also could assist in screening people for disease....

While I don't really believe that this is anything more than technocratic boilerplate, I have to admire the perfect insularity of the concept. The real world, with its moribund airline industry, and its long lines of angry travelers, and its undertrained and overworked security personnel, and its baffling array of laws and lawyers, is so far away at this point that we may as well be in Heaven. Anyone who can tune out everyday life to this extent could just as easily transcend terrorism and disease, it seems to me, and probably wouldn't need anaesthetic for a root canal.

Even without this handy feature, I think that mass deployment of SPAMS would simply represent a progression of our national autoimmune disorder; our vulnerability to our own defenses increases with their sensitivity to apparent threats.

(Photo at top via The Anti-Advertising Agency.)

Food Deserts and Fortifications

A paper in The International Journal of Health Geographics discusses the use of GIS to track the evolution of urban "food deserts":

The findings indicate that residents of inner-city neighbourhoods of low socioeconomic status have the poorest access to supermarkets. Furthermore, spatial inequalities in access to supermarkets have increased over time, particularly in the inner-city neighbourhoods of Central and East London, where distinct urban food deserts now exist.

The problem of spatial inequalities isn't confined to southern Ontario, needless to say. Cervantes goes so far as to suggest that the current food shortage deserves some of the attention that's currently being given to lapel pins and bowling scores:

This is not a temporary problem. It's a long-term, secular (as the economists say) trend. The planet is running out of stuff -- water, land, topsoil, petroleum, atmosphere.

In America, at least, higher food prices may have some connection with the crackdown on immigrant workers, as well as hard-right hysteria over the AgJOBS Act. Still, this is the sort of situation that can trigger mass migration and civil unrest, making border security -- regional, national and local -- more important than ever.

The $20 million prototype for the virtual fence near Tucson may've been scrapped -- along with the law it was supposed to protect and represent -- but the outlook for solid walls and barriers is very promising indeed, especially when it comes to protecting microborders. Whether you're planning "a gated community or an insurgent holding pen," or some convenient amalgam of the two, blast walls are de rigeur in the modern City of Refuge (which will ideally protect us not only from being punished for unintentional killing, but also from being accused of it).

Unfortunately, simply building walls isn't enough to protect yourself from the tired, and the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. You also have to make sure that no one gets around, under, or over them. In that regard, knowledge is power, especially when it confirms what you already believe.

The Drug Enforcement Agency wants to find a small business with a Top Secret security clearance that can snoop on Spanish language conversations transmitted over foreign communications systems and "instantaneously" translate those conversations from Spanish into English....

The translation company would be expected to create online records of "complex foreign voice radio transmissions containing technical terminology, advanced grammar and syntax, and colloquial conversational forms"....

The problem is, when people know they're being overheard, they can use codes, or intentionally spread misinformation, or simply agree to meet up in person. That's why DARPA's Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (HI-MEMS) is so exciting:

These half-bug, half-chip creations — DARPA calls them "insect cyborgs" — would be ideal for surveillance missions, the agency says in a brief description on its website.

Scientist Amit Lal and his team insert mechanical components into baby bugs during "the caterpillar and the pupae stages," which would then allow the adult bugs to be deployed to do the Pentagon's bidding.

The article ends with a joke that has considerably more than a grain of truth to it:

Presumably, enemy arsenals will soon be well-stocked with Raid.

It's easy to imagine pesticides being the first line of defense against these cyber insects, regardless of any collateral damage to "useful" species; one thing DARPA will probably want to do is create hybrids that are immune to common pesticides (particularly in Latin America, where a much wider range of chemicals is used).

At that point, I suppose evildoers would have to clear their confidential meeting places with flamethrowers, or perhaps jamming signals. There's also the possibility that natural predators -- for lack of a better term -- will eat some of these semi-mechanical bugs; they should probably be equipped to deliver an electric shock, or a squirt of some noxious liquid, that'll discourage hungry birds and bats.

Surely none of these problems is insurmountable, given what's at stake in a world that's low on resources (or finds it impractical to distribute them equitably, which amounts to the pretty much the same thing).

In completely unrelated news, Bruce Schneier asks a serious question, and provides a serious answer:

[G]iven a security patch, can you automatically reverse-engineer the security vulnerability that is being patched and create exploit code to exploit it?

Turns out you can.

Frightening, isn't it? There oughta be a law.

(Illustration from The War Illustrated, April 3 1915.)

The Politics of Possibility

As the price of oil skyrockets, and we discuss past and future "surgical strikes" on Syria and Iran, the U.S. Energy Secretary asks our Middle Eastern friends whether they've ever considered the advantages of nuclear power:

Gulf Arab oil exporters and countries around the world should look into nuclear power as an alternative to hydrocarbons, U.S. Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said on Monday.

