Drone Vs. Drone

The Defense Department loves drones. There's some evidence that they always don't work as well as they might, but the DoD loves them dearly nonetheless - with all the tumultuous passion of its proud, headstrong nature - and it wants more. Lots more.

But as Defense Tech notes:

We're not the only ones with drones. China, Russia, Iran, France -- all sorts of enemies of freedom have unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. All in all, "some 32 nations are developing or manufacturing more than 250 models" of drones, according to the Defense Department's UAV Roadmap.

With that many drones coming down the pike, there's only one possible solution: immediate, costly research into a drone-destroying drone. And of course, when you need costly research into a weapon system of dubious utility, DARPA is your best bet.

The Peregrine program will develop and demonstrate a UAV interceptor aircraft that will utilize a dual propulsive power system to provide very high endurance for the loiter and surveillance period, and a very high dash speed for intercept and kill....

And with any luck at all, we should be able to outsource operation of the Peregrine to private firms!

What happens when an anti-anti-drone system is invented - to destroy the drone-destroyers - is a question for another, less festive day.

Economies of Scale

POGO has an interview with former DHS Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin, which gives us important new insights into the taut, alert, elegant mind of Asa Hutchinson:

What are some examples of waste and inefficiency you’ve found at DHS?

There are so many. We did this undercover work where we found that it was still easier than it should have been after 9/11 to sneak guns and knives and bombs onto airplanes. We were able to confirm that ABC News was able to smuggle depleted – not weapons-grade – uranium into the United States. Even though Customs and border protection had inspected those containers, the Department missed it on two occasions. In terms of border security, they’re not catching as many people as they might if their systems were interoperable with the FBI's. It's entirely a DHS decision not to, the reason being the FBI takes ten fingerprints while DHS only takes two. When asked why, [DHS Under Secretary] Asa Hutchinson said it would be too time consuming. I don’t know why. It's not five times more time consuming, you just put down all ten fingers instead of two!

Socialized Losses, Privatized Profits

There are a couple of great posts at Effect Measure today. The first is a devastating dissection of recent anti-pandemic recommendations from the Infectious Diseases Society of America, most of which are hopelessly vague or unrealistic, with the prominent and inevitable exception of "strengthen liability protections during emergency outbreak response." Revere asks the essential question:

Why do we always socialize the losses and keep the profits private? Let's socialize both the losses and the profits. I'm sick of hearing about "liability" barriers. How about "affordability barriers" for a change?

The second is a discussion of what pandemic response actually entails, when you live in a society that has crippled its public-health system for the sake of ideological purity: a series of wrenching moral dilemmas that make the Terri Schiavo case look like a walk in the park.

Wedge or Bridge?

A week or so ago, I was arguing that the environment is an ideal wedge issue to use against the Right, especially in state and local politics. This article concurs...in a sense:

Environmental issues, especially at the state and local levels, are bringing together conservatives and liberals who agree on little else, providing common ground in an increasingly polarized nation....Conservatives such as pro-gun hunters and antiabortion evangelicals are making common cause with pro-abortion-rights, gun-control liberals on land conservation, pollution, and endangered-species protection.

It's an interesting article, worth reading in full. What I think is odd, though, is how it speaks of "bringing people together," "making common cause," and so forth. It made me realize that this is often the tone the media prefers when the Right grants the Left's traditional positions some validity. By contrast, when the Right siphons away some lefties, as it's done with gay marriage or abortion, it's popularly seen as exploiting a "wedge issue." In other words, the Right is portrayed as being willing, occasionally, to take the unexpected stance of "validating" liberal concerns, while the Left is portrayed as a beleaguered group of backbiters trying desperately to hold together a marriage of convenience.

Has anyone else noticed this, or am I just imaging things?

Dust and Noise

An overwrought, poorly written, and apparently unedited opinion piece by Jay Lehr and Richard T. McGuire tearfully contrasts America's Golden Age of resource exploitation with our current era of business-thwarting "junk science":

In the past we used our natural resources freely. We took great pride in our ability to convert resources into products with a direct benefit to the public. We turned trees into houses, coal and iron into automobiles.

Today we hear that we must stop using our economic resources. Scale back. Harvest fewer trees. Drill fewer oil wells. Use less fertilizer. Build no new power plants.

Oh, the humanity! Needless to say, Lehr and McGuire immediately launch into a rant on environmental hysteria, and the privations we've all suffered as the result of imaginary terrors like the "asbestos scare." Intellectual seed is spilled - or perhaps I should say "dribbled" - over the cornucopian fantasy of "wise use." And of course, the mythical Alar Scare - that spavined old warhorse of the anti-environmental ultra-right - is dutifully trotted out as evidence of public irrationality.

Though they try gamely to come across as moderates, the authors simply can't keep their inner demons at bay. One moment they're cautioning us against irrational fears; the next, they're flailing around like Linda Blair in The Exorcist, screeching about the

[T]echnically unsupportable global warming assumptions being pressed upon us by a scientific community receiving $4 billion a year to prove the unprovable, the United Nations wishing to expand its power, big business desiring to drive small business out of business, foreign nations desiring to shackle our economy, environmental zealots wishing to undermine our capitalistic economy and a will [sic] co-conspiring news media which thrives on all manufactured crisis.

As you can see, Lehr and McGuire find it very difficult to keep their paws out of the cookie jar of Conservative Cliché. They're aware that they might scare ordinary people away with this deliriously paranoid babbling, though, so they quickly strike a rather pathetic defensive pose:

We are not against wetlands or in favor of dust and noise. We believe in the regulation or [sic] our natural resources. We don't think anyone has the right to spray poison anywhere he likes and we acknowledge the need for community involvement.

In other words, it's not that the environment shouldn't be protected (here and there, now and then). It's just that, like Dick Cheney, we've got "other priorities":

Aside from the obvious and unfortunate cost of our war in Iraq, we all agree that our educational system is in need of major overhaul. We are far from winning the war on drugs. In many states our roads and bridges need repair. And in too many places our water and sewerage systems need improvement to protect our own drinking water.

Isn't this too cute for words? The "unfortunate cost" of the Iraq War is a reason why we can't afford to protect the environment. Sounds like another good reason not to have started it!

Lehr describes himself elsewhere as a libertarian committed to market solutions, so it's very possible that all his tender concern for public infrastructure is a mere ignis fatuus. In any case, it's interesting that he thinks people will be impressed by the argument that we should worry less about protecting the environment, and more about protecting our drinking water.

Towards the end of the piece, Lehr and McGuire ask the really hard questions: questions so incoherent and dishonest that to accept them as rational on any level is to forfeit one's status as a sentient being:

Saving the world from Radon, Asbestos, arsenic, ozone and CO2 is great for raising money, but what is the real cost to the nation's industry?

What's the cost to industry of "saving the world"? Hmmm...let me do the math, and get back to you.

Wetlands, wilderness and unobstructed views are vital to us all, but where, how much and at what cost?

That's a good question, and we'd better err on the side of caution 'til we figure it out. As far as wetlands are concerned, the nation's lost about fifty percent of them. That doesn't sound too bad - perhaps - until you note that states like California and Louisiana and Florida have lost up to 90 percent of their wetlands. Personally, I don't see any reason to shoot for 95 percent.

By the way, Lehr is the "science director" of the Heartland Institute, a Scaife-funded anti-environmental group whose board of directors includes plenty of folks from the fossil-fuel, automotive, financial, and tobacco industries. Of course, the site that printed these ravings didn't see fit to give its readers any background on Lehr or his cronies.

Since I'm a blogger, I may as well get the most out of my irredeemable lack of standards and decency: These people are vermin.

A Coincidence

William Arkin recently wrote a fascinating book called Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs and Operations in the 9/11 World.

"Polo Step" is secret Pentagon code for classified material that is more sensitive than "Top Secret." When veteran military-affairs journalist William Arkin first publicly mentioned "Polo Step" in a 2002 column in the Los Angeles Times, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was apparently furious and ordered an investigation into the leak. Over 1,000 officials, military personnel, and contractors were ultimately interviewed, and the investigation even had its own code name, "Seven Seekers." Such is the zealousness, Arkin writes in his book Code Names, with which secrecy is protected in the 9/11 world.

Now, there's been a completely unrelated development, which only a tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorist would suggest is anything more than a coincidence:

Someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to produce a document accusing journalist and activist William Arkin of serving as a spy for Saddam Hussein.

The Pentagon says the supposed Defense Intelligence Agency cable is a forgery. Arkin says it's "chilling" and is demanding an investigation. The NBC News military analyst says he became aware of the bogus document when a Washington Times reporter called about the spying allegation and sent him a copy.

