Small Steps

A couple of nights ago, I went to see a lecture by Temple Grandin, a woman with autism who works as a consultant to the factory-farm industry. Through what appears to be a profound understanding of animal cognition, which she attributes to her autism, she works to eliminate processes and practices that frighten farm animals and make them unmanageable. Her work is popular with fast-food businesses; many of the major chains audit their meat suppliers using standards that Ms. Grandin developed.

Her work is somewhat controversial in the vegan/vegetarian community, where humane killing is correctly - but also somewhat irrelevantly - seen as a euphemism for killing, period.

It wasn't surprising, therefore, that during the lecture, a woman in the audience asked her about the larger issues of factory farms, such as their effect on the environment and public health. Ms. Grandin responded that having autism doesn't allow her the luxury of broad, abstract thinking; she's limited to a narrow focus on how she can address a certain problem, at a certain place and time.

I thought this was an interesting response. I spend a lot of time on this site arguing for a systematic approach to problems, and against ignoring connections and implications. At the same time, I do realize that a besetting sin of the Left is its tendency to want immediate, total change - to make perfection the enemy of improvement, and to discourage people by emphasizing the global scope of the problems they face. Too often, people on the Left claim that activists who focus on narrow issues are being naive, or addressing symptoms rather than causes, or what have you. Factory farms are a huge social evil, one version of the argument goes, and making them more morally acceptable, as Ms. Grandin tries to do, merely perpetuates a system that ought to be done away with entirely; to this worldview, anything short of total reform is compromise or appeasement.

I don't entirely agree. On the contrary, I think this issue is one of those "slippery slope" arguments that George Lakoff says the Left needs so desperately. On the Right, discussion of "partial-birth abortion" is intended as a step towards making all abortion cognitively unacceptable; get people to reject the morality of one type of abortion, and you're well on your way to making all forms of the procedure unacceptable.

Grandin's ideas are similar, in that they promote an initial emotional engagement with a specific problem of factory farming; this is a necessary before there can be any sort of commitment to changing a system that is catastrophic for meat-eaters and vegetarians alike. There may be many, many steps between thinking "just because we eat animals doesn't mean we should torture them," and recognizing that factory farming is a public-health disaster for human beings themselves (or vice versa, for that matter), but that journey has to start somewhere, and it must be taken even if it ends in failure, as it well may. Even when they're not autistic, people seldom grasp complex systems at a glance; also, people need to feel that problems are manageable, and that small actions can make a big difference. Unfortunately, this is a view the Left doesn't always encourage.

It's a bit similar to being in debt; you can focus on the lump sum you owe, and say "Where am I going to get $10,000?", or you can focus on the fact that you can afford to pay $100 a month. People usually get into debt gradually, through the accumulation of small purchases and everyday expenses. They need to get out of debt the same way, through many small payments; they can't simply hold off on making payments until they win the lottery.

Through inattention and irresponsibility and inaction, we allowed our country to be taken over by radicals who worked slowly, but thoroughly, to achieve their ends; you can be quite sure that no victory ever seemed too small for them. Where they couldn't take a mile, they settled for an inch. But those inches have added up to a good many miles in my lifetime. Barring a Watergate-style meltdown, which is always a possibility, we're going to have to take America back just as slowly and thoroughly. Which means that the small victories are just as important as the big ones.

Anything Goes

If you want further proof that Bushism is a radical cult that seeks to overthrow the basic concepts of American governance, and replace them with something more akin to the Divine Right of Kings, look no further than these recent remarks by Dick Cheney:

Vice President Cheney said in an interview that the proper power of the presidency has finally been restored after being diminished in the wake of the Vietnam War and Watergate, and that President Bush contributed to the process by not allowing his narrow victory in the 2000 election to inhibit him during his first term.

"Even after we went through all of that, he never wanted to allow, correctly, the closeness of our election to in any way diminish the power of the presidency, lead him to make a decision that he needed to somehow trim his sails, and be less than a fully authorized, if you will, commander in chief, leader of our government, president of the United States," Cheney said in an interview last month that will be broadcast tomorrow night on "Inside the Presidency," a documentary on the History Channel.

[snip]

Cheney said that the "low point" of presidential power occurred at the beginning of Gerald R. Ford's presidency and that "over time" it has been restored, despite such challenges as the Iran-contra investigation under President Ronald Reagan, which Cheney characterized as an attempt to "criminalize a policy difference" between the president and Congress.

There's not much to say about this, except that it stands every ideal of American democracy on its head, displays utter contempt for the most basic Constitutional principles, and suggests that the next four years will be exceedingly grim times for anyone - Right or Left - who believes in legal or ethical limits on government power.

Quickening and Ensoulment

I finally got around to reading Londa Schiebinger's Plants and Empire, a fascinating book on colonialist bioprospecting which deals at great length with the controversy over abortifacients in early modern Europe, particularly as regards the slave trade. (Slave women frequently took abortifacient drugs in order to avoid having their children born into captivity.)

The part of the book that's especially pertinent right now has to do with the European views of "ensoulment": the point at which a fetus stops being a blob of protoplasm, and starts being a person. Initially, it seems, ensoulment was often thought to happen in the fourth or fifth month, after "quickening." When the baby started kicking, it was a person. Before that, it was simply biological matter with no special claim to respect or protection. (Though Schiebinger doesn't mention it, versions of this viewpoint were approved by Aristotle and Augustine; the latter drew a clear distiction between the ensouled "embryo animatus," and the unsouled "embryo inanimatus.")

Apparently, the combined authority of Aristotle and Augustine was more than enough for many early modern churches; Schiebinger notes that around 1600,

Church law was more lenient, teaching that "it is lawful to procure abortion before ensoulment of the fetus, lest a girl, detected pregnant, be killed or defamed. It seems probable that the fetus...lacks a rational soul and begins first to have one when it is born; and consequently it must be said that no abortion is homicide."

What's really fascinating is that laws specifying that ensoulment came with quickening made the pregnant women herself the arbiter of when a fetus was ensouled. Thus, it seems likely that the dogma that ensoulment occurs at conception was turned into law in order to take from women the authority to declare a child ensouled, which had made them the arbiters of whether or not they'd had a "criminal" abortion.

A very interesting book, and well worth reading given our current controversies. At the least, it provides further evidence that the modern pro-life view of ensoulment-at-conception by no means represents the traditional or scriptural religious view.

Credibility and Integrity

A week or so ago, I posted an article stating that

Jeb Bush has fired a top official who was accused of sexual harassment...

...and replaced him with a pornography addict, plagiarist, and apologist for slavery.

Now, the pornography addict, plagiarist, and apologist for slavery has resigned. He blames "sensationalized news stories" for his troubles, rather than the fact that the charges against him are clearly true. Plagiarism, in particular, is pretty easy to detect, and it was his own newspaper that investigated and punished him for it.

But just as Condi Rice can find it within herself to become aggrieved when her "credibility and integrity" are impugned by a public recitation of her own words, this fellow holds to the Republican credo that one remains innocent after being proved guilty.

Don't Leave Home Without It

From Behind the Homefront:

Plastic wallet cards that offer talking points for media interviews are standard issue for Army soldiers leaving for Iraq and are part of a stepped-up media-training program for soldiers, The News & Observer of Raleigh and Editor & Publisher reported.

"Talking point" cards for military personnel, meanwhile, are being updated regularly as the war progresses - often as much as once a week - to keep up with the conflict's changing issues and the proximity of embedded reporters. Among the current talking points: "We are a values-based, people-focused team that strives to uphold the dignity and respect of all."

Minding the Store

Given the latest lame attempts to explain the "missing" WMD, this can't be said often enough: If WMD were transferred from Iraq to Syria, it's BushCo's fault.

After all, we had the technology to discover and prevent it:

Since the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Pentagon says it has vastly improved its ability to sort, assess and organize the information from spy satellites, reconnaissance aircraft and other sensors. It relays that data quickly to analysts and commanders around the globe.

And we weren't alone, either...satellites from many other countries were watching Iraq very closely, well before the war started:

A profusion of both spy and commercial satellites in the last several years virtually guarantees that nothing done in the open can remain a secret for long. Some satellites boast technology that allows them to clearly see objects as small as 2 feet.

And thanks to a tip from Donald Rumsfeld, we even knew precisely where to look for the WMD:

Spy satellites, photo-reconnaissance aircraft, and Predator and Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles are scouring the area between Baghdad and Tikrit.

This inside information should've enabled us to ensure that nothing could slip through the net, not even a truck convoy carrying hundreds of tons of nerve gas through the open desert:

American spy satellites scanning key targets throughout Iraq at least once every two hours in a concentrated surveillance operation which can pick out objects as small as six inches across in daylight and two to three feet wide at night....The giant craft orbit over Iraq at regular, predictable intervals, snapping high-resolution digital pictures of "sites of military interest" and providing the Pentagon and the CIA with continually updated records of major ground and air activity.