"Nuclear power should be an alternative for Gulf countries and other countries around the world," Bodman said in the United Arab Emirates during a visit.

Meanwhile, in the American Southeast, the ongoing drought may force nuclear plants to shut down:

Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

Utility officials say such shutdowns probably wouldn't result in blackouts. But they could lead to shockingly higher electric bills for millions of Southerners, because the region's utilities may be forced to buy expensive replacement power from other energy companies.

And in the American Southwest, people are falling in love all over again with oil shale, the perennial fuel of the paleo-future. Estimates of how much water it'd take to develop this low-grade oil range from ghastly to staggering; one thing it's fairly safe to say is that a (subsidized, artificial) oil shale boom would result in a massive influx of thirsty new residents, much as the tar sands boom did in Alberta.

With these stories in mind, it's interesting to learn that farmers in California are thinking it might be more profitable to sell their (subsidized) water to cities, instead of using it to grow crops:

In a state where water has become an increasingly scarce commodity, a growing number of farmers are betting they can make more money selling their water supplies to thirsty cities and farms to the south than by growing crops....

"It just makes dollars and sense right now," said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer in Northern California's lush Sacramento Valley. "There's more economic advantage to fallowing than raising a crop."

All of which can only mean one thing: it's time to transcend the politics of limits, and embrace the politics of possibility.

(Photo: Ship stranded in Aral Sea.)

Stupid Smart Machines

In consumer technology, as in biology, mutations tend to be useless or maladaptive. The Taser isn't improved by being combined with an mp3 player, unless you believe that two capabilities are automatically better than one, no matter how incompatible they may be. I think it's fair to suggest that turning a dangerous weapon into yet another lifestyle accessory - one that distracts you from your surroundings, no less - makes users and innocent bystanders less safe.

Now, there's talk among Serious People of marketing a cellphone that doubles as a radiation detector:

"The likely targets of a potential terrorist attack would be big cities with concentrated populations, and a system like this would make it very difficult for someone to go undetected with a radiological dirty bomb in such an area," said Longman, who also is Purdue alumnus. "The more people are walking around with cell phones and PDAs, the easier it would be to detect and catch the perpetrator. We are asking the public to push for this."

Let's imagine for a moment that I'm an actual terrorist, rather than a member of that Islamopacifascist fifth column, the American Left. Let's suppose further that I have access to radioactive material, and that I don't want it to go undetected. What's to stop me from putting it in magnetic containers on the undercarriage of UPS trucks, or crosstown buses? Or taping it under subway or taxicab or bicycle seats? Or floating it down rivers and canals? Or mailing it?

It seems to me that anyone who took these steps could cost one or more cities a great deal of money, and citizens a huge amount of trouble and worry, while undermining whatever remained of public faith in our "protectors." This is a perfect example of how easily anti-terrorist technology can become a readymade weapon, or a force multiplier, making us more vulnerable to disruption and despair as well as to violence. Schemes like this one are the technocratic equivalent of an autoimmune disorder.

If these modern-day Tom Swifts have considered this argument, they're keeping quiet about it:

The system could be trained to ignore known radiation sources, such as hospitals, and radiation from certain common items, such as bananas, which contain a radioactive isotope of potassium.

"The radiological dirty bomb or a suitcase nuclear weapon is going to give off higher levels of radiation than those background sources," Fischbach said. "The system would be sensitive enough to detect these tiny levels of radiation, but it would be smart enough to discern which sources posed potential threats and which are harmless."

Which would be great, in theory, if human beings of average intelligence weren't more than smart enough to outwit it, and to turn it against us.

In other news, our infrastructure is crumbling. Which is why it's disheartening to learn that research into this miracle cellphone "has been funded by the Indiana Department of Transportation through the Joint Transportation Research Program and School of Civil Engineering at Purdue."

Vacuuming Up Data

Michael Tanji explains the problem with what he calls "attempting to gill-net bad guys" through mass surveillance:

It's bad enough that the Director of National Intelligence is trotting out a bogus threat so the government can snoop on all Internet traffic. What's worse is that this kind of mass surveillance is a pretty lame way to catch the honest-to-God bad guys....

This is not a needle in a haystack problem; it’s a needle somewhere in an unidentified field in the western portion of Nebraska. The problem with vacuuming up data wholesale is that even with a lot of machine-based filtering, an intelligence analyst is left with a massive pile of rock in which may lay a speck of gold. Intelligence does not want, need, look at or even retain the VAST majority of what passes through the ‘Net, which is something privacy mavens conveniently leave out of their angrily worded press releases.

Although I agree with Tanji's basic point - how could you not? - I'm always troubled when people reject textbook authoritarian measures on the basis of their inefficiency, rather than their unconstitutionality.