"Someone who put this together obviously tried to make it plausible enough to do harm and endanger me," William Arkin says of the bogus document.

Such, it seems, is the zeal with which BushCo exacts revenge in the 9/11 world.

Arms Control Wonk reports that Rumseld flunky Larry Di Rita has said that an investigation of the forged document is "not likely."

For more information on exactly what "Polo Step" is, you can read this Democracy Now interview with Arkin.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

Friday Hope Blogging

I usually prefer to stretch out a bit on the "hope blogging" thing, but I'm very busy today so I'm pretty much just going to refer you to this WorldChanging article on the possibility of extracting methane from landfills:

New Scientist reported recently on the project, and noted that Europe alone has the potential to generate up to 94 billion cubic meters of methane annually from landfills, with only 1% of that currently being tapped. The remainder either escapes into the atmosphere (where it is a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide) or is simply flared -- burned off to prevent explosive accumulation -- dumping a variety of impurities into the air.

There's one thing I'd like to clarify: It's not that I think that technology or science is going to save us through its magical powers. But I do hope that the realization that we need saving might lead us to look at the world more carefully, question the basic assumptions that drive our society, and change things for the better using all the tools at our disposal, including science. Venting or flaring of methane from landfills is a good example of something awful that simply happens in our system, almost as though it were an act of God. We don't have the luxury of that kind of irresponsibility anymore. We never did, really.

Another thing: When we think about progress, we usually think about computers and lasers and exciting new electronic innovations. But progress, in my view, doesn't mean moving ever closer to some gadget-ridden climax of the technological sublime, where robots shine our shoes and we download music directly into our brains. Progress can also be based on ridiculously simple nonelectric constructions with few or no moving parts, and those are the breakthroughs I prefer to talk about. Progress, to me, means making human systems work better and more safely. In some cases, this may require us to go backwards. If you're lost, after all, the best way to make progress is to retrace your steps.

Blackwashing GMOs

Jonathan Matthews of GM Watch has written a terrific article on Monsanto's attempt to paint opponents of genetically modified food as racists and imperialists, a shameful effort for which they've enlisted the shameless Roy and Niger Innis of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a phony civil-rights group that Glen Ford and Peter Gamble of The Black Commentator describe as:

[A] tin cup outstretched to every Hard Right political campaign or cause that finds it convenient - or a sick joke - to hire Black cheerleaders for their cross burning events.

For their pro-GMO jihad, the Innises have joined forces with Paul Driessen, an anti-environmental PR shill who's in bed with every rabid ultra-right lunatic from Ron Arnold to the Reverend Moon. As Matthews notes:

CORE itself has become increasingly controversial--and in some ways downright strange--since Roy Innis took its helm. Innis once branded opponents of racial segregation in the US as "house niggers", and dismissed the struggle against Apartheid as "a vicarious, romantic adventure" with "no honest base". When asked in 1973 why CORE supported Idi Amin despite the Ugandan president's hatred of Jewish people and praise of Hitler, Innis is reported to have said, "we have no records to prove if Hitler was a friend or an enemy of black people."

Innis has had no corresponding difficulty working out the enemy of black people when it comes to biotech. At Cancun his son Niger, a protégé of Armstrong Williams, handed out "lethal eco-imperialism" awards to the European Union and Greenpeace. But there was another award - an "Uncle Tom" award, presented in front of an audience of grinning corporate lobbyists and libertarians to the Malaysia-based Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific. PANAP is an organisation that works with small-scale and family farmers, peasants' movements, indigenous people, landless laborers and women in countries throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Innis denounced PANAP for "selling out its own people".

Read the whole article, by all means. And be sure to check out The Biotech Brigade, GM Watch's awe-inspiring database of intricately interconnected propagandists, think tanks, astroturf organizations, scientific hacks, and PR shills.

More Theory, More Practice

Ten geologists have been accused of falsifying data pertaining to the safety of the proposed nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada:

Federal scientists may have falsified documents on a key safety issue for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump, two federal agencies said Wednesday. If the allegations prove true, it could delay and possibly kill the controversial plan to bury nuclear waste in a mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas starting in about a dozen years. That would be a major blow to the stalled Bush energy plan, which calls for building new nuclear-power plants provided there's someplace to store their waste....

Well, if there is proof of falsification, and it does kill Yucca Mountain - and, by extension, the nuclear component of BushCo's energy plan - then I'd say these professional liars had unwittingly done all of us a great service.

That said, the fact would remain that these people had used their authority as scientists to mislead the public about a matter of the gravest conceivable importance, which is a pretty good - and a depressingly common - example of human viciousness and evil.

I've been involved in a lot of debates lately about what science is, and what it does, and whether or not it can solve the problems we face. Personally, I think it could solve our problems, so long as we first eradicate human corruptibility, perhaps by completely overhauling human nature.

I'm sure each of us is working on that project in his or her own way. Meanwhile, though, there are important questions about what legitimizes scientific authority. Of course, I know what's supposed to do it, in theory. But in practice, a great deal of science is legitimized on the basis of its agreement with political or economic doctrine. (If the hypothesis of global warming had agreed with the interests of our government, it would've been accepted as fact over a decade ago, evidence or no evidence.) The authority of science - as mediated by, say, a professional group or a journal - is not necessarily a match for political and economic authority even in those rare cases where it's truly autonomous from that authority.

What I'm trying to understand is why anyone believes this situation will change.

Theory and Practice

The question of how excreted pharamaceuticals persist in the environment - and what their long-term effects might be - has only tentatively been addressed by the EPA and the FDA. Unfortunately, requirements for assessing the environmental risk of pharmaceuticals didn't take effect until 1998.

This article discusses the ecotoxicology of carbamazepine, an environmentally persistent drug prescribed for a variety of illnesses, including epilepsy:

In the late 1990s, scientists began detecting carbamazepine in our waterways, and they later found that the drug resists degradation in drinking-water treatment plants.

Most readers will recall that we have a similar problem with Prozac (how could you forget the media's wonderfully clever gags about depressed fish?).

Anyway, the present article notes that apart from the inherent difficulties of investigating the ecotoxicology of pharmaceuticals, the proprietary nature of these drugs has made independent investigation impossible:

Companies submit anticipated production and sales figures to the FDA during a new drug application (NDA), but this information is then withheld from the public to protect the company from competitors. This makes it impossible to determine how much of any pharmaceutical is pouring into waterways.

That's not very reassuring. But here's the part of all this that I find really disturbing:

[U]nder current regulations, a company can obtain a "categorical exclusion" and not have to perform an environmental assessment if they manufacture less than 40,000 kilograms (kg) per year....A categorical exclusion does not take into account the input from multiple companies that might all be making the same drug. For instance, if 10 companies are manufacturing a drug at 30,000 kg each, for a total of 300,000 kg, there is no trigger to perform an environmental assessment.

The problems with this approach are obvious enough that I'll restrict myself to a general point. Elsewhere, I've prattled about the difference between science as a field - using "field" in Pierre Bourdieu's sense of a competitive system of social relations based on power, which must be assessed in terms of its subjection to the political field - and Science as a Platonic ideal of objective, noble, honest truth-seeking. Our arbitrary, inadequate, scientifically incoherent approach to assessing pharmaceutical pollution makes that difference particularly clear, and reaffirms my belief that public "irrationality" is much less of a threat to science - and to society - than the private "rationality" of gaining and perpetuating political and economic power.

Under Mars

A site called Under Mars is compiling digital photos taken by US soldiers in Iraq. It posts them as they're received - unedited and uncensored - along with captions from the photographers. Given government attempts to control the dissemination of imagery from Iraq, one can't help thinking that this site could be headed for trouble.

Here's what the sitemaster says about the project:

The goal of this site is exclusively to share photos of the experience of war, without politicizing, censoring, or editing....I have presented the captions as they were given to me and have not censored or edited them. I do not know what motivated their titling, nor have I asked, nor do I intend to. My goal is only to record them. These are extreme experiences and I make no claim to understand the feelings involved.

It's a fascinating site - with many powerful and sometimes beautiful images - but please note that some photos are extremely graphic, and disturbing beyond your worst nightmares.

A Successful Government Program

The results are apparently in on Los Angeles' restaurant-grading system:

A recently released study found that the number of people hospitalized around the county for food-borne illnesses declined 13 percent since the county forced eateries to display their health inspection grades prominently.

It's important to note that this thirteen-percent decline is in hospitalizations; most victims of food poisoning are not hospitalized, and many never seek medical treatment of any kind.