In short, if Saddam moved those weapons to another country under our nose, it was perhaps BushCo's single greatest intelligence failure, and is arguably far worse than simply being mistaken about the presence of WMD.

Personally, I'd rather plead guilty to being wrong about the WMD than to letting Saddam's henchmen waltz off with tons of them through one of the most carefully surveilled regions of the world. But chacun á son gout, as they say in France.

If you want a more detailed, technical account of the intensive pre-war surveillance of Iraq's weapons facilities, you can go here.

Travels In Candyland

Near Near Future recently beguiled me into reading an article on the radical new science of "neuroeconomics" (no sooner do I type the words than I imagine a frowning Echidne, lovely in Her wrath).

It was originally published in The Economist - a magazine that has never been afraid to tackle the thornier points of socioeconomic ontology - and it starts off not with a bang, but a whimper:

Although Plato compared the human soul to a chariot pulled by the two horses of reason and emotion, modern economics has mostly been a one-horse show. It has been obsessed with reason.

Don't you just love the structure of that first sentence? I can write non sequiturs too, you know. Watch this: "Although Lesley Gore sang about sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows, meteorology has concerned itself primarily with sunshine and rainbows."

Also, the fact that Plato scribbled that gag about horses doesn't mean that he himself wasn't "obsessed with reason," or that he mightn't have argued that economics should be a "one-horse show."

Let's not split hairs, though. Let's just take it on faith that Plato is the intellectual godfather of modern economics, and that he disapproved of placing reason above emotion, so that we can get back to this awesomely outrageous new science that's revolutionizing classical economics:

In decisions from how much to produce to whether to save and invest, humans have been assumed to be coolly rational calculators of their own self-interest. Over the past few years, however, evidence from psychology has persuaded many economists that reason does not always have its way.

That "many economists" have been dragged kicking and screaming from the spun-sugar citadels of Candyland represents real progress - there's no doubt about that - but there's clearly a great deal more work to be done. For instance, this writer's definition of "reason" as the "cooly rational" calculation of self-interest is both gratuitous and absurd. Self-interest and rationality may converge or diverge; they are not Siamese twins. Human economic behavior, taken as a whole, has never been coolly rational, and coolly rational decisions don't guarantee happy outcomes, or even non-fatal ones.

Anyway, just to bring the article full circle - it started out by talking about Plato, remember? - the author ends with an invocation of Life's Ineffable Mysteries:

Then there are age-old questions of free will: is your failure to save for old age simply a lifestyle choice, or is it down to faulty brain circuits?

Beats me...but I do know that "failure to save for old age" has been a common disaster throughout recorded history (almost as common as being defrauded of one's life savings by corrupt financiers). This offers further evidence that human beings can't be described en masse as "coolly rational calculators of self-interest." On the contrary, they've very often been self-defeating, feckless, improvident fuck-ups. What humans want, as often as not, is something for nothing. That's why they gamble, that's why they give their bank-account numbers to self-styled Nigerian functionaries, and that's why they believe in the illogical babblings of politicians and stock brokers and economists.

And as long as we're dragging Plato's carcass through the mud, it's worth noting that he also argued that "it should be impossible to entertain contradictory notions that defy the science of measurement." Just sayin'!

Put On a Happy Face

In an unwelcome attempt to intensify my already dour mood, Defense Tech discusses the military's need for new and better forms of propaganda to replace leafletting campaigns, which really haven't changed much since World War II.

[L]ast year, the U.S. military dropped 9.3 million leaflets into Afghanistan, and another 3.8 million into Iraq, according to Special Operations Technology magazine, trying to convince the locals to play nice with G.I.s.

U.S. Special Operations Command is exploring alternatives to the flyers. In a recent call for research, SOCOM expressed an interest in "air droppable, scatterable electronic media" to spread the good word about American intentions. "Internet-capable devices, entertainment and game devices, greeting cards, and phone and text messaging technologies" are just a few of the suggested options for these so-called "psychological operations," the magazine notes.

Obviously, communication is important when you're occupying a country. But to be effective, the message you're communicating has to have some connection to what people are seeing and hearing every day. Some propagandists make the mistake of treating populations as a blank slate, to be decorated with smiley faces at will, and fail to acknowledge the power of actual events to shape opinions. There's very little we can say to wipe the image of Abu Ghraib out of the Iraqi mind, for instance. The systematic, formalized use of torture and humiliation represented a conscious choice by the Pentagon to portray Americans as implacably evil people; this has had a lasting effect on Iraqi perceptions, just as it was intended to. The response to feel-good propaganda is different in the USA, of course, but that's because people here are comfortable. Comforting lies have a much greater power to compel belief in America than they do in Iraq.

Thus, when you're talking about raining electronic trinkets on the Iraqi population, you're talking about wasting a great deal of money that could be used instead to provide clean water (or what have you), as well as adding a significant new waste stream to a society that doesn't have the infrastructure to deal with the waste it's got.

Sometimes, it almost seems as though winning hearts and minds is not actually our goal.

Bad to Worse

The information in the new Seymour Hersh article is dreadful enough for anyone. But Arms Control Wonk makes a strong case that the situation may be even worse than Hersh says:

Hersh obviously thinks such a strike would be foolish, but he repeats a myth that is at least partially responsible for the ardor of proponents of a strike against Iranian facilities:

In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years.

Dan Reiter, a professor at Emory University, has written The Osiraq Myth and the Track Record of Preventive Military Attacks arguing that "closer examination of the Osiraq attack reveals that it did not substantially delay the Iraqi nuclear [weapons] program and may have even hastened it." [Emphasis, mine.]

The explanation for this is worth reading in full, as is Reiter's piece.

Absolutely Fucking Despicable

There are moments - pretty often, actually - when Bush's dithering, vacant facade cracks, and one sees him for the spoiled, sociopathic, amoral fiend that he is. Here's an example:

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath.

"We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."

Fair enough. After all, Clinton's re-election meant that he was morally unassailable, and that there was no longer any legal or moral rationale for holding him or his minions accountable for a single goddamn thing that happened in the previous four years.

In addition to extolling the joys of moral relativism, Bush also explained that he intends to let homosexuals bring our once-great nation to its...uh...knees, even though it means betraying the "values voters" who supposedly put him in office:

On the domestic front, Bush said he would not lobby the Senate to pass a constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage....The president said there is no reason to press for the amendment because so many senators are convinced that the Defense of Marriage Act -- which says states that outlaw same-sex unions do not have to recognize such marriages conducted outside their borders -- is sufficient. "Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I'd take their admonition seriously. . . . Until that changes, nothing will happen in the Senate."

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated, fundies? I've argued before that Bush's religiosity was a sham; this should be all the proof anyone needs. But something tells me the "values voters" will accept this new confabulation without any discomfort, and will start echoing it confidently, as though they'd never believed anything else.

Mistakes Were Made

In the course of its disingenuous, paint-by-numbers breastbeating over the human frailties of journalists, the Wilmington News Journal studiously conflates Dan Rather's "mistake" on the Bush memos with Armstrong Williams' acceptance of federal bribe money:

Armstrong Williams' mistake was even more insidious. The Department of Education paid the television pundit and syndicated columnist, $249,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind program himself and to others.[Huh?] Mr. Armstrong first said he didn't realize he had done anything wrong because he had no formal journalism training.

What this editorialist fails to notice is that what Williams did or thought or said is utterly immaterial. What's important is that the Bush administration uses taxpayer money to bribe people; that fact would remain true even if Williams had turned the money down.

The Williams story isn't about a crisis in journalism, but in governance. The crisis in journalism is a subsidiary one, and one sees it primarily in the willingness of the media to throw themselves on any grenade that might threaten BushCo, just as this editorialist does by trotting out the usual self-flagellating journalistic cliches: "We have high ideals, but we're only human. In future, we really must try to be less partisan. Opinion and news must be separate, and clearly defined."

It's all improvisatory, incoherent, and totally beside the point. The only thing the Williams story means is that the federal government uses taxpayer money to bribe people. Anything Williams said about why he took the money, or how he feels about it in retrospect, merely confirms that our money was offered to him illegally.

UPDATE: I got up early to write this post, but not early enough to outfox the preternaturally shrewd Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, who was kind enough to point out that the editorial couldn't even get Williams' name right; you'll note that the article refers to "Mr. Armstrong." Pretty goddamn lame, eh?

Who's Counting?

Canadian scientists have invented a plastic composite that transforms infrared rays into electricity; National Geographic has a not entirely accurate take on it, with which I will now ceremoniously quibble:

The researchers combined specially designed nano particles called quantum dots with a polymer to make the plastic that can detect energy in the infrared.

With further advances, the new plastic "could allow up to 30 percent of the sun's radiant energy to be harnessed, compared to 6 percent in today's best plastic solar cells," said Peter Peumans, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor, who studied the work.