Even if we assume for the sake of argument (and in spite of evidence to the contrary) that raw data on law-abiding citizens have no political or economic value, questions remain about what constitutes a red flag, and about the construction of what Bruce Schneier calls "an infrastructure of surveillance," and about what Dan Lockton calls "the creeping erosion of norms" regarding privacy rights. What intelligence wants ought to be less important, legally speaking, than what they're allowed to have and how they're allowed to get it.

With this in mind, it's interesting to consider this low-tech version of mass surveillance currently underway in Phoeniz, AZ:

"The protesters, several visibly armed with guns, have been verbally engaging anyone walking by that seems to look illegal or don't seem supportive of them," Strand said. "These are residents, students, business people, neighborhood and spiritual leaders."

In theory, this group's aim is to detect illegal immigrants, which they do by challenging people who "look illegal." In pursuit of their larger political goals, however, and as an expression of the basic animus that drives them, they also end up targeting people who "don't seem supportive" of their brave efforts to defend the Homeland:

Lynne Stevens smiled and pulled open her jacket, revealing her Smith & Wesson....She scoffed at the idea that her fellow protesters are causing harm to the neighborhood. "We just want to get the illegals out of here....It's a black-and-white issue," she said. "I'm here to run them off. You turn the light on them and they scatter like roaches."

I suspect that American citizens of all colors have scattered "like roaches" in order to avoid tangling with these overwrought, abusive, visibly armed loudmouths...not least because businesses around the protest site are reporting a 15-percent drop in customers. If I were heading to a business in this area, would I wear a t-shirt that might offend someone like Lynne Stevens? I suppose it'd depend on whether I felt like getting into a potentially dangerous shouting match with an armed fanatic.

The point being that this demonstrates one of the effects of "screening" on public behavior: it can cause people to feel more vulnerable, and to change their behavior accordingly. They may not take the route they'd planned, or shop where they'd intended to, or say what's on their minds, or what have you. They may do their best not to "look illegal," and to seem "supportive" (or at least neutral); this can then conveniently be portrayed as informed consent.

Ultimately, the threat isn't that ordinary citizens will get caught doing something we're not supposed to do; it's that we'll feel insecure doing things we have every right to do.

(Illustration via Susan E. Gallagher.)

Sophisticated Sensors

An article in the Washington Post describes the controversy in NYC over the deployment of sensors that are supposed to provide early warning of a biological attack. It seems that the initial sampling equipment, which has cost about $400 million so far, leaves a lot to be desired:

The older samplers catch airborne particles in filters that are manually collected once a day and taken to a laboratory, requiring up to 30 hours to detect a pathogen. They may not preserve live organisms that scientists use to select treatment options. And the process is cost- and labor-intensive, leading to false alarms, quality-control problems and limits on the system's size, despite an $85 million-a-year national budget.

The new sensors aren't exactly ideal, either:

Runge said technical challenges remain in ensuring new sensors' accuracy and reducing their size and operating costs. He said DHS plans to begin pilot tests this year of alternative sensors -- which it hopes will be better than those made by Lawrence Livermore -- and to oversee a competition between two private bidders, IQuum and Microfluidic Systems, beginning in 2009. As a result, Runge said, decisions on what and how big a system to deploy will be left to the next administration.

That's probably just as well. It sounds as though the BioWatch system isn't in much better shape than it was back in 2005, when the EPA's inspector general announced that the EPA hadn't "ensured the reliability, timeliness and efficiency of air sampling that Bush directed be part of a $129 million early warning system."

EPA sometimes placed sensors too far apart, failed to make sure they were all in secure locations and didn't always factor in topography and seasonal wind pattern changes in some cities.

As I argued a couple of years ago, "agent detection is an interesting but comparatively minor field; it doesn't work well, but even if it did, mere data aren't all that useful unless you have a staffed and funded and organized public health system." Thanks to BushCo's technofetishist belief that every problem can be solved by paying private contractors to build some high-priced gizmo, this is precisely what we don't have:

How fast do public health departments nationwide respond to a medical practitioner's alert that a patient has a serious infectious disease like smallpox or meningitis? Or respond to a doctor who thinks he's seeing the first symptoms of anthrax from bioterrorism?....The new study found an average response time of 63 minutes, and some agencies took nearly 17 hours to call back. The report ranked one-third of the health departments as “poor” because one or more of their reply calls came more than four hours after the alert.

In her recent testimony before Congress, biosecurity expert Tara O'Toole raised a fascinating question:

Environmental sensor technologies are now being marketed to individual companies for installation in privately owned buildings. Will DHS develop commercial standards or regulations to ensure that such systems are reliable and maintained properly? Should public health agencies be required to assess every warning signal (“hit”) registered by privately owned sensors? Should public health agencies be reimbursed for such assessments?