Government inspection of restaurants is a good example of why hardline libertarian dogma is wrongheaded. A food business could improve its bottom line by refusing to replace a faulty refrigeration system, by using food products that are past their "use by" date, or by cutting corners on janitorial staff and cleaning supplies. All other things being equal, a business that behaves in this way has an unfair advantage over a business that obeys the law. Thus, the law should be enforced for the benefit of the honest business, as well as for the safety of consumers.

"But private companies can do these inspections on a contract basis!" cry the libertarians. "The government shouldn't be involved. Just post the results and let consumers make up their minds where to eat!" Of course, the government is involved, regardless; it requires the inspections, and requires that the results be posted, and it also provides a legal framework for the enforcement of contracts between private businesses (shall we have privatized courts, too?). Another virtue of having government inspections is that the results are standardized: you can presume that a grade of "A" means the same thing, no matter which restaurant you visit. Otherwise, the concerned consumer is forced to assess the capabilities and methodologies of several inspection firms.

According to libertarians, government regulatory bodies are prone to abuse and dishonesty; someone at a public-health agency, for instance, could decide to make an example of a particular business; they could also demand or accept bribes. But private firms can do precisely the same things. The libertarian idea is that consumers will find a trusted private inspector on the basis of a reputation garnered over time; obviously, then, your success as a private inspector depends on convincing consumers that you have the highest standards around, and there are plenty of unethical ways of doing this, from bribery to coercion to doctoring lab results.

The funny thing is, libertarians would make this type of deceit incredibly easy, because they assume - for no reason at all - that private enterprise is basically good, and that the market will winnow out anyone who isn't. Unless, of course, they want the government to inspect inspectors, and make sure they have adequate expertise and technology?

Libertarian thought reminds me of the epicycles that were invented to make the observed motions of the planets agree with the Aristotelian dogma that heavenly bodies must move at uniform speed, in perfect circles. So long as they can imagine a scenario in which privatization would work - no matter how little connection it has to reality - the system triumphs.

Complexity and Crime

A four-year study by fifty scientists offers further evidence for the hypothesis that things happen whether you're paying attention to them or not:

The new studies identified toxic mercury contamination in mountain songbirds - the first time contamination was documented in wildlife not associated with water. Mercury is converted into a toxic form in water and mud, but the toxic mercury was also discovered in the song bird, which does not eat fish.

The songbirds may have been exposed by eating insects that ate tree leaves that converted mercury to its toxic form, scientists said. That "dry" route of exposure is new.

These findings are sure to be controversial, since they fly in the face of what I've elsewhere called the "Refusing to Pay Any Attention Principle." This is an epistemological norm that makes scientific research and public policy easier, by reducing the number of possible effects that a given cause can have. The basic idea is that the importance of missing information decreases as complexity increases.

Despite this shocking new evidence that ecosystems are characterized by complex interrelationships and a high degree of context dependence, and are thus more susceptible to the toxic effects of mercury than was previously thought, BushCo wants mercury-spewing power plants to be able to buy pollution "allowances" instead of cutting emissions, on the grounds that this sort of market-based solution has been successful at "curbing the pollution that causes acid rain."

Putting aside the fact that acid rain and mercury pollution are incommensurable as threats, I'd dispute the idea that market-based regulation is a rational response to market-based pollution. When a system leads to disastrous results - widespread mercury pollution, for example - I think one is obliged to question whether it's a good system.

We don't politely ask meth labs to adopt a cap-and-trade system for their hazardous waste emissions, nor do we invite the Mafia to police itself. We correctly see these groups as antisocial lawbreakers, and we don't expect them to reform themselves. I see no reason to view polluting firms any differently. Their freedoms end where ours begin, after all. BushCo's "market-based solutions" should be recognized for what they are: a reward for criminal behavior.

Come On Down!

The US-funded al-Iraqiya channel has an exciting new TV game show in which alleged Iraqi insurgents are confronted by their victims' families, and forced to confess on camera:

Terror in the Grip of Justice is the latest weapon in the Government's propaganda war against the insurgents, exposing them as the enemies of Iraqis and cautioning those tempted to join them. The authorities insist that the confessions are genuine, although many wonder whether the statements are made by ashamed killers or simply bad B-actors.

[snip]

Insurgents have begun a propaganda counter-offensive, denouncing the tapes as fakes and threatening to impose "God's justice" on the station's employees — a threat apparently made real with the killing of Raeda Wazan, an anchorwoman, last month.

Hmmm. "Terror in the grip of justice" versus "God's justice." I don't know...they both make a good case!

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

"In my frightened arms, polka dots and moonbeams sparkled on a pug-nosed dream."

Friday Hope Blogging

I believe that pollution comprises the biggest wedge issue the Left's got. Handled correctly, it could dwarf the political impact of Der Kulturkampf. As frightening as the idea of extending human rights to fellow citizens might be to the average American, there's compelling evidence that Americans are more concerned about the state of their air, water, and food than they are about gay marriage and televised nipples. For one thing, it's a local issue, and the Right does poorly on local issues; they prefer to prattle about abstract ideas of national rebirth and manifest destiny, because they know that there's a limit to the lies you can tell people about what's going on in their own communities.

You hear a lot about BushCo's assualt on the environment - and rightly so - but unless you read a hundred environmental news stories a day, as I do, you might not notice that all over the country, people are fighting back and winning. They're bringing lawsuits against polluters, preventing various types of development, and generally raising hell. And at the same time, cities and towns are converting vehicle fleets to alternative fuels, installing rainwater cisterns, banning truck and bus idling, installing solar panels, and offering consumers green energy options.

What's interesting about all this is not whether, say, biodiesel or wind farms will "save" us from this, that, or the other catastrophe; what's interesting is the incredible rapidity of these changes, which is something I've really never seen in my lifetime. Half the battle with bureaucracy is getting it to admit that change is possible, let alone necessary. But today, in many states, local bureaucracies are actually in the vanguard of change. I find that heartening, and pretty much unprecedented; it seems to me that this may be what the early stages of a national change in attitude look like.

Meanwhile, BushCo's appalling Clean Skies Initiative is dead, for now. And although one hesitates to put any faith in evangelicals, since they're so easily sidetracked by the voluptuous terrors of human sexuality, the fact that they're taking a stand in favor of "creation care" (i.e., common sense) is promising:

The Rev. Ted Haggard, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group of 51 church denominations, said he had become passionate about global warming because of his experience scuba diving and observing the effects of rising ocean temperatures and pollution on coral reefs.

"The question is, Will evangelicals make a difference, and the answer is, The Senate thinks so," Mr. Haggard said. "We do represent 30 million people, and we can mobilize them if we have to."

A new study shows just how much Republicans and Democrats agree on the environment. Here's what happened when respondents were presented with Bush's 2005 budget priorities, and asked to adjust them to match their own priorities:

Funds for conservation and the development of renewable energy were increased by 1090%. That is not a typo. 70% of respondents opted for increases in this area.

So why do we keep losing battles? There are various answers; one of them is "We don't." In a recent article called We're Winning, Ted Williams interviews a gaggle of long-time environmentalists, and finds a remarkable amount of optimism:

"The environmental movement is doing fine," said Brock Evans, formerly of the Sierra Club and Audubon and now president of the Endangered Species Coalition. "I remember in the 1960s rivers were burning. There were no laws; there was only hope. Today we win most battles. I don't get scared anymore when I see another Republican assault on an environmental law. We've been there before; we saw it in 1995 when Gingrich came out with his Contract on America." Evans cited seemingly hopeless battles won at the 59th minute of the 11th hour — the California Desert Bill, saving Hell's Canyon from dams, establishing the wilderness areas in the Cascades, the Alaska Lands Act. "Our greatest victory was the ancient-forest wars from 1988 to 1994. We got allowable cut in the Northwest knocked down 95 percent. Politicians from both parties were opposing us. I kept an 1,800-page diary of it. Scary reading, but we did it. I'm optimistic because we win. We win so much, I've come to believe there's no such thing as miracles. We win by standing tall, by not quitting against seemingly hopeless odds, by endless pressure endlessly applied."

He's got a point. One of the places I occasionally go birdwatching has a deep, manmade duck pond in the middle of one of its meadows. It was the initial excavation for a nuclear plant that was never built, because public pressure stopped it.

And at a preserve I sometimes visit near Stanford, an aerial view of the site has an overlay showing the acres of parking lots, malls, and airport tarmac that were supposed to be built. It didn't happen, and now the preserve is home to "Rail Alley," one of the few places where one can reliably see the retiring clapper rail, which was hunted almost to extinction in the early 20th century.

Both these battles were won at a time when there was virtually no public awareness about environmental issues, no organized environmental movement, and no Internets. We should be able to do better today. And while we're at it, we should be able to portray the GOP as the party of dirty air, dirty water, and cancer clusters.