That "6 percent" is somewhat misleading, in that today's best solar cells already convert over 30 percent of radiant energy to electricity. Those aren't plastic cells, though (they're triple-junction gallium-indium-phosphide on gallium arsenide on germanium concentrator cells, if you really must know). If memory serves, the average commercial solar cell currently converts 12 to 15 percent.

At a current cost of 25 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, solar power is significantly more expensive than conventional electrical power for residences. Average U.S. residential power prices are less than ten cents per kilowatt-hour, according to experts.

And therein lies the problem with how we calculate costs in this society. Obviously, the price at which a commodity is offered is different from its cost of production. In some cases, price is lower than cost (subsidies are the obvious example). The prices for coal, natural gas, and nuclear power are artificially low, and don't take into account the external costs of these technologies, which include pollution, accidents, the opportunity costs of land use, health problems among workers, and perhaps even the occasional war. The figure of ten cents per kilowatt-hour is simply wishful thinking; to think otherwise is to be guilty of reification.

Out With the Old

You can add the British Museum to the list of socialist weasels who hate freedom:

U.S. led troops using the ancient Iraqi city of Babylon as a base have caused widespread damage and contamination, according to a report by the British Museum.

The report, quoted by the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, said military vehicles had crushed a 2,600-year-old brick pavement and that there were archaeological fragments scattered across the site, including broken bricks stamped by King Nebuchadnezzar.

The dragons at the Ishtar Gate were marred by cracks and gaps where someone tried to remove their decorative bricks, the paper said....John Curtis, keeper of the British Museum's Near East department, who was invited by the Iraqis to study the site, also found that large quantities of sand mixed with archaeological fragments have been taken from the site to fill military sandbags and metal mesh baskets, the newspaper said.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

After the steamy intimacy of last week's pics, I thought I'd better calm your raging hormones with the austere grandeur of Melibe leonina, the hooded nudibranch.

Fun With Moral Relativism

The hell with it. I'm going to trim this goddamn thing way down.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

When Bush calls a given program "essential," it's a pretty good indication that he intends to cripple it financially, or eliminate it altogether. Consider the sad fate of two important climate monitoring networks:

Congress has eliminated funding for a fledgling network of 110 observation stations intended to provide a definitive, long-term climate record for the United States.

The surprise assault on the Climate Reference Network (CRN) was buried in the 3000-page omnibus spending package for 2005 signed last month by President George W. Bush (Science, 3 December 2004, p. 1662). Legislators also took a bite out of a long-established atmospheric monitoring network that includes the historic time sequence of increasing carbon dioxide levels measured at Hawaii's Mauna Loa. Both networks are key pillars in a much-touted international "system of systems" for earth observation that the Bush Administration has called essential for resolving uncertainties in the connection between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change (Science, 20 August 2004, p. 1096)

If you say that a program is "essential for resolving uncertainties," and then refuse to fund it, the logical conclusion is that you prefer uncertainty to facts. This typifies BushCo's "don't ask, don't tell" approach to science: it doesn't ask important questions, and doesn't wish to be told important things. Facts are meaningful only to the extent that they provide justification for doing what you've already decided to do.

Another example: the GOP's beloved missile defense is one of the great technological failures of our time. It simply doesn't work in any meaningful way. Its greatest "successes" have been due to a testing protocol that's analogous to playing "Pin the Tail on the Donkey" with one's eyes open, and bears no resemblance to likely real-world events. Now, it's failed yet again. But that's no reason to fret, according to the general in charge of the project:

Obering expressed confidence that the system "would work" if pressed into service against relatively simple enemy targets, meaning warheads without complex decoys or other measures for deceiving U.S. interceptors.

Which means, in other words, that it wouldn't do what it needs to even if it weren't a malfunctioning mess. Still, we'll fund the missile defense program, which doesn't work, and de-fund climate monitoring, which does.

Gut Instinct

Some sharp-eyed person at DU caught a great exchange from one of Bush's Town Hall meetings (which are absolutely not scripted in any way):

MS. STONE: I would like to introduce my mom. This is my mother, Rhoda Stone. And she is grandmother of three, and originally from Helsinki, Finland, and has been here over 40 years.

THE PRESIDENT: Fantastic. Same age as my mother.

MS. STONE: Just turned 80.

A Sucker's Game

Via Panda's Thumb comes the surprising news that the reprehensible John Derbyshire, NRO's favorite homophobe-who-doth-protest-too-much, is risking his immortal soul by trashing the ID movement:

None of the ID people I have encountered (in person or books) is an open-minded inquirer trying to uncover facts about the world. Every one I know of is a Christian looking to justify his faith. This naturally inclines me to think that they are grinding axes, not conducting dispassionate science. This is, in my opinion, not only a path to bad science, but also a path to bad theology.

Give that stopped clock a cigar. Trying to prove or disprove deity is a game for suckers, whether you're a theologian or a scientist. The only likely outcomes are bad theology, bad science, or some problematic amalgam of the two.

The question of origins is immaterial to how scientific inquiry can or should be undertaken. Whether my car was made in a factory or sprang full-blown from the forehead of Zeus has no bearing on how its engine works. And if I want to repair it, I'm better off with an automotive manual than with Hesiod's otherwise admirable Works and Days. If I have questions about the spiritual implications of driving, I can always take them up with theologians or philosophers, and let scientists get back to more important business (like preparing biased air-pollution studies for General Motors).

Putting aside the fact that ID arguments would have no scientific utility even if they were logically sound, I don't like the ID folks' paranoid assumption that science is some sort of monolithic machine for imposing philosophical naturalism on people. In principle, good science doesn't require any more than a conscientious adherence to certain methodological standards. Many of our greatest scientists have been religious to one degree or another, and many of them have credited their religious ideas with the intuitions that led to their discoveries. Nonetheless, we revere them today primarily because their discoveries were demonstrable. They didn't think that their intuitions about the nature of reality were a substitute for logical proof. Gödel may have detested positivism and favored a Leibnitzian concept of deity - good for him, says I! - and this may even have aided him in formulating his incompleteness theorems, but the theorems stand today because he demonstrated them to be true. Which is why his insights belong properly to science, rather than to the somewhat less rigorous discipline of Making Shit Up.

Evolution in Action

While America settles down for another nice long argument about whether evolution should be taught in schools, the continuing evolution of the H5N1 avian flu virus brings the world ever closer to an unprecedented public-health disaster in which millions of people could die:

H5N1 has been evolving much more rapidly than H3N2. This is due in part to the extreme genetic instability of H5N1 in Asia. H5N1 evolves via recombination, and each year new sequences fly into the region via migrating birds.

In Viet Nam, the situation is getting very bad indeed. As Effect Measure notes,

The Viet Namese report that after its initial appearance in early December, the spread began to accelerate in the first nine days of January. We are thus entering the exponential growth phase of the epidemic curve.

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, a disease resembling meningococcemia, but with a fatality rate much more comparable to that of avian flu, is claiming victims through human-to-human transmission.

Both stories are virtually absent from the U.S. media; the situation in the Philippines, in particular, has been completely ignored.

The Anti-War Right

"This war is all about oil. We're destabilizing the region. We're not being told about the costs of war. You can't liberate people by dropping bombs on them. There could be dangerous consequences. The media are biased towards the pro-war viewpoint."

Voices from the bedwetting left?

Nope...the voices of Michael Savage, Debra Saunders, and Phyllis Schlafly, raised as one to criticize the commander-in-chief while U.S. troops were in harm's way.

Debra Saunders (3/30/99):

"I believe in the long term, the Kosovars Iraqis will be better off for us having done this than us not having done this,' National Security Adviser Sandy Berger Seceretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the New York Times last week.

May it be so.

Maybe Americans can just swoop down like a superhero....drop a few bombs, suffer few or no casualties, and yet nonetheless save thousands of innocent lives....Maybe the bombing won't turn the Serbs Iraqis against us....Maybe the bombing of Yugoslavia Iraq will stabilize the area, not destabilize it....Maybe the area just looks more unstable now, but really isn't....Maybe the law of unintended consequences won't prevail in this engagement.

Maybe U.S. forces should be the world's policeman. Maybe this country has a stellar record in picking sides....Maybe Bill Clinton George W. Bush hasn't gotten this country into a mire from which there is no clear possible end.

Probably Bill Clinton George W. Bush, if he were of draft age again, would like nothing better than to risk his life overseas...

Michael Savage (11/30/99):

Kosovo Iraq is about oil and nothing but oil....And you thought it was to save the poor Kosovar Albanians Iraqis....the poor Serbs Iraqis just happened to own the wrong real estate at the wrong time....

Now it begins to make sense, doesn't it? The reason becomes clear why, of all the ethnic and religious oppression in the world, NATO George W. Bush chose this area...for ground-leveling "humanitarian" aid. And why the One World media places Slobodan Milosevich Saddam Hussein, a small-time local tyrant, alongside Hitler and Stalin....