With that in mind, read this:

The NYPD is moving to license private biological, chemical and radiological detectors because of "concerns" raised by the feds, a police official testified yesterday....

Falkenrath said the private deployment of sophisticated sensors has increased since 9/11. Information about where the sophisticated sensors are and how reliable they are is sketchy.

Opponents of licensing claim that "the measure could stifle the independent collection of environmental data," which is a valid point, especially given the official suppression of air-quality data after 9/11. But again, there's a definite limit to what data collection can do for us, given that Ayn Rand has expressly forbidden us to have a fully funded, equipped, integrated, and accessible public healthcare system.

Let's Roll!

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

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

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

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

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

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

These days, you can't be too careful.

Really Good Things

A cryptoclimatological discoverist from the Kansas state legislature expounds on the Great Chain of Being:

A state legislator Wednesday criticized rejection of two coal-fired power plants in western Kansas, saying carbon dioxide emissions were good for crops.

“One of the really good things about CO2 is that plants perform better under stress (drought, etc.) with increased levels of CO2,” Rep. Larry Powell, R-Garden City, said in a letter disseminated to the media.

Ideally, CO2 will increase agricultural yield, which'll increase earth's carrying capacity, which'll increase earth's population, which'll increase CO2 emissions, which'll increase agricultural yield. World without end, amen!

Powell's information comes from a report by Craig and Keith Idso, who've been singing this tune for many years now (with a little help from ExxonMobil and the rabidly pro-coal Western Fuels Association).

All their huffing and puffing will come to nothing, though. Coal is the fuel of the past; the fuel of the future is low-grade synthetic crude extracted from oil shale with "portable" nuclear reactors that may or may not actually work:

Though it would produce 27 megawatts worth of thermal energy, Hyperion doesn’t like to think of its product as a “reactor.” It’s self-contained, involves no moving parts and, therefore, doesn’t require a human operator....

“The lab is doing a lot of work on oil shales and oil sands, but there’s no way to get power to those facilities,” Blackwell says. “So, this nuclear battery would be brought in and that would provide the power to run a small city of industrial use.”

Oil shale extraction is thirsty work. But since increasing CO2 emissions will make crops more drought resistant, it seems logical that this'll free up water for the oil shale boom.

All things considered, I'm feeling cautiously optimistic.

(Photo: Mid-day dust storm in Garden City, Kansas, 1935.)

They're All Around!

We're in a war for our very survival against radical Islam. Which means it's time for all patriotic Americans to harass Mexicans at the local big-box hardware store:

For Truman Fields, the war against foreign invaders begins at home -- Home Depot.

Several times a month during Florida's latest building boom, the retired IBM executive climbed into his Dodge pickup and cruised home-improvement stores or construction sites in southwest Florida. Armed with a camera and a missionary's zeal, he'd look for groups of Hispanic men and start snapping pictures. Fields, 66, assumed anyone who ran off was here illegally....

"They're all around if people will just open their eyes."

The goal here is to prevent La Reconquista, which is at least as imminent as our national subjection to Sharia. (This dual threat is what makes the strategic thinking of America's own modern-day Clausewitz more compelling than ever.)

Some people call the anti-immigrant movement racist. It isn't, though. It's RACIST.

"Real Americans Committed to Integrity, Sovereignty and Truth."

"That's what 'racist' means to us."

And really, what other interpretation matters?

Truman Fields believes that people who run away from him are probably here illegally. If we could somehow make an armed drone "understand" this deep insight, it'd free confused, angry, and racist RACIST Americans from the drudgery of playing soldier in strip malls, and let them return to more personally fulfilling endeavors.

A French businessman tells AFP his company is working on putting TASER stun guns on a flying saucer that would zap protesters, evil-doers, and anybody else that authorities there don't like.

This technology could also prevent messy situations like the recent tasing of a mildly argumentative motorist; eliminating the human factor will make summary punishment easier to accept, or at least harder to argue with:

Police in Texas want to use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to spot speeders, and now Miami cops are also looking at drones for SWAT Teams.

These systems are fallible, of course. That's why we need lots of them, everywhere. Traditionally, the border has been visualized as something like the aseptic seal that keeps a product uncontaminated. We'd be better off seeing it as something more like the immune system, with the official border as a skinlike barrier, concerned private citizens as pattern recognition receptors, and armed drones as monocytes.

Xenophobes, racialists and paranoiacs have an advantage when it comes to viewing human beings as pathogens that are "all around if people will just open their eyes." Thus, their visionary insights will be invaluable in helping to define and deploy this vital new security technology.

You may think this is insane. But to me, "insane" simply means "Improving National Security As Needed, Eternally."

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.)