A Slap On the Wrist

Effect Measure alerts me to the imperial arrogance of the Washington Post, which has seen fit to slap the wrists of the nearly 800 microbiologists who argued that BushCo's fixation on biodefense is wrecking the public health system:

Where we lose sympathy for the authors is when they state that funds have been diverted from "projects of high public-health importance" to "projects of high biodefense but low public-health importance." This country has already experienced one anthrax attack. Security officials have stated repeatedly their belief that al Qaeda and others continue to search for more lethal bioweapons. Surely that makes biodefense projects of "high public-health importance."

Of course, "security officials" have repeatedly stated a lot of beliefs that turned out to be lies or errors, but I can't say I'm surprised that the WaPo is pretending not to recall this, despite (as Revere notes) having issued a public apology for believing the Administration in the past.

But what really strikes me about this editorial is its author's belief that this sort of languidly pompous dismissal constitutes a valid rebuttal to the combined authority of 758 microbiologists, and offers legitimate grounds for questioning their competence as health professionals. Apparently, the media now function as a sort of drive-through peer review board; whatever hurdles these microbiologists might have overcome in their professional careers, whatever laurels they may have earned, they've failed the all-important test of impressing an editorialist, and have thus forfeited their right to his or her "sympathy." And needless to say, if some anonymous trained monkey at the WaPo fails to understand risk, then it's incumbent on all of us to do likewise, like those loyal subjects who used to throw themselves into the dirt when the king stumbled.

Here's a brainteaser for the folks at the WaPo: Suppose you could either double your risk of dying from anthrax, or double your risk of dying from ordinary influenza. Which would you prefer?

This editorial also demonstrates the odd logic of media. Anthrax attacks are rare and frightening, which makes them big news, which makes them a grave concern to all informed people, which makes them the rightful focus of healthcare professionals.

What evidence do we have that anthrax attacks are "of high public-health importance"? The fact that the 2001 attacks were obsessively covered by the media, who devised ominous graphics and sinister music for the occasion, making the five victims seem more vibrantly, excitingly dead than the hundreds of people who die monthly from all-too-common diseases like AIDS, hepatitis, and pneumonia. And in addition, the fact that BushCo - the most dishonest administration in modern memory - says we're in serious danger. Meanwhile, everyday sickness and death isn't newsworthy, so it's not a threat. And thus the WaPo can wag its finger at these out-of-touch microbiologists, who obviously haven't been reading the papers.

For those who missed it the first time, you can click here to see the expenditures that the microbiologists are complaining about. You'll note that anthrax spending is up 2388 percent, while hepatitis is down 58 percent, and tuberculosis and AIDS are down 20 percent.

I Know, I Know

Blogger's commenting is atrocious lately. And it's not just the commenting; I'm getting double and triple posts, and the simplest things take an eternity.

I realize that it's prevented some people from commenting - I've gotten a number of e-mails about it - and that bothers me, 'cause Lord knows I'm more interested in what you folks have to say than I am in my own ramblings.

Still, I did like the last commenting update Blogger did, and I'm hoping they'll make some further improvements. I have serious qualms about Haloscan, but if Blogger doesn't improve soon I guess I'll be obliged to switch over.

Social Security Of The Gods

As long as I'm in a bad mood anyway, let me explain - briefly - why I think it would be salubrious if America's fundamentalist Christians were stripped naked, slathered with extra-fancy-grade itching powder, and sent on a one-way trip to the Horsehead Nebula.

I make a point of slogging through Rapture Ready News every day, because they collect stories from all over the place and some of 'em are interesting. But of course, all the stories are presented as "evidence" that the Rapture is nigh.

And thus, inevitably, you come across stories like this one:

More than half a billion people, nearly double previous estimates, were affected by the deadliest form of malaria in 2002, scientists say. Most were in sub-Saharan Africa but nearly 25 percent occurred in southeast Asia and the Western Pacific.

Now, disease is a fact of life. And treatment options for malaria are less than ideal. But prevention of malaria is possible, given a modest amount of money and time and education. In fact, Eritrea recently reduced its malaria cases:

[T]he key reason for the decline was the government's distribution of bed nets. Insecticide-treated nets have been shown to cut malaria transmission by up to 90 percent.

90 percent? It's a miracle! Praise Jesus!

Of course, helping poorer countries to reduce their malaria caseload is of no interest to the folks at Rapture Ready. To them, every disaster is a good disaster - a fun little puzzle to be interpreted, like the Junior Jumble. Through their bizarre rose-colored glasses, tragedies that are nothing more than the perfectly logical consequence of human stupidity and avarice and callousness and selfishness become nothing less than God's glad tidings for His faithful lambs.

Not that these dear lambs aren't forced to walk along the Via Dolorosa from time to time. For instance:

Despite a series of interruptions, which I blame on the devil, we’ve managed to keep the wheel of progress in motion.

And Saint Anthony thought he had problems.

Though Rapture Ready is focused firmly on the splendors of its home on high, it recognizes that certain worldly obligations can't be ignored. Spreading demonstrable lies about Social Security, for instance:

This past week, Washington D.C. was buzzing about the poor state of Social Security. A decade before the trust fund is projected to begin collapsing from an overabundance of retirees, Congress suddenly realized the money pot is full of nothing but IOUs.

I firmly believe there is a spiritual trust fund that glorified believers will someday draw upon for their eternal rewards. Unlike Social Security, this trust fund is solely funded by the deeds of the individual.

Isn't this altogether charming stuff? A blind eye and a deaf ear is turned to human suffering, except insofar as it brings these good people closer to their shuddering theophanic climax. But as tantalizingly close as the Rapture is, they still think it's best to help Bush destroy Social Security, just in case. And if they have to resort to lies to do it? Well, Christians aren't perfect...just forgiven.

Bring on the Rapture, I say. It's time to take out the trash.

Dreams of Power

My rant against pop science was apparently taken in some quarters as a manifesto for a sort of militant, utopian rationalism. That's my own fault, of course. What I want to say - and how I say it - is constrained not just by my literary incapacities, but also by what I believe the specific people I'm addressing are willing to accept as valid arguments.

Anyway, it's an easy misconception to clear up. All I have to do is act naturally.

Cervantes said in a recent comment that "the question of whether we proceed on the basis of faith or science has great implications for the future of humanity." Whatever I lack in cogency, I more than make up for in my capacity for obsessive brooding, and I've been brooding about that statement for days.

It's a pretty typical claim for a "rational" person to make, in order to demand capitulation rather than accomodation from the stubbornly irrational Other. It sounds very sober and serious, and it adds a thrilling sense of urgency to the proceedings. Unfortunately, it's nonsense. In the first place, as human beings, we're going to proceed on the basis of faith and science, whether we like it or not. I see no reason to believe this will ever change, or could ever change; a philosophy that refuses to accept people as they are, and imagines that it can remake them in its own image, is deranged in theory and dangerous in practice.

In this regard, the distinction between faith and science is analogous not to the distinction between truth and falsehood, but to that between Scylla and Charybdis. If you insist that humanity must choose between truth and error, you must also believe that it has a reliable ability (and a willingness) to distinguish between the two. And anyone who believes such a thing is in no position to lecture anyone else about misplaced credulity.

Like religion, science is corruptible and can give rise to problems of power, authority, control, and dominance. We know all about this; we know about the Tuskegee Experiments and Dr. Mengele and - possibly - the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor, as well as any number of other grievous injustices justified by the science of some other era. And yet, it's apparently impolite to talk about these things when we talk about the future of science, much as it's impolite to talk to today's Catholics about the persecution of the Cathars. Those were the bad old days, after all, when people were ignorant and irrational.

I think I'm within my rights to say that science - and by this I mean the field as it actually, demonstrably functions within our society, and not the omnipotent, infinitely good, crypto-Platonic abstraction - could, at this moment, be leading us over a cliff. For that matter, we may already have gone over the edge.

Obviously, I really prefer not to believe that. In fact, I'm obliged not to believe that. And sometimes I even believe that science will solve the problems it's created (though I'm sure it will never learn to raise its victims from the dead). But this is hope speaking, not rationality. We hear much about the "self-correcting" nature of scientific endeavor; unfortunately, the corrections sometimes happen only after irreversible damage has been done.

Cervantes' claim seems to rely on an assumption that the solutions to human problems must be arrived at rationally (whatever that means in philosophical terms), preferably through use of the scientific method (whatever that means in practical terms). That assumption is objectively false. The only coherent criterion for judging problem-solving behavior is its ability to solve problems. Double-blind studies can solve problems, but so can an inspired guess. So can drawing lots or flipping a coin. So can dreams, as in the case of Kekule's "discovery" of the benzene's ring structure.