But the greatest shame must fall upon the tendentious media hacks. ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and most columnists of the neo-right all fell in line: "The criminal bombing was just. It was to save the innocent "ethnic" Albanians Iraqis from the evil [non-ethnic] Serbs Saddam." Have you now heard one of these hacks apologize or admit they were duped? Used by Big Oil to apologize for, no, to justify, US war crimes?

Even their "reportage" on the recent demonstrations...was biased. Both by under-reporting the number ("hundreds," blared the San Francisco Examiner) and by ascribing the legitimate protests against Clinton's Bush's war crimes to "communists" and anti-American sentiment going back to the 1970s!

Phyllis Schlafly (2/10/99):

Clinton Bush has no exit strategy for Bosnia or Kosovo Iraq and no reliable estimates of the war's cost. The Clinton Bush Administration pretends to fear that the conflict terrorism could spread if we don't act. It is far more likely that, if the conflict terrorism spreads, U.S. intervention will be the cause....Sending U.S. troops might actually endanger U.S. security in ways we cannot now foresee.

Fundamentalism's Tombstone?

I'm absolutely reeling from a recent post by Echidne, who discusses this article about the "Museum of Creation" that will open in Kentucky this spring.

It sounds as though it'll be the ne plus ultra of hallucinatory, high-camp Christofascist freak shows, and it will undoubtedly give America's ever-dwindling population of sane people yet another reason to hang their heads in shame:

[C]ontroversial exhibits deal with diseases and famine, which are portrayed not as random disasters, but as the result of mankind's sin. Mr Ham's Answers in Genesis movement blames the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, in which two teenagers killed 12 classmates and a teacher before killing themselves, on evolutionist teaching, claiming that the perpetrators believed in Darwin's survival of the fittest.

If this is true, all I can say is that they apparently took a rather dim view of their own fitness to survive, since they shot themselves dead.

This next tidbit is so predictable that it's barely worth mentioning:

Other exhibits in the museum will blame homosexuals for Aids.

I must say, the wheels of God's wrath grind very slowly indeed if it took Him centuries to invent a fatal disease with which to punish homosexuals. But maybe He was exhausted after conjuring up dinosaurs with which to terrorize Adam and Eve:

[V]isitors will see a tyrannosaurus rex pursuing Adam and Eve after their fall from grace. "That's the real terror that Adam's sin unleashed," visitors will be warned.

One always wishes to be tolerant of other people's beliefs. But I have to draw the line at people who think that Adam and Eve were not only real, but were chased from Eden by the Giant Lizards of the Lord. To put it bluntly, it strains my credulity.

This museum is further evidence that for all its sound and fury, conservative American Christianity is in utter psychic disarray, having broken not only with reality itself, but with anything remotely resembling its supposed beliefs. Garish monuments to dogma are exactly what you'd expect from a sickly faith that has replaced agape with triumphalist pomp and circumstance. One can only hope that the Museum of Creation ends up being Christian fundamentalism's tombstone.

Avoiding Punishment for Sex

I just stumbled on a very interesting post by Sharon Howard at Early Modern Notes, which discusses Virginia's proposed "fetal death" law in light of a 17th-century act of Parliament intended to prevent "the destroying and murthering of bastard children." (She also delivers a friendly but well-deserved slap on the wrist to Pharyngula over their incessant use of "medieval" as a blanket pejorative, which happens to be a pet peeve of mine, too!).

Here's a particularly thought-provoking excerpt:

[T]he statute enacted that any woman who secretly gave birth to an illegitimate child and killed it, or procured its death, or attempted to conceal its death, 'whether it were born alive or not' (my emphasis), should 'suffer death as in case of murther'. That is: the Act did not, quite, presume murder in such cases; it simply made the concealment of a death in itself a capital crime.

Read the entire post, by all means. Ms. Howard is an expert on crime and women's issues in the early modern era, and her analysis is fascinating.

The Meatrix

I'm not sure how I missed this animation; apparently, it's the most popular online advocacy film ever made. It's a pretty good overview of the major problems with factory farming, particularly the ones that affect human communities.

Just so you know, this is not vegan propaganda; it's anti-factory farming propaganda that suggests less dangerous and destructive sources for meat products. I mention it here mainly because it ends with a link to a zipcode-based search engine for family farms in your area. That's a great resource, IMO.

Exploring Our Options

Current discussions of the "Salvador option" seem to me like another example of the Right's ongoing demand for public approval of every crime and injustice it's ever perpetrated. From pseudoscientific apologies for racism by the likes of D'Souza and Thernstrom, to Ann Coulter's typically addled defense of Joe McCarthy, to all the commentators who recently pretended that Vietnam War protestors were some tiny lunatic fringe, to the repackaging of Oliver North as a legitimate policy analyst, the Right has for years been demanding new debates - on its own terms - on all its biggest failures. Every humiliation and insult the Right ever brought upon itself must apparently be recast as triumph in the public mind, while every act of flint-hearted evil is to be viewed as the respectable exercise of an "option."

The point of the "Salvador option" is that, legally speaking, it was never an option. On the contrary, it was an extremely serious crime. That's why it was kept secret from Congress, and from the public. That's also why, when I protested these actions at the time, I was accused of being a conspiracy theorist or a liar. Now, however, we're learning that the illegal and immoral things that were done in El Salvador comprise an "option": one mere thing amongst other things, all of which can and should be discussed dispassionately by civilized people.

This is one of the Right's favorite strategies: They select arguments that traditionally carry a risk of social sanction, and absolutely revel in discussing them publicly. The goal, I believe, is to overthrow social norms, and make it emotionally and socially easier for people to say things like:

"I'm not a racist, but..."

"I don't support torture, but..."

"I believe in freedom of speech, but..."

"Sure, slavery was bad, but..."

The Right is eager to promote conversations like these, because it understands that every time a person can be led to compromise basic moral principles - every time a person defends the indefensible, or justifies the unjustifiable - that person becomes weaker and more malleable. It's a funny thing, but once I've gotten you to discuss the possible merits of doing something evil, I'm more than halfway to convincing you that it's worth doing.

The proper response to discussions about the "Salvador option" isn't a debate on effectiveness or morality or constitutionality or possible blowback; the proper response is horror and outrage. If a man offers to buy your six-year-old daughter for the international sex trade, you're not going to haggle over the price; you're going to see to it that this predatory monster is stopped dead in his tracks. That's precisely the emotional response that's appropriate when right-wing ghouls take to the airwaves to defend torture and terrorism and racism; the situation calls not for debate - not even heated debate - but for deep-seated spiritual revulsion, and immediate and effective preventative action.

If we refuse to rise to that occasion as a nation - if we can't say "enough is enough," and cast these intolerably arrogant moral lepers back into the outer darkness where they belong - it seems to me that we're just as despicable and dangerous as they are.

Re-Engineering

This article by Gil Friend of Natural Logic eloquently confirms what my miniscule coterie of loyal readers already knows: The standard American business model is a disaster not merely because it's environmentally unsustainable in the long term, but because it stifles technological innovation and American competiveness in the short term.

In particular, Friend points up the folly of companies that

...have taken a "do as little as possible, as late as possible" strategy -- a strategy based on a pervasive and deeply wrong-headed assumption: that designing and delivering better, more efficient, less toxic, more recyclable products would necessarily cost more money and yield less profit. The bottom line impact of losing access to the European market aside, the assumption is patently -- and demonstrably -- false.

In this context, I want to describe my personal experience with re-engineering. Not because it shows how clever or forward-thinking I am, mind you, but because it shows how incredibly hard it can be to think clearly when you're stuck in a rut.

A company I worked for about a decade ago sold a product that included a number of chemical components. New federal regulations meant that suddenly, a specific component could no longer be sent via airmail. Obviously, our first impulse was to curse the regulations, and that impulse got stronger the more often we had to explain to customers that we couldn't get a working product delivered overnight. Customers in Alaska and Hawai'i posed even worse logistical problems, and within a month the situation was intolerable. And it was only at that point that I asked myself, "Couldn't we just use something else?"

It turned out that we didn't even have to: the solution was a simple matter of diluting the compound below the regulatory threshold. This didn't just solve our regulatory problem; it also saved us money by making the raw compound stretch much, much further.

Having made this embarassingly simple discovery months - if not years - too late, I began to wonder what else was wrong with our product from a design standpoint. A lot, as it turned out. I won't bore you with the details, but after a month or two of research, testing, and hunting down alternative manufacturers, I found that the product had 18 components - most of them hazardous and heavily regulated - that could either be replaced with less hazardous alternatives, or dispensed with altogether.

The process of finding this out also uncovered flaws with the product's functionality, and made improvements possible. Manufacturing was quicker and easier at all stages. In addition, the product weighed less after re-engineering, which meant it cost less to ship. Also, with the hazardous materials removed, the cartons no longer required time-consuming hazmat labeling. We'd also solved problems for our customers, by making it easier for them to comply with in-house and local hazmat-disposal regulations.