A system of ethics must be complete; it must be able to generate answers for moral dilemmas as they arise; if these answers are to generate a solution, they have to create emotional or rational assent despite the absence of proof.

Science is incomplete by definition, so at any given point there will be things it can neither prove nor disprove. Some people believe that humans will eventually know everything that can be known, and that all important questions will be answered. Whether that's true or not (I think it's delirious nonsense), that's not the situation we're in at the moment. If we're going to solve our problems, we have to make do with what we have. This includes centuries of rich intellectual and social traditions from all over the world, which compel belief in the same way that a moral argument lacking evidence compels belief: by being just, and thus by being worthy of being true. Some people argue that these traditions are inferior to science because they're not scientific. The utter incoherence of this argument is apparently a minor flaw to be worked out in the fullness of time.

In my opinion, it's not sufficient to call a concept religious, or scientific, and act as though you've settled the question of which one should guide our actions. The important questions about "the future of humanity" are ethical questions about specific uses of religion and science: Is it ethical to stone adulterers to death, or to deny certain groups of people rights? Is it ethical to conduct certain types of experiments, or to work on certain government projects?

If we're to avoid disaster, we'd better arrive at the correct conclusions, one way or another. But your status as a scientist, or a priest, does not in itself give you the moral authority to decide these questions for other people by decree. Among other things, you may have a conflict of interest.

Another question is whether progress comes most reliably from adherence to the rules of a system, or from the free interplay of ideas of all sorts. My suspicion is that a variety of ideas - right, wrong, and in between - is as important to a healthy culture as genetic diversity or temperature variation is to life itself. My problem with pop science books is not that they're irrational, or wrong, or silly, but that they constitute a form of argumentum ad verecundiam, in which the authority of, say, a physicist is supposed to be transferable to his or her ruminations on metaphysics or morality. Though I'd never argue that such books shouldn't be written, I object to the popular idea that the metaphysical fantods of a scientist are somehow worth more per pound than mine or yours or anyone else's, and it troubles me when people who swallow the propositions in these books see fit to look down their noses at the credulity of others. While it's interesting that Schrödinger was led by physics to embrace Vedanta, it's also interesting that millions of uneducated people lived peacefully and gracefully within that tradition long before it received his seal of approval.

It's a busy day for me, so I'll cut things off right there, and leave you with an intemperate but admirable quote from Paul Feyerabend:

But dreams of power such as these are not only very far from my mind - they positively make me sick. I have little love for the educator or moral reformer who treats his wretched effusions as though they were a new sun brightening the lives of those living in darkness...I have only contempt for the fine plans to enslave people in the name of "god" or "truth" or "justice" or other abstractions, especially as their perpetrators are too cowardly to accept responsibility for these ideas but hide behind their alleged "objectivity."

Thirsty Work

The image above comes from an amazing online museum of vintage Soviet anti-alcoholism posters. I can't help wishing today's propaganda had half as much aesthetic appeal!

Link via Near Near Future.

Loose Cannon

Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) wants to resume nuclear testing in the desert West.

What makes this interesting is that in 1979, Cannon was one of the lawyers who filed a landmark lawsuit called Irene Allen v. United States, which sought government compensation for the victims of fallout from earlier nuclear tests.

Cannon has also claimed that fallout from nuclear tests killed his father.

Cannon says he believes his own father died of cancers that were caused in part by his exposure to radioactive fallout from the tests.

Take a deep breath, let it out slowly, and we'll proceed.

If you think that Cannon must have a fairly compelling reason for resuming tests that he himself believes harmed his family and his fellow citizens, you're mistaken. Cannon's rationale for a new round of testing is simply to frighten the "evildoers" into embracing civilization:

"We need to give them the fear of destruction and hopefully over time people will recognize that the democratic system works."

Sounds reasonable. After all, who but an old Scrooge could fail to admire a system that allows gibbering lunatics like Cannon to lurch aimlessly through the halls of power?

By the way, if you're one of those unhappy souls who thinks that we recently went to war with an essentially unarmed country that didn't attack us, Cannon's got a stern message for you:

"Democracies don't create wars. Evil people who assume positions of power create wars."

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

BushCo is considering removing hazmat placards from rail cars. The reason, of course, is terrorism.

For decades, emergency-response teams approaching train wrecks have peered at the signs through binoculars to see what dangerous chemicals might be leaking. But federal officials will soon decide on a proposal to remove the placards from all tank cars. Their fear is that terrorists could use them to lock in on targets for highly toxic attacks.

This is stupid for any number of reasons. First, it's a typical example of BushCo's penchant for ignoring real dangers in favor of speculative ones. Hazmat incidents are scandalously common, and often devastating; frankly, our rail system is so accident-plagued that the odd terrorist incident would be a drop in the bucket.

Second, regardless of whether a spill is accidental or not, first responders very definitely need to know what's in any leaking tanks. Sad to say, compliance with current placarding rules is less than ideal. Even in cases where placards are present, they're not always accurate (especially on trucks), nor do they always give a complete picture of a given material's hazardous characteristics. All other things being equal, we'd be much safer if we improved training and compliance than if we simply did away with the placarding system.

Third, if you want to terrorize people with toxic gas, you could make your own out of any number of compounds, the sale of which remains virtually unregulated because these chemicals have friends in high places. If you're a bit more ambitious, you could attack one of our nearly 3500 chemical plants, a good number of which remain unprotected both by BushCo and by the firms that run them. The only thing that's been done to "secure" many of these facilities is hiding evacuation plans and the like from citizens and lawmakers:

People who live near chemical and nuclear plants, dams and oil and gas pipelines complain that it has become harder to find out about disaster plans and environmental hazards, and some have sued for more information. Engineering reports have been stripped from government Web sites, and several agencies are creating new controls on sensitive information that go far beyond the wide-ranging classification system built in the cold war.

And of course, if all else fails, you can always use guns.

What's most disturbing about all this secrecy is that there's rarely any talk of fixing problems; vulnerabilities are being hidden instead of remedied. But does anyone really, truly believe that some terrorist - a white Christian terrorist, in particular - couldn't get hired at a chemical or nuclear plant, or a railyard, and learn about these vulnerabilities first hand? That scenario seems perfectly plausible to me...though not nearly as plausible as a disastrous accidental derailing or explosion in some crowded suburb.

In my opinion, this proposal is intended to advance the cause of government secrecy, and to limit restrictions on the chemical industry. As such, it's a typical BushCo "security" measure...the kind that'll end up getting people killed.

Duh

When I lived in New York, my dehumidifier pulled about a gallon of water out of the air every few hours, which meant I was constantly dumping pails of water into the bathtub.

I still use the dehumidifier pretty often to keep mold growth down. Since I have a garden now, I dump the water there.

This, however, is something that never occurred to me:

Somebody had the clever idea of combining a dehumidifier with a water purifier, so that instead of throwing out the pan of water sucked from the air, you can drink it....It'll produce 20 liters of water a day in 70% humidity, which is about the amount that comes in one of those fat-ass 5 gallon bottles, but without the waste or transportation emissions.

I wish I'd thought of that. Make a solar-powered version of this thing, and you just might have one of the greatest products ever.

An Outright Xenophobe

In re John Bolton being nominated to the post of ambassador to the UN, there are a couple of must-read posts at Arms Control Wonk today. (Of course, every post at ACW is must-read, but you know what I mean.)

In particular, check out this quote from Bolton:

In substantive field after field — human rights, labor, health, the environment, political-military affairs, and international organizations — the Globalists have been advancing while the Americanists have slept. Recent clashes in and around the United States Senate indicate that the Americanist party has awakened, and that the harm and costs to the United States of belittling our popular sovereignty and constitutionalism, and restricting both our domestic and our international policy flexibility and power are finally receiving attention.

Biodefense Versus Public Health

Effect Measure has a terrific post today on how the public-health system is being sacrificed to the biodefense juggernaut. It offers a special rebuke to those who believe that increased bioterror spending will result in some sort of Golden Age for public health.

In reality, these people have it exactly backwards. If you build the best public-health system you can, in order to deal with everyday problems, most of the work of preparing for bioterror gets done automatically. Agent detection is an interesting but comparatively minor field; it doesn't work well, but even if it did, mere data aren't all that useful unless you have a staffed and funded and organized public-system system. Bioterror is primarily an intelligence and law-enforcement issue; the greatest threat (and it really is miniscule in comparison to everyday public-health threats) comes not from international jihadists, but from homegrown racists, lunatics, and apocalyptic religious cults (from Bush's base, in other words). Forcing the public-health system to concentrate on biodefense is like designing a car that has a parachute - in case a bridge you're driving on collapses - but doesn't have seat belts.

But BushCo is ignoring all of this in order to siphon more money into the defense industry's all too capacious pockets; a new bioweapons race - requiring a decade or two of fantastically expensive, taxpayer-funded research into some omnipotent high-tech "bioshield" - would suit them just fine. And as Revere notes, this is likely to have grave consequences for public health and science:

Some of the research will inevitably be secret or classified. No public health research that is classified can serve a public health purpose or even a legitimate scientific agenda. If the results of our research is not to be made available to the global public health community of scientists and public health workers, we are not serving public health, a global enterprise of shared knowledge and endeavor. Instead, we corrupt that enterprise, just as physics was corrrupted by the Cold War.

Meanwhile, new vulnerability testing will be conducted in New York City:

At some point within the next two weeks, Madison Square Garden will play host to a swarm of observers scrutinizing the behavior of an unseen agent.

As early as Wednesday morning, depending on the weather, the carefully orchestrated release of a colorless, harmless gas in Manhattan should help researchers get a better handle on how hazardous contaminants - whether from natural sources or malicious attacks - disperse in an urban setting.

Sounds innocuous enough, perhaps, but it isn't. I believe that under Bush, a return to earlier levels of intensive open-air testing is all but inevitable (if it hasn't happened already). The temptation to use live bacteria, or potentially allergenic aerosols or particulates, is not one I can see BushCo resisting. Whether such vulnerability testing ends up harming people or not, it's expensive, unethical, and indistinguishable from the testing of offensive bioweapons.

Unreasonable, But Correct

PZ Myers has a thought-provoking article over at The American Street today, which, coupled with Robert M. Jeffers' ruminations about Wittgenstein, which he wrote in response to my ruminations about pop science, were...um...

Jeez, causality is harder to elucidate than I thought!

Anyway, Wittgenstein once said something more or less like this: "I'm not a religious man, but I can't help seeing every problem in religious terms." That's true of pretty much all of us, I think. For one thing, our language is religiously charged, never more so than when we describe dropping napalm on children, or the immorality of pre-emptive war, or similar atrocities. Remove religious concepts from language, and you impoverish your ability to speak, precisely when it's most necessary to speak. I find this interesting.

Here's how Myers' piece ends:

"[S]ecular" is not inferior to "religious", but is actually a higher kind of value, better because of its universality.

Now, I enjoy arguing epistemological points, so I might take issue, here and there, with what can be known or demonstrated at a given point, and what implications this has for the distinction between religious and secular thought. Still, Myers is quite correct; the moral community must be as inclusive as possible, but religion very often attempts to limit moral consideration to a "deserving" few, usually on the basis of some depressingly rational set of tribalist assumptions. This is wrong, because morality is responsibility - or obligation, as Simone Weil puts it - that one feels without "reason." The more universal are the duties which it imposes, the more unreasonable it is, in the worldly sense.

Of course, no one's ethical values actually are universal. But we have an obligation to make them as universal as we can, as Myers notes, unreasonably and correctly.

A PR Makeover for Al-Jazeera

It'll be interesting to see what comes of this:

Al-Jazeera has appointed the former director of CNBC Europe to head up the commercial operations of its new English-language channel as it gears up for launch later this year....The former Hill and Knowlton executive, Charlotte Dent, has also joined as the head of public relations.

You may remember Hill and Knowlton as the firm behind the imaginary Iraqi baby-murdering story that circulated in the months prior to the first Gulf War, which H&K disseminated through a fake organization called Citizens for a Free Kuwait. They also did a bit of work on Florida balloting right before the 2004 election.

Friday Nudibranch Blogging

It was hard to pick just one this time around, but I'm comfortable with my decision.

Friday Hope Blogging

Some problems are amazingly simple and inexpensive to solve.

For instance, village wells in northern Nepal are contaminated with up to 700ppb of arsenic. One solution is a filter made of gravel, sand, iron nails and shards of brick, requiring no energy and costing roughly twenty dollars to manufacture.

The filtering device, based on a design created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, relies on nothing more complex than iron nails, sand and gravel layered in a large plastic bucket....Under the direction of trained workers, Nepalese villagers are taught to take sand from riverbanks and sieve it through a wire mesh. Gravel and sand are layered in a clean plastic can topped by a diffuser containing iron nails and shards of brick. When water is poured through the filter, the arsenic bonds to the iron in the nails.

This simple device removes 96 percent of the arsenic from the water. Meanwhile, chelating agents and vitamins can help to decontaminate the villagers themselves.

A more general form of water purification is provided by the Musaffa sachet currently being used in Pakistan:

Each Musaffa sachet weighs 250gm and when added to water in a bucket it provides effective water purification for one month at a cost of 60 rupees (less than USD $1).

The sachet contains sand and a silver base to disinfect clear water. Silver is a well-known bactericide; it has been used since Roman times to add to liquids to keep them fresher for longer, and is often used aboard space shuttles to sterilize recycled water. Milk kept in silver jugs, or with silver coins in it, is known to delay spoilage.

Going back to the subject of Nepal's water, the region is a hotbed of microhydropower, utilizing inexpensive turbines that can generate hydropower from a relatively small change in elevation. ("Drop," of course, is an abundant commodity in the Himalayas). The Nepalese have long used streams to power prayer wheels, so this seems like a logical development. (These days, they also have solar-powered prayer wheels!)

Vietnam, however, leads the world in microhydropower. A 300-watt turbine costs about $20; it's adequate for a rural family's needs, and is considerably cheaper than getting energy from the power grid.

Floxed

Back in October of 2001, when I was living in NYC, I got a bad sinus infection, and ended up on a 15-day course of Cipro (ciprofloxacin), which is a member of the fluoroquinolone group of antibiotics. By the tenth day, I was feeling very strange. It's hard to describe...it felt a bit as though I were boiling inside, or as though my bones and muscles were exploding in slow motion. I got through to the fifteenth day, but it was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and I'm famously stoical about physical discomfort.

I got another sinus infection last Saturday. I tolerated it until Tuesday, and then dragged myself to the doctor. This time, I got Levanquin (levofloxacin), which is another fluoroquinolone.

I made it to day three of a ten-day course. Yesterday, my legs were all but unable to bear my weight, and my feet throbbed dangerously inside my shoes. I tried to wash the dishes, and had to rest my arms after five plates. The worst of it came last night, when I found that my neck barely had enough strength to keep my head erect. It put me in an mental fog, too. While driving on Wednesday, I made an appointment to pick up a friend for lunch, and immediately forgot both to pick him up, and to eat! When he called, an hour later, it took me a few moments to remember what had happened.

I already knew that fluoroquinolones were notorious for side effects, but I decided to do a bit of research. On the Internets, I found a page of consumer reviews; on a satisfaction scale of 1 to 5, the fluoroquinolones didn't even make it to 2 ("not satisfied"). An amazing number of people said things like "This is poison...no matter what's wrong with you, it's probably preferable to taking this stuff." I found a number of support groups and discussion boards dedicated to adverse reactions, where people described having been "Floxed." Even allowing for the hysteria and hypochondria that such forums engender, it seemed obvious that something very nasty is going on with these drugs.

My initial bout with Cipro came a week or two after the anthrax attacks that contaminated New York's main post office; the word "Cipro" was on everybody's lips. Did we have enough? How many doses would be needed to protect the entire country? There were reports of hoarders, and of people who'd resolved to take Cipro every day just in case. Before long, the price shot up to almost seven dollars a tablet, until Tommy Thompson "negotiated" a reduced - but still quite profitable - price (for government, not for the public). Anyway, what with all this excitement, getting the prescription was a bit like meeting a celebrity, or being accepted by some exclusive club.

Other antibiotics work against anthrax, so how did Cipro the become the official treatment? As Robert Kuttner reported in October of 2001:

Curiously, another antibiotic, doxycycline, is just as effective as Cipro in treating anthrax. But until this crisis, Cipro was the only drug approved by the FDA explicitly to treat anthrax exposure caused by inhalation of spores. This monopoly is also the result of efforts by Bayer.

According to Dr. Sidney Wolfe, director of Public Citizens Health Research Group, the government asked Bayer last year to present research that would lead to FDA approval of a drug for preventive treatment of persons exposed to inhalation anthrax. Bayer relied on government research (done by American bio-warfare scientists using animal subjects) which clearly showed Cipro and doxycycline, a generic antibiotic, to be equally effective. But Bayer requested and got FDA approval for only Cipro. A month's treatment of doxycycline retails for about $20, or one-15th of what Bayer charges for Cipro.

This article estimates that

...for every million people who take Cipro, as many as 10,000 might experience the less common - and often most serious - side effects.