And best of all, the overall production cost had been reduced by roughly $800, which meant that we made an extra $800 on every unit sold. Or, looking at it another way, you could say that the opportunity cost of "business as usual" for our firm amounted to roughly $40,000 per month before re-engineering.

In other words, far from being an intolerable burden imposed by the unregenerate socialists of the Clinton regime, the new federal regulatory threshold had been a blessing. But not until I'd stopped whining and started thinking. The sad fact is, we all sometimes need a good swift kick in the ass to get our brains working properly.

My experience shows the value of simple re-engineering, but doesn't take into account far more lucrative possibilities for cashing in on intellectual property developed in response to new regulations. The potential value of patents for green technology and processes is unfathomable; countries and businesses that sink research dollars into this sort of innovation are going to be rewarded very handsomely in years to come.

For U.S. industry, the intelligent course of action in regards to EU regulations is to beat Europe at its own game by adopting a consumer orientation; if Europe wants green technology, Americans should be designing, patenting, and selling them the best the world's ever seen. Unfortunately, too much of our industry prefers to spend money on PR campaigns geared at attacking or changing regulations; that money and energy would be better spent on keeping American industry competitive in a changing marketplace.

Most of this is straight out of Marketing 101. It's almost always going to be easier and cheaper to sell people something they want, than to convince them through a PR blitz that they want something else. The problem is that so many industry leaders are focused on their traditional positions at the expense of their best interests; they're more concerned about being "right" than about staying competitive. That's a mistake that "Old Europe" is trying to avoid, and we'd do well to follow their example.

Saving Time

This is odd:

The federal government has announced new plans to erect a security fence around the atomic clock in Boulder, Colo., that sets official U.S. time, but refuses to release information about its decision, Clint Talbott reported in his column for The (Boulder) Daily Camera's Web site on Friday. A local organization made an FOI Act request for documents relating to the fence, and although the government produced approximately 1,000 documents, none of which revealed very much about the need for the fence, another 481 documents were completely withheld for relating "solely to the internal rules and practices of an agency." Talbott quotes a government insider privy to those records as saying that there seemed to be no good reason for keeping the information secret.

I agree. The atomic clock is very important to the DOD aand DOT, who obviously depend on an extremely high level of coordination with Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Military GPS systems rely on it, as do LORAN-C radionavigation systems. Once you've said that, you've said about as much as anyone needs to know to justify protecting the clock. The administration's refusal to explain itself is bizarre.

Of Course?

In an unpleasant, somewhat scatterbrained article entitled Feminists Face Tough Times After Election, AP National writer David Crary makes this dubious point:

Bush, of course, can make a strong case that he respects women — his new Cabinet will likely have four, including Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, and women for years have been among his closest political and legal advisers.

The phrasing here is obnoxious, to say the least. The fact that Bush will have four women in his cabinet says precisely nothing about whether or not he respects women per se. There are about 175 million women in the United States; the fact that Bush finds a handful of them politically useful does not make a "strong case" for anything. One properly judges the Bush administration's attitude towards women by its policies, not by its cynical burlesque of "diversity."

The only thing we really know about Bush's attitude towards women is that he likes women who have oil tankers named after them, and women who agree with him, and women who'll debase themselves by lying for him. None of these things implies that he has any respect for women in and of themselves.

Beyond that, I don't much like this article's implication that it's only "feminists" - as opposed to women in general - who are facing tough times thanks to Bush. The fact that some women are upset about the Right's increasingly outlandish attacks on women's rights, while others aren't, doesn't mean that both sides are equally correct. Any woman who supports repressive policies towards women is a failure as a moral being; she has no legal or moral right to deny other women rights simply because she's a woman, any more than Ken Blackwell has a legal or moral right to disenfranchise black voters simply because he's black, or Roy Cohn had a legal or moral right to persecute gays simply because he was gay.

These people can't ennoble bad policies by standing up for them; all they can do is display the extent of their own degradation.

The Skull Beneath the Skin

On the lighter side - or possibly not - Portland-based artist Michael Paulus offers disturbing glimpses at the skeletal structures of 25 beloved cartoon characters.

Best New Blog

I'm amazed and flattered to have been nominated by even one person for a Koufax Award for "Best New Blog."

It's an award I feel strongly should go to Adventus, because I think that Robert M. Jeffers has a perspective that's unique, challenging, and important. Beyond that, its comments, in which people with diametrically opposed views of reality attempt to find common ground, are fascinating and often touching.

The issue of religion has been turned into a minefield for the Left, and I find RMJ's insights invaluable in charting a course through it. Whether you agree with Robert or not, you can't help but learn things from him.

Homeland Security Follies

There've been some very exciting developments in homeland security this week. First off, here's a short follow-up on my earlier post about the apparently unregulated sale of botulinum toxin through the mail:

Federal officials are scrambling to locate and seize dozens of vials of deadly botulinum toxin, more than $53,000 worth, shipped to South Florida by a company that investigators say was pushing it as an alternative to wrinkle-smoothing licensed Botox.

[snip]

Health Director Malecki...said, "Where is Homeland Security on this? If you can buy the most lethal toxin known to man (botulinum) over the phone, why hasn't something been done?...$53,000 worth of this stuff could kill a lot of people." Link.

Things are not going as well as they might in terms of protecting Americans from radiation, either:

Radiation monitors that would sound alarms in Trenton if readings around the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant climbed to unhealthy levels remain broken and beyond repair after the federal government denied the state funding to replace them. Link.

Meanwhile, the Department of Energy has appointed a serial violator of hazmat regulations to an advisory board that will "make recommendations on the storage and disposal of nuclear and other hazardous waste generated at DOE's Oak Ridge operations."

And of course, the recent rail disaster in South Carolina underscored what safety officials told BushCo almost a year ago:

[M]ore than half of the nation's 60,000 pressurized rail tank cars did not meet industry standards, and...could rupture too easily in an accident....

It also underscores what the FBI told BushCo way back in 2002:

Al Qaeda might be planning to attack trains in the United States, possibly causing derailments or blowing up tank cars laden with hazardous materials.

To be fair, some progress has been made in protecting important Americans from hazmat disasters:

[A]fter bombings on commuter trains killed 191 people in Spain last March, security officials secretly persuaded one railroad to reroute toxic shipments that had routinely passed within four blocks of the Capitol in Washington....

Not bad, eh? An impressive array of homegrown biological, nuclear, and chemical threats...all of them dangerous in and of themselves, all of them presenting opportunities for terrorists, and all of them ignored or mismanaged by the Bush administration.

Beyond Belief (Almost)

With things getting worse in Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld is looking wistfully at those dear dead days when America was truly "walking tall": the era of right-wing death squads in El Salvador.

[T]he Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration's battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success — despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal.

I like this scheme a lot. First, we launch an unnecessary war to protect ourselves from weapons that didn't exist, and botch it in every conceivable way. Then we allegedly change our focus to creating a pro-Western democracy in Iraq, and botch that in every conceivable way.

So what's the solution? Why, it's child's play! All we need to do is set up paramilitary death squads, in conscious emulation of one of the darkest and most evil chapters in American history. What could possibly go wrong?

As someone who stridently protested these murdering monsters back in the day, I can't tell you how many times I was informed by wingnuts that there were no death squads in Central America, and that even if there were, we had nothing to do with them. But now, it seems to be common knowledge that "many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success." We've come a long way, haven't we?

(BTW, there was a wee bit more to Iran-Contra than "arms for hostages.")

Cleaning House

Showing that commitment to sexual temperance which has long been a laughable pretense of the Bush family, Jeb Bush has fired a top official who was accused of sexual harassment...

..and replaced him with a pornography addict, plagiarist, and apologist for slavery.

I guess Jonah Goldberg could call him a threefer. (link via Atrios.)

Guilty Now and Forever

Captain James Yee has received an honorable discharge from the Army.

Remember when Michelle Maglalang said this about him?

Yee exploited our bent-over-backwards solicitude toward Muslims in the military by allegedly using his access to smuggle out diagrams of the detainees' cells and lists of the names of the detainees and their interrogators.

Note to Michelle: That "allegedly" belonged before "exploited," you insufferable buffoon, not before "using."

Maglalang goes on to make Yee a poster child for the evils of something called "multiculturalism" (which is known to most of us as "reality"). I'm sure that her apology will be sincere and effusive.

Mithras catalogs a few other examples of the Right howling for this innocent man's blood:

They all called him a traitor, said leg irons were too good for him, said political correctness was shielding him from media scrutiny, and said all Muslim chaplains should be under suspicion.

Meanwhile, after studiously ignoring the fact that Yee was completely cleared of all criminal charges, Misha at AIR points out that "gee, adultery is pretty darn bad too."

Yes, it is. That being the case, let's pass a law making adultery grounds for summary dismissal from political office, shall we? After all, it'd be nice to see lots of new faces in Congress, wouldn't it? Of course, the Republicans might end up losing a few political heavyweights, but the goal of moral purity surely trumps such petty strategic considerations.

Smiley Faces Are On the March

If you want an explanation of this cartoon, prepare to get sick to your stomach, and then click here.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Caught in the act!

Just FYI, nudibranchs are hermaphroditic; they both produce sperm and eggs. Nice work if you can get it, eh?

It's Only Money!

POGO Blog catches AP misrepresenting the cost to taxpayers of the disastrous and pointless F/A-22 Raptor:

This AP article seriously understated the F/A-22 Raptor's price tag. The article says that "Raptors cost approximately $133 million each." As we said in the recent post...The latest acquisition numbers show the F/A-22 development and manufacturing program will cost $71.7 billion for 279 aircraft – or about $257 million per copy. If the program is sliced by $10.5 billion, the 180 F/A-22s will cost about $340 million each.

That's a very, very large increase in costs - especially for an unnecessary plane that doesn't work properly - and POGO deserves a lot of credit for predicting it way back in 1998.

Some of you may have read the despicable David Holcberg's recent commentary, in which he argued that the US should not give a penny to tsunami victims, "because the money is not the government's to give...and has to be extorted from an American taxpayer first."

Obviously, Holcberg is being foolish, in that he's pretending to know what the taxpayers' wishes are. In fact, the majority of Americans support sending aid overseas, especially in response to a disaster of this magnitude; in the present case, nearly half of American households have added to the federal funds with donations to charity out of their own pockets.

I'd argue that tsunami relief isn't a misuse of taxpayer funds; it's an example of why we should pay taxes...so that we can respond instantly (or eventually, in BushCo's case) to emergencies at home and abroad.

There are Americans like Mr. Holcberg and Michael Savage who don't agree with me, and that's fine. But personally, I don't support the use of my tax dollars for stupid, money-burning projects like the Raptor. And now, it looks as though the cost of one Raptor - one faulty, unproven, unnecessary, dangerous, insanely expensive jet fighter - may end up being roughly equivalent to the entire amount the US government is sending for tsunami relief.

Kind of puts things in perspective, I think.

It Can't Happen Here

Same-day voter registration has been blocked repeatedly by Republican scaremongers in this country, who claim that it rolls out a red carpet for fraud and abuse. But in Iraq, oddly enough, it's simply another jewel in democracy's crown:

"We allowed the population of Mosul and Anbar province to register themselves the same day as polling," said Hareth Mohammad Hassan, the commission's energetic 33 year old deputy director. "A voter can just show his Iraqi documents and picture ID, get registered and vote."

So which is it: Are we allowing the Iraqis to undermine democracy by setting up an inherently corrupt voting system, or is same-day registration a perfectly reasonable idea that could be implemented in every state in America?

The Invisible Hand

Once again, Monsanto has demonstrated why laissez-faire economics is a pipe dream:

The US agrochemical giant Monsanto has agreed to pay a $1.5m (£799,000) fine for bribing an Indonesian official. Monsanto admitted one of its employees paid the senior official two years ago in a bid to avoid environmental impact studies being conducted on its cotton.

In addition to the penalty, Monsanto also agreed to three years' close monitoring of its business practices by the American authorities. It said it accepted full responsibility for what it called improper activities.

Last time I checked, bribery is a criminal offense; a fine of 1.5 mil seems pretty goddamn small. And this isn't the first time Monsanto's paid bribes, either; it's been their SOP for some time, as this article - and Monsanto itself - admits.

NSPD 28

Arms Control Wonk may have uncovered "a previously undisclosed National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) relating to nuclear weapons."

Very interesting stuff...go have a look.

Bush to Fundies: "Fuck Jesus...We're Taking Him Out!"

BushCo's thank you to the fundies for turning out in record numbers to support their false prophet's faux-Christian agenda? No crosses allowed at the inauguration parade!

A Christian group is accusing the U.S. Secret Service of religious discrimination and censorship for issuing a memo that bans Christian crosses from the presidential inauguration parade later this month.

Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Christian Defense Coalition, contends the Secret Service has "trampled the First Amendment and crushed religious freedom in the public square."

"Simply put, it is religious bigotry and censorship," he said. "It is even more troubling when one realizes that it is only Christian symbols that have been excluded from the inauguration parade."

Get used to it, Pat. Bush is not going to be throwing you folks too many bones this time around. He can't run again, and he knows that no matter what he does, you clowns are guaranteed to fall in line behind the next GOP nihilist who can mouth pieties with a straight face. Bush's "faith" is about as convincing as a hooker's multiple orgasms...but you poor saps just can't stop laying your money down, can you?

How Things Affect Other Things, Part XXIV

It seems possible that the type and amount of beachfront development in Southeast Asian resort towns had some bearing on how much damage the tsunami did:

"Places that had healthy coral reefs and intact mangroves were far less badly hit than places where the reefs had been damaged and the mangroves ripped out and replaced by beachfront hotels and prawn farms," said Simon Cripps, director of the Global Marine Programme at the environment group WWF Internationational.

"Coral reefs act as a natural breakwater and mangroves are a natural shock absorber, and this applies to floods and cyclones as well as tsunamis," he said in an interview from Geneva.

He compared the outcome of the December 26 tsunami in the Maldives, the low-lying archipelago which emphasises good coral management in its policy of upmarket tourism; and the Thai resort of Phuket, where mangroves and a coastline belt have been replaced by aquaculture and a hotel strip.

Both places were swamped and suffered severe economic damage. In the Maldives, just over 100 people have been counted as dead and missing in a populace of 270,000; in Phuket, where there is a roughly similar size of population at peak season, the toll is nearly 1,000.

Makes sense to me. In most cases, good planning means allowing oneself to be limited by natural conditions. For instance, you really don't want to build on landfill or reclaimed wetlands in earthquake country, because the ground liquefies when it starts shaking. And in general, the long-term economic value of intact, clean wetlands is greater than that of development.

This article also says something about the potentially debasing nature of tourism. When a country destroys its scenic attractions in order to accomodate more guests and services, it loses some of its appeal, and attracts the type of tourists who are less likely to care if Phuket, Thailand looks pretty much like Palm Beach, Florida. This becomes a vicious circle; the more tourists you get who have low expectations about natural attractions, the less need there is for preserving them. As such towns become more crowded and developed, they become less desirable as destinations; revenues drop, and problems like prostitution and crime increase. Therefore, countries that protect the things that make them special, and limit tourism based on a sustainability model, are likely to earn far more tourism dollars over the long term than countries that try to pack people in like sardines.

And, it seems, they may even be better able to withstand natural disasters.

Forward, Mince!

Defense Tech reports on a 1994 Air Force proposal to confound the Enemies of Freedom "with bugs, rats, and horny gay men."

[T]he Air Force document calls for "chemicals that affect human behavior so that discipline and morale in enemy units is adversely effected. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."

There's more; go read it, and rejoice in the power and wisdom of our nation's defenders.

There Must Be Some Mistake

As we all know, Democrats can't and won't win elections until they stop appeasing gay couples who want equal rights just because they're citizens, taxpayers, and human beings. Denying these rights is something Ameicans feel very strongly about, and nothing will ever change their minds, because it's a matter of moral values.

Except in Vermont, where something's gone dreadfully wrong.

The Democrats triumphantly reclaimed control of the Vermont House on Wednesday, four years after they were swept from power in a backlash against the state's first-in-the-nation law creating civil unions for gay couples.

Lawmakers and political observers said Vermont's voters have become more comfortable with the notion of civil unions, which grant gay couples nearly all the rights and responsibilities of marriage.

Evil Salutes Incompetence (Or Vice Versa)

Via Atrios, here's some sobering news for fans of the lively arts:

The inaugural ceremony will include performances by the U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club, the U.S. Marine Band and mezzo sopranos Denyce Graves and Susan Graham.

Guy Hovis, a vocalist from Tupelo, Miss., who performed on the Lawrence Welk show, will sing, "Let the Eagle Soar," a song written by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Shortly thereafter, the earth will careen out of its orbit and into the sun, due to a gravitational anomaly caused by hundreds of deceased American presidents and composers simultaneously spinning in their graves.

Pulling the Wishbone

With the Arctic generally agreed to be warming up dramatically, the only question that can really be of interest to serious people is "Who gets to cash in?"

After all, there could be huge amounts of fossil fuel up there. And just think of all the problems that would solve!

Driven by that inexorable logic peculiar to dreamers and lunatics, a number of countries are jockeying for position in the melting Arctic, asserting territorial claims, and - inevitably - rattling sabers:

One Canadian diplomat says: "To stake a territorial claim, you must be able to demonstrate you can actively patrol and enforce it, if necessary militarily."

How true that is. And indeed, it may well be that if Canada wants to exploit whatever's left of the Arctic, it'll have to pry it out of Denmark's cold, dead fingers:

"The North Pole is one of the only virgin territories left on the globe," says Torquil Meedon, a senior official at Denmark's ministry of science and technology. "Climate changes indicate that ice in the Polar Sea may disappear within 50 to 100 years....Who knows how valuable the rights to the North Pole could be 100 years from now?"