Of course, those figures refer to short courses like the ones I've been prescribed. Anthrax treatment or prophylaxis requires 60 days. (Some of the people who received treatment during the 2001 attacks report lingering problems.) Fortunately, doxycycline has been approved as a treatment for susceptible strains of anthrax, like the one used in 2001.

There's not really any point to this post, other than advise people to be very careful about taking fluoroquinolones. If your muscles or tendons feel strange or uncomfortable, stop taking it, and ask your doctor for something else. It's not your imagination.

"Every Absurdity Now Has A Champion"

I've read a fair amount of pop science in my day, which means that I've been regularly entertained with tall tales that would make Baron Munchausen blush. Theoretical physicists are the worst offenders, but anyone with the proper scientific capital can publish a pop science book on virtually any absurdity he or she can dream up, and there are plenty of people who'll swallow it whole.

Douglas Hofstadter babbles about putting everything that was in Einstein's head into a book, in order to converse with him. Freeman Dyson says that genetic engineering will soon become a wonderful hobby for the masses. Other folks dazzle us with anthropic principles, self-organization, the physics of immortality, the "God particle" and the "God gene."

Then there's the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which not only sheathes Occam's Razor, but throws it on the ground, smashes it with a sledgehammer, and pisses all over the fragments. And there's the ineffably silly Ray Kurzweil, who's so anxious about the ethical issues raised by the advent of "Spiritual Machines" (Cheer up, Ray...it may never happen!). And there are philosophers who fancy they've proved that consciousness is an illusion, but that the information consciousness offers and receives is more than substantial enough to be worth a book deal or a TV appearance.

All of these notions can't be right, though there's no reason why they couldn't all be wrong. But people swoon over them to an amazing extent. I've had perfectly intelligent people tell me, in all earnestness, that their computers are conscious, or that it's impossible that any scientific question could go unanswered forever, or that there's something called a "God gene," or that many worlds are, at this moment, diverging from this dimension at the rate of trillions per nanosecond.

Many years ago, someone I used to know read a book on quantum mechanics, and proclaimed to me that there were only two possibilities: Either everything is superposed between being and not-being, happening and not-happening, until it's observed; or each possible occurrence, down to the subatomic level, causes a new universe to form. I tried to say, politely, that he was laboring under a couple of simple misconceptions, but he wouldn't hear of it. "Those are the scientifically acceptable choices," he said. "It's one or the other."

At Pharyngula the other day, a commenter tried to refute a garden-variety creationist troll by (among other things) invoking Kurzweil's belief that we will soon download human personalities, like computer software, into new bodies. Now, we can argue about whether that's possible; I happen to think it's absurd techno-triumphalist claptrap and that Kurzweil's an utter schmuck. Nonetheless, I accept that someone could disagree with me as to the theoretical possibility without being crazy or stupid. But when such downloadable personalities are treated for all intents and purposes as fact, and are produced triumphantly in argument as a rebuke to the illiterati, I lose all patience.

Not that I have much patience to begin with, given the sort of gobbledlygook that regularly gets a free pass by virtue of being "scientific." For instance, here's Freeman Dyson on what he calls our Post-Darwinian Future:

We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal. In the post-Darwinian era, biotechnology will be domesticated....Genetic engineering, once it gets into the hands of the general public, will give us an explosion of biodiversity. Designing genomes will be a new art form, as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but all will bring joy to their creators and diversity to our fauna and flora.

Every one of Dyson's statements seems to me to be perfectly insane; the whole concept is not only ghastly beyond belief, but logically unjustifiable. Nonetheless, it's been received rather rapturously in a couple of "scientific" forums I've visited, and by any number of science-minded bloggers. What's missing from it - besides the merest fragment of evidence or common sense - is any comprehension of how people are, and why they can't necessarily be trusted to use technology wisely. It lacks any grasp whatsoever of the wholesome and bracing truth that "man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward," and it proves yet again that scientists are not necessarily ethicists, nor even reasonable people.

Dr. Michio Kaku is one of the worst offenders in the field; his new book, Parallel Worlds, is a typical hodge-podge of ultra-fashionable theoretical physics, cavalier assumptions, and pure fantasy. It's one of the most perfectly useless books I've ever read...useless in the sense that it fails as science and as metaphysics. It simultaneously lacks the tutelary virtues of religion and myth, and the scientific virtues of cold hard materialism, and is therefore an essentially sterile work of the imagination and the last thing on earth anyone should take seriously.

And yet, retail shelves are groaning under the weight of books like Parallel Worlds...books that brew all the "wild" ideas of physics and evolutionary psychology and cognitive science into an unwholesome potion that seems to have no other purpose than to afflict the general public with slack-jawed, uncritical, quasi-religious awe.

Why is this? Because, for whatever reason suits your prejudices, human beings seem to enjoy the feeling of slack-jawed, uncritical, quasi-religious awe.

Beyond this, people like to feel that they're conversant with great mysteries; they very much like to feel that they understand life, and can explain it to other people. Speaking of which, over at Eschaton the other night, I found myself in an argument with one of those wonderfully polite racialists who tries to justify his unpleasant theories via recourse to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate. That's par for the course towards the end of a long thread. But imagine my chagrin the next morning, when I was listening - with my usual edgy disapproval - to Air America's tiresome Marc Maron, and heard him tell a caller to "read The Blank Slate and start figuring out what's actually behind all the stuff people do" (or words to that effect).

His smugness was palpable, needless to say. He'd figured things out, thanks to Science, and was all set to rid the world of Error.

Unfortunately for him, error happens to be science's primary export. As Arthur Fine points out in The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory:

Overwhelmingly, the results of the conscientious pursuit of scientific inquiry are failures: failed theories, failed hypotheses, failed conjectures, inaccurate measurements, incorrect estimations of parameters, fallacious causal inferences, and so forth.

As a simple statistical matter, a given hypothesis - and most pop science books are either hypotheses or descriptions of hypotheses - has a far better chance of being wrong than right. (Particularly when it's founded on shoddy research, like Pinker's.)

In Science of Science and Reflexivity, Pierre Bourdieu notes that science, like all fields, has a "price of entry" that makes it more (or less) autonomous by regulating its accessibility to new entrants. A firm grasp of higher mathematics is a typical entrance fee; there are others. Ideally, in Bourdieu's view, such restrictions must strike a balance between elitism and demagogy. As regards the latter option, he devastatingly describes consumers of pop science as people who have:

[A] self-interested propensity to hide from themselves the limits of their own capacities of appropriation - following the model of self-deception that is expressed so well by readers of popularizing journals when they assert that "this is a high-level scientific journal that anyone can understand."

But popularizing journals make a great deal of money, of course, and this is alluring not just to publishers, but to scientists who are willing to trade autonomy for fame and money by catering to a sensation-starved public.

At which point, all is vanity. We end up with a situation where people like Marc Maron can cheaply assert their status as rational intellectuals by pledging allegiance to "Science," by way of whatever pop-science potboiler is blowing minds at the moment. In my opinion, these books are a bad influence on public debate, and are not all that different from Medieval wonder-books that amazed readers with the marvels of the Great Chain of Being (except that their use of language isn't as graceful, of course). As a counterbalance to the forces of "irrationality and superstition," they leave a lot to be desired.

That's what I think, anyway.

False Economy

A new UK study has attempted to calculate the hidden costs of British produce. It concludes that British consumers (much like American ones) pay three times for food items: first at the register, second in environmental costs, and third in subsidies to farmers.

I'd also argue that they also pay, given the nature of their medical system, for medical costs associated with food contamination and poor nutrition. And then there's the question of opportunity costs: what benefits and innovations are they missing out on by sticking with the current system?

Anyway, here's one of the study's more straightforward findings:

If all farms were organic it would save £1.1bn a year. Removing pesticides from water supplies, for example, adds £250m a year to water bills. Other costs range from pollution to losses in soil and biodiversity, and costs in human and animal health, such as BSE and antibiotic resistance. Hidden costs of £1.5bn a year could be cut to £385m.

The usual caveats apply as regards these figures; this is very speculative work. Still, hidden costs are real, and they do need to be calculated to the best of our abilities. This looks to me like a pretty good - and probably conservative - stab at assessing the costs of factory farming, which is an exceptionally fertile breeding-ground for social and economic evils.

Antibiotic resistance is an especially interesting problem. Currently, its costs come from the need to prescribe more expensive antibiotics, as well as from higher mortality rates, and longer hospital stays for survivors of "superbugs." Lost productivity, and lasting disabilities - as in the case of amputation - add up to additional costs. But the cost of antibiotic resistance is, today, negligible compared to what it could be in the future. According to this article, the true social cost of antibiotic resistance will not be known for a decade or so. As bad a bargain as factory farming is today, it could be a far worse one tomorrow.