This completely irrational conflict, the preparations for which are based on blithe acceptance of an environmental and social catastrophe whose ultimate negative effects no one can reliably gauge, reminds me of a wishbone being pulled. The meal has been eaten, the bones have been gnawed, and now its time to see who'll get the bigger part of the wishbone, and have his or her dreams come true.

I try to remain positive, but I really don't think that a new round of bellicose geopolitical squabbling is the proper response to global warming. This is simply not how rational people act.

Geckomimesis

On this bright morning, I am very pleased to draw your attention to the remarkable adhesive qualities of gecko feet:

In 2002, biologist Kellar Autumn at Lewis & Clark University in Oregon discovered that the adhesion came from van der Waals Forces, minute molecular-scale attraction (spider feet work in a similar, albeit simpler, manner). Each gecko foot is covered with millions of tiny hairs, or setae, which branch in to nanoscale tips, or spatulae; each seta is strong enough to lift 20mg. The combined adhesive power of a gecko's four feet is over 90 lbs.

Duly impressed, Autumn set out to create a biomimetic structure with similar adhesive capabilities:

In 2003, they managed to create artificial setae with adhesion on the order of 0.5 Newton per square centimeter; their eventual goal is adhesion force equivalent to gecko setae, 10 Newton per square centimeter.

One feature of systems of millions of tiny attraction points is that they can be both incredibly strong and readily detached. A gecko is able to peel its feet up and run at a good clip, or stand still and be nearly impossible to pull from a window or wall. As Autumn suggests, geckomimetic adhesive could be of enormous value in object construction, as the adhesion force could be quite strong. At the same time, being able to simply peel apart components -- with no chemical residue -- would enhance our ability to design for disassembly, an important part of cradle-to-cradle thinking.

Why I'm Not a "Darwinist"

I don't like to be offered false choices, and this leads me to address - somewhat hesitantly - our culture's false dichotomy between fundamentalist religion and Darwinism.

First, let me assure you that I'm not talking here about evolution, and I will certainly not be weighing in on the battle between evolution and creationism (a battle which I happen to think is both utterly inconsequential, and boring beyond endurance). Nor am I talking about the specific collection of scientific beliefs that Darwin himself held (some of which science rejected in streamlining his theory, like pangenesis and Lamarckism).

What I'm talking about is a particular subset of dubious and ugly assumptions about the human condition, which come from a politicized interpretation of biological data rather than from the data themselves, and which have been allowed to bask in the reflected glory of science while remaining thoroughly speculative. I could call it Social Darwinism, but I think that's a bit too explicit and political a term for what is more of a cultural miasma at this point. I prefer to describe Darwinism as any philosophy of human interaction that cites Darwin as its central authority, and posits competition and selfishness as the root causes (and, too often, as the justification) for human behavior.

Whenever I find this influence oppressive, I wonder what our life might be like if Alfred Russel Wallace, who postulated the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin - and received joint credit for it when the theory was first presented - occupied Darwin's current place in our pantheon of immortals. Wallace was a fervent champion of Darwin, and the two men were on good terms, though their friendship was made somewhat uneasy by their radically different views of the world (and later, by Wallace's growing conviction that the development of human consciousness was beyond the scope of natural selection, as commonly understood).

Darwin was a staunch Malthusian, whose preoccupation with the struggle for existence and the "quality" of breeders did much to encourage the nascent pseudoscience of eugenics. Here's a famous passage from The Descent of Man:

We civilized men...do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the mained, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

To me, what's most notable about this passage is Darwin's claim that "civilized men" routinely did their "utmost" to save the lives of the poor. This is absurd to anyone who has the slightest familiarity with the social policies of Victorian England, unless one cares to argue that obliging seven-year-old girls to work 14-hour shifts in coal mines is doing one's "utmost" for humanity. The idea that laissez-faire Britain was not being sufficiently hard on the poor - or that the "utmost skill" was used to save the life of any person who was injured or fell ill, or that the era's agonizingly slow steps towards reform represented the apex of moral engagement with suffering - is simply not a product of rational thought.

By contrast, here's Wallace speaking against eugenics:

Segregation of the unfit, indeed! It is a mere excuse for establishing a medical tyranny. And we have enough of this kind of tyranny already....Eugenics is simply the meddlesome interference of an arrogant, scientific priestcraft.

Given the horrors of the last hundred years, I think most of us will have far more sympathy for Wallace's point of view than for Darwin's. And in fact, Wallace remained strongly, and often effectively, engaged with social problems 'til the end of his life. (This site has a wonderful collection of Wallace's writings, as well as a great deal of biographical information.)

Wallace has been painted as something of a crackpot, mainly because of his interest in spiritualism. I'm not particularly troubled by this foible, especially when I consider that his excursions into metaphysics and evolutionary teleology tended to be clearly labeled as such in his writings, which even today is a courtesy seldom observed by theorists on the alleged social implications of evolution. Wallace's religious notions - what little there were of them - were somewhat similar to Einstein's or Schrodinger's in their vague impersonality, and their practical consequences amounted to little more than compassion, humility, and a distaste for the more glaring excesses of his era's positivist dogma.

Given the inevitable limitations imposed by personality and place - which weigh just as heavily on us as they did on our forebears - Wallace's views were generally modern, sensible, and humane. He wrote voluminously and reasonably on capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, greed, laissez-faire economics, the subjection of women, pollution, misuse of land, and a host of other ills, and he was very often not merely right, but prophetic. That Darwin preferred science to fighting for social justice is no reason to condemn him, but it's hard not to feel that Wallace's passionate progressivism might've been a better tutelary spirit for the early 20th century than Darwin's remote and gloomy Malthusianism. Both men had their qualities, but there's no question in my mind as to who was more worthy of real admiration.

Another figure I admire is Petr Kropotkin, whose impatience with some aspects of the doctrine of Universal Struggle led him to write the great book Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution. Despite this title, which is scrupulous in stating the limited scope of the book's exceptionally well-researched argument, some Darwinians sneered at the idea that cooperation, rather than competition, was the primary motive force behind evolution, without noticing that Kropotkin had never that said it was. I think it's possible to detect the outlines of a specific philosophical agenda behind that sort of obstinate misrepresentation, and I fear that even today, neither the agenda nor the misrepresentation has been completely abandoned.

Both Wallace and Kropotkin were scientists, and both accepted the central role of natural selection in evolution (Wallace, in some ways, was more staunch in that regard than Darwin himself). But the progressive and nonexploitative inferences they drew from the data - their answers to the question "How then shall we live?" - were never really engaged with by the Darwinists, let alone accepted. For some reason, the belief in morality as an integral aspect of nature (often operating, in Wallace's opinion, independently of individual "experiences of utility") seemed far more airy and speculative than the equally fanciful assumption of a universe that favors only selfishness (or at best, tribalism). But if both views are quasi-teleological extrapolations beyond the data, the former is at least as well supported, and far more socially useful.

The logical assumption here, which I did not invent and which will probably not shock anyone, is that the most successful philosophical interpretation of scientific fact is often the one that best serves the needs of its age, regardless of whether or not it's true. For some reason, Darwinian philosophy is seldom seen by liberals as part of an official apparatus of exploitation, possibly because it's been artificially set up as an opposing force to religious irrationality. But Darwinism never overthrew religion; in some cases, it actually conjured up a new set of metaphysical leaps, wild teleological claims, and unpardonable sins. At its worst, it even combined with religion to create noxious amalgams like Manifest Destiny, or Hitlerian race-mysticism.

At its advent, the philosophy of Darwinism simply confirmed what few of the era's great men had ever really doubted, which was that Caucasian men were intended by nature to rule the world. Indeed, Darwin suggested as much himself:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.

This, of course, begs an important question: What is a savage? I'd argue that a savage is an irrational person who is driven by fear or ignorance to destroy anything to which he or she cannot - thanks to a total failure of imagination - assign value. (This behavior, by the way, is actually fairly rare in primitive societies, which tend to assign value to virtually everything.) Surely there's less to regret in being a victim of this savagery than in being an agent of it, and yet the agents of this looming extermination are specifically defined by Darwin as "civilized races."

It's important to understand that this is a fallacy that Darwin was under no logical compulsion to accept, let alone to promote; Wallace, to his lasting credit, rejected it entirely. As a final contrast with Darwin's bloodcurdling vision of the White Man's Burden, here's Wallace speaking against the application of Darwinian theory to social engineering:

The principle of competition - a life and death struggle for bare existence - has had more than a century's unbroken trial under conditions created by its upholders, and it has absolutely failed. The workers, now for the first time, know why it is that with ever-increasing production of wealth so many of them still suffer the most terrible extremes of want and of preventable disease. There must, therefore, be no further compromise, no mere talking. To allow the present state of things to continue is a crime against humanity. Any Government that will not abolish starvation in this land of superfluous wealth must be driven from power.

Brand New Ideas, Same Old Thinking

Flann O'Brien once argued that each instance of scientific progress actually increases the sum total of human ignorance, by creating more uncertainty than it dispels. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but in terms of his example - the splitting of the atom - he was surely correct.

Biopharming is another case where O'Brien's warning holds true. This article demonstrates the danger of promoting revolutionary scientific concepts without a complementary change in attitude (registration required, but you can get a password from BugMeNot).

Think of fields as factories. Rice and barley could yield wonder drugs, transformed from dinner table staples to medical miracles by laboratory gene tinkering.

Ventria Bioscience, a small California company hoping to reap the harvest of so-called biopharming, is moving a handful of employees and the promise of a blossoming science to Missouri.

Yet the move of Ventria from Sacramento to Maryville, and its plans to plant crops in small plots in northwest and eastern Missouri, brings with it a new chapter of biotech agriculture that has run into resistance around the country and the world.

The chief worry is that drug-brewing crops might contaminate the food supply — scaring the marketplace from using ordinary commodity crops out of fear of drug-laced grain.

Again, new technology requires new thinking; grafting a technological innovation onto an existing conceptual model can be like strapping a jet engine to a tricycle. Lord knows I dislike the concept of pharmaceutical plants, but even if I put that dislike aside, I still notice a couple of things wrong with the assumptions here.

First off, they seem to think that because they're planting crops, they must plant them outside, because that's what farmers do. In my opinion, they're operating under the wrong paradigm; the situation is more analogous to working with infectious agents. Crops like these should be grown in special buildings that maintain negative pressure, and people who work in them should wear special clothes and go through decontamination on leaving. This would have the added advantage of not letting the plants be eaten by insects and animals, which could carry the drug-producing genes throughout the food chain. (It'd also prevent activists from destroying the crops.)

Second - and the article does make this point - there's no reason to use food crops for producing pharmaceuticals. In food crops like rice and corn, genetic contamination with pharmaceutical-producing genes could effectively destroy American agriculture. Using a non-food plant would at least protect conventional and organic farms. Unfortunately, most of the knowledge about bioengineering is geared towards food crops, and there's a strong resistance to doing things differently.

Scott Deeter, the president of Ventria, says that these safeguards are unnecessary because "It's a closed system." That's an interesting claim to make about a system in which a self-replicating organism has been placed into the environment. The fact is, the only way to reduce risk to the bare minimum is to grow these crops indoors, using the protocols appropriate to infectious agents. If that's too expensive and unwieldy, then the technology's too expensive and unwieldy.

Cheap Talk

No sooner did I finish attacking David Brooks' grotesque metaphysical striptease, than I stumbled upon a whole series of similar articles pondering the implications of the tsunami for people of faith.

I find myself getting increasingly angry about this type of discourse, which views catastrophe in terms of its effect on people far removed from its epicenter...people who, in many cases, have suffered nothing more than philosophical unease. I have no sympathy for these people, or for their crises of faith, and I resent the fact that their metaphysical fantods are considered newsworthy.

If the pointless destruction of human life is going to shake anyone's faith, the unfathomable horrors of the twentieth century should've done the job long before now. Also, the all-too-common Christian belief that the "heathens" who were killed in this disaster are currently wailing in Hell is just about the only philosophical concept that could make a situation this bad seem even uglier and more pointless. Anyone who believes such a thing deserves to have his or her faith not merely shaken, but pulverized.

In any case, the "spiritual crisis" here is an entirely private one; its only possible importance to society lies in how it prompts a specific person to act. But since the immediate, practical course of action for atheists and the religious must be precisely the same - helping to save lives and rebuild homes - there's no reason to debate issues of faith. In fact, to agonize publicly over one's faith is to be a boor at the very least. No one would appreciate hearing such talk at a funeral, and I don't see why it should be any more welcome at a mass grave.

The only remotely positive thing about a disaster that wipes out infrastructure is the chance to make the new system better than the old one, but for some reason we tend not to take advantage of this opportunity. For instance, after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, buildings were rebuilt quickly and shoddily, sowing the seeds of a future disaster. That didn't have to happen; sensible and humane people wouldn't have let it happen.

We face a similar choice today. Instead of rebuilding Southeast Asia's slums and resorts, we can help to build new communities that share in the benefits of technology and health care and education. In particular, I hope that everyone whose "faith" was shaken by this event will lay down their spiritual hand-mirrors for a time, and petition their governments to forgive the crippling debt burdens of Indonesia and Sri Lanka. Indonesia's debt, largely accrued under Suharto for the benefit of himself and his cronies, is equal to two-thirds of the country's GDP.

To any American whose faith is so brittle that it shatters in the face of injustice, our long support for Suharto's bloodthirsty regime - and our willingness to let him drain his country's coffers and put the literally impossible burden of repayment on its citizens - might well provide ample grounds for atheism. But not for apathy.

A Minor Observation

The more I examine conservative thought, the more it seems to be divided against itself.

Consider this: Conservatives generally claim that there are absolute standards for morality, and relativism is a lie. However, they also tend to believe that the pursuit of rational self-interest (Smith), or "selfishness" (Rand), or outright criminality (Mandeville) generates morally desirable outcomes.

Meanwhile, the actions of "do-gooders" (a favorite pejorative against liberal activists) are shabby and shameful because they're secretly inspired by the very same self-interest which, in a different context, is the most reliable force for social good, even (or especially) when it's directed towards evil goals.

Which would seem to imply that moral action is both relative, and shameful as an end in itself.

Vulgarity and Evil

Brad DeLong and Echidne have already dealt ably with the unappetizing spectacle of David Brooks' spiritual exhibitionism, but when you're wide awake at 4 AM, it's all too easy to convince yourself that you have a few things to add.

First, it's amazing that Brooks thinks anyone who is reeling from the horrors of the tsunami will be edified by this scatterbrained, contradictory inventory of what he fancies are his insights into Nature and God; this is mere peacock vanity on his part, and it's also colossally vulgar.

In his search for an emotionally comforting "explanation" for this disaster, Brooks fails to grasp that the central question of religion isn't who lives and who dies; it's who cares and who helps. Nonetheless, Brooks makes a great show of pondering "what it means" when catastrophe strikes, which naturally includes a solemn attempt to address the question of "God's will."

I'm no theologian, but it's at least possible that God entrusted our well-being to one another, and that Brooks' rhetorical contortions represent an elaborate effort to miss a theological point that's actually rather terrifying in its perfect simplicity.

If God's will is done on earth, surely it's done through our bodies and minds. After all, if God had intended to look after the world's poor, the Bible would probably have spent far less time telling us that we have to do it.

But if God doesn't exist, our human obligations remain no less real and no less pressing, unless we're in sympathy with those pseudomoral nihilists for whose amusement Brooks cuts his marionette capers. Despite what Brooks appears to believe, the view of God as some cosmic Johnny Appleseed who dispenses liberal doses of disaster for our benefit is very far indeed from giving meaning to human suffering; actually, it's a clarion call either to schadenfreude or to atheism. Indeed, between its pinched, self-centered moral relativism and its willful avoidance of basic religious ideals, the Right does more to make atheism attractive than any dozen godless polemicists could.

But maybe it's not God's fault, says Brooks. Maybe it's Nature's fault. Nature, according to Brooks, is both amoral and cruel; its disasters are meaningless and random, but also hostile and hateful. (After all, lions eat gazelles, no matter how much we try to pretend otherwise while we loll around drinking soy lattes at "organic food stores.")

For Brooks, America is perpetually on the verge of losing its innocence, and Nature's worst crime is that it threatens to discourage America from its mission of "National Greatness." Here's one of Brooks' only sincere-sounding complaints about the tsunami:

[I]mages of something dark and unmerciful were thrust onto a culture that is by temperament upbeat and romantic.

Poor old us. Of course, there was also something dark and unmerciful in the bombs that rained down on Baghdad recently, and some might argue that a temperament too "upbeat and romantic" to contemplate the suffering it visits upon other people is a temperament that's defective at best. Brooks' sententious wrath at Nature - it's arbitrary, it's cruel, it's vicious and willful! - could as easily be aimed at the Bush administration; his search for "human agency" might just as well start with his own tireless cheerleading for an unjust war, which has stained his hands indelibly with the blood of children.

To be warned against the "fog of compassion" by a gibbering husk like Brooks is deeply insulting, as is the notion that we should fear Nature more than the evil men whose viciousness and violence Brooks has sought for so long to glorify. Spare me the apocryphal "good intentions" that Brooks has so often discerned in the Bush administration's disastrous schemes, and I'll take my chances with Nature.

Donate Airline Mileage to Charities

Firedoglake reports that you can donate airline mileage to Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, OxFam, Unicef and other charities who are helping tsunami victims.

He has a set of links to airlines that accept transfer of mileage to humanitarian organizations. This is a great way to help out, especially if you've already given as much cash as you can afford.