Bouphonia: Another View

Over at Common Dreams, Karen Armstrong has some interesting things to say about the Bouphonia:

On the day before new year in classical Athens, the strange festival of Bouphonia ("ox-murder") was enacted on the Acropolis. An ox was ritually slaughtered in a way that induced profound guilt. The priest who had dealt the blow had to flee for his life, pursued by the angry crowd. A court was convened, which found the priest's knife guilty of murder, and it was duly cast into the sea. Animal sacrifice was a daily occurrence in Athens, but the burlesque drama of Bouphonia revealed a lurking horror of violence, even killing that was sanctioned by religion and by the state. The buried guilt of the community was allowed to rise to the surface, and the manifest absurdity of the court's judgment showed the inadequacy of any official inquiry that attempts to exonerate the human agent.

I like this passage very much, but I don't quite understand the last sentence. Perhaps I'm misreading Ms. Armstrong, but she seems to be suggesting that the ritual had some sort of ironic, almost meta-ritualistic aspect. If so, I have to say that I don't accept that its absurdity was "manifest" in any real sense (though Aristophanes mocked it much later in The Clouds). It seems to me that the ritual was perfectly solemn and serious; it was, as Jane Harrison put it, "a terror-stricken service of Aversion," occasioned by that society's inability to conceive of certain immoral actions as unnecessary. The issue is not that violence was "sanctioned by religion and the state"; the issue is that it was required by religion and the state. The participants in this ritual, in my opinion, were in a state of cognitive dissonance about "necessary" injustice which is very common today, and which is famously unable to perceive its own absurdity.

If Ms Armstong means merely that the Bouphonia's absurdity demonstrates to us the inadequacy of "any official inquiry that attempts to exonerate the human agent," then her interpretation is much closer to mine, though I do think the need for formal exoneration of an unjust society, and not the particular choice of scapegoat, is what's really important here.

Anyway, it's an interesting article, well worth reading in full. Ms. Armstrong also wrote a book called The Spiral Staircase; I haven't read it, but my wife liked it quite a bit, and she's the brains of the family.

Rapture Ready!

Fellow Christians, I'm pleased to report that we're beginning to have some idea of how many poor foreign people the Lord God Jehovah has righteously slain by burying them under countless tons of fermenting garbage and toxic sludge:

The death toll from a landslide at a mountainside rubbish dump in West Java province has increased to 136, while 47 people are still missing, an official said Tuesday (22/2/05). Triggered by heavy rains, the landslide occurred at about 2am Monday, sending tons of hazardous waste and mud onto the hamlets of Cilimus and Cireundeu in Leuwigajah village, outside Cimahi town.

Experts are divided on the meaning of this dreadful new warning to a sinful world. While the worship of false gods is endemic in the region, the similarity of this judgment to the deadly landslides that recently struck Southern California suggests that the specific cause for this awe-inspiring example of divine wrath is more likely to be sexual immorality, anti-Americanism, or some combination of the two.

"That would be the most charitable explanation," said Rev. Billy Hovis, Pastor of the Free Presbyterian Church of Crippleback, Missouri. "But as in the Los Angeles disaster, the possibility of divine vengeance against witchcraft or bestiality is very real."

In other news, the Lord God Jehovah has abundantly blessed Shirley Applebee of Green River, Wyoming, a Bible-believing mother of nine who learned on Tuesday that her car hadn't blown a head gasket after all. "God heard my prayers," she said. "And I couldn't be happier."

United We Stand

In contrast to the misleading vividness of the bioterror scenarios described below, here's a real but largely ignored public-health problem:

Influenza cases have picked up enough that some hospitals in Cincinnati are running out of room to admit patients....Because of hospital capacity problems, the public should use emergency rooms only when there is a true emergency, said Colleen O'Toole, vice president of the Greater Cincinnati Health Council. Otherwise, you can expect a long wait if your condition is not serious.

The important thing to note here is that this is a predictable seasonal problem, and yet we don't seem to be able to adapt to it without great effort. The flu season so far has been comparatively mild, too (except for those odd cases that resulted in the sudden death of young people). Last year, hospitals were in far worse shape.

The point is, barring an immediate conceptual and financial overhaul of our public-health system, a flu pandemic would be very likely to reduce the availability and quality of medical care pretty much across the board, leading to serious consequences even if the flu's mortality rate turned out to be just a little bit higher than that of a normal season. Because it's increasingly privatized and underfunded, our public-health infrastructure simply can't handle a large increase in hospital admissions.

This has come about partially because too many of our leaders see healthcare as a problem for individuals, instead of as a basic component of the social contract. In reality, the quality and effectiveness of the medical care that even the poorest individual gets - especially in the case of contagious disease - is a matter of huge importance to society at large. It's not that different from firefighting; society must put out my burning house not because I'm part of some "meritocracy," in the ugly and hyperexclusionary Republican sense of the word, but because a conflagration at my house may well burn down everyone else's.

It's always been fashionable on the right to sneer at universal healthcare. It's interesting that the people most likely to buy "United We Stand" bumperstickers are also very likely to see themselves as standing outside the webs of interdependence and mutuality that necessarily bind worthwhile human communities. This stance is typical of people who can't face up to their own vulnerability. Unfortunately, because they pretend to be invulnerable, they can't be relied on to protect themselves or their country; you can't protect anyone from a danger you refuse to acknowledge. These people aren't America's fearless guardians, as they like to pretend; they're cowards insofar as they won't face up to reality, and traitors insofar as they present an obstacle to protecting the nation's health.

Misleading Vividness

Via Defense Tech, hundreds of scientists have signed a petition to protest the funneling of public-health dollars into that mysterious black hole known as "bioterror preparedness."

More than 700 scientists sent a petition on Monday to the director of the National Institutes of Health protesting what they said was the shift of tens of millions of dollars in federal research money since 2001 away from pathogens that cause major public health problems to obscure germs the government fears might be used in a bioterrorist attack.

They're right, of course. And apart from the fact that common pathogens (to say nothing of emergent or drug-resistant ones) pose a far greater threat than anthrax or botulinum toxin, I can't help noticing that research into bioterror "preparedness" and "defense" often bears an eerie resemblance to offensive weapons research, particularly when it involves vulnerability testing over urban areas.

I've noted elsewhere that the DHS has vastly overstated the danger we face from bioterror agents like botulinum toxin. Whenever government or media choose to hyperventilate over remote dangers, I assume that they're consciously exploiting the availability heuristic, by using "misleading vividness" to make unlikely threats seem immediate. It's tempting to view their "concern" about bioterrorism as a mechanism of social control, and (more important) as an excuse to line the pockets of defense behemoths like BAE Systems.

If you want to know exactly how drastically BushCo has cut our expenditures on diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis, and hepatitis, here are the numbers. Read 'em and weep!

Mercury, IQ, and Lost Income

A new study attempts to put a dollar amount on lost earnings due to childhood mercury intake:

Lower IQ levels linked to mercury exposure in the womb costs the United States $8.7 billion a year in lost earnings potential, according to a study released Monday by researchers at a New York hospital.

I have mixed emotions about studies like this one. Their assumptions tend to be open to considerable dispute, and in some cases they end up coming across as "junk science" even when their methodology is basically sound, simply because they're not written in a way that reduces the chance of propagandistic misuse by one side or the other.

As regards these specific findings, I'm extremely wary of studies that link future productivity, earnings, or social status to IQ. The scientist chosen to debunk the findings shares at least some of my concerns:

Leonard Levin, a scientist at the Electric Power Research Institute, said no group has produced hard evidence to back up the estimates of the impact mercury has on intelligence.

It's also true that no one's produced hard evidence that IQ and "intelligence" have any meaningful correspondence, or that IQ has a broad predictive value that reliably cuts across socioeconomic lines. That gratifying point of agreement aside, the article might've mentioned the Electric Power Research Institute's massive conflict of interest, since it's a front group for mercury-spewing energy companies, and has a history of conducting scientifically questionable studies itself.

That said, if science knows anything at all, it knows that mercury is a neurodevelopmental toxin, and that relatively small amounts of it will affect infant brains to a greater or lesser extent. I have no doubt that there's a social cost associated with childhood mercury exposure, and I suspect that it's shamefully high; whether or not it's really quantifiable is another matter. Still, I think this type of research is useful; it's far more reasonable to debate the amount of damage that environmental toxins do, than to argue over whether or not the damage occurs.

UPDATE: Chris Mooney has written an excellent article on Republican attempts to downplay the dangers of mercury, which - needless to say - rely heavily on skewed data from industry groups like EPRI.